He gave me his stare again and I returned him a look of polite passivity. He was using another scroot interrogator's technique: letting a silence extend until the interviewee feels compelled to break it. I, however, was comfortable with silences and let this one go on until he finally snorted and turned to leave.
"I'll be back," he said.
"I'll look forward to it," I said.
When he was gone, I said to my assistant, "How about some punge?"
"Nothing," it replied, meaning that in response to my coded instruction it had scanned the premises for any small items that the Colonel-Investigator might have left behind.
I spoke to my inner companion, "Were you listening to my conversation with Warhanny?"
"No," he said, "I was clumping."
His answer disturbed me slightly. I was not sure I liked the idea of half of my mind being engaged in activities I had never heard of. "And what is clumping?" I said.
"An intuitive exercise. I throw a scattering of facts before me then look to see which ones attract each other and which repel."
"By what rules?" I said.
"If I had rules for it, it wouldn't be intuitive. It would be analytical, and I would be you."
"Have you always done this, this clumping?"
"I suppose I must have," he said. "It seems to be a familiar exercise."
Which meant that through all the years that I had prided myself on the precision of my intellect, the portion of it that had operated out of sight, in the rear pastures of my mind, had been playing an entirely different game. It reminded me of a story I had once come across in the Olkney Implicator. It was about a man who lived in a well-made house that had stood for generations, but who noticed a draft of cold air in one of the downstairs rooms. It grew worse, and he traced it to where the wooden floor met base of an inside wall. Curious, he brought tools and pulled up the floorboards. When he shone a beam of light into the space beneath, he discovered a yawning cavern. The house had been built over an ancient mineshaft that had been capped with a plug of rubble. A great many years passed before the erection of the house and the existence of the mine had long been forgotten. Some time after, the rubble cap had gradually subsided then fallen in; thereafter, the occupant had been walking around on what he thought was a floor set upon a solid foundation, when in reality only the thickness of a board lay between his tranquil life and a terrifying plunge into darkness and death.
I did not show these thoughts to my other self but he was aware of my moods. "I am as I have always been," he said. "It is only that now I deal with you consciously instead of as an unfocused attribute."
"I know," I said. "That is what makes you strange."
"I cannot be too strange. I am an aspect of you."
"So you keep reminding me. And yet. . ."
"A man who is afraid of himself needs no enemies," he quoted.
"It is peculiar to be. . ." -- I chose the next word carefully -- "at close quarters with someone who is both familiar and yet very different."
"You were going to say, 'trapped,' weren't you?"
"I considered the word," I said, "and rejected it."
"Still, it popped into your mind."
"And was thrust out again."
He was silent but I knew he was brooding. Finally, he said, "We have to trust each other."
"I wish to trust you."
"But you do not, not entirely."
"It may be just a matter of getting used to the new way."
"I am what I always was," he said.
I decided it was time to face the issue. "Are you?" I said. "How do you know? How do you know that, in being brought to an early reification, you were not also changed in the process?"
"If I were different, I would know. I would feel it."
"You answered that question very quickly."
"Are you accusing me of being glib?"
"I would have given it some thought," I said.
"Because you are analytical. I am intuitive."
"What difference does that make?"
"For an associative mind, sometimes the conclusion comes before the consideration," he said.
"That makes no sense."
"And yet it is how it works. And always did before you knew me as an independent entity."
Again, I sensed the strangeness of this other me. It brought an unsettling emotion.
He gave the inner equivalent of a sigh. "You have to trust me."
"I wish to," I said again, "but I foresee a problem."
I showed him what was in my mind: that the day would come when he was on the ascendant and I was sliding toward the shadows, when he might become impatient at waiting out the last little time and might contrive to send me into the night before I was ready to go.
"Now we are balanced," I said, "but you will grow steadily stronger, and I weaker. Will you be so patient then?"
"I believe I will," he said. "Our characters are the same."
"Are they?" I said. "Or what about this possibility?" I showed him a scenario in which we once more came into contact with the kind of magical influences that had brought him into awareness. "What if that offered an opportunity for you to reach out and take full control, stripping me of my personhood and making of me what you once were -- a nameless dweller in a mental back room?"
"I am not impatient. I accept that I am here prematurely," he said. "But what if the situation was reversed? What if you could step into an energy flux that would send me back to the far corridors of our mind?"
It was a possibility I had entertained when he was asleep. Now I did not deny that I would be tempted.
"I see," he said. "You do not trust me because you know that I should not trust you."
"There is a difference," I said. "Unlike you, I have known what it is like to be master of my own realm."
"Or so it seemed to you at the time."
"Indeed, it did. Can I be faulted for wanting what I always had, an arrangement that unfailingly met my needs? After all, I did not ask for you to be here ahead of your time."
"Nor did I."
We were both silent for a moment. I was wondering if we had come to a breach that would widen. It was not a happy prospect.
"At least," he said, "you can no longer complain of being bored."
