STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael

by Barbara Hambly

  Trae consulted his scroll again. “The United States representative from the old Washington Territory,” he said. “A man named Aaron Stemple.”

  Chapter 12

  IT WAS CLOSE ON to six o’clock, and the winter darkness had long since settled on the land. Up the hill the whine of the sawmill continued, as it would far into the night. Beyond the black glass of the office windows, the white boil of the tailrace fluttered like star-shot silk in the distant gloom. Peace and silence seemed to concentrate themselves in the lamplight of the small mill office; in the warmth of the stove, the aromatic steam of coffee, the soft scratching of the pen as Ishmael worked over columns of figures long neglected. The stillness, the silence, brought him a deep sense of peace, like something he half remembered but which he could not quite recall. Like so many other things, that feeling of an inner calming of the soul lay on the opposite side of the barrier in his mind. Trying to reach through that barrier was like trying to put your hand through a fluctuating geon field ...

  Ishmael paused for a moment, remembering very clearly what a fluctuating geon field was and how one set up the circuitry to make one, yet how or where he had acquired this knowledge he did not recall. Every path that his mind probed seemed to be cloaked in a poisonous white fog of pain. Only those things which he saw did he remember—the stars, and the green shape of the San Francisco hills.

  He leaned his forehead for a moment on his fingers. It was growing late. Biddy would doubtless be at the house already, and she and Aaron would be waiting for him with supper. He returned to his figuring, wanting to finish the payroll accounts and irked by that now-familiar feeling that there should be some far easier way to do them.

  Footsteps thumped on the steps outside, and voices lifted in raucous violation of the peace of the night. “Ishmael!” “Hey, Ish!” “Hey, in there!”

  Resignedly, he laid aside his quietude as the Bolt brothers came trooping into the office.

  Jason peered around the corner of the desk at Ish’s booted ankles. “Where’s the chains, Ish? Jeremy, get that key down from the nail on the wall and unshackle this poor serf.”

  Jeremy hunted for the fictional key to the imaginary spancels. “I can’t find it, Jason. I think Aaron swallowed it.”

  “The fiend!” declared Jason, and Joshua, dropping into Aaron’s swivel chair, hissed in shocked disapproval. Grinning, Jeremy swung a leg over the seat of the office’s one “company” chair, and Jason perched himself on the corner of Ishmael’s desk.

  Carefully, Ishmael closed the ledger and folded his hands on top of it. He regarded the brothers for a moment with polite curiosity. “Can I help you gentlemen?”

  “I’m glad you asked that,” said Jason expansively. “As a matter of fact, you can.”

  “I feared so.”

  “Ishmael,” said Jason, leaning across the desk toward him, “how would you like to go to San Francisco?”

  “I have been to San Francisco.”

  “Not for business,” said Jason in a mysterious voice. “For pleasure.”

  Ish started back, alarmed.

  “Listen.” Jason leaned his hands flat on the surface of the desk, his brown eyes bright with the dream of conquest. His voice was low and coaxing, the great love of life, of adventure, of new and wonderful things, expressed in every line of his big, graceful body. “You know Aaron’s giving us the option to buy out of the bet. He wants $50,000, flat cash, no strings.”

  “I am aware of this.”

  “Well,” said Jason, “that’s mighty big of him, and I appreciate his generosity, because in five years Bridal Veil Mountain will be worth ten times that, with me working it and Seattle growing as it is. But,” he went on, “you also probably know we haven’t got that kind of money nor anywheres near it. Not now.

  “But listen to me, Ishmael. In this land, a man can make what he wants of his life, twist Fate to do his bidding. All it takes is courage, and initiative—and money.”

  “And,” Ishmael concluded for him, “lacking courage and initiative, money will suffice.”

  “Well, of course,” admitted Jason. “But to get money, big money, you need to have big money—or else have luck.”

  “Or commit a crime,” chipped in Joshua, producing a tin flask from his pocket and taking a swig, then passing it on to Jeremy. Ishmael had already concluded that the Bolt brothers had begun the evening at Lottie’s and were fairly well flown before they set out for the mill.

  “If you are going to ask me to hold the reins of your horses while you rob the San Francisco bank ...”

