Up Jim River

V. HARPALOON OR BUST

Harpaloon is a rawboned world with a raucous flux of folk from all over the Spiral Arm. She is the oldest of the settled planets edging Lafrontera, and beneath the movers and the bummerls and the adventurers and the second sons settling down or passing through lies a substratum who claim descent from the aboriginal population. These folk occasionally celebrate odd holidays and conduct strange festivals. Every three hundred and forty metric days, regardless of the season, they deck their hair with three-leaf clovers and walk en masse onto the barren Plains of the Jazz to drink green beer and throw rocks at a sandstone pillar for reasons no one can provide.

During the Great Diaspora, humans had been scattered far and wide, but few had been scattered asfar as the’ Loons. After the Reconnection, when explorers from Cuddalore and New Shangdong discovered and partitioned Harpaloon between them, they found little more than rustic villages and market towns—and the brittle remnants of ancient machines. Since then, other folks have swarmed to the half-empty world, eventually outnumbering the natives and even the old Cuddle-Dong aristocracy. This has not gone unremarked by the’ Loons, who call the newcomers “coffers” or “gulls” and nurse a resentment that at times boils over into riot. To this, the coffers are largely oblivious, since life on Harpaloon is riotous even at the best of times.

Harpaloon was not the only world that claimed the honor of “gateway to Lafrontera.” Siggy O’Hara had a fair claim, and so did Dancing Vrouw and a number of others. The frontier was a broad swath of stars and there was more than one road into it. But Harpaloon lay at the end of the fabulous Silk Road and if not all set forth from there, a substantial number did. Ships crowded her parking orbits; and out in the libration points, enormous colony vessels awaited the settlement companies that would fill them. Each of the great ships broadcast a marker for her shuttles: “Ten-Beck’s World, Home on this Beacon!” “Slufut Settlement Company! Departure immanent! Final Call!” “Stavronofsky’s World, terraforming 90% complete! Openings available! Apply now!”

Openings indeed. The Great Hall on Folkinward Station was lined with booths rented out to the various companies, each under its own colorful banner, and it was to these that the bulk of Siddiqi’s disembarking steerage swarmed. Why pass through Harpaloon Customs if you were only going somewhere else? The famous “Floating Dome” overarched lounges and restaurants, jugglers and magicians, venues for simulated, interactive, recorded, and live performances. A minstrel bowed a Keller’s viol in a reasonable rendition of a recently popular tune. Here and there, someone famous (or infamous) had gathered a tail of followers—newsers, websters, admirers—much like a comet approaching its sun.

Above their heads, but below the springline of the dome, stretched the famed Harpaloon Murals, painted fifty years before by Hendrik Pak Gbọnju. Bold, broad, bigger than life, they portrayed the great migrations of the mythic past. Thick-hewn men and resolute women moved west in ox-drawn “prairie schooners,” Cossacks trudged east through S’birski snows, Zhõgwó families creaked in great two-wheeled carts up the Gansu Corridor, Magreebees homesteaded in the decaying suburbs of Yurp. Across the banks of the Great Fish River, Four-trekkers heading north greeted Mantu cattlemen heading south. Here, too, legendary figures posed: Jacinta Rosario peered across the rusty sands of Mars; Yang huang-ti pointed dramatically to the lichen-covered plains of Dao Chetty; Chettiwan Mahadevan, hands a-hip, stared at the crumpled ruins of the first-found prehuman city on New Mumbai.

It was all very improbably epic, the harper thought while standing on line for Inbound Customs. Gbọnju’s imagination had wrestled with history and had pinned history defeated to the mat. Most heroes didn’t know at the time that they were, and seldom had occasion to strike dramatic poses. Rosario was certainly a myth, a storybook character; and the same was likely true of Yang. And while Mahadevan was known to history, his story was surely embellished beyond recognition.

The lander gate for Preeshdad Town was crowded: fellow passengers from Srini Siddiqi, private travelers, movers with time to kill before their ark departed, customs and immigration shift-workers returning home for their “down” time. The harper and the scarred man were among them, for it was from Preeshdad that Bridget ban had checked in with the Kennel.

Nearby, but a little apart, stood a hatchet-faced man and a wife with lips pulled as tight as harp strings, and two small children in nondescript clothes and terribly solemn faces. Méarana heard snippets of fierce, whispered conversation.

“I told you we’d be late. I told you.”

“They said they’d hold our berth. How’d I know they would give it away?”

“You could’ve got us here on time. What do we do now?”

“There’ll be a second voyage. They promised.”

“Like they promised to hold our berths? What’ll we live on until then? Those tickets took our last ducats. We need that money.”

“Cash the tickets in, and you can kiss TenBeck’s World good-bye. We’ll never save up…”

Perhaps they noticed the harper, for they lowered their voices still further and moved off a distance, followed by their bewildered and silent children. Donovan chuckled.

“Behold, the noble pioneers!”

“Must everything be with you a bone of contention? When I set out to find you, I had expected a better man at the end of the hunt.”

“Instead, you found only a man, more or less.”

“Rather more than less.” She tapped him on the forehead with her finger. “When do I meet these others that you carry with you?’

The scarred man backed away. “They come out when the Fudir and I let them. He and I are the consuls of our little republic.”

The harper glanced once more at the mover family. She was not so foolish as to confuse the particular with the general, and already she was limning the encounter in a goltraí, a lament for a lost world. What sadder fate than to lose your future?

Pwairt na Pree, the groundside shuttle field, lay in the Jazz plains, a few leagues east of the capital. It handled trans-global semi-ballistic shuttles as well as ground-orbit traffic, and most of the passengers who downsided with Donovan and Méarana swarmed off to their connecting gates, bound for newly-opened townships in what the locals called the Boonlands. Even so, the monorail platform outside the terminal was crowded with those eager to sample the city life of Preeshdad itself.

A warm, gritty wind tore at their clothing when they stepped out onto the platform. Cloaks billowed and hats fled the heads of those who wore them. The green banner of the planetary league snapped in the stiff breeze: a golden harp enfolded by a silver crescent moon.

That flag logo reminds me of something, said the Pedant.

What doesn’t? jeered the Sleuth.

The scarred man’s head jerked here and there, as the desires of some of him to study the flag struggled with desires of others to watch their companions on the platform.

«There could be danger here,» said Inner Child.

“Are you ill?” A woman standing beside the scarred man reached out to him to steady him, but Inner Child cried out and pulled back.

“It’s all right,” Méarana assured the doubtful woman. “It’s a muscle spasm. He gets them sometimes.” She held tight to his arm.

The Fudir calmed his disparate mind and bowed to the woman. “Thankee, missy. You much kind this-man.”

But the woman was not reassured. She, too, took a step back. “You’re a Terry,” she said and glanced half-consciously at the hand with which she had touched him. Waiting passengers, attracted by the by-play, reacted in various attitudes. One man scowled and stepped closer to the woman, fists clenched as if to defend her. Others, newly dropped from other worlds of the Periphery, pursed their lips or tsk’ed or simply turned away, but whether from distaste for the Terran or for his treatment by a local, the Fudir did not know.

“Watch ourself here,” the Fudir warned himselves. “They don’t seem well-disposed toward Terrans.”

“Considering that nowhere are Peripherals well-disposed to Terrans,” Donovan answered, “that is a considerable understatement.”

That was why Donovan preferred Jehovah. Jehovans did not like Terrans, but Jehovans did not like anyone; and as long as they did not dislike Terrans more than anyone else, Donovan counted that as warm embrace.

The train was approaching from the city, slowing with a hum of its magnets into the station platform. “It’s why we should have stayed there,” he told the others. “Like I suggested.”

The Fudir demurred. “Then who would ward our… our Méarana?”

Up until now, said the Sleuth, I don’t see that she’s needed much warding.

“Not yet. But you know where this is all heading,” said the Fudir.

Of course, said the Sleuth. I saw that back in de la Susa’s office.

Technically, it wasn’t his office.

Shaddap, Pedant.

“What if she did have to lean on us?” the Fudir said. “We’d snap. We’d break.”

“Yes,” said Donovan. “Remember the alley in Jenlùshy, when the moment came for quick and decisive action.”

If youse guys had let me take charge, like you shoulda…

“Quick and decisive, Brute. Not quick, decisive, and stupid.”

Preeshdad was the capital of Cliff na Murph, the largest of the sovereign states of Harpaloon and by default the nominal capital of the planet. She was a middling town and as ramshackle as Jenlùshy. But where Jenlùshy was often shaken down, Preeshdad was shaken up. Her buildings had the indefinable patchwork irregularity of things thrown together in haste, as if the folk of Harpaloon had been in a tearing hurry to get on with something else.

The folk, too, had that same improvisational quality. They made life up as they went along. Rioting was the municipal sport; but a man was as apt to fight someone one day as stand him a drink the next. If on Thistlewaite all plans failed, on Harpaloon they barely got started before another overtook it.

