The Second Science Fiction Megapack

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  I went to a phone booth and checked the listings, found Jacy Hines. I called her number and she answered.

  “This is Nuala. May I come and see you?”

  She hesitated. I waited.

  “Let me meet you somewhere,” she said at last. I wondered if Hugh were there with her now.

  I told her where I was, and she came fifteen minutes later. She wore a brown jacket over a dark orange dress, and black tights and shoes. She looked small and comforting, like someone I should like for a friend.

  We both got coffee and sat across from each other in the booth. I waited.

  She had drunk half of her coffee when she finally spoke. “What do you want?”

  “What are you doing with my husband?”

  She stared into her cup. “He said you wouldn’t mind.”

  “You have been misinformed.”

  She glanced up then, and I drew that look on the table top with my darkest pencil, letting touch-power enter her outline.

  “You see,” I whispered when I knew I had her attention, that her gaze would not waver, “I made promises when I married him, and he gave me promises in return. Are his promises mist? Does that make mine water, to melt and flow instead of staying hard as ice?”

  “He said you were no longer sexual with each other.” Her whisper was strained.

  “I don’t remember by whose desire.” I rubbed my fingertips over my forehead.

  “Do you want him still? I didn’t know.”

  “I am bound to him by vows I hold sacred.”

  For a moment she said nothing. “I’m sorry.”

  “He has drawn you in. Does that mean I pull you farther into our vows, or that I let go of our vows?” I got a different pencil out of my box and drew carefully on the portrait of Jacy, added lines of warmth where I had learned they would most affect a human. She twitched and shuddered as I worked, and red flowed across her face.

  “What are you doing?” she asked in an agonized whisper.

  Another touch there. Three tweaks. I slid my eyes sideways, watched her shudder again.

  “Whatever I like.” I watched her for a while, left her suspended almost all the way to where she would find release, not quite there, just the itchy anxious side short of it. Then I touched my drawing, and she shook and shuddered, her breath panting in and out of her. Finally she melted back against her bench.

  I traced the lines of my picture with summon power until the picture released the tabletop. It eased into my hand. Jacy’s shoulders shifted. “What are you doing?” she whispered again. A tear leaked from one of her eyes.

  “Knotwork.” I tied the lines of her drawing in several complicated knots and slipped it into my pocket. This was so easy for me that I knew my vows had indeed melted. Since I had not stepped outside them, I knew Hugh had destroyed them.

  Did I want to reinstate them? Or should I leave him now? I ran my fingers over the small knot of lines in the bottom of my pocket. Jacy jumped and twitched.

  “Please,” she said. “Please don’t do that.”

  I rubbed the warm places in my knots with the ball of my thumb. She leaned back, eyes closed, mouth open. Low gasps rang from her. I rubbed slower, then faster, until she melted down under the table. People at nearby tables watched her when her gasps grew loud enough. “Stop,” she moaned. I gave her lines one last rub, and she cried out, loud enough for everyone in the restaurant to hear.

  I took my hand out of my pocket. I finished my coffee. I glanced at the waitress, who came over to me after a couple minutes.

  “Is your friend all right?” she asked as she refilled my cup.

  “She’s fine.” I pointed to Jacy’s cup and the waitress refilled that too, and went away. I poured two creams into Jacy’s coffee, as I had seen her do when she first sat down. I sipped my coffee. Then I leaned down and spoke under the table. “You can come out now.”

  She had curled into a ball. “I’m never coming out.” Tears streaked her face.

  “You can come out, or I can make you come out.”

  She rubbed her eyes. A little later she crept out from under the table and settled herself in her seat. People stared. She looked toward the wall, her cheeks flushed.

  “Drink your coffee.”

  She drank. “What do you want?” she asked.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. He said—”

  I nodded. I dropped money on the table to cover our coffees and a tip. “Let’s go.”

  She collected her purse and her jacket from the bench and tried to stand. Staggered.

  I slipped my hand into my pocket and stroked strength into her lines. She straightened, took a deep breath, and followed me out of the restaurant.

  “Are you a witch?” she asked in the parking lot.

  “Not exactly.”

  “But you can make me feel things.” She blushed again.

  “Did you like it?”

  She stared at the ground. She shook her head. She smiled a tiny smile, the smile one smiles for oneself. “I can never go into that restaurant again.”

  “Let’s go back right now.”

  She touched my arm. “Please. Don’t.”

  I stared at her hand until she dropped it. “Please,” she whispered.

  I cupped her knotwork in my hand. She tensed.

  “Let’s go to your apartment.”

  She relaxed.

  I let her drive us in her car.

  My husband’s scent was in her living room.

  It was a small and comforting place. I sat on her brown velvet couch, and she dropped into a red armchair across a walnut coffee table from me. Bookshelves lined one wall, most of the books hardcovers and well worn. A plant stand held a number of leggy, healthy plants. A red and blue persian carpet the size of a bathroom stall in a hotel covered a patch of floor between furniture.

  Brown velvet smelled of my husband, his satisfied scent.

