Explanations, Inc.

By Nancy Kress

Ayn Rand and Warren Salomon are responsible for this story, both unwittingly.

Ayn Rand, of course, is the Objectivist author of ATLAS SHRUGGED, a book I have read six or seven times with fascination and annoyance. Warren Salomon is an SF writer who, like Rand, believes that the universe is rational, that rationality is man’s only means to understand the world and himself, and that only rational actions have moral validity. A year’s worth of spirited correspondence left me unconvinced, but it was an interesting exchange of letters, articles, and vituperation.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I wrote this story.

The first time Harkavy passed the new storefront on Frazier Street, he didn’t notice it. He strode rapidly, arms pumping, long-jawed face scowling so fiercely that an Airedale set to bark at him thought the better of it and slunk away into the shadows. He was furious, was Professor Harkavy, too furious to notice a new shop in an old storefront, dusty despite its newness, identified by a hand-lettered sign propped against a drooping ficus benjamina.

The second time around the block, and still furious. Blocks! Stones! Worse than senseless things! It hadn’t been this bad when he had been a student—no, it had not. His peers in those dim past days had studied for exam questions. Or at least thought about exam questions. Or at least—the very least (pump, pump) been conscious while answering exam questions. But this lot! Intellectually dead! He, Harkavy, was probably in violation of the vice code—he was practicing pedagogic necrophilia.

The cleverness of this phrase slowed him down—actually, it was pretty neat. He would have to remember it for later, for the faculty dining room. Morton, from Anthro, would love it. Harkavy stopped pumping and stopped scowling, and noticed the storefront and its hand-lettered sign:

EXPLANATIONS, INC.

WE EXPLAIN ANYTHING

GRAND OPENING TODAY

Harkavy snorted. Explain anything, indeed! The presumption, the intellectual arrogance—and the ficus benjamina had mealybug. Harkavy could see it through the window, the ghostly white fibers just beginning to spread across the undersides of the plant’s droopy leaves. Harkavy snorted again and, because, pushed open the door and entered the shop. Because he boiled with furious energy; because associate professors without the Ph.D. taught the dumbest classes; because his own plants, in orderly rows of terra-cotta pots that let roots breathe, never developed parasitic diseases. Because. How was that for an explanation?

The shop was tiny, dim, and faded, the walls a dingy beige and the floor covered with gritty linoleum. The only furnishings were a cracked brown leather chair and a counter, also brown, across the back. On the wall behind the counter hung a large placard:

* Management does not handle questions of existence or nonexistence.

* If a phenomenon does exist or an event did happen, we can explain it.

* Both procedural and causal explanations available.

* Not responsible for any consequences of imparting explanations.

* Discounts for senior citizens. Valid ID required.

Before Harkavy had finished reading this, the single door behind the counter opened and closed and a man stood waiting courteously, a dim, thin man in a brown suit and gray expression. He was much shorter than Harkavy. Because of this, and because of the silly placard, and because Harkavy’s fury had passed beyond simple frustration into that wide, free place where recklessness seems not only permissible but required, Harkavy lit into the inoffensive stranger, who deserved it for being so inoffensive.

“Explanation—explanation! You’re interested in explanations? I am a college teacher—last night I gave my students an examination; this morning I have so-called ‘explanations’ swirling around my ears. Not explanations swirling out of thin air—no, no! Explanations coming out of five weeks of careful lectures on British poetry, of meticulously chosen readings, of class discussions nursed along like intensive-care patients. And what do I read this morning? I’ll tell you what I read this morning. I read this morning, in response to a simple question to explain the term ‘carpe diem’—do you know what that means? It means ‘seize the day’ That’s all—just seize the day, as in do it now, tra la la. And what explanations do I get of ‘carpe diem’? I get ‘sees the day’: s-e-e-s. I get ‘cease the day’: c-e-a-s-e, that one undoubtedly from an apocalyptic religious. And I get ‘sneeze the dead.’ Sneeze the dead poetry! A whole undiscovered school of viral lyricism! What goes through a student’s mind when he writes ‘this is a sneeze the dead poem’? What? Can you explain that?”

