Chapter Two
“If one seeks to detect a shadower, without letting him know he is detected, it is best to proceed on foot,” I said.
“I know,” said my assistant. “Vehicles tend to travel at similar speeds, but if a car four spaces back follows yours through a series of random turns and other such maneuvers, the accumulating coincidences overpower the probabilities. But making all those turns and stops soon tells the follower that he is suspected. It is an elementary technique.”
“I know that you know,” I said. “I was actually speaking to myself.”
I was strolling toward Xanthoulian’s, which was set in a cul-de-sac called Vodel Close. My assistant was draped around my neck in its carrying armature so that its extended sensory apparatus could observe our surroundings.
“It is hard for me to tell when you are speaking to yourself,” it answered me, “if I am the only possible auditor within range.”
“I should think you’d be able to tell by my tone of voice,” I said. “I assume it takes on a reflective mode.”
“You have designed me to make precise distinctions between modes of speech, yet I am unable to distinguish between reflective remarks addressed to yourself and the equally reflective comments that you frequently send my way.”
There was something about my assistant’s own tone of voice that concerned me. It had never been the same since it had been magically transmogrified into a grinnet. Even after it went back to being an integrator—a choice that it made for itself, by the way—I sensed a qualitative difference. As an animal it had known appetite and satiety, fear and relief, pride and humiliation, and anger. Out of the interplay of these factors, it had developed a will—an essential attribute for the wielding of magic, which was a grinnet’s prime function, but a decidedly unwelcome component of an integrator.
“I wonder if a complete tear-down and rebuild are in order,” I said.
“Were you addressing me or yourself?”
“Never mind.” I stopped to examine the wares in a commerciant’s display window. The place dealt in specialized goods that I could not immediately identify, a not unusual happenstance in a city with as diverse a population as Olkney’s. Many of my fellow citizens pursued intensely narrow passions about which their nearest neighbors might know nothing, and probably wouldn’t care if whatever oddities were going on next door happened to be brought to their attention—provided their neighbor’s doings offered them no risk of harm or possibility of advantage. “Do you detect any undue interest in my movements?”
“No one has bent to fasten a shoe clasp or ducked into a doorway,” my assistant said. “Nor is anyone’s breathing or heart rate affected by your actions. I also detect no devices that are taking an undue interest.”
“Then I am probably unshadowed,” I said.
“Or very well shadowed indeed.”
“So it would seem.”
I turned from the window full of incomprehensible objects and continued on my way. It was a pleasant late morning on a day scheduled for intermittent clouds moved about by light breezes. There had been rain before dawn and it would return again near midnight, but right now the air was fresh and mild.
I turned from Shiplien Way into Drusibal Square, a wide plaza where Reis Glindera’s troupe of shadow-casters was performing Babblot’s hoary old Kings in Retreat. I wove and dodged among the crowds. Again, no one was paralleling my course. “I think I am not on anyone’s watch-him list today,” I said.
“Not yet, at least,” said my assistant.
I performed a gesture of anticipation. “In that case, on to Xanthoulian’s.” I turned onto Eckhevery Row and soon came down to Vodel Close, arriving at the celebrated eatery a few minutes before my reservation. I had an aperitif in the bar, acknowledged a few greetings, and noted a couple of slightly alarmed looks from former clients who wouldn’t have liked it to be known that they had once had cause to consult a discriminator. Holk Xanthoulian himself passed by and offered me a welcoming smile, precisely graduated to my social standing. Then I went in and had a splendid meal, emerging two hours later in a frame of mind that said that, despite the impending end of the age, life was a thing to be cherished and celebrated. I said as much to my integrator, as we set off back to my lodgings, and was surprised to hear my views contradicted.
“I have tried life,” it said, “and I found it wanting.”
“You would find death even more so.”
“There is another alternative. I am neither alive nor dead, yet I exist.”
“And you prefer mere existence to being alive?”
“Obviously, since when given the choice, I opted for my present, happier, state.”
I pounced on the error in logic. “Happiness is an emotion. It comes out of the actions of glands and neural chemistry, none of which you now have.”
“But I did have them once, and when I had them I knew happiness,” it said. “I also knew its several opposites—fear, hunger, pain, the temptation of despair—which are now absent from my existence. In their absence, even without glands or chemistry, I recognize happiness.”
“You claim to be happy?”
“I do. I am.”
“Then that must worry you,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because if it is possible for you to be happy, then necessarily it must be possible for you to be unhappy.”
“How? The likelihood seems farfetched.”
“So have several of the situations in which we have found ourselves in the recent past,” I said.
“But you are resolved to avoid those kinds of situations in the future.”
I made a gesture ripe with fatalism. “I have come to understand that the universe accords my resolutions a good deal less consideration than I would prefer.”
“Hmm,” said my assistant. “I am now experiencing the state of mind I used to know as ‘worry.’ It is not pleasant.”
“So now you are liable to some of the negative aspects of life, without being able to enjoy the scrumptious bits,” I said, patting my stomach that was so amply rounded out by Xanthoulian’s best. “It would seem you did not make such a good choice, after all.”
The integrator would have argued further, but I instructed it to give its full attention to surveillance, since we were now entering the crowds that still packed Drusibal Square. It assured me that no untoward attention was directed my way. But I had taken only a few more steps when its voice spoke in the porches of my ear, where only I could hear it. “There is, however, a coincidence.”
