September Song by Kat Allison

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The night was a warm one, far too warm for September, and it followed a day of blazing heat. The kind of heat that made newspaper headlines, that sent journalists to seek scientists' pontifications on global warming, that sent millennarian catastrophists to contemplate the rapidly-nearing End Days, and to tally once again their hoarded litres of water and their freeze-dried foods. But the people of Paris--it merely sent them out into the velvety night air, in throngs, to stroll the avenues and boulevards, to ride shrieking in honking cars, to crowd in cafes and caress in the shadows. Methos moved among them, solitary and anonymous, the only notable thing about him the cylindrical architect's tube file he carried slung over one shoulder. It was his latest solution to the difficulties of keeping at least a small sword handy in hot weather, and he'd discovered that it had a side benefit; at some point when he hadn't been paying attention architects had unaccountably zoomed up the hip-o-meter to become figures of cerebral allure, and he'd passed some pleasant flirtatious afternoons in cafes, beguiling artistically inclined young things with confabulations about his designs for the Museum of Early Arts in Ahmadabad. Tonight, though, he was alone, apart, a spectator. The role was as comfortable to him as his own skin, and yet tonight, for some reason, he felt uneasy. Something was unsettling him, something that poked and irked, like a scratchy tag in a shirt collar. Though he knew what he felt was not the prickling sense of another Immortal, still he stayed by reflex in the midst of the crowds; but that only seemed to disquiet him more. He walked quickly, navigating the eddying swirls of humanity, trying to outpace his unease. Everything seemed as it should-- kiosks, buses, traffic signals, all orderly and accountable--and yet… Too much, he thought illogically. Too many people were out for this time of night, their voices a little too shrill, and the lights were a little too bright. It was like a carnival midway, gaiety with a frantic, off-key edge. And the heat--the heat was too much, fever-like, and the buzz in the air was feverish. He knew that in a few hours more the city would fall quiet; he could sense cold stone, enduring, implacable, under the crowd's clattering feet. In the same way, he could feel the weight of winter, hunkered down somewhere to the north, lowering behind the flimsy scrim of summer. It had been sidetracked, perhaps, delayed; but he knew better than anyone the inevitability of its arrival. He also knew that in fact he would be glad of it, whenever it came. For all his loud public protestations, and for all that his flesh flinched at the cold, he loved the spare Japanese beauty of winter. Blank, bare, still--it soothed him, just as it soothed him to roam city streets in the small hours, when they were empty and quiet. But for now the heat still ruled, the heat and the noise and crowds, and he strode on, sweating and prickly with unease, feeling as if his skin were too tight on him. Ridiculous, he told himself. Enjoy this while it lasts; and he turned his attention outward, to feel the heat hanging thick in the air, almost liquid, caressing him like warm water, people swirling around him in streams. At times one would brush close to him, and he could feel the glow of thinly-clad skin against his, for just an instant. He strolled on, breathing deeply, letting himself relish the smells--tendrilling whiffs of food from cafes; exhaust fumes in the backwash of a bus; here and there, as he passed an alley, the rank stench of garbage. And musk and sweat and perfume, the bouquet of bodies, a fugitive aroma he loitered to savor from the passersby. But still restlessness drove him onward, and a rasping sense of unease that only grew sharper the faster he walked. He angled on to Rue des Bernadins, dodging hellbent honking traffic across an intersection, strode on past headlights and streetlights and traffic lights, turned a corner, and there, right before him, was the place where the lights suddenly ended. A dark cold silence, slicing through the glare and babble. The sight stopped him. How many centuries had he known the Seine? But tonight… it was no longer the familiar presence he had drunk from, washed in, ferried across, that he had seen in flood and drought, alive with salmon or thick with corpses, that he had known long before it was pent in stone channels. No longer familiar, not even river, it seemed, rather, a black abyss, a crevasse where the gridded paving cracked apart and something dark and ancient welled up. He felt himself drawn on, down to the quai and then out onto the bridge, all the way out to the middle, before he stopped to lean over and gaze down. The water lay like oil, heavy and slack. Always, at night, ripples laced its skin, sparkling light back to the sky. But on this night it seemed a black hole in the glittering galaxy of the city, and it sucked all light into its depths. Lethe, Methos thought, staring down into blackness. The name glimmered in his mind for a moment and then dropped away from him into the dark, the water closing over it in silence. And then he could feel his other words following…languages, and places, and names, people he had known, people he had been… all of them, trickling away from him, drowning, lost. The water, he could see, for all its stillness, was moving in its depths, swallowing them down. Pulling him down, deeper and deeper. The ebbing into death that he'd