Hasso slipped the knot under his jaw and flung the helmet away. “Shut into a cell and tied up here too! Really!”
“Because you were fighting so hard, Hasso. You were put to sleep to calm you down. With the drugs you are taking you will be quite well in a few days—and this is the finest hospital in the world.”
“And then I will be shut back up in a cell, I suppose!”
“Absolutely no—”
The door opened then and Hasso shut his mouth at the sight of the Director General himself, the employer of his employers.
That official, whose name was Vannar, was a large and dignified man wearing a white flax-seed sash with gold buttons of office. Hasso had seen him on TriV many times but they had never met. He put out his tongue courteously at Tharma, turned to Hasso and said, “Archivist, I speak for myself as well as my Customs Officers when I say that we owe you the deepest apology.”
In this moment Hasso was putting his mind in order and it seeped in that he was not to be put back into a cell. “Your Honor, those officers had evidence that it might have been dangerous to ignore.” But even safer to run an identity check on the accusers instead of being so frightened of Gorodek. The DG, massively helmeted in brass and silver, was safe from the criticism.
He squatted beside the bed, looked down at Hasso and said gravely, “It will not be of much importance now.” Hasso became frightened again, but Vannar swallowed air and said, “That fellow, Sketh was his name, I believe? who accused you is—how can I put it otherwise?—dead. In fact, he was killed. Murdered.”
“Dead? He was in a ce—holding area like mine. How—”
“We have no idea how—and even less, why! One of those small window panes was melted away—”
Hasso’s mind became concentrated very quickly. He had an idea, and was glad of the Director’s helmet.
“—and the officers found him dead from an arterial wound in the neck. He had no weapon with him, and none was found. What is, what is more,” Vannar stammered a bit, “the autopsigram and psychopitron readings showed definite signs of karynon deformation syndrome in his brain and blood cells as well as traces of other illegal drugs … eh, whereas there was no sign of such in your own tests.”
The Director held up his hand for patience and took time to draw air, “And as well, there was a scale fragment of his found in your travel-case, clear enough evidence that your baggage had been tampered with.”
“And I am exonerated,” Hasso said quietly.
“Of course! Completely!” Vannar began to rise out of his squat.
“If my exoneration and your apologies are well publicized I will not consider taking legal action.”
“Understood,” Vannar said stiffly. Then he crouched down again and said more warmly, “My dear Archivist, I can hardly tell you how grateful we are that you are alive and in good care. You would not believe the horror our officials felt when they found both of you collapsed in that manner.”
“I am sure I can well imagine it.” Hasso said civilly. “Thank you very much for your kindness in being so frank, Director.” With a twitch of eyelids Vannar made a sober exit.
Tharma waited until the door had slid closed. “Not a bad fellow, but a bit slow on his feet,” she said. “You may change your mind about legal action. That experience must have had an effect on your heart.”
“It brought out something I may well have been born with.” Hasso began to stir himself and felt his heart’s flutterings. “And I don’t need such an ugly weapon.”
“I have informed your stepmother, she was eager to come here, but I hope you will excuse me. I told her not to make the long hard journey.”
“Quite right, thank you. And what of my Lyhhrt? Is he safe?”
“He has a small room to himself in a servants’ lodging house. There are better outworld lodgings, but …”
He is too fearful.
“All of your friends here have asked after you, but I’m afraid your troubles have been rather eclipsed by the excitement of the murder.”
“The less gossip the better,” Hasso said. “Has no one else tried to contact me? I have an appointment with the Director of Interworld Relations—”
“You must rest for a few days, Hasso.”
“I suppose so …” But the matter lay heavy on him.
Before Tharma left, Hasso weighed the padded helmet in his hands and confided, “Such thoughts as I was then—or now—thinking I would not want to be the property of others … .”
Tharma gave him her deep smile again. “No one here would dare go near your mind for fear of drowning in facts, Hasso, so you have nothing to worry about there! If I see you again I hope it is in greeting.”
