Asimov's SF, July 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The streets of Copenhagen. Ladies and gentlemen stepping from carriages, the occasional tricolor of feathers on a hat or, worse, once, tartan over a shoulder. Hamilton found himself reacting, furious. But then he saw it was Campbell. The wearer, a youth in evening wear, was the sort of fool who heard an accent in a bar and took up anything apparently forbidden, in impotent protest against the world. And thus got fleeced by Scotsmen.

  He was annoyed at his anger. He had failed to contain himself.

  He walked past the facade of the British embassy, with the Hanoverian regiment on guard, turned a corner and waited in one of those convenient dark streets that form the second map of diplomatic quarters everywhere in the world. After a moment, a door with no external fittings swung open and someone ushered him inside and took his coat.

  * * * *

  “The girl arrived at the front door, in some distress. She spoke to one of our Hanoverians, Private Glassman, and became agitated when he couldn't understand her. Then she seems to have decided that none of us should understand her. We tried to put her through the observer inside the hallway, but she wouldn't hear of it.” The ambassador was Bayoumi, a Musselman with grey in his beard. Hamilton had met him once before, at a ball held in a palace balanced on a single wave, grown out of the ocean and held there to mark the presence of royalty from three of the great powers. He had been exactly gracious, as he had to be, making his duty appear weightless. In this place, perhaps that was what he took it to be.

  “So she could be armed?” Hamilton had made himself sit down, and now he was focusing on the swirls of lacquered gunwood on the surface of the ambassador's desk.

  “She could be folded like origami.”

  “You're sure of the identification?”

  “Well . . .” Hamilton recognized that moment when the diplomatic skills of a continental ambassador unfolded themselves. At least they were present. “Major, if we can, I'd like to get through this without compromising the girl's dignity—”

  Hamilton cut him off. “Your people trusted nothing to the courier except a name and assume the EM out of here's compromised.” Which was shoddy to the point of terrifying. "What?"

  The ambassador let out a sigh. “I make it a point,” he said, “never to ask a lady her age.”

  * * * *

  They had kept her in the entrance hallway and closed the embassy to all other business that day. Eventually, they had extended the embassy's security bunker to the hallway, created a doorway into it by drilling out the wall, and set up a small room for her inside it. She was separated from the rest of the embassy by a fold, which had light pushed through it, so Hamilton could watch her on an intelligent projection that took up much of a wall in one of the building's many unused office spaces.

  Hamilton saw her face, and found he was holding his breath. “Let me in there.”

  “But if—”

  “If she kills me nobody will care. Which is why she won't.”

  * * * *

  He walked into the room made of space, with a white sheen on the walls for the visual comfort of those inside. He closed the door behind him.

  She looked at him. Perhaps she started to recognize him. She wavered with uncertainty.

  He sat down opposite her.

  She reacted as his gaze took her in, aware that he wasn't looking at her as a stranger should look at a lady. Perhaps that was tipping her toward recognition. Not that that would necessarily be a sign of anything.

  The body was definitely that of Lustre Saint Clair: bobbed hair; full mouth; the affectation of spectacles; those warm, hurt eyes.

  But she couldn't be more than eighteen. The notes in his eyes confirmed it, beyond all cosmetic possibility.

  This was the Lustre Saint Clair he'd known. The Lustre Saint Clair from fifteen years ago.

  “Is it you?” she said. In Enochian. In Lustre's voice.

  He had been fourteen, having left Cork for the first time, indentured in the 4th Dragoons because of his father's debt, proud to finally be able to pay it through his service. He'd had the corners knocked off him and had yet to gain new ones at Keble. Billeted in Warminster, he had been every inch the Gentleman Cadet, forced to find a common society with the other ranks, who tended to laugh at the aristocracy of his Irish accent. They were always asking how many Tories he'd killed, and he'd never found an answer. Years later, he'd come to think he should have told the truth and said two and seen if that would shock them. He'd been acutely conscious of his virginity.

  Lustre had been one of the young ladies it was acceptable for him to be seen with in town. Her being older then he was had appealed to Hamilton very much. Especially since she was reticent, shy, unable to overawe him. That had allowed him to be bold. Too bold, on occasion. They were always seeing and then not seeing each other. She was on his arm at dances, with no need of a card on three occasions, and then supposedly with some other cadet. But Hamilton had always annoyed Lustre by not taking those other suitors seriously, and she had always come back to him. The whole idiocy had taken less than three months, his internal calendar now said, incredibly. But it was years written in stone.

  He had never been sure if she was even slightly fond of him until the moment she had initiated him into the mysteries. And they had even fought that night. But they had at least been together after that, for a while, awkward and fearful as that had been.

  Lustre was a secretary for Lord Surtees, but she had told Hamilton, during that night of greater intimacy, that this was basically a lie, that she was also a courier, that in her head was the seed for a diplomatic language, that sometimes she would be asked to speak the words that made it grow into her, and then she would know no other language, and be foreign to all countries apart from the dozen people in court and government with whom she could converse. In the event of capture, she would say other words, or her package would force them on her, and she would be left with a language, in thought and memory as well as in speech, spoken by no other, which any other would be unable to learn, and she would be like that unto death, which, cut off from the sum of mankind that made the balance as she would be, would presumably and hopefully soon follow.

