Fool’s Run Read online

  The vision was light…It stared down upon a shifting landscape where blurred shapes were bewilderingly, hauntingly familiar. The sand, pale, barren, ran suddenly hot, glazing into molten glass. Under the yellow stare even the oval melted. It became a child’s face, screaming silently in terror…

  From the master stylus of bestselling fantasy novelist Patricia McKillip comes this spellbinding tale of high stakes suspense, taut intrigue, and ominous apparitions. And in this brilliant science fiction debut, McKillip continues the legendary tradition of Anne McCaffrey’s Crystal Singer, providing her millions of readers with the most unforgettable heroine of all: the masked musician whose dark secret fuses with an inescapable destiny, touching off a riveting intergalactic adventure known as the Fool’s Run.

  She is the Queen of Hearts, the stellar performer whose ability to beat out the timeless rhythms of the universe has earned her acclaim as the best cuber in the galaxy. And she wears the golden smile, the gilded face-paint which masks her true identity. Yet as the band, headed by her old friend the Magician, closes in on the orbiting penal colony known as the Underworld, the Queen of Hearts knows that this will be more than a one-night gig. For in the shadow of dark prison resides the one remaining link between the masked musician and her forgotten past.

  Incarcerated in the depths of the Underworld is Terra Viridian, the hollow-eyed visionary of apocalypse—and the murderer of more than fifteen hundred innocent people. Encased in the bubble of the experimental mind prober known as “The Dream Machine,” Terra projects onto a screen the nightmarish sequence of images that make up her haunting future-vision: a molten red sun, an oval turned inward, a desert of amethyst sand. But as scientists scramble to decode Terra’s devastating message, yet another image appears on the screen: Hearts…red hearts…the red hearts that licked at the golden skin like tongues of fire.

  In a stunning turnabout, Terra Viridian will have the opportunity to once again pursue the vision that has haunted her, a vision that hides a secret and a mystery vital to the lives of everyone on the Fool’s Run.

  An action-packed, “off-world” adventure by a top-flight novelist, Fool’s Run is destined to establish Patricia McKillip as a creative force in the science fiction realm.

  Copyright © 1987 by Patricia A. McKillip

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10103

  A Warner Communications Company

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing: April 1987

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McKillip, Patricia A.

  Fool’s run.

  I. Title.

  PS3563.C38F6 1987 813'.54 86-40411

  ISBN 0-446-51278-8

  Book design: H. Roberts

  For all the musicians and patrollers of the 23 Club.

  With my very special thanks to Don Harriss.

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  PART ONE: The Queen Of Hearts

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  PART TWO: The Underworld

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  PART THREE: The Vision

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  * * *

  PROLOGUE

  Silence. A cliff face black as deep space. A dim, reddish sky beyond it. An oval bent back on itself, all colors or no color, lying on amethyst sand. A concave vision of a red star. The cliff. The oval. The red sun. The vision.

  Silence. Darkness.

  A sound. The prisoner moved her eyes, saw grey. A cushioned chair back angling into a grey uniform sleeve. Wrist. Fingers. A control panel with a Milky Way of glittering lights. Transparent ovals set into grey walls. Oval weapon lockers. She shifted slightly, heard her own breath, then radio static.

  “Identify.”

  “Voice code six: ‘I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky.’ Jailbird, coming home to roost. One prisoner.”

  “Status.”

  “Extremely dangerous. Request double guard at the dock. Request entry code.”

  “Challenge.”

  “‘To drift in a world of dreamers, to see no sun.’”

  “Challenge.”

  “4.057 x 1013.”

  “Challenge.”

  “Betty Grable. Jailbird, WGC909Z, request permission to enter.”

  “Entry code C. Channel three. Jailbird. Permission to enter the Underworld.”

  A gigantic circle slowly turning against the stars, two rings twisting around each another, one light, one dark. Minute lights flashed from a section of the light ring; the cruiser Jailbird turned toward them. The prisoner stared at the floor. A crystal filament was looped loosely around her wrists. If she moved too abruptly, she would cut off her hands. From the polished grey wasteland grew four boots. If she lifted her eyes from them, she would see laser-rifles. A star exploded in some galaxy in the dark at the back of her mind. Light dazzled across her brain. She made some sound; a rifle shifted. She raised her head slowly, slowly in the wild light.

  The static again. A different voice. “Jailbird. This is Records. Name of prisoner?”

  “Terra Viridian.”

  The com whistled. “You’ve got her.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Legal status.”

  “Her status-sheet is a mile long, can I give—”

  “Give us a printout when you dock. Jailbird. Is she sane?”

  “Legally.”

  “Off-record.”

  A breath of silence. “You ask her. Look into her eyes and ask her. Records. Shifting to entry channel.”

  The ring-wall loomed before them. The shielding opened to a blazing oval of lights. The prisoner rose. Six feet tall, bald, emaciated, she looked inconsequential enough to be borne away on a solar wind. But the unnatural stillness of her face, the enormous, smoky grey eyes touching the face of one guard, then the other, made them raise their weapons. She said tiredly, with a curious logic, “You cut off my hair. How could I harm you?”

