Hespira

by Matthew Hughes

  “Never mind showing me the hand,” he said. Then, asking the young woman to excuse us a moment while we discussed debts and payments, he led me out of the main room and down a narrow, unlit hallway to a small door. The portal bore no lock nor even a handle, but I suspected it needed neither because it opened of its own accord when he made complex motions involving both hands. The room beyond was darker than the hall, yet I saw something gleaming in the scant light that fell past us through the doorway.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Currency,” he said, lowering his voice, “mostly ancient, I think, since I don’t recognize many of the scripts and certainly none of the faces and scenes. Oh, and that pile over there is most of the jewels.”

  My eyes had adjusted to the dimness. I saw heaps of coins, rounds and squares and multisided lozenges of precious metals; and a mound of faceted gems, in sizes from fingernail to fist.

  “There was a lot more,” Osk Rievor was saying. “The spell was deceptively simple, only a few syllables. But you have to get the combined tone of voice and volume just right, or the trickle becomes a torrent. Fortunately, I made the earliest attempts out in the forest—I’ve learned not to try new incantations indoors—and I just covered up the piles with leaves and dirt.”

  I dropped my own voice to a whisper. “You left piles of coins and jewels out in the forest?”

  “It would have been a great deal of work to bring them in,” he said. “Much easier just to turn on the tap here, now that I’ve learned how to keep the flow within limits. I will send back the unneeded heaps in the woods.”

  So many questions were occurring to me that I couldn’t decide which one to ask first. Before I could fix on one he continued, “I was thinking I should open an account at the fiduciary pool.”

  “Perhaps more than one,” I said. “Though, if you turn up with amounts like this, especially in ancient tender, you will draw attention.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I think I will send back all the coins. Jewels are much more anonymous, don’t you think? But I must ask your assistance.”

  “Of course. Whatever I can do.” A red jewel the size of a charneck’s egg lay on the floor just within the door. I stooped and picked it up. It was round, cut in sixty-four facets, and heavy in my hand. “Where do they come from? Or do you make them out of air and shadows?”

  “Some hoard, I think,” he said. “Probably several, and far removed from each other in time and space. And, of course, from here and now.”

  “Of course,” I said. I bent to replace the gem, but he caught my hand and closed my fingers around its coolness.

  “Keep it,” he said. “Take as much as you can carry. I owe you a great deal.”

  I did not know what to say. I was aware that my mouth seemed to want to hang open. I was strangely glad that we had left Hespira in the other room, because I did not want her to see me gawking like some hobbledehoy bumpkin.

  I felt Osk Rievor’s hands on my shoulders. He turned me gently and pushed me back along the corridor. “Never mind about it now,” he said. “I’ll fill a bag and you can take it when you leave.”

  My mind’s gears were beginning to reengage. I stopped and faced him. “A hoard,” I said, “implies a hoarder. A hoarder usually hates to let loose so much as a bent groat and will often go to great lengths to recoup anything that is taken. Are you not concerned that someone will come looking for his missing treasure? And for whoever took it?”

  “That has occurred to me,” he said, “but I will deal with the situation if or when it happens. And it may not. In the meantime, I have a plan.”

  It was my turn to give him an off-slant look. Intuitive psyches operated more on impulses than on anything that a logical mind would call a plan. “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “Wealth tends to generate wealth,” he began.

  I gave a qualified assent. “If it does not instead give birth to folly.”

  He ignored the remark. “I thought I would invest in the fiduciary pool. When the proceeds are enough to see me through to the…” He paused and sought for a word, and decided that “rearrangement” was the least indelicate—“I’ll convert the capital back into gems and return them by reversing the polarity of the spell. If I’ve read the instructions aright, I should be able to put the goods back at almost the same moment they were originally taken.”

  “You’re confident that you can do so?” I said. “The more steps to a plan, the more opportunities for one of those steps to lead you over a cliff. Especially when some of them are taken in the dark.”

