Дэймон Найт - Orbit 4

Tatja smiled. “Wow! All right, Miss Ascuasenya, just what did you see when Svir walked by you?”

Cor looked confused. She glanced from Tatja to Svir and back again. “When I first looked at him coming down the hall, I could have sworn it was my father—but my family is in the Llerenito Archipelagate! As he got closer I saw that it was Jespen Tarulle. I mean, I knew it was Svir—it had to be. But it was Jespen Tarulle at the same time. Even now when I look at him, I see Tarulle —and yet I can see Svir, too.” Hedrigs glanced at An-cho’s ears. They weren’t pointing at Cor. The hallucination persisted even after the dorfox stopped radiating.

Tatja didn’t say anything for a second. She made a couple of notes in her book and looked up. “Can you see Ancho sitting on Hedrigs’ shoulder?”

Ascasenya squinted. “No. All I see is that queer double image I just described.”

The others had similar reactions. About half saw Hedrigs as Tatja. These people were especially confused, since they now saw two Tatja Grimms. Every one of them realized that Ancho’s trickery was involved, and all but two could see Hedrigs behind the hallucination.

Svir’s shoulders sagged. All that work, and the best they could come up with was a halfbaked illusion that wasn’t even uniform. It would never fool the Royal Guards.

But Tatja seemed to feel otherwise. She finished writing in the notebook, and looked up, smiling. “Well, we’ve done it. The illusion is one of the strongest I’ve ever seen. It persists even in the face of contradiction-to-fact situations. See, Svir, all you have to do is act confident. Ancho knows you and will radiate the same thing. I really didn’t mean to jump on you.”

Hedrigs nodded, still blushing from the unexpected attack. Her technique worked, but it was shocking.

Grimm continued, “We’d better knock off now. Ancho’s beginning to lose interest. By now he’s crammed full of klig leaves. And most of you look pretty dragged out. Let’s have another session after lunch.”

During the rest of the voyage to Bayfast they had four hours of practice in every wake period. In the end, Ancho was able to broadcast the authority signal even better than he could the I’m-not-here. He also grew fat on the klig leaves, assuming an almost spherical configuration. Tatja had him perform his new trick under every conceivable condition—even in the dark, down in one of the holds. They found that if a single authority figure were suggested to all the victims, then they all saw that same person. It took Ancho only a fraction of a second to set up the illusion in the human mind, and it persisted without booster treatment for almost ten minutes. Ancho could detect people hiding behind bulkheads, and could even project the authority illusion through several feet of stone. Tatja tried several times to make the dorfox generate the illusion for her, but Ancho just purred when she held him.

One experiment was a mystery to Svir. Tatja produced a flat balsir box and strapped it to the dorfox’s back. Ancho didn’t seem to mind. The box was light and apparently the straps didn’t chafe. The contraption looked vaguely like an oversize cookie cutter—its profile was an irregular set of semi-circles and lines. From either side of the box projected stubby cylinders of glass and wood. On top was a little hole—like the keyhole in a spring-powered clock. And the device clicked almost like a clock when it was mounted on Ancho’s back.

Tatja refused to reveal the exact purpose of the contraption. She said it was a last precaution, one whose usefulness would be impaired if Hedrigs knew its purpose. Hedrigs couldn’t imagine what sort of precaution would have such properties, but he accepted her explanation. Perhaps it was empty—a placebo to give him the false confidence necessary to trigger Ancho’s authority signal. But whatever it was, it was for the best—Tatja wanted it.

The Drag kept Grimm busy—even busier than the general run of the crew. Besides their practice sessions, he was with her only two or three hours out of every wake period. He saw almost as much of the proofreader, Coronadas Ascuasenya. It was surprising how often he found her eating at the same time and in the same meal hall as he. Hedrigs came to enjoy those meals more and more. Cor was no competition for Tatja, but she was pretty and intelligent and nice to be with.

Hedrigs spent the rest of his free time in the Barge library, where Tatja’s influence had opened some otherwise locked doors. Only fifteen or twenty people out of the thousand on board were allowed access to the library, but once inside there was no restriction on the use of materials. Here Tarulle kept specimen copies of all available issues of magazines published by the company. That amounted to about one hundred thousand volumes. Jespen Tarulle was in the printing business to make money, but he had a sense of history too, and the Barge library was the most luxurious part of the craft that Svir had yet seen. Here was none of the cramped stuffiness of the lower decks. Virtually none of the sea or ship noises were audible through the thick glass windows. Deep carpets covered the floor. During the night wake periods, well-tended algae pots supplemented Seraph’s light.

To a confirmed Fantasie addict, it was heaven. The Tarulle collection was nearly three-quarters complete— more than seven thousand issues. That was better than any of the libraries Svir had seen on the Islands. They even had several copies of the First Issue, printed just forty years after the invention of move able type. In those years the magazine was sold in two yard-square sheets, folded into quarters. Only rarely was a story illustrated and then it was with crude woodcuts. But that was part of the enchantment. On that single barque—the predecessor of the Barge—they had printed such stories as Delennor’s Doom, and Search for the Last Kingdom— novels that after seven hundred years were still studied by poets and read with enjoyment by near-illiterates. The genius which showed through those smudged pages transcended the vehicle that had brought it across time to the present.

That original barque had been owned by an ambitious trading family, distantly related to the present publisher, Tarulle. At first, they confined their trade to the major islands or the Osterlei group—and at the same time provided regular and vital communication between those islands. As the business became more profitable, the family gave up their other trading operations, and visited islands further and further asea. The islands beyond the horizon provided even more enchanting themes and original authors. Fantasie readers were the first (and for a long time the only) cosmopolitans on the planet.

The magazine’s success was not without social repercussions. The effects of the first interplanetary fantasy were shattering both for the magazine and for the rulers of the Llerenito Archipelagate. Migration, by Ti Liso, forecast the rise of contrivance fiction. Liso’s hero discovered a species of flying fish which, during the winter season in the northern hemisphere, migrated to the southern hemisphere of Seraph. The hero captured several of the vicious creatures and taught them to pull his sailing boat. After a two-week flight, the fish deposited him halfstarved on the south polar continent of Seraph. The story went on to describe the civilization he found there. It was an unfortunate coincidence that his Seraphian government was an absurd dictatorship founded on Tu-worship —for the tyrannical government of the Llerenitos was just such a farce in reverse. In plain fact the story had not been intended as satire. It had been written as straight adventure—Liso was a native of the Osterleis and he had honestly conceived the most ridiculous autarchy imaginable. The Seraphiles of the Llerenitos did not take it as a joke, and for the next fifty years, until the fall of their religion, Llerenito waters were forbidden to the barque. This was an especial hardship, since the technique for sailing to windward was not fully developed at that time. Avoiding the Llerenitos cost many months’ sailing time.