The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

by Harry Turtledove

  He meant that more literally than most people who use the line—and his particular swamp held worse things than mere alligators. We said our goodbyes and hung up. I looked at the phone for a few seconds afterwards. Maybe Sudakis never had reconciled himself to Christianity, or to monotheism generally. That last comment of his made me wonder. Well, the Confederacy is a free country. He could believe whatever he wanted, as long as the didn’t go burning down monasteries to make his point.

  “Interesting,” I said again, to nobody in particular, and started squeezing the undines out of my own swamp.

  I’d decided to note the contaminants from the smaller companies first, before I tackled the light-and-magic outfits and the aerospace consortia. If one of the little guys was dumping something spectacularly illicit, my hopes was that it would stand out like a mullah in the College of Cardinals.

  I was amazed to see just how much nasty stuff some of the little guys messed around with. Take the outfit called Slow Jinn Fizz, for instance. Heaven help me, they were using things there I wouldn’t have expected to find coming out of Loki’s Cobold Works. I mean, they were stowing stove-in Solomon’s Seals at Devonshire. You think for a while about the thaumaturgical pressure it takes to deform one of those things, and the likely effect on the surrounding countryside when you try it, and you’ll have some idea why I noted that in red.

  Chocolate Weasel had just as many nastinesses, things EPA men in most of the Confederation wouldn’t see once in a thousand years—Aztecian stuff, almost exclusively. My stomach did a slow flipflop when I saw one neatly written item on their dumping manifesto: flayed human skin substitute.

  As I think I’ve said before, human sacrifice is—officially—banned within the Aztecian Empire these days. But it used to be a central part of the Aztecian cult. One whole twenty-day month of their old calendar, Tlaxipeualiztli (say it three times fast—I dare you), means “boning of the men,” and almost all of it had parades where priests capered around wearing the skins of sacrificial victims.

  Obviously, death magic is some of the strongest sorcery there is. But modern technology has eliminated the need that was formerly perceived for it. Proper application of the law of similarity lets the Aztecians produce by less bloodthirsty means the same effect they used to get from ripping the hearts out of victims. But it’s still a daunting item to find on a form.

  There are also rumors that some of the flayed skin substitute isn’t created through the law of similarity, but rather through the law of contagion. Yes, I’m afraid that means what you think it does: the substitute material gains its effectiveness by touching a real flayed human skin, one hidden away since the days when such sacrifices were not only legal but required.

  The Aztecians spend a lot of time denying those rumors. The EPA spends a lot of time checking them—we don’t want that kind of sorcery getting loose in this country. Nothing’s ever been proved. But the rumors persist.

  I noted that one down in red ink, too. Chocolate Weasel, I thought, would get a visit from some inspector soon; if not me, then someone else. Properly manufactured flayed skin substitute isn’t illegal, but it is one of the things we like to keep an eye on.

  None of the other little firms that used the Devonshire dump put anything quite so ferocious in it, though I did raise an eyebrow to see how many roosters’ eggshells Essence Extractions was getting rid of. “Cockatrices,” I said out loud. The little creatures are dangerous and always have been ferociously expensive because they’re so rare, but I wondered if these folks hadn’t found a way to turn them out in quantity.

  I looked thoughtfully at that manifest before I went on to the next one. If Essence Extractions had found a way to produce lots of cockatrices, they were sitting on the goose that laid the golden egg. Pardon the botched ornithological metaphor, but it’s true. And the dumping records gave some good clues on how they were going about it. Tony Sudakis hadn’t worried about confidentiality for nothing.

  Seeing the folks who are trying to thwart you as people just like yourself rather than The Enemy (in Satanic red sometimes, not just capital letters) isn’t easy. You’re better off dealing with them that way, though, because it’s surprising (or revolting, depending on how you look it at) how often they have a point.

  I knocked off at five, slid down to the ground. Pickets were marking on the sidewalk off to one side of the parking lot. Pickets marched outside the Confederal Building about three days out of five, touting one cause or another (sometimes the people touting one cause run into those touting another, and then there can be trouble).

