Deep Secret (9 page)

I
t took me another two hours to simmer down. That only happened when I admitted to myself that not only had I been hoping that Mallory would turn out to be Magid material, but I had also, on the basis of her personality trace, been building up a picture of a brave person in considerable adversity. She had a broken home, she had been jilted by this man Robbie, she had no money and was forced to live with a bitchy aunt, and on top of this her father (adoptive father, I supposed) was dying of cancer. I had been prepared to be wonderfully sorry for her. But all that went when I saw her grotesque baglike figure prancing at the side of the road. Then, after the way she had first ignored and then looked at me, I wanted to go and shake the hand of that ex-boyfriend and tell him he was well out of it. I was well out of it. It was worth a hundred quid – cheap at the price.

“Ready to talk now?” Stan asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“What you want to do,” he said, “is collect all your candidates in one place and interview them for the job. Am I correct?”

I had been brooding with my chin on my chest. I sat up. “But how?”

“The extreme way,” he said. “Tweak their fatelines. Bring them to you.”

“Is it permissible?” I said. I had thought that way was only for emergencies. Anything that involved meddling in someone’s personal life without their permission was to be considered only in extreme need.

“Yes, you’re allowed to do it if you’re choosing a new Magid. That’s important,” Stan said. “You’d be doing it anyway by appointing someone, if you think about it.”

“OK, but not tonight,” I said.

What Stan was suggesting was a fairly arduous process. I have always thought it lucky it is so difficult, or Magids – and other people – might be tempted to do it for trivial reasons. Done often, it could bring chaos to more than one world. It can also bring chaos down on the Magid who does the working, unless it is done carefully, with proper safeguards. If you don’t get it right, you can tangle your own fatelines disastrously with those of the people you are trying to influence. A Magid is supposed to be a free agent. One of the things which is done when you become a Magid is that your personal fatelines are freed from those of the rest of the multiverse. Rather a lonely state, actually.

Anyway, I knew it was going to take days and I didn’t want to be interrupted. The next day, I finished all my ordinary business (somewhat late, but too bad – Mallory’s fault) and then disconnected my phones from this world and the others. I shut down all the computers, including the one devoted to Magid business, and hung what amounted to a ‘Do Not Disturb’ notice on that one.

I was a little irritated to find a series of faxes from General Dakros had come in overnight. The first said triumphantly that his experts had deciphered the genetic codes on the two lists: they would be able to recognise all the heirs when they found them. The second told me that Knarros was still untraced; the third that Jeffros thought Knarros was hidden by magic. The fourth asked me outright to come and discover Knarros for them.

I faxed back briskly that I saw no reason why they should maintain the Emperor’s secrecy, and suggested that they advertise for Knarros in the media. Then I unplugged the machine.

“See?” I said to Stan. “Not sentimental at all.”

Then I set to work with a large globe of the world, pins and strands of cotton. It was important to find a point in this country to which it was best to summon my four candidates. Because this was fateline work, the place had to be a node of power (there are a surprising number of these nodes in the British Isles) and the distance between this place and each of the four people had to satisfy mathematical laws. It also had to be somewhere where any of them might naturally expect to go. Even though they would be tugged to this spot by a series of Magid-made accidents, I could not stretch the laws of probability too far for fear the three I did not select would notice.

This was why I ruled out all the solitary nodes like Stonehenge, or most castles, or that hidden valley in Derbyshire, and looked mainly at towns or at country places where there were conference centres. Before long, I was sitting in a heap of guidebooks and information leaflets, darting between these and the globe, and then to the detailed maps spread out on the floor. I needed a mundane, normal-seeming node. Stan was a great help here. As a jockey, he had rushed all over the country to racecourses in every corner of it, and he knew hotels and nodes I had never heard of.

Myself, I had hoped to bring everyone together in London, but that did not satisfy the numerical conditions. Annoyingly, it would have been fine had Mallory still been in the equation. I found I was interrupted here by a great rush of anger and exasperation at Mallory. How
dared
she lead me such a dance! How dared she go
on
doing so, even when I had eliminated her!

