Hespira

by Matthew Hughes

  “Here I am,” she said, slipping the camouflage down to her waist so that now she was half visible. “I have to ap—”

  She got no further because the young man launched himself at her, with little glad cries and deep-throated murmurs. He enfolded her in his arms and kissed her neck and ears. She stiffened in his embrace and sought to push him away, but her arms were pinned to her body. Meanwhile he spoke rapidly and in hushed whispers, something about how he had known that she would return to him, that he had remained devoted to her, that they were “like Albamir and Thirraz.”

  “A legendary couple from an Ikkibali romance,” my assistant said in our private mode. “She set him a series of increasingly daunting tasks, all of which he—”

  “Shush,” I said, aloud and to both the integrator and the boy. I intervened in his pinioning of my client, levering his arm from around her torso, then interposing my invisible self between them. He struggled to reattach himself to her but I put my hands against his chest and pushed him away.

  “Enough,” I said. “This is not a reunion. This is a Severance.”

  The word had a specific meaning within the Ikkibali romantic tradition, which I had comprehensively researched. In a Severance, the damzel broke all connection with the swain—I have used the archaic Ikkibali terms—until he had met all of her Stipulations—again, the jargon of the custom—usually by performing several difficult tasks. He might be sent on an arduous journey—the Wayfaring that was called—or be required to undertake some self-demeaning labor, known as the Abnegation.

  “Who speaks?” the young man said.

  “The damzel’s intermediary,” I said. I removed the cowl of my elision suit so that my head floated in the air before him.

  He assumed the prescribed stance. “Say on,” he said, “I attend.” These were the formal words, signifying that he had accepted that henceforward I would be the only conduit between him and the object of his obsession.

  “Wait—” said Hespira, but I put a still invisible finger to her lips and whispered into her ear, “If you wish to be kind to this fellow, you will give him what he seeks.”

  “But—”

  “I assure you, what he seeks is not you. It is the ritual of which he has made you the focus.”

  She subsided. I believed that the impetuosity with which he had seized her was causing her to reassess the situation. Meanwhile, the young man had drawn himself into a pose I had seen in my researches: one leg before the other, its foot extended at an angle to the other, one fist balled and pressed against the hip, chin elevated, eyes seeking the middle distance. “I will hear the Stipulations,” he said, and I heard a repressed tremor of excitement beneath the attempt at dignified calm.

  “Only the first will be revealed to you tonight,” I said.

  “Very well.”

  Stipulations came in sets of four, seven, or nine. “There will be seven,” I said, a number I believed would satisfy this particular swain. Four would probably have seemed trifling, even an insult, for one of such ardor, but nine might have broken the spell; seven ought to strike the right balance.

  “Accepted,” he said, confirming my estimations.

  “Tonight’s task will be the Violation.”

  He blinked at that, and his chin began to droop. I supposed that he had been expecting the Privation—the swain must fast for a few days, or give up some favorite food for a longer spell—but pride would not allow him to quail at the first test. He straightened and said, “Very well.”

  “At the rear of your father’s house,” I said, “there is a nebulosity.”

  The swain’s eyes widened in alarm. I supposed he had been expecting a garden-variety Violation, to be sent to steal some small treasure from a neighbor or deface a public monument. But the Grange had neither. Still, the young man recovered his aplomb; after all, the more daunting the tasks, the more credit to be won by facing down his fears.

  “You will take us into the clouded space and reveal its secret.”

  He hissed in a breath between almost closed lips, then blew out the air and shook himself. “I will meet the Stipulation,” he said.

  “Then let us be about it.”

  My assistant had been examining the wards and defenses. It told me quietly that it could have defeated most of them, but that one or two might have caused problems. But by suborning the son of the dominee, we had taken a simpler, more direct approach: he knew all the codes and waved us through what would otherwise have been a time-consuming maze. Still, he took us along shadowed paths that kept hedges and topiary between us and the lighted windows of the manor, until we came to what had been a walled garden, but was now filled with a general vagueness.

  “It is a very good cloud,” said my assistant. “I am not sure I could have penetrated it without being noticed. Also, once we pass within, I will not be able to detect any comings and goings outside the nebulosity.”

  “We will not be here long,” I said.

  The son touched his fingertips to a receptor set in the wall beside the ornamental iron gate, then spoke a combination of words and numbers. Silently, the gate swung wide, and I noticed that its lower edge had concealed the emitter of a powerful disorganizer set into the threshold. Anyone attempting to pass through without authorization would not have received a warning jolt, but would have instantly become an expanding nebula of disconnected molecules.

  We stepped through and found ourselves at the outer edge of the cloud. Our guide extended his ungloved hand at waist height. It disappeared into the vagueness. He turned his wrist, I heard a click, and when he pulled back he drew toward him the handle of a door made of panes of treated glass. Beyond were light and warmth, and two familiar odors. We stepped inside and he closed the door after us.

  Another disorganizer, mounted on an armature against the opposite wall, brought its emitter to bear on us, but the swain spoke a phrase in an archaic language. “Honor something,” my assistant quietly translated for me. “It is the motto of an aristocratic Razhaman family known as—”

  “I know what family,” I said. It was warm and sultry in the greenhouse. I stripped off the upper half of my elision suit, saying, “I am more interested in the insects.”

