by Geof Johnson
“It was fine. It seemed to have plenty of get up and go, though you can’t go very fast on these dirt roads.”
“I thought about getting one for the school, if we have the money. Mr. Bass could use one, sometimes.”
She picked up her cup of tea, took a sip and said, “You are changing things pretty fast here, maybe too fast. We need to bring in some more researchers to study and document this society before it changes permanently. I suggest you at least bring in an anthropologist and a sociologist, and soon, because once the changes happen, there’s no going back. It’ll never be the same.”
Jamie took a deep breath and stared at the floor for a moment. “I know, but I’m really paranoid about telling more people about the magic. It’s just…it’s troubling. Keeps me up at night.”
“I’m sure it does. I talked to Eric at the bonfire the other night, and I can understand your concern about being found out by the government. But you need to think about what’s right for these people and for science, too. Lost opportunities stay lost.” She rested her tea cup on her thigh and said, “Do you know what Leora’s parents gave us with our lunch? Roasted chestnuts. I’ve never had them before. It’s hard to find chestnut trees on Earth, since so many got wiped out years ago by the blight. Did you know that they still grow abundantly here?”
“Uncle Charlie mentioned that, after one of his rides in the woods. He borrows Sugar once in a while and takes her out in the countryside. He notices things that I don’t.”
“How about other endangered or extinct species? The dodo bird or the sabre tooth tiger? Do those exist here?”
“I have no idea. But there are some unique animals here that you won’t find on Earth, like the three-toed rock cat. Eddan knew about those. They live to be over three hundred years old.”
“You mentioned that the other day. I’d like to see it.” She arched her eyebrows. “How many species does this world share with Earth? Ninety percent? Eighty-five?” Jamie shrugged, and her eyes narrowed. She looked more like a professor again instead of a friendly woman sharing a cup of tea with him. She shook a finger at him and said, “We need to find out. Somebody needs to be out there in the field investigating, probably more than one person. Hundreds, more than likely.”
Jamie tilted his head back and pressed one hand to the side of his face. “I know, but what can I do? That’s an unworkable number of people for me. There’s no way my magic will stay secret with that many people knowing about it, and with all of them coming and going through magic portals.”
“I’m sorry.” Her expression softened. “I don’t mean to put so much pressure on you. It’s just my scientist-self talking. I get worked up about certain things.”
“I wish that somebody else could help, but I’m the only one who can make doorways.”
“How about Rollie? Or Mr. Winston?”
“Rollie doesn’t want to learn how, and Mr. Winston is too weak. Aiven might be able to someday, but not for decades, and that’s if he works really hard at it.”
“Are doorways that difficult to make?”
“One of the hardest spells.”
“But you seem to do it so easily.”
“I’ve made a lot of them. It gets easier, the more you do. I hardly have to think about it now. The steps for the spell run through my mind automatically, kinda like muscle memory.”
“Fascinating.” She pursed her lips. “I guess it’s good, in a way, that you’re the only one making doorways. You can control who gets access. Though I could see how some people might resent the fact that you guard the gateway, so to speak, for anyone who wants to take advantage of this world’s resources.” She shook her head firmly. “I hope you never open this planet up to exploitation. I would hate to see a strip mining operation here, or an oil field.”
“I’ll never let that happen. I’ll shut off all doorways permanently if it comes to that. I feel bad enough that I’m allowing mining on an uninhabited planet, but it’s too late to worry about that, now.” He sighed. “My granddad starting talking about how much money we could make doing it, and I let myself get pulled into that first deal without thinking it through. It won’t happen that way again, though.”
Then he gave her a steady look, and she tightened her mouth again and nodded. “I know what you’re hinting at,” she said. “I promised I would help you evaluate another world for mining. Just let me finish my work here, first.”
“Do you think you could ever really finish? I mean, to your satisfaction?”
“No. This world is a lifetime’s worth of work. Maybe more.”
