. . . because she needs you, the jewel whispered. Because you promised.
His hand did not move. His fist stayed closed. The cold against his palm passed beyond pain, into numbness.
That other Dirk, the younger one, Gwen’s Dirk. He had promised. But so had she, he remembered. Long ago on Avalon. The old esper, a wizened Emereli with a very minor Talent and red-gold hair, had cut two jewels. He had read Dirk t’Larien, had felt all the love Dirk had for his Jenny, and then had put as much of that into the gem as his poor psionic powers allowed him to. Later, he had done the same for Gwen. Then they had traded jewels.
It had been his idea. It may not always be so, he had told her, quoting an ancient poem. So they had promised, both of them: Send this memory, and I will come. No matter where I am, or when, or what has passed between us. I will come, and there will be no questions.
But it was a shattered promise. Six months after she had left him, Dirk had sent her the jewel. She had not come. After that, he could never have expected her to invoke his promise. Yet now she had.
Did she really expect him to come?
And he knew, with sadness, that the man he had been back then, that man would come to her, no matter what, no matter how much he might hate her—or love her. But that fool was long buried. Time and Gwen had killed him.
But he still listened to the jewel and felt his old feelings and his new weariness. And finally he looked up and thought, Well, perhaps it is not too late after all.
There are many ways to move between the stars, and some of them are faster than light and some are not, and all of them are slow. It takes most of a man’s lifetime to ship from one end of the manrealm to the other, and the manrealm—the scattered worlds of humanity and the greater emptiness in between—is the very smallest part of the galaxy. But Braque was close to the Veil, and the outworlds beyond, and there was some trade back and forth, so Dirk could find a ship.
It was named the Shuddering of Forgotten Enemies, and it went from Braque to Tara and then through the Veil to Wolfheim and then to Kimdiss and finally to Worlorn, and the voyage, even by FTL drive, took more than three months standard. After Worlorn, Dirk knew, the Shuddering would move on, to High Kavalaan and ai-Emerel and the Last Stars, before it turned and began to retrace its tedious route.
The spacefield had been built to handle twenty ships a day; now it handled perhaps one a month. The greater part of it was shut, dark, abandoned. The Shuddering set down in the middle of a small portion that still functioned, dwarfing a nearby cluster of private ships and a partially dismantled Toberian freighter.
A section of the vast terminal, automated and yet lifeless, was still brightly lit, but Dirk moved through it quickly, out into the night, an empty outworld night that cried for want of stars. They were there, waiting for him, just beyond the main doors, more or less as he had expected. The captain of the Shuddering had lasered on ahead as soon as the ship emerged from drive into normal space.
Gwen Delvano had come to meet him, then, as he had asked her to. But she had not come alone. Gwen and the man she had brought with her were talking to each other in low, careful voices when he emerged from the terminal.
Dirk stopped just past the door, smiled as easily as he could manage, and dropped the single light bag he carried: “Hey,” he said softly. “I hear there’s a Festival going on.”
She had turned at the sound of his voice, and now she laughed, a so-well-remembered laugh. “No,” she said. “You’re about ten years too late.”
Dirk scowled and shook his head. “Hell,” he said. Then he smiled again, and she came to him, and they embraced. The other man, the stranger, stood and watched without a trace of self-consciousness.
It was a short hug. No sooner had Dirk wrapped his arms about her than Gwen pulled back. After the break they stood very close, and each looked to see what the years had done.
She was older but much the same, and what changes he saw were probably only defects in his memory. Her wide green eyes were not quite as wide or green as he remembered them, and she was a little taller than he recalled and perhaps a bit heavier. But she was close enough; she smiled the same way, and her hair was the same; fine and dark, falling past her shoulders in a shimmering stream blacker than an outworld night. She wore a white turtleneck pullover and belted pants of sturdy chameleon cloth, faded to night-black now, and a thick headband, as she had liked to dress on Avalon. Now she wore a bracelet too, and that was new. Or perhaps the proper word was armlet. It was a massive thing, cool silver set with jade, that covered half her left forearm. The sleeve of her pullover was rolled back to display it.