The small man said, “Would you like to see a contract?”

Taken aback, Harkavy said, “A what?”

“A contract,” the man said patiently. “We never begin an explanation without both a contract and a completed job sheet. We would, for instance, need to know the student’s name and, preferably, university ID number.”

Harkavy stared. “You’re serious.”

“Very,” the man said quietly. He did something with his hand under the counter, and a single sheet of paper rose upward through a slot Harkavy had not noticed. A little dazed, and also a little sulky that the man had ignored all his fine reckless hyperbole, Harkavy picked up the paper and read it.

There was also a paragraph granting permission for the signer’s name and explanation to be used for advertising purposes.

The corners of Harkavy’s mouth quirked unpleasantly. “Advertising?”

“That portion of our operation is not quite functional.”

“I’ll bet,” Harkavy said.

“This is merely a branch office,” the man said.

A great weariness, inevitable after the glow of fury, settled over Harkavy. Charlatans, intellectual poseurs, or unreasoning dolts. Nowhere were there left powerful and honest minds actually striving for rational clarity. He, Harkavy, was a Diogenes with a cerebral lamp, and all he found was darkness, darkness. Morton from Anthro had the right idea: expect no spark of rationality, and you can never be disappointed. Anticipate fallacy, expect meaninglessness, presume fraud.

“Fraud,” Harkavy said.

“Certainly not,” the small gray man said, not without dignity. The dignity, so unmerited, rekindled Harkavy’s anger.

“All right, then—I’ll bite. I’ll pay for an ‘explanation.’ Why not? I always pay anyway—you don’t think the students are the ones pained when I pass 40 percent of them because department guidelines discourage flunking more than 60 percent? I’ll buy one of your fraudulent little explanations— why not, if meaning is dead, then no real explanations are possible anyway!”

“Your reasoning is circular,” the man said dispassionately. “What specifically would you like explained?”

Harkavy cast about for something extravagant yet absurd, the perfect example to illustrate the ironic depths of his disillusionment. He didn’t find it. The brown and gray little man took a fresh contract from the slot, Harkavy having crumpled the first one in his fist.

“Yes, Professor?”

“How do you know I’m a professor?”

“You have said so. What would you like explained?”

Ironic depths still eluded Harkavy. But unmasking fraud-he could manage a question to unmask fraud. “Explain what happened to Amelia Earhart, the aviatrix who disa—”

“I recognize Miss Earhart’s name,” the man said. He smiled faintly, his first hint of expression. “As it happens, we are having a special today on Amelia Earhart.”

“A—”

“Twenty dollars. Thirty if you wish to request a causal as well as procedural explanation. Both to include documented proof, of course.”

Harkavy requested both. Together he and the small man, who gave his name as Stone, defined terms, made out a job sheet, signed a contract. Harkavy paid the thirty dollars. As he wrote out the check—a little surprised that such an outfit would accept a check; checks can be traced—his anger began to give way to amusement. What a story to tell Morton! It was almost worth the thirty dollars; Morton would love it. He, Harkavy, would become in the telling a wistfully gallant figure, hoping against hope for intellectual value, knowing better all the time. A single-combat idealist who was almost— but not quite—missing in the existential action. Morton would love it.

A pang of genuine wistfulness, unexpected as heartburn, shot through him.

Still, he whistled on the walk home, and once there he tore into the rest of the examinations with something close to good humor, not even slowing down when a student explained that Alexander Pope, now deceased, had once been the illegitimate son of a Catholic pontiff. When he had finished the exams, Harkavy got himself a cold beer and the morning Times, which he hadn’t yet seen. The bottom half of page one displayed the photograph of a young woman with badly cut hair and a pretty face, dressed in a flight jacket.

AMELIA EARHART FINALLY FOUND

REMAINS REVEALED ON SAIPAN

The article was quite long, and very thorough. Politicians, medical doctors, anthropologists, and Navy personnel were all quoted extensively. They detailed exactly what had happened to Amelia Earhart.

“You tricked me,” Harkavy said.

“Certainly not,” said Stone. “As a matter of fact, I have your completed explanation right here.”

