by Dakota Rusk
13
“The point is, he was right,” said Merri when I brought her the news. “Not about killing himself, of course,” she added hastily, “but about all of this.” She made a disgusted gesture at the collection of dusty texts on the desk before her. These were the materials supplied by Parallel 17 for the first meeting of the advisory board, which was set for that same week. I skimmed over the spines; there were books on numerology, on reincarnation, on alchemy. “There’s no honor in meeting these people midway,” Merri continued, pushing the volumes away from her. “What does it matter, if you’re worshipping Shazamoth the ancient sentient blood-clot of the universe—”
“Azathoth,” I corrected her.
“—or just innocuously doing someone’s zodiac chart?” she continued, ignoring me. “Once you’ve abandoned the principles of scientific inquiry, the degree to which you deviate is entirely irrelevant. Why bother tip-toeing? You’ve already shirked a thousand years of scholarly rigor; go ahead, dance naked around a pentagram and invoke the great and terrible ancient whatevers! Find a nice elemental somewhere, and settle down! Get pregnant, give birth to a little fish-baby or—I don’t know. A wind-sock. Why not?” She clutched up some of the papers in front of her and threw them into the air; they fluttered down around her head like autumn leaves.
I thought she was being too dismissive of what Dr. Bernstein’s suicide seemed to suggest: that other members of the faculty would be similarly unable to accommodate the new demands on them. But as it happened, Dr. Bernstein was one of the few who was even asked to do so, and only because his course was designed to be interdisciplinary. Cosmology, it was felt, should incorporate magic as well as science. The other areas of study were left alone; astronomy had to give up some hours to accommodate astrology, for instance—but it didn’t have to share a lectern with it.
What was more worrisome to Darius was the clampdown on the news of Dr. Bernstein’s death. “We should have heard of it as soon as the body was discovered,” he said. “The fact that the administration suppressed it until they had no choice anymore—until it had already leaked everywhere—that’s not a very good sign at all.” Valery, who was still nominally president, was horrified to learn that he was being held accountable in the world press; “I had no more idea than any of you did,” he said. “This was Jocasta’s call, made behind my back. She’s—what’s the expression you young people use?— thrown me under the bus.”
But Jocasta’s attempts to prop up her own profile took a heavy blow starting almost immediately after finals. It seems that everyone—certainly all those who had voted for the referendum—expected that as soon as exams were over, they’d be sent to their home parallels for the winter holiday. Why wouldn’t they? The witches had repeatedly boasted of having the means to cross the Veil; that was the whole point of bringing them in. Well, now they were here, and the students—as well as many of the faculty—were ready to be rewarded for trusting them. Many had already started packing for the trip.
It was only gradually, over a period of days, when no announcement was made of any kind of scheduling for such a massive undertaken, that the grumbling started. When I appeared on the commons with Rowella, Donald, and Ntombi, the looks we drew were no longer so interested and admiring; in fact they grew steadily more hostile. Then the taunts began: “Why are we still here, witch girl?” “Get your damn broomstick, witch girl, and fly me home.”
Rowella was shaken by the sudden abuse. “Don’t they understand?” she lamented. “Magic isn’t finger-snapping. It’s not as easy as just popping people back into their parallels. This will take preparation, and the proper alignment of stars and cycles.”
“How could they understand that?” I replied. “It’s never been explained to them. Nothing about this has ever explained to them.” I was surprised at how harsh I sounded; it might have been Merri talking.
“Whoa, there,” said Donald, putting a hand in the air. “Easy does it! Rowella’s not the one who’s in charge of this business. And she’s not the one who can fix it.”
But clearly people thought she was. Within a space of a few days her popularity plummeted; she became the most hated person on campus (Jocasta Foxglove being still overseas). A hastily issued statement by the incoming administration—which carefully pointed out that they hadn’t taken over yet, and wouldn’t until January—basically re-stated the argument Rowella had given us: that just as the Terminus Engine had been a complex and labor-intensive means of breaching the Veil, so was its magical equivalent. A formal structure for processing requests would be set up within the first quarter of the new year.
