Shaman's Curse

by Audrey Faye

  Still nothing, but I couldn’t stop. There was too much riding on me being absolutely sure.

  I breathed again, and this time, I shifted entirely out of the careful shields I’d learned as a KarmaCorp trainee and put on the skin of a child of Quixal, daughter of the grandmothers, sister to the jungle. I stepped my bare toes onto my spirit web and let the hairs on my skin listen, the cells of my DNA sniff the energetic winds.

  There was something. Or rather, there was nothing, and yet I knew I must keep going. A calling. A knowing. A heartbeat in the woo. All of those and none of them.

  I shivered and stepped off my spirit web into the inky black of in between. I was traveling blind now, walking into the deep dark, following something older than vision, older than instinct. My KarmaCorp instructors would have flayed me for such risk, but I was a child of the great mother, born to serve. I stripped the last of my protections, the ones I only ever released deep in trance in the heart of the jungle.

  And felt it reach for me.

  My soul gasped. My eyes could see nothing, but my Shamanic senses literally felt the Harmonium canister as if it were a new magnetic pole. One that intended to eat me as quietly and efficiently as possible.

  I found the lines of my spirit web like my nimble toes had once found vines in the dark of the jungle, and snapped strength out into the web that was my essence, astonished at the strength of the technology’s pull—and furious. I was nobody’s galactic dust bunny. Even as my protections steadied, I readied a Shaman’s offensive tools—and blinked as the machine totally let go.

  I pushed out circular waves of energy, light ones and dark ones, searching for what had just come for me. It took a moment to find the heart of the Harmonium tech again, but I knew better than to lose the location of an enemy.

  An enemy who apparently no longer cared where I was. The canister was as uninterested in my presence as the bolts on Scotty’s desk. I gave it a good poke or two, the kind that would have caused any human being who shared my Talent to either bleat in protest or poke back.

  Nothing. A vacuum that had apparently decided I wasn’t a dust bunny.

  I leaned back in my chair, using its solid lines to anchor me firmly back into my physical self. It wasn’t safe for me or anyone else to have them stumble into my very impromptu web-walking session, and I’d learned what I’d come to learn. Now I just needed to gather myself up and work out exactly what I’d discovered.

  The vacuum had ignored me until I’d completely unshielded. I remembered Scotty’s words. Harmonium worked by looking for energies that were unused, ignored, unstructured, in a state of decay. None of that was true of a Quixali web walker, but it was close enough on the surface that I could see how a vacuum cleaner might get confused.

  Spirit walking, especially in the in between, was utter surrender. Vast receptiveness to the universe. Not altogether unlike the mostly latent, mostly receptive energies of weak sensitives. The thing that had come for me would recognize the structured patterns of an active psychic or a trained Shaman as useful. Not to be vacuumed. It would consider people like Jonas as one big, oddly shaped dust bunny.

  Which was why it was only workers with very low-level sensitivities, below the threshold that could be trained, who had complained. And why skilled psychics in the follow-up tests had felt nothing. I sighed. None of the participants would have been dumb enough to drop all their shields.

  “Ready for that burger?” Scotty walked back in, wiping grease off his hands and eyeing me with the kind of intent stare he probably turned on a loose coupling.

  Not remotely, but we both needed to keep playing this game or I was going to get him in a world of trouble. He wasn’t big enough to change this, and he was honorable enough to try. I pushed up out of my chair and joined him at the door.

  He waited until he got out into the noise of the main engineering space to talk again. “Learn anything?”

  I hid my instinctive wince. I hated to lie to him, and maybe one day that would change, but in this moment I had something larger to protect—and him too. I told him as much truth as I could. “It wouldn’t touch a trained Shaman. Or your friend with the itchy neck.” That ability spoke of enough coherence to evade Harmonium’s filters.

  At least until someone got drunk or a little too gooey at the sight of their new grandson.

  He looked relieved. “Good. I’d hate to think my girl was a menace.”

