“Yes, you did rather,” I said. “But other people were at it too. And you got all the pieces?”
“No,” he said. “Some were dead, and those who had become anti-matter were impossible to reach on this plane of Infinity. In order to become complete, I found I had to go outside the material planes entirely, to the place that is another part of your Babylon secret. No doubt this was Intended. For while I was on my way there, I encountered three heirs to the Empire and learnt more or less what was going on there. Rob came with me. He asked for his birthright, you know. He said that you and your brother had made him ashamed to be without it. He told me a great deal on the way back.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Our Rob likes to talk. So you’ll be followed by a line of centaurs as Emperor? Good idea. Centaurs have never been the force they should be in any world.”
“I’m glad you agree,” Koryfos said. “But I feel I have deprived you of your office. Rob and I got lost on the way back. We were trying to do two incompatible things, trying to get home and to find you. And we found your brother instead. The Powers Above promptly installed your brother as our adviser instead of you.”
“Si’s a good deal more competent than me,” I said ruefully. “He seems to have got you recognised as Emperor in no time at all.”
“He knew just what to do, certainly,” said Koryfos. “And he tells me that he is Intended to become Magid to the Empire from now on. But I would have preferred you. Your brother’s habit of striding about and fiddling with things perturbs me.”
“You mean even you can’t make him sit still!” I exclaimed.
“I doubt if anyone could,” Koryfos admitted. “It seems to be part of the way your brother functions.”
I could not help smiling. Nothing is ever perfect. Koryfos was obviously an exceptional man, but all the same… All the same, one thing about Koryfos was plain impossible. “How is it,” I asked him, “that you managed to get stripped so often and still be alive after more than two thousand years?”
He looked at me with his golden head tipped to one side and a slight smile on one corner of his mouth. In that pose, he looked exactly like all the statues of himself. He answered me with a question that shook me to the core. “How many members of the Upper Room are there?”
“You know I can’t tell you that!” I said. “You shouldn’t even know there is an Upper Room!”
“Precisely,” he said. “So I will tell you. There are presently seventy-one. There should be seventy-two, but there are not, because I am missing.”
“Oh!” I said. No one but an Archon could have Koryfos’s sort of vitality, or choose a centaur as his heir, for that matter. “Then greetings, great Archon.”
“Greetings to you too, Magid,” he replied. “I had to come here to do something that would stop Infinity drifting entirely Naywards. The Empire was supposed to do that. But I had not established it properly when I was stripped. I must now finish what I started. Because of this, can I ask you to do two things for me?”
“Probably,” I said. “As a neighbour, or as a Magid?”
“One of each,” he said. “Sadly, I must desert my house and my inventing. Would you, Magid, consent to become the owner of my house, to look after or to sell as you see fit?”
I thought of my quacks and Maree’s notion of me standing in Andrew’s pond and I was filled with pleasure. His house is bigger than mine too. “I’d be delighted. What was the other thing?”
“I would like,” he said, “if it is not too difficult, that when you make your report for the Upper Room, you give a copy to me for the archive I shall found in Iforion.”
I considered. He was asking me something much dodgier here. I could see by his head-on-one-side hopeful look that he knew perfectly well he was. It is not just that the Upper Room do not like the reports of Magids to go anywhere but to them: they also take steps to make sure of this. It would take a bit of contriving to get round their usual methods. And I would need to add a few explanations for lay readers. Still, it could probably be done. It could be regarded as a challenge. “Yes, all right,” I said. “But don’t be too disappointed if you don’t get it.”
“I have every faith in you,” he said.
Our interview was over with that. He gave me a strong, electrical handshake and I wandered forth into the metal passageways again. Will and Simon seemed to have gone from the cubby-hole. I walked on, with the steel resonating faintly around me, to the entrance and down the great ramp. I did not feel like going back into the hotel. I went to the staff car park instead, thinking of how to tell Stan about all this.
