Alienist

by Laurence M. Janifer

  “It worked?”

  “Your report was clear, and I’ve recorded it for analysis,” he said. I sat up—slowly; I felt as if I could have used another eight hours of sleep, or at least an hour of good massage.

  Discussion time.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  “A dog factory?” Mirella said.

  I shrugged. “Why not a dog factory?” I said. “I must have built it, one way or another—we have no evidence that Folla can impose anything more than Folla on a dreamer.”

  “We have no evidence that he is not at this moment making arrangements with six other humans,” the Master said. “Despite his promise, which we cannot wholly trust, it is possible, though I admit unlikely, that he is now treating with another, here on Ravenal, or on Kingsley, or Rimshot, or Earth.” He looked around at the rest of us, sitting scattered in Euglane’s comfortable living-room. “Or can we derive something?”

  Euglane said: “Perhaps we can.” There was a little silence.

  “Expound,” Master Higsbee said.

  Euglane looked inquiringly at me, and it took me a second to get it. Then I nodded; Mirella knew a little about Gielli, and she wouldn’t be too disturbed by the change.

  Then, as he relaxed, it occurred to me a) that Euglane had asked my verdict on possibly disturbing Mirella with the sudden appearance of his long arms and legs, and b) that I had accepted that fact as normal.

  Well … it was something to think about. Later.

  Much later.

  “Let us assume,” Euglane said, when he had the kinks out a little, “that Folla—that these beings in general—can access, so to speak, any human being at any location. If this is true, he did not appear in Knave’s dream just now.”

  “Probabilities?” the Master said.

  “Exactly,” Euglane said. “He needs, or wants, to—’get in’—to have this machine built for him. If he can access any human anywhere—we are still unsure of other beings, not human, but the distinction is not relevant to this chain of reasoning—then he will, first, be accessing those who can most easily perform the task, and, second, be accessing as many humans or other beings as possible. He would be occupied with many such encounters; that he would be free to appear in Knave’s dream when called, with little delay, is, as you have realized, Master, very highly improbable.”

  “He could be anyplace all at once,” Mirella said.

  “Polylocation,” Euglane said. “Folla, spreading out over our spaces to attack at thousands of points simultaneously. It’s a frightening picture, Lance-Corporal—but no.”

  “So why not?” Mirella said.

  “Folla is Folla,” he said. “He is not several beings; Dube is Dube. Individuated, he has said—and ‘so identified’. If individuated, he is not collective. He is the same person each time.”

  “So Folla is assigned to us, here,” Mirella said, “and sixty other aliens are assigned to sixty somebody elses, in some other place. This is not possible?”

  “It is very unlikely,” Euglane said. “Folla was not on Ravenal to begin with; the being who appeared in Ms MacEvoy’s dream, and in Hilda’s, was Dube, and of the identity of Harris France’s being, once it became a real alien rather than his illusion, we have no data. We assume that being to have been Folla, Dube or another of the same sort. But Folla would have come here after having sent Knave here. And—this is, after all, Ravenal. Someone fully capable of building a machine for these aliens—someone who could manage the job with ease—would be easy to find, anywhere in the Scholarte. Any mechanician, perhaps electronics technician, perhaps metallurgist, perhaps—”

  “I see,” the Master said. “And Dube, as we’ve been realizing, chose the crippled widow of a Professor at Leibniz. Folla, clearly, is not better-informed.”

  “A Professor of Military History,” Euglane said. “Scarcely the sort of discipline that would be handy—even if Ms MacEvoy were fully acquainted with her late husband’s specialty, which we don’t know.”

  “I doubt it like Hell,” Mirella said, “just on what I hear about her. But so maybe Dube makes a mistake and tries her out—how much can he know about humans? Does he know there is such a thing as a metallurgist, say? Maybe by him this woman in a wheelchair is an expert, and just right.”