  They didn’t answer. Two faces: one male, one female, one light, one dark, identical in their expressions. The cruiser-commander swiveled to look at her; beside him, the navigator eased the vessel toward the lights.

  “Sit down,” the commander said.

  “True or false,” she said to him, like an ancient conundrum. “I am sane.”

  He met her eyes a moment longer, trying to find an answer in them, then shook his head. “In there, in the Dark Ring, it won’t matter.” He added almost gently, “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Christ. Godchrist. A hundred years here. You can’t be sane. They should have sent you to New Horizon, repatterned your brain.”

  “I am sane.”

  “You murdered one thousand five hundred and nine people. Is that sane?”

  She gazed at him, hearing him as from the small end of a funnel. “You belong to one pattern,” she said, as she had repeated a hundred times during her trials. “I am caught in another.”

  He turned away impatiently. The great oval doors yawned wider; dock lights flared below them. “Drugs,” he said. But she hadn’t finished.

  “The vision is different.” Her thin voice was careful, insistent. “The Dark Ring is not in the vision.”

  He looked back at her, qui
et again, still trying to comprehend her. “What color was your hair? Before they shaved you? When you were a child?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Do you remember being a child?”

  “I was never a child.”

  “Are you a killer?”

  “Yes.”

  The navigator touched his arm when he didn’t move. “We’re here. You want to program the entry code before we blow up?”

  The commander turned, fingered lights savagely. “Some days I hate this job.” The red warning lights around them turned to gold. The cruiser settled in the vast, metallic silence. The prisoner hid behind her eyes, listening.

  FOOL’S

  RUN

  ONE

  THE

  QUEEN

  OF HEARTS

  ONE

  The Magician sat alone on a stage in the Constellation Club, playing Bach to the robots whirling a grave minuet around him as they sucked cigarette butts off the floor. Though the walls of the vast club were a polished, starless black, in the world outside, the sun was just rising. He changed key in a sarabande, and the blackness washed away in a sudden tide of color. The walls, now glowing chartreuse, proclaimed it six o’clock in the morning. The Magician and the robots remained oblivious. Only Sidney Halleck, polishing the oak slab of one of the dozen bars in the place, gave the change any attention. Something closer to the color of mud, his wincing eyes told him, would have been easier on the eyes after a night like that.

  The Magician’s fingers wrapped chords neatly together into a resolution, then leaped forward three centuries. The piano, made over 150 years before, a pre-FWG antique, sounded gentle but precise in the empty cavern of the club. Sidney stopped caressing the oak and leaned on it, listening: a big man with a plump, benign face, a massive nose and shrewd, serene eyes. With its twenty oval stages scattered across the floor, most of them littered with equipment, the Constellation Club by day resembled a hanger for UFOs. The Magician and the antique grand, producing weird music in solitary abstraction, like a kind of exhaust, seemed suddenly to Sidney as unidentifiable as any object that might have descended out of the stars to land in his club.

  The patternless spatter of notes came to an end. The Magician sat still, gazing at nothing, softly pressing one key over and over. Sidney waited; the B-flat led nowhere. He broke gently into the Magician’s reverie.

  “Was that Hanro you just played? ‘Aurora Borealis Cocktail’?”

  The Magician nodded absently. “Doesn’t translate well to the piano…” He was still sounding the key. Half his spare, high-boned face was magenta from the night before. He trailed a couple of disconnected body-wires from his belt and from his neck-ring. A stardust of green and magenta glittered in his hair, on the piano keys.

  His ear focused finally on the sound he was making; he listened as the air trembled and stilled. His face, of a chameleon type that changed with every thought, lost its clinical detachment from the noise he’d been making and somehow became more magenta.

  “I swear every time I breathe on this thing it goes out of tune…”

  “It’s had a long and weary life,” Sidney said. “It was up in an attic in Prairie Sector for seventy-five years until I tracked it down. Mice were nesting among the strings.” He added, when the Magician seemed no longer in danger of vanishing back into his music, “Coffee? Beer?”

  The Magician shook his head, then blew the glitter off the keys. “Thanks, it’s bedtime. What are you doing here so late, Sidney? It’s—whatever hour that god-awful green in the walls is.”

  “It’s dawn,” Sidney said, and the Magician stopped breathing. He gazed at Sidney expressionlessly over the piano. “I stayed to listen to you. How often do I get a free Bach concert? I had to stay after hours anyway. One of the bands nearly went Full Primal at closing time.” The Magician made a garbled noise that Sidney took to be a question. “You were playing, then. You didn’t notice the patrollers and the ambulances.”

  “What—who—”

  Sidney waved a hand vaguely toward a distant stage. “A new band called Desperate Sun. They seemed innocuous when they auditioned…They were planning to electrocute themselves with their instruments as a gesture of support for the National Regression Coalition of Sundown Sector. One of my bouncers cut off their electricity before they hurt themselves too badly. They kept making speeches to the patrollers about Sundown Sector’s right to bear arms, tax itself and call itself Australia again. Though why they wanted to die for Australia in my club eluded me.”

