by T. A. Pratt
“Burn the lot?”
Jason chuckled. “Old carnie term. If a carnival was hard up for money, they'd sometimes pull out all the stops—cheat more than usual, use every dirty trick they knew to part rubes from their bankrolls, even outright theft with pickpockets circulating in the crowd. That's what they call burning the lot. Of course, the downside to pulling shit like that is the townspeople get pissed, and they won't be real happy to see your carnival, or any carnival, roll into town anytime in the next few years. If you do return, you're apt to get your head busted by the locals, including the cops. So the town is burned, metaphorically Get it?”
“Got it.”
“Good. We're not going to burn Cam-Cam. We're going to string him along, give him a lot of thrills and chills, make him think he's in some kind of supernatural action thriller, and then blow him off.” Jason puffed up his cheeks and exhaled a loud spurt of air. “And him, poor sap, he'll just float away when we're finished, like so much dandelion fluff.”
“You sound confident.” Rondeau was both doubtful and admiring.
“I've always been a confident man, Ronnie.”
“So what the hell's wrong with him?” Marla said.
“Hmm.” Langford stared into a wide-screen computer monitor that appeared to display a bubbling green fluid. “We'll see.”
“What are you staring at?”
“My cauldron,” Langford said absently. As usual, he wore a white lab coat stained with suspicious splotches, steel-rimmed round glasses, and a distant expression. “It's a quantum cauldron. Less messy than the conventional sort.”
He tapped at the keys, and B shouted, “Holy fuck!” and jolted in the chair, jostling the odd helmet he wore—like a metal colander with bare-wire leads running out to one of Langford's computers.
“Sorry.” Langford didn't even look at B. Marla knew that when he got into the zone, into the flow, he was barely aware of his surroundings. B was, just at the moment, not a person to Langford, but a collection of interesting data.
Marla peered over Langford's shoulder at the screen, which had developed some black bubbles now. “Does this even do anything, or are you fucking with me for a generous hourly rate?”
Langford turned toward her, blinked a couple of times, and frowned. “Would you like to engage in repartee, or would you like me to finish my diagnostic series? I'm fine either way My consulting fee doesn't vary based on the nature of your demands.”
“Do your work, then.” Marla hooked a stool with her ankle and pulled it away from a nearby lab table, sitting down beside B, who was understandably looking a little freaked-out. Langford's lab didn't inspire comfort in a patient—it was all bubbling beakers and tubes, shelves full of pickled things that used to be alive, and cages of varying sizes that were mostly, blessedly, empty at the moment. “You all right?” Marla asked her apprentice. “Being hooked up to one of Langford's contraptions can be stressful. I always get the sense he could switch my brain with a chicken's if he wanted.”
“That's reassuring.” B peered out dismally from beneath the helmet. “Is that a Tesla coil over there?”
Marla looked at the spark-spitting machine and nodded. “When I bought this new lab space for Langford—which was not cheap, but he earned it—I threw that in as a joke.”
“Marla considers me a mad scientist.” Langford kept tapping keys in a rapid-fire rhythm that Marla found oddly comforting. “Though I am not mad, and am only intermittently a scientist.” He leaned so close to the monitor that his nose almost touched the screen, said “Aha” in a satisfied voice, then leaned back. “I see.”
“See what?” Marla hopped off her stool. The screen didn't look much different to her.
Langford drummed his fingers on the table for a moment. “Imagine that Bradley's brain is a program for reading e-mail.”
“I don't use e-mail.” Marla crossed her arms. You couldn't effectively threaten someone over e-mail, was her feeling.
“Then you'll have to work very hard to imagine it,” Langford said equably. “So: incoming messages are stored on a server—that's a big computer, off-site somewhere, Marla. The e-mail program fetches those messages, pulling them down over phone lines or cable or a wireless network, to your local machine.”
“You download the messages, right,” B said. Marla glared at him. “What? You're the only Luddite in the room, boss.”
