“They’re useless anyway,” Donovan said. “The Sleuth thinks the rest of us are stupid. Inner Child is afraid of his own shadow. The Brute…What’s the use? I could give you six reasons.”
“Six. That would include Donovan.”
He shrugged. “There’s such a thing as too cold-blooded.”
“Which means you can give me six good reasons why you should stay here on Gatmander and wait for us to return.”
“I would wait forever. I can’t do it. Zorba…”
“Don’t use Uncle Zorba as an excuse! That’s the very worst thing you could have said.” She turned and swept her arm across the Dukovers’ backyard. “What do you think of their landscaping?”
“Eh?” The scarred man took on an unfocused look while he tried to decide which of him was best suited to answer. But she did not wait for him to decide.
“Gats don’t think of themselves as actors,” she said. “It’s in their very grammar. They are always acted upon. Stuff happens. They’re just spectators. So, don’t you tell me, Donovan buigh, that you are tagging along because circumstances forced you!” She looked up, saw a drape flutter in the sliding door, and Billy Chins appeared briefly to nod at her. She indicated that she had seen him and took Donovan by the arm.
“Let’s go back and finish our porch.” The scarred man snorted. “What’s the rush? It was cold when they served it.” But he followed her meekly back into the Dukover house.
He had not swallowed more than three more spoonfuls when he realized what had been done to him. He turned a gaze already growing uncertain on the harper, and his mouth tried to open and form words. “You…”
“Sleep,” she said. “I’ve paid the Dukovers to watch over you until we return. Rest. Find peace. We are commanded to love others as we love ourselves. Start with that.”
When the scarred man was snoring, Méarana turned to Billy. “Are we ready?”
Billy spared hardly a glance for his former master. “Blankets and Beads, she lose him High Gat Orbit tomorrow. Bumboat go jildy, two horae; then cargo boat early morning.”
The harper nodded and turned to Sefr Dukover, the husband. “You’ll see that our luggage gets on the cargo boat?”
“As it pertains to me, there is an occasion of compliance.”
Méarana sought the intercession of heaven. “Just once, could you say, ‘I’ll do it’?”
The Gat twisted his face into a look of disgust. “As it pertains to off-worlders, there is an occasion of tolerance; but there is no occasion for offensive speech.”
Teodorq returned to the dining room, still buckling a holster around his waist. “Cab’s here, babe.” He spared a glance for the scarred man. “I still don’t like this.”
“Who will sing Nagarajan glories, my good pahari?” asked Billy. “Lady Harp or old man? Old-fella, he be no-good sick. He for burning ghats. Not long time die in Wild.”
Nagarajan wore his sword over his shoulder and he reached back to test its draw. “Didn’t say yuh was wrong, I said I didn’t like it. It’s a bad omen to start a journey. Shoulda sacrificed a goat.”
When they went to the cab hovering on the parking apron, Teodorq held Méarana back for a moment after Billy had gotten in.
“What’d he mean ‘pahari’?”
The harper glanced at the khitmutgar, then at the Wildman. “Hill-man, I think.”
Teodorq snorted. “Shows how smart he is. I was a prairieman, born and bred.” And he reached over his shoulder and refastened the thong on his scabbard to keep the sword in place.
X. A MAN APART
The Silky Voice falls through an infinite space, though in defiance of the god Newton her rate of fall remains constant, so that she seems almost to float. From her throne high in the hypothalamus, she notes respiration, heartbeat, the rush of endorphins through the glands and ducts and bloodstream. And still she falls. There is no bottom. There is no such thing as a bottom. She may as well be falling up, or sidewise, or in upon herself.
Weariness envelops the Brute, his contant alertness grows lax, muscles loosen. He lies down on a yielding and undefined surface to rest himself.
We’ve been drugged, the Sleuth concludes.
“Brilliant,” the Fudir answers. “I never cease to marvel at the quickness of our mind.”
A child’s voice echoes through the white fog that now fills the Dukover dining room, that swallows up all the edges and all the colors: «Who did this to us! Who did this!»
Méarana swims into his view.
“You…,” croaks Inner Child, but with Donovan’s voice. No other word can express the immensity of the betrayal.
“Sleep,” the harper says, not without kindness. “I’ve paid the Dukovers to watch over you until we return. Rest. Find peace. We are commanded to love others as we love ourselves. Start with that.”
Then the eyelids drift together and the darkness takes him. Distantly, he hears another voice. “Blankets and Beads, she lose him High Gat Orbit tomorrow. Bumboat go jildy, two horae; cargo boat early morning.” After that, whatever the world has to say, it does not speak in his world.
There is fog, but not fog, for even the smoky tendrils of fog have an amorphous shape and this darkness is without shape. It is not even, strictly speaking, “darkness.” But for all that, it possesses substance. Paradox! Can there be matter without form? Can there be a geometrical figure without a geometry? Can there be a story without the words in which it is told? Every thing must be some thing before it can be understood.
And so form emerges from chaos. Substance undefined takes on the seeming of quarks. Quarks embrace and became baryons, and these join hands and became nuclei. Photons dance joyously around them and, subtly, somehow, become electrons. Atoms share electrons; molecule bonds to molecule; and so upward down the slippery slope to order. The whole beckons the parts and, by bringing them to closure, perfects them.
And so function follows form.
It is the form of Donovan that has been broken, and deliberately so. His matter remains the same. Those of Name had labored under the ancient error that the whole is grasped as the sum of its parts, and that by perfecting the parts the whole would be uplifted. But while a brick may be broken into molecules, what molecule is red and rectangular?
How much more true for a piece of work like man! When Those had with their cold deliberation cut the form of Donovan into parts, they thereby lost Donovan, much as a water molecule, split into its constituent atoms, ceases to be water.
Darkness becomes light. The shapeless fog becomes shape. But the pieces of Donovan do not become Donovan.
Instead, they find themselves arranged as once before around the the same long, dark-wood table in the same ill-defined room, with the same ten padded chairs arranged around it. The Fudir studies the six faces, so alike in their differences. “Being unconscious,” he wisecracks, “is not like it used to be.”
Donovan scowls from the other end of the table. “Are we to endure another tiresome committee meeting? Pedant, why have you brought us here?”
The more corpulent Donovan turns its massive face toward him. The gray, watery eyes appear troubled. This is not my doing.
Perhaps, the narrow-faced Sleuth suggests, it is simply memory induced by the drug.
The Fudir wonders if it might not be imagination instead of memory. That would point to Inner Child.