“Bridget ban can be very persuasive,” said the Fudir.
“Ah. You know her.”
“She is my mother,” said the harper.
“And I have been charged to escort the daughter to her.”
The emperor cocked his head. “And where that?”
“I regret, ah, Jimmy, that the information is privileged. You know the ways of the Kennel.”
“Why do you curse the day my mother made you emperor?” the harper interjected. “She made you emperor of one of the Fourteen States.”
“That curse.” Jimmy turned a little in his seat. “See sigils over throne? Love-heaven. Person. Protect. Heaven-below. In ancient tongue: Low tyen chay, pow tyen-sha. It say that man who love heaven-sky will protect empire. But heaven perfect. Never fail, never fall. Heaven-below, Sheen Jenlùshy should be imitate that perfection. Never does. But if emperor love heaven good enough, everything fine below, too. Never fail, never fall. One Man must be regular as sky, must be never-changing. I move in orbit, like planet. Go here, go there. All same ceremony, all same word. All pest black-fly ministers buzz round me. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Do this, do that. All ‘veddy propah.’ No mistake. Mistake in heaven-below cause mistake in heaven-above. Very bad. Calf stillborn. My fault. Did not recite sunrise prayer proper. Bandit rob exchequer in Bristol-fu. My fault. Did not make proper ablution. All universe connected through dough. Everything affect everything. Mountainslide in Northumberchow Shan…”
“Your fault,” said the Fudir. “We get it. I can see cosmic oneness has its drawbacks. If you forget to clip your toenails, who knows what horrors might be unleashed? I can see why none of the Fourteen States wants to conquer the others. Considering what can go wrong in one day in any one sheen, being emperor of the whole kit and kaboodle must have been hell on wheels.”
Jimmy frowned. “Please?”
“Never mind him,” said the harper. “He’s a Terran.”
The emperor shook his head. “Only here in tea ceremony, two three other times, is emperor become Jimmy again.” He turned abruptly to the harper. “Tell me of home world, Mistress Harp.”
“Dangchao Waypoint? It’s a small world, a dependency of Die Bold. Mostly open prairies on Great Stretch continent, where we raise Nolan’s Beasts. A few big towns. When we go to Die Bold, we say we’re going to ‘The City.’ May I have one of those finger sandwiches? What is the spread?”
“Pimento and Devonchao cream. Made in Praefecture of Wild Violets. I hear of planet in Wild, out in the Burnt-Over District. They talk of ‘The City’” He waved an imperial wrist. “Out past Ampayam and Gatmander. Somewhere.”
“The ‘Burnt-Over District,’” the harper suggested.
“Traveler tales. Suns go nova now and then. Burn up cities.”
“If their suns went nova periodically,” the Fudir said, “it would burn up more than their cities. There’d be no one left to spread travelers’ tales.”
“The Wild,” said the harper, “is a region of romance. Anything can happen there.”
“Even romance,” the Fudir replied. “But what usually happens out there is death or bankruptcy. Or both. Most of the worlds are uncivilized. A few have spaceflight; none have rediscovered sliding. Their cities are smelly and dirty, and you’d be lucky not to come away diseased. Romance,” he concluded, “is best considered from a distance.”
“You have harp with you, mistress? Of course. Ollamh never far from instrument. You bring with tomorrow. Play songs of your Dangchao, so far away.”
Méarana put her cup carefully on its saucer. “Well… Donovan and I have some business to conduct…”
“Oh, no,” said Resilient Services. “I must insist.”
And there was something hard in the way he said it that caused the harper to hesitate and glance at her companion.
“I had planned to visit the Corner,” the Fudir said. “You can entertain the emperor while I do that.”
“Yes,” agreed the emperor of the Morning Dew. “You do that.”
The next morning, as Méarana prepared for her command performance at the palace, the Fudir prepared to enter the Corner of Jenlùshy For this, he did not dress as he had for the palace. Indeed, he barely dressed at all. Around his waist he tied a simple blue-and-white checkered dhoti. On his feet, sandals. His upper body he oiled.
“Easier to slip out of someone’s grip,” he said with a leer. Save for secreting various weapons in unlikely places, that completed his toilet.
