Up Jim River Read online

  The scarred man and the harper booked passage on Dragomir Pennymac, out of Hadley Prime bound for Hanower and Dancing Vrouw by way of High Tara. She was the sort of liner called an “Eighteener,” after her complement of alfven engines, and she bore three thousand souls, passengers and crew. She was pushed out of High jehovan Orbit onto the crawl, and Space Traffic Control’s network of magnetic particle beam projectors juggled her steadily upward, handing her off from this platform to that, building her velocity; hurtling her up past the orbit of Ashterath and into the arms of the giant projectors tapping off Shreesheeva, the superjovian in the outer reaches of Jehovah Roads. By that time, Pennymac had achieved a sizable fraction of light speed, and was homing for a hole in space.

  The Fudir explained the process to the harper one evening in the aft passenger lounge called Devi’s Delight, a large room done up in a décor suitable for those impecunious enough to travel below Eight-Deck. Holograms of scenery on Beth Hadley surrounded them; but adjacent panels clashed and the overall impression was of an incompetent landscapes The harper and the scarred man dined on plates of overcooked vegetables and a filet of something that very much resembled the flesh of swine.

  “The ancient god Shree Einstein,” the Fudir explained, “decreed that nothing could move through space faster than the speed of light. He did this, so it is said, to imprison mankind on the Home World of Terra.”

  The harper was less interested in how they would get to High Tara than in what they would do once they got there; but the hunt for Bridget ban could not begin until then. She sighed. “And why would Shree Einstein do such a thing?”

  “He foresaw, so it is said, the overthrow and degradation of Terra by her colonies and thought to prevent that by preventing star travel itself.”

  “‘So it is said…’” She allowed skepticism to show.

  The Fudir shrugged. “Shree Einstein spoke with such gravity that the very nature of matter responded. But the trickster god, Shree Maxwell, set loose his demons. Unlike the word of Shree Einstein, which is univocal and lovingly draws everything toward ultimate unity, the words of Shree Maxwell are bipolar, and may repel or attract. Plasmas ran from star to star at his command, creasing the very fabric of space into superluminal folds when the universe was a cosmic egg, no bigger than my hand might hold. And it was through these roads that mankind spread across the Spiral Arm.”

  The crook of the harper’s mouth expressed her skepticism. “But Shree Einstein decreed that nothing could move faster than light. Can one god then overrule another? If so, what sort of mewling half-gods can they be?”

  The Fudir bobbed his head from side to side in the Terran yes. “And so it was. But Shree Einstein also decreed that space cannot exist without matter; and so space itself is no ‘thing.’ And ‘no thing’ can travel faster than light. It is what we Terrans call a ‘loophole.’ The plasma loops create holes in space itself, and these deceive Shree Einstein, since what falls into the creases cannot be seen from the Newtonian flats. Thus, we escape his ire by escaping his notice. Within the creases, ships like Pennymac must still move more slowly than light, but ship and light alike are carried along by the speed of space.”

  “Awa’ wi’ your parables.” The harper turned her attention to the meal, but it was not such a meal as to merit much attention; and so after a moment she said, “I’m not one for theology, but my mother was skeptical. She believed there could be at most one god, and all the others were but wise men of the past who had been ordered and guided by the Divine Wisdom. She liked to cite the ancient prophet Ockham, who said you should not worship more gods than necessary; and one was quite enough, thank you.”

  The scarred man began to laugh, only to stiffen with the smile half-formed. He held this terrible rictus for a moment before he shuddered and his features took on a sharper and more vulpine look. The edges of his lips pulled away from his teeth in a manner not at all comforting. It was not the smile that he had started to make.

  “You will have to forgive friend Fudir,” he said. “He was a chartsman himself in the long ago and thinks everyone finds the theology of superluminal travel as fascinating as he does.”

  “Ah…” The harper sat back and stared at her companion. She had seen these sudden mood shifts before. Now she understood what lay beneath them. “You must be Donovan.”

