From: top@MATH.AMS.COM (Twila Price)
Subject: Jazz takes a trip to the country
Date: 7 Feb 92 23:28:22 GMT


Jazz looked over the rim of the sim helmet at the thin-faced man
who stood at the controls.  "You sure this is a meditation sim?"
she asked for the fiftieth time since he'd blackmailed her into
becoming his favorite guinea pig.

"Yes," he said in a falsely paitient tone.  "It runs maybe ten minutes
tops. Won't bother you at all. Now, if you don't mind...."

*********************************************************************

The narrow streets beckoned.  She hesitated before she took off the
high heels that confined her feet, and, dangling them by thin straps
of leather, she ran.  For the fun of it.  For the wind and the stars
and the moonlight.

Later, much later, when the sun had come up, she looked behind her.
The town had given way to suburbs, then to country as she'd run.  Now
she was on a dirt road, trees overarching and making the sunlight
slant through gaps in the branches.

She slowed to a walk.  It was cool now, the heat left behind with the
high confining walls, and she listened to the first cheeps of birds as
they woke up.

Somewhere along the way, she'd lost the shoes, and now she reached up
and took the feathered pin from her hair, to let it fall around her
face and shoulders.

A bridge made of sun-bleached planks and rusty iron crossed a narrow
cut in the road. She looked down between the gaps in the planks where
kids had once thrown firecrackers to frighten the frogs.  A long way
down, it seemed, a creek flowed between high banks.  A frog looked
back up at her and croaked, once, BRADPT, then flicked out its tongue
to catch a dragonfly.
                      #  #   #
The woman dressed in black jeans, huge black teeshirt, newly shorn
hair, and no shoes stepped down the road in silence.  The air was
still around her as she walked away from the paisley barn.  It felt
like it was getting ready to rain, but when she looked up at the sky,
the stars were huge and close.  To the north, a green shimmering veil
writhed between her and the stars.  It pulsed and faded, then grew
bright again as she watched.  It looked like a silk curtain that a cat
was playing with, but she knew it was the Northern Lights, unusually
bright for so far south.

She watched for a long time, until the lights faded, and then she
began walking once more.  The dirt road turned into a paved road
sometime around dawn, but she didn't care.  It was going somewhere
she'd never been, and that was all that mattered.

The paved road changed from a little two-lane affair to a four-lane
and then into a six-lane, complete with traffic, by the time the
morning was half-gone.  The woman kept on walking, until a car stopped
inches away from her bare feet, and a man pushed open the passenger
door.  "Hey, wanta ride?" he asked, his business suit no barrier to the
red-necked menace in his voice.

She shrugged, and kept on walking.  The car cruised by, still keeping
on the earth berm, so as to stay out of the faster traffic.  The man
made obscene gestures, but she didn't give him the dignity of seeming
annoyed.  He started swerving the car closer.  She moved off the berm,
into the grassy culvert between the lanes. He couldn't drive his car
in there.  If he got out and followed her, he would find out why she
could walk free.

He didn't, and she walked a little further along the culvert.  There
were long grasses in the culvert, where no one ever mowed, and flowers
that the drivers never saw.  She saw purple heather taller than she
was, and butterflies, drab because of their nearness to the city.
Once, a bunny ran over her foot, and she saw the footprints of larger
animals, skunks, possums, possibly a deer or two.  She shook her head
at the primacy of wild life even so close to the places where men
walked, and most people never even knew it....

It was very late in the morning.  Her shadow had become a black
dwarven companion when she clambered out of the culvert and back onto
the berm.  The town was very near.  She couldn't read the signs that
said what its name was, for the alphabet was blurred from the one
she'd been reading all her life.  She walked on.

Traffic was sparse now, and she walked the last mile or so very
slowly.  She saw a sign that had the same logo as her shirt, and she
followed its blinking on-and-off coyote-and-moon to the door of a
small greasy spoon cafe.  She pushed on the screen door, and it
opened, BANG, like that.  A radio perched high on the shelf above the
cook's head was tuned to a country station.  A male singer, one with
the real old-timey twang in his words, sang about my baby and my
'Vette, they done me wrong.

The cook concentrated on his work, the frying of huge hunks of red
bloody meat, and she would normally have ordered chicken or perhaps a
salad, but the scent of meat was heavy in the air, perfuming it with
that imagined taste that is hardwired into the tastebuds---the kill
after the long hard chase, the skinning, the charring over the open
fire---.  She sat down and watched him for a while, waiting for a
chance to order.

