that.
You don’t need to feel shame on my account.”
“You are gracious,” the scriptorium spirit said. Brother Vahan also inclined his head in my direction. That made me feel good; winning Brother Vahan’s good opinion isn’t easy, but it’s worth doing.
“What happened after you finished providing the perpetrators with this information, after”—Kawaguchi glanced down at his notes—“12:58?”
“I finished betraying Inspector Fisher at 1:03,” Erasmus said bleakly. “I hoped that would be the end of it, that the malefactors would take what they had learned and depart. Instead, as you know, they forthwith kindled the fire which I gather resulted in the destruction of the Thomas Brothers monastery. As to that, I could not speak with certainty, for when the ground glasses in the scriptorium melted or shattered from the heat of the flames, I lost my interface with Your Side and, still in agony, awaited my own dissolution.”
“The firecrew and constabulary rescued you,” I said.
“Exactly so. At the time and since, I have doubted whether they did me any great favor, but, as with my betrayal of you, the deed is done and we now must proceed to act upon its consequences.” The scriptorium spirit turned to Legate Kawaguchi. “Oh: there is one thing more. For some time after I was tormented, I lacked much of my normal awareness of self and surroundings. Were I flesh and blood, I gather you would say I was semiconscious. Only quite recently have I regained my full sensorium. When I did so, I found as part of my immediate surroundings—this.”
I hadn’t figured Erasmus for a sense of the dramatic. But from behind his back he pulled out a short green feather.
Kawaguchi held out his had. “May I see it?” Erasmus gave it to him. He felt it, held it close to his face in a gesture that said he was nearsighted. He shrugged. “Just seems like a feather to the eye and the hand.” He turned to Madame Ruth and Nigel Cholmondeley and asked, “Are magical forensic tests possible in virtuous reality?’
They both shook their heads. Madame Ruth said,
“Remember, that isn’t the actual feather you’re holding, Legate, but its analog in this sorcerous space. And, like everything else in virtuous reality, it is imbued with special properties springing from this space and thus not a fit subject for testing.”
“I should have thought of that.” Kawaguchi clicked his tongue between his teeth, not so much in disappointment as in annoyance at himself. He turned to Brother Vahan. “Further questions?”
“I have one,” I said. “How did the two men react when you finally yielded to the cow’s hooves and told them what I’d been investigating?”
“One of them said to the other, ‘He’ll get his, too, I expect,’ ” Erasmus answered. It didn’t surprise me, but it didn’t delight me, either. If somebody was willing to bum down a monastery, the added burden of sin that would accrue from going after an EPA inspector couldn’t have been heavy enough to worry him.
Brother Vahan said, “Old friend, how soon will you be able to manifest yourself normally on Our Side once more?”
“It shouldn’t be much longer, holy abbot,” Erasmus said.
“The metaphysicians tell me I could do it now if my familiar haunts were restored. As it is, I’m given to understand it’s a matter of days rather than weeks.”
“Good,” the abbot said. “I shall pray that the time will be soon, for purely selfish reasons: I find I miss you very much.”
An undead who hadn’t fed in a thousand years had infinitely more blood in him than Erasmus ever could, so when I saw the scriptorium spirit blush I just chalked it up to virtuous reality. And if we were out of questions, we didn’t need to be there any more. I asked, “How do we get back to Interrogation Room Two?”
“You must return to awareness of the body you left behind there,” Nigel Cholmondeley answered. “As soon as your hands leave contact with those of the persons to either side of you, the circuit will be broken and you—and all of us—will return to the mundane world.”
My hands? I looked down, and of course I couldn’t see them. From what my eyes reported, I might as well not have had any hands, or anything else—I was just there. Virtuous reality is an insidious kind of place: it so completely involves all the senses and seems so dioroughly real that leaving wasn’t as easy as Cholmondeley made it sound. I wondered if early explorers had got stuck in it forever. Ifdiey had, I wondered ifdiey’d realized it.
