The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

by Harry Turtledove

  Instead of finding something constructive to do with the last half hour of my work day, I looked out the window to see if the succubi were still marching down below. They were, and traffic in the building rush hour on Wilshire Boulevard, always heavy, was becoming downright elephantine. Maybe I could duck south down side flyways to St Monica’s Boulevard and get on the freeway there.

  It was a good plan. It should have worked, too; Veteran was crowded heading north because people couldn’t turn onto Wilshire from it, but southbound traffic didn’t look too bad. I felt pretty smug sliding down to the parking lot—this once, I figured, I had a fighting chance of beating the system.

  Thaumaturgy hasn’t found them yet, but there must be gremlins who sit around listening for thoughts like that. I was just strapping on my safety belt when a priest happened to fly down Veteran. In an instant, all the succubi who had been on Wilshire started running after his carpet, shaking everything they had (and believe me, they had plenty) and calling out blandishments that made my ears turn red—and they weren’t even directed at me.

  Succubi, of course, delight in tormenting priests: that’s been obvious ever since Christianity began. And priests, being mortal, have been known to yield to temptation. Some of the temptation here was pretty tempting, too.

  A normal rule in Westwood is that you can’t find a parking space to save your soul. The priest, though, must have had the power of the Lord behind him, because he managed to slide his carpet into one. The succubi squealed with delight and jounced after him, sure they’d found another sinner in clerical collar.

  They got a rude surprise. The priest hadn’t stopped to dally with them, he’d stopped to give them a load of fire and brimstone to take the place of the sweet scents they were wearing: bitch wolves was the nicest thing he called them, and went on to things like haughty, vainglorious, lecherous betrayers, ready for every wickedness, and fickle in love (which, when applied to a succubus, is about like calling the ocean damp). He roasted them on both sides. Meanwhile, though, half the males on Wilshire tried to turn onto Veteran so they could keep ogling the succubi, which meant the traffic jam spread with them.

  At first the succubi didn’t believe the priest was serious.

  They had a thorough understanding of the way people work, and knew too many folks like to condemn in public what they do in private. So they kept on pressing themselves against the priest, rubbing their hands over him, kissing his cheek and his ear and the bare circle of his tonsure, paying no heed to his outraged bellows.

  Then he pulled out an ampule of holy water. The suo cubi’s squeals turned to screams. They ran, you’ll pardon the expression, like hell. And the priest, his virtue intact even if his clothes were mussed, got back onto his carpet and flew away.

  He flew away slowly. By then, that was the only way it was possible to fly on Veteran. Everyone else flew slowly, too, including me. I shouldn’t have been thinking such uncharitable thoughts abut a man of the cloth, especially one who had just proved his faith against a challenge to which many would have succumbed… but I was. If he’d flown by five minutes later, I’d have had an easy trip to the freeway. Getting snarled in traffic instead would have tried the patience of a saint.

  I made it home much later than I’d intended, and in a much fouler mood. These things happen. After a bottle of ale and a steak, my attitude improved a good deal. I know what would improve it more, too: I called Judy.

  “I’m so jealous, I’m going to hit you the next time I see you,” she said when I told her I’d been involved in using virtuous reality to contact Erasmus. “We were just talking about Ak-x that at the office today. The consensus in the business is that it’s the biggest advance in sorcerous technology since ectoplasmic cloning.”

  “I didn’t think it was that important,” I said. Look at the ways having large numbers of identical microimps has changed our lives: spellcheckers, telephones, ethemet sets, all sorts of things our grandparents couldn’t have imagined.

  Thinking of that much change happening again—and probably happening faster, because it would be allied to the developments that are already in place—made my head spin.

  But Judy said, “Oh, it is, David. The world will be a different place twenty years from now, because we’ll have figured out all the things we can do in virtuous reality. Think about it: what’s the biggest problem in sorcerous applications today?”

  “Ask me a hard one,” I answered. “To accomplish everything people want to do these days, spells keep getting more and more complex, and errors creep in.” Some of the errors are pretty ghastly, too, like the one at the Union Kobold works in India a few years back, where a Rakshawas mistakenly ordered to turn out wood alcohol instead of the more friendly sort. Hundreds died from drinking it, and a couple of thousand more were permanently blinded—all from one small goof in translating a spell from Latin into Sanskrit so the Hindu demon could understand it.

  “You’re right, of course,” Judy said, which took my mind off the contemplation of disaster. Just as well, too. She went on, “But think what will happen when any old mage can go into virtuous reality to develop his sorcerous subroutines. Because of the nature of that space, the number of errors should drop way down. Ideally, it should fall to zero, but I think the fallibility principles will keep that from happening. Still—”

  “I hadn’t thought of it in those terms,” I admitted. “It just seemed a handy way to reach a spirit who’d been too badly damaged to manifest himself in this rough, rugged world.” I thought about some of the things the wizards had done to poor Erasmus. Judy didn’t need to know about those.

  She said, “I’m just glad I’ll have my master’s and be out of the copy-editing and proofreading end of the business soon.

  Mark my words, the accuracy breakthrough that will come with virtuous reality is going to throw a lot of sharp people onto the streets.”

