The man leans back into the alcove and laughter emerges from shadows even as he recedes into them. “You don’t get answers this soon in a tale, even if you had the question right.”
“This is an intermezzo then,” she says, “a bridge.” She plays an aimless conjunction of music, a strain that summarizes what has gone before and promises newer tropes to come after.
“If you wish,” the scarred man says. “But there is a notion that nothing ever happens on a bridge, and that is wrong. People jump off them.”
The harper places her instrument once more upon the table and the silence, now that her fingers have ceased their continuo, is louder than her music had been. “Now you mock,” she says. “Word games. Do you mean that O’Carroll trusted the Fudir too much?”
“Or that he trusted him too little. That’s a delicate point, don’t you think? But—and maybe you haven’t noticed this, either—the Fudir had to trust O’Carroll, too. Up to a point. The question is, was it to the same point? But, come, drink!” He raises his uisce bowl on high. “Drink to the quest!”
The harper disagrees. “The quest itself means nothing. The heart of the matter is Jason—and Medea—not the Fleece. The Argonauts could have sought anything, and their fates would have been the same.”
The scarred man strikes the tabletop with the flat of his hand, and the bowls and the tableware—and a few nearby drinkers—jump a little. “No! What you seek determines how you fail. Had Jason sought a Tin Whistle or an Aluminum Coffeepot instead of a Golden Fleece, the failure would have run quite differently.”
“More melodiously in the first case,” the harper allows, “and with greater alertness in the second. But, must it always end in failure?”
“Always.”
“Your cynicism extracts a price. You can never know the thing in itself, because you always look past it for a hidden reality. I would think all failures alike. Coffeepot or Golden Fleece, failure means you haven’t obtained what you sought.”
“No,” the scarred man answers mockingly. “Each failure is inevitably, enormously different from all the others. Each man who seeks does so for a different reason, and so can fail in a different way. Hercules failed in the quest for the Fleece; but his failure was of a different sort than Jason’s.”
“Jason secured the Fleece,” the harper points out.
“That was his failure.”
Goltraí: Ships Passing in the Light
Many an interchange carries more traffic than Jehovah Roads, the scarred man says…
…but none is ever quite so busy.
Here, ships may shift from the Champs Elysées to the Yellow Brick, from the Silk Road to the Grand Trunk, and to and from several lesser roads beside. They slide in from Alabaster and far-off Gatmander, from Agadar and Hawthorn Rose, from Peacock Junction and New Chennai, from Megranome and Valency, from Abyalon and Die Bold and Old ’Saken. Here grand liners mingle with humble freighters, with peacekeepers and survey ships and pirates, with commercial carriers, and tourist cruisers and private yachts, with savvy Chettinad merchants from the Lesser Hanse.
All this riot of voyagers—high and low, desperate and indifferent, jaded and eager and matter-of-fact—is tossed and juggled by the magbeam “light houses” spotted about the Jehovan system. Drawing their power off the sun, off the wind, off the two superjovians spinning like dynamos in the outer system, and even off the electric currents of the roads themselves, they push outbound ships toward their portals, cushion those emerging, and coordinate the arrivals, departures, and transits in an intricately choreographed opera of words and deeds.
If the League lives anywhere other than in the secret devotions of her Hounds, it is in this bustling interchange.
New Angeles leaped into this kaleidoscope, burning off HOJO just behind a Hadley liner plying the inner circuit and just ahead of a Gladiola terraforming ark outward bound for the Rim. At cutoff, when the legendary god Shree Newton would otherwise have seized New Angeles and whirled her ’round in endless ellipses, HOJO Platform Number Two shook hands with the onboard target array and its beams accelerated the ship steadily toward the coopers.
Old spacehands call this traverse of Newtonian space “the crawl,” and it generally consumes more time than slipstreaming from star to star. It is a slow lazy interval, for most of the grunt work happens portside and most of the skull sweat on the ramp. The crawl passes in boredom and the troubles consequent thereto.
Portside, there is cargo to load, and although the stevedores handle most of that, the ship still wants a deckhand for the orbital transfer, and no damned outsider is going to settle the stowage on a captain’s ship. Little Hugh O’Carroll learned that, in practice, this meant that Maggie told engineering the balance along each axis, Hogan then told Malone to rectify that balance accordingly, and Malone told “Ringbao” to shift containers within the cargo hold. This struck Hugh as rather more chieftains than clansmen, but he had put up with more tedious labors during the Troubles, and so he did the work willingly, if not happily.
Mahmoud Malone, his immediate boss, had been born on Gehpari and proved not a bad sort when there was no work to pass along. In unguarded moments he would revert to a Gehparisian accent, in which stresses showed up tardy and final vowels arose like resurrected saints. He was a man of great depth but of limited breadth, so that while he knew very little, he knew a great deal about it. Women, distilled spirits, distilled spirits applied to women, the laws of probability applied to games of chance, and the mulishness of alfven engines could spark endless conversations. Outside this range, his interests dropped off in inverse squares. The easiest way to shut him up was to change the subject.
“I hand it to yew, Ringbao,” Malone had said, once New Angeles had settled on the hyperbolic trajectory to Electric Avenue, “you air certainly a better workair than that Mgurk. We made the trim of the vessel say bone.” He made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, pressed it to his lips, kissing it. Hugh did not tell him that on several worlds of his acquaintance the circle of thumb and forefinger signified an asshole.
Of course, “we” meant that Malone had given orders and watched while Hugh sweated cargo containers into place with hand truck, crane, and old-fashioned block-and-tackle—by the end of which Hugh had gained a certain sympathy for the storied Johnny Mgurk.
“Good,” he answered. “Then we can relax until we reach New Eireann,” with just the lightest ironic emphasis on the “we.”
Malone’s shrug was eloquent. Who knew what tasks might await the unwary deckhand in his idle moments?
The deck went on watch-in-four, and the Fudir found himself assigned the third watch, sandwiched between Maggie B. and Bill Tirasi. For the first several rotations, Maggie motherhenned the deck after being relieved, and Bill strolled on early, so that Kalim’s shoulder was never entirely unlooked over. He signed the log and the responsibilities were his, but the other officers were not yet comfortable with him.