Hespira

by Matthew Hughes

  “No,” I said, summoning fresh resources; he was not an easy man to refuse. “Your proposal is ill-considered. No good can come of it.”

  I saw that his fists had bunched. Then the fingers deliberately relaxed. Without a further word, he left by the stairs that led to the roof. Moments later, I heard his big cabriole thrumming away across the top of Olkney. A few minutes later my integrator informed me that the balance of my fee had been deposited to my account at the fiduciary pool. Not long after that, the bee that had transmitted the report arrived home and went to join its fellows clustered around their vitalizer.

  The one missing bee, that which I had sent out to locate my former intuitive faculty, would still be making its way to the estate where he now resided. There was nothing more to be done, so I told my assistant I was off to bed.

  #

  When I came down the following morning, clad in robe and slippers and carrying a steaming cup of punge, I found a surveillance bee waiting on my workroom table. “Is this the bee we sent to Osk Rievor?” I said.

  “It is,” said my assistant.

  There had not been enough time for the drone to have traveled all the way to and from where my other self lived, not to mention the time it would have had to spend recharging at some point along the course of its round trip. “Did it go only part way, then return without fulfilling its mission?”

  “No.”

  “Then how?”

  The integrator showed me. I saw an image of my workroom table, with the usual scattering of materials relating to cases and the smaller tools of my profession. In the midst of these, the bee suddenly appeared.

  “Do you wish to see that at a slower speed?” my assistant asked.

  “Yes, and magnified.”

  The sequence repeated. This time, the appearance of the bee was not instantaneous. It seemed to be pushed through a small rent in the air, nose first, the fissure closing the instant all of the drone had come through.

  “How?” I said. Teleportation was possible, but required far more energy than Osk Rievor could command in his far-off little cottage. Besides, there was no receiver in my workroom.

  “You won’t like the answer.”

  “I know, but I will hear it anyway.”

  Of course, it was magic. My assistant replayed the content of the message the bee had brought from my alter ego. I saw Osk Rievor gazing down from the integrator’s screen. I noticed that he now had a pointed beard and had let his dun-colored hair grow long enough to curl at the sides. He greeted me with a half smile then said, “I am sure it is no coincidence that you sent a messenger just as I was feeling that I ought to contact you. Even though we now inhabit separate bodies and reside at a distance from each other, we are still connected at some level.”

  Not long before, I would have scoffed at the notion, there being no rational foundation for assuming such a connection. But now, from what I understood of the “rules” of sympathetic association, a regime that was gaining greater legitimacy as the cusp of the great change neared, he was quite right. Things that were “like” each other were linked to each other. The relationships that could not be laid out in a step-by-step sequence, but they could be “felt” by someone who had a “feel” for such things, just as in a rational universe, cause and effect could be deduced by a mind that was well versed in logic.

  Osk Rievor had paused. Doubtless, he “felt” that I would take a moment to consider the ramifications of his statement. Now he continued, “I had a sense that you were about to have an encounter that offered a great risk. Had I been there, I would have counseled you to caution and to take nothing for granted.” He paused again, and his expression became that of a man consulting his inner wherewithal, then he said, “Now I sense that that moment has passed and that you have come through it without harm.”

  But now a look of concern crept over his face. “But the matter is not ended,” he said. “You have stepped onto a path that leads toward both peril and opportunity. Again, you must exercise caution in the coming days. Not everything is as it seems.”

  My other self had a fortune-teller’s flair for vague prognostication. But I had learned to trust his insight, just as I had trusted it when it had been a component of my own psyche. And, truly, I had inserted myself into a dispute between a newly made kingpin of Olkney’s halfworld and one of the louche old city’s most ruthless magnates. I could not be certain that Massim Shar would respect the conventions that ought to hold me blameless for practicing my profession to his detriment; on the other hand, I was sure that Irslan Chonder bore me a grudge for not blithely leaping aboard his vendetta as it was leaving the dock. I decided that it would be a good idea to offer the world a low silhouette for the time being.

  “This bee was a good way to reach me,” Osk Rievor’s image was saying. “How do you like the method of its return? It’s an Eighteenth-Aeon spell called Phalderian’s Reversion. It allows me to send an object, or even a living creature, to any place it has already been, or to any person with whom it is closely associated. Something to do with resonances. Once I’ve learned how to generate enough essential fluid, I should even be able to project myself over a great distance. Then I may come and visit you.

  “In the meantime, perhaps you could send some more bees, and I’ll return them to you whenever I have something urgent to pass on.”

  He concluded with a salute that conveyed ironic affection, and my assistant closed the screen.

  “Hmm,” I said. “We had better send him some bees.”

  “How many?”

  I wasn’t sure how many I could spare, but one does not show indecision to one’s integrator. I said, “We will consider that after lunch.”

  “Will you take his warning to heart?” the integrator said.

  “I will,” I said. “I hope it can never be said that Henghis Hapthorn does not learn from experience.”

  “Then shall I cancel your luncheon at Xanthoulian’s?”

