Good Guys

by Steven Brust

  The motion was passed by acclaim.

  * * *

  To Marci the grid lines were an instrument; she played them that way. Each line had its own vibration, its own tone. She would give herself to the line so that she could take from it, shape it into something beautiful; the final effect was merely an afterthought. It wasn’t about the result; it was about the process—working the lines, the patterns, shaping them, exploring them; testing her abilities, filled her with a euphoria like nothing else. What could she do with magic? The question was more what couldn’t she do, because that question led her to try things, to fall into it until she felt she wasn’t so much an actor as a conduit between the power she touched and the matter she manipulated. It was a problem in three-dimensional mathematics, where the numbers were tangible and the operations excited the sensations. Marci didn’t practice meditation, or, really, know anything about it; but when she heard about the serene joy of vanishing into one’s own head, she thought she might understand just a little of what that must be like. What can you do with magic was, at this point, not even the question.

  “What can you do with magic?” she’d asked Sam, one of her instructors, years ago, at the beginning of her training.

  “What can I do?”

  “No, no. You know, I mean—”

  “What can be done with magic?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anything that can be done without it, and nothing that can’t be done at all.”

  They were in one of the large practice rooms. It had a high unfinished ceiling and concrete walls. There was a rectangular table with three chairs to one side, where judges sat when someone was being tested, but it was unoccupied. The room felt more than anything like a gymnasium with the bleachers and basketball hoops removed—it even had the same echoes. All it needed was the musky smell of locker room instead of the faint antiseptic smell and she’d have been convinced she was back in high school. Marci had been assured that there were spells all around it to make sure none of the students could do any damage to anything past the metal doors.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “What can be done with muscle? With brain? With muscle and brain working together, along with the materials the Earth provides?”

  “Well, anything, I guess. I mean, anything that, uh, that doesn’t violate natural law. Depending on, you know.”

  “Depending on what, Marci?”

  “Well, on how much muscle, how much brain, what kind of materials.”

  “Well, there you go. The grid lines and points and nodes provide the muscle; the skill of the user provides the brains. The materials you have to find, but they’re all around you, and can often be transformed into something else.”

  She caught herself playing with her hair, and stopped. “Transformed?”

  “The technical term is ‘transmutation.’”

  “Like, lead into gold?”

  “That would be atomic level, not molecular. There have been a couple people able to do that, but it’s a fluke talent. And even for them it was slow and hard. How are you on physics and chemistry?”

  “A little. I have the math background, but haven’t actually studied them much.”

  Sam sat on the floor, cross-legged. Marci sat down facing him.

  “You’ll need to learn more,” said Sam.

  “I need physics and chemistry to be a sorcerer? That’s—”

  “Not ‘need,’ exactly. But the more you understand how things work, the easier it is to manipulate them.”

  Marci put her elbows on her knees, rested her chin in her hands. “So then, the more I understand natural laws, the better I can violate them?”

  “Actually, that isn’t a bad way to think about it, for now. Of course, there’s a lot more than knowledge that determines what comes easy, what comes hard, and what’s impossible for you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Do you sing?”

  “You know I’m tone-deaf.”

  Sam nodded. “And no matter how much you studied the techniques, you probably still wouldn’t be very good at it.”

  “So there’s talent involved.”

  “Yes. A mix of talent and knowledge and willpower.”

  “How much of each?”

  “It varies with each person.”

  Marci started tracing circles on the floor with her finger as she worked on that. Sam let her think. After a moment, she said, “So, then, you’re saying that underneath it all, natural law is still natural law.”

  “Yes.” He looked at her. “Are you starting to understand?”

  “Sort of. Can you give me an example? Something practical.”

  “All right. Suppose someone is shooting at you.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  Sam’s lips twitched. “Work with me, Marci.”

  “All right.”

  “If you had some stone, and some stone-shaping tools, and the muscle and skill to build a wall, you could build one that bullets couldn’t get past, right?”

  “It’d take a while.”

  “Yes it would. My point is, magic can do the same thing, only faster. And with the added advantage of it being invisible, so the shooter will freak out a bit.”

  “Faster than a bullet?”

  “Well, it’s best to have the shield up before someone starts shooting.”

  “It’s best if no one starts shooting.”

  “Well, yes. That is its own skill. To manipulate the will, the feelings, the emotions, of another.”

  “That seems kind of…” She fell silent.

  “Morally dubious?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It is. One difference between us and the Mystici is that, as a rule, we don’t hold with that. We feel it is a violation, and only to be used in an extremity, or in the case of a subtle effect we are certain will do no lasting harm.”

  “And they don’t agree?”

  Sam frowned, as if looking for words. “It isn’t that, as much as it is they don’t think it’s their business to tell anyone what’s right and what’s wrong.”

  “Okay. How about immortality?”

  “No.”

  “Extended life?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Certain diseases we can cure, others not; some we’re working on. But in general, magic can’t be used to extend life, but we can do better than that.”

  “Oh? I can’t wait to hear this.”

