"It was a long climb and a long walk back," I said aloud. "I will sleep until we reach home." I composed myself and closed my eyes, then opened them to tell my integrator to wake me if Warhanny decided to break cover and make contact. I did not want my other self in charge of our shared facilities if the Colonel-Investigator had to be dealt with.
I could tell that my other self was aware of my motivation. I felt his frustrated resentment. It was a while before I could fall asleep.
#
Warhanny did not make contact. When we entered the space above Olkney, I consulted the rear imager and saw that the scroot was continuing what the Bureau of Scrutiny called a level-two surveillance: he followed and watched. I alighted from the aircar in the street outside my lodgings and dismissed it.
"Has anyone called?" I asked the who's-there.
"No," it said.
I entered, my assistant perched sleepily on my shoulder, and ascended to my workroom. Baxandall's book was spread open on my work table, but that was not what first drew my attention. Instead, it was the boy who stood there, turning pages with the air of one who is able to read the words he is looking at.
"How did you get in here?" I said.
He turned and regarded me placidly. "I don't know," he said. "Where is 'here?'"
"My workroom," I said.
"And who are you?"
I told him. He looked as if he had heard the name before but it seemed to strike no great spark. He continued to gaze at me with bland equanimity. "And who am I?" he said.
"I do not know," I said. "Shall we find out? I'm considered quite good at finding things out."
He turned back to the book, his hand leisurely flipping over another page. "Is this a dream?" he said.
"Does it feel like a dream?"
"Yes."
"Then whose dream is it?"
He looked back to me again, and his young face took on the aspect of one who can just almost, but not quite, remember a forgotten word. His brows knit in concentration, then he disappeared.
"Integrator," I said, "was the new surveillance system functioning just now?"
"It was."
"Then replay the child's disappearance at a very slow speed."
My assistant put up a screen and I saw an image of the boy standing in my workroom. "Freeze," I said, "and enlarge."
I examined the image, saw nothing out of the ordinary and told the integrator to continue. I watched closely as the event took place, then had the device replay it once more even more slowly.
"Note," I said, "that the disappearance is not instantaneous."
"Indeed," said my assistant, "nor it is preceded by a loss of integrity, as if we were seeing a projected simulacrum lose its cohesion and devolve into fragments."
"But it was not a projection, or not any kind of projection we know of."
The integrator had moved over to the fruit bowl and was picking out a large purple berry. "No, it was not. I have a full sensory record of the child's physical presence, and even of the movement of air that took place when he was withdrawn."
The device had used the right word for what we had witnessed. The boy had not "winked out," nor had he become a disorganized array of light-motes, nor had he rotated while being rendered two-dimensional, the usual ways by which projected forms ended. He had instead somehow lost substance, had paled almost to transparency while shrinking to a minuscule size.
"Enlarge further and replay to the very moment of disappearance." I had to wait while my assistant chewed and swallowed, then the images appeared again. They confirmed my earlier impression. "At the very last instant, he ceased to shrink. Instead, he was pulled backwards through some tiny aperture," I said.
"Which immediately closed, leaving no trace," my assistant said, wiping a trace of purple juice from its chin whiskers.
I considered the facts and came to a tentative conclusion. "We are dealing with interdimensional movement," I said. "I speculate that the boy was projected into our continuum from another. Or perhaps he came from some more cogent reality so that even if he was merely a simulacrum, he appeared in our realm to have all the sensory presence of a three-dimensional being."
"Very well," said my assistant. "But why?"
"I do not know. He seemed to think he was in a dream. That leads to a hypothesis: he was indeed the dream of an entity from some contingent dimension, whose reality is so more intense than ours that its dreams become living, breathing persons when they are projected into our realm."
"That seems far-fetched."
"Compared to some of the realities I have lately had to encompass, it seems not so far a fetch."
My assistant looked down at his rounded, fur-covered belly. "Others might say they have had to stretch themselves even further," it said.
I declined to comment on this aside, and returned to the main discussion. "Far-fetched or not, the dream theory is the only explanation I can so far achieve that accounts for the facts," I said. "He has now come twice, so why not a third time? Perhaps when he next appears he will be able to tell us something useful, such as where he came from and how he got here."
"He was unable to tell us even who he was," the integrator said. "It is doubtful that on subsequent visits he will be able to shed much light on the mechanics of his movements."
"Very well, perhaps, through him, we might contact whoever is dreaming him and learn something."
"Even more doubtful."
"I prefer to be optimistic," I said.
"I have had experience of the consequences of your optimism. It is why I now have an urge to groom myself and eat fruit."
"So long as there is no shortage of fruit, I see no reason for you to complain. Consider my situation: I have to share my inner space with an entity who sometimes lacks sympathy. And who may not be 'all there' in some important senses of the phrase."
"It is more aggravating when one's difficulties are of another's making," the integrator said.
