Hespira

by Matthew Hughes

  #

  It took some convincing before she agreed to accompany me to my workroom. I was reduced to having to ask Xanthoulian, who had been hovering near the front door to his premises, to vouch for me. He assured the young woman that I was indeed a discriminator of note and that I was consulted by persons of Olkney’s highest social rank.

  “Olkney?” she said, the name clearly causing no chimes of recognition to resonate through her mental chambers.

  “Here,” I said, indicating the city around us. “Olkney, on Old Earth.”

  She repeated the name of the planet, but it seemed from her tone that she had at least heard of our ancient world. “I’m on Old Earth?” she added, as if the location was among the last she would have expected to find herself. Then she gave her head a small but determined shake, as if the motion might cause its internal components to fall into more useful arrangements. They clearly did not, but I noticed that her look of surprise and confusion was much more charming than it had been the previous evening.

  “So you are not of this world?” I asked.

  She looked about her, then up at the faded sun. “I am sure I am not,” she said. Then she shook her head, albeit less forcefully, and added, “Though I don’t know why I am sure.”

  “Come to my workroom,” I said. “We’ll soon have this worked out.”

  Still, she balked. “Why should I trust you?” she said, stooping a little to peer into my face. “You do not have a particularly kindly look to you. You look the sort who finds the thought of other people’s misfortunes none too hard to bear.”

  “You do me an injustice,” I said. “I have made a career out of helping those who have been wronged.”

  “For free? Out of the shining goodness of your nature?”

  “Well, no. I do have to earn my living.”

  Her hands felt for pockets in the lacy gown, found nothing. “I appear to have no means to pay you.” Her eyes narrowed and her head drew back. “Or do you intend to take your fee in other currencies?”

  “I assure you—” I began.

  “No, you do not,” she said. “I feel anything but assured. What do you want from me? Why should I trust you?”

  They were fair questions. I answered them honestly. “I do not want anything from you, other than to be of help. I am not sure why, because I do not think I like you. Yet somehow I feel an altruistic impulse.”

  “Altruistic?” she said. “Is that what they call it on Old Earth?”

  A counterurge was developing in me. To put some distance between myself and this unsympathetic woman, to let her get on with her problems as best she could, seemed a wise course. And yet…

  “Let me propose this,” I said, looking at the stream of pedestrians that was dividing to pass on either side of the small obstacle that the woman and I made. “Stop anyone you see and ask them to give me a character reference. If that doesn’t satisfy you, I will be happy to direct you to the nearest agent of the Bureau of Scrutiny, and you can take your chances.”

  “What is the Bureau of Scrutiny?”

  “A large apparatus allegedly for the solving of mysteries. Especially appropriate for those who have a great deal of free time and a matching supply of patience. Also, it helps if you enjoy filling out complex and lengthy forms while a succession of functionaries require you to answer the same questions over and over again. I’m sure they have something quite like it wherever you come from.”

  The suggestion did not conjure up a memory in her, but it certainly activated a deep-seated impression. “That does not sound useful,” she said.

  I indicated the passing perambulators. “Then pick your referent.”

  She turned and regarded the various people coming toward her, discarding the first few: a boy wearing an entertainment device that moved him to sing along to a tune only he could hear; a middle-aged man in a brocaded daysuit who, feeling her eyes upon him, responded with a leisurely and full-length inspection of her form; an elderly couple seemingly locked in argument over which owed the other an apology. Behind the squabblers came a broadly built woman of mature years who wore gabardine trousers and a high-collared wool jacket, a hat too small for the feather that bobbed above it, and a well-set-in look of general disapproval.

  “Excuse me,” said the amnesiac as the woman made to pass, “but can you tell me who this man is?”

  The censorious expression did not soften. “He is Henghis Hapthorn, some sort of a discriminator.”

  “Has he a good reputation?”

  I had the impression that we had found an interviewee who had spent mere moments dwelling on the virtues of those held in good esteem, compared to the hours devoted to the vices of persons of lesser repute. The woman struggled with the concept, cast an irritated glance my way, then said, “I’ve heard he thinks quite well of himself.”

  “But he’s not a bad person?”

  “I suppose he’s no worse than most.”

  I interceded for myself. “And am I reckoned a capable discriminator?”

  The woman sniffed and said, “Certainly the quality go running to him whenever they find themselves in the kinds of trouble that comes from possessing far too much wealth and far too little character.”

  I pressed a hand to my breast. “To have won such praise,” I said, shaking my head in a show of modesty.

  “Well,” said the matron, “as long as he lives he’ll always have at least one admirer.” With that, she swept on. If she had had a wake, we would have been left bobbing in it.

  “Will that do?” I said.

  The red-haired woman showed me distrust contending with reluctant acceptance until the latter conquered, though only just. “I suppose,” she said.

  I had my assistant stop a passing jitney. It touched down, took us aboard, and lifted off again. The young woman looked out at the cityscape of Olkney, its towers and cupolas, its tall, terraced houses beneath their steeply canted roofs, its parks and tree-shaded avenues, and above it all the steep slopes of the Devenish Range topped by the vast palace of the Archon.

