The Enigma Score

by Tepper, Sheri S

  It was the voices that wakened her. Soft voices in the dark, calling her.

  But not by name. At first the strangeness of that did not strike her. Only when she had come fully awake did the voices seem odd and mysterious. Until then they had been a component of dream.

  ‘We search for the wife of Lim Ferrence,’ the voices said. Sang. Chanted.

  ‘Lim Terree,’ another voice contradicted with a soft soprano warble. The mother said he called himself Lim Terree.’

  ‘So she did,’ the voices sang. ‘We search for the wife of Lim Terree.’

  She did not answer, could not have answered. These were ghost voices from a world of spirits and haunts, a childhood world of reasonless fear.

  ‘Perhaps she is afraid,’ said the second voice. It sounded like a woman’s voice, or a child’s. Not a man’s voice. Vivian’s heart hammered. She had to say something. Perhaps they had come to help her. Help Miles.

  ‘What do you want?’ she called, her voice a thin shriek on the edge of terror.

  ‘Do not be afraid, please,’ the voices sang. ‘The mother of Lim Terree thought you were in danger. We have come to help you.’

  ‘Some men came,’ she cried. ‘Looking for me. For my little boy.’

  ‘Ah,’ the voices sang. ‘Can you move? Can you walk? Are you strong and well?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. I’m all right.’

  The voices murmured in some other language. A few voices first, then several, then many. A chorus. Whatever it was they were singing, they did it several times over until it satisfied them. In some obscure way, it satisfied Vivian, too. When they were through with the song, it was completed. Even she could hear that.

  ‘We have sung this predicament,’ the voices told her. ‘You cannot walk in the dark. You have not the means, as we have. You would hurt yourself and the little one. So, when it is light, you must come to the red mountains. We will come behind and wipe away the tracks you will leave.’

  ‘The red mountain? The Enigma!’

  ‘Yes. So you call it.’

  ‘It’s where Lim died,’ she cried. ‘I don’t want to go there!’

  ‘Not quite there,’ they murmured. ‘Only near there. It is safe there. No Loudsingers … no humans come there.’

  ‘I wanted to go to Deepsoil Five,’ she cried. ‘Lim’s mother is there.’

  ‘We think the men who looked for you are also there. It is not safe there. Later we will take you there.’

  The fog became silent once more. After a time, she thought she had dreamed it. When light came at last, she knew it had not been a dream. In the fine sand all around the edge of the hole were the strange four-toed prints of viggy feet. She had never heard that they could speak. In the light of day, she could not believe they had spoken.

  Her disbelief immobilized her and would have kept her from moving, except for the light that came darting from the trail toward Harmony. Morning had come; the fog had slowly burned away; she had seen the tracks and marveled at them, uncertain whether to be curious or terrified. No one had ever alleged viggies to be harmful. The few specimens who had been caught in the early years of exploitation had all died, most of them very quickly. No rumor of violence attached to them at all. They were virtually unseen, a constant presence to the ear, an unconsidered irrelevancy otherwise.

  But no one had ever said they could talk. It was this that made her suspicious. Suppose they were not really viggies at all.

  ‘But they were here,’ she told herself. ‘Right here, not four feet from me. If they’d wanted to, they could have snatched me up or killed me or whatever they wanted.’

  Still, she was undecided. Then, as she was having a slow look around from the lip of the hole, she saw the glint of light up the trail toward Harmony. Flash. Then again, flash. She watched for a long time until it came again, three, four times. Light reflecting off lenses. Up that trail, at the limit of vision, someone was watching this place.

  Had they been watching yesterday?

  She slid down into the hole and began to pack their few belongings. A little way east of them was a narrow ridge, paralleling the trail, running eastward along it. If she could get behind that, no one could see her from the trail.

  She watched first, waiting until the flashes came, then came again, then did not come. Then she was out of the hole and trotting toward the east with Miles staggering along behind. When they came to a grove of Jubal trees, she picked up Miles and darted into the grove to lie behind a tree and watch the Harmony trail.