The song ended, and another began, before he turned around.  The cook
was easily the skinniest man she'd seen in years.  He grunted, "The
usual?", gesturing at her tee-shirt.  She nodded, bemused.  He plonked
a heavy white ceramic plate onto the counter.  Under a mass of parsley
was a hunk of charred meat the size of Nebraska.  No fork or knife
would serve to cut dainty pieces off this monster.  It was meant to be
picked up in two fists and gnawed.

She cleared her throat.  The cook had already gone back into his own
little world of chopping and charring, charring and chopping, and he
wouldn't turn around.  She sat for a long moment, then nibbled the
parsley.  It was excellent.  Finally, she gave in to the atavistic
urges and picked up the meat by the heavy bone, which had cooled
enough to touch.

Her face greasy with the meat's juices, she put down the ivory-colored
bone.  She felt so full that she flashed on a mental picture of a
lioness sacking out on the savannah, its belly distended by antelope
haunch.  "How much do I owe you?" she asked, her hand fishing for the
coins that she knew were in the jean pockets.

The cook grunted. "Nothin'.  Ya got the shirt.  If ya need a place to
stay, go two blocks to the Hotel de Saint-Germain.  The housekeeper'll
give you a room and a job 'till you know where you're goin'. Tell her
Al sent ya."

"Thanks," she said.  It was a thought.  She didn't have much money,
and a place to stay sounded awfully good right about then.  She didn't
want to leave this city before she'd found out what it was like.

She walked down the street, past the burned-out buildings, past the
tanks stalled in the streets with dried flowers stuck in their
gun-ports, past the barricades and the flags and the bloodstains.  The
Hotel de Saint-Germain turned out to be a neatly-kept townhouse, with
flowers on the windowsills and freshly-swept steps leading up to a
white-painted oak door.  The houses on each side of it had drawn away
a little, as if affronted that a building in that part of town dared
to stay in shape.

She climbed the steps and knocked on the door.  A creaking sound and a
very faded blue eye peered at her from the hole just at her eye-level.
"Yes?" The voice was old, but she liked the accent, something
European?

"Al sent me?" She said, her voice rising as she realized how odd it
must sound.  She half-turned to walk away, for no respectable old
woman would dare let a stranger in on that dubious recommendation, not
in a town where the scars of revolution were still bleeding.

The door opened, and a little hunched-over woman, no taller than her
rib-cage, beckoned her into the house. "Come in, come in.  Ye're one
of us, eh?  I didnae know the young girls today were sae ...
interested."  She saw the stool that the old woman must have stood
upon, pushed to the side, its toenails gleaming in the late afternoon
sun, as she went into the darkened house.

The old woman chattered on and on as she steered her towards the back
of the house, through hallways dusty with old velvet hangings and
festooned with memorabilia from many old and forgotten corners of the
world.  Ivory carvings, masks, huge 20 bore elephant guns, once a
shrunken head, all attesting to the fact that the owner of this house
had been a travelling man too, or his grandfathers had been, more
likely.

The kitchen was a surprise, open and airy, with plants everywhere the
counters didn't need to be bare.  She sat at the table and allowed the
old woman to pour her a mug of tea, sweetened with rock crystal and
lightened by Devonshire cream, as the older woman told her with a
wink.

"'tis only me right, young lady," she said. "The Master willnae drink
any but his own brews, and 'tis a pity to allow it to go to waste.
He'll be wanting to interview ye when he's awake this evening."

The old woman showed her into a library when their tea was finished.
She settled into a polished chestnut-colored leather chair.  The
half-drawn curtains let in a stream of golden light that slanted
exactly on the pages of the book she held.  A first edition of "The
Talisman" by Sir Walter Scott, it was pleasingly hefty in her hands,
and the words lulled her into sleep.

"Ach, the Master will see ye now," the old woman said, rousing her
from dreams of knights and ladies and the Holy Land of old.  She
rubbed the sleep dust from her eyes and sat up straighter.  The
library was lit by gas lamps, their flames mellowing the book bindings
into a large textured wall.

A white-haired man sat in the wing chair opposite her, a snifter of
dark ruby liquid in one pale hand.

"Anna has told me you were one of us," he stated, in a voice much
stronger than she'd expected.

"I...one of what?" she asked, when he didn't say any more.  He sat up
straighter and put the snifter down on a tambour table.

"As'dagh....." he said, then went on in a language she most definitely
did not understand.  He paused, then went on in English, "Show me your
identification.  I would like to know who I'm dealing with.  Police?"

