Teodorq scratched his head. “Yuh think yer mom went looking for these dancing savages?”
Méarana laughed, because as far as savagery went, Teddy ran rather closer to the dancers than to his present companions. But all things are a matter of degree and everyone drew the line somewhere. “Of course not,” she said. “She went looking for whatever that is.” And her pointing finger rested on the bright star from which lightning bathed the earth.
But Méarana could not take her eyes from the figure of the young girl engulfed in the flames, and a cold, deadly certainty engulfed her heart.
At dinner that evening Méarana was silent and uncommunicative. The Dukovers did not notice. Donovan, who talked to himself, did not notice. Teodorq, who talked to anyone, did not notice. But Billy Chins, their servant, who insistently helped their hosts in presenting the meal, took note and whispered encouragement to her.
“Maybe so, we find her, your mama-meri. Fella no look, fella no find.”
Méarana gave him a wan, but grateful smile and attacked her “red porch,” a cold vegetable stew dominated by beets, with all the enthusiasm it warranted. It added to the chill within her. In the whole time of her search—when time had gone by and gone by, when no word had come, when the Kennel had given up, when Donovan announced his pessimism, while she had wended the Roads out to Lafrontera—in all that time a small flame of belief had burned within that she would find Bridget ban at the end of it all. But the sight of that Wild carving had extinguished it at last.
Teodorq chattered on to no one’s interest about the arms he had procured. “They still had my old nine that I pawned for eating money when I come in on the old Gopher Broke.” His “nine” was an automatic pistol that fired off a magazine of bullets, but why it was called a nine neither the Wildman nor anyone else knew. “It’s just what it’s called,” he had protested. He had also picked up a long sword called a “claymore,” much to Billy’s amusement.
“Why any-fella need him, pistol and sword? Suppose other-fella got him pistol. What good sword? And suppose other fella got him sword, the pistol is enough.”
“Sure,” Teodorq replied expansively, “until yuh run outta bullets.” Then in a labored imitation of Billy’s accent, “Sword, no run him outta stabs.”
Méarana tossed her spoon to the table and stood up. “I’m going out to take the air.” She turned and passed out through the sliding glass doors into the broad shrub-littered lawn behind the house. The grass had the same ragged quality of everything else on Gatmander. The bushes seemed to grow wherever chance had driven the seeds, and were trimmed in what could be only described as the “natural look.”
She grew aware that someone had come out behind her, and she did not look to see who it was. “I don’t think I want to know you anymore, Donovan.”
The scarred man was silent for a time. “I may not disagree,” he said finally. “It’s too much work. What is your reason?”
“I saw you hit Billy, back on Chandlers Lane.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When you and he lingered at the arms shop.”
“That? He teased me about my eyes. I gave him a swat. It was good-natured.”
Méarana shook her head. “That isn’t the only thing. You treat him badly.”
“What about me?” asked the Fudir. “Do you want to know me?”
She turned and struck him on the chest with both fists. “Stop! Don’t play identity games with me. I’m going into the Wild and I’m scared.” There. She had said it.
“You should be. It’s a rough and dangerous region. There are old settled planets out there that haven’t made Reconnection. Human worlds where starflight is unknown, where men fight with gunpowder or swords. Travel is chancy—there are no scheduled liners—and the people are treacherous. They don’t like Leaguesmen. They want what we have, and they know they can’t have it because they can’t build the tools to build the tools. You wouldn’t last. Some tramp captain could drop you off on some primitive internal combustion world and never return to pick you up. He could sell you as a sex slave to some machraj or king.”
“I don’t think I—”
“I think you can trust Teddy. And even Billy might not run in a pinch. But there are limits to what the three of us can do. Do you want to risk it all just to find your mother’s grave?”
“I know that now. She’s gone. But I have to keep looking.”
“Why? Do you think she would thank you? Do you think she would even know?”
Méarana shrugged. “She may. You plan to go on, though.”
