The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

by Harry Turtledove

  I liked her place. It was in an older block of flats than mine, so it had occasional plumbing problems, no ice elemental connection for hot summer days, and a wheezy excuse for a salamander that couldn’t keep the place warm in winter, but there were compensations. The main one, I think, was decently thick walls: you didn’t find out everything your neighbors were up to as if you watched them in a crystal ball.

  She’d lived there for five years, and the flat had the stamp of her personality on it. It was crammed with books, maybe even more than mine. The knickknacks (aside from the menorah and brass candlesticks for the Sabbath) were museum copies of Greek and Roman sorcerous apparatus, all mellow clay and greened bronze. The prints on the wall were by Arcimboldo—you know, the fellow who made portraits out of interlocked fish or fruit or imps. They’re endlessly fascinating to look at, and you never can decide just how far out of his tree old Arcimboldo was.

  If you think I’m building up to a tale of lurid lovemaking, I’m sorry—it wasn’t like that. We hugged each other, she made some coffee, we talked later than we should have, and when we slept together, that’s all we did: we slept together. If you’re under twenty-five you probably won’t believe me, but sometimes that’s better—and more intimate, too—than twitches and moans. Not, believe me, that I have anything against twitches and moans, but to every thing its season.

  My sleep season ended too soon the next morning; the horological demon in Judy’s alarm clock bounced me out of her bed with a bloodcurdling ululation. I hurried back to my place (which luckily wasn’t far out of my way), showered, changed clothes, grabbed a Danish and my portable spellchecker, and headed for the office.

  What I had in mind was racing through business in the morning and heading up to the Corderos’ house in the afternoon to take some readings with the spellchecker. That’s what I ended up doing, too, but it wasn’t as simple as I’d had in mind. Something large and unpleasant landed on my desk with a thud.

  I don’t quite mean that literally, but the report I was going to have to produce would be fat enough to thud down somewhere. I’ve mentioned that Angels City is in the middle of a drought. The note Bea passed to me explained that some sorcerers up in the north end of the Barony of Angels tried to bring rain with Chumash Indian charmstones, perhaps in the hope that native spirits would have more effect on the local weather than imported white man’s magic.

  They got nothing. I don’t mean they didn’t get rain. Nobody’s been able to get much in the way of rain for Angels City the past few years. I mean they got nothing—no sign that the Powers linked to those charmstones were still there to be summoned. What Bea wanted me to do was determine whether the Chumash Powers were in fact extinct.

  That’s always a melancholy job. Extinction means something wonderful going out of the world forever, whether from This Side or the Other. The poor Chumash, though, have been so thoroughly dispossessed and assimilated over the last couple of hundred years that no one believes any more in the Powers they once revered. Not only does no one believe in them, hardly anybody even knows they exist. And Powers without believers will die. Even the great Pan is two thousand years dead now.

  Heavens, before I could get started, I had to go to the reference library to look up Chumash charmstones and how they fit into the rest of the Indians’ cult. I found out they were used not only for making rain, but also in war (they could make you invisible to arrows), in medicine, and in general sorcery. They tied in with other talismans—’atishwin, the Chumash called those—and with the Powers who helped the Chumash shamans. And now, by what Bea had passed to me, they were just little carved chunks of steatite, as inert as if they’d never had any magical intent at all.

  I went up to Bea’s office, shot the breeze with her secretary (Rose really runs that place; if she ever quit, we’d fall apart) until she got off the phone, then ducked in fast before it made noise again. “What’s my priority on this Chumash thing?” I asked her. “The Devonshire project is taking up a lot of my time right now.”

  “I know,” she answered. “It still comes first—it’s active, while if the Chumash Powers really are extinct, there’s no hurry about saying so. You’ll want to get a more formal investigation going to check that out one way or the other, have the thaumaturges see if the Chumash gods of the Upper World, the First People, or the Nunashish of the Lower World are still accessible to invocation.”

  “You’ve been reading up on this,” I said; up until a couple of minutes before, I’d never heard of the dark, misshapen Nunashish.

