“Commander!” Breeth said. “Surely you don’t believe in the Renewal?”
“I maintain an open mind,” said Tenton, “as should a two-circle investigator.”
“May I show you?” said Shvarden.
“Show me what?” said the commander.
“What’s inside.”
Tenton lifted the box and gently shook it. “It’s not solid?”
Shvarden signaled a negative.
“Then show us.”
Shvarden approached the desk and set his hands on the sides of the box. His fingertips pressed and they all heard the tiny click. He lifted free the lid. Even Tenton gasped at what was revealed.
The commander put out a finger and touched the gray lens, gingerly, as if the brief contact might burn his flesh. “It’s real,” he breathed.
Brosch stood and bent over the object. The older man’s eyes were wide, Imbry noticed, his pupils darkly dilated even though the room was well lit. He looked at Shvarden, then at the rest of them, finally at Imbry for a long moment, before turning to Tenton. “Commander?” he said.
“I am not a man for the mysteries,” the provost’s officer said. “Not many of us are, in the Corps.”
“But . . .” said Brosch.
“But either this man with the two names is what he says he is,” Tenton said, “or he’s somehow gathered together every fragment of clitch on the planet to make this object—and I doubt there would be enough—which means he’s gone to a great deal of trouble to fool a couple of small-town arbiters and the local provost’s men.”
“Sir,” Breeth said, getting to his feet. “Don’t let this filthy—”
“Enough!” snapped the commander. “I see no criminal charge to answer. Therefore, this is not a matter for the Corps. It is plainly a matter for the College. The prisoners are released.” He spoke to Brosch. “Do you require an escort? That object, whatever it is, is priceless.”
“No,” said the senior arbiter. “But tomorrow we may have to move it to where it can be properly studied. I may ask for the Corps’ assistance then.”
“You will have it,” said Tenton.
“Sir!” Breeth protested. Imbry cast a quick glance at the investigator. An open stare would probably bring on an attack, the presence of the man’s commander notwithstanding. He saw that Breeth was in a state of extremis. Something deep within the provost’s man was rising to overwhelm his surface self. Something dark. Something violent.
“Investigator Breeth,” Tenton said, rising to his feet, “you are hereby relieved. You are clearly under a strain and not fit to carry out your duties. You will take leave until you can demonstrate that your judgment has been restored.”
The investigator made a choked sound, his hands spasmodically opening and closing. He looked from face to face, as if unable to believe that his vision of the truth in this matter had not been accepted. At last his eyes fell on Imbry and the fat man saw them fill with murder.
But so did the others in the room. “Regulator Uka,” Tenton said, “restrain Investigator Breeth.” Uka placed himself between his superior and the others, while the commander suggested to Brosch that he take his junior and the suspect to the Arbitration. “I will accompany you,” he finished, “and make sure that this”—he picked up the ceramic box and held it carefully in both hands—“is delivered safely.”
“I thank you,” said the senior arbiter.
“I don’t know if you should,” said the commander. “I think that here in this room tonight we have opened a door that leads . . .” He sighed. “I’ve no idea where it leads.”
They went out. Imbry’s last view of Investigator Breeth was of a pale and shaking man, looking at him over the shoulder of Regulator Uka who blocked his way. And in that look was the promise of death.
CHAPTER EIGHT
They crossed the square to the Arbitration, Imbry flanked by Brosch and Shvarden, the other arbiters forming a protective envelope around them. A few residents of Pilger’s Corners had remained after the crowd broke up, loitering under the deo trees. None of them approached, but Imbry heard whispers and low conversations as he passed.
One of the arbiters sprinted up the stairs as the group neared the building, producing a key that fit one of the big doors. It was unlocked, opened, then closed behind them and locked again, the process as smooth as if they had all rehearsed it.
The fat man looked around him as two of the arbiters hurried about, touching lumens mounted on the walls to create a multisourced glow. The Arbitration was mostly open space, longer than it was wide, floored in polished gray stone and roofed by a wooden-ribbed dome of overlapped slates. Large, round windows that pierced the upper walls would have lit the place well in daylight, but right now the upper parts of the building were in shadow, the light from the shaded lumens directed downward. The lower walls were of varnished wood, lined with doors. There was no altar or central focus, no idols in niches or fanes with flames before them, though mounted high on the wall opposite the doors was a more-than-life-size portrait of an Ideal, his rounded chin thrust forward and his small, pale eyes lifted to some distant vista. Imbry would not have bet against this being a representation of the Blessed Haldeyn.
Brosch and Shvarden hustled the fat man across the wide floor to a door at the far right corner of the building. Imbry expected to be ushered into an office, but instead found himself being urged to descend a flight of wooden steps to a dark basement. Shvarden activated a lumen but its glow was slight. Entering the chill and shadowy space, Imbry felt a sudden fear that he had exchanged one prison for another. But then the younger arbiter crossed to a wall of shelves that held what looked to be ledgers and files of paper. He pushed at something and pulled at something else, and a section of wall and shelves together pivoted outward. The arbiter reached inside and suddenly a brighter glow shone from the concealed room.
