by John M. Ford
He started the car. "So, where do you live?"
"Aren't you going to take me home?"
"Well, yeah, as soon as I find out where it is. Oh." He banged his knuckles on the steering wheel.
"I mean, I think you're a nice guy. And Mr. Patrise has always been really good to me."
"Oh." He heard something clatter down the alley, turned to see what it was. Nothing. His heart was so loud he had to check that the car was still running. "Which way do I go from here? To get to your place?"
She pulled the shoulder belt across her breasts, cinched it. Danny looked away. She said, "Back out of the alley, then right."
After a few blocks, she said, "It wouldn't be the first time for me. I'm not scared." She tugged at her coat. "Do you want to?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I do. But not because somebody told you to."
"Turn right here."
"You're not—you won't lose your job, or anything, if—"
"I'm not one of Chloe's girls. Left, you can't get through down there. Did Mr. Patrise ask you to—well, heck, do anything with me, except drive me home?"
"No."
"Stop the car."
He did, expecting her to get out. Instead she turned to look directly at him. "This is important. Listen. I came out here a year ago last summer. I didn't have a car, I hitched. I thought I was gonna have to go work on the street, or—I don't want to tell you
what I thought about doing. You ever been crazy, I mean, just crazy over the way things were, so anything else looked good?" Her voice was rising. Danny knew why.
"McCain picked me up. I knew who Mr. Patrise was; everybody on the Levee does. So I thought, yeah, sure, one night on clean sheets. But Mr. Patrise gave me a job. And Shaker taught me how to tend bar. So if he told me, to lie down for you, I'd do it, okay, Doc?" She breathed in hard, clenched her hands. "He's taken me to dinner a couple of times, and I mean dinner. Everybody who works for him gets things like that. But this is the first time—do you want to know what he said?"
"I guess I do."
"He said, 'Hallow's new, and he's alone, and that's not right. No more right than that you should be alone. See what happens.' "
"You said you'd—"
"That was a long time ago," she said. "I guess we'd better move on, huh?"
Danny started the car again. Ginevra said, "Up here, on the right."
He pulled to the curb in front of a brownstone apartment block, torch-shaped lamps flanking the door. She sat there, buckled in tight. "So I guess nothing happens tonight, huh?"
"Not tonight."
"I could make you some tea, or something."
If he went up there, he surely would not come down until morning. He didn't dare even touch his seat belt, and he surely could not touch hers.
She unfastened herself, turned as much as the little car would allow, her face just inches from his. "You're really sweet. And you want to be nice, and I like that. I appreciate that. But you're on the Levee now, in the Shadow. You have to know nobody cares one way or another. Nobody but us." She kissed him. "Hey, redhead. you're hot."
He didn't move.
"You wanna safeword out, Doc?"
"What do you mean?"
"Have you got a word that means 'really stop it, ri,t;ht now*?"
"I never heard o( that."
"Oh," she said, and Danny understood that he was missing something important. "And I haven't seen any reason to use mine. Well. Let me tell you how to get back to Mr. Patrise's house. You really don't want to get lost around here." She spelled out the directions; he tried to remember them. Then she got out of the car.
His body made him call out, "I'll see you again?"
"Oh, jeez, Doc. Sure."
He waited until she had gone up the steps and entered the building before starting the car. You could have, he kept thinking all the way back, you could have. Nobody. Would. Have. Cared.
"She wasn't afraid"" he said out loud, as he passed a cluster of people warming themselves around an oil-drum fire. It brought him to the edge of laughing, and the tension got him home.
lie woke up a little after eight the next morning. When he went down to the dining room, Phasia was there, sitting at the table in a long flowered gown. There was also a man Danny hadn't seen before, wearing shirtsleeves and suspenders; he had short brown hair, large dark eyes behind round-rimmed glasses. He ate scrambled eggs and home fries with his left hand and wrote on a pad of graph paper with his right.
"Hello," Danny said.
Fay looked up from her egg cup and toast. She was still very beautiful, especially when she smiled and her crystalline blue eyes twinkled, but the fabulous glow was not there. Danny wondered if he had really seen it at all.
