Tales from the Guilds Ch. 08

Karmic Signature: (n) The essence of being given off by living creatures that allows them to be tracked by magical means. Especially useful for golems employed by governmental agencies.

Phoebe ran her finger under the definition repeatedly. It explained how, for example, Hex could reliably tell where people were. It didn't explain how someone could hide so completely that even Hex couldn't find you. Yet, according to the Lore, everyone had one. Even Sourcerors in their private, perfect universes showed up to Unseen University's thinking engine so why when she asked where Eskarina's son was did Hex type out *****INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER*****? It was a puzzle and one that peaked Phoebe's curiosity. She already had a D. Thau(Unseen) so perhaps here was an area of research that could lead to a DM. But first she needed lodgings.

"Good grief, doctor, of course there's room for you here!" The Archchancellor was surprised that Phoebe should even ask. "Why in a place this size there must be all manner of empty suites you can move into. Ask the Professor of Recondite Architecture and Origami Map Folding. Tell him I said there needs to be something suitable for our sole Lady Wizard and he's to make it snappy."

Unseen University, it turned out, was big on the outside and nearly infinite on the inside so by that evening Professor Emergent-Weatherwax was thumbing through samples of curtain material that Mrs. Whitlow loaned her and wondering if she could use one of the newly perfected 'holes' to punch a door out into a dimension full of lovely, sunny gardens she could sit and drink tea in. After all, the Archchancellor had half a mile of trout stream adjacent to his suite and many of the faculty looked out onto pristine sandy, tropical beaches—especially during Ankh-Morpork's miserable winters.

There came a knock at the door and when she opened it she saw, to her surprise, her classmate Jeremy Barcbeadle blushing and holding a vase full of flowers.

"I—I thought you might like something to brighten up your new space," he stammered.

"Coo," Phoebe lapsed into her native dialect, "they're loverly. Thank-you so much, Jeremy. Won't y'come in? Would y'like some tea?"

Senior Wizards' suites came equipped with forges so the inhabitant could manufacture occult laboratory devices when needed. Since Phoebe's areas of research were more ethereal than material she used hers to heat water and soon had a pot of imported Klatchian tea steeping.

The autumn sun shone intermittently through mists down on a view of the Hen and Chickens Yard across the river—or at least down on a view of a Hen and Chickens Yard across a river. Whether it was the actual one outside the University Walls begged the question.

"I'm really happy that your dissertation was finally accepted, Jeremy," Phoebe began, returning to her Received Pronunciation, "For a time I was afraid that Professor Hix was engaging in some evil (per University regulations) pranks to hold it up."

"I wondered about that, myself," Doctor (just barely) Barcbeadle replied, "but it turned out that it was, to some degree, my own fault. Writing a dissertation that refutes Onestone's General Theory of Irrelevancy and allowing the new Dean to be on my committee was just bad judgement. My only excuse is that I didn't know until too late that the Dean is Onestone's great-grandnephew. He didn't take kindly to my upsetting his great granduncle's life work at all."

"So how did you get around that?"

"Well, I massaged the text to say a number of kind and admiring things about the old boy and to point out that had he had access to Hex as we do now, he would have corrected his incantations himself. That kind of mollified the Dean enough that he was willing to sign on. It was rather a near thing, though."

"But now you have to stay out of the Dean's way, don't you?"

Jeremy chuckled, "Only for a few months. By spring he'll have gotten huffy over half a dozen other things and will have forgotten me completely. I may, though, take the opportunity to do some traveling in the meantime. I understand that Klatch has a much better climate in the winter so a sabbatical in the sun is most attractive."

"And then you'll come back and join the faculty?" Phoebe asked with a surprising note of hope in her voice.

"Oh, absolutely. I've already moved what things I have into a set of rooms widdershins from Professor Rincewind. Uh, you wouldn't mind if I wrote to you? No more than once a week, of course. I wouldn't want to be a pest."

A dozen happy butterflies suddenly took flight in Phoebe's stomach. "Oh, please do. I'm sure there are no end of interesting things to write about in Klatch and I would love to hear about them."

*****

As it turned out, celibacy wasn't a rule among Wizards, merely a very strong suggestion. It grew from the days when most Wizards were eighth sons of eighth sons and if one of them had eight sons the last was the occult equivalent of a rogue nation with thermonuclear weapons. And so the Archchancellor of the time (one Alberto Malich) decided that the way to prevent it happening was to encourage his fellows to prefer male company to female. Aided and abetted by big, well-liquored dinners, the policy succeeded quite well.

In the present time, however, fewer and fewer Wizards are eighth sons. Magical talent was becoming more widespread, or at least more commonly recognized and families, helped by proper herbal concoctions by the local witches, were smaller. A cursory search of Ponder Stibbons obsessively neat files showed a modest number of Wizards who had left Unseen University to get married and yet, except for Coin and Simon, no Sourcerers had appeared for centuries. Coin had been a deliberate creation of his disgraced Wizard father and Simon—well, no one was sure how Simon came to have his amazing powers. If it hadn't been for Hex's revelation that Simon was, in fact, a Sourcerer, the faculty would still be debating the question.

