* * * *
Two days passed without a word from Houdini, and Keyes thought: another bust.
Each day he dropped by Tom's Trash & Treasures, a musty shop on Bonaparte's Main Street, to inquire about the guy who'd found the lead plates, Jamie Something-or-Other. But Tom said Jamie was a roofer currently working in New Orleans, putting roofs back on houses that had lost them in you-know-what.
How had he found the plates? Well, Jamie's hobby was going around with a metal detector looking for Civil War memorabilia like bullets and buttons, and one day he dug up the plates.
"He didn't say where he found them?” Keyes asked, and Tom growled, “For the fifth time, no."
"You've got his cell phone number?"
"Yeah, and I've called him, but he don't answer."
"Suppose you give me the number and I'll try it."
"I don't give out people's numbers without their permission. I've told you that five times, too."
Cretin, thought Keyes. Nothing was working right for him.
The third morning after his talk with Houdini, Keyes was drinking bad coffee in his office and gazing balefully at the still unfinished Batman crossword, when his own phone began to bleat.
"Yeah?” he growled, and the voice of Bernard Marx said, “Well, I got it."
Keyes's mind was still locked onto a clue that said Wayne's feathered friend? Oh, hell, how obvious, he thought, and wrote down Robin, while muttering, “Got what?"
"The code. Wanna take me to lunch?"
Keyes did. They met in the rundown campus cafeteria named Bilbo Commons (and invariably called Dildo Commons). Accustomed to the pukey way the food smelled, neither complained as they filled their plastic trays and carried them to a corner table. There, through mouthfuls of ghastly country-fried steak, macerated Brussels sprouts, and other academic viands, Bernard explained how he'd unraveled in a few days a mystery that had been bothering people for the past hundred and seventy years.
"It's kind of a dumb code,” he mumbled, “but in a way it's kind of smart, too. I mean, everything's there. You start with those first two Bible quotes, ‘There is gold,’ and ‘Seek and ye shall find.’ That tells Chastity what it's all about. Then you go to block letters, so there's been a change. And the list starts with Numbers. Well, I read in Bandits of the Trace where Justice was a natural with numbers, so I thought, hey, that's a hint. The code is somewhere in the numbers."
"Go on!” said Keyes, who was getting interested. “Go on!"
"I must've messed with those damn numbers all night. And then about four a.m., when I was too tired to keep making the same mistakes, suddenly I thought: Whoa! Justice says by one, by two, and by three. Well, if you put the Bible chapters in numerical order they go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. I could use some coffee."
With the alacrity of a well-trained waiter, Keyes fetched a Dixie cup of brownish fluid from the coffee-and-soup machine. Houdini dumped three pink packets of Sweeter ‘n’ Sweet into it, stirred it with one of the plastic straws that served the diners at Bilbo Commons in place of teaspoons, and went on:
"So I tried rearranging the books, lining them up numerically instead of by how they appear in the Bible. And I got—lemme show you—"
He commandeered a paper napkin, borrowed Keyes's ballpoint pen, and wrote:
* * * *
1st chapter of C O R I N T H I A N S Verse 21
2nd “ “ T I T U S “ 9
3rd “ “ J O S H U A “ 12
4th “ “ M A T T H E W “ 9
5th “ “ N U M B E R S “ 8
6th “ “ D E U T E R O N O M Y “ 7
7th “ “ I I C H R O N I C L E S “ 15
* * * *
"As soon as I got it arranged like that, I saw it. It's just like Justice said. You take the first letter of the first word and the second letter of the second word, and so on, and you get ‘cistern.’ And I thought, cistern? So I went back to Bandits again, and I saw—"
"You saw,” said Keyes, heart palpitating, “that Justice and Chastity used to hide in a cistern to escape from their Papa's wrath. The wrath of God, you might say. A lot of the old houses had underground cisterns to catch rainwater from the roof for drinking and cooking. And the water table's low up on the bluff, so after the house burned the water slowly oozed away. The empty cistern must have looked like the perfect hiding place."
