Alienist

by Laurence M. Janifer

  And editing out identity might be an interesting job; wiping or changing names would be easy, but changing the voice rhythms and general speech patterns, even if the vocal ranges were changed, would be a neat trick.

  Well, the Master thought there’d be no trouble, and just maybe there wouldn’t be—for the Master.

  I tried Euglane’s number again, and the thing blipped three times before I heard his voice: “Yes? I am Euglane.”

  “Gerald Knave,” I said. “I’m with Master Higsbee, and there’s been a development we’d like to talk over with you.”

  “Regarding Harris?” he said.

  I had almost forgotten there was such a person as Harris France. “Maybe,” I said after a few seconds. “What we know is, it involves alien beings.”

  There was silence for almost half a minute. “I see,” he said. “Or perhaps I don’t. At any rate—I have just left my last patient for the day. Where do you suggest we meet?”

  I spent a few tough seconds fighting down the temptation to invite him over to the Playtime Wispies office. “Your place, or mine,” I said. The Master, from his chair, put in:

  “Or mine, of course, Gerald.”

  “Why not?” Euglane said, having heard the voice. ““It’s been some weeks since we’ve visited, Master. Can you set a time?”

  I looked at the Master. He said: “There will be traffic abroad. You do not drive in City Two, Gerald. A taxi—we should allow the better part of an hour, much of it spent in locating one.”

  I looked up at the clock Roquelaire Hanna had been watching. Seventeen-ten. “Eighteen-fifteen,” I said.

  “I will provide a small dinner,” the Master said. “Tell Euglane that I do recall his preferences and his needs.”

  “Please thank the Master for me. And—six-fifteen P. S.,” Euglane said. “Is that the way you prefer to say it, Knave?”

  “Close enough,” I said, and fetched up some polite goodbyes, as did he.

  In the cab—which we managed to find after only four or five minutes of casting around on the crowded street—City Two hasn’t really got pushing-and-shoving crowds, but just after five (seventeen) any working day it tries its best to pretend it has—the Master said: “You have not visited me at home in several years, Gerald. You will note changes.”

  “You’ve given up the fish?”

  He looked almost shocked. “Of course not,” he said. “But there will be four at dinner; I have contracted an obligation.”

  I remembered the female voice I’d heard when I’d tried to phone him earlier. It was hard to believe, but—“You’ve gotten married?”

  He gave me his chuckle. “I have not,” he said. “Her name is Hilda Ramsgate, she is thirty-seven years old, and she has had recent difficulties. She required some small assistance, and I have provided; she is staying with me for a time.” Another small chuckle. “There is no thought of marriage,” he said. “Nor of any sort of—liaison. You will see.”

  But the first thing I saw, when I followed the Master through his massive oaken doorway into the entrance hall, was the damned wall of fish. The hall opened into a living room with a couch, three comfortable chairs, and a couple of tables—and, at the far end, the glass wall. It was lit from above, and not brightly, but the savage little fish were perfectly visible. I hoped to God somebody had fed them recently enough that I wouldn’t have to watch the process.

  “They are not pets,” he’d told me once, long ago. “Keeping a pet is an offense against the independence of all living things. They are exemplars.”

  Well, whatever they were, they were extremely nasty little horrors. I have never known anybody else who would even think of keeping piranhas as a hobby—for one thing, they need special temperature control, special lighting, and a lot of very careful consideration generally. And of course feeding them isn’t a matter of buying a dollar’s worth of fish food flakes every so often.

  They were drifting lazily around behind the glass, and looked torpid, which was a good sign. We went into the living room, and the Master gestured toward one of the chairs. As I ambled over to sit down—the chair didn’t quite face the wall of piranhas, which was a relief—he called out: “Hilda!”

  I’d heard her footsteps before he’d raised his voice, and in about a second she appeared in the doorway that led to the kitchen. “You have—a guest?” she said in a rough baritone I’d heard once before; it was still female enough that I’d known she was a woman in one sentence over the phone.

