For the first three days after his return he was too busy to give attention to this plan. Everybody in New Belfast seemingly had written him or telephoned him or called at one of his two homes to see him. Although Monkey-face was a lousy secretary, Park didn’t dare hire another so long as he had his double identity to maintain.
But the Antonini trials were due in a week, back in that other world. And the heirs and assigns of Trigvy Darling had had a date set for a hearing on their damage claim. And, if Park knew his history, there would probably be a “reconstruction” period in the revolted territories, of which he wanted no part.
For the second time Edwy Borup had his sanctuary invaded by Allister Park and a lot of tough-looking official persons, including Rufus Callahan. Borup was getting resigned if not reconciled to this. If they didn’t let his prize patient Noggle escape before, they weren’t likely to this time.
“Haw, Noggle,” said Park. “Feel a little more with-doing?”
“Nay,” snapped Noggle. “But since you have me by the little finger I suppose I’ll have to do what you say.”
“All right. You’re honest, anyway. First you’re going to stop Bretwald Kedrick’s wheel. Bring him in, boys.”
“But I daren’t stop a wheel without my down-writings. You bethink last time-”
“That’s all right; we brought your whole damn library over.”
There was nothing to it. Noggle stared at the fidgety Bretwald — the period of whose cycle was fortunately just twice his, so that both were in their own bodies at the same time. Then he said: “Whew. Had a lot of psychic momentum, that ane; I just did stop him. He’ll be all rick now. What next?”
Park told everybody but Callahan to go out. Then he explained that Noggle was to give his wheel another half turn.
“But,” objected Noggle, “that’ll take seven days. What’s going to be done with your body in the meantime?”
“It’ll be kept here, and so will you. When the half-cycle’s done, you’ll stop my wheel, and then we’ll let you stop your own whenever you like. I’ve made sure that you’ll stay here until you do the right thing by my wheel, whether you cure your own case or not.”
Noggle sighed. “And MacSvensson thock he’d get some simple-minded idealist like the bishop! How is it that your pattern of acting is otherly from his, when by the laws of luck you started out with much the same forebearish make-up?”
Park shrugged. “Probably because I’ve had to fick every step of the way, while he was more or less born into his job. We’re not so otherly, at that; his excess energy went into social crusading, while mine’s gone into politics. I have an ideal or two kicking around somewhere. I’d like to meet Bishop Scoglund some time; think I’d like him.”
“I’m afraid that’s undoable,” said Noggle. “Even sending you back is risky. I don’t know what would happen if your body died while his mind indwelt it. You might land in still another doable world instead of in your ain. Or you mick not land anywhere.”
“I’ll take a chance,” said Park. “Ready?”
“Yes.” Dr. Joseph Noggle stared at Park.
“Hey, Thane Park,” said a voice from the doorway. “A wick named Dunedin wants to see you. Says it’s weighty.”
“Tell him I’m busy — no, I’ll see him.”
Monkey-face appeared, panting. “Have you gone yet? Have you changed? Glory to Bridget! You — I mean his hallowship — what I mean is, the Althing signed a treaty with the Dakotians and Cherogians and such, setting up an International Court for the Continent of Skrelleland, and the bishop has been chosen one of the judges! I thock you ock to know before you did anything.”
“Well, well,” said Park. “That’s interesting, but I don’t know that it changes anything.”
Callahan spoke up: “I think you’d make a better judge, Allister, than he would. He’s a fine fellow, but he will believe that everybody else is as uprick as he. They’d pull the wool over his eyes all the time.”
Park pondered. After all, what had he gone to all this trouble for — why had he helped turn the affairs of half the continent upside down — except to resume a career as public prosecutor which, he hoped, would some day land him on the bench? And here was a judgeship handed him on a platter.
“I’ll stay,” he said.
“But,” objected Noggle, “how about those thirteen other men on your wheel? Are you going to leave them out of their rick rooms?”
Park grinned. “If they’re like me, they’re adaptable guys who’ve probably got started on new careers by now. If we shift ’em all again, it’ll just make more trouble for them. Come along, Rufus.”
