The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

by Harry Turtledove

  “Go ahead,” I said. Nobody I’d talked to would even entertain the idea that he could be responsible for the leaks. Well, I didn’t find the idea entertaining, either.

  “Thanks.” Arnold steepled his fingers, more a thoughtful gesture, I judged, than a prayerful one. He went on. “I gather this toxic spell leak is believed to be through the dump’s containment system rather than airborne.”

  “Yes, I believe that’s true,” I said cautiously. “So?”

  He nodded as if he’d scored a point. “Thought as much. I’m not breaking security to tell you that Space Division spells are universally volatile in nature, with byproducts to match. That’s not surprising, is it, considering what we do?”

  “I suppose not,” I said. “What exactly is your consortium’s role in getting the Garuda Bird out of the atmosphere?”

  That did it. He started rolling like the Juggernaut’s car, which, considering the project we were talking about, isn’t the worst of comparisons. Loki was in charge of two project phases, the second of which (presumably because it dealt with air elementals) had been split into two elements.

  “First, we handle the new spells pertaining to the Garuda Bird itself.” Arnold pointed to a picture tacked onto the wall behind him: an artist’s conception of the Bird lifting a cargo into low orbit, with the curve of the Earth and the black of space behind it. Even in a painting, the Bird is something to see. Think of a roc squared and then square that again—well, the Bird could turn a roc into a pebble. For a second, I forgot about being an investigator and felt like a kid with a new kite.

  “The Bird is magic-intensive anyway,” Arnold went on. “Has to be, or else that big bulk would never get off the ground. But we’ve had to upgrade all the spell systems and develop a whole new set for upper-atmospheric and exatmospheric work. They do fine in similarity modeling; pretty soon we’ll get to see what the models are worth. You with me so far?”

  “Pretty much so, yeah,” I answered. “What’s this other phase you were talking about? Something to do with sylphs?”

  “That’s right. Turns out our models show that max-Q—”

  “What?”

  “Maximum dynamic pressure on the Bird,” he explained grudgingly, and then, because I still didn’t get it, added more grudgingly still, “Maximum air buffeting.”

  “Oh.”

  I’d distracted him. He gave me a dirty look, as if he were a wizard who’d forgotten the key word of an invocation just as his demon was about to appear in the pentacle. When I didn’t rip off his head or swallow him whole, he pulled himself together. “As I was saying, max-Q on the Garuda Bird occurs relatively low in the atmosphere, due to sylphic action on the traveler through the aery realm.”

  “Sylphs are like that,” I agreed. “Always have been. How do you propose to get them to act any different?”

  “As I said before, we have a two-element approach to the problem—”

  He pulled a chart out of his top desk drawer and showed me what he meant. If he hadn’t been an aerospace thaumaturge, he would have called it the carrot-and-stick approach. As it was, he talked about sylph-esteem and sylph-discipline.

  Sylph-esteem, I gathered, involved making the sylphs above the Garuda Bird launch site so happy they wouldn’t think about blowing the Bird around as it flew past them. Like a lot of half-smart plans, it looked good on parchment. Trouble is, sylphs by their very nature are happy-go-lucky already, and also changeable as the weather. How do you go about not only making them even more cheerful than they were already but also making them stay that way?

  If you ask me (which Magister Arnold didn’t), sylph-discipline is a better way to go. Putting the fear of higher Powers into the sylphs might well make the air elementals behave themselves long enough to let the Garuda Bird get through. True, you couldn’t keep it up long, sylphs being as they are, but then, you wouldn’t need to.

  “For sylph-discipline to be effective, timing is of the essence,” Arnold said. “Implement your deterrence activity too soon and the elementals forget the brief intimidation; implement it too late and it is useless. We are still in the process of developing the sorcerous systems that will enable us to ensure minimal sylphic disturbance as the Garuda Bird proceeds on its mission.”

  “If you’re still developing them, am I correct in assuming that no byproducts from that element of your project would appear on my list of contaminants from Loki?”

