The Skill of Our Hands--A Novel

by Steven Brust

  Frio closed his eyes. “Not for a long time I’m not.”

  “Friday wasn’t exactly ancient history.”

  Frio raised his eyebrows without opening his eyes. “Feels like it.”

  Irina managed a chuckle. It was gruff, but better than Oskar could have done. She was a calculating and manipulative player, but she was good at her game.

  “I hear that,” Irina said. “Time to put the gun down, Frio.”

  “Ah hell no,” Frio said, but he thumbed the safety back on. “Power is power, Irina. I’ll set my gun down when you put your credit cards and education on the floor.” He stuck the gun into the waistband of his jeans, grimacing with the pain it caused him. “But I’ll put mine where you can’t see it, which is more than you’ll do for me.”

  * * *

  Phil ignored remarks about how disorganized his closet full of switch-making materials was. He didn’t ignore Ren, working next to him, feeling close and distant, happy and pensive, and above all, as frustrated as he was that there was no time for just them—for welcome back, for touching and talking and being. She was worried about something, and there was no time to reassure her, or to consider if her worry was justified.

  “I’ve spoken with Kate.” Ramon’s voice was expressionless. “Shall Daniel and I leave you to work?”

  Only Daniel missed what he meant. “What? No. I like seeing how it all gets done.” Then he went quiet. Then pale. He understood. “Matsu’s stub.”

  Phil caught Daniel’s eye and nodded to him. He had the look Phil had seen all around him before the second assault on Vicksburg from those who were determined to go forward and didn’t expect to return alive. It brought him back; there was a coldness, and a distance. It wasn’t like watching yourself act, it was more like a heightened consciousness of everything else—every breath, the complex action of mouth and throat when you swallow, even the movement of your eyes. It’s all realer than real; the moments of courage, if there were any, came before or after.

  Daniel returned Phil’s nod, and followed Ramon into the guest room.

  Jimmy was ready first, and Phil could feel his impatience in his stillness; Jimmy was never impatient. Phil frowned. Since when had he been so conscious of people’s feelings? What was—

  No. Not now. Now, focus on Sam.

  For a rushed bit of half-assed meddlework, Phil was pleased to have found a couple of switches he could use for his part. He had no idea about everyone else, and couldn’t afford the attention. You have one job, Phil; let them worry about their pieces.

  They were ready. Jimmy drove, Jane in the front seat next to him, and Phil paid no attention to the route they took, and didn’t remember the drive.

  Ren turned to him, and Phil saw the way her eyes corrected for his new, larger body. They refocused affection and distance. “Phil?” she said in a way that was both a request and a promise.

  “Yeah?”

  “What happened while you were in stub?”

  “Nothing. Nothing ever happens while we’re in stub.”

  “Okay. Then what happened when you were Henry Lattimer? Or when Henry became Carter, I guess. Oskar said it resonated with now.”

  That Second’s life had ended over a hundred and fifty years ago, but felt closer to Phil than Chuck’s. “Quite a lot,” he said. “Now that you mention it.”

  “I need to know.” Ren’s voice was gentle but keen.

  “Okay.” He took her hand. “Where should I start?”

  “I think that is actually the question, isn’t it?” Ren said, looking at their interwoven fingers. “Where does it start?”

  Not an easy question, that. Phil considered. “I suppose,” he finally said, “it starts in Illinois.”

  “Illinois?”

  “Yeah. In 1856.”

  * * *

  Kate rolled out of bed, climbed into her warm, quilted bathrobe and zipped it up under her chin. Her left slipper was somewhere under the bed, or buried in the heap of dirty clothes, or out on its own hunting other rabbits, so Kate pulled on socks instead, and padded downstairs, leaving Wrecker sleeping. She didn’t peek in on the girls, and she didn’t turn on the lights in the kitchen.

  Kate Donnally was a nationally recognized specialist in pediatric endocrinology. She ran a thriving private practice, and donated her time and expertise in two inner-city clinics. She had published in The Lancet, and served as children’s health adviser to the Governor of Pennsylvania, but a sink full of unwashed dishes could still make her feel like she’d flunked adulthood. She considered throwing herself into cleaning the kitchen but navigated it in the dark instead, and dug her emergency pint of Ben & Jerry’s out of the econo bag of frozen green beans.

