STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael

by Barbara Hambly

  In time the concentration was almost palpable in the air, like a vibration or a slowly intensifying light. There were less than a dozen spectators—an oddly assorted lot including two of the house gamblers, a dancehall girl in red silk, a rancher from Virginia City, a scruffy little man in checked pants who looked like a drummer and a thin cowboy in a trail-worn green shirt—and they were mostly silent. Occasionally the owner would come in, shake his head in mystification, and go out again to mind the progress of the gaudier pastimes in the gambling rooms outside.

  Someone touched Joshua lightly on the arm. Jeremy’s voice whispered, “What the hell are they up to?”

  “Chess,” said Josh.

  Jeremy glanced past him at the tableau of still forms in the flickering halo of the gaslight, then back at his older brother. “Josh, listen. Do you have the rest of the money on you?”

  That got Joshua’s attention. “Why?”

  “Jason’s luck has turned—he’s winning, and winning big. He’s d—doubled what we came in with tonight; he must have picked up fifteen thousand dollars since he sat down, and it seems like the more he bets, the more he wins.”

  Joshua frowned, not liking the sound of this. “That isn’t what he’s supposed to be doing.”

  “But it is, Josh! He’s going with his luck. It’s what we came here for.”

  Joshua hesitated, and glanced back toward the unmoving circle around the chess players. Neither had stirred, nor had any member of their small audience.

  Josh’s mind raced, trying to decide what would be best. Ishmael had said that the essence of the system was not to be panicked, either by losses or by wins. Looking at that hawk-like profile bent over the hieratic ivory figures on the board, he wondered if Ish had understood how high gambling stakes could run. There were, Josh had discovered, some odd gaps in his friend’s knowledge; curious, inexplicable areas of ignorance, and an odd sort of naiveté. Joshua had no doubt that he understood the mathematics, but he suddenly wondered if Ishmael fully comprehended the human element of the game.

  As he handed over the wallet containing their $8,000 reserve and watched Jeremy slip quietly away into the gambling rooms, he felt a sensation akin to panic intrude itself into the portion of his anatomy just above his watch pocket. At this time of night—it was now nearly three in the morning—the gambling rooms had an air of unreality anyway, ascribed by Ishmael to the cumulative effects of oxygen deprivation and nicotine poisoning. The colors seemed more intense through the blurring of blue cigar smoke, the noisier roar of the early night muffled down, with only an occasional, disjointed fragment of the dealer’s voice coming through it, or a man’s exclamation of triumph. Joshua left the group around the chess-game and made his way to the scrolled archway that led into the gambling room.

  One glance told him that Jeremy hadn’t been exaggerating. Jason sat in the middle of a small crowd, his red-brown hair tousled and falling into his eyes. Gold was stacked elbow-deep all around him; the glitter of it wasn’t as bright as his eyes. He was riding his luck, and that, more than the aura of the gold, seemed to hang about him like a halo of fire—he was a man on a winning streak, twisting Fate into victory.

  But what Jeremy hadn’t said was that Jason had changed his game. He was no longer playing blackjack, but poker.

  “Raise,” said Jason in an emotionless voice, and Joshua felt his heart stop. It started again, racing—numbers would work in blackjack, a game of numbers played against the house’s numbers. Poker was as unpredictable as the men who sat around the table: a calm-eyed gambler, a couple of ranchers, and a mining-man from Virginia City. The little money had all long since been run out of the game.

  There was the soft, flat pat of folded cards thrown in. Jason scooped the money toward him; Joshua saw him smile.

  At his elbow, Jeremy’s voice whispered, “He’s hot, Joshua. He’s magic tonight. They c—can’t stop him.”

  Joshua threw a despairing glance over his shoulder. In the brief gap between watchers he got a slim vision of Ishmael, brooding over the chessboard like an Egyptian cat-god. He looked back in time to see Jason draw two, raise, and raise again. And still he won.

