Silence descends upon the group, into the midst of which the Fudir eventually drops the comment, “Zorba would not like that.”
“What! Are we to look after her for the rest of her life?”
That would seem the logical deduction.
And are we not duty-bound to do so?
“No proof of that. If the harper stirred a pot, that’s her look-out, not ours. She’s no child, to escape the consequences of her own decisions.”
“Oh, that we could escape the consequences of ours!”
“It’s a tough Spiral Arm. No one ever promised safety or success.”
You can’t mean that!
“Can’t I? All in favor of taking the money, raise your hand.”
Ghostly images raise hands: Donovan, Inner Child, Sleuth.
“Sleuth!” says the Fudir.
It’s the rational course.
“Damn reason! But that leaves four opposed.”
He, the Brute, and the Silky Voice raise their hands—in consequence of which all eyes turn to the Pedant.
But the ponderous body shakes the massive head. I am facts, and to take the bribe or not cannot be answered with facts. “Is” does not equal “Should.” Neither logic nor fear nor sentiment nor brute strength nor any other fragment of who we once were can provide an answer. Rather, the contrary.
Three to three with one abstention.
The Fudir raps knuckles on the table. “The point is moot. We can do nothing until Siggy O’Hara. I say we accompany her within the Circuit. Anything we learn, we can turn over to Greystroke and Hugh.”
Donovan sighs. “I remember when we were only to escort her to High Tara.” The Brute rumbles. Just a question here, but anyone else wondering about the empty seats at this table? Pedant, you set this up. Why ten chairs?
The massive face appears startled. I did not realize… I did. Like the Brute, the Sleuth had access to the sensory inputs. “Why do ten imaginary chairs matter more than seven?” says Donovan. Child, you have the imagination. Did you…?
… and he was back in the common room, to find that he had staggered slightly and that the harper had grabbed a hold of his arm to keep him from falling. “Are you all right?” Méarana asked, and Donovan saw his opening and ducked into it.
“How… long was I out?” he asked, with more confusion than he ought.
“A few moments. You muttered.”
Donovan imitated a chuckle. “Good old Fudir. He does run on. I… don’t feel well.” He allowed her to lead him back to the settee and lower him gently into it.
“Billy,” she said, “fetch sahb Donovan an orange juice.” While the khitmutgar rushed to do her bidding, Méarana arranged pillows around the scarred man. “Better?”
Donovan tried to speak, only to find the Fudir holding his tongue. His voice slurred like that of a man following a seizure. The Fudir realized that this only abetted Donovan’s plans, and let go. “Yes,” Donovan choked out. “Better. Thank you, boy.” He drank the proffered juice, handed back the empty glass. “Méarana… I think this journey is taking too much from me. I’m tired and confused. We should lay over for a time, recover my strength.” He wheezed for effect, trying not to overdo it.
The harper sat across from him and leaned her arms on her knees. “Do we dare? What of the Confederate courier?”
“Oh, mistress,” Billy sang from the sink, where he was cleaning the glass. “He follow long Lola Hadley to Jemson’s Moon. Sahb Donovan tell so.”
“No,” Donovan replied. “He’ll query Lola over the Circuit, and by now they know we’re not aboard… It will take a while. Lola can communicate only while passing through encircuited systems. So we have a lead on him, but he’ll untangle the skein eventually and…” He enclosed both her hands in his. “I don’t know what I can do when he catches up.”
“Maybe we should have…”
“What?”
Méarana disengaged. She looked away. “Maybe we should have accepted Greystroke’s offer and turned everything over to him.” She would not look at him and her hands worked a harp she did not hold.
Donovan spoke as if in reluctant admission. “Greystroke and Hugh have better resources… Why mind the stove, if they will cook the meal?” Donovan had never believed that the harper was chasing after Bridget ban “because a daughter knows her mother.” What daughter has ever known that? She was chasing Bridget ban because she was chasing Bridget ban; and had been chasing her all her life. “Let it go.”
The challenge struck hard. Donovan could almost see the fracture lines streak across the quartz of her resolve. He could almost see her crack; and he knew that the next words she spoke would be to abandon the quest.