“With documentation from the New York Times!”

“Just so.”

“You had this information before I even signed this ridiculous contract!”

“Mr. Harkavy, I am a businessman. You offered to buy certain information; I possessed that information. Had Explanations, Inc., been required to obtain information it did not already possess, the price of your explanation would have been much higher. You call yourself a rational man; surely you can see that this is so.”

Harkavy’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t like being made a fool of.”

“No one does,” Stone said mildly.

Harkavy drummed his fingers on the counter. It was no longer brown; between yesterday afternoon and this morning the counter had been painted a rich, deep blue. With paint bought with his thirty dollars?

He studied Stone. The little man gazed back at him from eyes so steady, so serene, that Harkavy felt bile rise in his throat. It was so shameless. At the very least the charlatan could show some shame. A flicker of the eyes, a looking away—and he, Harkavy, would be satisfied. No more than that, merely a silent admission that it had been possible, once, to believe the world genuinely explicable, and that this was a shoddy exploitation of that springtime belief … just a flicker of the eyes, a so slight bending of the head… .

Stone neither flickered nor bent.

“All right,” Harkavy said quietly, “then, let’s just see how you do when you don’t already possess the information.”

“Certainly,” Stone said. He moved his hand under the counter, and a fresh contract arose from the slot. “What would you liked explained?”

Harkavy did not even think. “Explain about Amy. Amy, my wife—explain why she left me. A causal explanation.”

Stone’s hands held still over the paper. He raised his gaze to Harkavy’s, and his voice grew softer. “Mr. Harkavy. Sometimes one asks for explanations one does not really want.”

Harkavy laughed unpleasantly. “Too difficult for you? Not the same as taking on a question already documented in the Times? Just so, Stone?”

Stone didn’t answer. He gazed down at the newly blue counter, at something Stone couldn’t see. When he finally spoke, it was still in that soft voice, gentle as mist. “Let us define our terms, Mr. Harkavy. Your ex-wife’s name?”

“Amy Loughton Harkavy. Quality control supervisor at Lunel Products. Social security number 090-40-0333. There, Stone—name, rank, and serial number; just what is allowed in any war. The rest is up to you. Explain away. Go ahead—if you can.”

“We can,” Stone said, but his voice told nothing.

Explanations, Inc., had stipulated six weeks to complete its labors. By the second day, Harkavy was cursing himself for a fool. To let his outrage get the better of him like that! To be bested by a fly-by-night bunko game! It wasn’t the money, it was the humiliation … no, by God, the humiliation was theirs. To pervert the mind’s sacred ability to explain into a hootchy-kootch come-on for suckers … although, actually, when you looked at it, it was pretty funny. Grim, but funny. He would tell Morton; Morton would absolutely roar. It was really very funny.

He didn’t tell Morton.

The second week, Harkavy strolled past the storefront to see if it was still there. Somewhat to his surprise, it was, although the ficus benjamina with mealybug no longer stood in the window. It had been replaced by three pots of unbloomed passiflora with the greenest leaves Harkavy had ever seen. By the counter a woman stood talking to Stone, who held what looked like a contract in his hands.

Unaccountably perturbed, Harkavy left. He did not go back.

Occasionally, during the course of the six weeks, Harkavy thought of his contract, the thought popping into his mind while he lectured or shaved or chaired yet another committee meeting—and when it did, he scowled fiercely. People began to regard him as a little eccentric. (“Since the break-up, you know, poor fellow. …”) Harkavy didn’t notice.

“Your wife left you,” Stone said neutrally, “because she could no longer tolerate life with ‘a man who insists on being right 93 percent of the time.’ The phrase is hers. Your documentation, Mr. Harkavy.” He pushed it across the counter and looked somewhere else.

There was a tape recorder. Amy’s voice, recalling incidents, discussing motives, explaining—to whom? Friend? Priest? Imposter? The other voice never answered. But Harkavy would have recognized Amy’s voice anywhere, slightly nasal breathiness with those captivating musical inflections: “He could never apologize when he was wrong. Only if he was right; because then, you see, it wasn’t threatening. He used to do this thing, if I solved some household problem we’d been discussing, he’d smile and say ‘I’m glad I thought of that!’ I can’t tell you how crazy it made me!”

