by IGMS
He had a phone. Which meant he'd come to us for more than our One Low Rate.
"You moocher," I said and felt a swell of pity and older-brotherly kindness take my heart. I waved him off with a hand. "Go ahead and call."
He didn't get Masego on the first try: the man had to be fetched. Obviously, Masego was not one of the phone-toting Bushmen. About three hour later, Delmus called again, and this time Masego was among the crowd at the other end. Delmus carried on about all his woes, and then when it was Masego's turn, Delmus just nodded and said ya, ya, ya.
The upshot of the conversation was that there were good gods and tricky ones and others that were simply mean. You couldn't know which was which until they possessed you. This one happened to fall into one of the latter two categories. Of course, Masego had supposedly explained all this back in Botswana, but Delmus, being Delmus, had simply ignored the risks.
Masego told Delmus it was very simple. He couldn't kill the god, but he could entice or drive it out of his body and into something else that gods liked. Things like dogs, ancient trees, and lightning. It was going to take chanting and clapping and some special trance dance.
When Delmus explained it all, I said, "You don't have any training as a witch doctor."
"Oh, now we got us a believer?" asked Delmus.
"Nothing of the sort," I said.
"Then what?" he said. "You want to send me back to the regular medicine men? What new things are they going to try?"
No new things. That was obvious. I just stood there and shrugged.
"Exactly, Mr. Higher Technology," said Delmus. "I just got me instructions from a pro, and I want to give them a whirl. Are you going to help or get out of the way?"
Why not? We were, all three of us, bright and consenting adults. It might end up being a journal moment.
"I'm not doing any drugs or weird crap," I said.
"All you got to do is clap and grunt," he said. Then he motioned at the couch. "Why don't you grab ahold of the other end, and we'll move it against the wall."
We couldn't find a handy dog. Yes, we have a little Terrier, Mr. Smee. But he is not a dog, really. We did not think it humane to dognap someone else's pet, and the animals at the shelter didn't count - buying one for this dance felt too much like a Nazi medical experiment. I wasn't going to have the neighbors gawking as Delmus did his thing around a tree, so Delmus decided on lightning.
"Lightning?" I asked. I looked outside at the clear, bright sky.
Delmus held a screwdriver in his hand. He walked over to our kitchen light switch, unscrewed the switch cover, and revealed the guts of my house. Then he pointed at the wires there. "120 volts."
"Delmus," I said.
I glanced over at Jill. I could see a little worry in her face. I was not a handyman, but even I knew you didn't go grabbing live wires in your house.
"That will kill you, won't it?"
He grinned that you-dumb-cityboy grin. "There's a chance," he said, "it just might light me up like a Christmas tree."
We helped Delmus make a number of pinto bean rattles. He used a marker to write our chant out phonetically on the back of a blue flyer advertising furnace cleaning. The rite required fire, and so we dipped into Jill's stockpile of scented candles. And that's how we started - me and Jill sitting in the middle of the living room floor with sunflower and bayberry candles burning on a plate between us. We read out our chants and Delmus danced circles around us.
Masego had said that it sometimes took a full night of dancing for the healing trance to fill a man up inside. After about twenty minutes I didn't think my arms had a snowball's chance of clapping and rattling for more than an hour.
But we sometimes surprise ourselves in our extremities. We chanted, and Delmus danced for more than four hours. He danced through dinner and sunset and into the dark night.
At about 11 o'clock he stopped. "I'm just about crazy," he said. "I think it's time."
We were all sweating and in pain.
Delmus put on my rubber boots, then he walked over to the exposed light switch, and looked at me.
"If I grab a hold of this thing and don't let go, you got to be prepared to pull me off."
I stood. "Whatever you say."
Delums turned back to the switch. "Alright, you funky little bugger. Here's some tasty lightning."
Delmus put his left hand behind his back. Then he reached out with his right hand, his thumb and forefinger on either side of the box.
