Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 51

"Every one." He reaches out and taps the hull of a double ba.s.s, the face striped purpleheart and rosewood and something gold. It thumps like a melon, sweet and ripe, so you wonder if he can feel the resonance through lingering fingertips.

"Do you sell them?" You want to touch the jazz guitar hanging over the lathe. Its faceplate is honey-colored, riddled with holes from worms that must have worked in the tree after it was fallen. The neck is mahogany, and it too has small scars, the imperfections of salvaged wood.

"I give them away," he says, and lifts down the guitar you were eyeing. It's finished and strung; he sets an electric tuner on the bench and bends over the strings. You probably couldn't tune as fast by ear as he does in his deafness.

When he's done, he scoops up the beast and holds it out to you like a toddler, archtop gleaming under the worklights. It's strung left-handed, and you wonder how he knew.

He says, "Care to try her?"

Your cold-stung fingers itch for it. "Give them away?" you ask. "How can you afford that?"

He gestures around and grins. "It doesn't take a lot of money to live like this, and I made some when I was young. When I still played myself, a little. Go on, take the guitar."

He has a point there. So you lift the guitar off his palms and stroke it for a second, finding where your hands should fall. You glance up, about to ask him what he wants to hear, and find him staring at your fingers. Oh, of course.

So you pick out a Simon and Garfunkel tune, because it's easy and fun and suits the instrument. And then you play a little Pete Seeger something, until your cracked fingertips start to more-than-sting. You don't bother singing: Marty's not listening, and you want to hear the guitar. You'd give it back, but it feels good in your arms, close and friendly, so you let it sit there and puppy-snuggle for a minute while you chat. You play a couple of bars of "Peggy Sue" and a couple of bars of "I Wanna Be Sedated," and it all sounds good. You expect a little buzz at the bottom of the neck, but it's clean all the way down.

"Who do you give them away to?"

"Deserving folks," he says. "Folks with music people listen to. Folks whose music makes a better world. That one's yours."

Your right hand locks on the neck. "I can't take this."

"I made it for you," he says. "The siren called you, Missy. There's no two ways about it. That there's your guitar."

You'd have expected to be too ill and exhausted to continue your vest-pocket tour, but you wake up rested and strong on Thursday, and in fine voice as if in spite of having been half-drowned in ice water and left on the stones. You hum to yourself in the mirror while you fix your hair, and you pick out a white b.u.t.ton shirt and patchwork vest with swingy gla.s.s bead fringe across the chest to pull on over threadbare jeans. Spiked up hair and too much makeup gives you cheekbones that will read from stage. You're getting too old for the scapegrace gamine schtick.

At the last minute, as you're packing up the Toyota, you decide to bring the new guitar.

Boston and Albany are great, better than good, CDs flying out of the booth, and in Albany you pick up a gig in Portsmouth for May and a business card from a booking agent who sounds six kinds of excited and impressed.

"You're a lot better live," she says, tossing bottle-red hair behind her shoulder. "We need to get you into bigger venues, get some quality production on those CDs."

You think you like her.

Two weeks later, when you make it back to play for the Eddies again, you've figured out something is up. The crowd treats you differently since the mermaid. It's not about the guitar, nice as the guitar is, because you experiment with using other instruments and it doesn't seem to change anything.

You have to stop yourself from scanning the crowd for the mermaid. She won't be here, you tell yourself, wondering why it's so hard to believe.

It's no surprise when Little Eddie sidles up after the second set and asks you for a return booking in another four weeks, at the same fee. You tell him you have to check your calendar and your booking agent will call him. You make a note to negotiate him up, and sharply.

But when he walks away, you catch Big Eddie looking over the bar at you and you can see the shine in her eyes. That rattles you. Big Eddie doesn't get like that. She never lets anything get under her skin.

You walk over on the excuse of a beer-the second set ends and the cafe closes before last call, so it's still legal to serve-and drape yourself over a stool.

Big Eddie slides it in front of you and says, "What did you do to your voice?"

"Does it sound bad?" You clear your throat, sip beer, and try again. "I kind of fell in some water and wound up with hypothermia on a hike, and it's sounded funny since."

