Fool Me Twice (Filidor Vesh)

by Matthew Hughes

  “It is not I who is complicating the situation,” said the voice. “Until a few moments ago, the world was proceeding with its customary smoothness. Then you appeared and made demands that are clearly out of the ordinary. If the plaque and sigil of Filidor Vesh are moving rapidly through the air toward a distant city, as indeed they have been for several seconds now, it is only logical to assume that Filidor Vesh himself is doing the same. After all, that is how things have worked until now, and we have no reason to expect sudden divergences.”

  “I do not care to engage in a philosophical dialogue,” said Filidor. “I want to go home.”

  “Ah, well,” said the voice, “now you open up entire new vistas for speculation. Can one ever truly go home again? Consider the case of the notorious Absamor Takofferny, who before departing his native village to see the world, isolated all of its environs and inhabitants in a strong stasis field, leaving them congealed in one unending moment while he roved abroad for a lifetime, before eventually returning, gray bearded and tracked with age, to revivify them. All was as he had left it, until his neighbors discovered what he had done to them. Then they beat him to death.”

  “I have more pressing concerns than the schemes of forgotten monomaniacs,” said Filidor. “Now, will you admit me?”

  But the integrator was still inclined to pursue abstruse conjectures, so Filidor’s hand snapped out and broke the connection. Now he would have to resort to a riskier means of regaining entry to his quarters. Reluctantly, he passed through the archway into the Connaissarium, crossed the tiled floor of its atrium, and took the leftmost of several doors that led into the building proper. He hurried through a gallery lined with cases displaying the stuffed carcasses of various hybrids created during one of the heydays of genetic prestidigitation, and came to an alcove that housed a dark, slab-like artifact that had been found orbiting an outer planet many millennia before. The object had been investigated and found to have neither internal parts nor apparent function, except that it sometimes emitted the mysterious syllables “Spa fon?” to persons who came within arms length.

  Today, the thing held its peace as Filidor squeezed behind it and felt along the alcove’s rear wall. When his fingers located a group of shallow depressions, he pressed and twisted, until a panel moved inward and to the side. The young man stepped into the passageway thus revealed and picked up a lumen from a box full that he had left there years before. It had been so long since he had come this way that there was an appreciable coating of dust on the appliance’s refractor.

  Growing up, Filidor had not been the most dutiful of nephews. His uncle had pressed him to study and reflection, but the boy had not been proficient with abstract concepts, and had been more attracted to frivolous pursuits. In those years, Filidor often required avenues of escape and avoidance which would allow him to put himself, at least temporarily, beyond the reach of the Archon for an hour or an afternoon. He had therefore assiduously explored the chambers and corridors of the immense Archonate palace, pushing, twisting and tapping on anything that might conceivably control a covert door or bolt hole. Regrettably, his efforts had abused and damaged many innocent ornaments and fixtures. But, every now and then, a wall had slid open and offered him a means of disappearing from view. Some of the hidden adits led to passageways that could take him well beyond the regions of the palace where his uncle might be searching for him.

  The alcove behind the slab artifact led to one such secret way. It meandered up and into the living rock of the Devenish Range, step after seemingly endless step, until it came to a small landing backed by a blank wall. In an upper corner of the barrier was a faded chalk circle, underneath which the words “Press Here” appeared in a child’s scrawl.

  Filidor lowered himself to sit on the landing and let his trembling legs dangle down the top steps. The last time he had re-entered the palace by this route, he must have been smaller, lighter and a good deal springier when it came to bounding up stairs. Now he waited until the long muscles of his thighs ceased to leap and twitch of their own accord and until his ears were not overfilled with the rush of his breathing and the thudding of his pulse. Finally, he crawled to the wall and pressed an ear against it, straining to hear any sound from the chamber beyond.

