Up Jim River

VI. A SNAKE IN THE GRASS

The great’ Saken philospher Chester Demidov, known as’ Akobundu,” once described the United League as “raisins in a bowl of porridge.” This struck many of his readers as just another of his obscurities; but people who put raisins in their porridge—and there were some—understood what he had meant. The best philosophy begins in sense experience, and a bowl of porridge is as sensible as it gets.

The raisins are the great clumps of civilized planets: the Old Planets, the Jen-Jen, Foreganger-Ramage-Valency, and elsewhere. Within these clumps, great and powerful worlds lie mere days apart, with war and commerce bustling between them, with cities large and impressive, and with those activities that make of life something more than being alive. It is here you find Akobundu’s “grand continuum of culture”: great literature, music, high art, travel, the enjoyment of nature, sports, fashion, social vanities, and the intoxication of the senses. The nature of a civilization could be gauged, he had said, by the point along this continuum where its people draw the line and say, “Below this lies the merely vulgar.”

Everything else is the porridge. These comprise the more widely-scattered solitaries, like Peacock Junction or Ugly Man, the barbarous regions like the Cynthian Hadramoo. These may boast great accomplishments, but they are not where the action is.

The Greater Hanse is one of the raisins, and a juicy one at that. There, fortunes are made—and many a second sib arrives in the dewy-eyed hope of making one. The Hanse chews them up and spits them out. It grinds them like polishing grit, and the result is a gleaming money-making machine—once the grit is washed off.

On Akobundu’s continuum, the Hansards set great store by the social vanities, pursuing their rivalries not only in board rooms and markets and entrepôts, but in balls and cotillions, in fashion, in clubs and organizations, at dinner parties, and in orders of nobility. But they draw the line at the intoxication of the senses. “Drink dissolves profit,” they say; “and dreams go up in smoke.” A man obsessed with pleasure seldom thinks clearly, and women are consequently a sort of weapon to intoxicate one’s rivals. They do not launch missiles at one another, so much as mistresses. Befuddle a rival with perfumes and tender caresses and you can diddle him in every way that she does not.

Dancing Vrouw had been settled initially from Agadar and Gladiola, and it is said that when the first ship had set down, after a harrowing voyage through then-uncharted roads, the landing party officer had stripped herself naked and, from a sheer and undiluted joy, whirled through the thigh-high spindle-grass of the landing field. Consequently, the blazon of tawny a nude danseuse all proper appeared in the flags of every state but one on the Vrouw, and was quartered in the arms of most of the Merchant Houses.

There is an addendum to the legend that involves an Ursini’s viper and the inadvisability of stepping on one, even while dancing, but it is a complication seldom mentioned by the tour guides and myth-mongers. The bite proved nonfatal, though chastening, and both it and the dance have provided fodder for local proverbs ever since and a warning against excessive exuberance. The one contrary state that eschews the danseuse emblazons a snake on its flag with the motto, “Don’t Tread on Me.”

A counter-legend holds that the landing officer had simply been a native of “Dancing,” said to be a city on Old Earth that had anciently been a member of the original Hanse. But what sort of romance can you spin off that? Naked women and serpents in the garden of a fresh new world were by far more fascinating.

The Steelyard was more than a spaceport. It was also the chief Counting House of the Vrouw. Thus, although located in the capital of the Eastern Cape Circle, it had extraterritorial status, and merchant princes from every Circle, and even from other Hansard planets, stationed factors there.

Groundside customs was more thorough than on Harpaloon. The Toll-Clerk, as he was called, studied their Kennel passes with great intensity, even employing a loupe to verify the watermarking of their papers, and required a retinal scan of each of them. Billy Chins proved a problem. A chumar, the lowest caste of Terran worker, he had little in the way of papers; and no one had ever thought his retinas worth scanning.

Rules meant much in the Greater Hanse, and their functionaries did not accept bribes to overlook them. However, everything was for sale, including entry visas, so the distinction was a fine one and not always apparent to out-worlders. There were regulations on how to bypass the regulations. These required three oath-helpers to swear to Billy Chins’s good character, and a native of the Vrouw to purchase the contract. The Clerk summoned a Trader from the Floor, and shortly a wide-bodied man in a marten-rimmed, sleeveless coat and wearing a silver medal on a neck-chain stepped off the lift.

“What is then all this?” he asked the Clerk and, the situation being explained, he turned to Billy Chins. “You-fella Terry? Good-good. We process, jildy Khitmutgar, you? Oho! Who thy master? This one?” A skeptical eye was cast over Donovan, but swift handshakes proved both members of the Brotherhood. The Trader switched to the Tongue. “This shalt proceed swiftly, my brother, and at a nominal fee. I hight Hendrik ten Muqtar, senior trader of the House of Coldperk. I will ask of thee no more than but a single marek, for honor’s sake.” He made a complex gesture with his hands. “But as for the Purse of the Steelyard, they will accept no-but less than one hundred mareks, however middling our contract.”

“Pliss, pliss,” said Billy Chins. “Me-fella blong this-man, Donovan. No blong you-fella.” To Donovan, he added, “I go long you. No go long him. Plis no send Billy Chins away!”

Donovan fluttered his fingers and addressed ten Muqtar. “Forgive him his intemperance.”

“It makes naught. Here. Behold the standard contract. Thou shalt enter names here, and here. Aye, the light pen, so that it may scan. Oho! A Kennel chit! Had I but known of him, thy fee would have soared. Deep pockets hath the Kennel.”

When all was completed to the jot and tittle of Hansard Commercial Regulation §189.3, Part V, paragraph 6.2 (a), Billy Chins tugged on ten Muqtar’s coat and said with something like awe, “Ally-all Terry here got plenty somtaing, laik you-fella?”

Ten Muqtar flashed them a quick sad smile and spoke to Donovan. “Tell your boy that the Hanse placeth no bars to those willing to work, and that many of the Original Folk have become here wealthy. But thou wilt have noticed that when the Clerk required a Trader to buy a Terran’s contract, he sent for a Terran. We prosper here and enjoy great liberties, but the doors of society are closed to us.”

“As oppressions go,” said Donovan, “that doth pale beside a Harpaloon lynch mob.”

