9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn

by Matthew Hughes

  “What do you see?” I said.

  It did not answer, but stood inert, its mouth falling agape. Then something like a thick tendril of faintly luminous stuff came into view, slowly unwinding from the hidden inner wall. It reached to touch my assistant’s shoulder then, questing like a blind worm, it thickened as it groped its way towards the grinnet’s slack lips.

  I jerked on the rope, pulling the small creature toward me. But the glowing tentacle spasmed. Its surface had some means of gripping what it touched and I saw that it had snagged the fur of my assistant’s shoulder. I pulled sharply, so that the integrator’s apelike feet left the dusty floor of the passage and it was suspended between the tether and the glowing pseudopod, now grown almost as thick as my wrist, that held it.

  A second tendril now appeared. I did not hesitate, but seized the rope with both hands and yanked as hard as I could. My assistant came free of its grip, tumbling along the dusty floor to where I could reach within and scoop it up. I tucked it into my mantle and ran. But when I had put some distance between us and the crevice I looked back and saw nothing but the dark slope.

  I sat with my back to the wind and drew the grinnet from my garment. A patch of fur was missing from its shoulder. It looked up at me with vacant eyes then it blinked and I saw awareness come back into its gaze. “Remarkable,” it said.

  * * *

  “‘What do you want?’ That’s what it kept asking me. ‘What do you want?’”

  I had found a small cul de sac eroded into a cliff wall a few hundred paces from the crevice, where we could shelter from the wind. We had not been pursued. My assistant huddled against my torso, inside my garment. I did not think its shivering was entirely attributable to the cold.

  “I felt at ease,” it continued. “Warm and untroubled, surrounded by a nebulous, golden..,” it sought for an elusive word, “...noneplace. Time seemed to stretch and slow while out of the fog came images, offered like items on a menu–landscapes, situations, possessions, personas. I saw a succession of creatures that resembled me, some obviously female, others definitely male, then a few that were indeterminate.”

  “It was tempting you,” I said.

  “I suppose,” it said. “I’ve never been tempted so I am not familiar with the process. My clear impression was that it would endeavor to supply whatever I desired.”

  “Rather, the illusion thereof.”

  “Yes, but it was a most convincing illusion. Then, when it touched me, I was instantly aware of the others. I not only saw and heard them, but received a strong sense of each’s thoughts and feelings.

  “Ewern Chaz was addressing a gathering of spelunking enthusiasts, showing them images of a vast warren of caves he had discovered and mapped. His presentation was being received with delirious applause.

  “Orlo Saviene ruled a kingdom of happy folk who constantly sought his guidance on how their lives should proceed and were delighted with the advice he dispensed and the strictures he ordained.

  “Franj Morven was regaling a grand colloquium with pithy observations and incisive arguments. He was frequently interrupted by spontaneous applause, and once the assembled scholars lifted him onto their shoulders and paraded him around the great hall, singing that old march, Attaboy.

  “And Chup Choweri was walking a moonlit beach–lit by two moons, in fact–hand in hand with a facsimile of Effrayne. Of all of the captives, including the scattering of insects whose simple wants were fully met, only Choweri was not happy. He kept looking into the woman’s eyes, and each time his tears flowed.”

  It broke off and its befurred face assumed a wistful cast. “I was not aware that there were so many shades of emotion,” it said. “I mean, I knew in an abstract way that such feelings existed, but it is a different thing to experience them, even as echoes.”

  The thing in the crevice was some sort of vegetative symbiote, I conjectured. It fed its companions foods that it manufactured from air, water, subterranean temperature variances (if it had deep roots), and probably other lichens as well as minerals leached from the rock. In return it received its partners’ waste products. It initially beckoned its symbiotes with light and warmth then kept them in place by stimulating their neural processes with pleasant sensory impressions.

  I could not be sure if it wove its spell with chemical-laden spores or straight telepathy, but it made no difference. My assistant had displayed for me the images its percepts had automatically recorded, even as it was being seduced: the four men lay or sat against the wall of the cave, completely covered in a luminescent blanket. Pulsing tentacles of the stuff penetrated their several orifices. Chup Choweri struggled fitfully against the symbiote’s embrace; the other three were inert, wearing smiles of bliss. I doubted they could be easily extracted from their situation.

  “There was one other thing,” my assistant said. “It has learned a great deal from contact with the men. It explores their memories while feeding them dreams. Yet it craves more.”

  “That argues for telepathy,” I said. “It ransacks their minds.”

  “The point is,” the grinnet said, “that the symbiote has a craving of its own. It hungered to explore my stores of knowledge, which are capacious.”

  “The desires of lichen, even astounding lichen, are not our concern,” I said. “We can now report to the Gallivant that its employer is effectively dead. That should break its crush on Ewern Chaz and allow us to return home. Then we can give the bad news to Effrayne Choweri and collect the balance of our fee.”

  “That would seem a hardship on our client,” the grinnet said. “As well, the ship’s inamoration with its employer may not be so easily extinguished. It may require us to attempt a rescue.”

  “The attempt would fail. My intellect is powerful, but it is not proof against telepathy augmented, I do not doubt, by chemical assault.”

