FSF Magazine, February 2007

by Spilogale Authors

  The silence stretched. By this point Duster would have realized that the truck was a distraction, and would be back with the rest of his team to cut off all routes of escape. As I thought about that, I found myself irritated with Maureen for not taking this obvious opportunity. In a real sense, it didn't matter if we were lying or not. If she didn't do something, her AI was done for.

  "Ah, screw it.” Max flipped a switch and the tractor motor hummed back to life. “She's too dumb. I'm taking this out. Ten percent finder's fee is better than nothing. Better than sitting around down here trying to slap some sense into an AI-worshipping interior decorator."

  "Wait!” Maureen turned to me. “Is this true? You're letting me go?"

  That was quite unnecessary. What made her trust me all of a sudden? “Yes. But not because we want to."

  "I wouldn't have it any other way.” She hopped on the tractor and hummed off into the dark tunnel.

  "Okay,” Petra said. “Have we really just let that thing go?"

  "Nah,” Max said. “Me and Taibo, we're all set. Now, let's see what the smoothies do when they show up."

  * * * *

  "I have to say, Taibo, that was a nice try with the truck.” Chet smiled at me. “Anton's pissed, though. I'd suggest staying out of his way when he finally turns up."

  Chet's team had arrived. Guys in long coats had spilled out of sedans with dark-tinted windows and smoothly closed off the mall. There seemed to be dozens of them, each with a stack of gear, a support vehicle, and a separate online channel of coverage. I was no doubt showing up on thirty different feeds right now, edited in different ways, with various explanatory text crawls on my chest. I tried to look iconically like the Losing Team. It was surprisingly easy.

  "Anton” had turned out to be Duster's real name. He had chased that truck for much longer than we'd anticipated. Max's hopped-up spiel to the driver had persuaded him to expect desperate plant hijackers, and he had led Duster and his team a merry chase along various Amish-cart-blocked roads down toward Lancaster. Duster, I gathered, had gotten a bit out of hand at the seizure, and been arrested by some local cops. The fact that the truck had come up completely clean of any AI activity would not do him any good at any hearing. Chet's team would have to finish their job here before anyone could try to get him out of the Upper Leacock lockup.

  "What are you going to do?” I asked in bewilderment. “Why are you here?"

  "We've got to take this over, Taibo.” He managed to sound sad and reluctant, as if it had really not been something he wanted to do. “This has gotten completely out of hand. I had hoped you would be able to handle ... well, it's all water under the bridge now, isn't it? Some things look really easy when others do them, but then turn out to take a great deal of skill. Just remember that, next time."

  It took every ounce of my willpower to keep from punching him. That was nothing you wanted to do while on two dozen channels of net coverage. People would be critiquing my form—"too much arm, not enough body"—before I was even under arrest.

  "So ... I still don't understand. Are you helping us out?"

  "No,” he said. “We're not helping you out. We're formally taking over this operation. All of it. It's the only way, Taibo. I'm sure you understand it."

  There. He'd finally gotten it out formally, though I was sure he'd also filed the necessary permissions. Along with the AI, he'd just taken on all the liabilities associated with the operation. Whatever happened, all the property damage was now entirely Chet's problem.

  "This is a really dangerous AI, Chet.” I got all goggle-eyed and paranoid. “You have no idea—"

  He smiled and patted my shoulder. “Come on, Taibo. Let's go in, and you can see how the big boys do it."

  * * * *

  Petra raised the lid. “Who had the pork and coconut?"

  "Me.” Max shoveled most of the bowl onto his rice and started eating. Petra looked at me and shrugged. We'd all earned a decent meal.

  "Shrimp and baby corn. You on a diet, Taibo?” She knew I usually went for pork.

  "It's going to be a long haul, Petra. I don't want to weigh myself down."

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself."

  The aromas of curry, fish sauce, and galangal mingled in the air.

