Hespira

by Matthew Hughes

  As the nondescript aircar rose toward the rooftops and the two ground vehicles full of Hand operatives made to move off, the third act opened: above the aircar appeared an armed volante in the green-on-black colors of the Bureau of Scrutiny; a boxy carry-all with the Bureau crest on its doors arrived to block the street; each of the several pedestrians who had been loitering or strolling on Shiplien Way now produced a shocker in one hand and flashed a scroot plaque in the other; and with a professional dispatch that the Hand operatives might have applauded, under other circumstances, both sets of kidnapers were rendered harmless, pushed indiscriminately together into the carry-all, and taken away.

  The three ground vehicles and the Hand’s aircar, ordered to report to the Bureau’s impound area, left the scene. I opened my door onto the restored calm of Shiplien Way just in time to see a Bureau command car alight where the action had taken place. I was not surprised to find myself once again under the lugubrious eye of Colonel-Investigator Brustram Warhanny.

  I executed a formal gesture of gratitude and said, “I thank you for the warning.”

  “I do not recall issuing a warning,” he said. “Alerting a civilian to an impending Bureau operation would contravene regulations. It must have been your legendary insight into the criminal mind that prompted you to take precautions.”

  “Indeed,” I said, “I suppose it must.”

  Warhanny gestured to an agent-ordinary, a young woman who stood nearby with a firm grip on the arm of the table-wiper from The Pot of Fire. The fellow, still pale and having acquired what looked to be a permanent expression of astonishment, was nudged into the command car. The senior scroot made to leave, but then turned back to me. “This will not end here,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “it won’t. There are plenty more where those came from. On both sides.”

  “It has also become an open case.”

  I inclined my head in acknowledgement. The Bureau had a short, sharp way with discriminators who tracked messy footprints through their open files.

  The Colonel-Investigator broached a new subject. “I hear you now own a space yacht.”

  “A grateful client,” I said.

  “It must allow you to find out-of-the way corners, places where you might pitch up for a little time.”

  “How little?” I said. Much of my time lately had been taken up, at small profit, in dealing with the repercussions of the impending change of the ages. Acquiring the Gallivant had made a substantial contribution to my net worth, but owning a private spaceship made me liable to a slew of new expenses without any countervailing sources of income. Of course, I could always offer the yacht for charter, but on the single occasion when I had raised that possibility with the vessel’s integrator, the idea had not been warmly received. The integrator had originally been installed in a much larger and grander spacecraft; it had adjusted, it had informed me, to its new station—but there were limits.

  “You would be wise to give it some weeks.”

  I sighed. Provisioning and operating the Gallivant for a lengthy cruise, not to mention landing and berthage fees on foreign worlds, would eat up the entire fee Chonder had paid me. On the other hand, there was only so much earning that I could do while barricaded in my lodgings; a discriminator who could not leave his rooms might thrive in fiction; in reality, much of the work required one’s presence on the streets.

  “I will pack a few necessities,” I said.

  Chapter Three

  “It is the safest course for you,” I said again. “You will have been seen in my company. That will make you of interest to the persons who are interested in me at the moment. You do not want to be of interest to those people.”

  We were seated in the small but comfortable salon of the Gallivant, awaiting word from the spaceport’s come-and-go that we were cleared to depart. She began to wring her hands again. It was a gesture that should not have endeared her to me—indeed, women who quailed at danger and difficulties usually bored me—yet there was something about her that drew my sympathy. I brought her a glass of cordial from the dispenser and encouraged her to be calm.

  “It may all be for the best,” I said. “You are almost certainly from offworld, which means that you have traveled on some kind of space vessel. This short trip may call up associations that will spring the locks in your mind.”

  She sipped the drink and made a visible effort to find something positive in her situation. “Have you anything I can wear?” she said after a moment, looking down at her dress. “Frankly, this is beginning to smell like I haven’t taken it off all week. And, for all I know, I haven’t.”

  The Gallivant’s integrator held patterns for many different kinds of garments, a necessity of space travel; what constituted high fashion on one of the Ten Thousand Worlds might get the wearer arrested on another. But her question raised a possible avenue of approach to the mystery of her origins.

  “Ship’s integrator,” I said, “examine our passenger’s garment and tell us if it closely matches any referents in your inventory.”

  Before the ship could answer, my assistant, which had accompanied us to the ship in the traveling armature that I had worn to lunch at Xanthoulian’s and was now hanging on a hook in the ship’s salon, interrupted, “That sort of question is more properly my role.”

  “The ship has been to worlds we have neither visited nor contacted,” I said.

  “Then you should ask me to inquire of the ship’s integrator. I am the assistant.”

  Before I could answer, the Gallivant said, “The owner may ask whom he pleases.”

  My assistant said, “This is a discussion between a discriminator and his integrator. If we require any input on navigation or planning the supper menu, you will be included. Otherwise—”

  “Enough,” I said. Both fell silent. “Assistant, do you have any useful information on the matter of the style of the client’s garments?”

