Mysterium

?

The same driver arrived in the morning to take him to town. The temperature had dropped but the sky was cloudless. “Pas de neige,” the driver said. No snow. Not yet.

Demarch let familiar sights lull him until the car passed under the eagle gates of the Bureau Centrality. The Centrality was a town of its own, with its good and bad neighborhoods, its loved and hated citizens. The Censeurs in their black hats and soutanes moved across the courtyard between the Ordinage and Propaganda wings like stalking birds. Demarch felt compromised in his simple lieutenant’s uniform. When he worked here he had seldom crossed the invisible line separating staff officers from the hierarchs’ quarters… unless he was summoned, always a frightening episode. Well, today he had been summoned, too.

He left the Haitian driver and crossed the pebbled yard to the Departement Administratif. The halls inside were marbled and high and supported by half-columns set into the walls. This was the heart of the Centrality, part temple, part government. It was a more powerful government, within its sphere, than the Praesidium a mile away. Clerks and pages called it “the capital’s capital.”

Censeur Bisonette waited in a conference room, a tall room with a mosaic floor and a long oaken table. Bisonette was at ease in a high-backed chair, his angular face composed. He didn’t stand when Demarch entered. Demarch stepped forward and bowed. His footsteps echoed from the high ceiling. Everything here was designed to intimidate. Everything did.

“Sit,” Bisonette croaked. They would speak English. It was a concession, or an insult, or both. “I want you to know our thoughts on the investigation.”

Our thoughts: the Bureau’s new doctrine. The investigation: Two Rivers. Among the hierarchs it was always the investigation, a nebulous enquiry whose object must never be named or defined. Demarch had learned the protocol in those first mad months.

Bisonette said, “The inventory and warehousing should be speeded up. Another military detail has been assigned—they’ll be there when you get back. I want you to report to me on their progress.”

“I will.”

“The technical and academic assessments can proceed apace. How is that going, by the way?”

“A great deal has been written. Ultimately, I don’t know how valuable it will be. Copies have gone to the Ideological Branch, but I can have them forwarded directly to the Departement if you’d prefer.”

“No, never mind. Let the archivists deal with it. There was an explosion, I understand…”

“A fire at a gasoline depot.”

“Accidental or sabotage?”

“Well, we aren’t sure. It seems now as if a militiaman might have neglected to set his hand brake. There was a robbery, but the fire may be coincidental.”

“May be?”

“It’s impossible to know, at this stage.”

“Delafleur insists it was sabotage.”

Wasn’t it Bisonette himself who had called Delafleur “a pompous idiot”? Demarch sensed Bureau politics at work here, a turn of the wheel, probably not to his advantage. “Of course it could have been, but there’s no way to prove it.”

“Personally speaking, though, you have a suspicion?”

“A simple robbery and a careless soldier. But again, I can’t present evidence.”

“Yes, I do understand that. Your bets are covered, Lieutenant Demarch.”

He felt himself blushing.

The Censeur said, “We don’t want to see any more episodes of the kind. But in the end it doesn’t matter, because we’ve advanced our schedule.”

It took a moment for the significance of that to sink in. When it did, Demarch felt faintly dizzy. “The weapon,” he said.

Bisonette nodded, watching him closely. “Progress has been faster than we expected. We’ve already dispatched engineers to erect a test gantry. The prototype should be available within a matter of weeks.”

“I thought—you said the spring.”

“That’s changed. Do you object, Lieutenant Demarch?”

How could he? “No. Although I wonder if it gives us time to extract everything we can from the, ah, enquiry.”

“Oh, I think we’ve extracted a considerable amount. We’ll be mining the archival material for decades, you know, from what I understand. I think that’s enough. We can’t really let the situation stand as it is, Lieutenant. None of us knows what happened in that place and I doubt that any of us ever will—it’s beyond comprehension, which is to say it’s in the nature of a miracle. If we wait to understand it, we’ll be waiting until the end of time. In the meantime there’s a real risk of contagion, both figuratively and literally. You might look at their medical arcana some time. These people may be carrying diseases, and that poses an immediate risk. They’re certainly carrying ideological diseases.” He shook his head. “The site has to be burned, and if I had my choice I would sow the ground with salt—though if this weapon operates as promised, that won’t be necessary.”

Demarch tried to rein in his thoughts. Be practical, he instructed himself. “It might take time to make arrangements. People will be suspicious if we start shipping out soldiers en masse.”

“I’m sure they would. But most of the soldiers won’t be shipped out.”

“I don’t understand.”

Bisonette shrugged as if to dismiss an annoying triviality. “The town was manned by second-rate troops. They’ve seen more than we want them talking about. They’re disease vectors, at least in the figurative sense. But don’t worry. We’ll extract the people we trust.”

?

After he left Bisonette he made an unscheduled stop at the small peripheral building marked ENQUETES, where he had once held a desk job. He kept his collar up and walked briskly to the office of Guy Marris, an old friend.

Friendship was important in the Centrality. Friendship governed what gossip you heard, the pivot on which a career might turn. Guy had been a wine friend, in Bureau jargon: someone you trusted enough to get drunk with.

Guy’s office was a small room—a closet, compared to Bisonette’s conference chamber. Guy, a bespectacled man with more gray hair than Demarch remembered, looked up from a stack of requisition forms. “Symeon!”

Demarch nodded and they talked for a time, the usual what-are-you-doing-back-in-town and what-about- the-family. But this wasn’t entirely a social visit, and Demarch began to drop hints to that effect, until Guy said, “You want a document—is that it?”

“I need a set of identification papers. Really just the basics. Enough for someone to show at checkpoints or to an employer.”

Guy studied his face for a long moment and then said, “Come with me.”

They walked to the courtyard, a standard maneuver if you wanted privacy. Demarch wondered why, after all these years, the hierarchs had never found a way to eavesdrop on this windy common. Or maybe they had. Or maybe they knew about it and still permitted a sliver of secrecy: no machine runs efficiently without a little grease.

Guy Marris shivered at the frigid air. He took a Victoire cigarette from the package in his breast pocket and lit it with a match. “I think this is unofficial work you’re talking about.”

“Yes,” Demarch admitted.

“Well … tell me the essentials. I don’t promise anything.”

“A woman. Mid-thirties. Make her thirty-five. Dark hair. Height, five foot eight. Weight, say ten stone.”

“She sounds intriguing.”