Alternate gerrolds, p.21
Alternate Gerrolds, page 21
I wasn’t sure I understood anything of what she said, but I nodded as if I did.
Sara wasn’t fooled. “Listen to me. Remember what I said about negative energy? You can’t afford it. You are a fountain of creative power. You can’t risk having your spring contaminated. You have to act now before you are permanently polluted. But whatever you do—you have to make sure that you don’t do greater harm to yourself.”
“What are you recommending?” I asked. She sounded so serious.
“Think of the peacock,” she said.
“Pretty. Loud. Pretty loud.” I free-associated.
“Do you know what a peacock eats?”
I shook my head.
“It eats the poisonous berries. It thrives on all the toxics that other birds won’t touch. And it turns them into beautiful peacock feathers. That’s the peacock—it takes nastiness and turns it into beauty. That’s your job. Find a way to take all that stuff about the neighbors and turn it into something useful and rewarding and enlightening.”
“A nice bonfire is the first thing that comes to mind. We could dance naked around it.”
“It’s time to stop being silly,” Sara said. “You asked for my help. That’s why I’m here. What kind of spell do you want to cast and what power do you want to invoke?”
“I want a spell that’s quiet and unobtrusive. Inconspicuous. It shouldn’t call attention to itself. No fireworks. No explosions. No ectoplasm, no manifestations, no mysterious cold spots. Just something that makes them go away.”
“That’s the best kind,” Sara said.
I was looking at the list. “Let’s invoke the power of the universe,” I said.
“Huh?”
I pointed at the organization chart. “Look, all the power flows from the top. Let’s go to the source. Let’s call upon the universe to activate the spell.”
Sara thought about it. “It might be overkill.”
“There’s no such thing as overkill,” I said. “Dead is dead.”
“How big an impact crater are you willing to live with?” she asked. “Remember, your house is well within the blast radius.”
“We’re going for gentleness, aren’t we?”
“Gentleness is not delivered with a firehose,” Sara said.
“Good point. We’ll have to be careful.”
“There could be side effects. You’re probably going to get hit with some of them. Are you sure you want to do this?”
I nodded. A thought had been lurking at the back of my mind for three days. Ever since Sara had first begun coaching me. Now it was ready to blossom forth as a full-blown idea. I handed her my notes. forty-three ideas. Forty-two of them had been crossed off. Only one remained.
Sara looked at it. She frowned. She narrowed her eyes. Her eyebrows squinched together. Her lips pursed. All of the separate parts of her face squinched up for a second, then relaxed, morph-like, into a big happy grin. “I think you may have real talent in this area,” she said.
She took her pen and underlined my note. Love-bomb the bastards!
PART FOUR:
At a quarter to midnight, we began. I went out to the back yard and flipped off every circuit-breaker. There was no electrical power at all to the house. There would be no contaminating fields of magnetic resonance. The computers had all been unplugged. The batteries had been removed from every radio and flashlight.
Sara gave me a diagram, and I began to lay out a complex pattern of thirty-nine votive candles. As I went around the room, lighting them, I recited a simple prayer of absolution. “May this light give me guidance. Help me align myself with the flows of universal power.”
When I finished, I began unwinding a long yellow cord around the room, putting a loop around each candle as I strung a spiral pattern leading to an empty plate in the center. I sat down at the outside of the spiral and held the other end of the cord. I began winding it around the fingers of my left hand. The power would flow from my heart to the empty plate. And back again.
I looked to Sara. She nodded. I hadn’t forgotten anything.
“Hello,” I said.
I waited a moment. If the universe was listening, it hadn’t given me any evidence. But then again, the universe never gives evidence of its involvement. It’s just there—the ultimate in passive aggressive.
I took three deep breaths. I closed my eyes and took three more. I waited until I thought I could see the candle flames through my closed eyelids. Then I waited until I was certain we were no longer alone.
“Hello,” I repeated. “Thank you. I apologize for any intrusion this action of mine might represent. I only wish to serve the flows of the universe, not to impede them. And I hope that the universe will let me be a part of its grander plans.”
I waited. This time I got the feeling that something was waiting for me.
“My neighbors,” I said. “The people who live in the house next-door. Particularly Bryce, Lyn, Vanessa, Jabed, Jason and Nolan. I believe that they have been impeding the natural rise toward godliness. Perhaps it is through no fault of their own. Perhaps it is because they have been seduced by the darker flows of nature. Perhaps there are reasons for which I have no language. Whatever forces are at work, I believe that they are at odds with the natural flow of universal power and goodness.”
I glanced over to Sara. She was watching me intently. She nodded and smiled.
“I believe that somehow they have become separated from their own abilities to connect with others and feel compassion. I believe that are unable to know the effects they have on the people around them. I believe that they do not see the pain they leave in their wake.”
With my right hand, I placed a bowl on the empty plate in the center of the room. I poured red wine into the bowl, then I placed a single roseblossom in the wine. “I offer you this gift,” I said. “I do so freely and with no thought of personal reward or gain. I ask nothing for myself, nor for anyone close to me. I ask only that you grant my neighbors an opportunity to join your larger purposes, to swim in the flow of universal spirit that heads inevitably toward the light and glory of enlightenment. Please help direct their energies toward goodness and joy.”
