by Emma Bull
“New Brighton, Hopkins, or Saint Louis Park,” Frances said.
“What?” said Theo and I, more or less in unison.
“Honeywell was building Darrieus turbines for the Army, to power mountain listening posts. The eggbeaters, right? Carbon fiber and plastic, and small, to avoid flyover detection. I can tell you where the plants were. Better yet, I can show you.”
I looked at Theo. “We’ve had an eggbeater turbine in the neighborhood all this time?”
“Somebody might have already hauled ’em away,” Theo said reluctantly.
“If we’d known about ’em, we would have. Can you make it work?”
“If we can find one,” he said. “If I can get it mounted… Sher, does it mess with the symbolism if I borrow some stuff from the Underbridge?”
“Hurrah for Tom Swift and his chums,” said Frances. “Now, what about Worecski?”
“I don’t know. That’s not my specialty.” I turned to Sher. “What do you use to contain a spirit?”
Sher thought about it. “A govi. A soul jar. People who think they’re under hoodoo attack have the houngan bottle their spirit and keep it safe for ’em. I think it’s bullshit.”
“Well, you know my views on the subject.”
She flushed. “Thanks.”
“No, my views are that I haven’t the faintest idea what’s going on, so I’ll try whatever anyone else thinks will work.”
“I don’t know if it’ll work. I don’t know if we have time to make one. Shit—”
I put out my hand and touched hers. “Oh, come on. Maybe I’ll be reincarnated.”
“I hope not,” she snapped, and stalked off across the town circle.
“I’d better get going,” said Theo. “I have to start gathering up gear. Can you spare Frances to help me hunt down the turbine?”
“Wait a minute,” I said, startled. “We haven’t—”
“Yeah, we have. Sher’s gone to do the research for her part. I have to go do mine. I mean, it sounds like we’re short on time.”
“Theo, if… Look, something’s going to go wrong. Maybe everything. You stand to lose a lot if any of the pieces fall on you. I think you should stay out of it.”
“I’ve already lost a lot.” His good-looking face had a set, hard look that I hoped wasn’t permanent. “I want a chance to get it back.”
“This may not be any chance at all.”
“You want to do it instead?”
He had me. And he knew it; I saw it in his eyes. “This is not The Magnificent Seven, Theo. This is real life.”
“Is it? You make it sound like A Fistful of Dollars. Go ahead. Tell me you’re gonna clean up the town single-handed.”
I had to drop my eyes from his. “I can’t. I don’t know how to be in two places at once.”
“So you need me to do the work in the Gilded West. Somebody’s got to, and I know how.”
Of course; it needed doing. Theo, who didn’t seem to have a religion, had always lived by the principles of this one.
“Just… ye gods, Theo, just stay away from Ego.”
“I’ll try,” he said. Then he clasped my hand quickly and headed off in the direction Sher had gone.
Which left Frances. “What shall I do, boss?”
“Help Theo find a turbine, I guess.”
“And then?”
“Come back here.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
I didn’t, either. “Why the hell do people have friends?” I burst out.
She didn’t misunderstand the sentiment. “As I’m sure Theo would say, it’s a bummer, man. But you can’t keep us from our future any more than we can keep you from yours. Place your troops.”
I sighed. “I’d feel better, actually, if you could stick to Theo. He’ll need help with the installation, and if he gets in any trouble—” I shrugged. “He’s not exactly John Wayne.”
“Luckily for you, neither am I; John Wayne was an actor. All right, I’ll be pit bull for Theo. Which means, I think, that this is good — pardon me, au revoir.”
“You won’t be back?”
“We’ll send word if we find the turbine. But if we do, I think we’d best go straight into town with it.”
She stood gravely in front of me for a moment; then, lightly, she put her arms around me and let go again. She looked to the sky and said fiercely, “And how thou pleasest, God, dispose the day.”
Then she left.
It was Saint John’s Eve; it was my birthday; it was, whether I was prepared or not, whether I liked it or not, the day of my introduction to the master of my head, my mait-tete, my patron in the system.