Jamie laughed and said, “We’ll have to get Mrs. Malley to make you a rejuvenation potion when you feel like you’re getting too old.”
“That name sounds familiar. Is she a witch?”
“Yes. She’s over a hundred years old and still going strong. You need to meet her. Her and Momma Sue both. They’re, uh, interesting, to say the least. Mrs. Malley’s house is about two miles south of the school, on the right. Everybody knows where she lives, so if you get lost, stop and ask somebody. I’ll tell Fred to let her know you’re coming.”
“Does she have a phone? I know you have one here.”
“No, a magic mirror.”
“A magic mirror? Really? Like in Snow White?”
“No. More like video chatting for witches. It’s pretty amazing.”
“It’s all amazing, Jamie. I’m spending the night on another world at the home of a sorcerer, we’re discussing real magic and wizards and witches like it’s an everyday thing, and I’m doing research where no one has before. Can you imagine what my colleagues would think if I told them that?”
“Would they laugh at you?”
“They’d be jealous as hell.”
* * *
Jamie poured himself a bowl of Cheerios and sat down to eat it at the table by the kitchen, and spied the morning paper still on the end where his father had left it. Jamie slid it closer and scanned the headlines. One in particular caught his eye, a story from Florida about seawater backing up onto the streets of Miami after a full moon high tide. “The eighth time this year,” he read aloud. “Wow.”
Scientists were predicting that the flooding there would become more common, perhaps as many as forty to fifty times per year before the end of the decade, due to rising sea levels.
Dr. Tindall told us about that in class. Low-lying cities around the globe would soon suffer from coastal flooding due to melting ice sheets in the Polar Regions. I wonder if she’s seen this article. Maybe I’ll go visit her again tonight and ask her about it.
Jamie caught an earful from Fred when he mentioned that he was going back to visit Dr. Tindall that night.
“You’re supposed to be spending time with me, remember? Now that there’s no school or cross country?”
“You can come with me, if you like. It’s interesting. Besides, if you come, you can keep me from staying so late.”
“And listen to you talk about science all night? Sounds boring.”
“We talk about interesting stuff. She’s a smart lady. You’d like her if you spent a little time with her.”
Fred grumbled and fumed, but in the end, she decided to go.
Melanie found out they were going to the stone house that night, and she wanted to come along, too. Bryce, not wanting to be left out, decided to join them. Jamie called Dr. Tindall first to see if it was okay, and she said she’d be happy to have them.
They sat together near the fire, drinking tea and hot chocolate, and the conversation was lively. When the topic turned to drought in the western United States, Dr. Tindall said, “We think that we might be entering something called a megadrought, which is a period of low rainfall that lasts for many, many years, perhaps a century or longer. They’re cyclical, and we know that the western states have had them before, of various durations. The last time was during the 1930s, and there were seventy million fewer people living there. So, not only is there less water right now, there’s greater demand f
or what little there is.”
“Commercial agriculture has increased, too,” Melanie said. “Especially in California. Big farms use a lot of water.”
“And the water’s not there to be had. Soon the rivers will all dry up and then they’ll really be in trouble. Nothing to drink, nothing to bathe in, nothing to wash clothes with.”
“Or fill their swimming pools,” Bryce said.
“The big problem is that those states probably shouldn’t have been settled with the huge number of people that they have there now. It may all crash and burn before too long. It’s happened before, to some Native American populations. One of them was a band of Pueblo Indians. They had no rain for a long period, so they had no crops, then mass starvation, and finally the settlement collapsed.”
“Is that what’s going to happen to Los Angeles?” Fred asked. “Will it become a ghost town?”
“Not totally, but it might become a hollow shell of what it is today.”
Bryce poked Jamie’s knee with one finger. “You can do something to fix it, can’t you?”
“I can’t make it rain. I don’t know a spell for it.”
“You’d have to have enough atmospheric moisture to begin with,” Dr. Tindall said. “Unless you know how to make water out of air.”