felt so often, heart's blood flowing slowly away, the heart itself emptying, slowing into stillness. Silence, then, and darkness--and release, such a deep blessed relief, to let it all go, to feel all the weight of particularity, the tedious burden of who and what and when, float away from him. Free ... and then no name, no words, no night or day, no love or hate, no sight or sound or smell or touch or taste...no thought, no wisdom; no death, and no end to dying…free, almost; there was almost nothing left to hold him back in himself, except the annoying sense that he was feeling something … was feeling-- Pain? There was pain, somewhere, a stupid trivial pain that niggled at him and refused to go away. There was a body, somehow…a body leaning far out over the stone railing. The edge digging hard into a belly. His belly. His body. Leaning too far--he jerked back, breath rushing back into him with a sudden whoop, and distantly he felt paving thump against his soles. Back into himself again--it was like the familiar agony of revival (something he'd often wished he could tell mortals, that coming back to life hurt worse than dying), and he gripped the stone hard, tearing his gaze away from the water. But as soon as he looked up he was drowning again, dizzied by the city's swirl of light and noise, and like a drowning man he struggled, looking for something to hang onto, helplessly feeling his eyes sink back down toward the river-- --and then seizing on a shape, a lighter shadow on the black water. The sight of it raised a faint itch on the skin of his memory--recent, something recent and--yes, known to him. He let the memories of all the countless watercraft he'd known flow over him, and all the names in all the languages for all the types and shapes of them, and what snagged and held was the word barge. He stared at the boat--the barge, yes, that was it--letting it clarify in his vision and his memory, knowing it for the heavy graceless scow that it was, and yet seeing it as fragile, a fallen leaf that could be whirled away at any turn of tide. A sudden gleam on the barge's deck illuminated a small form, something human-shaped--a man sitting, bent over, intent on some task. In the darkness, the man was edged with light, as vivid as a background figure in a Breughel painting. Tiny, insignificant, next to the barge's bulk, the river's depth. But that presence anchored Methos' eyes and his mind, and that one small light, among the millions glittering and swirling around him, was what pulled him, at last, into movement. He walked off the bridge, moving stiffly, aware of having once more won the oldest battle he knew. Someday, he knew, he'd lose that fight. But not tonight, he told the river, told himself. Not just yet. He made it to the quai, and with every step something grounded him--a car radio blasting merengue, the yip of a passerby's Pomeranian, headlines on the newspaper lying in the gutter--and by the time he reached the gangplank and felt Presence burning through his nerves, he was almost all the way back. He paused for a moment, taking odd comfort in the sight of the heavy ropes and bollards that anchored the barge to land. Had he meant to come here tonight? Was he expected? He thought so, on the whole, and the lack of alarm at his approach gave him the assurance to start up the gangplank. He ascended slowly, staring down at his feet, and when he reached the top and looked up he saw Duncan MacLeod, sitting cross-legged on the deck in a pool of yellow light, surrounded by tools and mechanical parts and his sword, frowning down into an odd-looking wooden box. Duncan nodded in greeting, and then picked up a screwdriver, squinting and adjusting the angle of the gooseneck lamp. Feeling unready for speech, Methos unslung his tube file and dropped it to the deck with a thump and rattle. He stepped carefully over extension cords and disappeared down the steps, returning a minute later with two bottles of beer. One he set down beside Duncan; sitting, he uncapped the other, and took a swallow. Only when the familiar chilly fizz had loosened the clench in his throat did he finally relax, and made himself speak, off-handedly. "Hot down there." Duncan nodded. "Do tell. You think I'm working up here because the light's good?" He was bent over, peering down into the box and maneuvering the screwdriver. "Mm. Beautiful night to be out, though. You'd never know it was September." Unlike him, to be chitchatting about the weather, he knew, but the feel of words rising easily in his mind, shaping easily into speech, steadied him. Some moments passed while he felt himself settling, his body synching with the boat's tiny elliptical movements. He found it restful to gaze at the floodlit bulk of Notre Dame, hovering aglow, afar, over the port stern, like a huge unlikely mothership. But distant and huge were not good just now, and with effort he pulled himself back, to focus instead on the mundane object of Duncan's attention, to clear his throat and speak. "What are you messing with there?" "Don't you know a phonograph when you see one? What, did these happen while you were hanging out in Tibet or something?" "Well, I'd be likelier to recognize it if it weren't in a dozen pieces at the moment." Methos stroked a fingertip over the flared rim of the horn, which lay forlorn on the deck, as if some enormous metallic lily-plant had been dropping its blossoms. "Isn't it a beauty?" Duncan straightened and gave the machine a loving look, rubbing his knuckles over the varnished wood casing. "Columbia Sterling. I used to have one of