Signs and Stones

Judith Tarr

A locked room, a dead alien, a starship full of deception and disguises...

The mission, if the author should choose to accept it:

A locked-room mystery. An alien is found dead in his/its quarters in a very swank multienvironmental spaceliner. A human detective, on board on his vacation, is summoned by the captain and asked to try to solve the murder as quickly and discreetly as possible; on the one hand, the captain doesn’t want bad publicity, but on the other, he realizes that there is a killer loose aboard the ship.

The only clues at the scene of the crime are a brand-new handkerchief possessing neither monogram nor fingerprints; a quill pen, and what appears to be the plastic wrapper for a small book.

Since the killer had plenty of time to make his escape, it can be assumed that these were left behind either to mislead the police, or because the killer did not think they could be used to identify him.

Solve the murder.

oOo

The Result:

The passenger in cabin 393B was dead. Dead, Farley reflected, as a doornail. Farley had moments of classical allusion: a hazard of his occupations. Both of them.

Captain R’kansssass was blue around the gills. The crewperson who had found the body had collapsed in a massive faint.

Farley edged around the deck steward and looked down at the corpus delicti. It lay on its side on the deck, looking amazingly like a sleeping Terran rhinoceros. Its mouth was slightly open. Its eyes were squeezed tight shut.

“No sign of violence,” Farley said. His translator beeped and booped. Captain R’kansssass hissed and hooted back. The translator said, “Passengers do not just die. Not on my ship.

“And,” she said, “there are these.” She gestured with a tentacle.

Farley’s eyebrow went up. The room was unfurnished, which seemed to be the passenger’s preference, except for a sleeping platform upholstered with pale chartreuse straw. The center of it was hollowed out in a space that would just accommodate the passenger, asleep. In the middle of that lay three perfectly ordinary, but perfectly incongruous, objects.

The plastic wrapper was common enough. On a cruise of this duration, a passenger who was disinclined toward food, games, or ogling fellow passengers had few other choices but to read. Farley peered at the title on the wrapper. A gaudy romance in Galactic Standard, with its covergram half torn through, blurring the image of a spectacularly mammalian humanoid in apparent distress.

Interesting choice of reading matter, Farley thought, for a passenger recorded as Scholar-Philosopher First Class, en route to the Interspecies Philosophical Congress on Derrida. But Farley knew a little about scholar-philosophers. The book would hardly have made his eyebrow twitch. The other two objects, however . . .

“A quill pen,” he said, noting absently the tortured squawking of his translator as it tried to convey the concept. “No ink or any sign of use. And a handkerchief. Clean. No monogram. No mark at all, not even a manufacturer’s label.” He had unfolded the handkerchief to be sure. He folded it again. “Fascinating.”

Captain R’kansssass hissed like a kettle on the boil. “Fascinating! Is that all you can say? Fascinating? One of my passengers is dead, and all you can say is—”

“Fascinating,” said Farley. “And no reader for the book. Which implies—”

“Highgrassians do not read,” said the captain. “They absorb knowledge, they say, through the skin. The ears, you would say. The computer would provide vocal feed. Not”—her tentacles flicked disdainfully—“this.”

“So one might assume that if in fact this was a murder, the murderer left the bookwrapper at least,” Farley said. “And possibly the other objects as well.”

“Human objects,” the captain said. She seemed to have recovered her equilibrium. Her gills looked a shade less blue.

“In which case,” said Farley, “I could be a prime suspect, if this is murder and not simple heart-analogue failure.”

The captain’s hide flashed from pearly pink through bright purple and back again. Negation, said the translator in retinal code. “You are the famous detective Mycroft Nkruma Farley. You are incapable of causing any death so obvious, or so frankly melodramatic, as this.”

Farley had his doubts. Melodrama would have been blood, and edged weapons. But different species had different ideas of the dramatic. “So,” he said mildly. “You’ve found me out.”

“It is the captain’s duty to know the identities of her passengers. And their occupations.” Her voice through the translator sounded prim. “You are also, of course, the passenger under whose name you travel, the even more famous, dare I say notorious—”

“I am,” said Farley. He returned the handkerchief to its place on the bed. “Your security staff will want to perform its own investigations according to its own methods. If you would call them in, we can begin.”

The captain bubbled and gurgled. “We must have discretion. We must! If the passengers discover that there has been a death on board—the panic, the morbid curiosity, the outrage, the lawsuits—”

“Your security chief, then,” Farley said firmly, cutting through her babble, “and one of her most trusted, and most discreet, assistants.”

oOo

The security chief and her trusted assistant discovered just about what Farley had expected, which was nothing. The computer had no record of any visitor or communication for the last ship day, except a steward with a cartload of fodder. That, once its contents were consumed, had been left in the corridor and duly collected. To all appearances, Its Excellency the Scholar-Philosopher First Class Grazer-in-the-Deep-Grasses had spent a completely quiet, completely and characteristically isolated shipday dozing, accessing the computer for information on Early Late New Neoplatonism, and revising the lecture it would be delivering at the conference.

Medical delivered a verdict of Death by Natural Causes. “Except,” said the ship’s doctor, “with a Highgrassian in that phase, there is no such thing as death by natural causes.”

