Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Read online

  And the other panels: what lay under them? I played my light across the swirl of spring colors, and my heart sank.

  The sensible thing would be to leave. God knows the place had chilled and I wanted to get out of there, and off Fishbowl, and to put behind me, somehow, the last four years of my life.

  I removed a second panel. There was enough light from outside to see that there was another sketch. I hesitated, and put the lamp on it.

  It was the same hideous figure.

  And I uncovered another, next to the second.

  I was slow to realize that the three images, however, were not identical. The angle of the profile changed from one to another, the shading in each set of eyes was subtly different, the beards—I took them all down, ten or eleven panels: the same face appeared again and again, its grotesque expression, each time, varied in some way.

  My Durell. The gentlest, finest human being I had known.

  I replaced the panels. If there had been a way, I would have razed the walls, or destroyed the building. No wonder the proprietor of the crockery shop had been frightened of me.

  4.

  Fishbowl’s chess club meets in a glass-lined conference room on the second level of the Annex, which is a flattened pyramid adjacent Survey’s main administration building. On the night of my visit, there were roughly a dozen games in progress, and one spectator, an elderly woman with the glittering eyes of a bird of prey. She immediately challenged me to play.

  I declined politely, whispering that I did not understand the game (an explanation which provoked a brief look of disbelief), and inquired whether she’d ever heard of Durell. She hadn’t, and I settled in to watch for an opportunity to ask someone else. The only sounds in the room were the occasional scraping of chairs, and the ticking of chess clocks.

  It was difficult to find a way to talk to any of them. Players had a tendency to resign merely by stopping the clock. Then, within moments, they’d reset the pieces and begun again. Not that it mattered: when I tried to ask questions, people shook their heads irritably, and looked pointedly at their boards.

  I retired from the field of combat, and settled for intercepting players on their way to the washroom. Two or three remembered Durell, but only as someone who came occasionally to the club. (“Liked to play the Dragon Variation of the Sirian, but he was far too cautious.”)

  Toward the end of the evening, I approached an overweight, red-faced little man whose name was Jon Hollander. Hollander was one of the club’s officers. Someone told me later that chess was the consuming passion of his life, but that he wasn’t very good at it. “I don’t recall him, Tiel, but we’ve had a lot of members over the years. What precisely did you want to know?” He looked at me the way men do when they’ve been a long time without a woman.

  I had no idea. “He was an old friend. I suppose I just wanted to talk with someone who’d known him,” I said.

  “And you can’t find anybody?”

  “Not really.”

  He nodded. “Maybe we can find something in the archives.”

  We left the clubroom, and turned into a long carpeted corridor that curved and rose until we’d ascended approximately one floor. He led the way into an office, and sat down at a terminal. “There may not be anything,” he said, “but we can try.”

  He punched in Durell’s name. Dates and numbers appeared. Hollander tapped the screen. “He was a member for almost two years.” He grinned. “He had some problems paying his dues.”

  “What else do you have?”

  “Address and code number. You want those?”

  “No.”

  Hollander frowned. “How about one of his games? We have three on record.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Looks like he lost them all anyhow.”

  “You don’t have a picture of him, do you?”

  Hollander pushed a pad, and an index appeared. “No,” he said, running his eye down the names. “We have several group photos from the period when he was a member, but he doesn’t seem to be in any of them.” The index faded, to be replaced by several people in parkas, standing outside the Annex during a snowstorm. “The Second Winter Open. Coll played in that tournament, but I guess he wasn’t around when they took the picture.” Another group appeared, still cold weather, but the snow was gone. “This was our first Masters’, the same year. He wasn’t eligible for that one.”

  He changed it again, for an indoor shot. But something had struck me about the Winter Open, and I didn’t know what. “Go back to the first one, Jon,” I said.

  The snow scene reappeared. Three women were seated on a bench, in front of four men. “That’s me on the left,” said Hollander.

  “Who’s that beside you?”

  He squinted. “Looks like Ux.” The man was bigger than Hollander, shorter than the other two. Although his hood was tied down against the chill of the day, he wore a wide smile. Hollander brought his image up. “Yes,” he said, “it’s Reuben Uxbridge. Did you know him?”

  I knew him: his was the face on the wall. “Who is he?”

  Hollander’s features softened. “He was a charter member. One of the strongest players we’ve ever had. He specialized in the end game. Absolutely deadly once the queens were off the board.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Ux died quite a few years ago, Tiel.”

  Down the long corridor, I could hear voices as the playing room emptied out. “What happened to him?” He was middle-aged, and he looked healthy enough.

  Hollander pressed his palms together. “He drowned. I guess it was only a year or so after the picture was taken.” His eyes grew thoughtful. “Queer business. He walked out onto a beach near his home one day in midsummer. A couple of families were there on an outing. He went past then without saying a word and simply walked into the sea.”

  He turned slowly in my direction, but his eyes were unfocused. “Why?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “He was here for about two years before they went to Belarius. When he came back, he was different.”

  “Belarius? Was that the second attempt?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I guess both expeditions more or less blew up. The official word was that there were hostile conditions. Ux never mentioned it and, to my knowledge, no one around here pressed him about it. But something happened. At one point, there was talk that he’d brought something back.”