The harper looked him over before he departed. “That’s no more than a long towel wrapped around you,” she said, pointing to the dhoti. “How do you bend over in that thing?”
“Very carefully. Be sure to keep the emperor happy. I think he’s a little taken with you. But remember: no hint of anything wrong ‘up in the skies.’”
“How many times will you tell me that, old man? Just be careful in the Corner. The concierge told me it’s a dangerous place.”
“Full of Terrans. You be careful, too. There aren’t any Terrans in the palace, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous.”
__________
He slipped out the service entrance of the hotel and followed the Street of the Tin Smiths to the Street of the Plastic Injection Molders, where he turned left and entered the Corner.
He had never been to the Corner of Jenlùshy, but he knew it when he was in it. Thistlewaite buildings tended toward the ramshackle, even without the help of a ‘quake, but as he proceeded farther along Beggars’ Lane they grew positively sketchy. Many did not bother with such vanities as walls. What could a wall ever do except collapse? If curtains and tapestries did not exactly bar entry to the burglar, neither did they hurt as much when they fell on you. And what might be within such hovels as to tempt a burglar?
Granted, this was no more than an accommodation to the geophysical realities, but by Alfven! A Terran ought not care if walls came down on him! Compared to the expulsion of their ancestors from Olde Earth, what harm could a few bricks and beams do? Nor ought they ape the dress of the Thistles quite so closely, nor speak that unadorned dialect of Gaelactic favored here. On Jehovah, the Terrans of the Corner spoke the old patois among themselves, and spoke it proudly.
The directions he had obtained from the Assistant Underwasherman in the hotel’s laundry brought him as far as the Tibbly Fountain, which formed the social center of the Corner, and there he found the women filling their water jugs. The Great’ Quake had wrecked the water distribution and one of the prices of independence was that you went to the end of the line when it came to restoration of services. The more he had seen of the Morning Dew, the more he had realized how unfinished Bridget ban had left things. What had she learned here that had sent her off elsewhere?
The Fudir found himself an overhang sheltering an outdoor moka shop and he leaned against the pole while he admired the sight and studied the crowd.
His home Corner on Jehovah was larger than this and its folk more bustling. There was a kind of unhurry to the crowd around him, leaving time for a bit of sport among the younger water-women, who splashed one another and laughed. This dampened their colorful sorries in often delightful ways.
He also noted the mama-sans watching from doorways and balconies, and the gonifs and grifters lounging about. Not one of them had failed to mark his presence.
Well, it was a small Corner as these things went, and a stranger stood out. The Fudir considered whom he might approach, and finally decided on a small, rat-faced man who squatted on his heels on the other side of the square, engaged in no apparent vocation. In any crowd of this sort, the Committee of Seven would have its eyes and ears, and the savvy man learned to recognize them.
But the Fudir hesitated. The rat-faced man was surely armed, and just as surely unfriendly to strangers. And who knew how the Seven would receive him after all these years? Did the Corner of Jenlùshy have anything like those Dunkle Street ghats that made the Corner of Jehovah so perilous for intruders? His own skills with knife and tongue must had ru
sted during his long inaction. If he failed here, what would become of Méarana?
What sort of piss-ant cowardice is this, the Brute demanded. One of the Fudir’s legs twitched, as if trying to step forth on its own.
He who hesitates is lost. And never more so than he who hesitates in a Terran Corner.
Comrades? I suggest we get off the pot, said the Sleuth.
“Donovan?” the Fudir whispered. “Help me out here.”
“All in favor of remaining a sitting duck,” said Donovan, “say aye.”
Well, a moving target is harder to hit…
The Fudir crossed to the fountain with only a slight hesitancy in his step. It could have been a limp. The chatter and gaiety continued, but he was tracked by two dozen pairs of eyes.
The die is cast, the Sleuth announced. Or as Caesar said, alea iacta est.
Actually, Caesar said it in Greek. It was a quote from a play by Menander: ’Avερρíφθω κμβς. That was the Pedant. It could not possibly be anyone else.
