The Shadow Matrix (7 page)

did not want to go back to Arilinn. More than anything, she wanted to ride west, to

follow Mikhail, to let the Domain and her studies go hang. But dutifully she reined the

horse around, and they headed back in the direction of the Tower, just visible above the

trees.

The stableyard seemed just as they had left it, and nothing appeared amiss. Margaret

dismounted, gave the reins to Martin, and patted Dorilys quickly but perfunctorily on

the neck. "Another day, my pretty. Another day we will have a good run." The horse

nickered in response, and looked at her with great dark eyes, as if she understood every

word.

Then she hurried to the Tower, her heart pounding a little. Her booted feet sped over

the paved walkway, and she passed the bakery and the scriptorium where she had

planned to spend the afternoon. She did not pause at her little house, because the closer

she got to the Tower, the greater was her sense of urgency.

Something had happened, something bad, and her mind began to manufacture all sorts

of things. Dio had gotten out of stasis, or Ariel had gone into premature labor, or

Mikhail had . . . No! Margaret slackened her pace a little and forced herself to stop

theorizing! She was an academic, not a hysterical female who went off the deep end!

She was a Fellow of the University, dammit!

Liriel?

Yes, Marguerida.
There was something sad and guarded in the answer.

What's happened?

Domenic . . .

Oh, .no!
Margaret came to a complete halt on the walkway. She felt her body turn to

ice, to stone.
But he was getting better!
That was not entirely true. Her own quick

actions had saved the boy's life immediately after his accident, but his neck had been

broken, and he would never be able to use his arms or legs again. The Healers had

done their best—and she now knew that their best was, in some ways, as good as any

offered by Terran medical technology—but the real damage was irreparable.
How?

He choked. It happened so quickly that no one could do anything.

Margaret felt her anger rise, and held it back with a great effort. Poor Ariel! If the child

had been taken to a Terran medical center, she knew, they would have put a breathing

tube in his throat, because the greatest danger with a neck broken in the third cervical

vertebra was what had just happened. She had not known that when he had been

injured, but in the ensuing months she had made it her busi-• ness to discover as much

as she was able about such injuries, so that she could do as much as she could to

prevent the very death she had foreseen at Armida months before. If only Ariel had not

been so stubbornly insistent on keeping the child at Arilinn.

Now it was too late, and the boy was gone. She felt tears begin to trickle down her

cheeks, and the vast grief for Ivor that she thought was past returned in full force. But

Ivor had been old, had lived a long and meaningful life. Domenic had been a child of

nine; he had hardly started to live!

Despite the reasons her rational mind offered her, Mar-

garet still felt that if she had just been more persuasive in her arguments, more

insistent, this tragedy might have been avoided. If only, she thought, she had not had

the premonition at Armida, or managed to conceal it better, if Ariel had not gone off

half-cocked, taking a clumsy carriage out in the start of a summer storm. If, if ... it was

all hindsight, and she knew it.

She felt sad, but even more she felt guilty, as if somehow the death of the little boy

were her fault. Margaret felt as if she were some sort of jinx. Ivor had died, and Dio

was dying! She shook herself all over and scolded herself for being a morbid idiot. It

was no one's fault—but she wanted someone to blame, and the best candidate was

always herself. It was not even Ariel's fault. She suspected, however, that her cousin

was in much the same state as she was, looking for a scapegoat.

How is Ariel taking it?

Quite well, under the circumstances. But I would not let her see you right now.

No, that would be pushing my luck. I'll go back to my house for the present.

Margaret turned back on the pathway, and retraced her steps toward the little house

that had been her home for four months. It was made of stone, the inner walls paneled

in polished wood. There were five rooms: two bedrooms, a parlor, dining room, and

kitchen. It was cozy and civilized, and she liked that, after years of enduring

sometimes primitive conditions with Ivor.

When she entered, she could hear her servant, Katrin, a , soft-spoken woman in her

fifties, rattling around the kitchen, banging pots and pans. A nice smell floated in the

air—rabbithorn stew, she thought. Margaret's appetite was gone, but she knew it would

return. Sometimes her need for food seemed like the only constant in her daily life.

The tears-had continued, and now her nose was starting to get stuffy. She found a

handkerchief, a large square of linen embroidered with pretty flowers, and mopped her

eyes and blew her nose. Then she sat down in a large chair beside the small fireplace in

the parlor and let herself grieve silently, her chest heaving with sobs, and tears

obliterating sight. She did not want Katrin to hear her, to try to comfort

her. She wanted to let herself release all the sorrow that seemed to fill her slender body.

The light in the room began to fade, as the bloody sun sank below the horizon. The

handkerchief was now a sodden, disgusting rag, and she didn't seem to have the

strength to get up and find another. Her face hurt from crying, and her nose was red

from repeated blowings. There was a wire around her chest, cutting into her breasts,

and the pleasant smell of horse on her riding skirt was nauseating to her.

Margaret wanted to stop crying, to stop feeling sad, or sorry for herself. She should be

thinking of Ariel, of Piedro Alar, Ariel's patient and long-suffering husband, of the little

boy she had hardly known before he was injured. All she could think of was Dio, and

Ivor.

Then the tears began to slacken, and she started to feel restless and useless, sitting

there in the growing dusk. She wanted to be comforted, but there was no comfort.