There was a psychologist’s report, fully notarized with shiny seals, recounting the psychologist’s post-divorce therapy sessions with one Ms. Amy Loughton. The therapist stated that Ms. Loughton’s initiation of divorce had been a positive desire to free herself from a destructive marital situation with a husband who could feel successful only if his judgment was acknowledged to be superior to that of everyone around him. Ms. Loughton’s post-divorce adjustment was described as successful.

Finally, there was a note from Amy herself, on the stationery Harkavy had given her on her last birthday: “… because he wants what nobody can have! He wants everything in the whole damn world to make sense!”

Stone still did not look at Harkavy. Harkavy sputtered, “You son of a bitch, you could end up in Leavenworth for this! Breaking into medical files, tampering with the U.S. mails—”

“Certainly not,” Stone said coldly. “Look again.”

Harkavy looked again. The note from Amy was addressed to Schariar Gait Stone.

“How—”

“The balance of your bill is now due, Mr. Harkavy.”

Harkavy paid it. The chair of cracked brown leather had been replaced with one of rich purple velvet. Harkavy sat down on it and stared ahead, unseeing.

Stone said quietly, “Mrs. Harkavy was wrong in one particular.”

“Ms. Loughton,” Harkavy said, jerking his chin upward. “She prefers to be called Ms. Loughton.”

“Ms. Loughton was wrong in one particular. The world does make sense. It is rational.”

“You son of a bitch. How did you get these documents?”

“Revealing our operational methods is not part of your contract, Mr. Harkavy.”

“If I went to the police with these stolen files—”

“They are not stolen,” Stone said. “The police would find no grounds for criminal charges. None at all. We can, in fact, explain everything.”

Harkavy went back. A week later, ten days—he was not exactly sure. After the first return, he went every day, striding over from the university with his head up and his arms pumping, acutely aware of the hollowness of all this vigor. Once in the tiny shop, he sat slumped in the glowing purple chair. A slump was all he could manage; the place turned all his vigor outside in, and it centrifuged to his eyes, which never blinked. Harkavy, a tweed-jacketed Argus, watched.

A blue-haired woman wanted an explanation of the UFO she had sighted above her barn. Another woman asked for a procedural explanation of how her apartment had been robbed, but she left when she found out the fee would be more than the value of the possessions stolen. An elderly man, thin and with the ascetic face of a figure on a stained-glass window, requested a true explanation of the birth of Christ. After he had received it, he left looking thoughtful, and his hand trembled. Who were all these people, where had they come from? A few looked vaguely familiar to Harkavy, like people he might have passed in the supermarket. A middle-aged man, long hair thinning and facial muscles rigidly controlled, wanted to know exactly why his son had joined the Marines. A young boy asked for the causes of the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Harvey blinked.

“Homework,” Stone said after the boy had left. It was the first time he had spoken to Harkavy.

“So now you’re in the homework business,” Harkavy said, with feeble scorn. He knew the scorn was feeble because it could not warm him. He was always cold now.

“Homework, too, can be explained.”

“I should think it would be beneath your notice. There can’t be much profit in children’s homework.”

“You would be surprised where we find profit.”

“I just bet I would,” Harkavy said. “You’ve had at least two customers this week storm out of here without paying you.”

“They will be billed. In addition, the corporation has figured standard parameters for the allowance for bad debts. The cost is unfortunately passed on to the customer.”

“All according to the Gospel of Business Management,” Harkavy sneered. Stone regarded him thoughtfully. The little man had discarded his brown suit; he wore a coat the deep purple-blue of a twilight sky, cut full enough so that sometimes, in some lights, it looked like a cape. It was not a cape.

A child requested an explanation for the death of her puppy. A young man, all knobby elbows and tortured dark eyes, wanted a causal explanation for the presence of evil in the world. Another young man wanted to know the procedure for making a killing on the stock market, but he was turned away: Explanations, Inc., did not handle procedural explanations for events that had not yet happened. A woman asked for an explanation of an old and trivial social slight, twenty-three years earlier, for which she was willing to pay a sum greater than Harkavy’s yearly salary. She could not be dissuaded: “I have to know why she acted like that to me. I have to know why!”

