On the Razor's Edge

by Michael Flynn

  The attendant remained unconvinced but escorted him to a room that bore sigils in the ancient Murkanglais proclaiming it a “research room.” This amused the Fudir no end, but he did not translate it into “search-again” for the skeptical attendant.

  That worthy unlocked a drawer in the wall and handed him a pair of gloves, showed him the commands to copy or scribe selected images or documents, then, with an air of having exhausted himself, withdrew to resume his guardianship of the entrance.

  The Pedant was in his milieu. He spent an hour scanning the indicia for anything that seemed relevant to his curiosity and discovered almost immediately that, while there were hundreds of files under the now-expired time lock of the Gran Publicamericana and seven still sequestered under the Audorithadesh Ympriales, there was nothing in the off-line Archive flagged with the Seal of the Great Names.

  Yet a wealth of files, documents, and images dated from the time of the Commonwealth’s fall, material that on the mong was forbidden. There could be but one reason for the oversight.

  The Names do not know these files exist! The off-line Archives were visible only to those who came physically to this building, and, to judge by the attendant’s reaction, those did not comprise a thundering herd.

  The old Ympriale files predated even the Commonwealth, and so were of little interest. Yet they were the only files still under time lock. They were titled Vyutha 1 through Vyutha 7, with no hint of their content. So whatever they were, even the Commonwealth had been unable to read them. Vyutha, the Pedant’s memory told him, seemed related to the old Murkanglais viuda, which had meant variously “widow, relict, et cetera.”

  Both the Fudir and the Sleuth expressed curiosity—if only to learn whether they could pick the lock—so Donovan copied the files on to one of the threads he had brought. Perhaps at further leisure he could break the locks.

  As the Pedant became accustomed to the gloves and the various hand motions, he began to wave up information more quickly on the holowall, sweeping documents into piles with a flick of the wrist, opening stacks with the jab of a finger. Embeds linked to other files, shelves, and sections. The Fudir filled several strings with old Commonwealth files for later perusal. Pictures flashed, diaries scrolled, dense mathematical texts unfolded. Pedant soaked it all up at the fastest blink-rate he could manage—even when not one of him could understand what was written. To the slower eye, the infowall grew blurred and smudged.

  An agent need not understand the documents he purloins, Donovan thought while he watched the others work. But an eidetic memory was a priceless asset.

  The oldest files on the Great Ice bore titles like “An Analysis of Ice Core Data on the Saskatchewan Glacier.” Later years contained titles like “Speculations on the Wisconsin Ice.” Later documents still: “A Reconsideration of Chathuri’s Thesis on the Origin of the El Lenoi Ice.” And so they had gone from analysis to speculation to reconsideration. A fossilization of the mind seemed to have set in, the end point of which was the attendant sitting out front, convinced that the great ones of the past had said all that was worth saying.

  To Donovan’s astonishment, he uncovered ancient documents written in a variant of Brythonic, which discussed other ice ages at the very dawn of human prehistory! Most of the files from that far back were unreadable. They had been recorded in protocols or on media that could no longer be deciphered. Sometime in the ancient past—as media decayed and the instruments to read them were breaking down—some poor tech had been faced with the choice of migrating these documents or those on to fresh media, and decided those were not worth his time. A Dark Age had descended, due less to the ravages of Kgonzdan the Oppressed or the Scything of the Beanstalks than to the inevitable decay of substrates over time. There never would have been enough of a budget or enough scribes or enough time to migrate every “disk” before it had passed below the horizon of readability. It was not that people who lived back then had suddenly turned stupid, but that their learning had become a blank slate, an inert disk, a broken thread.

  Deep in the Stasis Vault beneath the Miwellion, he learned, there were physical objects: a “tape,” a “thumb drive,” an ancient book. Only the book could still be read—by a special emorái camera that scanned page images at various depths into what otherwise was a solidly fused block of paper.

