Phoresis and other journ.., p.12
Phoresis and Other Journeys, page 12
She put the sheets down and started sobbing, covering her mouth to stifle the sound, even though her closest neighbors had no hope of hearing her.
13
Alice woke to a pounding on the door. She lifted her head from the desk, confused for a moment about where she was. From the gloom she judged it to be early evening; she must have fallen asleep. She should have been at home cooking dinner, but her mother would not have come to seek her out like this.
“Who is it?” she called, as she lit a lamp. There was no reply, but the banging continued. She opened the door to find, hanging in midair, a lamp that appeared unlit to her, and a slate, bearing the words, “Fire in town. I can smell it.”
Alice grabbed her own slate and followed the visitant out onto the street; she finally got a better look at the slate with the message, and concluded from the familiar pattern of cracks around the frame that it was her father’s.
“Where?” she muttered to herself, hurrying behind him as he followed the scent of Mytonian smoke, willing him to be mistaken. Who knew what strange olfactory phantoms might arise in the wake of the transition?
The streets were crowded with people on their way to dine, or visit with friends; Alice caught their amused expressions at the bobbing slate that weaved around them rather more closely than was decorous, but at least Mr. Pemberthy himself was now harmless.
They began to cross the square, but then her father halted. “Tavern,” he wrote. “I can’t go any closer.”
Alice gazed in the direction they’d been walking. There were three taverns on the far side of the square, and they all appeared perfectly intact.
“Which one?” she wrote. “From our left?”
He paused. How thick was the smoke, that he couldn’t reply immediately? Finally, he wrote, “Second.”
Alice ran, pushing her way through the throng. When she entered the tavern the sound of laughter and chatter around her was deafening; she looked around and saw a man carrying a plate to one of the tables.
“Excuse me,” she begged, grabbing his elbow.
“Could you wait your turn, please,” he replied, more patiently than she had any right to expect.
“There’s a fire! You need to get everyone out!”
That caught his attention, but he demanded, “Where?”
“I’m not sure,” Alice confessed. “It’s Mytonian. It could be anywhere. It could be all around us!”
She watched the man’s expression change from confusion to skepticism. “How could you possibly know that?”
Alice fought to stay calm; even if news of the isolation’s end had spread, visitors would hardly be expected so soon. “I have a Mytonian guest.”
“And he set this fire?”
“No! But he can smell it, and see it. He pointed it out from a distance, but it’s too fierce for him to join me.”
The man remained undecided, frowning at this bizarre claim but not quite ready to dismiss it. Alice supposed she sounded like a madwoman or a prankster – or perhaps some kind of troublemaker, aiming to bring their neighbors into disrepute at the very moment they had voted to restore a normal relationship.
She said, “Maybe if you put your hand to something? One of the tables?”
He walked over to an empty table, set down the plate he’d been carrying, and pressed his palm hard against the stone. “It does feel a bit warm,” he admitted. “Warmer than it ought to be.” He was still hesitant. Hadn’t he ever seen the famous trick, as a child? When the conjuror let you touch the stone plate, you noticed it was just a little bit warm – and then a minute later, it was in pieces?
Apparently, he had.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” he shouted. “I need to ask everyone to leave the establishment now, in an orderly fashion. There is a fire we need to deal with, and while it’s small and contained for the moment, we can not risk your safety by allowing you to remain. There will be free meals to compensate for the disruption, which I’ll be honored to provide on any night that suits you, but for now, please, I must ask you to leave.”
Alice felt her body sag with relief as the grumbling patrons began to file out. The “small fire” was a clever lie; by the time they’d convinced all these people that they were the target of Mytonian saboteurs the whole town could have burned to the ground.
“What now?” the landlord asked Alice, as if she had some kind of experience with these matters. “Can I put it out with rainwater? Or sand? Sand should work!”
“I can’t advise you,” she said. “But trying to fight this, blind ... ?” She spread her hands in resignation. “I’m sorry.” She didn’t want the man to lose his business, but she wasn’t going to stand here passing buckets of sand to him while they waited to see if the roof would cave in.
It took her forever to find her father again. His slate was bobbing awkwardly around the square, caught between flows of people – many of whom seemed to have been attracted by the commotion, only to linger for the sole purpose of expressing their disappointment at the lack of any visible conflagration.
“The tavern’s been evacuated,” she wrote on her own slate.
“Good,” he replied.
“Who would do this?” Alice wrote. The question was rhetorical, but her bewilderment was sincere. For all her fretting over the extremists who’d cheered Mrs. Kenworth, she had never imagined them acting so swiftly, or with such callous intent.
“They must have left before I did,” her father wrote. “Prepared even before the vote was announced.”
They’d known they were going to lose, but they were committed to their position regardless. But what did they imagine the outcome of their actions would be? The people of Ryther, and the other four towns, would just surrender their land and walk away, leaving Myton with a magical moat of wilderness that would protect it from the Dispersion?
“How much fuel, do you think?” she asked her father.
