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III.

Hipner Pilnipott preferred to be known as The Fox, though no one called him that other than his students, who were required to do so, and the woman whom everyone thought was his mother not the least because she encouraged it while secretly considering it a very funny title, mainly because of its inappropriateness. Pilnipott did indeed resemble any one of several different animals, none of which were anything like a fox. Of all the suggested alternatives—echidna, hedgehog and beaver, to name but a few—the most apt was the ordinary garden mole. For a mole, he would have been, of course, very large, but for a human being he was in fact quite small. He was pear-shaped and almost neckless—the smoothly curving line connecting the crown of his head with his expansive hips being unbroken by any discernable neck or shoulders. He resembled, in fact, an eggplant more than anything in the animal kingdom. His face came to a dull point; his blunt, protruding nose, made all the more prominent by the lack of either chin or forehead, was moist and pimply. He was fearsomely nearsighted and his already small eyes—as damp and beady as a pair of capers—were shrunk to pinpoints by the thick concave lenses he wore.

His detractors, however, were being far too literal, for while Pilnipott might physically be mole-like he did indeed resemble a fox in the only really significant way: he was magnificently wily. He had been a brilliant child in an environment where intelligence was underappreciated, especially when combined with any physical handicap, let alone the catalog of infirmities which burdened young Pilnipott. As might be expected, a decade of humiliations and beatings had driven the boy into a world of his own making. He devoured every book, magazine, tabloid and dime novel which had even so much as a single sentence describing a crime or a criminal. The most successful thief, malfeasor, misdemeanant, miscreant, pickpocket, picklock, burglar, second story man, scofflaw, gangster, racketeer, thug, swindler, confidence man, highwayman or outlaw became his ardent hero. Being an intelligent lad, however, he was not satisfied with admiration—he wanted to emulate. But, being intelligent, he was all too aware of his physical limitations. He was clumsy, nearly blind, claustrophobic, acrophobic, nervous, fretful and prone to jump at sudden, loud noises. His voice, weak and fluting, would never command respect. An order to “stick ‘em up!” would only result in a tolerant chuckle and either a pat on the head or a sharp cuff against an earhole.

He realized, however, that a successful crime actually consisted of two separate and distinct parts: planning and commission. These did not necessarily have to be performed by the same person. Indeed, there were persuasive arguments as to why they should be undertaken by entirely different people. The thug, physically active, with adept fingers and sharp eyes, capable of carrying any crime to its successful conclusion, did not of necessity possess the brains to invent that crime, let alone think through all possible consequences and permutations. That’s why so many of them, young Pilnipott reasoned, had a night’s dangerous labor rewarded with only a few crowns or a handful of worthless silverplate—or, all too often, several years at hard labor. On the other hand, the criminal mastermind, able to plan an escapade to its last detail, foreseeing every circumstance, did not of necessity have the brute skills required for its execution.

Young Pilnipott decided to become a criminal mastermind.

Establishing himself proved to be a slow process, for he had to convince those who had hitherto considered him a laughingstock to now consider him a genius and become his willing and subservient accomplices. To overcome this formidable difficulty, he formulated a sublime plan, meticulously worked out over a period of months in every conceivable detail. Its rewards, if the scheme were successfully performed, would be great—certainly greater than anything his prospective collaborators had ever received from their petty crimes. As an additional inducement, he declined any personal gain: his accomplices could share among themselves all of the profits. This latter was considered an almost inconceivable largess.

Initially skeptical, the others could not help but be impressed by the detail of the plan, its promised reward and the bland confidence of its inventor. They accepted the scheme, said they’d give it a try and then they’d see.

It seems almost unnecessary to say that Pilnipott’s idea was a success and that his collaborationists, impressed beyond all expressing, even had they been that articulate, came back to him—and not merely as equals, but with the fawning respect due a true leader. And, of course, they readily agreed to split any future proceeds.

