Nova (24 page)

Flashing from his hair, hands, and shoulders, a man came up the walkway in a lame vest. A tray of jewels hung around his neck. The couple stopped him. She bought a jewel from the vendor and, laughing, placed it on her boyfriend's forehead. The sequined streamers from the central cluster of stones ran back and wound themselves in his long hair. They laughed up the wet street.

Lorq and the Mouse reached the end of the fence. A crowd of uniformed Pleiades patrolmen came up the stone steps; three girls ran up behind them, screaming. Five boys overtook them, and the screams turned to laughter. The Mouse looked back to see them cluster about the jewelry man.

Lorq started down the steps.

"What's down there?" The Mouse hurried on behind.

On the side of the broad steps, people drank at tables set beside the cafes cut into the rock wall.

"You look like you know where you're going, Captain." The Mouse caught up with Lorq's elbow. "Who is that?" He gazed after one stroller. Among the lightly clad people, she wore a heavy parka rimmed with fur.

"She's one of your ice-fishermen," the captain told him. "Leo will he wearing one of them soon. They spend most of their time away from the heated part of the City."

"Where are we going?"

"I think it was down this way." They turned along a dim ledge; there were a few windows in the rock. Blue light leaked from the shades. "These places change owners every couple of months, and I haven't been in the City for five years. If we don't find the place I'm looking for, we'll find one that'll do."

"What sort of place is it?"

A woman shrieked. A door swung open; she staggered out. Another suddenly reached from the darkness, caught her by the arm, slapped her twice, and yanked her back. The door slammed on a second shriek. An old man— probably another ice-fisherman— supported a younger man on his shoulder, "We you back to the room you take. Your head up hold. All right it will be. To the room we you take."

The Mouse watched them stagger by. A couple had stopped back near the stone stairway. She was shaking her head. Finally he nodded, and they turned back.

"The place I was thinking of, among other things, used to have a thriving business conning people to work in the mines in the Outer Colonies, then collecting a commission on each recruit. It was perfectly legal; there're a lot of stupid people in the universe. I've been a foreman in one of those mines and seen it from the other end. It's not very pretty." Lorq looked over a doorway. "Different name. Same place."

He started down the steps. The Mouse looked quickly behind him, then followed: They entered a long room with a plank bar by one wall. A few panels of multichrome gave out feeble color. "Same people too."

A man older than the Mouse, younger than Lorq, with stringy hair and dirty nails came up. "What can I do for you boys?"

"What have you got to make us feel good?"

He closed an eye. "Have a seat."

Dim figures passed and paused before the bar.

Lorq and the Mouse slipped into a booth. The man pulled up a chair, reversed it, straddled it, and sat at the table's head. "How good do you want to feel?"

Lorq turned his hands palms up on the table.

"Downstairs we have a ..." The man glanced toward a doorway in the back where people moved in and out. " ...pathobath?"

"What's that?" the Mouse asked.

"A place with crystal walls that reflect the color of your thoughts," Lorq told him. "You leave your clothes at the door and float among columns of light on currents of glycerin.

They heat it to body temperature, mask out all your senses. After a little while, deprived of contact with sensory reality, you go insane. Your own psychotic fantasies provide the floor show." He looked back at the man. "I want something we can take with us."

Behind thin lips the man's teeth came together sharply.

On the stage at the end of the bar a naked girl stepped into the coral spotlight and began to chant a poem. Those sitting at the bar clapped in time.

The man looked quickly back and forth between the captain and the Mouse.

Lorq folded his hands. "Bliss."

The man's eyebrows raised under the matted hair that fell down his forehead. "That's what I thought." His own hands came together. "Bliss."

The Mouse looked at the girl. Her skin was unnaturally shiny. Glycerin, the Mouse thought. Yeah, glycerin. He leaned against the stone wall, then quickly pulled away. Drops of water ran the cold rock. The Mouse rubbed his shoulder and looked back at the captain.

"We'll wait for it."

The man nodded. After a moment he said to the Mouse, "What do you and pretty-man do for a living?"

"Crew on a ... freighter." The captain nodded just enough to communicate approval.

