Tepper,Sheri - After Long Silence Read online

  "Oh, don't be stiff about it, Tas." Celcy was pleading now, making a playful face at him. "He's family and it's all really exciting! Let him have it."

  "Celcy." He shook his head helplessly, praying she would understand. "I'm a Tripsinger. I'm licensed under a code of ethics. Even if we ignored the risk to my job, our livelihood, I swore to uphold those ethics. They won't permit me to do what Lim wants, I'm sorry."

  "Hell, I was a Tripsinger, too, brother," Lim said in a harsh, demanding tone. "Don't you owe me a little professional courtesy? Not even to make a bundle for old Mom, huh?" Said with that easy smile, with a little sneer, a well-remembered sneer.

  The dam broke.

  "What you spent for that unit you've got on your wrist would get Mom's eyes fixed and set her up for life," Tasmin said flatly. "Don't feed me that shit about putting it all into equipment because I know it's a lie. You were never a Tripsinger. You broke every rule, every oath you took. You set up that ass Ran Connel to help you fake your way through the first trip, then after you were licensed you led four trips, and your backup had to bail you out on all of them. You got through school by stealing. You stole tests. You stole answers. You stole other people's homework including mine. Whenever anyone had anything you wanted, you took it. And when you couldn't make it here, you stole money from Dad's friends and then ran for the Coast. The reason I have to support Mom as well as my own family is that Dad spent almost everything he had paying off the money you took. You never figured the rules applied to you, big brother, and you always got by on a charming smile and that damned marvelous voice!"

  Celcy was staring at him, her face white with shock. Lim was pale, mouth pinched.

  Tasmin threw down his napkin. "I'm sorry. I'm not hungry. Celcy, would you mind if we left now?"

  She gulped, turning a stricken face on Lim, "Yes, I would mind. I'm starved. I'm going to have dinner with Lim because he invited us, and if you're too rude to let childish bygones be bygones … " Her voice changed, becoming angry. "I'm certainly not going to go along with you. Go on home. Go to your mother's. Maybe she'll sympathize with you, but I certainly don't."

  He couldn't remember leaving the restaurant. He couldn't remember anything that happened until he found himself in a cubicle at the citadel dormitory, sitting on the edge of the bed, shivering as though he would never stop. It had all boiled up, out of nothing, out of everything. All the suppressed, buried stuff of fifteen years, twenty years …

  Over twenty years. When he was seven and Lim was twelve, Dad had given Tasmin a viggy for his birthday. They were rare in captivity, and Tasmin had been speechless with joy. That night, Lim had taken it out of the cage and out into the road where it had been killed, said Lim, by a passing quiet-car. When Tasmin was eight, he had won a school medal for music. Lim had borrowed it and lost it. When he was sixteen, Tasmin had been desperately, hopelessly in love with Chani Vincent. Lim, six years older than she, had seduced her, got her pregnant, then left on the trip to the Deepsoil Coast from which he had never returned. The Vincents moved to Harmony, and from there God knows where, and Dad had been advised by several of his friends that Lim had stolen money—quite a lot of it. With Dad it had been a matter of honor.

  Honor. Twenty years.

  "Oh, Lord, why didn't I just say I'd think about it, then tell him I couldn't get access to the damn thing." He didn't realize he had said it aloud until a voice murmured from the door.

  "Master?" It was Jamieson, an expression on his face that Tasmin could not quite read. Surprise, certainly. And concern? "Can I help you, sir?"

  "No," he barked. "Yes. Ask the dispensary if they'd part with some kind of sleeping pill, would you. I'm having a—a family problem."

  When he woke before dawn, it was with a fuzzy head, a cottony mouth, and a feeling of inadequacy that he had thought he had left behind him long ago. He had ruined Celcy's big evening. She wouldn't soon let him forget it, either. It was probably going to be one of those emotional crises that required months to heal, and with her pregnant, the whole thing had been unforgivable. The longer he stayed away, the worse it would be.