  Most forces for good had a shadow side. We just didn’t know the size of this one yet. “How hard would it be to recalibrate Harmonium—say, if you figured out there was a certain kind of dust bunny you wanted it to leave alone?”

  “Now?” He laughed. “Some guy last year decided she was messing with a certain kind of electromagnetic photon stream that only happens around asteroids with particularly high concentrations of certain radioactive metals. He had a pretty convincing story about how it might impact the formation of new stars in another billion years or so and had a bunch of bigwig eggheads sign off on a letter of concern. It was chaos around here while we tweaked my girl, got her to leave his precious photons alone, and then tested to make sure it hadn’t screwed anything else up. Delayed the launch by six months and near put the head honchos into epileptic seizure. The only way they’d do that again would be with a decree from the Almighty himself, and he’d better have a stack of data ten meters thick backing him up.”

  Yeah. Reports from a few Shamans and psychics willing to drop their shields for science probably weren’t going to cut it.

  I needed a bigger dust bunny. One people in power might care about.

  I reached up to scratch my right ear—and froze.

  It wasn’t my ear that was itching. It was a small, tight section of my spirit web, glowing hot with realization. I knew of a bigger dust bunny. One most of the people in power knew very little about, but everyone knew what the Travelers had contributed to humanity. Threatening that would get attention far faster than a few unhappy Shamans.

  I looked at Scotty and kept my voice as casual as I could. “When Harmonium vacuums, does its effort scale to the size of the energy it’s trying to mop up?”

  He raised an eyebrow and nodded. “Sure. No point throwing underpowered tech at a job, but we don’t want to send her full power after a small puddle, either. She’d overheat, make my job harder. The eggheads worked very hard on her learning algorithms to keep them efficient.”

  “And have you tested her up to full power?”

  “Sure. We had to give her something interesting to mop up, though, so we ran an expedition out into one of the unstable sectors and let her clean things up out there for a while.”

  Any sane ship stayed out of those areas. A successful mission had probably been very good for the project’s PR. “So she’s pretty powerful if she needs to be.” If she needed to suck up something bigger than a puny Shaman.

  He eyed me carefully. “Is there a problem?”

  I didn’t know yet, but I had a horrible feeling creeping through the ooze in my gut. “Let’s just say there’s an itch on the back of my neck.”

  His lips firmed, and he nodded slowly. “Okay. You know where to find me if that itch doesn’t go away, yeah?”

  I did, but it wasn’t him I needed to find.

  It was one of Elleni’s nodes.

  12

  “Tell me about the nodes.”

  I stared at Elleni across the meter or so that separated us in the simple, lovely meditation space in her private quarters. I hadn’t asked permission to be here—I’d just charged in and taken a seat. In my culture, that kind of breach of privacy was a harbinger of either terrible manners or stark urgency. I was grateful she’d assumed the latter.

  She returned my sharp gaze with utter calm. “What is it that you wish to know?”

  I wasn’t sure how to word the knowing that swam in my gut. I reached for common cultural ground. “Is there a way, in the traditions of the Wanderers, for an energy worker to step into complete surrender? To be one with th
e spirit of all that is?”

  She sat utterly immobile except for a single long, slow breath. “We use different words, but there is such a thing. We believe it’s how a soul steps into communion with the eternal clan.”

  We had our common ground. “The nodes—do they feel like that? Like open, receptive power that would feel passive to someone or something trained in a culture that mistakes stillness for lack of purpose?”

  “Perhaps.” She studied me carefully. “I’m connected to the nearest node. It fluxed earlier today, just before the lunch hour.”

  The uneasy feeling in my gut congealed. “What do you mean, it fluxed?”

  “It changed vibration. Reached out, almost. For only a few moments, and then it stopped.”

  Even Shamans know there are coincidences, but there was no way this was one of them. I stared at her, horrified. “I found someone to turn on the Harmonium tech for me. Then we went and ate a bacon burger.” Which had tasted like sawdust, but that was wildly beside the point.