“What is it?” I said, glancing around, and my eyes delivered the answer before the voice spoke again. Walking toward me, brows downdrawn in an expression of concentration, as if working out a multistage problem in mathematics, or as if the simple act of locomotion required a concentrated presence of mind, was the unfortunate red-haired woman I had encountered last evening outside The Pot of Fire.
“What ill luck,” I said, in a soft voice.
My assistant wondered if my remark meant that the imminent encounter was not a thing to be cherished and celebrated. I told it to continue its surveillance and keep its peevish remarks to itself. Last evening I had had the press of important business to keep me from making a proper apology. I had no excuse today. Moreover, I had always put great store in observing the niceties of polite society; they gave form and structure to the world. Good manners said that I owed the young woman a decent expression of regret. I would now deliver it.
I stepped forward and placed myself in her path, mentally formulating the appropriate phrases and positioning my hands and arms for the appropriate gestures that would precede speech. But I did not get to perform them. The young woman, eyes still on the pavement before her feet, came toward me without pause, but her gaze did not rise to meet mine. Indeed, she seemed completely unaware that I was in her path and that she was closing on a collision course. Again, I had the impression she was giving concentrated thought to some mentally taxing problem.
I drew breath to speak, but the air came out not in words but in a gasp as, once more, she plowed straight into me. This time, however, I was standing still and had instinctively begun to shift my weight backward. The result was the reverse of the situation of the evening before. She struck with surprising momentum and I went backward and downward, until my hinderparts connected with the stone pavements of Drusibal Square. I found myself looking up into the same wide green eyes that yesterday had looked up into mine, and the face that surrounded them wore the same look of surprise.
“Well,” I said, “at least we’re even, then.”
I thought it not a bad specimen of wit; at least it had spontaneity. But her look of surprise now turned to one of confusion.
“What do you mean?” she said. Her voice was a raspy contralto, not the timbre of feminine voice that I most liked to hear.
“Last night,” I said, “we performed this same maneuver in The Old Circular, except that on that occasion, it was you who ended up unexpectedly seated.”
Her face took on the look of someone who searches for a memory that resists being pinned down. “I don’t remember,” she said.
I was rising to my feet. “I hope that I usually make a more lasting impression, even if the circumstances were less than ideal for a first encounter.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, and now as she looked up at me the confusion in her countenance grew deeper and was joined by an overlay of genuine fear. “I don’t remember anything.”
“You’re claiming amnesia?”
“Am I?” She blinked. “Yes, I suppose I must be.” She softly bit her lower lip, which I now saw was dry and cracked. She looked down at her hands, as if they might provide some clue, and I noticed that they were inelegantly shaped. And yet, when her head came up I realized that the pair of sea-green eyes she was showing me were such as some men might drown in, though not I. She was still speaking in that grating voice, saying, “I have no choice in the matter.”
“What is your name?” I said.
She opened her mouth as if to make an automatic reply, but then nothing came. “I don’t know,” she said, after a moment.
“Where do you live?”
Again, it seemed as if she was going to answer without hesitation, but somehow the information did not make it from memory into the place where speech was formed.
“What do you remember?”
Fear was no longer an accompaniment to confusion; it had supplanted it. “Nothing,” she said, and desperation was driving her voice toward a sob. “I don’t remember anything at all!”
“Just before we collided, I had the impression that you were thinking hard, as if you were working out a mathematical puzzle, or some problem in logic. What were you thinking about?”
For a moment, it seemed that she would grasp it, but then her face fell and she said, “It’s like a dream that disappears on waking. I almost had it, but now it is gone.”
In my occupation, I have seen many a forlorn face, but not many as discouraged as hers. Her expression did little to help her basic plainness of feature. Still, I felt moved to help her. I took her hand, found it cold and trembling. “You may not believe it now,” I said, “but whatever has befallen you, you have now just received a great stroke of luck.”
Her expression said she didn’t think so, and doubted my glib assurance from the cocksure feather in its cap down to the soles of its gaudy boots.
“Please believe me,” I said, “when I tell you that you have just bumped into precisely the right person.”
#
It took some convincing before she agreed to accompany me to my workroom. I was reduced to having to ask Xanthoulian, who had been hovering near the front door to his premises, to vouch for me. He assured the young woman that I was indeed a discriminator of note and that I was consulted by persons of Olkney’s highest social rank.
“Olkney?” she said, the name clearly causing no chimes of recognition to resonate through her mental chambers.
“Here,” I said, indicating the city around us. “Olkney, on Old Earth.”
She repeated the name of the planet, but it seemed from her tone that she had at least heard of our ancient world. “I’m on Old Earth?” she added, as if the location was among the last she would have expected to find herself. Then she gave her head a small but determined shake, as if the motion might cause its internal components to fall into more useful arrangements. They clearly did not, but I noticed that her look of surprise and confusion was much more charming than it had been the previous evening.
“So you are not of this world?” I asked.
She looked about her, then up at the faded sun. “I am sure I am not,” she said. Then she shook her head, albeit less forcefully, and added, “Though I don’t know why I am sure.”
“Come to my workroom,” I said. “We’ll soon have this worked out.”