You didn't miss the way your voice has changed, and not just the timbre: it's your phrasing and your range as well. It took a little while and some messing around with a digital recorder to understand what you were hearing. The tentativeness, the derivative garage-band sound the mermaid commented on, have been washed from your music, leaving something etched and rough-edged and labyrinthine as sea caves.

You love it. You haven't been able to stop singing-to the cat, to yourself, in the shower, walking down the street-since she kissed you. Your new voice fills you up, clothes you in bright glory. You know how everyone else who hears it feels, because you feel it too.

Eddie says, "No, no. It sounds great. But it doesn't sound like you."

You have to bang on the door of Marty's shop to get his attention. When the door creaks open on sawdust-clogged hinges, he blinks at the brightness of sun off snow and covers it by pushing up his safety gla.s.ses. "Problem with the guitar, Missy?"

"Actually, just the opposite," you say, shaping the words so he can read them on your lips and tongue. "The guitar is wonderful. It's something else I need to give back, and I was hoping you'd come with me. Because I don't know what I'll do if I hear her singing. I'd really-" You look down in embarra.s.sment, force yourself to look up again. If he can't see your face, he can't understand what you're saying. "-I'd really owe you one."

You already owe him one. More than one. Closer to a dozen. Your impression that he's a good guy is reinforced by the fact that he hangs the goggles on a nail inside the shop threshold, pulls his coat and gloves on without a word, and only pauses long enough to padlock the door.

You go down into the earth like pilgrims, making obeisance to the G.o.ds of deep places, sometimes sc.r.a.ping on your bellies over rough stones. Marty takes you deeper and by different pa.s.sages than you went before, and all you can do is follow. You can't talk to him in the dark, not unless you make him turn and shine his light into your face, and so you listen to what he has to say instead.

"I had a daughter your age," he says, and you notice the verb tense and don't ask, just let your fingers brush the back of his wrist. In the cave, echoing from stone, shimmering from the moving surface of the underground river, his voice takes on the resonances and harmonics that have come to invest your own.

But then he adds, "She was a guitar player too." And, after another moment, "Kids are stupid. And maybe G.o.d protects fools, drunks and musicians, but all three at once is a bit much to ask of anybody."

You touch his shoulder in the dark, and realize it wasn't the deafness that made him give up playing. He leans into it for a second before walking forward, placing feet carefully on the rippled stones, ducking sideways to bend under a low roof. Water's worn scallops on the floor of the cave; they look like ripples in sand where a river's flowed over it. Wave patterns, sine patterns, like sound.

Water and music are the same thing, at the core.

You stop at the edge of a pool deeper and wider and even more pellucid than the one in which you met the mermaid before. The water moves only where slow drips scatter into it from the ceiling, the beams of your flashlight and Marty's scattering where they're reflected.

You half-expected the mermaid to be waiting, maybe even for her to sing you in, but the only sound is the arrhythmic plink of droplets. She's taken what she wanted and given what she chose to give. She's done and the rest is yours now.

Except you want it all to be yours, earned, not borrowed glory. You wonder if Marty-if anyone-can get her to let you go this time, let you come up out of the darkness again. You wonder if she'll be angry that you're rejecting her gift. You wonder what she'll say, and if she'll curse you.

You breathe deep of wet air to fill yourself up, and nerve yourself to call her up with your song. Because even if it's quick and easy, even if you've already paid for it, even if it's the most beautiful sound you'll ever make, you don't want to echo her voice forever.

You want to grow your own.

One-Eyed Jack And the Suicide King It's not a straight drop. Rather, the Dam is a long sweeping plunge of winter-white concrete: a dress for a three-time Las Vegas bride without quite the gall to show up in French lace and seed pearls. If you face Arizona , Lake Mead spreads out blue and alien on your left hand, inside a bathtub ring of Colorado River limestone and perchlorate drainage from wartime t.i.tanium plants. Unlikely as ca.n.a.ls on Mars, all that azure water rimmed in ma.s.sive red and black rock; the likeness to an alien landscape is redoubled by the Dam's louvered concrete intake towers. At your back is the Hoover Dam visitor's center, and on the lake side sit two art-deco angels, swordcut wings thirty feet tall piercing the desert sky, their big toes shiny from touches for luck.

That angled drop is on your right. a main droite. Downriver. To California . The same way all those phalanxes and legions of electrical towers march.

