Authors: Sheri S. Tepper
‘Would you want to destroy that?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I really wouldn’t.’
‘To say nothing of PEC orders to the contrary,’ Jamieson remarked drily. ‘The Planetary Exploitation Council strictures do prohibit demolition of anything except deepsoil encroachment.’
‘Little ones,’ she sighed. ‘ ’Lets or ’lings. Nothing like that.’
‘Nothing like that,’ Tasmin agreed. ‘Now, I’d like you to pay some attention to the aspect of the Watchers from this direction.’ He dropped into his dry, lecture-time voice, trying to turn their attention to something besides the possibility of totally arbitrary annihilation. ‘The score is different coming from the west, of course, and it’s an uphill climb, which means a longer reach, musically. It’s called the “trouble side,” though the westside score is actually simpler, both vocally and in orchestral effects. I’d suggest we get a move on. We have the False Eagers, the Startles, and Riddance Ridge to pass yet today before we go down the deepsoil pass to Harmony.’
The first-timers took turns on the winding road beside the Eagers, a repetitive canon on one simple theme. James started well enough, but he got worse as the trip progressed. Refnic sang them through the Startles with practiced ease. As Jamieson had predicted, James froze in mid PJ on Riddance Ridge during an a capella series of phrases without any orchestral effects to cover the quiet. There was a moment of hideous silence. The ground began to tremble beneath them, but just as Tasmin opened his mouth to pick up the vocal Jamieson began singing, missing hardly a syllable, his voice soaring effortlessly. The ground beneath them quieted. When they had come across, Tasmin stopped them and passed his field glasses around, pointing out the wreckage of wagons that lay in a weathered tumble at the foot of the ridge.
It was hard to make a point in a whisper, but Tasmin could not let it wait. ‘James, that’s the result of too little knowledge, too many assumptions, bad preparations, or Tripsingers who freeze. There’s nothing wrong with being a good backup man. The orchestral effects are just as important as the vocals. If you can’t depend on yourself for the vocals, for Erickson’s sake, don’t risk your life and those of other people.’ James was white with shame and frustration. He had been badly frightened by the explosion at the foot of the Watchers, but so had they all. Jamieson’s face was bland. He was too bright even to hint at I-told-you-so.
After the trip, Harmony was blessedly dull, a small deepsoil pocket, entirely agricultural. Still, the food and beds were good, and Tasmin took half an hour to pay a condolence call on his mother’s sister Betuny, a woman not close enough to ever have been called ‘aunt.’ Her husband had died only recently, and Tasmin brought a letter from his mother. After this duty call, he returned to the Trip House to find Renna Clarin on the porch waiting for him. She had wrapped a bright scarf around her head and wore a matching robe, vividly striped. For the first time he noticed how lovely she was, a thought that caught him with its oddness. He was not accustomed to thinking of the neophytes as lovely.
‘I wanted to thank you, sir.’
‘For what, Clarin? You did a good job out there.’
‘For … for not jumping all over me when I got scared.’
She was standing slightly above him on the porch, a tall girl with a calm and perceptive manner. Without the Tripsinger’s robe she looked thinner, more graceful, and he remembered the feel of her body against his when he had hugged her. One always hugged students at times of peril, but he realized with a flush that she was the first female student he had ever precepted. ‘So you were scared?’ he asked softly. ‘Really scared?’
‘Really scared.’ She laughed a little, embarrassed at the admission.
‘So was I. I often am. After a while you … you look forward to it. When you’re really scared, the whole world seems to … brighten.’
She considered this, doubtfully. ‘That’s hard to imagine.’
‘Trust me. It happens. Either it happens, or you get into some other line of work.’
She flushed, thanked him again, and went down the hall to her room. In his own room, Tasmin lay awake, conscious of the towering escarpments all around the town, gathered Presences so quiet that one could hear choruses of viggies singing off in the hills. Echoes of that surge of emotion hitting him that morning were with him still, a welling apprehension, half pleasurable, half terrifying. It had seldom come so strongly. It had seldom lasted so long. He lay there, his body tasting it, listening to the viggies singing until almost midnight.
