Among Others

by Jo Walton

  “I think that would be wrong,” I said. The other girls from school were all getting up, and I knew it must be time for the bus.

  “I know she’s your mother—”

  “That has nothing to do with it. Nobody could hate her more than I do. But I think killing her would be the wrong thing to do. It feels wrong. I could talk to the fairies about it, but if it would have helped, I think they would have told me to do it already. You’re thinking about it in the wrong sort of way, as if it was a story.”

  “This is just so damn weird,” he said.

  “I’m going to have to go. I’ll miss the bus.” I stood up, leaving the rest of my coffee.

  He gulped his own coffee. “When will I see you?”

  “Tuesday, like always. For Zelazny.” I smiled. I was looking forward to that.

  “Sure, but on our own?”

  “Next Saturday.” I shrugged my coat on. “It’s the only time there is.”

  We started walking out of the cafe. “They don’t let you out of there at all?”

  “No. They pretty much don’t.”

  “It’s like prison.”

  “It is in a way.” We walked down to the bus stop. “Well, Tuesday then,” I said, as we reached it. The bus was there, and the girls were pouring onto it. And then—no, this needs to be on a line of its own.

  And then he kissed me.

  TUESDAY 5TH FEBRUARY 1980

  It took me until today to finish writing up what happened on Saturday.

  I’m not sure I really like The Number of the Beast. There’s a lot to like about it, but it’s all over the place as far as plot goes, and as far as location goes as well. I’ve never read Oz or the Lensmen, and I’m not quite sure what they were doing there.

  Apart from that, the main excitement has been that all the girls who were on the bus have been asking me nonstop about “my boyfriend,” where I met him, what he’s like, what he does, and so on and on and on. Some of them who were in the cafe know about his reputation and have warned me about him—what, seventeen-year-old boy had sex with girlfriend, shock horror! It’s such a weird mixture of puritanical and prurient. The girls who have local boyfriends say they’re not serious about them, and some of them have what they call serious boyfriends at home. What they mean by serious is just what Jane Austen would have called an eligible parti, a boy of the same class who they might marry. They’re slumming with the local boys, and the local boys mostly know that. It’s vile, they’re vile, the whole thing is vile and I don’t want to think about Wim in the same breath as that.

  The real difference is that we’re not of different classes. Wim and I are both of a class that expects to go to university. I don’t know what his father does, but that his mother works in the hospital kitchens while I go to school here is irrelevant. Well, maybe not irrelevant, but not the point. Anyway, I’m not sure if Wim is my boyfriend, and even if he is it isn’t at all the thing they’re talking about with their serious and not serious. I’m only fifteen. I’m not sure I ever want to get married. I’m neither messing around while waiting nor looking for some “real thing.” What I want is much more complicated. I want somebody I can talk to about books, who would be my friend, and why couldn’t we have sex as well if we wanted to? (And used contraception.) I’m not looking for romance. Lord Peter and Harriet would seem a pretty good model to me. I wonder if Wim has read Sayers?

  But that’s also almost irrelevant, because there’s also the ethical thing of the magic. I should probably tell him, and then he’d hate me, anybody would.

  I’ve asked Nurse to make me a doctor’s appointment. She didn’t ask what for.

  WEDNESDAY 6TH FEBRUARY 1980

  Zelazny meeting last night. Wim thinks Zelazny’s the greatest stylist of all time. Brian thinks style is unimportant compared to ideas, and he thinks Zelazny’s ideas are ordinary, except for Shadow. It’s funny how people divided on that one. I think if we’d voted for whether style matters or only ideas, the division would have been really different from whether Zelazny has good ideas. I think he does, and I think both matter, which isn’t to say that the Foundation books suck because they have no style, or Clarke either. Zelazny can get where he’s all style and no substance—I can’t forget Creatures of Light and Darkness after all, which almost put me off him forever. But mostly he keeps the balance.

