Water to Burn

by Katharine Kerr

“Ask me to pass it to you, dear,” Aunt Eileen said.

  “Sorry. It’s hella good, Aunt E.”

  She smiled and handed him the platter. Ari glanced my way and winked. I took it as meaning that yes, Michael had been slipping through the gate to visit his girl.

  “What beats me all to hell,” Uncle Jim continued, “is why the damned thing had to be right here in my house. Of all the bum luck!”

  “No, not luck,” I said. “Consider our family, all of it, over the generations. It’s perfectly logical that there would be one here. It’s not like it was the only one in San Francisco.”

  Uncle Jim grunted and speared a chunk of potato with his fork. I had the distinct feeling that I’d spoken truer than I knew. Mike was watching me, I realized.

  “Mike,” I said, “have you read those e-mails I printed out for you, the ones from our expert on the deviant levels?”

  “NumbersGrrl, you mean?” Michael wiped his mouth on his crumpled napkin. “Yeah, they helped a lot. I did a little Web surfing, too, trying to find something about worldwalkers, but I only found a couple of fiction books.”

  “Here’s one possibility. Look up a man named John ‘Walking’ Stewart. Late eighteenth century.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  “He supposedly walked from England to America without bothering with a ship.”

  Mike blinked at me for a moment, then his mouth framed a silent O.

  “He also believed,” I went on, “in the transmigration of molecules and atoms from one body to another, but his main trick was covering long distances in short times just by walking.”

  “Are you having a joke on us?” Ari glared at me.

  “No. Guys like Coleridge and Wordsworth wrote about him, so there’s evidence. He’d disappear from one location, then turn up thousands of miles away in a year or so, but he always traveled on foot. He claimed that the atoms in your body could dissolve in one place and re-form in another, or something like that.”

  Uncle Jim leaned forward. “Wait a minute,” he said. “This business about the atoms. Is that where Flann O’Brien got the idea about the Irishman and his bicycle?”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “Flann O’Brien?” A bewildered Ari glanced at Aunt Eileen. “Another relative?”

  “No, dear,” Eileen said. “A novelist, and that’s just his pen name, a very strange novelist who wrote a book called The Third Policeman.”

  “What is it, a murder mystery?”

  Since Aunt Eileen had taken a bite of salad, I answered for her. “Sort of, but a comic take on one, and a lot weirder than usual. The narrator has this idea that over the years an Irishman and his bicycle exchange so many atoms that one becomes part of the other.”

  Ari stared at me. “A novelist,” he said eventually. “No wonder I don’t read fiction.”

  Uncle Jim’s face turned pink from suppressed laughter. He made a great show of cutting his massive chunk of pot roast into tidy slices. Michael pushed back his chair and stood up.

  “I’m going to write this down, okay?” he said to Aunt Eileen. “I’ll be right back. Walking Stewart and then the writer guy.”

  “The book’s in your uncle’s den,” Aunt Eileen said. “Remind me later, and I’ll dig it out for you.”

  “I will, Aunt E. Thanks. Seriously.”

  Michael hurried up the staircase to the upper floor and his bedroom. Aunt Eileen watched him go with a slight smile.

  “Anything to get them to read,” she murmured in my direction.

  “That ‘them’ means me as well as the boys,” Uncle Jim said. “But I got to admit, I enjoyed that Third Policeman book, even if O’Brien was a Unionist.” He glanced at Ari. “I’m betting you know what that means, working for the outfit you do and all.”

  “Oh, yes,” Ari said. “Interpol does keep an eye on some aspects of the Irish situation.”

  I felt a sudden nag of premonitory fear. Aunt Eileen raised an eyebrow and lowered it again—quickly.

  “There are some potatoes left,” she said. “Brian, Ari, what about finishing them up?”

  “Thank you, but I’ve had more than enough,” Ari said. “Everything was very good.”

  Brian grabbed the serving spoon and loaded potatoes onto his plate. Gravy followed in profusion.

  “Basketball practice again today?” I said to him.

