"I sense it has something to do with that business on Great Gallowan," he said.
"I don't see how that can be," I said. "The connection is remote."
"In your realm."
"We were in my realm. We went by space yacht, not a chariot pulled by griffums."
I felt him agonizing and the emotion drew my sympathy. He had been, after all, an aspect of me. I was about to try to offer comfort when he said, "What if, within your realm, there are other precursors of mine?"
My first inclination was to scoff, but I had experienced enough strangeness in recent times to put down the habitual response. "You believe that Osk Rievor might be sharing Toop Zherev's spare room?"
"Not 'believe,'" he said, "but I'm willing to entertain the notion."
"And you believe that he is somehow connected to this book, even though he was halfway down The Spray on a world full of dull people who envy the folk of other worlds their pomp and pride?"
"Why not? If one and one soon won't have to make two," he said, "why not?"
"It seems an odd place to find a spellster."
"No more odd than here in Olkney, where we found Baxandall. Or on the edge of Dimpfen Moor, where Turgut Therobar had discovered a dimple of the oncoming age. Perhaps there is another on Balwinder Sound."
I had learned, while confined to a cage in Therobar's subterranean chamber, that the transition from rationalism to sympathy did not sweep across our cosmos like a wave rolling up onto a shore. Instead, the new order would appear everywhere at once, like a liquid seeping through a porous membrane. But there were certain points -- dimples, Therobar had called them -- where the seepage was premature. In those places, where the seepage pooled, the potency of spells was intensified. It was as if they were islands of the age of magic appearing ahead of schedule in the sea of rationality. It was on one of those islands, on the edge of the desolate moor, that the ambitious thaumaturge had chosen to build his estate, Wan Water.
I said, "It is possible that Toop Zherev's flambord station is such a dimple, but I cannot see that fish farmer as a powerful thaumaturge. I have discovered that they project a certain presence. He lacked it."
"True," said my sharer. "Still, there is some connection."
I had no good reply, but was saved from admitting so by the who's-there. It chimed its usual annuciatory note and said, "There may be someone at the door."
"Can you not be more definite?" I said.
"No."
I descended from my workroom to street level and looked through the viewer. Outside night was gathering in the gaudy, blowsy city that was the capital of Old Earth in the planet's penultimate age. It had rained and the streets were wet, the pavement glistening in the light from the lumen above my door. I saw no one standing there.
The who's-there activated again. "I detect a presence," it said, "though my percepts cannot secure an image. But someone is there."
Magic? I thought, and I was already chiding myself for slipping toward my inner companion's frame of reference when he spoke inside our head.
"Nothing that I sense," he said.
"Could the visitor be wearing an elision suit?" I asked the who's-there?
"If so, it is a more sophisticated version than most," it answered.
"Recalibrate your percepts to the upper limits."
It did so and reported, "It most likely is a person of medium build and normal body temperature. I detect no energy weapons."
"Ah," I said, "then our visitor is likely to be someone of prominence who does not wish to be seen consulting a freelance discriminator."
My bashful visitor might also be someone who had been the subject of one of my discriminations. There were more than a few criminals in Olkney whose schemes I had upended and who did not wish me well. And not all weapons required energy. I thought for a moment, then said, "Open the door, but be prepared to suppress any aggressive conduct." I heard a faint hum as the door's built-in defenses charged themselves. An opaque panel that allowed me to see out while no one could see in slid down to cover the doorway, then the outer door cycled open. A voice, youthful but firm, said, "I wish to speak with Henghis Hapthorn."
"I am he. Do you wish to consult me?"
"Yes."
"Who are you?"
"I will reveal that once I am out of sight of the street."
"I see," I said. The accent was cultured. This was a person of means.
"What does your intuition say?" I asked my other self.
"Trouble," he said. "Very considerable trouble."
"Danger?" I said.
"When are the two ever separated?"
"To me? To us, I mean?"
"I don't think so."
I bid the opaque barrier remove itself. "Please enter and follow," I said and turned to ascend to my workroom. There I invited my invisible visitor to state his business.
"This is a matter of great importance," said the disembodied voice.
"Very few clients come to me over trivialities," I said.
"Terrible events may be in the offing, horrors unimaginable."
"And what," I said, "is the source of these calamities?"
"I cannot tell you."
"Why not?"
"Because I do not know."
It now belatedly occurred to me that there was a third category of persons who sometimes sought me out: those who were afflicted with disorders of the mind and thought themselves pursued by powerful forces. Most such loons could not afford high-efficiency elision suits, but insanity was not unknown among the wealthy. Indeed, some forms of madness had sometimes been cultivated as fashionable accessories.
I stroked my chin as if in thought and stepped toward a corner of my workroom that could be instantly sealed off. At the utterance of a nonsense phrase, impermeable barriers would spring from floor and ceiling.
I turned and addressed the faint shimmer in the air where my visitor stood. "You do not know? Does this mean you have received no cryptic messages from unlikely sources? No voices mysteriously beamed directly to you by vast intelligences beyond our ken?"