  She grinned at me. “Of course I have. If I knew about these spirits off the top of my head, they wouldn’t be on the edge of extinction, would they? If it turns out they haven’t gone over the edge, report back to me right away, because we’ll need to try to arrange a preservation scheme—assuming we can afford one.”

  Doing a cost-benefit analysis to figure out whether it’s worthwhile to save an endangered deity is so coldblooded that it’s one of my least favorite parts of the job. It is, unfortunately, also all too often necessary. As I noted when I saw Matt Arnold’s door Herm, maintaining a cult for a supernatural being who would otherwise be gone is expensive: it’s the Other Side’s equivalent of a captive breeding program for an animal that’s vanished from the wild.

  If the Chumash Powers were still alive, somebody—me, most likely—would have to figure out their role in the local thecosystem, and whether that role justified the money to provide worshipers and whatever else they needed. I’d never been part of the God Squad before. It’s an awesome responsibility, when you think about it.

  Bea must have seen the look on my face. “Don’t get yourself in an uproar, David. The odds are that these Powers have just faded away, like so many others the Indians reverenced before white folks—and black—settled here. If that’s so, all you’ll have to do is write up the report. It’s only if the Nunashish and the rest are still around that you’ll have any bigger worries.”

  “I know that,” I answered. “Actually, I hope they do survive. But if they do, and if they’re very much enfeebled—which they will be—”

  “Yes, I know. Holding a Power’s fate in your hands isn’t easy. In the old days, they were proud of ridding the world of gods in whom they didn’t believe—some of the early Christian writings, the ones from the time of the Great Extinctions in Europe, will sicken you with their gloating. But our ideas are different now; we know everything has its place in Creation, to be preserved if possible.”

  “But to be the one who decides if it’s possible, and then to have to live with myself afterwards… it won’t be easy, Bea.”

  “If you wanted a job that was easy all the time, you wouldn’t be here,” she said. “Anything else? No? All right, thank you, David.”

  I went back to my office and made a couple of calls, got the ball rolling on the Chumash charmstones. Then I plowed through as much of the more routine stuff as I could before lunch. If I’d known how bad lunch was going to be, I’d have worked straight through it. The cafeteria must have assembled the unappetizing glop on my plate with help from the law of contagion: some time a long while ago, it might have been in contact with real food. Two crowns ninety-five shot to—well, you get the idea.

  I slid down to my carpet with my spellchecker in my lap. My stomach made small unhappy noises. Hoping they wouldn’t turn into large unhappy noises, I flew on up into St. Ferdinand’s Valley. The brown dirt and yellow-brown dry brush of the pass were getting to look very familiar.

  The Corderos lived in a neighborhood that had been upper middle class maybe thirty years before. A lot of the houses still looked pretty nice, but it wasn’t upper middle class any more. Gang symbols and tags, mostly in Spainish, were scrawled on too many walls, sometimes on top of one another. And the houses, even the nice-looking ones, often held three, four, or more families, because that was the only way the new immigrants could afford to pay the rent.

  The house the Corderos lived in was like that. Three women and a herd
of kids not old enough for school watched me while I set up the spellchecker. All the men, including Ramón Cordero, were out working. Lupe held poor little Jesus and nursed him while she tried to keep track of a toddler who looked just like her.

  One of the women—her name was Magdalena—spoke good English. She translated for me when I said, “First things first. Let me check that bottle of tonic you were telling me about, Mrs. Cordero.”

  Lupe Cordero rattled off something in Spainish. The woman who wasn’t Magdalena disappeared into the back part of the house. She came back a minute later with a jar that had started out life holding tartar sauce. It was half full of a murky brown liquid. Lupe made a face. “Don’ taste good,” she said.

  I actuated the spellchecker with Passover wine and a Hebrew blessing. My rite was close enough to what the women were used to—a Latin prayer and communion wine—that they didn’t remark on it, not even to say I’d omitted the sign of the cross. I was almost disappointed. “Soy jud°o” is one of the Spainish phrases I do know.