The funeral of Allister Park, assistant Secretary of War, brought out thousands of people. Some were politicians who had been associated with Park; some came for the ride. A few came because they liked the man.
In an anteroom of the cathedral, Bishop Scoglund waited for that infernal music to end, whereupon he would go out and preach the swellest damn funeral oration New Belfast had ever heard. It isn’t given to every man to conduct that touching ceremony for his own corpse, and the bishop intended to give his alter-ego a good send-off.
In a way he was sorry to bid Allister Park good-bye. Allister had a good deal more in common with his natural, authentic self than did the bishop. But he couldn’t keep up the two identities forever, and with the judgeship on one hand and the damage suit on the other there wasn’t much question of which of the two would have to be sacrificed. The pose of piety would probably become natural in time. The judgeship would give him an excuse for resigning his bishopric. Luckily the Celtic Christian Church had a liberal attitude toward folk who wished to leave the church. Of course he’d still have to be careful — girlfriends and such. Maybe it would even be worthwhile getting married…
“What the devil — what do you wish, my son?” said the bishop, looking up into Figgis’s unpleasant face.
“You know what I wish, you old goat! What are you going to do about my wife?”
“Why, friend, it seems that you have been subject to a monstrous fooling!”
“You bet I-”
“Please, do not shout in the house of God! What I was saying was that the guilty man was none other than the late Allister Park, may the good Lord forgive his sins. He has been impersonating me. As you know, we looked much alike. Allister Park upowned to me on his deathbed two days ago. No doubt his excesses brought him to his untimely end. Still, for all his human frailties, he was a man of many good qualities. You will forgive him, will you not?”
“But — but I-”
“Please, for my sake. You would not speak ill of the dead, would you?”
“Oh, hell. Your forgiveness, Bishop. I thock I had a good thing, that’s all. G’bye. Sorry.”
The music was coming to an end. The bishop stood up, straightened his vestments, and strode majestically out. If he could only count on that drunken nitwit Callahan not to forget himself and bust out laughing…
The coffin, smothered in flowers, was, like all coffins in Vinland, shaped like a Viking longboat. It was also filled with pine planks. Some people were weeping a bit. Even Callahan, in the front row, was appropriately solemn.
“Friends, we have gathered here to pay a last gild to one who has passed from among us…”
The Pugnacious Peacemaker
Harry Turtledove
“Aka,” the wire recorder said. “Aka, aka, aka.”
“Aka,” Eric Dunedin repeated. “Aka, aka, aka.”
Dunedin’s boss, Judge Ib Scoglund, burst out laughing. The thane’s pinched, rather simian face twisted into a reproachful frown. Scoglund could guess what he was thinking: you didn’t act like this back in the days when you were a bishop.
The judge knew Dunedin was right. He hadn’t acted this way when he was a bishop, not up until the very end. Of course, the mind of an up-and-coming New York assistant DA named Allister Park hadn’t come to inhabit this body till then, either.
“I beg forgiveness, Eric,�
� he said, more or less sincerely. “But you have to say forth that twoth wordpart down in the back of the throat, like this: aka. Do you hear the otherness?”
“Nay, Hallow, er, Judge,” Dunedin said.
Allister Park breathed through Ib Scoglund’s nose in exasperation. “Well, you’re going to have to learn to hear it if you ever aim at speak Ketjwa. The way you spoke it, the way the letters look on paper to someone who’s used to English, aka doesn’t mean ‘corn beer.’ It means”-at the last moment, he decided to have mercy on his servant’s sensibilities-“ ‘dung.’ ”
Dunedin looked ready to burst into tears. “I never wanted to learn to speak Ketjwa, or aught save English. All these Skrelling tongues tie my wits up in knots.”
Privately, Scoglund, or rather Park, agreed with him. But he said, “I’m learning it, so that shows you can. And you’ll have to, for no one in Kuuskoo but a few men of letters and spokesfolk to the Bretwaldate knows even one word of our speech. How will you keep us in meat and potatoes — to say naught of aka — if you can’t talk with the folk who sell them?”
“I’ll — try, Judge,” Dunedin said. “Aka.” He pronounced it wrong again.
