‘I don’t remember,’ he equivocated. ‘I was just a kid; just getting out of basic school. But if you want to go to his concert, love, I’ll bet he has some tickets he’d make available – for his family.’ Which seemed to do the trick for she stopped sulking and talked with him, and when night came, she said she was too tired but didn’t insist upon it after he kissed her.
Still, their lovemaking was anything but satisfying. She seemed to be thinking about something else, as though there were something she wanted to tell him or talk to him about but couldn’t. It was the way she behaved when she’d spent money they didn’t have, or was about to, or when she flirted herself into a corner she needed his help to get out of. He knew why she did those things, testing him, making him prove that he loved her. If he asked what was bothering her before she was ready to tell him, it would only lead to accusations that he didn’t trust her. One of these days, they’d have to take time to work it out. One of these days he would get professional help for her instead of endlessly playing daddy for her in the vain hope she’d grow up. He had made himself this promise before. Somehow there never seemed to be time to keep it – time, or the energy to get through the inevitable resentment. Looking at her sleeping face, he knew that Celcy would regard it as a betrayal.
Sighing, unable to sleep, he took his let-down, half hostile feelings onto the roof. It was his place for exorcising demons.
Virtually every house in Deepsoil Five had a deck or small tower from which people could watch approaching caravans or spy on the Presences through telescopes. He had given Celcy a fine scope three years ago for her birthday, but she had never used it. She didn’t like looking at the Presences, something he should have realized before he picked out the gift. Back then he was still thinking that what interested him would interest her.
‘A very masculine failing.’ His mother had laughed softly at his rueful confession. ‘Your father was the same way.’ And then, almost wistfully, she added, ‘Give her something to make her feel treasured. Give her jewelry next time, Tas.’
He had given her jewelry since, but he’d kept the scope. Now he swung it toward the south. A scant twenty miles away the monstrous hulk of the Enigma quivered darkly against the Old Moon, a great, split pillar guarding the wall between the interior and the southern coast. Was the new score really a password past the Presence? Or would it be just one more failed attempt, ending in blood and death? The Enigma offered no comment, simply went on quivering, visibly occulting the stars at its edge in a constant shimmer of motion.
He turned to the west in a wide arc, ticking off the Presences along the horizon. Enigma, Sky Hammer, Amber Axe, Deadly Dozen, Cloud Gatherer, Black Tower, the Far Watchlings, then the western escarpment of crowded and mostly unnamed Presences. A little south of west were the Twin Watchers. The Watcher score was one of the first Passwords he had ever learned – a fairly simple piece of singing, with phonemes that were easy to get one’s tongue around. ‘Arndaff duh-roomavah,’ he chanted softly, ‘sindir dassalam awoh,’ wondering as he occasionally did if there was really any meaning in the sounds. Official doctrine taught there was not, that the sounds, when properly sung and backed up with appropriate orchestration, merely damped the vibration in the crystalline Presences, thus allowing caravans to get through without being crushed. Or dismembered. Or blown away by scattering shards of crystal.
Although ever since Erickson there had been people who believed implicitly in the language theory. Even now there were a few outspoken holdouts like Chad Jaconi, the Master Librarian, who believed that the sounds of the librettos were really words, and said so. Jaconi had spent the last forty years making a dictionary of tripsong phonemes, buying new translators from out-system, trying to establish that the Password scores were, indeed, a language. Every time old Jaconi thought he’d proved something, however, someone came along with a new libretto that contradicted it. There were still Explorer-singers out there with recorders and synthesizers and computers, crouched just outside the range of various Presences, trying endless combinations to see what seemed to work, coming up with new stuff even after all these years. Tasmin had actually heard the original cube made a hundred years ago by Ben Erickson, the first Explorer to get past the Far Watchlings to inland Deepsoil, an amazing and utterly mysterious, if not mystical, achievement. How could anyone possibly have arrived at the particular combination of phonemes and orchestral effect by trial and error! It seemed impossible.
‘It had to be clairvoyance,’ Tasmin mused, not for the first time. ‘A crystal ball and a fine voice.’
Erickson had sung his way past the Presences for almost fifty years before becoming one more singer to fall to the Enigma. During those years he had made an immortal name for himself and founded both the Order of Tripsingers and the Order of Explorers. Not bad accomplishments for one man. Tasmin would have been content to do one-quarter as well.
‘Tassy?’ A sad little whisper from the stairway.
