Wood Sprites

by Wen Spencer

  “They’ll have us.”

  Louise hunched against a scream of denial. She felt so close to crumbling. She couldn’t bear the idea of being responsible for four real babies, each one as hungry as Joy, and as inquisitive as Nikola. Four Joy/Nikolas all with poopy diapers? Louise couldn’t be their mother. The babies needed someone that wasn’t teetering on the edge. They deserved someone that didn’t feel so eggshell fragile that they were starting to wonder when, not if, they would break under the stress.

  The twins needed to save the babies. It would destroy them both to lose the babies now. But be the babies’ parents? No, they couldn’t do that.

  * * *

  Louise woke up to a mischief of singing mice. Four of them stood on her pillow; one tapped her on the nose. When she opened her eyes, they began to sing in four-part harmony.

  “Blue Moon,” the four mice sang. “You saw me standing alone. Without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own.”

  “Nikola?” Louise rubbed at her eyes, wondering if she were dreaming. When she’d fallen asleep, there had been only one naked mouse robot. She had been struggling to fit fur onto it. Her sewing skills weren’t matching up to the task of creating the form-fitting skin.

  No, she was awake, and there were definitely four white-furred mice sitting on her pillow. They each had a tiny scarf of different colored fabric wrapped about their neck. The one with a blue muffler waved its hand, identifying itself as her baby brother while the other three clapped their tiny paws. It was very cute in a slightly creepy kind of way.

  She sat up, careful not to knock them from the pillow. “How did you . . . ? There was only one . . . And it was naked.” She cautiously picked up Nikola mouse to peer closely at its skin. The rabbit fur had been perfectly joined together so she could barely see the seams.

  The babies all started to talk at once.

  “Joy fitted the skins,” Pink Scarf said.

  “We printed more mice!” Red Gingham said.

  “She used magic!” Green Velvet said.

  “It was boring waiting to take turns!” Pink cried.

  “They’re kind of cramped, even just for one,” Nikola squeaked. It was still Christopher Robin’s Welsh lilt but sonic high, thin, and fast.

  “So we made one for each of us!” the girls chorused.

  “Vroom! Vroom!” Pink cried. “We can run really fast!”

  “And climb!” Green added.

  “We can race!” Pink cried.

  And the girls took off running in a lap around Tesla, making high-pitched motor noises. Tesla lay unearthly still. Louise had gotten used to the babies moving the dog’s body. It was even creepier to see the big robot sitting idle.

  The mice finished their lap with Pink winning.

  “Joy made us racing scarfs.” Nikola showed off his blue muffler. “Mine is Wind Clan blue!”

  “Mine’s wonderful amazing pink!” Pink cried. “I want goggles, too! Just like Tinker and Oilcan!”

  It took Louise a moment to recognize the nicknames of their sister and cousin. It also made Louise realize that she’d been thinking of all of the babies as Nikola Tesla when only one of them was a boy. The three girls still were unnamed.

  “Have you thought about names?” Louise asked.

  “I want to be Jawbreaker,” Red Gingham stated.

  “Jawbreaker?” Louise echoed, mystified.

  “It’s Joy’s favorite candy,” Jawbreaker explained.

  “Maybe . . .” Louise hesitated in suggesting “Candy” as a name. It was one of those weak, sexist female names that always appalled her mother. “Girls should have names that allow them to be Supreme Court judges if they wanted. Sissy and Candy would have an uphill battle just because of their names.” Still, Candy had to be better than Jawbreaker . . . right?

  “I want to be Chuck Norris,” Pink announced as Louise struggled on with the whole “strong name” issue.

  “Chuck Norris is a boy,” Nikola pointed out.

  “I can be a boy if I want to be,” Pink stated firmly and then turned to Louise. “You get to pick your gender, don’t you?”

  Before Louise could answer, Green Velvet squeaked, “I want to be Jawbreaker, too.”

  “No! I said it first!” Red Gingham cried.

  They collapsed into a ball of squirming fur as they wrestled for use of the name.

