The Planet on the Table (17 page)

I crumpled the sheet and tossed it to the floor. “A forgery,” I said, voice still calm. “He tries usurping me.”

I pulled my épée from my scabbard. Velasquo did the same. The company drew back, pulling the front table with them to make room. The Cardinal made his way forward. Sanguinetto stood beside him. The two of them linked arms, and the Cardinal spoke:

“The truth is in Fate’s hands. Let them fence.”

And in my mind I heard the blocking instruction, in Bloomsman’s dry voice: “Fence.”

Finally, finally the light became red, a bright crimson glare that bathed us both in blood. We circled each other warily. I watched his wrist, his stance, and in my concentration the world contracted to the two of us. Adrenaline flooded through me and my pulse was trip-hammer fast.

His blade had a tip on it, but that meant nothing; I knew it would slide back on contact, releasing the sharp point. The Hieronomo had used it before.

We began tentatively. He lunged, I parried, and we established a simple parry-riposte pattern, often used in practice, at very high speed. The flashing blades and the rapid clicking of clean parries were highly dramatic, but meant little.

After a short pause to regain balance, Velasquo lunged again, more fully this time, and we bouted with increased speed, using the full variety of tactics. The scrape and ring of steel against steel, the wooden thumping of our footwork, our hoarse breathing were the only sounds in the theater.

The exchange ended and we stared at each other, breathing heavily. A wrinkle of concentration appeared between his eyes. I was sure he now realized that my knowledge of fencing was not implanted, that it was learned from actual experience. Implanted fencing was adequate for theatrics, but it consisted entirely of conscious moves and strategies, it was a verbal memory. Fencing learned by experience was remembered to a large extent in the cerebellum, where movement and balance are controlled, and thus reactions were nearly reflex-fast. Velasquo was certainly aware of this, and now he knew that he had been discovered by someone capable of besting him.

Suddenly he lunged with great violence. The thrust avoided my parry and I had to leap back to dodge his blade. The real fight had begun. He lunged in straightforward attacks that were easy enough to parry, but when I did so he remised, continued to attack. He was ignoring my tipped weapon, which was clearly harmless. When I understood this, I jumped back and slapped my épée against the floor. The tip stayed on. I had to retreat and parry for my life, watching nothing but his blade, and striking it aside desperately each time it thrust at me.

My heel hit the bottom of the left stairway and I nearly stumbled. I stepped up backward, and Velasquo followed, negating my height advantage with the energy of his attack. I turned and ran up to the balcony, swinging my epée against the bannister all the way. The tip stayed on. I turned and lunged fiercely at my pursuer. He halted, lead foot three steps above his hind foot, and we engaged in a grim slashing battle, as if we were fighting with sabers. I didn’t want him to reach the balcony. It was hopeless; still unafraid of my épée, he drove me back by degrees and managed, step by step, to make his way up to my level. When he reached the balcony I turned and sprinted down the other staircase four steps at a time, spinning and slashing once to impede his pursuit, and slamming my blade viciously against the side wall all the way down.

When I got to the stage, I saw that my tip had snapped off and disappeared. Exultantly I turned, parried Velasquo’s running attack, and riposted straight at his chest. He leaped to one side to avoid the thrust. Several feet separated us; we stood panting.

He saw the change in my blade, invisible from more than a few feet away, and his expression became one of alarm— the idea struck him, perhaps, that tonight we had reversed roles; tonight I had become the Hieronomo. He looked up to my face, and I smiled.

Instinctively he lunged and in a fury of desperate motion drove me back across the stage. But now we were armed evenly, he had to respect my blade, and I wasn’t forced to retreat for long. We battled with a sweaty, intense, total concentration.

He stopped and our blades circled each other: mine jagged and blunt, but slender; his still tipped by the treacherous false button. He started a complicated, deceptive attack. I stole the offensive from him with a stop thrust, lunged for his chest and hit just below the sternum. Amazingly, the blade did not bend and push my hand back, as it always had before:
it slid right in
.

Velasquo dropped his épée, stumbled back and fell, tugging free of my blade. I lifted it; the steel was streaked with blood, unnaturally red in the light. It dripped like water. Velasquo rolled onto his belly.

I looked up and surveyed the stage. Most of the cast had moved into the wings, which were blocked.

Caropia stepped forward, her tall cup still in her hands. Her eyes and mouth were black holes in a face as white as the mask she had long since removed. She appeared confused, but spoke her lines nevertheless, in a dry, airy voice:

“There lies he, chok’d in his own blood,

A ravenous wolf whom all the world thought good.”

Velasquo rolled over. Caropia’s cup toppled to the floor. Sanguinetto, his mask still on, stepped toward me. I swung my épée in his direction and he stopped. I walked toward the rear exit, keeping the blade pointed at him. Above me on the balcony, the gargoyle waved an arm, and the curtain jerked downward. The audience leaped to their feet, and I thought
They’re after me, I’m caught
; but they were clapping, cheering, it was an ovation—the gargoyle bowed—I fled.

An unfamiliar door in the dressing room gave me access to a dark storage room. I crossed it, entered another hallway. It turned and almost immediately I was lost, running without plan down hallways and through dark rooms. Muffled shouts of pursuit reverberated through the walls from time to time, spurring me on. I tried to work my way in a single direction. A short set of stairs led me up to a little closet theater, stage no bigger than a sitting room. Hearing voices backstage, I crouched down between two rows of seats. I looked through the slot between two seat backs and watched a red-coated guard, one of the extras from our play, run on stage and halt. I held my breath. He surveyed the room quickly, then left as quickly as he had entered. The voices receded like echoes and I got up and ran again, out the back of the theater.

