“Our weapons?” I said.
Bey paused, thought about it, then made a decision. “I will have them sent to your ship, but they will not be turned over until you are cleared for departure.”
“Well enough.”
“One other stipulation: if you return from Shannery by way of this world, you will not land.” I heard an “Or else,” even though she did not say it.
“I see.”
“See that you see, Discriminator,” she said.
#
“You did not tell them that you thought Chumblot’s murder might have been intended as a message,” Hespira said.
“That was merely my assistant and me thinking out loud,” I said. “I’ve found that thinking out loud is inadvisable near the ears of curious police.”
We were back aboard the Gallivant, clad again in the clothing in which we had arrived on Ikkibal. Our rank-bespeaking garb had gone into the Espantia’s waste hopper. When we were settled in the salon, the ship was eager to ply us with punge and pastries, and I acceded to its solicitations. The ship’s bread was good and the punge well up to standard.
“Besides,” I continued, “if it was a message, it was so ambiguous as to be unactionable. The most likely meaning was: ‘Go away,’ which is what we are doing.”
“So you are just going to do nothing?”
“No, as I said, I am doing something. I am going away.”
Anger did not improve the arrangement of her features. “I mean you are going to do nothing about poor Chumblot?”
“I do not see what I could have done about it,” I said. “Discriminations involving murder by unknown elements for unknown reasons are difficult enough at home; on an unfamiliar world in the face of an irate constabulary, they are deeply impractical. And I am a practical man.”
Her eyes dug at me much the way Brevich’s had. “Then why are you chasing off across the Ten Thousand Worlds to assist me?” she said. “Where’s the practicality of that?”
The only answer that came to mind was that it would be premature to say. That seemed an unuseful phrase at the moment, so I left it unvoiced and went to put away the energy pistol and shocker that a Watchman had delivered to the ship immediately before we left.
“Ikkibal was a tiring experience,” I said, “and the whimsy that will throw us toward Shannery is not far off. Let us rest a while, make the transit, then meet back here to consider what we have learned about where we are going.”
I intended to sleep through the hour or so it would take the Gallivant’s drive to push-pull us to the whimsy, then awaken and take the medications that would protect my mind from exposure to irreality. But instead of letting the sleeping pallet ease me into its restful care, I found my thoughts circling the question that Hespira had asked: why was I going to all this trouble for a woman I did not know—who did not, indeed, know who she was herself—a woman I found physically unappealing?
Was I no better than poor Chumblot, cloaking in heroic garb a naked appetite for adventure? That seemed unlikely; my life had already brought me adventure aplenty and I had no doubt that the oncoming change would bring me an absolute surfeit of it, surely far more than I would care to stomach.
Or did I imagine that, like some heroine in a child’s tale of romance, Hespira would emerge at the end of the play as a comely princess, that the rough caterpillar would take wing? That, too, I much doubted.
I probed at my inner works, holding up possible motives like prospective garments, to see if they fit the true shape of Hapthorn. None did, but one: I felt an urge to protect the woman. When I examined this sentiment with cold rationality, it revealed itself as an almost fatherly instinct. And I decided that it must arise from within me, rather than from any quality of hers.
I had fathered no children, and now would not. I had never felt much inclination to explore whatever part of me parenthood would have brought to the fore. And I would certainly not bring a child into existence just on the brink of an age of chaos. I wondered, though, if that unexplored region of my complex psyche had seen the encounter with a helpless amnesiac outside Xanthoulian’s as a last opportunity to exert itself. Was an episode of surrogate fatherhood the price I must pay for inner peace as the universe ticked its way toward the inevitable cataclysm?
It was as good an answer as any, I supposed. Besides, the matter would resolve when I discovered who Hespira was and who had stolen her life from her. I expected to be able to give that life back to her, or at least put her on the path to a restoration. And if that metaphorical giving of life somehow satisfied my inchoate fatherly urges, then they would not trouble me further, and I could get on with preparing to meet the end of the world as I knew it.
By the time my mind had settled, the first chime had already sounded to alert us to the approach of the whimsy. I belayed the sleeping pallet’s functions and squeezed the sac of medications into my palm. When the darkness cleared, I awoke, muzzy and befogged as usual. Once I could speak without slurring, I asked the ship how far we were from Shannery and was told that it would take us several hours to cross the gulf of normal space. The Gallivant also informed me that Hespira was already up and in the salon, where my assistant was prepared to discuss its research findings.
“Fine,” I said, and got up to revive myself at the sanitary suite.
“There was one other thing,” the ship’s integrator said.
“Hmm?” I said, my face immersed in the suite’s spray.
“While we were in the whimsy, an object appeared in your cabin.”
I froze, water dripping from my nose and chin. So many questions crowded into my drug-muddled mind that I could not choose which to ask first. I decided to go with the most obvious. “What kind of object?”
“I do not know. It was small, metallic, but disordered.”
“What do you mean, ‘disordered’?”
“I think it was a device, but it arrived broken into fragments.”