  It was equipped, he remembered, as an apparaticist’s workroom. His uncle had had it fitted out as a suitable place for Filidor to master the elementary disciplines involved in the creation, maintenance and repair of the various devices he was likely to encounter as he went through life. But the adolescent Filidor had balked at the Archon’s proposal.

  “I require a working knowledge of only one device,” he had said, languidly indicating the communicator on the workbench. “With this, I can summon Master Berro, and have him restore whatever needs restoration.”

  “True enough,” said his uncle. “But suppose this should happen.” He picked up a twin-headed maul and struck the communicator a harsh blow, so that its components scattered across the workbench. “Then what would you do?”

  And while Filidor spluttered, the Archon had instructed the young man to repair the fractured instrument so that he could then summon someone to unlock the door of the workroom, which the Archon bolted behind him as he left. Filidor had not repaired the device; instead, he had explored the workroom until he found the concealed exit. His uncle had not mentioned the matter again, leaving Filidor to wonder if he might have passed the test after all.

  Crouched on the landing, Filidor listened for several long moments. There was a slight possibility that his uncle might be using the work space for one of his idiosyncratic research projects, poking about in some arcane apparatus from a bygone age, trying to get it to perform whatever pointless function it had been designed to achieve by inventors who by now were most likely part of the dust that accumulated everywhere throughout the palace.

  No sound penetrated the stone from the other side of the wall. The young man stood up and pressed the chalk circle, causing the wall to rotate on a central pivot. The space beyond was dark. Filidor stepped through and closed the portal behind him. He had left the lumen on the landing, in case he ever had to come this way again, and now he waited in the unlit workroom for his eyes to adjust to the dimness.

  The place was not totally dark. A small light glowed on the other side of the room, so faint that it faded from view when Filidor looked at it directly, and could only be apprehended from the corner of his vision. Memory told him that its source must be slightly above the main workbench, but he could not think of any device that might account for it. Intrigued, he felt his way across the room toward it, until a nearer distance made it bright enough to see straight on. He moved closer still, bending to peer at what was now revealed to be a transparent sphere no wider than the tip of his finger, hovering unsupported above the bench top, black within but shot through with a myriad scintillating points of luminescence.

  “Remarkable,” Filidor mused to himself.

  “Just so,” said a creaking but familiar voice nearby. Filidor leapt backwards and collided with some piece of equipment hidden in the darkness.

  “Careful!” hissed his uncle. “The equilibrating energies have not reached full resonance. You might evaporate the connection.”

  “I cannot see,” said the young man.

  “Why not?” snapped the Archon.

  “There is no light.”

  “You mean you still can’t see without light?”

  “No, uncle.”

  The Archon made the same disapproving noise with which the ascender disk had greeted Filidor’s attempt to kick it. “You must return to your studies,” he said.

  The little man then went on to explain that any light in the workroom at the present stage of his experiment would vitiate the delicate forces with which he was working. He seized his nephew’s arms in his customary strong grip -- both of the captured limbs immediately began to go numb -- and maneuvered him through the d
arkness to a position on the other side of the bench. Filidor felt an instrument of some kind being pressed into his tingling hand. Depress the uppermost stud when I tell you,” said the Archon.

  Filidor heard the rustle of the little man’s clothing as he worked his way carefully around to the other side of the bench. His uncle was humming to himself, and there was a clink and clatter of objects being rearranged, then the crackling voice said, “By the way, don’t touch the bottommost stud at all.”

  “Why not?” said Filidor. “What would happen?”

  There was a pause from the other side of the table, then his uncle said, “You would not be here, and I would have to send for a new assistant.”

  “Where would I be?” asked Filidor.

  “Difficult to say. But I wouldn’t expect to see you return.”

  Filidor felt a sheen of perspiration suddenly interpose itself between his hand and the object it held. It began to slip from his grasp, and he clutched at it with sudden desperation, causing it to slip under his fingers. “Uncle,” he said, “I think you should send for another assistant. A more capable one.”

