Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  We are near the spiraldown. I cannot see the mooring lights, and there are no landmarks on Paylay, but I remember how the lights of Jewell’s abbey looked from here: a thin, disjointed string of Christmas tree lights, red and green and gold. Closer in you can see the red line under the buildings, and you think you are seeing the heat of Paylay, but it is only the reflection of the lights off the ground and the metalpaper undersides of Jewell’s and the gaming house.

  “You kin’t see the heat,” Jewell said on our way in from the down, “but you’ll feel it. Your shoes all right?”

  My shoes were fine, but they were clumsy to walk in. I would have fallen over in them at home, but here the heavier gravity almost clamped them to the ground. They had six-inch plastic soles cut into a latticework as fragile looking as the mooring tower, but they were sturdier than they looked, and they were not letting any heat get through. I wasn’t feeling anything at all, and halfway to Jewell’s I knelt and felt the sooty ground. It felt warm but not so hot as I had thought it would be, walking on a star.

  “Leave your hand there a minute,” Jewell said. I did, and then jerked my soot-covered hand up and put it in my mouth.

  “Gits hot fast, din’t it?” she said. “A tapper kidd fall down out here or kimm out with no shoes on and die inside of an hour of heatstroke. That’s why I thought I bitter come out and wilcome you to Paylay. That’s what they call this tapped-out star. You’re sipposed to be able to pick up minny laying on the ground. You kin’t. You have to drill a tap and build a compressor around it and hope to Gid you don’t blow yoursilf up while you’re doing it.”

  What she did not say, in the high squeaky voice we both had from the helium in the air, was that she had waited over two hours for me by the down’s plastic mooring tower and that the bottoms of her feet were frying in the towering shoes. The plastic is not a very good insulator. Open metal ribs would work far better to dissipate the heat that wells up through the thin crust of Paylay, but they can’t allow any more metal here than is absolutely necessary, not with the hydrogen and oxygen ready to explode at the slightest spark.

  The downpilot should have taken any potential fire-starters and metal I had away from me before he let me off the spiraldown, but Jewell had interrupted him before he could ask me what I had. “Doubletap it, will you?” she said. “I want to git back before the nixt shift. You were an hour late.”

  “Sorry, Jewell,” the pilot said. “We hit thirty percent almost a kilometer up and had to go into a Fermat.” He looked down again at the piece of paper in his hand. “The following items are contraband. Unlawful possession can result in expulsion from Paylay. Do you have any: sonic fires, electromags, matches …”

  Jewell took a step forward and put her foot down like she was afraid the ground would give way.

  “Iv course he din’t. He’s a pianoboard player.”

  The pilot laughed and said, “Okay, Jewell, take him,” and she grabbed up my tote and walked me back to St. Pierre. She asked about my uncle, and she told me about the abbey and the girls and how she’d given them all house names of jewels because of her name. She told me how Taber, who ran the gaming house next door to her abbey, had christened the little string of buildings we could see in the distance St. Pierre after the patron saint of tappers, and all the time the bottoms of her feet fried like cooking meat and she never said a word.

  I couldn’t see her very well. She was wearing a chemiloom lantern strapped to her forehead, and she had brought one for me, but they didn’t give off much light, and her face was in shadow. My uncle had told me she had a big scar that ran down the side of her face and under her chin. He said she got the scar from a fight with a sidon.

  “It nearly cut the jugular,” my uncle had said. “It would have if they hadn’t gotten it off of her. It cut up quite a few of the tappers, too.”

  “What was she doing with a sidon anyway?” I asked. I had never seen one, but I had heard about them: beautiful blood-red animals with thick, soft fur and sot-razor claws, animals that could seem tame for as long as a year and then explode without warning into violence. “You can’t tame them.”

  “Jewell thought she could,” my uncle said. “One of the tappers brought it back with him from Solfatara in a cage. Somebody let it out, and it got away. Jewell went after it. Its feet were burned, and it was suffering from heatstroke. Jewell sat down on the ground and held it on her lap till someone came to help. She insisted on bringing it back to the abbey, making it into a pet. She wouldn’t believe she couldn’t tame it.”