  After a time, flash, and flash again. This time she carried Miles as she trotted quickly away to the next grove. She had begun to get the feel of it. Someone was taking a look every quarter hour.

  It took four more dashes between groves to attain the ridge. Then they were behind it.

  ‘More game,’ suggested Miles, who had become fond of diving behind trees.

  ‘Not right now, my big boy,’ she told him. ‘Right now, we’re just going for a long walk. Can you do that?’

  He nodded, mouth pursed in a bargaining expression. ‘Cooky?’

  ‘When we stop for lunch, I’ll give you a cooky. How’s that?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Long before they stopped for lunch he was worn out and asleep on her shoulder. Long before they arrived at the red mountains, while they were still miles from them, she was equally worn. Evening found them curled in a circle of settler’s brush, eating cold rations and drinking less water than they wanted, then falling into exhausted slumber.

  ‘Come,’ the voice said, almost in her ear. ‘You cannot sleep now. Men are seeking you. Come.’

  This time she saw them, in the thinnest glimmer of New Moon light, occulted by the shadow of Serendipity to a mere scythe of silver. They were furred and large-eyed, with wide, mobile ears. Their necks were corrugated with hanging flaps of bright hide, shadowed red and amber and orange, and their heads were decked with long, feathery antennae that looked like nothing so much as the fronds of Jubal trees. They were all around her, singing, singing in her own language, and she was not afraid of them.

  ‘Where are the men?’ she whispered. ‘How far back?’

  ‘They saw you come this way,’ the viggies sang. ‘Even though we wiped the lands clean of your feet, still they search.’

  ‘What are we to do?’

  ‘We will take you where they cannot go, woman of Lim Terree, honored be his name.’

  They guided her. She carried Miles, and two of the viggies ran along at her sides, their hands on her thighs, pushing or tugging ever so slightly to keep her on the right path. Bondri had introduced himself, as they went he named off the others of the troupe. Sometimes they slowed, sometimes to allow others of the troupe to clear a way ahead, sometimes to allow those who had been clearing the way behind to change jobs with others. Always they sang, sometimes in their own language, sometimes in hers. So she learned the story of Favel, the broken one, and of his release by the Loudsinger child. She wanted to laugh, then to cry. Lim hadn’t done it out of generosity. He hadn’t done it out of sympathy for the poor viggy, either. He’d done it out of spite and wounded feelings and jealousy and pain. She tried to tell Bondri this, and he listened with one ear cocked backward to hear her.

  ‘Good,’ he said at last. ‘This is what Favel wanted. Another view to make his song more true.’

  It made no sense to her. Only that they were saving her, and Miles. That made sense.

  They went eastward to the end of the ridge, then northward, into the crystal range. Now the viggies were singing in their own tongue exclusively, quieting the earth that trembled beneath them, opening ways that would be closed to those who followed. Some of the troupe climbed to the tops of peaks and yodeled into the night, while all those below opened their ears wide, listening.

  ‘What are they doing?’ she asked Bondri.

  ‘The troupe of Chowdri goes around near here. They keep watch on the Mad One, the one you call the Enigma. I have a daughter to trade with Chowdri, and we wil
l sing of Favel’s death so the word may go east and south.’ He did this all in one breath, a kind of recitatif, and she shook her head in amazement. Lim had been an accomplished musician, perhaps a genius. But Bondri could do things with his voice Lim could never have attempted. Of course, Lim hadn’t had a song-sack on his neck to hold several extra lungfuls of air, either.

  At dawn they stopped. The Enigma towered above them, a little to the east, like two bloody swords stabbed upward into the sky. Several weary viggies ran up from the south, singing as they came.

  ‘The men have gone back the way they came, still looking. They did not find any sign of the woman or the child. They say they will go to Deepsoil Five, that the woman must eventually come to Deepsoil Five.’

  Well, she had left some of her few belongings on the wagon, in a carton. Undoubtedly whoever was after her and Miles had found them.