  It had been an uncomfortable scene. Chet's crew had torn the place apart. No Gardener. No aicons. Nothing. Just a huge hole in the floor and some astronomical liability. They'd found Petra in the barewear shop trying on some delts she didn't need, and hauled Max out of his hidey hole behind a fish tank. The exposed orchid aicon had been the biggest risk. Max hadn't yet said anything about what might have happened to it, and Chet had spent a lot of time looking for it, based on the description Duster had phoned in from his holding cell.

  Chet had spent some time telling me what an idiot he thought I was, how he had played me the whole way, how I had never had a clue. In the end, he had managed to imply that I'd somehow taken advantage of his generosity to an old and unsuccessful friend in order to betray him. I'd invited him to join us for lunch.

  As it happened, he had other plans.

  Petra glanced at Max, who still had his face buried in his food. “Okay, Max. Come up for air and tell us where the aicon is."

  Max looked up, vaguely irritated, and, instead of answering Petra's question, signaled a waiter. “Hey! Where's the extra?” He then grinned at us. “I ordered another dish for us. From the fish tank. Stuff like that's always best when it's fresh."

  "From the—stop screwing around, Max."

  "You gave me the assignment ... ah, here we go."

  The waiter pushed up a cart. Max grinned at him and took the covered tray from it.

  Petra stared at it. “How—"

  "Can't show it yet. Taibo's buds are still staring at us. The orchid's in a doggie bag. We can haul it out with our lefties. I shoved it through the basement maintenance hatch of the fish tank with an almost-neutral floater. It's an old drug smuggling trick. Thing looks just like some bit of kelp or something. Floated right up past these guys while they were charging around."

  "Well, Max.” Petra sat back. “Very enterprising.” She looked at me. “You don't look too happy about it, Taibo."

  I had been moving my food around, but not eating it. “I—I don't actually like shrimp that much."

  "Hey, man, you scared that Maureen won't like you when you come after her supersmart gardening machine?” Max laughed, spilling rice down his chin. “You got a steady job. She'll forgive you."

  I didn't look at him. He was my buddy, but sometimes he really annoyed me.

  "That really was good work, Taibo.” Petra sat back in her chair. “We have a link back to the AI. Beagle & Charlevoix have been forced to assume all the liability for this job, by formally taking it over. It'll bankrupt them, guaranteed.” If I hadn't known her dedication to AI hunting, I would have thought that the most pleasing aspect of the job was the damage it would do to her former employer. “But shorn of aicons, with its processing reduced for transport, this Brenda or whatever it is will still look like the Donald we originally thought it was.” She glanced at me, looked away. “Maureen's looking for support from the acolyte underground, but it will be a few days before she manages to find it."

  Neither Max nor Petra understood my position. I'd been mediocre in various positions in the past. But now I had a job I was good at. It was in a declining industry, natch, but you can't have everything. The next step, in addition to being good at it, was to be successful at it.

  "Let's grab our leftovers,” I said. “Who's driving?"

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Books To Look For by Charles de Lint

  Eyes of Crow, by Jeri Smith-Ready, Luna Books, 2006, $14.95.

  I've said it before: I like trying books by new writers. With a debut novel, you never know what you're going to get. It might be gold, or it might all turn to mud and twigs and leaves after only a few pages. You go into the story with no expectations, because this is a new voice, a fresh t
ake, and let's face it, new territories are what we're looking for when we open a book.

  Eyes of Crow is an absolutely delightful coming-of-age story, set in a world where the industrial age has yet to arrive. Our third-person viewpoint character is a young woman named Rhia, and the people of her agricultural-based tribe have a close connection with personal animal spirit guides. It has nothing to do with faith. They have an actual relationship with their guides and can often utilize certain of their animal attributes.

  Rhia's known forever that her spirit guide is Crow, but she has avoided accepting it because in this culture, those rare people connected to Crow are the ones who can foresee death, and guide the spirits of the dead from this world into the next. It's an important task, though not a particularly cheerful one.

  But her avoidance has a cost when she is unable to help her own mother's passage from this world. Heavy with guilt, Rhia finally accepts her burden and goes to a nearby hunter/gatherer forest tribe to begin her training.