  * * *

  Pedant found an image of a barren shoreline recognizably that of the Bay of Ketchell, but without a city embracing it. A party of fifteen, bundled in parkas, faced the imager. A few of them were waving. One was pointing northward, as if to indicate their destination. The image bore a partly legible caption in the old Taņţamiž: Capt.(?) Hitchkorn-pandit and his par** **ior to setting out f** ******. 1* Jun* ****. The Fudir wondered where they had been heading to, and whether any had ever come back.

  Donovan used the image as a search term and soon unearthed a dozen similar scenes captured over the centuries from the same angle. The oldest were flat or, more likely, their 3-D extensions had corrupted. The more recent were holograms. The Sleuth rotated the holograms to match as nearly as possible the viewpoint of the fixed images.

  Viewing them in sequence, he could watch the land on which Ketchell was built emerge from the sea. The shoreline receded; harbors became lakes, then farmlands. And Ketchell grew brick by brick. The oldest image of all looked across a broad mudflat on which was cradled a once-sunken ship now careened drunkenly on her side. In the middle distance, beyond the forest that had grown between them and the sea, Donovan could make out the sky-scraping spires of an older city from whose docks and harbors the ocean had retreated.

  From the estimated dates of the images, the Sleuth calculated a time lapse of no more than two hundred years from the barren mudflats to the beginnings of Ketchell. Now, according to its residents, Ketchell had “always” been there.

  * * *

  A Farewell to Manitoba, by Henri Sanchez Patel, was the diary of someone purporting to be the last resident of that otherwise-unknown realm before it vanished beneath the ice. He wrote movingly of the empty houses, the silent roadways, the deserted cemeteries, most of all the memories, and how one year the snow that fell in winter failed to melt in the following summer. Even at the speed of Pedant’s reading, the lingering love of Patel for his native land came through and reduced the Silky Voice to tears.

  But there was one curious passage that caught Donovan’s attention.

  Word came today on the net that the great Kenya Beanstalk has come down at last. It was long expected, but perhaps it would have been wiser to let nature take its course. Its upper reaches were detached and, being at orbital velocity, High Nairobi flew off into deep space. But that was the only part that went according to plan. Tragedy was foredoomed. If the world is too poor to maintain those grand old structures, then certainly she is too poor to deconstruct them safely. Different parts of the stalk, they said, had different eastward velocities, and the debris field scattered much farther than officials had so confidently predicted. Tala and Kituni had been wisely evacuated, but the whole structure twisted north and sections separated and screeched over the horizon to fall like flaming shrapnel on Kisimaayo and even as far as Muqdisho. These are places I never heard of before, and now no one will ever hear of them again.

  But that could not be right. The Twelve Gates had been scythed down by Dao Chetty in their rebellious attack on Terra during the overthrow of the Commonwealth. The Dao Chettians themselves said so. He wondered if one of them—this “Kenya Beanstalk”—had been brought down earlier for some other reason and the demolition had been tragically mishandled.

  said Inner Child.

  The attendant? asked the Silky Voice.

  No, the Pedant told himselves. The attendant walks with a shuffle. These are soft, and stealthy.

  How could They have traced us here? the Sleuth asked. We had the niplips removed.

  “Unless Foo-lin lied,” muttered the Fudir.

  ople? Or Ekadrina and hers?>

  The Brute pulled a teaser from the folds of his garment and in two swift bounds slipped beside the open door. He pressed back against the wall, out of sight from the corridor.

 

  No. Then he’d know we heard him.

  The faint footfalls approached the entry, and stopped.

  There was time for two breaths, then a voice said, “Knock, knock.”

  Dumbfounded, the scarred man made no reply, and the voice said with some asperity, “You’re supposed to say ‘Who’s there?,’ Donovan.”

  Donovan did not recognize the voice. He shifted his grip on the teaser. “Who’s there?”

  “Gwillgi.”

  Donovan did not ask, Gwillgi who?

  * * *

  Gwillgi Hound carried a dazer, which more than trumped Donovan’s teaser. The scarred man put his weapon away without being asked. Gwillgi did not and was not asked.

  The Hound gave the impression of a great deal of energy packed into a small space, like a spring compressed. He was short, dark visaged, and bore a pencil-thin mustache on his lip. His cheeks and chin were a bed of short, sharp bristles. When he smiled, his teeth showed, but not to any comforting effect.

