‘What did Lim know or think that was so important to him? What was he trying to prove? What made her go with him? Why did she die!’
‘Celcy,’ he cried aloud, as though she would answer him, forgive him. ‘Why, Celcy?’
The Enigma listened, then it didn’t. Jamieson called what the Watchling did during our last trip a joke. He said it was laughing at us. Maybe it was. Lim said he knew something, something to knock Jubal on its ear….
He started the car. There was a mount waiting for him at the citadel. The things he was taking with him were already there, packed by the Tripmaster’s own hands into two mule panniers and slung on Tasmin’s saddle. All the supplies a Tripsinger needed to travel alone, a rare thing in itself and one for which the Master General had been evasive about granting permission.
On the seat beside him was another bag that Tasmin had packed for himself. His favorite holo of Celcy was there, and the note she had written him, and the earring that was all the Enigma had left him of her.
The toy viggy baby was there, too. He didn’t know why he was taking it, except that it couldn’t go with the house and he couldn’t bear to throw it away.
He laid his hand on the bag. Through the heavy fabric, Lim’s recording synthesizer made a hard, edgy lump. One puzzle was inside that lump, preserved. His brother’s music. Unexpected and glorious, not what he had thought it would be, not a music the Lim he thought he knew could ever have created.
The other puzzle was inside himself, in a place he couldn’t reach, something he had to touch, could not rest until he touched …
Why had she gone there? Despite her terror? What possible reason could there be?
Whose fault was it? Why had she and the baby died at all?
4
The Ron River stretched its placid length along a gentle deepsoil valley sloping down to Deepsoil Five from the north. In the valley, deepsoil was no more than a mile wide at any point, less than that in most places. There were isolated farmsteads along the Ron, small crofts tenanted by eremitic types, many of them engaged in crop research for BDL. Most were doing research on brou, but some were engaged in improving the ubiquitous and invaluable settler’s brush, a native plant that had been repeatedly tinkered with by the bioengineers, a plant on which both mule and human depended during long journeys and which, it was said, the viggies and other local fauna ate as well.
Tasmin was greeted variously as he went, sometimes with friendliness and other times with surliness. He returned each greeting with a raised hand and distant smile. He did not want to stop and talk. There was nothing to talk about. Certainly not about the weather or the scenery. The weather was what it always was on this part of Jubal, sunny, virtually rainless.
As for the scenery, there was little enough of it. Wind sang in the power lines stretching from the reservoir down to Deepsoil Five; the distant hydroelectric plant squatted at the top of the visible slope like a dropped brick; the fields were neatly furrowed; each dwelling was impeccably maintained. Like a set of blocks, Tasmin thought. All lines crossed at right angles. Even the Ron had had its major meanders straightened, its banks sanitized. Few crystals. No singing. No peacock tailed trees turning toward the sun. No trees of any kind.
A demolition crew was working at one point on the road, lowering a heavy mesh cone over an intruding ’ling. A noise box directed a loud burst of low frequency sound at the shrouded crystal, and the pillar exploded into a thousand fragments within the mesh cone. Tasmin spent a few idle minutes watching the crew gather up the knife-edged pieces and truck them a few thousand yards to a vacant spot of prairie, well away from the road. In time, every shard would seed another ’let and a new forest of crystals would grow. From the color of the one destroyed, Tasmin thought it might be a Watchling, probably from the North Watcher. That particular ashy shade was rare elsewhere. How it had come here was anyone’s guess. A piece picked up on a wheel or popped into a wagon, perhaps. A shiny gem thrust into a pocket and then carelessly thrown away. Then the dews of night had dissolved minute quantities of mineral in the soil, and the crystal had grown, but how it had reached ’ling size without demolition was someone’s culpable oversight. The thing had been twelve feet tall!
By evening, he had passed the hydroelectric plant and the dam, circled the shining lake, and reached the top of the long ridge that backed the reservoir. Here the flora was more typical of Jubal, the fanshaped trees relaxing into their nighttime fountain shapes as the sun dropped. His lungs filled with the faintly spicy aroma he loved.
He had almost decided to place his camp in a small clearing among a grove of the plumy Jubal trees when he heard a voice behind him.
‘Master Ferrence? Camp is set up over here, sir.’
‘Jamieson? What the dissonant hell are you doing here?’ He turned to see the boy standing beside an arched tent, which was so well hidden among the trees that he had missed it on his walk through the grove.
‘Acolyte’s oath, Master.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! Acolyte’s oath only applies in the citadel.’
‘Not according to Master General, Master Ferrence. He says I owe you most of a year yet, and where you go, I go. So says Master General with some vehemence.’ The boy was downcast over something, not his usual ebullient self.
‘How did you know which
