Free The Enigma Score by Sheri S. Tepper Page A

just go on fretting.’
    ‘I will, Mother. I’ll take everything I need.’
    He went out to the quiet-car and sat in it, too weary to move for the moment, thinking aloud all the things he had wanted to say but had not.
    ‘I’ve always been your good boy, Mother. Yours and Dad’s. I never asked questions. I always did what I was told. If I broke any rules, they were always little rules, for what I thought were good reasons. I loved someone, even though I knew she loved me in a different way. I wanted a child, and she wanted to be my child. Still, I really loved her, and sometimes – oh, sometimes all that love came back to me a hundredfold. And I thought if I went on being good, life would be like that always. Something bright and singing, something terrible and wonderful would come to me. Like my viggy Dad gave me when I was seven. Like the medal I won. Like Celcy the way she was sometimes. Something joyful.
    ‘And instead there’s this thing caught in my throat that won’t go down. Two people dead, and I don’t know why. One I loved, one I hated, or maybe loved, I don’t know which. Maybe the other way around. All the things I thought I wanted … I don’t know about them anymore…. I thought Celcy was everything to me, and yet I didn’t ever take the time to get things growing between us. I thought I loved her, yet right there at the end, I was thinking about the Enigma! Why? Why was I thinking about the music instead of about her?
    ‘What did Lim know or think that was so important to him? What was he trying to prove? What made her go with him? Why did she die!’
    ‘Celcy,’ he cried aloud, as though she would answer him, forgive him. ‘Why, Celcy?’
    The Enigma listened, then it didn’t. Jamieson called what the Watchling did during our last trip a joke. He said it was laughing at us. Maybe it was. Lim said he knew something, something to knock Jubal on its ear….
    He started the car. There was a mount waiting for him at the citadel. The things he was taking with him were already there, packed by the Tripmaster’s own hands into two mule panniers and slung on Tasmin’s saddle. All the supplies a Tripsinger needed to travel alone, a rare thing in itself and one for which the Master General had been evasive about granting permission.
    On the seat beside him was another bag that Tasmin had packed for himself. His favorite holo of Celcy was there, and the note she had written him, and the earring that was all the Enigma had left him of her.
    The toy viggy baby was there, too. He didn’t know why he was taking it, except that it couldn’t go with the house and he couldn’t bear to throw it away.
    He laid his hand on the bag. Through the heavy fabric, Lim’s recording synthesizer made a hard, edgy lump. One puzzle was inside that lump, preserved. His brother’s music. Unexpected and glorious, not what he had thought it would be, not a music the Lim he thought he knew could ever have created.
    The other puzzle was inside himself, in a place he couldn’t reach, something he had to touch, could not rest until he touched …
    Why had she gone there? Despite her terror? What possible reason could there be?
    Whose fault was it? Why had she and the baby died at all?

4
     
    The Ron River stretched its placid length along a gentle deepsoil valley sloping down to Deepsoil Five from the north. In the valley, deepsoil was no more than a mile wide at any point, less than that in most places. There were isolated farmsteads along the Ron, small crofts tenanted by eremitic types, many of them engaged in crop research for BDL. Most were doing research on brou, but some were engaged in improving the ubiquitous and invaluable settler’s brush, a native plant that had been repeatedly tinkered with by the bioengineers, a plant on which both mule and human depended during long journeys and which, it was said, the viggies and other local fauna ate as well.
    Tasmin was greeted variously as he went, sometimes with