  “I bound myself to him, and he to me,” I told Jacy.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize. He acted as if there were nothing between you anymore.”

  “When I met you, you didn’t smell like a threat.”

  She shook her head. “I never thought of it. I was surprised when he came into my office and asked me to help him evaluate a portfolio. He’s my senior. I thought perhaps he was grooming me for a higher-level position. I thought it was because of my merits. Then he kept asking my help. Things that seemed natural at first, and then things that seemed outside our jobs. Step by step he walked me away from what I thought was right, and I did not notice. Until one night we were up here together. I thought we were talking about work. And then it was different somehow. He sat close to me. I’ve been alone a long time. People don’t see me that way, and I—I’m so sorry, Mrs. Breton.”

  “I don’t know if that’s my name anymore.”

  She covered her face with her hands. “I never meant—I don’t know how it happened. I should have listened to Barry. He told me to stay away from Hugh. But it seemed like nothing at first, so innocent. I am such a fool. I am deeply sorry.”

  “Was he here tonight?”

  She lowered her head. Her lips tightened.

  “Why did he make your relationship public?” I wondered. “If he doesn’t mind my taking classes—if he knows it means he can see you—why let me find out about it?”

  “I don’t think that’s right,” she said in a low voice. “I think he minds.”

  I slipped my hand into my pocket, cradled her lines inside it. “Does he speak to you of me?”

  Her gaze fixed on my hand in my pocket. She was frightened. “Sometimes,” she whispered.

  “What does he tell you?”

  “He says you don’t care about him anymore. That you’re gone a lot. That he’s a passionate man and you no longer want him.”

  I tried to view this as Hugh did. Had he told Jacy his own truth? I was not gone a lot. Perhps twice a week seemed like a lot. Perhaps he resented the time I spent
with my friends while he was at the office. Did I signal Hugh that I no longer wanted him? We climbed into bed and went to sleep. We never turned to each other anymore.

  All the knotwork I had made with Hugh was what we had woven together; in my vows I had decided that I would not hold him in my hand the way I held Jacy now. That was part of the risk and wonder of our marriage for me. Where I came from, one wove knots on knots. That was what one knew: the skill of the knotmaker determined who ruled the connection between any two people. I had come here to find something new.

  No knots but first knots. Shelve that skill and try something new. So I had new skills, but it was time, past time, to reclaim the old ones.

  I took Jacy’s knotwork out of my pocket and sat with it in my hand. She shivered and leaned forward to look. “Is that me?” she asked.

  “It is not you, but what I use on you. We spoke of this when we first met.”

  “We did?” She reached out a hand, touched the edge of her knot, jerked the hand back, her eyes widening. “I felt that.”

  I smiled at her and drew a finger along an edge, watched as she straightened. This was a stroke up her side. She stared at me. I stroked down her other side. She glanced at her side, then at me.

  “It’s not fair,” she said. “How can you do that to me?”

  “Fair has nothing to do with it.” I had woven myself tight in a lace of rules, played at being one of them. All of that was gone.

  I set Jacy’s knotwork on the table between us and leaned back against her couch. Again I smelled my husband’s satisfaction.

  All his actions told me that he wanted everything to change. Did he want to go back to what we were? Did he want to move on, join with Jacy and abandon me? He was no longer the person I married; and nor was I the person who had married him any longer.

  What did I want?

  I thought of my friends, the knots we had tied in our lives where they intersected, our weekly lunches, our telephone conversations, our movie dates, the occasional friend emergency where we met one or two or three or four together, to comfort someone in trouble. I thought of my studies, the greatest of which was my study of how to mimic a human, all the rest subsidiary. I thought of the pleasures Hugh and I had shared, how they had swallowed every other consideration until I had thought nothing else mattered.

  I took a pencil out of my purse, pulled out my grocery list, flipped to a blank page, and drew Hugh.

  I had never knotted him in this way before. I had knotted spirit in him, but never body. I had abdicated that power after our marriage.

  This time I drew on all my memories of our days and nights, on how I had touched him everywhere, and how he had touched me. I drew his spark points and his dull points, the parts of himself he groomed and those small spaces that escaped him.

  I left these lines blank, open to whichever power I would choose to pour into them when I was ready. I took out the other two pencils and laid lines on top, the warmth lines, the pain lines. I turned my husband from equal to object.

  I dropped the pad on the table beside Jacy’s knotwork.

  “What is it a picture of?” she asked.

  I startled. I had forgotten she was there.

  I turned the pad so she could see it better and looked at her, my eyebrows up. How well did she know Hugh?

  Her eyes shifted as she studied the knotwork. Slowly a frown pulled the edges of her mouth down. “Is it—” She sat back suddenly, eyes wide, cheeks pale. “This is Hugh?”

  I smiled.

  “What are you going to do?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know yet.” I leaned forward and picked up her lines. She hunched her shoulders, then relaxed them, but bit her lower lip. I set her knotwork on top of the picture of Hugh’s, wondering what would happen. Hugh’s work was not active yet; I had not powered it; but Jacy knew what it was.

  Her lines curled away from the image of Hugh’s. No attempt to tangle.