This satisfied Pilnipott—who had immediately insisted on the nom de crime of The Fox—through his teens and early twenties, but there came gradually a niggling dissatisfaction. He became aware of a lack of absolute control that kept his schemes from being performed with the faultlessness that he expected and demanded. No matter how perfectly formed were his plans, no matter that every possible contingency was allowed for, however unlikely, there was always one factor over which he had little or no control and that was that he had to depend upon others to carry out his perfectly-conceived crime—yet he was of necessity forced to employ the labor that was available—rather like a master architect who has to rely on retarded children to construct his buildings. However adept The Fox’s associates may be, however experienced, adroit and clever, they were nevertheless contaminated by unknown frailties, loyalties and motives. He found this annoyingly unacceptable.

Being a genius, The Fox quickly invented a solution that was as epic as it was brilliant. He would create his own gang as literally as a sculptor creates his own models from raw clay, molding and shaping to suit himself and no other.

The first experiment took years before he was assured that it would, indeed, work. He had an infant kidnaped and brought to his headquarters. Here, he had it cared for by an old woman (whom many thought was his mother but was not) until it was old enough to begin its training—which would be sometime between its twelfth and eighteenth month, The Fox determined.

Every night, Pilnipott read bedtime stories to the child—carefully chosen from his own highly idiosyncratic library of criminous books and periodicals. In addition, he took some considerable creative pleasure in recasting fairy tales, folk stories, legends and myths in a more criminal light. By the time the child was old enough to read on his own, it had its own peculiar literary slant well-developed, to say nothing of a coterie of outlaw heroes. Where other children dreamed of emulating Captain Truly Ironheart, the Savior of Woldercan, Pilnipott’s protégé worshiped Scarface Dan, the Demon Highwayman. Even more important than the humanities was the child’s practical education. His instructors were the elder pickpockets, thieves and confidence artists who, though respected and acknowledged masters of their craft, were finding their effectiveness hampered by the various infirmities of age. All of them were glad of The Fox’s offer. Better, they thought, that their efforts be rewarded by passing their experience and skill to a new generation than by spending their declining years in prison, betrayed by trembling fingers, tardy reflexes and meandering thoughts, wasting their considerable talents sewing gloves or assembling mailbags.

While the child was still barely able to walk on his own, Pilnipott rented him to various mendicants, beggars and confidence artists. These were delighted to have the use of a chubby, golden-haired, patently innocent waif and readily put him to any number of imaginative uses. Lomza Lohardarga, a beggar who had perfected the art of appearing completely legless, found her income more than doubled through no more effort on her part than holding an infant in her arms. Where a citizen would have passed by her with scarcely a downward glance—or perhaps a glare of annoyance when they found their busy path impeded by her unpleasantly truncated body—they now found their coins attracted to the radiantly-smiling babe like a needle to a magnet. “Fwank ‘oo kin’ thir,” the infant would lisp. “Mufoom bwess ‘oo.” Only the hardest hearts were able to turn away with a dry eye.

Broffol de Wet, a cat burglar of legendary repute, trained the child to slither through gates, railings, grilles and ventilators, allowing him unobtrusive, clueless access to hitherto inaccessible plunder in a crime spree that confounded police for more than a decade. Raoul Wo-Wo and his partner Esdraelon L. Hoorn, the most accomplished bunco-artists in Guesclin, found that a child added an invaluable aura of verisimilitude to their scams. They offered to purchase the boy outright and although the sum was a staggering one, Pilnipott gently but firmly refused.

At the same time The Fox’s protégé was being gainfully if illegally employed, his higher education was continued by the practical example of some of the most accomplished criminals in the country. By the time that the boy was four or five years old, Pilnipott had no fear of sending him out with only his own wit and devices to guide him. When after the first week The Fox contemplated, with some amazement, the accumulated loot representing the unaided efforts of his creation, he knew that his scheme had been vindicated.

He then advertised widely among the kidnappers and baby brokers, picking and choosing as carefully as a finicky shopper selecting a melon. The dozen or so infants thus selected every six months were transported to Pilnipott’s headquarters in the Transmoltus. There, for eighteen months, they were taken care of with, if not kindness, at least the bland, indifferent attention a dairy farmer would give a profitable herd. A high-ceilinged loft over a sponge warehouse had been transformed into a rudimentary nursery, given over to the care of the half-crippled hag who may or may not have been The Fox’s mother. In exchange for a daily quart of gin she saw that the infants were fed, if irregularly, and cleaned perhaps less often than absolutely necessary. The Fox, who maintained his own apartments three floors above, was not inconvenienced by either of these derelictions. Indeed, once he knew that his experiment was viable, he took no especial interest whatsoever in any of his charges for the first year and a half. After that, his only interest lay in the weekly accounting of their income. He trusted in his genius and the smoothly operating machine he had created.

