Fool’s Run

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Jase eyed the doctor. The best defense against questions like that, he had decided long ago, was to answer them. “I think,” he said finally, “that peoples’ minds are like houses. Full of bedrooms, cellars, attics, closets, kitchens, elegant living rooms, gardens…Full of doors. By the time you’ve reached my age, you’ve pretty much opened all the doors. You know what closets the monsters are kept in, what ugly thought lives down in the basement, what bloody impulse is behind the attic door. You know, by this time, what they’re worth to you. I’m comfortable in my own house. If someone rings the door bell, I let them in.”

  Dr. Fiori put his cup down, smiling. “I didn’t think I’d like you,” he said, “when I first talked to you.”

  “Well,” Jase said uncomfortably. “You never know.”

  “I think you shouldn’t judge her too quickly at this point. Bowls of oranges don’t make people crazy. There’s nothing wrong with her brain. It’s she who’s making herself crazy. And she’ll tell us why. She can’t speak. Words are terrifying to her. Or too precise, too imprecise, who knows? Or else we have never invented the words to say what she has seen. So she tells her story in a language that is silent, in hope that someone can learn to hear.”

  SEVEN

  The Magician sat alone in the Constellation Club, listening. Sounds suggested other sounds in his head; the silence surrounding him slowly became layered and textured with music. The walls were indigo. Between three and four in the morning the world was as still as it ever got. He could even hear the mournful, distant moan of the last foghorn warning, warning. His fingers found the two bass notes on the keyboard between which the note of the foghorn hid; he touched the notes softly, played them against the foghorn, still listening.

  His right hand strayed up the treble, a ripple of mist against the brooding bass. In his mind, he heard the rod-harp’s brilliant, restless voice, the thunder of the cubes. The moon-white face of the mist looming against the indigo sky, the welter and crash of tide, the foghorn crying in its private, urgent voice of things invisible, secret, unexpected, that might or might not be within the mist…

  A step in the mist dispersed it. Startled, he spun on the piano stool. The dark walls built around him once again. The silence within them was empty. The rod-harp, the cubes on the stage, covered against the dust, had sounded only in his head.

  Aaron, in uniform, paused midstep. “Sorry,” he said. “I saw the outer door unlocked. Thought I’d check…You’re here late.”

  The Magician nodded, rising to stretch his legs. “We had a band meeting after hours. I stayed later to tune the piano. I got sidetracked, I guess…It’s quiet here at nights. Quieter even than the smallcraft dock.”

  “Did I interrupt genius?”

  The Magician grinned. “Hardly. I was just listening to the foghorn.”

  Aaron crossed the floor, dropped down onto the stage ramp. “It’s a peaceful night,” he commented. “About once a year we get a night like this. No full moon, no brawls, no speeders, no family fights. The muggers and snipers, even the street gangs stay home. You’re the most dangerous man I’ve seen.”

  “Demented but harmless,” the Magician murmured. Aaron watched him sound a key, lean into the strings to make a minute adjustment.

  “Are you ready for the tour?”

  “Outside of the receiver, which has gone berserk, a jammed reflector shield, an unidentified thunk in the plumbing, an ex-con for a singer and a catatonic cuber, we’re ready.”

  “Is the Gambler going?”

  “He says no. We may have to kidnap him.”

  Aaron grunted. “You must know someone.”

  The Magician shook his head, tuned another note. “No one good enough. We’re going, though.”

  “How? Without a cuber?”

  A low G answered him, soft, repetitive. Aaron listened, but the minuscule change in pitch eluded him. He leaned back tiredly on his elbows. A dispatch in his ear made him tense again; the message wasn’t for him. His body stirred anyway, then subsided. He needed a break, and within the indigo silence, he could almost hear music, last night’s, the next night’s, drifting, waiting, on the edge of time.

  He caught himself yawning; the Magician stopped sounding an A-flat.

  “You look like you haven’t been sleeping,” he commented. Aaron shrugged a little.

  “I keep dreaming.” The Magician’s attention had an impersonal quality; he added, as if to himself, “Sometimes I go through cycles of bad dreams…You ever been married?”

