Nova (2 page)
"I stole it." Even though the words came with gushes of air through ill-anchored vocal cords, at ten the orphaned gypsy spoke some half dozen of the languages bordering the Mediterranean much more facilely than people like Leo who had learned his tongues under a hypno-teacher.
The construction men, grimy from their power shovels (and hopefully limited to Turkish) sat down at the table, massaging their wrists and rubbing their spinal sockets on the smalls of their backs where the great machines had been plugged into their bodies. They called for fish.
Leo bent and tossed. Silver flicked the air, and the oil roared.
Leo leaned against the railing and opened the drawstring. "Yes." He spoke slowly. "None on Earth, much less here, I didn't know was. Where it from is?"
"I got it from the bazaar," the Mouse explained. "If it can be found on Earth, it can be found in the Grand Bazaar." He quoted the adage that had brought millions on millions to the Queen of Cities.
"So I'd heard," Leo said. Then in Turkish again: "These gentlemen their lunch you give."
The Mouse took up the ladle and scooped the fish into plastic plates. What had gone in silver came out gold. The men pulled chunks of bread from the baskets under the table and ate with their hands.
He hunted the two other fish from the oil and brought them to Leo who was still sitting on the rail, smiling into the sack. "Coherent image out of this thing, can I get? Don't know. Since fishing for methane squid in the Outer Colonies, I was, not in my hands one of these is. Back then, pretty well this I could play." The sack fell away and Leo sucked his breath between his teeth. "It pretty is!"
On his lap in crumpled leather, It might have been a harp, it might have been a computer. With inductance surfaces like a theremin, with frets like a guitar, down one side were short drones as on a sitar. On the other were the extended bass drones of a guitarina. Parts were carved from rosewood. Parts were cast from stainless steel. It had insets of black plastic, and was cushioned with plush.
Leo turned it.
The clouds had torn even further.
Sunlight ran the polished grain, flashed in the steel. At the table the workmen tapped their coins, then squinted. Leo nodded to them. They put the money on the greasy boards and, puzzled, left the boat.
Leo did something with the controls. There was a clear ringing; the air shivered; and cutting out the olid odor of wet rope and tar was the scent of ... orchids? A long time ago, perhaps at five or six, the Mouse had smelled them wild in the fields edging a road. (Then, there had been a big woman in a print skirt who may have been Mama, and three barefoot, heavily mustachioed men, one of whom he had been told to call Papa; but that was in some other country ...) Yes, orchids.
Leo's hand moved; shivering became shimmering. Brightness fell from the air, coalesced in blue light whose source was somewhere between them. The odor moistened to roses.
"It works!" rasped the Mouse.
Leo nodded. "Better than the one I used to have. The Illyrion battery almost brand-new is. Those things I on the boat used to play, can still play, I wonder." His face furrowed. "Not too good going to be is. Out of practice am." Embarrassment rearranged Leo's features into an expression the Mouse had never seen. Leo's hand closed to the tuning haft.
Where light had filled the air, illumination shaped to her, till she turned and stared at them over her shoulder.
The Mouse blinked.
She was translucent; yet so much realer by the concentration he needed to define her chin, her shoulder, her foot, her face, till she spun, laughing, and tossed surprising flowers at him. Under the petals the Mouse ducked and closed his eyes. He'd been breathing naturally, but on this inhalation, he just didn't stop. He opened his mouth to the odors, prolonging the breath till his diaphragm stretched sharply from the bottom of his ribs. Then pain arched beneath his sternum and he had to let the breath out. Fast. Then began the slow return—
He opened his eyes.
Oil, the yellow water of the Horn, sludge; but the air was empty of blossoms. Leo, his single boot on the bottom rung of the rail, was fiddling with a knob.
She was gone.
"But ..." The Mouse took a step, stopped, balancing on his toes, his throat working. "How ...?"
Leo looked up. "Rusty, I am! I once pretty good was. But it a long time is. Long time. Once, once, this thing I truly could play."
"Leo ... could you ...? I mean you said you ... I didn't know ... I didn't think ..."
"What?"
"Teach! Could you teach ... me?"
Leo looked at the dumbfounded gypsy boy whom he had befriended here on the docks with tales of his wanderings through the oceans and ports of a dozen worlds. He was puzzled.
The Mouse's fingers twitched. "Show me, Leo! Now you've got to show me!" The Mouse's mind tumbled from Alexandrian to Berber Arabic and ended up in Italian as he searched for the word. "Bellissimo, Leo! Bellissimo!"
