The Enigma Score

by Tepper, Sheri S

  Among whom, she warned herself silently, might be one with a laser pistol or an old-fashioned garotte or just a plain steel knife. The last one had had such a knife. Donatella still had it in her Explorer’s case, wrapped in a bloody shirt, and she had a half-healed slash in her left arm to remind her of the cost of naive enthusiasm.

  She finished her brou-pod tea, set the cup down with a little click of finality, and wiped her lips. Rise, she instructed herself. Rise to the occasion. Smile at the people. Wave. Go back in the room where they can’t see you. Do not, repeat, do not shut the curtains. Only someone with something to hide would shut the curtains.

  Why in heaven’s name had she decided to stay at the Chapter House? She hadn’t remembered it being this public, this exposed. And why in heaven’s name had they built the stupid Priory right in the middle of town? She asked the services man this question when he came for her dishes.

  ‘I think the town grew up around it, Ma’am. Some of the nearby buildings have gone up during the past year. Sixty or seventy years ago, as I understand it, the Priory was quite secluded.’ He busied himself with the table and with a quick inspection of the room. As he left, he paused by the door to say, ‘I am, by the way, instructed to ask if you have any special wishes during your visit? Special food or drink, entertainment?’

  She knew the man’s job description included entertainment of several very specific sorts, but despite his obvious charm and intelligence, he didn’t appeal to her except as a source of information. If she needed to avail herself of a service employee sexually, she’d stick to Zimmy.

  ‘How about a concert?’ she asked, apparently with her usual dangerously naive enthusiasm channeled this time. Used for advantage. ‘Chantry or Pit Paragon – one of those.’ She gave him an eager, expectant look.

  ‘It’s not considered …’ He frowned, his darkly handsome face expressing disapproval neatly mixed with a proper degree of subservience, torso ever so slightly bent toward her, respect and good advice, impeccably offered. Oh, he was slick, this one.

  ‘Oh, hell, man, I know what it’s considered. Slumming, right? Undignified? Why would an Explorer knight want to listen to some revisionary rip-off of the sacred calling?’

  He grinned, and she suddenly liked him better.

  ‘Tell you what, what’s your name?’

  ‘Blanchet, Ma’am.’

  ‘All right, Blanchet, we won’t scandalize the natives by appearing in public as ourselves. You shop for me today. Buy me a wig. Let’s see. Something red, I think.’ She turned to catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror, smoothing the wide, short bell of golden hair with one hand. Dark blue eyes. Straight nose, a little too long she had always felt. All that climbing about had kept her figure slim, what there was of it. She could get away with a red wig. ‘Are they still wearing masks at public events down here? Well, buy me a small one that’ll hide my eyes and nose. And a dress. I need a bright blue dress.’

  The man was openly laughing now. ‘Size, Ma’am?’

  ‘One of those wraparound things with the straps that go all which a ways. They only come one size, you know what I mean? Stretch to fit? In some cases, stretch to rip?’

  He nodded. ‘Is that all, Ma’am?’

  ‘Concert tickets. Any one of the top six will do fine, and you might keep your mouth shut about it, if you’re allowed to do that. No point in distressing your Prior or mine … or the Explorer King.’

  ‘I can be discreet.’

  ‘You’ll find me most generous if you are.’

  He bowed himself out with the breakfast dishes, almost certainly going to report directly to someone from the Exploration Department. Probably the local Prior, who would want to know what the visiting knight was up to. So, let him report: The Explorer knight had a taste for night life; the Explorer knight wanted a new dress; the Explorer knight didn’t want to be recognized. Everything on the list slightly against the conventions and everything perfectly harmless. The conventions would have had her making a ceremonial procession of herself, dressed in tall boots and worn Explorer leathers, avoiding questionable entertainment and signing autographs with a slightly distant smile. Theoretically, they should suspect her more if she were more compliant. Surely someone on the edge of treason wouldn’t be dressing up for a ’Soilcoast singer concert.

