Part 6 (1/2)

Plasir had been the thief, on and off, for years. He'd seen everything through his eyes. The thief knew his own past, of course, but he wasn't really thinking about it on that morning. For instance, Plasir had known from Second Sentence that the thief played the violin, but only learned from Sunken that he had stolen his own instrument from a p.a.w.nshop. Plasir knew about the thief only what he'd managed to gather from the young man's thoughts on that afternoon at the bridge. Then, when he first caught Sunken, the old Lifer had shown Plasir the face of the person through whose eyes he'd formerly seen everything.

There was something about that face. Something familiar. The thief looked healthy and happy, and wary and furtive-none of this strange in a criminal on light duty and near the end of his time. But when the stone fell into the river, and the guards turned their spite into sport, and the two convicts were driven to the river's edge, and the old Lifer gazed into the young thief's face and saw fear and pity- ”I know that person,” Plasir thought. ”I've seen that sensitive, stubborn mouth before. Not in a dream.” He pictured the mouth and the eyes. Eyes full of sadness and shame and resignation and, behind all that, power: pitiless, cold power.

3.

HORLEY TOLD GRACE THAT HE'D PROMISED THE GRAND PATRIARCH HIS HELP WITH ”THE CAUSE.”

”What cause is this?” Grace asked. ”Tziga's? Laura's? The cause of stirring up trouble between dreamhunters and their public?”

”The Grand Patriarch offers refuge to renegade dreamhunters. He thinks the Body is up to no good. Tziga's ideas and Laura's actions have nothing to do with him. You can't blame him.”

Grace glared at her husband. ”Am I allowed to blame anyone? Or is it best for me to just bite my lip?”

”Better than biting me, dear. It's not my fault that Laura and Tziga are out of reach.”

”No, but it is the fault of Erasmus Tiebold.”

Chorley gave a sigh of put-upon patience, kissed his wife on top of her head, and went out.

The Grand Patriarch thanked Chorley for his visit and told him that, since no one expected him to denounce dreamhunting, did he think he could investigate the Place?

”Rangers go there and make maps and call it exploration,” the Grand Patriarch said. ”Philosophers muse about it as a phenomenon and call that-rightly in some ways -thinking about it. But none of us are getting any nearer to knowing what the Place really is. You've been close to the subject for years; you are familiar with all the distracting facts already. You have a reputation as something of a scientific mind, and an independent thinker. So please, Mr. Tiebold, look into it for me.”

Chorley had gone away, and for days he hadn't been able to imagine where to start. He reread some of those philosophers and was struck again by how they all seemed to talk about the Place as if, by coming up with the right metaphor for it, they might be able to say what it was. He found that he liked Dr. King's account in A History of Southland. King's approach to the Place seemed practical; he tried to find evidence of its earliest appearance. Chorley mused on Dr. King's speculation that the dreams might be memories of people who had lived in its geographic vicinity. And on his own idea that the Place was like a mirage. Chorley considered all this-as, no doubt, the Grand Patriarch already had.

And then he remembered the telegraph line that had once run through the Rifleman Pa.s.s, from Doorhandle to Sisters Beach. A line that was long ago abandoned. The wire, though intact and visible along its entire length, was finally deemed hopelessly unreliable. Signals were lost, and there were strange interferences, both a patterned tapping that didn't match any known telegraphic code and bits of code that could be deciphered but that gave the key man on the receiving end bad, mad messages.

And so it was that, several days after remembering the abandoned telegraph line, Chorley found himself waiting in a poky room beneath the mosaic floor of the Founderston Central Post Office. The man Chorley waited with didn't have much to say, but he stood at his desk sorting through a bunch of keys on a string. The room was dingy. There were windows only at the top of one wall. Through them Chorley could see people-or their feet at least-pa.s.sing on the street, scuffed shoes and polished ones, the wheels of a pram, a woman in a hobble skirt, and the lower legs of a small girl in flimsy blue sandals.

”It's summer already,” he thought.

