The transformer trilogy, p.37
The Transformer Trilogy, page 37
“Well, that’s curious. I left when I was young; I was not one of her natural children.” Here, the clerk nodded knowingly. “But I recall her as being very stable, very ... how should I say, forward-moving. She enjoyed things greatly, you know.” Here, Nazarine favored the pale girl with a lewd wink, which the clerk acknowledged and understood, but also gave a look which suggested a degree of prim disapproval. Nazarine added, “I saw nothing which would have caused anyone to remand her to a rehab center.”
The clerk nodded sagely. “There is certainly nothing in here to indicate any reason. But there is something else missing.”
“What’s that?”
“Her employment. I look here and there’s no way you could tell where she worked, or what she did. I know she wasn’t a scrubwoman.”
“How do you know this?”
“The children’s indicators. Jedily paid for the maternity services. All three times. Not her lover, and she didn’t use the public facilities. No, no. She took the best, and paid for it out of her own pocket! Whatever she was, she was well-set.”
Nazarine said, to hide her emotions more than anything else, “Well we never wanted for anything we really needed, I recall that.”
“Right! Then you know what she did for a living?”
“Of course ... but it doesn’t matter now. And I’d imagine you couldn’t correct your file without something more than recollection. Documentation.”
The clerk shook her head, but with sympathy. “I am glad you understand. So few do. It is a thankless job.”
“Just so. So, then, there’s no more to be had in this....”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Well, then, I will be on my way.” Nazarine turned away from the counter, and then turned back. The pale girl clerk was already headed into the stacks. Nazarine asked, “Would The Mask Factory have had any control over people going into rehab?”
The clerk turned and said, quite without thinking, “Generally not, as I recall, although they always had a representative in here who scanned the rehab rosters.”
“Really? Do you recall if it was anyone you knew?”
The girl blurted out, “Who could forget that repulsive little slug, always creeping around the stacks, grabbing a feel here, a feel there, always groping. That flunky over at The Mask Factory, the errand-boy. Avaria was his name. Elegro Avaria. I can say that because he vanished in the Troubles and hasn’t been seen in these parts since.”
Nazarine made a motion with her hand, indicating that she wished the clerk farewell, and turned away to go, but her real reason in turning away was to hide her face from the girl, because when she heard Avaria’s name, the alarm bells in her head must have been nearly audible to passersby. Oh, yes, Nazarine as Rael-memory recalled Avaria well enough. Well enough indeed. And there was something worth finding out. She could hardly wait to get off in solitude, where she could add this datum into the oracle. On the surface, it wasn’t much. But of necessity, the entering edge of the wedge is narrow and sharp. But it can widen enough to crack open the thing it’s applied against.
7
“At the impassable and irreducible core of every meaningful and deeply real thing there lies irrationality pure and undisguised: Transcendental Numbers, irreducible fractions, even,—gasp!—imaginary numbers. And that is how you tell the Real from the unreal. And those things that can be reduced to rational, fixed ends? Trash, illusion, nonsense, Maya, ghosts, the demonic. They only have power over us to the extent that we waste time worrying about them.”
—H.C., Atropine
NAZARINE RETURNED TO her tiny rooms at the Symbarupol Traveller’s hostel and stretched her long body out on the simple cot that served as a bed, watching the mellow, diffused light of the afternoon sun evolve across the wall on which it slanted. Evolve, not move. Sunlights and shadows alike moved too slowly to perceive on Oerlikon, but move they did, whether one watched them or not. Now she reviewed the facts and suggestions she possessed, reaching for the right question.
She now knew, with reasonable validity, that Jedily had been selected for The Mask Factory, by no less a person than Elegro Avaria. Pternam didn’t pick his victims. They were brought to him. Also that Jedily had once, most of her life, been somebody of some success. The records had been badly stripped. Whoever did it hadn’t cared if his work was noticed. Only that her former life vanish from records. Why? At the first approximation, for the simple reason that the record of her life would not justify “rehabilitation.” Also that she wasn’t well-known. A success, but quiet about it. But why rehab a quiet success? Jedily didn’t fit the pattern. There was definitely something here that didn’t fit. In one sense, the question went nowhere. But these unknowings were the life blood to the original Rael, and Nazarine had not forgotten how to work with these “unknowns.” One solved equations for them!
She sat up for a moment, watching the sky beyond the window, and then went to the crude little table under the window. There was a blank pad of paper there, which she had left. Now she bent over it and began laying out the lines of Rael’s oracle, concentrating on the question of what had Jedily been. One by one the outlines began filling in, an indecipherable hieroglyph to the uninitiated, barely comprehensible even to her until the very last step. But at last she had it: Jedily Tulilly was a spy.
Nazarine pushed the chair back and leaned back even farther. A spy. Then she had been caught. But that made no more sense than before. A spy for whom? Doing what? Nazarine knew that because of the majestic indifference of the Makhaks, and the monolithic Lisak society, there were in fact few real spies and those that were, were in a local resistance. Or were ... offworlders, of which the Lisaks knew nothing. What had the Answer said? A spy. If she had been of the Lisak Underground, there would have been no rehab, but outright execution, summary justice on the spot. And if for the offworlders, there would have been more hue and cry. She went through rehab. They knew everything. And yet they did nothing, and in fact she knew very well as Rael that they didn’t know about the offworlders. Dead end either way. Another unknown. Now how to address it: in what direction should she approach this still-unknown? She bent to the pad again, and began concentrating. A spy for whom? And who caught her?
