The Enigma Score

by Tepper, Sheri S

  ‘You’ve been to Heron’s World?’

  ‘Of course not, Tripsinger. I was born here. My mother got a bonus for me, as a matter of fact. I was her third.’

  ‘It saves shipping when you can manufacture locally,’ he responded.

  ‘Many thanks, Tripsinger.’

  ‘No strain intended, Don. I was just wondering how you knew so much about Heron’s World.’

  ‘Library stuff. Adventure stories.’

  ‘Adventure stories?’ he laughed. ‘After being an Explorer on Jubal?’

  ‘You know it’s not always that exciting,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it’s anything but.’

  ‘As when?’ he asked.

  She had stories, her own stories, others’ stories, tales of defeat and pain. They were not the stories Explorers told one another, and she didn’t know why she told Tasmin except that they were stories needing telling and she might not have another chance. During the trip, she had learned all about him and Celcy. Now she wanted to talk about her and Link.

  ‘Some things you bury,’ she said. ‘I believe in burying many things. Not denying they happened, you understand, but just getting rid of them. Putting them away somewhere where you don’t stumble over them every day. But with Link … there’s no way I can bury that. I used to delight in the Presences. Since one of them almost killed Link … since then I don’t like them as much.’

  He considered this, wondering why it didn’t apply to him. Celcy had died on the Enigma, and yet he, Tasmin, still felt as he always had about the Presences. Perhaps women were different. His mother had always told him that they were. ‘And you’ve been alone since then?’ he asked her.

  ‘Not exactly alone. I have good friends. And there was a talented services man in Northwest City. I took advantage of his good nature from time to time. Zimmy. Of course, Zimmy was spying on me, as I should have known he would. I saw his face the last time I returned to Northwest. You’d have to know Zimmy for it to make sense, but he didn’t expect me to be back.’

  When she explained how she knew, Tasmin commented, ‘Not a lot to go on. Just the expression on a man’s face,’

  ‘I said you’d have to know Zimmy. Believe me, he expected never to see me again.’

  Tasmin’s eyes narrowed and his mouth stretched in a silent grimace. ‘Who’s the one who gave the orders, Don? Who hired him?’ The man who hired Zimmy had hired the assassin. The man who hired the assassin was the man who had driven Don Furz underground, causing her to conspire with Lim. And that man was ultimately responsible for Lim’s and Celcy’s death.

  ‘The top of BDL, most likely. Harward Justin is an evil man. I know that about him for sure.’

  ‘I’ve never met Harward Justin.’ But that’s where the ultimate responsibility probably lay. Tasmin nodded to himself over this. If there was fault, that’s where it lay.

  She shivered. ‘I met him once. Luckily, I’d just come back from a trip and I looked like a wet viggy.’

  ‘Why luckily?’

  ‘I’ve been told I’m attractive. And I’ve been told that Justin has an appetite for attractive women. And he doesn’t let them tell him no.’

  For a moment he thought she was going to say something more about this, but she fell into an abstracted and painful silence that it would have seemed impertinent to interrupt.

  By late afternoon, they had begun to climb once more, and well before dark they had reached a crest of hills lined with tiny amber ’lets, no higher than their knees. Far to the east stood the golden Presence from which these small crystals had come.

  ‘An old streambed,’ Donatella explained. ‘It washed the seed crystals down here in almost a straight line. I believe that’s how a lot of the straight ramparts formed originally. A million years ago, there was nothing there but a river. Now there’s a mountain range.’

  ‘We’re moving onto high country,’ he agreed. ‘I want to get a view behind us if I can.’

  He dismounted and lay among the crowded ’lets, peering through his glasses back along their trail. At last he spotted them, moving figures well inside the limit of vision. ‘They’re there. Still coming, and they’re past the side trail where Clarin and Jamieson turned off.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘All six. None of them have gone after the youngsters. I don’t know whether to be glad or sorry.’

  ‘They’re closer than when Jamieson saw them, aren’t they? Only two or three hours behind.’

  ‘My guess would be yes.’

