Chapter 4: The Hunt Begins

Donald Canardino stood before what was essentially a small mansion and double checked the address. The house was painted a plain white color and the garden outside hosted only a few patches of flowers. It didn't seem abandoned or disheveled, but whoever owned it only seemed to do the bare minimum for its upkeep. The blinds were all drawn shut and Donald had know way of knowing who or what was waiting for him inside.

It hadn't escaped Donald that this was likely a trap. Still, something about it didn't make a lot of sense. Instead of asking him to come alone, it had insisted that his "associates" wait outside. That almost implied he was expected to bring backup. Letting on that the author knew his true identity was probably a way to lure him in, but to what end? No one in their right mind would kill an agent of the secret police. It was suicide. Donald brought a pistol anyway.

Trap or not, this was his only lead in a case that had yielded him nothing so far. If he wanted to progress, he had to spring it. Donald took a breath and knocked on the door. He heard a shuffling inside the house, and then faintly, a woman's voice. A man responded. There was more shuffling, and then the door swung open. Donald resisted the urge to put his hand on his gun.

A young man stood before him, no older than twenty five. He was tall and slender, with light brown skin. Some kind of physical deformity caused one eye to appear larger and higher up than the other. The man didn't look Donald in the eyes, staring instead at the air above his shoulder.

"Mr. Canardino! A pleasure to meet you face to face. Come in, come in."

As he spoke, the man's eyes flicked around in time with his voice, seemingly looking in random directions. He turned and strode into the house. Donald followed. The interior of the house was very clean, if a bit dimly lit. Most of the furniture seemed antique and well made.

"Would you like some tea?" asked the man. "I've got a kettle on."

"Sure," said Donald. "I'm sorry, who are you exactly?"

The man seemed to hear the question, but was already walking into the kitchen where the faint whistling of the tea kettle could be heard.

"Right, of course," the man called from the kitchen. "My name is George. George Goofenberg."

"Your letter addressed me by name," said Donald loudly, standing awkwardly in the living room. "Do I know you from somewhere?"

"Not yet," said George, emerging from the kitchen with two cups of tea in saucers. "But I'm sure we're about to become fast friends."

An old, pale faced woman appeared behind him and put her hand on his shoulder. George smiled gently.

"I'm fine, thank you," he said. The woman bowed her head and stepped back.

"This is my lovely caretaker," said George. "Miss Claire. She helps me out with matters of a more optical nature."

Donald's eyes widened. He had found the way George's eyes darted around the room strange before, but now he saw that they also had a murky white film across them, like cataracts.

"You're blind."

"Right you are," said George cheerfully, setting the teacups on the coffee table and taking a seat. "Have been since birth. Please, sit."

Donald obeyed, and sat across from him. He took a sip of his tea. It was bitter, but not in a bad way. Donald let himself relax a bit. He didn't know what he expected to find inside the house, but a blind man and an old woman didn't exactly constitute an ambush.

"Before we get into… whatever this is," said Donald, "I feel I should mention that even knowing my name makes you a threat to the security of the nation. I could arrest you just for sending me that letter."

George smiled devilishly. "You could arrest me even if I didn't send the letter. That's exactly why I wanted to talk to you. You're a man who likes to make deals, and you've got the power to back them up."

"I only make deals with people who have information," said Donald menacingly. "So I suggest you start talking."

"Very well then," said George. "Miss Claire, would you mind running to the store and getting me some eggs? I seem to have forgotten them."

The old woman understood, and exited the house. Once they were alone, George continued.

"Three weeks ago I started receiving letters." He produced an opened envelope from his breast pocket and handed it across the coffee table. Donald took it from his hand and inspected its contents. It was a sheet of music.

"I had Miss Claire read the notes to me," said George, taking a sip of his tea and then standing. He walked over to a grand piano on the other end of the room. "I'm quite fond of music."

"That's nice," said Donald, "But it doesn't explain how you know classified information. Why don't you tell me what this has to do with my case."

