‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’
‘And when we get to Vowe?’ asked Jamieson, equally subdued.
‘Just tell him. Put it in his hands. He’ll know what he can do with it. If he can do anything with it. Pray God he’ll believe you.’
‘Oh, he’ll believe me,’ said Clarin. ‘He’ll believe every word I tell him.’
‘You did know him before,’ Tasmin said. ‘I thought so. When we met him there in Northwest.’
‘He’s … he’s an old family friend,’ she said. ‘He didn’t let on because it makes it … difficult.’
‘Enough of this,’ Don said. ‘Let’s take a few minutes to familiarize you two with this box. Then let’s be on our way. According to what Jamieson says, they’re only one day behind.’
‘Do you have any idea who they are, Donatella?’
She shook her head. ‘Forget the Explorers. They could be anyone. From Northwest or anywhere. As you say, they could even be my friends. The others? I have no idea. The only woman I’ve offended is Honeypeach Thonks, but I can’t imagine her on a mule, hunting me down in the backcountry.’ She beckoned the two acolytes to her and began a quick, detailed exposition.
Jamieson and Clarin were both quick to pick up the intricacies of the Explorer box. It was different from the Tripsinger synthesizers only in detail, and they demonstrated considerable proficiency at the end of an hour, enough, at least, that Don nodded her head in approval. ‘Good enough. We’d better move out quickly.’
Tasmin had already packed the mule saddles, and they took a few moments to hide the remnants of their fire before leaving. Not that it would do any good. If the tracker behind them could find evidence of their passage on the barren trail down the cliff, he would find evidence here as well.
They rode on southward, the hooves of the unshod mules making a musical clopping that was hypnotic. If they had traveled on some other business, if they had traveled without pursuit, Tasmin felt he could have gloried in this strange corridor that Don Furz had found amidst the towering Presences. They were on every side, seeming to look down into the valley where the group walked, violet and ochre, ruby and sapphire, emerald and ashen – a thousand gathered giants, occasionally quaking the air with their muttered colloquies.
‘What are they saying,’ he asked Don.
‘Nothing, so far as I know.’
‘Doesn’t your new translator pick up words?’
‘It did, at the Enigma, and in answer to what I sang! But this muttering doesn’t translate to anything. All the translator does is snore and snarl and moan.’
‘You have tried the new translator on it then? Once? More than once?’
‘I’ve tried the translator for hours at a time during every trip since the Enigma. Nothing.’
‘Then these along here aren’t sentient?’ Somehow that didn’t seem an appropriate premise.
‘I wouldn’t draw that conclusion,’ remarked Clarin. ‘Perhaps they simply aren’t talking.’
‘Or won’t,’ said Jamieson. ‘I still need proof.’
‘You were so sure they were sentient,’ Clarin objected.
‘That doesn’t mean they’ll talk to us,’ he replied. ‘If you were one of them, would you?’
They all stared up at the Presences. Cliffs of coruscating rose. Towers of glittering amber. Mighty ramparts of shimmering sapphire, lambent with refracted light. Walls of gray, shattered with silver. Barricades of scintillating flame.
‘Ahhh.’ The sound came from Clarin, the sound of someone wounded, or a sound of lovemaking, a climactic ecstasy of sound, half muffled. The expression on her face was the one she got sometimes when she was singing.
Tasmin’s hands shivered on the reins, wanting to reach for her. ‘We can’t linger,’ he said in his driest voice. ‘Come, we can’t stop.’ Donatella was looking at him strangely, and he avoided her eyes. His whole being felt stretched, pulled into gossamer, encompassing the world.
An act of self-hypnosis, his tutorial mind advised him. A so-called religious experience. Simply be quiet and it will depart.
As it did, slowly, over the following long hours in the saddle.
They came to the fork in the trail. Donatella checked the charts the others were carrying, checked their machine once more, then sat beside Tasmin as Jamieson and Clarin rode away, small figures growing smaller, dwindling down the west-pointing canyon, not looking back, going away to the cities of the Deepsoil Coast and possibly … what?
‘It’s unlikely anyone is looking for them, as individuals,’ Donatella said, trying to be comforting, trying to convince herself. ‘They’re safer without us, Tasmin. Come, let’s do what we can to wipe out their tracks.’
‘I pray so,’ he said, aching with a loss he had not thought to feel so soon again. It was like the loss of Celcy, and yet unlike. This time it was as though something of himself had gone. ‘I pray so.’
Rheme Gentry, while ostensibly much occupied with the Governor’s private business, was actually engaged in two equally demanding activities. On the one hand, he was feeding every item of available information to Thyle Vowe, for his assistance in trying to outwit ‘that bastard at BDL.’ On the other hand, he was trying desperately to figure out a way to get a vital message to Serendipity and save Maybelle Thonk’s life, or at the very least, her health and sanity, in the process.
Things were drawing to a climax on Jubal. The Honorable Wuyllum was increasingly preoccupied with getting certain items of private – and public – property shipped away to Serendipity, and this required a good deal of falsification of papers inasmuch as BDL had shut down all off-planet shipments except for the necessary flow of brou. Getting anything but brou into space took some doing, though Rheme was getting to be an expert at it. Justin hadn’t quite shut off courtesies to the Governor’s office. Not yet. Why, the young singer, Chantry, had been shipped out the week before at Honeypeach’s insistence, babbling, half conscious, and likely to remain that way. Regeneration didn’t