  "You childish bastard," he chided himself in the mirror. "Clod!" The white-haired, straight-nosed face stared back at him, its wide, narrow mouth an expressionless slit. It might be more to the point to be angry at Celcy, he thought broodingly, but what good would it do? Being angry with Celcy had few satisfactions to it. "Idiot," he accused himself. "You can sing your way past practically any Presence in this world, but you can't get through one touchy social situation!" His eyes were so black they looked bruised.

  He borrowed a quiet-car from the citadel lot and drove home slowly, not relishing the thought of arrival. When he got there, he found the door locked. Few people in Deepsoil Five locked their doors, but Celcy always did. He had to find the spare key buried under one of the imported shrubs, running a thorn into his finger in the process.

  She wasn't at home. He looked in their bedroom, in the study, in the kitchen. It was only when he went to the bathroom to bandage the thorn-stuck finger that he saw the note, taped to the mirror.

  "Tasmin, you were just so rude I can't believe it to your very own brother, I gave him the score he wanted, because I knew you'd be ashamed of yourself when you had some sleep and he really needs it. He really does, Tas. It was wrong what you said about his not being a Tripsinger, because what he found out will make us famous and we're going to the Enigma so he can be sure. You'll be proud of us. It would be better with you, Lim says, but we'll have to do it just ourselves.

  "You were mean to spoil our party, after I decided to go ahead and have the baby just because you want it even though I don't, and I'm really mad at you."

  So, that's what she hadn't been telling him. That's what she had been hiding from him. A desire to end the pregnancy, not go through with it. The letters of the note were slanted erratically, as though blown by varying winds. "Drunk," he thought in a wave of frozen anger and pity. "She and Lim stayed at the restaurant, commiserating, and they got drunk." There were drops of water gleaming on the basin. They couldn't have left long ago.

  He went to his desk to shuffle through the documents he had brought home for study. The Enigma score was missing.

  Surely Lim wouldn't. Surely. No amount of liquor or brou would make him do any such thing. He wasn't suicidal. He couldn't have forgotten his own abysmal record as a Tripsinger; he wouldn't try the Enigma. He was too pleased with himself. Surely. Surely.

  Tasmin ran from the house. It was possible to drive to within about three miles of the Enigma, but deepsoil ended suddenly at that point. From there on, travelers went at their peril. With cold efficiency he checked the gauges. The batteries would carry him that far and back. There were standard field glasses in the storage compartment.

  He was through the foodcrop fields in a matter of minutes and into the endless rows of carefully tended brou. Ten miles, fifteen. BDL land. Miles of it. BDL, who controlled everything, who would not like this unauthorized approach to the Enigma.

  Who would have his hide if he wrecked their car, he reminded himself, focusing sharply on a five-foot Enigmalet that had appeared from nowhere, almost at the side of the road, miles out of its range. Sometimes the damned things seemed to grow up overnight! As 'lets they were easy to dispose of, and someone should have disposed of this one. When they got to 'ling size, it was a very different and difficult thing.

  He could see the Enigma peaks clearly. The great Presence was bifurcated almost to its base, rearing above the plain like a bloody two-tined fork. Five miles more. At the end of it he found his own car parked against the barricade. He could feel the ground tremble as he set his feet on it, and he hastily removed his shoes and took the glasses from the compartment. How high would Lim have dared go? How high would Celcy go with him, and how high would he dare go after them?

  The world shivered under his feet, twitching like the hide of a mule under a biting fly. It wanted him off. It wanted him away. Moreover, it wanted those oth
ers off as well. He bit his lip and kept on. It was three miles to the summit from where one could actually see the faces of the Enigma itself, shattered plane of glowing scarlet, fading into a wall that extended east and west as far as had ever been traveled, a mighty faceted twin mountain that stood in an endless forest of Enigmalings, looming over the plains along the empty southern coast.

  He climbed and stopped, scarcely breathing, climbed again. To his left, a pillar of bloody crystal squeaked to itself, whined, then shivered into fragments. He cried out as one chunk buried itself in a bank a foot from his head. One of the smaller fragments must have hit him. He wiped blood from his eyes. Other pillars took up the whine. He controlled his trembling and went on. Surely Celcy wouldn't go on. As frightened of the Presences as she was? She wouldn't go on. Unless she had no choice. Lim had always taken what he wanted. Perhaps now he was simply taking Celcy, because he wanted her.