  The Magician’s harlequin face was a patchwork of expressions. “What was I doing through all this?”

  “You played a lot of fugues and toccatas. Then you played the Inventions. All of them. That was a little dry,” he admitted. “Then you played the Fourth English Suite. Then most of the Fifth, and then parts of the French Suites—”

  “I didn’t—”

  “And you finished up with Hanro’s ‘Cocktail.’ Four hours, nonstop, with patrollers taking statements and injured bodies being borne away under your nose. What on earth were you thinking about?”

  The Magician’s eyes lingered, wide, on Sidney’s face. His right hand slid to the keyboard; the soft, single note sounded again. His eyes, still on Sidney’s face, grew opaque.

  The walls blackened around him once again. They had lost their angles; in the cold, pristine night of space, something minute, flashing dark and light, followed its changeless orbit around him…

  “Magic-Man,” Sidney said gently and he blinked. He stopped playing the note after a moment, stared down at it.

  “B-flat.” He ran his hands over his face, smearing the paint, and stood up stiffly. “I think I need that beer.”

  “I’ll join you. I don’t have to be anywhere until ten.”

  The Magician crossed the floor to the bar: Sidney’s favorite, an old-fashioned corner of oak and brass, polished mirrors and mellow light. He started to sit and changed his mind. “You waited for me all night,” he said amazedly. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

  Sidney hesitated, building a head on their beers with artistry. “I was too fascinated,” he said finally. “I’ve never seen anyone play classical music in such a trance. Besides, you were playing very well. Once I got the debris cleared off the floor and the place emptied, it was soothing.”

  “I’m glad.” He sipped the cold beer bemusedly and asked, because it was an uncomplicated question, “Where are you going this morning? Are you lecturing somewhere, or searching Amazon Sector for the first penny-whistle?”

  “I’m going home,” Sidney said simply. “I had a message yesterday that I’d receive a call at ten this morning from the Underworld.”

  “The Un—” He swallowed beer too fast; Sidney handed him a towel. “Why?” he asked, breathing again. Sidney shrugged cheerfully.

  “I can’t imagine. I’ve worked with several FWG institutions, but never with a prison.”

  “You own the busiest and most famous club in Suncoast Sector; maybe you’re beginning to attract attention in the wrong places. Have you bounced any crime-lords lately?”

  “Aaron would tell me. He keeps an eye on everyone.”

  “Aaron…” the Magician said oddly, and Sidney, swallowing beer, glanced at him.

  “He was here last night. Or rather, this morning.”

  “He was on duty?”

  “You didn’t see him.”

  “I could have sworn I was alone…”

  “Have you ever done that before? Played in a trance?”

  The Magician looked at him incredulously. “While a band tries to fry itself in front of me? I wouldn’t have thought I could play all the Inventions if you paid me. I don’t even remember learning them all.”

  Sidney propped his chin on his fist. “It was a remarkable performance.”

  “It’s a wonder the patrollers didn’t shoot me for some peace and quiet.”

  “Aaron told them you were demented but harmless.”

  The Magician’s mo
uth quirked. He caught sight of his face in the ornate mirror behind Sidney, a garish blur of paint and sweat, and ran the bar towel over it. The face that emerged, tense, alert, questing, seemed only remotely his own; the eyes, of the indeterminate color of water at twilight, waited for something just beyond the Magician’s vision.

  He dropped the towel and drank beer, his fingers colder than the glass. He felt it then: the sudden drag of sleeplessness, the chilly dampness of his body, which had pursued music with energy and passion for four hours without him. Sidney was still regarding him curiously.

  “You don’t remember what you were thinking about.”

  He shook his head, yawning. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Something must have triggered it,” Sidney said with gentle insistence, and the Magician felt the tug of Sidney’s mind, brilliant, generous and painstaking, toward the scent of a musical mystery. Such things were his career, his passion, and the Magician stirred his own weary brain to give him something valuable.

  But there was nothing: the smoothly revolving chip of light and shadow against deeper shadow, the slow rhythm against which he had ordered his playing…

  “Just…” He gave up, shaking his head again. “I’m sorry.”

  “There was something.”

  “Yes. But there’s no context.”

  “The B-flat.”

  “It was slightly out of tune. That’s all.” He said again, “I’m sorry.”

  “You’ll remember,” Sidney said tranquilly. “I don’t believe anything is ever really lost. Not a note of it. I think we dwell among the echoes of all the music ever played just as surely as we dwell among our ghosts. No instrument is ever obsolete; someone is always born to play it. You play music hundreds of years older than you are; it lingered for that long in the air, beyond all the noises of the world, until you heard a fragment of it, between noise and noise, an intimation of its existence. Then came the quest for it. The hunger.”

  The Magician, lulled into a pleasant half-trance by Sidney’s voice, was jarred by the word. He lifted his eyes from his shadow on the oak.