Tepper,Sheri - After Long Silence Read online

  "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 Horn 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 acolyte 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 non-sentient … "

  "Not if," said Jamieson. "Since. BDL's been defini
ng 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 Fèrrence. 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 halfway 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.

  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 Terrée.

  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 deep-soil 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.