  It was like being in a nightmare, watching events in which he was helpless to interfere. Josh quickly calculated the sum on the table at Jason’s elbow—about twice their total capital, some thirty thousand dollars. His brother was grim, the sweat trickling, shining, down his face, playing with an unerring instinct that was in itself almost a system. He was taking chances he couldn’t possibly have taken, and winning, running the sum on the table up higher and higher and always getting away with it. Hypnotized, Joshua knew that was their entire fortune riding on those cards, riding on Jason’s instinct, on that mysterious thing called “feel.”

  A harsh voice spoke in his ear, breaking the dreamlike spell. “What is he doing?” It was Ishmael, his face like something carved from rock.

  “He’s winning,” said Joshua self-evidently, but his voice was shaky.

  “He is gambling.” Behind that neutral, expressionless tone that masked so much, Joshua could tell that Ish was profoundly shocked. “He has decided to trust his instincts, rather than the mathematics of the system.”

  “He has damn g—good instincts,” said Jeremy softly, from Josh’s other side. Jason stood pat, and won on three sevens; drew three cards on the next hand, and won again.

  The stakes went up. There was close to thirty thousand on the table—Jason raised, and won. There must have been other noises, from the billiard room and the saloon, from the other tables. Joshua was conscious of none of them. He watched in horrified fascination as Jason disregarded every precept, every system, took chance after chance—won hand after hand. We’re going to do it, thought Josh. We’re going to win the money, buy out our bet, go home ...

  The weird elation went like fire through him. The closed-in room seemed hot beyond bearing; all the world was concentrated in the brilliance of the golden gaslight, and the glitter of the money; in the black-and-red magic of the cards. Jason drew two, and raised; one of the ranchers folded, the other met and raised. After a momentary, enigmatic scrutiny of his cards, so did the gambler.

  “Stand,” whispered Joshua desperately. “Stand, for God’s sake.”

  Jason raised a second time. The gold seemed to blaze like a mountain of fire in the lamplight. In a quiet voice, the gambler said, “Raise,” and pushed forward the rest of his own pile, the equal to what Jason had left.

  Josh whispered, “Fold on it ...”

  Jason, after a moment’s thought, silently pushed forward the glittering stacks of gold.

  Chapter 14

  IT TOOK THEM three days to work their passage back to Seattle, on a cattle boat bound for Vancouver. In that time Jason Bolt could barely be gotten to speak to either of his brothers or to Ishmael. It was not that they felt any animosity toward him; he was blistered by his own shame. He knew what he’d done.

  They trailed quietly off the gangplank in Seattle in the early dusk, Jeremy carrying a new guitar case in addition to his carpetbag, all of them back in the familiar comfort of flannel shirts and Levi’s, their mackinaws buttoned against the raw evening cold.

  On the wharf, waiting for them, were Candy Pruitt, Aaron Stemple and Biddy Cloom. Candy and the Bolt Brothers hugged each other, a round mutual hug, and set off up the road for the mountain in the dusk. Ishmael caught a last glimpse of them through the trees, as Jeremy and Candy dropped back behind the others, and Jeremy fished in his pocket and gave the tall girl a small velvet box. He saw her pause in her tracks for a moment, then take it and kiss him; then he lost sight of them in the gathering dark.

  He turned his steps thoughtfully after Aaron and Biddy, as they descended the muddy path toward the mill.

  “I take it the expedition was less than a success,” said Aaron with a wry expression.

  Ishmael raised his eyebrow.

  “You would have come home in a lot finer style than that garbage scow, if Jason Bolt had made a
success of it.”

  “It was—fascinating.” Ish paused, debating whether he should mention Joshua’s inexplicable disappearance, then brushed the thought away. “Had Jason stayed with the system, he would have won his money in another ten days. He elected to try double-or-nothing, and he finished with nothing.”

  “Oh, no!” cried Biddy. “How awful! Oh, Ish, you’ll have to tell me all about it—I’ve never been to San Francisco, or any big city, really. You must have had a terrible time, in all those gambling palaces. ...”

  “Indeed,” said Ishmael, “were it not for the money I won playing chess, we would have been hard put to pay the hotel bill.”

  “Chess?” Stemple glanced sharply sideways at Ishmael in the gray dusk. “Who the devil taught you to play chess?”

