Connie Willis - Fire Watch

Jewell took a step forward and put her foot down like she was afraid the ground would give way.

“Iv course he din’t. He’s a pianoboard player.”

The pilot laughed and said, “Okay, Jewell, take him,” and she grabbed up my tote and walked me back to St. Pierre. She asked about my uncle, she told me about the abbey and the girls and how she’d given them all house names of jewels because of her name. She told me how Taber, who ran the gaming house next door to her abbey had christened the little string of buildings we could see in the distance St. Pierre after the patron saint of tappers, and all the time the bottoms of her feet fried like cooking meat and she never said a word.

I couldn’t see her very well. She was wearing a chemiloom lantern strapped to her forehead and she had brought one for me, but they didn’t give off much light and her face was in shadow. My uncle had told me she had a big scar, from a fight with a sidon, that ran down the side of her face and under her chin.

“It nearly cut the jugular,” my uncle had said. “It would have if they hadn’t gotten it off of her. It cut up quite a few of the tappers, too.”

“What was she doing with a sidon anyway?” I said. I had never seen one, but I had heard about them, beautiful blood-red animals with thick, soft fur and sot-razor claws, animals that could seem tame for as long as a year and then explode without warning into violence. “You can’t tame them.”

“Jewell thought she could,” my uncle said. “One of the tappers brought it back with him from Solfatara in a cage. Somebody let it out, and it got away. Jewell went after it. Its feet were burned and it was suffering from heatstroke. Jewell sat down on the ground and held it on her lap till someone came to help. She insisted on bringing it back to the abbey, making it into a pet. She wouldn’t believe she couldn’t tame it.”

“But a sidon can’t help what it is,” I said. “It’s like us. It doesn’t even know it’s doing it.”

My uncle did not say anything, and after a minute I said, “She thinks she can tame us, too. That’s why she’s willing to take me, isn’t it? I knew there had to be a reason she’d take me when we’re not allowed on Solfatara. She thinks she can keep me from copying.”

My uncle still did not answer, and I took that for assent. He had not answered any of my questions. He had suddenly said I was going, though nobody had gone off-planet since the ban, and when I asked him questions, he answered with statements that did not answer them at all.

“Why do I have to go?” I said. I was afraid of going, afraid of what might happen.

“I want you to copy Jewell. She is a kind person, a good person. You can learn a great deal from her.”

“Why can’t she come here? Kovich did.”

“She runs an abbey on Paylay. There are not more than two dozen tappers and girls on the whole star. It is perfectly safe.”

“What if there’s somebody evil there? What if I copy him instead and kill somebody like happened on Solfatara? What if something bad happens?”

“Jewell runs a clean abbey. No sots, no pervs, and the girls are well-behaved. It’s nothing like the happy houses. As for Paylay itself, you shouldn’t worry about it being a star. It’s in the last stages of burning out. It has a crust almost two thousand feet thick, which means there’s hardly any radiation. People can walk on the surface without any protective clothing at all. There’s some radiation from the hydrogen taps, of course, but you won’t go anywhere near them.”

He had reassured me about everything except what was important. Now, trudging along after Jewell through the sooty carbon of Paylay, I knew all about all the dangers except the worst ones myself.

I could not see anything that looked like a tap. “Where are they?” I asked, and Jewell pointed back the way we had come.

“As far away as we kin git thim from St. Pierre and each it her so simm tripletapping fool kin’t kill ivverybody when he blows himsilf up. The first sidon’s off thit way, ten kilometers or so.”

“Sidon,” I said, frightened. My uncle had told me the tappers had killed the sidon and made it into a rug after it nearly killed Jewell.

She laughed. “Thits what they call the taps. Because they blow up on you and you don’t even know what hit. They make thim as safe as they can, but the comprission equipmints metal and metal means sparks. Ivvery once in a while that whole sky over there lights up like Chrissmiss. We built St. Pierre as faraway as we kidd, and there in’t a scrap of metal in the whole place, but the hydrogen leaks are ivverywhere. And helium. Din’t we sound like apairiv vools squeaking at each other?” She laughed again, and I noticed that as we had stood there looking at the black horizon, my feet had begun to feel uncomfortably hot.

It was a long walk through the darkness to the string of lights, and the whole way I watched Jewell and wondered if I had already begun to copy her. I would not know it, of course. I had not known I was copying my uncle either. One day he had asked me to playa song, and I had sat down at the pianoboard and played it. When I was finished, he said, “How long have you been able to do that?” and I did not know. Only after I had done the copying would I know it, and then only if someone told me. I trudged after Jewell in darkness and tried, tried to copy her.

It took us nearly an hour to get to the town, and when we got there I could see it wasn’t a town at all. What Jewell had called St. Pierre was only two tall metalpaper-covered buildings perched on plastic frameworks nearly two meters high and a huddle of stilt-tents. Neither building had a sign over the door, just strings of multicolored chemiloom lights strung along the eaves. They were fairly bright, and they reflected off the metalpaper into even more light, but Jewell took off the lantern she had had strapped to her head and held it close to the wooden openwork steps, as if I couldn’t see to climb up to the front door high above us without it.

“Why are you walking like thit?” she said when we got to the top of the steps, and for the first time I could see her scar. It looked almost black in the colored light of the lantern and the looms, and it was much wider than I had thought it would be, a fissure of dark puckered skin down one whole side of her face.

“Walking like what?” I said, and looked down at my feet.

“Like you kin’t bear to hivv your feet touch the ground. I got my feet too hot out at the down. You didn’t. So din’t walk like thit.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I won’t do it anymore.”

She smiled at me, and the scar faded a little. “Now you just kimm on in and meet the girls. Din’t mind it if they say simmthing about the way you look. They’ve nivver seen a Mirror before, but they’re good girls.” She opened the thick door. It was metalpaper backed with a thick pad of insulation. “We take our shoes off out here and wear shuffles inside the abbey"

It was much cooler inside. There was a plastic heat-trigger fan set in the ceiling and surrounded by rose-colored chemilooms. We were in an anteroom with a rack for the high shoes and the lanterns. They dangled by their straps.

Jewell sat down on a chair and began unbuckling her bulky shoes. “Din’t ivver go out without shoes and a lantern,” she said. She gestured toward the rack. “The little ones with the twillpaper hiddbands are for town. They only list about an hour. If you’re going out to the taps or the spiraldown, take one iv the big ones with you.”

She looked different in the rosy light. Her scar hardly showed at all. Her voice was different, too, deeper. She sounded older than she had at the down. I looked up and around at the air.