The Enigma Score (7 page)

Tasmin ran from the house. It was possible to drive to within about three miles of the Enigma, but deepsoil ended suddenly at that point. From there on, travelers went at their peril. With cold efficiency he checked the gauges. The batteries would carry him that far and back. There were standard field glasses in the storage compartment.

He was through the foodcrop fields in a matter of minutes and into the endless rows of carefully tended brou. Ten miles, fifteen. BDL land. Miles of it. BDL, who controlled everything, who would not like this unauthorized approach to the Enigma.

Who would have his hide if he wrecked their car, he reminded himself, focusing sharply on a five-foot Enigmalet that had appeared from nowhere, almost at the side of the road, miles out of its range. Sometimes the damned things seemed to grow up overnight! As ’lets they were easy to dispose of, and someone should have disposed of this one. When they got to ’ling size, it was a very different and difficult thing.

He could see the Enigma peaks clearly. The great Presence was bifurcated almost to its base, rearing above the plain like a bloody two-tined fork. Five miles more. At the end of it he found his own car parked against the barricade. He could feel the ground tremble as he set his feet on it, and he hastily removed his shoes and took the glasses from the compartment. How high would Lim have dared go? How high would Celcy go with him, and how high would he dare go after them?

The world shivered under his feet, twitching like the hide of a mule under a biting fly. It wanted him off. It wanted him away. Moreover, it wanted those others off as well. He bit his lip and kept on. It was three miles to the summit from where one could actually see the faces of the Enigma itself, shattered plane of glowing scarlet, fading into a wall that extended east and west as far as had ever been traveled, a mighty faceted twin mountain that stood in an endless forest of Enigmalings, looming over the plains along the empty southern coast.

He climbed and stopped, scarcely breathing, climbed again. To his left, a pillar of bloody crystal squeaked to itself, whined, then shivered into fragments. He cried out as one chunk buried itself in a bank a foot from his head. One of the smaller fragments must have hit him. He wiped blood from his eyes. Other pillars took up the whine. He controlled his trembling and went on. Surely Celcy wouldn’t go on. As frightened of the Presences as she was? She wouldn’t go on. Unless she had no choice. Lim had always taken what he wanted. Perhaps now he was simply taking Celcy, because he wanted her.

He reached the top of a high, east-west ridge from which he could peer through a gap in the next rise. A narrow face of scarlet crystal shone to the left of the gap and another to the right, the twin peaks of the Enigma. From somewhere ahead, he heard a voice….

Lim. Singing. He had a portable synthesizer with him, a very good one. All around Tasmin, the shivering ceased and quiet fell. Desperately, he climbed on, scrambling up the slope, finding the faint path almost by instinct. Something traveled here to keep his trail clear. Not people, but something.

The voice was rising, more and more surely. Silence from the ground. Absolute quiet. Tasmin tried to control his breathing; every panting breath seemed a threat.

Then he was at the top.

The path wound down to a small clearing between the two faces of the Enigma. Celcy sat on a stone in the middle of it, pale but composed, her hands clasped tightly in front of her as though to keep them from shaking, her face knitted in concentration. Lim stood at one edge, his hands darting over the synthesizer propped before him, his head up, singing. On the music rack of the synthesizer, the Enigma score fluttered in a light wind.

Tasmin put his head in his hands. He didn’t dare interrupt. He didn’t dare go on down the path. He didn’t dare to call or wave. He could only poise himself here, waiting. Silently, he sang with Lim. The Petition and Justification. God, the man was talented. It should take at least three people to get those effects, and he was doing it alone, sight reading. Even if he had spent several hours reviewing the score before coming out here, it was still an almost miraculous performance. He had to be taking something that quickened his reaction time and heightened his perceptions. There was no way a man could do what he was doing otherwise….

‘Go on down,’ he urged them silently. ‘For God’s sake, go on down. Get down to the flatland. Get out of range.’

Celcy’s eyes were huge, fastened upon Lim as though she were in a concert hall. Through the glasses he could see the eggshell oval of her face, as still as though enchanted or hypnotized. She did not look like herself, particularly around the eyes. Perhaps Lim had given her some of the drug he’d been taking? Go on down the trail, Celcy. While he’s singing, go on down. Or come back up to me.

