Assignment in Nowhere

Chapter Seven

It was three days before I felt strong enough to pay my call on Mother Goodwill. Her cottage was a thatch-roofed rectangle of weathered stone almost lost under a tangle of wrist-sized rose vines heavy with deep red blossoms. I squeezed through a rusted gate, picked my way along a path overhung with untrimmed rhododendron, lifted the the huge brass knocker, clanked it against the low black oak door. Through the one small, many-paned window, I caught a glimpse of the corner of a table, a pot of forgetmenots, a thick leather-bound book. There was a humming of bees in the air, a scent of flowers, and a whiff of fresh-brewed coffee. Not the traditional setting for calling on a witch, I thought…

The door opened. Mother Goodwill, looking neat in a white shirt and peasant skirt, favored me with a sad smile, motioning me in.

“No Halloween costume today,” I commented.

“You’re feeling better, Mr. Bayard,” she said drily. “Will you have a mug of coffee? Or is’t not customary in your native land?”

I shot her a sharp look. “Skeptical already?”

Her shoulders lifted and dropped. “I believe what my senses tell me. Sometimes they seem to contradict each the other.” I took a chair at the table, glanced around the small room. It was scrupulously clean and tidy, furnished with the kind of rustic authenticity that would have had the ladies of the DAR back home oohing and aahing and overworking the word “quaint.” Mother Goodwill brought the pot over, poured two cups, put cream and sugar on the table, then sat.

“Well, Mr. Bayard, is your mind clear this morning, your remembrance well restored?”

I nodded, tried the coffee. It was good.

“Don’t you have some other name I could call you?” I asked. “Mother Goodwill goes with the fright wig and the warts.”

“You may call me Olivia.” She had slim, white hands, and on one finger a fine green stone twinkled. She sipped her coffee and looked at me, as though making up her mind to tell me something.

“You were going to ask me questions,” I prompted her. “After I’ve answered them, maybe you’ll clear up a few matters for me.”

“Many were the wonders you babbled of in your delirium,” she said. I heard a tiny clatter, glanced at her cup; a fine tremor was rattling it against the saucer. She put it down quickly, ducked her hands out of sight.

“Oft have I sensed that there was more to existence than this…” she waved a hand to take in everything. “In dreams I’ve glimpsed enchanted hills and my heart yearned out to them, and I’d wake with the pain of something beautiful and lost that haunted me long after. I think in your wild talk, there was that which made a certain hope spring up again—a hope long forgotten, with the other hopes of youth. Now tell me, stranger, that talk of other worlds, like each to other as new-struck silver pieces, yet each with a tiny difference—and of a strange coach, with the power to fly from one to the next—all this was fancy, eh? The raving of a mind sore vexed with meddling—”

“It’s true—Olivia,” I cut in. “I know it’s hard to grasp at first. I seem to recall I was a bit difficult to convince once. We’re accustomed to thinking we know everything. There’s a powerful tendency to disbelieve anything that doesn’t fit the preconception.”

“You spoke of trouble, Brion…” she spoke my name easily, familiarly. I suppose sharing someone’s innermost thoughts tends to relax formalities. I didn’t mind. Olivia without her disguise was a charming woman, in spite of her severe hairdo and prison pallor. With a little sunshine and just a touch of makeup—

I pulled myself back to the subject at hand.

She listened attentively as I told her the whole story, from Richthofen’s strange interrogation to my sentencing by the Xonijeelians.

“So I’m stuck,” I finished. “Without a shuttle, I’m trapped here for the rest of my days.”

She shook her head. “These are strange things, Brion, things I should not believe, so wild and fantastic are they. And yet—I do believe…”

“From what little I’ve learned of this world line, it’s backward technologically—”

“Why, we’re a very modern people,” Olivia said. “We have steam power—the ships on the Atlantic run make the crossing in nine days—and there are the balloons, the telegraph, and telephone, our modern coal-burning road cars which are beginning to replace the horse in many parts of the colonies, even—”

“Sure, I know Olivia—no offense intended. Let’s just say that in some areas we’re ahead of you. The Imperium has the M-C drive. My own native world has nuclear power, jet aircraft, radar, and a primitive space program. Here you’ve gone in other directions. The point is, I’m stranded here. They’ve exiled me to a continuum I can never escape from.”

