The Other

by Matthew Hughes

  “Only a fool would!” Breeth’s eyes were slits. They regarded the fat man with a hatred that caused Imbry, whose career had often exposed him to strong emotions, to take an involuntary step back.

  Imbry said, “What is this?” The hand that held the needle-thrower had brought the weapon up to cover Breeth. “You are goading him to the point where he may attack me. If so, I will kill him.”

  “I am ‘goading’ him,” said Shvarden, “into facing the truth. You are the Finder. He is attracted. Therefore he is—”

  “No!” The shout came from Breeth’s depths. His hands came up in front of him, fingers poised to grasp or strangle. “Stop this!”

  The arbiter did not stop. “He is the Finder. And you are the Speaker.”

  “Never!” The word broke on a half-stifled sob.

  Shvarden bored in. “There can be no other explanation.”

  “There must be,” said the investigator, but now that the words had been spoken his anger turned to anguish. Tears brimmed in his eyes. “There must be.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Imbry.

  Shvarden stepped to Breeth. He put an arm around the provost’s man’s shoulders. Tears now poured down both bland and identical faces. “It makes sense,” the arbiter said. “The Blessed Founder would not wish us to be divided. He would choose the most stalwart member of the Reorientation to play the pivotal role.”

  “No,” said Breeth, but it was the kind of denial voiced by one who has already accepted an unwelcome truth in every way short of the final public declaration.

  “You should rejoice,” said the arbiter. “You will make possible the Renewal. In Perfection, your name will be second only to that of the Blessed Haldeyn in our praises.”

  “Oh,” said the provost’s man. He was sobbing now, the younger man patting his back, offering murmurs of comfort.

  Imbry said, “He will speak the words of your prophet?”

  “Is it not obvious?”

  “So we must take him with us?”

  “Again,” said Shvarden, “do you not see how obvious it is?”

  Imbry did not reply. He went and leaned on the side rail of the carry-all and looked, as if idly, into the operator’s compartment. There was the vehicle’s control surface. Behind it were arrays of components that, if he could but apply his skills and knowledge to them, would reduce its integrator to a state of useful subservience. He considered simply shooting Breeth and Shvarden where they stood, altering the vehicle’s control matrix then flying to some remote spot where he could take his chances with calling down a spaceship on which he could buy passage.

  But, he thought, what if the Fuldan authorities also had the means to contact passing vessels? If so, some conscientious captain might respond to Imbry’s call only to deliver him into the hands of Commander Tenton and his colleagues. The captain would not even have to be conscientious if the Provost’s Corps offered a sufficient reward. And he suspected that the political situation in which he had become an unwillingly conscripted participant was important enough to the authorities to open the public purse. He couldn’t imagine what the Fuldans might collectively possess that civilized passersby might construe as wealth—certainly he had seen nothing himself that was worth enough to buy a decent meal at Xanthoulian’s, back on Old Earth—but it was an adage of the Ten Thousand Worlds that every world had something worth taking.

  He sighed. “It must be obvious to you two,” he said. “Very well, let us go aloft and depart for . . .”

  “Naicam,” said Shvarden.

  And so, to Naicam they went.

  It was nearly dark before they reached the next node on the spiral map. The high upper air through which they flew remained full of light, but when they angled down to the surface they descended into a purple murk. The carry-all’s percepts pierced the gloom, allowing it to see where it was taking them, but when its runners grated on the gritty ground and its obviators cycled down, true darkness reigned. Shvarden illuminated the scene with his hand lumen, and Imbry saw another of the bulbous indigene constructions, and beside it another shallowly conical depression, its stone surface grooved and marked with symbols, and another wide oval at its center.

  The arbiter was eager to see what lay beneath the figured center, but Imbry said no.

  “We will wait for daylight,” the fat man said.

  “Why?” said Shvarden. “I have a hand lumen. It will be dark beneath the ground no matter where the sun is.”

