“No,” Aaron said, startled. “Why should I?”
“You always do.”
Aaron was silent. Was that where the mystery lay? he wondered. Somewhere in the stat-sheets of the FWG? His own haunting was reduced to a single, barren phrase: Wife…deceased. It said nothing. The glimpse he had had of a fellow traveler in the sad frozen wasteland he knew so well might be explained by a word or two in FWG files, if he could even recognize them. Or, by FWG standards, it might not even have been worth a word.
“This time,” he said softly, his face turned away from Sidney, “I want to ask.”
She seemed drawn to him, chattering her way amicably across the floor during breaks to drift beside him, like a boat out of a storm finding a quiet harbor. She told him many things. They had walked familiar streets, seen the same noisy, smoky bars, the same rich and drunken clubs, heard the same snatches of music through open doors when the summer fog stayed out to sea and the full moon hung like a blood-orange in the sky. And yet she told him nothing.
“How come you never answer a direct question?” he asked her recklessly one night. She only laughed.
“Like what?”
“What’s your name? Where were you born? Do you ever take that paint off your face?”
“No,” she said. Then, “Well, sometimes. But never, ever in front of anyone. Do you know the Magician’s name?”
“Yes. But I’m sworn to secrecy.”
“Well, I don’t. I never asked him. It’s not important. It’s like the Nebraskan. I asked him once where Nebraska was, when it was Nebraska, and he said it was somewhere in Eastcoast Sector. You’d think he was born there, in what was pre-FWG Nebraska, wouldn’t you? But he got his long mustache and his drawl out of old videos, and the place he thought Nebraska was, was West Virginia. Something gets lost, though, don’t you think, if you know that? Something very small but important. In its way.”
“Where were you born?”
“The Moon.” She added, after a moment, “I was named after it.”
“Oh.”
“So.” She shrugged a shoulder, bare except for a sheen of sweat that made all coherent thought suddenly vanish from his head. “You asked a question. I answered.”
He looked for her subconsciously, as he looked for trouble in the restless city; every throb of cubes he heard seemed to come from her. No matter what else occupied him—sky patrolling, dispatches, reports, street brawls or wild chases—he would find himself inevitably walking into the Constellation Club during the hours when Nova would be there. I’m addicted, he thought helplessly. A junkie for a cuber with a face of gold. She demanded nothing from him; dwelling in his mind, she never interfered with his work. She was simply there in his thoughts, because he wanted her there, until the moments when he could walk into the club and watch her eyes search the lights and shadows until she found him and stopped searching.
He missed their final rehearsal. Accidents and painstaking reports held him away until, near dawn, he came wearily into the club. Sidney was still there, at that lost hour unclaimed by night or morning. Aaron joined him. On the stage the Magician, turning green, shook the keyboard with one last chord. A run of light spattered down the rod-harp. The Queen of Hearts framed her face with her cube-sticks and brought them down with a crash. The stage went black. There was a beat of silence. Then out of the darkness came a single, sweet phrase of Bach.
Aaron and Sidney clapped. The Nebraskan turned the stage lights back on. Quasar dropped down on the ramp, shook her hair wildly, throwing glitter into the air.
“Merde,” she said huskily. “What time is it?”
The Nebraskan’s answer turned into a yawn. The Magician glanced at his wrist, but his mind seemed still enveloped in colors and nothing registered. Sidney said, “It’s four-thirty. Good morning, Aaron. Who ripped your pockets?”
“Merde,” Quasar said again. She turned, flashed a manic grin full of silver glitter at the Queen of Hearts. “That was some cubing.”
The Queen of Hearts started to lean against a wall, then remembered there was no wall. Her eyes had found Aaron beyond the light. He breathed in soundlessly, for, as when he had first seen her, he felt mercifully adrift of both past and future. That was the addiction, he realized: that freedom from memory, from himself. That was how she drew him back, to stand at the borders of the hidden country behind her eyes. She didn’t smile; her eyes, above the luminous, cooling cubes, turned a shade darker.
