License to Ensorcell

by Katharine Kerr

  I had just finished filing my report when Ari opened the door and stepped in.

  “Time to leave,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind, but for some reason I’m quite tired.”

  “Gosh, I can’t imagine why.”

  “Neither can I.” He looked and sounded perfectly serious.

  I’d forgotten about Ari and irony. I smiled and took the laptop with me.

  Our next mystery destination turned out to be a big hotel down on Fisherman’s Wharf, right in the middle of a decent sampling of off-season tourists who, I figured, would muddle the aura field better than any electronic scrambler. The room was a definite step up from the bargain hotel of the night before, all decorated in creams and blues, with a sitting area and a good television as well as the usual sleeping arrangements. Ari had an amazing expense account.

  Since I technically still served on Chaos watch, we left the hotel so I could take a look around. I led the way through the tourist area, all gray concrete, sleazy shops, and cheap attractions. The aimless mob of sight-seers drifting through could have hidden fifty Chaotics, because I never could have sensed them there. The crowd pulsed with a muddle of thoughts and half-heard conversations, the crying of exhausted children, and the ramblings of men who’d had too much to drink.

  We walked to the silence of one of the oldest wharves, where actual fishing boats still docked. The sun was setting out beyond the Golden Gate, turning the dead-calm water into patches of rainbow, thanks to the flecks of engine oil and gasoline floating among the boats. Ari put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close while we looked north across the bay to the Marin hills, dark and tranquil in the twilight mist.

  “Nola,” he said, “do you think you’ll like living in Israel?”

  “Say what?”

  “Well, it’s very different from California.”

  “Ari, what exactly are you—”

  “Do you think I’m going to just walk out of your life? When we get this bit of work taken care of, I mean.”

  I pulled away and looked up at his puzzled frown.

  “A warning,” I said, “I’m not going to marry anyone, not even you.”

  “Well, all right. We can just live together, then.”

  “I am not moving to Israel with you.”

  “Why not?”

  “What do you mean, why not?” I wanted to say, “We’ve just met and I hardly know you,” but when I considered my behavior of the night before, those sentiments rang hollow. “My family’s all here, my job’s here, and that’s enough of a reason.”

  “No, it isn’t. We can always visit.” Ari grinned at me. “But we can discuss this later if you’d like. We do have other things to tend to.”

  “Yeah, we certainly do. Like finding my brother.”

  I turned and started back to the hotel. He caught up with me and took my hand, a comfortable fit in his. As we returned to the room, I thought about telling him the truth, that all my other—well, boyfriends for want of a better word—had all wanted to marry me as long as we were together, right together, that is, within a couple of miles of each other. Once they went farther away than that, on a business trip or vacation or whatever, they began to remember how strange I was.

  Just like Kathleen, I saw no reason to lie to them about my talents or my family. When they were with me, none of that mattered. But once we’d separated, it only took a few days for the truth to sink in. They had ended our relationship every single time.

  The first few hurt. Now I knew what to expect. I reminded myself that I had no reason to worry about Ari’s long-term plans. Let him go back to Israel to report to his superiors, and that would be that.

  While he took a shower, I distracted myself by seeing if I could find a show worth watching on TV. If Johnson were trying to see through my eyes with an MP or SM: P, maybe a dose of Looney Tunes or Star Trek would make him sign off on the attempt. The limited hotel cable offered no cartoons at all, not even animé. The only Trek episode I could find was “Spock’s Brain.” I don’t know why I was surprised. It had been that kind of week.

  The hotel, however, did offer free wireless access. I set up the laptop, which of course lacked the listing of all my usual search sites. I could remember most of them—a good thing, too, because I realized I could look for events that might be considered evidence of those deviant world levels. Since the Agency laptop had TranceWeb installed, I logged on and left an e-mail for NumbersGrrl. After I logged off, I got a temporary Yahoo address and hit the surf. I was just taking notes on one interesting “haunted” hotel in the Midwest when I heard Ari come out of the bathroom.

  “Find anything?” he said from behind me.

  “Yeah, actually, I did.” I turned on my chair and forgot what I was going to say.

  Ari was wearing only a towel, wrapped and knotted around his waist. Lamplight glistened on the patches of damp on his chest and back. He picked up a pair of his briefs from the chair by the bed, then looked at me with his head tilted to one side.

  “Is something wrong?” he said.

  “Oh, no.”

  “All right, then. Start thinking about where you want to go for dinner.”

  “I’m not hungry yet.”

  All at once he caught the drift and grinned at me. “We can always have room service,” he said, “later.”

  Fortunately the hotel’s room service stayed available till eleven. Ari fell asleep almost as soon as we’d finished eating. As I was putting the dirty dishes out in the hall, I saw the Chaos critter again. It sidled up to the remains of my salad and whined at me.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “You can eat that.”

  I’d hidden a half-eaten roll in a napkin just so Ari wouldn’t insist on me finishing it. I unwrapped it and put it out for the creature next to the salad bowl. I left it chowing down and returned to the laptop and my research.