After she had left, Harkavy said—the first time he had spoken in ten days—to Stone, “‘The heart has reasons of which the reason knows nothing.’”

“Pascal.”

Harkavy scowled. He had not expected Stone to know.

Stone said, “Even the reasons of the heart can be explained. The truth of the causes is not dependent on the absurdity of the results.”

“Nor of their emotional manageability?”

“Certainly not,” Stone said.

Another customer appeared at the door, hand hesitating on the knob, face peering through the glass storefront.

“All these questions,” Harkavy said.

“All these questions,” Stone said. Harkavy scowled and went back to silence. In the deep purple chair, Harkavy felt invisible, witness but not participant, a noncombatant temporarily removed from action. Customers ignored him. He was part of the furniture. He was always cold.

Between one afternoon and the following morning, the gritty linoleum disappeared, replaced by an Oriental carpet luminously and intricately woven in shades of wine, purple, deep blue. The ground beneath Harkavy’s feet glowed like jewels.

“Explain,” Harkavy said, “the reason for the universe.”

Stone went on doing something behind the counter.

“Explain,” Harkavy said more loudly, rising finally from his chair, “the reason for the universe!”

“Mr. Harkavy,” Stone said formally, as though Harkavy had just entered the shop. He had, in fact, been sitting in the purple chair for over a month. The cushions bore overlapping imprints of his body, one for each restless position.

“I wish a contract,” Harkavy said, almost resentfully, “to explain the universe.”

“Then I take it that you have become convinced of the validity of Explanations, Inc., despite your first impressions?”

Harkavy ground his teeth. “Can we get on with it!”

“Certainly,” Stone said. “How the universe was formed?”

“Why.”

“Ah,” Stone said. To Harkavy the word sounded drawn out and sibilant, like a sigh, despite having no s’s in it. The twilight noncape rustled softly.

“Well?” Harkavy said. “Can you explain that?”

“Yes.”

“Need we define many terms?”

“No. The terms are clear.”

“Will it be expensive?”

“No. Very cheap.”

“Will it take long to prepare the answer?”

“Only a few minutes.”

“Then,” Harkavy said, “it must be a question asked often.”

“Very often.”

“And I will receive a stock explanation?”

“You will receive a true explanation.”

“All right, then,” Harkavy said tonelessly. His face had gone rather gray. Stone’s face did not change expression, and as Harkavy wrote out the check, he had the sudden thought that, seen through the glass from the sidewalk, they might have been two ordinary businessmen engaged in any of the more well-bred trades, insurance or pharmaceuticals or law.

Stone brought his explanation from whatever place lay behind the door beyond the counter. It was very detailed, a sheaf of closely printed papers. Harkavy, unfamiliar with this terminology but familiar with universal academic style, stood quietly as he scanned the abstracts by great physicists. Radial velocities, the Hubble law, the cosmologic principle, Big Bang micro-radiation, law of entropy.

“This is a procedural explanation, Stone. It explains how the universe came into being. I requested why.”

“Yes,” Stone said simply, and said no more.

Harkavy understood. The procedure was the cause. The universe existed because it existed. No more than that.

Harkavy said loudly, “I don’t really care, you know.”

Stone said nothing.

“It isn’t as if it were more than an intellectual exercise, or as if I didn’t already know this. My God, man, Sartre—I teach sophomores who have figured all this out for themselves, some of them, and not the brightest ones, either!”

“Please don’t shout,” Stone said.

“I was right all along!”

“Yes.”

“God! All those poor saps trailing in here, all those suckers, thinking there was a point to what they choose to do!”

Stone was silent.

“I suppose the proper philanthropic response is pity, isn’t it? But I don’t pity ignorance, Stone. Nor illusions. A mind that does not think is an ugly thing. Not pitiful—ugly. Does that shock you?”

“No.”

Harkavy’s voice rose louder again. “But I suppose you think that just because I asked that question, I must be devastated by the answer. I knew the explanation all along. It was you I was testing!”