The man scratched his head with the eraser end of his pencil and looked up. "You must be Doc. I'm Stagger Lee. Sit down and join us."
Danny did. One of the staff was there instantly to take his breakfast order.
Stagger Lee said, "You're up kind of early. I thought you were out at the club last night."
"I came back early."
"Oh. I'm just finishing up for the night." Danny noticed that Stagger Lee's shirt was badly wrinkled, and one of his suspenders was flapping loose.
Fay folded her napkin and stood up. Stagger Lee was on his feet at once; Danny did likewise.
"Staganess day toll," she said, or something sounding like that. "Doc well be dockelnight, sorge do well." She made a small, nervous gesture with her hand and left the room. .
Stagger Lee said gently "I guess you haven't heard Fay speak."
"I heard her sing last night."
"No. Not the same."
"Phasia," Danny said, understanding. "Aphasia"
Stagger Lee said, "Yup," dragging the syllable way out. "I guess we could sit back down now."
Danny's pancakes and bacon appeared. Stagger Lee said, "Excuse my company while you eat; I need to get this done before I drop over. You know we're going to be out late tonight. You might want to get a couple of hours' sleep this afternoon."
"Does Mr. Patrise party every night?"
"Not every night. And I wouldn't call this evening a party, at least not the way you mean." He worked a while longer, then said, "Are you a poker player, Doc?"
"I know how."
"There's a game Monday night. You'll be welcome." He glanced up. "Unless Patrise wants you then?"
"He hasn't said."
"Right." He sat back, drinking coffee and examining his notes. As Danny finished his breakfast, Stagger Lee said, "I've got the infirmary keys. You ought to get your bag like you want it before tonight."
Stagger Lee led the way out of the dining room, absent-mindedly hitching his loose suspender. "Know anything about magic?"
"They tell me it works here."
"True. Not always well, but it works."
The infirmary was in the south wing. It had white enameled cabinets, a desk and examining table out front; in back was a room with two hospital beds, and another room fitted for light surgery. None of the facilities seemed to have seen much use.
Stagger Lee said. "Some of the staff have first-aid training, so if you ever need a hand down here, give the switchboard I yell.
And there's me." He disconnected a small ring of keys from a larger one, jingled them in his fingers. "Glad to pass the buck, to be honest."
"Are you a doctor?"
"Not an MD." He unlocked one of the cabinets. It was full of supplies: vials, boxes, syringes, tape. "I'm just the general tech guy around here. Have you ever heard of Stagg Field?"
"Where the nuclear reactor was."
"Bingo. It's not there any more, but I went to what's left of the University of Chicago. Just in case," he said with a grin, "you thought I'd shot somebody on account of a hat."
He took some boxes down from a cabinet. "This is goldenrod unguent, for all-purpose healing; it works best on elves, but you can use it on humans. Pinon gum's for abscesses and infections. Boneset leaf, you may have seen that before in the W
orld. . . ."
He held up a fabric-covered object a little thinner than his thumb. "This is a tarantelle cap, for serious systemic poisoning. You use it like an ammonia inhaler: crack it under the nostrils, have the victim breathe. And then get clear: they'll start dancing like crazy to drive out the poison."
"You're kidding."
"Empiricists don't kid, Doc. I've seen it work. I mean it about the getting clear, too. If the patient's busted up physically, you've got a judgment call, because the tarantelle doesn't care about a few broken bones. But remember that we've got poisons here like nothing you ever saw in the World."
"Magic," Danny said.
"These aren't spells. Most of them are old folk remedies on our side of the fire; some even work—pinon kills Staph aureus. They just work better here, like penicillin works better in the World. That's the other thing: magic's unreliable here in the middle, but so is penicillin. The only things you can really always rely on are mechanical closure, sutures and tape, and usually the simpler antiseptics, alcohol and iodine. You're going to see some really bad scarring around here. Don't let it get to you."
Danny thought of Norma Jean. He thought of Rob, too, of course.