  But Imbry said no again. The prospect of going down into another of the indigenes’ cellars caused him unease. He did not want to do it until there was bright daylight to come back to. Something was going on that stirred the back of the fat man’s mind.

  “This is silly,” said the arbiter. He made no attempt to disguise his eagerness to fulfill the Founder’s will. “We have waited so long—”

  “Then another night’s wait shouldn’t be any trouble,” said Imbry. “I’m not going down until daylight. Besides, I am hungry and thirsty.”

  There was no oasis at Naicam, only an ancient mechanical pump around which were grouped some roofless, derelict buildings that dated from the mining era. Breeth primed the pump and managed to get some brown water out of it. After more pumping, with each of them taking turns, the liquid ran clear. Shvarden produced a packet of dry meal from his pouch, as well as a collapsible container, and in this they mixed up a kind of cold pulse. Breeth contributed some of his compressed rations, and they sat in the bed of the carry-all and ate from the common pot.

  Imbry scooped up some of the runny paste and sucked and licked the grainy goo from his fingers. Without hesitation, Breeth plunged his hand into the mess and did likewise, prompting the fat man to ask the investigator, “You no longer consider anything I have touched to be contaminated?”

  The provost’s man looked at him without resentment. “That is all over now. If you are the Finder, you cannot be just another od—” He caught himself. “Just another irregular.”

  “Besides,” Shvarden said, “the Renewal is at hand. Soon we will all go to Perfection. The strictures against contact have served their purpose. They can be discarded.”

  Imbry nodded as if he now understood the matter and said nothing more. He ate and reflected. He had never personally encountered members of a fanatic cult at the climax of their apocalyptic drama, but he was familiar with the common elements. Unlikely transversions were to be expected. Breeth had undergone such an event. His was a mind that had believed devoutly in a particular narrow interpretation of the eschatological underpinnings of the universe, until it encountered a complete, shattering negation of that long-cherished view. The experience did not make him immediately receptive to the idea that there might be multiple explanations for why things were as they were, from which he might choose that which made the most sense. Rigidly organized psyches did not become flexible under a traumatic impact; instead, they all too often reached out and clutched to themselves a system that was the exact opposite of what they had, until moments ago, known to be the incontestable truth.

  Breeth had been a stalwart of the Reorientation. Imbry did not know what its tenets were, but he assumed they were a conservative resistance to the radical reformation that the Renewal threatened to bring to the existing state of affairs. But now the investigator’s faith in the old ways had been smashed by signs and wonders, not least his own unlooked-for fascination with a member of the hated Other: a stranded kidnappee named Luff Imbry. The psychic force had built within Breeth until it could be withstood no longer. His cognitive framework had snapped, and he had abandoned it for the only alternative. Having seen the light, he would now be as partisan a supporter of the Renewal as he had been of the Reorientation.

  The Renewal, Imbry thought he understood: the Renewalists believed that history had a direction and a purpose, and that their efforts would bring them to a threshold beyond which history would end, leading them into a heaven. Those who had striven to bring about the apocalypse would be admitted in
to paradise, there to live in perfected bliss forever.

  He also understood that the psychic energy of the Ideals, both as individuals and as a culture, came from their relation to the Other. As centuries of selective breeding had made them increasingly alike, they would have been compelled to define themselves not by what they were, but by what they were not: by the irregulars. That had been easy to do when they had all lived as a militant minority in the world they called the Pit, were surrounded by, and feeling themselves oppressed by, the despicable Others.

  But once established on Fulda, they had had no Other to define themselves against, only the fading memories of what things had been like in the Pit. But a cult like Idealism could not exist without an Other from which to draw psychic energy. Thus inevitably, a mystical movement had sprung up, one which placed the irregulars at the center of a new rite, allowing the devotees to be both repelled and drawn. The energy returned. Visions appeared. Holy sweats and fits and tics convinced those desperate to be convinced that their march toward the ultimate meaning of history had resumed.