"All in due time, dear friend," said George. He began to play a sweet melody. "But it's actually a lot harder to explain than you'd think. This music has a peculiar effect, but it seems it needs to be played about three times in a row for the effect to begin. I hope you'll be patient with me as I demonstrate."

Donald gave a frustrated sigh, but listened to the piano with his chin resting on his palm. He took another sip of tea. Near the end of the second listen, the room around him began to swim, but he didn't feel sick. It was like the images he was seeing were jittering in time with the notes. It was oddly comforting, like waves upon a beach. Then came the third listen. As it drew to a close, George spoke up.

"Now fair warning, this can be a little jarring if you've never-"

George's words were interrupted by Donald giving a sharp yelp and shooting to his feet. His vision had gone completely blank, replaced by a bright white light that obscured everything.

"I'm blind!" shouted Donald in alarm, putting his hands over his eyes. The light didn't get any dimmer.

"That's funny," said George, who had stopped playing. "I went deaf the first time."

Donald stumbled and sputtered, banging his knee on the coffee table as he instinctively tried to escape. "You… you drugged me. You put something in my tea."

"I promise you I did no such thing," said George. "For the moment, just stay calm. Your senses are being overwhelmed by stimuli you've never felt before. You're gaining a new type of sense."

"How can I stay calm when you did this to me?" bellowed Donald. "Give me the antidote!"

George tried to stifle a chuckle. "It's not a snake bite. The effect will wear off if you focus. Listen to the sound of my voice and try to localize it with your ears. Or, I guess for you it would be your eyes."

Donald had no option but to trust his words. He listened as George continued to speak, and concentrated. Eventually, the white light began to dim and his vision returned. When it first came back, it was overlaid with colorful ghostly images of all shapes and sizes. Prehistoric plants, floating blobs, and wispy fibrous tendrils seemed to exist in the same space as everything else in the living room. It was incredibly distracting.

"Now I'm hallucinating," said Donald. "What did you do to me?"

"They're not hallucinations, but I'll explain more when you've calmed down a bit. Keep focusing on my voice."

Donald clenched his face and squinted through the colorful ocean of strange things in between him and George. In another minute of concentration, they had all but vanished. Donald had felt silly for thinking it was an ambush earlier, but now he felt silly for letting his guard down. He pulled his pistol and pointed it at George, who was still sitting on the piano bench, but was now facing him.

"You're under arrest. Stand up."

George chucked again. Donald remembered that he was blind.

"I'm pointing a pistol at you," announced Donald, feeling a bit out of his element. He had never needed to arrest anyone who couldn't see before.

"I'd prefer if you didn't."

"Stand up!" shouted Donald. George stood slowly.

"Think clearly Mr. Canardino. If I had drugged you, what compound wouldn't still be in your system right now? Have you ever known a person to take a drug that causes an extreme effect and then completely goes away in a matter of minutes? It was the music, Mr. Canardino."

Donald mulled this over for a second and then cautiously lowered his pistol. "Keep talking."

"Would you mind if I take a seat?" George started to walk to the coffee table.

"No, stay where you are," barked Donald.

"Fair enough. I was as surprised as you were when I first felt it," said George. "Well, maybe a little less violent, but equally surprised. It's not just a new world, it's thousands of them. And the more I listened, the more I understood how they worked. They're all different, you see."

"What are you talking about?"

"Aren't you curious why so many strange things are happening in the capital these days?"

"Go on," said Donald. "Explain it."

"I can hear all sorts of patterns now. You called them hallucinations before, but they're not. The music I hear teaches me things about the real world. It's how I know your name, and it's how I know you're investigating a string of bizarre incidents that started about a week ago."

Donald's blood turned to ice. A week ago? The most recent incident happened a few days ago. Donald wondered what other incidents he wasn't privy to.

"How does music teach you things?" demanded Donald.

George smiled. "Let's do an experiment, shall we? Hold up a single finger."

Donald obliged. "Ok, what now?"

"Now hold up two fingers."

Donald did so.

"Now keep switching back and forth between the two until I tell you to stop."

After a minute of doing this, Donald's patience was beginning to wane.

