The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

by Harry Turtledove

  You know, of course, which road is paved with good intentions. So do I. So does the EPA. The real question wasn’t what would happen when one apsychic kid got a soul. The real question was what would happen when jinnetic engineering and jinn-splicing techniques began stirring up the psychic material of the Other Side on a large scale, I didn’t have any answers for that. Neither did anybody else. The EPAs job was to make sure we found those answers before exploiting those techniques got us into trouble, not afterwards. But to give Jesus Cordero, a series of one case, a chance at life after life—why not?

  Mistress Kuznetsov said, “Inspector, I want to thank you for being flexible; you’re going to make the Corderos very happy, and as for Jesus—he won’t understand what’s happened for a long time yet, but when he does, he’ll be eternally grateful.”

  “I hope so, anyway,” I said. “The technique is experimental and, from what Ramzan Durani told me, it hasn’t yet undergone the test of mortality. But when you’re in that position, you have to grasp at straws, don’t you?”

  “That’s my view as a public health officer, certainly,” Susan Kuznetsov said. “I wasn’t sure how the EPA would view the matter.”

  “If you’d said you wanted to add a thousand people to the experimental list I would have given you a different answer.

  But one little boy, and one I’ve met—”

  “Yes, the law of contagion does remind us of how important personal contact is, doesn’t it? I was just afraid you’d be working against contagion, as I often have to do, rather than allowing it full scope.”

  “Not this time,” I answered quietly. Letting Jesus Cordero have a chance to beat apsychia wasn’t as big a thing as thwarting the Chumash Powers or keeping Huitzilopochtli and his fiery friend from establishing themselves in Angels City, but it felt just as good. Maybe better—as Susan Kuznetsov had said, this was personal.

  I only wished the rest of my personal worries were doing as well. No word of Judy, none at all.

  To keep myself from thinking of that and what it might mean, I plunged into the environmental impact report on what importing leprechauns into Angels City was liable to do to the local thecology. I made more progress in an hour and a half than I had in the past two weeks. No wonder; now I could make my prognostications secure in the knowledge that the Wee Folk weren’t going to have any adverse effect on the Chumash Powers. I’d taken care of that myself, in spades.

  Eventually, I supposed, I’d get around to feeling bad about siccmgthe Garuda Bird on them. An EPA man, after all, is supposed to protect endangered Powers, not exterminate them. From their point of view, I couldn’t really blame the Lizard and the Great (but not Great enough) Eagle and the rest for wanting to overturn the balance of Powers and twist things back to the way they’d been before the first Europeans touched the New World.

  But, along with a couple of hundred million other people, I live in the world that’s sprung from the European expansion. And, as Michael Manstein said, we’d done more and better with this land than its original inhabitants would have in the same length of time. So while I figured I’d eventually get round to feeling bad, it wouldn’t be any time real soon.

  Speaking of Michael, he poked his head into my office about then. “I’m going home now,” he said. “Perhaps you should do the same.” He clearly wasn’t used to me working | longer hours than he did. He was right. I went home. I ate something (don’t ask me what), then went to bed. Worries or no, I slept almost as soundly as if I’d been in Ephesus: the aftermath of nearly dying a couple of times during the course of a day. If my alarm dock hadn’t screamed me awake, I might be snoring yet No sooner had I got to the office than the phone started yelling. I came this close to knocking over my cup of cafeteria coffee grabbing for it. “Environmental Perfection Agency, David Fisher.”

  “Inspector Fisher, this is Legate Shtro Kawaguchi, Angels City Constabulary Department.” Kawaguchi spoke as if he were introducing himself for the first time. “Inspector Fisher, interrogation of the suspect Jorge Vasquez has led us to your fiancee, Mistress Judith Ather.”

  I let out a whoop that rattled my windows. “That’s wonderful, Legate! When can I see her?” He didn’t answer right away. My joy crashed into dread. “Is she—all right?”