Stagger Lee held up a glass vial of what looked like colored
glitter. "This is fairy dust: broad-spectrum illusion powder. The Shadow uses a lot of this stuff. Did you see people at the club who looked like they were glowing? Dust."
Okay, Danny thought, that was it. That explained Phasia's appearance, her light.
"It's also a euphoric, psychologically addictive."
"Psychologically?"
"You can't prove dust has any somatic effects. But it sure does hook people."
"What am I supposed to do with it?"
"Comfort the dying." Danny couldn't tell if Stagger Lee was joking or not. "Meanwhile, back at reality . . ." Stagger Lee unlocked another cabinet, pointed to boxes of hypodermic cartridges. "Meperidine, haloperidol, straight morphine—synthetics don't work as well on elves."
"I can't carry that stuff."
"Why not? You've got a license."
"Sure, but I'm supposed to have authorizations."
"Doc. " Stagger Lee sounded amused. "You can carry any of this stuff you want, and prescribe it any way you want, to anybody you want, at least on this side of the Fire. You have all the authorization there is." Danny got the message. "Okay. Atropine, lidocaine, most of the rest of it you know better than I do. There's a reference library over there. Down here's bicarb in a heart needle pack, though the only coronaries I've ever seen Shadowside were so coke-boosted they needed the bomb squad more than CPR. It's your call, but most of your cases are going to be trauma, and combat trauma at that."
"How about IV fluids? And blood?"
Stagger opened another cabinet, revealing racks of solution bags and accessories. "The plastic bags are hard to come by, even for us. We've got a glass still and autoclavable bottles, though they're a pain to haul around. Remember what I said about trauma?"
Danny nodded.
"So you understand the problem?"
"Yes."
"Wish I had a good answer for you."
"Thanks."'
"Don't mention it."
"How about blood?"
"Mm. Anybody told you about elf blood?"
"It doesn't mix."
"Sure doesn't. Somebody down in the New Carre gave a human patient who would have died anyway a unit of gwaedgwir. . . . Well, like I said, he would have died anyway. Don't even think about transfusing between Truebloods; the class and race situation's too complicated. They don't mingle."
"Truebloods . . ."
"Elves."
"McCain called them Ellyll."
"Yup. Short course in nonhuman nomenclature: All elves are Truebloods, or gwaed gwir. Ellyllon—that's the plural—are a kind of minor nobility. Almost all the elves you see on this side of the gates are Ellyll; the lower orders can't come across and the higher ones rarely bother. You might think of the Ellyll as like the nothing-special European nobles who went off to the New World a few centuries back, looking for adventure and easy loot.
"Once in a while a High-born elf—an Urthas—comes over to our tacky little reality. It's not polite to mix them up with the Ellyll, but you're not likely to. High-borns are conspicuous. And if you do goof, they're probably not listening. Get it?"
"Got it."
"Good. The only other sort of Trueblood you might see are the Mani; they're a service class, who fetch and carry for the Urthas."
"What do I say to them?"
"They're easy to get along with. Very mission-centered, and either you're the object of the mission or you're not there. Even if you are—do you talk to postage stamps?"
"How many of the . . . Truebloods speak English?"
"All the Urthas and Ellyllon can, when they feel like it. Their own languages—I know of forty—aren't available for mortals to study. But there's Ellytha, which is like a trade language; humans can learn it, and it's okay if you don't speak it very well, because heck, humans aren't supposed to speak the beautiful elven tongue very well. They don't even mind if we call it 'Elvish'. There are
dictionaries and recordings in the library downstairs, if you're interested."
Danny nodded.
"Okay, let's finish up here. I have got to get some sleep." Stagger Lee pointed to a clipboard inside the IV cupboard. "All us mortals in the house are typed; list's here. If you need a withdrawal from the bank, Mr. Patrise can arrange that."
"Is there anything Mr. Patrise can't get?"
"He's got me. And you." Stagger Lee yawned. He tossed Danny the key ring. "The house is about as safe as anywhere on the Levee, so you don't absolutely have to lock up every time you go out the door. Your call."
