Authors: Patricia A. McKillip
The Magician and the Scholar jumped. The Nebraskan, returning with coffee, spilled it on his hand. The Magician, his eyes on Michele, his mind blank, struggled with the phrase of music a moment, then gave up and checked the controls.
“What is it?” the Scholar asked tensely. “More company?”
The Magician shook his head. The yellow light that had flashed on held his attention a moment longer as if the message it gave him were more critical, more dire than a routine fuel warning. “Fuel’s almost half gone. The pursuit thrusters cost us a lot.” He dragged his eyes from the light. It swam in front of his vision; he blinked it away, saw Michele sipping coffee.
Her hand shook badly, but she was seeing again. He held her eyes, asked her a question silently, urgently, had his answer from her before she spoke.
“No,” she whispered. “Don’t turn back. Please. Please, Magic-Man. You said it was ending. End it.”
Aaron?” the Magician said. “Chief Klyos? Are you all still alive?”
“Mr. Restak,” Jase said wearily. “Are you aware of the course you’re following? You certainly haven’t got enough fuel to get to Andromeda.”
“I want Terra’s voice,” said the com. “Terra?”
“I’m here,” she said from the floor.
“Terra. Are you listening to me?”
“Yes,” she said remotely.
“Terra. Listen to me. The next time you have a vision, I want you to talk. I want to hear your voice. You’ve done that before, at your trial, to Dr. Fiori. I want you to talk your way through your vision. Describe exactly what you’re seeing. I’ll be describing it too. Maybe that way they’ll begin to see that what we’re saying exists beyond our minds. Will you remem—”
“Magic-Man,” Aaron interrupted. His voice was taut with a dangerous control; his eyes had picked up the blackness of deep space. “Don’t make me listen to that. Don’t.”
There was a moment’s silence. “Aaron.” His own voice sounded unfamiliar, shaded with overtones of unexpected emotions. “You’ve got all the weight of justice. When this is over, you can walk away from it. I’m trying to show you something. I’m risking my life to show you. So that if they blow up the
Flying Wail
, and I’m nothing but an echo of light moving toward the end of the universe, maybe you won’t be totally bewildered. Or totally bitter.”
Aaron was silent. Jase glanced at him. His face was rigid, flushed to the roots of his hair. The struggle in him, between his fury, his ingrained reserves of pride and grief, and his need, seemed explosive. Jase shifted, uneasy in the currents, but when Aaron spoke finally, all feeling had been buried briefly beneath a calm professional surface.
“Don’t waste time doing me any favors. Just return to the Underworld and you won’t get blown up.”
“Aaron—”
“How many lines do you think you can cross at once anyway? She’s got that rifle at my back now. Because of you.”
“I know. But, Aaron, she’s just—”
The calm snapped. “You defend her, Magic-Man, I’ll walk across empty space and turn you into light myself!”
Jase turned, feeling the uncoiled movement behind him before he saw it. The rifle swung across his vision. He heard the Magician shout.
“Terra! No!”
There was dead silence. Jase blinked at sudden sweat, saw the rifle wedged between Aaron’s shoulders slowly fall away. Terra stepped back after a moment, sat down again. Her expression between one movement and another hadn’t varied. She didn’t shoot, Jase thought.
Still she didn’t.
He spoke into the com, feeling very tired. “How did you know, Mr. Restak?”
“I knew. What’d she do?”
“No damage yet. She made her point. She doesn’t like you threatened.”
“Aaron?”
Jase glanced at him. He was breathing unevenly, but noiselessly, his face colorless. From his brittle stillness, Jase surmised, he was just on the verge of trembling with rage.
“He’s unhurt. Mr. Restak, this situation is intolerable.”
“God, I know. Aaron?”
“Mr. Fisher is, I believe, too furious to talk. He’s trying not to get shot. In the name of friendship, how in hell do you justify this, Mr. Restak? You’re going to get him killed.”
“He never told me,” the Magician said. Jase heard him draw air. “I’ve known him for years. He said his wife had died. Once, he said that. He never talked about her. I couldn’t have anticipated this.”
