Deep Secret (25 page)

I hoped I had said enough, savagely enough, to stop them trying again. But in my heart of hearts, I suspected I had overdone it. The trouble with pretending outrage and anger is that your body responds to the gestures you make and your fake emotions start becoming real. I was quite angry even before we waded in among Will’s chickens. When, during tea, Will told me – looking his smuggest – that he had seen no reason not to tell them all about Magids, I almost hit the beams in his ceiling. Thule is
not
Earth. I was glad Carina agreed with me. I was so furious with Will that I wished I had not already arranged for him to take over from me at the hotel while I went to see Knarros. I would have asked someone else. Gladly.

What I should have done is to have sat carefully down and let my precognition work on why I was so furious and alarmed. But I was quivering all over and angry with Will too, and I confused those feelings with my exasperation about Fisk and Thurless. Possibly I confused Stan too. But his precognition was never as acute as mine.

I didn’t get to talk to Stan, anyway, until the Saturday morning. Every time I looked out into the staff car park, there seemed to be at least four of the hotel employees out there, wandering from car to car. They appeared to be looking for something. Since I had no wish to draw attention to my illegally parked car, I went indoors again. But Saturday morning, when I tried once more, there must have been a good twenty people out there, including the hotel manager.

I heard him say, “No, I don’t know where the devil it’s coming from either, but I know it’s Scarlatti.”

Oops! I thought and dived indoors again.

It took me twenty minutes, sitting unobtrusively on an old tubular chair outside the kitchens, to persuade them to stop their search for the source of the music and go back to work. They were convinced the staff car park was haunted. And, being natives of Naywards old Earth, they were not going to leave until they had found a rational explanation instead. I put the explanation before them. I dandled it. I waved it enticingly. And they still rightly suspected a ghost.

Finally I got to work on the manager himself and persuaded him to give up in disgust and send the rest about their business. One of the chefs went in past me, saying, “Well, all I can say is that if it
is
a car radio, why is it always the same music?”

The waiter with him agreed. “Thirty-six hours, it’s been going. Any car would have a flat battery by this time.”

I went cautiously out to where my car sat disguised as a B-reg Ford, drawing power from the sun and exuding a faint far-off tinkle of Scarlatti. I could understand why the hotel staff were spooked. Unless you knew, the sound didn’t seem to be coming from
anywhere
.

“Stan,” I began as I unlocked the door.

“What’s going on? What were all those people hunting for?” he wanted to know.

“You,” I said.

He was very chastened when I explained. “You mean I’ve got to go without music even?” he said piteously. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Can’t you make yourself psychic earphones or something?” I demanded. “I’ve got enough on my mind without you terrifying the hotel staff.”

“I never thought of that. Psychic earphones, now,” he mused. “Let’s see…” I was about to point out to him, rather acidly, that he was not here to learn all five hundred-odd Scarlatti sonatas by heart, when he said, “You’re going to wipe that list then?” and I realised he was just kidding me.

“It’s more or less wiped itself,” I told him. “Fisk massaged my hands for an hour while she told me my aura was like a grey psychic blanket, but unfortunately the greyness is hers. She’s swathed in it. She can’t see outside it any more. I don’t know what she’s done to herself, but she smells of the bad stuff. Thurless too. He—”

“Hang on. What do you mean, ‘smells’?” Stan interrupted.

If the mad Gabrelisovic could describe this sensation as smell, then so could I, I thought. “You must know the feeling, Stan. It’s like acid indigestion to your soul, or as if someone were sponging your mind down with strong bleach. You get it when black practitioners start to talk to you. Or in bad cases, when they just look at you.”

“Oh, I get you!” Stan said. “Mindburn, I used to call it. Thurless has it too?”

“Much stronger than Fisk,” I said. “I talked to him for quite a time, while he gave me a dreary history of all the times people have let him down, or insulted him, or pinched his ideas, or persuaded publishers not to take his latest book – in the end, I asked him straight out if it might not be his own fault. I asked him if he’d ever gone out of his way to be nice to anyone, or had a kind or an affectionate thought. And he didn’t know what I was getting at, Stan. And by then this – mindburn, was it? – smell was coming off him so strongly that I felt ill and had to go away. And then—”

“The Croatian?” asked Stan.

