The Planet on the Table (23 page)

“Yes,” Getty said. ‘

“So each man in the squad can imagine he may not have shot me’?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

A tight, unhumorous smile was January’s last expression. He threw down the cigarette, ground it out, poked the priest in the arm. “But I know.” Then the mask slipped back into place for good, making the hood redundant, and with a firm step January went to the wall. One might have said he was at peace.

—1983

t figures, just as sure as shift-start, that on our big day there’d be trouble. It’s a law of physics, the one miners know best: things tend to fuck up.

I woke first out of the last of several nervous catnaps, and wandered down to the hotel bar to get something a little less heavyweight than the White Brother for my nerves. On one level I was calm as could be, but on another I was feeling a bit shaky (Shaky Barnes, that’s me). Now, we drank the Brother during performances back on the rocks, of course, between sets sitting at the tables, or during the last songs when someone offered it; and Hook would make his announcement, “We never know if this’ll make us play better or worse, but it sure is fun finding out,” and then pass it around. Which was the point; we
had
to play good this day, so I wanted something soothing, with a little less pop to it than the White Brother we’d brought with us, which amplifies your every feeling, including fear.

So when I threaded my way through the hotel (which was as big as the whole operation on Hebe or Iris) back to our rooms, I expected the band to still be there sleeping. But when I’d finished stepping over all the scattered chairs, tables, mattresses and such (the remains of the previous shift’s practice session) I could find only three of them, all tangled up in the fancy sheets: Fingers, Crazy, and Washboard. I wasn’t surprised that my brother Hook was gone—he often was—but Sidney shouldn’t have been missing; he hadn’t gone off by himself since we left Ceres Central.

“Hey!” I said, still not too worried. “Where’d they go, you slag-eaters!” They mumbled and grunted and tried to ignore me; I gave Washboard a shove with my foot. “Where’s Hook? Where’s Sidney?” I said a little louder.

“Quit shouting,” Washboard said fuzzily. “Hook’s probably gone back to the Tower of Bible to visit the Jezebels again.” He buried his head in the pillow, like a snoutbit diving into bubblerock; suddenly it popped back out. “Sidney’s gone?”

“You see him?”

Fingers propped himself up on his elbow. “You better find Hook,” he said in his slow way. “Hook, he’ll know where Sidney gone to.”

“Well, did Hook
say
he was going to the Tower of Bible?” No one spoke. Crazy crawled over to a bed and sat up. He reached behind the bed and pulled out a tall thin bottle, still half filled with cloudy white liquid. He put it to his mouth and tilted it up; the level dropped abruptly a couple of times.

“Crazy, I never seen you hit the White Brother so early in the dayshift before,” I said.

“Shaky,” he replied, “you never seen me get the chance.”

“You going to get us in trouble,” I said, remembering certain misadventures of the past.

“No, I’m not,” Crazy said. “Now why don’t you run down Hook, I’m pretty sure he’s in Sodom and Gomorrah, he liked that place”—he took another swallow—”and we’ll hold down the fort and wait for Sidney to come back.”

“He better come back,” I said. “Shit. Here it is the biggest day in our lives and you guys don’t even have the sense to stay in one spot.”

“Don’t worry,” Crazy said. “Things’ll go fine, I’ll see to it.”

I took one of the slow cars through the track-webbed space between our hotel and the Tower of Bible. The Tower is one of Titania’s biggest experiments in Neo-Archeo-Ritualism, sometimes called Participatory Art. Within the huge structure, set right against the wall of the Titania Gap, the setting for every chapter in the Bible is contained, which means you can participate in a wide variety of activities. The lobby of the Tower was unusually crowded for the early hours of the dayshift, but it was Performance Day, I remembered, and people were starting early. I worked from ramp to ramp, trying to make my way through the oddly assorted crowd to the elevator that would take me to Sodom and Gomorrah. Finally I slid through the closing doors and took my place in the mass of future Sodomites.

“What I want to know,” one of them said happily, “is do they periodically sulfurize everyone in the room?”

“Every two hours,” a woman with round eyes replied, “and does it feel real! But then they unfreeze you and you get to begin again!” She laughed.

“Oh,” said the man, blinking.

The elevator opened and the group surged past me toward Costumes. I stood and looked down some of the smoky streets of Gomorrah, hoping to see my brother in the crowd. Just as I decided to get one of the costumes and start searching, I saw him coming out of the door marked JEZEBELS one arm wrapped around a veiled woman.

“Why, he must have just got here,” I said aloud, and took off after him. “Hook!” I called. “Hook!”

He heard me and quickly steered the woman into a side street. I started running. Sure enough, when I rounded the corner they had disappeared; I made a lucky guess and opened the door to a house made of sediments, and caught up with them moving up the narrow stairs. “Hook. God damn it,” I said.

“Later,” he mumbled back at me, face buried in the Jezebel’s neck.

“Hook, it’s important.”

He waved his right arm back at me in a brush-away motion, and the metal rods of his hand flashed in my face. “Not important!” he bellowed. I grabbed his arm and pulled on it.

“How can you say that?” I cried. “Today’s the day! The six bands those judges pick today get to go to Earth and everywhere—”

He finally stopped dragging us all up the stairs. “I know all that, Shaky, but that don’t happen for a few hours yet, so why don‘t you go down to Psalms or Proverbs and calm down some? No reason for you to be so anxious.”

“Yes, there is,” I said, “a real good reason. Sidney’s gone.”

Hook tucked his chin into his neck. “Sidney’s gone?” he repeated.

