Fool's Run (v1.1)

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Was there?”

  “Nothing,” she whispered. “Ever.”

  He let his breath out silently, noiselessly, he thought, but she heard him. She misinterpreted, her hand reached toward him, withdrawing.

  “There was truly no warning, Magic-Man. We lived together when we got out of school. She worked at an employment agency counseling people about to leave Earth to work in space. I played the cubes in any band that would hire me. She cooked, kept the apartment clean. I fished the fork out of the recycler, hung the shelf, stopped the leak. The only odd thing about her life was that she never—she never looked ahead. She never thought about what she might be doing with herself for the next fifty years. She never brought the same man home more than twice. She’d let friends drift away. People liked her, they tried to get close to her. But she was so detached. It was as if she were made of glass. Nothing clung to her, nothing could trouble her. I was closest to her. But she never talked about the past, even to me. Never. Not about Todd, about our parents, about working in space—nothing. Ever since we were tiny, she had always told me her dreams. Now, when I asked her, she told me that on Earth she never dreamed…”

  “You said she was psychic.”

  Michele nodded. Her eyes grew wide again, heavy with unshed tears. “I loved her, Magic-Man. I really thought she hadn’t changed much, when we came to Earth. She always had been competent, sweet tempered… But now I can see what she was doing. She was hiding. Not only from the past, but from a future she must have seen coming… She said she never dreamed, but I think she must have just buried what she did dream, because it didn’t bear looking at. Her future. The killings in Desert Sector, the Underworld, her loneliness and madness… If she caught glimpses of this in her future no wonder she said she—no wonder—”

  The Magician put his hand on her shoulder, gripped it as he heard the long, jagged draw of her breath. “Was she psychic in other ways? Besides dreaming?”

  She straightened, reached for her glass. “She always knew what I was going to wear in the morning, even before I knew. She could look at a message-light and know who had called us.

  She’d look at the light and say, ‘It was for you—Will called.’ She did that, the day she got drafted. She looked at the message-light when we walked in the door. Only this message had a strange feel to it. Because she said, ‘I think it’s for me.’ As if she knew that this was the point where she would begin to change…

  “So the next morning she went down to the Induction Center. And six weeks later she was in Gulfstream Sector, in training. And then, two months later she was at the airport, and I was saying good-bye to her just before she boarded the transport shuttle.

  “That’s when I saw her.” She sat quietly a moment, her face still again, her shoulders slumped under the Magician’s hand. “I mean, saw what she had become. She didn’t seem troubled; she was—what she always was. Patient, good-humored, detached. She looked beautiful, like a recruiting ad, like the kind of woman things are always happening to. I realized then what she had left behind her on the moon colony. I knew that everything she had ever wanted had already been given to her and torn away from her. There was no fire left in her from which to kindle events.

  “She said—she said: ‘It’s just FWG technicality. I’ll work in an office for a year, then I’ll be home. Take care of yourself. Write to me. I’ll miss you.’ She kissed me good-bye and turned. A laser-rifle hung from her shoulder.

  “I watched her trials.” Her voice was nearly gone, husky, strengthless. “I had gone south again, tried to see her after they caught her, but they said she was too dangerous. The journalists, the lawyers, all descended on me when I came back. They wanted me to tell them about Terra’s secret, bizarre double life, to tell them that she hated our mother, she hated our father, that she had sabotaged the cargo shuttle that killed them, that she hated men, she abused young children, she—They wanted a reason. They wanted me to tell them anything except that a normal human being just like them could go berserk at a moment’s notice and wind up on trial for murder.

  “I couldn’t tell them that. They wanted me at the trial, but I ran north again. I didn’t know her anymore. I watched the trial alone inside the ghetto room I had taken… It wasn’t Terra they tried. It was some thin, pale woman who spoke of visions, who said yes, she had killed but that it was not important. ‘The vision is all.’ It wasn’t Terra.

  “But she wore my face.”