“Then I trust we have proved ourselves reliable.”

“It doesn’t matter to me! The explanation doesn’t matter to me!”

“Ah,” said Stone.

“I was right!” Harkavy shrieked. He tore the sheaf of documentation in half, then in half again and yet again. Pieces of paper drifted down onto the carpet. “I was right! There are no real explanations!”

“There are two more questions,” Stone said, but Harkavy didn’t hear him. He was gone, storming out of the shop, leaving the bits of paper littered over the glowing depths of the carpet, scattered as random stars.

“I would like to apologize,” Harkavy said stiffly. He stood holding the counter with both hands. Since yesterday the counter seemed to have deepened in color. “I do not usually behave so badly. I do not usually lose my temper in quite that fashion. Therefore, I would like to apologize.”

“Your apology is accepted,” Stone said gravely. He gazed at Harkavy with a thoughtful intensity. Harkavy felt ridiculous.

“I think you should know,” he said, “that I have contacted both the Better Business Bureau and the Consumer Protection League.”

“Yes?” Stone said. He did not look alarmed.

“Explanations, Inc., is registered with neither.”

“No.”

“But neither organization has received any complaints concerning you.”

“No.”

“Until now,” Harkavy added.

“Ah.”

“You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe I filed a complaint with the bureaucracy.”

“No,” Stone said. He did not smile back. Harkavy leaned over the counter, his back to the purple velvet chair, and waited to see if Stone would say anything that would let him, Harkavy, leave. Stone said nothing. The silence lengthened. Finally, Harkavy shifted his weight, crossed one leg over the opposite calf, and tried, desperately, for nonchalance.

“So when did you paint the ceiling?” he said heartily. Stone did not look upward. The ceiling, which by some trick of lighting now looked very far away, was a deep, glowing wine. Between ceiling and carpet the tiny shop hung suspended, mysterious with jeweled color. In the window the passionflowers had begun to bloom scarlet.

“It was painted not long ago,” Stone said.

“That must mean profits are good.”

“Profits are good.”

“People seek after a great many explanations, I imagine. For you to keep in business.”

“Some do, yes.”

“But not all?”

“No. Not all.”

“Funny, isn’t it, how people do differ in their intellectual curiosity. It doesn’t even seem to correlate directly to intelligence, does it? With students, of course, you see all levels of curiosity coupled with all levels of intelligence, no predictability—why, I was saying just the other day to Morton, he’s in Anthro, he—”

“Mr. Harkavy,” Stone said, not urgently, “ask the next question.”

The two men stared at each other, one serene and waxing, one with nonchalance gone dry. Harkavy could have sworn he caught a whiff of incense—just a passing scent, elusive on warm air.

“A causal,” Harkavy said. “Why do I keep coming back to Explanations, Inc.?”

“Come into the back room,” Stone said.

There was a computer, as of course there would have to be. There was a couch, hard and severe, upon which Harkavy lay. Most of all, there was a parade of people in white lab coats; the parade went on for three days. Harkavy never left, except to make one phone call to the university, requesting emergency sick leave. Psychiatrist, hypnotist, doctor with a compassionate smile and a wicked hypodermic, Stone with spartan meals, a stenographer who was also a notary public. Documentation, Harkavy thought around the wooziness of the hypodermic; it was his one clear thought in three days. He didn’t mind, somehow. Answers awaited at the end. Cleansed and gentled, almost luxuriating in the abandonment of control (the hypodermic?), Harkavy talked, and dozed, and talked some more, and it seemed to him that his words were hard silvery flakes drifting up from his defenseless prone position, and that the flakes coalesced to form a shining mirror in which he saw himself at peace.

The fee was enormous.

When at last he stood again in the front of the shop and held in his hand the corporation’s contract, answer, and documentation, Harkavy felt detached enough to read them. The print was small yet easy to read, a rational choice. The smell of passion flowers was much stronger.

QUESTION: Why has Philip Warren Harkavy returned on thirty-nine separate occasions [Harkavy had not been counting] to the Frazier Street branch of Explanations, Inc.?

