When at last shocks and stabs stopped cracking through me, when the pain eased, when the shift felt finished and nothing changed, I blinked and looked around.
My eyes worked well again. Air against my skin was mostly cold, though a current of warmth came to me from the stove. A whole world of sounds and scents had vanished; I was dizzy with new deafness.
Ma, Pa, and Maura were all sitting on the floor staring up at me, and I realized I was naked. I looked down, then hunched my shoulders and covered my genitals with my hands.
Pa got to his feet, went to the coat hooks by the back door, and grabbed my winter coat. He handed it to me, and I put it on. Then Ma was hugging me tighter than she had since I was seven and fell from a tree onto gravel and skinned my knees and palms.
"Sam, are you okay?" Pa asked, his voice hoarse. He stroked my head.
"I don't know," I said. My voice cracked. It had been doing that a lot in my recent non-rat past. Cracking or not, I had a voice again, and I could say words.
Ma was crushing me. I hadn't known she was so strong. "Ma," I squeaked.
She eased her grip on me. Once I could breathe again, I heaved the biggest sigh of my life. I was glad to have my regular body back, and I already missed my rat senses. And I was starving, thirsty, and majorly tired.
Ma finally let me go. Maura grabbed me, her arms around my waist, her damp face pressed into my chest. "I'll never do it again, Sammy, never, ever, ever. I'm so sorry!" she said, punctuated by small hiccoughy sobs.
"Hey," I said. "At least you turned me into something alive and functioning. And it feels like you turned me back okay. Better than some of your experiments, right?"
She sniffled and let go of me, looked up at my face. Her breath hitched and she blinked, then reached up to touch the space between my nose and mouth. I felt movement under the skin there. I whisked the shape and texture of her fingertip. Her mouth opened. No words came out.
I fingered what might be a mustache, only it felt more like heavy, individual hairs instead of a pelt like a regular mustache. I twitched them, felt air currents, but nothing besides my hand was close enough to whisk. They flickered over my fingertips, building a three-dimensional map in my mind.
Maura touched one of my ears. I swiveled it, flicking it back, away from her fingers.
Oh, yeah. I hadn't been able to do that before. I glanced around the room, moving my ears. I could hear everyone's breathing and separate out those sounds, assigning one breath-thread to each of my relatives, but I no longer heard their heartbeats.
"I—I'll figure out how to fix it," she whispered.
"Leave me alone, will you? No more changes!" I stroked my flickery whiskers. Anger rumbled in my stomach. Things had been changing too fast for my feelings to catch up with me, but now that I was more or less stable again, I was angry with the fire of a thousand suns.
"If that's what you want," Maura said, staring at the floor. She kicked at a floorboard.
"It is." I kept my tone even. No sense loosing my anger on her. I'd have to find something else to do with it.
She looked up, her eyes wet and shimmering, then ran from the room.
I looked at Ma and Pa. "How bad is it?"
Ma hugged me again, then stepped back and studied me. She mussed my hair. "If you grow your hair a little longer than it is now, it'll cover the ears," she said. "They're not terrible, just not entirely human anymore. You know, like Lem Allowyn's after the accident with the trans-taters." She hesitated, then touched my whiskers. "Well."
"My razor can take those right off," said Pa.
I twitched my whiskers and shook my head. "Not yet. I want to see—who I am now." Thank the Source it was summer and I didn't have school. I wanted to take a look at myself before I had to face anybody besides family.
"Was it terrible?" Ma asked.
I shook my head again. "In some ways, it was great. I was a wizard."
"Being a rat made you a wizard?" Pa asked.
I nodded.
He gripped my shoulder. "Are you a wizard still?" he asked.
"I—I don't know." I picked up a carved wooden spoon from the kitchen table, held it in both hands, and said: "Be a sausage."
My stomach growled as loud as speech. I felt something stir in my middle, but the spoon stayed a spoon.