“Nobody’s seen him all shift.”

His three metal fingers waved up and down, scissoring the air; it was the same nervous sign of thought he’d made when he had his hand, and played the trumpet. “Did you search the hotel good?” he said after a bit. “I don’t think he’d leave the hotel.”

I shook my head. “I came here, I thought you’d know where he is.”

“Well, he’s probably in the hotel somewhere, take a look why don’t you?”

“What if he’s not there? Come on, Hook, if we don’t find him we’re sunk.”

“All right,” he said. “Shit. You’re as bad as Sidney. I’ve been playing with that man near twenty years, and I never seen him so scared.”

“You think he’s scared?” That had never occurred to me. Sidney was quiet, not too forward, but I’d never seen him scared of playing music.

“Sure he’s scared.” He looked at the Jezebel, who hadn’t made a sound so far. “I got to find Sidney,” he explained. “I’ll be back to celebrate tomorrow.”

Her veiled head nodded, and I could see the flash of teeth. “We better hurry,” Hook said. “We’re due to be turned into a pillar of salt any minute now.” We ran back and dived into the elevator, just behind the man who had been asking questions on the way up. Down in the lobby we dodged through a group of wide-eyed Venusian monks and then through a stumbling crowd of wet people from one of the aquatic scenes. Then we made it to the exit, jumped in a car, and popped out into the Gap.

“That Participatory Art,” Hook said, “is really something.”

“Sidney’s probably hiding in the hotel somewhere, the bar or maybe the baggage rooms,” Hook said as we neared our hotel.

I could see that he was as worried as I was. Despite his easygoing speculations, his nervous trumpet fingering gave him away. Sidney’s absence was a serious matter, partly because it was so unexpected; Sidney was never gone, never sick, never hurt; there was nothing that could keep Sidney from playing. And how he could play that clarinet! It was more than notes, it had to do with what was inside the man, the strength and the feeling; there’s no way I can describe it to you but by telling a story here; a little blues:

After the long shift’s ending, when I was just a kid and still working the sheds, I’d go down to the Heel Bar to sip beer and listen to Sidney play his clarinet. At this time he was playing with just Washboard and a piano man, Christy Morton, who later got killed in the big tunnel collapse on Troilus; and they were working out all the old tunes he’d discovered in the Benson Curtis tapes.

Sidney was as quiet and unassuming then as always. It didn’t matter how much stomping and shouting he stirred up, or how much Washboard and Christy sang into the tune; old Sidney would stand there, head bowed, horn cradled in his arm when he wasn’t playing, as silent and bashful as a child. Then he’d raise that horn lo his mouth, and when be played it was clear he had found his way of talking to the world. All the clamoring in the room channeled into him, he was transformed, and, sweat-bright with the effort, he’d wrench those songs into a sound as clean and live as a welding arc. Listening to him my cheeks would flush with blood, my heart would pound like Washboard’s cowbell.

One time, late in the graveyard shift, I was joined at my front table by a Metis mute, one of the miners whose vocal cords had been ruined by the zinc blowout on Metis. Between sets Sidney sat with us, asked me how Hook was doing (this was right after his accident), and talked about Earth. He told us about New Orleans in the old times, when the jazz bands played in the streets. Telling it, he got so excited I didn’t need to prod him with questions; he spoke on his own, even told us his one childhood memory of Earth: “That ocean, it was like a flat blue plate, big as Jupiter from lo, speckled with shadows from clouds; and the horizon was straight as a rail, edge to edge culling off a sky that was a blue I can’t describe.” When he went back to play I was under the spell of Dixieland; and by the gleam in the mute’s eye I could tell he felt it too. When Sidney played a good break the mute would put back his head and laugh, mouth split wide open, silent as space.

So when Sidney was done we decided to take the mute along to Sidney’s place, to give the mute some floor to sleep on; he didn’t have any money or anywhere to go. Now at this time (this was on Achilles) Sidney lived in a cubbyhole behind one of the Supervisor’s big homes. When we got there Sidney wanted us to hold back while he went to check if his sister-in-law was awake—she didn’t like him bringing folks home. Sidney explained this, but the mute didn’t appear to understand; he must have thought he was being left, because every time Sidney walked a few steps and turned around, be found the mute right behind him, grinning and dragging me along. So there was a lot of waving and explaining going on when the JM police suddenly appeared; we didn’t even have time to run.

“Where you going?” one of them asked.

“Home,” Sidney said.

“I suppose you live here?” the cop said, pointing at the Supervisor’s place.

“Yeah,” Sidney said, and before he had time to explain, they were taking us off to jail.

We were hardly inside the jail door when they went to work on the Metis mute. Kicked him and beat him till he couldn’t stand. His face was so bloody. Sidney and I stood shaking against the wall, expecting we’d be next, but they let us alone. Turned out one of the cops’ wives had been killed on Metis, and he’d been after the mutes ever since. So when they were done with him they slammed us all into the bullpen.

There’s not much JM can do to make its jails any worse than its mines, but what they can do they have done. The cell we were in was cold and dark, like a tunnel in a power breakdown, except for the gravity, which felt like it was over 1 .00. I crawled over the rock floor, unable to see, and quietly called Sidney’s name.

“Steve?” his voice said. “Where you gone to?” His hand caught my arm, and he set me down beside him.

“Quit that snuffling,” he said to me. “This is your first time in jail? Is that right? Well, it won’t be your last, no, not a miner kid like you. They’ll put you here many times before you’re done.” He paused. “Look at all these folks.”