  We talked about Amber and what’s going to happen, and we talked about the kind of wisecracking voice he uses in those and in Isle of the Dead and This Immortal and we talked about whether it was actually science fiction or fantasy. Hugh thinks the Amber books are fantasy, and so is Isle of the Dead, because despite the aliens and everything, world-building is talked about in such magical terms. “That’s condemning him for being poetic!” Wim said.

  “Saying it’s fantasy isn’t condemnation,” Harriet said.

  So, a good meeting. Afterwards Wim said to Greg, “Do you have a recent Ansible?”

  There’s a magazine, a “fanzine” called Ansible! It’s for information about what’s going on in the SF fan world, it’s funny, and it’s so exactly what I would have called it that I love the author, Dave Langford, sight unseen without meeting him. Ansibles are from The Dispossessed and they’re faster-than-light communication devices. Brilliant. All the details about Albacon in Glasgow at Easter were in Greg’s copy, and I copied them down, and all I have to do now is get the money from Daniel when I see him, probably at half term, which is at the end of next week, and send it off.

  Walking out of the library, Wim held my hand. “Are you sure I can’t see you until Saturday?” he said. “Will you be locked up in school the whole time?”

  “Well yes, apart from going to Shrewsbury Thursday afternoon for acupuncture,” I said.

  “What time are you going?” he asked.

  “On the half-past one train—but don’t you have to work?”

  “I work mornings and go to college in the afternoons,” he said. “That’s how I came to see you in hospital, remember? I can skive off tomorrow afternoon if I want to. Nobody cares.”

  “Skive” is like “mitch,” it means “skipping school.” That’s what they say around here. The first time I heard it I had no idea what it meant.

  “You’ll care when it gets to the exams,” I said.

  “I won’t even notice,” he said. “I’ll meet you in Gobowen railway station, all right?”

  Greg drove me back to school, as normal. “So, I was right,” he said.

  I blushed. I don’t think he saw in the darkness. “Sort of,” I admitted.

  “Well, good luck.”

  “Hot jets,” I replied.

  Greg laughed. “I’ve always said that what Wim needs is a girlfriend who could quote Heinlein at him.”

  Has he always said that? Or does he only think he always said that because I did the karass-magic? Greg existed before I did it. I know he did. I met him in the library. But he never said a word to me beyond not letting me join the first day and then taking my interlibrary loan cards. Was the book group, and SF fandom, there all the time, or did it all come into being when I did that magic, to give me a karass? Was there Ansible? I know they think there was, that there were conventions going back to 1939, and certainly science fiction was there all the time. There’s no proving anything once magic gets involved.

  I’m going to have to tell Wim. It’s the only ethical thing.

  THURSDAY 7TH FEBRUARY 1980

  I set off from school with even more of a sense of escaping this week, even though it was raining, the kind of irresistible damp drizzle that gets through every crack. If I had clothes of my own here I could have changed into them before leaving, but I don’t so I couldn’t. Arlinghurst wants its girls to be recognisable at all times. If they could make us wear the uniform in the holidays they would. At least the coat is good and solid, and the hat might be awful but it does keep the rain off, mostly.

  Wim was waiting in Gobowen station. It’s not much of a station, more like a bus shelter beside the
line with a ticket machine and a couple of empty hanging baskets. He was sitting in the shelter with his feet up on the glass, folded up like a paperclip. His bike was chained to the railings outside, getting wet. There was a fat woman with a child sitting next to him, and a balding man with a briefcase, all in raincoats. Wim was wearing the same duffle coat as before. Next to him, the other people looked as if they were in black and white while he was in colour. He didn’t see me for a moment, then the balding man saw me and made a fuss about getting up to give me his seat, so Wim noticed and smiled and got up instead. It was funny, we were kind of shy with each other. It was the first time we’d been alone together since Saturday, and we weren’t really alone, they were there, but they didn’t quite count. I didn’t know how to behave, and if he did—and he should, as he’s had a lot more practice—he didn’t show it.

