Fool's Run (v1.1) (9 page)

“But she was crazy before she shot all those people, or else why would she kill them? Unless she wasn’t crazy, and she deserves to be here.”

“Then something even more terrible happened before that…Terra. Can you hear me? What is the first thing you remember? The very first thing in your life?” The screen changed. They were silent. “Water?”

“An ocean?”

“She’s a spacer,” Dr. Fiori said puzzledly. “There’s no ocean on Mars.”

“It’s not the right color. Doctor, maybe you’d better test her colors again.”

“Sh. Terra. Think back. You were born on a tiny moon circling a planet with no seas. What do you remember? What’s that?”

“Static.”

“From what? Is it the system?”

She touched lights. “No, it’s her. Sort of—a brainstorm, I guess.” They watched the screen.

“Electric blue against black. It’s pretty…”

“Okay. Let’s try another question. Terra. What is it that needs to take form? What is it? Can you show us?”

She spoke from behind him, startling him again, for he had been talking to the screen. “I need to take form.” Her voice was very thin, far away. “I need.”

“What form?”

She was silent; the screen went dark. Dr. Fiori sat down.

“All right,” he said softly, patiently. “Let’s try something else.”

An hour later he was pacing. Terra sat against the bubble-wall, watching him indifferently under half-closed eyes. The image on the screen had barely changed in ten minutes. “What is it?” he demanded. “Did I not ask you the right question? All right. Never mind. Your mind is your locked, secret room; I can’t batter my way into it. I must persuade it open with the right key. I have a million keys, a million words, but only one word is right…” He stopped in front of the screen, stared at the black wall, the shadowy red background. It was fading. “Now what? Reina, what’s she doing?”

His assistant blinked. She checked the monitor screen. “Falling asleep. So am I. What did you say, Doctor?”

“Nothing,” he said penitently. “I’m sorry.”

She frowned. “We’ve all been at it fourteen hours. She’ll get sick at this rate; she’s already thin as a stick. We’ll all start hallucinating.”

He dropped reluctantly into a chair. “All right. Call the guards. I want her back here in nine hours. Tell Ng I want him in your chair in nine hours.”

“Okay, yes, Doctor.” She shut down the Dream Machine and stretched.

“I wonder if we could rig up some way of taping her dreams…”

“I’ll come back myself,” Reina said suddenly. “There’s nothing much else to do in the Underworld. Nat and Pietro have a card game going in the cafeteria with some of the guards. I’d rather watch this.”

He smiled. “All right.”

“It’s interesting. I just keep wondering… something about the colors she sees.”

“What?”

She gazed at the blank screen, still frowning. “There are no cliffs in that Sector. And why is the sky red?”

A handful of colored, viscous drops slowly elongating as they fell. A horizontal line, dark above, light below. Something flickering, out of focus, against a yellow surface. A lightning bolt or a crooked bone frozen in cloudy red. A cave full of colored teeth, a mouthful of jewels. The bent oval…

The prisoner sat once more in the bubble, creating images. Jase had been drawn to watch; he leaned against a wall, his arms folded, eyeing the screen coldly. Dr. Fiori, looking a little less exhausted, swiveled on a stool like a top, monitoring Terra and her incomprehensible thoughts.

“That,” Jase said finally, of something that flowed and rippled itself down into a disturbed surface, “is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. Dr. Fiori, are you sure this machine is working right?”

“I tested it,” Dr. Fiori said. He tapped his head absently. “My own thoughts. Minor variations…”

“Does it bother her if I talk?”

“Look at her. She hardly knows you’re here. You’re not in the vision.”

“The vision,” Jase repeated softly. Life, it seemed to him, was a clutter of visions. Your own, someone else’s, all demanding attention, all interfacing with or rebounding from another stubborn mingling of aspiration and experience. I have a vision of not working here, he thought, that is bumping against someone else’s vision of me working here. My vision nudges his, his nudges mine… While we wait to see whose vision is stronger, the work gets done.

When your vision is so strong you can’t see the world any longer, when you see nothing but what’s in your own head, that’s when you go crazy. He pondered his own thoughts, and added, Or you change the world.

He studied the prisoner, huddled limply against herself, too lost in her own mind even to blink. She can’t even change her socks.

