I conceded the point. “Still,” I said, “a few well chosen words can lighten the mood.”
“Providing they are indeed well chosen,” it said, “the test of which would be the client’s answering smile or chuckle. But when the reaction is a scowl or blank incomprehension, one might conclude that the witticism is ill placed.”
I made a gesture to indicate the inconsequentiality of our discussion. “Some people are impervious to the subtler forms of humor.”
“That must be a comforting thought,” the integrator said.
Not for the first time, I made a mental note to review my assistant’s cognitive architecture. The better grade of integrators were expected to evolve and complexify themselves, and I knew that I had installed a disputatious element in this one’s reflective and evaluative functions. But I was beginning to wonder if the components had lapsed out of balance.
I decided I would schedule a full review for the earliest convenient moment, but when that moment might arrive was difficult to foresee. I was, after all, Henghis Hapthorn, Old Earth’s most eminent freelance discriminator, and thus in constant demand. Currently I was conducting six discriminations, five involving cases that had baffled the best sleuths of the Archonate’s renowned Bureau of Scrutiny. The other concerned an attempt to extort funds and favors from Ogram Fillanny. He was an immensely wealthy member of Olkney’s mercantile class who delighted in certain discreditable, juvenile pastimes which could harm only himself–and even then, only if he indulged to gross excess–but were nonetheless unlikely to win him widespread acclaim.
And then in the midst of it all, Sigbart Sajessarian appeared at my premises and requested that I find him. “Perhaps my levity was ill timed,” I said and saw the dark line between his brows fade to a mere crease. “Please tell me more.”
He rose from the divan and began to stroll about the workroom in an abstracted manner. “I am, as I’m sure you know, something of an adventurer,” he said.
“Indeed,” I replied. In truth, I knew that he was a skilled blackmailer and purloiner and that he would probably have poisoned public wells if could have gained a grimlet from it, but my saying so at this juncture would truncate our conversation before I could find out where it might lead. And I was curious, so I said, “Indeed” a second time.
“I am engaged,” he went on, “in an affair which may outrage certain well placed parties for a span of time. If they should lay hold of me before the situation matures...” He spread his hands in a motion that invited me to imagine the consequences.
“You wish to remain out of circulation until hot blood has cooled,” I said.
“The cold blooded are more easily reasoned with,” he confirmed. “But even during the hot blooded phase that will naturally follow my intended operation, the aggrieved parties will have the sense to hire the best possible aid in locating me.”
I saw where he was going. “Ah,” I said, touching a palm to my breast.
“Yes,” he said, “they might well send you to find me.”
“And you wish to conduct a dry run to see if the course of evasion you have planned will defeat my efforts to uncover your lair.”
“Only within the period when I am in danger. I am sure that I could not escape you forever.”
He was a practiced flatterer, I knew. But he was also correct.
“I cannot be an accomplice to illegality,” I said.
His narrow shoulders rose and fell in a languid shrug. “I believe the more appropriate term is immorality.”
“Make your distinction clear.”
“Let us say that immorality is a world and illegality but one of its continents, albeit a broad one containing many distinct and fascinating landscapes.” He half smiled to himself at some inner conceit. “What I plan to do would fit on an island well offshore.”
“Hmm,” I said. “I require more detail.”
He steepled his fingertips together and thought for a moment, then said, “On behalf of one group of eminent persons I intend to discomfit a member of another group. I can assure you that there will be no loss of life, blood or wealth, though a reputation will be deservedly diminished.”
“Indeed,” I said again. This had the odor of an affair among Olkney’s decadent aristocracy who, possessing every luxury that Old Earth might offer, chose to salt and season their otherwise placid existence by competing against each other for shaved minims of prestige and precedence. Players at these social games would mount the most elaborate conspiracies whose only ends were that the victim would not be asked to Lady Whatsoever’s spring cotillion or would be seated one chair farther down from the Duke at dinner.
To keep their fingers unsoiled and unscorched, lordly rivals often hired others to perform the mechanics of the plots. From time to time I received delicate approaches from magnates and aristocrats seeking to enlist me in their schemes. I invariably declined. Creatures like Sajessarian made fortunes by accepting.
“I will take the case,” I said. “How long a head start will you require?”
“If you would begin to seek for me three days from now, I will have laid my false trails and blind alleys.”
“And how long do you need to remain unfound?”
“Let us say three days for that as well.”
“Done,” I said.
* * *
During the ensuing three days I concluded Ogram Fillanny’s business and advanced the progress of three other outstanding cases. I could have achieved more but I will admit that I was distracted by a new pursuit: the being who visited me occasionally from an adjacent dimension had introduced me to a new game which I found fascinating. It irked me slightly that I could not refer to either the game or my visitor by a name, but symbol and being were so inextricably mixed in his continuum that voicing the one materially affected the other. Doing so in my universe would have catastrophic results.
