“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?”
Aaron shook his head. “I’ve got to go.” Still he lingered, listening, he realized finally, to the overtones of music constantly trembling beyond the silence within the Flying Wail. He turned to make a request, and found the Magician already in motion.
He had swiveled his chair; his fingers played a pattern on the rows of lights beside the control panel. The panel opened to reveal an old-fashioned black-and-white keyboard. The Magician touched a few keys gently. A reflector over the main porthole turned slowly to intercept light.
Aaron smiled, both at the lovely synchronicity between mechanics and music, and the Magician’s unabashed satisfaction in his handiwork. The Magician disengaged the keyboard from the ship’s power and glanced at Aaron, acknowledging his thoughts. Then all his attention drained out of the world around him. His face grew detached, gently contemplative.
His hands strayed randomly over the keys, slowly fashioned the sounds into something complex, elegant and, Aaron guessed, a few centuries older than the FWG. For a moment the numb weariness in his brain eased, and even the squat, battered patrol-cruiser took on dignity under the Magician’s vision.
He was still playing when Aaron left.
When Aaron woke in the late afternoon, the sky was roiling white with summer fog.
He watched it as he dressed. He lived high above the city, in one of the huge FWG ghettos.
They marched among smaller constructs like alien spiders; their intersecting arches buttressed one another against earthquake, and their free form took up space instead of land. Aaron had a small room close to the top of an arch. It contained nothing much besides a bed and an FWG-issue computer. It faced west; on hot evenings he could watch the horizon blaze with odd colors as the sun sank behind the haze the sea-factories expelled. Suncoast Sector was three hundred miles wide and a thousand miles long. The north section Aaron lived in was haunted by a stubborn ghost of pre-FWG history. In a hundred years it had grown extremely elusive.
But even Aaron, whose imagination was negligible, could sense it now and then in the sigh of the tide, the silent fog drifting through old streets running always to the sea.
The fog was feathering now through the immense arches of the ghettos. He watched it mindlessly, his eyes reflecting its paleness. He turned abruptly, a brisk, finely tuned movement away from the fog, negating with his body the subtle, chilly silence drifting into his head.
He had three hours before his night shift started. He took an elevator to the street and got into an empty magne-car that carried him to the parking dock where he kept his sol-car. He eased himself up into the milky sky. He liked flying fast; he had raced felons and drunk drivers to turnaround and brought them down under luminous moons, skies giddy with stars. But the fog’s blank face looming out from the sea turned the long summer evening into an amorphous blur of white and shadow. Air traffic moved cautiously around him, slow blobs of indistinct light. He rose high above them and the world he inhabited vanished.
A single foghorn bellowed like a dinosaur in the mists. It was obsolete; an endless argument between Sector bureaucracy and FWG bureaucracy kept it sounding. It was said to forecast ghost ships, lives rising out of the brine of earlier times. It cried warnings at Aaron that grew fainter and fainter, though no less imperative, as he flew west. He landed finally on a promontory and got out. The breakwaters in front of the sea-factories and purifying-plants had calmed the tides, but the ocean could still braid a bitter whip of wind and spume. Aaron stood a moment in the cold, steeled against it and enjoying it. He strained his eyes for rotting sails, rusty hulls. But all the ghosts stayed hidden beneath the surface of the sea.
He turned, made his way to a hatch in the earth, and disappeared underground. The cliff edge seemed to him a ridiculous place to build a nuclear shelter, but a hundred years ago there must have been more earth between the shelter and the sea. A few more rainy seasons and the remaining wedge of cliff, bomb shelter and all, would slide soggily into the sea. But for now, it suited his needs.
A secondary shield opened to his voice, and triggered the ceiling lights. As he stepped inside, he saw the message-light flashing on his console. He took a sandwich out of the freezer, put it in the microwave, then read the messages.
There were two reports: one from Eastcoast Sector, and one from the asteroid colonies. He took the colony message first.
He sat silently, studying the list of recent applicants for various colony jobs. Seven had made the long journey from Earth, eighty had been refused. The reasons for refusal were theoretically private information, but in the FWG’s eyes, a citizen wh
o demanded privacy was probably up to something. Aaron had disguised his own deep instinct for privacy with the uniform of an FWG employee. No one questioned him and he had access to endless amounts of confidential information.
