Template: A Novel of the Archonate

by Matthew Hughes

  The servant was plainly discomfited but he left Conn’s cabin. In his absence, Conn practiced walking and sitting in the unfamiliar garments, finding that short steps worked better than his customary long stride – he assumed that the gown was not supposed to gape and expose the knees. He was midway through a room crossing when Po returned.

  “If you clasp your hands at your waist, you will achieve the desired effect of unruffled nonchalance,” the servant said, then added, “Very good,” when Conn followed his advice.

  Po’s plump hands held a cylindrical box made of material that captured the room’s lights in a metallic sheen. He placed the container on a table and pressed a stud that caused its top and sides to unfold, revealing a translucent globe much like a giant pearl, but with a flattened bottom.

  The undervalet turned to Conn and assumed an air of one who does as he is bid, regardless of his own opinions. “This was left by Lord Faurenel and never collected. It is, the senior keeper of the wardrobe believes, a distaff cousin of the Faurenels’ cadet branch, though with several removes.” He lifted the object in two hands. “If you would sit.”

  Conn sat on a chair at the dressing table. In the reflector he saw the servant approach from behind, holding the globe before him as if officiating at a coronation, his face set in a wry look that abruptly disappeared when his eyes met Conn’s reflected gaze. Then the mask was lowered over Conn’s head and he saw only gray light. He heard a click.

  “It will take a few moments to establish itself,” Po said.

  Even as he spoke, Conn felt a tickling and tingling at several points on his skull. Something brushed across his brow. There was a wriggling sensation in his nostrils and a brief but unbearable itching in his ears. Then the sensations stopped.

  Vision abruptly returned. He was looking at himself in the reflector, but instead of the globe’s opaque surface he now saw the face of a woman of middle years. She was plain of feature, heavy of brow and chin, with dull, dark eyes that somehow seemed to express an expectation that no particularly pleasant sights would pass before them.

  Conn looked up; the mask’s eyes looked up. He turned his head to one side and regarded the reflector from the corners of his eyes; the face in the mask mimicked him. He turned and regarded the room. Everything looked as it had before, although the colors seemed slightly different, the blues a little deeper. Before he had seen three shades of green in the wall coverings; now there were clearly four.

  There came yet another new perception – not in what he saw, but in what he recognized. There was a familiarity to the cabin that he had not felt before, a vague sense that he had been here in the past. The impression was not strong, just a mild recognition of having spent time in these same surroundings, the comfort of knowing where he was. He probed at the sensation and realized with a shock that the faint memory was not his.

  “Remove this!” he said to the undervalet and had the unsettling experience of hearing his words spoken in another voice. It was a female voice – hers, the woman whose face regarded him with alarm as he turned back to the reflector. Behind him, he saw Po jump, startled, and immediately reach for the globe.

  No, wait! Please, not yet! said the same voice. But Po’s hands did not stop and Conn realized that the woman had spoken only in his own mind. Now he heard again the click that had activated the mask, though this time the action of the control was reversed. He was blind in soft gray light and felt once more the touches and ticklings as the device withdrew from his senses. Then the mask was lifted away and Conn saw his own features in the reflector, his cheeks pale and his eyes troubled, with the undervalet’s anxious face behind and above him.

  “That was... unpleasant,” Conn said.

  Po was profuse in his apologies. “I thought you knew what to expect,” he said, a trembling lower lip fear adding a stammer to his words. “I did not think it my place to offer advice.”

  Conn looked at the pearly globe. “Put it away,” he said. “The fault was mine. I thought it merely a simulacrum. I did not know about the... intimacy.”

  In memory, he could still hear the voice inside his head. Worse, he could still feel the emotions that had accompanied the plea not to remove the mask – the loneliness, the desperate longing to live – behind which he had sensed the darkness out of which the speaker had come and to which she was about to return, having had only seconds of existence.

  “There is cruelty in it,” he told Po. “Explain.”

