Authors: Sheri S. Tepper
“Well, my story and the Hags’ story would be the same,” interrupted Mouche. “Because Timmys told both of us. The Hags had Timmy nursemaids, just as all of us did.”
Unperturbed, Questioner went on, “I believe the Quaggi at some point lose their wings and become long-lived, planet-bound creatures devoted to philosophy. They don’t talk about their method of reproduction, and this little song of yours gives us a rather nasty hint that the females either die after being waylaid and raped, or perhaps in the act of laying the egg or hatching the young. All that bit about her broken wings and her dead dreams and being unable to fly. Most unpleasant.”
Ornery said, “Maybe the females don’t die. Maybe they just can’t fly anymore so they have to stay put.”
A long silence before Questioner commented: “Possibly. If the scene I witnessed was typical, that would be equivalent to lifetime solitary confinement. They have the lifespan of rocks.”
“So, since Quaggi are real,” said Mouche, “then maybe the song was real, too, and she could still be wherever it happened.”
“How big are they?” Ornery asked. “These Quaggi things?”
“The ones we’ve seen vary in size from mountainous to merely large,” mused Questioner. “The females could be smaller.”
Mouche said, “I can’t see what the Corojumi and the Bofusdiaga have to do with it.”
“Maybe they were just witnesses,” remarked Ornery.
“Many tribes of men tell stories that have bases in fact,” mused Questioner. “Of the eclipse of the sun, perhaps, or of shooting stars. Ornery may be correct, and these people may have witnessed the encounter.”
“In which case, the story has nothing to do with this journey,” said Mouche, finalizing the matter. He really wanted to stop talking.
“I think contrariwise,” murmured Questioner. “Everything has something to do with this journey. Tell me, Mouche, do the Timmys dance?”
“How did you know?” he asked, amazed. “They dance all the time. Everywhere. But who told you?”
“Actually, Mouche, it was an interstellar trader, who got into conversation with someone at your port, who told him a charming story about something you call the Long Nights.”
“Our midwinter holiday.”
“Which, according to the story, you celebrate because all your workers are busy dancing, even though you’ve tried and tried to make them quit.”
“There is a story like that,” he admitted.
“And another thing, Mouche. I am interested in the singer of your song.”
Startled, he replied, “The singer? My Timmy sang it to me….”
“Ah, yes. But who, in the song, apostrophizes and instructs? Who is it who cries, ‘Oh, Corojumi.’ Who is it who tells what occurred in ‘the dimmer galaxies.’ Is there some other personage present we have not yet heard of?”
T
he morning following the Questioner’s visit to the Temple, D’Jevier took note that there had been no tremors through the night. Those venturing into the street saw clear blue above the scarp for the first time in seasons. Her hope that the predictions of the geologists aboard
The Quest
might have been premature was cast down, however, when those same geologists sent word to the Temple that the calm was merely a hiatus and they could not reach the Questioner. Where was she? D’Jevier received this message just as Onsofruct came in with a message from the steward at Mantelby Mansion.
“Marool, dead?” D’Jevier breathed. “How?”
Onsofruct told her. Though the steward’s account had been somewhat reticent, she had accurately imagined some of what he had left unsaid.
“Also,” said Onsofruct, taking a deep breath, “the entire entourage that accompanied the Questioner has disappeared, along with the Questioner herself and four pressed men, three of them from House Genevois. And if that were not trouble enough, the ship that brought her knows of it and has stated its intention of relaying this information to the Council of Worlds.”
“Three men from House Genevois? Who, Onsy?”
“I didn’t ask their names. But by every Hagion from A to Z, I’d like to know what is going on!”
“We know what’s going on,” said her cousin. “At least, we have a fat hint or two that something real is happening among creatures or beings we have always considered mythical.”
“I wish we knew the extent of the reality!”
“What do the Men of Business say? Anything useful?”
“This and that. It will or won’t bankrupt the world. It will or won’t put us all back to the Stone Age. It will or won’t have anything to do with our social … arrangements, though they know nothing about this world’s real arrangements.”
“No,” said D’Jevier. “But they think they do, and they simmer with discontent. They are sexually frustrated, overburdened with responsibilities, often overtired. They turn to drink and to drugs or nagging at their children. They blame themselves if they have no daughters.”