At the fountain, the Fudir stared into the waters. The rat-faced man affected not to notice him and continued to do nothing with great concentration. When the Fudir had once more gotten a hold of himself, he stretched and, in doing so, made a sign with his right hand.
The rat-faced man had been twirling a stick with one hand. Now he dropped it and, in picking it up, made the answering gesture.
The Terran Brotherhood was not outlawed within the League of the Periphery, as it was within the Confederation, but neither did it like to draw attention to itself. For one thing, Confederate agents were ofttimes about, and willing to freelance an assassination or two, and some Terrans were genuinely sympathetic to the Confederation, if for no better reason than that Olde Earth was their hostage. For another, League governments would sometimes decide that détente was the order of the day and move to suppress the Brotherhood to curry favor with the’ Feds.
Two others in the square had noticed the by-play and one of the water-women pursed her lips in disapproval. There was a third faction among the Terrans, and by no means a small one, that believed that what was lost was lost. They still believed in Terra—else they would cease to be Terrans at all—but they believed in the Ideal Terra, Terra-of-the-Dream, the “City-on-the-Hill” toward which one must always strive, and to which one would be transported after death. The idea of one day returning en masse and in the flesh to a physical Terra struck them as somehow sinful. To them, the Confederation was neither friend nor foe, but an irrelevancy.
The rat-faced man stood and walked toward the southern end of the square, where he ducked between a one-story wattle hut selling hand-phones and an open shed where a naked man with a welding mask was repairing a truck. After a decent interval, the Fudir followed him.
But as he turned into the alley behind the phone shop, rough arms grabbed him and a canvas hood was pulled down over his head.
The Silky Voice whimpered and Inner Child cried out in alarm. The Brute, for just a moment, seized control of the scarred man’s limbs and began to struggle; but the Fudir took them back and relaxed. If they had meant him harm, the darkness would have been permanent and not a mere hoodwink. They intended to take him somewhere and did not wish him to know where. He was still in grave danger; but the danger would come when the hoodwink was removed and he was in a comfortable room with smiling people.
“I long to see fruited plains of your home world,” the emperor said after Méarana had played a set of Dangchao songs from the Eastern Plains. “To ride like wind chasing Nolan’s Beasts with lasso and bolo. To drive herd to market in—how you say? Port Qis-i-nao? No, Port Kitch-e-ner.” He pronounced the alien sounds with great care. “Oh, life of Beastie boys, live free under stars.”
Sometimes Méarana wanted to slap the emperor of the Morning Dew. He confused song with life. You didn’t chase Nolan’s Beasts. That would run the meat off them. And life on the plains, under the stars, driving the herd to the knocking plants for shipment to Die Bold, was dirty, tiring, bone-breaking labor that stole sleep and health and even life itself. Beastie boys fared better in song than on the plains.
“Play again song of Dusty Shiv Sharma,” said the emperor over cups of Peacock’s Rose tea; and he warbled with a bad accent, “‘Best Beastie boy o’er alla High Plain.’”
Dusty Sharma had been a real “beast-puncher” a hundred and fifty metric years ago; but he had been called “Shiv” because he carried a hideout knife in his knee boot. Historians said he would not have been a pleasant man to meet, even when sober; but he had been so encrusted with legend that the real man was unrecognizable.
And so she played a geantraí, a jaunty tune that evoked what the Dangchao beast-punchers called the Out-in-back. Of “the splendor o’ the mountains, a-rearin’ toward the sky, cloud-shaker, avalanche maker, cool an’ dry an’ high.” Of such things as these at least there could be no musty historians’ doubts.
When they pulled the hoodwink from him, the Fudir blinked at the light and found himself facing seven men and women sitting on cushions behind a broad, low “kaffé” table, and not one smile to share among the lot of them. The Fudir was puzzled at first, since at every meeting of the Seven of Jehovah that he had ever attended there would be at least one or two that were “in the wind” due to misunderstandings with the Jehovan rectors. But then Terrans on Jehovah lived an edgier life than here, where a certain amount of segregation kept the Terrans more to themselves. He did not doubt that Jenlùshy Terrans ran their share of scrambles, but fewer of them seemed to intersect with the folk of the sheen.
