Connie Willis - Fire Watch

Jewell left us alone while I helped her get dressed after the scan, and I said, “Taber is a very bad man. He wants to hurt you.”

“I know,” she said. She was standing very still while I clipped the row of pearl buttons on the back of her dress together.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s like the sidon.”

“You mean he can’t help himself, that he doesn’t know what he’s doing?” I said, outraged. “He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

“The tappers used to poke at the sidon with sticks when it was in the cage,” she said. “They couldn’t reach it to really hurt it, though, and Taber couldn’t stand that. He made the tapper give him the key to the cage just so he could get to it. Just so he could hurt it. Now why would he want to hurt the sidon?”

“Because it was helpless,” I said, and wondered if the man who’d blinded Pearl had been like that. “Because it couldn’t protect itself.”

“Jewell and I were in the same happy house on Solfatara,” she said. “We had a friend there, a pianoboard player like you. He was very tall like you, too, and he was the kindest person I ever knew. Sometimes you remind me of him.” She walked certainly to the door, as if she were not counting the memorized steps. “A cage is a safe place as long as nobody has the key Don’t worry Ruby. He can’t get in.” She turned and looked at me. “Will you come and play for me?”

“Yes,” I said, and followed her down to the music room. Before the shifts started, while the girls were upstairs dressing, she liked to sit in the white chair and listen to me play. She understood, more than any of the others, that I could only play the songs I had copied from Kovich. Jewell to the end thought I could read music, and Taber even brought me hardcopies from Solfatara. Pearl simply said the names of songs, and I played them. She never asked for one I didn’t know, and I thought that was because she listened carefully to the tappers’ requests and my refusals, and I was grateful.

I sat down at the pianoboard and looked at Pearl in the mirror. I had asked Jewell for the mirror so I could see over my shoulder. I had told her I wanted it so she could signal me songs and breaks and sometimes the rope-cutter if the men got rough or noisy but it was really so I could keep Taber from standing there without my knowing it.

“Back Home,” Pearl said. I could hardly hear her over the nitrogen blowers. I began playing it, and Taber came in. He walked swiftly over to her, and then stood quite still, and between my playing and the noise of the blowers, she did not hear him. He stood about half a meter from her, close enough to touch her, but just out of reach if she had put out her hand to try to find him.

He took the cigar out of his mouth and bent down as if he were going to speak to her, and instead he pursed his lips and blew gently at her. I could almost see the smoke. At first she didn’t seem to notice, but then she shivered and drew her shinethread shawl closer about her.

He stopped and smiled at her a moment and then reached out and touched her with the tip of his cigar, lightly, on the shoulder, as if he intended to burn her, and then darted it back out of her reach. She swatted at the air, and he repeated the little pantomime again and again until she stood and put her hands up helplessly against what she could not see. As she did so, he moved swiftly and silently to the door so that when she cried out, “Who is it? Who’s there?” he said in his slow drawl, “Its me, Pearl. I’ve just come in. Did I frighten you?”

“No,” she said, and sat back down again. But when he took her hand, she flinched away from him as I had thought she would from me. And all the while I had not missed a beat of the song.

“I just came over to see you for a minute,” Taber said, “and to hear your pianoboard player. He gets better every day doesn’t he?”

Pearl didn’t answer, and I saw in the mirror that her hands lay crossed in her lap again and didn’t move.

“Yes,” he said, and walked toward me, flicking imaginary ashes from his unlit cigar onto my hands. “Better and better,” he said softly. “I can almost see my face in you, Mirror.”

“What did you say?” Pearl said frightenedly.

“I said I’d better go see Jewell a minute about some business and then get back next door. Jack found a new hydrogen tap today, a big one.”

He went back through the card room to the kitchen, and I sat at the pianoboard, watching in the mirror until I saw the kitchen door shut behind him.

“Taber was in the room the whole time,” I said. “He was… doing things to you.”

“I know,” she said.

“You shouldn’t let him. You should stop him,” I said violently, and as soon as I said it, I knew that she knew that I had not stopped him either. “He’s a very bad man,” I said.

“He has never locked me in,” she said after a minute. “He has never tied me up.”

“He has never known how before,” I said, and knew it was true. “He wants me to find out for him.”

She bent her head to her hands, which still lay crossed at the wrists, almost relaxed, showing nothing of what she was thinking. “And will you?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“He’s trying to get you to copy him, isn’t he?” she said.

“Yes.”

“And you think it’s working?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t tell when I’m copying. Do I sound like Taber?”

“No,” she said, so definitely that I was relieved. I had listened to myself with an anxious ear, hoping for Jewell’s shortened vowels and tapper slang, waiting in dread for the slow, lazy speech of Taber. I did not think I had heard either of them, but I had been afraid I wouldn’t know if I did.

“Do you know who I’m copying?” I said.

“You walk like Jewell,” she said, and smiled a little. “It makes her furious.”

It was the end of the shift before I realized that, like my uncle, she had not really answered what I had asked.

Jack’s new tap turned out to be so big that he needed a crew to help put up the compressors, and for several shifts hardly anyone was in the house, including Taber. Because business was so slack, Jewell even let some of the girls go over to the gaming house. Taber didn’t go near the tap, but he didn’t come over quite so often either, and when he did he spent his time upstairs or with Carnie, talking to her in a low voice and clicking the sparker over and over again, as if he could not help himself. Then, once the compressors were set up and the sidon working, the men poured back into St. Pierre, and Taber was too busy to come over at all.

The one time he did find Pearl alone, he said, “It’s Taber, Pearl,” almost before I had banged a loud chord on the keys and said, “Taber’s here.” He did not have his cigar with him, or his sparker, and he did not even speak to me. Watching Pearl talk to him in the little mirror, her head gracefully turned away from him, her hands quiet in her lap, I could almost believe that he would not succeed, that nothing could hurt her, safe in her blindness.

We were so busy that Jewell hardly spoke to me, but when she did, she told me sharply that if I had nothing better to do than copy her I should tend bar, and set me to passing out the watered liquor she had brought out in honor of the new sidon. She did the boards for the week herself while I ran the body checks.

Pearl, naked under the scan, looked calm and unhurt. Carnie had sot-scars under her arms. I did not report her. If Jewell found out, she would send Carnie back to Solfatara, and I wanted Taber to be working on Carnie, giving her sots and trying to get her to help him, because then I could believe he had given up on me. He had not given up on Pearl, I did not dare believe that, but I did not think that he and Carnie alone could hurt her, no matter what they did to her. Not without my help. Not so long as I was copying Jewell.