Michael Flynn - Up Jim River

When she rejoined him in the common room he was dressed up in a shawkéad fáwsuc , what on Dangchao Waypoint was called a “bush jacket.” Into one of its capacious pockets he slipped the package she had gotten at Chinwemma. “It must have been nice,” she said as she watched him, “to see your old friends again.”

“It was enlightening,” he said. “That’s always nice.” He produced an audio player and set it on the table. “Did I ever tell you about my experience as an instrument tech on January’s ship? Let me explain about astrogation.” With that he activated the player, and Méarana heard a recording of a conversation they had had weeks before on Dragomir Pennymac . It picked up seamlessly from Donovan’s question and while it chattered on about roads and the currents of space and holes in space, he led her quietly to the door.

Their caephyas hung on hooks by the door, but he waved her off. The door slid open soundlessly and they stepped into the hall. Méarana started to ask him what he was doing but Donovan covered her mouth briefly with his hand. His lips moved. No talking yet.

He took her to the far end of the hall and down the stairs to a side exit, where they stepped out into the bitter nighttime wind. It tore at her hair and filled her nose with grit. She coughed and brushed at her hair. “I’ll be a week washing this clean! Why did you make me leave my chabb behind?”

He leaned close to her ear. “Do you know what aimshifars are?”

“Microscopic jeepyeses . Shippers put them in packages to track their locations by satellite… Oh.”

“Yes. ‘Oh.’ Of all the cafés in all the Spiral Arm? I don’t believe in coincidences. ‘Imagine finding you two here!’ Come on. Not the hotel shops.”

They crossed the darkened parking lot to a haberdashery on the other side of Comfort Street. Inside, they found a variety of headgear and bought themselves new hoods and dust goggles. “Greystroke is what we Terrans call a ‘prick,’” Donovan explained. “But he isn’t a stupid prick. That whole encounter in the café was carefully choreographed. He wanted to find out what we knew about your mother. If he had half a brain—and if he doesn’t, Little Hugh has the other half—he would have sprinkled some aimshifars onto our clothing sometime during that amiable dinner we had.”

The dukandar returned with the caephyas , and Méarana noted that they were styled very differently from the ones they had worn earlier. “Lost yours, hey?” the woman said. She had a Megranomic accent—a mover or the daughter of movers. “That happens a lot if’n yuh don’t tie’ em down proper. Wind shifts and—hey!—off’n she goes liken a kite. That’ll be fifteen punts, eight dinners.

As they left the shop, Donovan said, “I feel like a walk in the park.”

“At night? What’s there to see at night?”

The scarred man cackled. “You’d be surprised. At least—I hope you’d be. But me, night is my natural habitat.”

They passed through a darkened neighborhood, where the only sound was the brush-like hiss of sand against the stones and, once, angry but unintelligible voices from behind one of the shaded windows. The Fudir paused and studied their backtrail. “Greystroke’s talent is blending in,” he said. “For that, he needs other people around. Open areas can defeat him.”

“Then, we’re…”

“Hugh’s talent, on the other hand, is concealment. Give him a shadow, and he’s in it.”

“But… If they bugged our suite, they’ll think we’re still in it, talking about astrogation.”

“We hope so. But we’d be a fool to depend on it.”

They emerged onto Beachfront Highway. Normally busy, traffic had faded at this time of night into a few solitary autos and some trucks coming in from the townships with food for tomorrow’s markets. There was no grid on such a raw frontier world, so the vehicles were all manually piloted.

Why do they call them ‘autos,’the Pedant wondered, if they are manually controlled?

Wardalbahr Park stretched along the coast of the Encircled Sea. It encompassed a long beach called Inch Strand, several groves of trees, and a wildlife sanctuary on a rocky hook of land farther to the south. They crossed the pedestrian walkway over the highway and walked to the beach, where tired waves lapped against the land.

Harpaloon had a moon, but it was on the smallish side; so while the Encircled Sea had tides and breakers, they were modest and unassuming. Méarana watched them roll in for a while. It was rare to find terrestrial worlds with giant moons. Terra itself was said to have a companion more than a quarter of her own size, the result of a cosmic freak accident, and it was this freak gravitational ball mill that had churned its oceans into tidal estuaries and provided self-organizing organic matter with an escalator onto the land. Harpaloon had been less fortunate. Some primordial collision had glanced across its face, creating the great divot of the Encircled Sea and tossing the clot of land aloft to become Gummar-Gyalack. A large moon, but not quite large enough.

Only a little bigger, some Harpalooners had claimed, and “Old G-G” might have stirred the seas to life here as the Great Moon of Terra had done. Only a little bigger… There was a harp tune there, a goltraí perhaps. A lament for life that never was. But that was a lament so well-worn that tears were no longer in it. No one assumed that a planet would hold anything more than pseudo-living matter—archaea, or bacteria, or protists—as likely to exchange genes laterally as vertically. Dough, but never kneaded , the great Alabaster poet, Shishaq sunna Pyoder, had once written.

“Do you really think Greystroke is listening?” she asked him. “Or is that only your paranoia? Inner Child, you called him.”

Donovan stood by her side facing seaward. His glance was a question.

She pointed at the sea and its waves. “I understand. You brought us here so the surf could mask our whispers—in case he has microphones aimed at us, right?”

Donovan shrugged. “It’s what I would do. He almost surely installed listeners in our hotel room. He may have followed us around—he knew we were canvassing jewelers, but he doesn’t know why. By tomorrow, he will. I just wish I knew how long we’ve been under his surveillance. Damn him.”

“You don’t think he’s standing right behind us , do you?”

Donovan started and turned. (She thought that was Inner Child again.) He scowled at her. “Hey, you no tease old Terry, right? Whoever bukkin, face ocean. Whoever harin watch beach. Here…” He pulled the package out of his pocket. “You open this.”

She popped open the flaps and found beneath the wrappings a gift box from the Chinwemma jewelry store. Inside the box was a pocket brain of the standard sort. And a note.

“Read it,” said Donovan, possibly the single most needless instruction he had ever given her.

Lady Hound [it read]. It appears to the author that he has reached Harpaloon before you. The difficulties of coordinating travel along the roads. But a delightful half-doozy days in the Great Hall were spent and samples from all over the Spiral Arm were gathered and collated. A trove richer even than Jehovah. The range of the sampling domain was extended considerably and this updated dibby has been left for your pickup. Preliminary analysis indicates a most peculiar pattern, somewhat at odds with prior results. Further data are required to clarify the issue, possibly from Boldly Go, since the markers sought pass from mother to daughter. Your assistance will be necessary to access their information, as previously discussed .