"Just a little bit longer," said George. "I need to get a solid baseline for this to work. Oh! There it is. Now hold up three fingers, and then four and then five."

Donald obeyed, but insisted upon an explanation.

"We're ready to begin," answered George. "Hold up any number of fingers on that hand and I'll tell you how many you're holding up. You can hide it behind your back if you want, but keep in mind I don't even know what a finger looks like."

Donald was skeptical, but held up a number.

"Five."

Donald frowned.

"Three. Two. Four. One."

George listed them off almost before Donald could hold up the fingers.

"So you've been able to see this whole time. This is all some kind of ruse?"

"Did you hold them where I could see? Go in the other room, put your hand in your pocket, anything you want."

Donald put his hand in his pocket and held four fingers.

"Four," said George.

Donald tested him dozens more times, hiding his hand behind anything and everything he could think to, but George guessed it every time. Finally, Donald thought of a clever trick, and clenched his hand into a fist behind his back.

"One. Wait, no. What is that, zero? Are you making a fist or something?"

Donald sat down, exasperated and confused. Hearing him sit, George walked back over to the coffee table and sat across from him again. He took a sip of tea.

"Aw," said George. "It's cold."

"How did you do that? Are you some kind of psychic?"

"I guess you could call it that," said George. "But really I just listened. You make a unique pitch whenever you hold up a different number of fingers. It took me a bit to figure out which pitches corresponded to which numbers, but once I got it, you were basically telling me the number."

"I didn't hear anything."

"You would have if you didn't freak out so much when I played you the music. Anyway, it took me about a week of constant practice before I started to understand any of what I was hearing."

"How does it work? I mean, what exactly are you doing?"

George sighed. "It's really hard to explain, but I'll do my best. Picture a ballroom. You know, a dance hall, with an orchestra. Except instead of one orchestra, there are hundreds, and they keep going in every direction. They're all playing at once, and they're all playing different pieces, but they're far enough apart that it's not cacophonous. If I'm curious about a specific piece of music or a specific instrument, I can walk over to it, or I can aim my ear at it."

"Aim your ear?"

"Yes," said George. "In this world, hearing is much more directional. My ears are like those of a cat. Or you can imagine I have a great bullhorn to my ear."

"Ok," said Donald, "go on."

"Well each ballroom has a great deal of information in it, and it maps more or less to something in the real world. It's not always clear what they map to, but the point is, none of it is fake."

"Hold on, ballrooms plural? You're losing me."

"Do you own a radio, Mr. Canardino?"

"No," said Donald. "I haven't gotten around to it."

George stood and walked over to where a large radio receiver stood against the wall. He turned it on, and it produced a great deal of static.

"Fabulous invention, radio. I'm very fond of it. Anyway, on a radio you have this dial, see? It's called a tuning dial. Listen to what happens when I turn it."

George rotated the dial and the different stations came through the speaker, each blending into the next. An old showtune. A jazz hit. A person narrating a story.

"Everything kind of overlaps," explained George. "Now imagine that instead of radio waves, those channels are real ballrooms full of people. There's a sort of dial I can turn in my mind to make one ballroom morph into another. On the radio there are only a few things you can listen to. In this world, there are thousands, maybe even an infinite number."

"So the magic trick with the fingers?"

"The first task was to find the right ballroom. That's why I had you switch between one and two fingers. I kept turning the dial until I found a ballroom where one of the orchestras seemed to correspond to what you were doing. There were actually a couple options, so I picked the easiest one."

"And then?"

"And then I asked you to hold up a number of fingers and memorized which note was played. That was the baseline."

"Ok that sort of makes sense," said Donald.

"Good, because that's a pretty simplified version. In actuality, the ballrooms are three dimensional. It's like I'm in a great swimming pool, and the orchestras are swimming all about above and below me."

"What about my name? How did you find out my name?"

"That took a while. I first found your musical signature, and then I paid a visit to my cousins. I had to find a ballroom where all of my cousins were playing in time with my signature. I took a guess that you might have cousins too, and I looked for people in that ballroom whose orchestras were playing in time with you. Your cousin Jeremy is a lovely chap by the way."

