The Skill of Our Hands--A Novel

by Steven Brust

  Once the pattern becomes apparent, the abstractions become concrete; the symbols become images; the metaphors, people: Ren is the Dragon, Oskar is War, Jimmy is Wisdom, Kate is Love. And it is only then that you realize that Irina is nowhere to be seen in the moving, shifting dance.

  The process goes back and forth: metaphor to person to symbol to image to metaphor. With each transition, you learn a little more. The Dragon’s dance is somewhere between traditional ballet and its modern, improvisational offspring; War almost parodies itself with a paso doble; Wisdom twirls in a Viennese Waltz against the four-four tempo as if the implied polyrhythm were as natural as breathing, Love contents itself with a rumba, because of course it does. And somehow, they all work together, tell a larger story.

  Now you must see what is not before you, and that is harder. You must find what is missing, what is not in the pattern but should be: the missing dancer, the missing dance. And although it may seem as if they are dancing for you, they are not; they are dancing for each other, and for themselves. If you forget that, it becomes nearly impossible to—

  There.

  Irina is Pride, off by herself dancing Flamenco to her own tempo, her own song.

  Follow her steps, see where her eyes go, wait for the empty place to fill. There is no hurry, for there is no time, any more than there is space.

  Yes. Pride is dancing with her own partner, Fear. Fear guides her steps. Fear of—?

  That shape is not clear yet, for it is someone who is not in the group, someone none of them know. The unknown dancer has no face, and no name; only Irina knows who it is, and even she may not be certain; see how hesitant her steps are? Her hands and arms tell of secrets kept; her feet spiral inward and away at once, because uncertainty is the hole at the center filled by Fear.

  You do not know what she fears, but you fear it too, because Pride cannot stop it.

  War cannot defeat it, Wisdom cannot convince it, Love cannot move it, the Dragon cannot consume it. Only the Pivot can turn it from enemy to friend; from disaster to triumph.

  There is no need for abstraction anymore, because everything, even the unknown, is sharp and clear and has hard edges.

  Irina was involved with someone who could destroy them—destroy them in a very real and physical way. The possibility of all of Salt, and maybe some others, being stubbed at the same time was very real, and things were moving in exactly that direction. And the one person able to transform the threat was Phil, and Phil was in stub.

  Takamatsu’s Garden returned to empty stillness, and vanished. He opened his eyes, sat down at his desktop, and consulted his bank account, then Hipmunk. If he were willing to make two stops and spend eleven hours in the air, he could just afford it.

  He booked a flight to Tucson, called in sick to work, got up and started packing.

  * * *

  Irina was not cut out for detective work. She just wasn’t. Spy? Sure. Bond girl? Absolutely. But she didn’t like waiting around, and she wasn’t exactly ace at subtlety.

  “Irina?”

  She opened one achy eye to find the soccer-coach-looking guy she’d seen in the alley squatting in front of her. His heavy eyebrows—dark, trimmed short, and spiked with an occasional gray wire—were drawn together in genuine concern. His hands almost glowed with urgency. “Do you need to go to the hospital?”

  Irina shifted against the shelves and knocked a book to the ground.

  The man, who could only be Kelly the vigilante who’d had Phil shot, picked it up and stacked it with the rest of the deadfall. “I’ll reshelve these,” he promised. He was considerate for a racist talking to a brown girl, but terribly on edge. His guilty shoulders were bundled like dynamite sticks and his jaw looked like the center pin of a Ferris wheel. Irina rotated her own jaw experimentally. Not broken. She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth, but the blood seemed to be only from where she had bitten her tongue.

  “Do you have somewhere you can go?” Kelly asked.

  Irina had lived everywhere from Haiti to Paris to Siem Reap in her seven hundred years, thank you very much, and she had both the condo in Tucson and the house in Florida, but she was bleeding from the mouth, had mascara ground into her eyelids, and stank of cheap beer so, okay. She might look like a walking—or a collapsing—disaster. But Kelly was living at the center of one.

