by Laer Carroll
One of her hands touched one of his. A million sub- microscopic probes analyzed his health, detected several minor problems, and automatically sent commands to his body to fix them. All in a fraction of a second.
He released her and gathered everyone’s attention. “Let’s eat, shall we?”
With that he and his wife ushered their guests and his daughter through a doorway and out onto a patio which overlooked Burbank and the San Fernando Valley to the south. There Tanya directed them to seats at an oval table set with places for seven. Beth was seated at the pride of place with the best view of the winking glittering panorama which presented itself. The sky was almost black with lingering purple and ruby sky to the west.
“Let’s not wait for late-comers, shall we?” said the magnate, picking up a folded menu which must have been printed out less than an hour before on glossy stock.
Everyone else obediently imitated him.
After a few minutes each of them began to set the menus down and speak up to place their orders to a microphone hidden in a bouquet placed in the middle of the table. As all here had done dozens or hundreds of times before.
For the first time in a long time Bethany considered the extravagance of all this luxury, and how oblivious to it she had been or become over the years. What a self-absorbed little girl she had been. Who only a few weeks before she’d died had congratulated herself on how mature she’d become!
Two black and white clad waiters had begun to deliver food when Beth’s supersensitive ears heard automobiles coming up the driveway below them. She kept silent. Minutes later she and the others heard car doors slamming.
Lee made to rise and go meet the arrivals but her father said, “Let Donald handle it, dear.” Lee settled but couldn’t keep herself from looking toward the door into the house every few minutes. Finally Beth heard a tiny voice speaking into Jonathan’s earbug announcing the arrival of three expected guests.
Shortly Naomi and Brigitte came hurrying through the doorway, closely followed by Gerard. The next few minutes were a flurry of greetings and hugs and hints of tears.
Soon tall thin black Naomi, almost-as-tall Swedish Brigitte, and increasingly muscular Gerard were sitting down where Tanya directed them. From long experience they perused menus and ordered food and drink.
Conversation quickly began to swirl around the table, Tanya drawing people out and Jonathan occasionally adding a question to the mix. The food and drink arrived in two waves for the early- and late-comers. Conversation lapsed a bit while everyone ate with good appetite, Beth a salmon plate with a sauce she loved, especially since her extra-normal palate served up to her all sorts of subtle tastes she never could have noticed before she died and came back to life.
Then there was dessert and more conversation, every person there coaxed (if necessary, and it rarely was!) to talk a bit about what had been happening to them most recently. Even host Jonathan served up a bit of industry gossip, to be topped by his wife with a bit of slightly salacious gossip which Bethany guessed had been carefully sanitized for the younger audience.
An hour passed and Bethany began to hear more automobiles approaching. She got a sinking feeling in her belly.
She began casting accusing looks at her four Bestys. Which most definitely included Gerard. That damned POUF would not have been left out of the conspiracy!
No one else there had her hearing but Kendall had 16 years of practice interpreting Bethany’s moods.
“What is it?” he said to her. Everyone else ceased talking .
Beth rapidly shuffled through lies, turned to him.
“I’ve just been wondering what these four are planning for an encore. First it was three extras for dinner. But that doesn’t seem like enough for these schemers.”
She spoke to Lee. “Who else did you invite?”
The small Chinese girl attempted innocence but quickly settled on nonchalance.
“Just the cheer squad....
“And the football team....
“And the basketball team....
“And a few others.”
Jonathan Wang had been slowly turning from affable to stone faced.
“Do you mean to tell me that you did this behind Bethany’s back?”
“Well... She never would have agreed to it.” Lee wilted, looked to Naomi, Brigitte, and Gerald. They were equally abashed.
Jonathan glanced at his wife. She gave a slight head-shake indicating ignorance.
Jonathan’s gaze turned inward for a few moments, then toward Bethany.
“I’m sorry, Bethany. Tanya and I thought you knew a party was being planned in your honor. You don’t have to attend it, of course. We can’t cancel at this late date, but we can say you’re sick or something and you and Kendall can leave. We can even take you and Ken out a back way.”
Bethany three weeks ago might have taken him up on the offer. But Bethany plus Maelgyreyt was a different matter. They would have no trouble navigating the social ocean awaiting them.
“No. Thank you. I’ll be fine.”
Kendall nodded but he was looking a bit—nervous? Oh, of course. Handsome and charming, he had no trouble meeting women of his own age or older. But teenaged girls tended to flock around him in worshipful throngs.
She grinned suddenly. Oh, this would give her and Helen YEARS of teasing!
“In fact,” she said quite cheerfully. “I’m looking forward to it!”
·
By the time Beth arrived at the top floor of the house a couple dozen people were already there, clustered together in the large expanse of greenery at the back of the house. This was the near edge of a large expanse punctuated by a tennis court and pool. The area was flat, having been cut out of the hillside to the north, and surrounded by high chain link fences to the east and west. A high hedge backed the area before it climbed abruptly uphill.
Bethany, applying her new situational assessment skills, guessed that there were more hidden defenses to intruders hoping to steal from the Wangs.
