“As did I, my dear,” said Konstantin. “I think we all did. This isn’t the place for a young lady. Please, may I accompany you —?”
“That won’t be necessary, Colonel,” interrupted Cabal. “I have said my piece and perhaps demonstrated my incompetence for such an investigation. I shall leave this in the hands of the captain, who will surely do a better job of it than I. Good night, gentlemen. I am, of course, at your service if you should need me for a statement or suchlike.” He nodded curtly, to which the colonel clicked his heels, while the captain distractedly bid them farewell.
On the way to Leonie Barrow’s cabin, Cabal stared at the carpet the whole way, his hands behind his back, thinking. She looked at him, mildly amused. “If anybody saw you like that, they’d forget all about us being the ship’s lovebirds. You’re taking me, unchaperoned, to my cabin, but you look like a man with acute dyspepsia.”
Cabal was not in the mood for verbal fencing. “DeGarre, missing and, in all reasonable probability, dead.”
“Yes?”
“A suicide note. Typed.”
“Yes.”
“Brooding over a few featherlight jibes from some boy who’s barely started shaving, he types a note, removes a securing bolt from his window, and throws himself into the void.”
“Yes.”
Cabal walked in silence for another few paces. “Do you believe a word of it?”
“No. No, I don’t. That business with the typewriter — what were you up to?”
“I told the captain. A letter from that typewriter for comparison.”
“That’s something else I didn’t believe a word of. You should be careful; I don’t think the captain believed you, either.”
Cabal stopped and looked at her. “What’s this?” he said, a bitter mockery evident in his tone. “Concerned for my safety?”
“I’ve explained that once.” She kept walking, and after a moment Cabal admitted defeat in this small conflict and followed. “All I’m saying is that you should keep your head down. If you want to keep it at all. So, the typewriter.”
“The typewriter. I backspaced twice and typed the last letter in DeGarre’s note, the m in them.”
“What use is that for comparison? It would have come down in the same place as the original.”
“No. It should have come down in the same place as the original.”
“But it didn’t?”
“No. About half a millimetre to the right and a little more upward.”
“Which means what, exactly? That the note was typed, removed, and then replaced? Why would DeGarre do that?”
“If DeGarre did it at all. And, even if he did not, why would this hypothetical expendable assassin do it?”
They had reached Leonie’s cabin and paused by the door, speaking in hushed tones. “We believe he was murdered, then?” she whispered. “I don’t believe in hypothetical expendable assassins, with or without parachutes. Unless we can come up with a reasonable explanation of how a murderer got out of a locked and barricaded room, we’re just going to have to accept that it was suicide, no matter how wrong that seems.”
There was something of the caged animal about Cabal, she thought, as she waited for a reply. He was angry and frustrated that he had been presented with a problem that intrigued him, but that engaging that problem might lead to his exposure, arrest, and execution. She could almost feel sorry for him. But this was Johannes Cabal, a man she knew from bitter experience was more than capable of monstrous acts of violence and cruelty when necessary. Then again, he was also the man who had sent her a letter and document of such astonishing and liberating power that it had made her father — a man of great imperturbability — sit down and repeat, “Well, I’ll be buggered” for the better part of a minute.
Whatever was going on inside Cabal’s mind currently, he did not seem in the mood to share. “Good night, Miss Barrow,” he said finally, and walked away, drawing his ridiculous Oriental dressing gown tight. Leonie watched him through narrowed eyes, shook her head, and retired for what was left of the night.
* * *
Cabal got back to his cabin, closed the door heavily, dumped the horrendous dressing gown on the floor, and threw himself into his bed with a muttered expression of irritation with the world. He just wanted to go back to sleep. He did not want to become any more involved in the curious case of the defenestrated DeGarre than he already was. Indeed, if he could avoid any further entanglements he would be a happy man. A happier man, at least. He was determined to roll over, make himself comfortable, forget all about the night’s events, and go to sleep.