“It is much of a such,” ten Muqtar said with a shrug. “Here, much business is done at dinner parties and on the courses of golf. Where a man’s expectations are greater, smaller slights grate the more.”

The skywalks ran above the Trading Floor and Méarana and her party paused while crossing to gaze over the banisters at the activity below.

A mob of Harpaloon drunks did not shout and mill as wildly as did the press on the Floor. They cried out or sent messages over headsets, buttonholed and bargained, waved fingers in the air in an arcane code. A display board at the far end listed cargos and vessels arriving in orbit and the Traders, who sat like lords around the periphery of the Floor, sent their Runners to ask and offer prices, the two hunting up and down the scale until they met and cleared the cargo. This was for the most part accomplished while the vessel was on the crawl, and a ship’s contents might be sold and sold again before ever it reached High Dancing Orbit.

The throng of arrivals followed the walkway to a broad outdoor plaza at third-storey level. It was come on to winter in that quarter of Dancing Vrouw and the wind drove light flurries of snow across the paving stones and into the sleeves and shoes of inaptly-dressed out-worlders. Incomers scattered, hailing skycabs or huddling in the tramline station or scurrying across the plaza to the Roaming Qaysar Hotel.

This hotel, a stolid, seven-storey building of dark ironwood timbers and light masonry, was said to be the largest primarily wooden building in the Spiral Arm. Flanking it on either side were Factor Houses from around the Vrouw: from nautical Giniksper to tropical Dangerminda to Kalmshdad in the Northern Waste. Farther off, stood the more modest entrepôts of other Hanse worlds—Yubeq, Hanower, Rigger, and elsewhere; so that overall the prospect before them was of a solid wall of buildings, diverse in size and style and color. Parti-colored House arms flashed in light-signage, in holo-projections, or in cloth flags.

Greystroke had booked them rooms on the seventh floor of the Roaming Qaysar and, having stowed their belongings, they foregathered in the suite’s common room before a wall-spanning window. Below, lay the city of Pròwenshwai: a faery jumble set along crooked streets, bisected by broad, straight avenues, interrupted by white plazas and green parks. Stairways twisted up bluffs where streets dared not go. Here and there, clocktowers, minarets, and kokoshniki pierced the skyline.

It was a city that delighted in wood and its possibilities. On the buildings below, cornice, tympanum, spandrel, gable, jamb, and shutters had been set into parquet or carved into basilisks, wyverns, griffins, distlefinks, gargoyles; into flowers and leaves and lacework. Statues emerged from the walls of the greater buildings.

“Is look strange-strange,” said Billy Chins. “Never off Harpaloon, me.”

“‘Tis broader spread than any city I’ve played,” Méarana said. “Even Èlfiuji is more compact.”

“You should see it when night falls,” Greystroke added. “They call it the Carpet of Lights. And at midwinter, when the snow covers all, they put candles in every window, and in small bags lining every walkway. Over that way,” he pointed, “is the Tower of the Snake. Remind me to tell you that story. You can recite it for drinks, Donovan, when you return to Jehovah.”

Donovan did not rise to the jibe. “Where’s the Toll Gate?” he said.

“Right behind the hotel. You can’t see it from this angle. It’s one of only two entries from the international enclave into Eastern Cape Circle itself.”

Donovan cocked his head. “Where’s the other?”

“You can scale the outside wall of the Hotel,” said Little Hugh, leaning close to the window and pointing off to the left. “There are stretchers and dog’s-teeth in the masonry. Then—see there?—you can jump from that ledge over onto the roof of that storage building and shinny down the rain pipe.”

Méarana shot him a glance to see if he was joking, but with the Ghost of Ardow it was hard to tell. He could get into and out of the most unlikely places. “We’ll take the easy way,” she said.

Hugh exchanged a glance with Greystroke. “Sometimes that is the easy way.”

“Enough said of that,” the Hound cautioned him. He turned to the harper. “I don’t know what you expect to find here that Gwillgi failed to find. According to the Hotel’s records and the Toll-for-One, Bridget ban stayed here only two days. She never even entered East Cape.”

Donovan grunted. “Makes you wonder why she came down at all.”

Hugh glanced at him. “We’ve all worried at that. If we knew why she came down… Thank you, Billy.” The khitmutgar had found the suite’s bar and had assembled a tray of drinks. As any good servant might, he had, on the flight from Harpaloon, identified everyone’s preference. They moved toward the center of the room. “If we knew why she paused here, we might know where she went afterward. But if this was just a stopover…”

“Why come planet-side for a mere rest stop,” said Méarana.

Hugh pursed his lips. “Sometimes you just need to get outside of a ship.”

“Maybe she was expecting to meet someone,” Donovan suggested. He had remained at the window, where he gazed down at the roof of the storage shed.

“Gwillgi thought so,” said Hugh, “but she met no one of whom the hotel staff was aware.” Both Donovan and Greystroke snorted. “Right,” Hugh added. “But Gwillgi checked into everyone staying in the hotel and…”

Donovan turned from the window. “Everyone?”

Hugh nodded. “Staff and guests. Gwillgi may not be as persistent as Grimpen, but he does dot all his t’s.”

“So, you may be right,” said Greystroke, who had materialized by Donovan’s side and nodded toward the perilous route into East Cape. “There’s only one flaw: no trace of her anywhere in Pròwenshwai.”

There’s always a trace, murmured the Sleuth.

“Greystroke,” Donovan said in a low voice, and moved the Hound a little apart from Hugh and Méarana, who were sampling a plate of hors d’oeuvres that Billy had prepared. “You and I both know that the jawharry at Côndefer Park…”

“…was killed by a Confederate courier. Elementary. Who else combines stealth and cruelty in such exquisite balance? Has it convinced her?”

“To give up the search? Not yet.”

“It might have been a coincidence, but…”

“It wasn’t.”

“Agreed. And you can’t go forward assuming it was. The question is: What is the courier’s mission? Is he hunting what Bridget ban was hunting? Or is he hunting you?”

“Me!” Donovan could not stop Inner Child from looking around in alarm. “No,” he said, turning back in time to glimpse Greystroke’s pity. “No,” he said again. “If he was hunting me, why torture the jawharry?”

