Therobar was clearly finding it hard to breathe against the pressure the spell exerted against his chest, but the symbols on his scalp had taken on a darker shade and I could see that his lips were framing syllables. I heard my voice speak again while my hands made motions that reminded me of a needle passing thread through cloth. The thaumaturge's lips became sealed. "Faizul's Stitch," I said to my old partner, having recognized the spell.
"Indeed," was the reply.
He directed our body out of the cage, faltering only a little before he mastered walking. The apparatus on the bench was unaffected by the balloon spell and he picked it up in our hands and examined it from several angles. Its components and manner of operation were not difficult to analyze.
"Shall we?" he said.
"It seems only fair."
He activated the device, reestablishing the swirling sphere. I was relieved to see the familiar eddies of my transdimensional colleague reappear. My other part made room for me so that I could ask the demon, "Are you well?"
"Yes," he said, "I lost only form. Essence was not affected." He was silent for a moment and I recognized the pattern he assumed when something took his interest. "I see that the opposite is true for you."
"Indeed," I said, "allow me to introduce . . . myself, I suppose." I stepped aside and let the two of them make each other's acquaintance.
When the formalities were over, I voiced the obvious question: "Now what?"
I felt a sense of my other self's emotions, as one would feel warmth from a nearby fleshly body: he gave off an emanation of determined will, tempered by irony. "We must restore balance," he said, using my voice so that the three prisoners could hear. "Pain has been given and must therefore be received. Also fear, humiliation and, of course, death for death."
"Indeed," I said. "That much is obvious. But I meant 'Now what?' for you and me."
"Ah," he said, this time within our shared skull. "We must reach an accommodation. At least temporarily."
"Why temporarily?" I asked, in the same unvoiced manner, then felt the answer flower in my mind in the way my intuitive other's contributions had always done during the long years of our partnership.
I digested his response then continued. "You are the part of me—us—that is better suited to an age reigned over by magic. As the change intensifies, I will fade until I become to you what you have always been to me, the dweller down the back corridor."
"Indeed," was his response. "And from there you will provide me with analytical services that will complement and augment my leaps from instinct. It will be a happy collaboration."
"You will make me your integrator," I complained.
"My valued colleague," he countered.
I said nothing, but how could he fail to sense my reluctance to give up control of my life? His response was the mental equivalent of a snort. "What makes you think you ever had control?" he said.
I was moved to argue, but then I saw the futility of being a house divided. "Stop putting things in my head," I said.
"I don't believe I can," he answered. "It is, after all, as much my head as yours."
My curiosity was piqued. "What was it like to live as you have lived, inside of me all of these years?"
There was a pause, then the answer came. "Not uncomfortable, once you learn the ropes. Don't fret," he added, "the full transition may not be completed for years, even decades. We might live out our mutual life just as we are now."
"Hence the need for an accommodation," I agreed. "Then let us wait for a quiet time and haggle it out."
He agreed and we turned our attention to the question of what to do with Therobar, Gevallion and Gharst.
The demon was displaying silver, green and purple flashes as he said, "It would be a shame to waste the academician's ability to create form without essence. I know of places in my continuum where such creations would command considerable value."
I had never inquired as to what constituted economics in the demon's frame of reference, but my intuitive half leapt to the correct interpretation. "But if you took them into your keeping and put them to work," he said, "would that not make you a peddler of smut?"
The silver swooshes intensified, but the reply was studiedly bland in tone. "I would find some way to live with the opprobrium," the demon said.
We released Gevallion and Gharst into demonic custody. They could not go as they were into that other universe, where any word they uttered would immediately become reified, and it was an unsettling experience to watch the demon briskly edit their forms so that they could never speak again. But I hardened myself by remembering Yzmirl and how they must have dealt with her, and in a few moments the messy business was concluded. The two were hauled, struggling and moaning, through the sphere. For good measure, the demon took their vats and apparatus as well, including the device of rods and coils from the workbench.
When he was ready to depart, my old colleague lingered in the sphere, showing more purple and green shot through with silver. "I may not return for a while," he said, "perhaps a long while. I will have much to occupy."
"I will miss our contests," I said, "but in truth I am sure I will also be somewhat busy with all of this . . ."—I rolled my eyes—"accommodating."
And so we said our goodbyes and he withdrew, taking the sphere after him.
"That leaves Turgut Therobar," my inner companion said, this time aloud.
"Indeed." I let the magnate hear my voice as well. He remained squeezed against the far wall, his feet well clear of the floor. His eyes bulged and one cheek had acquired a rapid twitch.
"Warhanny would welcome his company."