I was lying blindfolded in a room, not my own. I hadn’t had anything to eat all day. I was wearing white. I knew that because I’d put it on myself, on Sherrea’s instructions. I knew about electronics. I knew nothing about the soul. I could only follow instructions.
Outside, the drums were playing, and had been for an hour.
I heard footsteps, several, and felt hands on my shoulders and under my knees. Whose hands? Oh, little gods, big gods, whose hands were they, that I was giving myself into? I could pull away, I could yank off the blindfold, I could say no. Sherrea hadn’t lied to me this morning: I could say no.
I jammed the syllable back down my throat until it was less than a whimper, only a tautness between my lungs and mouth. I was lifted up and carried outdoors, into the hot, windless air and the endless chirring of crickets. The drums wrapped around me like flannel.
My attendants set me on my bare feet suddenly, with a bang, and I staggered. I was on grass. I smelled candle wax and burning wood and people. I was held by my upper arms on both sides and drawn forward, and gripped and drawn forward again. I was being passed, I realized, down a double row of hands.
They weren’t strangers. None of the people who participated, who moved me from this point to the next one, would be strange to me. Josh would be here, whose hands had held my life and not dropped it, and given it back to me for free. Kris might have just passed me on, dirt under her stubby nails, teeth flashing in a firelit grin. LeRoy, who had picked me up broken and delivered me here, and Mags, who had fed and clothed me. These were the people who had lifted and carried me from the old condition of my mind to the current one. I could trust them to move me safely one more time.
Even under the blindfold, the light had grown strong. I heard the shook-canvas sound of the bonfire. A small pressure on my shoulders urged me to my knees, and finally full-length, facedown, on the grass. Above me, but not far, as if she might be kneeling, I heard Sherrea’s voice. It was the voice of a kick-ass bruja. My friend Sherrea looked like a waif, and sounded like a governess turned gun moll. She cried when I hurt. She was gone. This was a bruja.
“Close the circle. Legba Attibon, let it close and sit by the door. As we invite, let you admit. Legba of the stick, you are always welcome.”
On all sides of me, voices answered, in a language I didn’t recognize.
“Who knows this person?” Sher asked.
“I do,” said a strong and ragged chorus of voices. What person? Me?
“Keep what you know in your heads, then, good and bad. Hold it there, fix it in your eye, see it clearly from all sides. Because this person is bound for death, where the self is withered and washed away, where even names are cut like wheat and eaten. This person will cross the river that never runs, and on the other side, if you can’t give back the soul that you remember, this person will be truly dead, and go forever nameless in the dark.”
Hands again, that brought me to my feet. I was pouring sweat in the heat of the fire and the hot night, dazed and weak from hunger and from fear. The hands pushed, and I stepped forward into ice water. I was off balance; the other foot joined the first, and I fell to hands and knees into cold so intense it simply stopped my nerves. If I had known what I ought to do next, I’d forgotten it.
Then warmth on each arm — hands? — pulled me forward. My fingers closed in grass; I dragg
ed myself, my feet useless as unshaped granite, and fell, facedown once more, on the ground.
Sound broke out like full-scale war. Yelling, drums, all the noises that can be made with the fingers and palms. It felt so good to be warm. It felt wonderful to be lying limp as wet newsprint, unable to rise, and to know that the condition was temporary.
In fact, I had to sit up almost at once, my legs under me, my head erect. The hands insisted. The hands cosseted and combed and smoothed, and where they passed, I was dry and free of any lingering chill. My skin seemed to have been remade and reinstalled. My heart gave a single, shattering bang and began to beat strong and evenly, and I wondered if it had been stopped and I hadn’t known. At last, the fingers traveling over my hair and face drew the blindfold away.
My eyes burned and watered with the light. The bonfire was behind me; before me was the great central tree of the town circle, surrounded in ramparts of candles. There were candles, too, in the hands of the people who formed the circle that enclosed me. There were enough people that it might have been everyone in town. No one stood close enough to me to have removed the blindfold that lay abandoned on my knees. Nowhere in the circle was there a body of water large enough that I could have stepped or fallen in it.