  “How did he change?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. It’s hard to put your finger on. For one thing, his game improved. No, don’t look at me like that: I mean really improved. He threw himself into his chess. Played like a man possessed. He opened up, and abandoned his old precise positional play for a ferocious combinative style. Listen, Tiel, chess players can change their approach to the game, but I never saw anything like this. It was like he was a different person.” He got up slowly and shut down the computer. “Furthermore, during that latter stage, he was the strongest player we had.

  “That wasn’t the only thing. He became withdrawn, didn’t talk much to anyone. That kind of condition has to become pretty severe before you notice it in a chess club.”

  We retraced our steps to the playing room. “Did he have a family? Anyone I might talk to?”

  “No,” said Hollander. “None that I know of. But I can give you a list of people who knew him. Everyone liked him.”

  “Who was with him on Belarius?”

  He shook his head. “Nobody here. They still have some people at Survey who made the second flight. They’ll remember him.”

  That seemed strange: we were on Survey’s grounds. “You mean there are no employees in Survey’s chess club?”

  “They just lend us the space, Tiel.”

  “Is it a coincidence,” I asked, “that Uxbridge’s name is the same as the bay’s? The one at the far end of the island?”

  “That’s the only bay we’ve got. No: it’s no coincidence. He lived out there. At the point.”

  “Jon,” I said,
“I was there yesterday, and I didn’t see any houses. Not in the area of the bay, anyhow.”

  “You wouldn’t,” he said. “It’s in the bay now. Shortly after Ux died, somebody took a laser to the projector at the Point, and let the sea in. Pity: it was a fine house.”

  My scalp began to prickle. “That sounds as if you’ve been inside it.”

  “A few times. He used to invite one or another of us out sometimes to play a few games.” His eyes closed, and a rueful smile appeared. “He had a kind of trophy room at the back of the house, filled with plaques and artifacts and whatnot. There were two leather chairs he’d brought from Rimway. Tiel, they were probably the only leather chairs on Fishbowl! Those were fine evenings. And good chess.”

  “Jon, was this before he went to Belarius?”

  “Oh, yes.” He nodded. “I don’t think anybody ever went out to the house after he came back. The invitations stopped. At least mine did. Although, now that I think of it, he came to my place now and then. He just didn’t reciprocate any more.” He’d turned away and was looking out through the glass. Fishbowl’s rings illuminated the sky over the Admin Building.

  “The destruction of the seawall,” he continued, “created some commotion, because people thought maybe we had a loony running around who was planning to sink the island. For a while they posted guards at all the projector stations, but nothing more ever happened, and I guess they finally decided it was just some kids. Now, the projectors are pretty well shielded.”

  “They never made repairs at the Point?”

  He shrugged. “Draining the new bay and reestablishing the screen would have been expensive, so we didn’t bother. No one ever stepped forward to take a proprietary interest. There’ve been proposals to go in and reclaim the land, but there’s really no reason to. So we named the bay after him instead.”

  I showed him the holo of the Cordelet, “Is this what we’re talking about?”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s it. The house is down there somewhere. Right about in the middle, I’d think.”

  I wondered if it had ever occurred to anyone that somebody had specifically wanted to destroy Uxbridge’s home.

  5.

  In the morning, I rented a skimmer. But instead of turning south and running down the coastline, I procrastinated, hovering aimlessly over Pellinor for an hour, and then drifting out to sea. I kept low, just above the waves, until my clothes were drenched with spray. Behind me, the land vanished into a hole in the ocean, bracketed by the cluster of brown hills to the south, and the upper levels of Pellinor’s wide ramps.

  I settled into the water. Gideon was hidden behind thick white clouds. The white rim of Heli was just pushing out of the sea, and the color of the sky was changing while I watched.

  I’m not sure how long I sat out there, listening to the water lap against the sideboards, thinking about the mad portraits and Reuben Uxbridge’s walk into the sea. If Hollander was correct, Uxbridge had undergone a basic personality change. As, to a lesser extent, Durell had.

  I was no longer sure I wanted to know the truth, but I did not wish to be driven at some future date to return to Fishbowl because I couldn’t sleep well. What had begun as an innocent nostalgic excursion had become something radically different.

  I buckled myself in, left the shields down so I could feel the rush of air, and started back. Only the drifting quill, their fibrilla dangling into the waves, broke the monotony of sea and sky. An ocean with a single shore gets little traffic.

  Just off the Point, a school of large marine animals were sunning themselves. There must have been a hundred or more, huge creatures, of the stature of Rimway’s behemoth, or Earth’s sperm whale. They moved slowly, and their great dark eyes rolled curiously skyward to watch me pass. The articulation of fin and jaw was not so fine or detailed as I was accustomed to, but Fishbowl is a young world.

  Abruptly, the sea fell away, and I was over the rills and valleys of the island. Then they too gave way, though not with the same breathtaking suddenness, to the burnished surface of Uxbridge Bay.