The announcement of this timeframe—to a student body already primed and ready to see the long-lost loved ones they’d been promised to be reunited with—triggered a kind of explosion. Once again there were demonstrations on the commons, even riots.
Gunther and the Hyena Girls were among the first to resort of violence, of course. And their target, naturally, was Rowella.
I’d been very careful about keeping my two sets of friends separate—since it was established that Merri and Rowella didn’t mix well—and it hadn’t been very hard to do, since Merri, Darius, and Gerrid were spending most of their days in advisory board meetings, or in ancillary activities with related professionals. I scarcely saw them.
But one day in early December I happened to be on my way to the gym, where I’d taken to running on a treadmill to keep myself in peak condition, and I crossed paths with Darius, who was returning to the dorm after a long day of meeting with the board.
“How’s it going?” I asked him.
He sighed. “Tensions are running pretty high. Merri and Gerrid have decided to challenge every single proposal the Parallel 17 delegation puts on the table. Today it’s been psychic phenomenon—ESP, that kind of thing.”
“You feel differently?”
He shrugged. “I think they’re wearing themselves down. The witches have already shown that they’re patient; they can wait out any tantrum Merri and Gerrid throw. My advice would be to choose our battles more carefully. This physic business, for instance; there’s possibly something to it.” He grinned at me, and I found to my surprise that I wasn’t quite as susceptible to his beauty as I used to be. Not so long ago a smile like this one would’ve made me weak in the knees. I credited my growing attraction to scruffy, bulky Donald, who couldn’t be less like sleek, gorgeous Darius. But then Darius didn’t have Donald’s wild charisma.
“What are you saying?” I asked, snapping myself back to the subject under discussion. “You believe in ESP now?”
He laughed. “Not exactly. But having spent so much time among biological humans, I’ve learned that you have the capability sometimes to draw truth from a complete absence of empirical evidence.”
“We call that ‘a hunch,’” I said.
“That’s what you call it,” he said. “But is that what it is? Possibly it’s something more. That kind of certainty…it might be arrived at by some means we don’t yet understand.”
“That kind of certainty,” I said, enjoying contradicting him, “is very often wrong.”
“But sometimes it’s not. At least it’s worth investigating. And while I don’t think the witches go about it correctly—trying to train people to be sensitive to so-called ‘psychic’ currents by means that clearly haven’t been tested, and probably couldn’t withstand testing if they were…well, we have to accommodate some of their disciplines. It might as well be the ones that have a connection, however tenuous, with subjects we consider valid ourselves.”
I was trying to think of a response to that—not because I thought he was wrong; I was just seeing whether I, with my second-rate brain, could find any holes in his argument—when suddenly his face froze and his chin jerked up; he seemed to be sniffing the air.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Something’s wrong,” he said tersely.
“Is that a conclusion you’ve drawn without empirical evidence?” I said, a bit
teasingly.
But he’d switched completely out of playful mode. “No,” he said; “I can hear it.” And he broke into a run.
I followed as best I could; it wasn’t easy to keep up with him—and I’m an athlete. He could’ve been the star of the track-and-field team, if he’d wanted to be; but he considered that he had an unfair advantage, being a synthetic rather than organic being.
We were drawing near to the pond where Donald and Ntombi and I had fed the ducks till they flew south for the winter; and I was again impressed that Darius’s hearing was so keenly calibrated that he could hear something amiss from what was more than a quarter-mile off. And now I heard it, too: a kind of half-scream, half-sob.
I arrived on the scene just a few moments after he did. In a small clearing behind a large rock, Rowella lay on the ground, her lip split and bleeding and her blouse torn. Standing over her, his fists balled, was Gunther; and off to the side were the Hyena Girls and a few more of his followers, egging him on.
