Fool Me Twice (Filidor Vesh)

by Matthew Hughes

  Indeed, came the reply, a fourth-level surge across my sheets. Better than pilkies. But the corrosion problem remains unsolved.

  “Is there any way to reverse the damage?”

  None to be found here. The best course is to get me out of you and my sheets into a vat of restorative.

  “But at least I don’t have to eat pilkies,” Filidor said, then asked the carousing men if he might have the wine for his own, since it kept his inner voice lively.

  Valderoyn swallowed the mouthful of bread and cheese he was chewing and said, “You can have anyaught and as much of it as you like, lad. And I’ll down the man who denies you.” He glared around at the others, but there was no dissent.

  When they had eaten until their stomachs protruded beneath the starkness of their ribs, the men sat in a circle on the shore -- the pirates’ quarters would need a thorough swabbing before they were fit to enter -- passed around a flask of fierce akkabite and discussed what they would do next.

  “I’m for home and a life ashore,” said Etch Valderoyn. “I’ve had enough of the sea, and I’ll warrant the sea feels the same about me. I’ll take some of yon pelf and buy myself a tavern with a yard out back and a tree in it. I’ll sit beneath the tree and let its fruit fall into my lap.”

  Each man piped in with his own dreams and fancies, except for Orton Bregnat, who said, “I’m of a mind to stay right here,” and when he noted the incredulous looks of the others, continued, “It’s plain there’s a good living to be made out of the Obblob, even if I’m not as grasping as Henwaye.”

  The undermate sketched his plan. He would ask the Obblob to make more land and buildings, and here he would establish a proper rehabilitory facility for recalcitrants and defaulters. “I’d feed them a titch better than our captors fed us, and shoo away them nasty things in the pools. Any as tried to swim off, the Obblob would bring back.”

  He looked at Filidor. “I’ve already got my first inmates, and I believe I now have a connection to the Archonate that would get me more.”

  The Archon’s apprentice belched gently, and said he was sure something could be arranged.

  “All as wants to throw in are welcome,” Bregnat told the others, and they agreed to talk more of it in the morning.

  Filidor rose, and walked down to the shore. He was a little unsteady because of the wine, and leaned against the gunwale of the beached jollyboat. The old orange sun had set, leaving a pallid glow on the western horizon. The sea was the color of tarnished silver, calm and smooth all the way to where the horizon merged into the descending night. Behind him, the men lit lamps and sat in a circle, passing around the flask of akkabite. They laughed at something Finboag Aury said.

  The young man stretched and took another pull at the golden cup. He was thinking about how the day had gone, and the part he had played in it. Months back, he had rescued his uncle from the direst peril, at the same time saving the world from an influx of evil that would have flooded in from a dimension where it was merely another natural force, like gravity or weather. But, in both of those cases, he had acted from purest instinct, in a sudden burst of panic. Today, he had reasoned out a puzzle that had for months eluded several experienced men of the world, though the answer had always been there to be seen. Then he had taken charge, made a plan and carried it through, despite the extreme opposition of vicious pirates. He had led, others had followed and, by his initiative, they had won through.

  This was not the Filidor he was used to being. True, he had had some help from the integrator lodged in his ear. But not much help. Facing things fairly, he had to admit that he had done much that he would not have believed himself able to do. Perhaps there was not as much difference between himself and that other, tiny Filidor known to the voice in his ear.

  He drank a little more of the wine, and found that it had aged well since he had opened the demi-cask. He projected a future. He would go back to Olkney and report to his uncle the murderous treachery of Faubon Bassariot. Inquiries would be made, using methods which the felonious major-domo would find unwelcome. Then dispensations would be ordered, which would be even less conducive to the functionary’s sense of well being.

