The Mongolian Wizard Stories

by Michael Swanwick

  “Thank you, Miss Christensen.” The director glanced at the sheet, scowled, and said to Ritter, “You must excuse me for a moment. My secretary will look after you in my absence.” He spun on his heel and hurried away.

  “The director seems a very busy man,” Ritter commented to the secretary.

  “That’s one word for it,” she replied acerbically.

  “Forgive me. But I must ask. Where was the director at the time of the murder?”

  “He and I were both with Peter Fischer who, despite his gender, is our best scryer. Also, rather a hothouse flower. He was having one of his periodic crises of confidence, and it took quite a long time to calm him down. We were with him from ten in the evening until at least two in the morning.” Miss Christensen smiled coldly. “Director MacDonald, I assure you, is no more your murderer than I am.”

  That evening, Ritter went over all he had learned—or, rather, failed to learn.

  There were not many people who had had contact with Miss Hargreaves—the ostler who had stabled her horse and directed her to Director MacDonald’s office, Miss Christensen who in the director’s absence had given her the standard orientation for a newcomer, the technician who had recorded her image on tintype as part of that orientation and, of course, her roommate for less than a day Miss Andrewes. Ritter had interviewed all of them, with the same results: She was an intelligent and attractive young woman who made no particular impression on anybody before slipping into the yew maze and getting herself murdered.

  Ritter had been given an attic room which had been a servant’s quarters when the building was a mansion and only God and the Cistercians knew what before then. So far as he could tell, the stairway served no other occupied rooms. There he sat that evening with his shoes off and a small fire in the hearth to ward off the spring chill, trying to sort out the facts, such as they were. Ritter found himself unable to form any theories or discern any pattern to the events surrounding the death. The strangeness of the Institute’s purpose kept getting in the way.

  Very well, then, he must consider that strangeness.

  What had he learned?

  And what did it mean?

  That the future existed, somewhere up ahead of him. That it could be changed. Which implied that there were more futures than one. Which made no sense. There was only one past and it was inalterable. Why should the future be any different?

  If the future was mutable, then what about the present? Did it solidify underfoot the instant one arrived at it, like the solidity of land gathering itself beneath the feet of a castaway when he finally manages to struggle free of the sea? Or was it, too, uncertain? Ritter suspected that . . .

  A flutter of wings filled the room and a frantic bird flew past Ritter’s ear.

  He started to his feet and felt the brush of feathers against his cheek as the panicked creature sped back the way it had come. There was for it no exit, but the creature had no way of knowing that. It looped through the room in wild, angular ambits.

  Wherever could it have come from?

  It must have flown down the chimney earlier in the day and been hiding in an obscured corner of the room when he lit the fire. There was no other possible explanation.

  The beating of wings ceased.

  Ritter looked around.

  The bird was completely gone.

  Which—in a room so small, with door closed and the single window sealed shut by multiple layers of old paint—was impossible.

  Ritter’s thoughts were interrupted by a low whine. Freki was crouched low against the ground, fur abristle. Gently, he touched the wolf’s mind and was astonished to discover fear. Simultaneously, outside his door he heard steady, heavy footsteps coming up the stairs.

  The footsteps reached the top landing and continued along the hall. They stopped in front of his door.

  And then . . . nothing.

  Ritter drew his revolver and silently positioned himself to the side of the door. Then he twisted the knob and flung open the door, mentally prepared for anything.

  But there was no one there.

  After such a baffling non-event, there was no chance of sleep. So Ritter banked the fire, pulled on his boots, and took Freki out for a walk. A grey, ghostly light flooded the grounds, cast by a full moon overhead. The great house and all the wooden sheds and houses about it were silent and dark. Moved by nothing more definite than whim and Brownian motion, he found himself at the mouth of the yew maze. He entered it and made his way to its center.

  The pale figure of a young woman turned eagerly at his approach and started forward. Then, on seeing his face, she flinched away from him. “Oh!” she said. “You startled me.”