Farley invited himer to continue. The doctor was himerself in a transitional phase for an Eridanian, with the sweet, almost cloying voice of a male, but the dun plumage of a precoital female. Heshe smoothed back a feather that showed just a glimmer of iridescence, and clacked hiser beak in irritation. “Tolerate if you will, gentlebeing, a brief disquisition. Natives of Highgrass, like natives of my own world, undergo certain alterations as they mature.” Heshe stabbed a button on the medconsole. An image appeared in front of Farley. It looked rather like a small dog.

“This,” said the doctor, “is a newborn first-stage Highgrassian. At puberty, after a series of complex metamorphoses, it enters a second stage.”

Farley started. This was thoroughly humanoid, and quite familiar. “That’s a Fomalhautian dockhand,” he said.

“That is a sexually mature male Highgrassian. Females are similar, but larger and less . . . glabrous.”

Hairier, heshe meant. But also considerably more mammalian. Like, Farley realized, the bookwrapper he had seen in cabin 393B.

“Fomalhautian dockhands are male Highgrassians?” Farley said. It was not really a question. “Highgrassians are known for their total isolationism. And dockhands—”

“Dockhands are absolute nonentities,” the doctor said. “Hired muscle, more economical than mechtechs. Need anyone know or care where they come from? These happen to be the unmated, unchosen males, who find that life on their own planet palls quickly, and who travel the spacelanes acquiring substantial wages which they then, dutifully, return through complex channels to their families on their homeworld. Since sexual congress is the trigger for the next phase, these never attain the metamorphosis, but die abroad or return home to a mate and metamorphosis or to inevitable and fairly accelerated death. Those who do metamorphose become the public image of their race, such as that representative who has so unfortunately been murdered on our ship.”

“I gather,” Farley said, eyeing the image of the upright, dignified, togaed rhinoceros in what was clearly a university classroom, “that in this phase, Highgrassians are virtually invulnerable.”

“Virtually,” the doctor said, “yes. To all intents and purposes, Philosopher-phase Highgrassians are immortal. They are not, it is true, indestructible. They can be killed. It takes a considerable amount of effort and application, and no little time. There was, in fact, a sect which devoted itself to a form of ritual suicide; the rites were a planet-year long, and extremely elaborate. If the victims were insufficiently careful, they never died at all, but simply accelerated their final metamorphosis.”

Farley regarded this latest image. In the light of the rest, it was hardly surprising. “A sacred cow.”

“A final-phase Highgrassian, “ the doctor said with a snap of hiser beak. “Placid, barely sentient, and content to graze its way into oblivion. Under the dogma of the Long Death Cult, death in Philosopher phase was more blessed, but death in final phase was honorable enough, and inevitable.”

“What else triggers final phase,” Farley inquired, “besides prolonged torture?”

“The Long Death Cult has long been suppressed,” the doctor said. “Final phase now occurs naturally and only, after a sufficient number of local centuries, under the stimulus of excessive population pressure. Or so I deduce, since Highgrassians will never leave their homeworld, and keep their population down to carefully calculated levels, particularly in the vicinity of their universities.”

“So if a Highgrassian wanted to commit slow suicide,” said Farley, “it would only have to invite all its friends and relations to live with it, and make sure that they produced plentiful offspring.”

“That,” said the doctor, “is disgusting.”

“Thank you,” said Farley. “So this death of a Philosopher, suddenly, with no prior warning, can only be murder.”

“It is impossible,” the doctor said.

“In the current state of medical knowledge,” said Farley, “it is.”

oOo

He had not endeared himself to the ship’s doctor. It was not his job to be endearing, even in his current, public persona. As far as the ship was concerned, he carried on in his established fashion. He appeared in the casino. He sneered at the health cultists in the hologardens. He wandered through the accessible levels, making use of his breathing apparatus where necessary, but avoiding the more hostile decks, since a human in an impermasuit would at this stage be excessively conspicuous. He dined each shipnight at his assigned table in the seating reserved for oxygen-breathing omnivores who preferred their nourishment dead on arrival. That had been interpreted with some latitude in the case of the Zki-riiiit whose scream and thrashing leap assured that its prey was deceased when it reached the table, but etiquette forbade comment.

Without seeming to be a man-about-the-ship, he managed to address as many of the passengers as attracted his, or the computer’s, attention. Sometimes it was even a pleasure. The lady from Barthes University...

oOo

“I should point out,” said Captain R’kansssass, “that Its Excellency has been dead for half an eight of shipdays. And you appear to be no closer to a solution that when its death was first discovered.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Farley, sitting back in the conformachair. The captain had paid him the unusual compliment of calling on him in his cabin. Her bulk, and what appeared to be a leak in her breathing apparatus, filled the room with a faint marshy redolence. Subvocally, he instructed the cabin’s atmosystem to counteract the imbalance. The system obliged with a whiff of heaven that also happened to be Madame Tsi-Nyu’s favored perfume.

“So?” the captain bubbled, oblivious to his distraction. “You have suspects?”

“I may,” Farley said. He sipped at the bulb he had ordered before the captain arrived. She had declined to join him. In her agitation she kept overflowing the chairsling and pouring toward the walls.

Farley suppressed a sigh. When he had assumed his second identity to take this cruise, he had expected to work. He had not expected that work to be detection of a murder. It was karma, he supposed, or a curse. In the media, death attached itself to detectives. Beings dropped dead around them. He had thought himself free of the myth; had embarked in the happy expectation of a T-month free from any and all suggestion of death, detection, or disaster.

