Sometimes your life can turn on the simplest of things, the most seemingly trival of decisions. Such as, do you happen to be looking down as you pass a certain spot? And if you are, and if you see something on the ground, do you pick it up?
James Alan Gardner has made many fiction sales to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Amazing, Tesseracts, On Spec, Northern Stars, and other markets. His books include the SF novels Expendable, Commitment Hour, Vigilant, Hunted, Ascending, and Trapped. His most recent novel is Radiant. His short fiction has been collected in Gravity Wells: Speculative Fiction Stories.
THIS IS A story about a ray-gun. The ray-gun will not be explained except to say, “It shoots rays.”
They are dangerous rays. If they hit you in the arm, it withers. If they hit you in the face, you go blind. If they hit you in the heart, you die. These things must be true, or else it would not be a ray-gun. But it is.
Ray-guns come from space. This one came from the captain of an alien starship passing through our solar system. The ship stopped to scoop up hydrogen from the atmosphere of Jupiter. During this refueling process, the crew mutinied for reasons we cannot comprehend. We will never comprehend aliens. If someone spent a month explaining alien thoughts to us, we’d think we understood but we wouldn’t. Our brains only know how to be human.
Although alien thoughts are beyond us, alien actions may be easy to grasp. We can understand the “what” if not the “why”. If we saw what happened inside the alien vessel, we would recognize that the crew tried to take the captain’s ray-gun and kill him.
There was a fight. The ray-gun went off many times. The starship exploded.
All this happened many centuries ago, before telescopes. The people of Earth still wore animal skins. They only knew Jupiter as a dot in the sky. When the starship exploded, the dot got a tiny bit brighter, then returned to normal. No one on Earth noticed – not even the shamans who thought dots in the sky were important.
The ray-gun survived the explosion. A ray-gun must be resilient, or else it is not a ray-gun. The explosion hurled the ray-gun away from Jupiter and out into open space.
After thousands of years, the ray-gun reached Earth. It fell from the sky like a meteor; it grew hot enough to glow, but it didn’t burn up.
The ray-gun fell at night during a blizzard. Travelling thousands of miles an hour, the ray-gun plunged deep into snow-covered woods. The snow melted so quickly that it burst into steam.
The blizzard continued, unaffected. Some things can’t be harmed, even by ray-guns.
Unthinking snowflakes drifted down. If they touched the ray-gun’s surface they vaporized, stealing heat from the weapon. Heat also radiated outward, melting snow nearby on the ground. Melt-water flowed into the shallow crater made by the ray-gun’s impact. Water and snow cooled the weapon until all excess temperature had dissipated. A million more snowflakes heaped over the crater, hiding the ray-gun till spring.
In March, the gun was found by a boy named Jack. He was fourteen years old and walking through the woods after school. He walked slowly, brooding about his lack of popularity. Jack despised popular students and had no interest in anything they did. Even so, he envied them. They didn’t appear to be lonely.
Jack wished he had a girlfriend. He wished he were important. He wished he knew what to do with his life. Instead, he walked alone in the woods on the edge of town.
The woods were not wild or isolated. They were crisscrossed with trails made by children playing hide-and-seek. But in spring, the trails were muddy; most people stayed away. Jack soon worried more about how to avoid shoe-sucking mud than about the unfairness of the world. He took wide detours around mucky patches, thrashing through brush that was crisp from winter.
Stalks broke as he passed. Burrs stuck to his jacket. He got farther and farther from the usual paths, hoping he’d find a way out by blundering forward rather than swallowing his pride and retreating.
In this way, Jack reached the spot where the ray-gun had landed. He saw the crater it had made. He found the ray-gun itself.
The gun seized Jack’s attention, but he didn’t know what it was. Its design was too alien to be recognized as a weapon. Its metal was blackened but not black, as if it had once been another colour but had finished that phase of its existence. Its pistol-butt was bulbous, the size of a tennis ball. Its barrel, as long as Jack’s hand, was straight but its surface had dozens of nubs like a briarwood cane. The gun’s trigger was a protruding blister you squeezed till it popped. A hard metal cap could slide over the blister to prevent the gun from firing accidentally, but the safety was off; it had been off for centuries, ever since the fight on the starship.
The alien captain who once owned the weapon might have considered it beautiful, but to human eyes, the gun resembled a dirty wet stick with a lump on one end. Jack might have walked by without giving it a second look if it hadn’t been lying in a scorched crater. But it was.
The crater was two paces across and barren of plant life. The vegetation had burned in the heat of the ray-gun’s fall. Soon enough, new spring growth would sprout, making the crater less obvious. At present though, the ray-gun stood out on the charred earth like a snake in an empty birdbath.
Jack picked up the gun. Though it looked like briarwood, it was cold like metal. It felt solid: not heavy, but substantial. It had the heft of a well-made object. Jack turned the gun in his hands, examining it from every angle. When he looked down the muzzle, he saw a crystal lens cut into hundreds of facets. Jack poked it with his baby-finger, thinking the lens was a piece of glass that someone had jammed inside. He had the idea this might be a toy – perhaps a squirt-gun dropped by a careless child. If so, it had to be the most expensive toy Jack had ever seen. The gun’s barrel and its lens were so perfectly machined that no one could mistake the craftsmanship.
Jack continued to poke at the weapon until the inevitable happened: he pressed the trigger blister. The ray-gun went off.
It might have been fatal, but by chance Jack was holding the gun aimed away from himself. A ray shot out of the gun’s muzzle and blasted through a maple tree ten paces away. The ray made no sound, and although Jack had seen it clearly, he couldn’t say what the ray’s colour had been. It had no colour; it was simply a presence, like wind-chill or gravity. Yet Jack was sure he’d seen a force emanate from the muzzle and strike the tree.
Though the ray can’t be described, its effect was plain. A circular hole appeared in the maple tree’s trunk where bark and wood disintegrated into sizzling plasma. The plasma expanded at high speed and pressure, blowing apart what remained of the surrounding trunk. The ray made no sound, but the explosion did. Shocked chunks of wood and boiling maple sap few outward, obliterating a cross-section of the tree. The lower part of the trunk and the roots were still there; so were the upper part and branches. In between was a gap, filled with hot escaping gases.
The unsupported part of the maple fell. It toppled ponderously backwards. The maple crashed onto the trees behind, its winter-bare branches snagging theirs. To Jack, it seemed that the forest had stopped the maple’s fall, like soldiers catching an injured companion before he hit the ground.
Jack still held the gun. He gazed at it in wonder. His mind couldn’t grasp what had happened.
He didn’t drop the gun in fear. He didn’t try to fire it again. He simply stared.
It was a ray-gun. It would never be anything else.
Jack wondered where the weapon had come from. Had aliens visited these woods? Or was the gun created by a secret government project? Did the gun’s owner want it back? Was he, she or it searching the woods right now?
Jack was tempted to put the gun back into the crater, then run before the owner showed up. But was there really an owner nearby? The crater suggested that the gun had fallen from space. Jack had seen photos of meteor impact craters; this wasn’t exactly the same, but it had a similar look.
Jack turned his eyes upward. He saw a mundane after-school sky. It had no UFOs. Jack felt embarrassed for even looking.
He examined the crater again. If Jack left the gun here, and the owner never retrieved it, sooner or later the weapon would be found by someone else – probably by children playing in the woods. They might shoot each other by accident. If this were an ordinary gun, Jack would never leave it lying in a place like this. He’d take the gun home, tell his parents, and they’d turn it over to the police.
Should he do the same for this gun? No. He didn’t want to.
But he didn’t know what he wanted to do instead. Questions buzzed through his mind, starting with, “What should I do?” then moving on to, “Am I in danger?” and, “Do aliens really exist?”
After a while, he found himself wondering, “Exactly how much can the gun blow up?” That question made him smile.
Jack decided he wouldn’t tell anyone about the gun – not now and maybe not ever. He would take it home and hide it where it wouldn’t be found, but where it would be available if trouble came. What kind of trouble? Aliens . . . spies . . . supervillains . . . who knew? If ray-guns were real, was anything impossible?
On the walk back home, Jack was so distracted by “What ifs?” that he nearly got hit by a car. He had reached the road that separated the woods from neighbouring houses. Like most roads in that part of Jack’s small town, it didn’t get much traffic. Jack stepped out from the trees and suddenly a sports-car whizzed past him, only two steps away. Jack staggered back; the driver leaned on the horn; Jack hit his shoulder on an oak tree; then the incident was over, except for belated adrenaline.
For a full minute afterward, Jack leaned against the oak and felt his heart pound. As close calls go, this one wasn’t too bad: Jack hadn’t really been near enough to the road to get hit. Still, Jack needed quite a while to calm down. How stupid would it be to die in an accident on the day he’d found something miraculous?
Jack ought to have been watching for trouble. What if the threat had been a bug-eyed monster instead of a car? Jack should have been alert and prepared. In his mind’s eye he imagined the incident again, only this time he casually somersaulted to safety rather than stumbling into a tree. That’s how you’re supposed to cheat death if you’re carrying a ray-gun: with cool heroic fair.
But Jack couldn’t do somersaults. He said to himself, I’m Peter Parker, not Spider-Man.
On the other hand, Jack had just acquired great power. And great responsibility. Like Peter Parker, Jack had to keep his power secret, for fear of tragic consequences. In Jack’s case, maybe aliens would come for him. Maybe spies or government agents would kidnap him and his family. No matter how farfetched those things seemed, the existence of a ray-gun proved the world wasn’t tame.
That night, Jack debated what to do with the gun. He pictured himself shooting terrorists and gang lords. If he rid the world of scum, pretty girls might admire him. But as soon as Jack imagined himself storming into a terrorist stronghold, he realized he’d get killed almost immediately. The ray-gun provided awesome firepower, but no defense at all. Besides if Jack had found an ordinary gun in the forest, he never would have dreamed of running around murdering bad guys. Why should a ray-gun be different?
But it was different. Jack couldn’t put the difference into words, but it was as real as the weapon’s solid weight in his hands. The ray-gun changed everything. A world that contained a ray-gun might also contain flying saucers, beautiful secret agents . . . and heroes.
Heroes who could somersault away from oncoming sports-cars. Heroes who would cope with any danger. Heroes who deserved to have a ray-gun.
When he was young, Jack had taken for granted he’d become a hero: brave, skilled and important. Somehow he’d lost that belief. He’d let himself settle for being ordinary. But now he wasn’t ordinary: he had a ray-gun.
He had to live up to it. Jack had to be ready for bug-eyed monsters and giant robots. These were no longer childish daydreams; they were real possibilities in a world where ray-guns existed. Jack could picture himself running through town, blasting aliens and saving the planet.
Such thoughts made sense when Jack held the ray-gun in his hands – as if the gun planted fantasies in his mind. The feel of the gun filled Jack with ambition.
All weapons have a sense of purpose.
Jack practised with the gun as often as he could. To avoid being seen, he rode his bike to a tract of land in the country: twenty acres owned by Jack’s Great-Uncle Ron. No one went there but Jack. Uncle Ron had once intended to build a house on the property, but that had never happened. Now Ron was in a nursing home. Jack’s family intended to sell the land once the old man died, but Ron was healthy for someone in his nineties. Until Uncle Ron’s health ran out, Jack had the place to himself.
The tract was undeveloped – raw forest, not a woods where children played. In the middle lay a pond, completely hidden by trees. Jack would float sticks in the pond and shoot them with the gun.
If he missed, the water boiled. If he didn’t, the sticks were destroyed. Sometimes they erupted in fre. Sometimes they burst with a bang but no flame. Sometimes they simply vanished. Jack couldn’t tell if he was doing something subtly different to get each effect, or if the ray-gun changed modes on its own. Perhaps it had a computer which analysed the target and chose the most lethal attack. Perhaps the attacks were always the same, but differences in the sticks made for different results. Jack didn’t know. But as spring led to summer, he became a better shot. By autumn, he’d begun throwing sticks into the air and trying to vaporize them before they reached the ground.
During this time, Jack grew stronger. Long bike rides to the pond helped his legs and his stamina. In addition, he exercised with fitness equipment his parents had bought but never used. If monsters ever came, Jack couldn’t afford to be weak – heroes had to climb fences and break down doors. They had to balance on rooftops and hang by their fingers from cliffs. They had to run fast enough to save the girl.
Jack pumped iron and ran every day. As he did so, he imagined dodging bullets and tentacles. When he felt like giving up, he cradled the ray-gun in his hands. It gave him the strength to persevere.
Before the ray-gun, Jack had seen himself as just another teenager; his life didn’t make sense. But the gun made Jack a hero who might be needed to save the Earth. It clarified everything. Sore muscles didn’t matter. Watching TV was a waste. If you let down your guard, that’s when the monsters came.
When he wasn’t exercising, Jack studied science. That was another part of being a hero. He sometimes dreamed he’d analyse the ray-gun, discovering how it worked and giving humans amazing new technology. At other times, he didn’t want to understand the gun at all. He liked its mystery. Besides, there was no guarantee Jack would ever understand how the gun worked. Perhaps human science wouldn’t progress far enough in Jack’s lifetime. Perhaps Jack himself wouldn’t have the brains to figure it out.
But he had enough brains for high school. He did well; he was motivated. He had to hold back to avoid attracting attention. When his gym teacher told him he should go out for track, Jack ran slower and pretended to get out of breath.
Spider-Man had to do the same.
Two years later, in geography class, a girl named Kirsten gave Jack a daisy. She said the daisy was good luck and he should make a wish.
Even a sixteen-year-old boy couldn’t misconstrue such a hint. Despite awkwardness and foot-dragging, Jack soon had a girlfriend.
Kirsten was quiet but pretty. She played guitar. She wrote poems. She’d never had a boyfriend but she knew how to kiss. These were all good things. Jack wondered if he should tell her about the ray-gun.
Until Kirsten, Jack’s only knowledge of girls came from his big sister, Rachel. Rachel was seventeen and incapable of keeping a secret. She talked with her friends about everything and was too slapdash to hide private things well. Jack didn’t snoop through his sister’s possessions, but when Rachel left her bedroom door ajar with empty cigarette packs tumbling out of the garbage can, who wouldn’t notice? When she gossiped on the phone about sex with her boyfriend, who couldn’t overhear? Jack didn’t want to listen, but Rachel never lowered her voice. The things Jack heard made him queasy – about his sister, and girls in general.
If he showed Kirsten the ray-gun, would she tell her friends? Jack wanted to believe she wasn’t that kind of girl, but he didn’t know how many kinds of girl there were. He just knew that the ray-gun was too important for him to take chances. Changing the status quo wasn’t worth the risk.
Yet the status quo changed anyway. The more time Jack spent with Kirsten, the less he had for shooting practice and other aspects of hero-dom. He felt guilty for skimping on crisis preparation; but when he went to the pond or spent a night reading science, he felt guilty for skimping on Kirsten. Jack would tell her he couldn’t come over to do homework and when she asked why, he’d have to make up excuses. He felt he was treating her like an enemy spy: holding her at arm’s length as if she were some femme fatale who was tempting him to betray state secrets. He hated not trusting her.
Despite this wall between them, Kirsten became Jack’s lens on the world. If anything interesting happened, Jack didn’t experience it directly; some portion of his mind stood back, enjoying the anticipation of having something to tell Kirsten about the next time they met. Whatever he saw, he wanted her to see it too. Whenever Jack heard a joke, even before he started laughing, he pictured himself repeating it to Kirsten.
Inevitably, Jack asked himself what she’d think of his hero-dom. Would she be impressed? Would she throw her arms around him and say he was even more wonderful than she’d thought? Or would she get that look on her face, the one when she heard bad poetry? Would she think he was an immature geek who’d read too many comic books and was pursuing some juvenile fantasy? How could anyone believe hostile aliens might appear in the sky? And if aliens did show up, how delusional was it that a teenage boy might make a difference, even if he owned a ray-gun and could do a hundred push-ups without stopping?
For weeks, Jack agonized: to tell or not to tell. Was Kirsten worthy, or just a copy of Jack’s sister? Was Jack himself worthy, or just a foolish boy?
One Saturday in May, Jack and Kirsten went biking. Jack led her to the pond where he practiced with the gun. He hadn’t yet decided what he’d do when they got there, but Jack couldn’t just tell Kirsten about the ray-gun. She’d never believe it was real unless she saw the rays in action. But so much could go wrong. Jack was terrified of giving away his deepest secret. He was afraid that when he saw hero-dom through Kirsten’s eyes, he’d realize it was silly.
At the pond, Jack felt so nervous he could hardly speak. He babbled about the warm weather . . . a patch of mushrooms . . . a crow cawing in a tree. He talked about everything except what was on his mind.
Kirsten misinterpreted his anxiety. She thought she knew why Jack had brought her to this secluded spot. After a while, she decided he needed encouragement, so she took off her shirt and her bra.
It was the wrong thing to do. Jack hadn’t meant this outing to be a test . . . but it was, and Kirsten had failed.
Jack took off his own shirt and wrapped his arms around her, chest touching breasts for the first time. He discovered it was possible to be excited and disappointed at the same time.
Jack and Kirsten made out on a patch of hard dirt. It was the first time they’d been alone with no risk of interruption. They kept their pants on, but they knew they could go farther: as far as there was. No one in the world would stop them from whatever they chose to do. Jack and Kirsten felt light in their skins – open and dizzy with possibilities.
Yet for Jack, it was all a mistake: one that couldn’t be reversed. Now he’d never tell Kirsten about the ray-gun. He’d missed his chance because she’d acted the way Jack’s sister would have acted. Kirsten had been thinking like a girl and she’d ruined things forever.
Jack hated the way he felt: all angry and resentful. He really liked Kirsten. He liked making out, and couldn’t wait till the next time. He refused to be a guy who dumped a girl as soon as she let him touch her breasts. But he was now shut off from her and he had no idea how to get over that.
In the following months, Jack grew guiltier: he was treating Kirsten as if she were good enough for sex but not good enough to be told about the most important thing in his life. As for Kirsten, every day made her more unhappy: she felt Jack blaming her for something but she didn’t know what she’d done. When they got together, they went straight to fondling and more as soon as possible. If they tried to talk, they didn’t know what to say.
In August, Kirsten left to spend three weeks with her grandparents on Vancouver Island. Neither she nor Jack missed each other. They didn’t even miss the sex. It was a relief to be apart. When Kirsten got back, they went for a walk and a confused conversation. Both produced excuses for why they couldn’t stay together. The excuses didn’t make sense, but neither Jack nor Kirsten noticed – they were too ashamed to pay attention to what they were saying. They both felt like failures. They’d thought their love would last forever, and now it was ending sordidly.
When the lying was over, Jack went for a run. He ran in a mental blur. His mind didn’t clear until he found himself at the pond.
Night was drawing in. He thought of all the things he’d done with Kirsten on the shore and in the water. After that first time, they’d come here a lot; it was private. Because of Kirsten, this wasn’t the same pond as when Jack had first begun to practice with the ray-gun. Jack wasn’t the same boy. He and the pond now carried histories.
Jack could feel himself balanced on the edge of quitting. He’d turned seventeen. One more year of high school, then he’d go away to university. He realized he no longer believed in the imminent arrival of aliens, nor could he see himself as some great hero saving the world.
Jack knew he wasn’t a hero. He’d used a nice girl for sex, then lied to get rid of her.
He felt like crap. But blasting the shit out of sticks made him feel a little better. The ray-gun still had its uses, even if shooting aliens wasn’t one of them.
The next day Jack did more blasting. He pumped iron. He got science books out of the library. Without Kirsten at his side several hours a day, he had time to fill, and emptiness. By the first day of the new school year, Jack was back to his full hero-dom program. He no longer deceived himself that he was preparing for battle, but the program gave him something to do: a purpose, a release, and a penance.