More guests were being escorted up the outside stairway from the house’s external parking lot. The Wangs did a good deal of partying, a lot of it attended by many leading lights in the entertainment industry.
She and Lihua had watched the arrivals of those celebrities many times from Lee’s bedroom window. It felt a little funny being the guest of honor at such a get together.
Perhaps predictably the first arrivals were most of the cheer squad. They flocked around her and she was engulfed in a big group hug. There was a good deal of squealing and jumping up and down. She forgot her sort-of grownup state as an inheritor of Maelgyreyt’s memories and did a bit of that herself.
Then much of the football team and basketball team arrived, though not many more than those of the cheer squad. There was a lot of overlap and some of the boys couldn’t make it or had no interest in doing so.
For the first half hour Tanya and Jonathan played hostess and host, enough to get the point across that there were adults around. Then they retired and the party picked up energy. There was already a dance going on at the tennis court to the music of an amateur DJ from school. The music was turned up. Regularly a few more people showed up.
There were plenty of snacks on a long buffet table and every once in a while one of several servitors hired for the occasion replenished it. Someone had snuck in alcohol and they spiked one of the two punch bowls. But they were discreet about it and Beth could tell they hadn’t been able to get anything harder than wine into the party. Still, the party got a touch more energetic and a few couples took advantage of some of the less well-lit corners to flirt and make out.
And some of the athletes began throwing a football around.
“Look at those idiots!” said Lee. “If they’re not careful they’re going to break something!”
Beth had had the same thought herself. And as she watched she noticed that the would-be quarterbacks were making longer throws, and more toward one side of the back of the house. If this kept u
p...
Then what she’d projected could happen began to seem as if it would happen. This next throw after the one coming up would be the dangerous one.
She began to jog, then run, then run very fast. Then as the ball arced down toward the catcher she leaped, caught the ball, tucked, rolled into a complete somersault, straightened, and came down feet first to run a few steps to slow herself down.
Only to be almost tackled. She heard someone pounding up behind her and, as the air of a moving body touched her, dodged to the side. Through the space she’d vacated hurdled a body: the boy whose catch she’d blocked.
She watched as he plowed into the grass, lay stunned a moment, then sat up. It was Steve, the blond senior she and Gerard had crushed on for a time.
Beth giggled then sobered. “Steve, are you OK?”
He shook his head, focused on her. “What were you thinking, doing that? You could have been hurt.”
“What were YOU thinking, tackling me? Anyway, I’m keeping the ball until you dummies behave yourselves. The very next throw was going to take out a window or something.”
“I wasn’t going to actually tackle you. Just grab the ball back.”
Then Kendall arrived, slowing from a run to a walk and to standing over Steve.
“After all my sister went through you still tried to tackle her? I should...” He halted, glaring down at the blond boy. His breathing was heavy, and Beth and Steve had no doubt it was from anger and not from exertion. Ken’s clenched fists told the two he was barely keeping himself from grabbing Steve and breaking him like a stick.
The sitting boy literally paled. He began to stammer an apology.
Kendall turned away abruptly, gathered Bethany to him with a glance, and walked stiff-legged quickly back toward the house, his sister almost running to keep up with him.
Bethany gave Steve an apologetic glance, tossed him the ball, and ran to catch up with her brother.
·
She woke out of a memory-not-a-dream, raised her head to glance at her bedside clock. The dim green glow announced that it was about 4:00. She closed her eyes, laid her head back down, and reviewed the memory before it could fade.
She’d again been the giant manta-ray-like creature floating high in the skies of a gas-giant planet like ringed Saturn. Only instead of harvesting that planet’s version of aerial plankton to eat, she (or it) had been harvesting lightning with which to make things.
But she’d woken before she could make something, so Bethany didn’t know what those things were. Darn!
She sighed, got up, dressed in jeans, sports bra, and tee-shirt. She remembered to put on tennis shoes rather than go bare-foot the way she had the last time she’d gone running at night.
She slipped phone, keys, and a slender wallet into her jeans, ghosted down the stairs and out the front door, locking it quietly behind her. Then she walked down the sidewalk till she was far enough away from home that the sounds of her running would not be audible to Kendall and her parents.
Running faster than a gazelle she was at the Burbank town center in just a few minutes. She slowed to a jog at that brightly lit area and turned west onto Glenoaks. A few blocks further something caught her attention.
As she approached a building she’d seen and ignored a hundred times before she felt a tingle in her chest. It was like a fizzy drink filling her chest, or a near-silent buzzer pressed to her skin but from the inside.
She slowed to a walk and really looked at the building. It was two stories, windowless, and beige stone. Closer still she saw a sign on its side: BURBANK WATER & POWER Electrical Distribution Station 4 .
So it was really a wall around unsightly equipment, not a building at all.
As she stood there the memory of her time as a floater came back to her. A skill she’d had in the dream/memory also came back to her.
Without thought her arms rose to point at the building and her hands turned toward something inside the wall, like leaves turning toward the sun. She gave a command.
