Timothy Zahn - Triplet

"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."