wreck of heaven

by Holly Lisle

  "How do I operate it?"

  "You don't. It's one-way." That was another lie, but Pete wasn't about to get into gates and showing Fred how to open one. Lauren had spent hours showing him, and he was still inept with anything bigger than a pocket mirror. Besides, the second he showed Fred that humans could make the thing work all on their own, he opened himself up to a whole range of questions he wasn't sure he wanted to answer yet. If ever. Right now, he and Fred were talking about extraterrestrial invaders who'd first shown up on the FBI's radar in Roswell back in 1947. If he introduced upworlds and downworlds and frontworlds and backworlds and sideworlds, he'd find himself with no control over the way the Bureau handled the situation next. As long as Fred was relatively comfortable with what he thought was going on, Pete could buy himself the time that he needed to figure out what was really going on, and what, if anything, he needed to do about it.

  Pete threw the last of his crumbs to the ducks at his feet, sighed, and rose. "I'll be in touch when I find out anything new."

  Behind him, Fred crumpled up his paper bag and tossed it into the trash can beside the bench. "As fast as you can, if you don't mind. You've done a nice job of scaring the shit out of me today."

  "We'll get a handle on it," Pete said.

  "I hope so. I've never particularly wanted to see one of those little gray bastards as president of the United States. Or emperor of the planet."

  Pete didn't look back.

  Copper House

  Guards led them—Lauren, Jake, Molly, and all the goroths—through the secret passage in Lauren's suite down into the bowels of the house. Lauren wanted the protection to be overkill; she wanted to think that she and Jake and Molly would be fine if they walked through the house alone. But they wouldn't—or if they were, it would be out of sheer dumb luck. She didn't know how she could adjust her thinking to accept the fact that she and her child were prey. The dagger at her hip seemed as heavy as a ball and chain, and she kept catching her arm on it as she walked. She had to adjust, though. She had to realize that she and hers now lived in a state of constant war—and she had to make that realization second nature. Then she had to find a way to make both Jake and herself damned unattractive targets.

  The route down to the safe room seemed simple enough: straight through the passageway to the first flight of stairs, down those stairs, then left along the damp, cold stone foundation to a big door of iron and dark, ancient wood. It struck Lauren as grim—the approach of prisoners to a dungeon.

  "The upper floors of this place are great," she told Molly. "But, God, do they need an interior decorator down here."

  Molly laughed—the laughter a little strained. "Maybe we could get Martha Stewart in to redo the place. Or Christopher Lowell."

  Lauren grinned at her. "Or both of them. I always thought they'd loathe each other. We could sell tickets to the catfights."

  Inside, the safe room felt no more welcoming than it had appeared from the outside. Stone walls all around, stone floor, stone columns, a vaulted stone ceiling. The place felt cold and damp, and Lauren's first thought was that Jake would get sick if they stayed long in this place.

  Going through the door, Molly posed like a real estate agent showing a property and said, "And this room is straight out of Home and Dungeon. Note the careful use of rocks in the floors, walls, and ceilings, and the way the stones let in the dark. And…and…" She stopped. "Help me out here. I'm not sure Martha and Christopher together could save this room."

  Lauren laughed. "It really is awful. I mean, it's ugly, but it's also just miserable. We can't work in it this way. The damp and the cold aren't good for anyone, but especially not for little guys."

  Molly nodded. "You can change things."

  Lauren thought for a moment, then did a tiny, careful spell to warm the air, and another to brighten the place, and a third to put carpet on the floor. With each change, she kept her focus small and tight—just this place, just this moment. The heat, the light, and even the carpet would go away when she and Molly were finished in the room. In every way, she focused on minimizing damage and rebound—because a tiny heat spell carelessly cast and poorly thought-out could cause a drought back on Earth; a sloppy light spell might rebound to cause headlights in cars in one city to suddenly brighten to the point that they blinded oncoming drivers; and as for carpeting…she didn't even want to consider where a disaster with that might lead. The return of Seventies shag? God forbid.

  She stopped herself. Her tendency to make jokes about things that unnerved her sometimes could be a good thing, but she didn't want to let herself trivialize magic in the process. A bit of carelessness by three traitor Sentinels had just weeks before resulted in the deaths of millions back on Earth—and from something so small and so stupid…

  Lauren shook her head. She didn't want to trivialize magic.

  "Better," Molly said.

  And Jake laughed, looking at the changes. "Down, please," he said.

  Lauren put him and the little bag containing Bearish and Mr. Puddleduck and his cars on the floor. "You can play for a while," she told him. "Molly and I are going to do things."

  He grinned. "I play with the doggies," he said.

  Molly raised an eyebrow. "Doggies?"

