Hespira

by Matthew Hughes

  “She is returning to Old Earth. Just as you have never heard of it, no one there has ever heard of you or the matter that caused you to come here and do all this. Besides, she has not worked out the story, having had enough troubles of her own.”

  I saw him mentally chewing what I had served him and, after a moment of indecision, I saw him swallow it. “Very well,” he said. “Depart immediately, and we will say no more.”

  The weapons were put away. I made a formal gesture of respect which the old man accepted with punctilio. Then I said, “Except for one last thing.”

  “And what is that?”

  “If you will accept it, I would like to compliment you on a delicious sense of humor.”

  The Razhaman looked at me without expression for the span of several heartbeats, then a grim half-smile briefly made a place for itself on his lips. “An apt choice of words,” he said, “on the strength of which I gratefully accept your compliment.”

  The son made a protest as Hespira and I moved toward the door, but as we exited I heard the father explaining in graphic terms how Imrith’s grasp of the situation fell short of reality. Fezzant led us to an open field stocked with hay and left us there. I had my assistant summon the Gallivant. It dropped rapidly from the sky, we went aboard, and we were already exiting Shannery’s atmosphere when a signal from Bars Hoop arrived, demanding to know what we were playing at.

  I replied that we had had to finish a small matter involving the Razhamans. “But all has ended amicably,” I said, “and we will never disturb Greighen Island again.”

  “See that you don’t,” said the Prepostor-Corporal, and broke the connection.

  #

  I honored my word to Issus Khal, for such was the name of the Razhaman elegantiast whose lands we had quitted, and did not respond to Hespira’s questions about the meaning of the clouded greenhouse and the singular cream. “You have been glad to have forgotten so much,” I said. “Just add the matter to your long list of the unremembered.”

  But later, as the Gallivant drove steadily toward the first whimsy that would throw us partway home, I raised the issue with my assistant. “I would like,” I said, “to be able to tell the substance of the story, without violating my undertaking to Issus Khal. When I attend salons, I am frequently importuned to relate episodes from my forays into Olkney’s criminal halfworld. The listeners find them at least titillating, and I endeavor to make them instructive.”

  “I believe you do not mind if you fail in the second objective,” the integrator said, “so long as you succeed in the first.”

  “You think me an entertainer?” I said.

  “I know that you enjoy the smattering of applause and the half-hidden grimaces of those whose stories you have outdone.”

  “There is no fault in taking pride in accomplishment,” I said, “but you are not addressing the issue. How may I tell the revenger’s tale without breaking my word?”

  “By removing the identifying elements of person and place, and retaining the essence of the original offense and the revenge. Or you can wait a little while, until he chooses to inform the ranking members of Razhaman society what he has been feeding them this past year and more.”

  I decided I would not wait. Instead, I had the ship bring out a scriptmanet in my cabin. It had always been my practice to compose my lengthier anecdotes in advance, refining and polishing them, then committing them to memory so that when I spoke at a salon the story would come out well-measured and balanced. Thus, as we sped toward the whimsy, I sat and produced this tale:

  There was a man of the highest rank on one of the Ten Thousand Worlds where rank means everything. He differed with his spouse of many years, a quarrel that could not be resolved because both had great pride and neither would yield. To force him to her will, she left their manse and went to a sanctuary, and there she cohabited with a great number of men, as custom allowed. Some of them were her husband’s peers, some were not, but all were experienced practitioners of the cruel arts of gossip and mockery.

  Soon, the husband found that he could not frequent any of his accustomed haunts without being the target of sardonic glances and salacious whispers. He bent enough to offer his spouse a compromise, but she would have none of it. The lady had developed a taste for being on top of things, and now her pride grew overweening. She would accept nothing but unconditional surrender. This the lord would not, could not offer.

  Like all persons of his station, he had no occupation but did have several interests. One of these was the study of his world’s insects, and in that amateur pursuit he saw an opportunity for vengeance. He made his plans and dispositions, and when all was in hand he went away to a remote place on another world where he was not known, and began to craft his revenge.