Ma smiled at me and went to the stove. She dished up a bowl of sausage, kale, and white bean soup and brought it to the table. She set it in front of me and kissed my forehead.
"Wizard or not, you're our Sam. I'm so glad you're back."
The soup smelled amazing, thick, rich, peppery, and meaty. I spooned up a bite. It tasted like paradise.
"Me, too," I said.
* * *
In the upstairs bathroom, I examined my new self. My face looked pointier than it used to, and my ears were bigger, sticking-out cups on the sides of my head. With a thought, I could move one or the other. So not human.
My whiskers formed a bristling forest of stiff white hairs with independent movement. That would disgust people, especially girls. Maybe I could dye them.
I held my hand up and whisked it. A three-dimensional map of my fingers formed in my mind, sharper than any vision. I smelled a faint hint of vinegar and cinnamon.
Hope woke, warm in my chest.
My frame was the same as it had been: a muscular boy, tall for fourteen, with big hands and feet I hadn't grown into yet.
My face, though—it wasn't normal. Anyone glancing at me would know I'd been spelled.
Lem looked weirder, and people got used to him.
I strode two-footed to my own room, a towering giant. Slaughter lay on my bed. I sat next to her and stroked her, and she woke enough to slit her green eyes open and purr at me. My bed was covered by an orange, yellow, and red quilt Ma had made from scraps. Color: I was glad I had that back.
Maura had left one of her wizard textbooks open on my desk. Elementary Spells Review . It was open to a page headed, "Simple Transformations."
Before my ratification, I had never shown a hint of wizard power aside from sensing magic, so I'd never looked at any of Maura's wizard books. I took the book to my bed, sat down, and pulled the cat into my lap.
I had tasted my own magic, in more ways than one, and I hungered for more. Slaughter purred drowsily in my lap. I lifted the book and touched it with my whiskers. They tingled, and I smelled ginger and pepper and possibility.
* * *
One Way
By Rick Norwood | 7883 words
Rick Norwood tells us that the beginning of this story is based on his own experiences presenting papers at academic conferences, although we're quite sure that nothing ever happened to him as bad—or as good—as what is about to happen to Harvey Gold.
HARVEY GOLD FELT LIKE the invisible man. Even his friends pretended that he wasn't there. There had been a time when he strode through a physics conference surrounded by admiring young faces. His invited talks were filled to overflowing. He wore a T-shirt and jeans.
Now, uncomfortable in a new suit bought at Sears with a credit card that had not been paid off in years, he doubted that more than two or three people would attend his contributed fifteen-minute talk. Fifteen minutes was the most time he had been able to wrangle. The next downward step would be a poster presentation, and then oblivion.
When he arrived at the small room where his talk was scheduled, he found just one person in the audience, a very young man with red hair and freckles. The only other person in the room was the professor who would introduce him.
Harvey pegged the young man as a mathematician. Mathematicians often look younger than they actually are. He was probably a graduate student who had wandered into this talk more or less at random, and who would wander out again before the talk was over.
Harvey slid his transparencies out of a manila envelope and began to check that they were in order. The facilitator gave him a pitying look. Everyone else was using PowerPoint. Harvey had never found time to learn PowerPoint. Since he lost
his tenure, the only job he could land was as an adjunct, with a heavy teaching load and mountains of papers to grade. He spent every spare minute on his research. The only recreation he allowed himself was an hour or two playing blues guitar just before bed.
Nervously, he began to sort through the thin plastic sheets. They squirted out of his hand and splashed to the floor. He stooped to pick them up and found his face near the freckled cheek of the youngster from the audience.
"Allow me, Professor Gold." Grateful, Harvey stood up. He was breathing hard and there was a pain in his chest. In recent years it had become more and more difficult to bend over.
He allowed the stranger to gather up the transparencies while he tried to put his thoughts in order. Surely a few more people would drift in, for old time's sake.
