After her initial shock and surprise at seeing Gretl, Don had asked few questions. Months ago she had identified a tortured body as being that of Gretl Mechas, doing so because it was found with Gretl’s clothes, not because she had actually recognized any part of it. Now, even as she realized it had been some other poor creature’s body, put there so that no one would look for Gretl, she also realized that Gretl might have preferred that that anonymous body had been hers, that she had been, in fact, dead, gone, out of it. On the surface, Don accepted this, even while she plotted with the giligees. ‘You want me to let your family know, don’t you?’ she suggested, carefully staying away from the subject of Gretl’s lover. ‘Back on Heron’s World?’
Gretl started to say no, then nodded yes. ‘Yes. Tell Mother I’m alive. Not ready to come home yet. Maybe not for quite a while. Never maybe. Maybe sometime. Yes. But alive.’ Alive, her mind said, wishing her soul could be convinced of that. She consented to go to the viggies because Don suggested it and because she was not able to decide to do anything else. After what she and the others had done to Harward Justin, she did not know if she would ever be fit to do anything normal and human again. And yet, at the end it had been Gretl who had convinced the others to let him die.
Link had been slow to agree to Don’s offer. At length, however, he had consented to go into the ranges with Don and Gretl and spend a time there with the giligees.
When ten long days had passed, the giligees had not yet done for Gretl what they hoped, eventually, to do. Gretl stayed with them. Link, despite his doubts, had been a simpler matter. He returned to Splash One with Don, weak and staggering, but walking. Each day he became stronger. Don watched his strength return, wondering why she did not feel the euphoria she had expected; then knowing why, never mentioning it to him. Now that Link could explore again, it seemed likely there would be nothing to explore. The dream had come true; the reason for the dream had departed. The irony of this escaped neither of them. They spent a great deal of time in each other’s company, gently making love and purposely saying very little, as though their emotions were a forest of ’lings they needed to thread their way through, very carefully.
After several days of this, Donatella did make time to have lunch with her Cousin Cyndal.
‘I was so sorry to hear about Lim’s wife and baby,’ Cousin Cyndal said, with an air of competence and without looking at the menu. ‘When Lim and I arranged the whole thing, he never said a word to me about the financial side of things. I feel responsible.’
‘You weren’t responsible. Trace it back, Cyndy, and the responsibility for the whole thing falls apart into chance and everyone’s individual devils. Except for Harward Justin, no one was at fault. I could have picked any other Presence to try Erickson’s suggestion on, but because it was big, and tough, and had stumped all the experts, and I had more ego than was good for me, I picked the Enigma. If I’d done it with any of the others – the Black Tower, the Watchers, even the Jammers – it would have been all right. I could blame myself, too.’
‘That’s fruitless.’
‘I know. It’s only marginally better than blaming someone else.’
‘How’s Link?’
‘Getting used to being himself again.’
‘Are you going to stay together?’
‘We haven’t decided. Since neither of us knows what kind of life we’re going to lead, or even where we’re going to lead it, it’s a little premature to make that decision.’
‘My, you’re being logical.’
‘I’ve been lecturing on the subject.’ Donatella remembered her diatribe to Tasmin and changed the subject. ‘Did anyone ever suspect you, Cyndal?’
‘Your elderly cousin, Cyndal? That fussy old woman? Of course not. No one here on Jubal knows what I did for a living before I came here. Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m feeble, but they don’t know that.’
Donatella flushed.
‘Now,’ said Cousin Cyndal, ‘let’s see if there’s anything on this menu I can eat.’
‘So ’lings are part of the skin of the Presences, are they?’ Thyle Vowe grumped to his daughter.
‘’Lings and ’lets and the surface of the large crystals as well,’ Clarin told him.
‘And all we were doing all these years was singing lullabies, were we?’ He growled in disgust.
‘I’m sorry, Daddy, but that’s about what we were doing. Very complicated lullabies, of course. The reason we could never translate the noises the Presences made was because they were just noises. Snores and squeaks and scratches. Just like you or me in the middle of a nap, coughing, sneezing, scratching an itch. In the hundred years we’ve been here, we never got the Presences awake enough to talk.’
‘Shit,’ erupted the Grand Master. ‘It makes a man wonder about the purpose of life.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Clarin, thinking about Jamieson and how much he had wanted to talk to the Presences, how much he had been looking forward to it. ‘Yes. It makes one wonder.’
A time came when everything had been said several times, when negotiations were completed, when ships had departed and other ships had arrived, when the worst of the grieving was over, when the dead had been buried – at least those whose bodies had been found, which did not include Harward Justin – when the matter that had begun with the Enigma score could be considered to be almost over. When that penultimate time came, Tasmin went looking for
