Michael Flynn - Up Jim River

Donovan noted dataports of antique design. Something plugs in here , the Sleuth noted. And something else there . Faded writing ran across the shells. On the one, a script much like the curlicues of the old Tantamiz on the other, madly jambled curls and hooks and dots unlike anything he had seen before. Or had he?

Hah, said the Pedant. Sometimes you need the old fart, don’t you?Achilles emerging from his tent could not have edged his voice with greater triumph.

“Where have we seen script like this before?” Donovan asked. He aimed the question at the Pedant, but received an answer from the harper.

“Why, those are the border decorations on the signage in Preeshdad!”

The scarred man’s anger was two-dimensional. One dimension was the anger of the Pedant at being upstaged. The other was the anger of Donovan at the ease with which a unified mind could process what to him came only through wrangles. Had the Fudir not insulted the Pedant, had the Pedant not sulked, he would have recognized the matter straight-off.

Méarana took one of the cassettes from him and tried to read the ancient Tantamiž. “Vu-ra-gith,” she said haltingly.

“Birakid,” Donovan said in sudden recognition. He rocked back on his heels as he realized what he had found so cunningly inserted in his goods. “Birakid Shee’us Nakopthayiní. The Specklings-Down of the Headmen.”

The harper started and dropped the cassette, but the Beast caught it on the fall.

“The Holy Books of Harpaloon!” she said. “How did they…?”

The scarred man’s smile was grim, but there was a touch of genuine happiness in it. “A parting gift from Little Hugh. He and Greystroke must have overheard my wish to read one.”

Inner Child feared reprisals from the devotees, but the Fudir reassured him. “There are supposed to be hundreds of these books. Hugh is smart enough to leave a dummy behind. They may never realize that two are missing.”

“But how,” Méarana said, “may one read them?”

The scarred man studied the antique dataports, and the Sleuth shook his head. “Long-forgotten technologies,” Donovan said. He sighed and tossed the cassettes to his bed. “Our remotest ancestors poked reeds into mud and baked the mud into brick. We can still read those ancient thoughts, millennia later. But it seems that the greater the technology, the more ephemeral it becomes. There is a lesson there, harper. But what, I do not know.”

The Spiral Staircase is unusual among the roads of Electric Avenue, for on its course it crosses the strata of the Spiral Arm. Most roads, for reasons past understanding, remain on particular “tiers” parallel to the galactic plane. The science-wallahs make brave sounds about rotating plasmas and angular momentums and delaminations, but the plain truth is that they do not know, and the brave sounds are to prevent the rest of us from learning that. In consequence, there are stars in the skies that are forever out of reach .

The Spiral Staircase is an exception that tests the rule. A great whorl of plasma, it starts at Ramage, high above the Galactic Plane, corkscrews around Alabaster and Siggy O’Hara down into the Greater Hanse roundabout, and passes below Thistlewaite before climbing again on an extension called the Grand Concourse, whence once more past Siggy O’Hara to Boldly Go, and all the way to Gatmander, where it becomes the Wilderness Road .

“Hurtling Gertie” is bound nonstop to Siggy O’Hara and the harper and the scarred man use the enforced idleness to study the scraps that they have gathered, arranging the pieces this way and that in the hope that they will form a picture .

“Why are we not stopping at Bangtop-Burgenland?” the harper asked when Donovan had announced this change of plan. She sat in a swing chair in the common room of their suite. Her harp nestled in her lap while she tuned it to the third mode.

First-class suites in a Hansard throughliner are broad and spacious and rival the Hadley liners in their luxury. The sofas and settees are low and comfortable and upholstered in fine, soft leather cured from the hides of Megranomic longerhorns. Colorful tapestries covered walls with stags and hunters and mountain streams. Satisfied burghers stared contentedly from engravings. Fine aromas wafted from well-stocked galleys. A team of servants had been assigned to look after their creature comforts, and Billy Chins had with delight taken these in hand. As sahb Avalam’s khansammy his majordomo, he speckled them with instructions, half of which the staff did not comprehend—or affected not to.

“Is easy, mistress harp,” Billy told her as he aimlessly polished and straightened a room already tidied by the now-departed staff. “We stop—pursuit catch us.”

“If there is pursuit. Fudir, are you simply being prudent, or do you have a reason?”

The scarred man curled on one of the settees across the room, with a reading screen in the crook of his arm. A sinuous man when not outright sinister, this twisted posture seemed his natural pose. He wore a saffron housecoat and beaded moccasin slippers provided by the room’s eager stewards. Now and then he touched the corner of the screen so as to page through the text. “I have half a dozen reasons,” he answered without looking up. “And if Donovan weren’t reading this book, I’d have even more.”

Méarana had been looking at Billy and saw understanding there before a mask of studied incomprehension took its place. He has guessed his master’s condition , she thought. “Willeth thou share with us thine reasons,” she asked in an execrable imitation of the Tongue, “or at least one of them?”

Donovan continued to read. Reading wanted eyes, not lips and ears and the scarred man had attentions to spare. The Fudir answered. “We know what your mother was looking for—the source of the medallion. We can be reasonably sure she learned it, and that she went there. What we don’t know is why she thought the medallion important. Or how it was supposed to protect the League against the Confederation.”

“No possible, sahb,” said Billy with a sad shake of his head. “Names much-much addykara, aah… have much-great power. Hold Terra,” he added more softly, and held his hand out as if cupping a ball.

“And this somehow means we don’t stop on Bangtop?” Méarana persisted.

“It means we squirt Bangtop a Kennel inquiry as we pass through the coopers,” the Fudir explained, “and they send a reply via the Circuit, care of High Kaddo Platform at Siggy O’Hara, so it will be awaiting us when we arrive there. Why crawl down and back for something like that? Here, Billy.” He tossed the khitmutgar a packet and a brain. “Take the packet to the concierge and have her queue it for the Bangtop squirt. Two messages: one for the jewelers’ bourse in New Dreading; the other for the tissue bank in Licking Stone.”

“You’ll ask about Sofwari-wallah, too,” said Méarana.

The Fudir made a sound of exasperation. “I’m not old-hammered. Sofwari’s name has come up twice—three times, if he’s the one who left the package on Harpaloon. That’s once or twice too often for my comfort level. Either she was following him or he was following her.” He hesitated and looked up from the book, and Méarana knew that Donovan had joined them.

“How can a man read with all this racket!” He tossed the screen aside.

Méarana knew Donovan meant chatter among his components. Being as fragmented as they were, they tended to rattle when set in motion. Sometimes she wondered how the man could think at all.

“There is a third possibility, you know,” Donovan told them. “Neither was following the other, but both were following the same trail. Sofwari put her onto it. That seems clear. And she probably wanted to cross-check with him when he reached Harpaloon, but they missed connection. Sofwari must have arrived there after she left, thinking he had gotten there first. Otherwise, why leave the brain? But he did arrive first at Dancing Vrouw and departed before she arrived. Even a harper should see why.”