Black Brillion

by Matthew Hughes

  Baro sat and watched the images sequentially appear and vanish on the screen of his mind’s eye. His analytical function, trained to look for patterns, sought to impose a meaning to the display, a message from the back reaches of his psyche. But nothing came. It was as if the events of recent days had been a stick to stir the sediments below the clear water of his consciousness, filling it with a cloud of unconnected memories.

  He saw again the scene of his father walking toward the garden gate, his mother digging in a flower bed. He held the image in his mind—his eidetic memory could do so effortlessly—and examined its details. He could see the sunlight glint from the captain’s pips on his father’s epaulets, the details of the design on his mother’s smock, the stray wisp of auburn hair that escaped from beneath her yellow scarf.

  Was there a message here? He could not see it. He pondered the image at length and still nothing came. Then, like a bubble rising through thick liquid, a question burst in the back of his mind. Why was he seeing the scene from inside the house? Why wasn’t he walking his father to the gate as he always did—it was a father-son ritual—when Captain Harkless left on assignment?

  The answer should have come with the question, Baro knew. His memories were as available to him as entries in an integrator’s data banks, back even as far as his infancy. Yet when he asked why he was watching from the house—no, confined to the house—he had to struggle to find the reason.

  This must be how it is for those with ordinary memories, he thought as he mentally pushed and prodded around the edges of the scene in his mind. The answer came slowly: he was in the house because he had been told he could not leave its walls for two days. Who had told him? He pushed again, and the response reluctantly presented itself: his father.

  Now he could see the man’s face looking down at him. I was nine years old, he remembered. His father’s expression was stern. We’re in the front room and he’s telling me I cannot leave the house. It is my punishment for … Baro could not remember. He strove to force the memory into his consciousness but it would not come. Some part of him resisted, would not open the door.

  I was nine, he told himself again. What could I have done that was so awful I still cannot let the memory see light? Almost, he turned from the question, but something would not let it go. Sweat had broken out on his face; he felt its coolness in the morning air. Eyes tightly closed, he reached for the memory, pushed against a resistance that held him at a distance, then suddenly gave way.

  I hate you! He heard the words in his nine-year-old’s voice, high-pitched and shouting. I hate you! I hope you never come back!

  He’d wanted something, still couldn’t remember what—to go with friends somewhere, he thought—and his father had said no. Young Baro had not completed an assignment, some project from his tutor. His father was saying that work comes before leisure, responsibility before caprice.

  “You will concentrate on your work until I return.” He could hear his father’s voice now, see his grave face, even read in its expression the concern for his son that had not been evident to his nine-year-old self.

  Young Baro had thrown a tantrum. Who knew why? today’s Baro asked himself. Was I feeling neglected? Was it a boy’s fear that his always-departing father might someday not return? Was that what made me wish that he would never come back? Did I make a weapon out of a childhood fear?

  He could feel sweat trickling down his back and belly now. His breath was coming hard. He felt a hand shaking his shoulder and opened his eyes to see Luff Imbry peering into his face with concern. “Are you all right?” his partner said.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you had lapsed into the Commons again.”

  “No, just memories.”

  “Do you wish to share them?”

  Baro signaled a negative and saw Imbry’s poorly concealed relief. The fat man returned to his own thoughts and Baro leaned his head against a rib of the cart’s frame and tried to think of nothing.

  The coolness of dawn gave way to the heat of full day. When the sun was an orange ball halfway to the zenith and the horizon was frequently lost in haze, the lead Rover yipped twice and the echelon of the carts redeployed. The leader slowed his shuggras, then turned them to the right and began to pull his cart in a tight circle. Each of the others followed his lead, the individual vehicles drawing closer together until they almost touched and the line was spinning around the leader like the hand of a dial. Within moments, the rotation had created a circle of trampled grass.

  “They’re clearing a space for us,” said Imbry. “Good. That may mean lunch.”

  “Too early,” said Guth Bandar, awakened from his nap by the Rovers’ cries. “This will be a rest stop.”

  When the circle was well flattened the Rovers drew the carts into a huddle in its center, unstrapped themselves, and dropped the tailboards for the passengers to dismount. Yaffak gestured toward the tall grass and said something that Bandar translated as “For our convenience.”

  He asked how long they would stay? and translated the Rover’s answer, “They want to rest the draft animals and take a small meal. The drivers also want to nap before the full heat of the day.”

  With his feet on the ground, Baro stretched, bending backward and forward to ease an ache in his lower back. He went out into the grass to relieve his bladder and when he returned he found that Imbry had brought the woven cushion from the cart and placed it on the trampled grass in the vehicle’s shade to give himself a comfortable seat. Baro came to sit cross-legged beside him.

  “You do not look well,” Imbry said.

  “I have had unsettling thoughts.”

  “Concerning Gebbling?”

  “No, there I confess myself at an impasse,” Baro said and related what Raina Haj had told him that morning. He did not tell Imbry about her suggestion that they take a “shortcut” and arrest the fraudster on spurious grounds.