  The train came, people got off, and then we got on. It was only a two-carriage train, and again full of people from North Wales with their funny singsong voices and yes/no questions. We managed to get a double seat because a nice lady moved across to give us one. We couldn’t really talk about anything, because she was sitting across from us, along with a worried young man with a cat in a carrier on his lap. The cat kept crying, and he kept trying to reassure it. It must be awful taking a cat to the vet on the train. Or maybe he was moving. He didn’t have much with him except the cat, but maybe you wouldn’t. Or perhaps, worst of all, he had to give the cat away, and he was taking it to a new home. If so, though, he’d probably have been crying too, and he wasn’t. The funny thing about the man with the cat was that Wim didn’t notice him at all. When I said something about him, after we were on the platform in Shrewsbury walking along, he didn’t know what I was talking about.

  I don’t think Wim goes to Shrewsbury very often, for all that it’s so near. He didn’t know where anything was. He didn’t know there was a bookshop in Owen Owens. I had to go for acupuncture first, so I left him in a cafe—a shiny coffee bar, all chrome and glass, after he’d rejected the one with the nice booths where I went last time because it didn’t have real coffee. I never knew before Saturday that there were any kinds of coffee but Nescafe (or Maxwell House, but they’re the same), granulated coffee you make with boiling water. It seems a funny thing to be fussy about.

  The acupuncture went well again. The acupuncturist says the traction might well have done it some violence (that’s the word he used) and been unwise. I’d use considerably stronger language than unwise, but I suppose it is my leg, and just any old leg to him. I looked at the chart the whole time I was on the table, memorising where the points are and what they affect. It could be really useful to know. Just pressing them might help. I can feel the magic, the “chi” when the pins are in, moving smoothly around my body with a jump like a spark-gap where the pain would be. I’m going to try it without needles and see if I can drain the pain out. The easiest thing would be to put it into something, like a rock or a piece of metal, but then anyone picking it up would get it. The acupuncture just drains it out into the world, as far as I can tell. Good trick if you can do it.

  Afterwards I went back—faster down the stairs than up them!—to where I’d left Wim. I sat down opposite him. The coffee machine let out a blast of coffee-scented steam. “Let’s go somewhere else,” he said. “I’m sick of this place.”

  Once we were out of there he cheered up. He held my hand, which was nice, though it would have been nicer if it had left me with a free hand. We went to the book department, and didn’t find anything, but it was nice to look and point things out to each other. He’s much more picky than I am, and also likes some things I don’t, like Dick. He despises Niven (!) and he doesn’t like Piper. (How can anyone not adore H. Beam Piper?) He’s never read Zenna Henderson, and of course they didn’t have any. I’ll borrow them from Daniel to lend to him.

  After that, I insisted I would buy him lunch, though it was mid-afternoon by that time. I was starving. We found a fish and chip place with a sit-down part, and we sat down and ate fish and chips and white bread and butter, and I had truly awful tea so stewed it was dark orange, and Wim had a Vimto, which he said he hadn’t had since he was eight years old. That made him smile. He also ran his finger over the back of my hand, which was nicer than holding hands walking along, and much more comfortable. It made me feel all shivery.

  The chip shop wasn’t full, so when we’d finished eating we ordered another Vimto and a lemonade—the tea was too awful even to pretend to drink. We sat there in the warm and dry while our coats steamed gently on the backs of our chairs. We talked about Tolkien. He compared it to Donaldson, and also to something called The Sword of Shannara which I haven’t read, but which sounds like a total crap ripoff. And then by degrees we got to talking about the elves. “They could be ghosts,” he said.

  “The dead can’t speak. Mor couldn’t speak when I saw her.” I managed to say her name perfectly normally, without even a quiver.

  “Maybe not when they’re newly dead. I had a thought about that. When they’re newly dead, they can’t speak, and they look like themselves. And you can make them speak using blood, like in Virgil, you said, right? Later, they draw life from things that are alive, animals and plants, and they get more like them, less like people, and they can speak, with that life.”

