by Steven Brust
She led me off down the street.
Intermezzo
I was feeling very thirsty
After eating salty grub
When lady luck directed me
To Mrs. Rockett’s pub.
“Mrs. Rockett’s Pub,”
words by Tommy Makem,
music Traditional
“Good afternoon, Mr. Feng.”
“Hmmph.”
“I’ve completed work on the Unit. How goes the, uh, that is, are you—”
“The overlay hasn’t been done yet, so you can relax. Tomorrow. What about the Unit?”
“I’ve tested all the mechanical functions. I’m leaving a set of repair assemblers in a floater in the basement. They will keep the equipment running as long as the integrity of the floater is—”
“I’ve studied elementary biology. What else?”
“The various nexus points are programmed into the DNA of the assemblers, and hence into the Unit itself. The power for each shift, of course—”
“I know. What about the rest of it?”
“Rest of it?”
“What does the Unit look like, idiot?”
“Oh. Ummm, as you know, we have—”
“Don’t tell me what I know. What does it look like?”
“We used a bar and restaurant motif.”
“That sounds good.”
“We’ve used all the information about Earth that you supplied us with. It was quite extensive. I think the restaurant will blend in nicely.”
“Good. How will it determine location?”
“Huh? As I said, the nexus—”
“No, precise location. Blending in, and—”
“Oh. Between departure and arrival, we have enough local time—between one point six four and two point zero nine seconds—for the squirmware to analyze local parameters to—”
“Will you shut up?”
“Huh? But you asked—”
“I know all that. I want the algorithm.”
“Oh. Sorry. I don’t know it. You’ll have to find someone who works with the—”
“Never mind. I’ll find out later. I take it you’re going to decorate it.”
“Yes. Period, of course.”
“I hope.”
“We’ll do our best. Ummm, we’re putting a plastic banana over the door to the outside, and a ‘Do the Job’ sign in the kitchen, if that’s all right.”
“That doesn’t sound like it’s pushing believability too much.”
“I hope not, sir.”
“Don’t call me sir.”
“Sorry, Mr. Feng. Is there anything else we can do for you?”
“No. If the Unit will blend in, and the assemblers will keep it working, I’ll find someone to verify the squirmware, and the rest is just luck.”
“And skill, Mr. Feng.”
“Heh. Care for a fortune cookie?”
“A what, Mr. Feng?”
“Never mind. Do the Job.”
“Do the Job, Mr. Feng.”
Chapter 5
As each day becomes another day,
Each year another year,
I’d trade a year in heaven
For a day with you, my dear.
“Another Time and Place,”
Dave Van Ronk
Someone tried to kill us.
I was told that right outside New Quebec was a series of natural caves hollowed out over the course of eons by the Quebec River, and that the hills overlooking the city had a sunflower-like plant that bloomed all day all year-round, and grew so thick you’d think you were wading in sunlight when you walked through the meadows.
I was told that New Quebec was founded by explorers from the Winnipeg Dave, which still stood in what was now the center of town, and that the Town Hall built from its remains was considered an architectural masterpiece. I’m told that the Science and Agriculture Building was a combination of living space, office space, greenhouse, and outdoor park, with each part blending into the others, and was one of the things that give New Quebec its personality.
As I said, I’m told these things, but I haven’t seen them, because they weren’t the sort of things Souci showed me. Instead, she brought me to a little bar called Nanette’s, on Champlain, where you could get a cheap drink and find a rare and delightful mixture of every stratum of New Quebec society, from panhandlers to lawyers to merchant seamen. She took me to a shop whose name I can’t remember where they sold anything and everything having to do with the sense of smell, and I bought amber in a small wooden box, and I bought Souci some cologne she liked, just because I felt like it and could afford it.
Whatever the shooting was, it wasn’t a fluke.
She took me to a club called En Avant, where someone famous had gotten his start. Her eyes glittered just a bit as she spoke of him, but I had the distinct feeling that she didn’t have the hots for him, she had the hots for fame and success. The place was nearly empty, so we climbed onto the stage (a five-foot riser) and walked around, listening to our feet echo. That was fun.
There are things I’ve been ignoring that I can’t ignore any longer.
Later she took me to a restaurant with an Italian-sounding name where they specialized in pastries, and we split a meat pie, then each had dessert—mine was a chocolate mousse torte that I’ll remember as long as I live.
As we left, I said, “Nice town.”
She nodded. “I thought you were not from here. When did you arrive?”
I came back to reality. I cleared my throat and said, “A few days ago.”
“Visiting?”
“We just came in to play some music at Feng’s.”
“That’s all?”
“Pretty much.”
“Oh.” Then casually, “Going to be here long?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe not more than a month or two.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“All right. Where are you from?”
“Originally? Off-planet.”
“Really? I’ve never been off-planet. Where?”
“Am I from?”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s gone now.”
“Gone?”
Ooops. “Well, you can never really go back.”