"You met my cousin?"

"Yes. And I asked him what his uncle's last name was. He didn't know your first name, but knowing Canardino narrowed it down a lot, and the Records Bureau had a copy of your birth certificate."

"This is insane," said Donald, breathless. "So the events in my case files, those are all psychics like you?"

George smiled nervously. "Psychic makes it sound like it's something I'm just able to do. I'm only able to hear the patterns if I play the music enough times, and I need to keep humming it to myself to refresh the ability. On top of that, each piece of music only lasts about twenty four hours. After that, it's just regular music, and I lose the ability entirely."

"So the one you played earlier on the piano-"

"I received it by mail about an hour before you arrived. No return address. Just like every day for the past three weeks. It was addressed to me by name. Miss Claire says the only other writing on it is a note that says 'for your ears only'."

"So much for that," mumbled Donald. "You're not concerned your benefactor will stop sending you new music because you shared this with me?"

"I thought about that," said George. "But I decided it was worth the risk. I needed to meet you."

"Why?"

"Like I said before, to make a deal. Here's what I can offer you. Everything that happens in this city creates a kind of rhythm. I spent the whole first week just listening to it all. After a while you get a sense of what sounds normal and what's out of place. That's how I know about the others. I'm not the only one who's getting sent sheets of music each day."

George reached for his tea and then remembered it was cold and thought better of it.

"Like echoes in a concert hall, I can hear the after effects of the things people do. Turns out it creates quite an uproar when someone steals thirteen gold bars."

"You know who did that?"

"Not by name, but I could find out if I wanted to. That's part of what I'm offering you."

"And the other part?"

"Solving the little cases would make your bosses happy, I'm sure, " said George, "but they'd be much happier if you solved the big case."

"You mean the person behind all of this? The one sending the music."

"That's right. I can help you find them."

Donald pondered this. This man would already be of huge value to the regime by virtue of what he could do. He was practically an entire intelligence agency all by himself. A more impulsive agent would arrest him now and compel him to use his powers for the Bureau. On the other hand, if what he was saying about the letters every day was true, then arresting him might cause the person sending the music to stop, and he would become useless overnight. The only way forward was to move carefully. Something still bothered Donald though.

"For it to be a deal, there has to be an exchange. What do you get out of this?"

"I'm just so patriotic that I'm happy to help out however I can," said George, before laughing at his own joke.

"But no, in all seriousness, I do want something, and it's no accident I chose you. You see, I'm in love with a young woman."

"And, what, you want me to spy on her or something?"

George frowned. "Nothing as sordid as all that, I assure you. We've been friends since childhood, and loved each other for almost as long."

"Then what's the problem?"

"The problem is your government, Mr. Canardino. Are you familiar with R.L.C. 22.6?"

"No," said Donald honestly.

"It's a law that's been in place for a few decades now. It's about people like me. You know, cripples, the dumb, and the lame."

Donald noticed more than a hint of venom in his voice.

"It says that in order to keep people like me from polluting the gene pool with our defective blood, we are forbidden from marrying or siring children, under penalty of death of the child or sterilization of the parent."

"I see," said Donald, growing uncomfortable with the growing tone of resentment that Geroge was taking.

"I've read the whole code of law in braille. I was looking for exceptions to the law, and I found only one."

"What did you find?"

"The executive bureaus have final authority over the courts," said George. "The laws only apply when the regime says they do. And that means a high enough ranking executive officer can sign a writ of exemption, allowing a specific person to do something that would otherwise be illegal. If you give me your blessing, I can get married."

"I don't have that power," said Donald.

"No," said George, "but your boss does. The director of the Intelligence Bureau can get me the writ I need."

"Let me get this straight," said Donald. "I get you an exemption so you can marry this girl of yours, and you'll use your powers in any way I ask?"

"That's the deal."

Donald considered the offer for only a couple of seconds before standing and extending his hand. Turning red, he remembered that George couldn't actually see his hand, so he grabbed George's hand and shook it.

Finally, thought Donald. The hunt is on.