Fool’s Run

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Shit.”

  “It’s messy,” Jase agreed.

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “You’re the one who told me just say it.”

  “It can’t be true.”

  “Okay.” He shrugged. “I’ll put the Magician behind light and that will be that. Or, I’ll tell what really happened, and you can have my—”

  “You say that,” Nils warned him, “you’ll lose teeth.” Then he sighed, his face patchy, all the strain of the recent hours showing. He glanced at his screen, typed a couple of orders. His shoulders slumped again; he stared at Jase.

  “There are five dead bodies in the morgue. Terra put them there before she left.”

  “I know,” Jase said.

  “She demolished the robot-guard. Not to mention a few dozen monitors and this office.”

  “I know.”

  “The Magician effectively shut down two-thirds of the operative cruisers in the Command Station for this area. We could have had a disaster on our hands.”

  “Yes.”

  “You and Mr. Fisher tracked him, alone and unarmed. You brought him back.”

  “Yes,” Jase said patiently.

  “Well,” Nils said, his voice rising again, “they won’t give you a medal for talking about visions! Just stick to the facts. That’s all you have to do. That’s all anybody wants out of you.”

  Jase was silent, staring at his dark reflection on the empty screen. There’s the Hub-craft log, he thought, and memories of the rich, vivid, alien imagery drifted into his mind. Fire and water…the giant red sun glowing through steam above a disturbed sea…the great, living ship, wings slowly lifting…Would some patroller years from now, on a routine cruise in the space around the astonishing planet he came from, spot it and become inarticulate in terror and wonder? We are born surrounded by mysteries, he thought. We make our compromises with terror, with wonder, so that we can go about the business of simply surviving from one day to another…We achieve a balance on the high wire, take one slow step after another, while the wire shakes and the wind blows, and nobody wants the unknown, the unexpected, with wings like some alien insect out of a gaudy, gargantuan jungle to sail by and sweep us off balance…

  “Jase,” Nils said, and he blinked, startled. “Message on-screen from FWGBI. They want to talk to you.”

  “Stall them.”

  “How long?” Nils asked tightly. “How long?”

  “Long enough,” Jase said, making one decision at least, “for me to talk to Mr. Restak. Get him up here. Please. And—”

  “I’m not leaving you alone in here with him. I just got this place cleaned up from the last time he was here.”

  “I want you to stay,” Jase said mildly. “I’m just trying to do what you suggested. I’m trying to do my job.”

  The prisoner came escorted by half a dozen guards. There was a filament around his wrists. He looked pale, unshaven and exhausted. He stood quietly, expressionless, while Jase said to the guards, “Take that off him. Wait outside.” He was silent until they had gone; the Magician glanced at Nils once, then waited, resigned, for Jase to lean back in his air-chair and contemplate the problem.

  “Mr. Restak,” he said finally, “do you realize, when you’re put on trial, what you’re going to sound like?”

  The Magician looked surprised. A little color came back into his face. “I’ve thought about that,” he said.

  “Once in a lifetime, somebody babbling about that, is a bizarre curiosity. Twice in seven years—” he shook his head. “It might be disturbing. Might be. I don’t know.” The Magician regarded him silently, as if trying to hear what Jase wasn’t saying.

  “The vision ended,” he said at last, softly. “Terra died. I turned around. There was no communication between the Hub-craft and the Flying Wail after that.”

  “No.”

  “So I have no idea what”—he paused, searching—“how much you understood.”

  Jase leaned over his desk. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Nils hunch farther over his work, trying not to listen, not wanting to listen. Jase sighed. “Mr. Restak. I don’t get paid for understanding. I get paid for dealing with things that happen or don’t happen. I know what happened on the Hub-craft. I’m just trying to figure out how much it’s worth to me.”

  The Magician started to speak, stopped. His eyes had changed. “You believe—”

  “No. I saw, Mr. Restak.” He paused, repeated gently, almost to himself, “I saw.” In memory he saw it again, the image Terra and the Magician had put into his head, unfurling its glittering sails across the black, black sea between suns. The Magician, the terrible weariness fading in his eyes, seemed to read Jase’s mind, watch it too. For a moment the office filled with an infinite, tranquil silence. “The point is, Mr. Restak,” Jase continued, “that I’m sitting here in my office and you’re standing there with six guards waiting to escort you back to Security. The Hub-craft log is ambiguous, and Mr. Fisher is, after all, your friend and therefore biased. The point is, Mr. Restak, what in God’s name am I going to do with you?”

  The Magician shifted slightly, as if Jase’s question had thrown him off balance. Nils was no longer even pretending not to listen. “Well,” the Magician said finally, his face impassive, masking hope, as he played one last wild card, “you said you wanted a transfer.”

  NINE

  Jase and Sidney Halleck sat at the mahogany bar in the Constellation Club, sipping beer. It was three-fifteen in the morning. The club was empty but for the Magician, playing something gentle and complicated on the stage nearest them. A year had passed since Jase had last heard him play. He had thought that exposure to Earth with all its riotous color and noise, would dim his off-world memories. But he still found himself trying to drink beer through gritted teeth.

