Bob Shaw - The Ceres Solution

“Yes, I could see he was…” She broke off, suddenly suspicious. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m saying you almost did Hargate a favour. He wanted to die anyway, so when Vekrynn…ah…disposed of him he was only doing what Hargate wanted.”

“Stop it!” Gretana threw her scissors on to the kitchen table and they slid along its surface with a metallic chittering. “I won’t listen to that kind of talk.”

“Sorry. I just don’t want you to feel guilty.”

“You’re still doing it. You…you are still calling Warden Vekrynn a criminal.” She tried to give a scornful laugh, but it emerged as something closer to a sob, further increasing her anger and frustration. “Why didn’t I tell the Bureau you were here?”

“There’s only one reason,” Lorrest said equably. “In your heart you didn’t really want to. If you’d been genuinely determined to turn me in nothing could have stopped you. Think about it.”

“I am thinking about it.” Gretana made the effort to clamp down on her emotions, realising that coldness and self-control were the best weapons against provocation. “I want you to go away from here and never come near me again.”

“So be it,” Lorrest said, apparently unruffled. He worked his splinted arm back into his shirt sleeve with some difficulty and began fumbling with the buttons. Gretana, disdaining to help, walked into the adjoining room and switched off the television set. Abruptly, and against her better judgement, she yielded to a desire to establish once and for all that the unwanted visitor was impervious to logic.

“Just tell me one thing,” she said, returning to the kitchen door. “Warden Vekrynn has everything that Mollanian society can offer—wealth, power, honour, privilege—so why should he descend to being the sort of person you think he is? What would he gain? Can you give me one shred of motive?”

“Not really,” Lorrest replied, picking up his jacket. “He’s a raving megalomaniac, of course—but merely saying that somebody is crazy isn’t analysing his motives.”

Gretana raised her eyebrows. “You are saying that he is insane?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Look at his big project, his famous Notebook. Do you know that he has taken imprints of the summarised depositions of every observer the Bureau has ever stationed on Earth?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It can’t be done, child—that’s what’s wrong with it.” Lorrest paused and softened the pedagogic manner with which he liked to impart information. “There’s an upper limit to the number of our imprints the brain can usefully accommodate. For most people it hovers around the thousand mark, and some highly gifted individuals can cope with three or four thousand—but Vekrynn has zapped himself with at least a hundred thousand. A tenth of a million , Gretana. I don’t think it does him any harm, any more than overfilling a bucket does it harm but it gives you a clue about how he regards his own intellect. A definite god complex, I’d say.”

Gretana struggled with unfamiliar concepts. “Even if what you say is true, it still doesn’t make him a murderer.”

“Doesn’t it? Perhaps what we would regard as culpable homicide he would see as justifiable insecticide. I’m telling you, Gretana, your friend Hargate was too much of an inconvenience to be let stay around.”

“You’re a liar.”

“Did you actually go with him to Cialth and see him installed in some kind of rest home for sick Terrans?”

“No. I told you Vekrynn was trying to protect me—we went to a disused Bureau station first of all, then we split up.”

Lorrest stopped in the act of donning his jacket. “A disused station? Was it bright and hot? All bright and hot, and yellow and orange, with a kind of forest made of barley sugar all around it?”

Gretana nodded. “That sounds right.”

“It must have been Branie IV. There was an observational headquarters there for one of the human civilisations we let go down the tubes about six centuries ago. If Vekrynn abandoned your friend there the heat will have killed him off within a day, but I don’t think he’d have done that. The skord connections are good from Branie IV, and quite a few travellers still go through there. It would be bloody awkward for Vekrynn if somebody found a dessicated Mr Hargate, spinster of this parish, sitting there in his pushchair. He’ll have dumped him somewhere else, but unfortunately—especially for Hargate—we’ve no way of knowing where.”

“Wrong!” Gretana was triumphant, eager to drive Lorrest into a trap of his own devising. “I went back to try to put things right with Vekrynn.”

“So you really were going to fix me.”

“Naturally.” She met Lorrest’s gaze directly, enjoying the moment. “But there was nobody there when I arrived, and I thought I was too late. I went to have a look at your barley sugar forest while I decided what to do next, then I thought I heard voices and I turned back. I was just in time to see Vekrynn and Denny Hargate leave.”

“For Cialth?”

“Where else?”

“I don’t know.” Lorrest looked thoughtful. “What was the mnemo-curve like?”

Gretana hesitated and, employing her Mollanian talent for a special kind of mathematics, traced an exact copy of the gesture Vekrynn had made on the instant of departing with Hargate.

“It wasn’t Cialth,” Lorrest said emphatically.

“How do you know?” Gretana demanded. “You haven’t memorised every reciprocal address in the sector.”

“No, but I know the general form they take. Look.” Abandoning the attempt to put on his jacket, Lorrest set the garment down and gave her an impromptu lecture on descriptive topography as used in the Mollanian transfer system. “So you see,” he concluded, “wherever Vekrynn took your friend it wasn’t to Cialth. Show me the curve again.”

Reluctantly, feeling that once again she was being out-manoeuvred, Gretana began slowly recreating the symbol with her right hand. She had used only about a dozen skord addresses in her life and had regarded each one as being an arbitrary set of mathematical elements. Lorrest’s approach, treating all addresses as part of a unified system and being able to predict relationships between them, was so far superior to hers that it smacked of being unfair. Who decides these things? she wondered, completing the curve. Who teaches one person to enjoy using and developing his mind, whilst allowing another to…?

“It isn’t even in the human sector!” Lorrest hugged his immobilised left arm to his side and began pacing the length of the narrow kitchen. “For some reason Vekrynn has dumped your friend, your tame Terran, about…let’s see…about two hundred light years inside the Attatorian sector. There must be a Type One world there that nobody else from Mollan has even seen—but how did old man Vekrynn latch on to it in the first place? And why ? Why would he…?”

“I’m glad you’ve got around to asking yourself that,” Gretana cut in. “You keep building up these fantastic accusations against the Warden, with no real evidence, and you expect me to believe them. Well, I still don’t believe them and you’re still on your way out of here. Come on!” She picked up Lorrest’s jacket and held it ready for him. Lorrest obediently slipped his arms into it and allowed her to draw it over his shoulders, an action which made him seem oddly childlike in spite of his size and physique.

“That’s a very good point about evidence, and I’m glad you made it,” he said, turning to face her. “I don’t quite know why it is, but I’m becoming obssessed with the notion of making you see reason. Maybe it’s the sheer magnitude of the challenge. Anyway, I’ve worked out how to give you all the proof you need.”