Tommy was as good as his word. It took a couple of days, but when he called Vincent, he had a lot to tell him. Vincent suggested that he come over to the house and tell Jim and Eric, too. It’ll save time, he told Tommy, and privately he added, and it reduce distortions. Vincent worried about the contact high effect of Note Perfect. He didn’t take it himself, but he sometimes experienced contact effects from being around Tommy when he had. He didn’t care for them. What is a man, after all, but his choices, thoughts and actions? And what are they but memories? Note Perfect led to making memories that were not perfect, and Vincent didn’t like that at all.
Eric had news of his own when he got in, but the tv had the same news, and all Eric could really add to it was speculation. He readily agreed to hang around for Tommy’s tale.
“We’re only as good as the quality of our information,” he said cheerfully, and Vincent suppressed a shudder. Wasn’t it enough that a thing was true, without having to enjoy it?
“I knew Robert, you know,” said Jim. “He used to work in the library at West Point.”
“That doesn’t seem like a place you would meet him,” said Eric.
“I didn’t, for a while. But his son was a promoter in New York, and I met him through him when Robert asked him to introduce us.”
“Why would he want to meet you?” asked Eric. “No offence, but I’m assuming he was pretty establishment.”
“Was he a celebrity stalker?” asked Vincent jokingly. Jim ignored him and answered Eric instead.
“Not as much as you might think. He was a pretty open-minded guy. Fought in the Pacific, served with the occupation forces in Japan after the war, and got into Zen a bit.”
“Weird combination.”
“Yeah, but he made it work,” said Jim. “He asked to meet us because he kept getting letters from GIs in Vietnam who wanted him to add our records to the West Point library’s collection.”
“Really?” asked Eric and Vincent in stunned unison. Jim grinned wickedly.
“Really. He even brought some of the letters along to show us.”
“Wow,” said Eric.
“Yeah. I never did find out how that all turned out, but I remember we gave him a complete set of our albums, and we all signed them to him, too.”
“Did you ever see him again?”
“Nahh. I knew he’d moved out here, and I always meant to go see him someday, but you know how it is. You always think that there will be more time.”
Vincent was about to agree with him when they all heard the doorbell. Answering it, he was unsurprised to find Tommy there, but a little more surprised that his Mom was with him. They made a weird contrast, the hippy-looking guy and the lady who looked like she’d just walked out of the fifties, but there was no mistaking their relation to each other. Tommy’s Mom carried herself with great dignity, but there was a certain amount of anger leaking out from under it. Vincent was pretty sure he knew what it was about, too.
Amelia is a very different woman now.
Forced to make her way as a kitchen drudge, Amelia now knows practical skills she was only vaguely aware existed before all this. She can cook and clean and sew. And oh yes, she can wield a sword. Her escape from her captors, almost a year ago itself now, was a simple enough thing – she simply hid herself in a wagon that was leaving the castle – but life since then has been more complicated. But not worse.
On her first night out, she fell in with some brigands, and that would likely have been the end of her if their leader, a good-looking fellow named Lobb, had not been feeling playful. When she challenged him to a duel, he told her that if she drew first blood she could join their band as an equal. So, as he turned to ask one of his followers to loan her a sword, she kicked him in the crotch, then slammed her knee into his face as he doubled over in pain. The resulting nosebleed was agreed by all there to constitute first blood, much to Lobb’s chagrin.
Amelia has never looked back. She worked hard and learned fast, and now she could pitch a tent, start a fire, ride a horse – all those things considered too indelicate for princesses to know. More importantly, she could defend herself with a sword, a knife or just her own two hands, and she was even getting more accurate, slowly, with a bow and arrow. She had an insider’s knowledge of where the rich and noble liked to hide their things, and the kinds of passwords they liked to ensorcel treasures with.
Lobb’s gang had never had it so good. With her advice, they stole more than they ever had before, and as she grew better at strategizing, did so with less effort, too. Within a few months of joining the gang, she had become the co-leader of it with Lobb (now somewhat less handsome, after his broken nose healed awry, but the had become lovers anyway, although that is another story entirely), and full leader in her own right after Lobb’s unfortunate encounter with the hangman.
In her heart, she cherishes a dream of winning back the kingdom to which she is the rightful heir someday. But the only outward sign of it is the veil she wears, that she not be recognized until it pleases her to be so.
Lafayette smelt… different. Ward had been there many times, of course, but he’d never sensed quite what he felt today. As soon as he set foot in the parish, he could feel it: the great swirl of a city’s thoughts. And this city was awash with indecision. A lot of it was just the general mood of the populace, wondering what they should do now – help their neighbours to the south, evacuate, strengthen their defences – but it was also the spirit of the city itself.
There was so much going on in the soul of the city that even Ward had trouble sorting it all out. There was a strong current of sympathy for New Orleans, but also a fear of it, which Ward attributed to worries about both refugees and government funding in the short term. The city was also afraid for its own sake – Katrina had come too close for comfort. And underneath all that, there was a sly calculation going on of how all this could work to Lafayette’s advantage in its never-ending struggle with Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Ward was used to the competitiveness of cities, but there was a vulturish quality to this particular incarnation of it that sickened him, even as he couldn’t help agreeing with the logic of it.
