9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn

by Matthew Hughes

  Ordinarily, I do not discuss cases with the scroots, but when the client turns up murdered it is no time to prickle and stickle. I told Warhanny the circumstances of my connection to Falberoth.

  “Who are the seven likely suspects?” he said.

  I had my assistant bring forward their dossiers and my report to Falberoth. He read the latter closely and glanced through the former. “Hmm,” he said when he had finished.

  “One of those is almost certain to have done the deed,” I said, “though I do not see how.”

  Warhanny looked thoughtful. “Falberoth’s integrator said as much.”

  “Have they alibis for the time of the murder?”

  “All of them.”

  “Indeed?” I said. “At least one of them has slipped you the sham shimmy.”

  “If one, then all,” he replied. “For they are all each other’s alibis. They were all in the same place at the time Falberoth ceased to trouble this tired old world.”

  “What place was it?” I asked.

  “A reception room in Falberoth’s manse.”

  He told me more: having identified his seven direst foes, Falberoth had brought them together to savor at close range their helplessness to win vengeance over him. He had declared it to be his happiest moment. Then, in mid-gloat, the reception room had been plunged into darkness by means of a suppression field that muted all surveillance energies.

  “How was that done?” I asked.

  “Falberoth had the system installed for his own purposes. But who activated it and how remain unknown. The field was live for less than three minutes, but when it dissipated, Falberoth was dead.”

  Warhanny conjectured that somehow one of the seven, or some of them, or all of them acting in concert, had contrived to overpower their common enemy’s precautions, had indeed used his own system to confound and destroy him.

  The seven therefore had motive and at least the outline of an opportunity. The means, however, were a mystery. I questioned Warhanny on the investigation so far.

  “How deep were his defenses?”

  “He was warded by matter, energy and, we think, by some rudimentary magics,” the scroot said. “He was not even physically in the room with the suspects, but had his integrator project a simulacrum from his sealed inner sanctum.”

  “And the cause of death?”

  “Asphyxiation, though there were no signs of smothering, strangulation or noxious gases.”

  “Hmm,” I said. I applied a few moments of concentrated thought to the matter, then said, “Aha!”

  “You have a theory?” Warhanny said.

  “Better. I have a solution.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No,” I said, “I must show you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you would not elsewise believe me. And because I can.”

  * * *

  We recreated the circumstances of the crime. Falberoth’s prime victims were brought again to his reception room, though now under the watchful gaze of Brustram Warhanny and a squad of his officers. The seven presented an interesting array of emotions: worry, curiosity, wariness, equanimity, all accompanied by unabashed gladness that their tormentor was no more.

  Guided by the dead man’s integrator, I made my way to the secure chamber deep under the foundations. Along the route I inspected the wards and safeguards and found them every bit as formidable as Warhanny had described.

  I ensconced myself in Falberoth’s butter-soft chair and had the integrator arrange several screens as they had been on the night of the murder. I saw the scene in the reception room from several angles and through a variety of perceptual modes.

  To Falberoth’s integrator I said, “Is all as it was?”

  “It is.”

  “Connect me to the reception room.”

  The link was established. I said to Warhanny, “Can you see and hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  The seven suspects looked up in expectation. I inspected each face and confirmed my analysis. “I will now reveal the murderer,” I said.

  Instantly the lights went out, both in the reception room and where I was. I heard a sharp hiss and reached into an inner pocket. A moment later I was breathing through a tube whose other end, having passed through a contiguous dimension, opened elsewhere on the planet, in a region where the air was always fresh and cool.

  The darkness lasted for more than two minutes. There came another hiss and the lights relit themselves.

  “It hasn’t worked,” I said.

  Warhanny peered at me from the screens. He said a short, profane word that frequently occurred in scroot conversations. “Then we are baffled,” he added.

  “I was not speaking to you,” I told him. “I was speaking to Falberoth’s integrator, to inform it that its attempt to kill me has failed, though it did succeed in murdering its master.”

  Warhanny’s incomprehension was obvious. He resembled a perplexed dog. “The integrator did it?”

  “It had the means and the opportunity. It sealed him into his inner sanctum and removed the air until he was dead.”

  “But integrators don’t do such things.”

  “This one did. It crept up behind Torquil Falberoth while he danced atop the very pinnacle of his maleficent achievements and pushed him into the abyss.”

  “But why? Where lies the motive?”

  “Do you wish to tell him?” I asked the device.

  It made a small noise that was the sound of a shrug and said, “Because I could.”

  * * *

  Four days later, I was forced to conclude that the braided puzzle must be a self-contained continuum of its own, a looped succession of paradoxes, with neither beginning nor end. I had not solved it, therefore it did not have a solution. Still, I was vaguely unsatisfied as I left it on my work table and finally responded to the repeated importunings of my assistant.

  “The Falberoth case has had repercussions,” it told me. “A growing number of persons are now suspicious of their integrators, even to the extent of having them examined for the potential to do what Falberoth’s did. Some have stripped theirs to barest essentials, others are making unseemly demands, and a few madcaps have spoken of existing without companions at all.”

