Uptown Local and Other Interventions

by Diane Duane

  “Is the weather a problem?” Ken said.

  “For chocolate?” She laughed, sounding rueful. “Weather’s nearly always a problem if you’re not careful. If it’s too hot the chocolate won’t temper correctly: if it’s too cold, it seizes: if it’s too humid, it blooms… There are a hundred things that can go wrong. And making chocolate in Manhattan is like trying to do organic chemistry in a subway tunnel. We’re the only ones still doing it here. Everybody else is out in Queens or up in Westchester somewhere, in big climate-controlled factories…”

  Ken got out his PDA and started scribbling hastily at the handwriting-recognition part of its screen. It would have taken much closer observation than Ms. Cruzeiros was giving him at the moment for her to see that he was writing, not in one of the PDA-proprietary shorthand styles, but in the device-friendly form of the wizardly Speech. Most of what he was going to need to know about this situation he wouldn’t find out until he got down to where the trouble was: but in the meantime the notes he took would all feed into whatever wizardry he found himself having to do. Something missing, Ken thought, while she talked on about cramped quarters and brownouts and landlord troubles: and on all of these he made notes. Then, Make me a list, he wrote in the Speech, of everything you need for a successful chocolate shop.

  His writing vanished. Going to be a long list… said the PDA, the characters scrawling themselves across the little screen.

  Better get started then, Ken wrote.

  The screen blanked: Ken tucked the PDA away. “I’m sorry,” Ms. Cruzeiros said as the cab turned onto Fifth Avenue and headed downtown. “I’m kind of in ear-bending mode today…”

  “Ms. Cruzeiros, please don’t worry about it,” Ken said; “it sounds like you’ve got reason to be.”

  “Ana, please,” she said then.

  “Ana. I’m Ken. I take it this vacancy came up rather suddenly.”

  “It did,” she said. For a moment her mouth set into that unhappy, grim look again. Then she sighed. “I suppose I really should have seen it coming,” Ana said. “But sometimes you just get taken by surprise—”

  She went quiet again. Ken went back to “making notes”. “How many square feet in your production area?” he said.

  She told him. It was small for any kind of business: close quarters, Ken thought. Probably the kind of place where tempers have no trouble flaring when you’re caught between commerce and art, with sugar on top.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ll look around, take some measurements, do some imaging of the workspace: the images can go up on our website if you like—it always helps with recruitment. Then make some calls. We could possibly have some people down here to talk to you this afternoon—”

  “That would be great,” Ana said as the cab pulled over on one side of Eighth Avenue, just shy of Jane Street. But as she got out and looked over at her premises, Ken got the feeling that it wasn’t ‘great’ at all: that this suddenly-empty position was the last thing Ana wanted to fill.

  She looked around her strangely, like someone trying to avoid having to make a damaging admission. Then she gave up. “I hate to say it,” she said, “but we really do need to get someone in here in a hurry, because though I’ve been working with my chocolatier for maybe four years now, I haven’t been able to get anything right in here since he left. Local conditions have been perfect for chocolate, these past couple of days. I thought I could manage. But—” She shook her head. “It seizes, it blooms, it burns, it melts at the wrong speed: everything that can go wrong with chocolate has been going wrong. I find that, far from being able to cope, I’m actually completely incompetent.”

  And I thought she looked angry before, Ken thought. I was mistaken… This was one of those people who was harder on herself than on anyone around her. “Let’s have a look around,” he said.

  The sign over the shopfront said THEOBROMA, in black on white, in a spidery font of the century before: and the sign was that old, too. Ancient green shades were pulled down over the windows on either side of the door, and inside the door itself. Ana unlocked the door and went in, not lifting the shade or flipping the CLOSED sign over. Ken went in behind her, gazing around at the beautiful old nineteenth-century tiles on the walls and the floor, all black and white, and the hammered-tin ceiling. The left side of the store was one long glass case full of beautiful chocolates, light, dark, shiny, cocoa’d, all in their little paper nests. The aroma was ravishing. “This was the last batch Rodrigo made before he left,” she said. “The last decent batch we’ve got…”

  The anxiety in her voice was painful. “Would whoever you hired be doing counter work as well?” Ken said.

  “Absolutely,” Ana said. “I’d love to be able to afford separate counter staff as well, but our profit margins are a little too close to the break-even line…”

  She went toward the back of the store area, and Ken followed her. Through a bead-curtained door was more white tile, this time less decorative: the walls and floor gleamed with them, and around the edges of the room were huge slabs of white marble and many bizarre-looking machines. Ken wandered over to one of them, like a huge pot with a water jacket around it, and some kind of stirring mechanism inside.

  “Tempering vat,” Ana said. “The fountain wrap keeps the chocolate at a steady temperature after it’s melted. The one over there with the big rollers in the drum, that’s a conching machine. It rolls the melted chocolate around until the edges are worn off the cocoa crystals: that’s how you get that really smooth mouthfeel on the best chocolate….”

  The description joined with the pervasive fragrance of the place to make his stomach growl. “This is a terrible place to be before lunch,” Ken muttered, holding the PDA up to each wall in turn, ostensibly to take wireless measurements of the space.