Once alone Hasso took a quiet moment to consider that miscreant Sketh. A flash of thought, perhaps accidentally sent him by one of the medics, gave him a vision of the crumpled figure in its gaudy sash collapsed on a dusty floor with its stream of clotting blood flowing from him. Whatever else he had become, Sketh was once a healthy and vigorous man; now he had been scoured and peeled into a piece of evidence. But a darker thought followed him.
A Lyhhrt is the only kind of being here that could have forced its way through that tiny window and done it . . . I had believed before all this happened that there was another Lyhhrt aboard … and I am so relieved that it was my friend Lyhhrt who kept faith with me and brought Tharma to help me, but … he was also the messenger who brought the bad news about Lyhhr and its claims on Khagodis.
… Sooner or later they will think of our friend and say, Eki! a Lyhhrt has done this and here is the only Lyhhrt we know, so it must be—
I must make sure that does not happen.
Later a police constable questioned Hasso briefly, but he had nothing to tell: he knew who Sketh was, but the two had never exchanged so much as a direct look before the accusation; his imprisonment was a blessing in that he had been under close surveillance while Sketh was being murdered.
After two more lonely days of being prodded, injected and manipulated by ticking, grinding and stuttering robots, he was shown into a private guest-house room where he found a beautiful marble sleeping basin with bronze and silver faucets, and flasks of fine unguents on the rim. His baggage was waiting for him, sea-salt and all.
As was his friend the Lyhhrt, in his thick mournful clothes.
“I am so happy to see you, Lyhhrt!”
“And I so sorry that I could not free you earlier.”
“I’m not much the worse.” Hoping that bitterness had not tinctured his voice.
“There is a banquet tonight, and everyone expects the only Lyhhrt in the world to attend. But I will not go unless you do. Will you be there?”
“Of course. Otherwise everyone will think I am either dead or in prison!”
“I will see you there.”
Alone, Hasso stood looking out of the pillared bay window at the sandstone plain far away to the east where New World Mesa upthrust itself into the last flame of the sunset, bearing the great alien ship on its table-top like an offering to the Cosmos. It had been carried far and long since its discovery in the Northern Spines near the Pearlstone Hills, Skerow’s homeland.
The ship was the source of the greatest mystery in the world. Because there were no aboriginal peoples on Khagodis; its citizens had no line of descent from or genetic relationship with any other life forms.
If the Khagodi had some other home world or people, they did not know them; they knew only that thousands of years of exploration and digging had never linked them to any other species in the world. There were branches of Khagodi religions that considered these conclusions heretical: the Diggers and Inheritors contended that no one had yet dug in the right place; the Watchers and Hatchlings who believed that their ancestors had been delivered by burning gods in enormous eggs. Perhaps this ship was one. The scores of life-forms preserved in it had come from many worlds, some still unknown, and no one knew where it had originated.
Hasso regarded it from a gleaming roo
m in a magnificent palace and wondered whether this generous lodging and beautiful prospect would have been assigned to him if he had not suffered that heartcracking experience. Then pushed aside his fears of frailty and dressed himself in a deep green sash with gold threads, the one in which he had delivered the dissertation that made him Master of Archives; finished by picking up his staff to set out for the WorldGuests Welcoming Banquet. He did not wear a helmet; the non-act was his form of dare.
The banquet was the culmination of a long schedule of official welcoming events with a lot of fuss for an hour or two and not much food. This fête was a genuine evening meal, held in a grand hall roofed with many-colored genuine glass panes in extravagant shapes, and floored in mauve and blue marble with inset circles of coral for guests to settle in while they ate or talked. Hasso found one for himself, as usual halfway between the center and the circumference of the crowd.
Though the men had brightened their scales with unguents and the women wore colorful robes, their attitudes were stiff and reserved: murder cast a shadow on them. Only the few outworlders, Dabiri with tails brilliantly dyed and braided, and Kylkladi with gilded feathers, seemed lighthearted.
