Emma Bull - Bone Dance

I traveled the fence line to the nearest of the three gates and found it open. The Night Fair was alive from sunset to full dawn. At any other time it was locked and silent, and no one climbed the fence.

What is that? she’d asked, and, A market, I’d told her. And an ocean is a large body of water, and hearts pump blood. The subtleties are lost.

What the Night Fair had been before I knew it, I couldn’t say. Now it was ten blocks of the City, in various states of repair. There were places where buildings had been knocked down or burnt away, and in those cavities and in the streets were the market and carnival places, the booths, the games of skill and chance, the food and drink vendors, the rides, the freak shows. For less easily granted wishes, one had to look to the buildings. There was no directory, no skyway map, no Guide to Retailers. If one wanted something in the buildings, one had to want it enough to go looking. I was as confident of the Night Fair as any of its patrons, but I went carefully when I left the streets.

I was so hungry I felt transparent, so thirsty that my own saliva rasped in my throat. But that was a state I could change, with a little currency. I could trudge to the other side of the Fair—but that was a long trudge. Besides, I wanted to feel the Deal in action. I had enough concentration left to do a little magic, if I could spot someone who’d shell out for it.

The Fair was half-asleep, so early in the evening; some of the stands were empty, and the ones that weren’t were gaudy islands without their proper context. The smell of cooking-oil lamps seemed strong without the stronger smells of food and fuel and humanity to bury it. But in a courtyard I found the kind of thing I was looking for, or in this case, listening for. A fat Oriental kid was running a duckshoot, and trying to catch custom with the City-run all-dance broadcast channel playing through an old Carvin PA speaker. Every bass note had the crunchy sound of a ripped speaker cone.

He looked hopeful when I approached, less so when I pointed to the speaker and said, “Sounds bad.”

His mouth turned down at the corners. “Sounds okay to me.”

“Ah. I guess you won’t want it fixed if there’s nothing wrong with it.” I half turned away.

“Why do you say it sounds bad?” he asked quickly, and I knew it was going to be all right. The passage of arms was begun.

“Well, last time I heard that jam, the guy playing the giant piece of cellophane wasn’t with them.”

“You mean that little noise?” He shrugged, and rather well, too. “It ain’t much. Nobody but an audiofreak’d notice.”

“Must be an audiofreak convention in town. People are crossing to the other side of the street.”

He scowled. No patience. With more patience, he could have been good at this. “What would it take to fix a little thing like that?”

“The right person, and twenty hard bucks.” The kid spit to his left. A ward against liars. “Hell, I could get another whole speaker for twenty.”

“You couldn’t get one of those for less than a hundred, and you’d have to find one first. And you know it.” Oh, he could have gotten something for twenty bucks. Maybe even that speaker, from someone who didn’t appreciate its solid, deep-throated sweetness.

“Five,” he said, one syllable of pure bravado. “Soft.”

“Kid,” I said, smiling kindly and leaning on the counter between the popguns, “have you ever heard the joke about the plumber and the little teeny hammer?” He was beaten. I could tell by his eyes. “Tapping, fifty cents; knowing where to tap, fifty dollars? Now, because I always enjoy telling a joke, I’ll give you a deal: fifteen, soft.” I should have held out for ten hard, but visions of carbohydrates were beginning to dance in front of my eyes.

It was a little tougher job than the plumber had. But I got the grille off and the cone out, and I carried a few things in my pockets that nobody else would have recognized as valuable. A roll of heat-shrink fiber tape, for instance; good for strain relief on cords, for covering spliced wire, and for mending tears in any stretched material. I covered the rip in the cone with a narrow piece and borrowed matches from the kid to shrink it tight. The speaker was not as good as new; one more fine and irreplaceable thing had slipped out of the world, and the world, as usual, hadn’t noticed. But a normal human being could now listen to it with teeth unclenched. At least, if said party liked City broadcast.

I wandered off with a light head, a sense of duty done, and fifteen folding City-made dollars. The first food vendor I came upon did Chinese. After six pot-stickers and three cups of lemon-balm tea, I was able to see the world with less prejudice. After another block, a few smoked pork ribs, and a skewer of batter-fried vegetables, my sense of proportion was restored. I tallied the day’s accomplishments. Today, after an impressively bad start, I had saved the life of one twelve-inch speaker cone, fed myself, and got all the way to Sherrea’s under my own (I granted myself some poetic exaggeration) power.

Where I’d been made no wiser, and been told besides to start shoveling or don’t show my face again. A fine friendly gesture. How was I to get my ordure in order if she couldn’t even give me useful clues? My theories about her mind reading were a little shaken, too; I refused to believe that the afternoon’s display of amateur theatricals had come out of my head.

In the deep, gritty voice that, looking back, I couldn’t call male or female: That’s bringin’ danger on you, and all the ones bound to you. I wasn’t bound. That would have been flying in the face of good sense, and I tried not to do that. Surely the pure voice of my subconscious would have a better handle on me than that. Sherrea—or her friend—seemed to declare that sacrifice was the road to salvation; but I wanted to fix a busted head, not a rotten soul.

But don’t ask what’s in it for you. It’s the ten of swords. The card with the dark-haired figure on the sand, the upright swords.

I noticed that I had finished eating; or at least, I didn’t seem to want any more.

By then, the joint was, as they say, jumping. Money, bright and folding, hard and soft, was running in its well-worn channels. Objects and services were passing from one hand to another, and by that alchemy were turned to gold, purifying with each transaction. The streets fizzed like charged water with noise, motion, and change. Here before me was the familiar exercise of my faith, the Deal. The exchange was only its sacrament, the symbol of its larger principles. Nothing Is Free. One way or another, you will pay your debts; better you should arrange the method of payment yourself.

This was what the woman on the tri-wheeler had blasphemed against, and why I feared her. Because she didn’t know the Deal.

The Odeon was open. Under its optimistic, badly lettered sign, block-printed posters taped to the painted-over shop windows promised showings of The Lady Vanishes. I dropped my gaze to the doorway where Huey was sitting in his folding chair, taking tickets, and I shook my head and grinned at him. He rolled his eyes. This was shorthand for (in my case), “Huey, I happen to know that’s a bad third-generation dub of the lousy non-Hitchcock remake that you’re going to show on your crummy nineteen-inch monitor with a misaligned yoke and out-of-whack color,” and (in his case), “So what? You don’t come to no storefront vid parlor, anyhow.” This is a conversation one only needs to have once; after that, it reels out again on fast forward whenever necessary, without further rehearsal.

In front of the Odeon’s shabby blandishments, a herd of nightbabies clumped like a blood clot in the vein of the sidewalk. They weren’t going in, oo dear meee, nooo. Only the crawlers do vid parlors. But it’s sooo Deep ambie, y’knoow?