“I am King Oberon of the Unseelie Court,” he proclaimed. “Give me what I want, and I will let you live.”
“Fine,” I said. “You can have the damn Pandora’s box, but there are conditions.”
King Oberon tilted his head slightly.
“No one from the Unseelie Court ever sets foot in our shop again. You don’t bother me, my Grandma, or that pathetic excuse of an opportunist over there.” I pointed at Sneaky Pete, who was huddling behind a shelf.
“Done,” said Oberon.
“Pete, I need your permission to do this. Rip up your pawn slip.”
“Can’t we talk about this?” Pete’s greed was overshadowing his instinct for self-preservation again. “It’s worth millions. Millions, I tell you! Make them pay for it, Sylvia. I will cut you in. Ten percent!”
Oberon scowled at Pete. The King of the Fae didn’t look like he was about to reach for a charge card.
“There’s a clause in the contract,” said Grandma, “meant to cover items damaged or lost while on pawn. We can void the pawn slip and just pay you double the value you declared on the paperwork, which you low-balled anyway. Of course, if we have to do that, protection for you will no longer be a part of our deal.”
I kept my expression passive and smiled inwardly. Such a clause did exist, but Grandma valued the shop’s reputation way too much to exercise it. But Pete had no way of knowing that.
“Fine!” Sneaky Pete threw his hands up in the air. “You win.” He withdrew a pawn slip from one of his pockets and ripped it in two. “I hope they choke on it,” he added, glaring at the trio of Fae.
I produced the Pandora’s box and held it up in front of Oberon. “I have your word?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, staring at the box like a cat at a saucer of milk. “The Fae never break their promises. Now give it to me.”
“Gladly,” I replied. And I dropped the Pandora’s box into a much larger cardboard crate on the counter, which I’d brought in from the back of the shop while we were waiting for the royal pain to arrive.
Before anyone had a chance to react, I picked up the crate, and shook.
“What is the meaning of this?” asked Oberon.
I smiled and turned over the crate, spilling its contents onto the counter. A dozen identical Pandora’s boxes rolled on the wide wooden surface like so many dice.
“You’ve tricked us,” growled the Tooth Fairy.
“Not at all,” I smiled at him sweetly. “Here at the shop we keep our word, just like the Fae. I promised you the Pandora’s box Pete brought in, and here you have it. No one said that I couldn’t include freebies. Consider this our ‘demand one by threat of violence, get eleven more free’ sale.”
I pointed at the Pandora’s boxes. “These things keep finding their way into the shop every decade or so. They aren’t worth all that much, though, because no one in their right mind is willing to open them. Nobody stores nice things in one of those. Plus, the original Pandora’s box — the famous one — is still out there. Could even be one of these.”
I swept them back into the cardboard crate. “Here you go. Your odds are one in twelve, which isn’t too bad, all things considered. But if you decide to try out your luck, do it somewhere far, far away from our shop. Have a nice life.” And I shoved the crate into Oberon’s hands.
After the fairies left, muttering curses they were powerless to act on bound by Oberon’s oath, and after Sneaky Pete shuffled out, only marginally happier than his pursuers, Grandma and I were having tea.
I poured each of us a steaming cup of Pomegranate Delight, set out of plate of crumpets, and, after we’d had a chance to enjoy a few sips, retrieved a futuristic-looking gadget from my pocket and placed it on the table next to the china.
“This is the device everyone’s after,” I said. “I removed it, just in case Oberon decides that he’s in the mood to play Russian Roulette with his Pandora’s boxes.” I grinned. “Our deal stated that he gets the Pandora’s box Pete brought in. No one ever mentioned the contents.”
“Oh, Sylvia,” Grandma gasped. “I can’t believe you risked opening one of those things.” And then my prickly, tough-as-nails Grandma hugged me tight. “Please don’t do anything so dangerous again. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
I melted, and hugged her back.
