The Enigma Score

by Tepper, Sheri S

  ‘I’m going,’ he moaned. ‘I’m going.’ So a flea might depart a giant dog. So vermin might be encouraged to leave a mighty palace. ‘I’m going.’

  As he turned, he stumbled over something and picked it up without thinking. Lim’s synthesizer. Miraculously unbroken. Tasmin clutched it under one arm as he staggered over the ridge and down the endless slopes to the place he had left the car. Not a single pillar whined or shattered. ‘Joke,’ he repeated to himself. ‘Joke.’

  Then he was in the car, bent over to protect the core of himself from further pain, gasping for air that would not, did not come.

  3

  He heard his mother’s voice as though through water, a bubbling liquidity that gradually became the sound of his own blood in his ears.

  ‘That acolyte of yours? Jamieson? He was worried about you, so he called me, and we went to your house and found the note she left you, Tas.’ His mother’s hand was dry and frail, yet somehow comforting in this chill, efficient hospital where doctors moved among acolytes of their own. ‘He got a search party out after you right away. They found you in the car, out near the Enigma. You’d been knocked in the head pretty badly. You’ve got some pins and things in your skull.’ She had always talked to him this way, telling him the worst in a calm, unfrightened voice. ‘You’ll be all right, the doctors say.’

  ‘Celcy?’ he’d asked, already knowing the answer.

  ‘Son, the search party didn’t go up on the Enigma. You wouldn’t expect that, would you? They’ll get close shots from the next satellite pass, that’s the best they can do.’ She was crying, her blind eyes oozing silent tears.

  ‘They won’t find anything.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they will. She did go there with Lim, didn’t she?’

  He nodded, awash in the wave of pain that tiny motion brought.

  ‘I can’t understand it. It isn’t anything I would have thought either of them would do! Celcy? The way she felt about the Presences? And Lim! He wasn’t brave, you know, Tas. He always ran away rather than fight. You know, when he was a little fellow, he was so sweet. Gentle natured, and handsome! Everyone thought he was the nicest boy. You adored him. The two of you were inseparable. It was when he got to be about twelve, about the time he entered choir school, he just turned rotten somehow. I’ve never known why. Something happened to him, or maybe it was just in him, waiting to happen.’

  ‘You were right about Celcy’s not wanting to have a baby,’ he murmured, newly sickened as he remembered. It wasn’t only Celcy who had died. ‘I thought she’d become excited about it, but she really didn’t want it.’

  ‘Oh, well, love, I knew that,’ she said sympathetically. ‘You knew it, too. A girl like that doesn’t really want babies. She was only a little baby herself. All pretty and full of herself; full of terrible fears and horrors, too. Afraid you’d leave her as her parents did. Hanging on to you. Not willing to share you with anything or anybody. Not willing to share you with a child. She needed you all for herself. When I read her note, I wondered if she would have been able to go through with it after all. I’m sorry, Tas, but it’s true.’

  It rang true. Everything she said was true, which simply made Celcy’s scribbled confession more valiant. ‘She was going to have the baby because I wanted it. She did things for me that no one … no one ever knew about.’ He breathed, letting the pain wash over and away. ‘When she wasn’t afraid – she wasn’t at all like the Celcy you always saw. I wanted her not to have to be so … so clinging. But I loved her. I got impatient sometimes, but so much of it was my fault. I never took the time with her I should have, the time to make her change. I just loved her!’

  It came out as a strangled plea for understanding, and his mother answered it in the only way she could to let him know she knew exactly what he meant, her voice filled with such an access of pain that his own agony was silenced before it.

  ‘I know, Tasmin. I loved Lim, too.’

  Under the circumstances, the Master General was inclined to waive discipline.

  ‘I don’t want any more unauthorized removal of manuscripts, Tasmin. I know it’s often done, but the rule against it stands. The fault wasn’t proximately yours, but the responsibility was. You have been punished by the tragedy already. Anything further would be gratuitously cruel.’

  Tasmin was silent for an appropriate time. He was not yet at the point where he could feel anything. He was sure a time would come that would demonstrate the truth of what the Master General had said about responsibility.

