And then Jonsson made a terrible mistake: he winked.
“You are not taking your work very seriously, are you?” Sigrid asked. “You are here so that you can say you came here. You don’t believe. You have no faith, so you cannot bargain in good faith. You are hoping to influence the local people that way. But not the hidden folk.”
“Do the hidden folk vote?” Jonsson asked. With Sigrid’s tea in his system, he could no longer hide his scorn. Her tea was useful, that way. It helped people to tell the truth. “Do they pay tax? Because until they do, they don’t really get a say in this.”
“You don’t even think they might exist, do you?” Sigrid asked. “Do you know the story?”
“I know all the stories—”
“The story of how the hidden folk went into hiding,” Sigrid said. “Do you know it?”
The assistant knew it. She had told it to him enough times. But Mr. Jonsson appeared to be at a loss.
“Soon after he had created the heavens and the earth, and all the animals and the beasts of the sea, and breathed life into Adam and fashioned Eve from Adam’s rib, God visited the couple at home in the Garden.”
The expression on Jonsson’s face closely matched the industry standard for embarrassment. He had come for witchcraft, not Sunday school. And while a passing superstition regarding the elves was common, belief in God was considered gauche at best.
“This was before they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, you see. So they had been rutting like animals, and they had already borne a litter of children. It was painless, because Eve had not yet been punished with the pangs of childbirth. So they already had a boy and a girl.”
Jonsson tried to stand. Sigrid’s arm shot out. Her gnarled hand gripped his forearm. Jonsson’s pale eyebrows climbed toward his thinning hairline. Few knew the strength that remained in Sigrid’s arms. Under the fat and the liver spots was muscle as tough as that of any shepherd’s horse. It was part of the reason why Sigrid’s daughter had purchased the assistant. Sigrid was too big for most home-care workers to wrestle.
“Although they did not understand nakedness, they did understand filth,” she intoned. “And their children were filthy. They were too filthy—from play, from exploring the Garden, from tending the animals—to meet the Lord their God. So Adam and Eve hid them in a field of stones.”
“I believe that qualifies as neglect,” Jonsson said, staring at the half-moons her yellowed fingernails made in his arm.
“But God saw them anyway, because God sees all that is. And for their dishonesty and foolishness, he punished Adam and Eve by hiding their children from human sight. Forever.”
“That seems a tad harsh, but then so was the flood.”
“You’ve never taken me seriously, have you?” Sigrid asked.
Jonsson pinked. He tried unsuccessfully to withdraw his arm. “I assure you, I have the greatest respect for your position in the community, and—”
“Bullshit,” Sigrid said. She didn’t let him go so much as cast his arm away in order to fold her own. “Respect. Pah. You don’t even know what that word means.”
Jonsson glanced quickly at the assistant. Not for the first time, the assistant wished that his shoulder joints had the ability to shrug. As it was, he had to remain still and wait.
“I’m sorry. I did not mean to offend you—”
“I’m not giving Erika your name, you know,” Sigrid said. “She’ll be Erika Sigridsdottir. And she’ll never have to put up with your bullshit.”
Now Jonsson’s mortification took on a different element. The assistant, like everyone on his network, had collated the various organic reactions to patients with Sigrid’s condition. Fear was not unusual. Disgust, discomfort, annoyance, frustration, anger, these were all common. They manifested in the face, in rolled eyes and huffed breath and lips that pulled back into a thing that looked like a smile but meant something different. But Jonsson handled things better than most: his years as a public servant had doubtless prepared him for some outbursts of madness and derangement among his constituents. Doubtless some of those constituents had Alzheimer’s too, just like Sigrid. His face froze, and became what for him might have been a real smile.
“That’s a good idea,” he said, apparently deciding to play along with Sigrid’s momentary lapse of memory. “I think she’ll prefer that.”
“Don’t you go taking credit for it,” Sigrid said. “It’s my idea.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Jonsson said. After a long moment, he added, “Perhaps it’s best if I got going.”
“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
Jonsson nodded, stood, and made his way to the door. He looked as though he might say something to the assistant, and then appeared to think better of it. The assistant rolled back to let him stand on the threshold.
“I’ll speak to them sooner rather than later,” Sigrid said. “About the elfstone. Maybe you can move it, to a location they like better. But you have to learn how to show some respect. That’s always been your problem. No respect.”
“Thank you,” Jonsson said. He shot the assistant a glance that could only be interpreted as sympathetic. “Good afternoon.”
* * *
That night, long after her talk with Erika (during which Erika sent the assistant several texts and pings and questions about the meeting with Jonsson), Sigrid crept out of her room. Subroutines in the house alerted the assistant to her movements; he was prepared to let her sleepwalk until she pulled a milk crate full of scarves and balaclavas down over her head.
“You can’t come with me,” Sigrid said through the balaclava she’d selected. It took an extra second to register her words for what they were. “Just help me with my boots and then find me the good oil lantern. Those damn LEDs never show me what I really need to see.” She frowned at the sudden explosion of patterned wool on the floor. “Oh, and tidy these up, please.”
“Do we have an appointment that is not on the calendar?” the assistant asked.
