Fool's Run (v1.1) (2 page)

He dropped the towel and drank beer, his fingers colder than the glass. He felt it then: the sudden drag of sleeplessness, the chilly dampness of his body, which had pursued music with energy and passion for four hours without him. Sidney was still regarding him curiously.

“You don’t remember what you were thinking about.”

He shook his head, yawning. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“Something must have triggered it,” Sidney said with gentle insistence, and the Magician felt the tug of Sidney’s mind, brilliant, generous and painstaking, toward the scent of a musical mystery. Such things were his career, his passion, and the Magician stirred his own weary brain to give him something valuable.

But there was nothing: the smoothly revolving chip of light and shadow against deeper shadow, the slow rhythm against which he had ordered his playing…

“Just…” He gave up, shaking his head again. “I’m sorry.”

“There was something.”

“Yes. But there’s no context.”

“The B-flat.”

“It was slightly out of tune. That’s all.” He said again, “I’m sorry.”

“You’ll remember,” Sidney said tranquilly. “I don’t believe anything is ever really lost. Not a note of it. I think we dwell among the echoes of all the music ever played just as surely as we dwell among our ghosts. No instrument is ever obsolete; someone is always born to play it. You play music hundreds of years older than you are; it lingered for that long in the air, beyond all the noises of the world, until you heard a fragment of it, between noise and noise, an intimation of its existence. Then came the quest for it. The hunger.”

The Magician, lulled into a pleasant half-trance by Sidney’s voice, was jarred by the word.

He lifted his eyes from his shadow on the oak.

“Hunger…” His face seemed vulnerable suddenly, undefended by experience, open to suggestion.

“I’m just rambling… thinking about the point where things begin.”

“Where what begins?”

“The search for anything loved, desired, sacrificed for. What possessed you, for example, to learn those millions of notes when you were young?”

“No—”

Sidney was silent, puzzled by the Magician’s intensity. “What is it?” he asked finally. The Magician heard him from a distance.

“Something,” he whispered.

“What? Are you remembering?”

“No. You said it. Your words. Something begins.” He was still again, his body tense, listening to the words in his head. Slowly the lines of his face changed, became defined, familiar. The beer focused under his eyes; he drained it. Sidney poured him another.

“A ghost was nesting along with the mice in that piano and crawled out into me tonight, gave itself a good time for four hours, then crawled back to bed. There’s your answer, Sidney.”

“What,” Sidney objected, “was a seventy-five-year-old ghost doing playing Hanro’s ‘Cocktail’?”

“Then Aaron is right. I am demented. I’ve been here too long.”

“Nonsense. You’ve only been here five years.”

The Magician eyed him quizzically. “Five years. Which is three years longer than you’ve kept any other band here.”

“I can’t help it if Nova is the only band besides Historical Curiosity I can stand listening to after six weeks.”

The Magician smiled. “In vino veritas, as the Scholar would say. Famous club owner admits he would rather drink flat beer than listen to the music he pays for.”

“Think how much Nova has improved since you came here. In spite of the fact that you switched cubers after I hired you.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did.”

“Not since we came here.”

“No. The cuber before the Gambler. The first time I heard you in—where was it? That place that looked like a morgue, with coffins for tables.”

“Oh. The Marble House.”

“Yes. The cuber with the heart-pins all over her hair.”

The Magician nodded, his face growing reminiscent. “The cuber with the face of gold… She played with us for two years, until you hired us.”

“Why did you let her go?”

“I couldn’t keep her. She was too good… Last I heard, she was doing a Sector tour with Alien Shoe.” He swallowed beer, still remembering. “She was young, too young to be that good. By the time I met her, she’d played in bands all over South Suncoast Sector. She came north on impulse, she said. She walked in off the street, sat in with us, and I wouldn’t let her go. She was the best cuber I’d ever played with… Now I think Nova might be good enough for her. But—” He stopped the thought abruptly, drank more beer instead. Sidney finished the sentence for him.

“But you’re only a club band.”

“I’m not complaining,” the Magician said mildly. “What other club owner would put up with my playing all night, and then pour me beer for breakfast?”

“Think nothing of it,” Sidney said graciously. “But if you could consider making a habit of this, I’ll sell tickets.”

The walls flickered around them at the changing hour. The chartreuse heated to a vibrant orange that caused them both to duck over their beers.