“‘Following the hare,’” Greystroke quoted, “‘the hunter starts a deer.’ Sometimes one path crosses another. That’s all chance is, you know. The Friendly Ones weave causal threads. Sometimes they cross, and we call that chance. Once you crossed the courier’s line of vision, he may have wondered what you were up to.”

“You suppose he recognized me.”

Greystroke nodded. His eyes rose toward Donovan’s scalp. “You bear certain distinguishing marks.”

But Donovan shook his head. “No. I’ve haunted the Bar on Jehovah for a great many years. If They had wanted to find me…”

“They may have wanted only to find you there. As long as you stayed in place, swilling whiskey, what did They care? Donovan-the-sot is no threat to them. Donovan-on-the-roads may be a different matter.”

The scarred man said nothing. He looked out over the whittled city.

“If you went back to Jehovah,” Greystroke said, “they’d likely lose interest again.”

Donovan felt turmoil within. «Safe!» said Inner Child. But, said the Silky Voice. The odds are better there, said the Sleuth.

“Méarana,” whispered the Fudir.

“She’d be safer with us,” said Greystroke.

Méarana, talking with Billy and Little Hugh on the other side of the room, laughed. Donovan and Greystroke both watched her silently for a while and, perhaps attracted by their gaze, she turned and smiled at them, waving to them to join the others. And so they did, and they chatted of inconsequential matters before proceeding to dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. But Donovan could see worry behind the eyes of all of them—except Billy Chins, who, having delivered himself utterly into the hands of another, had not a worry in all the known worlds.

Sometimes, the drink worked, and sometimes it did not. There were shards in the ruin of his mind; and sometimes drink floated them to the surface, if not to the service, of his consciousness. The barroom of the Roaming Qaysar stood in the under-cellar of the building in a series of rooms made up to look like caves. It was called a Vine-stoop, and served a kind of wine called a hoyrigen, which referred to that morning’s press. It was not yet aged; it was not yet fully mature. It had not the quick numbing of the uiscebaugh, which stunned like a ball-peen hammer. It was more like drowning.

After dinner, the scarred man took himself down to the stoop where he could sit in dim light and be as much alone as a man like him could ever be. Around him, inside and out, swirled whispers and comfortable laughter, and the occasional clink of stolid Hansard toasts. They sought contentment, the Vrouwenfolk did. The beedermayer, they called it; the gemoot’. But always there was the main chance looked for, the edge sought; and so contentment was an elusive thing, enjoyed only by the sliders and touristas who just adored the quaint customs of the cutthroat merchants of the Greater Hanse.

The tables were rough-polished ironwood, with no adornment save a short candle that floated in a red-glass bowl. The flame took nothing from the darkness, but he blew it out anyway; and when later the gellrin, the waitress, tried to re-light it, he sent her scuttling with a well-aimed growl.

Watch the one in the corner, he heard the whispers. He’s surly when drunk.

How little they knew him here! He needed no drink for that.

“She will be safer if she goes with Greystroke,” he assured himself.

The courier didn’t kill the jawharry in the Kasper, the Pedant pointed out. Nor any of the others.

“No, Greystroke would have told us had there been others.”

Would he?

“Yes,” said Donovan. “He means to scare us off. For that, an abundance of bodies is more persuasive than one.”

«One was enough. Oh, it was.»

Silience, Child.

You know what it means, said the Sleuth.

Nah, but you’re gonna tell us, aren’t ya, smart-ass?

It means that, even if it was Donovan who crossed the courier’s path, it is Méarana that he’s interested in.

Inner Child trembled, and the scarred man spilled some of his day-wine.

You don’t know that.

So, she’s not safe, even with Greystroke and Hugh.

“I said she’d be ‘safer,’” Donovan pointed out. “I didn’t say she’d be ‘safe.’”

She’ll be glad to know that.

The Kennel’s success rate at protecting…

“You’re an ass, Pedant,” said the Fudir. “Probabilities don’t matter. What difference to the corpse that it was one chance in a million that slew him?”

Resentment swelled within him like a rancid bubble. I sense I am not welcome here.

“That’s the first sense you’ve made all evening.”

The Pedant broke off, and Donovan became acutely aware that there were things he had known that he had now forgotten. “Smart move, Fudir. Pedant’s our data base.”

“Ah, who needs him?”

There was something about Bridget ban, said the Sleuth.

The late Bridget ban.

Donovan gestured to the gellrin, and wagged an empty carafe. “Red,” he called.

Sleuth, said the Silky Voice, why would this agent of theirs be interested in Méarana?

A worm of hope stirred painfully in the Fudir’s breast. “Because he hopes she will lead him to Bridget ban?”

She may be alive? After all this time? Or does he simply not know she’s dead?

Their agents use the Circuit like everyone else, said the Sleuth. If one of them had capped her, they’d all know by now.

“Or he hopes Méarana will lead him to whatever it was Bridget ban was hunting. The weapon that would protect the League against Them. She would not have told them what it was when they caught her. She would have died silent.”

The gellrin came by with a fresh carafe, and it was on this occasion that she sought to re-light the café-candle and Donovan snapped at her.

“Great,” said the Fudir after she had stalked off. “It’s one thing to piss the Pedant off; quite another to anger the waitress. What do we do when this carafe runs dry?”

Wave a Gladiola Bill ‘stead O’ the empty. She’ll come running.

“Brute,” said Donovan, “there is something charming in your simplicity.”

Yeah. And sometimes ya need the charm.

“But what was it about Bridget ban, Sleuth?” said the Fudir.

I’ve forgotten. The Pedant knew. He never forgets anything.

“Well, kiss him on the lips. Maybe he’ll tell us.”

He had raised his voice. A couple at a nearby table who had been drowning in each other’s gaze turned and looked at him. “Why don’t you drink your own wine,” the woman snapped.

Maybe it was the dim lighting, but he thought for an instant that the woman was Bridget ban herself, warning him off. Her hair was shorter and darker than the Red Hound’s—but hair can be dyed, and cut. Her complexion was dark, like hers—and it might prove golden in a better light. But… No one lops eighteen thumbs off her height for the sake of mere disguise, and the woman was that much shy of the witch’s height. The scarred man, who had begun to lean forward, slumped back in his chair.