For the remaining decades of his life, Hipner Pilnipott devoted himself to writing his memoirs, an encyclopedia of criminal techniques and a long-running series of popular teenage romances.

But let it not be thought that the children were in any way abused or maltreated or that they lived in conditions that were particularly substandard—at least as compared to what they would have suffered if left in their original environments, had they survived at all. Indeed, given the increasingly bilateral state of Tamlaghtese economy—the rapidity with which its population was being divided into two classes: the very small number who were benefitting directly from the introduction of spaceflight versus everyone else—Pilnipott’s children actually fared better than the largest proportion of the citizenry. He made certain they realized and appreciated this and that they grew up to despise the plump, pink children who were being pampered like suckling piglets in the big houses across the river and smugly confident they were more fortunate than the gaunt children scavaging ashcans in Transmoltan alleys. Pilnipott’s children, repeated assured that this contempt was real, hated tenfold in return.

The Fox’s progeny gazed, from their loftily assumed position, with disdain upon those on whom they preyed. They were educated, skilled, appreciated, feared, invisible—a special, unique class of their own and Pilnipott was scrupulous in making certain they never forgot that.

As soon as the children were able to walk, or at least stand unaided, they were expected to begin repaying The Fox for his generosity. For half a day, from dawn to noon, they underwent intense indoctrination by the Faculty. They were taught to read, write and reckon, for The Fox recognized the criminal utility of literacy (the need, for example, to write a ransom note or perhaps a memo informing a teller that she’s being held up. There was no excuse, The Fox earnestly believed, for these things not to be done in the best penmanship. To do otherwise offended his sense of the aesthetic. Slovenliness in details reflected upon him). For the remainder of the day, from noon until whenever they were returned, the children were leased out, as we have seen, to beggars, charlatans and shoplifters, who found the presence of a dewy-eyed toddler adding verisimilitude and engendering trust, or found tiny fingers or slim, lithe bodies useful in any number of ways. Those children who had some talent for mimicry or acting commanded the highest prices, for they could be trained to impersonate the blind, crippled or otherwise handicapped. These were allowed to attend special classes on prosthetic makeup and appliances, enabling them to all the better impersonate the afflicted. The older children, from eighteen months to two years or so, he allowed to operate independently if they showed sufficient talent and ability and these he released into the streets like an army of light-fingered monkeys. So confident was he in their indoctrination that he never doubted their trustworthiness.

Somewhere between the ages of five and ten, the children were allowed to fend for themselves, turned out to make room for the next generation—but were beholden for life to The Fox for seven-eighths of their income—and so well-trained were they that few, if any, questioned the fairness of such an exorbitant tithe. There were those, of course, who rebelled, and they simply were not seen again for The Fox did not allow paternal instincts to interfere with business, and none of the children questioned this, either.

At the time Mr. Gerber sold the child who was to become Captain Judikha to Hipner Pilnipott, the latter had been operating his syndicate for more than thirty-five years and had turned whole armies of larcenous urchins onto the streets; indeed, there was much to support the suggestion that in all likelihood the entire criminal class of the Transmoltus—and a dozen other cities both in Tamlaght and on the Continent—had its origins in the nurseries of The Fox.


Gerber depended upon his quarterly sales of ten to fifteen infants to The Fox for the greater part of his business. No more so than this particular time when his wagon held less than a third of its usual capacity. His accustomed sources had disappointed him terribly—mostly due to the combined effects of the drought and the volcano. Had he even suspected the appearance of the latter he certainly would have taken the northerly and easterly routes. He hadn’t, of course, and had instead found himself wandering uselessly around a blistered and fruitless landscape. So it goes.

Upon his arrival in the Transmoltus, he carefully pruned his stock—what was left, of course, after natural attrition. Some of the survivors were so sickly he knew there would be no point in showing them to The Fox. These he let go to his discounters at a loss. This left him with a miserable fifteen or so—a scant fraction of his usual selection. The Fox would be terribly disappointed, but there it was.