  “Don’t do that,” said the little man.

  “Don’t do what?” said Filidor. A flash of panic iced the nape of his neck and he clutched the instrument tightly enough to make his hand bones ache.

  “Don’t think. Just press the top stud when I say.”

  The humming resumed. After an interminable few seconds, the dwarf spoke again. “All right, now!”

  Filidor pressed the topmost stud. There was a crackle of energy and a bluish glow briefly loomed behind the diminutive sphere, then faded to deep indigo before finally disappearing into the surrounding gloom. The sphere itself then dwindled rapidly to a mere pinprick of light and winked out, leaving Filidor in complete blackness.

  “Don’t move,” said the Archon. A moment later, the workroom was flooded with bright illumination. The little man set a powerful lamp on the gleaming metal bench top, then reached below and brought up a framework of metal rods which he rapidly assembled while whistling tunelessly through pursed lips. When the apparatus was configured to his liking, he peered with tightly scrunched eyes at the surface of the workbench. “Must be here somewhere,” he said, and touched the framework at several of its intersections.

  A shimmer of energy rippled over the bench top, then stabilized into a layer of green plasma in which rotating arms of cerulean blue radiance extended from a central pinpoint of black.

  “Aha,” said the Archon. He adjusted the rods of his mechanism, and the rotation gradually slowed to a stop. He did something else to the device, and the core of the flux expanded to the size of a serving platter, its darkness again flecked with tiny disks and whorls of light. “Hand me the speculum,” he said to Filidor.

  Filidor selected a tube from among a slew of instruments scattered on a side table. By luck, it was the device his uncle required. He watched as the little man peered through the cylinder at the display on the workbench, and when he again heard the tuneless whistle, he began to edge quietly toward the outer door. His fingers had just found the knob that would open the portal when his uncle said, without looking up, “Why were you sneaking into the palace through the Terfel Connaissarium?”

  “Nostalgia?” Filidor tried. He sought to turn the knob, but it was locked.

  “Come back here, and wait until I have concluded this procedure,” said the Archon. “It’s time we had a revealing talk.”

  Filidor saw his hopes evaporate. To his certain recollection, no revealing talk with his uncle had ever revealed anything to his own benefit. In his younger years, they had been one-sided discussions that, all too often, led to unusual experiences through which the Archon sought to encourage in his nephew a due regard for the responsibilities that accompanied a position in society. Filidor might have accepted these assignments with more grace, if he had ever been able to understand exactly what his uncle wished him to learn from such exercises as introducing dozens of small, scurrying animals into the annual gala of the Commendable Order of the Eminent Demesne, just as the senior members of the society were leading their partners onto the floor to dance a solemn pavane. The ensuing chaos was memorable -- a number of dowagers climbed the furniture, while others scaled their escorts -- but Filidor could not grasp whatever lesson his uncle had intended. At times he wondered whether the Archon, who as Grand Master of the Commendable Order had placidly viewed the commotion from his ornate seat upon the dais, had ordered the prank merely for his own amusement.

  “Uncle,” he had asked once, “is confusion a necessary precursor of enlightenment?”

  The Archon had given him one of his rare smiles, and nodded his assent.

  “Then I must someday achieve a great edification,” Filidor said, “because I seem to spend my days in perpetual befuddlement.”

  His uncle had clapped him on the shoulder and sent him off to paste up posters offering an extravagant reward for a missing pet feranche said to belong to the doted upon daughter of a wealthy magnate. The notices went into exacting detail: “a rare Noriego Blue, with underplumage of saffron and emerald scapulars and secondaries,” but since no such variety of feranche had ever existed, all those who appeared at the appointed time and place bearing artfully dyed specimens were quickly clapped into detention. Filidor felt that he had at last seen to the bottom of one of his uncle’s schemes, until he soon after encountered two of the felons not only at large, but newly attired in the green and black livery of the Archonate’s Bureau of Scrutiny.

