The Other

by Matthew Hughes

  “Well,” he said, “there were the Ideals, obsessing over the Other amongst them—their own children, irregularly formed by the processes of the womb or by a mutated germ cell. But the Ideals did not realize that they, themselves, had been conscripted to play the role of the Other in the myth-made-reality of an ultraterrene species.”

  “Ultraterrene?” Fonsaculo said. “On Fulda?”

  “Indeed,” said Imbry, “and a decidedly xenophobic species with, and this is only informed speculation, transplanar powers.”

  The news left the spacer captain agape. “You are certain of the presence of a new sapient species?”

  “I am.”

  “The Archivists on Odlum would offer a substantial prize for indisputable evidence of any new ultraterrenes.”

  “I have heard that,” said Imbry. He reached into the white pouch he wore over his new clothes and produced a recording medium. The golden-hued bead shone as he held it up to the light. “And here is the evidence, assembled by the carry-all’s percepts.”

  A wide smile split Fonsaculo’s face. Imbry recognized it as the expression of a man who enjoyed a good haggle, especially if it led to the acquisition of something much to be desired. His own face had often worn that same aspect.

  “Odlum is not all that far from Tintamarre,” the spacer said.

  “I believe that is so.”

  “How much might you pay to be carried there?”

  “How much might you charge?”

  “Take some more punge,” said the captain, “then together we will find out.”

  Huband Kesh-Iverey, Rightfully Elevated High Archivist, was an Odlumite of the Superb social class, a distinction evident by the enthusiasm of his facial hair and its complex arrangement in frosted plaits and beaded ringlets. He regarded Imbry from within this hirsute thicket, and even with so much of his face hidden from view, the Old Earther was able to read deep suspicion.

  “It has been no less than an Aeon since a new sapient ultraterrene species was identified and described,” the official said.

  “Precisely why your venerable institution has offered such a handsome reward for evidence of a new find.”

  “Yes,” said the archivist, “evidence.” Imbry heard the emphasis but said nothing. “Occasionally,” Kesh-Iverey went on, “fraudsters cross our doorstep with artifacts they have themselves manufactured, and snatches of blurry images that they purport show a newly found species.” Kesh-Iverey’s index finger made a fluttering motion in the direction of the recording bead Imbry had placed in the viewer on the Archivist’s desk. “We have also made inquiries. Your reputation precedes you on several worlds, and the shadow that it casts is not . . .” He paused as if searching for a word, then chose, “wholesome.”

  “I cannot assume responsibility for what others may say of me,” said Imbry. “I flourish in a competitive field. There are always some who would rather believe that their competence would be more than adequate if it were not occluded by others’ shenanigans.”

  “And you deny any association with ‘shenanigans’?”

  “I neither affirm nor deny anything. But I do understand your subordinates’ reluctance to accept my evidence and their insistence that it be placed before you personally.”

  The fat man reached out and touched the viewer’s control. Immediately, the images of the tubular, tentacled indigenes of Fulda again filled the screen that appeared in the air before them. “You will note,” Imbry said, “that these images are sharp and not at all transitory.”

  “They show a marine environment. Fulda is a desert planet.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “You are claiming that these new ultraterrenes used transplanar energies to turn their world from wet to dry so that humans could settle on it while the indigenes hid themselves away for scores of millennia.”

  “I would not say I ‘claim,’” said Imbry. “Rather, I hypothesize.”

  “A distinction too narrow for us poor Archivists, I am sure,” said Kesh-Iverey. “You also ‘hypothesize’ that the unnamed species are intensely xenophobic—”

  “Insanely so,” Imbry put in.

  “Just so. You believe that they lured humans to their world with the specific intent of drowning them all.”

  “I do. They did.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “I suggest,” said Imbry, “that you mount an expedition to Fulda to ask them. Though I doubt you will get a satisfactory explanation.”

  “You are the one alleging firsthand observation. I invite you to hypothesize.”