I bowed my head. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. Thank you for letting me serve you tonight.”
And—maybe it was the sudden breeze from the door—but every single candle in the room went out simultaneously.
“Nicely done,” said Sara, after a long startled silence. “Very nicely done.”
EPILOGUE:
The next morning, I felt rather silly for having gone through the whole silly ritual. But I made up my mind to wait a week. Or two. Or even six.
Nothing happened at first.
Then, one horrible weekend, everything happened. Lyn and Bryce were out somewhere. Vanessa had invited 500 close friends to a backyard bash, with 600 decibels of heavy metal rock music and illegal fireworks. Jabed and Jason were sitting on the roof of the garage throwing cherry bombs into the dancers, which triggered a spate of angry gunfire between members of two rival gangs who were trying to crash the party from the alley-side of the yard. In the ensuing panic, several automobiles were smashed into each other as people tried to flee—a dead-end street does not lend itself to an orderly evacuation. In the confusion, Nolan found the box of fireworks and managed to light both them and the house on fire. By the time the police and the fire department arrived, the structure was sending fifty foot flames into the air and I was hosing down my roof and praying that the overhanging tree wouldn’t catch. The fire crew couldn’t get through the mass of cars to the fire hydrant, and even if they could have, it wouldn’t have done any good because someone had crashed into it, knocking it off, sending a high-pressure fountain spraying high into the air where it made an impressive, but otherwise useless, display of uncontained aquatic energy. They ended up taking one of the units around to the alley side and backing it into my backyard so they could pump the water out of my pool and onto the neighbor’s roof. It took them twenty minutes to knock down the blaze, leaving the house a charred and waterlogged mess. By the time they were through, there were over twenty police vehicles on the block, three ambulances and four news vans.
In the aftermath, four stolen cars were recovered from joy-riding gang-bangers, seventeen people were arrested for possession and dealing of illegal substances, twelve illegal weapons were confiscated and twenty-six of the party-goers spent the night in jail for being drunk and disorderly. Fourteen outstanding warrants were served for offenses as varied as unpaid parking tickets and felony armed robbery. Vanessa’s friends were an assorted lot.
The following Monday, Lyn and Bryce were investigated by the Department of Social Services.
And I called Sara and asked what went wrong. She told me not to worry. Everything was fine. Just be patient.
She was right. It took a while for everything to get sorted out, but eventually, it did.
The judge ordered three years of family-counseling for the whole clan. Vanessa was put on probation, conditional on her remaining in Alcoholics Anonymous. Jabed and Jason were put into a special education program to help them recover from prolonged emotional abuse and also to prevent them from drifting into patterns of juvenile delinquency. Nolan was identified as suffering from a serious learning disability and is now in full-time therapy. Tali is in pre-school. Damien is president of the local Queer-Nation chapter. Grandma had to sell the house to help Lynn and Bryce cover the legal expenses. They all live with her now.
The insurance company leveled the remains of the house and sold the land to the city for use as a pocket park. It wasn’t cost-effective to rebuild.
To paraphrase my favorite moose, sometimes I don’t know my own strength.
For a while, both Sara and I were concerned about the backwash from the spell. We’d love-bombed the entire family, and they were all definitely much better off than they had been before. But Sara was afraid that there would be serious side-effects to the spell that might affect both of us. If there have been any, we haven’t noticed them yet. But then again, we’ve been much too busy. Sara’s planning to move in with me next month, and I’ve applied to adopt a little boy. And I expect to get back to my writing Real Soon Now.
AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD:
Next up, the money spell….
The seed for this story was an actual anecdote I’d read many years ago and saved in my idea file—something about archaeologists and blind spots and how much does a Grecian urn?
Digging In Gehenna
DADDY WAS ARGUING WITH DR. BLOM AGAIN, so Mom told me to stay away from the dig for awhile, at least until tempers cooled off. That was the only thing likely to cool off anytime soon. Spring was rising, and so were the daytime temperatures. We would be heading back south to the more comfortable polar zones as soon as the last trucks were loaded and the skywhale arrived tomorrow morning. Twenty-four months would pass before the sand would be cool enough to stand on again, but nobody knew if we would be coming back.
“They’re arguing about the horn again, aren’t they?”
Mom nodded. “It’s their favorite argument.”
“Do you think Daddy’s right? Or Dr. Blom?”
“Actually, I hope they’re both wrong.” Mom looked up from the fabber she was disassembling. “Pray that we never find out what the damn thing was really used for. If either one of them is proven right, they’ll never be able to work together again.”
“They’ll just find something else to argue about.”
“No, this is one of those arguments that people don’t forget. If you’re wrong, it’s a career-killer. The only hope for resolution is for them to be equally embarrassed by the facts. And don’t tell Daddy I said this. It would hurt his feelings enormously.”