"Well— " Leo felt what might have been fear at the boy's avidity, had Leo been more used to fear.
The Mouse looked at the stolen thing with awe and terror.
"Can you show me how to play it?' Then he did something brave. He took it, gently, from Leo's lap. And fear was an emotion that the Mouse had lived with all his short, shattered life.
Reaching, however, he began the intricate process of becoming himself. Wondering, the Mouse turned the sensory-syrynx around and around.
At the head of a muddy street that wound on a hill behind an iron gate, the Mouse had a night job carrying trays of coffee and salep from the tea house through the herds of men who roamed back and forth by the narrow glass doors, crouching to stare at the women passing inside.
Now the Mouse came to work later and later. He stayed on the boat as long as possible. The harbor lights winked down the mile-long docks, and Asia flickered through the fog while Leo showed him where each projectable odor, color, shape, texture, and movement hid in the polished syrynx. The Mouse's eyes and hands began to open.
Two years later, when Leo announced that he had sold his boat and was thinking of going to the other side of Draco, perhaps to New Mars to fish for dust skates, the Mouse could already surpass the tawdry illusion that Leo had first shown him.
A month later the Mouse himself left Istanbul, waiting beneath the dripping stones of the Edernakapi till a truck offered him a ride toward the border town of Ipsala. He walked across the border into Greece, joined a red wagon full of gypsies, and for the duration of the trip fell back into Romany, the tongue of his birth. He'd been in Turkey three years. On leaving, all he had taken besides the clothes he wore was a thick silver puzzle ring too big for any of his fingers— and the syrynx.
Two and a half years later when he left Greece, he still had the ring. He had grown one little fingernail three quarters of an inch long, as did the other boys who worked the dirty streets behind the Monasteraiki flea market, selling rugs, brass gewgaws, or whatever tourists would buy, just outside the edge of the geodesic dome that covered the square mile of Athenas Market; and he took the syrynx.
The cruise boat on which he was a deck hand left Piraeus for Port Said, sailed through the canal and on toward its home port in Melbourne.
When he sailed back, this time to Bombay, It was as an entertainer in the ship's nightclub: Pontichos Provechi, recreating great works of art, musical and graphic, for your pleasure, with perfumed accompaniment. In Bombay he quit, got very drunk (he was sixteen now), and stalked the dirty pier by moonlight, quivering and ill. He swore he would never play purely for money again ("Come on, kid! Give us the mosaics on the San Sophia ceiling again before you do the Parthenon frieze— and make 'em swing!"). When he returned to Australia, it was as a deck hand. He came ashore with the puzzle ring, his long nail, and a gold earring in his left ear. Sailors who crossed the equator on the Indian Ocean had been entitled to that earring for fifteen hundred years. The steward had pierced his earlobe with ice and a canvas needle. He still had the syrynx.
In Melbourne again, he played on the street. He spent a lot of time in a coffee shop frequented by kids from the Cooper Astronautics Academy. A twenty-year-old girl he was living with suggested he sit in on some classes.
"Come on, get yourself some plugs. You'll get them eventually somewhere, and you might as well get some education on how to use them for something other than a factory job. You like to travel. Might as well run the stars as operate a garbage unit."
When he finally broke up with the girl, and left Australia, he had his certificate as a cyborg stud for any inter— and intra— system ship. He still had his gold earring, his little fingernail, his puzzle ring— and the syrynx.
Even with a certificate, it was hard to sign onto a star-run straight from Earth. For a couple of years he plugged into a small commercial line that ran the Shifting Triangle run: Earth to Mars, Mars to Ganymede, Ganymede to Earth. But by now his black eyes were a-glitter with stars. A few days after his eighteenth birthday (at least it was the day the girl and he had agreed would be his birthday back in Melbourne), the Mouse hitched out to the second moon of Neptune, from which the big commercial lines left for worlds all over Draco, for the Pleiades Federation, and even the Outer Colonies. The puzzle ring fit him now.
Draco, Triton, Hell3, 3172
The Mouse walked beside Hell3, his boot heel clicking, his bare foot silent (as in another city on another world, Leo had walked). This was his latest travel acquisition. Those who worked under free-fall in the ships that went between planets developed the agility of at least one set of toes, sometimes both, till it rivaled world-lubbers' hands, and ever after kept that foot free. The commercial interstellar freighters had artificial gravity, which discouraged such development.
As he ambled beneath a plane tree, the leaves roared in the warm wind. Then his shoulder struck something. He staggered, was caught, was whirled around.
