She poured herself a drink and sat down on the couch that fronted the extravagant windows, far enough back in the room that she could not be seen. There were at least ten gawkers outside her window now, all staring upward as though hypnotized. In a few minutes she would go and lean out of the window, wave to them, call out ‘Hi, how are you? Great night, isn’t it?’ Watching for any move in her direction, any weapon. Anything that might betray another assassin.
Though there might not be another one. Not yet. Whoever had sent the first assassin could not know that the would-be killer was dead. For all the sender knew, the assassin might be alive and well and ready to try again. She could say that phrase to herself calmly, ‘try again,’ say it almost without fear. It was only when she took the thought further, ‘try again to kill Don Furz,’ that her stomach clenched into a knot and bile burned in her throat. ‘Try again to kill Don Furz because Don Furz knows something she is not supposed to know.’
Not that she’d been trying to find out any such thing!
She had been sitting in the large underground library of the Chapter House, three floors below where she was sitting right now, poring through some old papers for references to the Mad Gap. Her Prior thought there might be some early Explorer comments that would suggest a useful method of approach. The Gap was currently impassable. BDL wanted it passable. Thus, Donatella Furz, who thought she remembered reading something about it years ago, was immured in dusty papers and unintelligible correspondence, bored to tears, yawning over the ancient stacks, and longing for dinner. She was skimming the letters between a virtually unremembered third decade Explorer and his Prior when she came upon a page in a completely different handwriting. The half-stretched yawn died on her face and she stared at it in disbelief. She did not need to see the signature to know whose it was. Erickson! She had seen faxes of that handwriting itself a hundred times in the Erickson Library at Northwest City, a library that was supposed to contain every extant scrap of original Erickson material.
But here it was, a letter in the master’s own hand! It had obviously been misfiled and had lain unread for the last seventy years. Misfiled by whom? Reading the entire letter made it very clear. Misfiled by Erickson himself.
It was a letter to the future, couched in such subtle and evasive terms that only an Explorer – and one of a particular turn of mind at that – would find it intelligible. It hinted at possibilities that Donatella Furz found stunning in their implications. ‘I have further outlined this matter,’ the letter concluded. ‘Reference my papers on the Shivering Desert, filed with the Chapter House in the Priory of Northwest.’
Northwest was her home House. When she had fruitlessly completed the Mad Gap research, too excited to concentrate on it any longer, she returned to Northwest City and found the papers Erickson had referred to. They took some finding because they weren’t included in the Erickson material at all. They were buried in the middle of an endless compilation of permutations used in the Shivering Desert, an area that had been totally passworded for eighty years and was, therefore, uninteresting.
‘Buried in boredom,’ she told herself. ‘He picked two places no one would look for decades, and he buried them there.’ The pertinent notes were on two pages of permapaper. Donatella folded them and hid them in the lining of her jacket, then spent hours poring over them in the privacy of her room.
She had taken the papers with a sense of saving them, though protocol would have required her to report them to the Prior at once. Later she examined her motives, finding much there that disturbed her, but coming at last to the conclusion that she thought the papers were safer with her than they would have been with the Department of Exploration.
Even then she had had sense enough to leave other, harmless papers out in her room to explain her study, in case anyone was watching, or wondering.
Erickson had not expected his eventual reader to believe him without proof. At the conclusion he said in effect, ‘If you want to test this theory, do thus and thus at some unpassworded Presence. If you do it right, you’ll see what I mean.’
Don had chosen to try it on the Enigma. Everyone and his favorite mule had tried the Enigma, and permission to approach it was almost impossible to obtain. It had taken six months before she had the opportunity to get to the Enigma from the southern coast. She did what Erickson suggested – and more!
When she returned, it was with the recording cubes and notes for the Enigma Score, and she was dizzy with what she knew, bubbling with it. Erickson had only known half of it. If he had had a synthesizer like the current ones…. She had hugged the knowledge to herself, glorying in it. Only Donatella Furz knew the whole truth, the truth about Jubal. No one else knew. No one!
Only some time later did she realize that in seventy years there might have been others who knew or suspected, but if they had, they had been ruthlessly suppressed – only after someone had tried to kill her.
On her return, she had arranged for the Enigma notes to be sent to a Tripsinger citadel for transcribing and orchestration – ‘Send it to that man in Deepsoil Five,’ she had suggested. ‘Tasmin Ferrence. The one who did that great score on the Black Tower.’ Then she had reported a possible breakthrough to the Prior of her Chapter