Stan recalled me by suggesting we considered some of the nodes in the Midlands. There are some good strong ones there. I wondered about Nottingham, but the numbers were off there too.

“Pity, that,” Stan said. “Nottingham’s a place where everyone goes sooner or later. All sorts of reasons. You want a lot of reasons. Concerts, conferences – or a racecourse would do it.”

“There are reasons for going to Birmingham,” I said, “but the node there’s only a pinprick. How about Stratford-upon-Avon?”

“Too many tourists,” he said. “Is Wigan any good?”

Wigan was numerically wrong. After hours of discussion and measuring and reading brochures, we settled on a medium-sized town called Wantchester. We both knew it. Stan said there were at least two good hotels there because of the racecourse. The guidebook claimed there were conference facilities and a factory that made small-arms. These were clearly new since Stan’s day, and mine. Stan remembered a pleasant, sleepy town. My memories were from a summer holiday there with my family, and I mostly remembered the river. There had been a fishing competition there for children. I had been in the grip of a fishing craze – I suppose I would be about nine at that time – and I had eagerly enrolled in the competition. I fished all day without the slightest luck. I was, I remember, disentangling my line from a willow tree for at least the fortieth time when my brother Will arrived and wanted to try his luck too. He never wanted to be outdone by his younger brothers.

The supervisor must have been very good-humoured. He gave Will instructions and Will borrowed my rod, and the supervisor left us to it. Will, in his usual way of always succeeding at everything, almost instantly hooked a fine fat fish. He struck at precisely the right moment and landed it perfectly. Then there was terrible trouble, because Will couldn’t bear to kill it and neither could I. It flopped about madly. We shouted for the supervisor, but he was out of hearing, and we were forced to deal with it ourselves. Between us, we succeeded in getting the hook out of its mouth and we threw it back in the river, where it floated on its side, convulsing and obviously dying. Will realised he had half-killed it. He burst into tears, even though he was thirteen. I felt awful. I kept trying to get the fish out of the river again and I couldn’t. We were in this state when our brother Simon wandered by. Simon hates killing things, so he had kept away from the fishing. When he saw us, Will in tears and me white and dithering, he simply waded into the water, fetched out the fish and whacked its head on a stone. “There,” he said, and went on his way. I gave up fishing after that. Will never tried again.

Later on, these memories of Wantchester struck me as decidedly inauspicious. Maybe they did even at the time. If so, I dismissed them, because I was tired of looking. Wantchester fitted our requirements. Stan and I both knew the town. That was sufficient.

“Wantchester it is, then,” we said.

The next step was, of course, to go to the place and check it out. “I wish you could come too,” I said to Stan.

“You don’t need me to help you look at a town,” he said, threatening huffiness. I was beginning to see that Stan got irritated whenever I went somewhere without him. I said no more.

The next day I drove up to Wantchester and found the place still very pleasant, despite a one-way system and the cold wind of late February. I even took a walk by the river for old times’ sake. There were willow trees, currently bare, and brown water swirling under the bridge, just as I remembered, but the river walk was curtailed since that far-off holiday by the new factory built on the riverside. So I walked back into the town, to the large hotel I had seen standing across the end of the main square. The hotel I remembered dimly, although we had stayed in a guest-house, but my chief memory was of the way the square was more like a very wide street, with a market in it. To my joy, the square (or street) was full of stalls that day too, and I stared at crockery, fruit and clothing, much as there had been when I was a nine-year-old, all the way to the hotel.

I was rather disconcerted to find it was called Hotel Babylon.

There is no such thing as coincidence, thought I, and pushed through the large glass doors. Inside it was large and hushed and a queer mixture of modern décor with traditional market-town habits. There seemed to be mirrors everywhere and the receptionist was foreign, but the place was filled with huntin’-and-fishin’ types who were here for the horse sales, and lunch was traditional and nourishing, served by staff with local accents. As I ate chicken and mushroom pie among the mirrors, I realised that the building was actually on the node. Better and better. After lunch, I enquired about booking a room for the Easter weekend. Stan and I had settled on Easter because that is a powerful time-node.