  “I can drive you,” he offered.

  “Where’s Santi?”

  “He’s making sure we don’t get interrupted. Can you stand?”

  The nice man who’d had Phil killed for helping illegal immigrants not die in the desert, offered Irina one hand, a wide, square palm, to help her up. His other clutched a modest ring of keys.

  “Tell you what,” she suggested, “why don’t, instead, you sit down?” Irina pushed herself up a little straighter against the bookshelf. “Santi punched me,” she recollected.

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “You are?”

  “He is too.” Kelly blushed—an incongruous cardiac blossom over his stubbled cheeks.

  “He works for you?”

  “We’re friends.”

  “Really?” Irina checked again, but there was no hint he was lying. Weird. “He knocked me out,” she said.

  “You, er. You hit the back of your head on a shelf.”

  “So it’s not his fault? The shelf’s, then?”

  Kelly had possibly the worst fake smile Irina had ever seen. “You know that’s not what I mean,” he said.

  Irina squinted at him through a scrim of headache. “How do you know,” she asked him, “what I know?”

  Kelly shrugged in a way that was also squaring off. “You’re not a fool.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “And you’re not a drunk or a junkie, either.” He said it like a confession she’d wrung from him.

  “Are you calling my bluff?”

  Kelly seemed like a nice guy, soft-spoken and educated, but Irina had been reading jaws and hands and shoulders, spotting the signs of lives at pivots—where everything changes and one way of being dies and a new one staggers out into the world—too long to think this guy was anything but imminent. He must have pulled the trigger himself.

  “Just let me help you get on your feet.” He was almost pleading. “There’s a room we can use.”

  “You must be feeling pretty clever.”

  “I’m not. Believe me.”

  Oddly, Irina did. Odder, she thought he might cry. Sure, all pivots are dark, you don’t turn yourself around if you’re headed the right direction in the kind sunshine but, “My god,” she said without thinking. “What’s happening to you?”

  His laugh was just like Oskar’s, but more hollow. “Let’s just get you to the community room, okay?”

  “No, seriously. What the hell is going on with you and Santi?”

  Kelly’s eyes flicked to his left where Santi must be stationed. “This shouldn’t concern him,” Kelly muttered, looking, if possible, even more hunted.

  “Maybe it shouldn’t,” Irina finished for him. “But it does.”

  The man swallowed, choking back vomit or tears.

  “It concerns him,” Irina went on, feeling her way around the tattered edge of Kelly’s psyche, “because this—whatever ‘this’ is—concerns you, and Santi has made your concerns his own.”

  Out of love or loyalty, Irina realized. Not out of fear or for money.

  “You didn’t kill Phil, did you?”

  “Jesus.” Kelly dropped Irina’s eyes and stood abruptly, like he needed to get out of the space where those words hung. “Of course I didn’t. I could never kill anyone.”

  Irina tipped up her head to see what besides guilt was in Kelly’s face, but an angry white pain knifed behind her eyes, and she had to close them. Kelly knelt next to her and put a solicitous hand on her shoulder.

  “Santi could,” she whispered. “Maybe has, but not Phil. Still, you’re friends with a killer, and you feel responsible for Phil’s death.” Irina cranked one e
ye open. “Why?”

  The quiet of Kelly’s not answering stretched between them, but the storm playing over his face demanded patience of her. When he met her eyes at last, his were the blue of inland oceans. “I’ll explain that,” he promised, “but can we please get you out of here before the same thing happens to you?”

  “Were you with him—Phil—when he died?”

  “No. He was alone.”

  Something in that sent a shiver through Irina; she felt like crying. “But you knew him.”

  “He’d been coming down here a while to use the reference section. I’d spoken to him once or twice. He asked a lot of questions.” Kelly’s voice was low and desperate.

  “What sort of questions?”

  “About alien registration and border patrol mostly. I tried to warn him off. We knew he was asking the same questions up in Phoenix.”

