Fool Me Twice (Filidor Vesh)

by Matthew Hughes

  “That’s an interesting trick,” Filidor said. “How’s it done?”

  The functionary had his head cocked to one side, as if listening to another voice. Then he looked at Filidor and said, “Do you not think it would be better to leave matters mainly in my hands, once we are in Trumble? I am more experienced at toting up the pros and cons of complex issues.”

  But the image of Emmlyn Podarke had now replaced Bassariot’s. “Beautiful girl,” Filidor said.

  He was so taken with his amorous mirage that he did not much notice the triumphant smile that now draped itself above Faubon Bassariot ample chins. “I told you,” the major-domo said.

  “Told me what?” Filidor said. “And why is your face so huge?”

  “Leave it to me. I’ll take care of him,” Bassariot said, as if Filidor had not even spoken, which caused Filidor to wonder if Red Abandon had done something to his vocal apparatus. “Hello?” the young man called across the table, which now seemed to stretch a vast distance.

  The vision of Emmlyn Podarke had evaporated, and Bassariot was back, but now his features began to shrink and recede, becoming a small round object at the end of a long, red tunnel. Filidor was reminded briefly of the light fixture suspended above the bench in his uncle’s workroom, and how the Archon’s tall projected image would pass right through it when they were alone. The little man saw no reason to accommodate his projection by bending, since his true stature allowed him to pass under the lumen with room to spare.

  The Red Abandon had the effect of leading the young man’s thoughts along pathways down which they normally did not wander. He thought of all the times he had surreptitiously exited the workroom when he should have been employed at whatever educational task the Archon had set him. It suddenly burst upon Filidor that the little man was the kindest, best uncle a boy could have wished for, and with this thought, large tears sprang from his eyes. The tiny vision of Bassariot at the end of his tunnel misted to complete obscurity.

  “My uncle is a wonderful man,” Filidor said.

  The dwindled major-domo said, “Oh, to be sure. Why not take another glass, then we might go on deck and survey the surroundings.”

  More of the Red Abandon seemed to Filidor an ideal proposition, and he cooperated fully. As the liquor percolated through his body, he felt his head separate gently from the rest of him, to float a little above his neck, like a tethered balloon. Then he had the peculiar sensation of drifting toward the door that led to the outer deck, and strangely enough when he looked down, his feet were moving across the carpet. Faubon Bassariot was walking beside him, clutching someone’s arm. Filidor thought he recognized the arm, but couldn’t quite place it.

  At the door, Bassariot took the handle and pushed it open. At that moment, Filidor again heard the faint chime by his left ear, this time accompanied by a tiny voice that said, Hello?

  “Hello,” said Filidor, inducing his head to drift softly in the direction where the sound appeared to come from. There was no one there but Faubon Bassariot.

  “’Hello’ might not be the most appropriate word,” said the major-domo. His face, when Filidor was able to focus on it, seemed tight with suppressed excitement, pale and grim, the single dark curl plastered to his forehead like a hook.

  Filidor felt himself maneuvered out onto the deck, where the wind of the ship’s passage struck his overwarmed flesh like jets of cold water.

  Can you hear me? said the small voice again, far away.

  “You seem very far away,” said Filidor.

  “It is the effects of the liquor,” said Bassariot, guiding the young man to the stern of the ship. “Soon to pass.”

  Where am I? said the voice.

  “Where are you?” answered Filidor.

  Bassariot said, “I am right here. Come, let us look over the rail.”

  They were at the stern, sheltered now from the wind. Further forward, along the portside deck, the Tabernaclists were disputing a doctrinal point with their customary clamor. Bassariot led Filidor to the waist high barrier. The wake of the Empyreal foamed like a chalk road across a field of shining black flint, laying a lingering trail of phosphorescence across the dark waters of Mornedy Sound. Olkney was only a glimmer on the farthest edge of the world.

  Is that better? said the voice, now a little louder.

  “Much better,” said Filidor. “Who are you?”

