Up Jim River

VII. THE FREEDOM OF CHOICE

A certain freedom comes from the abandonment of obligation; a sense of boundlessness from the lack of bonds. So the remainder of the transit to Siggy O’Hara ran more carelessly than had the initial part. A kind of melancholy settled over Méarana’s playing, not only in what she played privately in their suite, but even in what she performed in the first-class lounge at Captain-Professor van Lyang’s request. A sweet sadness informed her choice of mode and tempo. Méarana, it seemed, had begun to accept the facts.

Except that Bridget ban’s death was not yet a fact, as the Pedant periodically reminded everyone. It was merely a reasonable abstraction from the facts that the Sleuth had drawn. Yet no one loved a puzzle better than the Sleuth and from time to time the scarred man found himself unwillingly wondering how that death might have come about.

Inner Child was just as happy not to know, because to learn it they would have to track the Hound to the end of her trail; and the closer they approached that end, the closer they would approach their own.

No, the best of all possible worlds was that Méarana resign herself to reality and abandon the quest. That would satisfy Zorba—and those who had offered the bribe.

There lingered, too, the possibilities that the Confederates had learned of Bridget ban’s objective, that they would not pay the bribe, that they would not leave Méarana unmolested. Donovan told himself not to worry over the future, although as the Fudir reminded him, the future was all that one could worry over. You may forget your cares, he told Donovan, not without a little satisfaction, but do not be so sure that those cares will forget you.

Meanwhile, he resigned himself to too much keening of the goltraí from the harper’s clairseach and to wondering from time to time why there had been three empty chairs at an imaginary table. He could see but three possibilities: That he had lost parts of his mind and had forgotten even which they were; that there were emergent fragments yet unrealized; or that the Pedant had been careless in imagining the boardroom. He settled on the third possibility as being the most comforting; but the Fudir reminded him, too, that while the truth set you free, it seldom did so in comfort.

And so they came to Siggy O’Hara, a world named after an ancient battle on Olde Earth, in which a Duke O’Gawa had defeated “Toy” O’Tommy. The very reasons, let alone the passions, of that battle had been long forgotten, but every local autumn, O’Haran nations staged mock combats in which fantastically armored reenactors fired off cannon and muskets and swung long, two-handed swords. It was all great fun and hardly anyone was ever killed. Scholars fretted over authenticity and thought the armor used was an anachronous mixture of ancient Yùrpan and Nìpný fashion. They doubted that the two original armies had painted their armor blue and gray, or even that they had worn turbans. But authenticity had never been a concern of the reenactors. It was an autumn celebration, a last carouse of color before dead winter.

The harper, the scarred man, and their servant Billy Chins left the “Hurtling Gertie” at High Kaddo Platform in the O’Haran coopers, and checked into the Hotel of the Summer Moon under their own names, there to await passage to Ramage on the upper curl of the Spiral Staircase, whence to Jehovah, and home. Far below them, the Siggy sun was a pinpoint, brighter than most and with a faintly crimson cast.

Harping was less iconic among the O’Harans than in most of the Periphery. In olden days, the system had been isolated from the mainstream and had developed its own peculiar traditions and musics. Only with the Opening of Lafrontera had history caught up with her. Traffic had coursed through from Alabaster and the older inward worlds, like the wave front of an explosion. The settling of Wiedermeier’s Chit, Sumday, and other worlds had been an unsettling period for the O’Harans. Long-standing customs had teetered and very nearly toppled. Though never as wild as Harpaloon on even a quiet day, Siggy O’Hara had afterward, tortoise-like, pulled in her head, and vowed that such times would never come again. Commerce with the rest of the League was tightly controlled by the “Back Office” of the McAdoo.

Days passed while they awaited a ship to take them to Alabaster and Ramage. None with open berths were scheduled, but Donovan visited the shipping office each morning in case new vessels had been logged on the Big Board. Most of Lafrontera was outside the Circuit—Siggy O’Hara was its outermost station—and inbound ships oft gave no notification other than swift boats dispatched down the roads ahead of them. Ships might arrive only hours behind their beacons. Not long ago, all traffic had operated that way.