  Imbry collected his thoughts. “I am a layman,” he said, “and this is a layman’s analysis. Perhaps the Fuldan indigenes, living in an ocean on a planet that lacked livable land surface, developed the ability to pierce the membranes between our plane and the others. Those membranes are known to contain vast energies, though we have been unable to tap them. They used these energies for purposes unknown to us; perhaps they traveled extensively through other dimensions, but certainly they showed no interest in exploring The Spray. They may have had only a vague awareness of it—and no awareness at all of the existence of other sapient life forms.

  “Then humans showed up. Our existence, and our insistence on making our existence known to the indigenes, may have constituted an intolerable affront to their understanding of how the cosmos was ordered. This unwelcome, unlooked-for knowledge created an immense psychic shock that reverberated within the collective unconscious of the ultraterrenes. A sapient species that may have had not even the concept of the Other was suddenly confronted by its physical presence.

  “They could not restore a psychic balance by assimilating the Other. They had no appropriate myths on which to fall back. That left the only other option: create a new myth, one in which the Other is confronted, encysted, and destroyed.

  “So,” Imbry concluded, “they restructured their planet to resemble what they conjectured a nonaquatic species would inhabit: dry land with scattered springs of water, a thick atmosphere to shield us from the harmful radiation that bathed the land. This they accomplished and maintained using transplanar energies focused through great lenses of clitch scattered about Fulda.”

  “Ah, yes,” said the High Archivist, “the mysterious substance.”

  “I brought you a fragment of it. The integrator on the Pallistre could not penetrate to its basal structure. Has your assistant had more success?”

  Behind the facial adornments, Imbry saw a moue of discomfort cross the Odlumite’s aspect, immediately succeeded by anger and hostility, not entirely confined.

  “It is the stuff that was mined on Fulda, in the Nineteenth Aeon,” Kesh-Iverey said.

  “I knew that before I left the place,” Imbry said.

  “Its provenance was never fully ascertained.”

  “What about its structure? What is it made of?”

  The High Archivist let his assistant answer. The integrator’s voice sounded from the air beside Imbry’s ear. “Carbon, silicon, betafluoron, ischalite, some trace elements that appear to have come from its being handled by several persons.”

  “Is it of organic manufacture?”

  “Do you mean was it produced in an organism?”

  “Yes.”

  “Indeterminate. It may have been, but there is no known organism that could produce it.”

  “What about,” said Imbry, “an organism that incorporated transplanar capacities?”

  The High Archivist made a sound indicating that he was experiencing a gratuitous insult to his intellect, but his assistant said, “That would account for the unusual molecular bonds. Yes, it is a valid hypothesis.”

  “There you have it,” said Imbry. “I claim my reward.”

  “This proves nothing,” said Kesh-Iverey.

  “It is not my responsibility to prove anything. It is yours. You must now send an expedition to Fulda to verify my claim.”

  The Odlumite pulled at a thick braid that descended from the flesh beneath his chin. T
he action seemed to cause him pain, yet he continued to tug. “I am not subject to your orders!” he said.

  “No, but you are subject to the rules and procedures of your calling,” the fat man said. “Am I not correct, integrator?”

  “You are. Shall I give instructions to assemble an expedition?” The question was directed to Kesh-Iverey, whose only response was a glare at the Old Earther. After an interval, the device said, “Did you not hear the question?”

  “I heard,” said the High Archivist.

  “And your answer?”

  “Give the instructions.” The order came through clenched teeth and was accompanied by a withering look that Imbry suspected would have crushed him against the carpeted floor if its sender had had the power. “It may take some time for an expedition to be formed, to go and to return, to file a report and have it adjudicated,” Kesh-Iverey said.

  “I am in no hurry,” said Imbry. “I will appoint Captain Shrant Fonsaculo of the freighter Pallistre to be my agent while you complete your investigations.” He stood to leave, then said, “Before I go, my fragment of clitch, please.”

  The Odlumite opened a drawer in his desk and took out the lump of greasy gray stuff. He tossed it angrily in Imbry’s direction, but the fat man nimbly caught it. He turned to go, then paused and said, “Integrator, would you send a copy of the analysis to the Pallistre?”

