Up Jim River

JOR (MADHYA)

The Spiral Staircase is unusual among the roads of Electric Avenue, for on its course it crosses the strata of the Spiral Arm. Most roads, for reasons past understanding, remain on particular “tiers” parallel to the galactic plane. The science-wallahs make brave sounds about rotating plasmas and angular momentums and delaminations, but the plain truth is that they do not know, and the brave sounds are to prevent the rest of us from learning that. In consequence, there are stars in the skies that are forever out of reach.

The Spiral Staircase is an exception that tests the rule. A great whorl of plasma, it starts at Ramage, high above the Galactic Plane, corkscrews around Alabaster and Siggy O’Hara down into the Greater Hanse roundabout, and passes below Thistlewaite before climbing again on an extension called the Grand Concourse, whence once more past Siggy O’Hara to Boldly Go, and all the way to Gatmander, where it becomes the Wilderness Road.

“Hurtling Gertie” is bound nonstop to Siggy O’Hara and the harper and the scarred man use the enforced idleness to study the scraps that they have gathered, arranging the pieces this way and that in the hope that they will form a picture.

“Why are we not stopping at Bangtop-Burgenland?” the harper asked when Donovan had announced this change of plan. She sat in a swing chair in the common room of their suite. Her harp nestled in her lap while she tuned it to the third mode.

First-class suites in a Hansard throughliner are broad and spacious and rival the Hadley liners in their luxury. The sofas and settees are low and comfortable and upholstered in fine, soft leather cured from the hides of Megranomic longerhorns. Colorful tapestries covered walls with stags and hunters and mountain streams. Satisfied burghers stared contentedly from engravings. Fine aromas wafted from well-stocked galleys. A team of servants had been assigned to look after their creature comforts, and Billy Chins had with delight taken these in hand. As sahb Avalam’s khansammy his majordomo, he speckled them with instructions, half of which the staff did not comprehend—or affected not to.

“Is easy, mistress harp,” Billy told her as he aimlessly polished and straightened a room already tidied by the now-departed staff. “We stop—pursuit catch us.”

“If there is pursuit. Fudir, are you simply being prudent, or do you have a reason?”

The scarred man curled on one of the settees across the room, with a reading screen in the crook of his arm. A sinuous man when not outright sinister, this twisted posture seemed his natural pose. He wore a saffron housecoat and beaded moccasin slippers provided by the room’s eager stewards. Now and then he touched the corner of the screen so as to page through the text. “I have half a dozen reasons,” he answered without looking up. “And if Donovan weren’t reading this book, I’d have even more.”

Méarana had been looking at Billy and saw understanding there before a mask of studied incomprehension took its place. He has guessed his master’s condition, she thought. “Willeth thou share with us thine reasons,” she asked in an execrable imitation of the Tongue, “or at least one of them?”

Donovan continued to read. Reading wanted eyes, not lips and ears and the scarred man had attentions to spare. The Fudir answered. “We know what your mother was looking for—the source of the medallion. We can be reasonably sure she learned it, and that she went there. What we don’t know is why she thought the medallion important. Or how it was supposed to protect the League against the Confederation.”

“No possible, sahb,” said Billy with a sad shake of his head. “Names much-much addykara, aah… have much-great power. Hold Terra,” he added more softly, and held his hand out as if cupping a ball.

“And this somehow means we don’t stop on Bangtop?” Méarana persisted.

“It means we squirt Bangtop a Kennel inquiry as we pass through the coopers,” the Fudir explained, “and they send a reply via the Circuit, care of High Kaddo Platform at Siggy O’Hara, so it will be awaiting us when we arrive there. Why crawl down and back for something like that? Here, Billy.” He tossed the khitmutgar a packet and a brain. “Take the packet to the concierge and have her queue it for the Bangtop squirt. Two messages: one for the jewelers’ bourse in New Dreading; the other for the tissue bank in Licking Stone.”

“You’ll ask about Sofwari-wallah, too,” said Méarana.

The Fudir made a sound of exasperation. “I’m not old-hammered. Sofwari’s name has come up twice—three times, if he’s the one who left the package on Harpaloon. That’s once or twice too often for my comfort level. Either she was following him or he was following her.” He hesitated and looked up from the book, and Méarana knew that Donovan had joined them.

“How can a man read with all this racket!” He tossed the screen aside.

Méarana knew Donovan meant chatter among his components. Being as fragmented as they were, they tended to rattle when set in motion. Sometimes she wondered how the man could think at all.