“When we reach Siggy O’Hara,” she said. And Donovan waited for her to finish, but she only shook her head and turned away before she could weep, and retired to her own quarters.
VII THE FREEDOM OF CHOICE
A certain freedom comes from the abandonment of obligation; a sense of boundlessness from the lack of bonds. So the remainder of the transit to Siggy O’Hara ran more carelessly than had the initial part. A kind of melancholy settled over Méarana’s playing, not only in what she played privately in their suite, but even in what she performed in the first-class lounge at Captain-Professor van Lyang’s request. A sweet sadness informed her choice of mode and tempo. Méarana, it seemed, had begun to accept the facts.
Except that Bridget ban’s death was not yet a fact, as the Pedant periodically reminded everyone. It was merely a reasonable abstraction from the facts that the Sleuth had drawn. Yet no one loved a puzzle better than the Sleuth and from time to time the scarred man found himself unwillingly wondering how that death might have come about.
Inner Child was just as happy not to know, because to learn it they would have to track the Hound to the end of her trail; and the closer they approached that end, the closer they would approach their own.
No, the best of all possible worlds was that Méarana resign herself to reality and abandon the quest. That would satisfy Zorba—and those who had offered the bribe.
There lingered, too, the possibilities that the Confederates had learned of Bridget ban’s objective, that they would not pay the bribe, that they would not leave Méarana unmolested. Donovan told himself not to worry over the future, although as the Fudir reminded him, the future was all that one could worry over. You may forget your cares, he told Donovan, not without a little satisfaction, but do not be so sure that those cares will forget you.
Meanwhile, he resigned himself to too much keening of the goltraí from the harper’s clairseach and to wondering from time to time why there had been three empty chairs at an imaginary table. He could see but three possibilities: That he had lost parts of his mind and had forgotten even which they were; that there were emergent fragments yet unrealized; or that the Pedant had been careless in imagining the boardroom. He settled on the third possibility as being the most comforting; but the Fudir reminded him, too, that while the truth set you free, it seldom did so in comfort.
And so they came to Siggy O’Hara, a world named after an ancient battle on Olde Earth, in which a Duke O’Gawa had defeated “Toy” O’Tommy. The very reasons, let alone the passions, of that battle had been long forgotten, but every local autumn, O’Haran nations staged mock combats in which fantastically armored reenactors fired off cannon and muskets and swung long, two-handed swords. It was all great fun and hardly anyone was ever killed. Scholars fretted over authenticity and thought the armor used was an anachronous mixture of ancient Yùrpan and Nìpný fashion. They doubted that the two original armies had painted their armor blue and gray, or even that they had worn turbans. But authenticity had never been a concern of the reenactors. It was an autumn celebration, a last carouse of color before dead winter.
The harper, the scarred man, and their servant Billy Chins l
eft the “Hurtling Gertie” at High Kaddo Platform in the O’Haran coopers, and checked into the Hotel of the Summer Moon under their own names, there to await passage to Ramage on the upper curl of the Spiral Staircase, whence to Jehovah, and home. Far below them, the Siggy sun was a pinpoint, brighter than most and with a faintly crimson cast.
Harping was less iconic among the O’Harans than in most of the Periphery. In olden days, the system had been isolated from the mainstream and had developed its own peculiar traditions and musics. Only with the Opening of Lafrontera had history caught up with her. Traffic had coursed through from Alabaster and the older inward worlds, like the wave front of an explosion. The settling of Wiedermeier’s Chit, Sumday, and other worlds had been an unsettling period for the O’Harans. Long-standing customs had teetered and very nearly toppled. Though never as wild as Harpaloon on even a quiet day, Siggy O’Hara had afterward, tortoise-like, pulled in her head, and vowed that such times would never come again. Commerce with the rest of the League was tightly controlled by the “Back Office” of the McAdoo.
Days passed while they awaited a ship to take them to Alabaster and Ramage. None with open berths were scheduled, but Donovan visited the shipping office each morning in case new vessels had been logged on the Big Board. Most of Lafrontera was outside the Circuit—Siggy O’Hara was its outermost station—and inbound ships oft gave no notification other than swift boats dispatched down the roads ahead of them. Ships might arrive only hours behind their beacons. Not long ago, all traffic had operated that way.