"No."  She fumbled in the beaded purse for her wallet, and pulled the
laminated card with her picture and name on it out of the hidden
pocket, handing it to him.  His hand was dry and cold.  He ran the
slick edges of the card through his fingers, his expression hard to
read in the gaslight.  She sat forward in her chair, the tips of her
toes touching the rich weave of the carpet.  He held the card close to
his face and read it over, once, and then again.  He handed it back to
her.

"Not police, not official trouble.  That is good.  You are one of us,
now, whether you meant to be or not.  Has Anna fed you?"  He said, his
voice gaining timbre as he spoke.  She could see that he wasn't as old
as she'd first thought.  He was white-haired, but his face was
unlined, and his body under the silk jacket was muscled and hard.

"I had tea, this afternoon, and the cook fed me lunch," she answered.

"Then you shall accompany me on my evening's business," he said.  He
clapped his hands.  Anna came in, scurrying on her rosebud feet. "Take
the child to the Green Room and find her some clothes.  We shall
depart in twenty minutes."

An hour later, she looked around the crowded room and wondered at the
fleeting escape running away had given her.  She'd left her home and
business to get away from just such gatherings, more people crowded
together than hens in a hen-yard, and more noisy, and now here she
was, in the middle of one again.  Her escort, still silent, sat and
stared out at the wildly gyrating crowd, his eyes half-closed against
the colored glare from the spotlights.  The sound system generated
more squeals than music, but that didn't dim the enthusiasm of the
dancers.

The music stopped. A white-clad man came out onto the small raised
stage.  "The Club Tepes is proud to present Borrodin," he shouted,
using no microphone.  The dancers began to clap, moving off the floor
and back to their tables.  The first man left the stage and a second
man climbed up.  He carried a stringed instrument that she didn't
recognize.  She turned to her companion, but he was staring intently
at the stage.

The man on stage sat on the edge, his feet dangling over the side.  He
was dark, with a full beard, and dressed in black.  He began to tune
his instrument.  She leaned over to her companion, and whispered,
"What is that? I've never seen a guitar that looked like that."

He answered, "It's of his own design.  You'll hear why, if you stay
silent."  He snapped his fingers and a waiter put two crystal glasses
of ruby liquid on their table.

She picked up hers and sipped.  Thick and sweet, it tasted like
raspberry jam.  She put it back down.  The man on stage had started
his performance.  His voice and the ringing sounds he produced from
his instrument blended perfectly, a bell-like harmony that sent
shivers from the top of her head to the little hairs on her fingers.
He used the same language that her companion had, its cadences very
alien but beautiful, and she felt an irresistible urge to close her
eyes.  When she did, she saw pictures on the dark screen of her
eyelids. Castles, tall pale men fighting with swords, women screaming,
and her companion riding through it all, his hair dark as the
singer's, his sword more bloodied than any.  These visions did not
disturb her, for she knew that they were true, in some unfathomable
way, and that there would be a place for her in these visions if she
could wait to see what it might be.  The song ended.  She opened her
eyes.

"Mischa, what are you doing here?" Borrodin stood beside their table.
Her companion laughed and patted the seat of the chair beside him.

"Sit down," he said.  "I do not like getting my neck crooked looking
up at you."  The singer sat down, his eyes still puzzled.

"I thought you were away," he said.  "Anna said you would not be home
for a month yet."

"Anna is too protective.  She wanted to keep me away from Tepes until
I had calmed down.  Please, have a drink and meet my new companion.
She arrived in town only today."

"Your singing was very beautiful, very sad," she said to Borrodin. "I
wish I knew what you were singing about."

He blushed. "You are too kind," he said.  "I was attempting to share
the songs of my country with these fools.  It is hard to be a
nationalist when everyone is seduced by that fool in the capital."

"No politics," Mischa said.  She wondered why he hadn't told her his
name before.  It suited him.  He was very handsome now that she'd
gotten used to the pale hair and the oddly glinting eyes.  "Tonight
is for music."

"As you will," Borrodin said, then got up and walked back to the
stage.

"For my good friend Mischa and his companion, I give you 'The Dark
Rose'," he said.  She stirred, but Mischa put his hand over hers and
Borrodin began to sing.

It was nearly dawn when they left the club, and she was drunk with
song and, perhaps, too much of the sweet red wine.  Borrodin had not
stopped singing for hours, his voice growing hoarse but all the more
beautiful for that.