  “Unfortunately, Inspector Fisher, I must tell you she is not,” Kawaguchi answered. “You will perhaps remember that an Aztecian Power, variously called the Cracker, the Page, and the One Called Night, was involved in the abduction of Mistress Ather.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  “From what our forensics man has to say. Inspector, it appears that the One Called Night, to use the name with which you appear to be most familiar, has carried Mistress Adier’s spirit into the realm known as the Nine Beyonds. We have recovered her body. She appears to be physically unharmed; she will eat or drink if food or water is placed in her mouth.

  But as for anything more than that… I’m very sorry, Inspector Fisher, but at present it is just not there.”

  “What do we do, then?” I asked hoarsely.

  “Our preliminaiy and tentative thaumaturgic efforts to restore her to herself have failed; she does not seem as responsive to certain rituals as we had hoped.” Kawaguchi paused. “I believe you are Jewish. Is Mistress Ather, also?”

  “Yes.”

  That may account for part of it, then. Most rituals designed to counter the Craclder assume a Catholic victim, and would be less efficacious in rescuing one from a different faith. While we continue to do our utmost, I suggest you also pursue every flyway that occurs to you. Otherwise, Inspector, I can offer no guarantee that Mistress Adler’s body and spirit will ever be reunited.”

  XI

  II took my troubles down to Madame Ruth—you know, that medium with the gold—capped tooth. She had an office down on 34th and Vine. I hoped she could help with a problem like mine. When Erasmus had been so dreadfully hurt as the Thomas Brothers monastery was torched, she and I Nigel Cholmondeley managed to access him where everyone else had failed. I was praying she’d be able to do the same for Judy.

  In her green silk dress and the matching scarf she used to cover her hair, she put me in mind of nothing so much as an enormous watermelon wearing too much makeup. But her looks didn’t matter, not to me they didn’t. She and her English partner were the local experts on virtuous reality, and from what I’d seen of the technique, I figured it offered the best chance of rescuing Judy’s spirit and bringing it back to This Side where it belonged.

  Madame Ruth heard me out, then slowly shook her head back and forth. “I dunno, Inspector Fisher,” she said. “This ain’t gonna be as easy as gettin’ hold of what’s-his-name, the scriptorium spirit, was. You don’t just wanna access your fiancee’s spirit, you wanna download it, too. That’s one fresh problem.”

  “If you say that’s one, you mean there are more,” I said.

  “What are they?”

  “Two good ones, offhand,” she answered. “One’s in the spiritual realm. We were able to build our own kinda place to meet the spirit—Erasmus, that’s what he goes by—in. If your girlfriend’s already stuck in the Nine Beyonds, we’re gonna hatta go in there and haul her out. Like I said, that ain’t gonna be easy.”

  I wondered what walking through a simulation of the Nine Beyonds would be like. Could even virtuous reality pretty up something with a handle like that so anyone except a Power named the One Called Night would want to go there? I had my doubts, but I also had no choice, not if I wanted Judy back. I asked, “What’s the other problem?”

  Madame Ruth coughed and looked down at her desk, an elephantine effort at discretion. “It’s not spiritual,” she said.

  “It’s more material-like, if you know what I mean.” She stopped there.

  After a couple of seconds, I figured out what she was flying at. Tm sure Judy’s medical insurance will cover your fees,” I said. “It’s one of the Blue Scutum plans, and it has an excellent thaumaturgy benefits package.”

 
; “That’s okay, then,” she said, nodding briskly. I understood that she had to show a profit, but what would Judy have done without insurance? Got stuck in the Nine Beyonds forever because no one would come after her without crowns on the barrelhead? Or ended up bankrupting herself to pay the fees afterwards? Nothing’s simple these days.

  “Will you try to help her?” I asked.

  “Lemme talk with my partner. This is gonna take both of us,” she said, and got up to go next door. I didn’t age more than eight or ten years in the few minutes she was gone. She came back with Cholmondeley, (weedy as ever, in her wake.

  She must have read my face, because she said, “It’s okay, Mr.

  Fisher. Well give it a try.”

  I started gasping out thank—yous, but Nigel Cholmondeley cut me off. “Time for all that later, old chap, if we succeed.