  “There is a spell—a very recent one, perfected by the Eggheads—that causes organs to fail all at the same time, within two or three weeks.”

  “Wait. How is that—”

  “You don’t understand—you can’t understand, yet, and really, neither can I. But one of the worst aspects of growing old is how you grow old in pieces—eyes, memory, kidneys, who knows? The spell ties all of your major organs together, so you remain, in all important ways, young, until your body fails and you die.”

  “That doesn’t sound all that good.”

  “Not to me, either, but I’m only forty. I’m assured that someday it will.”

  “All right. I’m more interested in that shield spell. Can you teach it to me?”

  “A shield spell? Why? Planning to join I and E? I’d figured you for research.”

  “No, it isn’t that; it’s just, I don’t know.” Who would not want to know how to do a spell that could stop bullets? I mean, it wasn’t as cool making lightning shoot from your fingertips, but she didn’t have the nerve to ask for that. Yet. “I just figured it’d be a good example,” she finished.

  “Sure,” said Sam. “We can do that. It won’t work if you’re on water, though. Or, at least, without adding a spell to freeze the water first. But dirt will work, sidewalk, most floors.”

  “Show me!”

  “All right.” Sam stood up, Marci did the same. Sam reached out to the empty air with his hands, fingers moving like he was playing an invisible piano. “We’ll use the floor here. Now, to start, touch
the node and feel your way into the floor. Eight or ten inches should do it.…”

  * * *

  Manuel Becker left work every day, including Saturday, at 8:01 PM CET, having shifted his schedule somewhat to accommodate his North American contacts, and took the bus across the river, then walked to his home on Calle Juan Pérez Almeida. It was a good ten-minute walk—actually a bit more, as he usually stopped for groceries—and one he took every day, regardless of weather. He didn’t own an umbrella, so when it rained he got wet.

  During the bus ride, he always thought about grid lines, and points, and nodes; he couldn’t keep himself from wondering if he was crossing any. Once he would have been able to feel them. Now he refused to look at the maps on which they were marked, but he couldn’t stop himself wondering. This was why he preferred not to travel. What he did not think about was work. If there were an emergency, he’d be informed; if not, he would think about it again tomorrow morning.

  He arrived home and removed his coat, his tie, and his shoes and socks. Walking around barefoot comforted him. Then he put on music—today it was Strauss’s Horn Concerto No. 1 in E flat Major, Opus 11, performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra, Galliera conducting, Dennis Brain as soloist, because it had been a difficult and vexing day; he wanted something triumphant. He sat in his favorite chair and did nothing except listen until the end—the touch of hunting horn and the strings coming in leaving the piece not so much unresolved as hinting that the story went on.

  He got up then and made dinner: chicken paella, accompanied by brown rice with lemon, followed by leche frita. Like so many Englishmen living in Spain, he’d become more Spanish than the Spaniards he knew, so many of whom had become Anglophiles. But after all, Spanish food was better. He ate like he’d listened to the music: with his full attention. When he was done, he put the leftovers away for tomorrow’s lunch, then washed the dishes, wiped the table and the sink, and sat down at his computer, where he worked on a jigsaw puzzle, this one a picture of the Himalayas. He had the border pieces done, and a lot of the obvious sections, so he was at a slow point. After exactly forty-five minutes he closed the puzzle, checked his email, deleted some spam, and shut down the computer.

  He spent an hour with a novel by Julio Llamazares, then put it down, marking his place with a bookmark from La Fugitiva.

  Then he went into his room and pulled open a drawer of his bedside table, removing an old and beaten folder that contained the notes he’d made in his efforts to perfect a spell to create a technical-magical interface for prosthetic limbs. He read over the notes until the tears came, then put the folder away.

  He took off his shirt, knelt beside the bed, took the flogger from the bedside table, and whipped himself until he was ready to sleep.

  6

  CHI-TOWN

  Margaret Laurel “Peggy” Hanson was born in 1983 in Nashville, Tennessee, where she attended public school, graduating from John Overton Comp in 2001. She studied archaeology at Belmont University until her junior year, when she received an email signed: “Julia Ramirez.” A week later, Peggy dropped out of the university and, to the amazement of her friends and family, and with little explanation other than “a good offer,” she moved to Madrid, Spain, and started work in March of 2005. Her work, for the first four years, included a lot of education; the Foundation helped her get her degree, and paid for a great deal of post-graduate study; that may have been what sold her. It wasn’t until 2009 that she actually became a full-time researcher.

  Peggy spent a lot of her time on the Internet, and much of the rest of it at the Biblioteca Nacional de España. The research librarians there knew her, and liked her, and would sometimes call her if they came across something they thought she might be interested in. They didn’t really know what she was interested in, but Peggy appreciated the effort.

  She read the American Journal of Archaeology cover to cover, and every paper the Society for Historical Archaeology published. She would use satellite photos to study sites and compare them to reports. She corresponded with curators of museums throughout the world, and studied the pictures they sent her with a magnifying glass. Oh, and history, especially Central European history from 1100 to 1350? Don’t even talk about it. She spoke and read eleven languages, only five of them in contemporary use, and she could find the one unusual fact in a nine-hundred-year-old document like no one else at the Foundation. It was tedious and repetitive and she loved it like she loved her cat, and considerably more than she loved her boyfriend, who kept insisting she learn to dance.

