Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (26 page)

“Punctual as ever,” he said. Fay flicked her gaze to my daughter, then to me. We shared the look, the look we Cairness mothers share, then bustled to get drinks and nibbles ready. Ken bent to place our daughter down, but she screamed, as she always did, clawed her way up and onto his shoulders. She stuck her long index fingers into his ears and pressed her face to his hair. He bent with her weight and said, “Who else are we expecting?” He is quiet now, and pale, like he’s an extension of her, a growth from under her arms with legs and part of a brain. She likes to be carried. Looked after.

Hugo and Maria, there early to help set up, kissed her.

“Four new families are coming today. Back from Cairness a year ago,” Maria said.

“So the children are three months old?” Fay said. We exchanged our Cairness mother’s glance again and knew we would not ask the women any questions. We wouldn’t say, “How was Cairness for you?” and we would pretend not to notice their babies’ eyes, silvery grey, all of them, all of the children’s eyes that silvery grey we knew well but that the husbands didn’t recognize because they never entered Cairness with us.

Nora arrived with her family. Their son vomited red and purple lollies, half-digested, in the entrance, and we cleaned it up. His arms were covered with carefully drawn naked pictures of his mother. Nora caught me watching and pulled his sleeves down. “He’s talking now,” she said. “He’s got a vocabulary of fifteen words.”

“That’s very good,” I said. I didn’t ask her if she could understand the words he spoke or if, like my daughter, the language sounded like something not quite English. It started to rain and we watched our children shiver inside, hide their eyes. To a one they hate water. We can’t teach them to swim, can’t take them to the beach. Fay says it’s because of the terrible story Hugo tells them again and again. We can’t stop him, though. He says it’s family history. He loves the children, each one of them. He gathers them to him like disciples.

“The parents of Cairness were the meanest you ever saw.” He spreads his fingers, drawing the children’s eyes to his. “And they trapped their dear children, tricked them into a room, and they let go the sluice gates. Those children drowned, choked with water in their lungs, no air. Can you imagine?”

Oh, the children could, all right. The others hated the story, but Ken saw its importance. “She’ll want to know where she came from. When she’s older.”

“She’s our child. That’s all that matters.”

“It does matter, though. All adopted children want to know.”

“She…is…not…adopted.” I could barely stand the sight of him.

The new families arrived, bringing store-roasted chicken and packets of chips. Their babies cried and fussed, wriggled and cried.

Fay said, “Don’t worry, it gets better,” but we watched the three year olds and we knew it wasn’t true. Her son crawled around, picking the sleep out of the babies’ eyes with his long fingernail.

We’ll keep in touch. We see Susan out sometimes, and she looks insane, her furious envy making her shake to see our lovely littlies. Our children are so close in age, and our shared experiences tie us together. Two boys and two girls. All of them difficult in their own way, cold about the eyes and lacking in innocence. But they are our children and we love them. As they grow we will watch them and wonder: What will they do to the world when they are adults, and what are the words we will use to justify bringing them to life?

•

Darin C. Bradley

Prester fingered the chain — he’d pulled it from the tank behind one of the commodes downtown, in Idio, the old feed-mill turned nightclub near the depot. The chain had absorbed such faith in the dank water, pulling endlessly as expected — as the clubbers believed it would. Prester imagined each flushing synapse exhausting its neural blast all the way through the chain and into the water, where it rippled gently into the lime-scarred porcelain. Idio’s clubbers had no doubt empowered the chain to degrees that, no matter how he found his gnosis, Prester would never fully measure. The tarnished scars on the delicate chain’s aged links reminded him of flowers, complete with rusted stems and lines of calcium like pale roots.

He took a deep breath as he eased out of his reverie, now acutely aware of his apartment’s water-stained breath. With a cough, he eased the chain back into his pocket — it had invaded his thoughts with decay enough for now.

“I’m going to need more charms,” he said aloud, the phosphor glow of his computer monitor rendering his fingers blue.

“aLan,” he called.

The screen on his link-pad blinked at his elbow, its colors momentarily negative as the slender machine stirred awake.

Prester glanced at it. “Sorry, thought you were in the box.”

Lacking speakers to respond, the pad blinked its patience as Prester linked it up to his stationary computer.

“You set?” Prester asked after a moment.

“I’m here,” aLan’s androgynous voice said.

“I need more charms,” Prester told it. “A
lot
more.”

aLan thought for a moment, its status bar slipping across the monitor’s screen. “You have two hundred inactive,” it reported.

Prester looked at the diagram tacked to his wall. The newsprint had yellowed in the last six months, and the storms that had softened the city last weekend had curled its edges. In lines of colors, twisting, arranged in Solomonic sigils, yoked together by strands of brittle yarn, his ready charms littered the page: names, addresses, e-mail servers — they all promised power in different guises. Some signified chain letters still sleeping in his filing cabinet; others were acronyms for the various forwards in his e-mail inbox. A few were rumors he hadn’t yet started. Each carried its own charm, the granted wish it promised for spreading it around. Prester didn’t have enough — not to make this new rite capable of generating the wishes it would need. He needed at least enough to diffuse the Levites’ anger, should an uninvited wish
or two slip past the protective rite and into their sanctum. Prester didn’t care what it was they wanted so badly to secure — he just wanted their money.