When he put his thumb on the exposed copper of the black wire, he scrunched up his face, but he didn't let go. The muscles on his arm stood out. The light in the room seemed to dim.
Then Delmus's head flipped back with a jerk, and I thought he was going to yell, but nothing came out.
"Delmus?" I said. How was I supposed to know when to pull him off?
We watched in horror for a few moments at Delmus's silent scream. His hair began to lift, and then his voice kicked in like a bullhorn. This shout broke our spell.
"Will!" Jill said.
And I could hear in her voice that this wasn't right at all.
I reached for Delmus. The light in the room brightened. But before I could pull him off there was an enormous pop like a mighty discharge of static electricity. Delmus flew through the air. Then the fixture above me sparked and plinked, and everything in the house went dark. Even the candles had blown out.
I heard Delmus thump to the floor.
Jill and I both dropped to our knees and fumbled about trying to find him, and when we located him, trying to see if he was moving.
"Is he breathing?" Jill asked.
I felt my way to his head, then I licked my hand and put it close to his mouth and nose. I couldn't feel his breath. I put my ear to his chest.
"Is he breathing?"
"Shush," I said.
I listened, and then I caught it.
"He's got a beat," I said.
"Come on, Delly," Jill said. "Come on."
We knelt there for what must have been ten minutes, blathering to Delmus and wondering what we had just done. We never even thought of calling 911. What would we say?
Then Delmus stirred and rolled over.
"I'm blind," he said. "I can't see!"
"It's the lights," I said. "You tripped the breakers."
I heard him breathe a sigh of relief, then he groaned and said, "I can hardly feel my arms, but I think we got him. I felt something go."
He felt something, there was no doubt about that.
We all fell silent and moments later I heard a noise coming from some corner of the house.
"What's that sound?" asked Delmus.
It was Chuck Berry playing in the bedroom.
"That must be our clock radio," I said. "You must have tripped it."
"But it doesn't have any batteries," said Jill.
"Then it would be out like everything else."
Even in the dark, I could see her pause and set herself to defend her point. "It doesn't have batteries," she said.
"Jill," I said. "I'll go flip the switches and we can all see."
I went downstairs and reset all the breakers. The lights all came back on and I walked back upstairs.
Delmus and Jill had moved to the bedroom. He was bug-eyed and a bit askew. The arm he'd touched the wire with hung like a wet noodle at his side.
Jill held the clock radio up for me to see. She had taken the battery cover off, and there was nothing inside.
"But that can't be," I said.
"You stay here with Delmus," she said. "Plug it back in. I'm going to flip all the breakers off."
I did, and when the lights went out, the radio played on like we were linked directly into the Hoover dam.
"How in the world..." said Delmus.
Then he fumbled for the lamp on the drawers with his one good arm, followed the cord, unplugged it from its socket, and then plugged it into this one. The lamp flickered and then glowed softly in the darkness.
We stood there in s
ilence. It had to be the result of some jerry-rigged wiring.
"It's in there," he said.
"Maybe Jill didn't trip the right breaker," I said.
"Billy Boy," Delmus said and looked about the shadows. "Electricity don't work like that."
Then the lamp and radio faded. And we heard and saw it move down the house. That's the only way to describe it. First the master bathroom light flickered. Then the hall light switched on and off again. The blender revved at what sounded like frappe. The microwave dinged. Another flicker down the hall, then all was silent and dark.
"Holy crap," said Delmus.
I hadn't really believed this would work - it was going to be just another Delmus moment. But now all my tidy explanations failed me.
"Pull them out," I said.
Delmus didn't move.
"The appliances," I said. "Everything. Pull them out!"
It was in the house. It was in the wires. I began calling out the appliances room by room. I yelled down to Jill to pull the plug on the washer and dryer downstairs. The last thing I wanted was that thing lurking in the toaster.
