THE MAN WITH THE FUNNY ACCENT
HELP me find my way 127.0.0.1, my shirt said. A little cliché, but it was all I could find on short notice.
EK Limited was situated on the ground floor of a two-story, converted warehouse a few blocks north of the waterfront. It was well maintained, at least, unlike the building across the street.
Inside, I was momentarily stunned by the assault of yellows and pinks.
After a few rapid blinks, I became aware of the curved pine table with a computer, a vase of orchids, and a small plastic rectangle that said “reception.”
There was nobody around, though I could pick up sounds behind a closed door off the lobby—snatches of conversation, the click of keyboards being used. “Lunch-ish,” Samedi had said; it was precisely 00:25. I waited around for a few more minutes, then decided to open the door.
Heads turned, and a woman rushed toward me, a can of coke in her hand. The yellow-and-pink decor had invaded the room beyond as well, sharing space with potted ferns and… wind-up dinosaurs?
“Hi,” the woman said, “can I help you?”
“I had an interview today with Mr. Ram,” I said. “Lunchish?”
“He didn’t tell me.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t worry!” she said. “He does this all the time. Come around back, I’ll go hunt him down. Would you like something to drink? Tea, soda, coffee?”
The Internet stated that it was terrible etiquette to request anything other than water at an interview, but water hadn’t been on her list. And the unexpectedness around me was clamouring for caffeine.
“Coffee, please,” I said, “if it’s not too much trouble?”
“Not at all,” she said. “I’m Emma, by the way.”
First names already? “Mori,” I said.
THE Baron had been right. Emma, obviously the receptionist, was wearing a blue silk shift with white trainers. Other people were attired in everything from T-shirts to Chinese-collared halter tops, but there was not a single suit in sight. Nor were there any offices or closed doors—the entire place was one giant loft.
A few people looked up as we walked past and, to my surprise, smiled at me. There was nothing to do but stretch my face into a grin and nod every time I met somebody’s eyes—who knew where the Lead Developer lurked in this place?
Emma led me to a kitchenette area near the back. A large espresso machine shared counter space with the disembowelled husk of a computer. She didn’t seem to mind, or even notice, the dead beast and proceeded to pull out a cup from a pantry.
“Espresso or latte or cappuccino?” Emma asked, twiddling with the knobs on the machine.
“American cappuccino or European cappuccino?”
“European cappuccinos are nonmigratory,” said Emma. “Sorry.”
“Espresso, then, please,” I said. She looked disappointed for a minute, shrugged, and handed me the cup, a rich brown liquid swirling in the bottom.
“I’ll go look for Ram,” she said. “Just take a seat, read a magazine or something. He might be in the basement.”
“Basement?” Was this just a showroom then, the real programmers kept in some underground sweatshop?
“Be right back.”
All I could do was take a seat on a battered blue Ikea sofa and gaze dutifully at the cover of July’s PCWorld.
The magazine featured an interview with Ramasundarm Vijayagopalan. Ram…? Mr. Vijayagopalan? My prospective boss? A quick glance at the article confirmed my suspicion. “Ram” was a thirty-year-old millionaire, retired from the world of investment software to pursue “experimental research in novel computing techniques.”
This place looked more like an unsupervised kindergarten than an experimental laboratory, so I was naturally sceptical at the last. The article contained nothing about what kind of skills he might want in the people he hired. With a sigh, I inhaled the aroma of a beautifully brewed espresso and resumed my covert inspection of the room for the Lead Developer.
HAVING mentally sorted the people in the room into “serial procrastinators,” “people who do something with hardware that involves a lot of swearing,” “caffeine addicts,” and “documentation obfuscators,” I was in the midst of constructing Venn diagrams with them when Emma returned, Mr. Vijayagopalan in tow.
He had gained some weight since the photo on the magazine cover. I rose to my feet and extended my hand.
“Mr. Vijayagopalan,” I said.
“Please,” he said, shaking my hand with both of his, “call me Ramasundarm.”
“Ramasundarm,” I said. “I’ve brought my resume and transcripts, if you’d like to take a look.”
