Read Fool's Run (v1.1) for Free Online

silence between them. But it was empty; it gave him no cue. He said finally, “It just happens, sometimes. That’s all. How long have we known each other?”
    “I don’t know. Four, five years. Since they came up with that program to put patrollers on foot during part of their shifts. I walked into the Constellation Club and there you were, playing Bach and turning orange.”

    The Magician grinned. “If I was orange, it wasn’t Bach. Five years. If one of my band members died, and I walked up to you the next morning and said it’s a fine day, what the hell would you say to me?”
    He shook his head, unconvinced. “There’s more—”
    “Okay. Sure it’s more complicated than that. But it’s not that important, and it wouldn’t be bothering you unless you had something—” He was on his feet suddenly, his back to Aaron.
    “This coffee tastes like lube oil. Hang on a moment. Besides,” he added above his noises in the kitchen, “I never pay much attention to it myself. I hate cluttering up my life with what’s in other people’s heads. I’m interested in music and money. In that order.” He reappeared with a fresh cup. “Maybe in that order.”
    “You like money,” Aaron said. The warm light had awakened some of the color in his face; the grit of sleeplessness in his eyes became more bearable. “You’d sell your soul—if you had one—for music.”
    The Magician sat down. He contemplated the worn, patched interior of the Flying Wail with complacent pride. “If I have a soul,” he said, “we’re sitting in it.”
    Aaron smiled. In his mind, the sniper’s fire ripped the dark air as if it were fabric, but his body no longer moved at the memory. It would streak across his final waking thought, he knew, but for now the Magician’s company kept it at bay. “Are you playing tonight?” he asked. “My schedule changes so much I never can keep yours straight.”
    The Magician nodded. “It’s poker night at the Constellation Club.”
    “Come again?”
    “I’m trying to teach Sidney Halleck how to play poker during breaks once a week when he’s not off somewhere lecturing.”
    “Sidney wants to play poker? Why?”
    The Magician shrugged. “He had five minutes when his brain had nothing to do, so he got interested in cards. If I’d been playing a zither instead of poker, he would have gotten interested in that.”
    “What’s a zither?”
    “It’s like an autoharp.”
    “Oh,” Aaron said blankly.
    The Magician sipped coffee and added, “Come to think of it, Sidney has a zither. That’s where I saw one: in his collection. He must own the log somebody hollowed out a million years ago to make the first drum.”
    “What is—”
    “It’s a flat soundbox with a lot of strings. As obsolete as the krummhorn. Sidney said he found his in an attic.”
    “Most of us would have trouble finding an attic these days.”
    “Sidney’s a magnet. He says he thinks about what he wants and it finds him.”
    “He must be a hell of a poker player.”
    The Magician gave a grunt of laughter. “He’s terrible. There’s nothing the cards can give him that he wants.”
    “He thinks about what he wants… and it finds him?”
    “That’s what he said. You know Sidney. The rest of us want fame, money, power—Sidney wants a nine-hundred-year-old instrument that sounds like a tree frog. Life gives him that, plus fame, money, power—”
    “Is there a moral here somewhere?”
    “I wish I knew.”
    “Why? What do you want that you haven’t got?”
    “A change,” the Magician said simply. “We’ve been playing the Constellation Club for five years. Bands like Cygnus and Alien Shoe are doing off-world tours on nothing but three chords and their face-jobs. I wouldn’t mind a few orchids and orbiting hotels, not to mention money. Then maybe I’d have a smallcraft with a receiver that works.” He gave the disemboweled panel a dour look. Aaron set his empty beer bottle down and stretched. “Let me know