  ‘They cannot come in here,’ Bondri said. ‘Your people have no words to let them into this place.’

  ‘But I cannot stay with your people forever, Bondri Wide Ears! Someday I must go to my own people.’

  ‘Someday is someday. We will sing that later. Just now we eat.’

  Miles woke up. He looked at the viggies with total wonder, then politely offered Bondri his last cooky. Bondri took it gravely and ate half, returning half. In return, Bondri gave him a cup of bark sap, which Miles shared with his mother. When she had drained the cup, she looked at it carefully, paling as she did so.

  ‘What … what is this?’

  ‘An ancestor cup,’ Bondri replied. This one belonged to Favel, who honored your husband’s name. Favel who laid his debt upon us that good should be returned for good.’

  Gently, she laid the skull cup down. Nothing in the Tripsingers’ reports had prepared her for this, but native good manners did what preparation could not. ‘I am honored,’ she whispered, listening carefully while Bondri sang several songs of Favel’s life. She joined the troupe in eating settler’s brush, though she gave Miles his breakfast from rations he was more accustomed to.

  And when they had finished, she joined the troupe in singing the song of her own rescue. That she had little or no voice did not seem to disturb the viggies. Miles more than made up for her.

  ‘He has a good voice, your son,’ they sang to her. ‘When he is big, he will be a troupe leader.’

  ‘If he lives to get big,’ she whispered. A giligee patted her shoulder and crooned in her ear.

  At midmorning, word was received from Chowdri’s troupe, and they began to work their way east, ever closer to the Enigma.

  ‘Isn’t this dangerous?’ she asked Bondri. ‘Aren’t we going into peril?’

  ‘Not into peril,’ he sang. ‘Not to the Mad One’s roost. Only to the edge of the skin where the songs keep it quiet.’

  ‘Skin?’ she asked, not sure she had understood.

  ‘The outer part,’ Bondri explained, searching his more limited Loudsinger vocabulary. ‘The hide, the fur, the …’ he found a word he liked, ‘the integument.’

  ‘Of the Presence?’

  ‘Yes. The part that only twitches and slaps, like your skin, Lim’s mate, when a wound fly crawls on it. The skin of the Mad One is not mad. Only the brain of it is mad, and we will not come close to that.’

  By evening, they had come closer to the Enigma than Vivian wanted to, and yet the troupe of Bondri Gesel showed no discomfort. Six of the viggies were delegated to sing quiet songs to the skin, and these six were replaced from time to time by six others, one at a time slipping into and out of the chorus so that it never ceased. The music was soothing, soporific. Vivian found herself yawning, and Miles curled up under a Jubal tree and fell deeply asleep, even without his supper.

  ‘You should stay awake,’ Bondri suggested. ‘Chowdri is on his way here. He has a good tongue. We sing well together.’

  The troupe of Chowdri joined them after dusk but before the night was much advanced. There were choral challenges and answers, contrapuntal exercises, long, slow passages sung by the two troupe leaders, and finally a brisk processional during which the singers tapped on their song-sacks to make a drumming sound. Chowdri had brought food. Chowdri was less amazed to see Vivian than Bondri thought he should be, and this occasioned some talk.

  ‘We have one, too,’ sang Chowdri importantly. ‘A very little one. Not depouched yet.’

  ‘A Loudsinger child!’ Bondri was incredulous. ‘A true Loudsinger child?’

  ‘My senior giligee found it in a body,’ Chowdri sang. ‘A female who was killed by the Mad One. My giligee went at once to find bones on the Enigma, before the gyre-birds came, and she found this little one, inside the woman, the way they grow. No bigger than a finger. We have sung that the taboo does not apply to such little ones.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Vivian asked.

  Bondri translated.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What does he mean?’

  Bondri beckoned to his own giligee, who came forward and allowed Bondri to open its pouch and point within. ‘There,’ he sang. ‘In the pouch. This is the brain-bird of Favel. Here, also, grow the little ones from mating. Our females carry them inside for only a little time, not like you Loudsingers. Favel told me all about it.’

