Did this mean that I too would— I couldn’t think about that possibility now, however, so I asked, “Was—was she really my aunt? Or maybe even my—my mother?”
“No, she was no actual relation. At least not in the human sense. All Pixies are related to one another, far back, just as the Imps are. But Lady Fritzie was King Jad’s lover at the time of his death. Your real mother—our mother—was named Micola. And she and I were living safely in Mexico at the time you were spirited away”
“Is she still alive?”
“I’m afraid not. But she lived out her full span, and now, as of old, her daughter—myself—is Queen and carries forward her lineage. Just as the Imp which Micola once carried—you—must be King.”
Before I could question her any further, Pia demanded, “Now tell me what kind of nonsense Ignatz is planning.”
I repeated everything Ignatz had said. The effect of this story on Pia was quite different from that which my personal one had produced. By the time I was done, she was steaming mad, a pint-sized pressure cooker ready to explode. I felt like I was sharing a bed with some small and wicked animal. A wolverine, perhaps.
“Force us! Force us! Feed us drugs and force us to give birth! That bastard! I’ll show that halfwit what real force is! We Pixies hold all the cards in this game! How easy it would be to kidnap an Imp or two when we needed them, milk them dry and then kill all the firstborns! Why, we could make Lysistrata look like June Cleaver!”
“Pia, please, calm down.”
She suddenly took notice of me, and her eyes gleamed with schemes. “And now that we have the Lost Son on our side, we hold the final trump!”
“Now, Pia, I don’t know if—”
She leaped out of bed and began dressing in the light of early morning filtering through the blinds. Ignoring my feeble protest, she said, “Get a move on. You’re coming with me to the Pixie Fest. It’s unprecedented, but this is an unprecedented threat.”
“Pia, you were going on vacation, I know, but I can’t just up and leave work without any notice.”
She looked at me with a basilisk gaze. “If you ever want to see me again, you’ll come along. Quickly and quietly.”
I sighed. Somehow we all never thought there’d be any complications to having our fantasies fulfilled. “Where are we going?”
“Denmark. Copenhagen first.”
“Let me go pack and get my passport.”
“Now you’re acting smart.”
I wondered. I really did.
We were at the airport within a few hours. Then we were aboard a plane. As I watched the city dwindle, I felt I was leaving my whole life behind for good.
Once settled in, Pia used the hours of flight to inform me of the long, long history of the Pixies and Imps, and the final details of my own past.
As Ignatz had intimated, the origins of the Pixies and Imps disappeared into antiquity much further back than humanity’s beginnings. For instance, not only did they have dim racial stories of competing with Neanderthals, but they had even more formless half-tales of watching smart apes emerge from the trees onto the African savannahs!
Throughout this long span of millennia, the Imps and Pixies managed to keep separate and unsubmerged from the common stream of mankind for one very good reason.
They—we—weren’t human.
Oh, in appearance they were indistinguishable from humanity albeit specimens from the far end of the human bodily spectrum. That was why any of their fossils that might have been unearthed had gone unrecognized as anything special. But genetically and metabolically and gestationally that was where they radically diverged.
Imps and Pixies had several chromosomes more than homo sapiens did. Naturally, this rendered interbreeding impossible. What was even stranger was how they did breed.
Pixies were born with the ability—or disability—to produce exactly two children apiece, none fewer and no more. Moreover, each Pixie had a little-understood ability to prevent conception psychosomatically until she so wished.
When the lucky Imp out of all previous copulations—and there had probably been quite a lot, since Pixies and Imps had very strong sex drives—succeeded in impregnating his Pixie, this was what happened:
One of the Pixie’s eggs took a single sperm onboard. A sperm which bore the entire genetic complement of the father. This egg contributed nothing of the mother’s genes, but served only as the matrix for embryogenesis.
Nine months later, a new Imp was born.
This Imp was not an exact clone of his father. For this reason.
The genes of the Imps and Pixies had no introns, no useless junk nucleotides. That gave them thousands and thousands of more possibilities than humanity, new patterns of brain and bone and skin being invoked every generation, in a complex dance of suppression and activation.
