Donovan chose to misunderstand her. “She’s fast enough to outrun most pirates, and well enough armed to give the rest pause.”
“That wasn’t what I meant. It means slower going to Harpaloon. If we had pushed it, we could have caught Joan Hadley before she left. She’s not only a faster ship but slides nonstop to Harpaloon.”
“But I don’t expect pirates along the old Silk Road,” the Fudir continued unperturbed. “Not this close to High Tara. Pirates may not respect much, but the High Taran Navy is one of them. Did you read the witch’s reports to the Kennel?”
“Stop calling my mother a witch. There’ll be plenty of time for that. It’s three weeks to Harpaloon. Oh, wait. Four weeks on this slogger.”
“Such a hurry!” the scarred man said, waving his hands in the air. “Rush, rush, rush. Hurry too fast and you only reach disappointment sooner. Beside, we’re getting off at Thistlewaite.”
“Thistlewaite!”
“Ya. That’s why I picked this bucket. Joan Hadley isn’t scheduled to rendezvous with any bumboats there. That’s why I picked third class, too. If we showed up missing at the Captain’s Dinner after Thistlewaite, everyone would know where we’d gotten off. Down here… Well, no one notices the cattle.”
“But… why? Mother went to Harpaloon.”
“Yes, but before that she had gone to Thistlewaite.”
“That was to organize disaster relief after the earthquakes…”
“I read about it. It was in all the newsfeeds. She was there for two years, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, but…”
“Yes, ‘but’ she came home excited, you told me, and spent most of her leave reading and searching the Die Bold libraries.”
“She’s always reading. She has to keep up with…”
“Stay with me. The Hounds have been working from an unexamined assumption: that Bridget ban received intelligence of some sort during her home leave and it set her off on a quest. But I think she learned that something on Thistlewaite. She came home to plan and then set out on the trail.”
The harper leaned forward on the couch, her eyes suddenly bright. “Are you certain?”
“Certain? Which Spiral Arm do you live in? The Sleuth is certain, but he can read things between the lines that aren’t actually there. But look: Your mother left Dangchao in her mobile field office on the fourteenth of Tenmonth, Taran Green Time, but she arrived in Harpaloon seven metric weeks later. A Hound’s field office should have made the transit in five and a half. The Sleuth thinks she spent the extra week on Thistlewaite.”
“It needn’t have been to do with her quest. Wrap-up work on her assignment there…”
“She would have filed a Supplement to her final report, and Uncle Zorba would have told us. Remember the map he showed us? None of her reports mentioned a stopover on Thistlewaite. Why conceal the visit?”
The harper fell silent for a moment. She stroked the pillow on the sofa, then looked up. “What do you think?”
“We don’t think. We take votes.”
Méarana leapt to her feet and clapped her hands. “But it’s something new, at least. It’s something none of the others have looked into! Oh, F—Fudir! I knew it was the right thing to bring you along!” She threw her arms around the scarred man’s neck, and he could not back off in time to evade them. “We’ll find her. I know we will.”
Donovan carefully disengaged from her embrace and stepped back. “No, we won’t. If we’re lucky, we’ll find out what sent her off on her last quest. If we are luckier still, we’ll find the thing she was hunting for. If we are luckiest of all, we won’t.”
“You’re a horrible man.”
“Whatever killed your mother would make short work of us. It’s one thing to learn what it was; another to get anywhere near it.”
“If we find it,” she said confidently, “we’ll find Mother.”
The scarred man looked at her bleakly, but he said nothing and after a moment he turned away. “I want you to place an Ourobouros call to your home on Dangchao. Is there someone there you can trust? Do you have a secure code?”
“It was Mother’s code. And yes, Hang Tenbottles has been with the family for ages, and his father practically raised me. He’s segundo on the ranch—runs it, really—and he’s been like an older brother to me.”
“All right, all right. You can trust this Tenbottles. Can he access the household gods?”
“The lares or the penates?”
“The penates. I don’t think the home security system would tell us anything useful. Unless someone’s been nosing around your place…?”
“Only Gwillgi, and he came openly.”
“You wouldn’t have known it if he hadn’t. Gwillgi doesn’t show up on ordinary home security systems.”
“Mother is a Hound. There is nothing ordinary about our security system.”
Donovan grunted. “Fine. What I want you to do is encrypt a message to this Tenbottles; have him check the household database and find out what your mother was reading during her home leave.”
“But Gwillgi already—”
“Something may seem more significant after we’ve nosed around on Thistlewaite. Go to the ship’s Passenger Comm Center tomorrow and give them the message so they can put it in the squirt queue for the next system we pass through with an Ourobouros station. Khlaphalon, I think. Tell Tenbottles to send the reply in care of the Plough and Stars on Harpaloon. We’ll catch up with it there.”
“Why not send it to us on Thistlewaite?”
“Because I don’t want anything on record that puts us on Thistlewaite. The Kennel may be monitoring transmissions in and out of Dangchao.”
The harper frowned and bit her lip. “You want to keep the Kennel in the dark? But aren’t we working with the Kennel? They gave us a chit, and letters of transit…”
The scarred man crossed his arms. “Let’s find out what Bridget ban thought she had before we lead the Hounds—or anyone else—to it.”
IV. ON RICKETY THISTLEWAITE
There is an ancient Terran word: rickety. It is not clear to scholars what this word meant exactly, but that it applied to Thistlewaite was undoubted. “Rickety Thistlewaite” had been its appellation from the beginning, from the days before even the First Ships set down. At least, if you can depend on their legends, which like everything else there, are shaky. The planet’s nature can be seen in its propensity to earthquakes. Somebody had forgotten to caulk the seams of her plates and they slip and slide with greasier abandon than they do on more gritty worlds. “As sturdy as a Thistlewaite skyscraper” is a proverb on half the planets of the South Central Periphery. The Thistles are not so mad as to build skyscrapers—and so the proverb does double-duty. What can be more sturdy than something left unbuilt, runs a Thistlean joke. A building never erected can never fall down. Ha, ha. But the Thistles have developed a keen sense of balance along with their mordant wit, and a fatalistic conviction that nothing can ever be done that will not eventually fail.
They have contrived no fewer than fourteen states in the tropic belt between the Mountains Acreeping and the River Everwinding, for their political structures are no more permanent than their architectural ones. There had once upon a time been a single state—an Empire, in a modest Thistlean fashion—but it, too, had collapsed.
“In the days of the gods, the seedships came,” begins an ancient story of theirs, the first of the Cautionary Books. Most of the Periphery takes the gods only half seriously, but on Thistlewaite they are taken wholly so. Of course, the gods are real—and they are absentminded and fumble-thumbed. How else to account for matters? Only the great sky gods—Einstein, Planck, Alfven—are steady and reliable. And who can blame them? The starry heavens above have alone not come crashing down upon them.