Up Jim River

AN AISTEAR

Curling Dawn was not a Hadley liner, but she was going in the right direction, and so the harper and the scarred man bought passage on her as far as Harpaloon. It gave Donovan sullen pleasure to use the chit that the Kennel had given him. If he was to be forced to tramp the Periphery, he may as well do so at Kennel expense.

The Grand Star ship was a throughliner, a flyer-by. She came out the Silk Road from Jehovah at just under Newton’s-c and crossed the coopers of High Tara toward the Rimward Extension on a two-day transit. She would not stop or descend to the capital. Rather, the bumboat Cormac Dhu had been boosted up the crawl to match trajectories with her as she passed through. A high-v match in the coopers was never entirely routine, and the scarred man, still nettled at Zorba’s threats, took some pleasure in describing to the more nervous passengers with whom he shared the bumboat all those things that could go wrong.

“If the rendevoo manoover is soo dangeroos,” a scowling businessman from Alabaster said, “why doo soo many use it?” Like most people from his region, he heightened his back and central vowels, a favorite trope for comics on a score of other worlds.

“Shortens trip for most,” said another passenger; this one, an elderly woman from the Jen-jen. “Imagine if throughliners must crawl down to planet, then crawl up again! Why—longest leg of trip is Newton’s crawl! Such time-waste!” She gave the scarred man a sidelong look. “Even if some exaggerate risk.”

The bumboat latched onto the throughliner with much clanging and hissing before the airlock doors pulled open from the connecting gangways. Disembarking passengers from Curling Dawn entered through the rear doors and embarking passengers left Cormac Dhu through the front. The liner and the boat had so synchronized their gravity grids that almost no one stumbled as they passed through the shipways. But even with the stewards shepherding people along, embarkation was a confusion.

The scarred man fell back until he stood at the rear of the throng, and when he reached the threshold, he hesitated. It was a small step to cross it, but a bigger one than he had taken on leaving the Bar of Jehovah. Then, he had offered to escort Méarana only to High Tara, intending to return once the Kennel had talked her out of her foolishness. But far from discouraging her, the Kennel had given her tools by which to pursue her doomed quest. Donovan had half a mind to step back, allow the air locks to close, and catch the next ship to Jehovah.

The problem was that the other half urged him forward.

Let’s go. It’s something to do, said the Brute with what was for him irrefutable logic.

We owe her our help. What if she encounters some danger on the Roads?

“If she does,” Donovan said with acid in his voice, “we’ll hold another debate like this one—which may not prove much help to owe her. Damn it, we can’t even go through a door without a lot of bickering.”

This is our last chance to turn back. Once we board, we’re committed.

Tell me something I don’t know.

But what finally brought the scarred man aboard the throughliner was not the Brute’s boredom, nor the fear of the Inner Child, nor the idealism of the Silky Voice, nor even the Fudir’s nostalgia, but his realization that the harper, too, had hesitated, just for a moment, at the brink.

That sort of unspoken doubt deserved support.

Although the Kennel had deep pockets and the chit would have enabled them to travel in first class, Donovan had booked them into third. He and the harper found their adjoining cabins on H-deck, where the hum of the idling alfven engines gave the gray walls a mild shiver, as if the ship were a living thing trembling with anticipation. The section steward—a Terran—delivered their trunks shortly after, and the Fudir tipped him generously in Gladiola Bills of Exchange and whispered certain instructions in his ear. After that, he waited for the harper to complain.

Which she did soon enough. She strode through the connecting door and threw herself onto the day couch in Donovan’s room. “Was this the best you could do?”

“Be memsahb so accustomed to luxury? Much sorry no satin pillows, no silk sheets.”

“No taste, either. I don’t mind cheap so much as tacky.”

The room was done up in tired colors, and the bunks and bureaus might be called Spartan had the Spartans been a less festive and sprightly folk. The Fudir shrugged.

“This be best ship in Grand Star Lines, missy.”

“The best ship of a second-rate line.”

“What of it? It’s not like second-rate is the worst there is. How many lines are of the first water?” He looked around the cabin. “This isn’t so bad, actually,” he assured her. “Donovan and I, we’ve traveled in accommodations far less splendid.”

“You haven’t seen my cabin. But I wasn’t talking about the accommodations.”

“I’ll switch with you, if you like. Besides,” he added as the harper made a gesture that meant nichevo, “there’s a certain freedom in traveling third. For one thing, you meet a better class of people. And there are fewer obligations. If we’d gone first class, we’d be expected at the Captain’s Dinner, assigned to one of the deck officers’ tables.”

“Oh, the horror!”

“Yes. ‘Better to live unnoticed.’ A Terran in first class is bound to excite interest, and never of a proper kind. Half the sliders will go out of their way to snub me; the other half will go out of their way to prove how oh-so-tolerant they are. Either way, I would stand out. Throw in an ollamh of the clairseach and tongues will wag from stem to stern. That could prove a nuisance when the time comes.”

“I was complaining about her speed,” the harper said. “She’s only a niner.”

Donovan chose to misunderstand her. “She’s fast enough to outrun most pirates, and well enough armed to give the rest pause.”