  The smile was cold. “Yes. The others ‘may’ be, but I am the one who ‘must’ be. I am the hule prote, the prime matter from which all of them were formed. But let me tell you: the Fudir will dance three ways around the Bar before he gets through the door, so I have taken the tongue from him to explain something that he will not; namely, that you are on a fool’s errand, and your search will end in failure.”

  “Well,” said the harper, “aren’t you the little bluebird of happiness.”

  “Mock on, harper. Optimism is the child of ignorance.”

  “I’d wish my harp with me. There is a goltraí coming on and my fingers itch to play you.”

  “Oh, what a cacophony that would be! In which mode might we seven harmonize? Pay attention. The Spiral Arm is home to only two sorts of men: those who have paid attention and those who are dead. Your mother was a Hound, sought diligently by other Hounds. Do you suppose that your flailing can succeed where their craft has failed?”

  “Perhaps.” The harper pushed the remains of her meal away from her. “And for two reasons. The first is that a daughter may know her mother more thoroughly than any colleague, and so see her where other eyes have failed.”

  “But she vanished on a Hound’s business, not a mother’s. If she has contacted neither you nor the Kennel, it means she cannot; and where a Hound is concerned, ‘cannot’ means she is dead. Accept that.”

  “No.”

  “Your denial is insufficient refutation. I cannot see your mother falling to any mere quotidian disaster. There are very few things in the Spiral Arm that can effect the disappearance of a Hound, and one of them is a Confederate courier.”

  “And the second reason,” the harper continued unperturbed, “is that her colleagues have abandoned the hunt. Were there even a hint of ‘Federal involvement, can you doubt they would have pressed matters to the limit?”

  “Can you be so sure they have not? Do not discount Those of Name. Their ears are keen, their arms are long. Do you know the Weapon of the Long Knife? They may strike from stars whose very light has yet to reach us. They may strike with no more than a word spoken into the right ear or a coin dropped in the right palm. But the Fudir is a sentimental fool. Somewhere in the cockle of his heart rests a mustard seed of affection; and you have watered it, a little, over the past few days. Like a stone embedded in a pane of glass, it is a weak point. It is there he can break, and we with him. The nostalgia you awakened for your mother has turned his head. And that is a mistake, for a man looking backward can blunder into unpleasant surprises before him. And as little as I care for him, his well-being is tied inextricably to mine. We will take you so far as the Kennel. On that we have agreed. There, the Hounds will also explain how hopeless a task you have undertaken. If after that you insist on pressing the chase, you will do so without our help.” Donovan scowled and shook his head vigorously. “Without our help,” he said again.

  The scarred man stilled briefly. His smile faded like the embers of a fire, and the cast of his features changed once more. Where Donovan might be called “cold,” the Fudir seemed merely “devious,” a mien almost friendly in comparison. He was a fox to Donovan’s wolf. But there was no humor now in the set of his mouth or eyes.

  “I hate him.”

  The harper did not ask who he meant. “He’s afraid. I understand why.”

  “No. You don’t. You can’t understand, unless you have a mind like shattered glass—and had endured the shattering.”

  She looked into his ever-shifting eyes. “You’re afraid, too.”

  “You’re a fool. We all are. Except Brute, who’s not smart enough to be afraid.”

  “Yet, you wan
ted to help me.”

  He shrugged. “It’s not like some of us could stay home.”

  III GUARD DOGS

  In the far-flung fiction that is the United League of the Periphery, High Tara is the invented capital of an imaginary realm. This is neither as arbitrary nor as futile as it sounds. Everything must have a center; and everything real started sometime as a dream. The dream may come at the end or even after the end, or it may come at the beginning. High Tara is a dream that came at the beginning. It might fairly be said that there was a United League only because, once upon a time, certain men and women had imagined that there might be.

  The ancient god Planck once decreed that even dead matter requires first that it be observed. What can be more dreamlike than that? If even the fact of being depends upon a wish, how much more so constructions of becoming erected upon those facts?

  But neither should a fiction become too real. A dream must be perfect, but reality is always flawed. So when the serpent Planck observed the quantum state and brought order from the chaos, he did reality no great favor.