  Po was putting the mask back in its container. “It was a custom among the aristocracy, quite some time ago. When death was unavoidable they would preserve the animating essence by artificial means.”

  He went on to explain that the essences were stored in devices that accompanied the funerary containers. When the calendar indicated that it was time to bring out the ashes of a great-grandparent or favorite uncle for veneration and to reflect on life’s transitory nature, the device was also activated. The descendants could then commune with a simulated persona generated out of the deceased’s essence, evoking a mood of fatalism and romantic melancholy.

  “The custom eventually fell out of favor, as all customs do,” Po said. “The essences were left on back shelves and in storage rooms. Then someone thought it might be diverting to incorporate them into systems that allowed them to interact with the senses and consciousness of the living.”

  The masks allowed an integration of the living and dead minds, putting the perceptions and memories of the latter at the behest of the former. The wearer derived novelty and sometimes insight; the worn regained a kind of life, which their essences had not experienced when they had been confined to the funerary devices.

  “But they became like ghosts in old stories,” the servant said, “poor, sad wraiths hungry for a simulation of life, however brief.”

  “Your masters must be hard indeed if they can do that to their own kin,” Conn said.

  Po dropped his voice conspiratorially. “Sometimes, when we are supposed to be cleaning the masks, we don them and reactivate the essences. The ghosts do not like to find their minds coupled with those of underlings, but they prefer it to being adrift in an echoless darkness. We servants find it stimulating to experience our world through the perceptions of our betters.”

  The chime sounded again. Conn stood up. “I will go to dinner without the mask,” he said.

  Po looked relieved. “It might have caused confusion. Perhaps even dissension.”

  Con’s brows contracted. “Yet you did not think to warn me.”

  Po’s relief evaporated. “I did not think it my place. I am, frankly, not entirely sure how to serve you. You seem to be, at one and the same time, helpless and menacing. I thought it best to tread lightly.”

  “I will not bridle at any advice sincerely intended to aid me,” Conn said. “Indeed, I will reward it amply. You might pass that information to the other staff.”

  “I shall.”

  “Now, will you conduct me to dinner?”

  “May I advise that we have Umlat do so? It is his function. It would appear odd if you were preceded by your dresser.”

  “Assuming,” Conn said, “that the others would notice.”

  “They notice anything out of the ordinary. Again, if I may advise you, eat the dinner, say as little as possible, and do not ask questions.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “They may seem distant, even comically effete. But they are dangerous.”

  Conn bid Po to summon Umlat. While the man was out of the room, he opened a concealed inner compartment of his suitcase. From it he took out one of the weapons he had received from Hilfdan Klepht: a short-range shocker, an appropriate weapon for personal defense on a space ship. He tucked it into the waist of his breeches beneath the robe.

  Conn found the Martichor’s dining room oppressive. Its dimensions were wide, leaving ample space for a table that could comfortably seat a dozen, as well as sideboards, cupboards and assorted paraphernalia involved in the final preparation and serving of foods. But the wall
s were invisible behind hangings of thick fabric: brocaded swag drapes and a tapestry depicting what Conn assumed to be Vullamir’s ancestors at their pleasures. The furniture was dark and massive, projecting a brooding sense of immobility, as if the chairs themselves were saying, “Here I am; move me if you can.”

  The persons seated around the table conveyed the same aura. They were dressed in a fashion similar to what Po had conjured up for Conn, though the insignia and jewelry varied widely from his. Fingers, wrists, upper arms and throats flashed and glittered with adornment, and Conn recognized that if their ornaments constituted a symbolic language it would be a lifetime’s work to master it.

  There was nothing to be learned from an inspection of the aristocrats’ faces. All wore life masks, a collection of projected faces in whose eyes Conn could read nothing. He assumed that the figure at the head of the table was Vullamir, but only because the others subtly deferred to him. The face he projected tonight was different from the magisterial visage Conn had seen when they had met behind the birl field – this one was old and lean, with the look of a predator.