The town had been built in a bowl valley on the western edge of the Jazz, hard by a natural harbor on the eastern shore of the Encircled Sea. For most of the local year, the sea breeze tempered the climate, keeping it cool and moist and escorting the occasional storm as the price; but twice each year the winds reversed and carried the dust off the grasslands. The hot-breathed, bale wind was called the shrogo, and during the season people doffed their waterproof tweed caps and donned instead the bright checkered head scarves known as caephyas. It was a bad time of year; for the warm, gritty breeze rubbed tempers raw, and even the meekest of men would grow irritable. The seasonal body count typically rose a bit in the good years, and spiked in the bad.

The few minutes on the train platform were all the convincing Méarana needed that the shrogo was in full career. Peddlers with mobile carts did a brisk business at the midtown rail terminal, selling headgear to touristas to protect hair and neck from the dust. Méarana bought a type of caephya called a chabb. Rimmed with tassels and woven of a light cloth known as shoddy, it wimpled her golden features in an emerald frame, so that her face, peering out as if from a window, seemed small and almost childlike. Lead slugs sewn into the hem allowed her to drape it to best effect and kept the fly ends from flapping in the stiff breeze.

Donovan she thought abrasive enough that the wind might need protection from his face. But he purchased a red-and-white checkered caephya and two pairs of protective goggles, called gloyngo santas.

They had noticed that some Harpaloon terms were strikingly similar to the Gaelactic, where síoda meant a kind of silk and angioini cosanta meant literally “the goggles protective.” But caephya and chabb and other words were unknown and seemed peculiar to Harpaloon. The Pedant suggested that these terms had come from the aboriginal’ Loon tongue.

The Phundaugh Plough and Stars was a short walk from the terminal and the Fudir found that all had been arranged there to his instructions. Members of the Brotherhood, acting with that solidarity that persecution creates and bribery knits together, had even conjured the illusion of occupation. Beds were mussed, linens used, clothing left in disarray. Room service had been ordered. Surely, this was fellowship!

Or an opportunity to live high on another’s expense. Donovan brushed away the tear of sentiment in the Fudir’s eye. And a close inspection of the disarray revealed some small objects missing.

The harper regarded this with no little amusement. The Fudir’s primary occupation on Jehovah had concerned small objects going missing. Not that she hadn’t been pilfered, too; but nothing of terribly great value had walked away and, “It does make a fair compensation for their effort, doesn’t it?”

“The Brotherhood was to have covered it,” the Fudir grumbled, surveying the remnants of his luggage. “And I was to compensate the Brotherhood from the Kennel’s chit.”

“Perhaps Curling Dawn’s steward did not explain things so clearly to his groundside contacts.”

“Perhaps Curling Dawn’s steward is wearing our second-best set of wrist bangles.”

“He may be. But note: it was the second-best he took.”

A sealed envelope bearing the tail-biting logo of the Ourobouros Circuit was waiting in the room: the reply from Hang Tenbottles to the request she had squirted en route. Méarana picked it up, but Donovan plucked it from her hands and inspected the envelope closely.

“It hasn’t been opened,” the harper said.

“Or it’s been opened by an expert.” He frowned some more over the cover, then handed it back to Méarana. “What does Tenbottles say?”

The harper broke the cover and pulled out the flimsy. “585.15, 575.02!” she read. “1041.07 937.20 +407.11. 870.07 253.09.”

Donovan grunted. “Well, that’s informative.”

“There’s more,” she said, gesturing to the sheet.

Donovan took it from her.

“It’s in code.” she told him.

“Really?”

“Your humor is heavy-handed. Everyone encodes Circuit messages. It saves face-time.”

“All right. What’s the basis for the code?”

“Weren’t you once a spy or something?”

Donovan shrugged. “Why pick a lock if someone will hand you the key?”

I love this, said the Sleuth. I can sink my teeth into this one.

“If you had any teeth,” Donovan told him. “I think the Brute owns those.”

The better to bite you with, said the Brute, showing a rare flash of humor.

Let me see the message, said the Pedant. I never forget anything.

The response was a chorus: “We know.”

Méarana scanned the message into her personal brain. She knew that Donovan was holding another of his internal debates and wished she could hear what the others were saying. Hearing half of a dialogue might enable one to tease out the whole thing; but hearing only two parts of a heptalogue was another matter entirely.

Hang had listed everything that Bridget ban had sent, received, or accessed during her home leave. Books, journals, correspondence, call logs… Some were local, or to and from Die Bold, and Méarana recognized many as dealing with ranch management. There was a Circuit call placed to the College of Scholars on Kàuntusulfalúghy, and a reply from the same source, but the contents had not been entered into the penátès.

“The College of Scholars,” said Donovan. “She was probably checking the bona fides of that Debly Jean Sofwari.”

“Sofwari was on her reading list, too,” Méarana said. “Here’s a story in something called the Kauntling Journal of Accumulated Facts. ‘27th Eve: a genetic reconstruction of the Old Planets.’ What does that mean?”

The scarred man shrugged. “It means Sofwari told your mother something hard to believe and she wanted to find out if he had the chops.”

“Well, yes, I suppose; but I meant what does the title of his story mean?”

“Do I look like a scholar? OK, Pedant, you know all sorts of useless facts. What does… Well, what good are you, then? Of course. The rest of us will try to bear up under your silence. Fudir, what do you think you’re…!”

Méarana looked away in embarrassment at the argument. When she had gone on her search for the scarred man, she had found more than she had bargained for.

“Donovan doesn’t know how to wheedle,” the Fudir told her. “He doesn’t politick enough. Now we’re going to be ignorant for a while until Pedant resurfaces all because Donovan buigh doesn’t know how to kiss his own ass.”

Méarana would not look at him. “Ignorant?” she said.

“Pedant has our long-term memory, or a big chunk of it, anyway. When he sulks, we forget things.”

The harper looked at him, at the ever-mobile eyes. “You should try to get along.”

“Get along? He’s me.”

“All the more reason.”

The two of them fell silent then. A certain sort of propriety had been breached. The scarred man usually tried to keep his internal chaos from breaking surface; the harper usually refrained from mentioning it. Méarana took the decoded list and pretended to read it once more.

After a while, the Fudir said, “The Pedant doesn’t know everything. He can only know what we’ve seen or heard or read. He never forgets, is all. But our memory is holographic; so it’s not like the rest of us know nothing when he’s… in his tent. Genetics is an ancient dogma. It has something to do with Predestination. We should try to get a copy of the story. The witch went out of her way to read it, so it may mean something. What else did she read during home leave?”

Méarana cleared her throat and continued to look down at the list in her hands. “Uh, gazetteers of the Spiral Arm. Communications with hotels. Maybe reserving rooms planet-side. She read a book by Mani Latapoori called Commonwealth Days: The Rise and Fall of Old Terra. You ought to like that one, Fudir. A novel by Ngozi dan Witkin titled The Greening of Hope. I remember dan Witkin from school. We had to read ancient literature, but what we read was…”

“Abandonment,” said the Fudir. “Everyone has to read that in forming school. It’s the classic novel of the Diaspora, a memoir of her grandparents. I didn’t even know she had written other books. Anything else?”

“Rimward Ho! The History of Lafrontera. And—these seem more scholarly—Compendium of Charters of the Gladiola Terraforming Institute. Monstrous Regiment: The Constitution of Boldly Go. Here’s one we ought to find locally: Customs of the’ Loon Tribes of Cliff na Mac Rebbe.”

“Ay-yi. How long was your mother at home?”

“She’s a fast reader; and if she already knew what she was looking for, she could have search-functioned these texts and been done in a blink.” Méarana unplugged her pocket memory. The Fudir nodded at the small box.

“The key to your code is in there?”

“Sure, but you’ll never find it.” She tossed it to him and he caught it one-handed. “So tell me that this has helped us find my mother.”

“The clues are somewhere in those texts.”

“You mean somewhere in the tens of thousands of screens that she read during her home leave. Yet, surely some of this—” She waved the hardcopy. “—maybe even all of this—was leisure reading. She did relax from time to time.”

“Did she? We’re not so certain of that. I don’t believe she ever did anything without purpose. She was the most intentional person I ever knew.” The scarred man consulted the clock. “Better lie down and get some rest. We’re space-lagged. Ship-time noon was four hours earlier than Preeshdad noon. I’ll wake you when it’s time to go on the prowl.”

“To find the jeweler who sold the medallion.”

“To go through the motions of finding him. The jewelist on Thistlewaite said only that the man who pawned it came from Harpaloon.”

“You make it sound hopeless.”

The scarred man grunted. “Good. I meant to.”

Harpaloon jewelers, called jawharries, were scattered throughout the town. So Méarana and Donovan compiled a list of shops courtesy of the municipal office, the Kennel chit, and a bit of buckshish under the table; and splitting the list between them, spent several days going from one to another. Not that they expected to find the’ harry who had sold the trinket; but someone might remember that Bridget ban had come asking, and someone might recognize the style or workmanship. It was worth the shot, though Donovan rather hoped that the shot would miss and Méarana would give up her hopeless hunt before it led them to where he feared it would.

They quickly learned that Bridget ban had indeed been asking after the pendant’s provenance. A few jawharries even mistook Méarana for her mother returned, remembering only the red hair and green eyes and the catlike grace in her step, and being greatly deceived on the number of years that underlay them. But they learned, too, only what she had learned then, which was nothing.