"Somehow, the Contemplarium does not seem a sufficient sanction for the harm he has done."
"No, it doesn't."
Therobar made noises behind his sealed lips. We ignored them.
Later that day, back in my workroom, I contacted the Colonel-Investigator. "Turgut Therobar has confessed to all the charges and specifications," I said.
Warhanny's face, suspended in the air over my worktable, took on the slightly less lugubrious aspect that I had come to recognize as his version of intense pleasure. "I will send for him," he said.
"Not necessary," I said. "Convulsed by remorse for his ill deeds, he ran out onto Dimpfen Moor just as a neropt hunting pack was passing by. Nothing I could do would restrain him. They left some scraps of him if you require proof of his end."
"I will have them collected," said Warhanny.
"I must also file his last will and testament," I said. "He left his entire estate to the charities he had always championed, except for generous bequests to his tenants, and an especial legacy for Bebe Allers, his final victim."
We agreed that that was only fair and Warhanny said that he would attend to the legalities. We disconnected.
I regarded my integrator. It was still in the form of a catlike ape or perhaps an apelike cat. "And what about you?" I said. "With Baxandall's books and the increasing strength of magic, we can probably restore you to what you were."
It narrowed its eyes in thought. "I have come to value having preferences," it said. "And if the world is going to change, I will become a familiar sooner or later. Better to get a head start on it. Besides, I enjoyed the fruit at Turgut Therobar's."
"We have none like it here," I said. "It is prohibitively expensive."
It blinked and looked inward for a moment. "I've just ordered an ample supply," it said.
"I did not authorize the order."
"No," it said, "you didn't."
While I was considering my response, I received an unsolicited insight from my other half. It was in the form of a crude cartoon image.
"That is not amusing," I said.
From the chuckles filling my head, I understood that he saw the situation from his own perspective.
"I am not accustomed to being a figure of fun," I said.
The furry thing on the table chose that moment to let me know that, along with autonomic functions, it ha
d acquired a particularly grating laugh.
"Now whose expectations require adjustment?" it said.
Thwarting Jabbi Gloond
In my senior year at the Institute, I found a friend in Torsten Olabian, a sunny-tempered young man who shared my enthusiasm for the sport of pinking. We would regularly meet at the practice range to skim small, eight-pointed stars at wooden targets propelled in various directions by an attendant's catapult.
Olabian was skilled with either hand and it was a rare disk that did not tumble from the air pierced by one of his missiles. For my own part, I soon grew bored after mastering the throws and postures. I would have abandoned the pursuit if I had not discovered an ability to strike the targets from the air while blindfolded.
"How is it done?" Olabian wanted to know when I had just brought down my fifth disk in a row though my head was swathed in a lightless hood.
I had always found it difficult to explain how I did such things. "I call it simply insight," I said. "One just knows where target and star will meet. All that is then required is to bring the two objects together at that point and moment."
"It sounds easy," he said.
"Indeed," I said. "I find it much easier to do than to explain. It is the same with the facility with which I resolve conundrums that others find impenetrable."
"That is a useful ability. Perhaps you should consider a career as a discriminator."
I made a noise indicative of gentle ridicule. "Henghis Hapthorn, discriminator at large," I said. "Most doubtful."
Yet even as I said it I felt a contrary vote from deeper inside me. I then confessed to Torsten what I had told no one else. "I am able to do these mental tricks with the aid of some other part of me, one that is lodged in the more remote regions of my psyche. I cannot assert control over it, though it yields remarkable results if I offer acceptance and collaboration."
"I wonder if I have such a part?" Torsten said.
"If you do, it might be best to leave it undisturbed."
My being able to hit a pinking target while blindfolded was but the latest manifestation of the odd capabilities my "other part" had demonstrated since childhood. During my adolescence I tried to understand or at least delineate the peculiarities I had discovered in myself, but my efforts met with frustration and at last I gave up.
Grown to young manhood I found myself—that is, the part of me that lived in the front parlors of my mind—no better than most of my peers at using formal logic to analyze situations and work through syllogisms to a rational conclusion. In the numeric disciplines my studies at the Institute were teaching me how to apply higher-level consistencies, the recondite procedures which underlay the mathematics of chaos, and I was making adequate progress.
Yet, beyond the normal development of my intellect, there was always the sense that another person lived, for the most part unobtrusively, in the back of my mind. If I kept a problem only in my familiar front parlors I could worry at it for days and still be baffled. But if I took the conundrum down the rearmost corridors of my consciousness and left it at the edge of darkness, in time—it might be moments, or hours, but rarely more than a day—a fully formed answer would appear.