“Tragic!” snapped Onsofruct. “Tit for tat after millennia of otherwise!”
D’Jevier sighed. “Did you expect them to agree on anything? It isn’t in them to adopt a cause or pursue justice, not given over to the game of profit as they are. That’s one of the reasons we designed … well, our fore-mothers designed things as they are.”
“Those same foremothers warned us, their daughters, that if ever a leader emerges among the Men of Business, they might rise up in rebellion. Especially if they ever found out …” Onsofruct’s voice trailed away.
D’Jevier shook her head warningly. “Which they won’t. We keep tight hold of information on this world. They have no way of getting hold of it.”
“Not so long as the Panhagion controls, no. But, the greater our population, the harder it gets to keep things quiet. If we’re going to keep on as we have been, it’ll take a new Temple near Nehbe and a couple of branch Temples out toward the scarp. Those valleys are filling up….” Onsofruct’s voice trailed away as she realized what she had said.
“Were filling up, Onsy. Were. The people there are either dead or evacuated by now. Which actually helps us control data. When the population is centralized, we manage very nicely.”
“Until the planet blows up.” She heard her voice rising stridently and put her hands over her eyes.
“If it does. Well, if it does, our troubles are over. I’ve been wishing we could ask the Timmys….”
“I think we must.” Onsofruct put her hands flat on the table before her and pushed herself erect. “Certainly we must. Let’s find some.”
“Unfortunately they don’t seem to be findable. I’ve had the word out among the Haggers for the last couple of days. The Timmys have completely vanished, Onsy. They went so quickly and totally that it appears they’d been planning it. As if they knew about it before we did.”
“That’s impossible!”
D’Jevier fought down a shriek, took a deep breath, and said as calmly as she could manage, “Nothing’s impossible any longer. We must go to Mantelby Mansion and see what we can find out there.”
They saw the scene of the deadly event, which both of them were reluctant to call a murder. They questioned everyone, learning the sequence of the disappearance, first the entourage, then the two Old Earthians, then the Questioner herself along with two gardener’s boys named Ornery and Mouche—at the mention of whose name D’Jevier’s face paled.
“You know him?” whispered her sister.
“Of him,” said D’Jevier, in so forbidding a manner that it halted further mention.
Two other boys had disappeared as well, the steward said, but they had disappeared from the cellar, where they had been with Marool. Their names had been Bane and Dyre.
The Hags examined the machines and fought through their disgust to a comprehension of their use. D’Jevier sent for a smith to bring a portable furnace and the necessary equipment to dismantle everything in the cellar and convert it to scrap. They found the maker’s name attached on neat little brass plates, and they directed a squad of Haggers to find and dispose of that individual, even before directing that Marool’s body be wrapped in a linen sheet and be buried without ceremony in the Mantelby graveyard, behind the ridge.
“And,” said D’Jevier with a glare at the steward, “as you value your life and sanity, don’t take that ring off her finger or whatever ate your aunt may come to nibble on you, as well.”
When the ashen-faced young man departed, leaving them momentarily alone in the hideous cellar, Onsofruct whispered, “Was her death a final act of worship?”
“Not a voluntary one,” murmured D’Jevier. “Which doesn’t mean Morrigan didn’t relish it. I think it’s clear Marool was murdered by two of the boys she got from House Genevois. The order of disappearance is probably significant. First the entourage, without the Questioner’s knowledge. Then, the two Old Earthians, then the Questioner and two gardener’s helpers, one Mouche, a Consort trainee, and one Ornery, a sailor lad. Finally, only after Marool’s body is discovered are the other Consort trainees found to be gone. We assume they left Marool dead or dying and may, in fact, have been the first to depart. I wonder who turned off the machine and took her out of it before she was dismembered.”
Onsofruct shuddered. “Is that what it would have done?”
“Oh, yes. The mechanical linkages led next to knives and then to a leveraged system which would quite effectively have quartered her after disembowelment. There has not been any such barbarism among mankind for millennia. Marool had reinvented it.”
