Deep Secret

  At the end of the first full day, I was ready for a trial. I put in the Empire disk and told it to copy to the hard disk. It resisted all my attempts to make it, even when I very cautiously took the protections off it. So I sighed, put the protections back, and told it to display its files. Nothing. I pushed, unwisely.

  The computer went down so comprehensively that things melted inside. Small flames played over it, and I only just saved the power adapter. I did not want to have to make another. I swore. I had to make haste to study the fused and mangled remains while they were still hot too, which was no fun. There turned out to have been no fewer than three magical safeguards embedded in that program, two major mistakes in my attempt at the Empire’s software, and several more in my adaptation of the unfortunate Amstrad. I spent the evening feverishly tracing pathways.

  “What did that fool Emperor think he was playing at?” I said irritably to Stan, through the tinkling of the CD player. “You’d almost think he’d said, ‘I can’t be Emperor when I’m dead, so I’ll make sure nobody else can.’”

  “Maybe he did,” Stan said. “But some of the other ones who were blown up must have been in the know. He maybe relied on them. It doesn’t matter. You don’t want to get involved.”

  “It’s the people who matter,” I said, thinking of the strained nightmare look on the face of General Dakros. “There’s an ordinary, honest man over there, trying to cope. There are millions of other ordinary people who could get slaughtered when the men of high rank in the other ten worlds start to move in on Dakros. There’s going to be an almighty civil war. It may have started already.”

  “Don’t get sentimental,” said Stan. “Either the high-rankers will win, or your general will get a taste for ruling and keep the Empire for himself. These things happen.”

  That night in bed, I had to admit he was right. But I also wanted to solve the problem.

  The next morning I got a letter from young Mallory. The hard-up student had replied by return of post.

  Dear Mr Venables,

  I don’t mind admitting I could use a hundred quid. I shall be at this address until July, so you can send the money any time. But do you mind telling me just who left me this legacy? I am an adopted child. I know nothing of my real family, and I thought they knew nothing of me.

  Yours,

  M. Mallory.

  “A graceless and slightly suspicious letter,” I remarked to Stan.

  “Yes. You get quite a feel of her from it,” he said. “You’ll know her if you see her across the street after this.”

  He was right. The letter was full of a personality. The paper had evidently been borrowed or purloined from the uncle. It was headed, in gothic type, From Ted Mallory, author of Demons Innumerable, and printed on a hideous dot-matrix printer with almost no ink. But it all breathed a very strong personality.

  “A nuisance, her being adopted,” I fretted. “Who on earth can her legacy be from?”

  “Me,” said Stan. “Say I did research and thought I was her uncle. I did have several very randy brothers, so it could even be true.”

  I dashed off a courteous note to this strong personality, saying that I would give her the money and explain its origin in person shortly, and got back to work on my second-oldest computer, a Toshiba I had barely touched for a year.

  It was hard, detailed going. And it put me under pressure, knowing that I only had the one disk left. I wished I had not left two with Dakros now. In fact I became harassed enough towards the end of that day to get through to the com number Dakros had given me and ask him to spare me another. The answer came back, a prompt and laconic fax:

  Both disks melted.

  Damn. And I really did not want to melt another computer. There seemed to be nothing for it but to cross my fingers and put the second disk in.

  VIRUS DETECTED, announced the Toshiba.

  I got the disk out quick, but at least I was on familiar ground here. I clicked my tongue at the paranoia of the Emperor and set about dismantling the virus. It was a magical implantation. It was like undoing old lace.

  “Aren’t you going to eat today?” Stan asked a while later.

  I looked up to find night had come, early, since it was early in the year, but time to stop for a bit. I made a cup of coffee while I wondered what to eat. Next thing I knew, I was in front of the Toshiba again. It was after midnight. But the virus had gone when I tried the disk.

  “You’re getting obsessed with that Empire,” Stan warned me.

  “Correction,” I said. “I’m obsessed with a computer problem. It’s not every day I get a magical virus.”

