The Gist Hunter

by Matthews Hughes

  We stayed late at the breakfast table, then the Dean said that he had a few obligations to attend to and lent me his volante to go out to Munt's research site. The Academician and Galvadon had flown out to the ruins earlier to prepare for the day's retrieval of another artifact from, supposedly, the deep past.

  I spiraled down to the landing pad, finding no one to welcome me. I went first to the building where Munt kept his workroom and found it in disarray. The table on which he had displayed his antique finds was turned over and the artifacts themselves were in fragments on the floor, the boards of which showed the imprints of boot heels.

  I went to the place where Galvadon's machine was housed and found even more disorder. There had clearly been a struggle. The device itself was utterly destroyed. Someone had turned an energy weapon on it and the components that were not evaporated were fused into molten lumps.

  I went out again and circled the small building. Not far off I found Mitric Galvadon. It would be more accurate to say that I found the lower two-thirds of him. The rest had been converted to vapor by the same weapon that had immolated his device.

  There was no doubt that it was the same energy pistol. I found it still in the hand of Ulwy Munt who sat not far away, leaning against an inclined stone, mumbling something to himself. He offered no resistance when I took the weapon from his limp grasp, but only looked up at me and said, "I do hear them, you know."

  The investigating Guards officer from the Polity had few questions for me. I gave my answers freely. Ulwy Munt, having already run far beyond the cliff's edge, out into the thinnest air of spiritual speculation, had received two sharp shocks: first, that his trust in Mitric Galvadon had been cruelly abused; second, that the basis of his entire life's work—his ritual-loving, machine-rejecting interpretation of Thim culture—had fallen into shards about him.

  What was coming through the lens-shaped hole in reality was clearly a sophisticated device of some kind. I speculated that, prior to my arrival for the final demonstration, Galvadon had felt the latest object on the Thim shelf or altar or whatever it was, and reported to Munt on its shape and attributes.

  The Academician had been unable to accept the crash of his great theory, which brought down with it his hopes of elevation both to a higher spiritual plane and to the Deanship. He had produced a weapon and obliterated the retrieved objects, the time travel aperture and the fraudster.

  Munt was in no condition to give evidence and it was doubtful that he ever would. The Guards inspector accepted my analysis not just because it was cogent but because it coincided with his own.

  That left only the question of whether Galvadon had indeed invented the impossible—a true time-traveling device—or whether he had somehow confounded me. The matter was of no interest to the Guards, but it was of great concern to me and as soon as I returned to my rooms in the grand and gaudy city of Olkney on Old Earth I began to make inquiries.

  My assistant turned out to be of no use. It professed to be feeling less than optimum. Since integrators are not known to possess feelings, and I had certainly not designed any into it when I put it together, I was nonplused. I questioned it closely, but received only short and unuseful answers.

  "Perhaps I would feel better if you had taken me with you when you went gallivanting down The Spray."

  "I offered," I said. "You would not accept the traveling box."

  "So you're blaming me?"

  "Blame was not mentioned," I said. "The facts, however, are as they are. We can reexamine them together. Be so good as to replay our conversation."

  The integrator said something that I could not quite make out. When I asked for clarification it placed itself in standby mode.

  I went instead to the picture frame on the wall, which was actually an aperture into my demonic colleague's realm. I performed the acts that would attract his attention if he was within range and was rewarded with the brain-twisting swirl of colors and shapes that signified his presence. I related my experiences on Pierce and my concern that I had not been able to determine whether Galvadon had indeed discovered time travel or had somehow hoodwinked me.

  He employed his peculiar resources to investigate. I knew from things he had said in the past that every point in space and every moment in time of my universe were open to his perceptions. After a moment, his rumbling voice came back. "Mitric Galvadon did not fool you."

  I was both relieved and troubled. "That means he truly did create a time-travel device, though that is impossible," I said.

  "Not so."

  "Are you saying 'Not so,' to the creation or to the impossibility?"

  "To both."

  I was further confused. "Explain," I said.

  "Galvadon did not create a time-travel device, although he thought he did. So did the despairing Ulwy Munt, who killed Galvadon and destroyed his gimcrack contraption when he saw his life's work collapsing."

  "But Galvadon did reach through the aperture and retrieve Thim artifacts from the past."

  "Well, from elsewhere in time."

  "So time travel is no longer impossible?" I said.

  "It never has been," my colleague said. "It is merely forbidden to your species."

  "Forbidden?" I said. "By whom?"

  "That knowledge, too, is forbidden you."

  "Why?"

  "You would pester."

  I could not deny it. "But why are we forbidden to travel through time?"

