Triplet

Chapter 42

"Ah; Ravagin," Corah Lea said, looking up as he came in. "Sit down, please."

He took the proffered chair, noting with a sinking feeling that her face was a study in inscrutability.

A bad sign.

"So." She arranged her forearms across her desk and tried without much success to smile. "Well. I have to say, first of all, that your report is the damnedest bit of high adventure I've ever seen come out of the Hidden Worlds. I hear the thing's been called up over eighty times in the past week alone—

twenty of those requests coming from the the folks upstairs. You've really made a stir."

"It's nice to be noticed," he said. "You call me in here to get an autograph before the rush starts?"

She made another attempt at a smile, with even worse results. "I wish it was something that easy.

Actually, you're here because—well, I've just gotten word down from the Directors' Council about your request to speak to them."

Ravagin felt his jaw tighten. "They turned me down?"

"Cold. I'm sorry, Ravagin. I can see how much this means to you."

"What it means to me isn't important—" He broke off, struggling to get his temper back under control. None of this was her fault, after all. "Did they read the petition? All of it?"

"Ravagin—" Lea spread her hands helplessly. "Look, I read your petition, too, and even knowing you as well as I do I can't really blame them. You offer not a single shred of objective proof that anything's seriously wrong on Karyx or Shamsheer, and yet you want them to summarily close down both Tunnels—"

"No proof? my God, Corah, just what the hell do they think that report of mine is? Spirits openly attacking us on Karyx, spirit-controlled machinery on Shamsheer—"

"Nordis's report disputes your version of whatever it was happened on Karyx," Lea cut him off.

"And as to Shamsheer, there's no direct, objective proof there were spirits involved in any of that."

"What About my contact with the sky-plane? Using a Karyx spell, I might add?"

"That could have been a psychological illusion," Lea shrugged. "Or maybe it was a real contact, but with the sky-plane itself—after all, the stuff could be semi-sentient."

"Oh, come on Corah—"

"I'm sorry, Ravagin, but you have to remember that the kind of spirit intrusion you're talking about is supposed to be impossible. You're bucking a hundred years of theory and experiment here, and with that kind of inertia behind it you need more than just a packet of fuzzy speculation."

"Inertia be damned," Ravagin snapped. "The theories are wrong."

"How, then? How did these spirits of yours manage to cross the telefold?"

And that was the crux of it all. He'd suspected—no, damn it, he'd known—that without that critical piece his report and recommendation would get exactly this kind of reaction. But to commit to the record the technique for calling spirits into Shamsheer or even Threshold itself... "I don't know," he lied with a sigh. "But it's possible. It has to be. What happened to me—to all three of us—can't be explained any other way."

Lea licked her lips. "Ravagin... look, even if it was true, and you could prove that beyond a doubt...

you can't seriously believe the Directors would actually shut Triplet down, let alone seal off the Tunnels. They'd be putting themselves out of prestigious jobs, and at the same time opening themselves up to a hell of a lot of ridicule. That's just not how the universe operates."

"Not even with the word and experience of their best Courier to go on? Not to mention the name mal ce Taeger on the report along with it?"

Lea grimaced. "And you'd be surprised at how much more important the latter seemed to them than the former," she said with a touch of bitterness. "But no, not even that was enough. Not even close.

They're going to send an investigation team in to Karyx to get Melentha's side of the story, but I get the feeling it's more a pro forma response than a real expectation of gleaning any information out of it. She'll deny your accusations, of course, the investigators will funnel the report upstairs, and that'll probably be the end of it."

"Yeah." Ravagin exhaled between clenched teeth. Hart had been right, he thought bitterly; but he'd felt the direct approach would be worth the effort. And now it had cost them two weeks... "If that's all, then, I'll be going."

"Well, actually... no. There's more." She took a deep breath. "You remember that request for a leave of absence you filed a few months ago?"

He'd forgotten all about it, actually. "I do now, yes."

"Well... it's been approved. Starting immediately."

He stared down at her, an icy hand clutching at his heart. "Immediately?" he said slowly. "As in...

when?"

Her eyes slipped away from his. "As in right now. As soon as you leave my office."

Or in other words, his attempt to do this the direct way had actually been worse than useless. He'd been branded a troublemaker—possibly even an unstable one—and they were countering by kicking him out of contact with the entire Triplet system until they could figure out whether that vacation should be made permanent. "Corah, they can't do this. I withdraw the application—"

"I'm sorry, Ravagin, but that won't do any good." She looked back at him with moisture in her eyes.

