Authors: Patricia A. McKillip
“I’ll make him. I’ll badger him. We’re talking about truth, justice, law—”
“We’re talking about an alien,” the Magician said patiently, “and no matter how we say it, we’ll still sound exactly like Terra. This was in the vision. This was not in the vision. The vision is ended.”
“Is this something you’re guessing at?” Aaron asked recklessly. “Or is it something you see will happen?”
The Magician looked at him silently. “I’m making an educated guess,” he said wearily. “I’m too tired for more visions. The rest of the band is probably safe. That’s all I care about at the moment. It’s me they want.” He glanced toward the hatch at the sound of footsteps. Aaron did not move, refusing, for a moment longer, to yield all the Magician’s past to the Underworld.
“No.”
Something broke through the unfamiliar darkness in the Magician’s eyes. He touched Aaron lightly, looking almost human again. “Have you talked to Michele?”
“No.” He frowned down at the floor, sensing the Magician’s surprise. “I’m scared to,” he admitted baldly. The guards stepped back into the cruiser. They motioned silently, peremptorily. “Where are you taking him?” Aaron asked, watching the Magician descend the ramp. He blinked a little, midway, as if he had walked suddenly into light.
“LR Security, level B.”
“Is that where the rest of the band is?”
“They’re back in VIP quarters,” the guard said over his shoulder. “Under guard.”
Aaron lingered at the hatch until the Magician, flanked by six guards, crossed the dock and disappeared. He did not look back. A strange emptiness yawned behind Aaron: the
Flying Wail
, stripped of all its magic and music, just another old, rather tired cruiser. He moved, impelled by overwhelming need.
He felt the light, cold sweat on his face as he stood outside the VIP quarters. The guards, recognizing him by his Sector uniform, unlocked the door. He caught Quasar midpace, swallowing smoke, the Scholar slumped glumly in a chair, the Nebraskan breaking off a gentle, melancholy wailing from a small rectangular instrument at his mouth. Michele, curled in a corner of the couch, raised her head, sliding the long hair back from her eyes.
All the words vanished from Aaron’s head. He met her eyes, helpless, inarticulate, incapable of moving. He could not see the expression on her face; it had blurred a little under his gaze.
“I looked—I looked for you for seven years,” he heard himself say finally. “I don’t know why walking the last six feet to you is so terrifying. I guess there’s something I need to say. The last thing Terra—Terra said to me.” He heard her voice faintly, in the distance, a question.
“Forgive me.”
Then he could walk blindly toward her, hoping that she would be there to meet him where his past ended and his future began.
Jase sat in his office, scowling at words on his console screen.
Conspiracy…
Assault
…
Destruction
…
Failure
…
Death
…
All applicable. None false. Yet somehow, none precise.
Nils, handling reports, trying to maneuver available cruisers where they were needed while Maindock was still inaccessible, worked quietly at his own desk. He seemed oblivious to Jase, and yet when Jase cleared his screen to start again for the fourth time in an hour, Nils commented, “It usually doesn’t take you this long to make a report. You usually do it once, speaking.”
“I’m tired,” Jase snapped. Nils’ head came up, his expression carefully neutral.
“Just say it,” he suggested. “Just say what happened. You’ve got evidence enough to lock the Magician away for most of his life.”
“I know.”
“It’s true.”
“I know.”
“Aaron Fisher—”
“Aaron,” Jase repeated softly. Nils took a breath or two, quelling confusion, or, Jase thought, anger at something that wasn’t performing flawlessly, that had betrayed a bewildering weakness. He knows, Jase thought. He hates knowing, but he knows. That the language I need for this report is nowhere in the books.
“Aaron Fisher was at your side the whole time. He’ll make his report; he’ll back you. Everything is clear, right down the line.”
Jase leaned back, feeling his own temper rise. “God damn it, Nils, the one thing that’s clear in this whole business is that if I tell the truth I’ll lose my job.”
Nils stared at him. His face flushed deep red. “No,” he said. “You can’t tell me that. You can’t even suggest that. That this—this vision business—that Terra was—wasn’t—”
“I may not say it,” Jase said, holding his eyes, “but my guess is Aaron will.”