When he saw us—or rather, when he saw Darius—his face broke into a malicious grin. “Calvin!” he called out. (“Calvin Carburetor” was his nickname for Darius—whom he considered a machine, not a human being at all.) “Long time, no see!”
“Step away from the girl,” said Darius in firm but unthreatening tones.
“Or what?” Gunther said. “You’ll come over and rust on me?” The Hyena Girls dutifully cackled, but Gunther’s eyes betrayed an unmistakable panic. He wasn’t quite so confident around me and my friends—not after Gerrid had actually killed his partner for trying to assault Merri. Gunther must have remembered that moment now, looking down at Rowella cringing below him and suddenly realizing how predatory he looked in this instance; and his bravado immediately evaporated.
He carefully stepped away from Rowella. “Never mind,” he said. “I’m finished with her anyway. The witch knows what she has to do.”
The Hyena Girls were disappointed. They wanted his pummeling of Rowella to continue. “Come on, Gunther,” said the larger of them—the one with the nose like a garden spade. “She could use a few more little reminders. She looks like the forgetful type.”
The other Hyena Girl—whose hair was like dirty straw—sneered at me. “We can handle the boy-bot and his girlfriend, no problem.”
I recognized that this could easily—and swiftly—turn into a brawl. And I also knew, from past experience, that Darius was reluctant to use his super-android-strength on mere flesh-and-blood humans; he’d rather take all the punishment himself, knowing his self-repairing nanotechnology would heal any damage in a matter of hours.
But I didn’t want to put him through that. And I didn’t want to risk any further attack on Rowella while Darius and I were busy with Gunther’s mob. So to defuse the situation as quickly as possible, I strode over to the Hyena Girls—who may have been bigger than everyone else on campus, but not bigger than me—and picked each one up by the throat.
They dangled from my upraised hands, sputtering and choking and trying to kick me into dropping them; but I was much tougher than they were, and it was time they knew it. I marched them right over to the edge of the pond, swung around once, then released them—and the sight of their big, clumsy bodies sailing through the air was exhilarating to behold.
The splash they made when they plunged into the lake reached me on the bank, spattering my boots. A moment later they rose up, draped in sludge, spitting and swearing and shaking with rage.
I turned. Gunther’s remaining followers, who perhaps had a better survival sense than the Hyena Girls did, rapidly dispersed. And Darius—for all his exquisitely calibrated programming—was trying not to laugh. He couldn’t even manage to get his face to hide it. He really was evolving…which was a kind of miracle in itself.
A kind of magic, I suddenly realized.
And then Gunther was next to me—nearly trembling with fury; his face was parchment-white.
“There’s blood between us now,” he snarled.
I shrugged. “If you’ve got it to spare.”
And with another, hideous sneer, he stomped off—not even waiting for the Hyena Girls to finish climbing out of the water and follow him.Rowella was so badly traumatized that it wasn’t till we’d gotten her back to her room and served her some tea that she was able to tell us what happened.
“They were so friendly before,” she said, between little hiccups of emotion. “That whole group…so pro-referendum. I thought they were my friends.”
“Friendship isn’t something they’re very good at,” I said.
“They told me I’d lied to them,” she continued, meeting my eyes earnestly, as if begging me to explain it to her. “They said I promised to send them home, and I’d better do it, or they’d send me home, one limb at a time. I never promised anyone anything! How can people act that way?”
Darius, who’d taken a chair across the room, spoke up. “They’re frightened, ignorant, and angry,” he said. “It’s a pretty potent brew. And lashing out makes them feel better.”
Rowella cocked her head to look past me at him. “That’s being very fair to them.”
He shrugged. “Isn’t that the whole point? I mean…civilization, and all?”
She gave him a reappraising look. “You’re Darius, right? I’m sorry, we never really met last year, when I was rooming across the hall from you. I wasn’t there long enough.”
He smiled (that smile again!). “I do remember you, though.”
