Mindworlds

by Phyllis Gotlieb

“Let me come with you on your car, then.”

  “No no, that’s crowded and uncomfortable for you, and I travel easily in my shell. But I will meet you as soon as we reach the Court.”

  “Let us both take care, then!”

  The Lyhhrt somehow edged away and became invisible once more.

  Hasso felt very much alone among the bustling passengers, and stood still. The visitors he had expected to spend his time with were arriving by solar airship, an expense worth a year and a half of Hasso’s salary, but he was mildly surprised that, with all the effusive invitations he had received, no one at all had come to meet him.

  As he was thinking this he became sharply aware that the young woman Ekket was standing, alone and unattended, only a few siguu away from him. She seemed bewildered and was looking searchingly in the flow of incurious travelers.

  Hasso did not move toward her. I was foolish enough to allow myself such strong feelings, but I cannot blame her for that. He could not keep himself from taking a good swallow of air and calling out, “Are you in difficulty, dems’l?”

  “Eki! I have lost my escort, who went to such great trouble to keep me close to him.” She spoke lightly, but with some bitterness.

  Hasso did not dare to look for the fellow. “I’m sure he will come to claim you soon.”

  But before he could move away from her, an official who was obviously the portmaster’s deputy by his red sash with brass studs, came striding forward, followed by Ekket’s guardian waving his arms and crying out, “I tell you he has been smuggling it for the purpose of overcoming and befouling the Governor’s bride! And that Lyhhrt, that you allow the freedom of this world, was conspiring with him, I heard their whispering—and now that creature has escaped!”

  The portmaster’s deputy placed himself in front of the guardian and spoke gravely, “What have you to say of this, Hasso son of Evarny?”

  Hasso was completely at a loss. “Say of what?”

  “This fellow Sketh is the aide of Governor Gorodek, and he claims that you have conspired with the Lyhhrt citizen to import an illegal substance, a dangerous aphrodisiac, for immoral purposes!”

  The accusation left Hasso both breathless and voiceless; he swallowed air desperately and managed to cry out, “That’s ridiculous!”

  “Nevertheless I must ask you to allow the search of your luggage.”

  “I—” Everything was becoming unreal to Hasso, and his head began to throb. “I—If I must, I will allow It—but you will find nothing improper, nothing!”

  The baggage handler fetched Hasso’s small case, almost the last one left now, and the deputy conducted Hasso into the office, where his assistant unlatched the case and carefully removed the contents: his formal sash, with its Seal of Honor, carefully packaged; his rather bulky comm unit; his rainclogs, a flask of dirib oil, a jar of sea salt … .

  The karynon was in the sea salt; after all else had been unfastened, shaken, and poked at, the assistant’s probing fingers plucked out the two small packages.

  Hasso was trembling. “That is not mine!”

  “It was found in your belongings,” the deputy said quietly, “and until this can be investigated you had better stay with us. We have a lodging for you in a holding area, and of course Sketh will remain here too. He must repeat this claim when the Peace Officer comes, and also tell us how he came to have this information.”

  Sketh did not look pleased, and the deputy addressed him: “The young woman in question has been met and taken in charge by a new escort, has she not? It may not have been wise for you to let her go without giving her an opportunity to give us more information. At any rate, you have no pressing business, I believe, and are also free to remain here.”

  Free to remain! Hasso would have pulled off his helmet and opened his mind to the whole world, but esp evidence was nowhere accepted, especially not in GalFed territory. And the train had left.

  Sketh cried with an explosion of breath, “You will hear from the governor!” But the deputy was an even larger and more imposing man than Sketh, and there was no more argument.

  The deputy watched Sketh being led away and said to Hasso, “I know your honest reputation, Archivist, and I deeply regret this action, but there is the evidence—and we are situated in a new Interworld Area of this world where we must codify the Law as we go.” He swallowed. “Ek! No consolation, is it?”

