9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn

by Matthew Hughes

  He glanced my way only a moment before averting his eyes, but I thought to see a look of guilt and shame in his aspect. “I don’t know,” he said. “I have never ascended all the way to the Epiphany.”

  “You do not question those who have?”

  “I tried, in the early days, but got nothing from them. You’ll see.”

  I was alarmed. “They are struck dumb?”

  Again, a brief culpable look came my way. “They can speak. Mostly, they do not. And never about what they encountered above.”

  I taxed him with being unduly mysterious and warned him that if this continuing parsimony with information was part of some scheme to cadge funds from me, I was not easily gulled. He stopped then and turned to me, and I heard a faint and pained laughter behind his voice when he replied, “You read me wrong. Far wrong.”

  “Then out with the whole of it,” I said. To underscore my determination, I drew the weapon from my pocket and held it within view, though I did not direct any of its dangerous orifices at him. He seemed unimpressed, but leaning on his staff and in a monotone, he told me his tale.

  The Epiphany–that was what it was called when he first arrived, some years back, though he did not know exactly what the name signified–was to be found in a subterranean gallery whose mouth opened near the base of one of the tallest crags. Froust did not know how long it had been there.

  “What do you know of it?” I said.

  “Its effect,” he said, and again a mournful inward look possessed him until I bucked him on with a gesture of my weapon-bearing hand.

  “I was on my way up, having spent my first night at the inn, eager to encounter that which I had searched for all my young life,” he said.

  “And that was?”

  “What all who come here seek: the substance behind the form. The real reality that underlies,”–he gestured inclusively but dismissively at the crags, the plain and the pale sky that overhung us–“all this.”

  “But you found something else?”

  His eyes beheld some haunted vista seen only by them. Then he looked upslope and said, “I found such as that.”

  I followed his gaze and saw a dark object beside the path above us. As we climbed toward it, it resolved itself into a bundle of clothing, and when we stood over it, it became clear that the bundle contained the recumbent form of Doldan Fullbrim, curled around himself like a toppled parenthesis.

  He was not dead, as Froust soon ascertained. The innkeeper took out a flask that he carried within his outer garment, turned the fallen man on his back and poured into the slack mouth a tawny liquid that I suspected was the same stuff Froust had been drinking when I first saw him at the inn. Fullbrim coughed and spluttered, his eyes opened but did not focus. His rescuer slapped him twice, forehand and backhand, across the cheeks, and now the empty eyes blinked, came back to an awareness of their surroundings, and immediately filled with tears.

  “Come,” said Froust, not unkindly. He put an arm beneath Fullbrim’s shoulders and helped him to rise. “I have a place for you,” he said.

  The substance-seeker made no response but allowed himself to be led down the path. I went after the pair.

  “Wait,” I said, and when they stopped I got in front of the man I had come to find. “What did you find up there?” I said.

  He turned to me a gaze so forlorn that it sent a pang of sympathy through me and, I had to admit, a frisson of fear. His throat worked and for a moment, I thought he would speak, but then all that came was a croak and a sob.

  Froust bid me let them pass, and I stood aside. But as they made their slow descent, the innkeeper looked back at me and said, “Climb the slope and find the answer, if you have the courage. Mine faltered, when I encountered my first of these. Yours may not.” He tightened his arm protectively around Fullbrim’s collapsed shoulders and led him away.

  I stood, irresolute. My assignment had been Fullbrim’s finding, and that was accomplished. I could return to Old Earth and report his whereabouts to his anxious spouse, and leave it to her to decide whether or not to bring him, or what was left of him, home. But I did not know what had happened to him up above; It seemed, at the very least, unprofessional to return without an explanation. It would also be an affront to my sense of who I was to leave it to Caddice Fullbrim to climb this path and face whatever had so undone her man.

  On the other hand, I was not a seeker after substance. Reality, as I engaged it regularly, was usually enough for me. If I required a more profound and penetrating perspective on the universe’s hows and how-comes, I was adept at the mathematical discipline of consistencies, which revealed the hidden structures behind apparent chaos.

  I turned to my assistant, which I had designed and built to be my interlocutor and partner in debate. I set before it the issues I had already considered and said, “What more should I put in the pot?”

  “The fact,” it said, “that consistencies eventually round themselves back to where one started.”

  “Yes,” I said, “there is that. As the great Balmerion put it, ‘It is either an elegant completion or a cruel trick.’“ I had always leaned toward the former, but in Fullbrim’s face I had seen that there might be evidence for the latter judgment.

  “And,” my assistant added, “the fact that you are a discriminator. It is your function to unravel any veil of mystery that obscures your view.”

  “Whatever the cost?” I said. “Something up there drives those who find it into helpless despair.”

  “Look at this way: if you have ever wondered at the absolute limits of your courage, here is an opportunity to put a scale to it.”

  I sighed and faced into the down-rolling breeze. “Then up we go.”

