The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

by Harry Turtledove

  “It could make you a nice piece of change, and us, too,”

  Madame Ruth said. “Like you said, virtuous reality is the coming thing, and if you was to get a piece of it-° “Wealth means nothing to me,” Brother Vahan said. I’ve heard a lot of people say that; he was one of the handful who made me believe it “As may be,” Nigel Cholmondeley said, which meant he had his doubts, too. He also had a hook: “No matter how frugal you personally may be, have you not got a monastery to rebuild?” Brother Vahan stared at him.

  I watched the hook snag the fish. The abbot said, “Let us discuss it, then, for the greater glory of God.”

  “Let’s eat somethin’ while we talk,” Madame Ruth said, which struck me as more honest than let’s do lunch and most of the other ways people try to combine business and food.

  Despite my sausage, I was hungry, too, but not as hungry as I thought I’d be. When I asked my watch what time it was, I found out to my amazement that I’d been in the world of virtuous reality for only about five minutes. It had seemed like a couple of hours while I was there. Oneiromancers say dreams are like that: a lot of things going on but compressed very tightly in terms of time. Judy keeps up on the ins and outs of theoretical thaumaturgy better than I do; I made a note to ask her how virtuous reality simulated the dream effect.

  I didn’t have lunch with Brother Vahan and the medium and channeler; enough things were going on at the office that I wanted to put in as much time as I could there, trying to claw my way through the piles of junk on my desk. I wouldn’t starve before dinner. So I went south through the pass into Westwood a little faster than a constable armed with a tracking demon would have approved of. Fortunately, I didn’t spot any black-and-white carpets all the way back down St. James’ Freeway.

  After a good trip on the freeway, I got stuck in regular flyway traffic on the way back to the Confederal Building. I peered around the carpets ahead of me, trying to figure out what had gone wrong this time.”

  The fellow on the rug next to me leaned over and called, There’s a demon stration up there at the comer.”

  Up there at the comer, of course, was where I was trying to go. I growled. “So what if there’s a demonstration? There’s a demonstration at that comer about three days a week.”

  Then what he’d said really sank in. “A demon stration?” I didn’t want to believe I’d heard that.

  But he nodded. I wondered if I ought to turn my carpet around and get out of there as fast as the sylphs would take me. No wonder there was a traffic jam, if demons were out protesting Confederal policy. I hoped the building would survive. There’d be SWAT teams and God only knows what all else up there, trying to keep the irate Powers from turning the place into an inferno.

  My sense of duty got the better of my sense of selfpreservation. I kept going toward the Confederal Building. It took a while for me to inch close enough to find out what was going on. I’d been wrong in my first guess: the Powers at the demon stration weren’t apt to turn violent, and they didn’t need constabulary thaumaturges to hold them at bay. But as soon as I saw them, I understood why they stopped traffic. You see, they were all succubi.

  Actually, that’s not quite true. Some of them were incubi, and some of them—well, I’m not quite certain whose fancy some of them catered to, but whosever it was, I’m sure they met it.

  As for me, I barely noticed those others. I was busy watching the succubi. I couldn’t help myself. Some of the pictures up on Iosefs wall were pretty spectacular, but pictures don’t begin to convey the essence of what succubi are all about. When you see them in the quasi-flesh, you can’t help but think they’re the creatures men were really designed to mate with; they make women look like clumsy makeshifts.

  Phyllis Kaminsky, bless her heart, was down there arguing with some of them, trying to convince (hem to give up and go away. Phyllis is a nice-looking gal, several years younger than I am and in better shape, too. The company she was keeping made her seem a poorly jointed wooden puppet turned out on a lathe by somebody who didn’t know how to run a lathe very well.

  One little devil with a blue dress on happened to catch my eye. The promise on her face, the way she ran an impossibly moist tongue over unbelievably sweet, unbelievably red lips, the sinuousness (and you can turn that into a pun or not, just as you please—it works either way) of her hip action—put ’em all together and it’s a minor miracle I didn’t run into the carpet in front of me.