So that was Jack’s passage into manhood. He was dishonest with the girl he loved.
Manhood means learning who you are.
In his last year of high school, Jack went out with other girls but he was past the all-or-nothingness of First Love. He could have casual fun; he could approach sex with perspective. “Monumental and life-changing” had been tempered to “pleasant and exciting”. Jack didn’t take his girlfriends for granted, but they were people, not objects of worship. He was never tempted to tell any of them about the gun.
When he left town for university, Jack majored in Engineering Physics. He hadn’t decided whether he’d ever analyze the ray-gun’s inner workings, but he couldn’t imagine taking courses that were irrelevant to the weapon. The ray-gun was the central fact of Jack’s life. Even if he wasn’t a hero, he was set apart from other people by this evidence that aliens existed.
During freshman year, Jack lived in an on-campus dormitory. Hiding the ray-gun from his roommate would have been impossible. Jack left the weapon at home, hidden near the pond. In sophomore year, Jack rented an apartment off campus. Now he could keep the ray-gun with him. He didn’t like leaving it untended.
Jack persuaded a lab assistant to let him borrow a Geiger counter. The ray-gun emitted no radioactivity at all. Objects blasted by the gun showed no significant radioactivity either. Over time, Jack borrowed other equipment, or took blast debris to the lab so he could conduct tests when no one was around. He found nothing that explained how the ray-gun worked.
The winter before Jack graduated, Great-Uncle Ron finally died. In his will, the old man left his twenty acres of forest to Jack. Uncle Ron had found out that Jack liked to visit the pond. “I told him,” said big sister Rachel. “Do you think I didn’t know where you and Kirsten went?”
Jack had to laugh – uncomfortably. He was embarrassed to discover he couldn’t keep secrets any better than his sister.
Jack’s father offered to help him sell the land to pay for his education. The offer was polite, not pressing. Uncle Ron had doled out so much cash in his will that Jack’s family was now well-off. When Jack said he’d rather hold on to the property “until the market improves”, no one objected.
After getting his bachelor’s degree, Jack continued on to grad school: first his master’s, then his Ph.D. In one of his courses, he met Deana, working toward her own doctorate – in Electrical Engineering rather than Engineering Physics.
The two programs shared several seminars, but considered themselves rivals. Engineering Physics students pretended that Electrical Engineers weren’t smart enough to understand abstract principles. Electrical Engineers pretended that Engineering Physics students were pie-in-the-sky dreamers whose theories were always wrong until real Engineers fixed them. Choosing to sit side by side, Jack and Deana teased each other every class. Within months, Deana moved into Jack’s apartment.
Deana was small but physical. She told Jack she’d been drawn to him because he was the only man in their class who lifted weights. When Deana was young, she’d been a competitive swimmer – “Very competitive,” she said – but her adolescent growth spurt had never arrived and she was eventually outmatched by girls with longer limbs. Deana had quit the competition circuit, but she hadn’t quit swimming nor had she lost the drive to be one up on those around her. She saw most things as contests, including her relationship with Jack. Deana was not beyond cheating if it gave her an edge.
In the apartment they now shared, Jack thought he’d hidden the ray-gun so well that Deana wouldn’t find it. He didn’t suspect that when he wasn’t home she went through his things. She couldn’t stand the thought that Jack might have secrets from her.
He returned one day to find the gun on the kitchen table. Deana was poking at it. Jack wanted to yell, “Leave it alone!” but he was so choked with anger he couldn’t speak.
Deana’s hand was close to the trigger. The safety was off and the muzzle pointed in Jack’s direction. He threw himself to the floor.
Nothing happened. Deana was so surprised by Jack’s sudden move that she jerked her hand away from the gun. “What the hell are you doing?”
Jack got to his feet. “I could ask you the same question.”
“I found this. I wondered what it was.”
Jack knew she didn’t “find” the gun. It had been buried under old notebooks inside a box at the back of a closet. Jack expected that Deana would invent some excuse for why she’d been digging into Jack’s private possessions, but the excuse wouldn’t be worth believing.
What infuriated Jack most was that he’d actually been thinking of showing Deana the gun. She was a very very good engineer; Jack had dreamed that together, he and she might discover how the gun worked. Of all the women Jack had known, Deana was the first he’d asked to move in with him. She was strong and she was smart. She might understand the gun. The time had never been right to tell her the truth – Jack was still getting to know her and he needed to be absolutely sure – but Jack had dreamed . . .
And now, like Kirsten at the pond, Deana had ruined everything. Jack felt so violated he could barely stand to look at the woman. He wanted to throw her out of the apartment . . . but that would draw too much attention to the gun. He couldn’t let Deana think the gun was important.
She was still staring at him, waiting for an explanation. “That’s just something from my Great-Uncle Ron,” Jack said. “An African good-luck charm. Or Indonesian. I forget. Uncle Ron travelled a lot.” Actually, Ron sold insurance and seldom left the town where he was born. Jack picked up the gun from the table, trying to do so calmly rather than protectively. “I wish you hadn’t touched this. It’s old and fragile.”
“It felt pretty solid to me.”
“Solid but still breakable.”
“Why did you dive to the floor?”
“Just silly superstition. It’s bad luck to have this end point toward you.” Jack gestured toward the muzzle. “And it’s good luck to be on this end.” He gestured toward the butt, then tried to make a joke. “Like there’s a Maxwell demon in the middle, batting bad luck one way and good luck the other.”
“You believe that crap?” Deana asked. She was an engineer. She went out of her way to disbelieve crap.
“Of course, I don’t believe it,” Jack said. “But why ask for trouble?”
He took the gun back to the closet. Deana followed. As Jack returned the gun to its box, Deana said she’d been going through Jack’s notes in search of anything he had on partial differential equations. Jack nearly let her get away with the lie; he usually let the women in his life get away with almost anything. But he realized he didn’t want Deana in his life anymore. Whatever connection she and he had once felt, it was cut off the moment he saw her with the ray-gun.
Jack accused her of invading his privacy. Deana said he was paranoid. The argument grew heated. Out of habit, Jack almost backed down several times, but he stopped himself. He didn’t want Deana under the same roof as the ray-gun. His feelings were partly irrational possessiveness, but also justifiable caution. If Deana got the gun and accidentally fired it, the results might be disastrous.
Jack and Deana continued to argue: right there in the closet within inches of the ray-gun. The gun lay in its box, like a child at the feet of parents fighting over custody. The ray-gun did nothing, as if it didn’t care who won.
Eventually, unforgivable words were spoken. Deana said she’d move out as soon as possible. She left to stay the night with a friend.
The moment she was gone, Jack moved the gun. Deana still had a key to the apartment – she needed it until she could pack her things – and Jack was certain she’d try to grab the weapon as soon as he was busy elsewhere. The ray-gun was now a prize in a contest, and Deana never backed down.
Jack took the weapon to the university. He worked as an assistant for his Ph.D. supervisor, and he’d been given a locker in the supervisor’s lab. The locker wasn’t Fort Knox but leaving the gun there was better than leaving it in the apartment. The more Jack thought about Deana, the more he saw her as prying and obsessive, grasping for dominance. He didn’t know what he’d ever seen in her.
The next morning, he wondered if he had overreacted. Was he demonizing his ex like a sitcom cliché? If she was so egotistic, why hadn’t he noticed before? Jack had no good answer. He decided he didn’t need one. Unlike when he broke up with Kirsten, Jack felt no guilt this time. The sooner Deana was gone, the happier he’d be.
In a few days, Deana called to say she’d found a new place to live. She and Jack arranged a time for her to pick up her belongings. Jack didn’t want to be there while she moved out; he couldn’t stand seeing her in the apartment again. Instead, Jack went back to his home town for a long weekend with his family.
It was lucky he did. Jack left Friday afternoon and didn’t get back to the university until Monday night. The police were waiting for him. Deana had disappeared late Saturday.
She’d talked to friends on Saturday afternoon. She’d made arrangements for Sunday brunch but hadn’t shown up. No one had seen her since.
As the ex-boyfriend, Jack was a prime suspect. But his alibi was solid: his home town was hundreds of miles from the university, and his family could testify he’d been there the whole time. Jack couldn’t possibly have sneaked back to the university, made Deana disappear, and raced back home.
Grudgingly, the police let Jack off the hook. They decided Deana must have been depressed by the break-up of the relationship. She might have run off so she wouldn’t have to see Jack around the university. She might even have committed suicide.
Jack suspected otherwise. As soon as the police let him go, he went to his supervisor’s lab. His locker had been pried open. The ray-gun lay on a nearby lab bench.
Jack could easily envision what happened. While moving out her things, Deana searched for the ray-gun. She hadn’t found it in the apartment. She knew Jack had a locker in the lab and she’d guessed he’d stashed the weapon there. She broke open the locker to get the gun. She’d examined it and perhaps tried to take it apart. The gun went off.
Now Deana was gone. Not even a smudge on the floor. The ray-gun lay on the lab bench as guiltless as a stone. Jack was the only one with a conscience.
He suffered for weeks. Jack wondered how he could feel so bad about a woman who’d made him furious. But he knew the source of his guilt: while he and Deana were arguing in the closet, Jack had imagined vaporizing her with the gun. He was far too decent to shoot her for real, but the thought had crossed his mind. If Deana simply vanished, Jack wouldn’t have to worry about what she might do. The ray-gun had made that thought come true, as if it had read Jack’s mind.
Jack told himself the notion was ridiculous. The gun wasn’t some genie who granted Jack’s unspoken wishes. What happened to Deana came purely from her own bad luck and inquisitiveness.
Still, Jack felt like a murderer. After all this time, Jack realized the ray-gun was too dangerous to keep. As long as Jack had it, he’d be forced to live alone: never marrying, never having children, never trusting the gun around other people. And even if Jack became a recluse, accidents could happen. Someone else might die. It would be Jack’s fault.
He wondered why he’d never had this thought before. Jack suddenly saw himself as one of those people who own a vicious attack dog. People like that always claimed they could keep the dog under control. How often did they end up on the evening news? How often did children get bitten, maimed or killed?
Some dogs are tragedies waiting to happen. The ray-gun was too. It would keep slipping off its leash until it was destroyed. Twelve years after finding the gun, Jack realized he finally had a heroic mission: to get rid of the weapon that made him a hero in the first place.
I’m not Spider-Man, he thought, I’m Frodo.
But how could Jack destroy something that had survived so much? The gun hadn’t frozen in the cold of outer space; it hadn’t burned up as it plunged through Earth’s atmosphere; it hadn’t broken when it hit the ground at terminal velocity. If the gun could endure such punishment, extreme measures would be needed to lay it to rest.
Jack imagined putting the gun into a blast furnace. But what if the weapon went off? What if it shot out the side of the furnace? The furnace itself could explode. That would be a disaster. Other means of destruction had similar problems. Crushing the gun in a hydraulic press . . . what if the gun shot a hole in the press, sending pieces of equipment flying in all directions? Immersing the gun in acid . . . what if the gun went off and splashed acid over everything? Slicing into the gun with a laser . . . Jack didn’t know what powered the gun, but obviously it contained vast energy. Destabilizing that energy might cause an explosion, a radiation leak, or some even greater catastrophe. Who knew what might happen if you tampered with alien technology?
And what if the gun could protect itself? Over the years, Jack had read every ray-gun story he could find. In some stories, such weapons had built-in computers. They had enough artificial intelligence to assess their situations. If they didn’t like what was happening, they took action. What if Jack’s gun was similar? What if attempts to destroy the weapon induced it to fight back? What if the ray-gun got mad?
Jack decided the only safe plan was to drop the gun into an ocean – the deeper the better. Even then, Jack feared the gun would somehow make its way back to shore. He hoped that the weapon would take years or even centuries to return, by which time humanity might be scientifically equipped to deal with the ray-gun’s power.
Jack’s plan had one weakness: both the university and Jack’s home town were far from the sea. Jack didn’t know anyone with an ocean-going boat suitable for dumping objects into deep water. He’d just have to drive to the coast and see if he could rent something.
But not until summer. Jack was in the final stages of his Ph.D. and didn’t have time to leave the university for an extended trip. As a temporary measure, Jack moved the ray-gun back to the pond. He buried the weapon several feet underground, hoping that would keep it safe from animals and anyone else who happened by.
(Jack imagined a new generation of lovesick teenagers discovering the pond. If that happened, he wanted them safe. Like a real hero, Jack cared about people he didn’t know.)
Jack no longer practised with the gun, but he maintained his physical regimen. He tried to exhaust himself so he wouldn’t have the energy to brood. It didn’t work. Lying sleepless in bed, he kept wondering what would have happened if he’d told Deana the truth. She wouldn’t have killed herself if she’d been warned to be cautious. But Jack had cared more about his precious secret than Deana’s life.
In the dark, Jack muttered, “It was her own damned fault.” His words were true, but not true enough.
When Jack wasn’t at the gym, he cloistered himself with schoolwork and research. (His doctoral thesis was about common properties of different types of high-energy beams.) Jack didn’t socialize. He seldom phoned home. He took days to answer email messages from his sister. Even so, he told himself he was doing an excellent job of acting “normal.”
Jack had underestimated his sister’s perceptiveness. One weekend, Rachel showed up on his doorstep to see why he’d “gone weird”. She spent two days digging under his skin. By the end of the weekend, she could tell that Deana’s disappearance had disturbed Jack profoundly. Rachel couldn’t guess the full truth, but as a big sister she felt entitled to meddle in Jack’s life. She resolved to snap her brother out of his low spirits.
The next weekend Rachel showed up on Jack’s doorstep again. This time, she brought Kirsten.
Nine years had passed since Kirsten and Jack had seen each other: the day they both graduated from high school. In the intervening time, when Jack had thought of Kirsten, he always pictured her as a high-school girl. It was strange to see her as a woman. At twenty-seven, she was not greatly changed from eighteen – new glasses and a better haircut – but despite similarities to her teenage self, Kirsten wore her life differently. She’d grown up.
So had Jack. Meeting Kirsten by surprise made Jack feel ambushed, but he soon got over it. Rachel helped by talking loud and fast through the initial awkwardness. She took Jack and Kirsten for coffee, and acted as emcee as they got reacquainted.
Kirsten had followed a path close to Jack’s: university and graduate work. She told him, “No one makes a living as a poet. Most of us find jobs as English professors – teaching poetry to others who won’t make a living at it either.”
Kirsten had earned her doctorate a month earlier. Now she was living back home. She currently had no man in her life – her last relationship had fizzled out months ago, and she’d decided to avoid new involvements until she knew where she would end up teaching. She’d sent her résumé to English departments all over the continent and was optimistic about her chances of success; to Jack’s surprise, Kirsten had published dozens of poems in literary magazines. She’d even sold two to The New Yorker. Her publishing record would be enough to interest many English departments.
After coffee, Rachel dragged Jack to a mall where she and Kirsten made him buy new clothes. Rachel bullied Jack while Kirsten made apologetic suggestions. Jack did his best to be a good sport; as they left the mall, Jack was surprised to find that he’d actually had a good time.
That evening, there was wine and more conversation. Rachel took Jack’s bed, leaving him and Kirsten to make whatever arrangements they chose. The two of them joked about Rachel trying to pair them up again. Eventually Kirsten took the couch in the living room while Jack crawled into a sleeping bag on the kitchen floor . . . but that was only after talking till three in the morning.
Rachel and Kirsten left the next afternoon, but Jack felt cleansed by their visit. He stayed in touch with Kirsten by email. It was casual: not romance, but a knowing friendship.
In the next few months, Kirsten got job interviews with several colleges and universities. She accepted a position on the Oregon coast. She sent Jack pictures of the school. It was directly on the ocean; it even had a beach. Kirsten said she’d always liked the water. She teasingly reminded him of their times at the pond.
But when Jack saw Kirsten’s pictures of the Pacific, all he could think of was dumping the ray-gun into the sea. He could drive out to visit her . . . rent a boat . . . sail out to deep water . . .
No. Jack knew nothing about sailing, and he didn’t have enough money to rent a boat that could venture far offshore. “How many years have I been preparing?” he asked himself. “Didn’t I intend to be ready for any emergency? Now I have an honest-to-god mission, and I’m useless.”
Then Kirsten sent him an emailed invitation to go sailing with her.
She had access to a sea-going yacht. It belonged to her grandparents – the ones she’d visited on Vancouver Island just before she and Jack broke up. During her trip to the island, Kirsten had gone boating with her grandparents every day. At the start, she’d done it to take her mind off Jack; then she’d discovered she enjoyed being out on the waves.
She’d spent time with her grandparents every summer since, learning the ins and outs of yachting. She’d taken courses. She’d earned the necessary licences. Now Kirsten was fully qualified for deep-water excursions . . . and as a gift to wish her well on her new job, Kirsten’s grandparents were lending her their boat for a month. They intended to sail down to Oregon, spend a few days there, then fly off to tour Australia. When they were done, they’d return and sail back home; but in the meantime, Kirsten would have the use of their yacht. She asked Jack if he’d like to be her crew.
When Jack got this invitation, he couldn’t help being disturbed. Kirsten had never mentioned boating before. Because she was living in their home town, most of her email to Jack had been about old high-school friends. Jack had even started to picture her as a teenager again; he’d spent a weekend with the grown-up Kirsten, but all her talk of high-school people and places had muddled Jack’s mental image of her. The thought of a bookish teenage girl captaining a yacht was absurd.
But that was a lesser problem compared to the suspicious convenience of her invitation. Jack needed a boat; all of a sudden, Kirsten had one. The coincidence was almost impossible to swallow.
He thought of the unknown aliens who made the ray-gun. Could they be influencing events? If the ray-gun was intelligent, could it be responsible for the coincidence?
Kirsten had often spent time near the gun. On their first visit to the pond, she and Jack had lain half-naked with the gun in Jack’s backpack beside them.
He thought of Kirsten that day. So open. So vulnerable. The gun had been within inches. Had it nurtured Kirsten’s interest in yachting . . . her decision to get a job in Oregon . . . even her grandparents’ offer of their boat? Had it molded Kirsten’s life so she was ready when Jack needed her? And if the gun could do that, what had it done to Jack himself?
This is ridiculous, Jack thought. The gun is just a gun. It doesn’t control people. It just kills them.
Yet Jack couldn’t shake off his sense of eeriness – about Kirsten as well as the ray-gun. All these years, while Jack had been preparing himself to be a hero, Kirsten had somehow done the same. Her self-improvement program had worked better than Jack’s. She had a boat; he didn’t.
Coincidence or not, Jack couldn’t look a gift-horse in the mouth. He told Kirsten he’d be delighted to go sailing with her. Only later did he realize that their time on the yacht would have a sexual subtext. He broke out laughing. “I’m such an idiot. We’ve done it again.” Like that day at the pond, Jack had only been thinking about the gun. Kirsten had been thinking about Jack. Her invitation wasn’t a carte-blanche come-on but it had a strong hint of, “Let’s get together and see what develops.”
Where Kirsten was concerned, Jack had always been slow to catch the signals. He thought, Obviously, the ray-gun keeps dulling my senses. This time, Jack meant it as a joke.
Summer came. Jack drove west with the ray-gun in the trunk of his car. The gun’s safety was on, but Jack still drove as if he were carrying nuclear waste. He’d taken the gun back and forth between his home town and university many times, but this trip was longer, on unfamiliar roads. It was also the last trip Jack ever intended to make with the gun; if the gun didn’t want to be thrown into the sea, perhaps it would cause trouble. But it didn’t.