I unlocked the bent driver’s door on the faintest tinkle of Scarlatti. “Stan?” I said.
There was nothing. No one. My tape-deck was still going, but the car inside was without a presence. Stan had gone. The Upper Room, with customary brusqueness, had decided that Stan’s job was now done and recalled him. I rested my forehead against the roof of the car, near tears.
“I don’t know whether your car or mine is more of a mess,” Maree said, with the gloomy sob prominent in her voice. “If you think this is bad, you should see what Janine did to mine.”
I looked up to find her with her chin resting on the other side of the roof. “I thought you’d gone to the Empire!”
“Not yet. Not permanently,” she said. “I stuck out for going twice a week for lessons, and I’m not seeing that other brother of yours until the end of this week anyway. And I’ve made it clear that it’s not going to interfere with my vet’s degree. No way. Otherwise…”
“Otherwise?” I said.
“There’s all this week and then a lot of time round the edges,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t there.” I felt a great deal better.
Nick Mallory Upperoom Doc
Printout for R. Venables
[1]
Rupert wanted me to write this. He said it was for something called the Upper Room. He said they needed a full report and he was having to make one as well, and would I mind very much? Even they don’t know the things about Babylon that I do. They wanted it for their records. Kind of a debriefing, he said.
I didn’t much want to. I don’t like writing things and when I try to think about Babylon I sort of think I don’t know what happened. I tried to get Rupert to bribe me to do it at first. I know he’s been transferred to a project in another set of worlds now, and it sounds fantastic and I said I’d do a report if he would tell me what he was doing now. But he wouldn’t. Well, it was worth a try. He told me to do it anyway.
Anyway I started. It was difficult at first, but then there was a breakthrough and it got quite easy. That part is on the rest of this disk. This part is the bit I’m adding to the disk I’m giving Rupert and copying the one for Maree to take to Koryfos. Koryfos really seems to want it.
When I’d done the report I copied it on all the disks I’d got. I’d got quite a lot. I can’t get used to having so much money. I do things wrong, like buying a hundred ready-formatted disks and forgetting that what I really want is a modem. The money is because my mother didn’t make a will and I count as her next of kin, and Gramos Albek did make a will, leaving everything to Mum. So I got the clothes business and the arms factory. I haven’t got the factory yet. Rupert and Dad are doing stingy stuff about setting up a Trust for that, but they sold the clothes shop to Mrs Fear, who used to run it really anyway, and now I have an allowance in the Post Office and humongous amounts in a building society and money to burn. I said I didn’t think it was fair on Maree or Dad, but Dad says he has his pride and his books do bring in a pittance after all. Maree says she wouldn’t touch anything belonging to those two with a bargepole as long as the Cabot Tower. But I think Maree’s all right for money. Koryfos has given her some kind of estate over there. She says she and Rupert are having fun laundering the money so that she can use it on Earth.
We persuaded Dad that there was enough money to pay someone to do the cooking. Maree can’t, Dad won’t learn, and I only k
now spaghetti. So Dad goes and gets Mrs Fear’s sister Yvonne, because she was the last person Mum sacked from the shop. This is carrying charity too far. Yvonne cooks worse than Maree. I spend £100 a week buying food I like instead. What I mean is that there is money for things. I bought all these ready-formatted disks. I put my report on all of them and then hid the disks in all sorts of different places before Maree drove me over to Rupert’s place in her new car.
Rupert’s house is quite small, but it’s really good inside. You should just see his roomful of computers and the sound system in his living room. They’re trying to persuade my Uncle Derek (Maree calls him her as-it-were-dad these days) to move in there. Maree and Rupert want to live in the bigger house just along the road where the pond is, as soon as Maree’s qualified, but that won’t be for a while yet, and she wants Rupert to keep an eye on my as-it-were-uncle. I think Uncle Derek is too independent-minded for that. If he stays in London, I shall buy Rupert’s house. I really like it.
