Friend Singer, Cheeirilaq said, poking a mandibled head through the hatchway with fine disregard for decompression risk, can you perhaps . . . turn it down somehow?
“I can . . . render the hull less elastic,” Singer said dubiously. “That will lower the amplitude of the vibrations. It might raise the frequency to uncomfortable levels.”
“Be expedient,” I said. “Just do it.”
A faint shudder of separation rang the Prize’s hull like a stroked glass bell as the sound hammering all of us faded somewhat. I stared up at the dome in time to catch a glimpse of two silvery motes surrounded by minuscule white coils sweeping away from us, headed outsystem. A moment later there was a coruscating blur as they folded space-time and were gone.
“What the Well was that?” Connla asked. “What’s that that just left the ship?”
“It’s a tiny little drone. Two tiny little drones,” said the closest constable.
“A couple of probes going back the way we came, I warrant,” I said tiredly.
“Shit,” said Connla eloquently. “That fucking pirate. Letting her friends know we’ve arrived.”
Cheeirilaq waved antennae. The good news is that we now have a better idea of Farweather’s whereabouts. Constable Grrrs, with me.
It vanished out the hatch, and Grrrs was right behind it. I wanted to be in hot pursuit as well. I longed to be with them, going after Farweather. I wanted to shout “Watch for traps!” as they scrambled out the door. But of course, of all the beings on the ship, Grrrs probably needed the warning less than any except for Murtaugh, and Murtaugh wasn’t going to be running after anything for a while, no matter how much they might want to. So I just wished Grrrs luck, from little blue hooves to quivering antennae, and forced myself to let it go.
“That singing.”
“Yes,” Singer said. “I am confident that you are correct and that it’s an attempt at communication. The problem is, what is it saying? And if it is, say, a passphrase—how do we give them the countersign?”
“And is it a welcome,” Connla said, “or a warning?”
“I’m going to go with warning.” I was still standing closest to the windows, so I was the first to notice that there was more light emerging from that dim red star suddenly. I pointed. Singer drew Connla’s attention as well, and my shipmate crossed to stand at my elbow. I couldn’t get used to all this moving in two dimensions and how awkward it was.
Bushyasta was still cuddled into the crook of my arm, but at least she’d stopped shaking when the noise abated somewhat. She’d probably replace it with tiny, mellifluous kitten snores presently.
Singer hit the magnification. Connla and I stood shoulder to shoulder and watched the night unravel.
Hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, the enormous constellation of objects we’d come all this way to investigate began to peel itself apart. Not all at once. But starting at the point closest to the Prize, and moving around the sphere in a stately ripple, the glassy charcoal-colored plates of the top orbital shell peeled off like a fruit skin and zoomed toward us. I stepped back involuntarily as the dull, grimly red sun extended a searching finger comprised of myriad comparatively infinitesimal scales out toward us.
“Yup,” Connla said. “That looks aggressive to me.”
“Maybe they’re just coming to say hi?”
“Figure the odds,” Singer said.
I refrained from pointing out that figuring the odds was his job. Instead, I said, “Do you think they’re asking for a countersign?”
“The code?” Singer asked. “That could be what it’s meant to give us, right? If it’s not just a string of words.”
Connla said, “Assuming this is all sort of some plan. And not a random sequence of coincidences we’re fitting to a pattern.”
“If we were led here,” I retorted, “I’m going to assume it was for a purpose. Singer, about that code—”
“I’m not entirely sure it is a code,” he said. “Or if it is, that we have the right key. I ran the scan through every permutation I could think of; brute force operations where cleverness failed. Counting forward, counting backward. Offsets and reversals. It doesn’t give me anything but strings of nonsense. And moreover, the whole mess is problematic because frankly, some of the integers that would seem to indicate which word on the page to use are higher than the number of words on any page! I tried various ways of compensating for this, such as counting through again—several times, if needed. I tried counting onto the next page. I tried counting to the end of the page and counting back, fan-fold style, I tried—” He made a sound like an exasperated sigh. “That list of words was the best I could manage. At least they seem thematically linked.”
“And here we are around a star, and there is music,” I reminded.
“There must be more to it, for the pirates to put so much effort into retrieving the data, however.”
“Did you try counting letters?” Connla interrupted.
“Letters. No, I did not consider that as a parameter. One moment please.”
While he ran that, I looked at Connla. “We’re taking a pretty wild guess here. Even assuming that the book Niyara gave me has any bearing on the string of numbers Farweather had memorized—even assuming they go to the same code! Connla. How did the Freeporters wind up with functional Koregoi gravity?”
“That one’s easy,” he said. “You told me about the marker buoy, for one thing. And for another, we’re not the only people who can salvage a wreck, and they obviously spend time in places that aren’t as picked clean as our usual haunts.”
“Okay. Fair. How did the Freeporters know to go steal the Koregoi senso that the Jothari were refining from the Ativahikas? And how long have they been working on this plan, if Niyara was in on it back when I was . . . nineteen?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He turned back to the window. “I can guess that they knew about the senso from . . . from that history you discovered, about how the Jothari were navigating to begin with. I don’t know if we’ll ever know the rest of it. But I do know one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Somebody in Freeport space knows the answer, and they have a hell of a story to tell.”
? ? ?
“It’s a tune,” Singer said, in a tone of voice that made me think he’d be hitting himself upside the forehead if he had hands.
“A . . . song.”
“Yes. Whoever crafted the code was extremely clever. Not only does the code seem to correspond to words, but if you interpret it backward, it also corresponds to a series of letters and spaces. These letters and spaces seem very likely to indicate musical notes, in one form of Terran notation. I am assuming that when the same letter is repeated without spaces in between, that is an indication of the duration of the note. So four Es would be an E whole note, and two would be an E half note, and so on.”
“Brilliant!” I said. “So you can sing it?”
“There are complications.”
“. . . Of course there are.”
“I have no idea what sort of time signature we’re dealing with here. Or if the pitch of the notes matters, as the same letter can be used to signify a number of different absolute frequencies that bear a particular relationship to one another, which is to say that the interval is defined as the ratio between two sonic fre—”
“Singer,” I said. “Please assume that Connla and I both have the same ability to parse musical theory as this cat here.” I demonstrated Bushyasta, who wasn’t quite snoring yet but was purring in her sleep.
“Cut to the chase?” Singer asked.
“Cut to the chase,” I confirmed.
“I’m going to have to experiment.”
“Right.” I gestured to the windows. “Experiment fast. Because those look like countermeasures.”
“I shall endeavor to. What are you going to do in the meantime?”
“Help the constables hunt Farweather.” I glanced at Connla. “And I guess we can start preparing for the worst by battening down the cats.”
? ? ?
Right. This is where busywork came in handy. When you’re facing down something bigger than you are, that you can’t do anything about, and you’re waiting for your shipmate to finish a series of possibly life-or-death experiments in carrying a tune, you need to keep . . . well, busy. And thinking about it isn’t helpful, because there aren’t any immediate solutions, and thrashing just to be doing something would make it worse. And dwelling on it isn’t going to accomplish anything except for making you miserable.
So you try to keep yourself out of trouble until the time for action comes, because what else are you going to do?
It’s a theory, anyway. I wonder how often it worked, back in the olden days, before rightminding?