Alienist

by Laurence M. Janifer

  “What did she do for you?”

  He grinned. “Everything she could,” he said. “She knew tricks. I mean, I have pressure of speech sometimes—that’s when you talk too fast, you can’t slow down or stop. She knew some things—breathing, even sometimes looking out a window—they break the chain for me. Most of the time.”

  “Tricks,” I said, and he said:

  “That isn’t all. This thing—Touretting—it isn’t one thing, it’s a hundred. A thousand. Tics. Speech. Even breathing, though I haven’t had that.” Hand to cheek. “Yet.” A small pause. “She knew it—like she had it herself, almost. Knew what it was like, and she knew ways to get around it. To get back to normal. What everybody accepts as normal.”

  “Did you discuss your personal life with her? Your working life?”

  “My working life, I’m a salesman,” he said. “I’m pretty good. I think people buy just so they can shut me up.” A grin. “We found ways for me to talk to people a little better, a little easier. Without the pressure or the dangers, most of the time.”

  “And your personal life?”

  “She found ways for everything,” he said. “My personal life, I’ve got a few friends, I enter duplicate bridge tournaments. Hearts, I play Hearts a lot. That’s about it, nothing much to discuss, but she found strategies, ways for me to handle the cards more easily.”

  “Nothing else?”

  He grinned once more. “Friend, there isn’t anything else,” he said. “I’m a simple guy, and I lead a simple life. A small apartment for two, that’s all there is.”

  I noddded. “For two?”

  “Me and Gilles de la Tourette,” he said. “My constant companion.”

  Hester MacEvoy was number four on the list, and I reached her by early afternoon. She was about Harnett Groves’ height as nearly as I could judge, perhaps a little shorter, but she outweighed him three to one, a round and lumpy woman with straggling grey hair, and dim, grey-blue eyes. Her hands looked like strong claws, and her jaw looked soft and weak.

  She was in a wheelchair when she came to her door, and I said I was sorry to disturb her.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. Her voice was a very faint foghorn, and she spoke slowly, the words dragging just a little. “You’re company. I enjoy company.”

  She wheeled back to let me by, and I went in and through a small dark hall to a tiny, even darker living-room. There were books everywhere, on shelves that went high into the dimness, and a tall coat-stand in one corner with a sort of dark-grey woman’s cloak hanging from a top peg. She wheeled in behind me, having shut the door, and told me to take a seat.

  “I’ve already got one, you see,” she said, and gave me the most miserable smile I’d seen in several years.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “As I told you on the phone, I’m here to talk about Dr. Rasczak.”

  “Cornelia,” she said. “Yes. Cornelia was a great help. I don’t know where I’m to find anyone else who can help the way she did.”

  “What did she do for you?” I said, but she was going right on.

  “I could tell her anything,” she said, almost dreamily. “Such a fine woman. So sympathetic. I had no secrets from Cornelia, because she understood. She didn’t laugh at me— they mostly laugh at you, you know, though they hide it and just pretend they’re taking notes.”

  Secrets? I said: “I promise I won’t laugh. I won’t even take notes.” I seldom do, except in my head where I can always get at them. “What kind of thing was it that she understood?”

  “It’s because I wasn’t born here,” she said. “I’m from Kingsley originally. But Mr. MacEvoy held the Chair of Military History at the Scholarte—well, at Leibniz, you know. That’s a college in the Scholarte.”

  “He doesn’t hold it now?”

  She laughed. The laugh sounded just as miserable as her smile had looked. “Lord bless you,” she said, “he passed over eight years ago. But how am I to go back to Kingsley after all this time? I’m fifty-six years old, and everyone I know is here. And there’s the pension. So I stay. But they don’t like outsiders here. There are plots.”

  “Plots?”

  “They laugh at you if you’re from somewhere else,” she said. “Especially me, because I have a midbrain disease and I’m in a wheelchair. I can drive my old car, and I can handle things. My hands look peculiar, I know, but I can use them well enough for anybody.” She looked at me, daring me to object. I didn’t object. “Cornelia didn’t laugh,” she said. “Never, not once, not even inside.”

