Despite his knife and his menace and his banty-cock threat, her heart went out to him. Did not everyone deserve something sacred?
She had agreed to meet Donovan at the Café Gwiyom, and there Méarana discovered the scarred man already worrying two fingers of uiscebaugh. He was not drunk, but he was immersed in that morose frame of mind that soured his every word. Drunks at least were sometimes cheerful. Méarana hesitated at the threshold, for she had not seen him in such a state since leaving Jehovah.
She considered the possibility of going on without him. If she left him here, he would barely notice. He would sink into the Terran demimonde and into the prison of his past. But she had invested too much effort in the finding of him and could not bring herself to forgo the return on that investment. And if the Fudir had the prison of his past, did she not have the prison of her future? Growing up, she had learned the art of patience.
She had forgotten that the scarred man was a man of parts, and one part, keeping vigil through his right eye, saw her standing irresolute in the entry, and his arm waved her inside. So she gathered herself, her thoughts, and her excitement and hurried to the table.
It was a bright and open café, unlike the Bar on Jehovah: spacious where the Bar was dense, well-lit where the Bar was dark, its clientele careless where the Bar’s were more carefree. And yet the scarred man had contrived, like a tea ball steeping in hot water, to lend the facility some of the hue of his former estate.
As always, the table he had chosen nestled near the rear wall of the café with himself facing the room. Never sit with you back to the room, he had told her once. You have to see them coming. Fine advice, she had thought, from one already occupying the recommended seat. And to “see them coming” didn’t you have to lift your gaze from the fascination of the whiskey?
She took the siege perilous opposite him, with her back defiantly to the room, and placed the package on the table. The scarred man did not lift his head, but she thought those restless eyes of his sought it out and found the name to which it had been addressed, for the grip of his hand on the tumbler tightened and his knuckles grew white.
“It’s been waiting for her at Côndefer Park for two years metric,” she told him. “It was all I could do on the air bus to keep from ripping it open; but… You know what it means? Whoever left the package would have notified her through the Circuit and… If we simply wait at the Park, eventually she will come to pick it up, or send a message to forward it…”
“We’d wait as long as the Cones, and the birds of the air would make their nests in our beards. And,” this he said more forcefully, “if she hasn’t come for it in two years, you will, sooner or later, have to face what that really means.”
“It could be that she changed her itinerary and the message went to the wrong world; or it reached her hotel after she had left and the hotel didn’t know where to forward it. Or she went to a world outside the Circuit. Or…”
The scarred man looked up from the table. “Or she’s dead! Whatever she had been looking for, she found it. Or it found her.”
Méarana stuck her chin out. “Or the package meant less to her than it did to its sender.”
“You think she left it behind on purpose?”
The harper hesitated, then looked away. “She leaves a great many things behind.”
They fell silent, each with their own thoughts, and one with a multitude of them. “No one I spoke with knew anything about the medallion,” she said finally. “Of course, this is a town with a high turnover, save for the’ Loons and the Terrans, and jawharries have come and gone since she passed through.”
“Moosers,” said the scarred man, staring into his whiskey. “They call us moosers here.”
“I thought it was ‘coffers.’”
“Everyone is a coffer—or a gull, they use the two terms interchangeably—but they have a special term just for Terrans. Because their holy books say we once abandoned them. A mooser is ‘one who submits.’ Submits to whom, and how that constitutes abandonment, no one will say.”
“Their holy books…”
“…are forbidden to others to read. The Birakid Shee’us Nakopthayiní and the Asejáhn Robábinah.”
“The first one sounds almost like Gaelactic. The ‘specklings down of the headmen.’”
“That’s what most headmen do. Speckle down on the rest of us.”
“The burial chamber of the king, out in the Cones, is called the gáván gofthayin. Sounds like it might be related.”
“‘Loonie headmen. Kopthayini. Gofthayin. Capitàn. Who cares? Shaddap, Pedant.” The Fudir gripped his head in both hands. “All these years, he’s silent. Now he won’t be quiet. Jabber, jabber, jabber. Yes, you!”
If Méarana understood the linguistic shifts that had taken place, then gáván must have once been kábán, meaning a “hut.” So, the burial chamber of the king was the “hut of the headman.” But when she mentioned this pleasant deduction to the Fudir, he shook his head.
“Please, missy. This ples nogut by Terries. Very budmash. We go from here jildy.” Then, dropping the patois, he added, “But I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on a copy of their sacred books. Find out what drives these’ Loons crazy against my people.”
“And yet they produce decent harpers,” said the harper. “The’ Loons do. And they’ve learned the Auld Stuff. The aislings and the airs. I’ve heard them when I’ve gone by’ Loontown. No geantraí, though. I’ve heard no geantraí.” She glanced at the placard above the servers bar—the harp and crescent moon—and wondered what it meant. “Have you ever seen the Cones?” she asked. “There was something in their appearance against the western sky, something ancient and forlorn.”
“They were the ships of exile. Did you expect joy?”
“Donovan, I think… Look.” She flipped open her comm into a holostage and showed him the image she had captured in the late afternoon sun. “Look at the Cones. Awesome enough to think they were tombs. But if they really were landers… Look at the hills. They have that same conical shape. Maybe…”
Donovan tore his gaze from the image. “What?”
“Maybe an entire fleet once set down there. And still rests there. I think the shrogo covered them in soil, and chance has disrobed only the southernmost three. There may be hundreds more of them buried out there.”
But Donovan had no eye for the hills. He brushed a tear and took the imager from her. The Cones floated above the table, as if lifting off. “Ah, will you look at that, then.”
“What? The bird?”
“No, on the bulkhead above the bird’s nest.” He upped the zoom. “Do you see it? That is the Great Burst of the old Commonwealth of Suns. Tsol in the center and the Seven Colonies around it. Of course there were more than seven before the end. There may have been seven hundred. Ah, those were storybook times, indeed, when even their wreckage is magnificent.”
“Magnificent? It’s all burnt and rotted and corroded, but… If the’ Loonies’ ancestors came in those ships, then they are Terrans, too.”
“We all are. But what does ancestry matter if you don’t remember—and persecute those who do?” Donovan’s eyes closed and his lips moved silently. “Hundreds, you think? Well, you can’t be the first to notice the resemblance, but no one is ever going to dig there until the movers and the moosers cut the throat of the last’ Loon. Sometimes, I think ‘Saken had the right idea.”