  To the lord’s left and right six other personages regarded each other with borrowed faces. They spoke in undertones, their words accompanied by subtle gestures of their hands and small movements of their projected eyes and mouths. Their attention was all for each other; after one small glance toward Conn as his entrance was minimally acknowledged by their host they ignored him completely.

  Umlat led Conn to a seat at the other end of the table. he sat across from the only other non-aristocratic diner: Yalum Erkatchian, the Martichor’s captain. The spacer smiled and told Conn, “Don’t worry about which knife to use. Just do as I do.”

  Conn had been wondering about the uses of the various implements with which his place was set: besides the ones he recognized, there were things with hooks and spikes and some whose functions he could not begin to guess at. He thanked the captain.

  “This is the only occasion when all of the ship’s complement will be required to dine together,” Erkatchian said. “You may take your other meals in your cabin, or you are welcome to join me.”

  “Why?” Conn asked.

  “To which of my statements are you asking ‘Why?’“ the captain said.

  “Why is it required that we all dine together?”

  “It is the custom.” The captain used his head to indicate the others around the table. “Over these people custom reigns with a rule of iron.”

  “Though, from all I hear, nothing else restrains them,” Conn said.

  “I have heard it argued that irony is the unifying principle of the cosmos.”

  “It may be so,” Conn said. “I have seen little to contradict the argument.”

  The captain declared that he found Conn a congenial table mate and renewed the invitation to dine in his cabin, adding, “I am not just observing the custom. Please join me for breakfast. There is something I’d like to discuss with you.”

  “What?”

  But the spacer indicated that the moment was not appropriate and digressed into their previous area of discussion. Conn learned that among the Old Earth aristocracy an invitation to dine was hedged about with a complexity of inviolable rules and procedures: the first invitation was always ignored; the second must provoke a protestation of unworthiness; the third raised concerns as to unavailability and a mutual checking of diaries; the fourth brought renewed expressions that it would all be far too much trouble for the prospective host; finally, the inviter informed the invitee that unless the latter would come to the table, the former risked death from mortification, and time and place were agreed upon.

  “It seems a great deal of trouble just to arrange a meal,” Conn said. “Where I come from, it is much simpler: a contract is proposed, details are negotiated. The whole matter is concluded in under a minute.”

  Erkatchian nodded. “What is it they say about your world? That the Thraisians built an admirable civilization, then tore it down and put up a marketplace instead.”

  “The two are not mutually exclusive,” said Conn.

  But the captain only made a comic face. A footman set a dish of soup before him and he turned his attention to it. Umlat served Conn who watched the captain select a spoon of middling size from the phalanx of silverware before doing likewise. He dipped into the liquid, tasted it and found it cold and bland.

  “I expected better fare at a lord’s table,” Conn whispered to Erkatchian.

  “Another tradition,” was the response. “Watch.”

  No sooner had the dish been tasted than it was whisked away by the servants and replaced by steaming bowls of a more toothsome broth. Conn chose another spoon and began to eat.

  “What is the meaning of the cold soup tradition?” he asked the captain.

  “No one remembers anymore.”

  “Then why is it still observed?”

  “Because that is what traditions are for.”

  There seemed no point in pursuing the matter. Conn returned to their earlier discussion. “You have been to Thrais?”

  “I have been up and down The Spray, first as a commercial spacer and in my present capacity – up, down and well beyond.”

  “You have been where we are going? To Forlor?”

  “How could I? Until you delivered the coordinates, no one but you knew where it was. The secret died with the Flagit brothers.” Erkatchian spooned up the last of the soup and dabbed his lips with fabric. “This craft is rarely in use. My lord Vullamir allowed me to go out and search for your hidden planet. Nor was I the only searcher. My lord offered a financial inducement that drew the avaricious and adventurous.”

  Erkatchian’s eyes looked into a distance beyond the walls of the saloon. “Had I been the lucky one, I would have had enough to buy a decent yacht of my own. Then I would run charters among the wealthier worlds. It would be my ideal life.”

