The directions he had obtained from the Assistant Underwasherman in the hotel’s laundry brought him as far as the Tibbly Fountain, which formed the social center of the Corner, and there he found the women filling their water jugs. The Great’ Quake had wrecked the water distribution and one of the prices of independence was that you went to the end of the line when it came to restoration of services. The more he had seen of the Morning Dew, the more he had realized how unfinished Bridget ban had left things. What had she learned here that had sent her off elsewhere?
The Fudir found himself an overhang sheltering an outdoor moka shop and he leaned against the pole while he admired the sight and studied the crowd.
His home Corner on Jehovah was larger than this and its folk more bustling. There was a kind of unhurry to the crowd around him, leaving time for a bit of sport among the younger water-women, who splashed one another and laughed. This dampened their colorful sorries in often delightful ways.
He also noted the mama-sans watching from doorways and balconies, and the gonifs and grifters lounging about. Not one of them had failed to mark his presence.
Well, it was a small Corner as these things went, and a stranger stood out. The Fudir considered whom he might approach, and finally decided on a small, rat-faced man who squatted on his heels on the other side of the square, engaged in no apparent vocation. In any crowd of this sort, the Committee of Seven would have its eyes and ears, and the savvy man learned to recognize them.
But the Fudir hesitated. The rat-faced man was surely armed, and just as surely unfriendly to strangers. And who knew how the Seven would receive him after all these years? Did the Corner of Jenlùshy have anything like those Dunkle Street ghats that made the Corner of Jehovah so perilous for intruders? His own skills with knife and tongue must had rusted during his long inaction. If he failed here, what would become of Méarana?
What sort of piss-ant cowardice is this, the Brute demanded. One of the Fudir’s legs twitched, as if trying to step forth on its own.
He who hesitates is lost. And never more so than he who hesitates in a Terran Corner.
Comrades? I suggest we get off the pot, said the Sleuth.
«No,» said Inner Child. «No no no no no…»
“Donovan?” the Fudir whispered. “Help me out here.”
“All in favor of remaining a sitting duck,” said Donovan, “say aye.”
Well, a moving target is harder to hit…
The Fudir crossed to the fountain with only a slight hesitancy in his step. It could have been a limp. The chatter and gaiety continued, but he was tracked by two dozen pairs of eyes.
The die is cast, the Sleuth announced. Or as Caesar said, alea iacta est.
Actually, Caesar said it in Greek. It was a quote from a play by Menander: ’Avερρíφθω κμβς. That was the Pedant. It could not possibly be anyone else.
«Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up…»
At the fountain, the Fudir stared into the waters. The rat-faced man affected not to notice him and continued to do nothing with great concentration. When the Fudir had once more gotten a hold of himself, he stretched and, in doing so, made a sign with his right hand.
The rat-faced man had been twirling a stick with one hand. Now he dropped it and, in picking it up, made the answering gesture.
The Terran Brotherhood was not outlawed within the League of the Periphery, as it was within the Confederation, but neither did it like to draw attention to itself. For one thing, Confederate agents were ofttimes about, and willing to freelance an assassination or two, and some Terrans were genuinely sympathetic to the Confederation, if for no better reason than that Olde Earth was their hostage. For another, League governments would sometimes decide that détente was the order of the day and move to suppress the Brotherhood to curry favor with the’ Feds.
Two others in the square had noticed the by-play and one of the water-women pursed her lips in disapproval. There was a third faction among the Terrans, and by no means a small one, that believed that what was lost was lost. They still believed in Terra—else they would cease to be Terrans at all—but they believed in the Ideal Terra, Terra-of-the-Dream, the “City-on-the-Hill” toward which one must always strive, and to which one would be transported after death. The idea of one day returning en masse and in the flesh to a physical Terra struck them as somehow sinful. To them, the Confederation was neither friend nor foe, but an irrelevancy.
The rat-faced man stood and walked toward the southern end of the square, where he ducked between a one-story wattle hut selling hand-phones and an open shed where a naked man with a welding mask was repairing a truck. After a decent interval, the Fudir followed him.
But as he turned into the alley behind the phone shop, rough arms grabbed him and a canvas hood was pulled down over his head.
The Silky Voice whimpered and Inner Child cried out in alarm. The Brute, for just a moment, seized control of the scarred man’s limbs and began to struggle; but the Fudir took them back and relaxed. If they had meant him harm, the darkness would have been permanent and not a mere hoodwink. They intended to take him somewhere and did not wish him to know where. He was still in grave danger; but the danger would come when the hoodwink was removed and he was in a comfortable room with smiling people.
“I long to see fruited plains of your home world,” the emperor said after Méarana had played a set of Dangchao songs from the Eastern Plains. “To ride like wind chasing Nolan’s Beasts with lasso and bolo. To drive herd to market in—how you say? Port Qis-i-nao? No, Port Kitch-e-ner.” He pronounced the alien sounds with great care. “Oh, life of Beastie boys, live free under stars.”
Sometimes Méarana wanted to slap the emperor of the Morning Dew. He confused song with life. You didn’t chase Nolan’s Beasts. That would run the meat off them. And life on the plains, under the stars, driving the herd to the knocking plants for shipment to Die Bold, was dirty, tiring, bone-breaking labor that stole sleep and health and even life itself. Beastie boys fared better in song than on the plains.
“Play again song of Dusty Shiv Sharma,” said the emperor over cups of Peacock’s Rose tea; and he warbled with a bad accent, “‘Best Beastie boy o’er alla High Plain.’”
Dusty Sharma had been a real “beast-puncher” a hundred and fifty metric years ago; but he had been called “Shiv” because he carried a hideout knife in his knee boot. Historians said he would not have been a pleasant man to meet, even when sober; but he had been so encrusted with legend that the real man was unrecognizable.
And so she played a geantraí, a jaunty tune that evoked what the Dangchao beast-punchers called the Out-in-back. Of “the splendor o’ the mountains, a-rearin’ toward the sky, cloud-shaker, avalanche maker, cool an’ dry an’ high.” Of such things as these at least there could be no musty historians’ doubts.
When they pulled the hoodwink from him, the Fudir blinked at the light and found himself facing seven men and women sitting on cushions behind a broad, low “kaffé” table, and not one smile to share among the lot of them. The Fudir was puzzled at first, since at every meeting of the Seven of Jehovah that he had ever attended there would be at least one or two that were “in the wind” due to misunderstandings with the Jehovan rectors. But then Terrans on Jehovah lived an edgier life than here, where a certain amount of segregation kept the Terrans more to themselves. He did not doubt that Jenlùshy Terrans ran their share of scrambles, but fewer of them seemed to intersect with the folk of the sheen.