Orbit 4 - Anthology

by Edited by Damon Night

  As she spoke these words, Grimm arrived on the mast deck. Tatja ran over and inspected Ancho with a careful, expert eye.

  She didn’t say anything for several seconds, though she favored the girl with a long, calculating glance.Could Tatja be jealous? thought Svir, surprised. The girl scrambled to her feet and bowed slightly to the Science Editor. Finally Tatja turned to Hedrigs and smiled. “Svir Hedrigs, be introduced to Apprentice Proofreader Coronadas Ascuasenya. Coronadas Ascuasenya, Parallax Astronomer Svir Hedrigs.”

  “Pleased.” The girl bowed again and smiled hesitantly.

  “Tatja, Coronadas climbed almost to the top of the mast to save Ancho.”

  “Yes, we saw from down below. That was a brave rescue.” She petted Ancho. “I just hope we haven’t wrecked the dorfox. We were fools to take him along this morning.” She looked up at the sun, which was just past the zenith. “We might as well get some dinner. It’s too late to start any training. We can begin this evening.” She picked up Ancho and they all descended to the lower decks.

  * * * *

  The sun was three hours down before they began. The night was clear and Seraph’s light brought a bluish sheen to the sea. Tatja had used paperboard partitions to simulate a hallway within Benesh’s Keep. She had constructed the mockup on a portion of the deck out of the wind and hidden from the view of other ships.

  “I’ll admit it’s pretty crude, Svir, but for the first trials we don’t need anything elaborate. The dimensions are the same as inside the. castle. You can see there are a couple of side passages opening off the main one.” Hedrigs moved to the entrance of the maze. It certainly wasn’t very convincing. The ceiling of the passage was purple sky. Posted at regular intervals down the forty-foot passage were company sailors simulating Royal Guardsmen. They didn’t seem too certain just what was expected of them.

  Tatja petted Ancho gently. “We want Ancho to hallucinate these ‘Guardsmen.’ It’s going to take some training, but I want Ancho to convince whoever he points those pretty ears at, that you and he constitute an authority figure.”

  Svir was surprised. “Is that possible? Ancho isn’t very smart, you know. It seems to me that in order to generate a detailed illusion, Ancho would have to be humanly intelligent.”

  Tatja shook her head and grinned. “Nope. The intelligence of the victim provides all the background detail. I’ve spent several months on Dorfox Island, and I know things like that are possible. C’mon, let’s start, or we’ll still be at it when we pull into Bay fast.”

  Ancho was sometimes sleepy during night wake periods, but he perked up noticeably when Tatja had a large bowl of rehydrated klig leaves brought on deck. He strained against Hedrigs’ hands, but the astronomer wouldn’t let him at the leaves. The dorfox was going to have to earn his treats. Svir’s father had often played games like this with Ancho, and had managed to teach the animal a number of tricks.

  Svir stood up and put the dorfox on his shoulder. The “guardsmen” had assumed their posts in the passageway. The only woman among them was Cor Ascuasenya, who stood at the far end of the mockup. Tatja stood behind Hedrigs. In this position, she could watch what happened with relative immunity, since Ancho was not likely to turn around and broadcast in her direction.

  “All right, Svir, give it a walk-through. We’ll see if Ancho will give us a demonstration,” said Tatja.

  Hedrigs walked slowly through the mockup. Everything seemed quite normal But then, Ancho rarely aimed his hallucinations at his master.

  When he was through, Tatja asked the first sailor what he had seen.

  The fellow looked at her a little blankly. “What do you mean? When are you going to start the test?” The others were similarly confused. None of them had been conscious of Svir or Ancho as they walked down the hall. Tatja unfastened the lid on the klig bowl.

  “That was a good performance,” she said. “Ancho managed to scan every person as you walked past. Now we have to make him try his other effects, till he produces exactly what we’re looking for.” She fed Ancho two leaves. The little mammal sucked on them greedily, momentarily enraptured. When he was done he reached out for more, but Tatja had already relocked the basket. He had done well, but a larger award must await an even better performance.

