“Four point one-two-three.”
The medic looked up and Donovan added, “Metric. Four point two-nine-two, in dodeka.”
“Name the Crossings.”
“Including the Tightrope? Point Pleasant, Krinthic Junction, Hanseatic Point, Sapphire Point…”
The smile vanished. “Those are the Peripheral names.”
“Well, we lived most our life over there—as myan zhan shebang, a sleeping agent—later as a discarded wreck of a man.” He cackled to show how wrecked he was.
“You were ill-used,” said the older magpie, speaking for the first time. The medic glanced at him but said nothing.
“I’ve prepared a schedule for your physical therapy,” the medic told Donovan. “Ready to get out of the box?”
Donovan agreed that they were ready and, with a little assistance from the two comets, was soon disconnected from the support systems and lowered to the floor, where he stood in momentary unsteadiness. The medic spoke another verbal note into his slug. Donovan glanced at the other three autoclinics in the room. Empty, but he had a phantom recollection that one of them had been occupied. He stretched, touched his toes, inspected those wounds visible from his perspective. He wondered if he should pretend to a lesser vigor than he felt. One of a man’s sharpest weapons was underestimation by his foes.
“What of the others?” he asked. “Ekadrina, Oschous, Big Jacques … Ravn?”
The medic glanced up from powering down the autoclinic. “Master will discuss that with you.”
Donovan turned to the older magpie. “You don’t talk much.”
“Don’t need to.”
“And you are…?”
“Your sparring partner. Physical therapy.”
“We had enough sparring with Ekadrina. We were hoping to relax.”
The older magpie nodded toward the autoclinic. “You have been.”
“I think we like you…” Donovan looked at the brassard. “Should we call you Five, or do you have a nicknumber?”
A smile very nearly cracked the man’s face. “I will have to you soon a schedule sent of our sessions.” And he bowed a fractional amount from the waist. From the man’s careful pronunciation the Fudir judged him not a native speaker of Confederal Manjrin, but he did not recognize the home-world from which the man’s consonants sprang.
“If you’ll follow me,” the medic said, “I’ll take you to Gidula. He was anxious for your recovery and wanted to see you as soon as you were ambulatory.”
Donovan could think of several reasons for that anxiety, not all of them a comfort. Gidula had snatched him away from Ekadrina, but he was not especially certain it had been a rescue.
Don’t worry, said the young woman in the chiton. Like the Brute always says, we’ve got him outnumbered.
“Pollyanna,” Donovan chided his optimism, “you’ve forgotten his magpies.”
We may have a handle there, said the young man, if I’ve read the body language aright.
The medic led Donovan down a carpeted hallway lined with paintings composed of intersecting geometric figures in various bright colors. Hand painted, the Pedant noted, and not drafted by machine. The subtle imperfections in the art—or should I say “craft”—
You shouldn’t say anything, the Sleuth suggested.
—add market value to the work. They grant an assurance of exclusivity that machine-craft does not. Perfection is too easily imitated; flaws are unique.
The Fudir’s previous life as a thief in the Terran Corner of Jehovah had given him an appreciation for art that a mere connoisseur did not possess. “We could make a shiny ducat from these pretties,” he murmured.
They give insight into Gidula, said the young man, both their hand-crafted nature and their subject matter.
Subject matter? said the Brute. They’re just shapes.
Yes. Exactly.
The hallway led around an S-curve and ended at an open archway, on the other side of which lay a vestibule. A young magpie sat behind a minimal desk, engaged in a multitude of tasks. One hand wrote on a light-pad with a stylus; the other hand entered data on a touch screen. Her throat worked as she subvocalized into a pickup. Her goggles, which lent her an insectlike appearance, flickered with disparate information on each lens. Earwigs undoubtedly whispered independently in each ear. A paraperceptic. Donovan regarded her as he might an evolutionary ancestor, and not without a little envy. Her channels were merely sensory and motor. Her intellect and will had not been fragmented into independent personalities.
“Ah, don’t fret, Donovan buigh,” the Fudir told himself. “You’d be lonely without us.”
Two other magpies sat in the vestibule along one wall, talking to each other in low voices. When Donovan and the medic entered, they glanced up and fell silent. One of them favored Donovan with a barely perceptible nod.
The office manager appeared not to notice, but that was the way of paraperceptics. They took a certain pride in what they called “multitasking” and delighted in disregard. Donovan was certain that she had seen him, studied him, and informed Gidula immediately of his arrival. The other two magpies returned to their conversation.
The medic had handed his slug to the office manager and departed. The Fudir looked about the room, and saw two open seats on opposite sides of the room. He started toward one, stopped, and turned toward the other, stopped again, and scratched his head. This attracted the attention not only of the two magpies but also of the office manager, which the scarred man counted as a signal accomplishment.
“What are you up to, Fudir?” he muttered.
In a whisper: “Let’s maintain the charade that we’re still fragmented.”
After that display of prowess with Ekadrina?
“How many of Gidula’s people actually witnessed that fight? As far as they’re concerned, their boss rescued us from certain death.”
“Maybe so, but I don’t think the Old One will be fooled.”
Perhaps not, but the manner in which he is not fooled may tell us much.
Did you notice the body language of the three magpies? said the young man. Number Two, the paraperceptic, seemed suspicious—but Twenty-three smirked while his friend Seventeen stifled genuine distress.
“Conclusions?”
The manager suspects the Fudir was playing Buridan’s Ass. In her position, she’d be privy to most of what Gidula knows. Twenty-three holds us in contempt. He knows we were supposed to be broken and doesn’t yet know we fought Ekadrina to a draw. But Seventeen …
“… is a genuine partisan of Geshler Padaborn.”
Who is supposedly us. The scarred man would not mind so much being a great hero from the past if he could remember any of the heroics. When the Names had diced and sliced his mind, they had buried his memories under a pile of shavings and debris.
Our therapist, Five, is also a Padabornian, the young man added.
The scarred man considered this. He had decided long before that Gidula was attempting to subvert the Revolution from within. Why bring Padaborn back if you truly believed him a ruined man? To raise the rebels’ spirits with the idea that Padaborn had returned, then crush them with the reality of the scarred man.
On the other hand—if anything as twisted as the politics of the Confederation had only two hands—broken or not, Geshler Padaborn knew some way into the Secret City; and whatever Gidula’s original purpose in peeling the scarred man from his uisce, he had other purposes now.