these, back when I was in New York. Bought it in--" He paused. "Must have been 1910 or thereabouts, I remember I really hated to leave it behind when the war broke out and I went to France." He bent again, readjusting the light. Methos watched him, allowing some affection to cross his face, since Duncan, intent on his work, was clearly not looking. "You know, MacLeod, it might have slipped your attention, but you do actually have a perfectly good CD player downstairs." The teasing tone, he found, was even more of a comfort than the beer; it was like putting on shoes worn perfectly to the fit of his feet. "There's no 'downstairs' on a boat. As you know. And actually, this might surprise you, but I'm well aware that I have a CD player--" a quick glare-- "below decks. No, this is for Joe." Duncan worked a screw free from the interior, dropped it with a splash into a small pail sitting by his foot. Methos leaned over to peer into the pail, and caught a chemical whiff that set him coughing. "What the hell is that stuff?" "Naphtha," Duncan said. "Takes the old grease off." He made a shooing motion with the screwdriver. "Get back, you're not supposed to breathe it." Methos sat back, rubbing his eyes. "Joe asked you to muck around with this thing? I find that hard to believe." "No, it's a surprise for him. Christmas, I was thinking. Did you know he's got a whole trunkful of old 78s in storage? Blind Willie Johnson, T-Bone Walker, Ma Rainey…" "All of whom are likely available on nicely remastered CD's, via one quick trip to Amazon dot com. And minus the naphtha." He stretched out a leg, and nudged a greasy gear with the toe of his shoe. "This thing's an antique. Primitive. Is some purpose served by restoring it to its wholly inadequate original operating condition?" "Oh, I dunno, likely the same one that's served by you keeping all those moldy old books around when you could get nice new paperback copies. Via Amazon dot com." Methos waved it away. "A different matter entirely." Duncan's smile was almost lost in the shadows. "You know the best part about this? It's hand-cranked. Human-powered. Perfect in case the electricity really does go down at midnight on New Year's. He'll still have music." "Anticipating the apocalypse, are you?" Methos himself had, in fact, temporarily forgotten that impending hiccup on time's horizon. "Glad to see you're as provident as ever. So I can assume you've been busy stocking up the emergency supplies? Canned goods, batteries? First-aid kit?" Duncan snorted. "Don't try to tell me you haven't been making arrangements yourself, because I won't believe you." He dipped an old toothbrush in the naphtha and began whisking greasy dirt off a gear. "You've probably got a cave somewhere in the Himalayas, with its own generator, and a thousand books, and a solar water-heater. And …" he waved the toothbrush in the air for a moment. "And cartons of canned pate and smoked salmon. And a year's supply of beer." "Alps," Methos corrected him. "The Himalayas are too far off. Hard to get to in a hurry." He let a beat pass before adding, "Took some hunting around to find a spot that had a decent landing pad for the helicopter." "Helicopter." "Well, I'm not driving up there, certainly, not in December." He gave Duncan a quick assessing glance and let himself take the game a step further. "A DragonFly 333. Lovely little thing, handles beautifully. And it's a two-seater. You're more than welcome to come along." When Duncan made a noise expressive of deep skepticism, he feigned hurt. "I'm an excellent pilot, you know." Duncan just looked at him. "Right, then. The Marquesas? Likely not too many computers there." "I'm staying put." Duncan went back to scrubbing at the gear, and after a pause Methos leaned on a bulkhead and took a swallow of his beer. "So, how was the lecture?" Duncan asked. Methos was willing to let the conversation be turned in a new direction. "In some respects, quite silly. In other respects, it was--interesting." He stopped, and Duncan looked up at him, clearly expecting more. Not like him, he knew, given an opening, to just say one or two sentences and leave it at that, and he made himself go on. "You know the real problem with divination? Or forecasting, or futurism or whatever you want to call it? It isn't so much that it's likely to be wrong, it's that people seem bent on using it for such silly ends. I mean, does it really contribute to the sum of human knowledge to be able to predict that 'Cats' will continue running on Broadway for somewhere between a hundred more days and four hundred more years?" "That's what the lecture was about?" Duncan was staring at him. "I thought this guy was a scientist. A Princeton professor." "Well, he is. Very distinguished. He's--" "They pay people to come up with that kind of crap?" Methos shrugged. "It's not so much--" "A hundred days to--what'd you say, four hundred years?" "Four hundred fourteen, to be precise." "Christ, well, there's a nice clear forecast. That's really useful. Well worth spending an evening to learn that." "Right, I said it had its silly aspects. It's not--" "How'd he come up with those numbers anyway?" Duncan's outrage had not yet run its course. "Statistics," Methos said airily. "All done with statistics, like so much else these days, and very simple when you stop to think about it. I could use the same technique to predict--oh, how long that CD player of yours is going to last." "Yeah?" "You bought it--when? Three years ago? All right, it could break down tomorrow, or it could go on for a hundred more years, but neither of those