Deep Secret (13 page)

“Then let’s get another Emperor quickly!” he said, with vehemence. “I’m sick of all these frauds, Magid. Did you know there were over a thousand of them?”

“What have you done with them all?” I asked him.

He was surprised I should wonder. “Executed them.”

“Bad idea,” I said.

They committed treason and fraud,” he said. He shrugged. “You can’t let people get away with that.”

“True,” I admitted. “But there
are
alternatives. Talking of which, where are all these other people who say they’re Knarros?”

“Oh, I’ve got them all lined up for you in the next room under guard,” he said. “I’ll have them marched in one by one and you can look them over in here. That suit you?”

The straightforward, soldierly method, I thought. It did not surprise me that things were falling to pieces here. Still, I was glad that I was not going to have to travel about the place to interview the claimants. The chances of getting shot seemed quite high. And my ankle still hurt, and both knees, where I had hit the ground. “Wheel them in, then,” I said.

I do not wish to dwell on those eight interviews with eight doomed men. They were all middle-aged and all looked rather imposing. You felt each one of them must have looked in the mirror at some point and thought, I look like someone the Emperor would trust. One was more or less in rags, one in the soutane of one of the travelling religions, and one seemed to be a minor noble. Two of them were school-teachers. God knows why those two had put themselves forward, unless it was looking in a mirror, as I said, and knowing they had care of the young – so why not the Emperor’s young? The other three were a grocer, a farmer and a poet. All these were mad. So, I discovered after a while, was the preacher. The one in rags was a sly rogue, the noble a blatant one. Most of them looked bewildered or shifty when I asked them about the youngsters supposedly in their charge, though the noble talked glibly of “the Emperor’s five fine boys”.

It did not take very deep Magid work to ascertain that every one of them was another fraud. And the worst of it was I could
not
bring myself to pretend about any one of them. I looked at Dakros’s strained face. I looked at the poet as they marched him away. I could
not
do this to him. Bugger the Empire. Bugger what was Intended. Dakros deserved some honesty.

“Sorry,” I said, when the door had shut behind the poet’s escort. “None of them is Knarros. But you could do yourself and the Empire a bit of good if you put them on trial publicly. Let justice be seen to be done. Expose them. Prove the mad ones are mad. Then imprison the sane ones and put the loonies in an asylum.”

It did no good. Dakros had not been raised to think in this way. He ran his hands through his decreasing hair again and said, “I’m sick of taking strong measures.” This did not mean he was considering what I said. It meant that he was going to take the strong measures, and he was fed up with doing it. I think the only reason he didn’t order a firing squad out into the back garden straight away was that he guessed I would find it offensive. He added, “I’m only saying this to you, you understand, because I can’t say it to anyone else. I’m sick of this whole thing. I keep wondering why
I’m
the one who’s been landed with it, and I want it to stop.”

“I understand,” I said. “Is High Lady Alexandra not with you?”

“By all gods,
no
!” he said. “I’ve sent her away to Thalangia. At least there’s no fighting there. I wish I was there too.”

I was sure he did wish it, since he had chivalrously sent the one person he might have talked to there. “Is it far to Thalangia?” I asked, and wondered whether, if I advised him to go there and let the Empire go to hell, he would listen to me. It was hard to see someone under such stress and not offer help.

“Far?” he said. “It’s two worlds Ayewards from here. And you can be sure I’ve got my best unit guarding that world gate. Those gates are so damned vulnerable, you know. The Telth gate went down in seconds. “Seeing me looking searchingly at him, he added, “I’m from that world – from Thalangia. Empire policy was that no soldier served in his or her world of origin. I had to come and serve here. But I’d go home tomorrow, except I know damn fine that hell would break loose in Thalangia too if there was no one at the head of things.”

“You’re certainly right there,” I said soberly. Then, as a last stab at getting things to go the way they were Intended, I said, “You could still solve that by taking the throne yourself. Why not?”

He gave me a long expressionless look. It almost seemed a look of hatred. “I’m not even tempted, Magid. There’s men on Telth and Annergam with much better families than mine, and they’ve taken power there, but they’ve not called it a throne, and they’ve not dared to call themselves Emperor. They know. I know. I’m not tempted.”