  “Let me check, if I may,” he said. He looked at my chart, just as I’d looked at his. “No, that’s not correct. Some of this activity with Beelzebub comes from our shop.”

  I remembered the patch of flies at the Devonshire dump and shivered a little. Dealing with Beelzebub involves some of the most potent, most dangerous sorcery there is. I said, “Sounds like overkill to me. Why pick such a mighty potentate of the Descending Hierarchy to overawe the air elementals?”

  My guess was that asking the question would prove a waste of time, that Arnold would baffle me with technical jargon till I gave up and went away. But he fooled me, saying, “It’s really quite straightforward, at least in broad outline. We shall require the Lord of the Flies to inflict a plague of his creatures on the sylphs to distract them from the passage of the Garuda Bird.”

  “You don’t think small,” I said. Then something else occurred to me: “But what’s to keep the flies from tormenting the Garuda Bird along with the air elementals?”

  Magister Arnold smiled thinly. “As I said, it’s straightforward in broad outline. Details of the negotiations with the demon are anything but simple, as you may imagine. He is, if you will forgive me, hellishly clever.”

  “Yes.” I let it go at that; if it were up to me, I’d have come up with some other way of distracting the sylphs. After a couple of seconds, I said, “Don’t byproducts from a conjuration involving Beelzebub have a chance of sliding through the underground containment scheme at the dump? They aren’t all volatile, as you claimed before.”

  “I suppose that’s true.” Arnold sounded anything but happy about supposing that was true, but he did it anyhow. I give him credit for that. He tried to put the best face on it: “You haven’t alluded to these particular byproducts as being the ones which are leaking, however, Inspector Fisher. Until you show me evidence that they are, I hope you will forgive my doubts.”

  “Okay, fair enough,” I said. Going around the edges of the dump with a sensitive spellchecker, checking air and earth, fire and water for sorcerous pollutants would blow Charlie Kelly’s request for discretion further into space than the Garuda Bird could carry it, but that couldn’t be helped, not now.

  I got up and started to leave. I’d just about made it to the door when I remembered the demon imprisoned in my visitor’s talisman. I turned around and headed right back toward Magister Arnold. He was coming after me.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t mention it.” His voice was dry. “My own peace of mind is involved in keeping you healthy till you get out the door, you know. Just think of all the parchmentwork I’d have to fill out if an Environmental Perfection Agency inspector got stung to death by the Loki security system. I wouldn’t get any real work done for weeks.”

  Knowing the EPA bureaucratic procedures as I do, I was sure he was right about that. Then a couple of casually uttered words sank in. “Stung to death, Magister Arnold?” I said, gulping. “The security guard didn’t mention that little detail.”

  “Well, he should have,” Arnold answered testily. He must have noticed my face chance expression. “Before you ask, Inspector, we do have a permit to incorporate deadly force into our security setup because of the sensitive nature of so much of what we do here. If you like, I will be happy to show you a copy, complete with chrysobull, of that permit.”

  “No, never mind.” The assurance in his voice said he wasn’t bluffing. And if I wanted to check, I could do it at the Criminal and Magical Courts building. “But visitors should be warned before they enter the secure area, sir. They’d hav
e more of an incentive for following instructions carefully.”

  “Oh, it seems to work out all right. We haven’t lost one in a couple of weeks.” The aerospace man had a perfect deadpan delivery. At first I accepted what he’d said without thinking about it, then did a double take, and only then noticed the very corners of his mouth curling up. I snorted. He’d got me good.

  He led me out to the door by which I’d entered. As soon as I was on the far side of it, I took off the talisman (now I could) and all but threw it at the security guard. “You didn’t tell me it was lethal,” I snarled.

  “If your intentions were good, sir, you didn’t need to know,” he answered. “And if they were bad, you also didn’t need to know.”

  He should have been a Jesuit. After I got done gasping for air, I slunk out toward my carpet, then headed for home. It was still early, but if I’d gone someplace else and done my song and dance, I’d have been late. I was late the day before. Put the two days together, I figured, and they’d come out even. It was the sort of logic you’d expect after a Zoroastrian lunch, but it satisfied me for the moment.