I could get no sense out of the foreign lady. I asked to see the manager. His name was Alfred Douglas, but that was not his fault. Easter weekend? he said. He was very sorry, but all the rooms were taken by a convention over Easter.

I nearly went away. Possibly I should have done. Things would certainly have turned out very differently if I had. I was within a whisker of deciding to try another town when it occurred to me to ask what kind of convention – expecting the reply to be Freemasons, Social Workers or some kind of Business Training.

A book-lovers’ convention, Mr Alfred Douglas told me. Science fiction and fantasy – or he believed the term might be speculative fiction. That kind of area, sir, anyway.

There is no such thing as coincidence! I thought, marvelling. Mervin Thurless
wrote
science fiction. According to my American contacts, Fisk had once taught a course about writing it. I didn’t know how Punt and Gabrelisovic felt about this genre, but there were half my candidates at least ready to fit in. Two of them could come here in the most natural manner possible.

“But that’s just what I was looking for!” I said.

Deeper enquiries elicited the fact that the convention guaranteed to fill the hotel for five days and did the booking for its members. But Mr Alfred Douglas was happy to let me have the name, address and telephone number of the organiser. He was called Rick Corrie. I phoned him from the hotel.

He was very pleasant. I liked at once the voice that answered, “PhantasmaCon hotel liaison here.” We had a very agreeable conversation, in the course of which I discovered that Corrie, like me, worked with computers from his home. Certainly I would join the convention, he said, and named a modest fee – that he apologised for: it seemed the sum had gone up after Christmas. He would, he said, send me the details and the hotel booking-form, and urged me to get it back to him quickly because the hotel was already quite full.

I gave him my address. “What happens if I send my form back but you find the hotel is booked solid?” I asked.

“Oh, we try to fit everyone in,” he said cheerfully. “A lot of fans sleep on the floor – don’t tell Alfred Douglas that – but I’ve got the Station Hotel lined up to take the overflow if there is one. But you’ll want to be in the Babylon if you can. That’s where the action will be.”

I promised to get my application back to him by return of post and rang off. Then I did a small amount of adjusting before I left, to ensure that I and my four candidates would indeed have rooms here. And – perhaps it was the thought of a letter by return of post – I found myself once more interrupted by a surge of rage against Mallory. So, as an afterthought, I did some more adjusting, to make sure that Mallory could have nothing to do with this. Then I went home, rather pleased with my day’s work.

There followed a time of intense, detailed labour to wind the fatelines in exactly the right way. Almost the only communication I had with the outside worlds was when I received from Rick Corrie a bundle of highly peculiar stuff. Opening it, I wished that Fisk, Punt or Thurless had replied to me anything like so promptly (in fact, none of them ever replied: either my letters went astray or they did not strike any of the three as important) and was once again seized with irrational rage at Mallory. My fingers quivered with fury as I examined Corrie’s bundle.

Some of it was the booking-forms he had promised me. That concerning the hotel was normal enough – except that I was required to state whether or not I wanted mushrooms for breakfast – but the booking-form for the actual convention was full of curious passages. I read: ‘Fans wishing to enter the Masquerade should state in advance whether Animal, Human or Other. We’re having three classes this year’ and a little further on: ‘PhantasmaCook entries must be checked in on arrival. The hotel manager has asked that no actual construction of green slime etc. be done in the hotel bedrooms’ and right at the end: ‘We regret having to ban explosions, but after last year the cost of insurance is now too high.’

Wondering what happened last year, I turned to the thing labelled
Progress Report III
and stared at it. My face was probably a study. Stan demanded to know what was the matter.

“‘Hobbits will be mustering under Gandalf as usual in the Ops Room,’” I read out to him. “‘Esoterica with the Master Mage is in a dimension yet to be fixed… Filking will be in the Home Universe this year… Writers’ Circle is rounding nicely in the hands of Wendy the Willow but there are rumours of another. Watch this space… Bumpkin has agreed to handle Games and Games Workshop… No charges of fraud in the Tarot classes this year, please. Our new reader is a genuine sensitive… There are still a few places in the Dealers Room. Apply to Eisenstein… Security will be handled by HitlerEnterprises and all swords are to be in their charge until Sunday…” Stan, who
are
these people?”