“What do you mean?”
“When you leave something and then come back to it later, you find out it’s changed into something else.”
“Deep,” she said ironically.
I winced. “Well, all right, I slipped. I originally meant something a little more practical than that.”
“Oh?”
I studied her for a moment, then said, “Why do you care?”
She shrugged. “You’ve made me curious. Where are you from that doesn’t exist anymore?”
I licked my lips. “Would you believe the Earth?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“Would you expect me to believe it?”
“No.”
She looked at me, but only said, “Where do you want to go?”
“Back to the apartment?”
“I don’t really want to see what’s his name, Tom, right now. How about my place?”
“Sure,” I said. “Which way is it?”
“Same direction as yours, about a half mile closer to the river.”
After a while, I said, “Thanks.”
“For what?”
“Showing me the town. Helping take my mind off things like bombs and bodies.” She nodded. I said, “It all feels so unreal—the killing, bomb scare, all that. I keep expecting to wake up.”
She nodded. “A friend of mine had her husband die, and she said it was like that. She was walking around knowing it had happened but not really feeling it, and knowing it would all hit her, and wondering when and how hard.”
I said, “That’s it, yeah. It’s been like that since the first time we jumped, and that was more than two years ago.”
“Jumped?”
I caught myself. “Never mind.”
“No, tell me about it.”
“You won’t believe me.”
“So?”
I had lost count of the slips I’d made to her. The events of the last day had shaken me, but I knew myself well enough to know I couldn’t make that many by accident. So all right. I started from Earth in the late 1980s and worked forward from there.
Twenty-four hours later Tommy and I were sitting next to the window in the back booth at Feng’s. Jamie and Rose were gossiping with Libby in the taproom while we waited for our food to arrive. I realized that I’d be seeing Souci again in less than four hours and my heart leapt. I cleared my throat and said, “So, how are things going with Carrie?”
“I think I’m in love,” said Tom.
I said, “Is that what it is? And here I thought you two hated each other.”
“What about you?”
I felt a sudden tension that I couldn’t account for. “I enjoy her company,” I said carefully. “She seems to enjoy mine. That’s pretty much it.”
Tom nodded. He said, “I told Carrie about us.”
“What do you mean?”
“I told her about how we’re from Earth, and keep getting moved around by being nuked.”
“You’re kidding. You really told her?”
“Well, yes and no.”
“What do you mean?”
“I told it like a story, like I didn’t expect her to believe it, and then I just kept filling in details about Old Earth and stuff like that.”
“Do you think she believed you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you care?”
“Yeah.”
“Would you rather she did or didn’t?”
“I don’t know. Except—” He caught my eyes and suddenly looked very earnest, almost angry. “If this place goes, I want her with us.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I understand. I keep wondering if, when we hear the alert, we should try to fill up Feng’s with as many people as we can. But—” I shrugged.
“It’s hard,” he said. “Who do you grab? How do you convince them? We don’t even know where we’re going.”
“It really sucks,” I said. My matzo ball soup arrived. I started to have some, stopped, and said, “I told Souci, too.”
“What?” He looked torn between disbelief and laughter.
I said, “I told it straight, but I said I didn’t expect her to believe me. I don’t know, I just wanted to have told her.”
“You enjoy her company,” he said, nodding sagely.
“Shut up, asshole.”
We didn’t practice again that week. Thursday, a local band whose name translated, according to Eve, to “Pan’s Dream,” came in to audition. Libby asked Tom and me to judge them, and Rose and Jamie and Carrie and Souci were around as well. They were a three-piece outfit with a tall guy with brown curly hair playing flute, a short, dark, long-haired fellow swapping between six-and twelve-string guitars, and a big guy with muttonchop sideburns playing six-string guitar, acoustic bass guitar, and balalaika. We listened for half a song, then Tom turned to me and said, “Jethro Tull.” A few minutes later I turned to him and said, “Hot Tuna.”
Their approach was traditional, and I suspect most of their music was “traditional” for this colony; sixty years is plenty of time to build up a body of music. It had its own style, too, not very similar to the French Canadian music I was familiar with. It seemed to emphasize minor-key verses changing to major-key chorus, like old Slavic folk songs; and had far more complex chord patterns than traditional American, and a lot of switching time signatures from four-four to eight-four and occasionally something in nine or eleven. All of this made their material far more musically challenging than the stuff we did, and they managed to pull it off. I was also grateful that they didn’t do much of what passed for folk music there, mostly interminable, monotonous ballads, like “The Wreck of the Gordon Lightfoot” which went back and forth between two notes for about fifteen minutes.
I sometimes got the impression that Pan’s Dream couldn’t decide what they were about musically, but that made Feng’s just the right place for them. They also surprised me a great deal by breaking into a traditional Irish tune, “Follow Me Down to Carlow,” which they executed with a great deal of musical dash and style, if not much vocal commitment—perhaps because none of them spoke English well. But it charmed the hell out of me.
