Fool's Run (v1.1) (18 page)

Their bald heads reflected odd colors under the eerie glow of the stage lights. They didn’t talk much; they hardly moved, except here and there when someone would sneak a quick, incredulous glance at the roped-off area which was the stage.

It was worth a glance. The rod-harp, a fish skeleton of copper and glass, stretched across three-quarters of the stage. Behind it, big, translucent cubes were stacked like some alien sculpture. The gases in them were warming, slowly coloring. The Nebraskan was still working with the lights, flooding the air with purple, green, orange. The Magician had painted his face a nebula of swirling colors and was tuning, of all things, a battered old piano. He plunked a final note on it, ran his thumb down the keys in a brisk glissando that made heads move, flashing.

The Nebraskan played an experimental rod. The copper spat electric blue toward a second rod; the glass emitted a high, fiery note. He darkened the stage.

The hall darkened a moment later. Even that brief blackness became strained. The murmurings of the guards ceased; Jase heard the creak of leather, the scrape of metal. Stupid, he thought, remembering the chains and bars still attached to the walls. Stupid, stupid—I’ll have Jeri’s hide for this. Then the place erupted with light.

The Queen of Hearts shook rose-red hair away from a face molded out of pure gold and brought her cube-sticks down. The cube she struck fumed crimson. She built a heartbeat out of crimson and indigo, fire and night, that shattered the Underworld silence like glass. Quasar, her hair shimmering the colors of the rainbow, leaped onstage with a street yell that must have come straight out of the sewers of Lumière Sector. The Magician, incandescent, began a duet between the piano and his body-wires. At the soundboard, the Nebraskan, his lank hair and mustache the color of pearl in the light, monitored the sounds of the body-wires, playing the Magician himself like an instrument. Light kindled in the icy bones of the rod-harp. A line of power crackled down its length. The Scholar wove a glissando of wild, timbreless notes into the Magician’s colors. Quasar’s voice, lean and husky, snapped across the weave:

A rod shattered under sound vibrations; the Scholar kicked the fragments from underfoot as he moved, tapping and caressing sound out of the bones. A second rod snapped with a crack of light. Quasar gave another yell. The Magician vanished into negative light. The stage turned a shadowy, midnight blue. From the dark came a sweet, quiet phrase of ancient music.

Jase clapped, surprised. There wasn’t a lowered head in the audience now; no one could have slept through that. He lingered, wanting to hear more. He saw Jeri Halpren suddenly, grinning at him triumphantly. But he stayed anyway.

The music wandered into warmer realms; the cubes beat a languorous pulse. Quasar sang a love ballad, slow and intimate, that made Jase remember, for the first time in years, himself sitting on a riverbank in Delta Sector, with a childhood playmate, a little girl whose eyes were green as frogs, whose hair, yellow as light, kept blowing across his mouth. The next song led them into cold, glittering space. Sounds drifted in night-darkness: the perpetual static, the murmur of icy metal from some drifting alien ship, a spattering of solar disturbance, the faint, constant throb of awareness: the heartbeat. Color passed to color down the rod-harp. The cubes flared, luminous with star-gas. Sounds gathered toward sound; Quasar’s voice echoed colors shirred from the Magician’s aura. A pattern struggled to emerge from the nebulosity, emerged finally as the Magician was lost in tides of changing hue: the gentle, precise music of the past.

The stage turned rose; the musicians retired to repair their paint. Jase turned back into the orderly silence of the Underworld, still surprised. I’ll have to tell Sidney Halleck, he thought. I didn’t expect to like it.

He returned to the Hub. One more nagging detail and he could go to bed. Everyone, he thought grumpily, is so damned innocent. Even the patroller summoned to the Underworld had no impulse to skulk in his guilt; he wanted to be entertained. If there’s nothing to worry about, he thought, why am I worried? And there’s nothing.

He summoned Aaron Fisher, sat waiting.

There’s nothing. There’s a woman in a band, there’s an old cruiser that was never altered properly, there’s a good and decent patroller who had his back turned to his computer at the wrong time.

There was nothing.

Or else there was something. And whatever it was revolved around Terra Viridian, the most dangerous prisoner in the Underworld.