Jamie shook his head grimly. “There is something I can do about the drought, but not without a big sacrifice on my part.” All eyes turned to him and he said, “I could open a doorway to an uninhabited world, right next to a river. Then I could connect that doorway to any city you want, like Los Angeles or Las Vegas, right by their water processing plant. They’d have access to as much water as they could ever possibly need.”
“I think the tradeoff would be your anonymity,” Fred said. “You couldn’t do it without someone finding out, eventually.”
Jamie nodded and stared at the floor. “I could do that for every drought-stricken city in the world. But I doubt I could do it secretly, and it would ruin my life and yours.” He looked up at his friends. “Probably ruin a lot of people’s. Everyone we’re close to.”
Dr. Tindall shook one finger. “And you would only be bailing them out and allowing them to continue on a wasteful path. If an area shouldn’t have been settled in the first place because of water issues, the last thing you should have in it are swimming pools and golf courses, which Southern California has in excess.”
“Still,” Jamie said, “it would be hard for me to sit back and do nothing if people were dying of thirst.”
Jamie and his friends returned to Rivershire the next night to visit with Dr. Tindall, her last evening before she went back to Cullowhee for Christmas. Rollie came with them, and Jamie made a doorway for Nova so that she could join them from her home in Hampstead.
Once they were all gathered in the main room of the stone house, Dr. Tindall made an announcement. “I, uh, have some news.” She took a short breath and held it with her lips pressed into her mouth, as if she were struggling to deliver a stupendous fact. “I just got an email about the DNA test results. They’re a positive match. I am related to Leora Hale’s family.”
Jamie barely shrugged. “That’s cool,” he said.
Her brow dropped sharply. “Don’t you think that’s astounding? I have relatives on another world! It’s a shock, to me.”
Fred shrugged, too. “It’s interesting, I guess.”
“The novelty has kinda worn off since Fred found out she was related to Shira Coy’s family,” Jamie said. “But I think it’s great.” He faked a smile and Dr. Tindall eyes turned flinty.
“Are you going to see the Hale’s again while you’re here?” Melanie asked Dr. Tindall.
“I’ll have to wait until after Christmas. They want me to have dinner with them.”
“That’s awesome,” Nova said. “You’ve only just come to this town, and already you’re the social butterfly.”
They sat around the fire and talked, and again the conversation was spirited and wide-ranging. They discussed all kinds of environmental disasters: the rapid shrinking of tropical rainforests. Masses of plastic trash the size of Texas, floating in the Pacific Ocean. Famine in Sudan. Oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. Each topic seemed to weigh more heavily on Jamie than the next. The longer they talked, the more depressed he got.
At one point, Dr. Tindall excused herself to go to the bathroom, and Jamie’s chin dropped to his chest and he stared at nothing. He felt as if all of the Earth’s problems were beginning to stack up on his shoulders, and he would soon collapse under the weight.
“What’s buggin’ you, Jamie?” Bryce said.
Jamie didn’t answer.
“Something is. I can tell.”
“He thinks all of these problems we’re talking about are his responsibility,” Fred said. “Which is ridiculous, of course.”
Jamie raised his head and said, “But I can do something about most of them.”
“What could you do about the deforestation of the Amazon rainforests?” Nova said.
“I could make the trees and vegetation grow back.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that.”
“Dude,” Rollie said, “it’s not your job. We’ve been able to stumble along okay for thousands of years without your help, so don’t worry about it.”
“I still feel like I should do something. Problem is, I don’t know how to do it without exposing us.”
“Jamie,” Melanie said, “if you fix things, mankind won’t have to figure out solutions on its own. Then Earth will become just like Eddan’s world, having to depend on sorcerers and witches to solve its problems. Isn’t that why you built a school here in Rivershire? So they can learn to do things for themselves?”
