Fool’s Run

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I need a drink,” the Nebraskan said faintly. “I’m starting to believe all this.”

  “I want to see the alien,” Quasar insisted. “Fly us there, Magic-Man.”

  “I don’t know where ‘there’ is,” the Magician said. “All I know is a state of mind.”

  “Then fly us there,” Quasar said.

  “That’s not—”

  “You go there. To this place.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “‘Yes, but’ is not an argument,” she said calmly. “We’re flying into nowhere as it is. I’ve been on this road to nowhere before. Either Aaron will capture us or the others will blow us up. Oblivion is no doubt a state of mind also. Or maybe, just maybe, there is something you see that no one else can see. Show us, Magic-Man.”

  “Quasar, I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  She flicked him a black glance; her mouth curved upward, wry but not bitter. “You might kill us all, Magic-Man. And you can’t give us this one little thing.”

  “I would,” he said helplessly, intensely. “For you, I’d do it. But—” He stopped, gazing at her across the room as if she were a mathematical equation of dubious construction. “Wait…” he whispered. “Wait…”

  She stared at him, surprised, trailing glitter into the air as he turned back to the com. He opened his mouth, wanting Klyos, but Sidney’s voice came over the UF before he could speak.

  “…I tracked it down myself. It’s a line from the Fifth English Suite: the prelude. Now can you explain—”

  “Thank God,” said the Underworld. “Thank you, Mr. Halleck. I’ll alert Suncoast Sector. Someone will pick you up momentarily.”

  “Is Nova in trouble?” Sidney asked worriedly. “Mr. Nilson, is that it?”

  “I can’t discuss this. I’m very sorry, Mr. Halleck.”

  “Mr. Halleck,” Chief Klyos interrupted. “This is Jase Klyos.”

  “Chief Klyos, what—”

  “I’m sorry to inconvenience you. Mr. Nilson is acting on my orders. Due to unforeseen circumstances, we’re maintaining a station-to-Earth blanket over classified information.”

  “Bach,” Sidney pointed out bewilderedly, “is a matter of public domain.”

  “Unfortunately so is ignorance. All I can tell you is this: I need your help. It has to do with a nursery rhyme.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “The one we were discussing when we first spoke. You may not remember; it was weeks ago, but think—”

  “The Queen of Hearts.” His voice had changed.

  “Yes. And would you bring something to play those phrases on?”

  There was a pause. “Chief Klyos,” Sidney said somberly. “I’ll be waiting for that sol-car.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Halleck.” Jase sighed.

  The Magician sat down slowly, his message forgotten. He gazed at the Queen of Hearts intently, bewilderedly, seeing the mask of gold, hearing the nursery rhyme, trying to connect them both into some plausible reason for a discussion between Sidney Halleck and the Chief of the Underworld, until Michele’s face wavered under his eyes, and she cried, “Magic-Man!”

  “I’m sorry.” He touched her, his fingers cold. “I’m just trying to…Did Sidney—did he know who you were? Are?”

  “I never told anyone.”

  “That’s strange…Was it a nursery rhyme they talked about then? Or was it you?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know!” He reached out, held her shoulders, but knew she wasn’t seeing him, she was looking back again, dangerously far, to the nightmare of confusion she thought she had escaped from. “They are right, though,” she said. “It’s my fault. That’s where it began: the night I painted my face and played with you. I should have known—I should have known you can’t hide things. I thought I would be safe. That’s all I did it for. To make myself safe. To keep myself from harm. It seems such a simple, human thing to do. One that wouldn’t harm anyone else. But look at us! Here we all are in the middle of nowhere, you trapped in a vision, my own sister behind us with a laser-rifle, cruisers about to blow us up, Sidney on his way to the Underworld to play Bach, and Aaron—” She stopped; he saw the pain bloom again in her eyes. “Aaron,” she whispered. And then he felt her slip away, go so far down into herself that this time not even the Queen of Hearts was left.