He had this dozen-odd cleaned up and kept them for a few days to give them a chance to fatten a touch, gritting his teeth at the cost of the milk, even though he purchased the soured, clotted, plaster-adulterated stuff at a considerable discount.

The Fox was, as Gerber half expected he would be, very disappointed.

“Hardly a decent showing this season,” he said, hands clasped behind his back, rocking on the balls of his feet, two sure signs that he was annoyed.

“Scant pickings, what with the drought and all,” Gerber explained, aggravated at having to apologize. “And the volcano.”

“Surely people haven’t stopped breeding? You’d think with all the farms dried up they’d have nothing else to do with their time.”

“So I would have thought,” agreed the broker, “but such did not prove to be the case.”

“Well, let’s see what we have then.”

The Fox waddled up and down the line of baskets that Gerber had placed in a neat row on the floor. He paced with his hands clasped lightly behind his back, his short arms barely allowing him to do this, stopping occasionally to rock back and forth on his little feet, as he considered first one infant, than another. He made little clucking noises with his tongue that made Gerber’s sweaty fists clench.

“All things considered,” The Fox said, finally, “it’s not a bad collection, even given the small number.”

“Thank you,” replied the broker, reluctant to acknowledge a welling surge of relief.

“Well, let’s see here. Might as well get right down to business.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hm. I’ll take these first three here. And that one. Um, that one. Those two. How many is that?”

“Uh, seven, Mr. The Fox, sir.”

“Hm. This one looks likely. And those two, and the one next to those, and...hm...oh, that one, too, I suppose.”

“That’s twelve, sir,” offered Gerber, scarcely able to believe his luck—and The Fox did not yet appear to be finished!

“Twelve, eh? Well...I rather fancied that one and that one too. Might as well take ‘em. How many’s that, now?”

“Fourteen, sir.” Holy Musrum!

“Fine. Five crowns each, as usual? That’s, uh...”

“Seventy crowns, Mr. The Fox, sir.”

“Come on to my office and I’ll get the money for you.”

“Mr. The Fox, sir, why don’t you take one more, as a bonus? The last child? As my gift, as a, a kind of thank-you? Make it fifteen altogether.”

“A bonus? Free, you mean? No charge? That’s very generous of you, Gerber, quite generous, but I don’t know that I really need fifteen.”

“Please, sir. I’d consider it an honor,” and one less mouth to feed, not that he would have fed it for long.

“Well...all right, if you insist.”

The fifteenth infant was, of course, our heroine.

Mr. Gerber received his seventy crowns and disappears from our history, concerning us no more than the fate of the remainder of his stock, which, the reader will readily appreciate, is just as well.

Judikha received her name strictly as a matter of expediency. She was flanked, alphabetically, by Joram, Jorilla and Jotham on one side, and Jugutha, Jumel and Jumieges on the other. Pilnipott got the names from a book, 10,000 Perfect Names for Baby, which he had stolen the very same week he had first started his enterprise, and was methodically working his way through it. It made no difference to The Fox whether the gender of the names was appropriate: a child received his or her name in the order in which they came, to do otherwise was a niggling detail upon which Pilnipott did not wish to waste time. Probability came to the rescue of most of the students who received names that were, if not particular sonorous, were at least appropriate. Still, there were husky male criminals named Dolores and Cissy and delicately feminine miscreants named Bruto and Edouard, but Pilnipott reasoned that this just made them tougher.

Judikha was at this time, of course, too young to be particularly interested in her surroundings, let alone her name. This did not particularly matter, since her surroundings did not change in all the time she was to remain under Pilnipott’s care. They were no different on the day she arrived then they were ten years later. The operation had established an efficient status quo long before her arrival and Pilnipott saw no reason to ever change it. He had created a fine machine that with very little attention methodically transformed useless, unwanted babies into productive, money-generating criminals and like any good engineer he wasn’t about to tamper with what was already perfect. The machine remained unchanging and the children were nothing more than the raw material that passed through it.

