A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows df-7

by Poul Anderson

  Frost walked along her spine. She stared at him and whispered: “Those men who caught me—murdered Trohdwyr—tortured and sentenced me—they were Merseians too?”

  “They were human,” Flandry said flatly, while he unfolded himself into a more normal posture. “They were sworn-in members of the Imperial Terran Naval Intelligence Corps. But, yes, they were serving Merseia. They arrived to ‘investigate’ and thus add credence to the clues about Dennitza which their earlier-landed fellows had already been spreading around.

  “Let the Imperium get extremely suspicious of the Gospodar—d’you see? The Imperium will have to act against him. It dare not stall any longer. But this action forces the Gospodar to respond—he already having reason to doubt the goodwill of the Terrans—”

  Flandry smashed his cigarette, drank, laid elbows on table and said most softly, his face near hers:

  “He’d hear rumors, and send somebody he could trust to look into them. Aycharaych—I’ll describe him later—Aycharaych of the Roidhunate knew that person would likeliest be you. He made ready. Your incrimination, as far as Terra was concerned—your degradation, as far as Dennitza was concerned—d’you see? Inadequate by themselves to provoke war. Still, remind me and I’ll tell you about Jenkins’ Ear. Nations on the brink don’t need a large push to send them toppling.

  “I’ve learned something about how you were lured, after you reached Diomedes. The rest you can tell me, if you will. Because when he isn’t weaving mirages, Aycharaych works on minds. He directed the blotting out of your memories. He implanted the false half-memories and that hate of the Empire you carry around. Given his uncanny telepathic capabilities, to let him monitor what drugs, electronics, hypnotism are doing to a brain, he can accomplish what nobody else is able to.

  “But I don’t think he totally wiped what was real. That’d have left you too unmistakably worked over. I think you keep most of the truth in you, disguised and buried.”

  The air sucked between her teeth. Her fists clenched on the table. He laid a hand across them, big and gentle.

  “I hope I can bring back what you’ve lost, Kossara.” The saying sounded difficult. “And, and free you from those conditioned-reflex emotions. It’s mainly a matter of psychotherapy. I don’t insist. Ask yourself: Can you trust me that much?”

  XII

  Sickbay was a single compartment, but astonishingly well equipped. Kossara entered with tightness in her gullet and dryness on her tongue. Flandry and Chives stood behind a surgical table. An electronic helmet, swiveled out above the pillow, crouched like an ugly arachnoid. The faint hum of driving energies, ventilation, service and life-support devices, seemed to her to have taken on a shrill note.

  Flandry had left flamboyancy outside. Tall in a plain green coverall, he spoke unsmiling: “Your decision isn’t final yet. Before we go any further, let me explain. Chives and I have done this sort of thing before, and we aren’t a bad team, but we’re no professionals.”

  This sort of thing—Muhammad Snell must lately have lain on that mattress, in the dream-bewildered helplessness of narco, while yonder man pumped him dry and injected the swift poison. Shouldn’t I fear the Imperialist? Dare I risk becoming the ally of one who treated a sentient being as we do a meat animal?

  I ought to feel indignation. I don’t, though. Nor do I feel guilty that I don’t.

  Well, I’m not revengeful, either. At least, not very much. I do remember how Trohdwyr died because he was an inconvenience; I remember how Mihail Svetich died, in a war Flandry says our enemies want to kindle anew.

  Flandry says—She heard him from afar, fast and pedantic. Had he rehearsed his speech?

  “This is not a hypnoprobe here, of course. It puts a human straight into quasisleep and stimulates memory activity, after a drug has damped inhibitions and emotions. In effect, everything the organism has permanently recorded becomes accessible to a questioner—assuming no deep conditioning against it. The process takes more time and skill than an ordinary quiz, where all that’s wanted is something the subject consciously knows but isn’t willing to tell. Psychiatrists use it to dig out key, repressed experiences in severely disturbed patients. I’ve mainly used it to get total accounts, generally from cooperative witnesses—significant items they may have noticed but forgotten. In your case, we’d best go in several fairly brief sessions, spaced three or four watches apart. That way you can assimilate your regained knowledge and avoid a crisis. The sessions will give you no pain and leave no recollection of themselves.”