Every light on the street dimmed. Inside the building an alarm began to sound, very faint but audible to her supersensitive hearing.
Startled, she gave another command. The lights around her began to brighten until they were at their normal level.
She was conspicuous if anyone chose to look her way. She let her arms fall to a natural position at her sides. Natural except that her hands continued to point at the power source from which she must be pulling power.
Beth glanced around her, trying to be natural about it, not furtive. There was no one around at near 4:30 on a Wednesday morning.
No, wait. Several blocks to her right a red light turned green. Two or three sets of car lights began to move her way.
She gave a third command. The power flow shut off. She could feel it somehow.
She turned west again and began to walk. Two cars passed her, then a block further behind them another. The red tail lights of the vehicles receded.
Inside her there remained the power she’d sucked out of the electrical system supplying this part of Burbank. No, not inside her. In some pool of power an infinite distance away from her, and yet as near as her heart.
Beth turned left at the large department store as she’d done dozens of times before and left again at the next street a block south. At the nearby Frank’s diner she ordered a large breakfast and took her tray to a table near a window onto the street. Only a few couples and singles shared the dining area. None of them paid her any attention.
She consumed her meal without tasting any of her food or drink, gazing out the window as if looking at the slight traffic as it passed back and forth under the bright yellow street lights. But she was really looking at the pool of power she’d collected.
Though “look” was not really accurate. She was “seeing” the pool with something other than eyes. Some sense she’d always had but never known she had until she experienced it in her alien dream. Her esoteric sense viewed the power pool as an iridescent bubble, a shifting rainbow surface overlaying a fog or cloud illuminated from within by a white light.
She thought back to her dream/memory when she had been about to do something with the power she had collected. What could one do with power?
You could move things likes cars and elevators. Make light, heat, cold…. No, not cold. That was created by fans. They cooled by moving fan blades to push heat from warm bodies such as heaters or people’s bodies. Air conditioners moved some fluid around inside the AC to transfer heat out of something such as a room or refrigerator.
She lifted her glass and realized it was empty. So was her plate. She wiped her lips with the napkin on the tray and stood up to put her scraps in the garbage bin by the door. She could still eat more, so she walked across the street and a block eastward toward the indoor mall. At the corner there she entered the Pancake House and bought another breakfast. One she didn’t taste as she sat at a table looking out the window.
Bethany finished her meal while puzzling over how one used power to create light. There were hot lights like incandescent bulbs and cooler lights like neon lights and cool lights like liquid crystal and emergency chemical lights which came in tubes. She didn’t know how the cool lights worked, but if she heated up something enough it would glow—or burn if it was flammable.
Done with her second breakfast, she got up and left, leaving a nice tip but not big enough to be memorable. It might not be a good idea to become known as a wanderer at odd times. Real superheroes should be inconspicuous.
Maybe she should start thinking about how to disguise herself. Start with a wig? Wear glasses? Not sun glasses, at least not at night. THAT would be more conspicuous than plain glasses.
Besides, it looked dorky, like someone desperate to be cool.
Though, come to think of it, why not look like a dork? It would set her apart from her normal self.
The sky up ahead was beginning to lighten and morning breezes to pick up. Dawn would come soon. Time to head home.
Beth came to a covered bus stop and seated herself. The sign above it showed that it served one of the busses which went by her house though two blocks over.
A few cars passed going both east and west. Traffic was picking up.
One of the vehicles was a large rental truck. It whipped up a bit of a breeze and sent a scrap of newspaper whirling up toward her face.
Reflexively she snapped a hand up, arm straight out before her and pointing her finger at the scrap. She dipped into her power pool and gave a command.
A thin bright blue shaft of light blinked between her hand and the scrap. It puffed into smoke which was instantly whiffed away by the breeze.
Holy shit!
Bethany dropped her hand back to her side and sat limp in her concrete seat.
This was serious. Suppose that had been someone!
Up till now all her experiments had been upon herself and had been abilities that her subconscious well knew how to apply and apply safely. Coming, she supposed, from the memories she was channeling from previous lives, or from her ancestors’ lives.
Though how she’d been aliens or had aliens as ancestors—that was completely mysterious.
She “looked” at the pool of power, judging she knew not how, how much energy it held. The amount had not been noticeably lessened. She’d automatically used just enough energy to zap the scrap into smoke and that hadn’t been much.
Beth looked up and down the street. There. Another scrap, maybe from the same piece of newspaper. She glanced around and behind her. No one watching her.
She tapped the energy and pointed her hand at the scrap, focused her gaze on it, and commanded it to float upward.
Nothing. So she didn’t have disembodied hands. That would have been useful. You didn’t often want to vaporize the things around you. But pushing and pulling and lifting them, that was different.
Maybe if she made a lifting and not a pointing motion with her hand? Nope, that didn’t work either.
She waited as several autos and another van passed her by. Then again she pointed and this time desired the scrap to go away. Again came the blue streak, so brief an eye-blink at the wrong moment and she’d have missed it.
