Fool Me Twice (Filidor Vesh)

by Matthew Hughes

  Orton Bregnat said he would stay on the island to keep a foot on Gwallyn Henwaye’s head, and Maijung Celemet chose to assist him. Byr Lak offered to take the others to Scullaway Point in the jollyboat, then return to help the two who were remaining on the island.

  Filidor went to the strong hut door and looked through the little window. Henwaye, Flevvel and Jorn sat where their prisoners had sat. The pirate chief looked up at the face in the window and set his features in a mode of mocking defiance.

  “Now it is you who will walk a wheel while another keeps the tally,” Filidor said. “How stands your philosophy this morning?”

  The pirate affected unconcern. “Wheels go up, wheels go down. The wise man is patient.”

  “I found patience elusive when I wore the suit you’ll be wearing,” Filidor said.

  “I took only your sweat,” Henwaye said. “Others crave your blood. Which of us is worse off?”

  When Filidor rejoined the men at the boat, they had found him a pouch with a tight seal in which he could stow the bobblobblobl, so that his presence among them would be bearable. The young man said goodbye to Orton Bregnat, vowing again to make good on his promise to create the island an official contemplarium with the undermate as its warden.

  “Aye, well,” said Bregnat, “official or not, we’ll make do in the meantime.”

  The trip to Scullaway Point was a matter of half a day, the jollyboat’s impellors being surprisingly well maintained by the pirates. The old sailor Byr Lak steered them straight and true by the sun, not bothering to consult the craft’s navigating devices. For a while, Filidor joined Valderoyn, Volpenge and Aury in conversation, but the common topic among his three companions was how each would enjoy his new found prosperity, while Filidor’s future offered little prospect of ease and pleasant diversion. After a while, he drew away and sat in the bow of the jollyboat, letting the sea air rush past his face and stream through his hair.

  Now that he was free of the island, it was time to consider how he might undo the works of his enemies. He assumed Faubon Bassariot had not acted alone; even that feckless romantic, Holmar Thurm, had had his following. He tried to imagine who and how many were against him, and by what means Filidor Vesh might prove to be one too many for them all.

  He thought for far longer than he was accustomed to think, but no plan came immediately to mind. In the adventure stories he had read as a boy, and still enjoyed when he was trapped at his Archonate desk with no means of escape, a handy avenue of approach always presented itself to the hero when the situation required action. Filidor suspected that real life was less conveniently arranged.

  At least he was not alone. He grunted and spoke quietly so that only his inner listener would hear. “Integrator, what shall we do now? Have you any plan yet?”

  We must first find out who is who and what is what, before we can contemplate any strategy.

  “What do you propose we do when we come to Scullaway Point?”

  Find a quiet place out of the public view, where we can assess our position.

  Filidor sighed. “I am worried about my uncle.”

  Being archon, he cannot be else than a man of resource and capability. He will have prepared for eventualities.

  The young man saw the sense in what the voice said, but his fear remained. It came to him now that, that beneath the anxiety he felt for the Archon’s wellbeing was a broad stream of affection for the peculiar little man who had exerted such a constant presence throughout Filidor’s life. He wondered if the dwarf felt a similar attachment, or whether his solicitude for his nephew was rooted only in the soil of duty. It came to Filidor that he would have liked to have liked his uncle, and to have been thought well of in return. If the little man had fallen victim to a plot, then their chance for a warm relationship was now lost.

  The Archon’s nephew sighed and pushed the thought from his mind. “This would not have happened in your universe,” he said. “Your version of Bassariot was dismissed early on by your Filidor Vesh.”

  The integrator chose to conserve its energies, or opted to maintain a diplomatic silence.

  “What is he like?” said Filidor.

  Who?

  “Your Filidor Vesh. How did he come to be what he is?

  He has lived life in a certain way, doing this followed by that, and he is the sum total of all of that living and doing.

  “Still, his life would have begun as mine did, and would have been moment for moment identical, until some particular jot of time brought us a choice of paths. Then he went left where I went right, and that has made all the difference.”

  No doubt. But to find that pivotal moment we would have to examine both lives, second by second, until we saw a divergence. And to what end? You are who you are. He is who he is.

  But that answer did not satisfy Filidor. It seemed to the Archon’s apprentice that it was one thing to say: here is Filidor Vesh, as he is, and all other possible Filidor Veshes are merely hypothetical. It was quite another thing when the hypothetical was actually living and breathing, on however small a plane. That other Filidor was daily setting about the business of an heroic existence, ornamenting his age with cheerful ease, winning the acclaim of glad multitudes. Therefore, comparisons were unavoidable.

  “You are his integrator,” said the young man. “You know his life. If you had to choose one moment, one choice which seemed to turn him toward what he was ultimately to become, what would that moment be? Tell me, and I will compare it with my own.”

  It might be something that seems inconsequential: eating too much cake and so precipitating a stomach ache that prevented a victory in a game of shin-hully. Or sleeping late one morning and missing an inspirational lecture.

  Filidor cast his mind back through his memory, but couldn’t recall any lectures that had been even remotely inspirational -- unless they had inspired him to sleep late and so miss them. He did not share this thought with the integrator.

