The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

  “I was preoccupied,” she said defensively.

  “Exactly. You’ve been fretting around trying to track down Gaston, causing all kinds of disturbances to boil up at the Border and into Pheyarcet and Phesaotois—unneighborly of you, stirring up their Eddies and jittering their Roads.” He lifted an eyebrow at her. “Right? You’ve let quite a number of uglies slip past you, in fact. Careless of you. It took a dragon to catch your attention.”

  I opened my mouth and shut it. How could he know about that? He hadn’t been here. Had Dewar been behind the plague of monsters visited on us? Had he sent Gemnamnon? All in an effort to get a rise out of his not-dead-but-transfigured sister? I began to give weight to Gaston’s assessment of him: a little crazier than he seemed.

  “Yes, but,” Freia replied, still defensively, “I was worried about you too. We talked about this last year. I’ve been doing better since.”

  “You still don’t like it, do you,” he said gently.

  No answer. Freia hugged herself, a misleadingly natural gesture, and almost hung her head.

  “But,” she began again, and stopped.

  Thiorn’s head was tipped again, her half-closed eyes on Dewar. “So what does this have to do with our little problem,” she prompted him.

  He flicked his left eyebrow up and down and returned his attention to her. “It is possible that she can be freed from the Spring. It is not as simple as her entrapment—there is a sorcerous procedure I’ve been working on which must accompany the, uh, sacrifice. But to get her soul out, there must be someplace to put her. Providing that is actually the easier of the two parts.”

  “A body,” Thiorn said. “I see—”

  “You idiot,” Freia said. “You perfect idiot!” A fountain of hissing, tiny droplets burst up near us and fell back, each glowing a different red through a ruddy spectrum.

  Dewar looked at her, eyebrows raised now. “It’s possible!” he said, holding up a hand. “I’ve been working on it, and I’ve already succeeded—”

  My breathing stuck. Ulrike. Was she Dewar’s creature, then? Of course! That would explain her blankness; she wasn’t meant to be real. He and Gaston, working together to create and nurture—

  “Fool! What have you done?” Freia interrupted his words and my thoughts. The Spring boomed tidally from side to side. The oscillation made me queasy.

  “What have I done? What do you mean?”

  Freia seethed more restrainedly. “That information is obsolete! The Tamackay record!”

  Thiorn looked surprised. “How so?”

  “I spliced a series of mitochondrial genes into myself,” she said.

  “How?” Thiorn asked, still surprised.

  “I didn’t work with the Tamackay. You were busy relocating after the abdication and the facilities were disrupted and overburdened.”

  Thiorn said, “Oh! Was that why you visited?”

  “Yes. I went on to another place with the right kind of knowledge.”

  Dewar opened his mouth and closed it. “Oh.”

  “Dear fool,” she said, and the Spring calmed around her and left them staring, a bit helplessly, at one another.

  Dewar was crestfallen. His lovely plan, spoilt …

  “You cannot use those data,” Freia said, shaking her head. “Remember I told you I was experimenting on myself, trying to … to make myself … stronger. I was aging … I succeeded. If you gave me a body based on the old sequences,” she looked weary, “I’d have to go through it all again.”

  “Oh,” he said, and sat down heavily on the Botanical Gardens bench, shoulders slumped.

  “But Ulrike’s already …” I said, and wasn’t sure what I thought.

  “What?” Dewar asked dully.

  “Ulrike,” I said. “Isn’t she—”

  “Ulrike?” my mother repeated, puzzled.

  “Who?” Dewar asked, and he twisted to look at me. “Oh, your sister,” he added indifferently. “What about her?”

  We stared at one another. “I thought she was … Couldn’t you just …” I said, nonplussed by his reaction.

  “Gwydion!” Freia said, her voice echoing through all the darkness and going through my head like a cold wire.

  Dewar said then, “Oh. Oh, hm.” But his expression was not particularly disapproving. “Ulrike,” he repeated. “You thought she was my work? A construct?”

  “Um.”