  Because I was early, I made good time on the way back down to Hawthorne. Of course, that left me rattling around my flat for a chunk of the afternoon. I’m usually good at just being there by myself, but it wasn’t working that day. I didn’t feel like going out and going shopping; besides, with next payday getting close and the last one only a ghostly memory, the ghouls had been chewing on my checking account.

  I decided to do something to put crowns into my pocket, not take them out. I had three or four sacks of aluminum cans rattling around under the sink and in my closet; I took ’em out (which freed up space to put in more), carried ’em down to my carpet, and headed for the local recycling center.

  SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT AND SAVE ENERGY, said the sign outside: RECYCLE ALUMINUM. I nodded approvingly as I lugged the cans over. Some programs sell themselves as being good for the environment when they’re not, but recycling isn’t one of them.

  The fellow at the center tossed the cans on the scale, looked back at a little chart on the wall behind him. “Give you two crowns sixty,” he said, and proceeded to do just that.

  The small change went into my pocket, the two-crown note into my wallet. “Thank you, friend,” I told him.

  “Any time,” he answered. “See you again soon, I hope. You’re making some sorcerer’s life easier.”

  I let that go with a nod. Since I work for the EPA, I would have bet I knew more about it than he did. Recycled aluminum lets magicians use the law of similarity to extract more of the metal directly from the ore; it’s a lot cheaper and more energy efficient than the alchemy they have to resort to when they’re working without any aluminum source… to say nothing of the preposterous and expensive mechanical processes you have to use to coax aluminum free of the minerals that contain it. Were it not for sorcery, I doubt we’d ever have learned what a wonderfully useful metal aluminum is.

  Two crowns sixty wouldn’t come close to paying the bill from the Department of Water and Powers I’d found in my mailbox. The bill was up from last month, too; the Department, a little clipped-on notice said, had gained approval for a three percent increase in salamander propitiation fees. Everything costs more these days.

  The money I’d got for the aluminum cans would just about cover a hamburger, though not the fries that went with it. A Golden Steeples was right around the corner from the recycling center. I went in there, spent my dividend and a bit more besides. It was a long way from a gourmet treat, but when you’re eating by yourself, a lot of the time you don’t care.

  A newspaper rack stood just outside the Golden Steeples: it used the same kind of greedy little imp that dwells in pay phones. I stuck in the right change, pulled out a Times. If I’d tried to take more than one, the imp would have screamed blue murder. I think it’s a shame the racks have to resort to measures like that, but they do. Life in the big city.

  Back in my flat, I opened a beer and drank it down while I read the daily. One of the page-nine stories directly concerned me: Brother Vahan was appealing to the Cardinal of Angels City for a dispensation to allow cosmetic sorcery for one of the monks badly burned in the Thomas Brothers fire.

  I prayed that the Cardinal would grant the dispensation. Cosmetic sorcery can do marvelous things these days. If the doctors and wizards have a recent portrait of someone before he was burned, they can use the law of similarity to bring his appearance back to what it used to be. Function doesn’t follow superficial form, of course, but a burn victim gains so much by not becoming a walking horror show.

  Trouble is, the Cardinal of Angels City is a stiff-necked Erseman who takes the mortification of the flesh and God’s will seriously. The story said he was considering Brother Vahan’s appeal, “but the issuance of a dispensation cannot be guaranteed.” He was liable to decide God wanted that monk disfigured, and who were we to argue with Him?

  That sort of attitude never made sense to me. Far as I can see, if God wanted burn victims to stay ugly forever, He wouldn’t have made cosmetic sorcery possible. But then, I’m just an EPA man, not a theologian (and especially not a Catholic theologian). What do I know?

  St. George and the Dragon was splashed all over the entertainment section (and I wondered what the Cardinal thought about that). I hadn’t gotten a good enough look at the blonde by the Hollywood Freeway to tell if she was the one falling out of her minitunic in the ads. I wasn’t about to go to the light-and-magic show to find out, either. That miserable publicity stunt had cost them at least one cash customer.

