The Enigma Score

by Tepper, Sheri S

  ‘Acolyte’s oath, Master.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! Acolyte’s oath only applies in the citadel.’

  ‘Not according to Master General, Master Ferrence. He says I owe you most of a year yet, and where you go, I go. So says Master General with some vehemence.’ The boy was downcast over something, not his usual ebullient self.

  ‘How did you know which way I was going?’

  ‘You and the Tripmaster discussed it. He told Master General and Master General told me. I left a few hours before you planned to.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it would do any good to ask you to go back and say you couldn’t find me.’

  ‘Master General would just send me looking. He said so already.’ The boy turned away, gesturing toward the pile of wood laid by and the cookpot hung ready. ‘We’ve got some fresh meat.’

  Tasmin followed him in a mood of some bewilderment. It had certainly not been his intention to travel in company, and had he chosen company, he would not have chosen Jamieson. Would he? ‘Master General didn’t say anything to me.’

  ‘He didn’t want to argue with you. He told us to make ourselves useful and not intrude on your privacy.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Me and Clarin, sir.’

  ‘Clarin!’

  ‘Yes, sir?’ The girl came out of the tent, touched her breast in a gesture of respect, and stood silently waiting.

  ‘You don’t have acolyte’s oath as a reason,’ he snarled, deeply dismayed. Clarin!

  ‘Master General said I might have oath, sir. If your journey takes you past Jamieson’s year, sir, then you would be starting on mine.’

  ‘I didn’t even say I’d take you as acolyte!’

  ‘Well, but you didn’t say you wouldn’t, sir, so Master General….’

  Tasmin shook his head and said nothing more. He was too weary and too shocked to deal with the subject. The pins in his skull had set up a tuneless throbbing at the first sight of Jamieson, and he wondered viciously if the Master General would have been so generous with acolytes if he knew the effect they had on Tasmin’s injured head. He had been peaceful, settling into the wonder of Jubal, letting it carry him. Now … Damn!

  He sat down beside the laid fire and watched while Jamieson and Clarin moved around the camp, making it comfortable. His acolyte seemed subdued, and Tasmin could appreciate why. An almost solitary trip into the wilds of Jubal would hardly appeal to Jamieson’s gregarious nature. Though it wasn’t mere social contact Jamieson craved. The boy would rather chase girls than eat, but he’d rather sing than chase girls, and he liked an audience when he did it. The thought of Jamieson’s discomfort and unhappiness damped his own annoyance with a modicum of sympathy. Obviously, this hadn’t been the boy’s idea.

  Clarin led Tasmin’s mule off toward the patch of settler’s brush just beyond the trees. The mule would eat it now; they might be eating it later – the roots and stalks would sustain life for human travelers, though no method of preparation did much to improve the taste. Clarin returned, leaving the mule munching contentedly.

  ‘Why in God’s name …’ he muttered.

  Clarin threw a questioning glance in Jamieson’s direction. The boy avoided meeting her glance. ‘I believe the Master General didn’t think you should be alone, sir.’ She was respectful but firm.

  ‘What did he think I was going to do? Throw myself at the foot of a Presence, like some hysterical neophyte or crazy Crystallite, and yodel for the end?’

  Jamieson still refused to look at her. Something going on there, but Tasmin was too weary to dig it out.

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I think he just thought you needed company.’

  Tasmin snorted. He didn’t want company. He wanted to sink himself in Jubal. Breathe it. Taste it. Lie wallowing in it, like a bantigon in a mudhole. Wanted to be alone.

  Which, wasn’t healthy. Even in his current frame of mind, he knew that. Well, did he need company? Certainly it would be easier traveling with three. There were routes that were passable to a single singer, particularly a good singer – and Tasmin was good, his peers and his own sense of value both told him that. However, two or three singers could do better, move faster.

  ‘Did the Tripmaster enlighten either of you as to where I was going to end up on this trip?’ he asked resignedly.

  ‘No, sir.’ Jamieson was heating something over the fire, still subdued.

  ‘The Deepsoil Coast.’ Where Lim Terree had lived. Where he had talked to people, left clues to himself. Lim’s territory.