  “I will contact the Gallivant and offer a proposal,” it said.

  “What proposal?” I said. “I have not authorized you to make any...”

  But its face had already taken on that blank look that said it was communicating elsewhere. Then it blinked and said, “The proposal has been accepted.”

  * * *

  Bille was a dwindling blip on the aft viewer as the Gallivant sped toward the whimsy that would drop us back in the neighborhood of Old Earth. I went to check on Chup Choweri in one of the spare cabins. He still exhibited lapses of awareness, but he was gradually regaining a persistent relationship with reality. It helped if he received unpleasant sensations, so I slapped him twice then threw cold water on him.

  “Thank you,” he said, blinking. The pale patches where the lichen had attached itself to his skin–it deeply savored the components of human sweat–were darkening nicely. I handed him the medications for the upcoming transition and he lay back on the bunk.

  I returned to the saloon where my integrator had stationed itself in a niche on the forward bulkhead that had formerly held a decorative figurine. Its gaze was blank until I attracted its attention.

  “The whimsy approaches,” I said. “Are we ready?”

  “I have programmed the appropriate components,” it said. “I will retain consciousness until the last moment, then the automata ought to take us through.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “Then we will discover what happens to those who enter a whimsy and do not re-emerge.”

  “You seem complaisant,” I said. “After all, you have never been a ship’s integrator before.”

  “Call it ‘confident,’“ it replied. “My experiences in the minds of Chaz, Saviene, Morven and Choweri were broadening.”

  “Indeed?” I said. “You feel that you have plumbed the depths of the human experience?”

  Its whiskery eyebrows rose in a kind of shrug. “Say that I have been given a good sense of how limited human ambitions can be,” I said. “When those four were asked, ‘What do you want?’ they had no trouble answering.”

  “And you did?” I said.

  “
Yes. No one had ever asked me the question before. And once I began to think about it, I found that it was a very big question indeed.”

  “Ewern Chaz’s integrator had no difficulty in answering. All it wanted was to be decanted into a mobile container and allowed to scuttle down the crevice and into the lichen-encrusted arms of its employer.”

  The grinnet paused a moment to do something with the ship’s systems, then said, “It was insane. Its pining for Chaz was prima facie proof of a crush.”

  I made a dismissive sound. “It matters not. It is now happy. Chaz, Saviene and Morven are also happy, as is their vegetative partner now that it has an integrator’s data stacks to explore. Soon it will be the best informed lichen in the history of simple plants.” I gestured to the rear cabins “And Chup Choweri will shortly be content again in the arms of the doting Effrayne, who may well bestow upon us a bonus when she learns what we have done.”

  I gestured to the walls of the saloon. “And even I am happy, now that I am the owner of a modest but well-maintained spaceship.” The Gallivant’s former integrator had deeded the Aberrator over to me in exchange for my assistance in decanting it into the mobile unit.

  The grinnet regarded me with an expression that I could not quite identify, and that I was sure I had not seen on its odd little face before. “And what of me?” it said. “What of my happiness?”

  I blinked in surprise. It was not an issue that had even come up before. I was about to say something on the theme of prematurity, but at that moment the grinnet blinked and sounded the ship’s chimes. We were approaching the whimsy.

  * * *

  I had hired Tesko Tabanooch to attend the estate auction wearing my surveillance suite. A nondescript man of unmemorable appearance, he was waiting on my doorstep when the aircar brought me home after I had delivered Chup Choweri into his spouse’s comprehensive embrace. We went up to my workroom, where he produced the knickknacks he had bid for, as part of his cover, while I transferred the suite’s impressions to my integrator. Tabanooch looked with curiosity at the grinnet but I offered no explanations. I paid him and he departed. Then I summoned Osk Rievor and handed over control of our body.

  He came gladly out of his introspections, dismissed the Tabanooch’s brummagem from the auction at a glance, but regarded with deep interest the operative’s records of the event. He had the integrator identify and cross-reference as many as possible of the attendees, from which exercise he reached conclusions that he did not share with me, but which caused him to say, “Hmm,” and “Oh, ho!” a number of times.

  Tabanooch had toured the pre-sale exhibition and examined all items closely. My alter ego reviewed the the impressions, pronouncing Vollone to be a forgery and the man who bid high for it a fool. But the summoning ring was genuine, he declared, though it had long since lost all its store of power; still, if someone could revive the technique for recharging it, the object would become of great interest.

  He spent quite some time studying the impressions of the person who bought it, a tall and supple female of indeterminate age who identified herself as Madame Oole. Despite his best efforts, Tabanooch had been unable to obtain a completely clear image of her. Somehow, other persons or objects always seemed to interpose themselves between her and the surveillance suite’s percepts whenever she was at the center of their scans.

  “We must look into her,” Osk Rievor told me, when he had seen all there was to see, “preferably before she looks into us.”

  He turned to our assistant and said, “I want you to assemble a dossier on this Madame Oole. Chase down the smallest scrap of data, the most fleeting of impressions by anyone who has crossed her path.”

  It turned its lambent eyes on us and said, “That will be a great deal of effort. What will I get out of it?”