Upon weaning, the infant Imp went to live with his father, the mother playing no more part in his upbringing. (I was unique, it appeared, in having been raised strictly by a Pixie. Pia planned to stress this fact when she did the unthinkable by taking me to her mysterious Pixie Fest.)
Nine months after the birth of the boy, without any further coital intervention by any Imp, the Pixie gave birth to a girl-baby who carried the mother’s remixed genes alone. Pixies, of course, raised these female children.
Then, in a final massive menstrual flushing, the mother lost all her remaining eggs. But not her hormonal libido.
Pia thanked the stewardess for the pillows. She put them on the floor beneath her chair so that her feet didn’t dangle in midair.
“Eighteen months of being pregnant, followed by some really hellish cramps. But then all that messy stuff is over, and we can spend the rest of our lives having fun!”
I swigged my second drink, which I really needed, trying to think what to say first. “But—but that means that the numbers of Pixies and Imps must have remained stable over millions of years.”
Pia looked sorrowful. “Actually, our population has diminished radically. We breed young, and we’re hard to injure or kill. But fatal accidents are inevitable. We used to be much more numerous. Just look at all the old legends and myths about Fairies and Sylphs, Gnomes and Kobolds, and how they used to be everywhere. We haven’t always gone by the names we use today, you know. Anyhow, the advent of human civilization—something we Pixies and Imps were disinclined to invent—hasn’t been entirely without its good side. It’s made getting stepped on by a woolly mammoth much less likely.”
I shook my head. “I don’t see how such a biological arrangement could have evolved though. Speaking Darwinically. The sexes having minimal contact, the limit on births.… Why, it’s completely unnatural!”
“I agree. We were made.”
That stumped me. All I could do was echo her. “Made?”
“Bred, engineered, tailored, fabricated. Whatever word you prefer. As slaves or servants or companions or toys or tools.”
“By whom?”
Pia shrugged. “Atlanteans, visiting aliens, intelligent dinosaurs, the Old Ones? Who knows? Our creators’ identity is lost, but their onetime existence is something we’ve always just known.”
Then Pia proceeded to connect my personal story with the race’s history.
A Pixie named Nimphidia had been my grandmother. Our grandmother. Sometime early last century, when she had been the reigning Queen of the Pixies, she had given birth to my father, who was destined by the immemorial traditions of the race to become King Jad, upon the death of his father, Hairy Jack. Then Nimphidia had given birth to my mother, Micola, who would assume the Queenship upon Nimphidia’s death.
That day came surprisingly soon. For Nimphidia failed to shed all her eggs. Instead, she became pregnant by Hairy Jack for an unprecedented third time, giving birth to Bobo, a rather feebleminded child whose advent killed her.
The miracle was the talk of both the Imps and the Pixies for decades. Then, when no other such third births happened, it became simply an accepted one-time curiosity.
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br /> Bobo, in turn, had grown up to father (upon a Pixie named Gudgekin) Ignatz and his “sister,” one Melusina, long before Jad had chosen to settle down with Micola and spawn Pia and me. Ignatz and Melusina were our older matrilineal cousins, the first such any Pixie or Imp had ever had.
“Melusina’s a doll,” Pia told me, sipping her Sprite. “No pretensions to the throne at all. She’s too busy with her line of clothing. For petites, of course. But Ignatz is a devil of another color entirely. Ambitious and unscrupulous, he put his father up to poisoning Jad and assuming the Kingship. Although there was some resentment and anger, the majority of Imps supported Bobo’s claim, for lack of any ready alternative. Now Ignatz is letting Bobo kill himself off gradually with eating and drinking, knowing that the Imps will have no choice but to name Ignatz King. And if he ever does become King, then he will carry out his crazy scheme. Which is to make all Pixies endure a third or even fourth drug-induced pregnancy, just like Nimphidia proved possible, so as to build the race’s numbers up. Even if it kills all the mothers.”
“But why?”
Pia waved her hand. “Oh, he has some long-range plan of taking over the planet from the humans. Doesn’t like the way they’re ruining it or something.”