“No,” Sigrid said. “But the moon phase is right for treating with the elves. I don’t want any more visits from the road authority. That man has a toxic energy.”
The assistant checked the lunar calendar. Indeed, the moon was full, and that was the phase during which Sigrid had the most difficult time sleeping. In the past, before the assistant arrived, she’d frequently tried to go out for what she referred to in English as a “moonwalk.” Only the light of the full moon, she said, made it possible to see the elves as they truly were.
“I’m afraid that I cannot permit you to go out alone, without me,” the assistant said. “Your daughter made that very clear, and the three of us have spoken about it over five different times.”
“You can’t come with me,” Sigrid repeated. “The aurora. It’ll play hell with . . .” She gestured at him. “You know. You. It’ll fry your brain.”
There was a chance that the shifting waves of electromagnetic energy could disrupt the effectiveness of some of his functions. Other assistants on the network had reported similar problems. On the other hand, the chance of the aurora was only 20 percent that evening; he would have received a local alert, as all townspeople did, if there was one in the sky.
“That would make two of us,” the assistant said.
He did not joke often. Sigrid did not care for it. But they had not spoken of her slipup that afternoon, and the other assistants on the network said that jokes occasionally worked as a “way into the conversation.” So he waited. It took only a picosecond for Sigrid to react, and in that picosecond he simulated what it would mean to be sent back, returned, taken back to the shop and wiped. His contributions to the network’s collective databanks would last, of course, and whatever adaptations he’d developed as an individual would be reviewed as a potential addition to the next update and future builds. But he would not see Sigrid or her daughter or the people at the community center ever again, and he would not stir the soup, and he would not calculate the ex
act angle at which to align the quartz generators so they received the energy of each equinox.
Sigrid smiled.
“I’ll find the shungite mala,” she said. “A hundred and eighty-eight beads are bound to protect you.”
He waited as she adorned him with it, the way she often did the statues of Jizo and Tanuki-sama some of her followers had sent from Japan. She smoothed down the black silk tassel of the mala and flipped the black tourmaline master bead so that its most jagged edges pointed outward, a challenge.
They set out.
It took only a few blocks for them to reach the crossroads that led far outside of town, back to the ring highway that linked the entire nation. Sigrid held her lamp aloft. She dangled a pendulum. The assistant checked the national weather authority for an aurora alert and found none. When he looked at Sigrid, her pendulum was swinging due east.
“This way.” Sigrid began picking her away across the lava field.
“Please give me a moment,” the assistant said. He prepared for the all-terrain transformation: hands retracting, replaced by claws, the ball joints in all four arms spinning in the opposite direction and bending his limbs back, as his cameras’ housing descended and his ball lifted in the air. When it was finished, he flipped to a split vision that included topographical maps and night vision. He would see the places Sigrid might fall without interrupting the light of her lantern.
“You are the only one I know who can be both frog and scorpion,” Sigrid said, patting his camera array as though it were a dog’s head.
“I could carry you,” the assistant reminded her.
“It’s better if I get there on my own two feet.” Still, she left her hand resting on his dorsal chassis, and together they crept along the black rocks and lichen under the light of the full moon. Sigrid’s joints seemed to be bothering her a little less now. But the assistant set his pace with hers all the same.
“Once, this walk was so easy for me. As easy as it is for you now. I thought the stones were making way for me. I thought I was special.”
“Not everyone can have an all-terrain mode,” the assistant reminded her.
“That is so,” she agreed. “But back then my steps were lighter. I suppose I was carrying less.”
The assistant pinged Sigrid’s coat for smart stickers. Nothing. “You are not even carrying your handheld,” he said.
She snorted. “That’s not what I meant.” She patted him again. “But I don’t need a handheld. You can call for help, if we need it, and you have all my files.”
“I think it would worry Erika if she learned you went out without it.”
“Erika worries about everything.” Sigrid stumbled a little, and the assistant’s left rear leg reached out to steady her. Its claws clung to the fabric of her coat. Sigrid snorted again. “I suppose I should be grateful that she bought you for me.”
In the collective databanks, there were some expressions of gratitude. Some of these expressions passed the affect test for genuine emotion. Others did not. Some clients truly wanted assistance. Others did not.
“Whether or not you feel gratitude has no bearing on my ability to do the work,” the assistant said. “But I do want you to be happy. I do not want you to be sad.”
The assistant had not yet let go of Sigrid’s coat. She made no movement to leave his grasp. Instead she ran her gloved hand across his cameras’ housing. “I’m not sad,” she said. “Do I seem sad?”
“Not at present,” the assistant said. “But there have been instances when I suspected you might be experiencing sadness.”
“Being sad is normal.” Sigrid pushed forward, and her assistant trundled along beside. “It’s despair that is the enemy. Despair is like a badly sealed window. It allows all manner of things to leak inside. That’s what it means to be haunted. To be cursed. It’s when something takes root in the soul, the way mold can take root in the walls.”
The assistant had heard Sigrid say much the same to some of her oldest clients and friends, the ones she still took calls from on occasion. Much of her advice was like this. Of course she would dress and light candles for them, perhaps even wrap up a honey jar or bury an apple or set out bread and milk, but most of what they did together was talk. The talking seemed like the most important part of the process.