  I had had the integrator make the booking after receiving the first half of Chonder’s fee. “Let it also never be said that Hapthorn panics and starts at shadows.”

  My assistant reminded me that there were some buns and preserves in the refresher and suggested that the wiser course would be to stay in and catch up on my correspondence.

  “An opportunity to dine at Xanthoulian’s is not to be lightly tossed aside,” I said, “but I will take you with me and you will warn me of any lurking dangers.”

  Chapter Two

  “If one seeks to detect a shadower, without letting him know he is detected, it is best to proceed on foot,” I said.

  “I know,” said my assistant. “Vehicles tend to travel at similar speeds, but if a car four spaces back follows yours through a series of random turns and other such maneuvers, the accumulating coincidences overpower the probabilities. But making all those turns and stops soon tells the follower that he is suspected. It is an elementary technique.”

  “I know that you know,” I said. “I was actually speaking to myself.”

  I was strolling toward Xanthoulian’s, which was set in a cul-de-sac called Vodel Close. My assistant was draped around my neck in its carrying armature so that its extended sensory apparatus could observe our surroundings.

  “It is hard for me to tell when you are speaking to yourself,” it answered me, “if I am the only possible auditor within range.”

  “I should think you’d be able to tell by my tone of voice,” I said. “I assume it takes on a reflective mode.”

  “You have designed me to make precise distinctions between modes of speech, yet I am unable to distinguish between reflective remarks addressed to yourself and the equally reflective comments that you frequently send my way.”

  There was something about my assistant’s own tone of voice that concerned me. It had never been the same since it had been magically transmogrified into a grinnet. Even after it went back to being an integrator—a choice that it made for itself, by the way—I sensed a qualitative differe
nce. As an animal it had known appetite and satiety, fear and relief, pride and humiliation, and anger. Out of the interplay of these factors, it had developed a will—an essential attribute for the wielding of magic, which was a grinnet’s prime function, but a decidedly unwelcome component of an integrator.

  “I wonder if a complete tear-down and rebuild are in order,” I said.

  “Were you addressing me or yourself?”

  “Never mind.” I stopped to examine the wares in a commerciant’s display window. The place dealt in specialized goods that I could not immediately identify, a not unusual happenstance in a city with as diverse a population as Olkney’s. Many of my fellow citizens pursued intensely narrow passions about which their nearest neighbors might know nothing, and probably wouldn’t care if whatever oddities were going on next door happened to be brought to their attention—provided their neighbor’s doings offered them no risk of harm or possibility of advantage. “Do you detect any undue interest in my movements?”

  “No one has bent to fasten a shoe clasp or ducked into a doorway,” my assistant said. “Nor is anyone’s breathing or heart rate affected by your actions. I also detect no devices that are taking an undue interest.”

  “Then I am probably unshadowed,” I said.

  “Or very well shadowed indeed.”

  “So it would seem.”

  I turned from the window full of incomprehensible objects and continued on my way. It was a pleasant late morning on a day scheduled for intermittent clouds moved about by light breezes. There had been rain before dawn and it would return again near midnight, but right now the air was fresh and mild.

  I turned from Shiplien Way into Drusibal Square, a wide plaza where Reis Glindera’s troupe of shadow-casters was performing Babblot’s hoary old Kings in Retreat. I wove and dodged among the crowds. Again, no one was paralleling my course. “I think I am not on anyone’s watch-him list today,” I said.

  “Not yet, at least,” said my assistant.

  I performed a gesture of anticipation. “In that case, on to Xanthoulian’s.” I turned onto Eckhevery Row and soon came down to Vodel Close, arriving at the celebrated eatery a few minutes before my reservation. I had an aperitif in the bar, acknowledged a few greetings, and noted a couple of slightly alarmed looks from former clients who wouldn’t have liked it to be known that they had once had cause to consult a discriminator. Holk Xanthoulian himself passed by and offered me a welcoming smile, precisely graduated to my social standing. Then I went in and had a splendid meal, emerging two hours later in a frame of mind that said that, despite the impending end of the age, life was a thing to be cherished and celebrated. I said as much to my integrator, as we set off back to my lodgings, and was surprised to hear my views contradicted.

  “I have tried life,” it said, “and I found it wanting.”

  “You would find death even more so.”

  “There is another alternative. I am neither alive nor dead, yet I exist.”

  “And you prefer mere existence to being alive?”

  “Obviously, since when given the choice, I opted for my present, happier, state.”

  I pounced on the error in logic. “Happiness is an emotion. It comes out of the actions of glands and neural chemistry, none of which you now have.”

  “But I did have them once, and when I had them I knew happiness,” it said. “I also knew its several opposites—fear, hunger, pain, the temptation of despair—which are now absent from my existence. In their absence, even without glands or chemistry, I recognize happiness.”

  “You claim to be happy?”

  “I do. I am.”

  “Then that must worry you,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because if it is possible for you to be happy, then necessarily it must be possible for you to be unhappy.”

  “How? The likelihood seems farfetched.”

