“Terra. Can you hear me? Terra.”
She was sitting in a bubble. It was warm, pliant, suspended in shadows above the floor. She lifted a hand, touched it wonderingly. The translucent wall stretched to her touch, then flowed back into shape.
“Terra.”
A young woman in a red jumpsuit was speaking softly into a computer. Terra stared at the red, swaying toward it as if it were a flame. “Project: Guinea Pig. Dr. A. Fiori. Assistants: Reina Barton. Nathaniel Ng. Pietro Ames. Subject: Terra Viridian. Female. Age 28. Prisoner, Dark Ring of the Underworld. Status-sheet follows. Legal permission for use of Underworld prisoner in experimental biocomputer program given by Dr. Grace Czerny, FWGBI, Department of Psychobiology. Family: one sister, whereabouts unknown.”
She looked at the doctor, who was standing beside the bubble. He nodded, smiling.
“Go ahead, Reina. Let’s begin.”
A screen above the console glowed. Colors washed across it, merged to form new colors that swirled together again into different shades. Terra, who had seen no colors outside of her own mind for seven years, watched, her lips parted. She put one hand on her head suddenly, felt a cap on it. But with the fuchsias and blues and golds fusing in front of her, the thin filaments running out of her head seemed unimportant.
“Terra. What do you see?”
“Colors. Novas.”
“Terra.” His voice was slower now, very calm. “I want you to do something very simple for me. All the things I will ask you to do for the next few days will be very simple.”
“Nothing is simple.”
“The beginning is very simple. Will you try?”
She moved her eyes from the screen, looked directly at him. “Override,” she said clearly.
Black lightning leaped through the red sky, struck a patch of the purple sand that melted and ran to meet the incoming tide. The colors on the screen dissolved into static. Someone whistled.
“How did she do that? Dr. Fiori, she called that one—”
“Sh. Terra. Concentrate on the colors. Remember them. Let them come back.”
She thought of them and they returned: colors beautiful enough to drink, to smell, to wear.
“Good, good… Keep concentrating…” His voice faded; the colors danced together, fell apart, swirled into a memory, as sudden and astonishing to her as any of her visions. The greenhouses on the tiny, misshapen moon where she had been born… the warm, damp air, the smell of an alien earth, all the colors that grew out of that Earth as easily as wishes, as freely as dust and ice and magma grew out of all the worlds she knew then…
“Terra. Tell me what you see.”
“A rose,” she whispered.
FIVE
Where,” the Magician demanded surprisedly, “is that light coming from?”
The members of Nova looked at one another, and then at him. In the midst of the Constellation Club, with its stages flooded with light and its walls, at that hour, glowing a soft amethyst mist, the question seemed absurd. The Nebraskan stroked his pale, drooping mustache and glanced around obligingly. The Scholar, his black face split by a silver lightning bolt, narrowed his eyes incredulously.
“Would you care to elucidate?”
“I don’t see anything,” the Gambler said vaguely. Propped against the stage, he looked as if his long, wraithlike body would collapse into a formless pile if the stage suddenly disappeared.
“Except. You know. The usual.”
“Elucidate,” Quasar said, sampling each syllable as if it were edible. She gave the Magician a sidelong smile, revealing scarlet teeth.
“Moi, I will help you elucidate, Magic-Man. Just tell me where.”
“It’s not from our stage,” the Nebraskan said. “What does it look like?”
“What?”
“The light,” the Nebraskan said bewilderedly. “You just said—”
“Oh.” He shook his head slightly, blinking. “I just saw something out of the corner of my eye. Or thought I did. I don’t see it now.”
“I don’t, either,” the Gambler said helpfully.
“Tell me about this thing: to elucidate. Is it legal, or is it subterranean?”
“Underground,” the Scholar murmured. “If that’s the word you’re looking for.”