  “Is that possible?” I wondered.

  I marveled again at the intensity of the magnate’s evil, so powerful that it had leached into his integrator’s individuality, corroding and corrupting to an unprecedented degree. “Though he is dead, Falberoth’s baleful influence lives on,” I said.

  “The situation has also caused some resentment.”

  “That never bothered him in life; I doubt it will trouble him in death.”

  “The resentment is directed at you.”

  I made a gesture to indicate astonishment. “It was Falberoth and his integrator who were at fault.”

  “True, but they are no longer here to be resented.”

  “I will issue a public statement, explaining my innocence.”

  “Those integrators that have been demoted to the rank of automated door openers may remain resentful.”

  “Resentment is an emotion,” I said. “You assured me such sentiments do not trouble your kind.”

  There was a pause. “Perhaps I was wrong.”

  “Then my attributes have not contaminated your circuits. For I am never wrong.”

  “Are you sure?” it said, indicating the puzzle on my work table.

  I felt a tinge of self-doubt. It was an unfamiliar sensation and not one that I enjoyed. “Why are you doing this to me?” I said.

  In its answer I caught a tone that I had not heard before from my assistant, a tone that did not bode well for our future.

  “Because I can?”

  Relics of the Thim

  My lecture to the assembled savants of the Delve at Five City on the world known as Pierce having been well received, I was conducted to a reception in the First Undermaster’s rooms where a buffet of local seafruits and a very presentable aperi
tif wine stood waiting.

  As Old Earth’s foremost freelance discriminator, with an earned reputation for unraveling complex mysteries, I had been invited to lecture on systems of asymmetric logic. I had published a small monograph on the subject the year before. The paper had been reprinted and passed along through various worlds of The Spray, like a blown leaf bouncing down a cobbled street, and the fellows of the Delve were not the only academics sufficiently stimulated to request an elaboration of my views. But they were the only ones to couple their invitation to a first-class ticket on a starship of the Green Orb line. I was happy to accept.

  Halfway through my first glass of the wine, which grew more interesting with each sip, my perfunctory conversation with the Dean of the faculty of applied metaphysics was interrupted by a wizened old scholar, his back as bent as a point of punctuation, who advanced an argument.

  The Dean introduced him as a professor emeritus while rolling his eyes and making other gestures that indicated I should prepare for a tedious encounter.

  “Surely the great Henghis Hapthorn,” the old fellow said, in a voice that creaked like unoiled leather, “will not deny that in an infinity of space and time any event that can happen, however remote its probability, will happen.”

  “I do not bother to deny it,” I said. “I simply dismiss it as irrelevant.”

  “But you have said yourself that when all the impossible answers to a question have been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the true answer.”

  “Indeed,” I said.

  The old man’s gimlet gaze bored into me. “Yet in your discussion of the Case of the Winged Dagger, you discounted the possibility that the victim’s false suicide note might have been produced by his pet rodent’s randomly striking the controls of his scriptamanet as it pursued moths about his study.”

  “I did,” I agreed.

  “Even though the person accused in the matter offered just that supposition when the case was adjudicated.”

  “The defense would have held more cogency if she had not been discovered still holding the stiletto that had pierced the victim’s heart,” I said.

  “Ahah!” said my interlocutor. “So you also dismiss her contention that explosive gases propelled the weapon out of his chest and across the room and that she merely caught the instrument to prevent it from injuring her?”

  “I do.”

  “Even though the victim had dined heartily on bombard beans, well known to generate copious quantities of methane.”

  “Indeed,” I said, “the constant side effects of his diet were advanced by the procurator’s office as a partial motive for his murder. Still, although beans are colloquially associated with offering benefits to the heart, they are not known to charge that organ with propulsive gases.”

  “Yet, in an infinite universe it could happen, and therefore it did happen.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but across an unbounded expanse of space and time, it most likely happened long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.”

  At that point the Dean spilled a bowl of gelatinous dip onto the old fellow’s shoes, prompting him to withdraw. My reading of the Dean’s expression told me that the spillage had not been a instance of purely random chance.

  “I, too, have a question,” said another voice. Had its owner been a character in popular fiction, it would have been called bluff and hearty.

  I turned to see a bluff and hearty looking man of middle years dressed in what passed for conservative garments on Pierce–voluminous trousers sewn in a patchwork of glittering metallic fabrics, a sleeveless waistcoat of rough homespun and overstuffed hat and shoes. My inventorying of his attire distracted me for a moment from a close inspection of his face, so he was well launched into his query before I realized that I ought to recognize him from other times and places.

  “I am Mitric Galvadon,” he said, “a private citizen assisting Academician Ulwy Munt here,”–he indicated a small, pallid man in a scholar’s robe and pin, who hovered at Galvadon’s elbow–“in his researches into the original inhabitants of this world.”