Park sighed. Nobody could make his thane a linguist, not in the couple of days before their steamship docked at Uuraba on the northern coast of the landstrait of Panama, not in the new sea journey down from the land-strait’s southern coast to Ookonja, the port nearest Kuuskoo — and not with twenty years to work, either. A talent for languages simply wasn’t in Monkey-face. The most to hope for was that he would learn more with Park bullying him than without.
“I’m going up on deck for some fresh air,” Park announced. “You stay here till you’ve played that record two more times.” Dunedin gave him a martyred look, which he ignored. The cabin was hot and stuffy; no one in this world had thought of air conditioning.
Park grabbed a hat and a couple of books and climbed the narrow iron staircase to the deck. The air there was no less humid than it had been inside, and hardly cooler: summer on the Westmiddle Sea (Park still thought of it as the Caribbean, no matter what the map said) was bound to be tropical. But here, at least, the air was moving.
The deck chairs were deck chairs, right down to their gaudy canvas webbing. Park threw himself into one. It complained about his weight. He sighed again. All the alter egos on his wheel of if seemed to run to portliness. They were all losing their hair, too; he put on the hat in a hurry, before the sun seared his scalp.
Soon he forgot sun, humidity, everything: when he studied, he studied hard. And he had a lot of studying to do. He felt like a student dropped into a class the week before exams. Ever since his — actually, Ib Scoglund’s — appointment to the International Court for the continent of Skrelleland the year before, he’d done little but study this world’s languages, history, and legal systems. They were still strange to him, but as soon as he got to Kuuskoo he would have to start using them.
He wished he’d been assigned a case involving the Bretwaldate of Vinland. Its customs were recognizably similar to the ones he’d grown up with. But assigning legal actions to disinterested outsiders made a certain amount of sense. Disinterested, Allister Park certainly was. Nothing like either country involved in this dispute existed in the world he knew.
Tawantiinsuuju was, he gathered from the text in his lap, what the Inca Empire might have become had Spaniards not strangled it in infancy. In this world, though, Arabs and Berbers still ruled Spain. Among other places, Park thought. That was part of the problem he’d have to deal with…
A shadow fell on the book. After a moment, Park looked up. A man was standing by his chair. “You are Judge Scoglund?” he asked in Ketjwa.
“Yes, I am,” Park answered slowly, using the same language. He was just glad he was talking with a man. Men and women used different words for kin and for other things in Ketjwa, and he wasn’t any too familiar with the distaff side of the vocabulary. “Who are you, sir?”
“I am called Ankowaljuu,” the fellow answered. He was in his late thirties, close to Park’s own age, with red-brown skin, straight black hair cut a little below his ears, and a high-cheekboned face dominated by a nose of nearly Roman impressiveness. He wore sandals, a wool tunic, and a black derby hat. “I am tukuuii riikook to the Son of the Sun, Maita Kapak.” At the mention of his ruler’s name, he shaded his eyes with one hand for a moment, as if to shield them from the monarch’s glory.
“Tukuuii riikook, eh?” Park looked at him with more interest than he’d felt before: Ankowaljuu was no ordinary passenger.
“You understand what it means, then?”
“Aye,” Park said. A tukuuii riikook was an imperial inspector, of the secret sort outside the usual chain of command. Most empires had them under one name or another, so the rulers could make sure their regular functionaries were performing as they should. Frowning, the judge went on, “I do not understand why you tell me, though.”
Ankowaljuu smiled, displaying large white teeth. “Shall I speak English, to make sure I am clear?”
“Please do,” Park said with relief. “I am working to learn your tongue, but I am not yet flowing in it.”
“You have the back-of-the-throat sounds, which are most often hardest for Vinlanders to gain,” Ankowaljuu said.
“But to go on: I tell you because I want you to know you may count on me — I speak for myself now, mind you, not for the Son of the Sun — for as long as you have a hand in judging this dealing between my folk and the Emirate of the Dar al-Harb.”