  He purchased an isolated estate and ringed it round with defenses of his privacy. He had brought with him two species of insect that lived in symbiotic harmony with each other. The relationship between them was that of herder and cattle. One species was placid; it ate ordure, digesting the filth and processing it through its alimentary canal so that what emerged was a nutritious liquid. The other was active and social; it collected the liquid, mixed the sweetness with enzymes in its own gut, and vomited out a stable food that was stored in its hives.

  The creatures grew larger and stronger on the remote world, where the gravity was less and the air richer. The lord now induced subtle changes into their digestive processes, so that the end result of their excreting and vomiting was a complex alkaloid as strangely delicious as it was highly addictive. He bred up a sufficient population of the symbiotes and when they began to produce small quantities of the drug, he contrived to introduce it into the eateries where those who had mocked him were wont to gather. He even designed and supplied a silver pot and a unique little spoon of the same metal with which the stuff must be eaten. And he mandated that its consumption should be preceded by a small ritual: the striking of the spoon against the pot. Those who ate the substance soon grew dependent on it; the mere sound of the chime would cause their mouths to water and the flesh to itch.

  But creating a class of addicts was only a step toward his aim. The revenge was in what he fed them. Certain animals, whose flesh was eaten on many worlds, were never consumed in his culture. They were considered spiritually unclean, and even the most tangential contact with them required the contaminated one to undergo a lengthy and tiresome ordeal ere purity could be regained. The lord acquired a herd of these beasts, and had them tended by persons of another culture who were not fastidious. Moreover, he ordered that their excrement be scrupulously collected so that it could be fed to the insects who excreted the liquid manure that became the vomit that those who had scorned and mocked him now craved. As a garnish, he added his own personal wastes to the feedstock.

  Then he waited, feeding their appetites, until he was sure that every one of them had consumed his product enough to crave it. Only then did he reappear amongst them. And he chose to do so during the grand levee that occupied the apex of the social season for persons of his rank.

  Into the great ballroom, filled with the cream of his society, he strode. He mounted the bunting-festooned dais. The music stopped, to be replaced by a hiss of whispers and a rattle of cruel laughter. But all that abruptly ceased when the returnee held up a small silver pot and tapped it with a small silver spoon, so that the tiny note rang in a sudden silence.

  “I have always heard,” said the lord, “that revenge is a dish best served cold. As mine has been served to you.”

  And then he told them.

  It would need a good polish, I decided, but the essence was there. And then the Gallivant sounded its own chime to announce that we were nearing the whimsy. It was time to lie down and take the medication that would prevent our impending passage through irreality from damaging our psyches. I lay upon my pallet and my fingers closed upon the small sac and pressed it into my palm. The substances entered my flesh and I fell into oblivion.

  #

&
nbsp; “There has been another incident,” the ship said when I awoke. I lay inert, letting the last wisps of the drugs effervesce from my neural tissues. My mouth was thick and dry. I sat up, groggy, and reached for the carafe of improved water. The liquid rinsed the coating from my tongue, the film over my eyes disappeared, and I settled back into the familiarity of space and time.

  “What has happened?” I said.

  “That,” the Gallivant said. It caused a narrow beam of light to fall from the ceiling onto the hinged table attached to the far wall of the cabin. Atop the table sat a scarred and battered object about the size of the top joint of my thumb. As I stood and approached it, it emitted a buzzing sound.

  “Report,” I said.

  The buzz stopped and was replaced by a human voice, Osk Rievor’s voice, though distorted and sounding as if it were produced by the vibration of thin plates of metal. “…third attempt… contact…” There came a pause, filled by a hissing sound, then, “if received…” Another static-filled pause, then, “…jewels…” another burst of meaningless noise, then, “a salamander… reverse polar… your return.”

