The Other

by Matthew Hughes

  Breeth blew air over his lower lip in a contemptuous dismissal. “Typical oddy blather.”

  Shvarden looked at him. “That must be a costly proposition.”

  Imbry had access to funds on several foundational domains. “I can afford it,” he said.

  Breeth was unconvinced, but the arbiter shrugged. “Once you have completed your role as Finder, you may do with the communicator as you wish.”

  “And this vehicle?”

  “It has no place on our world. The Blessed Founder advised us to eschew self-aware machines.”

  “Then would you order it to accept my authority once you have no more use for it?”

  “I do so now.”

  “Integrator?” Imbry said.

  “Understood,” the carry-all said.

  From the tailgate, Breeth said, “You do not fool me, oddy.”

  “Your perceptiveness is no doubt legendary,” said the fat man. “But will you observe the truce?”

  “Oh, certainly.”

  “And you, Decider?”

  “The time is at hand,” said Shvarden. “He will see.”

  “But until then?”

  “Very well. It is not proper, in any case, to mock the misguided.”

  “Why, you—” Breeth began, forcing Imbry to raise his voice again and aim the weapon. As Breeth quieted, the Old Earther wondered if it might be better just to shoot them both and take his chances with the integrator. Shvarden, dead, would clearly “have no more use” for the carry-all. With its ethical systems edited, the vehicle might accept such specious reasoning. On the other hand, the integrator showed a tendency to quibble. The fat man decided to keep on until a better opportunity for escape presented itself. “Let us just get through this, then we can all go our separate ways,” he said.

  “I know where you’ll be going, oddy,” said the provost’s man. “And you with him, Arbiter.”

  “You will address me as Decider,” said Shvarden. “And I will be going to Perfection.”

  That got Breeth going again, requiring Imbry to shoot a needle past the man’s ear. “I will withdraw my cooperation,” he told Shvarden, “if you do not accept the truce.”

  The arbiter said something only he could hear, and the provost’s man contributed his own sub-audible commentary, but otherwise quiet descended on the vehicle except for the whisper of air past its deflectors. Imbry made Breeth turn and face the direction opposite to travel. “How long until we reach our destination?” he asked the arbiter.

  “At this speed, not long at all,” was the answer.

  “Good.”

  They flew on. Imbry kept an eye on Breeth but otherwise watched the landscape unroll beneath them. The land was mostly flat and featureless, except for the widely scattered patches of green and sky-reflecting water that marked the oases. Here and there he saw parcels of elevated land standing atop cliffs or slopes, some large, some small. After they had passed several such uplands, he said to Shvarden, “Do the oases only occur at lower elevations?”

  The arbiter pushed out his lower lip and drew down his brows. “I suppose so,” he said. “I’ve never thought about it.”

  “So you don’t know why that should be?”

  Breeth said, “We didn’t come to Fulda to study hydrology, oddy. We have more important things to concern us.”

  They were passing close by one of the larger parcels of risen land. Imbry studied it for a moment, then said, “That is a beach.” He looked farther along the length of shingle that followed the line of the higher slope and saw a fan-shaped crevice cut through the long-ago shoreline. Behind, a shallow arroyo snaked back to a pass that opened in a range of high, dry hills. “And that,” he said, “is a river bed.”

  “What is a beach?” said Shvarden. “And what kind of bed?”

  “What,” Imbry said, “happened to the water on this world?”

  The arbiter shrugged. “It has always been the way it is.”

  “But obviously, there used to be seas and rivers. Where did the water all go?” He looked up into the greenish sky. “It can’t all have gone into the atmosphere and stayed there. How often does it rain?”

  “What is rain?” said the arbiter.

  “Who gives a fart?” said Breeth. “More damned oddy blather. You listen, entranced, and don’t notice his hand in your pouch.”

  “Never mind,” said Imbry. If he was still curious when he got to some civilized place, he would look up Fulda’s specifications in Hobey’s Guide.