  We had stopped in the hallway. “I admit,” he said, “that there are some obscure patches along the way ahead. But I am growing more adept at the craft, and my confidence increases daily.”

  “Remember that overconfidence has been the undoing of virtually every practitioner of the arcane arts that we have yet encountered.”

  “I am being careful. Small steps, no grand saltations into the unknown.”

  I could not argue with him. He routinely grappled with matters on which my mind could not even lodge a finger. “Keep being careful,” was all I could say.

  “I will,” he assured me, then sketched the rest of his plan. I was to go offworld for a while. When I returned, I would come back to the cottage, scoop up his piles of pelf, and take them to the fiduciary pool. There I would offer a plausible story about adventuring on some distant and unregulated planet. The officers of the pool would not care where the treasure had come from, nor how it had been acquired, so long as it had not been feloniously lifted on any of the worlds with which they had dealings. “And provided, of course,” he concluded, “that they get their fees and commissions when they put it to use.”

  “That part of the plan should pose no problems,” I said.

  “Excellent,” he said. “Things are working out wonderfully well.”

  “So it would appear,” I said.

  #

  “Your colleague has unusual interests,” Hespira said.

  We had said farewell to Osk Rievor and were taking a turn around the woods that lay behind the cottage, I having expressed a desire to breathe some fresh air before we sealed ourselves in the Gallivant and departed Old Earth. It was, of course, another misdirection on my part, intended to give my other self time to transfer a satchel of jewels to the ship. The anonymous gems would be most easily converted to local funds on other worlds.

  “He has an unusual history,” I said, repressing the urge to complete the thought: And an even more unusual future.

  “He seems to like you.”

  “I suppose he does, in his own way.”

  “And you like him.”

  “I suppose that also is true,” I said. “We were once very close.”

  My steps had led us to a sunny clearing among some grand shade trees. At its center lay a little circle of small white stones surrounding a mound of bare earth. Here was buried the remains of the grinnet, that strange beast whose body had housed, for a while, my integrator—until my assistant had demanded to be decanted back into its normal arrangement of components and connectors. A few blades of grass had taken root on the grave, and as I bent to pluck them I noticed that the mound had been disturbed, as if some predator had sought to dig up what I had put there.

  Hespira was continuing our discussion of Osk Rievor. “I wonder that the two of you should be so close. Your natures seem so dissimilar.”

  “We have had some common experiences. Bonds could not help being forged.”

  Her eyebrows performed a minimal shrug. “Still, I can’t see you getting yourself all wrapped up in such a flippadiday as all that so-called magic.”

  “He has his reasons for—” I began then interrupted myself. “Wait. That word, ‘flippadiday’—don’t you mean ‘flippydedoo’?”

  She frowned in thought. “No, I don’t think I do. It seems to me that I used the word I am familiar with, though I can’t remember an actual instance of saying it before, or even hearing it.”

&nb
sp; I had left my assistant on the Gallivant. “Let us go to the ship,” I said. “I want to put a question to my integrator.”

  When we came aboard, I told the ship to prepare for departure. The Gallivant reported that we could be on our way as soon as I gave it a destination. “We may be about to get an indication as to that,” I said. “Assistant—”

  But before I could issue an instruction to my integrator, the vessel said, “In the meantime, would you care to try some of my flavored ship’s bread with a pot of fresh punge?”

  And before I could answer the ship, my assistant spoke brusquely, saying, “We have important work to do.”

  I put down the small bubble of irritation that rose in me. As the great change approached, complex devices that had been exposed to dimples, like the Gallivant’s integrator and my own assistant, were becoming increasingly more willful, even quirksome. I had already decided that since it seemed to please the Gallivant to ply me with such offerings I would go along. Events that had happened in my past but which would not occur until well in the ship’s future had taught me that it would be wise to place myself on the good side of any ledger the Gallivant might have started to keep.

