Psellus dipped his head gracefully. 'Thank you,' he said. 'I'd been wondering.'
'Understandably.'
'It was kind of you to set my mind at rest. I can stop fretting about that and concentrate on this job you've given me.'
'Excellent.' Boioannes stood up. 'As I understand it, you've already…' He frowned again. 'Immersed yourself in Ziani Vaatzes, so you have the relevant data. His books, for example.' The way in which he reached out and picked the book off the shelf told Psellus that he already knew exactly where to find it. 'A sensible place to start. Why should a machine shop foreman go to all the trouble of making himself a book out of scrounged materials, and then fill it with low-grade, homemade love poetry?' He opened the book, stared at the pages as if they were an apple he'd bitten into and found a wormhole, shut it with a snap and put it back. 'You may find this an interesting comparison,' he went on, taking a familiar-looking brass tube from his sleeve. 'This is a copy of a letter from Duke Valens to the wife of Duke Orsea, written two months before Orsea's ill-fated attack on the Republic. Fortuitously, it was sent by the hand of a merchant who does business with us, and who had the wit to make a copy before passing it on. There's no poetry in it, apart from a few quotations, but there are distinct parallels which you may find illuminating.' He dropped the tube on the desk. It rolled, and came to rest against the inkwell. 'Thank you for your time, Commissioner. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.'
After he'd gone, Psellus realized that he was shaking slightly. This surprised him. He hoped it hadn't been visible enough for Boioannes to notice.
He got up, with a vague idea of going down to the buttery and getting something strong to drink, but once he was on his feet the idea ceased to appeal. He went back carefully over the interview, assessing it in the way a judge at a fencing match awards points to the contestants, and came to the surprising conclusion that it had either been a draw or else he'd come out of it with a very slight lead. True, Boioannes had beaten him up pretty conclusively, but he hadn't heard anything about his own shortcomings that he hadn't already known for some time. On the positive side, he'd finally been given something to do, which made a pleasant change, and he'd forced Boioannes to tell him an unplanned and largely unprepared lie. A lie, he'd learned long ago, is often the mirror image of the truth; by examining it carefully, you can reconstruct the fact that lie was designed to conceal. That was a step forward, but not necessarily one he'd been anxious to take…
(He sat down again. He'd seen a lion once, in a cage in a traveling circus. He'd watched it with a mixture of awe and compassion, as it roared and lashed its tail; absolute ruler of five paces.)
Because the step Boioannes had practically shoved him into taking led to a question that he had no way of answering, but which had quietly tormented him ever since he first read Vaatzes' dossier. Previously he'd assumed that the answer wasn't worth finding because Vaatzes' motivation, soul and very essence didn't really matter very much to the future well-being of the Republic. Now, however, it appeared that Maris Boioannes himself felt that it might have some deeper significance. In which case, he had no option. Until he'd made some kind of headway with the problem, he couldn't get anywhere; it was a locked gate he had to get through, or over.
So. (He tilted the small jug on his desk, just in case an invisible goodwill fairy had refilled it in the last ten minutes.)
Ziani Vaatzes was condemned for abomination because he'd made a clockwork toy for his daughter that contained forbidden mechanical innovations and modifications. Fair enough; but how on earth had he been found out in the first place?
Like a donkey turning a grindstone, he followed the familiar, weary circle. By its very nature, the abomination, the toy, was a private thing, not something liable even to be seen by strangers, let alone dismantled and examined with calipers. Neither the wife nor the daughter could have known about the transgression, since they didn't have the mechanical knowledge to recognize it. Surely Vaatzes hadn't talked about it to his fellow workers, or left notes and drawings lying about. Unlikely that he'd made himself conspicuous by stealing or scrounging materials liable to betray his illicit intentions; as shop foreman, he could requisition pretty much anything without exciting suspicion; besides, none of the materials used had been rare or unusual. An unexpected visitor, calling at the house late one evening and seeing components carelessly left lying about on the kitchen table; no, because the deviations from Specification wouldn't have been obvious out of context, and even if the visitor somehow knew they were meant for use in a clockwork toy, he'd have needed calipers to detect the irregularity. It was, in essence, the perfect crime.