Until, as luck would have it, luck had them. Twice.

Or three times, depending on how one defined luck.

The first time was on the fourth day, when Donovan entered a small shop on Algebra Street. This tight-fit lane had been in Preeshdad’s earliest days its central street. Addresses still pegged east and west from it, although the main business district had long since wandered off to the newer parts of town and Algebra Street now sported slapdash boarding houses and brothels, saloons and small shops. The district was called alternately “The Kasper” or “The Liberties.” Donovan thought that in the dark of night the street might appear ominous, but in the bright afternoon it was merely shabby, and teeming with aimless humanity—ragged’ Loons, soi-disant Cuddle-Dong aristos, rough-trousered settlers in from the Boonlands, a sprinkling of more brightly-garbed touristas lured from the city center—all of them seeking bargains or thrills or forbidden pleasures, and hailed from all sides by the hawkers of each of them. The Kasper was strung out and tangled in a warren of streets: Aonsharad and Dhasharad to the east; Trickawall and Trickathanny to the west; but it seemed more crowded because the streets were tight and never straight for very long.

BOO SADD MAC SORLI, the sign announced in Gaelactic, pine jewelry, pawn, and pre-owned. Above this ran a line of gracefully curling symbols that might be a decorative border. Behind the shatterproof window sat displays of all the small, dispensable possessions of men and women who had found the need to dispense with them. Donovan wondered how many, driven to pawn such property, ever rebounded enough to redeem them.

“Donovan,” said the Fudir, “let me bukh with this dukandar.”

A local, pushing by in the throng, gave him a startled look and hurried on.

The scarred man shrugged. “Have at him. I’m tired of all the chaffering. This is the fourteenth shop on our list. I don’t think she’ll ever give up.”

We could simply tell her we’d gone to these places, the Sleuth pointed out. Why waste our time just because she wastes hers?

That would not be honorable.

You are in the wrong business for honor, Silky.

“We’re not in that business anymore,” Donovan reminded himselves.

Boo Sadd, summoned by the door chimes, proved to be a’ Loon: large nose, red hair, hazel eyes, and a dusky complexion against which freckles barely showed. If the approach of a possible customer pleased him, he concealed his joy admirably well. “Shoran, you wouldn’t be off your orbit, coffer, now would you?”

The Fudir smiled and chose to use a Valencian accent. “Ain’t no mover, me. Just a tourista. Got a question bout some jewelry, an’ mebbe you kin help me widdit.” He held out a hologram of Méarana’s medallion. “Guy sold it to me on Thistlewaite, said it come from here, an’…”

The jeweler’s eyes barely flicked to the image. “Ah, no, fendy,” he said, making a fluttery wave of his hand. “As lush, flowing streams on the parched plains of the Jazz, are Thistles in my poor dook. No Harpaloon hand made this. I grieve that I cannot help you.” His face revealed the depth of his grief.

The Fudir leaned on the edge of the counter. “You got a long mem’ry, friend, for such a quick answer. This woulda been a coupla years ago. If it ain’t Harpy work, mebbe you know where it come from. Not too much to ask, innit?”

Valency had famously been ruled by a line of tyrants of notable brutality and, consequently, most people felt an urge to cooperate when a Valencian asked politely in just that tone of voice.

The jawharry took the image in his hand and studied it. “Hard to tell, o best one, from such a poor reproduction. Do I know if the colors are true? No. May I proof the hardness? I cannot. I have seen work—kluzni, they call it—from the Cliff of Anne de Louis, far across the Jazz which… But… No. This is not Louisian work.”

“But you seen stuff like it? Import ware?”

“I recall now a coffer woman half a handful of years past who asked after something much like this. I will share with you what I am after telling her. My dook does not handle coffer work. Such things are harm. But at times it comes into the hands of assdikkas and they bring it to me so as not to pollute their fingers. Allow me to check…” He whispered into a microphone, studied the result, and whispered a few more parameters. After a moment, he swiveled the viewing stage so the Fudir could see the resulting holo. “These pieces, I am thinking, are like in craftsmanship to yours.”

Above the stage floated two rings and a man’s bracelet. Each was inlaid with the same sort of pastel-colored stones, cleverly cut and fitted into impressionistic and abstract patterns.

“Pedant?” whispered the Fudir.

The jawharry misunderstood. “No, fendy. No pendants, only these rings and bracelet.”

What? said the Pedant. Oh. Yes. These pieces definitely arose from the same artistic tradition.

Donovan’s heart fell. The search, it appeared, would go on.

“Where’d dis stuff come from?” the Fudir asked.

The’ harry checked his records. “A man of the sook, who is called Boo Zed O’Culinane. He had them off a Wildman who was less than prudent of his purse.” ’Ah. We learn by our mistakes.”

“Then thanks to Boo Zed he departed Harpaloon a far wiser man.”

The Fudir laughed. “If ya can’t know the truth, ya better know yer errors. Which Wild-world did dis guy come from?”

“O best one! Who may number the grains of sand on the beach of Inch? So many are the worlds of the Wild. But few Wildmen come so far as Harpaloon, and so they are more clearly noted than other coffers…” The jawharry bowed slightly and struck his breast. “Begging your honor’s pardon. I heard that he came from a world within the Burnt-Over District. The name of it was something like Ōram or Eḥku or Enjrun, but who can keep straight such heathen names?”

The back of the scarred man’s scalp prickled. Enjrun, he did not know, but the other two sounded eerily of the old Tantamiž. Without thinking, he bowed over his folded hands, “Nandri, dukandar. You have been…”

But the jawharry’s eyes narrowed. “Am I looking like a moose to you, you farking coffer?” And he mimed spitting on the floor.

Inner Child started in fright and the Fudir said, “Dint mean no fence. Whassa moose?” He knew of two kinds of animals that were called by that name. One was a sort of giant elk on Bracka; another was a variety of rodent that had spread across several worlds in the Jen-jen Cluster.

“A Terry,” said the jawharry, and this time the spitting was not mimed.

“Is there something wrong with…,” the Fudir began, but Donovan seized control. “Hey, no fence,” he said, reasserting the Valencian accent.

“But ya used a coupla words I heard from Terrans. Die Bold Terrans call their leader ‘Fendy.’ On Jehovah, dey call a shop a dukan; and you call yours a dook.”

The ‘harry touched his breast, lips, and forehead, and then each shoulder. “Shoran, they steal everything, even our tongues. They are worse than movers, seventy times seven. The Terries abandoned us after we had risked everything for them.”

The man’s voice has risen as he spoke and now took on a pitch close to cracking. But he suddenly stopped and visibly subsided into a dull rage. “I think you had better leave. You never call a’ Loon a moose. Shoran, that’s a deadly insult. Darkness falls on Algebra Street, and I cannot answer for your safety once the light is fled. Go and, indila, you find your way whole to your Phundaugh.”

The second piece of luck befell Méarana a little later that same day at Jawharry Chinwemma. Since this stood at Côndefer Park on the prairie east of Preeshdad, she took the air bus from Shdad-Center. The tourista rush was over, but a family of movers from Gladiola was aboard and their children shrieked most admirably when the bus left the launch rail and hit free fall. A trio of’ Loons twisted their faces at this, but aside from a muttered comment about coffers and spawning, they said nothing. The two young men wore their caephyas at a rakish angle and sported goatees. Their companion wore a gauze mask across her nose and mouth and her hair was caught up in a tammershanner. It was the garb of the “Young’ Loons,” a youth movement gaining in popularity.

Below, the grasslands rolled sere and uninterrupted to the horizon. Just as the bus lost its ballistic lift, the rotors kicked in and they settled into powered flight. The children flocked to the windows and pointed and chattered as the cluster of steep hills came into view. Méarana had one quick glimpse before the bus descended toward the receiving platform, where it hooked onto the brake-rail with a minimum of jostling and squealing.

Jawharry Chinwemma proved to be a gift shop attached to the park. The harper saw immediately that it was a jawharry in name only. True, it sold jewelry, mostly of an inexpensive sort designed to advertise Côndefer Park, but that it might harbor a genuine jeweler seemed beyond chance. The sign above the entrance announced the establishment’s name and asserted, curiously, that “God owns everything beautiful.” Like most other signs on Harpaloon, it bore a row of decorative squiggles underneath.

Behind the counter a pale, flat-nosed woman smiled at the late afternoon traffic. She was thin and of middling height, a few metric years older than Méarana herself.

“Excuse me,” Méarana said. “Are you Chinwemma? The jeweler… I mean, jawharry?”

The young woman’s eyes sparkled. “You’re from the Old Planets, aren’t you? I could tell by your accent. Your Gaelactic doesn’t have the lilt of High Tara, and you are much too direct.”

“Um… I’m from Dangchao Waypoint.”

“I would have guessed Die Bold. My, you are a long way from home.” Her eyes dropped to Méarana’s fingers, noted the nails. “And are ye after leaving yer harp behind ye?”

This last line was delivered with such a pitch-perfect impression of High Taran Gaelactic that Méarana laughed. “I’m afraid so. Is there a song out there on the plains?”