  He studied Donovan from topaz eyes that resembled aperture crystals for a laser. “I don’t believe we’ve formally met, Donovan. Or should I say, ‘Geshler Padaborn’?”

  Donovan retreated to the egg-chair that hung before the holowall and lowered himself into it. He had met his share of Hounds—Bridget ban, Greystroke, Cerberus, and others—but none had inspired the feeling of utter dread as did Gwillgi. If the little man was a compressed spring, he was a spring wound of razor wire.

  The Hound gestured and a second egg-chair descended from a recess in the ceiling and hung before the holowall. Gwillgi captured the wall in a glance while he seated himself.

  “Did you come here to kill me?” Donovan asked.

  Gwillgi’s smile showed canines. “If I had, you’d ne’er have asked that question. Death is best served briskly. Anyone who makes it a play is a fool.”

  The Fudir relaxed just a little, although he could think of three reasons why Gwillgi might delay an assassination. “I’m on vacation,” he said, resurrecting a portion of his bravado. “Come back when I’m on the clock again.”

  “On the clock…?” Gwillgi considered the phrase, deduced its meaning. “Let’s say you’re on call, why don’t we? I’ve got some questions. You can answer them, or you will answer them.”

  “Do I have to choose?”

  Gwillgi barked. It might have been a laugh. “I can see what she meant. Now, let’s start at the top, why don’t we. Are you Geshler Padaborn?”

  “I … don’t know.” Donovan tensed unwillingly.

  The human dynamite pursed his lips. “Well. There goes my script. I expected one of three responses, but that wasn’t one of them. How could you not know…? Ah.”

  “Yes, you must have read the report I gave Zorba three years back.”

  The Hound nodded. “How many are you, inside that cantaloupe?”

  “Nine—that we know of.” He grinned nervously. “We’ve got you outnumbered.”

  Gwillgi grunted. “Sure. But you’re sitting all bunched up. Is Padaborn one of your nine?”

  “Might, or might not be. We … destroyed one a couple years ago that was, well, dysfunctional.”

  Gwillgi raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. I’ve never spoken with the survivor of a successful suicide attempt.”

  Donovan shrugged. “It might have been Padaborn, but…”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “I’m starting to remember things that Padaborn might remember.”

  “You think there might be more personas awakening?”

  Donovan turned wistful. “Ten was such a nice round number.”

  “So’s twelve. More divisors. Could mean you’re still two short.”

  “Present company planty nuff, sahb.”

  Gwillgi nodded. “Padaborn or no, how high up in the revolutionary cabal are you?” When Donovan hesitated, Gwillgi cocked his head, and the cocking of Gwillgi’s head was enough to elicit words from any man.

  Donovan took a deep breath. “The Revolution plans to crack me open and suck me dry. They think I know something they want to know. That’s why I’m on vacation.”

  Gwillgi pursed his lips, tilted his head. “That’s forthright.”

  The Fudir spread his hands. “Have I ever lied to you?”

  “On Yuts’ga you engaged in battle on the rebel side and fought Sèanmazy to a draw. That was impressive.”

  “How did you know—”

  “I’d been following Domino Tight. He was a coming man among them and bore watching. Then he was killed in a back alley in Cambertown and I switched to my number two target: a loyalist named Pendragon Jones.”

  “Killed? But he…”

  “Yes. Tight proved remarkably chipper for being so recently and thoroughly deceased. And then, the lagniappe: an unexpected guest appearance by Bridget ban’s old lover. Well, one of them. And in the role of the storied Padaborn, no less.”

  “You were watching—”

  “Of course. I arrived late because of an assassination in downtown Cambertown. The mums hit the lyres all over Yuts’ga and the Confederation cashed out short a minor official. The rebels are trying to maneuver their own people into key offices, aren’t they?”

  “I’d rather not betray anyone.”

  Gwillgi waved a hand. His nails were almost like claws. “That would be a neat trick, and I wouldn’t mind watching you try. But let me suggest my own name at the top of the list of those you’d not betray. Which side are you working for?”

