Among Others

by Jo Walton

  “I wish we had the education system they have in Doorways in the Sand,” I said. “Here it is, by the way.” I got it out from under all the library books and handed it over. He held it for a moment before putting it in his coat pocket. It looked very purple against his blue jumper. “Did you know, there’s a new Heinlein? The Number of the Beast. And he’s borrowed the idea of that education system, where you study all those different things and sign up and graduate when you have enough credits in everything, and you can keep taking courses forever if you want, but he doesn’t acknowledge Zelazny anywhere.”

  Wim laughed. “That’s what they really do in America,” he said.

  “Really?” My mouth was full, but I didn’t care. I felt embarrassed that I’d been so stupid, but also thrilled it was true. “They do? They really do? I want to go to university there!”

  “You can’t afford it. Well, maybe you can, but I never could. It costs thousands every term, every semester. You have to be rich. That’s the downside. You can get scholarships if you’re brilliant, but otherwise it’s all loans. Who’d give me a loan?”

  “Anyone,” I said. “Or if it’s real, maybe they have universities here that do it where you could go for free.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Imagine studying a little bit of everything you wanted to,” I said.

  We just sat there for a moment, imagining it. “How come you’re reading Heinlein?” Wim asked. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d like him. He’s such a fascist.”

  I sputtered. “A fascist? Heinlein? What are you talking about?”

  “His books are so authoritarian. Oh, his kids’ books are all right, but look at Starship Troopers.”

  “Well, look at The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,” I countered. “That’s about a revolution against authority. Look at Citizen of the Galaxy. He’s not a fascist! He’s in favour of human dignity and taking care of yourself, and old-fashioned things like loyalty and duty, that’s not being a fascist!”

  Wim help up a hand. “Hold it,” he said. “I didn’t mean to stir up a hornet’s nest. I just wouldn’t have thought you’d be the type to like him, with liking Delany and Zelazny and Le Guin.”

  “I like them all,” I said, disappointed in him. “It isn’t exclusive, so far as I know.”

  “You’re really weird,” he said, putting down his coffee spoon and looking intently at me. “You care more about Heinlein than about the Ruthie thing.”

  “Well of course I do,” I said, and then felt awful. “What I mean is, whatever it was with Ruthie, nobody says you did anything to deliberately hurt her. You were both stupid, and she was even stupider, from the best I can tell. That matters in one way, but good grief, Wim, surely in a universal sense Robert A. Heinlein matters a lot more however you look at it.”

  “I suppose so,” he said. He laughed. I could see the woman behind the counter looking at us in a curious way. “I hadn’t thought about it exactly like that.”

  I laughed too. The woman behind the counter and what she thought didn’t matter at all. “From the distance of Alpha Centauri, from the perspective of posterity?”

  “It could have been posterity,” he said, more soberly. “If Ruthie had been pregnant.”

  “Did you really dump her because you thought she was?” I asked. I put the last bite of my bun into my mouth.

  “No! I dumped her because she told everyone before she told me, so it was all over everywhere and I heard it second hand. She walked into Boots and bought a pregnancy testing kit. She told her mother. She told her friends. She might as well have bought a megaphone and stood in the market square. And then she wasn’t even pregnant after all. I dumped her because of what you said, because she was stupid. Stupid. What a moron.” He shook his head. “And then the shunning started. I might have been poison. They seemed to think that because I’d slept with her I ought to marry her and tie myself to her forever even though there wasn’t even a baby.”

  “Why didn’t you tell people that?”

  “Tell who? The whole town? Janine? I don’t think so. They won’t listen to me anyway. They think they know something about me. They don’t.” His face was hard.

  “But you have a girlfriend now,” I said, encouragingly.

  He rolled his eyes. “Shirley? Actually I’ve dumped her too. She’s another moron, not quite as bad as Ruthie, but close. She’s working in the laundry at the school, and she’s quite happy to keep on doing that until she gets married. She was making getting married noises at me, so I broke up with her.”

  “You certainly get through them,” I said, because I didn’t know what to say.

  “It would be different with someone who wasn’t a moron,” he said, and he was looking at me carefully, and I thought maybe he meant he was interested, but he couldn’t be, not Wim, not in me, and I was feeling breathless enough without that.

  “Let’s go and see if I can find you an elf,” I said.

  He frowned. “Look, it’s all right,” he said. “I know you were just saying that because—well, I’d asked you a very strange question, and you were in a lot of pain on that thing and . . .”

  “No, it is real,” I said. “I don’t know if you’re going to be able to see them, because you have to believe first, but I think you nearly do. You don’t have pierced ears or anything that would stop you. Just promise you won’t get all sarcastic and hate me if you can’t see them.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” he said, standing up. “Look, Mori, you kind of like me, right?”

  “Right,” I said, cautiously, staying where I was. He was way up above me, but I didn’t want to be struggling to my feet.

  “I kind of like you too,” he said.

  For an instant, I felt wonderfully happy, and then I remembered about the karass magic. I’d cheated. I’d made it happen. He didn’t really like me, well, maybe he did, but he liked me because the magic had made him like me. That didn’t mean he didn’t really think he liked me now, of course, but it made it much more complicated.

