Part 13 (2/2)

”You're not thinking at all,” Jewell said to her and stood up. She winced a little as she put her weight on her feet. ”Go borrow a pair of Garnet's shuffles. I'll nivver be able to git mine on. And go till Sapphire to doubletap hersilfinto the kitchen.”

She let me help her to the stairs, but not up them. ”When Carnie comes back, you hivv her show you your room. We work an eight and eight here, and it's nearly time for the s.h.i.+ft. You kin practice till supper if you want.”

She went up two steps and stopped. ”If Carnie asks you innymore silly questions, tell her I told her to lit you alone. I don't want to hear any more nonsinse about copying and Mirrors. You're here to play the pian.o.board.”

She went on up the stairs, and I went back into the music room. Pearl was still there, sitting in the white chair, and I didn't know whether she was included in the instructions to leave me alone, so I sat down on the hard wooden stool and looked at the pian.o.board.

It had a wooden soundboard and bridges, but the strings were plastic instead of metal. I tried a few chords, and it seemed to have a good sound in spite of the strings. I played a few scales and more chords and looked at the names on the hardcopies that stood against the music rack. I can't read music, of course, but I could see by the t.i.tles that I knew most of the songs.

”It isn't nonsense, is it?” Pearl said. ”About the copying.” She spoke slowly and without the clipped accent Jewell and Carnie had.

I turned around on the stool and faced her. ”No,” I said. ”Mirrors have to copy. They can't help themselves. They don't even know who they're copying. Jewell doesn't believe me. Do you?”

”The worst thing about being blind is not that things are done to you,” she said, and looked up at me again with her gray eyes. ”It's that you don't know who's doing them.”

Carnie came in through the curtained door. ”I'm sipposed to show you around,” she said. ”Oh, Pearl, I wish you kidd see him. He has eight fingers on each hand, and he's really tall. Almost to the ceiling. And his skin is bright red.”

”Like a sidon's,” Pearl said, looking at me.

Carnie looked down at the blood-red rug she was standing on. ”Jist like,” she said, and dragged me upstairs to show me my room and the clothes I was to wear and to show me off to the other girls. They were already dressed for the s.h.i.+ft in trailing satinpaper dresses that matched their names. Garnet wore rose-red chemilooms in her upswept hair, Emerald an elaborately lit collar.

Carnie got dressed in front of me, stepping out of her robe and into an orange-red dress as if I weren't watching. She asked me to fasten her armropes of winking orange, lifting up her red curls so I could tie the strings of the chemilooms behind her shoulders. I could not decide then if she were trying to seduce me or to get me to copy her or simply to convince me that she was the naive child she pretended to be.

I thought then that whatever she was trying she had failed. She had succeeded only in convincing me of what my uncle had already told me. In spite of her youth, her silliness, I could well believe she had been on Solfatara, had known all of it, the pervs, the sots, the worst the happy houses had to offer. I think now she didn't mean anything by it except that she wanted to be cruel, that she was simply poking at me as if I were an animal in a cage.

At supper, watching Sapphire set Pearl's plate for her between taped marks, I wondered whether Carnie was ever cruel to Pearl as she had been to me, s.h.i.+fting the plate slightly as she set it down or moving her chair so she could not find it.

Sapphire set the rest of the plates on the table, her eyes dark blue from some old bitterness, and I thought, Jewell shouldn't have brought any of them with her from Solfatara except Pearl. Pearl is the only one who hasn't been ruined by it. Her blindness has kept her safe, I thought. She has been protected from all the horrors because she couldn't see them. Perhaps her blindness protects her from Carnie, too, I thought. Perhaps that is the secret, that she is safe inside her blindness and no one can hurt her, and Jewell knows that. I did not think then about the man who had blinded her, and how she had not been safe from him at all.

Jewell called the meal to order. ”I want you to make our new pian.o.board player wilcome,” she said. She reached across the table and patted Carnie's hand. ”Thank you for doing the introductions, and for bandaging my foot,” she said, and I thought, Pearl is safe after all. Jewell has tamed Carnie and all the rest of them. I did not think about the sidon she had tamed, and how it now lay on the floor in front of the card-room door.

That first s.h.i.+ft Jewell decked me out in formals and a black-red dog collar and had me stand at the door with her as she greeted the tappers. They were in formals, too, under their soot-black work jackets. They hung the many-pocketed jackets, heavy with tools, on the rack in the anteroom along with their lanterns and sat down to take off their high shoes with hands almost as red as mine. They had washed their hands and faces, but their fingernails were black with soot, and there was soot in every line of their palms. Their faces looked hot and raw, and they all had a broad pale band across their foreheads from the lantern strap. One of them Jewell called Scorch had singed off his eyebrows and a long strip of hair on top of his head.

”You'll meet almost all the tappers this s.h.i.+ft. The gaming house will close hiffway through and the rist of them will come over. Taber and I stagger the s.h.i.+fts so simmthings always open.”

She didn't introduce me, though some of the tappers looked at my eight-fingered hands curiously; and one of the men looked surprised and then angry. He looked as if he was going to say something to me, and then changed his mind, his face getting redder and darker until the lantern line stood out like a scar.

When they were all inside the music room, Jewell led me to the pian.o.board and had me sit down and spread my hands out over the keyboard, ready to play. Then she said, ”This is my new pian.o.board player, boys. Say hillo to him.”

”What's his name, Jewell?” one of the men said. ”You ginna give him a fancy name like the girls?”

”I nivver thought about it,” she said. ”What do you think?”

The tapper who had turned so red said loudly, ”I think you s.h.i.+d call him sidon and kick him out to burn on Paylay. He's a Mirror.”

”I alriddy got a Carnelian and a Garnet. And I had a sidon once. I giss I'll call him Ruby.” She looked calmly over at the man who had spoken. ”That okay with you, Jick?”