When we had pulled anything with a cord, I went back and tested the clock radio in the bedroom. It would not work. I tried it in half a dozen other plugs, but in each it was dead and dark. I unplugged the radio from the last socket.
"It's still here, isn't it?" asked Jill.
"We're going to flip the breakers," I said. "And whatever it is will hopefully find its way out of the house wiring."
All three of us walked downstairs and flipped the breakers. The lights came back on. And we waited a very long time.
I was speechless, but Delmus wasn't.
"I don't think I'm going to give that other one to Andi," he said.
"Good idea," I said.
"No," he said. "I'm keeping it."
He paused.
"I think I finally know my calling," he said. "I'm going into electrology. I'm going to bust these buggers wide open."
I paused for a moment.
"Electronics?" I said.
"Nope," he said. "Electrology."
"I don't think that's a word," I said. "I know there's no such major at the university."
"Oh, Billy Boy," he said. "There will be when I finish. I guarantee."
Electrology. The study of electrical gods.
Who knew where such a study might lead him? And at that moment I realized that while Delmus was not a Lamborghini, he wasn't a go-cart either. I looked at him with newfound respect. Delmus was some experimental vehicle that just might be the one to take us all in a whole new direction.
The operation to take out Delmus's second Cyclops eye won Andi's heart. While he was recovering, she came to visit, and he told her the whole story and showed her the eyeballs he kept in a solution in a pickle jar.
Andi decided that was the grossest, most tragic, most romantic story she'd ever heard. I suppose his afflictions had made him into some kind of noble-hearted doofus, and she just happened to be a sucker for that kind of man.
I have refrained from pointing out to Delums what such an oddly fickle woman might bring to a marriage.
Jill, of course, used the seeming fact that Delmus had been right about the beetles all along to muddy the waters of our discussion about the quality of our family lines.
Me? I tell them all I don't know what to think. But sometimes I lie awake at night looking at the lamp, the red lights of the clock radio, and the dark holes and slots of the wall sockets, wondering if it's still there, or if it's gone hunting on the public grid for whatever it eats, uncertain if it would return from such a foray. Heaven forbid it should multiply.
This I know: a small disaster's coming down the line. You simply can't have a god running loose in the wires. And when it breaks, I'll be pinning my hopes on a hick with some dark horses under the hood.
Trill and the Beanstalk
by Edmund R. Schubert
Artwork by I-Wei Huang
* * *
Captain Jack Trilling leaned his shoulder against the floor-to-ceiling window that separated the base's observation deck from the black, white, and gray chroma of the lunar landscape. The tip of his nose was less than three centimeters from the window. He was not, however, looking at the moon's surface, or even at the stars which called to him from the perpetual night sky. Instead, his brown eyes were focused on the reflection of the man moving behind him.
"Do that and you're a dead man, Vishti," he said.
Vishti paused, piece in hand, and clucked his tongue. "Trill, Trill, Trill . . . You've had a long run at the top, but this time you are going down."
With that, he placed his queen on king's pawn four.
Trill needed only a fraction of a second to study the chessboard's reflection. This game was going exactly as he played it in his head twelve moves ago.
"Bishop captures Queen," Trill said.
Vishti's dark eyes darted from the board to Trill and back again. He was clearly pleased.
Perfect. That meant Vishti would study the pieces just long enough to convince himself Trill was falling into his trap. Trill felt a fragment of a smile begin to form at one corner of his mouth. He immediately brought it under control.
With a shrug and a shake of his head, Vishti moved Trill's bishop for him, capturing the queen. Then he moved his rook.
"I can not believe you fell for my sacrificial queen gambit," the Indian programmer said, "In fairness, I should tell you that mate is now inevitable. Two moves and it's done."
"You're right, my friend, except it's not two moves. Only one."
Trill stood, turned his back on the lunar panorama, and walked to the table.
"Vishti," Trill said, "you get better every time we play. But today isn't the day you beat me."
He moved his knight. Trill found that people often overlooked knights late in the game. "Checkmate."