  There was an answer but it was drowned beneath Faubon Bassariot’s hearty offer of, “One last pull at the flask, then off to bed.”

  Filidor felt the leather covered glass pressed into his hand. He raised its neck to his lips. At the same instant, there came a sudden clashing of cymbals and shouts of “Ho, there!” and “Wakey-wakey!” from the clutch of Tabernaclists forward. The eruption of sound startled Filidor, and he dropped the flask. When he looked around for it, he had a startling view of the top of Faubon Bassariot’s head. The major-domo was squatting behind him, his hands grasping the backs of Filidor’s knees.

  The Archon’s apprentice was about to ask the functionary what he was doing down there, but the thought was driven from his mind when he discovered that, suddenly, he could fly. Amazingly, he was rising through the air, his shins brushing the top of the rail as he sailed out and above the boiling wake of the Empyreal. Then he didn’t seem to be rising so much as swooping. The whiteness of foamed water loomed larger and larger, expanding until it filled his entire vision. He smelled the faint, salty reek of the sea.

  Then he hit the cold water head first and was immediately sucked beneath the surface by the vortices of the ship’s twin impellors. Filidor was tossed and flung in several directions at once, none of them toward the air. The small voice said, How’s this? It was louder now, but Filidor was not equipped to answer. The chill blackness of the night sea had apparently entered through his feet and was steadily climbing to where the last vestige of him huddled on the highest shelf inside his head. Contrary to his hopes, the darkness came all the way up and collected him.

  Chapter 3

  When Filidor awoke, something gray and white was standing on his chest. It clacked a sharp yellow bill and cocked its head to eye him with what he was sure was evil intent.

  He opened his mouth to say, “Get off me!” but all that came out of him was the kind of sound a particularly inarticulate beast might make, accompanied by a rolling belch that reeked of stale Red Abandon. The bird took offense and flapped away.

  Filidor closed his eyes, having discovered that light, even the weak light cast by the fading orange sun in this latter age of Old Earth, was not a friend to his present condition. His head felt as if his skull’s contents had been roughly sawn into segments that someone was now rhythmically rubbing together without regard for consequences. His tongue was entirely the wrong size and shape, and the taste in his mouth caused him to worry that the departed bird might have left something unpleasant there.

  Eyes still tightly closed, he sought to sit up, pushing against the resilient surface he was lying on. It felt to be yielding yet cold, fibrous yet slick. When he was fairly sure that the upper half of him had become vertical, he hung his head and allowed his eyelids to offer his vision the narrowest slit. Beneath and between his outstretched legs he saw an interwoven mat of green fibers and thick lengths of tuber, some of them dark of hue and some biliously pale. All at once he became aware of the smell. It was like low tide on a beach after a night of storms, and it made him retch; but only weakly -- the lingering influence of Red Abandon prevented him from serious efforts of even the involuntary kind.

  Shading his eyes from the sun, which appeared to be at its mid-morning station, he looked about him. He was on a circular mat of aquatic vegetation, a little wider than he was tall, but thick enough to bear his weight. It was concave in shape, like a shallow bowl, its sides tightly woven and its lip a handsbreadth above the water, which rippled past its outer sides with a contented swish and gu
rgle. I’m in a basket, he thought. Beyond lay nothing but green and level sea in every direction.

  He looked down and saw, nestled between his right leg and the woven inner wall of the basket, a grayish object a little smaller than his head. He picked it up and found that it was a bladder full of a liquid that sloshed when he moved it, and stoppered by a plug of bone. Filidor pulled the stop from the neck, peered at then sniffed the contents, then tasted. It was water, fresh but flat.

  He was immediately seized by a great, burning thirst, and drank down half the bladder’s contents in several gulps. His stomach reacted to the sudden cool draft with instant outrage, and voted to send it back, but Filidor overruled his innards: there was no telling where the drinkable water had come from or whether there would be any more in the offing.