“Is it so ill then, Brion? You have a whole world here before you—and now that the artificial barriers have been cleansed from your mind, you’ll freely recall these wonders you left behind!” She was speaking eagerly now, excited at the prospect. “You spoke of aircraft. Build one! How marvelous to fly in the sky like a bird! Your coming here could mean the dawn of a new Age of Glory for the Empire!”

“Uh-huh,” I said ungraciously. “That’s great. But what about my world? By now the Hagroon have probably launched their attack—and maybe succeeded with it! My wife may be wearing chains now instead of pearls!” I got up, stamped over to the window and stared out. “While I rot here, in this backwater world,” I snarled.

“Brion,” she said softly behind me. “You find yourself troubled—not so much by the threat of your beloved friends as by the quality of remoteness these matters have taken on…”

I turned. “What do you mean, remote? Barbro, my friends, in the hands of these ape-men—”

“Those who tampered with your mind, Brion, sought to erase these things from your memory. True, my skill availed to lift the curse—but ’tis no wonder that they seem to you now as old memories, a tale told long ago. And I myself gave a command to you while yet you slept, that the pain of loss be eased—”

“The pain of loss be damned! If I hadn’t been fool enough to trust Dzok—”

“Poor Brion. Know you not yet it was he who gulled you while you slept, planted the desire to go with him to Xonijeel? Yet he did his best for you—or so your memory tells.”

“I could have taken the shuttle back,” I said flatly. “At least I’d have been there, to help fight the bastards off.”

“And yet, the wise ones, the monkey-men of Xonijeel, told you that this Zero-zero world did not exist—”

“They’re crazy!” I took a turn up and down the room. “There’s too much here I don’t understand, Olivia! I’m like a man wandering in the dark, banging into things that he can’t quite get his hands on. And now—” I raised my hands and let them fall, suddenly inexpressibly weary.

“You have your life still ahead, Brion. You will make a new place for yourself here. Accept that which cannot be changed.”

I came back and sat down.

“Olivia, I haven’t asked Gunvor and the others many questions. I didn’t want to arouse curiosity by my ignorance. The indoctrination Dzok and his boys gave me didn’t cover much—just enough to get me started. I suppose they figured I’d get to a library and brief myself. Tell me something about this world. Fill me in on your history, to start with.”

She laughed—an unexpectedly merry sound.

“How charming, Brion—to be called upon to describe this humdrum old world as though it were a dreamer’s fancy—a might-have-been, instead of dull reality.”

I managed a sour smile. “Reality’s always a little dull to whoever’s involved in it.”

“Where shall I begin? With Ancient Rome? The Middle Ages?”

“The first thing to do is establish a Common History date—the point at which your world diverged from mine. You mentioned ‘The Empire.’ What empire? When was it founded?”

“Why, the Empire of France, of course…” Olivia blinked, then shook her head. “But then, nothing is ‘of course’,” she said. “I speak of the Empire established by Bonaparte, in 1799.”

“So far so good,” I said. “We had a Bonaparte, too. But his empire didn’t last long. He abdicated and was sent off to Elba in 1814—”

“Yes—but he escaped, returned to France, and led his armies to glorious victory!”

I was shaking my head. “He was free for a hundred days, until the British defeated him at Waterloo. He was sent to St. Helena and died a few years later.”

Olivia stared at me. “How strange… how eerie, and how strange. The Emperor Napoleon ruled in splendor at Paris for twenty-three years after his great victory at Brussels, and died in 1837 at Nice. He was succeeded by his son, Louis—”

“The Duke of Reichstadt?”

“No; the Duke died in his youth, of consumption. Louis was a boy of sixteen, the son of Emperor and the Princess of Denmark.”

“And his Empire still exists,” I mused.

“After the abdication of the English tyrant George, the British Isles were permitted to enter the Empire as a special ward of the Emperor. After the unification of Europe, enlightenment was brought to the Asians and Africans. Today, they are semiautonomous provinces, administered from Paris, but with their own local Houses of Deputies empowered to deal with internal matters. As for New France—or Louisiana—this talk of rebellion will soon die down. A royal commission has been sent to look into the complaints against the Viceroy.”