  Freki, who had been lagging behind, now padded up to Ritter’s side. For a second time, the young lady started. Then she recovered herself. “What a state I’m in! I thought for a moment your dog was a wolf.”

  “Oh, he is a wolf, indeed. But he is a very gentle and polite wolf. Freki, show the lady what a gentleman you are.” Slipping into his animal’s mind, Ritter made him sit up like a dog and offer his paw. Laughing, the young woman shook it vigorously, saying, “I am very pleased to meet you, Freki.”

  Ritter moved the wolf back to his side and disengaged from his thoughts. Then he said, “Should I leave? Are you meeting someone?”

  Even in the moonlight, he could see her blush. “Forgive me, please. Yes, I am waiting for Curdie, and . . . well, tonight is special. I have never met him before, you see. But I had a vision, and–”

  “I understand.” Ritter clicked his heels together and bowed. “I shall leave immediately. It has been very pleasant meeting you, Fraulein . . . ?”

  “Hargreaves,” she said. “Alice Hargreaves.”

  Ritter felt a cold chill. “But surely . . .” he began.

  The universe shuddered, and the woman ceased to be.

  Ritter spent the better part of an hour hidden in the shadows of a copse of trees, waiting to see if someone would approach the yew maze. But no one did.

  Finally, there was nothing to be done but to go to bed.

  In the morning, he resumed his investigation.

  First, he joined Miss Christensen in the canteen at the small table where, it was evident, she habitually ate alone. With dour grace, she accepted Ritter’s self-invitation to sit. Then, after the requisite small talk, Ritter said, “Tell me. Is the director having an affair with Miss Andrewes?”

  Miss Christensen put down her cup of tea. “I really couldn’t say.”

  “I remind you that there has been a murder. This is no time for false reticence.”

  “You don’t understand.” The secretary raised her chin and turned her aquiline profile to either side before lowering her voice to say, “The young ladies here are informally referred to as the director’s harem. I long ago gave up keeping track of which one he was currently involved with.”

  “So conceivably, Miss Hargreaves could have learned of this affair . . .”

  “If she did, and if there were any such affair to begin with, it would scarcely be cause for murder. The director’s dalliances are far from secret—ask any of the other girls, and they’ll tell you.”

  “Very well,” Ritter said. “I shall.”

  Miss Andrewes’ rooms were at the end of a long, wood-paneled hall in the labyrinthine Women’s Wing, culminating in a small chapel which had been converted into a spacious janitorial closet. Thus, she shared a wall with but a single suite.

  That suite – a front office with twin desks and a birdcage containing three fairies which sang in voices like little silver bells, and a bunk bed in the back room—was shared by two young women, twin sisters as it happened, named Lily and Rosie. After a certain amount of giggling and blushing, they were happy to confirm Ritter’s suspicions. Director MacDonald and his prize scryer—everyone agreed she was particularly good at her job – were indeed romantically involved. In fact, once begun, the sisters grew so explicit in their details of what had been overheard through the common wal
l that at length Ritter flushed and had to beg them to stop. “And Miss Andrewes’ character?” he asked, to cover his embarrassment. “How would you describe her?”

  “Very definite,” said Rosie. “She’s top-notch as a seer, nobody could claim otherwise. But . . .”

  “. . . but a little stuck-up,” Lily finished for her. “As if she were a fairy tale princess.”

  “One who had her destiny foretold at birth, so she knew she was entitled to great things.”

  “Still, a good scryer,” Lily said. “Very disciplined. Very strong.”

  “The best in the Institute, would you say?”

  “Oh, no. That would be Peter Fischer. He’s really quite astonishing.”

  “I imagine he’s rather sought-after then,” Ritter said, thinking of the ten-to-one ratio of women to men that Director MacDonald had mentioned.

  The sisters burst into laugher again. “Dismal Peter Fischer? Popular?” Lily cried.