  “I have been giving the matter some thought,” said Imbry. “I am not trained in investigations, but some questions occurred to me. I have been thinking about our fellow passengers.”

  Baro felt a pang of guilt. In truth, he had not given their assignment a moment’s thought since he had boarded the Rover’s cart. “Where have your thoughts led you?” he said.

  “I have found a common factor. In fact, two.”

  “Tell me.”

  “While you were sweating and gazing at the horizon,” Imbry said, “I consulted the data stored in my plaque. Two things stood out: one is that all of the lassitude sufferers are at the same stage in the progress of the disease. None has lapsed into complete catatonia. There is no waxiness of the skin. And none shows the stuttering and twitching of the earliest onset.”

  Baro’s mind engaged. “That means they all must have contracted the condition at the same time,” he said.

  “I believe so,” said Imbry. “The other common factor is even more arresting. With the exception of one pair, they all live within a certain distance of a particular geographical point.”

  Imbry now had Baro’s full attention. “Where is that point and who is the exception?” Baro said.

  “The exception is Trig Helvic and his daughter Erisme. The point is in the vicinity of the Monument, near the center of the Swept, not far from here.”

  Baro’s mind chewed the information. “The fact that all are in the same stage of the disease cannot be a coincidence,” he said after a while. A chilling thought struck him. “Is it possible that Gebbling has discovered not just how to cure the lassitude, but how to cause it? Did he deliberately infect all of these people so that he could send them invitations to be cured?”

  “It would make sense,” Imbry said, “in a terribly cynical way. He could present this mixed assemblage of folk, from different places and various walks of life, as living samples of his abilities: The world would come rushing to his door.”

  “But,” said Baro, “if he has found a cure, why all the flimflammery, the landship, the Rovers, the image projected fr
om some hidden source? He need only walk into the nearest hospice and start raising the afflicted from their beds.”

  “I don’t know,” said Imbry. “Perhaps he can cure only those he has afflicted.”

  Baro turned the discussion to the geographical distribution of the passengers. “That also seems relevant,” he said, “though I would feel better if the exceptional pair had turned out to be Monlaurion and Flix.”

  Imbry agreed. “It would tend to argue for their having been shills. Then the imagist’s death might have been a falling out among miscreants. Flix might give us a crevice into Gebbling’s scheme that we could work at and widen.”

  Baro made up his mind. “Haj said she was not involved. I believe her. But we must question Helvic. If his daughter was within range of the common geographical center at about the time she came down with the lassitude, then we have something solid at last.” He flicked his head in annoyance and added, “But what that ‘something solid’ means we still don’t know.”

  “Well, we must sip before we swallow,” said Imbry. “But Helvic does not seem the sort to welcome casual conversation. See how he stands aside from all others.”

  Helvic was standing at the edge of the cleared space, inflicting a grim look on the endless grass.

  “I do not intend casual conversation,” Baro said. “I will identify myself as a Bureau agent. Even the wealthy and powerful must answer a scroot’s questions.”

  “Is that wise?” said Imbry. “Arboghast commanded us to remain undercover.”

  “His exact words,” Baro said, “were ‘You will observe the strictest undercover protocols.’ Section eight, subparagraph twelve of standing orders governing covert operations allows an agent to reveal his status if he judges the person in whom he confides to be trustworthy.”

  “Helvic is one of the wealthiest men in the world and his daughter suffers from the lassitude,” said Imbry. “He is unlikely to be in league with the likes of Gebbling.”

  “Let us see what we can learn,” said Baro.

  Baro and Imbry approached the magnate. Baro discreetly displayed his plaque and said, “My partner and I are agents of the Bureau of Scrutiny operating undercover.”

  Helvic’s leaden expression did not alter. He glanced at the plaque and turned his head slightly toward them. “What are you investigating?” he said.

  “Possibly the source of the lassitude. We believe that Father Olwyn, who is a fraudster known to us as Horslan Gebbling, may be its creator.”

  “Such infamy had never occurred to me,” said Helvic. “I thought at worst he would dangle a hope before me while he picked my pocket.”

  “Yet you were willing to come along,” said Luff Imbry.

  The magnate smiled a sardonic smile and looked to where a steward was feeding his daughter from a tube. “I have plenty of pockets,” he said, “but only one child.”

  “I wish to ask you a question,” Baro said.

  “Then ask.”

  “Where was your daughter when she first contracted the disease?”

  It did not take Helvic more than a moment to answer. “She was hiking in the hills above Farflung. There are some curious rock formations there. She was—is—a connoisseur of geological oddities.”

  That put Erisme Helvic well within the circle shared by the other victims. “Thank you,” Baro said.

  Imbry had another question. “Why did you accept Gebbling’s invitation?”

  “Hope for a cure,” Helvic answered.

  “You do not strike me as a man who bases his decisions on hope,” Imbry said.

  “True, I am not such a man.”

  “Then there was something that spoke more forcefully to you,” said Baro. “Please tell us what it was.”

  Helvic looked around them and though the nearest person was out of earshot he lowered his voice and said, “Black brillion.”