  Everything is different among the forest people, including the fact that for a person connected to Crow to carry out her functions for the tribe properly, she first has to die.

  There's an abundance of riches in this book, and Smith-Ready handles them all so well. The cultures and customs are well thought out and rendered, the connections with the spirit guides are wonderfully magical and filled with Mystery, and the complicated relationships of the tribes people are handled with a realistic flare.

  There is a war brewing (isn't there always in a fantasy novel?), but Smith-Ready focuses on the people as much as the mustering and movement of armies, which gives the readers a strong emotional connection to every element of the book, be it a complicated relationship between a couple of characters or a battle scene.

  And best of all, while this is the first book of a trilogy, the reader is left completely satisfied at the conclusion of this book, while still wanting to read the next volume.

  * * * *

  Thunderbird Falls, by C. E. Murphy, Luna Books, 2006, $14.95.

  We were first introduced to C. E. Murphy's half-Irish, half-Cherokee protagonist Joanne Walker in Urban Shaman, in which the Seattle-based police mechanic discovers a connection with, and a responsibility to, her magical abilities. Through the course of the story, she gained a sidekick (cab driver Gary), became a little more familiar with her abilities (while trying to deny that they exist), and saved the world from the Wild Hunt.

  In Thunderbird Falls, she's now a policeman on foot patrol, though she still lives mostly in denial of her abilities. (A note to the author: that was interesting in the first book, but it's getting just a little old now; please don't keep this as an element of her personality in the next story, because if Walker still can't accept what she is after all she's gone through by the end of this book, she's too dumb to keep our respect.)

  Reluctantly, Walker finds a spirit teacher to train her in these abilities she's not one-hundred percent sure she has, and it pretty much goes downhill from there—in terms of Walker's problems, that is, not Murphy's ability to tell a story.

  Walker's first-person voice is charming, with just the right touch of self-deprecating humor, and immediately draws the reader in. The magical elements are personal and a nice blend of pragmatic and spiritual. And Murphy keeps us on track (and on the edge of our seat) throughout, no matter how convoluted the plot eventually gets.

  As I said about Urban Shaman, this isn't a Big Think book, but it's thoroughly entertaining from start to finish, and in a time when too many books have a tired, same-old, same-old feel to them, that's reason enough to pick up one of Murphy's books and give her a try.

  * * * *

  The Beast of Noor, by Janet Lee Carey, Atheneum, 2006, $16.95.

  At the length of belaboring a point I've made in this column before, I'd like to return for a moment to the late sixties/early seventies. If a fantasy fan from those days was to see the vast cornucopia of material available to us here in the first part of the twenty-first century, they'd think they'd died and gone to heaven. (Mind you, the cultural shock in terms of technological advancement might be enough to give them a heart attack, but I digress.)

  At that earlier point in time, when I first began to read fantasy, you had to work to find the sort of book we take for granted now. We had the Unicorn imprint from Ballantine under the editorship of Lin Carter; Dover books with their reprints of classic books by Leslie Barringer, Robert W. Chambers, and others that had fallen into public domain; and the odd offering from other publishers that was usually hidden in their sf line. With so little material readily available, readers would scour used book stores for the grail of titles by the likes of Lord Dunsany and William Morris. Or we'd plunder the mainstream sections of the book stores for reprints by, say, Thorne Smith.

  Or we'd look to the children's book section. (I might be wrong, but I think the term Young Adult was still to come—just as was the idea of a dedicated fantasy genre.)

  One of the best sources for quality material in those days was Atheneum—the imprint that brought us such luminaries as Susan Cooper and Patricia McKillip, the latter still offering up perfect fantasy jewels at least once a year, albeit from a different publisher now. I have many fond memories of those early Atheneum titles, curled up in a reading chair late at night, letting the words take me away into the magical otherworlds to be found in their pages.

  So it was with great delight that I found The Beast of Noor to be upholding that fine tradition.