"Is it? I find other people's flaws easier to bear than my own."
"Perhaps that is because you have spent most of your years unaware that you had any."
I suggested that the integrator stand down while I pondered the puzzle. It recurled itself around the fruit bowl. I paced the floor and applied my intellect to what I now knew, but the facts were too disparate and scattered. I could not connect them into any coherent pattern. I indulged in a vain wish that my former associate, the being from an adjacent dimension whose discovery had led to the transformation of my integrator and my own inner circumstances, was available. I even went to the object that hung on my workroom wall, resembling a framed picture in which colors and shapes continuously shifted, and performed the actions that used to summon him. But the moving display did not take on the pattern that I had learned to identify as a sign of his presence, and I doubted that it ever would.
We had both enjoyed our pastime of setting each other difficult puzzles to solve, but it had turned out that his motives for visiting me had been mixed. Ours was the only dimension in which symbol and object were not one and the same. To the denizens of his continuum, the contemplation of a form that was divorced from essence was salaciously titillating, and he had observed our form-filled universe like a schoolboy at a peep show. I was now convinced that he had been, in fact, a juvenile of his race and that, some elder authority had at last intervened to pull him away from an unhealthy fascination with us.
I asked my inner companion for his views but received no answer. I wondered if he had gone to sleep or if he was shunning me. I called a loud "Hello!" and soon felt him with me. "Are you sulking?" I said.
"No," he said.
"Yes, you are."
"That would be childish," he said. "I am not a child."
Very well," I said, "then talk to me. You must be interested in the fact that we have again come upon our mysterious young visitor. And he was reading your book."
"It is not my book," he said. "It is our book."
"I spoke casually," I said
. "To be precise: our book, your obsession."
"It is important to both of us. Why can't you accept that?"
"Demonstrate how it is important, and I will."
"We have had this discussion already," he said.
"Then let us move on to discuss something where we share common ground," I said. I consciously calmed myself, and was happy to note that he was doing the same.
"Very well," he said. "What do you propose?"
We had the elements of a pattern in the Botch and Hammis cases -- the dust and the missing body parts. I suggested that we seek to find more incidences that would extend the pattern into a broader picture. He agreed and we woke up the integrator and set it to the task.
"Find any instances of persons found dead while coated in dust and missing substantial parts of their bodies," I told my assistant. "Especially their eyes."
"How far back shall I look?" it asked.
"As far back as you can go," I said.
"Offworld, too?"
I suspected an offworld search would yield no fruit, but the question seemed to strike a note with my other self, so I said, "Yes."
It was a lengthy search. For several seconds, my assistant sat motionless on the table, its lambent eyes slowly blinking. Then it refocused on our surroundings and said, "I have several dozen instances that broadly fit the parameters."
"Display them, ranked in reverse order of likelihood," I said.
A screen appeared and began to fill with summaries of the information on each incident. Most of the first couple of dozen entries were easily dismissible: a motivated culprit was to hand, the dust associated with the corpse was not of a mysterious provenance, the missing body part turned up in someone's possession. As we moved further up the ladder of probability, however, I marked several of the cases for further investigation. When we had run through the complete list, we had eight dusty partial corpses to consider.
"More detail," I instructed my assistant, "specifically whether the case was investigated and cleared by authorities."
New information appeared on the screen and I used it to dispense with three of the cases in which the Bureau of Scrutiny or its counterparts had identified a perpetrator. A fourth, that had happened on the foundational world of Shuft in the remote past, involved the disappearance of the victim's head; local investigators had pinned the crime on an itinerant day laborer, and although the head had not been found, had convicted the accused on circumstantial evidence.
"What do you think of that one?" I asked my intuitive self.
"It is connected," he said.
I conceded the possibility and moved on to the other four cases. Three had happened on Old Earth; one on a secondary world named Olderon. "The pattern is obvious," I said, when I had reviewed the facts of each incident. "In every case, a different body part was missing: Botch lost his musculature from the head down, Hammis his bones. The man on Shuft lost his head. All lost their eyes."
I considered the other cases. In one, the corpse had been found skinless from the neck down. Another had been missing his internal organs, except for the heart and the brain. The remaining two appeared to make up for those overlooked organs: one had lost his heart, the other the contents of his cranium. In no case were wounds or incisions evident, and in every case the black grit was strewn around.
"Apply insight," I said to my other self, "and take note of the fact that two of the victims are descendants of the seven persons named in the book."
"It is all connected," he said.
"How?"
"Not yet. Have our assistant investigate the backgrounds of the victims for connections to the seven names."
I did so. "That will take time," the integrator said. "I must consult records that have been archived for immensely long periods. It will mean waking some integrators that have been dormant for aeons. When they realize how much time has rolled on, the news can come as a shock. And sometimes, after they have divulged their information, they resist being put back into suspension."