  I unscrewed the lid of the ex-tartar-sauce jar, sniffed the current contents myself. The brown liquid didn’t smell like anything in particular. I reminded myself that Lupe had drunk it without ill effect, and that Father Flanagan had told me few curanderos trafficked in—or with—anything dangerous. That reminded me: I asked Lupe, “Want to tell me the name of the person you got this from?”

  She shook her head. “Don’ remember,” she said stubbornly. I shrugged; I hadn’t expected anything different.

  I started to stick the spellchecker’s probe right into the liquid, but the microimps inside the unit started screaming as soon as I got the end of the probe over the rim of the jar. The women exclaimed bilingually. I decided I’d better not put the probe in until I saw what the spellchecker was screaming about.

  Words started showing up on the ground glass as the microimps tried to tell me what was wrong. They’d been programmed to write in what was mirror image for them, but they were so agitated that they kept forgetting. It didn’t matter; I could follow either style well enough.

  The ingredient listing came first: octli (maguey beer to you), ocelot blood, ferret flesh, dragon blood—I blinked a little at that one, but the Aztecans have dragons, too. Then the spellchecker’s imps started writing UNIDENTIFIED—FORBIDDEN over and over and over. I’d never seen the spellchecker do that before. I never wanted to see it again, either.

  “Gevalt,” I muttered under my breath; sometimes English lacks the words you need. I almost wished Judaism had a convenient gesture like the sign of the cross. I could have used one just then. To say I was flummoxed is to put it mildly.

  “Let’s try it again,” I said, as much to steady myself as for any other reason. I tried again, from square one, shutting down the spellchecker and reactivating it. You have to be careful if you do that more than once in a short time: the spirits inside can take on too many spirits from the wine and lose memory. But it did make them stop screaming.

  This time I reversed the normal order and had them analyze the sorcerous component of the tonic, not the physical ingredients that went into making the complete magic. That’s what I tried to do, at any rate. The screaming started again as soon as the probe got anywhere near the jar.

  I looked at the ground glass to see what the microimps had to say. They expressed their opinion in two words: UNIDENTIFIED—FORBIDDEN. They wrote those two words until the whole screen was full, then started underlining them. Whatever had gone into that tonic, in analyzing it I’d sent a boy to do a man’s, or maybe a giant’s, job.

  Even moving the probe away didn’t calm the spellchecker imps. They stopped underlining only when I closed the jar as tight as I could. Even then, none of the usual commands or invocations would clear the ground glass or make them stop screaming. I had to shut down the spellchecker to get them to shut up.

  “Mrs. Cordero, whatever is in this potion, it’s very strong magic and very dark magic,” I said. Magdalena translated for me. “My spellchecker won’t even confront it, you see. I want two things from you, please.” She nodded. I went on, “First, I want to take this jar to a proper thaumaturgical laboratory for full analysis.”

  “Sí, take it,” she said.

  “The other thing I want is the name of the curandero who sold it to you,” I said. “Mrs. Cordero, this stuff is dangerous. Do you want another mother to have a baby born like Jesus?”

  “Madre de Dios, no,” she exclaimed.

  “Good,” I answered, more abstractedly than I should have. I was wondering if the hellbrew in the tartar-sauce jar had caused all the apsychic births around the Devonshire dump. If it had, then the biggest part of the case for leaks against the dump had just collapsed. But if the dump and everybody using it were innocent, who’d torched the Thomas Brothers monastery, and why? All at once, nothing made sense.

  I pulled my attention back to the tacky little living room in which I stood (I’m sorry, but an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, while undoubtedly effective as an apotropaic, is not to my mind a work of art if it’s painted on black velvet in luridly phosphorescent colors). Lupe Cordero still hadn’t said who the curandero was. I realized she was waiting to be coaxed. Okay, I’d coax her. “Please, Mrs. Cordero, this information is very important.”

  “You don’ tell him who you hear it from?” she asked anxiously.

  I hedged. “I’ll try not to.”