  Irina added Kelly’s obvious heft of secrets to the strength of Santi’s loyalty and toted up a wild, improbable sum. Could this man’s “we” be Jack Harris’s “they”? Could a guerrilla leader be so suburban? “Kelly,” she said gently. “Who’s ‘we’?”

  He sprang to standing, too fast for Irina’s headache. She swallowed hard.

  “God, this is unbelievably messed up!” Kelly groaned. “Why are you here? Why wouldn’t you just go home? You don’t have any idea how dangerous this is.”

  “You’re not dangerous.”

  “I am!”

  “Not to me.”

  Kelly looked around like he might start tearing books from the shelves. It hurt Irina too much to turn her head to watch him pace, so she just waited for him to come back into frame.

  “No,” he said, not looking at her. “Not to you. Or not directly. God, now can we please get you out of here?”

  “Once you explain who your ‘we’ is.”

  “No!” Kelly was back crouching in front of her. “You explain yours, Irina. You tell me what the hell you and Phil are part of, and why you keep asking questions. It got him killed. Why are you doing the same thing? And how in the name of hope and meaning did my wife get involved?”

  “Your wife?”

  He sank back on his heels like a deflating balloon. “She spent the night at Phil’s house with his widow.”

  “You’re married to Jane?”

  “How do you know her name?” It was nearly a whimper.

  “You’re Sam,” Irina said.

  Sam Kelly stayed where he was, looking like a man who knew all the real impetus of his life had left him. He was nothing like Oskar, but Irina could see how someone who loved this man would find Oskar irresistible. Of course, it was hard to imagine a woman who wouldn’t.

  “And you know Jane spent last night at Phil’s house?” Irina asked. “I was there, too.”

  “How does Phil’s wife—”

  “Fiancée. Her name’s Ren. Short for Renee.”

  “How does she know Jane?”

  “I don’t think she does. She was just investigating her.”

  “She’s a detective?” Anger animated Sam.

  “No.”

  “A reporter?”

  “Closer.”

  “What about Jane, exactly, was Renee investigating?”

  “I don’t know, actually. Something about kids bringing guns to school.”

  “Oh god.” Sam slumped against the stacks. “That was us.”

  “Sam?”

  He met her eyes.

  “Sam, who’s ‘us’?”

  SEPTEMBER, 1856

  THE GRAVITY OF THE GROUP’S MORAL CORE

  After Lane’s tussle at Hickory Point, a bunch of us sitting around Robinson’s house had another argument. Morrow was there, and Cody, and Montgomery, and a few others, including Judge Wakefield, a solid Free-Soiler, though not an abolitionist. I think Wakefield might have supported the “No Negroes In Kansas” Free-Soil constitution, so I steered us away from that whole subject. Other than that, I didn’t say much, and the argument accomplished less—those like Montgomery who wanted to go after Sheriff Jones still wanted to, those like Robinson who wanted to stay within the strict letter of the law didn’t budge. The move from bad coffee to decent whiskey didn’t help anything either.

  The whole argument was set off, of course, by the Lecompton Constitution, one of foulest pieces of chicanery ever attempted to be practiced. We’d gotten word that it had passed, by a vote of something like twice as many people as were legally in the territory. I learned a few days later that Montgomery had actually walked up to one of the ballot boxes full of fraudulent votes and smashed it, but I didn’t know that then. If I had, I would have told him it was the wrong way to fight, and shaken him by the hand.

  I sat, and I listened, and I knew what would happen: those who wanted to fight by creating a Free-State constitution would do that, and those who wanted to fight by killing border ruffians would go ahead and do that, and nothing anyone said would stop either faction.

  And old Osawatomie Brown would be right in the middle of those wanting to fight. I needed to get to him. After the meeting, I managed to find a friend of his, a young Jew named Bondi. Oskar had known him in Austria in ’48, and was able to give me his switches.

  * * *

  August Bondi. He was twelve years old in ’48, and fought like a tiger.

  —O

  * * *

  I used them, and we had a friendly conversation that went nowhere. As soon as I started asking about Brown, however subtle I tried to be, Bondi would change the subject. Brown had managed to surround himself with a loyal band that wasn’t giving anything away, no matter what.