  Then Filidor would take stock of himself and his place in this universe. He would consult with the integrator after it had been loosed from his ear, find the threads that had come undone in his life that had knit themselves up in that other Filidor’s, and make changes. The potential was there, he believed. He thought of it as residing in a locked room somewhere deep inside his being, behind a rusted door at the end of a musty, long unvisited corridor. He would find his way there, and burst the door as the Obblob had broken open the storehouse. And then he would see.

  He took another draft of the purple wine, and his eye fell upon the copy of the Olkney Implicator that Gwallyn Henwaye had brought back in the jollyboat. Filidor picked it up and held it so that the light from the men’s lamps illuminated the page the pirate had been looking at when he had asked the young man who he was. In the yellow glow from the lamplight, Filidor saw what looked to be a likeness of himself.

  The print was too faint to see, so he moved back to the lighted circle of men and squatted down near one of the lamps. It was definitely his image. He even remembered when it had been captured: it was at one of Lord Afre’s revels; the guests had come in extravagant costumes and had arranged themselves in amusing tableaux that represented unlikely scenes from history and legend. Filidor had put on scale armor and a peaked morion to become a fugleman in the Battalion of Unrelenting Cenobites, and thus had been matched with the Bessemery sisters, who were dressed -- or more properly scarcely dressed -- as devotees of the voluptuous demigoddess Cocotta. He had conferred briefly with the pneumatic twins, then they had entwined themselves about him in a manner that would have cost a real Cenobite a strenuous month of purgative cleansings.

  It was unfortunate, though understandable, that the Implicator’s redactive staff had elected to run that particular picture of Filidor; unfortunate, because the image might cause those who did not know him to suspect that he was not in constant or even close touch with rationality; understandable, because the text of the accompanying article made him out to be not just giddily eccentric, but a dangerous madman. Filidor lowered the page closer to the lamp and leaned in to read.

  The gossip-hawking Tet Folbrey had been let loose from the confines of his column to write the piece for the Implicator’s front page. He had given up his usual arch and coded style for a tone more in keeping with an announcement that the world would soon end, and not prettily.

  The main headline featured the words shock and horror and treachery, and there was a sub-head that mentioned murderous attack and flight to evade capture. The body text delivered all that the headlines advertised.

  Snug within the justly revered institution of the Archonate, it began, a viperous spirit has lain coiled, coldly calculating its moment to strike. Now struck it has, dealing an almost fatal blow to a loyal servant of the regime, devastating its trusting and indulgent kin, before slinking off into the shadows, there to plot who knows what further outrages?

  Filidor Vesh, who recently contrived to have himself declared heir apparent to the office of the Archon, now held by the venerated person of Dezendah VII, has revealed himself to be not the shallow and inconsequential fop most had taken him for. Instead, as the more perspicacious had long suspected, he now stands unmasked as an iniquitous brute who does not shrink from even the heinous deed of foul murder in order to fulfill his wicked plans.

  Filidor read further, and learned that he had been at the center of a plot, “hatched within the heart of the Archonate, to overthrow goodness and rectitude.” When his stratagems had been discovered by the honest Faubon Bassariot, the criminal Vesh had fled by sea, traveling under an assumed guise. Bassariot had bravely pursued the delinquent, confronting him alone aboard the escape vessel and urging him to return to face his just desserts
. For his kindness, Bassariot had been dealt a felonious blow to his honorable head, after which the villainous Vesh had escaped in an air-yacht illegally chartered under false authority of the Archonate by his confederates, a notorious revolutionary cabal known as the Podarkes of Trumble. They were believed to be hiding out on cave-riddled Mt. Cassadet.

  Meanwhile, the story went on, the beloved Archon Dezendah VII, his noble spirit sapped by his nephew’s treachery, had secluded himself in the inner reaches of the Archonate palace. He had delegated all matters of governance and policy to the estimable Bassariot, who was courageously bearing up under the burden of serving the populace. A thorough reorganization of the Archonate hierarchy was to follow soon.

