Fool's Run (v1.1) (4 page)

“Mr. Halleck.”

“Chief Klyos?” Sidney said. His deep, calm voice sounded bewildered but courteous.

“What can I do for you?”

“I don’t know anything about music, but I’m told it’s an honor to meet you.”

“Did you ever sing a nursery rhyme? Then you know something about music.”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“Mr. Halleck,” Jase said carefully, trying to remember Jeri’s babbling. “You’ve been recommended to us by the FWG Bureau of Arts as well as by the FWG Institute of—ah—Social Institutions. May I ask you to talk for a few minutes to our Director of Rehabilitations, Dr. Jeri Halpren? He’s experimenting with a new program for inmates due to be sent back into Earth society. May I transfer you to him?”

“Of course,” Sidney Halleck said bemusedly. “I’m at a loss to know how I can help him; I know nothing about prisons, but—”

“He’ll explain.” He glanced at Jeri, who was staring at him in grateful disbelief. He kept his voice courteous with an effort. “Thank you very much, Mr. Halleck. It’s been a pleasure to—oh.” He stopped, surprised. “I’ll be damned.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I just remembered a nursery rhyme.”

Sidney smiled cheerfully. “The brain is a marvelous junkyard.”

“Isn’t it, though?”

“Which rhyme was it?”

“Ah—tarts. ‘The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts, all on a summer’s day…’ But, Mr. Halleck, there’s no music to that one.”

“Strictly speaking, no,” Sidney said apologetically. “You’re right. But there is rhythm, and if you define music as a succession or pattern of sound intervals set to a predictable or varied rhythm, then you’re halfway there with ‘The Queen of Hearts,’ right? Whereas something like ‘All around the Mulberry Bush—’ ”

“Oh, yeah—‘the monkey chased the weasel’—”

“Actually has its own melody. You remember?”

“What the hell was that next line?” They were both silent, thinking. Then Jase became aware of a turmoil of emotion at his elbow. He glanced at Jeri. “Ah—my Rehab Director is getting restless. Mr. Halleck—”

“Please. Sidney.”

“Sidney. If you decide to visit the Underworld, I’ll look forward to talking to you again.”

“I hope I can be of some help. Good day, Chief Klyos.”

Jase turned the com over to Jeri and rose to get away from Jeri’s irritating nasal. What was that line? The monkey chased the weasel… And who was the Queen of Hearts? He stared at the question blankly, until the sheer nonsense of it, of him standing entranced in the Hub of the Underworld wondering about the identity of a nursery-rhyme character, overcame him.

But, he thought stubbornly, they all meant something else. All those rhymes. Didn’t they?

Politics, plague, fire, life and death… He resisted the urge to interrupt Jeri’s conversation, then yielded to it the moment Jeri broke contact and said, “He’s coming.” His smile beamed against the force of Jeri’s irritation and dwindled. “Now what did I do?”

“I wanted to ask him something. I wanted to ask him—” He waved a hand. “Ah, forget it. Ridiculous.” But he heard it again, teasing his brain as he resumed his work. The monkey chased the weasel… Only he was chasing the Queen of Hearts too. And—pop!

They all disappeared.

He scowled severely, blocking the bizarre image, and concentrated on the monotonous, crucial habits of the Underworld.

The Magician was flat on his back beneath the control panel of the
Flying Wail
when Aaron Fisher ascended the ramp and rapped his knuckles on the open hatch. There being no response from the body beneath the panel, he stepped across the threshold into the smallcraft. A gentle, ancient mingling of horns and trumpets sounded at the step. The Magician put down his laser-welder and rolled out too abruptly, banging his head.

“Ouch, damn it to molten—Aaron.” He got to his feet, smiling, extending one hand and rubbing his head with the other.

“You okay?”

“I’ll live.” He spun the commander’s chair around, casting an eye on Aaron’s rumpled uniform. “Have a seat. Or are you here on business?”

Aaron shook his head tiredly. “I’m on my way home.”

“Coffee?”

“Yes. No. Have you got a cold beer?”

“Coming up.” He lingered a moment, still absently rubbing his head, his expression peculiar. “I hope you enjoyed the concert the other night.”

Aaron grinned briefly, amazedly at the memory. “When did you finally stop?”