“You are born into the light,” said Sherrea, and I saw her at last. White cloth ran unbelted from her shoulders to her ankles and left her arms bare. Her hair was uncovered and massed like a thundercloud around her head, around her stern face. The stern waif’s face, with an indented place at the corner of the mouth as if a smile was stored there, with a lift of the eyebrows that said in her voice, clear as words, “Is this wild, or what? Isn’t this hot?”
“You who kept the soul and spirit plain, come and set it in its place again,” she said to the circle at large.
There was a big black ceramic pot at her feet. One by one, people came from out of the circle to put things in it. It was a singular, startling procession.
Josh began it. He wore an African shirt so large it might have roofed the sheep pen; he pulled from somewhere in it a paperback book. It was the copy of A Tale of Two Cities that I’d been reading at his kitchen table. He dropped it into the pot with a look at me so full of mingled things that I couldn’t begin to sort them out.
Kris followed him, with — it was. I almost laughed aloud. A leaf of lettuce, and a wink.
Paulo came, with both hands cupped closed around something. He held them over the mouth of the pot and opened them, but the contents went up, not down, and glowed for an instant, gold-green, against the dark sky. A firefly. He looked dismayed for a moment, then caught my eye. For the first time I could remember, he seemed very much the opposite of solemn.
LeRoy dropped in a spare bit of wiring harness I’d made him for the truck. And said, “I have a memory that isn’t mine.”
“Give it,” said Sher.
From a pocket, LeRoy pulled a video-8 format cassette. I couldn’t read the label, but I knew it by the colors and their arrangement. It was achingly familiar. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the best buddy movie ever made. Theo, Theo. Oh, santos, I was going to cry, and in front of everybody.
Then Sherrea leaned forward with something in her hand. A piece of paper… No, a card. The Page of Swords. Joan of Arc, with her boy’s hair and man’s armor, looking down to hell, up to heaven. The card flexed, fluttered, and was gone, into the mouth of the pot.
“You are reborn and remade,” Sherrea said, “and only the strongest and most true went into the making. Now you have to wake. Stand up and receive the spirit of your head.”
I had to do it by myself. I was weak; my legs trembled under me, and my hands shook. But I stood. Sherrea came to me — so small for such a kick-ass bruja — with a glass bowl full of something clear. Water? She dipped her finger in it, and the smell rose: alcohol. With her finger, she drew something on my forehead.
Someone must have fed the fire, because I was blinded with light. Empty whiteness rose around me from my feet to my shoulders to my chin (I saw Sherrea’s face for a last moment, through the thickening haze) and finally closed over my head.
Me, the dog/rabbit, patient and silly in black on white. The dancing flutist with the two feathers, or antennae, or ears. And the woman with the halo of fire. There was no line of other pictographs, and I felt the lack of dimension more strongly than ever.
“If you want anything,” said the flutist, “just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you?”
“I’ve seen that one,” I said.
“You ain’t seen nothin’, kid. Just whistle. You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone, but accept no substitutes. Just put your lips together and blow. Don’t let your deal go down.”
“You know, that almost made sense.”
“It will pretty soon. Or you’re dead meat.”
“Where are the others?” I asked it.
“That’s all we have time for! Tune in next week!”
I might be dead next week, I tried to say, but it was too late.
I opened my eyes on the ground, where I’d landed in what I recognized in hindsight as a boneless, uncontested faint. No one in the cluster of people around me seemed to think I ought to be embarrassed. I had a vague impression of some ritual things being done quickly; then Josh and Kris put a shoulder under each of my arms and half carried me back to the farmhouse. Not long after they’d stretched me on my bed, Sher poked her head, then the rest of her, in the door. She was back to the torn leggings. I felt much better.
“I don’t know if that will help,” she said. “But it was a damn good try. You take a mean initiation.”