"The decision's been made, and there's nothing I can do about it."

His hands tightened into fists, the pressure of his fingernails against the skin bringing back the memory of that lonely combat with the parasite spirit in the sky-plane. The spirit hadn't stopped him

—all the spirits in Karyx hadn't stopped him—and he would not be stopped now.

Would not be stopped. "All right, Corah," he said at last. "I'm calling in all the favors you owe me—

all the favors that anyone in the entire Courier Corps owes me. You understand?"

"Ravagin—"

"I'm not here," he interrupted her. "You haven't seen me—haven't been able to find me to give me this message—and therefore I cannot yet officially be barred from the Crosspoint Building or even the Hidden Worlds. You understand?"

"Ravagin, that's crazy," Lea snapped. "I can't just forget to give you an order like that."

"So you sent me the message to come here and I ignored it. Three days, Corah—just let me have three days. Please."

She stared up at him... and slowly, the tears dried and her mouth settled into hard lines. "Two days," she said at last. "I'll give you two days. I can't push it any farther."

He hesitated, then nodded. "Two days," he echoed. "Thanks, Corah."

"You've spent sixteen years earning it." She hesitated. "And I hope to God you're as wrong about this spirit invasion as they think you are upstairs."

There was nothing to say to that. So he said nothing, and left.

The Double Imperial restaurant in Gateway City was, from all appearances, one of the most expensive and exclusive eating places on Threshold—the kind, Ravagin thought only half humorously, where the salad vinegar was handled by the wine steward. The restaurant's walls and ceiling were covered with art objects from all over the Twenty Worlds; the tableware was hand carved from petrified ballisand bone; the flatware was white gold with yellow gold accents. It was an unlikely place for someone of Ravagin's station and income to find himself in, and he felt acutely uncomfortable as he waded through the deep carpet behind the maitre d', sending surreptitious glances at the other immaculately groomed diners they passed. It was a place of elegance, a place for those with sufficient wealth to enjoy spending some of it while immersed in the most civilized atmosphere Threshold had to offer.

It was, in short, a thoroughly unlikely place for a council of war. Which was presumably why Danae and Hart had chosen it.

They were waiting for him when he reached the table. "Well?" Danae asked as the maitre d' seated him and disappeared. "Any word?"

"Yes," he said grimly, "and all of it bad. You were right, Hart—the directors don't care for people who attempt to rock the boat. Not only was my petition turned down flat, but I've been kicked out of the Corps."

"You've been what?" Danae frowned. "But they can't do that... can they?"

Ravagin shrugged. "Officially, they're simply approving my request for a leave of absence—the one I filed months ago, the one they refused to grant then so that they could have me take you into the Hidden Worlds."

"A leave they can easily make more permanent once all the fuss you've raised has died down," Hart murmured, sipping at his wine. "A simple-minded approach, but usually effective for all that."

Danae reached across the table to squeeze Ravagin's hand. "So what happens now?"

The wine steward appeared at Ravagin's elbow before he could answer, filling his glass with a pale pink liquid. "I beat Corah's fingers into giving me two more days," he said when the steward had left.

"But after that, I won't even be allowed into the Crosspoint Building, let alone the Tunnel."

"Two days," Danae murmured, shaking her head. "That's not much time."

"No." Ravagin focused on Hart. "Well, Hart, I guess this is where you get to show that same wonderful magic that got you out of the jail cell you were tossed into at the beginning of all this."

"Whatever contacts and skills I have are at Ms. mal ce Taeger's disposal," Hart said. "What exactly do you have in mind?"

"Sealing up the Tunnel, of course," Ravagin said grimly. "We'll need a few thousand cubic meters of exocrete, or something even more permanent if you can find it. We'll also need some kind of forged orders to get the stuff into the Dead Zone and on into—" He broke off at the expression on the other's face. "Objection?"

Hart cleared his throat. "Magic I can do, Ravagin; miracles are another matter entirely. Even setting aside the ethics of trapping a whole group of Twenty Worlds' citizens in there, you're talking about rolling an entire convoy of fully loaded reaction trucks through the Crosspoint Building. I'm not even sure there are any doors large enough to handle something that big. And you think no one will stop to question us, make a few phone calls—?"