For much of the drive, Jack debated how to tell Kirsten about the gun. He’d considered smuggling it onto the boat and throwing the weapon overboard when she wasn’t looking, but Jack felt that he owed her the truth. It was overdue. Besides, this cruise could be the beginning of a new relationship. Jack didn’t want to start by sneaking behind Kirsten’s back.
So he had to reveal his deepest secret. Every other secret would follow: what happened to Deana; what had really been on Jack’s mind that day at the pond; what made First Love go sour. Jack would expose his guilt to the woman who’d suffered from the fallout.
He thought, She’ll probably throw me overboard with the gun. But he would open up anyway, even if it made Kirsten hate him. When he tossed the ray-gun into the sea, he wanted to unburden himself of everything.
The first day on the boat, Jack said nothing about the ray-gun. Instead, he talked compulsively about trivia. So did Kirsten. It was strange being together, looking so much like they did in high school but being entirely different people.
Fortunately, they had practical matters to fill their time. Jack needed a crash course in seamanship. He learned quickly. Kirsten was a good teacher. Besides, Jack’s longstanding program of hero-dom had prepared his mind and muscles. Kirsten was impressed that he knew Morse code and had extensive knowledge of knots. She asked, “Were you a Boy Scout?”
“No. When I was a kid, I wanted to be able to untie myself if I ever got captured by spies.”
Kirsten laughed. She thought he was joking.
That first day, they stayed close to shore. They never had to deal with being alone; there were always other yachts in sight, and sailboats, and people on shore. When night came, they put in to harbour. They ate in an ocean-view restaurant. Jack asked, “So where will we go tomorrow?”
“Where would you like? Up the coast, down the coast, or straight out to sea?”
“Why not straight out?” said Jack.
Back on the yacht, he and Kirsten talked long past midnight. There was only one cabin, but two separate fold-away beds. Without discussion, they each chose a bed. Both usually slept in the nude, but for this trip they’d both brought makeshift “pajamas” consisting of a T-shirt and track-pants. They laughed at the clothes, the coincidence, and themselves.
They didn’t kiss goodnight. Jack silently wished they had. He hoped Kirsten was wishing the same thing. They talked for an hour after they’d turned out the lights, becoming nothing but voices in the dark.
The next day they sailed due west. Both waited to see if the other would suggest turning back before dark. Neither did. The farther they got from shore, the fewer other boats remained in sight. By sunset, Jack and Kirsten knew they were once more alone with each other. No one in the world would stop them from whatever they chose to do.
Jack asked Kirsten to stay on deck. He went below and got the ray-gun from his luggage. He brought it up into the twilight. Before he could speak, Kirsten said, “I’ve seen that before.”
Jack stared at her in shock. “What? Where?”
“I saw it years ago, in the woods back home. I was out for a walk. I noticed it lying in a little crater, as if it had fallen from the sky.”
“Really? You found it too?”
“But I didn’t touch it,” Kirsten said. “I don’t know why. Then I heard someone coming and I ran away. But the memory stayed vivid in my head. A mysterious object in a crater in the woods. I can’t tell you how often I’ve tried to write poems about it, but they never work out.” She looked at the gun in Jack’s hands. “What is it?”
“A ray-gun,” he said. In the fading light, he could see a clump of seaweed floating a short distance from the boat. He raised the gun and fired. The seaweed exploded in a blaze of fire, burning brightly against the dark waves.
“A ray-gun,” said Kirsten. “Can I try it?”
Some time later, holding hands, they let the gun fall into the water. It sank without protest.
Long after that, they talked in each other’s arms. Jack said the gun had made him who he was. Kirsten said she was the same. “Until I saw the gun, I just wrote poems about myself – overwritten self-absorbed pap, like every teenage girl. But the gun gave me something else to write about. I’d only seen it for a minute, but it was one of those burned-into-your-memory moments. I felt driven to find words to express what I’d seen. I kept refining my poems, trying to make them better. That’s what made the difference.”
“I felt driven too,” Jack said. “Sometimes I’ve wondered if the gun can affect human minds. Maybe it brainwashed us into becoming who we are.”
“Or maybe it’s just Stone Soup,” Kirsten said. “You know the story? Someone claims he can make soup from a stone, but what he really does is trick people into adding their own food to the pot. Maybe the ray-gun is like that. It did nothing but sit there like a stone. You and I did everything – made ourselves who we are – and the ray-gun is only an excuse.”
“Maybe,” Jack said. “But so many coincidences brought us here . . .”
“You think the gun manipulated us because it wanted to be thrown into the Pacific? Why?”
“Maybe even a ray-gun gets tired of killing.” Jack shivered, thinking of Deana. “Maybe the gun feels guilty for the deaths it’s caused; it wanted to go someplace where it would never have to kill again.”
“Deana’s death wasn’t your fault,” Kirsten said. “Really, Jack. It was awful, but it wasn’t your fault.” She shivered too, then made her voice brighter. “Maybe the ray-gun orchestrated all this because it’s an incurable romantic. It wanted to bring us together: our own personal matchmaker from the stars.”
Jack kissed Kirsten on the nose. “If that’s true, I don’t object.”
“Neither do I.” She kissed him back.
Not on the nose.
Far below, the ray-gun drifted through the cold black depths. Beneath it, on the bottom of the sea, lay wreckage from the starship that had exploded centuries before. The wreckage had travelled all the way from Jupiter. Because of tiny differences in trajectory, the wreckage had splashed down thousands of miles from where the ray-gun landed.
The ray-gun sank straight toward the wreckage . . . but what the wreckage held or why the ray-gun wanted to rejoin it we will never know.
We will never comprehend aliens. If someone spent a month explaining alien thoughts to us, we’d think we understood.
But we wouldn’t.
New writer Gord Sellar was born in Malawi, grew up in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan, and currently lives in South Korea, where he teaches at a university. The year 2008 was a big one for him, as he published highly visible stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, Fantasy, and Tesseracts Twelve, one of the splashier debuts in recent years. (He had two previous sales last year, to Nature and to Flurb, but they went largely unnoticed.) He graduated from Clarion West in 2006. His website is at gordsellar.com.
In addition to writing, Sellar is a jazz buff and plays jazz saxophone, a background he obviously drew upon in writing the clever story that follows, in which a down-and-out jazzman gets a chance to play some literally out-of-this-world music, and hopes that his luck has changed. Which it has, but the question is, which way?
HIS FIRST NIGHT back on Earth after his gig on the Frogships, Bird showed up at Minton’s cleaner than a broke-dick dog, with a brand new horn and a head full of crazy-people music. He’d got himself a nice suit somewhere, and a fine new Conn alto. Now, this was back in ’48, when everyone – me included – was crazy about Conn and King and only a few younger cats were playing on Selmer horns.
But it wasn’t just that big-shouldered suit and the horn; the cat was clean. I mean clean, no more dope, no more liquor, no more fried chicken. Hell, he was always called Bird – short for Yardbird – on account of how much fried chicken he liked to eat. This was like a whole different Charlie Parker. He was living clean as a monk. He was walking straight and talking clear. His eyes weren’t all fucked-up and scary anymore, either.
To be honest, I didn’t recognize him when he walked into Minton’s. It was about three am, and the regular jam session had been going for a long time, and all these cats from Philly had shown up, you know, dressed up like country negroes on Sunday morning and playing all that Philadelphia grandpa-swing they liked used to like to play. Smooth and all, but old-fashioned, especially for 1948. Even in New York City, the hotbed of bebop and the only place where the Frogs were taking jazz musicians on tour, there was still a lotta old guys dressed up in Zoot suits cut for them five years before, trying to play like Coleman Hawkins and Johnny Hodges and Lester Young used to in the old days, before they all disappeared. Bebop was huge, but a lot of ignorant cats, they were trying to resist it, still disrespecting us, calling what we played “Chinese music” and shit.
But Bird, he was clean like I said, but he played some shit like I never heard before, like nobody never heard before. I’m telling you, when he went up on the bandstand and brought that horn up to his mouth, the music that came out of it was . . . well, it made us crazy. Back in those days, we were like mad scientists when it came to sounds. We’d be taking a leak at the same time and one of us would break wind and we all knew what note it was. We’d call it together, turn to one another laughing and shit, and say, “E-flat, Jack, you just farted an E-flat.” And that night we’d play every third tune in E-flat.
But them tunes Bird was playing, man, I ain’t never heard nobody put notes together like that. The rhythms were so tangled up that even I had to listen close to catch them all. He was playing 37 notes evenly spaced across a four-beat bar in fast swing, crazy licks like that, and he was playing all these halfway tunings, quarter tones and multiphonics and all kinds of craziness. And even so, he was swinging.
Everyone went crazy, it was just too much. And Bird just grinned like a goddamn king and said, in that snooty British gentleman accent he used to like to put on sometimes, “Ladies and gents, this music is the wave of the future. It received its dé-but off the rings of Saturn, and if you don’t like it, you can come right on up here and kiss my royal black ass.”
Them old guys, the Zoot suit cats, they didn’t like that, but they didn’t say nothing. Everyone remembered how Bird never took no shit off nobody back before he went off touring the solar system.
Man, all that scared me a little, but I still wanted to get onto one of them Frogships and hear what kind of music everyone was playing up there. They were hiring cats, everyone knew that, but that was all I knew about it. Now, I hadn’t never met Bird before, and I knew he wasn’t going to talk to me, but Max Roach, Max was drumming there that night, and I’d met Max one time before there at Minton’s, so I figured I could talk to him.
Max, he’d gone up onto the Frogships a year or two back. Well, he looked at me like he knew what I wanted, what I was gonna ask about, but he sat down to talk to me anyway. I told him I wanted onto the ships, wanted to know how to get in.
“You audition, same as for anything else,” he said, shrugging. “Who knows what they like? Don’t ask me.”
“But you been on the ships . . .”
“Uh-huh,” Max said, nodded, but didn’t say no more.
“What kind of music they hire you to play?”
“Oh, man, you just need to play whatever,” he said in that quiet, calm voice of his. He was a really cool, soulful cat most of the time. “Some of the time, they take cats who swing the old way, real old-fashioned; like what Duke’s band used to play in the old days, or Billy Eckstine’s. Hell, sometimes they want New Orleans funeral songs, or some cat who plays like Jelly Roll Morton. Other times they only take cats who play real hard bebop, man. You can’t never know what they want. But anyway, you don’t need to go on up to the ships. It messes a cat up, man.” He tapped the tablecloth with his drumsticks, hit my glass of bourbon with one of them. Ting.
I know better now, but then I just thought he was stonewalling me. Figured maybe there were only limited spaces, and he was bullshitting me, trying to keep gigs open for cats he knew better.
“What do you mean?” I said. “Look at Bird! Remember when he left? Cat went up there looking like death on a soda cracker, and look at him now!” I glanced over and saw him sitting at a table with Diz and Miles and Monk and Art Blakey and Fat Girl Navarro and a couple of them white women who used to hang around at Minton’s. They were laughing like a bunch of old women, like someone had just told a joke a second before. Bird, he wasn’t fat no more, he was lean, and real clear-headed and healthy-looking, nothing like when they let his ass out of Camarillo. He looked like a cat with a long life ahead of him.
“Bird’s been different, always, man,” Max said. “He’s just that kind of cat. Plus, they fixed him up. They wanted him bad, so they took him apart and then put him back together out there. A lot of cats, they just . . .” Then he stopped, like he didn’t know what to say, and his eyes went a little scary, the way Bird’s used to be, and he looked at me like he could see through my skin or something, and said, “Look, cats almost never come back like he did. The things that go on . . . you can’t even imagine,” he said.
The room went quiet sometime while we were talking, and I could tell Max was relieved. He didn’t like talking about the Frogships, didn’t want to recommend them to nobody. We both looked around and saw other people were all staring at the back of the club, at the entrance, and what do you know but this big tall-assed Frog had come on in the back and was standing there watching us all.
These days there ain’t a lot of cats who remember what the Frogs looked like, really. It’s been so long since they moved on, and let me tell you, the pictures don’t show not even the half of it. They were like these big frogs who stretched their skin over a real tall man, but they had more eyes and weird-assed hands. No fingers, just some tentacles on the ends of their goddamned arms, man, and they walked on two legs. Now, this Frog, he was fat, and he wore a Zoot suit tailored specially for him, hat and all, which just made him look totally out, man, just crazy. He came in with three or four guys, white hipsters, and they sat themselves down at a table in the front of the club that was set out for them in a hurry.
That Frog, he was smoking long, black cigarettes, four or five of them at once, on these long jade cigarette holders. He was looking around, too, with all these eyes on his face, as if to say, Where’s the goddamn music? I looked at him closely, and noticed that his skin, his face and hands, even his suit, it was all a little blurry, like a badly-shot photograph. He puffed on his cigarettes and looked around.
Nobody said nothing.
But all these cats, especially them sad Philly boys, they all thought it was their big chance. They hurried on up onto the bandstand, and they started to play their jumped-up jive-ass swing. That old Frog just leaned on back in its chair and kept on smoking those slow-burning black cigarettes, sticking its long blue tongue up into the smoke as it puffed it out. There were little black eyes all over its tongue, too, and they swiveled toward the bandstand.
I couldn’t tell if it was bored or enjoying the show, but I do know that finally, after they finished a few tunes, Bird had finally had enough. He tapped Thelonious Monk on the shoulder, and Monk nodded, and stood up, and went up to the bandstand. Everyone had heard about what had happened that night at the Three Deuces back in January in 1946; everyone knew how these Frog cats felt about Monk’s music.
Man, Thelonious, he just went on up to the piano and sat down, and everyone else on the bandstand just watched him, every one of them quiet and thinking, Oh shit. Monk, he lifted up his hands, all dramatic like he was about to play a Beethoven sonata or whatever, like that, you know what I mean, and when everyone shut up he started playing.
“Straight, No Chaser.” That was a fine tune, just a little jagged and twisted up. He played the head real simple, melody with his right hand, old-fashioned blues stride with the left. The alien leaned forward. Everyone knew how much they liked Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, granddaddy music like that.
But when Monk finished out the head the second time, and started improvising on the changes, man, you could see him sitting with this big-assed grin on his face up there at the piano. He started playing some of his really Monkish shit, all that weird, tangled up melody, banging out tone clusters over and over and plunking out his crooked little comping rhythms.
The Frog, when it heard Monk start up with all that, it stood itself up, dropped its cigarettes on the ground and slapped one hand over its huge front face-eyes and the other behind the back of its head. It was moaning – with three or four voices at once – and this blue stuff starting leaking out of its nose. Then it decided it was time to get the hell out.
It wobbled but finally made it out the door, shaky like a junkie dying to shoot himself up. All them hipster cats it came in with, they all followed it out, making out like they were all nervous and worried. Teddy Hill, who was running Minton’s Playhouse back then, he followed them all out with a scared face on, too. Bird, he laughed like a fucking maniac when he saw all that.
“Damn Frogs never could handle Monk,” Max said, laughing. “Man, that was beautiful!”
A few weeks later, my buddy J.J. came by with this poster he’d found on some lamp-post nearby. He read it out to me while I brushed my teeth one morning.
“Now hiring jazz musicians of all instrumental specialties . . . the intergalactic society of entertainers and artists’ guild . . . Colored Americans only please, special preference currently given to aspiring bebop players. No re-hires from previous tours please. One-year (possibly renewable) contracts available. See the solar system! Play blues on the moons of Jupiter! Go someplace where The Man won’t be breathing down your neck! Press HERE for more information!”
I spat out the foam from my toothpaste, put down my electrobrush, and asked, “So? Where’s the audition?”
He pressed his finger on the word HERE and the sheet went blank for a second. Then a map appeared on it. “Over on West 52nd, at the Onyx.”
“What?” I was shocked. Going to the Onyx for an audition, man, that was like going on a tour of Mississippi with a busload of negroes, women and children and all. Over at the Onyx, man, it was all what my father used to call ofays – white men – running the joint, every last one of them motherfuckers so goddamned racist it wasn’t even funny.
“You heard me. The Onyx.”
“Shit. What time?”
“The Onyx?!” That was my woman, Francine. She’d been cooking and she’d come up behind J.J. so quiet we hadn’t heard her till it was too late. She looked at J.J. and man, it was like, No bacon for you this morning, motherfucker —
She pushed past him, put her hands on her hips, and said, “What are you gonna do? Go on up in space, and leave me alone with this baby?” she said, putting her hands under her big belly.
“Francine,” I said.
“No, Robbie, don’t try to sweet talk me,” she said, shaking her head like she was having none of this. “Goddamn! My mama told me I should stay away from you. Said musicians weren’t nothing but trouble.”
I looked up at J.J. and tilted my head in the direction of the door, and he just nodded and left us alone. She didn’t say nothing till the screen door clicked shut.
“Robbie, baby,” she said, looking up at me with those sweet brown eyes of hers. “You are not going to that audition at the Onyx,” she said.
Man, it just about broke my heart, but I knew that I was done, completely done with her. I knew she’d be a good mama, but not to my babies. It was all over right then.
So I looked at her, and I said, “I seen those letters you got all wrapped-up. Up in your sock drawer.”
“What letters?” she said, and it was almost believable, except I could see she was pretending. Lying.
“Francine, come on, girl. I wasn’t born yesterday. Maybe last week, but not yesterday, baby. I know about you and Thornton. And don’t be telling me it’s some one-sided thing, because I seen how you wrapped them letters up in a ribbon and hid them and all. And I seen the dates on them, too.”
She slumped a little, and said, “Baby, I . . .” and then she stopped. She couldn’t lie to me no more, and she knew it. She was tired of lying to me, too, I think. She was a good enough woman, Francine.
“Now listen, baby,” she said, and her voice cracked but she tried to sound strong just the same. “It ain’t like I never heard about you running around with those other women. I know I ain’t the only one of us who been unfaithful.”
“Francine, you and I both know that baby probably ain’t mine, the way you been rationing me around here – which is why I been with other women, since you don’t give me what I need. Did I complain to you? Have I been nagging your ass? No, that’s fine, I understand. But this . . . look, you want that baby to have a daddy, you better go marry the man who done gave it to you.”
“This is bullshit,” she said. “You can run around as much as you want, but you can’t never get pregnant. Me, I do it once or twice behind your back, and look what I get.”
“I know,” I said, and I tried to put my arms around her, but she pushed me away. “Life ain’t fair, is it, girl?” I said, and tried again. This time she let me hug her. It was breaking my heart, those brown-sugar eyes all full of tears, her arms shaking a little as she hugged me back. But I wasn’t gonna have no other man’s baby calling me daddy, and I wasn’t gonna stay with no woman who been going behind my back with no other cat, so it was probably a mistake, me being so nice to her just then like that.
She started crying, saying, “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry.” Begging and pleading, and kissing on me. She told me she wouldn’t never do it again.
“That’s good. You learned your lesson. Like you gonna be a good wife to Teddy Thornton,” I said. He was the one who’d written her the letters. Used to play drums around town, though I heard his granddad died and he went into business off the money he inherited.
And I tell you, when I said that, it was like the werewolf in them movies, you know, how he changes shape in a second? That was Francine, man. Bam. “What, you mean you ain’t staying, now, after all that?” Her eyes were full of a kind of fire only a woman can fill up with.
I shook my head. “I’m gonna get this gig, girl. Damn, Bird, and Hawk, and . . . all those cats who gone up there, they come back richer than Rockefeller. You damn right I’m going up there.”
“You son of a bitch!” she yelled, tears still running down her cheeks, and she grabbed a lamp from the hallway just outside the bathroom. “You was gonna run off to space no matter what, wasn’t you? God-damn you!”
Then she threw the lamp at me, but I was quick and jumped sideways, so it hit the floor and broke into a million pieces. Man, that pissed me off. It was my goddamn lamp, I’d bought it with the money I’d made off gigs, and I knew it’d be good as new in a few hours – it was the new foreign kind that was just coming out then, the kind that could fix itself – but this shit was still just a pain in the ass. I never did like being disrespected by no women.
