Michael Flynn: Up Jim River

Although it was early morning, the Bar was full. There are those for whom the night is day, and these have slipped in one by one to escape the unconcealing sun, discuss their nocturnal ramblings, and divide the take. Longshoremen have trudged up Greaseline Street from the Spaceport Yards to celebrate the end of their shift. There were sliders and touristas, too, since liners and freighters tocked to shipboard times and it was only by wildest chance that these ever coincided with the Bar’s own meridian. Sliders were as likely to come weary with the dawn as bright-eyed with the eve.

And they talked, all of them. They told tales, aired grievances, warbled songs. They muttered darkly, and whispered intrigues as intricate and Byzantine as their states of intoxication allowed. It all merged into a hum that rose and fell with numbers and furtiveness but which never ceased entirely. It was a joke among the regular patrons that there were conversations still ongoing long after the originators had died; and what jest is ever purely a lie? There are documented cases of ship captains returning after long absences and resuming the self-same discussion.

The scarred man sat to his breakfast and his breakfast was one of daal, and baked beans and sautéed mushrooms, with scrambled eggs and cold, fatty bacon. He ate in a silence punctuated by occasional mumbles and subvocalizations, as if he himself embodied in small the chattering crowd around him. Some thought him a little mad because of this, although they were wrong, for there was nothing little about his madness.

Above, a door closed, and the scarred man’s eyes flicked upward for just a moment before he dipped his daal into the beans and lifted the dripping mass to his mouth. Footsteps followed on the wooden staircase, and still the scarred man did not move. Then she was with him, pulling out a seat opposite, and directing a sneer at his noisome breakfast. She herself had only a cup of black coffee—or something that had coffee in its ancestry. (The human diaspora was millennia old, and genes had been tinkered with on this planet or that. The bean went by many names—caff, chick, moke, joe—but even when it bore the same name, it was never quite the same drink.)

“She” was the harper, and that name, too, will serve for now. She had come to him a metric week ago and pricked from his teeth the tale of January’s Dancer, in the process unearthing in him old and hurtful memories. And he saw in the backlit dawn of the thrown-wide shutters that she intended to hurt him further. For she had walked with purpose in her stride, and purpose meant motion, and, as an ancient sage had once said, “With the motion of creatures, time began to run its course.” And time was the one thing the scarred man had not measured for all these many years.

Her eyes were the hard, sharp glass-green of flint, and her hair was a great flame of red, but her skin was dark gold. The bhisti science-wallahs who had touched the genes of coffee had not forborne to touch the genes of men, and what they had done had wrought wonders and horrors; and it was just as well that their art had been forgotten, for the world can bear only so much wonder.

The harper waited in silence. It was a talent she had, as great a talent as her harping; for silence is a vacuum that sucks words from the throats of men. She lifted the coffee to her lips; set it upon the table; adjusted the cup slightly.

Minutes died.

But the scarred man, too, knew the art of silence, and had had many more years of practice.

Finally, she looked up, halting for a moment his restless eyes. “I’ll be leaving today,” she announced, but in an uncertain voice that indicated an unsettled purpose.

The scarred man smiled—because he had won a small victory in the art of waiting. A part of him wished to bid her adieu, but another part wished her to stay. “Where away?” he said, serving a neutral response.

“To find my mother.”

The scarred man nodded slowly. He could see the mother in the child; should have seen it earlier; should have seen it in the moment the harper had first strode through the Bar like the Queen of High Tara. The harper was not quite so striking, not quite so wild in her look as had been Bridget ban; but neither was she quite so hardened. For Bridget ban had practiced the art of seduction, and nothing quite so coarsens the soul as to use too roughly a tool so soft. The harper preserved something deep within herself that in her mother had grown rigid and worn.

“Your mother was a witch,” he said. “A harlot queen. She is best left unsought.”

He had hoped for some reaction from the harper, but the young woman only dipped her head. “I understand your hurt. You loved her once and lost her; but I knew a different woman.”

“Don’t be so sure you did,” the scarred man responded. “A leopard does not change her spots. It was not my idea to love her, but hers. It is not in any man to resist her if she but chooses that he not. She played me like you play your harp, until I sang her tune. What chance does a child have against such snares as she could lay?”

“I think you are too bitter. You made your own choices. It was you who left her .”

“I escaped .” The scarred man remembered an early morning in the slums of Chel’veckistad, on Old’ Saken: stealing from the bed of Bridget ban, cold-cocking Hugh, and heading off to secure the Dancer for himself.

Of all the hard things he had done in his life, those three had been the hardest.

“How long has she been gone?” he asked grudgingly. A part of him wanted to know. A part of him was curious.

“Three years. She left when I was sixteen metric.”

“And only now you’ve come looking?”

“Don’t think you were easy to find. I followed clues, rumors. They led here.”

“They shouldn’t have. No slip of a girl should have tracked me down.”

“Mother is a Hound. She taught me things.”

The Hounds of the Ardry were resourceful agents—skilled in arts politic and martial; without pity or remorse when what had to be done had to be done. They could be many things, and any thing: messenger, scout, spy, ambassador, saboteur, assassin, savior, planetary manager. Child-rearing was not beyond the multitudinous talents of Bridget ban.

He pushed his breakfast aside. “And what makes you, a harper, think you can find a Hound if she does not wish the finding? A Hound may be years on a case. She may be on her way back even now.”

“Gwillgi came to see me on Dangchao, on our family’s ranch.”

“Gwillgi!”

“He was searching for Mother and thought I might know something, some small detail. That’s how I knew she’d gone missing and was not simply a long time on her task.”

“All the more reason not to get involved. I’ve met enough of the Ardry’s Hounds to be wishful of meeting no more; Gwillgi least among them.”

“He did seem an… intense little man.”

“He could kill you with a flip of his wrist.”

“You know how thinly the Kennel is spread. There are always more missions than Hounds to take them. They cannot neglect their other missions.” She reached out and seized the scarred man’s wrist. “Fudir, they’ve called off the search”

“And did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Know one small detail.”

The harper thought for a moment, fingering a medallion that hung on a silver chain around her neck. “I… don’t know. Mother had been conducting disaster relief on Thistlewaite. She came home, took a fortnight’s home leave, then she was gone.” The harper’s voice hardened just a little bit at this, and the scarred man gave her a sharp look.

“And she didn’t tell you where she was headed.”

The harper gave him a look. “If she had,” she snapped, “I’d nae be searching! She ne’er told me aforehand. Hound’s business… It was nae for me tae know!”