Quasar waved fingernails that matched the hues of her short, rainbow hair. “La même chose —it’s the same. Underground, subterranean—”
“One has political connotations, the other is from an ancient, pre-FWG language called Latin. Sub: under. Terra: earth. Under-earth, underground—”
“Can we get down to business?” the Magician pleaded, “before the break is—”
“Anyway, the opposite of legal is not subterranean, but—”
“Underworld,” the Gambler suggested. The Magician folded his arms and raised his voice.
“Which is why I called this meeting, if anyone happens to remember that this is a meeting.”
“Well, what?” the Scholar asked affably. “We’re here, we’re listening. Sidney give us a raise?”
“Sidney’s giving us an off-world tour, beginning at the Underworld.”
They were silent, staring at him again, their vivid, painted faces still as masks hanging in the air around him. Then the Nebraskan grinned, and the Gambler made a sudden move to keep himself from sliding onto the floor.
“The Underworld,” the Scholar breathed. “Magic-Man—”
“We’ll play one night there, then go on to the moon, to Rimrock and Moonshadow, then to Helios—”
“The sun?” the Gambler asked bewilderedly.
“The space-city.”
“Hot damn,” the Nebraskan said. Quasar, expressionless, lit a cigarette and blew smoke in a jet stream over the Magician’s head.
“Prison,” she said brittlely. She added something succinct and untranslatable in old-world.
“Magic-Man—”
“It’s just one concert,” he said again, quickly, watching her hand shake as she drew on the cigarette. “We’ll only be there overnight.”
“But what do they want with music in the Underworld?” the Scholar asked amazedly.
“Especially ours?”
“They’re starting a new Rehab program.” He smiled dryly. “They’re trying to bring more noise into the Underworld. Sidney recommended us. The Suncoast Agency is setting up the rest of the tour for us.” He nodded at the Scholar’s whistle. “It’s too good to turn down. If we can get some publicity, maybe we can return to a full Sector tour.”
The Gambler had come to life, standing almost straight. He looked horrified. “Fly?”
The Magician closed his eyes and opened them. “That’s the general idea.”
“Space?”
“It’s ubiquitous,” the Scholar said gravely.
“No.”
“No what?”
“No way. Magic-Man, I can’t. I don’t have any balance.”
“I’m not asking you to walk a tightrope to the Underworld. What do you mean you can’t? You’re going. Going without you is not among the options.”
“Here.” The Gambler tapped at his ear. “I don’t have any balance here. I get sick. Throw up. Even in tall buildings. Everywhere.”
The Magician gazed at him remotely, as if he had just dropped a pint of beer into the piano.
“There are cures for that,” he said distinctly.
“I can’t—”
“You can’t back out on me now, is what you can’t do. You’ve been playing my music for five years. It might be the only thing inside whatever it is you call a brain, but you know it like you know air, and if you think Nova is going on an off-world tour with some cuber off the streets we’ve rehearsed with for three weeks, you are thinking with your head up your backside. You’re going, and that’s all—”
“I can’t.” He swayed back from the Magician’s wrath, his pale, gangly arms draped along the stage. Only his shoulders, wide and straight from cubing, suggested any muscle beneath his bodysuit. “I
don’t even fly a sol-car. Magic-Man, I have to stay on the ground. I don’t like air under me. At all. Ever. Me”—he put a palm to his lips and then to the floor at his feet—“Earth. We like each other. There’s nothing I can do. I knew you would get famous on me someday.”
“What?”
“I left my last band because of that. They started to do tours. Fly. I knew it would happen to Nova.” He sighed. “The best bands are always leaving me.” He added, his fingers gripping the stage as if he might float away, “I’m sorry.”
The Magician regarded him expressionlessly a moment longer. He turned his gaze to the Scholar. “How’s your balance?” he asked with dangerous calm.
“Fine,” the Scholar said hastily. “Me.” He kissed the air. “Space. I’m with you, Magic-Man.”
The Magician looked at Quasar, who was puffing rapidly. “We can’t go without the Gambler,” she said nonchalantly, but she didn’t meet his eyes.
“We’re going.”
“But—”
“The Gambler will either go with us or find a replacement. As good as he is.”
