Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014

by Penny Publications

  "We are respectable members of the literary establishment!" the balding man said angrily from the crowd. Dupin, beside Fogg, shrugged. "I do not know about respectable, " he murmured, then shook his head. "It is no matter."

  "Two," Fogg said, "the automaton known as E.T.A. Hoffman, AKA E.T., AKA The Hoff, attends the convention as an honored guest. Originally constructed by the Leibniz Korp. of Germany, it later took political asylum in the Republic, where it became a free citizen. That same automaton, I may add, of which we had a reasonable reason to suspect of being involved with a radical underground movement, Blake's Revolutionary Army, whose purpose is to overthrow the rule of Les Lézards."

  "Impossible!" the balding man said. Fogg fixed him with a cool stare that made the little man visibly wilt.

  "Three—a question: Who would want Hoffman dead?"

  "Indeed," Dupin said. Orphan, left unnoticed by their side, had the strange feeling that the two were almost identical: like two brothers separated at birth who still maintain a parallel personality throughout their life. "Allow me. Killing Hoffman in the cathedral, a symbol of Les Lézards at the very heart of the Republic, would be a message impossible to ignore. But a message to whom? To Les Lézards —or to those who try to fight against them?"

  "It depends," Fogg said, "on who those men were who attacked us so suddenly upon discovering the body." He looked over the audience and smiled. It was not a nice smile. "I believe they were, like Hoffman, members of this convention."

  "Impossible!"—"Ludicrous!"—"How dare you, sir, how dare you?"—and from Fix, a look full of hatred aimed at Fogg.

  "Look here," he said, "surely the account of this Mr. Chapman —if that is even his real name—suggests that it was this man, this impostor who dares to claim to be me, who was responsible for the murder? Can't you see that this, this pretender, this fraud, is the real murderer? He killed Hoffman. Not some imagined men in black. He killed Hoffman, and now when things are desperate and he has been found out, unable to flee, he is making one last, desperate stand!"

  "A valid point of view," Dupin murmured.

  "Nonsense," Fogg said. "Chapman is an innocent victim of circumstances. The question we must ask ourselves is this—who were the men who skulked in the cathedral and attacked us both? That, I suggest, will help us most on our quest for truth."

  "I may be able to help here," Dupin said. "Since Scotland Yard is not the only police force to have intelligence at their disposal." He paused and looked at the audience with glittering eyes.

  "Do go on," Fogg said.

  "Monsieur Hoffman was German, as you pointed out. A product of German ingenuity, and of the Liebniz Korp. engineers. For a long time we at the Sûreté suspected Hoffman of—how shall I put it?—not entirely giving up his loyalties to the fatherland. That he was, in other words, something of a spy."

  "And you did nothing?" Fix said.

  "Why catch a fly if the spider goes free?" Dupin said. "We kept our eyes on him. This convention did concern us. So many people from so many different places, all gathered together in Paris—who knows what foreign agents would attempt to use such an opportunity?"

  "The men in the cathedral?" Fogg said, looking annoyed. Orphan almost smiled: the detectives were competing with each other in one-upmanship. Perhaps, he thought, both already know the conclusion they were each leading toward.

  "Patience," Dupin said. He raised one hand theatrically. "As I said, we suspected Hoffman. And, when this convention came to our attention, we naturally paid particular attention to any German delegates who might be attending."

  In the audience Orphan saw the young man he had spotted earlier while having his lunch. He was looking directly at Dupin, with a small smile playing on his face. "What was his name?"

  "Hanns Heinz Ewers," Dupin said, and the young man rose from his seat and made a sardonic bow.

  More murmurs from the audience.

  "An audacious adventurer," Dupin said. "How old are you? Seventeen?"

  "Eighteen," Ewers said.

  "You're under arrest."

  The young man continued to smile. "I think you'll find I have diplomatic immunity," he said calmly. "You can look it up with my embassy. Besides, I didn't kill Hoffman."

  "But you were at the cathedral," Dupin said. "You were leading the group that attacked Mr. Chapman here."

  "What did you expect?" Ewers said. "As far as I knew, he killed E.T."

  He turned to Orphan and touched his fingers to his forehead in a salute. "My apologies, by the way."

