“I’m sorry,” Jase said finally, ineffectually. Aaron shook his head a little, expressionless, blinking as if his eyes were gritty. “It’s one of those things, I guess.”
“God help us all,” Jase murmured, “if this is what they mean by those things.” He touched the com. “Klyos to Maindock.”
“Maindock.”
“Have you located Sidney Halleck yet?”
“Affirmative. We played him the docking challenges off the Maindock log; he’s analyzing them now, sir.”
“Good,” Jase sighed. “I want to talk to him. And I want him to talk to the Magician. The Flying Wail has its UF open—”
“Yes, sir, we’ve heard them. They still don’t respond to us, though.”
“Arrange a com-link with Sidney Halleck when he checks back. I bet they respond to that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Out.” He sensed unspoken dissent, glanced at Aaron. “Something, Mr. Fisher?”
“Nothing. I just hate to see Sidney tangled up in this… He loved the Magician’s music. That’s why he sent Nova up here. If he ever sees the Magician alive again, he’ll be in a cell with no hair and he won’t be playing music.” His face tightened suddenly; he looked as if he wanted to put his fist through the scanner. But his hands stayed still; he added, steadily enough, “I don’t know much about music. But I know Sidney. He’ll take it hard. The waste. The utter, absolute waste…” His eyes lifted, stared, hard, at the dark. “She’s still killing people…”
People you love, Jase finished silently. He glanced behind them at the still figure sitting on the floor, the rifle angled toward the back of Aaron’s chair. Just above the belt, Jase figured, if Aaron startled her. Her eyes moved, met his; he was not what she wanted to see. He loosed her to her mysterious waiting.
He said abruptly, “You never told the Magician about your wife.”
“No,” Aaron said shortly.
“Mr. Fisher, did you ever run across an old poem about six blind men trying to define an elephant by feel?”
Aaron was silent, bleakly regarding a smear of Milky Way. Then he sighed. “I’m sorry. I keep forgetting it happened seven years ago…”
“That’s a long time for silence.”
“I’m used to being silent about it… When I get angry, I can’t talk. I bury things. Right now, I’d like to take the Hub-craft in my hands and throw it at the Flying Wail.”
“I know.”
“I remember that elephant poem. Third grade.”
“That’s why I’m asking questions. I’ve been defining this elephant as a snake with a tuft of hair at one end and a stink at the other. Michele Viridian talked the Magician into rescuing Terra out of the Dark Ring, and that’s all there is to it, simple. Right?”
“That’s simple,” Aaron agreed.
“Probable?”
Aaron’s eyes turned away from the stars to Jase. “Not if you know the Flying Wail. He could fly that craft by music. He says it’s his soul. He’d never put it into jeopardy. Also, he’s simply got too much sense. Or he did have.”
Jase nodded. “That’s what I can’t understand. What moving mountain seems to be attached to the snake…”
“I keep trying to think of a word,” Aaron said. His face stiffened again, but he continued doggedly, “She killed my wife. Now, seven years later, here we are, she and I, in the same smallcraft, when she should be locked away in the Dark Ring and I should be on Earth and this time she’s got the rifle pointed at me.”
“Irony.”
“Is that it? It seems too small a word… I keep going over it and over it. How we all got into this position.”
“What I want to know is why.”
Aaron made a dry, humorless noise. “I tried for seven years to find reasons. All I came up with was this.”
“Well,” Jase sighed, “you certainly came up with a mare’s nest.”
“Chief Klyos,” Maindock said. “Maindock.”
“Here.”
“The pursuit fleet requests latest position of the Flying Wail.”
Aaron transmitted the coordinates, watching for the Flying Wail to veer as it intercepted them. Nothing happened: the cruiser was dead silent and on a straight course for a neighboring galaxy.
“Chief Klyos,” another voice said. “Nilson.”
“Nils! Are you in the Hub?”
“Yes, sir. We’ve pretty much got it in working order, though the monitor screens are still being replaced. They’re also replacing your desk, your chair, all your equipment and most of the carpet.”
