“Then two in three will be tempered and make a home. What of those who simply yearn for new constellations to point their ways? For them, even Lafrontera may prove too tame, too settled. They’ll go out into the Wild, perhaps even to the Rim itself.”
“The more fool, they. What can a new sky offer that an old one cannot? New constellations mean strange gods, which is always a chancy thing. There are human worlds in the Wild that have not yet rediscovered starflight; and some indeed have rediscovered little more than grass huts and stone knives. Among such, a man might live as a god—or a saint. Or worse.”
Méarana’s fingers call out a jaunty, martial tune. “In they end, it does not matter whether the past drives or the future lures. Bummerl or mover or the merely restless… It is the going that matters. What sort of Spiral Arm would it be if men had never gone out from Terra herself?”
The scarred man grunts. “A less noisome one, I think.”
“Is this your way of commenting on our quest?”
“Your quest. No. I remember what you told Zorba. ‘When hope is all there is, it is enough.’ But I’d not place such hope in hope. Of all the virtues, it is the greatest liar.”
The harper laughs, but a little sadly. “I realize that I may never find her. If something has happened to her… I couldn’t… I mustn’t…” She pauses for a moment in search of her voice. “But I must learn what that something was. Do you understand that? Mother has vanished into the void, and I don’t know where or how.”
To this, the scarred man makes no answer.
Afterward, she goes off and plays cheerful music for the steerage, despite the ache in her heart; or perhaps because of it. A man has produced a fiddle, which he plays in the crook of his elbow. A woman has a tambourine; another, a guitar Somehow, they sort things out in that spontaneous human way. Young men and women form lines and dance toward and away from each other, stamping the floor on the beat, so that the dorm becomes a drum.
How, the scarred man wonders, can a woman in such sorrow play with such joy; and he wishes he knew the secret of it for himself.
V. HARPALOON OR BUST
Harpaloon is a rawboned world with a raucous flux of folk from all over the Spiral Arm. She is the oldest of the settled planets edging Lafrontera, and beneath the movers and the bummerls and the adventurers and the second sons settling down or passing through lies a substratum who claim descent from the aboriginal population. These folk occasionally celebrate odd holidays and conduct strange festivals. Every three hundred and forty metric days, regardless of the season, they deck their hair with three-leaf clovers and walk en masse onto the barren Plains of the Jazz to drink green beer and throw rocks at a sandstone pillar for reasons no one can provide.
During the Great Diaspora, humans had been scattered far and wide, but few had been scattered asfar as the’ Loons. After the Reconnection, when explorers from Cuddalore and New Shangdong discovered and partitioned Harpaloon between them, they found little more than rustic villages and market towns—and the brittle remnants of ancient machines. Since then, other folks have swarmed to the half-empty world, eventually outnumbering the natives and even the old Cuddle-Dong aristocracy. This has not gone unremarked by the’ Loons, who call the newcomers “coffers” or “gulls” and nurse a resentment that at times boils over into riot. To this, the coffers are largely oblivious, since life on Harpaloon is riotous even at the best of times.
Harpaloon was not the only world that claimed the honor of “gateway to Lafrontera.” Siggy O’Hara had a fair claim, and so did Dancing Vrouw and a number of others. The frontier was a broad swath of stars and there was more than one road into it. But Harpaloon lay at the end of the fabulous Silk Road and if not all set forth from there, a substantial number did. Ships crowded her parking orbits; and out in the libration points, enormous colony vessels awaited the settlement companies that would fill them. Each of the great ships broadcast a marker for her shuttles: “Ten-Beck’s World, Home on this Beacon!” “Slufut Settlement Company! Departure immanent! Final Call!” “Stavronofsky’s World, terraforming 90% complete! Openings available! Apply now!”
Openings indeed. The Great Hall on Folkinward Station was lined with booths rented out to the various companies, each under its own colorful banner, and it was to these that the bulk of Siddiqi’s disembarking steerage swarmed. Why pass through Harpaloon Customs if you were only going somewhere else? The famous “Floating Dome” overarched lounges and restaurants, jugglers and magicians, venues for simulated, interactive, recorded, and live performances. A minstrel bowed a Keller’s viol in a reasonable rendition of a recently popular tune. Here and there, someone famous (or infamous) had gathered a tail of followers—newsers, websters, admirers—much like a comet approaching its sun.
Above their heads, but below the springline of the dome, stretched the famed Harpaloon Murals, painted fifty years before by Hendrik Pak Gbọnju. Bold, broad, bigger than life, they portrayed the great migrations of the mythic past. Thick-hewn men and resolute women moved west in ox-drawn “prairie schooners,” Cossacks trudged east through S’birski snows, Zhõgwó families creaked in great two-wheeled carts up the Gansu Corridor, Magreebees homesteaded in the decaying suburbs of Yurp. Across the banks of the Great Fish River, Four-trekkers heading north greeted Mantu cattlemen heading south. Here, too, legendary figures posed: Jacinta Rosario peered across the rusty sands of Mars; Yang huang-ti pointed dramatically to the lichen-covered plains of Dao Chetty; Chettiwan Mahadevan, hands a-hip, stared at the crumpled ruins of the first-found prehuman city on New Mumbai.
It was all very improbably epic, the harper thought while standing on line for Inbound Customs. Gbọnju’s imagination had wrestled with history and had pinned history defeated to the mat. Most heroes didn’t know at the time that they were, and seldom had occasion to strike dramatic poses. Rosario was certainly a myth, a storybook character; and the same was likely true of Yang. And while Mahadevan was known to history, his story was surely embellished beyond recognition.
The lander gate for Preeshdad Town was crowded: fellow passengers from Srini Siddiqi, private travelers, movers with time to kill before their ark departed, customs and immigration shift-workers returning home for their “down” time. The harper and the scarred man were among them, for it was from Preeshdad that Bridget ban had checked in with the Kennel.
Nearby, but a little apart, stood a hatchet-faced man and a wife with lips pulled as tight as harp strings, and two small children in nondescript clothes and terribly solemn faces. Méarana heard snippets of fierce, whispered conversation.
“I told you we’d be late. I told you.”
“They said they’d hold our berth. How’d I know they would give it away?”
“You could’ve got us here on time. What do we do now?”
“There’ll be a second voyage. They promised.”