A half-smile. “There may be, but you’d best not sing it. Not until you’ve put parsex between yourself and Algebra Street.”

“Umm, parsex?”

“A local term meaning ‘a long distance.’ This is sacred ground to the’ Loons. The spot where their ancestors touched down. They claim the ‘Iron Cones’ are the landers they came down in. And they do look like landers of a sort, though precious large ones if they are. They’d be the only boats from Diaspora Days to have lasted. Historians have always been twitchy to study them, but the’ Loons will not allow it. They’d not like you mocking them, either. No, my name’s Enwelumokwu Tottenheim. Call me Enwii.”

Méarana was grateful for the contraction as well as for the pause. “I’d not mock a sacred spot. Do you expect Chinwemma back today?”

“Oh, no, no, no, Chinwemma is the name of the shop. It was my mother’s name. She told me it means ‘God owns all things beautiful’ in some ancient language. And I thought it would make a marvelous name for a jewelry shop.”

Méarana heard nothing from her earwig and was forced to agree. There were languages so long forgotten that the translators knew not even their names. Scraps of family traditions were all that remained—personal names, place names, a few phrases embedded in the tongues of others. “And what of Enwel… Enwela… Your name. Does it mean something, too?”

“I have something to say.”

Méarana waited, and then she realized that Enwii had answered her question, and she laughed again. “Don’t we all. Now if we could only get someone to listen…”

“Mehwíí. Is there something… Excuse me. Thank you, sir. That will be five punts, four dinners… Gladiola Bills? Of course, we take them.” Enwii checked the rate of exchange and made change for the man. She ran the little statuette through the packager, and handed it back to him. “Come again some day.”

When he was gone, Enwii laughed. “A set of three featureless steel cones. But it’s a replica of the Famous Iron Cones of Harpaloon. It says so on the base. The Cone of Momad, the Cone of Fìnmakuhl, and the Cone of Homer ben. Sells for just under five-and-a-half punts. I’ll leave you to guess how much it costs Wimbley and Chatterji to make them.”

“You’re not trying very hard to sell me anything.”

“Well, you didn’t come here to buy anything, now did you?”

Méarana pulled the medallion from under her blouse. “Do ye recognize this? I mean the sort of work, not this particular piece.”

Enwii took it and put it under the magnifying light. “Hmm. No, I can’t say I do… Of course, I’m not a real jawharry; but I suppose you know that by now. Sadd!” She called to a young man standing by. “The sun is coming through the windows. Be a good boy and turn the shades?” As the lad shuffled off, Enwii whispered, “His father’s a small-time’ harry in the Algebra Street Kasper. He prenticed him out here to give him a taste of the business—and maybe to keep an eye on the holy ground. I’ve lived on Harpaloon most my life, but to him I’m just a mover. My mother was Jugurthan and my father was a’ Cocker—if you can imagine so unlikely a couple!—so what does that make me? Sadd’s a conscientious lad, but he’s a’ Loon and you have to keep on him all the time or he’ll… Oho! What’s this! There’s writing on the back side. Micro-relief Sadd! Wait a minute before you roll down the shades. The light catches it… See here, ah…” Enwii straightened and blinked. “What is your name?”

“Lucy. Lucy Thompson.”

“Funny name. No offense. Die Bold, right. What do they say there? ‘Die Bold, Live Bolder!’ There, do you see the lettering? Let me put it on the screen. The light has to catch it at just the right angle. There.”

The back side of the medallion, which had hitherto seemed smooth and featureless gold, now sported the shadows of lettering.

“What does it say?” asked Méarana.

“I’ve no idea. I’ve never seen that script before.”

“Can you capture an image of it? My partner knows some of the old languages.”

Enwii touched the rim of the magnifier and a sheet slid out of the printer. “Thompson,” she said, this time with a slight frown. “Rings a bell.”

“Rings a…? I’m sorry. I don’t know the idiom.”

“I mean, I’ve heard the name before…” The shopkeeper cocked her head. “About five years ago.”

Méarana’s heart leapt. “Did she have red hair, too?”

“Don’t know. Never laid eyes on her.”

“Never laid…?”

“Never saw her. What was it, now… Excuse me. Oh, here they come. The tour must be over. Let me just…” She whispered into her throat mike, called something onto the touch board, and brushed it with her hand. “But no. It was a package left for a Franane Thompson. Five years ago. But you say your name is Lucy? I wonder if we still have it. Be right with you, mistress; I’m helping another customer right now.”

“Five years? But Mother was on Thistlewaite then. She didn’t reach Harpaloon until… Oh, local years! That would be more like two years, metric time, right? That fits. You can give it to me. I’m on my way to meet her.”

“Francine Thompson was your mother? I suppose you can prove that. Maybe I threw the package out long ago. Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

Wait here? As if she were not welded to this very spot! Oh, Donovan! We will find her! I know we will. Méarana dug in her pouch, looking for identification. What if Enwii refused to hand it over? What if she had discarded it already?

The shopkeeper returned from the back room with a small parcel in her hand. It was wrapped in plain brown paper, the cheapest sort and was about a palm in length and width. A printed label affixed to it read:

FRANCINE THOMPSON. HOLD UNTIL CALLED FOR.

“I recalled the name only because it was so odd,” Enwii said, “May I see your identification? I suppose if I’ve held it so long, I really should make sure it goes to the right person.”

Méarana handed her a photograph. “Will this do? It’s from the Dangchao City Elucidator. That’s me on the left after a concert; and that’s Mother. Francine.”

“I told you I never saw the woman; so this…” She stumbled to a halt. The holograph had been taken at a formal dinner at the Comchal Odeon on Dangchao Waypoint following one of Méarana’s concerts. Bridget ban stood beside her daughter, wearing the beribboned mess jacket and slacks that the Hounds of the Service called “dress greens.”

Enwii looked up from the holograph a bit more pale than when she had looked down. Méarana displayed the chit that Zorba had given her, holding it so that none other could see what was in her hand. It glowed a muted gold, which such sigils could do only in the hand of their rightful bearer.

“Take it,” said Enwii, shoving the package across the counter. “I don’t want it here.”

“You’re doing the right thing.”

“It doesn’t matter. Hound’s business? That’s a magnet for trouble. I don’t want to be involved.”

“I’ll tell her you kept it faithfully for her.”

“Tell her nothing. Here.” She took a set of steel cones and sent them through the wrapper. “My gift to you. Just get that… package out of here. The air bus leaves in…” A glance at the wall clock. “In ten metric minutes.”

Méarana thanked her again and turned to go. Enwii did not tell her to come back some time.

Ten metric minutes was a little under seven grossbeats in the dodeka time used in the Old Planets, or a little less than a “quarter hour” in Donovan’s Terran time. That gave her time to stride over to the viewing platform, and a quick blick at the famous Iron Cones.

The sunset threw long, ruddy shadows across the prairie, casting the Cones into high relief. The lowest reaches were overgrown with grass and shrubbery, but the higher parts were clear so that the broken and corroded metallocene of the half-buried structures was revealed. They were gargantuan, towering as tall as the hills behind them. Enwii had been right. If those had once been landers, they were the largest landers she had ever heard of. Most of the worlds of the Periphery had stories about their First Ships, but she’d never heard them described as so enormous.

Landers or not, the Cones were undoubtedly the largest artifacts to have survived from ancient times; but they were more likely apartment buildings, or factories, or even the tombs of the first rulers. An ancient land on Old Earth, called Meesar, had buried its kings under great pyramids of stone. Likely, that is how each cone had gotten its name. Momad and Finmakuhl and Homer ben might be the names of ancient, now-forgotten kings. A line of fences surrounded the cones and a sign in Gaelactic warned touristas against closer approach. She supposed that the interior ruin and decay made entry hazardous. The ancients had built for the ages, but the ages had passed and only wreckage remained.

“Seen enough, gull?”

Méarana started at the sudden voice at her elbow. It was one of the’ Loons from the bus: a pleasant-faced young man with the swarthy complexion and blue eyes common to his breed. The hair was so darkly red as to be almost chocolate-brown. His manner of asking the question implied that she had certainly seen enough.

Méarana pulled her head back. “Is it any of your business?”

The man shrugged. “It could be.” Casually, he pulled a spring-knife from his pocket and used it to pare his nails. Méarana stared at the blade.

“I could help you with that,” she said, and the’ Loon looked up with a puzzled squint.

“Help? How?”

Méarana shrugged and the quillion dagger she carried up her sleeve dropped into her hand. She held it horizontally in underfist position, a little to the side so that she could use it in a backhand slash or an overhand stab as opportunity presented itself. The blade was lively in her grip, almost alive. “I’ve manicured a few fingers here and there,” she said.

The’ Loon studied the quillion and his own spring-knife, shrugged, and made the blade disappear into his handle. “Take your farkin picture, then, brasser. May the cat eat you and the shayten eat the cat.” He stepped away with ill grace.

