He shrugged. “Only a fancy of mine. The roads we know may be the only network, and all those other stars as empty as were once the ones we filled. Yet all the human stars, after all the years of settlement, I can cover with my left thumb.” He held that thumb out so that it blotted a portion of the sky. “Well,” he grudged, “maybe not all of them.” He held up his other thumb. “There, that does it.” Méarana laughed and the Fudir tapped the window with his knuckles. “All that immensity… It makes you feel how small you and I and the whole of humanity really are.”
“In all that immensity,” the harper answered, “even superclusters of galaxies are small, so I don’t see what importance smallness has. I look at it and marvel that all that immensity has produced you and me.”
The Fudir chuckled. “Seems a bit overkill. ‘The mountain labored and brought forth a mouse!’” A comment that would have been a sneer from the lips of Donovan, was gentle amusement from the Fudir.
“Why not?” said Méarana. “How many acorns lie scattered to make an oak? How many sperm are expended to make a man? Why shouldn’t it take a universe to make a world?”
The Fudir paused and stared at her. “By the gods!” He turned to face the Spiral Arm. “By the gods… I will never again look upon the night sky without seeing it as… as a mass of sperm.” Then he could contain himself no more and threw back his head and laughed.
Méarana colored and walked on ahead of him. He hurried after. “Don’t be offended.”
“You don’t take me seriously.”
“That’s not true. I…”
They had come to the portion of the perimeter opposite their entry point and the stars beyond the viewing windows had thinned. There were still more of them than she could count, but she could see that they grew sparser. And beyond that sparsity, nothing. “The Rim,” she said.
The Fudir broke off his fumbled apology and simply nodded. “Aye. Technically, the tail end of the Cygnus Arm is out there somewhere; but yes… It’s a big Spiral Arm, but it reaches an edge at last.” He gazed across the thinning carpet of light. “The closer stars are Lafrontera. They shade off into the Wild. There are human worlds out there that have never been Reconnected. When the prehumans broke up the old Commonwealth of Suns, they scattered us far and wide. But most of the worlds out there are empty, barren, never terraformed. Here…” He touched an information placard, scanned it quickly, then led her a few paces farther along, where he activated the magnification.
“Skelly Mike,” an androgynous voice announced while a highlighter circled a particular star. “A so-called ‘trailer’ at the far end of the Cygnus Arm. His orbit around the galactic core takes him beyond the Rim, almost as if he were straining to loose himself from the electromagnetic bonds that hold the galaxy together. His distance from Siggy Sun…”
Méarana stopped listening and stared at the vista in silence. “You think she went out there, don’t you? Not to Skelly Mike, I mean. Into the Wild.”
The Fudir shifted uncomfortably. “If you follow her path, when she left here, she looped through Boldly Go, Sumday, and Wiedermeier’s Chit and circled back to here. If you extrapolate that trajectory, it continues through to Alabaster and then, who knows? Ramage, Valency, or one of the other stars in the SoHi district…”
Méarana shook her head. “She’s not an inanimate object. She doesn’t have a ‘trajectory.’ You think she went out there.”
The Fudir sighed. “Yes, I think she went out there. The apparent back-tracking was to throw others off the scent. She could have done that by planting time-delayed drones.”
Méarana would not look at him. “We’ll never find her, will we? All those stars… We’ll never, ever know what happened to her.”
The Fudir did not answer for a while. What a god-awful haystack, he thought, in which to lose a single needle. Ah, Bridget ban. Franane.
She must have been beautiful said the Silky Voice, not unkindly.
No, not beautiful; not in any conventional sense. But she had an inner light.
“And you were a moth to her flame,” whispered Donovan. What happened to the “witch” whose spell you “barely escaped”?
The Fudir made no answer. Turning to Méarana, he said, “No. I don’t think we ever will. I never did.”
Hot tears flowed down the harper’s face. She struck the Fudir repeatedly on the chest with both fists. “Then why, why, why did you come on this useless expedition?”
He took her by the wrists and stilled her punches; and she pressed herself against him and wept. “Maybe,” he said, “I was looking for something else.”
That night, Méarana sat at the desk in her bedroom reading Customs of the’ Loon Tribes of Cliff na Mac Rebbe hoping to find in its turgid pages some hint of why her mother had read it. But so far its only effect was to induce periodic slumber. The author’s primary conclusion seemed to be that’ Loon customs were unlike any elsewhere in the Periphery; but surely that could be said of the customs of most any people. She sighed, pinched the bridge of her nose, and closed the screen.
The room darkned with the screen. What did it matter, anyway? She had broken poor Donovan’s health, and all for what? What sort of Hell was it when love was alive and hope was dead? Maybe that was what Hell was: the graveyard of hope.
But the quest had not been entirely in vain! They had discovered some things that the Kennel had overlooked: That Mother had met Sofwari on Thistlewaite; that Sofwari had told her something that sent her back to Dangchao to spend most of two weeks behind the doors of her study. They had learned that she was searching for the source of the medallion, and that she had traveled as Lady Melisonde. All told, that was not much; but it was not nothing.
Greystroke and Hugh knew of these things now, and perhaps now the Kennel would resume the search—and have better luck in it than she could hope to have.
Perhaps it was time to think of herself. That was all Mother ever thought of.
It is the nature of man to be selfish, Mother had said. (And Méarana remembered a much younger self sitting by Bridget ban’s knee before a great fierce fire in Clanthompson Hall, while certain wounds of her mother healed.) It is a weakness passed down from our uttermost ancestors, the original sin from which all others arise. It emanates from the ancient brain stem and spreads by electrical synapses to the cortex, establishing by repetition its debilitating pattern.
The more these patterns of self-indulgence dominate, her mother had cautioned her, the less your capacity for reason. The brain stem is not in the final analysis a thoughtful companion.
But her mother rejected predestination. Whether the curse is carried in the genes, as the Calvinist prophet Dawkins had claimed, or whether it involves apples and serpents, as still older allegories run, a man can school his soul to a “second nature” and so overcome the curse. By diligent exercise, he can establish habits of thought that temper or block these signals with neural patterns of their own. With prudence, justice, moderation. And courage.
And Bridget ban had displayed to her awestuck daughter images from the emorái machine of her very souclass="underline" the sparking footprints of thought running through her mind.
There were too few such moments in her memory, though each one burned there with a certain intensity, as if like diamonds they compensated with their brilliance for their rarity. She had found herself when young wishing that her mother would be hurt again, forced thereby to convalesce at home. A minor wound—a child is none too clear on such matters—one that did not truly hurt. Had that not been a kind of selfishness?