Fool Me Twice (Filidor Vesh)

by Matthew Hughes

  “If some good has come of it, all the better,” said Siskine heartily.

  “And more will follow,” Filidor assured the Podarkes. “The manner in which I handled your case left much to be desired, but now I mean to make amends.”

  “The Company has its permit, and work has begun,” Emmlyn said. “We had resigned ourselves to an unpleasant necessity.”

  “Let the Company do the resigning,” Filidor said. He took a last bite of the excellent friggols, swallowed and cleared the space before him, then folded his hands and said, “I have my plaque and sigil. Tell me now what you would have told me then, and I will give you justice.”

  He looked sidelong to see how Emmlyn was taking this new, masterful Filidor. The smile had not changed, but he thought to see more warmth in her eyes.

  “Come into the study,” said Siskine. “There is a map.”

  It all had to do with land, the elder Podarke explained, when they had grouped themselves around his ornate desk, under the sightless eyes of the dead creatures that hung on the walls. Several generations past, when Trumble had been a mere village, the surrounding territory had been divided among several grand estates owned by the region’s great families. Emmlyn’s forebears had long been tenants on the domains of the Magguffynnes and the Falouches, two of the great land owning families of years gone by, until their line produced a shrewdly perspicacious entrepreneur named Hableck Podarke. This able and energetic man -- he may also have been something of a rogue, Siskine admitted -- was an agrological genius who applied his brilliance to the task of perfecting the clabber vine. The land barons who drew much wealth from the crop, which was used to curdle milk in the manufacture of fine curds and cheeses, competed to offer Hableck inducements. But he would take only one form of recompense for his knowledge and services: land.

  By a wily series of transactions involving this and that plot or acreage, followed by a bewildering sequence of swaps and trades with fellow small holders, the root of the Podarke dynasty had assembled a substantial parcel of good clabber land already planted with the vine. He had then applied his genius to full measure, creating the clabber cordial, which quickly found a market as a much valued after restorative. He now became the greatest landgraff in the region, and prospered through a long life, some of its length credited to the cordial. Before he died, he had so eclipsed his neighbors that most of then sold their estates to him, always at his price, and moved on.

  For as long as the nectar he had wrung from the clabber vine remained a sought-after commodity, generations of the Podarkes had flourished. In time, however, other tastes superseded the cordial, which the world had now forgotten. The family put new crops into most of the land, and contented themselves with the bucolic life. But, to honor their ancestor, they had kept the acreage best suited for clabber, a south-facing slope with perfect drainage, always and only in that crop, and now the ancient vines produced an exquisite fruit. It was in that exact field that the Ancient and Excellent Company of Assemblors and Sundry Merchandisers had applied for and received permission to dig. Up to thirty per cent of the vines would be disturbed.

  Leaning over the desk, Filidor examined the map and read the documents that he would have seen if he had not run from his office toward the lunch at Xanthoulian’s that he never got. Emmlyn stood beside him, leaning in from time to time to point out pertinent facts and clauses. She was close enough that he could smell the warm scent that hung in her red curls, and occasionally feel her breath displacing the hairs of his wrist. These perceptions caused an indescribable but delightful sensation in his inner self.

  “So it was all about a hole in the ground,” he concluded.

  “More like a tunnel into a hill,” she said.

  “And what is at the end of this tunnel?”

  Emmlyn scratched the tip of her nose, causing Filidor to wonder how he had ever failed to notice how affecting such a simple gesture could be. “That has never been made fully clear to us,” she said. “It’s a device of some kind, buried by a long dead Magguffynne who created it but found fault with its workings. He interred it then built a hill over it, out in his back pasturage. It passed into our family’s holdings in ancestor Hableck’s time.”

  “You said ‘a Magguffynne,’” Filidor asked. “I know of a Lord Magguffynne in Olkney.”

  “It may be the same family. The last of them left these parts in Hableck’s day,” the young woman said.