  "I saw you," Orphan said. "Were you watching me? You knew I was meant to meet him. It was you and that French man. Leroux."

  "I had nothing to do with it!" said an angry voice. Gaston Leroux, looking pale and very young, rose and glared at them.

  "No doubt monsieur le fantôme arranged for that group of thugs to be put at your disposal?" Dupin said with a smirk. "Oh, we know all about you, Leroux. You let your imagination and your life become hopelessly entangled."

  "I am an artist, not a murderer," Leroux said.

  "An artist, sure. And a masked vigilante at night, non?"

  "Enough!" Fix said. "I demand you stop this charade, Dupin. It is clear it is this

  Fogg who killed your man. Arrest him and be done with it."

  "Silence!" Dupin said. Fogg smiled thinly.

  "I don't understand," Orphan said. His palms were wet. He was growing angry. This really was a charade, he thought.

  Dupin, playing up to the audience. The man was a fool. "Who killed Hoffman?" Dupin nodded. He was not smiling. He looked, now, as if the play was finally over. He turned and addressed the room. His voice boomed over the assembled heads the way Verne's had done. They were in the palm of his hands. A captive audience.

  "Hoffman arranged to meet Chapman in the cathedral. I suspect Chapman is here on his own undeclared mission. I suspect, too, though I cannot prove it, that he is an agent of the automaton they call The Turk. But we, the French, have no fight with the Turk. That is for the lizards to deal with."

  He began ticking items off on his hands in unconscious imitation of Fogg.

  "One: Hoffman arranged to meet Chapman in the cathedral.

  "Two: Hoffman notifies Ewers, who, together with Leroux and his gang of local misfits, hide in the cathedral as backup. My theory is that Hoffman was already sitting there when you arrived, is that not so, monsieur?"

  "That's correct," Ewers said. "We stayed well away. I did not know...."

  "Quite," Dupin said. "Three: Chapman arrives, discovers Hoffman's death. This man—" he pointed at Fogg, "arrives almost immediately. They make a run for it. Ewers and his boys pursue them, thinking them to be the killers."

  "Correct," Ewers said. Dupin raised a hand to silence him. "I am speaking."

  "My apologies."

  "Four: it is a simple assumption to make, the only logical choice, in fact, that Hoffman was killed when he was on his own, before anyone else arrived."

  "So who was it?" someone in the audience shouted.

  "Why, it is as clear as glass," Dupin said, and he clicked his fingers. The two uniforms by the door stirred.

  "It was Detective Fix."

  "What? How dare—" The uniforms grabbed him.

  "You, monsieur, are the real culprit," Dupin said. "You are the true agent of that enemy of all thinking men, of L'homme de livre! You were seen, monsieur, observing the hotel, pretending to be Detective Fix of Scotland Yard, and then you followed Hoffman and, when he was alone, you killed him!"

  His voice thundered, his hands moved majestically as if conducting an orchestra. "You are the murderer, and a most fiendish one! How clever of you to come to me, to pretend to work with me in solving this crime, to construct this Mr. Fogg of yours as the criminal while you, yourself, are the real Fogg! And you—" and here his voice grew even louder and more thunderous "—You are under arrest!"

  The audience rose to their feet as one and gave a standing ovation. Their clapping was loud enough to bring down the r
oof. Dupin smiled, bowed, and led the way out of the room, the two uniformed men and their prisoner in tow.

  Orphan remained standing, baffled—and quite badly needing a pee.

  Six: The End of the Affair

  Events took a speedy turn. Orphan barely had time to relieve himself before Fogg whisked him out of the building and into a waiting barouche-landau with darkened windows. Orphan climbed in after Fogg and sat down, feeling light-headed. The barouche-landau pulled away and into the traffic.

  "At last!" a booming voice said, and only then did Orphan register the man sitting opposite them.

  It was Jules Verne.

  "How tedious that man Dupin is!" He smiled, exposing teeth like jagged breakers on a stormy shore. "I must confess you had me worried there for a moment, Fogg. Or shall I say Fix?"

  Fogg laughed. "Poor Fix," he said, "I'd love to see his face when they lock him up behind bars!"

  "Forget Fix, it's Dupin's face I'd like to see when he realizes he got the wrong man!" Verne said.