Then she was looking back at him, her eyes direct, smoky, and he felt the skin move on the back of his neck. Shifting his eyes, he saw a man’s face on the screen, dark browed, heavy eyed, grim, on the plump side, its individuality lost in the translation from Terra’s eyes to machine, but his own face.

I’m damned, he marveled. It works.

“Terra,” said Dr. Fiori gently, “can you tell us about the images you’ve just shown us? What do they mean?”

“They mean…” Her voice faded tiredly, returned. “What they are.”

“But what are they?”

“They are what exists.”

“Where?”

She swallowed. Her hands fluttered slightly in the shadows. “They are the messages. They are the doorways.”

“Doorways to what?”

“To the change.”

“Who will change? You?”

“Yes. I.”

Hopeless, Jase thought. But Dr. Fiori seemed pleased.

“When did the images begin?”

“On that day,” Terra said.

“On what day?” He paused, added softly, “That day in the desert?”

Her fists clenched; her head swung back and forth. “No. No. No—”

“Terra.”

“No.”

“Terra.”

“That was in the vision.”

“It was—” He paused again, his mouth open, groping. Reina glanced at him, her brows raised in her poised, polished face. Jase thought, It’s a game to her. Terra isn’t human to her, she’s a puzzle broken into pieces. Nothing like this could ever happen to someone named Reina in a silver jumpsuit, as long as she puts her lipstick on straight and never uses words like initiation in a sentence.

He said aloud, “Premeditated?” Dr. Fiori glanced at him vaguely, as if a chair had spoken.

“Terra. What day, then? What day did the visions begin on?”

“The day the oranges turned red.”

“The day the—Terra, can you show me? What else happened on that day? What were you seeing? Think. Remember. What happened when the oranges turned red? Why did they turn red? Show us.”

Oranges in a blue bowl. Their reflection in a chrome table. The hem of a white curtain above them. A hand, reaching for an orange. A red shadow spilled over them.

“It began,” Terra said simply.

“You must see,” Dr. Fiori said in the cafeteria, over a cup of bouillon. “She is groping for a way out of her craziness. She’s inventing her own symbolic language of change, but she’s afraid to use it, follow it through. She’s afraid to remember what drove her crazy in the first place. What happened on the day the oranges turned red.”

“So it wasn’t the massacre itself,” Jase said politely.

“I don’t think so. Although,” he admitted, “it’s difficult to conceive of a more traumatic event than that. Something outraged her sense of reality, her sense of balance in the world.”

“Are you saying something happened to her that would justify her actions in Desert Sector?”

“No, no,” Dr. Fiori said quickly. “I’m not looking for justifications. I’m primarily interested in the language she’s using, and if it will lead her out of her trauma.” He sipped bouillon, and added, “Terrible things happen to all of us. Most of us find ways to assimilate experience, to adjust to it. We don’t turn bowls of oranges red in our minds. We—You don’t care,” he said accusingly, and Jase, still feeling the polite expression on his face, let it sag finally.

“I guess not,” he said slowly. “She lost me with the oranges. Up to then, I could see a little of what you’re seeing: that the strange images might have protected her from something. But if all this began because of a bowl of oranges, then I think it doesn’t matter where she is—the Dark Ring, New Horizon—she’s simply loony, and you’ll never—” He stopped himself, gesturing. “What do I know? You’re the doctor. I think your machine is incredible, but you’re wasting your time with her.”

“Maybe,” Dr. Fiori said, steaming his face over the hot cup. “Why are you so judgmental about a bowl of oranges?”

Jase leaned back in his chair. “She massacred those people because an orange turned red. That leaves me cold. I can’t have any feeling for her as a human being. I can’t care anything more about her.”

“You did care, then.”

He shook his head. “I never cared. She got what she deserved here—less than she deserved. And yet—”

“And yet.”

“She’s not criminal. There’s no malice, no gain, no anger, no human reason for her to have done what she did. You can’t have feelings for someone that alien. Except maybe fear.”

“Of her? Or of yourself?”

Jase eyed the doctor. The best defense against questions like that, he had decided long ago, was to answer them. “I think,” he said finally, “that peoples’ minds are like houses. Full of bedrooms, cellars, attics, closets, kitchens, elegant living rooms, gardens… Full of doors. By the time you’ve reached my age, you’ve pretty much opened all the doors. You know what closets the monsters are kept in, what ugly thought lives down in the basement, what bloody impulse is behind the attic door. You know, by this time, what they’re worth to you. I’m comfortable in my own house. If someone rings the door bell, I let them in.”

