Michael Flynn - Up Jim River

“Me?” said Donovan. “I have more brains than you might think; but I’m only a broken vessel.”

Teodorq shrugged his massive shoulders. “Broken stuff is generally pretty sharp. And that leaves you, Lady Harp. I’m real sorry, me, about yer mother. That’s tough breaks, and I feel for yuh. But what a fellowship we have here! I want the glory. Lady Méarana wants to find her mother. Dovovan wants to find a wonder-weapon. And Billy Chins wants to kiss Donovan’s ass so bad he’ll do a prostate exam with his tongue.”

The little Terran cried out in fury and lunged from his seat, his left hand having pulled a stiletto from inside his blouse.

But Teodorq’s massive hands moved like twin snakes and seized Billy’s wrist in a certain grip, causing him to go white and drop the dagger. The Wildman looked first at the scarred man, then at the harper, then he grinned and pointed to each in turn. “Hideout gun in the back of your waist—a teaser, right? And that dagger yuh showed me once before. Sweet. Smart enough to draw. Smart enough to hold back and see what played out. Here, boy.” He handed the dagger back to Billy Chins, who took it with smoldering eyes.

“Yuh got guts, boy,” the Wildman said. “Pulling on me is usually a one-way trip to the boneyard; but I wanted to see what yuh was made of. Yuh may be a weasel; but a weasel got sharp teeth and ain’t bad to have on your side when yer on the sharp end.”

Méarana spoke up. “Are ye done playing games, Teodorq? Would ye hae me sing a satire on ye? Billy, sit down! Where we gang is gae dangerous, an’ we all maun work together or we’ll nae ayn of us come back.”

“As your mother ‘nae’ came back,” said Donovan.

Méarana turned on him. “What I said about everyone working together applies to ye in spades, Donovan buigh!”

The scarred man’s face twisted as he tried to sneer, smile, and smirk at the same time. But the harper spun to face the Wildman. “And now, we’ll hae no more dancing. Where did your medallion come from?”

Teodorq pursed his lips and looked toward the ceiling. “An export shop on Gatmander.”

Méarana could scarce believe it. “Ye’ve nae took it off a Nyacki warrior? For such mickle return I sprang ye from Josang Prison?”

“Yuh had yer goal, babe; and I had mine.”

Donovan said, “The release form says she gives you back when she’s done. There’s a Pup on Ampayam who’d be glad to escort you there.”

The Wildman shrugged. “What can he do? Put me under a second death sentence? Yuh can only kill me once, old man.”

“Billy Chins knows things,” said the khitmutgar. “Not death, but wish-for-death.”

“Oh, don’t get your shorts in a knot,” the Wildman told them. “I said I was with yuh—to death and glory. The export-guy on Gatmander gotta know where it come from. An’ I seen other pieces like it here and there out in the Free Worlds.” He stood from the table. “I’ll need to buy arms when we hit Gatmander,” he said. “Yuh don’t wanna roam the Free Worlds without yuh be armed—and with more than a teaser.” With that, he left, whistling.

Billy rose to follow. Donovan held him back a moment.

“Don’t kill him. We need him.”

Billy nodded. “I make nice-nice, me. Billy patient man.”

Méarana watched the khitmutgar go. “There will be trouble between those two, sooner or later.”

“Later, rather than sooner,” the scarred man said. “Billy is no fool. Having Teodorq along shortens the odds against coming back.”

“You don’t think we’re coming back, do you?”

“No.”

“Then why are you going?”

“That’s what worries me. I’m not half so afraid of Those of Name as I am of what might be left over up here.” He rapped his skull with his knuckles. “It’s what might awaken in the closets of our minds.”

Méarana reached for the harp case that sat at her feet; but the scarred man shook his head.

“Don’t try your harper’s tricks on me. Why do you play that thing anyway?”

She took the harp out and played a glissando, listening to the jangle of the chords. She began to tighten the ones that had grown slack. “To bring faith, and joy, and love.”

Donovan grunted. “It’s a big Spiral Arm. You have your work cut out for you.”

“I’ll be happy,” the harper answered, “if I can bring them to just one person.”

The scarred man shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “That’s a more modest goal, and—if it makes you happy—a self-fulfilling one.”

“No,” said the harper in an almost distracted manner. “Just you, Donovan. Just you. I want you to believe in something, to find joy in something, to love something.”

The mocking smile reclaimed Donovan’s lips. “Why, then you are in luck,” he said. “I believe I’ll have another whiskey. Because I love it. And…I expect I’ll enjoy it, too.”

“Ah, such a joy is fleeting. It doesn’t last.”

“That’s why you have to drink more than one.”

Gatmander’s sun lies more distant than most and he gleams in her sky as a blue-white diamond. Young Gat women are known to hold their splayed fingers to the sky and imagine the sunset in an engagement ring. Daylight on Gatmander would be called dusk most anywhere else .

She should be a colder world than she is. But her sun is hotter and compensates somewhat for his distance by his temperament. Partly, too, being a large world, Gatmander squeezes her core like a woman hugging herself for warmth. In consequence, her heart seethes from the pressing love of gravity, and some of this grills her surface. And partly, too, the water vapor in her air seizes and hoards what heat her star and core grant from above and below. This vapor falls as snow for almost half the year and melts grudgingly in a summer more like spring. The species planted by the ancient terraforming arks had made the best of a bad deal and have adapted with admirable dispatch. Behaviors changed, features were bent to new uses, and new features appeared in the blink of a biological eye as the god Lamarck awoke sleeping “junk genes” to tackle new environmental conditions .

Taken all for all, she is a bleak world. Tundra in the high latitudes, taiga over the temperate zones, oak and maple in the tropics. A bare million souls live in no more than a few score cities, with maybe another two million scattered in towns and villages across the Canda landmass. The other continent, Zobiir, splays half her bulk across the north pole and supports nothing but massive glaciers and a precarious research base on her Southern Bay. The people are friendly enough, but embrace a kind of enthusiastic fatalism. Their literature runs heavily to huddled, lonely women yearning for hot but distant lovers .

The harper and the scarred man landed with servant and bodyguard in train at the groundside spaceport near Gudsga, which was what passed for the planetary capital. Gatmander supported a single planetary government, mainly because no one saw reason to support more than one. That was theory. In practice, each city governed its own hinterland of towns and villages and sent a couple of boys to Gudsga to sit in a council they called the loyal shirka .

Passengers unboarded the shuttle by means of mobile stairs and walked across the field to the terminal. It was morning and the sun was behind them, casting bluish shadows across the field. The sky itself was lightening from black to gunmetal gray.

The terminal was little more than a large shed, and there were no formalities to their entry. Gats saw no reason to bar either those mad enough to come or sane enough to leave. The sign across the entry read: welcome to gatmander: the end of the road. Méarana wondered if the Gats had meant that the way it sounded, or if they had intended only a bald, factual description. For it was here that that Yellow Brick Road and the Gorky Prospect, having combined into the Grand Concourse, came to an end, and ships had to circle halfway around Black Diamond Star to reach the Wilderness Trail into the Wild.