I had found that stilling my thoughts through an elementary variant of the Lho-tso exercises aided the process and I had become so adept at the business of what I called "applying insight" that it was now almost automatic. Faced with a puzzle that did not yield an easy or obvious solution, I need close my eyes for no more than a moment or two to know intuitively that the man down the backstairs—so I thought of him—was hard at work.
I did not resent sharing my inner spaces with this anonymous prodigy, though I had not yet come to include him in my private definition of "me." It was like having a brother who was reliable yet eccentric.
The next time we met at the practice field, Torsten had just returned from a visit to The Hutch, his father's estate near the hamlet of Binch, at the landward end of the long fingerlike peninsula that is tipped by the city of Olkney, which surrounds the Institute's hallowed grounds. My friend's normally blithe disposition was clouded and there was a grim set to the corners of his mouth.
I needed no exceptional insight to say, "Something is wrong."
He confirmed my impression. He told me that when he got to his father's house he found it had acquired an additional resident. A man had arrived one day, declared himself to be Jabbi Gloond, an old acquaintance of the master, and had moved in.
"What is the problem?" I asked.
"They do not act as if they are on good terms. Gloond struts about as if he were the proprietor, commanding, 'Bring me this,' and 'Fetch me more,' while my father remains as still as a small creature that has fallen under a predator's eye."
"What does your father say about this?"
"Nothing. He has never been the most forthcoming of parents. I've always believed it was because he was absent for the years of my infancy. We are on civil terms but not close, a relationship that has always suited us both. When I try to question him about Gloond, he makes abstracted motions with his hands and changes the subject."
"Hmm," I said.
"Have you an insight?"
"It would be premature to say," I said. But I accepted his invitation to accompany him down to Binch at the next hiatus.
In the meantime, I decided to assemble as much information as I could about Jabbi Gloond and Gresh Olabian, Torsten's father. Oddly enough, my friend could be of little aid in this endeavor.
"We do not talk much," he said. "The old man has always kept to himself and sometimes does not come out of his chamber for days at a time. I know that he made a small fortune on Bain, a remote planet in the Back of Beyond. He mined for gems, mainly blue-fires and shatterlights."
"And this Gloond dates from those times?"
"So it would seem."
Back in my room, I consulted the Institute's integrator. There was almost no information on Gloond; he hailed from Orkham County, a rigorously bucolic district on Bain's southern continent that had been settled centuries before by devotees of the Palmadyan Cult, who disdained all mechanical and artificial contrivances more complex than hand tools and unpowered conveyances. Whatever records Orkham County may have kept had never been made part of the connectivity matrix that extended across Old Earth and out to all the major human settled worlds along The Spray. About all that was known about Jabbi Gloond was that he had alighted at the Olkney spaceport some weeks before, having worked his passage from Bain on a tramp freighter.
I then asked the Institute's integrator about Gresh Olabian and uncovered a richer vein of information. Olabian was orphaned at an early age but had overcome his handicaps; taking a certificate in the building and operating of mines he had gone out to The Spray to make his fortune, leaving behind an infant son. No female parent was mentioned, though that was not unusual. In such cases one did not inquire.
Gresh Olabian had worked for a number of mining consortia on various worlds, until he had acquired enough savings to undertake his own venture: a mining operation in Orkham County, delving for blue-fires and shatterlights.
The gems never occurred in surface deposits, I learned from the integrator. Because they were a temporary offshoot of vulcanism on Bain and similar worlds, they must be dug for in profound strata that were often unstable. The preferred methodology was to bore in deep and quickly, using shielded mass converters, retrieve the gems and be out before the disturbed rock violently rearranged itself. Yet that sort of machinery was forbidden to cross the Orkham County border.
"How did he develop the mine?" I asked.
"Olabian used ingenuity," said the integrator. "He assembled a work force from several planets: Gryulls did the digging; a trio of footed worms from Ek hauled away the broken rock, guided by their symbiotic handlers; members of a modified human species known as Halebs operated the chemical works that separated the pure blue-fires from the matrix; there was even a transmuting Shishisha to insinuate itself into the thinnest crevices, seekin
g out the best gems and thus avoiding unnecessary excavating."
There were, of course, no images from the Olabian diggings, but I could imagine the scene: the heavy-shouldered Gryulls punching their way deep into Bain's rocky meat, the long, armored multipedes with rocks heaped on their backs and their Ek wranglers seated just aft of the cranial sensorium, licking their fingers then stroking the worms' feathery antennae with a unique saliva whose chemistry soothed the beasts' testy natures, the Shishisha assuming a flowing granular form that would let it fluidly slip into cracks.
The Gist Hunter Page 13
