Deep Secret (46 page)

“They Intended that,” my brother said. “You know how ruthless they can be. They’re not going to blame you for that, or let it give you a bad name. They’re fair, as well as ruthless. I think they’re really quite pleased with you.”

“So why aren’t they letting me instruct Maree?” I said.

“Oh that’s different.” Simon came and plunged down on to the bench again. “They wouldn’t let
me
instruct Zinka – Zinka says I just confused her with long explanations anyway. They never let you teach someone you’re married to, and they seem sure you’re likely to marry Maree—”

“Hang on,” I said. “Are you and Zinka
married
?”

“These last three years,” Si said, grinning merrily. “It’s nice.”

“But—” I said, in some consternation.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “She may draw sexy pictures of alien life forms, but I make damn sure it’s only Art.”

“Sure,” I said, though that was not what I had in mind at all.

Luckily, Will came striding down the corridor just then and fetched up with a clang against the cubby-hole doorway. “Family reunion,” he said. “Wow, that was an interview and a half! Koryfos seems to think I reformed Rob overnight.”

“Well you did shout a few home truths at him,” I said. “Rob needed someone to do it.” I stood up nervously. “Does he want to talk to me yet? Or not?”

“Oh yes,” said Will. “Show him, Si. I’ll wait for you here.”

Simon showed me up the rest of the short passage to a steel door heavily stencilled in red. It slid aside to let me in and slid closed again behind me, shutting me in a big steel box with the almost overwhelming presence of my one-time neighbour.

He was sitting on a bench rather like the one I had just left, but he got up to meet me. “Forgive me keeping you waiting so long, Rupert,” he said. “I wanted to get the other things sorted out so that I could talk to you properly.”

He had somehow contained his kingliness, pushed it down to a more domestic level, but he was still not an ordinary man. You know how thunderclouds produce those shining white towers above the main cloud, full of energy? What he was showing me was like that, a smaller energy pile above the main one. Being in the same room with a thunderhead is a fairly stunning experience.

I was feeling fairly dejected one way and another. I said, “Thanks.”

He smiled at me, in the way that had always astonished me. This time it astonished me by making me feel more like a viable human being again. “I want to thank you,” he said.

“I don’t understand why,” I said. “A bit of driving. A tin of beans and a bag of sugar or so…”

“Yes, but you see you did those kindnesses to a person who was, on a rough estimate, only a twentieth part of me,” he said. “Most people would have avoided me as plain mad. Let me explain.

“At the end of my last reign, I was in your world, in a city called Babylon which no longer exists, trying to negotiate an alliance with the ruler there. The ruler refused any kind of treaty, so I meant to leave. But the Babylonians attacked as I left with my party and the Magid with us tried to open a gate for us in too much of a hurry. And he accidentally opened it right through me.”

I was glad to hear that some Magids besides me made mistakes. “You were stripped?”

He nodded. “And assumed dead, and buried on both sides of the gate. That area, as you know, is a mass of nodes. The gate had been opened at a node. The stripping was very violent and it took me a good many years to come round from it. When I did, I found I was having practical experience of part of your Babylon secret. Changes had occurred in the worlds on both sides and worlds had divided and multiplied. As I had been buried at the point of division, I had multiplied also.” He laughed slightly, making the room electric. “There were ten of me in normal Infinity and another ten existing as anti-matter. I’ve spent all this time trying to come together again.”

“But I don’t see how you—” I began. Koryfos shook his head slightly and I stopped.

“This is where you come in,” he said. “I was always, without understanding why, trying to settle near a Magid. I had a sense that Magids knew something about nodes that I didn’t and that I needed a node to help me in some way. You would hardly believe how many times, in this world and in others, I achieved proximity to a Magid, only to have that Magid realise that there was something strange about me and move away in a hurry.”

“I moved in after you, in Weavers End,” I said. “You’d been there six months when I bought my house. That was pure luck.”

“Maybe,” he said, “but it was not pure luck that you were unfailingly kindly and helpful. You drove me to one node after another, even though neither of us knew what we were doing, until you brought me to the extremely powerful node here in Wantchester. And I would not have understood how to use this node, any more than any of the others, if you had not happened to include me in your fateline working.”

“How
did
that happen?” I said.

“I sensed the working,” he said. “I always sensed any powerful working and I always came along to them, like a hungry animal, not knowing what I needed. Every Magid before you promptly turned me out. You let me stay. And I half consciously linked my fateline in as you worked. Believe me, it was like a revelation. Quite suddenly I felt and knew four times as much. I knew I had to come to this powerful node here and I knew what to do when I got here. For nearly three days, I was collecting the other parts of myself. I’m afraid I disturbed the node somewhat.”

“Yes, you did rather,” I said. “But other people were at it too. And you got all the pieces?”

“No,” he said. “Some were dead, and those who had become anti-matter were impossible to reach on this plane of Infinity. In order to become complete, I found I had to go outside the material planes entirely, to the place that is another part of your Babylon secret. No doubt this was Intended. For while I was on my way there, I encountered three heirs to the Empire and learnt more or less what was going on there. Rob came with me. He asked for his birthright, you know. He said that you and your brother had made him ashamed to be without it. He told me a great deal on the way back.”

I couldn’t help smiling. “Our Rob likes to talk. So you’ll be followed by a line of centaurs as Emperor? Good idea. Centaurs have never been the force they should be in any world.”

“I’m glad you agree,” Koryfos said. “But I feel I have deprived you of your office. Rob and I got lost on the way back. We were trying to do two incompatible things, trying to get home and to find you. And we found your brother instead. The Powers Above promptly installed your brother as our adviser instead of you.”

“Si’s a good deal more competent than me,” I said ruefully. “He seems to have got you recognised as Emperor in no time at all.”

