Fool’s Run

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Her voice lost its remoteness. “Michele.”

  “What?”

  “Listen to me. Listen.”

  A cliff face black as deep space. A dim, reddish sky beyond it. An oval bent back on itself, all colors or no color, lying on amethyst sand. A concave vision of a red star. The cliff. The oval. The red sun…The need, the primal, overpowering, overriding need…The vision.

  He stopped himself from making a noise. His eyes felt frozen open. The thin face, the enormous eyes, seeing visions, seeing into his eyes, making him see…

  Michele whispered, “I’m listening.” It was a question. She still waited, the Magician realized, still listened for what had just been said…Terra’s voice came again finally, half lost within the bubble.

  “I’m so tired. So tired.”

  “Talk to her,” Dr. Fiori murmured.

  “She—”

  “Talk to her. Make her remember.”

  “Terra.” She paused, groping at the past. “Do you—do you remember when we came to Suncoast Sector? We saw grass under sunlight for the first time. And great gardens of flowers, growing outside of greenhouses. Do you remember?”

  “Birds…mosquitoes…”

  “Yes.”

  “Spiderwebs, strung in the morning light.”

  “Lemon trees. We didn’t have words for all the things we saw.”

  “Words.”

  “We were sixteen. New to Earth. We were sad at first. But after a while we began to laugh again.”

  “You played music. Always, always…you dreamed it, you loved it, you were haunted with it…It was your vision.”

  “And you took care of us. You lied to the schools for me, you cooked, you even bought clothes for me…”

  “You drove the sol-car. You fixed things. You had the dream.”

  “You had—”

  “I had no future.”

  “You—”

  “I waited. For no future. For a place where they would cut off my hair.”

  “It will grow—”

  “Not here. Never, in the Dark Ring. And I will never leave.”

  Michele started to speak. Then she put both hands over her mouth, hunched, raked by a noiseless grief. The Magician, shaken with pity, took a step toward her. A shape blossomed in his mind, halting him. It flattened like rain hitting pavement, then drew back into itself and scuttled away down the purple shore. Another followed. Another. A sound built in him. He closed his eyes but the shapes still bloomed. Terra, he pleaded. Terra. And, amazingly, they stopped.

  “She’s losing herself. Keep talking, Michele.” Dr. Fiori’s voice, soft, insistent. “Michele. Ask her about Desert Sector.”

  “No.” She shook her head sharply. “No.”

  “Ask her.”

  God, no, the Magician thought, horrified.

  “Ask her. Be careful.”

  Michele turned, torn, agonized; he said again, “Be careful. Don’t disturb her.”

  “How?” She drew a shuddering breath. “How can I ask her that and not?”

  “You know her.”

  “I don’t know her! I never knew her!”

  “Sh. Take it slowly. Try. For her sake.”

  She faced Terra again, her voice drained, barely audible. “Terra. Can you hear me?”

  “Michele.”

  “I can hardly see your face. Aren’t you cold in there?”

  “Cold. There is no cold.”

  “Do you remem—Do you remember the last time we saw each other? Seven years ago?” There was a silence within the bubble. The Magician heard his heart hammering. I can walk out of here, he thought. I can keep walking. But his body held no more volition than a rock. And there was no place for him anywhere in the universe now beyond Terra’s eyes, Terra’s vision.

  “Terra. Do you remember?”

  “There is no time.” The words were a whisper.

  “You kissed me good-bye. You were in uniform.”

  “No.”

  “Terra, I tried—I tried to see you after that. I—they wouldn’t—”

  “I know.”

  The room was soundless.

  “How could you know? They wouldn’t let me see you, they said you were dangerous, they said—”

  “Your face was not in the vision, but I knew you. The rest”—one thin arm gestured—“was nothing.” She crumpled onto the floor of the bubble, held her knees tightly, her head shaking back and forth. “Faces. Voices. Questions. Noise. The vision.”