He took the stack of plastic sheets from the stranger and clicked their edges against the desk to straighten them. Glancing down, he realized that they were hopelessly out of order.
He heard his name and looked up. The introducer read, from the printed schedule of talks, "Doctor Harvey Gold, of Kansas State University, will be speaking on 'A Stable Field which Acts at the Atomic Level.'"
Harvey shuffled through the transparencies, found the title page, and put it on the overhead projector. He looked up. He still had an audience of one. But the young man had known his name and was gazing at him with an intent expression, and so he began.
It was the worst talk he had ever given in his life. Even trivial derivations confused him. He kept finding mistakes on the transparencies, scratching them out, and writing in the margins. He had not even gotten to his important results when he saw other people drifting into the room and taking their seats. The introducer stood up and interrupted him. "Are there any questions? No. Then I'm afraid we're out of time. Our next talk will start in five minutes."
Harvey gathered up his transparencies and shoved them into the manila envelope, tearing it along one side. He pushed his way through the crowd at the door and hurried down the hall. He wanted nothing so much as a drink.
Then he noticed that the young man was walking at his side. He stopped. The closer he looked, the stronger his impression became that this was just a boy. He couldn't be more than sixteen. He was short, clean-shaven, with curly red hair and blue eyes, slim but muscular—clearly he got some sort of regular exercise. He was wearing a Pima cotton shirt, chinos, and expensive loafers. Harvey was impressed by the intensity of his gaze.
Harvey said, "I want to thank you for attending my talk."
The boy held out his hand. "Jerry Morgan."
Harvey blinked. He had read about this boy. MIT graduate at twelve. Johns Hopkins Ph.D. at fourteen. "Thank you again," he said.
"Can we go somewhere and talk? It's a little early for lunch, but we could get a cup of coffee."
Harvey allowed himself to be led to the line at the coffee machine.
"I've been following your work," Jerry said. "You can't imagine how excited I was when I heard you would be presenting a new paper. I flew in from New York just to hear your talk."
Harvey began to feel a little of the old excitement but he clenched his jaw. This was no time to become sentimental, to dwell on the promising career he had thrown away. A startlingly erotic image of Ann flashed into his mind. He hadn't thought of her that way for years. Yes, she had been his student, but she had been willing. God, had she been willing!
This boy, this Jerry Morgan, was talking about his work. He forced himself to focus. They were sitting at student desks someone had pulled into the hallway. There was a cup of coffee in front of him—Harvey couldn't remember getting it. What was Jerry saying? It didn't make sense.
"It's really a good thing nobody came to your talk. Can you imagine what would happen if anyone understood what you've discovered? We have to be careful—not publish until you've taken out a patent. Several patents, actually," Jerry said.
"Not publish?"
"If you publish now, and if anyone is smart enough to grasp what you're on to, they'll take out a whole slew of patents on every application of your discovery, possible or impossible. Then they'll claim proprietary rights and get an injunction to stop you from publishing anything else. You'll be shut out."
Harvey could feel the pulse in his neck. His hands were shaking. This boy understood. This boy really understood.
"I hope you'll allow me to work with you," Jerry was saying. "I'm not even in your league when it comes to theory, but I think I have something to contribute to experimental design. And nobody is going to believe your theory until it's been tested in the lab. With your permission, I'd like to bring two other people in on this. One is a friend of mine I've worked with before, Sam Gleason. He's great with machines—couldn't solve a quadratic equation if his life depended on it, but if it's made out of wires and metal, he's your man. The other person we need is a patent lawyer. Do you know one?"
"Me?" Harvey said. "No. The only lawyer I know I still owe money to."
"Seriously, we need a first-rate patent lawyer who is willing to work on spec. If we can get one who's honest, all the better. Because unless I am very much mistaken, you and I are going to become obscenely rich."