Age, physical description, work experience, family background, medical and psychological profiles: he ran through the records of eighty-seven strangers, then sat back with a sigh.
Nothing. She wasn’t in the mining colonies, nor had she applied to go there. His sandwich had grown cold again in the microwave, but at least it was thawed. He ate it mechanically.
Then he talked to Raymond Takuda, Sector Head of Eastcoast Patrollers.
“Aaron, give it up,” Takuda groaned. His face was lined, hard and polished as a walnut after fifty years of patrol work. “You’ve been on that conspiracy theory for years without a nibble.”
“I can’t give it up,” Aaron lied. “I’m still on assignment. Besides, she’s still missing.”
“Maybe she had a sex change. Maybe she’s dead.”
“I’ve checked hospital and morgue records all over the world.”
Takuda grunted, looking interested in spite of himself. “No traces? That’s highly inefficient of us, to lose a private citizen.”
“You didn’t find anything.”
“She’s not in any Eastcoast Detention Centers, she hasn’t been arrested, she hasn’t registered to vote in Sector elections, or been hospitalized at FWG expense, or got a docking or a speeding fine, she hasn’t even got a registered vehicle or a credit account at this end of the world. Maybe she drowned or fell off a mountain.”
“Maybe.”
“Sometimes when you’ve torn your hair out trying to find something, you find it right under your nose—you’re just not seeing it.”
“Is that the best you can give me?”
“Are you obsessed?”
Aaron paused a moment, to give the question the consideration it warranted. “Maybe,” he said slowly. “I hadn’t thought about it. It’s just—I guess I’m obsessed about how anyone could do that. Just walk out of sight. She’s the sister of a mass murderer. The question of conspiracy, given the political climate of Desert Sector at the time, is certainly valid. Even if she’s totally innocent, if she can disappear like this, so can other people. I want to know how she’s doing it.”
The walnut-lines merged as Takuda grimaced. “You’re right. I don’t like that, either. But, Aaron, we were given that Conspiracy to Disturb, Undermine or Destroy as a blind to absolve the FWGBI of any intent to use a madwoman as a scapegoat. Everybody knows that.”
Aaron smiled. “They will now.”
“Ah, nobody cares anymore. Yours is the only Sector still working on it.”
“It looks better that way. Besides—” He shrugged. “Who knows? It might be true. We still can’t find her. And I’m beginning to wonder who we’ll find with her if we do.”
“There’s that,” Takuda agreed softly. “There is indeed that. Have you checked with Sundown Sector? Maybe she’s involved with the National Regression Coalition.”
“That’s a possibility. No, I haven’t checked it.”
“Well, I’ll let you know if we come across anything. As you say, it’s an interesting problem.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
He had to get to work himself, then. Yet he sat gazing at the blank screen, a man trained to movement, alertness, decision, still as a shadow in an old bomb shelter inside the Earth, while seconds and minutes on the chronometer wound silently into the past. Memory traced a face lightly, briefly on the screen; he remembered, as if remembering a missing hand, what it was to feel.
He stirred, murmuring. His voice sounded eerie in the underground bubble. He moved then, quickly, restlessly, wanting familiar patterns of action, the beginnings and endings of small incidents, human voices.
As he walked into the Constellation Club, the walls around him kindled to a fiery rose.
Midnight, by Sidney Halleck’s frivolous timepiece. He stood a moment in the shadows near one of the house security guards, otherwise known as Sidney’s bouncers. Eighteen of the twenty stages were enclosed within silken falls of light. People wandered in and out of the light, glowing, for a moment, like dragonflies in the cascades of color. Eighteen bands were playing at once under Sidney’s roof, but the sound itself was caught and transformed within the curtains of light. The only music to be heard above the noise from the dozen bars was Sidney’s house band, Historical Curiosity, decorously playing chamber music in a corner.
The place seemed untroubled. Aaron, who had been on his feet for four hours, called in a shift break. He borrowed a glittering receiver-belt from the bouncer and pressed a colored light at random. A robot band called IQ was running through the popular tunes of the hour behind the blue curtain. He touched other lights, got alpha music on the green stage, electronic music on the yellow, and, behind orange, something that sounded like a battle between recycling bins. He located Nova, finally, behind purple light.
Quasar was belting out a song about making love on an asteroid passing too near the sun.