  Instead, he said, “Think. At what age did people first begin to say, ‘Here’s a ripe prospect?’”

  They certainly said that about his dissertation on the causes of the Fenfillion Rebellion. That decisively deconstructed a number of carefully built reputations among the wise and witty. Did you write such a dissertation when you were sixteen?

  “No,” said Filidor. “That was my year for researching the carnal habits of a number of young women in the upper echelons of Olkney society.”

  I see, said the little voice. Did you publish your findings?

  “Not as such,” said Filidor, “although there were some mentions in the popular press.” He did not add that they had prompted his uncle to contemplate having his nephew led about on a leash by a brawny keeper with access to ready supplies of cold water.

  Well then, let’s go back a few years. At twelve, there was the gold medal for practical aesthetics at the Beyornay Institute.

  “I attended for three weeks, but it was decided that my strengths lay elsewhere,” said Filidor.

  Oh. Where?

  “That was never made completely clear.”

  Age ten. A cycle of satirical quatrains took a first in the Euphetrics Competition.

  “As I recall, I spent that year becoming amazingly proficient at a game known as The Furious Fists of Klong.”

  In my realm, said the integrator, that is a pastime of maladjusted youth who spend hours in darkened rooms, squinting at images of ferocity while the game controls raise callouses on their thumbs and forefingers.

  “I recall it as a much more rewarding experience.”

  Hmm. Let us move on. Age nine. Strong interest in thermeneutics.

  All Filidor recalled from that time was the several hiding places that allowed him to avoid thermeneutics so assiduously that today he could not be quite sure of the meaning of the word. “Don’t think so,” he said.

  Eight. Built his ow
n glider.

  “No.”

  Seven. There was a pause. Nothing much here. A note by your uncle that he had spent an afternoon with you, and that you had mastered all seven levels of Balmerion’s Great Theorem.

  “No,” said Filidor, then, “no, wait.” Something was tugging at his memory. “That’s wrong, but I can almost remember the occasion.”

  It was a summer day. You worked in the Archon’s study. I’ll read the note: “The boy struggled through the first four intervals, then stuck fast on the fifth. But I worked with him until he caught a glimpse of the underlying structure, then suddenly it all fell into order for him. I saw his face open with a great surmise, and I knew he had it. I think all will be well from this day forward.”

  Filidor strained to find his way back through the store of years to the day in question. He remembered the quiet in his uncle’s book-choked study, the smell of dust in the air and the clicking of some device in the corner. The Archon and he had sat together at a little table, Filidor in his childhood shorts and jumper, his uncle cloaked as he always was in the magisterial appearance generated by the device on his belt. The young man could recall with sudden clarity what it had been to be that boy on that day, how he had struggled to hold the first four intervals of the Balmerion’s grand construction in play while his mind reached to grasp the fifth and place it appositely with the others.

  He had almost had it. Then, in memory, he saw the door to the study open, saw a soft faced man enter -- some minor functionary come to remind the Archon of a matter of business left undone. His uncle had reluctantly risen and gone out, saying to the man as he left, “Help the boy with his Balmerion. He’s almost there.”

  But the breakthrough had not come. In truth, Filidor had never fully mastered Balmerion’s ancient thought, as any educated person must. Instead, he had learned how to dissimulate on those occasions -- rare among the circle of leisured drones with whom the young man consorted -- when reference was made to the great formula that explained the universe through an elegant architecture that connected space to time, matter with energy, and infused all with the elusive quality known as gist.

  “There is the point of departure,” he told the integrator. “In my world, someone with poor timing -- I would call it positively porlockian timing -- came in and broke the chain before my uncle and I could fully forge it. And everything has descended from that moment.”

  How unfortunate.

  But Filidor was not listening, because the meaning of his recovered memory was now making itself plain to him. Earlier, he had realized that the loss of his plaque and sigil could be laid to the fault of Faubon Bassariot, and that discovery had brought wondrous relief from the drubbing he had been delivering to his self-regard ever since he had lain supine in Vodel Close, seeing the Podarke girl disappear into the crowd. But the dawning light of that earlier absolution now faded to the dim glow of a weak lumen next to the brilliant illumination that now flooded his being: it was all not his fault. His whole life had been meant to take another direction. He should have been, could have been, what the other Filidor had become.

  He had been ready to learn, had been trying to the full limits of a seven-year-old’s utmost. He had been about to step aboard the cerebral ship that would have carried him over the horizon into who knew what realms of discovery? Well, actually, he thought, the integrator in his inner ear knew the answer to that question to the last detail, for it had logged and charted that very voyage by its own diminutive Filidor. But just as he was about to step aboard, someone had parted vessel from dock, and -- like the other, dead Etch Valderoyn -- Filidor had fallen into the chuck.

  He felt a moment’s sadness, but it was soon overcome by a resurgence of the joyful knowledge that none of this was his fault. The blame belonged to that faceless bureaucrat who had unknowingly blown out Filidor’s fire just as it was about to kindle. The Archon’s apprentice poked and prodded his memory again, squeezing out another few drops of reminiscence that seeped into his consciousness. He remembered that he had sat there, still holding the four and struggling to bring in the fifth, but the man had not helped him. Instead, the fellow had poked around the Archon’s study, opening drawers and pulling books from the shelves, then riffling through papers on the old desk in the corner where the boy’s uncle sketched his research projects.