  She gritted her teeth in concentration. Since someone had tried to kill her, she had to assume that everything she did was watched, every word she said was overheard. Making contact was up to her trusted friend. All she had to do was get herself out in public where it could be done without being noticed. The Chapter House would be watched for the agreed-upon signal – a red wig and a blue dress. Pray God her trusted friend had managed everything according to plan.

  And pray God the arrangement had been made with Lim Terree.

  When evening came, she decided she rather liked the effect of the red wig, an almost devil-may-care gaiety, in no sense diminished by the impish half mask with the feathery eyebrows. And the blue dress, which clung satisfactorily, was a success also, drawing attention away from her face. Blanchet would accompany her, of course. Explorer knights, male or female, always had at least one escort when in the larger ’Soilcoast cities, if for no other reason than to keep the celebrity seekers in order. If she and Blanchet were lucky, they would be taken for just another couple out on the town; tourists from Serendipity or even from out-system, perhaps; or minor BDL officials in from a deepsoil pocket, a dirt town. They would have dinner, see the sights, attend the concert, and return to the Chapter House. Where she either would or would not invite Blanchet to share her bed for the night. He was an attractive enough man. But he wasn’t Link. He wasn’t even Zimmy.

  She poured herself a drink and sat down on the couch that fronted the extravagant windows, far enough back in the room that she could not be seen. There were at least ten gawkers outside her window now, all staring upward as though hypnotized. In a few minutes she would go and lean out of the window, wave to them, call out ‘Hi, how are you? Great night, isn’t it?’ Watching for any move in her direction, any weapon. Anything that might betray another assassin.

  Though there might not be another one. Not yet. Whoever had sent the first assassin could not know that the would-be killer was dead. For all the sender knew, the assassin might be alive and well and ready to try again. She could say that phrase to herself calmly, ‘try again,’ say it almost without fear. It was only when she took the thought further, ‘try again to kill Don Furz,’ that her stomach clenched into a knot and bile burned in her throat. ‘Try again to kill Don Furz because Don Furz knows something she is not supposed to know.’

  Not that she’d been trying to find out any such thing!

  She had been sitting in the large underground library of the Chapter House, three floors below where she was sitting right now, poring through some old papers for references to the Mad Gap. Her Prior thought there might be some early Explorer comments that would suggest a useful method of approach. The Gap was currently impassable. BDL wanted it passable. Thus, Donatella Furz, who thought she remembered reading something about it years ago, was immured in dusty papers and unintelligible correspondence, bored to tears, yawning over the ancient stacks, and longing for dinner. She was skimming the letters between a virtually unremembered third decade Explorer and his Prior when she came upon a page in a completely different handwriting. The half-stretched yawn died on her face and she stared at it in disbelief. She did not need to see the signature to know whose it was. Erickson! She had seen faxes of that handwriting itself a hundred times in the Erickson Library at Northwest City, a library that was supposed to contain every extant scrap of original Erickson material.

  But here it was, a letter in the master’s own hand! It had obviously been misfiled and had lain unread for the last seventy years. Misfiled by whom? Reading the entire letter made it very clear. Misfiled by Erickson himself.

  It was a letter to the future, couched in such subtle and evasive terms that only an E
xplorer – and one of a particular turn of mind at that – would find it intelligible. It hinted at possibilities that Donatella Furz found stunning in their implications. ‘I have further outlined this matter,’ the letter concluded. ‘Reference my papers on the Shivering Desert, filed with the Chapter House in the Priory of Northwest.’

  Northwest was her home House. When she had fruitlessly completed the Mad Gap research, too excited to concentrate on it any longer, she returned to Northwest City and found the papers Erickson had referred to. They took some finding because they weren’t included in the Erickson material at all. They were buried in the middle of an endless compilation of permutations used in the Shivering Desert, an area that had been totally passworded for eighty years and was, therefore, uninteresting.

  ‘Buried in boredom,’ she told herself. ‘He picked two places no one would look for decades, and he buried them there.’ The pertinent notes were on two pages of permapaper. Donatella folded them and hid them in the lining of her jacket, then spent hours poring over them in the privacy of her room.