An instant later, Lafayette recognised him as the intruder he was, and his window to the thoughts of the city’s soul was slammed shut. Despite knowing that he’d been lying flat on his back the whole time, Ward had the sensation that the back of his head had been slammed against a wall. Hard.
Dammit. He had to learn to control his own emotions a little better. Lafayette had had no idea he was there until he’d reacted like that. Hard as it was, he needed to be better at this if he was going to be any use at all. That was what the Aussie at the casino had been trying to tell him, among other things. That was what had made him turn around and come home again. Mostly.
It made his head hurt to think about all this, although no doubt a part of that was the kicking Lafayette had given his spirit.
Ward got up and staggered to the minibar. This was going to require some anaesthetizing.
Eric was sitting in the library minding his own business, his head deep in the newspaper morgue, when he heard the screams. There was a particular quality to them that he’d learned to recognise during his time in Vietnam. Basically, there were two types of scream: fear screams, which were when you learned something and your immediate reaction was to expect things to get worse from there; and shock screams, which were when you learned something too late to do anything about it. This was the latter, so he headed towards it. A trained first aider, Eric never missed a chance to be helpful to people.
The person who had caused the screams was beyond any need of first aid – he could see that at a glance. The actual screamer was one of the librarians, and most likely just needed to lie down somewhere quiet and maybe sip from a glass of water. Eric could see that her workmates had that situation well in hand, so he turned his attention back to the body.
The man was about sixty years old, and he was lying on his back. Although there was blood all over his clothes, he only hand one visible wound – his throat had been cut by someone who knew what they were doing, from the looks of it, although Eric couldn’t get quite close enough to tell whether the cutter had been left or right handed. He was wearing a badge identifying him as a library staff member, and his name was Robert.
Despite what Vincent so often said, Eric wasn’t completely lacking in human sensitivities. He wandered off between the shelves where no one could see him before adding Robert’s name and the few details he knew about the man to the list in his notebook. It might be nothing, but something about the professionalism of the killing suggested to Eric that this one was connected. In a way, he kind of hoped it was – the alternative, that Robert had been killed by some random psycho, was even less comforting.
You know those stories about kings and queens going incognito and walking among the simple peasant folk to find out what said simple peasant folk really think? Yeah, they’re bullshit. Every one of them.
It just doesn’t work. A royal without a single callus, whose clothes are all un-patched and whose hair has been washed this year, not being noticed? A person without a single practical skill – most monarchs wouldn’t know which way up to hold a broom, for example, and you’d be risking your life to stand next to one holding any sort of gardening implement – managing to fit in among a class of people whose very livelihoods depend on knowing these things and knowing them well? It is to laugh.
The best that such a fairy-tale-believing royal twit can hope for is to be humiliated, because the other options are all worse. They are, in ascending order of badness, injury, death and being taken hostage. You might think that death would worse than being taken hostage, but that’s because you’re one of those simple peasant folk who doesn’t understand the complex realities of the international geo-political system. Or at least, that’s what they’d tell you. In truth, princesses are not exactly in short supply, are only really useful for forging dynastic alliances, and are, let’s face it, easy enough to replace should you lose one. The real bad news about having your royal daughter taken hostage is one that anyone would understand: it costs money. Lots of money. And then it costs more again, because a kidnapped daughter will need a bigger dowry than usual to bribe some poor idiot into marrying her.
So naturally, when the Princess Amelia decided that she was going to walk among the common people of the realm all unknown, she got maybe five feet from the castle gate without being recognised. Not that anyone said anything to her, of course – one of the practical skills peasants tend to possess is a keen awareness of when their masters need to be indulged – but she was marked. In some ways, this worked out well for her – it meant that she had a certain degree of protection as she walked through the streets. But in the long run, gossip was her undoing. It doesn’t take long for a tasty rumour to circulate, and before long, it reached precisely the wrong pair of ears.
Two nights later, a man came up behind her and placed a hood over her head. A few days of being gagged and blindfolded in the back of some carriage later, and the next thing she knew, she was three kingdoms over and didn’t speak the language. Oh, there was a translator, but the man was an obvious lech who she was fairly sure was reinterpreting all the communications passed through him for his own benefit. The attempt to ransom her fell through when a plague wiped out her family and the new royals found it easier to pretend that she’d died with them. (The translator was beheaded after Amelia learned enough of the language to communicate without him and it was discovered that he had been less than trustworthy.)
That was two years ago.
Phillip Ward, Jenna was coming to think, was perhaps the strangest man she’d ever met. It wasn’t just that he was also the most fearless, although perhaps his courage came from abandon than from any healthier source. He’d flipped an entire truck full of soldier guys the bird earlier. Given that they were probably headed to the same place, she hoped that wouldn’t come back to bite Ward – or herself – on the ass.