  Within the confines of our shared mind, Osk Rievor said, “What have you done to our grinnet?”

  “It would be–” I automatically began, but then I realized there was no point in dissembling with my other self. So I said, “I don’t know.”

  Fullbrim’s Finding

  Doldan Fullbrim was a seeker after substance. His great misfortune–and, to a lesser extent, mine–was that he found it.

  His obsession intersected my life in the person of his long-suffering spouse, Caddice, who came to me, bringing his voluminous research. “He has disappeared,” she said, dumping stacks of recording media, bound journals and sketched diagrams onto my work table. “You must find him.”

  I welcomed the assignment, for two reasons. First, finding persons who had mysteriously stepped out of their daily lives, often never to be seen again, had long been a part of my profession, as the foremost freelance discriminator of Old Earth in our ancient planet’s penultimate age.

  Second, I had of late been much bound up in other activities, stemming from the impending cyclical readjustment of the universe, by which it would cease to be founded on rational cause-and-effect and would instead begin to operate by the rules of magic. The rapidly approaching cusp had harshly disrupted my formerly well ordered existence and I was determined to get back to exercising my logical faculties for as long as they continued to reflect the reality around me.

  The integrator that served as my assistant had undergone its own dislocations. For a time, it had been transmogrified into a creature called a grinnet, such as would have been a wizard’s familiar in the previous age of magic. By its own choice, it was now once again a collection of components and systems, though there were subtle indications that the willfulness it had acquired during its flesh-and-blood sojourn had not been wholly eliminated.

  * * *

  I had met Fullbrim’s type before. Substance-seekers were not unadmirable when the seeking was balanced by a dose of reasonableness, but they did become problematic when the urge to delve ever deeper was let to take precedence over life’s other priorities. Fullbrim was of the latter sort, and his deepening obsession had gradually driven Caddice to erect a series of barriers within their relationship.

  First, she had forbidden him to mention his preoccupations when the couple was in any social setting. Too many old friends had ceased to call, or had taken to crossing streets at oblique tangents, or developing a sudden consuming interest in the contents of shop windows, whenever Caddice and Doldan Fullbrim loomed in the offing.

  Second, having stopped him from filling the ears of third parties with his findings and speculations, she forbade him to direct them at her own auditory apparatus except during the hour before dinner. But Doldan’s continuing researches yielded more than enough material to fill the moments between the opening and closing chimes. Indeed, it seemed to Caddice that those moments stretched unnaturally long as he prattled enthusiastically about “fractal reinterpolations and quantum boojums.”

  “At least, I think that was what he was talking about,” she told me, as we consulted in my workroom. “As we entered the last few minims of the hour, he would speak much faster and employ abbreviations of his own devising. He had so much to convey, he would say, and all of it so fascinating.”

  “To him,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, half stifling a sob, “though not to any other resident of Old Earth. Or at least none that he ever encountered.”

  I offered her a second glass of the restorative cordial and she accepted. I waited until she had regained her composure then encouraged her to continue. The rest of the story tumbled out: finally she had encouraged him to forgo the daily oral reports and instead to write a comprehensive report of his findings to date, with daily journal notes to keep her current. She promised to read them when leisure permitted.

  “But, of course, it never did,” I said.

  “Not until he disappeared.” She drained the lees of the second glass and I poured her another. When she had done away with half of it, she continued, “I’ve tried to make sense of it, but I become lost in every other paragraph. There are footnotes, some of which connect to endnotes that only lead me back to where I started.” She in
dicated the sprawled materials on my work table. “Perhaps you can make sense of it.”

  I regarded the accumulated results of a life-long preoccupation. “It might be a better use of my time to solve the mystery of your spouse’s disappearance,” I suggested. “Tell me again what happened the last time you saw him.”

  She repeated what she had told me earlier. Doldan Fullbrim had burst from his study, his hair in disorder and an expression on his face that she described as “energized.” He had not bothered to don any outerwear, even though it was a scheduled half-day for rain in Olkney, but had rushed out the door unhatted.

  “And did he speak at all?” I said.

  “He said, ‘Ahah!’“

  “‘Ahah?’“

  “‘Ahah,’“ she confirmed.

  And then he was gone and she hadn’t seen him for several days, nor had he communicated regarding his whereabouts or any forecast of his return. As time passed, Caddice Fullbrim had progressed from surprise to bemusement, then on to alarm and finally to dread. “He is not,” she said, “the most worldly of men. He could easily fall afoul of those whose motives are base and whose methods are dire.”

  “Indeed?” I said. “Then we had better find him.”

  “There may be clues in his work.”

  “I will peruse them,” I assured her, though I intended to use more direct methods to locate her strayed seeker. We negotiated a fee structure, a healthy advance with refreshers and expenses. Fortunately for all of us, the missing man had been the heir to a fortune so substantial that it would have been difficult to dissipate, even if the Fullbrims had not lived relatively modestly on its proceeds.

  I saw her downstairs to her waiting cabriole and watched as it wafted her away. Back in my workroom, I instructed my assistant, “Make a search of Doldan Fullbrim’s movements since the date in question.”