“Typically?”
“Typically—but not this time.”
“‘Much remembered,’” Chalmers drawled, swiping the cut-glass bottle up once more. “Sending me a bloody obituary, isn’t she, girl? Biggest ruddy find in all Post-Unification research, and what do I get for it? Pat on the back, a new heap of work, and my colleague’s wish for bloody remembrances. The nerve.”
A knock at the study door jerked him from his bleary rumination.
Chalmers squinted at the clock on the wall and scowled. “Told you already I wasn’t going to Regenzi’s cursed ball, Mrs. Gilleyen. Breakfast not for hours. Do be a love and sod off, there’s a girl, eh?” The laugh began as a drunken snigger, then a splutter. Finally, he was dabbing at his nose and the unseemly snort of phlegm his humor left behind.
The knocking continued, a good deal louder than Gilleyen’s usual thumping. Chalmers’s temples throbbed with each blow.
“Bloody Rood, Gilleyen, it’s not even morning!” he bellowed, slapping the desk. “Have you completely lost . . . your . . . ?”
He peered at the water clock again, just making out the steady motion of the wire-thin second hand passing round the hour mark once more. . . . She was early. Far too early.
Chalmers looked down at the letter in his hands. . . . Much remembered . . . all out of my hands now. . . .
“Oh dear.”
The boozy sickness surged from Chalmers’s belly up to his ears, and he reeled to his feet, pawing at the catch under the center desk drawer.
The door wasn’t knocking any longer. It was thundering in the jamb, buckling inward. Chalmers heard it splinter just as his fingers fumbled over the switch, and the little hatch beside his right leg popped open to reveal a dainty alley pistol. It had been a gift from a colleague, a rib at his faintheartedness. It had never been out of the drawer. His colleague had had to load it for him before leaving it there with a wink. Chalmers desperately pounded at the safety hammer.
By then the splintering sound was a rending noise, and what was left of the door flew into the room like so much kindling. The aigamuxa crossed the space in three strides, vaulted the desk—
Chalmers raised the pistol. There was a sudden flare of powder and the smell of carbon. Then, his head was full of stars and clanging bells.
“It’s not often done, hanging by this means,” Knox said, clucking tongue against yellowed teeth with something very much like admiration. “It takes a will.”
He showed Gammon his meaning with a gloved fingertip. The woman’s neck was circled with a black, almost perfectly continuous line. It was less than a finger’s width, a black adder of bruising curled about her throat.
“Probably used a bodice- or bootlace. She’d have tied it up in a noose and hooked it behind her. Probably attached to a closet bar or something of the kind. They noose up and stand there, leaning forward.”
Gammon grimaced. “I can’t imagine it works. You’d black out before you were dead, fall over, and probably catch your breath while unconscious. A garrote would make the same wound, and the victim’s hands being bound would account for the lack of defensive clawing. It’s a more reasonable cause of death, given the evidence.”
“But, there are no binding marks around the wrists, and no contusions on the upper or lower arms to suggest she was grappled. As to the hanging?” Knox wagged a finger, a schoolmaster scolding his pupil. “Think masses and vectors, Inspector. You fall unconscious, but if you’ve made the lead short enough, you’re still pulled taut even after sinking down. Tie your knot well, keep your resolve as the lights are flaring and your lungs are screaming, and you’ll buckle with your arse off the floor. Your own weight will finish the job. This girl had weight enough to spare, I should think.” He returned his gaze to the woman’s heavy body, fishing into her belly. “And she had a will.”
It might have been hours later or only minutes. The room was dark and Chalmers’s head full of dull noise and dirty cotton. Bile coated the back of his tongue, but it was less horrid than the pungent, animal reek stifling him, or the pounding in his head.
Chalmers opened his eyes, blinking, the room swaying. It was not his study.
