The Enigma Score (2 page)

‘Jammlings,’ he said. ‘Scattered all through the water. I don’t think there’s a space a hundred yards wide between them anywhere. The Juttites would have needed a Tripsinger to get through there just as they did to get between the Jammers.’

‘Oh. Well, none of the characters said that in the holo. They just kept getting more and more starved until they got desperate.’ Her face was very pale and there were tiny drops of moisture on her forehead. ‘Then they tried rushing past the Jam … the Jam … the Presences, and somebody tried to sing them through and couldn’t and everybody got squashed and ripped apart and … well, you know. It was bloody and awful.’ Her voice was a choked gargle.

Well, of course it was, an inner voice said. As you should have known, silly girl. He pulled her to him and quelled the voice sternly, annoyed with himself. Her hysteria was real. She had been genuinely upset by the drama. Sympathy was called for rather than his increasingly habitual impatience. ‘Hey, forget it. All past history and long gone. Now that you’re pregnant, you need more cheerful influences.’ With a flourish, he produced his surprise. ‘Here, something I picked up.’

‘Oh, Tasmin!’ She slipped the ribbon to one side and tore at the paper, pulling the stuffed toy from its wrappings and hugging the gray-green plush of the wide-eyed little animal. ‘It’s so cunning. Look at that. A viggy baby. I love it. Thank you.’ She stroked the feathery antennae, planting a kiss on the green velour nose.

He suppressed the happy comments he had been about to make. The toy had been intended for the baby, a symbol of expectation. He should have said something to that effect before she opened it. Or perhaps not. She was more pleased with it than a baby would be.

He tried with another gift. ‘Except for a preceptor trip next month, I’ve told the Master General I won’t be available for any extended duty until after the baby comes. How about that?’

‘I wish it was already next month,’ she went on with her own thoughts, only half hearing him.

‘Why? What’s next month?’

‘Lim Terree is coming to do a concert. Less than three weeks from now. I really want to hear that …’

Lim Terree.

He heard the name, then chose not to hear it. Not to have heard it.

Instead, he found himself examining Celcy’s smooth lineless face, staring at her full lips, her wide bright eyes, totally unchanged by their five years of marriage. She was so tiny, he chanted to himself in his private ritual, so tiny, like a doll. Her skin was as smooth as satin. When they made love, he could cup each of her buttocks in one of his hands, a silken mound. When they made love his world came apart in wonderful fire. She was his own sweet girl.

Lim Terree.

She was pregnant now. An accident. The doctor had told them she couldn’t possibly get pregnant unless she took the hormones he gave her, but she wouldn’t take the drug. Could not, she said. It made her sick. Impossible that she could be pregnant, and yet she was. ‘Sometimes these things happen.’ A miracle.

Tasmin was amazed at his own joy, astonished at his salesmanship in convincing her it would be fun to have a child of their own. Too soon for a test yet, but he hoped for a son. Celcy wouldn’t mind his caring for a boy, but she would probably hate sharing him with a little girl. ‘Fear sharing him,’ he told himself, remembering his mother’s words. ‘Not hate, fear.’

He coughed, almost choking. He couldn’t just go on staring at his wife and ignoring what she had said. He had to respond. ‘When did you hear he was coming?’

‘There are big posters down at the Center.
“Lim Terree. Jubal’s entertainment idol. Straight from his triumphant tour of the Deepsoil Coast
.” I got his most recent cube and it’s wonderful. I don’t know why you couldn’t do concert versions, Tasmin. Your voice is every bit as good as his. He started as a Tripsinger, too, you know.’

He let the implications of this pass. It wasn’t the first time she had implied that his profession was not very important, something that anyone could do if they were foolish enough to want to.
Mere
Tripsinger was in her tone if not in her words, betraying an ignorance shared by a significant part of the lay population on Jubal. She was wrong about Lim, though. He hadn’t been a Tripsinger, mere or otherwise.

Lim Terree.

‘I know him,’ he said, his voice sounding tight and unnatural. ‘He’s my brother.’

‘Oh, don’t make jokes,’ she said, the petulant expression back on her face. For a moment she had forgotten her recent neglect. ‘That’s a weird thing to say, Tasmin.’