“In there,” said Brosch. Shvarden had already entered ahead of them and was touching the controls of a heat panel set into the wall. It began to radiate warmth. The room had chairs, a long work table, and locked cabinets. Another image of the Ideals’ Founder looked down from the wall, this time with an expression that was probably meant to encourage ardor in the cause, but which raised in Imbry only an uncomfortable feeling.
Shvarden pulled the door closed, then across the concealed opening he pulled a heavy black curtain that would keep both light and sound from revealing their presence to anyone who entered the basement. The action caused Imbry concern.
“You are expecting Investigator Breeth to come searching for me,” he said.
Brosch waved him to a chair and took another for himself, facing Imbry. Shvarden went to one of the cabinets, unlocked it, and began lifting documents onto the table.
Imbry had noticed that the arbiters did not take the gaze of an irregular as an insult. He raised his eyebrows and opened his hands in a way that indicated he was waiting for an answer to his question. Brosch sighed and returned him a look that said the fat man had gauged an unhappy situation correctly. “He has developed an illicit attachment to you,” the elder said.
“I am not yet clear what that means,” Imbry said.
“You really are from another world?” Brosch said.
“Yes, and where I come from it is not all that remarkable a distinction.”
“Here,” said Shvarden, his paper-sorting completed, “it is highly remarkable. And I suspect the word ‘distinction’ has a different meaning in our vocabulary.”
“You have so little contact with the Ten Thousand Worlds?” Imbry said.
“Is that what you call them?” Shvarden said, his question implicitly answering Imbry’s. “Are there really so many, or is that just irregular braggadocio?”
It was not a question Imbry had ever considered. Old Earth was room enough for most of its inhabitants. Imbry was in the distinct minority who had been off-world more than once. “There are,” he said “more than a thousand foundational domains,”—when he saw the blank looks on the arb
iters’ faces, he added—“those are the grand, major worlds settled in the first effloration of humanity out into The Spray.”
“The Spray?” said Shvarden.
“The arm of the galaxy along which human civilization has spread since the end of the dawn-time.” He saw that either “galaxy” or “dawn-time,” if not both, was a stumbling block but carried on, “Each foundational domain is associated with its secondary worlds—two, three, four, some as many as a dozen—and then there are the odds and ends of planets that host small populations. They are generally inhospitable places: too dry, too wet, too hot, too cold, or infested with life-forms that are too adept at devouring human flesh, from the outside or from within.
“And then there are the worlds inhabited by ultraterrenes—”
It was plain that all of this was coming as fresh and even startling news to Shvarden. The elder arbiter may have known more of it, but was less inclined to hear it spoken of. “Enough of this,” he said, forestalling the next question already forming on his younger colleague’s lips. “We have the here and now to deal with.”
“Very well,” said Imbry, “my goal is to find a way off Fulda and return to my home.”
Brosch brushed that consideration aside just as brusquely. “I have no idea how that goal can be achieved,” he said.
“There is truly no space port on Fulda? Or at least a beacon that can be used to hail passing ships that might be willing to take on a passenger?”
“I have never heard of such a thing. And if it existed, I would have heard of it.”
Imbry contained his disappointment and capped the anger he felt rising in him. He would defer his justifiable rage until he had a proper focus for it. “Then what am I to do?”
“That is the problem,” said Brosch. “You have set us a conundrum.”
“How so?”
The elder took a moment to frame his thoughts, then said, “Over the past few generations, it has become generally accepted that our delvings have revealed a genuine revelation. Dansk the Visionary’s revelation of the Finder and the First Eye are established as fulfillment of the Blessed Haldeyne’s”—here his eyes went to the painting on the wall and he touched his forehead, nose, and chin, as if to confirm that each was where it ought to be—“statement in scripture that as the Ideals, as a body, grew ever closer to the Golden Mean, we would know new signs and wonders.”
“You said, ‘generally accepted,’” Imbry said. “I take it that not everyone concurs—Breeth, for example.”
“Let us say that there are some doubters,” Brosch said. “Fewer now than there were a generation or two ago, when there was more cause to doubt.”
“But there are some holdouts.”
“Regrettably, yes.”
“And they are organized?”
“Even more regrettably.”
“And their numbers include a disproportionate number of provost’s men?”
Brosch looked sharply at Shvarden, who looked away, abashed. The elder man sighed again. “Yes.”
“Let me see if I understand this,” Imbry said. “You used to”—he had been about to say “murder” but instead chose a less emotionally freighted term—“eliminate children who were born markedly short of the Golden Mean. Then someone realized that their ‘otherness’ was a pathway to enlightenment. Since then, you have been conducting carefully managed contacts between Ideals and irregulars. Out of these contacts have come pieces of a new revelation, which you have studied and assembled into a recognizable shape.”
“Yes,” said Brosch, “You’re really quite insightful for an irregular.”
“I’ve had more schooling and a wider experience,” said Imbry. “The ‘shape’ you have recognized is that of a person who will someday find an object, an event that will trigger a spiritual occurrence of great import, which you call the Renewal.”
Brosch looked at the junior arbiter again. “I chose you because I thought you had learned discretion,” he said.