When we got there, his latest lot of quack chicks had just hatched. You couldn’t go in the kitchen for fear of treading on them. The Lady Quack always nests under the sink. Lord Quack comes in through the cat flap Rupert’s put in the back door for them, and then goes out again in a hurry when all the chicks rush at him. He came and sat in the living room with us while we had lunch. Rupert is a really good cook. I wish he’d give Yvonne some lessons.
When we’d finish eating, Rupert said, “Ready, you two?” and when we said yes he told me to have my print-out ready and to hold it in my hand. Then he said, “Whatever you may think happens, you must remember that you’re never really going to leave this room where we are.”
I keep wondering why he said that. I had a sort of feeling that it was what he was supposed to say to outsiders (meaning me). And I don’t believe it was true. Magids seem to have to lie quite a lot. I like that, personally. I know that when we’d finished it was hours later and my feet ached from having to stand up all that time. But we started by sitting round in three chairs facing the bookcases and the sound system.
After a while, though nothing much had changed, Rupert said “Right,” and got up and went to the bookcase. He swung a piece of it back like a door. Inside there was a foggy-looking staircase. “Follow me,” he said, and started to climb up it. It was wooden and it creaked. Maree went next. She was very nervous. You can always tell when Maree’s nervous because she looks extra fierce and gloomy and keeps pushing up her specs and blinking. I went last, and I wasn’t nervous at all at that point.
The stairs went up and up and round in a spiral for quite a long time. After about half the climb, I realised that we’d already gone higher than Rupert’s house by a long way. I got very interested. And the higher we climbed, the foggier the stairs got, until everything was sort of milky – or just a bit like a film negative – but the stairs were still made of wood. They still creaked. I could smell the dusty wood-smell of them and I know they were as real as I am. It was quite warm too, and that made the wooden smell stronger.
When I reckon we had climbed at least as high as the top of the church spire in the next village, or maybe higher, we suddenly came under an open arched doorway, on to a bare wooden floor made of very wide boards that creaked worse than the stairs. And I saw we were in the Upper Room. It was pretty big, but I never saw how big, even though I could see the walls and see that they were plain and whitewashed, because it was all the same milky, film-negative whiteness as the stairs. The people there were like that as well. There were lots of them. Half of them were sitting against the wall on benches that looked built in there, and the other half were sitting in chairs round an enormous wooden table that filled most of the room. They seemed to stretch off into the distance. I could see the ones up the other end bending forward or leaning right back in their chairs to look at us.
It was odd, with these people. You got the feeling they were from all different times and places, even though they all dressed the same. Some of them had the kind of faces you only see in very old paintings. And there were two kinds of them. I can’t describe how I knew that. It had nothing to do with where they were sitting or how they looked. I just knew that some of them had been alive once and some of them never had.
The only one who wasn’t sitting down was a little man with a half-bald head and rather bandy legs, who came skipping up to Rupert, grinning all over his face. He was as real as everything else. Rupert bent down and hugged him and then kissed him on both sides of his face like a European politician. I thought the little man must be French or Russian or something. Then he started speaking and I recognised the croaky voice. He was the ghost who was in Rupert’s car. Even then I wasn’t nervous, though Maree was, worse and worse. It was so warm and quiet there.
“I’ve given my evidence already, lad,” the little man croaked. “I’m staying on to confirm yours.”
“Great,” Rupert said. I thought he was a bit nervous too. “I was afraid I wasn’t going to see you again. You remember Nick and Maree, don’t you? This is Stan.”
We shook hands. It was all normal, except that Stan croaked, “Pleased to meet you face to face, if you see what I mean.”
Then Rupert sort of ushered us all forward to the end of the table. There was no one sitting at that end. It was wide enough for us all to stand in a row along it. Even in the milkiness, I could see that the table was thick black oak, and under our feet, where we were standing, the floorboards were worn in a dip from other people standing there.