  He reached the top of a high, east-west ridge from which he could peer through a gap in the next rise. A narrow face of scarlet crystal shone to the left of the gap and another to the right, the twin peaks of the Enigma. From somewhere ahead, he heard a voice …

  Lim. Singing. He had a portable synthesizer with him, a very good one. All around Tasmin, the shivering ceased and quiet fell. Desperately, he climbed on, scrambling up the slope, finding the faint path almost by instinct. Something traveled here to keep his trail clear. Not people, but something.

  The voice was rising, more and more surely. Silence from the ground. Absolute quiet. Tasmin tried to control his breathing; every panting breath seemed a threat.

  Then he was at the top.

  The path wound down to a small clearing between the two faces of the Enigma. Celcy sat on a stone in the middle of it, pale but composed, her hands clasped tightly in front of her as though to keep them from shaking, her face knitted in concentration. Lim stood at one edge, his hands darting over the synthesizer propped before him, his head up, singing. On the music rack of the synthesizer, the Enigma score fluttered in a light wind.

  Tasmin put his head in his hands. He didn't dare interrupt. He didn't dare go on down the path. He didn't dare to call or wave. He could only poise himself here, waiting. Silently, he sang with Lim. The Petition and Justification. God, the man was talented. It should take at least three people to get those effects, and he was doing it alone, sight reading. Even if he had spent several hours reviewing the score before coming out here, it was still an almost miraculous performance. He had to be taking something that quickened his reaction time and heightened his perceptions. There was no way a man could do what he was doing otherwise …

  "Go on down," he urged them silently. "For God's sake, go on down. Get down to the flatland. Get out of range."

  Celcy's eyes were huge, fastened upon Lim as though she were in a concert hall. Through the glasses he could see the eggshell oval of her face, as still as though enchanted or hypnotized. She did not look like herself, particularly around the eyes. Perhaps Lim had given her some of the drug he'd been taking? Go on down the trail, Celcy. While he's singing, go on down. Or come back up to me.

  But Lim wouldn't have told her to go on. He wouldn't have thought how he was to go on singing and carrying the synthesizer and reading the music all at once. Perhaps she could carry the music for him. Lim began the First Variation.

  "Move," he begged them, biting his lower lip until the blood ran onto his chin. "Oh, for God's sake, Lim, move one way or the other." Lim's back was to him; Celcy's hands were unclenched now, lying loosely in her lap. Her face was relaxing. She was breathing deeply. He could see the soft rise and fall of her breast.

  Second Variation. Lim's voice soared. And the Enigma responded! Unable to help himself, Tasmin's eyes left the tiny human figures and soared with that voice, up the sides of the Enigma, his glance leaping from prominence to prominence, shivering with the glory that was there. He had not seen a Presence react in this way before. Light shattered at him from fractures within the crystal, seeming to run within the mighty monolith like rivers of fire, quivering. Leaping.

  A tiny sound brought his eyes down. Celcy had gasped, peering up at the tower above them, gasped and risen. Tasmin barely heard the sound of that brief inhalation, but Lim reacted to it immediately. He turned, too quickly for a normal reaction, his eyes leaving the music. Tasmin saw Lim's face as he beamed at Celcy, his eyes like lanterns. Oh, yes, he was on something, something that disturbed his sense of reality, too. Reacting to Celcy's action, Lim abandoned the Furz score and began to improvise.

  Tasmin screamed, "Don't. Lim!"

  The world came apart in shattering fragments, broke itself to pieces and shook itself, rattling its parts like dice in a cup. Tasmin clung to the heaving soil and stopped knowing. The sound was enormous, too huge to hear, too monstrous to believe or comprehend. The motion of the crystals beneath him and around him was too complex for understanding. He simply clung, like a tick, waiting for the endless time to pass.

  When he came to himself again, the world was quiet. Below him, the small clearing was gone. Nothing of it remained. Blindly, uncaring for his own safety, he stumbled down to the place he thought it had been. Nothing. A tumble of fragments, gently glowing in the noon sun. Silence. Far off the sound of viggies singing. At his feet a glowing fragment, an earring, gold and amber.