  “Very good,” he said. “You detected the breathing, of course.”

  “Breathing and motion,” she said. “He walked to the—the light-blue chair. I think he sat down.”

  “The dark-blue chair,” the Master said. “A difference of a few feet only. You are doing very well, Hilda.”

  She gave him a brief smile—like a spasm. “I’ll get there,” she said, and he went to the couch and eased himself down, leaning the cane next to him.

  “You will indeed,” he said, and smiled at her. She couldn’t see that, of course, but she could hear it in his voice.

  Standing in the doorway, she looked perfectly capable of bracing herself against the sides and bringing the whole damned house down, like Samson. She was a little under my height— which is six feet even—and she was built like an all-in wrestler; under the brightly flowered jumper she had muscles on her muscles, and her shoulders and arms were very impressive for size and apparent strength.

  Her face was square and strong, and when she spoke she showed the largest and whitest teeth I’d seen in years. Her mouth was big and generous, her nose a small round snub, her hair a simple, neat mat of red-brown curls. Her eyes were closed. She looked younger than thirty-seven, but not by much.

  “Hilda Ramsgate,” the Master said without rising, “Gerald Knave. Gerald, my house-guest, Hilda.”

  “Ah,” she said. “You’re Gerald. I’ve heard things about you.”

  “I talked to you on the phone yesterday,” I said. “What things?”

  She said it again: “Ah.” Then: “Yes, when I hear you clearly I remember. It’s nice to meet you.” She did that little spasm of a smile again. Well, I might find out what she’d heard some other time. Or not, of course. I said:

  “My pleasure.”

  “May I explain, Hilda?” the Master said. “Gerald will be curious.”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “It’s no secret, Sir.”

  “Hilda became blind five months ago,” he told me. “She wishes to learn to deal with her situation, as I have.”

  I nodded. “She can get her eyes replaced,” I said. The Master never had, and I’d heard him give seventy different reasons why. One did not badger him on the subject. But I’d thought his attitude was—like almost everything else about him—unique.

  “It might be possible for her,” he said mildly. “But she feels—Hilda, would you explain? And sit, by all means.”

  She was still standing in the doorway. “Thank you, Sir,” she said, and walked—trying to do it casually and easily, but moving slowly—to the light-blue chair near mine.

  She backed to it, feeling not with her hands but with the backs of her knees, and sat down, trying to make it look natural, and almost succeeding. She turned her head toward me.

  “It’s my own fault, Gerald,” she said. “I thought I was—as he says— smarter than the universe.” The odd smile again.

  “How so?” I said.

  She shook her head slowly. “I was a chemist,” she said. “In my work, precise color differentiation was important. I came across mentions of something called Calorate-six. You may not have heard of it—”

  “Oh, God,” I said. “Three drops into each eye, and your rods and cones are six times as efficient. See with greater precision. Discriminate fine shades.” It had been something of a fashion, first on Apelles, where odd and expensive fashions sometimes do take hold, and then on several worlds. I hadn’t heard of it on Ravenal, but why the Hell not? Intelligence is only intelligence; sense
is a different thing altogether.

  Back before the Clean Slate War, away back there among the ancients, it might not have been possible for Hilda Ramsgate to go out and casually buy Calorate-six. It would probably have been a Prescription Drug—which means that nobody could sell it to you unless you had a Prescription. This was an official order from an official doctor (or dentist, or psychiatrist) telling whoever had such stuff for sale that you were officially allowed to purchase it—a sort of Security Clearance program for various chemicals.

  This odd little rule never did make any sense—many things that could kill or injure the buyer could be acquired without Prescriptions—aspirin, for instance, which was a favorite drug among suicides. And some common poisons, like arsenic, could be bought without Prescriptions if they were labeled as weed-killer or some such. (Weeds are unwanted plants. The ancients divided the vegetable world up into wanted plants and unwanted ones, on no system anybody has ever been able to explain.) But the rule, once put into effect, was as impossible to kill as it was to understand.