"You clumsy, rat-faced little— "
A hand clamped his shoulder and jammed him out to arm's length. The Mouse looked up at the man blinking down.
Someone had tried to hack the face open. The scar zagged from the chin, neared the cusp of heavy lips, rose through the cheek muscles— the yellow eye was miraculously alive— and cut the left brow; where it disappeared into red, Negro hair, a blaze of silkier yellow flamed. The flesh pulled into the scar like beaten copper to a vein of bronze.
"Where do you think you're going, boy?"
"Sorry— "
The man's vest bore the gold disk of an officer.
"Guess I wasn't looking— "
A lot of muscles in the forehead shifted. The back of the jaw got thicker. Sound started behind the face, spilled. It was laughter, full and contemptuous.
The Mouse smiled, hating it. "I guess I wasn't looking where I was going."
"I guess you weren't." The hand fell twice again on his shoulder. The captain shook his head and strode off.
Embarrassed and alert, the Mouse started walking again.
Then he stopped and looked back. The gold disk on the left shoulder of the captain's vest had been bossed with the name Lorq Von Ray. The Mouse's hand moved on the sack under his arm.
He flung back black hair that had fallen down his forehead, looked about, then climbed to the railing. He hooked boot and foot behind the lower rung, and took out the syrynx.
His vest was half laced, and he braced the instrument against the small, defined muscles of his chest. The Mouse's face lowered; long lashes closed. His hand, ringed and bladed, fell toward the inductance surfaces.
The air was filled with shocked images—
Katin, long and brilliant, shambled toward Hell3, eyes on the ground, mind on moons aloft.
"You, boy!"
"Huh?"
The unshaven derelict leaned on the fence, clutching the rail with scaly hands.
"Where you from?" The derelict's eyes were fogged.
"Luna," Katin said.
"From a little white house on a tree-lined street, with a bicycle in the garage? I had a bicycle."
"My house was green," Katin said. "And under an air dome. I had a bicycle, though."
The derelict swayed by the rail. "You don't know, boy. You don't know."
One must listen to madmen, Katin thought. They are becoming increasingly rare. And remembered to make a note.
"So long ago ... so long!" The old man lurched away.
Katin shook his head and started walking again.
He was gawky and absurdly tall; nearly six foot nine. He'd shot to that height at sixteen. Never really believing he was so big, ten years later he still tended to hunch his shoulders. His huge hands were shoved beneath the belt of his shorts. He strode with elbows flapping.
And his mind went back to moons.
Katin, born on the moon, loved moons. He had always lived on moons, save for the time he had convinced his parents, stenographers for the Draco court on Luna, to let him take his university education on Earth at that center of learning for the mysterious and inscrutable West, Harvard, still a haven for the rich, the eccentric, and the brilliant— the last two of which he was.
The changes that vary a planet's surface, Himalayan heights to gentle, blistering Sahara dunes, he knew only by report. The freezing lichen forests of the Martian polar caps or the raging dust rivers at the red planet's equator; or Mercurian night versus Mercurian day— these he had experienced only through psychorama travelogs.
These were not what Katin knew, what Katin loved.
Moons?
Moons are small. A moon's beauty is in variations of sameness, From Harvard, Katin had returned to Luna, and from there gone to Phobos Station where he'd plugged in to a battery of recording units, low-capacity computers, and addressographs— a glorified file clerk. On time off, in tractor suit with polarized lenses, he explored Phobos, while Demos, a bright hunk of rock ten miles wide, swung by the unnervingly close horizon. He finally got up a party to land on Demos and explored the tiny moon as only a worldlet can be explored. Then he transferred to the moons of Jupiter. Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto turned beneath his brown eyes. The moons of Saturn, under the diffuse illumination of the rings, rotated before his solitary inspection as he wandered out from the land compounds where he was stationed. He explored the gray craters, the gray mountains, valleys, and canons through days and nights of blinding intensity. Moons are the same?
Had Katin been placed on any of them, and blindfold suddenly removed, petrological structure, crystalline formation, and general topography would have identified it for him immediately. Tall Katin was used to making subtle distinctions in both landscape and character. The passions that come through the diversity of a complete world, or a whole man, he knew— but did not like.
He dealt with this dislike two ways.
For the inner manifestations, he was writing a novel.
A jeweled recorder that his parents had given him when he won his scholarship hung from a chain at his waist. To date it contained some hundred thousand words of notes. He had not begun the first chapter.