  Orphan stared at Verne. He had changed his clothes, and now wore a dark, velvet-lined cape and held a traveling-stick in his hand, a dark ebony cane capped with a silver skull.

  "So who killed Hoffman?" Orphan said at last.

  Verne chuckled. Fogg wore a thin smile like a cut from a blade.

  "I did," he said. "Of course."

  Orphan felt his hands tighten. "You bastard."

  "Shut up, boy," Fogg said, the smile disappearing like a fencing blade unbending. "You work for the Bookman now. And what the Bookman does, and how he uses his pieces on the board, is up to only one man."

  "The Bookman," Orphan said, and thought, he is no man.

  "Correct," Fogg said.

  Le maire de Paris assassiné!

  Paris—In the early hours of the evening the mayor, the esteemed Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, was assassinated by person or persons unknown. The one-time magician and maker of automata (whose phenomenal success earned him the sobriquet The Heir of Vaucanson ) was found in a locked room inside the Hôtel de Ville. The room was secured from the inside, and there was no sign of tampering with the lock. The mayor's body was obliterated by a small explosive device. The mayor's personal secretary has confirmed to this newspaper that shortly before the event she delivered to the mayor a parcel that had just arrived in the last post. She said, "It felt like a heavy book." No one at the Sûreté was available for comment, and the whereabouts at that time of Inspector Dupin, who was in charge of the mayor's security, remain unknown.

  Orphan stared at the newspaper. They had just pulled into Nantes station.

  It all made sense now, he thought. The killing of Hoffman in the cathedral. Fogg framing him for the act. All to withdraw attention from the Bookman's real plans, all to lure Dupin to the wrong place at the wrong time, so that an innocent-looking book could be delivered to the mayor. And yet—it was, he had to admit, brilliantly done. At one stroke the Bookman's faction had disposed of the mayor, of the Hoffman automaton, and put away the real detective, that poor man Fix, behind bars.

  "Oh, cheer up, Orphan," Verne said. He beamed at him. "The story's been a tragic one, with death and ugly murder... and your own story, not told here, full of love and loss and a quest for redemption.... I hope I could write it one day."

  "It isn't over yet," Fogg said. "So save your energies until Orphan reaches the end. If he does."

  "Ah, The End!" Verne said, and he sighed a little, as if overcome by emotion. "These are always my favorite words in a book."

  "To write or to read?" Orphan said, unable to restrain himself.

  "Why, both," Verne said, smiled, and twirled his cane.

  THE END.

  * * *

  THE PHILOSOPHER DUCK

  Kara Dalkey | 2554 words

  Kara Dalkey has been publishing SF and fantasy short stories for nearly thirty years, and has had fifteen fantasy novels published as well, many of them set in Asia. She currently resides in the beautiful and mysterious Puget Sound region with a sweetie and a pixie bobcat. Her first story for Asimov's coalesced out of a nebula of inspiration, including the Seven Minutes of Terror that placed Curiosity safely on Mars, and the future plight of Bangladesh due to Global Warming. She tells us, "it was written months before the super-typhoon struck the Philippines. I based my story background on what climate scientists have been predicting for some time—that tropical cyclones might become fewer but much stronger. And, sadly, this may have been borne out, all too soon."

  Thunder rumbled to the south. Ravi turned his head and stared. A gargantuan, curved gray wall of cloud filled the sky over the Bay of Bengal, glowing baleful orange on its west side where the last light of the setting sun struck it. The cyclone that the weathermen on the radio claimed had been headed to Myanmar had turned northwest and was now headed straight for Bangladesh. Ravi could smell the oncoming torrent as the wind grew ever stronger. "Chandni!" he called to his wife, "You must finish up the packing. It's coming faster than we thought!" Fear flowed from his stomach to his knees and neck, making him tremble. "Anu! Hurry!" Ravi shouted to his six-year-old son, who was paddling his little boat around the pylons beneath their platform.

  "I'm watching the ducks, Bappi!" Anu loved birds.

  "No time for that! The storm is coming. Get out of the boat and come up!"

  "Yes, Bappi."

