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