  When I got to work the next morning, more pickets were marching out alongside the Confederal Building to protest the aerial spraying for Medvamps. I shook my head as I went up the elevator to work. Some people simply cannot weigh short-term inconvenience against long-term benefit.

  As soon as I got to my desk, I started working like a man possessed; had a priest wandered by, he probably would have wanted to perform an exorcism on me. But I banged through the routine parts of my job as fast as I could so I’d have time to investigate the Devonshire case properly. I wanted to get out to Chocolate Weasel that afternoon.

  The best-laid plans—

  I’d just managed to get the wood on top of my desk out from under the usual sea of parchments and visible to the naked eye once more when the phone started yelling at me. Unlike some people I know, I don’t usually have premonitions, but I did this time. What I smelled was trouble. The phone hadn’t given me much else lately.

  “David Fisher, Environmental Perfection Agency.”

  “Mr. Fisher, this is Susan Kuznetsov, of the Barony’s Bureau of Physical and Spiritual Health…”

  “Yes?” I’d never heard of her.

  “Mr. Fisher, I’m calling from Chatsworth Memorial Hospital. I was going to notify the St. Ferdinand’s chapter of the Thomas Brothers, as is usual in such cases, but due to the recent tragedy there, that was impossible. When I called the East Angels City Thomas Brothers monastery, I was referred to you.”

  “Why?” I asked. My mind wasn’t on the Devonshire dump, not that minute. But then, before she could answer, I put together whom she worked for, where she was calling from, her likeliest reason for wanting to get hold of the Thomas Brothers, and their likeliest reason for passing her on to me. “Don’t tell me, Mistress Kuznetsov—”

  “I’m afraid so, Mr. Fisher. We’ve just had an apsychic baby born here.”

  IV

  I don’t know much about babies: call it lack of practical experience. Give Judy and me a few years and I expect we’ll do something about that, but not now. Oh, my brother up in Portland has a two-year-old girl and I have some little cousins up there, too, but I can count on the smelly fingers of both hands the number of diapers I’ve changed.

  So poor little Jesus Cordero (the irony of the name struck me as soon as I heard it) didn’t look much different from any other new-minted kid to me. He lay on his tummy in the cradle, wriggling in a sort
of random way, as if he didn’t really understand he had arms and legs and could do things with them. The only thing in the least remarkable about him to the eye was an astonishingly thick head of black, black hair.

  His mother sat on the side of the bed by the cradle. She was nineteen, twenty, something like that; she might have been pretty if she hadn’t looked so wrung out from giving birth. Her husband had a hand on her shoulder. He was about her age, dressed like a day laborer. They talked back and forth in Spainish. I wondered if they’d entered the Confederation legally, and wondered even more if they truly understood what had happened to little baby Jesus.

  In the room with them were Susan Kuznetsov—a middle-aged woman, no-nonsense variety, built like a crate—and a priest. He was a tubby little redheaded fellow named Father Flanagan, but he proved to speak fluent Spainish himself. In Angels City, that’s a practical necessity for a priest these days.

  “Any question about the diagnosis, Father?” I asked him.

  “Not a bit of it, worse luck for the poor boy,” he answered. Listening to him, I wondered if you could speak Spainish with a brogue. But all such frivolous thoughts vanished as he went on: “I was going through the nursery last night the way I always do, blessing the newborns of my creed. I came to this little fellow and—well, see for your own self, Inspector.”

  He took off the crucifix from around his neck, set it against the baby’s cheek, murmured a few words of Latin. That’s not my ritual, of course, but I knew what was supposed to happen: because babies, being new to the world, are uncorrupt, the cross should have glowed for a moment, symbolic of the linkage between goodness on the Other Side and the innocence of the baby’s soul. Not for nothing did Scandinavian converts speak of the White Christ.

  But nothing was all we saw here. The crucifix might have been merely metal and wood, not one of the most potent mystical symbols on This Side. At its touch, little Jesus twisted his head in the hope that it was a milk-filled breast.