is really very likely. At this point it's probably somewhere in the middle of its lifespan. Statisticians work at ninety-five percent confidence levels, so let's say it's somewhere in the middle ninety-five percent of its total life. So that leaves five percent for both the two extremes, divide that by two, then you take, what would that make, two and a half percent of three years, and then multiply that times …" He faltered a moment, and took a sip of beer. "Well, run the numbers. You'll get, oh, another six months to twenty years, perhaps, something like that. Rounding off the fractions, of course." Duncan was giving him a steady, skeptical stare. "First of all, I don't have a clue what you're talking about, second, I don't think you do either--you just made those numbers up, right? And third, that's the stupidest thing I've heard in ages." He picked up his own beer and took a swallow. "Well, I can't help it if you can't follow the higher mathematics, MacLeod--all right, all right!" He held up appeasing hands as Duncan made to go for his sword. "Okay, no question that it's silly, I'll grant you that. But the point is, the application's not what's interesting. It's the underlying concepts. They're . . . " He fell silent, for so long that Duncan finally reached over and tapped his knee with the bottle. "What about them?" "I was just thinking . . . how often have you come across individuals--mortals--who really understand that they're ordinary. That they, and their time and their place, are nothing special." "I take it you're not looking for some answer along the lines of how everyone is unique and special in God's eyes." Methos, drawing breath to continue, suddenly paused, looked at him. "Is that what you believe?" Duncan bent his head, picked up a screwdriver, examined it. "I don't know. At least not about the 'God's eyes' part. Unique and special--yeah, I do believe that." His tone turned a little belligerent. "Go ahead, laugh. I know from your perspective we must all seem alike." "We don’t, certainly. I've got every one of us that I've ever met, or heard of, catalogued up here--" he tapped his temple-- "just as you do. Appearance, relevant history, customary armaments--right?--particulars of fighting style--in your case, lifetime score on the MacLeod Scale of Reprehensible Behavior--" He dodged easily, catching the hex nut flung at his head. "But them . . . " he began, and then stopped, staring out over the city. Duncan glanced up, and then looked down again, giving him time to speak. "Snowflakes," Methos found himself saying at last. "You know that every one is unique. But that's a hard thing to remember, or to believe, when you're watching a blizzard." At that, Duncan straightened, setting down his screwdriver. "That's what it's like for you?" "Have you ever done that? Gone out in a snowstorm and really tried to look at individual flakes?" He closed his eyes for a moment, to the image of snow falling--so deep, so endless, so perfectly cold--he was drifting again, he could feel it, and he closed his eyes tightly, reaching for words to bring himself back. "The trick is to move fast enough. The minute you touch them, or get up close and breathe on them--they're so beautiful, but you barely have an instant before they melt away." Then looking up, he saw Duncan sitting rigid, with pain in his eyes, and it pulled him all the way back. "Sorry. I just . . . " He gave Duncan's leg a quick apologetic touch. "I'm sorry." He could see the war in Duncan's face--the lure of grief, and the resolve to set grieving aside. Bending, Duncan picked up the screwdriver again, started purposefully working screws free from the phonograph's interior and dropping them in the pail. "So--does this have something to do with the lecture?" "Actually, yes." In relief, Methos fell into familiar comfort of lecturing. "What makes this fellow's work interesting is that he actually sees something that should be obvious to everyone." "If it's so obvious, I can't see why it'd interest you." It was comforting, too, to hear Duncan falling back into his familiar grumbling. "Well, look at it this way. All events have a beginning, a middle and an end, and most of the time we're neither at the beginning nor the end but somewhere in between. And most phenomena follow a normal distribution, with very few cases out at the extremes and almost all cases lumped up in the middle." He sketched a haphazard curve in the air with his hand. Duncan said nothing, merely gave him an I know you're going somewhere with this so feel free to hasten the journey look. Methos, noting it, perversely refused to be hastened. "For example. Very few people's names would fall on the first or the last page of the phone book. Most names lie somewhere in the middle." He picked up a small screw that had rolled away from Duncan and handed it back. "Like us, for example. MacLeod, Pierson. In the middle, more or less." "You're not in the phone book," Duncan pointed out. Methos waved it away. "Very few people are over six-five, let's say, or under four-ten. Most people are of middling height." Duncan was stirring screws and gears around in the naphtha, fishing them out with a slotted spoon. "I have to tell you, Methos, I'm not feeling cosmic enlightenment breaking over me yet." "Sure, that part of it's obvious. But it also follows that most of the time we're neither at the beginning or the end of something, but somewhere in the middle. Very seldom are we present at the creation, or conversely at the brink of doom." He could tell by Duncan's expression that he was listening, although