For my own purposes, I had taken to calling the game Will. Its playing pieces were semi-sentient entities that could carry out complex strategies in three dimensions over time if motivated to do so by a focused expenditure of the player’s mental energy. The rules were fairly easy to master but the inherent variability of the playing area–one could not call it merely a board–allowed for intricate maneuvers to develop from simple beginnings once one grasped the rhythms by which play ebbed and flowed.
It had taken me a little while, under my opponent’s guidance, to develop the faculty of focusing my thoughts on the pieces, especially how to contemplate a move without causing it to happen before I had definitely decided that that was what I wanted the pieces to do. Now, however, I had achieved what my partner called a modest but promising ability. A few more games, each one followed by a thorough digesting of my defeat at his hands–I use the expression loosely; they were more like the claws a bear would have if a bear were a species of insect–and he promised that I would approximate a good opponent.
I tended to ponder long over each move, whereas he made his with an alacrity that at first frustrated me. In our latest match, however, he had lingered in the portal which gave him limited access to this continuum, assessing the deployment of my pieces for quite some time.
Finally, he said, “You have divided your forces.”
“Indeed,” I said, exerting the mild effort that kept the pieces where I had willed them.
“What do you think that will achieve?”
“It would be premature to say,” I said. “It is your move.”
The shifting colors and shapes that filled the portal assumed an orientation that I had come to recognize as his equivalent of a frown of concentration. “Take your time,” I added.
He emitted a noise that combined a thoughtful hmmm with a rumbling growl and reformed his reserves while launching a cloud of what I called fast-darters into the middle-middle of the playing area. His plods–that is how I thought of the slower, larger pieces–moved heavily in formation into the lower-forefront, waited while the terrain exhibited one of its regular oscillations, then rotated and inched
forward once more before stopping at a barrier that emerged from the “ground.” The plods then changed color to become two shades lighter.
“Hmm,” I said and looked thoughtful, although his move was almost exactly how I had expected him to respond to mine.
“I shall return when you are ready to make your next disposition,” he said.
“It may be a while,” I told him. “I am about to pursue a discrimination that will almost certainly require me to leave these premises. I may even have to go offworld.” I told him briefly about the impending search for Sigbart Sajessarian.
“If you wish,” he said, “I can tell you where he is, now or at any moment in his lifespan.” His access to this realm was limited but his perspection of some aspects of it was limitless.
I did not wish him to do so. “We have discussed this,” I said. “I value you most highly as a partner in such pursuits as this,”–I indicated the game–“because you have largely drained the swamp of boredom in which I long floundered. But my profession is an essential element of my being, and your omniscience threatens to leave me without purpose.”
The swirling colors assumed a pattern I recognized as a shrug. “As you wish,” he said, “but I am interested to see where your strategy will lead. Perhaps you might take game and portal with you, in case you have an idle hour during the search for Sajessarian.”
“I might, at that,” I said.
He departed and immediately I turned to my assistant. “Integrator, consider the disposition of the pieces. Note that our opponent blanched his plods by two shades instead of three. Project my ten most likely strategies that I may evaluate them.” I had found it easier to let the device present the options; when I envisioned where my pieces might next go I must exercise will to prevent them from drifting in the foreseen directions. The effort could become tiring.
“Your opponent,” said my assistant.
“I beg your pardon?”
“He is your opponent, not mine,” said the device. “I am only your aide.”
The correction was technically precise, and I had designed the device to be exacting in its use of language. As we speak, so do we think, after all. Still, I thought to detect a tone that, in a human interlocutor, would have betokened jealousy.
But when I inquired of my assistant if there was anything it wished to discuss regarding my relationship with my transdimensional visitor, it answered my query with a question of its own.
“How could there be?” it said.
“Indeed,” I said, though again I noted what would have been a certain frostiness. After a moment, I added, “We must schedule that review of your systems.”
“How thoughtful of you.”
* * *
My thoughts were on the game as I boarded the shuttle to Zeel, where I would rapidly–in Zeel it was an offense to do anything at less than full speed–transfer to an air bus bound for an estate called The Hands, in the rolling countryside known as the Former Marches. The estate took its name from a pair of gigantic sculpted human hands that had weathered out of a range of low hills several centuries ago. They were surely a monument to some forgotten person, event or ideal that had flourished in a previous aeon, but no record of their creation now existed. The great stone fingers were arranged in a remarkable pattern, to which various meanings had been assigned, leading to heated exchanges between academics in a number of disciplines. My own view was that The Hands symbolized insouciant defiance, but of what and by whom I had no idea.
The estate was the ancestral seat of Lord Tussant Tarboush-Rein, the aged last survivor of a family so ancient that its founders may well have been responsible for the sculptures that gave the place its name. The manse was now grown as decrepit as its final resident, who lived alone except for a single house servant and a greensman whose sole duty was to keep open a tunnel through what had once been a garden but was now long since given over to vegetative rampage. The greensman’s position was no sinecure: in youth Lord Tussant had been an enthusiastic collector of exotic and offworld biota; some of the plants whose tendrils rustled and slithered through the impenetrable foliage had sharp appetites and no hesitation about satisfying them.
