Authors: Sheri S. Tepper
The Enigma Score
THE ENIGMA SCORE
Sheri S. Tepper
Enter the SF Gateway …
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Contents
When Tasmin reached for the gold leaf, he found the box empty. The glue was already neatly painted onto the ornamented initial letter of the Enigma score, and it would dry into uselessness within minutes. He spent a fleeting moment wanting to curse but satisfied himself by bellowing, ‘Jamieson!’ in a tone that was an unequivocal imprecation.
‘Master Ferrence?’ The boyish face thrust around the door was wide-eyed in its most ‘Who, me?’ expression, and the dark blond hair fell artfully over a forehead only slightly wrinkled as though to indicate ‘I’m working very hard, now what does he want?’
Undeceived by all this, Tasmin waved the empty box and snarled, ‘One minute, Jamieson. Or less.’
The acolyte evidently read Tasmin’s expression correctly for he moved away in a nicely assessed pretense of panic mixed with alacrity. The gold leaf was kept in a store-room up one flight, and the boy could conceivably make it within the time limit if he went at a dead run.
He returned panting and, for once, silent. In gratitude, Tasmin postponed the lecture he had been rehearsing. ‘Get on with what you were doing.’
‘It wasn’t important, Master.’
‘If what you were doing wasn’t important, then you should have checked my supplies. Only pressure of urgent work could have excused your not doing so.’
‘I guess it was important, after all,’ Jamieson responded, a quirk at the corner of his mouth the only betrayal of the fact that he had been well and truly caught. He let the door shut quietly behind him and Tasmin smiled ruefully. The boy was not called Reb Jamieson for nothing. He rebelled at everything, including the discipline of an acolyte, almost as a matter of conviction. If he weren’t almost consistently right about things; if he didn’t have a voice like an angel …
Tasmin cut off the thought as he placed the felt pad over the gold leaf and rubbed it, setting the gilding onto the glue, then brushed the excess gold into the salvage pot. It was a conceit of his never to do the initial letter on a master copy until the rest of the score and libretto was complete. Now he could touch up the one or two red accents that needed brightening, get himself out of his robes and into civilian clothes, and make a photostat of the score for his own study at home – not at all in accordance with the rules, but generally winked at so long as the score didn’t leave his possession. The finished master manuscript would go into a ceremonial filing binder and be delivered to Jaconi. They would talk a few minutes about the Master Librarian’s perennial hobby horse, his language theory and then Tasmin would borrow a quiet-car from the citadel garage and drive through the small settlement of Deepsoil Five, on his way home to Celcy.
Who would, as usual, greet his homecoming with sulks for some little time.
‘This whole celibacy thing is just superstition,’ she pouted, as he had predicted. ‘Something left over from old religious ideas from Erickson’s time. We’ve all outgrown that. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to come home at night even if you are copying a score.’
The phrases were borrowed; the argument wasn’t new; neither was his rejoinder. ‘That may be true. Maybe all the ritual is superstition and nonsense, Celcy love. Maybe it’s only tradition, and fairly meaningless at that, but I took an oath to observe every bit of it, and it’s honorable to keep I oaths.’
‘Your stupid oath is more important than I am.’
Tasmin remembered a line from a pre-dispersion poet about not being able to love half as much if one didn’t love honor more, but he didn’t quote it. Celcy hated being quoted at. ‘No, love, not more important than you. I made some oaths about you, too, and I’m just as determined to keep those. Things about loving and cherishing and so forth.’ He tilted her head back, coaxing a smile, unhappily aware of the implications of what he had just said but trusting her preoccupation with her own feelings to keep her from noticing. Sometimes, as now, he did feel he stayed with her more because of commitment than desire, but whenever the thought came to him he reminded himself of the other Celcy, the Celcy who, when things were secure and right, seemed magically to take this Celcy’s place. She didn’t always act like this. Certain things just seemed to bring it out.