I was in a long white hallway with a very high ceiling. Green light poured from long strips in the wall. To my left, at the end of the hail, was a door. I ran for it. As I approached I saw words printed on the door, above the horizontal bar that opened it: EMERGENCY EXIT—ALARM WILL SOUND.

The moment I comprehended the words, the dry, ineffable presence of
déjà vu
filled me:
this had happened before
. In a flash I knew everything, I understood all that had occurred in the theater, it stood before me in my mind like a crystalline sphere. But just as quickly the entire matrix of thought collapsed, leaving no trace except the memory of its existence:
presque vu
, almost seen.

I slammed into the bar crossing the door, and it flew open. To the sharp blast of a siren I leaped out into the chill air, and back into the world.

—1976

ar breeds strange pastimes. In July of 1945 on Tinian Island in the North Pacific, Captain Frank January had taken to piling pebble cairns on the crown of Mount Lasso—one pebble for each B-29 takeoff, one cairn for each mission. The largest cairn had four hundred stones in it. It was a mindless pastime, but so was poker. The men of the 509th had played a million hands of poker, sitting in the shade of a palm around an upturned crate sweating in their skivvies, swearing and betting all their pay and cigarettes, playing hand after hand after hand, until the cards got so soft and dog-eared you could have used them for toilet paper. Captain January had gotten sick of it, and after he lit out for the hilltop a few times some of his crewmates started trailing him. When their pilot Jim Fitch joined them it became an official pastime, like throwing flares into the compound or going hunting for stray Japs. What Captain January thought of the development he didn’t say. The others grouped near Captain Fitch, who passed around his battered flask. “Hey, January,” Fitch called. “Come have a shot.”

January wandered over and took the flask. Fitch laughed at his pebble. “Practicing your bombing up here, eh, Professor?”

“Yah,” January said sullenly. Anyone who read more than the funnies was Professor to Fitch. Thirstily January knocked back some rum. He could drink it any way he pleased up here, out from under the eye of the group psychiatrist. He passed the flask on to Lieutenant Matthews, their navigator.

“That’s why he’s the best,” Matthews joked. “Always practicing.”

Fitch laughed. “He’s best because I make him be best, right, Professor?”

January frowned. Fitch was a bulky youth, thick-featured, pig-eyed—a thug, in January’s opinion. The rest of the crew were all in their mid-twenties like Fitch, and they liked the captain’s bossy roughhouse style. January, who was thirty-seven, didn’t go for it. He wandered away, back to the cairn he had been building. From Mount Lasso they had an overview of the whole island, from the harbor at Wall Street to the north field in Harlem. January had observed hundreds of B-29s roar off the four parallel runways of the north field and head for Japan. The last quartet of this particular mission buzzed across the width of the island, and January dropped four more pebbles, aiming for crevices in the pile. One of them stuck nicely.

“There they are!” said Matthews. “They ‘re on the taxiing strip.”

January located the 509th’s first plane. Today, the first of August, there was something more interesting to watch than the usual Superfortress parade. Word was out that General Le May wanted to take the 509th’s mission away from it. Their commander Colonel Tibbets had gone and bitched to Le May in person, and the general had agreed the mission was theirs, but on one condition: one of the general’s men was to make a test flight with the 509th, to make sure they were fit for combat over Japan. The general’s man had arrived, and now he was down there in the strike plane, with Tibbets and the whole first team. January sidled back to his mates to view the takeoff with them.

“Why don’t the strike plane have a name, though?” Haddock was saying.

Fitch said, “Lewis won’t give it a name because it’s not his plane, and he knows it.” The others laughed. Lewis and his crew were naturally unpopular, being Tibbets’ favorites.

“What do you think he’ll do to the general’s man?” Matthews asked.

The others laughed at the. very idea. “He’ll kill an engine at takeoff, I bet you anything,” Fitch said. He pointed at the wrecked B-29s that marked the end of every runway, planes whose engines had given out on takeoff. “He’ll want to show that he wouldn’t go down if it happened to him.”

“ ‘Course he wouldn’t!” Matthews said.

“You hope,” January said under his breath.

“They let those Wright engines out too soon,” Haddock said seriously. “They keep busting under the takeoff load.”

“Won’t matter to the old bull,” Matthews said. Then they all started in about Tibbets’ flying ability, even Fitch. They all thought Tibbets was the greatest. January, on the other hand, liked Tibbets even less than he liked Fitch. That had started right after he was assigned to the 509th. He had been told he was part of the most important group in the war, and then given a leave. In Vicksburg a couple of fliers just back from England had bought him a lot of whiskies, and since January had spent several months stationed near London they had talked for a good long time and gotten pretty drunk, The two were really curious about what January was up to now, but he had stayed vague on it and kept returning the talk to the blitz. He had been seeing an English nurse, for instance, whose flat had been bombed, family and neighbors killed… But they had really wanted to know. So he had told them he was onto something special, and they bad flipped out their badges and told him they were Army Intelligence, and that if he ever broke security like that again he’d be transferred to Alaska. It was a dirty trick. January had gone back to Wendover and told Tibbets so to his face, and Tibbets had turned red and threatened him some more. January despised him for that. The upshot was that January was effectively out of the war, because Tibbets really played his favorites. January wasn’t sure he really minded, but during their year’s training he had bombed better than ever, as a way of showing the old bull he was wrong to write January off. Every time their eyes had met it was clear what was going on. But Tibbets never backed off no matter how precise January’s bombing got. Just thinking about it was enough to cause January to line up a pebble over an ant and drop it.