“No good,” he finally concluded. “I already set most of them in the rite: counter-charms.” He scratched his head. “And I need the few spares to get out of here later.”

aLan did some more thinking. As familiars went, it was slow, but Prester had counted on it for so long, he didn’t want to summon a new one — not with today’s risks on the web. There was too much at stake now to open himself up to whatever strange programs would answer his call.

“Taylor,” aLan eventually reported, “has released eighty charms in the last five days.”

Prester wheeled away from the computer, the chair’s hissing casters sighing his frustration. With enough active to release that many so quickly, Taylor wouldn’t surrender any for cheap.

But what had she done with them?

•

“Why do you need so many?” Taylor asked. The Pipeline was making something digitally husky of her voice. Prester recalled with a shudder how long it had taken him to separate the glamour she’d created for herself in the ‘line from how she’d sounded in the bedroom.

Prester pushed aLan’s headphone deeper into his ear. “It’s for a job — I’ve got a deadline.”

“You can’t farm your own?”

“No.”

Taylor paused. “This isn’t about the New Levites, is it?”

Prester didn’t say anything.

“Didn’t I tell you not to take that job?”

“Yeah.”

“And you took it.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, fuck you then, Prester.” He could hear the cigarette smoke in her voice — he was still quit, ever since they decided to do it together that Christmas.

He decided to hold his tongue, decided not to tell her that not every charmer could still pull college-money from dad. With a record like his, he had few options. He hadn’t held an identity long enough in the past two years to put any real-world equity into it, so the best job he had found had been cleaning toilets for the scensters at Idio.

Prester steadied his voice. “Taylor, please. Let’s just do this —
just business.”

“Fine,” she snapped — he could tell she wasn’t doing business, not the kind he wanted. “I’ll get you the charms, but I’m going to have to pull them from what’s available.”

He could tell where this was going.

“Short notice leaves you without many options, Prester — it’s gonna take a theft to get what you want.”

Damn. He’d only just gotten used to this identity.

“Andrick,” he realized.

“Yep,” Taylor snapped, exhaling. Her smoke seemed to send static crackles through the ‘line. “And he’s got clients itching for a hit on their South African.”

Prester held his tongue. He thought everyone had abandoned the South African — no one believed in benevolent bankers looking to give away money anymore. At least, so he’d thought.

“All right,” he said. aLan’s task bar paced across the computer screen, looking rather judgmental, Prester thought. “Forward it along, and I’ll respond.”

“The money’s got to be legit,” she warned.

“It is — there’s just not much of it.”

She paused again. “You want this, you deal with the headache. No reports. Nothing.”

Prester ran a hand through his hair. It was too oily, he realized. How long had it been since he’d showered?

“I’ll play to the scam,” he promised. “Just send it along and Pipe the charms to aLan.”

“Have you got a new face ready?” she asked.

He nodded. “Been doctoring it for a few months — figured something would come up sooner or later.”

“New security number, birth — credit rec — ”

“It’s covered, Taylor. I’ll give your South Africans a week of transfers and then tank the old face.”

“You’re going to regret this, Prester.”

“I know.”

•

“They’re aligned,” aLan reported.

Prester stirred awake. Dumbed by fatigue, he took a pull from the mug on his desk, forgetting the effects of naps on coffee. He swallowed with a grimace. aLan had aligned Taylor’s charms with the new rite and was slipping the results through the aged plastic lips of Prester’s printer. He thought it looked like the machine was gumming the page — a pair of waxy, chapped jaws, trying the alignment out, hoping, perhaps, it was edible. No doubt the printer was as hungry as everything else in Prester’s apartment, including himself.

He sat up, groaning with the chair, and started re-arranging his yarn. Taylor had been good for it — aLan’s printout had forwards on it that Prester hadn’t seen yet, each one promising a different route to the same miracles, the same desires that suckered the charms into life in the first place. Ten friends, ten minutes, three wishes in an hour. Dumb as it had once sounded to Prester, there were enough people who’d try — just in case — and ship the idea along to their friends, families. Things had been different when charmers had relied only on chain letters, but the principle had been the same. Internet had only sped things up. The Pipeline made them insane.

Prester pulled scraps of paper from the piles of envelopes and petitions on his desk. After a few minutes, he’d scribbled out the names of the new charms and pinned them to the wall. He was almost out of yarn, but he had enough to track the new charms’ positions in the rite. Different threads for different wishes — ribbons on these, sketches on those, braids for counter-charms. Once aLan got the rite moving, Prester’d sell the wall again. He hoped the Arts Council was still into gutter collage.

“Right,” Prester said, stepping away. “Open the reserve charms.”

“To whom?” aLan asked mechanically.

“Doesn’t matter,” Prester told it. “I’m not looking for fireworks here, just a coincidence.”

“Set?” he asked after a moment.

“Ready,” aLan reported.

