The Reign of the Brown Magician

Chapter Seventeen

“He wants the bodies,” Best said. “He said I should say that you’d know what he meant, but if you…well, in his words, if you try to play dumb, he means he wants the remains of his wife and daughter.”

Markham drummed fingers on his desk. “Now he’s asking,” he said.

“Because we’ve got them safe and he can’t get them any other way,” Albright said.

“Or because he knows that we know he wants them,” Howe suggested. “He wants us to think he’s coming out in the open.”

“You don’t think he is?” Markham asked her, mildly startled.

Howe shrugged. “I never trust anyone a telepath can’t read,” she said.

“Sensible attitude,” Albright agreed.

“I wonder if we shouldn’t tell the General Secretary about this,” Markham said. “After all, this Brown is effectively a head of state-a real one, not some penny-ante rebel tyrant-and he’s asking us to turn over what might be Imperial property. I don’t see this as within the purview of the Department of Science. We were directed to investigate and contain Shadow, and to contact any other interdimensional civilizations we could locate. We’ve done that-Shadow is dead, and we’ve got this Brown ready to talk. So we’re done.”

“As long as the Empire’s security is threatened, the military is still involved,” Albright said, “but I don’t see this as a military matter, either.”

Albright and Markham turned to Howe, who shrugged. “I’m not authorized to say anything about Intelligence’s opinion,” she said.

“Neither am I,” Best said. “I’m just a field agent on detached duty to the Department of Interdimensional Affairs.”

Best had noticed that John Bascombe, head of that department, was not present; he didn’t have to ask why, but he did wonder whether Bascombe was still alive and free. He hadn’t heard Bascombe’s name spoken since he had arrived at Base One; he’d been sent directly to Markham’s office, where the current gathering had formed. It was quite clear that Bascombe was no longer in any position of authority.

Best was fairly sure that initially, Markham would just have removed Bascombe from duty-that was easier to keep quiet. If Bascombe didn’t want to keep quiet, though, if he protested-well, there were prisons where no word would get out. And if that was too much trouble, a blaster charge was cheaper and more permanent.

In any case, mentioning him did not seem like a good idea, and Best didn’t.

This talk about the General Secretary was not comforting, though. Any blame for screwing up that Secretary Sheffield might want to hand out would be directed at higher levels than mere field agents, but Intelligence’s internal attitude was another matter. Nothing official would be done, but agents who showed any signs of developing a high profile had a tendency to wind up either in obscure backwaters, or on assignments with excessive casualty rates.

Like 100%.

Best hoped Bascombe, wherever he was, was proud of himself.

* * * *

Miletti was slumped in the armchair, staring disinterestedly at the TV, when the daily knock came.

“Come in, it’s open,” he called.

The lieutenant crept in, tape recorder in hand and already running. He’d had practice. The questioning went better if Miletti wasn’t paying attention-and both he and Miletti knew that. Miletti wasn’t being rude by watching reruns of “$25,000 Pyramid,” he was making it easier on everyone.

The lieutenant did wonder sometimes about what shape Miletti was in, physically and emotionally-he obviously didn’t enjoy any of this.

That wasn’t the lieutenant’s department, though; he was just an interviewer. (That sounded much nicer than “interrogator.”)

“Any attempts at contact?” he asked.

“They’re listening,” Miletti said, without looking up.

“Sending?”

“Not sending.”

“Any mention of Earth?”

“Nothing new.”

“Proserpine Thorpe?”

“Nothing new.”

“Amy Jewell?”

“Nothing.”

“Pel Brown?”

“Sent a message.”

Miletti blinked, startled by his own words.

The lieutenant was almost equally startled-until now there had been no change for a couple of weeks. “What’s the message?” he asked.

“He wants the bodies,” Miletti answered without thinking. “His wife and daughter.”

This was outside anything the lieutenant was prepared to deal with, but he could at least ask the obvious. “Why?”

“Don’t know.”

“Is the Empire going to deliver them?”

Miletti looked up at the lieutenant. “This is spooky, you know,” he said. “I really hate this. And I can’t believe it’s real. How do you know I’m getting this right, and not just making it up?”

“Not my department,” the lieutenant said. “Are they going to give Brown the bodies?”

“That’s what’s really spooky,” Miletti said. “They think they don’t know yet, but they do, and I know it.” The lieutenant needed a second to puzzle that out, and had just got it straight when Miletti concluded, “They aren’t going to.”

* * * *

“How do I report that?” Carrie Hall asked her brother.

He didn’t need to ask what she meant.

