Michael Flynn: In the Lion’s Mouth

After Donovan had eaten, Olafsdottr locked him in the ward room. It was decorated to resemble the cabin of an Agadar sloop, a sailing vessel much favored on that watery world. It was longer than it was wide, and paneled in light woods. A holostage with a play deck and swivel chair adorned one end. To its right hung a set of wall-mounted nautical instruments that, the nearest ocean being rather distant, were certainly more decorative than functional. Cabinetry and cushioned benches ran along the walls, including a bunk recessed into the wall. Two comfortable chairs occupied the middle of the room. The overall effect was “taut.”

“Stay poot,” Olafsdottr said, wagging a finger before she closed and locked the door on him. “Plainty in there to amuse you,” she added from the other side.

And so there was. The Fudir’s primary amusement on Jehovah had involved the opening of locked doors. He set to work. “Not very difficult,” he judged.

It’s a monoship, the Sleuth reminded him. Why would a one-man ship have high-end locks?

Why would it have locks at all? wondered Donovan.

What is the second-most frequent usage of monoships?asked the Pedant.

What is the most frequently annoying personality we have to share a head with? the Sleuth answered.

Funny that you should ask,the Brute said.

Private yacht?

Second-most frequent, Silky.

Donovan sighed. Sometimes his head seemed a very crowded place. On occasion, he remembered that he had been the original and the others remained in some sense tenants, and he remembered that he had once been alone.

Perhaps, said the young man in the chlamys. But the “I” that cooks up schemes, and the “I” that remembers everything, and the “I” that is master of every martial art, and … all the rest of us … We are all the same “I,” aren’t we? We’re closer to you than your skin.

Donovan said nothing. He was not especially fond of his skin, which stretched sallow and drumhead tight across his bones. He still owned that gaunt and hollowed-out look that long years in the Bar of Jehovah had given him. He wondered if he might have always looked that way, even in the flush and vigor of his youth. Assuming he had had a youth, or that it had been flushed with vigor.

We’ll remember someday, Pollyanna assured him.

Donovan was less sure. Sometimes matters were lost past all retrieval; and maybe happily so. Some memories might best remain covered than recovered. “I liked it better when you had all fallen silent,” he said, and wondered if the drug that Olafsdottr had given him had also upset the delicate truce he had reached with himself the previous year.

“Smuggling,” snapped the Fudir, distracted from his inspection of the lock. “Smuggling and bonded courier work. All right? Now quiet down and let me work.”

Bonded couriers. Precisely. There is a popular show on Dubonnet’s World called Samples and Secrets, in which the unnamed pilot of a monoship brings each episode some package—a secret, a visitor, a treasure—that changes the recipient’s life for good or ill.

It’s why they’re sometimes called “schlepships,” the Sleuth said.

The Fudir pulled his special tool from the hidden cache in his sandal and set to work on the lock mechanism. The Pedant had been right. These were not high-security locks. The door opened onto the main hallway.

Ravn Olafsdottr was waiting outside. “Really, Donovan, where do you expect to go?”

The Fudir grinned. “Admit it, Ravn. You would have been disappointed if I hadn’t come out. If you wanted me to stay put, you would have had better locks installed.”

“I was in a hurry. But I may do so, if you do not behave yourself. You were not supposed to awake so soon. Annoy me too greatly and I will soospend you once more.”

“And forego the pleasure of our company?” He looked up and down the corridor. “You have Eyes all through the ship, don’t you?”

The Confederal shrugged a little, as if not to belabor the obvious. “And motion sensors for your restlessness. You move about, I hear the ping of your processions.”

“Then what does it matter if I stay in one room or not?”

Olafsdottr scratched the bright yellow stubble of her hair. “Who can say? Perhaps you sneak up behind, garrote me, have your wicked way, and take ship back to Jehovah.” A foolish notion, her smile said. “We will be good friends sometime, you and I; but that time is not yet.”

“Don’t be so sure I would want my way with you,” the scarred man grumbled. “I’ve been with more toothsome wenches than you in my time.”

“Ooh! Boot do they bite so wail with those tooths?” She gnashed the dentition in question and switched to Manjrin. “You stay ward room now. We past Dangchao. Be on Tightrope soon. Not jog pilot’s elbow on such road.”

Inner Child chirped with alarm, but Donovan maintained the scarred man’s composure. “The Tightrope,” he said casually. “No wonder you snatched a monoship. Anything bigger couldn’t take that road.”

“A narrow way, but correspondingly swift,” his kidnapper said in Gaelactic, “as Shree Bernoulli commanded. And speed is of the essence. Urgent matters await us on Henrietta, and the game is worth the candle.”

Donovan cocked his head attentively, but Olafsdottr did not elaborate on the nature of the candle. The Pedant volunteered that Henrietta was the sector capital of Qien-tuq, in the Confederal borderlands. Once in the Confederation, escape would become problematical.

“I’ve heard it said,” Donovan suggested, “that the speed of space on the Tightrope is so great that one can cross the Rift standing still.”

“Ooh, that is exaggeration, I am thinking! But the walls are close and the subluminal mud encroaches on the channel. It is a bad way and a treacherous one. But one unpatrolled by League corvettes.”

“Sounds like a good reason to seize control of the ship before you get us on it.”

“Ooh,” said Olafsdottr, “you are a foony man, for sure. Should I kill you now and save myself soospense?”

Donovan grinned. “You won’t do that. You went to all that trouble to sneak into the League, nab me, and commandeer a handy ship when you could have injected me with something fatal and been done with it. That means you plan to keep me alive, and that means you’re taking me somewhere. I’m a valuable cargo.”

“Valuable,” Olafsdottr admitted, “but not priceless. Don’t make your inventory cost greater than you be worth.”

That evening, before he turned the lights out, the scarred man removed a particular hologram from his scrip and studied on it.

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. Bridget ban sat in the middle turned at three-quarters but with her head fully facing the imager. Her smile, broad; her eyes seducing the viewer; her red hair captured in midflight, 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 the Fudir’s on the table. Greystroke’s hand rested on her shoulder.

A fellowship, and a good one. He missed them all terribly. The four of them back then had been in search of the Twisting Stone, and the singular tragedy was that they had found it.

“She’s not expecting us on Dangchao, you know,” Donovan told himselves after restoring the image to his scrip and speaking the lights out. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to visit her. She won’t know it when we don’t show up.”