“There’s something out there. It’s just not your mother. Something that created an entire district of burnt-out worlds. The Burnt-Over District. It’s what your mother set out to find.”
“Then I’ll find it for her.”
The Fudir shook his head. “No. That’s not your quest. Go back to Dangchao. Put all this in your songs. Keep Bridget ban in your heart. That’s where I keep her.”
“Do you? I hadn’t noticed. But she was never an easy one to keep anywhere. She had a way of slipping off. You can’t go out there, Donovan. No matter how despicable you are, I can’t let you go.” She took him by his shirt and shook him until he rattled. “You’re coming apart, old man! You’ve grown unfocused, indecisive. Those six pieces of you are flying in all directions. And when any of them gets in a snit, you lose a part of yourself. You were more single-minded behind a bowl of uiscebeatha in the Bar of Jehovah!”
“It was the one thing on which we could all agree.”
“Listen to yourself. Is there some part of you that wants to die? What good would you be to me if your were half-drunk all the time? Whose skills would you blunt? The Pedant’s memory? The Sleuth’s deductive abilities? The Brute’s physical prowess? Keep them docile and you keep them useless.”
“They’re useless anyway,” Donovan said. “The Sleuth thinks the rest of us are stupid. Inner Child is afraid of his own shadow. The Brute…What’s the use? I could give you six reasons.”
“Six. That would include Donovan.”
He shrugged. “There’s such a thing as too cold-blooded.”
“Which means you can give me six good reasons why you should stay here on Gatmander and wait for us to return.”
“I would wait forever. I can’t do it. Zorba…”
“Don’t use Uncle Zorba as an excuse! That’s the very worst thing you could have said.” She turned and swept her arm across the Dukovers’ backyard. “What do you think of their landscaping?”
“Eh?” The scarred man took on an unfocused look while he tried to decide which of him was best suited to answer. But she did not wait for him to decide.
“Gats don’t think of themselves as actors,” she said. “It’s in their very grammar. They are always acted upon. Stuff happens. They’re just spectators. So, don’t you tell me, Donovan buigh, that you are tagging along because circumstances forced you!” She looked up, saw a drape flutter in the sliding door, and Billy Chins appeared briefly to nod at her. She indicated that she had seen him and took Donovan by the arm.
“Let’s go back and finish our porch.” The scarred man snorted. “What’s the rush? It was cold when they served it.” But he followed her meekly back into the Dukover house.
__________
He had not swallowed more than three more spoonfuls when he realized what had been done to him. He turned a gaze already growing uncertain on the harper, and his mouth tried to open and form words. “You…”
“Sleep,” she said. “I’ve paid the Dukovers to watch over you until we return. Rest. Find peace. We are commanded to love others as we love ourselves. Start with that.”
When the scarred man was snoring, Méarana turned to Billy. “Are we ready?”
Billy spared hardly a glance for his former master. “Blankets and Beads, she lose him High Gat Orbit tomorrow. Bumboat go jildy, two horae; then cargo boat early morning.”
The harper nodded and turned to Sefr Dukover, the hu
sband. “You’ll see that our luggage gets on the cargo boat?”
“As it pertains to me, there is an occasion of compliance.”
Méarana sought the intercession of heaven. “Just once, could you say, ‘I’ll do it’?”
The Gat twisted his face into a look of disgust. “As it pertains to off-worlders, there is an occasion of tolerance; but there is no occasion for offensive speech.”
Teodorq returned to the dining room, still buckling a holster around his waist. “Cab’s here, babe.” He spared a glance for the scarred man. “I still don’t like this.”
“Who will sing Nagarajan glories, my good pahari?” asked Billy. “Lady Harp or old man? Old-fella, he be no-good sick. He for burning ghats. Not long time die in Wild.”
Nagarajan wore his sword over his shoulder and he reached back to test its draw. “Didn’t say yuh was wrong, I said I didn’t like it. It’s a bad omen to start a journey. Shoulda sacrificed a goat.”