It was a long, blurry time before his head made sense of the floor above it, the hooded alchemical lamp thrust impossibly upward from a hook. The swaying . . . He groaned, and when the vomit choked out and ran down his forehead, he knew he’d been strung up by his ankles. Sputtering and spitting, he blinked his vision clear. He reached to wipe at his brow, relieved to find his hands weren’t bound, too. He studied the spare, dim room and began mentally inverting its contents. Soon, things made as much sense as they were going to for a head full of gin and a face full of aigamuxa.
Being upside down was, perhaps, the only thing that could have made the beast’s body look even more wrong.
The creature lurked a few feet away, crouched with its feet perched atop shoulders and calves hugging spine. Eyes the size of Chalmers’s fist glared out from the creature’s heels, flanking its sloping not-face. Two serpentine slits passed for a nose, and a broad, slack mouth full of teeth as jagged as a shark’s worked at some invisible cud. A featureless, oval dome of skull rose above that, sickeningly smooth and empty without a brow or eyes. Its hide was glossy gray, like oiled sealskin, shoulders etched with the white ridges of old scars. It crouched an arm’s length away from Chalmers’s suspended form, pelvis bent horribly backward, arms thrust down between its legs, the long, four-jointed fingers splayed wide.
“You had something,” the creature hissed.
Chalmers swallowed, tasting acid.
“I . . . I did. Maybe. I’ve had many things.”
One of the hands struck his chest, emptying him like a bellows.
“You had the book.”
Chalmers nodded, gasping.
“We have need of it.”
He shook his head but curled an arm protectively around his belly as he did so. “Must . . . be some . . . mistake. . . .” Chalmers gulped air. “It’s nothing anyway. Piece of Post-Unity mythology. Apocryphal.”
The egg-shaped head tilted to the side, like a dog contemplating some conundrum.
“Your judgment in this is unimportant. We prefer ours.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know who we—who you, rather—are. And I don’t have the book.”
The head tilted back to midpoint. Chalmers realized with sickening clarity that the aiga seemed to have two parallel-running spines, each an inch or so off true center. They moved below the skin of the neck where a human’s carotid might be found. Perhaps that allowed for its exceptional flexibility, even asymmetrically, the bizarre contortions so perfectly a part of its form.
“But you did have it, once,” it said.
“Out of my hands now. And besides,” Chalmers said, too quickly, “it’s all a bunch of theological speculation. Doctrinaire at best. Most people, actually, think it’s all just metaphors, you know. It would be mad to take it literally.”
“Humor us.” The creature narrowed its gaze. “Tell us what you know.”
Chalmers blinked. His vision blurred; his face felt flushed and swollen.
“I know a . . . a lot of things.” He winced. No, no, no, idiot—you don’t know anything. It needs to let you go. “Or, rather, some things. Small things.”
Seeing the shift of the creature’s weight on its arms, Chalmers corrected course hastily. “The doctrine states— My God, it’s hot in here. I can’t— Look, you’re twice my size, and I think my head’s half caved in. I couldn’t run from you. Could you be bothered to, perhaps—”
With a savage swipe, the creature severed the rope. Chalmers fell like a sack of stones. He heard the aigamuxa’s voice over the ringing in his ears, but barely.
“Up, Reverend,” it called with rasping gentleness.
Groaning, Chalmers pushed himself to his knees and ran his fingers through his hair. They came out damp and slick. Then he remembered being sick.
“My thanks.”
“
Thanks are not what we want. Tell us what you know.”
Chalmers eased out of the ropes binding his feet. He rotated his ankles and found them in working order, pins and needles notwithstanding. He felt he might be sick again.
Simplify by reducing, he thought. Phillip Chalmers closed his eyes and revised the room, imagining it without the aigamuxa, the cold, the ringing in his ears, the fear. He spoke as if he were back in seminary rehearsing a lecture for exams.
“Since Unification, science and theology have mutually believed that God is literally an engineer and something of a researcher. He creates. He observes the functions of His creations. He records. He draws conclusions, and from those conclusions, He will determine the meaning of the whole Experiment. . . .”
Chalmers opened his eyes. The aigamuxa stared at him. He felt what little courage he’d summoned slipping away and tried to tether it with words.