  Meanwhile, where is Mistress, uh, Ather now located?”

  Kawaguchi had told me that. “Her body’s at the West Hills Temple of Healing,” I said. Where the rest of her was… Well, Cholmondeley and Madame Ruth already knew about that.

  Madame Ruth was looking through her appointments scroll. “We’re on for this afternoon and tomorrow morning, too,” she said. “We can work her in tomorrow afternoon, though, if that’s okay wit’ you?” She looked at me. I nodded.

  I wanted them to drop everything and rush right out to take care of Judy, but everybody else they were working for felt his case was the most important one in the world, too.

  Madame Ruth said, “It’s okay, Mr. Fisher, maybe even better than okay. This gives us a chance to square things with the constables and with the West Hills place, so as we can be all set up and ready to go.”

  I nodded again. Cholmondeley unrolled his own scroll, inked a quill, and scribbled a note. “We shall see you there, then, at half past one.” He stuck out a bony hand. I clasped it, then walked out of Madame Ruth’s office. I wanted to get back to my own shop as soon as I could: I was using vacation time for this visit. Crazy how you keep track of the little things even when the big ones in your world are falling every which way.

  There was a rack of news stands outside Madame Ruth’s building. I stuck a quarter-crown into the waiting palm of one of the little vending demons, took away a copy of the A.C. Times. I figured yesterday’s goings-on would be pageone stuff, and so they were: the flight of the Garuda Bird across St. Ferdinand’s Valley isn’t something you can easily ignore. Neither is the emergency evacuation of the neighborhoods surrounding the Devonshire toxic spell dump.

  Sure enough, both of those got plenty of ink, though the reporters seemed confused about just what had happened.

  That didn’t bother me; the whole truth here probably would have set off a panic we didn’t need, especially since (I hoped) things were back under control.

  One of the reporters quoted Matt Arnold out at the Loki works. He gave the impression he’d turned the Garuda Bird loose as a preorbital flight test, then went on about the next step in the space program after the Bird got us into low orbit:

  Loki was designing new sorceware to work the Indian Rope Trick from some spot on the equator 22,300 miles straight up to geosynchronous orbit, from which mages could project sorcery over big parts of the globe day and night.

  Nobody asked me, but I thought Loki ought to work on a new rope, too.

  The mess at Chocolate Weasel made page one, too, but only as a big industrial accident Not a word about the sacrifices, not a word about any connection to the mess at the Devonshire dump.

  What really got me, though, was the rest of the headlines.

  The Aztecian Emperor had ordered his entire cabinet executed, It was, the Times said, the first general cabinet massacre since the time when Azteca almost joined the First Sorcerous War on the Alemanian side. The new ministers were supposed to be “more inclined toward improving relations with the Confederation than their predecessors had been.”

  Or else, I read between the lines.

  There’d also been some sort of disaster outside D.StC., but I didn’t even glance at that story. I just headed over to Westwood to go back to work.

  When I got up to my floor, Bea was coming down the corridor as I stepped out of the elevator shaft. She asked about Judy and gave me her best in a way that sounded as if she really meant it. I’m sure she did, too; Bea cares about people. Sounding as if you care, though, isn’t so easy. Then she said, “You and Michael have done some very important work lately, and under extremely trying circumstances. I want you to know I know it, and I couldn’t be more pleased.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “But you know what? I think I’d rather have spent all that time in a nice, dull staff meeting.”

  Her head went to one side; I realized I’d stuck my foot in my face. “I’m going to understand that the way I hope you meant it,” she said, to my relief more in sorrow—and in amusement—than in anger.

  She let me escape then, so escape I did, to the smaller problems left behind after the spectacular collapse of the bigger ones. I plugged away at the leprechaun study, lining up values for my variables so I could get rolling on the crystal-ball prognostications maybe next week. I had to call the Angels City archdiocese for some of the data I needed; the Catholic Church has lived side by side with the Wee Polk on the Emerald Isle for the past fifteen hundred years, and knows more about ’em than anybody these days.

