Read Online The Enigma Score by Sheri S. Tepper - Free Book Online Page A

was still alive.
    ‘I’m going,’ he moaned. ‘I’m going.’ So a flea might depart a giant dog. So vermin might be encouraged to leave a mighty palace. ‘I’m going.’
    As he turned, he stumbled over something and picked it up without thinking. Lim’s synthesizer. Miraculously unbroken. Tasmin clutched it under one arm as he staggered over the ridge and down the endless slopes to the place he had left the car. Not a single pillar whined or shattered. ‘Joke,’ he repeated to himself. ‘Joke.’
    Then he was in the car, bent over to protect the core of himself from further pain, gasping for air that would not, did not come.

3
     
    He heard his mother’s voice as though through water, a bubbling liquidity that gradually became the sound of his own blood in his ears.
    ‘That acolyte of yours? Jamieson? He was worried about you, so he called me, and we went to your house and found the note she left you, Tas.’ His mother’s hand was dry and frail, yet somehow comforting in this chill, efficient hospital where doctors moved among acolytes of their own. ‘He got a search party out after you right away. They found you in the car, out near the Enigma. You’d been knocked in the head pretty badly. You’ve got some pins and things in your skull.’ She had always talked to him this way, telling him the worst in a calm, unfrightened voice. ‘You’ll be all right, the doctors say.’
    ‘Celcy?’ he’d asked, already knowing the answer.
    ‘Son, the search party didn’t go up on the Enigma. You wouldn’t expect that, would you? They’ll get close shots from the next satellite pass, that’s the best they can do.’ She was crying, her blind eyes oozing silent tears.
    ‘They won’t find anything.’
    ‘I don’t suppose they will. She did go there with Lim, didn’t she?’
    He nodded, awash in the wave of pain that tiny motion brought.
    ‘I can’t understand it. It isn’t anything I would have thought either of them would do! Celcy? The way she felt about the Presences? And Lim! He wasn’t brave, you know, Tas. He always ran away rather than fight. You know, when he was a little fellow, he was so sweet. Gentle natured, and handsome! Everyone thought he was the nicest boy. You adored him. The two of you were inseparable. It was when he got to be about twelve, about the time he entered choir school, he just turned rotten somehow. I’ve never known why. Something happened to him, or maybe it was just in him, waiting to happen.’
    ‘You were right about Celcy’s not wanting to have a baby,’ he murmured, newly sickened as he remembered. It wasn’t only Celcy who had died. ‘I thought she’d become excited about it, but she really didn’t want it.’
    ‘Oh, well, love, I knew that,’ she said sympathetically. ‘You knew it, too. A girl like that doesn’t really want babies. She was only a little baby herself. All pretty and full of herself; full of terrible fears and horrors, too. Afraid you’d leave her as her parents did. Hanging on to you. Not willing to share you with anything or anybody. Not willing to share you with a child. She needed you all for herself. When I read her note, I wondered if she would have been able to go through with it after all. I’m sorry, Tas, but it’s true.’
    It rang true. Everything she said was true, which simply made Celcy’s scribbled confession more valiant. ‘She was going to have the baby because I wanted it. She did things for me that no one … no one ever knew about.’ He breathed, letting the pain wash over and away. ‘When she wasn’t afraid – she wasn’t at all like the Celcy you always saw. I wanted her not to have to be so … so clinging. But I loved her. I got impatient sometimes, but so much of it was my fault. I never took the time with her I should have, the time to make her change. I just loved her!’
    It came out as a strangled plea for understanding, and his mother answered it in the only way she could to let him know she knew