  Now he watched as the dwarf set a thin disk of gray metal on a side table. Next he found a new device and focused its aperture on the dark globe above the workbench. The Archon spun large dials and nudged tiny levers until their arrangement met with his satisfaction. Then he fingered a control. The action had no discernible effect that Filidor could see, but when the little man turned and passed a detecting device over the gray disk, whatever he found there evoked a grunt of pleasure.

  The Archon looked up and seemed to focus on Filidor for the first time. “Where are your sigil and plaque?” he asked.

  Filidor stepped closer to the workbench. “Is this what I think it is?” he asked. It was a desperate ploy, which would come to nothing if his uncle did not automatically return the serve. In truth, Filidor would have had difficulty identifying all but the most common apparati in the workroom, and even some of those would have required a hopeful guess. But if he could reignite the Archon’s enthusiasm for tinkering, he might avoid -- or at least put off -- the promised revealing talk and an encounter with certain questions whose answers demanded time for creativity.

  Fortunately, the dwarf returned Filidor’s sally without a blink. “Yes, it is,” he said. “It all began when I discovered a working model of a Zenthro Intrusifer in the upper southwest wing, and restored it to working condition.”

  “Indeed,” said Filidor. “Please tell me more.”

  His uncle proceeded to do so. Some of it Filidor understood -- the part about the universe being permeated by infinite variations of itself in unthinkable miniature, each one differing from every other by insignificant or massive degrees of variance, every child knew that -- but the ability of Zenthro’s device to isolate one of these infinitesimal realms and intrude it into the larger cosmos, where it could be enlarged and examined, that was new to him.

  “An impossibly ancient technology, of course,” said the Archon, “but wonderfully effective. And it prompted me to undertake a very productive line of research.” From there, the dwarf soon descended into complexities and terminologies well beyond Filidor’s orbit, but the young man grasped that a device of his uncle’s own creation -- the thing with dials and levers -- allowed him to reach into the tiny intruded universe and identify a particular object in it. More than that, the Archon’s device could replicate the chosen object and enlarge it to a manageable size, so that it could be kept for study in this
macrocosm after the intruded nanocosm had been released.

  “Remarkable,” said Filidor, coming over to peer approvingly at the gray disk, where the replicated something apparently reposed, slowly enlarging in size. “But how did you deal with the, uh...” -- he waved a hand as if the apposite word temporarily escaped him -- “the, how do you say...”

  “The fermatic harmonization flux?” his uncle suggested.

  “Exactly,” said Filidor. “I was hoping you would explain that.”

  “I fed the excess energies into an implied tesseract, where they eventually...” But here the little man stopped. For a long moment, he regarded Filidor with an expression in which annoyance and congratulation mingled and contended with each other, then he said, “I asked you about your plaque and sigil.”

  Filidor looked down at his breast, abstractedly patting parts of his torso. “I’m sure I had them this morning,” he said. He could swear to that without qualm or quibble.

  The Archon’s hairless jaw moved sideways a time or two, then he pressed a point on his own entaglioed ring and spoke to the air, “Where is Faubon Bassariot?”

  A chime sounded, then a voice said, “He is attending a private function in Eckhevry Row.”

  The dwarf reached within his garments and activated the device that bent light and adapted sound around his person, so that he suddenly appeared to be a tall, austere man of regal bearing, wearing garments that were of richly woven stuff and impeccable taste. The Archon had long ago understood that certain folk in Olkney -- especially those who thought themselves the cream afloat upon the whey -- would prefer that the topmost point of their social pyramid be occupied by someone who appeared to fit the ideal of a wise and sagacious ruler, rather than by a small, yellowish creature which looked to have been indifferently designed and only half finished. Through most of his upbringing, Filidor himself had not known of his uncle’s true appearance. It had only come to light when the two had traveled together through several of Old Earth’s odd societies, on the progress of esteeming the balance.