  “What was the function of the device?” Filidor asked her. He could not help thinking of the squat gray cube of metal lodged in the center of the Barran wasteland, where he and the Archon had almost met their doom. In the long myriads of years leading to this penultimate age of Old Earth, many mechanisms had been built that would have been better never to have been conceived. “Is it a weapon of some kind? A transdimensional device?”

  Emmlyn looked at her brother and her uncle, all of whom made those universal motions of head, shoulders and hands that signified their inability to answer his question. “Some sort of entertainment complex, it’s thought, hence the name Funhouse Rise for the hill under which it lies. But I doubt that several hundred years beneath the ground will have done it much good.”

  “I am sure you are right. Still, if it poses any danger,” he said, touching his hand to his Archonate plaque, “I need no more pretext to cancel the operation.”

  “It may well be too late,” she said.

  “We shall see,” said Filidor, conscious of a quiet but deep current of confidence flowing through him. He did not relish admitting it, but perhaps his uncle was right to arrange these adventures for him.

  It was agreed that he and Emmlyn would go. Siskine lent them his car, a rubber wheeled two-seater of an old-fashioned design, but well maintained and comfortable. Ommely had packed them a picnic lunch. Emmlyn took the wheel, and they headed for Trumble.

  The trip was a pleasant excursion. Filidor found the young woman to be a brisk and charming conversationalist. He had to focus deliberately on what she was saying, however, because his attention kept wandering to the perfection of her soft voice, the delightful arrangement of her features and the delicate movements of her expressive hands. The Archon’s heir was at pains to make his own contributions both agreeable and sparkling, though he did not tell his listener that his wittiest sallies had been coined by some of Olkney’s leading salon stars.

  As they entered Trumble, Filidor was thinking how pleasant it would be to show Emmlyn Podarke the attractions of Olkney, and how he would enjoy entering rooms with her resplendent on his arm. He took scant note of the little community through which they passed. It seemed to be a place of low-built houses clad in pastel stuccos and ranged along wide avenues, which lined with dwarf fruit trees that yielded their produce to any who felt inclined to pluck. There was a quiet somnolence to the town, as if it were a pensioner that had done all its chores in life and now chose to doze amiably in the sun.

  The Podarke holdings were on the east side of town and still extensive, although the ancestral manor had fallen into disuse generations before. The decay had been arrested by a sect of pyroklasts who had purchased the sprawling old pile and turned it into a seminary; their celebrations of saints’ days occasionally lit up the sky. Hableck’s descendants now lived in a comfortable house on the edge of town. Most of their land was farmed by machines that had been convinced that the work was eminently satisfying; only the clabber patch was tended by Podarke hands.

  They passed the house on the north-south road that was the eastern limit of Trumble. A minute later, Emmlyn said, “Here we are,” and pulled off the pavement into a dirt road that led through a wood-and-wire gate then skirted the base of a hill that rose on their left. They came around to its south slope, and the young woman looked out of the window, and said, “By Dibbley, I told you we’d be too late. Look at what they’ve done!”

  A wide tunnel, rectangular in shape and of a height double that of a tall
man, had been cut into the bottom slope of the hill. The excavation’s walls had been made smooth by tools that focused powerful energies, and its roof was supported by portable jacks and timbers. Tracks made by some kind of heavy equipment had torn up the ground outside. They disappeared into the darkness deeper in the broad tunnel where the light of the old orange sun barely reached.

  As they rounded the side of the hill, Filidor and Emmlynn could peer straight into the depths of the dig. “There’s something back there.” Emmlyn said. She brought the car to a halt.

  “A volante, I think,” Filidor said, getting out. He was sure it was the same one he had seen when he and Valderoyn had been traveling on the skimdoo. He also thought he whom the vehicle had carried. “Let’s see what’s being prepared for us.”

  They walked in out of the daylight. It was cold under the hill, and gloomy: there were lumens strung along the beams that held up the ceiling, but they were not turned on. The tunnel had the look of a place where work has finished and the crew has gone -- except for the long, sleek air-car parked deeper in the darkness, its forward illumination lighting up something at the end of the excavated space.

  The darkness and the cold sent a shiver up Filidor’s spine. He stole a quick glance at Emmlyn to see if she had noticed, and was not sure whether to be comforted or not by the fact that she seemed more curious than nervous.