My head, already spinning at the beginning of the flight, had ended up completely awhirl. My allegiances were utterly split, my course of action unclear.
Pia seemed to have no such confusion.
“You don’t have any silly trouble with us being ‘brother’ and ‘sister,’ do you? That’s just a human taboo, you know. After all, we don’t share any genes, and we certainly weren’t raised together, even less so than any other Pixie and Imp ever were.”
“No, that’s one thing I’m not worried about anymore.”
Pia reached over and did something beneath my lowered meal tray that I prayed no one witnessed.
“Good. Because we have a week to enjoy ourselves before the Pixie Fest.”
Something Pia had said came back to me. “Uh, Pia what about magic? If you’re a Fairy, where’s your magic?”
She told me. In words of one-syllable and four letters.
Over the next few days, she showed me all her tantric spells.
Those few hours when we weren’t in our hotel room, we did the usual sightseeing things in Copenhagen. Every now and then, across a restaurant or down some street, I’d see another Pixie, a sight that always made my heart race. Signs of mutual acknowledgement would pass between these others and Pia, along with looks of curiosity directed my way. But none of the other Pixies ever made any contact with us.
“We don’t like to gather in groups or even couples,” Pia explained. “It causes too much comment among the humans. That’s why you’ll never encounter any community of Pixies or Imps, and why the annual Fest means so much to us.”
I thought of Pidge, my high school crush, and why I had had such a hard time finding her or Aunt Itzie’s like.
Pia squeezed my thigh. “The Queen always arrives last at the Fest. By then, every Pixie there will know about the ‘human’ accompanying the Queen. When they learn who you really are, you won’t be able to keep them off you with a cattle prod!”
The image was both alluring and scary. “Um, Pia, aren’t we going to be King and Queen together?”
“Of course! But that doesn’t mean we can’t have as many lovers as we want! How boring it would be if we had to be ‘faithful.’”
“You wouldn’t be jealous?”
She laughed. “What a human thing to say! By the time I have our children, I’ll be ready for a change.”
“You’re not—”
“Yes, I am. And pregnancy always makes a Pixie extra randy!”
On the fifth day we rented a car and began driving east.
Two leisurely days later found us in Jutland, outside the small town of Billund.
“Can I finally know where we’re going?”
“Of course, dear. Like good tourists, we’re going to Legoland.”
Soon we were at the gates of the theme park. They were staffed by two Pixies, who curtsied to their Queen as she approached. Pia returned a regal nod.
“We rent the whole park exclusively for a day,” Pia explained as we entered. “It’s costly, but you’d be surprised how much money you can accumulate over a century or two with even simple interest. We’re helping to fund the construction of another Legoland in America, so we can have a change of scenery every other year.”
Soon we were among the scale models of famous buildings, all built of the colorful plastic bricks, which formed the major attraction of the park.
The toy streets were thronged with Pixies, for once looking larger than life. Hundreds and thousands of chattering, happy sisterly women of every shade and minor variation, each one of them representing my once unattainable perfect sexual object.
I broke out into a sweat. The air was thick with the Pixies’ unique viburnum pheromones. I found I could hardly think.
“You can see why no Imps are permitted at the Fest. It would degenerate into an orgy. And we have business to attend to.”
Pia conducted me through the crowd which parted graciously and then rejoined behind us, a mass of whispering and giggles. We approached a mini Bavarian castle; a temporary wooden speaker’s platform festooned with purple bunting had been erected next to it. Pia and I ascended steps until we stood nearly as high as the top of the model, some twelve feet above the ground.
Before us stretched a field of upturned Pixie faces, eagerly awaiting the word of their Queen.
Pia gestured for silence. “Sisters, before We hear your petitions and dispense Our traditional justice, We must present a personage of great importance to us, and speak of a threat to our integrity, both bodily and spiritual.
“First, We want to introduce you to the Lost Son, King Walter of the Imps, raised as a human, preserved from assassination by Our loyal and selfless subject, Lady Fritzie de la Mare!”