“Occasionally,” Langford went on, “there's a message on the server that's too large to download, and the e-mail program times out—essentially, it gives up on trying to pull down the message. Meanwhile, new messages arrive, but they can't be downloaded, either, because that enormous message is sitting in the way.”
“Clogging up the tubes,” Marla said.
Langford winced. “Yes. In a manner of speaking. The program keeps trying to download the message, and it keeps failing, though it may manage to download a truncated version of the message, producing a lot of gibberish that can't be read.”
“So I've got some huge vision my brain can't handle?” B said. “And it's keeping all my other normal-sized visions from coming through?”
“That's my working theory. The big vision is arriving in garbled form, at best—that's the persistent voice of doom. Meanwhile, the program—which, I'm afraid, is your brain—keeps crashing. Hence the bleeding eyes. You can't cope with… whatever's trying to drop itself into your brain.”
“Huh,” Marla said. “Ain't science grand. What do we do about it?”
“This is where the analogy breaks down a bit.” Langford swiveled back and forth on his stool. “With e-mail, you can often access the server directly and de lete the offending message. But in this case, the ‘server’ is wherever Bradley's mystical dreams come from, and that is a place beyond my understanding.”
“So if you can't get to the server?”
“You can tell the program to simply ignore messages over a certain size. The program will then stop trying to download that message, leave it on the server, and just move on to the next message. No more crashing. No more bleeding eyes.”
“You can make B's brain do that?”
“Of course.” Langford said.
“Without giving him a stroke or lesions? Or the brain of a chicken?”
“Your faith is all that sustains me. There should be no permanent damage.” Langford spoke in that bland way that managed to sound completely confident yet totally nonreassuring. “The alternative will almost certainly cause Bradley great harm as more visions pile up, increasing the psychic pressure on his mind until… something breaks.”
“What do you think, B? It's your brain, so I won't decide for you.”
“I was crying blood earlier. I'm willing to try alternatives. But, and maybe this is an obvious question… even if this works, doesn't that mean we're ignoring the giant-sized monster vision pressing down on my head?”
“Yep.”
“Isn't it likely to be kind of important?”
“Probably,” Langford said. “Psychics are… resistant to analysis… but broadly speaking, in my experience, such powerful visions tend to be either items of vast universal importance—apocalypse or the like—or else something profoundly life-altering for the psychic personally.”
“Great. So whatever it is, we'll be flying blind?”
“Don't sweat it, B.” Marla patted him on the shoulder. “There are billions of people who go through their lives and never have a single dream that comes true, and who even manage to decide what brand of toilet tissue to buy without consulting the oracle of the paper products aisle first. We've got other options to figure out the nature of this oblivion-threatening danger we might have to face. At least we know there's something, right? Forewarned is forearmed, even if we're not quite as well armed as we'd like to be.”
“All right,” B said. “It's not like I'm faced with a lot of choices here. Work your magic.”
“You heard him, Langford. Let's flush out those tubes.”
“All right. Be aware, once I re
move the blockage, you may be flooded with all your backed-up visions. And Bradley, in case you should die, I'd like to say I'm a great admirer of your films.” Langford tapped a few keys. The bubbling mass on the computer screen roiled furiously
Judging by the way B's eyes rolled back in his head, and with him falling out of the chair while shouting in a strange tongue and all, Marla figured Langford was right about the whole vision-flood thing.
Langford checked B's vitals and arranged him a bit more comfortably on the floor. “He's likely to be out for a while. Would you like to see a little something I made with you in mind?”
“You want to show me gadgets while my apprentice is twitching in a vision-coma?”
“You'd rather sit over him and make small talk?”
“Good point. Let's see what you've got.”
Langford led her to one of his lab tables, reached underneath, and came back with a pair of steel-toed boots, not unlike Marla's current pair in shape, though these were made of dark green leather.
“You're a cobbler now?”