  Try as I would, though, I didn’t get a whole lot done.

  People kept coming in to congratulate me and wish me the best—Phylhs, Rose, Jose. Even if the papers were being coy, the folks I work with knew what I’d done. Maybe Michael had talked with them; I don’t know. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate their dropping by, but they kept distracting me from what I was trying to do. And when I got distracted, I had a hard time pulling my mind back where it was supposed to be.

  I also kept trying to crystal-ball it in my head, to work out where in the big picture the events in Angels City really fit.

  What did thwarting the Chumash Powers have to do with the liquidation of the Aztecian cabinet, for instance? Something, sure, but what?

  As with the leprechaun study, I was missing data. Here, though, the Catholic Church wasn’t the place that had ’em. I called Central Intelligence back in D.StC. and asked for Henry Legion.

  I listened to a long silence on the other end of the ether.

  Then the CI operator asked, “Who’s calling, please?”

  “David Fisher, from the EPA out in Angels City.”

  “One moment, sir.” If that was one moment, you could live a long lifetime in three or four of them. At last, though, someone came back on the line—a new voice, but not Henry Legion’s. “Mr. Fisher? I’m sorry to have to tell you that Henry Legion’s essence has undergone dissolution. He gave his country the last full measure of devotion; his name will go up on the memorial tablet commemorating our agency’s heroes and martyrs. He shall not be forgotten, I assure you.”

  “What happened?” I exclaimed. “And to whom am I talking?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t answer either of those questions, sir: security,” the new voice said. “I’m sure you understand.

  Good day. Thank you for your concern,” The phone imps reproduced the sound of a handset clunking into its cradle.

  I hung up, too, and stared at the phone for a while. Whatever Henry Legion had been doing, it cost him everything. I knew I’d never learn all the answers I wanted, not with him gone. I was back to my own guesses, for better or worse—probably worse. After seeing a little ways into his secret, secretive world, I was blind again.

  I wondered if his passing had anything to do with the extermination of the sitting Aztecian cabinet, or perhaps with the disaster outside D.StC. the Times had mentioned. Did some sort of war try to start there, too, and get suppressed as it had in Angels City? More things I’d never know, not without Henry Legion to ask.

  Since I’d never know, sitting around wondering was just a waste of taxpayers’ crowns. I buckled down and t
ried to do my job, but things came slow, slow. Maybe I suddenly needed a crisis breathing down my neck like a hungry werewolf to make myself perform.

  Lord, what a horrid idea!

  I flew into tile parking lot of the West Hills Temple of Heating about ten past one the next afternoon, then flew around inside the lot for the next ten minutes looking for a space for my carpet. I wouldn’t have been late, not for anything.

  When I told the receptionist who I was and for whom I was looking, she said, “Go up to the fifth floor, Mr. Fisher.

  Mistress Ather is in 547, right across the hall from the Intensive Prayer Unit. Just follow the IPU signs and you can’t go wrong.”

  Famous last words, I knew. Well, this time the gal was right; the signs took me straight to 547. I didn’t know what to think about Judy’s being where she was. Should I have been glad she was so close to intensive prayer in case she needed it, or worried she was there because they were afraid she would need it? Being me, I worried. When I opened the door to 547, I discovered a constable sitting in one of the uncomfortable-looking chairs in there.

  He carefully checked my EPA sigil and said, “You’re fine, Mr. Fisher, but we have to be sure,” before he went back to his book.

  By then I’d forgotten all about him. Seeing Judy again took everything else out of my mind. She didn’t look bad, but then she always looks good to me, so I wasn’t in any real position to judge. Her color was good, her eyes were open, she was breathing normally: to that much I can objectively attest.

  But I soon noticed that, even if her eyes were open, they didn’t track. I walked across her field of vision a couple of times, but she took no notice of me. She didn’t say anything. When she moved on the bed, she didn’t adjust the covers afterwards. Her body lay there, but not the rest other. That was off in the Nine Beyonds, the realm of the One Called Night.