Vishti brought one hand to his face, placed a fingertip on the end of his nose, and tried to comprehend what had just happened. Now Trill allowed himself to smile. It was never hard to see -- once the pieces were all in position. But Trill always kept the Indian programmer off balance with a series of feints designed to keep him from seeing the real plan until it was too late.
Vishti pinched his lips together. "Someday someone is going to beat you and I pray that I am there to see it."
Trill shrugged with his eyebrows. "Just between you and me, I'm looking forward to that day, too. Probably more than you are."
"You wish to lose?"
"I wish to get better. No disrespect, but you're the only one who'll play me anymore and beating you five times a week isn't making me any better. And playing the computer just isn't the same. I want a real person."
"You are saying that losing is good . . .?"
"I'm saying it depends on your priorities." Trill rubbed his hands together. "And my priority right now is getting into space. I've been trapped on the moon's surface for far too long, so pay up."
"Do you really think the colonel will permit this?" Vishti asked. "I can not imagine him allowing us to trade duty assignments."
Trill didn't care what Colonel Kirtley thought. At first he had hoped it might be different here on the moon, but in the end it turned out like all the rest of his assignments. When Colonel Kirtley had learned Trill's aunt was also the 52nd and current President of the United States, his attitude toward him immediately changed. Kirtley wasn't vindictive about it -- Trill wasn't even sure the colonel was conscious of it -- but the change was undeniable. Like nearly every commanding officer before, Kirtley assumed that Trill's relationship to the President was the only reason he had gotten this post. That he had to have pulled strings, called favors, and used his aunt, Madam-President, to get his way. Which pissed Trill off. He was his own man. He succeeded or failed on his own merits.
Not once in all the years since Aunt Chelsea had first been elected had Trill played that card. He had even hoped she wouldn't be re-elected back in 2048. He had voted for her, of co
urse -- but secretly he had hoped she would lose. Trill's relationship to the president usually proved out to be more of a liability than an advantage. Commanders either took punitive attitudes and gave him crap jobs, or did what Kirtley did and "balanced the scales." Made him work twice as hard for half the credit. Trill understood it was only human nature, but that didn't make it suck any less.
And he wasn't asking for much; all he wanted was his turn running the lunar elevator up to meet the shuttle. To swim in a sea of stars was the whole reason he became an astronaut -- and Kirtley kept taking that away from him.
"I'm an astronaut, dammit," he heard himself say, "not the bloody Maytag man." Trill hadn't intended to say it out loud, but he had reached his limit. "I didn't sign up for a year up here so I could spend it fixing broken-down ore carriers that aren't even carrying anything."
"You are the chief engineer, are you not?" Vishti countered.
"Emphasis on the word 'chief.' Look, I don't mind pulling my own weight, but he sends me out every time there's a problem."
"As desperate as we are to beat the Chinese to Mars, we need to ensure the equipment will work properly before we fly it out there, don't we? And who better to determine that than the chief engineer?"
Trill walked back to the window, allowing himself to actually look outside this time. He wasn't going to let Vishti get under his skin. Vishti was probably convinced he was merely telling unpleasant but necessary truths.
Trill closed his eyes and took a deep breath. No, he thought, Vishti's just jerking my chain. Friends do that. And Vishti was as good a friend as Trill had among the dozen astronauts stationed on the American moon-base. He was just needling him and Trill knew it.
A new reflection moved across the window. Trill steeled himself.
"Captain Trilling," Kirtley announced. "Time to suit up; you've got work to do. Computer's showing a breakdown near the maintenance dome."
Vishti rose to his feet, saying, "I shall attend to it, Colonel."
Kirtley pivoted in Vishti's direction -- a difficult maneuver in 1/6 Earth gravity and one Trill imagined Kirtley must have practiced repeatedly to get just right. He clasped his hands behind his back and snapped, "At what point did my senior programmer change his name?"