  There was a tink-tink sound from beyond the air-car. Now, as they came closer to the end of the passage, they could see that the vehicle’s forelumens lit up a square cornered hole -- about the size of my desk back at the Archonate palace, Filidor thought, for some reason -- that had been dug with hand tools into the bedrock. It was a smaller excavation within the floor of a larger one, its spoil piled beyond against the back wall of the tunnel. The clinking noise came from down in its depths.

  They crept forward until they were near the rear of the air-car. Standing in the dimness, his eyes dazzled by the glare at the front of the vehicle, Filidor could tell no more about the air-car than its overall shape. But that shape was familiar enough. He moved forward, ran his hand along the polished door and felt the rougher texture of the raised insignia that was centered in the panel. He put that recognition together with the tinking sound, and now his suspicions as to who was down in the hole translated into a certainty.

  He touched Emmlyn’s shoulder and whispered, “We have caught my uncle in the midst of preparations for one of his little tricks. Hold here while I go and give him a surprise.”

  She shrugged and remained at the edge of the pool of light as Filidor advanced into the glare and called to the noisemaker in the hole, “Ho, there, uncle! What, do you prepare yet another startlement for me? Well, give it up. I know all, so your game is...”

  And here Filidor paused, because his progress had brought him to the lip of the excavation, and he now found himself overlooking a hole as deep as he was tall. In the middle of that hole, staring back at him with unfeigned shock, was a pale, round face with a large dark curl adhered to its forehead.

  “Bassariot!” Filidor cried. “What are you doing down there?”

  “Getting up,” was what the young man thought his major-domo had replied, until he saw the compact energy weapon that had appeared in the functionary’s hand, and heard the phrase repeated, “I said, ‘Get them up.’”

  There was a slim metal ladder in one corner of the excavation, and Bassariot ascended it with remarkable speed and coordination. He made a determined gesture with the gun, and Filidor shrugged and raised his hands to shoulder height. Now Bassariot saw Emmlyn, and said, “You, too, and come into the light.”

  Filidor sighed. “It’s no good, man. I have sussed out the plot. Let us end this silly pretense.” He lowered his hands, and Bassariot immediately loosed a bolt of crimson energy at him, which passed just near enough to sear a line across the young man’s upper arm. A spot on the tunnel wall behind Filidor glowed yellow then dimmed to red.

  Emmlyn took a sharp inward breath, and Bassariot swung the weapon toward her.

  Filidor had had enough of the nonsense. He rubbed his scorched arm and said, “You could have hurt me!”

  “I think he meant to,” Emmlyn said.

  “Fah!” said Filidor, and would have said more, but now his major-domo leveled the weapon at him with unmistakable intent.

  “Shut up,” Faubon Bassariot said. And then he sighed through a smile. “Oh, how often have I longed to say those words to you, and more besides. I think I’m going to say them again. Yes, I am. Shut up. Shut up, you primping, prancing, pointless pile of pomposity. You feckless dandy, you waste of my time, you traducer of my dignity, you furuncle upon my fundament. Shut up, or I will shoot holes into your useless head until all its compacted silliness dribbles out.”

  Filidor was shocked and outraged. But he looked into the pits and slots of the energy weapon’s business end and kept his mouth closed.

  The man with the gun took thought for a moment, then came to a decision. He said, “Into the hole with the both of you, I think,” and covered them carefully as they went where he ordered.

  “I don’t understand,” Filidor said.

  “That could be your epitaph,” Bassariot said. “And now you never will understand, because unlike villains in those vacuous romances you kept in your bottom desk drawer, to read when you were supposed to be working, I will not take the time to explain your doom to you.”

  “But...,” Filidor began, then ducked as Bassariot loosed a bolt into the dirt beside his head.

  “Shut up,” the man said again. “Now do as I say. You will see a smallish metal object in the wall of the hole, and a hand pick on the floor. Use the one to free the other, carefully. It won’t take long; I almost had it out when you arrived.”