“I think we’ve got the C. H. date pretty well pinned down,” I said. “Eighteen-fourteen. And it looks as though there’s been no significant scientific or technological progress since.”

This prompted questions which I answered at length. Olivia was an intelligent and well-educated woman. She was enthralled by my picture of a world without the giant shadow of Bonaparte falling across it.

The morning had developed into the drowsy warmth of noon by the time I finished. Olivia offered me lunch and I accepted. While she busied herself at the wood-burning stove, I sat by the window, sipping a stone mug of brown beer, looking out at this curious, anachronistic landscape of tilled fields, a black-topped road along which a horse pulled a rubber-tired carriage, the white and red dots of farmhouses across the valley. There was an air of peace and plenty that made my oddly distant recollection of the threat to the Imperium seem, as Olivia said, like a half-forgotten story, read long ago—like something in the book lying on the table. I picked up the fat, red leather-bound volume, glanced at the title:

“That’s funny,” I said.

Olivia glanced over at the book in my hands, smiled almost shyly.

“Strange reading matter for a witch, you think? But on these fancies my own dreams sometimes love to dwell, Brion. As I told you, this one narrow world seems not enough—”

“It’s not that, Olivia. We’ve pretty well established that our C. H. date is early in the nineteenth century. Baum wasn’t born until about 1855 or so—nearly half a century later. But here he is…”

I flipped the book open, noted the publisher—Wiley & Cotton, New York, New Orleans, and Paris—and the date: 1896.

“You know this book, in your own strange world?” Olivia asked.

I shook my head. “In my world he never wrote this one…” I was admiring the frontispiece by W. W. Denslow, showing a Glinda-like figure facing a group of gnomes. The next page had an elaborate initial “I” at the top, followed by the words: “ ‘…summoned you here,’ said Sorana the Sorceress, ‘to tell you…’ ”

“It was my favorite book as a child,” Olivia said. “But if you know it not, how then do you recognize the author’s name?”

“He wrote others. THE WIZARD OF OZ was the first book I ever read all the way through.”

“The Wizard of Oz? Not The Sorceress? How enchanting it would be to read it!”

“Is this the only one he wrote?”

“Sadly, yes. He died the following year—1897.”

“Eighteen ninety-seven; that could mean…” I trailed off. The fog that had been hanging over my mind for days since I had awakened here was rapidly dissipating in the brisk wind of a sudden realization: Dzok and his friends had relocated me, complete with phony memories to replace the ones they’d tried to erase, in a world-line as close as possible to my own. They’d been clever, thorough, and humane. But not quite as clever as they thought, a bit less thorough in their research than they should have been—and altogether too humane.

I remembered the photogram the councillors had shown me—and the glowing point, unknown to Imperial Net cartographers, which represented a fourth, undiscovered world lying within the Blight. I had thought at the time that it was an error, along with the other, greater error that had omitted—the Zero-zero line of the Imperium.

But it had been no mistake. B-I Four existed—a world with a Common History date far more recent than the 15th century—the C. H. date of the closest lines beyond the Blight.

And I was there—or here—in a world where, in 1897 at least one man known in my own world had existed. And if one, why not another—or two others: Maxoni and Cocini, inventors of the M-C drive.

“Could mean what, Brion?” Olivia’s voice jarred me back to the present.

“Nothing. Just a thought.” I put the book down. “I suppose it’s only natural that even fifty years after a major divergence, not everything would have been affected. Some of the same people would be born…”

“Brion,” Olivia looked at me across the room. “I won’t ask you to trust me, but let me help you.”

“Help me with what?” I tried to recapture the casual expression I’d been wearing up until a moment before, but I could feel it freezing on my face like a mud pack.

“You have made a plan; I sense it. Alone, you cannot succeed. There is too much that is strange to you here, too many pitfalls to betray you. Let me lend you what help I can.”

“Why should you want to help me—if I were planning something?”

She looked at me for a minute without answering, her dark eyes wide in her pale, classic face.