The sunlight faded, became more golden, and moved imperceptibly diagonally across the wall a bit before she had this answer: Jedily was an offworlder. She was caught by the offworlders.
Nazarine ran her slender fingers through the brown, loose curls of her hair, and pursed her full mouth in perplexity. There, too, was ambiguity. She was an offworlder, then, working for the offworld group which was actually maintaining an artificial stability on Oerlikon, for their own purposes. Presumably Jedily had also worked to those ends. Quietly, but in such a way as to lead a quiet and prosperous life, with plenty of time for three children at wide intervals, presumably with different lovers, that being the custom of Lisagor. She reached for the memory knowing it wouldn’t be there, but she felt a framework it had left behind. A sense of completion, satisfaction. There had been no bitterness in it.
Very well. Then I am an offworlder myself. I am not child of Jedily, but a replication of her, in a different body, derived from the potentials latent in the orginal Jedily DNA. For a moment, the knowledge made her a bit lightheaded, dizzy. But caught by the same group she belonged to ... ? How so? Would she have gone too far native and turned against her masters? Nazarine did not think so. That didn’t feel right. The offworlders were the most conservative group on the planet, and if one had turned on them, surely such an event would have left traces. No. There were no ripples of that anywhere. But somehow she opposed them, and they “caught her.” Nazarine did not wish to ask another scan. She felt the presence of too many unknowns. She needed to try to find those records from The Mask Factory, and she’d have to catch the beamliner late tonight, to start for Karshiyaka. She removed the used pages from the pad and shredded them into tiny pieces in the wastebag. Satisfied that the room looked secure, she glanced at the fading light, and nodded, leaving the room for supper at one of the few remaining operable communal dining halls.
After supper, alone in the midst of multitudes, absorbed in her own thoughts, she returned to the hostel and retrieved her few belongings, and checked out, walking slowly through the deserted streets, still guarded by the improbable monolithic government buildings, now untenanted save for a handful of squatters.
Using the cartouche, she went to the beamliner station and purchased a ticket for the end of the line, Thurso’s Landing, and when the liner came in, swaying on its suspended track of I-beams, she boarded it, without looking back. But she was still wrestling with the unanswered questions and an incomplete oracle. There was something here that escaped her powers. And that could only happen in such a case that the answer could be derived by the ordinary progress of everyday reasoning. But it was maddening: she couldn’t find where the discrepancy was. She was still worrying herself like a dog with a bone when she found an empty seat, and in arranging her bag, she looked up, sensing that she was the object of someone’s attentions. A few seats back was a bald man of no determinable age, watching her with interest, and perhaps appreciation. She returned the look, with a slight internal grimace: No. Not that one. But as she started to sit, some subliminal alarm system planted long ago by Rael went off She didn’t dare look back to find out what it was, but something he’d done wasn’t right, wasn’t Lisak. A thrill slid upward from the small of her back, and lodged high up between her shoulder blades. Offworlder! On the liner, from parts west, perhaps Clisp. Looking for a trace of Phaedrus? She shivered. I’m getting paranoid. A second inner voice suggested, Maybe not paranoid enough? The voice of reason answered, Maybe not looking, but he can at least find one who does. So she sat very still for a long time, until she felt it worth risking a glance back to where the bald man sat, and to her immense relief, he was asleep, his mouth slightly open. With almost no movement, save a series of graceful flows from one position to another, she carefully gathered her bag up, and slid out of the seat, and then out of the coach. At the next stop, she got off, and it wasn’t until she caught a fleeting glimpse of the bald man passing in the departing coach that she felt some measure of reassurance. The pressure had been intense. And suddenly letting down, the answer she had been looking for crystallized and emerged fully developed, complete. Of course! It couldn’t be any other way! Jedily hadn’t been sent to a Lisak rehab at all: her own people, the offworlders, did their own version first. They didn’t care what rehab got out of her then—she’d already been cleaned out like a gourd. She knew or did something, and they— she hesitated at the word—erased her, and dumped her back into the process by which The Mask Factory obtained its recruits. And now she had a real problem for the oracle: what was Avaria’s connection? How could they be so sure she would vanish into that hole? But as Nazarine walked tiredly through the unpaved streets of a very minor little town, looking for a place to stay, she thought that she would hold those questions until she had tried to find the missing Mask Factory records. She needed one more piece of Jedily, if possible, before asking again. And of course it was also true that you couldn’t push it too hard, and depend on the answers. So for now she would let it be.
She never found a place open, but returned to the station, where she made do on one of the wooden benches. And in the morning, red-eyed and stiff, she wandered all over the town until she finally located a dray-wagon headed north for Karshiyaka, the end of the world, whose driver reluctantly agreed to take her aboard as a passenger. She rode in the back of the wagon with the load, apparently large burlap bags full of legumes, and watched the rolling, empty lands pass under the indigo skies of the north.