“Sure, sure. Sit, please!”
I pulled the papers out of my faux-leather satchel, then handed them to him across the coffee table. His forehead creased as he began to read, and he sat down, crossing his legs. Breathe.
“This all looks good Mori,” he said. “Welcome aboard.”
“Pardon?”
“You were expecting a longer interview?”
“Um. Somewhat?”
He smiled at me. “You’ll come to see that we do things differently around here. You were recommended by a fantastic musician. And everybody in this office can pronounce my name correctly.”
“What does that have….” I trailed off and settled for quirking my eyebrow at him.
“Data,” he said. “Get enough of it and very strange things emerge.”
“If analyzed correctly,” I agreed. “What did data tell you about your name?”
“It told me that each and every person that pronounces this set of syllables in the correct way makes an ideal addition to this company.”
“Doesn’t that confer an unfair advantage to Indians?”
He laughed. “As you can see, we are a very diverse group here. You never say a name just with your mouth—the eyes, the hands, everything speaks.”
The Mageborn surely know the truth of that, though I could detect no spark of power in this man. Hard to tell with the Restriction wound around my midriff.
“Of course, we wasted a lot of time with interviews and probationary periods and standardized testing,” he said. “Finally, I decided enough was enough and went with this approach.”
“I see.” My new boss was utterly mad.
“My mother named me Bobby, you know,” Ramasundarm continued. “Imagine trying to explain to her why I had to change it.”
“You have more courage than I, sir,” I replied. “My mother named me Mordred.”
“Mothers,” he said, patting my shoulder. “What can you do?”
ALAS, good and evil come in pairs. Getting a job was good. Evil was waiting for me at my front door in the form of a large, thuggish man in an ill-fitting suit.
“Can I help you?” I asked as I walked up to my apartment.
He raised his hand, contorting his fingers in a gesture that looked rather painful. I narrowed my eyes.
“You mean this?” I gave him a variant of “Rock-On.” He nodded, and I had to refrain from rolling my eyes. Every Deathless I knew had abandoned the super-secret-handsign idiocy with the advent of Heavy Metal.
“Your monthly statement,” he said, handing me an envelope. “Payment is now overdue.”
Looking down at the white rectangle in my hand, I sorely missed the illustrative power of Magic; a fireball would have been extremely appropriate right now. But all I could do was talk. And nicely, at that.
“Sorry, I just got a job today. I’ll put in the installment as soon as I have my first paycheck—I’m starting next week.”
“Payment is now overdue. It will be more overdue next week.”
“There. Is. No. Money. You ken? There will be some when I get my paycheck. Then I’ll pay you.”
He frowned at me. “Payment will be even more overdue then.”
“So what are you going to do, break my fingers?”
“You crazy?” he asked. Fair question.
“So, what?”
“So we take away furniture.”
“And how will you do that without violence?” The loan could hardly be registered with the Credit Bureau—there would be no bailiffs involved.
“You will open front door.”
“Just like that?”
“You owe money. You have no money. So we take furniture. You will open door. That is how it works.”
“And if I don’t want to let you take my furniture?”
He looked appalled. “But you are Deathless!”
And a knight, however disgraced. I will open door. Right.
Inside, the thug looked around for a moment, then settled on my bed. “This one.” With barely any effort, he heaved off the mattress and attacked the wooden frame with his bare hands.
“You’re not even going to take it?”
“No resale value,” he replied.
The bed was reduced to kindling in a few moments, the mattress shredded soon after. Imp, attracted out of the shadows by the commotion, was hiding behind my legs.
“Thank you for your patience,” the thug said. “Have a good evening. Next time I break TV.”
SPENDING nights on the couch did nothing for my disposition, marginal under the best of circumstances. Almost, I was late to work on my first day.
11:18. Half the office was full, it appeared, though Emma was missing.
“You’re the new guy?” asked a man dressed in a tattered T-shirt, his breath laced with the ketones of a garlic bagel.
“Yes,” I replied.
