She will not take them further, not to the desolation of the Rift or the Rieving of New Eireann, not to the hall of heads on Peacock Junction. It is too bright an afternoon for that. She gives them a sample of Bridget ban’s theme—it is not yet fully realized—and allows the music to fade into the mysteries, into diminished sevenths, before stilling her strings.
The tabla man grunts with satisfaction and the young piper grins. The crowd murmurs its satisfaction—it is not their way to clap hands—and they begin to break up. The young boy holds his tinwissle up to her in both hands and the harper, remembering a story she once heard from a Terran “saxman” on Jenjen’s Khōyāstan, takes it in her own hands and gravely kisses it before giving it back to him. The boy backs two solemn steps away and then boyishness triumphs and he turns and rushes to rejoin his companions.
The harper has thought that in such a mood the locals might answer her questions, but when she mentions the scarred man, they turn away and begin chattering among themselves. The sesta is past and the plaza begins to fill with the usual late-afternoon bustle of people busily going nowhere in particular.
“I take you, missy.”
It is the jowly man in the blue-checked dhoti. His smile is oily; his lip wet with perspiration. “Scar-head, me, goombah. I take you him.” His eyes are harder than his smile and they smolder. The harper hesitates. “Chel, Memsahb,” he says. “He no long one place.”
“Give me one minute.” The harper bends to put the harp back in its case and notices with no surprise that the modest pile of coins that had gathered there is now gone.
But when she straightens, harp case now slung over shoulder, the man in the dhoti stands with a fixed, glassy smile, looking past her. “No, missy. So sorry. Not know him, scar-head.” He turns and walks away and the man behind him, who had eaten the guava, now puts his knife away. He bobs his head to her. “We watch ’um, such men, no touch women. E’en so, eetee woman.”
Then, he, too, turns and walks away.
The harper sits suddenly on the edge of the fountain.
“We don’t know how you came this far,” says the scarred man, who is sitting on the other side of the fountain, his back to her. He rises and comes around to sit beside her. “That was a fool’s play. How did you ever hope to find us?”
“It can’t be so foolish as all that, seeing that I have.”
The scarred man grunts. “He heard you playing that theme, and we knew you’d stuck your head in the lion’s mouth.”
“That’s why I played. You can’t catch a man by chasing him. Better betimes to remain still, and he will come to you.”
Several loiterers had edged closer to them and the scarred man jumps suddenly to his feet and cries, “Yo, skevoose! Go see where you gotta be. Scat, before I give you leather in the kuli.” They slink off and he resumes his seat. “Pay the illiewhackers no mind.” He strikes his fist into his palm and rubs it. “Why did you come after me? What is it that she wants?”
“She?”
He turns red-rimmed rheumy eyes on her. “Your mother. The witch.”
“She didn’t send me.”
“No?”
“I’m chasing her, too.”
The scarred man digests that a time in silence. “I see,” he says at length, “that is the ‘One Thing’ that you have loved and lost.”
“Not a thing, a person.”
“And there’s no music for that, is there?”
“Your story’s not at an end yet. And at the end of your story I may hope to find the beginning of mine. What is the second way? In what other way may we speak of the story’s end?”
They sit side by side now, no table between them, but neither do they face each other. “An end,” the scarred man says. “There are qualities each story must possess, and when it has them it has been perfected. However good or bad the story may be, when it has all the qualities it needs to be itself, what can change accomplish but to lose one of them, and so become something less.” He inclines his head toward the harp case, which she has once more slid from her back. It rests now between her knees. “What you played here this afternoon…You will never again play it without remembering this day, without comparing it to this day, and it will never sound half so fine on your fingertips as it did here in a dusty, closed-in plaza of the Corner of Jehovah. You and others may play it from now until the Heat Death, but in that way, it has come to its end. From now on, it will always be a reprise.”
In answer, she recites a proverb: “‘A tune is more lasting than the song of the birds.’”
Perforce, he must complete it: “‘And a word is more lasting than the wealth of the world.’”
“What are those words, seanachy? Your story has yet to perfect itself.”
“What has she already told you?” he asks. “How does her version run?”
But the harper only shakes her head and stares silently at the windowless building before her. Eventually, the scarred man grunts. “I’ve never seen any reason for self-deception,” he says. “But she spent her whole life deceiving people. Why should she have exempted herself?”
“You don’t know that,” the harper says without looking at him. “I knew a different woman, sweet, gentle, but always with a sadness beneath her smile. It was a wan smile, the ghost of a smile. You had to look twice to see that it was there. But once you saw it…”
The scarred man nods slowly. “Aye. I knew her long ago, and what man or woman is only one man or woman? She had a god who was supposed to be three without being more than one; but she put her god to shame with the multitude she comprised.” He turns his head and his eyes pin her. “Are you certain you want to know how this ends?”
“It’s why I came.”
“It may also be why you go.”
She thinks for a moment, then nods her head slowly. “It may. But the question is: To where?”
Geantraí: The Call of Dooty
Die Bold, like the other Old Planets, is a place where the future was born but whence, like an ungrateful child, it has departed to seek its fortune elsewhere on the Periphery. The Old Planets have been left like aged parents in an empty nest, remembering what things had been like when the future was young.
Like any whelping, the future had been delivered amid pain and blood and cries of anguish, despite it having been, in some sense, a Caesarean birth. In those days, so the stories ran, they really had been Terrans and really had remembered Terra herself, and not just, as now, the memory of that memory. Cast across the Rift, mingled with strangers, they had huddled and despaired and fought with one another and slowly built something new from what wreckage they had saved.
Die Bold was old enough to have a history. Scattered and quarrelsome refugee camps had grown into cities, burned in civil wars, grown again upon the ruins. Conquerors came and went; old arts informed new renaissances; knowledge lost was rediscovered—or its merest memory vanished forever. Archives conserved by loyal priesthoods were cracked and archaic tongues deciphered, and humanity cruised once more along Electric Avenue. Die Bold explorers arrived at Abyalon. A ship of Old ’Saken encountered one from Friesing’s World already in orbit at Bandonope. Megranome found bustling industry on Waius; sustenance farmers on Cynthia; and naught but desolation on the nameless worlds of the Yung-lo Cluster.