  All who lived on the Great Pier knew such a day would come. Families who had lost their land from the rising of the sea were encouraged to move onto the platforms built up and out, so that they would not crowd the remaining land. Farmers had become fishermen and salvage divers. Villages grew on the piers built by an international consortium of nations and wealthy men. But there was ever the danger of the cyclones. With the warming of the air, they were greater when they came.

  Ravi's grandfather had warned him as the sea rose, saying the future would bring only misery, disaster, and death. But Ravi had a wife and son to look after and could not let despair overwhelm him.

  Ravi went inside their reed and twig hut, which shook and leaned with each gust of wind. Chandni had already opened and spread out the rescue sphere, which had been provided to each family living on the Pier. She had already tucked a plastic container of water, cooking utensils, and some clothes into the webbing. She had not been the most attractive of her sisters, but Chandni had proved so smart and practical and tireless that Ravi felt he got the much better bargain over his shallower brothers-in-law.

  "Are we ready to inflate it?" he asked her.

  "As ready as we can be. Where is Anu?"

  "I am here, Mammi," said Anu, coming up behind Ravi. "Bappi, where will we put the boat?"

  "We must leave it, Anu. There will be no room. We will get another later."

  Ravi paused, his heel above the automatic pump. "Do you want to say goodbye to the house?" he said to Chandni. "It will be destroyed when this goes up."

  "I never say goodbye to houses, or hello. It is bad luck," said Chandni.

  "Very well." Ravi stomped on the pedal that started the inflation and the great orange sphere began to rise, pushing the flimsy walls of their hut aside.

  Anu stared, wide-eyed, his fingers in his mouth.

  Ravi paused to marvel, too. These rescue spheres were adapted from those that placed vehicles on Mars—a place that to him was only a cinnabar light in the night sky. And now such a sphere was being used to save people in a storm. At least Ravi hoped it would.

  Ravi glanced down the Great Pier. Many of his neighbors had fled toward the mainland, hoping the storm shelters would take them in, especially those who had sold their spheres long ago. A few families, like Ravi's, had remained, and orange and tan balls of rubber were rising out of their homes as well.

  The wind began to buffet the hut, whipping Ravi's hair into his face. "Get in, Anu! We must strap you in." Remembering the safety lectures given at the village center once a year, Ravi said, "Put your feet in those rubber loops and hold onto these ropes." Ravi attached the plastic and
Velcro straps around Anu's waist. He turned to help Chandni, but she was already strapped in and ready.

  As the inflation of the sphere was nearly complete, Ravi reached up to zip and seal the top flaps. Three of the top panels had to be loose on one side, to let some air in. As each section curved closed, a glow stick along each spine cracked, allowing the chemicals to mix and produce a green glow. Just before Ravi could close the final flap, however, there was a furious fluttering noise outside and a black and white tufted duck flew into the sphere with a loud "Mack! Mack! Mack! Mack!"

  "Oh no!" cried Ravi and he chased the duck, saying, "Shoo! Shoo!" The duck managed to just evade him even though the sphere was only a meter and a half across. "Let him stay, Bappi!" said Anu, giggling. "He wants to be saved from the storm too." "Yes, let him stay," said Chandni, "and then we will have something to cook and eat when the storm is over. Besides, the rain is coming in. Close up and strap in yourself."

  "Very well," said Ravi, finishing the final flap. "But you may not be so happy with your choice when he beats you with his wings and scratches you with his feet." As the final gray sunlight was closed off, the interior of the sphere glowed with eerie green light as if they were underwater. Edging around the duck, Ravi strapped himself in halfway between Anu and Chandni, and grabbed the plastic guide ropes. The duck settled itself in the very center of the sand-weighted floor between the three of them, muttering an annoyed "buck... buck... buck..."

  A strong gust hit the sphere, blowing it a few feet back. Ravi heard his neighbors call out to each other from their spheres, "Courage! Hold on! Stay safe!" Then the wind-wall of the storm hit and the cries of encouragement changed to shouted prayers, to Allah, to Christ, to Vishnu. Ravi whispered his prayers to the latter, as he felt their sphere blown off the pier platform. Then, to his shock, it was raised into the air. Anu and Chandni cried out as the sphere bounced against other spheres and the edge of the pier platform, and then splashed into the water of the sea. Through it all, the duck wobbled and jumped and muttered to itself, but never strayed from the center of the sphere floor.