“All right,” I said dejectedly. “All right. Then you’ll just have to keep on looking for Knarros.”

He sighed deeply. “I know. Eight more dead.”

“Eight more poor fools dead,” I told Stan when I arrived home with a black ragged hole in one trouser-knee and my hands covered with sooty mud.

“Seven of them would have been anyway,” he said. “You know what the Empire’s like.” He was listening to Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas that week. He had gone through all Bach while I worked on the fatelines. Now it was Scarlatti.
Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle
. There are over five hundred Scarlatti keyboard sonatas. I only had a few. In self-defence, I went and bought Stan three more CDs full of them that afternoon, in order to have a different
tinkle-tinkle
to listen to while I took another look at the Emperor’s disk.

I was hoping there was a clue to the whereabouts of Knarros somewhere on it. The Emperor had brought himself to make this secret record after all. Being Timos IX, he must have felt he was shouting the facts from the Palace roof. So why not go a bit further and put in
all
the facts? Even he must have realised that he might not be there to explain the program. I had hopes that there might be something hiding behind the lists. There was an awful lot of space left of that disk. But there really seemed to be nothing. And the darned thing was designed as a loop. Like the continuum itself, it kept bringing you back to the beginning. Babylon, I thought uneasily. First you got the graphics, with the world arranged like isobars, waving from one configuration to another, and then, superimposed on these, the semi-animated drawings of men, women and centaurs of both sexes.

The drawings were all in side-view and had, as I said, the look of having been taken from photographs of real people. I stopped each one and studied it, but I was none the wiser. They were all different unknown beings, except that two – a human girl and a young female centaur with rather similar features – occurred twice, but this seemed to be because the programmer had slightly botched the loop and put them in at both start and finish by mistake. The girl and the centaur-woman both had the strong-arched nose and the almond eyes you find on Greek vases and Minoan wall paintings, but this told me nothing, except perhaps that the graphics had stylised the real picture to conform with the fashion of beauty. Funny to think that the Koryfonic Empire was already flourishing when Greece and Minos were new. High time it broke up, really.

I froze each of the linear, isobar-like worlds then and looked each one up laboriously in my Magid database. They were a loop too, starting randomly with a different Empire world each time, and making a circuit of the Empire and forty-one neighbouring worlds, Ayewards and Naywards both. Apart from the fact that I incidentally learnt the Koryfonic isobars for Earth, this told me nothing.

“I give up!” I said to Stan.

“I think that’s what you’re supposed to do,” he said.
Tinkle, tinkle.

All this put me in such a pessimistic mood that I was quite surprised when my fatelines started to draw in beautifully. They drew in all through the rest of March, just as I had planned. At least I got
something
right! I thought after NATO stepped in and sorted out the former Yugoslavia, and my Croatian candidate came to light manning a gun emplacement in the mountains there. Kornelius Punt returned to Holland. Fisk came out of her retreat (or clinic, or whatever) and seemed to be making plans to come to Britain soon; and my remaining British candidate flew in from Tokyo a week before Easter. When Rick Corrie or one of his colleagues sent me a sheaf of updates on the convention, I began to think I had wrought better than I knew. Mervin Thurless actually figured in it as ‘hopefully making a guest appearance’. The rest of the stuff was almost too strange to contemplate, but I hoped I could make sense of it once I was there. Almost the only other part I understood was the statement that the Guest of Honour was now confirmed to be ‘world-acclaimed writer Ted Mallory, the Grand Master of black humour’. For some reason, the name rang no bells with me. I went into Cambridge and bought a paperback by him called
Shadowfall
and fell asleep over it repeatedly.

I was preoccupied at that time with a premonition. This told me I needed Stan with me in Wantchester, and Stan couldn’t leave my house. We experimented. He could not go out through the front door at all. He could go a foot or so beyond the back door, but not as far as the barn. At the sides of the house, he tended to get sucked back in through the windows.