  She'd said this to him as if she was making an observation about the weather. Not with the detachment that Hamilton had come to admire in his soldiers, but with a fatalism that made him feel sick that night and afraid. He hadn't known whether to believe her. It had been her seeming certainty of how she would end, that night, that had made him react, raise his voice, drag them back into one of their endless grindings of not yet shaped person on person. But in the weeks that followed, he had come to half appreciate those confidences, shrugging aside the terrible burden she put on him, and her weakness in doing so, if it all was true, because of the wonder of her.

  He had done many more foolish and terrible things while he was a cadet. Every now and then he supposed he should have regrets. But what was the point? And yet here was the one thing he hadn't done. He hadn't left that little room above the inn and gone straight back to the barracks and asked for an interview with Lieutenant Rashid and told him that this supposed lady had felt able to share the secret of her status. He hadn't done it in all the weeks after.

  The one thing he hadn't done, and, like some Greek fate or the recoil from a prayer too few, here it was back for him.

  Six months later, Lustre Saint Clair, after she'd followed His Lordship back to London and stopped returning Hamilton's letters, had vanished.

  He'd only heard of it because he'd recognized a friend of hers at some ball, had distracted the lady on his arm and gone to pay his respects, and had heard of tears and horrors and none of the girls in Surtees’ employ knowing what had become of her.

  He'd hidden his reaction then. And ever after. He'd made what inquiries he could. Almost none. He'd found the journals for that day on his plate, and located something about a diplomatic incident between the Court of Saint James's and the Danes, both blaming the other for a “misunderstanding” that the writer of the p
iece was duty bound not to go into in any more detail, but was surely the fault of typical Dansk whimsy. Reading between the lines, it was clear that something had been lost, possibly a diplomatic bag. Presumably that bag had contained or been Lustre. And then his regiment had suddenly mustered and he'd been dragged away from it all.

  For months, years, it had made him feel sick, starting with a great and sudden fear there at his desk. It had stayed his burden and only gradually declined. But nothing had come of it. As he had risen in the ranks, and started to do out of uniform work, he had quieted his conscience by assuring himself that he had had no concrete detail to impart to his superiors. She had been loose-lipped and awkward with the world. This is not evidence, these are feelings.

  That had been the whole of it until that morning. When he had heard her name again, out of Turpin's mouth, when Hamilton had been standing in his office off Horseguards Parade.

  That name, and her seeming return after fifteen years of being assumed dead.

  Hamilton had concealed the enormity of his reaction. He was good at that now. His Irish blood was kept in an English jar.

  At last he had heard the details he had carefully never asked about since he'd started doing out of uniform work. All those years ago, Lustre had been sent to Copenhagen on a routine information exchange, intelligence deemed too sensitive to be trusted to the embroidery or anything else that was subject to the whims of man and God. Turpin hadn't told him what the information was, only that it had been marked For Their Majesties, meaning that only the crowned heads of specific great powers and their chosen advisors could hear it. Lustre had been set down in one of the parks, met by members of the Politiets Efterretningstjeneste, and walked to Amalienborg Palace. Presumably. Because she and they never got there. They had simply not arrived, and after an hour of Dansk laissez faire, in which time it was presumably thought they might have gone to the pub or had a spot of lunch, the alarms had begun. Nothing had ever been found. There were no witnesses. It had been a perfect abduction, if that was what it was.

  The great powers had panicked, Turpin had said. They'd expected the balance to collapse, for war to follow shortly. Armies across the continent and solar system had been dispatched to ports and carriage posts. Hamilton remembered that sudden muster, that his regiment had been sent to kick the mud off their boots in Portsmouth. Which soon had turned into just another exercise. Turpin's predecessor had lost his job as a result of the affair, and shortly after that his life, in a hunting accident that was more of the former than the latter.

  Hamilton had known better, this morning, than to say that whatever was in Lustre's head must have extraordinary value, for it to mean the end of the sacred trust of all those in public life, the end of everything. The thought of it had made him feel sick again, tugging on a thread that connected the import of what she'd carried to her willingness to talk.

  “Is this matter,” he'd asked, “still as sensitive?”

  Turpin had nodded. “That's why I'm sending you. And why you're going to be briefed with Enochian. We presume that'll be all she's able to speak, or that's what we hope, and you're going to need to hear what she has to say and act on it there and then. The alternative would be to send a force to get her out of there, and, as of this hour, we're not quite ready to invade Denmark.”

  His tone had suggested no irony. It was said mad old King Frederik was amused by the idea of his state bringing trouble to the great powers. That he had aspirations to acquisitions in the Solar System beyond the few small rocks that currently had Dansk written through them like bacon.

  The warmth of Turpin's trust had supported Hamilton against his old weakness. He'd taken on the language and got into the carriage to cross stormy waters, feeling not prayed for enough, yet unwilling to ask for it, fated and ready to die.