  Janet Lee Carey's new book has that same timeless quality of the best of fantasy. There's not a lot of exposition. Instead, we're immediately plunged into the island world of Hanna Ferrell and her brother Miles, finding out about the island community and the wide world beyond its shores only when necessary, and in passing. What's surprising is that her earlier three books have contemporary settings. Where did she get the authorial chops to write such a resonant fantasy novel, individual, but still touching on all the tropes that draw readers to this sort of a book?

  It doesn't really matter. All we need to do is crack open the cover and slip into the story.

  Hanna and Miles are outsiders. Their family is related to the Sheens, an island family that, long before the book begins, was responsible for bringing into being the Shriker, a giant murderous dog that lures its victims into the untamed forest.

  Gone for some time, the Shriker has returned, and a young girl from the village is the beast's latest victim. Her death firms Miles's resolve to make right the errors of his ancestors—a determination that only grows stronger when he realizes Hanna has begun to have the dreams that will have her sleepwalk into the forest where the Shriker will be waiting for her.

  As usual, I don't like to go into a lot of plot details—how a story unfolds should be the reader's pleasure. But let me assure you that Carey is a generous and lyrical author. She doesn't waste words, but the immediacy of her prose carries in it the brevity of good poetry, and a contemporary flair. The Beast of Noor reads like a fairy tale—but a sustained, substantial one, with plenty of solid characterization and the sort of magical moments that will have your heart sing in one moment then shiver in the next.

  Is it a Young Adult novel? Yes, if you still consider McKillip's books to be YA.

  Will an adult fantasy reader enjoy it? Without question.

  Highly recommended.

  Material to be considered for review in this column should be sent to Charles de Lint, P. O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 3V2.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Musing on Books by Michelle West

  Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett, HarperCollins, 2006, $16.99.

  The Fourth Bear, by Jasper Fforde, Viking Penguin, 2006, $24.95.

  The Privilege of the Sword, by Ellen Kushner, Bantam Spectra, 2006, $14.

  * * * *

  Terry Prachett gets me every time.

  I approach each of his novels as if it were, in and of itself, a trusted friend, which is why I often save t
hem for times when you need one—like, at four a.m. when your real friends might justifiably consider homicide if you phoned them. But as with all good friendships, the dialogue never moves just one way; you put something into the reading, and it marks you; you take it away with you and it sits inside your head. Well, mine at any rate.

  In his third venture into the world of young witch-in-the-making Tiffany Aching, he opens with the end, and then starts at the beginning. This gives you the added pleasure of rereading the beginning later on.

  Tiffany Aching is a witch of the Chalk, the land of her people, a village in the middle of nowhere that's never had much use for witches, and wouldn't hold with having one if Tiffany weren't the daughter of Granny Aching, the old woman of the hills who kept the hills safe.

  Her ties to the land are stronger than those of any other witch that she knows, and stronger than she herself has ever fully realized, and her ties to the seasons are strong because of it. She accidentally happens to blunder into the dark silence of the Other Morris Dance because, well, her feet just pick up the beat, and anyway, Morris Dances are for dancing.

  But in Pratchett's universe, the Other Morris Dance is danced in the darkest of Winter nights, and the bells are utterly silent. It is not a festive dance. It is, however, a dance that is not meant for Tiffany Aching, nor any other young girl.

  Joining it was not well thought out on her part. Any other young girl might be forgiven this, but Tiffany is a witch of the Disc, and all her actions have consequences. In this case, it's an adolescent boy crush. Unfortunately, the adolescent boy is the embodiment of Winter, and he's set his sights on Tiffany. And Tiffany is not entirely unhappy about it to start with—because really, the life of a witch is all about not using magic, about not doing things the easy way; it's work and drudgery, and this is a little ... cool.

  Unfortunately, it gets very cold, and if Tiffany—who has her hands full with a new village witch who needs a lot of help, but is almost too proud to ask for it, and certainly too proud in general—can't somehow bring out the end of the natural story of the seasons themselves, Winter will never end.