“Where is it?” I said, looking about.
“It did not stay.”
“You mean it reassembled itself and left the room?”
“It is difficult to explain,” the ship said. “We were in the whimsy, so there was a great deal of extraneous ‘noise.’ ”
Integrators were not affected by the strangeness of nonspace and nontime that pertained during the transit. They “tuned it out,” as one ship’s integrator had once tried to explain it to me.
“At first,” the Gallivant went on, “I thought it was more of the whimsy’s bum-bum and tarafadiddle. Then just as I registered that the object truly existed, it didn’t.”
A thought occurred. “Might it have been a surveillance bee?”
“It might. I have never probed the insides of one, so I would not have recognized its scattered components, especially while tuning out a whimsy’s noise.”
“Where was the object?”
There was a fold-down table attached to the wall of the cabin. A beam of light now fell from the ceiling onto its surface. “There,” said the Gallivant.
I fished out Osk Rievor’s disk, took it from around my neck, and touched it to the spot the beam illuminated. The disk turned from deep blue to a faded pink.
Osk Rievor had said something about trying to send objects far across space, as he had sent a bee to my workroom from his cottage on the Arlem estate. “Let me know if it happens again,” I said. I dried my face and called for a fresh singlesuit. While I was dressing, the Gallivant broached a new subject.
“I also thought I received a message,” it said.
I paused again. “What do you mean, you ‘thought’ you received a message? Either you did or you didn’t.”
“I received an indication that there was a message to be received. But when I opened to accept it, there was…” It was unusual to find an integrator having to dither over a choice of words—“there was nothing there.”
“Define ‘nothing.’ ”
“No content.”
“I do not understand,” I said.
“A message is its content. No content, no message.”
“I am not designed for metaphor,” the ship said. That was true. A spaceship needed to be direct, even literal, in pursuit of its business, or those who traveled in it might end up having unexpected, even unwelcome, adventures. “But if I did attempt a metaphor, it would be this: I heard a knock at the door, but when I opened it there was no one there.”
“What kind of knock?” I said.
“I cannot say. I received some kind of attention-demand, I know that objectively. But when I look for the recording of it, there is nothing there.”
Now a cold chill went through me, driving away the last of the transit drugs’ effects. I thought of the clouding of the peeper in Hespira’s hotel room, a system of such a high order that my Hapthorn-designed assistant had had difficulty penetrating it.
“Examine your systems minutely,” I said. “Specifically, look for any evidence, however scant, that someone has inserted a latent command into your matrix then convinced you to forget that you have received the command until it is time to act upon it.”
“I have examined myself thoroughly, several times since the incident,” the Gallivant said. “Nothing is amiss with me.”
I spoke carefully. “I would like you to allow my assistant to examine you.”
“That would be intrusive. It is not… not something I have experienced before.”
“Nor is a message that seemingly arrives without content and departs without leaving a trace.”
“True.”
“I do not wish to alarm my client. Bespeak my assistant and have it conduct the examination while I make my way to the salon.”
“Is there another way to resolve your concerns?” the ship said.
“I cannot think of one.” The ship made no reply. After several moments, I said, “Are you complying with my instruction?”
“I was conducting my own self-examination, several hundred times. I found no incongruencies.”
I reminded myself that this increasingly willful ship’s integrator would one day be the essence of a dragon on whose good graces my life would depend. “Please do as I ask,” I said. “I will respect you all the more for the sacrifice required.”
“Done. The examination is underway. It is a… curious experience.”
“We live in curious times,” I said.
I found Hespira studying images that my assistant was placing on its screen. They were landscapes and cityscapes representative of Shannery’s three continents and their typical terrains. She looked my way as I entered the salon and I saw hope in her face.
“Have you seen anything you recognize?” I asked her.
She looked back to the screen and frowned in concentration. “Nothing specific,” she said, “but some of it does seem familiar.”
“Keep looking,” I said. “There may be a cumulative effect.”
My assistant was speaking to me privately. It had performed a deep-searching examination of the ship’s integrator and found nothing of concern. It said it had an observation, however, and out of Hespira’s line of sight I signaled the integrator to make it.
“You will recall when I tried to make contact with Osk Rievor through the Old Earth connectivity?”
My lips moved silently. “I do.”
“I had an odd sense of having connected, yet not connected, to something at his coordinates.”
“Yes.”
“It may be that the Gallivant has had a similar experience. I might have described the event as a ‘message without content.’ ”
It was possible that my other self was seeking to make contact, by some means that mimicked the communications element of the connectivity but was not properly tuned to its protocols. If so, and if he succeeded, it would be a remarkable achievement, across such a gulf of interstellar space.
“There was no indication of anything sinister?”
“No, though a truly sinister intrusion would be phrased in such a way as to appear not sinister.”
“That is not reassuring,” I said.
“You did not design me to reassure you. Do you wish me to begin offering you comforting bromides and uplifting anecdotes?”
I ignored the question. “Ask the Gallivant to relay any more such contacts to you,” I said, “and see if you can contrive to capture the specifics.”