  The Magician was silent, remembering a bar the size of a shoebox in north Suncoast Sector… a night seven years before, when a young woman with a gold face and Terra’s black heart-pins in her hair had crossed his vision, dragged his attention away from the music under his hands…

  “That night—that night I met you—”

  She looked up at him, her eyes weary, stunned with pain. “Magic-Man, I was barely twenty-one. Of all the people I’d loved most, two were dead and one was mad. I hadn’t—I hadn’t planned to live very long. But I wanted to cube one more time. I disguised myself, and went looking for one last band. I heard your music.” His lips moved soundlessly; his face was chilled again, white. “You named me, Magic-Man,” she said softly. “And you gave me a reason to stay alive past dawn.”

  His hand slid from her shoulder. He rose, stiff, crossed the room until the wall stopped him. He stood staring at the web of stars, until they seemed to kindle and spark under his eyes.

  He said, “You came with us to take Terra out of here.”

  “Yes. You had the cruiser, I opened the Underworld Frequency to learn the docking procedures.”

  “Where were you planning to take her?”

  “I don’t know. Magic-Man, the moment I saw this place I realized that I could no more get Terra out than I could jump over the sun. The Scholar was right. There’s no way out of the Underworld. And then—and then I saw Terra. For years I thought that she could give me some answer, if I just asked her why. I thought she had just disguised herself, like I had, that somewhere in her the Terra I always knew still existed. She is still part of me, Magic-Man. Even though now I know there’s no part of her I understand anymore. She’s simply crazy. That’s the final separation.”

  The Magician opened his mouth and closed it. He reached out, touched a dying star.

  “Michele.” His voice sounded peculiar; so did her name. “I never saw what was on the computer screen while we were with her. She put her vision into my mind.”

  The silence behind him was so complete that he turned, wondering if she had disappeared, like an unobserved particle. She was still there, staring at him. “Magic-Man,” she whispered.

  “The things she had to say: the red sun, the purple sand, the distorted oval weren’t things that could be spoken. Not in language anyway. She gave them to me without words.”

  “She went—” He saw her shudder; Scotch splashed out of her glass. “She went into your mind.”

  “She had something she needed to say. I happened to be able to hear it.”

  “What?” She was on her feet, bewildered, incredulous. “What could she possibly say to you? About killing all those people—”

  “The sun was dark.”

  “In the middle of the desert on a hot summer day!”

  “The vision was light.”

  “Magic-Man, only a crazy woman would stand under a blazing sun and think it was dark!”

  She went to him then; he sensed her terror for him, her terror of hope. She caught his wrists in her powerful cuber’s grip. “Magic-Man. What is she thinking? Could you understand? Please. Please. Could you understand her at all?”

  “Oh, God,” he whispered. “God help me, yes. You saw what she told me. On the computer screen. But the computer couldn’t feel.”

  “Feel what?”

  “The hunger. The absolute, overwhelming need.”

  “For what?”

  “To change. To complete the vision.”

  “What vision?” She shook him, crying again. “What vision?”


  “Her vision. Something else’s vision. Whoever’s vision it is, it must be finished.” His voice had grown very calm, detached; from the expression on his face, in his eyes, he might have been listening to antique music. “There is no time within the vision. Time has not even begun yet… There is one imperative, and it is as absolute a need as breath: to complete the changing. Nothing else matters. Nothing else exists. Nothing but that drive toward time. Toward life.”

  “Magic-Man.” Tears slipped down her face again. She held him as if one of them were drowning. “You sound like Terra.”

  FIVE

  In his office, Jase tapped out yet another transfer request. Tundra Sector, he’d heard, was a peaceful place if you didn’t mind cold. Faster than he could type, more vividly than he could imagine freedom, the images he had seen on the Dream Machine rose between him and his typing. He gave up finally, leaned his head on his fingers. The silence in the Hub crept like a mist around him. Usually he was grateful for quiet. Now, in the waning of the day, all Terra’s mad thoughts haunted his brain and the silence troubled him. He stared at the console screen, saw his own shadowy reflection, then the amethyst sand.

