Fool Me Twice (Filidor Vesh)

by Matthew Hughes

  “That is a safe assumption.”

  A substantial divergence?

  Filidor had to admit that it was so.

  Then I withdraw my earlier expression of confidence, the voice said. But if you would care to enlighten me as to the details of our situation, I might have something to offer.

  In as few words as possible, Filidor told about the Podarkes and the plaque, about the Empyreal and Faubon Bassariot, and about Pwyfus wine and Red Abandon,up to his last memory, which was of going out onto the ship’s stern deck. “I must have fallen off the ship,” he said.

  This Faubon Bassariot, said the voice. In my cosmos, he was a pilfering pettifogger whom you dismissed long ago for persistent malfeasance. He ended up selling counterfeit insurance stamps down by the docks, and was transported to an offworld contemplarium.

  “In this dominion,” Filidor said, “he seems to be more capable. There is something else about him that I feel I ought to remember, but it eludes me.”

  We can unpick the minor mysteries later. The immediate concern must be to discover land and reach it. Baskets of marine vegetation are not recommended as sea-going craft where I come from, and I see no reason to assume they would be here. Please inspect your surroundings and provide me with a description.

  The clashings in Filidor’s head had receded to a low rumble of an ache, and he found he was able to open his eyes without feeling it would be less painful to tear them out of their sockets. He turned slowly to survey what was about him in all directions, which continued to be nothing but sea and sky. From the position of the sun, he deduced that he was moving north. He divulged this information to the integrator.

  Moving, you say, said the voice. Is there a wind behind us?

  “No,” said Filidor, “if anything, there is a breeze of passage in my face. Perhaps we are in a current.”

  Are there any floating objects keeping pace with us?

  Filidor looked. “No. In fact, we are passing bits of flotsam that seem to lie unmoving on the surface.”

  Then there is no current. Please look over the front of the basket and tell me what you see.

  Filidor did so, and said, “There is a woven rope of fibrous material descending into the water.”

  Hmm, said the voice. Now look well out in front of the craft. Do you see any disturbance in the water.

  “Now that you mention it, there are some peculiar ripplings and dimplings of the surface.”

  As if something was moving beneath it?

  “Yes.”

  Something large?

  Filidor looked again and experienced a sudden chill, although the sun had risen far enough to be on the verge of becoming oppressively warm. “Fairly large.”

  Hmm, said the voice again.

  “I think I’m going to require more than a ‘Hmm,’” he told the voice in his head.

  Have you ever heard of the Obblob? it asked.

  Filidor hadn’t, and was now not looking forward to doing so. Given that he was being towed to an unknown destination by some kind of large seagoing creature with aims that were entirely its own, and which might well offer him indignities, if not much worse, the prospects for a happy assessment of his situation seemed thin. “Are they what one might describe, in a general sort of way, as friendly?”

  The voice paused to reflect. “Friendly” might not convey exactly the most apt connotation, it said. The Obblob are a species of aquatic ultramondes, who settled in Earth’s shallower seas several centuries ago. Some of them have a certain fondness for human beings.

  Filidor sat very still. “When you say ‘fondness,’ are you using the term in the sense of affection, or of appetite?”

  You might say both, said the integrator. They consider humankind’s various farings and doings to be of antic interest, and chuckle at swimmers in much the way you might regard as comical the chattering creatures which swing about in their cages at the vivarium. If such an Obblob found a human lost at sea, it might effect a rescue in much the same way you might put a baby bird back in its nest, if you came upon it lolloping about beneath a tree.

  Filidor’s spirits rose a titch or two. “Good news,” he said.

  Not really, said the integrator. A Obblob who comes to one’s aid already equipped with a basket is more likely to have more dedicated aims. There is, among the Obblob, a minority cult of ecstatics who are addicted to human essences, which act upon Obblob neurons to stimulate gaudy visions shot through with paroxysms of joy. They haunt the sea lanes hoping to acquire persons in difficult straits.

  “Essences?” said Filidor, the chill now returning with a force deep enough to provoke a swift shudder. “And how are these essences extracted?”

  But the integrator did not respond to this inquiry. Instead, it told Filidor that its internal energy sources, intended only for short-term emergency use, were becoming drained and that it would have to cease communication while they regenerated. Unless, it said, you have about you some more of that Pwyfus wine you were imbibing.

  “Why?” Filidor asked.

  A brief explanation followed. The device had some capacity for self-modification, and could reorient its emergency energy stores so that they could generate fresh power if exposed to the right chemicals. Recently, traces of a useful substance had appeared in its host’s bodily fluids, allowing the integrator to recharge its energy clusters. Its analysis led it to conclude that the wine had boosted its powers enough to allow it to communicate with its host. But now it must cease its efforts, or risk falling below its own threshold of consciousness, in which case it might not be able revive itself even if the recharging chemicals should again present themselves.

  “At least tell me,” Filidor asked, “if the process by which the Obblob gather essences involves any disruption of the normal arrangement of my limbs and organs, since I prefer to keep them in their current disposition.”