  “Terra. In Desert Sector. What happened?” Silence. “Terra. You said good-bye to me and you went there and you—and I never—I never—you never came back, you—”

  The sun was dark, in the Magician’s head, on the screen of the Dream Machine.

  “You went to the desert, and—”

  The vision was light.

  The Magician’s lips parted. Smothered, blinded in darkness, he hungered after light, dreamed light, envisioned light…He made light.

  “Terra. You were—” Her voice broke; she covered her face. “I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t—”

  “The vision,” Dr. Fiori said. “Ask her what the vision is. Ask her. Michele.”

  “Terra. What—what is the vision? What are you seeing?”

  Terra’s face disappeared against her knees. Her breathing sounded ragged, exhausted. She swallowed, said finally, “Words. Questions. Words without sound.”

  “Words without sound…” She turned finally, bewilderedly, to face the Dream Machine. Something viscous, vaguely yellow, bubbled and spat in the Magician’s mind. That stilled, faded into the twilight shoreline, where the oval lay, bent, colorless or of all colors, isolated and unchanging as a moon. The Magician wanted to release his motionless body to time, drown his mind in the cool purple.

  “A word,” Michele whispered, “without sound. But what does it mean?”

  “The vision.”

  He saw the amethyst sand, grainy, translucent; he was in the sand; he was the sand. He saw nothing, heard nothing. Then the eye of God, the red sun, opened the darkness, and he felt an imperative like the drag of a tidal wave across the sand, revoking the past, transforming the boundaries of the world. He could not speak, he could not feel. There was only the hunger, inexorable and absolute, and with the hunger: the vision.

  The vision was light. It fired across his mind from a hundred points; where the lifeless, empty darkness swallowed it, it streaked again, over and over, battling the long night until the dark curled away to reveal chaos and more light. The yellow sun against a fierce blue sky…It stared down upon a shifting landscape where blurred shapes were bewilderingly, hauntingly familiar before they too became transformed into light. The sand, pale, barren, ran suddenly hot, glazing into molten glass. Under the yellow stare even the oval melted.

  It became a child’s face, screaming silently in terror.

  And then the screaming was no longer silent.

  Terra had risen; she was pounding against the bubble-wall, screaming the child’s scream. The Magician, sagging on his feet, reached out blindly. He hit the edge of the Dream Machine, and then two people in the midst of some struggle.

  “No. It’s all right. She can’t hurt herself.”

  “Let go of me!” That was his cuber, he remembered hazily, the Queen of Hearts.

  Dr. Fiori answered her quickly, soothingly, “Okay, I’m letting go, now.”

  They broke apart; the Magician released them, balanced again and able to see. For a second he made Dr. Fiori veer from his relentless pursuit of Terra.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, startled. “You look dead.” He added, before the Magician could answer, “Can you stay longer? She’s remembering. She’s beginning to face reality. You saw how the symbol changed.”

  “Symbol.” Michele, her face a weird smear of tears and colors, stared at him, trying to make sense of him.

  “She’s disguising her actions behind a screen of vague symbols which are safer for her to look at. You’re he
lping her face truth.”

  She looked at him a moment longer, then at the shadows, the computer, the bald, whimpering prisoner, the assistants and guards, the segment of the vast, contorted ring around them. Tears slid again down her face. “For what?” she asked him. “Please tell me that. For what?”

  FOUR

  The Magician saw nothing, said nothing on the way back from the Infirmary, until, left at their quarters by the guards, he brought himself up against a door that would not open.

  “The doorknob,” Michele Viridian said faintly and turned it. “Oh.”

  Their luggage was inside; the rest of the band was not. Somewhere, he assumed, a stage was being set up. He thought he was standing still; something within him was still. But he had crossed the room; a case was open; he was uncapping a bottle. There was another blank moment, tranquil, silent. Then he tasted Scotch in his throat. He lowered the bottle and shuddered suddenly, violently.

  He turned. The Queen of Hearts was sitting on a couch, still crying, noiselessly and absently. Most of her face paint was on her hands. In the pallor of her skin, in her eyes, haunted, grey, seeing and not seeing, the Magician caught an eerie glimpse of Terra’s face.