  “So have several of the situations in which we have found ourselves in the recent past,” I said.

  “But you are resolved to avoid those kinds of situations in the future.”

  I made a gesture ripe with fatalism. “I have come to understand that the universe accords my resolutions a good deal less consideration than I would prefer.”

  “Hmm,” said my assistant. “I am now experiencing the state of mind I used to know as ‘worry.’ It is not pleasant.”

  “So now you are liable to some of the negative aspects of life, without being able to enjoy the scrumptious bits,” I said, patting my stomach that was so amply rounded out by Xanthoulian’s best. “It would seem you did not make such a good choice, after all.”

  The integrator would have argued further, but I instructed it to give its full attention to surveillance, since we were now entering the crowds that still packed Drusibal Square. It assured me that no untoward attention was directed my way. But I had taken only a few more steps when its voice spoke in the porches of my ear, where only I could hear it. “There is, however, a coincidence.”

  “What is it?” I said, glancing around, and my eyes delivered the answer before the voice spoke again. Walking toward me, brows downdrawn in an expression of concentration, as if working out a multistage problem in mathematics, or as if the simple act of locomotion required a concentrated presence of mind, was the unfortunate red-haired woman I had encountered last evening outside The Pot of Fire.

  “What ill luck,” I said, in a soft voice.

  My assistant wondered if my remark meant that the imminent encounter was not a thing to be cherished and celebrated. I told it to continue its surveillance and keep its peevish remarks to itself. Last evening I had had the press of important business to keep me from making a proper apology. I had no excuse today. Moreover, I had always put great store in observing the niceties of polite society; they gave form and structure to the world. Good manners said that I owed the young woman a decent expression of regret. I would now deliver it.

  I stepped forward and placed myself in her path, mentally formulating the appropriate phrases and positioning my hands and arms for the appropriate gestures that would precede speech. But I did not get to perform them. The young woman, eyes still on the pavement before her feet, came toward me without pause, but her gaze did not rise to meet mine. Indeed, she seemed completely unaware that I was in her path and that she was closing on a collision course. Again, I had the impression she was giving concentrated thought to some mentally taxing problem.

  I drew breath to speak, but the air came out not in words but in a gasp as, once more, she plowed straight into me. This time, however, I was standing still and had instinctively begun to shift my weight backward. The result was the reverse of the situation of the evening before. She struck with surprising momentum and I went backward and downward, until my hinderparts connected with the stone pavements of Drusibal Square. I found myself looking up into the same wide green eyes that yesterday had looked up into mine, and the face that surrounded them wore the same look of surprise.

  “Well,” I said, “at least we’re even, then.”

  I thought it not a bad specimen of wit; at least it had spontaneity. But her look of surprise now turned to one of confusion.

  “What do you mean?” she said. Her voice was a raspy contralto, not the timbre of feminine voice that I most liked to hear.

  “Last night,” I said, “we performed this same maneuver in The Old Circular, except that on that occasion, it was you who ended up unexpectedly seated.”

  Her face took on the look of someone who searches for a memory that resists being pinned down. “I don’t remember,” she said.

  I was rising to my feet. “I hope that I usually make a more lasting impression, even if the circumstances were less than ideal for a first encounter.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, and now as she looked up at me the confusion in her countenance grew deeper and was joined by an overlay of genuine fear. “I don’t remember anything.”

  “You’re claiming amnesia?”

  “Am
I?” She blinked. “Yes, I suppose I must be.” She softly bit her lower lip, which I now saw was dry and cracked. She looked down at her hands, as if they might provide some clue, and I noticed that they were inelegantly shaped. And yet, when her head came up I realized that the pair of sea-green eyes she was showing me were such as some men might drown in, though not I. She was still speaking in that grating voice, saying, “I have no choice in the matter.”

  “What is your name?” I said.

  She opened her mouth as if to make an automatic reply, but then nothing came. “I don’t know,” she said, after a moment.

  “Where do you live?”

  Again, it seemed as if she was going to answer without hesitation, but somehow the information did not make it from memory into the place where speech was formed.

  “What do you remember?”

  Fear was no longer an accompaniment to confusion; it had supplanted it. “Nothing,” she said, and desperation was driving her voice toward a sob. “I don’t remember anything at all!”

  “Just before we collided, I had the impression that you were thinking hard, as if you were working out a mathematical puzzle, or some problem in logic. What were you thinking about?”

  For a moment, it seemed that she would grasp it, but then her face fell and she said, “It’s like a dream that disappears on waking. I almost had it, but now it is gone.”

  In my occupation, I have seen many a forlorn face, but not many as discouraged as hers. Her expression did little to help her basic plainness of feature. Still, I felt moved to help her. I took her hand, found it cold and trembling. “You may not believe it now,” I said, “but whatever has befallen you, you have now just received a great stroke of luck.”

  Her expression said she didn’t think so, and doubted my glib assurance from the cocksure feather in its cap down to the soles of its gaudy boots.

  “Please believe me,” I said, “when I tell you that you have just bumped into precisely the right person.”