Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Reign of the Brown Magician

The Empire seemed to be spying on Earth-but it was Shadow that had been the enemy.

Then wouldn’t they be spying on Shadow, as well? Or rather, since Shadow was dead, on him?

As that thought struck him he felt a sudden twinge, something in the matrix, somewhere…he took a moment to analyze the still-unfamiliar sensations the matrix transmitted.

It was somewhere outside the fortress, somewhere far away, but not too far-still on the near side of the world. When he tried, he could sense the world’s curvature, could feel the matrix reaching around to meet itself, as well as stretching up beyond the atmosphere and down deep into the stone below; compared with all that, this new thing was close by, but he knew it was miles away.

He’d felt it before, he remembered. He had felt the same odd twist in the matrix when Athelstan had first suggested dissecting one of the fetches.

Pel suddenly made a connection.

The Empire probably was spying on him-and that’s what he felt. He guessed that they’d re shy;opened the space-warp out in the forest where Christopher had crashed. They’d opened it when Athelstan made his suggestion. They’d opened it then and sent someone through, and now they’d opened it again-to get a report, maybe?

That was annoying; Pel didn’t like the idea of being spied on, and he didn’t much want to get involved with the Empire again.

But it didn’t matter. If Johnston sent back the fetch Pel could bring back Nancy and Rachel, and then he wouldn’t care what the goddamned Galactic Empire did.

* * * *

“I say we should send a telepath,” Albright said. “This dropping a ladder and waiting for messages is stupid. It’s a half-assed, asinine idea, relying on this when we could send a telepath and have instant reports whenever we want them.”

“Sir,” Bascombe said, “may I respectfully remind you that the only telepath to ever leave Imperial space went rogue, and is still loose? Do we really want to risk the loss of another?”

“Bascombe’s right, for once,” Markham said. “We don’t have enough telepaths to send one along with every single expedition. Especially since the freaks can’t even read minds once they’re there.”

“Well, damn it…”

“However,” Secretary Markham added, cutting off Albright’s objection, “I think we might be well advised to see if our mutant friends can pick up a link to Shadow’s world. They’ve read minds there before, haven’t they? Have we tried to follow Best’s actions from here?” He turned and looked at his own personal telepath.

“I didn’t work on that project, sir,” the telepath answered, “and I haven’t gone over it all consciously, but it’s certainly true that some minds in Shadow’s world can be read. Not very many, but more than on Earth. As for reading Captain Best’s mind, I couldn’t say whether it’s possible or not. I would suggest that the Halls would be best suited to make the attempt, as Carolyn Hall maintained contact with her cousin Thorpe for some time while Thorpe was in that universe, and Brian Hall has had considerable experience in interdimensional communication.”

“Good enough,” Albright said. “Get the Halls in here, then.”

* * * *

Pel accepted the wastebaskets and said, “Thanks,” before he remembered that he was talking to a fetch.

He paused, startled by his own slip.

The fetch had been human once. It wasn’t now. Pel could fix that.

He really ought to fix that.

After he had Nancy and Rachel back, he promised himself. After that he’d fix all the fetches. For now, he had more important things to do.

It was a relief to let the portal to Earth close, finally, and to move on to other things; he collapsed the opening into nothingness, then sent the fetch away with a wave of his hand and stared hungrily into the wastebaskets, at the hairbrushes and the bits of dust and hair.

From that he could grow new bodies-clones, they’d be called in Earth terms; simulacra, they were called here. To the wizards it was a matter of the Law of Parts, of the part containing the whole; Pel tended to think more of the genetic pattern that must be complete in every single cell.

It might be the same thing; he didn’t know.

And what’s more, he didn’t care, so long as it worked.

* * * *

“Okay, we know one of the players,” Johnston said. “Brown and his friends look pretty straight and simple, just the way Ms. Jewell and Ms. Thorpe here said, and he’s happy now he’s got his zombie back; as long as he stays on top there I don’t think we have to worry, and he currently holds all the strings.”

He paused, and looked around at the others-at his staff, the FBI man, Jewell, Thorpe, and the rest of them.

No one spoke.

“This Galactic Empire’s another matter,” Johnston continued. “They’ve got the ability to pop through into our reality, and for all we know they can do it anywhere-though the fact that they came through the same place twice might mean it’s not that easy for them. They tried to send an embassy first, and we arrested ’em-maybe that’s why the second bunch looks like spies, but it might just be they’re twisty, and how we treated the first batch didn’t matter. They speak English, but that doesn’t mean we know how they think.”

Thorpe shifted-deliberately, Johnston realized, to remind him of her presence.

“Thorpe, here, does know how they think, better than anyone-she grew up there, and she could read minds-so we’ve got something to work with, but on the other hand, she doesn’t understand how we think.”

Thorpe almost nodded at that.

“They have one big advantage-they can spy on us, with their telepaths and space-warps, and we can’t get at them at all. So we’re going to collect everyone we know they can contact and see if we can open some serious negotiations, and we’re going to keep an eye on Ms. Jewell’s back yard, but mostly, since we don’t have any space-warps or magical portals or mind-readers, we just wait. Unless anyone has a better idea.”

This time it was Jewell who got his attention by clearing her throat.

“Was there something you wanted to say, Ma’am?” Johnston asked.

She looked around nervously, then shook her head, and he made a note to talk to her privately as soon as possible.

* * * *

Growing a simulacrum from bits of hair and skin and nail was not the same as creating one from scratch; Pel didn’t need to sculpt it, but instead coaxed it along in what seemed a process of unfolding. As he guided the magic through and into it, the little knot of detritus on the workshop table melted together into a little blob, then elongated, expanded, shaped itself.

He had thought that it might grow like a clone, first an embryo, then a fetus, a baby, a child, until Nancy was again a grown woman; he had even idly toyed with the idea of stopping the process a bit early, restoring her to her youthful beauty-not that she wasn’t still beautiful, but…

But he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do that. He wanted Nancy, the way she had been when she was killed, not some close approximation.

And it turned out to be a moot point, because the thing didn’t develop that way at all; it didn’t acquire any recognizable human features until it was two feet long, and by the time it reached three feet in length and became clearly a person stretched out there on the rough wooden table, it was an adult woman in form, not a child. The familiar breasts were fully developed, in proportion to the still-small body; the hips were as broad, in proportion, as the real Nancy’s had been.

He cursed himself for thinking “the real Nancy” that way. This was the real Nancy, or at any rate it soon would be. And it was enlarging- she was enlarging quickly, drawing mass from the magical energy Pel poured into her.