‘I sure don’t feel loved,’ she said sulkily. He sighed, half in relief. She might not take less than a day to forgive him for having been away for the seventeen days it had taken to orchestrate and copy the new Enigma score – or, more accurately, the putative Enigma score since it hadn’t been tested on the Enigma yet, and might never be – but she would come around eventually. Nothing he could do would hurry the process. If he ignored her, it would take even longer, so he set himself to be pleasant, reminding himself of her condition, trying to think of small things that might please her.
‘What’s going on at the center? Something you’d like to see? Any good holos?’
‘Nothing good. I went to a new one that Jeanne Gentrack told me about, but it was awful.’ She shivered. ‘All about the people on the Jut, starving and trying to get out through the Jammers after their Tripsingers were assassinated by that crazy fanatic.’
‘You know you hate things like that, Celcy. Why did you go?’
‘Oh, it was something to do.’ She had gone alone, of course. Celcy had no women friends and was too conventional to go with a man, even though Tasmin wouldn’t have objected. ‘I’d heard it was about Tripsingers, and I thought you might like it if I went.’ She was flirting with him now, cutely petulant, lower lip protruding, wanting to be babied and cosseted, making him be daddy. He would try to kiss her; she would evade him. They would play this game for some time. Tonight she would be ‘too tired’ as a punishment for his neglect, and then about noon tomorrow she might show evidence of that joyously sparkling girl he had fallen in love with, the Celcy he had married.
He put on a sympathetic smile. ‘It’s great that you’d like to know more about my work, love, but maybe seeing a tragic movie about the Jut famine isn’t the best way to go about it.’ Of course, she wasn’t interested in his work, though Tasmin hadn’t realized it until a year or two after they were married. Five years ago, when Celcy was eighteen, her friends had been the children of laborers and clerks, and she had thought it was a coup to marry a Tripsinger. She had listened to him then, eyes shining, as he told her about this triumph or that defeat. Now all their friends were citadel people, and Tasmin was merely one of the crowd, nothing special, nothing to brag about, just a man engaged in uninteresting activities that forced him to leave her alone a lot. He could even sympathize with her resentment. Some of his work bored him, too.
‘It’s not just that she’s bored, Tas,’ his mother had said, fumbling for his hand through the perpetual mists that her blindness made of her world. ‘Her parents died on a trip. Her uncle took her in, but he had children of his own, and they wouldn’t be normal if they hadn’t resented her. Then, on their way to Deepsoil Five, there was a disaster, one wagon completely lost, several people badly maimed. Poor little Celcy was only eight or nine and hardly slept for weeks after they got here. She’s frightened to death of being abandoned and of the Presences.’
He had been dumbfounded.’ I never knew that! How did I you?’
She had frowned, blind eyes searching for memory. ‘I think Celcy’s uncle told me most of it, Tas. At your wedding.’
‘I wonder why she never mentioned it to me?’ he had mused aloud.
‘Because she doesn’t want to admit it or remember it,’ his mother had answered in that slightly sharpened voice reserved for occasions when Tasmin, or his father before him, had been unusually dense. Tasmin remembered his father, Miles Ferrence, as a grim, pious man who said little and expected much, given to unexpected fits of fury toward the world and his family, interspersed with equally unexpected pits of deep depression. Miles had gone into peril and died at the foot of the Black Tower the year after … well, the year after Tasmin’s older brother had … Never mind. Tasmin had been surprised at how difficult it was to mourn his father, and then had been troubled by his own surprise.
Celcy was still talking about the holodrama, her voice becoming agitated and querulous. ‘I couldn’t see why they didn’t build boats and just float down the shore. Why did they have to get out through the Jammers?’
He closed his eyes, shutting out other thoughts and recollections, visualizing the map of the Jut. The far north-west of Jubal, an area called New Pacifica. A peninsula of deepsoil protruding into a shallow bay. At the continental end of this Jut were two great crystal promontories, the Jammers – not merely promontories but Presences. Between them led a steep, narrow pass that connected the Jut to the land mass of New Pacifica and the rest of Jubal, while out in the bay, like the protruding teeth of a mighty carnivore, clustered the smaller – though still very large – offspring of the Jammers, the Jammlings.