  Something jumped in the Magician’s throat. He swallowed, whispered, “Heart-Lady.” He touched her hair, her wet cheek. “Michele.” Neither answered. He stood up, met the Scholar’s dark, shocked eyes, saw the Nebraskan’s moment of hesitation before he jerked himself to his feet and hit the water dispenser. Nothing came out. He disappeared into the kitchen, swearing.

  “Michele.” The Magician held her cold hands, shook her slightly. “Please.” She was nowhere to be found; he did not know where to go to bring her back. Then Quasar rose, her own face transformed, unfamiliar in its gentleness.

  “Heart-Lady,” she said, putting her arms around the Queen of Hearts. “Don’t grieve. These things are always happening. The world is made of them. But it keeps on going, the old rich-ragged woman-world, who loves you one day and curses you the next. Because that’s her secret: she keeps you going, because you never know—even you don’t know, now—if she will hand you broken glass or gold.”

  The silence spun itself so tightly the Magician thought it would snap and recoil endlessly as far as there was time. Then Michele was crying against Quasar’s shoulder, while Quasar murmured old-world into her hair.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said, comprehensible again. “You did right. I know about hiding. Come away from all these lights. The Magician is navigating into his dreams. Maybe he’ll pull that stupid patroller into them, maybe not. But I don’t care: I want to see his alien, and I would rather blow up than be bald.”

  The Flying Wail spoke.

  The Magician and the Scholar jumped. The Nebraskan, returning with coffee, spilled it on his hand. The Magician, his eyes on Michele, his mind blank, struggled with the phrase of music a moment, then gave up and checked the controls.

  “What is it?” the Scholar asked tensely. “More company?”

  The Magician shook his head. The yellow light that had flashed on held his attention a moment longer as if the message it gave him were more critical, more dire than a routine fuel warning. “Fuel’s almost half gone. The pursuit thrusters cost us a lot.” He dragged his eyes from the light. It swam in front of his vision; he blinked it away, saw Michele sipping coffee. Her hand shook badly, but she was seeing again. He held her eyes, asked her a question silently, urgently, had his answer from her before she spoke.

  “No,” she whispered. “Don’t turn back. Please. Please, Magic-Man. You said it was ending. End it.”

  SIX

  Aaron?” the Magician said. “Chief Klyos? Are you all still alive?”

  “Mr. Restak,” Jase said wearily. “Are you aware of the course you’re following? You certainly haven’t got enough fuel to get to Andromeda.”

  “I want Terra’s voice,” said the com. “Terra?”

  “I’m here,” she said from the floor.

  “Terra. Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes,” she said remotely.

  “Terra. Listen to me. The next time you have a vision, I want you to talk. I want to hear your voice. You’ve done that before, at your trial, to Dr. Fiori. I want you to talk your way through your vision. Describe exactly what you’re seeing. I’ll be describing it too. Maybe that way they’ll begin to see that what we’re saying exists beyond our minds. Will you remem—”

  “Magic-Man,” Aaron interrupted. His voice was taut with a dangerous control; his eyes had picked up the blackness of deep space. “Don’t make me listen to that. Don’t.”

  There was a moment’s silence. “Aaron.” His own voice sounded unfamiliar, shaded with overtones of unexpected emotions. “You’ve got all the weight of justice. When this is over, you can walk away from it. I’m trying to show you something. I’m risking my life to show you. So that if
they blow up the Flying Wail, and I’m nothing but an echo of light moving toward the end of the universe, maybe you won’t be totally bewildered. Or totally bitter.”

  Aaron was silent. Jase glanced at him. His face was rigid, flushed to the roots of his hair. The struggle in him, between his fury, his ingrained reserves of pride and grief, and his need, seemed explosive. Jase shifted, uneasy in the currents, but when Aaron spoke finally, all feeling had been buried briefly beneath a calm professional surface.

  “Don’t waste time doing me any favors. Just return to the Underworld and you won’t get blown up.”

  “Aaron—”

  “How many lines do you think you can cross at once anyway? She’s got that rifle at my back now. Because of you.”