The Magician jumped down off the stage, headed for the bar. “How was it?” he asked Sidney. “Good enough for the Underworld?”
“You’ll probably cause a permanent disruption of its sound waves.”
“I gather that’s what they want.” He reached behind Aaron for a bar towel. “What happened to your pants?”
“I didn’t run fast enough,” Aaron said absently, watching the Queen of Hearts descend from the stage. The Magician glanced at him curiously. He hid the sudden smile tugging at his mouth behind the towel. Sidney, an amiable sorcerer in his own realm, moved behind the bar to pour beer.
The Queen of Hearts joined them. She did not look at Aaron, but she stood close to him, and he realized with a shock how soon she would be leaving. Her question, asked of the universe in general, was directed at him. “Did you enjoy it?” She looked at him finally. In the smoky, jeweled shadows her eyes were the color of the air.
“I loved it,” Aaron said.
She smiled. “You weren’t even here.”
“I was,” Sidney said. “You were wonderful.”
The Scholar draped himself over the bar. “I am dead and on my way to the Underworld. Heart-Lady, you worked us so hard, I thought my rod-harp was going to shatter.”
“Me,” she said. “That was you making me work.” She lifted her hair off her neck, wound it on top of her head with her fingers. “Times like this I want to canonize whoever invented sweat-proof face paint.”
“Did the Agency get hold of you?” Sidney asked the Magician.
The Magician shook his head over his beer. “Why?”
“They told me today that your concert at Helios will be picked up by satellite and broadcast over NSBC.”
The Nebraskan’s mouth dropped. “You’re kidding! Us?” He pounded the Magician’s back. “We’re going on the air!”
The Magician shook spilled beer off his fingers. “Nova’s a club band. How on Earth did you get the media to pay attention to us?”
“Human interest. The first band to play the Underworld, the effect on off-world prisoners, et cetera. They’ll do a story about the Rehab program, but they couldn’t get permission to bring a film crew to the Underworld, so they’ll film you on Helios.”
“Sidney, you’re a genius.”
“I know,” Sidney said unabashedly. Aaron turned to the Queen of Hearts, wanting to see her eyes again. But she was no longer at his elbow. He glanced around bewilderedly and found her back on the stage, walking aimlessly around her cubes. He wondered at her odd silence, the sudden distance she put between them. He made a move toward her, subsided against the bar, then knew the unexpected hollow of loss at words left unspoken, action only contemplated. He felt the Magician’s attention like a searchlight sweeping over him. The old, familiar impulse to guard his actions, to hide his life, kept him a moment longer at the bar, sipping his beer, acknowledging nothing.
Then he thought, Ah, to hell with it.
He put his beer down and crossed the floor, went up the ramp to where the Queen of Hearts stood staring at her cubes. Almost cold, they still flared darkly now and then from within, like cooling stars.
Standing beside her, uncertain, he said the first thing that came into his head. “Did you get the receiver fixed yet?”
She shook her head abruptly, almost fiercely, as if she were answering a question he hadn’t asked. Heart-pins slid; she caught at them. He helped her. His fingers brushed her cheek once, and her face followed his touch, seeking. She met his eyes, suddenly shaken, vulnerable. He took her han
d, opened it, filled it with hearts.
“No,” she said. She drew breath. “It’s more complicated than I thought.”
“I have access to patrol-cruiser information, repair manuals for cruisers sold to the public. You could get it through the Library Bank, but this way you won’t have to pay the user’s fee. The Magician will appreciate that.”
She smiled a little; it didn’t reach her eyes. “I don’t want—It’s too late. I mean early. You’re still working.”
“I get a breakfast break in thirty minutes. Wait for me here.”
“Aaron—” She stopped, shook her head again. But she didn’t withdraw her hand, didn’t move. He reached into one untorn pocket, opened her other hand and dropped a rose, faded to a dusty burgundy and still lightly scented, into her palm. She gazed at it; he saw her swallow.
“It came into my hand one night out of nowhere. I brought it for you.” She was still silent; he added, feeling suddenly uncertain, inane, “It’s just a dead rose. I know. There’s no user’s fee. It meant something to me, that’s all.”