  And that was all. I picked up the bee, noted that it was ice cold, though the metal of its outer shell now felt soft, almost cheese-like. I carried it to the salon, where my assistant hung upon its hook. “You heard?” I said.

  “Indeed.”

  “Inspect the bee. See if more of the message can be recovered.”

  It did so, but without success other than to repair a severed connection that had inhibited the device’s display of the image that accompanied the sound. I saw a sequence of views of my other self, flashing on and off, interrupted by a screenful of flickering spots, accompanying the broken-up message. I could tell from the background that Osk Rievor was in the rented cottage at the Arlem estate, in the study where he kept his magical paraphernalia. The bee looked to have been sitting in the palm of his hand and, as he spoke to its percepts, the effect was as if he was looking down toward me.

  “What was that?” I said. I thought I had caught a flash of light just as he spoke the last word of the message. It seemed to me that Osk Rievor had reacted to it, looking away from the bee’s visual percept and, if I had the angle right in my recollection, toward the study window.

  “I will replay the sequence,” my assistant said.

  “Do so. And slow it down.”

  The image reappeared, without the sound. I saw my former intuition’s lips slowly shaping themselves around the first syllable of “return,” then came a sudden illumination upon the plaster wall behind him. Osk Rievor’s eyes moved leisurely from me toward something above and behind me. I saw them widen in surprise, then the image was gone.

  “Replay,” I said, “from the beginning.” I watched the emotions that animated my alter ego’s face, seeing what would have been brief micro-expressions evolve more slowly as he appeared and disappeared between stretches of empty noise.

  “I see agitation, but tending more toward excitement than fear,” I said to my assistant. “Then, at the end, I see pure surprise.”

  “I concur,” the integrator said. “But there is something more. Observe.”

  At that moment, Hespira came in, rubbing her eyes. “What is going on?” she said, but I signaled that I was occupied and waved her toward the pot of punge that the ship had provided, and which I had been ignoring. Then I gave my full attention to what the integrator was now displaying.

  It had frozen the image of Osk Rievor’s face as his gaze had turned to the window whence came the flash of light. Now that image enlarged and enlarged again, until the screen was filled with only my alter ego’s right eye. Still the magnification bored closer, until I was seeing only the dark pupil, widening in surprise. Reflected in the lens was a view of the study window. I could see the intersecting bars of wood that separated the aperture’s square panes of glass, though the straight lines and right angles were curved by the curvature of Osk Rievor’s eye. Little could be seen of the view outside the cottage because the glass was aglare with bright, actinic light. I could not see the light’s source.

  “What is that?” I said, pointing to a dark shape barely visible against the light from outside.

  “It is indistinct,” my assistant said. “It appears just as the light bursts, but then the signal ends in static and the shape breaks up.”

  “Can you clarify it?”

  “Only by hypothesizing.” The integrator referred to the process by which it would adjust for the lack of resolution of the image by applying fractal geometries to what it could be seeing. With most images, the infilling would yield usable results, but this one appeared so briefly, and in a distorted reflection, that my assistant’s confidence in the outcome of its hypothesizing was low.

  “Make the attempt,” I said, then watched as the vague outline developed more structure and form. “Could those,” I said, pointing, “be ears?”

  “Oddly shaped,” said Hespira.

  “Not,” I said, “if they are ears that have been battered and chewed upon in taproom brawls.”

  “Hak Binram,” my assistant said, in a tone that neither affirmed nor denied. It superimposed an image of the Olkney halfworld bravo over the silhouette. The outlines roughly coincided. “Perhaps. Or it could be someone wearing close-fitting headgear.” Now it replaced Binram’s tattooed visage with a generic face framed by the leather cloche worn by an agent of the Bureau of Scrutiny in operations where armed resistance could be expected.

  “I suppose,” I said.

  “It makes a difference,” the integrator said. “When we are in range to transmit a signal, we might be able to call upon the Bureau to go to the aid of an Osk Rievor under siege from criminals. Summoning the scroots to aid a person they are moving against in force will raise difficult questions.”