Hasso could not see the Lyhhrt, and did not look for Ekket; she was beyond even his timid dreams now. There was no sign of the consul who was to be his contact, an old friend from the Northern Spines, now working here; but he was relieved to find friends coming quickly to surround him, several minds chiming in at once:
:We couldn’t find you anywhere, Hasso, there was a fuss and a stir, and you were taken away! Vannar told the whole story … but did not want to let us visit and tire you out.:
No, he kept me well wrapped in bedclothes and padding, Hasso did not say. He leaned on his staff and let his friends bring him sea-stars, fingerclams and crisped winterbracket from the round dining table.
:But how could that Sketh have possibly been murdered? —everyone’s talking of it. And why … ?:
Hasso was not sure why, but the man was a bad-tempered brutal drugger who could not be trusted to take charge of others—particularly a young woman like Ekket who knew little of the world beyond her home. Gorodek had been a fool to trust him. Perhaps it was planned to murder me and his Lyhhrt chose the wrong one. No. That Lyhhrt would not choose the wrong one. Hasso took firm control of these thoughts, and kept them buried under many heaps of other thoughts, beneath all of the facts that Tharma assured him would frighten everybody away.
Across the room he could see her, a big hearty woman who looked too serious now to be approachable. He was still searching for his Interworld contact when Isska, a retired Court Recorder so bent with age she was not very much taller than he, brought him a bowl of soothing petal-brew and sipped from it herself first. :Never know what can fall into these concoctions: and Hasso was struck by the sense of conspiracy and expectancy that Sketh’s murder was fostering, thinking that fear and suspicion always found fertile ground.
Expectancy was fulfilled soon enough by a stir in one corner that sent a wave of reactions among the guests: those wearing helmets raised their hands to check the latches. This movement almost amused Hasso for a moment; his friends were mild-mannered academics and minor officials who might have liked to have more interesting secrets than they did.
Hasso heard a whisper of ek, there’s Gorodek! and the stir swelled into a close procession of burly men in liveries of copper-colored silkweed sashes with thaqwood staffs and rattling clogs. Hasso had never seen the Governor of Western Sealand in person, and had not paid him much attention on TriV. In a space between one fellow’s snout and another’s tail he saw a little shrunken man with a pot belly taking two steps for every one the guards took.
And Gorodek’s sash was also dark and narrow, its buttons of copper like his simple mesh helmet.
Behind him, in blue-green moire winesilk and too many heavy gold necklaces, Ekket followed, stepping in her sandals as if she were treading beds of coals. She did not look to left or right.
The sight of her was a tightness of the heart; Hasso turned away and would have left the feasting then, but the procession stopped before him, and Gorodek came forward, harshly drawing air: “Hasso, are you!”
“Yes, Governor.” Hasso showed his tongue.
Gorodek wagged his massive head back and forth: “I don’t see your Lyhhrt friend around here—perhaps he’s shy and doesn’t care for our company!”
Nor I yours, Hasso very nearly said aloud, but was saved by a mindwave that swept him with relief: “He’s sure to be here, Governor. Here he is coming now!”
The crowd fell away on its own to let through the slim and brilliant figure.
“Yes. It seems I was mistaken,” Gorodek said. He was staring as if his eyes could penetrate that casing. “But we are all delighted to see him, are we not?”
“I certainly am,” Hasso said meekly. “I am sorry for the loss of your aide Sketh.”
“Are you truly? Be grateful that you still have yours, Archivist!” Gorodek turned away and his troop fell in around him.
Hasso shivered, not from fear but because in Gorodek he could see himself shrunk into embittered age, and he thanked his Saints that he had never wanted power over people. He turned to the Lyhhrt. “You make this time and place bearable to me.”
:You see, Archivist, that I have decided against being fearful.: The Lyhhrt could make sure that no one paid overmuch heed to him, but now he was splendid in gold with star patterns, centered with diamonds. He had called himself a bejeweled fool, but had not thrown his jewels away.