  These particular pickets weren’t just marching; they were chanting, too: “Hey, hey, waddaya say, let’s throw out the EPA!”

  That flicked my curiosity. I wandered over to see what they were upset about. Their signs spoke for themselves: SAVE OUR STRAWBERRIES! was one. Another said, STOP AERIAL GARLIC SPRAYING! And a third—BETTER MEDVAMPS THAN TURNING MY BACK YARD INTO AN ITALIAN DELI! I liked that, actually, even if I couldn’t agree with it.

  Sometimes protesters will listen to reason. I decided to give it a try, remarking to a fellow with a blond beard, “You know, if we let Medvamps establish themselves here, they’ll wipe out a good part of our agriculture. Look what they’ve done to the Sandwich Islands.”

  “I don’t care about the Sandwich Islands, pal,” Blond Beard answered. “All I know is that as far as I’m concerned, garlic stinks. I have to smell it every hour of the day and night, and I think it’s making me sick. And it’s gotten into my flying carpet, and the sylphs don’t like it any better than I do. I may have to trade the stupid thing in, and with the performance shot, I won’t get near what it’s worth. So there!”

  “But—” I started. Blond Beard had stopped paying attention to me; he was chanting again. I gave up and headed back to my own carpet. Reminding him that all the people in the spraying area had been warned to cover up their carpets or bring them indoors wouldn’t have changed his mind, it would just have made him angrier than he was already. Some people might as well be zombies, for all the constructive use they get out of their free will.

  As I started to fly toward the freeway, I noticed a familiar-looking man holding a glass glove up to the mouth of one of the picketers. It was Joe Forbes of Ethernet Station One. “Thanks a lot, Joe,” I muttered. Thousands of people, I had no doubt, would hear about the imaginary evils of garlic spraying just as if they were thaumaturgically established.

  I hoped he’d have the integrity to interview an EPA sorcerer or somebody from the citrus business, too. But even if he did, the views of people who didn’t know anything except what they didn’t like would in effect get equal weight with those of folks who’d been studying the problem since it first bared its teeth. I sighed. What could I do about it? People out picketing and raising a ruckus were “news,” regardless of whether they had any facts to back them up.

  The freeway was jammed, too, which didn’t do anything to improve my mood by the time I finally got home.

  Next morning, I started adding to my chart some of the toxic spell components the aerospace firms dumped at Devonshire. I hadn’t been at it for more than a couple of hours before I saw I’d have to talk with my boss.

  Bea was on the phone when I went up to her office. Sometimes I think she’s had that imp permanently implanted in her ear. As soon as she laid down the handset, I scurried in. Before the phone could go off again, I tossed my still only half-done chart on the desk in front of her.

  Her eyes followed it down. When she saw some of the things I’d written in red, she gave a real live theatrical gasp. “Good God in heaven, are we actually storing these things inside a populated area?” she exclaimed, raising a shocked hand. Her gaze lingered on the flayed human skin substitute. Even though it’s legal, it’s appalling to contemplate.

  “Looks that way,” I said, “and this isn’t all of it, by any means. I wanted to ask you to let me do some afternoon fieldwork this week, maybe talk to some of the people who use this stuff and see
if there aren’t substitutes. Or even substitutes for the substitutes,” I added, wondering if a second-generation ersatz skin would be magically efficacious.

  “Go ahead,” she told me without hesitation; she really is a pretty good boss. “Do one other thing first, though: call Mr. Charles Kelly and let him know what sort of mess he’s landed this office in. I’ve already had words with him about that, but you can emphasize it, too. If we have to holler for help from the District of St. Columba, I don’t want him to be able to say he wasn’t warned in advance.”

  Burning brimstone makes you think of demons. Bureaucratic finagling has a smell of its own, too. I went back to my desk and made the call. When I got through to Charlie, he sounded jovially wary, a combination implausible only to someone who’s never taken his crowns from the government. “What can I do for you this afternoon, David?” he boomed. I’d expected him not to bother remembering it was still morning for me, so I wasn’t disappointed when he didn’t.

  “You’ve hear about what happened out here over the weekend?” I asked. It wasn’t really a question.