I was now within the space that could be hived off, pretending an interest in some bric-a-brac on a small table. I had only to utter the trigger word and my integrator. . ..
But here I was brought up short. My integrator lay sprawled in deep sleep in the space beneath the divan, emitting delicate snores. Its change from discriminator's assistant to what seemed to be the kind of familiar that might be employed by a wizard from a fairy tale was still so recent that I had not yet delineated every detail of the new paradigm. Specifically, I now realized that I did not know if shouting code words at its sleeping ear would bring the desired effect of isolating me from my invisible visitor, should he suddenly begin to rave and throw himself at my throat.
"I am sorry," I said. "I was thinking and did not hear what you said."
"If you would stop playing with those gewgaws on the table and pay attention," said the voice in a tone that seemed at ease with command, "this conversation could proceed to a culmination."
I put down the knick-knack I'd been holding. "Very well," I said, loudly, hoping that the volume would rouse my assistant from the sleeping place it had made for itself beneath my divan. But its regular breathing went on uninterrupted, except for a brief snort and a smacking of prehensile lips.
"I said," said my visitor, "that I am not delusional. The danger is very real, even if I cannot identify the source."
I took up another piece of bric-a-brac -- it was a statue of the Archon Dezendah IV, recently retired -- and struck the table a sharp rap. The breathing from under the divan continued untroubled.
"What is the danger, then?" I said.
"A plot. I suspect there is a conspiracy to overthrow the Archonate and replace it with a sinister regime."
My inner companion was saying something but my attention was focused on the invisible madman before me. "Indeed," I said, in a mollifying tone, and, "oh, dear." I had raised my voice but still I was answered onl
y by faint snores from beneath the divan and a throat-clearing growl from my visitor. It was time for the code words.
"Looby looby!" I cried. But no shimmering barrier appeared. I tried again, this time shouting as loudly as I could. I heard snorts from beneath the divan, the unmistakable sounds of awakening.
From directly in front of me, however, I heard an angry though still cultured voice inquiring as to what kind of idiocy I was engaged in. Its source was clearly advancing toward me. I reached again for the brass statue of the former Archon and flung it in the direction of the sound.
It flew straight and true -- my eye and hand have always enjoyed good relations -- and stopped dead in the air a short distance before me. It fell to the floor with a thump, followed immediately by the sound of a body doing much the same thing.
I stepped forward, meaning to investigate my fallen attacker, strip the elision suit's pliofilm from his features, and discover who he was. My intent was blocked by the sudden appearance before me of the security barrier. I recoiled from the impact, rubbing my injured nose, as the integrator crept out from beneath the divan, blinked its large golden eyes at me and said, "If you needed to know whether the emergency barrier worked from the inside you could have just asked me."
Several possible rejoinders occurred to me but I put them aside and ordered my assistant to extinguish the obstruction. "I was under attack from an unbalanced assailant in an elision suit," I said, "who now lies unconscious on the floor. We will shortly discover who he is."
"You ninny," said the voice in my head, "how could you not know who he is?"
"And you do?" I said, also within the confines of my skull.
"The moment he spoke of a threat to the Archonate." He showed me an image on our shared inner screen: a young man of noble aspect wearing the appurtenances and regalia of the ruler of Old Earth.
"You're saying that's the Archon Filidor?" I said.
"I am."
"How would you know that?"
"Intuition, of course."
With a dismissive fricatation of air over my lips, I knelt and felt for the face, then peeled the light-eliding film away. The face of the unconscious young man on my workroom floor matched the features that my mental cohabitant had shown me.
"It's Filidor, all right," I said.
My assistant came over and peered down at the face whose broad forehead bore a circular red mark the exact size of the statuette's base. "He doesn't look all right to me," it said.
#
Among the many disparate societies that speckled those parts of Old Earth in the ancient world's penultimate age, it was universally accepted that the institution of the Archonate was the ideal form of government. The head of the regime, and the pinnacle of the social order in the capital city, Olkney, was the Archon. He wielded vast, though only vaguely defined, powers, ruling in an entirely indirect manner, more by inference than decree.
Although he was rarely seen outside the Archonate Palace, a sprawling architectural accretion atop the black crags of the Devenish Range above the city, it was also universally known that the Archon often wandered through the world in disguise. He might appear as a carefree vagabond, an itinerant dealer in rarities, a strolling narrator. Thus any stranger might be the Archon, come to exercise sudden and perhaps rigorous judgment, with the full might of the Bureau of Scrutiny behind him. The peregrinations of Archons had been referred to since time immemorial as the progress of esteeming the balance.
The Archon was not known, however, to present himself incognito at the door of Old Earth's foremost freelance discriminator mouthing mysterious warnings about apocalyptic evil. "It was a reasonable response," I said to my inner critic as I lifted the mostly invisible Archon Filidor I and carried him to the divan. "He was shouting and coming toward me."
"He is probably not used to having his sanity questioned by persons who then proceed to yelp nonsense at him," said the voice in my head. "Though he is only recently come into the title, I believe Filidor has been Archon long enough to have grown accustomed to people taking him seriously."