  It ought to be a relatively harmless procedure, said the inner voice, and then would respond no more. Filidor took what solace he could from the voice’s last ambiguous statement. He was, by nature, an optimist, and had lived a life based on the principle that doing nothing was usually his wisest strategy, believing that all would work out well in the end. Indeed, on the few occasions when he had intervened in the placid flow of events, hoping to divert their course in his favor, things had seldom resolved themselves to his satisfaction.

  He decided to hope for the best, and took another long pull at the water bladder. The throbbing in his head had eased, and his stomach had stopped threatening to leave him. He settled back in the basket and allowed his fingers to trail in the water, his mind emptying of all but sea and sky and the old orange orb that lit the world in its penultimate age. But, as he let his thoughts subside, there flashed across the inner screen of his consciousness an image of Faubon Bassariot’s hands gripping his knees, and of the functionary straightening from a toad-like squat to hurl a drink-sodden Filidor Vesh to a briny death.

  The recalled image brought first shock, then confusion. It was one thing to have done something abysmally stupid while fogged by inebriating liquor; Filidor lacked enough fingers to count the number of his ne’er-do-well young friends who had done the like. But to have been rendered incapable by a trusted associate -- he remembered now his major-domo’s simper as he poured the Red Abandon -- then thrown into the seething wake of the Empyreal, that was an insufferable affront. Something would have to be done about Faubon Bassariot, something splendidly awful.

  “An example shall be made,” Filidor declared, and took another drink of the flat water to seal the promise.

  Any reply his internal passenger might have made was drowned out by a loud and mournful sound from the sea ahead, like the hollowing of a morose foghorn. Filidor looked forward and saw the back of a large domed head breaking the surface, followed by the tops of shoulders about as wide as he was tall. The Obblob was rising gradua
lly from the water, apparently walking a submerged slope that led gently up to a sprawl of low, white dunes just above the surface in the near distance.

  The Obblob was roughly manlike in conformation, though the muscles were elongated and seemed loose under dark green skin of a rubbery texture, flecked with speckles of gold. Descending from the head and stretching along the shoulders and arms, as well as down the long spine to the backs of its legs, were closely packed short tubes of pale pink, like lilies of flesh rooted in the creature’s pelt. Filidor asked the voice in his head what they might be, and received in reply the single word Symbiote, from which he deduced that the tubular growths were a symbiotic species that probably extracted oxygen and other nutrients from sea water and shared them with its host.

  The voice then said, Energy down. Get Pwyfus, and then would say no more.

  The Obblob was now only waist deep and still rising. Its cry boomed out again to the small, stony island they were approaching. Filidor saw no beach nor any vegetation. Indeed, the closer he came, the more the place seemed to be only a surface outcropping of a coral reef rising from deep in the sea, and when he looked down into the water, he saw that it was so.

  A sound came from the island, the clanging of a rusty bell suspended from a frame of driftwood at the water’s edge. The metal was being beaten by a length of driftwood in the hand of a hard faced man of more than average height and close clipped hair, who wore the dark and rough garb of a common seafarer. His other hand held a short cudgel attached to his wrist by a thong of fish leather. He kept up the clatter until he was joined from somewhere by two other men, dressed much the same, one of them large and the other even larger. These two waded out into the water and prepared to receive the craft in which Filidor reposed.

  The Obblob did not come ashore, but remained in the shallows. It tugged on the woven rope in a way that swept the towed basket toward the two who waited to receive it. The Obblob made soft gobbling sounds, at which the man with the cudgel made noises that sounded to Filidor like variations on the single syllable “Blob.” The Obblob returned a last “Blob” of its own, then strode out to the deep water, submerged and swam away.

  While this was going on, Filidor was lifted from the basket by the two who had waded out, the larger of whom had also retrieved the bladder of water that had been in the seaweed basket. The young man was brought to stand before the bell beater, who paid him scant attention. Instead, the man brought out a stylus and a pad of paper. He flicked to a fresh page, at the top of which he put a large number eight. Only then did he look the young man up and down, in the manner of a farmer examining a prospective purchase at a livestock show.

  “Good morning,” said Filidor, performing the most expansive gesture of greeting that his condition would allow. “I express my gratitude for a most welcome rescue. Now, if you would direct me to your communications nexus, I will contact my uncle, who will send an air-car to collect me. I am sure he will bring a very generous honorarium. In the meantime, I would be grateful for some breakfast, although I suppose a noggin of purple Pwyfus is out of the question.”

  Filidor waited for a reply, but the man with the cudgel paid him no heed, only continuing to make marks upon the pad, with the air of a foreman who is comfortably in charge. When he had written whatever he was recording to his apparent satisfaction, he beckoned to the fellow holding the almost empty water bladder to hand it over. He appeared to take a careful reckoning of its contents, and shook his head ruefully before making a final note. He tucked the container into his shirt, then told the others, “Break him in on Number Four. Half shifts to begin with.”

  At that, the two helpers took eager hold of various parts of Filidor, with grips of a strength that he could not have broken even in the best of condition, and hustled him toward a pale coral mound not far away.

