“What did you want to know from me?” he asked.
“Who composes the music sung here?” she asked. It was a spontaneous question, one that had occurred to her on the way up.
“I do,” he said simply. “Much of it.”
She smiled meaninglessly and thanked him. On her way down the twisting trail, she realized that when Siminone died a few days hence of the euphoric disease she had given him, the music he had not yet written would die with him.
She looked at her fingers in distaste, remembering Zasper Ertigon.
“You will hate yourself sometimes,” he had warned her.
“I hate myself all the time, now,” she had said.
Until the fish ate the child, she had not remembered his words. Until a few moments ago, she had not fully understood what he meant. She had a sudden urge to strip off the glove, suck her infected thumb, and make an end of her involvement in such matters. Better unthink that, as well. She fixed her eyes upon the trail and thought of her turtle shell at home. Gray thorn and gray leaf and gray mist rising. Heights were perilous. Perhaps she should have stayed at home, in her own pond.
When Fringe returned to the Dove, she found Danivon on deck alone, staring across the glittering water where the long-legged forms of the Fisher Folk moved along the dikes between the shallow fishponds. Some carried buckets of food for the fish, others carried spears as they searched for the small gavers who fed in shallow waters at night.
He turned and greeted her in a muted voice, thinking her face was more than usually pale in the moving light of the flares. “I waited for you,” he said.
“The music we heard today …” she said to him, as though she were taking up a conversation they’d been having moments before.
“Wonderful,” he said enthusiastically. “No one can sing like the people of Choire.”
“… was composed by Siminone Drad.”
“Ah.” He shook his head at her. “Gone. Too bad.”
“It is worse than that,” she insisted. “It’s tragic. Why was it necessary to …”
“To Attend the Situation?” he asked. “Hadn’t Siminone caused the Situation? Curvis and I both thought he had.”
“Undoubtedly he had, but we could have talked to him….”
“‘Each Enforcer to his own solutions,’” quoted Danivon sententiously, thinking once more that women were unsuited to this work. Even beautiful women. Even a beautiful, pale woman with hair like a fiery torrent and a body like a cool flame. “You didn’t have to go,” he said gently. “Curvis or I would have gone.”
“Why didn’t we consider talking to Drad,” she persisted. “I’m not quarreling with you, I’m asking for information.”
Danivon settled on the railing. “Talking to him would merely have increased his tendency to think. He is an innovator, and that’s what innovators do: They think. They don’t reason, mind you. They don’t see consequences. And they’re never contented with things as they are but must be always fiddling. Siminone might fiddle, for example, with the implications and applications of his former dicta, coming up with other interesting changes he could make. Our conversation might stimulate quite a number of insights. Then, when we came back from upriver, we would find Choire doing something entirely new, different, and reprehensible. A man who makes changes can’t stop making changes. You know the rules, Fringe Owldark. ‘If one death will do …’”
“‘If one death will do, do one death,’” she said. Of course she knew. One death rather than a few. A few rather than many. And many, when one must. Danivon was right. It would probably have been a choice, eventually, of Siminone or plague. One death or many. Reformers were always a problem. But the music….
“One thing that was not discussed with them,” she said stubbornly, “was feeding the increased number.”
“Feeding?”
“Salt Maresh sends food to Choire. If there are more people in Salt Maresh, then less food goes to Choire. Much less. We could have pointed that out.”
“In our experience …”
“It wouldn’t have worked,” she finished for him, remembering Jory’s history lesson earlier in the day.
Danivon regarded her with sympathetic eyes. She was being fairly reasonable, for Fringe, so he would give her the benefit of his wider experience. “You heard Jory talking about Earth. It was the same then. Telling people they will go hungry has never worked. When I started out as an Enforcer, I tried preaching good sense. I’ve said things like, ‘Momma, you know you can only get two babies through the dry season, so why did you have three, or five, or seven,’ and they tell me, ‘They’re here now! They’ve got to eat!’ Or, they say, ‘Abidoi will provide.’ But, after they say their god will provide, it’s their neighbors they beg from, the ones who still have food because they’ve only one or two children. And, often as not, the neighbors give them food and both families watch their children starve, tears all down their faces, never once admitting they’re responsible for it themselves. Everybody’s possessed by the notion his own children are entitled to life, no matter what happens to other people’s.”
She turned her face away, hating this talk of death. He spoke so matter-of-factly, so