And then suddenly I was nervous. It was all those faces, all looking. I could see Maree shaking. Stan patted my arm. I looked down on the top of his head, half bald, half curly grey hair, and it made me feel a bit better. But those faces. Some of them were – well, like Koryfos. Even the normal ones looked like judges do without their wigs on television. You know the way they have mouths that don’t seem to smile in the same way as normal people’s. And it made it worse that they were all rather hard to see in the milkiness.
Rupert said, “Magids and Archons of the Upper Room, may I sponsor to your presence Sempronia Marina Timosa Euranivai Koryfoides, as the latest Magid of our number?”
Now I knew why Maree was so nervous. I had noticed she was wearing smart clothes, whatever she says, but I’d thought they were just because she was meeting Rupert. She always dresses up for him. I hadn’t realised it was her day for being sponsored. She bowed.
Someone halfway up the table, a man with a dry sort of voice, asked her if she felt ready to be a Magid, and she pushed at her glasses and more or less snapped, “As ready as I’m ever going to be.”
Then they started asking her all sorts of questions. It was an oral exam really. And I can’t say anything about the questions. I heard them quite clearly at the time, but they seem to have arranged to have them all blurred in my mind when I try to think what was asked – rather like what I thought had happened over Babylon. But Maree did quite well answering. Everyone asked her things, but the chief askers were halfway up the table on both sides. I think that’s where the important ones sat.
And I can’t say anything about the next bit either, because Maree says she’ll kill me if I do. I know she could kill me too, but she says how to do it is a deep secret. She’ll let me say that what she had to do next was a sort of ceremony of magic, like the Tea Ceremony in Japan, and that’s all. That was because she went wrong in the middle. She had to go back three stages and do it again from there. But I was impressed at what she could do. And envious. I can’t make light in the shape of the Infinity sign float over my head. I’ve tried.
She finished properly in the end. One of the people on the benches came and gave her a bundle of robes like the ones they were all wearing, and she put them on and went all milky like they were. That frightened me. It was so like when she was stripped. Stan saw and patted my arm again. Then they told her by all her names that she was now a Magid. She stopped looking nervous and she beamed, all white and foggy.
After that it was Rupert’s
turn. He was really nervous by then. He had gone stringy-faced. One of the ones in the middle of the table asked if he had made a full report “of Koryfos, the heirs of Koryfos and the matters associated”. He said he had. And he laid a thick bundle of papers on the end of the table. I couldn’t help trying to read the first page, but all I saw in the milkiness was the first line. That said: “About a year ago, I was summoned to the Empire capital, Iforion, to attend a judicial enquiry.” I think he’s done what I did and added some more later.
All the faces turned to the papers. There was a long, long thoughtful sort of pause. It was rather horrible. Rupert got out a handkerchief and wiped at his face.
Then, all at once, they seemed to know all about what he’d said in the papers, and they began asking him about it. Really hard questions. Did he know the Emperor was going to beam Timotheo? Did he even suspect it? Why had he taken such a casual attitude to the Empire and its affairs? Was he acquainted with the nature of the bush-goddess? Had he looked her up in the Magid database. On and on.
Rupert explained what he’d done and his reasons, carefully each time. Sometimes he even defended himself, but he didn’t make nearly such a good job of it as I would have done. I kept thinking of excuses he could have made. Twice I made excuses for him. Maree and I both chipped in when they asked why he had let us go after him to Thule and then Thalangia. Maree got really angry, the second time.
“We made sure he didn’t know a thing about it,” she said. “We only followed him because Rob was hurt and couldn’t take us. Damn it, how else were we going to find the way? You can’t just sit there and blame him for something we did!”
I expected them to get angry with her for that, but they were quite polite. Someone right down the end of the table that I couldn’t really see said, “My dear, there’s no need to get so heated. We are not blaming the Magid. We are trying to find out truly how and why these things happened.”