  ‘Master.’

  ‘Yes, Tasmin.’

  ‘I was actually on the Enigma when it blew.’

  ‘So I’ve been told. You have the devil’s own luck, Tasmin.’

  ‘Yes, sir. The fact is, sir, my bro … Lim Terree was singing the Furz score. He had a portable synthesizer, I’d swear it was an Explorer model, and he was good, sir. He really was good. I haven’t heard any better….’

  ‘If you’re trying to justify …’

  ‘No, sir, you misunderstand. The score was effective. It wasn’t until he forgot himself and started improvising that the Enigma blew.’

  ‘Effective!’

  ‘Yes, sir. There wasn’t a quiver. He got through the first variation and well into the second before he deviated from the score. If they’d been able to go on down the far side, they’d have been well away.’ He choked, remembering Celcy’s face as she had looked joyously at the singer. ‘Well away, sir. Well away.’

  There was a long silence. ‘I’m fascinated, Tasmin. And quite frankly, I’m surprised and puzzled. I remember Lim when he was here. I wouldn’t have said this was in character at all. Your wife was a very attractive girl. Could she have – oh, egged him on, so to speak?’

  Tasmin shook his head, ‘No, sir. She was terrified of the Presences. She wouldn’t even look at them through a ‘scope.’

  ‘How do you explain it?’

  ‘I can’t, sir. I really can’t.’

  ‘But the score was effective, a real Password.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I think so, sir.’

  ‘Well. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Tasmin. I’m sincerely sorry for your loss.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  And then home again. Sick leave. Dizziness and nausea and a constant gray feeling. Jamieson dropping in each evening to fill him in on what was going on. A Jamieson oddly tentative and uncharacteristically kind.

  ‘James dropped out of Tripsinging. He’s going to specialize in orchestrals.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Refnic’s moving to the Jut. They’ve still got a shortage of Tripsingers there, even after – what is it now, six years? I guess most singers are still afraid of the Crystallite fanatics. Anyhow, Refnic’s going.’

  ‘Good for him.’

  ‘Clarin’s staying in Deepsoil Five. When I finish my acolyte’s year, I thought you might like to have her. She’d like to work with you. You know, Master Ferrence, there’s a lot to her.’

  It was as though Jamieson was offering him something he could not quite see. Tasmin tried to respond but couldn’t. Jamieson left it at that.

  The synthesizer lay on the table in his study where the medical team had dropped it off. There were prints of the satellite pictures, too. The Master General had known he would want to see them even though they showed nothing at all except tumbled crystal.

  The synthesizer was the best one Tasmin had ever seen, if not an Explorer model, something close. It had some kind of transposition circuits in it that Tasmin wasn’t familiar with. He fooled with it for over an hour before he was able to get it into play, and then what emerged was a mishmash that must have accumulated over weeks or months. Lim’s voice. Rehearsals. Lim’s voice again, cursing at a technician. ‘Damn you, I’ve told you twenty times I want….’ Then again, ‘Get it right this time or get off the job….’

  Fragments of music. Real Tripsinging, as pure as air. Lim’s improvisations. The Enigma score. Celcy’s voice.

&
nbsp; ‘… Tasmin will be so proud! Everyone will know who we are, won’t they? You, and Tasmin, and even me.’

  Then back to the recording session, Lim’s voice again. ‘You’d think after all this time they could say something meaningful … that was petulant of you … pisses me off when they don’t know who I am …’

  And finally great swaths of music, a full concert of it, uninterrupted hours of Lim’s music, indomitable and triumphant.

  When it was over, Tasmin sat in the silence of the house for most of the night, staring at nothing.

  ‘It wasn’t you, Tassy. It wasn’t your fault.’ Tasmin’s mother wept, agonized by his guilt.

  ‘In a way it was. If the Enigma score hadn’t been at the house, she couldn’t have given it to him. If he hadn’t had it, he couldn’t have gone there.’ He reached for her hand, taking it in his, wishing she could see him.

  ‘Tassy, it was he who asked for it, and she who gave it. All you did was …’ His mother stared in his direction, intimidated by his silence.

