The Other

by Matthew Hughes

  The provost’s man came into the hut, his weapon still aimed at Imbry. Behind him came two other brown-hats, younger men, but with the same anger and contempt in their identical faces. At their superior’s order, they moved to free Shvarden from his bonds.

  “But do not let him touch you,” Breeth added. “He has been in contact with this filth”—he indicated Imbry—“and is unclean.”

  “Something has happened,” Shvarden said, truculence fighting with shame in his face and voice.

  “That much is obvious,” said Breeth. “Take him out.”

  The two junior provost’s men seized the black-hat’s arms with gloved hands, but their prisoner struggled. “Hear me! He is the Finder! Look on the bed!”

  Imbry had been shielding the figured box from Breeth’s view. Now, at a gesture from the weapon, he moved aside. The fat man saw the investigator’s pupils involuntary widen as he beheld the object on the pallet, then they contracted as he turned a hostile gaze on Imbry.

  “So this is your scheme?” the brown-hat said. “Well, you may fool some simple-minded country arbiter, but you are now in the hands of the Reorientation”—he turned his head to include Shvarden in his field of vision—“oh, yes, and we have been waiting for the likes of him to reveal how far the College of Arbiters has strayed from scripture.”

  “He is the Finder!” Shvarden said. “The signs, the First Eye. How can you doubt it?”

  Breeth made a wordless sound of contempt. “The signs are manufactured. Your own credulity fills in the gaps.”

  “He is from off-world,” the provost’s man countered. “The creatures of the Pit command infernal powers. It is all in scripture.”

  “May I ask,” Imbry said, eyes lowered, “why an off-world irregular would want to interfere in your affairs?”

  “Because,” said Breeth, “you are evil. Foul creatures of the teeming Pit, you cannot help but be filled with hatred for we who have so nearly reached Perfection.”

  Against such certainty, Imbry judged it unwise to argue. He gazed at his sandaled feet and said nothing. “Put Shvarden in the roller, and restrain him,” the investigator said to his subordinates. To Imbry he said, “Turn around and cross your wrists behind you.”

  The fat man felt a pressure on his wrists and heard the click of a restraint. One of the provost’s men came back in and asked where the investigator wanted Imbry.

  “Tie the barbarel’s reins to the rear of the roller. This filth can ride in the carriage. Put the dead one in with him.”

  “The dead one?” Imbry said, remembering just in time not to raise his eyes to the investigator’s.

  Breeth made the sound of contempt again. “That’s good, pretend you don’t know. What happened? Did she grow scared, refuse to go along with the plan?”

  “Where did you find her?”

  “Where you left her,” the provost’s man said. “Lying on the trail, her face smashed in and her neck broken.”

  Imbry made his own wordless sound, an exhalation of breath that signaled anger coupled with helpless regret.

  “It won’t work,” Breeth said. “You killed her and the other one. And I’ll see you burned for it.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  They had wrapped the girl’s body in a coarse cloth, but when the provost’s men lifted her with gloved hands from the cargo compartment at the rear of the roller, one small, fur-covered arm dangled from beneath the edge of the covering. The bare palm had turned pale as blood had drained from the extremities. The sight troubled Imbry. He did not mind death in the abstract, nor in the concrete when it was necessary to further his goals—but this seemed a waste.

  He believed that whoever had killed Shan-Pei had done so to make life difficult for Luff Imbry. The girl had been a pawn. Or perhaps she had seen something that the killer did not want revealed. Either way, the business smacked of a callousness that angered him.

  He sat now in the carriage, the corpse-bundle bound to its back shelf. One of the provost’s men kept an eye on him, a weapon in his hand. They had put Shvarden in the rear seat of the roller and the other junior officer sat in the operator’s position, though turned so that he could keep the black-hat under observation. But the black-hat offered no more resistance, sitting slumped and silent.