  “My—” began Ishmael, and the word dropped off into that white void, leaving him silent.

  “I’ll get this yet.” Biddy Gloom straightened up, and surveyed her massacred forces on the chessboard with a critical eye.

  “I believe you will,” agreed Ishmael equably. “All that it requires is time and concentration.”

  Above the mantel, the camelback clock wheezed and thumped eight-thirty, and Aaron folded up his newspaper, removed his reading glasses, and went to fetch Biddy’s cloak, to walk with her back to the dormitory.

  As the dormitory had emptied over the last few months, Biddy had taken to spending more time at the big house near the mill. Several evenings a week she could be found there, usually cooking dinner for the two bachelors, often staying afterwards, sewing or knitting while Aaron handled the mill papers and Ish read. When she was in the company of people she trusted, like Stemple and Ishmael, Aaron was surprised to discover that Biddy was actually a fairly quiet girl. In fact, he had to admit that he had been wrong about her almost entirely, and was coming to enjoy her company, when she wasn’t nervous and trying to attract men as the other girls did.

  She was learning to play chess now, having watched his games with Ishmael in the last few weeks since his nephew had returned from San Francisco. Like most beginners she had no concept of strategy, nor any idea of why she kept losing, but Aaron noticed that she didn’t make mistakes about which pieces made which moves, and didn’t talk during games. She made up for this in between times with a spate of chatter and gossip—preparations for Candy’s wedding, the fact that Jason and Joshua Bolt had had a fearful falling-out over some unspecified request that Jason had made of Joshua. Upon closer acquaintance with her, Aaron came to realize that one of the things that had earned Biddy her reputation for tactlessness was the fact that she was observant of those around her, and had considerable intuition about people’s motivations.

  He was even, he found, coming to miss her on those evenings when she wasn’t around.

  As Aaron left the room to fetch her cloak Biddy stood up, and as she turned away from the hearth Ish caught the faint clink of silver falling on wood. He reached to pick up what she had dropped—a tiny pendant that had slipped from its chain and fallen into the shadows by the fireplace. He angled it to the light, looking for something on its worn surface ... difficult to see in this light, for the pendant was small, not much longer than his own thumbnail.

  “Oh, Ish!” She came hurrying back, the silver chain loose in her hand. “I only just this minute realized it was gone.”

  “I heard it fall,” he said simply.

  “You ...” she said disbelieving. Then, “No, you’re funning me.”

  Ishmael started to object, then kept silent. There were too many things, he knew, that he took for granted. One day one of them would give him away; it was something of a tribute to human inability to believe the previously unthought-of that it hadn’t already.

  “It is very pretty,” he said, holding it carefully on his palm. “It’s a—a fleur-de-lys, isn’t it?” The strange name came haltingly to his tongue. To his knowledge he’d never heard it before, and knew it was in another language. “A French lily?” He turned it over. On one side its center band bore a very small star, the thing he had been looking for in the firelight.

  “Yes,” said Biddy. “I think it’s real silver.”

  Ish estimated its mass against its slight weight in his palm. “It appears to be,” he judged. There was something familiar about the tiny thing, the sense that he’d seen it before. Someone had told him once that this shape was a French lily, a fleur-de-lys. A woman’s voice, he thought. He could almost see the woman’s face. “Where did you get it?” he asked, taking the chain from her hand and stringing it through the tiny wire hoop.

  “Oh, you don’t have to—thank you, Ish. It was Grandma Larkin’s. She said to pass it along to my daughters, when I have them.” She smiled again, a wry, tired smile. “That may be a long time.”

  She was returning, Ish knew, to a dormitory all but empty, those few girls who were left humming with the preparations for Candy Pruitt’s wedding. An unnecessary cruelty, he thought, maneuvering the fragile silver of the twisted chain-links together and pinching them closed with his fingernail. One she does not deserve. “Does it matter?” he asked, stepping behind her to fix the necklace round her neck again under the white lace of her collar.

  She turned her head, startled, her brown curls falling over his hands where they rested at the nape of her neck.

  “Is time so vital,” said Ishmael, “that you would close the door to something important, only to take what was offered first?”

