“Like they promised to hold our berths? What’ll we live on until then? Those tickets took our last ducats. We need that money.”
“Cash the tickets in, and you can kiss TenBeck’s World good-bye. We’ll never save up…”
Perhaps they noticed the harper, for they lowered their voices still further and moved off a distance, followed by their bewildered and silent children. Donovan chuckled.
“Behold, the noble pioneers!”
“Must everything be with you a bone of contention? When I set out to find you, I had expected a better man at the end of the hunt.”
“Instead, you found only a man, more or less.”
“Rather more than less.” She tapped him on the forehead with her finger. “When do I meet these others that you carry with you?’
The scarred man backed away. “They come out when the Fudir and I let them. He and I are the consuls of our little republic.”
The harper glanced once more at the mover family. She was not so foolish as to confuse the particular with the general, and already she was limning the encounter in a goltraí, a lament for a lost world. What sadder fate than to lose your future?
Pwairt na Pree, the groundside shuttle field, lay in the Jazz plains, a few leagues east of the capital. It handled trans-global semi-ballistic shuttles as well as ground-orbit traffic, and most of the passengers who downsided with Donovan and Méarana swarmed off to their connecting gates, bound for newly-opened townships in what the locals called the Boonlands. Even so, the monorail platform outside the terminal was crowded with those eager to sample the city life of Preeshdad itself.
A warm, gritty wind tore at their clothing when they stepped out onto the platform. Cloaks billowed and hats fled the heads of those who wore them. The green banner of the planetary league snapped in the stiff breeze: a golden harp enfolded by a silver crescent moon.
That flag logo reminds me of something, said the Pedant.
What doesn’t? jeered the Sleuth.
The scarred man’s head jerked here and there, as the desires of some of him to study the flag struggled with desires of others to watch their companions on the platform.
«There could be danger here,» said Inner Child.
“Are you ill?” A woman standing beside the scarred man reached out to him to steady him, but Inner Child cried out and pulled back.
“It’s all right,” Méarana assured the doubtful woman. “It’s a muscle spasm. He gets them sometimes.” She held tight to his arm.
The Fudir calmed his disparate mind and bowed to the woman. “Thankee, missy. You much kind this-man.”
But the woman was not reassured. She, too, took a step back. “You’re a Terry,” she said and glanced half-consciously at the hand with which she had touched him. Waiting passengers, attracted by the by-play, reacted in various attitudes. One man scowled and stepped closer to the woman, fists clenched as if to defend her. Others, newly dropped from other worlds of the Periphery, pursed their lips or tsk’ed or simply turned away, but whether from distaste for the Terran or for his treatment by a local, the Fudir did not know.
“Watch ourself here,” the Fudir warned himselves. “They don’t seem well-disposed toward Terrans.”
“Considering that nowhere are Peripherals well-disposed to Terrans,” Donovan answered, “that is a considerable understatement.”
That was why Donovan preferred Jehovah. Jehovans did not like Terrans, but Jehovans did not like anyone; and as long as they did not dislike Terrans more than anyone else, Donovan counted that as warm embrace.
The train was approaching from the city, slowing with a hum of its magnets into the station platform. “It’s why we should have stayed there,” he told the others. “Like I suggested.”
The Fudir demurred. “Then who would ward our… our Méarana?”
Up until now, said the Sleuth, I don’t see that she’s needed much warding.
“Not yet. But you know where this is all heading,” said the Fudir.
Of course, said the Sleuth. I saw that back in de la Susa’s office.
Technically, it wasn’t his office.
Shaddap, Pedant.
“What if she did have to lean on us?” the Fudir said. “We’d snap. We’d break.”
“Yes,” said Donovan. “Remember the alley in Jenlùshy, when the moment came for quick and decisive action.”
If youse guys had let me take charge, like you shoulda…
“Quick and decisive, Brute. Not quick, decisive, and stupid.”
Preeshdad was the capital of Cliff na Murph, the largest of the sovereign states of Harpaloon and by default the nominal capital of the planet. She was a middling town and as ramshackle as Jenlùshy. But where Jenlùshy was often shaken down, Preeshdad was shaken up. Her buildings had the indefinable patchwork irregularity of things thrown together in haste, as if the folk of Harpaloon had been in a tearing hurry to get on with something else.
The folk, too, had that same improvisational quality. They made life up as they went along. Rioting was the municipal sport; but a man was as apt to fight someone one day as stand him a drink the next. If on Thistlewaite all plans failed, on Harpaloon they barely got started before another overtook it.
The town had been built in a bowl valley on the western edge of the Jazz, hard by a natural harbor on the eastern shore of the Encircled Sea. For most of the local year, the sea breeze tempered the climate, keeping it cool and moist and escorting the occasional storm as the price; but twice each year the winds reversed and carried the dust off the grasslands. The hot-breathed, bale wind was called the shrogo, and during the season people doffed their waterproof tweed caps and donned instead the bright checkered head scarves known as caephyas. It was a bad time of year; for the warm, gritty breeze rubbed tempers raw, and even the meekest of men would grow irritable. The seasonal body count typically rose a bit in the good years, and spiked in the bad.
The few minutes on the train platform were all the convincing Méarana needed that the shrogo was in full career. Peddlers with mobile carts did a brisk business at the midtown rail terminal, selling headgear to touristas to protect hair and neck from the dust. Méarana bought a type of caephya called a chabb. Rimmed with tassels and woven of a light cloth known as shoddy, it wimpled her golden features in an emerald frame, so that her face, peering out as if from a window, seemed small and almost childlike. Lead slugs sewn into the hem allowed her to drape it to best effect and kept the fly ends from flapping in the stiff breeze.
Donovan she thought abrasive enough that the wind might need protection from his face. But he purchased a red-and-white checkered caephya and two pairs of protective goggles, called gloyngo santas.
They had noticed that some Harpaloon terms were strikingly similar to the Gaelactic, where síoda meant a kind of silk and angioini cosanta meant literally “the goggles protective.” But caephya and chabb and other words were unknown and seemed peculiar to Harpaloon. The Pedant suggested that these terms had come from the aboriginal’ Loon tongue.
The Phundaugh Plough and Stars was a short walk from the terminal and the Fudir found that all had been arranged there to his instructions. Members of the Brotherhood, acting with that solidarity that persecution creates and bribery knits together, had even conjured the illusion of occupation. Beds were mussed, linens used, clothing left in disarray. Room service had been ordered. Surely, this was fellowship!