“I’ve spent my life in search for a key to some other world… some dreamworld of my mind. Somehow, you seem to be a link, Brion. Even if I can never go there, it would please me to know I’d helped someone to reach the unattainable shore.”

“They’re all worlds, just like this one, Olivia. Some better, some worse—some much, much worse. They’re all made up of people and earth and buildings, the same old natural laws, the same old human nature. You can’t find your dreamworld by packing up and moving on; you’ve got to build it where you are.”

“And yet—I see the ignorance, the corruption, the social and moral decay, the lies, the cheats, the treachery of those who hold the trust of the innocent—”

“Sure—and until we’ve evolved a human society to match our human intelligence, those things will exist. But give us time, Olivia—we’ve only been experimenting with culture for a few thousand years. A few thousand more will make a lot of difference.”

She laughed. “You speak as though an age were but a moment.”

“Compared with the time it took us to evolve from an amoeba to an ape—or even from the first Homo sapiens to the first tilled field—it is a moment. But don’t give up your dreams. They’re the force that carries us on toward whatever our ultimate goal is.”

“Then let me lend that dream concrete reality. Let me help you, Brion. The story they told me—that you had fallen ill from overwork as an official of the Colonial Office, that you were here for a rest cure—’tis as thin as a Parisian nightdress! And, Brion…” She lowered her voice. “You are watched.”

“Watched? By whom—a little man with a beard and dark glasses?”

“ ’Tis no jest, Brion! I saw a man last night lurking by the gate at Gunvor’s house—and half an hour since, a man well muffled up in scarves passed in the road yonder, as you supped coffee.”

“That doesn’t prove anything—”

She shook her head impatiently. “You plan to fly, I know that. I know also that your visit to me will arouse the curiosity of those who prison you here—”

“Prison me? Why, I’m as free as a bird—”

“You waste time, Brion,” she cut me off. “What deed you committed, or why, I know not; but in a contest between you and drab officialdom, I’ll support your cause. Now, quickly, Brion! Where will you go? How will you travel? What plan will—”

“Hold on, Olivia! You’re jumping to conclusions!”

“And jump you must, if you’d evade the hounds of the hunter! I sense danger, closing about you as a snare about the roebuck’s neck!”

“I’ve told you, Olivia—I was exiled here by the Xonijeelian Council. They didn’t believe my story—or pretended not to. They dumped me here to be rid of me—they fancy themselves as humane, you know. If they’d meant to kill me, they had every opportunity to do so—”

“They sought to’ mesmerize your knowledge of the past away; now they watch, their results to judge. And when they see you restive, familiar of a witch—”

“You’re no witch—”

“As such all know me here. ’Twas an ill gambit that brought you here by daylight, Brion—”

“If I’d crept out at midnight, they’d have seen me anyway—if they’re watching me as you seem to think—and they’d have known damned well I wasn’t satisfied with their hand-painted picture of my past.”

“In any case, they’ll like it not. They’ll come again, take you away, and once again essay to numb your knowledge of the worlds, and of your past.”

I thought that over. “They might, at that,” I said. “I don’t suppose it was part of their relocation program to have me spreading technical knowledge among the primitives.”

“Where will you go, Brion?”

I hesitated; but what the hell, Olivia was right. I had to have help. And if she intended to betray me, she had plenty on me already.

“Rome,” I said.

She nodded. “Very well. What is the state of your purse?”

“I have a bank account—”

“Leave that. Luckily, I have my store of gold Napoleons buried in the garden.”

“I don’t want your money—”

“Nonsense. We’ll both need it. I’m going with you.”

“You can’t—”

“Can, and will!” she said, her dark eyes alight. “Make ready, Brion! We leave this very night!”

“This is crazy,” I whispered to the dark, hooded figure standing beside me on the shadowed path. “There’s no reason for you to get involved in this…”

“Hush,” Olivia said softly. “Now he grows restless. See him there? I think he’ll cross the road now, more closely to spy us out.”

