Fool's Run by Patricia McKillip

Author:Patricia McKillip [Patricia McKillip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780445205185
Google: j50gPwAACAAJ
Amazon: 0446512788
Publisher: Warner Books
Published: 1987-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

FOUR

The Magician saw nothing, said nothing on the way back from the Infirmary, until, left at their quarters by the guards, he brought himself up against a door that would not open.

“The doorknob,” Michele Viridian said faintly and turned it. “Oh.”

Their luggage was inside; the rest of the band was not. Somewhere, he assumed, a stage was being set up. He thought he was standing still; something within him was still. But he had crossed the room; a case was open; he was uncapping a bottle. There was another blank moment, tranquil, silent. Then he tasted Scotch in his throat. He lowered the bottle and shuddered suddenly, violently.

He turned. The Queen of Hearts was sitting on a couch, still crying, noiselessly and absently. Most of her face paint was on her hands. In the pallor of her skin, in her eyes, haunted, grey, seeing and not seeing, the Magician caught an eerie glimpse of Terra’s face.

He drank again. Then he found a glass in the bathroom, filled it with Scotch and pushed it into Michele’s hand.

“Drink that.” He waited while she stared at it, then lifted it off her knee and took a swallow. She swept hair out of her eyes with her fingers, streaking it with gold. A heart-pin dropped; she gazed at the heart in her hand, a hard, glossy black acrylic, worth nothing. A memory that didn’t belong to him slid into the Magician’s mind: heart-pins scattered on long hair so pale it seemed to spark here and there with white fire.

He said, “Those heart-pins. They belonged to Terra.”

She nodded. Then, her head still bowed over the pin, her eyes slanted up at him, like a child alerted and wary of something looming in the shadows. “Yes,” she whispered. She was silent a moment; her face lifted cautiously, toward the dark. “They shaved her head. Magic-Man, how could you look at her and see those heart-pins on her?”

He lifted the bottle again. He was still sweating; he felt the chill of it on his face, his back. “Why didn’t you tell me about Terra?”

“I cou—I couldn’t.”

“What do you think I would have done? You never told anyone?”

“No.”

“God, Heart-Lady.” He balanced on the couch arm beside her, the bottle on his knee. “Michele.” He touched her shoulder, and was overwhelmed by twin lonelinesses: one woman imprisoned in a vision, the other behind a mask. He said urgently, his mind filling again with Terra’s eyes, Terra’s power, “Tell me about her.”

“There’s so little to tell. There’s nothing.”

“Tell me where it began.”

“I don’t know!” Her eyes filled again. “I don’t know.”

“Tell me what you know, then. You weren’t born on the moon. Not Earth’s moon. Tell me.”

She dragged a long breath; her voice shook. “Where we were born, there was a moon’s tiny horizon. Space. Night. The planet’s face. The red planet. There was a constant sound, always the same sound. The heartbeat. The generators. They never stopped. Like blood running. The first sound we heard. For me, it became the drum of the cubes.

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