"Now you got it,” said Houdini, like a kindly teacher encouraging a backward student. “And those Bible verses—well, obviously, once again it's the numbers that count. The numbers that count,” he repeated. “I might think that's funny, if only I had a sense of humor. Anyway, when you add ‘em up, they come to eighty-one. I went back to Bandits again, and that's the last total Justice lived to write down. And the word thousand appears in the letter, underlined at that. So translated, the whole message says, Hey, Chastity, look, girl. There's a treasure in the cistern, and it's worth 81 thou.
"And,” Houdini finished, swallowing his lethally oversweetened coffee at a gulp, “that's also why the solution's not worth a crap. The one thing she doesn't say is where the cistern's located, because Chastity already knew that. And since nobody today even knows where the farm used to be, much less the house, much less the cistern, and since there's a town built on top of it all, well—"
"But it was a brilliant job of decryption,” said Keyes, and shook Houdini's hand with rare warmth as they parted.
He was so close to it now. So close to wealth and freedom. Back in his office, he belched—the least unpleasant consequence of a meal at Bilbo Commons—lined up the heavy lead plates side by side on his desk, and read aloud the mysterious words cut into the soft metal: Faith. Prudence. Charity. Mercy. Wisdom.
In all the world, only he knew that the plates were grave markers for dead infants. And the graves didn't lie in some municipal cemetery (none existed when the tiny bodies were interred) but in a private burial ground. After a hundred and seventy years the Urquhart farm had been rediscovered, courtesy of a Civil War buff with a metal detector. And somewhere on that farm was the cistern.
Maybe there was a God, after all.
Further proof of this thesis was quickly forthcoming. First of all, Keyes finished the puzzle. Tragic jester in Wayne's pack? queried the clue (6 letters, ends with R). Keyes, who'd been reading up on recent Batmania, thought suddenly of the dead guy that all the reviews said had given the best and final performance of his life as the Joker. Ledger, he wrote, and it not only fit—it gave him the crossing words, too.
He was still admiring the completed puzzle when his phone bleated again. A gruff, unfamiliar male voice asked, “You the guy Tom says wants to talk with me?"
Keyes said yes, surprised at the calmness of his voice. Jamie the roofer was apologetic.
"I keep forgetting to check my mailbox, you know? About them lead plates I found—Tom said you bought ‘em, so I guess you got a right to know where they come from. I found ‘em in Reservoir Park, behind the college, up near the water tower. That's what you wanted to know, right?"
"Right,” said Keyes. “And thanks for calling."
He didn't sleep that night. Didn't especially want to. He bought a bottle of brandy at Bonaparte Package Liquors and sat in the kitchen of his run-down house on a back street, sipping fluid fire from a Wal-Mart snifter and planning the final phase of the treasure hunt. He'd have to rent a metal detector and learn how to use it, then divide the park into squares and go over it systematically, foot by foot. Sooner or later all that metal in the cistern—all that precious metal—would set the gadget squealing—
Unless. Unless the treasure had been found already. Unless some bastardly robber had stolen it before he could. Unless, once he found it, the IRS claimed it for taxes and the Treasury claimed it because of the Army payroll. Unless the town fathers of Bonaparte claimed it because it was found on municipal property. Unless legal fees ate up whatever he gained. At the end of the process, would anything be left? Who did he know that was slick enough to secure the treasure for
its rightful owner?
He could think of only one name. Next day he bought Houdini lunch again in the Commons, told him that he now knew where to find the cistern with the treasure, and made his pitch.
"When your Dad gets out of jail, I'm going to need his help as legal adviser. On a contingency basis, of course. I'm prepared to offer him one percent of my net gains."
Houdini didn't even stop chewing before saying, “Fifty."
"Ten."
"Thirty. He won't take any less. If he accepted less than thirty, he'd spend the rest of his life brooding about it. I let him screw me, he'd think. It's a question of manhood with him. He's my father, but he's also a fruitcake. You wanna pay less, find yourself another crook."
After a brief struggle with himself, Keyes asked, “You think he'll go for it on that basis?"
"Oh, yeah. He's still fighting disbarment, but he knows it's coming, so he'll want to make a final killing before he retires to Palm Beach. When do we start going over the place where Justice hid the loot?"
"After I have the contract in hand—signed, sealed, and delivered."
"Right. One thing you never wanna do with my old man is trust him. I learned that when I was still watching Romper Room."