  They were not true insects, of course, having evolved on another world, but they were a reasonable approximation. They came in two kinds: a slow-moving, gray, dome-backed species almost as long as my palm was wide; and an agile, multi-legged type that was about the size and shape of my smallest finger, if my finger had been covered in segmented bands of black chitin, ending in several eyes and a tubelike mouth.

  The slow-movers were mooching around in the bottom of a wide, shallow tray that covered most of the floor of what I now saw must have formerly been a greenhouse. The quicker beasts were constantly attending the gray ones, stroking and grooming them with their forelegs. The result of these ministrations was that one end of each dome-backed creature regularly secreted a globe of clear, amber liquid. To this, the segmented insect would apply its tubular mouth, the droplet would shrink and vanish, and the herder would scuttle away to disappear into one of several small holes in a large, square box that stood at the far end of the tray.

  From the tray rose a foul stench of ordure. I moved closer and saw that its bottom was smeared with rotting vegetation and other, even less wholesome matter. Now I skirted around the edge of the tray to examine the box. It was hinged on the top, and when I lifted the lid to see inside, I was met by a gust of pungent sweetness—the odor of singular cream.

  Within, the hive was a writhing squirm of the black herders, scores of them moving in complex patterns. As I watched, a new arrival came in from the tray. The insect walked across its hive-mates to an inner wall of the box that was covered from floor to top with six-sided cells that looked to be made of paper. Other insects, with chisel-like mandibles, were chewing at the wood of the box to create the material from which the cells were made.

  But my eye remained on the one that had come in from the herd. It clim
bed the box’s rear wall to position itself at the mouth of a newly made cell. It dipped its mouth-tube into the empty space, then its long body convulsed; the spasm projected a spew of thick, pale liquid from its innards, filling perhaps a third of the cell. Immediately, the insect turned and departed the hive, its place at the cell being taken by another incomer that vomited up its portion in turn. As I watched, a third herder came in and relieved itself of its stomach’s contents, after which the cell builders sealed the now filled cavity with a paper plug.

  “Can you identify them?” I asked my assistant.

  “They are not native to Shannery,” it said. “They closely resemble two symbiotic species that occur in the jungles of Aphor on Ikkibal, but these are much larger.”

  “Shannery has lighter gravity and richer air. The animals could be induced to grow larger here.”

  “That would explain it. But what is their purpose, and why must it be kept secret?”

  I thought I knew the answer but was lacking one more item of evidence. Unfortunately, that item now arrived unexpectedly, as the door to the greenhouse opened and was filled by the figure of the dominee’s large and capable retainer, carrying a ceramic pot covered by a cloth. Behind him came the hawk-eyed elegantiast himself.

  The servant stooped to put the pot down inside the insects’ enclosure. As he rose, his hand was moving to a pocket of his breeches but he froze in a half crouch as he saw the energy pistol that had filled my hand as I flexed my forearm.

  “Beware!” said my assistant in my ear, but the warning came too late. While I had been dealing with the bodyguard, the dominee had spoken a word. From behind me I heard the hum of the disorganizer charging itself and the simultaneous swish of its swivel mount as the weapon swung in my direction—but my assistant acted to confuse its aiming mechanism, giving me time to step closer to the dominee’s son and point my weapon at him.

  The old man spoke another word. The disorganizer’s hum diminished. But now the retainer had his weapon out and pointed at Hespira. I felt a burst of anxiety but I mastered it and spoke calmly to the dominee. “The situation is not as dire as it may seem.”

  His raptor’s eyes raked me. “It is as dire as I say it is.”

  I inclined my head. “Indeed. But I hope to convince you that your suppositions are in error.”

  He still regarded me with distaste and the eye-flick he aimed Hespira’s way conveyed only disgust. But then he looked at his fool of a son, with my weapon’s emitter close by the young man’s head, and his mouth softened, though only slightly. “Very well,” he said, “convince me.”

  “May we lower our weapons and call a truce?”

  He nodded to the retainer and we let our pistols descend until they lay alongside our thighs. I felt the tension ease from the muscles of my back and I said, “We have two issues here. The first is the situation of my client.”

  “She was paid,” the old man said, “and well paid. I will not give her more.”

  “Father,” said the young man, “I—”

  “Silence!” The dominee’s voice carried almost a physical force. The son reacted as if he had been slapped, but he said no more.

  “She has not come for money,” I said.

  A moment’s confusion made its way across the old man’s face, then his expression hardened again into contempt as he gestured toward the young man and said, “She cannot possibly expect to…”

  I spoke the words he could not bring himself to utter. “Espouse herself to your son? No. She would find the notion as ridiculous as you do.”

  The swain groaned. No one paid him any heed.

  The old man’s head drew back and he looked at me from the corners of his eyes. “Then what?” he said.

  “It was as I said at the Prepostory. Someone has taken her memories. I found her wandering the streets of Olkney on Old Earth—”

  “Old Earth?” said the dominee. “I do not know the place.”