  “They are from offworld.”

  “Can you specify which world?”

  “Not precisely.”

  “I designed you for specificity. Have you anything useful to add to the case?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Then do not speak until you do. Ship’s integrator, answer the original query.”

  “I have no exact referents,” said the ship. “If anything, it is a generic style. It would not be much out of place on scores of worlds, at least in recent centuries, yet it does not bespeak any particular place or time that I am familiar with.”

  Conscious that there was a long voyage ahead of us, I now spoke to my assistant, “What can you say about the fabric?”

  “It is a cotton derivative, of a kind grown on many worlds. From the trace elements caught up in its fibers, I can tell that it has at least been laundered on Old Earth often enough to disguise any connection with the mineral contents of offworld soils and waters recorded in my information stores.”

  “So we do not know whether she wore this dress where she came from, or acquired it after arriving on Old Earth?” I said.

  “Either could be true. However, she has, as she mentions, been wearing it for at least two days.”

  The woman spoke. “So I would like to postpone further discussion of it until I am wearing something else.”

  I set the Gallivant to work. By the time I had shown her to the cabin set aside for her, the ship was providing a fresh new garment: one-piece, suitable for ship-wear, yet finely made and of good quality stuff. A selection of underclothes was also waiting on the stand next to the sleeping pallet. She examined them and found them acceptable.

  I showed her the sanitary suite, invited her to command any toiletries that the ship could supply, and went to the door. But there I paused, as if struck by an inspiration, and said, “We should also give you a name. What is the first one that comes to mind?”

  She thought for no more than the time it took her to blink twice and said, “Hespira?”

  “Why Hespira?” I immediately said.


  This time she blinked only once. “I don’t know. Is it significant?”

  I adopted the tone and posture that often reassured anxious clients when I could find nothing more useful to contribute and said, “It would be premature to say.”

  #

  “It is not a common name on any of the Ten Thousand Worlds,” said my assistant, “and there are only seventy-two where it has much currency at all.”

  I had it cross-match that information with the specifics of her appearance, her mode of speech, and the dress with the ribbons. Again, nothing unambiguous emerged. Her coloring, finger shape, and the fact that she pronounced some of her consonants more explicitly than was the norm on Old Earth ruled out three or four worlds. “Assuming, that is,” said my assistant, “that she has not been schooled. Anyone can be taught to speak with a different accent.”

  “Is there any reason to make that assumption?” I said.

  “No. Nor is there any reason not to.”

  “You are suspicious of her?”

  “Of course. To have bumped into you once might be an accident; to have done so twice within less than a day hints at purposefulness.”

  I flourished a hand to dismiss the implications. “Coincidences do happen.”

  I had designed my assistant to act as a check on my own assumptions. “Indeed they do,” it said, “and usually you give them a close inspection before you accept them as innocent. It concerns me that, in this case, you have given a truly glaring coincidence a free pass.”

  “Are you questioning my judgment?”

  “Knowing that your intuition has departed, I would be remiss if I did not note that you are not acting normally.”

  “Speak plainly,” I said.

  The integrator did so. “You have allowed a person of whom you know nothing to get behind your defenses at a time when you are under a serious threat.”

  “Technically,” I said, “I was not under a serious threat when I first encountered her.”

  “A quibble. Irslan Chonder surely had cast you for a supporting role in his personal drama before ever he came to you, and that was well before the woman made her entrance.”

  That was true. But was Chonder subtle enough for such a ploy? I doubted it. His movements on life’s game board did not come at oblique angles or by taking two steps forward and one to the side; he bulled straight ahead, by frontal assault. Using me as tethered bait had probably taxed the limits of his strategizing. “I am not hearing a strong case,” I said.

  “Then I will add to it. I did not witness your first encounter in The Old Circular, but I have the records of the surveillance suite you were wearing.”

  “And?”

  “You responded to her with annoyance.”

  “She blundered into my path when I was intent on a piece of business that entailed some risk. I scarcely had time to notice her.”

  “Agreed. But when you again encountered her outside Xanthoulian’s, your reactions were markedly different.”

  “I had just had an excellent lunch, paid for out of a handsome fee. I was at ease with the world.”

  “Except that the longer you remained in her presence, the stronger your physiological responses became.”

  My assistant was right. I had been too immersed in my own biology, not to mention being busy with the problem of Shar and Chonder, to have considered the matter. “Hmm,” I said.

  “Also, she does not fit the template of the kind of woman who normally affects you.”

  “Hmm,” I said, in a deeper tone. I remembered the odd mood that had struck me just before Warhanny arrived. “Not limbic stimulation?” I said.

  There were devices that set subtle energies romping through the sparsely furnished rooms of the brain’s lower floors, stimulating animal responses—fear, lust, motherly protectiveness—at a strength far beyond what was called for by whatever might be going on in the world outside. The emitters were built into some artworks and entertainments, and were a private recourse for the sexually jaded. It was unethical to use them without gaining the subject’s consent, and in the parts of Olkney where such tricks were played, the victim was usually first plied with potent liquor or other distractants.