“Thank you for coming to my rescue today,” she said. Then she looked back up at me. “You, too, Fabia. I don’t know what I would’ve done, if—if you—if you hadn’t—”
She started trembling again; I took the cup of tea from her hands so that she didn’t spill it over her beautifully woven duvet. “It’s all right now,” I said, setting the cup on the table behind me. “You’re safe.”
She retrieved a crimson handkerchief from up one of her voluminous sleeves, and daubed at the corners of her eyes.
“I don’t really know Jocasta Foxglove all that well,” she said. “I only actually met her twice before coming here, and only for a few minutes each time. But she did give me a means to reach her, in an emergency.”
I blinked. “But…this isn’t an emergency. I just told you: you’re safe.”
“Gunther and his gang are essentially cowards,” Darius reassured her. “Just avoid them; and steer clear of the less populated areas on campus for a while.”
She shook her head. “I’m not talking about me. It’s the mood here—the way everything seems ready to explode. Jocasta told me she does have a plan to start sending students home; she meant to begin implementing it sometime after taking over as president in January.” She stuffed the handkerchief back in her sleeve. “But I think, all things considered, that timetable should be moved up. Even if it’s just one or two token students—just to show good faith.”
I frowned. “I don’t see how that’s possible. Valery’s term doesn’t officially end for another two weeks. And even if it didn’t, how could just ‘one or two token students’ be chosen from among the six thousand vying to go home? That kind of favoritism would only make things more explosive.”
We sat in silence, contemplating this for a while.
Then Darius said, “I have an idea.”
14
“It’s a lottery,” I said. “They’re going to announce it later today. That’s what I’m told, anyway.”
Donald and Ntombi gave me one of those looks—the ones that said we’re-still-totally-impressed-by-how-connected-you-are—and then Ntombi said, “A lottery? What is that, exactly?”
We were seated cross-legged on the commons. We’d been on our way to the commissary for coffee, but the weather was so unseasonably fine—very mild and clear, like one last kiss goodbye from autumn before winter blasted in—that we decided to bask under the sun instead. And just the way Ntombi sat on her knees, graceful and erect, looking like an ancient Egyptian statue of a cat, reminded me that, as life
long royalty, she probably wasn’t very familiar with the concept of games of chance.
“It’s simple,” I explained. “If you want to be sent home for the holiday, you enter your name in a random drawing. Whoever’s name gets drawn, that’s who wins. No favoritism or pulling rank; everyone has an equal chance. Darius thought of it.”
“It should be you,” Donald said as he chewed lazily on a long, straw-like blade of grass he’d plucked from the lawn. By comparison to Ntombi’s primness, he was sprawled out on the ground like he’d been dropped there from a low-flying plane. Casual as he was, he was instinctively expert at arranging himself so that his kilt didn’t fold up in a way that revealed too much. Even so, his massive, hairy thighs were on display, as if defying the fine weather to go ahead, turn cold again, who cared. “You’re the one who deserves to go home,” he repeated.
I ignored him; Ntombi did as well. “But how will that stop all the unrest on campus?” she asked. Again, as someone who’d grown up in a series of palaces, she was more nervous than we were about the volatility of a mob; the demonstrations of the past few months had seriously unnerved her.
“That’s the inspired part,” I said, taking pleasure in the ingenuity of Darius’s plan; in fact, I was surprised to realize I was proud of him. “For the next week, everybody gets to live in hope. Everyone gets the fantasy that he or she will be the one chosen. That alone will cool all the simmering tensions. Plus, there’s the bonus of finally getting proof that the witches really do have the means to bridge the Veil.”
“Proof?” Ntombi said, cocking her head so that her braids fell over one shoulder. “Someone disappears from campus, fine. That doesn’t necessarily mean they were sent home.”
I blinked in surprise. All this time, Ntombi had been so enthusiastically supportive of the Parallel 17 delegation. Now, on the point of them actually delivering on their promise, she was suddenly skeptical. What was that about?