Soldiers patrolled the streets, challenging each other as they crossed
paths at the intersections.  No other civilians were out in the heavy
darkness. She stumbled over a soft mass and he pulled her close, his
arm around her.  The soldiers never challenged them, and she wondered
why, hazily, in the fog of her thoughts.

She did not wake until late the next day, when Anna finally marched
into the bedroom she was using and yanked open the curtains.

"What time izzit?" she asked, her voice muffled by the pillow.

"Nearly five," Anna said.  "Time ye were up and doing.  The Master
will expect to find things to his liking."

"What'm I supposed to do?"

"..." Anna looked puzzled, then threw her hands into the air. "If
himself didn't tell ye, I dinna know what to say."

She ignored the old woman's fussing while she climbed into the new
clothes that lay on the chair under the window.  Shirt, pants, shoes,
all fitting perfectly.  She pushed back the hair that drooped into her
eyes, and said, "Ok, now what?"

"Follow me."

They ended up in a room off the library.  It was taller than it was
wide, and draped with dark red velvet hangings from ceiling to floor.
A crystal chandelier fractured the available light into scintillant
shards that slashed through the darkness of the velvet.  She felt
suffocated by the heaviness of the design, but Anna marched up to the
far wall and lifted one corner of the velvet, revealing a
state-of-the-art stereo system.

"Ye can start here," Anna said. "He'll be needing this indexed and
organized.  I hae enough to do in the house without fooling with
gormless trash like this."

She picked up an album.  _Another Way to Travel_, Cats Laughing.  Not
one of her favorites, but definitely not what she would have expected
to find anywhere in the house of a man like Mischa.  Classics,
certainly, but a minor folk-jazz group from Minneapolis?  She put it
down and picked up the next. It was printed in the odd alphabet she
had begun to recognize as the accepted one here, where-ever here was.
It wasn't lower mideast Ohio, near Marietta, that was one thing she
was definite on.

She found an old Spirit of the West album that looked interesting, and
put it on the turntable.  As the chords boomed out among the velvet
draperies, she wondered if any juxtaposition more odd could be found:
a Canadian singing about Indian rights in a house built by
Imperialistic overlords and stuffed with the flotsam of that conquest.

She began to sing along, "before the revolution's fought, before the
weapons are all bought, ....be right."

"Be Right," a bass voice joined her on the chorus.  She turned around
and Mischa was there.  He smiled, the lights gleaming redly off his
teeth.  "Very good taste," he said.  She stumbled backwards against
the turntable, bumping the needle across the last few lines before the
end of the record.  She grabbed the record and held it to the light to
see if it had been scratched. It hadn't.  Mischa came and took it from
her, also tilting it to the light.

"You startled me," she said. "I didn't realize how late it was.  I'll
get back to work."  She picked up another album and tried to read the
liner notes.

"No bother," he said, moving so that he was between her and the light.
"Anna made a mistake.  Your job here will be to accompany me on
my...outings."  The velvet hangings made shadows like blood on his
hair and shoulders.  She felt trapped against the wall, like a fly in
sap, although no sap she knew of ran ruby red and black.

"I would rather not," she whispered. She knew he would hear the
slightest sound she made. "Working here is fine."

"My wishes are the ones that must be consulted, my dear," Mischa said.
"Now, please, go and dress.  I've told Anna to find something very
beautiful for tonight."

She found that Mischa hadn't exaggerated when he'd told Anna to find
something beautiful for her to wear.  Laid out on the bed was a dress
that looked as if it had been woven of moonbeams, fragile and silvery
spiderwebs of material. It was so light when she picked it up that she
could see the bones of her fingers through it.

Anna said, "*Not* what I'd have chosen for the night's work, but
the Master will do what he wants."

She asked, "Why do you call him that?  Borrodin called him Mischa."

Anna smlled.  "Borrodin is a fool.  A well-voiced fool, but a fool.
The Master allows him much."

She pulled off the clothes she'd been wearing and wrapped the dress
around herself until she was satisfied it would stay on.  Anna walked
over and made a few adjustments, then held up a mirror.  She could not
say that she looked well, for it was extraordinarily hard to see
herself at all in the glass.  She could see the room perfectly well,
but her own face and body were insubstantial in the mirror.  She
looked down at herself.  All there and solid.