  I pressed, just a little. “And you told her about the plots?”

  “Oh, they don’t really hurt me,” she said. “Sometimes I think I’m just imagining such things, you know. But she really was a great help about the aliens.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I took a deep breath. “Aliens?”

  She smiled at me again. It was an expression that could drive a man to suicide—or at least to apology. I started to say I was sorry I’d brought the subject up—which I hadn’t, and wasn’t—and she said: “You have a nice aura. I can tell you. Your name is Knave, you said?”

  “Gerald Knave,” I said, and for some damn reason added: “Ma’am.”

  “Yes,” she said, sounding a little vague. “Knave. Knave. I think I can tell you.”

  “Go right ahead,” I said.

  “They want to get in,” she said. “In where we are.”

  I nodded. “They’re not in now?”

  She frowned. That looked more natural on her face than the smile had. “Of course not,” she said. “They’re aliens. They’re from outside.” She waved a hand—a weak motion, as vague as her voice. “Outside everything.”

  I thought of Folla—from “other spaces.” It was brilliantly obvious that the woman was mad. But even mad people can be accurate, sometimes. They may think two plus two make sixteen and a third, but they may be perfectly sound on four plus three.

  So I asked her, carefully, how they were trying to get in, and she said:

  “Every way. They come and talk to me. They try to make me open a door for them.” Another frown, a big one. “I don’t understand that at all,” Hester MacEvoy said.

  “What kind of door?” I said. “What is it they want you to do?”

  “They want me to build something,” she said. “I can’t build things for them. I have a midbrain disease, and I’m in a wheelchair. Anybody can see that. What do they think I am?”

  “Build something?”

  “With my own two hands,” she said, and raised the claws to me. I nodded again.

  “What kind of thing?”

  “I said,” she told me impatiently—slowly, but the impatience was clear—“I said I don’t understand it at all. I can’t build things for them. They ought to know that.” Her smile was small and distant. “They seem to know a lot, to hear them talk.”

  I took a breath. Maybe it meant nothing, but maybe there was something here. I’d talk to Euglane—and to the Master. “Hear them talk,” I said. “Do they come and talk to you?”

  “They talk,” she said. “I hear them. Clear as I can hear you. Clearer. But they can’t come in yet. They need me to build something, first.” A big smile, the first that seemed genuine. “I won’t do that,” she said. “Do you think I would do that? I won’t.”

  Another angle, maybe. “You say—they tell you things. Who is this ‘they’, do you know?”

  “Dube,” she said. “Mostly I talk to Dube. Or he talks to me. Maybe she. You can’t really tell with aliens.”

  “Right,” I said. I repeated the name. “Dube?”

  “Tell the truth, Mr. Knave, I don’t think they even have names,” she said. “Not really. But he said I could call him Dube. He said it was sound.” She paused and frowned, remembering. “Sound-coded something,” she said.

  I swallowed. Hard. “Sound-coded individuation,” I said.

  “Right,” she said, unsurprised. “That was it. Sound-coded individuation. Dube.”

/>   Oh, Lord.

  Hester and I had quite a long talk, and she agreed to talk to other people if I sent them around. “It’s company,” she said with that horribly depressing smile. “I like company.”

  I told her I’d do my best to see she got some, and I went away. I’d forgotten to hook in my pocket piece, so I looked around on the street for a phone, but Hester’s neighborhood was quiet-suburban, small houses that looked just a little worn, lawns, dogs and cars. No handy phone booths. I’d be better off at home anyhow, I told myself.

  There was a shopping street a couple of blocks off, and a cab-stand on it. I got home as fast as possible, and I started punching numbers even faster.