  The third day, I actually got the program to copy and display. That was a relief, since I could now reshape some of my own disks and make backups. But it did me no good. All I could get on the screen was the statement that Timotheo was deleted and the perpetual PASSWORD REQUIRED. This was maddening, since I had been behind the scenes of it, so to speak, dealing with the virus, and ought to have been able to bypass the need for a password. But if I tried that, I got nothing at all. And I did not dare push, Magid fashion, for fear of another meltdown.

  Stan heard me swearing and drifted into my workroom. “Give it a password then,” he said. “And when you’ve a moment, put me another music disc on, would you?”

  “What’s the matter with Diabelli? Have you learnt it by heart?” I said.

  “Every note,” he said, quite seriously. “I know Beethoven like a friend now.”

  I put him on a choral medley, because that made a change, and got through to Dakros again. The reply was from the mage Jeffros:

  Empire passwords are usually seven letters. We didn’t try many because the disks melted at every third mistake. But the High Lady Alexandra suspects the word may have been from a nursery rhyme.

  A nursery rhyme! Well, Lady Alexandra was definitely not just a pretty face and the suggestion fitted, as we were dealing with children here. Empire nursery rhymes are not so different from Earth’s. They are one of the things we Magids put into circulation. But seven letters, like a mad hand of Scrabble, in any one of the fourteen languages spoken in the Empire! Actually I was full of hope as I went to set up one of my other computers to run through all the possibilities. I think my only problem was surprise that Timos IX knew such things as nursery rhymes existed.

  Just then I heard Stan’s new music lustily bellowing, “In Babylon, the mighty city!”

  It gave me a frisson. Babylon is one of the deep secrets of the Magids. But it was, for this reason, also a nursery rhyme. I went to the Toshiba and told it ‘BABYLON’.

  It was right.

  World maps began to unfold on the screen, Empire fashion, rippling with lines like isobars on weather charts, map after map, world after world, like half of Infinity. I leant back and watched them, wondering why the Emperor had chosen this particular password from this particular rhyme. Babylon was never a place in the Empire. After a while, a moving frieze of graphics appeared, humans and centaurs passing in profile across the shifting maps. They had the look of real people taken from photographs and they all seemed to be different, but it was hard to tell if they were intended to be meaningful or just an indication that the program was now truly running. Finally, the screen cleared. Letters said TYPE KNARROS.

  I typed ‘KNARROS.’

  NOW TYPE THE NAME OF MY GODDESS came the reply.

  I turned frantically to the computer that held my Empire database, knowing I was going to be too late. “Stan!” I shouted. “Stan, what’s the name of the Emperor’s dismal goddess?”

  “Can’t remember,” he shouted back across what seemed to be the Hallelujah Chorus. “Some damn great mouthful.”

  I remembered it myself – Aglaia-Ualaia – just as the disk wiped.

  “And that’s the man who knew every racehorse from 1935!” I said. “Well, at least I have backups.”

  I did it all over again. By the early evening I was ready again, this time with a list of various other gods, heroes and histori
cal personages from the Empire, just in case. I had developed a hearty respect for the Emperor’s paranoia. But it seemed that the name of his goddess was his last resort. I typed ‘KNARROS’ followed by ‘AGLAIA-UALAIA’ and a list came up.

  KNARROS CODEWORLD LIXOS

  FEMALE B. 3390 CODENAME NATHALIA

  FEMALE B. 3390 CODENAME PHYSILLA

  FEMALE B. 3400 CODENAME ANANTE

  MALE B. 3401 CODENAME EKLOS

  MALE B. 3402 CODENAME MAGRAKES

  PLUS TWO MALE CENTAURS B. 3394 AND 3396

  CODEWORLD BABYLON

  FEMALE B. 3393 CODENAME TIMOAEA

  MALE B. 3399 CODENAME JELLIERO

  Each of the names was followed by clumps of letters, numbers and signs, which meant nothing to me, but which I supposed were the Empire’s version of blood groups or genetic codes or some such. The two lists were followed by the statement:

  KNARROS WILL SUPPLY IDENTIFICATION AND

  AUTHENTICATION OF HEIR(S) ONLY TO ACCREDITED

  MESSENGER ON PROOF OF THE DEATH OF TIMOS IX

  “Gotcha!” I said. I opened a bottle of wine to celebrate before I endeavoured to get through to Dakros on his com number. After the fun and games of the last few days, it was a simple matter to splice him into my telephone. I got him after half an hour, sounding far-off, crackly and very tired. “Two sets of them,” I said, “on two codenamed worlds.” I read him what they were.