Still, she balked. “Why should I trust you?” she said, stooping a little to peer into my face. “You do not have a particularly kindly look to you. You look the sort who finds the thought of other people’s misfortunes none too hard to bear.”
“You do me an injustice,” I said. “I have made a career out of helping those who have been wronged.”
“For free? Out of the shining goodness of your nature?”
“Well, no. I do have to earn my living.”
Her hands felt for pockets in the lacy gown, found nothing. “I appear to have no means to pay you.” Her eyes narrowed and her head drew back. “Or do you intend to take your fee in other currencies?”
“I assure you—” I began.
“No, you do not,” she said. “I feel anything but assured. What do you want from me? Why should I trust you?”
They were fair questions. I answered them honestly. “I do not want anything from you, other than to be of help. I am not sure why, because I do not think I like you. Yet somehow I feel an altruistic impulse.”
“Altruistic?” she said. “Is that what they call it on Old Earth?”
A counterurge was developing in me. To put some distance between myself and this unsympathetic woman, to let her get on with her problems as best she could, seemed a wise course. And yet…
“Let me propose this,” I said, looking at the stream of pedestrians that was dividing to pass on either side of the small obstacle that the woman and I made. “Stop anyone you see and ask them to give me a character reference. If that doesn’t satisfy you, I will be happy to direct you to the nearest agent of the Bureau of Scrutiny, and you can take your chances.”
“What is the Bureau of Scrutiny?”
“A large apparatus allegedly for the solving of mysteries. Especially appropriate for those who have a great deal of free time and a matching supply of patience. Also, it helps if you enjoy filling out complex and lengthy forms while a succession of functionaries require you to answer the same questions over and over again. I’m sure they have something quite like it wherever you come from.”
The suggestion did not conjure up a memory in her, but it certainly activated a deep-seated impression. “That does not sound useful,” she said.
I indicated the passing perambulators. “Then pick your referent.”
She turned and regarded the various people coming toward her, discarding the first few: a boy wearing an entertainment device that moved him to sing along to a tune only he could hear; a middle-aged man in a brocaded daysuit who, feeling her eyes upon him, responded with a leisurely and full-length inspection of her form; an elderly couple seemingly locked in argument over which owed the other an apology. Behind the squabblers came a broadly built woman of mature years who wore gabardine trousers and a high-collared wool jacket, a hat too small for the feather that bobbed above it, and a well-set-in look of general disapproval.
“Excuse me,” said the amnesiac as the woman made to pass, “but can you tell me who this man is?”
The censorious expression did not soften. “He is Henghis Hapthorn, some sort of a discriminator.”
“Has he a good reputation?”
I had the impression that we had found an interviewee who had spent mere moments dwelling on the virtues of those held in good esteem, compared to the hours devoted to the vices of persons of lesser repute. The woman struggled with the concept, cast an irritated glance my way, then said, “I’ve heard he thinks quite well of himself.”
“But he’s not a bad person?”
“I suppose he’s no worse than most.”
I interceded for myself. “And am I reckoned a capable discriminator?”
The woman sniffed and said, “Certainly the quality go running to him whenever they find themselves in the kinds of trouble that comes from possessing far too much wealth and far too little character.”
I pressed a hand to my breast. “To have won such praise,” I said, shaking my head in a show of modesty.
“Well,” said the matron, “as long as he lives he’ll always have at least one admirer.” With that, she swept on. If she had had a wake, we would have been left bobbing in it.
“Will that do?” I said.
The red-haired woman showed me distrust contending with reluctant acceptance until the latter conquered, though only just. “I suppose,” she said.
I had my assistant stop a passing jitney. It touched down, took us aboard, and lifted off again. The young woman looked out at the cityscape of Olkney, its towers and cupolas, its tall, terraced houses beneath their steeply canted roofs, its parks and tree-shaded avenues, and above it all the steep slopes of the Devenish Range topped by the vast palace of the Archon.
“Does none of it call up any associations?” I asked her.
“None,” she said.
“What about before we collided? Where were you coming from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Integrator,” I said, “replay your surveillance records and let us see where she came from.”
My assistant’s screen appeared before us on the forward wall of the vehicle, showing the woman walking toward me. Then the flow of the images reversed and she was moving backward. She backstepped across Vodel Close to the opposite side of the cul-de-sac, her gaze downcast to the pavement before her, wearing that look of concentration I had noticed before. I had the integrator pause the sequence.
“You don’t remember what you were thinking of at that moment?” I said.
She strove to remember, but couldn’t.
“You did seem to be thinking hard about something.”
“Yes, I did, didn’t I.”
I turned my head away, as if to examine the familiar scene and whispered a word too quietly for her to hear. My assistant, responding to my coded command, said, so that only I could hear, “She is telling the truth. I detect a general anxiety, but no indications of extra stress when she answers your questions. Also, she has not eaten today although that may be because she has only recently woken from sleep.”
It also informed me that she carried no concealed weapons or communications devices, was not pregnant, and that she was a natural redhead. At that point, I signaled that I had heard enough for the moment. We were, in any case, about to land on the stage above my lodgings. Moments later, we descended into my workroom where I waved her to a chair and began the business of finding out who she was and where she came from.
My assistant resumed its report, but I interrupted to say, “Out loud, for the benefit of the client.”
Its voice spoke from the air. “There are no structural alterations to her neural systems that I can detect. The amnesia is therefore not a result of organic processes.”