  His thirst quieted, he felt a little closer to human, and tried to take stock of his predicament. He was sure that there was something unusual about the situation to which he had awakened, but his mental equipment was not yet available to consider it. He closed his eyes again, and would have sunk back to a reclining position, except that the smell of the seaweed at such close quarters was more than he could bear. He managed to coax his knees into bending, so that he sat cross-legged in the middle of the saucer of green. He belched another fetid reminder of the night’s excess, and strove to remember how he came to be in this odd setting.

  Gradually, pieces of the day before began to present themselves -- not in order of occurrence, but as random flashes of individual scenes. He remembered being with his uncle in the workroom, then saw himself following Faubon Bassariot up a gangway. There was something about a cluster of Tabernaclists, and some mummers had performed. Then, like a curtain lifting on a tableau of bygone misery, he clearly saw the angry face of Emmlyn Podarke, her brother and servant behind her, as she reached down and yanked away his plaque and sigil. It all came back, and he groaned.

  Hello, said a small voice from somewhere, and now Filidor remembered that mystery too.

  “Huh?” he said. No more than a whisper of actual sound escaped his coated lips, but the voice responded immediately.

  Where am I?, it said.

  Filidor opened his eyes. The glare of sunlight off water made them feel as if they were being sliced into sections, but he shaded them with a hand and looked about him. There was no one else in sight. “Not here,” he said and let his lids shelter him from the pain.

  Of course, I am here, said the voice. I just don’t know where here is.

  Something about the tone was familiar, but Filidor was more concerned with the larger mystery of where he was and how he had got there. Now another scene slotted itself into place: Bassariot’s pale visage looming over a red flask, accompanied by the name of the amber corruption it contained.

  The Archon’s apprentice moaned again. “Red Abandon,” he said.

  Dreadful stuff, said the voice. The sailor’s ruin.

  Filidor opened his eyes and looked, but again there was nothing beyond him and the sea. Carefully, he turned his head to one side, then stretched out a hand to the edge of the woven bowl. Ever so slowly, he leaned his weight sideways until he could see down into the water. There was nothing there but green sea and a little white foam.

  “Where are you?” he said.

  We have established that, said the voice. I am here. One is always here; even when one departs here to go there, the there then becomes the here in which one is. Since I do not know where this particular “here” happens to be, I believe it might be more useful to ask you where you are. It is impossible to navigate with only one point of reference, but if I can combine my here with your there, the rudiments of a map begin to take form.

  “I am at sea,” said Filidor. “My reference points are endless water and a sky with the sun in it. At the center of things is a floating basket of seaweed, and at the center of the basket is me.”

  This is less useful than I had hoped for, was the reply. I do not even know the means by which we are communicating, other than that I am emitting vibrations into some kind of surrounding medium that resembles contaminated seawater, nor how you are apprehending and returning these signals. Normally, I have a wide range of communications media at my command, but all of them are now inert. Your voice comes to me as a distorted vibration, which I filter and improve. But, for all I know, you may be on another world, connected by some freakish current running through the continuum of where and when, or even in another universe.

  At the voice’s last remark, a spark of an idea flickered somewhere in the back of Filidor’s consciousness, but his head was too stuffed with pain and pressure to let him blow it into a true flame.

  Perhaps, the voice went on, if we turn our attention to who we are, we may turn up some clue as to where we are.

  “I agree,” said Filidor. It was something he could do with his eyes closed.

  So who are you?

  “You first.”

  There was a pause. No, said the voice, my situation may be perilous. It is possible that I have been kidnaped so that my powers may be turned to unwholesome ends. I prefer to reserve my answer until I have heard yours.

  The pain in Filidor’s head had begun to diminish, and he was able to subject the voice’s last utterance to some rough analysis. “It’s hard to imagine what powers might be wielded by someone who is not even quite sure what universe he is in,” he said, and as he said it, the idea that had earlier sparked in the back of his mind popped into full blown existence in the uncrowded forefront of his understanding.

