The Enigma Score (20 page)

Well, if Don Furz didn’t sing them out, Clarin could. And Jamieson could, of course, without notes, having heard it only once, though his face showed none of what went on inside.

The score was effective enough, a little thin in places. There were several small tremors, nothing serious. Tasmin saw Clarin rescoring on her box, making lightning decisions as to what effects were needed to flesh out the notes and make them hold for Tripsinging purposes. She was faster at orchestration than Jamieson was. Not that they would ever need such a score. This canyon looked very much like a dead-end to nowhere.

Above them loomed the bloody pillars of the range, almost black in the dusk, with the jagged tooth of Redfang itself behind them. These were not Fanglings they went among. They were far too large for that, and Tasmin wondered briefly if they had been individually named and whether the same basic Password worked for them all.

The sounds of pursuit faded behind them. They came out of peril, down from the crystal pass to find a pocket of deepsoil, a hundred square yards of Jubal trees and shrubs gathered around a tiny spring, which filled a rock cup with reflected starlight.

They dismounted wearily, making no effort to set up camp. ‘How safe are we here?’ Tasmin asked.

Don wiped her forehead with an already dirty sleeve. ‘Well, if they can get a singer or two to help them, they might come in after us after a few hours’ work. More likely, they’ll use the standard route and come in east of us, then work this way. If they have access to a set of satellite charts of this area, it won’t take them long to figure it out.’ She stared back the way they had come, her back and shoulders rigid.

‘We shouldn’t stay here then.’

‘Just long enough to rest the animals and get some food for ourselves.’ She was still standing, still rigidly staring.

Tasmin put his hand on her arm. She turned slowly, glaring at him with angry, despairing eyes.

‘This is the third time they’ve tried,’ she said. The third time. They almost killed me twice before.’ She shook his hand away. ‘That is my synthesizer you’ve got. Lim gave it to you, didn’t he? You’re his brother. I didn’t know that …’ Her voice was ragged, jerky with half suppressed emotion.

‘Hush,’ Tasmin said firmly. ‘Get hold of yourself, Explorer. Clarin’s already brewing tea. I suggest we sit down quietly, have a cup together while you explain what all this is about.’

She shook her head, an unconscious gesture of negation.

‘We did save your life,’ drawled Jamieson, looking up from his position by the fire where he was blowing strips of dried settler’s brush into reluctant flame, his face speckled with soot. ‘I know you don’t trust anyone. Probably don’t know who’s coming at you next, but we are the good guys, really.’

Don laughed, a slightly hysterical laugh. ‘I keep escaping by the narrowest margins. As though I had a slightly incompetent guardian angel. Why in heaven’s name did you show up when you did?’

‘I believe someone thought you might be in trouble,’ Tasmin told her, digging in his pocket for the message the Grand Master had sent and explaining briefly how they had happened to seek her out near Redfang. ‘They gave us the rifle just before we left.’

‘On a very transparent pretext,’ Jamieson commented.

‘And it was set on kill,’ Tasmin concluded. ‘It was irresponsible of me not to have checked it before firing, but …’

‘But we were in a bit of a hurry,’ Jamieson concluded, irrepressibly.

‘Jamieson!’ Clarin said patiently. ‘Slash it off.’

‘You don’t really act like assassins.’ Donatella sighed as she opened the message. ‘But then, Zimmy didn’t either.’ She sank to the ground near the fire. ‘I don’t know what this means.’

‘What does it say?’

She spread the small sheet of paper on a rock by the fire and read its contents aloud.

‘The Grand Master is aware
. What does that mean?’

‘He’s certainly being careful, isn’t he?’ said Tasmin. ‘I think he’s telling us he knows something, but he’s not putting anything on paper that would prove anything against him. Let’s get back to you, Explorer Furz. You’ve been attacked, but you’ve escaped. You’re still alive. On the other hand, my brother is dead. My wife is dead….’

‘Your wife! What did she have to do with –’

‘Leave that aside for the moment. Evidently the reason they’re dead has something to do with you. That’s why I’m here. The acolytes are here because one of them is presumptuous and the other got dragged in by the ears.’ Jamieson flushed, and Tasmin went on. ‘I suggest that now’s a very good time to find out where we all stand.’

‘I don’t know where to start,’ she said hopelessly.

‘At the beginning,’ suggested Clarin. ‘Where did it all start?’

‘In the library of the Priory at Splash One,’ Don said quietly. ‘When I found a letter Erickson had written….’