“This way,” he said. I was led to a desk near the back of the room—close to the coffee machine. “Here’s your station, computer, phone. Need anything else, you ask Curtis, the guy with the dreads, though he doesn’t come in till ten. Login is your first initial, last name, same as your e-mail username. Here’s the password.” He handed me a yellow Post-it with a string of letters and numbers: p455w0rd. “Any questions?”
“Um… what am I supposed to be doing?”
“Dunno. Get yourself set up, I guess. There’s some documentation on the internal wiki—192.168.31.17. Only Alan updates it anymore. Read. Get a coffee.”
“Ah. And I’m being paid 60k for that?”
The man snorted. “I’m getting paid 80k, and mostly all I do is babysit Windows. But it won’t last long. Something in the air tells me the shit’s about to hit the fan.”
“Something in the air?”
“Yeah. Traffic’s doubled, and boss has started pulling the R&D team into the basement at least three times a day. Not that I’ll find out what’s going on till the last minute. I mean, I’m just the Sysadmin.”
“Ouch,” I said. Then, “Basement?”
“It’s complicated—Ramasundarm would be able to explain it better. Very hush-hush.”
“Ramasundarm said something about us setting up beta servers?”
“Beta!” The Sysadmin started laughing. “We’re still in pre-alpha. Our beloved R&D goons—they don’t show up till eleven—have been having a nut.”
“So we’ve got theoretical delays.”
“You a math guy?” he asked.
“Something like that.”
“Yeah, then you’ll end up on the Other Side.”
“Sounds bad.”
“It is,” he said. “We’re the Good Side: Emma, me, Curtis, the hardware people, the guys that run everything around here. Then there’s the Others: the math guys, the PhDs, cryptos, the theoretical computer scientists—didn’t even know you could get those on the open market. Basement Dwellers. Real busy right now. Probably where you’ll end up.”
It certainly sounded like the place to be. But, “As long as we have our Sysadmin and Caffeine Nurse, everything will be all right.”
Sysadmin grinned nastily. “I knew it. You’re already talking like one of Them.”
“Birds of feather,” I said.
“… shit together,” he finished and, with a jaunty wave, returned to the wire-infested terminal in the center of the room.
I couldn’t wait to get into the basement.
MY PROCESSED-to-hell-and-back crackers and cheese sat on my desk, mocking me as I watched Ramasundarm carefully open a three-tiered, stainless steel lunch box in the kitchenette. My mouth filled with saliva, and I was gripped with a hunger that had absolutely nothing to do with the Symbiot. By all that is holy, please, please, please, don’t eat that in front of me.
He spooned one delicious smelling curry onto the rice and was about to start eating. But then he looked up for a moment and caught my frankly ravenous gaze. Embarrassed, I ducked my head in apology and started to open the plastic wrapping on my crackers.
“Is that all you’re eating?” Ramasundarm asked.
“Um,” I said, “I didn’t have time to pack lunch today.” And the crackers cost one dollar.
“You like Indian food?”
At my hesitant nod, he pointed to the pantry with a becurried spoon.
“Grab a plate! There’s plenty here for two.”
“Please, sir, I couldn’t possibly.”
“Nonsense!” he said. “My wife always packs too much, then shouts at me if I don’t finish it all. I have no idea how the starving orphans in India would possibly be helped by my leftovers, but what do I know? You’d be doing me a favor if you help me eat this.”
AFTER lunch, Justin the JavaScript developer was assigned by Gabe the Sysadmin to explain my job to me. From the sounds of it, Justin didn’t quite know what his own job was.
“Everything clear?” he asked.
“Yes, it is,” I lied, just to get him to stop explaining. “We’re doing piecemeal integration of the R&D people’s code. And because of the Great C# Jihad of April, everyone programs in different languages, some of their own making.”
“Yup.”
“Why not process them in their native language, just… slightly modified to run on our cluster?” I asked.
“Alan says that’s ugly,” said Justin.
Alan, whoever he was, was right, but the sheer insanity of the task…. “Okay, so which one of these”—I scrolled down the page—“thirty-odd projects do I start with first?”
Justin scrolled up and down a few times, then shrugged. “Just pick any one. Doesn’t matter.”