While they tarried, a message caught up with them from Little Hugh, confirming that “Lady Melisonde” had contacted the tissue banks at Licking Stone, Bangtop, and there, too, she had obtained a duplicate of the files copied by Debly Jean Sofwari and “thank you for telling us about the science-wallah.” If that last had been intended sarcastically, it did not come across in the machine-printed code groups in which the message had been couched.
“You guessed right,” he told Méarana at lunch that day in the hotel’s restaurant. “Sofwari was on Bangtop while your mother was at home prepping. He went the long way ‘round and she tried to head him off.”
“Was he trying to evade her, or had they planned to meet?” the harper asked. “Thank you, Billy.” The khitmutgar had interposed himself between the station’s staff and his masters, taking the serving dishes from the waiters and spooning portions onto their plates.
“It’s Greystroke’s problem now,” Donovan said.
Méarana pursed her lips and dropped her eyes. “I suppose so.”
“That nogut, lady harp,” Billy said. “Pickny-meri always belong mama. No one-time never have em.” He screwed his brow a moment in thought, then said, enunciating very carefully, “Daughter, she belong always to mother. Never give up.”
“Billy!” Donovan said sharply. “It has already been decided.”
The khitmutgar cringed. “No beat him, poor Billy. Not Billy’s place, talk him so.”
Méarana looked sharply at Donovan, but said nothing. She turned to Billy. “It’s not final,” she told him, “until we board a ship. Donovan, what else did Hugh have to say?”
The scarred man’s eyes dropped to the decoded text. Gwillgi had been alerted and was asking questions on Kàuntusulfalúghy, in case they knew where Sofwari was. I could have done that, the Sleuth told him, if I had realized his importance earlier. Pedant stuffs his facts away like a magpie. I can’t reason from what I don’t know.
A poor workman blames his tools.
The scarred man’s fist clenched. Quiet! The both O’ youse!
And so before Donovan could answer Méarana—nothing of consequence—she had plucked the message slip from his hand and read it. “Maybe Gwillgi can learn something,” she said.
“He’ll learn that Sofwari never reconnected with Bridget ban. A blind alley.”
“But we may learn,” she said with some of the earlier excitement in her voice, “what Sofwari was searching for, which had something to do with what she was searching for.”
“Let the Kennel roll over the rocks. Something may crawl out.”
She looked at Hugh’s message again. “What does he mean in the postscript: ‘Fudir, what is the Treasure Fleet?’”
Donovan snorted. “It means he is playing the game, too. He learned something on Bangtop and isn’t telling us what it is.”
“Then there is something to learn! What is the Treasure Fleet?”
Donovan snatched the message back. “How should I know?” But he felt a stir in the back of his mind and thought that the Pedant had some bright ribbon of fact tucked away back in his nest.
Later, Méarana, concerned that the scarred man was sinking back into the glum haze in which she had initially found him, pried him from the comfortable chair in which he preferred to await, drinking soggy, the arrival of a ship inward bound for Alabaster. “Let’s go for a walk, old man,” she insisted. “Let Billy have some time to himself.”
“He doesn’t have a self,” the scarred man retorted. “I have it. Right here.” And he clenched his left hand into a ball, as if crushing some small and inconsequential object.
But she persevered, and eventually Donovan threw on a cloak and placed a skullcap on his head and followed her out of the room. Billy, who sat at the dining table with a portable’ face, looked up from the screen with a question in his eyes.
“The Fudir and I are going to the Starwalk, Billy.” This was a cue to the scarred man that Donovan would not be welcome. “We’ll be back for dinner. We’ll eat in the restaurant, so you don’t need to cook anything.” In truth—though she would never say such a thing to his face—Billy favored Terran foods, which she found peculiar in flavor.
“It lacks the True Coriander,” the Fudir explained when she mentioned this on the esplanade and they had turned their steps toward the Grand Erebata.
“And what is the True Coriander? You told me once, but I’ve forgotten.”