  “Work and replenishment are not mutually exclusive,” I said. “Bring on the refreshments and we will try them while we hear my assistant’s report.” Thus Hespira and I sat at the salon’s folding table, sipping punge and taking a few bites of flavored ship’s bread. I commented favorably on taste and texture, then said, “Integrator, what can you tell us about the word ‘flippadiday’?”

  My assistant’s traveling armature still hung on its hook near the forward hatch but, as always, its voice sounded from some indeterminate point in the air. “It is a variant of ‘flippydedoo,’ ” it said. “It occurs in common speech on a quartet of secondary worlds originally settled from the foundational domain of Ikkibal.”

  “Name the worlds,” I said, and when it had done so I asked Hespira if any of the names rang true for her.

  “No,” she said.

  “The cotton from which her dress was made,” I asked the integrator, “does it grow on those worlds?”

  “It does.”

  “And the dyes that color the thread?”

  “They also occur there.”

  “Well,” I said, “there it is. Gallivant, set course for Ikkibal. The game is begun.”

  Immediately, the in-atmosphere obviators cycled up and we lifted smoothly above the Blik Arlem estate. It was only then that I remembered that I had wanted to speak to Osk Rievor about the grinnet’s grave. But as we passed beyond Old Earth’s curtain of air and the ship’s heavy drive began to vibrate quietly beneath our feet, I reminded myself that the little corpse had been buried in a sealed metal container that should keep it safe from molestation.

  #

  Ikkibal was a mellow world, rich in greens and blues and lit by a healthy yellow star named Op. It had been settled in the third wave of the Great Effloration, when humankind reached the midpoint of the immense distance between Old Earth—which in those days might still have been called just Earth—and the wispy trails of stars that marked the end of The Spray and the beginning of the Great Dark. Its first settlers had been dedicated city builders; they created eight great metropolises along the shores of the single huge continent that their new world offered, and a ninth high in the mountain-ringed plateau that occupied its middle. But as the ages had rolled by, the dominant culture on Ikkibal had become rigidly stratified, social rank coming to dominate all other principles. In consequence, many of the original settlers’ descendants had filtered away to the four secondary worlds, there to build themselves societies more to their likings. Seven of the coastal cities had been gradually abandoned, their towers and seawalls battered and undermined by once-in-a-century storms and surges. Now only New Kutt and Razham were inhabited, the former arcing in a ring of white walls and red-tiled roofs around the landward side of the extinct caldera that formed Five Reef Bay, the latter throwing its pale blue spires high into the attenuated air of the Central Uplands. It was here that the planet’s main spaceport was set, the New Kuttians being even less interested than the Razhamans in whatever might come from offworld.

  The Razhamans were, however, more polite to outlanders than their coastal cousins, who had a tendency to ignore visitors’ requests for directions or their queries about how a distinctive building or pleasure garden had come to be. Ikkibal was a self-satisfied world, having exported for a thousand generations those of its citizens who chafed under the slow rhythms of its manners and customs. The malcontents had mostly gone out to four secondary worlds orbiting three nearby star systems—Tuk, Obal, Shannery, and New Cepernaum—where they grew cultures that fit them better.

  I had the Gallivant set down in the transients’ section of Razham’s spaceport. I had decided that we would spend a day or two in a hotel here. The interlude was not needed for purposes of unraveling Hespira’s mystery, but for my personal peace of mind. The trip out from Old Earth had been a long one, with lengthy intervals during which we puttered across vast stretches of normal space between the whimsies that bridged the unimaginably immense gaps between star systems. My ship was small and we of necessity spent a great deal of time in each other’s company, and often at close quarters. I found her much in my thoughts.

