by Myers, Karen
George’s god-granted skill with the ways was what let him understand them directly, since they were very like ways themselves, and Cernunnos was a master of ways.
*Granite Cloud is well. She stays closer to home now. She enjoys talking to Maelgwn when he contacts her.*
George put the thought of Cernunnos aside. I can well imagine, he told her. Please tell her “hi” from Maelgwn and me.
Maelgwn had been Cloudie’s companion in captivity, in Madog’s domain beyond the Blue Ridge. They had all rescued each other, after a fashion, and in the end Seething Magma had executed Madog and saved George’s life.
Mariah came through the door with a lunch tray carrying a couple of BLTs and some brownies, and a soft-sided small cooler holding beer and bottled water was slung over her shoulder. “I remembered that you liked these.”
George took the tray out of her hand. “No tomatoes over there at all,” he said, “and a bacon and greens sandwich would seem very strange to them. These will hit the spot.”
“Your computer’s over there,” she said, pointing to the end of the table nearest them. “You’ll have to share.” The sideways glance made it clear she was joking, but he put the tray down where she indicated and laid the saddle bag next to it.
“So, how long have you known our new friends?”
“Since Gwyn came and asked my advice about housing them,” she said. “He helped pick out a location and, once we got the building up, he came back and just stood there at the far end. And Seething Magma appeared. It was unnerving, but they’ve been very polite guests.”
Mag added her own commentary. *Gwyn was my focus for precision. Not as easy as using you but the distance was very short.*
“I never felt the other end at Greenway Court.” George spoke out loud for the benefit of Mariah, and Mag answered the same way, in her low, rumbling, alien voice.
“It begins underground, like the way to the Academy. Shall we call this Academy East, as you suggested?”
“I was joking,” he said, “but sure, why not?”
A thought struck him, and he asked Mariah, “Have you been warned not to touch them?”
“Why not? It hasn’t been a problem.”
Well, that answered one of his old questions. Crossing a non-traveling way, a way like an invisible tunnel above ground, was very painful for the fae and the other dwellers in Annwn. It was one such way that had made a barrier around Edgewood, with debilitating impact upon the inhabitants. The touch of a rock-wight had the same effect. George was immune, and he had wondered what other humans felt. He had a theory that creatures of no magic, like humans and animals would not suffer at all, compared to the magic-touched, and that creatures closer to Cernunnos, like his first generation hounds and even himself, would also be spared.
“Good to know,” he told her. “It’s painful for the fae but not, apparently, for humans.”
He gestured at the building shell surrounding them. “What have you told your neighbors about this place? I’m sure there’re no secrets around here.”
She opened the cooler for him and he grabbed a beer.
“I let them know it’s for farm equipment, of course,” she said. “That’s even true. And none of them will be coming inside.”
“No windows, I see. Were those motion detectors I saw outside?”
“Yes, and cameras. It’s gotten very high-tech inside the house.”
“What will you tell your son?” he asked.
That silenced her for a moment. “That’s the hard part,” Mariah said. “I’m going to have to tell him the building’s off-limits next time he comes, but I don’t see how I can keep him from suspecting something. I was thinking of telling him that some of the furniture and papers from the main house are being stored here, and the insurance requires that no one besides me is allowed to deal with them. I think that’s marginally plausible.”
George paused a moment. “Are you ever going to tell him?”
“About Gwyn, you mean, and all of this?” She waved a hand at the interested rock-wights. “I don’t know. Maybe not, if he moves away after the Marines. But if he wants to stay in the area, maybe marry and settle down… I’d like to have him follow me. He’s sensible, practical. I’d like to share this with him.”
George smiled in sympathy, and she sighed. “We’ll see. It’s not time for that yet.”
“Well,” George said, “I think you’ve done a great job setting this up. It won’t pull a lot of power to make it stand out, not like some illegal grow-shed, just computers and lights, and a bit of heat and A/C, and the trees keep it well sheltered.”
“No plumbing, though. You’ll have to come to the house for that.” She looked at George, who was still uneasy. “What are you worried about?”
“I’m afraid of some database noticing an unexplained sustained increase in power usage. I’m afraid of some NSA hotshot ordering a satellite sweep and looking for heat signatures.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know what I’m afraid of, I just don’t want them found. I don’t want the human world colliding with Annwn. I don’t think anything good would come of that.”
She shrugged. “You’re probably right. Not my call, happily.” She pointed to a wireless phone sitting in a cradle with some phone numbers taped on the table alongside it. “Call if you need anything.”
She let herself out through the partition door.
George pulled over a wheeled office chair, and plopped down in it to start his lunch. How convenient these chairs were, and how comfortable, compared to the hard chairs and non-sprung surfaces so common in his new home.
He turned his attention back to Seething Magma and her sister as he picked up half of the first sandwich. “So, who taught you how to use the internet?”