An intense look of concentration came over Brodier Vahan’s face. Presumably he couldn’t see his own hands, either. But an instant later, I was sitting on a hard chair with a stifling helmet over my eyes and ears. I clawed it off. The (nimy reality of the interrogation room was a long, long way om the Garden where I’d been a moment before. Everyone else was taldng off the masks, too. Now that we were back in the constabulary station, Nigel Cholmondeley was horsefaced again, Madame Ruth fat as any two people you want to name, and Legate Kawaguchi short and skinny and tired-looking. I suppose I looked the way I always do, too.
On the table in front of Kawaguchi, along with the cigarette bums and coffee rings, lay a note tablet full of scribbles.
I didn’t remember its being there when we sat down. I didn’t think he could have brought it back from virtuous reality… but then I saw, right in the middle of the table, a bright green feather. Kawaguchi spotted it at the same time I did.
He grabbed it and stuck it in a little transparent pouch made of spirit gum to keep it from being magically influenced.
“Remarkable,” Nigel Cholmondeley said. “One seldom sees artifacts returning with participants in a virtuous reality experience.”
“Officially, this is not and cannot be evidence,” Kawaguchi said. “Its trail of provenance is severely tainted; any judge to whom it was presented would throw it out of court, and very likely the case with it. Unofficially, I shall convey it to the lab and find out what our forensics people make of it.”
“Let me know, please,” I said. If I’d snatched it first, I’d have taken it straight to Michael Manstein— assuming, of course, that Kawaguchi and half a dozen big constables with clubs hadn’t started working out on me to make me give it back. Since they might have done just that, constables being demons for evidence, maybe it was for the best Kawaguchi got it instead of me.
Brother Vahan dipped his head to Madame Ruth and then to Cholmondeley. “Let me apologize to both of you for my previous doubts as to the nature of virtuous reality,” he said; he was, as usual, nothing if not gracious. “I can see that it will become a valuable tool in thaumaturgic research.”
“Thanks right back atcha for thinkin’ fast and breakin’ the circle.” Madame Ruth sounded like herself again, too. Too bad. “That can be the tricky part, gettin’ back here where we belong.”
Nigel Cholmondeley put it more piously: “Mankind was ever reluctant to leave the Garden.”
“So I thought,” the abbot agreed. “But then I remembered I had no true right there, burdened as I was by the weight of Original Sin. After that, recalling my body to action in this actual world was easier.”
The channeler and the medium looked at each other.
“Let’s talk about that some more. Brother Vahan, if you don’t mind,” Cholmondeley said. The extraction technique you describe might well be incorporated into one of the helmets’ ritual subroutines if we are able to isolate the symbolic essence of your thought sequence.”
“It could make you a nice piece of change, and us, too,”
Madame Ruth said. “Like you said, virtuous reality is the coming thing, and if you was to get a piece of it-° “Wealth means nothing to me,” Brother Vahan said. I’ve heard a lot of people say that; he was one of the handful who made me believe it “As may be,” Nigel Cholmondeley said, which meant he had his doubts, too. He also had a hook: “No matter how frugal you personally may be, have you not got a monastery to rebuild?” Brother Vahan stared at him.
I watched the hook snag the fish. The abbot said, “Let us discuss it, then, for the greater glory of God.”
“Let’s eat somethin’ while we talk,” Madame Ruth said, which struck me as more honest than let’s do lunch and most of the other ways people try to combine business and food.
Despite my sausage, I was hungry, too, but not as hungry as I thought I’d be. When I asked my watch what time it was, I found out to my amazement that I’d been in the world of virtuous reality for only about five minutes. It had seemed like a couple of hours while I was there. Oneiromancers say dreams are like that: a lot of things going on but compressed very tightly in terms of time. Judy keeps up on the ins and outs of theoretical thaumaturgy better than I do; I made a note to ask her how virtuous reality simulated the dream effect.