“Usually, you test a theory by gathering data to support or refute it. That’s good science. This time, we—Nora and I—found data and searched around for the theory it fit into. We were going to present the data at the conference but hold the book it all came from back. How could we share it? After all, we—” He pursed his lips, then considered. “We just found it. Or Nora did. She never said quite where when she called me in to help compile the data for the project.” He paused and considered the beast’s expressionless face. “Once we ciphered the data, we found its readings corresponded to readings of certain particles in the immediate atmosphere. That’s what my work had been about before Nora. Measuring god particle concentrations to see if they corresponded to environmental shifts.”
“God particles,” the aigamuxa repeated.
“It’s a . . . a pet term, I suppose. Trace energies, invisible to the naked eye. The Ecclesiastical Commission has noted the particles’ presence as a kind of background phenomenon for some time now. Meteorological teams and physical scientists measuring the particles’ charges have detected them, but as they seemed to be just some kind of neutron soup of variable concentration, they’ve been dismissed as atomic detritus. Someone got in the habit of calling them ‘god particles’ because of their ubiquity. It stuck. A little joke.”
The aigamuxa’s heel eyes blinked.
“Very little.” Chalmers swallowed. “In any case, Nora came to me about the book because she thought it might have something to do with the particles. You see . . . it updates itself. Seems to be independent of any observable, guided hand. The pages just fill up as some kind of data is gathered.”
“We know.”
Chalmers opened his mouth to carry on and stopped. “You know?” The creature showed no interest in the reverend’s perplexity. “What about the Nine?”
Chalmers felt his heart stop. It was neither an exaggeration nor a figure of speech. For a moment, he felt a horrible nothingness in his chest, the sudden awareness of not feeling something once taken for granted.
And then, his vision swimming, he felt it start again.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
It was a lie, and it earned him another blow, this one from one of the legs, which spun nearly a full circle from its perch over the aigamuxa’s shoulders, clouting the reverend under the jaw. He crashed backward, his mouth full of hot metal. Yet Chalmers barely felt the rebound of his head against the bare stone. He was too engrossed in feeling his heart come back, thundering away, sliding back down from its leap up into his throat.
The aigamuxa reached down and hauled him to his knees, lips spread in a horrible pantomime of a smile.
“Do not make me strike you again. You are not very strong, and I have need of you.”
“You want the book,” Chalmers gasped, “because you think it has to do with the Nine?”
“We know it has to do with the Nine. You use another word for them.”
“The Vautneks. It’s from the old languages—part of a number, meaning ‘thirty-six.’ It seems . . .” Chalmers paused uncertainly and found himself rattling on, trying to soothe himself with words. “It seems the old estimates of the Vautneks’ numbers were a little high. They are supposed to be the subjects God watches, the ones whose actions are used to justify humanity’s continued existence to the Divinity. Theoretically, humanity exists only as long as the Vautneks are pleasing to God—or . . . or interesting to Him. Or useful. The EC has been debating for ages what God wants to verify in them, assuming the Vautnek theory is real.”
“We know this already. We have come here to collect their names.”
Chalmers blinked. “We?”
Again, the jagged smile. “We have different purposes, but we are a ‘we,’ of a kind. He will tell you his motives, if it pleases him. Or he will not. I wish to have the names because I have been called by God to find them.”
As a member of the Unified Ecclesiastical Commission, Phillip Chalmers was a believer in the supremacy of humankind, in Reason, in God the Experimenter, and in the Grand Hypothesis. The Unified church maintained that there was, indeed, an intelligence that had designed the universe. Its choices could be understood only through humankind’s scientific explorations. The whole purpose of science was to determine and record the will of God, to demonstrate the objective truth of Reason as the ultimate object of Faith. Other beings—intelligent beings like the lanyani and the aigamuxa—had the capacity to observe God’s workings, true, but their disinterest in the scientific process was a priori evidence of their distance from Him and His undoubtedly mutual disinterest in their existence.