  One of the reasons I didn’t was that the gal flying that carpet wasn’t exactly where she was supposed to be, either: instead of keeping her eye on the carpet in front of her, she’d been gaping at an incubus who was taller, darker, and handsomer than he had any business being.

  When you think about it, you shouldn’t be surprised our sexual demons are so strong. They’ve been evolving right along with us for as long as we’ve been human, proof of which is how strongly they manifest themselves on This Side.

  They’re used to coming Across; they’ve been doing it for millions of years. (You have a dirty mind, do you know that? Filtering out all the double entendres that come naturally [you see, there you go again] when discussing succubi is more trouble than it’s worth.) Unlike the Medvamp protesters, the succubi and incubi didn’t cany signs or chant slogans. They just paraded, they were their own best message.

  By then I’d got dose enough to hear Phyllis as well as see her. She was saying, “-but the existence you lead degrades both you and mankind. Don’t you see that sexual exploitation is wrong and damaging to the soul?”

  “If this were a Muslim country, we’d be honored, not hunted,” a succubus retorted. Though irate herself, she made PhyUis sound shriD and screechy by comparison: her voice brought to the ear the taste of Erse Creme liqueur. She went on, “We have no souls to worry about; we exist for pleasure. And since you humans endlessly prate about free will, surely you’ll admit you can choose us or avoid us as you see fit.”

  PhyUis had been over that ground before. She said, “Tart of your attraction comes from the Other Side, so it distorts free will. Besides, humans of unsavory sorts carry on their sordid affairs in areas you frequent because they know they’ll find a lot of customers there. You don’t just haunt neighborhoods—you blight them.”

  The succubus’ shrug was magnificent. This is your problem, not ours. We get we want from humans; they get what they want from us. We find it an equitable arrangement.”

  As I finally flew into the parking lot, Phyllis lost her temper and started shouting at the succubus. It’s always a mistake to let Powers, even minor ones, get your goat. They have more patience than people anyhow; what with their far longer terms of being, they can afford it.

  Besides, here I feared PhyUis was fighting a losing game.

  The succubus’ knowledge of biology was empirical and extremely specialized, but she had a point: her kind and mankind were essentiaUy symbiotes, and nobody was likely to make either turn loose of the other. If that hadn’t happened all through recorded history, it wasn’t likely to start in modem Angels City.

  But Phyllis had a point, too. Because the people in our society who go to succubi and incubi are generaUy out for a cheap thrill, they’re often the people who go after other thrills. Find a neighborhood with succubi on the streetoorners and you’H generally find it’s not the kind of place where you’d want to bring up your lads if you had a choice. Keeping sexual demons of any flavor off the streets makes pretty fair sense to me.

  I parked my carpet, got off, and went over to see if Phyllis wanted a hand from me. As I was walking up to her that succubus in blue gave me the eye again. My breath went short. I couldn’t help ifc succubi have been perfecting the art of seduction probably since the days of the man-apes. Natural selection works on the Other Side no less than on this one—Powers that aren’t adored perish, and others take their place.

  If my reaction meant anything, that particular succubus would stay around forever.

  Phyllis saw me not quite slavering and made a
n exasperated noise. I suppose I can’t blame hen I must have seemed more like part of the problem than part of the solution. She said, “What do you plan on doing, Dave? Will you whip out your little tin badge and run them all in?”

  You don’t want to get into a war of sarcasm with Phyllis, or at least I don’t. I’ve been scorched often enough to keep that in mind at all times. So—please believe me—I was about to answer with something mild and soothing.

  But before I could, the succubus in blue said, “I’m sure he’d rather whip out something else instead, dear.” Just listening to her was enough to set my heart racing like a couple of laps around the track. But when she licked her lips again, I started sweating so hard I did the only thing I could (short of whipping out something else, I mean)-I fled.