CHAPTER 7
The crunch of breaking plastic caught George’s attention, and he took his eyes off his screen to look over at Seething Magma and Ash Tremor at their own computers. The tables were just a human convenience—each rock-wight adjusted her form to make manipulation of the keyboard and mouse convenient and neither needed a chair. Their senses were diffused around their bodies, and George had been wondering how well they could see the screens, but they didn’t seem to have any difficulty.
Now he understood why Mariah had set them up with monitors and keyboards rather than simple laptops. Ash Tremor’s keyboard had shattered and her pseudopods were frozen over it in a moment of embarrassment.
George smothered a smile and walked over to the supplies stashed on the shelves along the walls. The presence of several keyboards next to the stacks of paper made sense now. Apparently the keyboards were consumables, too.
“Need any help switching to a new one?” he asked, as he brought it over to Ash Tremor.
*Thank you, but I have mastered the technique.*
Her younger sister commented. *And you’ve had reason to learn.*
This time George couldn’t keep the grin off his face. “Got carried away by something on the internet?”
*A dispute over the impact of an asteroid thirteen thousand years ago, on this continent. None of you humans who are writing were alive then, but you’ve pulled evidence from sediments in ice and water.*
He nodded encouragingly.
*I remember it well, we both do. The paper I was reading says the location is unknown.*
Ash Tremor paused. *We know where it happened.*
“Ah, I see. And you wanted to tell someone, but there wouldn’t be any way to explain how you knew, without revealing yourself. Frustrating.”
*And they also think it caused all the large animal deaths in this land. But that’s not true, they’re still alive.*
“Not in the human world. Nothing’s ever that simple, but whenever there’s a new idea, someone wants to make it the one and only cause. It’s a curse of how we operate, simplifying reality to understand it better.” He snorted. “We don’t have time for nuance when we’re running away from the lion.” He pictured the imaginary scene for them, c
omplete with caveman-in-bearskins, for their amusement.
*Priorities. Yes, I understand. But these scientists, they’re not running away from asteroids.*
George appreciated the joke. This was a collision of worlds in more ways than one. “Indeed, or at least they wouldn’t get very far.” He wondered for a moment. If external events like asteroid impacts were the same in both worlds, what about land-shaping events that were man-made? Surely an open-pit mine from the human world wasn’t duplicated mysteriously among the fae. What made the difference?
He watched her unwrap the new keyboard and discard the pieces of the old one very dexterously into a wastebasket.
“Have you done anything but read on the internet, so far?”
Seething Magma explained. *Mariah showed us how to create a presence and give it a name, so we can ask simple questions.*
Avatars, he thought, and anonymous ids. “So, you’re talking to other people?”
Mag said, *Very carefully. They don’t know who we are.*
Ash Tremor added, *I have tried to ask these… professors for more detail, but they say they’re busy. I’m not an official student. I can’t tell them who I am or why I’m interested.*
George was alarmed by the obvious yearning in her thoughts. “I have to say it again, it’s very important that the humans not know about you or about the otherworld. There would be a tremendous shock on both sides. Deaths. It may be that it can’t be prevented but a thoughtless accidental revelation would certainly be disastrous.”
*We understand.* Mag shifted restlessly. *We have several different personas, for different fields of study—mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology.*
“But you have no standing, I know. Be patient, we’ll work something out.”
He envisioned truck-sized Seething Magma at the back of a university classroom, raising a pseudopod to ask a question and shook his head to dispel the image.
He changed the topic. “What does Gravel think of all of this?”
Ash Tremor told him. *She can’t fit in here, but it was her decision once she got the idea from you. She wanted to take advantage of this road to knowledge, and so she bargained with Gwyn. Access for a few of us here, paid for by way-building by the ones attending. A good trade for both of us.*
Mag added, *Gwyn liked it immediately but we haven’t built many ways yet. He’s been busy with maps.*
“Yes, I saw.” George was surprised Gwyn understood enough about the internet and email. I’ll have to ask Mariah about that, he thought.
*We’ve started to order some books.* She gestured at the long shelves, which held perhaps a couple hundred books.
“I’m surprised there aren’t more,” he said.
*When we’ve read them, we bring them to the Academy for everyone.*
Ah, and they’re paying for that with way-creation work. No wonder that Rhodri is so eager to push Maelgwn’s way-training along. He must expect to be buried in way-token requests. I wonder… if the other end comes out underground, maybe more of the setup could be moved back to their world, out of reach of this one.
“You know, I can’t think of any way to get you internet access at home, inside the mountains or at the Academy, but you could use computers there, if you really want to. Even without electricity, you could use batteries and recharge them here. Or we could put a generator together and run it for you, bringing fuel for it from the human world.”
*I will tell our mother Gravel about the choices, but coming here is easy enough.* George heard the puzzlement in Mag’s reply.
“Yes, but I’m worried you’ll be seen. It looks like Mariah’s done everything possible here but still…”
He frowned. “Don’t ever go outside. Do you know about satellites?”
There was no response.
“Come watch,” he said, grimly. He spent the next half hour online giving them a tour of satellite surveillance and internet privacy, or rather the lack thereof. He ended by showing them the very building they were in, by zeroing in on their location from satellite photos.