“There’s no queue? No priority?”
“Nope. Whatever you want to do.”
My soul shuddered. “Can’t someone downstairs write some sort of interpreter or conversion or something to automate the whole ‘rewrite programs from whatever godforsaken language they’re written in’ process?”
Justin looked at me oddly. “You’re going to end up in the basement, aren’t you?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Nothing. Never mind. Yeah, they did start fiddling around with a universal compiler, semantic on-the-fly type of thing, but that got a bad case of creep-and-stall when Alan went on vacation. Um… here… one sec….”
Justin opened a new tab in the browser and quickly typed an address into the URL bar: http://head.electrickindren.com.
“Um, sorry about the flash,” he said as a bright blue loading bar began crawling slowly from left to right. “It was faster before everybody started playing with her.”
Her?
Suddenly, a 3D, animated, hairless, eyeless head popped up on the screen.
“Gertrude, a.k.a. The Head, a.k.a. Gabe’s precious,” said Justin. “She was supposed to be the front end. Now she’s just sort of like a chat bot. This stuff gets really, really annoying. She’s someone to talk to, you know?”
No, I didn’t. “I see.”
“We’ve been adding to her lexicon,” he said. “Poke around if you like. You can put it on your timesheet as ‘internal R&D’.”
“Ah.” The junior programmers had found a budget item specifically designed for procrastination. “I think I’ll just start with something in a language I don’t know,” I said, firmly closing Gertrude’s tab. That is, I would start with the very first program on the list, since I was equally ignorant of all languages.
“Sure, dude,” said Justin. “By the way, you any good with a paddle? We break for Ping-Pong at eleven.”
“No. I do not Ping-Pong.”
“Um. Okay,” he said, “I’ll be at my desk. If you have any questions, I won’t be able to answer them, so just… figure it out, okay?”
“Sure.”
BY 12:09, so great was my consternation with EK’s arcane version-tracking methods that the Symbiot had a bare millisecond to warn me before I felt a hand on my shoulder.
It was Emma, with two espresso cups. One for me? Yes.
“Thank you,” I said, with all the gratitude I could muster. “You didn’t have to.”
She giggled. “I can recognize a fellow addict.”
“I’m not addicted,” I said gently. The poor girl had been nice to me; I could hardly repay that with a stern lecture on what does and does not constitute addiction. “It just tastes very good. And warm.”
“And caffeinated,” she said. “When did you start?”
Four hundred years ago. “A while. You?”
“Since I was sixteen. Hated my first couple of cups,” she said. “Then it just… I get headaches when I don’t have enough.”
“I don’t,” I said.
“Then tomorrow you fight for your second cup yourself.”
Fight? “Fight?”
“Uh huh,” said Emma. “If I don’t ration the beans, we end up running out by Wednesday afternoon.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Can’t you just… order more?”
“Doesn’t make a difference,” she said. “We always run out.”
Strange. “But—” A look of annoyance crossed her face; I changed direction. “How long have you been working here?”
“Lemme see… we moved to Canada last year before the fall semester—my partner’s in grad school at UfT—and the work permit took a couple… so, ten months in September.”
“You’re not Canadian?” I asked.
“Unfortunately, no,” she said. “I’m from Texas.”
That explained the strange modulation to her speech. I had never knowingly met a Texan before. “Why unfortunately?” I asked.
She gave me a look I couldn’t quite interpret. “Um….”
“Never mind,” I said. Her arms, loosely held to her sides till now, were crossed defensively at her chest. It would not do to make the Caffeine Nurse uncomfortable. “Stronger dollar, gay marriage, healthcare,” I said. Thank you, Wikipedia. “No need to explain.”
“The only thing you don’t have is the Stanley Cup,” she said, her good humor restored.
I racked my mind for which game that particular award was for. Something Canadians were supposed to be good at, obviously. Curling? Snow forts? “Just… don’t bring it up,” I said.
“Deal,” she said.
We drained the last of our coffee in unison.
ALAS, there is no peace for the wicked this side of the Desert.