While they tarried, a message caught up with them from Little Hugh, confirming that “Lady Melisonde” had contacted the tissue banks at Licking Stone, Bangtop, and there, too, she had obtained a duplicate of the files copied by Debly Jean Sofwari and “thank you for telling us about the science-wallah.” If that last had been intended sarcastically, it did not come across in the machine-printed code groups in which the message had been couched.

“You guessed right,” he told Méarana at lunch that day in the hotel’s restaurant. “Sofwari was on Bangtop while your mother was at home prepping. He went the long way ‘round and she tried to head him off.”

“Was he trying to evade her, or had they planned to meet?” the harper asked. “Thank you, Billy.” The khitmutgar had interposed himself between the station’s staff and his masters, taking the serving dishes from the waiters and spooning portions onto their plates.

“It’s Greystroke’s problem now,” Donovan said.

Méarana pursed her lips and dropped her eyes. “I suppose so.”

“That nogut, lady harp,” Billy said. “Pickny-meri always belong mama. No one-time never have em.” He screwed his brow a moment in thought, then said, enunciating very carefully, “Daughter, she belong always to mother. Never give up.”

“Billy!” Donovan said sharply. “It has already been decided.”

The khitmutgar cringed. “No beat him, poor Billy. Not Billy’s place, talk him so.”

Méarana looked sharply at Donovan, but said nothing. She turned to Billy. “It’s not final,” she told him, “until we board a ship. Donovan, what else did Hugh have to say?”

The scarred man’s eyes dropped to the decoded text. Gwillgi had been alerted and was asking questions on Kàuntusulfalúghy, in case they knew where Sofwari was. I could have done that, the Sleuth told him, if I had realized his importance earlier. Pedant stuffs his facts away like a magpie. I can’t reason from what I don’t know.

A poor workman blames his tools.

The scarred man’s fist clenched. Quiet! The both O’ youse!

And so before Donovan could answer Méarana—nothing of consequence—she had plucked the message slip from his hand and read it. “Maybe Gwillgi can learn something,” she said.

“He’ll learn that Sofwari never reconnected with Bridget ban. A blind alley.”

“But we may learn,” she said with some of the earlier excitement in her voice, “what Sofwari was searching for, which had something to do with what she was searching for.”

“Let the Kennel roll over the rocks. Something may crawl out.”

She looked at Hugh’s message again. “What does he mean in the postscript: ‘Fudir, what is the Treasure Fleet?’”

Donovan snorted. “It means he is playing the game, too. He learned something on Bangtop and isn’t telling us what it is.”

“Then there is something to learn! What is the Treasure Fleet?”

Donovan snatched the message back. “How should I know?” But he felt a stir in the back of his mind and thought that the Pedant had some bright ribbon of fact tucked away back in his nest.

Later, Méarana, concerned that the scarred man was sinking back into the glum haze in which she had initially found him, pried him from the comfortable chair in which he preferred to await, drinking soggy, the arrival of a ship inward bound for Alabaster. “Let’s go for a walk, old man,” she insisted. “Let Billy have some time to himself.”

“He doesn’t have a self,” the scarred man retorted. “I have it. Right here.” And he clenched his left hand into a ball, as if crushing some small and inconsequential object.

But she persevered, and eventually Donovan threw on a cloak and placed a skullcap on his head and followed her out of the room. Billy, who sat at the dining table with a portable’ face, looked up from the screen with a question in his eyes.

“The Fudir and I are going to the Starwalk, Billy.” This was a cue to the scarred man that Donovan would not be welcome. “We’ll be back for dinner. We’ll eat in the restaurant, so you don’t need to cook anything.” In truth—though she would never say such a thing to his face—Billy favored Terran foods, which she found peculiar in flavor.

“It lacks the True Coriander,” the Fudir explained when she mentioned this on the esplanade and they had turned their steps toward the Grand Erebata.