  “Careful!” Louise caught them in her cupped hands before they could roll off the edge of the bed. “Hey, no fighting.”

  They were so tiny and light. The two of them barely weighed anything at all as they squirmed about, all soft rabbit fur and plastic bones. They felt so fragile that it took her breath away. She could crush them by accident.

  This isn’t really them, she reassured herself. They’re still safe within Tesla.

  “What’s wrong with names like Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey or Rachel Carson?”

  “We want names like Tinker and Oilcan!” the babies squeaked in chorus. “They’re so cool! You should see them race! They’re awesome!”

  “Race?” Louise wondered if she was mistaken about the whole “awake” thing.

  * * *

  Sometime during the night, the babies had visited the Jello Shot forum and discovered a vast treasure trove of pictures and video of Alexander. All of them had to do with hoverbike racing. The still shots were all after winning a race, covered with mud except where goggles protected her eyes, grinning triumphantly. In many of the photos, Orville was within arm’s reach, smiling just as brilliantly.

  The Jello Shot people were divided in several camps. The haters were disappointed that Alexander didn’t look like the valkyrie from The Queen’s Salvage. What did Prince Yardstick see in such a short, dirty, wild thing? With so many beautiful female elves to choose from, why had he married her?

  The romantics decided that the blonde in the video was a clear reference to Disney’s Cinderella and that Lemon-Lime had merely presented an iconic princess with a Pittsburgh twist. Clearly the masses weren’t ready for the truth, which was “Love is indeed blind.”

  A growing number of fans, however, were entranced by Alexander. They wanted to know everything about her, hence the unearthed videos. The sources were Pittsburghers in college on Earth, people who had studied at the University of Pittsburgh, and the small but rabid niche fandom of hoverbike racing.

  The Jello Shots had found an amateur documentary made during last year’s blistering hot summer. The filmmaker was Charles Wyatt, a grad student in history attending the University of Pittsburgh. Apparently it was his only effort at making a documentary, and it showed. All the scenes were horribly framed, badly scripted, and lacked anything in terms of editing. At least he had a rich, deep voice. He saw the hoverbike as the first integration of elf magic and human machine. It might turn out to be like the Jacquard loom, which could be “programmed” via paper tape, arguably the great-grandfather of the modern computer. “A chance to record history as it’s being made by the people actually making it,” Wyatt announced at the start of the video. He’d conceived of the documentary with only a few months left on Elfhome to film it. Almost immediately, he ran into an unexpected reluctance of those involved to talk to anyone with a camera.

  Wyatt started with the president of a company that made hoverbikes.

  The man laughed and shook his head. “I don’t really know how they work. I could rebuild the gearbox for the spell chain blindfolded, but explain how it actually makes the bikes move forward? No.”

  There was a long surprised pause that hadn’t been edited out. “I was told you’ve made all the hoverbikes in Pittsburgh.”

  “Mostly. There are a handful of custom jobs that we didn’t do. Deltas. The next generation. They’re faster.”

  “How can you be the only manufacturer of hoverbikes and not know how they work?”

  “We’re mostly just modifying motorcycles. We order in superbike racers with twin four-stroke twelve-hundred-cc engines. Hoverbikes need powerful engines for the lift drives. We
strip them down for the engine, the transmission, and the entire electrical system, including the headlights—just about everything but the frames and the wheels. We discovered it was easier to carve the frame out of ironwood. The flexibility of the wood allows for more vibration damping and better impact tolerance.”

  “Vibration? Like what you get while riding a bicycle on a rough road? Is it really that much of a problem in a flying vehicle?”

  “No, not that. The spell chain is sensitive to some sound resonance . . .” The president paused and considered the camera with a slight widening of his eyes, as if he realized everything he was saying was being recorded. “I’d rather not discuss specifics. Company secrets and all that.”

  “But-but-but where do you get the spell chains?” Wyatt asked. “Who makes them? Are they actual chains?”