“Dude, dude, dude, check this out!”
With a sigh I looked away from my work. “Yes, Justin?”
“Come check this out!” A YouTube video was paused on his screen.
The excited exclamations had the effect of drawing all the other procrastinators on the floor to Justin’s desk, like flies to poisoned honey.
Satisfied that he had a sufficiently attentive crowd, he started the video. I really couldn’t see what the fuss was about—some cartoon animals, a bespectacled scientist, various accents.
And then, that logo, vectorized to within an inch of sanity.
Lost in my contemplation of satisfactory retorts to Lead Developer put-downs, I missed something—everyone started laughing. And didn’t stop for a good minute after the video came to an end.
“This just went viral,” Justin said.
“Smart fuckers,” said Curtis. “Fucking brilliant.”
“It’s an ad,” I said. “So what?”
“It’s not just any ad,” said Justin. “It’s JCN’s ad.”
“We hate them,” said Curtis, by way of explanation. “All corporate suits and marketing campaigns and billions in R&D money. No soul. Big bad competitor, you know?”
“But we’re working on….” I paused for thought. “I see. David versus Goliath.”
“Yup,” said Justin. “They’d love to shut us down.”
Curtis snorted. “They don’t even know we exist.”
“Better keep it that way,” said Gabe, who had wandered over to our mini-moot. “If they start throwing money at the Basement Dwellers’ problems?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Justin. “We have Alan.”
The question had to be asked. “Um. Who is Alan?”
“Who is Alan?” Justin’s question was greeted by a couple of groans, and people started dispersing toward their desks. Undaunted, he continued. “He’s supposed to be American. Some say his father was British. Nobody Upstairs has ever seen him—”
“Alan’s our offsite Lead Developer,” interrupted Curtis.
Offsite? Excellent. “I see,” I said. “And who does he lead?”
“Nobody knows anybody that works directly for him,” said Justin, “but to hear Ramasundarm tell it, any one of us could be working on an Alan Project. You never know.”
Gabe rolled his eyes and walked away.
“And does this Alan have a last name?” I asked.
“Probably,” said Curtis, “but we have a ‘if you have to ask, you don’t need to know because I don’t want to friend you on Facebook’ policy.”
Thank the gods. @imparse’s tweets would have been… difficult… to explain.
“Following Twitter feeds is usually okay,” said Justin.
Damn.
“But with Alan,” he continued, “just… don’t snoop. No packet sniffing, no IP traces, no piggyback code. He Who Must Not Be Named got fired for that.”
“Bullshit,” said Curtis.
Justin raised his hands and backed up a step. “Hey man, I’m just saying what was said to me when I first started.”
“He Who Must Not Be Named,” said Curtis, “was fired because he was a shitty programmer.”
A slight hint of belligerence entered Justin’s stance. “So how come he got hired by JCN?”
Because he didn’t have the misfortune of having a sadist sit in on his interview?
“Cuz JCN sucks,” said Curtis.
“He delved too deep. He found something.”
“Sure, buddy,” said Curtis. “The greatest trick Alan ever pulled was convincing everyone he telecommutes, right?”
Justin didn’t say anything. Making a mental note never to a) snoop into Alan’s affairs, or b) leave any bad code lying around where Alan could see it, I returned to my desk.
PEOPLE started leaving the office at the end of the workday—23:22, Monday, July 9th. Mordred Pendragon becomes a Software Engineer. Surely it was an event worth celebrating? And the one person that truly knows how to celebrate was but a phone call away.
“HELLO.”
“Hi, Tom’s phone, Natalia speaking.” Natalia of the perfectly peaked nipples?
“Um, sorry to bother you, ma’am. I just wanted—”
“One sec, he’s here,” the voice said. “Honeysuckle, somebody’s on the phone for you. Caller ID says ‘Count Chocula’.”
Some insults must be paid back in pain, and Tom was racking up quite a tab. There was a rustle as the phone changed hands on the other end.
“Hello darlin’,” said a familiar voice, “what made you call our humble self tonight?”
