Doc Sidhe

by Aaron Allston

  "One of several." Alastair gave him a sympathetic look. "Harris, why don't you go home?"

  "Back to the grim world?"

  "You can go back anytime. It's not a trivial effort, but we can do it. Doc has recovered, and I can also do the ceremony. All we have to do is find a spot that's usually clear on both worlds. You were talking about a spot on something called Liberty Island."

  "No, thanks."

  "Why not?"

  "Do you want to get rid of me?"

  "No. I just want to know why you're so determined to stay in a place that makes you so unhappy."

  Harris grimaced. "I don't want Gaby to feel alone. You know, surrounded by strangers."

  "Strangers. Harris, she's fitting in better than you. We haven't had one jot of success trying to figure out how she can use that well of Gift power she has, but she learns, she asks questions, she suggests, she makes Doc think—I'm a betting man, and my money says Doc will ask her to stay as an associate when all is said and done."

  Harris scowled. "She won't."

  "Perhaps not." Alastair drew on his pipe and blew a perfect smoke ring toward the ceiling. "You know she's fretting. Says it's almost time for the homelords to collect her rent. Says her parents have to be going mad with worry."

  "Yeah, mine too, probably."

  "But you won't go back, not even for a day, to straighten out affairs. Why not? Are you afraid you wouldn't be able to return?"

  "That's not it." He chewed over his reply. "Alastair, if I go back . . . maybe people would be relieved if I didn't return to the fair world at all."

  The doctor gave him a puzzled look. "Even if it's true, and I don't think it is, what does that matter?"

  "It matters. If I go, I might lose my nerve and not come back. If I don't go, that can't happen."

  "Have you lost your nerve since you've been here?"

  "I guess not. But I don't want to give myself the chance."

  Alastair's expression remained confused. He stared up at the ceiling as if enlightenment might be waiting there.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Day four.

  As he rose past up ninety, the laboratory floor, on his way to the residential floor, Harris heard his name called. He pulled the elevator's lever back to neutral and beyond, bringing the car down level with up ninety.

  Jean-Pierre waited there and yanked the exterior cage open. Harris did the same for the interior cage.

  Jean-Pierre held a folded paper packet out to him. "Almost missed you. Gods, you stink." He looked over Harris' boxing shorts and the towel around his shoulders. "You're spending far too much time in the gymnasium."

  "I just get in the way up here." Harris accepted the packet; it was heavier than he expected. "What's this?"

  "You know, there's a shooting range on the same floor."

  "I know. Noriko offered to teach me to shoot."

  Jean-Pierre beamed. "Did she? I made the same offer to Gaby." His face fell. "Not the only offer I made. I haven't quite persuaded her to bed with me. Do you know the trick?"

  Harris glared. "You could kill yourself. Play on her sympathy."

  "Ah."

  Harris tried to let go of the sudden flush of anger. "So what is this?"

  "Your pay, of course."

  "Pay?" Harris popped the wax seal on the packet. Out from the folded paper slid a dozen libs, the big silver coins Harris had seen before, plus a few of the smaller silver decs and copper pennies.

  "Every half-moon on the chime. Doc pays all his associates and consultants while they're working with him. It doesn't do to accrue indebtedness; there are devisers out there who could take advantage of it. So he pays off as fast as he accrues." He pulled the elevator exterior grate shut again.

  Harris hefted the coins. "Well, that settles it. I'm going out."

  "Out of the building? Not a good idea."

  "You're damned right, it's not. But neither is staying here until I blow up from boredom." Harris pulled the interior grate closed. "I think I need to find a tailor. And do you know where Banwite's Talk-Boxes and, uh, Electrical Eccentricities is?"

  Jean-Pierre looked surprised. "Brian Banwite? Doc sometimes uses him for specialty work. Good man. He's on Damablanca in Drakshire. Walk six blocks east, take the uptown underground to the Damablanca station. And look for Brannach the Seamer on the same street. My tailor."

  "I'll do that, thanks." Harris sent the elevator into motion again.