  I had the strong feeling I was running out of time.

  TEN

  A Loyal Band That Wasn’t Giving Anything Away

  The full weight of the last sixteen hours landed on Jimmy’s shoulders with a dismal thump. Phil had been murdered. Ren teetered between devastated and determined. And somewhere out there, someone they didn’t know had been driven by something they had done to the breaking point of his own humanity, and then beyond it. With Jane and Ren both staring at him, Jimmy drew a heavy breath and explained, “It’s almost true, and it should be completely true, that we never do anything bad, but it isn’t.”

  “Jimmy,” said Ren, warning in her voice. “What are you talking about?”

  “Countermeddling,” he said. “Sometimes we call it backmeddling. If you stayed current on the boards, you’d see the arguments.”

  “That’s why I don’t stay current,” said Ren, and Oskar barked an Oskar-laugh. Jane just watched Jimmy.

  “Countermeddling,” he explained, “is when we make something bad even worse to create a backlash that makes things better.”

  “We do that?” said Ren, frowning. “It seems … I don’t know. I don’t like it.”

  “Nor do I,” said Jimmy. “I hate it. It is rarely a good idea, and never the best one. If we had the right to forbid anything, we’d forbid that. Even Oskar is against it.”

  Oskar scowled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Jimmy ignored him, something he thought he should probably do more.

  “Give me an example?” Jane asked.

  “Watergate, I think, most recently. We countermeddled some of Nixon’s advisers so they’d give him bad advice. I didn’t like it then; almost no one did. But one of us—I won’t name names—went ahead and did it anyway.”

  “Don’t you people have any control?” Jane asked. “Checks and balances? Ways to make sure you’re doing good?”

  “No.”

  “That,” said Oskar, “is why recruiting is so important. That’s where we decide if someone is really the sort of person we can count on to want to make things better.”

  “Just because someone did something decent, you think that means you can depend—”

  “No, no,” said Oskar. Then, “Excuse me, I shouldn’t have interrupted you.”

  “No, go ahead.”

  Oskar nodded “The ‘doing something decent’ is what gets ou
r attention, if you will. It’s the first requirement. After that, we investigate the person. Thoroughly,” he added.

  “How?

  “We have a good chance of finding any information that anyone has ever expressed symbolically.”

  “‘Expressed symbolically?’”

  “Written down,” said Jimmy.

  Oskar nodded. “For the most part, or represented with any other sort of symbol. As I recall, Ren learned about your cat because of an art project you did in the eighth grade.”

  Jane’s mouth opened, then closed. Her eyes never left Oskar.

  “Anything anyone puts into symbol can go into our Garden.” Oskar continued, “Usually it’s simply writing. Computers—the Internet—makes it laughably easy, but letters, diaries—”

  “So then,” said Jane. “You can just decide to read my diary? All the way back to college? At my most vulnerable?” She looked—no, she was—outraged. “What by Astarte’s tits gives you the right?”

  “Because we can, and if it can help us make things better for Sam,” Ren said, her voice hard, talking over both Oskar and Jimmy’s started explanations, “what gives us the right not to?”

  Wordless, Jane held Ren’s eyes a long time, but Ren wasn’t going to apologize for their privacy violations, and Jane wasn’t going to forgive them. Jimmy remembered the first time he’d seen a photo of Ren, the pixie-haired UI girl Phil wanted to recruit for Celeste’s Second. He’d been afraid Phil wanted someone fragile to give Celeste a better chance. Jimmy was glad to have been proved wrong.

  “So you go intruding into people’s personal lives in order to find people who are good,” Jane said, “by a definition of good that permits snooping like the fucking NSA.”

  “Yes,” said Oskar. “That’s about right.”

  “And that definition of good is the only thing that prevents a horrific abuse of power?”

  “Yes,” said Oskar.

  “And that works?” said Jane, in a tone somewhere between skeptical and mocking.