“Mad,” I said. “Certifiable. And—”

“Then what about Punt?” said Stan.

“He’s even more irresponsible than Mallory. He sees himself as Court Jester to the world, I think. But let me tell you about Mallory’s latest caper.” I told him about the way I had set off to see Will, and my horrified astonishment when I arrived at Will’s gate to find Maree and her cousin running after me. “The boy, Nick, said he wanted to talk to me. I’ve no idea about what.
Nothing
could justify the risk, Stan! They could have got themselves stripped. Will and I could have spent the evening picking pieces of them out of five different worlds!”

“I take it they weren’t to know that, though,” Stan remarked.

“They weren’t to know
anything
,” I said sourly, “except that Will then went blandly ahead and told them all about Magids. All I could do after that was pretend to fly into a rage and put embargoes on their telling anyone else.”

“Pretend?” asked Stan.

“Yes, I am still pretty angry,” I admitted. “With Will as well.”

“Seems to me,” Stan said musingly, “that our Will must have had a reason for telling them. I admit he’s a tactless bugger, always shooting his mouth off, but he’s surely got to have thought they were Magid material after what they did. Was it just the girl who transferred them both, or did the boy do it too?”

“Both of them,” I said. “That boy’s pretty gifted in a quiet way. But for one thing he’s too young, and for another he’s about the most self-centred kid I’ve ever met. I don’t think Will thought at all. And yes, I’m going to wipe that list and start looking all over again just as soon as I’ve unwound this working.”

“Then you’d better lay in a load of Palestrina and Monteverdi,” Stan observed. “I’ll be on to that next. What about the working? Is Will coming here?”

“Middle of this afternoon,” I told him. “I don’t have to meet Dakros until around six, so there’ll be plenty of time for Will to take hold. Meanwhile – I’m sorry about this, Stan – could you seriously think of a way to listen to Scarlatti without all the hotel staff hearing it too?”

“I’ll try,” Stan said dubiously. “It won’t be easy, but I’ll do what I can.”

I left him to try and went back into the hotel. There was a panel on at midday on “What Makes Good Fantasy”, and I thought I might pass the time by going to it and finding out. In the meantime, I bought one of Hotel Babylon’s excellent pots of coffee and took it into the Grand Lobby to drink.

The area was, as usual, crammed with people, some in strange attire and most of them looking thoroughly hung over after the publishers’ parties the night before. Ted Mallory was sitting in one corner, looking more hung over than anyone. His wife sat beside him, obviously bored, in a new and startling jumper. At a quick glance, it looked as if someone had thrown a pint of blood at her right breast. Whatever the red stuff was, it glistened like a raw wound. I looked hastily away and spotted Maree and Nick Mallory perched on a bench at the side of the area, under one of the long windows. It occurred to me to wonder, as I made my way over to them, at the way the elder Mallorys took almost no notice of the younger ones. I had realised at yesterday’s breakfast, of course, just how acutely Janine disliked Maree, but I did marvel that, apart from buttering one slice of toast for him, she had never to my knowledge done anything maternal for Nick. Maybe it was simply that Nick didn’t let her. People of fourteen are touchy about mothers fussing around them. But Nick seemed to rely heavily on Maree instead. The marvel of it, to me, was that Janine tolerated that. She did not strike me as a woman who tolerated much.

I suppose I speculated this way to disguise from myself the fact that I was going to talk to them. I planted my coffee tray on the windowsill and found I was saying, “Coffee, either of you? I got the largest size of pot.”

They were both looking thoroughly dejected. I know my heart smote me. I suppose I wanted to make amends. That it was mostly my fault they were so dejected was plain. They both looked up warily, almost relieved I seemed friendly, but not sure I was. Maree went a little pink and said, “Nick’s still awash from breakfast, but I’d love a cup.”

The hotel had provided four cups, to go with the size of pot. Nick eyed them. “Me too. Who’s the fourth one for?”

“Nobody,” I said. We settled, sort of amicably, along the bench, looking out into the mirrors that lined the far wall. “I’m sorry I lost my temper,” I found myself saying.

“So am I,” said Maree, with the gloomy sob prominent in her voice. “I’ve been thinking I probably said the unforgivable thing.”