  “I protest,” Filidor began to say, but got no further. The lesser of his two captors, a man of sandy colored hair above a broad pink face, which contained eyes of unequal size, clamped a hard hand over their prisoner’s mouth and said, “Save your moisture.” The other man, a dark browed, bullet headed specimen who seemed only slightly smaller than the departed Obblob, grunted in agreement.

  They took him toward one of the low hills, which by the regularity of its shallow domed shape, now looked to have been somehow artificially created out of coral rock. He saw that there were three other such mounds on the small island, one of them smaller than the others, with a solidly built wooden door set in it. But the mound toward which Filidor was being dragged was pierced by an arched doorway in which hung a thick curtain of woven seaweed. His escorts shouldered this barrier aside and took him within.

  The whole interior of the dome was one large room, wide and low ceilinged, and floored with the same rough textured rock as the roof. It was dimly lit from overhead, where patches of the coral roof had been scraped thin to allow a diffuse daylight to enter, and by reflections from great round holes in the coral floor along one wall that were filled with seawater. Into the opposite wall had been cut a low bench on which a naked pot-bellied man slumped in a posture of deep exhaustion, but when Filidor was brought in, the fellow found energy enough to look up and sneer.

  Most of the space beneath the dome was taken up by four massive wooden cylinders suspended horizontally on axles above the circular ponds. Set into the curved surface of each drum was a series of spaced planks like steps, giving them the appearance of the paddle wheels that drove ancient river boats. Three of the constructions were slowly turning on their axles, with a creaking, ponderous motion, each impelled by the footsteps of a man endlessly climbing the rotating cylinder of wood. The men were scarcely to be recognized as human under thick suits of buff colored clothing that covered them from crown to sole, leaving only a narrow slit for their eyes and a small hole beneath it for the mouth.

  “Why are those men so bundled up?” he asked the pop-eyed man on his left, raising his voice above the constant rumbling and squeaking of the wheels. The rock walls and open pools made the room cool, it was true, but he was sure their exertions must provide them with sufficient warmth.

  Instead of answering the question, the man laid his larger eye on Filidor and said, “Briskly, now,” and drew the Archon’s apprentice to the far end of the room where there lay a heap of the suits the wheel walkers were wearing. He picked over the pile and pulled out a one-piece garment, which he held up against Filidor’s frame. The young man saw that it was made of some intensely tangled stuff, perhaps a dried sea moss, but stiff and dense enough to scrub a pot with. It smelled stale and rank, and it was clear to Filidor that others had worn the thing before The chosen garment was judged by the man holding to be too small, and he went back into the pile for one that promised a better fit. His companion, meanwhile, had begun to remove Filidor’s clothing.

  “I prefer my own garments,” the Archon’s apprentice said, this time in his firmest tone. When his words had no effect, he tried to recover the shirt they had pulled half way over his head, saying, “I am not accustomed to such familiarities.”

  But this objection too was ignored. Grateful though he was for the rescue, Filidor now decided that his saviors’ persuasion of what hospitality required was more than he could comfortably bear. He began to resist, at first genteelly, then with increasing conviction. He was thoroughly engaged in struggling to free himself from the unwanted attentions when he noticed the foreman enter the dome, cross the floor and raise his cudgel with unmistakable intent.

  Filidor allowed the two underlings to remove his clothes, which they did with practiced efficiency. They then slid him, with equal proficiency, into the suit of sea furze, closing him from head to toe in the rough and scratchy substance. Filidor instantly felt a sensation that spread like sheet lightning to every fleck of his skin: it was an itch, but an itch so intense and so widely dispersed about his hide as to constitute a whole new definition of the concept. Comparing it to any itch he had ever exp
erienced before would have been like contrasting a handful of earth to a vasty continent. It was as if the nerves of his skin had spent their entire existence in peaceful slumber, from which they had now all at once awakened with each demanding his exclusive and immediate attention.

  The pop-eyed man knelt to tug the feet of the one-piece suit more snugly over the young man’s toes. With the motion came a fresh eruption of itching along the inner surfaces of Filidor’s thighs. Seconds earlier, he would not have believed that it was possible for his sensory equipment to broadcast a more urgent appeal for his attention, but this new itch overrode all the others the way a solar flare outshines the blazing orange skin of the sun. His itching fingers formed themselves into the shape of talons and he bent to scratch.

  But that relief was denied him. His captors, now finished dressing him, seized his wrists. When Filidor still made fitful, crook fingered motions, the pop eyed one shook his head, and said, “Just makes it worse,” then he and his partner turned Filidor toward the drum at the end of the room. Now Filidor found that the itching he had experienced while stationary was a pale cousin to the storm of prururation that accompanied motion. He realized that of all the things he might ever have thought he wanted in life, he had never desired anything so much as he now craved an opportunity to scrape something rough, and the rougher the better, across the outer surface of his body.

  Instead he was held by hard hands that clamped through the layers of torturing sea furze and hauled him toward the fourth wooden cylinder. The foreman went outside and came back in with a long plank, which he positioned across the sea pool, then the two others manhandled Filidor out onto this rough bridge. He tried to protest, and thought about struggling, but with the hand that held the cudgel not far away, the Archon’s apprentice judged it wiser to cooperate until he better understood the ramifications of his situation.