  Forty-five minutes later, he was clean and presentable, but instead of heading straight for the lobby he descended only one floor. Up ninety-one was where Doc kept his offices . . . and his library. Odds were good that he'd find her there.

  Gaby was in her usual place, in the stuffed chair at the end of the smaller of the two long tables, where the light was best, and as usual she had a stack of books beside her. She didn't notice him as he entered; he silently closed the door behind him and studied her.

  She was in the jeans she'd worn from the grim world and a flowing yellow blouse they'd given her here. She bent over her books, intent on them, her hair half-concealing her face.

  So many times he'd seen her in just that pose. He found that his mouth was dry. It was suddenly impossible to look away from her. Impossible to accept that he couldn't just walk up to her, take her head in his hands, twining his fingers into the glossy heaviness of her hair, tilting up her chin to kiss him . . .

  She brushed her hair back from her face and caught sight of him. She looked up, startled. "Hi."

  "Hi."

  "I haven't seen much of you lately. What have you been up to?"

  "Actually, I was just obsessing about your hair."

  She winced. "Harris."

  "Yeah, I know. I shouldn't. I didn't mean to upset you."

  "It's all right." He could tell from her expression that it wasn't. "Jean-Pierre was just looking for you."

  "He found me. He forced a small fortune into my unwilling hands."

  "So you're all dressed up to go out and spend it?"

  He settled into the seat next to her. "Yeah, basically. I'm going to pay off a debt, then find a tailor and commission some blue jeans."

  Her eyes got round. "I never thought of that. What a great idea! If I give you some of my money and my measurements—"

  "Sure."

  She tore a page from the back of the notebook she was writing in and began scribbling. Harris saw that she did already know the measurement system the people of Neckerdam used—a standard value called a "pace" broken down into fifty "fingers."

  He glanced over the books she was browsing through. Events of the Reign of Bregon and Gwaeddan in Novimagos, Volume One. The Full History of the World Crisis. "Catching up on history?"

  She slid the piece of paper and several of her own coins to him. "Yes, and you should be, too. Noriko told me a little about the recent history of the fair world, and it was too strange—I had to check up on some things."

  "Oh, God, the journalist is running amok again." He folded the paper and tucked it and the coins away. "Things such as what?"

  "Such as . . . about twenty years ago, in the Old World, which is what they usually call Europe, they had this deal called the Conclave of Masallia. A lot of the kings of the Old World swore undying affection for each other. A mutual protection pact. Then one of them flipped out and invaded his neighbor. Everybody was obliged by the treaty to side with both of them, so they sort of split down the middle and everybody attacked everybody. And since they all owned colonies in the New World and in their versions of Africa and Asia, pretty soon half the planet was at war. Sound familiar?"

  "Like World War Two?"

  "Well, closer to World War One, actually." She tapped another volume, Mechanics of Systemic Economic Collapse, the first one Harris had seen with a title that wouldn't have looked strange in one of his own college courses. "And here. About five years ago, the economic alliance of the League of Ardree, most of the nations of what should be North America, had a crash. For the last long while, the
y'd gone increasingly industrial, whole nations turning to production and importing almost all their food. Then there was a trade glut, a repayment problem at the international level, foreclosings, treasuries folding, an economic collapse affecting pretty much the whole world. The fair world is still recovering from it. You see it?"

  "History was never my strong point. But you're trying to draw a parallel with the Great Depression."

  "I sure am."

  "I think you're reaching. A war followed by an economy going bust and you're talking about history repeating itself. That's pretty thin."

  "Okay, try this. In the grim world, about the time we were having the Depression, Japan was at war with China."

  "So?"

  "So Noriko told me yesterday that her people, the Wo, are involved in a pointless war with the nations of Shanga. I looked them up on the map. Any guesses as to what Wo and Shanga correspond to?"

  "I already know." Harris frowned.

  "So it sounds like another mystery for Doc to go funny about. Like why English and Low Cretanis are the same language. Between that, and the routine with the guns and pepper gas and my wristwatch being all twisted when they got here when nothing else was, he's chewing on the furniture in frustration. How about you?"

  "You know I don't chew furniture."