“I wanted to make quite sure you didn’t believe it – that we secretly rule the world,” I said. This seemed to be the real reason I had sought the two of them out. That surprised me. “It caught me on the raw, because we do indeed do a fair amount of guiding and pushing and persuading when the need arises,” I said. “Sometimes we do tread a mighty thin line between persuading and ruling.”

“I thought you had to,” Nick said. “You must have to have rules about it.”

“Very strict ones,” I said.

“I wish I could make a computer game out of it,” he said wistfully. “But I bet I couldn’t. I tried to mention you to Dave – he runs the Games here – as an experiment, and I couldn’t. You did something to stop us. It wasn’t just threats, was it?”

It turned out that the reason they had run after me was Nick’s passionate desire to sell a couple of games he had invented. I have come across games submitted by kids before. They stink, frankly, and I had no reason to think Nick’s inventions were any different. But I was still wanting to make amends. I gave him a few names and addresses, which he wrote down rapturously.

While he wrote, Maree said, “There must be times when you can’t guide, or you know you mustn’t. It must have been like that in the World Wars. How does that work? It’s been worrying me.”

“It can be agonising,” I said, thinking of my current dealings with the Koryfonic Empire. “You just have to stand aside. Sometimes you get a directive to leave things alone, but sometimes you have to work out for yourself that there’s nothing you can do. There are times when you even have to go in and make things worse, knowing that millions of people—”

I stopped, because she had stopped attending. Her face was bright red and she was staring, one finger to the bridge of her glasses, at something across the room. Around us, the buzz of talk had died down considerably. I could hear gasps and murmurs. I looked at where Maree was staring and I know my mouth fell open.

Andrew was walking through the room – walking in that way of his, vague but single-minded, looking neither to right nor left, but somehow avoiding all obstacles, even people sprawled in his way, gazing up at him, and small children zigzagging across his path.

“Oh God!” Maree gasped sobbingly. “The fabulous Nordic type again!”

It looked as if every female in the place was saying, or thinking, the same. Even Janine had both hands clasped to her bleeding bosom and stared with the rest. Andrew certainly seemed healthier than when I last saw him. There was better colour in his face and he strode with a swing. But I never have the least idea what makes a man attractive to women. To me he was just my neighbour in a surprising holiday mood. I hadn’t realised he had meant to attend the Convention, but he had clearly paid at the door. He was even wearing convention-type clothes, more so than mine – a matter of a knee-length embroidered jacket in red and brown, and brown baggy pants that seemed to be cross-gartered. At any rate, red criss-cross bindings flashed forth with each of his purposeful strides, from knee to foot.

“Wonderful!” said Maree.

Nick jabbed my arm with his pen. “Look in the mirrors.”

I looked, up beyond Andrew, to Andrew’s reflection striding parallel through the reflection of the crowded room. Nick had noticed something I should have noticed myself. In the mirrors, Andrew wore a sort of navy blue battledress nipped in at the waist with a broad white canvas belt.

“It was like that when he came through yesterday,” Nick murmured. “Only it was ordinary clothes here, and a long overcoat like a tramp’s in the mirror.”

I was dumbfounded, for more than just one reason. Maree, beside me, moaned, “Oh. I wish I knew who he was!” and I realised that the reason I was not going to tell her had changed. When I first saw Andrew, I was not going to let on that I knew him out of pure, simple jealousy. Now I was not going to tell her because there was something very strange about my neighbour which it was my business as a Magid to investigate. Both reasons, and the fact that they were both true, held me rigid and dumb and staring, while Andrew strode on and strode out through the other end of the Grand Lobby.

Then I was galvanised. I leapt up and rushed after him.

I could not see Andrew anywhere. I could not even sense his presence. And I never learnt what makes good fantasy. I was too busy roving over the hotel hunting for him and trying to come to terms with that double realisation. Kicking myself. Why had I not realised that I had been wildly attracted to the sense of Maree that I had followed all over Bristol that time? Because she had annoyed me by mad behaviour that didn’t live up to my romantic expectations, I suppose. I had let that totally mess up my search for a new Magid. And on top of that, Andrew had been my neighbour for two years and I had not noticed anything wrong with him. I had had to have it pointed out by a teenage boy!