  Phyllis lost it. Again, I can’t say I blame her—here she was, watching one of her own people turned into a bowl of quivering gelatin (I was definitely quivering, but at least part of me was a lot stiffer than gelatin) by one of the sexy little demons she was trying to control. She started screaming at the succubus. The succubus screamed right back, with invective from just about every language since primeval Indo-European.

  She’d had a lot of satisfied customers, all right.

  Since I obviously wasn’t going to be of any use at the demon stration, I went upstairs to work on other tilings.

  Rose had left a message on my desk: Professor Blank of UCAC had called while I was out.

  Scratching my head, I took the message up to her. “Professor Blank?” I said, pointing. “Wouldn’t he leave his name?”

  Now Rose looked puzzled. “I think he said his first name was Harvey.”

  There I was, looking and feeling like an idiot twice in the space of ten minutes. Harvey Blank was chair of the Goetic Sciences Department at UCAC; he was one of the first people I’d phoned about investigating whether the Chumash Powers were still around. I slunk back to my desk and returned his call.

  The telephone imps reproduced his voice even more blurrfly than is their habit; he must have been eating something when he answered. After a sentence or two, he spoke more clearly: “Hello, Inspector Fisher. Thanks for returning my call. I wanted to get back to you about some preliminary results of the extinction investigation.”

  “Go ahead,” I said, grabbing for a pencil and a scrap of parchment. “What have you learned?”

  “Not as much as I’d like,” he answered: yes, he was a professor. “The experiments I have conducted, however, do indicate that the Powers formerly venerated by the Chumash Indians are not currently manifesting themselves in the Barony of Angels.”

  “They’re extinct, you mean?” I had curiously mixed feelings. Most of me was sorry, as I’m always sorry (well, almost always—I’d make an exception for Huitzilopochtli) to see the Other Side diminished. But that nasty, lazy piece everyone has lurking inside, the one Christians identify with Original Sin, let out a cheer because I wouldn’t have to work as hard on the leprechauns if the Chumash Powers were gone for good.

  “I didn’t quite say that,” Professor Blank said.

  “That’s what it sounded like to me,” I told him.

  “It was the first conclusion I drew from the thaumaturgic regression analysis,” he admitted. “A more thorough evaluation of the data, however, leads to a different interpretation: it seems more likely that the Powers in question have not so much vanished as withdrawn from any contact with This Side. The withdrawal appears volitional.”

  “Are you sure?” I said. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.” The general rule is that Powers will keep a toehold on This Side if they possibly can: the more active they are, the more they show themselves in the world, the better chance they have of attracting and keeping worshipers to give them the veneration they need, Professor Blank said, “No, I’m not sure. The void in the thecological contours of the barony is certainly there. It is, however, if you will permit me to employ metaphorical language, more as if the Powers made the hole and pufled it in after themselves than as if they simply disappeared from spiritual starvation.”

  “They are gone, though?”

  “They’re gone,” he agreed. “That much is indisputable. I have been unable to contact or detect them in any way, either by recreating the old Chumash rituals or through modem scientific sorcery.”

  “But they might come back?”

  “If the situation is as I envision in the highest—probability scenario, that possibility remains open, yes. If on the other hand this is merely an unusually sudden extinction, as remains possible, they are indeed gone for good.”

  “Can you find out which more precisely?” The lazy part of me was still hoping to get away with running only one set of projections for the thecological impact of leprechauns on the Barony of Angels. If I had to run two, all right But ifl had to run two and then didn’t know which one to we—nightmares spring from such things. So do blighted careers.

  “I’m working on that now,” Professor Blank said. By the way he said it, he hadn’t the faintest idea whether what he was working on would work, if you know what I mean.

  “Let me ask you something else,” I said: “Suppose the Chumash Powers have withdrawn voluntarily—in their terms, suppose the great eagle whose wings support the Upper World has flown away. Is it goetically even possible for them to reverse the process?’ “I don’t know, just as I don’t know why they’ve withdrawn,” Blank answered. “My research team is still working on that, too. We’re exploring various possibilities there.”