  For a second, though, he sounded as if it was. “Only news out of Angels City I’ve heard is that monastery fire.” He hesitated, just for a second. I could almost see the ball of St. Elmo’s fire pop into being above his head. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me that’s connected to the Devonshire case?”

  “I sure am, Charlie. Eleven monks dead of arson, in case all the news didn’t make it back East.” Without giving him a chance to rally, I pushed ahead: “My boss Bea says she’s already spoken to you about the way I got this case. It’s bigger than you thought, it’s bigger than I imagined when you dropped it on me. You should be aware that we may have to have help from D.St.C.”

  “If you do, you’ll get it. Eleven monks. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” Charlie being of the Erse persuasion, I thought that would hit him where he lived.

  “Something else,” I said: “Don’t you think it’s time to level with me and stop playing coy about the ‘bird’ who tipped you to the trouble at the Devonshire dump?”

  This time, Kelly’s pause lasted a lot longer than a second. Even through two phone imps and three thousand miles of ether, he sounded unhappy as he answered, “Dave, I’d tell you if I could, but I swear I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  I blew exasperated air out my nose, hard enough to stir the hairs of my mustache against my upper lip. “Okay, Charlie. Play a game with me, then. Is your feathered friend from groups involved with any of these…?” I named the Garuda Bird, Quetzalcoatl, the Peacock Throne, (hesitantly) the Peacock Angel, and, as an afterthought, the phoenix.

  More silence from Charlie. Finally he said, “Yeah, the bird’s in there somewhere. Believe me, I’m taking a chance telling you even that much. So long.” And he was gone, faster than a Medvamp out of a Korean restaurant.

  Nice to know one of the ideas Judy and I had come up with was the right one. It would have been nicer still, of course, to know which. I thought about what he’d said and, as well as I could tell over the phone, how he’d said it. Maybe politics wasn’t what sealed his lips. Maybe it was fear. That was the first time I started getting a little bit fearful myself.

  Well, onward—no help for it unless I felt like quitting. And if I did that, not only would I not want to look at myself in the mirror but Judy would drop me like something just up from the Pit. So off I went to Slow Jinn Fizz, the closest outfit I’d yet found that had a red-letter contaminant on my chart.

  The carpet ride up into St. Ferdinand’s Valley took about twenty minutes. Slow Jinn Fizz was on the chief business flyway of the Valley, Venture Boulevard. The address itself was enough to tell me the outfit had money. The building argued for that, too: an elegant gray stucco structure with SLOW JINN FIZZ in neat gold letters on the plate glass window by the entry door. Underneath, in smaller (but just as gold) letters, it added, A JINNETIC ENGINEERING CONSORTIUM.

  “Aha!” I said before I walked in. The combination of the name and the Solomon’s Seals discarded at the Devonshire dump had made me figure jinnetic engineering was what Slow Jinn Fizz was all about. Nice to be right every so often.

  A dazzling blond receptionist, as expensive-looking and probably as carefully chosen as the rest of the decor, gave me a dazzling white smile. “How may I help you, sir?” she asked in the kind of voice that suggested she’d do anything I asked.

  I reminded myself I was engaged. The smile congealed on her face when I pulled out my EPA sigil. “I’d like to see Mr. Durani, please, in connection with some of your firm’s recent dumping activities.”

  “One moment, Inspector, uh, Fishman,” she said, and disappeared into the back of the building.

  Ramzan Durani came out a couple of minutes later, in person. He was a plump, medium-brown fellow in his mid-forties who wore a white lab robe of Persian cut and an equally white turban. “Inspector Fisher, yes?” he said as we shook hands. I gave him a point for getting it right even though his receptionist hadn’t. “We spoke on the phone last week, did we not?”

  “That’s right, sir. In a way, this is about the same matter.”

  “I thought it might be.” He didn’t seem as volatile in person as he had over the phone, for which I was duly grateful. “Please come with me to my office, and we shall discuss this further.”

