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10: Finding Timony
Setting out was the hardest thing I'd done in a long time, because I was leaving the comfort of a loving home, the likes of which I'd never experienced anywhere. Nevertheless, I set forth with my O2 and my staff, and Sam gave me a small pistol with several rounds that had belonged to Hang Me Now. I thought the piece was bad luck, and traded it for a better one (along with a pair of red rabbits I'd hunted) in a Triber market on the rusty slopes.
Passing over the many small adventures, which are common on such wanderings, and tedious to tell—encounters with bandits, falling into cold mountain streams, fighting off the growing number of smallish but deadly animals that are evolving into fearsome predators—I came to my first destination.
I found the resting place of Timony at the foot of a 300 foot vertical drop shrouded in hoarfrost. Looking up the two mile pinkish-gray crags, I thought I could make out the distant pinhead of a turret from which he had sailed in his last minutes of life, and in whose stairway my life had changed forever. To reach his resting place, I had to leave the main road (the same one by which Her Holiness had come to visit us on the eve of her death). I had to painstakingly wander across miles of huge boulders. It was torturous, climbing each one and descending carefully before climbing the next, and at each step I had to be careful not to slip and fall into the cracks inbetween, where if I broke a leg I would simply have to wait for my death. I did manage to acquire, by stealing from a Dome farm, a high-end converter that can take anything containing oxygen, from rocks to ice, and extract breathable air. I didn’t have to worry about my breathing, therefore, which is the bane of Tribers in particuar and Marsers in general.
He was one of the browned husks of which I have spoken. Two clawed paws, a wizened coppery mask of a face without eyes, and a tangle of clothing and airlite parts were all I found on that lonely slope far from human sight. The wreckage and body looked disturbed, but probably from the fearful fall. If the Granistoners had come for him, I know they would have retrieved the entire thing for examination in their forensics lab. The Temple might have had reason to retrieve the body, which led me to an awful thought. Either Chief Brown or the Abbot, or both, would have made such a call, but they didn't. In connection with the murder of a Popess, no shred of evidence would have been too slight to want recovery. So why had they not sent airlites down, or an expedition with shoulder-porters to bring everything up to the Domes? Could it be that the Temple did not want to know what was down here, if anything? Did it mean the traitor was of the Temple, perhaps even the Abbot who had raised me? How little did I know that cold and distant man, I thought as I stepped carefully around the wreckage and the body.
The wind keened softly in that desolate place, as I knelt down and reverently touched his forehead to ask forgiveness. It was icy and leathery to the touch. His teeth shone white, and his lips had pulled back into a blackened grin. I had to dig away fine gravel that had sifted into the places where meat had been among the broken bones and struts. I spent hours sitting there, catching the occasional faint whiff of corpse stench as I pulled more out of the ground. Some of it was stiff and almost impossible to untangle, but I went through every inch of him and his craft. I found a billfold with Royal paper money in it, which I tucked into my belt without another thought. Finally, in the last glimmering of evening light, I found something.
Afraid to light a fire for fear of arousing suspicion up in the Granistons, I huddled in a small cave at the foot of the cliff face. I longed for the warmth I'd found with Sam and Sudie, but the memory was all I had to warm me inwardly, while I managed to pad myself against the frigid night with the thick, hardy mosswort, land kelps, and sagemosses that grow ever more abundantly in the slowly terraforming wilderness.
In the morning light, I was able to carefully unfold the scrap of paperplast that Timony had carried with him. I could see that it was something he had often stared at, for its surface was networked with fine wrinkles. I instantly recognized the six points—the same configuration as on the coin, and in the Holy Mother's journeys. The six points were just that, circles drawn in pencil and filled in, while the seventh point was a square, also filled in. There was no writing, and almost no other marks, for he'd kept his knowledge in his head. I would have expected that the seventh point would be geometrically equidistant from the other six, which would have meant a point or a line somewhere around the middle. Instead, the seventh point was just next to the Temple station in King City on Olympus Mons. Timony must have spent years tracing the journeys of the Holy Mother's wagon train, hoping to find some cue, any clue, however subtle or faint, and finally there it was. I rose slowly and looked for stones to make a cairn so his remains could rest without further indignity. As I worked, slowly and carefully to conserve breath, I thought about it hard. I came to the conclusion that, if Timony had thought it worth chasing that dream, so should I—for his sake, and Sudie's; for all the families who had been treated so harshly by the Free Domers, the Royals, and the Tribers.
The next step of my journey would take me to the Royal Lands atop Olympus Mons.
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