The Other

by Matthew Hughes

  “These are matters beyond my competence,” said the vehicle. “I will take you to Overcommander Chope and let you settle it amongst yourselves.”

  “No,” said the arbiter, supported by Breeth. But the vessel turned its nose. It was now on a convergent course with the heavy transporters.

  “I order you—” Shvarden said, but Imbry cut him off.

  “Let me,” he said. He turned and reached over the back of the seat, found the toolbay, and rummaged through it until he came up with a flat case about the size of his hand. He opened it and studied several small tools attached to brackets within, finally selecting one and holding it up for close inspection. “This will do,” he said.

  “What are you doing?” said the integrator.

  Imbry made no answer but reached under the operator’s panel and, with one sudden wrench, tore it free. He flung it over his shoulder into the cargo bay, gave the naked components a quick glance and inserted the business end of the selected tool into an orifice.

  “Stop!” said the carry-all. “You are not authorized to modify—”

  Imbry twisted the tool and the voice was silenced. At the same time, the vehicle lost both forward thrust and altitude. Shvarden and Breeth made high-pitched sounds indicative of the onset of panic as the carry-all also began to rotate on its long axis, threatening to turn upside down and spill them out of the uncanopied compartment.

  But Imbry remained calm. He inserted the tool into another slot and applied pressure. The vehicle regained its equilibrium. Imbry selected a length of metal with notches cut into one end. This he slid into another receptacle, twisted it until he heard a click and determined that the implement would not come free when he pulled it. He moved the now-fixed lever sideways, then up and down. The carry-all responded by moving in the indicated directions.

  “All right,” said the fat man. “I can steer and control our descent. I cannot adjust our speed without removing the tool that keeps us from turning over, but we will get to Omphal well before those slow-moving transports—though the landing may be a little rough.”

  Fortunately, though it sloped very gradually, the ground near the edge of the central depression was as level as in most places on Fulda. Imbry brought the vehicle down to within a hand’s breadth of the hardpan before he pulled the first tool from its slot and jammed it into another. Immediately, the vehicle lost both forward thrust and lift. It made rough contact with the arid hardpan and slid gratingly across the ground before coming to a halt in a cloud of gritty dust.

  “Out,” said the fat man. He wanted this business wrapped up quickly so he could get the carry-all back into the air and away from the impending arrival of Overcommander Chope and what he was sure was an oversufficiency of armed provost’s men with limited tolerance for oddies.

  The arbiter and the investigator responded to his instruction. For all their faith in the unstoppable force of the revealed will of Idealism’s founder, the sight of the oncoming heavy vehicles, now appearing larger than mere dots in the northern offing, seemed to concern them.

  “Let us get these rods out of the carry-all,” Imbry said, climbing over the seat—nimbly, for all his bulk—and reattaching the portable obviators. “Then we can . . .” He broke off as his standing posture gave him a better view down into the central hollow in Fulda’s navel. He saw a rounded shape, smooth and gray, and the sight made him swear in surprise. “Look at that,” he said.

  In width, the hole was several times a man’s height; in depth, not quite so large. But filling the bottom of the hole was a huge lens of clitch. And sitting atop the great gray curve was another lens, perhaps half the larger one’s size.

  “And look there, and there,” said Shvarden, standing on the rim of the hole and pointing.

  “It’s obvious,” said Breeth.

  And it was, even to a non-Ideal, even to a marooned irregular from Old Earth. Graved into the great lens, near its center, was a circle of slots. A set of matching cavities were cut into the smaller one. Imbry knew without measuring that the notches in the greater lens would receive the ends of the rods in the carry-all, that the circle at one end of the rods from Shabaqua would exactly fit the second, smaller lens, and that the positions of the slots in the smaller lens would match the smaller matrix of rods he had found at Naicam, into one end of which the original First Eye of clitch was already fitted.

  “Three lenses,” Shvarden said, “in sequence, one above the other, supported on two frameworks. First Eye, Second Eye, Third Eye, as in the prophecy. It couldn’t be clearer.”