  The president considered for a moment before admitting. “Yes, there’s a chain. The design is under patent, but we’re trying to keep it a literal black box. We have an exclusive licensing agreement with the inventor. Like I said, except for a handful of custom models, we’re sole producer of hoverbikes in Pittsburgh, and we would like to stay that way. It’s a small niche market, and we have to sink a lot of money into parts and labor before we can make a profit.”

  “I understand. Historically, it’s the mass supply and demand that fuels innovation. When only a handful of companies could afford computers, the rate of improvement in the technology was minuscule compared to the leaps in advances when they became tools of the masses.”

  “Pittsburgh doesn’t have masses. It’s still an expensive, nearly handmade piece of equipment with a very narrow profit margin.”

  “But if you could find some way to translate them to Earth . . .”

  Suspicion filled the Pittsburgher’s face, and the segment ended with president gesturing that the camera should be turned off. “I think I’ve answered enough questions.”

  Wyatt then proceeded to stop random people who owned hoverbikes and ask how they worked. The riders could explain that the lift drive took power from the gasoline engine and “somehow generated the vertical motion.” The more power into the lift drive, the higher the bike would hover, at the sacrifice of speed to the horizontal motion. That much they all knew.

  One college student leaned against his hoverbike, shaking his head. “It hurts my brain when I try to understand it. The lift you can actually see if you’re like over a mud puddle. See. There’s a force pushing downwards, and it’s creating an equal and opposite reaction. But the forward motion? I really don’t know how it possibly works. Especially the fact that you can brake. Logically the bikes should be like boats in water; in a frictionless state, things in motion stay in motion. It’s not stopping on a dime, but you can brake—only I have not a clue how. It’s not like you throw out an anchor.”

  Louise could guess which spell Alexander had used to create the lift. She wondered about the possible combinations of spells that could have created the forward motion of the hoverbike.

  It took Wyatt weeks before he managed to catch Alexander on-camera. Even then, he wasn’t aware that he’d found the person that he was looking for. He’d cornered Team Tinker at the racetrack, packing up to leave for the day. Heavy steel toolboxes and a mud-covered hoverbike were being strapped down onto the back of a big flatbed truck with “Pittsburgh Salvage” painted onto the door. Two massive elfhounds came to their feet as Wyatt walked up to the team, their growls as deep and menacing as a grizzly bear’s.

  “Bruno. Pete.” A man in a Team Tinker T-shirt called to the dogs, silencing them. “We don’t allow photographing of our riders except during the races. We do sell publicity photos. If you want pictures, come by our table in the concession area next week.”

  There was a jump in time as Wyatt negotiated the right to continue filming. During the interval, Alexander appeared on the back of the flatbed. Hair damp from a shower, she wore a Team Tinker T-shirt, cargo shorts, and hiking boots. She stomped in and out of the shoot, checking gear and complaining about the heat. Either Wyatt had been banned from photographing her or he missed the subtle body language of the people arrayed around him. Alexander might have been the youngest member of the team, but her teammates rotated around her like planets about a star. Instead, Wyatt kept the camera trained on the team’s business manager, who was only identified by the name of “Roach.” (Everyone in Pittsburgh apparently used weird nicknames.)

  “Everyone I’ve talked to says that the Chang family might have built the race track but it was Team Tinker that started the sport.”

  “I suppose,” Roach admitted cautiously. “Most of us went to high school together.” This generated a rude noise from Alexander. “Those of us that went to high school. The statistical outliers we met through business.” Another rude noise. “Roach Refuse.” He tapped his chest. “Pittsburgh Salvage.” He waved vaguely toward the truck. “Even people with brains the size of a planet need help with how to successfully run a business when they’re first starting out, and I learned it at my grandfather’s knee.”

  “How did you start the sport? Where did you get the hoverbikes? Were they already invented or was that part of coming up with the sport?”

  Roach’s eyes widened slightly and the corner of his mouth twitched with what might have been a nervous laugh. He started to turn toward Alexander, but she cut him short with, “Ah-uh! You’re the one that agreed to this!” He winced and ducked his head to kick at the ground for a moment.