His face was as dark a red as mine. ”I didn't say it to be mean, Jewell,” he said. ”You're doing what you did with the sidon, taking in simmthing thit'll turn on you. They won't even lit Mirrors on Solfatara.”

”I think that's probably a good ricommendation considering what they do lit on Solfatara,” Jewell said quietly ”Sot-gamblers, tap-stealers, pervers-”

”You saw that Mirror kill the tapper. Stid there right in front iv ivverybody and n.o.body kidd stop him. n.o.body. The tapper bigging for mercy, his hands tied in front of him, and thit Mirror coming at him with a sot-razor, smiling while he did it.”

”Yes,” Jewell said. ”I saw it. I saw a lot of things on Solfatara. But this is Paylay. And this is my pian.o.board player Ruby I din't think a man should be outlawed till he does simmthing, di you, Jick?” She put her hand on my shoulder. ”Do you know 'Back Home'?” she said. Or course I knew it. I knew all the tapper songs. Kovich had played in every happy house on Solfatara before somebody broke his hands. He had called ”Back Home” his rope-cutter.

”Play it, thin,” she said. ”Show thim what you can do, Ruby.”

I played it with lots of trills and octave stretches, all the fancy things Kovich could do with five fingers instead of eight. Then I stopped and waited. The nitrogen blowers kicked off, and even the fans made no noise. During the song Jewell had gone and stood next to Jack, putting her hand on his shoulder, trying to tame him. I wondered if she had succeeded. Jack looked at me, and then at Jewell and back at me again. His hand went into his formals s.h.i.+rt, and my heart almost stopped before he brought it out again.

”Jewell's right,” he said. ”You s.h.i.+ddn't judge a man till you see what he does. That was gid playing,” he said, handing me a plastic-wrapped cigar. ”Wilcome to Paylay.”

Jewell nodded at me, and I extended my hand and took the cigar. I fumbled to get the slippery plastic off and then had to look at the cigar a minute to make sure I was getting the right end in my mouth. I stuck it in my mouth and reached inside my s.h.i.+rt for my sparker. I didn't know what would happen when I lit the cigar. For all I understood what was going on, the cigar might be full of gunpower. Jewell did not look worried, but then she had misjudged the sidon, too.

My hand closed on the sparker inside my s.h.i.+rt, the nitrogen blowers kicked suddenly on, and Jack said lazily, ”Now whit you ginna light that with, Ruby? There in't a match on Paylay!”

Jewell laughed and the men guffawed. I pulled my empty hand sheepishly out of my jacket and took the cigar out of my mouth to look at it. ”I forgot you can't smoke on Paylay,” I said.

”You and ivvery tapper that kimms in on the down,” Jewell said. ”I've seen Jick play that joke on how many newcomers?”

”Ivvery one,” Jack said, looking pleased with himself. ”It even worked on you, Jewell, and you weren't a newcomer.”

”It did not, you tripletapping liar,” she said. ”Lit's hear simmthing else, Ruby,” she said. ”Whit do you want Ruby to play boys?”

Scorch shouted out a song, and I played it, and then another, but I do not know what they were. It had been a joke, offer the newcomer a cigar and then watch him try to light it on a star where no open flames are allowed. A good joke, and Jack had done it in spite of what he had seen on Solfatara to show Jewell he didn't think I was a sidon, that he would wait to see what I would do before he judged me.

And that would have been too late. What would have happened when I lit the cigar? Would the house have gone up in a ball of flame, or all of St. Pierre? The hydrogen-oxygen ratio had been high enough in the upper atmosphere that we had had to shut off the engines above a kilometer and spiral in, and here the fans were pumping in even more oxygen. Half of Paylay might have gone up.

I knew how it had happened. Jewell had interrupted the downpilot before he could ask about sparkers, and now, because her feet had hurt, there was a live sparker in her house. And she had just convinced Jack I was not dangerous.

I had stopped playing, sitting there staring blindly at the keyboard, the unlit cigar clamped so hard between my teeth I had nearly bitten it through. The men were still shouting out the names of songs, but Jewell stepped between them and me and put a hardcopy on the music rack. ”No more riquists,” she said. ”Pearl is going to sing for you.”

Pearl stood up and walked una.s.sisted from her white chair to the pian.o.board. She stopped no more than an inch from me and put her hand down certainly on the end of the keyboard. I looked at the music. It showed a line of notes before her part began, but I did not know that version, only the song that Kovich had known, and that began on the first note of the verse. I could not nod at her, and she could not see my hands on the keys.

”I don't know the introduction,” I said. ”Just the verse. What should I do?”

She bent down to me. ”Put your hand on mine when you are ready to begin, and I will count three,” she said, and straightened again, leaving her hand where it was.

I looked down at her hand. Carnie had told her about my hands, and if I touched her lightly with only the middle fingers, she might not even be able to tell it from a human's touch. I wanted more than anything not to frighten her. I did not think I could bear it if she flinched away from me.

Now I think it would have been better if she had, that I could have stood it better than this, sitting here with her head on my lap, waiting. If she had flinched, Jack would have seen her. He would have seen her draw away from me, and that would have been enough for him to grab me by the dog collar and throw me out the door, kick me down the wooden steps so hard that the sparker bounced out, leave me to cook in the furnace of Paylay.

”Now whit did you do thit for?” Jewell would have said. ”He din't do innything but tich her hand.”

”And he'll nivver do innything ilse to her either,” he would have said, and handed Jewell the sparker. And I would never have been able to do anything else to her.

But she did not flinch. She took a light breath that took no longer than it did for my hand to return to the keys and hit the first note on the count of three, and we began together. I did not do any trills, any octave stretches. Her voice was sweet and thready and true. She didn't need me.

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