  “Was one of the searchers named Chask Daitoo?”

  The name meant nothing to Erkatchian. “There must have been dozens. Some came back empty handed. Others were never heard of again.”

  “What about the name Willifree?”

  The captain laughed. “That would be a masking name. It is a name from a children’s story. Willifree is a secret kingdom hidden beneath a magical stone. Its inhabitants have unusual powers and pursuits. The tale was not read to you when you were a child, to engage your imagination?”

  “My childhood was centered on other priorities.”

  They were served something in pastry. A delicate waft of herbs and vapor greeted Conn when he broke the crust. He chewed thoughtfully and watched the aristocrats at the end of the table. They were able to eat through the mouths of their life masks; the translucent material could apparently admit solids and liquids just as it allowed air to pass back and forth. The lords were conversing in tones too low for him to hear.

  “What use will Lord Vullamir make of Forlor once he acquires it?”

  Erkatchian looked away. “I have decided not to ask that question,” he said. “The answer may trouble me.”

  “A man who called himself Willifree, an aristocrat, killed a woman on the ship that brought me to Old Earth. His motives were unsavory,” Conn said. “One who seemed knowledgeable about these things connected him with the Immersion.”

  The captain’s gaze sharpened. “You know about that?”

  “Perhaps not as much as I should.”

  “You are a peculiar Thraisian,” Erkatchian said. “Does not your credo counsel you to let others alone if they accord you the same liberty?”

  “Perhaps I am not as Thraisian as I thought I was. Certainly I am not the same as I was before I left the planet,” Conn said.

  “I believe that is why few Thraisians have a yen to travel off their own world,” the captain observed. “They are satisfied with their perspectives and do not enjoy having them contradicted. The visiting foreigners they encounter at home are merely peculiar and quaintly misguided, objects of behind-the-hand mockery. Of
f-world, the strangers are encountered in strength and on their own ground. It must be sorely abrasive to Thraisian sensibilities.”

  “I think I am coming to believe that some sensibilities are all the better for an occasional abrading,” Conn said.

  “That is as may be,” said the captain, “though I would not advise you to apply the rough side of anything to the sentiments of your present host and my employer. These Old Earth nobles affect a languid ease, but poke them in a sensitive spot and they can make the most tightly wound Thraisian look all happity-slappity-pull-it-again.”

  They were now eating some kind of fish paste spread on thin rounds of dried vegetable that had to be conveyed to the lips by a pair of small tongs. The maneuver took more practice than Conn would have anticipated and he was too occupied to talk until the next course – chopped meats, vegetables and cubes of an unidentifiable substance – was placed before him. He used the time to consider his situation and the directions in which it might evolve.

  By the standards of his upbringing, it should concern him not a whit what Vullamir intended to do on Forlor. Both the lord and Conn were free individuals, neither of them in any way responsible for whatever the other might get up to. It was an elegantly simple philosophy, all sharp edges and precise shapes. A Thraisian school child could have demonstrated, by geometric logic, that Conn was exempt from any consideration of events that might transpire on Forlor once it was Vullamir’s.

  Yet Conn had seen something more of the universe than was revealed to Thraisian schoolchildren. He believed he could summon up a sense of how Ren Farbuck would respond to the idea of a world made safe for Willifrees, a hidden world to which other Clariq Walladers might be transported and not heard from again. Conn certainly knew how Jenore Mordene would view his role in bringing about such an eventuality.

  It came down to the meaning that Jenore would give to the word “good.” It was a concept that had great meaning to her. She had called him “a good man.” If he wished to go back to her and resume the relationship that they had begun he could not turn what she would call a morally blind eye to the question of what Vullamir would do on Forlor. He found that he did indeed wish to return to the woman who had placed his hand upon her heart. In all the Ten Thousand Worlds, she was the only person who had taken his side; he knew he must take hers.