"Okay; point taken," Ravagin growled. "Then plan B: we get a small tactical nuke, juice it up with cobalt or something equally dirty, and set it off inside the Tunnel near the telefold. The radiation ought to last—"

"Until they get teams in to scrape the residue off the walls," Hart interrupted. "Or were you expecting the bomb to irradiate the Tunnel walls themselves? Because there've been experiments done, and the walls won't accept radiation."

Ravagin stared across the table, annoyance at Hart's glacial calm beginning to edge toward anger.

"Maybe you don't realize just what we're facing here," he bit out, hearing his voice tremble slightly as he fought to control it. "If that demon ever gets out onto Threshold the entire universe is up for grabs. That's not melodramatics; that's hard, cold reality."

"Ravagin—" Danae began.

"Let me finish," he cut her off. "We've already had a solid demonstration of how thoroughly spirits can invade and control electronic devices—that by itself would make them the worst threat the Twenty Worlds has ever faced. Add in the fact that they'll probably still be able to affect people's minds like they do on Karyx—and remember that none of the major control spells work here—and you've got an invasion that would be well-nigh unstoppable."

"Ravagin," Danae said quietly before he could continue, "we all realize what's at stake here. But getting mad at Hart just because he points out logical flaws isn't going to help any."

Ravagin clenched his teeth. "You're right," he admitted as the anger drained reluctantly away.

"You're right. Sorry, Hart."

The other shrugged the apology away. "You're on the right track, though. Closing off the Tunnel is certainly the simplest way to keep the demon off Threshold."

"Except that it's impossible to do," Danae said.

"It's just a matter of finding the right way—"

"No: not difficult," she cut him off harshly. "Impossible. Mathematically impossible."

Both men looked at her. "What do you mean?" Ravagin asked, frowning.

She took a deep breath. "I've spent the past couple of days researching everything known or postulated about the spatial mathematics of Triplet and the Tunnels. If you run computer simulations, it turns out there has to be at least a selective passage between each of the dimensions.

Tunnels, by any other name."

"Why?" Ravagin asked.

She shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. Maybe it's like a whorl—you know, the way a vector field has to contain at least one point whose vector has zero length."

He took a moment to digest that. "So what happens if the passage isn't there? Do the other dimensions just disappear?"

She shook her head. "On some models the passage simply reestablished itself in the same place, disintegrating whatever blockage I'd put there. On others the blockage stayed but the Tunnel popped out somewhere else. Somewhere completely random." She gazed across at him, her eyes aching.

"I'm sorry. It's just not going to work.

Ravagin gazed back at her for a moment, then dropped his eyes to his wine glass, bitterness welling up in his throat. Everything he'd pushed for the past two weeks... He took a deep breath. They had just two days left; he couldn't afford to waste any of it in self-pity. "All right, then. One more direct approach scrapped. What else have we got?"

Danae squeezed his hand, and seemed to let out a relieved breath. "I've been thinking about that, between computer runs, she said. "It seems to me that if we can't block off the Hidden Worlds, the next best thing would be to put things back the way they're supposed to be."

"Translation: get the spirits back to Karyx?" Ravagin chewed at his lip. "That's a tall order. We still don't know how any of the spirithandling rules work in Shamsheer."

"We know at least one of them does," Hart reminded him. "You used it against the sky-plane parasite spirit."

"Yeah—and I have no intention of ever doing it again," Ravagin told him, a shiver running up his back. "Especially since it's not the parasite spirits that are our problem. They have no power whatsoever without their attendant demon; and I am not, repeat not, making that kind of contact with a full demon."

"I wasn't suggesting you do so," Hart shook his head. "My point was that there clearly are rules that will work in Shamsheer. We may not know what they are; but there ought to be others elsewhere who do."

"Like on Karyx," Danae said thoughtfully. "Gartanis, maybe?"

"He's as likely to know something as any of the other spiritmasters," Ravagin shrugged. "Horribly illegal to take a Karyx native through to Shamsheer, of course."

Hart snorted gently. "You really care about that?"

"I stopped worrying about the legalities a long time ago."

From behind Danae a troop of waiters appeared and began setting out a dinner that the others must have ordered before Ravagin's arrival. It was, in retrospect, exactly the sort of meal Ravagin would have expected from a place like the Double Imperial: a large number of plates, each with modest to minuscule servings of elaborately sculpted food. The uncomfortable landed-fish sensation threatened to reappear, but he found that if he could ignore the surroundings and food design and look on it as just an ordinary sampler-style dinner, he could untie the stomach knots enough to relax and actually taste the food. Which, though far out of his experience, was generally pretty good.