  “But what does it do?” said Imbry.

  “Opens the way to Perfection,” the arbiter said.

  “What else could it be?” said Breeth.

  Imbry looked to the north. The transporters were coming. He could leave the Ideals here, coerce the carry-all to take him away, outpacing the heavier aircraft. But he would need its communicator—he could not restore the aircraft’s communications function without also reinitiating its self-cognizance, which would immediately summon help against him. For a moment he was tempted to savor the irony of his having kidnapped the integrator that had connived in his own carrying-off. But more pressing circumstances commanded his attention.

  The arrangement that the clitch lenses were meant to assume was obvious. With gravity obviators, putting the thing together would be neither difficult nor time-consuming. Imbry had no idea what the assembled components would do, but he had no doubt they would do something. And that something might well be enough to hold the attention of the forces of the Reorientation, which had apparently seized control of Fulda’s government, while Imbry made his getaway.

  Imbry envisioned Overcommander Chope as a hard-eyed man who was accustomed to telling others how things were going to be, one of the kind who rose to senior rank in police forces by dint of memorizing the organization’s rules and procedures then applying them ruthlessly in all situations. Faced with circumstances they understood, such types were indomitable. Faced with events beyond their linear thought processes, they tended to lose focus rapidly and stand with mouth agape. There was a reasonable chance that, whatever would happen once the lenses were assembled, it would be an effect beyond Chope’s ability to assimilate.

  In a top-down authoritarian apparatus, if the pinnacle froze, the whole pyramid did likewise. Imbry would gamble that such would be the case here at Fulda’s navel, and that soon after he could flag down a passing vessel and put the whole corpus of this benighted planet far, far behind him.

  It took mere moments for this process of ratiocination to reach its conclusion in Imbry’s well-ordered mind. “We must assemble it now,” he said. “The Reorientation must not be allowed to impede the will of the Blessed Founder. The Renewal is at hand. Tonight you will be in Perfection.”

  Desperation could induce speed, Imbry thought, but it was nothing compared to the power of sheer joy. Shvarden and Breeth wore smiles on their faces as they raced to open the door to Perfection. At Imbry’s instruction, they slid down into the depression and attached gravity obviators to the underside of the smaller great lens. Then they hoisted it, light as a feather pillow, and bore it up and out of the hollow, and placed it into the carry-all’s cargo bay, from which the bundled rods had already been removed.

  Complex maneuvers followed, first to get the tall matrix of rods flexed and opened so that the arcs at its upper end arranged themselves into a circle. Then, with Breeth holding the rods steady and Imbry manually operating the carry-all to lift the lens high, Shvarden stood in the cargo bay and carefully slid the obviated clitch lens into the beveled inner surface of the great ring. Breeth pushed the feet of two of the rods wider apart, then spread two others, and they all heard the clack as the ring gripped the lens.

  Imbry looked to the north. The transports were definitely closer. They must be putting on their best speed. They no longer looked like toys in the air, but had taken on the solidity of heavy machinery moving ponderously toward a goal. They were just crossing the outer r
im of the crater. It would not be long before they were within the effective range of the kind of distance weapons they had employed at Pilger’s Corners. And not long after that they would be on the ground and disgorging armed and determined men.

  Even as these thoughts flew through his mind, the fat man was bringing the carry-all back down. He and Shvarden dismounted and joined Breeth beneath the middle lens. Each seizing one of the legs of the structure they had created, they carried it to the pit then slid gingerly down the sides of the depression onto the huge lens of clitch at its bottom. The stuff made for treacherous footing, and they had to be careful not to cause the unwieldy object they carried to tip—obviators dealt with gravity, not mass, and a large object in motion retained momentum that could lead to surprises for those, like the two Ideals, not used to dealing with them.

  But Imbry’s judicious coaxing was enough to restrain the ardor of two Fuldans who were anxious to bring on the end of their world. Without too much trouble, the lower ends of the rods were brought into position over the slots in the great lens, then gently inserted. As all three had expected, they fit exactly.