  He was nothing like as jubilant. “Who is this Knarros?”

  “Some kind of guardian, I imagine. He might come forward when he hears—”

  “Well, he hasn’t,” he said. “And which bloody worlds are Lixos and Babylon meant to be?”

  “You could get the Imperial Secret Service on to it,” I suggested.

  “I could if they weren’t all mindless gangsters,” he retorted. “We executed most of them yesterday. Trying to stage a coup. And,” he returned to what was obviously the main difficulty, “I don’t like the way it all seems to hang on this Knarros. You have to go through him for the eldest boy, even if it is on another world. What if he’s untrustworthy or someone does him in?”

  “Blame the stupidity of your late ruler,” I said.

  “I don’t like it,” he said.

  “Neither do I,” I said. The fact that the password was Babylon still made my back creep. “I’ve faxed the list to Jeffros. Let him put people to work on it and tell him to let me know if you need my help.”

  “I’m bound to,” he said. “This is a stupid over-secretive mess!”

  I rang off, sighing. “He’s going to want me to find Babylon for him. I can see it coming.”

  “You can’t do that!” Stan said sharply.

  “I think we’re talking about two different things, Stan,” I said. “Or at least I hope we are. Mind turning that music down? I’ve got a headache.”

  I drove to Bristol the next day with a passenger. I had not meant to go so soon, in spite of Stan’s nagging. It seemed to me that I had earned a day with my feet up. But my neighbour rang my doorbell just at the point where I had drunk enough of the wine to quench my headache.

  Andrew Connick is a strange fellow, an inventor. Unlike the unfortunate Derek Mallory, Andrew has succeeded in pushing his creations out of his head into reality, and he holds several dozen patents, all for very useful gadgets. My favourite coffee-pot is one of them. Andrew gave it me to test. Like me, he lives alone – in one of the only two other houses in Weavers End, which is bigger and fancier than mine; it has a large garden with a pond in it, which I sometimes envy him for, until I think of all the digging and weeding Andrew has to do. The third house in Weavers End contains the Gibbs family: Mrs Gibbs cleans my house, her daughter cleans Andrew’s. Mrs Gibbs tells me her daughter says Andrew Connick is a very strange man. And I believe her – though I also believe that Mrs Gibbs tells Andrew that her mother says Rupert Venables is pretty strange too.

  He was standing on my doorstep looking as if he was not sure why he was there. “Hello, Andrew,” I said. “Come on in.” I supposed Stan would have the sense to keep quiet, even though choral music was blasting out around me.

  “I’ll not come in,” he said, in his distrait, Nordic way. Actually I believe him to be Scottish, but I think of him as Nordic because he has that bleached, handsome head and those large bones I always associate with Scandinavians. He is very tall. I am just under six feet and he towered over me, looking uncertain. “No, I’ll not enter,” he said. “I just came to ask you to give me a lift tomorrow.”

  “Car broken down again?” I said. My heart sank. The last two occasions Andrew’s car had failed him, between Christmas and New Year, I had clocked up over six hundred miles shuttling Andrew and various spare parts between here and Cambridge – and Ely and Huntingdon and St Neots, not to speak of Peterborough and King’s Lynn.

  “Aye,” he said. “It won’t be moving.”

  My heart rebelled against more shuttling. I had earned a rest. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m not going to be here tomorrow. I’ve got to go to Bristol.”

  He was silent, with his large pale eyes on the distance above my head, evidently thinking. After a while he said, “I’ll come to Bristol then.”