The air bus descended to let me off at the lane that led to the estate, the vehicle’s operator rolling his eyes in admonition when I insisted that I was not concerned about venturing into the unwholesome place. The conveyance soared skyward in a whoosh of displaced air and I contemplated the short walk to where the estate’s walls were broken by a pair of black metal gates, their outer edges entwined in creepers that undulated slightly as I approached.
My assistant was housed in an armature I had designed for convenience when traveling. It was made of a soft, dense material and I could wear it across my shoulders like a stuffed stole, blunt and rounded at one end and tapering to a tail-like appendage at the other. It resembled the rough draft of a small animal coiled loosely about my neck.
I spoke to it. “That is clutch-apple, I believe, though I do not recognize the variety.”
The integrator stirred as its percepts focused on the creeper at the gate. “Lord Tussant is said to have bred some new variations,” it said. “Note the ring of barbed thorns around the rim of each sucker. And farther down the path I see a fully developed got-you-now.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Generate some harmonics to discourage it and any other lurking appetites.” Immediately I sensed a vibration in my back teeth. I approached the gate and looked for a who’s-there, but found only a large bell of tarnished metal with next to it a stick on a chain. I did the obvious and when the reverberations had faded but the gates remained closed, I struck the thing again.
This time the gates lurched, and amidst squawks and creaks from unoiled hinges, they shuddered open just wide enough to admit me. I strode unmolested along the green umbilicus, noting how some of Lord Tussant’s experiments had come to fruition, literally in the case of one stubby tree from which hung dark purple globes. “I am told their juice produces the most interesting effects,” I said to my assistant.
“Not the least of which,” it replied, “is to be rendered blissfully immobile while the parent inserts threadlike ciliae into your ankles and drains your bodily fluids.”
“Every experience exacts some price,” I said, but I decided not to pick the fruit.
I arrived at the front doors to find another bell and clapper. This one summoned a stooped, cadaverous fellow in black and burgundy livery, his skull encased in a headdress fashioned from thick cloth folded in a complicated fashion. “The master is not at home,” he said in a voice as light and dry as last year’s leaves.
“Of course he is,” I said. “But it is not Lord Tussant whom I have come to see.”
“Then whom?” said the butler.
“Sigbart Sajessarian.”
“I do not recognize the name.”
“Yes, you do,” I answered, brushing past him into the manse’s foyer, “for it is your own.”
* * *
“How did you know where to look?” Sajessarian asked. We had repaired to a sitting room deeper inside the crumbling manor where a blaze in a fireplace struggled to overcome the damp and gloom. He had disengaged the device that cloaked his appearance in a projected image and distorted his voice.
“I do not reveal my methods,” I said. “Put it down to insight and analysis.”
In truth, it had not been difficult. Sajessarian was devious but not original. He would not trust in the simplicity of hiding in plain sight, and his attempts to mislead by booking passage on three separate space liners outbound to the human settled worlds along The Spray were complex but easily discounted. I simply tasked my assistant with searching his background for the most obscure connections. Within moments it had uncovered a third cousin twice removed who, some years back, had supplied Lord Tussant with biotic specimens. Having tenuously linked the fugitive to The Hands, it took only a brief consideration of vehicle movements in the area to discover that an unlicensed air car had moved through a
n adjacent town’s air space before passing out of range of the municipal scan. My suppositions were confirmed when the gardener failed to answer the outer bell.
“Where are the real servants?” I inquired.
“In their quarters,” he said. “Both have a fondness for the fruits of the garden and normally lie insensible from dusk to dawn. I merely increased the dosage.”
“And Lord Tussant himself?”
“He lies insensible almost all of the time. His fondness for a cocktail of soporific juices laced with tickleberries knows no bounds.”
I rubbed my hands and extended them to the fire. “Well,” I said, “there remains only the fee.”
“I will fetch it,” he said. “Indeed, I will double the amount if while I am bringing it you would design an escape plan that would stymie even Henghis Hapthorn for more than three days.”
It was an interesting challenge. What would fool me? I agreed to his request, and gave the matter several seconds thought after he departed. When I had conceived a stratagem I had my assistant embellish it with some loops and diversions, then I called for a display of the Will scenarios. I was contemplating a promising permutation of plods, fast-darters and sideslips when Sajessarian returned with a heavy satchel. He took it to a table, opened it and began to dispense stacks of currency, counting as he did so.
My mind was still weighing and discarding options for the game of Will as I said, “I have come up with an escape course that would baffle even me, at least for a time.”
He expressed interest so I outlined the gist of it and the nature of the distractions. “It’s a subtle variation on the classic runaround, with a reverse twist.”
“Magnificent.” He continued to lay out the funds. Then he said, “The fire dwindles. Would you reset the flux control?”
My mind still on Will, I reached and pressed the flux modulator. As I did so, I heard Sigbart Sajessarian say, “It is indeed a fine plan.” He went on to say, “But I have a better.” These last words came from a distance because the floor had opened beneath me, plunging me into darkness and the rush of cold air.
9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn Page 10