It's not a straight drop. Hoover 's much wider at the base than at the apex, where a two-lane road runs, flanked by sidewalks. The cement in the Dam's tunnel-riddled bowels won't be cured for another hundred years, and they say it'll take a glacier or a nuke to shift the structure. Its face is ragged with protruding rebar and unsmoothed edges, for all it looks fondant-frosted and insubstantial in the asphyxiating light of a Mojave summer.

Stewart had gotten hung up on an upright pipe about forty feet down the rock face beside the dam proper, and it hadn't killed him. I could hear him screaming from where I stood, beside those New Deal angels. I winced, hoping he died before the rescue crews got to him.

Plexiglas along a portion of the walkway wall discourages jumpers and incautious children: a laughable barrier. But then, so is Hoover itself-a fragile slice of mortal engineering between the oppressive rocks, more a symbol interrupting the flow of the sacred Colorado than any real, solid object.

Still. It holds the river back, don't it?

Stewart screamed again-a high, twisting cry like a gutted dog. I leaned against the black diorite base of the left-hand angel, my feet inches from this inscription: 2,700 BC IN THE REIGN OF THE PHARAOH MENKAURE THE LAST GREAT PYRAMID WAS BROUGHT TO COMPLETION. I bathed in the stare of a teenaged girl too cool to walk over and check out the carnage. She checked me out instead; I ignored her with all the cat-coolness I could muster, my right hand hooked on the tool loop of my leather cargo pants.

With my left one, I reached up to grasp the toe of the angel. Desert-cooked metal seared my fingers; I held on for as long as I could before sticking them in my mouth, and then reached up to grab on again, making my biceps ridge through my skin. Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Moe. Eyepatch and Doc Martens, diamond in my ear or not, the girl eventually got tired of me. I saw her turn away from the corner of my regular eye.

They were moving cars off the Dam to let emergency vehicles through, but the rescue chopper would have to come from Las Vegas. There wasn't one closer. I checked my watch. n.o.body was looking at me anymore, despite dyed matte-black hair, trendy goatee and the sunburned skin showing through my torn sleeveless shirt.

Which was the plan, after all.

I released the angel and strolled across the mosaic commemorating the dedication of the Dam. Bra.s.s and steel inlaid in terrazzo express moons and stars: Alcyone, B Tauri and Mizar. Marked out among them are lines of inclination and paths of arc. The star map was left for future archaeologists to find if they wondered at the Dam's provenance: a sort of "we were here, and this is what we made you" signature scrawled on the bottom of a glue-and-glitter card. A hundred and twenty miles north of here, we're leaving them another gift: a mountain full of spent nuclear fuel rods, and scribed on its surface a similar message, but that one's meant to say "Don't Touch."

Some card.

The steel lines describe the precession of equinoxes and define orbital periods. They mark out a series of curves and angles superimposed across the whole night sky and the entire history of civilized mankind, cutting and containing them as the Dam cuts and contains the river.

It creeps me out. What can I say?

THEY DIED TO MAKE THE DESERT BLOOM, an inscription reads across the compa.s.s rose and signs of the zodiac on my left, and near my feet CAPELLA. And ON THIS 30TH DAY OF THE MONTH OF SEPTEMBER IN THE YEAR (INCARNATIONIS DOMINICAE ANNO MCMx.x.xV) 1935, FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT, 32ND PRESIDENT OF THESE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA DEDICATED TO THE SERVICE OF OUR PEOPLE THIS DAM, POWER PLANT, AND RESERVOIR. A little more than ten years before Bugsy Siegel gave us the Flamingo Hotel and the Las Vegas we know and love today, but an inextricable link in the same unholy chain none the less. I try to be suitably grateful.

But Bugsy was from California.

I pa.s.sed over or beside the words, never stopping, my ears full of Stewart's screaming and the babble of conversation, the shouts of officers, the wail of sirens. And soon, very soon, the rattle of a helicopter's rotors.

The area of terrazzo closest to the angels' feet is called the Wheel of Time. It mentions the pyramids, and the birth of Christ, and the Dam. It ends in the year A.D. 14,000. The official Dam tour recommends you stay home that day.

Alongside these dates is another: EARLY PART OF A.D. 2,100.

Slipped in among all the ancient significances, with a blank s.p.a.ce before it and the obvious and precise intention that it someday be filled to match the rest.