  “Nah.” Josh dismissed the idea with a wave. “Jason’d lock himself in the vault in all the excitement and Jeremy’d shoot himself in the foot.”

  “Hey!” objected the youngest brother.

  “But”—Jason’s voice overrode this byplay effortlessly—“the big money’s in San Francisco. All the wealth of the Comstock lode finds its way there. Fortunes are won and lost every night at the gambling tables on Montgomery Street. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes, on the turn of a single card. Think of it, Ishmael. ...”

  “I am,” replied Ish in a dry voice. “And I believe that I will hold your horses, after all.”

  “Ish.” Jason’s gesture conjured all the gold in San Francisco between his palms. “Think about it. I’ve seen you and Joshua play your games with mathematics. I don’t know how or why you do it, but I know you can make numbers sing songs and dance dances for you. And I know those gambling games aren’t games of chance. Josh has told me that a hundred times. They’re only games of odds.”

  His voice dropped low, like that of a prophet speaking his visions. “Run me a system, Ish. Joshua knows every card game in the book. The two of you could figure out a system—hell, you can do it, you’ve got a brain like a ledger—and Jeremy and I would play them. It’s all numbers—fifty-two variables, Ish, that’s all. We need you. We need your help. We can do it with you, Ish—but we can’t do it without you.”

  Ishmael regarded him severely, exasperated, thinking that it was very like Jason Bolt to gamble what funds he had in an attempt such as this. But then, what had he to lose? If the mountain went, Jason would be forced to start from scratch again in any case.

  “This is insanity,” he stated, looking up at Jason.

  “We need you,” Jason replied.

  Ish was silent.

  “G—God damn it, Ish, we need your help,” added Jeremy quietly. “You’ve g—got to break us free of this, at least g—give us the chance.”

  Ishmael’s gaze moved from Jason to Jeremy. In his mind he heard Jeremy’s voice again, twined with Candy’s, echoing up out of the mine; and against it was the vague memory of what love felt like when it was tainted with expectations. Joshua had taught him to play some card games, and it would be ridiculously simple to calculate the odds—he did it semi-automatically already when he played with Biddy at home. Absently, he remarked, “I would need advice upon the rules of the games. ...”

  Jason let out a whoop you could hear in Portland.

  “You’ll do it! Ish, I could kiss you!”

  Ish stared forbiddingly at him. “I trust you will restrain yourself.”

  The Bolt brothers were laughing and slapping one another on the back; Jason pressed the tin flask into his hand, and though Ishmael had never seen any point in deliberately imbibing alcohol he took a drink out of politeness. It seemed to be a ritual pact-sealing gesture, and obliquely it crossed his mind that the brothers must indeed trust him, to ask his help in thwarting his uncle’s schemes. For some reason he found this both curious and gratifying.

  Ten days later they were in San Francisco. A different San Francisco, thought Ishmael, as he made his fastidious way through the mob in the crystal gambling palace on Montgomery Street. A San Francisco of diamonds and silk, of brilliant ladies and smooth gentlemen, of gamblers laying cards on the green tables, and the black and red of the wheels turning, blinding to the eyes.

  The dark uniform of evening d
ress suited Ish, the black broadcloth and white ruffled shirt setting off his dark spareness, whereas it only gave Jason a bull-in-a-china-shop air of having wandered into the wrong place in the wrong clothes. The mathematical and theoretical side of the combine, fair and dark, looked sober and professional; Jason and Jeremy, in their stickpins and fancy weskits, seemed bright and a little dudish standing next to them in the flickering atmosphere of gaslight and crystal. A piano tinkled—somewhere a woman was singing. From the gaming rooms in whose fancy-scrolled doorway they stood came a hushed and purposeful buzz of voices punctuated now and then by a woman’s shrill laughter or a man’s hoarse guffaw of triumph. On the other side of the archway was the barroom, noisier and rowdier. Over by the bar a good-looking boy in the dusty clothes of a trailhand just in from Virginia City and his oxlike older brother had gotten into a vociferous argument over a girl with a dark-haired gambler, their voices rising higher and higher over Ishmael’s quiet instructions to Jason.