  Breeth came out of the hut, his weapon in one hand and the ceramic box tucked under one arm. Shvarden looked up as the investigator approached and held out his hands for the object. But the brown-hat gave him only a look of amused contempt and stowed the box in the cargo hold. Then he went back to the hut and aimed the metal tube through the doorway, adjusting some control on its wooden stock. A burst of light sprang from the end, and a moment later there came a crackle and a roar from within. The doorway belched white smoke and yellow fire. For a moment, Breeth stood and watched the small inferno, and Imbry saw on his face an expression so like that of Shvarden when he’d seen the gray lens that, for that moment, the two Ideals were identical. Then the provost’s man’s aspect became businesslike again. He slung the weapon over his shoulder and climbed into the front seat of the roller next to the operator. He signaled the other provost’s man to get in beside the black-hat. “And keep an eye on the fat oddy,” he said.

  The vehicle started up and inched forward. As the slack of the reins tightened, the barbarel followed and the carriage began to roll. Fulda’s sun was near the horizon when they started, and they moved at a moderate pace through the long twilight back toward Pilger’s Corners. Imbry found it a nuisance not to have his hands free as the carriage swayed, but he appreciated the opportunity to think about what he had learned.

  He was not a profound student of history. Indeed, on Old Earth it was a peculiar sort who bothered with a close study of the past. Humankind had by now been in existence over a vast span of time, and across that myriad of millennia every possible permutation and combination of social orders had been tried and judged. All that needed to be known about the ways in which societies could be—and more important, should be—organized, was now known. There were, of course, a few feckless romantics who pined for the freedom of the long-ago dawn-times, when anything might be possible and humanity stumbled blindly forward, making it up as they went along. But sensible people, and Imbry was nothing if not sensible, knew that the quest for social perfection was always misguided. It never failed to produce misery.

  The Ideals of Fulda had fallen into an old and oft-repeated error. The Blessed Haldeyn, finding to his sadness that the world about him was grossly imperfect, had deduced that the flaw lay in the mutability of the individuals who created and sustained it. He had thus set out to create perfect individuals. Statistical chance having revealed that he was freakishly average in almost every way, he no doubt found it easy to convince himself that there was some great meaning in the concatenation of coincidences that had made him who he was. Compared to that great mental leap it was but a hop and a skip to the idea of using his own person and personality as the template and standard of measurement of the Ideals.

  First, on some hapless foundational domain or secondary world, he had gathered a coterie of followers—the charismatically insane always find that task an easy one—and set about trying to convince his fellow citizens of the worth of his concepts. He had won over some, but not all. Next, he had tried to enforce his views on the recalcitrant. That had not worked—it never did for long—so he had led his faithful to Fulda. The Ideals had fallen upon the scant population, expelling most of them and probably murdering the last holdouts. Then they settled down to practicing the perfection they preached. Within a few generations, they had created an ideal population—at least, according to their tenets—of nearly identical units. The task then became to prevent that perfection from ever changing.

  It was the old fallacy of the frozen river, as Imbry recalled from his schooling. When the normally endless fluctuations of current, eddy, and flow come to be seen as evil, the reformer eliminates them by freezing the river solid. But ice was never a true solid; it still flowed,
albeit slowly. And where it was stressed, it cracked. And when the stress was great, the inevitable fracturing became catastrophic.

  Fuldan society, being a fundamentally unnatural system that could be maintained only by constant effort contrary to the natures of its constituents, was under great stress. The stress generated within the Fuldan mass psyche a surge of mysticism. Because Idealism was founded on a division of humanity into the “us” of the pure stock and the “they” of the irregulars, the relationship between the two was bound to become the fulcrum on which the growing forces hinged. The forbidden flesh of the Other, therefore, became a great Shadow within the Fuldan collective unconscious, full of man and power. When the Ideals touched that flesh, they touched their own inner Shadow, which was always an act of great psychic moment; thus, they saw signs and wonders, heard voices, experienced a brush with the ineffable.