* * *
The warehouse in New Jersey did not look like a proper birthplace for a major new invention. It had a high metal roof, a cement floor, corrugated metal walls. The only amenities were a toilet and sink in one corner, with two low wooden walls that did not come all the way down to the floor providing the minimum of privacy.
Harvey and Jerry dropped Harvey's bags off at a cheap motel where Harvey would be spending the summer. Jerry had a loft in the City. They walked to the warehouse—their new laboratory—where they found a young man sweeping the floor. Harvey took him for a janitor until Jerry introduced him as Sam Gleason, their lab technician.
In a remarkably short time, the lab began to fill up with crates, cartons, and FedEx boxes. Sam didn't say much, but machines seemed to know he was their friend.
Harvey left the experimental design entirely to Jerry. All he really cared about was the theory. But he knew that an experiment was necessary for his theories to be accepted. There was plenty of work for all three men. The paper that Harvey had presented—or rather tried to present—at the conference provided a theory which depended on the existence of a solution to a certain family of partial differential equations. Harvey had demonstrated that a solution existed. Jerry wanted numbers. Harvey spent most of his days sitting on a high stool by a lab table, scribbling equations on a legal pad and then solving them on his laptop using Mathematica. On the other side of the table, Jerry sketched circuit diagrams and Sam worked with a soldering iron.
The biggest challenge was to make the tools required to build the field generator. The generator itself had a simple design, but it needed to be constructed to more exacting specifications than a commercial tool and die works could meet. Nothing like it had ever been built before, and endless tests were performed to make sure that every part was exactly right. Like a chronometer, the generator would not work unless every part was perfect.
* * *
JERRY BROUGHT his girlfriend to see the lab. "Harvey Gold, meet Deloris Lake. She's an undergraduate at Pratt."
Without understanding why, Harvey disliked Deloris on sight. He made an effort not to frown and took her small, cool hand in his. "Pleased to meet you, Miss Lake."
"Call me Lor. Everybody does. Any friend of Jer's is a friend of mine."
"I wanted to show Lor the lab," Jerry said.
"I'm so excited about the work you're doing. Jer is happier than he's been in years."
"Lor is an English major," Jerry said.
What Harvey understood by this was that Lor didn't know any science, and so he started to talk about their work. "We're building a one-way screen. You've seen one-way mirrors? On one side they reflect light, on the other side they let light through? Well, what we're building is like that, only for matter instead of energy. Atoms can pass through in one direction
but not in the other."
Lor's said, "That sounds important. I don't know any science, but if anything like that had been invented, I think I'd have heard about it. Are you and Jer going to become famous?" She put an arm around Jerry and pulled him closer.
Lor and Jer! Harvey felt vaguely sick to his stomach and wished he had not spoken so frankly about their work. Knowing that he was being rude, he turned and walked away. He listened to the tap , tap , tap of Lor's feet as she crossed the concrete and heard her say, "Hello, Sam." He returned to the lab table, but it was hard for him to concentrate. The equations on the yellow sheet of paper stopped making sense. He put one hand over his face and rubbed his temples, then he jumped down from the stool and walked to the door. "I'll be back," he said.
It was late when he returned to the lab. He was carrying a bottle, and he slipped it into a drawer in an old wooden desk that he or Jerry sometimes used when they were sorting through the mail.
* * *
Even the most dedicated researchers need some downtime. In the evenings, Harvey and Jerry played Go. They both played like Americans, which is to say badly. A professional Go player from Japan would have been bored by their game. They had not memorized even the simplest figures—for them, the fun lay in deducing moves from first principles. The game of Go has only two rules. From simple axioms complex systems grow. Because they were playing for fun rather than seriously, they were able to carry on a conversation as they did so, with frequent pauses to count degrees of freedom.
"I read your first paper when I was ten," Jerry said.
Harvey shook his head in wonder. That paper had made his reputation, but he later learned that many of the people who praised it had not really understood it.
Fantasy & Science Fiction - JanFeb 2017 Page 10