  My assistant said, “I would have detected and blocked anything so crude.”

  “Enhanced pheromones?”

  “I considered that, but, though she is aromatic, her output is within the normal range.”

  “Subliminal suggestions?” I said. “Symbols microflashed directly to my retina, infrasonic murmurs beamed to my auditory bones?”

  “Also considered, and found absent. But still your responses require an explanation.”

  “Then what are you suggesting?”

  “You won’t like it.”

  I sighed and rolled my eyes. “Must it always be magic?” I said.

  “After what we have been through, I would be remiss if I did not factor sympathetic association into any analysis,” the integrator said.

  The Gallivant interrupted. “We are cleared to depart.”

  “Then let us do so.”

  I felt the in-atmosphere obviators cycling up. It always pleased me to do so. The ship had a good voice, as the spacers would put it. Rich and warm, it made a good soundtrack for arrivals and departures. We lifted so smoothly that the vibrations were the only sign that we had left the berth.

  “Where are we going?” the ship asked.

  I had planned to decide that after, I had hoped, getting some more indication of where the woman might have hailed from. But now I said, “The Blik Arlem estate. We will consult my other half.”

  #

  We took the long way around, moving out to the streams of orbitals that ceaselessly circled our old planet, then joining the multitude of craft, personal, commercial, and official, that traveled not only up and down, in and out, but from orbital to orbital, many of which were inhabited by persons—human and occasionally ultraterrene—who had no interest in visiting the well-trod surface of Old Earth. It was highly unlikely that Massim Shar commanded the means to remotely track a small ship through all that busyness, and only a little less probable that Irslan Chonder could manage it on short notice. Add to that the likelihood that, after their plans for the Shiplien Way operation had been crashed by Brustram Warhanny, neither would have had time to organize a physical shadow. Nonetheless, I had the Gallivant track the movement of other nearby small craft, while we varied speed and direction, sometimes ducking behind large orbitals and emerging from them in shadows of grander vessels.

  These precautions gave us time to research further the possible relevance of the name Hespira. There were eight worlds on which it had ever occurred with any frequency: Affax, Hollay, Tryshant, Ummer, New Bellas, Blink, Far Corondine, and Qum. “The name came into currency on those worlds,” said my assistant, “among persons who admired a fiction known as The Drama of Setiphar, a tale about a hero cruelly separated from his true love who pursues her throughout a lifelong quest, frequently missing a reunion by moments when fate—or a particularly mean-spirited author—keeps throwing delays and obstacles in their way. They meet at last, only to die shortly thereafter in each other’s arms.”

  I allowed my face to express the appropriate emotion and my assistant continued, “The novel was not original. It was based on a much older tale of courtly affection, about a prince who wooed a farm girl against his kingly father’s will.” Their affair also ended badly, though without the thickly cloying sentiment that dripped from every line of the plagiarized novel. Then the novel was turned into a stage version laced—or perhaps “larded” is the better term—with poignant and maudlin songs that toured on those same eight worlds. “That was a few hundred years ago but the production has been revived every other generation since.”

  “And I presume that Hespira is the heroine’s name?” I said.

  “Only in the original tale. In the novel and stage show, the heroine was Alanthea. Hespira was the name of her faithful and perpetually optimistic companion, a semi-sapient
creature known as a sylinx, chimerically bred from equine and feline plasms. The sylinx is not in the original courtly version.”

  “Parents named their children after a pet?” I said.

  “Presumably, the parents were themselves children when they encountered the story. The sylinx sang one of the most affecting songs in the musical version.”

  The thought occasioned a mild dizziness. I allowed it to pass, then said, “Have we a copy of the tune?”

  We did, and when Hespira returned to the salon, dressed in the ship-provided clothing and with her damp hair tied up in a kerchief, my assistant played it for her. She said it sounded vaguely familiar, but when I suggested she let her mind go blank while the integrator replayed the melody she listened again then opened her eyes and said, “I know, it sounds like the opening of Hernanke’s Third Concerto.” She hummed that almost universally known anthem, and of course I recognized it. The tunester who had written the songs for The Drama of Setiphar had lifted the melody from the great composer—indeed, when my assistant analyzed the production’s other songs, it became clear that they had all been copied from the works of better composers, all of them safely long dead.

  I took a philosophical view. The pursuit of the discriminator’s craft often leads down blind alleys; one learns to enjoy the trip or one segues into another line of work. Meanwhile, I took a dispassionate accounting of Hespira: the face, the voice, the shape of her. I found nothing to stir me. My earlier, quixotic reaction to her presence I put down to circumstances of the moment; in other words, the impulses must have come from my own inner workings, that slow roiling of wants and needs that are bound up in the very nature of the inner mind, and that are sometimes projected onto whatever hapless person comes into view while those instincts are bubbling around the foundations of the conscious persona. Half the miseries of humankind’s history have originated in those who think they see in the fellow next to them virtues and vices that exist only in the mind of the beholder.