“It wasn’t dangerous,” I said. “Puck told me what’s inside the box, and then Pete confirmed it. How often do you get the opportunity to open one of those things, risk-free?”
The device sits on the shelf in the most secure storage room of the shop, between the Holy Grail and the snow-globe-shaped pocket dimension with Cthulhu sleeping inside.
Grandma and I discussed selling the device to Puck. She would pay more than enough to cover the damage and our trouble. But, for now, we decided against it. The Internet is a weird enough place without high-tech fairies in the mix.
I had so much fun playing in the magic pawn shop sandbox that I knew I would have to come back to this setting and characters, again and again. In the first story, Cthulhu trapped in a snowglobe-like pocket dimension was brought to the pawn shop. So I got to thinking, what other interesting items might show up at its doorstep? Excalibur? The Holy Grail? A mint Alf action figure in original packaging? The Pandora’s Box was definitely on the short list, and that’s what I went with next.
Like its predecessor, this story was originally published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.
Of course, I wanted the title to be as over-the-top as “Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma,” which is how I came up with “High-Tech Fairies and the Pandora Perplexity.” It sounds like an episode of The Big Bang Theory which, to my mind, is a good thing. I was especially pleased with the play on words—in addition to its popular meaning (bewilderment), perplexity is also a mathematical term, dealing with the probability of distribution. Which makes perfect sense for this story.
I intend to keep writing funny Magic Pawn Shop stories, so this hopefully will not be the last you’ve read of Sylvia.
THE KEEPSAKE BOX
For this spell, only the most powerful magic will do.
The glass tubes full of air magic jingle like wind chimes as she takes them off the shelf, the iridescent gases swirling inside. Next she moves the heavy clay pots filled with earth magic and then wrangles the jug of water magic with both hands. Hidden behind it is the keepsake box.
Spellcasting is no different from chemistry. She can mix elements and emotions, memories and mantras, in just the right dose, and watch them react to each other and produce carefully measured miracles. Among many possible ingredients, love is the most powerful magic of all.
She’s been storing mementos of their love since the day they met. Items of little meaning, of little value, to anyone but her. Items charged with concentrated magic, squirreled away for a rainy day. Today, she has no choice but to use everything.
She dumps the contents of the keepsake box onto the table and begins to chant as she picks up the items one by one, drains them of their power, and weaves the resulting strands of enchantment into her spell.
From the twig of the tree under which she met him, she drains excitement. It’s light and full of possibilities, like beats of a fluttering heart.
The dried-up petal of a borage flower from the bouquet he brought her on their first date yields the first drops of love, full-bodied and aromatic.
His hair, plucked from the bed after their first night together, holds the magic of ecstasy. Like cinnamon, it must be sprinkled onto the spell in small doses. Too much will overpower it, will make her burn.
The pebble from the beach where he proposed and the strand from her wedding dress both provide copious volumes of joy, thick and sweet like expensive wine. She hesitates for a briefest moment before using them up for her spell.
A small copper coin provides a dose of frustration distilled from the memory of their first fight. It’s hot-pepper spicy, tempered only with time and wisdom.
&nbs
p; A seashell they found on the evening when she told him she was pregnant is crackling with bliss, sweet and fluffy like whipped cream. They walked along the shore the entire night, held hands, and thought up baby names.
Her hands shake as she reaches for the next item. A wooden doll he made for their future child stores the despair of the day she miscarried. He held her and spoke words of encouragement and promises he couldn’t deliver. Despair has the bitterness of an over-steeped tea.
A shard from a broken wine bottle holds disappointment. After she couldn’t conceive again, he became distant, sullen, and often inebriated. He lost interest in carpentry, and when he ran out of coin to pay for his drink, expensive enchantments she worked so hard to create began disappearing from their home. Disappointment is bland.
The last ingredient is rage. She needs no item to store it, for it is burning within her. It has been boiling since she found out about the other woman. Rage is sharp and pungent like an aged cheese. She drains as much of it as she can stand into the spell.