Karshiyaka was the place where the northern tier of hills across Lisagor turned to the northeast, diminished to a series of hogback hills and low rises, and vanished into the gray-green waters of the Cold Ocean. There were no trees; the land was covered by a low, brushy plant which gave off a bitter, aromatic odor. The climate was damp and misty, and the houses and towns were half-sunken into the rocky ground. The monotony of the landscape was broken only occasionally by squat, low towers with conical roofs, apparently the residences of hermits, for to Nazarine’s eye they seemed to have little relationship to any activity near to them or far away. Going by what little she could see, it was cold, and she had burrowed deep into the harsh bags for warmth. This was the northeast, far from the sunny, light-swept distances of Clisp, plain and mountains, or from Marula, far away in the south. And the season, however mild, was indeed winter. She burrowed deeper into the lumpy bags and tried to ignore hunger and cold some more.
After the passage of several days, which had stretched into a uniform dull blur, the power-wagon and its trailer rolled onto hard, stony streets, closed in tightly by the lowering, half-submerged houses and shops. The streets curved and intersected with a sense of willful perversity, all eventually winding down slippery cobblestones to the harbor, which surprisingly looked full and busy. The wind off the water had a bite to it, and the few people she saw about went about their business without wasted motions or socializing. The wagon reached a section of warehouses along the docks, and Nazarine got off there, and went looking for an inn or hostel. She did not know what she would find here, in this land’s-end corner of Lisagor: already it had a foreign air to it.
The town was called, unimaginatively, Karshiyaka. But whatever went on here apparently called for a lot of transients, for there were a lot of inns and taverns, not to mention the traditional Lisak hostels. Nazarine, feeling more secure now in this impossible corner of the country, and feeling acutely both hunger and fatigue, decided on one of the better inns, which included a warm tavern, and to her relief they accepted the credit of the cartouche that Pompeo had given Phaedrus without question. In fact, they accepted it willingly. She selected a large room with heavy half-timber walls, small round windows, and which had a plain but well-furnished bath attached. And the water was hot. She glanced at the blue, overcast twilight, through the windows, and ordered supper sent up to her. After supper, a bowl of herbal sea stew, accompanied by a hard-crust bread and hot beer, she filled the old iron tub full of water, and after bolting the doors, removed her clothes and settled gently into the steaming water, where she scrubbed madly, and then lay back to soak. She woke up a bit later, feeling guilty, surrounded by now-cool water. The room was cool, too, but she found enough blankets to pile on the bed, and lay down wearily and slept deeply, untroubled by dreams or problems that she could remember.
She slept through the day and the next night as well, waking only enough to roll over. But by the next morning she finally woke, and set about the things she had come to Karshiyaka to do. First came some heavier clothing, and then she went about the town making discreet inquiries about an eccentric Makhak supposed to have settled in the area. Eventually she derived directions to one of the towers on the southern side of the projecting finger of land, and set out for it, walking.
It was a bit farther than she had thought, and she could feel the cold through the heavy clothing by the time she approached it, but there was no mistaking it. The Makhak immigrant lived in an eccentric stone castle built out on the end of a low headland, an irregular structure of no particular shape, with three towers of different heights, none especially tall.
The building was enigmatic and blank-faced; Nazarine walked around it three times before she found what appeared to be an entrance, and the day, already well-gone toward evening, was nearer night before someone within finally opened the door for her. This was, apparently, a servant or bondsman. Or bondswoman; she could not tell. The person was tall and gaunt and curiously indeterminate of gender. It met her without a single word at the door, and conveyed her through a series of empty stone corridors to a large, drafty room, where another tall and cadaverous person, not a great deal different from the servant, sat before a peat fire and brooded. The servant left.
Presently the one by the fire turned and stood up. This one, at least, seemed to be male, and well-advanced in years as well. He was thin and sticklike in build, moving with an odd reserve which suggested fragility—but great strength as well. He spoke first, in a low, muttering tone, almost a whisper. He held his hands stuffed into voluminous sleeves.
“I am Yakhin Pakhad.”
She said, “Nazarine Alea.”
“Lisak?”
“Yes and no.”
“Ah, the followers of the old ways; always ambiguity, duality.”
Nazarine smiled a tremulous little half-smile to herself. “Indeed, sir, duality ... and the half has not yet been told.”
Pakhad nodded, recognizing something of a private humor he had keyed in her. He said, after a moment, “We are private people, you know, we Makhaks. And you being young and graceful and with an entire continent of stalwarts at your back, I must conjecture, I must assume ...”
Nazarine knew of the Makhak distase for superfluous conversation. She interrupted, “I have heard of the Makhak ways, of how each of you follows an ‘excellence.’ ”
“Just so; we are great scholars.”
“It was described to me how a certain scholar of Tartary resided in this neighborhood, one whose excellence was the study of statistics.”
“I am such a person.”
“I am in the service of Clisp....”
“We do not require reasons.”
“You obtained the records of the old Mask Factory, of Symbarupol? This was reported to me there.”
He made a slight nod of agreement, leaving his face turned down.