The answer should, of course, have been right there in the dossier, in the investigators' report. But it wasn't. No account of the course of the investigation, because Vaatzes had immediately pleaded guilty.
Not that it mattered, because all he had to do was ask the men who'd brought the prosecution in the first place. Which was exactly what he'd done. He'd written to Sphrantzes, the prosecutor, and Manin, the investigating officer. No reply from either of them; he'd written again, and also to their immediate superiors, their departmental supervisors, their heads of department and the permanent secretaries of their division. He'd had plenty of replies from the upper echelons, all promising to look into the matter and get him his answer. Before giving up and resolving to forget about the whole thing, Psellus had even tried to find the two men and talk to them personally. He'd planned it all like an explorer seeking a lost city in the desert: he'd obtained floor plans of the east wing with Sphrantzes' and Manin's offices clearly marked in red, he'd contrived to get hold of copies of their work schedules so he'd be reasonably certain of finding them at home when he called. In the event, he found their offices empty; neighbors had told him in both cases that they'd been relocated to new offices in the north wing extension, but the corridor and staircase coordinates they gave him turned out not to have been built yet. None of that was particularly sinister. The geography of the Guildhall was a notoriously imprecise science, and every new arrival was treated to the ancient stories of men who nipped out of their offices for a drink of water, never to be seen again until their shriveled carcasses were found somewhere in the attics or the archive stacks. The likeliest explanation was that the internal mail service couldn't find them either, which was why none of Psellus' letters had ever been answered. Manin and Sphrantzes, he knew, were both very much alive and active. They wrote and delivered reports, addressed subcommittees, gave evidence at tribunals and courts corporate and mercantile. Psellus was sure he'd seen Sphrantzes not so very long ago, crossing the main quadrangle one afternoon. The truth was that he'd been glad of an excuse to let the matter lie.
Now, apparently, that excuse had been taken from him. In which case, since he was an officer of the War Commission and therefore a person of consequence and standing (he couldn't help grinning as he thought that), he might as well use his seniority and make sure he got an answer. He flipped up the lid of his inkwell, dipped the tip of his pen and wrote a memo. To: Maris Boioannes From: Lucao Psellus I need to speak to Investigator Manin of Internal Intelligence, and Prosecutor Sphrantzes of the judicial office. I've written to them myself, and to their superiors, but so far I have not received a reply. There's bound to be a rational explanation for this. However, it would be very helpful to me in carrying out the request you made of me today if I could meet both of these men as soon as conveniently possible. Do you think you could ask one of your people to see to it? I'm sorry to bother you with such a tiresome business, but I know how efficient your staff is.
He blotted the page and smiled. He was fairly sure his memo wasn't going to flush Manin and Sphrantzes out of their lairs, but the outcome, whatever it turned out to be, would almost certainly leave him better informed than he had been before; and if he had to have someone like Boioannes in his life, he might as well make use of him. If he'd got nothing else out of the war, it had taught him one thing. Spears and arrows and siege engines and field artillery are all very well in their way, but people are the best weapons.
He walked to the window and looked out. In the courtyard, the scale of the great bronze water-clock ordained that it was a quarter to seven; four hours to go before the meeting started. It was a well-kept secret, which he'd been let into only once he'd joined Necessary Evil, that the water-clock, on which all time throughout the Republic was ultimately based, was running slow. Tiny traces of limescale in the water were gradually furring up the outlet pipes-it was something to do with mining works in the Suivance Hills, which meant the river that supplied the aqueduct that brought the water that fed the conduit that filled the clock was beginning to cut into the limestone bedrock of the hills, hardening the water supply ever so slightly-which meant that the clock's outflow rate was down from nine gallons a day to eight-point-nine-nine-seven-something. Far too small to notice, of course (unless you were the sort of man who carried calipers in your pocket when you paid social calls on your friends); but the plain fact was that time throughout the Republic was gradually slowing down. Every hour was a tenth of a second longer this year than it had been last year; in ten years' time, given the exponential rate of the distortion, an hour would last an hour and five seconds. Eventually, on that basis, there would finally come an hour that would never end. Of course, the problem could be solved in a couple of minutes by a careful apprentice with a bow-drill