  ‘What!’ Jamieson turned, almost upsetting the pot, not seeing Clarin glaring at him as she set it upright once more and took his place tending it. ‘No joke? Apogee! I’ve always wanted to go there!’ His face was suddenly alive with anticipation.

  ‘We’re a long way from there. Weeks.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I know.’

  ‘What route?’ asked Clarin, stirring the pot without looking at it, the light reflecting on her hair. It had grown into tiny ringlets, Tasmin noted, and she looked more feminine than he had remembered. In her quiet way, she seemed to be as excited as Jamieson.

  ‘The only way I could get the Master General to agree to my going at all was to offer to do some mapping on the way. We’ve got some old scores he wants me to verify. Little stuff, mostly. Challenger Canyon. The Wicked Witch of the West. The Mad Gap.’

  Jamieson put on his weighing look. ‘Mapping is Explorer business. Besides, nobody travels that way.’

  ‘Which is why he can’t get an Explorer to do it. They have more important things to do. For some reason, Master General wants the scores verified. Nobody’s been that way for ten or twenty years. Nobody’s used the Mad Gap password for about fifty. I had quite a hunt to find a copy of the score, as a matter of fact. We have no idea whether the Passwords will still work.’ It sounded weak, even to Tasmin, and yet Master General had been adamant about it. Something going on there? Tasmin would have bet his dinner that the hierarchy of the Order was up to something.

  Jamieson was unaccountably subdued again. ‘It sounds like it will take forever,’ he said with self-conscious drama.

  ‘Not forever. A few weeks, which is what I said to start with. Good practice for you two.’

  ‘I suppose.’ The boy growled something to himself, and Clarin muttered a reply.

  ‘You don’t sound overjoyed.’

  Jamieson grunted, ‘Right at the moment – I’m sorry. I shouldn’t mention personal things.’

  ‘Mention away.’ Tasmin stretched out on his bedroll, feeling through his pack for the flask of broundy he usually carried.

  ‘Right at the moment I’m mainly concerned that Wendra Gentrack will still be single when I get back to Deepsoil Five. She was madder than anybody I’ve ever seen when I told her … told her I had to go.’

  ‘Ah,’ Tasmin murmured. Wendra Gentrack was a very social young lady. Daughter of Celcy’s friend Jeannie and of Hom Gentrack, one of BDL’s Agricultural Section Managers. ‘You have an understanding?’

  ‘I have had what I regarded as an understanding, yes. She seems to have whatever seems to be most fun for her on any given day.’

  ‘I told Jamieson he was brou-dizzy,’ the girl said from her place beside the fire. ‘Wendra is virtually brain dead.’

  Jamieson poked the fire viciously, pulled the kettle off and set out three bowls. ‘Are you ready to eat now?’ he asked Clarin in a poisonous tone. ‘Would that activity possibly occupy your mouth with something besides giving me advice I didn’t ask for?’

  Oh, marvelous, Tasmin thought. All I need. A juvenile feud. Without thinking, he said, ‘There are relationships that strike others as being inappropriate, Clarin, which are, in fact, very rewarding to those involved.’

  She flushed, and he realized with sudden shock what he had just said. He felt his face flame, but kept his eyes locked on hers. ‘We’re evidently going to be traveling together. There is only one way I can see that this will work. From this moment you both have equal acol
yte status. I expect citadel courtesy between the two of you as well as toward me. Right?’

  They nodded. He thought Clarin had an expression of relief, although perhaps it was more one of quiet amusement. Amusement? At what?

  Doggedly, he went on. ‘And, Jamieson, I do understand how you feel about leaving ’Five just now. Believe me, I do. I would send you back if there were any way to do it.’ And I will keep trying to think of a way, he told himself grimly.

  ‘Now, what have you fixed for our supper?’

  They sprawled near the fire with their bowls, a savory dish of fresh vegetables and grain served with scraps of broiled meat. A little wind came down the slope behind them, bringing the scent of Jubal and the sound of viggies singing. ‘I had a viggy once,’ mused Tasmin. ‘For a few hours.’

  ‘No joke? I didn’t know anyone could catch them.’

  ‘No, they can be caught. They just die in captivity, is all. But this was a young one that was found with broken legs along the caravan route. Somebody splinted the legs and kept the viggy and it lived. Later they sold him to my father.’