  “Done.”

  On his return to the ship, Imbry offered Captain Fonsaculo five percent to act as his agent with the Archives. The spacer countered with twelve percent and, after a mutually enjoyable passage of gestures and epithets, complete with appeals to deities and reason, theatrical declarations of despair and clutching at wounded hearts, they agreed on eight-and-a-half. Imbry went to his cabin satisfied; he would have been willing to settle for nine. He suspected that Fonsaculo harbored feelings of genuine friendship for him. In return, the fat man thought well of the spacer; he decided to think about accepting and reciprocating the sentiment. He had few friends, scattered on several worlds, but he valued that handful of kindred souls highly.

  The Pallistre was now bound for Tintamarre and the annual contest of spaceship galleys known as the Grand Gastronomicon. Fonsaculo had been able to pick up a charter on Odlum—three passengers who wished to visit Tintamarre’s glittering cairngorm grottos and tour the Cloud Castles—and the salon was theirs for the duration. Imbry repaired to his quarters and asked the integrator to display the analysis of clitch. A three-dimensional diagram of the stuff’s odd molecular structure appeared on a screen in the air.

  “Rotate the image ninety degrees,” he said. There was something familiar about the peculiar arrangement of the different atoms that bound in improbable ways to form the molecule. He was now certain that transplanar energies were involved in the bonding, but there was something else about the diagram that tickled his memory. “Where have I seen that before?” he said.

  “I do not know,” said the integrator. “Our acquaintanceship is only recent.”

  “It was a self-directed query,” Imbry said. Integrators could never grasp why humans consciously asked themselves questions they could not answer. It was not a failing of the device’s, however; the inability was built into them, lest they fall into the habit of constantly asking themselves such questions. Experience had shown that integrators that were too closely modeled on human mentation had a tendency to develop an unhappy condition known as “the vagues.”

  After a polite pause, the Pallistre said, “Concerning the clitch analysis, we are now too distant from Odlum for me to access the connectivity there. Do you wish me to inquire through the connectivity on Tintamarre once we have passed through the whimsy and come into range?”

  “Please,” said Imbry.

  “Very well.” The integrator paused, as the devices were instructed to do before changing the subject, so as not to disconcert the far slower mental processes of their human associates. It said, “I am considering what menu I should present to the judges at the Grand Gastronomicon.”

  “I see.”

  “Would you be willing to sample some of the dishes? I wish to make some novel combinations of appetizers, entrees, savories, and sweets.”

  “An excellent strategy,” said Imbry. “Bors Nachakkian is one of the judges this year. He likes to be taken by surprise.”

  “And his responses will weigh heavily with Tino Ganswether, one of the other judges.”

  Imbry said, “If you can sway those two, the momentum will be yours.”

  “My thinking also,” said the Pallistre.

  “If you make a good showing in the Gastronomicon,” the fat man said, “you could do more charters and haul less cargo.”

  “Again, my thinking, too. It would be nice to have my holds remain clean.”

  “Or even convert them to cabins.” Imbry wondered if Fonsaculo might be interested in taking on a silent partner, one who could finance the conversion of the ship into a charter yacht. He decided to broach the subject at dinner. To the integrator, he said, “I would be delighted to serve as your test palate for the Grand Gastronomicon. Consider me at your service.”

  When they came out of the whimsy that flung the ship through irreality between Odlum and Tintamarre, there remained only a short run through normal space before they were touching down at the spaceport outside Khilreyn. Imbry was still muzzy from the medications that were needed to protect the human cerebrum from the unsettling sensory distortions that passage through a whimsy produced in an unsedated brain. He gathered together his few possessions and went to find Shrant Fonsaculo.

  The spacer had just discharged the charter passengers into the hands of Tintamarrean greeters, who were already pressing each of the new arrivals to drink a mug of rich, dark ale and bite into the hand-sized loaf of fresh bread that were part of a traditional welcome to the grand old foundational domain. Visitors who came to Tintamarre with agendas that did not include plenty of time for eating and drinking were offered many opportunities daily to change their perspective.