“And what is the True Coriander? You told me once, but I’ve forgotten.”

The Fudir’s look became distant. “No man knows. We find it in some ancient recipes, but whether vegetable, meat, herb, or a mineral like salt, who knows? It grew only on Olde Earth and its secret has long been lost.” He shrugged. “What we really mean when we say that, is ‘all that we have lost since we lost Terra, and all that we hope once more to have.’”

The Grand Erebata was an oval atrium that ran end to end through the hotel, and from whose rim jutted diving platforms. Low-g gravity grids at one focus of the ellipse were on the roof; at the other focus on the mezzanine, so that one could leap out into the great open space and fall leaf-gentle in whichever direction one chose. When Méarana hesitated at the brink and looked toward the mezzanine twelve storeys below, the Fudir growled and reminded her that they were in free fall and “down” was an aesthetic choice. “Why do you think they only allow these things in free-falling habitats?”

And so she leapt. And fell upward. Whatever the Fudir had said, it felt like up, since the residential floors she passed all shared a common orientation. Gradually, she gathered speed. The god Newton is not mocked. But she had called out her destination when she leapt and the tracers directed counter-grids that slowed her so that she alighted like a dancer on the Star-walk level.

The Fudir was waiting. Méarana slipped her hand through the crook of his arm and they set off around the galleria that circled the “top” floor of the hotel. Faux-windows enclosed them on all sides but the inboard. These reproduced the vista beyond the hotel’s shielding and served all the purposes of windows without the hazard of placing a thin pane of glass between hotel guests and hard vacuum. And so they walked, it seemed, through a great glass torus.

While nearby stars were individual points of yellow and white and red and blue, they were no more than free particles thrown off by a great slurry: the Spiral Arm. In that great Core-ward swath of light, individual stars were lost, no more than bricks in a great white wall.

“The Orion Arm,” she said, pointing this out. “It’s like there is no Rift between us.”

“Oh, the Rift is real enough. From Ramage, you can see it clearly. But their ‘Orion Arm’ is only a part of our Perseus Arm split off by the Rift. Or so the Pedant tells me. This view… You get a sense of how small the League and the Confederation are. The vast majority of those stars out there have never shone on human folly.”

“‘It’s a big Spiral Arm.’ That’s what they always say. Oh, look! That bright star. The display says it’s Siggy Sun. It looks so far away. Yet, we’re in Siggy System.”

“Those stars,” he said, as if not hearing. “They are not only leagues away; they’re years ago. This is a vista of time, as well as space. Blind Rami, were he visible from this angle, would be Blind Rami two centuries ago. Jehovah, a millennium. They are not even contemporary. There are thriving worlds out there where, had we’ scope enough, we would see barren wastes, because this light, here, today, is from a time before they were even terraformed.”

They had begun their perambulation, slowly clockwise around the torus, as was the custom. Now and then, they stopped to activate a placard identifying this or that distant sight. The Crab Nebula, looking not much like a crab from this direction, hung off in the galactic west, just within the borders of the ULP.

Several large telescopes, called “Hummels,” were mounted to High Kaddo Station, and these fed special images to the faux-windows. By touching a spot, that portion of the skyscape would swell in magnification as the Hummels obediently redirected themselves. The Fudir summoned a close-up of the Crab.

“It’s as if we zoom out into the cosmos,” said the delighted harper. Then, “It’s quite beautiful.”

“It’s much larger than the Crab they once saw on Olde Earth. That was a much younger nebula. In fact, they actually saw it born, though they didn’t know it at the time. You see, there was once a star there—a massive, giant star, ‘so it is said.’ Then, about the dawn of human civilization, the star exploded and collapsed into something the science-wallahs call a pulsing star. It’s deep in the heart of the nebula to this day, spinning like a madman and strewing his dusty remnants all over that sector—the Badlands, it’s called. It tangles up the roads; so no one goes there, except to mine helium. But light takes six millennia to make the Newtonian crawl from the Crab to the Earth so it did not light the sky there until Old Year 1054. Zhõgwó sages made note of it. Later still, when they could measure such things, the Murkan wallahs found it already eleven light-years wide. That’s Earth-years. Today, from Earth, it would appear to be forty light-years wide. But if you actually went over there, you would see that it’s more like seventy light-years wide, and still dispersing. That was one hell of a firecracker.”