  “Imagine kissing Mr. Gloomypants!” Rosie gasped.

  Which told Ritter whom he must interview next.

  “So here you are at last,” Peter Fischer said. He did not stand. Ritter had expected a melancholic. He found a man in the grips of despair. Fischer’s manner was dark and he would not meet Ritter’s eyes. “You have questions. Go ahead and ask. I must caution you that I am bound by the Official Secrets Act and there are some matters I cannot disclose.”

  Ritter took a chair. “I will start with what I hope is not a delicate topic for you. I was told that most males with foresight were sent to the front. Yet here you are.”

  “I had visions. Or nightmares, rather. Of unspeakable things that would happen if I went there. Normally, such premonitions would not be taken into account. But what I saw was . . . I had to be sedated. Even today, there is a doctor who checks in on me regularly and sometimes administers an opiate. I . . . I am afraid that is all I am at liberty to tell you.”

  “I understand.” Ritter looked about the office. Save for Director MacDonald’s, it was the largest he had seen so far, and by far the most cluttered. There were drawings and charts tacked up everywhere on the walls. Some had been turned blank side out. “Similarly, there are certain of your technical drawings I am not allowed to see?”

  “Yes. It is nothing personal.”

  Ritter pointed. “That chart with the colored lines. I have seen it or something very like it in every office I have visited so far. May I ask its purpose?”

  “A trot sheet of variable timelines. It is updated daily. To our prior selves, we are only a statistical possibility, you see. So when we are projecting messages into the past, we must visualize their passage along variant gradients of likenesses.”

  “I don’t quite follow you.”

  “Marcus Aurelius said, ‘Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.’ Heraclitus observed, ‘You cannot step twice into the same stream. For as you are stepping in, other waters are ever flowing on to you.’ And Cratylus rejoined that one cannot step in the same river even once. When I was in university, these were merely interesting speculations. Since, Director MacDonald has proved—and experience confirmed—them all to be observable facts.” Then, possibly realizing how difficult this must be for his auditor to follow, Fischer sighed and said, “Think of it as a chart of river currents.”

  “But if what you say is true,” Ritter objected, “then not only is the future variable, but the past as well.”

  Almost pedantically (Ritter had the impression that the young man found a refuge in abstractions from a world he otherwise found unbearable), Peter Fischer said, “There are two chief theories explaining the structure of time. One states that whenever a decision is made, however small, all possible outcomes occur simultaneously. Thus, if a coin is tossed, the act creates two universes—one in which it came down heads and another in which it came down tails. So that even the most humdrum of men must necessarily be constantly creating new universes and the bustling happenstance of daily life is responsible for a burgeoning infinity of worlds.”

  “That seems wasteful,” Ritter observed.

  “Extravagantly so,” Fischer agreed. “All that energy, and for what? From where? No, I subscribe to the ‘branching timelines’ theory. Which posits that while temporary universes branch outward, only the central trunk is stable. Deviances from it which make no serious difference merge quickly back into it. This is why two people will often have variant memories of minor events. Lines which cannot be reconciled simply dwindle to nothing. Significant ruptures, however—well, nobody knows.”

  Ritter tried, with little success, to comprehend this vision of time. “Surely there must be other theories?”

  One pale hand rose in a listless gesture of dismissal. “As many as there are possible universes. It may be that all of them are true. Or none. All we know for sure is that time is fluid and that we can nevertheless work within that fluidity.”

  “One last question. Could I prevail upon you to look into the future—or, rather, send a message back from it—and tell me the results of my investigation? It would save me a great deal of time and trouble.”

  Fischer did not look up. “I . . . no. That is not permitted, you see. I . . . have been sworn not to do so.”