“You’re thinner, Dirk,” she said.
He shrugged and thrust his hands into his jacket pockets. “Yes,” he said. In truth, he was almost gaunt, though still a little round-shouldered from slouching too much. The years had aged him in other ways as well; now his hair had more gray than brown, when once it had been the other way around, and he wore it nearly as long as Gwen, though his was a mass of curls and tangles.
“A long time,” Gwen said.
“Seven years, standard,” he replied nodding. “I didn’t think that . . .”
The other man, the waiting stranger, coughed then, as if to remind them that they were not alone. Dirk glanced up, and Gwen turned. The man came forward and bowed politely. Short and chubby and very blond—his hair looked almost white—he wore a brightly colored silkeen suit, all green and yellow, and a tiny black knit cap that stayed in place despite his bow.
“Arkin Ruark,” he said to Dirk.
“Dirk t’Larien.”
“Arkin is working with me on the project,” Gwen said.
“Project?”
She blinked. “Don’t you even know why I’m here?”
He didn’t. The whisperjewel had been sent from Worlorn, so he had known not much else than where to find her. “You’re an ecologist,” he said. “On Avalon . . .”
“Yes. At the Institute. A long time ago. I finished there, got my credentials, and I’ve been on High Kavalaan since. Until I was sent here.”
“Gwen is with the Ironjade Gathering,” Ruark said. He had a small, tight smile on his face. “Me, I’m representing Impril City Academy. Kimdiss. You know?”
Dirk nodded. Ruark was a Kimdissi then, an outworlder, from one of their universities.
“Impril and Ironjade, well, after the same thing, you know? Research on ecological interaction on Worlorn. Never really done properly during the Festival, the outworlds not being so strong on ecology, none of them. A science ai-forgotten, as the Emereli say. But that’s the project. Gwen and I knew each other from before, so we thought, well, here for the same reason, so it is good sense to work together and learn what we can learn.”
“I suppose,” Dirk said. He was not really overly interested in the project just then. He wanted to talk to Gwen. He looked at her. “You’ll have to tell me all about it later. When we talk. I imagine you want to talk.”
She gave him an odd look. “Yes, of course. We do have a lot to talk about.”
He picked up his bag. “Where to?” he asked. “I could probably do with a bath and some food.”
Gwen exchanged glances with Ruark. “Arkin and I were just talking about that. He can put you up. We’re in the same building. Only a few floors apart.”
Ruark nodded. “Gladly, gladly. Pleasure in doing for friends, and both of us are friend to Gwen, are we not?”
“Uh,” said Dirk. “I thought, somehow, that I would stay with you, Gwen.”
She could not look at him for a time. She looked at Ruark, at the ground, at the black night sky, before her eyes finally found his. “Perhaps,” she said, not smiling now, her voice careful. “But not right now. I don’t think it would be best, not immediately. But we’ll go home, of course. We have a car.”
“This way,” Ruark put in, before Dirk could frame his words. Something was very strange. He had played through the reunion scene a hundred times on board the Shuddering during
the months of his voyage, and sometimes he had imagined it tender and loving, and sometimes it had been an angry confrontation, and often it had been tearful—but it had never been quite like this, awkward and at odd angles, with a stranger present throughout it all. He began to wonder exactly who Arkin Ruark was, and whether his relationship with Gwen was quite what they said it was. But then, they had hardly said anything. Without knowing what to say or to think, he shrugged and followed as they led him to their aircar.
The walk was quite short. The car, when they reached it, took Dirk aback. He had seen a lot of different types of aircars in his travels, but none quite like this one; huge and steel-gray, with curved and muscled triangular wings, it looked almost alive, like a great aerial manta ray fashioned in metal. A small cockpit with four seats was set between the wings, and beneath the wingtips he glimpsed ominous rods.
He looked at Gwen and pointed. “Are those lasers?”
She nodded, smiling just a little.