  “Yeah, it makes you kind of hungry.” Brian’s voice became solicitous as he continued, “Nola, you sure you don’t want that last potato? And there’s some beef left.”

  “What is this?” I managed a smile. “A conspiracy to make me eat?”

  “More of a unified effort, dear,” Aunt Eileen said.

  I debated. If submitting to a lecture on my supposed eating disorder would keep the conversation away from the family secrets, Irish Politics Division, the annoyance would be worth it.

  “I really do eat more than you all think I do.” I allowed a slight surly tone to creep into my voice. “It’s not like I’m starving to death.”

  “No,” Ari said. “You just look like you are.”

  “Good point.” Uncle Jim waved his fork in Ari’s general direction. “You tell her.”

  “He does,” I snapped. “Constantly.”

  Aunt Eileen gave Ari a beaming smile of approval. “This all started when Nola was a teenager,” she began.

  “Well, hey,” I broke in before she could make the inevitable segue to my father’s disappearance, an event that everyone in my family blamed for every single thing that ever went wrong ever after. “I was such a fat kid.”

  “No, you weren’t,” Uncle Jim said.

  “He’s right,” Aunt Eileen said. “You were a perfectly normal size for your age. It’s your wretched mother who started in on you because you weren’t really thin, just normal.”

  “Ah,” Ari murmured. “The dragon.”

  Brian suppressed a chortle and dropped his fork onto the floor. I welcomed the distraction. Unfortunately, it didn’t last.

  “I should get out a photo album,” Aunt Eileen said to Ari. “And show you Nola’s high school pictures.”

  “Please don’t.” The sound of my voice shocked me: a small desperate plea that threatened tears. I grabbed my water glass and drank. Everyone stared at me.

  “All right, dear, I won’t.” Aunt Eileen stood up. “Everyone who’s done hand me their plates. Nola, would you get the glass dessert plates down from the cupboard? You’re taller than me, and I can’t quite reach them.”

  Dessert turned out to be one of Eileen’s irresistibles, as I called her fancy desserts, a chocolate cream pie in this case. Mike came back downstairs just as we were serving. He’d always had a good nose for chocolate in any shape or form. I took a slender slice to quell talk of my supposed disorder.

  When everyone had finished dessert, the boys cleared the table under Uncle Jim’s direction, not that they needed it, and began to load the dishwasher. Ari retrieved his sport coat from the back of the chair and brought something out of an inner pocket.

  “That lining’s torn,” Aunt Eileen said. “I can fix it for you while you’re here.”

  “Would you?” Ari said. “Thank you.” He handed her an oblong white box. “I picked this up for you.”

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a successful gift. As soon as Aunt Eileen realized that the rosary came direct from the Holy Land, she oohed and aahed and grinned until everyone had to smile with her. Ari relaxed. He even let Uncle Jim pour him a splash of whiskey and soda. I was oddly conscious of that gun he carried, especially when Aunt Eileen began mending his jacket for him. It set him apart, although no one but me knew about it.

  I found myself remembering a long string of family dinners for various birthdays or anniversaries or holidays—heartwarming, perfectly normal family dinners except of course they were being given and attended by O’Gradys and O’Briens, none of us what you’d call normal, all of us set apart, too. We’d all learned to hide young, and so had Ari. In a way, I thought, we all li
ved on our very own deviant world level. It was not a happy thought.

  When the time came to leave, Michael walked with us to the front door.

  “Something I wanted to ask you,” Michael said to me. “When are you going to get a real cell phone?”

  “What’s wrong with the one I have?” I said.

  “It can’t text. Epic fail!”

  “Sorry, but I don’t text. There’s no way to secure those messages, because they all end up stored on a server somewhere. The Agency strictly forbids them.”

  Michael glanced at Ari, who nodded a confirmation. I’ll admit to feeling annoyed that my pup of a brother doubted my information, but I decided that the slight was too slight, as it were, to argue over.