When they went to the cab hovering on the parking apron, Teodorq held Méarana back for a moment after Billy had gotten in.
“What’d he mean ‘pahari’?”
The harper glanced at the khitmutgar, then at the Wildman. “Hill-man, I think.”
Teodorq snorted. “Shows how smart he is. I was a prairieman, born and bred.” And he reached over his shoulder and refastened the thong on his scabbard to keep the sword in place.
X A MAN APART
The Silky Voice falls through an infinite space, though in defiance of the god Newton her rate of fall remains constant, so that she seems almost to float. From her throne high in the hypothalamus, she notes respiration, heartbeat, the rush of endorphins through the glands and ducts and bloodstream. And still she falls. There is no bottom. There is no such thing as a bottom. She may as well be falling up, or sidewise, or in upon herself.
Weariness envelops the Brute, his contant alertness grows lax, muscles loosen. He lies down on a yielding and undefined surface to rest himself.
We’ve been drugged, the Sleuth concludes.
“Brilliant,” the Fudir answers. “I never cease to marvel at the quickness of our mind.”
A child’s voice echoes through the white fog that now fills the Dukover dining room, that swallows up all the edges and all the colors:
Méarana swims into his view.
“You…,” croaks Inner Child, but with Donovan’s voice. No other word can express the immensity of the betrayal.
“Sleep,” the harper says, not without kindness. “I’ve paid the Dukovers to watch over you until we return. Rest. Find peace. We are commanded to love others as we love ourselves. Start with that.”
Then the eyelids drift together and the darkness takes him. Distantly, he hears another voice. “Blankets and Beads, she lose him High Gat Orbit tomorrow. Bumboat go jildy, two horae; cargo boat early morning.” After that, whatever the world has to say, it does not speak in his world.
There is fog, but not fog, for even the smoky tendrils of fog have an amorphous shape and this darkness is without shape. It is not even, strictly speaking, “darkness.” But for all that, it possesses substance. Paradox! Can there be matter without form? Can there be a geometrical figure without a geometry? Can there be a story without the words in which it is told? Every thing must be some thing before it can be understood.
And so form emerges from chaos. Substance undefined takes on the seeming of quarks. Quarks embrace and became baryons, and these join hands and became nuclei. Photons dance joyously around them and, subtly, somehow, become electrons. Atoms share electrons; molecule bonds to molecule; and so upward down the slippery slope to order. The whole beckons the parts and, by bringing them to closure, perfects them.
And so function follows form.
It is the form of Donovan that has been broken, and deliberately so. His matter remains the same. Those of Name had labored under the ancient error that the whole is grasped as the sum of its parts, and that by perfecting the parts the whole would be uplifted. But while a brick may be broken into molecules, what molecule is red and rectangular?
How much more true for a piece of work like man! When Those had with their cold deliberation cut the form of Donovan into parts, they thereby lost Donovan, much as a water molecule, split into its constituent atoms, ceases to be water.
Darkness becomes light. The shapeless fog becomes shape. But the pieces of Donovan do not become Donovan.
Instead, they find themselves arranged as once before around the the same long, dark-wood table in the same ill-defined room, with the same ten padded chairs arranged around it. The Fudir studies the six faces, so alike in their differences. “Being unconscious,” he wisecracks, “is not like it used to be.”
Donovan scowls from the other end of the table. “Are we to endure another tiresome committee meeting? Pedant, why have you brought us here?”
The more corpulent Donovan turns its massive face toward him. The gray, watery eyes appear troubled. This is not my doing.
Perhaps, the narrow-faced Sleuth suggests, it is simply memory induced by the drug.
The Fudir wonders if it might not be imagination instead of memory. That would point to Inner Child.
Hush, Child. We’re here to discuss Méarana’s treachery.
It wasn’t her. It was Billy.
But it was clearly she who instigated it. Billy was only her instrument.