  His uncle had worked to replicate an object from a miniature universe into the larger cosmos, so that it might be enlarged and studied. The thing had been suspended in a field of energy above the gray disk beside the workbench while it was enlarging to a size the Archon could work with. Filidor had put his hand on the disk and the object must have entered him through his palm -- he remembered a brief sensation -- perhaps even insinuating itself between the molecules, which could have been the size of houses to the replicated morsel of the other cosmos.

  Now Filidor not only knew where the object was -- inside his own body -- but could even guess exactly what item his uncle would have wanted to intrude from another the other universe and recreate in this one. He put the surmise to a test. “Are you by any chance the primary integrator of the Archonate?” he asked.

  After a pause, the voice said cautiously, I am. Now let us be just and equal. Who are you?

  “I am Filidor Vesh, and I believe you are encompassed by my body. To be precise, I suspect that you have lodged somewhere in the inner porches of my ear, which explains why I can hear you, and why my speech comes to you somewhat distorted.”

  Filidor Vesh? said the voice. Truly?

  “None other.”

  Then all is well.

  The voice’s confidence ought to have been comforting, but somehow Filidor failed to experience any heightened assurance.

  “May I ask why my being Filidor Vesh dismisses what one might otherwise consider a justified anxiety?” he asked.

  Surely, it goes without saying, was the answer.

  “Indulge me,” said Filidor. “Assume that a certain amount of saying will make things go better.”

  The voice now seemed less certain. Are you sure you are Filidor Vesh?

  “It is one of the few things of which I am reasonably certain at the moment.”

  Well, said the voice, it’s just that if you have decided to remove me from my place and duties, separate me from my communications media and install me in your inner ear, there is undoubtedly a good reason for it. You are, after all, that kind of Archon.

  “What kind of Archon would that be?” Filidor asked.

  A most great and learned Archon, of course, said the voice. The model for millennia, as many have said. Or as the Olkney Implicator put it in reporting on your investiture, “A definite keeper.”

&n
bsp; The transcosmic integrator went on at some length, describing the Archon Filidor I as an ornament of the age, a byword for sagacity whose accession to office was celebrated by joyous throngs in the streets of Olkney and by solemn ceremonies of thanksgiving in regional cities. Some prominent geographical features of the planet had been renamed in his honor.

  Filidor broke in at some point. “And my predecessor?”

  Dezendah VII? said the small voice, and made a temporizing sound. A moderate success.

  Filidor was not usually prone to pensive moments, but here was a degree of irony sufficient to give even him cause to pause. He knew, of course, that universes tended to diverge at some individual juncture, from whence each grew steadily remote from the other. Somewhere, for example, there was a universe in which the ancient savant Phlegemonis, who studied the phenomenon of fire with the aim of transmuting the unruly plasma known as flame into a liquid form that could be more easily stored and handled, had been blessed with better than average coordination between hand and eye. In that realm, the city of Ythinia was still standing, and the concept of a lake of perpetual combustion remained an untested hypothesis. Filidor wondered at what point the intruded and replicated integrator’s universe had deviated from his own to make him an Archon whose name graced a mountain, an archipelago of volcanic islands and an asteroid of substantial size.

  “I am sorry to be the agent of your unhappiness,” he told the tiny device that was lodged somewhere in his ear, “but I must launch a few clouds into your otherwise untroubled sky.”

  Oh? said the voice.

  Then Filidor related how his uncle, the Archon Dezendah Vesh, had identified the integrator in its own tiny universe, so that a replica could be created in the larger cosmos. The Archon’s apprentice did not expand on his role in preceding and subsequent events, but did allow as how the absorption of the device into his body had been an inadvertent by-product of the procedures.

  Oh, said the voice. And am I to assume that, since your uncle is Archon in this universe, while you are forlornly floating in a woven basket of seaweed, far from sight of land, that there is a divergence between the Filidor I am familiar with, and the Filidor that now surrounds me?