  “Such as?” I prompted.

  “Speculation (and that’s all it is at this point) ranges from withdrawal to maintain some level of survival—the Other Side’s equivalent of fungi forming spores when the environment grows too hostile for normal growth—to an active protest against the thecological changes here over the past two centuries.”

  When I heard that, I wanted to bang my head on the desk. Protests about environmental issues are hard enough to deal with when they come from This Side.

  What was going on down on the sidewalk showed how much more complicated they could get when Powers started playing what had at first been a human game.

  Absurdly, I wondered whether the Chumash First People and Sky Coyote had gotten the idea from the parading succubi. After a moment, I realized that was impossible: the Chumash Powers had disappeared before the sexual demons went on the march.

  “Hunger strike,” I murmured, as much to myself as to Professor Blank.

  “I pray your pardon?” he said.

  “Maybe the Powers are starving themselves of recognition to force us to notice them and give them the veneration they require.”

  “Thank you, Inspector Fisher; that will go onto the list. And let me thank you again for involving me and my graduate students”—I presume that was what he’d meant when he talkeda bout his research team before—“in this project I am confident we shall eventually learn a great deal from it.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that eventually. “When do you hope to have some results I can use to help plan policy, Professor? I think I ought to remind you that this isn’t just a research project, but one where the answers will be put to practical use.”

  “I understand that, of course,” he said, a little sulkily. He might have understood it, but he didn’t like it one bit. A professor indeed, I thought. He went on, “We shall endeavor to be as expeditious as possible, provided that we remain consistent with appropriate experimental protocols.”

  “That’s fine, sir, but I think I ought to warn you that if I don’t have harder data than you’ve given by, hmm, three weeks from today, I can’t guarantee that your report will become part of the decision-making process.”

  Was I playing fair? Of course not, not even slightly. Professors always claim they go into the university or take holy orders or whatever so they can devote their full attention to whatever they’re interested in; Roman epigraphy or beekeeping or the thaumaturgical arts of a vanished Indian tribe. Sometimes they
even mean it But a lot more often, I’ve found that professors who see a chance to influence events outside academe will leap at it in spite of their alleged lack of interest Truth to tell, I don’t know if a savant of Roman epigraphy ever got that kind of chance (at least since the days when the Empire was a going concern), but my guess is that he’d grab it, too.

  And so now Professor Blank said, “Three weeks, eh?”

  Even with two phone imps between his mouth and my ear, he sounded distinctly unhappy. Another phone pause followed. I understood the reason for this one: he was giving me a chance to say I’d made a mistake and the real deadline was three months—or three years—away. I didn’t say any such thing. Blank sighed. “Very well, Inspector Fisher, I will attempt to meet the challenging timeframe you have outlined. God give you good day, sir.”

  The same to you, Professor, and I’m grateful for your help. I look forward to seeing your detailed report; it will be most valuable both to me and to the Environmental Perfection Agency as a whole.” As long as he was going to do what I wanted, I had no problem with letting him down easy.

  It worked, too; he seemed a lot happier by the time he got off the phone.

  I spent the next several minutes making notes on the conversation, both as an aide-memoire for me and to let me have something to show Bea so she’d know I really and truly was working on all the cases that crowded my desk. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have had to waste my time with worries like that, but no one has ever claimed Plato would recognize the Confederal bureaucracy as an ideal world.

  I asked my watch what time it was, found out it was almost half past four. A busy day. I was getting tired of not having the chance to get up to Bakhtiars Precision Burins, but I had made one trip to St. Ferdinand’s Valley. Maybe tomorrow, I told myself. I wrote a note reminding me to call Tony Sudakis tomorrow, too; the investigation had gone so many different ways lately that I hadn’t done much with the Devonshire dump itself in quite a while. Sudakis probably figured I’d fallen off the edge of the world, not that he’d miss me if I did.