Maybe, the Brute rumbles, it was her purpose all along to lure us to the edge of the world and abandon us.
If so, can you say she had no reason?
“Leaving us here,” says Donovan, “may have saved our lives. That is reason enough.”
If a life is no longer worth living, can you call it ‘saved’? What if she never comes back?
“This is getting us nowhere,” gripes the Fudir.
“Nowhere?” Donovan laughs. “We are lying unconscious in some gods-forsaken hovel on a desolate planet, awaiting the return of people who may never return. Surely, nowhere is precisely where we’ve gotten.”
It was bound to end badly, the Sleuth comments. I always said so.
Had he? The Sleuth’s hunger for puzzles had lured him from the Bar of Jehovah against his better judgment; and now, on the edge of the Wild, his better judgment had finally won.
Something like that, drunkard.
We cannot abandon her.
Wake up, Silky. It’s her what’s abandoned us.
Inner Child yelps suddenly and runs to the Silky Voice instead.
From what?
The room shakes, and the Fudir grabs the edges of the table to steady himself. An earthquake on Gatmander affecting his dreams? But a shiver runs through him, too, as if he were a tree and an autumn wind were shuddering the dead leaves from him. The impression grows that he is being watched.
Something is wrong with the table’s geometry. Donovan still faces him down the long axis of the table, but the perspectives have all gone awry, for the empty seat is also at the far end facing him and it is not so empty a seat as before. Something inhabits it now; something remnant of the chaos. Perhaps it is man-shaped, perhaps not. There is too much shadow in it to say for sure. In a better light, it might have a face, and the Fudir is suddenly, irrationally glad that the light is not better.
“Donovan, in the seat on your right…”
But Donovan shakes his head. “No, on your right.”
“Pedant? This is no time for jokes.”
What I see sits to the Sleuth’s right, at the far end of the table. Perhaps it is some poor deduction he has made.
Or a bad memory that sits beside you, the Sleuth shoots back. But Silky sees it beside the Brute; and the Brute sees it beside Silky. All of them, likewise, at opposite ends of the table’s long axis. Inner Child, of course, sees it everywhere.
If time ceases, you live forever.
>
Nervous laughter. By definition, I would think.
“Quiet, Sleuth! Who spoke? Who are you?”
Namaste. Greet the God within.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” the Fudir says. “No, you don’t. Not that old trick.”
Death is the life that never ends.
That’s nonsense. Death is the end of life.
Death is non-sense, for in death the senses are not. Change brings pain, and life is change. In death there is no change, and so, no pain.
What are you trying to tell us?
“He can’t tell us anything, you hair-splitting fool.” The Fudir’s voice is just short of breaking. “He’s only some leftover part of us, no less foolish than any of us.”
Which path should we follow? Do we abandon Méarana? Or do we persuade her to abandon her search? Do we fly to the Hounds, or flee from them?
“It’s no Oracle, Pedant! Donovan, do something!”
Take any path. You cannot avoid what lies at the end.
Dawdle all you like. In the vastness of time, the longest life is no more than a speck. It is no more significant than a single man in the vastness of the universe. Your youth is dead already. There is rest at the end, a surcease from striving, relief from the Wheel.
“Donovan! The table!”
The seats are receding like galaxies from one another as the table seems to swell. Donovan, Brute, Sleuth, and the rest are red-shifting. The Fudir knows what this must symbolize. His mind is flying apart. He hears laughter like the crackling of dried autumn leaves. Brute to his left, Sleuth to his right are already out of reach, but he lunges forward and stretches his arms and…
…and his hand encounters a pile of jackstraws in the middle of a light game table. He is the only one sitting at it. The jackstraws, multicolored on their tips, are all a-jumble. The Fudir hesitates and reaches out as delicately as if he were picking a pocket and lifts a bright red staw from the top of the pile. He holds it a moment aloft and waits to see if the pile shifts.
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