A stunned silence was broken by a tentative clap or two, which soon swelled into a round of applause and shouts, as the Pixies absorbed the news. I made my best approximation of a kingly bow.
“And now,” Pia began, “let Us tell you of what the vile usurper, Ignatz Lagerkvist, has in mind for us—”
An amplified shout interrupted the Queen then.
“No! She’s lying! I’m trying to give you a choice and strengthen our race, and she wants to cling to her own power!”
A bullhorn in his hand, Ignatz stood atop the castle, having emerged from behind a turret. His face was brutally avid, aflame with an insane greed.
“This human is an imposter! Your Queen is a pervert! Oust her, and let Melusina rule in her place! Then we can go on to achieve our destiny!”
“No!” Pia shouted. “Don’t listen to him! He killed King Jad!”
Confusion was spreading among the Pixies. “What is this Impish foolishness to us?” someone yelled. “Let them fight it out among themselves!” another said. “Stick to Pixie matters, Queen!”
“This is a Pixie matter! You don’t know what the imposter intends for us! He wants—”
Ignatz landed with a thud on our platform. He dropped the bullhorn and began to throttle Pia, screaming, “Die, human-lover!”
I came out of my trance then, and leaped on Ignatz, breaking his chokehold on the Queen.
He turned his full strength on me. Small he might have been, but he was muscled like a bull.
But I was an Imp too. And had the reach on him.
Our vicious struggle brought us right up to the edge of the platform. Ignatz managed to butt his head into my chin, and I saw nebulae, lost my grip on him.
The next second, he had clambered atop the two-by-four that formed the platform railing, ready to hurl himself at me.
I threw myself toward him first.
Over he went.
But he never hit the ground.
His flailing trajectory carried him onto the next door model.
Ignatz’s bo
dy lay grotesquely impaled by the torch of the miniature Statue of Liberty.
One tough little woman.
Pia’s throat was already starting to show purple, but she moved under her own power to address the crowd.
“Pixies!” she croaked. “Hail the King of the Imps!”
Then she collapsed.
When I bent down to help her, amid the roar of her subjects, she winked.
My first official act as King was to make sure Rufus had his eye-surgery. The second was to get the nursery ready for my son. The third—
The third was to take extensive magic lessons, from an assortment of Pixies recommended by Pia.
I had a lot of lonely years to make up for.
And apparently quite a few, not so lonely, ahead.
Here’s the B-side to “Lennon Spex.” “Every generation throws its hero up the pop charts,” said one wiser-than-average musical geezer. Those who hesitate to place KC on the same pedestal (or even in the same gutter) as JL suffer from an astigmatism even magical spectacles or mind-altering knitwear might fail to cure.
The Cobain Sweater
This time I’m really gonna do it.
I’m alone in the trailer. School was cancelled cuz of boiler trouble, and Mom’s at work at the diner for the breakfast-to-lunch shift, praying the bald tires on our ’85 Civic will last another day. (If the tips from the truckers and lumbermen at The Fried Owl are decent, she said, maybe we can afford to buy a couple of retreads this week.) I don’t have any friends to hang with—they’re all jerky granolas and jocks and geeks in this hick town we had to move to, Butthole, Washington, population ten million trees and maybe an equal number of morons. I got no money or car to make going to the stripmall in Vantage a possibility. Not even my license, if you get right down to it. I don’t like to read, I’ve watched every one of the five videos we own a hundred times (Pocahontas, Risky Business, Airplane!, Scarface, and Desperately Seeking Susan), the TV only gets one station, and I’ve worn the fire button off the Sega. My face is this blotchy map of zits that makes the maps of Bosnia you see on Tom Brokaw look regular as a checkerboard. Every kid within miles hates me, I’ve got no girlfriend and never will have one, and the best and biggest curse of my whole miserable, stinking life is my name, the name that was mostly the choice of my moron dead father who I never knew or could ever imagine wanting to know and who was trying to brown-nose some rich old uncle who never left us a dime by saddling his kid with the lousiest name in the whole universe.
Fractal Paisleys Page 26