All of the children lived together, regardless of age or sex, in a kind of barracks-nursery. As the first class became older, they were put in charge of the younger, and so on until, after several years, there was established an iron-clad order of society and responsibility. This relieved The Fox’s mother, if she was his mother, of considerable burden.

Pilnipott, with his usual careful organization, had arranged the loft somewhat on the plan of an assembly line, with the newest infants at one end of the room and the oldest children at the other, with the remainder graded between according to age. The rows of wooden cots, placed only a couple of feet apart, were not unlike the conveyor belt of an assembly line, with raw material continuously pouring in one end and a finished product coming off the other. Every year, as the infants became old enough to begin their formal training, the two-year-olds moved to the next row of beds further down the room, the three-year-olds to the next and so on. The oldest children, of nine or ten, having no beds to move to, were therefore “graduated” and forced to find lodging outside the school, in whatever way they could, though their ties to The Fox were of course expected to be no less stringently observed.

Judikha’s earliest unambiguous memories were from the age of two or three years. By that time she was already well advanced in her training. There were three reasons for her rapid progress. The first to be exploited by Pilnipott was that she was a particularly appealing-looking child with a pale, fine-boned face and enormous dark eyes. She quickly became the infant of choice by those who were leasing babies from The Fox as props, as it were. Thereby she was exposed earlier and far more often to the outside world than most of her comrades, to say nothing of the role models who were her de facto employers. The second reason (and one that soon supplanted the first) was that she grew quickly. Tall for her age, and an early walker, she quickly graduated to more advanced training, while most of the other infants were still little more than toddling props. She developed into a long child, as skinny and lithe and quick as a salamander. A dark child, with mahogany eyes and fine, straight hair the color of oiled teak.

The third reason was her almost preternatural intelligence.

The Judikha of these first few years was a quiet, introspective, shy child who never voluntarily mingled with her surrogate brothers and sisters. She neither made nor encouraged friends. This aloofness at first involved her in a good many brawls with her classmates, who understandably felt slighted. But in addition to her intelligence Judikha was as tough as spring steel and not the least loathe to fight with an imaginative dirtiness against which the mere physical superiority of her enemies was no match. She was soon left alone, which was exactly her intention.

The Fox, after the first few years of his deanship, did not often thereafter take a great deal of interest in his pupils. The ministrations of the woman who may have been his mother, with the aid of trusties selected from the ranks of the eldest children, sufficed for all daily needs, such as they were. Every Friday morning, all were expected to file past his massive oak desk and render unto their master his rightful tithe. He took the offerings silently, entering the amounts in meticulous copperplate hand in the big ledger next to the appropriate names, otherwise neither acknowledging the receipt of the money nor the presence of the child, no more than someone would acknowledge receipt of a candy bar from a vending machine. He never questioned the accuracy of the amounts. They were always correct; on the rare occasions when they were not—when the child had held back a demipfennig or two for whatever purpose seemed important at the time, or for no purpose at all, perhaps, other than daring or rebelliousness—when there was even the slightest shortage, he knew instantly. There was never any need to count the coins. There was something about the way the small fist released its load of warm, moist coins, perhaps, a sense of haste, or of furtiveness, or of ill-feigned casualness, perhaps something entirely psychic—it did not matter because he knew and that was all there was to that. He never said a thing at the time because he never spoke to the children, but he made a mark beside the name in the ledger and later showed the book to the hag who might very well have been his mother. That same evening the miscreant was called from his or her bed and terribly punished. It did not matter whether the embezzled amount was a demipfennig—which was just barely capable of being traded for a piece of rock candy no larger than the end of one’s little finger—or an imperial eagle, the punishment was the same. And the punishment was always brutal because the woman who may or may not have been The Fox’s mother considered it an annoying chore and she disliked being annoyed even more than she disliked caring for the children.

Pilnipott took notice of Judikha because, of all the children who had filed past his desk, hundreds upon hundreds of them, to fulfil their weekly obeisance, she was the only one about whose honesty he was not certain. Over the decades the children had been reduced to an endless procession of shuffling feet, snuffling noses and downcast eyes, a kind of tattered mechanism depositing an endless stream of coins. Since it had been Judikha’s habit, from the very first, to stride purposefully across the room, never taking her eyes from her master, toss his share of her earnings onto the blotter, pivot on her heel and march back through the door, it is easy to appreciate how she came to not only attract Pilnipott’s attention but excite his suspicions as well. No one could be that self-assured without having something to hide.