  * * *

  The cave mouth was not flanked by baleful idols, nor were there any portentous warnings carved in the living rock. It was merely the adit of a nondescript cavern which turned out, when I entered it, to be level of floor and high enough of ceiling that there was no need to stoop, nor yet to approach the mystery on supplicating hands and knees.

  I stood in the mouth, letting my eyes adjust to the murk within, and said to my assistant, “What do you detect?”

  “Nothing inimical,” it said. “No lurking beasts, no subtly triggered deadfalls, no fissures emitting noxious gases, nor any devices to project missiles, energies, psychotropic drugs or holographic illusions.”

  I stepped farther within. A wide crack split the cave’s rear wall, opening onto the gallery in which waited whatever had caused such dismay to Doldan Fullbrim and his predecessors. I paused before it. “Scan again,” I said.

  “Still nothing.”

  Was that it? I wondered. Do they come expecting so much, only to find nothing? Is that enough to break their hearts?”

  “Of course not,” said a mellow baritone in the accents of Olkney’s better-bred citizens. I could not quite place the voice, though it seemed intimately familiar. I stepped into the gallery and realized that the voice I had not recognized at first was identical to my own in tenor, the voice I heard in my own head when I spoke aloud or silently in my own thoughts. Yet there was an indescribable resonance, an intensity, behind its well rounded cadences that told me that someone else was speaking.”

  “Did you hear that?” I asked my assistant.

  “What?” it said. “I hear only the wind across the cave mouth.”

  “Never mind,” I said and stepped toward the rift in the rear wall. As I entered the gallery beyond, lit clearly by some sourceless glow, I saw that not only was the voice I had heard mine own, but so were the face and figure of the man who sat on a rough boulder at the far end of the passage.

  Or not actually on, I saw as I approached. Rather, he was partially sunk into the rock, and unable to move. “Aha,” I said, “an illusion.”

  “Oh, no,” came his reply. “All else is the illusion. I am the reality.”

  “May I?” I said, extending a hand.

  “If you like,” said the man on the rock, bearing wit
h good grace my tactile examination of his form. He felt as substantial as he looked.

  “Integrator,” I said, “what do you see and hear?”

  “I see and hear you talking to a rock and patting the air above it as if something solid met your hand. It is not an encouraging sight.”

  I returned my attention to the simulacrum of me, but my assistant said, “Hypothesis: your recent experiences have culminated in an episode of insanity. I should immediately assume direction of your affairs and return you to Olkney, where you may be confined for treatment.”

  “Hush,” I said. “Indeed, put yourself on standby until I require you again.”

  I was surprised that my assistant sought to disobey my order. I was required to repeat myself.

  “Artificial devices cannot apprehend me,” the apparition said. “It would spoil the desired effect if questers could simply send a substitute for their own sensoria, or if they did not experience me as idealized versions of themselves.”

  “And what effect is that?” I said.

  “To make me unhappy.”

  It seemed to me that the subscription for any unhappiness generated in this cave was much more heavily underwritten by those who struggled up the path with their expectations honed to a whit, only to stumble back down it with hearts dull as lead. Still, for the moment, I overlooked that point to ask, “Why do you desire to make yourself unhappy?”

  “I don’t desire it. It is a punishment set upon me.”

  “Set by whom, and for what crime?”

  And thereupon, of course, hung a tale.

  * * *

  Back at the inn, I looked in upon Doldan Fullbrim. Froust had settled him in one of the cells off the small corridor, where he sat staring into the darkness, but seeing a deeper nothingness. I asked him if he had any message for me to take back to Caddice but he moved his head in an almost infinitesimal signal of negation. I thought that it might be best simply to tell the woman that he had died quickly in a climbing accident, expiring with her name on his lips. The lie would be kinder than the pathetic truth, if the latter encouraged her to journey all the way out here in the hope she could somehow resuscitate him after his encounter with reality.

  What to tell the innkeeper was a thornier matter. As I prepared to trudge back to the Gallivant, I left it up to him to inquire. If he asked, I would speak. If not, I would leave him as I had found him.

  He stood behind the counter, scouring out bowls, and merely nodded as I bade him farewell. I paused a moment when I had my hand on the edge of the felt curtain that covered the front doorway, but still he said nothing. It was only when I had passed through the barrier and set my footsteps toward my waiting ship that I heard his voice raised in a hoarse shout behind me. I turned and retraced my steps.

  “If you must know,” I said, “I will tell you. But it will not be welcome news.”

  “Come inside again,” he said, and when I followed him within, he went to the bar, brought out two small tumblers of a fine, white stone, and filled them with the liquid he had poured into Fullbrim. It was a raw, pungent liquor that enflamed the throat and thrust open the sinuses, but the subsequent spreading of its warmth was welcome.

  Froust downed his and poured a second. He tossed back half of that one, recovered from the inner wallop, then said, “Tell.”

  It might not be so bad for him, I thought. It is worst for those who expect the most. “You are familiar,” I began, “with the kind of story, allegedly humorous, that consists of a long and complex build-up, leading to some cave on a remote mountain peak, where the end of all the striving turns out to be no more than a deflating inanity?”

