“Mock on, harper. Optimism is the child of ignorance.”
“I’d wish my harp with me. There is a goltraí coming on and my fingers itch to play you.”
“Oh, what a cacophony that would be! In which mode might we seven harmonize? Pay attention. The Spiral Arm is home to only two sorts of men: those who have paid attention and those who are dead. Your mother was a Hound, sought diligently by other Hounds. Do you suppose that your flailing can succeed where their craft has failed?”
“Perhaps.” The harper pushed the remains of her meal away from her. “And for two reasons. The first is that a daughter may know her mother more thoroughly than any colleague, and so see her where other eyes have failed.”
“But she vanished on a Hound’s business, not a mother’s. If she has contacted neither you nor the Kennel, it means she cannot; and where a Hound is concerned, ‘cannot’ means she is dead. Accept that.”
“No.”
“Your denial is insufficient refutation. I cannot see your mother falling to any mere quotidian disaster. There are very few things in the Spiral Arm that can effect the disappearance of a Hound, and one of them is a Confederate courier.”
“And the second reason,” the harper continued unperturbed, “is that her colleagues have abandoned the hunt. Were there even a hint of ‘Federal involvement, can you doubt they would have pressed matters to the limit?”
“Can you be so sure they have not? Do not discount Those of Name. Their ears are keen, their arms are long. Do you know the Weapon of the Long Knife? They may strike from stars whose very light has yet to reach us. They may strike with no more than a word spoken into the right ear or a coin dropped in the right palm. But the Fudir is a sentimental fool. Somewhere in the cockle of his heart rests a mustard seed of affection; and you have watered it, a little, over the past few days. Like a stone embedded in a pane of glass, it is a weak point. It is there he can break, and we with him. The nostalgia you awakened for your mother has turned his head. And that is a mistake, for a man looking backward can blunder into unpleasant surprises before him. And as little as I care for him, his well-being is tied inextricably to mine. We will take you so far as the Kennel. On that we have agreed. There, the Hounds will also explain how hopeless a task you have undertaken. If after that you insist on pressing the chase, you will do so without our help.” Donovan scowled and shook his head vigorously. “Without our help,” he said again.
The scarred man stilled briefly. His smile faded like the embers of a fire, and the cast of his features changed once more. Where Donovan might be called “cold,” the Fudir seemed merely “devious,” a mien almost friendly in comparison. He was a fox to Donovan’s wolf. But there was no humor now in the set of his mouth or eyes.
“I hate him.”
The harper did not ask who he meant. “He’s afraid. I understand why.”
“No. You don’t. You can’t understand, unless you have a mind like shattered glass—and had endured the shattering.”
She looked into his ever-shifting eyes. “You’re afraid, too.”
“You’re a fool. We all are. Except Brute, who’s not smart enough to be afraid.”
“Yet, you wanted to help me.”
He shrugged. “It’s not like some of us could stay home.”
III. GUARD DOGS
In the far-flung fiction that is the United League of the Periphery, High Tara is the invented capital of an imaginary realm. This is neither as arbitrary nor as futile as it sounds. Everything must have a center; and everything real started sometime as a dream. The dream may come at the end or even after the end, or it may come at the beginning. High Tara is a dream that came at the beginning. It might fairly be said that there was a United League only because, once upon a time, certain men and women had imagined that there might be.
The ancient god Planck once decreed that even dead matter requires first that it be observed. What can be more dreamlike than that? If even the fact of being depends upon a wish, how much more so constructions of becoming erected upon those facts?
But neither should a fiction become too real. A dream must be perfect, but reality is always flawed. So when the serpent Planck observed the quantum state and brought order from the chaos, he did reality no great favor.
High Tara, seen from orbit, seemed one great forest. Something in her soils had proven remarkably receptive to the ancient seed ships. Where New Eireann had started with little more than basalt, High Tara had possessed a substratum of prokaryotic raw materials. It had been a world almost alive, depending on how far one stretched the fictions of life.
The original colonists had been the usual amalgam of late Commonwealth times: Vraddies and Murkans, Zhõgwó and Roomies, and they had spoken the Tantamiž lingua franca of that era. It had been a Romantic age, as all dangerous and interesting times are. No one crosses the stars for a decimal point, but they may for a dream. Contrived anachronisms from the Terran past had been all the fashion; and thus—“so it is said”—a mere dozen or so Irish had managed, quantum-like, to impress their own imagined and somewhat eccentric past onto the colony. But across so many years, ancestry was a collective thing and every Finn was a Bantu beside. Most people no longer had any clear idea whence their recreated culture had come. I’m a’ Cocker, they might say; or I’m from Die Bold, or A Gatmander, me. And other names, older names, names like Polynesia or Britain or Roosiya, brought now little more than a puzzled stare. And so it was that the colorful and kilted throngs of High Tara were as likely as not to braid their hair in queues or hide it under turbans, and to own skins of gold and bronze and cinnabar—and call themselves Gaels in spite of all.
The Green Gawain was a broad, manicured park in the center of Bally Oakley. Hedgerows were mazes, colorful gardens spilled out into patches of wildflowers. Forgotten writers and artists postured on plinth and pedestal. Fountains murmured theatrically and benches gave respite to lovers or the weary. Ornamentation was everywhere: floral arrangements blossomed into pictures when seen from a distance; serpents twisted up lampposts; intricate geometries rimmed pools and walkways, breaking out of their borders here and there into fanciful flowers and more fanciful beasts, into lotus blossoms, swastikas, or taijis, or simply into ornate capitals in the ancient Tantamiž script. It was a peaceful refuge, where one could relax or take a pleasant and conversational stroll with an old friend, and there were secluded groves where you could forget you were in the midst of a great city.
Yet there was something artful in the artlessness of the Green Gawain, something careful about its casualness. Despite the wildflowers and the broken symmetries, it was a bit too well-manicured, a little too obviously contrived. Perhaps the hedge maze was its true heart: a place a bit devious, in the embrace of which one might get lost.
The harper and the scarred man hurried through this restful arbor to the sprawling compound of muted grey stone at its eastern end. Occasional couples demurely holding hands on the benches would turn their heads as if whipsawed by the wind of their passage. But the harper was anxious to get started, and the Fudir anxious to finish.
The Kennel’s main building, facing the public ways along the Green, was dwarfed by its neighbors, a shy architectural maid between her more brazen sisters. No murals, no statues. The Kennel bore beside its plain black doors only a brass plaque reading AN SHERIVESH ÁWRIHAY, “The Particular Service.”