“Only incidentally The U.S. military has been trying to develop footwear and gloves that can enable wearers to cling to virtually any surface. In theory, soldiers so equipped could scale sheer walls as easily as they'd climb a ladder. The technology is based on the microfibers that geckos have on their feet, called setae, which enable them to stick to practically anything, even vertical sheets of glass. Most sticky creatures are literally sticky, with secretions that help them cling, but with geckos, it's all in the structure of the skin, tiny hairs that interact with surfaces. It's fascinating, really, the van der Waals forces—”
“You're going to lose me talking like that,” Marla interrupted. “Synthetic gecko feet is all I need to know. So you've done what the military couldn't? Made sticky boots?”
“Well, yes, though I cheated—I used real gecko skin and sympathetic magic.” He stroked the boots. “I've got a pair of gloves you could wear, too.”
“What do I want to climb walls for?”
Langford shrugged. “I can't imagine. I just thought it was an interesting challenge, and now that I've exceeded my own expectations, I'm bored and looking to sell the results. I'm sure you'd find a good excuse to go walking on a ceiling.”
“Fair enough.” Marla stroked the boots. “Can you put a nasty inertial charm on these, too? The boots I've got on now can kick through a concrete wall without even stubbing my toe.”
“The magics shouldn't interact badly, so I don't see why not.”
Marla sighed. “They had to be green lizardskin, didn't they? Rondeau's going to give me shit about my fashion sense. Ah, well. I'll just jump on him from the ceiling for revenge.”
B woke up in a puddle of his own drool, which he decided was marginally better than awakening in his own vomit, if no less sticky He sat up, groaning, and took stock. He was on a hard little cot in a corner of Langford's lab, squeezed between a black taxidermy goat and a crude clay jar sealed shut with wax. Marla approached and handed him a bottle of water, which he greedily gulped. “Thanks, boss.” He did a quick interior survey “I feel… better.”
“Good.” She dropped down to squat on her heels so their faces were on the same level. “So what's the news from dreamland?”
“Mushrooms,” B said. “Beyond that, I'll have to consult an oracle. I saw lots of things, but I'm not sure what most of it means.”
“Langford says you oughta be able to talk to oracles and get straight answers again. As straight as you ever did anyway.”
“They tend to be crooked as Lombard Street, but as long as I'm not blind or bleeding, I can cope. Can we find an oracle now? It's the only way to get this taste out of my brain.”
“You sure you feel up to that, iron man?”
“No, but some knowledge is better out than in.”
“Langford, give Hamil a call and tell him I said he should send you a big sack of money We've got to hit the streets—”
“No.” B started at the clay pot beside him. It was old, and from far away, he could tell. He could feel it. “No, I think I can call up an oracle right here.”
Marla backed away “Langford, is that jar a container for some malevolent desert spirit? Some dark genie from the center of the Earth? Some kind of…” She paused. “I'm trying to come up with a joke using the phrase ‘djinn and chthonic,’ I've been waiting years to use that, but I got nothing.”
“Alcoholic jokes are apropos,” Langford said, “though it's not gin in that pot, but exceedingly elderly wine. You sense a spirit in the clay, Bradley?”
B didn't answer—couldn't answer, because he was thinking too hard, his brain straining to produce an oracle.
The pot shivered and rattled and hissed, though the wax seal remained unbroken. An oily smoke began to coalesce in the air above the jar, with a smell like a dusty tomb's inner chamber. Two sparks that might have been embers and that could pass for eyes winked into existence in the cloud's depths. “I am Il-a-mo-ta-qu'in,” the cloud said in a raspy sandstorm of a voice. “Master of traps and deceptions, killer with a poison kiss. What would you ask of me?”
“I had a dream,” B said. “One of those dreams. About mushrooms, and a man with the snout of a pig, and a mad slave, and a rotting forest, and an empty box, and—”
“I know of this dream,” Il-a-mo-ta-qu'in said. “It heralds the coming of a servant of the Mycelium. He will arrive soon, seeking powerful magic, and willing to strike down any who oppose him. His madness has a terrible clarity that I admire, even as I despise him for being so… moist. He would not survive an hour in the burning sands of the empty quarter, where even lichen on rocks have been known to die of thirst.”
“Thank you, Il-a-mo-ta-qu'in,” B said formally “How may I repay you?”