“There is a third possibility, you know,” Donovan told them. “Neither was following the other, but both were following the same trail. Sofwari put her onto it. That seems clear. And she probably wanted to cross-check with him when he reached Harpaloon, but they missed connection. Sofwari must have arrived there after she left, thinking he had gotten there first. Otherwise, why leave the brain? But he did arrive first at Dancing Vrouw and departed before she arrived. Even a harper should see why.”

Méarana tuned a few strings. “They went ‘round the Staircase in opposite directions. After they parted on Thistlewaite, Mother came home to do her research. When she returned to Thistlewaite and learned that Sofwari had not waited for her, she went to Harpaloon to intercept him. But he had not gotten there yet. She lost patience and went down the Staircase to Dancing Vrouw.”

Donovan grunted. “And likely, passed Sofwari, who was coming up at the same time. You do understand.”

Méarana strummed a chord, frowned, twisted a key a quarter turn. “I don’t understand any of it. Why did Mother come all the way back to Dangchao to do her research? She could have done most of it from Thistlewaite and left with Sofwari. Why did Sofwari not wait for her on Thistlewaite? Why did it take him longer to reach Harpaloon than Mother allowed for?”

The scarred man showed his teeth. “Oil and water, girl. A Hound is relentless on the scent; but science-wallahs move in fits and starts. How could Sofwari abide on Thistlewaite, while the tissue banks of the Hanse beckoned? But once there, he could linger weeks in study at each depository. There is an unworldliness about his sort that more efficient folk like your mother cannot grasp. It never occurred to her that he would dawdle.” A grunt of laughter was pulled from him and he muttered softly, “Yes, Pedant. I was sure you would understand.”

“But why did Mother ‘dawdle?’ Why did she spend two weeks at home on research she could have done almost anywhere? Ourobouros Thistlewaite was back in-circuit. At worst, she need have gone up the Silk Road no farther than High Tara.”

“Ah.” The scarred man’s smile was like a knife wound. “There was one thing she wanted to access that she could only do on Dangchao.”

“And what was that?”

“You.”

The harper struck a false note, and looked to the scarred man with a surprise that she quickly suppressed. She tucked her head to the harp. “I doubt that,” she murmured, addressing the strings and pretending to tune them.

Donovan nodded to his servant. “What do you think of all this, Billy?”

The khitmutgar flipped his hands ulta-pulta. “No savvy alla runaround. Go here. Go there. Romance, I think.”

“Romance!” said Méarana; and the scarred man cocked his head with interest.

“Why you say that, boy?”

“Sahb! Man chase woman; woman chase man. What other reason ever?”

Donovan barked laughter. “Oh, that would be a fine joke! What weight honor and duty when Kam’deev the Bodyless looses the arrows of love!”

Méarana played a discord. “I’m not certain I like that.”

The scarred man shook himself and pointed at Billy. “Before I forget… That brain I gave you has the dibby that Sofwari left for Bridget ban. It’s nothing but columns of numbers. Actuaries work with statistics and data bases. See if you can parse it.”

Billy studied the brain in his hand, and a shy smile stole across his features. “Oh yes, sahb. Child of Wonder shows much faith in poor Billy Chins. I work this no long time, you see.”

Donovan grunted. “See me when you get back and we’ll discuss it.”

Billy hurried off to do his duty and Méarana said, “Do you think he can do it?”

Donovan spread his hands. “He claims to be good with that sort of thing. Don’t let his dialect fool you.”

Reading and harping then claimed them, and for a time a soft melody floated in the suite’s air. “The Hunt for Bridget ban.” It was a variation on a melody of hers that her mother had especially liked and, playing it, she felt as if the music drew her mother toward her. But she plucked it from the third mode; and Méarana was quite aware of what that signified. Even in its gentler chords the third smacked of anger—more fire, and the yellow bile. She had chosen it without thinking. Yet, until she knew who had wrought her mother’s fate, against whom might the anger be directed?

A few minutes later, Donovan rasped in his throat. Grateful for an excuse to break off a strain that had grown too labored, Méarana stilled her strings with the flat of her hand. “What is it?” she asked him.

Donovan struck the reading screen with his knuckles. “This is an abridged edition of Commonwealth Days—compiled on Ladelthorp eighty metric years ago. The publishing history cites an original edition three hundred and fifty years earlier on Friesing’s World.”

The harper nodded. “And?”

“And which edition did your mother read?”

“Ah.”