  Orville came onto camera, freshly showered, carrying his muddy riding leathers and a cherry ice pop. With a wary look at Wyatt, he handed the ice pop to Alexander. He asked a silent question with the jerk of his head and Alexander snorted with utter disgust. The cousins sat side by side on the edge of the truck’s bed as Alexander sucked on the ice pop and listened to Roach trying to explain.

  “It’s not like we don’t have money,” Roach said. “But in Pittsburgh, we use barter a lot instead of cash. It’s a simple way to cut out the middleman who would normally take a big chunk of the profit to collect and redistribute goods. I’ve got a puppy. The guy who wants an elfhound has a half dozen old snowmobiles that are useless eight months out of the year. I know how to set up accounting books so the county won’t hassle you.” He jerked his head in the direction of the cousins. “They know how to cannibalize snowmobiles into something more all-weather. The thing nobody has a lot of are tires, especially ones for ATVs. Harder than sin to come by. We’re sitting around, drinking beer, having a bull session on where we could scrounge up tires, and the little mad scientist starts to giggle.”

  A woman walked into camera range, carrying gear that she dropped beside Alexander. “Usually a very terrifying thing, and you want to get out of blast range as quickly as possible, but still be in viewing distance, because it will be worth watching.”

  Alexander glared at the woman, who danced away from a halfhearted kick.

  Roach took a couple of steps out of reach, too. “A week later, we all had hoverbikes. And of course, the most natural thing in the world is to race them.”

  There was a long silence after Roach came to the end of his story. Wyatt waited for more but none was coming. Judging by the looks Roach was giving Alexander, he was vaguely afraid of saying anything else.

  “You’re Team Tinker,” Wyatt broke the silence. “Is Tinker the one that invented the hoverbikes? I’ve heard all sorts of wild rumors about Tinker.”

  The racing team all froze in place at the question.

  “What wild rumors?” Alexander had been in the middle of licking melted ice pop off her fingers.

  “Umm.” The camera bobbed as Wyatt accessed his notes. “Umm. The half-elf that runs the general store in McKees Rocks said that Tinker lives in the middle of the river and hands out magical swords to future kings.”

  “What?” the entire team half-shouted, half-laughed.

  “Yeah, it sounded really Arthurian to me,” Wyatt said. “I talked to a few elves, and they all said that Tinker i
s a baby wood sprite, which apparently is a race of very clever but dangerous elves or a very clever but dangerous raccoon. My Elvish isn’t that good.”

  Roach was making little snorts as he tried to hold in his laughter.

  Orville scooped up Alexander as she started to sputter and carried her off-camera.

  “One person, an EMT, by the name of Johnnie Be Good, claimed that Tinker fathered most of the half-elves in Pittsburgh and is Blue Sky Montana’s real father.”

  Roach lost control of his laughter. After a full minute of laughing, he wiped tears out of his eyes and stated, “That one is utterly true.”

  There was a howl of anger and the video went black. Captions explained that Roach had ducked a helmet thrown at him, and it hit the unsuspecting Wyatt instead. His only camera broken, he was unable to continue filming. The team reimbursed him for his camera. There was no indication, however, that they ever told him the truth.

  Louise played the interview with Team Tinker over and over again. This was her older twin sister. Their cousin Orville, who obviously was loving and protective and caring. Their close friends that they could count on. A warm and bright happy moment that Louise wanted for herself.

  The babies, however, quickly grew bored of it and started to add mini-windows to the screen to show off clips of Alexander and Orville racing on hoverbikes. The mice stood on her shoulders, tugging at her hair and pointing, squeaking excitedly.

  “Maybe we can make mini-hoverbikes!” Nikola stated. “They use a gasoline engine only because they need to lift the weight of an adult. If we can figure out what spells Alexander used, we could just stand on top of a magic generator and fly.”

  The thought of the four mice zipping around the bedroom like hyper bats felt dangerous. Louise knew that the mice bodies were merely remotely run puppets for the babies, but mini-hoverbikes just seemed to have “will not end well” written all over it. (Even though she had to admit—quietly to herself—that she didn’t know it would. Surely common sense overruled precognition.)