  “What vision?”

  His voice startled him. He scowled at his shadow. Dr. Fiori was right. She was disguising her thoughts; there was no mystery, just a crazy woman who couldn’t face what she had done.

  “Can’t even get the color of the sun right,” he muttered. He paused again, sat absolutely still in the silence. The red sun. The purple sand. The sea… “There’s no sea in Desert Sector…”

  The com-light flashed; he touched it. “Klyos.”

  “Nils, sir. That Suncoast patroller just arrived. Aaron Fisher. Do you want him now?”

  “Not immediately. Let him sit and think awhile.”

  “He requested permission to go to the concert. Sir, I don’t think he knows why he’s here.”

  “He’s under suspicion of conspiracy,” Jase said grimly.

  “On record?”

  “No. On hunch. I don’t want this on his record unless I make formal charges. He’s not under arrest, but I didn’t invite him up here for a concert either. Feed him and put him in the guards’ dorm. That should keep him out of trouble.”

  “Should.” He paused. “You talked to Michele Viridian. Is she—”

  “She’s hardly a hardened conspirator. She’s not crazy enough to think she could get her sister out of here, though I suspect the thought crossed her mind.”

  “Is she like Terra?”

  Jase sighed, remembering the hands straining toward Michele out of the bubble. He felt a sudden depression, like something damp and moldering in his chest. “No,” he said, answering Nils’ oblique question, “there’s nothing in her to make you understand Terra. If anyone would want to. I wish to heaven Fiori had left her alone.”

  “Are you okay? Is something wrong?”

  “Not yet.”

  There was another pause. “You want me up there?” Nils asked abruptly. Jase shook his head.

  “No. Go listen to the music. Maybe I’ll go too, before I start jumping at shadows.”

  “You don’t jump at nothing,” Nils said.

  Later, Jase stood in the doorway of the D-Level Rec Room, the only place big enough for a concert. The swimming pool was covered; the body equipment had been taken out. The walls were lined two deep with security guards, a good eighty percent of them volunteers. The prisoners sat on the floor, and on the sections of movable wall that had been laid over the pool.

  Their bald heads reflected odd colors under the eerie glow of the stage lights. They didn’t talk much; they hardly moved, except here and there when someone would sneak a quick, incredulous glance at the roped-off area which was the stage.

  It was worth a glance. The rod-harp, a fish skeleton of copper and glass, stretched across three-quarters of the stage. Behind it, big, translucent cubes were stacked like some alien sculpture. The gases in them were warming, slowly coloring. The Nebraskan was still working with the lights, flooding the air with purple, green, orange. The Magician had painted his face a nebula of swirling colors and was tuning, of all things, a battered old piano. He plunked a final note on it, ran his thumb down the keys in a brisk glissando that made heads move, flashing.

  The Nebraskan played an experimental rod. The copper spat electric blue toward a second rod; the glass emitted a high, fiery note. He darkened the stage.

  The hall darkened a moment later. Even that brief blackness became strained. The murmurings of the guards ceased; Jase heard the creak of leather, the scrape of metal. Stupid, he thought, remembering the chains and bars still attached to the walls. Stupid, stupid—I’ll have Jeri’s hide for this. Then the place erupted with light.

  The Queen of Hearts shook rose-red hair away from a face molded out of pure gold and brought her cube-sticks down. The cube she struck fumed crimson. She built a heartbeat out of crimson and indigo, fire and night, that shattered the Underworld silence like glass. Quasar, her hair shimmering the colors of the rainbow, leaped onstage with a street yell that must have come straight out of the sewers of Lumière Sector. The Magician, incandescent, began a duet between the piano and his body-wires. At the soundboard, the Nebraskan, his lank hair and mustache the color of pearl in the light, monitored the sounds of the body-wires, playing the Magician himself like an instrument. Light kindled in the icy bones of the rod-harp. A line of power crackled down its length. The Scholar wove a glissando of wild, timbreless notes into the Magician’s colors. Quasar’s voice, lean and husky, snapped across the weave:

  “Pick a card from Fortune’s morning,

  Turn up the Queen of Hearts;

  Pick a card from Fortune’s warning,

  Turn down the Ace of Spades.