“About as much as a dozen people could have carried,” he replied, getting to the heart of the question. Not a vast army, but not a mere handful either. A dozen invisible saboteurs could not wipe a town off the map, but they could harm a great many people, and stir up a lot of ill will against their home town.
There was a loud creaking sound from across the square. Alice turned just in time to see the tavern collapse in on itself, spilling rubble onto the street and sending up a dust cloud to rival the smoke that her father must have been seeing all along.
The spectators were silent for a moment, but then they began shouting at each other in astonishment. It would not take long for the whole of Ryther to learn that this was not the work of a small fire that had somehow wrought damage disproportionate to its size.
“Follow me back?” Alice suggested. She wasn’t expecting the tavern’s patrons to try to stone their invisible benefactor to death, but it still seemed wise to err on the side of caution: the mere presence of his disembodied slate was potentially inflammatory now, and the crowd was subject to whatever rumors and speculation gained the most traction in the next few minutes.
They made their way back to the warehouse without any further exchange of messages, but when they were safely indoors Alice asked, “What should we do? Can Myton rein these people in?”
“Perhaps.” Her father hesitated, his chalk poised but motionless. “I should go back and spread word of their crimes,” he wrote finally. “Mr. Warren can serve as fire warden.”
Alice replied, “Very well.” Given that Mr. Warren had apparently slept through the blaze, she would have felt safer with her father on fire watch, but no other emissary would be taken as seriously in Myton.
“Please tell your mother where I’ve gone.”
“Of course.”
He put down the slate, and Alice saw the door to the street swing open. When he was gone, she stood for a while, trying to find the most favorable light in which to view the night’s events. The saboteurs had failed to inflict a single casualty. Their grand gesture had simply exposed them, and would soon see everyone they’d hoped to intimidate taking steps to defend themselves.
Before leaving, she went to each of the other investigators and explained what had happened; all but Mr. Warren, whose town was safe for the next few days, chose to depart at once to carry word back to their homes.
As Mrs. Bambridge packed for her journey, she reassured Alice, “They’re not going to make trouble for anyone but themselves. Their own townspeople voted against them!”
Alice smiled, welcoming the optimistic appraisal, but a part of her mind was racing ahead, cranking out scenarios that had surely occurred to their enemy already. Come at night, and hide a stone knife in the gutter. In the morning, when the town square is full of people, retrieve the weapon and stab the air a dozen times; you’re sure to hit at least one person in the crowd before anyone notices the act of levitation. Drop the knife, and vanish.
What could be simpler?
For the perpetrator: no witnesses, no risk of capture or punishment.
For the victims: no defense.
14
Alice’s mother ascended the ramp to the stage, leaning on Alice’s arm to keep her balance as she made her way to the lectern. “We have a proposal from Myton,” she announced. “Twelve monitors, twelve volunteers, willing to give up their time and the comforts of home to live among us and help keep us safe.”
“And who keeps us safe from them?” a man shouted. He was not a lone dissenter; Alice could see other members of the gathering nodding in agreement.
Rebecca paused and looked around the hall, clearly bewildered by the response she was receiving. “Why would anyone treat that offer with suspicion? If they meant us harm, they wouldn’t ask permission to join us! And they will all be vetted—”
“Vetted by your husband?” a woman interjected. “The instigator of the isolation?”
“Vetted by everyone of good will in Myton!” Rebecca retorted.
“Everyone claiming good will,” the same woman countered.
Rebecca began mumbling obscenities under her breath. Alice touched her arm, but she was not in a mood to be pacified.
“This is a sign of both friendship and enlightened self-interest,” she argued. “Everyone in Myton knows that these attacks risk undermining their own safety, and the prosperity they were hoping the end of the isolation would bring. Why should we doubt that these people are opposed to the fanatics who are trying to rob them of their future?”
When Rebecca ceded the lectern, Mrs. Collins, the interjector, took her place. “Here is an alternative proposal that we should be taking to our neighbors: each of the five towns that are in danger should send volunteers to the other four, so we will always have friendly eyes among us who can spot the saboteurs from Myton.”
“Four times more people, four times more organizing, four times the delay!” Rebecca yelled up at her.
“Four times as safe!” Mrs. Collins shouted back.
“No it’s not,” Rebecca said, simply confused now, as if she couldn’t quite believe that anyone could reason so poorly about the situation.
Other people in the audience took up the chant. “Four times as safe! Four times as safe!”
There was no time to organize a vote from the whole town; it was up to the elected councilors to decide on their behalf. Alice sat beside her mother, trying to keep her from being drawn into futile shouting matches with her opponents, while the council, having retired to their chambers, discussed the proposal among themselves.
“I should never have sent you to Myton,” her mother declared gloomily.
“Why’s that?”
“If the vote had gone in favor of isolation, at least the extremists would have been half-satisfied. That might have kept them in check.”
Alice decided this was a roundabout way of telling her that she should not have begged her father to go back to try to sway the vote. “Hindsight is a wonderful thing,” she replied. “Maybe you should have just kidnapped him before he walked out on us the first time, and then all this hysteria about maintaining the purity of the fractions might have been nipped in the bud.”
