“If you need to tell the ICC anything, you could go straight to Old ’Saken. It’s closer to Cynthia.”
The lag time had begun to increase again as the Cynthians accelerated toward the entrance to the Silk Road.
“Ha ha,” said the Molnar with apparent delight. “That’s a good one. Wait’ll I tell my wives. Old ’Saken, she’s like a lion’s den. Lotsa tracks go in; not many come out. You don’t beard a lion in his HQ, Fido. All we want is the ICC should leave free men be.”
“Free men!” said Fir Li. “Free to pillage! While across the Rift the Confederacy waits to scoop us all up. To travel so far…What profit in that?”
The Molnar’s reply this time came through grim lips. “Hear me, Fido. A man pleasures only in battle. Everything else…” He spit to the side. “Money? Love? Power? The stars care nothing; and death ends all. I live. I eat. I have women and boys. I kill. ‘The bright madness of battle,’ say the holy books. You know how th’ world works, Fido. ‘The strong take what they can; the weak suffer what they must.’ I do it better, me. I live, make sons. The weaklings, their seed is lost. You fear the ’Feds, you? Then be happy some men here know how to fight!”
“And…he’s gone,” Traffic Control announced. The pirate fleet had vanished down the Silk Road.
“I live,” said Fire Control. “I eat, I fart, I stink.”
“I have women and boys,” said Comm, “and sheep and small mammals!”
Fir Li said nothing amid the laughter, for the lawlessness endemic to the Periphery was no laughing matter. Would that the Ardry smite them as they deserve… But it took too long for the Ardry to learn of matters remote from High Tara; too long for the response to follow. In practice, the will of the Ardry and the Grand Seanaid extended no more than a week’s streaming from High Tara. And wherever his Hounds might find themselves. Each planet or planetary combine kept the peace locally as best they could. And some of them were the worst offenders.
“What was that ‘Twister’ he mentioned?” Greystroke asked. “If the ICC has come up with some new weapons system, the Ardry ought to know of it. Whatever it is, this Molnar is willing to take an entire flotilla on a long trek to grab it.”
Fir Li looked over his right shoulder, at where the Rift spread across the ceiling. “It’s a distraction from our duty. Send a swifty to High Tara and pass this Twister rumor on to the Little One. Let the Master of Hounds decide.”
“Aye, Cu,” Greystroke said and turned to the supervisor of Auxiliary Vessels and Drones; but Fir Li held him back with a word.
“Pup,” he said. “Hear me. No effort is the greatest effort. You stumble because you try too hard not to stumble.”
An Craic
“A lonely duty,” the harper says and her fingers evoke the loneliness of the Rift, empty, echoing chords that seem to sound from very far away. The scarred man watches her play for a while, then he tosses off the remainder of his drink in one long swallow. His face screws up and his fists clench.
“There’s no pleasure in that draught.”
“Then why drink such slops?”
“Because there’s less pleasure in not drinking it. You need a different mode for that. Something mad. Something off-key.”
The harper introduces a dissonance into the vacancy of the Rift and proceeds in diminished sevenths, inverted. “You think na Fir Li mad?” The strings laugh, but the laughter is a little off.
“Don’t you? He believes in something that doesn’t exist.”
“The threat from the CCW.”
“No, the ULP.”
“Ah. The gap between theory and practice. He’s obsessed, not mad. There’s a difference. It’s the man who cares for nothing who may be mad. The root meaning of ‘care’ is to cry out, to scream; and what sane man is careless?”
The scarred man grunts without humor. “You caught the irony, of course. On the one hand, Fir Li regretted the Molnar’s power to pillage; but on the other, he wished his Ardry had the power to crush him. What is the difference between a pirate chief and a king but the number and quality of the ships at his command?”
“The pirate butchers; the king milks. On the whole, I’d rather be milked. Fir Li knew the difference.”
The scarred man runs a hand through the remnants of his hair. “I hate Fir Li. We hate the very thought of him. He thinks too much.”
“Normally,” the harper answers, “thinking would be accounted a good thing.”
“No, we mean his paraperception, his multitasking, or however your milk-tongue puts it. For a man so single-minded, he’s had too many minds.”
“I don’t know how the encoding works for parallel perception, but…”
“You don’t want to know. Beside, Fir Li doesn’t matter. He wasn’t a player, except on the edges. A fit role for a man on the edge of the sky, and perhaps on the edge of his own sanity. Although being of more than one mind, he might be edgier than most.”
“Who was the player then…? Ah. Greystroke.”
“Yes, the man no one sees. He could be sitting here at this table with us, and you’d not mark him, so well does he blend in.”
The harper laughs. “Surely, an exaggeration!”
The scarred man smiles, and his smiles are not pleasant. “Surely. An exaggeration. But what sort of music would you play to limn a man like that? Music wants to be heard, to call attention to itself, and that is the very opposite of the Grey One.
“I can hide a melody in the chords. It’s not always the top notes that sing, you know.”
“The trick,” the scarred man says, as if to himself, “is for all the notes to sing in concert.”
“January, Little Hugh, and now Greystroke. We’re for Jehovah now?”
The shrunken head dips, the smile turns bitter. “For now. There are a few others who aren’t in it yet. But we have enough to start with.”
Geantraí: Bread and Salt
It began on Jehovah, the scarred man says…
…because this is the place where everything begins or where everything ends, and we are not yet at the end.
The Bar of Jehovah hums like a bagpipe. All those private conversations blend together and couple with some curious resonances due to the architecture of the room. There is a permanence to this sound. Like those eddies that form in flowing water, it persists independently of the men and women who flow in and flow out. It is said that there are conversations still going on, long after their originators have passed away. The hum seldom changes in pitch, though it will rise and fall in volume and even, by random chance, drop into momentary silences.
The Bar is a place where the dispossessed take possession. The skyfaring folk—freighters and liners and survey ships and military vessels—come and go, but there is a substrate beneath these transients, a more permanent population for whom the Bar is less a refuge than a home. Here, old grudges are endlessly rehashed and new plans continually laid. Here, the past is always remembered and the future never comes.