The transformer trilogy, p.38
The Transformer Trilogy, page 38
“I am no statistician. But in those records there may be mention of a person I am trying to trace. Therefore I ask your assistance.” She hoped it was short enough. One never knew with Makhaks exactly where the line was between essential speech and rudeness.
“Curious.”
“Why so?”
“I would have imagined them valuable—the records. But they sold cheaply, and no one has come asking anything. A poor investment, but a treasure-trove for me. I will never finish unraveling them. And of course it will be difficult to find one person in all that. Is there haste?”
“I don’t know. If I must say yes or no, I will say yes, but it is no emergency ... yet.”
Pakhad made a subtle signal with a hand, which he removed from its sleeve, to which responded the servant. Pakhad made a few more signs, and then made an easy waving motion to Nazarine. “All is arranged. Food and rest. Sleep well, rise early. Tomorrow we will see. Do you require entertainment tonight?”
“Entertainment?”
“Young men? Girls?”
Nazarine smiled openly, at last able to give something back. “Neither. I have an excellence of my own to pursue. Food and rest will suffice.”
“Curious, curious. Have you considered emigration to the Free Land?”
“No, but I think I will wind up there, whether I would or not.”
Pakhad raised his bushy eyebrows at that, but turned away to his peat fire and private thoughts, signifying that for the moment, conversation was over. Presently the servant reappeared with a bowl of some crushed fruit and a loaf of crusty bread, and a flagon of cold water, which had something of the flavor of the outside to it. Nazarine suspected it was rainwater. She accepted it without comment, and ate stolidly, not entirely certain when her next meal might be. And after that, the servant appeared again, and in total silence led her through the odd and disjointed corridors of the old castle to one of the towers, so she surmised from the stairs she ascended, and to a cold room with a rude cot, which thankfully was furnished with a number of coarse homespun blankets. In the darkness, she climbed into the cot, piled blankets around herself, and listened for any sounds she might hear. She only heard a distant, soft murmuring, of an easy surf on a narrow sandy beach.
Pakhad was as good as his word, and sent the servant for her at dawn, or something near to it. She could see little difference from night itself. Breakfast was half a loaf and more rainwater. And then another passage through the dusty, random corridors, apparently to another one of the towers, where she was conducted to a large room filled from floor to ceiling with stacks of paper. Pakhad waited for her.
“And now we begin.”
She looked at the untidy stacks of paper, seemingly in no order whatsoever, and for a moment almost gave in to total despair. This bookworm couldn’t find his own name in that mess! She drew a deep, slow breath of the cold air, and let it out in a long, uninterrupted sigh. “I am looking for one each Jedily Tulilly.”
Pakhad looked about thoughtfully and asked, “Give me some categories, some references. A woman, yes? That alone will not help us.”
“I know very little of exact facts; what I have is approximate, relative. Age elderly, past maturity. I know she was in The Mask Factory, but I do not know how long, or when she went in.”
“Did she come out?”
“No. She ended there.”
“More?”
“Before she went in, she was apparently well off, but I don’t know the occupation, or residence. Presumably Symbarupol, although there I am guessing.”
“But definitely in The Mask Factory?”
“Yes. Immediately before that, she was a rehabilitee, working in the Bureau of Public Roads. I think she was in The Mask Factory for a long time. What they did to her there couldn’t have been done fast.” Nazarine suddenly felt a hot flash of embarrassment, at herself. For all her powers and all she knew, what she had on Jedily was still almost nothing.
Pakhad glanced about the random stacks of paper, scratched his chin, paced back and forth, adjusted the lamps, and muttered to himself, inaudibly. Finally he selected a stack of papers, and went through it, searching. Then he put the stack back in its place. He said, “I haven’t yet succeeded in setting up the kind of order I want, so one has to try things out. There is no index. I was not, of course, interested in individual cases, so I have little on that. Only as one of a category will we find anything.”
“Can I help?”
He shook his head. And went on searching. Pakhad tried another stack, with the same results. And another. Presently, he came to a stack which he first started going through rapidly, and then slowed down. Leafing through, he finally stopped on a single bound sheaf, which he extracted, and handed to Nazarine. “This is it. Do you want it, or will you study it here?”
“Here will do. I travel light. There may be something there, maybe not. But what I need from there ... I don’t need a copy.”
“I have work here. Use the main room.”
Nazarine took the papers and threaded her way through the structure, back to the sitting room, where she settled in a chair before the smoldering fire and began to read through the forgotten documents. Hesitantly at first, but with growing absorption. The nameless servant brought her some herb tea in an earthenware pot, with a matching cup, but it cooled before she thought to drink it.
Nazarine walked slowly back up the coast road, if one could call it that, back toward Karshiyaka Town, her head full of unassimilated facts. Much of the file had dealt with the regimen of treatments which Jedily had been put through, at which Nazarine alternated between outrage and astonishment. Those things had been done to her herself. True, she had no memory of them, or at best, mercifully obscured horrors which even Rael had avoided and forgot as much as he could. But what was the most amazing thing of all was that the procedure they were using on Jedily was one that had been used many times before, an exercise that took place in territory which was very familiar to the people performing the ... exercises. They had had plenty of failures, but they were working within the bounds of a known system. Something that had collected its own idioms and cross-references. They had been trying for the Morphodite for a long time.