  On the way home, while I drove, we discussed what we’d learned from our various conversations. I told Ari about the bothersome Caleb, and he told me about his conversation with Michael concerning Lisa, his girlfriend in the deviant level. She saw Mike as the best thing to ever come her way, an accurate observation considering the profession she’d been forced into.

  “She never said this outright,” Ari said, “but Mike got the impression that she was hoping he’d take her away, into his world.”

  “I can’t say I’d blame her for wanting to leave hers.”

  “No more can I, but it’s not possible, is it? For any length of time, I mean. What if she were involved in some sort of an accident? Would she heal up properly?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea. I’ll have to ask NumbersGrrl. If anyone knows, which I doubt, it’ll be her.”

  “Good. Do ask. Now here’s the interesting bit. At some point in these conversations, Lisa said something along the lines of ‘other people have gotten out of here permanently.’ When he asked her what she meant, she changed the subject. She seemed frightened, as if she’d made some kind of slip.”

  “Very interesting, for sure! I wonder if Michael can find out more? He might as well do something useful, since there’s no way we can stop him from going there.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s true. I didn’t even bother to ask him to stay away from that level. I don’t want to make him start lying to me.” Ari paused, staring out the windshield as we came down the sweeping curves by Laguna Honda. “I did raise the subject of marijuana. Michael handed his supply over to me, and he promised me he’d stay clean from now on.”

  “Good,” I said, “and thank you. What about Brian?”

  “He and Michael solemnly swore that Brian had never smoked any. Brian’s afraid it would interfere with his athletics. Breathing hot smoke and all that.”

  “It would, yeah. What are you going to do with the stash now that you’ve got it?”

  “Put it down the garbage disposal.”

  “That should get rid of it.” A premonition crept over me. “Although I have this feeling it could come in handy, somehow. Not to smoke, don’t worry. To bargain with or something.”

  “I don’t want contraband in our apartment.”

  “How much is it?”

  “No more than half an ounce.”

  “Nothing to worry about. The San Francisco police won’t even bother anyone over that amount. Look, am I ever wrong about stuff like this?”

  “No.” The word squeezed out of grudging lips. “But hide it, will you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. I have a question. I was thinking about the dinner conversation. That sofa your aunt has in the lounge. Isn’t it a bit odd that it’s orange?”

  “She got it on sale, and she’s an American.” I nearly slipped up and added: in our family, we leave Irish politics to the men. Instead, I said, “If I remember correctly, the orange color wasn’t moving, so the furniture guy knocked three hundred bucks off.”

  “That’s a nice amount, yes.”

  Once we got back to the apartment, Ari handed me a plastic bag containing my brother’s attempt at rebellion, enough cheap shake for maybe four joints. I tucked it under a pile of sweaters in the middle drawer of my dresser. As I was shutting the drawer, I noticed a blue cardboard box, roughly two inches thick and five long, lying on the top of the dresser. I sketched a quick Chaos ward, which had no effect on the box at all. I felt no SAWM concerning it, but since I’d never seen it before, I decided against touching it.

  “Ari?” I said. “Would you come take a look at this?”

  He walked into the bedroom and considered the box. “Oh,” he said. “That.”

  “Yeah. That. Do you know what it is?”

  “Yes. Perfectly harmless.”

  “It’s one of your devices?”

  “No.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Well.” He looked away. “Actually, it’s for you. Um, I got it for you, and then I thought you might be offended, so, well, I put it there.”

  At that point, I realized he was embarrassed. Yes, it was slow of me, but I’d never thought of him as capable of embarrassment.

  “Offended?” I said. “Why?”

  “Because it’s a gift. I didn’t know if you’d take a gift from me.”

  He shoved his hands in the pockets of his slacks and looked at me with his head tilted a little back. My first impulse was to say, “No, I won’t,” but luckily my second impulse was to think, “you bitch!”—so I shut up. He’d brought a gift for the woman he was sleeping with. What was wrong with that? Why did I want to hand it back to him with a sour remark? The moment stretched to a cold, nasty interval while I dithered.

  “Sorry.” Ari reached for the box. “I’ll just put it away.”

