No alarms. This far from the tourist areas, the ’Cockers did not fear unauthorized entries. Among themselves, custom was a stronger bar than locks and alarms. Those who found trespass unimaginable would find it hard to imagine trespassers. Briefly, she wondered what it might be like to live in a society that did not bar its doors.
Her implant returned the datum that buildings of this style were called remonstratoria, or Halls of Remonstration. They were thought to be either law courts or temples, but no off-worlder had ever been inside one, and what rites were performed within remained a mystery.
Wonderful. She could add sacrilege to her list of offenses.
The door swung noiselessly inward, revealing a darkened corridor. She stepped through, closing the door softly, and found herself in a rough basement. She squatted there, panting from her run, and sniffed. A harsh chemical odor stung her nostrils. It might mask the odor of a human being—a custodian or night watchman.
But listening, she heard nothing save the creaking and settling of the building itself. This was an old building. She could smell the age in the dank stone, in the seasoned wood. The years had soaked into them and settled there.
Old buildings are sacred in societies ruled by custom.
Sacred because it was old or old because it was sacred, it made no difference. But how could she enter such a building and not explore? Hounds are, by their nature, always sniffing around.
She picked out a flight of old wooden steps twisting up a narrow stairwell. The runners had rounded dips in their centers, worn by countless feet over countless years. She thought the building might pre-date the Reconnection, when some of the Diaspora worlds had recovered the ability to slide between the stars.
Stairs are meant for climbing; and so, she did.
She paused again on the main floor to sniff and listen. The chemical scents were stronger here, but the silences remained as profound. Light glimmered through shutter slats covering the windows. A tree must have stood between the window and the streetlamp because the light flickered irregularly as the branches outside wavered in the fitful night breeze.
She made out row after row of racks reaching nearly to the ceiling and arranged in rigid precision from the front of the room to its back. The severity of the geometry was at one with the architecture of the building—and very unlike the free-flowing, unwalled improvisations of modern ’Cockers.
A library, she thought, or possibly an art gallery.
Drawing nearer, she discerned solid objects mounted to the walls. Sculpture, perhaps? If so, sculpture of little variety. Equally spaced in rigid rows, each seemed roughly the same size as all the others. Well, sonnets were all the same “size,” yet each could be an exquisitely different work of art—for the greatest art, Die Bolders believed, lay in “achievement within restrictions,” just as accomplishment in sport required hurdles and nets and balk lines.
Brief bursts of dim light alternated with closeted darkness as the leaves fluttered in front of the window. Bridget ban stepped into an aisle to get a better look at one of the sculptures.
And came face-to-face with a wide-eyed, grim-lipped elf with wild, frizzy hair. It required all her Hound’s training to stifle the cry that climbed up her throat.
Discovered! There had been a watchman, after all.
But the elf said nothing. The eyes did not blink. The mouth did not part. A disembodied voice spoke through sewn-still lips. “I am Billy Kisilwando. I killed my partner in a drunken fit…”
And the horror of discovery gave way to the discovery of horror.
It was a head, carefully preserved by the taxidermist’s art, eyes replaced by glass, lips stitched closed, mounted to a wall bracket. Beneath was a plaque bearing a name, an offense, and a date. Evidently, if someone stood for a time before a particular head, an intelligence would play that person’s last words.
When Billy Kisilwando killed his partner in a drunken fit, he was given one hundred days grace to set his affairs in order and to meditate, which he did. He set off into the Malawayo Wilderness with a rucksack, a hiking staff, and a small, but faithful terrier. He emerged after ninety-nine days, minus dog and staff, and reported to the District Head, confessed his sin, and prayed forgiveness from his partner’s manu. Then they cut off his head, preserved it, and mounted it in the Hall of Remonstration, where it is admired by all who pass through the Nolapatady District on their journeys. And forever after he repeated his confession to all who came to see him. Such is the cruelty of custom: not that a man be given the grace to contemplate his end; but that he feels bound to honor its expiration.