But I just nodded my head. Didn’t matter what she broke, long as it wasn’t my horns. I wouldn’t need no lamp where I was going.
The Onyx was a nice place, inside. Fancy, I mean. Every cat I knew was in there, plus a few I wished I knew. Sonny Rollins was in there, Red Dog, and Art Tatum, and Hot Lips Bell, and some other cats I recognized too.
We were all outside the green room, waiting. Green room, that shit was funny: it’d always been called that, but at the Onyx, during these auditions, it was really the green room, with real green Frogs inside. That was where cats went in to play their auditions, and the Frogs would listen and decide whether they wanted them on the ships.
I waited my turn. Everyone was real quiet, more than you’d expect, and through the wall we could hear drums and bass start up every once in a while after guys went in. The bass sounded like one of those expensive self-amplified ones, the kind that looked like a regular bass but got real loud all on its own, except you had to plug it into the wall at night.
Cat after cat went in, played for five or ten minutes, and then left. I sat there with my buddies, Back Pocket and J.J. and Big Jimmy Hunt, and we all just cradled our instruments and watched the TV in the corner of the room, no sound, just colour picture, and waited without talking.
Finally, after a few hours of listening and waiting, it was my turn. The door opened, and this skinny white hipster came out and called my name: “Robbie Coolidge?”
“That’s me,” I said, and I followed him into the room.
There were a couple of Frogs sitting on a couch in there, both of them smoking bouquets of the same damned cigarettes on long metal cigarette holders. They were wearing shades and black suits that didn’t hide the bumps they had all over their bodies, and they didn’t say nothing to me at all. On the other side of the room, a couple more of them hipsters sat there at a small table with piles of old-fashioned paper on it. Nobody bothered to stand or shake my hand, but one of them hipsters started talking to me. Didn’t introduce himself or nothing, just started talking.
“Tenor player.” It wasn’t no question.
“Yes sir. I can also play the alto and the flute, a little,” I said, just as cool as I could.
“You got a manager?”
“Uh, no sir. I, uh . . . I manage myself.” I wanted to sound cool, but I felt like a damn country negro right then.
“Well, that’s just fine,” he said, grinning that white hipster grin of his. “Why don’t you play us a song, then?”
So I called the tune, counted it off, and launched into it. The tune I played was one of Bird’s, “Confirmation”, and I guess their machine knew it, because as soon as I started playing it, bass and drums were piped in from nowhere. They wanted bebop, so I played my best bebop tune.
“Not bad,” the hipster said, and the Frogs were agreeing, nodding. “Can you play anything sweet?” he asked, and I played them a chorus of “Misty” as soulful and pretty as I could.
“That was just fine, Mr Coolidge. Please leave us your phone number and we’ll call you soon. Thanks,” the boss man hipster said when I handed him my name card, and one of his sidekicks showed me out. After that, I waited around while my buddies all auditioned, and they all said it’d gone pretty much the same.
I wondered whether that was a good sign or a bad one, but a few weeks later, I was on the subway when my pocket phone rang. I fished it out of my pants pocket, and dialed in my access number on the rotary dial to open the connection.
Looking at the face on the little screen for a second, I wondered why this slick, pale-assed young hipster was calling me, until I realized that it was that same hipster from the Onyx.
“Mr Coolidge,” he said, “I have some good news for you.”
And that was how I ended up touring the solar system with Big C.
The space elevator, that blew me away. It was a fucking gas, man. I only ever rode up it once, and I swear it was smooth as Ingrid Bergman’s skin, or Lena Horne’s smile, even though it was going faster than anything I’d ever been in before.
J.J. Wilson was the only one of my friends who also got a gig up on the Frogships, and he and I sat there side by side with our seat belts around our waists, looking down through the glass floor – it wasn’t really glass but we could see through it – at the Earth and everything we were leaving behind. It seemed so strange to be looking at the whole world like that. I could see South America, the ocean, some of Africa. Clouds, and ice on north pole and south pole. I could see places I’ve never gone in all the years since then, and probably will never go.
Only a few hours before, J.J.’s wife had driven us up into the Catskills where the Frogs’ launchpad had been. She’d cried a little, but soon she was making jokes and small talk. Francine, on the other hand: the first time she called, she was crying, and she pleaded with me on my pocket phone till I hung up on her. Then she called back screaming, and made me listen to her break plates and windows and shit. I’d felt a little lonely on the way up, and a little bad for her, but after that, I was glad she hadn’t come along for the ride, and I was sure I’d done the right thing by leaving her.
It was strange, that trip, because I hadn’t never seen the Catskills before. Right there by New York, but I never went and saw them till I was leaving to go to outer space. Can you believe it?
We caught us a jet up there, one that flew on up almost into space, but then come down again in some mountains up in north Brazil somewhere. I was hoping we might stop by in the city, so we could try out some Brazilian chicks. I heard good things about them, Brazilian girls, I mean. But we didn’t have time for that – it was straight up to the ships for us.
We weren’t the only ones strapped down into chairs in the elevator, though. There were all kinds of interesting people in there. There were a couple of skinny Chinese girls with some kind of weird musical instruments, what you might call zithers; and there were a bunch of Mexican and white guys dressed like cowboys with spurs and lassos and all that shit, just like in the Hollywood westerns. There was also this Russian cat in a suit who tried to talk to us through some kind of translator machine, but we couldn’t understand him at all. He had a satchel of books with him.
And I swear there were about fifteen French girls in there with us, too. Cute, with fine cheekbones and low asses and long-assed legs, dressed up in their can-can outfits. I caught one of them looking at me a few times, and I just smiled and reminded myself to look her up sometime. French women, you know, sometimes they’re less racist than American women. They’re ladies. But you know, women always bring too much shit along with them when they travel. Those can-can girls each had a big stack of suitcases strapped onto the ground beside them, every last one of them.
Me, I just brought my horns, a couple of extra suits, and my music collection, some on vinyl and some on crystal.
When the elevator got to where it was going, we all unstrapped ourselves, got out of our seats, and stepped out into what looked like an airport. I had pulled on my big old herringbone winter coat, thinking it’d be cold in space, but it wasn’t. It was like a train station, and as soon as we were in it, I started hearing a beeping sound. The card they’d given me to hang around my neck was beeping. A glowing red arrow pointed to my left, and same for J.J., too. We went off in that direction, following the can-can girls, full of hope and dreams of long legs.
Turned out we’d all been sent up for the same ship. J.J. and me and the can-can girls arrived together in a small waiting room, and the cowboys came a while later. We figured that once the Russian guy showed up, and the Chinese girlies, maybe someone would come and get us, so we just chatted for a while. Turned out the cowboys were rodeo heroes, you know, the guys who ride bulls and catch cows with lassos and shit like that. They’d been hired as entertainers, just like us, one-year contract. Same pay and everything.
Man, ain’t nobody in the world back then who paid a black man and a white man and a Mexican and a woman the same money for the same gig – not before them Frogs done it.
So finally, when the Russian and them Chinese chicks showed up, it was because this big tall-assed Frog in a white suit and tie brought them to the waiting room. Like the Frogs I’d seen on Earth, this one was smoking a few black cigarettes on long cigarette holders, all of them poking out of one side of its mouth. It stuck its tongue out and looked at us slowly, one by one, with all of its gigantic eyes on its face and the little ones on its tongue, as if it was checking us against a memorized list of faces.
“Welcome aboard the space station. This way, please, to the ship that will be your home for the next year.” It wasn’t the Frog itself speaking; the voice came from a speaker on the collar of the Frog’s suit. It waved its three-tentacled hand at the wall of the waiting room, and the wall slid open. There was a hallway on the other side, and at the far end of the hallway was another door, far away, slowly opening in the same way.
We went down the hall in little groups, staying close to the people we’d come with. Walking down that hallway, we all looked like old dogs, walked with our heads down, bracing for some bad shit to come down onto us.
But at the end of that hallway, when we came through the second door, you know what we found? Can you guess?
The whole place was done up like a big-assed hotel or cruise ship or something. There was this huge-assed lobby and ballroom, and main stairs leading up and down. One whole wall of the lobby was transparent, you could see right through it to the stars. Frogs wandered every which way, a few cats and fine skinny women of every colour here and there, all of them dressed bad, real hip.
“Welcome on board The Mmmhumhhunah!” Ship name sounded something like that, like how people would talk if they had socks in their mouth or something. That was what the Frogs’ language sounded like to me, at least at first. He tried to make it sound like we were guests. “Your navigation stubs should guide you to your places of accommodation. Should you have any questions, please feel free to ask any passing staff member, who can be identified by the subordinate rank uniforms they are required to wear, and which have been modeled on uniforms denoting similar positions in your culture. We will begin preparations tomorrow, and the tour will commence a week henceforth.”
“What’s he talking about, man?” J.J. asked. His eyes were wide, like he’d seen his grandmama’s ghost.
“Follow the little arrow thing to your room,” I explained. “If you need help with your bass, ask a bellboy. First rehearsal’s tomorrow.”
“And please give me your instruments,” added the Frog. “They need to be treated specially to withstand both repeated decoherence and space travel.”
“Deco-what?” J.J. was very protective of Big Mama, which was what he liked to call his bass. “Hey, can you put one of them self-amplifiers into her?”
“Yes, of course, that was already planned,” the alien said, and its eyes went round in circles. “Everyone else, also, we must collect your instruments. They will be returned to you tomorrow.”
“Awright,” J.J. said, twisting his head to one aside and the other as he leaned on Big Mama in her carrying case, gave the bass one last hug.
I handed them my tenor sax, but I wasn’t happy about it. I didn’t know what the hell they was going to do to it, but it was a Conn and had cost me an arm and a leg to get. But I handed it over. I already had the serial numbers written on a piece of paper in my shoe, just in case.
Now, listen up: I know me some drugs. I seen what heroin does to a cat, how it robs him of his soul, turns him into a pathetic junkie. I even tried it once or twice. And I know how spun-around a cat can get on bennies, ’cause I’ve done lots of them too. I’ve drunk every goddamn thing a man can drink, a lot of drinks at the same time, even. I’ve been so fucked up I didn’t know what planet I was on. But nothing fucks you up like the drugs they gave us on the ships.
I first tried them at that first rehearsal, day after we arrived on the cruise ship, but before we got our own horns back. Me and J.J. showed up at the same time, and met the cat who was running the music program. He was a fat old brother with a trumpet style nobody ever copied right, nobody ever beat, and his name was Carl Thorton, but everyone called him Big C. He gave us these pills to swallow. Three of them, each one a different colour.
“Yellow one’s so you can blur, the way they like. Blue one fixes you up with a better memory, so you can call up everything you ever heard. That one takes a while to kick in. Last one, the green one, that one’s for programming memory of all those licks you memorize into your muscles and shit, instant super-chops. That one comes in real quick. You gotta take these sons-a-bitches every day for six months. Don’t forget, or you’ll turn your own ass so inside-out it ain’t even funny. Got it?”
“Uh huh,” me and J.J. said, and took the pills with a big glass of water. Water didn’t taste quite right, wasn’t nice and a little sweet like back in New York.
Big C, he had a bunch of us new guys – enough to play in a big band. He had us all sit down and listen to the old band, outgoing band, who wouldn’t be leaving for a couple of days, so we could listen to them and get the hang of things. He told us big bands only went on tour on the Frogships for a year at a time, most times. Man, I didn’t know they was looking to make a big band. I hadn’t played in one for years, but whatever. I sat and listened. Didn’t figure I could back out then, it was too late.
Well, they started to play – some old Basie tune, I think it was, but they were playing it so fast I couldn’t tell which one. Badass, these cats – they didn’t drop a beat, not a squeak anywhere. They played the head perfectly at what was definitely 300 beats a minute or more.
But when the solo section came, I rubbed my eyes and starting worrying about them drugs Big C had gave us. Big C, I could see him fine and clear, but the lead alto saxman, when he stood up and started playing a solo, he started to blur, and he wasn’t playing one solo, it was two solos at once. And then four solos, and five, all of them going in different directions at the same time. He had his horn all the way up, leaning back and screeching altissimo, and he was hunched forward and honking at the low end of his horn. All of that at the same time, fast lines and slow lines together. He was like a dozen saxophonists in one.
The drummer was slowly going out of sync with himself, blurring into a smear of sticks and flashing cymbals, and when I looked close, I could see the cymbals moving, and staying still, all at the same time. It was one hell of a sight to see, believe me. I tapped J.J. on the shoulder, told him to check that shit out, and he nodded, so I knew I wasn’t crazy. It was like ten drummers all playing at once, almost all the same thing, but a little bit off, each one a little bit different. Different cymbal crashes at different times, the downbeat pushed a little forward and a little back all at the same time. But if you listened, in a way, it all ft together somehow. That blew me away.
The rest of the band started playing backgrounds, but they weren’t blurry, so the shout chorus came in together – a few beats quiet, then, in unison, bop!, then a few bars, then ba-doo-BOP! The alto player was playing three-octave unisons with himself. I swear I could see his right hand on the bottom keys, fingers moving and totally still at the same time.
And then the head of the tune came back, but the whole band was a blur, and everything was craziness, like ten, twenty, a hundred big bands trying to play together and coming close but never lining up the downbeats, pushing them forward and back all at the same time, clashing and smashing – it was something else!
It was a new kind of music, man. Real out. Like hearing bebop again for the first time, but multiplied by all the dope in the world.
“Them pills we took, they gonna let us play like that?”
“I suppose so, J.J.”
“Goddamn!” he hollered, and “Sheeeeeeeeee-it!” and “Check these cats out!” all at once, in three different voices, and he started clapping his hands and not-clapping his hands all at the same time.
“Brother, I been living with these Frog-head bastards a long goddamn time, and trust me, shit ain’t right with them. You ever look at one closely?” That was Big C.
“Well, yeah,” I answered, looking around his room. “They’re blurry. Too many eyes.”
“Too many eyes? You ever stop and think that we don’t have enough eyes?” He squinted at me the way Monk used to do to people. “But that blur . . . ! Now, that’s what I’m talking about!” he said, waving his hands at me. “They’re all blurred up, it’s like there’s a hundred Frogs inside every one of them cats, walking around, doing things. They can’t squash themselves into just one person, the way we all just do naturally.”
He wiggled his fingers in front of his face like he was showing me what he meant. “And if they’re listening to a band, they need the band to blur too, or they just get bored. That’s why they like jazz so much! Best goddamn music in the world. ’Cause we make shit up – we improvise. Can’t do that with no goddamn Mozart, now can you? Classical music, that just bores these Frogs to death, everything all written out and the same every time, the same even when you blur it.”
I was staring at my hands, watching them blur and unblur. It was kind of like taking a piss, you could control it just by thinking about it. Except I was like a little kid, I didn’t know exactly how to control it yet, just that I could kind of make it happen.
“You’re getting it, Robbie, just relax into it, man. It’ll be like natural soon.”
“So how long you been on these ships, Big C?” I asked.
He scratched under his chin, back up where his beard was shaved off, and made a face at me. “What year’s it now?”
“Nineteen forty-eight.”
“Goddamn,” he said. “God-damn!” And he got real quiet, and turned his head away so I wouldn’t see him cry.
Our schedule for those first few weeks was crazy, all day practicing and then all night jamming our asses off and hanging out in one another’s rooms, horns in our hands, LPs going.
One of the craziest things the drugs did was they let us memorize any kind of music we heard. Hearing it was all it took to program it into our heads, well, except it was more like your fingers would remember the tune.
So we would sit there listening to all kinds of LPs, bebop and swing and ragtime and Bach and Stravinsky and Indian music and whatever, and since we all had good ears, and since we could blur ourselves, each blurred self could listen to a different part of the music – the bass line, harmony lines, and the solo on top of it all – so we could come to the end of a record with the whole thing in our heads.
Now, this wasn’t so new: I could listen to a solo a couple of times and hold it in my head, but what was strange was that, after a couple of weeks on them alien drugs, I found I could remember any damn tune I wanted, note-for-note. I could call up any one of Bird’s recorded solos on “Anthropology”; I could call up a big band playing Monk’s arrangement of “Epistrophy” and play the second trombone line on my sax if I wanted. Every line was right there in my head, and in the muscles of my arms and fingers and lips, and if I blurred out and played back that line even once, I could play it again and again, forever, just by deciding to, without even having to think it through.
In other words, them alien drugs made each and every one of us into one-man jazz record machines.
That was why we spent so much time sitting around listening to everyone else’s LPs and crystals, a bunch of us cats blurred out of our minds, laughing and telling ourselves to shut up and soaking that shit up, all of it. There were some bootlegs, too, and man, some of them were amazing: “Bird on Mars,” one of them was labelled, and that was some crazy, hip, bad music. I could listen to that shit all day long.
But you know, eventually, a cat gets tired of just being around musicians, and he starts wanting himself some jelly. Me, I never had no problem getting me some, women like me and I like them, but it had been a couple of weeks since I’d gotten any, so I decided to go look up them can-can girls and get me some.
I took the elevator down a floor at a time, wandered around till I found them. I saw some crazy-assed sights on the way, too: in one room, there was some kind of Russian circus with these huge blurred-up clowns juggling fire-sticks on the backs of blurry elephants who were dancing to the beat of the some scary Russian music. There were all these bears, too, just as blurred as anything, marching around them all. In another room, I saw those rodeo cowboys again, too, riding on blurred-up horses and swinging lassos in a hundred directions at once. But this one guy I saw, he wasn’t just blurred, he split from himselves, ran in ten different directions at once after a bull that blurred and split up in the same damn way. Some of him caught the bull and roped it, and some of him got stomped by it. One of him even got gored in the stomach by its horns, poor bean-eating bastard.
But finally, I got down about ten floors below our floor, which was under the big-assed lobby. All the signs there were in French, so I knew I was in the right place. I went from room to room, saw a bunch of them blurry Frogs in these salons, smoking their cigarettes and talking in their weird voices while skinny East Indian girls in old-fashioned oriental clothing served them dainty little white teacups full of funky tea and whatever else Frogs drank.
But finally, I found the auditorium where the girls danced the can-can. That was the orchestra’s night off, so the girls were practicing to these crazy recordings of blurred-up can-can music. When I walked in, they were dancing, those French can-can girls, and they was fine, all long strong legs going up and down, arms on each other’s shoulders. Ain’t nothing in the world turns a cat on like seeing women touch each other, except seeing their legs up in the air.
So I sat there and watched their legs go up and down, down and up, scissoring blurs, and I blurred myself too so I could see them clearly. I scanned up and down the line of them, until I found the one I remembered from the elevator, and let her faces burn into my mind.
After they finished, I went and found my way backstage. There was a bunch of green rooms. It was crazy – every girl had her own little green room on that floor. But I didn’t know which one she was in, that fine-built woman I picked out from the can-can lineup, so I blurred myself and went up to all the green rooms I could, knocked on every one of them at once.
The door where she answered, I unblurred myself over to that one, and smiled at her with that innocent-country-boy smile like I always used to use on women. She was wearing some kind of silk kimono, you know, one of them Japanese-type housecoats, and her hair was down, and I could hear jazz wafting out from behind. Heard that jazz and I knew that I was in.
“You’re the one I ’ave seen in the elevator, oui? The one who kept looking at me? But why ’ave you come ’ere?”
“Well, I thought about it, and decided I missed you.”
She mumbled something in French, something that sounded a little like I’d be needing to try some other can-can girl next, but then she opened the door wide and smiled at me. “Come in, Monsieur . . .”