ABSTRACT: Philip Warren Harkavy exhibits the behavior and thought processes characteristic of metaphobia, a fear of there not being enough meaning in the universe. In this specific case, the basic phobia manifests itself as a counterphobia taking the form of resistance to the idea that the world can be rationally explained at all. This is not an unusual manifestation, here distinguished only by its deep-seatedness and by the subject’s conscious awareness of it. In previous ages, metaphobia gave rise to elaborate and rigid religious structures. In modern periods, other manifestations of the phobia are more common.

Both the subject’s career as an English professor, transmitting knowledge but not creating it, and his basic personality structure, tenacious self-righteousness undercut by irony, are examples of the basic phobia working itself out in life choices. The subject passionately desires the world to be explicable. He is afraid that it is not. Caught between desire and fear, he is drawn to Explanations, Inc., at the same time that he is repelled by it. This is why he has returned on thirty-nine separate occasions.

Documentation attached.

6154A38L

“What are the numbers at the end for?” Harkavy asked. He looked up from the page. At some point Stone had grown a beard, a lush patriarchal tangle of black curls that deepened his eyes.

“The numbers are for office use only, Mr. Harkavy.”

“I see,” Harkavy said. His voice was all tired courtesy, no bluster—the last of the bluster had leached out of him during the three days of research and had not returned. He looked thinner, a tall, quiet man swaying in the incense-laden breeze.

“Thank you,” he said quietly, and turned to leave.

“You can’t go now!” Stone cried. Emotion, the first Harkavy had heard from him with any vigor to it, swelled his voice to richness.

“No?” Harkavy said.

“There is one more question!”

“I can’t think what it could be.”

“Think is what you can do, Harkavy!”

“It does not appear to make much difference.”

“You are merely confused by your first reaction to your answer—this phase will not last. Truly!”

“Metaphobia,” Harkavy mused.

“Many live a full and normal lifespan, with proper precautions. With proper precautions. Think, Harkavy— think.”

“Thank you,” Harkavy said absently, lost in thought, and left the shop. His feet stumbled a little. The window was crowded with passion flowers, all bursting into bloom, a riot of scarlet flowers rustling mysteriously in perfumed shadows

One day. Two days. A week: seven days. On the seventh day, Harkavy returned. He looked as if he had slept badly, arid his suit, old and wrinkled, hung from his frame. There was in his face the quiet grayness that is in itself a kind of focus: a great granite boulder whose energies exist perfectly balanced upon one smaller stone beneath, and hence exist motionless.

“Philip!” Stone cried. He bustled forward, arms thrown wide in welcome, rich, dark beard glistening against the folds of his cape. “You did return!”

“Stone,” Harkavy said quietly. Stone threw his arms around Harkavy and kissed each cheek, and on his skin Harkavy smelled incense and rich oils. Around them the shop glowed like a jewel box, its air heavy with the passionflowers, lush with velvety promise.

“One question, Stone,” Harkavy said, without inflection. “One final question.”

“Of course!” Stone boomed. His black eyes gleamed.

“Don’t we need a contract?”

“Not this time—are you not an old and valued customer? Not this time!”

The scented air stirred on soft winds.

Slowly Harkavy said, “I understand the explanation of Metaphobia. It is accurate. The longing for order … for comprehension … it gnaws away at you, gnaws and gnaws. …”

“The question, Philip! The question!”

“Explain … I would like to have explained—”

“Yes? Yes?”

“Explain the reason for the existence of Explanations, Inc. Why did it come to Frazier Street?”

“Ah!” crowed Stone, and flung his arms wide in a huge, sensuous blessing. “You have it! You have it!” And at just that moment the walls sprung into intricate and subtle designs in the glowing ancient dyes, and the temple bells began to ring, and ring, and ring.

“So what is this dump?” the young man sneered. “Another tourist trap?” He began to read the sign posted behind the counter. “Or just local tealeaf garbage? What have you got back there, a crystal ball to bilk the yokels with?”

“Certainly not,” Harkavy said quietly. He moved his hand behind the counter, and a contract rose up from the slot.

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