“We’re a trade ship, Maggie. We don’t turn on a dime.”
“I’ll take quarters. Give me what we have.”
Moments passed, and none of the shutters snapped open.
Maggie Barnes began to relax. “She can’t fire.”
There was a sudden flare deep within the derelict ship. Something buckled and part of the ship seemed to cave in on itself.
“She thinks the gun ports are open,” whispered Bridget ban.
“Her sensors are slagged on this side,” said D.Z. “How is she aiming?”
“She’s not. She’s firing blind. Expect a broadside.”
A. K. Prabhakaran suddenly lit up like a candaleria. She glowed a serene and lovely orange. Radiances leaked from the edges of ports and from open hangar decks. Donovan thought of sunlight striking through gaps in the clouds.
And then Prabhakaran herself was a cloud—a bright, hot nebula of gasses that for a time held the shape of the ship she had been, and then began to disperse. The ark had been large enough that its own gravity would hold much of the debris together and someday it would congeal into a strange metaloceramic asteroid.
With traces of organic chemicals mixed throughout.
Good-bye, Billy, Donovan thought. Sofwari. Paulie. Good-bye, nameless thousands of Terran colonists, dreaming of new lives on new worlds. Good-bye, Peacharoo.
He sighed. “Damn,” he said.
Méarana looked at him; took his hand. “What?”
Donovan nodded at the screen. “We broke it.”
XVII. WHERE HEARTS ARE
Praisegod Barebones looks up from the inventory that he is reconciling to see the scarred man enter the Bar of Jehovah and blink in the dimness. He raises his hand in salute.
“You came back,” he says.
The scarred man grunts. “I could not bear our separation any longer.”
“You were too wicked even for the paynim beyond our protected skies,” the Bartender guesses.
“I saw wickedness even you might blanch to hear, brother Barebones.”
“I am the Bartender. I hear so many confessions you might be surprised what I blanch to hear.”
The scarred man sketches the ghost of a smile. “A bowl of uiscebeatha.”
“I would hardly blanch at that, friend Fudir. My uisce sales suffered horribly in your absence.”
The scarred man says nothing, and returns to his former niche in the wall. He wonders if anyone had sat here during his absence. He wonders if anyone knows he has returned.
The Bar is never empty, it is never at rest; but at midafternoon it approaches a pause. The sun casts a nimbus of white light through the front windows, giving those at the tables in the barroom an imprecision of outline, a faerie appearance. It reminds him of how the sun had dawned inside A. K. Prabhakaran.
Praisegod brings the bowl himself and sets it down. “You still owe a tab,” he points out.
The scarred man pulls a chit from his blouse and shows it to him. It is a marvelous imitation of a Kennel chit. The Bartender has never seen a finer copy. But it does not glow when handled, as genuine chits do.
“Ah,” mumbles the scarred man. “I had forgotten. The account is closed.” He rummages in his scrip and pulls out Gladiola Bills.
“Friend,” says Praisegod, placing himself discretely between the money and curious eyes, “far be it from me to lecture the sons of this world on prudence, but don’t flash a wad like that in here.”
The scarred man presses a wad upon him.
“I almost hate to accept these,” Praisegod says of the Bills. “Your tab was your immortality. It bid fair to outlive you. If I close it out…Well,” he continues after a bleak glance from his customer, “what happened to that harper you left with? Some of our patrons have asked after her.”
“She has gone home to spend time with her mother.”
“Has she now? Will you go visit her there?”
“She asked me to. Her mother was less certain.”
The scarred man sits in the niche and drinks. He misses his inner voices. He knows that Inner Child is watching the door, is watching the barroom, is watching each of the other patrons. He knows the Pedant is mulling over lessons learned on this most recent scramble. But their voices are no longer those of strangers. They speak with his own voice, for they are now fully him as well as fully themselves.
Don’t worry, Donovan. We’re still here when you need us.
The scarred man smiles a little at that, and takes another drink.
I hear ye claimed to be my husband, Donovan buigh, Bridget ban had said on the way back to Gatmander.
It was one of those shipboard romances, he had answered. You may have forgotten.
I remember it too well, Donovan buigh. And I remember the aftermath.
Donovan had nodded toward Méarana, who had been playing her harp for the crew. You could have treated her better, despite all that.
Are ye the doting father now? I don’t recall seeing ye much around Clanthompson Hall.
She doesn’t recall seeing you there much, either.
It had been a long, silent transit back to Gatmander after that and, for Méarana, a bewildering one. She kept trying to build a bridge between them, to fulfill some fantasy that she had long entertained. But there is no bridge to span an ocean.
Greystroke and Little Hugh had been waiting on Gatmander, and Bridget ban and her daughter had passage back to High Tara.
Sorry, Donovan, Greystroke had lied, but there’s no more room in my ship. He had approved Donovan’s Kennel chit for passage back to Jehovah and for a generous consultation fee for protecting the harper. But he had sensed that there might still be a possibility for him and had moved quickly to seize it.
Don’t feel too badly, Fudir, Little Hugh had told him. You can’t lose what you never had.
Perhaps not, the scarred man tells his uisce. But in a peculiar sense, he had had it for a time, in the mind of Lucia Thompson, and that had been enough to make it real, for a dream strong enough may leak from one mind to another.
The sun has dimmed and the windows in the front of the Bar have darkened. The shutters have been closed against the creeping night. Into the bar steps Bikhram. There is no particular moment when one may say, “He has come,” but there is a moment when one realizes, “He is here.” It is the sort of skill that serves well a man whose profession is to enter places and to leave with sundry of its contents.
He represents the Committee of Seven, and sits himself at the table, positioning himself so that he, too, does not show his back to the room. A glass of masaala paal appears before him, spiced with clove and saffron. Bikhram tastes it and sprinkles some badaam powder into it from an envelope he carries in his blouse.
The scarred man watches him and, after a time, passes him a red envelope. “These are seeds,” he says, “of the True Coriander, found only on the Wild World of Enjrun, and brought there by the Terrans of the Treasure Fleet itself. Perhaps they will germinate in the soil of the Corner; perhaps they will not.”
“You are a man of many humors, Fudir. Wild Worlds! The Treasure Fleet! Perhaps your grandmother’s ancient recipe, passed on in secret?”
“Mock if you wish, Bikhram. It is not much of a such, but it is the coriander. Why not a fairy-tale origin for a fairy-tale spice?”