“Not inevitably,” said Conn. “For I see no possible profit in obliging you.”
Consternation and frustrated outrage clashed in the Hauserian’s face. He found his -brimmed hat and set it on his head, turned and stalked from the room on hard-heeled boots without another word or rearward glance.
“Did you hear what he said when you declared that neither had won nor lost in the hassenge?” Moat Wallader asked.
“No.”
“It was an observation that some people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Do you know what he meant?”
Conn turned the statement over in his head. “Is it a riddle?” he said after a while.
“No,” said the Divorgian, “but never mind.”
Jenore said, “You said Hauserian culture was based on the sin of pride. What about Thrais?”
Both Divorgians spoke as one. “Why, greed.”
Conn waited for some clarification. When none was forthcoming he said, “But greed is not a sin.”
They looked at him expectantly.
“Greed is a virtue,” he said. “It is simply the praiseworthy desire to better oneself. That urge is the foundation of society, the motivating force behind every transaction. If people did not wish to acquire the wherewithal of life, they would not act. Society would come to a halt.”
“To you, this is self-evident,” said Clariq.
“To any rational person.”
“Does Ren Farbuck seem rational to you?” she said.
“He does not rave, though he speaks in riddles.”
“He is typical of his culture. Hauserians like the good things of life and spend considerable energy to acquire them. But the true goal of their existence is to acquire repute and standing among their fellows. Ren Farbuck, I believe, would give his entire fortune to preserve his reputation among his peers, or even among those he considers his social inferiors. And give it gladly.”
“Then he is mad,” said Conn, “and his world a madhouse.”
“He might say the same about you and Thrais,” Clariq said.
“But he would be wrong.”
Jenore intervened again. “Tell us about the man with the jewels in his face. What motivates him?”
“Ah,” said Moat Wallader, “I sense you know already.”
“Perhaps,” said Jenore, “but my companion does not.”
Moat made an ambiguous gesture. “He is an adherent of the Immersion. I estimate his rank as not less than Blue-Green Exemplar and possibly as high as Yellow Cynosure.”
“I am not familiar with the terms,” Conn said.
“The Immersion is an association or fellowship – the less charitable would call it a cult – among the intensely inbred aristocracy of Old Earth. It has chapters up and down The Spray and its members devote themselves to erotic pursuits of extraordinary types. Their goal is to encompass the full depth and breadth of amatory experience and thus enable themselves to break through to a new realm of consciousness they call Prismatic Abundance.”
“Why?” Conn asked.
“It is what gives shape and meaning to their lives,” Moat said. “They believe that the copulative impulse is the prime human drive. All else is adjunct and afterthought. They must experience every possible variant and many of them devote considerable energy to the search for new varieties, which, when you consider that human beings have been futtering each other with verve and imagination for millions of years, bespeaks a remarkable optimism.”
Jenore said, “In other words, their world view is founded on the sin of lust.”
“Just so,” said Clariq.
“Hence the bejeweled man’s strategy at the thrash table,” Jenore went on. “He was playing to reduce your brother’s purse to the point where you would be vulnerable to his advances.”
“Worse,” said Conn, “he was cheating.”
“Hmm,” said Clariq. “He would have been disappointed. We would have applied through the captain to the Bodoglio Seminary for further funds.”
She looked at her brother and they smiled as at the pranks of a child.
“Did you not hear what I said?” Conn said. “He was cheating. Are you not revolted?”
Moat made a complacent gesture. “It is of no moment. All worked out well. We were able to observe him at close range.”
Jenore said, “Suppose the captain had not agreed to advance you funds, and suppose further that Conn had not intervened to undo the aristocrat’s scheme. Then what?”
“Then I suppose I would have had to accommodate the man,” Clariq said, with a small sigh.
“It might have been painful,” Jenore said. “It would almost certainly have had repellent aspects. I expect he has moved far beyond the usual ins and outs.”
“Then I would have learned something for my pains,” the woman said.
“If you survived them. There are rumors about some of the Immersion’s less advertised practices.”
“If death became unavoidable, I trust I would have had the presence of mind to appreciate the experience.”
“And that would have been consistent with the sin around which Divorgian society is built,” Jenore said.
Clariq’s thin lips spread in acknowledgement. “True,” she said, “I admit that we are all gluttons. We choke ourselves with sensations and experiences of divers kinds. For some it is the sight of sunset on every world. For others, it is all the musics of The Spray. For Moat and me it is revealing encounters with our fellow human beings; we will gorge ourselves on knowledge of the other until our neural membranes burst.”
Conn had heard enough. He rose and made a more brusque leave taking than the informality of the discussion warranted. After a few more words with the Walladers Jenore gave a more amiable salute and followed him.
Up a broad spiral staircase from the forward lounge was a crescent shaped gallery that stretched across the bow of the Dan. Some of the passengers stood to watch the stars flow toward them as the ship continued to build momentum. Soon the alarms would sound to notify the ship’s complement that they were nearing the whimsy through which they plunge, leaving familiar space and time to traverse a region of another kind of reality, emerging eventually – some said the passage took hours, others days, a few found it interminable – into normal space a prodigious distance away.