  “I just put a new piano on that stage,” Sidney said, watching it and the Magician fondly. “An old German make, very fine. He seems to like it.”

  “It’s big enough,” Jase said politely.

  “Nova performed here tonight for old times’ sake. If you’d gotten here earlier, you could have heard them. The Magician forgot to stop playing…They’ll leave tomorrow for Archipelago Sector.”

  “I just came from there.”

  “Beautiful, isn’t it.”

  Jase nodded. “I guess I left just in time.”

  Sidney’s eyes wandered from the stage to Jase’s face. “I can ask him to stop,” he said. Jase shook his head, feeling himself relax under Sidney’s tranquil gaze.

  “No,” he sighed. “It’s just that…I never really feel safe around Mr. Restak. To look at him up there, he seems harmless enough. But things happen around him…I haven’t seen him for nearly a year. I retire from my job, I wander around the world awhile, one day I get on a shuttle for a five-thousand-mile flight to Suncoast Sector, I have a six-hour stopover in the middle of the night, and so I come here to pay you a visit. I walk in the door and I find it’s the one night the Magician and Nova have come to play. I’ve never been paranoid, or even very imaginative. But that man makes me uneasy.”

  Sidney leaned over the bar, pulled a fresh glass off a rack and set it under one of the antique draft handles. Dark beer trickled slowly into the glass. “That’s quite understandable, though. His freedom cost you your job.”

  “No,” Jase said fairly. “I wouldn’t put it like that.”

  “You refused to press charges.”

  “That’s not what cost me. The Magician’s stat-sheet was so clean it squeaked; there was a speeding fine on it, maybe a docking fine. That’s it. The patrollers were furious with him for being smart enough to lock them up for a few hours. But they were the same men and women who had gone to hear his band play. He didn’t hurt anybody. I was the one who took Terra out of the Underworld. The Magician had transgressed, but he wasn’t a criminal, there was no deep feeling against him. And I had Aaron backing me, when I refused to press charges. As well as my own reputation. That carried some weight. No. There was
just one detail that cost. And that cost blood.”

  “The alien,” Sidney said gently.

  Jase nodded. “The moment I suggested that Terra Viridian might not have been crazy, that’s the moment they decided I was crazy.”

  “Was there one?”

  “One what?”

  “An alien?”

  Jase gazed across the floor at the Magician, absorbed in his music. “I let him go, didn’t I?”

  Sidney made a soft sound. He set the full beer glass on the bar; Jase took a swallow. Chilled, the color of molasses, with a head on it like whipped cream…it gave even the Magician’s music charm, for a moment. Jase wiped his mouth. “That’s all I wanted.”

  “What?” Sidney said, smiling.

  “Nine years, Chief of the Underworld, and all I really wanted was a cold draft beer.”

  “Maybe,” Sidney murmured. The smile faded from his face; his eyes, grave, contemplative, sought out the piano player again. “But for you, he would still be there. In the Underworld, note by note, forgetting all that music…As his friend, I’m very grateful that you were there. Anyone else would have—”

  “Ah—” Jase interrupted him, shrugged. “I was trapped up there. I wanted out. My deputy-in-chief was a good man to leave the Underworld to, so I did. I told FWGBI he’d make a terrible administrator, and they went for him, hook, line and sinker. He’s not fond of aliens, but other than that, he’ll do a fine job.”

  “What will you do? I can’t believe you’ll be content being a tourist for the rest of your life.”

  “When I find a quiet spot with some sun, water and good fishing, I’ll do a little private business, detecting, consultant work. I enjoy working with people…” He took another swallow of beer. A phrase of music drifted into his head, so sweet and precisely measured it seemed he heard it with the Magician’s ear. He recognized it; like a key it unlocked memories. He looked up, half expecting to hear his own voice challenging the phrase.

  It was the Constellation Club he stood in, not the Underworld. His hands were linked tightly around the glass. He felt Sidney watching him. He said softly, “That night…that long flight into an alien vision…with a madwoman holding a rifle at my back, with the Underworld paralyzed, while I chased a man who’d invented laws to break, there was a moment when I was compelled to look with wonder at the structure of my own right hand…That’s the moment when I had no choice, I knew what happened.”

  “I looked at Aaron,” Sidney said simply. “I knew something extraordinary had to have happened.”

  “Aaron…He would have been on my back for the rest of my life if I hadn’t let the Magician go. And what he goes after comes to him.”

  “He’s not here anymore,” Sidney sighed. “They transferred him south.”

  “I know. I keep an eye on him.”

  “They made him a station commander. So I don’t see him or the Queen of Hearts very often. He said it was your fault he got transferred, you got him so many commendations.”