After all these years, the witch’s spells were still potent. A good thing he had left her when he had. He closed his eyes—and a dozen others in the stoop relaxed. Two put weapons away.

The Fudir remembered a bright spring afternoon atop a wooded hill overlooking the Dalhousie Estate on Old’ Saken. He and Bridget ban had been scouting the estate under the pretext of bird-watching. The breeze had been gentle and cool, flowing off the Northbound Hills, and the birds had trilled and piped; and Bridget ban had placed her hand upon his arm, perhaps forgetful for just a moment of their purpose, and said with pure delight… “Listen, that’s a rubythroat! We have them at home on Dangchao.”

Let the Pedant settle for factual memories, for bricks dry from the kiln. The memories of touch and smell, the sound of her voice, could immerse him like a living river lazy on the plains.

“There’s an interesting bird,” he heard the remembered Fudir say. “A double-bellied nap-snatcher.” It had been the approaching ornithopter with two security guards in it. He and Bridget ban had been using aliases on that scramble. Méarana’s mother had called herself…

The fact would not come. The kiln had grown cold.

A strange sensation crept over him, as if something loomed behind him, vast and implacable. And he was sitting with his back against the wall. Inner Child shivered and the Brute clenched his fists under the table.

I feel it, too, said the Silky Voice. And it’s not the first time.

He waited, and he felt the others waiting, too.

A time went by and then another time, until slowly, the feeling abated, like a pool of spilt wine soaking into the thirsty dirt. Though no candles had been lit, the room grew sensibly lighter.

The release was a long-held breath expelled. Inner Child began to cry and tears stained the scarred man’s cheeks.

Later that night, Méarana awoke and found herself unable to go back to sleep. She kept thinking of poor Enwii, killed brutally for what she did not know. Little Hugh had thought the murderer a Confederate agent who, while on another mission, had recognized Donovan. But he might have been watching Donovan on Jehovah and had followed him from there.

In either case, she was responsible for Enwii’s death. The scarred man would never have left Jehovah but for her importuning.

It was this thought that had unsettled her sleep, and which kept her now awake.

Restless, she arose and took her harp to the common room, where she played on muted strings a suantraí for Enwelumokwu Tottenheim. The chords wept, but she found her heart was not in it; or perhaps that her heart was too much in it. So she laid the clairseach aside and sat in silence in the darkened room.

Eventually, she grew aware that, opposite her sofa, the door to Donovan’s room stood ajar, and curious at this anomaly, she crossed the room and peeked inside.

The room was empty.

The bedclothes were rumpled, thrown aside and Méarana remembered Little Hugh’s bitterness when he told of the Fudir abandoning him twenty years ago. That must have been some knock on the head the Fudir had given him, to hurt so after so long.

There was a Terran Corner in Pròwenshwai and the Terrans of the Hanse ran to wealth and power—more perhaps than other Hansards found comfortable. With the Brotherhood’s aid, Donovan could hide indefinitely. Stepping inside the room, she checked the fresher, half expecting for reasons she could not name, to find he had hanged himself.

But no body dangled from the “rain shower,” no body lay blood-drained in the tub. She chided herself on the expectation, blaming the late hour and her own feelings of guilt.

Returning to the sleeping quarters, she threw open the closet and found his meager wardrobe still inside. His kit littered the vanity in wild confusion. If he had fled, he had fled without his clothing, without his personal items. But what did that prove? He had left such ephemera behind in Chel’veckistad, too, when he had walked out on Bridget ban.

She had picked up his brush. Now she laid it down and noticed, tucked to the frame of the vanity’s mirror, a palm-sized hologram. She plucked it up and held it to the lamplight that speckled through open window-blinds.

Four figures sat at an outdoor café table on the sunlit cobbles of the Place of the Chooser, the great public square in Èlfiuji, in the Kingdom on Die Bold. It was one of those images that strolling artists would take of touristas. Donovan, Greystroke, her mother, and Hugh. The image was old, but only Hugh had noticeably aged. He had not then acquired the hardness in the corners of his mouth, and still retained something of his youthful insouciance, as if the world were a joke and only he knew the punch line. Bridget ban sat in the middle—difficult to accomplish in a group of four, save that Greystroke had managed to fade a little into the background and was nearly obscured by Donovan and her mother. Méarana smiled a little to note that detail. The Gray Hound was a dear little man, if a trifle too cold for her comfort.

Mother, dressed in the travel garb of a Lady of the Court, sat turned at three-quarters but with her head fully facing the imager. In the depth of view, she was the most forward. Her smile, broad; her eyes seducing the viewer; her red hair captured in midnight, as if she had just then tossed her head to look at the artist. Her left arm draped Little Hugh’s shoulders; her right hand covered Donovan’s on the table. Greystroke’s hand rested on her shoulder. They were all smiling, playing at the time the role of chance-met strangers; but Méarana thought they were smiling, too, because they were happy.

Hugh’s eyes and his smile were directly for Bridget ban, and no mistake, for he was turned in her direction. Donovan and Greystroke smiled into the viewer, but in the drift of their eyes, they, too, looked on Bridget ban; Greystroke, because he had placed her in his line of sight to the imager; Donovan, because though he faced one way he glanced another.

He had been the Fudir back then, Méarana reminded herself. Donovan had not yet been awakened, and the others were then uncreated. She wondered what it meant that he had kept this hologram until now; and wondered if the other three had copies as well.

Of course, Hugh’s bitterness notwithstanding, the Fudir had not run out. He had, more accurately, run off. He had reasoned that what had to be done he had to do alone. It had been no more an act of abandonment than throwing oneself on a hand grenade.

But that had been a different man. The wreckage that now called itself by Donovan’s name was timid where the Fudir had been bold. He had fled into the Corner of Jehovah on the mere realization of Méarana’s identity. She had tracked him down then—more accurately, she had lured him to her.

Returning to the common room, she replaced her harp in its case, slung it over her shoulder, and slipped out of the suite.

But in making her way to the rear exit—and to the Eastern Cape Toll Gate—she passed by the hotel’s exercise rooms and, glancing therein, saw the scarred man running in the simulator. She watched him for a while, knowing a certain relief that she did not examine too closely. Then she slipped the door open and quietly entered.

