Fire Watch (20 page)

She smiled at me, and the scar faded a little. “Now you just kimm on in and meet the girls. Din’t mind it if they say simmthing about the way you look. They’ve nivver seen a Mirror before, but they’re good girls.” She opened the thick door. It was metalpaper backed with a thick pad of
insulation. “We take our shoes off out here and wear shuffles inside the abbey”

It was much cooler inside. There was a plastic heat-trigger fan set in the ceiling and surrounded by rose-colored chemilooms. We were in an anteroom with a rack for the high shoes and the lanterns. They dangled by their straps.

Jewell sat down on a chair and began unbuckling her bulky shoes. “Din’t ivver go out without shoes and a lantern,” she said. She gestured toward the rack. “The little ones with the twillpaper hiddbands are for town. They only list about an hour. If you’re going out to the taps or the spiraldown, take one iv the big ones with you.”

She looked different in the rosy light. Her scar hardly showed at all. Her voice was different, too, deeper. She sounded older than she had at the down. I looked up and around at the air.

“We blow nitrogen and oxygen in from a tap behind the house,” she said. “The tappers din’t like having squeaky little helium voices when they’re with the girls. You can’t git rid of the helium, or the hydrogen either. They leak in ivverywhere. The bist you can do is dilute it. You shid be glad you weren’t here at the beginning, before they tapped an atmosphere. You had to wear vacuum suits thin.” She pried off her shoe. The bottom of her foot was a mass of blisters. She started to stand up and then sat down again.

“Yill for Carnie,” she said. “Till her to bring some bandages.”

I hung my outside shoes on the rack and opened the inner door. It fit tightly, though it opened with just a touch. It was made of the same insulation as the outer door. It opened onto a fancy room, all curtains and fur rugs and hanging looms that cast little pools of colored light, green and rose and gold. The pianoboard stood over against one wall on a carved plastic table. I could not see anyone in the room, and I could not hear voices for the sound of the blowers. I started across a blood-red fur rug to another door hung with curtains.

“Jewell?” a woman’s voice said. The blowers kicked off, and she said, “Jewell?” again, and I saw that I had nearly
walked past her. She was sitting in a white velvet chair in a little bay that would have been a window if this were not Paylay. She was wearing a white satinpaper dress with a long skirt. Her hair was piled on top of her head, and there was a string of pearls around her long neck. She was sitting so quietly, with her hands in her lap and her head turned slightly away from me, that I had not even seen her.

“Are you Carnie?” I said.

“No,” she said, and she didn’t look up at me. “What is it?”

“Jewell got her feet burned,” I said. “She needs bandages. I’m the new pianoboard player.”

“I know,” the girl said. She lifted her head a little in the direction of the stairs and called, “Carnie. Get the remedy case.”

A girl came running down the stairs in an orange-red robe and no shoes. “Is it Jewell?” she said to the girl in the white dress, and when she nodded, Carnie ran past us into the other room. I could hear the hollow sound of an insulated door opening. The girl had made no move to come and see Jewell. She sat perfectly still in the white chair, her hands lying quietly in her lap.

“Jewell’s feet are pretty bad,” I said. “Can’t you at least come see them?”

“No,” she said, and looked up at me. “My name is Pearl,” she said. “I had a friend once who played the pianoboard.”

Even then I wouldn’t have known she was blind except that my uncle had told me. “Most of the girls are newcomers Jewell hired for Paylay right off the ships, before the happy houses could ruin them,” my uncle had said. “She only brought a couple of the girls with her from Solfatara, girls who worked with her in the happy house she came out of. Carnie, and I think Sapphire, and Pearl, the blind one.”

“Blind?” I had said. Solfatara is a long way out, but anyplace has doctors.

“He cut the optic nerve was severed. They did orb implants and reattached all the muscles, but it was only cosmetic repair. She can’t see anything.”

Even after all the horrible stories I had heard about Solfatara, it had shocked me to think that someone could do something like that. I remember thinking that the man must have been incredibly cruel to have done such a thing, that it would have been kinder to kill her outright than to have left her helpless and injured like that in a place like Solfatara.

“Who did it to her?” I said.

“A tapper,” he said, and for a minute he looked very much like Kovich, so much that I asked, “Was it the same man who broke Kovich’s hands?”