  “Change has a way of doing that: the more efficient the spells get, the more they do and the less anybody needs actual people,” I said. One of the reasons the General Movers plant in Van Nuys is going under is that the Japanese have figured out a way to power the looms that make their flying carpets by kamkazes-divine winds.

  “That does look to be the way it’s going,” she said, “but what do we do with all the people who lose jobs? Eventually nobody will need people for anything, and then where will we be?”

  The two answers that occur to me are bored and broke”

  I answered. “But those are for people in general. People in particular—us, I mean—will be married. We may end up broke, but I don’t think we’ll be bored.”

  “No, not bored,” she agreed, “especially not with children in the house.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. I know children are usually one of the things marriage is about. I even looked forward, in an abstract sort of way, to being a father. But it didn’t seem real to me; I had trouble imagining myself giving a baby a bath or helping a little girl with her subtraction problems.

  Then I thought about the Corderos. They were nice lads who’d had every reason to expect a nice, normal baby.

  Instead they got Jesus, bom without a soul. How were they handling it? How could I handle something like that if it happened to me? The very idea was nearly enough to put me off parenthood for good.

  “You still there?” Judy asked when I didn’t say anything for a while. “Relax—it’s not as if you’re going to have to start changing diapers tomorrow.” The woman can read me like one of the grimoires she proofs. I suspect that, like them, I’ll end up better for the editing, too.

  Just to show her I had other things on my mind besides immediately turning into a daddy, I said, “Something else interesting happened today—or at least I thought it was.” I told her about the demon stration outside the Confederal Building.

  “I’ll bet you thought it was interesting,” she said darldy.

  Women take a particular tone when they talk about attractive competition that bothers them. They take a dif
ferent—but not very different—tone when they talk about attractive competition that amuses them. Over the phone, I had a tough time telling which one Judy was using. She went on, “See anything you liked in particular?”

  “Well—” The image of the succubus in blue leaped into my mind, as fully three-dimensional as the little demon had been herself. “As a matter of fact, yes.” I did my best to sound sheepish, but I didn’t know how good my best was.

  Judy left me hanging for a couple of seconds before she started to laugh. “Good,” she said between chuckles. “If you’d told me anything else, I’d have figured you were lying—succubi are made to be succulent, after all. I wish I’d been there; I could have leered at some of the incubi.

  Watching is fun, though I think men may be more apt to enjoy it than women.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “It didn’t seem to matter much to the traffic, though. Everybody was staring, men and women both.”

  “Oh, God, I hadn’t even thought about that It must have been awful.” Commuting every day from Long Beach up into East A.C., Judy knows all about traffic tangles and loves them as much as anyone else who has to get on the freeway to go to work.

  “It was worse than that.” She laughed again when I told her how the strong-minded priest had foiled my effort to escape down Veteran. Thinking back on it, I decided it was funny, too. It certainly hadn’t felt funny why I was sitting on my carpet twiddling my thumbs for an extra twenty minutes.

  “So how was your day?” I asked.

  “Certainly not as interesting as yours,” she answered.

  “Very much the usual: looking at sheets of parchment and making little marks on them in red. It keeps me out of the baron’s Paupers’ Home, but past that it doesn’t have a whole lot to recommend it. I can’t wait to finish my master’s so somebody will hire me to work on the theoretical side of sorcery.”

  Then you’ll be working in virtuous reality all the time, if it turns out to be as important as you think it wffl,” I said.

  “It will, and I will. Then I’ll come home and we can be less than virtuous together.” Judy hesitated, just a beat “But we’ll be married, so it’ll be virtuous after all. Hmm. I’m not sure I like that.”

  “I think it’ll be fine any which way,” I said. “And speaking-indirectly-of such things, do you want to have dinner with me tomorrow night?”

  “Indirectly indeed,” she said. “Sure, I’d love to. Shall we go to that Hanese place near your flat again?”

  “Sounds good to me. You want to meet here after we get off work?”

  “All right,” Judy said. “It’ll be good to see you. I love you.”

  “Love you too, hon. See you tomorrow. Bye.”

  Thinking of seeing Judy kept me going through a miserable Tuesday at the office. I did get some of the small stuff done. Lord, the things that show up on an EPA man’s desk sometimes! I got a letter from a woman up in the high desert asking it the ashes of a coyote’s flesh had the same anti-asthmatic effect as those of a fox’s flesh when drunk in wine and, if so, whether she could set traps for the ones that kept trying to catch her cats. Just answering that one took a couple of hours of research and a phone call to the Chief Huntsman of the Barony of Angels (in case you’re interested, the answers are yes and she had to buy a twenty-crown license first, respectively).

  The environmental study on importing leprechauns, though, took a large step backwards. I got a very fancylooking legal brief from an outfit that called itself Save Our Basin, which opposed allowing the Little People to establish themselves here. SOB put forward the fear that, once we had leprechauns here, all the Sidhe would henceforth pack up and move to Angels City. I’m condensing, but that’s what the gist of it was. Now on first glance this stuck me as one of the more idiotic environmental concerns I’d seen lately. The climate here, both literal and theological, isn’t congenial to Powers from cool, moist Eire. But the Save Our Basin folks had so many citations in their brief—from the evocatio of Juno out of Veil and into Rome to the establishment of the Virgin at Guadalupe in what had been a purely Aztecan thecology—that I couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. It would have to be countered, which meant more research, more projections—and more delay. I wondered how long leprechauns could stay in hiberniation. I hoped it was a long time.