  “I am. And I will say that I never cared much for them.”

  “Well, it appears that they are a clue to the true nature of reality,” I said, “along with much of the material Fullbrim gathered and studied over many years.”

  I emptied the satchel full of my quarry’s research notes and spread them on the counter. Froust picked through them and said, “My own investigations paralleled some of these lines of inquiry.”

  I poked amongst the litter myself, saying, “The use of the bell curve as the standard measuring tool, even though it produces only rough approximations; the fact that the atoms of which solids are formed attenuate so that there are no actual surfaces; the fractal jaggedness at the edges of everything, creating jumbles where there ought to be clean lines; the endless variation of every form, so that not even two snowflakes are exactly alike; the fact that at the quantum level lies only uncertainty. These are also clues.”

  “I considered them,” said Froust. “They led me to believe that there had to be more to the universe than was argued for by appearances–that this was only froth, with the solid substance hidden beneath. Eventually, I came upon hints and insinuations that there were places where the truth gleamed through the dross, and that one of those places was a cave on Far Grommsgrik.” “As did Fullbrim,” I said, “and so many more before him.”

  “And what did they find up there? Does the cave contain the truth or a deflating inanity?”

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “it contains both.”

  He drank the other half of his fortifying cup, coughed, and said, “Say on.”

  “Up there is the entity who created this universe. Or an aspect of the entity. Apparently, he is spread here and there throughout the galaxies that were his handiwork. Each such avatar is at the last step on a trail of abstruse clues that beckon those who most desire to encounter him.”

  Froust’s eyes gleamed in the dim light. “He is, for lack of a better word, god?”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “He was merely one of the helpers, and of a lowly rank. His job was to create only a rough-and-ready sketch of the intended final product.”

  “And did he?”

  “Indeed. But then, when the project moved on toward creating the final version, in all its wondrous perfection, he was supposed to throw the rough draft away.”

  But, of course, he hadn’t. He had grown attached to his handiwork, especially to its “denizens,” as he called them. He “admired how they”–we, that is–“struggled.” He thought it gave them–us–“dignity.”

  The other builders, doing the bidding of their grand high overseer, went on to construct the true, perfect universe, compared to which ours was never more than the scantiest, most primitive rendering–not much more than “a lick and a promise” was how they scornfully described it. Still, our fellow lingered on, bemused by his crudely shaped piece of brummagem. Eventually, his disregard of orders and inattention to the important aspects of the great work brought wrath and retribution down upon his head: he was told, “If you like your tawdry creation so much, you can wear it.”

  He was imbued into the rough draft, fragmented to become a constellation of avatars, each imprisoned in one of his opus’s hardest-to-find corners. Such was his involvement in its workings that his “denizens”–at least, those whose natures most resonated with his–would be drawn to seek him out. When they succeeded, after much labor, their expectations would be cruelly dashed. He whom they thought of as their god would have to reveal to them the essential puniness of all creation and of its dishonored creator.

  “Just when they think they have won through to a glorious enlightenment, he is forced to undo the very meaning of their lives and break their hearts,” I said. “His having to witness their misery was meant to be the sharpest tooth of his punishment.”

  Froust poured us both another cupful of the liquor and we drank in silence. “It seems,” he said, after a long moment of quiet reflection, “rather harsh on the poor fellow.”

  I agreed with him, adding, “I gather that those who dwell among true perfection were scandalized by his fixation on our squalid circumstances.”

  “It seems also rather a hardship on us.”

  “I don’t believe that was even a consideration,” I said.

  We sipped some more. With every glass, I was finding the potent drink less outrageous to
my tongue and throat. After more reflection, the innkeeper said, “It’s odd that you were not rendered catatonic by the unfortunate news.”

  I had mulled the question on my way down from the cave. “I believe that the practice of the profession of freelance discriminator has long since taught me the futility of seeking perfection in this life,” I said. “One of the advantages of dulled expectations is that disappointments do not bite deeply.”

  We again fell into another moment of bibulous contemplation. Then I asked him what he would now do. He blinked slowly two or three times and said, “Tomorrow, I may climb up there and seal up the cave. Enough, after all, is enough.”

  “I am glad you said that,” I replied, “because I have already done the job.” I showed him my weapon with its now-depleted energy stores.

  He sighed and poured us some more. “Then I will stay and tend to the sufferers until they expire, turning away any more who find their way here.”

  “That would be a kindness.”

  “Though it doesn’t balance the cruelty.”

  “No,” I said, “it does not.”

  He drained his cup. “And after the last of them is dead, who knows? Perhaps I shall go to one of the foundational worlds and create a new school of philosophy.”

  I joined him in a toast to the proposal. “Or, if you prefer a more useful occupation, you might do well to introduce this remarkable beverage to places where it is not already known. I can think of several establishments in Olkney where it would be warmly received. Especially the second glass.”

  He sighed. “It’s a long way down from seeking perfection,” he said.

  I poured us both another measure. “Yes, but at least it cushions the landing.”