  She regarded him, startled, and then he saw her eyes shine with sudden tears. “Are you only saying that,” she murmured, “because Aaron has a bet on it?”

  “Do you think that poorly of me?” asked Ish.

  She tried to pull away from him, and he caught her shoulders between his hands and held her thus for the time it took her to think. When he felt her relax a little in his grip, he let her go.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. She turned around to face him. “It’s just—I’m glad you think I’d be worth two offers.”

  There was no logical reply. Aaron came from the other room, wrapped in his coat and carrying her cloak, and offered her his arm. They stepped together out into the snowy night.

  Ishmael closed the door behind them, and sank back into his chair by the fireplace, staring at the gold light as it played over the chess pieces still scattered like footprints over the board. There was another way to play that game, he knew. A more complex way. He picked up two pieces, suspended them in the air above the board. Why did he think they should move up and down as well as back and forth?

  Who was it that he so poignantly missed playing chess with?

  Why did he sometimes have vague dreams about playing chess with a machine?

  He set the pieces down. It was something he would not know until he saw it again, as he had known Biddy’s pendant.

  Not just another silver pendant of a fleur-de-lys, but that one. I have seen it, I have held it in my hand, he thought. I know it, recognize it. Of all the things here that are strange to me, why do I recognize Biddy Cloom’s French lily?

  It was clear, clear as crystal before his eyes. Lying in the palm of his hand, looking different, the star worn until it was no more than a fragile tracery, visible only in the strongest of sunlight. But undeniably the same.

  But he could never have seen it, could never have held it before. He was an alien, alien to this planet, and the thing was part of Biddy’s family and had been so for generations. Grandma Larkin’s—even the name sounded an echo in his mind. Who had said they’d had—“Ever-so-great-grandma Larkin ... ?” A woman’s voice, a woman’s face ...

  He knew them, knew them so well.

  It is impossible. He raised his head to look in the mirror over the mantelpiece, and from it the alien face looked back, as it had looked at him every day since he had wakened at the cabin on Eagle Head Point, marking him as a stranger among these people, an impostor in human guise.

  He ran his hands through his hair, shoving the black thick mass of it back away from h
is forehead, throwing into prominence the strange bone structure, the harsh slant of the brows. Very faintly he could see the marks on his temples still, the small greenish shadow images of burns. What had that been? Something that had wiped out his memory, as it had obliterated those few hours from Joshua’s. Only Joshua had wakened with his friend and the woman he loved beside him. Joshua had wakened in a world that he knew.

  Ishmael leaned his brow on his hands, his head beginning to ache excruciatingly, as it always did when he tried to see past that cloudy void of white pain. What had happened to him? he wondered. And why had it happened to Joshua? He was still sitting, staring into the fire, when Stemple returned an hour later. Stemple, too, had been doing some thinking on his way back up that dark, slushy road from the dormitory. He was uncomfortably quiet as he moved about, stripping off his coat and boots.

  Ishmael glanced up at him. “It is unjust, what you are doing to Biddy.”

  Stemple laughed harshly. “I’ve as good as guaranteed her a husband before the second of January. And a good one,” he added defensively. “Jason Bolt will do right by her.”

  “Indeed,” replied Ish in a colorless voice. “Nevertheless, you wrong her.”

  “Ish,” said Aaron, in the truculent tone of a man seeking to justify what he knows to be wrong, “if Biddy Cloom hadn’t come to Seattle, and if there wasn’t that threat of losing his mountain to push Jason into proposing to her—which he will do, New Year’s Eve if I know Bolt—she’d die an old maid. I gave Bolt the chance to buy out of the bet and he muffed it. I’m not even sure letting him out of it at this point would be the best thing.”

  “For Biddy?”

  Stemple went and hung up his coat.

  “Aaron,” said Ish, when he returned to the parlor, “one thing in all of this which I do not understand. What is so wrong with Biddy Cloom? This—beauty—that is spoken of, I do not understand. Perhaps because I am alien, I feel no desire for any of those girls, and I do not see—beauty. Are humans truly so blind?”