He managed exactly half of this list. After rolling over and making himself comfortable, he discovered that he was just comfortable enough to consider the night’s events in detail, and in so doing drove away any hope of sleep. He was in that awkward place where rationality and logic don’t quite match up, and the horrible squealing of misaligned mental cogs was driving him to distraction. Pure brute logic said the door was locked and barricaded, the window was open, and the cabin offered no hiding places, therefore the occupant of the cabin had gone out of the window. Pure brute logic overruled any silly murder shenanigans by pointing out the suicide note and the locked room, and then proceeded to wave Ockham’s razor around in a threatening manner.
Rationality, however, is a slightly different beast, or, at least, Cabal’s was. It considered the curious facts of DeGarre’s good humour at dinner, the curiosity of the misaligned suicide note, and … damn it! The chair! Cabal sat up in bed, thinking hard. Why had DeGarre barricaded his door at all? The door was already locked. Even if opening the window turned out to be a noisy operation, by the time a member of the crew bearing a master key arrived to open the door he would long since have completed his unsuccessful impersonation of Peter Pan and become an untidy mess in the Mirkarvian wilderness. To protect against or at least slow any attempt to kick the door down. Schten had dislodged the chair with a single well-placed kick, but the captain was a big man. Anybody else would have taken longer to get through, and that was what DeGarre had planned upon. There, it was satisfactorily explained. No, it wasn’t. It was overplanned. Once the window was open, it was the work of a moment to climb out into eternity. Unless he ended up dithering before the jump? No, that wouldn’t do, either. That meant he had planned for time spent dithering, which meant he expected to be unsure or at least anticipated the possibility of being unsure, in which case he was unsure of committing suicide, in which case — Cabal growled with irritation. In which case, why had he committed suicide? People don’t set out to kill themselves and then make contingency plans lest they change their minds. It was a stupid, stupid circular argument. So he returned to the point of departure. Why had DeGarre barricaded his door? Cabal looked around for a new path to follow, one that didn’t curve so alarmingly, but was to be disappointed.
He slumped back down and tried to sleep. At first, his slowing conscious mind was naïve enough to believe that his subconscious was helping him to drift off. It presented him with a vision of a limitless plane of tiles beneath a sterile white sky. The tiles were marked on each edge with a letter — a, b, c, d — to indicate orientation, and some mathematical symbols were scrawled across the centre. He halfheartedly attempted to read one, but the notations squirmed beneath his gaze and it seemed too much work to force them to stay still. He was fairly sure they were something to do with topology, and that was enough for him. Topology was not one of his favourite branches of mathematics. Instead, he went for a walk, feeling the reassuring touch of pure, warm shag pile scientific logic beneath his bare feet. There was little to look at except for the tiles, so he watched them pass beneath and by him as he strolled, enjoying the swirling patterns of notation on their surfaces, enjoying the regularity, and the —
Something stabbed his foot. He hopped sideways, swearing with surprise. One of the tiles was not flush with the others, and had gashed his foot. The tiles didn’t feel warm and woolly anymore but cold and hostile.
His blood was scattered in scarlet drops across the offending tile, shining like rubies. As he watched, the notation joined with his blood and formed new shapes. Belatedly, he realised that the writing was not entirely topographical. It was too late now, though. All around him tiles were rising to reveal that they were in fact the top faces of cubes. All but the one that had cut him; that one grew and expanded, and he could see extra dimensionality within it, a tesseract. He tried to name its four dimensions — he felt he had to — but they came out wrong. This cube had the dimensions of height, length, width, and significance. It grew and grew until he was in its skeletal shadow, the white sky warped in its core.
Cabal awoke suddenly from a light slumber, sweating, angry, and with a phantom pain in his foot. He was angry at himself for looking and not seeing, angry at his unconscious mind’s infuriating habit of telling him things in the most obscure way possible, and angry at circumstances for putting him in this wretched situation. He could investigate the potential clue he had just perceived, but he knew that he shouldn’t.