The Reverend Doctor Phillip Chalmers, therefore, believed a great deal. None of it prepared him to accept that God had anything to do with these illogically formed, ill-adapted beasts from the jungles of faraway Leonis.
“You want their names,” he scoffed. “You’re mad.”
The smooth, eerie head tilted. “This is an expression I do not know.”
Chalmers considered clarifying the idiom but balked when he opened his mouth. One of his bicuspids moved with suspicious looseness.
He opted for a different tack.
“If the Vautneks—the Nine, I mean—are real, if they are the true focus of the Grand Experiment,” Chalmers began, “then their actions must be recorded, cataloged, and assessed by God. Nora and I started calling the book the ‘Vautnek text’ because it seems to show exactly that happening. Nine subjects, different locations, patterns of actions and interactions recorded. Periodically, the group’s membership shifts. Human mortality requires this. No single subject’s lifetime could encompass the duration of the Experiment. But you must understand: no one knows the Vautneks’ names. If you know enough to ask these kinds of questions, you must know that the Experiment only works if the experimental population remains unaware of being its focus. They are meant to justify the existence of Man to God—unconsciously. Organically. No one has the names of the Nine because to have them would endanger the Experiment. Endanger all of us.”
“Perhaps. But this thing you call science is not our concern.” The creature swung up to its feet and snared Chalmers by the collar of his shirt. Its leathery, featureless face pressed close to the reverend’s. The many-jointed fingers circled his neck, wrapping nearly twice around. It was like wearing a lobster’s tail as a scarf, a segmented horror pressing deep into the flesh.
“I’m sorry?” Chalmers wheezed.
“We do not require apologies. We require you.”
“Why me?”
“You traced the particles. Tied them to the text and deciphered it. Now, you will read the names from it.”
Chalmers blinked at the aigamuxa in perfect stupidity.
“That . . . was really more Nora’s business. My research partner. The—the Reverend Doctor Pierce?”
“She is dead.”
Chalmers remembered the galvano-gram from earlier in the day and compared its businesslike tone to the panic of the letters he had only just read, kept secret by long delay. Had she been taken in Lemarcke? Perhaps. But then why had her tone changed so much, in th
e weeks between her missives? He swallowed back a knot of fear, inching closer to a realization he did not wish to have.
“How did she die?”
“She would not give us the names.”
Chalmers was not a man of vivid imagination, but he could easily visualize the aigamuxa’s cruel hands cutting into Nora’s neck. He knew what he should say. To reveal the most crucial elements of the Experiment, to open not only the Nine but the whole of creation to some terrible and unforeseeable consequence? It was more than irresponsible. It was unthinkable. Chalmers struggled to marshal his strongest invective, but the courage wasn’t there. Nora had had courage. Conviction. Even something a little like genius. For her sake, he offered up a protest.
“You don’t just . . . peek . . . into God’s laboratory notes.”
The look that played across the aigamuxa’s eyeless face was more grotesque than its smile had been, more chilling than its bared, snapping maw. There was a placidity there, a northward shift in the flesh near the crest of the skull—perhaps what passed for a brow? Perhaps a look of bemusement.
“And why not?” it wondered aloud.
“Because . . . Because . . .” And it dawned on Phillip Chalmers that he had no good explanation, not even one that made his own actions— the research, the proposal, the keynote, the eventual publication—defensible. He could feel his convictions yawning like an unknotted purse, dropping in bits and pieces from his mental vault.
“You simply . . . don’t.”
The aigamuxa’s chuckle was a desiccated thing. “That is not the answer of a devoutly curious mind, Reverend Doctor.”
The fingers released. Chalmers’s legs wobbled beneath him. There was still a faint ringing in his ears.
“I am called Nasrahiel,” the aigamuxa said, turning on the balls of its feet, heel-set eyes winking up from the ground as it padded toward a door barely visible in the lamplight. “There is much for you to do, if you expect to live. Come. I will take you to the other half of ‘we.’”
The Nine Page 9