his hands were busy laying metallic parts out on a towel, in an orderly array. "But mortals haven't the perspective to see this, and so they tend to think their times are extraordinary. Surely, they tell themselves, change has never been more upsetting, sin has never been more sinful, the youth have never been more disrespectful, the cities have never been more magnificent, or more hellish, the future that stretches before us has never been more glorious or more hopeless, the winters have never been colder nor the summers hotter, the calamities have never been more calamitous, than they are at this moment, out of all time." He paused for breath, before adding, "But they're almost always wrong about that." Duncan appeared to be taking that in, thinking it over. After a moment he pointed out, "But that also means that--sometimes they're right. There are people in the phone book named --oh, Aaron, or … " "Zylquist," Methos supplied helpfully. "Yeah. Just because most people are average height doesn't mean there aren't giants, and dwarfs." He slanted a look toward Methos. "Why, if you looked around long enough, I bet you'd eventually find someone who's lived longer than anyone else on the planet. The very first name in the book, so to speak." At Methos' snort, he put on an innocent expression. "After all, I suppose someone's got to be." He paused, and then went on in a more serious tone, "And so that means--there are really times when…when things end." Methos could feel the river gently shivering the barge against its moorings. He watched for several minutes as Duncan began reassembling the phonograph, screwing parts into place. Now that the conversation had arrived where he'd intended, he felt strangely hesitant. "Do you ever think that? That we're at the end time? "No, I don't think that. And in any case, why are you asking me? You're the one who knows so much about the higher mathematics of it all." Duncan had been struggling with a screw that refused to thread itself back into place, and he finally yanked it out and tossed it over the railing and into the river. He leaned back on his hands for a moment, shifting his legs. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. "Sometimes I think about--I wonder, if my mother and father could be here, if they could see this." He waved a hand around, at the city that lay all around them, shimmering with light, simmering with noise. "What they'd make of it all." "And what do you think?" Methos kept his tone light and gentle, encouraging. Duncan seldom talked about his first life. "I imagine that they'd think it was the end of the world. They wouldn't know if this was heaven or hell, but they'd sure know it wasn't earth, not any earth they knew." He looked around again, staring hard, as if trying to see with new eyes. "They'd have hated this. I don't think they would have wanted to live in this world." "It's very different from the Highlands, yes. From everything you grew up with. You've traveled a very long distance from where you began." He was watching Duncan closely. "And in another few hundred years everything will be as different again as Paris on the brink of the millennium is from the 16th century Scotland. That phonograph you're working on will be just another bit of rubble. Joe, and Tessa--and Richie--they'll be as far gone from you as your parents are now." He stopped, watching the weight gathering in Duncan's brow, and then went on. "Will you want to stick around then? Live in that world?" "How the hell should I know?" Duncan reached for his beer bottle. "Will I? What'll the world be like then? You tell me that." He took a long angry draught, wiped his mouth hard with the back of his hand. "I'm no prophet," Methos said mildly. "Gave up that racket a long time ago. I'll leave it to the fellows with the statistics." "And what did you mean by that, anyway--'would you want to live in that world'? Just how bad do you think it's going to be?" "I'm telling you, MacLeod, I don't do predictions." "Oh, come on." When Methos stayed silent, Duncan said, "You just don't want to commit to something and then be caught out wrong." "Well, of course. Why set yourself up to look like a ninny?" "Chicken." Duncan reached out with one foot and gently kicked Methos' ankle. "All right, all right. You want my best guess? And it's only a guess." He sat up, crossing his legs, and craned his head left and right, loosening his neck, gazing out over the city. "This won't go on too much longer." Duncan sat very still. "'This?' What do you mean by that?" "Oh--all this. Motorcars, CD players, NATO, the internet, antibiotics..." He picked up his bottle of beer and peeled the label off as he spoke. "Civilization, perhaps. Homo sapiens, possibly, though I think that's got a while more to run yet." Duncan thought that over, and finally waved a hand around to take in the brightly-lit humming engine of the city. "It's a little hard to believe, looking at that." "Perhaps." Methos remembered the feverish unease he'd felt earlier. "I'll tell you what it makes me think of, though, it's like watching--you know how people with consumption look? The way they glitter, just before they die?" Duncan seemed taken aback. "You're really rattled, aren't you? You don't really think--" Whatever he saw in Methos' face stopped him; he let a moment pass, and then all he said was, "You want another beer?" "Not just yet." Methos realized he'd been rolling the empty bottle, denuded of its label, between his palms, and he set it down on the deck. "That fellow who was giving the lecture--he doesn't