  Hauntings have a great many explanations, simple fraud in a lot of cases, brought on by the perpetrator’s desire to be famous or to get money for their story out of the junk press. Memory combined with sincere longing produces “ghosts,” too, when a person sees their dead partner sitting in his favorite chair or hears her voice in the other room. In my early days with the Agency, I’d researched three cases that really did appear to be actual ghosts, all of them violently dead, but even those might have been time-stream scars rather than visitations.

  The so-called hauntings that interested me at the moment fell into a different, very rare category. Glimpses and voices, we can call them, of different worlds—the sound of someone walking in the room above, or a glance out the window into a different seeming view, an argument dimly heard on the other side of a bedroom wall. A woman reported standing in a shopping mall and seeing a man walk straight toward her, as if she were invisible; at the last moment she stepped aside and saw him vanish. A teacher and her entire class heard a child crying in the cloakroom of her schoolroom, but when she looked, no one was there.

  I gathered a handful of these events, if we can call them events. They all had one thing in common. They’d happened in complicated spaces, a convoluted mall, an old school building bristling with new construction, a sports stadium, a hotel. The locations might have been analogs, in a sense, for those deviant levels that “shot off in all directions,” as Y’s expert had told him.

  The role of the portal and its energy field in the case I had in hand puzzled me. The only theory I could come up with was that Doyle and Johnson had somehow invented an artificial way to skip from one deviant level to another and back again. They must have had some sort of talent or access to information about the process to even think of the idea in the first place. If they could control the skips, they could bring their drugs from Kurdistan to the United States without ever going through Customs simply by going into their own world and then out again into ours.

  I managed to convert all these observations to reasonable prose and e-mailed them off to NumbersGrrl to get her opinion. By then the clock read one in the morning. I tu
rned off the laptop and crawled back into bed. In his sleep Ari rolled over and reached for me. I cuddled close and drowsed off to the sound of his heart beating.

  Morning light and the noise of a busy hotel woke me early. Ari had already gotten up and dressed; he was sitting on the other side of the room talking on his cell phone. I staggered past him to go take a shower. When I was done, I put on the glen plaid trousers and a dark blue wrap top.

  Ari was talking on the phone in Hebrew by the time I left the bathroom. Though he never shouted or even raised his voice, I could feel his SPP: pure anger poured out of him. Finally he clicked off with a snarl.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Nothing.” He paused for a couple of seconds. “Procedural difficulties.” Another pause. “But I had a good talk with Sanchez earlier. They’re holding a news conference in a couple of hours to ask for citizen help in finding the Silver Bullet Killer. They’re going to flood the TV news services with pictures of Johnson and a description of Doyle, offer a reward, that kind of thing. A friend of the Romeros has persuaded the bank he works for to donate thirty-five thousand. The mayor’s fund is putting in ten thousand more.”

  “That should bring in a few tips.”

  “Let’s hope.” He stood up and stretched. “They want me to appear at the press event.”

  “Saying what?”

  “That the suspects are also wanted in Israel for murder.”

  “Both suspects?”

  “I doubt it, but it could be true.” Ari shrugged. “Sanchez has the right idea. He wants to stress that these men are too dangerous for anyone but the police to approach.”

  “Now there I agree one hundred percent.”

  I decided to try an LDRS for Johnson before we checked out. If he tracked me to the hotel, we’d be long gone before he arrived. As soon as I started to draw, my hand sketched out the view from the backseat of a small car. I picked up the sensation of eating greasy food, too, some kind of fast food eggy horror, and the definite stink of an unwashed human.

  “I think Johnson’s living in a car,” I told Ari. “But damn it, I can’t focus on what it looks like. He’s too busy stuffing his face.”

  “Well, can you try again later? That’s very significant.”

  “Yeah, I will, but we’d better get on the road.”

  They held the press conference in a bleak wood-paneled room at the Hall of Justice, a concrete slab of a building down near the Morrison office. I sat well away from the clustered cameras and microphones and watched while Sanchez spoke at length, announcing the reward. Ari added a few sentences about the murders on his home turf, then mentioned Michael and displayed his picture as another possible victim.

  In that building, with cops swarming all around, I felt safe enough to run a full Search Mode for Johnson. I picked up danger loud and clear to the west-northwest on the inner compass. When I tried to refine the sensation, I felt the greasy anxiety I’d come to associate with the murdering bastard. While I should have stopped the scan immediately, I had picked up something so interesting that I let it run for a brief few moments more.

  The anxiety I felt was coming from Johnson, not me. He was so intensely preoccupied with something that I risked probing a little deeper. His thoughts circled around and around the bite Mary Rose had given him. Soon, in less than three weeks, the moon would return to full. He would know, then, if he’d been infected or not.

  Next I searched for Doyle, only to run into a solid Shield Persona. I tried every trick I knew, but I never managed to break it down. I did receive a faint impression of gloating, a childish satisfaction that Johnson might be going to suffer what he himself had had to suffer for years. I broke off the attempt rather than subject myself to that twisted sentiment any longer.

  As soon as the conference ended, a uniformed officer trotted up to Sanchez and Ari, who listened intently to what he had to say. Ari filled me in as we walked back to the car, parked in an underground garage.