The resulting mix is potent and dangerous, a complex blend of textures and flavors, the most powerful spell she had ever created. It needs one final ingredient — hope.
She places the spell inside of the keepsake box itself. It has stored a decade of memories, pleasant and painful, a haphazard map charting the course of their relationship. There is no better item to represent hope.
Tonight, she’ll confront him. She will demand answers. She will challenge him on his infidelity, his larceny, his alcoholism. She will demand that he either leave or change.
And then she’ll lie.
She’ll tell him about the keepsake box, and how it holds the most precious spell inside, the magic of their love, coalesced into a priceless ruby. She’ll admonish him to never, ever open the box. That would break the spell forever and end their marriage. And then she’ll wait.
If he truly loves her still, he won’t open the keepsake box. The value of the gem inside will not tempt him. There will be time to mend their relationship, to bridge the rift that has developed between them. That is, if he loves her. And if he doesn’t…
Pandora snaps the keepsake box shut and waits for her husband to come home.
For contrast with “High-Tech Fairies,” this is a non-humor story featuring a Pandora’s Box. It originally appeared in Daily Science Fiction and was reprinted in Timeless Tales.
I explored the concept of the keepsake box in greater detail in “Icarus Falls,” a science fiction story very different from this one in tone and theme. I liked it enough to revisit here. The two stories were written only a few months apart.
THE FIELD TRIP
The obelisk towered over the surrounding ruins, the strange signs carved into its sides gleaming in the afternoon sun. It was mysterious, majestic, and very, very annoying.
I walked over and joined the other students. The group waited in an uncomfortable silence, sizing each other up nervously and trying to guess if any of the others had better luck at figuring out Professor Quilp’s puzzle. The stakes were high. Professor Quilp, one of Milky Way’s most notable scholars of xenoarchaeology, had room for exactly one new intern in his department at the Academy. We five were his top candidates, and this was the final audition.
Earlier that morning we had been ordered to meet Professor Quilp at his office and bring whatever equipment we might need on a field trip. No additional details were provided, except that the world we’d be traveling to had an oxygen-based atmosphere, and that we’d be back at the Academy in time for lunch. The former was great news for me as an oxygen breather; it would give me a distinct advantage over Xkinth and Eetal. On the other hand, this implied a brief assignment and I always worked better when given sufficient time to thoroughly analyze the problem.
Professor Quilp was already waiting at the office, even though every single one of us took care to arrive early. Also waiting for us were information packets. The packets were brief, with details so sparse they might have been written by a Phys Ed major.
The planet in question used to be populated by tool-using bipedal mammals who learned to split the atom a little too soon for their own good, a scenario so common in this part of the galaxy that there are entire digital storage units full of examples, all filed under “Boring.” Bipedal mammals account for roughly fifty percent of the intelligent species in the universe. I am one myself. And that’s counting them after almost ninety percent of mammal civilizations manage to destroy themselves somewhere along the slow crawl up the evolutionary tree. It may not be politically correct to say so, but mammal cultures do not tend to create very interesting architecture, either. It’s always “pyramid” this or “castle” that. Not like the sentient crystals on Galco III who literally dream their dwellings into being.
But I digress.
These particular aliens blew themselves up only a few hundred years back. That’s the sweet spot for xenoarchaeologists—the radiation has abated and nuclear winter has passed, but most of the structures were still intact. Mostly there were your typical remnants of industrial civilization—skyscrapers, suburban housing and a lot of fast-food establishments. In this case, however, there was a large area that just did not fit in. It was full of oddly-constructed buildings, with a big obelisk right in the center. It wasn’t housing. It wasn’t a manufacturing center. Our assignment was to port over to the planet, study the obelisk and its surroundings, and come up with the best hypothesis that could explain its purpose—all in one hour.
