Michael Flynn - Up Jim River

The harper, the scarred man, and their servant Billy Chins left the “Hurtling Gertie” at High Kaddo Platform in the O’Haran coopers, and checked into the Hotel of the Summer Moon under their own names, there to await passage to Ramage on the upper curl of the Spiral Staircase, whence to Jehovah, and home. Far below them, the Siggy sun was a pinpoint, brighter than most and with a faintly crimson cast.

Harping was less iconic among the O’Harans than in most of the Periphery. In olden days, the system had been isolated from the mainstream and had developed its own peculiar traditions and musics. Only with the Opening of Lafrontera had history caught up with her. Traffic had coursed through from Alabaster and the older inward worlds, like the wave front of an explosion. The settling of Wiedermeier’s Chit, Sumday, and other worlds had been an unsettling period for the O’Harans. Long-standing customs had teetered and very nearly toppled. Though never as wild as Harpaloon on even a quiet day, Siggy O’Hara had afterward, tortoise-like, pulled in her head, and vowed that such times would never come again. Commerce with the rest of the League was tightly controlled by the “Back Office” of the McAdoo.

Days passed while they awaited a ship to take them to Alabaster and Ramage. None with open berths were scheduled, but Donovan visited the shipping office each morning in case new vessels had been logged on the Big Board. Most of Lafrontera was outside the Circuit—Siggy O’Hara was its outermost station—and inbound ships oft gave no notification other than swift boats dispatched down the roads ahead of them. Ships might arrive only hours behind their beacons. Not long ago, all traffic had operated that way.

While they tarried, a message caught up with them from Little Hugh, confirming that “Lady Melisonde” had contacted the tissue banks at Licking Stone, Bangtop, and there, too, she had obtained a duplicate of the files copied by Debly Jean Sofwari and “thank you for telling us about the science-wallah.” If that last had been intended sarcastically, it did not come across in the machine-printed code groups in which the message had been couched.

“You guessed right,” he told Méarana at lunch that day in the hotel’s restaurant. “Sofwari was on Bangtop while your mother was at home prepping. He went the long way ‘round and she tried to head him off.”

“Was he trying to evade her, or had they planned to meet?” the harper asked. “Thank you, Billy.” The khitmutgar had interposed himself between the station’s staff and his masters, taking the serving dishes from the waiters and spooning portions onto their plates.

“It’s Greystroke’s problem now,” Donovan said.

Méarana pursed her lips and dropped her eyes. “I suppose so.”

“That nogut, lady harp,” Billy said. “Pickny-meri always belong mama. No one-time never have em.” He screwed his brow a moment in thought, then said, enunciating very carefully, “Daughter, she belong always to mother. Never give up.”

“Billy!” Donovan said sharply. “It has already been decided.”

The khitmutgar cringed. “No beat him, poor Billy. Not Billy’s place, talk him so.”

Méarana looked sharply at Donovan, but said nothing. She turned to Billy. “It’s not final,” she told him, “until we board a ship. Donovan, what else did Hugh have to say?”

The scarred man’s eyes dropped to the decoded text. Gwillgi had been alerted and was asking questions on Kàuntusulfalúghy, in case they knew where Sofwari was. I could have done that , the Sleuth told him, if I had realized his importance earlier. Pedant stuffs his facts away like a magpie. I can’t reason from what I don’t know .

A poor workman blames his tools.

The scarred man’s fist clenched. Quiet! The both O’ youse!

And so before Donovan could answer Méarana— nothing of consequence —she had plucked the message slip from his hand and read it. “Maybe Gwillgi can learn something,” she said.

“He’ll learn that Sofwari never reconnected with Bridget ban. A blind alley.”

“But we may learn,” she said with some of the earlier excitement in her voice, “what Sofwari was searching for, which had something to do with what she was searching for.”

“Let the Kennel roll over the rocks. Something may crawl out.”

She looked at Hugh’s message again. “What does he mean in the postscript: ‘Fudir, what is the Treasure Fleet?’”

Donovan snorted. “It means he is playing the game, too. He learned something on Bangtop and isn’t telling us what it is.”

“Then there is something to learn! What is the Treasure Fleet?”

Donovan snatched the message back. “How should I know?” But he felt a stir in the back of his mind and thought that the Pedant had some bright ribbon of fact tucked away back in his nest.

Later, Méarana, concerned that the scarred man was sinking back into the glum haze in which she had initially found him, pried him from the comfortable chair in which he preferred to await, drinking soggy, the arrival of a ship inward bound for Alabaster. “Let’s go for a walk, old man,” she insisted. “Let Billy have some time to himself.”

“He doesn’t have a self,” the scarred man retorted. “I have it. Right here.” And he clenched his left hand into a ball, as if crushing some small and inconsequential object.

But she persevered, and eventually Donovan threw on a cloak and placed a skullcap on his head and followed her out of the room. Billy, who sat at the dining table with a portable’ face, looked up from the screen with a question in his eyes.

“The Fudir and I are going to the Starwalk, Billy.” This was a cue to the scarred man that Donovan would not be welcome. “We’ll be back for dinner. We’ll eat in the restaurant, so you don’t need to cook anything.” In truth—though she would never say such a thing to his face—Billy favored Terran foods, which she found peculiar in flavor.

“It lacks the True Coriander,” the Fudir explained when she mentioned this on the esplanade and they had turned their steps toward the Grand Erebata.

“And what is the True Coriander? You told me once, but I’ve forgotten.”

The Fudir’s look became distant. “No man knows. We find it in some ancient recipes, but whether vegetable, meat, herb, or a mineral like salt, who knows? It grew only on Olde Earth and its secret has long been lost.” He shrugged. “What we really mean when we say that, is ‘all that we have lost since we lost Terra, and all that we hope once more to have.’”

The Grand Erebata was an oval atrium that ran end to end through the hotel, and from whose rim jutted diving platforms. Low-g gravity grids at one focus of the ellipse were on the roof; at the other focus on the mezzanine, so that one could leap out into the great open space and fall leaf-gentle in whichever direction one chose. When Méarana hesitated at the brink and looked toward the mezzanine twelve storeys below, the Fudir growled and reminded her that they were in free fall and “down” was an aesthetic choice. “Why do you think they only allow these things in free-falling habitats?”

And so she leapt. And fell upward. Whatever the Fudir had said, it felt like up, since the residential floors she passed all shared a common orientation. Gradually, she gathered speed. The god Newton is not mocked. But she had called out her destination when she leapt and the tracers directed counter-grids that slowed her so that she alighted like a dancer on the Star-walk level.

The Fudir was waiting. Méarana slipped her hand through the crook of his arm and they set off around the galleria that circled the “top” floor of the hotel. Faux-windows enclosed them on all sides but the inboard. These reproduced the vista beyond the hotel’s shielding and served all the purposes of windows without the hazard of placing a thin pane of glass between hotel guests and hard vacuum. And so they walked, it seemed, through a great glass torus.