For the outer manifestations, he had chosen this isolate life below his educational capacity, not even particularly in keeping with his temperament. He was slowly moving further and further away from the focus of human activity, which for him was still a world called Earth. He had completed his course as a cyborg stud only a month ago. He had arrived on this last moon of Neptune— the last moon in the Solar System— that morning.
His brown hair was silky, unkempt, and long enough to grab in a fight (if you were that tall). His hands, under the belt, kneaded his flat belly. As he reached the walkway, he stopped. Someone was sitting on the railing playing a sensory-syrynx.
Several people had stopped to watch.
Colors sluiced the air with fugal patterns as a shape subsumed the breeze and fell, to form further on, a brighter emerald, a duller amethyst. Odors flushed the wind with vinegar, snow, ocean, ginger, poppies, rum. Autumn, ocean, ginger, ocean, autumn; ocean, ocean, the surge of ocean again, while light foamed in the dimming blue that underlit the Mouse's face. Electric arpeggios of a neo-raga rilled.
Perched on the railing, the Mouse looked between the images, implosions on bright implosion, and at his own brown fingers leaping on the frets, as light from the machine flowed on the backs of his hands. And his fingers fell. Images vaulted from under his palms.
Some two dozen people had gathered. They blinked, they turned their heads. Light from the illusion shook on the roofs of their eye sockets, flowed in the lines about their mouths, filled the ridges furrowing foreheads. One woman rubbed her ear and coughed. One man punched the bottom of his pockets.
Katin looked down over lots of heads.
Somebody was jostling forward. Still playing, the Mouse looked up.
Blind Dan lurched out, stopped, then staggered in the syrynx's fire.
"Hey, come on, get out of there— "
"Come on, old man, move— "
"We can't see what the kid's making— "
In the middle of the Mouse's creation, Dan swayed, head wagging.
The Mouse laughed; then his brown hand closed over the projection haft, and light and sounds and smells deflated around a single, gorgeous demon who stood before Dan, bleating, grimacing, flapping scaled wings that shifted color with each beat. It yowled like a trumpet, twisted its face to resemble Dan's own, but with a third eye spinning.
The people began to laugh.
The spectre leaped and squatted to the Mouse's fingers. Malevolently the gypsy grinned.
Dan staggered forward, one arm flailing through.
Shrieking, the demon turned its back, bent. There was a sound like a flutter valve and the spectators howled at the stink.
Katin, who was leaning on the rail next to the Mouse, felt embarrassment heat his neck.
The demon cavorted.
Then Katin reached down and put his palm over the visual inductance field and the image blurred.
The Mouse looked up sharply. "Hey— "
"You don't have to do that," Katin said, his big hand burying the Mouse's shoulder.
"He's blind," the Mouse said. "He can't hear, he can't smell— he doesn't know what's going on ..." Black brows lowered. But he had stopped playing.
Dan stood alone in the center of the crowd, oblivious. Suddenly he shrieked. And shrieked again. The sound clanged in his lungs. People fell back. The Mouse and Katin both looked in the direction Dan's arm flailed.
In dark blue vest with gold disk, his scar flaming beneath the blaze, Captain Lorq Von Ray left the line of people.
Dan, through his blindness, had recognized him. He turned, staggered from the circle. Pushing a man aside, striking a woman's shoulder with the side of his hand, he disappeared in the crowd.
Dan gone and the syrynx still, attention shifted to the captain. Von Ray slapped his thigh, making his palm on his black pants crack like a board. "Hold up! Stop yelling!"
The voice was big.
"I'm here to pick out a crew of cyborg studs for a long trip, probably along the inner arm." So alive, his yellow eyes. The features around the ropy scar, under rust-rough hair, grinned. But it took seconds to name the expression on the distorted mouth and brow. "All right, which one of you wants a hand-hold halfway to the night's rim? Are you sand-footed, or star steppers? You!" He pointed to the Mouse, still sitting on the rail. "You want to come along?"
The Mouse stepped down. "Me?"
"You and your infernal hurdy-gurdy! If you think you can watch where you're going, I'd like somebody to juggle the air in front of my eyes and tickle my earlobes. Take the job."
A grin struck the Mouse's lips back from his teeth. "Sure," and the grin went. "I'll go." The words came from the young gypsy in an old man's whisky whisper. "Sure I'll go, Captain." The Mouse nodded and his gold earring flashed above the volcanic crevice. Hot wind over the rail struck down hanks of his black hair.
"Do you have a mate you want to make the run with? I need a crew."
The Mouse, who didn't particularly like anyone in this port, looked up at the incredibly tall young man who had stopped his harassment of Dan. "What about shorty?" He thumbed at surprised Katin. "Don't know him, but he's mate enough."