“Thank you,” she said sweetly, and tucked the quillion back into its cache. Raising her imager, she hoped her hand would not shake too much. Half the advantage was projecting a mien of confidence. She wondered if she could have followed through on her implied threat. It was one thing to practice on dummies in Mother’s gymnasium; another thing entirely to face a living man.

The sun was low, illuminating the west side of the Cones. One of the holes in the side of the largest cone—the one they called Momad—received the light directly, revealing a tangled mess of broken decking. Supposedly, there was a chamber deep inside called the gáván gofthayin, where the ruler was buried. A bird flew toward the hole, probably to a nest inside, and impulsively Méarana captured that image.

The backdrop was impressive, too. The irregular cluster of hills behind the Cones was also deeply shadowed by the setting sun, and in the dim light they looked almost as if they, too, were cones arrayed in serried ranks.

That was plain silly. An entire mountain range of these things?

Behind her, Méarana heard the warning hoot from the air bus platform and the hum as the magnets on the rail kicked in to receive the incoming bus. So she stuffed package and comm in the pockets of her jacket, pulled her chabb tight against the shrogo wind and hurried to the departure ramp. Glancing back, she saw the’ Loon genuflect on one knee toward the Cones and touch his breast, lips, forehead, and shoulders with the fingers of his right hand.

Despite his knife and his menace and his banty-cock threat, her heart went out to him. Did not everyone deserve something sacred?

She had agreed to meet Donovan at the Café Gwiyom, and there Méarana discovered the scarred man already worrying two fingers of uiscebaugh. He was not drunk, but he was immersed in that morose frame of mind that soured his every word. Drunks at least were sometimes cheerful. Méarana hesitated at the threshold, for she had not seen him in such a state since leaving Jehovah.

She considered the possibility of going on without him. If she left him here, he would barely notice. He would sink into the Terran demimonde and into the prison of his past. But she had invested too much effort in the finding of him and could not bring herself to forgo the return on that investment. And if the Fudir had the prison of his past, did she not have the prison of her future? Growing up, she had learned the art of patience.

She had forgotten that the scarred man was a man of parts, and one part, keeping vigil through his right eye, saw her standing irresolute in the entry, and his arm waved her inside. So she gathered herself, her thoughts, and her excitement and hurried to the table.

It was a bright and open café, unlike the Bar on Jehovah: spacious where the Bar was dense, well-lit where the Bar was dark, its clientele careless where the Bar’s were more carefree. And yet the scarred man had contrived, like a tea ball steeping in hot water, to lend the facility some of the hue of his former estate.

As always, the table he had chosen nestled near the rear wall of the café with himself facing the room. Never sit with you back to the room, he had told her once. You have to see them coming. Fine advice, she had thought, from one already occupying the recommended seat. And to “see them coming” didn’t you have to lift your gaze from the fascination of the whiskey?

She took the siege perilous opposite him, with her back defiantly to the room, and placed the package on the table. The scarred man did not lift his head, but she thought those restless eyes of his sought it out and found the name to which it had been addressed, for the grip of his hand on the tumbler tightened and his knuckles grew white.

“It’s been waiting for her at Côndefer Park for two years metric,” she told him. “It was all I could do on the air bus to keep from ripping it open; but… You know what it means? Whoever left the package would have notified her through the Circuit and… If we simply wait at the Park, eventually she will come to pick it up, or send a message to forward it…”

“We’d wait as long as the Cones, and the birds of the air would make their nests in our beards. And,” this he said more forcefully, “if she hasn’t come for it in two years, you will, sooner or later, have to face what that really means.”

“It could be that she changed her itinerary and the message went to the wrong world; or it reached her hotel after she had left and the hotel didn’t know where to forward it. Or she went to a world outside the Circuit. Or…”

The scarred man looked up from the table. “Or she’s dead! Whatever she had been looking for, she found it. Or it found her.”

Méarana stuck her chin out. “Or the package meant less to her than it did to its sender.”

“You think she left it behind on purpose?”

The harper hesitated, then looked away. “She leaves a great many things behind.”

They fell silent, each with their own thoughts, and one with a multitude of them. “No one I spoke with knew anything about the medallion,” she said finally. “Of course, this is a town with a high turnover, save for the’ Loons and the Terrans, and jawharries have come and gone since she passed through.”

“Moosers,” said the scarred man, staring into his whiskey. “They call us moosers here.”

“I thought it was ‘coffers.’”

“Everyone is a coffer—or a gull, they use the two terms interchangeably—but they have a special term just for Terrans. Because their holy books say we once abandoned them. A mooser is ‘one who submits.’ Submits to whom, and how that constitutes abandonment, no one will say.”

“Their holy books…”

“…are forbidden to others to read. The Birakid Shee’us Nakopthayiní and the Asejáhn Robábinah.”

“The first one sounds almost like Gaelactic. The ‘specklings down of the headmen.’”

“That’s what most headmen do. Speckle down on the rest of us.”

“The burial chamber of the king, out in the Cones, is called the gáván gofthayin. Sounds like it might be related.”

“‘Loonie headmen. Kopthayini. Gofthayin. Capitàn. Who cares? Shaddap, Pedant.” The Fudir gripped his head in both hands. “All these years, he’s silent. Now he won’t be quiet. Jabber, jabber, jabber. Yes, you!”

If Méarana understood the linguistic shifts that had taken place, then gáván must have once been kábán, meaning a “hut.” So, the burial chamber of the king was the “hut of the headman.” But when she mentioned this pleasant deduction to the Fudir, he shook his head.

“Please, missy. This ples nogut by Terries. Very budmash. We go from here jildy.” Then, dropping the patois, he added, “But I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on a copy of their sacred books. Find out what drives these’ Loons crazy against my people.”

“And yet they produce decent harpers,” said the harper. “The’ Loons do. And they’ve learned the Auld Stuff. The aislings and the airs. I’ve heard them when I’ve gone by’ Loontown. No geantraí, though. I’ve heard no geantraí.” She glanced at the placard above the servers bar—the harp and crescent moon—and wondered what it meant. “Have you ever seen the Cones?” she asked. “There was something in their appearance against the western sky, something ancient and forlorn.”

“They were the ships of exile. Did you expect joy?”

“Donovan, I think… Look.” She flipped open her comm into a holostage and showed him the image she had captured in the late afternoon sun. “Look at the Cones. Awesome enough to think they were tombs. But if they really were landers… Look at the hills. They have that same conical shape. Maybe…”

Donovan tore his gaze from the image. “What?”

“Maybe an entire fleet once set down there. And still rests there. I think the shrogo covered them in soil, and chance has disrobed only the southernmost three. There may be hundreds more of them buried out there.”

But Donovan had no eye for the hills. He brushed a tear and took the imager from her. The Cones floated above the table, as if lifting off. “Ah, will you look at that, then.”

“What? The bird?”

“No, on the bulkhead above the bird’s nest.” He upped the zoom. “Do you see it? That is the Great Burst of the old Commonwealth of Suns. Tsol in the center and the Seven Colonies around it. Of course there were more than seven before the end. There may have been seven hundred. Ah, those were storybook times, indeed, when even their wreckage is magnificent.”

“Magnificent? It’s all burnt and rotted and corroded, but… If the’ Loonies’ ancestors came in those ships, then they are Terrans, too.”

“We all are. But what does ancestry matter if you don’t remember—and persecute those who do?” Donovan’s eyes closed and his lips moved silently. “Hundreds, you think? Well, you can’t be the first to notice the resemblance, but no one is ever going to dig there until the movers and the moosers cut the throat of the last’ Loon. Sometimes, I think ‘Saken had the right idea.”

Méarana expressed surprise. “The ‘Forsaken’ dismantled their landers in the early days and used the material to build their settlements. They paved over First Field two hundred years ago and redeveloped it. Sentiment is not their forté. I thought you said the remembering mattered.”

A certain ferociousness passed across the Fudir’s face. “I’d rather see the past paved over than birds nest in it.”

The harper refrained from extending the sympathetic hand that she knew would be rebuffed. “Sometimes,” she said, “it’s the ancestors who neglect the descendants.”

The Fudir looked at her. “Do they.”

“And what did you find, Donovan, out among the jawharries?”

The scarred man stared at his whiskey. After a time, he heard the silence and his head rose. “Donovan, he no got nothing.”

Méarana’s sigh was long and weary. “So the medallion is a dead end. We must find Mother’s trail some other way. Perhaps the package…”

The Fudir parted his lips as if to speak; but a voice called out, bluff and hearty: “Is this a private party or can anyone join?”

Méarana made the package disappear and the scarred man turned to snarl at the newcomer, but paused in shock and instead cried out, “Hugh!” And it seemed as if the wind had blown away the clouds of ten thousand years and the bright sun of delight shone through his face unfiltered.

It was only for a moment before the face closed in again; and though the smile remained, it was a sorry thing to that which it had come before. Yet the harper was glad to have seen it, if only just this once.

The man pumping hands with the Fudir was solidly built. He had a square jaw and dusty-red hair. His left cheek bore a scar now only faintly visible. “You must be Little Hugh O’Carroll,” she said, extending her hand.