“Lord,” Sidney said painfully. “I had no idea what goes on here at this time of the morning.”

The Magician swallowed most of the second beer, then stretched, pleasantly groggy. “I’d better check the stage, make sure everything is off.”

“Take your body-wires off,” Sidney suggested; the Magician felt the neck-ring then, and freed himself, methodically rolling wire as he crossed the floor.

He covered the piano. The Nebraskan, his lanky, drawling sound man, had put everything else to rest. He stood a moment, frowning at the clutter, expecting to see something, but not remembering what. He touched the piano, reassured by a familiar curve. Then he leaped down from the stage, joined Sidney, who was washing their glasses. Sidney wiped them, put them in place, then glanced fondly over his domain, readied for another night.

“But first,” he murmured, reminding himself, “a message from the Underworld.”

The Magician stared at him, felt the hair lift at the nape of his neck. He saw it again: the twisted rings, light and dark, journeying soundlessly in and out of the Earth’s shadow. The intimation shuddered lightly through him: a psychic quake. Then it was over, past, and he could speak.

“The Underworld,” he whispered. “That’s what I was doing while I played.”

“What?”

“Watching it.”

Jason Klyos glared at his reflection on the bathroom wall. Eleven years in this floating pretzel and you’re still trapped in the same damn mirror. When are you going to break out of here, Klyos? When? He touched a com-light beside the mirror and ordered, “Coffee. Hot and fast.”

“Yes, sir.”

He leaned closer to the mirror, studied the capillaries in his eyes. His dark hair was receding year by year like a slow tide. Up here, it didn’t matter. Up here—

The com signaled, two gentle, musical tones. He slapped at it irritably. “What? Speak.”

“Sir, Jeri Halpren.”

Jase grunted, wondering what he had done to deserve Jeri’s voice before he had had his coffee. Jeri Halpren was the Underworld’s FWG-appointed Rehabilitations Director; he had fake hair, fake teeth and he snapped awake in the morning full of missionary zeal, which he strove to impart to Jase before his own brain had crawled out of dreams. I remember, he thought. I’ve been putting him off. Three meetings delayed. Something to do with… art?

The face in the mirror looked martyred, as if its owner had stepped into something noxious.

“Sir,” Jeri Halpren said reproachfully. “You promised you’d see me this morning. I know you don’t like to be bothered with Rehab matters, but you told me yesterday to schedule this call. It’s on the roster for ten hundred hours—”

“What call?”

“I told you—”

“No, you didn’t.” He held his hand underwater, ran it over his face. For no reason at all the face of a girl he had known twenty-five years before crossed his mind. He smelled the soap and sunlight in her hair, and found himself smiling. “Oh. Yes, I do.” All those protein-head scientists are wrong, he thought. Time isn’t a circle or a straight line. It’s a smell bottle. You catch a whiff here, a whiff there… “Yes,” he said, interrupting Jeri. “Yes, yes, yes. I’ll authorize the call. Who is it I’m supposed to talk to? Oh, never mind, tell me later. I’m in the bathroom.”

He cut off Jeri’s flurry of protests and immediately the com sounded again. “Hell’s bells,” he fumed. “Can’t you wait until I reach the office?”

“Sir—”

The door alarm buzzed, then lit, going through its triple ID scan.

“Voice ID 246-859-7. Johnson, Samuel Nyler. Status—”

“Sir, it’s your coffee!”

“Come in!” Jase bellowed, and the locks snapped back at the sound of his voice. He took a deep breath, smelling Time again: wind, and a house with a door that didn’t talk back.

Johnson, Samuel Nyler, bleary-eyed and immaculate, set the coffee tray on the table. Fresh coffee. Not black plastic dispensed from a vein in the wall. That’s all it amounts to, he thought.

That and the privilege of introducing myself to artistic geniuses. Of the two niggardly rewards he much preferred the coffee.

“Sir,” the com on the table said. It was his Deputy Chief, Nils Nilson. He was just going off duty; his voice sounded tired. Jase liked him, so he toned his own voice down a few decibels.

Nils’ great dream in life was Jase’s job; Jase’s dream was to give it to him. But the wheels on Earth that turned over spacers’ fortunes were oiled by the endless perversity of the FWG bureaucracy. Because Jase wanted Earth, they’d keep him in space forever.

Because Nilson would do an excellent job of running the Underworld, they’d find someone who couldn’t, to replace the mummified Jase.