Initially, the Fox did not quite know what to make of Judikha’s behavior. In the normal course of things he would have attached considerable doubt to actions far less overt than those of this scrawny, large-eyed girl. It was the scale that bothered him. He was far more accustomed to the detection of barely perceptible signs of guilt: an infinitesimal tic, a minute shift of an eye, a nanosecond’s hesitation. Judikha’s gestures were broad, coarse and overt. Too, anyone with something to hide wouldn’t charge through the door as though they owned the place and toss a fistful of money onto his blotter with same negligent—even supercilious!—gesture that would be used to fling a few coins to a street beggar. However, when he entered her accounts next to her name, he noticed that the numbers were never suspiciously less than he expected them to be and, surprisingly, were often more.

Not knowing what to make of her, he had her punished once or twice just as a precautionary measure. It was not until she was nearly seven years of age did Pilnipott realize what she had been doing.

One evening, in counting Judikha’s weekly tithe, he noticed—and noticed for no particular reason other than that they were her coins—that one of the bronze ten-pfennig pieces had two peculiar wedge-shaped cuts in it, as though someone had twice jammed the blade of a knife into its edge. There was no cause to take special notice of this anomaly: he merely glanced at the coin for perhaps a quarter second longer than usual before tallying it with the others. However, when on the succeeding Friday he saw a ten-pfennig piece bearing vaguely familiar wedge-shaped marks, he remembered the disfigured coin he had seen the week before. Curious, he thought, and was about to place the coin with the others when another, more disturbing, even horrifying, thought came to mind. Taking from his pocket his own penknife, he opened its blade and made a third notch in the rim of the coin adjacent to the others. He looked at it for a moment, wondering why he had done something so atypically capricious, then tossed it into the growing pile and returned to his accounting, trusting to a genius even he sometimes failed to fully understand.

Once again he had forgotten the strange coin until, on the following Friday, he saw it lying in the palm of his hand. It seemed to be sneering at him. By Musrum’s bristly balls!, he thought with more sincere reverence than any psychic eavesdropper would have thought.

When Judikha found herself unexpectedly summoned to The Fox’s office, she stood before the great desk, placidly looking at the fat man behind it with enormous, dark, vaguely disinterested eyes. There was nothing at all furtive, conciliatory nor cowed about her gaze and this impressed The Fox not a little. He knew that she knew perfectly well why she was there and that she could maintain an expression of such calm, clear dispassion impelled an unfamiliar sense of pride. She had no ready excuses, no wary mask of guilt—she was wasting nothing, waiting upon his initiative.

“Ah, Judikha,” he began, wondering why he began so hesitatingly. “You know why you are here.”

“If you say so, sir,” she replied. It should have sounded insolent but did not. It was just a polite statement of fact.

“Are you suggesting that you don’t know why you are here?”

“No, sir.”

“Then would you care to tell me why you are here?”

“Because you sent for me, sir.”

“And why did I do that?”

“Because you wanted to see me, sir.”

“And why do you think I wanted to see you?”

“Well, sir, I could only guess about that.”

“Try.”

“Well, perhaps you found an error in your arithmetic, sir, and wanted to refund some of my money.”

“Now you’re being insolent!”

“I don’t know what that means, sir.”

“There’s no use in pretending that you don’t know that I know you’ve been stealing from me!”

“No, sir?”

“No, there isn’t.”

“I’ve never stolen so much a demipfennig from you, sir,” she said, flatly, never taking her eyes from his.

Oh, what a good little girl! he thought, happily. Stout denial! The very first thing I try to teach them. And right here to my face! Without blinking an eyelash! Oh, she’s got a little nerve, she has!

“There’s no use denying it, Judikha. I’ve got proof.”

She didn’t reply, nor did her bland expression change.

He held up the marked coin between a chubby forefinger and thumb. “I’ve seen this coin,” he said, “three times, and each time it was in your payment.”

“I’m sure there must be many coins with nicks in them, sir.”