  High Tara, seen from orbit, seemed one great forest. Something in her soils had proven remarkably receptive to the ancient seed ships. Where New Eireann had started with little more than basalt, High Tara had possessed a substratum of prokaryotic raw materials. It had been a world almost alive, depending on how far one stretched the fictions of life.

  The original colonists had been the usual amalgam of late Commonwealth times: Vraddies and Murkans, Zhõgwó and Roomies, and they had spoken the Tantamiž lingua franca of that era. It had been a Romantic age, as all dangerous and interesting times are. No one crosses the stars for a decimal point, but they may for a dream. Contrived anachronisms from the Terran past had been all the fashion; and thus—“so it is said”—a mere dozen or so Irish had managed, quantum-like, to impress their own imagined and somewhat eccentric past onto the colony. But across so many years, ancestry was a collective thing and every Finn was a Bantu beside. Most people no longer had any clear idea whence their recreated culture had come. I’m a’ Cocker, they might say; or I’m from Die Bold, or A Gatmander, me. And other names, older names, names like Polynesia or Britain or Roosiya, brought now little more than a puzzled stare. And so it was that the colorful and kilted throngs of High Tara were as likely as not to braid their hair in queues or hide it under turbans, and to own skins of gold and bronze and cinnabar—and call themselves Gaels in spite of all.

  The Green Gawain was a broad, manicured park in the center of Bally Oakley. Hedgerows were mazes, colorful gardens spilled out into patches of wildflowers. Forgotten writers and artists postured on plinth and pedestal. Fountains murmured theatrically and benches gave respite to lovers or the weary. Ornamentation was everywhere: floral arrangements blossomed into pictures when seen from a distance; serpents twisted up lampposts; intricate geometries rimmed pools and walkways, breaking out of their borders here and there into fanciful flowers and more fanciful beasts, into lotus blossoms, swastikas, or taijis, or simply into ornate capitals in the ancient Tantamiž script. It was a peaceful refuge, where one could relax or take a pleasant and conversational stroll with an old friend, and there were secluded groves where you could forget you were in the midst of a great city.

  Yet there was something artful in the artlessness of the Green Gawain, something careful about its casualness. Despite the wildflowers and the broken symmetries, it was a bit too well-manicured, a little too obviously contrived. Perhaps the hedge maze was its true heart: a place a bit devious, in the embrace of which one might get lost.

  The harper and the scarred man hurried through this restful arbor to the sprawling compound of muted grey stone at its eastern end. Occasional couples demurely holding hands on the benches would turn their heads as if whipsawed by the wind of their passage. But the harper was anxious to get started, and the Fudir anxious to finish.

  __________

  The Kennel’s main building, facing the public ways along the Green, was dwarfed by its neighbors, a shy architectural maid between her more brazen sisters. No murals, no statues. The Kennel bore beside its plain black doors only a brass plaque reading AN SHERIVESH ÁWRIHAY, “The Particular Service.”

  There was an unobtrusive scanner just beside the door, placed so that visitors could affect no notice of it. The Fudir framed it with his hands. “It’s an old-style facemaker,” he said. “It scans two dozen dimensions on the face—features immune to the surgeon’s art, like the distance between the eye sockets.” His forefinger and least-finger made a gauge with which he indicated his two eyes. “Scales you against the eigenfaces in their files.” He stared directly into the scanner and pulled his mouth open with his two forefingers.

  “Should you do that?” the harper asked uncertainly.

  “Ah, it can only improve my beauty. If my face isn’t in their records, it’s not worth their mounting a scanner by the door.” He squinted at the lenticel. “In the old Terran Commonwealth, it would be HDTV”

  “Ah, the lost glories of Olde Terra. What was HDTV?”

  “Oh missy. In old Murkan language, it stand for Hostile Detection Technique Visual. They use-then ’real-time, noninvasive automated sensor technologies to detect culturally independent, multimodal indicators of hostile intent.”

  The harper frowned. “You mean the Terrans had a machine to tell them if someone were acting suspiciously.”

  “Oh, yes, memsahb. No budmash man kamin, if ‘AI’ say ‘he big dhik.’ Such machine, much wonderful.”