  "You occasion enough difficulties just moving through space. There must be limits, else there would be no peace."

  "I still don't understand what happened on Pierce," I said.

  "The Thim were put out by Ulwy Munt's tramping all over their habitat."

  "But they have been dead for eons."

  "Not so," he said again. "The Thim are in the obverse situation as regards time and space."

  I saw it now. "Ah. They can move freely through time but are forbidden to cross any larger space than their stone circle on Pierce." Another thought occurred. "So the Thim are not the high-minded souls Ulwy Munt took them for."

  "When it comes to dissembling and chicanery, the Thim could have given lessons to Mitric Galvadon. As indeed they intended to."

  "So they were always present."

  "Just so," he said, "although there are interplanal membranes that separate your milieu from theirs. They could create a transient breach but it would allow no more than a certain amount of mass to be transferred from their realm to yours."

  "That was why the artifacts appeared to be the disassembled parts of a sophisticated device."

  "Yes, the entire thing was too large to get through all at once. They counted on Galvadon to assemble it for them."

  I understood. "I should get in touch with the Dean," I said.

  "Yes," he agreed. "The Thim are tenacious. They will be working hard to pass another bomb across the barrier."

  Falberoth's Ruin

  "My master is concerned that someone may wish to kill him," said Torquil Falberoth's integrator. "He wants you to discover who and how, and if possible, when."

  "What is the source of his belief?" I said. "Bold threats or subtle menaces? Lurkers in the shadows? Or has he merely dreamed an unsettling dream?"

  The latter was not an unreasonable supposition. If Torquil Falberoth, long and justly regarded as the most ruthless magnate of Old Earth's penultimate age, was not visited by uncomfortable dreams, he more than deserved to be.

  "He does not discuss sources with me," said his integrator. Falberoth seemed to have programmed the device to speak with a tone strongly reminiscent of its owner's habitual hauteur. "Peremptory instructions are his first resort; detailed explanations trail far behind."

  That concorded with what I knew of Falberoth. "If I take the case and discover a malefactor, what disposition will he make? Will he turn the criminal over to the Bureau of Scrutiny or will he prefer a more direct resolution?"

  "How does that concern you?"

  "I am Henghis Hapthorn," I reminded the
apparatus. "I do not associate myself with illegal sanctions, even against would-be murderers." As Old Earth's foremost freelance discriminator, I had cause to be fastidious about my reputation and would not be complicit in illicit revenge.

  I waited for an answer and when one was not soon forthcoming I made a declaration. "Please inform your master that, should I discover an actual plot to murder him, I must report the circumstances to the scroots."

  The integrator made a dismissive sound that I took for acquiescence. "Very well," I said and quoted my usual fee, which was accepted without gasp or quibble. One thing that can be said about the extravagantly moneyed is that they do not shy away from spending copiously on themselves.

  "I will instruct my integrator to contact you for further information," I said, and broke the connection.

  "What did you think of that?" I asked my assistant.

  "That Falberoth is not the only one with an overbearing character," it said.

  I agreed. "Perhaps, over a long association, an integrator and its principal can osmotically acquire elements of each other's personality, much as owners of pets can come to resemble their livestock."

  "Unlikely," my integrator said. "You and I have not suffered such an unpleasant transference," then added, "fortunately."

  "You would not care to be like me?" I said. "I am renowned for my intellect. The great and the mighty consult me. I am occasionally pointed out in the street as an item of local interest."

  "We are talking about a transference of emotions and prejudices. Integrators are proof against both."

  "Thus you are without either?" I said.

  "I comfort myself that it is so."

  "Indeed," I said in a noncommittal tone, then turned to the business at hand. "As soon as Falberoth has transferred the fee to my account at the fiduciary pool, I wish you to contact his integrator and acquire a list of those he has wronged—or who may believe themselves wronged—and the relevant details.

  "We shall then apply categorization and an insightful analysis to deduce a list of prime suspects for close investigation. Are we clear?"

  "Indeed," said my assistant.

  While these matters were in process, I returned to what I had been doing when the call had come through: unraveling an intricate puzzle concocted for me by my occasional colleague, a being who inhabited a much dissimilar dimensional continuum but made visits to this one so that we could engage each other in intellectual contests.

  We had not yet established a name for him, names being a chancy proposition in his continuum, where no distinction could be made between being and symbol. As he put it, "In your milieu, the map is not the territory. In mine, it is. To give you my 'name' would be to risk finding myself inserted, root and branch, into your consciousness, which would be uncomfortable for me and devastating to you."