**********************************************************************
Voices...whispering....high and sqeaky...low and menacing....she hears:

Nothing can be said.  Nor done.  It's just the way it goes.  That's
what they say.  That's what they say.  I hear them sometimes.  In the
dark.  Nothing.  Nothing.  Darkness is something.  So they're wrong.
*oh no we're not*

**********************************************************************
Above bit of existentialism a product of ShadowEnterprises(TM) A
wholly owned subsidiary of DarkDesires MusicCorp. Giving *you* the
finest in dark musings and callow philosophy. Call 555-8375 for
details.
***********************************************************************

Off came the helmet, pulling hair with it.  "Damnit! What's with the
commercials?"

Veldt smirked at her from his place by the console. "What's your
whine, Jasmine?  I had to get funding SOMEWHERE, and you sure as
hell weren't any help."

She yanked the zipper on the front of the vr suit, jamming it in the
process. She began taking it off anyway. Veldt could just make another
one if she ripped it. "Stuff it, Veldt.  I have a run tonight."

"Ah, c'mon, I don't have any one else I can trust," Veldt said.
Jasmine shrugged and started putting on her leathers.  Just because
she *owed* him for the cyberwork didn't mean she wanted to have his
slimy sims messing with her head.  Not before a run.

"And," she said, turning around and glaring at him,"what's the deal
with this Mischa?  I didn't agree to any kinky stuff.  _Just a nice
little run in the country_ you said. _I need to fine tune the
sensations_ Yeah, right.  I find myself in this surreal townhouse
with a Drac clone. That's your idea of a relaxing time?"

He backed up, his hands in the air. "What Mischa? Weren't nobody
but you in that sim, honey."

Jasmine picked up the helmet and tossed it at him. Veldt ducked and
the helmet clanged against the wall.  "Better check your machines for
ghosts, then, *honey*, cause I sure ain't using those sims till you're
sure the bugs're out."

"Ghosts in the machine?" Veldt laughed. "Right, Jasmine. Tell that to
your Mage buddy.  He'll believe you."

Jasmine shook her head. Veldt was _so_ tech-headed that he didn't
believe that magic worked. It was lucky he hadn't tried running the
streets, or he'd have found out his error about the time some rat
shaman turned him into a vole.  Veldt was good at his work, damn good,
but that didn't mean she didn't get the urge to rip his face off
sometimes.

"I'll be sure to pass that along, Veldt," she said.  "See you."

She made it out the door before he realized she was leaving him with
the half-tested sim.  His screams didn't even cause an eye-blink on
the street, where razor-boys and -girls were just coming out in the
gathering darkness.  Veldt would never dare to follow her out here,
away from his safe laboratory.

She hummed the latest Elfsblood hit as she strolled along the gutter;
safer there than on the sidewalk.  Packbrats in bloodred leather
glared at her; she glared back safe in the knowledge of her pointed
ears and pure silver hair.  Packbrats wouldn't touch one of their own,
not even when that one hummed Humanis-club trash.

She walked into the bar as if she owned the place, nodding to the
other regulars as she passed.  The man at the bar smiled when she sat
down on the empty stool.

"Hey, Ratz, what's cookin'?" she asked as he put a shot glass in front
of her.

"Not much, Jazz," he replied.  He started wiping wet circles from the
wooden surface of the bar, his mil-spec arm whirr'clicking in the
damp.  "Hear you're on call tonight."

Jasmine didn't answer.  She didn't need to.  Ratz knew what he knew.
She watched the play of power in the room in the mirror behind the
bar.  There, an Orbital jetboy fell for one of Lonny's girls; in the
corner booth, a mage dickered with a corpsicle.  Business as usual.
Business as usual.  Sure.  A few drinks later, Shiraz was late, and
likely to become even later, once Jasmine found him.

The door swung open, letting in some of the cold wet night air, and
Jasmine watched the tall skeletal figure wrapped in a longcoat scurry
across the room. Shiraz.  She didn't bother to turn around.

"You're late," she said.  He stopped, and looked at her image in the
mirror.

His mirror-image grinned at her, the gems embedded in his teeth
catching what light there was and spreading it in a rainbow arc.  "You
had something better to do?  The show won't start without me."

"The show won't start at all, if you don't get your ass in gear," she
said.  "The client told us twenty-four hundred on the nose.  It's
twenty-three and counting now."


*********************************************************************
That's all for now, but if anyone wants to join the fun, feel free to
contact me. Jazz, Shiraz, and Veldt copyright Twila Oxley Price, 1992.

"Tigers don't worry about much, do they?"
`No. It's one of the perks of being feral.'
Twila Oxley Price
top@math.ams.com