  Svir petted the dorfox. Ancho appeared to enjoy the game. “You know, Tatja, Ancho is really dependable with that I’m-not-here signal. And he can scan a lot of people at once. Why don’t you settle for that, without trying for something more sophisticated?”

  “It’s not enough, Svir. You’re going to have to go all the way to the center of the Keep—to the vault where the most precious sacrifices are kept. With Ancho’s I’m-not-here, youprobably could steal the Guards’ keys. But what if some of the doors have combination locks? You need more than the Guards’ passive acceptance. They must actively help you. And there are more than ten thousand volumes in theFantasie collection. That comes to at least two tons. You’re going to need help getting them out.” She picked up her noteboard and pen. “Let’s try it again.”

  And again. And again.

  Ancho soon learned that anything he tried would earn him some reward, but that if he repeated a previous performance, the prize was smaller. So he tried to come up with a new effect on each try. They soon exhausted the natural dorfox responses—the instinctive responses which served so well on the dorfox’s native island. Some of these could drive predators away, or dull their senses. Others attracted insects and lulled their suspicions.

  Ancho also tried the tricks he had been taught since arriving in civilization. On one pass, all the crewmen in the passage broke into fits of hysterical laughter. Ascuasenya had the giggles fifteen minutes after Ancho came by. What they saw was hilariously funny, though they couldn’t explain to Tatja and Svir just why.

  And though Tatja did her best to pace the work, the project became a grind. The sailors were especially tired. Ancho had put them through an emotional wringer. In one twenty-minute period, he made them laugh and cry. The dorfox had responded eagerly to all the attention showered upon him, but now was beginning to lose interest.

  For the hundredth time, Svir started down the mock passageway. He was surprised at the degree of respect and obedience these sailors showed Tatja. She must have more authority on the Barge than her title indicated. When she made a suggestion in her low pleasant voice, people jumped. It was evidence how the best people rose to the top in any organization. What had he done to deserve her?

  But it was beginning to look as though she was wrong about Ancho. Apparently this was one trick the dorfox couldn’t do. Maybe it was just as well. Hedrigs wasn’t really eager to stick his nose into the business of Tar Benesh.

  “Damn it, man, stand up straight when you walk!” It took Svir an astonished second to realize that Tatja was speaking to him. “Come back and start over. How can you expect the dorfox to cast an illusion of authority if you drag about like an addled triform student?”

  Hedrigs bit back a sharp reply. He walked to the beginning and started over. He almost swaggered down the passageway, imitating the gait of a Crownesse Bureaucrat he had once seen at a university dinner in Krirsarque. The effect was subtle. Suddenly Svir was no longer pretending. He actually felt important and powerful—the way he had always imagined politicians and generals feel. It seemed only natural that the sailors should snap to attention as he passed them. He returned their brace with an informal salute. The feeling of power disappeared when he came to the end of the passage.

  Tatja smiled. “Wow! All right, Miss Ascuasenya, just what did you see when Svir walked by you?”

  Cor looked confused. She glanced from Tatja to Svir and back again. “When I first looked at him coming down the hall, I could have sworn it was my father—but my family is in the Llerenito Archipelagate! As he got closer I saw that it was Jespen Tarulle. I mean, I knew it was Svir—it had to be. But it was Jespen Tarulle at the same time. Even now when I look at him, I see Tarulle —and yet I can see Svir, too.” Hedrigs g
lanced at Ancho’s ears. They weren’t pointing at Cor. The hallucination persisted even after the dorfox stopped radiating.

  Tatja didn’t say anything for a second. She made a couple of notes in her book and looked up. “Can you see Ancho sitting on Hedrigs’ shoulder?”

  Ascuasenya squinted. “No. All I see is that queer double image I just described.”