  ‘If we only had a moon, we could keep going late tonight, walk and lead the mules.’

  ‘They may keep coming anyhow,’ he said, staring through the glasses back the way they had come. There was something implacable about the lead rider, something relentless in the angle of his body. He exclaimed, ‘Damn!’

  She peered through her own glasses. Now for the first time, they saw, trailing the group, a mule hostler with a string of unburdened animals.

  ‘They have fresh mounts,’ Don whispered. ‘No wonder they’re moving so fast. If they catch us before we reach the south end of the valley….’

  ‘We can’t outrun them,’ Tasmin said. ‘We’ll have to think of something else.’

  He thought as they rode, stopping twice to pick over bunches of green settler’s brush, which he whittled at on the way.

  ‘What in hell are you doing?’ Donatella asked.

  ‘Being inventive again, Donatella. I’ll let you know if it works,’ he told her, trying to sound more confident than he felt. Half an hour later he had four flat disks of settler’s brush, thick spirals of narrow branches, made to fit tightly inside mule shoes.

  He showed them to her. ‘We’re going to tie these onto our feet, just as soon as we find someplace we can hide the mules. Then we’re going to go on, leaving a false mule trail, until we can find a place to hide ourselves – a small place that they won’t think of searching, because they’ll be looking for people and mules, not people alone.’

  ‘Hide the mules! Where?’

  ‘I don’t know where. I’m praying we can find a place.’

  They did find a place, across a little stream and up a draw, a dense grove of Jubal trees in a tiny box canyon on the opposite side of the narrow valley from the trail. They rode their animals down to the stream, leaving a clear trail, and taking time to water the animals well. Then they led the animals over rock up the curving draw and tied them deep among the trees. On their return, they wiped out all prints, then donned the false mule shoes and walked back to the trail from the stream, leaving clear but infrequent imprints.

  ‘We’ll come back for them when the pursuit passes us by,’ Tasmin asserted, allowing no doubt to creep into his voice.

  Donatella stopped on the trail to wipe her forehead and settle the straps of her pack. They had left most of their gear on the mules, taking only what was needed for survival. ‘What if we didn’t get the tracks into that grove completely wiped out. What if they don’t believe the tracks? What if they go down into that draw?’

  ‘Then they’ll have two more mules and most of our equipment. But they still won’t have us. Now we have to leave as much trail as we can before dark.’

  Walking on the false mule shoes was neither easy nor quick. Twice in the following hour they spied on their pursuers, who were drawing frighteningly close. The second time, Donatella saw them clearly and she put the glasses down with an expression of horrified surprise that she didn’t offer to explain. Tasmin let her alone. Attempting a mulelike pace while keeping his balance on the false mule feet required total concentration.

  They had not gone far enough to satisfy him when it began to grow dark. ‘We can’t go much farther, Donatella. The soil is getting shallower along here. If we just keep going, we may find ourselves on a barren slope when they catch up with us. I wish I knew for sure what they intended. It might make a difference….’

  Her abstracted silence broke with a rush of words. ‘I know what they intend. Killing. Torture. One of them is a ma
n I know about, Tasmin. I saw him through my glasses, saw him clearly. I’ve seen that face before. I know who he is.’ Her voice faded to silence, as though the name could not be uttered.

  ‘Tell me,’ he ordered.

  ‘His name is Geroan,’ she answered. ‘He works for BDL, for Harward Justin. He’s an assassin. A hired killer.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘A friend of mine met him. She told me about Spider Geroan.’ Donatella had turned white herself, for something more than mere recollection of what a friend might have said. Tasmin waited for her to go on, but she bit her lip and was silent.

  ‘We have the rifle,’ he offered.

  ‘We daren’t use it. The moment we use it, they’ll be sure we’re here. And we only have one rifle. They probably have six or seven.’

  ‘True,’ he nodded. ‘You’re right. They can’t know we’re here. Not yet. Not for sure.’