  They traveled on in silence until Shvarden raised himself up above his seat and said, “There it is. Integrator, take us down to that oasis.”

  The vehicle slid smoothly down an invisible incline and came to a halt on the grass beside a small pool. No buildings stood beneath the greig trees, but not far off across the hardpan was another of the multilobed indigene structures, with beside it a circular depression in the form of a shallow cone.

  “Come,” the arbiter said, stepping out of the carry-all.

  “Wait,” said Imbry. He had seen a flash of anticipation cross the investigator’s face then be suppressed by an expression that bespoke only the most innocent of intentions. He handed the communicator to Shvarden then took up the ceramic box. Alighting from the vehicle, the needle-thrower trained on Breeth, he said, “Tell it to rise into the air and stay there until we come back.”

  “But we have a truce,” said Shvarden. He looked to Breeth and the provost’s man smiled broadly in agreement.

  Too broadly for Imbry. “Even so,” the fat man said.

  Shvarden shrugged—Imbry was coming to see the gesture as one of the arbiter’s defining characteristics—and sent the carry-all and its remaining passenger aloft. Breeth said nothing, but Imbry read the narrowing of the man’s eyes as a promise of retribution. He put the weapon into his pouch.

  “This way,” Shvarden said. “Bring the First Eye.” They approached the indigene structure. Imbry again noted the absence of doors, but saw again the seemingly random distribution of holes large and small in the rounded walls.

  “They swam,” he said. It was obvious now that he put it together with the beach and the dry river on the uplands they had overflown. “They were sea creatures, and this was the bottom of the sea.”

  Shvarden’s face told him that he was not being understood. “All of this,” Imbry said, extending an arm in a wide arc, “was once covered in water. A great deal of water, filling all of this space right up to the beach we saw on those hills.”

  “There is not that much water in the world,” the arbiter said. “We have the oases, and that is all.”

  “What about the aquifers that feed the oases? There must be plenty underground.”

  The other man looked as if he could vaguely recall an obscure fact from his school days. “The old miners calculated it, but I can’t remember the figures. Besides, it doesn’t matter. There is always water in the oases.”

  Imbry scratched his head. “And it never rains?” Seeing the arbiter’s puzzlement, he said, “Water falling in droplets from the upper air?”

  Shvarden recouped another memory. “That happened in the Pit,” he said. “The Blessed Founder took us away from all that. Here we have no untidy back-and-forthing. Things remain as they should be, even and calm.”

  “It makes no sense—” Imbry began, but the other man cut him off. They had arrived at the indigene building, which was several times Imbry’s height. He found where a hole had been roughly broken through the wall and peered in, saw a dimly lit interior with wider holes in floor and ceiling. They definitely swam, he thought.

  But Shvarden was following a more focused program. “This way,” he said, leading the fat man to the circular depression a few steps from the structure. He pointed at the oval lozenge in the center of the shallow cone. “Look.”

  Imbry saw a design graved in the whitish material. It matched the next spot on the spiral map. “Very well,” he said. “What do I do?”

  “What did you do when you found th
e first one?”

  Imbry answered by setting the box on the ground, stepping into the circle, and walking down to the center. He stood on the design. Almost immediately, he heard a faint grating sound and the sifting of sand. The lozenge began to sink into the ground.

  Shvarden reached into his pouch, brought out a hand lumen, and tossed it to Imbry.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was cool beneath ground level, and it took a few moments for Imbry’s eyes to adjust to the dimness beyond the light that spilled down from the opening through which he descended. Shvarden remained above, lying flat on the figured surface of the dry pool, his head poking over the edge of the oval. As in the first time, his descent was short, but unlike the other occasion, he did not have to search for whatever he was supposed to find. A short distance away was a round opening in the floor, perhaps three times as wide as Imbry was tall. Beside it stood a cylindrical framework of thin struts, jointed together so that, when Imbry picked it up and examined it in the brighter light of the hand lumen, he saw that the contraption was apparently made to flex in a way that caused one of its circular ends to enlarge or contract. Measuring by eye, the fat man decided that the gray lens of clitch in the ceramic box Shvarden was keeping above matched the maximum size of the opening. He ran a finger around the rim of the cylinder; it was grooved around the inside, and again he was sure that the edge of the lens would fit snugly. If the conjoined objects were then set so that the lens was on top of the network, its weight would cause the rim to contract around it, holding it like a gem set in a matrix of wire.