“Yes,” my uncle said.

“Did they kill him?” I said, and that was not the question I had intended to ask. I had meant did Kovich kill him, but I had said “they.”

And my uncle, not looking like Kovich at all, had said, “Yes, they killed him,” as if that were the right question after all.

The orb implants, the muscle reattachments had been very good. Her eyes were a beautiful pale gray; and someone had taught her to follow voices with them. There was nothing at all in the angle of her head or her eyes or her quiet hands to tell me she was blind or make me pity her, and standing there looking down at her, I was glad, glad that they had killed him. I hoped that they had cut his eyes out first.

Carnie darted past us with the remedy case, and I said, still looking down at Pearl, “I’ll go and see if I can help her.” I went back out into the anteroom and watched while Carnie put some kind of oil on Jewell’s feet and then a meshlike pad, and wrapped her feet in bandages.

“This is Carnelian,” Jewell said. “Carnie, this is our new pianoboard player.”

She smiled at me. She looked very young. She must have been only a child when she worked in the happy house on Solfatara with Jewell.

“I bit you can do real fancy stuff with those hands,” she said, and giggled.

“Don’t tease him,” Jewell said. “He’s here to play the pianoboard.”

“I
meant
on the pianoboard. You din’t look like a real Mirror. You know, shiny and ivverything? Who are you going to copy?”

“He’s not going to copy innybody,” Jewell said sharply “He’s going to play the pianoboard, and that’s all. Is supper riddy?”

“No. I was jist in the kitchen and Sapphire wasn’t even there yit.” She looked back up at me. “When you copy somebody, do you look like them?”

“No,” I said. “You’re thinking of a Chameleon.”

“You’re not thinking at all,” Jewell said to her and stood up. She winced a little as she put her weight on her feet. “Go borrow a pair of Garnet’s shuffles. I’ll nivver be able to git mine on. And go till Sapphire to doubletap hersilfinto the kitchen.”

She let me help her to the stairs, but not up them. “When Carnie comes back, you hivv her show you your room. We work an eight and eight here, and it’s nearly time for the shift. You kin practice till supper if you want.”

She went up two steps and stopped. “If Carnie asks you innymore silly questions, tell her I told her to lit you alone. I don’t want to hear any more nonsinse about copying and Mirrors. You’re here to play the pianoboard.”

She went on up the stairs, and I went back into the music room. Pearl was still there, sitting in the white chair, and I didn’t know whether she was included in the instructions to leave me alone, so I sat down on the hard wooden stool and looked at the pianoboard.

It had a wooden soundboard and bridges, but the strings were plastic instead of metal. I tried a few chords, and it seemed to have a good sound in spite of the strings. I played a few scales and more chords and looked at the names on the hardcopies that stood against the music rack. I can’t read music, of course, but I could see by the titles that I knew most of the songs.

“It isn’t nonsense, is it?” Pearl said. “About the copying.” She spoke slowly and without the clipped accent Jewell and Carnie had.

I turned around on the stool and faced her. “No,” I said. “Mirrors have to copy. They can’t help themselves.
They don’t even know who they’re copying. Jewell doesn’t believe me. Do you?”

“The worst thing about being blind is not that things are done to you,” she said, and looked up at me again with her gray eyes. “It’s that you don’t know who’s doing them.”

Carnie came in through the curtained door. “I’m sipposed to show you around,” she said. “Oh, Pearl, I wish you kidd see him. He has eight fingers on each hand, and he’s really tall. Almost to the ceiling. And his skin is bright red.”

“Like a sidon’s,” Pearl said, looking at me.

Carnie looked down at the blood-red rug she was standing on. “Jist like,” she said, and dragged me upstairs to show me my room and the clothes I was to wear and to show me off to the other girls. They were already dressed for the shift in trailing satinpaper dresses that matched their names. Garnet wore rose-red chemilooms in her upswept hair, Emerald an elaborately lit collar.

Carnie got dressed in front of me, stepping out of her robe and into an orange-red dress as if I weren’t watching. She asked me to fasten her armropes of winking orange, lifting up her red curls so I could tie the strings of the chemilooms behind her shoulders. I could not decide then if she were trying to seduce me or to get me to copy her or simply to convince me that she was the naive child she pretended to be.