  Baro saw Imbry’s eyebrows rise but he kept his gaze on Helvic. “You must tell us the whole thing,” he said.

  “A man came to my home. I did not know him,” Helvic said. “He had altered the set of his features”—he glanced at Luff Imbry—“much as you appear to have done so. He asked me, ‘Would you see your daughter cured?’

  The man had taken a small gold box from his pocket and opened it. Within was a speck of something dark that glistened with the colors of the rainbow. The man had used tweezers to extract the tiny ort, then he had placed it on the back of Erisme Helvic’s hand.

  “In a moment the rigor left her face,” her father said. “She smiled and laughed and we embraced. At that moment I would have given the man all of my fortune, at least all but Erisme’s portion, and counted it a good bargain.”

  But the man had held up an admonitory hand. The shred of black brillion was not strong enough to create a permanent remission of the lassitude. In a few hours, the paralysis must return.

  Helvic had been distraught. How could he deliver his daughter from this horror? The man laid a document before him. It contained a list of instructions: charter the Orgulon, invite the accompanying list of persons to join him on the cruise, say nothing to anyone.

  “Did he instruct you to transfer any funds or to bring valuables with you?” Imbry asked.

  “No.”

  “Has he contacted you since?” Baro said. “Has anyone approached you since we left Farflung?”

  “No to the first question, and to the second, only you.”

  “Hmm,” said Imbry.

  Baro made the same sound. They thanked Helvic and left him. The magnate again lapsed into his dark study.

  Baro and Imbry returned to the cart. “So we have learned something,” Imbry said.

  “Yes. We have time and location in common, two factors that must point to something. But we don’t know what.”

  “Let us give it time.”

  “And we know how Gebbling can afford all this expense.”

  “Yes,” Imbry said. “But now there is a mysterious confederate. And so-called black brillion plays a part.”

  “How might Trig Helvic be fooled? He is a hard-minded man.”

  “There are drugs that, surreptitiously administered, can induce the victim’s senses to see and hear whatever the perpetrator suggests,” Imbry said.

  “But those drugs leave aftereffects that alert the intelligent to the possibility that their perceptions have been tampered with,” Baro countered. “Helvic does not fit the profile of an easy victim.”

  “Again, true,” said Imbry. “So we have learned something, but not enough. This investigating is ofttimes as interesting as my former work.”

  Baro was chagrined at himself and it showed in his face.

  “What?” Imbry said.

  “I am the trained agent, you are the amateur,” the young man said, “yet it was you who exercised initiative and mined the data for good results.”

  “There are other fields besides criminology that reward an inquiring mind,” his partner said. “For example, you might learn something from watching the Rovers. Bandar is highly interested.”

  Baro looked and saw that the historian was watching the drivers intently. They had unhitched the shuggras from the carts although each team remained harnessed together. They moved the teams to separate points on the rim of the trampled circle before feeding the beasts from nosebags strapped to their heads. The Rovers themselves settled in a group at the center of the circle to eat their own rations, a pile of hard biscuits and what looked like jerked meat piled on a cloth in the center of the ring. Without apparent ceremony, the Rovers helped themselves to the food and sat on their haunches chewing mechanically.

  Bandar watched for a while, then shook his head and walked away. Baro joined him. “Something disturbs you?” he asked the historian.

  “There should have been jostling and attempts by junior-ranked members of the pack to improve their place in the feeding order,” the small man said. “Indeed, there was no order of precedence. All reached at the same time.”

  “Perhaps they have c
hanged their ways.”

  “No,” said Bandar. He thought about it, then said, “Not possible.”

  “It seems that you regularly encounter the impossible on this journey,” said Baro. “Perhaps, like Father Olwyn, they have received a revelation and changed their ways.”

  “Rover consciousness is a thin veneer over a solid mass of deep instinct,” Bandar said. “It would take more than a preacher to change them.”

  “Then could it be disease?” Baro suggested. “Perhaps this is how the lassitude affects them.”

  “They have a definite reaction to illness,” Bandar said. “The sick one goes away until he is either cured or dies. It protects the group.”

  “You know a great deal about them,” Baro said as they walked back to where Imbry sat.

  “Only what is common knowledge.”

  “Not common to me,” Baro said. “In fact, I had never heard of them before this morning. Nor the Commons before I met you.”

  “Never heard of Rovers or the Commons,” Bandar mused. “What other things do you not know?”

  “A tautology,” said Imbry, who had overheard. “How can he be expected to know what he does not know?”

  “A fair point,” said Bandar. “After all, he is merely a provincial gentleman, an occupation that requires one to know no more than the latest fashionable fillips and the precise social worth of one’s neighbors. But he does wear the scarf of an Institute graduate.”

  “Though only third tier,” said Imbry.

  “True,” said the historian. “What was your field again?”

  “Criminology,” said Baro.

  “He can quote verbatim from manuals of the Bureau of Scrutiny,” Imbry said.

  “What a peculiar distinction,” said Bandar. “I mean, I am sure the capability would be of use to a Bureau employee, but even the most earnest scroot would need to command a wider array of knowledge than just standards and procedures.”