They had expected more of Jedily than the usual subject that fell into their nets. There were notes jotted down along the margins of some of the sheets, to indicate that someone knew she was less than their usual prey. More than one marginal note made reference to “twice-rehab.” So they had not been grabbing at random. Perhaps at first. Not with Jedily. They knew what they were getting. That could only mean that there was someone within The Mask Factory who had contact with the offworlders—the group covered by the Oerlikon Mission.
As for Pternam, who had seemingly set the process in motion, he was revealed to be a relative latecomer, only brought into things late in the game, when they began to think that they would succeed. There was their error, she thought wryly. Pternam had been ever more unprincipled than they had been, and quickly took over the whole project to his own ends. And that raised its own question, which she dared not ask, knowing that there are evils in the world and time that one would rather not know: what would they have done with Rael without Pternam? They had been reaching for the deadliest weapon in the universe, and surely somewhere someone knew what that weapon’s target was to have been. It was Pternam who had turned Rael loose upon Lisagor.
The file had contained numerous reproductions of Jedily at various parts of her life. Nazarine had looked at these with disbelief, and some amusement. An odd sensation of vertigo. After all, this was me! Jedily had been a rounded, soft woman, with a ready smile and alert, flashing eyes, slightly taller than average. There was no resemblance at all to the thin and saturnine Rael, who resembled a half-civilized Makhak, or the petite Damistofia. Jedily had had a slight double chin which, someone had noted, suggested a sensual disposition.
They were thorough, and covered their tracks only superficially. There were two types of visual reproductions easily distinguishable: One set covered Jedily’s life in Lisagor, which apparently commenced when she had been in her late twenties, standard. There was another set covering her younger days. No mention was made of where those came from, but they were equally obviously not Lisagor: spiky stone buildings and odd vegetation with needlelike foliage in the backgrounds. Within that group, there were a few of Jedily as a child. There the backgrounds were innocuous, but there was something alien about them. Not Lisagor. Not Oerlikon.
Jedily’s profession had been interesting, too. She had been a physician.
Although few women practiced medicine on Oerlikon, apparently no one had questioned her, once she was established. She had worked within one of the larger clinics in Symbarupol, and specialized in the treatment of degenerative ailments of the aged. Her certifications had been managed as a case of self-education and success as passing the myriad tests of Lisak society. Once established, she promptly buried herself in one of the enormous civil service hierarchies as a supervisor of some obscure program. This was traced out with meticulous care. They seemed to think it important, as if somehow these facts were justification for something. There was one line which had been particularly interesting: it had read:“Last assignment: Certification Section, Symbarupol. Oversees induction of indigents and defectives into rehabilitation processes. Approves quotas set by Medical Experimental Station.”
Indeed it was! Jedily had been the monitor of the input into The Mask Factory! The conclusion was unavoidable: she had been promoted routinely into a routine position, but there was something she saw in that for which ... the offworlders silenced her by erasing her and dumping her into the very program she was monitoring.
Nazarine walked on, shivering in the cold wind; perhaps more than from the wind blowing off the gray-green sea, under the damp cloud cover. She felt emotions for which she had no name, but which gnawed at her vitals, at the foundations of her precarious existence. She had drained the cup of revenge upon Lisagor and The Mask Factory, but had not yet tasted that which was of the killing of Meliosme and the children. And now another draught was set, as it were, by an unseen hand, on the counter before her: she wondered if there was any bottom to this evil at all, and she was reminded of the Tale of the Chagrined Optimist, a folk tale widely circulated throughout Lisagor: The Optimist said, as disaster befell him, “Cheer up! Things could be worse!” And as he cheered up, so indeed things got worse. And for the first time, she began to wonder if the way Phaedrus had chosen hadn’t been the right way, after all. Disengage. It was beginning to seem as if there were wrongs whose scope visibly exceeded her formidable powers as the Morphodite to right. But just when the gloom of hopelessness closed in on her, she looked around herself at the bleak shores of Karshiyaka, and she thought, Disengage, is it? Go back to the warmer parts of Lisagor and find an obscure place for myself, with a bit of fun with men to liven up the times ... Yes, and no matter who I found, no matter how much it would mean, there would never be an escape for me, or those I might love, like Phaedrus. They killed Jedily, and they hunted Phaedrus, and they’ll come for me, too. And whatever powers Rael developed, nursing his own plots, none of us expressions of the immortal is a god. We’ve got a blind side, and they’ll waste enough agents to find it. No. And I’ve painted myself into a corner with the identity changes. The next one’s to be early childhood. I could die of nothing more willfully evil than simple overexposure after Change, lying in the open and feverish. No. This has got to be seen to the end, and the definitive action carried out. Some of the chill left her then and, rounding a headland, she saw ahead in the evening gloom the lights of Karshiyaka Town, riding lights on the ships in the harbor.