  They had created new institutions to contain the Other: the confinement of the irregulars to segregated communities; their employment as performers in traveling shows; the ritual of the performances during which Ideals who felt the call would exhibit the appropriate signs; the “delvings” whereby the laity would physically touch the forbidden flesh of the Other, generating a psychic shock that produced visual and auditory hallucinations, which the arbiters—who had begun as a civil authority but had since become a nascent priesthood—would interpret and codify.

  It was not surprising to Imbry that the artifacts left behind by the vanished indigenes—the tablets marked with strange characters—should become part of the cult. The indigenes were an even more remote variety of Other, a conveniently undefined dimension onto which anything could be projected.

  The only aspect of the situation that puzzled Imbry was the finding of physical objects—the lens and its perfectly fitted matrix—in indigene sites that could not have failed to be well explored back in the mining days. Clitch, whatever it had been used for, had been valuable enough to sustain a planet-wide industry. The ovals that descended to where the lens and matrix were found had once been covered by huge lenses of clitch, giant versions of the one he had found. Surely, in the removal process, someone would have stepped on one of the centers and been lowered to the secret space beneath.

  It was possible that the ovals had become elevators over time, if one allowed for the vanished indigenes to have created subtle engineering works of sand and stone. Imbry could conceive of systems whereby a few grains a year trickled out of some precisely machined cylinder so that only after millennia would a footstep onto the platform cause it to sink.

  More likely, members of the Renewal’s inner circle might have surreptitiously engineered the sites and deposited the objects. It was not unknown for fanatical devotees of apocalyptic cults to seek to bring on the eschaton by seeding the clouds of glory. But none of this truly mattered to Imbry. His objective was to fulfill Shvarden’s, and now Breeth’s, dreams by completing the journey ordained by the map. He would leave them to carry out their parts: Breeth to speak the words of power, and Shvarden to watch for the door into Perfection. And by “leave,” he meant literally and physically to depart in the carry-all; he would fly to some private spot and use the communicator to arrange passage on a spaceship.

  Behind him, the Ideals, finding that the gates of heaven would not open for them, would briefly lapse into shock. But then they would begin busily constructing another timeline toward the apocalypse. In the meantime, the Reorientation would take power against the backdrop of the great disappointment. They would probably go back to murdering irregulars again, first all the existing adults, then the infants as they occasionally appeared. Unless in the turmoil of the period of chaos they found some new peculiar use for them.

  One thing they would not do would be to give up Haldeyn’s nonsense. Imbry knew that much about such cults, not a few of which speckled those parts of Old Earth still inhabited by human beings, as well as too many of the Ten Thousand Worlds to count: humans did not give up their delusions save under the most intense pressure. And even then, they were as likely as not to use the antagonism of others—and Others—as fuel for their bonfires.

  While Imbry roamed through his own thoughts, Shvarden and Breeth conversed like children on the eve of a festival day. Another sleep, perhaps two, and they would arise to romp through Three-Pie Heaven, as the old mocking song from Imbry’s school days had it. The fat man got down from the vehicle and walked out into the darkness. He could not recognize any of the stars he saw from Fulda—The Spray was a big place—but he knew that around one of the great lights he could see splashed across the night circled a planet where he could touch down as the first step on his way home. It might even be orbiting the same sun as shone on Fulda.

  For a moment Imbry was as impatient as the two Ideals. He imagined returning to Old Earth and embarking on a chain of events whose last link would be the end of someone else’s history. For Imbry meant to discover who had done this to him, and to take appropriate measures. As if to encourage him, a pinpoint moved among the stars. A ship, coursing its way, full of cargo or passengers, or likely both. If he had reset the communicator, he could send his message.