Dr. Fiori put his cup down, smiling. “I didn’t think I’d like you,” he said, “when I first talked to you.”

“Well,” Jase said uncomfortably. “You never know.”

“I think you shouldn’t judge her too quickly at this point. Bowls of oranges don’t make people crazy. There’s nothing wrong with her brain. It’s she who’s making herself crazy. And she’ll tell us why. She can’t speak. Words are terrifying to her. Or too precise, too imprecise, who knows? Or else we have never invented the words to say what she has seen. So she tells her story in a language that is silent, in hope that someone can learn to hear.”

The Magician sat alone in the Constellation Club, listening. Sounds suggested other sounds in his head; the silence surrounding him slowly became layered and textured with music. The walls were indigo. Between three and four in the morning the world was as still as it ever got.

He could even hear the mournful, distant moan of the last foghorn warning, warning. His fingers found the two bass notes on the keyboard between which the note of the foghorn hid; he touched the notes softly, played them against the foghorn, still listening.

His right hand strayed up the treble, a ripple of mist against the brooding bass. In his mind, he heard the rod-harp’s brilliant, restless voice, the thunder of the cubes. The moon-white face of the mist looming against the indigo sky, the welter and crash of tide, the foghorn crying in its private, urgent voice of things invisible, secret, unexpected, that might or might not be within the mist…

A step in the mist dispersed it. Startled, he spun on the piano stool. The dark walls built around him once again. The silence within them was empty. The rod-harp, the cubes on the stage, covered against the dust, had sounded only in his head.

Aaron, in uniform, paused midstep. “Sorry,” he said. “I saw the outer door unlocked. Thought I’d check… You’re here late.”

The Magician nodded, rising to stretch his legs. “We had a band meeting after hours. I stayed later to tune the piano. I got sidetracked, I guess… It’s quiet here at nights. Quieter even than the smallcraft dock.”

“Did I interrupt genius?”

The Magician grinned. “Hardly. I was just listening to the foghorn.”

Aaron crossed the floor, dropped down onto the stage ramp. “It’s a peaceful night,” he commented. “About once a year we get a night like this. No full moon, no brawls, no speeders, no family fights. The muggers and snipers, even the street gangs stay home. You’re the most dangerous man I’ve seen.”

“Demented but harmless,” the Magician murmured. Aaron watched him sound a key, lean into the strings to make a minute adjustment.

“Are you ready for the tour?”

“Outside of the receiver, which has gone berserk, a jammed reflector shield, an unidentified thunk in the plumbing, an ex-con for a singer and a catatonic cuber, we’re ready.”

“Is the Gambler going?”

“He says no. We may have to kidnap him.”

Aaron grunted. “You must know someone.”

The Magician shook his head, tuned another note. “No one good enough. We’re going, though.”

“How? Without a cuber?”

A low G answered him, soft, repetitive. Aaron listened, but the minuscule change in pitch eluded him. He leaned back tiredly on his elbows. A dispatch in his ear made him tense again; the message wasn’t for him. His body stirred anyway, then subsided. He needed a break, and within the indigo silence, he could almost hear music, last night’s, the next night’s, drifting, waiting, on the edge of time.

He caught himself yawning; the Magician stopped sounding an A-flat.

“You look like you haven’t been sleeping,” he commented. Aaron shrugged a little.

“I keep dreaming.” The Magician’s attention had an impersonal quality; he added, as if to himself, “Sometimes I go through cycles of bad dreams… You ever been married?”

“Once.” He chuckled for some reason. “We parted friends. You?”

“Once.” He waited through another note. The Magician’s face was quiet, absorbed. Then the note stopped sounding. Within the silence, all the music suddenly stopped.

Aaron lifted his head, found the Magician staring at him. His breath stopped; he felt the hair on the nape of his neck stir. For a moment a ghost, unbidden, stood between them. The Magician, his face pale, his eyes wide, seemed to see her, seemed to have picked out of the innermost place in Aaron’s brain some sense of his torment. Aaron, frozen under his gaze, waited like a doomed man for him to bring her back with language.