  Hasso Alone

  The holding area was a dusty square cell with a dry sleeping basin in one corner and a square window of thick glastex. Hasso could see nothing through it but a blur of gray sky and scrubby vegetation. All of his possessions had been left with him except for the incriminating jar of salt, but within a few moments of closing and locking the door, the deputy’s assistant returned with a bowl of fresh sea salt—“Local, and very good!” he hissed—and Hasso could barely croak a thankyou. He was so dispirited that he stood in the center of this room leaning on his staff and did not want to move.

  He did not know what to think. It had flashed through his mind that his own Lyhhrt friend might have been working with this fellow Sketh—Hasso had no way of knowing otherwise—and that his claims of keeping Hasso safe had been false, and his fears and tremblings nothing but deceit.

  Hasso had thought that Sketh might be working with another Lyhhrt … but perhaps there was no other Lyhhrt. It may well have been my Lyhhrt, the Baby, that I trusted, who betrayed me and led me into a trap, who would not let me travel with him because his ticket was cheap … if there had been another Lyhhrt among us he would have known everything we were discussing without our knowing, and he could surely have struck us dumb and without memory if he wished, but he let us be, and then suddenly—yes, suddenly he found a way to strike me dumb, here, in this place … .

  Eh, I am sure that karynon belongs to Sketh, and he is the one who uses it!

  And a neat trick he played.

  He recalled a case of Skerow’s in which a Galactic Federation agent, an Earther named Lebedev, had been set up and falsely charged with smuggling karynon, had spent a year in a violent prison—unfortunately he was really smuggling Earther foods called barley and chickpeas, a foolish misdeed usually absolved by a small fine. Hasso did not know who was going to absolve him. And few prisons were as violent as the ones on Khagodis, whose psychotic telepaths could not be subdued by the most powerful of the sedating drugs.

  And all because of my suspicions about the Platinum-Iridium Field?

  Into the second quarter of the day the assistant returned with a bowl of fresh braised sea-stars flavored with sprig-wort. “Cooked them myself,” he whispered like a conspirator. His eyes would not meet Hasso’s. He turned the taps to fill the basin and tossed a handful of salt into the water. “Rest if you like, citizen,” he said, and crawled out in an agony of embarassment.

  Hasso was humble, so much so that he was sometimes accused of working at it. Whether he was or did, he did not like being humbled—and although the civility of his keepers blunted the sharp force of his anger, his contempt for their fear of the Governor of Western Sealand left a dull ache in his belly. But he did not believe that Sketh would be served with fresh braised sea-stars. He forced himself to eat, slowly, and then moved to lean against one of the four walls. He did not want to sink into the basin and lose himself in sleep.

  He pulled off his helmet and let it drop to the floor. The room was shielded; though he had his comm with him he could not use it. And he had no secrets.

  I am sure there must be many others who suspect Gorodek of having designs on those Fields … I have no proof of that, and surely no one believed I would run off with the bride! Yet I must have some secrets, or Sketh and his master would not be afraid of me.

  Gorodek’s purchase of the Nohl estate had nothing to do with me, I have no power and I stay away from those who have it. My only interest in the documents about it is to complete my Zamos archive. I do nothing but read and listen and gather dusty facts … .

  Skerow had once said: Take care you are
not seen as The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hasso … .

  What I know is my only power, and whoever feared me would be afraid of what I know. Should he be afraid?

  Back against the wall, grasping his staff, he contemplated the room, the dusty cube of dim light.

  My Lyhhrt friend warned me of Gorodek, I cannot blame him for being frightened and running off. The thought came unbidden and comforted him. My back aches horribly, but my mind is clear … .

  If I were home in my own study—and how I wish, instead of leaning on this dirty wall—if I were home that window would look out on my street with its stucco houses and blowing trees. My set of shelves would be on that wall beside the basin … my clay tablets and styluses at the bottom where they don’t have far to fall, the sealed packs of damp clay beside them; next up my three-screen comm with TriV and players for spools, wire, tape, optic, and those disks with old local ordinances I really should throw out, up to the top my vellum scrolls of WorldGov Records going back two hundred and fifty years … the fan humming to keep the dust out of them and the almost annoying perhaps sometimes comforting buzz of the humidifier that keeps them from cracking to pieces … and in front of all those my lectern and the thaqwood scroller with silver knobs that dear Skerow gave me after I had presented my dissertation. All of my secrets are on that wall. Everything to do with Zamos.