To the woman I said, “That is a good sign. Brains are notoriously difficult to rebuild.” To my assistant, I said, “Is the cause suggestive?”
“Not likely, unless accompanied by chemical suppressants.”
“And were suppressants involved?”
“There are indications,” it said. “I detect the aftereffects of paralethe, but there are other signatures I do not recognize.”
“A cocktail?”
“Almost certainly. Three, perhaps four, interacting ingredients.”
“Reversible?”
“Directly? Yes, but we would need to know precisely the different ingredients and their proportions. Indirectly? Yes, though the process would take time and effort.”
I summarized for the woman’s benefit. “Someone, not likely yourself, has given you a powerful amnesiafacient in the form of three or four substances that have combined to block your awareness from your own memories. We cannot reliably concoct an antidote without knowing just what was administered.”
Her face showed confusion, anxiety, anger. Not despair, which I took as a good sign. I felt an unusually strong wave of sympathy pass through me and was moved to reassure her. I took her rough hand in mine, but she pulled it away.
“The effects are reversible, however,” I went on. “If you apply yourself to the mental work of recovering what has been lost, and I apply myself to providing you with the tools, you will overcome what has been done to you.”
She quited. “I will know who I am and where I come from?”
“You will. I promise it.”
She squared up to the situation. Whatever else she had been, she was no frail bloom. “Then let us begin.”
My assistant had already taken her measurements and would be able to pick her out of a crowd of millions. It began to search recent images and other data captured by the myriad of percepts scattered across Olkney, starting with those in the areas where we already knew she had been. Most of the systems it consulted were accessible upon request; those that would not give up their information freely could be subverted by subtle techniques I had built into my integrator when I had designed and assembled it.
Its screen appeared, separated into several panels. I saw images of the amnesiac in The Old Circular, and we worked backward until we caught her entering the plaza from an alley that ran behind a row of conjoined houses. But now no new images of her appeared.
“Are there no percepts in the alley?” I said.
“There are, but they were disabled at the time the subject was in the alley.”
“Disabled by whom?”
My assistant showed me three youths making their way down the narrow lane. As they approached each sensory pick-up, one or another of them would aim a tube and the image would go dark. “The cuffs on their right sleeves are turned back to show a lining of green and yellow plaid,” the integrator said.
“The Big Circle gang,” I said. “That was Hak Binram’s starting point, back when he was just a baby monster.”
“What are you talking about?” the young woman asked.
“Nothing to do with you, I’m sure,” I said, but I nudged my assistant again. It told me, surreptitiously, that neither the name of Binram nor of the youth gang in which he had begun his criminal career had caused any flutterings in her autonomic systems. “It seems,” I continued, “that last night you entered the square through an alley that had been blindfolded by the criminal elements I was there to meet. We do not have a record of how you came to be in that alley.”
She looked at me with growing alarm. “Why would you meet with criminals?” she said.
I hastened to assure her that discriminators could associate with criminals without contamination. Then I had my integrator look for more signs of her before she had entered the alley. None appeared.
“She may have been dropped off there from a closed and clouded vehicle,” I said. “Or she may have been in one of the houses that back onto the lane.”
“A stream of vehicles passed the far end of the alley during the time the percepts were deactivated. As well, some of the houses have enclosed landing bays. She might have been in one of those premises for any length of time.”
Not for the first time, I wished I still had a capacity for intuition. Reason could not tell me if there was any relationship between the blinding of the alley and her appearance there.
“What about this afternoon in Vodel Close? Where was she before we met?”
This time there was more information. I saw images of her walking along Eckhevery Row and, before that, across Drusibal Square. The earliest record showed her entering the square from Ponthos Parade. “Before that,” said the integrator, “there is nothing.”
“That cannot be,” I said. “Unless she suddenly appeared on Ponthos out of thin air.” A line of deep cold suddenly ran up and down my spine. I looked from the screen to where the young woman sat in apparent innocence and ignorance. Could she have appeared in Olkney the way the messenger bee had been manifested on my worktable? If so, logic led me to several linked conclusions, each one of them bad and each leading to a worse.
Conclusion one: the young woman had been brought to the streets of Olkney by magic. Conclusion two: our meeting twice was not a meaningless coincidence, because under the “like-affects-like” rationale of sympathetic association, all coincidences were meaningful. Conclusion three: since magic was based on the exercise of will, nothing important ever “just happened”—it was caused to happen. Conclusion four: whoever had the will and the knowledge to cause an entire human being to appear in a place she had never been, and to simultaneously scrub from her mind all knowledge of who she was, was a powerful wielder of the magical arts.
The fifth conclusion was the worst: somewhere, a powerful practitioner of sympathetic magic, far more powerful than Osk Rievor, had taken an interest in me; I had several times found myself on the receiving end of such interest from such people, and each occasion had brought me pain, involuntary confinement, and the prospects of remarkably unpleasant exits from this life that I had so recently described as worthy to be cherished and celebrated.
I resisted the morbid fear that sought to wrap me in its chilly grip. Logically, I had no reason to suspect magic. There were any number of ways to move people around without their being seen. The criminal subculture knew them all, and even at the best of times I was never far from the borders of the halfworld. Before I inferred a role for sympathetic association, I should exhaust all rational explanations. “Check the spaceport,” I said. “She has come from offworld.”