She fell silent, wanting to spit the foul taste from her mouth, taking refuge in changing the subject. “I’ve noticed quite a draft. Look at the smoke from those candles.” She pointed at a branched iron stand where guttering candles unskeined black smoke that drifted sideways to disappear along a wall. The paneling was ajar. They tugged it open to reveal a shadowy sneakway running along the walls. D’Jevier went in and peered at the dusty floor, noting the footprints there, noting the spyholes in the walls.
“See, here.” She pointed. “There, those depressions which are not quite footlike. The Questioner. And two pairs of boots, the Consort and the sailor. Some other tracks beneath, too scuffed to read, all of them headed in the same direction.” She stood staring into the dark. “The murderers went some other way. I want to see Madame Genevois. Let us go to her, woman to woman. It will save time.”
Madame was in her office, off the welcome suite. She greeted D’Jevier as an old friend, and, after a look at their haggard faces, offered brandy. When she’d heard what they had to say about Marool’s death, she rang for Simon and sent him with one of the workmen to fetch a picture from the hallway upstairs.
“I collect a certain kind of thing. It’s as well to be somewhat cautionary with the young men, and also to blunt their curiosity.” She sipped, and poured, and in moments, Simon was back, bearing the picture as though it were a long-dead fish.
“By all the Hagions,” murmured D’Jevier. “Where did you get it?”
“The artist disappeared. His body showed up, later, giving evidence that he had died by this machine or some similar. Someone had rifled his studio and then tried, unsuccessfully, to burn it down. This painting was found, quite undamaged, among several others in a kind of vault he had built below his house. His heirs sold it to me.”
“If Marool had known you had it….”
“She didn’t know. I’ve always refused to deal with Mistress Mantelby. Even if I’d never seen this, I’d have refused to deal with her. There was always something … possessed about her.”
“You say ‘always’….”
Madame sat back comfortably and stared beyond them, into the past. “I saw her first at a Family Men’s Soirée at her parent’s house. I often attend such events. It gives me an opportunity to get off in a corner with a patroness to discuss what I might have in stock to interest her, or for her to tell me what she’s looking for. Marool was at the time about four, but her expression was merciless, like a hungry animal watching prey. Her eyes were without humanity. I saw her several times after that, as she grew older, and I thought each time that her eyes were like viper’s eyes.
“After she ran off to join the Wasters, I saw her in their company from time to time, and of course, after she returned from her so-called pilgrimage, I saw her at the Panhagion and at the theater, and I heard things from other Houses about Mantelby Consorts who disappeared or died without explanation.”
D’Jevier set down her cup. “About these two boys who supposedly killed her …”
Madame said, “Bane and Dyre. I believe they were her sons. I can’t say whether they knew she was their mother, though I rather think not. Mismothering was probably the least of her sins.”
The two Hags were shocked into silence. Madame sipped, staring at them over the rim of her glass, thinking that she, too, might have been shocked if she had not had the opportunity of knowing Bane and Dyre and the man she thought was their father. “Whether she was or was not their mother, I believe their father is a man known to me as Thor Ashburn. Not a Family Man, no g’ to his name, but not a supernume, either. He offered my investors a very large fee if I would take these two boys and train them. Left to my own decision, I would not have done so for any sum, but as you know, we cannot always do what we would prefer.”
“Indeed,” D’Jevier said thoughtfully.
Madame went on, “Over the years I’ve heard this and that about Marool. Consorts talk among themselves at the Temple and in the park. The talk comes back, and the Houses hear what’s said. What was said about Mantelby identified her as a sadist, an accomplished torturer, a gloating killer. She’s been seen in public every day or so for eighteen years, however, so if she bore these boys, it was while she was away, supposedly at Nehbe.”
“Interesting,” murmured Onsofruct. “Our Haggers tell us the man who made the terrible machines also lives near Nehbe.”
Madame set down her glass. “The thing I can’t figure out is that Thor Ashburn seems unconnected to any known family. Also, he and his sons share a family stink.”
“Skunk-lung?”
“That’s what it’s called,” Madame confirmed. “Though it doesn’t come from the lung.”
“But none of the settlers could have had it,” D’Jevier remarked. “It would have been a disqualifying attribute for a colonial.”