Hasso sensed that the display was meant to bolster his own spirit. “That doesn’t mean you should not be cautious, dear friend, but I am very glad to be with you here.” And this feeling supported Hasso through an hour of pretending to enjoy himself, nibbling and sipping, allowing himself to be presented on the dais as an honored guest, watching the performance of a Kylkladi dance troupe so furious and energetic that it sent their feathers flying, and listening to a brace of Bengtvadi playing mournfully out of tune on nose-flutes. Whenever he shut his eyes he could see Ekket chained in gold, and when his patience ran out he pleaded a genuine tiredness; his body seemed very heavy to him.
The Lyhhrt walked him back down the long cold halls to his room. At the doorway Hasso pushed his mind away from Ekket and said, :I have not seen or heard anything of our Interworld contact, and that makes me uneasy … we will find out tomorrow … :
For one moment the Lyhhrt stood so still that his diamonds did not glitter. Then, :I believe we are about to find that out tonight, Archivist. May I come in with you?:
Hasso’s scales rose. “Certainly.” His hand trembled on the latch, but he pushed the door open and went in.
:We don’t need light.:
In the darkness with the Lyhhrt beside him Hasso stood again at the center of the room, leaning on his staff. The moons were rising; they cast the black shadows of the rock spurs and the mesa that was barely of a size enough to be the platform of the great ship.
:Over there … :
His attention sharpened as he caught a movement at the corner of his eye and found a shadow that had not been there before.
A new mindvoice said, :I have been waiting for you but I have not much more time.:
:Who—: But Hasso recognized the mind of a majestic woman named Reddow, a former protégé of Skerow’s who also lived in the Northern Spines: his contact from Interworld. She was crouched outside the building in the angle of pillar and window, alone and in tears.
:What are you doing here, Consul Reddow? Go around and come in!:
:I cannot. There is a switch on the pillar to your left. Touch it and come out.:
Hasso did this and the glass pane slid away; he stepped out onto the esplanade into sharp moonlight. The Lyhhrt did not follow.
“Don’t look at me,” Reddow said sharply. “There are spy-eyes in that room. Pretend I’m not here. If you are seen talking to me it will go badly for you.”
:I have shut down those eye
s,: the Lyhhrt said.
Hasso could not keep his own eyes turned away. “What happened?”
“I have simply been sent away,” Reddow was trembling. “Told my services were no longer needed.” She went on bitterly, “They gave me tickets—”
“Who are ‘they’?”
“The court clerk and two attendants, people I hired myself! Tickets for the barge leaving empty at midnight—a cargo vessel—to meet the ship that will take me home in the morning, and a sum of money that they said was the rest of the salary due me—and I will be so disgraced I will have no way of finding work except in my own local office!”
Willy-nilly, Hasso found himself in her mind, tasting her hot tears, and sensing an odd blankness. “Did no one give you a reason?”
“No—but I believe it must have to do with what we were going to discuss … .”
Hasso said slowly, “You were—you are the superior officer of those clerks, Consul. Why did you allow them to treat you that way?”
Her head rose slowly. “That way?”
With care Hasso said, “It’s you who have power over them. You needn’t have obeyed them.”
Slowly her body lifted from its crouch. She said wonderingly, “It never occurred to me not to do so.”
“Yes,” Hasso said. “I believe your mind has been under some stranger’s influence.”
“Who is it?”
“I’m not sure,” Hasso said, although he was. Except for his own friend there was only one other being who might have the power. “I think you will find everything as it should be if you go back to your room now … and we needn’t discuss our important business for a day or two … we do have that much time.”
“But what am I to do with the tickets—and the money?” Reddow said faintly, trying to fight through the mist lingering in her consciousness.
“My impulse would be to say: Tear up the tickets and keep the money—but I believe it might be safer to return them to your clerks. Tell them: Take care of these. They might not have realized the seriousness of what they were doing, and that way you will not ever be accused of theft. Are you feeling a little better?”
Mindworlds Page 9