  The only thing I’ll say about his office is that it made Tony Sudakis’ look like a slum, and Tony’s beats mine seven ways from Sunday. He poured mint tea, gave me sweetmeats, sat me down, and generally fussed over me until I felt as if I’d gone back to my mom’s for Rosh Hashanah dinner. I don’t care for the feeling at my mom’s and I didn’t care for it here, either.

  I answered it with bluntness: “Devonshire dump is under investigation for leaking toxic spell components into the surrounding environment. We haven’t learned exactly what’s getting out yet, but I can give you an idea of how serious the problem is by telling you there have been three cases of apsychia in the area over the past year alone.”

  “And you think we are to blame? Slow Jinn Fizz?” Durani bounced—no, flew—out of his chair. His volatility was still there, all right; I just hadn’t conjured it up in polite greetings. “No, no, ten thousand times no!” he cried. I thought he was going to rend his garment. He didn’t; he contented himself with grabbing his turban in both hands, as if he feared his head would fall off. “How can you accuse us of such an outrage? How dare you, sir!”

  “Calm yourself, Mr. Durani, please.” I made a little placating gesture, hoping he’d sit down again. It didn’t work. I went on quickly, before he threw the samovar at me. “Nobody’s accusing Slow Jinn Fizz of anything. I’m just trying to find out what’s going on at the dump site.”

  “You dare accuse Slow Jinn Fizz of causing apsychia!” He extravagantly wasn’t listening.

  “I haven’t accused you,” I said, louder this time. “Have—not. I’m just investigating. And you must admit that Solomon’s Seals are very potent magic, with a strong potential for polluting the environment.”

  Durani cast his eyes up to the ceiling and, presumably, past it toward Allah. “They think I am destroying souls,” he said—not to me. He glared my way a moment later. “You wretched bureaucratic fool, Slow Jinn Fizz does not cause apsychia. I—we—this consortium—am—are—is on the edge of curing this dreadful defect.”

  I started to get angry at him, then stopped when I realized what he’d just said. “You are?” I exclaimed. “How, in God’s name?”

  “In God’s name indeed—in the name of the Compassionate, the Merciful.” Durani calmed down again, so fast that I wondered how much of his rage was real temper and how much for show. But that didn’t matter, either, not if he really was on the edge of beating apsychia. If he could do that, I didn’t mind him chewing me out every day—and twice on Fridays.

  “Tell me what you’re doing here,” I said. “Please.” People have been trying to cure apsychia since the dawn of civilization, and probably long before that. Modern goetic
technology can work plenty of marvels, but that…

  “Jinnetic engineering can accomplish things no one would have imagined possible only a generation ago,” Durani said. “Combining the raw strength of the jinn with the rigor and precision of Western sorcery—”

  “That much I know,” I said. Jinnetic engineering outfits have fueled a lot of the big boom on the Bourse the past few years, and with reason. The only way their profit margins could be bigger would be for the jinni to fetch bags of gold from the Other Side.

  But Durani had found something else for them to do Over There: jinn-splicing, he called it. What he had in mind was for the jinni to take a tiny fraction of the spiritual packet that made up a disembodied human soul, bring it back to This Side, and, using recombinant techniques he didn’t—wouldn’t—describe, join it with a bunch of other tiny fragments to produce what was in essence a synthesized soul, which could then be transplanted into some poor little apsychic kid.

  “So you see,” he said, gesturing violently, “it is impossible—impossible, I tell you!—for Slow Jinn Fizz or any of our byproducts to cause apsychia. We aim to prevent this tragedy, to make it as if it never was, not to cause it.”

  Whether what he aimed at was what he accomplished, I couldn’t have said. For that matter, neither could he, not with any confidence. Sorcerous byproducts have a way of taking on lives of their own.

  But that wasn’t what was really on my mind. “Have you actually transplanted one of these, uh, synthesized souls into an apsychic human being?” I knew there was awe in my voice, the same sort of awe the Garuda Bird program raises in me: I felt I was at the very edge of something bigger than I’d ever imagined, and if I reached out just a little, I could touch it.

  “We have transplanted three so far,” he answered with quiet pride.

  “And?” I wanted to reach out, all right, reach out and pull the answer from him.