Nils half rose, subsided again into his chair. Jase watched the fury in him calm slowly. Nils lifted his hands to the keyboard, touched it, then dropped them again. He leaned forward, pushed his face into his hands; when Jase could see him again, he looked groggy.
“Shit.”
“It’s messy,” Jase agreed.
“I don’t want to know.”
“You’re the one who told me just say it.”
“It can’t be true.”
“Okay.” He shrugged. “I’ll put the Magician behind light and that will be that. Or, I’ll tell what really happened, and you can have my—”
“You say that,” Nils warned him, “you’ll lose teeth.” Then he sighed, his face patchy, all the strain of the recent hours showing. He glanced at his screen, typed a couple of orders. His shoulders slumped again; he stared at Jase.
“There are five dead bodies in the morgue. Terra put them there before she left.”
“I know,” Jase said.
“She demolished the robot-guard. Not to mention a few dozen monitors and this office.”
“I know.”
“The Magician effectively shut down two-thirds of the operative cruisers in the Command Station for this area. We could have had a disaster on our hands.”
“Yes.”
“You and Mr. Fisher tracked him, alone and unarmed. You brought him back.”
“Yes,” Jase said patiently.
“Well,” Nils said, his voice rising again, “they won’t give you a medal for talking about visions! Just stick to the facts. That’s all you have to do. That’s all anybody wants out of you.”
Jase was silent, staring at his dark reflection on the empty screen. There’s the Hub-craft log, he thought, and memories of the rich, vivid, alien imagery drifted into his mind. Fire and water… the giant red sun glowing through steam above a disturbed sea… the great, living ship, wings slowly lifting… Would some patroller years from now, on a routine cruise in the space around the astonishing planet he came from, spot it and become inarticulate in terror and wonder? We are born surrounded by mysteries, he thought. We make our compromises with terror, with wonder, so that we can go about the business of simply surviving from one day to another… We achieve a balance on the high wire, take one slow step after another, while the wire shakes and the wind blows, and nobody wants the unknown, the unexpected, with wings like some alien insect out of a gaudy, gargantuan jungle to sail by and sweep us off balance…
“Jase,” Nils said, and he blinked, startled. “Message on-screen from FWGBI. They want to talk to you.”
“Stall them.”
“How long?” Nils asked tightly. “How long?”
“Long enough,” Jase said, making one decision at least, “for me to talk to Mr. Restak. Get him up here. Please. And—”
“I’m not leaving you alone in here with him. I just got this place cleaned up from the last time he was here.”
“I want you to stay,” Jase said mildly. “I’m just trying to do what you suggested. I’m trying to do my job.”
The prisoner came escorted by half a dozen guards. There was a filament around his wrists.
He looked pale, unshaven and exhausted. He stood quietly, expressionless, while Jase said to the guards, “Take that off him. Wait outside.” He was silent until they had gone; the Magician glanced at Nils once, then waited, resigned, for Jase to lean back in his air-chair and contemplate the problem.
“Mr. Restak,” he said finally, “do you realize, when you’re put on trial, what you’re going to sound like?”
The Magician looked surprised. A little color came back into his face. “I’ve thought about that,” he said.
“Once in a lifetime, somebody babbling about that, is a bizarre curiosity. Twice in seven years—” he shook his head. “It might be disturbing. Might be. I don’t know.” The Magician regarded him silently, as if trying to hear what Jase wasn’t saying.
“The vision ended,” he said at last, softly. “Terra died. I turned around. There was no communication between the Hub-craft and the
Flying Wail
after that.”
“No.”
“So I have no idea what”—he paused, searching—“how much you understood.”
Jase leaned over his desk. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Nils hunch farther over his work, trying not to listen, not wanting to listen. Jase sighed. “Mr. Restak. I don’t get paid for understanding. I get paid for dealing with things that happen or don’t happen. I know what happened on the Hub-craft. I’m just trying to figure out how much it’s worth to me.”
The Magician started to speak, stopped. His eyes had changed. “You believe—”
“No. I saw, Mr. Restak.” He paused, repeated gently, almost to himself, “I saw.” In memory he saw it again, the image Terra and the Magician had put into his head, unfurling its glittering sails across the black, black sea between suns. The Magician, the terrible weariness fading in his eyes, seemed to read Jase’s mind, watch it too. For a moment the office filled with an infinite, tranquil silence. “The point is, Mr. Restak,” Jase continued, “that I’m sitting here in my office and you’re standing there with six guards waiting to escort you back to Security. The Hub-craft log is ambiguous, and Mr. Fisher is, after all, your friend and therefore biased. The point is, Mr. Restak, what in God’s name am I going to do with you?”