  “Once.” He chuckled for some reason. “We parted friends. You?”

  “Once.” He waited through another note. The Magician’s face was quiet, absorbed. Then the note stopped sounding. Within the silence, all the music suddenly stopped.

  Aaron lifted his head, found the Magician staring at him. His breath stopped; he felt the hair on the nape of his neck stir. For a moment a ghost, unbidden, stood between them. The Magician, his face pale, his eyes wide, seemed to see her, seemed to have picked out of the innermost place in Aaron’s brain some sense of his torment. Aaron, frozen under his gaze, waited like a doomed man for him to bring her back with language.

  But it had been little more than an intimation of grief. The Magician’s eyes turned again to the key under his hand.

  “An accident?”

  Aaron swallowed. “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry. So you’ve been dreaming about it?”

  “It comes back now and then.”

  “You never mentioned it.”

  “No.” There was a hard warning in his voice; the Magician’s head bowed over his work. The B-flat sounded once, twice. Aaron sighed. He spoke again and it stilled. “It’s—I’ve always had a hard time talking about things like that. Maybe that’s why I have to dream about it.”

  “Probably. Sorry I brought it up.”

  “You didn’t,” Aaron said helplessly. “You just pulled it out of my head. You just—”

  The Magician looked at him again, trying to remember. The key still moved under his hand. His face had lost color and its calmness; his eyes were narrowed slightly, as at a chill wind. “It was in your voice.”

  Aaron shook his head doggedly. “It was in the silence after my voice.”

  The B-flat sounded once more. Then the Magician lifted his hand, touched his eyes with his fingers. He came over to the stage edge, dropped down beside Aaron.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Did you grow up doing that?”

  “I don’t remember being obnoxious with it. I hardly pay attention to it. Sometimes I know things, that’s all. Everyone does. You do.”

  “I don’t pull things out of your head.”

  “That’s because I don’t store much there besides music,” the Magician said, so reasonably that Aaron smiled. “Right now I’m storing the sound of the B-flat. I was listening to it, to the vibrations of it in the air when you spoke; maybe I accidentally picked up some overtones in you too.” He paused, listening once more, or taking a sounding of the silence. Aaron resisted an impulse to shift away from him. His eyes on a far door, he blocked the Magician from his sight, let his silence block the Magician from his mind.

  He didn’t hear the Magician move; the B-flat sounded again, gentle, remote. He felt himself breathe again, the blood flush back into his face. He wanted to speak, then, for even he could feel the chill he had left in the air. Ghosts, he remembered, emanate cold. He turned, not knowing if words would get past the stiffness in his throat. But the Magician had ducked back down into the piano, leaving Aaron his privacy. Aaron turned back again, stared at the unlocked door, and for a moment it seemed just another entry into nowhere, into a world roamed by ghosts, all searching for the nonexistent doorway back into the past.

  The door opened.

  He froze on the ramp, ambushed, despite all his training, by an ambiguity. A woman appeared in the shadows; he watched her, not moving, not breathing. She glanced at the stage, at the Magician lost inside the piano, tightening an
d refining the small, single sound he was making. She closed the door gently behind her. She moved out of the shadows and Aaron breathed again.

  She wore a rumpled, silvery jumpsuit. The bulging bag over her shoulder was about to overflow with odd things: black lace, red satin, the rhinestone-studded heel of a shoe, a pair of rose-colored cube-sticks. Her face winked in the light, glitter from her hair caught in the lustrous mask of paint that was so smoothly and richly gold, Aaron had a sudden desire to touch it, see if it was as warming as it looked. Her hair, long, wild, crimson as the color on a playing card, nudged at his memory. She saw him then; her quick steps missed a beat, lagged. Her head turned toward him; her eyes, wide set, deep, opaque grey, gazed back at him. I know those eyes, he thought, his body tense again, memory struggling to surface in his head. I know them. Seconds passed, it seemed, or whole hours between her steps, while he dragged the memory out of him, out of her. Her eyes changed, shadowed as under a change of light, and he finally glimpsed it in her, the place he recognized: the haunted world he lived in.