  I looked at the names on the letterhead of the Save Our Basin parchment I didn’t recognize any of them, but somebody in that organization was one clever lawyer. As far as I could see, none of the citations in the brief was precisely analogous to what would happen if we imported leprechauns into Angels City, but they were all close enough to being analogous that I (and, again by analogy, our legal staff) couldn’t afford to ignore them. We’d have to examine every one of those instances, demonstrate that it was irrelevant, and withstand challenges from Save Our Basin trying to establish that the instances weren’t irrelevant at all.

  In a word, a mess. I figured the best way was to taclde their citations chronologically, so I started researching the Roman sack of Veil. I found out in a hurry that all the accounts of the sack are legendary, some more so than others. Legends are trickier to deal with than myths. Mythical material definitely has theological overtones; you know what the thaumaturgic content is. But in a legend you can’t tell what’s from This Side and what from the Other. A lawyers paradise, in other words.

  I’m sure Save Our Basin did it on purpose, too. Not for the first time lately, I had the feeling I was wading deeper into quicksand. When quitting time finally rolled around, I breathed a heartfelt. “Thank God!” My spirits improved considerably as I left behind the spirits I’d been wrestling with at work and looking forward to dinner with rest of the being more enjoy on my way home, someone tried to kill me.

  VII

  Everything was fine till I got off the freeway at The Second. Traffic, in fact, had been a little lighter than usual, though on St. James’ Freeway at rush hour a little light than usual isn’t the same as light, or even close to it Still, I was feeling pretty good about the world as I headed east up The Second toward my flat I had to wait for cross traffic at the comer of The Second and Anglewood Boulevard; a small church was being moved up Anglewood on top of a couple of extra-heavy-duty carpets. When at last it cleared the intersection, I tried to start across fast but couldn’t because the little old lady on the carpet in front of me didn’t. That probably saved my life, though I sent foul thoughts her way at the time.

  A carpet had been idling in the parking lot of the filed chicken place on the far side of Anglewood. I’d noticed it, and wondered what the two guys on it were thinking about. Most likely nothing, was my disparagmg opinion; if they’d had any brains, they would have taken advantage of the hole in traffic the traveling church made and headed up The Second themselves.

  They got moving fast enough after I went by. Too fast, in fact—if a black-and-white carpet had been anywhere nearby, they’d have picked up a ticket just like that I saw in my rearview mirror that they didn’t seem to like the way I was flying, either: they zoomed up above me to pass. That would have earned them another ticket from any constable who saw them.

  I thought about signifying my opinion of the way they flew with an ancient fertility gesture, but I decided not to. As I’ve mentioned, Hawthorne is a tough town, and people have been known to get shot or have other unpleasant things happen to them on the flyways of Angels City. So I just did my best to pretend the louts didn’t exist as they went up and over me.

  As they did, though, one of them leaned out past the fringe of his carpet and dropped something down onto mine.

  They sped away,.. and my carpet didn’t want to fly any more.

  I had time for one startled squawk and the first two words of the Shnw before the carpet, suddenly just a rug, hit the ground with a thump that made me bite my tongue and left my backside bruised for the next two weeks. If I hadn’t been wearing my safety belt, if the carpet hadn’t rolled up around me when I hit, or if I’d been going faster, I don’t care to think wha
t might have happened.

  As things were, I wasn’t badly hurt, but I had that weird sensation you get after an accident: I was pretty shaky, but I had almost total perception and recall of everything going on around me. Other carpets kept flying by a few feet overhead, the people on them intent on their own business and not caring at all about somebody who’d just had his carpet fail him.

  But why had it failed? I couldn’t figure that out Did it have something to do with whatever the punk had dropped on my carpet? I looked around for that, trying to find out what it was. I didn’t see anything on the carpet itself, but something was stirring out on the weed-covered dirt just beyond the fringe.

  I bent my head closer. The earth itself seemed to be writhing. For a second or two, I didn’t understand what I was looking at Then I did, and ice ran through me: it was a tiny earth elemental, busfly digging itself back into its proper home.

  Fire and water are the opposing elements we most commonly notice, but earth and air are opposites, too. Matt Arnold had talked about sylph-esteem and sylph-discipline, but if those two guys had tossed an earth elemental down onto my carpet, that was nothing short of sylph-abuse.

  The elemental had gone now, though, back to its own proper home. I tried the starting spell. My carpet lifted off the ground as smoothly as if nothing had ever been wrong with it Very carefully, looking every which way as I went and wishing for eyes in the back of my head, I flew on home.

  All the way there, I tried to make some sense out of what had happened, the way theologians wrestle with God’s will.

  Was it just a couple of hooligans out to have some sport with whoever drew the short straw? That’s the sort of random violence that gives Angels City flyways a bad name, but this time I wished I could believe it. I couldn’t, though.