“No doubt. But not another one with a mark I put on it myself.”

She was silent for what could not have been more than three heartbeats, though her expression did not waver.

“Oops, huh, sir?”

“Oops, indeed.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I should have been more observant.”

“No, no. Well, yes, you should have been more careful, but you did very well. Better than anyone has before you, I can tell you that. There’ve been some pretty bold liars in this office and some very slick operators, but no one, Judikha, no one among all the hundreds who’ve been through my academy, have had the nerve to steal from me!”

“Thank you, sir. I really do try to do my best.”

“Would you mind telling me how you went about it?”

“Do I have to, sir?”

“No. No, I suppose not. But you’ve been punished once or twice before. How did you know that it wasn’t for stealing from me? Why did you keep on doing it?”

“Well, sir, I figured that if I was being punished for stealing from you, I surely would have been told. Just to make sure, I stole again the next week and nothing happened. So I knew that it must have been either for something else—though just what I couldn’t figure out—or you were only making an example of me.”

“Good heavens, you are nerveless!”

“Thank you, sir.”

Judikha was obviously such an apt pupil that The Fox felt a wholly unexpected and unfamiliar quiver of pride. He rewarded himself by increasing her tithe to an even ninety per cent. Nevertheless, he instructed the hag (his mother? some thought so) to punish the girl that night and he withheld the old woman’s gin to insure that it would be an experience Judikha would not soon forget.

Turned out at eight and a quarter years of age—more than a year and a half earlier than the average—Judikha found a niche for herself in an abandoned garret, much as the infant barnacle, set free from its parent, soon attaches itself to a rock, pier or hull.

An irregular hole that served as the only window looked out on a chaotic landscape of steam and wheels and smokestacks and ruined warehouses. Factories gloomed through the oily mists, dynamos throbbed and steam hammers rang. And every now and then there would be the subsonic roar of a launching rocket. She could feel the city’s vibrations through the soles of her feet and when she pressed her cheek against the clammy plaster of the wall. Squabs of grass, wounded by the iron-dust that sifted from the atmosphere in lieu of rain or snow, added a sad color among the rockeries of broken bricks and shattered masonry. An unceasing brown rain dripped from the bare hedges. From across the singed yards, where snakes of yellow smoke writhed, she could hear the voices of engines and the yelping of dogs. Only the dogs and the wheels denied the thought that the Transmoltus was a city of destruction surrendered to the conqueror smoke. Through the crevice came persistently, day and night, the surge and throb and squall of the city. From dawn to dawn the movements of its insane symphony repeated themselves, now taken up here, now there, beating against the outer walls with grandiloquent noise, lashing and swirling in little eddies or concerted waves. But on the horizon, against the clouding sky, through the banners of flame, through a roaring cloud of smoke and steam and sunset, she could see the craggy, gleaming terraces of the City.

Her home was little more than a den created from an odd angle in the top floor of a massive tenement block. It was crisscrossed by the massive, black timbers that supported the lead-sheeted roof; a weird, prismatic hollow with no right angles, it boasted a feature that had infinite appeal to the young girl: the outside wall, more than two feet of stone, brick and plaster, had that meandering crack that allowed her an unobstructed view of Blavek and, more importantly the spaceport beyond.

The garret had been inhabited, off and on, for centuries. She discovered that at one time someone had papered all the walls with pictures cut from magazines and newspapers. They had been painted over countless times, but with patience she could often pick away the ancient scales until an image was revealed. She never knew what it was going to be; sometimes it was an animal, sometimes a flower, sometimes a pretty girl. Sometimes the layers merged imperceptibly one into the other, so she would uncover, perhaps, a bird-person or an automobile-fish or some other surprising and even disconcerting hybrid.