I’d sooner have anticipated being eaten by crocodiles on the moon, Jase thought darkly. He kept his voice steady, groping toward some scrap of sanity, even from the Magician. He said, risking another explosion beside him, “Mr. Fisher seems to be a very private man. Did he tell you that for the last seven years, he’s been secretly searching for Michele Viridian, to see if he could understand from her why Terra killed his wife? Using all our highly sophisticated and thorough records systems, he still failed to find her, she hid that well.”
“He found her,” the Magician whispered.
“That’s why I brought him up here. Because she used his computer to request restricted Underworld information… She found him, Mr. Restak. If she hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t be sitting here with Terra at his back.”
“She—”
“Michele Viridian is liable to some very serious charges. But you never knew her name?”
“She never told me. She never told anyone. She was terrified of it.” He added, after a pause, “In the Underworld, she told me that seven years ago, Michele Viridian painted her face after Terra was sentenced, so that she could cube one last time without being recognized. Then she was—she would have killed herself. That night. From despair. She’s not the hardened criminal you describe, Chief Klyos. She was alone on Earth, with no other family except Terra then. And Terra was on her way to the Dark Ring.”
“That night,” Jase said curiously. “She didn’t kill herself. What happened to make her change her mind?”
“She found—she found one last band to cube with. Mine.”
Aaron’s head lifted involuntarily; he swallowed, stared down again, his eyes hidden, unblinking.
Jase shifted in his seat. The tiny Hub-craft cabin felt even closer, crowded with overlapping events, too many details that prismed into complexity.
“The Queen of Hearts,” he said without inflection.
“The nursery rhyme,” the Magician said, startling him. He felt, furiously, that his mind had been read.
“How did you—”
“I was listening, when you talked to Sidney.”
“Mr. Halleck… did he know the Queen of Hearts long?”
“He met her seven years ago, not long after she first played with me.”
Jase was silent. “Mr. Restak,” he said wearily. “Every time I try to make sense of this, I just get tangled tighter and tighter. That pursuit fleet is just about on your tail. A while ago, after you tied me up and played hell and Bach with my cruisers, I couldn’t have cared how many pieces you were scattered into. But now, before they blow you up, I’d certainly like to know what’s going on. If you’ve got anything to explain, I’ll listen. If you want Terra to talk, I’ll listen; I’ll try to keep Mr. Fisher from killing himself. Just tell me how in God’s name a nursery rhyme got us into all this trouble.”
“It didn’t start with a nursery rhyme. It started—”
“When?”
“That day,” the Magician said carefully. “In the Desert Sector. I know why Terra massacred those people.”
“You know—”
“It has to do with the visions in her head. The transformation. I can see it.”
“Mr. Restak, every time you start talking like that you make me uneasy. I want to go give my brain a shower.”
“Please. Listen.” He paused again. Jase felt him picking at words. He heard then the deep underlying weariness: the Magician juggling with tables and scarves and coffee cups, and one knife too many. “When I went with you and Michele to see Terra: you remember?”
“Yes.”
“There was the computer, showing images in her mind. We walked in there; we looked at Terra, because that’s the first thing you see, the bald madwoman in the bubble. Then you looked at the screen. And she looked at me. And I saw in my own mind all the images she’s been seeing. And it’s—it was overwhelming. It was—Chief Klyos, what’s the one thing you want most out of life?”
“A transfer.”
The Magician paused. “All right,” he said, with inhuman patience. “What’s the one thing in life that touches you most deeply?”
Jase was silent, struck by the unexpectedness of the question. “What is it you’re trying to say, Mr. Restak?”
“That what she—what we’re both seeing is that important. That vital. Not to us. Not on a human level. On a—”
“Oh, Christ, you’re not going to start talking about aliens.”
“You saw those images.”
He saw them again suddenly, the strangeness of them, always on the wrong side of the broad boundaries of his experience. Forms pelting down like rain, hurrying away down an amethyst shore. The bent oval, serene as a moon dropped on the sand. The red sun… The colors are all wrong, he thought. But she had insisted on those colors.
“She killed because of those images. Because whatever makes them, I think, felt an overwhelming urge for light. The urge was probably biological, instinctive. Like animals or reptiles born on land who are driven to water or they die. They’re driven. What happened in this case, I don’t know. Maybe it had something to do with the dying sun. Terra was in the desert in broad daylight. But the image in her mind was dark. She saw dark. She felt dark. She made light.”