  “I’m working for Donovan buigh.”

  Gwillgi ran a fingernail along the barrel of his dazer. “Don’t try for ‘cute,’ Donovan buigh. You haven’t the dimples for it.”

  Donovan flapped his arm. “I was out of the Long Game. Out of it! All I wanted was to visit my daughter on Dangchao Waypoint and mend some fences with her mother. That’s all. I was kidnapped and brought here against my will.” He started to say more but decided not to add any further complications. “I have some debts and obligations now.”

  “So your promise is suddenly worth something?”

  “You’re here as the Kennel’s observer,” countered Donovan.

  “It’s a big Spiral Arm. We don’t want the Confederation to fall unless we know which way it will topple. And that means we need to know what the sides are, who is on which, and how the victory of either would affect the League.”

  “And now I’m your focus.”

  “My interests are varied. I still want to know who put Humpty Domino back together again. But why and how you got not only into it but apparently into a leadership position does pique my curiosity somewhat. Old man Gidula picked you up. He’s a clever sod. He wins every battle by being late and picking up the pieces. I knew he’d bring you to Terra, so—”

  “So you watched the Forks from remote viewers up atop Kojj Hill.”

  Gwillgi wagged the dazer at him. “I’m impressed.”

  “You left a footprint.”

  “Mmm, well. Can’t get them all.”

  “And your lander’s skid pressed into the ground when you concealed it in a hidden meadow.”

  “And from that you knew it was me?”

  “I knew it was someone. No offense, I was hoping it would be someone else.”

  Gwillgi finally made his weapon disappear. “Kidnapped, you say. I could smuggle you back into the League. You could brief Black Shuck personally, then go to Dangchao and learn if Bridget ban will shoot you or not.”

  “Well…”

  “Well?”

  “It’s gotten complicated.”

  “Oh, good.” Gwillgi swung a leg over his knee and clasped his hands over it. “I was afraid it was all too simple. Tell me more.”

  So Donovan told him more. He just didn’t tell him all.
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  * * *

  Later, they dined at a restaurant overlooking the Go-Gates from Mount Morn on the northern cliff. The mist from the falls of the Qornja where it passed between the two cliffs created rainbows over the gorge, and it seemed as of the faerie bridge above them were supported on an arch of light.

  Donovan noted that as the sun moved lower in the west and cast the cliffs into sharp relief a human figure emerged faintly from the ancient rocks of the southern cliff: a bearded man wearing an expression of unutterable weariness and holding at ease a shoulder-fired weapon of indeterminate type. The outline was much eroded from the water and the stiff wind that scoured the Gates, but Donovan thought it looked sandblasted as well. He wondered how many generations had separated the fulgent praise that had shaped the figure from the obloquy that had sought to obliterate it.

  Gwillgi expressed no curiosity about the image; but it wasn’t his planet, after all. The headwaiter, when the robot server had summoned him, was equally uninformative.

  “We call it the Moment, snor, which means ‘The Face of Evening.’ There is another, a different face, on the cliff below us, but only the finest of lighting calls it from the rock. That is why it is best to patronize this poor place, which snor does not forget is called Dinner in the Mist. The view from Prizga is not so fine as from here.”

  By this the Fudir understood that the two restaurants were rivals. Perhaps there would be something about the cliff faces in the files he had copied at the Miwellion. He wasn’t sure why it mattered, or even that it did; but deprived of the Mount of Many Faces, he would settle for the Cliffs of Two Faces.

  “I fancy myself a good judge of character,” Gwillgi said. “I’ve seldom been wrong, and never wrong twice. I don’t see you working for the Names. Otherwise, you’d be in that gorge, not gazing at it. As for the Revolution … Are you certain about those apparitions? The ones who appeared from nowhere at the warehouse fight?”

  Donovan stroked his chin. His bowl held a steaming heap of vermicelli and rice pilaf, seasoned with a variety of spices, from which he took a forkful. “I can’t be entirely certain,” he said after he had swallowed. “They may have been lurking somewhere nearby. But Oschous was monitoring the battle through the sensor array, and swore that they simply appeared on his screens.”