The Reign of the Brown Magician. Lawrence Watt-Evans

child of a dead rapist from another universe.

      And it wouldn’t hurt to have a general check-up, after all she had been through.

      “Do you think they might have posted guards around the ship?” Prossie asked suddenly.

      Amy blinked at her, startled. “Who?” she asked.

      “Your government. The ones who arrested us.”

      Amy put a hand to her mouth, then admitted, “I hadn’t thought of that.” Then she lowered the hand and managed an uncertain smile. “But even if they…no, they can’t have guards there; it’s private property, and poor Susan had a court order or something. And we haven’t done anything wrong.”

      As she finished her attempt at reassurance Amy realized she could hear sirens; she turned to look out the window. For a moment she stared in disbelief; then she headed for the living room for a better view.

      “How did they know?” Prossie asked as she followed Amy. “Do you think they might have telepaths, somehow?”

      “No,” Amy said. “They don’t have any telepaths. They might have the place staked out, though. I didn’t think we were that obvious.” She paused, then added, “They must have tapped the phone.”

      Prossie didn’t ask what that meant.

      A moment later Amy and Prossie were joined by Ted, and the three of them stood at the front window watching as men in suits and uniforms emerged from the two county police cruisers that had pulled up in front of the Browns’ home, and from an official-looking car in the driveway, a sedan that had a government seal of some sort on the driver’s door.

      Amy realized, annoyed, that she hadn’t had a chance to go through Nancy’s closet; she was still in her Imperial rags. She doubted these people would let her change.

      And her hair was a mess—her last bleach and perm had all grown out long ago, and she hadn’t even had a chance to brush it in days.

      Ted moaned softly.

      * * * *

      “We have a report, sir,” the lieutenant said, saluting briskly.

      Bascombe put down his pen and glowered at the young man.

      “A report from whom?” he demanded. “From where? About what?”

      “From Registered Master Telepath Bernard Dixon, sir!” the lieutenant said, snapping sharply back to attention.

      “Ah,” Bascombe said. “And exactly which of our mind-reading freaks is this Dixon?”

      “Telepath Dixon is currently serving aboard I.S.S. Meteor, sir, investigating the reported reappearance of the renegade, Proserpine Thorpe.”

      “Which reported reappearance?”

      “Uh…the first one, sir. I think.” The lieutenant quivered uncertainly. Bascombe sighed.

      “Tell me about it,” he said.

      “Yes, sir. According to Dixon, he has established, working in cooperation with five other telepaths, the approximate location of Thorpe’s reappearance—he reports that there is only one system it could have been in, an unnamed system with no habitable planets—the navigator aboard Meteor has the catalog number, but it was not included in the report. Dixon is unable to narrow it down any farther; no physical traces have been found, and telepathy, he says, is not sufficiently precise over interstellar distances to be more exact.”

      “Did he say how he found the system at all?” Bascombe asked.

      “Ah…that was not included in the report I received, sir,” the lieutenant admitted.

      “Dismissed,” Bascombe said.

      “Sir?” The lieutenant blinked.

      “I said dismissed. Get out.”

      The lieutenant almost forgot to salute again as he hurried out.

      Bascombe picked up his pen and considered.

      He knew how the location was determined; telepaths on a dozen planets had been asked to report which direction Prossie Thorpe had been in, and those were then adjusted by the astronomers to allow for planetary rotation and used as approximate vectors. Where the resulting lines—or rather, cones, since none were narrow enough to be lines—intersected, that was where Thorpe had been.

      Meteor had been sent to explore the resulting volume of space; the charts didn’t show any inhabited systems there, but the charts could be wrong.

      This time, according to Dixon, they weren’t. And he’d checked back with five other stinking mutants to see if his distance felt right.

      So Thorpe hadn’t appeared on an inhabited planet, or even just a habitable one.

      That meant a ship.

      And that might explain why her stay there had been so brief, only about a minute—she had delivered something to a ship, and then returned to Shadow’s world.

      But if she were just a courier, why would Shadow, or Raven, or whoever was behind it, use a telepath? A telepath would stand out like a beacon—Thorpe had stood out like a beacon.

      Someone had wanted the Empire to know something was going on; someone had wanted to get the Empire’s attention—but who? And why?

      Was it a distraction, a feint? Or was someone trying to tell them something, a message they weren’t receiving?

      What about Thorpe’s other appearance? That one had been narrowed down to two possible systems, one of them, Upsilon Ceti, home to the Imperial colony of Beckett; I.S.S. Wasp was scheduled to arrive at Beckett Spaceport in a matter of hours.

      If there had been a telepath on Beckett in the first place, maybe life would have been a bit simpler—but four hundred telepaths couldn’t cover three thousand Imperial planets, and Thorpe had only appeared in the Beckett area briefly. It wasn’t quite as fast as the other, about five minutes instead of one, but it was brief.

      Was that a message of some kind? Why Beckett, which was a quiet little backwater?

      And now Thorpe was supposed to be on Earth, the only human-inhabited planet in the Third Universe, and this time she was staying there. What did that mean?

      Did it mean anything?

      Or were all the telepaths lying? Had Thorpe ever really been in any of those places? Carrie Hall’s reports hadn’t started arriving yet, but he was fairly certain that when they did, they’d be useless.

      Something was definitely going on, but whether the enemy was Shadow, or Raven’s band of revolutionaries, or some faction within the Empire, or the telepaths themselves, Bascombe didn’t know.

      But he intended to find out.

      He almost called for a telepath, but then he caught himself; he rose and stepped to the door, and called to his receptionist, “Miss Miller, have a messenger sent to Special Branch; I want orders sent to Meteor to stay where they are and search carefully for any signs of activity—ships, gravity fields, lights, whatever.”

      “Yes, Mr. Bascombe.”

      He nodded, and retreated back into his office.

      The message would be sent by telepath, of course; there was no other way to reach Meteor except through Dixon. Sending it downstairs to Special Branch on paper, though, would mean that no telepath would be reading his mind directly.

      At least, not legally.

      And if telepaths were reading minds illegally, he couldn’t stop them in any case—but that way lay madness. Telepaths could be listening to any thought, at any moment.

      He just hoped they weren’t.

      * * * *

      “Am I under arrest?” Amy demanded, folding her arms across her chest and glaring up at the man in the blue uniform who seemed