The swarm of men and women and children in the steerage dorms of Srini Siddiqi are a mixed lot from across the Spiral Arm: Sharpies with sagging jowls, squat Jugurthans with wide, out-turned noses and pasty-white skin, ebony blonds from Alabaster, second sons of the High Taran aristocracy, fringe-cloaked Jehovans fingering their prayer beads, bored youngsters spurning the stodgy proprieties of the Old Planets, ‘Cockers disinclined to mount their heads in the Halls of Remonstration. They hail from Abyalon and Megranome, from Ramage and Valency, from the Tesser Hanse and Gladiola, from New Eireann and Hawthorn Rose. More of them, indeed, than there are berths in the dorms, since, for a lesser fee, one may elect to share a berth and sleep on it in shifts.
And all of them bound for Harpaloon, “the Gateway to Lafrontera.”
The dormitory has self-organized into sections for single men, single women, and families. The harper and the scarred man claim berths in the appropriate sections and rejoin at one of the common tables. The harper has opened her case and her instrument sits upon her lap while she tunes its strings. It will not be long, Donovan supposes, before he loses her to this crowd.
It is a way to pass the time, says the Silky Voice.
Donovan scowls, waiting for the Fudir to chime in with his half-ducat’s worth. But the scrambler says nothing, which irritates Donovan further still.
“A geantraí, I think,” the harper says, brushing her nails across the strings, then tightening one or two of them with a key. “The music should reflect the hope in their hearts.”
“That is called ‘enabling,’” Donovan answers. “I think you should play them a goltraí. They may need the antidote more than the poison.”
She looks to him and then to the passengers about the steerage dorm. “Hope is a poison?”
“All those who die of disappointment have first ingested hope.”
“The hopeless are never disappointed. I will grant you that much. Unless things turn out well despite all. I suppose that would be a kind of disappointment.”
“Which they never do. Turn out well, I mean.” Donovan gestures to the dormitory and its inhabitants. “Look at them. They think the streets of Lafrontera are paved with platinum. But it isn’t that way at all. They are paved with blood and tears.”
“Really. I would have expected asphalt or magplast.”
“Mockery sits ill on such cheerful features as yours. Later generations might call them heroic; but it seldom looks that way from steerage. A burning bridge flares more brightly at a distance than in the eyes of those crossing it. Some of your audience are bummerls. Their hope is really carelessness. Each is convinced his bad luck has been an accident of his place and not an essence of his character, and if only he can go some other place, he can ‘start over.’”
“Some do.”
“No, no, no. That’s the great fallacy, don’t you see? Everything is already started. It started with the midwife’s slap, if not before. After that, there is no starting over.”
Méarana’s fingers dance over the strings, tossing off flower petals of music. “What of that family over there? A young man and woman, their three children. They seem prosperous, well-fed. From Mfecanay, by their clothing. They are no bummerls, fleeing failure on old worlds. They are movers, seeking success on new ones. The frontier is hungry and they hope to make their fortune in Lafrontera.”
“If the frontier is hungry,” the scarred man says, “it will devour them and all their hopes. And if they seek their fortune out there, it can only mean that they have not found it on Mfecanay, and so they, too, are failures, if of a more subtle sort than the bummerl. If a man has what it takes. he can ‘make his fortune’ anywhere. He needn’t put it all to hazard on a strange raw world. One in three of your movers will break and go home.”
“Then two in three will be tempered and make a home. What of those who simply yearn for new constellations to point their ways? For them, even Lafrontera may prove too tame, too settled. They’ll go out into the Wild, perhaps even to the Rim itself.”
“The more fool, they. What can a new sky offer that an old one cannot? New constellations mean strange gods, which is always a chancy thing. There are human worlds in the Wild that have not yet rediscovered starflight; and some indeed have rediscovered little more than grass huts and stone knives. Among such, a man might live as a god—or a saint. Or worse.”
Méarana’s fingers call out a jaunty, martial tune. “In they end, it does not matter whether the past drives or the future lures. Bummerl or mover or the merely restless… It is the going that matters. What sort of Spiral Arm would it be if men had never gone out from Terra herself?”