  Little Filidor had kept up the unequal struggle with Balmerion, but his small strength, unaided, could not long maintain the effort. The fifth interval fell from his mind’s grasp, then the first four collapsed into a heap of unsorted facts and ratios.

  “Stupid,” the boy had said. It was meant to be communicated only to himself, but the functionary heard, and turned. Filidor saw in his memory the sneer that had smirked along the man’s mouth. Then suddenly, from catching the detail, he recaptured the whole: he saw the contemptuous face clearly, the incipient jowls, the wet but unfeeling eyes, and the vain curl across the forehead. It was the young Faubon Bassariot’s face, and it was Faubon Bassariot’s disdainful neglect of the Archon’s orders to help the boy that had cost Filidor the fruitful life that should have been, would have been, his.

  “Integrator,” he said, “I believe I am having an epiphany. “Everything has assumed a new shape.”

  Indeed?

  “Indeed, you may well say,” Filidor confirmed, and quickly recounted the memory and its meaning. “It becomes clear that Faubon Bassariot is the great ill fact of my life, the rock on which I stuck, the rub on which I stumbled, the... “ here he was lost for another analogy, and finished with, “the something specifically awful that has made everything else generally awful ever since. If you take my meaning.”

  I do, said the voice in his head. However, it seems to me that ills done to you in the distant past are less important than the prospect of being killed in the immediate future. How you came to be who you are will not matter if you cease to be at all, which is what your enemies intend. And since I am to running low on energy, we should defer this discussion, fascinating though you may find it, to some later time.

  “But I would value your advice in deciding how to undo Bassariot to a degree that would be fitting, considering the harm he has done me.”

  Are there any pilkies in the jollyboat?

  Filidor snorted. “I am arranging to put the greatest possible sea room between me and the nearest pilkie. Even the recollection of their taste makes my tongue want to flee to parts unknown.”

  Then the alternative is strong drink.

  Filidor hefted the flask of purple wine he had brought. “Well, if I must...”

  Except, that would entail your arriving in Scullaway Point with your faculties at least somewhat askew, precisely when you may need them in good array.

  “Why? Bassariot thinks me carrion at the bottom of the sea.”

  But only Bassariot thinks you thus. He has told the rest of the world that you are a fugitive desperado. And since your face recently held pride of place in the Olkney Implicator, which circulates in Scullaway Point, readers of that publication may be inclined to shout alarmingly upon sight of you. In which case, I am sure you would find being intoxicated an impediment to remaining free. And, should you again fall into the hands of Faubon Bassariot, I have no doubt that you would not leave them until you were well and thoroughly accounted for.

  “When you put it that way,” Filidor said, “I find it difficult to argue.”

  The integrator again chose diplomatic restraint, and said nothing.

  “However, until such time as we can clap together a plan, I shall focus my mind on the evils Faubon Bassariot has done me, and the grim recompense that I swear I will claim.”

  If you must, said the voice in his head. But assigning blame is a fixation of an ineffective mind. Better to concentrate on how you propose to make your claim stick.

  Filidor looked ahead, to where the hills above Scullaway Point were serrating the horizon. He had never bee
n to the seafarers’ town, but he knew it to be a bustling place of wide and well lit streets. Narrow, dark alleys suitable for skulking along unnoticed might be in short supply. He would need to remain untaken by the authorities long enough to find a bolt hole where he could lie low, gather information and put together a plan. It would have to be an exceptionally safe hiding place, since he would need to become at least moderately inebriated while charging the integrator’s plates enough to make it useful.

  An idea occurred to him. He remembered the old tale of the two sisters: one had been beautiful and one had been decidedly not; all the world could describe to the last exquisite detail the face of the fair one, but no one had ever wanted to look long enough at her poor, repellent sister to note the exact particulars of her facial ill fortune. Thus the ugly girl was able to go and come as she needed to, while the cynosure was always under the scrutiny of every eye that touched her. The distinction had made quite a difference to the contours of their lives.

  “Is there any grease or pitch aboard?” Filidor asked. Etch Valderoyn dug into a compartment near the stern and came out with a little pot of something black and gummy. Filidor asked the sailor to dip his finger in the muck and draw two inverted chevrons on his cheeks, a thick bar across his forehead and a single stripe from lower lip to chin. When Valderoyn was finished and sat back to inspect his work, Filidor pulled up the hood of his shirt to cover his head and frame his marked face, tying the strings tight beneath his jaw.

  “Do I look like a consecrate of the Piacular Tumult?” he asked, referring to that resolutely violent sect of muscular ascetics for whose members the mere existence of nonbelievers was an unbearable affront to their principles. A consecrate would attack without mercy or limitation any heathen whose presence was inflicted upon him. On the rare occasions when utter necessity brought consecrates out of their own communities and into contact with the rest of humanity, those who encountered them were wise to avert their gazes and walk in other directions.