I watched the dense shadows, made out the figure of a man. He moved off, crossed the road a hundred yards below the cottage, disappeared among the trees on our side. I shifted my weight carefully, itching under the wild getup Olivia had assembled for me—warty face, gnarly hands, stringy white hair, and all. I looked like Mother Goodwill’s older brother—as ill-tempered an old duffer as ever gnashed his gums at the carryings-on of the younger generation. Olivia was done up like Belle Watling in three layers of paint, a fancy red wig, a purple dress that fit her trim figure like wet silk, and enough bangles, rings, beads and tinkly earrings to stock a gyfte shoppe.

“Hist—he steals closer now,” my coconspirator whispered. “Another half minute…”

I waited, listening to the monotonous chirrup of crickets in a nearby field, the faraway oo-mau of a cow, the yapping of a farm dog. After dark, the world belonged to the animals.

Olivia’s hand touched mine. “Now…” I followed as she stepped silently off. I had to crouch slightly to keep below the level of the ragged hedge. There was no moon, only a little faint starlight to help us pick a way along the rutted dirt road. We reached the end of the hedge, and I motioned Olivia back, stole a look toward the house. A head was clearly silhouetted against the faint light from the small side window.

“It’s okay,” I said in a low voice. “He’s at the window—”

There was a crunch of gravel, and a light snapped on, played across the ruts, flashed over me, settled on Olivia.

“Here, woman,” a deep voice growled. “What’re ye doing aboard after bell-toll?”

Olivia planted a hand on her hip, tossed her head, not neglecting to smile archly.

“Aoow, Capting,” she purred. “Ye fair give me a turn! It’s only me old gaffer, what oi’m seein orf to the rile-trine.”

“Gaffer, is it?” The light dwelt on me again briefly, went back to caress Olivia’s sequinned bosom. “Haven’t seen ye about the village before. Where ye from?”

“I float about, as ye might say, Major. A tourist, like, ye might call me—”

“On shank’s mare, in the middle of the night? Queer idea o’ fun, I call it—and with yer gaffer, too. Better let me see yer identity papers, ducks.”

“Well, as it appears, I come away in such a rush, they seem to ’ave got left behind…”

“Like that, is’t?” I heard a snort from the unseen man behind the light—one of the roving security police who were a fixture of this world, I guessed. “Run off with a fistful o’ spoons, did ye? Or maybe lifted one purse too many—”

“Nofink o’ that sort! What cheek! I’m an honest, licensed tart, plying ’er profession and keeping her old gaffer, what oi’m the sole support of!”

“Never mind, love. I won’t take ye in. A wee sample of yer wares, and I’ll forget I ever saw y,e.” He came close, and a big hand reached out toward Olivia. She let out a sharp squeak and jumped back. The cop brushed past me. I caught a glimpse of a tricorn hat, a beak nose, loose jowls, a splash of color on the collar of the uniform. I picked my spot, chopped down hard across the base of his neck with the side of my hand. He yelped, dropped the light, stumbled to hands and knees. The stiff collar had protected him from the full force of the blow. He scrambled, trying to rise; I followed, kicked him square under the chin. He back-flipped and sprawled out, unconscious. I grabbed up the light and found the switch, flicked it off.

“Is he… badly hurt?” Olivia was staring at the smear of blood at the corner of the slack mouth.

“He’ll have trouble asking for bribes for a few weeks.” I pulled Olivia back toward the hedgerow. “Let’s hope our snooper didn’t hear anything.”

We waited for a minute, then started off again, hurrying now. Far away, a spark of wavering, yellowish light moved across the slope of the hill beyond the village.

“That’s the train,” Olivia said. “We’ll have to hurry!”

We walked briskly for fifteen minutes, passed the darkened shops at the edge of town, reached the station just as the puffing coal-burner pulled in. A severe-looking clerk in a dark uniform with crossed chest straps and coattails accepted Olivia’s money, wrote out tickets by hand, pointed out our car. Inside we found wide seats upholstered in green plush. We were the only passengers. I leaned back in my seat with a sigh. The train whistle shrilled, a lurch ran through the car.

“We’re on our way,” Olivia breathed. She looked ecstatic, like a kid at the fair.

“We’re just going to Rome,” I said. “Not the land of Oz.”

“Who can say whither the road of the future leads?”