The scarred man grunts. “A less noisome one, I think.”
“Is this your way of commenting on our quest?”
“Your quest. No. I remember what you told Zorba. ‘When hope is all there is, it is enough.’ But I’d not place such hope in hope. Of all the virtues, it is the greatest liar.”
The harper laughs, but a little sadly. “I realize that I may never find her. If something has happened to her… I couldn’t… I mustn’t…” She pauses for a moment in search of her voice. “But I must learn what that something was. Do you understand that? Mother has vanished into the void, and I don’t know where or how.”
To this, the scarred man makes no answer.
Afterward, she goes off and plays cheerful music for the steerage, despite the ache in her heart; or perhaps because of it. A man has produced a fiddle, which he plays in the crook of his elbow. A woman has a tambourine; another, a guitar Somehow, they sort things out in that spontaneous human way. Young men and women form lines and dance toward and away from each other, stamping the floor on the beat, so that the dorm becomes a drum.
How, the scarred man wonders, can a woman in such sorrow play with such joy; and he wishes he knew the secret of it for himself.
V HARPALOON OR BUST
Harpaloon is a rawboned world with a raucous flux of folk from all over the Spiral Arm. She is the oldest of the settled planets edging Lafrontera, and beneath the movers and the bummerls and the adventurers and the second sons settling down or passing through lies a substratum who claim descent from the aboriginal population. These folk occasionally celebrate odd holidays and conduct strange festivals. Every three hundred and forty metric days, regardless of the season, they deck their hair with three-leaf clovers and walk en masse onto the barren Plains of the Jazz to drink green beer and throw rocks at a sandstone pillar for reasons no one can provide.
During the Great Diaspora, humans had been scattered far and wide, but few had been scattered asfar as the’ Loons. After the Reconnection, when explorers from Cuddalore and New Shangdong discovered and partitioned Harpaloon between them, they found little more than rustic villages and market towns—and the brittle remnants of ancient machines. Since then, other folks have swarmed to the half-empty world, eventually outnumbering the natives and even the old Cuddle-Dong aristocracy. This has not gone unremarked by the’ Loons, who call the newcomers “coffers” or “gulls” and nurse a resentment that at times boils over into riot. To this, the coffers are largely oblivious, since life on Harpaloon is riotous even at the best of times.
Harpaloon was not the only world that claimed the honor of “gateway to Lafrontera.” Siggy O’Hara had a fair claim, and so did Dancing Vrouw and a number of others. The frontier was a broad swath of stars and there was more than one road into it. But Harpaloon lay at the end of the fabulous Silk Road and if not all set forth from there, a substantial number did. Ships crowded her parking orbits; and out in the libration points, enormous colony vessels awaited the settlement companies that would fill them. Each of the great ships broadcast a marker for her shuttles: “Ten-Beck’s World, Home on this Beacon!” “Slufut Settlement Company! Departure immanent! Final Call!” “Stavronofsky’s World, terraforming 90% complete! Openings available! Apply now!”
Openings indeed. The Great H
all on Folkinward Station was lined with booths rented out to the various companies, each under its own colorful banner, and it was to these that the bulk of Siddiqi’s disembarking steerage swarmed. Why pass through Harpaloon Customs if you were only going somewhere else? The famous “Floating Dome” overarched lounges and restaurants, jugglers and magicians, venues for simulated, interactive, recorded, and live performances. A minstrel bowed a Keller’s viol in a reasonable rendition of a recently popular tune. Here and there, someone famous (or infamous) had gathered a tail of followers—newsers, websters, admirers—much like a comet approaching its sun.