  ‘It’s been a long time since I came this way, but I don’t think there’s anything ahead of us to help. It gets more and more barren the farther up this valley we go, and narrower. There’s no way out on either side. Just precipices with no passes through them. The only ways out are back, the way we came, where the pursuers are right now, or at the southern end….’

  Where they were seemed barren enough, a slope of hard igneous rock that looked as though it had not changed since it had been spewed out molten except to be sparsely netted with soil-filled cracks. There were only a few stunted Jubal trees, their meager fans trembling in the chill wind. Occasionally there were veins of softer, lighter stone running parallel with the trail: pale, sedimentary strata, the bottom of some ancient sea, layered between stripes of the harder stone by cycle after cycle of vulcanism and alluvium, one replacing the other.

  As they moved on, these veins tilted into a wall on their right, at first low, then towering, a striped and undulating outcropping where the softer strata had been eaten away to leave shadowed pockets between the wind-smoothed shelves of harder rock.

  As his eyes and mind searched for a hiding place, Tasmin chewed over what Donatella had said about the man following them. There had been fear in her voice, abject fear, more fear than would have been occasioned by no more than she had told him. It was not merely that the man was an assassin. Tasmin started to ask her, then caught himself. She was already afraid. Talking about it might only make it worse.

  He turned his mind to the stone, concentrating on it, searching for something his traveler’s sense told him must be there, somewhere….

  ‘Stop,’ he cried. The trail curved to the right around the slope where wind had chewed deeply between the layers, making horizontal crevices that held darkness in their depths. One of these pockets, slightly above their heads, was almost entirely hidden behind fragments fallen from the shelf above. ‘There,’ he pointed. At one side of the shelf a hole gaped, thicker than their bodies, accessible from the trail by a tumbled stairway of fallen rock.

  He was halfway up the stones before she reacted enough to follow him. He was inside the cleft, exploring its sloping depth, before she reached the shelf. ‘Come in,’ he whispered, wary of the echoes his voice might rouse. ‘It slopes back, away from the trail. Some of the rocks have rolled back here. Help me push some of them up to narrow the hole we came through!’ He thrust one of the stones toward her, and she rolled sideways to push it still farther. Within moments they had cleared themselves a hidden crawlspace with ledges of stone above and below and walls of broken rock around them. The wind came through the crevices with many shrill complaints and the late light of evening fell slantingly in frail, reedlike beams, lighting Don’s pale face and wide, apprehensive eyes.

  ‘It’ll be fairly dark by the time they get here,’ he said, one hand squeezing her shoulder. ‘I’m going out and lay additional mule tracks, around the corner and down a bit farther. They may use lights to see the trail, but in the dusk this wall will look solid, as though this crack were full of stone.’

  He slipped out and onto the trail, seeking out tiny patches of soil that would take clear imprints of the false hooves. When he had gone half a mile farther, he came to a split in the trail, which he traveled until it petered out onto rock, and more rock stretching endlessly away to the south. Then he pocketed the mule shoes, climbed the wall and scrambled back the way he had come, careful to leave no visible trace, grateful for the wind that might be presumed to have blown their tracks away.

  She was waiting for him with stones ready to plug the hole behind him. Their two mattresses were already inflated on the roughly rippled stone. ‘Thank God for an inflatable mattress,’ she murmured. ‘We’ll have to be quiet. It’ll be easier with something soft under us.’ Her voice broke into a gasping sob.

  He pulled her toward him, almost roughly. ‘You’ve been strange ever since you saw them,’ he said. ‘Ever since you saw that man. There’s more to it than you’ve told me.’ He stretched out on his own mattress and drew her down beside him, watching her face. One eye was lit from the side by a last vagrant beam of sunset light, that eye tear-filled and spilling. ‘Tell me.’

  She gasped. Her teeth were gritted. He saw the muscle at the corner of her jaw, clenched tight.

  ‘Will you tell me,’ he asked. ‘Don’t you think I should know?’

  ‘I had a friend,’ she said. ‘A good friend. Her name was Mechas, Gretl Mechas. She came from Heron’s World, on contract to the Department of Exploration. Not an Explorer. She was in procurement and accounting. They housed her in the Priory in Northwest because there was extra space there. We got to know one another very well….’