  Then she shut him out, left him staring at a mask. Her pace quickened again; she turned her head toward the Magician, beginning to smile as he groped for another key. The smile became a laugh, husky, exuberant, and he pulled himself out of the piano, his head snapping toward her.

  “Heart-Lady!”

  That’s it, Aaron thought, remembering Sidney’s poker hand. Fool’s Run.

  She laughed again as the Magician leaped down from the stage, and threw her arms around him. Things fell: a cube-stick, a heart-pin from her hair. She was a spacer, Aaron realized. Long-boned and slender, the kind of body made to drift.

  “Magic-Man, you’re still here! After all these years! Can’t you tear yourself away from Sidney Halleck’s pianos?”

  “He keeps finding me new ones.” He held her away to look at her. “What in the world are you doing wandering around here at four in the morning? Last I heard you were touring with the Ramjets.”

  “I couldn’t come any sooner,” she said vaguely. “The Ramjets—Oh, I left them a month ago.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged; another heart-pin fell. “I got bored.”

  “In the middle of a full-Sector tour?”

  “Well, yes, but I stayed to the end of the tour. Magic-Man, you look—you look—” She threw up her hands, laughing again, touched his shoulders. “You’re a sight for my eyes, like coming home or something. I missed you playing Bach. Nobody else plays a piano. Oh, a few bands do, but not that. Not like you. Anyway. I saw you, but I didn’t have time to—I’m playing down the street. I know I haven’t heard your music for a while, but I’ve played everything. Everything. Even”—she glanced at Aaron, still smiling—“Primal Mind Reds. Not Full Primal, nobody died, but it was still spectacular. Lots of noise, though. I didn’t last long; I got tired of broken instruments. I wouldn’t let them touch my cubes, though, and since it was me, they didn’t make me—”

  “You played PMR?” the Magician said incredulously. Aaron, fascinated by the gentle swirl of words, wondered if she were on something. Then he thought, No. The Magician looks used to this.

  “Well, I wanted to play every kind of music.”

  “PMR is not—”

  “Magic-Man, we can argue about that later, over a barrel of beer. Or do you still drink Scotch? Anyway, if you want to, you can come and hear me play before you say yes or no, and I won’t be offended if—after all, it’s been what? Five years since I’ve played with you? And after all—”

  “Yes or no to what?” the Magician asked, finally bewildered.

  “Me. I ran into the Gambler the other night at the Starshot, where I played this last week. He was sort of attached to the bar as if it were his mother, looking like a jittery scarecrow. You know how he looks…He can’t drink at all, must have something to do with his balance. Anyway, he told me about your tour to the Underworld, so I said if he could sub for me at the Starshot, sure I’ll go. On your off-world tour.” She touched a heart-pin. “To the Underworld.”

  The Magician was so still for a second that Aaron wondered if he had died standing up. Then the air around him flushed a sudden red, as if his heartbeat had bled color into it. Aaron’s body tensed, a word starting and stopping in his throat. Before he could move, the aura was gone. The woman, suddenly wordless herself, felt the air behind the Magician’s back.

  “Magic-Man? Are you still connected?”

  The Magician, oblivious, lifted his hands, held her lightly, as if she might turn to smoke between his fingers. “You? You’ll come?”

  She was silent. A little, affectionate smile changed her eyes again. “If you want me, Magic-Man. I’d love to play with you again. I miss your music.”

  “If I want you. God,” he said reverently. “I threatened the Gambler with his life if he didn’t come up with a replacement. I never thought he’d come up with you.” He kissed her cheek swiftly. “Thank you.” He caught sight of Aaron, grinning behind her. He loosed her, led her over to the ramp, and Aaron dropped down to the floor.

  “This is Aaron Fisher, a good friend of mine. Aaron, this is the best cuber in fourteen Sectors: the Queen of Hearts.”

  The hand she held out was slender, long-jointed; she had a cuber’s muscular grip. Her eyes, on Aaron’s face, were smiling, again opaque. “I’m not musical,” Aaron said. “I recognize elevator tunes. But I’ve heard your name.”

  “Well, I’ve been in so many bands, so many places…though not,” she said thoughtfully, “in elevators. No. I’m sure not. Was the Magician giving you a concert? Is that why you were stretched out on the ramp?”