Above their heads, but below the springline of the dome, stretched the famed Harpaloon Murals, painted fifty years before by Hendrik Pak Gbọnju. Bold, broad, bigger than life, they portrayed the great migrations of the mythic past. Thick-hewn men and resolute women moved west in ox-drawn “prairie schooners,” Cossacks trudged east through S’birski snows, Zhõgwó families creaked in great two-wheeled carts up the Gansu Corridor, Magreebees homesteaded in the decaying suburbs of Yurp. Across the banks of the Great Fish River, Four-trekkers heading north greeted Mantu cattlemen heading south. Here, too, legendary figures posed: Jacinta Rosario peered across the rusty sands of Mars; Yang huang-ti pointed dramatically to the lichen-covered plains of Dao Chetty; Chettiwan Mahadevan, hands a-hip, stared at the crumpled ruins of the first-found prehuman city on New Mumbai.
It was all very improbably epic, the harper thought while standing on line for Inbound Customs. Gbọnju’s imagination had wrestled with history and had pinned history defeated to the mat. Most heroes didn’t know at the time that they were, and seldom had occasion to strike dramatic poses. Rosario was certainly a myth, a storybook character; and the same was likely true of Yang. And while Mahadevan was known to history, his story was surely embellished beyond recognition.
The lander gate for Preeshdad Town was crowded: fellow passengers from Srini Siddiqi, private travelers, movers with time to kill before their ark departed, customs and immigration shift-workers returning home for their “down” time. The harper and the scarred man were among them, for it was from Preeshdad that Bridget ban had checked in with the Kennel.
Nearby, but a little apart, stood a hatchet-faced man and a wife with lips pulled as tight as harp strings, and two small children in nondescript clothes and terribly solemn faces. Méarana heard snippets of fierce, whispered conversation.
“I told you we’d be late. I told you.”
“They said they’d hold our berth. How’d I know they would give it away?”
“You could’ve got us here on time. What do we do now?”
“There’ll be a second voyage. They promised.”
“Like they promised to hold our berths? What’ll we live on until then? Those tickets took our last ducats. We need that money.”
“Cash the tickets in, and you can kiss TenBeck’s World good-bye. We’ll never save up…”
Perhaps they noticed the harper, for they lowered their voices still further and moved off a distance, followed by their bewildered and silent children. Donovan chuckled.
“Behold, the noble pioneers!”
“Must everything be with you a bone of contention? When I set out to find you, I had expected a better man at the end of the hunt.”
“Instead, you found only a man, more or less.”
“Rather more than less.” She tapped him on the forehead with her finger. “When do I meet these others that you carry with you?’
The scarred man backed away. “They come out when the Fudir and I let them. He and I are the consuls of our little republic.”
The harper glanced once more at the mover family. She was not so foolish as to confuse the particular with the general, and already she was limning the encounter in a goltraí, a lament for a lost world. What sadder fate than to lose your future?
Pwairt na Pree, the groundside shuttle field, lay in the Jazz plains, a few leagues east of the capital. It handled trans-global semi-ballistic shuttles as well as ground-orbit traffic, and most of the passengers who downsided with Donovan and Méarana swarmed off to their connecting gates, bound for newly-opened townships in what the locals called the Boonlands. Even so, the monorail platform outside the terminal was crowded with those eager to sample the city life of Preeshdad itself.
A warm, gritty wind tore at their clothing when they stepped out onto the platform. Cloaks billowed and hats fled the heads of those who wore them. The green banner of the planetary league snapped in the stiff breeze: a golden harp enfolded by a silver crescent moon.
That flag logo reminds me of something, said the Pedant.
What doesn’t? jeered the Sleuth.
The scarred man’s head jerked here and there, as the desires of some of him to study the flag struggled with desires of others to watch their companions on the platform.
“Are you ill?” A woman standing beside the scarred man reached out to him to steady him, but Inner Child cried out and pulled back.
“It’s all right,” Méarana assured the doubtful woman. “It’s a muscle spasm. He gets them sometimes.” She held tight to his arm.
The Fudir calmed his disparate mind and bowed to the woman. “Thankee, missy. You much kind this-man.”
But the woman was not reassured. She, too, took a step back. “You’re a Terry,” she said and glanced half-consciously at the hand with which she had touched him. Waiting passengers, attracted by the by-play, reacted in various attitudes. One man scowled and stepped closer to the woman, fists clenched as if to defend her. Others, newly dropped from other worlds of the Periphery, pursed their lips or tsk’ed or simply turned away, but whether from distaste for the Terran or for his treatment by a local, the Fudir did not know.