The track was a multi-belt surrounded by a hologram of scenery. The scarred man ran through an urban landscape and the belt conformed itself to it, taking him uphill and down and around corners. He ran with ferocious concentration, oblivious to everything but the sim and his own body, and it seemed to Méarana that he bulked a bit larger than usual. His face was set harder. His arms and legs appeared muscled.

But it was only a seeming. Physically, he was unchanged. It was the same skin; the same skeleton. The muscles had always been there. Yet, what informed the body seemed more substantial, like a big man wearing a smaller man’s clothes. She lowered herself onto a nearby floor mat and sat cross-legged. Without conscious thought on her part, the harp found its way to her hands.

He had programmed the running boards for random hazards, and so vehicles and other pedestrians appeared in his path, coming out of side streets or doorways or simply moving more slowly, causing him to dodge and weave and, in one case, pirouette gracefully around a matron with three dogs on leash. Méarana’s fingers picked out a running beat on the strings, hunting for the melody that would capture this determined running machine.

He turned! And the sensors in the simulator shifted the direction of the treadle by ninety degrees as he ran up an alleyway to all appearances directly toward the harper.

Startled, Méarana rolled to the side; but of course the onrushing approach was only an illusion created by the rolling belt.

The scarred man skipped a beat, and slowed his pace. Then he pointed at her and a grin split his features and he laughed.

It was a horrid, flaccid laugh. It reminded Méarana of the voices of people she had heard talking in their sleep. She plucked a staccato chord. “You must be the Brute,” she said.

The scarred man nodded in time to his running.

“Donovan and the Fudir have sometimes complained of sore muscles in the morning,” she said. “A sign of age, they thought. Now I know why.”

The Brute smiled again and made a flip with his hand.

“Who cares about them, right? You’re mute. You don’t control the voice, they told me.”

“Aaaasleeeeb,” the Brute moaned.

“When Donovan and the Fudir are asleep you can speak, a little. You must have some access to the speech center of your brain or you’d not be able to communicate with them.”

The shoulders rolled in a great shrug. “Naaaad maa shaaaab.”

“You don’t know about brains and paraperception, is that it? All you’re good for is combat and physical exertion?”

Another smile and a thumbs-up.

“I understand. If it’s all you’re good for, at least you’re good for it. You’re… Don’t take this the wrong way. You’re the animal part of Donovan’s soul, aren’t you?”

The Brute scowled and there was something red behind his eyes. Then he tossed his head, a great deal as a horse or a dog might do it. “Easy, fellow,” she said. “Each of us is an animal—sensation, perception, emotion, and action. There’s an ‘I’…” She plucked a chord. “…that simply touches the strings and hears… An ‘I’ that doesn’t know music, but only sound. An ‘I’ that thinks, remembers, and imagines, but does not conceive. Am I making myself clear?”

The Brute shrugged and gave a half smile. He raised his right hand and pinched his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart.

“But the ‘I’ that only hears the sounds and the ‘I’ that understands the music… Those are the same ‘I.’ The animal and the person, we’re one. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have them split apart.”

The Brute wiggled his hands. Then he held up all ten fingers and splayed them.

“Split ten ways? Donovan told me there were only seven.”

The Brute scowled and seemed to count on his fingers. Then he shrugged, held up all ten fingers and wiggled them, following up with a “who knows?” look. His eyes retreated and worry crossed his features.

He slowed to a modest pace, cooling off. The simulation vanished from around him and a series of numbers appeared above the hologram platform, to which the Brute paid no mind. He counted again on his fingers; then, held up seven as firmly as a row of spears. But then three, followed by a shrug.

“I don’t understand.”

The belt stopped, and the Brute came and sat beside her. Méarana flinched and pulled back, and the Brute hung his head.

Méarana stroked the back of his neck. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. But you are a little scary.”

The Brute grinned and shook his head. “Uh lod sgairee. Sbozabee,” he moaned. A lot scary. Supposed to be.

The harper returned his grin. “Sure, who would be afraid of a fluffy bunny?”

The Brute rocked with silent laughter. But when he subsided he reached out and took her chin in his hand and stared into her face.

The animal body, she knew, had been trained in every martial art that muscle memory could hold. She knew that, should anything alarm him, he could with a flick of his wrist snap her neck. There had been the Xiao family in Main Tooth, in the Out-in-back of Dangchao, that had kept a pair of hunting poodles. And one day their son of four, in all innocence, had poked them the wrong way, and the devoted pets had become killers. That the Brute could speak in a limited fashion made him somehow more frightening.

“Bready,” he said. “Uh’d dye voryuh.”

But the harper did not know what he meant.

When she led him back into the suite, she found the other three in the common room and in a state of consternation over their absence. They unleashed a cacophony of demand, worry, and rebuke.

“There you are!” “Where were you?” “Oh! Master no bandon Billy!”

Billy threw himself at the Brute’s feet and grabbed hold of his ankles. That woke the scarred man and Méarana could see the Brute cast one last glance in her direction before he sank beneath the sand of Donovan’s awareness. The scarred man looked around the room in anger. “What the devil is going on?”

“That would be my question,” said Greystroke.

Hugh took both the harper’s hands in his. “We were worried about you. In case… You know.”

“So you didn’t run out this time, Donovan?” Greystroke said to the scarred man.

“In case we were followed here from Harpaloon?” Méarana said to Hugh. “Not likely.”

“Nor impossible. There are fossil images in the berms of the Roads. A clever man can follow a ship, and from the blue-shift know where she had exited. So…”

“So,” said Greystroke to both the harper and the scarred man, “isn’t it time you told us everything and handed the job back to the professionals?”

“Before the Confederate catches up with you?” added Hugh.

Donovan swatted Billy Chins on the side of the head. “Stop that now, or I really will set you free! A life spent groveling is not worth living.”

Billy Chins released Donovan’s ankles and scrambled to his feet. “So sorry, master. I no serve you good? I still serve you?”

“Serve me, if you must. But do it on your feet! What am I doing out here?”

“You were sleepwalking,” Méarana told him.

“Well,” said Greystroke, “what’s your answer?”

Donovan nodded to Méarana. “It’s her answer to give.” To the harper, he added, “It’s the smart move. I’ve told you that from the beginning.”