  ‘All I did was break a rule. Me. The one who was always telling her how important the oaths were. The one who always talked about honor.’

  ‘What you did was make a mistake. Not a dishonorable one. You only wanted the score to study. It was just a mistake, not a matter of honor….’

  ‘Mother, it feels like a matter of honor to me. I can’t explain it. I know I’m not guilty of having any evil intent. I know I’m not guilty of anything perverse or dreadful, but I can’t just let it rest. If I’d obeyed the rules, there wouldn’t have been a mistake. Celcy would be alive. And Lim.’

  ‘All right,’ she spat at him, her decade’s old resignation giving way at last to something alive and angry. ‘So you did something wrong. God forbid you should ever do anything wrong. Everyone else, but not you. You’re so much above mistakes. So damn good. And now you’re going to punish me because you made a mistake.’ She began to weep, tears running down her face in runnels from those wide, blind eyes. ‘You’re all I have left!’

  The money I got for the house will take care of you,’ he said at last, unable to meet her pain with anything but this chilly comfort. ‘I bought a BDL annuity, and I’ve written to Betuny in Harmony. She sent word by the last caravan through. She’s coming from Harmony. One of the laymen from the Citadel will look after you until she gets here.’

  ‘We never really got along.’

  ‘You will now. She’s your sister, and she’s very grateful to have a place since her husband died.’

  ‘She thinks I’m crazy.’ It was half a laugh.

  ‘Let her think what she likes. And I won’t be gone forever.’

  ‘I wish I understood why you have to go at all.’

  He wanted to tell her, but it would only have confused her as much as it confused him, so he said none of the things he had been thinking for days. Instead he murmured, ‘I have to know why, Mother. I can’t go back to my own life until I know why. Right now all I can think of is questions with no answers. Please – if you won’t give me your blessing, at least tell me it’s all right.’ He did not want to weep. He had already wept enough.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, drying her eyes on her sleeve. ‘It’s all right, Tasmin. If you feel you have to, I guess you have to. I just wish you’d forgive yourself and let it go. We can all blame ourselves because people die. I blamed myself over your father. And over Lim.’

  ‘I know you did. This is just something I have to do.’

  ‘All right.’ She twisted the handkerchief in her hands, wringing it, reaching up to run it under her eyes. ‘Just be sure you take warm clothes with you. And plenty of food…. ‘ She laughed at herself. ‘I sounded so … motherlike. We never outgrow it. We just go on fretting.’

  ‘I will, Mother. I’ll take everything I need.’

  He went out to the quiet-car and sat in it, too weary to move for the moment, thinking aloud all the things he had wanted to say but had not.

  ‘I’ve always been your good boy, Mother. Yours and Dad’s. I never asked questions. I always did what I was told. If I broke any rules, they were always little rules, for what I thought were good reasons. I loved someone, even though I knew she loved me in a different way. I wanted a child, and she wanted to be my child. Still, I really loved her, and sometimes – oh, sometimes all that love came back to me a hundredfold. And I thought if I went on being good, life would be like that always. Something bright and singing, something terrible and wonderful would come to me. Like my viggy Dad gave me when I was seven. Like the medal I won. Like Celcy the way she was sometimes. Something joyful.

  ‘And instead there’s this thing caught in my throat that won’t go down. Two people dead, and I don’t know why. One I loved, one I hated, or maybe loved, I don’t know which. Maybe the other way around. All the things I thought I wanted … I don’t know about them anymore…. I thought Celcy was everything to me, and yet I didn’t ever take the time to get things growing between us. I thought I loved her, yet right there at the end, I was thinking about the Enigma! Why? Why was I thinking about the music instead of about her?

  ‘What did Lim know or think that was so important to him? What was he trying to prove? What made her go with him? Why did she die!’

  ‘Celcy,’ he cried aloud, as though she would answer him, forgive him. ‘Why, Celcy?’

  The Enigma listened, then it didn’t. Jamieson called what the Watchling did during our last trip a joke. He said it was laughing at us. Maybe it was. Lim said he knew something, something to knock Jubal on its ear….