  “The way they speak really isn’t much like people, not even dead people,” I said. “What you’re saying makes sense, and it would fit perfectly in a story, but I’m not sure it feels right.”

  “It would explain why they like ruins,” he said. “I went back there afterwards, on Saturday. I could sort of see them, out of the corner of my eye, when I was touching your rock.” He touched his pocket when he mentioned it. I liked the thought that he was carrying around something I’d had so long. It won’t really do anything except protect him from my mother—but goodness knows, that can’t be a bad thing.

  “You should be able to see them,” I said. “They’re all over.”

  “They’re ghosts,” he said. “You just think they’re fairies.”

  “I don’t know what they are, and I don’t know that it really matters,” I said.

  “Don’t you want to find out?” he asked, his eyes gleaming. That’s the spirit of science fiction.

  “Yes,” I said, but I didn’t really mean it. They are what they are, that’s all.

  “Well, what do you think they have to do with?”

  “Places,” I said, very sure. “They don’t move around all that much. Glor—my friend did magic to make me come down to South Wales at Halloween, he didn’t come here and speak to me.”

  “Well, that’s like ghosts, lingering where they come from.”

  I shook my head.

  “Will you teach me magic?” he asked next.

  I jumped. “I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s so dangerous. If you don’t know what you’re doing, and I don’t mean you, I mean anyone, anyone who doesn’t know enough, it’s so hard not to do things that have wide-reaching effects and you don’t know what.” This was the perfect opportunity to tell him about the karass spell, and I knew it, but when it came to it, I didn’t want to. “Like George Orr in The Lathe of Heaven, only with magic, not with dreams.”

  “Have you done anything that’s like that?” he asked.

  So I had to tell him. “You’re not going to like it. But I was very lonely and very desperate. I was doing a magic for protection against my mother, because she kept sending me terrible dreams all the time. And while I was at it, I did a magic to find me a karass.”

  He looked blank. “What’s a karass?”

  “You haven’t read Vonnegut? Oh well, you’d like him I think. Start with Cat’s Cradle. But anyway, a karass is a group of people who are genuinely connected together. And the opposite is a granfalloon, a group that has a fake kind of connection, like all being in school together. I did a magic to find me friends.”

  He actually
recoiled, almost knocking his chair over. “And you think it worked?”

  “The day after, Greg invited me to the book group.” I let that hang there while he filled in the implications for himself.

  “But we’d been meeting for months already. You just . . . found us.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “But I didn’t know anything about it before. I’d never seen any indication of it, or of fandom either.”

  I looked at him. He was rarer than a unicorn, a beautiful boy in a red-checked shirt who read and thought and talked about books. How much of his life had my magic touched, to make him what he was? Had he even existed before? Or what had he been? There’s no knowing, no way to know. He was here now, and I was, and that was all.

  “But I was there,” he said. “I was going to it. I know it was there. I was at Seacon in Brighton last summer.”

  “Er’ perrhenne,” I said, with my best guess at pronunciation.

  I am used to people being afraid of me, but I don’t really like it. I don’t suppose even Tiberius really liked it. But after a horrible instant his face softened. “It must have just found us for you. You couldn’t have changed all that,” he said, and picking up his Vimto, drained the bottle.

  “I wanted to tell you, because there’s an ethical question about why you like me, if you like me because of that,” I said, to make it perfectly clear.

  He laughed, a little shakily. “I’ll have to think about that,” he said.

  We walked back through the wet streets to the station, not holding hands. But on the train, which was much emptier going back, we sat together, and our sides touched and after a moment he put his arm around me. “It’s a lot to take in,” he said. “I always wanted the world to have magic in it.”

  “I’d prefer spaceships,” I said. “Or if there has to be magic, then less confusing magic, magic with easy rules, like in books.”

  “Let’s talk about something normal,” he said. “Like, why do you have such short hair? I like it, but it’s really unusual.”