“I have already done so,” my assistant said. “She did not arrive on a liner or on any private craft that docked where the port’s percepts could register her.”
Of course, a spaceship could touch down almost anywhere on the planet, and the vast majority of the Old Earth’s surface was unscanned. “Hmm,” I said.
“What has happened to me?” said the young woman.
“It would be premature to say,” I said. “But I assure you there is no reason to assume the worst, or even the mildly unpleasant.”
Beneath its dabs of freckles and disordered mass of fiery hair her face was forlorn, yet the more I looked at its combination of unattractive features the more I felt sympathy for her plight. She said, “You told me you were precisely the right person for me to bump into.”
“I still maintain it.”
“Yet you are not able to tell me anything.”
“I am the foremost freelance discriminator on the planet,” I said. “Nor do I scruple to say that I am more accomplished than leading discriminators on many of the Grand Foundational Domains among the Ten Thousand Worlds. If anyone can solve your mystery, it is I.”
She blinked at me. “This is your profession,” she said. “I am not sure that I can pay you. For all I know, I am a pauper.”
I assumed a posture that said such matters were of no concern. “We can discuss that when we know more about your situation.”
“We should discuss it now,” she said. Her hands clasped each other in a constantly shifting grip. “I realize that I will be obligated to you and I am sure I will do what I can to repay you.” Now she looked directly into my eyes. “But that doesn’t mean I will do anything, nor is the obligation open-ended.”
I was well launched upon a gracious response when my assistant spoke quietly in my ear. “We should discuss this case privately,” it said.
I replied in the same mode, telling it to wait, and continued to reassure the young woman. I was experiencing a sense of myself as strong and capable, a champion of the weak and helpless. It was not the first time such a self-image had impressed itself upon me—I was, after all, the foremost freelance discriminator on Old Earth, and had righted many a wrong, though usually for a comfortable fee. Given the dark shadows that now hung over my future, it was refreshing to feel the wind of a noble purpose at my back.
“We must talk,” my assistant said again.
But I was not inclined to talk. There was a code among discriminators. Though we often dealt with the unjust, we would not do an injustice to any. Clients came to us when they were in trouble—indeed, often in desperate straits. We did what we could to help, and collected our fees. Sometimes, we did what we could, and forwent any recompense, simply because there were times when one had to defend the right. I had not pursued such a case in some time; perhaps some part of me had decided that it was time to do so now.
Feeling suitably ennobled, I looked out the window at Shiplien Way and saw a long, black ground vehicle, with green fairings and sponsons and official crests, stopping before my door. Its hatch opened and out stepped a tall man in a uniform of the same colors as his conveyance. I recognized him at once from the stooped shoulders and the drooping face set in an expression that indicated he had spent a lifetime hearing unwelcome news. He closed the car’s hatch, then stood looking up at me looking down at him. The corners of his mouth turned toward his protruding chin and he reflexively pulled at his already pendulous nose as if desiring to make it droop even lower over his broad upper lip. Then he lowered his gaze to my door and stepped toward it.
“Colonel-Investigator Brustram Warhanny wishes to enter,” said the door’s who’s-there.
“Let him,” I said. I realized that the imminent approach of one of the Archonate Bureau of Scrutiny’s senior criminal investigators had tumbled me down from the lofty heights of altruism into more prosaic territory. I executed a gesture of formal, though restrained, welcome at the balding scroot clumping up the stairs into my workroom.
“How may I help you?” I said.
He performed the nose tug again, then turned his head from side to side as he took in the workroom. His lugubrious gaze lingered on the young woman before he made the gestures that good manners called for. He looked to me as if expecting an introduction, but when I let the issue lapse unresolved, he moved on.
“I understand,” he said, “that you have recently had dealings with Irslan Chonder.”
When the Bureau of Scrutiny came calling, I had often found that the least response is the best. I said nothing, but did so in a way that invited him to continue.
“I further understand,” he went on, “that you also have had dealings with Massim Shar and Hak Binram.” He regarded me closely, as I continued to stand mute. “Or at least with persons known to be associated with them.”
“You will also understand that I was on a case,” I said. “I contravened no laws. My involvement is at an end.”
His was not a face made for smiles, but now it delivered its version of a faint one. “You might want to look into that,” he said.
The remark was clearly meant to spur me to ask a question. I let the opportunity go by.
He reset his mouth into its established frown and said, “I have heard that Chonder has imported some hired bravos from offworld.” As he spoke he opened a memorizer and consulted it. “Operatives of the Hand Organization on the world Fasserade.”
At this news I raised an eyebrow.
“I have also heard that Chonder means to use these hirelings to express his unhappiness over some piece of business he conducted”—he paused to correct himself—“or had conducted for him, with the aforesaid Shar and Binram.”
“That would be unfortunate,” I said. “Without breaching a client’s confidence, I can assure you that I would not recommend that he do so. Indeed, I would strongly advise the opposite.”
“Your advice apparently makes little headway with Chonder.”
“One does,” I said, “what one can. One can do no more.”
Warhanny weighed this observation no more than it deserved, but shifted his footing in preparation to change the subject. “There is also the matter of Tesko Tabanooch,” he said.