A second clerk, a man with a coat and a complexion the color of manila cardboard, shuffled into the room. The first clerk stopped sorting his keys and tossed them back into an open drawer. He said, ”I was just telling Mr. Tiebold here that if any of the bad transcriptions from the Wry-Valley-to-Sisters-Beach line had been kept, you would know where to find them.” He turned to Chorley and said, ”Mr. Nevis was a key man at Doorhandle twenty years ago, when the trouble started.” Then-to Mr. Nevis, ”Can you help Mr. Tiebold?”

Mr. Nevis nodded and held the door open.

As they descended into the cold subterranean corridors beneath the Central Post Office, Mr. Nevis told Chorley that-yes-he had been a key man in Doorhandle. He had sent and deciphered messages to and from Sisters Beach. In fact, he had been at his post in the telegraph office on the evening that the Doorhandle innkeeper came in to wire for a surgeon from Sisters Beach. ”For the boy with the broken leg-who later became your brother-in-law, Mr. Hame,” Mr. Nevis said. ”The line had been complete then for three years. It was working well, except when the road washed out once and took half a dozen poles with it. The weather in the Rifleman Pa.s.s was a challenge, but we hadn't yet encountered the problem that closed us down. That problem started after Tziga Hame's fall.”

Mr. Nevis opened a steel door, located a light switch, and let Chorley into a room with long avenues of shelves filled with files. The air was chilly and undisturbed.

”We kept those messages separate,” said Mr. Nevis. ”We had a special file for them-several by the time the Post Office abandoned the line, which they didn't do, despite the problems, till the Founderston to Sisters Beach Railway opened, and the new telegraphic line with it. Those files had red tape on their spines. I remember making up a new one myself.”

”How many were there?”

”Mad messages? Hundreds. We had to have a special short key code for 'Corrupt. Send again.'”

Mr. Nevis made a noise of discovery and dropped into a crouch, his knees creaking. He pulled files from a shelf, bundled them into his arms, and got up with Chorley's help.

At the back wall, there was a bench under a light, a bare bulb in a wire cage. ”I'm afraid you won't be very comfortable, Mr. Tiebold. My manager doesn't really like anything brought up from underground. But I'm sure you'll find you won't need to look far for a good example. For nonsense of a special kind.”

”Is it formless nonsense? Or nonsense only in the context of the message?” Chorley asked. He longed to edge the man aside and look himself.

Mr. Nevis was patting the pile of files, tidying and talking. ”I never thought madness terribly interesting myself, whether it was Lady Macbeth wringing her hands or Lucia di Lammermoor wafting around in her bloodied bridal gown. I never looked at the corrupt messages with any real attention.”

Chorley stepped up beside the elderly clerk, seized the stack, and slid it along the bench till it was under his own nose. ”Has anyone ever gone through these looking for a pattern?”

”What kind of pattern? All the Post Office did was try to fix the problem. It even had men camping out nights under every tenth pole in order to catch the pranksters.”

”And all this happened before the Regulatory Body was formed?”

”Yes. Otherwise it would have been their problem. The Post Office blamed us key men at first, said it was our mischief. We blamed the fellows on the other end. But it was the Place. That telegraph line was unbroken from Doorhandle to Tricksie Bend; it ran outside, not Inside-but the Place used it to try to talk to us. Look!” Mr. Nevis s.n.a.t.c.hed one file, flipped pages, and found a message: MOTHER FAILING STOP DOCTOR SAYS ONLY MATTER OF DAYS STOP PLEASE RISE UP I SAID RISE UP COME AT ONCE STOP ANDREW.

”That's more or less typical. That 'Rise up' stuff.” Mr. Nevis sounded triumphant. He peered at Chorley, waiting for a reaction.

Small hairs were bristling on Chorley's nape, his whole scalp tightening. The ”interruption” in the telegram was a plea, like the cry of a king besieged on a battlefield. He licked his dry lips. ”Does this sort of thing turn up often?”

”'Rise up' you mean? Yes. We got that one all the time. Come to think of it, perhaps that's the pattern you're asking about?”

”Yes.”

Mr. Nevis sighed. ”I suppose then that you'll want to read through all of these?”

”I will.” Chorley was engrossed already, leafing through the first file.

”Shall I see if I can find you something to sit on?”

”Thank you.”