  “Does none of it call up any associations?” I asked her.

  “None,” she said.

  “What about before we collided? Where were you coming from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Integrator,” I said, “replay your surveillance records and let us see where she came from.”

  My assistant’s screen appeared before us on the forward wall of the vehicle, showing the woman walking toward me. Then the flow of the images reversed and she was moving backward. She backstepped across Vodel Close to the opposite side of the cul-de-sac, her gaze downcast to the pavement before her, wearing that look of concentration I had noticed before. I had the integrator pause the sequence.

  “You don’t remember what you were thinking of at that moment?” I said.

  She strove to remember, but couldn’t.

  “You did seem to be thinking hard about something.”

  “Yes, I did, didn’t I.”

  I turned my head away, as if to examine the familiar scene and whispered a word too quietly for her to hear. My assistant, responding to my coded command, said, so that only I could hear, “She is telling the truth. I detect a general anxiety, but no indications of extra stress when she answers your questions. Also, she has not eaten today although that may be because she has only recently woken from sleep.”

  It also informed me that she carried no concealed weapons or communications devices, was not pregnant, and that she was a natural redhead. At that point, I signaled that I had heard enough for the moment. We were, in any case, about to land on the stage above my lodgings. Moments later, we descended into my workroom where I waved her to a chair and began the business of finding out who she was and where she came from.

  My assistant resumed its report, but I interrupted to say, “Out loud, for the benefit of the client.”

  Its voice spoke from the air. “There are no structural alterations to her neural systems that I can detect. The amnes
ia is therefore not a result of organic processes.”

  To the woman I said, “That is a good sign. Brains are notoriously difficult to rebuild.” To my assistant, I said, “Is the cause suggestive?”

  “Not likely, unless accompanied by chemical suppressants.”

  “And were suppressants involved?”

  “There are indications,” it said. “I detect the aftereffects of paralethe, but there are other signatures I do not recognize.”

  “A cocktail?”

  “Almost certainly. Three, perhaps four, interacting ingredients.”

  “Reversible?”

  “Directly? Yes, but we would need to know precisely the different ingredients and their proportions. Indirectly? Yes, though the process would take time and effort.”

  I summarized for the woman’s benefit. “Someone, not likely yourself, has given you a powerful amnesiafacient in the form of three or four substances that have combined to block your awareness from your own memories. We cannot reliably concoct an antidote without knowing just what was administered.”

  Her face showed confusion, anxiety, anger. Not despair, which I took as a good sign. I felt an unusually strong wave of sympathy pass through me and was moved to reassure her. I took her rough hand in mine, but she pulled it away.

  “The effects are reversible, however,” I went on. “If you apply yourself to the mental work of recovering what has been lost, and I apply myself to providing you with the tools, you will overcome what has been done to you.”

  She quited. “I will know who I am and where I come from?”

  “You will. I promise it.”

  She squared up to the situation. Whatever else she had been, she was no frail bloom. “Then let us begin.”

  My assistant had already taken her measurements and would be able to pick her out of a crowd of millions. It began to search recent images and other data captured by the myriad of percepts scattered across Olkney, starting with those in the areas where we already knew she had been. Most of the systems it consulted were accessible upon request; those that would not give up their information freely could be subverted by subtle techniques I had built into my integrator when I had designed and assembled it.

  Its screen appeared, separated into several panels. I saw images of the amnesiac in The Old Circular, and we worked backward until we caught her entering the plaza from an alley that ran behind a row of conjoined houses. But now no new images of her appeared.

  “Are there no percepts in the alley?” I said.

  “There are, but they were disabled at the time the subject was in the alley.”

  “Disabled by whom?”

  My assistant showed me three youths making their way down the narrow lane. As they approached each sensory pick-up, one or another of them would aim a tube and the image would go dark. “The cuffs on their right sleeves are turned back to show a lining of green and yellow plaid,” the integrator said.

  “The Big Circle gang,” I said. “That was Hak Binram’s starting point, back when he was just a baby monster.”

  “What are you talking about?” the young woman asked.

  “Nothing to do with you, I’m sure,” I said, but I nudged my assistant again. It told me, surreptitiously, that neither the name of Binram nor of the youth gang in which he had begun his criminal career had caused any flutterings in her autonomic systems. “It seems,” I continued, “that last night you entered the square through an alley that had been blindfolded by the criminal elements I was there to meet. We do not have a record of how you came to be in that alley.”

  She looked at me with growing alarm. “Why would you meet with criminals?” she said.

  I hastened to assure her that discriminators could associate with criminals without contamination. Then I had my integrator look for more signs of her before she had entered the alley. None appeared.

  “She may have been dropped off there from a closed and clouded vehicle,” I said. “Or she may have been in one of the houses that back onto the lane.”

  “A stream of vehicles passed the far end of the alley during the time the percepts were deactivated. As well, some of the houses have enclosed landing bays. She might have been in one of those premises for any length of time.”