  “No,” Euglane said. “In order to gain her cooperation at all, he helped her to walk. He knows enough about humans to know that her wheelchair does not provide an optimum condition for any work he needs done.” He paused. “It seems probable that he knows of metallurgists, or whatever his machine requires; he is to provide specifications for its construction, and must have acquired those specifications from some experience of materials and possibilities in our spaces. But, whether or not that is so, the limitation of the wheelchair applies: he chose her because—for reasons we don’t know—he had to choose her; his pool of possibles must in fact be very limited.”

  “Maybe,” Mirella said, “maybe he needs a chemical analyst. He came into Hilda’s dream, after all.”

  “So he did,” the Master said. “Into hers, and Ms MacEvoy’s, as Folla entered Knave’s—a widow with physical troubles and no apparent helpful specialty, a chemist, and a Survivor. He also seems to have some tie to the late Harris France, a police official. We cannot judge of the needs of these aliens from the people known to have been accessed; they are too varied.” He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Euglane is right: as I have said, he has chosen those he must choose, and has hoped that one, at least, will be both capable and willing.”

  “Like MacEvoy,” Mirella said. “Who is maybe willing, can we say for certain?” Which brought us back to that little puzzle.

  Arresting Hester MacEvoy was going to be a job. Such hard evidence as we had—without bringing in Dube—was not going to be persuasive to an average judge, jury or prosecutor—and mentioning Dube at all didn’t look like a cheerful thought.

  “I can see it now,” Mirella said. “What the idea would be is, we are all a little bit nuts. We have visions. Maybe, just maybe, we are harmless and do not have to be locked up.”

  “All right: what do we do?” I said. “I agree something has to happen; she said she wouldn’t build the damn machine—but she also said she couldn’t, because she was in a wheelchair. Which turns out to be true only now and then. So what the Hell do we do?”

  Hilda was standing at the top of the stairs. For a large person, she was really remarkably quiet; none of us had noticed her. She cleared her throat, and gave us all that little spasm of a smile. Her deep voice was very quiet, almost apologetic “We frame her,” she said.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  So we did.

  Persuading a lot of officials that Hester MacEvoy could get out of her wheelchair—which was the basic point; if we could do that, I thought, police could do the rest, because Hester, stubborn or not, wouldn’t stand up under questioning very well; she was a little too flaky—didn’t sound possible; the trick was, obviously, to get her to demonstrate her mobility before an audience. And I didn’t think asking her to get up and do a few dance steps was going to work.

  Rushing into her place and shouting: “Fire! Earthquake! Flood!” was better, but what if she simply put on a burst of speed and wheeled the Hell out? Perfectly possible—people in wheelchairs can move like streaks, when practiced.

  But there was another way…

  Euglane had to use his persuasive skills again, because Guin Jenn wouldn’t have responded well to mine. She’d do me the occasional favor, always just a bit amused at whatever the Hell I happened to be involved with, but actual neurosurgery was something she didn’t like playing games with. And I couldn’t appear in the picture at all, when things got going—Hester was already worried that she’d babbled to me, and if I popped up, no matter how confused she happened to be at the moment, all her alarms were going to go off. So we planned it, carefully, that night, until we had everything nicely set up and agreed on by the two on-stage players.

  Guin, when she’d arrived, had had a
lot of objections, even when she’d agreed to the basic notion. “Non-invasive procedure?” she’d said scornfully. “Knave, what, exactly, is a non-invasive neurosurgical procedure? Do I cast spells for the woman?”

  “If we offer her an operation,” I said, “she’ll refuse it. She’ll come up with a reason—she’s used to her life, she doesn’t want to run any surgical risks, something. She can walk right now— she has no reason to check into a hospital and have her head sawed open.”

  “And this—idiotic story?”

  “She’ll have to accept that,” I said. “No risk, no trouble for her—and she has to look as if she wants to be able to walk. She has to be minimally plausible—offer her a cure and she has to take it, if it’s risk-free—whether or not she needs it.”

  “I don’t like it,” Guin said.

  “I’m not all that fond of it myself,” I said, “but it’ll work. We’re calling her bluff.”