Donovan tossed the reader screen aside. “Send another message to your pal, Tenbottles, and ask him to find out. And while he’s at it, check the editions and revs for all the other books as well. Meanwhile, I have to write a summary report for Greystroke and Hugh and drop it on them when we pass through Yubeq.”

Méarana raised her brows. “We’re not holding things back anymore?”

“Of course, we’re holding things back. Only not the same things.”

Mèarana bent over her harp and plucked out a small, cheerful melody to hide her smile. “You ought to become friends again.”

Donovan grunted. “Call it gratitude, for want of something better.”

The harper laughed. “Fudir might be grateful for the Harpaloon sacred books. I doubt Donovan is.”

“It wasn’t that. Or not just that. Greystroke… Never mind what Greystroke did. Using the Hounds is the logical thing to do. The Kennel can better track Sofwari. He cannot have covered his tracks so well as a Hound.”

“And if we find Sofwari, we find Mother!”

“Or we’ll find where she’s buried.”

It wasn’t a fair shot. Donovan had dug deep and pulled the dart from some dark quiver of his mind. She hadn’t been expecting it, and the point sank deep into her. She turned and fled from the common room. Donovan looked away. “But more than likely,” he told the now empty room, “he’s gone missing, too.”

Fifty metric minutes passed before Billy returned, and Donovan had begun to wonder at his absence. When he reappeared, he clutched a message packet in his hand.

“This come for sahb!” he said in a voice as shaky as the hand.

Donovan took the packet and saw that it was addressed only to “the man with the scars upon his head.” And who in the Spiral Arm knew that such a man was aboard Gerthru van Ij?bwode? He grabbed Billy by the blouse. “Where did you get this?” Inner Child gibbered: «The courier! On board!»

“Please, sahb! Message, he find me at concierge. Signal-man not savvy ‘the man with scars’; but he knew you wear him, the skullcap. I say, too, Where you get this? Sahb! He come in upsquirt from Nee Stoggome during the fly-by. How this man send him know you here?”

Donovan studied the packet seal more closely. An external receipt stamp from the signal room. Place of origin, Dancing Vrouw, forwarded via the Circuit, confidential. That meant that the message had been decrypted automatically from a standard “blindside” commercial code. Anxiety drained suddenly from him. He clapped Billy on the shoulder. “Simple, boy! He sent the same message to every ship that left Dancing Vrouw. Place a bet on every number and you win every time!” The scarred man broke the seal and extracted the slip.

DONOVAN, the slip read, TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND IN GLADIOLA BILLS OF EXCHANGE TO YOUR ACCOUNT AT JEHOVAH’S TRUST WHEN YOU ABANDON YOUR USELESS SEARCH.

It was not signed, of course. Its mere existence was signature enough.

“What message say, sahb?”

Donovan shook his head. “It says, ‘Don’t throw me in the briar patch, Bre’er Fox.’” He smiled at Billy and crumpled the message in his fist. “Someone wants to pay me to do something I’ve been aching to do.”

“What was that?” asked Méarana, who had emerged from her room, eyes raw and face red and puffy. She held the harp against her chest like a shield.

Donovan tossed the crumpled message and it arced gracefully into the flash hole, where it flared into ash. “An offer to buy a double-gross of your medallions.”

The harper cocked her head and plucked a few random notes. She said, “A generous offer?”

Donovan nodded. “Very.”

“Then, I suppose, we had better find some.”

Donovan sighed, and closed his eyes, and…

… and the table is dark wood, longer than it is wide, and no less well-wrought for being imaginary. The room it centers is vague and shades off into shadows in which flare dim lamps that cast no pools of illumination and whose muted reflections glimmer in the table’s polished surface. Ten padded, high-backed chairs ring the table and before each lies a pad of smart paper and a light-pen.

Seven of the seats are occupied, each by a version of himself.

Donovan looks around the circle. “Whose idea was this?”

Pedant’s, says the Sleuth. The Sleuth is a whippet of a man, so lean that he seems taller than his companions. Sharp eyes flank a thin, hawk-like nose and confer an aspect of alertness, as his prominent, squarish chin bestows determination.

“I’ve always wondered what you looked like,” says Donovan.

Irony becomes you, the Sleuth responds. Would you like me to describe your self?

“What need? We are identical septuplets, are we not? Only the seemings differ.”

Then, the seeming is what matters. Recall that a man shares all but a fraction of his genes with the chimpanzee. But this does not show how alike are man and chimp, but how little genes matter in things that matter.