  Tasmin waited, waited longer, then said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘She got word her sister was in need of something back on Heron’s World. Gretl never told me what it was. She seemed a little annoyed about it, in fact, like the kid had gotten herself into some kind of trouble. Anyhow, Gretl needed money to send home. She went down to Splash One, to the BDL credit authority. She could have done it all by com, but Gretl was like that. She liked to do things personally.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When she got back she told me she’d met Harward Justin. He’d stopped by the loan desk while she was there, and he’d been pretty persistent in asking her to have lunch with him. She told me she’d refused him though he hadn’t made it easy. You’d have to have seen Gretl in order to visualize this properly, Tasmin. She was stunning. Men did pester her, but she didn’t take it seriously because she was in love with someone back on Heron’s. She laughed about it when she told me. She said Justin looked like a Jubal toadfish, fat and greasy and with terrible little eyes….

  ‘Anyhow, when she went to make her first payment, they told her Justin had paid off the loan. She owed him, personally. She left her payment in an envelope for him, but as she was leaving, that man – that Spider Geroan – accosted her and told her Justin wanted to see her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She was very strong-willed, Gretl. Indomitable. Spider Geroan took her to Justin’s office, there in the BDL building. Justin told her how he wanted her to pay the debt, and she told him she would pay her debt on the terms she had incurred when she took it, nothing else.

  ‘When she got back she was angry. I’d never seen her so angry before. And she told me what Justin said. Justin told her he’d paid her debt, now she owed him. He told her people had to pay him what they owed him, or else. He said if she wouldn’t have him, then Geroan could have her. And he laughed when he said it.

  ‘She told me about it, shaking her head over it, furious, not able to believe the man. She reported it to the Priory office and to the Explorer King, both personally and in writing. Technically, it was a violation of the union contract. The contract doesn’t allow sexual harassment….

  ‘Two days later they found her in the alley out behind the Priory, there in Northwest. Her flesh cut in little pieces, all over, like noodles. Head, face, everywhere. Her clothing and personal things were dumped on top of the body. Except for her clothing, we c
ouldn’t have identified her. I tried to believe it was someone else, but the clothes were hers. No one could have recognized her. Whoever did it had rubbed something into the cuts to keep her from bleeding to death right away. And then dumped her there. Like a message.’

  ‘And you think it was Geroan?’

  ‘I know it was. I went to the protector that investigated her death and I screamed at him to find who was responsible. I told him about Harward Justin trying to use her, about his threatening her. The protector got me out of there, took me for a walk, and he whispered to me that if I didn’t want the same thing to happen to me, I’d keep my mouth shut. He was scared, Tasmin. Really scared. He said they knew who did it, who’d been doing it for years, but they couldn’t touch him because he had people to swear he was in Splash One when it happened. He even showed me pictures of the man. His name was Spider Geroan, they said, and he worked for Harward Justin. Then I remembered what Gretl had told me. She wouldn’t give Justin what he wanted, so he told Spider he could have her….’

  ‘She’d been raped I suppose,’ Tasmin said, sickness boiling in his stomach.

  ‘No,’ she choked. ‘Nothing so normal as that. Geroan isn’t interested in sex. He isn’t even interested in dominance, which is what most rape is anyhow. No, the protector said Geroan has something wrong with his nervous system. He can’t feel pain, so it fascinates him. Watching people in pain is the only pleasure he has….’

  Donatella shuddered into gulping sobs, and he took her in his arms, pulling his blanket over them both. There was a sound, and they tensed, listening. It came again. Far down the trail, the way they had come, a voice shouting. Had they found the mules? He shivered. Why else would they call out?

  Following that sound, he felt only fear, her fear, shared, her trembling and his, their bodies cold under the hasty covering, their senses strained for the first breath of sound that would presage the arrival of the adversary, the enemy, perhaps Geroan, who would use them for an arcane and terrible pleasure, perhaps someone else merely seeking their deaths and not particular about how these deaths were to be brought about.