“Coolidge,” I said, and took off my fedora to bow to her all charming, the way women like when you first meet them. “Robbie Coolidge.” I stepped into the room, and could hear the music clearly: it was Nat King Cole, “Stardust.” Her can-can outfit was draped over the makeup mirror with the light bulbs all around it, huge peacock feathers sticking up above our heads, and I could smell mentholated smoke in the air.
“I am called Monique,” she said. No last name then, just Monique. Then she asked, “You would like some coffee?”
“Mmm, yeah, coffee sounds good.”
She excused herself for a minute, and when she came back, she had two cups of coffee in her hands.
“You ’ave cigarette?” she asked.
I nodded. “Got a whole pack,” I said, and I fished it out of my coat pocket and set it on the table with a pack of matches on top. They were Mercury Barron’s Ultras, the new kind that were supposed to make you live longer if you smoked three a day. “Want one?”
“Non,” she said, and smiled. “Maybe later.”
The coffee was fine, really good French coffee, steaming. Even the goddamn steam smelled good. I held the cup and breathed deep and looked at her sipping from her own cup.
“So where you from?” I asked, and she stared at me for a few minutes. She rubbed an eyelid, and a little of the makeup smudged.
“I don’t t’ink you really care, do you?” she asked, and sipped her coffee.
“Sure, girl, I care,” I lied, and she leaned forward, and blurred herself, and a million breathy whispers of gay Pa-ree tickled in my ear.
That ended up being the night the ship took off for Mars, though Monique and I were too busy to notice. We only found out later, when one of the guys in the band ended up wandering into the lobby and noticing the stars were moving, nice and slow, but still moving.
It was a couple of weeks before Monique was in the habit of coming up and listening to the band play, and some of the guys didn’t like it. That was when some of the cats in the band were starting to act all high-and-mighty, turning into what my father used to call “political negroes,” and taking it upon themselves to tell everyone else how a black man oughtta live.
What made me real sad was that J.J. had fallen in with that pack of nuts. He used to be real nice, real cool and thoughtful. He’d always been a soulful kind of cat, but when he was with them space-Muslim gum-flappers, talking all that nonsense about how the black man was supposed to colonize the solar system for Allah’s glory and to show the devil white man and all that, I couldn’t stand to be around him. I hated it when he talked that bullshit.
So this one day, between sets, I’m sitting there at one of the tables with Monique and having a nice time. She’s drinking wine and I’m having a cigarette and we’re talking, and J.J. comes up with this look on his face. I knew it was trouble, that look, and I stood up before he got close, and said, “J.J., I already got one daddy, and he’s in Philly, so I don’t need you to . . .”
“Robbie, goddamn it, you listen to me,” he said, and glanced at Monique as if she might leave if he glanced at her the right way.
“Who is ’e?” she asked, standing up.
“Sit down, Monique,” I said firmly, and she instantly got that look on her face. You know the look: the one women get when you tell them what to do for their own good.
“Robbie, something’s going on round here! We gotta cut out, brother! Them Frogs, they been in my room, man! They put something inside my stomach. Like a worm. No, a woman. Yeah, a woman worm! She been crawling inside my stomach, screamin’, like, ‘J.J.! J.J.! Gimme some ice cream!’ Help me, Robbie! I’m fuckin’ dying here, man!” he screamed and blurred before my eyes, all his voices screaming at me at once. Poor cat was scared shitless, and he scared the shit out of me, too.
I pushed Monique off to the side and blurred myself, and each of me reached out to one of them blurs of J.J.
“J.J.,” each of me said, all together. “Listen, J.J., you sick or something, man. You need to cool it. Cool it right now.”
He screamed louder, each of him started to shake, and his blurred selves started moving farther and farther apart. I didn’t want him to pull me apart like that too, so I quickly unblurred myself, relaxed back into one, and stepped back from him.
A couple of big old bad-assed Frog bouncers smeared themselves out into an army, and rushed around the room in pairs, grabbing all his blurred selves and hauling them, every last one of J.J.’s selves screaming at the top of its lungs, out one of the exits of the room.
The room went tense and quiet, and many eyes, Frog and human alike, were on me and Monique. Whispering started, and I caught Big C’s eye. Set-break’s over, his look said. Back on the goddamn bandstand. Now.
So I tried to kiss Monique on the cheek – she pulled away a little, but I still got her for a second – and hurried back up with my tenor in hand.
“Apologies, everyone!” Big C said into the microphone with a big fake smile on his face. “Show must go on, like they say. Luckily for us, we got a Mphmnngi in the house who’s proficient at bass.” Mphmnngi, that was what the Frogs called themselves. Then Big C started saying some bizarre sounds, and I thought he was going crazy too, until some stank old Frog in a tight black suit stood up and bowed his big old froggy head at Big C. Then I realized those weird-assed sounds were this Frog’s name.
“Come on up and join us!” Big C said, and the Frog came up on stage, picked up J.J.’s bass with his three-tentacled hands, and strummed the strings to check the tuning.
“Goddamn shame,” said Winslow Jackson, the alto player who sat beside me on the bandstand. He and Big C were almost the only guys who had toured before. “Seen too many many guys end up like that.”
“How’s that?” I asked, wondering if maybe some of outer space had got into the ship, and fucked with J.J.’s head.
“Must’ve forgot to take his pills,” Jackson said, shaking his head. “It’s a damn shame.”
Not taking your pills for one day would make you go crazy like that? I ain’t never heard of no drug like that, and to this day I’m not so sure it was the pills at all. What if I had took my pills every day and ended up the same as him anyway? Poor J.J. I didn’t know whether I’d ever see him again, but I didn’t have any time to worry about that: Big C was talking to the crowd again, and I had to get ready to play.
“Before we dig into the music, I’d like to share some important news with you! We have arrived at Mars orbit!” Big C hollered into the mike, and behind him, a big piece of wall just suddenly went transparent. Everyone turned to look at the red planet out there, except Big C, who kept talking about how exciting it was to be playing at Mars again, how much he enjoyed it every time.
Mars. We were at Mars. That shit blew my mind.
“And now, we have another special guest who’s going to join us,” Big C said into the microphone.
A short, weird-assed looking Frog got up, a long black bassoon under his arm, and started walking toward us. He was wearing a fine brown suit, tight as a motherfucker, and a brown fedora hat that matched his fern-coloured Frog skin. He waved his little tail behind him as he went up to the stage.
“Everyone please welcome Heavy Gills Mmmhmhnngn,” Big C said. The names were starting to be more and more pronounceable to me, a fact I didn’t exactly appreciate.
Big C turned from the microphone and faced us, snapping his fingers on two and four, and loudly whispered, “Stardust.” We all got our horns ready, and he nodded and the rhythm section started us off with a mild blur. We usually played it as a tenor lead tune, meaning it was usually my solo, but of course, when you have a guest feature sitting in, the melody gets played by the guest, so I just improvised harmonies with the other saxes.
The bassoon was awful, like a dog being beat down by a drunk master. It wasn’t music. Ain’t no other way to say it. He played the whole time blurred up so bad that not a damn thing fit together. The tunes didn’t line up right, there was no fugue or harmony or counterpoint that I could find. It was just like a bunch of jumbles laid up on top of one another. I swear, I got dizzy just hearing it. He ended the tune by playing a high E and a high F-natural and a high D-sharp all together, this ugly dissonant sustained cluster that went all through the outro and kept going for two minutes after the rest of the band had stopped playing.
At the end of it, all the Frogs in the audience cheered and groaned and waved their tentacled hands in the air, which was their way of clapping, and I hunkered down for a long night of bullshit.
So J.J., he came back a week later. I saw him drinking coffee in one of the open bars when I came back from window-shopping with Monique in the station dome on Mars. Not that there was anything for me to buy, or that I had any money – that was all waiting for me back on Earth. But there was a lot to see on the station at Mars in those days, and I even picked myself up a real live Mars rock. Still got it, too, at my house.
“Hi,” I said to J.J.
He looked up at me and blinked, sniffed the air. “Hello. How are you? I’ll see you at rehearsal tomorrow.” And then he turned back to his coffee, as if I’d already walked away.
Still, weird as that was, I didn’t quite believe it when Big C told me he wasn’t J.J. no more. “Might seem like it, might talk like it, but he ain’t J.J.,” Big C said. “They made some kind of living copy of him, fixed it up all wrong – fixed it up to think more like them than like us – and now he just plain ain’t J.J. no more. Just accept it.”
Me, I figured that Big C had been on the ships long enough to have lost his mind too. But thinking back on that conversation, I could see that J.J. was different. He talked like some kind of white lawyer or something, for one, his voice all stiff and polite. And when time came for the next rehearsal, his playing was dead. There wasn’t nothing original in it, no spark. I’d listen along to his bass lines and then go back to my room and listen to my LPs, and I’m telling you, there wasn’t a single line he played after he came back that wasn’t lifted out of some someone else’s playing.
But I really knew it wasn’t him because of the time I finally saw how he got himself off. He’d been dropping hints, every once in a while, but I never figured it out until one night, when I went to get back some Mingus LP I’d loaned him. I banged on his door, I knew he was in there, but he didn’t answer.
So finally I opened the door myself, and there he was on his bed with two Frogs on top of him, tentacles stuck down his throat and wrapped round his legs, slithering their eyed-tongues all over his balls and shit. I slammed the door and just about threw up.
J.J., he had been always as much of a sex-freak as any other cat in any band I played with, and maybe he was so pent-up with all that celibate living that the space Muslims got him thinking he had to do. Maybe his balls got so blue that he lost his mind. But he’d never, ever talked about screwing no Frogs. That was what convinced me, finally, that J.J. was gone.
I found Monique in the lobby a few days after that, staring out the window at the stars. I hadn’t seen her around in a week and a half, hadn’t gone down to the French floor, but we were already on our way to Jupiter. It was supposed to take a month or two to get out there, and we’d stay for a week or so, or that was what Big C told us. There was a lot to see and do on all the moons, and some shows not to be missed.
“Where you been, girl?” I asked her.
“Busy,” she said. “Very busy.”
“Doin’ what?” I asked her, as innocently as I could.
“One of our girls, she is sick. She was taken away by les grenouilles,” she said, and made a face.
“Must’ve forgot to take her pills,” I said, almost to myself.
“Euh? Quoi?” Monique said. She surprised me. I looked at her. “Que dis-tu?”
“I said, she must have forgotten to take her pills. Like what happened to J.J.”
“Non,” she said. “One of the alligator . . .”
“Frogs . . .” I corrected her.
“Frog, oui, les grenouilles, one of the ‘frog,’ ’e ask ’er to come to ’is rooms, and she say non, and next day she become very sick.” Suddenly I could see J.J. in my head with those tentacles in his mouth and wrapped around his legs. I couldn’t stand to think about all that again.
“But baby, you’re okay, right?” I took her hand.
She turned and looked at with those eyes of hers, green like Chinese jade. “I want to go ’ome,” she said, and squeezed my hand. “I don’t know ’ow you can t’ink you are falling in love on a Frog ship. I don’t know ’ow anyone can believe in love in a ’orrible place like this.”
“Baby, come with me,” I said to her.
“Oui, I will come with you. But I will not love you, Robbie,” she said, and squeezed my hand a little. “And you must not love me, either,” she said.
And then she turned her head and looked out at all them stars for a little while more.
The month we spent travelling out to Jupiter passed so goddamn fast, all blurred awkward sex and blurred awkward music and J.J. all sad and serious up there on his bass, and that dumb, stank-ass Frog Heavy Gills Mmmhmhnngn sitting in on his sad-assed bassoon at least once a week. The band still played like a well-oiled machine, still hit every note exactly right, but there was something going wrong, and I think we all could feel it.
And then one day, right in the middle of our show, Big C does that hamming-up thing that he was always so good at, and the wall went all transparent and I swear, Jupiter – fucking Jupiter – was right there in front of us covering the whole window. It looked like a giant bowl of vanilla ice cream and caramel and chocolate sauce all melted together and mixed up, with a big red cherry in the middle of it. It was big, man, biggest thing I ever saw, with these little moons floating around it. I couldn’t breathe for a second. I looked out into the audience for Monique, but she wasn’t at the table I’d left her at. Too bad, she would have loved to see Jupiter like that, right there in front of us.
“Now, as you all know, the orbit of Jupiter is a special place, a place where many people travel and choose to stay because it’s so beautiful. While you’re here, you should all go down to Io and use this opportunity to see some of the greats of jazz, people like Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Cab Calloway, Johnny Hodges . . . don’t miss them.” When I heard that, I couldn’t believe my ears. Bird? How could they have Bird up here, when I’d seen him in New York? Had he come back for another tour? I had no idea how that could be. I didn’t think it through so good, though, then. My mind went right on back to that other name: Lester Young.
“Now,” Big C said, “in honour of the jazz mecca that we’re at, we’re going to play a little tune called ‘The Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues.’”
He counted us in, four, five, four five six seven, and what do you know but that damn Frog’s bassoon started up again with the head. By then I swear I would have broken the thing over Heavy Gills Mmmhmhnngn’s head if I ever got the chance, I’d heard so much of it.
There was all kinds of cool shit to do on them moons, submarine trips on Europa and Ganymede, volcano jumps on Io; they even let us humans ride along in these special ships that could drop down into the atmosphere of that badass old Jupiter himself and see the critters that the Frogs had transplanted there from some planet near where they came from.
But none of that interested me. Some of the cats in the band, they told me, “Robbie, man, what you doing missing a chance to see all this fine shit?”
“Man, all I wanna see,” I told them, “is Lester Young. I’m gonna go see the Prez.”
The club on Io was small, quiet. The Frogs didn’t get interested in jazz until sometime after they’d checked out everything else that their people had done on Jupiter and the moons, and since ours was the only cruiser to show up for a while, right away was the best time to go in and check out the Prez.
That’s what we called Lester Young, “Prez”, because he used to be – and according to me up till that day, still was – the President of the Tenor Saxophone. Man, that sound. I’d seen him in New York a few times, and a bunch of times in Philly too, and he always had it, that thing, what Monique always called je ne sais quoi, which means who the fuck knows what? Man, before the war, Prez always had that up there in his sweet, sweet sound.
So anyway, Monique and me, we ended up in this little club in a bubble floating over Io. There were these big windows all over where you could look out onto the volcanoes spitting fire and smoke and shit. There was even one of them windows in the club, and Monique kept looking out of it.
Prez wasn’t playing when we got there, it was too early so some other cats were on the bandstand. Trio of cats, didn’t know their names but I was pretty sure I’d met the pianist before. They were alright. Sometimes guys like Prez, man, they did even better with those plain bread-and-butter rhythm sections, playing that kind of old swing style. It was all about his beautiful voice, his sound. Waiting for Prez, I could hear his tenor sound, man, that touch of vibrato, that strong gentle turn in his melody riding his own beat, just a little off of the bass, you know what I mean.
Monique started to get bored. I could tell. She fiddled with her hair, looked out at the volcanoes.
“Baby, Prez should be on soon,” I told her.
She frowned at me, that sexy baby-I’m-pissed-off kind of frown. “I want to go for a walk. See the bubble.” We’d passed some nice shop windows and cafes out there, and I guessed she really just wanted to go shopping. But it also felt a little bit like a test, and I never in my life let no woman test me.
“You go on and go shopping if you want, but me, I ain’t gonna miss Prez for the world. Not a tune, not a single damn note.”
“Fine,” she said, and adjusted her purse. “I’ll be back later. Maybe,” she added with a pout, and turned on her high heel and marched out, adjusting her hair as she went, and wiggling her ass because she knew I was checking it.
I didn’t give a shit, man. French can-can girls you can get any old time if you really want one, but there wasn’t nowhere to see Lester Young except on Io. This was my last chance to see him in my life, unless he came back to Earth, and he’d been in bad shape the last time I’d seen him.
Well, I ended up sitting there through a half hour of mediocre rhythm section ad lib, sipping my Deep Europa Iced Tea – that’s what they called a Long Island Iced Tea in that place, the only drink I could afford – when finally Prez showed up.
Now, seeing Prez that time, hearing him play, it was kind of like the first time you had sex. I don’t mean waking up from a dirty dream and finding your bed’s all sticky, neither. I mean the first time you’re with some girl a year ahead of you in junior high school, and you go on upstairs in her house when her mama’s out and maybe you kiss on her a little and then you put it in her, and a minute or two later you’re wondering what just happened and is that it and why everyone is always making a big deal about that shit?
It was a shame and a huge fucking letdown, is what I’m trying to say.
Prez, he used to be a little fucked-up. Not when he was younger, before the war. Back then, that cat had some kind of magic power, man. People always wanted him to play like Hawk, I mean Coleman Hawkins, but he didn’t listen to nobody, he played his own sound, and it was beautiful. He had this way of making melodies just sing, so sweet it’d break your heart in half.
But then they sent him to war, and seeing as he was black, they never put him in the army band. Just who exactly do you think you are, boy? Glenn Miller? Off to the front line with you, nigger, that’s how it was. Folks said it wasn’t surprising, him not having his head on straight after all that happened to him: being sent to fight in Europe, and what he saw in Berlin after the Russians dropped that bomb they got from the Frogs onto the city. How he got stuck in a barracks in Paris for all that time after, fighting the local reds, and what happened after we pulled out of Europe, where they court-martialed his ass because his wife was a white woman and didn’t take shit off the other soldiers for it. After all that, they said that something inside him was broke, broke in a way that couldn’t never be fixed.
Well, you know, I was hoping that maybe the Frogs had somehow fixed him up, like they’d done with Bird. When I seen him, standing tall, cleanest cat you ever seen, with a big old smile and a fine suit and the same old porkpie hat he always wore, I started to think maybe they’d done the world a service, brought back the President of the tenor saxophone.
So anyway, he lifted that horn of his up to his lips, with the neck screwed in a little sideways, so that the body of the horn was lifted up off to the side the way he always used to do, and as he started to blow “Polka Dots and Moonbeams”, my heart sank.
It didn’t sound like the real Lester Young, not the Prez I knew. It sounded like some kind of King Tut mummy Lester Young sound. Like the outside shape of his sound was still there, but that something important inside it had been took out. I’m sure nobody else there could hear it, but I could. I knew it right away.
I could feel my heart splitting in two as I just sat there and watched the Prez, the man who’d been the Prez, drift his way through tune after tune. It was all right, that floating sound of his, the way he always waltzed loose with the rhythm, the sweet tone, the little bursts forward and then the cool, leaning-back thing he’d do after it. But there was something missing.
Then it hit me what was wrong. I knew every last one of the solos he was playing. Not the tunes, I mean, not just the heads and changes. I mean I knew every goddamn note he played. He wasn’t improvizing at all. Everything, every lick, was from his old recordings. “My Funny Valentine”; “I Cover the Waterfront”; “Afternoon of a Basieite” . . . Every goddamn note was off one of his old pre-war LPs. He was playing it all exactly the way he’d played it in the studio, at live shows, anywhere he’d been recorded. I knew, because I had all them same recordings up in my head, too, every last one of them.
So I just sat there staring at him with tears in my eyes, and waited for it to be over.
But you know, during the first set break, he came over and sat with me. Of all the people he could have sat with, all the people who’d come to Io just to see him, he came and sat with me, probably the only cat in the place who was disappointed with what he’d heard.
“You’re a saxophone player, aren’t you, young man?” he said, suave as ever but a bit too cool. He must’ve seen me eyeing his fingers on the horn.
“Yes sir, I am. I’m from Philadelphia, and my name’s Robbie Coolidge.”
“Might you happen to be a tenor player by any chance?”
“Yes sir,” I said, nodding.