  And what has Gorodek to do with Zamos? Since World-Court still sends me documentation of everything to do with Zamos though the trials are over and there are no new prosecutions—at the moment in any case—the Court was sending me documents about Gorodek and his land purchase with reference to Zamos—what would be new there?

  Think, if I were to step on my ladder and reach up to those Earther books with spines and leaves, codex number seven. Testimony of witnesses—all of whom went to prison.

  Yes: that land in the Isthmuses was bought from the Nohl family in the name of the Interworld Trade Consortium and managed by a gang of felons who were stealing its gold and selling it back to the Consortium. And let me leaf through past their words to—I do remember that I stuffed these extra leaves of copy into this volume because they were of Earther paper and did not read them more than once because symbo lingua does make my eyes sore.

  Description of lands—and the deed itself, as sold to Agga, the wife of Gorodek who soon inherited it! No, I saved it in that Codex not only because it was paper, but because it was connected to Zamos. Of course that was why it was sent to me … .

  The purchase was revealed three years ago, but his wife had bought it three years before that. She was also a member of the Nohl family and she bought it cheap because it was swamp land and there was no gold left. Of course there was a fuss about her owning it when her husband was the governing official of another land, but she claimed, or he claimed for her, that she cherished it because it had been in her family—a nostalgic sentiment!—but as I recall, if you looked more closely at the evidence during the trials, you would find that piece of land contained a clone factory, an experimental laboratory of excruciating tortures, a nest of Ix that reached out northwest even to Burning Mountain—sentiment indeed! And much of that was still there after they’d bought it. Yes. The last leavings of Zamos’s empire.

  There is no provable evidence that Gorodek or his wife knew of that, or had anything to do with it. Though I do wonder how she died. No children at any rate, that’s why he wants that young lass I dare not think of. Eki, Hasso! You have no luck!

  But I would not be surprised if there were Ix on that land when they bought it, and he knew that. But why did he buy it? He may be thinking of using it as a staging area but that was not why he bought it, six years ago.

  Hasso dismounted from his imaginary stepladder. The thought of Ix had made him dizzy for a moment; though he had never met one, he had once fought off an Ix attack by the force of his mind; that was meeting enough for him.

  And his father Evarny had been killed by an Ix.

  In the Interworld Court, in the same bower where Hasso was lecturing a few days ago, at the end of the testimony during the first round of trials, everyone making the first move to leave … Hasso had made Skerow tell him everything, on one of those days on the rooftop under the winter sun, brewing tea and pouring the whitethorn:

  Skerow: Myself standing up at the back thinking how wonderful it was that justice was coming to pass, watching Evarny come up the stair to meet me, how bright and sharp he was, how quickly he stepped—then saw the sparks, smelled the ozone, felt faint and dizzy, could not help looking up where it was crouching in the roofing branches, holding that gun in the black claw hands, long-barreled silver gun, lightning-bolt against blackness, meant for me because I had made the first move to destroy that monster of evil Zamos and—

  She could not go on, but he had seen it clearly enough in her mind:

  No! no!—his father—my father!—throwing himself in the way and the reverberation of the bullet exploding in his body.

  And the gun, the long-barreled Quadzull, that the Lyhhrt designed for the Ix, to their credit the only weapon they ever made. No threat could force them to design another once they saw how that bullet exploded in a body.

  That gun.