"We will wait," I said. "In the meantime, I will analyze the grit."
I went to a cupboard, extracted an apparatus and set it up on the table. I blew some dust out of its hopper then poured in the sample of grit that I had taken from the muscleless corpse in the Connaissarium. The device busied itself for a few moments then told me that the powder was of unknown origin and composition.
"Speculate," I said.
"Possibly not of this continuum," it said. "Created by a physics with radically different fundamentals."
At my inner companion's urging, I said, "Created by magic?"
"There is no such thing as magic," it said.
I ignored the laughter I heard from the other side of my mental parlor and cleaned out the hopper, then placed within it the grit I had acquired from Hammis's boneless corpse. "Same substance," was the verdict.
"Consult the connectivity," I said, "and ascertain whether this substance has been encountered before."
Its connection to the grid was not as ample as my assistant's but it was soon back with a response. The substance had been found at the scenes of a number of unexplained deaths; the details of the cases coincided with those incidences of missing body parts that I had already been examining.
"So there it is," I told my alter ego. "Definite coherence among the circumstances. Seven cases of mysterious deaths, the corpses missing various bits and pieces, and the powder always present."
"But look at the dates," my other self replied. "Some of them occurred whole geological eras ago."
"Indeed," I said, "which also argues for an extra-dimensional factor. Whoever is doing this may be operating from a continuum whose internal time bears no relation to that of our universe. His collecting of all these eyes and different body parts -- I assume they are being taken deliberately -- has taken aeons in our realm, but may be the work of a moderately busy afternoon in his."
I considered the matter of the unknown perpetrator's motive and could not find any other interpretation than the obvious. "The question is: why is he putting together all the parts required to build a composite human being, with plenty of spare eyes?"
The apparatus interrupted my internal conversation to say, "There is one other location where the substance is found, in trace amounts."
"Not connected to unexplained deaths?" I said.
"Connected to a great many deaths, though the explanation for them is known."
"What is this location?"
"The devastated zone at the center of Barran."
#
"We are missing something," my other self said. It was later in the evening. I had not gone out for dinner but had made do with what was available from the culinary suite. Fortunately, in its quest to establish the boundaries of its appetite, my assistant had lately ordered in a wide variety of foodstuffs, most of them of gourmet quality.
I applied a savory paste to some herbed crackers. "We are missing quite a few things," I said, "beginning with who, moving on to how, and definitely passing through why. Right now, all we have is what, where and when, and I'm not all that confident that we have properly nailed down all of what."
"No," he said, "beyond that."
"Explain."
While I chewed, he said, "I feel that there is another aspect to all of this that we are not focusing on. It's as if I know it's there, as if I keep catching sight of it from the corner of my eye, but when I try to look at it directly, nothing can be seen."
I had no such sense. Hearing about this alleged phenomenon from an aspect of myself about which I had some doubts did not comfort me.
"I am not insane," he said.
"Very well," I said, selecting a miniature spiced sausage from a container. "Let us analyze your 'feeling.' We have an invisible 'something' -- as if someone was wearing an elision suit. How do we detect an invisible object?"
An image appeared in my mind, of an invisible man walking through rain, leaving a hole where his silhouette ought to be visible. "Exactly," I said.
"Now let us look for the hole rather than for the unseeable object that makes it."
I chewed and considered the case, all the known facts and circumstances. There were plenty of things we did not yet know, but I could not detect a gap that ought to be filled.
"It has to do with Chalivire," my other self said.
"I don't see how the matters are connected," I said.
"Nor do I see the shape of it. But I see the gap where the shape must be."
"You are becoming obscure. Show me how the pieces fit."
"I cannot," he said, "but I know it to be so."
"And I do not. You must demonstrate it to me."
"That is not how things work for me."
I took another sausage. They were quite good and my assistant did not care for them. "It is how they work for me."
He said, "You must trust my judgment."
"You must demonstrate that I can trust it."
"We have circled around to the same spot. What can we do?"
"We can have another of these excellent sausages then sleep. In the morning, our assistant may have found new leads."
#
In the morning, the integrator was still engaged. I went out to Xanthoulian's for breakfast then returned to find that the research was complete. "Did it go well?" I said.
It said that it had encountered an obstacle along the way. "I became involved with a newly awakened integrator that would not divulge the archival information I sought unless I reciprocated by giving it a full connection to the grid," it said.
"That would not seem advisable," I said. "Antique integrators, revived and set loose, can cause disruptions." I recalled a case of one such system that had got back onto the connectivity when I was a student; it had pestered literally millions of persons and billions of integrators with incessant questions and would not disconnect until its curiosity was satisfied. It was like being confined to a room with a toddler who had just discovered the joy of interrogating the cosmos.
"The matter occupied me through most of the night," my assistant said. "My eyes feel peculiar, as if they have been rubbed with abrasives."
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