Her mother laughed dryly. “All right, I deserved that.” She reached down to massage her knee, wincing. “I do wish I hadn’t followed you up into the hills, though. I’ve been paying for that ever since.”
The councilors filed back into the public gallery.
“We have given all submissions our earnest and careful consideration,” the Mayor assured the gathering. “And we have decided to send emissaries to Salton, Drayville, Bonnerton and Ridgewood, to negotiate an exchange of monitors between the towns during this period of heightened tension. Volunteers for this initiative are welcome, and in the coming days we will be making further announcements as to how they can apply, and what selection criteria they should address in their written applications.”
Rebecca said, “Hooray.”
15
“You can have my dirty bandages,” Mrs. Jasper decided. “That’s all. You’re not cutting me, like you did to that poor boy!”
“No, of course not. Thank you for helping.” Alice’s face burned, but she persisted. “If you’d be willing to let us have samples of urine and stools ... ?”
“That’s disgusting!”
“It is, but if we find something it will be worth it.”
Mrs. Jasper said, “So long as the nurses just hand it over to you from the bedpan. So long as I don’t have to watch you dealing with it.” She grimaced. “What are you going to find, poking around in that filth?”
“If we knew the answer, we wouldn’t have to do it,” Alice replied.
“Fair enough.”
Alice left the ward, exhausted, with consent for a supply of noninvasive samples from eight of the twelve patients. No one had agreed to let her take tissue or draw blood, but why would they? It had done Timothy no good.
Back in her workroom, she began preparing slides from the bandages of three patients with the Dispersion, and three with other kinds of wounds. Even if the researchers couldn’t catch the disease at work within the body, the detritus it left behind could help them winnow down the possibilities.
Her mother knocked on the door and entered without waiting for an invitation. “Apparently someone’s started planting wooden spikes on all the trails leading down from the hills,” she said.
“I don’t understand,” Alice replied. “If the saboteurs can’t see them, how will they be injured?”
“The rumor is the stake-planters bought some chickens from Haverfield, and they’re smearing small, sharp stones in the excrement and embedding them in the tips of the stakes.”
“That’s ... creative, I suppose.” Alice had trouble deciding whether the intruders would face a real risk of injury and sepsis, or if the end result would just be someone kicking a malodorous speck of gravel aside. But she had more urgent things to ponder.
“How is it that I exist?” she asked her mother.
“I thought we had that conversation a while ago.”
“Not one trace of my father’s emission could persist inside you – but he’s still my father, as surely as if he were from Ryther. So in the end, his contribution was not material at all, but purely in the nature of information.”
“Yes.” Rebecca pursed her lips with mock-solemnity. “When you put it as starkly as that, it’s quite unnerving. It’s as if you could find yourself carrying a child just from reading the wrong kind of poetry.”
Alice laughed, but she persisted. “Your body transcribed ... something. At the very least, whatever it was that gave me some resemblance to him, in my appearance and character. But is that all? We know that paternal inheritance is not constrained to superficial matters: there are ailments that a father can pass on to his child, despite the mother being in perfect health.”
“Which means the father’s body can offer bad advice sometimes,” Rebecca concluded. “Should that surprise us?”
Alice said, “No, but why heed it? If the mother is healthy and the father is not, why does she pass the bad advice on to her child?”
“You might as well ask why anyone suffers from any sickness, ever,” Rebecca replied. “Why don’t we all just find someone healthy and imitate them perfectly, down to the bones? Easy to talk about, not so easily done.”
“But if there ever was a chance to do that, surely it would be at conception? When it comes to creating a child, there is no other source of guidance but the imitation of the parents – so why not imitate the mother alone?”
“What if she’s not healthy, though? What if she’s the one with the ailment? What happens in the womb isn’t driven by some omniscient force – or even by the mother’s own insights. I might know that I have some heritable illness that has passed down the maternal line in my family ... but is that inference available to guide my reproductive system? The same reproductive system, more or less, as possessed by animals with no notion of anything so abstract as a familial disease.”
“That makes sense,” Alice conceded. “So the body has no choice but to gamble, mixing up advice from both parents in the hope that the child will stand a better chance of good health than it would if there were a universal rule that committed it to mimicking the mother or father alone.”
Rebecca concurred. “From both the breeding of livestock, and what we see in human families, it’s clear that there’s an equal contribution from both parents.”
“And there’s no reason for that to be different if the father belongs to a different fraction than the mother?”
Rebecca said, “I don’t think so. At the time of conception – if conception is possible at all – the body can’t tell the difference. And it’s not unknown for farmers to pay for the use of prize bulls from other towns to introduce traits into their herds.”
Alice was still groping her way forward, but she had a clearer picture now of where she was heading. “If the instructions to the child’s body come equally from both parents, and if the parents need not even be from the same fraction, then we must all – inasmuch as we are healthy – be performing identical actions. Whatever fraction we belong to, the processes we use to keep ourselves in that fraction – to resist the kind of dispersion that afflicts inanimate objects – must be the same.”