Jamie sighed and stared at the fire, still burning brightly in the fireplace. “I suppose. It just tears me up inside, though, watching all of these huge problems get worse and worse and me not doing anything about it. I could, you know.”
“Like I said,” Rollie added, “it’s not your job.” Then he spread his arms wide and nodded firmly. “Earth abides, dude. Earth abides.”
Chapter 14
Early on Christmas morning, Fred’s family opened their presents. Sammi didn’t want hers yet, though there was a huge pile for her under the tree, the largest Fred had seen in years. Fred knew what many of them were. She had helped wrap them: the mega-art kit with stacks of drawing tablets. The clothes, shiny and sparkly (Fred was a little jealous about those). The DVDs of Sammi’s favorite Disney movies.
Sammi insisted that her parents open their gift from her first. She pulled it from the stack under the tree and ceremoniously handed it to Lisa and Larry, who sat together on the gold couch in the living room, rumpled in their robes and slippers, Lisa’s hair a disheveled mess and Larry unshaven and sleepy-eyed.
“What is it?” Lisa said as she accepted it.
“Open it!” Sammi began bouncing on the balls of her feet and patting her hands together. “I wrapped it myself.”
“I can see that.” Lisa managed a feeble smile. “You did a fine job.” The bright green paper was cut only slightly crooked and was held together by less than 50 little strips of clear tape.
Lisa turned and offered it to Larry. “Let’s do it together. You first.” Larry pulled the red ribbon from the gift and motioned for Lisa to finish. Lisa carefully slipped a finger under the edge of the wrapping paper while Sammi’s bouncing became more extreme.
“Hurry up, Mom,” Fred said, “before Sammi explodes.”
Lisa ripped the present open to reveal the framed picture of the young Native American couple. “Oh, it’s beautiful Sammi.”
“They’re Cherokee.” Sammi beamed. “I got it at Annie’s shop. I picked that one because you can tell that they’re in love, like you and Daddy are.”
“It’s just…wonderful. Don’t you think so, Larry?” She turned to him and the dullness in his eyes vanished.
“That’s beautiful,” Larry said and sat up straight. “Where do you think we should put it, Sammi?”
Lisa put a hand on Sammi’s cheek and frowned. “Uh, oh. Is she having a vision, Fred?”
“Looks like it. Give her a sec and she’ll come out of it.”
After a few moments of tense silence, Sammi blinked and gave her head a tight shake.
“What happened?” Larry said. “Did you just hear something with your magic?”
Sammi nodded. “It was Mr. Cage.”
“Are you sure?” Fred said.
Sammi nodded again. “He sounded like he was talking on the phone, and he was mad. He was shouting.”
Fred gestured with one hand, a rolling motion. “Well, what did he say?”
Sammi’s dark eyebrows fell and she frowned. “He used some bad words.”
“Just work around those.”
Sammi nodded one more time and took a short breath. “It wasn’t much. He said, ‘I don’t care if it’s Christmas or not. If you don’t get my gosh-darned runway fixed by tomorrow afternoon, there will be heck to pay.’ Then it sounded like something smashed on the floor, like the phone.”
“I bet he didn’t say gosh-darned or heck, did he?”
“No.” Sammi’s brow dropped even lower.
“What should we do, Fred?” Lisa asked. “Should we tell Jamie or one of those two agents?”
“Terry said not to call or text them unless it was an emergency because it would be suspicious. We should tell Jamie, but we’ll have to wait until he gets up. It’s still way too early for civilized people to be awake.”
Fred called Jamie to come over around ten thirty, and Sammi repeated what she’d heard from Phillip Cage. Jamie stood near her with his faceo thoughtful and calculating, and when she finished he said, “I guess I’m going to have to go up to Langley and try to get hold of Eric or Terry so I can tell them in person. Wish I could just send them a text, instead.”
“But it’s Christmas, Jamie,” Lisa said. “Don’t you think you should wait until tomorrow so you won’t disturb their time with their families?”