  At first, Imbry thought, the arbiters would have considered the practice of oddy-touching as a foul heresy. They would have worked to suppress it, probably violently, and no doubt enlisting the organized authority of the Provost. But the establishment’s resistance would only have increased the perceived power of the Other, at least among those whose psyches resonated to the siren song of the Shadow. Eventually, that power would have been built to the point where it either destroyed the establishment or merged with it. In Fulda’s case, the solution had been merger: the Ideals could touch the forbidden flesh of the irregulars and experience their epiphanies, but only under the control and direction of the Arbitration.

  But obviously, the reconciliation between the new mysticism and the established order had not been universally acclaimed. Some Fuldans had remained true to the Blessed Haldeyn’s original teachings, rejecting the Arbitration’s emendations. To the holdouts, the irregulars were still repulsive, wrong in the most fundamental way.

  Two camps had formed, the adherents of each speaking less and less with their opposites, and more and more with their like-minded fellows. A new “us” and “they” regarded each other with growing suspicion and dislike, each distorting and perverting the other’s views and aims.

  It was understandable that the rejection of the new dispensation would be strongest among the provost’s men. Their work brought them constantly into contact with the prosaic iconoclasm of criminals; this caused them to develop a resistance to high-minded concepts. To the provost’s men, questions of right and wrong were the stuff of their day-to-day work. But those questions were not put to them in abstract and ethereal terms. Instead they came in the form of violence, theft, chicanery, and vandalism. Who killed whom? Who stole what? Who cheated? Who destroyed?

  Still, the Shadow was as active in the minds of the rejectionists’ as it was in those who accepted the new dispensation. But instead of the Other being the gateway to gnostic enlightenment, the reviled irregulars were the fount of deception and evil. The more the Arbitration pandered to the majority’s desire to touch the forbidden, the more the provost’s department sought to repress the people they called oddies.

  Repressive social orders always generated internal stress, Imbry knew, as did every educated person of Old Earth. That stress built up at the society’s points of division, the social equivalents of faults in the deep strata of slow-moving rock. On Fulda, the irregulars were now the point of division between two diametrically opposed factions. The opponents were acting out, in the phenomenal or “real” world, struggles that were simultaneously occurring in the profoundest depths of their psyches, with no likelihood of compromise. By what Imbry had seen, the conflict had not risen to the level of social war, with neighbors cutting each other’s throats and fathers damning sons to eternal perdition. But if Breeth’s behavior represented an example of a growing unhappiness within the Fuldan polity, an outbreak of atavistic bloodletting might not be far off.

  On whatever world Haldeyn had first had his revelation, the outcome had been social war. The losing side—the Ideals—had boarded ships and escaped to Fulda. But Haldeyn must have sent those ships away and closed the space port. So the coming holy war would offer no escape valve. It would be a struggle to the death, each side needing to destroy the enemy utterly, because each side had painted the enemy with the image of the Shadow from its own collective psyche.

  Fulda was not safe for a visiting stranger at any time. Imbry doubted there was even a word in the local vocabulary for “neutral,” and if there were it would not be applicable to someone as irregularly formed as he. He had no hope of being exempted as a disinterested bystander. The Fuldans’ mystic surge had introduced a new factor: oddy-touchers had given birth to a new myth—that of the Finder and the First Eye—which was sure to heighten the excitement of the believers and deepen the outrage of the rejectionists.

  Archetypes were now in full, free play in the Fuldan psychoscape—that is, they were all going mad together. Whoever was designated the Finder would be hailed by one faction as a messiah; the other would revile him as the Father of Lies. After what had happened at the indigenes’ fortress, Imbry had no doubt that Shvarden saw him as the expected one. Nor did he doubt that Breeth saw him as a monster of iniquity.

  Imbry-as-Finder posed a psyche-threatening problem for Breeth and his faction—Imbry was sure they were members of the Reorientation. The simplest solution to that problem would be to destroy the hated deceiver before he could lead others astray. The more he thought the matter through, the surer Imbry became that, if he was taken into the provost station, he would only emerge from it wrapped in a shroud. That might not yet be Breeth’s plan, but the idea would inevitably emerge. Therefore, as soon as they entered the town, he would look for an arbiter, preferably Brosch, the senior man, who had been able to intimidate Breeth. But whoever was under the first black-hat Imbry saw, the fat man meant to throw himself from the carriage and cry out for sanctuary.