“Decider,” the younger man offered, “it seemed pointless to hide anything from the Finder.” Imbry was glad the young arbiter had not detailed the methods by which Imbry had extracted the information from him. He also recognized that the young man’s psyche had protected itself from a troubling dissonance by deciding in retrospect that he had acted rightly after all.
Brosch did not reply. His normally impassive face showed that he was experiencing inner discomfort. Imbry studied the expressions that flickered across those bland features and achieved his own revelation.
“I understand,” he said. “No one expected the Finder to be an irregular.” That must be a hard swallow for even the most accepting of the orthodox, those who believed that the Renewal would someday arrive; those in the Reorientation, already revolted by the Arbitration-sanctioned practice of oddy-touching, would never accept an off-worlder, a denizen of the Pit, as the harbinger of the final spiritual leap forward.
And then there was Breeth, whose rejection of the idea of the Renewal was compounded by his hatred of Imbry, on whom his fragile psyche had unhealthily fixated. Revolted by, and at the same time drawn to, the most irregular oddy he had ever encountered, the investigator’s mind must be a seething cauldron of contradictory drives.
“Indeed,” said Brosch, passing a hand over his face. “I am having trouble coming to terms with the concept myself.”
“You must get me out of Breeth’s reach,” Imbry said. “Unless the provost locks him up, he will come for me.” He looked around at the room. “I would not be surprised if he knows about this place.”
“He probably does,” Brosch said. “He has always been an able investigator.”
“Can Tenton contain him?”
“Not indefinitely. Not unless, as you say, they confined him. And even then, some sympathizer might set him free.”
“Does he have many sympathizers? Will they follow him if he defies his superior?”
Another sigh from the elder arbiter. “I cannot say. The Reorientation is not as strong here as in some of the larger towns. But it is not negligible.”
Shvarden put forward an opinion. “When word spreads that the Finder is not an Idealist, some of those who have been only leaning toward the Reorientation may harden their views.”
That sounded logical to Imbry. “I need to get out of here,” he said.
“Yes,” said Brosch. “The question is where?”
“And I need a weapon.”
The older man’s eyes widened. “Unthinkable! Only the provost’s men are armed.”
“Yes,” said Imbry, “and one or more of them will be coming to kill me.”
Brosch made a gesture that removed the issue from debate. “Nothing will happen while Commander Tenton and his party are in town,” he said. “I will ask him to stay on a day or two. Besides, where could you go that is safer than here?”
Imbry saw that Shvarden had been about to say something but had thought better of it. But the fat man was growing tired of being dependent on these Fuldans, regular or otherwise. “What were you going to say?” he said.
“Never mind,” Brosch said. “We have work—”
Imbry cut in. “I want to know.”
The elder’s voice was sharp, his heavy brows drawing down. “I said, never mind.”
Shvarden lowered his head. As meek as an oddy, Imbry thought. But it was time to put their relationship on a new footing. He still remembered Breeth’s firing of the hut. “To whom,” he said, “are you going to listen: him, or the Finder?”
It had clearly been a long time since Brosch had been bluntly contradicted. He glared at Imbry, but then his gaze went to the ceramic box and his anger leaked away. “If you really are the Finder . . .” he said.
“If that is the object you call the ‘First Eye,’” said Imbry, “then I am the one who found it.”
“There can be no doubt of that,” Shvarden said. “He was in a shaft beneath the center of a cartouche. That must be the meaning of ‘down, middle, dark.’”
/> “Don’t tell me what anything ‘must mean,’” Brosch said, but his tone was now more like that of a teacher reproving a bright but bumptious student.
“He found an opening that opened to him and no one else.”
Imbry could see that this was a telling point. Brosch knit his brows and nodded.
“And in that opening,” Shvarden said, “he found a perfect lens of clitch.” His face took on an ecstatic look. “The First Eye.”
Imbry could see that Brosch was wavering. Perhaps the man was that rare kind of scholar who was more interested in the truth than in shoring up his own position. It was time to be reasonable. “If I am the Finder,” he said, “I think I ought to know what there is to know. Even if it goes against your feelings about allowing irregulars to learn the mysteries.”
“He’s right,” Shvarden said. But Brosch made a noise indicative of discomfort.
“Suppose he is not the Finder,” the elder said, “and we reveal to him mysteries that are not known even to all arbiters—as, indeed, you already have—then what do we do with him?”
The younger man focused on the air in front of him while his thoughts followed to where they naturally led. “I suppose,” he said after a moment, “we’d have to kill him.”
“Well, there you have it,” said Brosch. To Imbry, he said, “We would, of course, regret it. But . . .”
“Let us,” said Imbry, “set that aside for now. I take it that I have already seen and heard more than any irregular should and still hope to live.”
Brosch looked him in the eye and, though he said nothing, the inference was plain. Shvarden showed deep discomfort. Imbry sighed. “If it is fatal for me to know a little, then it can do no harm to tell me everything. If you decide I am not the Finder, you will regretfully kill me. If I am the Finder, you will have helped me to fulfill my role.”
“He’s right, Decider,” Shvarden said. “In fact, I think we should take the First Eye and depart as soon as possible for—”
The Other Page 16