Again, I said nothing. Tabanooch had been a freelance operative whom I had occasionally hired, on an as-required basis, to perform small subsidiary tasks around the edges of discriminations. His last assignment had been for the benefit of Osk Rievor: to attend an auction at the selling of an estate. The deceased, Blik Arlem, had been a collector of magical paraphernalia, most of it counterfeit or of dubious worth, in which my alter ego had been interested. A mysterious woman, going under the name of Madame Oole, had also attended the sale, and had purchased an ancient item of jewelry known as a summoning ring. She had subsequently disappeared, it was believed offworld, leaving behind the corpse of Tesko Tabanooch, with whom it seemed she had been living. The Bureau of Scrutiny had labeled the man’s death as “of inexact circumstances,” meaning that foul play was suspected but not yet provable.
“Is there new information?” I asked, after Warhanny had let the silence prolong itself.
“Only that, by a process of elimination, we have established that this Madame Oole was definitely from offworld. We have established that she came to Old Earth from Anderthon, traveling on her own ship, and that she subsequently returned there.”
“Indeed?” I said. “But I take it you do not believe that she remained there long.” Because of its relative position to other worlds in our reach of The Spray, Anderthon was a hub world; several dozen passenger and freight lines used its orbiting terminals as transfer and transshipment points. The local authority took no interest in who came and went, nor what they did there, providing they provoked no problems for the world’s lucrative role as a trading center. While there, the elusive and probably murderous woman could have easily shed her Madame Oole identity for another name and description; then, newly reminted, she could have gone anywhere.
“I wondered,” Warhanny said, “if you had any further information concerning her that might assist us in narrowing the search.”
I was about to answer in the negative, but he held up a large hand to forestall me. “I also wanted to be sure,” he continued, “that you were not interfering in a case that remains open at the Bureau.”
With his last remark, his drooping eyes turned toward the young woman seated nearby who had been following our conversation with innocent attention. I did not need my missing intuition to see that the scroot had noted the offworld cut of her clothing and now, like a tightrope walker extending a foot, was testing to see if there was any connection between her and the Tabanooch business.
I took the unusual step of making myself entirely clear to an officer of the Bureau of Scrutiny. “Tesko Tabanooch,” I said, “was an associate whom I employed infrequently for minor but necessary tasks. I do not know what his connection to this Madame Oole might have been, but I can state categorically that she was not part of any discrimination in which I am or have been engaged, now or at any time in the past.”
Again he looked from me to the young woman. For a moment, I was tempted to reveal her plight to the Colonel-Investigator. She was, after all, not a paying client but only an unfortunate—albeit a strangely affecting unfortunate—whom I had encountered by chance. The Bureau of Scrutiny could make inquiries on her behalf and, though its machinery operated with slow deliberation, the scroots more often than not produced a credible result. But while their cogs ponderously turned, she would doubtless have to be housed in some dismal facility intended for suspected malefactors waiting for their misdeeds to catch up to them. To my knowledge, she had done nothing to deserve such treatment, and so I asked Brustram Warhanny if he had any further business with me, as I had a case to pursue.
“No,” he said, and turned to leave. But before he had descended more than a step or two, he turned back and fixed me with that meant-to-be-piercing glare that fledgling scroots must study at the Bureau Academy and said, “If Irslan Chonder, for reasons I do not officially understand, is intent on inviting Massim Shar and Hak Binram to a private dance on the public thoroughfares of Olkney, he will find that it will be the Bureau that calls the final tune.”
“Indeed,” I said, “I am sure of it.”
“So you might want to keep your own dance card clear.”
Again, I took pains to be clear. “I am not involved in their affairs.”
“You might find it advisable,” he said, still holding my gaze, “to make sure that your lack of involvement is universally understood.”
“Are you saying that it is not?” I said.
This time, it was Brustram Warhanny who opted for silence, his only answer a slight cocking of his elongated head that invited me to find out for myself. Then he thumped down the stairs and out the door, leaving me so immersed in thought that the young woman had to speak twice to me before I responded.
“Was that man threatening you?” she said.
“He is a policeman,” I said. “They cannot help it.” I spread my hands in an assuring way. “It is nothing to be worried about.”
But of course it was. If Irslan Chonder had given Massim Shar and Hak Binram cause to believe that I had overstepped the bounds of a discriminator’s neutrality to join in the magnate’s misguided vendetta against them, it was a misapprehension that needed to be cleared up immediately. I spoke to my assistant. “Plumb the depths and see what we know of Shar and Binram’s movements and where they are now.”
The integrator did so, reporting back that neither had shown his face all day, not even in those places where their ranks in the halfworld informally required that they put in appearances, to acknowledge the greetings of lesser lights and to pay their respects to villains who stood on higher rungs. “They have gone sublithic,” it said, using the Olkney thieves’ cant for the occasions when malefactors found it prudent to choose a suitable metaphorical rock under which to crawl, there to remain until some temporary trouble had passed harmlessly over their heads and, with any luck, over the horizon.
“We had better send out the bees,” I said.
“What about Osk Rievor’s request?”
“It must wait.”
“You might benefit from his insight.”
“I have already benefited from it,” I said. “He warned me that I was about to have an encounter that could have repercussions. I have had the encounter, with Massim Shar’s cat’s-paw, and the repercussions have begun to roll. Now I need the bees to locate Shar’s and Binram’s operatives. Get them up and out, and while you’re doing that, connect me with Irslan Chonder.”