I thought then that whatever she was trying she had failed. She had succeeded only in convincing me of what my uncle had already told me. In spite of her youth, her silliness, I could well believe she had been on Solfatara, had known all of it, the pervs, the sots, the worst the happy houses had to offer. I think now she didn’t mean anything by it except that she wanted to be cruel, that she was simply poking at me as if I were an animal in a cage.

At supper, watching Sapphire set Pearl’s plate for her between taped marks, I wondered whether Carnie was ever cruel to Pearl as she had been to me, shifting the plate slightly as she set it down or moving her chair so she could not find it.

Sapphire set the rest of the plates on the table, her
eyes dark blue from some old bitterness, and I thought, Jewell shouldn’t have brought any of them with her from Solfatara except Pearl. Pearl is the only one who hasn’t been ruined by it. Her blindness has kept her safe, I thought. She has been protected from all the horrors because she couldn’t see them. Perhaps her blindness protects her from Carnie, too, I thought. Perhaps that is the secret, that she is safe inside her blindness and no one can hurt her, and Jewell knows that. I did not think then about the man who had blinded her, and how she had not been safe from him at all.

Jewell called the meal to order. “I want you to make our new pianoboard player wilcome,” she said. She reached across the table and patted Carnie’s hand. “Thank you for doing the introductions, and for bandaging my foot,” she said, and I thought, Pearl is safe after all. Jewell has tamed Carnie and all the rest of them. I did not think about the sidon she had tamed, and how it now lay on the floor in front of the card-room door.

That first shift Jewell decked me out in formals and a black-red dog collar and had me stand at the door with her as she greeted the tappers. They were in formals, too, under their soot-black work jackets. They hung the many-pocketed jackets, heavy with tools, on the rack in the anteroom along with their lanterns and sat down to take off their high shoes with hands almost as red as mine. They had washed their hands and faces, but their fingernails were black with soot, and there was soot in every line of their palms. Their faces looked hot and raw, and they all had a broad pale band across their foreheads from the lantern strap. One of them Jewell called Scorch had singed off his eyebrows and a long strip of hair on top of his head.

“You’ll meet almost all the tappers this shift. The gaming house will close hiffway through and the rist of them will come over. Taber and I stagger the shifts so simmthings always open.”

She didn’t introduce me, though some of the tappers looked at my eight-fingered hands curiously; and one of the men looked surprised and then angry. He looked as if he
was going to say something to me, and then changed his mind, his face getting redder and darker until the lantern line stood out like a scar.

When they were all inside the music room, Jewell led me to the pianoboard and had me sit down and spread my hands out over the keyboard, ready to play. Then she said, “This is my new pianoboard player, boys. Say hillo to him.”

“What’s his name, Jewell?” one of the men said. “You ginna give him a fancy name like the girls?”

“I nivver thought about it,” she said. “What do you think?”

The tapper who had turned so red said loudly, “I think you shid call him sidon and kick him out to burn on Paylay. He’s a Mirror.”

“I alriddy got a Carnelian and a Garnet. And I had a sidon once. I giss I’ll call him Ruby.” She looked calmly over at the man who had spoken. “That okay with you, Jick?”

His face was as dark a red as mine. “I didn’t say it to be mean, Jewell,” he said. “You’re doing what you did with the sidon, taking in simmthing thit’ll turn on you. They won’t even lit Mirrors on Solfatara.”

“I think that’s probably a good ricommendation considering what they do lit on Solfatara,” Jewell said quietly “Sot-gamblers, tap-stealers, pervers—”

“You saw that Mirror kill the tapper. Stid there right in front iv ivverybody and nobody kidd stop him. Nobody. The tapper bigging for mercy, his hands tied in front of him, and thit Mirror coming at him with a sot-razor, smiling while he did it.”

“Yes,” Jewell said. “I saw it. I saw a lot of things on Solfatara. But this is Paylay. And this is my pianoboard player Ruby I din’t think a man should be outlawed till he does simmthing, di you, Jick?” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Do you know ‘Back Home’?” she said. Or course I knew it. I knew all the tapper songs. Kovich had played in every happy house on Solfatara before somebody broke his hands. He had called “Back Home” his rope-cutter.

“Play it, thin,” she said. “Show thim what you can do, Ruby.”