Up Jim River

AN AISTEAR

Departing Dancing Vrouw, the harper finally achieves her wish. She and the scarred man and their servant travel first class on the Hansard liner, Gerthru van Ijebwode, Hanower to Siggy O’Hara. A splendid ship, it sports that combination of fashion, comfort, and social vanity for which the Greater Hanse is justly famed: Never has cloth so flattered human form; never has palate been so sumptuously pleased; never have manners and status been flaunted with such deadly purpose.

The appointments are luxurious, and even steerage would excite envy. Decor favors the ornate fashions of the Hanse. Serious portraits and scenes of nature and sport alternate with shelves full of knickknack and scrimshaw. Among the more bookish folk of Ramage or Hawthorne Rose, the Hansards are accounted unspeakably vulgar; but a Hansard merchant prince can buy or sell half of Ramage and take Hawthorne Rose as pocket change; so what do they care?

“The best disguise,” the scarred man told the harper at lunch the first day, “is the truth, so long as it be not the whole truth.” He had by nature an aversion to wholeness, and was partial to partial truths. Being smaller, they fit better in his mouth.

Donovan had acquired for the duration the guise of Avalam of New Chennai. This caused Billy no end of amusement, for in the Terran patois Avalam meant “a noise made with the mouth in defiance.” Ostensibly, he had an agreement with House van Abimbola to locate and deliver jewelry in the style of Méarana’s medallion.

This was the partial truth. Donovan actually did have such a contract. Inquiries at the Great Shmuggery had uncovered no further clues on the medallion’s origin, but they had aroused the interests of several importers.

“I understand the precaution,” said the harper, now Ariel pen Drehon of New Cornwall.

“Billy no samjaw,” said the khitmutgar as he poured the wine for them. While the ship was well-staffed for the comforts of her first-class passengers, these often traveled with their personal servants. In the background a string orchestra played pleasant incidental music; waiters circulated with dimsum carts bearing small portions on small plates.

Méarana assaulted once more the ramparts of his ignorance. “You see, Billy, when the courier reaches Pròwenshwai and learns we’ve gone, he’ll check all the departing passenger manifests.”

“He think we chel with Hound,” the pudgy little man announced. “Old Terry kahavata. ‘Thou goest with the one who brought thee.’” His teeth showed.

Donovan had taken the measure of those ramparts, and knew them unscalable. “Thou art the very Bood of wisdom,” he told him, sweeping his hand over the servant in the Sign of the Wheel.

“Don’t mock,” said the harper. “It’s a reasonable guess. But, Billy, the man will nolangtaim learn that we were still in the hotel after Greystroke left the system. So we must have left on a commercial liner.”

“But why we buy two tickets? We go twice as fast?”

“The other tickets were in our own names,” she said. “When he finds them, the agent will think we left on Lola Hadley for Jemson’s Moon.”

Billy’s eyes turned white and round. “We go Jemson’s Moon? That much budmash place.”

“No, Billy, we go Siggy O’Hara.”

The servant’s eyes welled up. “I am confused.”

Méarana sighed, but she did not engage Donovan’s I-told-you-so smirk. “Billy… Don’t take this the wrong way, but… What did you do in the Corner of Preeshdad?”

For the first time since she had met him, Billy showed animation. His hands took life, defined with their trajectories the circumference of his answers. “Oh! I sell insurance, me. Explain risk analysis, premiums, benefits. Price cheap; but goods big-big.”

“Billy,” said Donovan, “if you try to sell me an insurance policy, I’ll dismiss you, and you’ll have to kill yourself.”

By now Billy was certain Donovan would do no such thing; or almost certain. “Ha, ha,” he said. “Master much funnyman. No sell policy you. Risk too great.”

Now it was Donovan’s turn to say, “Ha, ha.”

“Policy very simple,” the Terran continued. “I tell dukandar merchants how much they pay for we not spoil him, the shop.”

The harper found her voice. “Billy! You ran a protection scramble? That is terrible!”

“Oh, no, lady harp,” he protested. “Terran Protection Service, Limited, good value. No let’ Loonie gangs burnim dukan, kill dukandar. That big dhik!”

The scarred man laughed and slapped the table so that silverware complained. “A protection scramble that actually sells protection… You’re well away from that, Billy. If you protect shopkeepers from’ Loon gangs, sooner or later the’ Loon gangs get you. As one almost did.”

Billy Chins acknowledged the memory by grasping the scarred man’s right hand and laying kisses on it. “Sahb Donovan most-blessed!”

Donovan yanked his hand back. “My name is Avalam. Try to remember.”

“I understand the false names and the decoy tickets,” said the harper, “but why maintain the charade on board ship? The Confederate couldn’t have reached Pròwenshwai in time to board ‘Hurtling Gertie,’ even if he guessed we were on her. And if he were on board, the pretense of the names would not survive the prospect of your scalp.”