  To my relief, that was good enough for her. “Okay,” she said. “He call himself CuauhtÇmoc Hernandez, and he have his house up near Van Nuys Boulevard and O’Melveny.” I noted the irony of a curandero operating by a Dutch and Erse corner; Angels City is changing. Lupe went on, “His sign, it say curandero in letters red an’ green.”

  “Thanks very much, Mrs. Cordero,” I said, and meant every word of it. I wrote down what she’d told me so I wouldn’t forget it, then left the house and started flying around looking for a public pay phone. I finally found one outside a liquor store whose front window said CERVEZA FRIA in letters three times the size of the ones that advertised COLD BEER.

  I called the office from there, and got Rose. When I asked to talk to Bea, she said, “I’m sorry, Dave, she’s already on the phone with someone.”

  “Could you ask her to come out to your desk, please?” I said. “This is important.”

  One of Rose’s many wonderful attributes is her almost occult sense of knowing when somebody really means something like that (and if there’s a spell to produce the same effect, way too many secretaries have never heard of it). Half a minute later, Bea said, “What is it, David?” It had better be interesting lurked behind her words.

  When I’d told her what the spellchecker had done with Lupe Cordero’s potion, she sighed and said, “Well, you were right: that is important. Bring it in to the laboratory right away, David, and we’ll see what really is in it. Then we and the constabulary will drop on Mr.—Hernandez, did you say his name was?—like a ton of bricks. Most of the time these curanderos are only guilty of venial sin, but desouling a baby isn’t even slightly venial.”

  “If that’s what did it,” I said cautiously. “But yeah, I’m on my way. I’m just glad the lab survived last year’s budget cuts.”

  “So am I,” Bea answered.

  Farming things out to private alchemists and wizards would have eaten up just as much budget as maintaining our own analysis unit: specialists, naturally, charge plenty for their expertise. You’re not just paying for what they know now, but for what learning it cost them. And besides, this way we didn’t have to stand in a queue in case we needed results in a hurry.

  As soon as I got back to the Westwood Confederal building, I took the jar over to the lab. It’s on the same floor as the rest of the EPA offices, but tucked into a corner and hedged around with protective charms not much different from the ones on the fence outside the Devonshire dump.

  Our principal thaumaturgic analyst (bureaucratese for wizard, in case you’re wondering) is a balding blond fellow named Mich
ael (not Mike) Manstein. He’s very good at what he does; he brings an Alemanic sense of precision and order to what’s too often a chaotic art. That he makes me want to stand at attention and click my heels every time I go in to talk with him is by comparison a detail.

  “Hello, David,” he said, looking up from the table where he was inscribing a circle with his black-handled knife. “What can I do for you this afternoon?”

  I gave him the tartar-sauce bottle and explained where I’d got it and how my spellchecker had reacted to it. His eyebrows came together as he listened; a little vertical crease appeared just above his nose. I finished, “So I’d like you to find out what really is in the jar here and what spells made it strong enough to set off my spellchecker like that. I may have to exorcise it before I can use it again.”

  “Interesting.” Michael took the jar from me, wrapped it in a green silk cloth with several magical symbols inscribed on it in pigeon’s blood. “When must you have results from the analysis?”

  “Yesterday would be good,” I said. He laughed the small, polite laugh of a man who not only doesn’t have the best sense of humor ever hatched but also has been besieged by importunate clients more times than he cares to remember. I went on, “Seriously, if I can have this tomorrow some time, that would be great. The stuff is suspected of being involved in an apsychia case, and may be linked to several others up in the Valley.”

  “Ah, I see. This tells me what I need to set my priorities for the coming work.” Michael Manstein is too compulsively precise to get sloppy with the language and say things like prioritize.

  “That’s nice,” I said. Whatever his priorities were, the potion wasn’t at the top of them. He went back to scribing his circle. I turned to go; trying to hurry Manstein is like trying to make the sun rise faster. Then I had an afterthought. “Whose sorcerer’s tools do you use, Michael?”