He dismissed the two guards who brought Aaron Fisher, and studied him a moment silently. He was taller than Jase expected. His uniform was impeccable. His face, lean, rugged, was freshly shaven. He met Jase’s eyes neither warily nor with challenge, but he did seem perplexed. He hadn’t, Jase decided, the vaguest idea why he had been brought under guard into the presence of the Chief of the Underworld. Or else he was capable of motives and solitary actions that overrode completely every limitation of his profession.

“Sit down.”

Aaron sat. Jase leaned back in his chair and said without preamble, “You’re here because we put a routine tracer on a request made through the Library Bank in your district, on your computer, for top-secret information about the Underworld. Why did you request such information?”

Aaron blinked. His face was immobile a moment, probably out of habit. Then the stiffness melted, and he looked simply astonished. “I didn’t.”

“Who else has access to your computer?”

“No one. Sir.”

“No one? Where is it? In a vault?”

“No, it’s—” His voice stopped then. He looked at Jase silently a moment, and Jase thought wearily, There’s something. Aaron glanced down at his hands. When he lifted his head again, the lines at the sides of his mouth had deepened.

“It’s in an old nuclear shelter,” he said. “On the coast.”

“Is that where you live?”

“No. I mean, I have a smaller system where I live, but it’s tied into this one.” He stopped again. Jase eyed him.

“Are you going to make me fish for it?”

Aaron drew breath. There was a hint of color in his face. His eyes had changed; they looked inward to some bleakness. Then his muscles loosened slightly; his eyes ran over the tiny, soundless room. “No,” he sighed. “I guess that would be pretty stupid.”

“I guess it would too.”

“It’s just—I never talked about it. To anyone.”

“I suggest you start.”

The tone of Jase’s voice brought Aaron out of his memories. He met Jase’s eyes squarely.

“I’m a patroller. A good one. The last thing in the world I’m interested in is classified information about the Underworld.”

Jase grunted. “Then what are you interested in, Mr. Fisher?”

“I—” His hands tightened, relaxed again. He spoke quickly, his voice devoid of expression.

“Seven years ago, my wife was murdered. She was a draftee serving in Desert Sector. She was killed by Terra Viridian. She was p—she was pregnant. I’ve been using that system in the bomb shelter for research. I don’t pretend it’s all been legal. I’ve been trying to find Terra Viridian’s sister. I wanted—I wanted to know—” His voice shook, and he swallowed, left Jase staring at his rigid face.

After a moment, Jase found his voice. “Is that why you wanted to go to that concert tonight?”

“What?” He looked bewildered, as if Jase had spoken old-world. His face was white; the backlog of emotions was crowding into his eyes. Jase straightened, a small movement, as though he were trying not to displace air.

“Revenge?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“She—nothing made sense. Why she was killed. I just wanted to understand why. To try to understand. I loved—I loved her.”

Let it go, Jase told himself, with sudden, urgent foresight. Let him go back without knowing. There’s no need. He’s put it into words.

But there was still the matter of the docking procedures. He said carefully, “That’s an unusual thing for a patroller to do, isn’t it? You must have spent a good deal of time at it.”

“I was assigned to it at first. The conspiracy theory, to cover up for the FWG for the trial that sent her here.”

Jase nodded. “I remember the assignment.”

“I told people—people I asked to help me—that I was still on assignment.”

“I see.”

“No one else—”

“I understand. I’m not investigating your prowling through theoretically private information, but I strongly suggest that you climb out of your bomb shelter and find some healthier activity before someone does want to investigate. You may be a first-class patroller, Mr. Fisher. Your records say so, your superiors say so. But I’d like an answer to my question. If you didn’t request docking information, then who was using your computer?”

“No—” He stopped. He stared at the air between them, the color draining from his face again, even, it seemed, from his eyes. Jase laid a hand on his desk.

“Who, Mr. Fisher?”

“Only one—only one other person I know used it. “ His voice was husky. He swallowed, but the ache stayed in it. His face was smudged with some fresh pain, and Jase shifted, sighing noiselessly.

“Who, Mr. Fisher?”

“A woman. I brought her there. She needed information about fixing a cruiser-receiver; it wasn’t working right…”

Jase touched his eyes. Damn it, he thought, feeling the weird stilling of time, as if they had reached the place where it ended its circle and began again. “Damn it!” he breathed, and stood up. Aaron was watching him. All the expression in his face had died. He looked, Jase thought, as if he had just become the man he had been afraid of becoming.