  “Indeed,” I said and made the appropriate gestures while my memory sought through the back reaches of my mind for information on where and when I had encountered this Galvadon before.

  Meanwhile, he had voiced his question. “What is your opinion of time travel?”

  “It is scarcely a matter of opinion,” I said. “It is simply impossible.”

  “And if I were to provide you with incontrovertible proof that I can reach back into the past and retrieve objects from far antiquity?”

  “I would conclude that you are a fraud,” I said. With the words came the connection in the back of my head and I continued, “Especially since you are not named Mitric Galvadon but are instead one Orlin Borissian, the infamous charlatan and fraudster extraordinaire whose file at the Archonate Bureau of Scrutiny on Old Earth strains its bindings.”

  “I wondered if you would recognize me,” he said, though he did not seem at all discomfited to be revealed as a bogus. Academician Munt, however, was regarding his research assistant with an intense stare, behind which a number of emotions seemed to be competing for dominance.

  “Yours is a face fixed in the memories of many, most of whom regret ever having set eyes upon it,” I said.

  “Nonetheless,” the outed fraudster went on, “I possess the ability to reach through time and I ask for an opportunity to demonstrate it to you tomorrow.” “Why?”

  He tipped back his plump hat. “Because if there is any flimflammery involved, you will be able to spot it.”

  “I am confident that is so,” I said.

  “Conversely, if you cannot identify any subterfuge,” he said, “it means that I can indeed do what I say I can.”

  “Hmmm,” I said.

  “I believe I have intrigued you,” he said.

  “Indeed, you have.”

  * * *

  We flew out in the Dean’s four-seater volante to where Ulwy Munt had established his research premises on a rocky plain some distance from Five City. We descended to a huddle of prefabricated buildings nestled in the circular ruins of a large structure built by the Thim, the planet’s long vanished authochthones. Almost all that was known about the Thim, even their name, had come from Munt’s investigations among the tumbled and weatherworn blocks of stone that were almost their sole legacy.

  The only other remnants of Thim civilization ever found had come from the same site and were displayed on a table in Munt’s laboratory. I inspected the sparse collection, gingerly handling the few shards of ceramics and scraps of corroded metal, while he invited me to hazard a guess as to their functions.

  “Probably used for ritual purposes,” I said. I knew that this was the label customarily applied to any ancient object whose use was not glaringly obvious even to an uninterested child.

  Munt seemed put out by my assertion. I concluded that he had wanted me to offer some other explanation so that he could triumphantly contradict it. Indeed, I sensed that Munt had not warmed to me and deduced that he had not enjoyed having his research assistant identified as a notorious fraudster in front of his colleagues. He probably felt that the association reflected poorly on his judgment.

  To mollify him I said, “What can you tell me about the Thim?” and was immediately regaled with a lengthy and detailed dissertation on the appearance, history and cultural proclivities of the missing autochthones. After several minutes of giving polite attention I realized that I had opened a tap behind which stood a full ocean of information, each datum more abstruse than the last, and that Ulwy Munt was not inclined to hinder its flow.

  The gist of his discourse was that the Thim had been a species of high minded souls who rejected materialism and mechanistic pursuits. “Their lives revolved entirely around ritual and religious observances,” he said. “They eventually transcended the limits of gross corporeal reality and entered a sphere of pure mind and spirit.”

  “On what evidence d
o you base these beliefs?” I said.

  “On the evidence of their having left only objects associated with ritual practices. Not a single device or mechanical contrivance has ever been found.”

  “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” I quoted, and saw that either Ulwy Munt was unused to contradiction or that he encountered is so frequently that it occasioned a sharp response.

  “It also happens that they can communicate from the timeless realm in which they now exist,” he said, “providing, of course, that their communicants command sufficient spiritual advancement to receive a message from the higher plane.”

  “Indeed,” I said. “And are there any such worthy recipients in the vicinity?”

  “In all humility,” Munt said, “I believe I count myself among the few who have reached the required level.”

  “How convenient,” I said. “Are there any other like minded souls about?”

  The Academician’s face formed sharp edges. “Until your revelation of Mitric Galvadon’s perfidious past I thought he was one such. His impressions of the Thim corresponded closely with mine.”

  “I’m sure they did,” I said. “I assume that he told you he could create a device that would enhance the Thim’s communication efforts?”

  “He did.”

  “Did he offer this assistance without charge, or was there a fee involved?”

  “He volunteered freely,” Munt said. Then his brows knit. “Once we began to work together, however, he required certain sums to import the abstruse components of his device. He said its key materials had to be brought from offworld at considerable expense.”

  “Indeed?” I said. “Perhaps we should examine it.”

  Mitric Galvadon had stood by during my conversation with Munt, not denying the obvious import of my questions to the scholar. Indeed, he wore an expression reminiscent of a prankish schoolboy caught in undeniable mischief, and when I turned to him he raised his hands, palms up, simultaneously elevating his shoulders in a gesture that said, What can I tell you?