“What the hell are you flying?” Dirk asked. “It looks like a war machine. Are we going to be assaulted by Hrangans? I haven’t seen anything like that since we toured the Institute museums back on Avalon.”
Gwen laughed, took his bag from him, and tossed it into the back seat. “Get in,” she told him. “It is a perfectly fine aircar of High Kavalaan manufacture. They’ve only recently started turning out their own. It’s supposed to look like an animal, the black banshee. A flying predator, also the brother-beast of the Ironjade Gathering. Very big in their folklore, sort of a totem.”
She climbed in, behind the stick, and Ruark followed a bit awkwardly, vaulting over the armored wing into the back. Dirk did not move. “But it has lasers!” he insisted.
Gwen sighed. “They’re not charged, and never have been. Every car built on High Kavalaan has weapons of some sort. The culture demands it. And I don’t mean just Ironjade’s. Redsteel, Braith, and the Shanagate Holding are all the same.”
Dirk walked around the car and climbed in next to Gwen, but his face was blank. “What?”
“Those are the four Kavalar holdfast-coalitions,” she explained. “Think of them as small nations, or big families. They’re a little of both.”
“But why the lasers?”
“High Kavalaan is a violent planet,” Gwen replied.
Ruark gave a snort of laughter. “Ah, Gwen,” he said. “That is utter wrong, utter!”
“Wrong?” she snapped.
“Very,” Ruark said. “Yes, utter, because you are close to truth, half and not everything, worst lie of all.”
Dirk turned in his seat to look back at the chubby blond Kimdissi. “What?”
“High Kavalaan was a violent planet, truth. But now, truth is, the violence is the Kavalars. Hostile folk, each and every among them, xenophobes often, racists. Proud and jealous. With their highwars and their code duello, yes, and that is why Kavalar cars have guns. To fight with, in the air! I warn you, t’Larien—”
“Arkin!” Gwen said between her teeth, and Dirk started at the edged malice in her tone. She threw on the gravity grid suddenly, touched the stick, and the aircar wrenched forward and left the ground with a whine of protest, rising rapidly. The port below them was bright with light where the Shuddering of Forgotten Enemies stood among the lesser starships, shadowy everywhere else. Around it was darkness to the unseen horizon where black ground blended with blacker sky. Only a thin powder of stars lit the night above. This was the Fringe, with intergalactic space above and the dusky curtain of the Tempter’s Veil below, and the world seemed lonelier than Dirk had ever imagined.
THE ARMAGEDDON RAG
Coming in February 2005 from Bantam Spectra
“The best novel concerning the American pop music
culture of the ’60s I’ve ever read.”
—Stephen King
“Moving . . . comic . . . eerie . . . really and truly a walk
down memory lane.”
—Washington Post
“A knowing, wistful appraisal of . . . a crucial American
generation . . . poetic, nostalgic, daring.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
THE ARMAGEDDON RAG
On sale February 2005
It was not one of Sandy Blair’s all-time great days. His agent had picked up the lunch tab, to be sure, but that only partially made up for the way he’d gotten on Sandy’s case about the novel deadline. The subway was full of yahoos and it seemed to take forever to get him back to Brooklyn. The three-block walk to the brownstone he called home seemed longer and colder than usual. He felt in dire need of a beer by the time he got there. He pulled one from the fridge, opened it, and ascended wearily to his third-floor office to face the stack of blank paper he was supposedly turning into a book. Once again, the elves had failed to knock off any chapters in his absence; page thirty-seven was still in his typewriter. You just couldn’t get good elves anymore, Sandy thought morosely. He stared at the words with distaste, took a swig from the bottle in his hand, and looked around for a distraction.
That was when he noticed the red light on his message machine, and found that Jared Patterson had phoned.
Actually it had been Jared’s secretary who made the call, which Sandy found amusing; even after seven years, and everything that had happened, Patterson was still a bit nervous about him. “Jared Patterson would like Mister Blair to contact him as soon as possible, in connection with an assignment,” said the pleasant professional voice. Sandy listened to her twice before erasing the tape. “Jared Patterson,” he said to himself, bemused. The name evoked a hell of a lot of memories.