"You know, there's good work in the Outer Colonies. You ever thought about doing a hitch in the mines?"

"I worked the mines for three years," Lorq said.

"Oh." The man fell silent.

After a moment, Lorq asked, "Are you going to send for the bliss?"

"I already did." A limp grin washed his lips.

At the bar the rhythmic clapping broke into applause as the girl finished her poem. She leaped from the stage, and ran across the floor toward them. The Mouse saw her take something quickly from one of the men at the bar. She hugged the man at the table with them. Their hands joined, and as she ran into the shadow, the Mouse saw the man's hand fall on the table, the knuckles high with something underneath. Lorq placed his hand over the man's, completely masking them.

"Three pounds," the man said, "@sg."

With his other hand Lorq put three bills on the table.

The man pulled his hand away and picked them up.

"Come on, Mouse, we've got what we want." Lorq rose from the table and started across the room.

The Mouse ran after him. "Hey, Captain. That man didn't speak the Pleiades way!"

"In a place like this, they always speak your language, no matter what it is. That's where their business comes from."

Just as they reached the door, the man suddenly hailed them once more. He nodded at Lorq. "Just wanted to remind you to come on back when you want some more. So long, beautiful."

"See you around, ugly." Lorq went out the door. In the cool night, he paused at the top of the steps, bent his head over his cupped hands and breathed deeply. "Here you go, Mouse." He held his hands out. "Have a whiff on me."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"Take a deep breath, hold it for a while, then let it go." As the Mouse leaned down, a shadow fell that was not his own. The Mouse jumped.

"All right. What you got?"

The Mouse looked up at, and Lorq looked down at the patrolman.

Lorq narrowed his eyes and opened his hands.

The patrolman decided to ignore the Mouse and looked at Lorq. "Oh." He moved his lower lip over his upper teeth. "Something dangerous it could have been. Something illegal, understand?"

Lorq nodded. "It could have been."

"These places around here, you got to watch out."

Lorq nodded again.

So did the patrolman. "Say, how about the law swinging out a little, you let?"

The Mouse saw the smile the captain had not yet allowed out on his face. Lorq raised his hands to the patrolman. "Out yourself knock."

The patrolman bent, sucked a breath, stood. "Thanks," and he turned into the dark.

The Mouse watched him a moment, shook his head, shrugged, then gave the captain a cynical frown.

He put his hands around Lorq's, leaned over, emptied his lungs, then filled them. After he held his breath, for nearly a minute, he exploded, "Now what's supposed to happen?"

"Don't worry about it," Lorq said. "It is."

They started back along the ledge past the blue windows.

The Mouse looked at the river of bright rock. "You know," he said after a while, "I wish I had my syrynx. I want to play." They had almost reached the steps with the open cafes under the lights. There was the tinkling of amplified music. Someone at a table dropped a glass that broke on the stone, and the sound disappeared under an onslaught of applause. The Mouse looked at his hands. "This stuff makes my fingers itchy." They started up the steps. "When I was a kid back on Earth, in Athens, there was a street like this. Odos Mnisicleous, it ran right up through the Plaka. I worked at a couple of places in the Plaka, you know? The Golden Prison, the '0 kal 'H. And you climb the stairs up from Adrianou and way above is the back porch of the Erechtheum in a spotlight over the Acropolis wall at the top of the hill. And people at the tables on the sides of the street, they break their plates, see, and laugh. You ever been in the Plaka in Athens, Captain?"

"Once, a long time ago," Lorq said. "I was just about your age now. It was only for an evening though."