  “But a sidon can’t help what it is,” I said. “It’s like us. It doesn’t even know it’s doing it.”

  My uncle did not say anything, and after a minute I said, “She thinks she can tame us, too. That’s why she’s willing to take me, isn’t it? I knew there had to be a reason she’d take me when we’re not allowed on Solfatara. She thinks she can keep me from copying.”

  My uncle still did not answer, and I took that for assent. He had not answered any of my questions. He had suddenly said I was going, though nobody had gone off-planet since the ban, and when I asked him questions, he answered with statements that did not answer them at all.

  “Why do I have to go?” I said. I was afraid of going, afraid of what might happen.

  “I want you to copy Jewell. She is a kind person, a good person. You can learn a great deal from her.”

  “Why can’t she come here? Kovich did.”

  “She runs an abbey on Paylay. There are not more than two dozen tappers and girls on the whole star. It is perfectly safe.”

  “What if there’s somebody evil there? What if I copy him instead and kill somebody, like happened on Solfatara? What if something bad happens?”

  “Jewell runs a clean abbey. No sots, no pervs, and the girls are well-behaved. It’s nothing like the happy houses. As for Paylay itself, you shouldn’t worry about it being a star. It’s in the last stages of burning out. It has a crust almost two thousand feet thick, which means there’s hardly any radiation. People can walk on the surface without any protective clothing at all. There’s some radiation from the hydrogen taps, of course, but you won’t go anywhere near them.”

  He had reassured me about everything except what was important. Now, trudging along after Jewell through the sooty carbon of Paylay, I knew about all the dangers, except the worst one—myself.

  I could not see anything that looked like a tap. “Where are they?” I asked, and Jewell pointed back the way we had come.

  “As far away as we kin git thim from St. Pierre and each ither so simm tripletapping fool kin’t kill ivverybody when he blows himself up. The first sidon’s off thit way, ten kilometers or so.”

  “Sidon?” I said, frightened. My uncle had told me the tappers had killed the sidon and made it into a rug after it nearly killed Jewell.

  She laughed. “Thit’s what they call the taps. Because they blow up on you and you don’t even know what hit. They make thim as safe as they can, but the comprission equipmint’s metal and metal means sparks. Ivvery once in awhile that whole sky over there lights up like Chrissmiss. We built St. Pierre as far away as we kidd, and there in’t a scrap of metal in the whole place, but the hydrogen leaks are ivverywhere. And helium. Din’t we sound like a pair iv fools squeaking at each other?”

  She laughed again, and I noticed that as we had stood there looking at the black horizon, my feet had begun to feel uncomfortably hot.

  It was a long walk through the darkness to the string of lights, and the whole way I watched Jewell and wondered if I had already begun to copy her. I would not know it, of course. I had not known I was copying my uncle either. One day he had asked me to play a song, and I had sat down at the pianoboard and played it. When I was finished, he said, “How long have you been able to do that?” and I did not know. Only after I had done the copying would I know it, and then only if someone told me. I trudged after Jewell in darkness and tried, tried to copy her.

  It took us nearly an hour to get t
o the town, and when we got there, I could see it wasn’t a town at all. What Jewell had called St. Pierre was only two tall metalpaper-covered buildings perched on plastic frameworks nearly two meters high and a huddle of stilt-tents. Neither building had a sign over the door, just strings of mulitcolored chemiloom lights strung along the eaves. They were fairly bright, and they reflected off the metalpaper into even more light, but Jewell took off the lantern she had strapped to her head and held it close to the wooden openwork steps, as if I couldn’t see to climb up to the front door high above us without it.

  “Why are you walking like thit?” she said when we got to the top of the steps, and for the first time I could see her scar. It looked almost black in the colored light of the lantern and the looms, and it was much wider than I had thought it would be, a fissure of dark puckered skin down one whole side of her face.

  “Walking like what?” I said, and looked down at my feet.

  “Like you kin’t bear to hivv your feet touch the ground. I got my feet too hot out at the down. You didn’t. So din’t walk like thit.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I won’t do it anymore.”