“Just wondering,” I said. “You see, I’ve just finished my first day as a contributing member of the economy—”
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” I could just imagine Tom fluttering his hands in excitement. “Nat and I are crashing this little gathering in Manhattan. Wanna join us?”
Manhattan? “If my presence is not an imposition,” I said. “And I don’t have to pay for it.”
“Never!” he said. “And it’s not a pay-your-way-in kind of party. I’ll send a road around, elevenish? Wear something sexy.”
“I don’t do ‘sexy’.”
“Dublin. 1871. I have the lithographs. Be ready at eleven.”
Goddamn blackmailing Faerie. Those pictures had to burn.
A SMALL whirlwind made up entirely of charcoal smoke and robin feathers showed up in my living room exactly at 24:27. Perhaps this Natalia woman was good for my cousin’s punctuality. Or, more likely, he was just afraid I would find an excuse to back out at the last minute. Blackmail aside, I didn’t have anything that could be considered “sexy.” My suit, unworn save for that first humiliating interview at JCN, would have to suffice.
Squeak? Squeak?
“No, I’m afraid not,” I told my crestfallen familiar. “It’s not a party for little Imps. Are they not running that twenty-four-hour Galaxy Express marathon on the Anime network?”
Immediately, Imp brightened, nodded frantically, and retreated to the sofa.
With a sigh, and not a few misgivings, I stepped into the whirlwind.
TRAVELING on a Faerie road is a bit like running into a cement wall headfirst without a helmet, only the wall is made up of the bottled chirping of endangered birds. Half choking on the honeysweet charcoal smoke, I was deposited onto what felt like soft carpet.
“There you are!”
As the smoke cleared from around me, I saw Tom standing a few meters away, dressed in an expertly tailored maroon suit. The plush carpet on the floor probably cost more than every piece of furniture in my house, and the bed—by all appearances, incredibly soft and comfortable—could sleep a half-dozen playboy models and have room to spare for their photographers.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“The Honeymoon Suite, of course. Come! Natalia is waiting.”
Standing up, I brushed myself off, then followed my cousin out the door.
THE buttons in the lift informed me that we were in a hotel with forty-eight floors and ascending at an alarming rate.
“Here, let me look at you,” said Tom.
Obediently, I turned to face him.
“Armani,” he observed. “Good, you won’t get us thrown out. Take off the tie, open the first three or four buttons.”
“No.”
“Do it!”
With a sigh, I started unknotting my nice, nondescript black tie. But I drew the line at three buttons, undoing a respectable two.
“Better?” I asked.
“You’ll do.”
And with that, we reached the forty-ninth floor.
THE terrace leading off the Penthouse opened up onto a stunning view of the Manhattan skyline. About two hundred people, some with faces recognizable from the news, stood around eating and talking.
“You couldn’t find some other party to crash?” I murmured.
“Re-election parties are the only ones worth crashing anymore,” replied my feckless cousin. “Have a little faith. I didn’t get us caught last time, did I?”
Because satellite surveillance hadn’t been invented back then.
“Drink,” he said, handing me the martini glass.
I drank.
TOM was well into his sixth cocktail, and I my fourth expensive-cheese-on-a-stick, when I caught sight of an arrestingly beautiful woman sitting at a table near the band, head bent in an intense discussion with the American Secretary of Energy. The woman was dressed in a cerise silk dress, which by all rights should have clashed horribly with her red hair but did no such thing. After a few moments, she disengaged gracefully from her conversation and rose from the table.
Heavily pregnant. Damn. Of all the people here, she…. I turned to Tom, about to make some remark about my almost-folly. Tom’s gaze was locked on the woman’s form, an expression of rapt awe on his face.
Even in a state of extreme gravidity, she was graceful as she walked over to us, bringing with her a scent of jasmine.
“Hello darling,” she said, twining her fingers around Tom’s free hand. Natalia of the perfectly peaked nipples was a pregnant American?
“Love,” Tom said. Even in the midst of battle, he had never sounded so serious. “Meet Mordred.”
“Lady Natalia.” What the hell have you done to my cousin, you succubus? “It is a pleasure to finally meet you.”