For the most part they ate silently, both from an apparently mutual desire to concentrate on the food and also because the constant bustling to and fro of the waiters would have made coherent conversation difficult in any case. But after about forty-five minutes the steady stream of waiters carrying new plates ceased, and the dessert and caffitina were served, and they got back down to business.

"All right," Ravagin said, poking carefully with his fork at a stiff and astonishingly sturdy creation of cream and fruit flavoring. "It seems to me that before we can tackle the Shamsheer demon there are two or three basic hurdles we have to consider. First of all, in order to get any real control over him, we're almost certainly going to need to know his name. Second, to get that name we're going to have to find the damn fool who brought him into Shamsheer in the first place. And third, once we've got the name, we need to have some idea in mind as to exactly what we're going to do with it. That about cover it?"

"Covers it and a half," Danae snorted, shaking her head. "That's an awful lot of ground to cover in two days, Ravagin. Especially since we haven't got the faintest idea who this damn fool, as you called him, might be."

"Perhaps we can at least narrow down his location," Hart suggested. "You said someone in Ordarl Protectorate told you they'd been experiencing equipment problems?"

"Yes," Ravagin nodded. "And the trolls that first attacked us were from Feymar Protectorate, while the trolls that Simrahi's people cleared out from their territory were from Trassp Protectorate. Take your pick."

Hart made a face. "I see."

"Hang on, it's not quite that bad," Ravagin assured him. "We know that our target must have spent a good deal of time in Karyx to have had the knowledge and insight to pull this off in the first place.

It's also pretty certain he's on Shamsheer at the moment; or if not, that he spent a fair amount of time there in the recent past."

"Why?" Danae asked around a mouthful of cream.

"Because whatever he intended to do with the demon—research or anything else—would have taken some time to accomplish," Ravagin told her. "That points to someone official, either a Courier or someone on staff at one of the way houses."

"Assuming you're right, what sort of numbers are we talking about?" Hart asked. "Ten possibilities?

A thousand?"

Ravagin shrugged. "We're probably starting with something on the order of six or seven hundred altogether. We should be able to drastically narrow that down, though, by checking experience records."

"And med/psych records," Danae put in.

Ravagin frowned at her. "What do you mean?"

She gave him a tight smile. "Don't you remember, Ravagin?—my official reason for going into the Hidden Worlds was to study their psychological effects on Couriers."

"Oh, right." He grimaced. "We seem to have lost that thread somewhere along the way."

"Yeah; but before we did I collected a fair amount of impressions on the subject. Particularly on how excessive spirit contact seems to affect the personality."

Ravagin studied the end of his fork, mentally leafing through his list of friends and acquaintances who'd spent time on Karyx. "Are you implying," he said slowly, "that it isn't so much absolute time on Karyx that matters, but how much contact you've had with the spirits there?"

"It seems to be a combination of the two." She hesitated. "And there isn't just one reaction to consider. For example... the emotional burnout you had seems to have been a direct result of not giving in to spirit influence. As if—"

"As if they couldn't control me, so they were working on driving me out?" Ravagin growled with a sudden flash of insight. "Why, those bastards. That is what they were doing, isn't it? Those ethereal little bastards."

"It's just a theory—"

"But it sure as hell sounds reasonable." Ravagin jabbed his fork viciously into his dessert, trying to imagine a demon's face there. It seemed to help. "Okay; it sounds like a good approach," he told her.

"The only catch in it is that med/psych records are on the restricted access list. I don't know any of the appropriate passkeys to get in."

"Can I phone into the computer from outside the Crosspoint Building?" Hart asked.

"No. It's a sealed system."

"How close is your phone to your terminal?"

"Oh—" Ravagin measured out half a meter between his hands. "About that far."

Hart nodded. "Then it can be done. I'll get you the appropriate gadget later this evening. You'll have to sneak it in and get it set up, I'm afraid, but it's a simple procedure and I'll include a set of instructions."

"What about the passkeys? Getting into the computer won't get you those."

Danae snorted. "That's the least of our worries," she said. "The system doesn't exist that Hart can't perk. I should know—he's been tracking me down through perk-proof systems for the past four years." She shot him a lopsided smile. "Funny how I never appreciated that talent before."

"My only real talent in such things lies in searching out the proper experts," Hart shrugged.

"Fortunately, there are several such experts on Threshold."

"Whom you've already made contact with?" Danae suggested.

"Of course," he said equably. "Part of my job."