The Magician shifted slightly, as if Jase’s question had thrown him off balance. Nils was no longer even pretending not to listen. “Well,” the Magician said finally, his face impassive, masking hope, as he played one last wild card, “you said you wanted a transfer.”
Jase and Sidney Halleck sat at the mahogany bar in the Constellation Club, sipping beer. It was three-fifteen in the morning. The club was empty but for the Magician, playing something gentle and complicated on the stage nearest them. A year had passed since Jase had last heard him play. He had thought that exposure to Earth with all its riotous color and noise, would dim his off-world memories. But he still found himself trying to drink beer through gritted teeth.
“I just put a new piano on that stage,” Sidney said, watching it and the Magician fondly.
“An old German make, very fine. He seems to like it.”
“It’s big enough,” Jase said politely.
“Nova performed here tonight for old times’ sake. If you’d gotten here earlier, you could have heard them. The Magician forgot to stop playing… They’ll leave tomorrow for Archipelago Sector.”
“I just came from there.”
“Beautiful, isn’t it.”
Jase nodded. “I guess I left just in time.”
Sidney’s eyes wandered from the stage to Jase’s face. “I can ask him to stop,” he said. Jase shook his head, feeling himself relax under Sidney’s tranquil gaze.
“No,” he sighed. “It’s just that… I never really feel safe around Mr. Restak. To look at him up there, he seems harmless enough. But things happen around him… I haven’t seen him for nearly a year. I retire from my job, I wander around the world awhile, one day I get on a shuttle for a five-thousand-mile flight to Suncoast Sector, I have a six-hour stopover in the middle of the night, and so I come here to pay you a visit. I walk in the door and I find it’s the one night the Magician and Nova have come to play. I’ve never been paranoid, or even very imaginative. But that man makes me uneasy.”
Sidney leaned over the bar, pulled a fresh glass off a rack and set it under one of the antique draft handles. Dark beer trickled slowly into the glass. “That’s quite understandable, though. His freedom cost you your job.”
“No,” Jase said fairly. “I wouldn’t put it like that.”
“You refused to press charges.”
“That’s not what cost me. The Magician’s stat-sheet was so clean it squeaked; there was a speeding fine on it, maybe a docking fine. That’s it. The patrollers were furious with him for being smart enough to lock them up for a few hours. But they were the same men and women who had gone to hear his band play. He didn’t hurt anybody. I was the one who took Terra out of the Underworld. The Magician had transgressed, but he wasn’t a criminal, there was no deep feeling against him. And I had Aaron backing me, when I refused to press charges. As well as my own reputation. That carried some weight. No. There was just one detail that cost. And that cost blood.”
“The alien,” Sidney said gently.
Jase nodded. “The moment I suggested that Terra Viridian might not have been crazy, that’s the moment they decided I was crazy.”
“Was there one?”
“One what?”
“An alien?”
Jase gazed across the floor at the Magician, absorbed in his music. “I let him go, didn’t I?”
Sidney made a soft sound. He set the full beer glass on the bar; Jase took a swallow. Chilled, the color of molasses, with a head on it like whipped cream… it gave even the Magician’s music charm, for a moment. Jase wiped his mouth. “That’s all I wanted.”
“What?” Sidney said, smiling.
“Nine years, Chief of the Underworld, and all I really wanted was a cold draft beer.”
“Maybe,” Sidney murmured. The smile faded from his face; his eyes, grave, contemplative, sought out the piano player again. “But for you, he would still be there. In the Underworld, note by note, forgetting all that music… As his friend, I’m very grateful that you were there. Anyone else would have—”
“Ah—” Jase interrupted him, shrugged. “I was trapped up there. I wanted out. My deputy-in-chief was a good man to leave the Underworld to, so I did. I told FWGBI he’d make a terrible administrator, and they went for him, hook, line and sinker. He’s not fond of aliens, but other than that, he’ll do a fine job.”
“What will you do? I can’t believe you’ll be content being a tourist for the rest of your life.”