“Six in the morning. Sidney was still there.”

“What were you on? Just out of professional curiosity.”

“Nothing. I finally decided one of my body-wires must have triggered something in my brain, because the music wouldn’t turn off. But I’ve been experimenting with them here, and nothing’s happened.”

Aaron’s smile faded. “Be careful,” he said, and the Magician’s eyes changed, focused with unconscious scrutiny on the patroller. Aaron’s face moved fractionally away, into the warm morning light falling through the open hatch across his chair. The light was soothing, not yet bright-hot; the air over the dock, which would smell later of asphalt, exhaust, chemicals, carried now a cool hint of the sea. Still feeling the curious, searching gaze he turned again to challenge it. But the Magician had disappeared; Aaron heard the cooler swish open in the tiny kitchen. He eased back in the seat and stared uncharacteristically at nothing.

He was a tall man, slender and hard, with a face that was at once amiable and aggressive.

He wore an old-fashioned growth of dark hair on his upper lip, and made no attempt to eradicate the restless lines and hollows he had earned. His eyes took color from their surroundings. At the moment, within the grey and silver interior of the
Flying Wail
, they were shadowed.

He said, as the Magician returned with beer, “You changed your door bell.”

“Handel’s
Water Music
.” He swiveled the navigator’s chair and sat. Aaron nodded toward the welder.

“Problems?”

“Just the com-system. The receiver’s old.”

“This is an old cruiser. I took my off-world training flights in this model, thirteen years ago. Ugly, but reliable. The Underworld changes models every four or five years; this was one of the best.”

“It’s so ugly,” the Magician said fondly, “I got it for a song.” He stretched out against the worn leather, propped his bare feet on the toolbox. For a moment he seemed to daydream, his face looking blurred and somehow boneless, his eyes intent on his coffee as if he were watching landscapes float across it. He asked abruptly, “What happened last night?”

“A sniper.”

“Who died?”

“A pat—” He stopped and drank beer. Then he eyed the Magician, his expression quizzical, defensive. The Magician was still gazing absently into his cup, but the lines of his face had become more pronounced. Aaron yielded, finished the word softly. “A patroller.”

The Magician looked at him quickly. “Someone you knew?”

“Not too well. He was just transferred into the station; they put him with me for the night. I had to fly him in. He died on the way.”

“You were shot at in the air?”

“The sniper was in a sol-car. Luckily the traffic was light.” He lifted the beer bottle; it touched his lips and descended again. He added, as if the silence were suddenly threatening, “It was a laser-rifle.” The Magician’s voice rumbled wordlessly in his throat. Aaron opened a hand to the air, pushing at the memory. “The sniper didn’t—the only thing on his status-sheet was docking fines. It wasn’t a grudge; he wasn’t on drugs, he did a normal day’s work—there was nothing for him to get out of opening fire on us. I’ve been shot at by kids over nothing more than a pack of cigarettes they didn’t feel like paying for. That makes me furious. But this—someone killing, someone killed for no reason anywhere under the stars, not the smallest reason—that gets to me like nothing else does.”

He lifted the beer again, drank this time. The Magician watched him almost curiously, as if he were hearing a chord that, with all his variegated musical background, he couldn’t chart. He said, with feeling, “You were lucky you didn’t get blown apart in midair.”

“Luck… What does that mean, really?”

“You mean is chance truly a matter of chance?”

“That’s a hackneyed question, isn’t it?” He stirred, pulling away again, but his brows were drawn hard at some memory forming in the sunlight. “I could see—I could see time slow down. While I was under fire. Seconds elongated… Magic-Man, I swear I saw that laser-beam part the air inch by inch. The one that killed. I would never have seen it that way unless I knew it was going to hit. But how could I have known? I knew it was going to kill, and I knew it wasn’t me about to die. How?”

“I’ve heard about things like that,” the Magician said softly. “I’ve never understood them.”

Aaron pulled his attention from the light. “I’ve seen it once or twice before. But it always surprises me. It makes me wonder… what other things I might know without knowing…”

“Or, while you’re so busy looking for other things, what you might be missing.”

Aaron looked at him. The widening light spilled over his face, washed the expression and most of the color out of his eyes. He was silent a moment. The Magician heard his breath gather and stop before he spoke. “How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Know things—before I want you to know them.”