  * * * *

  And so here she was. Or was she?

  Was she a grown homunculus, with enough passing memory to recognize him? And speak Enochian too? No, surely that was beyond what could be stuffed into such a foul little brain. And assigning such personhood to such an object was beneath even the depths to which the Heeresnachrichtenamt would sink. Was she a real person with grown features to suggest young Lustre? That was entirely possible. But what was the point, when she'd be suspected immediately? Why not make her look the age she was supposed to be?

  “Yes,” he said in Enochian. “It's me.”

  “Then . . . it's true, God's-seen-it. What's been obvious since I . . . since I got back.”

  “Back from where?”

  “They said someone with authority was coming to see me. Is that you?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked as if she could hardly believe it. “I need protection. Once we're back in Britain—”

  “Not until I know—”

  “You know as well as I do that this room, this building—!”

  “On the way in, when this was a hallway, why didn't you let yourself be observed?”

  She took a breath and her mouth formed into a thin line. And suddenly they were back fighting again. Fools. Still. With so much at stake.

  He should have told them. They should have sent someone else.

  “Listen,” she said, “how long has it been since you last saw me?”

  “Decade and a half, give or take.”

  He saw the shock on her face again. It was as if she kept getting hurt by the same thing. By the echoes of it. “I saw the dates when I got out. I couldn't believe it. For me it's been . . . four years . . . or . . . no time at all, really.”

  Hamilton was certain there was nothing that could do this. He shook his head, putting the mystery aside for a moment. “Is the package safe?”

  “Typical you, to gallop round. Yes! That's why I didn't take the observer machine! Those things have a reputation, particularly one here. It might have set me babbling.”

  But that was also what a homunculus or a cover would say. He found he was scowling at her. “Tell me what happened. Everything.”

  But then a small sound came from beside them. Where a sound couldn't be. It was like a heavy item of furniture being thumped against the wall.

  Lustre startled, turned to look—

  Hamilton leapt at her.

  He felt the sudden fire flare behind him.

  And then he was falling upward, sideways, back down again!

  He landed and threw himself sidelong to grab Lustre as she was falling up out of her chair, as it was crashing away from her. The room was battering at his eyes, milky fire, arcing rainbows. Two impact holes, half the chamber billowing from each. An explosion was rushing around the walls toward them.

  A shaped charge, Hamilton thought in the part of his mind that was fitted to take apart such things and turn them round, with a fold in the cone to demolish artificially curved space.

  Whoever they were, they wanted Lustre or both of them alive.

  Hamilton grabbed her round the shoulders and threw her at the door.

  She burst it open and stumbled into the sudden gravity of the corridor beyond. He kicked his heels on the spinning chair, and dived through after her.

  He fell onto the ground, hard on his shoulder, rolled to his feet, and jumped to slam the door behind them. It did its duty and completed the fold seconds before the explosion rolled straight at it.

  There was nobody waiting for them in the hallway.

  So they'd been about to enter the fold through the holes they'd blown? They might have found their corpses. It was a mistake, and Hamilton didn't like to feel that his enemy made mistakes. He'd rather assume he was missing something.

  He had no gun.

  Alarms started up in distant parts of the building. The corridor, he realized, was filling with smoke from above.

  There came the sound of running feet, coming down the stairs from above them.

  Friend or foe? No way to tell.

  The attack had come from outside, but there might have been inside help, might now be combatants pouring in. The front door
had held, but then it had been folded to distraction. If they knew enough to use that charge, they might not have even tried it.

  Lustre was looking at the only door they could reach before the running feet reached them. It had a sign on it that Hamilton's Danish notations read as “cellar.”

  He threw himself back at the wall, then charged it with his foot. Non-grown wood burst around the lock. He kicked it out. The damage would be seen. He was betting on it not mattering. He swung open the door and found steps beyond. Lustre ran inside, and he closed the door behind them.

  He tried a couple of shadowy objects and found something he could lift and put against the door. A tool box. They were in a room of ancient boilers, presumably a back-up if the fuel cells failed.

  “They'll find—!” Lustre began. But she immediately quieted herself.

  He quickly found what he had suspected might be down here, a communications station on the wall. Sometimes when he was out of uniform he carried a small link to the embroidery, usually disguised as a watch to stop anyone from wondering what sort of person would have something like that. But he would never be allowed to bring such kit into a supposedly friendly country. The link on the wall was an internal system. He could only hope it connected to the link on the roof. He could and should have called the FLV. But he couldn't afford to trust the locals now. He couldn't have their systems register an honest call to Buckingham Palace or the building off Horseguards Parade. That would be a sin against the balance. So there was now only one person he could call. If she wasn't in her boudoir, he was dead and Lustre was back in the bag.

  He tapped on the connector and blew the right notes into the receiver, hopefully letting the intelligent sound he was connecting to push past any listening ears.

  To his relief, Cushion McKenzie came straight on the line, sounding urgent. Someone in the Palace might have tipped her off as to where he was tonight. “Johnny, what can I do for you?” Her voice came from the roof, the direction reserved for officers.