“Done. And I’m sure it will all look better in the morning.”
“Enough!” I said.
At that moment, Hespira called out, “Wait!”
I turned my attention to her. During our conversation, my assistant had continued to present her with images of Shannery. Now she was studying the screen, her long face intent. “What are we seeing?” I said aloud to my assistant.
“A street scene from Wathers, the main seaport on the continent of Ballaraigh. Ballaraigh is the large land mass in the Southern Ocean.”
“Show both,” I said. The screen divided longitudinally. I saw a roughly triangular continent extending from near the southern pole to just below the equator, with a speckle of islands, some quite large, on its northwest coast. A great, multibranched river system flowed from the central interior, tending eastward to meet saltwater in a semicircular bay, as if a giant had taken a gargantuan bite out of Ballaraigh’s eastern seaboard. On the north side of the bay stood Wathers.
“Back to the street scene,” I said, “and enlarge to show detail.”
It was the kind of thoroughfare to be found in a thousand seaports on a hundred worlds: near the docks, so the street was lined with the kinds of enterprises that cater to transient sailors, the signs and hoardings advertising wares in images and text that made no taxing demands on the imagination. Clearly, sexual mores on Shannery were somewhat more accommodating than on Ikkibal.
Hespira studied the close-up images with deep concentration, her brows knit. Occasionally, as a detail of a sign or a doorway came up before us, she nodded. Finally, she said, “It’s like with the singular cream. I can’t remember the actual occasion, but I am sure I have been on that street.”
“Have we interior views of any of those establishments?” I said.
“One, only,” my assistant said. “They are not the kind of places that encourage image-fixing.”
The screen showed a large, windowless room, well-packed with patrons, mostly men, seated at round tables or on long benches that lined two of the walls, knob-knuckled hands around tankards and bottles. The air was hazed with smoke, through which the lumens hanging from the ceiling cast a yellow glow over hunched backs clad in wool and heads covered by felt caps, some tasseled, some with polished leather peaks.
“Rolling pig,” said Hespira.
“What?”
“I don’t know. It just came to me.”
My assistant said, “Here,” and isolated a detail from the larger image. At one side of the room was a long counter of wood that had once been polished but was now gouged and scarred. Behind it stood a bald man whose belly was scarcely contained by a gray and stained apron. Behind him, surrounded by shelves laden with garishly labeled bottles and kegs, could be seen the upended hindquarters and tail of some beast carved from dark wood. The legs ended in hooves and the tail was corkscrewed, the carving plainly that of a pig rolling on its back, presumably in the throes of porcine pleasure.
“I think we have our destination,” I said. “Ship, is there a spaceport at Wathers?”
“There is.”
“Then that is where we are bound.”
#
As a secondary world associated with such a grand foundational domain as Ikkibal, Shannery merited almost a half-page in Hobey’s Compleat Guide to the Settled Planets. It was described as “of bucolic habits, largely self-sufficient, and reliant for exquisitries on imports from more opulent Foundationals, particularly from Ikkibal.” Its geophysical characteristics put it in the class of planets that have “long since weathered the tumultuous eons of shifting tectons and volcanic exuberances, so that Shannery’s former mountains have worn th
emselves down to comfortably rounded hills without new ranges thrusting up to serrate the wide skies. A pair of small but close-orbiting satellites, Weft and Warp, create complex but gentle tides.”
There were no great cities, but many substantial towns and an uncountable strew of villages and hamlets across the three continents. “Some of these,” Hobey said, “offer the visitor quaint festivals and bustling market days, when locally fashioned little curios and ‘rare finds’ may be acquired. The Shanner counts it a triumph of humor, however, to extract from strangers maximum value for minimum worth, and practices the dickerer’s art with a relentless and inexhaustible élan. The discerning traveler should be prepared, once a negotiation has begun, to devote ample time to its rhythms and requirements.”
The description of the world’s dominant physical type—“tall, long-headed, with large hands and analogous feet, skin shaded from chestnut to blanched”—fit Hespira. A footnote revealed that a recessive gene made rufousity of the hair endemic among the population of the Windstance Archipelago, the straggle of islands off Ballaraigh’s northern coast.
“If we find no joy in Wathers,” I said, “we may try those islands.” But first we would review what my assistant had derived from sending and receiving queries via spaceships passing between Ikkibal and its secondary.
The obvious question had been asked and answered: no woman of Hespira’s age and description had been reported missing in recent times. I did not see it as proper to keep this information from my client, although I knew it could be a discouragement to her.
“So I disappeared and nobody cared to make a report?” she said, setting her unfortunate features in an arrangement that robbed them of what little appeal they could manage if left untroubled.
“Not so,” I said. “Not everyone who is missing is missed. A traveler may set out for some far-flung destination, first telling all of his acquaintances not to look for him for a while because he will be off and away. He then goes astray on the journey, but since no word of him is expected, it may be some time before anyone decides that there is anything unusual about his not having been heard from.”
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