“Please, call me Nat. And it’s fantastic to meet you too! Tom tells me you’re half Faerie?”
Tom had obviously lost his wits. “I believe the politically correct term is bisexual.”
She laughed, the socially correct amount of titter in her voice for my witticism. Tom’s giggle was far more sincere.
“Love,” she said, turning to him. “Could you fetch me a safe drink? And one of those cheese puffs?”
“Anything,” he said and set off through the crowd.
As soon as Tom was out of earshot, Natalia turned to me. “Not that I have to explain myself, but you’re important to Tom. It’s his baby.”
Is that what you’ve told him? “Statistical improbability,” I said, still smiling.
“Lady Moyen said the exact same thing.”
I blinked. Then in the next breath my world righted itself and concern replaced fury.
“But you’re not infected!” I was careful to keep my voice low.
“Not yet,” said Natalia. “So Tom keeps getting shipments of injections to stab me with.”
The Lady must be positively gleeful to have a chance to study so anomalous a happening. “Care packages, Moyen style?” I asked.
“She wants to adopt me,” said Natalia, a glimmer of something in her eyes I couldn’t quite grasp.
“What Lady Moyen wants,” I said, “she generally gets.” Up to and including the exile of a Prince.
Natalia smiled. “I’m looking forward to it.”
Most sane people I knew did not “look forward” to having an extended relationship with Moyen. I raised an eyebrow.
“My biological mother died before I was two,” said Natalia.
Ah. “I’m sorry, my Lady.”
“Don’t be. I hardly remember her,” she said, tossing her hair back. “What I wanted to talk to you about was Tom.”
“What about him?”
“I need to make him come to his senses. He doesn’t eat if I’m not around, I have more handwritten poetry than I know what to do with. Exquisite poetry, but there’s still too much of it.”
“He’s a Faerie,” I said. “The art’s always exquisite. And, well, it’s not really dangerous—missing a few meals won’t hurt one of the Deathless.” Nor, come to think of it, will a steady diet of Ramen noodles.
“Maybe I can get the poems published. Send him on a book tour. Give him something to do.” Something that will come between a Faerie Lord and his doom? A sinister thought rose, unbidden, that I had to voice.
“Just make sure you don’t die.”
“I wasn’t planning to,” she said, half laughing.
“Good. Because he’ll kill himself if you do.”
The instant change from half amused, half puzzled to wholly alert and angry assured me of her intent far more thoroughly than any admissions filled with emotional truth.
“He forgot to mention that,” she said.
“He wouldn’t.”
“Goddamn Faerie,” she muttered, instantly earning herself a place at my dinner parties, if I were to give any in the next millennium. “Here he comes.”
WE ENDED up on the floor of Natalia’s Scarborough apartment. My suit jacket had come off sometime after midnight, stuffed with cheese puffs for Imp.
“… virus,” said the Lady of the perfectly peaked nipples. I could see the shape of them under her dress. Tom had impeccable taste.
“Not while you’re still pregnant,” I said. The Symbiot would have to wait to bond with her, at least a few months.
Natalia sat with her back against a wall, her legs outstretched, Tom’s head in her lap. “You know what he first told me?” she asked.
Tom smiled, catlike. “I said, ‘there is a dark goddess under the Earth, bigger than the world. And to drink from her breast is to drink immortality’.”
Natalia smiled. “I thought it was a literary device to seduce me into vampirism.”
That earned her a dirty look. “There’s no such thing as Vampires,” I said. “The Lifestream, once it binds to you, it’s your Symbiot. Otherwise we’d be hip deep in immortals every time a Deathless so much as sneezed on Earth.”
Natalia laughed. “Then I thought he meant Lady Moyen.”
I snorted. “She set you straight, I hope?”
“I got a little brochure,” said Natalia, running her hands through Tom’s hair. “‘The Lifestream And You—Coming To Terms With A Sentient Virus, Methods For A New Millennium. 10% Off Your First Counselling Session. Buy Today’.”
Tom giggled. House Petra’s commercial ventures were a source of constant amusement to House Unseelie.