Bandits of the Trace, thought Keyes. Every century produces its own kind.
* * * *
She'd guarded it long and guarded it well. She'd died for it, and then—discovering in herself a power that could only have come from her true father—she'd captured the body of the beast that killed her. She'd have shared the treasure with Chastity, who was in every sense her sister. But Chastity never came.
* * * *
She stirred, her immense pale coils rustling with the motion. Her garnet eyes stared blindly. They were all gone—the mother she could hardly remember, the stepfather she'd hated, the sister she'd loved, Robert whose life she'd ruled and guided with an inner strength she'd felt but hadn't yet understood.
All gone. All but the treasure. That she would keep.
She was deaf, of course, yet suddenly her delicate, flickering tongue picked up the vibrations of men walking, three of them. A shovel struck the earth above. Steel grated on ancient brick. Someone coming to rob her? After all this time? They'd get a surprise!
She tensed, ready to defend what was hers.
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Novelet: THE WAY THEY WOVE THE SPELLS IN SIPPULGAR by Robert Silverberg
I find it eerie to think of my writing a story for the 60th anniversary issue. I can clearly remember seeing issue number one on sale on a day in September or very early October, 1949, when I was just starting my sophomore year of high school and had already made my first hapless story submissions (to John Campbell, of course, who was very gentle with me). The thirty-five-cent price-tag for The Magazine of Fantas , as it was then called, was a little steep for my barely adolescent self, and instead of buying it at once I decided to wait a little while and save up for it, since the magazine was a quarterly and I had lots of time to put the money together before the issue disappeared from the newsstands. But then a couple of weeks later I stumbled upon a second-hand copy, probably at half price, and pounced on it. I still own that copy. And now, to my utter astonishment, I find myself magically transformed into a white-bearded old gentleman who is still writing stories for that very magazine, sixty years later!—Robert Silverberg
I had always yearned to visit Sippulgar, that golden city of the southern coast. Every schoolchild hears tales of its extraordinary beauty. But there are many places on Majipoor I yearn to visit—the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount, or at least a few of them, and marvelous Dulorn, the shining city of crystalline stone that the Ghayrog folk built in far-off Zimroel, and mighty Ni-moya on that same distant continent, and many another. Our world is a huge one, though, and life is short. I am a man of business, an expediter of merchandise, and business has kept me close to my native city of Sisivondal for most of my days.
It was the strange disappearance and presumed death of Melifont Ambithorn, my wife Thuwayne's elder brother, that finally brought me to Sippulgar. I had hardly known Melifont at all, you understand: I had met him just twice, once at my wedding and once perhaps ten years later, when one of his many unsuccessful business ventures brought him to Sisivondal for a few days. He was fifteen years older than my wife and she seemed to regard him more as an uncle than as a brother; but when word came to her that he was thought to have perished in some mysterious and unpleasant way, she was deeply affected, far more than I would have thought, asking me to go at once to Sippulgar to see if I could discover what had happened to him, and to lay a memorial wreath on his grave, if he was indeed dead. Thuwayne herself is no traveler; she dislikes the upheavals and discomforts of even the shortest trip most intensely. But she could not bear to leave her brother's death a mystery, and I think she entertained some hope that I would actually find him still alive. She begged me to go, and I knew that I had no choice but to do it.
For all my fascination with the fabled marvels of Sippulgar, it was not an especially good time for me to be setting out on such a long excursion. Sisivondal is the chief mercantile center of western Alhanroel, where all roads that cross the heart of the continent meet, and we were coming now into the busiest season of the year, when caravans travel from all directions to unload their goods into our warehouses and to buy merchandise for their return journeys. But I will refuse Thuwayne nothing. I cherish her beyond all measure. And so, after just a few mild expressions of uneasiness about undertaking such a venture at this time of year, I put my business affairs into the hands of my most trusted assistant and made my arrangements for my visit to Sippulgar. This was in the time of Lord Confalume, who was then about thirty years into his long and glorious reign as Coronal. Prankipin was our Pontifex. In those days, you know, we enjoyed a time of great prosperity; and also it was the period when all sorts of esoteric new philosophies—sorcery, necromancy, prognostication, the worship of supernatural spirits of every kind, the opening of doors into hidden universes populated by gods and demons—were taking hold on Majipoor.