  Lauren watched her son, looking happier and more confident than he had since the day Molly died, head for the goroths. "Explaining to him that the goroths aren't doggies would be too much trouble, and as far as I can tell, this world doesn't have dogs anyway. So it can't be an insult. Or a compliment, either. For what it's worth, Jake really likes dogs."

  Molly said, "He's a beautiful little boy, Lauren."

  "Thank you." Lauren thought about what her sister had given up so that Lauren could still have her beautiful little boy. She turned to Molly. "Thank you for saving him," she said. "That thanks isn't enough—and I don't think that anything I can do for you will ever be enough. But I'll do what I can."

  Molly smiled, her eyes sad. "Let's figure out how we're going to keep him safe. If we can do that, then I won't have died for nothing."

  "What we need," Lauren said, "is a way to tell immediately what effects our magic is having upstream. Yours is supposed to be completely clean, right? Because you're from both worlds, the magic you do…has a damper on it, for lack of a better analogy. Right?"

  Molly nodded. "That's the theory."

  "But mine isn't. So anything we have to do that might get messy, you'll have to handle. I can take the small stuff and the happy spells—the things that should rebound for good. But even so, we have to be able to check results. If we don't, we could set off a disaster with something that feels like nothing."

  Molly settled cross-legged onto the floor and closed her eyes. "Approach this logically. We have to see what's happening on Earth, pretty much simultaneously with putting a spell together."

  "That would be the ideal." Lauren settled to the floor beside her. She thought chairs and a table would be nice, but if this took long, they could have the guards bring some in. That was a much easier problem to solve than temperature control in the subbasement of an ancient castle. "To the best of my knowledge—and I confess that my knowledge is severely limited—everyone working with magic works blind. So we're starting from nothing if we're looking at a way to see the effects of what we're doing while we're doing it. How do we do that? What are we looking for?"

  "Can you link the spell to some sort of viewer? Sort of…tag the spell, I suppose. Like those big radio tags that scientists put on animals so they can see where they go and tell what they're doing without actually having to follow them."

  Lauren got thoughtful. From what she had seen, magic worked well with analogy. If you could describe almost any working process, you could use that process to create a functional spell by analogy. If she used the animal-tracking process, visualized each spell as being tagged, then hooked the tag to a mirror…

  "We could tag the spells and link them to viewing mirrors. They're mirrors that have closed, relatively stable
gates attached. We should be able to check our results just by letting the tag dictate the viewing destination, and then scanning the mirrors."

  Molly gave her a cockeyed smile. "That might work for you. I have no idea how to use a gate, how to look through a mirror—none of that. I have healing down pretty well, and I am getting used to the idea of making and changing things with magic—basic spellcasting. Gates, though, and mirrors—I have no idea what to do with them. If you hadn't had the gate already open when you asked me to take Jake back to Earth, I would not have been able to go through."

  Lauren considered that. "If we didn't want to track results, we could just have you do all the spells."

  "We could. Is there ever a time when rebound is desirable?"

  "Well—yes. You heal someone here, and a handful of people back home have spontaneous remissions from cancer. You build something good here, and construction can jump in a town that needs the economic boost. Or you could be responsible for yet another strip mall in the middle of an overcrowded, overbuilt city, I guess. Anything that is good for one person is likely to be bad for someone else." Lauren pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around her legs, and rested chin on knees. "There aren't easy answers to any of this—everything has a price, and our big job is to be sure that whatever we do for Jake doesn't create consequences we can't live with."

  "Are we sure my magic has no rebound?" Molly asked.

  "I'm not sure about anything," Lauren told her. "The theory is that your magic has no rebound. The Sentinels seemed fairly sure that was the case. Mom and Dad's notes suggest that this is an important part of your power. And when June Bug Tate was trying to figure out where you were and what you were doing, she had a hell of a time even pinpointing you to an area. And she has a whole lot of years of tracking experience."

  Molly frowned. "That seems all wrong, though. If good magic benefits people upstream, why the hell am I the healer? That seems—wasteful. If you have to have a job done, and one person can do it and create a by-product that will benefit uncounted people, and a second one can do the work but you get no by-product—who are you going to put in charge of that job?"

  "You want a corporation answer for that, an Air Force answer, or the logical answer?"

  Molly snorted. "I forgot the Air Force had its hooks in you, too."

  "Sometimes for the good. Anyway—there has to have been a reason why our parents set it up that way. Even good rebound could be destabilizing, or maybe it has something to do with negative effects of positive magic. I don't know. We'll figure it out as we go."

  Molly frowned. "As far as my magic—and rebound—the books I read last night were all written by long-dead veyâr, none of whom had clue one about how magic actually works. So their biographies of the previous Vodian, while interesting, are pretty useless for me. I needed to know how the previous Vodian used magic, and what they used it for, and what I've been getting is a list of their interventions and dealings with the old gods, and not much mention of magic at all. I could use the dead voices as a resource, I suppose—but I don't want to go there more than I absolutely have to. The dead Vodian are dangerous in ways I can't quite put my finger on yet."