He squeezed the last drop of Glenlivet onto his tongue, rolled it until it sublimed into the aether of his hard palate, and set down the bulb. The captain was almost completely amorphous, a faintly blue-tinged, rose-pink mass with upright and quivering eyestalks.

Farley addressed her in his driest tone. “In examining the ship’s manifest which you so generously provided me, and in inspecting the passengers’ files, I was interested to note the peculiarly homogeneous quality of their occupations and avocations.”

The eyestalks stilled. “This is a multispecies, multienvironmental ship,” the captain said. “Surely you would not accuse us of the crime of excessive homogeneity. “

“Certainly not,” said Farley. “But I note that a substantial percentage of passengers are members of a charter voyage to the Interspecies Conference, either participants or their guests or attachments. Our victim was one such, and a rarity at that: the first Highgrassian Scholar-Philosopher to leave its homeworld in several standard decades.”

“We are the favored line, and the favored vessel, for the Conference,” the captain said with some pride. She had recovered herself sufficiently to resume her usual octopoidal shape. “We have been ferrying guests since the first gathering. And never,” she said, growing agitated again, “have we suffered a single mishap.”

“Certainly not,” Farley said. “Your record has been exemplary. I myself chose this ship, and this particular charter, for that reason.”

“Then it is fortunate for us,” said the captain, “that you are aboard for this of all possible disasters.”

Farley could not help but admire her agility of mind, although he deplored her lack of paranoia. “I could perfectly well have staged the entire affair for my own amusement,” he pointed out.

“No,” she said flatly. “You are not amused. Your stress readings indicate that you are considerably annoyed, reluctantly diverted, and deplorably fascinated by certain of the passengers whom you have been, for lack of a better concept, investigating. Do you believe that the murderer is a human woman of somewhat unexceptional endowments?”

“Madame Tsi-Nyu,” said Farley with dignity, “is a charming lady of considerable intelligence and wit.”

“She was also the last known being to speak to Its Excellency before its death.”

Farley closed his mouth with care. “I see that I’ve underestimated you, Captain.”

The captain quivered its anterior set of tentacles: a shrug. “I have a strong and pressing interest in the solution of this crime.”

“Then you also know,” said Farley, “that Madame Tsi-Nyu is a scholar-philosopher in her own right, and a colleague of Its late and yet-to-be-lamented Excellency.”

“A rival, one might say,” the captain said.

“But then,” said Farley, “so are two-thirds of the passengers on this ship. No scholar is an honest friend to any other, as long as the law of Publish-or-Perish holds true.”

“So I understand,” the captain said. “Clearly Its Excellency was given no opportunity to publish; rather, it perished.”

oOo

Madame Tsi-Nyu was at her scintillating best that shipevening, holding court in the oxybreathers’ lounge. She was not a beautiful woman, as humans went. She was shorter than the norm, she was plumper than fashion decreed, her features were agreeable but irregular, her hair allowed, with scholarly carelessness, to go gray. None of which mattered in the least, once one had basked in the warmth of her charm.

She greeted Farley with delight. “My dear Mycroft! See who has consented to emerge from his lair tonight, and all, he says, for the pleasure of our company.” Her hand, ornamented with a large and rather splendid Denebian opal, swept in a graceful gesture toward the being beside her.

Farley bowed in a particular, bobbing fashion. The alien bowed in return, a little less deeply, with a flourish of glimmering crest. “Dweller in High Places,” Farley said. “You honor us with your presence.”

“Oddly symbolic, is it not,” someone nearby observed, “how often rank is implied by elevation.”

The voice was human. The face was young, smooth, and self-consciously intelligent. “Ser diJon, “ Farley said by way of greeting.

The young man ignored him. “Elder,” he said to the alien, “is that, too, an Archetype: the high place, and the ruler as the dweller in it?”

“All things are a sign,” said Dweller in High Places, “and the Types are in all that is or is perceived.” The flick of his crest and the quick double blink of his eye was a smile. “Or so I attempt to teach. Ser diJon, is it true that you reckon yourself an analyst of Archetypes?”

“Oh,” said the young man in evident confusion. “I’m nothing as lofty as that. I’m a critic, no more.”

“A reviewer,” Madame Tsi-Nyu said, “of popular fiction. He’s to be a speaker at our conference, did you know?”

Farley knew. He watched the flush travel up the young man’s face.

“Fiction is a mirror,” the Elder said in a tone that the translator rendered as gentle, “as clear as any that there may be. Clearer than most, for a truth. Have you read the work of Merris deVane?”

DiJon’s flush deepened.

Farley allowed himself a moment’s pity for youth and snobbery. “I’ve read it all,” he said, “or as much as I can find. Marvelous stuff. Robust. Swashbuckling. Not too badly written. Did you know the author is a pseudonym?”

DiJon was lost in mortification. The Elder looked politely puzzled. Madame Tsi-Nyu said, “Oh, is she? I’d wondered. Is she anyone we know, do you think?”

“Who’s to tell?” said Farley. “I’ve heard that she may not be human, in spite of the name.”

“If such is the case,” said Dweller in High Places, “she is a master of your human psychology.”