Closer by, he picked out the sun of Alabaster for her. “He’s the next star up the Spiral Staircase,” he explained. “Other stars are closer to Siggy across the Newtonian flats, but a ship would take centuries to reach them, so in a paradoxical way they are actually farther away. Some say there are undiscovered turnoffs and byways on Electric Avenue that we will one day find. Others say that there are multiple road networks, mutually interpenetrating, but unconnected, so you cannot slide from one network to another. Those inaccessible stars may harbor scores of leagues and confederacies and commonwealths.”

“But not human. If there’s no connection between their roads and ours, men could never have reached them. ‘All Men are One.’”

He shrugged. “Only a fancy of mine. The roads we know may be the only network, and all those other stars as empty as were once the ones we filled. Yet all the human stars, after all the years of settlement, I can cover with my left thumb.” He held that thumb out so that it blotted a portion of the sky. “Well,” he grudged, “maybe not all of them.” He held up his other thumb. “There, that does it.” Méarana laughed and the Fudir tapped the window with his knuckles. “All that immensity… It makes you feel how small you and I and the whole of humanity really are.”

“In all that immensity,” the harper answered, “even superclusters of galaxies are small, so I don’t see what importance smallness has. I look at it and marvel that all that immensity has produced you and me.”

The Fudir chuckled. “Seems a bit overkill. ‘The mountain labored and brought forth a mouse!’” A comment that would have been a sneer from the lips of Donovan, was gentle amusement from the Fudir.

“Why not?” said Méarana. “How many acorns lie scattered to make an oak? How many sperm are expended to make a man? Why shouldn’t it take a universe to make a world?”

The Fudir paused and stared at her. “By the gods!” He turned to face the Spiral Arm. “By the gods… I will never again look upon the night sky without seeing it as… as a mass of sperm.” Then he could contain himself no more and threw back his head and laughed.

Méarana colored and walked on ahead of him. He hurried after. “Don’t be offended.”

“You don’t take me seriously.”

“That’s not true. I…”

They had come to the portion of the perimeter opposite their entry point and the stars beyond the viewing windows had thinned. There were still more of them than she could count, but she could see that they grew sparser. And beyond that sparsity, nothing. “The Rim,” she said.

The Fudir broke off his fumbled apology and simply nodded. “Aye. Technically, the tail end of the Cygnus Arm is out there somewhere; but yes… It’s a big Spiral Arm, but it reaches an edge at last.” He gazed across the thinning carpet of light. “The closer stars are Lafrontera. They shade off into the Wild. There are human worlds out there that have never been Reconnected. When the prehumans broke up the old Commonwealth of Suns, they scattered us far and wide. But most of the worlds out there are empty, barren, never terraformed. Here…” He touched an information placard, scanned it quickly, then led her a few paces farther along, where he activated the magnification.

“Skelly Mike,” an androgynous voice announced while a highlighter circled a particular star. “A so-called ‘trailer’ at the far end of the Cygnus Arm. His orbit around the galactic core takes him beyond the Rim, almost as if he were straining to loose himself from the electromagnetic bonds that hold the galaxy together. His distance from Siggy Sun…”

Méarana stopped listening and stared at the vista in silence. “You think she went out there, don’t you? Not to Skelly Mike, I mean. Into the Wild.”

The Fudir shifted uncomfortably. “If you follow her path, when she left here, she looped through Boldly Go, Sumday, and Wiedermeier’s Chit and circled back to here. If you extrapolate that trajectory, it continues through to Alabaster and then, who knows? Ramage, Valency, or one of the other stars in the SoHi district…”

Méarana shook her head. “She’s not an inanimate object. She doesn’t have a ‘trajectory.’ You think she went out there.”

