Bone Dance

“Ah. I guess you won’t want it fixed if there’s nothing wrong with it.” I half turned away.

“Why do you say it sounds bad?” he asked quickly, and I knew it was going to be all right. The passage of arms was begun.

“Well, last time I heard that jam, the guy playing the giant piece of cellophane wasn’t with them.”

“You mean that little noise?” He shrugged, and rather well, too. “It ain’t much. Nobody but an audiofreak’d notice.”

“Must be an audiofreak convention in town. People are crossing to the other side of the street.”

He scowled. No patience. With more patience, he could have been good at this. “What would it take to fix a little thing like that?”

“The right person, and twenty hard bucks.” The kid spit to his left. A ward against liars. “Hell, I could get another whole speaker for twenty.”

“You couldn’t get one of those for less than a hundred, and you’d have to find one first. And you know it.” Oh, he could have gotten something for twenty bucks. Maybe even that speaker, from someone who didn’t appreciate its solid, deep-throated sweetness.

“Five,” he said, one syllable of pure bravado. “Soft.”

“Kid,” I said, smiling kindly and leaning on the counter between the popguns, “have you ever heard the joke about the plumber and the little teeny hammer?” He was beaten. I could tell by his eyes. “Tapping, fifty cents; knowing where to tap, fifty dollars? Now, because I always enjoy telling a joke, I’ll give you a deal: fifteen, soft.” I should have held out for ten hard, but visions of carbohydrates were begi

It was a little tougher job than the plumber had. But I got the grille off and the cone out, and I carried a few things in my pockets that nobody else would have recognized as valuable. A roll of heat-shrink fiber tape, for instance; good for strain relief on cords, for covering spliced wire, and for mending tears in any stretched material. I covered the rip in the cone with a narrow piece and borrowed matches from the kid to shrink it tight. The speaker was not as good as new; one more fine and irreplaceable thing had slipped out of the world, and the world, as usual, hadn’t noticed. But a normal human being could now listen to it with teeth unclenched. At least, if said party liked City broadcast.

I wandered off with a light head, a sense of duty done, and fifteen folding City-made dollars. The first food vendor I came upon did Chinese. After six pot-stickers and three cups of lemon-balm tea, I was able to see the world with less prejudice. After another block, a few smoked pork ribs, and a skewer of batter-fried vegetables, my sense of proportion was restored. I tallied the day’s accomplishments. Today, after an impressively bad start, I had saved the life of one twelve-inch speaker cone, fed myself, and got all the way to Sherrea’s under my own (I granted myself some poetic exaggeration) power.

Where I’d been made no wiser, and been told besides to start shoveling or don’t show my face again. A fine friendly gesture. How was I to get my ordure in order if she couldn’t even give me useful clues? My theories about her mind reading were a little shaken, too; I refused to believe that the afternoon’s display of amateur theatricals had come out of my head.

In the deep, gritty voice that, looking back, I couldn’t call male or female: That’s bringin’ danger on you, and all the ones bound to you. I wasn’t bound. That would have been flying in the face of good sense, and I tried not to do that. Surely the pure voice of my subconscious would have a better handle on me than that. Sherrea — or her friend — seemed to declare that sacrifice was the road to salvation; but I wanted to fix a busted head, not a rotten soul.

But don’t ask what’s in it for you. It’s the ten of swords. The card with the dark-haired figure on the sand, the upright swords.

I noticed that I had finished eating; or at least, I didn’t seem to want any more.

By then, the joint was, as they say, jumping. Money, bright and folding, hard and soft, was ru

This was what the woman on the tri-wheeler had blasphemed against, and why I feared her. Because she didn’t know the Deal.

The Odeon was open. Under its optimistic, badly lettered sign, block-printed posters taped to the painted-over shop windows promised showings of The Lady Vanishes. I dropped my gaze to the doorway where Huey was sitting in his folding chair, taking tickets, and I shook my head and gri

In front of the Odeon’s shabby blandishments, a herd of nightbabies clumped like a blood clot in the vein of the sidewalk. They weren’t going in, oo dear meee, nooo. Only the crawlers do vid parlors. But it’s sooo Deep ambie, y’knoow?

They were in High Savage, by which I decided they were from the greenkraals at the City’s edge. The tide was going out on Savage; in the towers, Rags was the waxing mode. The nearest nightbaby swayed out in front of me as I came closer. She had a mud-painted face, multicolored mud hair, and an epoxy bone in her nose — or a real one, maybe, but that was considered gauche in some circles.

“Ooo, loook! It’s a preeecious bit of street-meat! Let’s take it hooome and waaash it, and see what it iiis.”

That provoked a unison giggle from the group. I’d probably sold things to their parents. “Cinder in your eye,” I said, held up my palm, and blew across it at her face. She dodged, and I laughed.

She gave me a quick, narrow-eyed look — wondering if she’d been had? She couldn’t have been sure. The blood of the Horsemen had trickled over the continent — still did, though the Horsemen were dead. And where that blood was, where those genes came to rest, a skill might sprout: Sherrea’s mind reading; the placing of a nonexistent cinder in someone’s eye. But I had no inheritance from the wicked riders of the mind.

The mud furrowed and cracked around her eyes as she stared at me. Light reflected into her face for a moment, and I saw that those eyes were a peculiar flat, hard gray. She seemed older than I’d first thought, bones planed with years. “Use it while you can, honey,” she murmured, so angry she forgot to drool over her vowels. I felt her watching me as I walked away.

I passed Banana Sam’s Beer Garden on my way up-Fair, and heard a familiar half whistle, half call, high-low-high. And Cassidy’s voice: “Little bird! Keeper of the fire! Come drink with meeeeee!”

He was already low in his chair, flushed and untidy. His wide eyes sank into their bruised-looking sockets like clams dug into the sand, and the bones below them lurched up against the skin as if to counterbalance. Frail strands of bleached gold hair had slid out of his queue and fallen around his face and ears. The pitcher in front of him had maybe an inch and a half left in it.

Resigned, I came to his table. “What’s this ‘little bird’ riff, Cass?”

“The sparrow,” he said, smug, dignified, and clownish. “Guarded fire for the Devil, ’til Swallow ripped it off and gave it to the walking dung beetles who started callin’ ’mselves Mankind.”