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

Coast where the influences of the star ships coming and going from Splash One and Two kept the style changing. Her current effort was brilliant orange, shockingly eye-catching with her black hair and brown skin, particularly inasmuch as it left bits of that skin bare in unlikely places.
    ‘You’re beautiful,’ Tasmin told her, knowing it was not entirely for him that she’d created the outfit. She took his admiration for her physical self for granted.
    ‘I am, aren’t I?’ She twirled before the mirror, trying various bits of jewelry, settling at last on the firestone earrings he had given her for their fifth anniversary after saving for two years to do so. He still felt a little guilty every time he saw her wear them. The money would have helped a lot on what he was saving for his mother’s medical treatment, but Celcy had really wanted them, and when she got things she wanted, she was as ecstatic as a birthday child. He loved her like that, loved the way she looked in the gems. They, too, glittered with hot orange flares.
    He stood behind her, assessing them as a couple, he tall, narrow faced and towhaired, like a pale candle, she tiny and glowing like a dark torch. Even in the crowded concert hall after the lights went down, she seemed to burn with an internal light.
    He had told himself he would detest the music, and he tried to hate it, particularly inasmuch as he recognized the Password bits, the words and phrases that had cost lives to get at, here displayed purely for effect, used to evoke thrills. Here, in a Tripsinger citadel town, Lim had sense enough not to bill anything as a tripsong, not to dress as a tripsinger and to stay away from the very familiar stuff that anyone might be expected to know. Except for those very sensible precautions, he used what he liked, interspersing real Password stuff with lyrics in plain language. Even though Tasmin knew too much of the material, he still felt a pulse and thrill building within him, a heightening of awareness, an internal excitement that had little or nothing to do with the plagiarized material. The music was simply good. He hated to admit it, but it was.
    Beside him, Celcy flushed and glittered as though she had been drinking or making love. When the concert was over, her eyes were wide and drugged looking. ‘Let’s hurry,’ she said. ‘I want to meet him.’
    Lim had made reservations at the nicest of the local restaurants. None of them could be called luxurious by Deepsoil Coast standards, but the attention they received from other diners made Celcy preen and glow. Lim greeted them as though he had never been away, as though he had seen them yesterday, as though he knew them well, a kind of easy bonhomie that grated on Tasmin even as he admired it. Lim had always made it look so easy. Everything he did, badly or well, he had done easily and with flair. Tasmin found a possible explanation in widely dilated eyes, a hectic flush. Lim was obviously on something, obviously keyed up. Perhaps one had to be to do the kind of concert they had just heard. Tasmin looked down at his own hands as they ordered, surprised to find them trembling. He clenched them, forced his body into a semblance of relaxation, and concentrated on being sociable. Celcy would not soon forgive him if he were stiff and unpleasant.
    ‘Place hasn’t changed,’ Lim was saying. ‘Same old center. I thought they’d have built a new auditorium by now.’
    Tasmin made obvious small talk. ‘Well, it’s the same old problem, Lim. Caravans have a tough enough time bringing essential supplies. It would be hard to get the BDL Administration interested in rebuilding a perfectly adequate structure even though I’ll admit it does lack a certain ambience.’
    ‘You can say that again, brother. The acoustics in that place are dreadful. I’d forgotten.’
    ‘I just can’t believe you’re from Deepsoil Five,’ Celcy bubbled. ‘You don’t look all that much like Tasmin, either. Are you really