“Mind if I join you here? Seeing as you lost your hat and all,” he said, hand on the back of a chair. By “hat,” he meant Monique. Everyone knew that was the way Prez talked, funny names for everything. “Hat” was a new one, though. “My ‘people’ are in need of a little rest, is all,” he said, and wiggled his fingers. That was what he called his fingers, his “people”.
And of course I told him I didn’t mind, and offered to buy him a drink and he laughed and said now that all the drinks were free for him, he didn’t want no liquor no more. And then he just started talking to me. Asked me how old I was, asked me if I missed my mama’s cooking – I didn’t, my mama was a terrible cook, she used food as a kind of weapon when she was mad at me, but I didn’t tell him that – and then he told me about his own mama’s cooking.
I don’t remember exactly what he said, honestly; what I remember was his careful, quiet smile and his bright big eyes lit by some exploding volcano out the big dome window, and how goddamned happy he seemed to be remembering his mama in the kitchen, the smells and the favours coming back to him across all those years and all those miles from when he’d sat at the kitchen table waiting for dinner.
And don’t ask me how I knew, but right then, I realized that they’d done to him whatever they’d done to J.J. and to Bird, and that Lester Young, whoever he was, he was gone from the world, same as J.J. and maybe same as Bird, even. All that was left of the Prez was a shell, filled with something that was supposed to be him but wasn’t. That was what I was talking to, and it was all I could do not to cry in his face.
At the end of the set break, when he got up to play again, he told me, “Get off the ships, son. Get yourself on back to the Apple Core,” which was what he’d started calling Harlem after the war. “You’re way too young for this kind of life.”
A little while after he started to play again, Monique came in, and I just took her by the hand and we left.
“Listen, you jive-assed negroes, just listen to me for a minute! This shit they got us playing, man, it ain’t jazz! I don’t know what the fuck it is, but it ain’t human music. Jazz is for humans, my brothers!”
Some of them Muslim brothers were nodding their heads as I said this, but I knew one or two of them who wasn’t going to go along with this so easy.
“Boy, you all wet. You signed a god-damned contract.” It was Albert Grubbs, just like I expected. I forget the Muslim name he’d gone and taken for himself, but anyway, I knew him as Albert Grubbs, and sure enough, a few years later, everyone else did too, once he dropped all that religious bullshit. But right then, he was dead against us doing anything to upset relations with the Frogs, because he was still big on the whole space Muslim thing at the time. They figured if we was good enough Uncle Toms, the Frogs might give us some ships of our own, and let us fly around the solar system, so we could brag about beating white people to it. He looked about ready to start quoting the Koran or Mohammed or something like that, so I stood up. I wasn’t gonna rehearse no more till we talked it all out.
“Yeah, I signed a contract. You signed a contract, too. You know who else signed a him a contract? J.J. – and look at him now!”
Everyone turned and looked at him. And he was just polishing his bass, oblivious, and he turned and said, “What?”
“Everyone knows he ain’t the same. Don’t matter if you never met him before he got on this ship. He used to be goofy and funny and clean, man, took care of his ass. Now look at him,” I said, and cleared my throat. “Hey, J.J.,” I called out. “What’s your favourite movie? What’s your favourite kind of ice cream?”
“Shut up, man,” he said. His voice sounded deader than the worst junkie’s. “Leave me alone.”
Grubbs had a sour look on his face, and he was shaking his head, but some of the other space Muslims, they were nodding and mumbling to one another. Wasn’t none of them gonna colonize nothing if they all ended up like J.J.
“See? See that? I’m telling you,” I said. “The longer we stay on . . .”
“. . . the more of us end up like J.J.” It was Big C, nodding his fat bald head. “The kid’s got a point. I done something like six tours of the solar system, and one quick trip out to Alpha Centauri, too, and you know, there’s always one or two guys who get messed up like that, sometimes more. Lately, it’s been more like three or four guys a trip. I’ve been starting to wonder when my time’s gonna come.”
This started the guys murmuring, discussing, disagreeing.
Grubbs and this other older guy, another space Muslim I remember was calling himself Yakub El-Hassan, one of the trombone players, they stood up to start preaching. I knew I had to do something quick.
“Hey, Big C,” I said. “Tell me, you know anything about what happened to Charlie Parker?” Not even Grubbs had the guts to interrupt Big C.
And that was the story that turned the tide. Bird, man, Bird had been right there on that same ship as we were on, at least that was how Big C told it. He’d gone off dope but was still drinking like a fish, whiskey and wine, still eating fried chicken by the five-pound serving, still smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, all of which, especially the liquor, was killing him.
“They took him away, and some of what they done to him, some of it gave him back what he lost back in Camarillo, that’s for sure. But what they did to him was even worse, killed off whatever was left from before Camarillo. Bird, man, he was ruined, all busted up inside. All he could to was play shit off records. Now, he played it crazy and slant. It was beautiful for what it was. But still, that was all he could do anymore. And to tell the truth, I heard they got copies of him. Extras, so they could have him around later. That whatever they took out of him, they kept it for the copies.”
The guys were all scared, then, all confused, and I knew finally I could maybe change their minds. Even Grubbs looked like he was starting to have his doubts, starting to feel like maybe we did have to make a stand.
“Man, you gotta think about it this way. They ain’t gonna copy nobody who don’t play what they like,” I said. “I mean, is this any better than slavery? Having your body copied and the most important part of you carried out into space? Your soul?” I said, hoping space Muslims believed in souls.
“Okay, so what can we do? Stop playing?” asked Yakub, still defiant, and though even Grubbs finally looked like he was ready to do something, he was nodding as if to say, Yeah, what can we do?
“Nuh-uh,” I said. “We stop playing, maybe they leave us on Jupiter or something. So we keep the contract. We play, but we play shit they don’t like. You never know, they might even drop us off at home early. And the only thing I ever promised when I signed up for this was that I’d play jazz, man.”
“I’m liking the sound of this,” Big C said, nodding his head. “Anything in mind?”
“Oh yeah, I got something in mind. Let’s go back to my place,” I said. “I got some LPs for us listen to, some new tunes to learn.”
Big C grinned his big old emcee grin and looked out into the crowd of Frogs. “Welcome, ladies, gentlemen, and whatever else you might happen to be. We’re glad to be back on the bandstand after our week off at Jupiter. We’ve got a whole new repertoire lined up for you, which we’ve worked hard to get ready, and we just know it’s gonna make a big splash. Welcome back, and remember: we’re the house band for the rest of this tour.”
Then he turned and faced the band, snapping his fingers one, two, one two three four, and then Jimmy Roscoe started the tune with a solo on the piano. “Straight, No Chaser,” it was, that night, my favourite Monk tune.
The band came in after a couple of bars, and not a goddamned one of us blurred. It wasn’t just that we were playing Monk, but we didn’t even blur when we played it. That made them crazy. The arrangement was lifted right off a Monk piano performance, the brass clanging out the tone clusters, and the saxes singing out his jagged solo in unison.
I never saw a roomful of Frogs clear out so fast, man. Not at first, of course; most of them waited until we segued into “Trinkle Tinkle” and they couldn’t stand it no longer. When aliens got sick off Monk, sometimes they even puked. It wasn’t pretty. Man, one of the most beautiful things I ever saw in my life was old Heavy Gills slipping on some purple alien puke on the way out, falling right on his bassoon and snapping it in half. I still don’t know what it was about Monk that always turned them upside down like that. Even Monk didn’t know. Later, after I got back, I told him – Monk – about that night, and it cracked him up. He said some scientist had come and seen him, with some kind of theory, equations and charts and numbers, but he told me he figured the answer was a whole lot simpler than that. “It’s just a gift,” he said, and he winked.
Anyway, the trip home, man, it was a lot quicker than we expected. We just played a few Monk tunes at the start of every set, and the few Frogs who even bothered to show up left quick and then we had the ballroom to ourselves. For a while, we started playing around with what we could do in music without blurring. We could still make our fingers remember anything, could still remember any music we’d heard since going on board. I’m still that way, all these years later. I got so many goddamn tunes in my head, it’s like a music library, even now.
But of course we didn’t just work all the time. We jammed, and most of us (except the few who were still trying to be space Muslims) drank all night, and started bringing in the can-can girls – I’d talked Monique into stirring them up, and you know, they were French. They love their revolutions. So they was refusing to blur during their can-can dances, and their auditorium was just as empty as our ballroom, and they had all the time in the world to come drink and hang around with us. All those French girls around, tempting our Muslims from their righteous path and fooling around with the rest of us, it was like heaven for a while.
I think the only people who blurred anymore were the cowboys, because most of them were having the times of their lives chasing those blurred-up cows around all blurred up themselves like that. And some of the animals in the Russian circus, because they didn’t know any better. And maybe that Russian guy, too, though him and the Chinese chicks I never did see again.
So anyway, we were supposed to have gone out to Pluto, but a few days off Jupiter, the complaints got so bad that Big C was called up to go see the man – I mean the Frogs running the ship – but when he came back, he said the Frogs agreed we was playing jazz, just like in the contract, and the contract didn’t say nothing about no Monk, so there was nothing they could do. I half expected them to start lynching our asses, but they didn’t. The ship went ahead and turned around, headed for Earth just as fast as it fucking could. Me and Monique, we had a fine old time partying the nights away, night after night, but we knew this trip wasn’t gonna last forever.
“Marry me,” I said to her one night when we were lying in bed, both of us smoking. I wasn’t sure I meant it, wasn’t sure I wanted to marry anyone at all, but it sounded like the thing to say.
“Robbie,” she said, “I know you. You are musicien. You don’t need a wife. You are like a bluebird in the sky.”
I puffed on the cigarette. “I guess you’re right, baby.”
“Let’s enjoy the time we ’ave, and when we get ’ome, we don’t say goodbye, only ‘See you around the later.’”
I laughed a little. “Naw, you mean, ‘See you later.’ Or ‘See you around,’ baby. Not . . .”
“Whatever,” she said, and yanked the sheets off me.
You know, when we got to Earth, we landed in Africa.
Africa, man, the motherland, the place where all our music started. I was in Africa and the funny thing was, I didn’t give a shit. I wanted to get back to New York, to the clubs on West 52nd, to Minton’s.
But it took time. We came down an elevator near some city whose name I can’t remember, in what was then still Belgian Congo, which was lousy with wealthy Belgian refugees by then, and we rode down into town in jeeps. Monique sat with me, held my hand, but I couldn’t see her face through the sunglasses she wore. She had this big sun hat on, too, huge thing I’d never seen before, and she kept looking out across the hillsides.
Finally, when we got into the city, that was it. I lifted her suitcase out of the back of the jeep, and there we were, the guys from the band off to one side, waiting for me so we could all catch a flight back to New York, and all them can-can girls off to the other side waiting for her so they could all go back to Paris.
And there we were in the middle.
“What you gonna do?” I said.
“I am not coming to New York,” she said.
“I know. What are you gonna do?”
“I am going to go to Paris,” she said, but the French way, Paree. “I’m going to tell people what I ’ave seen, and ask the everyone to stop cooperating wit’ les grenouilles.” Which was exactly what she did, too, on and on until the Frogs finally just up and left. Not that they left because of her, I don’t think, but she never stopped fighting them.
“That sounds good,” I said, and I looked at her hands.
“’Ow about you?” she said, a little more softly.
“Me? I’m a musician, Monique. I’m gonna go home and play me some music.”
I kissed her, and I wanted that kiss to be magic, like in the stories your folks read you when you’re a little kid. When a kiss wakes up a princess or saves the world, that kind of shit. But all that happened was that she kissed me back for a little while, and then she was gone.
It was a hell of a thing, getting back to New York like that. Not just all the new buildings, or them new flying cars zipping around like they owned the place, crashing into one another. The goddamned Frogs, they were pissed at all of us from that tour. Those sons of bitches over at the Onyx, they had already tore up all the contracts, and I didn’t ever see more than a few thousand dollars from the whole thing, which was bullshit, really, since I’d signed up for a cool million, and been gone for almost half the time I’d signed up for.
But you know, in the end, I didn’t give a shit. Those pills I took, none of them had worn off yet. (Most of them still haven’t, even now, and it’s been decades.) My mama, she used to say, “Take whatever lemons you get in life, boy, and you go on and make yourself some lemonade.” My mama, she couldn’t cook to save her life, but she knew something, alright.
So I started making lemonade. I got myself one of those new typewriter-phones that everyone was buying, and sent a phone-letter to my buddies from the band, and on Monday nights, we started meeting down under the 145th Street Bridge.
Man, down under that bridge, with them new flying cars buzzing overhead, we invented a new kind of music. It was all about playing together, at the same time, like in old-fashioned Dixieland music, except that we were swinging it hard, real hard, and half of it was made of chunks of music from the libraries in our heads. Everyone who showed up there, we’d been up on the ships, so we all had libraries in our heads. Our fingers were programmed, you know, so we could play anything back that we wanted. You could start with a little Monk, then switch over to Bird, throw in a little Prez, and of course there was room for whatever else you wanted to play up in there, too, and man did we play.
All that memory and all those programmable chops that they gave us to make up for the fact that playing blurred was so hard, we used all of that. After a few months, we found none of us could blur anymore even if we wanted to, but we didn’t even care. We were doing something new, man, and all the music that’s come after, you can hear some of what we did right in there, still!
Time came years later when all of that would start to sound old-fashioned, when people would start talking shit about us for that, criticizing us for ever having gone onto them Frogships and even blaming us for what happened in Russia and Europe, which is just crazy. Man, when we were fighting back, that was the first time ever where anything like that had been done, at least with the Frogs. It was all new. It’s easy to disrespect people making mistakes before you were born, way easier than worrying about not making your own mistakes. That’s just bullshit, trying to fill us up with regret for what’s all long gone now, like the Frogs.
Shit, maybe there are things I regret, like leaving Francine the way I did, or how I totally stopped visiting J.J. in the asylum after we got back. But most my regrets are for things that ain’t my fault. I regret seeing Prez the way he ended up, for instance, and I regret never seeing Big C again, and Monique for that matter. I used to think about all that a lot, after I first got back. Man, I remember lots of times when I used to stand there under the bridge while everyone was playing back all their favourite lines from old records we all knew, and I’d look up into the sky and find Jupiter. It’s easy, you know, just look up. It looks like a star, a bright old star up there. I’d stare on up at Jupiter, back then, and think of Prez, and blow a blues on my horn, the baddest old motherfucker of a blues that anybody anywhere ever heard in the world.
New writer Aliette de Bodard is a software engineer who was born in the United States but grew up in France, where she still lives. Only a couple of years into her career, her short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future, Coyote Wild, Electric Velocipede, Fictitious Force, Shimmer, and elsewhere.
Here she takes us sideways in time to an alternate world, where the details of history and the fortunes of empires may be very different from those we know, but heartache, loneliness, jealousy, and passion remain very much the same.
EVEN SEEN FROM afar, the Mexica District in Fenliu was distinctive: tall, whitewashed buildings clashing with the glass-and-metal architecture of the other skyscrapers. A banner featuring Huitzilpochtli, protector god of Greater Mexica, flapped in the wind as my aircar passed under the security gates. The god’s face was painted as dark as blood.
A familiar sight, even though I’d turned my back on the religion of my forefathers a lifetime ago. I sighed, and tried to focus on the case ahead. Zhu Bao, the magistrate in charge of the district, had talked me into taking on this murder investigation because he thought I would handle the situation better than him, being Mexica-born.
I wasn’t quite so sure.
The crime scene was a wide, well-lit dome room on the last floor of 3454 Hummingbird Avenue, with the highest ceiling I had ever seen. The floor was strewn with hologram pedestals, though the holograms were all turned off.
A helical stair led up to a mezzanine dazzlingly high, somewhere near the top of the dome. At the bottom of those stairs, an area had been cordoned off. Within lay the naked body of a woman. She was Mexica, and about thirty years old – she could have been my older sister. Morbidly fascinated, I let my eyes take in everything: the fine dust that covered the body, the yellow make-up she’d spread all over herself, the soft swell of her breasts, the unseeing eyes still staring upwards.
I looked up at the railing high above. I guessed she’d fallen down. Broken neck probably, though I’d have to wait for the lab people to be sure.
A militiaman in silk robes was standing guard near one of the hologram pedestals. “I’m Private Li Fai, ma’am. I was the first man on the scene,” he said, saluting as I approached. I couldn’t help scrutinising him for signs of contempt. As the only Mexica-born magistrate in the Xuyan administration, I’d had my fair share of racism to deal with. But Li Fai appeared sincere, utterly unconcerned by the colour of my skin.
“I’m Magistrate Hue Ma of Yellow Dragon Falls District,” I said, giving him my Xuyan name and title with scarcely a pause. “Magistrate Zhu Bao has transferred the case over to me. When did you get here?”
He shrugged. “We got a call near the Fourth Bi-Hour. A man named Tecolli, who said his lover had fallen to her death.”
I almost told him he was pronouncing “Tecolli” wrong, that a Mexica wouldn’t have put the accent that way, and then I realized this was pointless. I was there as a Xuyan magistrate, not a Mexica refugee – those days were over, long past. “They told me it was a crime, but this looks like an accident.”
Li Fai shook his head. “There are markings on the railing above, ma’am, and her nails are all ragged and bloody. Looks like she struggled, and hard.”
“I see.” It looked I wasn’t going to get out of this so easily.
I wasn’t trying to shirk my job. But any contacts with Mexica made me uneasy – reminded me of my childhood in Greater Mexica, cut short by the Civil War. Had Zhu Bao not insisted . . .
No. I was a magistrate. I had a job to do, a murderer to catch.
“Where is this . . . Tecolli?” I asked, finally.
“We’re holding him,” Li Fai said. “You want to talk to him?”
I shook my head. “Not right now.” I pointed to the landing high above. “Have you been there?”
He nodded. “There’s a bedroom, and a workshop. She was a hologram designer.”
Holograms were the latest craze in Xuya. Like all works of art, they were expensive: one of them, with the artist’s electronic signature, would be worth more than my annual stipend. “What was her name?”
“Papalotl,” Li Fai said.
Papalotl. Butterfly, in Nahuatl. A graceful name given to beautiful Mexica girls. There had been one of them in my school, back in Tenochtitlán, before the Civil War.
The Civil War . . .
Abruptly, I was twelve again, jammed in the aircar against my brother Cuauhtemoc, hearing the sound of gunfire splitting the window —
No. No. I wasn’t a child any more. I’d made my life in Xuya, passed the administrative exams and risen to magistrate, the only Mexica-born to do so in Fenliu.
“Ma’am?” Li Fai asked, staring at me.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll just have a look around, and then we’ll see about Tecolli.”
I moved towards the nearest hologram pedestal. A plaque showed its title: the journey. It was engraved in Nahuatl, in English and in Xuyan, the three languages of our continent. I turned it on, and watched a cone of white light widen from the pedestal to the ceiling; a young Xuyan coalesced at its centre, wearing the grey silk robes of a eunuch.
“We did not think it would go that far,” he said, even as his image faded, replaced by thirteen junks sailing over great waves. “To the East, Si-Jian Ma said as we departed China; to the East, until we struck land —”
I turned the hologram off. Every child on the continent knew what was coming next: the first Chinese explorers landing on the West Coast of the Lands of Dawn, the first tentative contacts with the Mexica Empire, culminating in Hernán Cortés’ aborted siege of Tenochtitlán, a siege cut short by Chinese gunpowder and cannon.
I moved to the next hologram, spring among the emerald flowers: a Mexica woman recounting a doomed love story between her and a Xuyan businessman.
The other holograms were much the same: people telling their life’s story – or, rather, I suspected, the script Papalotl had written for them.