  The little convoy rumbled on. Pilger’s Corners was not yet even a gleam in the distance. Having decided on how he would act in his immediate future, Imbry turned his thoughts to the larger scenario. He had been put on this world by someone who wanted him here. At first it had seemed possible that his enemy’s motive had been merely to humiliate him. He could imagine how many of his colleagues and competitors in the Olkney halfworld would enjoy watching a recording of Luff Imbry, naked and in a buffoonish hat, conscripted into a traveling show of loathed freaks and misfits, forced to sing for his livelihood in front of yokels and rustics. His reputation would suffer, which would diminish his status within the halfworld, which would lead to a drop in business.

  But that relatively benign scenario had evaporated with the death of Shan-Pei. It was possible that Tuchol had been killed to prevent his revealing a clue as to the identity of Imbry’s persecutor. Perhaps he had even sought to blackmail the hidden enemy; Imbry had sized up the half-man as the type to try to wring advantage from any available circumstance. But why kill the fur-covered girl, who knew nothing and meant no harm? The only motive Imbry could deduce was to brand him as a murderer among people who already hated him on sight.

  On a civilized planet, with a properly articulated judicial process, Imbry could have proved his innocence. On backwards Fulda, he doubted that an oddy—even Shvarden had used the insulting term when he referred to poor, dead Shan-Pei—would get a fair hearing. Imbry suspected that, had Shvarden not been a witness, Investigator Breeth might well have incinerated his carefully built corpulence along with the stone beehive’s contaminated contents, even without the affront to the provost’s man’s convictions posed by the finding of the First Eye—or, in Breeth’s view, the “alleged” First Eye.

  Imbry was now, in Breeth’s eyes, a monster, a murderer, and a conniving threat to the social order; the Old Earther doubted that he would survive the night once the doors of the Pilger’s Corners provost station closed on him. He must do what he could to avoid that fate, but he was still faced with the fact that someone was trying to set him up for execution.

  Shan-Pei’s death offered one sign of hope, however. Th
e fur-covered girl had been seized from the hut and manhandled into the carry-all. That meant that whoever was doing this to Imbry was still in the vicinity. There was a ship somewhere above him, its operator surreptitiously coming and going in the vessel’s carry-all. If the unknown enemy’s goal was to push Imbry toward a humiliating death, the foe would probably want to be on hand for the occasion. Imbry might be able to arrange matters so that the carry-all brought his enemy down at a place and time of Imbry’s choosing. Then, if conditions were propitious, when it returned to the orbiting ship, the aircraft would carry the fat man to safety—and the enemy, if he was still living, to a full accounting.

  There was also a chance, however, that the next time he saw the carry-all it would be operating on its own. If so, Imbry would have to adapt his tactics to the situation. Either way, Imbry faced a series of daunting obstacles; but he was a man of resource and guile, and the product of a long and eventful life that had taught him that he was able to deal with whatever challenges might throw themselves athwart his path.

  The sun was now well below the horizon and the desert was submerged in deepening shadows, light slowly fading from the upper air. In the far distance ahead, the lumens of Pilger’s Corners clustered against the darkness. Imbry composed himself. He would be ready to act when an opportunity for action arrived.

  At present, the only opportunity was for thought. He thought about the dead girl tied to the shelf at the carriage’s rear. He thought even of the half-man who had brought him here—probably as unwillingly as he had said. Somewhere, high above him, was the person who had casually robbed those two of their lives.

  Now he turned once again to the puzzle of who that adversary might be. Barlo Krim was still the single loose end on which the fat man could tug. Who knew that Krim middled for Imbry? There were two classes of suspects: clients with whom Imbry had dealt through the middler; and other practitioners of the theft and forgery profession who also used Krim as an intermediary.