Souci didn’t think much of them, Rose wanted to play fiddle for them, Carrie wanted to sing with them, Jamie was in awe of them, and Tom and I decided that they were better musicians than we were, even if they never looked as if they enjoyed playing. I told Libby to go ahead and hire them, which she did, giving us the weekend off.
Souci got Friday night off and took me dancing, then Saturday we walked along the Quebec, which was amazing mostly for its lack of insect life. I asked Souci why that was and she just looked at me funny.
She said, “You seem distracted.”
I said, “There’s some stuff happening that’s got me worried.”
“Can you do anything about it?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
“Then don’t worry about it.”
It sounded so easy when she put it that way. I wondered what would happen if I gave it a try. She leaned her head against my shoulder as we walked and my arm fit so well around her waist. Yeah, maybe I could try not worrying for a while.
It was a strange time, that next week—or was it two? Three? A month? Even while it was happening, I had an idea of how strange it was—like being in a dream and knowing you’re dreaming; hoping desperately that you’ll never wake up, knowing that you’ll have to someday. There were things I needed to be doing, and I didn’t do them, and while there were still a few lingering effects from the jump, I can’t use that as an excuse for all of it.
She.
She was the center of everything, for that brief time. None of us in the band felt like practicing, Rich and Eve were off in a library somewhere, and I didn’t want to hang around Feng’s because I knew if I did I’d drink too much. So I spent time with Souci. I can’t tell you everything we did during that strange timeless time, but it was all—I don’t know, fun seems like such an inadequate word.
Dancing? Hell, I think we saw every band in New Quebec. One that consisted of two synthesizer players, trading off different roles not just between songs, but during each song; a three-piece band that sounded like a power trio except their material was taken from old, old, Tin Pan Alley standards; a particularly weird combination of American square-dance tunes and rock with a fifties sound that Souci told me was pretty much the leading edge thereabouts; Souci teaching me dances that had set patterns, which I’d never learned in my life, and then I got to show her the slide and the cathop, and be proud when she turned out to like them.
Shopping? Watching other customers in the big department store and making snide remarks to each other about how they were dressed; juggling oranges at a produce stand; stopping in a Christian bookstore where Souci pretended she was trying to convert me; sneaking away to buy each other the sort of inane greeting cards that I’d hoped had died out with Old Earth.
Drugs? Guilty as charged. Up for two days straight doing speed, where reality became psychedelic in stages so gradual we weren’t aware of it until we realized that we were babbling to each other about the stupidest things; making love standing up in the shower as the two hundred mics of LSD started to come on, then, later, staring in amazed delight at the patterns the rain made on the window; doing shots of tequila and realizing that there were a lot of Old Earth jokes that she hadn’t heard, and watching her dissolve into giggles over the pig with the wooden leg.
She.
She hated Tom, pretty much ignored Eve, got along well with Rich, and seemed to connect with both Jamie and Rose. Sometimes when I was tied up for an afternoon, she’d spend the day with the two of them, and I was pleased that they seemed to get along so well
. I met few of her friends, and at first I thought she was ashamed of me, then I realized that she just didn’t care what they thought, and it was almost more ego inflation than I could stand.
She.
It was only slowly that I discovered how much she was coming to dominate my thoughts and actions. If she was happy, I was happy. If I wanted to do something she didn’t like, such as play “Goin’ Down that Old Dusty Road,” she could take the pleasure out of it, and her scorn pierced like needles.
She.
She had more moods than anyone I’d ever met, and at times I found myself just standing back and watching them: the imp in the bookstore; the seductress who first propositioned me from beneath her eyelashes; the bitch who nearly tore my throat out the second time we argued about Hags disease (which story I’ll skip, thanks); the Star to Be, with her eyes gleaming and her voice calm as she spoke about the future; the personal secretary and valet who helped me figure out my budget, cut my hair, and advised me on clothes that would look good to her without offending my twentieth-century Earth sensibilities; and, very, very occasionally, the warm, vulnerable human being who wanted to be cherished and loved.
She had as many different personalities in bed, too, but those aren’t any of your business, and I don’t think knowing will help your understanding of the strange events I’ve chosen to relate, so they’ll stay here in my heart where I can keep them safe. But once or twice, she’d hold me so tight I could hardly breathe and say, “I’m crazy about you, you know,” as if she couldn’t believe it herself.
I guess maybe I couldn’t believe it, either.
I was sitting in my favorite booth one Tuesday, when Libby signaled me over to her. She was wearing black jeans and a loose pink top that set off her pale skin and brown hair. I said, “What’s up?”
“Not much. The most important man in the world was here earlier.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Only I didn’t realize he was the most important man in the world, so I was serving someone who got here first and I didn’t jump fast enough.”
“Did he complain?”
“Yeah. I told him I was sorry I hadn’t known he was the most important man in the world.”