Except the music. That never died, or went away to remote places, or said unkind

things.
My, what a morbid mood I am in,
she thought, finding something quite

comforting in feeling wretched. With a great effort, she stood up, went into the

bedroom, and fetched her little harp from where it stood in the corner of the room. She

found another hanky, too, because she suspected she was not really finished with her

crying.

Returning to the living room, she removed the cloth case from her instrument and

started tuning it. Margaret realized she hadn't taken it out in a couple of weeks, that she

had neglected her music in the press of her studies at the Tower. She hadn't recorded

any new music for Dio in almost a month! Not that her sleeping beauty of a stepmother

was going to complain, but if she
could
hear the music, she must be getting tired of it

by now.

Margaret warmed up with a few simple scales, readjusted the tuning, and started to

play randomly. The cascade of notes was sweet to her ears. After several minutes she

found herself picking out one of her favorite pieces, Montaine's
Third Etude.
It had

originally been intended for the piano, and she had adapted it to the harp as part of her

honors program at the University. It was complex enough

to engage her attention, but sufficiently familiar to offer her no real challenge.

Still, after two playings, she started to do some variations, as if the exercise demanded

it. Margaret noticed what she was doing in a distant, abstract way, noting that she had

just turned one of the themes on its head in a way she had never done before. It was

just the sort of play that went on in Ivor and Ida Davidson's house in the evenings.

They always had several students living in the large house just outside the confines of

the Music School. She did not think of the house often, for when she remembered

University, she almost always thought of the .dormitories where she had spent her first

rather miserable year, before Ivor had heard her singing in the library and helped her

find something that gave her life a direction and meaning. It brought back a simpler

time, a happier time for her, when there had been no complications, no death, no

uncertainties about her life.

As she played, Margaret found herself remembering Ivor's funeral in Thendara, and

how many of the members of the Musicians Guild, who had never even met him, had

carried his coffin to the graveyard and offered their songs. She had sung that day, but

now her voice seemed stilled, as if her grief could not be vocalized. Ivor was old and

Domenic had been young. That was the difference.

Her fingers played across the strings, and she found the dirge she had sung for Ivor that

day emerge from the harp. It was a fine piece of music, twenty-eighth century

Centauri. It was a sad thing, but there was a feeling in it of hope that began to ease her

pain a bit.

Barely aware of what she was doing, Margaret stopped playing the dirge and began to

pluck another tune from her harp. After several minutes, she realized that she did not

know the piece at all, that she was making it up as she went along, thinking of the little

boy taken untimely, of all the things he would never experience. It was a strong song, a

piece that moved her even as she was creating it. And it was her own, not borrowed

from another! Her mind, so well disciplined for years, observed the composition and

found it good. Margaret rarely created original work, and she allowed herself to rejoice

in the music that flowed from her fingers, uncritically for once. It had, she noticed,

some-

thing of the sound of the river as she had ridden beside it a few hours before,

something of the rushes waving in the breeze, and the call of some songbird she had

heard without really noticing.

Margaret was so deep in the music that she did not hear the front door open, and was

unaware she had a visitor until she came to a halt and heard the soft sound of a throat

clearing behind her. She turned abruptly to find Lew Alton standing in the entrance to

the parlor, a light cloak draped over his arm. He wore a rather shabby riding tunic, and

his silvered hair was tousled.

"Father! How long have you been standing here?" She searched his face, suddenly

tense, trying to discern his mood as she had when she was a child. Then Margaret

realized that she no longer had to do that, that this Lew Alton was quite a different man

from the one she remembered. He no longer drank himself into despair, nor raged like

a beast. But the habits were long-standing, and it was hard to completely trust the man

she had begun to know in the past few months.

"I have no idea. I was so entranced by your music that I lost track of time. What is it?"

Lew smiled slowly, as if the movement was strange, new to him, and his eyes gleamed

with interest.

"I don't know—I just made it up." '"Well, I certainly hope you can remember it, for it is

quite splendid."

"Oh, yes. I was scoring it as I went along."

"You make it sound so simple," Lew said, setting his cloak aside. "I am always rather

awed that you can remember so much music, but you never told me you could

compose." He sat down across from her, searching her tear-stained face.

"I don't, much. Not like Jheffy Chang, or Amethyst."

"Who?"

"People I knew at University. Jheffy composed all the time, and he and Am used to

have a kind of ongoing contest when I lived at Ivor's house. It was terrific, because

they were completely unself-conscious about it. Music, new music, just seemed to leak

out of their bodies, all the time. I never had that ability, which is a good thing, because

if

I had, I would never have ended up becoming Ivor's assistant."

"Why not?"

"Father, you don't ask a racehorse to pull a plow, do you? Or expect a drayhorse to run

a race?"

"Are you calling yourself a plowhorse, daughter?" He sounded stern, yet playful at the

same time.

"Musically, yes, I am. I am good enough to imitate others, to interpret, but I am not

particularly original or creative. Or, at least, I wasn't when I was studying at

University. And I don't really regret it a bit, because the demands of being an original

composer are enormous. Jheffy was something of a prodigy, and he was very vain and

had the social skills of a marmot. Am was better, because she came from a long line of

musicians, and her family hadn't spoiled her as Jheffy's did him. Not that she was a

pleasant person—she wasn't one bit—but she didn't have to prove herself the best

every second of the day."

"I am sorry that my work in the Federation Senate prevented me from watching you