  Filidor did as he was told, and very shortly pulled from the packed dirt a hand-sized oblong of white metal, one side of which was covered in rows of gray hemispheres. It appeared to be some kind of control. He unthinkingly brushed the dirt from it while his mind grappled with the madness of his situation. His uncle had contrived to place him in uncomfortable circumstances before, but Filidor doubted that the little man would actually allow him to be shot. Yet the wound on his arm burned with genuine pain, and Faubon Bassariot could not be a good enough actor to fake the joyful anticipation which had been manifest in every aspect of the major-domo’s comportment as he had talked about shooting holes in the Archon’s nephew. This is real, he told himself. He means to do it.

  Bassariot interrupted his thoughts. “Put the device and the pick on the ground, at the edge of the hole, then step back,” he said. Only when Filidor and Emmlyn had their backs against the far side of the excavation did Bassariot stoop to pick the control up.

  “Very good,” he said, turning the thing over is his free hand. He appeared well satisfied. “I’m glad I noticed this after they took out the larger machine, and glad that I stayed to dig it free. The delay has afforded me the delightful opportunity to kill you again. I did enjoy it so much the first time, but it was dark on the boat and hard to see. I still don’t know how you survived, but we can fix that now.”

  “Why did you besmirch my family’s name?” said Emmlyn, moving forward. “What did we ever do to you?”

  Bassariot shrugged. “Why, nothing. That was a whim of..., well never mind. There’s no point trying to put off the inevitable, and I am a little pressed for time. I still have to fill in the hole to cover your corpses. So, goodbye.”

  He aimed the energy weapon at them, but instead of the sizzle of its murderous discharge, there came a hissing from the other end of the tunnel, like the sound of air escaping from a balloon. Bassariot turned toward it, gun at the ready, only to be struck hard as out of the darkness hurtled the silenced skimdoo, with a grim faced Etch Valderoyn crouched over the controls.

  But the man with the gun had been turning as he was hit, so the impact was not square. Bassariot wa
s flung from his feet, and the energy weapon left his hand and skittered across the packed clay of the tunnel floor. The collision broke Valderoyn’s grip on the skimdoo’s controls, and the vehicle tilted sharply sideways then began to tumble as its gyrotics came under too great a stress. The machine came apart with a clatter and screech of tearing metal. The sailor ended up sprawled face down on the cold hardpan, but after only a moment’s pause, he levered himself up and shook his head. There was a seeping bruise on one temple, and a torn flaring had ripped gashes across the backs of his thighs. As he struggled to rise, face pale and arms trembling, he looked at Filidor and said, “Get the gun,” then grunted in pain.

  Faubon Bassariot had had the same thought. Though dazed and hurt, the treacherous official was crawling on hands and knees toward the energy weapon. Filidor sprang to the ladder in the corner of the hole, but he was only halfway out of the excavation when he saw Bassariot’s hand stretch out toward the weapon, and the young man knew he could not get there in time.

  Filidor came out of the hole then with all the speed he could make, but the major-domo’s soft fingers were closing about the gun’s grip, and now Bassariot was settling back on his knees, raising the gun painfully but surely, and bringing it to bear on Filidor. He smiled again, and his hand tightened to compress the firing stud.

  With a roar of pain and rage, Etch Valderoyn flung his torn and bleeding body between Filidor and the gun’s emitter. The weapon’s discharge, a thin beam of not quite light, pierced the sailor’s upper torso from front to back, leaving a smouldering hole between shoulder blade and spine. He screamed, then fell inert and silent across Bassariot’s thighs.

  There was a necessary pause then for Faubon Bassariot, because it took a moment for his weapon to repower itself after a full discharge. He used the moment to push the Etch Valderoyn out of the way, and clear his aim. Then he raised the gun once more, but only had time to register the sad rage in Filidor’s eyes as the young man caught the hand pick Emmlyn Podarke scooped up and threw to him, then brought its pointed tip down in a short, vicious arc that did not end at the top of Faubon Bassariot’s pomaded head, but went deep beyond into the man’s skull, to finish the business between them for once and for all.