Bridget ban contemplated the head of Billy Kisilwando, and passed judgment.
“Now, that’s different,” she said aloud.
She wandered fascinated through the hall, and found aisle after aisle of stuffed and mounted heads. The panels near the street entrance were newer; those near the back or in side chambers were older, more severe in their lines, with classical moldboards and trim. The older plaques bore dates in the former “Peacock’s Era.” The newer plaques bore Gaelactic dates, but with the Year of the Peacock noted parenthetically underneath.
There were fewer elves in the back rooms, and in one especially dusty room, the only heads were identifiably men and women. These older displays were crowded closer together, and the heads were tattered and moth-eaten. As the displays grew more recent, the heads converged toward the androgynous average.
On the newer walls, brightly painted in the exuberant pastels of modern Peacock, were mounted among the elves the heads of others: pale, flat-faced Jugurthans; golden women from Valency; thin-featured Alabastrines with skin like night; even a Cynthian warrior’s head, dripping with jewels, cruel arrogance, and barbaric splendor—and hard must have been the severing of that neck. The off-worlder faces all bore a look of immense surprise; as if they could not credit what was being done to them; all except the Cynthian, who managed somehow to sneer even in death. Curious, she waited until it spoke its confession.
Eat my dick, the head whispered, and an involuntary smile caught at the ends of Bridget ban’s lips. One thing you had to grant the barbarians of the Hadramoo: they died in style.
A Hound can construct marvels out of odds and ends, and in the remonstratorium she found all she needed. The preparation rooms downstairs contained a dye with which she darkened her entire body from gold to brown, save on the palms and soles. She had known Megranomers who styled their bodies so. A knife in the same room cut off the longest part of her hair, and a thong bundled the rest of it atop her head. A bit of charcoal from the machine shop added lines to her face and aged her appearance in subtle ways, and two small coins found in a drawer and pressed into her nostrils altered the shape of her nose.
Finally, she wound her srong about her waist. It was possible that the enforcers had gotten a picture of her clothing. But she had been in the dark between two lamps when she slid away, and they had been sauntering complacently behind, thinking themselves clever and undetected. At best they might recall the srong having “many iridescent colors,” which would narrow the sartorial odds not at all. She dared not try to alter the pattern, because she had purged the cache and most of the memory in the fabric was now taken up by the STC database. She contented herself with turning the fabric the other way out, which reversed the pattern and presented a slightly more muted version.
Ponchos, however, were not native to this world and they would notice hers immediately. She could not discard it, since part of the copied database resided in its mems; but she did manage to tighten the neck hole into a headband—the old-fashioned way: there was needle and thread in the prep rooms—and she wrapped the whole thing above her head in a fair imitation of a Chettinad turban. This served the double purpose of concealing the remnant of her red hair.
She still looked like an outworlder, but she might be an older Chettinad or a Megranomer or at any rate not the fleet young golden Hound who had fled from them the night before. “Ah aim abutt mahyõ bizz,” sh
e said aloud, practicing a Megranomic accent from the Eastern Isles. Best not lay it on too thick. The idea was to be unnoticed.
Finally, it could not be good for any outworlder to be found too near the remonstratorium. So, as the eastern sky grayed just a little, she worked her way through still, silent gardens toward the maglev line. There, she found a copse in a public park and concealed herself. Outdoors, the waning night was chilly and she wrapped her arms about herself, wishing she hadn’t had to disguise the poncho.
In the morning, as people began to gather at the Uasladonto Street maglev station for the ride into town, Bridget ban spotted a mixed trio of touristas. She slid from concealment and crossed the walkway so as to come smoothly into line with them. As she expected, they were delighted to find “another real woman,” the man in the group being especially appreciative. He was from High Tara itself, and sported checkered kilts, a fringed cloak, and an admiring glance. The Jugurthan woman with him was robust of physique and carried an umbrella matching the pattern of her srong. She introduced a Valencian woman she had met in a nearby restaurant.
