Fire Watch (19 page)

At 9:04 she found her scientists where they had been before, on the tennis courts around the other side of the building. They were setting up their equipment, most of which was short, fat, and the same faded khaki as the missile in the park. They were all talking animatedly at each other and nodding at the sky.

At 9:05 the clouds around the sun began to be pushed away in a ragged circle and the sun’s disc began to shine very thinly through. Meg made Laynie put her special glasses on. At 9:17 the sun came out and everybody cheered. Meg walked Laynie back around to the front of the school where Rich had the telescope set up. Rich looked frantic, which meant he was hopeful. He and Paulos were wearing eye patches made of kleenex and masking tape. It began to get dark in the west, a purple-blue darkness like a summer rainstorm. Meg looked through the telescope at the last sliver of the sun, still shining too bright to look at in the now completely blue eastern half of the sky.

At 9:24 Paulos said, “She’s a-coming.” Meg picked Laynie up and started edging away from the men in the
direction of the tennis courts. It began to get very dark. Laynie clung to Meg’s neck and squeezed her eyes shut under the mylar glasses. Shadows rippled suddenly over Meg like a shudder. She looked up.

And was caught by the eclipse. There was a flash, like the captured light from a diamond, and then it was there, suspended in the sky The sky was not totally dark. Reflection from the snow. The science teacher had explained it yesterday in the auditorium. He had not explained how beautiful it would be. The sky was a dawn blue with pink shining from the retreating clouds like a coming sunrise. In the center of the fragile blue the sun flared out on all sides from behind the moon.

Meg pried Laynie’s arms loose from around her neck and took her glasses off her. “This is it, Laynie honey,” she whispered. “Look at the clips.”

Laynie turned around shyly, as if she were being introduced to someone. “Oh,” she said in a tiny voice, and stuck her finger in her mouth. Her other hand she kept tight around Meg’s neck.

“Twenty-nine, twenty-eight …” One of the redheaded boys was counting backwards. It could not possibly have been two minutes already. A fine line of light appeared at one side of the bluish circle. “Thar she goes!” somebody said. Meg shoved Laynie’s glasses back on her and looked down at the snow. The sun flared back into blindingness and there was a tremendous roar of applause.

The redheaded boys pounded Meg on the back. “Boy, was that ever neat!” they kept saying. “Boy, are we ever glad we listened to you.”

Rich grinned at her. “You’ve set women’s lib back a hundred years,” he said, and squeezed her hand.

“Quite a show,” Paulos said, rocking back contentedly on his heels, “quite a show.”

“Oh,” Meg said, and took off through the forest of tripods with Laynie still in her arms. They were already gone, the four of them carrying their equipment down the hill. There was probably time to catch them before they made it to the park. I didn’t want to catch them, Meg thought. I just wanted to see what they thought of it, if it
was worth it, coming all this way She could see them gesturing. Their gestures had taken on grandiose proportions. Meg decided it must have been.

“Laynie had to go to the bathroom,” Meg explained when they got back. The air had turned chilly. Meg put Laynie’s hood up.

“Ten-degree drop of temperature during the eclipse,” Paulos said. “It looks like it’s turning bad again, too.” He got into the car. The even layer of clouds was pushing steadily back over the sun.

Meg settled Laynie in the back seat and then helped Rich get the camera tripod maneuvered into the trunk. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?” Rich said.

Meg looked at him. “Tell you what?”

He slammed the trunk shut. Meg got into the back seat with Laynie. Rich started the car.

“I sure would like to know what you did back there,” Paulos said. “That was some weather predicting!”

“Um,” Meg said. She was straining to see the park as they passed the side street she and Laynie had walked up.

“Rocket,” Laynie said. “Rocket. Tana. Clips.”

“What, honey?” Rich asked.

Emergency situations demand emergency measures. Meg popped a Lifesaver into Laynie’s mouth.

There’s been a lot of research on twins lately, especially twins who were raised separately. They meet for the first time at age thirty and find that they both smoke Marlboros, drive Rabbits, are married to girls named Jennifer, and are computer technicians. You see them on TV. Donahue asks them a question and they both start to answer at the same time, in the same words. They stop, both of them lean backward, put their hands on their knees, reach for a Marlboro. The audience laughs.

Doesn’t this strike terror into any hearts besides mine? What if Donahue asked them, “Do you believe in free will?” What would they answer? “Yes, of course”? At the same time? And then would they lean backward, put their hands on their knees, and reach for a Marlboro?

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 as hot as I had thought it would be, walking on a star.

“Leave your hand there a minute,” Jewell said, and 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 comprissor 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, 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, from a fight with a sidon, that ran down the side of her face and under her chin.

“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 said. 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 all about all the dangers except the worst ones 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 it her so simm tripletapping fool kin’t kill ivverybody when he blows himsilf 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. “Thits 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 equipmints metal and metal means sparks. Ivvery once in a while that whole sky over there lights up like Chrissmiss. We built St. Pierre as faraway 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 apairiv vools 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 playa 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 to 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 multicolored 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 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.”