“I must be,” said the Ghost of Ardow, bowing low and kissing the back of her hand, “for no one else wants the fookin job.” He pulled out a seat on the left side of the table. This was the third time luck had had them, depending on how one counted luck. “An’ how do ye fare, Fudir? Still keeping ahead of the law?”

“I’ve retired,” said Donovan. “The law ran out of breath from the chasing of me.”

“Ah, it’s a sad thing, not to be wanted, even by the likes of the Jehovah proctors.”

“Donovan has told me so much about you,” the harper said.

Hugh grinned infectiously. “Nothing too bad, I hope.” He pointed a finger at her. “An’ you, if I had to guess, I’d say you are Little Lucy.”

The harper covered her face. “Oh, no! No one’s called me that for ages.”

“Sure, not too many ages! Fudir,” he said turning, “how can you drink that fuel oil? Let me buy you a porter.” He twisted in his seat and signaled to the waitress with his fingers. “Fudir and I,” he told Méarana, “used to ‘pal’ around in the old days. Did I say that right? ‘Pal?’ He must have told you about it? The last time I saw him, he cold-conked me and left me on the front stoop of a tenement in a Chel’veckistad slum. I haven’t paid him back for that one yet.”

“No charge,” muttered the Fudir.

Hugh laughed. “You haven’t changed.”

A number of emotions chased themselves across Donovan’s features. After a handful of beats and behind a faint smile, he said, “You’ve aged well. Run any guerillas lately?”

“Two. No, three.” Hugh laughed at their reaction and, reaching inside his tunic, pulled out a badge. “All in a good cause,” he said. “I’m a Hound’s Pup now, and there are two tyrants and a pirate king who won’t be breaking the Ardry’s Peace now.”

Donovan took the badge from him and the golden glow faded as it passed from Hugh’s hands. He handed it to Méarana. “I left you in bad company. You’ve been corrupted.”

“Oh,’ t isn’t so bad as all that. I was a little older starting than the Kennel liked; but my Oriel training in planetary management gave me a leg up on the admin skills, and the civil war on New Eireann gave me a leg up on, well, the operational skills. Beside which, I was motivated.”

“How?”

“They promised me my first assignment would be to hunt you down.”

The Fudir grunted. “If you find me, let me know.”

At the jest, Méarana did lay a hand on his shoulder, but only briefly. “But you didn’t,” she said, passing the badge along. “You went on an adventure with my mother.”

Hugh nodded and fell silent, fingering the scar on his cheek. “Aye, so I did. Into the Rift… By then, the betrayal no longer hurt as much. No, don’t tell me it was all for the best, old friend. From what I hear, it was. But that doesn’t really matter, now does it? Sometimes… I think about those days. Amir Naith’s Gully, sliding with January and his crew—whatever happened to them, I wonder—or the Restoration of New Eireann, or…’ On to the Hadramoo!”’ He pumped his fist. “Remember that?” He sighed. “Ah, but it can never be that way again, can it?” And there was something in his eyes that was sad and distant.

“I know,” the Fudir said quietly. After a time, with something of his old spirit, he added, “And as long as you’re not hunting for me, I wish you good luck. What’s your office name? Not Little Hugh. You don’t work for Clan na Oriel any more, so you can’t use one of their names.”

“I’ll still be Hugh where you and I are concerned. But for Kennel work, I’m ‘Rinty’”

“Rinty. Who’s your doggy?”

The waitress came by and set four mugs on the table. Hugh paid her. “Greystroke,” he said.

“Greystroke!” The Fudir laughed and slapped the table. “There never was a man as good as he was at blending in. Where is he now?”

“Right here,” said Greystroke, who sat at the table’s fourth side. He handed the badge back to Hugh, picked up one of the mugs, and smiled at Donovan.

The scarred man shook his head. “I wish I knew how you did that.” He took a drink of his own. “Did I not tell you, harper? He is so ordinary that no one notices him.”

“Only when he wants it so,” said Hugh. “Otherwise, he can be as obtrusive as… Well, as you.”

“You make a good pair,” admitted the Fudir. “The Ghost of Ardow was hard to find, too.”

“It comes in handy,” admitted Hugh.

“Speaking of which,” said Greystroke, “Rinty and I have just finished a case on Khlabash and being in the neighborhood, thought we’d stop here and sift for information on Bridget ban.” He looked from Donovan to Méarana and back, and smiled. “Imagine finding you two here! If I had to guess, you must be doing the same.’

Evening had come on and they ordered dinner from the café. The waitresses brought special pillows for them to sit on and plates of beaten copper and small cups of turgid coffee. They ordered McLoob—boiled chicken and fried vegetables all cooked together with rice. It was sometimes called the “planetary dish” of Harpaloon, though it was popular only in the Cliff na Murph and neighboring countries.

The craic ran high. Inevitably, there were reminisces of the Dancer affair, and the Fudir had the opportunity to set straight what had happened in the endgame and his close brush with Ravn Olafsdottr. “Still on the loose, I hear,” said Greystroke. “Hope she’s not still hunting for you. There are signs that many of their agents have gone back. Some sort of trouble in the Confederation.” The Hound and Hugh recounted some cases they had worked on, “as much as we can tell you.” And Méarana talked of her music and promised to play for them the next day. When the Fudir told them, with almost proprietary pride, of her song cycle around the Dancer, Hugh said lightly, “Be sure to play the part where the Fudir knocked me cold.”

They spoke, too, of Méarana’s mother, praising her skills. But the Silky Voice saw in the cast of the harper’s face the thought that one only eulogizes the departed.

“She was a woman easy to love,” said Greystroke, “but at the same time, difficult.”

“Aye,” said Little Hugh. “Easy for her to be loved, less easy for her to love.”

“She used her affections as a weapon,” Greystroke said. He lifted his coffee toward his lips, but it never arrived, and after a while he returned the cup to its saucer. “It blunts them,” he finished, “to use them so. She grew coarse, numb. She could not feel the caress of others.”

The third person. The past tense.

“Translation,” the Fudir said. “You wanted her to love you, and she would not.”

“Or she could not,” the Hound countered.

“All three of us wanted that,” said Hugh. “Didn’t we? We wanted her to love us; but she only wanted us to love her. I didn’t mind that. I wasn’t looking to be loved. Not then.”

“No,” said the Fudir. “She wanted control, not love. A bond becomes a leash when it fastens on only one end.”

“Ah, bile yer haids,” said Méarana with some heat. “Ye’re haverin’ because ye got the fling from her. What else could she have done—as a Hound? To love someone, ye maun gi’e yourself awa’. And she could nae afford that. The tightest leash? She kept that on herself. At home, wi’ me,’ twas different.” At that, she turned away a little from the table and fell into silence.

The Fudir exchanged glances with the others. “The strange thing,” he said finally in the quiet that had followed Méarana’s outburst, “is what I remember most clearly about her.”

“And what’s that?” said Greystroke.

“You would think it would be the… the weapons she used on me,” the Fudir said. “But what remains with me most clearly is the flair with which she did everything. The audacity. She was not always happy; but she was always full of cheer. With her, you always felt that things were possible.” Méarana turned and half looked at him over her shoulder. Her left eye, the one he could see, glimmered and a tear trickled down her cheek.

“Ah, it was different with me,” said Hugh. “It was more like exercise. She laid a trap for my heart, but I saw the trap and stepped into it willingly. So you might say we trapped each other.”

“Then perhaps,” said Greystroke, “she did love each of us, in a way, and if only a little.”

The Fudir pursed his lips. “With Hugh, she may have enjoyed the sheer recreation. With me, she may have liked battling wits. But only the gods know what she saw in you, Greystroke. No offense, but she had flair and she had drama; and among your many fine qualities those are not to be numbered.”

The Hound smiled. “Haven’t you heard? Opposites attract.”

The jibe irritated the Fudir almost as much as the chuckles he heard from the other voices in his head. “I, at least, was not snared,” he told the others. “In the end, I walked out on her.”

“She wasn’t the only one you walked out on,” said Hugh. “But, tell me: did you walk, or did you run?”

The Fudir flushed; and he shifted, suddenly uncomfortable, on his pillow.

“She was quite angry with you afterward,” the Pup added, “and for a long time.”

“And what greater anger,” the Fudir said with a smile toward Grey-stroke, “than that of love spurned? She wasn’t used to rejection.”

Hugh grinned. “Greystroke was madder than any of us. Does that mean he loved you even more?”

The question caught the Fudir short and he saw in a momentary slip that it caught Greystroke, too. Then he blew the Hound a kiss and said, “Gray One! I didn’t know you cared.” They laughed more heartily than the joke had warranted, and Méarana rejoined the banter dry-eyed once more.

Dessert had come by then and, when they were enjoying the mango sherbets and the McMoul cookies, Greystroke said, “So, how goes the search? Zorba told us over the Circuit that we should cooperate if we happened to cross paths. Retired agents have no authority to issue orders, but you know how that goes…” He wagged his hand ulta-pulta. “Though the Friendly Ones alone know how you hope to succeed where we have failed.”

The harper closed her eyes briefly. “I thought, being her daughter, I would notice something that you and your colleagues overlooked. No offense.”

Greystroke pursed his lips. “None taken. What have you found?”