Sandy knew that he really ought to ignore Patterson’s message. The sonofabitch deserved no more. That was hopeless, though; he was already too curious. He picked up the phone and dialed, mildly astonished to discover that he still remembered the number, after seven years. A secretary picked up. “Hedgehog,” she said. “Mister Patterson’s office.”
“This is Sander Blair,” Sandy said. “Jared phoned me. Tell the poltroon that I’m returning his call.”
“Yes, Mister Blair. Mister Patterson left instructions to put you through at once. Please hold.”
A moment later, Patterson’s familiar mock-hearty voice was ringing in Sandy’s ear. “Sandy! It’s great to hear ya, really it is. Long time, old man. How’s it hanging?”
“Cut the shit, Jared,” Sandy said sharply. “You’re no happier to hear from me than I was to hear from you. What the hell do you want? And keep it short, I’m a busy man.”
Patterson chuckled. “Is that any way to talk to an old friend? Still no social graces, I see. All right then, however you want it. I wantcha to do a story for Hedgehog, how’s that for straight?”
“Go suck a lemon,” Sandy said. “Why the hell should I write for you? You fired me, you asshole.”
“Bitter, bitter,” Jared chided. “That was seven years ago, Sandy. I hardly remember it now.”
“That’s funny. I remember it real well. I’d lost it, you said. I was out of touch with what was happening, you said. I was too old to edit for the youth audience, you said. I was taking the Hog down the tubes, you said. Like shit. I was the one who made that paper, and you damn well know it.”
“Never denied it,” Jared Patterson said breezily. “But times changed, and you didn’t. If I’d kept you on, we’d have gone down with the Freep and the Barb and all the rest. All that counterculture stuff had to go. I mean, who needed it? All that politics, reviewers who hated the hot new trends in music, the drug stories . . . it just didn’t cut it, y’know?” He sighed. “Look, I didn’t call to hash over ancient history. I was hoping you’d have more perspective by now. Hell, Sandy, firing you hurt me more than it did you.”
“Oh, sure,” Sandy said. “You sold out to a chain and got a nice cushy salaried job as publisher while you were firing three-quarters of your staff. You must be in such pain.” He snorted. “Jared, you’re still an asshole. We built that paper together, as a communal sort of thing. It wa
sn’t yours to sell.”
“Hey, communes were all well and good back when we were young, but you seem to forget that it was my money kept the whole show afloat.”
“Your money and our talent.”
“God, you haven’t changed a bit, have you?” Jared said. “Well, think what you like, but our circulation is three times what it was when you were editor, and our ad revenues are out of sight. Hedgehog has class now. We got nominated for real journalism awards. Have you seen us lately?”
“Sure,” said Sandy. “Great stuff. Restaurant reviews. Profiles of movie stars. Suzanne Somers on the cover, for God’s sake. Consumer reports on video games. A dating service for lonely singles. What is it you call yourself now? The Newspaper of Alternative Lifestyles?”
“We changed that, dropped the ‘alternative’ part. It’s just Lifestyles now. Between the two H’s in the logo.”
“Jesus,” Sandy said. “Your music editor has green hair!”
“He’s got a real deep understanding of pop music,” Jared said defensively. “And stop shouting at me. You’re always shouting at me. I’m starting to regret calling you, y’know. Do you want to talk about this assignment or not?”
“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. Why do you think I need your assignment?”
“No one said you did. I’m not out of it, I know you’ve been doing well. How many novels have you published? Four?”
“Three,” Sandy corrected.
“Hedgehog’s run reviews of every one of them too. You oughtta be grateful. Firing you was the best thing I could have done for you. You were always a better writer than you were an editor.”
“Oh, thank you, massa, thank you. I’s ever so thankful. I owes it all to you.”
“You could at least be civil,” Jared said. “Look, you don’t need us and we don’t need you, but I thought it would be nice to work together again, just for old time’s sake. Admit it, it’d be a kick to have your byline in the old Hog again, wouldn’t it? And we pay better than we used to.”