"Then you don't know the little neighborhood above it. Not if you were just there one evening." The Mouse's hoarse whisper gained momentum. "You keep going up that street of stone steps till all the night clubs give out and there's nothing but dirt and grass and gravel, but you keep going, with the ruins still poking over that wall. Then you come to this place called Anaphiotika. That means 'Little Anaphi,' see? Anaphi was an island that was almost destroyed by an earthquake, a long time ago. And they got little stone houses, right in the side of the mountain, and streets eighteen inches wide with steps so steep it's like climbing a ladder. I knew a guy who had a house there. And after I got finished work, I'd get some girls. And some wine. Even when I was a kid, I could get girls— " The Mouse snapped his fingers. "You climb up to his roof by a rusty spiral stair outside the front door, chase the cats off. Then we'd play and drink wine and watch the city spread all down the mountain like a carpet of lights, and then up the mountain with the little monastery like a splinter of bone at the top. Once we played too loud and the old lady in the house above us threw a pitcher at us. But we laughed at her and yelled back and made her get up and come down for a glass of wine. And already the sky was getting gray behind the mountains, behind the monastery. I liked that, Captain. And I like this too. I can play much better than I could back then. That's because I play a lot. I want to play the things I can see around me. But there's so much around me I can see that you can't. And I have to play that too. Just because you can't touch it, doesn't mean you can't smell and see and hear it. I walk down one world and up another and I like what I see in all of them. You know the curve of your hand in the hand of someone more important to you than anybody? That's the spirals of the galaxy locked in one another. You know the curve of your hand when the other hand is gone and you're trying to remember how it felt? There is no other curve like that. I want to play them against each other. Katin says I'm scared. I am, Captain. Of everything around me. So whatever I see, I press against my eyeballs, stick my fingers and tongue in it. I like today; that means I have to live scared. Because today is scary. And at least I'm not afraid of being frightened. Katin,— he's all mixed up with the past. Sure, the past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow; Captain, there's a river crashing by us. But we can only go down to drink one place and it's called 'now.' I play my syrynx, see, and it's like an invitation for everybody to come down and drink. When I play I want everybody to applaud. Cause when I play I'm up there, see, with the tightrope walkers, balancing on that blazing rim of crazy where my mind still works. I dance in the fire. When I play, I lead all the other dancers where you, and you"— the Mouse pointed at people passing— "and him and her, can't get without my help. Captain, back three years ago, when I was fifteen in Athens, I remember one morning up on that roof. I was leaning on the frame of the grape arbor with shiny grape leaves on my cheek and the lights of the city going out under the dawn, and the dancing had stopped, and two of the girls were making out in a red blanket back under the iron table. And suddenly I asked myself, 'What am I doing here?' Then I asked it again: 'What am I doing here?' Then it got like a tune caught in my head, playing through again and again. I was scared, Captain. I was excited and happy, and scared to death, and I bet I was grinning wide as I'm grinning now. That's how I run, Captain. I haven't got the voice to sing or shout it. But I play my harp, don't I? And what am I doing now, Captain? Climbing another street of stone steps worlds away, dawn then, night now, happy and scared as the devil. What am I doing here? Yeah! What am I doing?"

"You're rapping, Mouse." Lorq let go of the post at the top of the steps. "Let's get back to Taafite."

"Oh, yeah. Sure, Captain." The Mouse suddenly looked into the ruined face. The captain looked down at him. Deep among the broken lines and lights, the Mouse saw humor and compassion. He laughed. "I wish I had my syrynx now. I'd play your eyes out of your head. I'd turn your nose inside out from both nostrils, and you'd be twice as ugly as you are now, Captain!" Then he looked across the street: at once wet pavement and people and lights and reflections kaleidoscoped behind amazing tears. "I wish I had my syrynx," the Mouse whispered again, "had it with me ... now."

They headed back to the monorail station.

"Eating, sleeping, current wages: how would I explain the present concept of these three to somebody from, say, the twenty-third century?"

Katin sat at the edge of the party watching the dancers, himself among them, laughing before Gold. Now and then he bent over his recorder.

"The way we handle these processes would be totally beyond the comprehension of someone from seven hundred years ago, even though he understood intravenous feeding and nutrition concentrates. Still he would have nowhere near the informational equipment to understand how everyone in this society, except the very, very rich, or the very, very poor take their daily nourishment. Half the process would seem completely incomprehensible; the other half, disgusting. Odd that drinking has remained the same. At the same period of time these changes took place— bless Ashton Clark— the novel more or less died. I wonder if there's a connection. Since I have chosen this archaic art form, must I consider my audience the people who will read it tomorrow, or should I address it to yesterday? Past or future, if I left those elements out of the narrative, it might serve to give the work more momentum."