  She brought her whole attention to him. “Do you play the tapes for me when I wake?” she asked.

  “I could,” he replied, “but wouldn’t you prefer I wiped them? You see, when our questions have brought out a coherent framework of what was buried, a simple command will fix it in your normal memory. By association, that will recover everything else. You’ll come to with full recall of whatever episode we concentrated on.”

  His eyes dwelt gravely upon her. “You must realize,” he continued, “your whole life will be open to us. We’ll try hard to direct our questioning so we don’t intrude. However, there’s no avoiding all related and heavily charged items. You’ll blurt many of them out. Besides, we’ll have to feel our way. Is such-and-such a scrap of information from your recent, bad past—or is it earlier, irrelevant? Often we’ll need to develop a line of investigation for some distance before we can be sure.

  “We’re bound to learn things you’ll wish we didn’t. You’ll simply have to take our word that we’ll keep silence ever afterward … and, yes, pass no judgment, lest we be judged by ourselves.

  “Do you really want that, Kossara?”

  She nodded with a stiff neck. “I want the truth.”

  “You can doubtless learn enough for practical purposes by talking to the Gospodar, if he’s alive and available when we reach Dennitza. And I make no bones: one hope of mine is gaining insight into the modus operandi of Merseian Intelligence, a few clear identifications of their agents among us … for the benefit of the Empire.

  “I won’t compel you,” Flandry finished. “Please think again before you decide.”

  She squared her shoulders. “I have thought.” Holding out her hand: “Give me the medicine.”

  The first eventide, her feet dragged her into the saloon. Flandry saw her disheveled, drably clad, signs of weeping upon her, against the stars. She had long been in her own room behind a closed door.

  “You needn’t eat here, you know,” he said in his gentlest tone.

  “Thank you, but I will,” she answered.

  “I admire your courage more than I have words to tell, dear. Come, sit down, take a drink or three before dinner.” Since he feared she might refuse, lest that seem to herself like running away from what was in her, he added, “Trohdwyr would like a toast to his manes, wouldn’t he?”

  She followed the suggestion in a numb way. “Will the whole job be this bad?” she asked.

  “No.” He joined her, pouring Merseian telloch for them both though he really wanted a Mars-dry martini. “I was afraid things might go as they went, the first time, but couldn’t see any road around. You did witness Trohdwyr’s murder, he suffered hideously, and he’d been your beloved mentor your whole life. The pain wasn’t annulled just because your thalamus was temporarily anesthetized. Being your strongest lost memory, already half in consciousness, it came out ahead of any others. And it’s still so isolated it feels like yesterday.”

  She settled wearily back. “Yes,” she said. “Before, everything was blurred, even that. Now … the faces, the whole betrayal—”

  {Nobody died in the cave except Trohdwyr. The rest stood by when a mere couple of marines arrived to arrest her. “You called them!” she screamed to the one who bore the name Steve Johnson, surely not his own. He grinned. Trohdwyr lunged, trying to get her free, win her a chance to scramble down the slope and vanish. The lieutenant blasted him. The life in his tough old body had not ebbed out, under the red moons, when they pulled her
away from him.

  Afterward she overheard Johnson: “Why’d you kill the servant? Why not take him along?”

  And the lieutenant: “He’d only be a nuisance. As is, when the Diomedeans find him, they won’t get suspicious at your disappearance. They’ll suppose the Terrans caught you. Which should make them handier material. For instance, if we want any of those who met you here to go guerrilla, our contact men can warn them they’ve been identified through data pulled out of you prisoners.”

  “Hm, what about us four?”

  “They’ll decide at headquarters. I daresay they’ll reassign you to a different region. Come on, now, let’s haul mass.” The lieutenant’s boot nudged Kossara, where she slumped wrist-bound against the cold cave wall. “On your feet, bitch!”}

  “His death happened many weeks ago,” Flandry said. “Once you get more memories back, you’ll see it, feel it in perspective—including time perspective. You’ll have done your grieving … which you did, down underneath; and you’re too healthy to mourn forever.”