  The analysis was correct. I knew Osk Rievor to be a reified persona from my own psyche—the person I would have become had I been born in the oncoming age of magic—but the Bureau would identify him by the body he inhabited: that of a man named Orlo Saviene who had gone missing some months ago, though no one had cared enough about the unloved loner to report his absence. Still, the scroots would want to know what Osk/Orlo was doing in a remote cottage on a disused estate, surrounded by magical paraphernalia and heaps of undocumented gems. Colonel-Investigator Brustram Warhanny, in particular, would be anxious to hear an explanation of how Old Earth’s foremost freelance discriminator had come to lease the jewel-filled cottage for Saviene. Warhanny had long shown an untoward interest in my affairs, motivated, I had sometimes thought, by professional envy.

  “We cannot make a decision now,” I said. We were just out of the whimsy that connected Shannery’s system to that of Ikkibal. We must make our way—“at best speed, ship’s integrator,” I ordered—to the whimsy that had brought us within reach of Ikkibal. Then there would be two more traverses of normal space, one of them extensive, punctuated by yet two more whimsies, before we would begin the long fall down to Old Earth. “It will be several days before we can get close enough to contact Osk Rievor directly—”

  I interrupted myself, remembering even as I spoke that my other self, incredibly, had chosen to live without an integrator. The only way to contact him, short of sending another bee once I returned to my lodgings, was to land the Gallivant in the meadow behind the estate. “And who knows what we will find then?”

  It was a question with several possible answers: a smoking hole, watched over by Hak Binram and Massim Shar, bent on revenge; the same hole, but with Irslan Chonder and his hirelings from the Hand Organization, standing over the bodies of Binram and Shar; a party of Bureau agents with restraints and weapons at the ready, and a full measure of scrootish determination to discover what had been going on; perhaps even a placid Osk Rievor, tidying up after unleashing horrendous, anachronistic powers against intruders; or some other surprise.

  “We will wait,” I said, “and see. In the meantime, integrator, you will put out inquiries as to any announcem
ents the Bureau may have made regarding recent arrests and detentions. By the time we are only one whimsy from home, we may have a clearer picture.”

  “Done,” said my assistant. It closed its screen.

  Hespira had poured me a mug of punge. She brought it to me. “Is there anything I can do?” she said.

  “I shouldn’t think so,” I said, a little surprised.

  “It is just that I was thinking—” she broke off, and seemed to be searching for the rest of her sentence. “I was thinking,” she began again, “that when we return to Old Earth, I might be useful to you. I will have to find some way to make a living, and neither tending firhogs nor being the focus of young aristocratic obsession seems to have given me much satisfaction.”

  “I have an assistant,” I said, indicating my integrator’s traveling armature, hanging on its hook.”

  “Then perhaps a housekeeper?”

  I was tempted to say, “It will not matter.” The world would shortly end, and having seen the barbaric world that would succeed ours—at least the Old Earth of a few centuries hence—finding a means to make a living would no longer be of great concern. Mere survival amid chaos and devastation would be work enough for any of us.

  But when I thought of Hespira struggling to survive amid the ruins, I again felt that strong urge to protect her. She had clearly come to represent something more to me than just a former client. After all Irslan Chonder was in that category, and I doubted that I would bother to urinate on him if his hair was on fire.

  “We will have to see,” I said.

  Chapter Nine

  “You are unhappy,” Hespira said to me. We were sitting in the Gallivant’s salon, and I had been mulling the possible scenarios I would encounter on my return to Old Earth, and the various courses of action that might be chosen among for each situation.

  “Am I?” I said.

  “Is it because I asked you not to find out what happened to me?”

  “No. I have other concerns. They occupy my mind. Your case was an opportunity to escape them for a while. Now it is done, and I am returning to those other matters. I must decide what to do.”