“This picture isn’t live,” he told them. “It was taken recently and the leaves on the trees make the building obscure. But a picture taken when the leaves are down, or live footage—this building would be quite visible.”
He rotated his chair to face both rock-wights. “The only protection, really, is obscurity. Don’t bring yourselves to anyone’s attention. Don’t give anyone a reason to think you’re anything other than a couple of humans on the internet.”
He placed the palm of his hand on Mag’s nearest surface. “You don’t feel warm to me, but I wonder if you would show up on infrared photography, and if we should insulate the roof to shield the heat signature.”
He showed them what he meant with some online examples.
The sisters faced each other for what George assumed was private communication. He took a moment to consider how he knew, since they had no actual faces and could move in any direction, but he decided that they had a habit of clustering their temporary pseudopods where they needed them, and the cluster read to his mind as their “front.”
Mag turned her attention back to him. *It’s good that you are finally here, George. We have been wanting your advice.*
“Yes? Advice about what?”
*About the best way to go out and visit the human world.*
An hour or so later, George paused in his own research for a moment, unable to concentrate. He was still shaken by Mag’s request. He hadn’t foreseen it, and he felt like an idiot for the lapse. Of course they would want to see more, once they’d tasted it. He’d thought they’d be satisfied with passively seeing what the humans had discovered in the scientific fields close to their hearts and then developing their own advancements, but anyone would want to know more and every rock-wight he’d met was insatiably curious.
Mag had told him that Ash Tremor, her daughter Cavern Wind, and she had all volunteered to explore, and Gravel had appointed Mag for the first experiment. They’d been waiting on George’s opinion before taking it further, and he promised to give it to them in a few days.
He wanted to let the notion settle in first. Was there any way it could be done safely? He doubted he had the authority to just veto it. After all, the rock-wights had always had the ability to make ways to the human world—that’s where those passages came from—but none of them lived here, as far as Mag knew, so they had little reason to stay and explore since the land was the same. Perhaps if they needed its resources… but he gathered that whatever passed for mineral food with them was not in short supply.
No, it was primarily curiosity that drew them, and they were a very curious people. All of this human technology and scientific advancement had only taken a few hundred years and from their perspective that was the blink of an eye. He’d felt Mag’s excitement about wanting to join in.
He refocused on the task before him. No doubt Seething Magma was picking up his reaction to her unsettling announcement, but she politely refrained from commenting, giving him the illusion of privacy while he tried to work, the way Cernunnos did.
Cernunnos’s continued silence unsettled him. If his current research didn’t draw the god out in protest, he’d go home surprised.
He’s already exhausted the online resources in Wales and made a list of people he would have to contact directly. The newspaper accounts were too old to be online, and the police reports weren’t available, so Wales as a whole was something of a dead end for long-distance research. He’d have to set up some inquiries.
He’d done a worldwide search on the name “Conrad Traherne” and come up blank. What next?
He sat for a moment and pursed his lips, thinking. The fingers of his left hand played idly with Angharad’s charm. He pulled it away from his skin and watched its reflection appear in the shiny metal pencil holder next to his screen, the green cord and the small green wooden arrow which spun slowly once it was free. It pointed to Angharad, even though she was in the otherworld, doubtless work
ing in her impromptu studio. When he released the cord and the arrow touched the skin at his throat again, it vanished.
An idea occurred to him. Not all data was online, and search engines couldn’t get into all that was. Wales was very small. If his father had survived the accident that killed his mother, might he have emigrated? If so, where to?
Perhaps he went to England. George didn’t know where to look for those records, but he knew how to search US immigration and census data. Genealogy sites had put passenger lists online but, when he looked into it, he realized those were focused on ships and in the 1980s most travel would have been by air. Census records for that recent a period weren’t available either.
He needed a specialist. He changed his approach to finding someone who could help, a professional. He scanned in the newspaper clipping he’d brought with him and identified himself as someone wanting to track the death or present whereabouts of one Conrad Traherne. He didn’t have a birth date for him, and added that to the list of things he wanted to know—whatever vital records could be found.
He asked for price quotes and emailed the request to the Culpeper lawyer who handled his and Gwyn’s affairs, asking him to locate a suitable firm or agent and stressing urgency. He included a cautionary note—his father, if alive, had some reason to vanish. He might resist being found.
He leaned back in his chair after launching the email and pulled his pocket watch out to check the time, smiling fondly as he ran his thumb over the engraving of St. George and the Dragon on the surface. Two months ago, in Britain, Mag had been the horse to his St. George, to their mutual amusement.
When he put it away he glanced at his monitor and laughed softly. He’d fallen out of the habit of using computers, something he couldn’t have imagined happening a few months ago, and of course the time of day was visible there—no need for a watch. Angharad would expect him in an hour or two.
That gave him an idea. He started looking at baby name websites and wrote a few possibilities on a scrap of paper. Nothing caught his fancy, but it was time to talk about it with Angharad.