  I reached out and caught his wrist. “No, don’t,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m being rude. I don’t know what’s wrong with me sometimes.”

  He hesitated, then said with a perfectly straight face, “At times I’ve found myself wondering the same thing.”

  “You bastard!”

  He grinned, his normal, no-tigers-need-apply smile, and handed me the box. I opened it, peeled off the thick layer of cotton packing, and felt myself smile, too.

  “This is really beautiful,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “This” was a pin in the shape of an olive branch in full leaf made of beaten gold, as soft and silky as only real gold can be. When I took it out, the leaves rustled, barely audible. I held it up against the rust sweater I was wearing, not a successful match.

  “It’ll look really good on the teal sweater,” I said, “or the dark blue blouse.”

  Since he’d moved to stand behind me, I could see his reflection, smiling in relief more than pleasure. As I put the pin back into the box for safekeeping, I remembered Venus’ advice that I needed a better mirror. I realized I did look a little gaunt in the bright light of the floor lamp.

  “We could go out for breakfast tomorrow,” I said, “if you want.”

  Ari slipped his arms around my waist and kissed the side of my neck.

  “Good idea,” he said. “So I’d better make sure you work up an appetite.”

  Being so thin had one big advantage. He could pick me up and carry me to bed.

  In the morning we did go out to eat, but since both of us had work to do, we hurried back to the apartment. Ari took his twin leather cases of devices into the bedroom and shut the door to do something mysterious. Occasionally I could hear him talking on the phone, but always in Hebrew. I fired up my computer system and logged on to the Internet.

  I had a set of news links that I surfed every day, because they specialized in local “human interest” stories. Now and then, hints of Chaos activity appeared in this welter of trivia, the kind of incidents you’d never find in the major television and paper news sources. Several of these sites reported on the rogue wave at Ocean Beach. As I’d intuited, the young girl had drowned.

  “That makes me sick,” I said to Ari later. “She was only twelve, just starting her life.”

  “Very sad, yes. Accidents will happen.”

  “It wasn’t any accident.”

  “Oh? But I don’t suppose tha
t Satan had anything to do with it. Or are you going to tell me that Satan actually exists?”

  “No.” I managed to smile at that. “There are Chaos forces that have been personified as Satan, but there’s no guy with the horns and the tail.”

  “Always nice to know. But you did get a feeling of agency, if I remember correctly.”

  “Yeah, but I’ll bet that the agent was some human being, fooling around with stuff they didn’t understand. That’s the trouble with Chaos forces. They’re chaotic. Which means they’re really hard to control, especially by people who are kind of unbalanced to begin with.”

  “Who else would want to play with them?” Ari said. “I really don’t understand this talk of Chaotics. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Of course it’s not going to make sense.”

  “But what do these people want? They must have goals.”

  “Their goal is pretty much to keep from making sense.”

  Ari started to say something, then scowled at me.

  “Well, what do you think Chaos is?” I went on. “When you talk about making sense, you’re talking about finding a pattern to their actions, some kind of organized activities, right, leading somewhere?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “That all falls under the heading of Order. Chaos exists to keep the principles of Order from forming that kind of pattern. Pattern and Order lock out new possibilities. Chaos releases the energy that makes possibilities—” Here I got stuck for a moment. “Makes new possibilities possible, I guess it is. A world dominated by Order would be dead, sterile, with everything locked into place once and for all. A world dominated by Chaos would be a madhouse, with lots of energy flowing around to no good ends whatsoever. That’s why I serve Harmony, that elusive balance point.”

  “Definitely a good cause, of course. I suppose that’s enough to get on with.”

  I returned to my computer. I brought up my notes on the Sea Cliff coven, as I was thinking of it. I’d spotted only seven members at the one ritual I’d seen. With three of them dead, the job of tracking down the others should have been easier, but I’d not picked up any traces of them during the past weeks. I did have one line of inquiry that I’d never followed up, because it required the help of the San Francisco police force. Now that Ari had returned and could reestablish his link with the long-suffering Detective Lieutenant Sanchez, I could pick up that loose end.