There had also been bits and pieces cast off by countless previous denizens for which Judikha always found some good use. Stumps of candles and puddles of spilled wax she carefully gathered and consolidated into new candles, if roughly formed and smokily inefficient. Cardboard cartons contained her neatly folded clothing. Bales of yellowed newspaper were crumpled into balls and used for insulation; a broken spoon, bits of cloth, a few pins, buttons, a can opener, rusted springs, shards of glass bottles, a rusted tin cup—dozens of odd objects, mostly useless and certainly worthless, all which she carefully preserved because, after all, one never knew. Chief among this detritus, and perhaps the least useful of it, was the tintype she found jammed edgewise between two floorboards. It took her half an hour of patient scrabbling and the help of a fork whose single remaining tine proved the perfect tool (and didn’t that go to show that you shouldn’t ever throw anything away?) to retrieve the photograph. As it was drawn from the crack—ever so slowly and gently for fear of scratching the surface—it entranced her from the first glimpse. Torn, bent and worn to an irregular oval shape, there was little left of the original image except the face of a young woman and the hint of old-fashioned-looking clothes. In the flickering, unsteady light of a single candle, the silvery features seemed to take on an uncanny life. It was the face she’d always imagined faeries to possess: pale, triangular, with wide, white brow and delicately pointed chin. The little mouth had upturned corners, which made it look wise and sardonic. The nose was tiny and, because the portrait was full-face, almost invisible. The eyes, however, were enormous and reminded her of a cat’s or an owl’s: wide, slanted and almost entirely occupied by huge black pupils, like two drops of oil in a pool of milk. Surrounding the elfin face was a froth of black hair that parted the shimmering forehead with a pronounced widow’s peak.

There were four crudely-written letters in wax crayon on the back of the tintype—a different color for each letter—that had been almost perfectly effaced. All they said was THUD. She discovered much later that this word should have meant something to her, but at the time the connection would have seemed so unlikely, so impossibly coincidental, that she can hardly be blamed for missing it.

The photograph became her most valuable possession. She neatly and meticulously trimmed away all of the image except for the haunting face and placed it in a brass-plated locket that she had stolen from a variety store—not without considerable agonizing over which of many styles most suited her prize. She would have been unable—or perhaps unwilling—to explain her fascination with the tintype and fortunately no one ever asked her to do so. But then, she never showed it to anyone. Judikha to this day is reluctant to discuss it—one who is otherwise candid, even graphic, in discussing the most intimate and even disreputable details of her life. However, she has made it clear that even at that early age she was dissatisfied with her physical appearance, that she thought herself homely and unattractive, so perhaps it is not unreasonable to suppose that she saw in the little tintype portrait an ideal, that when she gazed into it she could imagine she was looking into a kind of magic mirror that reflected the image she’d prefer seeing.5

Often, at night, after rolling herself into her blankets, she would open the locket and stare at the tiny face until she fell asleep. Sometimes, just before she lost consciousness, the face, dimly lit by the evanescent, auroral light of the furnaces that flickered through the crack in the wall, filtered through quivering half-closed lashes and watery half-focused eyes, would seem to momentarily appear alive. Inspired by that illusory movement, her imagination—unfettered by a brain whose logical faculty was already half-asleep—saw the strange, elongated woman step toward her, her long, luminous body like a wavering shaft of moonlight—which in truth it probably was. The sad gentleness in that limpid cat-face lacerated Judikha’s heart. She wanted more than anything to ask what was wrong, to inexplicably say she was sorry, but swallowed the words aborning, for fear that the slightest sound would make the beautiful woman vanish like a soap bubble. Invariably and disappointingly she always fell asleep before she could discover what the woman wanted or why she looked so sad.

Once, when she was nine, she slipped across the bridge into Blavek. She had to be careful; the police, who turned a blind eye to what occurred in the Transmoltus so long as it stayed there, were particular as to whom they allowed to roam the streets of the capital. Stringy ragamuffins with hungry eyes were very much on their list of undesirables. But it was winter, and a bleak, dank, foggy evening, and the forces of law and order were not prone to discomforting themselves over trifles, therefore no notice was taken of the slight, silent shadow. For a giddy hour thereafter Judikha had looked through the unshaded window of an alabaster townhouse, received an eyeful of white-linened table, gleamingly bare arms and necks and backs, flashes of silver and the glint of crystal all aswim in a pink glow. It was more than a glimpse into Blavek, more than a glimpse into the cool world of the privileged; it was a glimpse into a life as alien as though it were on another planet.

Another winter dusk, when she was ten, she stood before a roaring sunset watching the soaring vapor trails subdividing the heavens and pledged a terrible oath to herself.


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Framed