“Did you get Fiori out?”
“Yes. He and his staff are safe. But he said the Dream Machine is beyond repair. FWGBI wants to talk to you.”
“I bet they do. What did you tell them?”
“We’re on alert status, but situation is stabilizing. Nothing more.”
“Good.”
“Also, we’re getting media calls.”
“How?” he demanded explosively.
“News leaks fast. We pull the fleet off the moon, people ask why.”
“Christ. Maintain station silence except for mobile cruisers and emergency. Tell FWGBI I’ll get back to them.”
“They said—”
“Tell them to stay off channels until I have something to give them. They can fire me later.”
“Okay. Sir, we haven’t found Terra Viridian. Can you confirm she’s with the Magician?”
“No,” Jase said sourly.
“Then, she must be—”
“She’s sitting in the Hub-craft hold with a rifle pointed at us.” He touched the com.
“Nilson. Nils.”
“I’m here,” he said raggedly. “What—what—”
“Other than that, we don’t seem to be in immediate danger. Nils, if we don’t get back, I want recommendations for citations for Valor, and for Extraordinary Performance in the Line, etc., for Aaron Fisher, Suncoast, A1A.”
“Jase,” Nils pleaded. “I don’t want your job this badly. Code.”
“No code. No orders. She’s interested in the Magician, not us. Stay calm. And get me Halleck as soon as possible. Out.” He added, brooding, “I can see the headlines. ‘Underworld Immobilized by Dead Composer.’ ‘Magician Grounds Underworld Fleet; Chief in Orbit’…” He reached toward the com again, restively, then changed his mind. “No. He’ll just tell me about visions. Has he ever gone crazy before?”
Aaron shook his head, then changed his mind. “Not crazy. Just—peculiar. I mentioned it before. The night a band in Sidney’s club nearly electrocuted themselves onstage. I was on patrol at the time. There were patrollers, ambulances, broken equipment, people and robots cleaning the debris up… and he never even saw us. He sat on a stage playing music and never even heard us, never knew…”
“That’s the looniest he’s ever gotten?”
“In the five years I’ve known him.”
“Then what caused this, in God’s name?”
“She did.”
“She who? Terra? Or Michele?”
“Not Michele. I watched them together. I needed to know. What—how they were with each other. There was only the music between them.”
“Terra,” Jase said incredulously, “has been sitting in the Dark Ring for seven years without even knowing the Magician existed. He saw her for about an hour.”
“Something happened then?”
“He never even spoke to her! When I realized who the Queen of Hearts was—”
Aaron’s head turned sharply. “How?” he pleaded. “I spent seven years trying to find Michele Viridian. How did you find her that fast?”
Jase considered the matter. “You were working with her real name. I took her stage name backward to the time when it ceased to exist. Seven years ago. I was also working on a pretty strong hunch that she was somebody whose name I wanted to know.”
“So was I.”
“But you weren’t suspicious of the Queen of Hearts. I was.”
“No,” Aaron said ho
llowly. “I wasn’t.”
“Anyway, I asked her if she wanted to see Terra. I figured that was what she’d come for anyway…” He paused, thinking back, again struck by the odd position of the Magician among the crowd of people listening to Terra. “Michele and Terra spoke. Dr. Fiori was there, and half a dozen guards, his three assistants and the Magician. I asked him to come with Michele. We all watched the Dream Machine. It was fascinating. You could see what Terra was thinking of on a screen. Her thoughts were pretty vivid. Bizarre, some of them, others concerning Michele, their past. What I’m trying to explain, Mr. Fisher,” he said, becoming aware of the chill wafting through the air between them, “is how engrossing the computer was. We all had our eyes on it.
Dr. Fiori even forgot a couple of times that the machine itself wasn’t Terra. All of us except the Magician. We looked at the Dream Machine to see what Terra was thinking.
“The Magician only looked at Terra.”