“He knew just what to do, certainly,” said Koryfos. “And he tells me that he is Intended to become Magid to the Empire from now on. But I would have preferred you. Your brother’s habit of striding about and fiddling with things perturbs me.”

“You mean even you can’t make him sit still!” I exclaimed.

“I doubt if anyone could,” Koryfos admitted. “It seems to be part of the way your brother functions.”

I could not help smiling. Nothing is ever perfect. Koryfos was obviously an exceptional man, but all the same… All the same, one thing about Koryfos was plain impossible. “How is it,” I asked him, “that you managed to get stripped so often and still be alive after more than two thousand years?”

He looked at me with his golden head tipped to one side and a slight smile on one corner of his mouth. In that pose, he looked exactly like all the statues of himself. He answered me with a question that shook me to the core. “How many members of the Upper Room are there?”

“You know I can’t tell you that!” I said. “You shouldn’t even know there
is
an Upper Room!”

“Precisely,” he said. “So I will tell
you
. There are presently seventy-one. There should be seventy-two, but there are not, because I am missing.”

“Oh!” I said. No one but an Archon could have Koryfos’s sort of vitality, or choose a centaur as his heir, for that matter. “Then greetings, great Archon.”

“Greetings to you too, Magid,” he replied. “I had to come here to do something that would stop Infinity drifting entirely Naywards. The Empire was supposed to do that. But I had not established it properly when I was stripped. I must now finish what I started. Because of this, can I ask you to do two things for me?”

“Probably,” I said. “As a neighbour, or as a Magid?”

“One of each,” he said. “Sadly, I must desert my house and my inventing. Would you, Magid, consent to become the owner of my house, to look after or to sell as you see fit?”

I thought of my quacks and Maree’s notion of me standing in Andrew’s pond and I was filled with pleasure. His house is bigger than mine too. “I’d be delighted. What was the other thing?”

“I would like,” he said, “if it is not too difficult, that when you make your report for the Upper Room, you give a copy to me for the archive I shall found in Iforion.”

I considered. He was asking me something much dodgier here. I could see by his head-on-one-side hopeful look that he knew perfectly well he was. It is not just that the Upper Room do not like the reports of Magids to go anywhere but to them: they also take steps to make sure of this. It would take a bit of contriving to get round their usual methods. And I would need to add a few explanations for lay readers. Still, it could probably be done. It could be regarded as a challenge. “Yes, all right,” I said. “But don’t be too disappointed if you don’t get it.”

“I have every faith in you,” he said.

Our interview was over with that. He gave me a strong, electrical handshake and I wandered forth into the metal passageways again. Will and Simon seemed to have gone from the cubby-hole. I walked on, with the steel resonating faintly around me, to the entrance and down the great ramp. I did not feel like going back into the hotel. I went to the staff car park instead, thinking of how to tell Stan about all this.

I unlocked the bent driver’s door on the faintest tinkle of Scarlatti. “Stan?” I said.

There was nothing. No one. My tape-deck was still going, but the car inside was without a presence. Stan had gone. The Upper Room, with customary brusqueness, had decided that Stan’s job was now done and recalled him. I rested my forehead against the roof of the car, near tears.

“I don’t know whether your car or mine is more of a mess,” Maree said, with the gloomy sob prominent in her voice. “If you think this is bad, you should see what Janine did to mine.”

I looked up to find her with her chin resting on the other side of the roof. “I thought you’d gone to the Empire!”

“Not yet. Not permanently,” she said. “I stuck out for going twice a week for lessons, and I’m not seeing that other brother of yours until the end of this week anyway. And I’ve made it clear that it’s not going to interfere with my vet’s degree. No way. Otherwise…”

“Otherwise?” I said.

“There’s all this week and then a lot of time round the edges,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t there.” I felt a great deal better.

Nick Mallory Upperoom Doc

Printout for R. Venables

[1]

R
upert wanted me to write this. He said it was for something called the Upper Room. He said they needed a full report and he was having to make one as well, and would I mind very much? Even they don’t know the things about Babylon that I do. They wanted it for their records. Kind of a debriefing, he said.

I didn’t much want to. I don’t like writing things and when I try to think about Babylon I sort of think I don’t know what happened. I tried to get Rupert to bribe me to do it at first. I know he’s been transferred to a project in another set of worlds now, and it sounds
fantastic
and I said I’d do a report if he would tell me what he was doing now. But he wouldn’t. Well, it was worth a try. He told me to do it anyway.

Anyway I started. It was difficult at first, but then there was a breakthrough and it got quite easy. That part is on the rest of this disk.
This
part is the bit I’m adding to the disk I’m giving Rupert and copying the one for Maree to take to Koryfos. Koryfos really seems to want it.

When I’d done the report I copied it on all the disks I’d got. I’d got quite a lot. I can’t get used to having so much
money
. I do things wrong, like buying a hundred ready-formatted disks and forgetting that what I really want is a modem. The money is because my mother didn’t make a will and I count as her next of kin, and Gramos Albek
did
make a will, leaving everything to Mum. So I got the clothes business
and
the arms factory. I haven’t got the factory yet. Rupert and Dad are doing stingy stuff about setting up a Trust for that, but they sold the clothes shop to Mrs Fear, who used to run it really anyway, and now I have an allowance in the Post Office and humongous amounts in a building society and money to burn. I said I didn’t think it was fair on Maree or Dad, but Dad says he has his pride and his books do bring in a pittance after all. Maree says she wouldn’t touch anything belonging to those two with a bargepole as long as the Cabot Tower. But I think Maree’s all right for money. Koryfos has given her some kind of estate over there. She says she and Rupert are having fun laundering the money so that she can use it on Earth.