The portal delivered us a few steps away from the obelisk, in the blistering heat of a desert afternoon. We scattered almost immediately to pursue our various lines of inquiry. There would be no possibility of cooperation—after all, only a single intern position was up for grabs.
I chose to start with the symbols carved into the sides of the obelisk. I scanned them with a portable translation device. The gadget chewed on the data longer than I’ve ever seen it take before and gave me back nothing. Modern translation machines are incredibly sophisticated, benefiting from having thousands of language structures in their database. If there is any sort of rhyme or reason to a language, the software can figure it out. Amazed, I pointed the device at some of the signage on nearby structures and it was able to translate those well enough. Pointed back at the obelisk, the gadget struggled a few moments longer and gave up once again. I’d swear there was a little embarrassment in the “No Match” beep, but this model was not programmed for emotions. Either the message on the obelisk was encoded by the most sophisticated cipher I’ve ever seen, or it wasn’t language at all, as we know it.
I spent nearly half of the allotted time meddling with various devices, measuring and analyzing the obelisk within an inch of its granite life. I wasn’t having any breakthroughs and, by the looks of them, neither was any of my competitors. At that point I realized that I wasn’t going to find whatever solution or inspiration at the obelisk and decided to port around for some additional perspective. I spent the remaining half hour examining nearby areas. As the deadline approached, I was beginning to formulate a theory. I rejoined my fellow students with not a minute to spare; Professor Quilp ported in right on schedule.
“Archaeology,” he said as we gathered in a semi-circle in front of him, “is art as much as science. Any half-decent researcher will respect and study the masterpieces of past civilizations. A good explorer will figure out an occasional mystery like this one, and benefit from this knowledge. But a truly great archaeologist can count on his assistants to reliably do it for him.
“By now all of you have had an opportunity to examine the nearby ruins and see that this structure does not fit in with the rest. The question is why.
“I am now prepared to hear your theories. Eetal, please begin.”
Eetal looked uncomfortable in the bulky suit that allowed a methane breather to move around in a hostile environment. At least she wasn’t getting slowly roasted by the heat. Probably.
“In my estimation,” she began carefully, “th
is obelisk could not have been built by the same people who erected these other structures. Design style, materials, and even the writing on the obelisk differ from anything else in evidence. My guess is that this is an artifact of a much earlier culture that was either transported to this location as a trophy or predates them, and they chose to build a settlement around it.”
I could not believe my luck. Eetal was one of the strongest contenders, and it wasn’t like her to make such a monumental gaffe. Professor Quilp frowned; he was probably thinking the same thing.
“Would any of you care to disprove this theory?” he said neutrally.
“The obelisk was built around the same time as these other structures,” Q’orr rushed to embarrass a rival, “as should be obvious to anyone who bothered to run the decay test.” He brandished the gadget that assessed an age of structures by examining the degree of weathering on their surface. I had one, too, and so presumably would the other students.
Eetal looked as though she was ready to just port out of there. “I’m Atrellian,” she stammered.
The blunder made sense now. Atrellian religion claimed that the universe was only about 50,000 years old and its followers weren’t allowed to use carbon and decay dating technologies that could prove otherwise.
“Next hypothesis, please.” Professor Quilp hurried things along, a kindness of redirecting attention away from Eetal, or perhaps he was as eager to get out of the heat as I was.
Nevri, an exchange student from the Orion nebula, could not speak. Instead, it projected three dimensional images and, when absolutely necessary, written text. It showed the obelisk to be a subject of worship by the natives, arguing that its placement in the center of the settlement supports that theory. I got a distinct feeling that it had nothing to go on, and Eetal’s calamity served as inspiration for its half-baked theory.
“This does not quite work for me,” said Professor Quilp. “If such an obelisk was a standard object of worship on this planet, we would find a lot more of them scattered throughout. If, on the other hand, this one was unique, a place of pilgrimage perhaps, the entire settlement would be laid out differently to accommodate the kind of traffic it would draw.”
Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories Page 11