  The point of the arrangement eluded Imbry, but it seemed clear enough that the intent of whoever had caused these objects to be hidden in scattered locations was to see them brought together. Nothing would dissuade Shvarden from proceeding from one node on the spiral map to another, until whatever waited to be found was found—and, presumably, put together. He examined the collection of jointed struts again. They were made of the same ceramic-like material as the figured box, and though they were spindly and thin in cross-section, they were not brittle. When he applied pressure to one of them, it bent slightly but immediately became straight again when he ceased to bend it.

  It was like no substance Imbry had encountered before, but that didn’t mean it was valuable. He knew of several dozen collectors of ultraterrene artifacts, but the market in such items tended toward the spectacular: barbed throwing sticks used in ritual combat by Wanwan warriors, preferably with the loser’s ichor still staining the tangs; Shoon wind-drums made from the ear membranes of soaring, web-winged windsliders that could only be taken if the wily beasts could be lured down to traps that were baited by the hunter’s own larval offspring; tiered crowns of polished electrum, studded with rough gems, used in status contests among the Veroin—hard to obtain except by robbing the tombs of their wearers, a risky occupation since the Veroin reserved the right to slow-roast and eat even casual passersby.

  But for a cylinder made of ceramic struts into which fitted an opaque lens of gray and greasy graphite he could think of no prospective buyers. Still, he thought, he had no choice but to continue Shvarden’s quest; and perhaps the next stop or the one after would deliver up something not only rare but sellable. He tucked the object gently under his arm and turned back toward the light. Then it occurred to him to shine the hand lumen’s beam into the wide, round shaft.

  He had thought the one where he had found the First Eye had been empty. This one was not. Far down, almost at the limit of the lumen’s reach, Imbry saw a reflected gleam of liquid. The sight again caused him to wonder about Fulda’s hydrological strangeness. But Imbry preferred to harness his well-developed curiosity to the pursuit of knowledge that could be translated into tangible wealth. If not even the Fuldans could be bothered to wonder about their world’s peculiarities, a stranded stranger could expect little profit from puzzling over them. He deactivated the lumen and trudged back to the hole into daylight.

  Shvarden was ecstatic when Imbry handed up the cylinder. He wasted no time in taking the gray lens from its container and fitting the two together. The two objects joined as the fat man had expected. “What is it?” he said, when the arbiter had helped him scramble out of the shaft, again abrading the skin of his capacious belly.

  “That has not yet been revealed,” Shvarden said, but his tone contained no room for doubt that it would be. “We must make for Naicam without delay.”

  Investigator Breeth did not share the arbiter’s enthusiasm when they called down the vehicle and Shvarden showed him the clitch lens in its new setting. “This is his doing,” he said. “He has planted the objects and now leads you in a fools’ parade.”

  “To what end?” said Imbry. “All I desire is to leave this backwards planet—”

  “Backwards?” said Shvarden, setting the matrix and lens on the seat between them. “Here we are on the brink of reaching Perfection, and you—one of the most irregular persons I have ever seen—call us backwards?” He laughed.

  “Tell me,” Imbry said, keeping his tone civil, “could anyone on this world make a vehicle such as the one we are flying in?”

  “It is nothing but a machine,” said the arbiter, while Breeth again made the fricative noise of air, lips, and teeth that was his way of marking the appearance of anything that merited his derision.

  Imbry’s patience for the Ideal worldview was wearing thin. “Nothing but a machine that takes us here and there at greater speed than anything I have seen since I arrived,” he said. “Or do barbarels fly as handily as they fart?”