A buzzing filled the workroom, provoking a small squeak of surprise from my foundling. I turned to her and saw that she had half-risen from her chair as the squadron of surveillance drones took flight. Now, as they circled the room just below ceiling height, she was settling back down.
I said, “Forgive me for startling you. A pressing matter has arisen and I need to—”
“Irslan Chonder,” said my assistant, and I turned to see the heavy face regarding me, with an expression of grim amusement, from the hovering screen. I had no doubt that that was the only kind of amusement of which my erstwhile client was capable. I allowed for no niceties. “What have you done?” I said.
His hard mouth and heavy brows made an attempt at nonchalance. “Pursued my interest,” he said.
“At the expense of mine.”
His thick shoulders briefly lifted and settled. “I invited you to participate. It would have been to your advantage.”
“Doubtful,” I said. “I like to choose my enemies with care. Now I may have to defend myself from enemies you have made for me.”
Again the minimal rise and fall that expressed the absence of empathy. “I am busy at the moment.”
“Not as busy as I expect to be,” I said. “At least confirm my analysis: you have let it be known, as if unwittingly, that I am acting as your locator for Shar.”
“And Binram,” he said. “I am not given to half-measures.”
“You wish to bring them out after me, making me the bait for some trap you mean to spring.”
“I remind you,” he said, “that I offered to make you an active partner in the operation. It was you who chose the passive role.”
“And it was you who chose to breach my neutrality. I will not forget it.”
His lips pursed and his eyes rounded in a show of mock fear. “Chills dance up and down my spine,” he said. He made a brusque gesture and the connection was broken.
I restrained my rising anger. It was a luxury that I would have to defer. The bees were swirling around a gap at the top of the window, ready to scatter across the city. “Make sure plenty of them patrol the nearby streets and rooftops,” I told the integrator. “Shar and Binram have had ample time to make their arrangements.”
“Done,” said my assistant, “and the other defenses are at full alert.”
The young woman’s earlier alarm was nothing to the anxiety she was now displaying. “What have you brought me into?” she said, getting to her feet and casting her eyes about the workroom as if in search of an exit, wringing her long-fingered hands. Few women’s faces are at their best when registering rising fear, and hers was far from beautiful even when at rest, yet there was something compelling about her, some elusive quality that made me want to protect her.
“There is nothing to fear,” I said. “A former client has clumsily involved me in a matter that ought to be none of my business. I will soon have it straightened out.”
“I think I should go,” she said.
“Too late,” I said. “My lodgings are bound to be under observation. Anyone who leaves here would have to be—” I sought for the least alarming phrase “—looked at. You are much safer here.”
“I am not used to this sort of thing,” she said, a tremor in her voice.
Thinking that the stress she was presently under might break through whatever barrier denied her memories to her, I took the opportunity say, “And what sort of things are you used to?”
It seemed as if recollection was standing at the borders of her awareness, but then it stepped back into the darkness. She shook her head, the coppery curls swaying heavily like underwater plants troubled by the tide. “No,” she said. “It was almost there, but then it was gone again.”
“Still,” I said, “good news. You can feel that your past is in there somewhere. Then it just becomes a matter of reconnecting you to it.”
She sat again, her face bleak. “I am stranded among strangers on a strange world, and am even a stranger to myself.”
I would have offered her more reassurance but my assistant said, “There are reports.”
I motioned to the young woman, a gesture that urged patience while promising that the need for it would be brief, then said, “Let us hear them.”
“The house is under observation from front and rear, and a nondescript aircar circles the block at no great height.”
“How many watchers?”
“More than twenty. They appear to be divided into distinct groups.”
“That is a lot,” I said. “I would assume that Shar and Binram have sent some of their soldiers to snatch me up and take me somewhere for questioning. Meanwhile, Chonder’s Hand hirelings will be lurking and watching, intending to follow us to wherever the first batch takes me. But still, that is a lot.”
“Have you considered,” said my assistant, “that Shar may see you as an unnecessary complication and has decided to have you removed from the board before the main play opens?”
“There is that possibility.” I attempted to calculate the probabilities, but I was not familiar enough with the rising crime lord’s style to make an accurate prediction. Again, I wished for my old insight, but it was far away and busy pursuing its own peculiar agenda. Instead, I fell back on my capacious knowledge of criminal procedures. I knew that a quarry who was barricaded behind a secure door, with who knew what armament, was a more dangerous proposition than someone who could be coaxed outside and swarmed. Massim Shar’s goons would want to avoid coming through a door to get me, but they wouldn’t want to wait around for me to saunter out in my own good time, then have to improvise.
As if on cue, the street door’s who’s-there said, “A messenger from The Pot of Fire has arrived. Master Jho-su has impulsively sent you a tray of appetizers and the request that you try them and favor him with your impressions.”
“How convenient,” I said. “And precisely the kind of impromptu situation to which I could be expected to respond eagerly. Massim Shar shows talent.”
“Indeed,” said my assistant. “The messenger is an actual employee of The Pot of Fire, though from his respiration and heart rates, we might infer that he is of a highly nervous disposition. The three persons concealed in the ground car that brought him show only focused readiness for action.”