The lyrics made Aaron wince.
But music shirred from the Scholar’s rod-harp like a solar wind, and the Magician was creating a wild, tangled counterpoint out of his head with his body-wires. The Gambler’s cubing made the air pulse like a war zone; Aaron wondered, not for the first time, where anyone who resembled a walking bundle of twigs hid so much strength. He returned the receiver-belt, and made his way across the floor. He was stopped, greeted several times; when he was halfway across the vast club, the purple light in the distance vanished.
He located the Magician at a table in a corner, toweling sweat and makeup off his face while Sidney dealt. Sidney, his serene, bulky face ferocious in concentration, saw him coming and beamed.
“Aaron. How are you?”
The Magician raised his smudged face out of the towel, smiling. “Pull up a seat,” he said, and Aaron chuckled.
“Thanks, I’d like to keep my job.”
“It’s not really gambling.”
“Why not?” Sidney asked, affronted. A deep, throbbing run of notes sounded from an unlit stage on the other side of the floor; the sound was faint but the Magician’s ear turned curiously toward it.
“What was that?”
“A pre-FWG guitar: an electric bass. Someone in Thames Sector found it and wrote to me about it. I bought it from her unseen. It’s in beautiful condition.”
“Who’s playing it?”
“Michael Mole of the Starcatchers. He loved the sound.” He added cheerfully at the Magician’s quizzical expression, “I can’t play it well myself, and you’ve seen my house full of instruments. I have everything from a nineteen-foot grand piano to a didjeridoo—”
“A didjeri—what?”
“So what should I do? Put it into a museum? The Mole took to it as if he had come into the world playing it. As if it were the ghost of the music he’d been waiting to hear. Music is meant to be given away.”
“Up to a point.”
“No. Impose no limits and you’ll encounter no limits.” He appealed to Aaron, who was lounging against the wall behind him, wondering when Sidney was going to pick up his cards.
“Isn’t that true, Aaron?”
“Except for the FWG drinking laws and your own credit.”
“Unless,” Sidney said complacently, “you own the bar.” He tossed a two-credit chip on the table between them and inquired of the patiently waiting Magician, “Are you in this game?”
The Magician shoved his own chip forward. “It’s customary,” he commented, “to look at your cards before you bet.”
“I’m gambling,” Sidney explained. He discarded, to Aaron’s eye at random, and swallowed beer. The Magician drew one. His face was at its leanest, its most clinical; Aaron could almost hear his brain working with ruthless precision to take Sidney’s money. Sidney ran his fingers down his nose and sipped beer again, his attention drawn fondly to his brilliant, s
moothly running creation. The Magician’s eyes lifted, first to Sidney’s absent face, and then to Aaron, who met his gaze expressionlessly.
The Magician’s head bent, all the reptilian intensity suddenly fled from his face. He laid his cards down, his voice struggling against laughter. “You’re an awful poker player, Sidney.”
“What did I do?” Sidney demanded. “What did I do? You were reading my mind.”
The Magician looked surprised. “It’s your body language. Every time you get a terrible hand you run your fingers down your nose and sip beer. When you get a good hand, you don’t move and I can feel you concentrate. It distracts me so much I’m having a hard time taking your money.”
Sidney was silent. He spread out his cards with a sigh, and the Magician looked at them and laughed.
“So,” Sidney said good-humoredly, “even your merciless streak has its limits.”
“Apparently so.” He gathered the cards. Then his head turned toward the stage lights behind him.
Aaron said, “They’re still off.”
“One more hand?”
“I’ll try to concentrate less audibly.” Sidney turned to add something to Aaron; his wrist receiver beeped before he could speak. He propped his head on his fist, listening. Aaron scanned the crowd, found the problem in an entrance not far from them.
A man dressed in the rotting fabrics of the immense, eerie wasteland of the Sector dump had wandered into the club. He looked bewildered by his surroundings. The silvery glow in his eyes told Aaron what drug he needed. Aaron signaled the street patrol; a moment later they saw grey uniforms at the edge of the light spilling out of the door as Sidney’s bouncers talked the wanderer back into the street. Sidney leaned back in his chair.
“Thank you, Aaron.”
“It’s odd he strayed so far… They think the world beyond the dump is dangerous.”
The Magician, about to deal, looked up incredulously from the cards. “You have talked to them?”
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