Algis Budrys - Michaelmas

That, it seemed to him, was just a little bit much. What would they talk about? Would they discuss why, if Clementine Gervaise had been able to see something, hadn’t the great Laurent Michaelmas delved into it on camera? What might a man’s motives be in such a case? All of that so she could wheedle him around into some damaging half-admission or other and then run tell her Kiki about it?

He smiled and said: “That would be an excellent idea. But I expect to be leaving before dinner time, and I also have some things I must do first. Another time, it would be a very pleasant thing.”

“Dommage,” Clementine said. Then she smiled. “Well, it will be very nice when it happens, don’t you think so?”

“Of course.” He smiled. Smiling, they reached the front of the Excelsior and he thanked her and got out. As the car drew away, she turned to wave to him a little through the rear window, and he waved back. “Very nice,” Domino said in his ear. “Very sophisticated, you two.”

“I will speak to you in the suite,” Michaelmas sub-vocalized, smiling to the doorman, passing through the lobby, waiting for the elevator, holding up his eyelids by force of the need to never show frailty.

In the cool suite, Michaelmas took off his suitcoat with slow care and meticulously hung it on the back of a chair beside the drawing-room table. He put the terminal down and sat, toeing off his shoes and tugging at the knot of his tie. He rested his elbows on the table and undid his cufflinks, pausing to rub gently at either side of his nose. “All right,” he said, his eyes unfocused. “Speak to me.”

“Yes. We’re still secure here,” Domino said. “Nothing’s tapping at us.”

Michaelmas’s face turned involuntarily towards the terminal. “Is that suddenly another problem to consider? I’ve always thought I’d arranged you to handle that sort of thing automatically.”

There was a longish pause. “Something peculiar happened at the sanatorium.”

Michaelmas tented his fingertips. “I’d gathered that. Please explain.”

Domino said slowly: “I’m not sure I can.”

Michaelmas sighed. “Domino, I realize you’ve had some sort of difficult experience. Please don’t hesitate to share it with me.”

“You’re being commendably patient with me, aren’t you?”

Michaelmas said: “If asked, I would say so. Let’s proceed.”

“Very well. At the sanatorium, I was maintaining excellent linkages via the various commercial facilities available. I had a good world scan, I was monitoring the comm circuits at your terminal, and I was running action programmes on the ordinary management problems we’d discussed earlier. I was also giving detail attention to Cikoumas et Cie, Hanrassy, UNAC, the Soviet spaceflight command, Papashvilly, the Watson crash, and so forth. I have reports ready for you on a number of these topics. I. really haven’t been idle since cutting away from your terminal.”

“And specifically what happened to make you shift out?”

There was a perceptible diminution in volume. “Something.”

Michaelmas raised an eyebrow. He reached forward gently and touched the terminal. “Stop mumbling and digging your toe in the sand, Domino,” he said. “We’ve all filled our pants on occasion.”

“I’m not frightened.”

“None of us are ever frightened. Now and then, we’d just like more time to plan our responses. Go on.”

“Spare me your aphorisms. Something happened when I next attempted to deploy into Limberg’s facilities and see what there was to learn. I learned nothing. There was an anomaly.”

“Anomaly.”

“Yes. There is something going on there. I linked into about as many kinds of conventional systems as you’d expect, and there was no problem; he has the usual assortment of telephones, open lines to investment services and the medical network, and so forth. But there was something—something began to happen to the ground underfoot.”

“Underfoot?”

“I have to anthropomorphize if I’m going to make sense to you. It was as if I’d take a stride of normal length and discover that my leg had become a mile long, so that my foot was set down out of sight far ahead of me. And my next step, with my other foot, might be done with a leg so short that the step was completed with incredible swiftness. Or it might again be one of the long steps — somewhat shorter or longer than other long steps. Yet I didn’t topple. But I would be rushing forward one moment and creeping the next. Nevertheless, I proceeded at an even pace. The length of my leg was always appropriate to the dimensions of the square on which I put down my foot, so that I always stepped to the exact centre of the next square. All the squares, no matter what their measurement in space, represented the same-sized increment of time.”

Michaelmas sucked his upper teeth. “Where were you going?” he finally asked.

“I have no idea. I can’t track individual electrons any more readily than you can. I’m just an information processor like any other living thing. Somewhere in that sanatorium is a crazy place. I had to cut out when it began echoing.”

“Echoing.”

“Yes, sir. I began receiving data I had generated and stored in the past. Fefre, the Turkish Greatness Party, Tim Brodzik… that sort of thing. Sometimes it arrived hollowed out, as if from the bottom of a very deep well, and at other times it was as shrill as the point of a pin. It was coded in exactly my style. It spoke in my voice, so to speak. However, I then noticed that minor variations were creeping in; with each repetition, there was apparently one electron’s worth of deviation, or something like that.”

“Electron’s worth?”

“I’m not sure what the actual increment was. It might have been as small as the fundamental particle, whatever that might turn out to be. But it seemed to me the coding was a notch farther off each time it… resonated. I’m not certain I was detecting a real change. My receptors might have been changing. When I thought of that, I cut out. First I dropped my world scan and my programmes out of the press links, and then I abandoned your terminal. I was out before the speaker actually started vibrating to tell you I was leaving. I felt as if I were chopping one end of a rope bridge with something already on it.”

“Why did you feel that? Did you think this phenomenon had its own propulsion?”

“It might have had.”

“A… resonance… was coming after you with intent to commit systematic gibberish.”

“It does sound stupid. But this… stuff… was — I don’t know. I did what I thought best.”

“How long were you exposed to it?”

“Five steps. That’s all I can tell you.”

“Hmm. And is it lurking in the vicinity now?”

“No. It can’t be. Simply because I dropped the press links first. I was worried it might somehow locate and hash up all my data storages. But since then it’s occurred to me that if I hadn’t, it could have taken any number of loop routes to us here. I consider we were just plain lucky. It’s back in whatever Limberg equipment it lives in.”

“Well, I’m glad of that. That is, if it was true that you were being stalked by the feedback beast of the incremental spaces.”

“That’s gauche. It’s simply that there’s some sort of totally unprecedented system in operation at Limberg’s sanatorium.”

“We’ve been assuming since last night that he has access to some peculiar devices.”

“I’ve encountered malaprop circuitry a fair number of times in this imperfect world. What I’m concerned about is not so much what sort of device Limberg has access to. It’s what the device has access to.”

Michaelmas sighed. “I don’t see how we can speculate on that as yet. I can tell you what happened. Not why, or how, but what. You ran into trouble that set upon you as fast as you can think. A condition common among humans. Even more common is having it advance faster than that.”