“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.”
TWO
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.”
Jase grunted. “If I didn’t know better, I’d send you to New Horizon for observation.”
Nils tapped his temple. “That’s just it. It’s patrol work by the brain. Battling the forces of evil by computer.”
“A game.”
“I always did like those old video war-games. If I had your job—” He stopped, shaking his head. “I’ll never have your job.”
“I’d give it to you for breakfast if it were my choice.”
“I know.” He swallowed the last of his shake, brooding without rancor. “I watch you. You know that? I watch you a lot. To see why you’re sitting there and I’m here. You know what I think it is?”
“Some idiot in L. E. Central.”
“No. Well, maybe that too. But it’s something I don’t have. A feel for when to cut through the rules. An instinct that tells you how to get to the heart of things. You used it as a patroller, but you can’t use it here, that’s why you can’t stand the job. But that’s why you got the job. Because this place could easily be run by someone with a microchip for a brain; it could almost be run by robots. But it’s the Underworld, the only isolated, self-sufficient, armed and orbiting prison colony, and those bureaucrats on Earth needed to put somebody human up here to talk to.”
Jase considered him almost surprisedly. Then he shook his head. “It’s neat, but I don’t see it that way. I see it as the perversity of Fate. I like wind, Fate gives me purified air. I like action, I get a desk. I like people, I get thousands upon thousands of people I only know by number. I like solving crimes, I get the criminals, tried and sentenced. I like Earth, I get… well, maybe you’re right. Maybe if I start sounding like a computer, they’ll take my transfer requests seriously…”
His voice trailed away; he gazed at the carpet, not seeing it. For a moment, the silence seemed to have mass. He felt a curious sense of dislocation, as if a fresh breeze had stirred under his nose, or a patch of sunlight had just faded in the windowless room. Something absolutely familiar that shouldn’t have been where it was. A name surfaced in his head. He remembered his early years as a patroller, when a name, a chance word, a hair on a sleeve came into sharp and unexpected focus: a small detail that linked everything else he knew about a crime into an unbreakable chain. That was when he began cutting rules. At that moment of unassailable intuition. But why now? And—“Who the hell is Fiori?”
Nils rose, stretching. “You know. That doctor from New Horizon. I told him you’d call him before you even sat down.”
“You did.”
“A little PR between outworlders.”
“Oh, him. He wants a body?”
“A particular one. It’s in with your messages.” He tossed his cup down the wall-chute. “I’m off.”
“Sweet dreams.”
Jase found Dr. Fiori’s name among the dozen people on his message roster who required his immediate attention. The message itself was peculiar.
Request permission study prisoner Q92814HD2, use of experimental equipment patients New Horizon. Dr. A. Fiori. Project: Guinea Pig.
Trying to make sense of that, he pulled the records of prisoner Q92814HD2. A bald, thin-faced woman with startling eyes gazed out of the screen at him and he grunted. Terra Viridian. The list of her crimes against the FWG was endless. For murder by laser under broad daylight of 1509 civilians and FWG services personnel… for desertion… for raising a laser-rifle against her Commanding Officer… for firing said weapon against… against… An image from a newscast of the massacre flashed across Jase’s mind; his brain, for the instant, filled with light… the fire-seared skeleton of the stockade, the desert burning beneath the hot eye of the sun, bodies engulfed by light as if a solar flare had stretched millions of miles across space to kiss the desert and withdraw… For attempting to transform, under the broiling, blue noon sky, everything she saw into light, she was consigned for all her days, without appeal, until her final breath, to the Dark Ring of the Underworld.
She had walked away from the massacre and boarded a commuter shuttle to Suncoast Sector. For three weeks rumor had her everywhere in the world at once: running weapons to a secret rebel space station at the same time she toiled up a mountain in Dragon Sector to join a monastery for her sins. Then, in south Suncoast Sector, two patrollers arrested a vagrant rummaging through a jammed recycling bin for something to eat. They brought her in when she fought, charged her with resisting arrest, possession of an illegal weapon. Then they found out who she was.
Terra Viridian. The illegal weapon was the bent steak knife that had been jamming the recycling bin…
She had been in the Underworld for seven years. No incidents, no accidents. No communication from anyone outside the Underworld. She ate her meals, therefore she was still alive. Jase stared at the screen, remembering her sensational trial. The Madwoman versus the Free World Government. He had been disgusted when they sent her to the Underworld. She was so far out of her mind, she’d warped into a different universe. A woman who had no idea where she was had no business being in the Underworld. But Desert Sector was threatening to secede from the FWG, taking its oil, mines and commerce with it, so the FWG declared Terra Viridian sane and criminally responsible for her actions. She sat in silence in the Dark Ring, alone with her visions, as little disturbance to anyone as if she were
buried. And now some Dr.
A. Fiori wanted to fiddle with her brain, make her realize exactly where she was. For the next fifty or a hundred years. The Dark Ring. No appeal.
He touched a com-light. “Outchannel. Klyos.”
“Voice ID 3. Identified.”
“Link New Horizon. Jason Klyos to speak to Dr. A. Fiori.”
New Horizon hovered appropriately in the shadow of the moon, a quiet place, privately funded and FWG supported, for the study of the criminally insane. “On-screen,” the com said a few moments later. “Dr. Fiori.”
“Chief Klyos,” he said. “Thank you for getting back to me.” A middle-aged man who ignored the latest fashion in faces, he looked as if he had been up for days. His thinning hair was tousled and there were shadows under his eyes. His smile seemed determinedly cheerful.
He rattled on without breathing, apparently, while Jase tried to pick out the salient points. He interrupted finally, to break the flow.
“Under no conditions may the prisoner leave the Underworld.”
“I know, dammit. It doesn’t matter—here or there she’s probably incurable. We’ll transport the equipment there.”
“You will, will you? Where are you planning to put it? In my bedroom?”
Dr. Fiori paused, puzzled. “Well, no. But it’s not that—surely you can spare a space the size of a cell.”
“Dr. Fiori, the Underworld is not a research center. People are sent here to be punished, not experimented with. I question the legality of this whole idea.”
“Legality—” Dr. Fiori gave an incredulous laugh. “She’s crazy. She shouldn’t even be in the Underworld.”
“She was tried and sentenced according to FWG law. The law didn’t say anything about experimentation.”
“Chief Klyos, we’ll treat her as carefully as one of our own patients.”
“Then why aren’t you using one of your own patients?” He caught Dr. Fiori with his mouth open, searching for words, and added ponderously, “Dr. Fiori, this conversation is being recorded for the Underworld log. I have no private conversations. All conversations concerning prisoners may be used as evidence for whatever purpose in a court of law.”
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