“As good?” the Gambler said doubtfully. The Magician withdrew his eyes from Quasar long enough to glare.
“And you’ll find one fast.” He turned back to Quasar, all his attention focused on her, for while her delicately raised eyebrows suggested indifference, her eyes were dark, expressionless, and the movements of her cigarette too abrupt. She would not put her reluctance into words, and yet it was there between them, tangible as the haze of smoke around her.
“It’s the prisoners we’ll play to,” he said, for she objected to authority instinctively and without compunction. “The Light-Ringers. Not the patrollers.” And then he saw it: her edgy, nervous movements confined in too small a space, her eyes straining to see through an artificial darkness.
He drew breath noiselessly; she looked at him then, smiling a little, wicked smile at her own terror.
“If you want this, Magic-Man,” she said, casting caution back to him. He made no move to intercept it.
“I want it,” he said. He also wanted to take her hand, kiss her cheek in gratitude. He didn’t move, but in some strange way the air around him transmitted his impulse: she looked surprised, the smile suddenly young.
“Good!” the Nebraskan said, oblivious to obstacles. “When are we leaving?”
“Three—less than three weeks.”
“You taking the Flying Wail?”
“Of course.”
“Does it still fly?” the Scholar asked.
“Of course it flies,” the Magician said indignantly. “It merely has a small problem communicating.”
“How big a small problem?”
“I’ll fix it.”
“Last time you had a small problem, the refrigeration system broke down, and we spent two weeks touring with no cold beer.”
“Beer,” the Nebraskan murmured. “Break’s half over.”
“We’ll meet tomorrow night, get the details straight, decide what we’re going to play. If,” he added icily, “we have a cuber among us.”
The Nebraskan fondled his mustache. “We could drug him for the flight,” he suggested.
The Gambler, galvanized, pushed himself away from the stage in the direction of the nearest bar, the Magician’s brooding gaze between his shoulder blades.
The Scholar shook his head. “How will we play without him? He plays those cubes like he’s inside our heads, hearing our music before we do.”
The Magician didn’t answer. Still frowning, he heard the rambling, chaotic noises in the club ebb to a distance, like a tide. A faint throb of cubing caught his ear, or the ghost of cubing from a different time.
He moved finally, it seemed to him toward the music. “Let’s get a beer while we have time. Don’t worry,” he added to the astonished Scholar. “We’ll have a cuber.”
Aaron, off duty, was sipping Scotch at one of the quieter bars: a broad, half oval of mahogany and brass that reminded him vaguely of old sailing ships. He was running through lists in his mind: lists of factory workers, private hospital personnel, army recruits, lists of names that could be lies, of lives that could be faked, all except for one incongruity, one careless detail at the moment of interface. Among 5.2 billion people scattered from Earth to the asteroids, how could he find someone who didn’t want to be found? She was picking rice in Dragon Sector, she was feeding birds and albino tigers in a zoo, she was leading Rim-Tours around the coast of Sundown Sector. She was studying for the priesthood. He mused over that one. But even they had credit numbers, ID cards, tax records. She had changed her name, but she couldn’t falsify every single record of her past, and there had to be that one moment when the two, past and future, overlapped into their complex identity. He stared into his Scotch, almost too tired of thinking to think. Why should I care? After seven years? What am I going to do with her if I find her? Shoot her because her crazy sister killed my—I want to find her. I need something from her. I need.
He stilled his thoughts and was immediately enveloped in memory. He tasted the ghost of a kiss. She was dressed in khaki, the last time. She kissed me good-bye and turned, damn near hitting me with her rifle as she went to board the troop-cruiser. Three months later she called me. She was pregnant, she was laughing, they were letting her come home early… She said I had a pirate’s face, she never wanted me to change it. She threw a frying pan at me once. Her eyes were so black you could fly in them…
Something hit his boots. He crawled out of the time-tunnel back to the present, back to Sidney’s Wonderland. He looked down bewilderedly. Half a dozen roses were scattered at his feet. He glanced behind him, saw a figure swathed in a cocoon of gold sequins, all but for one bare arm still gracefully completing the arc of its toss. Even the eyelashes glittered gold. The dark eyes smiled, but there was no telling what sex the slender arm belonged to. Aaron, distrusting ambiguities, let the roses lie.