believe that. He gives the species, oh, another five thousand years or so, bare minimum. But he also thinks we should be colonizing Mars. Just to improve the odds." Duncan snorted, with surprise or perhaps disdain. "Space colonies? Yeah, right, live in capsules, eat algae, drink recirculated piss. No thank you." "You might not have that much of a choice, you know." He hesitated, and then went on. "What if it came to that? To the point where there was no way to go on living here? If humanity were really destroying itself, dying off by the millions, or billions… could you really stay here and watch that happen? Knowing there was nothing you could do to stop it?" "Nothing?" Duncan spread his grease-smeared hands wide. "Methos--I can't possibly answer every 'what if' you're capable of coming up with. But I can tell you that there'll always be something I can do. Something better than running off to Mars. Maybe it won't be enough, sure, but as long as I can do something…" Then he looked over at Methos and, surprisingly, grinned. "But you already knew that, right? Methos nodded. "And you wouldn't?" Duncan held his gaze for a moment, searchingly, then turned away. He picked up a barrel-shaped casing and began working loose the phonograph's mainspring. It emerged quivering with the impulse to uncoil itself and lash about all over the deck, and it took quick action with a towel, along with cursing and cut fingers, to get it under control. Only when Duncan had the spring safely corralled in toweling, and had begun scrubbing it down with naphtha, did he speak again, in a tone of determined lightness. "So--you think that's it, then? We're living on the brink of doom? Three more months, and everyone's VCRs will shut down, airplanes'll fall from the sky, mobs will roam the streets with flaming torches--" It was an invitation, of sorts, and Methos caught the ball and lobbed it back. "Oh put a sock in it, MacLeod, don't even start with me on that nonsense. It's bad enough I'm getting e-mails every other day from the University about their Y2K status. They seem to think if they keep churning out beautifully phrased assurances of progress, that's as good as actually doing something. Bloody French..." Duncan grinned down at the coiled spring. "Joe tells me the Watchers are running behind too." "Well, that's hardly surprising, technological troglodytes that they are. They dragged their heels enough getting into computers as it was." "Oh, well, gee, now I wonder why that would be." "Listen, the problem there wasn't the technology per se. The basic concept of the database was perfect. Inevitable. The problem was that the organization was so willfully blind about the whole thing that they left the door open for a couple of ignoramuses like Don and me to fumble our way into it." Duncan put a hand to ear, listening, miming astonishment. "Can we get that again, please? A little louder? Ignoramuses? Fumble?" "Hey, I can admit a mistake. And technically, the database design was excellent, even you have to admit that. We just needed to put a little more effort into security." "Damn." Duncan sat on his heels, hand to his mouth, sucking the blood from a fresh cut. The mainspring was apparently unwilling to be coiled back into its casing. "Can you give me a hand with this?" Between the two of them they got it wound tight and wrestled into place, and Methos leaned back, wiping his hands on a scrap of rag. "No. It's not the bloody millennium I'm talking about. Who cares when the wheels click around on that odometer, especially one that's been reset so many times ... No, it's something else. Something different. I just have this feeling . . . " The restlessness that had been simmering all night boiled up in him again, and he got to his feet, casting around the limited space of the deck. "Like animals, when they feel an earthquake coming on." Duncan's eyes were following him, as he paced. "Thanks so much for the analogy, MacLeod." He would rather have stopped pacing, but his body seemed unwilling to settle. "I could say, like how the woolly caterpillars know when a hard winter's coming," Duncan offered. "But you're even less like a woolly caterpillar." It was the cue for a snappy comeback of some kind, but he was past repartee, working too hard trying to still himself, trying to keep his feet from taking him onto the gangplank and right off into the night. The buzzing unease assailed him like a swarm of hornets…and it brought memories with it, memories from very far back. Groping backward in his mind, he slowed his pacing, and finally stopped, sat, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes. When he finally lowered them, and looked around, it felt like quite a while had gone by. The last few scattered parts were gone from the deck, and Duncan was tightening the horn onto the tone arm. He cocked an eyebrow at Methos, and his silence gave Methos enough space to start speaking again. "A long time--very long time--ago, there was a, what…a tribe, I suppose, that I lived with--" He faltered, halted. It was hard labor to fit words, in this new language, to what he had always felt, never spoken of. After a moment he went on, slowly. "We used to follow the seasons. The grazing. We didn't--I don't think we had any calendars. We didn't need them. You knew--just by the angle of the sun, you'd get a feeling, and you'd know it was time to load up and move on. You couldn't not go. A shift in the direction of the wind, the way the air smelled, and you'd just get that feeling. You learned to trust it. Live by it. It told you more than any calendar