Michael Flynn - Up Jim River

And all of them bound for Harpaloon, “the Gateway to Lafrontera.”

The dormitory has self-organized into sections for single men, single women, and families. The harper and the scarred man claim berths in the appropriate sections and rejoin at one of the common tables. The harper has opened her case and her instrument sits upon her lap while she tunes its strings. It will not be long, Donovan supposes, before he loses her to this crowd .

It is a way to pass the time, says the Silky Voice .

«That’s not why he’s irritated,» suggests another .

Donovan scowls, waiting for the Fudir to chime in with his half-ducat’s worth. But the scrambler says nothing, which irritates Donovan further still .

“A geantraí, I think,” the harper says, brushing her nails across the strings, then tightening one or two of them with a key. “The music should reflect the hope in their hearts.”

“That is called ‘enabling,’” Donovan answers. “I think you should play them a goltraí. They may need the antidote more than the poison.”

She looks to him and then to the passengers about the steerage dorm. “Hope is a poison?”

“All those who die of disappointment have first ingested hope.”

“The hopeless are never disappointed. I will grant you that much. Unless things turn out well despite all. I suppose that would be a kind of disappointment.”

“Which they never do. Turn out well, I mean.” Donovan gestures to the dormitory and its inhabitants. “Look at them. They think the streets of Lafrontera are paved with platinum. But it isn’t that way at all. They are paved with blood and tears.”

“Really. I would have expected asphalt or magplast.”

“Mockery sits ill on such cheerful features as yours. Later generations might call them heroic; but it seldom looks that way from steerage. A burning bridge flares more brightly at a distance than in the eyes of those crossing it. Some of your audience are bummerls. Their hope is really carelessness. Each is convinced his bad luck has been an accident of his place and not an essence of his character, and if only he can go some other place, he can ‘start over.’”

“Some do.”

“No, no, no. That’s the great fallacy, don’t you see? Everything is already started. It started with the midwife’s slap, if not before. After that, there is no starting over.”

Méarana’s fingers dance over the strings, tossing off flower petals of music. “What of that family over there? A young man and woman, their three children. They seem prosperous, well-fed. From Mfecanay, by their clothing. They are no bummerls, fleeing failure on old worlds. They are movers, seeking success on new ones. The frontier is hungry and they hope to make their fortune in Lafrontera.”

“If the frontier is hungry,” the scarred man says, “it will devour them and all their hopes. And if they seek their fortune out there, it can only mean that they have not found it on Mfecanay, and so they, too, are failures, if of a more subtle sort than the bummerl. If a man has what it takes. he can ‘make his fortune’ anywhere. He needn’t put it all to hazard on a strange raw world. One in three of your movers will break and go home.”

“Then two in three will be tempered and make a home. What of those who simply yearn for new constellations to point their ways? For them, even Lafrontera may prove too tame, too settled. They’ll go out into the Wild, perhaps even to the Rim itself.”

“The more fool, they. What can a new sky offer that an old one cannot? New constellations mean strange gods, which is always a chancy thing. There are human worlds in the Wild that have not yet rediscovered starflight; and some indeed have rediscovered little more than grass huts and stone knives. Among such, a man might live as a god—or a saint. Or worse.”

Méarana’s fingers call out a jaunty, martial tune. “In they end, it does not matter whether the past drives or the future lures. Bummerl or mover or the merely restless… It is the going that matters. What sort of Spiral Arm would it be if men had never gone out from Terra herself?”

The scarred man grunts. “A less noisome one, I think.”

“Is this your way of commenting on our quest?”

“Your quest. No. I remember what you told Zorba. ‘When hope is all there is, it is enough.’ But I’d not place such hope in hope. Of all the virtues, it is the greatest liar.”

The harper laughs, but a little sadly. “I realize that I may never find her. If something has happened to her… I couldn’t… I mustn’t…” She pauses for a moment in search of her voice . “But I must learn what that something was. Do you understand that? Mother has vanished into the void, and I don’t know where or how.”

To this, the scarred man makes no answer .

Afterward, she goes off and plays cheerful music for the steerage, despite the ache in her heart; or perhaps because of it. A man has produced a fiddle, which he plays in the crook of his elbow. A woman has a tambourine; another, a guitar Somehow, they sort things out in that spontaneous human way. Young men and women form lines and dance toward and away from each other, stamping the floor on the beat, so that the dorm becomes a drum .

How, the scarred man wonders, can a woman in such sorrow play with such joy; and he wishes he knew the secret of it for himself .

Harpaloon is a rawboned world with a raucous flux of folk from all over the Spiral Arm. She is the oldest of the settled planets edging Lafrontera, and beneath the movers and the bummerls and the adventurers and the second sons settling down or passing through lies a substratum who claim descent from the aboriginal population. These folk occasionally celebrate odd holidays and conduct strange festivals. Every three hundred and forty metric days, regardless of the season, they deck their hair with three-leaf clovers and walk en masse onto the barren Plains of the Jazz to drink green beer and throw rocks at a sandstone pillar for reasons no one can provide .

During the Great Diaspora, humans had been scattered far and wide, but few had been scattered asfar as the’ Loons. After the Reconnection, when explorers from Cuddalore and New Shangdong discovered and partitioned Harpaloon between them, they found little more than rustic villages and market towns—and the brittle remnants of ancient machines. Since then, other folks have swarmed to the half-empty world, eventually outnumbering the natives and even the old Cuddle-Dong aristocracy. This has not gone unremarked by the’ Loons, who call the newcomers “coffers” or “gulls” and nurse a resentment that at times boils over into riot. To this, the coffers are largely oblivious, since life on Harpaloon is riotous even at the best of times .

Harpaloon was not the only world that claimed the honor of “gateway to Lafrontera.” Siggy O’Hara had a fair claim, and so did Dancing Vrouw and a number of others. The frontier was a broad swath of stars and there was more than one road into it. But Harpaloon lay at the end of the fabulous Silk Road and if not all set forth from there, a substantial number did. Ships crowded her parking orbits; and out in the libration points, enormous colony vessels awaited the settlement companies that would fill them. Each of the great ships broadcast a marker for her shuttles: “Ten-Beck’s World, Home on this Beacon!” “Slufut Settlement Company! Departure immanent! Final Call!” “Stavronofsky’s World, terraforming 90% complete! Openings available! Apply now!”