  The mood of my first visit was gone: the sense of a place out of time, of a world with psychic links to an earlier age, had evaporated. And in its stead, despite the twin morning suns, I sensed only madness and despair.

  I drifted over the waters of the bay, slowed to a few klicks, and locked in the pilot. Out near the Point, beyond the arc of hills, lay the sandy beach across which Uxbridge had strolled to his death.

  The bay was almost perfectly circular. This was a feature not apparent in the Cordelet, where the harbor mouth appears quite distant, and the far shore rather near, suggesting a more elongated shape. Close in, the bottom was littered with rocks. But it was relatively clear, despite rippling shadows cast by currents, and clumps of undulating sea anima. A line of rocks lay close to the place where I’d stood my first day surveying the scene. Paralleling the coastline for a considerable distance, they were either a collapsed breakwater or the remains of a wall.

  I dropped lower and flew in wide circles that took me well out to sea on each pass. There was no sign of a submerged house. After an hour or so, I flew listlessly over the mouth of the bay, suspecting the entire story was mythical. I was about to give up when I saw a shadow in the water.

  I lobbed a cone buoy over the side, came around and, too absorbed perhaps to pay attention to what I was doing, cut power before I was fully down. The skimmer chopped heavily into the water, bounced, jabbed its nose below the surface, and threatened briefly to turn over.

  I blamed it on the lighter gravity, took a quick look around for damage (there was none), and got out a deep-sided glass dish I’d brought along for submarine viewing. There was a house down there. The light wasn’t good, but I could see its roof.

  It looked intact. That struck me as being exceedingly unlikely, until I noticed a small ridge cutting diagonally down from the shoreline and across the bottom of the basin. Driven into it, and now broken off, were a pair of stems of the type that provided nominal support for a Gantner light system.

  That meant Uxbridge’s house had been entirely, or at least partly, above the flood. But the water had got at the projector and shorted it out. The increased weight had snapped the stems, and the place had gone to the bottom.

  It was a three-level structure, and it looked like stone rather than the standardized materials generally in use on Fishbowl. The external appurtenances, stylized cupolas, belvederes, porticoes, and so on that characterize most of the wealthy homes on Fishbowl (and on Rimway, for that matter) were particularly in evidence here. Add small, round windows, and the illusion of an exotic sea beast lying quietly in the sand was complete.

  But the windows were dark, and only fish swam through its abandoned rooms.

  It had no tower.

  I’d brought a breather with me, and I knew that the next rational step was to use it. But the house was far down, and the suspicion of what I might find prevented my unpacking the unit. Instead, I sat rocking gently on the skimmer, feeling like a damned fool.

  After a while, I started the engine and rolled angrily into the bright clear sky.

  6.

  When Jon Hollander looks through the windows from the office in which the Pellinor Chess Club keeps its records, he can see a broad oval pool. Directly beyond the pool crouches a heavy, triple-tiered oblate building utterly out of place among the crystal structures of the Survey complex. This is the Belarian Field Museum. It is, according to a plaque mounted at the front entrance, an accurate representation of architectural styles to be found at Ysdril West, one of the major excavation sites in that world’s southern hemisphere. It is accurate rather than exact, because it has been necessary to increase the size of doorways, and raise ceilings, to accommodate human visitors.

  One recognizes immediately that it is the work of a primitive race. Constructed of quartz, the Field Museum is set within a pavilion ringed by flapping pennants. There are few windows, and the upper tiers are progressively recessed, creating
an effect somewhat like that of a ziggurat.

  The quartz blocks are rough-hewn and joined with cement. Nightmare creatures with bared fangs and talons guard the entrances, and hieroglyphs have been stenciled into the living rock, marking the four cardinal points of the compass. The inscriptions are delicate, sylphlike engravings, utterly out of character with the ponderous stone blocks and doors.

  I’d paused on the west portico to examine one, tracing the lean characters with my fingers. A plate translated: “In the hour of need, I am with you.”

  The Museum’s windows were small, recessed, and barred. Another plaque announced that the structure was a place of worship, but it felt like a fortress.

  I wasn’t entirely ignorant about the Belarians. They’d been small creatures, by human standards, seldom surpassing a meter in height. Artists’ renderings of their appearance were disquieting, however: pale, bloated, gas-filled bodies, not unlike the amoeba-like quill.

  They never achieved a technological culture, and the last of them went to their reward a million years ago. Standing in the shadow of that gloomy pile, I wondered how such creatures could have developed a written language. Or, for that matter, juggled building supplies.

  I entered the Field Museum through a heavy square-cut arch. The ground floor was crowded with display cases, statuary, tools, and assorted other artifacts. An attendant in Survey’s light and dark green uniform stood beside a stone altar, behind which several viewing booths had been installed. To my right, a ramp ascended to the upper levels.

  I was surprised to discover an abundance of natural light emanating from a circular courtyard. The overall effect was that somehow, within these walls, time had slowed from its natural pace, and become somehow quite palpable.

  There was only one other visitor, a brittle, elderly man who was sketching an inscription from a hexagonal stone mounted over a display board. I walked among the artifacts, little figures carved from black rock set in gleaming cases with neat white cards identifying their probable age and use.