Fifty metric minutes passed before Billy returned, and Donovan had begun to wonder at his absence. When he reappeared, he clutched a message packet in his hand.
“This come for sahb!” he said in a voice as shaky as the hand.
Donovan took the packet and saw that it was addressed only to “the man with the scars upon his head.” And who in the Spiral Arm knew that such a man was aboard Gerthru van Ij?bwode? He grabbed Billy by the blouse. “Where did you get this?” Inner Child gibbered: «The courier! On board!»
“Please, sahb! Message, he find me at concierge. Signal-man not savvy ‘the man with scars’; but he knew you wear him, the skullcap. I say, too, Where you get this? Sahb! He come in upsquirt from Nee Stoggome during the fly-by. How this man send him know you here?”
Donovan studied the packet seal more closely. An external receipt stamp from the signal room. Place of origin, Dancing Vrouw, forwarded via the Circuit, confidential. That meant that the message had been decrypted automatically from a standard “blindside” commercial code. Anxiety drained suddenly from him. He clapped Billy on the shoulder. “Simple, boy! He sent the same message to every ship that left Dancing Vrouw. Place a bet on every number and you win every time!” The scarred man broke the seal and extracted the slip.
DONOVAN, the slip read, TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND IN GLADIOLA BILLS OF EXCHANGE TO YOUR ACCOUNT AT JEHOVAH’S TRUST WHEN YOU ABANDON YOUR USELESS SEARCH.
It was not signed, of course. Its mere existence was signature enough.
“What message say, sahb?”
Donovan shook his head. “It says, ‘Don’t throw me in the briar patch, Bre’er Fox.’” He smiled at Billy and crumpled the message in his fist. “Someone wants to pay me to do something I’ve been aching to do.”
“What was that?” asked Méarana, who had emerged from her room, eyes raw and face red and puffy. She held the harp against her chest like a shield.
Donovan tossed the crumpled message and it arced gracefully into the flash hole, where it flared into ash. “An offer to buy a double-gross of your medallions.”
The harper cocked her head and plucked a few random notes. She said, “A generous offer?”
Donovan nodded. “Very.”
“Then, I suppose, we had better find some.”
Donovan sighed, and closed his eyes, and…
… and the table is dark wood, longer than it is wide, and no less well-wrought for being imaginary. The room it centers is vague and shades off into shadows in which flare dim lamps that cast no pools of illumination and whose muted reflections glimmer in the table’s polished surface. Ten padded, high-backed chairs ring the table and before each lies a pad of smart paper and a light-pen.
Seven of the seats are occupied, each by a version of himself.
Donovan looks around the circle. “Whose idea was this?”
Pedant’s, says the Sleuth. The Sleuth is a whippet of a man, so lean that he seems taller than his companions. Sharp eyes flank a thin, hawk-like nose and confer an aspect of alertness, as his prominent, squarish chin bestows determination.
“I’ve always wondered what you looked like,” says Donovan.
Irony becomes you, the Sleuth responds. Would you like me to describe your self?
“What need? We are identical septuplets, are we not? Only the seemings differ.”
Then, the seeming is what matters. Recall that a man shares all but a fraction of his genes with the chimpanzee. But this does not show how alike are man and chimp, but how little genes matter in things that matter.
Donovan thinks he would have recognized Pedant even without his ponderous pronouncements. His body appears somehow corpulent; his face massive, like a man who has lately enjoyed a very large dinner. His gray, watery eyes give him a dreamy, introspective countenance. He rumbles with laughter. Aristotle compared the act of knowing to the act of eating. In either case, you take something in, and you make it a part of yourself.
It is the sort of irritating “factlet” that Pedant emits like particles from a lump of radium—allieviated only by his periodic sulks, as if he withdrew into a private club where the members never speak to one another.
Donovan’s inner eye flickers from one persona to another. “So, what’s the agenda, and why the elaborate visualization?” He looks to the Fudir, who usually has control of the visual cortex, but the scrambler sits at the far end of the table, his expression masked by distance.
“Will you take the bribe?” the Fudir asks.
“Two hundred kilobills?” Donovan laughs. “Why not?”
To his right, farther down the table, the Brute rumbles. That version of Donovan seems as large as the Pedant, but harder, more solid, yet at the same time lithe and athletic. The hardness extends even to the eyes. We shouldn’t run out on her, he says. Can we be bought for so little?
“It’s not that little. It’s enough to keep Fudir drunk for as long as he likes.”
The Fudir shakes his head. “You’re the one who needs to numb the fear with spirits.”
“Or is it,” says Donovan, “to numb the spirits.”
“A nice play. But, which spirits?”
“The spirits of the past who haunt your present.”
“Bastard.”
“And it’s less that we abandon her, Brute, but that she abandons her.”
Méarana will never abandon her mother. Beside the Brute sits a veiled figure who speaks with a silky and seductive voice.
“Do you think so? She’s on the edge of retribution even now. The smallest push…”
Retribution? For what?
“How often has Bridget ban abandoned the harper? Why not return the favor just this once?”
Is morality transitive, then? Does her abandonment justify ours?
Bridget ban was sent on assignments, says the Sleuth. That’s not abandonment.
“A touching faith in logic, Sleuth. But it’s not what something is that matters, it’s what that something seems. I never said she intended to abandon the quest. I said she felt entitled to do so.”
The Fudir speaks from the far end of the table. “How would you know how she feels, Donovan? You’d need feelings of your own to recognize them in others.”
Donovan cocks his head. “Perhaps you ought to ask Pedant to purge those memories. The ghosts seem to bother you.”
“Not his memories to purge. What of your ghosts? You’re the one Those tortured. I slept through the whole thing. Small wonder you run in fear.”
A smaller version of Donovan, one with large, wide eyes and prominent ears, slips from his chair and scampers about the perimeter of the room. From the ill-defined darkness come the sound of door latches jiggling, of bolts shutting home. «The courier hasn’t caught up yet; but we should bar the doors.»