“I didn’t think anyone could hurt Daddy’s feelings.”
“Only people he cares about.” She closed the lid of the machine and handed me the used cartridges for the recycler. “Just because he doesn’t show his feelings doesn’t mean he doesn’t have any.”
There were over two hundred people on the dig. We weren’t the only family here. There were twenty others who’d brought their children. We were a whole village. We had sixteen acre-tents and at least a hundred equipment and storage tents scattered around. Three of the acre-tents were habitats, with hanging rugs to give each family-group some privacy.
We had offworlders here too. The dig was big news all the way back to Earth; the first alien civilization ever discovered. And because the actual site was habitable only four out of twenty-eight months, this was a precious opportunity, especially for the Ph.D. candidates, like Hank, the big goofy guy who called me “swee’pea” and “short stuff” and “Little Darlin’” until Mom gave him the glare. So of course, I wanted to see more of him.
Actually, she’s my stepmom, and according to the rule-books, I’m supposed to resent her, but mostly she and I are good friends. Probably because she’s only twelve years older than me, so she feels more like a big sister than a stepmom, but I call her Mom anyway. I’m almost seventeen, old enough to get married; but Mom has this rule that nobody gets married until they finish college. She refused to marry Daddy for three years until she finished her doctorate.
Mom said that Hank was too old for me anyway. I respectfully did not point out that Hank was only five years older than me while Daddy was fifteen years her senior. I didn’t need to start that fight. And besides, she was twenty-four when she married him.
Hank was one of the offworlders who had trouble adapting to Gehenna’s seventy-two-hour day, but eventually he found his rhythm. The others settled in too. Everyone does. Daddy says that twelve hours on and twelve hours off mimics Earth time almost perfectly—despite the fact that the sunlight doesn’t match.
I’d been allowed to come on the dig because Mom and Dad were team leaders. There were another dozen college students who’d been brought along for grunt-work and experience, so I was lumped in with them. We all had class in the morning and chores in the afternoon. Then class in the evening and chores again in the early morning. Interspersed with sleep, of course.
I was part of the toddler-team; we took care of the little ones while the various moms went off to work. There were only five of them, but they were a handful. I don’t think we ever had five dry diapers at a time. We solved the problem by putting one person on diaper-duty each shift.
There’s this about changing diapers—it keeps you from biting your nails. My private goal was to potty-train the little monsters as quickly as possible. We’d made real progress with the other four, but my little brother, Zakky, had so far resisted all inducements toward sanitary behavior. Despite that, I still thought he was cute. Mom said that my attitude would change as soon as Zakky learned how to say no. Once he learned how to argue, he’d be just like his daddy.
Daddy was famous for his arguments. Of maybe infamous. He wasn’t loud or aggressive. I’d never even seen him raise his voice. He was painfully polite. He would make his points carefully, exquisitely, elegantly reasoned, making connections so obvious you could slap your forehead for not seeing them yourself. And when he was done, he had assembled a framework of logic as marvelous as a Chinese tapestry—so beautiful and compelling and overwhelming in its construction you were left with no place to stand. You just wanted to find a great big club and whack him across the head with it for being so damnably, blandly, patiently, right. Again.
Daddy’s brain never stopped working. The universe was a giant puzzle to him, and he felt it was his personal responsibility to fit the pieces together. When I was little, I was afraid of him; but now that I understood better, I admired him. I used to wonder why Mom had married him, but most times I envied her for the adventure.
But Daddy could get so preoccupied with solving the puzzles of the universe that sometimes he forgot everything else. Sometimes we had to drag him physically away from the dig just to get him to eat, and even then we could have put a slice of shale between two pieces of bread and he wouldn’t have noticed, he’d be so busy talking about what he had found and what he had to do next and what it might mean. Of course, that led to a lot of arguments with the other diggers, about what each new discovery meant. They were all on new ground here. Nobody knew for sure what any of it really was, so everything was still just opinion.
The one thing we knew about the tripods—that’s what we called them—was that we didn’t know anything about them at all. We had no idea how they had lived, what they ate, what they believed in, what kind of culture they had or even how many sexes they had. Every new fragment suggested as many possibilities as it disproved.
Daddy wasn’t the only one arguing, of course. Everyone argued with everyone. Mom said that was because -ology didn’t mean “the study of” as much as it meant “the argument about.” But Daddy liked to argue. He said that arguing was the highest exercise of intelligence at work, measuring, testing and challenging ideas. He said that it was the passion of the argument that ultimately revealed the true self. Of course, Daddy would argue with the weather if he could. Failing that, he had argued for extending our stay onsite by an extra two weeks. He’d won half that argument. We were a week past our original departure date and already the temperatures were half-past unbearable.
But Daddy wasn’t the only one who wanted to stay. Almost everybody on the team was so excited at what they were pulling out of the ground that nobody wanted to quit, even if it meant working in 110-degree weather. What if we were only half an hour away from finding the tripod Rosetta Stone? There might not be another expedition like this one in our lifetime. Gehenna’s weather wasn’t exactly friendly.