  Today, of course, it doesn’t exist; when people put society back together after the War, there were some pieces they felt it better not to include, thank God. When you need a medicine, you may not need the delay and foolery, not to mention the expense, of going to an official person and begging for a Prescription.

  The argument an ancient might make in favor of Prescriptions would probably have been: “But how do you know what medicine you need? An official person, who knows all about medicines, has to tell you that.”

  And sometimes he does, and if you have any sense, and don’t know quite what’s wrong, or what remedy there is for what’s wrong, you’ll go and ask. (And if you don’t have the sense to do that, it is not up to the rules to lead you around by the hand.)

  But if you’ve had the same thing before, or if you know what it is you need—and quite a lot of people have, or do—why waste time, money and attention?

  Well, the ancients were, as the Master had said, a strange collection of people.

  Hilda Ramsgate had heard about Calorate-six, and had decided, without enough checking, to try some. A fair number of people on various planets had, and the results had varied from zero to blindness. If you think such a thing couldn’t have happened if they’d all had to go and beg Prescriptions, you have more faith in preSpace doctors than is reasonable.

  (Of course, if a preSpace doctor had handed out such a Prescription, and Hilda had then become blind, she could have sued him. Doctors and lawyers thus became equivalent, and very busy, bothers.)

  “I thought it would help,” Hilda said. “I should have known better; I should have checked thoroughly. But—well, he’s right, you know. I thought I was smarter than the universe.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But replacement—”

  “It was my own fault,” she said firmly. That baritone voice had a lot of firmness in it, when called for. “I’ll just have to deal with it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I didn’t start an argument. Hilda said suddenly: “I should have told you at once, Sir: I fed them at fifteen-thirty.”

  “Good,” the Master said, and turned to smile—fondly, I swear it—to the glass wall of fish for a minute. Then back. “We will have two guests for dinner, Hilda. Would you instruct the kitchen?”

  “The usual menu?”

  “Ah,” the Master said. “I had forgot—I shall have to instruct it myself. Euglane has preferences; and of course the meal will be vegetarian.”

  “Euglane,” Hilda said. “I know his preferences, Sir. I could instruct—”

  “I’ll do it, Hilda,” he said. “There are also Gerald’s preferences to consider.”

  I told him it didn’t matter—and it didn’t; why put him to the trouble of limping his way to the kitchen and pushing four or five buttons?—but he was firm about it, giving me a smile that said, as clear as large print, that though crippled, blind and aged, he would see to my comfort. For God’s sake. He did go off to the kitchen—not limping perceptibly—and Hilda said:

  “He’s a wonderful man, the Master.”

  “He’s like God,” I said. “Wonderful and terrible.”

  “He’s helping me a lot,” she said. “And he never complains. Not about anything.”

  This was not the Master Higsbee I had come to know and sometimes put up with, but I didn’t argue the matter. Hilda and I chatted idly for a few minutes, and the Master came stalking back, dropped into his seat on the couch and leaned his cane against an arm-rest.

  “Euglane should be here shortly,” he said. “Gerald—we may discuss this openly before Hilda; I have few secrets she is not privy to, and none as regards such matters as this; she does not chatter—have you any suggestions about a line of inquiry?”

  “You said it all,” I told him. “His patients. Alien beings. What the patients said they experienced, in as much detail as is available.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But perhaps his own researches—he has, after all, been looking into the question of aliens from other dimensions, whatever that might be taken to mean—might also serve as a ground for discussion.”

  And Hilda said: “Alien beings? Excuse me, Sir—and Gerald—I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “Quite all right, Hilda,” the Master said. “Humans seem naturally fascinated by the very notion of alien beings.”

  “Oh,” she said, “it isn’t that. But—when I was in the hospital, you know—I had the strangest dream. Only it wasn’t a dream, because it predicted a true event.”