“Thank you. I think.”
“There’s usually pronouns in it, though.”
It was a moment before I figured out what she meant. Then I laughed.
“We tried to fix your identity to your body, so that you’d be more likely to hold out against Tom. And we made this.” She lifted up an oblong glass bead, the size of the end of my thumb. “It’s not exactly a govi. It’s sort of your doppelganger.”
“Strong family resemblance,” I agreed.
“Your psychic doppelganger, dipshit. The idea is that you buck Tom off, and this doesn’t; you trap him in this and break it. It’s a decoy body.”
“Do you think it’ll work?”
She sat down, hard, on the edge of the bed. “No. But I can’t think of anything else to do. Santos, I wish we had more time.”
“We’re available for a limited time only,” I said, three-fourths asleep.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“They’ve got the turbine; the note came from Theo an hour ago. He says he’ll see you in Oz.”
“Ha ha, Theo. Sher? In the… thing, this evening. There wasn’t anything from Frances.”
“She said, in — I think it was an Irish accent — that there was only one thing you’d ever given her that she could hold in her two hands, that she hadn’t eaten. And that the one thing would be perfect for the pot, but it was also the first thing you’d given her, and she thought the sentiment would be more use to her than the identification would be to you.”
I laughed again. “That’s very Frances-like of her. Sher, why does China Black have silver eyebrows?”
“She got in trouble once, she says, because her eyebrows moved. She was afraid it would happen again.”
“Silly,” I said, and fell asleep.
10.1: Who plans revenge must dig two graves
The wind had come up, and swept a domed lid of overcast across the night as far as I could see. Which, given the towers in the way, wasn’t far; but I’d seen it over the road into the City, too. In the Night Fair, vendors would be keeping an eye on the sky, a hand on their shutters and awning cranks. If the wind didn’t blow the clouds away, there would be rain. Which was no guarantee that there would be a whirlwind.
LeRoy had driven me to the edge of the Deeps. I’d spent the ride looking out the passenger’s side window of the truck, to keep from looking at
him. Even so, I could tell that he was glancing over every few minutes, when the crumbling pavement gave him leave. Whatever he wanted — to ask if he could come along, to ask me to give it up, to cuss me out for undoing his work in getting me out of the City in the first place — I wasn’t strong enough to stand against it. So I’d kept my face to the glass and the growing darkness, and hoped that the cloud cover meant that the Engineers, or random luck, were giving us what we needed.
Josh had wanted to come, too. I’d talked him out of that, at least. I didn’t want anyone else there if Tom Worecski managed to backtrack along my trail. LeRoy was risk enough. I wondered if LeRoy realized that I hadn’t made any provisions for getting out of the City. Something could happen that would leave me alive and in danger if I stayed. But how could I say when and where I’d meet him, or what to do if I didn’t? Besides, alive and still in danger was the least likely possibility.
I had a clean shirt, Large Bob’s nice trousers, the glass bead on a chain around my neck, and not much else. Nothing that might serve as a weapon. I had maybe been rash there. But I didn’t know anything about weapons, and I didn’t want to hurt myself. Or have someone take the gun or knife or whatever away and use it to hurt me. That, at the moment, seemed more pressing than symbolism.
It wasn’t deja vu; I had been here before, in the street, looking up at Ego. But the appropriate haunted-house sky was missing this time behind the building’s halo of little lights. And Frances wasn’t with me. She was in the Gilded West, with Theo, waiting for a brisk Jehovan miracle. For Oya Iansa, Lightning Woman, patron of revolution and change, whose dancing brings the wind. I wondered if she was the pictograph who sounded like Frances. I hoped Theo hadn’t taken too much gear from the Underbridge. If an electrical storm came with the tornado, the club would be full of dancers under the long windows. Oh, gods. I wanted to be on the sound balcony. I wanted to see Robby, and hear Spangler say “fuck” one more time. I wanted it so badly I hurt.
Enough. I shook myself and went to Ego’s front door.