“You don’t,” he said. “Bad enough they know we’re leaking anything; if they find out we’re leaking things that we aren’t supposed to know, that nobody knows consciously…well, hell, maybe he’s wrong, anyway. Maybe it’s just an opinion he picked up somewhere. Just don’t mention it.”

Carrie nodded reluctantly.

She didn’t like it, though. Telepaths weren’t supposed to keep secrets like that-they had orders to report on Miletti, and they weren’t supposed to leave out anything important. And there shouldn’t be that sort of leakage. There never had been before they started getting involved with these other worlds. Telepaths all knew things they shouldn’t, but nobody in the entire Empire had ever tapped into the group unconscious of the telepaths the way this Miletti had.

Earthpeople were apparently slightly different from Imperials, in some very subtle way-or at least, Miletti was. Maybe he was a mutant himself-maybe he would be a telepath in Imperial space, if he ever came through a space-warp into the normal universe, and maybe that was why they couldn’t shut him out.

They had tried. Miletti was the only psychic they’d found on Earth where they hadn’t been able to make any conscious contact at all, even though they knew he ought to be receptive-maybe it was because he’d had enough telepathic talent that he’d learned to shut them out.

But he couldn’t shut out their unconscious transmissions-and neither could they. They’d been able to close off the others, but not Miletti.

So for the first time ever a non-telepath, someone who hadn’t been brought up from infancy in the Special Branch, who hadn’t been trained in keeping secrets, someone who hadn’t sworn loyalty to the Emperor and the Empire, was linked into the telepathic network.

Nothing like that had ever happened before they’d begun messing around with other universes.

And Prossie hadn’t been an outcast before they contacted Earth. She never would have gone rogue if she’d stayed in the Empire.

And if she had gone rogue anywhere in the Empire she would never have survived if she hadn’t had Earth to escape to. Carrie suspected that bad thoughts were leaking through from Prossie on some subconscious level, just as secrets were leaking through to Miletti, and that Prossie’s horrible rebelliousness was affecting the entire family-everyone seemed to be thinking strangely lately.

Or maybe it wasn’t Prossie, maybe it was just all those minds out there, on Earth and in Faerie, with their alien ways of thinking, subtly different from the ordinary thoughts of the Imperial citizenry.

Could Miletti know a decision that no one in the Empire had consciously reached yet? These Earth psychics were so odd, with their erratic, untrained receptiveness, each one a bit different-could he have really learned that from the telepaths? Did they all really know it? Had they suppressed it?

Could Miletti be precognitive? Imperial science said that was impossible, but reality was different on Earth. Maybe he was seeing the future with his own psychic talent, not reading the telepathic unconscious at all.

And would the Empire deliver the two corpses?

Maybe Miletti knew, but Carrie didn’t, or at least didn’t want to admit it if she did, and she didn’t like that.

She didn’t like any of this.

* * * *

“How long should I give them?” Pel asked, without looking at Susan.

“However long seems reasonable,” she replied.

“How long is that?” He glanced at her; as usual, she was standing by the side of the room, not doing much of anything.

That didn’t seem right, somehow; shouldn’t she be going about her own business, instead of just hanging around him all the time?

But then, what business did she have?

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Neither do I,” Pel muttered. “I don’t know how long it takes to get from Gregory’s place to Base One, or who’ll have to authorize the decision, or how long they’ll need to argue about it.” He sighed. “Maybe I shouldn’t have sent those two away-Begley and Poole, I mean. I just sent them back out to the berry patches, but I could have sent them somewhere in the Empire, and maybe that would have sped things up. Or maybe I should have tried the weak spots until I found a portal that goes directly to Terra-there must be one. Then I could’ve sent someone straight to the Emperor; he’d have to listen, right? I mean, I’m ruler of an entire universe, right? Even if all I’ve seen of it is some woods and a marsh and a few villages and this damned depressing fortress.” He slumped back in the throne, thinking.

What he had just said wasn’t exactly true, Pel realized. That was all he had seen with his own eyes, but he could reach out through the matrix and touch almost any place in Faerie. The matrix distorted distances, and he couldn’t sense all of it at once-probably, he thought, just because his brain couldn’t handle anything so large-but he had a vague idea of just how huge Shadow’s realm was. The space-warp that the Empire maintained in West Sunderland was two hundred miles away-and that was right next door. Even assuming that the scale was constant, which he was fairly sure wasn’t true, he could sense things dozens of times as distant as that, which would put them three thousand miles or more away.

And in fact, he believed the scale was logarithmic, which would make that distance tens of thousands of miles.

It still wasn’t anything like the Galactic Empire, with its thousands of planets, but surely it deserved some respect, and surely, once his request worked its way far enough up the chain of command, someone over there would see how reasonable it was and would deliver Nancy and Rachel.

