Up Jim River

II. A MAN OF PARTS

The scarred man’s breakfast had gone as cold as his heart, but he mopped up the last of the beans, chewed down the last strip of fatty bacon, and washed it all down with an acrid gulp of uiscebeatha. He had sent the harper off with his refusal in her ears, and yet, quantum-like, it entangled also on his tongue, so that he could taste nothing of his meal. Praisegod always served the worst whiskies first, in the hope that it would drive clients off the creature, but this morning the fire lit the scarred man’s throat and belly almost as an afterthought.

“That was a terrible thing to do,” he said.

A Gladiola ark-master passing by the niche turned startled eyes toward him. The voice had seemed to come disembodied out of the shadows. Perhaps he wondered what terrible thing it was that he had done, and who it was who had caught him out at last.

“What did she expect us to do?” Donovan answered. “Drop everything and run off on a goose chase across the whole Spiral Arm?”

“Drop everything?” the Fudir answered in a slightly different voice, and gestured around the table, as if to encompass the “everything” that they would have to drop.

The goose is of high value, a part of him said. There are those who would be grateful for the finding of her.

And the puzzle is a pretty one, the Sleuth commented.

“The answer is ‘out on the edge,’” Donovan said. “We’re safe here in the center.”

There is such a thing as honor. Honor has some value.

“Great value,” said the Fudir, “it being rare.” The Fudir seldom heard that silky, seductive voice. He wondered how many others were lurking. Somewhere in the back of his mind there was a rustling, as of dried leaves in the winds of autumn.

I’m bored. Do one thing or the other; but decide.

That voice, he did recognize. He and Donovan called him the Brute. In their artful carvings of Donovan’s psyche, Those of Name had thought physical prowess would be as useful as cleverness and reason and seduction.

“Go back to sleep,” Donovan told the Brute. “Later, we’ll go out and cruise the Corner.”

I liked her. She was taking action.

Foolish action.

And so?

You owe it to her.

“We owe no one,” said Donovan. “It’s the rest of them that owe us everything.”

Praisegod had come by with a fresh bowl of uiscebeatha. “You owe me” he said offhandedly, “and that’s for certain. You run a tab.”

The Fudir laughed. “They all think we’re crazy.”

“Are they wrong?” said Praisegod. He gathered up the empty bowls and left, chuckling to himself.

“I don’t know why we’re even discussing this,” Donovan said. “Think about it. You, too, Brute, if you can. In all the Spiral Arm, who has the nuts to make a Hound disappear?”

That entrained an uncomfortable silence, broken only by the gentle hissing of an unheard wind. The Fudir shivered, as if the moon had passed behind a leafless tree.

And so what if it is Those? the Brute demanded, though with less bravado.

“If anyone beside the Confederacy has the skill to take on a Hound,” Donovan insisted, “I’ll be glad to hear.” He waited a few beats, but his inner voices were silent. “Do you want to risk Those laying hands on us again?”

What more could they do to us? asked the Sleuth, attempting insouciance.

“Do you want to find out?”

The Brute laughed.

You all know why we should help her.

The Fudir turned a little in the niche so that he could stare at the wall and not at the milling crowd in the Barroom. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

You loved her mother once.

“Once was enough. And, besides, that was nearly twenty years ago.”

Yes. Exactly.

“That was you who slept with her,” Donovan said. “I missed the whole thing.”

“Don’t complain. It was less a lark than it sounds.”

“Why not complain? I’ve had an obligation laid on me without the pleasure of incurring it.”

It would be, allowed the Sleuth, something of a coup to rescue a Hound. Gratitude can loosen purses.

Or loosen belts. Then you could have the pleasure you missed out on before.

The Fudir knew a sudden stab of jealousy. He could not have her again. There would be too many watching, too many participating.

«Don’t go. I’m afraid.»