He managed to resist his curiosity for the best part of four minutes.
It was now over two hours since the discovery of DeGarre’s disappearance and probable death. The corridors were quiet again, and the muttered conferences from his fellow passengers speculating about the night’s events had long since died away. Cabal wrapped the dressing gown around himself again and, his phantasmically injured foot still fresh in his memory, put on Meissner’s slippers.
He looked up and down the corridor, but it was silent and empty. Satisfied that he was alone for the moment, he turned his attention downwards, and started walking towards DeGarre’s cabin.
The dark red carpet marked with a black pattern was not made up of a single roll at all. Instead, the ingenious Mirkarvians had used individual squares of carpet. The practicality of being able to easily replace damaged or stained sections without the necessity of recarpeting great lengths of corridor was not lost on Cabal. Nor, now, was the significance of his dream. Tesseract sounds a great deal like tessellate, at least to an overactive unconscious mind. There are seventeen groups of tessellation with translational symmetry in two dimensions; the pattern woven into the identical carpet squares used group pmg, which reflects in only one direction. Therefore, if a tile is placed incorrectly it breaks the pattern. The pattern was a complex one, wrought in one dark colour upon another, if one regards black as a colour. In the normal run of things, it might have been months before an error was noticed, if it ever was.
Between Cabal’s eye for order and the analytical qualities of his unusual mind, it had been discovered within a few hours. A few hours, because Cabal was positive the carpeting had been perfect before. Yet now — he stopped and knelt just around the corner from DeGarre’s cabin — one square had been lifted and replaced incorrectly. Why was that? It was obvious that the pattern had been disrupted, if only one took a few moments to examine it properly. The unmistakeable conclusion was that it had been replaced in a hurry, and there had been no time to check.
The square was well tamped down, and Cabal was frustrated to find that he couldn’t lift it. A brief trip back to his cabin and he returned with his switchblade. It was the work of seconds to insert the tip of the knife beneath the square’s edge and lift it out.
Beneath was a bed of underlay. Unlike the carpet, this seemed to be continuous. Yet he could make out a neat cut running through it close to the edge of the exposed area. Cabal lifted more carpet squares and revealed that a square section of underlay, perhaps seventy centimetres along an edge, had been cut. It didn’t look to be a hurried job and, when he lifted the loose square of underlay, he saw that it had probably been done when the flooring was originally laid. A maintenance hatch lay in the area he had cleared, a ring in its surface ingeniously flush, with only a small space to insert a fingertip and flip the ring up so the hatch could be lifted. Without a second thought, Cabal did so.
He disliked extemporised activities, not least because going without preparation usually meant being unprepared. As he lowered himself into the darkness of the ducting that lay beneath the open hatch, he reflected that there were better ways to explore a mysterious dark place than without a torch and naked but for a Chinese dressing gown and a pair of slippers. Giving himself the assurance that he would not go far, he shuffled along on all fours.
The duct almost immediately reached a T-junction. He gauged that turning left would take him beneath the corridor on which DeGarre’s cabin lay, so that was the way he went. The light filtering down through the open hatch behind him dimmed sharply as he took the corner, and for the next two or three metres he crawled forwards in deep gloom. Thus, he felt, rather than saw, something unusual in the duct. The slightly flexible sheet metal became suddenly rigid and, feeling around, he realised that he had discovered yet another hatch, locked shut at its four corners by rotating catches connected to small handles. He gripped one of the handles, gave it an experimental turn, and felt a catch disengage. He did the same to one of its neighbours, and felt that side of the hatch drop slightly until it came to rest on something. He guessed that the hatch would have a lip running around its edge to prevent it simply falling through once all four catches were opened, because — unless he was very much mistaken — he had a very good idea what was on the other side of it, and dropping the hatch would be inconvenient at the very least.