  Putting his hands on the arms of his chair preparatory to getting up, Ritter said, “I want to thank you for–”

  Abruptly, he found himself standing before the sundial at the center of the yew maze. Opposite him was Peter Fischer. The young man looked directly at Ritter, tears streaming down his face. “From earliest adolescence, I knew she would be my wife. My very first vision was of Alice Hargreaves. And now . . .”

  “Who killed her?” Ritter heard himself say. “Was it the director?”

  “Director MacDonald? He is nothing more than an opportunist and a mouse hunter. Their affair would have soon ended and then I could surely have convinced Alice my love was true. But I was jealous and wrote back to myself to delay the director so he would not meet her in the maze. I did not know my folly would result in her death.”

  “Can you not contact yourself in the past and–?”

  “Do you think I haven’t tried?” Fischer cried. “The currents about the time of her death are so turbulent that nothing gets through. Perhaps it is just as well. There are worse things that could happen than–”

  The world jolted to one side.

  “So here you are at last,” Peter Fischer said. They were in his office again. “You have questions. Go ahead and ask. I must caution you that I am bound by the Official Secrets Act and there are some matters I cannot disclose.”

  “Act or no, you will answer my questions,” Ritter said harshly. “Begin by telling me what could possibly be worse than the death of the woman you loved.”

  Margaret Andrewes shrieked when Ritter burst into her office and objected noisily when he seized her arm and hauled her up from her desk. But she allowed herself to be marched to the director’s office readily enough. A man with a wolf was not easily disobeyed. Pushing past Miss Christensen, he slammed open the door to the inner sanctum.

  Director MacDonald came to his feet scowling with displeasure. Then, seeing that his lover had been hauled before him, he sighed in exasperation. “Please. I can guess what you’re about to say. But Miss Andrewes and I are both adults and what we do in our free time is no concern of yours.”

  Ritter released Margaret Andrewes and kicked the door shut behind him. “I spoke with Miss Hargreaves last night. Don’t pretend you don’t know such a thing is possible. All your meddling in causality, altering the past as well as the future, creates disturbances in time. People and things are displaced from their proper locations in the scheme of things. A bird flying over a sunlit meadow finds itself in a garret room at midnight. A young woman waiting at the center of a maze to meet her lover for the first time is thrown forward a week, where sh
e tells me his name is Curdie.

  “That was your childhood nickname, wasn’t it, director? Or perhaps it was what you were called at public school. I imagine your paramours employ it as an endearment.”

  Tensely, carefully, Director MacDonald said, “I was to meet Miss Hargreaves in the yew maze, yes. But I was delayed and by the time I got there, she was already dead.”

  “That is so. It must be terribly convenient for you to take as lovers women who already know the liaison will occur. Unfortunately, those you are about to abandon can see that coming as well. So a woman who had the misfortune of loving you and then being cast aside sent a message back to her earlier self detailing exactly what she must do.”

  Ritter addressed Miss Andrewes directly: “Is that not right?”

  Margaret Andrewes turned pale, clasped her hands, and did not speak. Director MacDonald looked surprised and then relieved. A little smile played upon his face. “Well,” he said. “I am astonished.”

  “I shall leave it to you to call in the local authorities,” Ritter said to the director. With a thought, he called Freki to heel, preparatory to leaving. “When you are done with that, you can start closing down the Institute.”

  “What?” For the first time, MacDonald appeared genuinely shocked.

  “How many apparitions occur daily here?” Ritter said. “In my brief stay, I have experienced several. You are eroding the very underpinnings of reality. I know you were warned. Master Fischer has told me of the visions he had of the chaos your work will unleash upon the world—visions which, ironically, his posting here is helping to bring about. Right now, the effects are small and almost harmless. But your little phantasms will grow into monsters if you are not stopped.

  “So I shall return to London and stop you. Trust me, when I have made my report, you will have to find a new line of work.”

  Ritter was staring intensely at the director as he spoke. So he was caught off guard when Miss Andrewes slammed into him, all but knocking him over. Her hands closed about his throat and, with surprising strength, she began choking him.