Stewart screamed again. I glanced over my shoulder; security was still distracted. Pulling a chisel from my s.p.a.cious pocket, I crouched on the stones and rested it against the top of the inscription. I produced a steel-headed mallet into my other hand. When I lifted the eyepatch off my otherwise eye, I saw the light saturating the stone shiver back from the point of my chisel like a prodded jellyfish. There was some power worked into it. A power I recognized, because I also saw its potential shimmer through my eye where my left one saw only the skin of my own hand. The Dam, and me. Something meant to look like something else.

Card tricks.

The lovely whistle-stop oasis called Las Vegas became a minor metropolis-by Nevada standards-in large part by serving gambling, whiskey and wh.o.r.es to the New Deal workers who poured these concrete blocks. Workers housed in Boulder City weren't permitted such things within town limits. On Friday nights they went looking for a place to spend some of the money they risked their lives earning all week. Then after a weekend in Sin City , they were back in harness seven hundred feet above the bottom of Black Canyon come Monday morning, nine a.m.

Ninety-six of them died on the Dam site. Close to three hundred more succ.u.mbed to black lung and other diseases. There's a legend some of them were entombed within the Dam.

It would never have been permitted. A body in the concrete means a weakness in the structure, and Hoover was made to last well past the date I was about to obliterate with a few well-placed blows. "Viva Las Vegas," I muttered under my breath, and raised the hammer. And then Stewart stopped screaming, and a velvety female purr sounded in my ear. "Jack, Jack, Jackie."

"G.o.ddess." I put the tools down and stood up, face inches from the face of the most beautiful woman in the world. "How did you know where to find me?"

She lowered tar-black lashes across a cheek like cream and thrust a narrow swell of hip out, pouting through her hair. The collar of her sleeveless blouse stood crisp-pressed, framing her face; I wondered how she managed it in a hundred-twenty. "I heard a rumor you meant to deface my Dam," she said with a smile that bent lacquered lips in a mockery of Cupid's little red bow. The too-cool teenager was staring at G.o.ddess now, brow wrinkled as if she thought G.o.ddess must be somebody famous and couldn't quite place who. G.o.ddess gets that reaction a lot.

I sighed. Contrived as she was, she was still lovelier than anything real life could manage. "You're looking a little peaked these days, G.o.ddess. Producers got you on a diet again? And it's my Dam, honey. I'm Las Vegas. Your turf is down the river."

Her eyes flashed. Literally. I c.o.c.ked an ear over my shoulder, but still no screaming. Which-dammit-meant that Stewart was probably dead, and I was out of time. Otherwise I would have bent down in front of her and done it anyway.

"It's not polite to ask a lady what she does to maintain her looks, darling. And I say Hoover belongs to L.A. You claim, what-ten percent of the power and water?" She took a couple of steps to the bra.s.s Great Seal of California there at the bottom of the terrazzo, front and center among the plaques to the seven states that could not live without the Colorado, and twice as big as the others. Immediately under the sheltering wings of a four-foot bas-relief eagle. She tapped it with a toe. The message was clear.

I contented myself with admiring the way her throat tightened under a Tiffany collar as I shrugged and booted my hammer aside. Out of my left eye, I saw her otherwise-a swirl of images and expectations, a casting-couch stain and a shattered dream streetwalking on Sunset Boulevard. "You still working by yourself, G.o.ddess? Imagine it's been lonely since your boyfriend died."

Usually there are two or three of us to a city. And we can be killed, although something new comes along eventually to replace us. Unless the city dies too: then it's all over. Her partner had gotten himself shot up in an alleyway. Appropriate.

"I get by," she answered with a Bette Davis sigh.

I was supposed to go over and comfort her. Instead, I flipped my eyepatch down. G.o.ddess makes me happy I don't like girls. She's a hazard to navigation for those who do. "I was just leaving. We could stop at that little ice cream place in Boulder City for an avocado-baconburger."

A surprised ripple of rutabaga-rutabagas ran through the crowd on the other sidewalk, and I heard officers shouting to each other. Stewart's body must have vanished.

"Ugh," G.o.ddess said expressively, the corners of her mouth turning down under her makeup.

"True. You shouldn't eat too much in a sitting; all that puking will ruin your teeth." I managed to beat my retreat while she was still hacking around a suitably acid response.