Half an hour later, she fell silent, the others still staring at her. There were things missing from her story. She knew it and they knew it. Still, they had the general outline.

‘Let me see if I understand this,’ Clarin said. ‘You found documents of Erickson’s that indicated a method of proving that the Presences are sentient.’

Don nodded.

‘You took some steps, as yet unspecified, to verify this information. As a consequence of this verification, you came up with the notes for the Enigma score.’

Don nodded again, slowly.

‘And at that point, you decided you had to tell someone what you knew.’

‘No,’ Don sighed. ‘At that point I just bubbled around like boiling sugar for a time, while everyone patted me on the head. Then I got some sense and I decided to keep my mouth shut.’

‘You didn’t say that!’ Jamieson complained, while Tasmin gave him a sidelong look.

‘It was a fleeting decision,’ she explained. ‘Figure it out for yourself, acolyte. If I come up with proof of sentience, somebody will have to do something about it. The Planetary Exploitation Council has to take some action, don’t they? I think everyone assumes that once sentience is established, on any planet, not just Jubal, humans have to get out.’

‘Not everywhere. Not always,’ Tasmin said.

‘No, not everywhere, not always, but those are the rare exceptions. So, why should I want to tip the tripwagon? I earn my living here, just the way you do. My friends are here. My livelihood is here. Besides – it’s Jubal! It’s home! I don’t want to leave here. So after I came down out of the clouds, the first thing I decided to do was keep my stupid mouth shut. Of course, that was after I went giggling around for several days like a damned fool. Anybody who looked at me probably knew I’d found something.’ She sighed again, rubbing grubby hands up the sides of her face, leaving long smears of soil.

Clarin passed cups of steaming tea and commented, ‘Presumably you decided differently after a while.’

‘After I’d had a chance to think, yes. We all know the CHASE Commission is due to meet here very soon. And everyone knows it’s rigged. Lord, the chairman of the commission is the Governor’s own stepson, and everyone knows that BDL owns the Governor. So, it’s pretty sure the results of the commission hearings are prearranged. And we all know what BDL wants those to be. Nonsentient. So then I got to thinking about what will happen after the CHASE Commission reports.’

‘And,’ Jamieson said impatiently.

‘And what will happen is that BDL won’t go on paying Explorers and Tripsingers when they don’t have to.’

Jamieson gave her a puzzled look. ‘I don’t understand.’

Tasmin nodded. What she said reinforced some suspicions of his own. ‘If the CHASE Commission reports nonsentience, the PEC strictures will be removed. They’re the usual strictures imposed by the PEC on any planet where indigenous sentience is a question.’

‘Nondestruction of habitat,’ quoted Clarin. ‘Something like that.’

‘Exactly like that,’ Tasmin nodded.

Jamieson still looked puzzled.

‘If the strictures are removed,’ Clarin explained to him, ‘then BDL can destroy whatever they like.’

Jamieson’s mouth fell open. ‘They wouldn’t! The Presences are absolutely unique!’

‘It’s never stopped humans before,’ Tasmin said, thinking of the histories he had read in the citadel. Rivers turned into sewers. Mountains leveled into rubble. All for the profit of the great agglomerates. ‘Not where profit is concerned. Think how profits could be increased if BDL didn’t have to use Explorers or Tripsingers or wagon trains. Think how much brou could be moved if they could fly the cargo in and out.’

‘It stinks,’ said Clarin with feeling.

‘It stinks,’ agreed Donatella. ‘But it’s obvious once you start thinking about it. So, quite selfishly I’d decided to keep my mouth shut, but then I realized it wouldn’t make any difference. Most likely I was going to be out of work and off-planet no matter what happened, and so was everyone else I knew. At that point, I decided to do what I should have decided in the first place. For Jubal’s sake, not mine.’

‘To get the word out,’ Clarin continued. ‘However, you suspected that if you simply spoke out, you would probably be silenced.’

‘I think it was a reasonable assumption,’ Don said, gesturing back the way they had come. ‘You saw them.’

Clarin leaned back on one arm and continued her recapitulation. ‘At this point the story gets a little confusing for me. You contacted a friend, whom you do not identify to us….’

‘For that friend’s own protection,’ Don assented, half angrily. ‘You say you’re the good guys, but how the hell do I know.’

‘All right. I’ll pay chits for that. So, you contact this friend, and you and the friend work up this plan. You decide to get one of the Top Six ’Soilcoast Singers to get the word out for you. You’re going to feed this singer certain information, which will then be used as the basis for a show.’