He released the last catch, lifted the far edge of the hatch, and pushed it away from him so that it lay on the duct floor on the far side of the opening. Then he crawled back a little and gingerly pushed the near edge of the hatch away from him to reveal what lay beneath.
It was Mirkarvia, some four thousand feet below him, and barely visible in the early-morning darkness. A cold wind blew up through the hatch and made him shiver, suddenly very aware of how ridiculously unprepared he was. Extemporisation! Pah! He spat, mentally, on the concept. Here he was, woefully underequipped to carry out any sort of detailed investigation, without light or notebook. And cold. Very, very cold. Still, he was here now, so he should make the most of it, although he had little idea what he hoped to find. The duct didn’t run beneath DeGarre’s cabin, with a convenient hatch to give the hypothetical assassin an escape route. He felt around for anything suspicious, but there was nothing; the duct’s main function seemed to be to carry assorted cables and pipes around the ship, with ventilation possibly a secondary task. There were a couple of sturdy metal handles mounted on either side of the opening, although they struck him as more likely to be used as mounting for ladders during maintenance than as rungs to hold when engineers climbed through here.
He reached down and felt around on the outer skin of the Princess Hortense but found very little to excite his attention. Well, it had seemed an interesting avenue of enquiry when it was all dreamscapes and hypercubes, but now that it had been reduced to freezing in a tin tunnel Cabal felt it had lost some of its allure. He pulled his arm back inside and backed up a little to allow himself room to pull the hatch into position. Except that he couldn’t back up a little; something was in the way, and by the time he realised that “something” was actually “somebody” it was much too late.
His knees squealing against the steel floor of the duct, he was bodily shoved forward. He tried to scramble across to the other side of the open hatchway, but a hand came down in the small of his back and pushed him forcefully down. As he fumbled, looking for some way to pull himself clear, one knee dropped over the edge of the gap, and Johannes Cabal fell out of the hatch.
CHAPTER 7
in which Cabal is in terrible danger and then has breakfast
Johannes Cabal disliked many things, despised fewer, loathed fewer still, and reserved true hatred for only a handful. Understanding how intense his personal definition of “dislike” was, however, gives some impression of how hot his hatreds ran. This is a man who had, after all, shot men dead for making him faintly peeved.
Johannes Cabal hated people trying to kill him. He hated
it, and he hated them. Certainly, most people aren’t keen on it, but few have actually experienced it, and fewer still on the regular basis with which Cabal was familiar. Already, within this single narrative, we have seen how the Mirkarvian judicial system had salted him away for execution and then, more personally, how the Count Marechal had intended to skewer him upon a cavalry sabre. Cabal by degrees had grown more inured to the actual event of an attempt upon his life, but he never could gird himself effectively against the intent. He didn’t so much find it hurtful as ignorant. To kill him would either be the work of a Luddite, fearful of his necromantic studies, or a vandal who tried to destroy him simply because that’s what vandals do. Thus, for Johannes Cabal, was the world arranged: Luddites, vandals, and a vast chorus of the undecided.
His first thought, as his legs preceded him towards a likely doom, was that at least this settled the question of DeGarre’s death. Unless there was some sort of recluse who lived in the ducting and took very unkindly to strangers, the person who had just thrown him out was DeGarre’s killer. Not suicide, then. Good. The numerous anomalies would have bothered him forever if it had been suicide. “Forever,” however, currently seemed to equate to the time it would take him to hit the ground.
Fortunately for him, the animal part of his brain that so irritated him with such base desires as eating and sleeping had different priorities. To expedite these, the uppermost of which was “Don’t die,” it had dumped a large quantity of adrenaline into Cabal’s bloodstream, and had — after locating one of the rungs by the hatch edge during a panicked fumble — affixed his right hand to it with a grip of stone. Thus, Cabal did not tumble to a lonely death on an unseen mountainside. At least, not immediately.
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