  ‘Did it sing?’ Clarin asked, her voice hushed.

  ‘Not while I had it. It might have. It … got away.’

  There was a long silence, interrupted only by the sound of chewing, the clatter of spoon on bowl.

  ‘Master?’

  ‘Clarin.’

  ‘You know I transferred in from Northwest.’

  ‘Yes. I never knew why.’

  ‘Oh.’ She seemed to be searching for a reply that would be appropriately impersonal. ‘My voice was too low for a lot of the scores up there. Nine out of ten of them are soprano scores, and I’m no soprano. The Masters thought I’d have a better chance of being steadily employed down around Five or even Northeast, over toward Eleven. It wasn’t until I got to Five that I ever heard much about the Crystallites. And then you mentioned Crystallites a little while ago. Are they really set on killing off all Tripsingers, or is that just a horror story?’

  ‘Well, there was that one notorious assassination on the Jut about six years ago,’ Tasmin replied. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard of that, even though you’d have been very young at the time. It was no campfire tale. All twelve Tripsingers at the local chapter house were killed by a band of Crystallite fanatics. The Jut has no food source of its own. The Jut Tripsingers made regular trips to bring in supplies by caravan, but there had been bad weather and food was already short. They were killed just as they were about to leave on a provisions run. There were about one hundred people there, and when they tried to get out between the Jammers, they all died but two. We have their accounts of what happened, and some accounts found on the Jut, written by people who died …’

  ‘And the Crystallites?’

  ‘They got away, clean away. As far as I know, no one has ever found out how. They had to have had help, that’s certain. Help from outside, somewhere. Anyhow, that was really the first occasion when anyone heard much about Crystallites.’

  ‘I don’t understand them!’

  ‘They seem to have picked up Erickson’s beliefs and carried them to a ridiculous extreme,’ Tasmin said. ‘Erickson believed the Presences are sentient, and by that he meant conscious, capable of understanding. He believed when we do a PJ we actually use meaningful words, even though we don’t know what the meaning is. He started the Tripsingers as a quasi-religious order – the Worshipful Order of Tripsingers – and we’ve still got a lot of the old religious vocabulary and trappings left.

  ‘The Crystallites picked up the belief in the sentience of Presences and built on it. In their religious scheme, the Presences are not merely sentient but godlike. The Crystallites believe either that Tripsinging is diabolical or that all Tripsingers are heretics, I’m not sure which. Quite frankly, their theology doesn’t seem to be very consistent or well thought out. Sometimes I think two or three people just invented it without bothering to do a first draft. At any rate, they seem to consider it blasphemous for people to speak to the Presences at all. Not up close, at any rate. If we do so, we’re tempting the gods who may, if they grow sufficiently agitated, destroy everything.’ Tasmin smiled at her. Stated thus baldly, it sounded silly. At the foot of the Black Tower, staring up, it often seemed quite reasonable.

  ‘What do the Crystallites want us to do?’

  Jamieson answered in a sarcastic, singsong voice. ‘They want us to stay on the coast, build cathedrals, burn incense, sing prayers all day, and bring in pilgrims from the known universe. Pilgrims who slap down consumer chits with both hands just to look at a Presence through a scope and even more to get within a few miles of one. That’s about it.’

  ‘Stated with Jamieson’s usual contempt for complexity,’ Tasmin chided, ‘but essentially true. They have quite a commercial empire built around pilgrimage. And, sad to say, the emergence of the Crystallites seems to have been what caused BDL to revise its own position on the Presences.’

  Clarin thought about this. ‘Oh, of course! If people really thought the Presences were sentient, and if the Planetary Exploitation Council thought so, too, then BDL probably couldn’t have exploitation rights to Jubal anymore. BDL might be deported, and it wouldn’t like that one little bit. But … if BDL defines the Presences as nonsentient …’

  ‘Not if,’ said Jamieson. ‘Since. BDL’s been defining the Presences as nonsentient for fifty years. Even though we all know they are….’

  ‘Jamieson!’

  The boy threw up his hands, saying in an argumentative tone, ‘Well, we do, Master Ferrence. I don’t know a single ’Singer who believes they’re nonsentient. No matter what he may say on the outside, inside he knows.’

