Fool's Run (v1.1) (29 page)

“When I find a quiet spot with some sun, water and good fishing, I’ll do a little private business, detecting, consultant work. I enjoy working with people…” He took another swallow of beer. A phrase of music drifted into his head, so sweet and precisely measured it seemed he heard it with the Magician’s ear. He recognized it; like a key it unlocked memories. He looked up, half expecting to hear his own voice challenging the phrase.

It was the Constellation Club he stood in, not the Underworld. His hands were linked tightly around the glass. He felt Sidney watching him. He said softly, “That night… that long flight into an alien vision… with a madwoman holding a rifle at my back, with the Underworld paralyzed, while I chased a man who’d invented laws to break, there was a moment when I was compelled to look with wonder at the structure of my own right hand… That’s the moment when I had no choice, I knew what happened.”

“I looked at Aaron,” Sidney said simply. “I knew something extraordinary had to have happened.”

“Aaron… He would have been on my back for the rest of my life if I hadn’t let the Magician go. And what he goes after comes to him.”

“He’s not here anymore,” Sidney sighed. “They transferred him south.”

“I know. I keep an eye on him.”

“They made him a station commander. So I don’t see him or the Queen of Hearts very often. He said it was your fault he got transferred, you got him so many commendations.”

Jase shook his head. “I couldn’t give him enough, not enough to make them forget that when I refused to make formal charges against the Magician, he backed me all the way. That’ll shadow his record. The FWGBI knows something more than routine went on up there during that flight, and it doesn’t want to hear what. An Underworld Chief going softheaded is one thing, but an Earthside patroller with an impeccable record agreeing with everything he says can’t be so easily explained. No matter how many commendations I got him, what they’ll see is that I recommended them.”

“You had an impeccable record too,” Sidney argued.

“Until I said a five-letter word. Funny how that word makes people jumpy…” He washed the bitterness out of his throat with beer, found himself listening again to the Magician’s music.

“Doesn’t he ever quit?”

“I’m surprised he’s not aware that you’re here.”

“Everywhere I go,” Jase said grumpily, “I hear their music. I find the tiniest, darkest hole-in-the-wall bar that looks like it hasn’t been swept since the FWG took over, and wouldn’t recognize sunlight if it fell all over the floor. Someone turns on a video and there they are. Nova.”

Sidney smiled. “You had your chance to stop them. You made them famous, letting them continue the tour.”

“I know. And I could have been a hero, too… pursuing dangerous criminals in the Hub-craft, getting everybody back to the Underworld—the FWGBI would have sent me flowers and a plaque.”

“It would have been easier for you,” Sidney said gently.

“After they quit giving me medals and laughing at me about the Bach, they would have left me sitting up there for the next ten or twenty years. Chief of the Underworld, with no way out. I like the way Earth smells…”

“Aaron and the Queen of Hearts and the Magician have all given me bits and pieces of what went on that night,” Sidney said, getting two more glasses. “That’s all it feels like to me: bits and pieces. Maybe, without the Magician’s vision, it will never seem more than that. But I still don’t understand why you brought Aaron of all people up there at that time on such a vague business. Or why you connected the Queen of Hearts with Michele Viridian. Or where Dr. Fiori sprang from, just in time to move Terra out of her cell. You were a busy man. Why such attention to such small details as a broken cruiser-receiver?”

“Do you ever have hunches?”

“I have a hunch you’re going to tell me a long story.”

“Do you have time?”

“And the beer.”

“It all started,” Jase said, “with a nursery rhyme.”

By the time he finished, the walls of the club had changed color twice, and there was a pyramid of glasses on the bar. The Constellation Club, to Jase’s eye, was Earth at its most harmonious and civilized; even the Magician’s music, he conceded, might sound good to some people.

“Good heavens,” Sidney said blankly. “You mean, I might have been up there playing Bach to a fleet of patrol-cruisers so that they could capture the
Flying Wail
?”

“That’s what we wanted you for. Luckily, the Magician’s vision ended and he turned back before you reached the Underworld.”

“And that’s what you saw, that was your premonition of disaster: Terra Viridian escaped from the Underworld.” He blinked a little, lifted an empty glass, then found the right one. “I remember now. The Magician had a premonition too.”

“The hell he did. When?”

“The night before you and I first talked. He was in here playing the piano. For hours. I’d never seen him like that. He never stopped, he never spoke… He said later he’d been watching the Underworld orbit as he played… It was very odd.”

Jase grunted. He felt the soothing fumes of beer in his brain slowly abandon him, leaving him adrift in the small hours, sleepless and unshaven, in the same stale clothes he’d worn for five thousand miles. Reluctantly, his eyes moved beyond the mellow gold and wood around him, out across the floor to the stage where the Magician still played.

“He doesn’t usually do that, then? Play for hours like that.”

“No.”

“Like he’s doing now.”

Sidney shifted on his stool. “It’s after five,” he said surprisedly.

“He was watching the Underworld orbit?”

“That’s what he said.”

They both watched the Magician, moving tirelessly, frowning slightly in concentration, or like someone deep in an engrossing dream. Jase said without hope, “Maybe he just likes the piano.”

Sidney gathered empty glasses between his fingers, poised them over the floor and dropped them. Jase jumped at the crash. But the Magician’s eyes did not even flicker.

“Mr. Restak!” Jase bellowed, praying for the Magician’s head to snap up, his fingers to tangle on the keys. The Magician, deaf as a hologram, paid no attention.

“It could be anything,” Sidney murmured. “It could be…”

“It could be anything,” Jase said grimly. “Except for one thing. I’m here.”

Sidney looked at him. They rose simultaneously.

Onstage, standing on both sides of the Magician as he played, they were still beyond the periphery of his vision. Sidney touched him, spoke his name. Finally, gently, Jase reached out, caught his left hand in the middle of an arpeggio and lifted it from the keys.

“Mr. Restak.”

The Magician’s right hand halted. He looked up at Jase, pale, his breathing audible, but showing no more surprise than one awakened, but not yet fully awakened, from a dream. He said, “It’s watching us orbit.”

—«»—«»—«»—

[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]

[A 3S Release—v1, html]

[May 09, 2007]

A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0 

Cleaned, re-formatted & proofread by 
nukie.

 v1.1

Reformatted, corrected TOC, fixed broken paragraphs