Diana Jones - Deep Secret

“And don’t necessarily choose the most willing. Run tests,” he said. “And when you do choose, make sure you let them follow you around during a fairly big assignment before you begin instructing them. See how they take it – the way I did with you over the Ayeworld pornography and with Will over the oil crisis.”

“What did Simon have?” I asked. No one had ever told me.

“A mistake on my part,” Stan admitted. “Someone was doing a white slave and marriage trade, pushing girls through Earth down from Naywards and then on through the Koryfonic Empire. I let Simon see the police team the Empire sent here to see me about it. Half of them were centaurs. There was no way I could pass them off as Earth people. After that I had to get him ratified as a Magid – he’d seen too much. Lucky for me he’s made a good one. But don’t you worry that you’ll make a mistake like that.”

“I should hope not!” I said.

“You won’t,” said Stan. “Because if you start, I’ll stop you.”

“Er…” I began, wondering how to point the hard truth out.

“I’ll be around,” he said. “I’ve arranged to be here. A Magid can work quite well disincarnate, and I plan to do that until you’ve got things settled.”

I said, half joking and wholly disbelieving, “Don’t you trust me not to balls it up then?”

“I trust you,” Stan said. “But you’ve only been a Magid just over two years. And it used to be customary for all new Magids to have a disincarnate adviser – I found it in the records. So I asked the Upper Room if I could stay and keep an eye on you, and they seemed to think it was reasonable. So I’ll be around. Rely on it.” He sighed, and stared into the distance somewhere beyond his flaking off-white ceiling.

I sighed too, and thought, Be honest, Stan. You just don’t want to go away for good. And I don’t want this to happen either.

“Mostly, though,” Stan added, “it’s that I can’t bear to leave. I’m only eighty-nine. That’s young for a Magid.”

I had not realised he was much above sixty, and said so.

“Oh yes,” he said. “I’ve kept my condition. Most of us do. Then one day you get told, ‘That’s it, boy. Deathday tomorrow,’ and you know it’s true. I’ve been given until sundown.”

I looked out of the window involuntarily. It was November. The shadows were long already.

“Call the doctor just before sunset,” Stan said, and did not say much for a while after that. I gave him some water, got myself some more coffee and waited. Some time later, he began to talk again, this time more generally and reminiscently.

“I’ve seen this world through a lot of changes,” he remarked. “I’ve helped clear away a lot of the political garbage that built up through this century. We’ve got the decks cleared for the changes due to come in the next century now. But, you know, the thing I take most pleasure in is the way we’ve managed to coax this world Ayewards. Gradually. Surreptitiously. When I was a lad, no one even considered there might be other universes, let alone talking of going to them. But now people write books about that, and they talk about working magic and having former lives, and nobody thinks you’re a nutcase for mentioning it. And I think, I did that. Me. I slid us back down the spiral. Back to where we should be. Earth is one of the early worlds, you know – well of course you know – and we should be a long way further Ayewards than we are.”

“I know,” I said, stressfully watching the shadow of my car spread over his bushy lawn.

“Help it along some more,” he said.

“It’s one of the things we’re here for,” I said.

Later, when the room was getting dim, Stan said suddenly, “It was the homesickness that brought me back here, you know.”

“How do you mean?” I asked him.

“I started out my work as a Magid a long way Ayewards,” he murmured. His voice was getting weaker. “I chose it. A bit like Simon chose it. But I chose it for the centaurs. I’d always loved centaurs, always wanted to work with them. And as soon as I learnt that more than half the places Ayewards of here have centaurs, off I went. I thought I’d never come back here, you know.” Centaurs need a magical ambience to maintain them – well, you know they do – and they all died out here when we drifted off Naywards. And for three years I was blissfully happy, working with centaurs, studying them. I don’t think there’s a thing I don’t know about centaurs and their ways. Then I got homesick. Just like that. I can’t tell you what for. It was too general. It was just that the world I was on wasn’t this one. It didn’t smell right. The wind didn’t blow like it does here. Grass the wrong green. Small things, like the water tasting too pure. So back I had to come.”

“To work as a jockey,” I said.

“It was next best to being a centaur,” he said. After a long pause, he added, “I want to get reborn as a centaur. Hope I can arrange that.” Then, after a longer pause still, “Better phone that doctor then.”

The phone was in the kitchen. I went through there and found the number carefully written on a pad laid by the phone. I remember thinking, as I punched it in, that this seemed hard on young Timotheo. I must have been one of the few people to be sorry he was dead, and yet all my sorrow was concentrated on Stan. I forgot Timotheo again the next moment. Stan had made his arrangements with care. The doctor, to my astonishment, answered the phone himself and promised to be there in ten minutes. I rang off and went to the front bedroom.

“Stan?” I said.

There was no answer. He had fallen half off the bed as he died and he had wanted to do that in private. I put him gently back.

“Stan?” I said again, into the dead, dim air.

There was nothing. I could feel nothing.

“So much for the idea of staying around,” I said loudly. But there was still nothing.

A little before Christmas, when most of the other small and large things connected with Stan’s death were done, I had a serious look at the list he had given me. There were five names on it, two of which were female. The addresses indicated that one of these women was British and the other American. The males were from Britain, Holland and – I had to get out my atlas – Croatia. I sighed and tried to look forward to travelling to meet all of them on various invented excuses. At least three of them spoke my language. I could call that lucky, I supposed. Stan had also supplied the dates of birth for all of them except the Croatian. The British girl and the man from Holland were both young. She was twenty, he was twenty-four. That was a point in their favour. The other two were in their forties. I found that a bit daunting. I had just been twenty-six, and the idea of having someone so much older for a pupil filled me with apprehension.

But I set to work to find them all.

I do not wish to describe the frustrations of that search. With interruptions from my neighbour – of whom more hereafter – and my mother’s natural desire to have at least one of her sons home for Christmas, I was divining, travelling or querying my various sources non-stop for six weeks. I flew to Amsterdam to find the Dutchman, Kornelius Punt, only to discover that he had won some kind of scholarship enabling him to travel. He had taken serious advantage of it too. I went down to Avignon, where he was last heard of, and found that he had gone to Rome, Athens and then Jerusalem. After a maddening four days, dealing with the Greek and Italian telephone systems, I came home to find a fax from a Magid visiting Israel informing me that Punt had gone to Australia. I gave up and decided to wait for him to come back. My American contacts traced the older woman, Tansy-Ann Fisk, soon after that. I was just preparing to fly out to Ohio when all sources sent urgent messages not to bother. Fisk had gone into retreat in some kind of all-female clinic where men were not allowed. Looking up this clinic in Magid records, I was a little perturbed to find it carried the remark ‘Query dubious esoterica’. Still, she could have entered the place in good faith for a simple rest-cure. All I could do was wait until she came out. The British man, Mervin Thurless, was equally hard to trace. Eventually it emerged that he was on a lecture tour in Japan. As for the Croatian, Gabrelisovic, I don’t have to remind you that there had been a war there. My NATO sources rather feared he was among the many who had vanished in it without trace.