“No doubt of that,” Farley said. “It’s a shame she’s sold and packaged so thoroughly in genre. She loses the respect she deserves, and would have if she sold less well, or suffered less lurid a reputation.”

“Unfortunate,” Dweller in High Places observed, “that popularity is so often mistaken for vulgarity.”

“And the shadow for the Type,” diJon said, so suddenly that Madame Tsi-Nyu started. Farley, who had kept the corner of an eye on him, noted that his flush had died to a ruddy glow. “Her books are perfect trash. Perfect. Every word is calculated to manipulate the psyche just so. When I reviewed Far Cries Across the Worlds—”

“That was in the Newer York Times, no?” Madame Tsi-Nyu inquired. “Interesting analysis. Very. What was it that its like used to be called?”

“A hatchet job,” the Elder said in precise and pedantic tones, “I believe. It was a masterful example of its kind.”

“It was a frank analysis of a cultural phenomenon,” said DiJon with a degree of heat. “If I had taken out the quotable lines, turned the summary around and grayed down the prose, it would have been a perfectly acceptable paper for the Conference.”

“Is that what you’ll be doing?” Farley asked. “Recycling your reviews?”

“A review,” said diJon, “is not a piece of literary criticism. Each requires a different cognitive orientation, and serves a different purpose.”

“Shadows again,” the Elder mused, “and Types. How fascinating! I had never thought of these things in quite such a fashion. Is the book the shadow or the type? Is the critic the true philosopher or the dreamer in the cave?”

“The reviewer is the recorder,” Farley said, “and the consumer’s guide.”

“Of course you would say so,” said diJon.

Farley smiled. “I do the odd review myself,” he said, “and the occasional bit of criticism. Aren’t we on the reviewers’ panel together, Ser diJon?”

“Not that I recall,” the young man said coldly.

“Well,” Farley said. “I did sign on late. I haven’t seen the program.”

Ser diJon looked thoroughly disgusted. Farley broadened his smile until the young pup muttered something that might have been an excuse, and made himself scarce.

“That was not kind of you,” said Madame Tsi-Nyu. Her eyes were laughing, Farley noticed.

“He’s young,” Farley said. “With luck and good feeding, he’ll outgrow it.”

“One may hope so,” said Dweller in High Places.

oOo

“Yes,” said Madame Tsi-Nyu when they had attained an agreeable measure of privacy. “I was the last to speak to Grazer-in-the-Deep-Grasses. So it is dead, then?”

Farley raised his eyebrow. “Someone’s been talking.”

“Someone has been deducing,” said Madame Tsi-Nyu. “No one has seen Its Excellency in some shipdays. And that, while not uncommon, is suspicious enough, with the whispers one hears. The captain is unusually agitated for so placid a voyage.”

“How many people know?” Farley asked.

She shrugged. It was a pleasure to watch. “Not many, I think. It had friends, but those are not numerous, and they respect its desire for privacy. Privacy is a great virtue among its kind.”

“The greatest, I’ve been told.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“What did you talk about, then? Anything unusual?”

She regarded him levelly. He resisted the urge to squirm. He was a bare T-decade her junior, if that, and a professional in his own right—in both of his personae. Even so, she could make him rarely uncomfortable.

“Solomon al-Rahib Mycroft,” she said, “one would think that we were in a detective novel, and you were the detective.”

“I do not,” he said grimly, “write detective novels.”

“You certainly do not,” she said, “as far as anyone knows. Why are you so interested in our late passenger?”

“It was murdered,” Farley said.

She did not seem startled. “It would have had to be, wouldn’t it? Since it was a Philosopher.” Suddenly her eyes were full of tears. “It was so gentle, Mycroft. So wise. We spoke of nothing in particular—shadows, types, signs and significations, the wind in the high grass, the taste of cool water in the sun’s heat.” She buried her face in his robe-front. “Oh, Mycroft! How could anyone have been so cruel as to kill it?”

Farley patted her and soothed her and did his best not to think of the baser passions. Her grief was genuine. He was sure of that.

oOo

Much later, and rather more rumpled than he had been when he began, he made his way along a corridor. It was deep in shipnight, and the lights were dimmed accordingly. He opted not to engage his augments, but made his way by natural vision, thinking of nothing in particular, letting his mind run on without his assistance.

The observation deck was all but deserted. There was nothing to see in nullspace, but Farley had an odd predilection for that degree of nothingness: neither white nor gray nor black, but somewhere in between. Some species went mad in contemplation of it. Farley found it soothing.

The shadow by the curve of the hull resolved itself into a tall-crested, vaguely avian, vaguely reptilian shape. Its eyes blinked, glowing green. It bobbed a greeting.

“Elder,” said Farley, bobbing in return.

“Ser Mycroft,” said Dweller in High Places.

There was a silence. Farley absorbed himself in the view, or the lack thereof.

At length the Elder said, “Here, of all places that are, one best understands the truth.”

“Is there one?” Farley asked.

“Oh, yes,” said the Elder of the Church of the Universal Archetype. “Certainly. Whether it is the truth that one wishes to see . . . that, I cannot judge.”

“Is it true,” asked Farley, “that in your belief, all species must be one, and all faiths one faith, united in the One Truth?”

“There is no must,” the Elder said. “Only is.”