  Her unstated and even unconsidered basic axiom was nothing can happen without leaving traces. It was her job to find the trace and deduce what had happened. Or, to put it another way (which she never did), she was a storyteller, building a tale out of hints and pieces and bits of dialog left behind by a non-existent author.

  She had discovered previously unknown artifacts—items that a sorcerer in the past had imbued with a spell, set to be triggered by anyone who knew the correct phrase or gesture—five times in six years. It was an astonishing record. In three of those cases, the team had been able to deduce the word or gesture required, which was even more remarkable.

  Most of the time, she worked in an almost meditative state—no rush, no urgency. The goal was never to find something in the paper or the document or the picture; the goal was to absorb it, to understand it thoroughly—so thoroughly that anything interesting just sort of leapt out at her. Deep down, she couldn’t understand how anyone else could miss something—it was right there, plain as day.

  She was also, quite naturally, pleasant to work with. She liked the environment of the office when she was there, and she liked her co-workers, and the very fact that she concentrated so fully made her easily interruptible: She could break off from her reading and share a joke, or hear who in the office had just broken up with whom (James was best for that—he heard everything first), and then get right back to where she was without so much as a ripple on the wide, calm lake of her concentration. Weather permitting, she took long lunches on the Paseo del Prado, sitting beneath the trees.

  But then, when she did hit something—when a couple of random facts came together to fill her with the conviction that there was something there—everything changed: She’d lean closer to the papers, or to the computer. Her eyes would narrow. Her lips would part. Her teeth would clench just a little.

  Her co-workers would look at each other and say, “Peggy’s on the scent,” and stop talking to her. Even Julia would keep her distance. From then on, they’d just bring her tea with lemon in paper cups and leave sweet rolls and mantecados on her desk like offerings at a shrine. She’d eat them—and her lunch—slowly and mechanically, without ever looking at the food. Once she’d bit into a hard-boiled egg she’d packed herself without realizing it was unpeeled. That pulled her out of her work and made her so angry she glared at it as if it had made an improper suggestion and threw it across the office. No one said anything.

  When she was in that state, she was the last one to leave the office, and the first one in, and she would pull all-nighters as often as not. Whereas she was usually deferential in asking favors from co-workers, when she got like this she’d snap, “Molly. Find the paper on the Turkish site 8 AG 227. Look up everything that dates between 1230 and 1280,” and Molly would be off to do it as if Peggy were Camellia Morgan herself.

  In the past, this stage had lasted between three and eight days. This time, it lasted four days, twenty-one hours, and seven minutes, at the end of which time she suddenly sat back in her chair, blinked, smiled, and looked over at the desk next to her. “Hey, Herberto. How is your dog?”

  “Fine, Peggy. It was just a cyst.”

  “Good,” she said, and nodded. Then her head rocked back and she fell asleep.

  * * *

  The East Coast felt different. Things were closer together, the streets were narrower and straighter, and the style of houses was all wrong. But it took a few minutes of just walking down the stree
t to make Matt realize it wasn’t any of those things so much as it was the mix—industry with houses with apartments with warehouses with stores with motels, and railroad tracks and bridges that seemed to come out of nowhere for no reason and go in random directions. There was something fundamentally untidy about it. He was most surprised, after walking a mile or so, to discover that he liked it—there was an odd sense of belonging, as if some part of him had always lived here.

  Magic? he wondered. And, No, he decided. Too bad, though. It’d be pretty cool to cast spells and shit. This immediately brought up the question of whether he believed what he’d been told, and, if he didn’t, how to explain what Marci had done to his throat, the strange transport, and the way he’d been confined to the chair with no rope or chain. He had no answer to any of this, so he put it out of his mind with the same effortless efficiency he’d learned in training—if you can’t control what your mind is doing, you can’t control what your body is doing.

  The training. That’s what civilians could never understand. Basic training gave you an experience you’d carry with you all your life, and advanced training taught you things you’d never forget. But SF training made you a different person. Whatever happened afterward, whatever you did, you were someone who had gone through that, been molded by that, been turned into a strange hybrid of who you were before, and the machine SF training made you.

  That thought came to him on the chilly New Jersey street, and he pushed it out of his mind, too. He had other things he needed to think about, like where he was going to spend the night, how to raise enough money to stay there, and, what felt more urgent (even if it clearly wasn’t), who had hired him, and why, and what to do about it all.

  He had done things, had Matt. He hadn’t divided the world into good guys and bad guys since he was eight—even when using those exact terms in planning an op. He knew very well his eight-year-old self wouldn’t be pleased with the things he’d done, and he also knew that, no, really, honestly, in the real world things were more complicated than his eight-year-old self thought they were. That might be an excuse, but it was also just the plain truth, dammit.