  I had a mad feeling that if I had said I was going to drive to Carlisle, Edinburgh or Canterbury he would have agreed to come to any of those places too. “It’s quite a way,” I said, in a last-ditch effort to dissuade him. “I’m making an early start.”

  He thought about that too. “I can be ready by six.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, I didn’t mean that early!” I said, giving in. “Let’s say eight-thirty, shall we?”

  “I’ll be there,” he said, and left.

  So I found myself committed to driving to Bristol. “Are you coming with me?” I asked Stan. “Or do you think you might frighten Andrew?”

  There was one of Stan’s unhappy pauses. Then he said, “I don’t think I can, lad. I seem to be confined to your house.”

  “Are you sure?” I said. “Where else have you tried to go?”

  “Beyond the garden gate. Past your barn at the back. I couldn’t manage either direction,” he said.

  I was annoyed. It had been a tiring few days. “What’s the good of having a ghostly adviser, if you can’t be around to advise me?” I demanded. “I was relying on your opinion about this girl.”

  “Then stand on your own feet for a change!” his voice retorted. “It’s what Them Up There seem to want you to do.”

  I knew I had hurt his feelings. He did not speak to me again that night, and I heard not a word from him in the morning, not even when I arranged for him a floating stack of CDs, each one magically programmed to hop in or out of the CD player when he gave it the word. I was proud of that magic. And I considered it thoughtful too. So I was offended in my turn. I went out to my car in chilly silence and found Andrew waiting beside it.

  Andrew is actually a good passenger. He does not make conversation, or talk about other motorists, or make nervous comments on how fast I drive (which is fast). He just sits there. This sometimes gets unnerving. When I got particularly unnerved – the first time was two-thirds of the way round the M25 – I asked him about his latest invention. And he told me, in his deceptively slow and meditative way, which nevertheless described the thing – he called it a “swing-ratchet” – so accurately that I could probably have done drawings and patented it myself. Then he stopped talking.

  Some way down the M4, I became unnerved again. But I felt it was my turn to tell him something. Usually when I drive him anywhere I tell him about any software problem I have lately run into. Very often he has set me on the right lines just with one of his slow, wandering responses. This time, however, my problems had been something of a deep secret. There did not seem to be any way to talk about them. Or was there? In a world tending Naywards like ours, no one is going to suspect you are talking about a collapsing Empire three universes away.

  “Tell me,” I said, “what would you think if you
found the password you needed to access someone else’s program was a sort of secret codeword the programmer shouldn’t really have thought of using in that way? I mean, suppose the password was something silly like Humpty-Dumpty to a very serious program – say, something about genetics – and you knew that Humpty-Dumpty was actually a codeword for something equally serious – say, classified military information. What would you think? Would you put it down to coincidence, or what?”

  Andrew said ruminatively, “I’m told there is no such thing as coincidence.”

  I was told that too and, what is more, told it as a Magid, which made it very significant. But it seemed to me that Andrew was just uttering a platitude. I was disappointed.

  He said, “Is there no chance the user of the password hacked into the other classified material?”

  I said, “Well, it’s always possible,” to cover up what I was really talking about, and added, “but it’s unlikely to many decimal places. Virtually impossible, in fact.”

  “If it’s that unlikely,” Andrew meditated, “then I reckon you have to go back in time, to some wee point where the codeword was known to someone who told it to both parties – a teacher who recited ‘Humpty-Dumpty’, to take your example, and both users learnt it from him. And this teacher would have given both of them the idea that the words were somehow important, maybe – but that is not essential.”

  “That,” I said, “is very true.” I drove digesting this thought. Were Magid secrets known in the Koryfonic Empire sometime in the past? I did not think they were supposed to be known there now, any more than they should be known here on Earth. There are some things that even Ayewards worlds should not know yet. But there are always hints, vestiges of knowledge both from the past and the future, that Magids leave for people to pick up when the time is right. Babylon was certainly one of those. I suppose it worried me that Timos IX was an unlikely person to be interested in such a hint.