  ‘Brain-bird?’ she faltered.

  ‘Excuse me, Chowdri,’ sang Bondri. ‘My guest has a difficulty that I must correct before we sing further together.’

  ‘Males and females mate,’ he sang to her. ‘You understand this?’

  Vivian fought down a hysterical giggle and told him yes, that she understood, that Loudsingers did a similar thing.

  ‘After a few days, the female seeks out the giligee and sheds the little one, like a little worm. The giligee takes the little thing into its pouch. The tendrils of the pouch close it in and give it nourishment. It lives and grows there. When it is big, it is depouched. It is a female.’

  ‘Always?’ she wondered.

  ‘Always,’ he said firmly. ‘We know it is not so with you, but with us it is always female. The female lives and is traded as a daughter to some other troupe and mates and does female things. Then the time comes her brain-bird cries for release. The giligee bites out the brain-bird and puts it in the pouch again. It grows again. This time it is male.’

  ‘Always,’ she nodded to herself in amazement.

  ‘Always. In every female there is a male waiting to grow. It grows up and mates and does male things. And when its own brain-bird cries for release, the giligee takes it once more. And this time, the last time, it grows to be a giligee.’

  ‘And when its brain-bird cries for release again?’

  ‘There is no brain-bird in a giligee. They get very old and finally die. Then we make an ancestor cup as we do for all, and put them beside a Presence and sing their songs.’

  ‘So Chowdri’s giligee has a human baby in it? You know whose baby that is, don’t you? That’s Tasmin’s baby. Lim’s brother. Tasmin Ferrence. The woman must have been his wife, Celcy. And Lim was there. Lim was on the Enigma. Maybe he didn’t die!’

  Bondri turned away in some haste and began a burst of song, which his troupe joined, then Chowdri’s troupe, the two groups singing away at one another as though to compile an encyclopedia of song. When the melody dwindled at last and Bondri returned to Vivian, he looked very sad and old, his song-sack hanging limp.

  ‘He is truly dead. I am sorry, Lim’s mate, but he is truly dead. The giligee took some of his bone to make a bark scraper. Do you want his ancestor cup? I know it is not the Loudsinger way, but the giligee can get it if you want it.’

  She shook her head, weeping. There for a moment, she had been full of irrational hope. Well. Miles was alive, and she was alive, and it seemed that Tasmin’s baby was alive also.

  ‘How long will the giligee keep it?’ she whispered.

  ‘Until it is done,’ Bondri sang, shrugging. ‘It is not nearly finished yet.’

  ‘Will … will the giligee give it to us – to Tasmin’s family
– when it is finished?’

  Bondri seemed to be considering this. ‘I believe it will. I will take debt with Chowdri’s troupe to assure it. In that way, the debt of Favel will be repaid to the family of Lim Terree. We have saved his wife and his child and his brother’s child. That is a good repayment.’

  ‘Repayment in full,’ the troupe sang. ‘Repayment at once, as Favel required. Proud the troupe of Bondri Gesel to have repaid a debt of honor.’

  15

  Maybelle Thonks squatted on her luggage in the small tender and stared across half a mile of slupping ocean to the spider-girdered tower in which the charred hulk of the Broumaster hung, readying for lift. The little boat in which she sat was packed with cartons and bags, all of which had been searched by BDL security men before they had been loaded. Maybelle had been searched as well.

  ‘For your protection, Ma’am,’ the female guard had sneered. ‘Sometimes people plant things on other people.’

  ‘How in hell do you think anyone could have planted anything there,’ Maybelle had hissed in her ear, shocked. ‘For the love of good sense, woman!’

  ‘Just routine,’ the guard had said, suddenly aware who she was violating.

  ‘You’ve been through my luggage, through my clothes, through my cosmetics. You’ve been all over my body like a bad sunburn. What the hell do you think I’m carrying, a bomb?’

  ‘Just routine,’ she mumbled again, handing Maybelle an intimate bit of her clothing.