  Aaron smiled. “I just came in to see who had left the door unlocked.” The face paint, even that close, was flawless; again he resisted a desire to touch it. He heard himself say inanely, “That’s quite a compliment, Magic-Man, the best cuber in fourteen Sectors leaving everything to play with you.”

  She shook her head; heart-pins slid and clung; a black crinoline collar dropped out of her bag. She picked it up absently, drew it like a garter up one arm. “I’ve played everywhere all right, in the asteroids, in the floating sea-hotels, in clubs so tiny I could hardly lift my cube-sticks without knocking out a stage light. I’ve done three full-Sector tours, each with a different band. You’d think no one would let me come near them, I always leave. But I leave them better than they were, and people say I bring luck with me. The Queen of Hearts, the Lucky Lady.” She laughed softly, without a hint of bitterness. “I don’t know if that’s true. So I’ve been everywhere, played everything. And nothing has ever stuck in my mind like the Magician’s music. So I came back.” She paused; they waited, in a charmed silence. “Here.” Her eyes changed unexpectedly, grew wide, glittering slightly. She bent quickly to retrieve the cube-sticks. “Here.”

  A shoe dropped out of her bag. Aaron fielded it; when he straightened, she was barricaded again behind the smile. She swung the shoe loosely between finger and thumb; the rhinestones glittered wildly.

  “You still play Bach, Magic-Man?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And the Flying Wail?” The rhinestones were suddenly still; her face, behind the smile, was very still. “Do you still have it?”

  “We’ll be touring in it,” the Magician said, and the lights gyrated again in her hand. “We’ll be rehearsing after hours every night here for the next two weeks. Can you make it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Tell the Nebraskan where your cubes are and he’ll help you move them. I’ll call the Agency tomorrow about an off-world passport for you—no, I can’t call until I get that bloody receiver fixed—”

  “I’ll get the passport,” she said quickly. “Magic-Man, you need help with repairs? I used to tinker with my dad’s shuttle when I was a kid. I’ll take a look at your receiver. Oh, and I can navigate, too, in space. I learned that on one tour or another. I think it was with Cygnus.” She laughed at the Magician’s expression. “Well, I was bored.”

  “Hear
t-Lady, you’re a godsend.”

  “Maybe. Maybe it’s you, though…” She tucked the shoe back into her bag, her face hidden behind the long, rippling, rose-colored hair.

  Aaron asked curiously, “Where were you born?”

  She shook her hair back, looked at him. One hand went up, settled a pin. She said slowly, “I remember you now. The Magician and Sidney Halleck were playing poker. You were watching behind Sidney’s shoulder.”

  He nodded. “Sidney dealt you into his poker hand.”

  Fingers still troubling the pin, she seemed suddenly aware of him: his height and weight, the timbre of his voice, the hint of choices made in the lines of his face, the shadow of morning stubble along his jaw. He watched himself change in her eyes to something more than a piece of backdrop in the Magician’s world. She started to say something, stopped. Then she said it, sounding tentative, surprised.

  “Will you come and hear me play?”

  He smiled. He felt tired, then pleasantly so, and knew that for some reason he could not yet fathom, he would sleep that day without dreams.

  “I’d love to.”

  He came the next night, and the night after, and all the nights after that, snatching moments out of his street patrolling to slip inside the doors of the Constellation Club at two, three or four in the morning, to watch her. Sometimes he had a chance to speak to her, sometimes not. On his nights off he sat through their full rehearsals, at the bar beside Sidney Halleck, while the cleaning crew whirled soundlessly around the vast floor, vacuuming, polishing. Though he had little ear for distinguishing one cuber from another, the powerful, controlled rhythms of her cubing shook him sometimes as if something deep inside the earth beneath them were shifting, speaking. Surrounded by the hot, glowing cubes, her face remote in concentration, washed in gold and the inner fires of the cubes, she brought a word out of Aaron’s memory that he had forgotten he ever knew.

  “She looks like a sorceress…”

  Sidney, sipping beer beside him, smiled. “Maybe she is. She appeared out of nowhere and granted the Magician’s wish. Did you do a status-check on her?”