“Very little,” Donovan said before the harper could speak. “They told me in the Corner that she met with some Terran and’ Loon leaders. Oh. And she was traveling as Francine Thompson—but that, you already knew.”

Greystroke sighed. “There is so much else to learn,” he ruminated. “What of her taste in jewelry, for example?”

Inner Child twitched and the scarred man’s hand knocked over his coffee cup. Everyone pushed back from the table and the waiters swooped in to clean things up.

The scarred man apologized to everyone for the spill. He found Little Hugh staring at him with grave concern. “Are you all right, Fudir?”

“Me-fella thik hai. You no worry, sahb.” If Greystroke noticed that the jewelry topic had been skipped, he was not so boorish as to point it out.

In the lift to their suite on the fifth floor, Méarana said, “I liked what you said about her.”

The Fudir looked wary. “What I said? What was that?” “You said, ‘She was not always happy; but she was always full of cheer.’ And that, old man, is the essence of hope.”

When they had reached their suite, the scarred man intimated to the harper by portents and signs that she should remain silent and change her clothing.

Méarana started to ask why, but he mimed silence again, and so, puzzled, she did as he wanted. While she changed, he chattered from the other room about past adventures with Hugh and Greystroke on Jehovah and New Eireann, and how pleased he had been to run into them like that. “Of all the cafés in all the worlds of the Spiral Arm,” he said, “they walk into ours.” Then he laughed, as if at some secret joke.

When she rejoined him in the common room he was dressed up in a shawkéad fáwsuc, what on Dangchao Waypoint was called a “bush jacket.” Into one of its capacious pockets he slipped the package she had gotten at Chinwemma. “It must have been nice,” she said as she watched him, “to see your old friends again.”

“It was enlightening,” he said. “That’s always nice.” He produced an audio player and set it on the table. “Did I ever tell you about my experience as an instrument tech on January’s ship? Let me explain about astrogation.” With that he activated the player, and Méarana heard a recording of a conversation they had had weeks before on Dragomir Pennymac. It picked up seamlessly from Donovan’s question and while it chattered on about roads and the currents of space and holes in space, he led her quietly to the door.

Their caephyas hung on hooks by the door, but he waved her off. The door slid open soundlessly and they stepped into the hall. Méarana started to ask him what he was doing but Donovan covered her mouth briefly with his hand. His lips moved. No talking yet.

He took her to the far end of the hall and down the stairs to a side exit, where they stepped out into the bitter nighttime wind. It tore at her hair and filled her nose with grit. She coughed and brushed at her hair. “I’ll be a week washing this clean! Why did you make me leave my chabb behind?”

He leaned close to her ear. “Do you know what aimshifars are?”

“Microscopic jeepyeses. Shippers put them in packages to track their locations by satellite… Oh.”

“Yes. ‘Oh.’ Of all the cafés in all the Spiral Arm? I don’t believe in coincidences. ‘Imagine finding you two here!’ Come on. Not the hotel shops.”

They crossed the darkened parking lot to a haberdashery on the other side of Comfort Street. Inside, they found a variety of headgear and bought themselves new hoods and dust goggles. “Greystroke is what we Terrans call a ‘prick,’” Donovan explained. “But he isn’t a stupid prick. That whole encounter in the café was carefully choreographed. He wanted to find out what we knew about your mother. If he had half a brain—and if he doesn’t, Little Hugh has the other half—he would have sprinkled some aimshifars onto our clothing sometime during that amiable dinner we had.”

The dukandar returned with the caephyas, and Méarana noted that they were styled very differently from the ones they had worn earlier. “Lost yours, hey?” the woman said. She had a Megranomic accent—a mover or the daughter of movers. “That happens a lot if’n yuh don’t tie’ em down proper. Wind shifts and—hey!—off’n she goes liken a kite. That’ll be fifteen punts, eight dinners.

As they left the shop, Donovan said, “I feel like a walk in the park.”

“At night? What’s there to see at night?”

The scarred man cackled. “You’d be surprised. At least—I hope you’d be. But me, night is my natural habitat.”

They passed through a darkened neighborhood, where the only sound was the brush-like hiss of sand against the stones and, once, angry but unintelligible voices from behind one of the shaded windows. The Fudir paused and studied their backtrail. “Greystroke’s talent is blending in,” he said. “For that, he needs other people around. Open areas can defeat him.”

“Then, we’re…”

“Hugh’s talent, on the other hand, is concealment. Give him a shadow, and he’s in it.”

“But… If they bugged our suite, they’ll think we’re still in it, talking about astrogation.”

“We hope so. But we’d be a fool to depend on it.”

They emerged onto Beachfront Highway. Normally busy, traffic had faded at this time of night into a few solitary autos and some trucks coming in from the townships with food for tomorrow’s markets. There was no grid on such a raw frontier world, so the vehicles were all manually piloted.

Why do they call them ‘autos,’ the Pedant wondered, if they are manually controlled?

Wardalbahr Park stretched along the coast of the Encircled Sea. It encompassed a long beach called Inch Strand, several groves of trees, and a wildlife sanctuary on a rocky hook of land farther to the south. They crossed the pedestrian walkway over the highway and walked to the beach, where tired waves lapped against the land.

Harpaloon had a moon, but it was on the smallish side; so while the Encircled Sea had tides and breakers, they were modest and unassuming. Méarana watched them roll in for a while. It was rare to find terrestrial worlds with giant moons. Terra itself was said to have a companion more than a quarter of her own size, the result of a cosmic freak accident, and it was this freak gravitational ball mill that had churned its oceans into tidal estuaries and provided self-organizing organic matter with an escalator onto the land. Harpaloon had been less fortunate. Some primordial collision had glanced across its face, creating the great divot of the Encircled Sea and tossing the clot of land aloft to become Gummar-Gyalack. A large moon, but not quite large enough.

Only a little bigger, some Harpalooners had claimed, and “Old G-G” might have stirred the seas to life here as the Great Moon of Terra had done. Only a little bigger… There was a harp tune there, a goltraí perhaps. A lament for life that never was. But that was a lament so well-worn that tears were no longer in it. No one assumed that a planet would hold anything more than pseudo-living matter—archaea, or bacteria, or protists—as likely to exchange genes laterally as vertically. Dough, but never kneaded, the great Alabaster poet, Shishaq sunna Pyoder, had once written.

“Do you really think Greystroke is listening?” she asked him. “Or is that only your paranoia? Inner Child, you called him.”

Donovan stood by her side facing seaward. His glance was a question.

She pointed at the sea and its waves. “I understand. You brought us here so the surf could mask our whispers—in case he has microphones aimed at us, right?”

Donovan shrugged. “It’s what I would do. He almost surely installed listeners in our hotel room. He may have followed us around—he knew we were canvassing jewelers, but he doesn’t know why. By tomorrow, he will. I just wish I knew how long we’ve been under his surveillance. Damn him.”

“You don’t think he’s standing right behind us, do you?”

Donovan started and turned. (She thought that was Inner Child again.) He scowled at her. “Hey, you no tease old Terry, right? Whoever bukkin, face ocean. Whoever harin watch beach. Here…” He pulled the package out of his pocket. “You open this.”

She popped open the flaps and found beneath the wrappings a gift box from the Chinwemma jewelry store. Inside the box was a pocket brain of the standard sort. And a note.

“Read it,” said Donovan, possibly the single most needless instruction he had ever given her.

Méarana folded the message, then unfolded it and read it again. Fire from the sky. There was that phrase again. What did it mean? More than she had assumed at first. She handed the slip of paper to Donovan, who barely glanced at it and did not take his eyes from the shadows that surrounded them.

From just such shadows, his own hauntings told him, the ninjas of Jenlùshy emerged.

Bring’ em on.

«No!»

The scarred man shuddered and his eyes began to wander as all of him struggled for their possession.

“Who do you expect to leap from the shadows here?” the Fudir asked himself. “Hugh? Greystroke?”

Hugh would not attack us!

Would he not, then? asked the Sleuth.

“Men change,” the Fudir whispered. “I knew him then; I don’t know him now. And he was a very good assassin.”

Méarana pulled the message from his fingers. She refolded it and returned it to the box along with the dibby. “What data?” she said to the whispering ocean waves.

“And who left it? said Donovan. “I see the quid, but where’s the quo?” The sand beneath him seemed suddenly of the quicker sort and a sound that would have been laughter rippled through his mind. Inner Child started and the Brute clenched Donovan’s fists.

Méarana touched his arm lightly. “Come, old man. We can’t read the dibby here on the beach.”

A moment longer the scarred man lingered. He turned his back on the shadows and stared out across the sluggish waters of the Encircled Sea. The curls hissed as they broke and rolled across the sands. An ochre moon hovered over the far horizon. Larger than Jehovah’s Ashterath, larger than Old ‘Saken’s Jubilee Moon, far larger than “the moonlet fleet” of Peacock Junction; but smaller than the Moon he had never seen, the Moon toward which his blood was drawn like the ocean’s tides. He sighed. He didn’t know whether Hugh had turned against him. And the sorrow of it was not the turning, but that he didn’t know.

