The Fudir, he thought he had plumbed, but the doubts were always there, beneath the surface, for the Fudir was a doubtful man. The Terran seemed genuinely pleased that Hugh was aboard; but did the pleasure grow from friendship, or from something else? It was hard to tell. With him, there might be no difference between the friendship and the something else.
But Olafsson was another matter. He was the anti-Fudir, as displeased with Hugh’s presence as the Fudir was pleased; as remote as the Fudir was companionable; as simple as the Fudir was complex. And where the Fudir was a petty criminal, with all the scrambler’s swagger and carefree independence, Olafsson was a lawman, single-minded in his duty, humorless in its execution.
There was some game about between Olafsson and the Fudir. Hugh caught enough snatches of conversation to know that the Pup was interested in a man named Donovan, perhaps the man at whose trial the Fudir was to testify. But the Fudir contrived always to have Hugh about when Olafsson was present. This made the one reluctant to ask, gave the other an excuse not to answer, and produced no little unease in the heart of the third.
The Pup conducted a fine simulation of hospitality, and was so unobtrusive that half the time Hugh hardly knew he was about. Yet, he had shown himself on Eireannsport Hard capable of sudden and violent action. That made more sense than Hugh liked. As the Ghost of Ardow, who knew better how deadly the unnoticed man could be? Therefore, Hugh slept but lightly as the ship crawled toward the Grand Trunk Road. The airlock was uncomfortably close by, and the solution to “three’s-a-crowd” stunningly obvious to anyone sufficiently ruthless.
It was not until two days out of New Eireann that Hugh and the Fudir found themselves for the first time alone. They were in the refectory breaking fast when Olafsson was called to the saddle to deal with the entry onto the Grand Trunk Road. The Fudir had programmed the kuchenart to produce a vile Terran sauté of rice, potatoes, onions, green chilies, mustard, curry, and peanuts whose pungent odor the air filters struggled to overcome.
Hugh began to say something about the Dancer, but the Fudir cut him off with a sign. He fingered his ear and rolled his eyes toward the pilot’s room. Hugh nodded and brushed his lips.
Sighing, he rose from the table and went to the sideboard to brew more tea. The Fudir seemed disinclined to discuss either the Dancer or their current predicament, at least while Olafsson might be listening—and Olafsson might be listening at any time. “Did I ever tell you,” he said, “that for my first seven years I didn’t have a name?”
The Fudir grunted and looked up from his breakfast. “And now you have too many of them.”
Hugh took that as a sign of interest. “I was what they called a vermbino. I ran the streets with a gang of other boys, stealing food or clothing, dodging the pleetsya and the feggins, searching out bolt-holes where we could sleep or hide. The shopkeepers had guns, and we were nothing to them. Worm-boys. Now and then, they’d form…hunting parties. Oh, it was great fun dodging them, and the prize for winning was that you got to live and do it again the next day. That’s why Handsome Jack could never find the Ghost. Not when being found has been a death sentence almost from birth. I grew pretty good at it. Not all of us did.”
The Fudir shoveled a spoonful of the masala dosa into his mouth. “Did you ever know your parents?” he asked around the potatoes and onions.
“Fudir, I didn’t even know I had parents. I didn’t know what parents were. Then, one day—there were only three of us left by then in my…my pod—I tried to rob a man in the market along the Grand Canal. He was a lean man and carried a purse that he wore on a belt around his robe. So, I ran past him, slicing the belt on the fly, and grabbing the purse as it dropped. I was halfway to the alley when he called after me. He said…”
Hugh paused over the memory.
“He said, ‘Wait, you did not get it all.’ I turned and stared and he was stooped in the street, gathering some ducats that had spilled from his purse and was holding them out to me. Well, as I learned to say later, ‘time was of the essence.’ There were several people on their handies calling the pleetsya, and two others who had pulled knives of their own, though whether to restore the money to its owner or take it for themselves, I don’t know.”
“The nature of every animal,” the Fudir said, “is to seek its own interest; and if anyone or anything—be it mother or brother, lover or god—becomes an impediment, we will throw it down, topple its statues, and burn its temples. I don’t understand the man with the purse; but I understand the men with the knives. It was a mistake to stop and turn. You lost lead time.”
“Yes.” Hugh dropped into silence and studied his past as if from the outside, trying to recognize the vermbino as himself. He seemed to float in memory above the scene on the Via Boadai, looking down on everything: the men with knives, the passersby frozen in anticipation, the robe with his hand outstretched, most of all the vermbino poised in flight. “I don’t know why,” he said. “To this day, I don’t know why. But I ran to him, to the robe, I mean; and he threw his arms around me, warding off the two knife-men, and he said…He said, ‘Would you like to have a name?’” Taken by surprise at the immediacy of the recollection, at the echo of that voice in his memory, Hugh turned away.
“And that was your first name. What did he call you?”
“Esp’ranzo, the Hopeful One. I thought he must have seen something in me to give him hope.”
“Your initiative,” the Fudir guessed. “Your daring, your survivability. He may have been a priest of the Darwinists, naturally selecting you because you had survived.”
“No, I asked him once, years later when I brought him a beneficio from my father; and he said that he had the hope before he had the boy.”
“And your father was della Cossa.”
“Della Costa. Shen-kua della Costa. He came to the home where the robes kept several boys like me and he lined us up and walked back and forth in front of us, and then he crooked his finger at me. He took me to the family compound, and they dressed me up in red quilted clothing, put golden rings on my fingers, and had a feast where they toasted me with wine and tea, as if I had just been born.”
“And so you became Ringbao della Costa. And later…”
“There were office-names. Those, I usually chose myself. I was Ludovic IX Krauzer when I was deputy finance minister on Markwald, Gessler’s Sun. I was Slim—just ‘Slim’—when I was education minister on Jemson’s Moon, Urquart’s Star.”
“And now you’re Hugh O’Carroll.”