They couldn’t get all the way through to New Orleans that night. After a long, slow drive, she’d finally decided that it made more sense to stop in Lafayette, a little over half the distance they needed to travel. Ward had tried to persuade her to share a motel room to save a little money, but she’d told him he could get his own room or sleep in the car. There was something about him that made her head itch, and until she knew for sure what it was, she wasn’t going to be sharing a room with him, much less a bed.
Not that she wasn’t tempted – he was a good looking man, it had been a while and he clearly found her attractive. But she wasn’t about jump into bed with anyone until she knew them a whole lot better. Maybe she was a little too cautious, but Jenna firmly believed that it was better to be safe than sorry.
Excerpted Transcript of “Meet The Press”, June 17, 1962.
In what police are referring to as “a disturbing development”, the NYPD today officially confirmed that a new drug was now being sold on the streets of Manhattan. Citing the highly dangerous and addictive nature of the drug, known to its users as Visible Music, NYPD Commissioner Michael J. Murphy today called for the drug to be made illegal.
His call was echoed by his fellow Commissioners across the country and around the world, and at the time of this writing, 23 US Senators and 84 Congressmen have pledged to pass legislation criminalizing the drug. Attorney-General Robert Kennedy said that the matter would be taken under advisement at the next round of Senate hearings, but added that he believes that criminalization of the drug is the most likely result.
The drug was first seen in America as early as 1957, but is believed to have first entered wide use in 1958 at about the time of the United States trade embargo against the Communist state in Cuba. It is described by users as enhancing the quality of experience of listening to music in much the same way that a fine wine is said to enhance the quality of a meal. However, critics of the drug were quick to point out its harmful aspects, which include temporary and in some cases permanent mutation. It is believed that doctors at Johns Hopkins are currently researching a potential link between the drug and cancer.
Senator Storm Thurmond is a staunch opponent of the drug who had led the calls for it to be made illegal; he joins us live in the studio tonight…
The whale sounds again, and there is a shout as all aboard realise that they are on target. The harpooner readies to throw when the whale next breaks the surface. But the whale does not come back when it should. The men at the oars mutter nervously to each other, while the tillerman calls for them to lay off their rowing and hold position.
The harpooner ignores them all. He watches for the tell-tale bubbles that will show him where the whale is. When he sees one, it is already too late, but he shouts a warning anyway. The whale has recognised its peril, and dealt with it directly. It rises directly under the long boat, lifting it easily on its back, until the timbers of the boat snap under the strain, and the men scatter everywhere. The harpooner makes his cast at the last possible instant as he tumbles, and strikes true, just above the whale’s left eye.
The whale immediately dives, pulling the harpooner and any other man unlucky enough to be entangled in the rope down with him. The men struggle to be free, and some make it, but three of them are too ensnared to get loose while their air lasts, and they drown. The harpooner is like neither of these.
A short, wiry man, he has come prepared. No ordinary man is this harpooner, but rather, a selkie. He speaks the words of enchantment and what had previously appeared to be a fur coat becomes a part of him. A man-shaped seal grips hard on the harpoon rope, and waits for the whale to tire.
It doesn’t take long. The whale surfaces, still thrashing and trying to rid itself of the harpoon, but the harpooner reaches up and pushes it in deeper, reaching the great beast’s brain. The whale twists away from him, to gaze at him with its one good eye, and names him traitor, outcast, betrayer and oath-breaker. It curses him with his secret name, known only to his own people before his exile. And as it expires, the words of the curse still on its lips, and the harpooner feels the magicks swirl around him, but knows not what they portend. He knows only that he is afraid.
The surviving men from the long boat are pulled aboard by their fellows in the other boats, and he is last of all to go aboard. While the men transform a dead whale into meat, blubbler, ambergris, baleen and myriad other useful substances, he stands apart, wondering what will become of him. Wondering what the nature of his curse will be, and swearing once more to kill the chieftain’s son should they ever meet again.
It is only later, when he attempts to shed the seal-skin, that Grigori realises what has been done to him. The skin will not come off, and although on land he can still breathe and walk like a man, he is covered all over in brown seal fur that merges into his shaggy hair and beard. His clothes itch to wear, but he must needs go covered for modesty’s sake. The men laugh to see him, thinking him a beast, and make jokes about dancing bears.
When he gets back to port, it is worse still. No woman will lie with him, for love or money; and no man will talk to him other than one he strongly suspects wants to stuff and mount him for display in a carnival freak show.
Another dancer arrived in the city that day. He didn’t contact the first one. There was no need. Each of them knew what preparations were needful, and set about making them. The dance would call to them when it was time, as it had called them there in the first place.
Eluding authority figures was getting more difficult in the city. There were more of them each day, and not a few of them were heavily equipped with armaments and lightly equipped with self-control. That would make things harder, at least until the dance began in earnest. After that, it wouldn’t matter anymore.
Vincent figured he’d pretty much seen the worst the world had to offer on his two tours in ‘Nam, so there wasn’t much that scared him. There were perfectly rational fears, like the fear that police might decide to abuse their authority, or that a drunk driver might wipe you out while you were walking home one night, but that was different. Those made a certain amount of sense. In fact, there was only one fear Vincent knew himself to possess that he regarded as irrational.
Continue reading Note Perfect, part eight
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