The man in the center—pale-skinned, tow-haired, beak-nosed—was the one they called Bwana. He was bare-chested and wore buckskin pantaloons with fringed seams. His cushions were larger and done up in elaborate green, black, and red patterns. To the extent the Corner had a government and had a president, these were them and he was it.
“Ah, Bwana,” the Fudir said, bowing over his folded hands. “May I introduce my humble self.”
But the Bwana replied in the patois, so thick that it seemed almost the old Tantamiž lingua franca itself. Even the Fudir had to call upon his earwig to thin it out.
“Thou art known to us, o Fudir, as a man of promise. Thou promised Memsahb Jehovah, thou promised Fendy Die Bold, thou promised to give us back the Earth. Those wert thy words. This promise, he run jildy from corner to corner, in whispers. Hutt, hutt, ‘from Gatmander to the Lesser Hanse.’ But many years die since and…” He spread his hands in entreaty. “…no Earth.”
The Fudir marveled that, the farther from the promise the rumor had run, the more fervently it seemed to have been embraced. The Memsahb and the Fendy had not taken either his promise or his failure to heart. The key to success was low expectations.
“The tool I had hoped to use,” he suggested, “proved too dangerous to employ. Big dhik, sahbs. A dagger with two blades may be showed back on the one who holds it. So my hope was false all along, and none wept greater tears than I to learn so.”
“And there are more stories still,” Bwana continued. “That thou art an agent of our enemy, the Great Shittin, the Confederation that oppresses Olde Earth. Deny this.”
“Bwana, I do not, save that that was past and no longer true. Many a Terran has worked for Those of Name—because they hold Olde Earth hostage. A man named Donovan ‘took their nickel’ long ago; and I was once that man. He passed on to them certain information regarding the League—and what do you or I owe the League? We are in it, but not of it—but never did he inform on the Brotherhood, or harm the interests of Terrans. And then, after a time, the Names put him to sleep, to be called upon as needed. And in that time he forgot them; though not they him.”
Donovan intervened then and prevented the Fudir from saying any more. The Fudir agreed that this was not for the ears of others, but resented Donovan’s high handedness. A bit of trust was not uncalled f
or. But Donovan laughed, for he had not lasted this long by over much trusting, even of himself.
To Bwana, it appeared as if the Fudir had choked for a moment. He drummed the table with his fingertips, looked left and right at his committee, gathered in their verdicts, bobbed his head side-to-side. Then he clapped his hands, twice.
“Bread and salt!” he cried out. “Bread and salt for our guest!”
The Fudir let out the breath he had been holding. Deep within, Inner Child wept for joy, while the Brute felt keen disappointment at the lost prospect of danger and combat. Donovan and the Sleuth were amused by their reaction, and the others grew angry. Relief, joy, disappointment, amusement, anger. Enzymes and hormones warred and the contending emotions sent a wave of dizziness through the scarred man that nearly overcame him. Bwana frowned and asked if he were ill, but the Fudir waved him off.
The servants came then with silver salvers of steaming flatbreads fresh from the tandoors and small bowls with ground sea salt. A pot of kaffé accompanied them, and Bwana gravely served the scarred man with his own hands.
When all had eaten and the Fudir was once more closeted with the Seven, Bwana relaxed in his cushions and said, “Tell us then, Fudir, why thou hast sought the Brotherhood out. By what right doest thou call upon Terra?”
“I seek very little, Bwana. As little as this: the readiness of lips to speak of matters that befell here on Thistlewaite. As you know the ears of Terrans are large, but their mouths are small.”
“As befitteth folk in our station. And thou swearest this toucheth not on Holy Terra?”
“Save only that some have said it may discomfit the Confederation; but this is nothing more than the whisper of a supposition.”
“And we all know what is worth a suppository! Haha! What matters are these?”
“They are matters that touch upon the Kennel, Bwana, and are not to be spoken of.”
The Bwana’s face hardened and his cheeks grew red. “There is the small matter of trust, Fudir. If the Kennel be neither foe nor friend, neither are they Terrans. Doest thou value them more than thou valuest your own blood?”
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