  “I will always miss him,” she whispered.

  Flandry regarded ghosts of his own. “Yes, I know.”

  She straightened. He saw her features harden, as if bones lent strength to flesh. The blue-green eyes turned arctic. “Sir Dominic, you were right in what you did to Snell. Nobody in that gang was—is—fit to live.”

  “Well, we’re in a war, we and they, the nastier for being undeclared,” he said carefully. “What you and I must do, if we can, is keep the sickness from infecting your planet. Or to the extent it has, if I may continue the metaphor, we’ve got to supply an antibiotic before the high fever takes hold and the eruptions begin.”

  His brutal practicality worked as he had hoped, to divert her from both sorrow and rage. “What do you plan?” The question held some of the crispness which ordinarily was hers.

  “Before leaving Diomedes,” he said, “I contacted Lagard’s field office on Lannach, transmitted a coded message for him to record, and showed him my authority to command immediate courier service. The message is directly to the Emperor. The code will bypass channels. In summary, it says, ‘Hold off at Dennitza, no matter what you hear, till I’ve collected full information’—followed by a synopsis of all I’ve learned thus far.”

  She began faintly to glow in her exhaustion. “Why, wonderful.”

  “M-m-m, not altogether, I’m afraid.” Flandry let the telloch savage his throat. “Remember, by now his Majesty’s barbarian-quelling on the Spican frontier. He’ll move around a lot. The courier may not track him down for a while. Meantime—the Admiralty on Terra may get word which provokes it to emergency action, without consulting Emperor or Policy Board. It has that right, subject to a later court of inquiry. And I’ve no direct line there. Probably make no difference if I did. Maybe not even any difference what I counsel Hans. I’m a lone agent. They could easily decide I must be wrong.”

  He forced a level look at her. “Or Dennitza could in fact have exploded, giving Emperor and Admiralty no choice,” he declared. “The Merseians are surely working that side of the street too.”

  “You hope I—we can get my uncle and the Skupshtina to stay their hands?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Flandry said. “This is a fast boat. However … we’ll be a month in transit, and Aycharaych Co. have a long jump on us.”

  {The resident and his lady made her welcome at Thursday Landing. They advised her against taking her research to the Sea of Achan countries. Unrest was particularly bad there. Indeed, she and her Merseian—pardon, her xenosophont companion—would do best to avoid migratory societies in general. Could they not gather sufficient data among the sedentary and maritime Diomedeans? Those were more intimate with modern civilization, more accustomed to dealing with offworlders, therefore doubtless more relevant to the problem which had caused her planetary government to send her here.

  Striving to mask her nervousness, she met Commander Maspes and a few junior officers of the Imperial Naval Intelligence team that was investigating the disturbances. He was polite but curt. His attitude evidently influenced the younger men, who must settle for stock words and sidelong stares. Yes, Maspes said, it was common knowledge that humans were partly responsible for the revolutionary agitation and organization on this planet. Most Diomedeans believed they were Avalonians, working for Ythri. Some native rebels, caught and interrogated, said they had actually been told so by the agents themselves. And indeed the Alatanist mystique was a potent recruiter … Yet how could a naive native distinguish one kind of human from another? Maybe Ythri was being maligned … He should say no more at the present stage. Had Donna Vymezal had a pleasant journey? What was the news at her home?

  Lagard apologized that he must bar her from a wing of the Residency. “A team member, his work’s confidential and—well, you are a civilian, you will be in the outback, and he’s a xeno, distinctive appearance—”

  Kossara smiled. “I can dog my hatch,” she said; “but since you wish, I’ll leash my curiosity.” She gave the matter scant thought, amidst everything else.}

  Flandry greeted her at breakfast: “Dobar yutro, Dama.”

  Startled, she asked, “You are learning Serbic?”

  “As fast as operant conditioning, electronics, and the pharmacopoeia can cram it into me.” He joined her at table. Orange juice shone above the cloth. Coffee made the air fragrant. He drank fast. She saw he was tired.