  * * * *

  Euglane’s number gave me a recording: “I’m sorry, but I’m with a patient just now. If you’ll leave a number I’ll get back to you just as soon as I can.” I didn’t bother to leave one—I’d get him later. I took a deep breath, hoping the Master wasn’t also occupied with something, and checked my watch. Four-twenty. All right, sixteen-twenty. Anything was possible.

  The thing blipped once, and his rasp said, as always: “Who?” It is no way to answer the phone. I’ve never mentioned it to him.

  “Gerald Knave, Master,” I said. “There’s been a development.”

  I heard him draw in his breath. I hadn’t heard him that excited in several years. “Folla?”

  “A friend of his,” I said. “I think. It may be nothing. On the other hand—”

  “Gerald,” he said, “I am at work. Whatever you have encountered, it will require discussion at some length, I imagine.”

  “I think it might,” I said.

  He chuckled. “Indeed,” he said. “Please come here at once. We can talk while I work.”

  I got an address from him, and left.

  He was set up in a small office in a distribution center for Playtime Wispies, and despite everything it took me a couple of minutes to adjust to the sight. It took me about a minute, sixty long seconds, to notice him at all.

  He was surrounded by boxes of spools and a big square reader equipped to speak its screen, and none of that was surprising. The reader was set on a desk, with the spools piled around it carelessly, and Master Higsbee sat behind it in what looked like an overstuffed armchair, his cane leaning on the left arm of the thing. There were a couple of stiff chairs in the room, too.

  And then there was a medium-tall blonde person, standing near a small table set against the left wall. She had grabbed my attention right away: she was dressed in Playtime Wispies, flat-heeled soft shoes, and nothing else.

  The table was heaped with an untidy collection of what looked like more Playtime Wispies.

  They were all colors—pink, coral, black, ivory, pale green and more. The ones being worn were a very pale pink, and there wasn’t a great deal of either the bra or the little panties.

  I must have stood in the doorway for longer than that minute. The Master had been listening to the reader tell him something, but when I shifted my balance in the doorway he looked up. “Ah,” he said. “Gerald. This is Roquelaire Hanna.” He waved a hand at the girl in the Wispies.

  “Call me Rocky, everybody does,” she said, and smiled at me. Her voice was a little thin, but it was the only thing about her that was in less than perfect proportion. “Hello, Gerald.”

  “Knave,” I said through my teeth, and, to the Master: “Your investigation?”

  “Of course,” he said. “We have been trying various combinations.”

  All right. “Combinations?” I was trying hard to keep my mind on conversation. This was not easy.

  “The thefts have been of display clothing, from models in stores throughout the city,” he said, as calmly as if there were nobody in the room but the two of us. “We have been attempting to see how the theft could be managed most easily, with a variety of lingerie, a variety of clasps or ties, and so on.” He gestured toward Roquelaire Hanna, casually. I couldn’t have made a casual gesture toward that woman if I’d practiced for years. “Ms Hanna serves my purpose better than a plastic display model,” he said. “She can cue her location by voice, and inform me which type of lingerie she is wearing.”

  I grinned—at him or at her, who knows? I couldn’t help it. “It sounds like interesting work,” I said.

  “The problem is a simple one, as I told you,” he said. “But there are subtleties.” He turned to her. “You said A53?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Bra and panties.”

  The Master got up. He took his cane and made his way slowly and easily over to her. When he stopped, she took the cane, without moving more than one arm and hand.

  He said: “One moment, Gerald,” and reached with his right hand, for the little pop-clasp that was set between her breasts. He popped it, moved to grasp the material just to the left of the clasp, and pulled. The bra—strapless, of course—came away. “Time?” he said.

  Roquelaire Hanna looked over my head—at a clock over the door, obviously. I had to concentrate to notice what her eyes were doing. “Just over nine seconds,” she said. “Nine point two.”

  “Thank you,” the Master said, handed her the bra, took his cane, and returned to his chair. “Gerald, what is it that has happened?”

  I hated to say it, but it seemed best. “We’d do better without an audience.”

  She’d been putting another bra on, a green model with straps. She clasped the thing, stopped and waited.