  She gave him an exasperated look.

  "Okay, okay, it's weird." He rose. "Did you find a Civil War?"

  "War of the Schism, eighty years ago. The League of Ardree split into two pieces, basically north against south."

  "American Revolution."

  "The Great Revolt, about a hundred and fifty years back. When the League of Ardree was formed. The people of Cretanis call it the Ingratitude."

  "Jesus."

  "The Carpenter Cult."

  "I meant, `Jesus H. Christ, you're freaking me out.' Okay?"

  "Sorry. I got carried away."

  Harris stood. He did some mental calculations. "I don't know whether you ought to tell Doc about this."

  "Why not?"

  "Because if you're right, events here are sort of following the history of the grim world, and we have a general idea of things that are going to be happening over the next forty or fifty years."

  "So?"

  "So we can predict the fair world's version of World War Two. Should we?"

  She frowned, considering.

  "I'll think about it, too. But first I'm going to order us some jeans."

  Once he was gone, Gaby finished up with the broader histories and returned to another subject: Duncan Blackletter.

  Reports of him appeared occasionally in the newspapers, and Doc's library had scores of bound volumes of crumbling periodicals. Of course, there tended to be a problem figuring out when things happened.

  By Novimagos reckoning, the current year was 28 R.B.G.—twenty-eighth year of the reign of Bregon and Gwaeddan, the current king and queen. Before these rulers were Gwaeddan's parents Dallan and Tangwen, who ruled forty-eight years: 1 R.D.T. to 48 R.D.T. Each royal reign reset the year to one, and each sovereign nation had a different chronology. Acadia, to the north, was in its eighteenth year under Jean-Pierre's widower father, King Henri IV—abbreviated 18 H.IV.R. It was maddening.

  Still, there were a few benchmarks. Years were often translated to a chronology dated from the union of the nation of Cretanis, 1435 years ago. Most historical volumes translated one date from each reign to this dating system, usually referred to as "Scholars' Years." But not even Cretanis used that dating system routinely; they were currently in year 248 of the reign of their current queen, Maeve X. Gaby marvelled at her longevity.

  Duncan Blackletter first showed up in Scholars' Year 1368, nearly seventy years ago. A young man then, leader of a gang, he was tried for the train hijacking of a gold shipment from Neckerdam to Nyrax. The gold was not recovered, and Duncan and some of his men escaped the next year. The dim photographs of him showed a lean, handsome, arrogant face; Gaby could recognize him beneath the years of the face Duncan wore today.

  Over the years, Duncan's plans became more ambitious and deadly. He constructed a metal-hulled ship with a ram and used it to pirate shipping routes; it was finally sunk by the navy of Nordland, but he escaped. He exterminated an entire community in Castilia because its rulers would not share their scholarship with him. He used his growing fortune to finance the development of new and bigger explosives, then used them to blackmail entire cities. In Scholars' Year 1398, he nearly bought the kingship of the southern nation of New Acadia through political corruption in its capital, Lackderry. Two years later, he emerged as one of the forces behind the development of glitter-bright, the narcotic liquor that first appeared in the faraway land of Shanga.

  It was then that Doc first appeared. Gaby found reports of a brilliant engineer from Cretanis named Desmond MaqqRee building a bridge across the River Madb in the Cretanis capital, Beldon. Doc had uncovered and thwarted a plot by Blackletter to assassinate the Queen. Gaby noted with interest some mild criticism in the newspapers that he had not been knighted for his efforts. This was thirty-five years ago, so she had to revise Doc's estimated age up again, to sixty or higher.

  Not long after, there was an obituary notice for a Deirdriu MaqqRee. A suicide, she'd jumped from one of the high towers of Doc's bridge. She was survived only by her husband . . . Desmond. Doc.

  There was no explanation, no other account of the death, no hint as to what Deirdriu might have been like or why she killed herself. Gaby fumed over the incomplete picture she was assembling. She kept at it.