  The others had similar reactions. About half saw Hedrigs as Tatja. These people were especially confused, since they now saw two Tatja Grimms. Every one of them realized that Ancho’s trickery was involved, and all but two could see Hedrigs behind the hallucination.

  Svir’s shoulders sagged. All that work, and the best they could come up with was a halfbaked illusion that wasn’t even uniform. It would never fool the Royal Guards.

  But Tatja seemed to feel otherwise. She finished writing in the notebook, and looked up, smiling. “Well, we’ve done it. The illusion is one of the strongest I’ve ever seen.

  It persists even in the face of contradiction-to-fact situations. See, Svir, all you have to do is act confident. Ancho knows you and will radiate the same thing. I really didn’t mean to jump on you.”

  Hedrigs nodded, still blushing from the unexpected attack. Her technique worked, but it was shocking.

  Grimm continued, “We’d better knock off now. Ancho’s beginning to lose interest. By now he’s crammed full of klig leaves. And most of you look pretty dragged out. Let’s have another session after lunch.”

  * * * *

  During the rest of the voyage to Bayfast they had four hours of practice in every wake period. In the end, Ancho was able to broadcast the authority signal even better than he could the I’m-not-here. He also grew fat on the klig leaves, assuming an almost spherical configuration. Tatja had him perform his new trick under every conceivable condition—even in the dark, down in one of the holds. They found that if a single authority figure were suggested to all the victims, then they all saw that same person. It took Ancho only a fraction of a second to set up the illusion in the human mind, and it persisted without booster treatment for almost ten minutes. Ancho could detect people hiding behind bulkheads, and could even project the authority illusion through several feet of stone. Tatja tried several times to make the dorfox generate the illusion for her, but Ancho just purred when she held him.

  One experiment was a mystery to Svir. Tatja produced a flat balsir box and strapped it to the dorfox’s back. Ancho didn’t seem to mind. The box was light and apparently the straps didn’t chafe. The contraption looked vaguely like an oversize cookie cutter—its profile was an irregular set of semi-circles and lines. From either side of the box projected stubby cylinders of glass and wood. On top was a little hole—like the keyhole in a spring-powered clock. And the device clicked almost like a clock when it was mounted on Ancho’s back.

  Tatja refused to reveal the exact purpose of the contraption. She said it was a last precaution, one whose usefulness would be impaired if Hedrigs knew its purpose. Hedrigs couldn’t imagine what sort of precaution would have such properties, but he accepted her explanation. Perhaps it was empty—a placebo to give him the false confidence necessary to trigger Ancho’s authority signal. But whatever it was, it was for the best—Tatja wanted it.

  The Drag kept Grimm busy—even busier than the general run of the crew. Besides their practice sessions, he was with her only two or three hours out of every wake period. He saw almost as much of the proofreader, Coronadas Ascuasenya. It was surprising how often he found her eating at the same time and in the same meal hall as he. Hedrigs came to enjoy those meals more and more. Cor was no competition for Tatja, but she was pretty and intelligent and nice to be with.

  Hedrigs spent the rest of his free time in the Barge library, where Tatja’s influence had opened some otherwise locked doors. Only fifteen or twenty people out of the thousand on board were allowed access to the library, but once inside there was no restriction on the use of materials. Here Tarulle kept specimen copies of all available issues of magazines published by the company. That amounted to about one hundred thousand volumes. Jespen Tarulle was in the printing business to make money, but he had a sense of history too, and the Barge library was the most luxurious part of the craft that Svir had yet seen. Here was none of the cramped stuffiness of the lower decks. Virtually none of the sea or ship noises were audible through the thick glass windows. Deep carpets covered the floor. During the night wake periods, well-tended algae pots supplemented Seraph’s light.