  “Though more wonderful not to need them. What sort of age was it that they must automate the identification of hostiles?”

  But the harper was spared another tale of the wonders of the Terran Commonwealth by the clack of the bolt unlatching. The Fudir pushed the door open and they walked down a short hallway into a broad, marble-floored lobby possessing a single desk at its far end. At the desk sat a small, dark, wrinkled man with baggy jowls and a pug nose, a race of men known as “sharpies.” He gave the impression that his skull had been exchanged at some point for one of a smaller size, so that the skin wrapping it now hung in folds. He looked up at their arrival and pushed a pair of spectacles back up a nose barely large enough to hold them.

  “An affectation, the glasses,” the Fudir said. “The Hounds do nothing without intent.”

  “Be quiet,” Donovan told himself.

  “Since they can nae have the wonder-machines of the Commonwealth,” the harper said with sly humor, “they can nae be certain of screening all assassins. Yet, they put only a single elderly dark in the foyer.”

  “Look over your shoulder,” said Donovan without turning.

  The harper’s glance was swift and she made no visible response to the sight of the machine-gun nest over the doorway or the two Pups who sat within the enclosure. “How did you…?”

  “A ‘murder hole.’ It’s what I would do. There are other eyes in this room, too. Depend on it. Nor would I discount the old clerk. I think he lies with that harmless mien of his. Remember the maze in the park. This is a world of twists and turns.”

  The room was oval in shape, with the hallway opening at one focus and the desk at the other. Small onyx statues backlit in yellow stood in niches along the walls. Donovan guessed that these might be great Hounds of the past and noted that several niches were empty. A nice touch. There would be greatness to come, the empty niches said.

  As they approached the clerk’s desk, Donovan realized that it was placed just a little off-focus and that the niches varied slightly in size. To an intruder standing in the other focal point, the perspective would be slightly off, as would be (were he so foolish as to bring a gun) his aim. This was definitely a room designed to kill any hostiles who entered.

  The clerk’s spectacles flickered with transient lights and the scarred man recognized them as infogoggles. Donovan’s life had surely flashed before the man’s eyes. Different files on each pane of the goggles, he was certain. If the receptionist was not paraperceptic, a
ble to read independently with each eye, the Kennel had missed a bet; and the Kennel never missed a bet.

  The receptionist gave the harper a quizzical look and the Sleuth interrupted Donovan’s thoughts to suggest that the harper’s face may not quite match what they have on file. The one thing that can fudge the eigenfaces is bone growth, he explained with annoying delight. So if the dataface has only a childhood portrait of her—

  Shaddap, suggested the Brute.

  Quiet, all of you!

  Shaddap some more.

  “Can I help you?” said the receptionist Hound. His tone of voice suggested that it was not very likely that he could, but a slim possibility must be allowed for. He was dressed in a black, tight-fitting short-sleeved shirt, and the slack in his face did not extend to the muscles of his chest and arms. Around his neck, he wore the white collar of a Hound. “Duty blacks” did not present a very prepossessing uniform; but among the strutting, kilted, colorful throng that infested High Tara, the Hounds of the Ardry had nothing to prove. His desk placard gave him the office-name of Cerberus.

  The Pedant roused himself. Cerberus. The three-headed guard dog of hell.

  The Sleuth cried, Ah! His paraperception is likely tripartite.

  “Then he’s not half the man we are,” the Fudir muttered.

  The harper glanced at him, but Donovan remained mute while he gathered his scattered thoughts. “We need to see Himself,” she said in the momentary silence. “The Little One.” This was the title of the Master of Hounds, the Ardry’s right hand.

  Cerberus raised his eyebrows, an impressive movement given how low they hung on the loose folds of his face. “Do ye now?” he asked. “One day, a visitor will come wanting to see some underling, and not the Big Dog; but that day is not today, I see. Well, ye can fill out a wee request form—’tis on the public network—and we’ll process it. Himself has an opening come Michealmas Eid.”

  Neither the Fudir nor the harper was familiar with local holidays, but it did not sound to the Fudir as if that day were fast approaching.