  He drank again. Then he found a glass in the bathroom, filled it with Scotch and pushed it into Michele’s hand.

  “Drink that.” He waited while she stared at it, then lifted it off her knee and took a swallow. She swept hair out of her eyes with her fingers, streaking it with gold. A heart-pin dropped; she gazed at the heart in her hand, a hard, glossy black acrylic, worth nothing. A memory that didn’t belong to him slid into the Magician’s mind: heart-pins scattered on long hair so pale it seemed to spark here and there with white fire.

  He said, “Those heart-pins. They belonged to Terra.”

  She nodded. Then, her head still bowed over the pin, her eyes slanted up at him, like a child alerted and wary of something looming in the shadows. “Yes,” she whispered. She was silent a moment; her face lifted cautiously, toward the dark. “They shaved her head. Magic-Man, how could you look at her and see those heart-pins on her?”

  He lifted the bottle again. He was still sweating; he felt the chill of it on his face, his back. “Why didn’t you tell me about Terra?”

  “I cou—I couldn’t.”

  “What do you think I would have done? You never told anyone?”

  “No.”

  “God, Heart-Lady.” He balanced on the couch arm beside her, the bottle on his knee. “Michele.” He touched her shoulder, and was overwhelmed by twin lonelinesses: one woman imprisoned in a vision, the other behind a mask. He said urgently, his mind filling again with Terra’s eyes, Terra’s power, “Tell me about her.”

  “There’s so little to tell. There’s nothing.”

  “Tell me where it began.”

  “I don’t know!” Her eyes filled again. “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me what you know, then. You weren’t born on the moon. Not Earth’s moon. Tell me.”

  She dragged a long breath; her voice shook. “Where we were born, there was a moon’s tiny horizon. Space. Night. The planet’s face. The red planet. There was a constant sound, always the same sound. The heartbeat. The generators. They never stopped. Like blood running. The first sound we heard. For me, it became the drum of the cubes. For her, it was always the heartbeat.” Her voice faded; he touched her, pleading.

  “Tell me what you remember. Anything. Everything. Tell me about the heart-pins.”

  “The heart-pins…Todd gave them to Terra…Magic-Man, we were born within the same minute. For years, when I looked into Terra’s eyes, I saw myself. An extension of myself. For years there were no separations between us, not in thought, hardly in body. We knew everyone in the colony. All the eighteen other children, all the adults. They were our family, our world. The entire universe was winding, white-tiled corridors and tiny rooms, the throb of the generators, the familiar faces, the immense face of the planet over us, the first thing I ever dreamed about…We lived without thinking, without really being aware or convinced that we were two people, not one. For years. Until the separation. The first one.”

  “What?”

  “We both went crazy together, that time. She fell in love with Todd MacNeal. I fell in love with music.” She sipped Scotch again, sat silently, brushing at her face, a weary line between her brows. “It was the first time. That our thoughts didn’t mirror each other’s. It was the first time I watched my mother’s music tapes and heard the sound of the generators—the sound of my world—behind every song I listened to. I wanted to make that sound. I dreamed the music, I dreamed cubing in my sleep. I beat on everything that would make a sound. I heard the cubes in everything I played. It was—it was—”

  “A vision,” the Magician said softly, and she nodded.

  “A kind of madness…That seems to be what those years are for. Terra simply fell in love.” She hesitated. The Magician swallowed Scotch from the bottle, waited.

  “Terra.”

  “She—she was always sensitive, intuitive. I never noticed it so much until we started growing into different people. I never paid attention before to which of us did what. But now, she was the one who wrote poetry. She was the one to walk down a corridor like she was dancing down the Milky Way. Her hair seemed always windblown, always glinting with sunlight, even in the middle of a moon-factory. She saw us from the other side of the universe, the other side of time. I didn’t see my face in her face any longer. I didn’t see hunger in it, impatience, hopeless love. Her eyes weren’t for me any longer. They were for Todd.