  Jacy and I stared at one another.

  “You renounce him?” I asked.

  “I never meant.… I can’t stay with someone who betrays someone else that way. I trusted what he told me, that you wouldn’t mind. He lied to me. I don’t want a person who does that.”

  I lifted her knotwork, held it between my hands and talked the knots into dissolving, let the power loose. Some of it came back to me, and some went into the air.

  I rubbed my hands against each other, then took a napkin from my purse and wiped off the stain.

  “What?” Jacy said. She patted her chest, her face. “What?”

  I showed her my empty hands.

  She heaved a big sigh and smiled at me. “Thank you.” Then she frowned. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I have let go of wanting to dictate your actions.”

  “But with Hugh—”

  I picked up my pad and looked at my knotwork. “I don’t know what I want.” I lifted a finger of my fire hand and held it just above the knotwork, ready to charge the picture with power. “What would you do if you were me?”

  She shook her head.

  “What is the human response?” I asked.

  She swallowed. “There is no one answer. Some wives look the other way and nurse their pain. Some talk it over with the husbands and decide that they can work it out. Some leave. Some kill their husbands.” She covered her mouth with her hand. “Forget I said that!”

  “Among my people, killing another is a sign of lack of imagination. So many other things are more satisfying, and hurt more.”

  She dropped her hand from her mouth, clasped her other hand in it. “Where do you come from?”

  “Somewhere else.”

  She frowned, then crossed her arms, hiding her hands in her armpits. “Why did you come here?” she whispered.

  “To learn.”

  She stared down at her feet for a moment, then gazed at me again. “Does Hugh know what you are?”

  “No.” I had let him bind me, but had not told him what powers I gave him, what powers I gave up. I knew, and that was enough.

  “He’s an idiot,” Jacy said.

  I cocked my head and stared at her.

  “Did you try to keep what you were a secret from him?”

  “I became something else in the framework of our marriage. I gave up my powers. How could he know what I was when I wasn’t myself?”

  “You said we talked about the pictures—the strings?—when we first met?”

  “Knotwork,” I said.

  “Knotwork. Like macrame?”

  “I don’t know that word.”

  “What do you remember about that conversation?”

  I thought back to the party. So many drunk people. I don’t like talking to drunken people. They don’t make sense, and they don’t remember what they said later. It’s as though the conversation never took place. So why have it take place?

  Only if I want information, and by that time I was not looking for information about my husband’s daytime environment. I was content to own the sphere of home.

  At the party, Jacy had held a glass, and only took little sips. So I talked to her. She spoke to me about coffee grinders in supermarkets, which ones had the best blends and which blends were not good; and we spoke of knotwork. “You told me who everyone in the room was, and how they were knotted to each other.”

  “Oh.” She frowned. “I didn’t call it that, though, did I?”

  “I don’t remember. That’s how it made sense to me, so that’s how I remember it.”

  “Knots are—” she began.

  The phone rang. It sat beside the couch. I looked at it, then at Jacy. She licked her lip and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  She listened a moment, then said, “I don’t think—”

  She put her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, “Hugh.”

  “What does he want?” I whispered back.

  “To come over.”

  Strange feelings eeled through me. I picked up my drawing of my husband and nodded to
Jacy.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said into the mouthpiece, “but if you really want to—”

  She listened a little longer. “All right.” She hung up the phone and looked at me. “He said you should be home by now. He said you should have a little of your own medicine. If you’re going to make him wait, he will make you wait.”

  “He’ll make me wait while he’s with you.”

  She nodded. “I don’t think he would have heard me even if I said no. I’ve never heard him talk like this before. If I had—”

  I waited.

  She twisted one hand in the other, shook her head. “I would suspect that there was something else going on, something I wouldn’t like. Obviously there’s still an emotional charge. He still cares, or he wouldn’t want you home on time.”

  “I heard you went shopping for my birthday present together,” I said.

  Her face went crimson. “He told me you liked silver,” she whispered, “and that if I picked it, it would be better. Something delicate, Celtic knots, he thought, but he said he didn’t know what looked good.”

  “Did you find me something good?”

  She ducked her head, twisted her hands. After a moment, she nodded.

  “Thank you.”

  A knock on Jacy’s door, then the sound of a key in the lock. I lifted my knotwork from the table and touched both ice and fire to it.

  “Jacy?” Hugh said. All he saw was her. He came across the room, stooped beside her armchair, and kissed her. Her hands clenched on the arms of the chair. “Honey?”

  She lifted one hand and pushed his face away until he could not help but see me. He straightened. “Nuala.”

  “Hugh.” I stroked summon power into my drawing until it pulled free of the page, and then I knotted it. The knot for power over another’s body. The knot for power over another’s speech. I hesitated a moment, thinking of other knots: power over another’s heart, power over another’s mind, power over another’s spirit. Without the knots, I could still stroke the pain and pleasure lines, manipulate the knotwork and cause strong but temporary effects, as I had with Jacy. With the knots, my power would be absolute, unless the person I knotted had his own knot power. I did not think Hugh had such power.