“On Highgrass, Philosophers would disagree with you profoundly.”

The Elder’s crest flattened. “So they would,” he said. His tone was mild. “There, each species must be sufficient unto itself, and each world should hold itself apart, lest it be contaminated by the evil of the Union.”

“Yet a Philosopher came to the conference that represents all its race must abhor,” said Farley. “You spoke often with it. Were you friends, after all? Or amicable enemies?”

“Both,” said Dweller in High Places. “If friendship is to share a meeting of minds, and to take pleasure in it—then we were friends. If enmity is to find no common ground of race or creed or philosophy, then we were enemies. I am sorry that it is dead. I have seldom known any being who so wonderfully challenged my assumptions.”

“It’s not officially dead,” Farley said.

“I know,” said the Elder. “I knew when it died. Friend-enemies have such a bond.”

Farley leaned forward. “Do you mean to say that you sensed its death?”

“I am not psi-rated,” the Elder said, “nor if I were, would I have been attuned to one so alien. But when it died, I felt its passing.”

“And you said nothing to anyone?”

“To whom would I speak? Whom would I trust?”

“Madame Tsi-Nyu.”

The Elder flicked his crest, amused perhaps, or slightly surprised. “She is, indeed, one in whom to confide.”

“And another friend-enemy?”

“A colleague,” said Dweller in High Places.

Farley paused. His next question came slowly, each word framed with care. “Is it true that the Philosopher had introduced a new form of isolationist dogma, one that would, once it had been promulgated, severely undercut your efforts on certain worlds of the Union?”

“If so,” the Elder replied with no evident hesitation, “it had not spoken of it to me. Nor, surely, would it have so far transgressed its own doctrine as to attend the Conference.”

“Unless the sin was necessary in order to serve the greater good.”

“Such a sin would require its exile and, if possible, its death.”

“Exactly,” said Farley.

Dweller in High Places drew himself up. He towered above Farley’s not inconsiderable height. “Suicide is not a choice that a Philosopher of that race can make.”

“Unless it is necessary,” Farley said again.

“I can be no judge of necessity in any being but myself,” the Elder said, and his voice was cold.

Farley took that as a dismissal. He bowed. His bow was not returned. When, at the door, he looked back, the Elder’s back was to him, its eyes fixed on the void between the stars.

oOo

“Pseudonyms?” Ser diJon said. “Of course they interest me. Why a person would choose to write under another name or another identity—whether it’s a form of concealment, or an almost ritual invocation of a different spirit—”

“Or gender,” said Madame Tsi-Nyu. “Or species.”

Farley was eavesdropping. He did not blush at it, even if he had been, like poor Ser diJon, pale enough for it to show.

The scholar and the critic were sitting on a bench in the ship s garden. A rather sad-looking pale-green tree drooped over them.

“I’ve made a study of pseudonymous authors,” Ser diJon went on. “Eventually it will be a book. Did you know how many of them are actually of a different species than they claim to be? More than half. And if you think that only promulgators of popular trash choose to hide themselves behind another name—I’ve found three major literary authors, so far, whose official biographies are unverifiable.”

“They may simply be extremely private people,” said Madame Tsi-Nyu.

“Maybe,” Ser diJon said. He paused. “Do you know very much about the Church of the Universal Archetype?”

“I know a little,” Madame Tsi-Nyu said. Her voice was serene. “Why?”

“It’s odd,” said Ser diJon. “Their Sacred Book is right out on the net for anyone to read. But talk to a practitioner, get her going, and she almost always hints at more.”

“Such as?”

“Well,” he said. “Suppose that everything is a shadow of a Type, and the universe strives toward a universal truth. What if a person consciously lives a lie?”

“Much of social interaction consists of discreet concealments and words left unsaid.”

“And the public Book condemns that,” he said. “But what if a person pretended be something, or someone, that she isn’t? For example—a pseudonymous author with a spurious biography. How would the Church regard that?”

“With regret, I would presume,” said Madame Tsi-Nyu.

“It could be more than regret,” he said. “In a fanatic, or in someone who takes the secret teachings too seriously.”

“I can’t imagine,” said Madame Tsi-Nyu, “that even a fanatical Archetypist would go about scourging and flaying pseudonymous authors of popular fiction.”

Farley, concealed behind a hedge, suppressed an urge to laugh.

Ser diJon, however, was young, and being young, had no sense of humor in such matters. “Oh, I can imagine worse. I can imagine a fanatic committing murder. If the crime were great enough—if the imposture were sufficiently appalling.”

“Are you saying,” she asked with a ripple of mirth, “that some enthusiastic proponent of the Archetype has an irresistible urge to rid the worlds of Merris de Vane? Is it you, perhaps? Are you a secret Archetypist?”

Farley could not see diJon’s face, but could well imagine the flush that suffused it. “I am nothing more or less than I pretend to be. If I want to commit mayhem, I’ll do it in a review, where the worlds can see.”

“And so you have,” she said. “So you certainly have.”

oOo

This time Farley went to the captain, albeit at her request. She saw him in her office, a peculiarly characterless place that tried to be all styles and none, to all species and none. Its atmosystem was set to a bland all-purpose oxygen mix with a suggestion of salt flat and tidal marsh. Farley made himself comfortable in a conformachair and waited.