"I suppose that is true."
He was silent again, then said, "You are right that there is a difference: you had an independence that was taken from you without your consent; in that sense, you were wronged. My situation is that I will inevitably win my independence as the Wheel turns, but I have already been given more scope than I had a right to expect.
"So it is only fair that you should feel nostalgia and resentment over what you have lost, and thus be tempted to put things back the way they were. For me to be similarly tempted, I would have to be motivated by impatience and greed."
"I have occasionally been impatient," I said. "So that must be part of your make-up, too."
"You have frequently been impatient," he corrected me, "but never greedy. Besides, I share your well developed sense of justice. Therefore, I do not feel that I would prematurely push you into a hole just to make things a little more convenient for me."
I could feel his sentiments. He was not attempting to deceive me. He truly believed that he would be content to patiently share our common milieu until the universe caught up with our untimely advance into the new age. Besides, who knew when we would encounter another burst of magic as powerful as the field that had enveloped us at Turgut Therobar's estate?
"Very well," I said. "We are partners. And there is work to do." I showed him the names written in faint green ink on the flyleaf of the ancient book.
"I know that hand," he said.
"Whose is it?"
"Baxandall's."
"Why have we not seen these names before?"
"Because we were not allowed to," he said.
"How not? By what means?"
"By magic, of course. A spell of concealment. There are two
of them in his other books."
"Are there spells to confuse the text? Is that why we cannot read it?"
"Possibly," he said, "though such spells would be beyond Baxandall's competence."
"But perhaps not by whoever produced the book."
The point raised a question. Clearly, back when the book had been created, magic had reigned supreme. A spell cast upon the book -- I still found it hard to believe I was thinking in such terms -- would have had power. After the Wheel turned and rationalism reasserted itself, surely the magic would have had less effect. But now we were nearing the cusp again; did that mean that a spell that had once been powerful but had lost its potency during the interregnum would now begin to regain its former vigor?
I handed the question to my alter ego and felt him turning it over. Then he said, "I don't know. But it would be safer to assume that old spells could come back."
It was an unpleasant thought: ancient curses and maledictions that had been lying dormant for an aeon would reassume their old maleficent powers. Pity the innocent who, like the man whose house was built over emptiness, stepped unknowingly into one.
"I think I will be glad to be gone when this new world fully comes upon us," I said. "I doubt I would be fit for it."
"Be that as it may," my other self said, "we now have more threads for you to tug at. Let us see what this list of names portends."
"Yes," I said, "we may have a night's work ahead of us."
I awoke my assistant and said, "How about some punge?"
It blinked and yawned and said, "Still nothing."
#
The hired aircar took us south and west, out over the breadth of Mornedy Sound and the scattered islets and keys of the New Shore, then straight on across the unbroken gray-green of the ocean. The senescent sun was just above the eastern horizon, seeming to have to struggle to lift itself as our vehicle climbed higher into the thin air of the upper atmosphere.
"It will be some time before we reach Mandoval," I said. "I will sleep for a while."
"As will I," said my other self.
It had been a long night. The names on the flyleaf of Baxandall's book had led us up and down many of the most obscure byways and side passages of Old Earth's long, long story. Little had come of the effort: the names Phaladrine Baudrel, Hilarion Falan-Falan, Chav Hemister and Omris Shevannagar returned nothing that could be even remotely related to our case, other than a confirmation that all were of Horthalian origin and that all were as thoroughly extinct as virtually every other aspect of that destroyed nation. No one had borne those names since the cataclysmic destruction of the culture that had spawned them.
App Imrici produced some scattered citations, most of them making reference to a book, now long since lost, that he was alleged to have authored. Neither the title nor the subject of the work was recorded, but the implications of the ancient comments we found were that it had dealt with magic. I wondered if it might be the very tome we now struggled to decipher.
"No," said my other self. At least, that was his feeling.
"How can you be sure?" I said.
"How do you know where your ear is when you can't see it?" he replied.
I took the question as rhetorical and let the matter slide.
Beyond App Imrici's alleged book, there was not much else to remember him by. He had left no other traces of his existence, nor any known descendants. There was a faint connection to the island of Mandoval, or Abhazar as it had been known during the Seventeenth Aeon: the Imrici surname had originated there, though it had not survived to be known among the present population.
The name of Hammis had proved, however, to be more hardy. Little was remembered of an Oblon Hammis of Horthalia, beyond a passing reference in an obscure treatise on a lost science known as copromantia. That apparently had been the art of predicting the future based upon studying the excrement of various species after flinging it against a whitewashed wall. The footnote in which we found the mention warned, however, that the translation of anything from Late Horthalian was prone to error, and that the dung may instead have been flung not by, but directly at, the seer. In either case, there was no doubt that there had been Hammises on Mandoval ever since, and it was alleged that a Vhobald Hammis now resided in a hermit's hut high up in the island's mountainous spine.