“Watch ourself here,” the Fudir warned himselves. “They don’t seem well-disposed toward Terrans.”
“Considering that nowhere are Peripherals well-disposed to Terrans,” Donovan answered, “that is a considerable understatement.”
That was why Donovan preferred Jehovah. Jehovans did not like Terrans, but Jehovans did not like anyone; and as long as they did not dislike Terrans more than anyone else, Donovan counted that as warm embrace.
The train was approaching from the city, slowing with a hum of its magnets into the station platform. “It’s why we should have stayed there,” he told the others. “Like I suggested.”
The Fudir demurred. “Then who would ward our… our Méarana?”
Up until now, said the Sleuth, I don’t see that she’s needed much warding.
“Not yet. But you know where this is all heading,” said the Fudir.
Of course, said the Sleuth. I saw that back in de la Susa’s office.
Technically, it wasn’t his office.
Shaddap, Pedant.
“What if she did have to lean on us?” the Fudir said. “We’d snap. We’d break.”
“Yes,” said Donovan. “Remember the alley in Jenlùshy, when the moment came for quick and decisive action.”
If youse guys had let me take charge, like you shoulda…
“Quick and decisive, Brute. Not quick, decisive, and stupid.”
Preeshdad was the capital of Cliff na Murph, the largest of the sovereign states of Harpaloon and by default the nominal capital of the planet. She was a middling town and as ramshackle as Jenlùshy. But where Jenlùshy was often shaken down, Preeshdad was shaken up. Her buildings had the indefinable patchwork irregularity of things thrown together in haste, as if the folk of Harpaloon had been in a tearing hurry to get on with something else.
The folk, too, had that same improvisational quality. They made life up as they went along. Rioting was the municipal sport; but a man was as apt to fight someone one day as stand him a drink the next. If on Thistlewaite all plans failed, on Harpaloon they barely got started before another overtook it.
The town had been built in a bowl valley on the western edge of the Jazz, hard by a natur
al harbor on the eastern shore of the Encircled Sea. For most of the local year, the sea breeze tempered the climate, keeping it cool and moist and escorting the occasional storm as the price; but twice each year the winds reversed and carried the dust off the grasslands. The hot-breathed, bale wind was called the shrogo, and during the season people doffed their waterproof tweed caps and donned instead the bright checkered head scarves known as caephyas. It was a bad time of year; for the warm, gritty breeze rubbed tempers raw, and even the meekest of men would grow irritable. The seasonal body count typically rose a bit in the good years, and spiked in the bad.
The few minutes on the train platform were all the convincing Méarana needed that the shrogo was in full career. Peddlers with mobile carts did a brisk business at the midtown rail terminal, selling headgear to touristas to protect hair and neck from the dust. Méarana bought a type of caephya called a chabb. Rimmed with tassels and woven of a light cloth known as shoddy, it wimpled her golden features in an emerald frame, so that her face, peering out as if from a window, seemed small and almost childlike. Lead slugs sewn into the hem allowed her to drape it to best effect and kept the fly ends from flapping in the stiff breeze.
Donovan she thought abrasive enough that the wind might need protection from his face. But he purchased a red-and-white checkered caephya and two pairs of protective goggles, called gloyngo santas.
They had noticed that some Harpaloon terms were strikingly similar to the Gaelactic, where síoda meant a kind of silk and angioini cosanta meant literally “the goggles protective.” But caephya and chabb and other words were unknown and seemed peculiar to Harpaloon. The Pedant suggested that these terms had come from the aboriginal’ Loon tongue.
The Phundaugh Plough and Stars was a short walk from the terminal and the Fudir found that all had been arranged there to his instructions. Members of the Brotherhood, acting with that solidarity that persecution creates and bribery knits together, had even conjured the illusion of occupation. Beds were mussed, linens used, clothing left in disarray. Room service had been ordered. Surely, this was fellowship!
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