Prester closed his eyes. He only needed a few gallons — a minor wish, as it went. He tried to keep Taylor out of his thoughts, tried to keep everything she had and he didn’t from souring the charm. It didn’t matter; he could feel his resentment staining the small rite. Taylor never had to worry about how many gallons she had in the tank — her father had been buying her metro passes as long as Prester could remember. Had been forking over credits for new clothes, a better pad. New furniture. Prester hadn’t held a pass in weeks, and there was no telling how much longer he could keep the Bel Air running. He couldn’t even remember what new things smelled like.

“Send,” he ordered.

•

Outside, he smiled. The pad was warm in his pocket — heated by aLan’s now-smug computing. Prester had seen the truck parked next to his car in the lot before, but it was always much further down, closer to the pool — nowhere near Prester’s dolorous efficiency.

He thumbed open the truck’s battered tank-flap and traced a finger over the gas cap. The paint wasn’t rusted in here, and the sun hadn’t gotten to the cap’s dark plastic. He unscrewed it, slipped in his hose and started sucking. A few moments later, the truck bled its noxious fuel down the line. Prester only took a few gallons — he didn’t want to push the charms. Having only sent ten to effect the coincidence, he feared things would go bad quickly if he tried to take more than he’d earned.

Afterward, he slid the hose into his trunk and coaxed his old car to life. He’d hoped to get moving earlier, when the sunlight meant the dim, left headlight wouldn’t make any difference. Now, he just hoped that the night would slip itself over the car, shrouding as best it could the old thing’s derelict complexion. He didn’t want to attract attention.

Downtown rolled past his windows in phantasmal lumps, its many signs and streetlights casting multicolored gazes across Prester’s windshield. Every building stared at nothing, each doing its neon best to be looked at in return but self-blind to know if it was working. Artificial barge-boards clung lamely to the rooflines, their finer details brightened by gap-toothed Christmas lights like lines of glowing birds. People slipped in and out of clubs below, smoking at each other, wandering with the traffic, looking smooth and going hurriedly nowhere. Compelled. Saturday was the excuse they gave themselves, but Prester knew there were charmers behind the crowds — there were good reasons why the corner mart’s business went dead when it did, why Ladies’ Night worked better here than there. Someone wanted a hold-up — another needed a club full of pockets to pick. Charmers made their own opportunities, and different places, different circumstances, decayed as ordered.

When he cleared the avenue and maneuvered through the tree-line, he could only see the city in its paranoid glare atop the misted spruce trees — those that had grown high enough to stare back. Gated communities lifted their parental, wrought-iron fingers as Prester passed — there’d be no decay behind their gates, they promised. Stucco and sheetrock and windows with fake casements — these places had the medical teams that downtown didn’t, effecting with their trowels and nail guns the cosmetic surgery that didn’t need neon, that didn’t blind itself — it only layered scars, and no one here looked for those.

At length, he passed the furthest-adventuring suburbs and moved down the old logging road toward the Levites’ estate. Their gate was open when he arrived, and the motion of the moonlight across the shadowed drive looked like an inhalation. Prester looked up at dozens of pairs of laced-together shoes dangling from the Levites’ wind-swinging Pipeline cable. He wondered what the old wack-jobs thought they had accomplished.

•

Prester stretched his feet, reclining across the chair’s tucked and pleated leather. The parlor had the same black and white domino floor that he saw in all these enclaves. He wanted to roll his eyes, wanted to carve something pithy into the yantras and mandalas and god-damned horseshoes tacked above the dark wainscoting.

But he didn’t. aLan worked sedulously on a mahogany lowboy at his elbow, porting Prester’s rite into the Levites’ aged terminal.

“This looks fine, young man,” the Levite said. Prester didn’t know his name, didn’t think they had names.

Prester smiled. “I’ve done my best, sir.”

“Our terminal reports that many of these…
charms
are new.” The old man studied Prester through his spectacles, the light of faux gas lamps dithering across his pate. “That will make the rite more potent?”

Prester leaned forward. “Yeah. My rite will keep your database secure, and the new charms mean it will learn faster. The more it encounters, the sooner it will mature — the better it will wish.” He glanced at aLan — it was almost finished uploading. “It should be fully itself within a month.”

“Very good,” the old man smiled, hunting and pecking at his keyboard. “I’ll just see to this transfer then. Your…
familiar
should be able to validate the funds shortly.”

Prester swallowed, fishing a slip of paper from the lapel of his battered coat. He offered it to the Levite. “Use this account, if you don’t mind.”

No sense putting his new money in the old account, just in case any of the South Africans were checking.

The old man squinted as he took the paper. “Of course.”

•

Prester took the cigarettes angrily and stormed through the shop’s doors. He felt guilty about smoking, but what did it matter? Who would care? Taylor certainly wouldn’t, much as he wanted her to.

Back inside his car, he jammed the cigarette lighter into its nest and accelerated out of the lot. aLan sat coolly on the naugahyde beside him, as blue and uninterested as the light slicking Prester’s dash. He was glad he’d be switching faces in a week — the tickets that damned community-cop had tossed at him would have eaten everything he earned from the Levites…and then some. At least now he’d only lose a quarter of it on a more authentic set of new plates. He could use the rest to get the jump on next month’s charms. Maybe, for once, people would be calling him.