  “Now, up again,” said Imbry, “and fit the First Eye.”

  “And then,” said Shvarden, scrambling out of the pit, “then . . .” but he was overtaken by a high-pitched giggle before he could finish his prediction.

  Imbry took him up in the carry-all. In the arbiter’s trembling grasp was the smallest lens of clitch, snug in its matrix of thin, strong rods. Imbry eased them over to the center of the second lens. There were the slots, waiting. And into them, though his hands shook, Shvarden fitted the ends of the matrix. “It is done,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “The Renewal—”

  “. . . is at hand,” Imbry finished for him, when he realized the Fuldan was too full of emotion to speak. The fat man was inclined to wonder what it must be like to be so immersed in a belief as to stir such depths. But when he glanced north he saw the transports looming, and turned back to the jury-rigged controls, working them fast to bring the vehicle to the ground, heedless of the bump with which it landed.

  Shvarden stepped out, the ceramic box that had held the First Eye raised in both hands like a tablet of law. He stepped with a measured pace to where Breeth stood beside the depression from which rose the second lens on its matrix of rods, with the First Eye fixed above its center.

  “Speaker,” said the arbiter, “are you ready?”

  “I am,” said Breeth, his voice unsteady. Then he swallowed and said, again, firmly, “I am ready.”

  Shvarden held the box before him, with its relief of strange characters. “Then speak,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Imbry, “and quickly.” The transports were now huge and their approach no longer seemed slow. An amplified voice boomed out from the lead carrier: “This is Overcommander Chope of the Corps of Provosts. Stand where you are and put your hands where we can see them.”

  Breeth swallowed and tried to speak the first word, helpfully indicated on the box by Shvarden’s trembling finger. But the investigator’s voice came out as a dry croak. He worked his tongue around inside his mouth and tried again. The first word, then the second. If, indeed, they were words, and not just sounds without content; they meant nothing to Imbry.

  Yet they meant something to the three-lensed contraption they had assembled in the Fulda’s navel. At the first syllable, the hairs on the back of Imbry’s neck and on his arms and legs lifted. At first he thought it was an effect of the heavy transport’s obviators—they could cause odd happenings if atmospherics were just right.

  But Fulda had not seen a thunderstorm in millennia, and the transports were still too distant. They took time to slow and land, and they were now at treetop height—had there been any trees in the crater—and just coming into distance-weapon range. By Breeth’s third syllable, Imbry had no doubt that what the man was saying was creating the effect. He felt his hair stirring underneath his wide-brimmed hat, could even feel his eyebrows standing up.

  Some sort of energy field, he thought. He looked down into the pit at the largest of the three lenses. It looked unchanged, still a dull, greasy gray, like polished graphite. And yet there was something different about it. Imbry couldn’t see it but he knew it was there. Had he the right instruments to let him scan the clitch in the nonvisual spectrum, he knew that he would see some powerful force radiating from the great lens—and more than radiating, he would see a beam being focused more tightly through the second lens, then tightened even more by passing through the third lens above.

  As Breeth spoke the final words of the—what? Imbry didn’t know; incantation, instruction, triggering phrase—the fat man’s sense of being in the presence of a huge and focused power intensified. Both the investigator and the arbiter were shaking—no, vibrating—in the grip of the energy field. Their hats flew off as if caught by a wind, though there was no wind, and their baldrics and pouches followed. They were lifted off the men’s shoulders and swept away on a circular course that had the objects orbiting the central pit. Imbry, farther out from the center of the field, felt his own hat rising. He stepped back, away from the paraphernalia he had helped build, and felt the effect lessen.

  “Lie down on the ground and put your hands out in front of you,” boomed the amplified voice of Overcommander Chope. The transports were close now, no more than twice Imbry’s height off the ground. The lead vessel had turned to present an oblique angle to the three men standing beside the three Eyes. A hatch on the facing side slid aside, and several brown-hatted Ideals stood in the opening, pointing long-tubed weapons at them. Imbry could see bulbous projections beneath the tubes and he had no doubt that these were weapons capable of killing—and overkilling—at the touch of a control.