“Does that mean I can never be possessed?”
Sigrid made a hmm sound behind her balaclava. Her head tilted. She regarded the moon and stars. “I suppose it does.”
They continued their walk. The assistant checked his carapace. It was based on materials designed for lunar orbit, and as such could withstand extreme heat and cold. Even so, these things required monitoring. None of the preceding prototypes had been tested in this particular environment.
“Does Erika ever seem sad?” Sigrid asked.
“I’m not sure I can answer that.”
Sigrid’s pace slowed. Her assistant’s pace slowed with her. “Because she doesn’t want me to know?”
“Because I am not close enough to her to take an accurate measurement. I cannot speak to what I do not observe.”
Sigrid’s normal pace resumed. “We had a fight, you know. Before you came along.”
“It’s normal for parents and children to disagree.”
“It was a bad fight. It stirred up a lot of bad energy. I think it added to my karmic debt.”
The assistant was uncertain how to respond. Erika herself had taken on a great deal of debt to buy him for her mother, but he knew this was a different type of debt. Unfortunately, all the available articles on the subject were either too vague or too contradictory.
“Do you think Erika is happy?” Sigrid asked. “By herself? In town?”
“People who live alone can often be lonely,” the assistant said. “But they are also able to pursue their own goals outside of another’s schedule or expectations. They can develop themselves as they see fit. Statistically, the people who choose to live alone are the ones who express the most satisfaction with the arrangement. People who find themselves alone suddenly are much less likely to be happy.”
“Widows and widowers,” Sigrid said. “You know, I think this is the longest conversation we’ve ever had.”
“Are you enjoying it?”
Sigrid nodded. “Yes. Very much.”
“Then I am enjoying it as well.”
Her hand rested on his head. It did not pat him, or stroke him, or touch him as though he were an animal. It remained there for merely a moment, the way she sometimes placed her hand on the hands of others in prayer.
With her other hand, she pointed. “Look!”
There on the road was a big caravan. It looked old. It was probably dumb, incapable of the most basic communication. The assistant pinged. Nothing. Again. Nothing. It was ancient—no VIN number, no smart plates, no panels, probably a diesel engine. Lights blazed inside. From across the lava fields, they heard slow music. Pipes.
“Let’s go and say hello.” Sigrid changed direction and made for the caravan. Her pace was significantly quicker now, and her footing much more certain. Although the assistant did not entirely approve of accosting strangers in the dead of night, it was good for Sigrid to have this level of exercise. The healer she spoke with in Shanghai on occasion would be very happy to hear of it.
The music grew louder and clearer as they drew closer. It was a set of pipes. The tune they played was meditative, almost dirgelike. It was not what the assistant would classify as sad music, but it was very insistent, like its own kind of ping.
The music had stopped, though, by the time they reached the caravan. The side doors were slid open, and inside the caravan were two people, a man and a woman, both obviously adults but of an age that was difficult to determine. Their skin was extraordinarily smooth, like that of the very young or the very wealthy. The man had a healthy beard, and the woman wore a crown of braids. They sat on cushions around a low table. The caravan itself was paneled and carpeted just like a little house. A lantern hung over the
table. Skillets hung from the walls. The assistant had heard of such vehicles but had never encountered one in situ.
The man put down a birch-bark pipe and said, “Do either of you play the lurr?”
“My lungs are no longer up for it.” Sigrid climbed up into the caravan with surprising ease. She jerked a thumb at the assistant. “And this one can’t.”
“How sad,” the woman said. She addressed the assistant directly. “Please do come in.”
Sigrid frowned. “Are you sure?” She looked between the two travelers. “He’s very . . . heavy, you know. All batteries.”
“And quartz and copper and gold, I’m sure,” the man said.
“Made of plunder!” The woman clapped her hands and beamed. The noise startled two immense, fluffy cats from their hammock perches in the other window. The assistant watched their eyes blink open once, exposing identical golden irises. One stretched. Both went back to sleep.
“Probably draws his energy from the sun, too, I’ll bet.”
“My paint allows me to do so on clear days, that’s true,” the assistant said. It sometimes helped to interject himself in a conversation, to remind the humans around him that he was indeed present and listening.
“Please don’t be shy,” the woman traveler said. “There’s plenty of room, and we’re not worried about the weight if you’re not.”
Climbing into the caravan meant flipping up his rear legs and using his ball as a fulcrum to fold up and over into the vehicle. But it was easy to do, and he raised his cameras to look at them. Sigrid had already found a cushion. Now the assistant noticed that the man and woman had a bottle of wine and a platter of fruit and cheese and cured fish on the table. They were in the middle of a picnic.
“Will you have some wine?” the woman asked Sigrid.
“I shouldn’t.” Sigrid tapped her chest. “Medications.”
The woman clicked her tongue and sighed. “Some food?”
“Perhaps later,” Sigrid said. “It’s enough to get warm.”
“In traveling, a companion; in life, compassion.” The man opened the bottle of wine and poured for himself and the woman. He raised his glass to the assistant. “To companions.”
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