And so, in this chatty company, to all appearances boon traveling companions, Bridget ban sauntered past the weary enforcer standing by the entry with a digital image in his hand and the upcoming shift change on his mind. He was looking for a younger, more athletic woman, traveling alone.
Entry to her ship was simple. She contacted the intelligence over her implant and the guards that had been placed about the ship were knocked out by a sonic burst from the ship’s defenses. She then slipped aboard, locked up, and let them wake up naturally. Later, she would call the hotel and have her belongings shuttled over, tell them she had spent the night aboard “on Hound’s business.” If the events of last night were brought up, she would profess ignorance. Yes, she had been wearing her “undress greens,” because Pulawayo had seemed much taken with her uniform. Yes, she had left Nolapatady at such and such an hour: they could ask Pulawayo. With only a little luck, they would feel so foolish at chasing some other red-haired tourista through the streets of Nolapatady that they would not press matters further. That would only attract the interest of the League and, more dreadfully, of the other Hounds. There would be no trace of her download of the STC database, and the Director would corroborate all the important details.
They might wonder what had happened to the other redhead, but everyone would pretend to believe a story that held together so wonderfully.
In the meantime, the data in her anycloth had better hold a damned good secret to make the whole effort worthwhile. What reason could Peacock have for protecting the phantom fleet that they would risk attacking a Hound?
She pulled off her srong and turban and linked them into her shipboard ’face, gave the intelligence the local dates for the ambush of the Cynthians, and asked it to track the ambushing fleet forward and backward. Then she showered and restored her appearance, produced a fall to complete her hair. When she returned to the ’face, the analysis was finished.
She studied the results. Then she asked for similar traces on all traffic, deleting first local in-system traffic, then traffic on the Silk Road and Route 66. Finally, she highlighted the points of origin and termination.
The results made her whistle.
The sky was full of holes.
An Craic
“You have to admit,” the scarred man says, “to an element of farce to all this. The Hound had come sniffing after one secret and flushed out two others quite by chance.”
The harper plays with her strings, tuning them for her first set. Her head is bent, her ear close to the clairseach. She plucks an A, listens, turns a key to tighten the cord. “That’s the way of it among secrets,” she replies without looking up. “One thing leads to another. The secret of the Dancer to the secret of the phantom fleet to the secret of Peacock’s hidden holes. Sometimes I think there is only one secret, and all others are but manifestations of it, and if only we learned what that one secret is, we would know everything.”
The scarred man screws up his face. “That’s too mystical for me. I prefer the irony of chance to the certainty of myth. It was luck, not fate. When you have your eye fixed on one thing, it’s easy to stumble over others.”
The harper sets her harp aside. “The ‘certainty’ of myth?”
“Of course. You can have supreme confidence in a thing only when you don’t quite know what that thing is.”
“Really.” The harper considers that: what it may say about the universe; or at least about the part of it the storyteller occupies. “I’d have thought the opposite.”
“No.” The scarred man grows animated. His hands accentuate his words, fluttering, chopping like a meat cleaver on the tabletop, causing the morning bowls to dance. “The more you know a thing, the more you know how it can fail you. That’s why we fall in love with strangers—and grow estranged from our closest companions. ‘Ignorance begets confidence,’ an ancient god once said, ‘more often than does knowledge.’”
The harper shows her teeth. “You seem very confident of that.”
The scarred man’s laugh is like the rustle of ancient, long-dried leaves. “Very well. Let us leave the issue uncertain, and at least smile that Bridget ban struck a goal at which she hadn’t aimed.”
The harper brushes a glissando from her strings. “At least she struck a goal.” This, she punctuates with a single plucked note, high at the end of her harp. It lingers in the air between them.
“But later,” the scarred man foretells, “she lost what she had loved and the tragedy is that she never knew it.”
The harper’s smile fades and she lifts the harp to her lap and plays aimlessly for a time. “Why did they try to kill her?” she finally asks.