  She’d been prickly since her call with Ramon, restless with the same kind of manic, quick-burn, quick-crash energy you get from high fructose corn syrup. HFCS and sleep deprivation both fuel rash decisions, promote poor emotional control, and contribute to risk-taking behavior. Kate was safer with ice cream. Besides, physical activity increases wakefulness, and she did want to sleep eventually. She had to work in the morning.

  Kate settled with her laptop on the sofa in the den, but there wasn’t much news on the forum, and an idea had lodged in the back of her mind like food between teeth. Ramon was in such a rush to get his Matsu stub spiked into her Daniel that he wouldn’t wait for her to get there. He wouldn’t even hold a dust ritual.

  Kate wasn’t sure whether her sudden, late-night decision to schedule an impromptu one herself was reckless defiance or outraged propriety. Either way, she knew it excited her, and focused her fidgets. Kate posted to the forum that she would hold a dust ritual for Matsu in the privacy of her own Garden in fifteen minutes, and that anyone who wanted to was welcome to come by for tea. Then she ate up most of her ice cream, and closed her eyes.

  When Wrecker had spiked the stub of Lady Maud Pelham-Gambirnet into Kate’s sturdy Midwestern mid-twenties body, she had opened her eyes to the obligatory deafening headache, and the apparently nonstandard certainty that she, Kate Donnally, wasn’t going anywhere. They had made love then, for the first time, Wrecker and Kate, in the whoosh of memories from Lady Maud’s seventy years, and ever since, every time she tried to remember something from Maud’s lifetime, Kate got a little turned on. Even now, annoyed and overtired, the excitement of a mouth not her husband’s, and the memory of bespoke Chanel gave Kate a shiver.

  Still, she’d always felt a touch guilty too, about Maud shading, even though Wrecker must have told her a zillion times that Maud was tired and jaded and not particularly keen for “another time about on this mad carousel,” and so Kate had given Maud’s memories a special spot in her Garden.

  The pox itch and dog smell faded as she hurried through the sitting room into the crafts area. It was so organized! When everything in Kate’s life, and certainly everything in her Pennsylvania house was always a bit of a jumble, the craft room of her Garden was all tidy drawers and orderly bins. Sometimes, she would just wander around it opening things and marveling how every last little thing had its own place. And it stayed there. Life without kids, maybe.

  But tonight, Kate was on a mission. Lady Maud had met Matsu only once, in Hawaii in 1983, when she was fifty and newly divorced. He was a consulting martial arts expert to a film being shot in the “jungle.” They had set up a meeting as Incrementalists always will when they have a chance to see someone’s new Second, but they had bonded more as foreigners—he from Japan, she born in South Rhodesia—than as immortal do-gooders. They had gotten on so well! And yes, Lady Maud would confess it, Duckie, she had quite enjoyed the second glances sliding their way, peeking at the older, wealthy white British lady dining with the young, lithe, muscular Asian man, so that yes, she had maybe had the tiniest tad too much to drink. They had arranged a second meeting; Lady Maud had something private to ask Matsu.

  It was that second meeting—a Baccarat crystal champagne coupe taken from the glass-fronted china cabinet that held all Maud’s seeds—that Kate re
trieved and placed as a WORLD’S BEST MOM mug onto the tea table in the sitting room of her Garden. Maud had seeded it for safekeeping, not putting a pointer to it on her stable door, so Kate knew it was a memory no one else would have seen. Nor likely would anyone now, what with the late hour and the short notice. Which suited Kate just fine, if she were really to tell the truth.

  Kate opened her eyes, checked the time, and wondered whether anyone would show up to help her dust Matsu, even with so little notice, even though he was probably already on his way back out of stub, but she didn’t care. She loved. She picked chocolate-covered bits out of the ice cream and didn’t check the boards again. At quarter to one in the morning, she closed her eyes, and drank up Maud’s secret seed.