  Duncan had invested in munitions and reaped big profits during the Colonial War between Castilia and the nations of the New World. A few years later, Scholars' Year 1412, he was at it again. There were hints that he manipulated the kings of the Old World into the war called the World Crisis. The same year, the papers reported Doc refusing a commission in the army of Cretanis and being exiled from that nation; he accepted citizenship in Novimagos.

  He was by this time appearing in the news as leader of the Sidhe Foundation, accompanied by an Acadian princess and other like-minded people; they settled disputes, turned the tides of some battles, and followed the trail of Duncan Blackletter across the landscape of the Old World.

  Then it was Scholars' Year 1415. Obituaries for Duncan Blackletter, Whiskers Okerry, Micah Cremm, and Siobhan Damvert—the last survived by her grieving prince of a husband, only two years away from becoming king himself, and her grim twelve-year-old son Jean-Pierre.

  The end of Duncan Blackletter . . . until his botched plan to kidnap Gaby resulted in Harris finding the fair world.

  Gaby sat back from her studies. With so much history between Doc and Duncan, Duncan and Jean-Pierre, there was no way they were all going to emerge from it alive. She feared for Harris and her new friends.

  Harris kept his fedora low on his face and left the Monarch Building by one of its side exits. He tried to use reflections in storefront windows to spot anyone who might be following, but couldn't spot anyone. If no one were following now, and if the device in his pocket were working right, then he'd be all right . . . but he felt more secure for having the hard, heavy lump pressed against his kidney, the revolver Noriko had given him.

  Jean-Pierre's directions were on target. Damablanca turned out to be a narrow, winding street with two-way traffic moving between tall residential buildings of brown brick; only at street level, where storefronts were crowded with neon and painted signs, was there any color along the street.

  And then, a few blocks later, there was Banwite's Talk-Boxes and Electrical Eccentricities, offering enough color and motion for any two normal blocks of storefronts. The shop's name was picked out in gleaming green neon Celtic knotwork letters and surrounded by a gigantic yellow neon oval; just outside the border of that oval ran a bronze model train, upside down when it turned to chug along the underside of the sign, always sending gray fog from its smokestack floating up into the sky. Like most of the ground-floor shops in Neckerdam, Banwite's
had no windows at street level, but in the windows up one, Harris glimpsed dozens of talk-boxes and moving mechanical toys.

  He shoved his way in through the front door, heard the clang of the cowbell hanging overhead, and walked in on a gadget-freak's vision of paradise. The shop interior was like a repeat of the exterior, only more crowded. In one corner was a gadget that looked like a diving suit's arms and legs sticking out of a water heater. A model aircraft with articulated pterodactyl-like wings hung from the ceiling. A grandfather clock with moving figurines instead of a pendulum behind the glass belled six, hours off from the correct time.

  Brian Banwite stood behind the massive black-and-gold cash register at the main counter. "Help you, son?"

  "You can take my money." Harris set a lib in front of him.

  "Always glad to oblige. But you have to take something for it."

  "I did that already." Harris lifted his hat. "Remember, about a week back, I stole a ride in the back of your truck—lorry?"

  "That was you!" Banwite scooped up the coin and pocketed it. "Done, then. I knew you were good for it. You seem to have done well for yourself." He shot Harris a suspicious look. "You haven't fallen in with bad eamons, have you? No gangs, no glitter-bright?"

  "A sort of gang, yes. The Sidhe Foundation."

  Banwite sighed, relieved.

  "You have a neat shop. Do you make all this, or just sell it?"

  "Half and half. If it's electrical or mechanical, I can make it for you. Ask Doc."

  "I'll do that." For politeness' sake, Harris took a walk around the shop, marveling at dioramas of moving figures, flashlights that were so small by fair world standards they looked almost normal to him, folding knives with extra tools like half-hearted Swiss Army knives. Then he tipped his hat to Banwite on the way out and went looking for the tailor's.

  It was two blocks further on, much less conspicuous than Banwite's. The owner, Brannach, was a comfortably overweight pale man with bright eyes and big, blindingly bright teeth. He'd never heard of denim, but showed Harris his selection of materials.

  One of them, demasalle— "That's more properly serge de Masallia, of course"—was the right stuff, but was available only in red and green.