  She had taken the papers with a sense of saving them, though protocol would have required her to report them to the Prior at once. Later she examined her motives, finding much there that disturbed her, but coming at last to the conclusion that she thought the papers were safer with her than they would have been with the Department of Exploration.

  Even then she had had sense enough to leave other, harmless papers out in her room to explain her study, in case anyone was watching, or wondering.

  Erickson had not expected his eventual reader to believe him without proof. At the conclusion he said in effect, ‘If you want to test this theory, do thus and thus at some unpassworded Presence. If you do it right, you’ll see what I mean.’

  Don had chosen to try it on the Enigma. Everyone and his favorite mule had tried the Enigma, and permission to approach it was almost impossible to obtain. It had taken six months before she had the opportunity to get to the Enigma from the southern coast. She did what Erickson suggested – and more!

  When she returned, it was with the recording cubes and notes for the Enigma Score, and she was dizzy with what she knew, bubbling with it. Erickson had only known half of it. If he had had a synthesizer like the current ones…. She had hugged the knowledge to herself, glorying in it. Only Donatella Furz knew the whole truth, the truth about Jubal. No one else knew. No one!

  Only some time later did she realize that in seventy years there might have been others who knew or suspected, but if they had, they had been ruthlessly suppressed – only after someone had tried to kill her.

  On her return, she had arranged for the Enigma notes to be sent to a Tripsinger citadel for transcribing and orchestration – ‘Send it to that man in Deepsoil Five,’ she had suggested. ‘Tasmin Ferrence. The one who did that great score on the Black Tower.’ Then she had reported a possible breakthrough to the Prior of her Chapter House and had done it with due modesty in language full of ‘perhaps’ and ‘this suggests.’ She had made all the proper moves in the proper order; none of them should have aroused suspicion. If only she could have kept it at that! But no matter what motions she went through, what modest little remarks she made when congratulated, she could not hide her elation. Inside herself, she was bubbling with what she knew, what she thought, what she wanted to prove, what she had proved. She had not been so foolish as to blurt it out to anyone – it was obviously information that some people would want to suppress – but neither had she been sensible enough to keep her obvious euphoria hidden.

  Who might have observed that euphoria?

  Explorers Martin and Ralth, while they were out at dinner one night. ‘Touch me, boys, because the day will come when you’ll tell people, “I knew her before she was famous.” ’

  ‘What are you up to now, Don?’ asked Martin, sounding bored. ‘Another new variation for the Creeping Desert? Don’t we have enough Creeping Desert variations already?’

  ‘Bigger than that,’ she had replied with a laugh. ‘Much bigger.’

  ‘You’ve got a Gemmed Rampart score that really works,’ suggested Ralth. ‘Or a foolproof way to get through the Crazies.’

  ‘Why not?’ She had giggled.

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Why not both. Why not everything?’

  They had laughed incredulously. They had ordered more wine. There had been laughter and arguments among the three Explorers and congratulations on the Enigma score.

  Well, what else had she said that night? Nothing. Nothing at all. One bragging phrase. ‘Why not everything?’ Had there been enough in that conversation to give someone the idea that Donatella Furz knew something they would rather she didn’t know? Not really. It could all be put down to her euphoria. Even an untested score for a Presence as famous as the Enigma lent a certain cachet to her name. She hadn’t really said anything at all!

  Who else had she talked to? Zimmy. A services employee. A Northwest Chapter House man. Not unlike this Chapter House man, Blanchet, except that Zimmy belonged to Don. He was only hers, he kept saying, and had been only hers for some years now, eager to please her, intelligent in meeting her needs for comfort and affection. Zimmy. She thought of him with both fondness and pleasure. What had she said to Zimmy? Nothing much. ‘Oh, Zimmy, if you knew what I know.’ Something like that. He hadn’t even paid much attention.

  And who else? The woman in Northwest City who usually cut her hair.