‘I said he is my brother. He is. My older brother. His real name is Lim Ferrence. He left Deepsoil Five about fifteen years ago.’

‘That’s just when I got here! He was a Tripsinger
here?’

Not really, he wanted to say. ‘You were only a school-child when he left. And yes, he did some trips out of here.’

‘Did he really do the Enigma? Everyone says he did the Enigma.’ She was suddenly eager, glowing.

It was hard to keep the resentment out of his voice.

‘Celcy, I don’t know who “everyone” is. Of course Lim didn’t sing the Enigma. No one has ever got by the Enigma alive.’

She cocked her head, considering this. ‘Oh, people don’t always tell the truth about things. Tripsingers are jealous of each other. Maybe he went with just a small group and got through, but it was never recorded or anything.’

He made a chopping, thrusting-away gesture that she hated, not realizing he had done it until he saw her face. ‘Lim Terree did not do the Enigma trip. So far as I remember he led two caravans east through the Minor Mysteries, one out to Half Moon and back, and one through the Creeping Desert to Splash One on the Deepsoil Coast and that was it. He didn’t come back from that one.’

‘Four trips?’ She gave him a skeptical look, making a mocking mouth. ‘Four trips? Come on, Tasmin. Sibling rivalry, I’ll bet. You’re jealous of him!’ Then she hastily tried to undo some of the anger he realized he had let show in his face. ‘Not that I can blame you. He’s so good looking. I’ll bet the girls mobbed him.’

Not really, he wanted to say again. They – most of them, at least the ones his own age – knew him for what he was, a man who … better not think about that. He wasn’t even sure that it was true anymore. Dad had screamed and hammered his fist, calling Lim filthy, depraved. Was that it? Depraved? Something like that, but that was after Lim had gone. Tasmin had only been sixteen, seventeen when Lim left. Lim had been five years older. Memory didn’t always cleave to the truth, particularly after someone had gone. Perhaps none of what he thought he remembered had really happened.

‘I don’t remember,’ he equivocated. ‘I was just a kid; just getting out of basic school. But if you want to go to his concert, love, I’ll bet he has some tickets he’d make available – for his family.’ Which seemed to do the trick for she stopped sulking and talked with him, and when night came, she said she was too tired but didn’t insist upon it after he kissed her.

Still, their lovemaking was anything but satisfying. She seemed to be thinking about something else, as though there were something she wanted to tell him or talk to him about but couldn’t. It was the way she behaved when she’d spent money they didn’t have, or was about to, or when she flirted herself into a corner she needed his help to get out of. He knew why she did those things, testing him, making him prove that he loved her. If he asked what was bothering her before she was ready to tell him, it would only lead to accusations that he didn’t trust her. One of these days, they’d have to take time to work it out. One of these days he would get professional help for her instead of endlessly playing daddy for her in the vain hope she’d grow up. He had made himself this promise before. Somehow there never seemed to be time to keep it – time, or the energy to get through the inevitable resentment. Looking at her sleeping face, he knew that Celcy would regard it as a betrayal.

Sighing, unable to sleep, he took his let-down, half hostile feelings onto the roof. It was his place for exorcising demons.

Virtually every house in Deepsoil Five had a deck or small tower from which people could watch approaching caravans or spy on the Presences through telescopes. He had given Celcy a fine scope three years ago for her birthday, but she had never used it. She didn’t like looking at the Presences, something he should have realized before he picked out the gift. Back then he was still thinking that what interested him would interest her.

‘A very masculine failing.’ His mother had laughed softly at his rueful confession. ‘Your father was the same way.’ And then, almost wistfully, she added, ‘Give her something to make her feel treasured. Give her jewelry next time, Tas.’

He had given her jewelry since, but he’d kept the scope. Now he swung it toward the south. A scant twenty miles away the monstrous hulk of the Enigma quivered darkly against the Old Moon, a great, split pillar guarding the wall between the interior and the southern coast. Was the new score really a password past the Presence? Or would it be just one more failed attempt, ending in blood and death? The Enigma offered no comment, simply went on quivering, visibly occulting the stars at its edge in a constant shimmer of motion.