“Do I?”

There was another silence. Then Aaron said dryly, “I say good morning and you ask me who died.”

“Oh, that.” He shrugged a little and tapped at his ear. “I pay attention to sounds. It was in your voice.”

Aaron shook his head. “I wasn’t even talking then. And you were staring at your coffee. I’m paid to notice things. You picked it right out of the air. It’s not the first time.”

The Magician smiled. “Why? You have some deep, dark secret you’re afraid I’ll discover accidentally? You might as well tell me, then, since—” His face changed as Aaron shifted. He frowned at his cold coffee, listening to the silence between them. But it was empty; it gave him no cue. He said finally, “It just happens, sometimes. That’s all. How long have we known each other?”

“I don’t know. Four, five years. Since they came up with that program to put patrollers on foot during part of their shifts. I walked into the Constellation Club and there you were, playing Bach and turning orange.”

The Magician grinned. “If I was orange, it wasn’t Bach. Five years. If one of my band members died, and I walked up to you the next morning and said it’s a fine day, what the hell would you say to me?”

He shook his head, unconvinced. “There’s more—”

“Okay. Sure it’s more complicated than that. But it’s not that important, and it wouldn’t be bothering you unless you had something—” He was on his feet suddenly, his back to Aaron.

“This coffee tastes like lube oil. Hang on a moment. Besides,” he added above his noises in the kitchen, “I never pay much attention to it myself. I hate cluttering up my life with what’s in other people’s heads. I’m interested in music and money. In that order.” He reappeared with a fresh cup. “Maybe in that order.”

“You like money,” Aaron said. The warm light had awakened some of the color in his face; the grit of sleeplessness in his eyes became more bearable. “You’d sell your soul—if you had one—for music.”

The Magician sat down. He contemplated the worn, patched interior of the
Flying Wail with complacent pride. “If I have a soul,” he said, “we’re sitting in it.”

Aaron smiled. In his mind, the sniper’s fire ripped the dark air as if it were fabric, but his body no longer moved at the memory. It would streak across his final waking thought, he knew, but for now the Magician’s company kept it at bay. “Are you playing tonight?” he asked. “My schedule changes so much I never can keep yours straight.”

The Magician nodded. “It’s poker night at the Constellation Club.”

“Come again?”

“I’m trying to teach Sidney Halleck how to play poker during breaks once a week when he’s not off somewhere lecturing.”

“Sidney wants to play poker? Why?”

The Magician shrugged. “He had five minutes when his brain had nothing to do, so he got interested in cards. If I’d been playing a zither instead of poker, he would have gotten interested in that.”

“What’s a zither?”

“It’s like an autoharp.”

“Oh,” Aaron said blankly.

The Magician sipped coffee and added, “Come to think of it, Sidney has a zither. That’s where I saw one: in his collection. He must own the log somebody hollowed out a million years ago to make the first drum.”

“What is—”

“It’s a flat soundbox with a lot of strings. As obsolete as the krummhorn. Sidney said he found his in an attic.”

“Most of us would have trouble finding an attic these days.”

“Sidney’s a magnet. He says he thinks about what he wants and it finds him.”

“He must be a hell of a poker player.”

The Magician gave a grunt of laughter. “He’s terrible. There’s nothing the cards can give him that he wants.”

“He thinks about what he wants… and it finds him?”

“That’s what he said. You know Sidney. The rest of us want fame, money, power—Sidney wants a nine-hundred-year-old instrument that sounds like a tree frog. Life gives him that, plus fame, money, power—”

“Is there a moral here somewhere?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Why? What do you want that you haven’t got?”

“A change,” the Magician said simply. “We’ve been playing the Constellation Club for five years. Bands like Cygnus and Alien Shoe are doing off-world tours on nothing but three chords and their face-jobs. I wouldn’t mind a few orchids and orbiting hotels, not to mention money.
Then maybe I’d have a smallcraft with a receiver that works.” He gave the disemboweled panel a dour look. Aaron set his empty beer bottle down and stretched. “Let me know if you need—”

A yawn smothered the rest of the sentence. He blinked vaguely at the dancing light. “God,” he said with gratitude. “I might actually sleep.”

“You want another beer?”