And the Fudir shivered in fear unadulterated, in terror unfiltered. The niche he sat in was suddenly a trap. There was no escape. The doors were far away.

Donovan sighed. “Holy Saint Freud, who woke Inner Child?”

Boo! said the Brute and laughed at the frisson of fear on the backwash.

Go to sleep, Child.

“I suppose,” said Donovan, “that she’s out in the Spaceport looking to charter a ship.”

The logical course, said the Sleuth, is to go to High Tara first. The Kennel must know from where she last reported. And they might know why she had gone out. Knowing why is the first clue to knowing where.

Gwillgi said nothing.

Would he have, if he knew? He was collecting information, not disbursing it.

The Fudir dropped his empty bowl to the table. “Big dhik, sahbs, but it’s no use. Can you think of anyone else we could trust to help her?”

“I can’t think of anyone,” said Donovan, “let alone an’ else.’ Whatever Bridget ban encountered, it would not likely be something from which the likes of us could save her.”

Then how much less so her daughter alone? Would you send the harper out to deal with Confederate agents?

“The chances of two snowballs in hell are not appreciably greater than those of one.”

“You can’t hide here from the CCW forever,” the Fudir reminded him.

“I’m not hiding. I’m bunkered up. Jehovah is the first place Those would look.”

«It’s been a long time. No one’s come. Maybe they’ve forgotten.»

Donovan said nothing. Those of Name had forgotten many things, but he was certain they had not forgotten him. They had hobbled his mind for a reason. The Fudir nodded agreement. Years before, he had believed himself forgotten. But Those had summoned him at last. There had been an agent of theirs, a tall slim woman who had used the name Ravn Olafsdottr. She had come as back-up to awaken Donovan if the prime agent failed. The scarred man recalled as if in faded and colorless holograms old days spent with Greystroke and Little Hugh… and Bridget ban. Those had been…” interesting times.”

More interesting than drinking all day, and running scrambles in the Corner at night.

Somewhere in his mind: a rumble of laughter like the onset of a distant storm.

He had met Olafsdottr only that one time, when they had both been enslaved by January’s Dancer and the only escape lay in awakening the unaffected Donovan persona. Your dooty then is yoor dooty now, she had said in her hooting Alabaster accent. And Donovan had emerged and taken over and the Fudir had spent a long time afterward in the dark.

“Tough,” said Donovan. “Think how many years I spent bundled away. I’m the prime, the original. The rest of you are only the pencil shavings of my mind.”

“So you say,” the Fudir told him. But the rejoinder sounded weak, even to himself.

The uisce’s gone, the Brute pointed out. What do we do, order more, or…?

“We’ll go with her as far as High Tara,” said the Fudir. “What risk in that?”

To all appearances the scarred man had frozen in place and muttered to himself for a few minutes. Those who knew him paid him no mind, and this had reassured those who did not. Now he pushed his bowl aside and rose from the table.

Praisegod looked his way and his eyebrows rose. “In the daylight?”

The scarred man wended his way through the milling throng. He had a way of moving—supple and balanced—that enabled him to slip through crowds with a minimum of delay and at a modest profit. When he reached the bar, he slapped someone’s ten-shekel note down. “I’ll need your prayers, friend Praisegod. I’m going aloft among the heathens.”

“I’ll pray for them. A decent heathen is hard to find.”

The Fudir smiled through the scarred man’s eyes and bowed Terran-style over his folded hands. “Nandri, sahb. I go jildy now. You sell less-less whiskey me gone.”

“You always leave,” said the Bartender, “but you always come back.” He touched his fingers to his temple with his palm facing out. “Sah!”

As the Fudir reached the door, Praisegod picked up the ten-shekel note and stuffed it in a shirt pocket, and he said softly, “And perhaps a prayer for you, as well.” But the Fudir pretended not to hear him.

Outside, the harper waited, leaning against the building with her arms folded.

The Fudir grunted as she fell in step with him. “Don’t look so smug.”