I headed for the hologram nearest the body. Its plaque read homewards. When turned on, it displayed the image of a swan, the flag-emblem Xuya had chosen after winning its independence from the Chinese motherland two centuries ago. The bird glided, serene, on a lake bordered by weeping willows. After a while, a hummingbird, Greater Mexica’s national bird, came and hovered by the swan, its beak opening and closing as if it were speaking.
But there was no sound at all.
I turned it off, and on again, to no avail. I felt around in the pedestal, and confirmed my suspicions: the sound chip was missing. Which was not normal. All holograms came with one – an empty one if necessary, but there was always a sound chip.
I’d have to ask the lab people. Perhaps the missing chip was simply upstairs, in Papalotl’s workshop.
I moved around the remaining holograms. Four of the pedestals, those furthest away from the centre, had no chips at all, neither visu nor sound. And yet the plaques all bore titles.
The most probable explanation was that Papalotl had changed the works on display; but given the missing sound chip, there could have been another explanation. Had the murderer touched those holograms – and if so, why?
I sighed, cast a quick glance at the room for anything else. Nothing leapt to my eyes, so I had Li Fai bring me Tecolli, Papalotl’s lover.
Tecolli stood watching me without fear – or indeed, without respect. He was a young, handsome Mexica man, but didn’t quite have the arrogance or assurance I expected.
“You know why I’m here,” I said.
Tecolli smiled. “Because the magistrate thinks I will confide in you.”
I shook my head. “I’m the magistrate,” I said. “The case has been transferred over to me.” I took out a small pad and a pen, ready to take notes during the interview.
Tecolli watched me, no doubt seeing for the first time the unobtrusive jade-coloured belt I wore over my robes. “You are not —” he started, and then changed his posture radically, moving in one fluid gesture from a slouch to a salute. “Apologies, Your Excellency. I was not paying attention.”
Something in his stance reminded me, sharply, of my lost childhood in Tenochtitlán, Greater Mexica’s capital. “You are a Jaguar Knight?”
He smiled like a delighted boy. “Close,” he said, switching from Xuyan to Nahuatl. “I’m an Eagle Knight in the Fifth Black Tezcatlipoca Regiment.”
The Fifth Regiment – nicknamed “Black Tez” by the Xuyans – was the one guarding the Mexica embassy. I had not put Tecolli down as a soldier, but I could see now the slight callus under his mouth, where the turquoise lip-plug would usually chafe.
“You weren’t born here,” Tecolli said. His stance had relaxed. “Xuyan-born can’t tell us apart from commoners.”
I shook my head, trying to dislodge old, unwelcome memories – my parents’ frozen faces after I told them I’d become a magistrate in Fenliu, and that I’d changed my name to a Xuyan one. “I wasn’t born in Xuya,” I said, in Xuyan. “But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.”
“No,” Tecolli said, coming back to Xuyan. There was fear in his face now. “You want to know about her.” His eyes flicked to the body, and back to me. For all his rigid stance, he looked as though he might be sick.
“Yes,” I said. “What can you tell me about this?”
“I came early this morning. Papalotl said we would have a sitting.”
“A sitting? I saw no hologram pieces with you.”
“It was not done yet,” Tecolli snapped, far too quickly for it to be the truth. “Anyway, I came and saw the security system was disengaged. I thought she was waiting for me —”
“Had she ever done this before? Disengaged the security system?”
Tecolli shrugged. “Sometimes. She was not very good at protecting herself.” His voice shook a little, but it didn’t sound like grief. Guilt?
Tecolli went on: “I came into the room, and I saw her. As she is now.” He paused, choking on his words. “I – I could not think. I checked to see if there was anything I could do . . . but she was dead. So I called the militia.”
“Yes, I know. Near the Fourth Bi-Hour. A bit early to be about, isn’t it?” In this season, on the West Coast, the sun wouldn’t even have risen.
“She wanted me to be early,” Tecolli said, but did not elaborate.
“I see,” I said. “What can you tell me about the swan?”
Tecolli started. “The swan?”
I pointed to the hologram. “It has no sound chip. And several other pieces have no chips at all.”
“Oh, the swan,” Tecolli said. He was not looking at me – in fact, he was positively sweating guilt. “It is a commission. By the Fenliu Prefect’s Office. They wanted something to symbolize the ties between Greater Mexica and Xuya. I suppose she never had time to complete the audio.”
“Don’t lie to me.” I was annoyed he would play me for a fool. “What’s the matter with that swan?”
“I do not see what you are talking about,” Tecolli said.
“I think you do,” I said, but did not press my point. At least, not yet. Tecolli’s mere presence at the scene of the crime gave me the right to bring him back to the tribunal’s cells to secure his testimony – and, should I judge it necessary, to ply him with drugs or pain to make him confess. Many Xuyan magistrates would have done that. I found the practice not only abhorrent, but needless. I knew I would not get the truth out of Tecolli that way. “Do you have any idea why she’s naked?” I asked.
Tecolli said, slowly, “She liked to work that way. At least with me,” he amended. “She said it was liberating. I . . .” He paused, and waited for a reaction. I kept my face perfectly blank.
Tecolli went on, “It turned her on. And we both knew it.”
I was surprised at his frankness. “So it isn’t surprising.” Well, that was one mystery solved – or perhaps not. Tecolli could still be lying to me. “How did you get along with her?”
Tecolli smiled – a smile that came too easily. “As well as lovers do.”
“Lovers can kill each other,” I said.
Tecolli stared at me, horrified. “Surely you do not think —”
“I’m just trying to determine what your relationship was.”
“I loved her,” Tecolli snapped. “I would never have harmed her. Are you satisfied?”
I wasn’t. He seemed to waver between providing glib answers and avoiding my questions altogether.
“Do you know if she had any enemies?” I asked.
“Papalotl?” Tecolli’s voice faltered. He would not look at me. “Some among our people felt she had turned away from the proper customs. She did not have an altar to the gods in her workshop, she seldom prayed or offered blood sacrifices —”
“And they hated her enough to kill?”
“No,” Tecolli said. He sounded horrified. “I do not see how anyone could have wanted to —”
“Someone did. Unless you believe it’s an accident?” I dangled the question innocently enough, but there was only one possible answer, and he knew it.
“Do not toy with me,” Tecolli said. “No one could have fallen over that railing by accident.”
“No. Indeed not.” I smiled, briefly, watching the fear creep across his face. What could he be hiding from me? If he’d committed the murder, he was a singularly fearful killer – but I had seen those too, those who would weep and profess regrets, but who still had blood on their hands. “Does she have any family?”
“Her parents died in the Civil War,” Tecolli said. “I know she came from Greater Mexica twelve years ago with her elder sister, Coaxoch, but I never met her. Papalotl did not talk much about herself.”
No. She would not have – not to another Mexica. I knew what one did, when one turned away from Mexica customs, as Papalotl had done, as I had done. One remained silent; one did not speak for fear one would be castigated – or worse, pitied.
“I’ll bring her the news,” I said. “You’ll have to accompany the militiamen to the tribunal, to have your story checked, and some blood samples taken.”
“And then?” He was too eager, far too much for an innocent, even an aggrieved one. “I’m free?”
“For the moment – and don’t think you can leave Fenliu. I need you at hand, in case I have more questions,” I said, darkly. I would catch him soon enough, and tear the truth from him if I had to.
As he turned to leave, he straightened his turtleneck, and I saw a glint of green around his neck. Jade. A necklace of jade, made of small beads – but I knew each of those beads would be worth a month’s salary for an ordinary Xuyan worker. “They pay you well, in the army,” I said, knowing that they did not.
Startled, Tecolli reached for his neck. “That? It is not what you think. It was an inheritance from a relative.”
He said the words quickly, and his eyes flicked back and forth between me and the door.
“I see,” I said, sweetly, knowing that he was lying. And that he knew I’d caught him. Good. Let him stew a bit. Perhaps it would make him more co-operative.
After Tecolli had left, I gave orders to Li Fai to trail him, and to report to me through the militia radio channel. Our young lover had looked in a hurry, and I was curious to know why.
Back at the tribunal, I had a brief discussion with Doctor Li: the lab people had examined the body, and they had come up with nothing significant. They confirmed that Papalotl had been thrown over the railing, plummeting from the high-perched mezzanine to her death.
“It’s a crime of passion,” Doctor Li said, darkly.
“What makes you say that?”
“Whoever did this pushed her over the railing, and she clung to it as she fell – we analysed the marks on the wood. And then the murderer kept on tearing at her until she let go. From the disorderly pattern of wounds on her hands, it’s obvious that the perpetrator was not thinking clearly, nor being very efficient.”
Passion. A lover’s passion, perhaps? A lover who seemed to have rather too much money for his pay – I wondered where Tecolli had earned it, and how.
The lab people had not found the missing audio chip either, which confirmed to me that the swan was important – but I did not know in what way.
“What about fingerprints?” I asked.
“We didn’t find any,” Doctor Li said. “Not even hers. The railing was obviously wiped clean by the perpetrator.”
Damn. The murderer had been thorough.
After that conversation, I made a brief stop by my office. There I lit a stick of incense over my small altar, pausing for a brief, perfunctory prayer to Guan Yin, Goddess of Compassion. Then I turned on my computer. Like almost every computer in the city of Fenliu, it had been manufactured in Greater Mexica, and the screen lit up with a stylised butterfly, symbol of Quetzalcoatl, the Mexica god of knowledge and computers.
This never failed to send a twinge of guilt through me, usually because it reminded me I should call my parents, something I hadn’t had the courage to do since becoming a magistrate. This time, though, the image that I could not banish from my mind was of Papalotl, stark naked, falling in slow motion over the railing.
I shook my head. It was not a time for morbid imaginings. I had work to do.
In my mail-box I found the preliminary reports of the militia, who had questioned the neighbours.
I scanned the reports, briefly. Most of the neighbours had not approved of Papalotl’s promiscuous attitude. Apparently Tecolli had only been the last in a series of men she’d brought home.
One thing Tecolli had not seen ft to mention to me was that he had quarrelled violently with Papalotl on the previous evening – shouts loud enough to be heard from the other flats. One neighbour had seen Tecolli leave, and Papalotl slam the door behind him.
So she had still been alive at that time.
I’d ask Tecolli about the quarrel. Later, though. I needed more evidence if I wanted to spring a trap, and so far I had little to go on.
In the meantime, I asked one of the clerks at the tribunal to look up the address of Papalotl’s sister. I busied myself with administrative matters while he searched in the directory, and soon had my answer.
Papalotl had had only one sister, and no other living relative. Coaxoch lived on 23 Izcopan Square, just a few streets away from her younger sibling, on the edge of the Mexica District – my next destination.
The address turned out to be a Mexica restaurant: The Quetzal’s Rest. I parked my aircar a few streets away and walked the rest of the way, mingling with the crowd on the sidewalks – elbowing Mexica businessmen in embroidered cotton suits, and women with yellow makeup and black-painted teeth, who wore knee-length skirts and swayed alluringly as they walked.
The restaurant’s facade was painted with a life-sized Mexica woman in a skirt and matching blouse, standing before an electric stove. Over the woman crouched Chantico, Goddess of the Hearth, wearing her crown of maguey cactus thorns and her heavy bracelets of carnelian and amber.
The restaurant itself had two parts: a small shack which churned out food to the aircars of busy men, and a larger room for those who had more time.
I headed for the last of those, wondering where I would find Coaxoch. The room was not unlike a Xuyan restaurant: sitting mats around low circular tables, and on the tables an electric brazier which kept the food warm – in this case maize flatbreads, the staple of Mexica food. The air had that familiar smell of fried oil and spices which always hung in my mother’s kitchen.
There were many customers, even though it was barely the Sixth Bi-Hour. Most of them were Mexica, but I caught a glimpse of Xuyans – and even of a paler face under red hair, which could only belong to an Irish-American.
I stopped the first waitress I could find, and asked, in Nahuatl, about Coaxoch.
“Our owner? She’s upstairs, doing the accounts.” The waitress was carrying bowls with various sauces, and it was clear that she had little time to chat with strangers.
“I need to see her,” I said.
The waitress looked me up and down, frowning – trying, no doubt, to piece the Mexica face with the Xuyan robes of state. “Not for good news, I’d wager. It’s the door on the left.”
I found Coaxoch in a small office, entering numbers onto a computer. Next to her, a tall, lugubrious Mexica man with spectacles was checking printed sheets. “Looks like the accounts don’t tally, Coaxoch.”
“Curses.” Coaxoch raised her head. She looked so much like her younger sister that I thought at first they might be twins; but then I saw the small differences: the slightly larger eyes, the fuller lips, and the rounder cheeks.
Coaxoch saw me standing in the doorway, and froze. “What do you want?” she asked.
“I —” Staring at her eyes, I found myself taken aback. “My name is Hue Ma. I’m the magistrate for the Yellow Dragon Falls District. Your sister is dead. I came to inform you, and to ask some questions.” I looked at her companion. “Would you mind leaving us alone?”
The man looked at Coaxoch, who had slumped on her desk, her face haggard. “Coaxoch?”
“I’ll be all right, Mahuizoh. Can you please go out?”
Mahuizoh threw me a worried glance, and went out, gently closing the door after him.
“So she is dead,” Coaxoch said, after a while, staring at her hands. “How?”
“She fell over a railing.”
Coaxoch looked up at me, a disturbing shrewdness in her eyes. “Fell? Or was pushed?”
“Was pushed,” I admitted, pulling a chair to me, and sitting face-to-face with her.
“And so you have come to find out who pushed her,” Coaxoch said.
“Yes. It happened this morning, near the Fourth Bi-Hour. Where were you then?”
Coaxoch shrugged, as if it did not matter that I asked her for an alibi. “Here, sleeping. I have a room on this floor, and the restaurant does not open until the Fifth Bi-Hour. I am afraid there were no witnesses though.”
I would check with the staff, but suspected Coaxoch was right and no one could speak for her. I said, carefully, “Do you know of any enemies she might have had?”
Coaxoch looked at her hands again. “I cannot help you.”
“She was your sister,” I said. “Don’t you want to know who killed her?”
“Want to know? Of course,” Coaxoch said. “I am not heartless. But I did not know her well enough to know her enemies. Funny, isn’t it, how far apart you can move? We came together from Tenochtitlán, each thinking the other’s thoughts, and now, twelve years later, I hardly ever saw her.”
I thought, uncomfortably, of the last time I’d talked to my parents – of the last time I’d spoken Nahuatl to anyone outside of my job. One, two years ago?
I couldn’t. Whenever I visited my parents, I’d see the same thing: the small, dingy flat with the remnants of their lives in Greater Mexica, with photographs of executed friends like so many funeral shrines. I’d smell again the odour of charred flesh in the streets of Tenochtitlán, see my friend Yaotl fall with a bullet in his chest, crying out my name, and I unable to do anything but scream for help that would never come.
Coaxoch was staring at me. I tore myself from my memories and said, “You knew about Papalotl’s lovers.” I couldn’t pin Coaxoch down. One moment she seemed remote, heartless, and the next her voice would crack, and her words come as if with great difficulty.
“She was notorious for them,” Coaxoch said. “It was my fault, all of this. I should have seen her more often. I should have asked . . .”
I said nothing. I had not known either of the two sisters, and my advice would have sounded false even to myself. I let Coaxoch’s voice trail off, and asked, “When did you last see her?”
“Six days ago,” Coaxoch said. “She had lunch with Mahuizoh and me.”
Mahuizoh had looked to be about Coaxoch’s age, or a little older. “Mahuizoh being . . . ?”
“A friend of the family,” Coaxoch said, her face closed.
Something told me I could ask about Mahuizoh, but would receive no true answer. I let the matter slide for the moment, and asked, “And she did not seem upset then?”
Coaxoch shook her head. She opened the drawer of her desk and withdrew a beautiful slender pipe of tortoiseshell, which she filled with shaking hands. As she closed the drawer, I caught a glimpse of an old-fashioned photograph: a young Mexica wearing the cloak of noblemen. It was half-buried beneath papers.
Coaxoch lit her pipe. She inhaled, deeply; the smell of flowers and tobacco filled the small office. “No, she did not seem upset at the time. She was working on a new piece, a commission by the Prefect’s Office. She was very proud of it.”
“Did you see the commission?”
“No,” Coaxoch said. “I knew it was going to be a swan and a hummingbird, the symbols of Xuya and Greater Mexica. But I did not know what text or what music she would choose.”
“Does Mahuizoh know?”
“Mahuizoh?” Coaxoch started. “I do not think he would know that, but you can ask him. He was closer to Papalotl than me.”
I’d already intended to interview Mahuizoh; I added that to the list of questions I’d have to ask him. “And so she just seemed excited?”
“Yes. But I could be wrong. I had not seen her in a year, almost.” Her voice had gone emotionless again.
“Why?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.
Coaxoch shrugged. “We . . . drifted apart after settling in Fenliu, each of us going our own way, I suppose. Papalotl found her refuge in her holograms and in her lovers; I found mine in my restaurant.”
“Refuge from what?” I asked.
Coaxoch looked at me. “You know,” she said. “You fed the Civil War as well, did you not?”
I said, startled, “You can’t know that.”
“It is written on your face. And why else would a Mexica become a Xuyan magistrate?”
“There are other reasons,” I said, keeping my face stern.
Coaxoch shrugged. “Perhaps. I will tell you what I remember: brother turning on brother, and the streets black with blood; the warriors of the Eagle Regiments fighting one another; snipers on the roof, felling people in the marketplace; priests of Tezcatlipoca entering every house to search for loyalists —”
Every word she spoke conjured confused, dreadful images in my mind, as if the twelve-year-old who had fed over the border was still within me. “Stop,” I whispered. “Stop.”
Coaxoch smiled, bitterly. “You remember as well.”
“I’ve put it behind me,” I said, behind clenched teeth.
Coaxoch’s gaze moved up and down, taking in my Xuyan robes and jade-coloured belt. “So I see.” Her voice was deeply ironic. But her eyes, brimming with tears, belied her. She was transferring her grief into aggressiveness. “Was there anything else you wanted to know?”
I could have told her that Papalotl had died naked, waiting for her lover. But I saw no point. Either she knew about her sister’s eccentric habits and it would come as no surprise, or she did not know everything and I would wound her needlessly.
“No,” I said, at last. “There wasn’t anything else.”
Coaxoch said, carefully, “When will you release the body? I have to make . . . funeral arrangements.” And her voice broke then. She buried her face in her hands.
I waited until she looked up again. “We’ll let it into your keeping as soon as we can.”
“I see. As soon as it is presentable,” Coaxoch said with a bitter smile.
There was no answer I could give to that. “Thank you for your time,” I said instead.
Coaxoch shrugged, but did not speak again. She turned back to the screen, staring at it with eyes that clearly did not see it. I wondered what memories she could be thinking of, but decided not to intrude any further.
As I exited the room my radio beeped, signalling a private message had been transmitted to my handset. Mahuizoh was waiting outside. “I’d like to have a word with you in a minute,” I said, lifting the handset out of my belt.
He nodded. “I’ll be with Coaxoch.”
In the corridor, I moved to a quiet corner to listen to the message. The frescoes on the walls were of gods: the Protector Huitzilpochtli with his face painted blue and his belt of obsidian knives; Tezcatlipoca, God of War and Fate, standing against a background of burning skyscrapers and stroking the jaguar by his side.
They made me feel uncomfortable, reminding me of what I’d left behind. Clearly Coaxoch had held to the old ways – perhaps clinging too much to them, as she herself had admitted.
The message came from Unit 6 of the militia: after leaving the tribunal, Tecolli had gone to the Black Tez Barracks. The militia, of course, had had to stop there, for the Barracks were Mexica territory. But they had posted a watch on a nearby rooftop, and had seen Tecolli make a long, frantic phone call from the courtyard. He had then gone back to his rooms, and had not emerged.