“I know. But… The ‘professionals’ searched for two years and gave up the hunt.”

Little Hugh stuck his chin out. “Greystroke and I have not. And we never will until we know where and how she…” He paused, and finished in a different voice. “Until we know.”

“Then you ought to understand. I can’t sit on Dangchao and simply wait.”

“Remember the jawharry on Harpaloon,” said Hugh.

“I do. And that’s one of the reasons I can’t quit. I owe her something more than quitting.”

Hugh suppressed a smile. “Scared you on instead of off?”

Donovan shook his head. “We’re all tired. It’s the middle of the night—and nights on the Vrouw are uncommonly long. Let’s sleep on it and in the morning…” He left unsaid what the morning would bring.

Everyone returned to their rooms. When Donovan turned to close his door, he found Greystroke in the room with him. He bobbed a finger. “Heel-and-toe, right?”

“I walk in your footsteps.”

“You know it. So, get this over with.”

The Hound walked to the work desk by the wall and sank into its chair. He waved Donovan to the reading chair in the corner.

“She doesn’t understand,” Greystroke said when they were both settled. “She doesn’t know how dangerous it is.”

“‘It is the young who catch the gliding snake.’”

Greystroke cocked his head. “Stop being the inscrutable Terran.”

“A Terran proverb. The young do dangerous things in innocence.”

“So, what’s our excuse? Never mind. This is no longer just nosing around Lafrontera. It’s not just taking ordinary chances on raw settlement worlds or staying in posh hotels like this one at Kennel expense. It’s not a bleeding lark!”

“She knows that.”

“Does she? There’s an agent of Those of Name nosing around. That’s not a mob of’ Loonie simpletons. That’s… Fates take it! She’s her daughter!”

“Then maybe you understand why she won’t give up.”

Greystroke opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, and crossed his arms. “When I remember twenty years ago…” His eyes lit briefly on the hologram on the vanity mirror. “Ah, well…” He fell silent for a time. “You’ll stay with her?”

“I promised Zorba.”

“No, he promised you. I know how he operates. But I don’t want you in this only because your personal skin is threatened. A man like that is too likely to disappear once he thinks he safely can. And where would that leave hen”

“There are other men,” Donovan observed, “who cannot abandon her because they have not stepped forward in the first place.”

Anger flashed briefly on the Hound’s bland countenance. “She came to you,” he pointed out. And Donovan wondered whether the anger was over his jibe or her choice.

“Don’t worry it, Hound,” Donovan said. “It all lies in how the gods decide.”

“The gods,” said Greystroke, “are merely despotic. But behind the gods sit the Fates, and they are deadly.”

“How could she go to you or to the Ghost for help? She needed someone… unencumbered.”

Greystroke snorted and looked inward for a time before he pulled a brain from a pocket and tossed it to Donovan.

The scarred man caught it on the fly, looked at it, looked at Donovan.

“It’s one of my private codes,” the Hound explained. “If you ever need me, encrypt it with that and send a message to the Kennel. They’ll forward it over the Circuit to wherever I am. Rinty and I will come as quickly as we can.”

Donovan said nothing, but looked at the Hound.

Greystroke colored and looked away. “We have to be on Yubeq shortly. On assignment.”

“That wasn’t a ruse?”

“No. We really were going your way.”

Donovan studied the pocket brain, turning it over and over in his fingers. Then, abruptly, he clenched his hand around it. “Why?”

“Why do you think?” He nodded toward the hologram. “Twenty years ago, the four of us were partners. I don’t like you; and you don’t like me. (Please. Spare me the wheedling Terran excuses.) But among the four of us, you and Rinty had a bond; and now he and I have one. And we were all bound to her, of course. But between you and me is the missing link. Just answer me one thing. Tell me you will not abandon her.”

Now it was Donovan’s turn to anger. “Do you think I would do that?”

Greystroke’s silence was eloquent.

Finally, Donovan waved a hand, and the Fudir answered, “No, sahb. I do no such a thing.”

“Because if you do…”

“Yes, I know. You’ll defend Méarana to the last drop of my blood. My beard is on fire, and you come to warm your hands at the blaze.”

Greystroke put his hands on his knees and pushed to his feet. He looked away. “I used to think that perhaps I… But no, I needed but one look at her.” His glance was iron. “You and I agree on one thing, at least. We both wish it were someone else going with her.”

Donovan temporized. “What more risk can there be than what we saw on Harpaloon? Bangtop, Siggy O’Hara, and the other places… I am as capable as the next man of booking passage on throughliners and rooms in hotels. And once we reach the Chit and the trail peters out, perhaps then she will give it up.”

Greystroke seemed about to speak; but shrugged and turned away.

After the door had closed, Donovan continued to sit in the reading chair, looking nowhere in particular, and turning Greystroke’s pocket brain over and over in his hand. He glanced at the hologram, noted that it was out of place and wondered if it had been Greystroke or Hugh who had fingered it. “I am become cane in the sugar-mill,” he said, reciting a proverb of his people, “and a bit of straw in the waves of the sea.”

In the morning, Greystroke and Little Hugh were gone, and their rooms as if no one had ever slept there. Méarana found herself oddly distraught by their absence. In their company, she had not felt so alone in her quest. Billy hardly counted at all, and Donovan had proven less than she had expected—although in another sense, he was more. Yet, a man can accomplish very little if he is of two minds about it, and Donovan was seven—or ten, if she had understood the Brute correctly. The Hound and his Pup had given her briefly the illusion that she had more allies in her quest, and indeed the greater illusion that they would lift the burden of her quest from her.

Did that desire make her a bad daughter? Or did it mean only that she was afraid she might fail? Sometimes she remembered that she had but twenty years metric in her crios. Despair is the one unforgivable sin, her mother used to tell her, for it is the only one that never seeks forgiveness. Yet Méarana could not but feel the beat of its wings nearby.

Mother had first told her that maxim when a very young Lucia had thrown her child’s harp from her in frustration over its intransigent strings. There had been tears, and strong encouragement. She had persevered and gained eventually a small degree of fame in and around the Old Planets. She would persevere in this task, too.