The Fudir sighed. “Yes, I think she went out there. The apparent back-tracking was to throw others off the scent. She could have done that by planting time-delayed drones.”

Méarana would not look at him. “We’ll never find her, will we? All those stars… We’ll never, ever know what happened to her.”

The Fudir did not answer for a while. What a god-awful haystack, he thought, in which to lose a single needle. Ah, Bridget ban. Franane.

She must have been beautiful said the Silky Voice, not unkindly.

No, not beautiful; not in any conventional sense. But she had an inner light.

“And you were a moth to her flame,” whispered Donovan. What happened to the “witch” whose spell you “barely escaped”?

The Fudir made no answer. Turning to Méarana, he said, “No. I don’t think we ever will. I never did.”

Hot tears flowed down the harper’s face. She struck the Fudir repeatedly on the chest with both fists. “Then why, why, why did you come on this useless expedition?”

He took her by the wrists and stilled her punches; and she pressed herself against him and wept. “Maybe,” he said, “I was looking for something else.”

That night, Méarana sat at the desk in her bedroom reading Customs of the’ Loon Tribes of Cliff na Mac Rebbe hoping to find in its turgid pages some hint of why her mother had read it. But so far its only effect was to induce periodic slumber. The author’s primary conclusion seemed to be that’ Loon customs were unlike any elsewhere in the Periphery; but surely that could be said of the customs of most any people. She sighed, pinched the bridge of her nose, and closed the screen.

The room darkned with the screen. What did it matter, anyway? She had broken poor Donovan’s health, and all for what? What sort of Hell was it when love was alive and hope was dead? Maybe that was what Hell was: the graveyard of hope.

But the quest had not been entirely in vain! They had discovered some things that the Kennel had overlooked: That Mother had met Sofwari on Thistlewaite; that Sofwari had told her something that sent her back to Dangchao to spend most of two weeks behind the doors of her study. They had learned that she was searching for the source of the medallion, and that she had traveled as Lady Melisonde. All told, that was not much; but it was not nothing.

Greystroke and Hugh knew of these things now, and perhaps now the Kennel would resume the search—and have better luck in it than she could hope to have.

Perhaps it was time to think of herself. That was all Mother ever thought of.

It is the nature of man to be selfish, Mother had said. (And Méarana remembered a much younger self sitting by Bridget ban’s knee before a great fierce fire in Clanthompson Hall, while certain wounds of her mother healed.) It is a weakness passed down from our uttermost ancestors, the original sin from which all others arise. It emanates from the ancient brain stem and spreads by electrical synapses to the cortex, establishing by repetition its debilitating pattern.

The more these patterns of self-indulgence dominate, her mother had cautioned her, the less your capacity for reason. The brain stem is not in the final analysis a thoughtful companion.

But her mother rejected predestination. Whether the curse is carried in the genes, as the Calvinist prophet Dawkins had claimed, or whether it involves apples and serpents, as still older allegories run, a man can school his soul to a “second nature” and so overcome the curse. By diligent exercise, he can establish habits of thought that temper or block these signals with neural patterns of their own. With prudence, justice, moderation. And courage.

And Bridget ban had displayed to her awestuck daughter images from the emorái machine of her very soul: the sparking footprints of thought running through her mind.

There were too few such moments in her memory, though each one burned there with a certain intensity, as if like diamonds they compensated with their brilliance for their rarity. She had found herself when young wishing that her mother would be hurt again, forced thereby to convalesce at home. A minor wound—a child is none too clear on such matters—one that did not truly hurt. Had that not been a kind of selfishness?

Mother?

Yes, Lucy?

Who was my father?

Oh, he was a brave man, a clever man. We had a great adventure one time, he and I and some others.

Perhaps she had shown courage enough in pushing the quest this far. Perhaps it was time to show prudence, and give the whole thing up.

But what, then, of justice?