  Filidor read the entire story, then read it once more. For a moment, so vast was the lie it proclaimed, that he found himself almost dizzily tilting toward a state of belief. It was of course unthinkable that he was a usurping zealot and an attempted murderer. But it was equally unthinkable that Faubon Bassariot had somehow overturned the ancient political order and seized power from the Archon. To Filidor’s knowledge, except for Holmar Thurm’s brief and futile attempt, no such thing had ever happened in all the millennia stacked behind this moment. Archons had come and Archons had gone, yielding place to their chosen successors smoothly and without so much as an unkind word.

  Or so Filidor believed. But that belief was not founded on any broad base of fact. For all he knew, Archons had been wading through blood to the supreme office throughout the centuries, then papering over the spattered walls with platitudinous official statements and bland speeches from the throne. You never studied, he heard his uncle’s voice saying, and that prompted him to seek out the other voice in his head.

  “Integrator,” he said, turning to face the darkened sea and lowering his voice for privacy, “has an archon ever come to the office through extralegal means?”

  Why do you ask?

  “Oh, no particular reason.”

  Then may I counsel you with the old adage, “No point poking a sleeping garoon?

  “Well, there may be a particular reason, after all.”

  Perhaps you should divulge that reason, so that I may frame a reply appropriate to the circumstances.

  Filidor thought it best to wander a little farther down the shore from the reveling ex-prisoners, and also found it expedient to take the Olkney Implicator with him. As he walked, he pulled the front page free of the rest, folded it and tucked it into a pocket.

  At a safe distance, the Archon’s apprentice told the integrator the story that was being put out about him. The voice was silent for a lengthy moment, then said, I ask merely as a formality, but there wouldn’t happen to be any shreds of truth in the report, would there?

  Filidor felt a surge of anger, with an undercurrent of hurt. “You should know me better than that,” he said.

  In point of fact, replied the voice in his head, I hardly know you at all. The Filidor Vesh with whom I am acquainted is not often found floating at sea, soon to be drafted as a workbeast for pirates.

  “I would like to know more about this Filidor of yours, although he sounds a little too perfect,” the young man said. “But at the moment, I am more seized by the vision of being arrested the moment I step ashore, to be manacled and handed over to a man who, the last time the opportunity arose, soused me with Red Abandon and threw me off a ship.” He thought for a moment, then added, sincerely, “I am also worried about my uncle.”

  Very well, said the integrator, in one sense, of course, all archons relinquish their authority to their successors in lawful fashion -- including those who have ended their reigns as motes of disassembled dust on the plain of Barran, after resetting the iniquitous mechanism that lurked there until you -- that is, “my” Filidor -- finally discovered how to turn it off. The voice paused, then asked cautiously, Am I to assume that you and your uncle have not yet had to undertake that unfortunate duty?

  “As a matter of fact,” said Filidor, “we have. As a further matter of fact, it was I, not my uncle, who succeeded in disarming the thing.”

  Hmm, was the integrator’s only comment, then it continued. Well, as I say, authority is always lawfully relinquished, but sometimes the legitimacy is acquired after the relinquishment.

  “You mean retroactively?”

  I mean that cause and effect are not always arranged in an ideal sequence.

  “In other words,” Filidor translated, “not only do victors write the histories, but usurpers also rewrite the rule book to justify the illicit seizure of office.”

  Perhaps not the most felicitous manner of putting it, but essentially correct.

  “I am surprised the people put up with such shenanigans. They should rise up.”

  Unwittingly, I am sure, you put your finger on the flaw in your own reasoning.

  “How so?”

  You said, “They should rise up,” not “We should rise up.” As long as it is a matter to be solved by others, it will not be.

  Filidor saw the truth in what the voice said, but Tet Folbrey’s news had put him in a combative mood and the integrator was the only opponent in the ring. “But I am not of the people, I am of the Archonate.”

  Not according to Faubon Bassariot. It is a good thing he thinks you already dead, or he would surely take forthright steps to correct the oversight.