  “And fly, fly, fly To that dark dealer in the sky.

  Love is leaving, the night is coming,

  Nova will trap you in its light…”

  A rod shattered under sound vibrations; the Scholar kicked the fragments from underfoot as he moved, tapping and caressing sound out of the bones. A second rod snapped with a crack of light. Quasar gave another yell. The Magician vanished into negative light. The stage turned a shadowy, midnight blue. From the dark came a sweet, quiet phrase of ancient music.

  Jase clapped, surprised. There wasn’t a lowered head in the audience now; no one could have slept through that. He lingered, wanting to hear more. He saw Jeri Halpren suddenly, grinning at him triumphantly. But he stayed anyway.

  The music wandered into warmer realms; the cubes beat a languorous pulse. Quasar sang a love ballad, slow and intimate, that made Jase remember, for the first time in years, himself sitting on a riverbank in Delta Sector, with a childhood playmate, a little girl whose eyes were green as frogs, whose hair, yellow as light, kept blowing across his mouth. The next song led them into cold, glittering space. Sounds drifted in night-darkness: the perpetual static, the murmur of icy metal from some drifting alien ship, a spattering of solar disturbance, the faint, constant throb of awareness: the heartbeat. Color passed to color down the rod-harp. The cubes flared, luminous with star-gas. Sounds gathered toward sound; Quasar’s voice echoed colors shirred from the Magician’s aura. A pattern struggled to emerge from the nebulosity, emerged finally as the Magician was lost in tides of changing hue: the gentle, precise music of the past.

  The stage turned rose; the musicians retired to repair their paint. Jase turned back into the orderly silence of the Underworld, still surprised. I’ll have to tell Sidney Halleck, he thought. I didn’t expect to like it.

  He returned to the Hub. One more nagging detail and he could go to bed. Everyone, he thought grumpily, is so damned innocent. Even the patroller summoned to the Underworld had no impulse to skulk in his guilt; he wanted to be entertained. If there’s nothing to worry about, he thought, why am I worried? And there’s nothing.

  He summoned Aaron Fisher, sat waiting.

  There’s nothing. There’s a woman in a band, there’s an old cruiser
that was never altered properly, there’s a good and decent patroller who had his back turned to his computer at the wrong time.

  There was nothing.

  Or else there was something. And whatever it was revolved around Terra Viridian, the most dangerous prisoner in the Underworld.

  He dismissed the two guards who brought Aaron Fisher, and studied him a moment silently. He was taller than Jase expected. His uniform was impeccable. His face, lean, rugged, was freshly shaven. He met Jase’s eyes neither warily nor with challenge, but he did seem perplexed. He hadn’t, Jase decided, the vaguest idea why he had been brought under guard into the presence of the Chief of the Underworld. Or else he was capable of motives and solitary actions that overrode completely every limitation of his profession.

  “Sit down.”

  Aaron sat. Jase leaned back in his chair and said without preamble, “You’re here because we put a routine tracer on a request made through the Library Bank in your district, on your computer, for top-secret information about the Underworld. Why did you request such information?”

  Aaron blinked. His face was immobile a moment, probably out of habit. Then the stiffness melted, and he looked simply astonished. “I didn’t.”

  “Who else has access to your computer?”

  “No one. Sir.”

  “No one? Where is it? In a vault?”

  “No, it’s—” His voice stopped then. He looked at Jase silently a moment, and Jase thought wearily, There’s something. Aaron glanced down at his hands. When he lifted his head again, the lines at the sides of his mouth had deepened.