  “I’m flattered,” he decided, “and it’s certainly an old practice to trade one life for another that way …” His voice trailed away. He swallowed.

  “Don’t. You. Dare,” Freia rumbled from within the bubble of force. The Spring became a globular eruption of incandescent gold, concealing her; we all turned away, bright-edged shadows cutting the dark stone into silhouettes.

  “No, no, naturally not,” Dewar said hastily, turning back to her, shading his eyes and gesturing. “Please stop doing that; you’re going to give us radiation poisoning.” Despite the joke, he looked a bit pale and ill.

  The Spring, with an air of insulted outrage, whumped as its unnatural illumination dimmed and calmed. It still shone, but less sunlike. Freia’s image shimmered only faintly over it.

  I looked away again, chagrined. Now that I looked at it here, in context, it did seem like madness to have entertained the idea that Ulrike was expendable for the sake of perpetuating Mother. I wished I had not said anything. It was a shameful thought to own.

  “This puts a different, and rather tragicomic, face on things,” Thiorn remarked, and sat down. My uncle snorted softly. “You are a well-meaning bunch of amateurs,” she added, without condescension.

  She produced a long, slender black pipe and filled it with a reddish powder from an ornate little black bottle, then lit it and smoked reflectively. Dewar ran his hands over his face and then rummaged a flat black case of cigarette-papers and a pouch of something green and dried out of his bag. He rolled a slender smoke. Thiorn offered him a light and he accepted.

  “See, Freia, we need you,” Dewar said after a few minutes, still a little weakly. “Such mischief children get into without supervision.”

  I turned and nearly hit him, stopping myself in time. Slowly I unclenched my fist. I was upset, shaking and angry; it was a child’s rage, striking at someone else when my anger was at myself.

  “It’s all right,” whispered something just at my ear, something Dewar and Thiorn plainly could not hear. “I understand,” it added, Freia’s voice very small.

  I exhaled slowly. Across the Spring, Freia looked at me and smiled a little, sad smile that my uncle and our guest didn’t see, as they were looking at one another. I smiled a little bit back, forgiven and ashamed. If Ulrike had not been so afraid of the Spring … It did not bear thinking of.

  Again that long-familiar voice whispered at my ear. “Don’t worry about it.” A warm nothing touched my hand for a moment and vanished.

  With a sigh, I leaned on the column behind the bench and took out my own pipe. The smoke rose up beyond the sphere of lantern-light into the vaulted dark.

  Freia turned half-away, folding her arms again, looking down into the Spring to all appearances.

  “So you can’t get out without a host body to receive you,” Thiorn said finally.

  “Correct,” Dewar replied for his sister. “According to Panurgus, someone car jump in the Spring with appropriate preliminaries and be immolated on her behalf, leaving her a body, and dying—really dying.”

  “There are surely better methods.” Thiorn blew a smoke ring.

  Dewar studied her, flicked an eyebrow, and said nothing.

  “I myself am an example of a stored personality reincarnated,” she pointed out. “Moreover, in my case I have to separate myself from a collective identity, a group mind if you will, to be reincarnated as me.”

  “Interesting,” he said.

  Another smoke ring. “Crude, crude, crude,” she said finally. “There’s a couple of ways I can see—”

  “Wait a minute. What are you talkin
g about?” Freia interrupted anxiously.

  “This is an fascinating problem,” Thiorn said. “Your brother picked the right time to rob us. I’m a sympathetic cop.” She smiled crookedly.

  Freia spread her hands and shook her head. “I have to stay here.”

  Thiorn leaned forward and jabbed the stem of her pipe at Freia’s image. “No, you don’t. For one thing, it was involuntary, and involuntary personality transfer is rape. For another, you’re doing—according to Dewar who was telling the truth, or most of it—you’re doing a crummy job. Better to leave it. For a third, you yourself would never support a society, a world structure, that relies on the misery and enslavement of one person to secure the happiness and safety of the rest.” She leaned back. “This Panurgus character is your source of information?”