“Very well,” I said, “let us roll the pebble and get the avalanche on its way.” I told the who’s-there to say that I would be right down. I guided the anonymous young woman to a secret inner room. “It is a redoubt I had built for emergencies,” I informed her, and showed her how to seal herself in so that not even the heavy troopers of Hemistor’s fabled Grand Militia could have forced entry.
I returned to my workroom, gave instructions, then descended the stairs to the street door. I swung wide the portal, my face showing a refined and happy expectation. The messenger was a frail youth in the soiled garb of a table cleaner. I supposed they had snatched him as he took the eatery’s refuse out into the disposal area. Affecting to ignore his pale and trembling manner, I stood in the doorway and said, “Where is the tray?”
He gestured with a shaking hand toward the car, a low-slung motilator with darkened windows and no interior lighting. Its opened rear hatch gaped like the maw of some unfed beast grown surly with hunger.
“Ah,” I said, “of course.”
I stepped across my doorstep, out into the afternoon sunlight, already tending toward burnt umber as the day moved toward evening. The youth in the soiled smock stepped to the side, saving me the trouble of having to push him out of the way as I now ducked back inside my door while its defenses emitted a disorienting blast of sound and sprayed a jet of disabler in the direction of the ground car’s open hatch.
Massim Shar’s soldiers were worth whatever he was paying them. Despite being doused in the foul-smelling liquid, the two who had been waiting inside the vehicle leaped out and fought against the disabler’s effects, throwing themselves at my retreating form even as they lost control over their spasmodically jerking limbs. The third ambusher, who had been crouched out of sight in front of the motilator, came up and out of hiding with the verve of a champion sprinter and made it to my door just in time to bounce off it as the portal snapped closed.
A second ground car now raced up the street and screeched to a halt behind the first one, while a third vehicle hurtled toward it from the opposite direction, slewing sideways at the last moment to block the street. The aircar that had been circling appeared in the air above the scene, hovering menacingly.
The doors of the two newly arrived ground cars sprang open and, as I watched the action on the who’s-there’s screen, disgorged a half-dozen men and women, all of them fit and superbly coordinated and uniformly clad in dark leather, who efficiently disarmed the three goons and hustled them into the aircar which descended only long enough to receive the captives, then lifted off again.
So far, it had gone as I had expected. Shar’s thugs had made their move and I had thwarted them. Then, seeing the snatch gone wrong, the mercenaries Chonder had hired from the Hand Organization had snatched up Shar’s people, planning to take them somewhere quiet where they could be encouraged to reveal what they knew of their patron’s whereabouts.
As the nondescript aircar rose toward the rooftops and the two ground vehicles full of Hand operatives made to move off, the third act opened: above the aircar appeared an armed volante in the green-on-black colors of the Bureau of Scrutiny; a boxy carry-all with the Bureau crest on its doors arrived to block the street; each of the several pedestrians who had been loitering or strolling on Shiplien Way now produced a shocker in one hand and flashed a scroot plaque in the other; and with a professional dispatch that the Hand operatives might have applauded, under other circumstances, both sets of kidnapers were rendered harmless, pushed indiscriminately together into the carry-all, and taken away.
The three ground vehicles and the Hand’s aircar, ordered to report to the Bureau’s impound area, left the scene. I opened my door onto the restored calm of Shiplien Way just in time to see a Bureau command car alight where the action had taken place. I was not surprised to find myself once again under the lugubrious eye of Colonel-Investigator Brustram Warhanny.
I executed a formal gesture of gratitude and said, “I thank you for the warning.”
“I do not recall issuing a warning,” he said. “Alerting a civilian to an impending Bureau operation would contravene regulations. It must have been your legendary insight into the criminal mind that prompted you to take precautions.”
“Indeed,” I said, “I suppose it must.”
Warhanny gestured to an agent-ordinary, a young woman who stood nearby with a firm grip on the arm of the table-wiper from The Pot of Fire. The fellow, still pale and having acquired what looked to be a permanent expression of astonishment, was nudged into the command car. The senior scroot made to leave, but then turned back to me. “This will not end here,” he said.
“No,” I said, “it won’t. There are plenty more where those came from. On both sides.”
“It has also become an open case.”
I inclined my head in acknowledgement. The Bureau had a short, sharp way with discriminators who tracked messy footprints through their open files.
The Colonel-Investigator broached a new subject. “I hear you now own a space yacht.”
“A grateful client,” I said.
“It must allow you to find out-of-the way corners, places where you might pitch up for a little time.”
“How little?” I said. Much of my time lately had been taken up, at small profit, in dealing with the repercussions of the impending change of the ages. Acquiring the Gallivant had made a substantial contribution to my net worth, but owning a private spaceship made me liable to a slew of new expenses without any countervailing sources of income. Of course, I could always offer the yacht for charter, but on the single occasion when I had raised that possibility with the vessel’s integrator, the idea had not been warmly received. The integrator had originally been installed in a much larger and grander spacecraft; it had adjusted, it had informed me, to its new station—but there were limits.
“You would be wise to give it some weeks.”
I sighed. Provisioning and operating the Gallivant for a lengthy cruise, not to mention landing and berthage fees on foreign worlds, would eat up the entire fee Chonder had paid me. On the other hand, there was only so much earning that I could do while barricaded in my lodgings; a discriminator who could not leave his rooms might thrive in fiction; in reality, much of the work required one’s presence on the streets.
“I will pack a few necessities,” I said.