Traffic wasn't moving across the dam yet, but I'd had the foresight to park the dusty-but-new F150 in the lot in Arizona, so all I had to do was walk across the Dam-on the lake side: there was still a crowd on the drop side-and haul Stewart (by the elbow) away from the KLAS reporter to whom he was providing an incoherently h.o.m.os.e.xual man-on-the-spot reaction. He did that sort of thing a lot. Stewart was the Suicide King. I kissed him as I shoved him into the truck.

He pulled back and caught my eye. "Did it work?"

"f.u.c.k, Stewart. I'm sorry."

"Sure," he said, leaning across to open the driver's-side door. "You spend fifteen minutes impaled on a rusty chunk of steel and then I'll tell you, 'Sorry.' What happened?"

"G.o.ddess."

He didn't say anything after that: just blew silky blond hair out of eyes bluer than the desert sky and put his hand on my knee as we drove south through Arizona, down to Laughlin, and came over the river and back up through the desert wastes of Searchlight and CalNevAri. In silence. Going home.

We parked the truck in the Four Queens garage and went strolling past the courthouse. The childhood-summer drone of cicadas surrounded us as we walked past the drunks and the itinerant ministers. We strolled downtown arm in arm, toward the Fremont Street Experience, daring somebody to say something.

The Suicide King and me. Wildcards, but only sometimes. In a city with streets named for Darth Vader and for Seattle Slew, we are the unseen princes. I said as much to Stewart.

"Or unseen queens," he joked, tugging me under the arch of lights roofing Fremont Street . "What happened back there?"

Music and cool air drifted out the open doorways of casinos, along with the irresistible chime of the slot machines that are driving out the table games. I saw the lure of their siren song in the gla.s.sy eyes of the gamblers shuffling past us. "Something must have called her. I was just going to deface a national landmark. Nothing special."

Someone jostled my arm on my otherwise side, blind with the eyepatch down. I turned my head, expecting a sneering curse. But he smiled from under a floppy moustache and a floppier hat, and disappeared into Binion's Horseshoe. I could pick the poker players out of the herd: they didn't look anaesthetized. That one wasn't a slot zombie. There might be life in my city yet.

Stewart grunted, cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife that wasn't street-legal by anyone's standards. Sweat marked half-moons on his red-striped shirt, armholes and collar. "And G.o.ddess showed up. All the way from the City of Angels ."

"Hollywood and Vine."

"What did she want?"

"The b.i.t.c.h said it was her f.u.c.king Dam." I turned my head to watch another zombie pa.s.s. A local. Tourists mostly stay down on the Strip these days, with its Hollywood a.s.sortment of two-dimensional mockeries of exotic places. Go to Las Vegas and never see it.

I'm waiting for the Las-Vegas themed casino: somewhere between Paris, Egypt, Venice, and the African coast. Right in the middle of the Strip. This isn't the city that gave Stewart and me birth. But this is the city I now am.

"Is it?"

"I don't know. Hoover should be ours by rights. But it called her: that's the only thing that makes sense. And I'm convinced that empty date forges a link between Vegas and L.A. It's as creepy as the d.a.m.ned Mayan calendar ending in 2012."

He let go of my arm and wandered over to one of the antique neon signs. Antique by Vegas standards, anyway. "You ever think of all those old towns under the lake, Jack? The ones they evacuated when the reservoir started to fill?"

I nodded, although he wasn't looking and I knew he couldn't hear my head rattle, and I followed him through the neon museum. I think a lot about those towns, actually. Them, and the Anasazi, who carved their names and legends on every wind-etched red rock within the glow of my lights and then vanished without a whisper, as if blown off the world by that selfsame wind. And Rhyolite, near Beatty, where they're building the nuke dump: it was the biggest city in Nevada in 1900 and in 1907 it was gone. I think about the Upshot Knothole Project: these downtown hotels are the older ones, built to withstand the tremors from the above-ground nuclear blasts that comprised it. And I think too of all the casinos that thrived in their day, and then accordioned into dust and tidy rubble when the men with the dynamite came.

Nevada has a way of eating things up. Swallowing them without a trace.

Except the Dam, with that cry etched on its surface. And a date that hasn't happened yet. Remember. Remember. Remember me.