  “Machines are a distraction,” said Breeth. “You fill your . . .”—he sought for a moment for an antonym for “backwards” and finally found one—“forwards worlds with things that will keep you from having to face the reality of your irregularity, which would crush you beneath a heap of shame and heartache.”

  “A distraction from what?” Imbry could not help asking the question. “From living a sparse existence in a desert, chewing the same perpetually dull dinners and engaging in the same perpetually dull conversations with the same perpetually dull neighbors until merciful death ends the perpetual dullness?”

  “It is a life with a purpose,” said Shvarden. “And the purpose is Perfection.”

  “We differ on our definitions of that term,” said the fat man.

  “Well, we would, wouldn’t we?” said Breeth, giving Imbry a calculatedly slow appraisal from top to bottom then coming back up to focus on his wide expanse of belly.

  Imbry gave a convincing imitation of Breeth’s sound of contempt.

  “Enough,” said the arbiter. “I must report the find to Decider Brosch.” He deposited the lens and matrix on the carry-all’s bench seat and took up the communicator. But when he set and activated the device and spoke the senior arbiter’s name into it, the voice that crackled from the speaker was not Brosch’s.

  “This is Commander Tenton,” it said. “Let me speak to Investigator Breeth.”

  Shvarden’s eyes flicked from one side to another as he chose his course of action. “I will not,” he said. “Let me speak to Decider Brosch.”

  “You cannot,” came the reply. “He is in custody, as are most of your colleagues. The plot has failed.”

  The young arbiter’s voice rose in both pitch and volume. “What plot? There is no plot! We are following the guidance of the Blessed Founder. We have already found the next piece of the First Eye.”

  “Next piece?” said Breeth. “Yesterday, you said you had found the First Eye. Now you’re saying it was not complete? The Renewal comes in dribs and drabs?”

  “Obviously,” said Shvarden.

  “Not to me.”

  “Let me speak to Breeth,” came the voice from the communicator.

  Shvarden did not waver. “I will not. Reconsider your views, Commander,” he said into the device. “The Renewal is at hand.”

  “Decider,” said Tenton, “let us end this. Come in and—”

  But the arbiter broke the connection.
“Get aboard,” he said to Breeth and Imbry. “We are going to Naicam.”

  “I will stay here,” said Breeth. He indicated the communicator. “Tell them to come and collect me.”

  “No.”

  Breeth’s tone was oddly plaintive. “Why not? I am of no use to you. And if I can, you know I will arrest you.”

  “You know why,” said the arbiter.

  Breeth affected a look of uncomprehending innocence, but Imbry saw not only deception but a deep tension beneath the wide-eyed expression. He saw that some strange conflict was building between these two men, neither of which was sane by the standards of Old Earth’s societies—at least most of them.

  “You will not accept it still?” Shvarden asked the investigator.

  The provost’s man feigned incomprehension. “Accept what?”

  “Who you are.”

  “I am Breeth, Investigator First Grade.” But the man’s voice trembled, as if he fought to suppress some other statement that threatened to burst from deep within him.

  The arbiter rolled his eyes. “Come,” he said, “face it.” He gestured at the lens in its framework. “This is the First Eye.” He indicated Imbry. “He is the Finder. We are on our way to the navel of the world. You are accompanying us—no one else—and that makes you . . .” He left the sentence unfinished, but looked directly at Breeth, his head cocked in an implicit invitation for the provost’s man to complete the thought. When Breeth opened his hands and mouth, brows raised in mock ignorance, Shvarden said, “You are drawn to him. No one else has been. Just you.”

  “I reject the allegation,” Breeth said, but he could not meet the arbiter’s gaze.

  “Why did you beat him?”

  “He annoyed me. Filthy oddy, look at him.”

  “You beat him because you yearned to touch him.”

  “Never!” The provost’s man grimaced in disgust, turned his head away. But his fists had clenched and Imbry saw barely suppressed rage in every line of the man’s stance.

  “Never? Always!” countered the arbiter. “You want to do it now. Any fool could see it!”