Thuwayne had been informed that her brother had begun dabbling in certain of those philosophies, and possibly had met his death as a result. I am a man of business, a practical man, concerned with shipping costs and bills of lading, not with the propitiation of demons, and I regard all these new philosophies essentially as lunacy. A few little protective amulets and talismans suffice for me, purely on the off chance that they might do some good; I go no further into any of this occult stuff. Sippulgar was known to be a spawning ground for the new cults, and that made me apprehensive. But, as I say, I will refuse Thuwayne nothing. She asked me to go to Sippulgar to investigate her brother's disappearance and probable death; and so to Sippulgar I went.
* * * *
Cities are far apart on Majipoor and the road from anywhere to anywhere is usually a long one; but Sippulgar is a port city on the southern sea, and Sisivondal is a heartland city set in the midst of a bare featureless plain some thousands of miles across, far to the north, and so I found myself embarking on what I knew would be the great journey of my lifetime.
Plotting my route was easy. A dozen great highways meet in Sisivondal, intersecting like the spokes of a giant wheel: one coming in from the great port of Alaisor in the west, five going eastward toward Castle Mount, three descending from the north, and three connecting us with the south. Sisivondal's boulevards and avenues are laid out in concentric circles that allow easy connection from one highway to another. All along the streets that run between the circular avenues are rows of warehouses where goods destined for transshipment to other zones of the continent are stored. The group of warehouses I control is close by the Great Southern Highway, the one that would carry me toward my goal, and so, after issuing a last set of instructions to my staff, I set out from there early one morning on my journey toward the sea.
Sisivondal has been called “a thousand miles of outskirts.” That is unkind, but I suppo
se it is true. The central sector is devoted entirely to commerce, many miles of warehouses and not much else; then one passes through the suburban residential district, and beyond that lies a zone of customs sheds and repair shops, gradually trickling off into the parched treeless plain beyond. Our climate is an extremely dry one and our only vegetation is of necessity sturdy: huge lumma-lummas that look like big gray rocks, and prickly garavedas that take a whole century to bring forth their black flower-spikes, and purple-leaved camaganda palms that can go years without a drop of water. Beyond town there is no vegetation at all, only a barren, dusty plain. Not a pretty place, I suppose, but essential to the economy of our continent; and in any case I am used to it.
Gradually, as I left central Alhanroel behind, the world grew more gracious. I spent a day or two in lovely Bailemoona, which I had visited years before, a city famous for its subtle cuisine and its swarms of shining bees, large as small birds and nearly as intelligent. There I hired a carriage to take me southward through the Sulfur Desert, that region of surpassing yellowness, where amidst fantastic eroded spires of soft cream-colored stone the bizarre city of Ketheron was set, a place of twisted yellow towers that could have been the pointed caps of witches. I had been there once before too. Beyond, though, everything was new to me. The air very shortly took on a tropic moistness, becoming soft as velvet, and rain-showers fell frequently. Our caravan rode past the Cliff of Eyes, a white mountain pockmarked with hundreds of dark shining boulders that stared down at us like disapproving orbs, and then we were at the Pillars of Dvorn, two sharp-tipped blue-gray rocks set athwart the highway to mark the boundary between central and southern Alhanroel. On the far side lay Arvyanda of the golden hills: here the slopes were covered by stubby trees whose stiff oval leaves had a metallic texture and yielded a brilliant glint in the strong tropical sunlight. Already I felt very far from Sisivondal, almost on another world entirely.
Gradually the sky grew dark with a thick cover of clouds. We were coming into the jungles of Kajith Kajulon, a green empire where rain falls constantly, more rain in a week than I had seen in the past ten years, and the trunks of the trees were bright with the red and yellow splashes of enormous fungi. There was no end to the rain, nor to the clouds of insects that swarmed around us, and we were besieged by armies of scarlet lizards and loud flat-headed toads. Long chains of blue spiders hung down from every branch, eyeing us in a sinister way. We rode through Kajith Kajulon for many days. I thought my bones would melt in the humid air.
FSF, October-November 2009 Page 8