“The concert.” His voice came easily then, without feeling. “You asked me about that. She’s in the band.”

Jase sat down again, weariness dragging at his bones. All on a summer’s day…

Terra stood in front of him.

She lingered in the doorway long enough to turn Jase into stone with her eyes. She carried a laser-rifle. Aaron turned at Jase’s stillness. The vision-drugged, alien eyes moved to him and he stopped moving, stopped breathing. She loosed him, melted back into the shadows, silently as she had come.

Jase, frozen for another fraction of a second, moved finally. He hit the Hub-alert, and snapped at Aaron, who was heading toward the door, “Fisher!”

Aaron, feeling the emptiness at his weapon belt, glanced down, surprised. Jase tossed him a stunner out of the desk. “Be careful!” His monitor screen was flashing different sections of the Hub: offices, computer rooms, storage, officers’ quarters, all quiet, all in shadow. “Where the hell is everybody!” The alarm was whooping in his ears. Men and women began running out of the Rec Room, out of their quarters. The screen showed him a door, welded shut with light.

Then the camera eye over the door exploded.

“God—” Jase breathed. He heard battering in the distance, shouting. Still no one came. He touched the com-light. “Get me Fiori.” His com screen darkened suddenly, eerily, but the com stayed open. “Dr. Fiori? Can you hear me?”

“Chief Klyos! Thank God! She—”

“She’s here in the Hub. Are you hurt?”

“No, but she welded the doors closed. I don’t know what happened. We thought she was falling asleep, we took her out of the bubble and she just went berserk. She grabbed a rifle from one of the guards and started shooting. She shot two guards and the ceiling cameras. She shot the hell out of the Dream Machine. Then she locked us in.”

“I’ll get someone to you, hang on.” The monitor screen showed him the transport corridor and he cursed, stunned. The robot squad was scattered in pieces all down the track. “She’s not human,” he whispered, and wondered, suddenly, if Aaron were still alive. “Fisher!”

“Chief Klyos!” Nils’ voice, taut, pitched high, came over the security channel. “What’s going on?”

“Nils, where are you?”

“D-Level Rec, helping the band pack up. What’s—”

“Terra Viridian is wandering around the Hub with a rifle. Grab Michele and get up here.”

“Jase,” Nils breathed. “Shoot her.”

“The thought crossed my mind. I think she’s blocked off Headquarters. Get a crew to open the transport doors, get Michele in here if you have to fly her around to the Hub-dock, and get me some security!”

“Are you alone?”

“Fisher’s here.”

“Fisher? That’s all?”

“Quit shouting and get in here, any way you can. Oh, and get a crew to rescue Fiori.” He glanced out; the smoky acrylic walls showed no movement in the hall. “Fisher!”

Aaron emerged from the Hub-computer room, crossed the hallway carefully. “I didn’t see her,” he said. He still looked startled, but his hands and voice were steady. “We alone?”

“She’s got us isolated.”

“How—who is she?”

Jase stared at him. Then he said, “I guess you wouldn’t know. You only saw her seven years ago. That’s Terra Viridian.”

For a second Aaron looked at him as if Jase had told him the Earth was flat and the Underworld full of horned devils. Then the blood swept furiously into his face. He whirled so fast that Jase barely had time to get air to bellow. “Mr. Fisher!” Aaron stopped short at the doorway, as if Jase’s voice had tangled around his feet. He didn’t turn back, but he didn’t move forward. He raised one hand, gripped the doorway, holding himself there. Jase saw him tremble with the effort.

He lowered his voice. “Mr. Fisher, if she kills you, I’ll be alone here. I want you alive.”

Aaron said something inarticulate. “You don’t know the Hub. She’s not attacking us for some reason. I want to keep it that way. I saw what she did to twenty armed robots in the transport tunnel. She’s got a gift for staying alive. You wouldn’t fare better than the robots.”

“I can’t—”

“She’ll kill you before you can kill her. I need you alive. She’s hardly human anymore. She’ll kill you, you’ll die, and she won’t know why you came to kill her, she won’t care who you are, or what she did to you, and you won’t care either because you’ll be dead, and she’ll still be alive in here and so will I. If you’ll follow orders now, she’ll be dead in five minutes and we’ll both be alive.”