  “I wondered why you are so seldom here when off duty,” she said.

  “That’s the reason.”

  He gazed out at the stars. She considered him. After a while, during which her pulse accelerated, she said, “No. I mean, if you’re studying, there is no need. You must know most of us speak Anglic. You need an excuse to avoid me.”

  It was his turn for surprise. “Eh? Why in cosmos would I that?”

  She drew breath, feeling cheeks, throat, breasts redden. “You think I’m embarrassed at what you’ve learned of me.”

  “No—” He swung his look to her. “Yes. Not that I—Well, I try not to, and what comes out regardless shows you clean as a … knife blade—But of course you’re full of life, you’ve been in love and—” Abruptly he flung his head back and laughed. “Oh, hellflash! I was afraid you would make me stammer like a schoolboy.”

  “I’m not angry. Haven’t you saved me? Aren’t you healing me?” She gathered resolution. “I did have to think hard, till I saw how nothing about me could surprise you.”

  “Oh, a lot could. Does.” Their eyes met fully.

  “Maybe you can equalize us a little,” she said through a rising drumbeat. “Tell me of your own past, what you really are under that flexmail you always wear.” She smiled. “In exchange, I can help you in your language lessons, and tell you stories about Dennitza that can’t be in your records. The time has been lonely for me, Dominic.”

  “For us both,” he said as though dazed.

  Chives brought in an omelet and fresh-baked bread.

  {From a dealer in Thursday Landing, Kossara rented an aircamper and field equipment, bought rations and guidebooks, requested advice. She needed information for its own sake as well as for cover. On the long voyage here—three changes of passenger-carrying freighter——she had absorbed what material on Diomedes the Shkola in Zorkagrad could supply. That wasn’t much. It could well have been zero if the planet weren’t unusual enough to be used as an interest-grabbing example in certain classes. She learned scraps of astronomy, physics, chemistry, topology, meteorology, biology, ethnology, history, economics, politics; she acquired a few phrases in several different languages, no real grasp of their grammar or semantics; her knowledge was a twig to which she clung above the windy chasm of her ignorance about an entire world.

  After a few days getting the feel of conditions, she and Trohdwyr flew to Lannach. The resident had not actually forbidden them. In the towns along Sagna Bay, they went among the gaunt high dwellings of the winged folk, seeking those who understood Anglic and might talk somew
hat freely. “We are from a planet called Dennitza. We wish to find out how to make friends and stay friends with a people who resemble you—”

  Eonan the factor proved helpful. Increasingly, Kossara tried to sound him out, and had an idea he was trying to do likewise to her. Whether or not he was involved in the subversive movement, he could well fear she came from Imperial Intelligence to entrap comrades of his. And yet the name “Dennitza” unmistakably excited more than one individual, quick though the Diomedeans were to hide that reaction.

  How far Dennitza felt, drowned in alien constellations! At night in their camper, she and Trohdwyr would talk long and long about old days and future days at home; he would sing his gruff ychan songs to her, and she would recite the poems of Simich that he loved: until at last an inner peace came to them both, bearing its gift of sleep.}

  Flandry always dressed for dinner. He liked being well turned out; it helped create an atmosphere which enhanced his appreciation of the food and wine; and Chives would raise polite hell if he didn’t. Kossara slopped in wearing whatever she’d happened to don when she got out of bed. Not to mock her mourning, he settled for the blue tunic, red sash, white trousers, and soft half-boots that were a human officer’s ordinary mess uniform.

  When she entered the saloon in evening garb, he nearly dropped the cocktail pitcher. Amidst the subdued elegance around her, she suddenly outblazed a great blue star and multitudinously lacy nebula which dominated the viewscreen. Burgundy-hued velvyl sheathed each curve of her tautness, from low on the bosom to silvery slippers. A necklace of jet and turquoise, a bracelet of gold, gleamed against ivory skin. Diamond-studded tiara and crystal earrings framed the ruddy hair; but a few freckles across the snub nose redeemed that high-cheeked, full-mouthed, large-eyed face from queenliness.