Eight magpies crewed her, standing alternate watches on the old naval pattern. They wore black body stockings—shenmats—that left only their faces bare. After a day on the crawl up Henrietta, Donovan confirmed that there was always one magpie in his line of sight. This caused him some unease, for there was an ancient Terran fable by which a magpie at one’s window was a foreboding of death.
During the transit, Oschous sought by sundry means to quicken Donovan’s memory, calling him habitually by the name Padaborn, or more familiarly as Gesh. He supplied the summary reports on Padaborn’s Rising, both the official and the unredacted versions, and praised him for his deeds therein. There was even a bootleg partisim—a “participative simulation”—produced before the Names had decided that the Rising had never happened, and had obliterated all references to it. But even when he reenacted the role of Padaborn himself, Donovan’s memory came back dry. The simulation was deficient. Most of the rebels had perished and so their deeds were sheer guesswork.
Oschous tried altered states, three times with Donovan’s consent, twice surreptitiously. But Donovan’s fragmented mind frustrated every effort. Whether drugs, hypnosis, or dhyāna, some part of him remained unaffected, so that he was never entirely in flight.
“We could have told you,” the Fudir said in the meditation room after one such session. “We spent twenty years drinking uisce in the Bar on Jehovah, and hardly got a buzz on. We’re like a ship with airtight compartments. Drug or hypnotize one personality, and another remains untouched.” Only once, he remembered, had he ever been affected in his entirety; but this he did not mention. Whatever the Wildman’s potion had been, it was unknown to him.
He and Oschous arose from the mat and bowed to each other. “Small wonder then Those smashed you,” Oschous suggested. “As a broken vessel, you’ve formidable resistance to the Question. Whole, who could say? There is always kaowèn,” he added in a meditative frame. “It has oft reaped unexpected returns.”
Donovan’s scalp prickled. “I’m not holding out deliberately,” he ventured.
Oschous waved a hand. “I know, I know. That’s why I’ve not used it. A man who knows things can be brought to confess them. But a man who knows nothing can also be brought to confess. At some point he would desire more than life itself to tell me what I ask. It need not be the truth; it need only bring him surcease. On such information, we might proceed confidently to our doom.”
“Then why employ kaowèn at all?”
Oschous’s ruddy eyebrows climbed his forehead. “But I told you. If a man does know the truth, the confession would be genuine. Really, Gesh, we don’t pith a man on whim, wondering if he might know something. That would be barbaric. We only employ kaowèn if we already know that he possesses the knowledge we want.”
“Considerate of you.”
“The sort of men we question don’t merit consideration. Well, perhaps you and I will have better luck next time. We’ll try a different school of meditation. Perhaps that of Gundilap. Memories are holograms. They can never be entirely eradicated. It’s simply a matter of finding the right fragment and reflecting upon it from the right angle.”
“There is a third possibility,” said Donovan. “I might not remember how Padaborn escaped because I’m not Padaborn.”
“I hope for your sake that you’re wrong,” the Shadow said gravely. “But I don’t think there’s any mistake. What Those did to Padaborn they didn’t do to many.” He bowed. “Go in peace, Gesh.”
Donovan opened the door to the corridor, and Ravn was suddenly in his face, shouting, “Run!”
Donovan started and cried, “Down!”
Ravn fell to laughing at this splendid joke and after pacifying the somewhat nettled Donovan and sending him off, she and Oschous pondered the involuntary response he had made and wondered at its significance.
“The Question was in his mind,” Oschous said. “When Padaborn ran at the last, he ran down.”
But Ravn was unimpressed. “He was last seen on a rooftop. In what other direction could he have run?”
Donovan, for his part, as he made his way to the suite he had been provided, wondered at Oschous’s own revelation. So, said the Sleuth, there are others like us.
Ashbanal was a fourth-generation world lying in the district called the Karnatika, a cluster of worlds interlocked by a web of short, fast roads known as the Oaks. One of these planets was said to be Oschous’s home world, but he would not say which, nor even whether it was truly said. “When a man enters the Lion’s Mouth,” he told Donovan during the crawl down-system, “his old self dies and with him all old ties. ‘The Abattoir is my home,’ we say, ‘and its Shadows are my family.’”
Ashbanal had been settled at various removes from Elria, Dunlemor, Habberstap, and New Krakas. Her Desolate Ocean had held few of those elementary prokaryotes from which life built itself, and the ancient terraforming arks had known no easy time in her quickening. Now, however, three continents lay verdant with old growth forest, save near the bays and inlets where the skimmer-boats put in and atop the mesas set aside for the ballistic shuttles. The fourth continent had either failed of terraformation or else had been reserved by the ancient Commonwealth world-planners for mining and extraction, for it was pitted worse than the oldest shield-moon, and giant molecular sieves crawled its surface and minced, swallowed, and sorted its native ores.
The port on the moon Neb’Qaysar was known as “the Anemone” for the many umbilicals by which the ships attached themselves. Leaving four magpies to secure the ship, Oschous led them through the tunnels inside the moon to the Inbound Customs gate and the drop ports. .
The boots who inspected their documents seemed amused. “Have fun donn dere,” said the inbound section chief in a guttural Sconsite accent. “Bott doan cut no sheep t’roats, mindja.”
Dee Karnatika cocked his head in interest.
The boots were military, feared enough by the commoners, but the chief grew uncomfortable under that cock of interest. He grimaced, tugged at his collar. “Just a lotta youse guys coming by lately, aina.”
Oschous had not identified himself as a “Deadly One,” but neither was he traveling “under the radar,” and it was neither surprising nor bothersome that the boots had pinged him. There is an aura projected by those whose profession is death. “Just passing through,” he said. “I’ve no official business on Ashbanal.”
The chief glanced at Olafsdottr, who wagged a thumb at Oschous. “I’m with him.”
He looked at Donovan.
The Fudir handed over travel documents no less impressive than the official sort despite being crafted only lately during the slide from Henrietta. “I was heading this way,” he said, “and they gave me a ride.” Which was close enough to the truth to have a nodding acquaintance with it.
That elicited another shrug. “Hey, our swoswai, he ain’t no dumb mutt. Youse make twenty-four come by here so far. Do whatcha gotta do, but try not to spook da sheep.”