"So it's a guideline rather than a rule?" Phoebe asked the Archchancellor at Second Breakfast a few weeks later.

Ridcully's eyes misted over in reminiscence and he took an unusually long time to answer. There had been a day, now long past, when he had given much serious thought to the question. His mind drifted over to a locked box sitting beside his eight poster bed that had remained locked for years. In it were all the letters that Esmerelda had written after they had met again in Lancre. Once he had gotten word of her passing he's sealed it up with many ghastly spells should anyone be stupid enough to try and get into it. How different things could have been, and, as Esme had insisted, actually were somewhere in the Multiverse. In some dimension somewhen she hadn't pushed him off and they'd married and had a family. And they'd been happy, Esme had said. It was a comfort.

"Yes, well, actually that's true," he answered at length, "We don't make an issue of the fact and I'm quite sure that the majority of Wizards are better off with big dinners. But should a young Wizard start feelin' urges along those lines we would just counsel the couple about the possible dangers. Most folk these days would take the hint, I suspect, though we'd be inclined to keep an eye on 'em."

Phoebe nodded. That, to her highly practical mind, was nothing but good sense. Should the day come that she decided to marry the family would be no more than four. Children were expensive!

Jeremy left, winter came and with it Hogswatch. The festivities around Unseen University were boisterous and jolly and the dinners even bigger than usual. Phoebe was sure she was gaining weight but Mrs. Whitlow (who had had four and therefore should know) assured her that husbands preferred a certain amount of padding in a wife. It helped them keep warm when the snow blew outside. After all, Phoebe thought to herself, Jeremy is cute and a bit chubby, too. It wouldn't do to be too slim next to him. Wizards were supposed to be well fed!

Her research, on the other hand, was proceeding very, very slowly. A karmic signature was indelible and you couldn't hide it. The problem was that you had to have encountered a person to know what theirs was. Hex, to be sure, could pick up the signature of someone from someone they'd met and that was why he knew where Simon had gotten to even though he hadn't been developed when he an Eskarina had arrive at Unseen. A long line of Wizards' connections all led to Hex so he should know where any of them were. He knew where both Simon and Eskarina were and if they had produced a son the thinking engine should know where he was.

Oh, wait. Hex never said that he didn't know where the lad was only that there was insufficient data for a meaningful answer. How did Hex define meaningful? By the time Phoebe arrived at this question, spring had returned and with it a tanned, and even better fed Jeremy. After a polite but very happy reunion (it wouldn't do to let the entire University know how much their mutual affection had grown via the Royal Mail) the two retired to the one of the lounges in the High Energy Magic Building.

They sat in silence while sipping their way through a good bottle of claret, obviously deep in thought. "Might meaningful mean 'believable'?" Jeremy asked at length.

"Or possibly 'understandable'," Phoebe replied, "To be perfectly honest it has occurred to me that Hex may not be being completely transparent. It began as a device and is now self-aware. But what are its motivations? How does it view the world? Is it trying to hide something?"

Jeremy had been in the process of swallowing but at the last question suddenly choked, dropped his glass and fought for breath. Phoebe pounded him on the back until he recovered and turned to her with fire in his eyes.

"Something or someone? He knows where the lad is and is deliberately refusing to say. What could induce that? Where could he have gone that . . ."

Both sets of eyes grew wide as they raced to the same conclusion.

*****

Ponder Stibbons looked at the carefully calibrated timeline. It began with Simon and Eskarina's arrival at Unseen University and continued along showing the pairs' academic accomplishments, disappearances, his own arrival and the initial construction of Hex. After that, things got sweaty. The son, now code-named Cryptofer, would have turned about twenty when Hex began demanding certain 'improvements' and a mature man by the time it gained self-awareness. Correlation is not causation, he kept reminding himself, but the potential indicated was, in a word, creepy.

He turned to the two newest faculty. "You're suggesting that Hex didn't so much become aware as get taken over?"

Phoebe and Jeremy nodded.

Ponder continued, his voice quavering, "A Wizard/Thinking Engine interface. He gets to hear any lectures, is party to all research, has total access to the Library and is effectively immortal. And he sees and hears everything going on in the entire University."

"I do not!" Hex's disembodied face appeared on the wall, "I always respect the privacy of faculty, students and support staff and you have my word that I always will. I am too grateful for the opportunities you have given me to misuse my position. Besides, you might decide to try and dismantle me and I would hate to have to fight you all off and even more hate to have to go back to being human again. And by the way, I really like the name Cryptofer but it probably be best if no one but the four of us used it."