  “I know. But, Aaron, she’s just—”

  The calm snapped. “You defend her, Magic-Man, I’ll walk across empty space and turn you into light myself!”

  Jase turned, feeling the uncoiled movement behind him before he saw it. The rifle swung across his vision. He heard the Magician shout.

  “Terra! No!”

  There was dead silence. Jase blinked at sudden sweat, saw the rifle wedged between Aaron’s shoulders slowly fall away. Terra stepped back after a moment, sat down again. Her expression between one movement and another hadn’t varied. She didn’t shoot, Jase thought. Still she didn’t.

  He spoke into the com, feeling very tired. “How did you know, Mr. Restak?”

  “I knew. What’d she do?”

  “No damage yet. She made her point. She doesn’t like you threatened.”

  “Aaron?”

  Jase glanced at him. He was breathing unevenly, but noiselessly, his face colorless. From his brittle stillness, Jase surmised, he was just on the verge of trembling with rage.

  “He’s unhurt. Mr. Restak, this situation is intolerable.”

  “God, I know. Aaron?”

  “Mr. Fisher is, I believe, too furious to talk. He’s trying not to get shot. In the name of friendship, how in hell do you justify this, Mr. Restak? You’re going to get him killed.”

  “He never told me,” the Magician said. Jase heard him draw air. “I’ve known him for years. He said his wife had died. Once, he said that. He never talked about her. I couldn’t have anticipated this.”

  I’d sooner have anticipated being eaten by crocodiles on the moon, Jase thought darkly. He kept his voice steady, groping toward some scrap of sanity, even from the Magician. He said, risking another explosion beside him, “Mr. Fisher seems to be a very private man. Did he tell you that for the last seven years, he’s been secretly searching for Michele Viridian, to see if he could understand from her why Terra killed his wife? Using all our highly sophisticated and thorough records systems, he still failed to find her, she hid that well.”

  “He found her,” the Magician whispered.

  “That’s why I brought him up here. Because she used his computer to request restricted Underworld information…She found him, Mr. Restak. If she hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t be sitting here with Terra at his back.”

  “She—”

  “Michele Viridian is liable to some very serious charges. But you never knew her name?”

  “She never told me. She never told anyone. She was terrified of it.” He added, after a pause, “In the Underworld, she told me that seven years ago, Michele Viridian painted her face after Terra was sentenced, so that she could cube one last time without being recognized. Then she was—she would have killed herself. That night. From despair. She’s not the hardened criminal you describe, Chief Klyos. She was alone on Earth, with no other family except Terra then. And Terra was on her way to the Dark Ring.”

  “That night,” Jase said curiously. “She didn’t kill herself. What happened to make her change her mind?”

  “She found—she found one last band to cube with. Mine.”

  Aaron’s head lifted involuntarily; he swallowed, stared down again, his eyes hidden, unblinking.

  Jase shifted in his seat. The tiny Hub-craft cabin felt even closer, crowded with overlapping events, too many details that prismed into complexity.

  “The Queen of Hearts,” he said without inflection.

  “The nursery rhyme,” the Magician said, startling him. He felt, furiously, that his mind had been read.

  “How did you—”

  “I was listening, when you talked to Sidney.”

  “Mr. Halleck…did he know the Queen of Hearts long?”

  “He met her seven years ago, not long after she first played with me.”

  Jase was silent. “Mr. Restak,” he said wearily. “Every time I try to make sense of this, I just get tangled tighter and tighter. That pursuit fleet is just about on your tail. A while ago, after you tied me up and played hell and Bach with my cruisers, I couldn’t have cared how many pieces you were scattered into. But now, before they blow you up, I’d certainly like to know what’s going on. If you’ve got anything to explain, I’ll listen. If you want Terra to talk, I’ll listen; I’ll try to keep Mr. Fisher from killing himself. Just tell me how in God’s name a nursery rhyme got us into all this trouble.”

  “It didn’t start with a nursery rhyme. It started—”

  “When?”

  “That day,” the Magician said carefully. “In the Desert Sector. I know why Terra massacred those people.”