But Lim wouldn’t have told her to go on. He wouldn’t have thought how he was to go on singing and carrying the synthesizer and reading the music all at once. Perhaps she could carry the music for him. Lim began the First Variation.

‘Move,’ he begged them, biting his lower lip until the blood ran onto his chin. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Lim, move one way or the other.’ Lim’s back was to him; Celcy’s hands were unclenched now, lying loosely in her lap. Her face was relaxing. She was breathing deeply. He could see the soft rise and fall of her breast.

Second Variation. Lim’s voice soared. And the Enigma responded! Unable to help himself, Tasmin’s eyes left the tiny human figures and soared with that voice, up the sides of the Enigma, his glance leaping from prominence to prominence, shivering with the glory that was there. He had not seen a Presence react in this way before. Light shattered at him from fractures within the crystal, seeming to run within the mighty monolith like rivers of fire, quivering. Leaping.

A tiny sound brought his eyes down. Celcy had gasped, peering up at the tower above them, gasped and risen. Tasmin barely heard the sound of that brief inhalation, but Lim reacted to it immediately. He turned, too quickly for a normal reaction, his eyes leaving the music. Tasmin saw Lim’s face as he beamed at Celcy, his eyes like lanterns. Oh, yes, he was on something, something that disturbed his sense of reality, too. Reacting to Celcy’s action, Lim abandoned the Furz score and began to improvise.

Tasmin screamed,’ Don’t.
Lim!’

The world came apart in shattering fragments, broke itself to pieces and shook itself, rattling its parts like dice in a cup. Tasmin clung to the heaving soil and stopped knowing. The sound was enormous, too huge to hear, too monstrous to believe or comprehend. The motion of the crystals beneath him and around him was too complex for understanding. He simply clung, like a tick, waiting for the endless time to pass.

When he came to himself again, the world was quiet. Below him, the small clearing was gone. Nothing of it remained. Blindly, uncaring for his own safety, he stumbled down to the place he thought it had been. Nothing. A tumble of fragments, gently glowing in the noon sun. Silence. Far off the sound of viggies singing. At his feet a glowing fragment, an earring, gold and amber.

‘To remember her by,’ he howled silently. ‘Joke.’

He wanted to scream aloud but did not. The world remained quiet. There was blood in his eyes again; he saw the world through a scarlet haze. Under his feet was only a tiny tremor, as though whatever lived there wished him to know it was still alive.

‘I’m going,’ he moaned. ‘I’m going.’ So a flea might depart a giant dog. So vermin might be encouraged to leave a mighty palace. ‘I’m going.’

As he turned, he stumbled over something and picked it up without thinking. Lim’s synthesizer. Miraculously unbroken. Tasmin clutched it under one arm as he staggered over the ridge and down the endless slopes to the place he had left the car. Not a single pillar whined or shattered. ‘Joke,’ he repeated to himself. ‘Joke.’

Then he was in the car, bent over to protect the core of himself from further pain, gasping for air that would not, did not come.

3

He heard his mother’s voice as though through water, a bubbling liquidity that gradually became the sound of his own blood in his ears.

‘That acolyte of yours? Jamieson? He was worried about you, so he called me, and we went to your house and found the note she left you, Tas.’ His mother’s hand was dry and frail, yet somehow comforting in this chill, efficient hospital where doctors moved among acolytes of their own. ‘He got a search party out after you right away. They found you in the car, out near the Enigma. You’d been knocked in the head pretty badly. You’ve got some pins and things in your skull.’ She had always talked to him this way, telling him the worst in a calm, unfrightened voice. ‘You’ll be all right, the doctors say.’

‘Celcy?’ he’d asked, already knowing the answer.

‘Son, the search party didn’t go up on the Enigma. You wouldn’t expect that, would you? They’ll get close shots from the next satellite pass, that’s the best they can do.’ She was crying, her blind eyes oozing silent tears.

‘They won’t find anything.’

‘I don’t suppose they will. She did go there with Lim, didn’t she?’

He nodded, awash in the wave of pain that tiny motion brought.

‘I can’t understand it. It isn’t anything I would have thought either of them would do! Celcy? The way she felt about the Presences? And Lim! He wasn’t brave, you know, Tas. He always ran away rather than fight. You know, when he was a little fellow, he was so sweet. Gentle natured, and handsome! Everyone thought he was the nicest boy. You adored him. The two of you were inseparable. It was when he got to be about twelve, about the time he entered choir school, he just turned rotten somehow. I’ve never known why. Something happened to him, or maybe it was just in him, waiting to happen.’