  “Come on,” I said, and struggled to my feet, putting my coat on. Wim put on a scruffy brown duffle coat and went out. I followed him out onto the pavement.

  There was an Indian woman with a baby in a pushchair just coming out of the bookshop as we came out. She was wearing a headscarf, which made me think of Nasreen and wonder how she was getting on. We waited for her to pass us and then crossed the road to the pond, where the mallards were chasing each other.

  “You don’t want to talk about it?” Wim asked.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said. I didn’t want to tell him about the karass magic, and I couldn’t think what was ethical, if I’d sort of accidentally bewitched him. It was a little bit exhilarating and a little bit terrifying, and it felt as if gravity wasn’t quite as strong as normally, or as if someone had decreased the oxygen or something.

  “I’ve never seen you at a loss for words,” he said.

  “Very few people have,” I said.

  He laughed, and followed me into the trees. “This magic thing, you’re not making it up?”

  “Why would I?” I didn’t get it. “It’s just that I really have sworn an oath not to do magic except to prevent harm, because it’s so difficult to understand the consequences. Anyway, magic is difficult to show, because it’s so deniable. You can say it would have happened anyway. And with the, um, the elves”—I didn’t want to say fairies, it sounded too babyish—“not everybody can see them, not all the time. You need to believe they’re there first, before you can.”

  “Can’t you give me a charm so I can see them? Or teach me their names? I’m not like stupid Thomas Covenant, you know.”

  “A charm is a good idea,” I said. I handed him my pocket rock and he rubbed it thoughtfully in his fingers. “This should help.” It wouldn’t exactly help him see the fairies, as all there was on it was general protection and specific protection against my mother, but if he thought it would, it might. “I haven’t read the Cove
nant books. I saw them, but it compared them to Tolkien on the cover so I didn’t want to read them.”

  “It isn’t the author’s fault what the publishers put on the cover,” he said. “Thomas Covenant is a leper who mopes his way around a fantasy world most of us would give our right arms to be in, refusing to believe anything is real.”

  “If it’s from the point of view of a depressed leper who doesn’t believe in it, I’m glad I haven’t read them!”

  He laughed. “There are some great giants. And it is a fantasy world, unless he’s mad, which he thinks he is and you can’t tell.”

  We were quite deep in among the trees now. It was muddy, as Harriet had said it would be. There were a few fairies in the trees. “I don’t know if you’ll be able to see, but hold tight to that rock and try looking there,” I said, pointing with my chin.

  Wim turned his head very slowly. The fairy vanished. “I thought I saw something for a second,” he said, very quietly. “Did I scare it off?”

  “The ones around here are very easily scared. They won’t talk to me. In South Wales where I come from there are some I know quite well.”

  “What’s the best place to find them? Do they live in the trees, like in Lorien?” His eyes were darting about all over, but not seeing the fairies that were peeping back.

  “They like places that used to be human and have been abandoned,” I said. “Ruins with green things growing in them. Is there anything like that?”

  “Follow me,” Wim said, and I followed him downhill through a lot of mud and old leaves. The sun was out, but it was still cold and damp and the wind was freezing.

  There was a stone wall about shoulder high, with ivy growing over it, and as we followed it along we came to an angle of wall, as if there had been a house once, and inside the angle where it was sheltered, snowdrops were pushing through the leaf mould. There was also a big puddle, which we stepped around. There was a half-height wall there, which we sat on, side by side. There was also a fairy, the one I had seen before on Janine’s lawn, like a dog with gossamer wings. I waited for a moment, quietly. Wim didn’t say anything either. Some more fairies came up—it really was just the kind of place they like. One of them was slim and beautiful and feminine, another was gnarled and squat.

  “Hold the stone, and look at the flowers, and at the reflection of the flowers in the water,” I said to Wim, quietly, not that it made much difference how loudly I spoke. “Now look at me.” When he looked at me I put my hands on the sides of his face. I was trying to give him confidence. He wanted so much to believe, to see one. His skin was warm and just slightly rough where he needed to shave. Touching him made me feel more breathless than ever.

  “He wants to see you,” I said to the fairies, in Welsh. “He won’t do any harm.”

  They didn’t reply, but they didn’t vanish either. “Now look to your left,” I said to Wim, letting go.

  He turned his head slowly, and he saw her, I could tell he did. He jumped. She regarded him curiously for a moment. I wondered for a second if she’d enchant him and lead him away into wherever it is they go when they vanish, like Tam Lin. He put out his hand towards her, and she vanished, they all did, like lights going out.

  “That was an elf?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “If you hadn’t said so, I’d have thought it was a ghost.” He sounded shaken. I’d have liked to have touched him again.

  “They’re not all that human-looking,” I said, which was an understatement. “Most of them are kind of gnarly.”

  “Gnomes?” he asked.

  “Well, sort of. The thing is you read things, and you see things, and they’re not the same. To read about it, it all makes so much more sense, with Seelie and Unseelie courts, with gnomes and elves, but it’s not like that. I’ve been seeing them all my life, and they’re all the same whatever they are and whatever they look like. I don’t really know what they are. They talk, well, the ones I know do, but they say odd things, and only in Welsh. Usually. I met one who spoke English at Christmas. He gave me this stick.” I tapped it in the mud. “They don’t call themselves elves, or anything. They don’t have names. They don’t use nouns very much.” It was such a relief to have someone to talk to about this! “I call them fairies because that’s what I’ve always called them, but I don’t really know what they are.”