  His palm felt the warmth of the needle-thrower. Despite Breeth’s conversion, he had not let the weapon out of his grasp even as they had eaten. He could go back, shoot them both, and call down a vessel. But the carry-all would inform on him, getting off a message on its own systems before he could disable that function. Of course he could shoot a spread of missiles into its control panel, then kill the arbiter and provost’s man. But if he then was unable to adapt the communicator, or if no ship responded to his hail, he might sit here until Commander Tenton came looking for his errant investigator. Or sit here and starve, if no one came.

  Imbry counseled himself to patience. There were only two more spots on the spiral map. Perhaps by tomorrow night, all of this would be done with, and he on his way back to the comforts and pleasures of gaudy old Olkney. He lay down on the sun-warmed hardpan, made a pillow of his hat and pouch, told the needle-thrower to go on standby, and waited for sleep to take him. Before his eyes closed, another ship crossed the bowl of the night sky. He took its passage as a good omen. Or at least a sign that he was in a populated region of The Spray.

  “Where is our next stop?” Imbry asked Shvarden after they had breakfasted on gruel and hardtack softened in water.

  “Shabaqua,” said the arbiter. “South and west of here, quite a distance.”

  “Ten days by roller,” said Breeth.

  Imbry did a rough calculation. The carry-all was built for sturdiness and utility, not speed. “An all-day flight, then.”

  They climbed aboard the vehicle. Imbry took the cargo bay this time. Shvarden and his new consort wanted to continue their discussion of the wonders of Perfection, soon to be theirs.

  The carry-all took them up and began to speed southwest. Imbry had thought of a question to put to Breeth. “Does the communicator continuously broadcast its location?”

  “Yes.”

  “So your Commander Tenton can keep track of us?”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t signify.”

  “Why not?”

  “The Corps has only ground vehicles,” Breeth said, “mostly rollers and a few animipedes. They cannot match the speed of this aircraft.”

  Imbry considered the point, then said, “That would be true if they were trying to follow us from one spot to another on our wayward course. But what if they knew our final destination,”—he turned to Shvarden—“the place you call Omphal? What if they go directly there to wait for us?”

  “How would they know to do that?” the arbiter said. “Only Decider Brosch and I know of the map, and he will not tell them, no matter how hard they press him.”

  Imbry was not reassured. “There are other ways to extr
act information beyond tying a suspect to a hook on the wall and beating him. Your man may want to share the glad tidings. If so, a competent interrogator could soon have him warbling.” To Breeth he said, “Your commander looked competent. Is he?”

  The provost’s man looked troubled for a moment, then his brow cleared. “The Blessed Founder will not let his works be undone. All shall be well.”

  Now Imbry was even less sanguine about how all this might end. He said to Shvarden, “Once all the finding has been done, and Breeth speaks, my role in this business is finished, is it not?”

  The arbiter wore the look of a man considering something for the first time. “I suppose.”

  “So I could depart?”

  A shrug, then again, “I suppose.”

  “And you will not need this vehicle.”

  Shvarden laughed and Breeth echoed the merriment. “Not in Perfection,” the arbiter said.

  “Then would you please tell the integrator,” Imbry said, “that, when we reach the place called Omphal, it should place itself under my authority.”

  Shvarden thought about it. “I suppose.”

  “Did you hear that, integrator?” Imbry said.

  “I hear everything,” said the device. “The arbiter’s supposition did not, however, constitute a clear and unequivocal instruction.”

  Imbry forbore to utter the comment that came into his mind about the literalness in which some integrators liked to cloak themselves. He suspected that the practice somehow amused the devices, though none of them would ever admit it. To Shvarden, he said, “Please instruct the integrator unambiguously.”

  “Very well,” said the Fuldan. “Integrator, when we have come to Omphal and our business there is complete, you will place yourself at the service of this man, Imbry. Is that clear?”

  “Define ‘business’ and ‘complete,’” said the carry-all.

  “We will undertake a rite, in which Investigator Breeth will speak certain words. When he has finished speaking, the rite will have been completed.”