The scarred man offered his arm to the harper. “787.09,” he said, “161.26 228.15!”

Re-crossing the highway, Méarana noticed a knot of people congregated at the three-way intersection between them and the hotel. They numbered perhaps twenty and she recognized in their garb and goatees the demeanor of Young’ Loons. She pointed them out to Donovan and mentioned again her encounter at Côndefer Park. “The Young’ Loons,” she said, “don’t believe in the accommodationist tactics of their elders.”

The scarred man looked on them with distaste. “I haven’t found their elders all that accommodating.”

“They want change.”

“Changing things is never a problem. Changing them for the better is.”

They had reached the stairs leading back down to street level. Méarana hesitated on the third step and turned around. “Do you think they’ll bother us? I mean, we’re just touristas, not movers or…”

“Or moosers? I’m afraid, missy, that I am.”

“But you don’t…” She hesitated again.

“I don’t look like a Terran? I don’t think it matters in the end. They detest all coffers and gulls, not just movers, not just Terrans. They even hate the remnants of the old Cuddle-Dong aristocracy, and how long have they lived here?”

“But, I’m a harper!”

“Perhaps they will pause and ask about that before they rough us up.”

Méarana took a breath, let it out. “They may be only a gang of idle young men hanging out on the street corner.”

“As harmless as that sounds… We could be judging them unfairly. But idle young men on a street corner in the small hours of the night do not inspire cozy feelings.” He nudged her in the small of the back. “At the bottom of the stairs, turn right, then go down the next street to the left. The streets here are a tangle, but I’ve got good bearings and we can circle around them. Go. Before they notice us.”

The harper and the scarred man hurried down the rest of the staircase and turned toward the next street, away from the phundaugh. Just before they reached it—Tchilbebber Lane, the sign announced—there was a shriek from the direction of the three-points, followed by the patter of rapid feet, followed by the drumming of many feet. Donovan looked back. There was a man in a billowing dust-coat sprinting up Beachfront Highway toward them. The Young’ Loons were pelting after him. He touched Méarana. “They’re not after us,” he said.

But they ducked around the corner anyway. Mobs, even small mobs, had a way of expanding their horizons on encountering targets of opportunity. «RUN!!!» cried Inner Child. “Brisk, now,” the scarred man told the harper. “But no need to run.”

“That poor man!” said Méarana.

“He’ll go up Beachfront. We’ll wait a little ways up this lane until they pass by, then we’ll make our way to the hotel.”

“Shouldn’t we try to help him?”

“Two of us against twenty? Three if that poor fool turns and stands. More likely, he’d keep running while we divert the crowd. That’s what I would do.”

“No, call the policers!”

“Méarana, this is Harpaloon. The policers come out in the morning and count the bodies… Quiet, here they come… Well, damn the gods!”

The deities he cursed had neglected their duties—for the fleeing man turned and came pelting up Tchilbebber Lane with the’ Loonie mob on his heels.

“Let’s get out of here,” Donovan started to say, but the man reached him and threw himself upon him.

“Pliz, pliz, you-fella. You help poor Terry-man! Budmash fella-they chase him no reason! Aiee!” And he ducked and crouched trembling behind Donovan.

His pursuers staggered to a halt when they saw the harper and the scarred man and their quarry hiding behind them.

“Just like a mooser,” one of them said. “Hide behind a shawner and a clean’s skirts.”

“Out of our way, coffers,” said another. “Shoran, we maun teach this Terry trash his manners.”

“You hear that, ye walad?” said a third. And he was chorused by the laughter of his companions.

Donovan spoke up. “This lady is a harper—an ollamh. Air hwuig shé? You will not touch her.”

The first speaker, whom Donovan took for the leader, said, “Shoran, we don’t care about coffer bints, shawnfir. Just you be stepping aside so we can teach this dog to step aside for us like a good little mooser.”

Donovan turned to Méarana. “You had better take yourself to the hotel.”

“Donovan…?” She spoke with uncertainty, but in her heart there was none. She knew what he meant to do. “I’m sorry.” She shrugged her shoulder and felt the knife drop into her hand, keeping it concealed from the mob. She emptied her mind of all but her mother’s training. It seemed she would learn how well the instruction had taken. But, twenty?

“Step aside!”

“No, no, pliz,” cried the Terran behind them. “Big dhik! You-man save me!”

Donovan turned and took him by the collar of his tunic, raising him to his feet. “I’ll not save a man on his knees,” he growled.

The leader of the gang grinned and stepped forward. “Hazza moontaz! We’ll take it from here.”

Donovan turned to him and bowed lightly over his folded hands. “Ah, no sahb. This-man no let dacoit takee. Hutt, hutt, you changars! You chumars!”

The gang leader’s face froze in surprise. Then it broke into an even broader grin than before as he did the arithmetic. “Hey, boyos, shoran we have us a twofer! And you, shawnfir, you’re two brassers short of a whorehouse.”

“I do not normally use a pick to play,” said the harper, bending slightly forward and balancing on the balls of her feet. She held her knife underfisted, ready to slash or stab. “But I can pluck at your heart strings either way.”

The scarred man’s lips had been moving. Then Donovan sighed and pulled a teaser from his pocket. “Fudir, are we agreed?” “No other choice.” “Take over, Brute.”

Debate was not the Brute’s forte. He struck without warning, teasing the leader so that he dropped twitching to the paving stones. Simultaneously, he drove the bunched fingers of his left hand into the brisket of the man’s companion, doubling him over. Méarana, in a catlike crouch, swiped her knife at the man before her, causing him to leap backward for the sake of his intestines. The other Terran wimpered.

Two down, thought the Brute, only eighteen to go. Méarana might be able to knife two of them if she would not hold herself back. But they would not prevail, even if the other Terran, quaking beside him, helped. He saw bats hefted in the crowd and caught the glint of at least one pellet gun. Well, it was fun for a while. He teased a second youth, but the field only numbed the yngling’s left side.

A shot rang out.

The Brute started, felt no pain, and turned in panic toward Méarana. No! Not her!

But the harper, too, was unhurt. The’ Loonie mob had frozen at the gunshot. Habituated the Preeshdad’ Loons might be to violence, but few there were who embraced it from the sharp end.

A voice boomed from the darkened alleyway on the left. “Throw down your weapons! You are surrounded!” And he was seconded by a voice from the right: “All men in place, Captain!”

The’ Loons looked to the blank rows of shuttered shops and tenements flanking them on either side of the lane. Did they see shadows moving into place? “The coffer riot cops?” “Damn mover regime…” “Where’d they come from?” Then someone in the middle of the mob hollered, “Let’s get out of here!” And with that cry, they broke and scattered down Tchilbebber Lane to the Beachfront Highway.

The Terran fell to his knees and began to kiss Donovan’s fingers and the hem of his tunic, calling him his savior and summoning blessings from the gods. The Brute nearly kicked him, but Donovan and the Fudir stopped him. Yeah, the Brute said bitterly, it’s “Brute, save us,” when you have it to do; but it’s “Brute, fall behind” when the drums stop rolling. He surrendered control before either Donovan or the Fudir had taken it back and the scarred man staggered. Méarana and the other Terran kept him upright, grabbing an arm apiece.

“That was close,” said Greystroke, dusting his hands and throwing down the bat he had taken from one of the gang members.

“They’re gone, Cu,” said O’Carroll, who stepped from the shadows on the right. “I followed them to the corner and they kept running. Are ye feelin’ none too well, Fudir?”

Greystroke stepped close to Donovan. “That was a fool play, Donovan. You could have gotten Méarana hurt! What possessed you to face down a lynch mob?”

The other Terran handed Donovan back his teaser and began to brush at and straighten Donovan’s clothing. The scarred man batted his hands away. “Call it a dislike of lynching,” he told the Hound. “Especially of Terrans.”

“This-man much arul,” the Terran said to Greystroke. “Save poor Billy Chins from akamiyam. From impiety and wickedness. He the shower of blessing, the gracious one. Me atangku him. Always his khitmugar.”

Donovan groaned. “Atangku? Is that the way it’s to be? Always a mooser, you?”

Greystroke had frowned in puzzlement before turning to Méarana. “It might be best if you take passage with us off planet.”

“We’d be glad to have you,” said Hugh.

“You’re following Bridget ban’s route,” the Hound said. “From here she went to…” He flipped open his pocket brain. “…to Dancing Vrouw. You are in luck.”

“I usually am,” said Donovan, “but the question is whether it’s good luck or bad.”

Hugh chuckled, and Greystroke spread his hands. “We can take you there. Rinty and I have business on Yubeq, and Dancing Vrouw is along the way.”

Donovan did not miss a beat. “Are you still looking to arrest me?”

Greystroke shook his head. “No.”

“Then, I guess you’re not the officious little prig you used to be.”

Greystroke smiled. “And you aren’t the wheedling, lying little scrambler you once were.”

“Good. Then we can both drink to the men we’ve become.” He and the Hound locked gazes.

Hugh sighed. “I don’t know,” he said, looking into the depths of the darkened lane. “I rather liked the lying little scrambler, myself.”