The scarred man did not answer right away. A plate of “invention” sat before him: the flesh of deer enhanced with a dark, mushroomy yeagersauce. After a while, he placed his fork on the plate with the morsel still impaled. “There are only two kinds of people: the careful and the dead.”

“And you are not dead—at least in some respects.”

Donovan’s grin cut through the scarred man’s lips. “The Purser knows us by our ticketed names. It will be less confusing to him, and draw less attention to us, if we continue using them. Otherwise, he may remark the matter in official reports; and these will run back to the Vrouw, and into the courier’s ear.”

The harper nodded slowly, glanced at Billy, who anxiously took that as a command to refill everyone’s water glass.

On the dance floor, the luncheon entertainment had begun. Scantily clad women leapt about, swirled their silk veils to wild music, and rhythmically slapped their shoes and short leather pants. For a time, the harper and her companions watched, each immersed in thought. And while Billy’s thoughts as he followed the dancers’ undulations were easily read, Donovan’s were farther away. Méarana asked to hear them.

“Your mother’s breadcrumbs,” he answered. “I understand the witch’s prudence in leaving a trail, and even her caution in making it hard to find. But so far as I know, only three people know she ever called herself Lady Melisonde.”

“Then she expected one of you eventually to follow her.”

“So it would seem.”

“So which bothers you more? That she might have left the trail for Greystroke or Little Hugh—or that she might have left it for Donovan?”

The scarred man went rigid and a conflict raged through his features. He began to mutter, both hands gripping the table’s edge. Billy rose. “I fetch doctor, jildy,” he said.

But the harper held him back and he sank slowly back into his seat. “It is only a way he has about him,” she said.

“Sahb Donovan much sick.”

“Yes.” The harper turned reflective. “I should not have brought him out here.”

“Why you do that to sick man, then?” Anger informed Billy’s moon-face.

She sighed. “I don’t know, Billy. I really don’t. I thought… maybe I owed it to him.” But what she meant by this was not for a stranger’s ears.

On the second day out, their steward informed them of the Second Officer’s invitation to sit at his table. Proper attire was required; but it was a big Spiral Arm and “proper” covered a wide range of attire. Donovan decided to wear the same outfit he had worn to the palace in Jenlùshy since it was still resident in the anycloth’s memory.

But in rummaging through the valise in which he had stuffed it he discovered two ceramic cassettes, each about the size of his hand, tucked in a pocket in the valise. One was white, the other white with red stripes. Inner Child recoiled, thinking them bombs planted somehow by the Confederate courier, and the scarred man ended in the undignified position in which the harper, rushing in, found him.

“What happened?” she cried. “Are you hurt?”

Only in his dignity; but he said nothing. Instead he pulled the two packets from the valise and examined them more closely. “What are those things?” the harper asked.

Donovan noted dataports of antique design. Something plugs in here, the Sleuth noted. And something else there. Faded writing ran across the shells. On the one, a script much like the curlicues of the old Tantamiz on the other, madly jambled curls and hooks and dots unlike anything he had seen before. Or had he?

Hah, said the Pedant. Sometimes you need the old fart, don’t you? Achilles emerging from his tent could not have edged his voice with greater triumph.

“Where have we seen script like this before?” Donovan asked. He aimed the question at the Pedant, but received an answer from the harper.

“Why, those are the border decorations on the signage in Preeshdad!”

The scarred man’s anger was two-dimensional. One dimension was the anger of the Pedant at being upstaged. The other was the anger of Donovan at the ease with which a unified mind could process what to him came only through wrangles. Had the Fudir not insulted the Pedant, had the Pedant not sulked, he would have recognized the matter straight-off.

Méarana took one of the cassettes from him and tried to read the ancient Tantamiž. “Vu-ra-gith,” she said haltingly.

“Birakid,” Donovan said in sudden recognition. He rocked back on his heels as he realized what he had found so cunningly inserted in his goods. “Birakid Shee’us Nakopthayiní. The Specklings-Down of the Headmen.”

The harper started and dropped the cassette, but the Beast caught it on the fall.

“The Holy Books of Harpaloon!” she said. “How did they…?”

The scarred man’s smile was grim, but there was a touch of genuine happiness in it. “A parting gift from Little Hugh. He and Greystroke must have overheard my wish to read one.”

Inner Child feared reprisals from the devotees, but the Fudir reassured him. “There are supposed to be hundreds of these books. Hugh is smart enough to leave a dummy behind. They may never realize that two are missing.”

“But how,” Méarana said, “may one read them?”

The scarred man studied the antique dataports, and the Sleuth shook his head. “Long-forgotten technologies,” Donovan said. He sighed and tossed the cassettes to his bed. “Our remotest ancestors poked reeds into mud and baked the mud into brick. We can still read those ancient thoughts, millennia later. But it seems that the greater the technology, the more ephemeral it becomes. There is a lesson there, harper. But what, I do not know.”