  * * *

  As Jimmy drove, Ren navigated back to the cottage flower beds that were Jimmy’s Garden as represented in hers while Phil collected his seeds from Illinois. Jimmy had added the fresh blades of Frio’s seeds to his castle armory, which sprouted by Sam’s white foxgloves as three new red-tinged flower spikes. She twisted a bloom from the closest spray and caught a whiff of something wrong. The smell got stronger as she broke off more of the trumpet-shaped flowers until the stalk was stripped to raw green. The blooms overfilled Ren’s hands, spilling onto curled fern heads, and the stink of industrial disinfectant burned her eyes. The chemical smell only mostly masked urine and cheap hamburger meat, and Ren knew what confidence smelled like to Frio.

  New buds sprang from the stalk, stoppering the smell. Grateful, Ren reached for the next, but saw something shimmering in the empty space between the flower and stem. As she fleeced more flowers, the void shivered darker, more vivid, into an opaque and brilliant fuchsia. To Frio, this was the color of rage—the deep purple-pink of his mother’s blouse the last time he’d seen her. His anger was vibrant and material, tinged with sensuality and despair, a wicked butterfly that stayed, wings pulsing, even when the flowers regrew and the shimmer faded.

  A springtime sun shone a lazy peach yellow, but Ren had only ten minutes to graze, and she had only two of Frio’s switches, and nothing at all of what Phil had seeded about Illinois in the 1850s. Her Garden was maddeningly slow, and she needed more than just ways of triggering feelings in Sam and Frio. She needed context and understanding. She needed empathy. Frio still didn’t make sense to her.

  She followed the anger plant down to its roots and stuck her fingers in cool, wet dirt, so different from the ground in Tucson or in Phoenix. This was soil that wanted things to grow, that nourished and fostered, that had water to spare. Careful not to break any of the muddy tendrils, Ren got her fingers around the top of the foxglove’s root ball.

  Frio had grown up in jail, juvie, a concrete box of echoing metal and shouted commands.

  His father died overseas in uniform—not military: private contractor.

  His mom had been deported. She was illegal. Back to Guatemala. You break the rules, you get caught, your kid suffers. Rage.

  Stripping flowers from another stalk, Ren tasted Good & Plenty candy in the big boxes from the movie theater. Frio had paid for himself and watched Batman Begins alone. Licorice was the taste of pride, but he only ate the white ones.

  “Jimmy,” she said. “We need to stop at a convenience store. We need licorice.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “Good catch,” said Phil after a pause long enough for him to have checked his Garden. “I’ll run in and get it. You keep grazing.”

  When Ren opened her eyes, Phil, next to her in the backseat, in Matsu’s powerful warrior’s body, closed a silent hand over hers. “About fifteen minutes,” he said.

  Ren nodded and closed her eyes. “Phil,” she said to her Garden with her mind’s mouth. “Today, here.”

  And there they were, the memories Phil had seeded as flowerpots—everything he thought she should know about where he’d been while his stub was lost in the Garden—in her hands as a convoluted corkscrew of braided wool.

  She unwound the coil and knew Phil believed he’d fucked up in Kansas.

  “Ren,” Phil said. “We’re here.”

  “Okay.” Ren wove her fingers into the tangle, and felt it loop and twist. “Just a second.” There was no time to pick apart all the knots or map them, to tease open thread from yarn, it would have to be enough to hold them all and love him, every snarl and involution.

  The car door opened and Ren opened her eyes knowing Phil had been wrong about Brown and the South. Wrong about Abolition and war. And being wrong made you afraid to do things; he’d said as much about Cambodia, about the scars and doubt. He’d had to accept it. But Celeste had meddled him into attempting something he couldn’t accept, into being something his nature had revolted against. And he still didn’t know whether his courage had failed or his character hadn’t.

  Ren would have to find a way to make that better.

  “I’m ready,” she said, getting out of the car.

  “Okay.” Phil took her hand and strode toward the dingy bar on Matsu’s long legs. “What do we do now?” he asked her.

  “Now,” Ren said, “we do what we do. And it fixes everything.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Bigger Thoughts, Bigger Plans

  Phil felt like they were in act three of an action movie, where all the tough guys walk into the bad guys’ stronghold to kick ass. Unfortunately, the only one of them capable of kicking anything tougher than an empty Coke can was in stub. He checked again for his switches, suddenly afraid he’d forgotten them. He always had that moment. But then, showing up ready to do the meddlework and realizing the things you need are still sitting next to the kitchen sink only has to happen a couple of times to make you want to be sure not to do it again.