“Well?” the captain said. “What have you been doing?”

“Reading,” Farley answered.

Her tentacles writhed. “What—”

“Popular fiction,” said Farley. “Specifically, the works of Merris deVane, Musharrog of Deneb, and the Unnamed Romanticist.”

There was a pause. Farley fancied that the sea-reek intensified.

“I thought,” the captain said, “that I had asked you to solve a crime.”

“It is a crime,” Farley said, “how excruciatingly badly some of these books are copyedited, packaged, and produced. I’m quite certain that Musharrog’s Savage Saurian Passion was gutted by what I hesitate to call its editor: there are glimmers of genuine competence, repeatedly and obviously hacked at or suppressed.” He shook his head, taking no notice of the captain’s bright blue gills. “Really, I’m going to have some very cutting things to say when I speak at the Conference.”

“Have you forgotten that there is a corpse on my ship?”

The translator could not render a true shriek, but it provided a more than adequate imitation. Farley winced and waited for his ears to stop ringing. “Of course I haven’t forgotten. I’ve been conducting investigations in my own fashion.”

“By reading popular effiuent and pursuing attractive and not so attractive females of your approximate species?”

“Madam,” said Farley coldly, “I am, as you are fond of pointing out, the famous detective Mycroft Nkruma Farley. I am also the notorious producer of popular effluent, Solomon al-Rahib Mycroft. In order to pursue the activities of the former, I must of necessity continue those of the latter.”

“You do not produce popular effluent,” the captain said. “You produce popular mindcandy with an occasional pretension to literary quality.”

“So does Merris deVane,” said Farley. “She really is better than her reputation.”

“If the Philosopher was even a fraction as infuriating as you, it’s small wonder it was murdered. Though how, with no record left behind, no sign of foul play, no hint of malice or deception among any of our passengers—”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Farley. “There’s a great deal of backbiting, particularly among the human-literature scholars. ShuManGa cut the august Professor Phathoumthong dead in the casino last night. Figuratively speaking, of course.”

“The corpse in cabin 393B is not figurative,” the captain said. “It is in stasis, awaiting solution of its murder and notification of its kin.”

“You haven’t sent notice to its next of kin?” Farley was shocked. “Do it, then, by all means.”

“It is significantly less troublesome to send a subspace feed from normal space, than to do so from subspace itself. When we emerge at our destination, I will send the notice. By which time I hope to include as well the name and motive of the murderer, and some assurance that the criminal has been apprehended.”

“Send the notice now,” Farley said.

“You’ve solved the murder?”

Farley looked up at the captain. She had risen in her excitement, narrowed and elongated and stretched her eyestalks to their farthest extent.

“Not quite,” Farley answered her. “But I have a lead. If you’ll help me with a few small matters...?”

oOo

They had laid the body of Grazer-in-the-Deep-Grasses on the bed in cabin 393B, turned on the stasis field, and applied safeguards. The captain herself had to penetrate the doorseal and assure the security system that the intrusion was authorized.

Farley counted a double handful of guests including himself and the captain. The head of security and her trusted assistant gravitated toward the wall and a position of watchful patience. The Elder of the Church of the Universal Archetype took stance beside the corpse, crest flattened in respect for the dead. Madame Tsi-Nyu stood a little away from him. The ship’s doctor ruffled and muttered to himerself, and possibly to hiser companion, a humanoid of substantial dimensions and lowering aspect. A Denebian scholar stood as still as the stone it resembled, until it angled a lambent eye in the direction of the last comer: Ser diJon in a hurry, skidding to a halt in the center of a circle of stares.

“Now,” said the captain, drawing the eyes to herself, “that all have arrived, we can begin.”

“Begin what?” Ser diJon clamped his mouth shut. His cheeks were crimson.

“I suppose you could call it an inquest,” said Madame Tsi-Nyu. “It is that, isn’t it?”

“In a manner of speaking,” the captain said. “I have summoned you in particular as representatives of the passengers and crew, and as beings involved to varying degrees in the life—and death—of the esteemed Scholar-Philosopher First Class, may it graze the deepest grasses until the stars sleep.”

Madame Tsi-Nyu blinked rapidly, eyes brimming with tears. The others seemed calmer, except Ser diJon, whom Farley had never seen otherwise than flustered. “Are you accusing one of us of murder?” the young idiot demanded.

The captain’s gills shaded from shell pink to indigo. Farley moved in smoothly, coming to stand by the corpse. “We make no accusations,” he said. “We’re searching for answers, no more.”

Ser diJon’s eyes narrowed. “You,” he said. “You’re a pseudonym.”

“My name is Mycroft,” said Farley. “I am the author of Foucault at Rest.”

“So who are you really?”

“A literary gentleman,” said Farley, “and sometime solver of riddles. Of which this is a peculiarly fine example. The noted scholar dead, it seems, of natural causes; except that Philosophers of Highgrass know no natural death. A locked room, a set of clues as cryptic as any Holmesian could ask for, and no sign or indication of foul play.”

“Minute, localized, but very precise and lethal cerebral trauma,” the doctor said, “is foul enough.”

“What weapon can do that?” the Elder asked. His voice was quiet, his interest apparently without urgency.

“None that we know of,” replied the chief of security. She sounded angry. “No weapon in our technology can deal a wound of that precise nature, or that perfectly calculated.”