She looked at him; without words she finally told him something. Around them, the dark walls began to swirl with light.
EIGHT
They flew high above the city, talking, while a huge, milky cat’s-eye of a moon stared at them above the sea, and the eastern sky shaded slowly into pearl.
“Cubing,” she said. Her low voice was husky with sleeplessness. “Just cubing. I fell in love with them when I was thirteen.”
“On the moon.”
She gazed at it puzzledly a moment, as if it had intruded unexpectedly on the wrong side of morning. “The moon. Yes. I played my mother’s music tapes until they broke. I practiced riffs and patterns with pencils, forks, saucepan lids. I went into the greenhouse where my mother worked, and turned empty plant pots upside down and beat on them. I wanted power over the cubes. I wanted them to stir alive to my playing, feel them warm themselves to me, begin to smolder, change color…I was obsessed, in love. In a dream. I thought that if I had a set of cubes I would be happy for the rest of my life. Playing music, on my private corner of the moon.”
“But you left the moon,” Aaron said softly.
Her head bowed; he couldn’t see the gold mask behind her hair. “They died. My parents. In an accident, four years later. FWG welfare rules said we were too young to stay by ourselves—”
“We—”
Her head lifted; she swept her hair back with both hands, frowning at the full moon. “It’s so hard lined,” she said wonderingly. “So pure. It looks like the eye of God out there, without a shadow or a subtlety on it. Close up, there are shadows…Me. And my sister. She’s on Rimrock, now; she married a geologist. So we were sent to Earth. To Suncoast Sector. Which, I discovered, had a set of cubes on every other corner. It was like falling down a long dark tunnel into some kind of disreputable Paradise…”
“A bar on every corner,” Aaron said. “And a set of cubes in every other bar.”
She nodded, laughing. Glitter shook through the air. Aaron took his eyes off the web of lights along the dark coast, drawn to the illusion of light, of warmth on her face. Brief lines gathered, then vanished under her eyes as she smiled. Twenty-five, he guessed, then asked her.
“Twenty-eight.”
“That seems young to be turning your back on Sector tours.”
She shrugged. “There’s fame and fortune. And then there’s the Magic-Man’s music.” She peered out of the window, down at the ghostly surf. Glancing at her, surprised, Aaron was left looking at the gold in her earlobe, and the long curve of her neck.
“So you came to Earth.”
“To get an education.” She settled back in her seat; one corner of her mouth crooked upward. “According to FWG regulations for Wards of the State. We had our parents’ credit, insurance, compensatory credit. And we were orphans, in a world we’d never seen before. We got educated. I started playing in bars when I was still in school. I was tall; I painted my face, went out at nights, and no one ever knew I was underage.”
“You painted it gold? Like it is now?”
For some reason, her face stilled. The gold became once again a mask. “No. This came later. The night I met the Magician.”
Aaron paused, his mouth opened, half a dozen questions occurring to him at once. “Why that night?”
“It was the first time I’d ever heard Bach…I was walking down the street at midnight, and someone opened a door and this sound came out that I’d never heard before, so I followed it and found the Magician. I sat in with his band, played cubes for two hours, and he asked me to stay. So I stayed.”
“Were you lovers?” The question seemed to come out of nowhere, startling him, as if the scanner had spoken. He flushed, then grinned sheepishly at her laughter. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”
“No. I suppose we might have been, but I needed him for other things.”
“What things?”
She made a vague gesture, frowning again; her eyes, gazing at the vast, dark grey sweep of sea, reflected it, seemed at once as familiar and as enigmatic. “Him,” she said finally, “and his music—they’re the place I come back to. When I go out into the world, learn to play PMR, take a bite of fame, see a million strangers whose names I’ll never know, even though they all, every one of them, know mine—there’s still a safe place to come home to. That’s what I need the Magic-Man for. To keep that safe place for me, the private piece of moon, where no one is a stranger, and the music never changes.”
