The Enigma Score (48 page)

He glared at her. Nothing she had said was really incorrect, and yet she infuriated him.

‘You are admirable in many respects, Tasmin. And honorable. But you are sometimes so damn stubborn it takes my breath away.’

‘You’ve no right to say that,’ he blurted. ‘I left Deepsoil Five to find out why she died. I’ve traveled God knows how many miles trying to find out why she died. One thing led to another thing, and they all led to Harward Justin – him and his minions. You say Justin isn’t that responsible? Then you tell me why she died.’

‘She could have died, Tasmin, because she knew you were disappointed in her and she wanted to do something you would wholly approve of.’

‘You’re saying I killed her….’

‘I’m saying that when any of us get into relationships where one person totally depends on another, we kill something. Ourselves, perhaps. Or them.’

‘We got along!’

‘Of course you did! Good Lord, Tasmin, between you and Jamieson, I’ve heard all about your life together. You were in love with Jubal, and she was scared to death of it. You were fascinated by the Presences, and she was in sheer terror of them. You were always forgiving her for it. Always making excuses for her. Always patronizing her. She may have died because she wanted to live up to your expectations, Tas. Oh, maybe she was brou-sotted at the time, I hope so, so that she didn’t know what was coming – maybe in her fogged up mind she decided to do one marvelous thing that you would have to admire.’

He gasped at her, unable to find words.

‘It’s true. You were at least as responsible as anyone else. But all you want to do is blast someone to make yourself feel better. First it was Lim, but he was dead. Then it was me, but you decided it wasn’t my fault. Then it was Harward Justin, but he got killed without your help, much. Now who is it going to be? Some mutinous trooper who doesn’t know a Presence from a piece of rock salt?’

Donatella was crying, partly for herself. ‘Quit looking for someone to blame, Tasmin, and get on with your life….’ She understood his feelings very well. She had been through it herself, with Link. She got up and left him there, staring at the steam rising from the cup in front of him.

When the troops marched out, Tasmin did not go with them. He was outside the city, at the foot of the Emerald Eminence, singing with Bondri Gesel.

‘Donatella said it,’ he sang, ‘but it isn’t true….’

They sat in quiet sunlight while machines thundered in the city, clearing away rubble, finding bodies, occasionally finding one that lived. Tasmin couldn’t identify what was going on inside himself, a kind of freshness coming, as though someone had opened a window inside him so that a chill, pure wind blew into him. It hurt. It was very cold and it hurt.

‘It wasn’t the whole truth, what Donatella said.’ He gasped again. ‘You know about us, Bondri. With us – each of us sees the truth our own way, from our own totally egocentric point of view, and then we insist on that. It’s like kids, fighting. You did. I didn’t. You did, too. You viggies don’t have those kinds of arguments. When you sing it, it comes out, “He felt hurt that she seemed to do this, and she was wounded at his lack of consideration, but neither intended such an outcome.”

‘Yes, you perceive us properly,’ sang Bondri Gesel. ‘We would sing that, more or less.’

‘I guess that once the words of memory are set into our minds in a specific way, that’s how we remember. We can’t remember the thing happening, we just remember the words we told ourselves about it. I told my mother once that I didn’t want a blind woman for my mother, and she remembered that for years. Every time she remembered it, she cried. She said blind is what she was, and if I said what I did, it meant I didn’t want her. I don’t think that’s what I meant, and yet it’s true. She was right. There was no way to separate what she was from her blindness. I had to accept her blindness if I was going to accept her. There’s no way to separate people into pieces of themselves and only accept the pieces we want. If the viggies had been singing to her, what they said wouldn’t have hurt her, for they would have said it all – not just part of it….

‘I’m beginning to think I talk to myself only in skin quieters, Bondri. What I say isn’t necessarily what I mean. It isn’t even the truth. It just gets me by….’

‘Ah,’ sighed Bondri Gesel. ‘It’s important to you? You really want to sing your Celcy, Tasmin Ferrence. Sing your Celcy as we would sing one of ours?’

Tasmin put his head in his hands, wetting his palms with tears. ‘Yes. I would like to sing the truth of her, Bondri. Because how do I know what happened to her until I know what she really was? I can’t believe she went there because of me….’