“She’s controlling his mind?” Aaron said dubiously. They both looked at Terra; the rifle shifted nervously. “Maybe,” he conceded. “He’s read my mind any number of times.”
“He’s psychic?”
“Whatever that means. But that wouldn’t explain why he’s obsessed. Why he’s gone over the edge. He wouldn’t throw away his life, his music or the Flying Wail just because of some—”
“Then why, Mr. Fisher? Why? What would cause a healthy, sane man to risk his life, his friends’ lives—and why aren’t they stopping him? Are they all in on this? Have they inhaled the same insanity virus? They’re heading precisely nowhere without extraordinary amounts of fuel; if they continue on their course, the pursuit fleet will blow them into a dust-ring around the Earth. Does he have some psychological hold over them? Do they ever disagree with him?”
“It’s a democracy,” Aaron said. “I’ve seen them argue.”
“Why don’t they force him back? Why are they allowing this? He put their lives in jeopardy, freeing a madwoman from the Underworld, and he couldn’t even manage to get her on the right smallcraft. Are they all seeing what he’s seeing?”
“Somebody’s navigating,” Aaron said, fielding a question at random. “They can’t all be having visions.”
“Then what? He’s coercing them?”
Aaron shook his head. “I’ve never seen any of them with a weapon. Not even Quasar.”
“He persuaded them?”
“He must have.”
“Is that likely? Does that seem credible?”
“No.”
“Then what does seem credible?”
“None of this,” Aaron said helplessly. Jase sat back, fuming silently.
“He’s not even negotiating for freedom,” he said wearily. “He’s controlling Terra, I’d say, as much as she’s controlling him. But he’s not threatening us with her, or offering to take her off our hands. He’s just—flying. Nowhere. I’d like to give them both to Dr. Fiori.”
“I should have checked,” Aaron said, gazing down at the controls. His eyes picked up stray colors from the lights. “I checked the whole Solar System, practically, but her. If I’d done that, this would never have happened.”
“When you were searching for Michele, you mean.”
“I never even did a stat-check on the Queen of Hearts. And I did one on everyone. Everyone. If I’d done that, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”
“Why not her?”
He was silent for a long time. “I thought,” he said finally, huskily, “that what I really wanted to know about her wouldn’t be in any records.”
Jase made a noise in his throat. “And what would you have done,” he asked softly, curiously, “if you had found out then that the Queen of Hearts was Michele Viridian?” He had to wait again, while Aaron contemplated the barren darkness in front of him, or in the seven years behind him. The icy, colorless mask of his face seemed to melt, become vulnerable to pain, to understanding.
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” he whispered. “Finding Michele Viridian, not finding her. I still would have had to go on looking. I never realized before… All those years, it was never her I was searching for. It was my wife.”
FIVE
Michele’s face hung like a mask at the edge of the Magician’s vision. He saw it in the unraveling dreams of alien landscapes; he saw it out of the corner of his eye as he watched the distant stars and waited. Its silence haunted him. A woman sat beside him, quietly navigating, but it wasn’t Michele. Michele Viridian had vanished, leaving the empty face of a playing card to rule her mind and her bones and her expressionless eyes.
He picked up the coordinates of the pursuit fleet as they were transmitted from the Hub-craft. As Aaron had said, it was coming fast and there was nowhere the Flying Wail could go to elude it. Aaron’s face came unbidden into the Magician’s mind, taut and white, as unyielding as the Queen of Hearts’ face. Seven years, the Magician thought, struck by pity, seven years for both of them…
And for the dreamer under the dying sun.
And for Terra.
And how many years, he wondered, pulling his thoughts back to the problem at hand, would he himself get in the Underworld if the alien failed to coordinate its transformation with the threat on the Flying Wail’s tail?
Life without music. They sure as hell wouldn’t let him out for a Rehab concert… That’s if for some reason they let him live. A blind panic rose in him at the thought of his death: the transformation incomplete, failed, aborted, the death of the vision…
It has to end now, he thought. Now. The odds were ridiculous. He stirred restlessly, and heard, distant and harsh with static, Sidney Halleck’s voice.