  Jase shook his head. “I couldn’t give him enough, not enough to make them forget that when I refused to make formal charges against the Magician, he backed me all the way. That’ll shadow his record. The FWGBI knows something more than routine went on up there during that flight, and it doesn’t want to hear what. An Underworld Chief going softheaded is one thing, but an Earthside patroller with an impeccable record agreeing with everything he says can’t be so easily explained. No matter how many commendations I got him, what they’ll see is that I recommended them.”

  “You had an impeccable record too,” Sidney argued.

  “Until I said a five-letter word. Funny how that word makes people jumpy…” He washed the bitterness out of his throat with beer, found himself listening again to the Magician’s music. “Doesn’t he ever quit?”

  “I’m surprised he’s not aware that you’re here.”

  “Everywhere I go,” Jase said grumpily, “I hear their music. I find the tiniest, darkest hole-in-the-wall bar that looks like it hasn’t been swept since the FWG took over, and wouldn’t recognize sunlight if it fell all over the floor. Someone turns on a video and there they are. Nova.”

  Sidney smiled. “You had your chance to stop them. You made them famous, letting them continue the tour.”

  “I know. And I could have been a hero, too…pursuing dangerous criminals in the Hub-craft, getting everybody back to the Underworld—the FWGBI would have sent me flowers and a plaque.”

  “It would have been easier for you,” Sidney said gently.

  “After they quit giving me medals and laughing at me about the Bach, they would have left me sitting up there for the next ten or twenty years. Chief of the Underworld, with no way out. I like the way Earth smells…”

  “Aaron and the Queen of Hearts and the Magician have all given me bits and pieces of what went on that night,” Sidney said, getting two more glasses. “That’s all it feels like to me: bits and pieces. Maybe, without the Magician’s vision, it will never seem more than that. But I still don’t understand why you brought Aaron of all people up there at that time on such a vague business. Or why you connected the Queen of Hearts with Michele Viridian. Or where Dr. Fiori sprang from, just in time to move Terra out of her cell. You were a busy man. Why such attention to such small details as a broken cruiser-receiver?”

  “Do you ever have hunches?”

  “I have a hunch you’re going to tell me a long story.”

  “Do you have time?”

  “And the beer.”

  “It all started,” Jase said, “with a nursery rhyme.”

  By the time he finished, the walls of the club had changed color twice, and there was a pyramid of glasses on the bar. The Constellation Club, to Jase’s eye, was Earth at its most harmonious and civilized; even the Magician’s music, he conceded, might sound good to some people.

  “Good heavens,” Sidney said blankly. “You mean, I might have been up there playing Bach to a fleet of patrol-cruisers so that they could capture the Flying Wail?”

  “That’s what we wanted you for. Luckily, the Magician’s vision ended and he turned back before you reached the Underworld.”

  “And that’s what you saw, that was your premonition of disaster: Terra Viridian escaped from the Underworld.” He blinked a little, lifted an empty glass, then found the right one. “I remember now. The Magician had a premonition too.”

  “The hell he did. When?”

  “The night before you and I first talked. He was in here playing the piano. For hours. I’d never seen him like that. He never stopped, he never spoke…He said later he’d been watching the Underworld orbit as he played…It was very odd.”

  Jase grunted. He felt the soothing fumes of beer in his brain slowly abandon him, leaving him adrift in the small hours, sleepless and unshaven, in the same stale clothes he’d worn for five thousand miles. Reluctantly, his eyes moved beyond the mellow gold and wood around him, out across the floor to the stage where the Magician still played.

  “He doesn’t usually do that, then? Play for hours like that.”

  “No.”

  “Like he’s doing now.”

  Sidney shifted on his stool. “It’s after five,” he said surprisedly.

  “He was watching the Underworld orbit?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  They both watched the Magician, moving tirelessly, frowning slightly in concentration, or like someone deep in an engrossing dream. Jase said without hope, “Maybe he just likes the piano.”

  Sidney gathered empty glasses between his fingers, poised them over the floor and dropped them. Jase jumped at the crash. But the Magician’s eyes did not even flicker.

  “Mr. Restak!” Jase bellowed, praying for the Magician’s head to snap up, his fingers to tangle on the keys. The Magician, deaf as a hologram, paid no attention.

  “It could be anything,” Sidney murmured. “It could be…”

  “It could be anything,” Jase said grimly. “Except for one thing
. I’m here.”

  Sidney looked at him. They rose simultaneously.

  Onstage, standing on both sides of the Magician as he played, they were still beyond the periphery of his vision. Sidney touched him, spoke his name. Finally, gently, Jase reached out, caught his left hand in the middle of an arpeggio and lifted it from the keys.

  “Mr. Restak.”

  The Magician’s right hand halted. He looked up at Jase, pale, his breathing audible, but showing no more surprise than one awakened, but not yet fully awakened, from a dream. He said, “It’s watching us orbit.”

  About the author

  World Fantasy Award winner Patricia A. McKillip has mesmerized millions with her bestselling fantasy series, The Riddle-Master Trilogy. Fool’s Run is her stunning science fiction debut. She lives and works in San Francisco.