  ‘He or she,’ said Clarin in a patient tone. ‘There are women singers, too, you know.’ It was obviously not the first time she had reminded Jamieson of this.

  Tasmin sighed. Did he really want to spend effort cleaving to the BDL line on this trip? Did he want this continuing tug of war with Jamieson? Jamieson, who was, Tasmin reminded himself, one of the most talented singers it had ever been Tasmin’s duty to try and whip into some kind of acceptable shape. Reb Jamieson? The everlasting mutineer? Who sang as he sang at least partly because he believed the Presences heard and understood what he sang? And Clarin. Clarin the what? He looked at her, but her face was turned down and he saw only the unlined curve of her forehead and the busy working of her hands on her bootlaces.

  He chose peace. ‘All right, Jamieson, say what you like on this trip. Say it to me. Say it to Clarin; she seems to have good sense. Say that the BDL has been trying to redefine the Presences as nonsentient for the last fifty years so BDL won’t be threatened with expulsion. Say that most of us, Tripsingers and Explorers, don’t really believe that. Say it here by the campfire. But don’t, for God’s sake, say it out loud in the citadel when we get back, or in any other citadel we may stop at. I won’t flame in on you if you’ll be halfway discreet.’ He astonished himself with an enormous yawn.

  The boy nodded, his face bright red in the fire glow. ‘Even though we all know they’re sentient, it’s different from being sure. I mean if anybody could prove it, the Planetary Exploitation Council might make BDL pack up and get out, so BDL won’t let that happen.’

  ‘BDL means you and me, too,’ sighed Tasmin. ‘If we’re being honest, none of us wants it to happen. So, be half-way discreet.’

  ‘It’s a kind of hypocrisy, isn’t it?’ Clarin asked softly.

  Jamieson shook his head at her warningly.

  ‘It’s interesting,’ mused Clarin. ‘I hadn’t paid much attention to all of this Crystallite business. We were very isolated up Northwest, and it’s closer there to the ’Soilcoast than it is to the interior. There are a number of Crystallite temples on the ’Coast, though. I do know that.’

  ‘Lots of temples,’ Tasmin agreed drowsily. ‘And lots of pilgrims coming in. Business versus business. Brou Distribution Limited against the Crystallites.’

  ‘Us in the middle,’ said Jamieson,
nodding.

  ‘Sleep,’ Tasmin suggested again, rising and moving toward the tent. Inside the cloverleaf tent the packs were distributed, each in a separate little wing, privacy curtains half lowered. Tasmin’s bedroll was stretched out for him, the cover turned down. Clarin’s touch. Clarin? A complex person, he thought. It took a good deal of courage to come halfway across Jubal, come as a stranger to a new citadel in an area where women were not as well accepted as Tripsingers as they were in the Northeast. Well. He would undoubtedly get to know Clarin rather well.

  Sighing, he lowered himself onto his bedroll and dropped the curtain, thinking about the whole BDL-Crystallite fracas. ‘Us in the middle,’ he said, intoning Jamieson’s sentiment as though it were some kind of bedtime prayer rather than the invocation of a troublesome truth.

  5

  The Explorers’ Chapter House at the Priory in Splash One made up in class for what it lacked in homey comforts. Or so Donatella Furz had always thought. Built in the first enthusiastic flush of planetary exploitation – back in the time before BDL realized how limited access to Jubal was actually going to be – it was a symphony of rare woods inlaid with Jubal coral, squat pillars of vitrified earth, and enormous beveled glass windows looking out onto the sea and the city. Donatella’s room had three such, a protruding roomlet facing in three directions, furnished with an elegantly laid table and two comfortable chairs. Eating breakfast in this extravagant bay window was an experience in both seeing and being seen. Half of Splash One seemed to be aware that it had a more or less famous personage among its more ordinary citizens, and a good number of them seemed to know where she was staying. Five or six young gawkers were gathered on the opposite sidewalk when she wakened that morning. They had gathered in front of a dilapidated structure, which seemed to be half saloon and half something else, both halves in danger of imminent collapse. ‘Looky, looky, Don Furz, the Explorer knight,’ their gestures said, though they didn’t shout at her, which she appreciated. When she sat down to breakfast, the same ones or substitute ones were still there, pointing and nudging one another.