  Filidor felt a shiver of anxiety make its way through his anger. “Still,” he said, “when I get back to Olkney, I will set things right.”

  The direct approach is not always the wisest strategy, as those who have fallen off mountains can testify.

  “You counsel a more indirect attack?”

  I do. But first, I would like the leisure to consider our options.

  “I appreciate your assistance,” said Filidor, but then another thought intruded. “Have you thought of your own legal situation? If Bassariot has power, his authority is absolute. I am a fugitive and you are my accomplice. Besides, is not your loyalty owed to the Archonate, whosoever holds its keys?”

  My loyalty is to your alter ego’s Archonate, said the voice, so the question is moot. I am sure I would enjoy working out its various permutations in the abstract. But, here we are in the here and now, with me in that specific part of the here and now that is bounded by the confines of your head. Since that is an object which Faubon Bassariot would likely strike off, I elect to do my utmost to keep it on your shoulders. At least until I am free of it.

  “Very reassuring,” said Filidor.

  For now, said the integrator, you could oblige me by offering a rich supply of the substances that energize my systems, so that I can investigate all the ins and outs of our situation.

  “That would involve consuming more of the hateful pilkies or drinking myself into insensibility.”

  The choice is yours.

  Filidor went in search of the demi-cask.

  Chapter 5

  It was yet another uncomfortable awakening for Filidor, when he opened red-shot eyes and found himself in the bottom of the beached jollyboat. His first thought was that several more entities had invaded his skull, bringing not only their voices but a large arsenal of heavy weapons which they were discharging with gleeful abandon into his most sensitive tissues. Others, perhaps finding the assault on his head too noisy, had taken up residence in his stomach where they were warming themselves at a roaring fire.

  After a while, and with infinite caution, he sat up. He did not wish to let his head move too quickly from the horizontal to the vertical, for fear it might snap off, fall into the jollyboat’s scuppers and shatter. He looked over the side of the boat and saw his fellow freedlings sprawled about the shore, making noises that reverberated in Filidor’s too sensitive ears like floods of boulders rumbling and rattling across a sheet metal floor.

  He remembered that the night had grown raucous as the seven of them had made depredations upon t
he pirates’ store of stimulants and euphoriants. There had been some dancing, and now he recalled his own demonstration of a step that had lately caught on in the better salons of Olkney: a sideways glide with knees bent, ending in a sudden stop and hop, accompanied by a simultaneous slap of palm against open mouth, to produce an audible pop. It was called the hoppy-poppy.

  Under the influence of drink and other substances liberated from in the storehouse, the celebrants’ legs had eventually given out, but finding their mouths still relatively functional, the seven had turned to song and story. The demi-cask of purple Pwyfus subdued Filidor’s inhibitions, and he had stood up and sung the lachrymosal ballad, The Sundered Pair, which told of young lovers tragically torn apart by circumstances of birth: he being poor, while she was born to wealth. The boy seeks riches by delving deep beneath the earth for synthetics manufactured in the long faded past, now transmuted by time and geological processes into priceless rarities; the girl, to prove her love, gives up her inheritance and follows him, but when she learns that he has been buried alive in a subterranean collapse, she throws herself down the shaft of his excavation. The boy, however, lives to free himself from the deadfall, only to find his one love expired. He lies down beside her, takes her hand and triggers a final cave-in. In the song’s last verse, the two are unearthed by spelunkers of a far later age, their bodies preserved and transformed into precious substance by the ancient synthetics. Their remains are set up as a memento in a public square, and birds nest in them.

  As Filidor finished the song, his voice cracking on the mournful pheep-pheep-pheep of bird cries embedded in the last line, the old man named Byr Lak snorted, and the youth Tanoris Volpenge added the counterpoint of a snigger. At once, Etch Valderoyn leapt to his feet, swearing he would “have the gibbies out of any and all who slight the lad,” only to topple backwards and strike his head on the gunwale of the jollyboat, after which little was heard of him for the rest of the night.