could, or any numbers." "I know." It jarred him out of his memory. "No. You don't know. You've never lived that way. For god's sake, look at how you grew up. Your people--what they had was their land, their wretched little bit of turf, and they stuck to it like grim death. Winter, summer. Hard, easy. And god help anyone who tried to move them an inch off of it. Right? So you don't really have a glimmer of what I'm talking about." "Okay, maybe not." Duncan sat like a rock, legs crossed, hands on his knees. "But I'll tell you what I do know about. What it taught me, growing up that way. It taught me how to live through a hard winter. How to tell when one's going to be hard, how to get ready for it. How to make it through." He fitted the crank to the phonograph, gave it a few brisk turns. "You stick together, is what you do. You go out in groups to hunt. Get food and carry it back. Gather around the fire and eat it. Tell stories, maybe. Take care of the old people, and the children. Keep the fires built up, take care of each other, and wait for spring to come around again." "Christmas on Walton's Mountain." It was an inaudible mutter, a feeble avert against the wave of feeling that rolled over him, as he watched the confident light in Duncan's eyes, listened to the strong voice. "And you know something? It always does come around again. All you have to do is hang on. Hang together. It always comes around again. You can count on it." Methos sat up very straight, rage and love burning fiercely in him. "Well, you're a trusting soul, aren't you? You've found the universe to be a reliable place?" He wanted another beer badly. "So that's it, then. You'd just stick around and go down the tubes with them." "I don't think it'll come to that, but if it does--then I guess we'd all go down together." Duncan gave him a level look. It was almost enough to choke him. "You are so--so damned earthbound, so entrenched, such a fixture--" He was spluttering, and stopped for a breath. "Only you, MacLeod, could live on running water"--he slapped his palm hard on the barge's deck-- "and still be so unbudgeably fucking rooted in the earth." "Is that so?" Duncan was utterly unfazed; was, in fact, smiling at him. "And maybe I've finally figured out why you hate boats so much. Maybe you know that if you don't keep your feet on solid ground you might just drift away and never be seen again." It knocked the breath out of him, and he was aware of sitting agape for a long moment. Even as he fumbled for a retort (something more intelligent, he hoped, than "oh yeah?"), he reminded himself of the folly of underestimating Duncan in a spar. "Clever, MacLeod, you must have sat up nights working on that one, but it's beside the point." "The point being?" "That sometimes moving on is the best thing to do. The only thing. You know that." Duncan turned away from him, face closed. "I want to try out the phonograph. See if it's working now." "Listen to me, MacLeod. You don't need me to tell you that a world population that's quadrupled in a single century is a population that's ripe for collapse. You don't need me to list out the manifold ways this species has developed to exterminate itself." Duncan was ignoring him, sorting through a small pile of 78s. "And you don't need five thousand years of experience to tell you that human beings, facing disaster, seem perpetually and unflaggingly determined to take everyone in reach down with them." "Ah, here we are." Duncan pulled a record from the stack, slid it out of its tattered sleeve. "You know what happens when you try to save someone who's drowning? Damn it, it happened to me one time. Jumped right in, like a fool, swam out--you know what happened? The son of a bitch drowned me!" The memory infuriated him still, almost as much as Duncan's cool reception of it. "You should sign up for Red Cross lifeguard training, then that wouldn't happen again." Duncan had eased the record onto the spindle and was reaching to lift the needle. Methos lunged forward, smacking his hand away, and grabbed him by the shoulders. "Run the experiment, MacLeod. Hypothesis: disaster impends. Nuclear winter, global pandemic, environmental catastrophe. Doesn't matter, pick a card. Millions--billions--are dying, will die. Do you stick around for that? Play out the end game? Or could you possibly find it in yourself to fold a losing hand, and move on?" Duncan shook him off, but Methos stayed with him, in his face, compelling his gaze. "Answer me. Could you?" "Methos--cut the shit." Duncan put a hand in his chest, pushed him back. "Disaster impends, my ass, you don't believe all that crock any more than I do. The fact is--you want to go. Right? And you're just looking for an excuse. Isn't that it?" Methos wanted to pick up the phonograph and hurl it over the railing into the river, but he made himself breathe, talk calmly. "All I want is an answer. Tell me. Could you go?" It was as if his air of calmness inflamed Duncan. "No, you answer me. Honestly. No matter how much you might want to go--could you really? And leave all this behind? Everything you've ever known? The truth, now. Could you?" "Of course I could." He felt only surprise that Duncan even thought the question worth asking. "You know I could." "Yeah. All right." Duncan gave one hard nod. "Then--would you? If I chose to stay here. Would you go?" He had no words to answer. All that was left was his body's mindless instinct to flight, but even as he shifted his legs Duncan reached over, took him by the shoulders, and pulled him off balance, pushed him down, so that he