No one had come through the Empire’s warp out in Sunderland lately, though; there had been that party of three outbound awhile back, but no one coming in.

This would all be much simpler if the Galactic Empire had telephones.

Or maybe not; after all, how could you use telephones between planets? And radio wouldn’t work, either; the planets might be closer together than they were in the real world, but the interstellar distances were still measured in light-years.

At least he could have run a phone line through that space-warp, though, instead of running messengers back and forth. Not through one of his portals, because then he’d have had to keep it open constantly, and he couldn’t do that, but the space-warp…

Well, the space-warp came and went, too, but it didn’t have to, did it?

It all seemed very weird, that there could be a Galactic Empire with space-warps and telepathy and anti-gravity, but no telephones. Movies and telegraphs, but no telephones or TV. The old science fiction stories never had anything like that.

Maybe it had something to do with the different physics involved.

He looked around at the marble walls of the chamber he sat in. More different physics, he thought; if this room were in either the Empire or the real world he wouldn’t be able to see a thing, because he’d be sitting in pitch darkness. The only light here came from the matrix he controlled.

Maybe he should do more with that magic. Maybe he should see more of this world he controlled. Maybe, just maybe, he and Nancy and Rachel wouldn’t go straight back to Earth once he’d restored them to life.

First, though, he had to get them back. The real ones, not cheap imitations like that thing waiting for him in the bedroom.

And she was still waiting for him in the bedroom; he had told her to, so she would. She wouldn’t leave that room for anything, not even to eat…

Was there a chamber pot there? He hoped so. And there wasn’t any food.

“Damn,” he said. He twitched the matrix, summoning a nearby fetch.

* * * *

Life aboard ship was usually boring, but Best thought he’d have preferred honest boredom to the endless games of stoking Markham wanted to play. Best could handle boredom, while playing cards with the Secretary of Science was wearing on his nerves. He was never sure whether to play his honest best, or to deliberately lose, and just how badly to lose. And stoking was never one of his favorite games in the first place.

He wished Albright or Howe or someone had come along, instead of staying at Base One; then he or she could play with Markham and give Best a break.

“Burn,” he said, dropping the king of cups on the central pile.

“Damp,” Markham replied, tossing the king of swords.

Best looked at the table, and drew three.

“I don’t know why you need me along, anyway,” he said, in an unusual moment of honesty. “I can’t tell Secretary Sheffield anything you can’t. Hell, I can’t tell him anything the telepaths haven’t already told him; I’m not sure why we’re making this trip at all.”

“You were there,” Markham said, looking at his hand. “The General Secretary always likes to hear things first-hand, likes to talk it out before deciding. Without telepaths.” He pulled out a card and threw the eight of diamonds. “Burn.”

With a sigh, Best played the knave of sticks. “Damp,” he said, and added three points to Markham’s score. He glanced up from the scratch pad and happened to catch the Secretary’s personal telepath watching.

As if playing stoking wasn’t bad enough, he had to worry about the mutant reading his thoughts and telling Markham all the details of his aggravation.

And of his cards, for that matter. Not that Markham would bother to cheat, but he might find out that Best had deliberately overlooked the nine of swords in his own hand. Best didn’t think Markham would like knowing that Best was losing intentionally.

But he didn’t think Markham would like losing, either.

Well, it was only two more days to Terra.

* * * *

“You don’t know what this mysterious project of his was?” Albright asked.

“No, sir,” Wilkins replied. He was already over his nervousness at finding himself questioned by the Imperial Space Marshal, and was now treating Albright as just another officer.

A good one, but just another officer.

And he was getting tired of repeating all this.

“It kept him from sending you home, though?”

“Yes, sir-that’s what he said.”

“D’you think it had anything to do with these bodies he wants?”

“I don’t know, sir; he never mentioned them to me.”

“But he could have just sent you to ask for them, at any time,” Albright said. “Why did he wait until Best showed up?”

“I have no idea, sir.”

Albright considered Wilkins silently for a moment, then turned to his telepath.

“I don’t like the sound of it,” he said. “Tell Secretary Sheffield and Secretary Markham about this.”

“Yes, sir,” the telepath said.

* * * *

“I’m going to check,” Pel said, already gathering the energies to open a portal.

Susan and the false Nancy didn’t argue; Susan stood motionless, and Nancy smiled agreeably. And of course the fetch didn’t respond.

Just having someone better to talk to would be a relief, Pel thought. Not that Gregory was much of an improvement.

He reached, and twisted, and the portal opened.

No one was there.

“Damn,” Pel said. He picked a fetch.

“You,” he said, “go find Peter Gregory.”