  “But the whole idea of the procedure is such nonsense—”

  “I know,” I said. “It has to be—because the whole meaning is that there’s no reason in the world for the procedure to make her walk. Unless she already can.”

  Euglane and Guin were to head over there the next afternoon—calling first, and spinning the story. Euglane was a noted psychiatrist, and a confrere, he was to tell Hester, of Cornelia Rasczak’s; Cornelia had told him of Hester’s problem, and he’d heard from another old friend (Guin) of a new procedure for such cases.

  “Brain tissue has been destroyed,” Guin had said to us. “Am I a miracle-worker, that I’m going to regrow it for her?”

  “You’re going to develop new pathways,” Euglane said. “By induction.”

  Guin laughed. Scornfully. “Do I chant while I do this?” she said. “Burn incense? Stagger through a ritual dance to something-or-other?”

  “You wear sterile gloves, perhaps,” Euglane said. “You put on a surgical mask. You look distant and professional. There are many sorts of rituals, Dr. Jenn.”

  “I only hope,” she said, “that word of this—escapade never surfaces. I would never, ever, live it down, you know.”

  “No fear,” I said. “We’ll never spill it, past a few selected police people—and Hester will be in no position to babble.”

  It was the next afternoon because Guin had, she insisted, a revision of a neck fusion to do in the morning. “I’m going to be in no shape for anything complex after that,” she said, “but I suppose I can handle simple nonsense.” And the time in between was interesting, if that’s the word.

  We all had to go to our various homes, after all, and go to sleep.

  The Master and Hilda went on home, Hilda looking determined—her normal expression, I suppose—and the Master assuring her that there was nothing to fear: “Folla has promised he will wait upon Gerald’s decision,” he told her. “If he break his word and come to you, you will of course temporize. He requires aid, Hilda; he will do nothing harmful in any way.”

  She said it again, of course: “If you say so, Sir.”

  Guin went home to rest up for her neck fusion job, disturbed only, as far as I could tell, by the pure idiocy of the story she was going to be delivering in eighteen or nineteen hours. Euglane seemed calm and even assured. And if Mirella fretted at all, she wasn’t fretting about Mirella.

  “Suppose he gets in a rush and comes to say hello to you?” she asked me, when we were driving me home in her car.

  “I’ll say hello, see you soon,” I said. “He’ll have to wait his turn—I don’t want to fence with him at all until I have some sort of word from the official Comity.”

  She didn’t sound persuaded. “So suppose this Folla doesn’t want to wait?” Mirella said.

  “That,” I said, “is his problem. As the Master was saying, he won’t hurt anything—he wants help.”

  “Just be careful, okay?” she said.

  And, if anybody dreamed anything, helpful or threatening, he or she never mentioned it. Folla was apparently keeping his word to wait for me; it occurred to me to wonder if Folla could lie. He’d promised Hilda a new sense, and he’d promised me something novel, too, but the fact that he hadn’t delivered didn’t quite mean that he wouldn’t, or couldn’t. Lying is a complicated thing to learn how to do; making a careful statement false to fact requires some grasp of what’s meant by “fact”, and, given that Folla wasn’t really used to a space-time that had mass and distance in it, and might also be a little vague as to what we meant by “time”, lying seemed unlikely.

  I actually thought all that. The howling clue buried in it passed me right by, at the time; I thought it was a small side-issue. Some days I am not as bright as I am other days.

  Well, the next afternoon did arrive, finally, and they took Euglane’s helmet, and most of the wiring and monitors that went with it—they crowded the back seat of Guin’s car with it. Mirella and I bade them a fond farewell, that next afternoon, from Euglane’s apartment; the Master was at the Playtime Wispies building, and Hilda back at home—feeding the piranhas, I supposed. “You will of course inform me of events,” Master Higsbee had said when we’d broken up the night before, and I’d said that of course I would.

  I’d helped load the car. Mirella had come along for no reason I could see. “Another day off?” said.

  “I am on investigative leave,” she said. “The France case is supposed to be closed out, but I have got them believing there are loose ends.”