  “Forensics came through,” Ari said. “They found some prints on the windmill goods that match Johnson’s. He—and probably Doyle—put those things inside it.”

  “That’s weird. That’s totally weird.”

  “Everything about this case is. Why are you surprised?”

  “You have a point. Unfortunately.”

  I made another stab at finding Johnson as soon as we reached the car. I sat in the backseat with my pad and crayons. Johnson seemed to be on his guard by then, but I did see a few faint images—a steering wheel, a misty view framed by a metal rim, glimpses of a dashboard. I tore off the sheet of paper and tried again with Doyle, only to get the same kind of scribbles minus the steering wheel but plus a stretch of blue metal. Wherever they were, they were sitting in the blue sedan together.

  “This is not real helpful.” I put my supplies back in the tote bag. “I’m just surprised they haven’t left town.”

  “So am I,” Ari said. “Arrogant little sods, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah, apparently so. Unless they can’t leave for some reason.”

  I changed seats to the front, buckled on the seat belt, and realized what I’d just said.

  “Ari, I need to get back to the doorway in the park.”

  “Are they there?”

  “No. I just need another look at it.”

  Although downtown the sun shone, out by the Portals of the Past the fog lingered. The gray sky reflected on gray water. The ducks quacked as they glided back and forth out in the pond. The marble pillars and lintel stood unchanged. As I walked up the steps, I perceived no energy field whatsoever, but when I stood directly under the lintel and held my hands out to the sides like antennae, I felt the barest trace of a very faint wisp of energy.

  “Hah! I thought so.”

  I returned to solid ground and a puzzled, shivering Ari.

  “You should have worn that sweater,” I said. “Or jumper. Whatever you call it.”

  “It’s in the boot. I’ll fetch it in a moment. What did you pick up in there?”

  “The energy field’s gone. If it’s regenerating, it’s doing so really slowly.” I realized that I’d never told Ari about Y’s theory. “The Agency thinks this thing leads into deviant levels of the multiverse, aka parallel worlds. Do you know what those are?”

  “I’ve seen them referred to in science fiction films.” His voice turned weary. “Don’t tell me those are real along with everything else.”

  “I don’t know if they are or not. No one at the Agency’s sure about any of this. But just suppose for a minute that they are real. Now, suppose Johnson or Doyle comes from such a level. He could have turned this portal into some kind of device that lets them go back and forth.”

  “Very well. I’m supposing. Carry on.”

  “Michael may have the ability to move between levels on his own, on the natch, as it were. If Michael walked through the gate, he’d give the energy field a double blast of psychic power—Qi, as we call it. He’d short the thing out. Now the portal’s nonfunctional, just as if that had happened.”

  Ari blinked, looked briefly distressed, then smiled his tiger’s smile. “Which leaves Johnson and Doyle trapped here without their escape route.”

  “If our suppositions hold, it’s no wonder they haven’t left the Bay Area. They need this gate, and they must be hoping to fix it, or maybe they’re hoping it will regenerate the field on its own.”

  “Do you think it will?”

  “I don’t know. I hope so, because this theory means that Michael’s trapped on the other side of it.”

  “I thought you said he could come through on his own.”

  “Maybe he can. Even if he can, does he know it? Can a person with his talent just come back anywhere, or do they need another gate of some kind? No one knows. This is all new territory for the Agency.”

  Ari frowned down at the ground. He absently kicked a stray eucalyptus pod, then looked up.

  “I remember now,” Ari said. “Kefitzat haderach.”

>   “Say what?”

  “It’s a term from a midrash. It means “a shortening of the way,” a shortcut, I suppose you’d call it. It’s one of the things that Reb Ezekiel claimed he could teach. Teleportation of a sort, my father told me. But now I wonder.” He nodded at the portal. “It could easily have meant something like this.”

  “If you could pop into a gate and pop out somewhere else, yeah, that would shorten the journey, all right. That’s fascinating. I just wish I knew more. If Sanchez can round them up, maybe we can make Johnson and his lupine pal give us some answers.”

  “True. The police might be able to make some sort of bargain.”

  “I was thinking of a more direct method.”

  “Nola!” Ari’s voice turned sharp. “I know you love your brother, but I’m not going to do anything unethical.”

  “Not beating them up or anything. Sheer psychic talent.”

  “Oh. Very well, then.”

  He didn’t realize that if I used my talents to force a confession, I’d be doing something as unethical in my little world as physical torture would be in his. You’re slipping into Chaos thinking again, O’Grady, I told myself. Watch it!

  “There’s one thing that makes me doubt our suppositions,” I said, “and that’s how public this place is. You’d think they’d rent a house and build their device inside out of sight.”

  “This portal might have some particular property they need,” Ari said.

  “Could be.” I wondered if Y could figure out a way to analyze the portal without attracting the wrong kind of attention. “Either that, or the theory’s not valid.”

  “Well, that’s always a possibility.” Ari glowered at the lintel for a moment. “Vitrified marble.”

  “Say what?”

  “Marble is limestone transformed by high heat, usually volcanic action. This particular bit’s been through a second vitrification, thanks to the fire in 1906. There might be some sort of crystallization that transformed the stone into something they could work with.”