She had no memory of ever having met Greystroke before—and what sadder fate than that could be told of any man? But she did remember Hugh from her childhood and remembered how Mother had brightened at his visits. She had formed certain conclusions from that, conclusions that she now saw were utterly fantastic, and now recalled that Hugh had always borne a sad and winsome countenance on his sojourns. After a time, he had no longer visited.

Now, inexplicably, he had abandoned her again. Duty had called, Donovan explained, but duty was a cold lover and false in the bargain.

“Is that so?” Donovan told her when she had said so. “Wherefore, dost thou seek thy mother?”

“That is love, not duty,” she explained.

“Love,” said Donovan, “is a duty, and a hard one.”

They had gathered around the breakfast table in the common room and Billy Chins provided from the hotel’s larder plates of egg and bangers, tomato juice, daal and beans—and a concoction of his own which he called fool. He brewed qalwah, which tasted much like ordinary Vrouwish kaff, save that it was bitter and muddy. “Billy savvy duty,” the khitmutgar said, taking the seat his master had ordained him. “Duty, me, to sahb Donovan.”

“You may wish otherwise,” Donovan said. “Let’s talk plans. No, Billy, you stay here. You may as well hear what you’re getting into. You may decide it’s more efficient to kill yourself now.”

“He doesn’t mean that, Billy.”

Donovan tore a piece of naan in two. “Don’t I? There’s a Confederate courier somewhere on our backtrail. That is not certain, but has more certainty than it ought to. We can’t afford to assume he will stay back there. If he knows we left Harpaloon with Greystroke, he may learn through other contacts that the Hound was bound for Yubeq. So he’ll follow down the Spiral Staircase to Dancing Vrouw. At that point, if he’s tracking the fossil images in the berms, he’ll see the blue shift and know that we stopped here. Tracking is slower going, so we have perhaps another day before we can expect him here. He may be in the coopers already and crawling down-system. So, let’s finish up and—to use a Terran phrase—‘haul ass.’ If we leave here before he shows, he’ll not know where we’re going next, and we’ll lose him.”

Billy Chins nodded vigorously. “Hutt, hutt; go jildy! Bungim paus, me.” He started to rise, but Donovan held him back.

“Some matters must be checked out before we go. Tomorrow, we go.”

“Oh, Fudir,” said the harper. “We spent weeks investigating on Harpaloon.”

“Then,” said Donovan, tossing his napkin to the table, “there’s not a moment to lose. Billy. This big-deal samting. We go, mistress harp and me, but come back no long time. No ansa him the door, less this knock.” He rapped his knuckles on the table in a tattoo. “You hear that, you answer back this…” Another, different tattoo. “…but only if alla pukka. If alla dhik, no knock-back. Savvy, you?” He ran Billy through the sign and countersign several times before he was satisfied. “No special knock, no ansa door. No ‘room service,’ no maid. No for nogat nothing.”

“I with you, me,” said Billy. “You see. I go with you wokabout. Out to Rim? I go. Out to Rift? I go. You wokabout place nogut, Billy Chins there. I good man, you see.”

Unaccountably touched, Donovan extended his hand, equal to equal, and Billy, after a moment’s hesitation, took it.

They took the easy way in.

“There were only two reasons why the Kennel never got a sniff of her,” Donovan explained to the harper after the Toll had franked their visas and issued them their green cards against their deposit of funds. “Either she entered East Cape in secret—in which case, we’ve no hope of picking up any trail—or she used a name they never thought to check. Normally, on official business, she would have used her office name—Bridget ban—and on personal business, she would have used her base name.”

“So Gwillgi only checked to see if ‘Bridget ban’ had entered East Cape, and she went in as Francine…”

Donovan steered her down a corridor of the Toll-for-One building.

The walls were tiled in pale masonry with a frieze at head level relieved into wreaths and tendrils. “Gwillgi is not stupid. He checked both names. We know she was on Harpaloon as Francine Thompson.”

“Then what…?”

“Bridget ban was not name-lacking. Gwillgi checked all the Kennel knew of.”

“Then…”

“The Kennel may not have known all of them. You told me once that your mother believed in the Four Strengths. Courage…”

“Courage, prudence, justice, and moderation.”

Donovan nodded. “If one is to believe in gods, those beat Greystroke’s Friendly Ones.”

“Yes, four to three.”

Donovan shot her a surprised glance. “You seem more cheery than earlier.”

“The sun is up. It’s easier to be cheery in the sunlight.”

“Even winter sunlight? Never mind. Prudence. The witch had the courage to take risks, no doubt of that. Otherwise, she’d have come home by now. But she would have been prudent enough to leave… breadcrumbs.”

“Breadcrumbs?”

“Old Terran fable. A trail of clues. The Sleuth deduced that. And I had to get him drunk to get that out of him. That helps sometimes, if we all get cheery-drunk together. Then the Pedant quit and we all forgot… Aaah, you don’t want to hear all that. Listen, and mallum bat. Your mother did not expect problems. She told you she’d be back soon. But she coppered her bets. She kept the Kennel updated on her whereabouts, if not on her whyabouts. She wasn’t ready to tell them what she was looking for. If it was a wild goose, she’d look foolish, and—you had some taste of Kennel politics—no Hound wants that. And if it was the goose that laid the golden eggs, she wanted first dibs.”

“Goose?” said Méarana. “Dibs?”

“Here we are.”

They entered an office which, like most such offices throughout the Spiral Arm, bustled with earnest activity. Clerks filed, frowned at screens, read hardcopies, entered data by voice, key, and touch. “If only they had the artificial intelligences of Olde Earth,” he told Méarana, who only laughed.

He flashed his Kennel chit and the Vrouw must have been more accustomed to dealing with League agents than either Thistlewaite or Harpaloon because the reception clerk merely glanced at it, handed them a set of forms, and directed them to a nearby table to fill them out. “So much for the Kennel mystique,” Donovan muttered.

“By the time we fill these out,” Méarana said, “the Confederate will catch up.”

The forms were “smart-forms” or “gloogardies” in the dialect of the Eastern Cape. They were laminas several hairs thick sandwiching a processor. The embedded logics were standard “spreadsheet” and it was only a matter of scribing the right data into the right entry fields, after which they propagated automatically. At the table, Donovan tried three light pens before finding one that worked; then hunted through the paperwork to find the forms he really needed, league request for unnatural alien identification and league request for alien identification card usage log. There was even a space for entering the Kennel chit number.