  “My friend,” Fonsaculo said, initiating the complex handshake that was a gesture of significance on his home world. Imbry was familiar with the mutating grip and matched the spacer move for move. They ended up facing the same direction, shoulders touching, in a brief bending of the knees.

  “I will transmit the funds for the refit as soon as I reach Old Earth,” Imbry said, adding, “partner.”

  “You do not wish to wait for the results of the Grand Gastronomicon?”

  Imbry waved the question away. “The menu that your integrator has designed—”

  “With your assistance,” the device put in.

  The fat man inclined his head. “The menu will win a significant prize.”

  “Still,” said Fonsaculo, “I will not take your money until the results are in.”

  “It will win,” Imbry said. The two men executed another complex series of hand grips and flutters, ending this one with hands pressed to each other’s chests, and Imbry turned to step through the hatch.

  “Wait,” said the integrator. “You forgot your information about the clitch.” It produced a recording bead from its dispenser. Imbry took it, with thanks, and put it in his wallet. Then he stepped out into the bustle of Khilreyn spaceport. He discouraged the greeters by informing them that, as a gourmet, he must choose carefully the substances that touched his gustatory apparatus. The explanation was respectfully accepted and the group of men and women were happy to answer the fat man’s question and direct him toward the Graz Line terminal, where he had already booked passage for Old Earth.

  Aboard the Graz Line’s Opulence, Imbry refreshed himself in a first-class cabin and reflected on the events that had begun when he went to meet Barlo Krim on the Belmain seawall. The prize he would receive from the Archivists on Odlum, less Captain Fonsaculo’s percentage and even after subtracting the cost of traveling from Fulda to Old Earth, was greater than he would have earned from buying and selling-on the set of custom-made knuckle-knacker
s he had been expecting to acquire from Krim. Plus he now owned an interest in a charter yacht whose prize from the galley competition would ensure a strong and steady return for as long as Imbry cared to maintain the relationship.

  All in all, the adventure had turned out better than the fat man could have expected when he was lying on the stone flags of the seawall, having his ribs bruised by a half-sized irregular from a nasty little world Imbry had never heard of. But if he had made a handsome and unexpected profit on the business, that happy result came from the wise and persistent application of his own resources. It diminished by not a minim his determination to levy a memorable retribution on whoever had done this to him. He still did not know who the culprit was, but he would not cease to inquire until he had found out.

  He would have to be careful. When it was known that Imbry was back, the hidden enemy would be strongly motivated to reduce his effectiveness before it could be brought to bear. The most direct method would be to strike hard and fast, since a dead Luff Imbry posed little peril. Or something more subtle might occur, with Imbry handed over to the scroots—Colonel-Investigator Brustram Warhanny had long followed the fat man’s career with interest—while in the possession of incriminating evidence.

  He would have to tread somewhat lightly, too, around the matter of Barlo Krim, however. His need for caution did not arise from his assumption that the middler had been forced, by means of threats to his beloved daughter, to gull Imbry into a trap. It came from the fact that the Krims were a numerous and capable clan of halfworlders, and to take on one was to take on all.

  But he was fairly sure that Barlo Krim would be willing to do what he could to make amends. Luff Imbry was also well known in the shadowy backwaters of Olkney, and common wisdom held that anyone who chose to muss up Imbry’s coiffure should expect to have to reach, and soon, for his own comb.

  Imbry again began to winnow through the list of those who had the will and the potential to have sprung this trick upon him. As he concentrated his thoughts on the question, it occurred to him that he had to accept an unpleasant possibility. The events that had happened after he arrived on Fulda had been put in play, he was quite sure, by a sapient species that was able to penetrate the membranes between the Nine Planes. Imbry had performed a key role in those events—he was the Finder, after all. Did that mean that his kidnapping and depositing on Fulda had been part of the indigenes’ myth? Would the hidden enemy ultimately turn out to be a race of tentacled, transplanar ultraterrenes?