Donovan thinks he would have recognized Pedant even without his ponderous pronouncements. His body appears somehow corpulent; his face massive, like a man who has lately enjoyed a very large dinner. His gray, watery eyes give him a dreamy, introspective countenance. He rumbles with laughter. Aristotle compared the act of knowing to the act of eating. In either case, you take something in, and you make it a part of yourself.

It is the sort of irritating “factlet” that Pedant emits like particles from a lump of radium—allieviated only by his periodic sulks, as if he withdrew into a private club where the members never speak to one another.

Donovan’s inner eye flickers from one persona to another. “So, what’s the agenda, and why the elaborate visualization?” He looks to the Fudir, who usually has control of the visual cortex, but the scrambler sits at the far end of the table, his expression masked by distance.

“Will you take the bribe?” the Fudir asks.

“Two hundred kilobills?” Donovan laughs. “Why not?”

To his right, farther down the table, the Brute rumbles. That version of Donovan seems as large as the Pedant, but harder, more solid, yet at the same time lithe and athletic. The hardness extends even to the eyes. We shouldn’t run out on her, he says. Can we be bought for so little?

“It’s not that little. It’s enough to keep Fudir drunk for as long as he likes.”

The Fudir shakes his head. “You’re the one who needs to numb the fear with spirits.”

“Or is it,” says Donovan, “to numb the spirits.”

“A nice play. But, which spirits?”

“The spirits of the past who haunt your present.”

“Bastard.”

“And it’s less that we abandon her, Brute, but that she abandons her.”

Méarana will never abandon her mother. Beside the Brute sits a veiled figure who speaks with a silky and seductive voice.

“Do you think so? She’s on the edge of retribution even now. The smallest push…”

Retribution? For what?

“How often has Bridget ban abandoned the harper? Why not return the favor just this once?”

Is morality transitive, then? Does her abandonment justify ours?

Bridget ban was sent on assignments, says the Sleuth. That’s not abandonment.

“A touching faith in logic, Sleuth. But it’s not what something is that matters, it’s what that something seems. I never said she intended to abandon the quest. I said she felt entitled to do so.”

The Fudir speaks from the far end of the table. “How would you know how she feels, Donovan? You’d need feelings of your own to recognize them in others.”

Donovan cocks his head. “Perhaps you ought to ask Pedant to purge those memories. The ghosts seem to bother you.”

“Not his memories to purge. What of your ghosts? You’re the one Those tortured. I slept through the whole thing. Small wonder you run in fear.”

A smaller version of Donovan, one with large, wide eyes and prominent ears, slips from his chair and scampers about the perimeter of the room. From the ill-defined darkness come the sound of door latches jiggling, of bolts shutting home. «The courier hasn’t caught up yet; but we should bar the doors.»

“Those aren’t real doors, Child,” Donovan chides him.

«And Zorba… Zorba will hunt us down if we abandon her!»

“If we bring her back safe, Zorba has no complaint coming.”

“And what of Bridget ban,” says the Fudir, “and her discovery? Does Zorba not want those as well?”

“His threat covered only the harper,” Donovan answers. “If he wanted a broader contract, he should have laid out the terms more clearly. Let it go, Fudir. Bridget ban is gone. Zorba knew that. Eventually, even Méarana will know it. And whatever she discovered—or thought she had discovered—is best left lost. Weapons that save the world have the power to wreck it.”

Don’t be so sure.

“Sure of what, Sleuth? That she’s dead? Or that dreadful weapons should be left alone?”

That the courier has been left behind.

“Ahh. Don’t let that message spook you. You’re reading too much between the lines.”

That’s what intelligence means. Inter legere, in the old, dead Romavasi tongue. “To read between.”

Surely, a man smart enough to send messages to every ship is intelligent enough to learn on which ship it found its mark.

“You don’t expect they’ll really pay up, do you?” says Fudir. “Two hundred thousand Bills, just to go home and drink? We used to do that for free. The likelier payment is knives between our ribs, not bills between our fingers.”

«If Those of Name know that Bridget ban was tracking down some sort of weapon against them, why would They give up the quest even if we do, even if Méarana does, even if Bridget ban failed?»

“What matter? We’d be out of it—back on Jehovah, the harper back on Dangchao. Off the bull’s-eye.”

No. If Bridget ban found the weapon before They killed her, They would already have it. But if They killed her before she found it—or if the finding of it killed her—They don’t yet know where it is, either.

Donovan says, “That the finding is what killed her is not the best argument you could have mustered for pressing the search.”