He had his first-trippers up and traveling as soon as there was enough light. They stared at the Black Tower long enough to be impressed with the sheer impossibility of the thing while Tasmin, Jamieson close behind him, read silently from the prayers for the dead. The remains of Miles Ferrence lay somewhere in that welter of crystal trash at the bottom of the tower. After Miles Ferrence had died, Tasmin had gone back to the original explorer’s notes and done a new Black Tower score, dedicated to the memory of his father. He had really done it to please his mother, and so far no one using it had died. Today he got them through by singing it himself, with Jamieson doing backup.
After the Black Tower, the Far Watchlings seemed minor league stuff, good practice, but with nothing very interesting about them. James asked to be excused. The sense of awe and mystery that Tasmin had been reveling in departed as they came through the last of the Watchlings and saw Deepsoil Five awaiting them at the bottom of the long slope. Back to reality again. Tasmin heaved a deep breath. He would be home in time for supper.
‘How did your boysies do?’ Celcy said, patting his face and reaching up to be kissed. ‘Were they in frightfully good voice.?’
‘All but one, yes.’ He didn’t really want to talk about James. Or, for some reason, Clarin.
‘Oh, poor poopsie, did he get popped off?’
‘Celcy, that’s not funny. And it’s in damn poor taste.’ He snapped at her, regretting it instantly.
Her good spirits were undampened, however. ‘I’m sorry, Tasmin. Really. I just wasn’t thinking. Of course, he didn’t get popped off with you there. That’s what you’re there for, isn’t it? To keep the boysies safe and sound.’
‘Among other things.’
‘I missed you. I missed you a lot.’ She opened his robe and came inside it, against him, pummeling his ribs with her fists. ‘Did you hear me, did you?’
‘I heard you.’ He laughed, suddenly joyous. ‘I heard you, Celcy.’
‘So. Do something about it.’
His weariness left him. The aftertrip letdown was postponed. She was as giddy and playful as a happy child, eager to please him, and the evening passed in a tangle of lovemaking and feasting.
‘I have been cooking dinner all day,’ she announced at one point, pouring him a third glass of wine. ‘All day long, without sur-cease!’
He rubbed his stomach ruefully. If he hadn’t married Celcy for quite other reasons, he might have married her for her cooking. ‘You’re very good to me.’
‘That’s because,’ she said, running her hands under his shirt. ‘Because.’
There was an interlude.
And then, sleepily, ‘Tassy, sweetie,
he
called.’
‘Who?’ He could not for the moment imagine whom she might be talking about, and then it came to him with a blow of almost physical force. ‘Lim? He’s here?’ He had to be on Deepsoil Five or he couldn’t have called.
‘He’s up at the power station. They’re camping there for a day or two to get some equipment fixed, he said. Then they’ll come on into town. He talked to me for the longest time, and he’s the sweetest man! Tassie, you never told me how wonderful he really is. He wanted to know all about you and me and how we met and everything.’
There was a cold, hard lump at the base of Tasmin’s throat. He tried to swallow it away, but it wouldn’t go.
‘What else did he want?’
‘To give us tickets to the show, of course. To have dinner with us after.’
‘Did he ask about Mother?’ It was the wrong thing to have asked. Her mood changed abruptly.
‘Yes. He asked if she and your father were still living at the same place, and I told him your father died, but she was still there. It’s funny he wouldn’t know that, Tassy, about your father. I imagine he’ll call her, too.’
Tasmin doubted it very much. When Lim had left Deepsoil Five, he had gone without a word. It wasn’t until almost four years later that they had found out he was alive and well on the Deepsoil Coast, doing nightclub concerts of trip songs, moving young women to passionate abandon, making money with both hands. After Tasmin’s father died, his mother could have used some of that money, but Lim had never offered, not even after Tasmin wrote….
Funny. In the letter, he had told Lim that Mother was in need, but he had not said his father was dead. He had supposed Lim knew. And yet, how would he have known?
‘What else did you tell him?’
‘Oh, just that we wanted tickets. I said lots and lots, so we could bring all our friends….’
Your friends, he thought. Your boyfriends and their wives. Celcy had lots of boyfriends, most of them married. Just friends, nothing to get jealous or upset over. Just boyfriends. No girlfriends, though. All women were rivals, no matter how young or old. Poor Celcy. Dear Celcy.
‘You said dinner?’
‘After the show, he said. He wants to talk to you.’
Jaconi caught him at lunch, very full of his newest theory. ‘I’m convinced I’ve found a repetitive sequence, Tas! A similarity that crops up in over ten percent of all successful Petitions and Justifications.’