  Elleni shook her head. “The technology has been turned on frequently over the last months and years. It doesn’t disrupt the node in this way.” She gave me a look that would have made a grandmother proud. “What did you do?”

  Nothing. And everything. “I dropped my protections. The KarmaCorp ones and the ones that my People take down when we join with the great mother, the spirit of all that is.”

  Her face showed alarm for the first time. “That was foolish.”

  Her voice said it was far more idiotic than that. I nodded grimly—I’d figured that out over my burger of sawdust and regrets. If the vacuum had just a small amount less respect for organized use of energy, I’d have walked out a very different Shaman than I walked in. “I know.”

  She nodded, accepting. “What’s done is done. What did you learn from your recklessness?”

  “The Harmonium tech is trained to vacuum up pools of energy that it judges to be non-useful. Ones with no obvious pattern or flow or contact with energy of known usefulness.” I’d quizzed Scotty more over lunch. “They’ve had hundreds of scientists working the tech through all the scientifically known forms of galactic energy until it’s got a very well-trained nose.”

  Her eyebrow went up. “Scientifically known?”

  “Yes. They’ve been very thorough, but they’re constrained by their own perceptions of what is useful.”

  She waited. A woman who knew the most important had not yet been said.

  I swallowed. The implications of this were immense, and I’d just barely begun to grasp them. “The vacuum reached for me. When I was unprotected and still.”

  She sat very calmly, but her entire spirit web flared—and the light in her eyes was that of a warrior. “You think it may reach for the nodes.”

  That’s what I’d thought when I’d come in. Now I was concerned that it might be far more complicated. “You said the node fluxed. That it reached out.”

  Surprise chased some of the warrior light away. “You think the node reached for the Harmonium tech?”

  I had no idea. “I think we need to find out.”

  She took a deep breath, and I could see serenity settling on her like a cloak—but I could also see that this time, it took work. “You will need to visit the node.”

  I did, and I was pretty sure that was a trickier request than she was making it out to be. Millennia of guardians would have learned to be cautious. “I need to assess the risk.” In all directions.

  Elleni didn’t speak for a long moment. “The nodes are very well protected.”

  There was conviction there—and deep concern. She sighed and rubbed her palms on her knees. “How much do you know of how your Travelers use the nodes?”

  Little more than the average trainee. “I know that Travelers find rare points where energies converge in very special ways and ask them to activate. We’re told little more than that.” And my generation hadn’t produced a Traveler, so there hadn’t even been any decent scuttlebutt to chase.

  She nodded. “That’s essentially correct. But much as you did today, most of the protections we place around a node must be removed when they are used.”

  By a Traveler, or whoever else the Sisters stood guard for. I wasn’t arrogant enough to believe the nodes were for KarmaCorp’s use alone. “They would be vulnerable in that moment.” Both Traveler and node—and both were precious beyond all imagining. Travelers were very few in number, but their contribution to the good of the galaxy was immeasurable, and that was only counting the contributions they’d made that we all knew about.

  Elleni’s hands fluttered just the smallest bit. Like Iggy’s when she was scared. Then her gaze lifted and scorched mine. “I don’t take you there lightly, Leticia Ravencroft. It wasn’t the Harmonium tech that caused the node to react today. It was you, unshielded.”

  I felt like I’d been sucked through a shredder I hadn’t even seen coming. “You think the node reacted to me?”

  “Yes.” Her serenity had a harder edge now. A warrior’s bite. “The technology alone has never disturbed the node. It reacted to you, or perhaps to you and the technology in tandem.”

  That was an even more horrifying thought. I was sister to the jungle, not to some overly amped-up galactic vacuum cleaner.

  “Breathe.” Elleni’s face softened slightly. “We are simply two people who have found ourselves in a moment in history that is a little more complicated than we first thought. We’re no more important, or less important, than that.”

  I wasn’t sure that made me feel any better. “I might be a danger to the node.”

