Or an opportunity to live high on another’s expense. Donovan brushed away the tear of sentiment in the Fudir’s eye. And a close inspection of the disarray revealed some small objects missing.
The harper regarded this with no little amusement. The Fudir’s primary occupation on Jehovah had concerned small objects going missing. Not that she hadn’t been pilfered, too; but nothing of terribly great value had walked away and, “It does make a fair compensation for their effort, doesn’t it?”
“The Brotherhood was to have covered it,” the Fudir grumbled, surveying the remnants of his luggage. “And I was to compensate the Brotherhood from the Kennel’s chit.”
“Perhaps Curling Dawn’s steward did not explain things so clearly to his groundside contacts.”
“Perhaps Curling Dawn’s steward is wearing our second-best set of wrist bangles.”
“He may be. But note: it was the second-best he took.”
A sealed envelope bearing the tail-biting logo of the Ourobouros Circuit was waiting in the room: the reply from Hang Tenbottles to the request she had squirted en route. Méarana picked it up, but Donovan plucked it from her hands and inspected the envelope closely.
“It hasn’t been opened,” the harper said.
“Or it’s been opened by an expert.” He frowned some more over the cover, then handed it back to Méarana. “What does Tenbottles say?”
The harper broke the cover and pulled out the flimsy. “585.15, 575.02!” she read. “1041.07 937.20 +407.11. 870.07 253.09.”
Donovan grunted. “Well, that’s informative.”
“There’s more,” she said, gesturing to the sheet.
Donovan took it from her.
“It’s in code.” she told him.
“Really?”
“Your humor is heavy-handed. Everyone encodes Circuit messages. It saves face-time.”
“All right. What’s the basis for the code?”
“Weren’t you once a spy or something?”
Donovan shrugged. “Why pick a lock if someone will hand you the key?”
I love this, said the Sleuth. I can sink my teeth into this one.
“If you had any teeth,” Donovan told him. “I think the Brute owns those.”
The better to bite you with, said the Brute, showing a rare flash of humor.
Let me see the message, said the Pedant. I never forget anything.
The response was a chorus: “We know.”
Méarana scanned the message into her personal brain. She knew that Donovan was holding another of his internal debates and wished she could hear what the others were saying. Hearing half of a dialogue might enable one to tease out the whole thing; but hearing only two parts of a heptalogue was another matter entirely.
Hang had listed everything that Bridget ban had sent, received, or accessed during her home leave. Books, journals, correspondence, call logs… Some were local, or to and from Die Bold, and Méarana recognized many as dealing with ranch management. There was a Circuit call placed to the College of Scholars on Kàuntusulfalúghy, and a reply from the same source, but the contents had not been entered into the penátès.
“The College of Scholars,” said Donovan. “She was probably checking the bona fides of that Debly Jean Sofwari.”
“Sofwari was on her reading list, too,” Méarana said. “Here’s a story in something called the Kauntling Journal of Accumulated Facts. ‘27th Eve: a genetic reconstruction of the Old Planets.’ What does that mean?”
The scarred man shrugged. “It means Sofwari told your mother something hard to believe and she wanted to find out if he had the chops.”
“Well, yes, I suppose; but I meant what does the title of his story mean?”
“Do I look like a scholar? OK, Pedant, you know all sorts of useless facts. What does… Well, what good are you, then? Of course. The rest of us will try to bear up under your silence. Fudir, what do you think you’re…!”
Méarana looked away in embarrassment at the argument. When she had gone on her search for the scarred man, she had found more than she had bargained for.
“Donovan doesn’t know how to wheedle,” the Fudir told her. “He doesn’t politick enough. Now we’re going to be ignorant for a while until Pedant resurfaces all because Donovan buigh doesn’t know how to kiss his own ass.”
Méarana would not look at him. “Ignorant?” she said.
“Pedant has our long-term memory, or a big chunk of it, anyway. When he sulks, we forget things.”
The harper looked at him, at the ever-mobile eyes. “You should try to get along.”
“Get along? He’s me.”
“All the more reason.”
The two of them fell silent then. A certain sort of propriety had been breached. The scarred man usually tried to keep his internal chaos from breaking surface; the harper usually refrained from mentioning it. Méarana took the decoded list and pretended to read it once more.
After a while, the Fudir said, “The Pedant doesn’t know everything. He can only know what we’ve seen or heard or read. He never forgets, is all. But our memory is holographic; so it’s not like the rest of us know nothing when he’s… in his tent. Genetics is an ancient dogma. It has something to do with Predestination. We should try to get a copy of the story. The witch went out of her way to read it, so it may mean something. What else did she read during home leave?”
Méarana cleared her throat and continued to look down at the list in her hands. “Uh, gazetteers of the Spiral Arm. Communications with hotels. Maybe reserving rooms planet-side. She read a book by Mani Latapoori called Commonwealth Days: The Rise and Fall of Old Terra. You ought to like that one, Fudir. A novel by Ngozi dan Witkin titled The Greening of Hope. I remember dan Witkin from school. We had to read ancient literature, but what we read was…”
“Abandonment,” said the Fudir. “Everyone has to read that in forming school. It’s the classic novel of the Diaspora, a memoir of her grandparents. I didn’t even know she had written other books. Anything else?”
“Rimward Ho! The History of Lafrontera. And—these seem more scholarly—Compendium of Charters of the Gladiola Terraforming Institute. Monstrous Regiment: The Constitution of Boldly Go. Here’s one we ought to find locally: Customs of the’ Loon Tribes of Cliff na Mac Rebbe.”
“Ay-yi. How long was your mother at home?”
“She’s a fast reader; and if she already knew what she was looking for, she could have search-functioned these texts and been done in a blink.” Méarana unplugged her pocket memory. The Fudir nodded at the small box.
“The key to your code is in there?”
“Sure, but you’ll never find it.” She tossed it to him and he caught it one-handed. “So tell me that this has helped us find my mother.”
“The clues are somewhere in those texts.”
“You mean somewhere in the tens of thousands of screens that she read during her home leave. Yet, surely some of this—” She waved the hardcopy. “—maybe even all of this—was leisure reading. She did relax from time to time.”
“Did she? We’re not so certain of that. I don’t believe she ever did anything without purpose. She was the most intentional person I ever knew.” The scarred man consulted the clock. “Better lie down and get some rest. We’re space-lagged. Ship-time noon was four hours earlier than Preeshdad noon. I’ll wake you when it’s time to go on the prowl.”