We gave up experimenting the day Mrs Gibbs arrived to find me leaning out of my bedroom window, calling to empty air, “Where are you now, Stan?” I don’t think she heard the croaked reply of “Round near your car. I just – oh bugger!” but we didn’t want to take any more chances.

“This is
ridiculous
, Stan!” I said, when Mrs Gibbs had safely gone, leaving the house scented with bleach and detergent. “The Upper Room sent you back expressly to help me choose your replacement, but they won’t let you come and do it! Do you think you could go back and point this gently out to them?”

“I could
try
,” Stan husked, after one of his unhappy pauses. “They don’t sort of think in these human terms, though, do they? As far as they’re concerned, I’m back and that’s it.”

“Go and explain,” I said. “I
know
I’m going to need you.”

“Precog?” he asked.

“Yup,” I said. I had absolutely no doubt.

“All right then,” he said. “But I may be away for some time, I warn you. It may take an appeal to Higher Up – not to speak of the way time goes odd that far outside the continuum.”

And before long, Stan was gone. It was a slow fading, nothing sudden. By mid-afternoon, the Scarlatti tinkled to a gentle stop and the house felt empty.

For the rest of that day, I enjoyed the sense of peace enormously. It was a relief not to have an invisible presence likely to look over your shoulder whatever you happened to be doing. It was a relief not to sense silent disapproval at my work on behalf of the Empire. Above all, it was a relief not to have to listen to Scarlatti all the time. The next day, I tried to enjoy the same feeling of relief, and even told myself I
was
enjoying it. The following day, the Wednesday before the convention, I couldn’t settle to anything. I told myself I was nervous of going to this strange gathering to make a selection on which the future of worlds depended – but it wasn’t that: it was Stan’s absence. On Thursday morning, I sat having breakfast and feeling truly desolate. It seemed to me that I had lost Stan finally and for ever, by my own insistence. Them Up There don’t like you trying to change their decisions (which never seems to stop us Magids trying, but there you go). They tend to say, “If you don’t like it, you can do without,” and turn their backs on you. I opened my newspaper, but I couldn’t concentrate on it.

The back door opened. Icy wind blew in.

I whirled round. I don’t know what I expected – Stan in some way more incarnate, I suppose – and I hope the smile of delight and welcome didn’t freeze on my face too obviously when I saw it was only Andrew. He was standing there, on my threshold, with that tranced look again. Damn! I thought, and told myself I should have been expecting this. Andrew had somehow got himself tied in with the other fatelines. He had been bound to turn up.

“I’m sorry, Rupert. I need you to drive me again,” he said.

“And
I’m
sorry too, Andrew,” I told him. “I can’t. Not today. Not till Tuesday. I’m going to be away till then, leaving this morning. But come in and have some coffee anyway.”

Andrew advanced a step, then stopped. “Where are you going this time?”

“Wantchester,” I said, “for a conference – I mean, convention.”

Andrew stood there with that air he has of consulting parts of his brain so distant that it takes time to reach them. Then he smiled and his face looked intelligent again. “I’ll come with you to Wantchester,” he said. “Thanks.”

“Andrew,” I said, truly exasperated, “this is a convention for readers of fantasy,
and
you have to book in advance.”

“It doesn’t sound like your cup of tea,” he remarked. “It’s not mine either. But I’d like to see round Wantchester. You can drop me off in the centre of town somewhere. I shan’t be in the way.”

“All right,” I said. What else
could
I say? “I’m aiming to start at twelve-thirty.”

“I’ll be there,” he said and went out and shut my back door, cutting out the icy blasts of wind, to my relief. It had been an unusually cold Spring. April had come in with snow. I poured myself some coffee that had cooled considerably despite Andrew’s patent pot, and muttered things about Andrew as I tried to drink it.

Stan’s voice said, “He was a fool not to have some of that coffee. It smells good. I wish I could have some.”

“Stan!” I said. “They let you come!”

“With conditions, Rupert. With conditions,” he said. “They’ll let me come with you, but I shall be bound to your car, just like I am to this house. When you want to talk to me, you’re going to have to come and sit in the car.”

“Why? What are they afraid you’ll do?” I said “Haunt people?”