‘Don’t be pedantic, Jacky. Call them PJs like everyone else does.’
The older man flushed, ran his fingers through his gray beard as though he were combing mice out of it. ‘Habit. Trying to stay dignified in front of the students. Hell, you were my student.’
‘I remember. And you were a good teacher, too. You should have stayed with it instead of taking the library job.’
‘Well, it gives me time to – you know. I know you call it my hobbyhorse, Tas, but it isn’t just that. Really. Some days I think I’m that close.’ He held up a pinched thumb and finger, almost meeting. ‘That close. I know we’re actually talking to the things! It almost seems I can understand what the words are….’
‘Until someone comes along with a new PJ?’
‘No, that’s been the trouble up until now. I’ve been assuming all the … PJs should have a common element, right? But what if Erickson was right? What if it is really language.’ Jaconi’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, and he looked around to be sure no one was listening. ‘I mean, we don’t always say the same things under similar circumstances. Suppose I step on your toe. I could say, “Gee, I’m sorry,” or “Excuse me,” or “That was clumsy of me,” or “Oh, shit,” or any one of a dozen other things, all equally appropriate.’
‘That’s true.’ Tasmin was interested, despite himself.
‘Always before, I was looking for identical elements. All those translators I bought, I was always looking for words or phrases or effects that were the same and had the same effect. But if we don’t always say the same thing to convey the same emotion, then maybe the Presences don’t either and what I should be looking for is clusters. Right?’
‘It sounds logical.’
‘Well, so that’s what I’m looking for now. I may even have found some. There are similar elements in about ten percent of all PJs.’
‘What do you mean, similar?’
‘Tone progressions of vowel sounds, mostly. With similar orchestrals. Horns and drums. There’s percussion in ninety-five percent of the clusters and horns in over eighty percent, and the other twenty have organ effects that are rather like horn sounds.’
Jaconi’s description had set off a chain of recollection in Tasmin’s mind, and he reached for it, rubbing his forehead. ‘Jacky, I brought you the new Enigma score a week or so ago.’
‘You poor guy. I looked it over after you left it and it was a bitch.’
‘Well, yeah, it was complex, but not that bad, really. The Explorer’s notes were excellent; I’ve never seen better. It did have a long sequence at the first of the PJs, though, lots of vowel progressions in thirds and fifths and percussion and horns.’
‘Who came up with it?’
‘Some explorer who normally works way up in the northwest. Don Furz? Does it ring a bell?’
‘Furz’s Rogue Tower Variations. Furz’s Creeping Desert Suite. Furz’s Canon for Fanglings.’ He pronounced it ‘Farzh.’
‘Oh,
Farzh
. I should have realized.’
‘When’s it scheduled for trial?’
‘It isn’t. The Master General wanted it on file, that’s all.’
‘No volunteers?’
‘That’s a bad joke, Jacky. We’ve been trying the Enigma for about a hundred years and what’s the score by now? Enigma, about eighty. Tripsingers, zero. We won’t have a volunteer unless we have someone set on suicide.’
Celcy had spent the week prior to the concert creating a new dress. Deepsoil Five was hardly a hotbed of fashion, and she often made her own clothing, copying things she saw in holos from the Coast where the influences of the star ships coming and going from Splash One and Two kept the style changing. Her current effort was brilliant orange, shockingly eye-catching with her black hair and brown skin, particularly inasmuch as it left bits of that skin bare in unlikely places.
‘You’re beautiful,’ Tasmin told her, knowing it was not entirely for him that she’d created the outfit. She took his admiration for her physical self for granted.
‘I am, aren’t I?’ She twirled before the mirror, trying various bits of jewelry, settling at last on the firestone earrings he had given her for their fifth anniversary after saving for two years to do so. He still felt a little guilty every time he saw her wear them. The money would have helped a lot on what he was saving for his mother’s medical treatment, but Celcy had really wanted them, and when she got things she wanted, she was as ecstatic as a birthday child. He loved her like that, loved the way she looked in the gems. They, too, glittered with hot orange flares.
He stood behind her, assessing them as a couple, he tall, narrow faced and towhaired, like a pale candle, she tiny and glowing like a dark torch. Even in the crowded concert hall after the lights went down, she seemed to burn with an internal light.