Bondri shook his head, an astonishingly human gesture. ‘Don Furz should not have tried to sing her to you alone, Tasmin Ferrence, because she did not know her. Even you should not sing her alone, Tasmin Ferrence. Who else was there, Tasmin Ferrence? She had no children. From what you say, your males saw only her quality of tineea. You have a word,
flirtation
. It is the same. It is a little dance the females do when they are too young to mate. The
tineea.
It says, admire me. Flatter me. Sing pretty things to me. Expect nothing from me, for I have nothing yet to give. It is this quality of tineea I hear in your song of her.’

‘There was more to her than that!’

‘Yes. There is always more.’

‘She was going to bear my child.’

‘Is this difficult or dangerous among humans?’

‘Not particularly, no. But she didn’t want to do it. She was doing it only for me.’

‘Ah. Well, then, we might sing the song of a child who reluctantly began to grow up for love of her mate. It is already a better song than tineea alone.’

‘She went to the Enigma, even though she was terrified of the Presences.’

‘You speak often of terror when you speak of her. Was she often frightened?’

‘She was always frightened. Her parents died when she was little. She was abandoned. Her uncle raised her, but he had children of his own. I was the first person she ever had that she belonged to – that belonged to her. She was afraid she would lose me, terrified, of that – of everything.’

‘Ah. Well. This is a different matter. Now we will sing of her valiance, of her courage, to be so afraid and yet to try to conquer it.’

‘She gave Lim what he needed when I refused it.’

‘We will sing of generosity.’

‘She loved me. If Don’s right, she died because she loved me.’

‘We will sing of devotion.’

Courage. Generosity. Devotion. They were not words he would ever have picked for Celcy, and yet he could not say they were not true. ‘I kept saying to myself that I would find the time to be with her more, time with her enough to reassure her that she wouldn’t lose me, enough so that she could start to grow up. She might have become a person quite different from the one people saw.’

‘We will sing of possibilities, Tasmin Ferrence. We will sing of what she might have become, given time.’

Tasmin sighed, a breath that filled him completely, that left him completely, suddenly aware of truth. ‘Sing what she might have become. That’s it. That’s the part that hurts so. That I didn’t give her time to become it before she died.’

‘So we will sing.’

Tasmin cried, then laughed, weakly, wiping the tears away. ‘Is it true, what you sing, Bondri? Are your songs true?’

‘Truth is what we sing, Tasmin Ferrence.’ On Tasmin’s arm the viggy fingers lay, four of them, three and a thumb, petting him. ‘You did not know her well enough, Tasmin Ferrence. And then she died. All things die. You did not know her as you should have, as you would have done. You cannot sing her now. You blame yourself. So, that becomes your song. You can sing that you blame yourself for not taking time. Bondri’s troupe will listen and help you sing. “He blames himself,” we will sing, “but it is not his fault. He did what he could do.” It is not fault. It is a debt you owe. You cannot pay it to her, but her child lives. You can learn to sing that child. And to that child, if you will sing devotion and courage and generosity long enough, that, too, will be true. If you will sing what she might have become, then the child will grow, knowing these things about his mother. And what starts now as a song full of time that never was, becomes, in time, the truth.’

Tasmin thought about it, slowly nodding his head. So. So. So. What starts as an enigma score, becomes the truth.

‘Think about it, Tasmin Ferrence.’

‘I’ll think about it, Bondri. When Jamieson gets back, I’ll talk to him about it. He knew Celcy. And he knows me so well….’

The viggy gasped as though hurt. It was a very human sound, full of a deep and abiding pain.

‘Tasmin, my friend. This morning I was told of something very sad and grievous that now I must sing to you….’

Thyle Vowe asked Tasmin to speak for the Tripsingers in negotiations with the Presences. Donatella was invited by her colleagues to represent the Explorers. After thinking about it only briefly, Don declined.

‘Let Tasmin represent us,’ she said to her colleagues. ‘I can’t do anything for you that he won’t do. And I have something else I have to take care of.’

As soon as services were reestablished, she withdrew a good part of her savings from the BDL credit authority and spent the lot on bantigons, which she offered to the five giligees in Bondri’s troupe. She had two friends she wanted them to work on. Link, of course. And Gretl Mechas, who had shown up out of the settling dust, like a wraith, half naked and quite mad.