  Now we waited for the spaceport’s arbiger to visit the ship and clear us to disembark. There were no issues to be resolved concerning disease or the importing of prohibited substances, but the Ikkibali had lately grown tired of receiving missionaries of the Astringency. This was a burgeoning spiritual movement that had taken root on the foundational domain of Armanc, from where its devotees had gone out to proselytize among dozens of worlds in the midsection of The Spray. Astringents clothed themselves in garments of dark hue and severe cut, wore their hair shorn above the ears, and felt morally obligated to comment adversely and in detail on other folks’ tastes and pastimes. They required no invitation before offering their views and would stride along at one’s elbow, delivering acerbic criticisms and recommending the reading of How and Why, copies of which they always had handy for sale. The small blue-bound volume was the seminal work of their prophet, Dunstone, who had been cruelly martyred on New Cepernaum in the movement’s first decade.

  The arbiger soon appeared at the Gallivant’s hatch. She was a barrel-chested woman clad in a uniform of tan cloth set off by belt, boots, and short cape of leather, all dyed vermilion. “Any books?” was her first question and, having received a negative reply, she visibly relaxed. “Very well, now what is your rank?”

  I found the question ambiguous and asked her to clarify.

  “Razham,” she told me, speaking as if she occupied a height some distance beyond my reach, “is crisply organized. Everyone knows who stands above and who below. It is a marvel of social precision for which we Razhamans are justly admired throughout the Ten Thousand Worlds.”

  “Really,” I said, “and yet this is the first I have heard of it.”

  “Where are you from again?”

  “Old Earth.”

  The name brought no hint of recognition to her broad, bland countenance. “Is that one of the Foundationals?”

  “No,” I said, “it is—”

  She interrupted. “Well, there you have it. If people will insist on coming from places no one has ever heard of, it is not surprising that they arrive out of touch with sophisticated standards.”

  “I take it,” I said, refocusing the discussion, “that rank is important in Razham?”

  I received one of those looks that are earned by persons who find it necessary to state the blindingly obvious. “Yes,” she said, when she had finished shaking her head, “and we need to establish yours so that we can color you appropriately.”

  “Color?” I knew that some societies found the normal human palette insufficient to express individuality. I did not care to find myself dyed bright pink or glowing saffron—the dyes sometimes took time to wear off.

  She
saw my hand go unconsciously to my cheek. “Your garments,” she said. “Cut and color bespeak rank. Without them, no one will know what you are, nor how to gauge the appropriate pause.”

  I let the issue of the meaning of “pause” slip by unchallenged. “Shall I describe my occupation?” I said.

  “If you have one.”

  I outlined the duties and activities of a freelance discriminator. She seemed underimpressed. I added that I was generally considered the foremost practitioner of my profession, and was frequently consulted by the “peak,” as the upper tiers of Olkney’s social pyramid were colloquially known.

  The arbiger wrestled with the concept. “Some sort of servant?” she offered.

  I drew myself up. “An independent professional,” I said, “performing essential services of a delicate nature.”

  The phrase “services of a delicate nature” apparently had a different connotation to Razhamans. I had to dissuade her from classifying me as a catamite or gigolo, neither of which commanded much honor in Razham. When the debris from that misapprehension was finally swept from her rigid mind, she decided that I was of the middle-to-lower tier of the avauntseur class, about three-quarters up the scale that had the lowest Ikkibali toenail-parer at its fundament and the purest-bred elegantiast at its acme. Thus fixed, I was allowed to wear any shade of blue, reds from pink to vermilion, and all but the brightest yellows. I could wear any two accessories of black, though if one of these was a hat the brim could be no wider than my shoulders.

  I remembered that I had been given an honorary rank by a former Archon of Old Earth and tried to mention this now, but the official clearly felt that she had spent enough time on the matter. She issued me a chit that I could take to a clothier and be properly outfitted. She then turned to Hespira who, of course, could answer none of her questions. Before another misunderstanding could break out, I intervened to explain the circumstances. “There are some philological indications she may have come from one of Ikkibal’s secondary worlds,” I said. “We are staying only as long as it takes to decide which is the most likely.”