“Unnatural?” said Méarana.

“Not naturalized.” Donovan poised his pen, then hesitated.

“What’s wrong? Did you forget the chit reference number?”

“It’s in the back of my mind,” Donovan complained. “But the Pedant is still in a snit, so he’s not letting it out.” He pulled the lanyard by which the chit hung under his blouse, and read the glowing number off the back side.

When he turned the forms in, the Clerk said, “You haven’t entered an Alien Identification Card Number for the Usage Log Request.”

“I can’t enter the Card Number until you process the Identification Request.”

The Clerk gave him a patient look and handed back the second form. Then, taking the first form, he went to a form reader and inserted it in the scanner.

“What name did you ask after?” the harper asked him.

“Julienne Lady Melisonde. That was the name she used when she and I were scouting the Dalhousie Estates on Old ‘Saken. It’s a shot in the dark. If it works…”

It did. A Julienne Lady Melisonde “of the Banry’s Court” had entered East Cape Circle with High Taran papers nearly three metric years before, exited later that same day. Alien Identification Card Number, thus and so. Donovan copied that onto the second form and handed that one again to the Clerk, who slid it through the reader.

“How did you know…?” Méarana asked.

“‘The whisper of a beautiful woman can be heard farther than the roar of a lion.’ But it was the only other name of hers I knew. And it was one that Gwillgi might not have known of. She used it for just that one scramble. Ah, here come the payoff…” He wagged his green card. “Unnatural Aliens have to deposit funds with a Hansard bank to prove they will not become a burden on the public purse during their stay. Then they use the cards for purchases, hotels, meals, entry swipes to public buildings… This list…” Which he took from the Clerk’s hand. “…should tell us where she went, who she contacted… Here we go… Ah! She went to two places. The Gross Schmuggery—that’s the jewelers’ bourse—and the Planetary Tissue Bank.”

Méarana took the sheet from him and read it. “The jewelers’ bourse. So she was still trying to trace the medallion. But why the Tissue Bank?”

The Director of the Planetary Tissue Bank was a broad-chested man named Shmon van Rwegasira y Gasdro. He was coal-black in complexion, so that his eyes and teeth seemed to float in the air just before his face. He shook hands in the brusque and hearty Hansard fashion and ushered them into an oppressively comfortable sitting room paneled in dark woods and decorated with serious leafy plants on tall column pedestals. Bookcases alternated with pen drawings of vaguely anatomical aspect. He called for a pot of kaff and engaged them in chatty conversation until it arrived. The supreme virtue of the Hansard was comfort, which they called gemoot, and van Rwegasira was a past master of it.

When fellowship had been brought to a proper pitch, the Director asked them what had brought the Kennel to the Tissue Bank. Donovan said, “We are investigating the activities of Julienne Lady Melisonde of High Tara. She came to the Tissue Bank on 17 Herbsmonat, 1176, local. In metric time…”

But the Director waved off the conversion. His holoscreen already displayed the calendar. “Yeah-well… I remember her. It’s unusual for outworlders here to come. To receive two such visitors in quick succession is unheard of.”

“Two,” said Donovan. He exchanged a glance with Méarana. “Who was the second?”

Van Rwegasira pursed his considerable lips and ran his finger down the screen that hovered before him. “That one was, umm. Yeah, here it stands. The other was named Sofwary of Kàuntusulfalúghy.” He looked up and blinked owlishly. “They are not in trouble, are they? You are not hunting them down to, ah….” His grin was at once appalled and fascinated. The Kennel had a reputation in popular culture.

“No. Just the opposite. They may be in danger, and we must warn them.”

The Director looked troubled but nodded. “The Tissue Bank maintains the samples of nearly all residents in the Eastern Cape Circle, as well as of three other Circles with whom we have contracts. This provides to our government a resource-value, both for the health care—for cloning replacement tissues via retrogression to sternly status—and also for the law enforcement—for the matching with the crime scene traces. Our cross-tabulation keys are the finest of their kind and the archives have sometimes been used by regswallers—how do you say it? Rights-wallahs? Lawyers?—yeah-doke, by lawyers, to establish correctly the property-inheritance. Since only five years there stood the well-famous case of the False Hubert of Miggeltally, who claimed rights to the van Jatterjee commercial empire and we…”

Donovan interrupted the public relations speech. “But what of this Sofwari and Lady Melisonde? What was their purpose in coming here? Did they come together?”

Van Rwegasira blinked several times, shook his head. “No. Professor Doctor Doctor Sofwari came on the third of Leafallmonat and spent here six weeks with our dibby manager, making many visits. Genealogical research, by my notes. That is the searching for the ancestors.” The Director shrugged, as if to ask what madness outworlders might be capable of.

“And what of Lady Melisonde?” said Méarana.

The Director worked his lips as he studied his logs. “She appears the same purpose to have had. Mina—she was then my dibby manager—has here that Lady Melisonde was after Sofwari asking. She provided to her a copy of his analysis.” Van Rwegasira looked up from his reading. “That was improper, yeah? We have not the authorization one man’s work to give another. Mina was reprimanded for the infraction, naturally.”

“Then, you’ll not show it to us?” asked Méarana.

“That is another pair of boots! Always, we cooperate with the authorities. I will have a brain immediately filled.” He subvocalized and a light appeared on his holoscreen. “Now, stand there other matters in which we may the Kennel serve? No? Then I will say what a pleasure this has been? Perhaps…” And this he added with exaggerated diffidence. “Perhaps I may mention this service to my colleagues?”

To enhance his prestige among his friends. Donovan imagined him subtly scoring points. As I explained to the agents of the Kennel when they consulted with me… He removed his cap so that the Director could see his scars. “That would not be wise, sir.”

The Director was too dark to go pale, but his eyes widened ever-so-slightly, and he nodded. “Yeah-doke,” he said. He ran a finger across his lips. “No word to any over this.”

“In fact, it would be a good idea to erase any record that this visit even occurred.”

“Of course.”

“It is for your own safety.”

Rwegasira was now plainly sweating. “Yeah-well.”