The name Terris Botch had returned no flood of useful information, other than the fact that Glam Botch, the sub-curator who had left his only partially filled skin in Terfel's Connaissarium, was likely descended from a Horthalian ancestor named Terris, who first appeared in the records at about the time of the destruction of that doomed land. There had been Botches down through all the ages since, most of them residents of the Olkney Peninsula and adjacent counties. Quite a number of them had been antiquarians, and several had risen to the title of Chief Curator of various Archons' connaissariums. Glam Botch himself might have someday held that revered post, had he not ended up lying on a stone floor with key parts of his person missing.
It would have been interesting, perhaps even instructive, to have asked Glam Botch about Baxandall's book. But wherever he was -- and lacking bones and a dermal covering, chances were not good that he was actually anywhere -- it was doubtful that he could make much of a useful answer. My inner companion had therefore decided that we should fly to Mandoval, put a question or two to Vhobald Hammis and see what came of it.
Ordinarily, we would have contacted the man through the connectivity. There were two reasons why we were not doing so, and were instead crossing the ocean to see the fellow in the flesh. One reason was that we did not yet wish to share our information with Brustram Warhanny, who would surely listen in on any use we now made of the grid. My information-retrieval matrix could tickle bits of knowledge out of the collective, undetected by scroot snooping. But point-to-point communication between Henghis Hapthorn and any person on Old Earth would right now be conducted under the ear of the Colonel-Investigator. Had we alerted Warhanny, the chances were good that we would be arriving at Mandoval only to find that a Bureau of Scrutiny squad in a high-speed volante had already got there before us to collect our person of interest. The other reason was that Vhobald Hammis was not attached to the connectivity.
That was a startling discovery. I had only ever come across one person who was not connected to the universe: Bristal Baxandall, from whose library all of our leads had come. I did not need my alter ego's well developed intuition to know that here was no coincidence.
Now, as we overflew the ocean at a height that turned the great waves below into mere wrinkles, I settled myself in the aircar's reclining seat and quieted my mind. I felt my inner companion slip away into sleep. Before employing the exercise that would send me after him, I said to my assistant, "Are we still being followed?"
"Yes," it said, "and at the same distance."
As I had expected, Warhanny was on the case.
#
Mandoval was a long, broad crescent of black rock rising out of an otherwise empty sea. It was what that was left of the eastern rim of a huge volcanic crater that had built up from the seabed only to collapse in upon itself, all of this cataclysmic upping and downing having happened back in some remote age. On the inner side of the demilune, at about the middle, a good-sized fishing town of the same name as the island sat above a shingle of gray rock and sand eroded away from the dark crags that rose toward the west. On the other side of the island, the cracked and fluted cliffs fell sheer from the broken heights above, providing nesting sites for massed flocks of sea birds of several species. The birds, in turn, provided a living for families of eggers, hardy types who boated around from the settled inner rim of the island to ascend the rugged rock faces on one-person obviators, looting the nests and selling the proceeds of their thievery to chefs on the mainland. Egging and fishing were the island's only occupations, practiced by all except for a few odd individuals who dwelt in contemplative solitude in tiny alpine valleys that striated the divisions between the high ridges.
The last known reference to Vhobald Hammis was a record of a dispute with a neighbor over some unspecified complaint. The issue had not been resolved when the neighbor tumbled to an early death from a narrow cliff's edge path that led from the victim's house to an area where he liked to forage for mosses. A subsequent investigation had noted that the path passed close by the rock-walled bothy where Hammis made his abode, but no definitive conclusions could be drawn.
My assistant awakened me when the aircar was a short flight from Mandoval Town. I left my alter ego to sleep on and bade the car set down near the settlement's administrative nexus, a low, two-roomed building built of the same dark rock as the island, and went in. As I did so, I noted from the corner of my eye a Bureau of Scrutiny volante sliding down to land near the harbor.
There were no scroots stationed on Mandoval; most places on Old Earth had no need for an official supervisory presence, the world being made up of entrenched social units in which iron-bound custom and mere habit rule the inhabitants' behavior. The administrative center's only occupant was a small and tidy man in the green uniform of the Inspectorate who looked up from a breakfast of eggs and toasted bread with a look of surprise.
His expression changed to puzzlement when I told him I was interested in locating a Mandovalian named Bulbul Skavar.
"You are too late," he said. "He is dead, has been dead these last seven years."
"Indeed?" I said.
"He fell from a cliff."
"Indeed?" I said again then applied the scroot technique of letting the silence grow. Warhanny would have been gratified to see it working effectively, because the Inspectorate officer pressed on, telling me that Skavar had been walking between his home and a small dell where he gathered lichens valued for their hallucinogenic properties -- "He was a devotee of the Prism," he said in an aside -- and appeared to have slipped on the wet rock.
"He fell but a short distance to a broad ledge," he said, "but somehow his tumble dislodged several substantial boulders, which crashed down upon him in a statistically unlikely but quite deadly manner."
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