  She smiled at me, and the scar faded a little. “Now you just kimm on in and meet the girls. Din’t mind it if they say simmthing about the way you look. They’ve nivver seen a Mirror before, but they’re good girls.” She opened the thick door. It was metalpaper backed with a thick pad of insulation. “We take our inside shoes off out here and wear shuffles inside the abbey.”

  It was much cooler inside. There was a plastic heat-trigger fan set in the ceiling and surrounded by rose-colored chemilooms. We were in an anteroom with a rack for the high shoes and the lanterns. They dangled by their straps.

  Jewell sat down on a chair and began unbuckling her bulky shoes. “Din’t ivver go out without shoes and a lantern,” she said. She gestured toward the rack. “The little ones with the twillpaper hiddbands are for town. They only list about an hour. If you’re going out to the taps or the spiraldown, take one iv the big ones with you.”

  She looked different in the rosy light. Her scar hardly showed at all. Her voice was different too, deeper. She sounded older than she had at the down. I looked up and around at the air.

  “We blow nitrogen and oxygen in from a tap behind the house,” she said. “The tappers din’t like having squeaky little helium voices when they’re with the girls. You can’t git rid of the helium, or the hydrogen either. They leak in ivverywhere. The bist you can do is dilute it. You shid be glad you weren’t here at the beginning, before they tapped an atmosphere. You had to wear vacuum suits thin.” She pried off her shoe. The bottom of her foot was a mass of blisters. She started to stand up and then sat down again.

  “Yill for Carnie,” said said. “Till her to bring some bandages.”

  I hung my outside shoes on the rack and opened the inner door. It fit tightly, though it opened with just a touch. It was made of the same insulation as the outer door. It opened onto a fancy room, all curtains and fur rugs and hanging looms that cast little pools of colored light, green and rose and gold. The pianoboard stood over against one wall on a carved plastic table. I could not see anyone in the room, and I could not hear voices for the sound of the blowers. I started across a blood-red fur rug to another door, hung with curtains.

  “Jewell?” a woman’s voice said. The blowers kicked off, and she said, “Jewell?” again, and I saw that I had nearly walked past her. She was sitting in a white velvet chair in a little bay that would have been a window if this were not Paylay. She was wearing a white satinpaper dress with a long skirt. Her hair was piled on top of her head, and there was a string of pearls around her long neck. She was sitting so quietly, with her hands in her lap and her head turned slightly away from me, that I had not even seen her.

  “Are you Carnie?” I said.

  “No,” she said, and she didn’t look up at me. “What is it?”

  “Jewell got her feet burned,” I said. “She needs bandages. I’m the new pianoboard player.”

  “I know,” the girl said. She lifted her head a little in the direction of the stairs and called, “Carnie. Get the remedy case.”

  A gril came running down the stairs in an orange-red robe and no shoes. “Is it Jewell?” she said to the girl in the white dress, and when she nodded, Carnie ran past us into the other room. I could hear the hollow sound of an insulated door opening. The girl had made no move to come and see Jewell. She sat perfectly still in the white chair, her hands lying quietly in her lap.

  “Jewell’s feet are pretty bad,” I said. “Can’t you at least come see them?”

  “No,” she said, and looked up at me. “My name is Pearl,” she said. “I had a friend once who played the pianoboard.”

  Even then, I wouldn’t have known she was blind except that my uncle had told me. “Most of the girls are newcomers Jewell hired for Paylay right off the ships, before the happy houses could ruin them,” my uncle had said. “She only brought a couple of the girls with her from Solfatara, girls who worked with her in the happy house she came out of. Carnie, and I think Sapphire, and Pearl, the blond one.”

  “Blind?” I had said. Solfatara is a long way out, but any place has doctors.

  “He cut … the optic nerve was servered. They did orb implants and reattached all the muscles, but it was only cosmetic repair. She can’t see anything.”

  Even after all the horrible stories I had heard about Solfatara, it had shocked me to think that someone could do something like that. I remember thinking that the man must have been incredibly cruel to have done such a thing, that it would have been kinder to kill her outright than to have left her helpless and injured like that in a place like Solfatara.

  “Who did it to her?” I said.