“Oh? Why is that?” Park hoped his voice did not show his sudden hard suspicion. His years in the DA’s office told him no one ever offered anything for nothing. “You must understand I cannot talk with you about this dealing — all the more so because you are a tukuuii riikook, a thane of your emperor.”
“Yes, of course I understand, That you naysay shows your honesty. I must tell you, the Son of the Sun was sorry he gave our quarrel with the Emir to the International Court when he learned the judge would be from Vinland.”
“Why is that?” Park asked again, this time out of genuine curiosity. “My country has little to do with either yours or the Emirate.”
“Because so many Vinlanders are forejudged against Skrellings,” Ankowaljuu said grimly. “But when I came up to New Belfast to find out what sort of man you are, I found his mistrusts were misplaced. No one who has swinked so hard for the ricks of the Skrellings in Vinland could be anything but fair in his judgments.”
“Well, thank you very much,” Park murmured, a little embarrassed at taking credit for work that had actually been Ib Scoglund’s. “I won’t needfully choose for you, either, just because you’re Skrellings, you know.”
Ankowaljuu made a shoving motion, as if to push that idea aside. “I would not reckon anything of the sort. But it is good to know you will not turn against us just because the folk of the Dar al-Harb are incomers to Skrelleland like you Vinlanders.”
“I never thock of that.” Park clapped a hand to his forehead. “This bounds strife is quite embrangled enough without worries of that sort.”
“So it is.” Ankowaljuu chuckled, a bit unpleasantly. “At least I need not trouble myself about any faithly forejudgment on your part. As a one-time Christian bishop, no doubt you will have glick scorn for the Emir and his Allah on the one hand and our hallowing of the sun and Patjakamak who put it in the sky on the other.”
“I think all faiths can be good,” Park said.
Ankowaljuu’s eloquent grunt showed just how much he believed that. The funny thing was, Park really meant it. Anyone who wanted to play politics in New York had to feel, or at least act, that way. And nothing in Park’s experience with criminals had shown him that people who followed any one religion behaved conspicuously better than those who believed in another.
Trouble was, both the Tawantiinsuujans and the Emir’s subjects took their religions so damned seriously. “Dar al-Harb” itself meant “Land of War”-war against the pagans the Mo
ors of Cordova had found when they crossed to what Park still sometimes thought of as Brazil. Since all the Skrellings in the southern half of Skrelleland were pagan, the past few hundred years had seen a lot of war.
“Well, maybe this is one war we’ll stop,” he muttered.
He didn’t know he had spoken aloud until Ankowaljuu said, “I hope we do.” The tukuuii riikook raised a hand to the brim of his derby and walked off.
Park opened his book to the place his thumb had been keeping. Religion, politics, greed… embrangled wasn’t nearly a strong enough word for this case. A word that was came to mind, but not one suited for polite company. He said it anyhow, softly, and plunged back in.
* * *
Reed flutes whistled mournfully. Allister Park didn’t think it was fit music for a fanfare, but nobody’d asked him.
“Judge Ib Scoglund of the International Court of Skrelleland!” a flunky bawled in Ketjwa. Park bowed at the doorway to the big reception hall, slowly walked in.
Slowly was the operative word, he thought. Kuuskoo was more than two miles above sea level; the air was chilly and, above all, thin. He’d come by train from the broiling tropical port of Ookonja in less than a day. Any sudden motion made his heart pound wildly. He looked around for a chair.
He spotted one, but before he could sit down, a big, red-faced man came over to pump his hand. “Haw, good to meet you, Hallow, er, Thane, er, Judge Scoglund,” he boomed. “I’m Osfric Lundqvist, the Bretwaldate’s spokesman to the Son of the Sun.”
“Thank you, Thane Lundqvist,” Park said.
“My joyment.” Lundqvist did not let go of Park’s hand.
“Thank you,” Park repeated, trying to find some polite way to disengage himself from the ambassador. Lundqvist was, he knew, an amiable nonentity who drank too much. Because several nations lay between Vinland and Tawantiinsuuju, this was a safe enough post for a rich squire with more influence than ability. No matter how badly he blundered, he could not start a war by himself.
Down in The Bottomlands (and Other Places) Page 21