She grew aware of a soft tapping at her door and thought it might have been ongoing for some time. Rising abruptly from the desk, she went to the door and threw it open.

It was Billy Chins. He held a message packet in his hand and had his data ‘face tucked under one arm.

“It’s late, Billy,” she said and started to close the door.

“Please, missy,” he said, thrusting his hand out. “This come when you and sahb on Starwalk. This tok address him you, from home. I forget till now, but now I think, maybe mama come home and this tell you so?”

Méarana did not believe that, but stranger things have happened and she snatched the message from his hand in a spasm of hope and broke the seal. Billy watched with half an eye while he set his reader screen on her desk and woke it.

The message was from Hang Tenbottles and it contained only the unabridged edition of Commonwealth Days that her mother had read. It had been peeled off the master copy at the Archives at Sannaklar on Friesing’s World. Weirdly disappointed—she had had no right to expect anything more—she tossed it to her desk. “And what are you doing, boy?” she snapped. Billy had had no cause to raise her hopes even so unwittingly as he had.

He was setting up his’ face as a holo stage. “Oh, please, Mistress Harp. Sahb Donovan, he larim—I mean, he ‘give up.’Ammasmarpaña krana. He is kaput! No more help you find mama-meri. So he no laikim tru for see this. I show you, even if he beat me for such.”

He had activated the stage and a holo image now hovered above it. Méarana crossed over and studied it.

“What is it, Billy?”

“Is dibby from Sofwari left by Harpaloon. Make no meaning, alla code numbers. But Billy smart. He have second dibby, come from Dancing Vrouw, and I think, Billy, I say, why not run matchim up? So I find him the Vrouw data in the Harpaloon dibby.” He beamed.

Méarana sighed with exasperation. ‘I’m sure the dibby Sofwari left on Harpaloon included the data he had already harvested on Bangtop and Dancing Vrouw.”

Billy’s head bounced enthusiastically. “And Thistlewaite. Even earlier files from other places. But, missy, tissue bank on Vrouw, she no use code numbers, so I translate some of dibby. Find code numbers mean for birth-worlds, for people-groups, and so. Then put those into data columns for Bangtop and Thistlewaite and find more by the crossing of references. Then I do same with Bangtop data from Rinty. Is Sofwari find thirty-two people-groups!”

“I’m sure that is very interesting, but…”

“So I make map by birth-worlds of different groups. Also other maps, time plots, frequency plots, correlation plots, and so cetera. Billy hard worker. But they tell no nothing. See here.”

Méarana saw that the holo was a map of the Periphery. One corner of the map bore a legend:

In the holomap, Megranome glowed bright red. Abyalon, Old’ Saken, and several worlds in the Cynthia Cluster were orange; Die Bold and Friesing’s World, yellowish; and Venishànghai and scattered other worlds were blue.

“What means it, Lady Harp?” Billy implored. “Billy, he make sense of data, but not make sense of sense.”

Méarana laughed at his syntax, but then reflected that the tangle had gotten it straight. The dibby meant the map; but what did the map mean? She flicked through some of the other groups: Kadrina, Khyaddy, Geeda…All female names, alphabetically ordered not according to Gaelactic but according to customary usages on some of the Old Planets. Most showed a “central locus” within the Old Planets shading off to other worlds. A few bore the note “Origin Before Cleansing.”

She recalled that Sofwari had been doing genealogy. She studied the map now showing. “This map means that 7200 years ago, some woman named Taruna—Now, how could he know her name? Right. Someone he code-named Taruna lived somewhere across the Rift, and her descendants wound up on Old ‘Saken and a few other worlds, probably during the Cleansing, and from there later descendants emigrated and settled on still other worlds. The color codes seem to indicate where Taruna’s mighty chondrians appeared most frequently.”

Billy’s expression showed bewilderment. “But…who cares?”

Méarana thought about the way a drop of dye spread through a glass of water. “I think it shows patterns of migration and settlement.”

“We know him yet. Old Planets, numma one settle; then people walkabout other pless.”