  “I guess it is, if you’re not used to it,” Ana said. “It’s been a long time since I noticed…” She smiled, a sad smile, shaking her head. “When I first started helping my mom, ten years ago, before she died, I couldn’t stay out of the stock. Afterwards I didn’t have the time or the inclination to indulge myself. It’s easy when you’re working under someone who’s known the ropes for half their life…harder when you don’t have them around any more and you’re trying to find your own way. There were a lot of stumbles before Rodrigo came along and helped me get a handle on things. It’s going to be strange working without him…”

  Ken lowered the PDA and scribbled on it. Got what you need?

  Working, boss.

  The screen went blank except for the familiar little turning-hourglass icon as the Manual went to work on an analysis of the surrounding space. “What kind of hours are you looking for from whoever applies for the position?” Ken said. “Full time? Part time?”

  “Officially, all the hours God sends,” Ana said, “but I guess it wouldn’t be smart to put that in the ad.” She went over to the conching machine, looked down into it. “That’s the trouble with this work. It takes… commitment—”

  She broke off again, and Ken hardly needed to be a wizard to hear that she wasn’t talking about chocolate-making right then. He glanced down at the PDA’s screen: as he did, it started to fill up with the graceful curving characters of the Speech, showing him the list that the PDA had been compiling for him. Ken tapped at it, bringing up for comparison the list of needful things that it had compiled on the way down in the cab. And the two lists tallied very closely together indeed…

  ...with one exception.

  The missing object was indicated by a long string of characters in the Speech. Ken nearly whistled out loud as he read the description and started to understand its ramification. …positive interventional effects usually relationship-based—affinity and effectiveness increases with duration of relationship and location, but is easily deranged by local physical or emotional disruption… He nodded to himself. I get it now, Ken thought. Wow, she really does have a problem.

  Ana had drifted up behind him and was looking curiously at the PDA. “Your handwr
iting’s worse than mine,” she said, seeing nothing but the indecipherable scribble the PDA showed any non-wizard who looked at it while it was in Manual mode. “Didn’t think that was possible. You get WiFi on that?”

  “Uh, yeah, when the conditions are right,” Ken said. Which is always… “Just checking the home database here…”

  But Ken was doing more than that. Every wizard has a specialty, whether it’s the one that seems to come naturally when first practicing the Art as a child, or one taken up later in life to better match their outlook as an adult. Ken was now beginning to exercise his own specialty, listening hard to everything around him, listening to life: and he was hearing plenty of it. But the one kind of life he was listening for was not in his immediate range.

  Not here. We’re going to have to do a longer-range search. At least it won’t have gone too far—

  “All right,” Ken said at last. “Ana, can I make a suggestion?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t think it’s another chocolatier you need. What you need is to get your old one back.”

  That grim look attached itself to her face again. “I think that’s going to be impossible,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t bet on that just yet,” Ken said.

  The grimness started to go angry now. “Oh, really! And how would you know—”

  “Just bear with me for a few moments while I explain,” Ken said. “How long has the business been running now? I mean, including your parents, and theirs…from the very beginning?”

  “A hundred and ten years,” she said. “They came over from Spain.”

  Ken nodded. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, bending over to look under one of the cupboards, “but some of them were in chocolate even earlier than that? I think that was on the flyer that came with the cream eggs.”

  “That’s true,” Ana said. “The family was in confectionery right back into the 1600’s.”

  “Around the time the Spanish brought chocolate back with them from the New World,” Ken said. “Along with, I strongly suspect, some things that went with chocolate.”

  She looked at him a little strangely. “Chilies? For those you want the Mexican place down the street.”

  Ken shook his head. “Something a little different,” he said. He bent over to look under the big conching machine.

  “What are you looking for, roaches?” Ana sounded indignant. “We’re very careful here. We don’t have roaches!”

  “On the contrary,” Ken said. “You are very careful, and as a result, you have very careful roaches. Guys?” he said in the Speech, and whistled.

  Ana went ashen and stood absolutely still as about a hundred roaches came flowing out from under the baseboards, all together, gathered into a little group, and looked up at her and Ken.

  “See,” Ken said, getting down on one knee and putting down a finger to one of them, which promptly climbed up on it and sat there waving its antennae, “they know you’re so careful about cleaning up and never leaving sweet things around because you really hate having to kill anything. So they’re careful to stay well out of sight inside the walls, and never show any sign that’ll make you have to call the exterminators. However—” he cocked an ear at the roach sitting on his finger—”they do like to hide in your wall space when the Chinese place around the corner has gotten so filthy in the back that the Board of Health guys descend on them. Then when the coast is clear they go back. They hate the cooks over there, because most of the time they ignore the roaches completely, except when the City’s about to show up. You, however, are consistent. Roaches like consistency.”

  Ana was standing there with her mouth open. Finally she found presence of mind enough to close it. “Horse whisperers I knew about,” she said. “Roach whisperers…? Only in New York.”