  “There are only two things to remember,” he was saying softly. “Do not under any circumstances get drunk, and follow the system exactly. When it is time to play, play. When it is not, hold your hand no matter what is in it.”

  Bolt wasn’t looking at him; his eyes were on the kaleidoscope sparkle and color of the gambling room beyond. “Ish,” he said over his shoulder, “I know what’s riding on this. It’s everything going for everything—you don’t need to warn me.”

  “Nevertheless, redundant warnings are infinitely preferable to errors.”

  Jason looked at him then, and laughed. “Don’t worry, Mother; your boy will be good. Josh, take Ish over to the billiard room and teach him how to play pool. Come on, Jeremy, let’s go win some money.”

  They started toward the blackjack tables, armed with all the coaching, all the numbers, all the systems that Ishmael and Joshua had been able to din into their heads in the last week and a half. Josh watched them go, anxious but unable to help now, like a mother watching her children off to their first day of school.

  Jason paused, and turned back with a teasing grin. “Aren’t you going to wish us luck?”

  “Luck,” replied Ishmael in arctic tones, “is the last thing that you need.”

  Across the barroom the two trailhands and the gambler had worked themselves into an argumentative pitch impossible in sober men. The girl calmly finished her drink and departed on the arm of an untidy little man with a flute sticking out of one pocket of his threadbare velvet frock-coat. The combatants continued their quarrel unabated. Ishmael frowned, his memory teased; then Joshua called out, “Are you coming, Ish?” and he shrugged and followed him to the billiard room.

  On the whole, Ishmael enjoyed the evening. He found the gambling palace fascinating, and, once grounded in the basics, billiards ridiculously easy. It was simple geometry and vectors, like—like something he almost remembered that was not a game. A couple of the local Cyprians made a try at him, gave him up in disgust as a cold fish, and returned much later in the evening simply to watch him play. When Jason came back to the billiard room much later to report he found Stemple’s prim nephew in his shirtsleeves, his ruffled shirt open at the collar, making a complicated bank shot while a gaily dressed girl in green held his coat and another one guarded his winnings.

  Ish made his shot; the girl in green handed him the chalk, and he thanked her with his usual grave courtesy, oblivious to the splendid display of bosom and calf, his mind clearly on the game. Jason came over to him, chuckling. “Oh, Ishmael, we’ll make a gambler of you yet.”

  Ish bent over the table, and put a kiss of English on the seven-ball to carom it off three cushions to meet its ultimate destiny. “I trust not,” he said, but Jason had the momentary impression that he was pleased.

  Daytimes, San Francisco had other treasures to offer. Jason spent his days following up business connections, dabbling a little on the stock exchange, meeting in their offices and hotels men he had met in the gambling palaces to make links with the web of finance that connected the state of California with the banking and commercial East. It was good to have access to newspapers, and to shops. He and Jeremy spent time wandering up and down the steep streets of downtown, finding those things that Seattle lacked and would lack for a long time yet. In a store on Mission Street Jeremy found what he wanted, a red-gold ring with a diamond and two small emeralds, and bought it out of his share of the winnings. He also found a guitar that it wrenched his heart to pass by, and, walking away from the shop window and up the long stairway of Columbus Avenue, Jason knew in his heart that his brother would find a way to go back for it if it cost him every penny of his dinner money for the rest of their stay and he had to live on hard-boiled eggs in the hotel-room.

  Well, what the hell, thought Jason with a grin. We can all afford a little slack. “The system’s slow,” he said, pursuing his thought as they walked down Sansome Street toward the Palace Hotel, “but it’s working. All we have to do is hang on and wait for it to come in.”

  “That’s what surprises me,” said Jeremy, hurrying a little to keep pace with his brother’s long-legged stride. “It feels like we win some, and lose some, p—pretty evenly all night. But we always c—come out with a little more than we start with. I don’t see how they know it, how they can do it, just with numbers, but it c—can’t be just luck.”

  Jason frowned. “Well, to an extent,” he agreed. “There’s always luck to it, Jeremy. No system can be that perfect. It isn’t all just numbers, no matter what Ish and Joshua say.” They emerged onto Market Street, and the wind from the bay struck them, whipping into tangled curls Jason’s reddish brown hair and snapping in the ends of the cravat he wore. The day was overcast; at the foot of the street, sky and water lay in varied tones of gray, broken by a spiky black army of masts. Across the water, the rolling shape of the hills was visible, greening now toward the emerald velvet of winter.