  The Master seemed to tense a little, leaning forward. “A dream?” he said. “Involving alien beings?”

  Hilda hesitated. “Well—one being,” she said. “And he said a visitor was coming to—to see me. And he was—but it had to be a dream, didn’t it, Sir?”

  I was a little tense myself, staring at Hilda, who sat quietly in the light-blue chair. “Did this being have a name?” I said. The Master cut in:

  “Hilda, you must not be shy of that word. People see. Even you and I can be said to see about something, or see whether something will occur. You must accustom yourself to the word; that is important, Hilda.”

  “Yes, Sir,” she said. “I know, and I do try. But—” She shook her head, and turned her face toward me. “He said his name was Dube,” she told me.

  And the door chime went off.

  All our plans for discussion had, of course, gone straight to Hell. Euglane got a set of somewhat distracted greetings— Hilda was calm and polite, and he’d visited the Master before; there were no introductions to bother about. The Master and I were both a little hurried. “It seems,” Master Higsbee told him, when he was seated and Hilda had gone off to find a fruit juice for him, “that we have more news than we thought.”

  “About Harris France?” Euglane said. He hadn’t relaxed, though the Master’s place had room for it. His chair had its back to the wall of piranhas.

  “About alien beings,” the Master said. “There may be a connection. But we can now establish most firmly that Folla is a real and existent being—and that there exists at least one other.”

  Euglane frowned; it’s an odd effect with a beak. “One?”

  “There may be many millions,” the Master said. “I speak of what we know. You may yourself know more.”

  That eagle’s face looked puzzled. “I myself,” he said, “know nothing at all. The beings of Harris’ fantasies are—fantasies.”

  “They may be,” the Master said; “that is surely most probable,” and I chipped in:

  “You said, by the way, that they didn’t have names.”

  “I said,” Euglane told me carefully, “that Harris doesn’t know their names, nor whether they have any. Has this become important?”

  I gestured, vaguely. “It may be,” I said. “Your other patients—the ones who have reported some kind of contact with aliens—do they have names?”

  “The patients?”

  “The aliens.”

 
; He shook his head again. He sighed, turned very slightly toward the piranhas, turned back and asked the Master: “Do you mind?” and the Master spread his hands, giving permission. Euglane relaxed, fairly quickly.

  “It varies,” he said after a few seconds. His arms twined over his head. “Some of them have the names of people associated with the patient’s past in some way. Or, most commonly, more or less arcane variants of such names. Some have no names at all; some have names whose origin I haven’t yet seen.”

  “Folla?” I said. The Master cut in:

  “If that name had come up, we would have known,” he said briskly. “Euglane would surely have mentioned it.”

  I nodded. “True. But how about Dube?”

  Euglane thought for a minute. “Dube,” he said. “I don’t think so. It’s not the—the sort of name I’d expect. Names of these fantasy-beings tend to be—polysyllabic, and full of odd echoes. Hotrufan, for instance. Dube is simple, has only one syllable, and doesn’t seem to echo much—’dubious’, of course, and its cognates, but little more. Has someone reported an alien being named Dube?”

  “It’s Dube himself—herself, itself, whatever—who’s been reporting in,” I said. “There’s a woman who’s had conversations with him. And he isn’t a fantasy.”

  Hilda had come back with the fruit juice. I sketched my talk with Hester MacEvoy. Euglane nodded.

  “But this does indeed sound very like the usual sort of fantasy,” he said. “Even to the business of—wanting to ‘get in.’”

  “But it’s not fantasy,” I said. “That seems to be clear; one phrase establishes it.”

  Another nod, a slow one. “I agree it’s an odd phrase,” Euglane said. “Still, it’s easier to believe in even a large coincidence than to believe—”

  “Ease of belief is not the question.” the Master said. “And there is more. Hilda here has—ah—met the same being Ms MacEvoy speaks of.”

  There was a little silence. Euglane broke it at last with one word: “Details?” His arms twined, then shook.