  Lauren got to the other end of Molly's commentary with no more idea of what Molly was driving at than she'd had at the beginning. "And your point in all of that?"

  "I don't think we're safe to assume that my magic has no rebound. It might just rebound to a different degree, or in a different direction."

  "Which means…?"

  "That we need to watch the results of any spell I cast as closely as we watch any spell you cast. I thought it might work to have me cast the spells, but I don't think we can take that for granted."

  Lauren nodded. "That does make sense." She glanced over at Jake, who was commanding his army of goroths. "I'm Superman," he said. "I am a superhero."

  He was fine. He'd need lunch in a while, but he was close, she could see that he was safe, they had guards at the doors and here in this one room, and if necessary she could use magic against anything that challenged the guards. She could breathe a little easier, could afford to take a bit of time. Not a lot—at some point, once she had an idea of how she and Molly would carry out their parents' plan, which was still pretty nebulous in her mind—she would have to get in touch with the Sentinels, at least long enough to tell them she wasn't coming back. If she wasn't, of course.

  But she and Molly could take a day to go over mirrors, figure out a way of tracking rebound, and then get into protection spells. She and Jake could easily spend a night sleeping in this room, if it came to that—she felt safe here. Maybe they could just turn this room into their apartment, and work from here. It was big enough that it could be turned into a nice little apartment for the duration of her time in Oria, and if she and Jake stayed here, Lauren thought she might be able to sleep a little better. She returned her attention to Molly. "Let's get you comfortable with gates, then, and viewing. I can show you what you need to know, then you can practice."

  "What will we need?"

  "Just mirrors. We should have some large ones and some small ones. You should be able to open and close an existing gate, too—that's just a safety precaution. I guess we should have some objects that could be shoved through the gates—once you open one, you must use it, because it won't close until you do, or until something else does."

  Molly looked a little green. "Something else?"

  Lauren nodded vigorously. "Assume the worst, then multiply by ten. Maybe a bird would fly through and close the thing for you. But maybe not. And there are some awful potentials in the 'nots.'"

  "What sort of objects should we send through, then?"

  Lauren considered. "Boiled stones would be ideal. No sense taking a chance on introducing bacteria or viruses or…God only knows. And stones are inert, and one looks pretty much like another to anyone who isn't a geologist."

  Molly rose, a graceful movement that went from cross-legged sitting to ankle-crossed standing in a single thrust. Lauren, older and feeling it, thought, I remember being able to do that. Will I ever again?

  "We're going to need some mirrors in here," Molly told the guard in charge. "Have an assortment brought in—standing mirrors and hand mirrors." She turned to Lauren. "Does the quality of the mirror matter?"

  "It's easier to work through a good surface than one that's scratched or dull."

  "Good mirrors," Molly amended. "And boiled rocks. Any size preference?" she asked Lauren over her shoulder.

  Lauren mimed something roughly the size of a softball. "And some lunch," Lauren added.

  Molly laughed. "You're hungry already?"

  "I think so. No time sense in here—we don't have a window, and my stomach is growling. I didn't eat much breakfast, though."

  "Chairs and a table," Molly told the guard. "Might be a good idea just to tell Seo what we need and let him arrange to have the house staff bring it."

  The guard nodded, bowed deeply, and took off.

  Lauren turned to watch her son commanding the goroths, perfectly content in the role of spoiled child god. "I'm going to go keep Jake company until our stuff gets here," she told Molly. "And I'm going to have a talk with the goroths. Jake is enough of a handful already without discovering that when he tells some people to jump, they obey. Megalomania is not something I want to encourage in him."

  Molly watched him for a moment, and winced. He was demanding that the goroths jump up and down. "I think that might be a good idea."

  Lauren pulled Jake away from his activities, sat on the floor with him on her lap, and told the goroths, "You don't have to do what he tells you. He's supposed to do what you tell him."

  "But he's an old god," Rue said, speaking for the rest of the goroths, who all nodded agreement.

  "No," Lauren said firmly. "In fact, he is a little boy. That's all. You don't let your own children tell you what to do, do you?"

  "No, Hunter. We do not."

  "Right. Because if you let them te
ll you what to do, they'd become unbearable to live with, right?"

  "Yes."

  "Same principle, then. He's only three. He can't do anything more than any of your littlest children can do. When he grows up—well, that'll be different, but between now and then, we will all teach him how to treat people, how to be responsible, how to think about others and not just himself. So that when he does have the powers of an old god, he doesn't think that he has the right to use them however he wants."

  The goroths nodded. Rue said, "Very wise, Hunter. We will, then, treat him as we would treat one of our own. With kindness, but with firmness as well."