Very rarely, a ship failed to reemerge. There were fanciful speculations about where – some said it was more appropriate to ask, “When?” – a lost vessel might reappear. Conn had encountered some of the theories: its atoms were evenly distributed across the cosmos; it reemerged, but out of phase with the rest of the universe, so that crew and passengers became sad ghosts vainly struggling to attract the attention and help of those who could not see them; it was captured by the inhabitants of the intermediate realm and worn as jewelry.
Conn had never thought much about the matter. He dwelled on it now, not out of fear or wonder but to take his mind away from the bothersome feelings that had arisen in him during the conversation with the off-worlders below. Why did they have to take perfectly simple, blatantly obvious facts and twist them so wildly out of true? It was one thing to recognize perversity. He was aware that fools and deluded folk came in abundance up and down The Spray. But to hold sense in one hand and nonsense in the other while pretending that each had equal weight and substance – why did they do that?
The first alarm sounded, a gentle bong followed by the ship’s integrator’s dignified tones advising that it was now advisable for passengers to return to their cabins, take their medications and lock the doors. Moments later, Jenore Mordene came up the spiral staircase.
“Are you all right?” she said.
“I am fine.”
“The conversation seemed to upset you.”
“It was foolish talk. People should be more serious about important matters.”
She said nothing but laid her hand upon his arm. For some reason it bothered him to read only solicitude in her expression but he did not free himself of her g
entle grip. She said, “We should get ready for the whimsy.”
“I have never experienced it before,” he said. “I was thinking of not taking the drugs.”
She sighed. “Keep them handy in case you change your mind. In fact, keep them in your hand. A cabin can seem as wide as a continent.”
“Have you been through it often?”
She nodded. “When I was with Chabriz’s show, we went up and down The Spray. I have tried it with and without medication. I recommend with, but it’s up to you.”
“I have heard that it is best to make one’s first passage unaltered. One learns about oneself.”
Her eyebrows went up. “I thought you already knew all that you wanted to know about yourself.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, I feel that I know you from what Hallis used to say. Paduay is a leisurely game. The players must come to understand each other’s minds in order to keep the game going. He said he never heard you speculate about your origins, who your parents might have been, why they sold you to Ovam Horder.”
“There is no need to speculate,” he said. “Obviously they could not keep me. I was not defective, else I would not have lived. Most likely they suffered an economic reverse and had to divest themselves of unaffordable burdens.”
“They could not have had other motives?”
“What other motives could there have been? I was too young to have offended them.”
The alarm sounded again, more strident. She had been about to saying something more but clearly changed her mind. “We should get ready for the whimsy,” she said.
They descended the staircase and found the lounge emptying out, the Walladers already gone. They made their way to their adjoining cabins in lower first class and separated. Conn locked himself in and reposed upon the bunk, the medications sac snug in his grasp. He composed himself and waited.
The third alarm came, annoying and insistent, lasting far longer than the other two warnings. Its cessation left a ringing silence. Moments later Conn felt a tilting followed by a stretching then a series of sensations he could not name. He closed his eyes and saw a landscape of shapes and lights, mutating and shifting across and through each other. He opened his eyes and saw the cabin anew. The ceiling seemed impossibly remote, an astronomical distance away, yet at the same time he felt its presence as if it vibrated only a hairsbreadth from the tip of his nose. There was a sense of unbearable imminence, as if the entire universe stood poised on a pinpoint threatening at any moment to topple and crash in a cataclysm of unimaginable proportions.
He moved his eyes to the reflector above the dressing table. It was flowing like a slow liquid although it did not move and instead of bouncing light from its surface it drew the energy in and transmuted it into a glowing darkness.
Conn closed his eyes again. His mindscape how offered him a spherical mandala, tranquil yet full of immense power. He watched its changes and permutations for a while, resisting the distractions of his sense of bodily position, which told him that his limbs had contorted themselves into impossible arrangements and that his head had ballooned to the size of a small moon.
The sensations and perceptions were interesting but not revelatory, except for one conclusion: he was certain that he had encountered them all before. He reached for a clearer memory, for a sense of time, but all that came was an impression of lying – no, of floating – in a congenial space, of a timeless existence that went on and on, moment by identical moment, for a seeming infinity. He sought for detail but his ability to clarify his mind was compromised by the absurdities that the whimsy was inflicting on his sensorium. He decided that he had experienced enough of the effect and squeezed the sac in his hand, causing its contents to seep into his palm. The swirling globe gradually dimmed and dwindled to nothing, as did Conn Labro.
Holycow was a spectacular world, wide and pastel-colored with eighteen moons in sweeping orbits just beyond the planet’s broad glittering rings. It was not far from where the Dan had reemerged into mundane space and by the time Conn appeared in the forward lounge, walking shakily as body and mind reacquainted themselves and dispelled the whimsy’s aftereffects, the great swirling orb hung enormous in the facsimile windows.