came to rest flat on his back, his head on Duncan's lap, pinned and held. He struggled for a moment, and then surrendered to the hands that gripped him hard, one pressing on his chest, the other on his forehead. He looked up. Duncan's face loomed over him, very near; and behind his face were the stars in their millions, very far away. No matter how he tried, there was no way to keep them both in focus. "Would you?" Duncan asked again. "I don't know," Methos said, and, giving up, he let his eyes slide shut. "I don't know." Still Duncan held him. Methos could feel a strong thumb stroking lightly over his eyebrow, smoothing the hairs, tracing the arch of bone, and then he heard Duncan's voice, soft and resigned, rueful. "Well…stay here tonight, anyway." "I am here." He lay still, wishing he could say more, knowing he couldn't. A pleasure boat chugged by, raucous with laughter and amplified music. After it had passed, its wake rocked the barge gently for long minutes. Duncan was quiet until the night was wholly still again, and then all he said was, "I want to see if the phonograph's working." Methos nodded, then made a small protesting noise as Duncan shifted beneath him, twisting and reaching to start the phonograph and move the needle carefully into place. He could hear whirring and rasping, the crackle as the needle touched the wax. "What is this, anyway?" "Wait and see." More scratching, and then abruptly the lilting adagio of a dance orchestra, sounding like an ensemble of midgets playing inside a steel drum, tinny and almost drowned out by the crackle and hiss. There were a few jarring jumps in the melody, as the needle skipped, and then the violins and saxophones quieted, and a human voice rose, faint and wavery, but pure.

Oh, it's a long, long while
from May to December,

"Oh for god's sake, MacLeod--" Methos groaned, with a loud show of affront, and started to sit up.

But the days grow short
when you reach September…

Duncan grabbed him by his shirtfront, laughing, and pushed him back down. "Shut up. I love this song." Methos subsided, muttering, "You are such a bloody sentimentalist," but then let his eyes close, listening. Who was the singer, he wondered--someone who'd once lived in the same world as him, the same city, perhaps, walked the same streets--whom he might have even seen, god knows--and who by now was certainly dead. He could feel Duncan's breathing rocking him, belly moving gently against the side of his head, and the solid live warmth of the thighs under his neck. Duncan's grip had eased but he still held a bunched fistful of shirt, his hand resting heavy over Methos' heart.

The days dwindle down to a precious few,
September, November…
And these few precious days I'll spend with you.
These precious days I'll spend wi--

A sudden tearing sound, and the needle ripped loose from the groove, skidding free to the blank space at the center of the record, circling over and over with a tuneless hiss. Duncan stirred. "The record's worn out, I guess. Someone must've played it a lot." He leaned over to lift the tone arm, and for a moment Methos' face was muffled against his belly. Methos turned into that solid warmth, taking a deep breath, realizing in that moment that although every damn snowflake did, in fact, look the same to him, everyone, mortal and Immortal as well, had their own unique smell. For too brief a moment, he breathed Duncan in, and then Duncan leaned back again and resettled himself. Methos turned his face blindly, following, for just an instant, and then let his head roll back, the smell drifting away from him. He felt a ridiculous sense of loss, a moment of deep tearing sadness, and to brush it away he said, "I like Lou Reed's version better." Duncan gave a snort of laughter, and thumped him solidly in the chest before finally letting go of his shirt. "Liar." Released at last, he chose yet to stay for just one moment longer. Soon, soon it would be time to get up, he knew, time to move around, gather up tools and records and the phonograph, and then to go below (downstairs, he reminded himself to say), and perhaps have one last drink; and then to bed, and the pleasures of bed; and so to sleep. Already it was past midnight; already the planet was spinning them toward dawn, into the new day, and then on its heels into darkness again. For a moment he could see the earth in his mind, whirling round and round, a dizzy top glowing in the emptiness of space. He felt briefly suffused with tenderness for it, a helpless heartbroken love for the green planet that carried him, and the man that held him, and everything that was already whirling away from him, down into darkness. Into darkness (and it was Duncan's voice he heard, saying it) and then into light again. Into winter, and then into spring. You should know that, by now. Duncan's hand was on him again, suddenly, a gentle stroke down his chest, and that light touch grounded him. For that moment, as he fell back into himself, he was merely there, merely a man lying on a boat deck on a September night, in Paris, waiting for the odometer to click over so the numbers could start ticking up from zero once again. The hum of restlessness slowed and stilled and faded out, at last. The next day would spin around soon enough, right on schedule. The sky was endlessly patient overhead, stars steady in their courses; and below him the river flowed endlessly, always waiting. For just that moment it was enough to lie still, held, in this eyeblink of balance, between black sky and black water. Between the dying summer, and the coming winter.