  “Perhaps.” She had her turtle shell firmly back in place. “You will not visit it alone. And you will not be permitted to harm it.”

  I was rapidly realizing just how little information Journeyman Fixers had about nodes. About how they worked, how they were protected, who else might have interest in them. Which suddenly felt like a gigantic hole in my useful knowledge, especially if my own behavior had somehow managed to get a node’s attention. I knew how dangerous a neophyte could be, no matter how good her intentions. “I will accept as much help as you can offer. Thank you.”

  I was a child of the tribe, first and always.

  Elleni smiled. “Good. I was hoping you would say that.” She flowed gracefully to her feet and walked over to a sizable trunk in the far corner of her room, decorated in swirling red-and-blue spirals. She lifted the lid and reached in, sifting through the contents for a few moments before pulling out what looked like a stuffed green pillow.

  She walked sedately back over to me and settled it in my lap.

  I stroked the brilliant green synth-silk, tracing the embroidered flowers on its surface. I didn’t have to ask if it was Wanderer work—it screamed its heritage in every line. Tassels on one end proclaimed it a bag, not a pillow.

  Elleni sat back down on her meditation cushion and closed her eyes. “You’ll need those. Let me know if they don’t fit. We leave in the morning.”

  13

  Somewhere during my long and restless night, tossing and turning and contemplating the strange galactic entities that were nodes, I had climbed out of bed and spent a few hours running my hands over the stitching of the skirt I now wore. It was a patchwork of every color in the red, plum, and purple rainbow, and it had called to my fingers even in the dim light of the candle holo on my bedside table.

  In the bright light of morning, it had become even more wondrous, and I’d been unable to resist the temptation to wear it to breakfast. Elleni had merely smiled and helped me fix the convoluted lacings of the slightly more subdued shift under the skirt. I’d known what I was wearing—even if she hadn’t told me of her heritage, the outfit was classic Wanderer garb.

  Everything else I’d assumed or guessed about the day to come had turned out to be just plain wrong. In the stories of my training, Wanderers were nomads, traveling tribes who meandered the outskirts of civilization, acting as traders, information peddlers, and carriers of cultural vir
uses of every kind. They were a rich source of art and music and ideas that churned up young people and gave Federation bureaucrats a regular source of minor headaches.

  Which predisposed me to liking them, and I’d assumed we were off to visit the nearest encampment. I’d looked at the soft, impractical slippers that came with the shift and skirt and made sure to pack my hiking boots, a compact walking stick, and my trusty water bladder. I had no idea where Wanderers had found themselves open space on a core-world planet, but I was deeply looking forward to the visit.

  Elleni had done a very poor job of hiding her grin as bemused shuttleport security examined my walking stick.

  I slung my pack over my shoulder as we left the clearance area. “I take it we’re not headed to the backcountry.”

  She laughed. “The DaVinci cluster doesn’t have any. A few manicured walking trails along well-behaved streams and that’s about it.”

  That made an unfortunate kind of sense. “I thought Wanderers liked wide-open spaces, or is that just me broadcasting my ignorance?”

  “We love them.” She walked briskly down the middle of the shuttleport’s main thoroughfare, waving at the small children gawking at our outfits and ignoring the stares of everyone else. “But a few of our clans have decided that it’s more fun to stay in one place and let humanity flow past them. We’re off to visit one of those.”

  I’d been watching the signs. “We’re catching a shuttle to the spaceport?”

  She nodded.

  Grandmothers could be deeply annoying when they thought you should work something out for yourself. I frowned at her young, unlined, laughing face. “The other planets near here must be as densely packed as this one.”

  “They are.” She grinned and took pity on me. “We won’t be leaving Leonardo Station.”

  I blinked. “A tribe of Wanderers has taken up residence in a spaceport?”

  “Indeed they have. And I’m grateful.” She breathed in deeply, like she’d just smelled something wonderful on the wind. “They keep me sane. I go up and visit every few months.”