  Let me reach up again, so hard, so tired, into those shelves. No justice for that murder, the Ix escaped and was almost certainly killed later, but those guns? Lying under that case of wire spools beside the psi-resonancer there is the printout on flaxskin sheets that I sewed together with red oilthread, World Court and Interworld Court Reports on Illegal Weapons, yes, Quadzull is an Ix name but we manufactured the guns on Khagodis, as that report told, like it or not, in that place, whatever is its name, Eki, I have dropped my staff, I am so dizzy and my heart beating fast and faster and such an ache in my ribs—dear Saints, let me not die before I discover—in a factory they claim is now closed, shut down, levelled to the ground on Five Point Island, a protectorate of Western Sealand, Gorodek’s land where they made guns for Ix to assassinate Skerow and murdered my father instead. I—

  Hasso fainted.

  Fthel IV: Night

  In the forest house karynon came in two dermcaps: the aphrodisiac and the antidote. She had pressed the one on his wrist where the veins were; the other was in a tiny jeweled box set into a gold bracelet on her wrist. Brezant did not need them; he wanted dangerous extremes. There was half an hour on the timer, after that madness and death. He lay alone on the immense four-poster watching as she dipped her fingertip into perfume and ran it up the inside of one thigh and then the other. Rubbing a fold of her skin between his thumb and finger.

  It had been another day of rage: bigger risks and more losses. She and Tyloe had held him down, soothing and cajoling, and the little doctor had supplied a big dose of calm.

  Now Tyloe watched through her eyes, in his bedroom or wherever he happened to be, because she wanted him to watch. She was not afraid of him, and didn’t care that he saw her fear and desire.

  :Enjoying yourself, Tyloe?: This thoughtvoice had a new tone. : You did. Now it’s time to stop. You watch them, Tyloe. Istvan, Cranshawe, Demarest—you watch all of them.:

  What she wanted him for.

  She loves him.

  And a Good Time Was Had by All

  Ned was staring out the train window at the landforms that rose and fell, the shoulder-high strawgrass and the semi-succulents like towers that had spines as long as his arm. Thinking about nearly having been murdered. “Those fighting-suits,” he said, “Lyhhrt didn’t make them, I guess?”

  The Lyhhrt said, “If we had you would be dead.”

  “I bet they cost a lot just the same. They wouldn’t put all the troops in them?”

  “Maybe front line attackers if they were using flamers. They would still cost.”

  “And if they didn’t work they’d cost a lot more.” He did his best to think of other things.

  Port City was the first real city built and settled on Fthel IV. Inland southwest toward the center of the continent, it rose out of a w
rinkled basalt desert, the overflow of an ancient volcano. It had been built prefab in straight lines, there were few gardens or gracious lives there, and the air was always hot, not warm. Its citizens sneered at effete towns like Miramar for their boutiques and historical atmosphere, and most often referred to them as The Refinery.

  Only at night did the city flower with coldlight and neon designs on every building, and then it burst into riots of color, and occasionally riots of whacked-out navvies and construction workers stopping in for a boost on the way home.

  Ned stood on the main street’s walkway, gripping the handrail, Lyhhrt to one side, Spartakos to the other. Below him the monorail hummed, and far across shuttles lifted into the evening sky on spurts of fire aimed at orbiting ships. The passersby, who had already seen everything coming and going, paid no attention.

  “Where now?” Hire-hall and Legion Hall had come up empty, and Ned wanted a beer and a sit-down. He sighed. “I know two or three places around here … .”

  “Let us go, then,” the Lyhhrt said.

  The bar was as Ned remembered it, down a long lane, very much like the one he had run with his heart thudding only yesterday, behind slivered boardwood doors between a PiKwiK and a CashNow. Ned pushed through the doors into a blazingly lit room blaring with drums and cymbals, and centered with a canvas-floored ring where three beefy life-forms of indeterminate sex and species had wrestled themselves into a grunting pretzel-knot.

  On the walls the same winking, gesturing holograms of buccaneering men and women who had piloted the traders/ smugglers of the spacelanes in the last couple of hundred years; in a corner the same chrome-plated form of a giant woman with classic features and breasts tipped with spigots: Goddess of Beer. She carried a lightning bolt in her left hand and her right hand held a copper mug, which she lifted stiffly to her mouth with bended elbow and set down again with a clank, lifted and set down again. In moments when the music paused her joints gritted faintly.