  “It is a long way up The Spray,” I said.

  “But how would she have gotten there? I gave her funds to take herself to Wathers and find suitable work, but not enough to travel to distant worlds.”

  “That is one of the questions I am seeking to answer,” I said. But I was beginning to think that I was asking the wrong person. “Let me tell you what I know and what I surmise, then see if you and I can find a common footing for further discussion.”

  “Very well.”

  “Almost three years ago, you and your son came here from Razham on Ikkibal. For reasons of your own, you bought up half of Greighen Island, and required those who sold their lands to you to move on. You then established a small farm and hired a few of the former residents to work it, although this clouded part of the enterprise was looked after only by you and those who were closest to you.”

  The old man dipped his head a minim. “Yes.”

  “My client, Irmyrlene Broon-Paskett, of Sandwynd, was engaged to tend your firhogs, she having had some experience in that line.”

  Again, the minimal dip of the chin.

  “But a problem ensued: your son was at that age when young Razhamans of his class engage in the Ennoblanz. Lacking an appropriate focus for his inclinations, he fixed upon my client and tried to involve her in the rituals.”

  A hiss escaped the old man’s drawn lips. I hurried on. “So you did what you thought necessary: you permanently separated them, paying the young woman to leave the vicinity. She had no particular regard for him and went. Your son lapsed into romantic reveries of what might have been, and all would have been well in the end—except that she suddenly reappeared.”

  The dominee’s eyes narrowed. “She will not profit by it.”

  “I assure you,” I said, “that she does not seek to. Nor do I. But now I must ask you a question and to charge you on your honor to answer with the truth.”

  I saw his eyes flick toward the covered pot. A humpbacked insect had got the hooks of its front legs into the fabric of the cloth and was trying to pull itself upward. A pair of feathery antennae wriggled, catching the foul odor that filtered out from beneath the cover.

  “No,” I said, “nothing to do with that. I want you to swear to me that neither you, nor any of your establishment, had any role in depriving my client of her memories.”

  The dominee looked at Hespira, and for the first time I saw no hostility in his aspect. “She truly does not remember?”

  Hespira spoke. “Until today, I did not know even my name.”

  The old man studied her. “She speaks differently,” he said. “The hard cockiness is gone.” He came to a decision. He struck one fist against his breastbone, touched its knuckles to his lips, and said, “I swear by the dignity of my ancestors and in the hope of my descendants’ good name that neither I nor any of mine had any part in what has happened to her.”

  It was the proper form. The Razhaman had to be believed. “You know nothing of what happened after she left?”

  “No. Fezzant, here,” he indicated the big man, “took her over to Orban and saw her onto the ferry. She left without a backward glance.”

  The young man groaned softly. Everyone turned to him and issued some variation on “Hush!”

  “Then the resolution I had hoped to find here still eludes me,” I said. “And I have no further trail to follow.”

  “It does not matter,” Hespira said.

  But it mattered to me. “We will trouble you no further,” I said.

  “No,” said the old man. “Unfortunately, I cannot let you leave. You have seen…” His hand gestured at the scene at our feet. A second gray insect was attempting to climb over the first, its antennae vibrating with its eagerness to get at the reeking stuff in the covered pot.

  “Your secret is safe with me,” I said.

  The old man signaled to the retainer, who brought up his weapon again. It was a high-velocity projectile pistol, and now its muzzle was aimed at me. I was familiar with its type; the barrel was surrounded with intense magnetic forces under artificia
l pressure, which were capable of accelerating a segmented pellet into my flesh with such speed that the projectile would virtually atomize on impact, sending a pressure wave to tear its way through my innards in all directions. The shock would kill me almost instantly.

  I brought my energy pistol once more to bear on the young man. But I saw something in the father’s gaze that troubled me. He was calculating whether his honor meant more to him than his son’s life, and for a Razhaman that could be a closely run contest.

  “There is another way,” I said.

  He looked at me as if I had interrupted him just when he had almost reached a conclusion. “What?” he said.

  “Give me a coin,” I said.

  Now his look said that I was irritating him with nonsense when he was in the midst of important concerns.

  “A coin,” I said. “I assure you I do not trifle.”

  Abstractedly, the dominee patted the front of his breeches and the loose blouse he wore above them. He found no coin; most probably, he almost never carried currency; the very rich seldom do. Finally, he glanced at the retainer and made a small gesture with two fingers.

  The man with the projectile weapon reached into his pocket, found a half-sequint, and flipped it toward me, never taking his eyes off mine. I caught the coin without breaking our locked gaze and saw his eyebrows quirk to acknowledge the achievement.

  “Now,” I said to the dominee, “say ‘I engage you.’ ”

  With the air of one humoring a harmless loon, the Razhaman repeated the phrase.

  “Then there it is,” I said. “You have retained me as a discriminator. I am professionally bound to protect your interest and never to divulge any information that derives from our association.”

  Skepticism warred with the old man’s wish to accept the information. I said, “You are not the only one concerned for his honor.”

  Hespira spoke up then. “It is true. His profession means everything to him. He is what he does. I trust him completely.”

  “And what of her?” the dominee said.