  “A man has to know when to seize his luck, and make it work for him,” Jason went on. “That’s what’s wrong with Ishmael—with Josh, too. They’re cold-blooded. They hang back. They won’t do it if it isn’t in the numbers. They have the half-light, but they’ll never have the sun.”

  “Now, I’ve seen Josh c—cut loose.” Jeremy defended his middle brother. “You know he’s got a hell of a temper when he’s pushed.”

  “Most people will cut loose in anger if you push them,” Jason replied. “Any dog’ll bite if you kick it. But they won’t cut loose in the other direction. Ishmael—he’s a good man, but there’s something uncanny about him. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t fight, he’s a vegetarian, he’s a bookworm, he doesn’t chase around with ladies—I’ve never even seen him lose his temper. He’s inhuman.”

  Jeremy shrugged. “But he p—plays damn good poker.”

  “With a face like that he couldn’t help it.” Jason withdrew his hands from his pockets, to tip his hat to a pair of parasoled ladies making their way along the board sidewalk amid a soft rustling of taffeta and lace. “You know, brother, I would truly like to know what he was, and where he came from, before he showed up in Seattle. I’d even like to know how he showed up in Seattle. It sure as hell wasn’t on Clancey’s boat.”

  “He c—could have come overland from Olympia, or up from Portland,” argued Jeremy, following as Jason stepped from the curb to the composite pavement of asphalt and boards that made up Market Street.

  “Without bringing a horse with him? It’s like he just fell out of the sky.”

  “Hey.” They dodged a horse-car trolley and a cartload of earth being hauled for fill to the harbor, and hurried up the pretentious marble steps to the carved portals of the Palace. “It’s his b—business, Jason.”

  “I know,” said his older brother conciliatingly. “And it’s not that I want to pry. But I don’t like not knowing about a man. I want to know what drives people, Jeremy. In most men it’s power, or knowledge, or love. I don’t know what it is that drives Ishmael. He’s hiding something—and I’m just a little curious abo
ut what it is.”

  Elsewhere in the city, in the long gulf between the hills where the warren of alleyways began to grow tighter and more and more of the houses were built of paper, canvas and scrap; where signs were increasingly written in Chinese, Joshua huddled his plaid jacket more tightly about him against the damp cold of the afternoon. He felt as though he’d loitered on the slanted muddy street for hours, and knew every shop sign and shadow and flapping awning by heart.

  Didn’t they ever break for dinner?

  St. Brendan’s Hospital looked shabby and desolate, the bad grade of the lumber it was built of showing up glaringly in the streaky damp dark. One coat of cheap paint accentuated rather than hid the run of a poor grain that Josh’s eye picked out almost automatically, from long experience. The place was a slapdash job—the first good earthquake would have them picking patients out of the ruins.

  The door opened. A couple of women came out, one too tall and one too stout, dressed in faded calicos and hugging inadequate shawls about them as they hurried down the steps. The street wasn’t paved hereabouts, and water ran down its center in a young torrent. Both women gathered up their petticoats in white handfuls as they hastened away. Josh tucked his cold fingers into his armpits, and backed a little more into the shelter of the overhang of the Li Chang Laundry, and went on waiting. The steam from within the little building breathed comfortingly on his face every time the door rattled a bit with the passage of feet inside, bringing with it the damp, mild smell of soap and clean linen. More women came out of the hospital, gesturing as they talked or pulling on mittens. None of them was the woman he sought. There was an air of downtrodden moneylessness to them. They looked tired, unlike the bright ladies who flocked around the gambling tables at night.

  The day was darkening. A Chinese woman hurried by, clothed in dark, ragged cotton and bending her head against the eyes of the foreign devil in the laundry door. A gust of wind blew from the alley behind the laundry, bringing the stink of fish and garbage. Joshua glanced at the sky, found the muzzy blur where the sun should be, and calculated that he had two more hours until they’d be getting ready to hit the gambling halls again. His mind automatically began calculating odds, reviewing the system for blackjack.