  “Yes—”

  “Don’t trust him. He sounds like he has an interest in keeping you here. He also sounds like he doesn’t understand the first thing about personality integrity and transfer procedures, never mind fundamental morality and human decency.”

  This sounded just like the beginning of one of Mother’s classic anti-Landuc, anti-Noroison tirades. I hid my smile.

  “Yow.” Dewar smiled. “So you think we can do it.”

  “We? We who?” She looked him over. “I’m here to kill you, buster. Stealing personal genetic information is death. Clearly you should have talked to Freia about this first. Double rape is worse than single rape.”

  He drew back. Ariel hissed and a whirlwind sprang up, stirring our hair and clothing. I felt a flow of power to them. An anxious expression came over Freia’s face and she started to say something, lifting a hand.

  “But, as I said,” Thiorn went on, “I’m a sympathetic cop. There’s ways around this. And I’m not going to do anything until we see what Freia wants to do. As the offended party, she has a say. If she were really dead it would be for me to decide on the spot.”

  “He meant well,” Freia said softly. “And he got the wrong information anyway.”

  “So where is the correct information?” Dewar asked.

  She crossed her arms again and looked down, shaking her head.

  “Freia, this is an utterly unnatural state for you,” Thiorn said, getting up and approaching the Spring. “I know you, and I can read you now, easily, and you’re thinking about that very agreeable man you wed, Gaston, and your family, and a lot of things you miss, still, even though you think you shouldn’t.” She pointed her pipestem at Freia. “Dare to contradict me. I can think of a number of occasions when you’ve tried to place what you thought was duty before self-interest and been wrong.”

  “Freia is never wrong,” Dewar grumbled, lighting another cigarette off his third.

  “Sure she is. She’s rot contradicting me, is she?”

  She wasn’t. She had turned away.

  “For example, wasn’t I right about that time with Herron on Sthanis?” pursued Thiorn, grinning quickly.

  Freia sighed. “You two,” she said, her back still turned. “This isn’t fair. I know what Gaston would say if he knew,” she added in an undertone.

  “He doesn’t?” Thiorn asked, her voice rising. “Why not? Where is he?”

  The Spring receded, light fading, and Freia was only dimly visible in the darkness over it. “I don’t know,” said she softly to the other side of the Catacombs. “Somewhere in Pheyarcet.”

  “I can find him,” Dewar said, smiling.

  “Don’t,” Freia replied, shaking her head, her voice almost inaudible.

  “Why not?” Dewar asked, in the gentle tone of someone reasoning with a small child.

  She shook her head again. “He went away,” she said, “I suppose he had a reason, and if he wanted to come back he would have done. He sent Ulrike alone … Find him for yourself if you wish, but not for me.”

  “He’d come right back if he knew. I could find him and tell him,” Dewar suggested in the same tone.

  “No. Too many people know already.”

  “Who knows?” Thiorn asked.

  “Everyone who knows is right here, although Prospero may suspect something or know something he has not spoken of,” I said.

  They glanced back at me, Thiorn spinning quickly around.

  “Gwydion, I’d forgotten you,” Thiorn said. “You’re quiet. What do you think? You’re nominally in charge of this puddle of power.”

  “It worked perfectly without Mother. If she can be extricated without damaging it, I will render what assistance I may.”

  Thiorn turned back to Freia. “So Gaston doesn’t know. I bet he’d say, get you out. There isn’t a man alive who’d prefer his wife a martyred ghost given a choice of having her living and breathing beside him instead.”

  Dewar ducked his head, grinning quickly.

  Freia turned back to us, shaking her head. “Papa wouldn’t—”

  “To hell with him!” her brother cut her off, jumping up, gesturing sharply. “Have you talked to him yourself? Let him know? Or has he tried to talk to you?”

  “N-no,” she admitted.

  “It’s not for him to approve or disapprove anything you do,” Dewar said. “Leave him out of this; you know as well as I how he is, how he’s always been. He’d say No, and I say you, your desires and your needs, should be considered first. Argylle was well enough with the Spring in its natural state! No harm can come of returning to that.”