  "To remember her by," he howled silently. "Joke."

  He wanted to scream aloud but did not. The world remained quiet. There was blood in his eyes again; he saw the world through a scarlet haze. Under his feet was only a tiny tremor, as though whatever lived there wished him to know it was still alive.

  "I'm going," he moaned. "I'm going." So a flea might depart a giant dog. So vermin might be encouraged to leave a mighty palace. "I'm going."

  As he turned, he stumbled over something and picked it up without thinking. Lim's synthesizer. Miraculously unbroken. Tasmin clutched it under one arm as he staggered over the ridge and down the endless slopes to the place he had left the car. Not a single pillar whined or shattered. "Joke," he repeated to himself. "Joke."

  Then he was in the car, bent over to protect the core of himself from further pain, gasping for air that would not, did not come.

  3

  He heard his mother's voice as though through water, a bubbling liquidity that gradually became the sound of his own blood in his ears. "That acolyte of yours? Jamieson? He was worried about you, so he called me, and we went to your house and found the note she left you, Tas." His mother's hand was dry and frail, yet somehow comforting in this chill, efficient hospital where doctors moved among acolytes of their own. "He got a search party out after you right away. They found you in the car, out near the Enigma. You'd been knocked in the head pretty badly. You've got some pins and things in your skull." She had always talked to him this way, telling him the worst in a calm, unfrightened voice. "You'll be all right, the doctors say."

  "Celcy?" he'd asked, already knowing the answer.

  "Son, the search party didn't go up on the Enigma. You wouldn't expect that, would you? They'll get close shots from the next satellite pass, that's the best they can do." She was crying, her blind eyes oozing silent tears.

  "They won't find anything."

  "I don't suppose they will. She did go there with Lim, didn't she?"

  He nodded, awash in the wave of pain that tiny motion brought.

  "I can't understand it. It isn't anything I would have thought either of them would do! Celcy? The way she felt about the Presences? And Lim! He wasn't brave, you know, Tas. He always ran away rather than fight. You know, when he was a little fellow, he was so sweet. Gentle natured, and handsome! Everyone thought he was the nicest boy. You adored him. The two of you were inseparable. It was when he got to be about twelve, about the time he entered choir school, he just turned rotten somehow. I've never known why. Something happened to him, or maybe it was just in him, waiting to happen."

  "You were right about Celcy's not wanting to have a baby," he murmured, ne
wly sickened as he remembered. It wasn't only Celcy who had died. "I thought she'd become excited about it, but she really didn't want it."

  "Oh, well, love, I knew that," she said sympathetically. "You knew it, too. A girl like that doesn't really want babies. She was only a little baby herself. All pretty and full of herself; full of terrible fears and horrors, too. Afraid you'd leave her as her parents did. Hanging on to you. Not willing to share you with anything or anybody. Not willing to share you with a child. She needed you all for herself. When I read her note, I wondered if she would have been able to go through with it after all. I'm sorry, Tas, but it's true."

  It rang true. Everything she said was true, which simply made Celcy's scribbled confession more valiant. "She was going to have the baby because I wanted it. She did things for me that no one … no one ever knew about." He breathed, letting the pain wash over and away. "When she wasn't afraid—she wasn't at all like the Celcy you always saw. I wanted her not to have to be so … so clinging. But I loved her. I got impatient sometimes, but so much of it was my fault. I never took the time with her I should have, the time to make her change. I just loved her!"

  It came out as a strangled plea for understanding, and his mother answered it in the only way she could to let him know she knew exactly what he meant, her voice filled with such an access of pain that his own agony was silenced before it.

  "I know, Tasmin. I loved Lim, too."

  Under the circumstances, the Master General was inclined to waive discipline.

  "I don't want any more unauthorized removal of manuscripts, Tasmin. I know it's often done, but the rule against it stands. The fault wasn't proximately yours, but the responsibility was. You have been punished by the tragedy already. Anything further would be gratuitously cruel."

  Tasmin was silent for an appropriate time. He was not yet at the point where he could feel anything. He was sure a time would come that would demonstrate the truth of what the Master General had said about responsibility.