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 others 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