He turned to the west in a wide arc, ticking off the Presences along the horizon. Enigma, Sky Hammer, Amber Axe, Deadly Dozen, Cloud Gatherer, Black Tower, the Far Watchlings, then the western escarpment of crowded and mostly unnamed Presences. A little south of west were the Twin Watchers. The Watcher score was one of the first Passwords he had ever learned – a fairly simple piece of singing, with phonemes that were easy to get one’s tongue around. ‘Arndaff duh-roomavah,’ he chanted softly, ‘sindir dassalam awoh,’ wondering as he occasionally did if there was really any meaning in the sounds. Official doctrine taught there was not, that the sounds, when properly sung and backed up with appropriate orchestration, merely damped the vibration in the crystalline Presences, thus allowing caravans to get through without being crushed. Or dismembered. Or blown away by scattering shards of crystal.

Although ever since Erickson there had been people who believed implicitly in the language theory. Even now there were a few outspoken holdouts like Chad Jaconi, the Master Librarian, who believed that the sounds of the librettos were really words, and said so. Jaconi had spent the last forty years making a dictionary of tripsong phonemes, buying new translators from out-system, trying to establish that the Password scores were, indeed, a language. Every time old Jaconi thought he’d proved something, however, someone came along with a new libretto that contradicted it. There were still Explorer-singers out there with recorders and synthesizers and computers, crouched just outside the range of various Presences, trying endless combinations to see what seemed to work, coming up with new stuff even after all these years. Tasmin had actually heard the original cube made a hundred years ago by Ben Erickson, the first Explorer to get past the Far Watchlings to inland Deepsoil, an amazing and utterly mysterious, if not mystical, achievement. How could anyone possibly have arrived at the particular combination of phonemes and orchestral effect by trial and error! It seemed impossible.

‘It had to be clairvoyance,’ Tasmin mused, not for the first time. ‘A crystal ball and a fine voice.’

Erickson had sung his way past the Presences for almost fifty years before becoming one more singer to fall to the Enigma. During those years he had made an immortal name for himself and founded both the Order of Tripsingers and the Order of Explorers. Not bad accomplishments for one man. Tasmin would have been content to do one-quarter as well.

‘Tassy?’ A sad little whisper from the stairway. ‘I woke up and you weren’t there.’

‘Just getting a little air, love.’ He went to her at the top of the stairs and gathered her into his arms. She nestled there, reaching up to stroke his face, whispering secret words into his ears, making his heart thunder and his arms tighten around her as though he would never let her go. As he picked her up to carry her downstairs, she turned to look out at the line of Presences, jagged against the stars.

‘You were looking at those things. I hate them, Tasmin. I do.’

It was the first time she had ever said she hated the Presences, and his sudden burst of compassionate understanding amazed him. They made love again, tenderly, and afterward he cuddled her until she went back to sleep, still murmuring about the concert.

‘He really is your brother? He’ll really give us tickets?’

‘I’m sure he will.’

In the morning, Tasmin wondered whether Lim might indeed make some seats available as Tasmin had promised. To be on the safe side, he bought a pair, finding himself both astonished and angry at a price so high as to be almost indecent.

The streets of Splash One were swarming with lunch-seekers and construction workers, military types, and bands of belligerent Crystallites, to say nothing of the chains of bewildered pilgrims, each intent on his or her own needs, and none of them making way for anyone else. Gretl Mechas fought her way grimly through the crowds, wondering what in the name of good sense had made her decide to come down to Splash One and make the payment on her loan in person. She could have sent a credit chit down from the priory in Northwest City by messenger, by comfax, by passenger bus – why had she decided to do it herself?

‘Fear,’ a remembered voice intoned in answer. ‘Debt is a terrible thing, Gretl. Never get into debt.’ It was her father’s voice, preserved in memory for Gretl’s lifetime.

‘Easy for you to say,’ she snarled. Easy for anyone to say. Hard to accomplish, however, when your only sister sent an emergency message from Heron’s World telling you that she’d lost an arm in an accident and couldn’t pay for her own regeneration. In advance, of course. No one did regeneration anymore unless they were paid in advance. And equally, of course, if you needed regeneration, no one would lend you any money either, except on extortionate terms that sometimes led to involuntary servitude. The stupid little twit hadn’t thought she’d need regeneration insurance. Naturally not, when she had Gretl to call on.