  Not for the first time, I wished I still had a capacity for intuition. Reason could not tell me if there was any relationship between the blinding of the alley and her appearance there.

  “What about this afternoon in Vodel Close? Where was she before we met?”

  This time there was more information. I saw images of her walking along Eckhevery Row and, before that, across Drusibal Square. The earliest record showed her entering the square from Ponthos Parade. “Before that,” said the integrator, “there is nothing.”

  “That cannot be,” I said. “Unless she suddenly appeared on Ponthos out of thin air.” A line of deep cold suddenly ran up and down my spine. I looked from the screen to where the young woman sat in apparent innocence and ignorance. Could she have appeared in Olkney the way the messenger bee had been manifested on my worktable? If so, logic led me to several linked conclusions, each one of them bad and each leading to a worse.

  Conclusion one: the young woman had been brought to the streets of Olkney by magic. Conclusion two: our meeting twice was not a meaningless coincidence, because under the “like-affects-like” rationale of sympathetic association, all coincidences were meaningful. Conclusion three: since magic was based on the exercise of will, nothing important ever “just happened”—it was caused to happen. Conclusion four: whoever had the will and the knowledge to cause an entire human being to appear in a place she had never been, and to simultaneously scrub from her mind all knowledge of who she was, was a powerful wielder of the magical arts.

  The fifth conclusion was the worst: somewhere, a powerful practitioner of sympathetic magic, far more powerful than Osk Rievor, had taken an interest in me; I had several times found myself on the receiving end of such interest from such people, and each occasion had brought me pain, involuntary confinement, and the prospects of remarkably unpleasant exits from this life that I had so recently described as worthy to be cherished and celebrated.

  I resisted the morbid fear that sought to wrap me in its chilly grip. Logically, I had no reason to suspect magic. There were any number of ways to move people around without their being seen. The criminal subculture knew them all, and even at the best of times I was never far from the borders of the halfworld. Before I inferred a role for sympathetic association, I should exhaust all rational explanations. “Check the spaceport,” I said. “She has come from offworld.”

  “I have already done so,” my assistant said. “She did not arrive on a liner or on any private craft that docked where the port’s percepts could register her.”

  Of course, a spaceship could touch down almost anywhere on the planet, and the vast majority of the Old Earth’s surface was unscanned. “Hmm,” I said.

  “What has happened to me?” said the young woman.

  “It would be premature to say,” I said. “But I assure you there is no reason to assume the worst, or even the mildly unpleasant.”

  Beneath its dabs of freckles and disordered mass of fiery hair her face was forlorn, yet the more I looked at its combination of unattractive features the more I felt sympathy for her plight. She said, “You told me you were precisely the right person for me to bump into.”

  “I still maintain it.”

  “Yet you are not able to tell me anything.”

  “I am the foremost freelance discriminator on the planet,” I said. “Nor do I scruple to say that I am more accomplished than leading discriminators on many of the Grand Foundational Domains among the Ten Thousand Worlds. If anyone can solve your mystery, it is I.”

  She blinked at me. “This is your profession,” she said. “I am not sure that I can pay you. For all I know, I am a pauper.”

  I assumed a posture that said such matters were of no concern. “We can discuss that when we know
more about your situation.”

  “We should discuss it now,” she said. Her hands clasped each other in a constantly shifting grip. “I realize that I will be obligated to you and I am sure I will do what I can to repay you.” Now she looked directly into my eyes. “But that doesn’t mean I will do anything, nor is the obligation open-ended.”

  I was well launched upon a gracious response when my assistant spoke quietly in my ear. “We should discuss this case privately,” it said.

  I replied in the same mode, telling it to wait, and continued to reassure the young woman. I was experiencing a sense of myself as strong and capable, a champion of the weak and helpless. It was not the first time such a self-image had impressed itself upon me—I was, after all, the foremost freelance discriminator on Old Earth, and had righted many a wrong, though usually for a comfortable fee. Given the dark shadows that now hung over my future, it was refreshing to feel the wind of a noble purpose at my back.

  “We must talk,” my assistant said again.

  But I was not inclined to talk. There was a code among discriminators. Though we often dealt with the unjust, we would not do an injustice to any. Clients came to us when they were in trouble—indeed, often in desperate straits. We did what we could to help, and collected our fees. Sometimes, we did what we could, and forwent any recompense, simply because there were times when one had to defend the right. I had not pursued such a case in some time; perhaps some part of me had decided that it was time to do so now.

  Feeling suitably ennobled, I looked out the window at Shiplien Way and saw a long, black ground vehicle, with green fairings and sponsons and official crests, stopping before my door. Its hatch opened and out stepped a tall man in a uniform of the same colors as his conveyance. I recognized him at once from the stooped shoulders and the drooping face set in an expression that indicated he had spent a lifetime hearing unwelcome news. He closed the car’s hatch, then stood looking up at me looking down at him. The corners of his mouth turned toward his protruding chin and he reflexively pulled at his already pendulous nose as if desiring to make it droop even lower over his broad upper lip. Then he lowered his gaze to my door and stepped toward it.