  “I heard our parents talk about us at night. My mother said, ‘What are we going to do with them? Michele and her saucepan lids, Terra trying to have her first love affair in a pharmaceutical factory on a chunk of rock so small you can hardly piss in private.’ I remember thinking, So that’s where Terra went. When I took my thoughts away from cubing, she wasn’t there anymore; I hardly knew her. I missed her. But the cubing…” Her voice trembled again. “The cubing. The music. The vision was all. My mother would tell my father we had to go to Earth. My father would say we were happy here, we should stay here. My mother would say, ‘Terra, maybe. But this moon is not big enough for Michele.’ I didn’t know what she meant, then. All I wanted was a set of cubes. And for us all to stay forever together on our private moon…”

  “And Terra? What did Terra want?”

  “Terra…” She paused, seeing nothing but Terra, warping time as she sat, returning to the past. Words came faster, all the words the Queen of Hearts had stored behind the mask for seven years. “Terra had what she wanted, all the magic of first love. She couldn’t do anything wrong; all the natural rules suspended themselves for her. If she was late for dinner because of Todd, dinner would make itself late. When she cut time from the ed-com lab, that would be the day her terminal would decide to malfunction. Doors were never locked against her. If she was home late, our parents would be even later. She was inside the weave of magic that wove the world. She was—she was inside her vision. But this vision everyone understood. Everyone had had it, or thought they had it, or wanted it, or dreamed it, or mourned it. She turned that factory into a fairy tale, and then she walked into it herself. She turned beautiful. Todd grew taller; he spoke without blushing; his voice deepened. They both laughed a lot. They were using each other to grow, transforming each other. Maybe…When I think back, sometimes I think that’s all she had needed to stay sane. To stay happy. If she could only have finished the fairy tale, if things had just come to a natural end. If she had married Todd, or grown up, away from him. If, one way or another, it could have been complete.”

  “What happened?”

  “She dreamed of fire…” She sat still then, her face still, as the Magician had often seen it without noticing: the stillness that guarded Michele. He recognized it now. He touched her gently.

  “A premonition?”

  “A vision,” she whispered. “That was another of the separations. She was b
ecoming psychic. I never was. She dreamed of fire and knew our parents were going to die…

  “They had gone to the Surface on a cargo shuttle, to spend a couple of days in one of the resorts. I woke up and found Terra sitting on the floor in the kitchen. She wouldn’t get up, she wouldn’t go to ed-com, she wouldn’t even talk. Not even to Todd when he came looking for her. So after ed-com, I sat down beside her on the floor and waited…

  “The cargo shuttle had malfunctioned as it landed. Terra had dreamed the explosion.

  “So. We were sent away from the colony. Away from our home, our world, everyone who had ever known our names. One day Terra was loved and in love. The next, she was flying through silence and darkness away from everything she had ever loved. We were born spacers. I could fly a mine shuttle as well as anyone. Terra could make anything grow. But we were fifteen. According to FWG regulations, we were too young to be hired in space.

  “So we were sent to Earth.”

  “Eat,” the Magician said. He had brought back sandwiches and hot soup from the cafeteria. Michele picked at a crust; the Magician stirred his soup once. Neither of them ate.

  “They wanted me to tape articles,” Michele said, “after it happened. They wanted me to write a book. Fire in the Desert, by Terra Viridian’s sister. They wanted me on talk shows. With my cubes and home videos of Mom and Dad and the little Viridians. This was even before she was tried.

  “I had been out cubing. I came home late. I had new silver shoes on. I came home alone…I remember the shoes because I stepped out of them, making a sandwich, and that’s where I left them, empty silver shoes standing at the kitchen counter, when I finally left the apartment and went five hundred miles up to north Suncoast Sector. For all I know, they’re still there. I ran because I had turned on the newscast to watch while I ate, and suddenly there was her face. My face. Only her hair was quite short, since she was a draftee, and she wore khaki and ID tags. She’d mailed the same picture to me months before as a joke.