8
“When the situation has become impossible, incomprehensible,
the meaning invisible, then we are wont to cry out: ‘Give us the
Truth! We must have it, come what may!’ But it is in these very
situations that the truth is in fact a horror that we could not bear
to see, something far more awful than we could have imagined
in our darkest hours. And then we do not change it, but it
changes us. No, I think we don’t want Truth, whatever we say.
Facts, maybe, and not so very many of them, either.”
—H.C., Atropine
IT WAS EVENING, in Tartary. Cesar Kham imagined that he had been walking for hours, with that same rude castle bulking on the horizon like some unlovely animal, that he had ceased to move and that it was the castle drifting, enlarging, obscuring the western sky, where a tattered yellow fragment, like burnt cloth, peeked under the masses of gray and streaked clouds that covered the sky. Did they never see blue sky in this land?
He shook his head, annoyed with himself. First failure in Clisp, and then this, brought on by having to operate out of this impossible location. Two failures, not one! Failure to accomplish the mission with confirmed results, and failure to turn anything up, a trip undertaken at great risk. And now he would have to spend more time in this bleak country, arguing endlessly with Palude over what they could do next. He came into the darkness of the castle, close, now, and thought, “Well, absence of proof is not proof of absence. Perhaps that raid did the job, anyway. Perhaps if it didn’t actually get The Morphodite it scared it off. Might well be skulking along the south coast of Clisp, hiding out in that empty land. What the hell—a person neutralized by fear was the same as dead, anyway.”
When he came to the door, it was opened by Arunda Palude, at which he expressed surprise, stepping quickly over the threshold to keep the cold, windy, dry air out of the chill castle.
“Waiting up for me?”
She said, pulling a cloak closer around her, “We knew you were coming; besides, out here on the plain you can see someone coming for hours. There’s not much else worth doing, you know.”
“I know. You must be bored to death.”
“I am.”
They made their way through the castle to their own quarters and sat down before the fire. Kham said, “Well, vile as it is, I’m glad to be back.”
Palude sat before the fire, trying to wheedle a bit more warmth out of it, the light casting harsh shadows along the planes and lines of her face. She looked drawn and pinched. She said nothing for a long time, but then asked, “Find anything?”
“Not a trace. Nothing. Zero. I’m almost convinced that the job got done, or else it scared it off.”
“None of the agents you contacted had anything?”
“Nothing. No trace of it. I’m sure that fortune-telling must be wrong. After all, if you asked for a reading on a dead man, you’d get a present answer, which is nonsense.”
“There’s a convention to these things: one doesn’t predict death, and one doesn’t ask nonsense questions of the oracle to test it—of course, the answer would be nonsense. But however that is ... I imagine it was after you left Clisp, but one of our agents in the palace managed to get a report out by radio. It was relayed into the port, and a messenger carried it to me.”
She had said the last with some difficulty, not looking directly at Kham. Now she looked at him. “It was the custom of the old days of Clisp to allow certain agents of the House to carry a sort of medallion, something they had had from the old days. There were very few of them, all under strict controls. Amadeo doesn’t believe in handing them out, and so has recalled them all, and so they reside now in the State Museum. Except one.”
Kham shrugged. “Could have been lost. Agents get killed, or accidents happen, otherwise.”
“Somebody is using one. It’s like a credit card. The user can buy anything he wants, and bill it to Clisp. They are honored all over Oerlikon.”
“Why didn’t we know about them?”
“The danger has been so great their use had been rare. But they are good everywhere on the planet and, so I am told, in more civilized places off it. And somebody is using one now. The royal Bursar has invoices from Marisol, and from Symbarupol. Somebody has one of the originals, and is currently using it.”
Kham looked across the room, small as it was, as if seeing a great distance. “What sort of purchases?”
“Women’s clothing. Food, lodging, all temporary.”
“Did anybody get a description?”
“No. The agent sent what he had. Fortunately the invoice for the clothing was highly detailed, as would befit a billing to the Royal House of Clisp. Sizes were included. The agent was able to derive some generalities therefrom: a rather tall woman, slender in build, rather full-breasted. She also picked up some cash, but small amounts at any one place. The second report was on a billing from Symbarupol.”
Something began stirring in Kham’s mind. A coincidence? He began sweating. “What kind of clothing—nice stuff or workmen’s coveralls?”
“Serviceable stuff, but rather nice in cut. She didn’t stint on the quality, or so he said. It was also all stuff which could be adapted to different climates by using less of it. Why?”
“How long ago the report?”
“At least a tenday. You were probably still in Lisagor.”
“Fits.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think I saw her. She boarded the beamliner at Symbarupol. Something caught my eye. She looked out of place, taking the night train, and economy class, but dressed well.”
“You saw her!”
“Yes. Same as the description. Young and good-looking, tall, with curly brown hair. I was going to keep an eye on her just in case, but I dozed off and she was gone. Some intermediate stop in the eastern mountains. Of course, it could be just coincidence, but I did see a woman that fits that description, who had no good reason in these times of poverty to be traveling at night, dressed that well.”
“Did she see you?”
“Looked right at me, but turned away. She didn’t look interested, if you know what I mean.”