“A medscanner can,” said Ser diJon.

“A medscanner requires careful calibration, meticulous programming, and highly specific aim and focus.” The doctor’s beak clacked. “There would be records of the scanner’s transport to this room, and the victim would have had to cooperate in its setup and application. We have no evidence of any such thing.”

“Computers can be subverted,” said the Elder, “and records erased.”

“We did consider that,” Farley said. “If the ship’s computer has been tampered with, the tampering was extremely skillful and its traces so far have been undetectable. To all appearances, the victim was alone when it died, and it died from no visible cause.”

“Then what left these?” The captain held up the objects that had been found with the body: the quill, the handkerchief, the bookwrapper.

“A guest,” Farley said, “who knew how to subvert the computer.”

“One of those is the murder weapon?” Ser diJon laughed. “Chloroform on the handkerchief? The quill in the heart?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Farley. “You are aware, I trust, that both Merris de Vane and Musharrog of Deneb are present on this voyage.”

The Denebian stirred slightly. Its translator was set to a particularly low register, like gravel shifting. “I am aware that I am here. And you, Solomon al-Rahib Mycroft. Sera DeVane . . .”

“Really,” said Madame Tsi-Nyu, “I am not she.”

“You are not,” Farley agreed. “The Unnamed Romanticist, however—”

She raised her fine arched brows.

“I’ve known that for months,” Ser diJon said. “I must say, Madame, Don Juan Descending was almost worthy of serious consideration.”

“Are you all impostors, then?” the Elder inquired. He seemed considerably bemused.

“Say rather that most of us are more than we seem,” Farley said. “Except you, of course, your reverence.”

“I am a shadow and a lie,” the Elder said, “as is all that walks in flesh. Yet this much is true: We are forbidden to conceal our names or our works, even for our lives’ sake.”

“Or that of your livelihood.” Farley nodded. “Suppose, then, that you discovered a great imposture, one so startling, and so disturbing, that your very faith was shaken. How would you receive it?”

“This was,” said the Elder, bowing toward the corpse, “truly, the Scholar-Philosopher First Class Grazer-in-the-Deep-Grasses. I have no doubt of it, nor can have. A great soul cannot be feigned.”

“Yet it can be disguised.”

“For what folly?”

“Folly, maybe. Or pleasure. Or simple playfulness.”

“We understand play,” the Elder said. “Lies, we do not endure.”

“And the liar, you put to death?”

The Elder was unperturbed. Others had come to attention; someone, perhaps Madame Tsi-Nyu, made a sound of protest. The Elder said, “For the great lie, death. For the lesser, repentance.”

“You admit it, then? You confess? How did you do it?”

The Elder regarded Ser diJon with a calm and unblinking eye. “I did nothing. What this late Philosopher did, we have yet to discover.”

“It wrote,” said Madame Tsi-Nyu. “Spoke, actually, since writing is not a Highgrassian vice.”

“Every philosopher teaches,” the Elder said.

“Does every philosopher also compose works of popular fiction?”

Ser diJon, to give him credit, was the first to understand. “Fiction? Popular fiction? That was Merris deVane?” His eyes were wide. His mouth was open. He seemed to have forgotten how to shut it.

“That was Merris deVane.” Farley considered the dead face with its curving horn. “It was a she before it metamorphosed; a mother of many. It understood much that is common to every sentient creature, and some that is unique to the humanoid—having been humanoid itself, and singuarly gifted with imagination and wit.”

“It was insane,” said the humanoid who stood beside the ship’s doctor.

“So are all Philosophers,” Farley said.

“This more than most,” the humanoid said. He looked more human than most Fomalhautian dockhands, being smaller and less hirsute than the run of his kind. Even so, Farley thought that he could see a suggestion of the Philosopher in the curve of the nose and the angling of the skull on the neck. “It was my herdkin. It was called the Sublime, but also the Mad. It should never have ventured this voyage, knowing what it knew, being what it was. So we all told it—I more than any, who joined this crew in order to watch over it; for all the use I proved to be. It would not listen.”

“It is never a Philosopher’s inclination to listen to the young and the cautious.” Madame Tsi-Nyu wiped her eyes. “Even to me it said so, after it told me the best of its secrets.”

“To think,” said Ser diJon. “I panned her—its—latest. I said it was too parochially Terran. Below even her accustomed standards. Feeble, hackneyed, and uninspired. But,” he said, “I did grant that she showed an occasional small flash of wit.”

“You were considerably less tactful than that,” Madame Tsi-Nyu said with rare heat. “You called the book a waste of time, netspace, and promotional budget. You recommended that the author consider a career in commercial broadcasting—where, you said, her lack of imagination would make her an enormous success.”

“It would,” said Ser diJon. “The mass media would have been perfect for her talents.”

He might have said more, but that was difficult with the dockhand’s fingers wrapped around his throat. The Highgrassian lifted him a solid half-meter above the floor and shook him, snarling. The translator rendered the snarl in words. “You . . . said . . . what? You . . . wrote. . . what?”

“There,” the chief of security said. “There, now.” She did something; Farley did not clearly see what. But it convinced the Highgrassian to drop the critic. Ser diJon fell in a heap, gagging and clutching his throat.