  “Well,” I said, “there’s one—the murderer. Film at eleven.”

  She stared at me. “What when?” she said.

  “PreSpace slang,” I said. “It means—wait for the tapes. Full sound and color.” Because, of course, Guin had been carefully rigged with a nicely invisible spy camera, its lens apparently a small decorative pin on her rather severe grey jumper.

  “If this doesn’t work,” Mirella said, “what do we do?” She was driving back to my place, following the wildly complex Ravenal traffic laws with, as far as I could tell, no trouble whatever. She even had enough spare attention for conversation.

  “We think up something else,” I said.

  “And Folla is just going to wait around?” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “we’ll think fast.” Once again a large clue had bit me on the nose, without my having noticed the fact.

  And in a few hours, my phone blipped, and it was Guin and Euglane, downstairs, reporting success and on the way up.

  They interrupted a small snack I’d cobbled up—blinis and caviar, and pots of Gunpowder Green tea—I’d had a little time that morning for shopping, and laid in a supply, most of which I’d frozen, in preparation for getting it into stasis on my ship. Mirella had never encountered blinis before, and I don’t think she’d ever encountered first-rate caviar, and we were having a fine, diet-free time whiling away the wait.

  “You should have seen it,” Euglane said, when they were nicely settled and I’d started a new array of blinis (for Euglane, with some slivered, salted and toasted wax beans I’d been crisping for a salad). “She bought the story without a blink—it was really a very good story for such a person—and once she had the helmet on, and everything ‘connected’—it’s surprising what a few blinking lights will do to persuade a human that something important is occurring—we went most solemnly through the ‘procedure.’”

  “And she walked?” I said. “And you got it on tape?”

  “Pure idiocy,” Guin said. I dished out some blinis, spooned out some caviar, and folded in the toasted wax beans for Euglane. Guin took a swallow of tea, and began on the food. “You’re improving, Knave,” she said. “Simplicity—it’s the key to good nourishment.”

  Well, I’d once tried to impress Guin with the Hell of a complex recipe; not that I’d ever succeeded in impressing her at all. But—“Nourishment?” I said.

  “Caviar is high-energy food,” Guin said. The medical viewpoint, maybe. “And yes, we have the scene on tape. Which I very much hope you will to show only to those people
who can keep their mouths shut.”

  “They won’t be interested in you at all,” I said. “How did it go?”

  “Watch the tape,” Euglane said, and fished it out of a pocket, unboxed it and slipped it into my display screen. “Perfectly satisfactory, I feel sure.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Satisfactory was the word. We ate blinis and caviar (or wax beans), drank tea, and watched Hester MacEvoy, with her incredibly depressing smile, usher Euglane in—Guin, camera-rigged, was just behind him, but we couldn’t see Guin, of course. I saw the damn cloak hanging on a nice high peg as Guin went by it, and then we were in the dark little living-room. The tape was good enough even in that light; we were getting detail and full color, as well as sound.

  Euglane went through the story nicely—I have the feeling that any good psychiatrist probably has the makings of a fair actor—and I applauded Hester silently; she looked almost as hopeful and distant as she should have looked, if she’d actually been pinned to that chair. She wanted to know how long the “induction therapy” would take, and what results it would have, and where she’d have to go to get it. I could see her piling up possible objections, but it took careful looking.

  “We can provide it here and now,” Euglane said. “Dr. Jenn is quite practiced in its use, and I will assist. The induction field will last for about fourteen minutes—” Never quote a simple figure like ten or fifteen, I’d told him; it won’t sound plausible—“and the effect should be immediate.”

  Hester stared. “Im—immediate?” she said slowly.

  “Your muscles may need a little practice,” Guin’s voice said. “Probably not much, Ms MacEvoy; according to Dr. Rasczak, there’s been very little loss over the years. The musculature is still basically healthy.” She sounded as if what she was saying made actual sense, and I turned to grin at her as we watched. Her expression was so completely a scowl that I buried the grin in a hurry.