Up Jim River

AN AISTEAR

The throughliner Srini Siddiqi, Megranome for Harpaloon, is by every measure a finer ship than Curling Dawn, but neither the harper nor the scarred man are in a position to appreciate it. Donovan does not want the trip to show on the Kennel’s accounts, so they have paid their own way and have taken quarters in steerage; and from steerage, all liners look the same.

“Just once,” says Méarana when she has stowed her trunk into the locker provided on board, “I’d like to travel in a little luxury.”

“It does seem a shame,” the Fudir admits, “to be on the arm and not squeeze the most out of it.”

The harper slams the locker closed with a little more force than required to latch it. “But a dormitory…”

“Think of it as an opportunity to make new friends. At least you don’t have to share a bed. One time on a transit from Salàmapudra to Nigglesworth, I berthed on a tramp freighter and…”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

The dormitory is a large open area. The beds line the walls in racks of three and the gravity has been dialed down to half-standard to facilitate the luckless travelers in the top bunks. The center of the common area holds dining tables, game tables, and various other means to occupy one’s up-time. The room is already crowded when they enter. Men and women and children occupy bunks and tables or run about the room laughing and causing the harper to dodge their career.

Several men spot the harper and call out to her. Children clap in anticipation. Emigrant families smile. Even those driven to the frontier by the ghosts of their pasts emerge from their introspection and wonder if this might provide the balm their hearts require. There is something about the way she carries herself and carries her harp case that promises uncommon melodies. Troubadours are always welcome. Enemies will suspend their quarrels with knives already pressed to throats to gather like brothers at their feet.

The swarm of men and women and children in the steerage dorms of Srini Siddiqi are a mixed lot from across the Spiral Arm: Sharpies with sagging jowls, squat Jugurthans with wide, out-turned noses and pasty-white skin, ebony blonds from Alabaster, second sons of the High Taran aristocracy, fringe-cloaked Jehovans fingering their prayer beads, bored youngsters spurning the stodgy proprieties of the Old Planets, ‘Cockers disinclined to mount their heads in the Halls of Remonstration. They hail from Abyalon and Megranome, from Ramage and Valency, from the Tesser Hanse and Gladiola, from New Eireann and Hawthorn Rose. More of them, indeed, than there are berths in the dorms, since, for a lesser fee, one may elect to share a berth and sleep on it in shifts.

And all of them bound for Harpaloon, “the Gateway to Lafrontera.”

The dormitory has self-organized into sections for single men, single women, and families. The harper and the scarred man claim berths in the appropriate sections and rejoin at one of the common tables. The harper has opened her case and her instrument sits upon her lap while she tunes its strings. It will not be long, Donovan supposes, before he loses her to this crowd.

It is a way to pass the time, says the Silky Voice.

«That’s not why he’s irritated,» suggests another.

Donovan scowls, waiting for the Fudir to chime in with his half-ducat’s worth. But the scrambler says nothing, which irritates Donovan further still.

“A geantraí, I think,” the harper says, brushing her nails across the strings, then tightening one or two of them with a key. “The music should reflect the hope in their hearts.”

“That is called ‘enabling,’” Donovan answers. “I think you should play them a goltraí. They may need the antidote more than the poison.”

She looks to him and then to the passengers about the steerage dorm. “Hope is a poison?”

“All those who die of disappointment have first ingested hope.”

“The hopeless are never disappointed. I will grant you that much. Unless things turn out well despite all. I suppose that would be a kind of disappointment.”

“Which they never do. Turn out well, I mean.” Donovan gestures to the dormitory and its inhabitants. “Look at them. They think the streets of Lafrontera are paved with platinum. But it isn’t that way at all. They are paved with blood and tears.”

“Really. I would have expected asphalt or magplast.”

“Mockery sits ill on such cheerful features as yours. Later generations might call them heroic; but it seldom looks that way from steerage. A burning bridge flares more brightly at a distance than in the eyes of those crossing it. Some of your audience are bummerls. Their hope is really carelessness. Each is convinced his bad luck has been an accident of his place and not an essence of his character, and if only he can go some other place, he can ‘start over.’”

“Some do.”

“No, no, no. That’s the great fallacy, don’t you see? Everything is already started. It started with the midwife’s slap, if not before. After that, there is no starting over.”

Méarana’s fingers dance over the strings, tossing off flower petals of music. “What of that family over there? A young man and woman, their three children. They seem prosperous, well-fed. From Mfecanay, by their clothing. They are no bummerls, fleeing failure on old worlds. They are movers, seeking success on new ones. The frontier is hungry and they hope to make their fortune in Lafrontera.”

“If the frontier is hungry,” the scarred man says, “it will devour them and all their hopes. And if they seek their fortune out there, it can only mean that they have not found it on Mfecanay, and so they, too, are failures, if of a more subtle sort than the bummerl. If a man has what it takes. he can ‘make his fortune’ anywhere. He needn’t put it all to hazard on a strange raw world. One in three of your movers will break and go home.”

“Then two in three will be tempered and make a home. What of those who simply yearn for new constellations to point their ways? For them, even Lafrontera may prove too tame, too settled. They’ll go out into the Wild, perhaps even to the Rim itself.”

“The more fool, they. What can a new sky offer that an old one cannot? New constellations mean strange gods, which is always a chancy thing. There are human worlds in the Wild that have not yet rediscovered starflight; and some indeed have rediscovered little more than grass huts and stone knives. Among such, a man might live as a god—or a saint. Or worse.”

Méarana’s fingers call out a jaunty, martial tune. “In they end, it does not matter whether the past drives or the future lures. Bummerl or mover or the merely restless… It is the going that matters. What sort of Spiral Arm would it be if men had never gone out from Terra herself?”

The scarred man grunts. “A less noisome one, I think.”

“Is this your way of commenting on our quest?”

“Your quest. No. I remember what you told Zorba. ‘When hope is all there is, it is enough.’ But I’d not place such hope in hope. Of all the virtues, it is the greatest liar.”

The harper laughs, but a little sadly. “I realize that I may never find her. If something has happened to her… I couldn’t… I mustn’t…” She pauses for a moment in search of her voice. “But I must learn what that something was. Do you understand that? Mother has vanished into the void, and I don’t know where or how.”

To this, the scarred man makes no answer.

Afterward, she goes off and plays cheerful music for the steerage, despite the ache in her heart; or perhaps because of it. A man has produced a fiddle, which he plays in the crook of his elbow. A woman has a tambourine; another, a guitar Somehow, they sort things out in that spontaneous human way. Young men and women form lines and dance toward and away from each other, stamping the floor on the beat, so that the dorm becomes a drum.

How, the scarred man wonders, can a woman in such sorrow play with such joy; and he wishes he knew the secret of it for himself.