  “So you don’t know what they are, not really?”

  “No. It’s not the sort of thing. What I think is that people have told a lot of stories about them and some of them are true and some of them are made up from other stories and some of them are muddled. They don’t tell stories themselves.”

  “But if you don’t know, then they could be ghosts?”

  “The dead are different,” I said.

  “You know? You’ve seen them?” His eyes were very wide.

  So I told him about Halloween and the oak leaves and the dead going under the hill, which meant I had to tell him about Mor. I was getting cold by this time. “So how did she die?” he asked.

  “I’m freezing,” I said. “Can we go back to town and maybe get a hot drink?”

  “I won’t see any more elves or whatever today?”

  I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t see them now. “Look carefully by the puddle,” I said.

  He turned his head slowly again and saw, I think, one of the gnarled gnome-like ugly fairies that isn’t human at all except for the eyes. He blinked.

  “Did you see it?” I asked.

  “I think so,” he said. “I saw its reflection. If it’s there and you can see it, why can’t I see it? I believe you, I really do. I saw the other one.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “There’s ever such a lot I don’t know about them. I can’t see them if they don’t want me to.”

  The fairy was smiling in an unpleasant way, as if it could understand. “Let’s go,” I said. “I’m getting chilled through.”

  It was hard to stand up from the wall, and hard to walk for the first few steps. Sitting on walls is better for my leg than standing up, but not very good for it all the same. Wim offered to help, but there’s nothing that helps, really. He put his hand on my arm, my other arm, my left arm. “Can I at least take your bag?” he asked.

  “If you have a bag, you could take the books,” I said. “But I have to keep the bag.”

  “Are you telling me your bag is magic?” he asked.

  We both looked at my bag, bulging with library books. You couldn’t find anything less magic looking if you tried. “It’s sort of part of me,” I said, feebly.

  He didn’t have a bag, but he took some of the library books anyway and carried them under his arm. “Now,” he said, as we came out of the woods. “Some real coffee, not that Nescafe swill.”

  “What do you mean, real coffee?” I asked.

  “In Marios, they have real filter coffee. They make it from coffee beans. You can smell them grinding it and roasting it.”

  “The smell of coffee is great. The taste, however, isn’t,” I said.

  “You’ve never had real coffee,” he said, confidently and correctly. “Wait and see.”

  Marios was one of the brightly lit neon cafes in the high street where the girls from school hang out with their local boyfriends. The tables were full of them. We went to sit at the back where there was a small table free. Wim ordered two filter coffees. There was a juke box playing “Oliver’s Army,” very loudly. It was horrible, but at least it was warm. He put my library books on the table, and I put them back into my bag.

  “How did she die?” he asked again, when we were sitting down.

  “This isn’t the place,” I said.

  “The wood wasn’t the place and this isn’t the place?” Wim asked. He put his hand on my hand, where it was lying on top of the table. I gasped. “Tell me about it.”

  “It was a car accident. But really it was my mother,” I said. “My mother was trying to do something, some huge magic, to get power, to take over the world
I think. The fairies knew and they told us what to do to stop it. She tried to stop us, and one of the things she did was to try to use things that weren’t real, things coming at us. We just had to keep on. I thought we’d both die, but it would have been worth it, to stop her. That’s what the fairies said, and that’s what we were prepared for, both of us. There were all those things that were magic, that were illusion. I thought it was like that, when I saw the lights, but it was a real car.”

  “Jesus, how awful for the driver,” Wim said.

  “I don’t know what he saw, or what he thought,” I said. “I wasn’t in any state to ask.”

  “But you stopped her? Your mother?”

  “We stopped her. But Mor was killed.”

  The waitress interrupted me by putting two red cups of black coffee down on the table. One of them was slopped into the saucer, onto the packets of sugar. Wim paid, before I could offer to.

  “And then what happened?” he asked.

  I couldn’t, of course, tell him about those awful days after Mor was killed, the bruise on the side of her face, the days when she was in a coma, the time when my mother turned off the machine, and then afterwards when I started to use her name and how nobody challenged me, though I’m sure Auntie Teg knew, and probably Grampar too. We might have been identical, but we were different people after all.

  “My grandfather had a stroke,” I said, because however unbearable that was it was the next bearable thing to say. “I found him. They used to call it elfshot. I don’t know if she made it happen.”

  I tried my coffee. It was horrible, even worse than instant coffee if that was possible. At the same time, I could see how it could become an acquired taste if I tried hard to like it. I’m not sure it would be worth the effort. After all, it’s not as if it’s good for you.

  “So what are you going to do about her?” Wim asked.

  “I don’t think I need to do anything. We stopped her. Her last chance was Halloween.”

  “Not if your sister didn’t go under the hill like she was supposed to. Not if she’s still there. She could use that again. You have to do something to really stop her. You have to kill her.”