“What is it, Nils?”

“I’m sorry, sir. There’s a Dr. A. Fiori calling from New Horizon. He won’t talk to anyone but you.”

“Oh, for—what does he—tell him to go to hell.” He gulped coffee. The com chuckled. “All right. Tell him I’ll talk to him. When I’ve reached the office. Not before. Who is he anyway?”

“Equipment salesman, I think.”

“What does he want?”

“A lifer.”

“Tell him to stand on his head.”

“I’ll tell him,” Nils said, yawning.

The room was silent. Jase drank his coffee warily. He daydreamed a moment. Bacon and hot biscuits. Lose thirty pounds when I get back to Earth. If. Maybe even a face-job. Nose not so bad. Change eyes
brn
to
grn
. Hair. Fifty-six, Chief of the Underworld. Lots of credit, nowhere to spend it up here. Request Sundown Sector. Beaches. Sun. Or Archipelago Sector.

Warm blue water. Maybe I’ll just resign… But he knew he never would, just as he knew the Underworld would never release him. Perversity.

In the office half an hour later, he read the shift reports on his console screen, while Nils, at his own desk, completed the night log. Their office was in the Hub of the Underworld, the circular fortress at the center of the rings, connected to them by two spokes: one for transport; the other holding water lines, generators, the main greenhouse. The Hub spun to its own gravitational needs. It housed the vast central computer, communications, a small armory, the chief officers’ quarters, its own kitchens, greenhouse and generator. It even contained a tiny dock, with one smallcraft always in readiness. In fifty years, the smallcraft had been replaced twelve times but never used.

The office, for a few moments, was soundless. The grey carpet was spotless. There was no dust even between the console keys. The air smelled strange. Jase, distracted, found himself taking short, tentative sniffs. What odor was it?

Ward 14BL. No incidents
.

Ward 15AD. No incidents
.

Ward 14CL. Accident report, Ward Officer P. C. Lawson. Prisoner D186521C1: superficial hand burns from contact with cell shield. Treated Infirmary Ward F. Returned to cell 5:47 GTE.

Nothing. The recycled, purified air smelled of nothing. “Christ,” he muttered, and Nils’ fingers stilled on his noiseless keyboard.

“Sir?”

“Nothing.” He tapped at his own keyboard, scanned a list of security officers and dock guards for the next shift. Then a report on incoming cruisers and their prisoners. Then he okayed a request for two cruisers in the L1 vicinity, and his meal-menu for the next day. Then he read Nils’ report. Nothing. Nothing.

“Good. Good.” He wanted to say: “I’m so bored I could eat carpet.” But in the face of Nils’ frustrations it seemed cruel. So he said instead, “I’m going to try another transfer request.”

Nils’ habitually serious expression relaxed. “Where to this time?”

“I don’t know. The south pole.” He pushed the message-key.
Halpren
, the screen said.

Again:
Halpren
. Then:
FWGBI
. “Who called from
FWGBI
?”

“Darrel Collins.”

“Mm. He wants us to throw some lifer into solitary and stick pins under his nails for information, I bet. Or it’s a court-gambit with some temp.”

“You could ask him,” Nils said mildly, and Jase smiled.

“I could. I will.”

Nilson, his own shift finished, didn’t move. For a moment the air was tranquil. No lights burned in it, no voices caused tremors. Jase moved to the front of his desk, sat on it. Nils lounged back in his air-chair, sipping a vitamin-shake. He was a lean, rangy, red-haired man whose brain was focused on the Underworld twenty-four hours a day. He didn’t understand Jase’s lack of enthusiasm, but his respect was genuine, and Jase trusted him more than any other man he knew.

“The south pole…” Nils murmured. “Penguins. Tourists.”

“Beats me why you like this place so much.”

Nils shrugged. “It’s not all administrative. We’re the Command Station for all the off-world patrol stations. I guess I like pushing buttons, sending cruisers out, getting them back with lawbreakers, sending them back to Earth, reading the trial reports, getting prisoners back again, putting them where they belong—When I was a kid I had the cleanest desk in school. There wasn’t a speck of dust on my rock collection. There were no fuzz balls under my bed.”

“Is there a point to this?”

“You asked. I like things tidy. All the bad guys in their cells, and me without dust, grime or blood on my hands. I had enough of that Earthside.”