He found Jenore curled up alone in an armchair, cradling a cup of punge in both hands. A second steaming mug awaited him on a small table beside a nearby chair and he took both gladly. They said nothing as they watched one of the planet’s moons loom larger; it was the transfer point for vessels heading in several directions up and down The Spray, there being no fewer than six whimsies within range of Holycow. Ships constantly rose and fell from and to the moon’s surface, while others connected with orbiting stations, touching only long enough to exchange goods and passengers before standing out for other stars.
It was a while before Conn and Jenore were ready for conversation. By then the Dan had docked at an orbiter and the ship’s bells were ringing to alert departing passengers to the need to gather their possessions and move toward the exits. They finished their punge and went to collect their goods, but as they were about to depart the lounge they encountered Moat Wallader looking pale and strained.
“Have you seen my sister?” the Divorgian asked.
They had not. The man looked about the lounge and saw no sign of Clariq. He went up the staircase but immediately came back down. “She is not in her cabin. Indeed, her bunk does not appear to have been used and her medication remains on the table.”
“We had best summon a steward,” Jenore said.
“Of course,” the man said. “I am still fuddled from the whimsy.” He spoke to the air, “Ship’s integrator. Please send a steward.”
A uniformed crewman appeared a few moments later. Jenore explained the situation and they repaired to the missing woman’s cabin, finding all as her brother had described.
A search of the ship was undertaken while disembarking passengers flooded the passageways. Clariq was in none of the common areas nor in the parts of the ship accessible only to the crew. Stewards went from cabin to cabin, knocking and entering, unlocking those from which there was no reply.
Clariq Wallader was found in a compartment in middle first class. The female steward who made the discovery suffered a collapse and had to sit on the floor of the cabin for some time before she recovered enough presence of mind to call for the ship’s security officer.
An order went out to hold all passengers but most of them had already disappeared into the anonymous rush and thrust of the station.
“She did not suffer,” said Second Officer Wochan, the Dan’s security officer, a small, smooth-haired man whose precisely cut white uniform somehow made him look even more compact than life had fashioned him.
They were gathered in the station’s constabulary office, grouped around a scarred table in the refreshments room. On one side were Wochan and the station’s chief constable, a portly man named Soof who clearly placed great importance on the size and grooming of his mustache. When he nodded in agreement with the ship’s officer, its elevated points bobbled in counterpoint.
On the other side of the table, Moat Wallader made a noise that might have been a sigh or a groan. Jenore put a hand on his shoulder and when he seemed unable to frame a response to the officer’s remark she asked Wochan to go on.
“The perpetrator was behind his cabin door, holding it slightly ajar. When the victim passed he stepped out, pressed the medication sac to her neck, caught her as she fell and took her within.”
“I do not understand,” Conn said. “Why did he do this?”
Wochan glanced at the distraught Divorgian and said, “At this point, any discussion of motive is pure conjecture.”
The chief constable gave a throat clearing rumble and said, “There are indications he was an Immersionist. If so, it is possible he sought to experience certain... sensations while in transit between the whimsies. Afterward, it appears that he took his medications and lost consciousness while still on top of her. Part of hi
s body blocked her airway and she smothered.”
Conn would have asked more but Wallader groaned again and Jenore interrupted to ask if the man had been identified or if his movements after leaving the Dan had been tracked.
The mustache semaphored as Soof indicated no. “He was manifested as Granfer Willifree, a margrave from the city of Olkney on Old Earth. We are almost certain that was a traveler’s pseudonym. We do not know what became of him after the Dan docked.”
Conn had a thought. “Could he have been wearing an elision suit?”
“It is quite possible,” Soof said. “Our monitors are calibrated to assist the movement of passengers from debarkation to embarkation and to identify dissident elements when there are delays because of mechanical failure or unavoidable work stoppages.”
“Why do you ask about elision suits?” said Wochan.
Conn told them about what had happened to Hallis Tharp under the eyes of a house integrator.
“Are you positing a connection between the cases?” said Wochan. “It seems farfetched.”
“Perhaps it is merely a coincidence,” Conn said.
“We have Willifree’s image and voice,” said the chief constable. “We will send them to the Archonate Bureau of Scrutiny on Old Earth. Doubtless he can be identified. Eventually, he will be caught and dealt with.”
“We are going to Old Earth,” said Jenore. “We could carry a report.”
Soof made a sound that mingled disparagement with surprise. “Your enthusiasm is commendable but this is an official matter.”
“My companion is accredited as an auxiliary of First Response on Thrais,” she said. “We will be contacting the Bureau of Scrutiny on another matter.”
The eyes above the mustache weighed Conn briefly. “That is different. Would you be willing to assist?”
Conn saw no reason why he should, but equally he saw no argument why he should not. He disliked Willifree. “I will do it,” he said and was surprised when the girl squeezed his arm.
Moat Wallader was descending into a deeper misery as shock wore off and the distraction offered by official proceedings wound down. At a discreet summons from Soof, a matronly woman appeared from an inner room and coaxed the Divorgian to accompany her to something called Travelers’ Aid.
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