The Lost Gate (39 page)

“What about a birth certificate?” asked Marion.

“I was thinking I'd go back to DC and ask Stone. He'll know how to get one made. Maybe find somebody who was born on the same day as me, but died young. Or maybe just buy a flat-out forgery. Or maybe I gate into some county's records office and fill out the forms myself and insert them into the records. We'll make it work.”

“So you're back to criminal activities,” said Leslie.

“Come on,” said Danny. “I have to have a birth certificate. An identity. There's no safe
and
legal way for me to get one.”

“She knows that,” said Marion. “And we both know that to get on in the drowther world you're going to have to have all that identification sooner or later. It sounds to me like you've thought this all through. Like you're exactly the careful, responsible, intelligent young man we thought was ready for a car. Only instead you're ready for something much bigger.”

“He'll still need a car, even in Buena Vista,” said Leslie.

“No, I won't,” said Danny. “I'm going to show up there poor, not prosperous. No car. Walking to school. Of course I'll gate to the grocery store since the nearest decent one is
miles
away. But I don't want to come in there in a showy way, with money and a car and nice clothes. I want to be unobtrusive. Somebody that most people will pretty much ignore. It's fine if they think I'm weird—just not
legendary
weird. I think I'll make a better grade of friends and maybe get to know a better kind of girl than the ones who are impressed with guys for their cars and clothes and money.”

“You do remember that those young adult novels are
fiction,
” said Leslie.

“But if they didn't get the details of the kids' lives right, the kids wouldn't read them,” said Danny. “
I
was reading them as an anthropologist.”

“You were reading them as a romantic young teenage boy,” said Leslie. “And you bought into the endings where the poor-but-decent lonely boy ends up with the nicest, smartest girl.”

“That too,” said Danny with a grin.

“It's a true story,” said Marion. “Don't you think, Leslie?”

Again the look between them, but this time it was saying an entirely different set of things that were really none of Danny's business.

*   *   *

I
T WAS GOOD
to see Stone again. The house hadn't changed, though Ced and Lana were long since divorced and gone—Ced to study windmagery with an old Galebreath in Oregon, and Lana to a business school where, as Stone said, she had a fair shot at learning how to be something that didn't involve prostitution. “Though she'll probably become a secretary, seduce the boss, break up his family, and then make his life a living hell till he divorces her,” said Stone. “But if he can't keep his fly zipped, he's the natural prey of angry damaged women who are careless about underwear.”

And then, seeing Danny's rueful look, Stone said, “She was just practicing on you. Thirteen-year-olds are too easy to be sporting.”

“I still dream about her,” said Danny ruefully.

“And you probably always will,” said Stone with a sigh.

Danny explained what he wanted.

“And you actually expect Victoria to be able to bring this off?” asked Stone.

“Why?” asked Danny. “You know her?”

Stone rolled his eyes. “You've been working with her for—how long?—and she's never mentioned me?”

“No. Not really. I don't think so.”

“I'm her husband, Danny,” said Stone. “My name is Von Roth. Peter Von Roth. She was Victoria Bland until she married me.”

“Bland?”
asked Danny.

“Really. Her parents' name. I think she's spent her whole life denying that name. Maybe she only married me because my last name was so Germanic and strong.
Von Roth!
” He gave it a strongly German pronunciation. “Sounds like the anger of the gods, yes?”

“But … she talks about her alimony.”

“She doesn't get alimony,” said Stone—or Peter, apparently. “We're still married. But her father is still one of the top mucky-mucks in the Department of Agriculture—he's really a first-rate Sapkin—and her mother inherited
her
father's land in northern Virginia, and sold off some nice chunks of it as they were building up Tysons Corner into a shopping mecca, so her family is awash in dough. Her ‘alimony' is checks from mommy and daddy.”

Danny had to laugh. “She really
is
a trickster. I never had a clue.”

“Well, I can tell you, our lives would have been very different if there had been any way to know that she was a gatemage instead of a drekka. She always
said
she was, but how could anyone believe her? She was so showy and dramatic, we all believed it was part of a pose.”

“But you married her.”

“I always talked with her as if she were a gatemage. I joined her fantasy, as I supposed. And come on, Danny, until you came along it
was
a fantasy. She had no more idea she was a gatemage than anyone else. We'd been married no more than a year when she realized that I didn't really believe that she was a gatemage. That I was sort of humoring her. I didn't mean to let on—I had always talked as if it were true, and I made no slip—but you know how gatemages are. You can read meanings in human speech or facial expressions that no else can see. Part of the language gift, maybe. Sometimes it makes me wonder if gatemagery isn't right next door to manmagery. Anyway, she realized that I was only playing along, and it really hurt her, and she began spending less and less time at home, until I realized she was … gone. I'm telling you more than I should. But if you're going to pin your whole plan on her being reliable…”

Danny nodded. “I appreciate your concern. But remember, we gatemages are tricksters and con men, too. She'll bring off the only thing I really need her for—getting me enrolled in high school, setting me up in a cheap rented house with an allowance for necessities, and then popping in when I need to show off my flamboyant aunt.”

Stone smiled. “Oh, you gatemages aren't the only tricksters.”

“Really?” asked Danny.

“Here you were, a genuine gatemage. And there I was, the man who still loves that infuriating woman. I thought, Maybe she really is a gatemage. I could never have gotten her to come
here
to see the gates you made—she now pretends to be allergic to the pollen of the plants I grow—but one day when she was visiting with her parents in Fairfax, I talked to her on the phone and reminisced a little about the restaurant Dona Flor, which used to be our favorite place to eat—they had risolli with a habanero sauce that could take the top of your head off—and she was as predictable as the tides. She drove off out Wisconsin where I knew you had some gates and…”

“And she was a gatemage after all.”