The scarred man studies her. His lips work as if tasting something. “Five uncharted roads on Electric Avenue? Unknown rivers of space leading to…Where? New worlds? Shortcuts to old ones? It was a secret worth killing for.”
“Provided you aren’t on the sharp end of the knife.”
He waves a hand, conceding the point. “What sacrifice goes willingly to the altar? The ’Cockers were terrified. Let word of such a prize leak out and every would-be highwayman in the Spiral Arm would cast his die to seize it. Perhaps even the Elders of Jehovah would stir at the thought of a rival so nearby. Certainly, the People of Foreganger would. The ’Cockers are clever and subtle and even dangerous in their quiet, treacherous way, but the ‘strong right arm’ is not their play and the wise man bets on the larger fleet. Who knows how many heads in their Halls of Remonstration once let slip the holes in Peacock’s sky through the hole in their face. Loose lips are best sewn shut forever.”
“There is not enough thread in the Spiral Arm for such embroidery,” the harper objects. “How many smugglers did they move over the years through those hidden channels? And none of them ever mentioned the clever way in which they laundered their cargo?”
The scarred man shrugs and looks about the Bar, where men and women laugh and trade stories and withhold secrets. “One hears a great many tales from captains in their cups. The stories move at a discount. But, no, the ’Cockers did the laundry themselves. Smugglers came to them, turned over their cargoes, and were paid ‘on the barrelhead,’ as the Terrans say. They might suspect a secret channel—most captains know of some here and there—but they would not know the currents, directions, loci, entry ramps, all those things needful for finding and using them. That was why Peacock could not let a Hound see the STC records. She’d learn not only that the roads existed, but also where they were.”
“Then it wasn’t the phantom fleet they were protecting, at all.”
“Not as such. I suspect they were surprised—and maybe even frightened—that the strangers knew one of their secret shortcuts. The ’Cockers told no one—but they forgot that holes often have two ends.”
“But why not lie? Tell her the fleet had come out of Route 66 or off the Spice Road from Jehovah. Then she’d leave and…Oh.”
> “Yes. ‘Oh.’ She’d reach Foreganger or Jehovah and find that no such fleet had passed through there. There are nodes where trans-cooper traffic is not well tracked and passersby go unrecorded; but not at those two suns. She’d’ve been back in a fortnight or two, and not in the best of humors.”
“Then they ought to have had a false record already prepared against the day.”
“But they were ’Cockers, and forethought is not their métier. The need for a ‘second set of books’ was never urgent until it was critical. And then, when they were faced with it, they doubted their ability to fool a Hound. A quite reasonable doubt,” the scarred man adds with a smirk.
The harper finds a menacing chord and plays out, in theme and variations, the grim array of severed heads, stretching back and back into the dawn of the Peacock’s Era. Their world might be accounted a paradise, but paradises have always been bound by strict rules, the breaking of which means exile or death. But she follows it with a jaunty, triumphant strain as Bridget ban leaps though the backyards of Nolapatady. “So, she left Peacock Junction and followed the phantom fleet down a secret hole. But I had thought…”
“What?”
“That she and Hugh…and the others, of course…joined forces.”
“Because it would make a better story?” The scarred man rubs the side of his nose with a forefinger and works his lips. He looks to the side, as if he studies the scene, as if he sees it in his mind’s eye. “There is a move in shaHmat in which an opponent’s princess is blocked and each of her replies ends badly. Having asked for the records, Bridget ban could not now say, ‘Never mind,’ and leave. They would know she’d gotten the intelligence some other way, and the planetary defense batteries would take her out before she reached low orbit. She was clever and her ship was quick, but the god Newton is cruel, and they would pot her on the rise. Of course,” he adds cruelly, “she could not wait too long, either, or they would wonder at her patience. She was pinned like a butterfly on the Spaceport Hard. She dared not leave.”
The January Dancer Page 22