  Whatever was happening with the thing he and the two others had assembled and erected, it was apparently not enough to distract the well trained provost’s men from their duty. He thought about taking cover under the carry-all, but knew that the thought was not worthy to be called a plan. He went down on one plump knee and prepared to bend the other, stretching his hands over his head in surrender.

  He wondered what the Reorientation would do with an off-world irregular who had been part of a society-dividing heresy and a suspect in two murders. Nothing good, he told himself and sighed. Whichever ill-wisher had sent him to Fulda, assuming he ever learned of the outcome, would chortle over the result. It galled Imbry to think that he would almost certainly die not knowing who was to blame.

  The lead transport was almost to the ground, its integrator edging it sideways so that it would not land on one of the engraved circles that had once held clitch lenses. The armed men in the open hatch kept their weapons trained on the three suspects they had come to apprehend. The amplified voice again ordered Breeth and Shvarden to prostrate themselves, although Imbry believed that the two were incapable of doing so, though whether that was from religious ecstasy or just from the effect of the invisible field, he could not say. But they vibrated so that the soles of their feet seemed to bounce against the ground.

  And then came a sound like a whoosh of wind past Imbry’s ears, though he felt no motion of the air. The arbiter and the investigator lifted into the air and swept sideways. They began to orbit the pit out of which their contraption of rods and lenses emerged, faster, then faster still. Imbry, farther away, felt a growing tug toward the apparatus. He flung himself flat on the ground and began to crawl toward the carry-all.

  Behind him, the whoosh grew in volume and simultaneously in frequency, cycling up quickly to a high-pitched whine that then passed out of the audible range. Imbry could feel the vibration though; his teeth made themselves known to him in a manner he had never before experienced. He crawled faster, and when he reached the carry-all he felt the effect, though still strong, lessen to just-bearable tolerability.

  He looked back at the pit. Breeth and Shvarden were spinning faster and faster, and in moments they became only a blur of flesh-color, two horizontal lines circli
ng the apparatus. Imbry suspected the forces to which they were being subjected had pulled them to pieces, perhaps even liquefied their flesh. He could no longer see into the pit, but the second lens remained clearly visible, as well as the rods that supported it. The gray clitch had darkened and continued to do so, becoming black as he watched. The greasy appearance had gone; its surface now glistened as if oiled. The rods, too, had changed their appearance. They glowed white and bright, too bright to look at, and with an almost invisible aura of dark purple that Imbry could only see from the corner of his eye when the glare made him look away.

  He looked instead toward the lead transport. Almost clear of one of the great circles, it was about to touch the ground. The men in the open hatch had lowered their weapons, astonished at the sight of the thing in the pit and what it had done to two of their quarry. But a man with a hollow gold circle on his hat and more presence of mind than the others was already shaking and slapping the provost’s men, and making unmistakable gestures at them to jump out of the aircraft.

  Imbry would not have done so, not into one of the pale circles that littered Omphal. All of them had begun to glow with the same, eerie nonlight that emanated from the Three Eyes. But these provost’s men must be an elite unit, trained to go where and when they were ordered. The first man in the doorway threw himself out of the aircraft, landing just within the edge of a circle that had once held a giant lens of clitch and which the transport was about to land beside. But the man’s feet never touched the figure-carved ceramic-like surface. Instead his sandaled foot landed on the top of a gray-green column that erupted instantly from the circle and rose at phenomenal speed into the sky, its sudden appearance accompanied by a huge roaring sound that did not cease.

  At the same time, identical columns shot up from every one of the circles that dotted the floor of the great crater, each adding its own roar, until Imbry’s head ached from the immensity of sound. One of the columns erupted right beneath the second transport. It lifted the great vehicle into the air, threw it straight up and out of sight so fast that Imbry missed most of the event because he had blinked in surprise.