The Fudir’s look became distant. “No man knows. We find it in some ancient recipes, but whether vegetable, meat, herb, or a mineral like salt, who knows? It grew only on Olde Earth and its secret has long been lost.” He shrugged. “What we really mean when we say that, is ‘all that we have lost since we lost Terra, and all that we hope once more to have.’”
The Grand Erebata was an oval atrium that ran end to end through the hotel, and from whose rim jutted diving platforms. Low-g gravity grids at one focus of the ellipse were on the roof; at the other focus on the mezzanine, so that one could leap out into the great open space and fall leaf-gentle in whichever direction one chose. When Méarana hesitated at the brink and looked toward the mezzanine twelve storeys below, the Fudir growled and reminded her that they were in free fall and “down” was an aesthetic choice. “Why do you think they only allow these things in free-falling habitats?”
And so she leapt. And fell upward. Whatever the Fudir had said, it felt like up, since the residential floors she passed all shared a common orientation. Gradually, she gathered speed. The god Newton is not mocked. But she had called out her destination when she leapt and the tracers directed counter-grids that slowed her so that she alighted like a dancer on the Star-walk level.
The Fudir was waiting. Méarana slipped her hand through the crook of his arm and they set off around the galleria that circled the “top” floor of the hotel. Faux-windows enclosed them on all sides but the inboard. These reproduced the vista beyond the hotel’s shielding and served all the purposes of windows without the hazard of placing a thin pane of glass between hotel guests and hard vacuum. And so they walked, it seemed, through a great glass torus.
While nearby stars were individual points of yellow and white and red and blue, they were no more than free particles thrown off by a great slurry: the Spiral Arm. In that great Core-ward swath of light, individual stars were lost, no more than bricks in a great white wall.
“The Orion Arm,” she said, pointing this out. “It’s like there is no Rift betwee
n us.”
“Oh, the Rift is real enough. From Ramage, you can see it clearly. But their ‘Orion Arm’ is only a part of our Perseus Arm split off by the Rift. Or so the Pedant tells me. This view… You get a sense of how small the League and the Confederation are. The vast majority of those stars out there have never shone on human folly.”
“‘It’s a big Spiral Arm.’ That’s what they always say. Oh, look! That bright star. The display says it’s Siggy Sun. It looks so far away. Yet, we’re in Siggy System.”
“Those stars,” he said, as if not hearing. “They are not only leagues away; they’re years ago. This is a vista of time, as well as space. Blind Rami, were he visible from this angle, would be Blind Rami two centuries ago. Jehovah, a millennium. They are not even contemporary. There are thriving worlds out there where, had we’ scope enough, we would see barren wastes, because this light, here, today, is from a time before they were even terraformed.”
They had begun their perambulation, slowly clockwise around the torus, as was the custom. Now and then, they stopped to activate a placard identifying this or that distant sight. The Crab Nebula, looking not much like a crab from this direction, hung off in the galactic west, just within the borders of the ULP.
Several large telescopes, called “Hummels,” were mounted to High Kaddo Station, and these fed special images to the faux-windows. By touching a spot, that portion of the skyscape would swell in magnification as the Hummels obediently redirected themselves. The Fudir summoned a close-up of the Crab.
“It’s as if we zoom out into the cosmos,” said the delighted harper. Then, “It’s quite beautiful.”
“It’s much larger than the Crab they once saw on Olde Earth. That was a much younger nebula. In fact, they actually saw it born, though they didn’t know it at the time. You see, there was once a star there—a massive, giant star, ‘so it is said.’ Then, about the dawn of human civilization, the star exploded and collapsed into something the science-wallahs call a pulsing star. It’s deep in the heart of the nebula to this day, spinning like a madman and strewing his dusty remnants all over that sector—the Badlands, it’s called. It tangles up the roads; so no one goes there, except to mine helium. But light takes six millennia to make the Newtonian crawl from the Crab to the Earth so it did not light the sky there until Old Year 1054. Zhõgwó sages made note of it. Later still, when they could measure such things, the Murkan wallahs found it already eleven light-years wide. That’s Earth-years. Today, from Earth, it would appear to be forty light-years wide. But if you actually went over there, you would see that it’s more like seventy light-years wide, and still dispersing. That was one hell of a firecracker.”
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