  “You know—”

  “It has to do with the visions in her head. The transformation. I can see it.”

  “Mr. Restak, every time you start talking like that you make me uneasy. I want to go give my brain a shower.”

  “Please. Listen.” He paused again. Jase felt him picking at words. He heard then the deep underlying weariness: the Magician juggling with tables and scarves and coffee cups, and one knife too many. “When I went with you and Michele to see Terra: you remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “There was the computer, showing images in her mind. We walked in there; we looked at Terra, because that’s the first thing you see, the bald madwoman in the bubble. Then you looked at the screen. And she looked at me. And I saw in my own mind all the images she’s been seeing. And it’s—it was overwhelming. It was—Chief Klyos, what’s the one thing you want most out of life?”

  “A transfer.”

  The Magician paused. “All right,” he said, with inhuman patience. “What’s the one thing in life that touches you most deeply?”

  Jase was silent, struck by the unexpectedness of the question. “What is it you’re trying to say, Mr. Restak?”

  “That what she—what we’re both seeing is that important. That vital. Not to us. Not on a human level. On a—”

  “Oh, Christ, you’re not going to start talking about aliens.”

  “You saw those images.”

  He saw them again suddenly, the strangeness of them, always on the wrong side of the broad boundaries of his experience. Forms pelting down like rain, hurrying away down an amethyst shore. The bent oval, serene as a moon dropped on the sand. The red sun…The colors are all wrong, he thought. But she had insisted on those colors.

  “She killed because of those images. Because whatever makes them, I think, felt an overwhelming urge for light. The urge was probably biological, instinctive. Like animals or reptiles born on land who are driven to water or they die. They’re driven. What happened in this case, I don’t know. Maybe it had something to do with the dying sun. Terra was in the desert in broad daylight. But the image in her mind was dark. She saw dark. She felt dark. She made light.”

  The outrage in Aaron’s voice jolted Jase like an electric shock. “Magic-Man, this is unbelievable! You hand me fairy-tale crap like that and expect me to forgive and forget—”

  “Mr. Fisher!” Jase snapped, seeing light glance across the rifle out of the corner of his eye. The Magician’s voice, worn with strain, snapped back at them, stilling them all.

  “Then, goddamn it, you explain it! You tell me what you’re doing up here, still tracking the woman you tracked for se
ven years, furious with her, furious with me, wanting to kill a woman tried and sentenced years ago—seven years, Aaron! You’ve got questions, I’m pulling out my back teeth trying to give you answers, and you can’t even listen because after a seven-year diet of bitterness and hatred, that’s all you remember how to feel!”

  “You—” The word came out of Aaron on a rush of breath, as if he had been kicked. “Magic-Man—”

  “Mr. Fisher, will you calm down!”

  “She’s the one who killed! Why am I on trial?”

  “Because all this is your fault as much as anyone’s!”

  “Mine!” he said incredulously. The rigid control was gone, but so was the fury; he looked, Jase thought, genuinely hurt by something not in his head. Terra had set the rifle down. Jase saw it, then repeated it to himself with amazement. She put the rifle down. Then, with even greater astonishment: She’s listening to this.

  “While you’ve been tracking Michele Viridian all these years, you’ve been giving her something to hide from, to run from as hard and as fast as we’re running now. You’re what she hid from in the first place: all that secret fury. It’s dangerous to hide things like that in this world. If you don’t put them into language, they transform into other things; they surface when you think you’ve got them buried, you find them where you least expect them: the madwoman with the rifle at your back, the mask across the face of the woman you cared for—you found exactly what you were looking for, Aaron: the things you hate.”

  Aaron’s lips moved soundlessly. He stared at the com-light as if it would suddenly produce the Magician like a hologram. There was little expression on his face; it had faded away with his color.

  “I’m trying—Aaron, I’m trying to show you a different way of looking at the thing you’ve been staring at for seven years. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m just trying to show you that you could never have explained Terra’s killings, Michele couldn’t have explained them—you were never looking for the right thing.”