I called Unit 6, and told them to notify me the moment Tecolli made a move.
Then I went back to Coaxoch’s office, to interview Mahuizoh.
When I came in, Mahuizoh was sitting close to Coaxoch, talking in a low voice to her. Behind the spectacles, his eyes shone with an odd kind of fervour. I wondered what he was to Coaxoch, what he had been to Papalotl.
Mahuizoh looked up and saw me. “Your Excellency,” he said. His Xuyan was much less accented than Coaxoch’s.
“Is there a room where we could have a quiet word?” I asked.
“My office. Next door,” Mahuizoh said. Coaxoch was still staring straight ahead, her eyes glassy, her face a blank mask. “Coaxoch —”
She did not answer. One of her hands was playing with the tortoiseshell pipe, twisting and turning it until I feared she would break it.
Mahuizoh’s office was much smaller than Coaxoch’s, and papered over with huge posters of ballgame players, proudly wearing their knee- and elbow-pads, soaring over the court to put the ball through the vertical steel-hoop.
Mahuizoh did not sit; he leaned against the desk, and crossed his arms over his chest. “What do you want to know?” he said.
“You work here?”
“From time to time,” Mahuizoh said. “I’m a computer programmer at Paoli Tech.”
“You’ve known Coaxoch long?”
Mahuizoh shrugged. “I met her and Papalotl when they came here, twelve years ago. My capulli clan helped them settle into the district. They were so young, back then,” he said, blithely unaware that he wasn’t much older than Coaxoch. “So . . . different.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Like frightened birds flushed out of the forest,” Mahuizoh said.
“The War does that to you,” I said, falling back on platitudes. But part of me, the terrified child that had fled Tenochtitlán, knew that those weren’t platitudes at all, but the only way to transcribe the unspeakable past into words.
“I suppose,” Mahuizoh said. “I was born in Fenliu, so I wouldn’t know that.”
“They lost both their parents in the War?”
“Their parents were loyal to the old administration – the one that lost the Civil War,” Mahuizoh said. “The priests of Tezcatlipoca found them one night, and killed them before Papalotl’s eyes. She never recovered from that.” His voice shook. “And now —”
I did not say the words he would have me say, all too aware of his grief. “You knew Papalotl well.”
Mahuizoh shrugged again. “No more or no less than Coaxoch.” I saw the faint flicker of his eyes. Liar.
“She had lovers,” I said, carefully probing at a sore space.
“She was always . . . more promiscuous than Coaxoch,” Mahuizoh said.
“Who has no fiancé?”
“Coaxoch had a fiancé. Izel was a nobleman in the old administration of Tenochtitlán. He was the one who bargained for Papalotl’s and Coaxoch’s release from jail, after the priests killed their parents. But he’s dead now,” Mahuizoh said.
“He’s the man whose picture is in her drawer?”
Mahuizoh started. “You’ve seen that? Yes, that’s him. She’s never got over him. She still makes funeral offerings even though he’s beyond all that nonsense. I hoped that with time she would forget, but she never did.”
“How did Izel die?”
“A party of rebel warriors started chasing their aircar a few measures away from the border. Izel told Coaxoch to drive on, and then he leapt out with his gun out. He managed to stop the warriors’ aircar, but they caught him. And executed him.”
“A hero’s death,” I said.
Mahuizoh smiled without joy. “And a hero’s life. Yes. I can certainly see why Coaxoch wouldn’t forget him in a hurry.” His voice was bitter, and I thought I knew why: he had hoped to gain a place in Coaxoch’s heart, but had always found a dead man standing before him.
“Tell me about Papalotl,” I said.
“Papalotl . . . could be difficult,” Mahuizoh said. “She was willful, and independent, and she left the clan to focus on her art, abandoning our customs.”
“And you disapproved?”
His face twisted. “I didn’t see what she saw. I didn’t live through a war. I didn’t have the right to judge – and neither had the clan.”
“So you loved her, in your own way.”
Mahuizoh started. “Yes,” he said. “You could say that.” But there was a deeper meaning to his words, one I could not fathom.
“Do you know Tecolli?”
Mahuizoh’s face darkened, and for a moment I saw murder in his eyes. “Yes. He was Papalotl’s lover.”
“You did not like him?”
“I met him once. I know his kind.”
“Know?”
He spat the words. “Tecolli is a parasite. He’ll take everything you have to give, and return nothing.”
“Not even love?” I asked, seemingly innocently.
“Mark my words,” Mahuizoh said, looking up at me, and all of a sudden I was not staring at the face of a frail computer programmer, but into the black-streaked one of a warrior. “He’ll suck everything out of you, drink your blood and feast on your pain, and when he leaves there’ll be nothing left but a dry husk. He didn’t love Papalotl; and I never understood what she saw in him.”
And in that last sentence I heard more than hatred for Tecolli.
“You were jealous,” I said. “Of both of them.”
He recoiled at my words. “No. Never.”
“Jealous enough to kill, even.”
His face had grown blank, and he said nothing. At last he looked up again, and he had grown smaller, almost penitent. “She didn’t understand,” he said. “Didn’t understand that she was wasting her time. I couldn’t make her see.”
“Where were you this morning?”
Mahuizoh smiled. “Checking alibis? I have very little to offer you. It was my day off, so I went for a walk near the Blue Crane Pagoda. And then I came here.”
“I suppose no one saw you?”
“No one that would recognize me. There were a few passers-by, but I wasn’t paying attention to them, and I doubt they were paying attention to me.”
“I see,” I said, but I could not forget his black rage, could not forget that he might have lost his calm once and for all, finding Papalotl naked in her workshop, waiting for her lover. “Thank you.”
“If you don’t need me, I’ll go back,” Mahuizoh said.
I shook my head. “No, I don’t need you. I might have further questions.”
He looked uncomfortable at that. “I’ll do my best to answer them.”
I left him, made my way through the crowded restaurant, listening to the hymns blaring out of the loudspeakers, inhaling the smell of maize and octli drink. I could not banish Coaxoch’s words from my mind: I will tell you what I remember: brother turning on brother, and the streets black with blood . . .
It was a nightmare I had left behind, a long time ago. It could neither touch me nor harm me. I was Xuyan, not Mexica. I was safe, ensconced in Xuya’s bosom, worshipping the Taoist Immortals and the Buddha, and trusting the protection of the Imperial Family in Dongjing.
Safe.
But the War, it seemed, never truly went away.
I came back to the tribunal in a thoughtful mood, having found no one to confirm either Mahuizoh’s or Coaxoch’s alibi. Since we were well into the Eighth Bi-Hour, I had a quick, belated lunch at my desk – noodle soup with coriander, and a coconut jelly as a dessert.
I checked my mails. A few reports from the militia were waiting for me. The timestamp dated them earlier than my departure for The Quetzal’s Rest, but they had been caught in the network of the bureaucracy and slowed down on their way to the tribunal.
Cursing against weighty administrations, I read them, not expecting much.
How wrong I was.
Unit 7 of the Mexica District Militia had interviewed the left-door neighbour of Papalotl: an old merchant who had insomnia, and who had been awake at the Third Bi-Hour. He had seen Tecolli enter Papalotl’s flat a full half-hour before Tecolli actually called the militia.
Damn. There was still a possibility that Tecolli could have found the body earlier, but if so, why hadn’t he called the militia at once? Why had he waited so much?
Disposing of evidence, I thought, my heart beating faster and faster.
I should have arrested Tecolli. But instead I had clung to my old ideals, that torture was abhorrent and that a magistrate should find the truth, not wring it out of suspects. I had been weak.
Now . . .
I had him watched. He had been making phone calls. It was only a matter of time before he had to make some kind of move.
I sighed. Once a mistake had been made, you might as well drain the cup to the dregs. I’d wait.
It was a frustrating process. The afternoon passed and deepened into night. I attempted some Buddhist meditations, but I could not focus on my breath properly, and after a while I gave this up as a lost cause.
When the announcement came, I was so coiled up I knocked down the handset trying to pick it up.
“Your Excellency? This is Unit 6 of the militia. Target is on the move. Repeat: target is on the move.”
I grabbed my coat and rushed out, shouting for my aircar.
I met up with the aircar of Unit 6 in a fairly seedy neighbourhood of Fenliu: the Gardens of Felicity, once a middle-class area, had sunk back to crowded tenements and derelict buildings, sometimes abandoned halfway through their construction.
I had a brief chat with Li Fai, who was heading the militia: Tecolli had left the Black Tez Barracks and taken the mag-lev train which crisscrossed Fenliu. One of the militiamen had followed Tecolli on the mag-lev, until he alighted at the Gardens of Felicity station, making his way on foot into a small, almost unremarkable shop on Lao Zi Avenue.
Both our aircars were parked at the corner of Lao Zi Avenue, about fifty paces from the shop – and Tecolli had not emerged from there.
I looked at the three militiamen, checking that they had their service weapons, and drew my own Yi Sen semi-automatic. “We’re going in,” I said, arming the weapon in one swift movement, and hearing the click as the bullet was released into the chamber.
I stood near the closed door of the shop, feeling the reassuring weight of my gun. At this late hour the street was almost deserted, and any stray passers-by gave us a wide berth, not keen on interfering with Xuyan justice.
Li Fai was standing on tiptoe, trying to look through the window. After a while he came down, and raised three fingers. Three people, then. Or more. Li Fai had not seemed very certain.
Armed? I signed, and he shrugged.
Oh well. There came a time when you had to act.
I raised my hand, and gave the signal.
The first of the militiamen kicked open the door, yelling, “Militia!” and rushed inside. I followed, caught between two militiamen, fighting to raise my gun amidst memories of the War, of pressing myself in a doorway as loyalists and rebels shot at each other on Tenochtitlán’s marketplace —
No.
Not now.
Inside, everything was dark, save for a dimly-lit door; I caught a glimpse of several figures running through the frame.
I was about to run through the door in pursuit, but someone – Li Fai – laid a hand on my shoulder to restrain me.
I remembered then that I was a District Magistrate, and that they could not take risks with my life. It was frustrating, but I knew I had not been trained for this. I nodded to tell Li Fai I’d understood, and watched the militiamen rush through the door.
Gunshots echoed through the room. The first man who had entered fell, clutching his shoulder. A few more gunshots – I could not see the militiamen; they’d gone beyond the door.
A deathly silence settled over the place. I moved cautiously around the counter, and stepped through the door.
The light I had seen came from several hologram pedestals, which had their visuals on, but not their audios. On the floor were scattered chips – I almost stepped on one.
In the corner of the wood-panelled room was the body of a small, wizened Xuyan woman I did not know. Beside her was the gun she’d used. The militia’s bullet had caught her in the chest and thrown her backwards, against the wall.
Tecolli was crouching next to her, in a position of surrender. Two militiamen stood guard over him.
I smiled, grimly. “You’re under arrest.”
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” Tecolli said, attempting to pull himself upright.
“Sedition will suffice,” I said. “Resisting the militia is a serious crime.” As I said this, my gaze, roaming the room, caught one of the images on a hologram pedestal, an image that was all too familiar: a Chinese man dressed in the grey silk robes of a eunuch, gradually fading and being replaced by thirteen junks on the ocean.
Papalotl’s holograms.
Things that should not have been copied, or sold elsewhere than in Papalotl’s workshop.
I remembered the missing chips in Papalotl’s pedestals, and suddenly understood where Tecolli’s wealth had come from. He had been stealing her chips, copying them and selling the copies on the black market And Papalotl had found out – no doubt the reason for the quarrel.
But for him it was different: he was an Eagle Knight, and subject to harsher laws than commoners. For a crime such as this he would be executed, his family disgraced. He’d had to silence Papalotl, once and for all.
He’ll suck everything out of you.
Mahuizoh could not have known the truth behind his words, back when he had spoken them to me. There was no way he could have known.
Tecolli’s eyes met mine, and must have seen the loathing I felt for him. All pretence fled from his face. “I did not kill her,” he said. “I swear to you I did not kill her.” He looked as though he might weep.
I spat, from between clenched teeth, “Take him away. We’ll deal with him at the tribunal.”
Yi Mei-Lin, one of the clerks, entered my office as I was typing the last of my preliminary report.
“How is he?” I asked.
“Still protesting his innocence. He says he found her already dead, and only used the extra half-hour to wipe off any proof that he might have tampered with the holograms – removing his fingerprints and wiping the pedestals clean.” Yi Mei-Lin had a full cardboard box in her hands, with a piece of paper covering it. “These are his things. I thought you might want a look.”
I sighed. My eyes ached from looking at the computer. “Yes. I probably should.” I already knew that although we’d found the missing chips in the black-market shop, the swan hologram’s audio chip had been nowhere to be found. Tecolli denied taking it. Not that I was inclined to trust him currently.
“I’ll bring you some jasmine tea,” Yi Mei-Lin said, and slipped out the door.
I rifled through Tecolli’s things, absentmindedly. The usual: wallet, keys, copper yuans – not even enough to buy tobacco. A metal lip-plug, tarnished from long contact with the skin. A packet of honey-toasted gourd seeds, still wrapped in plastic.
A wad of papers, folded over and over. I reached for it, unwound it, and stared at the letters. It was part of a script – the swan’s script, I realized, my heart beating faster. Tecolli had been the voice of the hummingbird, and Papalotl’s script was forcefully underlined and annotated in the margins, in preparation for his role.
The swan – Papalotl’s voice – merely recited a series of dates: the doomed charge of the Second Red Tezcatlipoca Regiment during Xuya’s Independence War with China; the Tripartite War and the triumph of the Mexica-Xuyan alliance over the United States.
And, finally, the Mexica Civil War, twelve years ago: the Xuyan soldiers dispatched to help restore order; the thousands of Mexica feeing their home cities and settling across the border.
The swan then fell silent, and the hummingbird appeared. It was there that Tecolli’s role started.
Tonatiuh, the Fifth Sun, has just risen, and outside my cell I hear the priests of Huitzilpochtli chanting their hymns as they prepare the altar for my sacrifice.
I know that you are beyond the border now. The Xuyans will welcome you as they have welcomed so many of our people, and you will make a new life there. I regret only that I will not be there to walk with you —
Puzzled, I turned the pages. It was a long, poignant monologue, but it did not feel like the other audio chips I’d heard in Papalotl’s workshop. It felt . . .
More real, I thought, chilled without knowing why. I scanned the bottom of the second-to-last page.
They will send this letter on to you, for although they are my enemies they are honourable men.
Weep not for me. I die a warrior’s death on the altar, and my blood will make Tonatiuh strong. But my love is and always has been yours forever, whether in this world of fading flowers or in the god’s heaven.
Izel.
Izel.
Coaxoch’s fiancé.
It was the Third Bi-Hour when I arrived at The Quetzal’s Rest, and the restaurant was deserted, all the patrons since long gone back to their houses.
A light was still on upstairs, in the office. Gently, I pushed the door open, and saw her standing by the window, her back to me. She wore a robe with embroidered deer, and a shawl of maguey fibres – the traditional garb of women in Greater Mexica.
“I was waiting for you,” she said, not turning around.
“Where’s Mahuizoh?”
“I sent him away.” Coaxoch’s voice was utterly emotionless. On the desk stood the faded picture of Izel, and in front of the picture was a small bowl holding some grass – a funeral offering. “He would not have understood.”
She turned, slowly, to face me. Two streaks of black makeup ran on either side of her cheeks: the markings put on the dead’s faces before they were cremated.
Surprised, I recoiled, but she made no move towards me. Cautiously, I extended Tecolli’s crumpled paper to her. “Papalotl stole the original letter from you, didn’t she?”
Coaxoch shook her head. “I should have seen her more often, after we moved here,” she said. “I should have seen what she was turning into.” She laid both hands on the desk, as stately as an Empress. “When it went missing, I didn’t think of Papalotl. Mahuizoh thought that maybe Tecolli —”
“Mahuizoh hates Tecolli,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Coaxoch said. “I went to Papalotl, to ask her whether she’d seen it. I didn’t think.” She took a deep breath to steady herself. Her skin had gone red under the makeup. “When I came in, she opened the door to me – naked, and she didn’t even offer to dress herself. She left me downstairs and headed for her workshop, to finish something, she said. I followed her.”
Her voice quavered, but she steadied it. “I saw the letter on her table – she’d taken it. And when I asked her about it, she told me about the hologram, told me we were going to be famous when she sold this, and the Prefect’s Office would put it where everyone could see it . . .”
I said nothing. I remained where I was, listening to her voice grow more and more intense, until every word tore at me.
“She was going to . . . sell my pain. To sell my memories just for a piece of fame. She was going —” Coaxoch drew a deep breath. “I told her to stop. I told her it was not right, but she stood on the landing, shaking her head and smiling at me – as if she just had to ask for everything to be made right.
“She didn’t understand. She just didn’t understand. She’d changed too much.” Coaxoch stared at her hands, and then back at the picture of Izel. “I couldn’t make her shut up, you understand? I pushed and beat at her, and she wouldn’t stop smiling at me, selling my pain —”
She raised her gaze towards me, and I recognised the look in her eyes: it was the look of someone already dead, and who knows it. “I had to make her stop,” she said, her voice lower now, almost spent. “But she never did. Even after she fell she was still smiling.” There were tears in her eyes now. “Still laughing at me.”
I said at last, finding my words with difficulty, “You know how it goes.”
Coaxoch shrugged. “Do you think I care, Hue Ma? It ceased to matter a long time ago.” She cast a last, longing glance towards Izel’s picture, and straightened her shoulders. “It’s not right either, what I’ve done. Do what you have to.”
She did not bend, then, as the militia came into the room – did not bend as they closed the handcuffs over her wrists and led her away. I knew she would not bend on the day of her execution either, whatever the manner of it.
As we exited the restaurant, I caught a glimpse of Mahuizoh among the few passers-by who had gathered to watch the militia aircar. His gaze met mine, and held it for a second – and there were such depths of grief behind the spectacles that my breath caught and could not be released.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Justice has to be done.” But I did not think he could hear me.
Back at the tribunal, I sat at my desk, staring at my computer’s screensaver – one of Quetzalcoatl’s butterflies, multiplying until it filled the screen. There was something mindlessly reassuring about it.
I had to deal with Tecolli, had to type a report, had to call Zhu Bao to let him know his trust had not been misplaced and that I had found the culprit. I had to –
I felt hollow, drained of everything. At last I moved, and knelt before my small altar. Slowly, with shaking hands, I lit a stick of incense and placed it upright before the lacquered tablets. Then I sat on my knees, trying to banish the memory of Coaxoch’s voice.
I thought of her words to me: it ceased to matter a long time ago.
And my own, an eternity ago: the War does that to you.
I thought of Papalotl, turning away from Mexica customs to forget her exile and the death of her parents, of what she had made of her life. I saw her letting go of the railing, slowly falling towards the floor; and saw Coaxoch’s eyes, those of someone already dead. I thought of my turning away from my inheritance, and thought of Xuya, which had taken me in but not healed me.
Which could never heal me, no matter how far away I ran from my fears.
I closed my eyes for a brief moment, and, before I could change my mind, got up and reached for the phone. My fingers dialled a number I hadn’t called for years but still had not forgotten.
The phone rang in the emptiness. I waited, my throat dry.
“Hello? Who is this?”
My stomach felt hollow – but it wasn’t fear, it was shame. I said in Nahuatl, every word coming with great difficulty, “Mother? It’s me.”
I waited for anger, for endless reproaches. But there was nothing of that. Only her voice, on the verge of breaking, speaking the name I’d been given in Tenochtitlán, “Oh, Nenetl, my child. I’m so glad.”
And though I hadn’t heard that name in years, still it felt right, in a way that nothing else could.