Michael Flynn - Up Jim River

Yet Teodorq detected no malice in the man, and wondered if he chattered on not to show off his kennings but simply because he took such joy in them that he could not conceive that others did not.

Teodorq understood maps, and the holographic projections that Sofwari showed them were only another sort. That the color gradients indicated the spread of certain clans from their points of origin he accepted on faith. In his own land, the migrations of the clans were recorded in the Great Lays and sometimes one came across a mountain or a river or a rock formation remembered from a Lay and would feel one’s heart swell at the thought of ancestors who had once roamed there.

“But what was it that my mother found so interesting in these maps?” Lady Harp asked the wallah.

Sofwari turned the holostage toward her. Everyone could see, except Lady Harp, that the wallah was much taken with her. “It was the anomaly,” he said. “The clan-mother I call ‘Zhaamileey.’ You see, the little thread shapes change over time for reasons that are not entirely clear. The rate differs from world to world, but for my purposes it only mattered that that between-world variation was small and randomly distributed. Then it could be treated as a constant for all practical purposes.”

Teodorq made “get on with it” motions and was none too subtle about it.

“As you see,” he told them in case they could not see, “this is a very old clade. Its most recent common mother—or DCM in Gaelactic—lived seventy-eight hundreds of years before present.”

Lady Harp raised her eyebrows. “Which places her before the Cleansing…”

“Yes, but that is not the anomaly. Zhaamileey is in the wrong part of the sky. Her descendants are mostly on Harpaloon, not in the Old Planets or the Jen-jen. The marker was first seen among scattered creole descendants on Cuddalore and New Shangdong, those with ancestors among the aboriginal’ Loons. That was one reason to visit Harpaloon. The other was that the flow of colonists from all over the Arm makes her a wonderful sampling point.”

“How do you explain the anomaly?” asked the harper.

Sofwari flipped a hand. “Two possibilities. Harpaloon is where Zhaamileey’s descendants first appeared; or it is where they last appear. As for the first, Those of Name scattered our ancestors far and wide. Harpaloon may have been scattered a little bit farther. But the second is the more likely explanation. The clan of Zhaamileey was once more widespread, but died out across most of the Periphery, so that the’ Loons are a remnant, not an origin.”

“Interesting…But there is a third possibility.”

“So your mother said.” Sofwari smiled in a kindly-meant manner and placed his hand over hers. Teodorq noted how the harper allowed it for a moment before slipping out. “One means no offense, of course, but your mother was not a science-wallah. Like many women, she was prone to romantic notions. She thought the anomalous pattern had to do with an old Commonwealth fable.”

“The Treasure Fleet,” said Lady Harp.

Sofwari bobbed his head side to side. “Yes. I had never heard of it; but she told me it was a well-known children’s tale when she had been ‘in barracks.’ But archeology must be based on facts, not romances. One may as well believe in Babylonia or California or the Snowdrift Ride of Christopher Chu.”

“California…,” Méarana suggested.

“A fabled land of eternal youth, of gods and goddesses, where the streets were paved with stars.” Sofwari chuckled and leaned toward the harper, as if to impart a confidence. “But the truth of it is that it is only a nebula off on the edge of Old Commonwealth space.”

“Is there a bright, hot, blue star nearby?” the harper asked. “Like the one at Sapphire Point?”

Sofwari wagged his hands ulta-pulta. “I don’t know. Other science-wallahs specialize in cataloging stars. Besides, it’s over in the Confederation.”

The harper sang softly a capella,

“ Away, away on the Rigel Run,

And off through California.”

Sofwari sighed. “A science-wallah does not leap ahead of the facts, let alone for the sake of a song.”

Teodorq chuckled and the other three turned to him. “Well enough, Sofwari,” he said. “If our Bridget ban leaped ahead of the facts, yet here we are, tiptoeing after.”

In all her years knocking about the Periphery, Captain Maggie Barnes of the trade ship Blankets and Beads had encountered a great many irritations and not a few outrages. Experience had taught her that most could be dealt with by patience. To invest much worry was pointless, because the return on that investment was usually more worries. Other problems were like fungus. If you didn’t sanitize right away, they just grew worse. Or “wusser ‘n’ wusser,” as they used to say when she had been growing up on Megranome.

But what to make of this which Pepper had dumped into her now, alas, more ample lap?

She had been in her dayroom reviewing manifests with her First Officer when Mart Pepper brought in a bit of supercargo who claimed the authority to commandeer her ship. She studied the passenger’s bona fides, and turned to First Officer ad-Din. “It seems to be a legitimate Kennel chit, D.Z.”

The First Officer’s full name was Dalapathi Zitharthan ad-Din, but to the joy of his shipmates, he would answer to his initials. He tugged at his beard. “Bumboat drops back to the Gat in a half-hora,” he said thoughtfully. “Plenty of empty space on it for unwanted passengers. Otherwise…Our first stop is Ākramaņapīchē. Folks marooned there don’t usually find their way back to the League.”

Barnes studied the chit more thoroughly. Its glow had died, of course, when she had taken it in hand; but it had been glowing. She had never heard of a Kennel chit being successfully counterfeited, but that did not mean it could not be done.

“This only means yuh have an unlimited expense account,” she told her guest. “It means yuh can afford my ship. Don’t mean yuh can have it.” She handed the chit back and noted how it resumed its glow. Tag-alongs glowed when you were in the corridors that activated them. There was no way for them to recognize who held them. That bit of Kennel craft was closely guarded indeed.

Reluctantly, she concluded that this Donovan was exactly what he pretended to be: a “special agent” of the Kennel. The next question was what real authority a “special agent” might possess. “We’ll gladly afford yuh passage to Enjrun. We was plannin’ to stop there, anyways.”

“We know,” Donovan replied. “We checked with your owners at Chandler House before the bumboat rose.”

We?

“The owners would have been asleep at that hour,” D.Z. pointed out.

“We woke them.”

“That why the bumboat was late?” Barnes was impressed with the throw-weight this indicated, but she did not let it show in her face. It might only show that people wakened in the middle of the night could be buffaloed more easily.

Donovan handed over a hard document and a brain. “It is also why we have a charter.”

The paper declared “to all and sundry” that Gospender and Recket Trading Company of Gaznogav-Gatmander, had accepted charter of their trade ship, Blankets and Beads , to the Kennel of the High King, to be used as directed by Donovan buigh, their agent, or by Lucia Thompson, d.b.a., Méarana of Dangchao.

Barnes handed the brain to D.Z., who ran it throught the sanitizer before inserting it in the reader. She held the hard up to the light. That was the G&R watermark, all right, and she recognized Kimmy Gospender’s chop. She doubted that the brain would prove a forgery, either because it was not a forgery, or because it was a very good one. She handed the hard over to her First. “Verify this with Kimmy—voice-and-vision—before we hit the roads.”