‘Part of the information was in the Enigma score, and I was the only one who had it at that point. We tried to figure out a way the singer could get the score without tracing it back to me. Then my friend told me Lim Terree could get the score from his brother in Deepsoil Five, Tripsinger Tasmin Ferrence, because I’d already sent it to you for scoring….’ Her voice trailed away. ‘I hadn’t known you were his brother. Getting it from you seemed less culpable. I didn’t think anyone would be surprised if he got it from someone in his own family. It wouldn’t seem like …’

‘Like a conspiracy,’ Tasmin finished for her. ‘It wouldn’t make BDL suspicious.’

She nodded gratefully. ‘I thought not. Our plan was that by the time anyone at BDL smartened to what was going on, everyone on Jubal would be talking about the show. Oh, people would doubt that what was in the show was real information, but it would still be widespread by then. Too widespread to stop. And the talk alone would make the PEC pay attention, whether they believed or not. Then, too, there’d be holo cubes made and distributed. It wouldn’t be controllable. Too many people would know.’

Clarin asked, ‘It wasn’t part of your plan that Lim Terree would go up on the Enigma?’

‘Lord, no! He wasn’t a Tripsinger. It wasn’t even a proven score yet. He was just supposed to get the score from his brother in a way that would seem natural and unthreatening and then bring it back to Splash One.’

‘And it wasn’t your intention that he should pauperize himself getting to Deepsoil Five? He did, you know. His wife and child are destitute.’ Clarin sipped at the last of her tea, watching Don’s face.

‘I didn’t know.’ Don leaned forward, burying her head in her hands. ‘Nothing went right, did it? I had no idea he’d done that. My friend arranged the whole thing. I should never have….’

‘Never mind, Don,’ Tasmin said gently. ‘It wasn’t your fault. Not any more than it was mine or my father’s or Lim’s own. He was trying desperately to prove himself. He put everything he had into this – more than he had. Your friend’s only mistake was to count too heavily on someone whose own demons were riding him. There’s more than enough guilt to go around, but you don’t deserve much of it.’

‘Meantime,’ Clarin said, going on with her précis, ‘two attempts were made on your life. One here in the Redfang Range, one sometime later in the Chapter House at Splash One. But you say you do not know who is attempting to kill you.’

‘It’s true. I don’t. I’ve been over and over everything I said to anyone from the beginning. As I said, I did bubble around a little bit, right at the first, but I never actually said anything. Maybe someone could suspect that I know something I shouldn’t, but no one can know, not for sure.’

‘For some people, suspicion is enough,’ Tasmin commented. ‘More than enough. Crystallites, for example. Though I should think they would welcome proof of sentience.’ He waited for a comment from Don but heard none. ‘Surely you must suspect someone.’

‘Someone with BDL, obviously,’ she said uncomfortably. ‘We all know how unscrupulous they are. He is.’

‘He being?’

‘Justin. The more profit out of Jubal, the more goes in his own pockets. At least, so I’ve heard.’

‘In his pockets, and the Governor’s. Some say it even goes to the PEC.’

‘I don’t like to believe that,’ Don said wearily. ‘The point is, what am I going to do now?’ She stood up and walked around the little fire, swinging her arms, rotating her head, working the kinks out. ‘I don’t know where to go, what to do. All I can think of is to use the com network to send information to everyone I can think of and hope it gets generally disseminated before they catch up to me.’

‘I doubt they’re going to let us out of here long enough for you to do that,’ Clarin remarked. ‘We’re bottled up.’

‘Oh, we can get out,’ Don said. ‘I know this Range well. Even if they come in after us, there are all kinds of little side canyons and slots you can’t even see from the satellite charts. But if we get out, what?’

‘I’m still trying to figure out what’s going to happen,’ Jamieson said in a puzzled voice. ‘There are some pieces that don’t seem to fit.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, we met an officer when we were coming into Splash One, and he told us all the Crystallites would be rounded up pretty soon for the sake of public order. They make a lot of noise, the Crystallites, but there aren’t all that many of them. Then when we were coming up to Northwest, the driver talked about the military and the roads. They’ve closed the base on Serendipity and moved the sector garrison here. The Deepsoil Coast is already overcrowded. Jubal can hardly feed its population now, while Serendipity has surpluses all over the place. It doesn’t make any economic sense at all. And what I’m wondering is, what are they going to use all those troopers for?’