  “Perhaps so,” the Master said. “Roquelaire, we will have to continue this at a later time. Perhaps in the morning. I am sorry, but a disclosure of some importance is occurring.”

  “Just give me a call,” she said. She gathered up the Wispies and left, dressed in bra and panties. I waited for noises from the hallway, but heard none except for her soft-soled footsteps. There couldn’t, I told myself, have been anybody in the hall just then; or the employees of Playtime Wispies were more blasé than I could make myself believe.

  “A helpful girl,” the Master said after a few seconds. It wasn’t quite the word I’d have picked, but I nodded. He shut his eyes for a second—he does that, perhaps ancient habit—and opened them. “Now,” he said. “What has developed?”

  I told him about Hester MacEvoy, in detail. When I was through he said: “You do not know the precise nature of her illness?”

  “She said a midbrain disease. There are a couple of hundred, at last count.”

  “And some of them,” he said, “involve mania, of various sorts and to varying degrees.”

  I nodded. “Which is not the point,” I said. “Three words are the point.”

  “I agree,” he said. “‘Sound-coded individuation’. Not a phrase anyone would hit upon easily, by chance.”

  “Folla used it,” I said. “This Dube, whatever he is—or she, or it, or they—used it. It would be the Hell of a coincidence if there were no connection.”

  He raised a finger at me. “Caution, Gerald,” he said. “You are assuming too much.”

  “That Folla and Dube are both real, and both aliens from the same—little sheaf of spaces? Either from ‘other dimensions’ or from the spaces between, in our set? It seems a natural—”

  “And so it is,” he said. “The phrase is striking, and we can take that much as a good assumption, at the least. But you are assuming more, Gerald: you are assuming that Folla is Dube.”

  Maybe he reads minds. It would be just like him never to mention it. “Well,” I said, “it’s possible.”

  “So it is,” he said. “It may be factual. And it may not.” He raised the finger again. Lesson time. “But it is no more than possible. We know next to nothing; we should not leap to certainties where none exist. As Ms MacEvoy said, perhaps they do not even own names; they are individuals, but may distinguish themselves in other ways.”

  “In which case,” I said, “they might both be the same person. Or thing. Or something.”

  “No: they individuate; we can assume that much,” he said. “To what degr
ee we must remain uncertain, but they may be as separate as you and I, Gerald. As separate as you and Ms Roquelaire.” He chuckled. “Which separation,” he went on casually, “I have no doubt you will do your best to lessen, should opportunity arise.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I didn’t bother cobbling up a reply to that, I just let it go. “So either Folla is back,” I said, “or a friend of his has popped up.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I think it reasonable to assume some closeness between the two, at the least; both not only speak our language, but use the same unusual phrase.”

  “Which neither one would exactly have picked out of casual conversation,” I said. “The question is, what do we do now?”

  He smiled. “We speak to Euglane,” he said. “He is a perceptive fellow, but precise wording may have escaped his close attention. We ask him exactly what the ‘alien beings’ his mad patients report to him have said, in their words as reported—if possible, we ask for recordings from the relevant talks with his patients.”

  “Confidentiality—” I began.

  “It is common practice,” he said. “And it is good practice. But identity can be edited out of such records, Gerald. The job will be laborious—but clearly it must be done. I am sure Euglane will agree.”

  I wasn’t, having had some experience of how carefully any doctor guards confidentiality. Back before the Clean Slate War, a doctor who broke it could have been sued—the ancients had laws for everything, including how a doctor ought to behave, for God’s sake; but then, the ancients seem to have had something on the order of one lawyer for very one and a third normal persons, a luxury the Comity is somehow managing to do without.

  Today there aren’t laws like that—either you trust your doctor, or you find another one, which does seem the simple way to handle the matter—but doctors are very determined on the subject. I’d been surprised into asking Euglane to breach confidentiality, back in Murray’s Basement, and he’d gone ice-cold on me for a few seconds.