He was silent, thinking of the bomb shelter, the safe place where no life could get at him. Then he thought, What hurt you? But she was questioning him.
“Were you always a patroller?”
“I’ve been one for ten years.”
“Do you live with someone?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
They were nearing the coast; he slowed the sol-car, angled it down. For a moment a glib reply was on his tongue. Then, listening to himself with astonishment, he said, “I loved a woman once. She got killed, seven years ago. I’ve lived alone since then.”
“How did she die?” He shut the cabin lights off as the sun rose behind them. Light seared the sea; her face was in shadow. Her voice was very soft, almost hollow. Aaron saw the circle of red lights he had installed over the shelter and dropped toward them.
“How?”
He had stepped into the station headquarters, whistling; the morning air smelled of spring. A fellow patroller, sipping coffee while he watched a newscast, had turned his head abruptly.
“Hey, Fisher. Isn’t your wife stationed over in Desert Sector?”
A sudden, cold sweat broke out on his face; he felt physically sick. The Queen of Hearts’ face lifted. The changeless gold mask, the still eyes were oddly calming. But he couldn’t tell her; he couldn’t put it into the past tense.
“Just a freak accident.”
They landed. Aaron checked in with the patrol station, then led the Queen of Hearts down beneath the earth. He heated soup and sandwiches, then tracked down the mechanics’ diagrams in the Library Bank for patrol-cruisers of the vintage of the Flying Wail. She studied them, chewing a rose-colored nail, and made notes. He handed her a sandwich.
“Here. It should be better than nail polish.”
She looked at her fingers blankly, then took the sandwich, still gazing at the screen.
“It’s not complete,” she said abruptly.
“Why?”
“Inside the Flying Wail’s receiver, there are two seals about the size of a fingernail, with the Underworld logo on them. I couldn’t figure out what they were for. There are no seals at all on this diagram.”
“Oh. Simple,” Aaron said with his mouth full. “Every time the Underworld sells its cruisers to the public, it adjusts the frequency capabilities of the receivers so that an ordinary citizen can’t pick up patroller or Underworld business. The seals are just a proof that the receiver has been altered for p
ublic consumption.”
“Why would they—”
“Keeps the air clear for emergencies. And there are a lot of things—docking procedures, patrol codes, other highly restricted information—carried over the UF. The Underworld Frequency.”
She bit into the sandwich, chewed slowly, still transfixed by the diagrams. “Which receiver am I looking at? Before or after the seals?”
“It’s an altered receiver. The Underworld doesn’t like the public even to know that the UF exists. So, not wanting a thousand questions about the seals—which aren’t easy to spot, unless you’re really digging—they didn’t put them in the diagram.”
She looked up, surprised. “How do you know all this?”
“I like knowing things. Coffee?”
“Please. And this place—” She glanced around her at the expensive equipment, the privacy and dustless order of the place. He paused, not knowing what lie or truth he might tell her when she asked. But she only said, “This is the place where you come to learn them…”
Aaron moved to the sink, washed cups. He glanced at her once; she was gazing at her reflection in the darkening screen, or the vague reflection of his own movements.
He turned back to the cups. Her hands lifted to the noiseless keyboard, typed.
Research: Underworld.
Letters ran across the screen, across her face.
A space-prison, satellite of Earth. Designed by H. Kent Claus. Funded by the Free World Government for the purpose of transporting life prisoners and potentially dangerous nonlife prisoners off-Earth. Completed: 29 FWG. Capacity: 500,000. Further information restricted. Apply to FWG Security Bureau for permission and codes.
Architectural design of Underworld.
Restricted.
Docking procedures.
Heavily restricted. Apply to Chief Administrator of the Underworld: Klyos, Jason, for information.
She cleared the screen. Aaron crossed the room, handed her coffee.
“Thank you.”
“Finished?”
“Yes.” She tilted her head on the back of the chair and smiled at him, and he wanted to take her out of the silent, windless, sunless place into the brine-filled dawn. Her smile froze suddenly. She touched him very lightly, for the first time. “I won’t get you into trouble, will I? Using your computer?”
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