After her initial shock and surprise at seeing Gretl, Don had asked few questions. Months ago she had identified a tortured body as being that of Gretl Mechas, doing so because it was found with Gretl’s clothes, not because she had actually recognized any part of it. Now, even as she realized it had been some other poor creature’s body, put there so that no one would look for Gretl, she also realized that Gretl might have preferred that that anonymous body had been hers, that she had been, in fact, dead, gone, out of it. On the surface, Don accepted this, even while she plotted with the giligees. ‘You want me to let your family know, don’t you?’ she suggested, carefully staying away from the subject of Gretl’s lover. ‘Back on Heron’s World?’

Gretl started to say no, then nodded yes. ‘Yes. Tell Mother I’m alive. Not ready to come home yet. Maybe not for quite a while. Never maybe. Maybe sometime. Yes. But alive.’ Alive, her mind said, wishing her soul could be convinced of that. She consented to go to the viggies because Don suggested it and because she was not able to decide to do anything else. After what she and the others had done to Harward Justin, she did not know if she would ever be fit to do anything normal and human again. And yet, at the end it had been Gretl who had convinced the others to let him die.

Link had been slow to agree to Don’s offer. At length, however, he had consented to go into the ranges with Don and Gretl and spend a time there with the giligees.

When ten long days had passed, the giligees had not yet done for Gretl what they hoped, eventually, to do. Gretl stayed with them. Link, despite his doubts, had been a simpler matter. He returned to Splash One with Don, weak and staggering, but walking. Each day he became stronger. Don watched his strength return, wondering why she did not feel the euphoria she had expected; then knowing why, never mentioning it to him. Now that Link could explore again, it seemed likely there would be nothing to explore. The dream had come true; the reason for the dream had departed. The irony of this escaped neither of them. They spent a great deal of time in each other’s company, gently making love and purposely saying very little, as though their emotions were a forest of ’lings they needed to thread their way through, very carefully.

After several days of this, Donatella did make time to have lunch with her Cousin Cyndal.

‘I was so sorry to hear about Lim’s wife and baby,’ Cousin Cyndal said, with an air of competence and without looking at the menu. ‘When Lim and I arranged the whole thing, he never said a word to me about the financial side of things. I feel responsible.’

‘You weren’t responsible. Trace it back, Cyndy, and the responsibility for the whole thing falls apart into chance and everyone’s individual devils. Except for Harward Justin, no one was at fault. I could have picked any other Presence to try Erickson’s suggestion on, but because it was big, and tough, and had stumped all the experts, and I had more ego than was good for me, I picked the Enigma. If I’d done it with any of the others – the Black Tower, the Watchers, even the Jammers – it would have been all right. I could blame myself, too.’

‘That’s fruitless.’

‘I know. It’s only marginally better than blaming someone else.’

‘How’s Link?’

‘Getting used to being himself again.’

‘Are you going to stay together?’

‘We haven’t decided. Since neither of us knows what kind of life we’re going to lead, or even where we’re going to lead it, it’s a little premature to make that decision.’

‘My, you’re being logical.’

‘I’ve been lecturing on the subject.’ Donatella remembered her diatribe to Tasmin and changed the subject. ‘Did anyone ever suspect you, Cyndal?’

‘Your elderly cousin, Cyndal? That fussy old woman? Of course not. No one here on Jubal knows what I did for a living before I came here. Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m feeble, but they don’t know that.’

Donatella flushed.

‘Now,’ said Cousin Cyndal, ‘let’s see if there’s anything on this menu I can eat.’

‘So ’lings are part of the skin of the Presences, are they?’ Thyle Vowe grumped to his daughter.

‘’Lings and ’lets and the surface of the large crystals as well,’ Clarin told him.

‘And all we were doing all these years was singing lullabies, were we?’ He growled in disgust.

‘I’m sorry, Daddy, but that’s about what we were doing. Very complicated lullabies, of course. The reason we could never translate the noises the Presences made was because they were just noises. Snores and squeaks and scratches. Just like you or me in the middle of a nap, coughing, sneezing, scratching an itch. In the hundred years we’ve been here, we never got the Presences awake enough to talk.’