"Right then. So I have ..." Captain Von Ray narrowed his eyes a moment, appraising Katin's slump shoulders, narrow chest, high cheeks and weak blue eyes floating behind contact lenses " ...two." Katin's ears warmed.
"Who else? What's the matter? Are you afraid to leave this little well of gravity funneling into that half-pint sun?" He jerked his chin toward the highlighted mountains. "Who's coming with us where night means forever and morning's a recollection?"
A man stepped forward. Skin the color of an emperor grape, he was long-headed and full-featured. "I'm for out." When he spoke, the muscles under his jaw and high on his nappy scalp rolled.
"Have a mate?"
A second man stepped up. His flesh was translucent as soap. His hair was like white wool. It took a moment for the likeness of feature to strike. There were the same sharp cusp lines at the corner of the heavy lips, the same slant below the bell nostrils, the same break far front on the cheekbones: twins. As the second man turned his head, the Mouse saw the blinking pink eyes, veiled with silver.
The albino dropped his broad hand— a sack of knuckles and work-ruined nails cabled to his forearm by thick, livid veins— on his brother's shoulder. "We run together."
Their voices, slow with colonial drawl, were identical.
"Anyone else?" Captain Von Ray looked about the crowd.
"You me, Captain, want to take?"
A man pushed forward.
Something flapped on his shoulder.
His yellow hair shook with a wind not from the chasm. Moist wings crinkled, stretched again, like onyx, like isinglass. The man reached up to where black claws made an epaulet on his knotted shoulder and caressed the grappling pads with a spatulate thumb.
"Do you have any other mate than your pet?"
Her small hand in his, she stepped out, following him at the length of their two arms.
Willow bough? Bird's wing? Wind in spring rushes? The Mouse riffled his sensory store to equal her face in gentleness. And failed.
Her eyes were the color of steel. Small breasts rose beneath the laces of her vest, steady in breath. Then steel glittered as she looked about. (She's a strong woman, thought Katin, who could perceive such subtleties.)
Captain Von Ray folded his arms. "You two, and the beast on your shoulder?"
"We six pets, Captain, have," she said.
"As long as they're broken to ship, fine. But I'll jettison the first fluttering devil I trip on."
"Fair, Captain," the man said. The slanted eyes in his ruddy face crinkled with a smile. With his free hand now he grasped his opposite biceps and slid his fingers down the blond hair that matted each forearm, the back of each knuckle, till he held the woman's hand in both of his. They were the couple who had played cards in the bar, the Mouse realized. "When you us aboard want?"
"An hour before dawn. My ship goes up to meet the sun. It's the Roc on Stage Seventeen. How do your friends call you?"
"Sebastian." The beast beat on his golden shoulder.
"Tyy." Its shadow crossed her face.
Captain Von Ray bent his head and stared from beneath his rusty brows with tiger's eyes. "And your enemies?"
The man laughed. "Damned Sebastian and his flapping black gillies."
Von Ray looked at the woman. And you?"
"Tyy." That, softly. "Still."
"You two" Von Ray turned to the twins. "Your names?"
"He's Idas— " the albino said, and once more put his hand on his brother's arm.
"— and he's Lynceos."
"And what would your enemies say if I asked them who you were?"
The dark twin shrugged. "Only Lynceos— "
"— and Idas."
"You?" Von Ray nodded toward the Mouse.
"You can call me the Mouse if you're my friend. You my enemy, and you never know my name."
Von Ray's lids fell halfway down the yellow balls as he looked at the tall one.
"Katin Crawford." Katin surprised himself by volunteering. "When my enemies tell me what they call me, I'll tell you, Captain Von Ray."
"We're on a long trip," Von Ray said. "And you'll face enemies you didn't know you had. We're running against Prince and Ruby Red. We fly a cargo ship out empty and come back— if the wheels of the machine run right— with a full hold. I want you to know this trip has been made twice before. Once it hardly got started. Once I got within sight of the goal. But the sight was too much for some of my crew. This time I intend to go out, fill my cargo hold, and come back."
"Where we for running are?" Sebastian asked. The creature on his shoulders stepped from one foot to the other, flapping to balance. Its wingspan was nearly seven feet. "What out there, Captain, is?"
Von Ray threw up his head as though he could see his destination. Then he looked down slowly. "Out there ..."
The Mouse felt the skin on the back of his neck go funny, as though it were cloth and someone had just snagged a loose end and raveled the fabric.