“Whatever happened to the art of gentle conversation?” Sidney Halleck murmured beside him. “It went out with the bassoon.” He bent, scooped the roses off the floor and dropped them onto the bar. Aaron touched one. Sleek, shiny black acrylic, they were all perfect and they would never die.
“Sometimes it’s easier not to talk… No confusion, no embarrassment, no hurt… and no tomorrow.”
“Really?”
“That’s the rule of the rose. One night, no questions, no complications—”
“No names?”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter; no one would believe you even if you gave your real name. That’s the simplest lie of all.”
“Is it?” He picked up the roses, let them fall gently. Aaron felt the amiable expression on his face suddenly strained.
“And,” he added lightly, “no thorns. Nothing to hurt with.”
“I see thorns,” Sidney said. Aaron looked at him. The powerful, kindly face made him smile suddenly, tiredly.
“So do I. But if I catch a rose, I take it for what it’s worth, and sometimes it’s worth clinging with one finger to the edge of life for one more day—” He stopped, startled at himself, and picked up his glass. Sidney motioned for a beer.
“I understand,” he said mildly. “I’m just critical because they clog my vacuums.” He smiled as Quasar, in black leather from head to foot, the heels on her boots impossibly high, strode across the floor toward them. Then he blushed as she flung her arms around him and left a rainbow stain of color on his lips. She turned on her heel to face Aaron, dragged deeply at her cigarette and threw it at his feet. He ground it out, his expression unruffled, as she spun away.
Sidney wiped his mouth, looking as if one of his pop robot-bands had just broken into opera.
“Impulsive,” Aaron commented. The rest of Nova scattered around the bar, the Magician at his elbow.
“I think,” Sidney said, emerging from behind his napkin, “it might actually catch on. A social dinosaur emerging back into fashion, outlasting even the roses.”
“What’s he talking about?” the Magician asked Aaron.
“Kissing.”
“But as a social gesture, the cigarette was bewildering. Does that mean she likes you or she doesn’t like you?”
“It means she wants to set my boots on fire.”
“She’ll more likely set my club on fire one of these days.” He added to the Magician, “Will Nova go to the Underworld?”
The Magician nodded a trifle grimly. “One way or another. The Gambler gets space-sick, and Quasar—does she have a record, Aaron?”
“Yes,” Aaron said. Then he put down his glass, flushing slightly. “How did you know—”
“You told me once you even did a status-check on me, when we first met. What kind of a record? Will they give her an off-world passport? Will they let her in the Underworld? Will they let her out again?”
Aaron nodded. “She had a pretty wild youth in Lumière Sector. She lived underground, in the old sewer and train tunnels. They charged her with a lot of things, but the only things ever proven against her were property damage and disturbing the peace.”
“She was in prison.”
“For a couple of months. That was so long ago it shouldn’t be a problem. As long as she doesn’t create problems herself. She doesn’t like patrollers.”
“I think she likes you,” the Magician said, with an unusual flash of insight. “It’s that she likes you that she doesn’t like.”
“Come again?”
“Never mind. It was a brilliant thought but fleeting. Thinking about people scrambles my circuitry. Have you ever been to the Underworld?”
“Once. I was doing some investigating in their Records Department. They don’t give Earth-access. It’s an amazing place. Quiet as a morgue and as efficient as death.”
“I had a pleasant conversation with the Chief of the Underworld,” Sidney commented. “We talked about nursery rhymes.”
“Klyos?” Aaron said amazedly. “Nursery rhymes?”
“Have you met him?”
“No. I’ve heard rumors, including one that he’s human.”
“Is that strange?”
“In a prison that size, with that potential for disaster, yes.” He shook his head. “Nursery rhymes. How did you get the Underworld Chief even to admit he might have been born?”
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