Farley helped him up. He was trembling violently. When he could manage a sensible word, it was a snarl to match the Highgrassian’s. “It was just a book review!”

“Yes,” said Farley. “A book review. If it’s good, it’s wonderful. If it’s bad, it’s nonsense. Never forget, never forgive, and never take it seriously. That’s the Author’s Code.”

“Unless one is a Philosopher,” said the Philosopher’s kinsman. “Then all that is true is true, and all that is false is wind. But if it is both true and false—”

“—it kills.” Madame Tsi-Nyu spoke quietly, with her accustomed calm, but her face was set and still. The face, Farley thought, of a woman who has gone beyond fear to bitter courage. “I was delighted to discover, through deduction and a midnight confession, that our revered Scholar-Philosopher was, like me, a purveyor of anodyne to the masses. I brought the review to laugh over. Not—” Her voice broke. “Not to die for.”

The Highgrassian did not leap at her as he had at Ser diJon. Perhaps he had no anger left.

She met his eyes. Her own were full of tears. “I truly didn’t know.”

“No one knows,” the Highgrassian said, “that words can kill.”

“If one is a Philosopher of Highgrass,” said Farley. “Words in a particular order, aimed at a particular target, in a being already approaching final metamorphosis, and practicing an art hitherto unknown to its people: lying in order to convey a truth more fundamental than truth itself.”

“Writing trash for the mob?” Ser diJon had most of his insouciance back, if not his vocal facility. His voice was a croak.

“Writing what the masses will read,” said Madame Tsi­Nyu. “Teaching them, maybe. Making them happy. It may not be a noble calling, but I reckon it a worthy one. I told Its Excellency so. Just—before—”

“Just before you read it Ser diJon’s review,” Farley said. His voice had no inflection. It sounded cold, he knew, and merciless. He could not help it.

“I only meant to laugh with it,” said Madame Tsi-Nyu; “to share my own collection of bad notices, and to wonder at the folly of the young, as writers love to do. It was laughing when it died, Mycroft. Truly, it was.”

“I believe you,” he said. Not gentle even yet, but less cold. “And the quill? The handkerchief?”

“Signs,” she said. “Trophies. Gifts for a practitioner of my own art. The pen that is mightier than the reviewer’s scalpel. The handkerchief—”

“Keeping one’s nose clean,” said diJon. “Writing under an assumed name, to spare one’s reputation.”

She nodded quickly. “And the wrapper, of course, was mine—my latest book. It was—” She swallowed. “Its Excellency was a fan of mine. As I was, of . . . of Merris de Vane.”

“You wanted her—it—dead,” diJon said. “Royalties—rivalries—”

“No.” Farley spoke before she could begin. “That was a mistake. Concealing it, however, was an error of a different order. Why, Madame?”

“Fear,” she said, clutching the handkerchief that was the twin of the one in Farley’s hand, the one she had left with the body. “And the hope that no one would guess, that it—it had died—of a book review.”

“ ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.'" The Elder blinked gravely in the face of collective surprise. “Words are as deadly as anything that is. Words that are lies are the quicker to bring destruction. And words that are truth, but truth twisted by malice and envy . . . those kill most quickly of all.” He turned his calm, terrible gaze on Ser diJon. “You as much as she are guilty of this murder. She brought the words to the Philosopher. You wrote them. You edged and sharpened them to do the most harm, in the swiftest fashion, without mercy or restraint.”

Ser diJon opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

“Do you wish justice?” the Elder asked the Highgrassian.

The Philosopher’s kinsman rubbed his lightly fuzzed chin. His anger seemed to have died, or to have turned cold. “What justice can there be now, with our greatest weakness exposed, and our greatest sage destroyed?”

“One might,” Farley said carefully, “place this gathering and this discussion under seal, and the participants under mindlock.” His glance forestalled protest, or even response. It neither lingered on nor favored one face above the rest. “One might also request that the perpetrators themselves—reviewer and revealer both—perform some suitable service to your world and your herdkin.”

“Such as become Merris deVane, and continue her career.” The Highgrassian’s demeanor was dour, its face implacable, but its wit, and its sense of justice, spoke to Farley of its dead kin. “Both of them. Together.”

Madame Tsi-Nyu said nothing. Her face was hidden in her hands.

Ser diJon was appalled. “Be Merris de Vane? Write that drivel?”

Farley knew a moment of perfect content. “How often have you indicated that you could do better in your sleep?” he asked. “Now you can prove it.”

“But to collaborate—to work with—with—”

“With a highly experienced and notably tactful senior associate who wishes above all to atone for the harm which she has done.” Madame Tsi-Nyu raised her head, squared her shoulders. Her courage, Farley reflected, was as admirable as her charm. “It’s a solution worthy of Its Excellency itself, and it is no more than just. If,” she said, “the authorities agree.”

“They will,” said Farley. The Highgrassian grunted, the captain bubbled assent. The Elder bowed its head.

Ser diJon was far from convinced. But Madame Tsi-Nyu had him in hand. The last Farley heard of him, he was still protesting, but with diminishing force. “But they were only words!”

“Words,” said Madame Tsi-Nyu, “are the deadliest weapon of all.”

Copyright © 1992 by Judith Tarr

First published: Whatdunits, ed. Mike Resnick (DAW)