  Ken resisted the urge to roll his eyes: he’d been called worse things. “I wouldn’t define my role that narrowly,” he said, and let the roach on his finger back down onto the floor. “Let’s just say I’m a student of the art of conversation. I listen to anything that has something to say to me. Mostly animals, though I do inorganics occasionally, just to keep my hand in.” He looked down at the roaches. “Okay, guys and gals,” he said, “back to business now. And leave those wires alone.”

  Ana watched the roaches vanish under the baseboards again, and swallowed. “And here I thought you were in personnel,” she said.

  “I am!” Ken said. “They’re personnel. Just not human personnel.”

  “Oh yeah,” Ana said. “Who do they work for?”

  “Life,” Ken said, and went over to the sink to wash his hands. “The same as you and me. They do it the way they were built to. We do it —“ He pulled a paper towel, dried his hands, chucked it in a nearby trash container. “Differently. And some of us do it very differently. Which is what I’m getting to here.” He looked around the candymaking kitchen one last time. “Because, taking everything together—the nature of your business, your reputation, the way the place looks, and the history of your company—something is definitely missing.”

  “What?”

  “Your xocolotl.”

  “My zocowhat?”

  “Lotl. The creature that’s been living in this building, maybe in this kitchen, for the past hundred years. The one that helps make your chocolate come out right even when the conditions are all against you.” She was staring at him open-mouthed, but this was no time to let her get her disbelief going again. “I have a feeling your mother probably knew about it. Maybe she meant to tell you and just never got around to it. And after that— You didn’t think it was just luck that’s pulled you through, all those times when things should really have gone wrong, did you?”

  She frowned. “Excuse me! I thought skill might have had something to do with it—”

  “Of course it does. That’s the only reason a xocolotl would ever have chosen to stay with you. They’re intimately associated with chocolate culture…have been since human beings discovered it, and them.”

  Ana looked understandably confused. “There are lots of animals associated with human food production,” Ken said. “You wouldn’t be surprised to see a horse or an ox plowing, would you? Or a dog herding sheep? This is like that. It’s not quite a symbiotic relationship. But some creatures just seem to be particularly well suited for some kinds of business, or just one kind. You’ve heard about those moths so specifically evolved that they can only drink from only one kind of flower—and the flower’s come to depend on them in turn? There are similarities here. There are other animals that do jobs nearly as specialized. And still others that don’t so much do anything…but their presence, or absence, is felt. They’re catalysts, in a way. In the xocolotl’s case, its presence has a subtle effect on your ingredients, the surroundings in which they’re kept…the people who work with them.”

  “Oh, come on,” Ana said after a moment. “It sounds like one of those fake sciences, like astrology! Mysterious vague influences—”

  “Like gravity wells?” Ken said. “Same principle. Some things bend spacetime out of shape in strange ways. And gravity’s weak, in the great scheme of things. Some things are much better at warping space. How many times have you gone looking for your house keys lately and not been able to find them?”

  Ana suddenly looked rather thoughtful.

  “This is what we’re after,” Ken said. “At least to start with.” He showed her the PDA.

  The screen was showing an image of something like an iguana, but mottled in ivory and chocolate-brown, in patterns that were vaguely reminiscent of a Gila monster’s. “You haven’t seen anything like that around here?”

  Ana shook her head. “I think I’d remember.”

  “It’s been here, though… and for quite a long time. I can feel it. However, it left suddenly a few days ago.”

  Ana blushed again, once more looking furious. “Whatever happens with Rodrigo,” Ken said, “you’re going to have to find the xocolotl and bring it home. It’s lived here
a long time: it’s repaid you for its security with at least some of your success. But it also doesn’t know any other way of life, and it won’t last long out on the streets. Once it’s back here, things will start to go right again.”

  She just looked at him for several seconds.

  Uh oh, the PDA said.

  Then Ana let out a breath. “Who am I to doubt a man who can talk to roaches?” she said.

  “If I were anyone else,” Ken said, “I might have mistaken that for irony. Do you have something you can change into? This isn’t going to be the kind of work you want to do in Manolos.”

  She caught his glance at her shoes, and grinned. “Wait here,” Ana said, and vanished through a side door and up a flight of stairs. A few minutes later she came down in sneakers and jeans and a T-shirt. “Where are we going?”

  “Not far,” Ken said as they went out, and Ana locked the door behind them. “No more than a four-block radius.”

  “Who’d have thought the Twilight Zone was so nearby,” Ana muttered as they headed down the street.

  *

  It took nearly an hour for Ken and easily a couple of miles of walking to get anything out of the PDA but repetitions of Cooler…a little warmer…no, cooler again. The problem was partly the xocolotl’s relatively slow metabolism, and partly the location where it had chosen to lose itself: the multitude of surrounding lifesigns tended to drown its own signature out. But three blocks away from Theobroma, the PDA suddenly said, One block south. One block west.

  “Does it see it?” Ana said, looking over Ken’s shoulder.

  “Not clearly, but we’re close,” he said. “Your xoco must have been really put out to go this far.”

  Ana said nothing for a moment. “This is so weird,” she said. “Magical lizards hiding in people’s kitchens. Some kind of chocolate elemental—“

  “It might be too much to call them magical. And elementals are usually a little more, uh, confrontational.”

  “But where does the xoco come from? Is it some kind of alien?”