Hugh dropped the envelope into the drawer and shoved it shut. “So.” He folded his arms and stretched his legs out, and this was sufficient to nearly touch the door. “Tell me how this Twister will help me reestablish the legitimate government in the Vale.”
“You want reassurance? You’ve been willing enough to come this far without it.”
The younger man managed to shrug without changing his posture. “Let me see…Assassin in the alleyway. Check. Terran criminal gang. Check. Lost in a tangled warren of hallways and tunnels. Check. Committee of Seven, with power of life and death. Check. Up to now, Fudir, I don’t see where my being willing has mattered very much.”
The Fudir closed his eyes. “If you don’t want to go back, you can stay here. I thought I was doing you a favor.”
“Fudir,” said Little Hugh, “if I thought you were doing me a favor, I’d be out that door.”
The Terran opened his eyes and looked slantwise at the other. “Aren’t you too young to be so cynical?”
“You’re using me to get off-planet. That’s fine. You’re probably only a step or two ahead of the rectors—”
“Five steps. What am I, an amateur?”
“—so I can see what’s in it for you. Me, I vowed to return to the Vale, so I’ve got it to do. But I’d like to know if that will mean anything more than another hopeless go-round with Jumdar. Set me down in the Southern Vale and I’ll have the guerilla up and running in a metric week—and Jumdar’s spy satellites and air-cav will shut it down in another. I’m as willing as the next man to make a heroic but doomed gesture—the New Eireann influence, I suppose—but you promised me something a cut above hopeless.”
“Fair enough,” the Fudir said. “Have you ever heard the story of the Wish of the Twisting Stone?”
“No. A bedtime story? Really?”
“They tell it on Old ’Saken and a slightly different version on Friesing’s World, and other variants circulate on Die Bold and Abyalon. All in and around the Old Planets, you see. Once…”
“…upon a time…”
“…there was a prehuman king whose scientists presented him with the Twisting Stone, saying it would grant him one wish. ‘Cutting to the chase,’ as we Terrans say, the king brandished it like a scepter and said that he wished only to be obeyed.”
“Isn’t it supposed to be three wishes?” Little Hugh suggested.
The Fudir propped himself up on his elbows. “Once the wish for obedience is fulfilled, what other wish can matter? In most versions, two prehuman kings struggle to possess it. ‘Stonewall,’ ‘Hillside,’ ‘Cliff’…The names of the kings vary from one world to another, so maybe there were more than two; but that doesn’t matter. Whichever finally gains possession finds himself obeyed without question. So if we gain you the possession of it…”
“I’ll find myself obeyed on New Eireann. Charming. You know what I think?”
The Fudir hesitated. “What?”
“That prehuman fathers chastised their children by hitting them with bricks, and that’s how the story of a stone conferring the power of obedience got started.”
The Fudir lay back down again. “Maybe it’s the wildest of fables. But isn’t it worth a two-week trip to find out? Did you have something better to do with your time?”
“How do you know what January found was this Twisting Stone?”
“In the stories, the stone is never the same shape twice. January said that the artifact he found changed its shape imperceptibly, like a very slow dance.”
“I’d think that a folk that could make stones twist could also make them dance without them being the same stone.”
“And as long as he had it, his crew followed his instructions. When he gave it away, they reverted to their normal squabbling.”
O’Carroll snorted. “You mean the crew we’re shipping out with? Wonderful. Why’d he give it away, then?”
“Because he didn’t know what he had. He thought the crew had finally pulled together because of the common danger they had faced on the world of the Vault, and they’ve now fallen back into old habits. He doesn’t connect it with having the stone and not having it. And you won’t tell him any different.”
“Oh, believe me, I wouldn’t dream of telling him anything like that. Who has it now?”
“Jumdar. She promised January that the ICC would auction it off and January would get a percentage of the profit.”
“Ah! So, Jumdar possess sigil of absolute obedience, and you and I go overthrow her. Everything now clear…”
“Don’t give me that Venishànghai crap. She doesn’t know, either. Or at least we hope she hasn’t learned in the meantime. She and January both think it’s an art object, potentially valuable because it’s prehuman; but that’s all. Any further questions?”
“No, a quixotic quest for a magic token seems about the right way to end the day. One thing does occur to me, though.”
The Fudir raised an eyebrow to the question. “What’s that?”
“If this gadget, or whatever it is, gives its owner such power, then why are you helping to gain it for me?”
The Fudir snorted. “There go your assumptions outracing your conclusions again. Not everyone yearns for power. Some of us yearn for justice. You were ill-used; and the ICC are crooks. That’s enough for me. Come on, there’s room on this bed for two even without intimacy.”
“No thanks,” O’Carroll said. “Harder beds than this floor greeted my back when I was on the run.”
“Have it your way,” the Fudir said, turning his face to the wall. “Just remember you’ll be stowing cargo most of the morning, starting at oh three hundred.”
An Craic
“A stone scepter that compels obedience to its holder?” The harper allows incredulity to speak for her.
“So the Fudir thought at the time. A flimsy notion built from half-believed myths. He might not have crossed the Spiral Arm to check it out; but New Eireann wasn’t that far from Jehovah, so what the hell? If he was wrong, what was lost but a little time?”
“Another short, hopeless civil war among the Eireannaughta?” the harper guesses at other losses. She leans forward over the table and adds in a harder voice than she has used up to then: “But what matter is that if absolute obedience might be won?”
“Don’t be a fool, harper. Little Hugh was going back to the Vale. Nothing could have stopped him short of death. He had promised on his father’s name. So the only real question was when he would return, and how.”
“That’s two questions.”
“No, because the when dictates the how. Had the Dancer been a myth, it would have made no difference to what happened. But if it were true after all, there needn’t be blood at all.”
“No. Only blind obedience. I’d rather see the blood.”
“Yes, so long as it’s someone else’s.”
The shot tells. The harper falls silent and her fingers touch idly the frame of her clairseach. Ideals in the abstract may be held abstractly, but the devil is always in the details.
“None of which,” the harper says at last, “tells us why the Fudir decided to help Hugh.”