The outrage in Aaron’s voice jolted Jase like an electric shock. “Magic-Man, this is unbelievable! You hand me fairy-tale crap like that and expect me to forgive and forget—”
“Mr. Fisher!” Jase snapped, seeing light glance across the rifle out of the corner of his eye.
The Magician’s voice, worn with strain, snapped back at them, stilling them all.
“Then, goddamn it, you explain it! You tell me what you’re doing up here, still tracking the woman you tracked for seven years, furious with her, furious with me, wanting to kill a woman tried and sentenced years ago—seven years, Aaron! You’ve got questions, I’m pulling out my back teeth trying to give you answers, and you can’t even listen because after a seven-year diet of bitterness and hatred, that’s all you remember how to feel!”
“You—” The word came out of Aaron on a rush of breath, as if he had been kicked.
“Magic-Man—”
“Mr. Fisher, will you calm down!”
“She’s the one who killed! Why am I on trial?”
“Because all this is your fault as much as anyone’s!”
“Mine!” he said incredulously. The rigid control was gone, but so was the fury; he looked, Jase thought, genuinely hurt by something not in his head. Terra had set the rifle down. Jase saw it, then repeated it to himself with amazement. She put the rifle down. Then, with even greater astonishment: She’s listening to this.
“While you’ve been tracking Michele Viridian all these years, you’ve been giving her something to hide from, to run from as hard and as fast as we’re running now. You’re what she hid from in the first place: all that secret fury. It’s dangerous to hide things like that in this world. If you don’t put them into language, they transform into other things; they surface when you think you’ve got them buried, you find them where you least expect them: the madwoman with the rifle at your back, the mask across the face of the woman you cared for—you found exactly what you were looking for, Aaron: the things you hate.”
Aaron’s lips moved soundlessly. He stared at the com-light as if it would suddenly produce the Magician like a hologram. There was little expression on his face; it had faded away with his color.
“I’m trying—Aaron, I’m trying to show you a different way of looking at the thing you’ve been staring at for seven years. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m just trying to show you that you could never have explained Terra’s killings, Michele couldn’t have explained them—you were never looking for the right thing.”
“I know,” he said, his voice so faint the Magician almost didn’t catch it. His eyes caught light oddly, filmed with tears or memories. His hands were loose; his whole body was loose, as though he were accepting the empty air. Jase’s throat stung suddenly. Seven years, he thought.
It took him seven years to let go. God help us, how do we manage to survive, with our sorrows and brief loves?
“Magician,” he said, shrugging the problem at hand back on his shoulders like an old familiar boulder. “You’ve got our attention. Now can you be more explicit—”
“Pursuit-cruiser
Hero
to Hub-craft,” the com interrupted abrasively. “Fleet approaching last transmitted coordinates of
Flying Wail
. Please transmit new coordinates—”
“They’re practically under your nose,” Jase said irritably. “Now—”
“Orders upon approach? Do you want us to fire on them?”
“I want you to get off—negative. Match speed and escort.”
“Sir,”
Hero
said incredulously. “Code 5?”
“Negative Code 5. They’re unarmed.”
“Sir, are you certain?”
“Just—I’m negotiating a return. Maintain silence; clear channels. Escort and wait—”
“Code 8?”
“Negative,” Jase shouted. “Negative Code 8. No force. Re—” He broke off as the Magician said something incoherent in the background. “Mr. Restak,” he said, suddenly, deeply uneasy.
“Magician.” He heard Terra’s breathing behind him, hard, unsteady. “Mr. Restak! Will you respond? Damn it,
Hero
, will you get off—”
“The need,” Terra said tightly, freezing Jase’s vocal cords, “is for light.”
Dark. Not the dark behind closed eyes, with its random shadows of color, not the dark of night with its distant fires, but the soundless, motionless midnight of emptiness… She stood in it.
Was enclosed in it. Buried in it. She held darkness between her teeth, breathed it into her lungs. Her bones were carved of night. Her eyes held no light. She might have been beyond the edge of the universe, in a place where light had not yet been conceived.
“This dark,” she whispered, to the Magician lost in his own blindness, to the vague, shadowy men, hardly more substantial than memory, whose gazes were riveted on her. “This dark…” A line of old poetry drifted through her head. “ ‘And dark on dark is dark…’ It is cold, this dark. And too small. The dark is… a skin that needs to be shed…”