"These aren't—anybody can use them?"
"No, we don't tag those keys. If you got hurt, you wouldn't want us to have to fool around getting the door open, right?"
"Right."
"Just take care of 'em. See you tonight."
"Yeah."
Danny stood in the infirmary for a little while, looking around at all the stuff with no rational idea of what to do next. Finally he put it all back on the shelves, locked the cabinets, and went over to the library shelf. He got out the Merck Manual, the PDR, and all the books on emergency medicine, called the kitchen for a pot of tea in his rooms. They politely asked if he wouldn't rather have coffee. He agreed, and went upstairs to study.
By noon he had worked out a list. He took the black bag downstairs, then had a thought partway through loading it, and went to the dining room. McCain was there, eating a sandwich and reading the Centurion. He hummed and nodded. "They said you were up early. You know about—"
"Tonight, yeah. I'll be awake. What are we gonna do tonight, anyway?"
"Raise some hell. It'll be interesting." He gestured at a pitcher of iced tea, and Danny poured himself a glass.
Danny said, "Miss Phasia talked to me this morning. How long has she been like that?"
"A couple of years." McCain looked up suddenly. "She calked to you? Was anybody else here?"
"Stagger Lee. But she spoke to me: she said my name, or tried to."
"She hadn't ever seen you before. Not close."
"Well—" Danny told McCain about the previous night, the encounter in the hall. "I couldn't understand it, until Stagger Lee told me about the fairy dust."
"You thought that was dustV" McCain looked terribly intense. "Let's go down to the infirmary."
McCain shut the infirmary door behind him, and leaned against the frame, head tilted as if he were listening for a sound in the hall. "Piece of friendly advice. Seeing Fay that night—forget it happened." Danny started to interrupt, but McCain stopped him with a raised finger. "I know it was just an accident, and all she did was smile. Leave it at that." He didn't sound angry; he sounded concerned.
"Okay."
"Okay." McCain relaxed.
"Can you tell me what happened to her voice
?"
"She used to be a singer," McCain said, almost offhandedly. "Pretty good one, as I hear. Then one night after a show, she said something to piss off an Ellyll. Big boss in the Glasa gang."
"What did she say?"
"I wasn't there, but I imagine it was something like No. Elves get upset easy anyway. So he cursed her. They do that. Crumpled her speech up, like you heard."
"And . . . her singing voice? The one I heard last night?"
McCain tapped one hand on another. "I stay clear of the witch ways, mostly. But I know it doesn't work right, here. Elves forget that, a lot. And some say it's to do with innocence—she hadn't done anything to bear cursing—but I don't know, it's not my idea of justice.
"Understand, she's like that with all words: she can't speak, or understand right, nor write nor read. When you're around her awhile, the understanding starts to come. And there's the Voice." He stood away from the door.
Danny said, "The elf who did it. . ."
"He didn't know how to undo it. Away from home they don't know how their own magic works. He's dead now."
"Aren't elves, you know, immortal?"
"They don't die of old age. But nobody ever dies of that in the Shade." He looked at the door to the surgery room. "If they can crawl back to Elfland, all the holes close up. This side, they die just like anybody."
"Okay," Danny said, because he didn't want to hear any more of this, "thanks for telling me, Lincoln."
"Wait. Fay trusts you: she doesn't talk to people she doesn't trust. You know what a glamour is?"
"Not something to do with movie stars?"
"No. It's a magic, that changes people's senses. The Voice is a glamour." McCain paused a long beat, as if considering something long and hard, then said, "It can show itself in other ways. You follow?"
"Yeah. Thanks."
"Don't mention it." McCain looked up, with just a little smile. "Really." He opened the door. "This place got everything you need?"
"Sure."
He nodded, paused again. "Oh, yeah. Can you shoot?"
"A rifle. Twenty-two."
McCain shook his head. "There's a range down in the garage, if you want to learn. 'Sides, didn't you always want to shoot a Tommy gun?"