He leaned over the com, amazed. The Scholar was at his elbow in an instant.
“Sidney. How come they pulled him in?”
“Sh.” There was a faint phrase of music, a harpsichord tinkling from the other side of the grave. The Magician’s eyes widened.
“It’s a fragment of the Italian Concerto,” Sidney said. “The slow movement. That’s the second phrase you played me. The third I haven’t isolated yet. I’ll run it through the music bank at the university where I teach, if you think it’s that—”
“It is, Mr. Halleck. Please.”
“But why don’t you ask the Magician, Mr. Nilson? He knows almost as much about Bach as I do.”
“Sir, that’s impossible,” Nils said.
“Why? He should be still with you.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t give you that information.”
“You just want the phrases identified,” Sidney said, bewildered but tolerant. “Mr. Nilson, do you realize how peculiar this seems?”
“Mr. Halleck,” Nils said, “without revealing restricted information, I can tell you that’s the word for it. When you’ve identified the third chal—the third phrase, let us know immediately. Chief Klyos will be in contact with you, then. He will ask you to come here.”
“To the Underworld? Why on Earth?”
“All I can say is that we’re in need of someone with your talents. Urgently in need.”
“Does this… does this have anything to do with—”
“Please contact us when you’ve identified the third phrase. We’ll have a sol-car at your doorstep to take you to Mid-Suncoast Dock. Hub out.”
The Magician listened, but heard nothing from the Hub-craft. He straightened, wiped sweat out of his eyes, marveling. “What’s that old-world expression for—”
“Touché,” the Scholar said with precision.
“What made them think of Sidney?” He answered his own question. “Aaron.”
“What’s Aaron doing up here anyway? Did they import him especially just to chase us?”
The Magician shook his head wordlessly. “God knows. But what could Sidney do? Bring a keyboard up, attach it to a few of the cruisers, directly to their computers. He’d know how to program the music. And how to play it…”
“Well,” the Scholar said tightly, “there goes the tour.” The Magician heard
the fear in his voice, felt, all around him, tension like a blind watch-beast roused by his own uncertainty.
“He’ll figure out your challenges, Magic-Man. They’ll bring him up; they’ll explain that the band he sent on tour on his recommendation instigated a prison escape, crippled the Underworld, and is now being pursued by the Chief of the Underworld all over the cosmos. You going to tell him about aliens?”
The Magician stared at him without seeing him, terror and mystery weighing to a fine balance in his head. The moment’s panic sloughed away from him, left his expression remote, wondering. He turned toward the starscreen, and the tension, unfed, dissolved.
“It’ll be all right,” he said, feeling it: the straight thread out of chaos to their future.
“God, Magic-Man,” the Scholar said explosively. “I wish I knew what you are seeing. The rest of us can plead dumb ignorance. All we were doing was loading the Flying Wail when you kidnapped us, and there’s no evidence of crime on the Flying Wail, not even a weapon, let alone a prisoner. But you. The Underworld will swallow you whole without bothering to spit out your bones. You know that. But you’re not running hard enough, and you’re not running scared. You’re playing the card up your sleeve, the one final trick down at the bottom of your magic tricks. At least I pray so, because there sure as hell are not any wild cards behind us.”
“It’s the need,” the Magician said. He felt it again as he struggled to explain. “Like thirst. Like breath. The overriding imperative of the changing. The Dark Ring is insignificant, a sand grain floating in the shadow of an eclipse. Nothing more. The Dark Ring is not in the vision.”
The still face next to him watching the scanner turned then, almost evidencing emotion.
“Terra said that…” Michele whispered. “So many times. You know what it means.”
“I know.”
“What does it mean?” Quasar asked suddenly, as if a vision without the shadow of the Underworld in it had finally snagged her attention. She looked up from the jar of glitter she was applying to her eyelids. “What are you seeing? You dream awake. Can you show us? Make us see an alien, Magic-Man.”
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