‘You were right about Celcy’s not wanting to have a baby,’ he murmured, newly sickened as he remembered. It wasn’t only Celcy who had died. ‘I thought she’d become excited about it, but she really didn’t want it.’

‘Oh, well, love, I knew that,’ she said sympathetically. ‘You knew it, too. A girl like that doesn’t really want babies. She was only a little baby herself. All pretty and full of herself; full of terrible fears and horrors, too. Afraid you’d leave her as her parents did. Hanging on to you. Not willing to share you with anything or anybody. Not willing to share you with a child. She needed you all for herself. When I read her note, I wondered if she would have been able to go through with it after all. I’m sorry, Tas, but it’s true.’

It rang true. Everything she said was true, which simply made Celcy’s scribbled confession more valiant. ‘She was going to have the baby because I wanted it. She did things for me that no one … no one ever knew about.’ He breathed, letting the pain wash over and away. ‘When she wasn’t afraid – she wasn’t at all like the Celcy you always saw. I wanted her not to have to be so … so clinging. But I loved her. I got impatient sometimes, but so much of it was my fault. I never took the time with her I should have, the time to make her change. I just loved her!’

It came out as a strangled plea for understanding, and his mother answered it in the only way she could to let him know she knew exactly what he meant, her voice filled with such an access of pain that his own agony was silenced before it.

‘I know, Tasmin. I loved Lim, too.’

Under the circumstances, the Master General was inclined to waive discipline.

‘I don’t want any more unauthorized removal of manuscripts, Tasmin. I know it’s often done, but the rule against it stands. The fault wasn’t proximately yours, but the responsibility was. You have been punished by the tragedy already. Anything further would be gratuitously cruel.’

Tasmin was silent for an appropriate time. He was not yet at the point where he could feel anything. He was sure a time would come that would demonstrate the truth of what the Master General had said about responsibility.

‘Master.’

‘Yes, Tasmin.’

‘I was actually on the Enigma when it blew.’

‘So I’ve been told. You have the devil’s own luck, Tasmin.’

‘Yes, sir. The fact is, sir, my bro … Lim Terree was singing the Furz score. He had a portable synthesizer, I’d swear it was an Explorer model, and he was good, sir. He really was good. I haven’t heard any better….’

‘If you’re trying to justify …’

‘No, sir, you misunderstand. The score was
effective
. It wasn’t until he forgot himself and started improvising that the Enigma blew.’

‘Effective!’

‘Yes, sir. There wasn’t a quiver. He got through the first variation and well into the second before he deviated from the score. If they’d been able to go on down the far side, they’d have been well away.’ He choked, remembering Celcy’s face as she had looked joyously at the singer. ‘Well away, sir. Well away.’

There was a long silence. ‘I’m fascinated, Tasmin. And quite frankly, I’m surprised and puzzled. I remember Lim when he was here. I wouldn’t have said this was in character at all. Your wife was a very attractive girl. Could she have – oh, egged him on, so to speak?’

Tasmin shook his head, ‘No, sir. She was terrified of the Presences. She wouldn’t even look at them through a ‘scope.’

‘How do you explain it?’

‘I can’t, sir. I really can’t.’

‘But the score was effective, a real Password.’

‘Yes, sir. I think so, sir.’

‘Well. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Tasmin. I’m sincerely sorry for your loss.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

And then home again. Sick leave. Dizziness and nausea and a constant gray feeling. Jamieson dropping in each evening to fill him in on what was going on. A Jamieson oddly tentative and uncharacteristically kind.

‘James dropped out of Tripsinging. He’s going to specialize in orchestrals.’

‘Good.’

‘Refnic’s moving to the Jut. They’ve still got a shortage of Tripsingers there, even after – what is it now, six years? I guess most singers are still afraid of the Crystallite fanatics. Anyhow, Refnic’s going.’

‘Good for him.’

‘Clarin’s staying in Deepsoil Five. When I finish my acolyte’s year, I thought you might like to have her. She’d like to work with you. You know, Master Ferrence, there’s a lot to her.’