I laid the unconscious young man on the divan, put a cushion under his head, which was all that I could yet see of him, and went to the sanitary suite for water and a restorative. When I returned, the Archon was blinking though his eyes had not yet rediscovered the ability to focus. The mark in the middle of his forehead was swelling into a bump. I sat beside him and placed a damp compress on the injury. After a moment, his vision coalesced and he regarded me with a mulling look then said, "Well, at least I don't have to worry about you."
"How so?" I said.
"If you were part of the conspiracy, I would not be waking up."
"That is probably so." I asked him if he felt well enough to sit, and when he did I offered him the restorative. It took effect and in a short time he was fully recovered.
"Still," he said, "I would like to know why you shouted, 'Looby, looby' then threw something at my head." he said.
I explained in a diplomatic manner the circumstances behind my behavior.
"You took me for a raver?"
"I've been under some strain lately."
"Who hasn't?" he said. He stood up and began to pace, which meant, since he was still wearing his elision suit, that I saw a disembodied and worried head passing to and fro across my workroom.
"I don't know whom to trust," he said after a while.
"You can trust me," I told him. "I am an admirer of the Archonate, though not always of your servants in the Bureau of Scrutiny, particularly one Colonel-Investigator Brustram Warhanny."
"I don't know him," the Archon said.
"You are more fortunate than I. For some reason, he resents it when I perform a discrimination that clears up a thorny part of his caseload."
"To return to my problem. . ." he said.
"Yes. Tell me about it. May I ask my integrator to take notes?" I indicated the apparent amalgam of feline and ape, that had established itself next to a bowl of karba fruit on my work table while we were talking. It was now peeling one with skillful fingers.
"That is your integrator?" the Archon said.
"I'm afraid so."
"Is this something new?"
I could not help but be reminded of the horrific realization that had come upon me with the arrival of my inner companion and the metamorphosis of my integrator: that the world of rationality into which I fit so well was itself soon to be transformed into a realm based on sympathetic association -- or, to use the common term, magic -- in the latest iteration of a cycle that had been going on throughout the aeons. "Both very new," I said, "and very old. But tell me of the plot. Who is in it, who is not, and what part do you wish me to play?"
"The answer to your first two questions is 'I don't know,'" he said. "The answer to the third is that the first thing I want you to do is to find those first two answers."
It was well known that Archons were encouraged by their advisors to acquire the habit of offering cryptic responses to most questions; the practice allegedly enhanced the mystery of the office. An Archon of the Nineteenth Aeon, Onoreef XVI, reigned for forty-two years answering every question put to him with a question of his own. His reign would have gone on for even longer if he had not answered an inquiry from a particularly dense underling -- "Do you really wish me to press this button?" -- with the needlessly ambiguous, "Why wouldn't I?"
Thus I took the time to replay Filidor's response in my head and found it was in fact direct statement of his situation: he had come to me because he was unsure whom he could trust within the Archonate apparatus -- or without it, for that matter.
"I am gratified that you would place your trust in me," I said.
"It was a process of elimination," he said. "I asked myself: first, who has the mental acuity to unravel a complex, clandestine conspiracy; second, who is the least likely to be invited to join such a cabal? The answer to each question was: Henghis Hapthorn."
"He is being polite," said the voice in my head. "The real que
stion was: 'Whom do I know who is full-brained yet friendless?'"
"Archons have no need to be polite," I silently replied. "Power is its own social lubricant." Aloud I said, "What indications do you have that something is afoot?"
"Last night, I found this on my nightstand," he said. From an inner pocket he produced a page that, by its ragged edge, must have been torn from a document. "It was not there when I disrobed and entered the sanitary suite. It was there when I returned."
I examined the document. it appeared to be a page torn from a catalog of items stored in that vast repository of treasures and oddments known as the Great Connaissarium. The Archon Terfel III, whose lifelong inquisitiveness was legendary, had established the collection long enough ago that some of the building he constructed to house it was now an ancient ruin.
"What did the integrator see?"
"Nothing. I had it replay the sequence of events. One moment the night table was bare, the next the page was there."
"Interesting," I said. "Was there anything else?"
"Yes. An object had been disturbed."
"What was this object?"
"A kind of key."
"What does it open?"
"I will not say," the disembodied head told me. "It is a matter known only to Archons and their most intimate aides."
"Then it is an important key," I said.
"Very."
I had further questions to put, but I was distracted by my alter ego's insistence that I pursue another line of inquiry.
"Ask him more about the key," he said.
"He will not answer."
"It is important."
"So is not angering clients who can have one consigned to a contemplarium."
I continued with the Archon. "At this point, we have a mystery. But how do you derive from it the existence of a conspiracy to overthrow the Archonate?"
"I derive it from this," he said, producing another document. "It accompanied the catalog page."
It was a handwritten note in an archaic script, the letters like spiders frozen on the page: They plot to remove you. Trust no one close.
"Hmm," I said.
"What do you think?" he said.
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