“That wasn’t what I meant. It means slower going to Harpaloon. If we had pushed it, we could have caught Joan Hadley before she left. She’s not only a faster ship but slides nonstop to Harpaloon.”

“But I don’t expect pirates along the old Silk Road,” the Fudir continued unperturbed. “Not this close to High Tara. Pirates may not respect much, but the High Taran Navy is one of them. Did you read the witch’s reports to the Kennel?”

“Stop calling my mother a witch. There’ll be plenty of time for that. It’s three weeks to Harpaloon. Oh, wait. Four weeks on this slogger.”

“Such a hurry!” the scarred man said, waving his hands in the air. “Rush, rush, rush. Hurry too fast and you only reach disappointment sooner. Beside, we’re getting off at Thistlewaite.”

“Thistlewaite!”

“Ya. That’s why I picked this bucket. Joan Hadley isn’t scheduled to rendezvous with any bumboats there. That’s why I picked third class, too. If we showed up missing at the Captain’s Dinner after Thistlewaite, everyone would know where we’d gotten off. Down here… Well, no one notices the cattle.”

“But… why? Mother went to Harpaloon.”

“Yes, but before that she had gone to Thistlewaite.”

“That was to organize disaster relief after the earthquakes…”

“I read about it. It was in all the newsfeeds. She was there for two years, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, but…”

“Yes, ‘but’ she came home excited, you told me, and spent most of her leave reading and searching the Die Bold libraries.”

“She’s always reading. She has to keep up with…”

“Stay with me. The Hounds have been working from an unexamined assumption: that Bridget ban received intelligence of some sort during her home leave and it set her off on a quest. But I think she learned that something on Thistlewaite. She came home to plan and then set out on the trail.”

The harper leaned forward on the couch, her eyes suddenly bright. “Are you certain?”

“Certain? Which Spiral Arm do you live in? The Sleuth is certain, but he can read things between the lines that aren’t actually there. But look: Your mother left Dangchao in her mobile field office on the fourteenth of Tenmonth, Taran Green Time, but she arrived in Harpaloon seven metric weeks later. A Hound’s field office should have made the transit in five and a half. The Sleuth thinks she spent the extra week on Thistlewaite.”

“It needn’t have been to do with her quest. Wrap-up work on her assignment there…”

“She would have filed a Supplement to her final report, and Uncle Zorba would have told us. Remember the map he showed us? None of her reports mentioned a stopover on Thistlewaite. Why conceal the visit?”

The harper fell silent for a moment. She stroked the pillow on the sofa, then looked up. “What do you think?”

“We don’t think. We take votes.”

Méarana leapt to her feet and clapped her hands. “But it’s something new, at least. It’s something none of the others have looked into! Oh, F—Fudir! I knew it was the right thing to bring you along!” She threw her arms around the scarred man’s neck, and he could not back off in time to evade them. “We’ll find her. I know we will.”

Donovan carefully disengaged from her embrace and stepped back. “No, we won’t. If we’re lucky, we’ll find out what sent her off on her last quest. If we are luckier still, we’ll find the thing she was hunting for. If we are luckiest of all, we won’t.”

“You’re a horrible man.”

“Whatever killed your mother would make short work of us. It’s one thing to learn what it was; another to get anywhere near it.”

“If we find it,” she said confidently, “we’ll find Mother.”

The scarred man looked at her bleakly, but he said nothing and after a moment he turned away. “I want you to place an Ourobouros call to your home on Dangchao. Is there someone there you can trust? Do you have a secure code?”

“It was Mother’s code. And yes, Hang Tenbottles has been with the family for ages, and his father practically raised me. He’s segundo on the ranch—runs it, really—and he’s been like an older brother to me.”

“All right, all right. You can trust this Tenbottles. Can he access the household gods?”

“The lares or the penates?”

“The penates. I don’t think the home security system would tell us anything useful. Unless someone’s been nosing around your place…?”

“Only Gwillgi, and he came openly.”

“You wouldn’t have known it if he hadn’t. Gwillgi doesn’t show up on ordinary home security systems.”

“Mother is a Hound. There is nothing ordinary about our security system.”

Donovan grunted. “Fine. What I want you to do is encrypt a message to this Tenbottles; have him check the household database and find out what your mother was reading during her home leave.”

“But Gwillgi already—”

“Something may seem more significant after we’ve nosed around on Thistlewaite. Go to the ship’s Passenger Comm Center tomorrow and give them the message so they can put it in the squirt queue for the next system we pass through with an Ourobouros station. Khlaphalon, I think. Tell Tenbottles to send the reply in care of the Plough and Stars on Harpaloon. We’ll catch up with it there.”

“Why not send it to us on Thistlewaite?”

“Because I don’t want anything on record that puts us on Thistlewaite. The Kennel may be monitoring transmissions in and out of Dangchao.”

The harper frowned and bit her lip. “You want to keep the Kennel in the dark? But aren’t we working with the Kennel? They gave us a chit, and letters of transit…”

The scarred man crossed his arms. “Let’s find out what Bridget ban thought she had before we lead the Hounds—or anyone else—to it.”