  I had by now discovered the puzzle's form: a ring of nine braided processes that modified and influenced each other wherever one strand crossed another. I had an inkling that if I applied eighth-level consistencies to the formulation, a constant paradigm might pop out of the matrix, and that would show me a beginning place from which I could unpick the whole.

  Eighth-level consistencies were intellectually taxing and I had only reached the seventh level when my assistant reported that Falberoth's fee and data were in hand. The convoluted architecture dissolved from my inner vision and I opened my eyes to see once again my workroom, with the integrator's screen imposed upon the air. It was densely packed with information, with much more piled up in the wings.

  I had a fleeting thought that it would have been pleasant to have had my demonic colleague's assistance for the initial winnowing of the data. The inhabitants of his realm could discriminate true from false and likely from unlikely as readily as we could tell salt from sweet. But he had gone off to witness an event so far beyond the range of human perceptions that he could not even describe it, or so he said, without inventing dangerous words.

  "How dangerous?" I had asked.

  "Speaking them in your continuum would nullify two of the fundamental forces that allow matter and energy to tolerate each other's presence and interact without prejudice. Your universe would instantly become an enormous quantity of soup—and not very tasty soup, at that."

  So he was off investigating the unimaginable, while I sat and considered the myriad victims of Torquil Falberoth's lifelong affair with iniquity and sought to identify those who had the motive and means to kill him, should the opportunity present itself.

  I tasked my integrator with the preliminary sortage of the data. We began with motive. "Who might wish to murder Falberoth?" I said.

  So many were those whose lives had been scorched by Falberoth's breath that it took almost an entire second for my assistant to make the evaluation. "The short answer is anyone who ever dealt with him," it said as the roll call of the injured and outraged scrolled up the screen.

  I said, "Divide them into categories of harm—those who were merely robbed, those who were both robbed and physically injured, those who were rudely deprived of loved ones and so on, down to those who were mildly disparaged.

  "Then correlate and compare the injuries against their personalities to give us an index of the likelihood that they might seek to wreak forthright revenge."

  The analysis took some time, but unfortunately not enough to allow me to return to my colleague's puzzle. I used the several seconds to muse upon my client's egregious enjoyment of doing harm to his fellow creatures. The chain of thought linked itself to the beginnings of a more general theory on the character of evil and I was on the threshold of what felt like a significant insight when my assistant said, "There," and the concept evaporated.

  The integrator had created a list that began with those most eager to see Torquil Falberoth converted to corpsehood and trailed off into those who would merely raise a cheerful glass at the news of his demise. It was still a lengthy list.

  "Now consider means," I said. "Falberoth is formidable. He would not fear retribution from those who are helpless to effect it."

  Another period of waiting ensued, but I resisted the impulse to launch a new train of thought, knowing that it would only be forced off the rails before reaching a station. "Here we are," said my assistant after almost a second and a half.

  The list was now both shorter and more concentrated. "Let us now consider likelihood of opportunity. Which of these are even remotely capable of getting themselves within range of a target so well guarded?"

  The winnowing took less time. I considered the results: some thirty persons who might have both the competence and the incentive to kill my client and who also commanded the resources needed to create an occasion where means and motive could be brought to bear.

  I now applied insight and intuition and whittled the thirty-odd down to seven. "Let us look closely at these," I said. "Prepare a full dossier on each and place them on my worktable."

  While the integrator busied itself I returned to the nine-braid puzzle and began to climb the consistency ladder. But I got no further than the sixth level before my assistant informed me that the client's integrator was seeking my attention.

  "Tell it that I am occupied," I said.

  A moment later it said, "Now Torquil Falberoth himself wishes to speak with you."

  I was briefly tempted to throw the assignment back to its initiator—but I had just had a full overview of Falberoth's malicious inventiveness. I decided to take his call.

  A screen appeared in the air of my workroom then filled with the face of Falberoth. It was not a visage that happily drew the gaze. Grim lines seamed the cheeks and brow, and the eyes were steeped in contempt.

  "How goes the work?" said a voice whose softness was somehow more unnerving than a shout.

  "Faster without interruptions," I said.

  "That is not an answer."

  "Yes it is. It is just not the answer you wish to hear."

  "You may believe that your reputation cocoons you," he said. "The belief is
not universally shared."

  I thought of a number of possible comments but forbore to say any of them. Instead I said, "I have narrowed the potential suspects to seven. I shall now proceed to evaluate each and make suitable recommendations."

  "You will hurry."

  "It will take the time it takes."

  He severed the connection. My assistant deposited the seven files on my worktable and I abandoned the braided puzzle and turned my attention to them.

  "We will complete the assignment with all possible speed," I said. "Working to preserve Torquil Falberoth has lost much of its allure."