  Jimmy was the first one through the door, then Jane, then Phil, then Ren. Back in the day, pirates used to wear a patch over one eye, so they could swap it to the other eye when going belowdecks, thus saving time for vision to adjust. Or, at least, that’s what Phil had been told; he was never a pirate. The point is, he wished he’d had one as he stepped into that bar; it was awfully damned dark.

  There was no sign of Irina or Oskar; Jimmy went up to the fat man behind the bar and they had a quiet conversation. It went on for a while, but Phil knew Jimmy; in the three steps up to the bar, he’d had time to graze, and that was all he needed, because he was Jimmy.

  The bartender gestured with his head toward the back, Jimmy nodded, and went that way. Phil and Ren followed. The sign on the door said EMPLOYEES ONLY, which Phil liked, because it didn’t say Team Members. It was unlocked, and opened to a landing with a mop and a bucket and cleaning supplies, and a stairway down. The stairs were wood and didn’t look all that stable. The light was no better than in the bar, but at least they could see. Jimmy hesitated at the top of the stairs, then shrugged and went down.

  They found everyone in the basement. Irina squatted next to Frio, pressing a spot high on his left leg. There was a lot of blood, and Frio didn’t look happy. Oskar stood next to them. A little apart was Sam, sitting on the floor, sobbing into his hands. As Phil and the gang came down the stairs, Sam looked up and said, “Jane?” putting a whole universe of hope and hopelessness into the word.

  “Hey there,” Phil said. “We’re the cavalry. Who needs rescuing?”

  Frio grimaced. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “My name is Phil. Last time we met, you shot me three times. How do you do?”

  “Yeah, sorry.”

  “What happened? Sam put it together? Figured out you were a cop?” Phil asked him.

  Frio nodded. “He tried to hit me, I pulled on him. He hit me again, and my gun went off. I caught a ricochet.”

  Jane had her arms around Sam, who was pretty much breaking down. Oskar stood watching and not moving. Irina was concentrating on keeping pressure on Frio’s leg.

  “So,” Phil said. “Want me to take a look at your leg?”

  Frio shrugged, and Phil, walking up to him as if there were no gun within reach of his han
d, couldn’t help thinking how pissed off Matt would be if he got this beautiful body killed in less than a day.

  * * *

  Watching Phil come down the basement stairs in Matsu’s body reminded Irina of her late-1980s’ attempt to learn Italian by watching overdubbed American movies. It was Phil, same as it had been Alec Baldwin, but Matsu’s beauty was as out of place as the deeper, embellished Italian coming out of Baldwin’s mouth had been. Phil squatted in front of Frio, hands relaxed. He didn’t spare a glance for her, kneeling on the cold concrete, or for Oskar, glowering over them all.

  Frio didn’t move, but something about him contracted and braced. Irina imagined an invisible carapace clicking into place over his body as Jimmy ushered Ren around them to Sam and Jane.

  “You’re a law-and-order man,” Phil remarked, and waited for Frio’s nod. He nodded himself. “Why’d you shoot me?”

  “I shot Chuck Purcell.”

  “Come on, Frio. You’ve had all this explained to you,” said Phil. His fingers were cold on Irina’s hand, but she let him move it to peer at Frio’s injury. “You didn’t have orders to kill me. Why’d you do it?”

  “To keep TPD off Sam.”

  Phil frowned, puzzled. “How does that work?”

  Frio snorted a laugh. “It didn’t.”

  “No,” Phil agreed. “Seems SWAT’s over at Sam’s house now.”

  Frio shrugged, and Irina decided he already knew about the raid and felt as betrayed by it as she did. Interesting. She wondered why.

  “What you told my friends about the Jose Guerena raid and the kid with the bad test grade, that was all true,” Phil said, and Irina could hear the anger under his Good Guy Meddlework voice. “You’ll have to get that stitched.” He returned Irina’s hand with a glance that told her to keep the pressure up. “But you managed to miss any of the dangerous bits.” Irina wondered how much he’d armed himself with—switches and background on the man who’d shot him. Phil settled himself on the ground and went on, conversationally. “You’re no fan of the cops. Not anymore. You tried to quit, but your boss had gotten his tires slashed the morning you went in with your resignation letter, hadn’t he?”