  Don’s head had been bent forward while the woman depilated the back of her neck, quite high, so that the bottom of the wide bell of her hair would come just to the bottom of the ears. ‘How can you do it?’ the woman had chattered. ‘All alone, out among the Presences. I would pee my pants, truly, lady knight, I would.’

  ‘It isn’t as dangerous as people have thought it was.’

  ‘No, it is more. I know it must be. To hear the Great Ones speak, to attempt to pacify them. Oh, a terror, lady knight, truly, a terror.’

  The woman’s use of the words ‘Great Ones’ should have stopped Donatella in her tracks. Those were the words used by Crystallites to refer to the Presences, but Don simply hadn’t noticed. ‘It won’t be long before we’ll all be able to walk among the Presences much more safely. Not long at all.’ Don had raised her head, seeing herself and the woman in the mirror.

  ‘Oh, you think some great discovery? Some marvel?’ The woman peered at her in the mirror, her black eyes gleaming with something acquisitive and desperate.

  And at that point Don had realized what she was saying and had drawn up sharply. ‘No, no discovery, no marvel, Sophron. Simply the slow accumulation of knowledge….’

  Who else had she talked to?

  Chase Random Hall, the Explorer King. Could anything she had said to him in the dining room of the Chapter House, during the informal time of day when everyone was on a first-name basis, could anything there have been interpreted as something threatening?

  ‘Randy, you ever think the day may come we’ll all be out of work?’

  ‘Mind your manners, silly girl. Don’t be obscene.’

  ‘No, I mean wouldn’t it be terrific if we found The Password?’ ‘The Password’ was the apotheosis on Jubal and had been for a hundred years. It was like ‘The Millennium’ or ‘The Second Coming,’ a terrible end said to be devoutly desired by some, the single score that would open every pass and permit free travel everywhere.

  ‘I think it’s a disgusting thought, one I would appreciate not having raised again in my hearing.’ Randy had been effete in his youth and was effete still, but there was no arguing with his successes. Now he smoothed his elegantly trimmed moustache and smiled at her in his best monster-eating-up-a-little-girl smile: glittering eyes in a brown, brown face with his terribly white teeth, teeth that made one weak even while they made one shiver, anticipating voracious kisses. They were inevitable, those teeth like death. ‘Do you like living dangerously, stupid child?’

  ‘Is it that dangerous to speculate about The Password?’
She had said it lightly. Surely she had said it lightly!

  ‘A little idle speculation here in the Chapter House, over drinks, perhaps not. Anything more than that, decidedly. As a moment’s thought – if you are capable of such – should have informed you. Think, silly girl. If you had The Password, there are at least twenty people I could name who would kill you to keep it quiet.’

  She knew her face had changed then. Changed with horror, in memory. People who would kill! She remembered her friend Gretl Mechas. Or rather, Gretl’s body as it had been when Donatella identified it. Remembering this, she turned away. She had had enough of this conversation.

  But then he had asked, ‘Would you like to go to bed with me, Donatella?’

  ‘I am the King Explorer’s to command,’ she had said, stiffly taking refuge in a ritual answer. This was a new gambit.

  ‘Not at all eager, are you?’

  ‘I … I have other affections, Randy.’

  ‘Don’t we all know it. Your affections are the talk of the House and most unworthy of you. Speaking of danger then, stupid child, what’s the news about the Mad Gap?’ And they had talked shop as she detailed her attempts to find a Password through the Gap before moving on to other things. Why had he mentioned going to bed together? Everyone knew Randy preferred men, though he would possess a woman if he thought it useful. Had he thought she might be useful? But not quite useful enough? Had he slipped when he spoke of people killing other people? Was he interested in her reaction? Or was it merely a very effective way to change the subject?

  It had been an odd, a very odd conversation. With her well-schooled memory for exact words and phrases, exact tones and progressions of tones, she could play it over in her head, again and again, but it made no more sense now than it had then.

  Her ruminations were interrupted by tapping at the door. Blanchet came in, dressed to the toenails in a one-piece glitter-suit with a plumed hat and multiple chains of Jubal coral around his neck. She made an appreciative sound. ‘Don’t you look marvelous.’