  For a moment, they gazed at one another, and then Freia nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “I had liever not bring him into this.”

  Dewar nodded, and Thiorn came back to the bench. They sat down again. She said, “It is an interesting problem … As I understand it, if one of the initiated, who are all members of your immediate family, goes through certain preliminaries, he or she can draw on the power here and manipulate it.”

  “Yes,” Dewar said.

  “So, Freia, since you’re part of it, what are you worth?” Thiorn went on. “What can you do?”

  “I can do almost anything I want but leave Argylle’s Dominion, the areas covered by the Road and Leys that have their source in Argylle’s Spring, of my own accord. I cannot pass the Border, in short, without assistance from an initiate, who must arrange a … buffered reconciliation with the Well for me to do so, a balanced spell. It is easier for me to get to Phesaotois. Sometimes I can do that alone, but it is difficult.”

  “Suppose you put together a spell of Sending such that your personality, your identity, be transferred, sent, to an available host.”

  Silence. Freia considered. “I don’t know. It’s never been done. I can’t see how it would be done.”

  “Sorcery is my bailiwick,” Dewar reminded her. “I have been working on exactly this plan. I believe it can be done.”

  “We’ll try that, then.” Thiorn tapped her pipestem against her chin. “You’ll have to point us toward your updated information. We can make you a new body and you can shift into it. Much better than relying on someone to sacrifice themselves for you, if less poetic.”

  Nobody looked at me, but I felt my cheeks grow warm. I owed Ulrike an apology, unspoken but genuine.

  “But Tython may take that opportunity to attempt to reenter Argylle,” Freia protested.

  “Tython is destroyed,” Dewar said firmly. “When you fell in you annihilated him.”

  “C’mon, Freia. Give it a chance,” Thiorn said. “Life is fun.”

  “I know it is.” She looked down, around, up. “I see it all around me. If I had known you two were going to gang up on me, I would never have put you in the same room.”

  Dewar chuckled softly. Thiorn grinned.

  Freia flicked out of view. Her voice went on. “In the city of Contrevis there is a spaceport. A man named Lars Holzen passes through there every fifty days. Mention my name to him and tell him I require the services of the Clinic. The keyword to identify yourself to him as truly a friend of mine is Renndamond. You will find everything you need among them; they too have perfected a version of
the art of personality transfer. The place lies in an Eddy on Pheyarcet’s Road.”

  Silence.

  “So, Ariel,” Dewar said, extinguishing his cigarette and pocketing the butts, “off you go.”

  I was envious. What might take me years to research, Dewar accomplished with an offhand command to his familiar Sylph.

  “Gladly, Master. There’s none can hide from my fingers.” Ariel whooshed out. The stillness that followed was startling; I’d grown used to his constant stirring and draughting about.

  “How long will he take to find it?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. It could be a while,” Dewar admitted. “I think I’d better lie low still. This is not a project the general public needs to know about. Or anybody else, for that matter.” He gave me a piercing, meaning look.

  I understood perfectly: especially Prospero. “Definitely not.” I stretched.

  “We’ll do the legwork,” Thiorn said. “Dewar seems to have a vague idea of what is involved and you, Gwydion, can be our contact here.”

  “All right,” I said. “You’re going to build a body?”

  “Yes. With the correct information, it’ll be a snap.” Thiorn smiled. “This Ariel, it can move through the worlds? See things, find things, tell you?”

  “Correct,” Dewar said. “When told what to look for.”

  “Too easy, almost. Hm. Freia had all these pieces. She could have put them together.”

  “Her sense of obligation doubtless impeded her,” Dewar suggested. “Fortunately yours appears to be more malleable.”

  “Yes.” She grinned at Dewar. “I’m hungry. Let’s get a bite to eat and wait for this creature of yours to pop back up.”

  “I’d better go run the nation for a while,” I said. “Apprise me of your progress, when you’ve made any.”

  Dewar grinned back at me. “Yes. Thanks, Gwydion.”

  “For what?”

  “Ruining my date.”

  I laughed, took the lantern, and climbed back up to the Core.