“The real thing. It's not as if I ever said she wasn't!” said Stone, as defensively as if Veevee were in the room. “And she'd have killed me if she'd known I planned it. ‘Trying to trap me into revealing that I couldn't see a gate that you
knew
was there, is that it?' ”

His imitation of Veevee was dead on, and Danny laughed.

“But I wasn't testing her, I was giving her an opportunity. I wanted it to be true—I always did. I knew it was an affinity that couldn't be tested as long as there were no gates in the world, unless she was a Pathsister or Gatemother herself, which was hardly likely.
You
are hardly likely, Danny. But I never said she
couldn't
be a gatemage.”

“You were agnostic.”

“Agnostic but hopeful,” said Stone. “Or maybe … wistful.”

“And your wist came true,” said Danny with a grin.

“Though I'll bet Leslie wasn't thrilled when Veevee showed up.”

“I get the feeling that … well, to put it unkindly,” said Danny, “you were second choice.”

“She hadn't met me when she had her fling with Marion,” said Stone. “And Marion flat out refused to accept her claim of gatemagery. He's a stonemage, for heaven's sake,
and
a geologist. He's not going to willingly live inside someone else's dream. And how could Veevee ever love or live with a man who didn't at least try to believe? If only she didn't have such a keen eye for pretense herself,” said Stone. “I'd still be happy to have her with me. But the final break was when she tested me. ‘Come to Florida,' she said. ‘If you love me, get out of this miserable town and come to Naples.'

“But I couldn't leave my work here.” Stone sighed. “America and a lot of the rest of the world come to DC. This is the place where my pollen can gather in the Orphan mages. The Families know about me, of course, but they don't care—to them Orphans are no better or more interesting than drowthers. I've found nearly a hundred mages since I've lived here. How many would I have found in Naples, Florida? At best, a handful of old coots who are way too old to train.”

“You still love her.”

“Everybody still loves her,” said Stone. “Even the people who hate her—that's why she makes them so angry. I bet Marion still thinks of her.”

“The way I think of Lana?”

“Well, no,” said Stone. “Veevee's not that kind of woman, if you know what I mean. More like … Marion still wishes he
could
have lived inside her dream. And now that it turns out it wasn't just a dream, she really
is
a gatemage, you can imagine how that must make him wonder and regret—even though he loves Leslie like crazy. Might-have-beens are a bitch.”

To Danny it was as if Stone had just unlocked everybody's diary and he felt like a sneak for knowing so much about Marion's and Leslie's and Veevee's past. And yet it was a relief to know.

“I'm glad you told me all this,” said Danny.

“I always kind of thought you knew. That somebody would have explained. But now that I'm saying this, it's such a ridiculous idea. Which of them would ever see the need to explain any of this to you? Not one of them is proud of their behavior. Well, Veevee is, but she's not an explainer.”

“She and I are doing our best to explain gatemagery.”

“Oh, come on,” said Stone. “She and you are trying to
invent
gatemagery. The best her research and yours can do is give you clues and hints and point you in interesting directions.”

“We've made some progress,” said Danny.

“Know how to make a Great Gate yet?” asked Stone.

“Not a clue,” said Danny.

“Keep it that way,” said Stone. “I don't want the Gate Thief to strip you and make a drekka out of you.”

“At least then I'd be safe from the Families,” said Danny.

“Don't count on it,” said Stone. “They'd assume it was a gatemage's trickery and kill you anyway, just to be sure.”

“Yeah,” said Danny ruefully. “They would.”

“I'm not going to put you in touch with counterfeiters and crooks who sell fake i.d.s,” said Stone. “In the end, those things can always be tracked down and then where would you be? But I've helped other fugitives from Families get more-or-less legitimate identities, and a gatemage like you should be able to get one that's a lot realer than usual, without having to bribe half as many people.”

After Stone explained the system and identified a likely county that hadn't fully computerized their old records, it took only an hour for Danny to learn the ins and outs of record keeping in West Jefferson, North Carolina, which Stone had chosen as his new birthplace. Inserting his birth into the records wasn't hard, so that when he and Veevee showed up asking for a duplicate, while Veevee shed a tear for her dear dead sister and brother-in-law, Danny's fictitious parents, they got a copy of the birth certificate with no trouble.

Stone looked at the birth certificate and made a face. “Why didn't you use ‘Silverman' as your last name?”

“In Ashe County, North Carolina? That's not going to be a believable name.”

“But ‘Danny Stone'? I'm flattered, but—”

“It's the one I thought of while I was in the records room,” said Danny. “Since it's not really your name, I didn't think you'd mind. And since I didn't use ‘Von Roth,' I figured Marion and Leslie would be fine with any other name I chose that
would
be believable in Ashe County.”

The Social Security number was a little trickier. There was a lot more information coded into the number than most people suspected. But Stone had a Westilian friend in the system who could pluck out whatever unused numbers met the paradigms—Social Security numbers of children who had died without ever having anything added to their records in the system. Attaching Danny's pertinent information to one of the numbers took very little time.

Then there was the matter of recording false childhood immunization records, but that was another job that a gatemage could do after hours in the office of a pediatrician who had been in the trade in the same town for a long time.

As for Danny's actual immunizations, Stone insisted that he owed it to the other children to actually get the shots and vaccinations.

“I can always go through a gate and heal myself whenever I start to feel sick.”

“I thought you were educated, Danny,” said Stone. “Don't you know you can be contagious for days before any symptoms show up?”

The fact is Danny didn't want anyone poking him with needles. It had never happened to him and he was pretty sure he wouldn't like it.

“Danny,” said Stone, “it's just a matter of distraction. Wiggle your toes while they're giving you the shots. Concentrate on that, and the needles themselves won't bother you.”