  To a confirmed Fantasie addict, it was heaven. The Tarulle collection was nearly three-quarters complete— more than seven thousand issues. That was better than any of the libraries Svir had seen on the Islands. They even had several copies of the First Issue, printed just forty years after the invention of moveable type. In those years the magazine was sold in two yard-square sheets, folded into quarters. Only rarely was a story illustrated and then it was with crude woodcuts. But that was part of the enchantment. On that single barque—the predecessor of the Barge—they had printed such stories as Delennor’s Doom, and Search for the Last Kingdom—novels that after seven hundred years were still studied by poets and read with enjoyment by near-illiterates. The genius which showed through those smudged pages transcended the vehicle that had brought it across time to the present.

  That original barque had been owned by an ambitious trading family, distantly related to the present publisher, Tarulle. At first, they confined their trade to the major islands of the Osterlei group—and at the same time provided regular and vital communication between those islands. As the business became more profitable, the family gave up their other trading operations, and visited islands further and further asea. The islands beyond the horizon provided even more enchanting themes and original authors. Fantasie readers were the first (and for a long time the only) cosmopolitans on the planet.

  The magazine’s success was not without social repercussions. The effects of the first interplanetary fantasy were shattering both for the magazine and for the rulers of the Llerenito Archipelagate. Migration, by Ti Liso, forecast the rise of contrivance fiction. Liso’s hero discovered a species of flying fish which, during the winter season in the northern hemisphere, migrated to the southern hemisphere of Seraph. The hero captured several of the vicious creatures and taught them to pull his sailing boat. After a two-week flight, the fish deposited him half-starved on the south polar continent of Seraph. The story went on to describe the civilization he found there. It was an unfortunate coincidence that his Seraphian government was an absurd dictatorship founded on Tu-worship —for the tyrannical government of the Llerenitos was just such a farce in reverse. In plain fact the story had not been intended as satire. It had been written as straight adventure—Liso was a native of the Osterleis and he had honestly conceived the most ridiculous autarchy imaginable. The Seraphiles of the Llerenitos did not take it as a joke, and for the next fifty years, until the fall of their religion, Llerenito waters were forbidden to the barque. This was an especial hardship, since the technique for sailing to windward was not fully developed at that time. Avoiding the Llerenitos cost many months’ sailing time.

  * * * *

  Each day brought Hedrigs closer to the coast of The Continent, closer to Bayfast. Back in Krirsarque, the prospect of invading the Crownesse Keep had seemed a faraway adventure. But Svir was coming to realize that it was a reality which he personally would have to face. He spent more and more of his time in the library, taking refuge in Fantasie. Sometimes he could avoid thinking of his own problems for hours at a time. He enjoyed the recent stories most. Especially contrivance fiction. The straight fantasy themes had been handled in every conceivable way in the past seven hundred years. It was only in the last two hundred that the idea of physical progress had emerged—the idea that there could be mechanical means of achieving fantastic ends. In the last fifteen years nearly half of Fantasies output had been c.f.

  Hedrigs read straight through Tsumish Kats’ new serial. Kats was a bi
ologist in the Tsanart Archipelagate. His science was usually strong and this novel was no exception. Like many authors, he postulated the discovery of large metallic deposits on The Continent. Such deposits made possible the construction of huge metal machines —machines powered by the same (as yet unexplained) mechanism which made the sun shine. As far as Svir could tell, this story contained a genuinely original idea —one that Hedrigs wished he had thought of first. Instead of going directly to Seraph in his metal “ships of space,” Kats set up way-stations, tiny artificial moons.

  The ultimate landing on Seraph produced deadly peril. Kats populated the other planet with a race of intelligent germs. Hedrigs choked—this fellow was supposed to be a biologist? But on the next few pages the author actually justified the alien existence in a manner quite as logical and novel as his space-island idea. Hedrigs found himself following the story more and more avidly as the human race fought to protect itself from the menace brought back aboard the landing ship. The struggle against the microscopic invaders was one of the most suspenseful he had ever read. Things looked hopeless for humankind. Hedrigs turned the page.