“A kiss. I developed a taste for kisses when I killed a prince with one.”
Marla said, “How are you supposed to kiss a cloud of dirty smoke?” But B didn't hesitate, just leaned in and shut his eyes, and the smoke closed over his face for a moment, then began to dissipate.
B coughed hard a few times, throat burning, and picked up the water bottle, finishing it off. The water eased the pain in his throat, but some of the oracle's substance remained in his lungs, probably shortening his life. Maybe Marla knew a way to make him live longer, to help balance things out. That was worth looking into.
Marla was already on a cell phone borrowed from Langford. “Hamil? B had a vision. There's some out-of-towner coming to make trouble, looking for some big magic. No, I don't know what. No, we don't have a name, either, all I know is he's a servant of something or someone called the Mycelium, and he's got something to do with mushrooms—”
“A mycelium is part of a mushroom,” Langford said. He knelt by the clay pot, prodding it with a wooden tongue depressor. “The underground, vegetative part—mushrooms are merely the fruit of the mycelium.”
“Langford says a mycelium is like the roots of a mushroom,” Marla went on. “Run this guy down for me, would you? Fungal magic. Icky Can't be too many big scary practitioners of that. Let me know if we need to lay in a supply of athlete's foot cream or something.” She snapped the phone shut. “Oh, goody. It's been like a week since I've had to beat the crap out of some invader muscling into my city. Way to be an early warning system, B.”
“Happy to be of service.”
“So… nothing about my brother in all those visions you had? Just the Fungus Channel?”
“No, nothing about Jason. But my visions tend to center on mystical stuff, trains to Hell and dead gods and scary magic, so family matters might be a little outside my area of expertise. I got mugged last year, and I never had a dream about that, though I could have used the warning… I think it was just too mundane to trigger my gift, such as it is.”
“You have a brother?” Langford said.
“I do,” Marla said. “Don't get any ideas. You aren't allowed to dissect him.”
“When the subject is still alive, it's called vivi
section.”
Marla rolled her eyes. “To be safe, B, could you call up ol’ long-ass-name there again and put a few questions to him about my brother? Ease my mind?”
B shook his head. “It wouldn't work.” He wasn't sure how to explain. “This is the wrong oracle for that question. It would be like asking a bricklayer for medical advice, or a piano tuner to fix your car's engine. He's the wrong guy for the job.”
“But a desert spirit was the right guy to ask about mushrooms, which are pretty distinctly nondesert?”
“I don't claim it makes sense, though I think Il-a-mo-ta-qu'in hates squishy wet things, and hate is a sort of affinity I can try to find another oracle to tell me about your brother if you like, later.”
“What, another little garbage god? Maybe we should. I wonder if it's symbolically relevant that the oracles who know about my brother are made of trash?”
“We can ask the oracle about that, too. It'll be totally recursive. But could we get something to eat first? I'm ravenous.”
“Sure,” Marla said. “You still interested in meeting Jason? Maybe we can all grab a bite together. Who knows, seeing him could spark one of those visions of yours. It'll do you good to quit talking shop for a couple of hours anyway.”
The messenger shut the rear doors of his van, closing Bulliard in. He considered running for it while the doors were locked—but the tickle at the back of his neck changed his mind. He reached back and gently patted at the nape of his neck, and his fingers encountered the rubbery sponginess of mushroom caps. He shuddered and wiped his hand on the front of his rather filthy black T-shirt. The messenger had done courier runs to rain forests and river basins, and had picked up his share of disturbing parasites and infections in the course of business, but this was the first time he'd ever been deliberately infected with such a thing by another human being—assuming Bulliard was human, something it was tempting to doubt.
He went around the van and climbed into the driver's seat. The back of the van was just open space, the rear seats long ago ripped out, various hooks and D-rings welded to the walls to help fasten down whatever strange cargoes he might have to transport. Never anything stranger than this. He looked in the rearview mirror, but Bulliard was still playing coy. “Why don't you want to let me know what you look like?”