“Billy, when they did ‘walkabout,’ they sometimes found people on the new worlds. Where did those people come from?”

The khitmutgar stammered a bit and Méarana said, “Look…See Lummila here? Her—what was the other term? ‘Little thread shapes.’ Her little thread shapes are 8100 years old, which means she lived Before Cleansing. But where are most of her descendants? On Venishànghai, other worlds in the Jen-jen, and on New Chennai, Hawthorne Rose, and Agadar. So the prehumans planted us on more worlds than the Old Planets. But the Old Planets rediscovered star-sliding first and started the Reconnection.”

“Okay, mistress. But was Dao Chetty cleansed Old Earth and settled poor Terries across the Rift.”

“That’s what everyone still believes, but…Well, never mind.” She copied the files to her own machine. She wasn’t sure why Mother had found this interesting. She wondered which of the “clanmothers” she herself descended from.

Billy hesitated, and shifted from foot to foot.

“Yes, Billy, was there something else?”

“I tingting me…What is you say, I think… maybe is got clue that dibby. Billy don’t know what, but maybe you see him the clue? Maybe say where mama-meri go?”

Méarana sighed, folded the projector fibers, and handed Billy his deactivated screen. “Maybe Greystroke can figure it out.”

Billy still did not move. “Billy says no wrong, you. But what mean him your mama when Greystroke find her, not her pickny-meri. What mean him you?”

Méarana’s lips thinned and she stood bolt upright. “Are you scolding me? How dare you lecture me on duty!”

The khitmutgar bowed his head. “Mistress Harp. Who know duty more than Billy Chins?”

“Sahb Donovan is waiting for a flight to Alabaster, and you have to go with him. Do you expect me to roam Lafrontera, to go into the Wild—alone?”

Billy gathered himself and stood to attention, touching his forehead with the back of his hand. “No, memsahb! Billy Chins go with! You better go-with man than Donovan.”

The announcement so surprised the harper that she sank slowly to her desk chair, strangely touched by the little man’s offer. “I thought Donovan possessed your life, and if you left him you would have to kill yourself.”

Billy shrugged. “Atangku much complex custom. You think mama-meri you go into the Wild, yes?”

“Yes, I think she went into the Wild.”

“And we go follow, we die that place?”

“Very likely.”

Billy spread his hands. “Then custom satisfied.”

Méarana laughed, but it was a sad laugh, a goltraí. She placed a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Does Donovan really beat you?”

Billy hung his head once more. “Should no speak budmash of master. Billy try the patience no few time.”

“There’s no excuse. I will speak to him for you.”

“No, no, lady harp. Big dhik. Such-much trouble. Silence better.” He bowed himself out of the room with his screen tucked once more under his arm. “Donovan,” he said at the door, “he take him the money from Those to give up hunt for mistress mother. I no serve man like that. Where you go, I go.” And then he closed the door softly behind him.

Méarana sat speechless at her desk for a time. That could not be! Surely, Billy was mistaken! That Donovan might give up the quest because it was hopeless, or because he could contribute nothing to it—those motives she could comprehend. But that he would do so for money seemed beyond even Donovan’s calculating nature.

Did it mean that he was not the man she thought he was?

No, it must only mean that Billy had misunderstood some comment of his. Perhaps he had vocalized one of those internal arguments of his, for she had no doubt that among the splinters of his mind were some mighty sharp slivers.

She began shutting down her screen and it reminded her that a file was open. The edition of Commonwealth Days that Hang had sent. She would have to remember to copy Donovan in the morning, although she wasn’t feeling particularly friendly toward Donovan just now. From curiosity, she entered the table of contents and saw that it was nearly three times longer than the edition she had already read. The Friesing Worlders had evidently intended a reference encyclopedia. Small wonder the Ladelthorpis had brought out an abridged popular edition! She had toyed earlier with the notion of a song cycle based on the tales, but this volume would make it a grand opera!

She saw it two-thirds of the way down the table of contents: “The Treasure Fleet.”

After that, she got no sleep at all.