Think it through, Donovan. If the harper is the best handle for tracking Bridget ban, and hence for finding the weapon, how long before Those come for her? And who will be there to protect her?

Silence descends upon the group, into the midst of which the Fudir eventually drops the comment, “Zorba would not like that.”

“What! Are we to look after her for the rest of her life?”

That would seem the logical deduction.

And are we not duty-bound to do so?

“No proof of that. If the harper stirred a pot, that’s her look-out, not ours. She’s no child, to escape the consequences of her own decisions.”

“Oh, that we could escape the consequences of ours!”

“It’s a tough Spiral Arm. No one ever promised safety or success.”

You can’t mean that!

“Can’t I? All in favor of taking the money, raise your hand.”

Ghostly images raise hands: Donovan, Inner Child, Sleuth.

“Sleuth!” says the Fudir.

It’s the rational course.

“Damn reason! But that leaves four opposed.”

He, the Brute, and the Silky Voice raise their hands—in consequence of which all eyes turn to the Pedant.

But the ponderous body shakes the massive head. I am facts, and to take the bribe or not cannot be answered with facts. “Is” does not equal “Should.” Neither logic nor fear nor sentiment nor brute strength nor any other fragment of who we once were can provide an answer. Rather, the contrary.

Three to three with one abstention.

The Fudir raps knuckles on the table. “The point is moot. We can do nothing until Siggy O’Hara. I say we accompany her within the Circuit. Anything we learn, we can turn over to Greystroke and Hugh.”

Just a question here, but anyone else wondering about the empty seats at this table? Pedant, you set this up. Why ten chairs?

The massive face appears startled. I did not realize… I did. Like the Brute, the Sleuth had access to the sensory inputs. “Why do ten imaginary chairs matter more than seven?” says Donovan. Child, you have the imagination. Did you…? «Not me, Silky. I’m the Guardian. I imagine threats.» Yeah? Too many of’ em, you ask me… Impatient with the chattering, Donovan opens his eyes and…

… and he was back in the common room, to find that he had staggered slightly and that the harper had grabbed a hold of his arm to keep him from falling. “Are you all right?” Méarana asked, and Donovan saw his opening and ducked into it.

“How… long was I out?” he asked, with more confusion than he ought.

“A few moments. You muttered.”

Donovan imitated a chuckle. “Good old Fudir. He does run on. I… don’t feel well.” He allowed her to lead him back to the settee and lower him gently into it.

“Billy,” she said, “fetch sahb Donovan an orange juice.” While the khitmutgar rushed to do her bidding, Méarana arranged pillows around the scarred man. “Better?”

Donovan tried to speak, only to find the Fudir holding his tongue. His voice slurred like that of a man following a seizure. The Fudir realized that this only abetted Donovan’s plans, and let go. “Yes,” Donovan choked out. “Better. Thank you, boy.” He drank the proffered juice, handed back the empty glass. “Méarana… I think this journey is taking too much from me. I’m tired and confused. We should lay over for a time, recover my strength.” He wheezed for effect, trying not to overdo it.

The harper sat across from him and leaned her arms on her knees. “Do we dare? What of the Confederate courier?”

“Oh, mistress,” Billy sang from the sink, where he was cleaning the glass. “He follow long Lola Hadley to Jemson’s Moon. Sahb Donovan tell so.”

“No,” Donovan replied. “He’ll query Lola over the Circuit, and by now they know we’re not aboard… It will take a while. Lola can communicate only while passing through encircuited systems. So we have a lead on him, but he’ll untangle the skein eventually and…” He enclosed both her hands in his. “I don’t know what I can do when he catches up.”

“Maybe we should have…”

“What?”

Méarana disengaged. She looked away. “Maybe we should have accepted Greystroke’s offer and turned everything over to him.” She would not look at him and her hands worked a harp she did not hold.

Donovan spoke as if in reluctant admission. “Greystroke and Hugh have better resources… Why mind the stove, if they will cook the meal?” Donovan had never believed that the harper was chasing after Bridget ban “because a daughter knows her mother.” What daughter has ever known that? She was chasing Bridget ban because she was chasing Bridget ban; and had been chasing her all her life. “Let it go.”

The challenge struck hard. Donovan could almost see the fracture lines streak across the quartz of her resolve. He could almost see her crack; and he knew that the next words she spoke would be to abandon the quest.

“When we reach Siggy O’Hara,” she said. And Donovan waited for her to finish, but she only shook her head and turned away before she could weep, and retired to her own quarters.