  He started the car. There was a mount waiting for him at the citadel. The things he was taking with him were already there, packed by the Tripmaster’s own hands into two mule panniers and slung on Tasmin’s saddle. All the supplies a Tripsinger needed to travel alone, a rare thing in itself and one for which the Master General had been evasive about granting permission.

  On the seat beside him was another bag that Tasmin had packed for himself. His favorite holo of Celcy was there, and the note she had written him, and the earring that was all the Enigma had left him of her.

  The toy viggy baby was there, too. He didn’t know why he was taking it, except that it couldn’t go with the house and he couldn’t bear to throw it away.

  He laid his hand on the bag. Through the heavy fabric, Lim’s recording synthesizer made a hard, edgy lump. One puzzle was inside that lump, preserved. His brother’s music. Unexpected and glorious, not what he had thought it would be, not a music the Lim he thought he knew could ever have created.

  The other puzzle was inside himself, in a place he couldn’t reach, something he had to touch, could not rest until he touched …

  Why had she gone there? Despite her terror? What possible reason could there be?

  Whose fault was it? Why had she and the baby died at all?

  4

  The Ron River stretched its placid length along a gentle deepsoil valley sloping down to Deepsoil Five from the north. In the valley, deepsoil was no more than a mile wide at any point, less than that in most places. There were isolated farmsteads along the Ron, small crofts tenanted by eremitic types, many of them engaged in crop research for BDL. Most were doing research on brou, but some were engaged in improving the ubiquitous and invaluable settler’s brush, a native plant that had been repeatedly tinkered with by the bioengineers, a plant on which both mule and human depended during long journeys and which, it was said, the viggies and other local fauna ate as well.

  Tasmin was greeted variously as he went, sometimes with friendliness and other times with surliness. He returned each greeting with a raised hand and distant smile. He did not want to stop and talk. There was nothing to talk about. Certainly not about the weather or the scenery. The weather was what it always was on this part of Jubal, sunny, virtually rainless.

  As for the scenery, there was little enough of it. Wind sang in the power lines stretching from the reservoir down to Deepsoil Five; the distant hydroelectric plant squatted at t
he top of the visible slope like a dropped brick; the fields were neatly furrowed; each dwelling was impeccably maintained. Like a set of blocks, Tasmin thought. All lines crossed at right angles. Even the Ron had had its major meanders straightened, its banks sanitized. Few crystals. No singing. No peacock tailed trees turning toward the sun. No trees of any kind.

  A demolition crew was working at one point on the road, lowering a heavy mesh cone over an intruding ’ling. A noise box directed a loud burst of low frequency sound at the shrouded crystal, and the pillar exploded into a thousand fragments within the mesh cone. Tasmin spent a few idle minutes watching the crew gather up the knife-edged pieces and truck them a few thousand yards to a vacant spot of prairie, well away from the road. In time, every shard would seed another ’let and a new forest of crystals would grow. From the color of the one destroyed, Tasmin thought it might be a Watchling, probably from the North Watcher. That particular ashy shade was rare elsewhere. How it had come here was anyone’s guess. A piece picked up on a wheel or popped into a wagon, perhaps. A shiny gem thrust into a pocket and then carelessly thrown away. Then the dews of night had dissolved minute quantities of mineral in the soil, and the crystal had grown, but how it had reached ’ling size without demolition was someone’s culpable oversight. The thing had been twelve feet tall!

  By evening, he had passed the hydroelectric plant and the dam, circled the shining lake, and reached the top of the long ridge that backed the reservoir. Here the flora was more typical of Jubal, the fanshaped trees relaxing into their nighttime fountain shapes as the sun dropped. His lungs filled with the faintly spicy aroma he loved.

  He had almost decided to place his camp in a small clearing among a grove of the plumy Jubal trees when he heard a voice behind him.

  ‘Master Ferrence? Camp is set up over here, sir.’

  ‘Jamieson? What the dissonant hell are you doing here?’ He turned to see the boy standing beside an arched tent, which was so well hidden among the trees that he had missed it on his walk through the grove.