  “A tapper,” he said, and for a minute he looked very much like Kovich, so much that I asked, “Was it the same man who broke Kovich’s hands?”

  “Yes,” my uncle said.

  “Did they kill him?” I said, but that was not the question I had intended to ask. I had meant did Kovich kill him, but I had said “they.”

  And my uncle, not looking like Kovich at all, had said, “Yes, they killed him,” as if that were the right question after all.

  The orb implants and the muscle reattachments had been very good. Her eyes were a beautiful pale gray, and someone had taught her to follow voices with them. There was nothing at all in the angle of her head or her eyes or her quiet hands to tell me she was blind or make me pity her, and standing there looking down at her, I was glad, glad that they had killed him. I hoped that they had cut his eyes out first.

  Carnie darted past us with the remedy case, and I said, still looking down at Pearl, “I’ll go and see if I can help her.” I went back out into the anteroom and watched while Carnie put some kind of oil on Jewell’s feet and then a meshlike pad, and wrapped her feet in bandages.

  “This is Carnelian,” Jewell said. “Carnie, this is our new pianoboard player.”

  She smiled at me. She looked very young. She must have been only a child when she worked in the happy house on Solfatara with Jewell.

  “I bit you can do real fancy stuff with those hands,” she said, and giggled.

  “Don’t tease him,” Jewell said. “He’s here to play the pianoboard.”

  “I meant on the pianoboard. You din’t look like a real mirror. You know, shiny and ivverything? Who are you going to copy?”

  “He’s not going to copy innybody,” Jewell said sharply. “He’s going to play the pianoboard, and that’s all. Is supper riddy?”

  “No. I was jist in the kitchen and Sapphire wasn’t even there yit.” She looked back up at me. “When you copy somebody, do you look like them?”

  “No,” I said. “You’re thinking of a chameleon.”

  “You’re not thinking it all,” Jewell said to her and stood up. She winced a little as she put her weight on her feet. “Go borrow a pair of Garnet’s shuffles. I’ll nivver be able to git mine on. And go ti
ll Sapphire to doubletap hersilf into the kitchen.”

  She let me help her to the stairs but not up them. “When Carnie comes back, you hivv her show you your room. We work an eight and eight here, and it’s nearly time for the shift. You kin practice till supper if you want.”

  She went up two steps and stopped. “If Carnie asks you inny more silly questions, tell her I told her to lit you alone. I don’t want to hear any more nonsinse about copying and Mirrors. You’re here to play the pianoboard.”

  She went on up the stairs, and I went back into the music room. Pearl was still there, sitting in the white chair, and I didn’t know whether she was included in the instructions to leave me alone, so I sat down on the hard wooden stool and looked at the pianoboard.

  It had a wooden soundboard and bridges, but the strings were plastic instead of metal. I tried a few chords, and it seemed to have a good sound in spite of the strings. I played a few scales and more chords and looked at the names on the hardcopies that stood against the music rack. I can’t read music, of course, but I could see by the titles that I knew most of the songs.

  “It isn’t nonsense, is it?” Pearl said, “About the copying.” She spoke slowly and without the clipped accent Jewell and Carnie had.

  I turned around on the stool and faced her. “No,” I said. “Mirrors have to copy. They can’t help themselves. They don’t even know who they’re copying. Jewell doesn’t believe me. Do you?”

  “The worst thing about being blind is not that things are done to you,” she said, and looked up at me again with her blind eyes. “It’s that you don’t know who’s doing them.”

  Carnie came in through the curtained door. “I’m sipposed to show you around,” she said. “Oh, Pearl, I wish you kidd see him. He has eight fingers on each hand, and he’s really tall. Almost to the ceiling. And his skin is bright red.”

  “Like a sidon’s,” Pearl said, looking at me.

  Carnie looked down at the blood-red rug she was standing on. “Jist like,” she said, and dragged me upstairs to show me my room and the clothes I was to wear and to show me off to the other girls. They were already dressed for the shift in trailing satinpaper dresses that matched their names. Garnet wore rose-red chemilooms in her upswept hair, Emerald an elaborately lit collar.