“So how does one get infected?” Natalia asked. “Nobody ever actually mentioned that part. Ooze? Immortality by injection?” She looked down at Tom. “Mutation by STD?”
“Usually,” I said at my most wry, “it’s a little ritual, more for psychological benefit than the Lifestream’s—a chalice, some words.” I shrugged.
Her eyes widened in pretend innocence. “So I’ve been swallowing for nothing all this time?”
Tom giggled, again. Gods. They were a match. She bent to place a kiss on his forehead, her hair falling like a curtain of fire around him. The picture they made together made me want to cup my hands around them, freeze them as they were in the moment. Then my cousin ruined it by sneezing.
“Tickles,” he said, sweeping her hair away from his face.
“So you drank from this chalice?” Natalia asked.
“Oh yes. Before Amergin brought invasion to Eire, we were as human as you are now,” said Tom. “The Lifestream recognized us. Symbiosis amplified us, twisted us, till we became the Fey of legend and passed into fairy tales.”
The floor was getting uncomfortable, especially for a history lesson. But the couch was too far away. I solved the problem by the simple expedient of grabbing whatever cushions were in reach and making a little nest around myself.
Once I was comfortable, “Same with House Yoten,” I added. “Hounded by our ancestors, they fled into the dark and passed into archaeology textbooks. And your Lady Moyen is the last of Crete-that-was.”
“All those people… all that history…,” said Natalia.
“All that genetic diversity,” I said, grinning. “The Lifestream does like to collect.”
“Professor Mordred leaches all the poetry out of it,” said Tom, pouting. “Lord Cain says that when the universe comes to an end—when all the planets have turned to dust and the light from the very last star finally winks out—we will remain and carry within us the history of all the life that ever existed. All the peoples—their loves and betrayals and wars and works. Within our genomes and our memory, they will live on and pass with us into a new universe.”
“Lord Cain is a romantic,” I observed. This called for more alcohol. Sadly, the bottle beside me was empty.
“A Priest, surely,” said Tom, passing his glass of bourbon to me.
I’ve never liked bourbon. Still, I took a sip.
“And who does he pray to?” asked Natalia.
“The same thing we all do—Life itself,” said Tom. “And this is our way of worship.” He traced the outline of a breast under her dress.
“Please,” I said, “don’t let this Apostate interrupt your religious observance.”
Natalia slapped my cousin’s hand away. “Oh sit down, Mordred, we’re not going to start fucking on the floor.”
“Speak for yourself,” muttered Tom.
The standing up had been a mistake. The Symbiot was being unusually recalcitrant about dealing with the ethanol poisoning. I had to go to work tomorrow, dammit!
“You’re half Faerie?” asked Natalia, looking up at me. “What house do you belong to?”
Tom started laughing. “He hasn’t decided on a name yet,” he said. “It’s a House of one, so far.” Natalia looked confused.
“Shut up cousin,” I warned. “We’re not telling this story.”
“So here’s the most virulent pathogen in all of space and time,” Tom continued, blithely ignoring my annoyance. “At the edge of the Planes, it forms a lake, though the size makes that a ridiculous descriptor. And in those concentrations, the Lifestream dissolves everything. Wood. Bone. Metal. Some—mostly House Kamigawa—make offerings sometimes, so I’ve seen this happen. Our dear Mordred here goes and falls into it. By accident.”
Groaning, I grabbed a cushion and placed it over my head.
“And then he walks out, looks around, confused, asks where he might find an Inn, he’s lost his way.”
“Okay, different question,” said Natalia, who, sober, had most certainly picked up the embarrassment coloring my face. “You’re single?”
More disgusting bourbon. “For the foreseeable future, yes,” I said. Then I grinned at her. “You don’t happen to have any siblings around, do you, milady?”
“Light!” said Tom, actually sitting up. “I thought you had something against relatives!”
“Only my own.”
“Sorry,” said Natalia. “One brother, thirty-three percent idiotic, sixty-seven percent homophobic. But if you tell me what you’d like…”
“Yes, tell her,” said Tom.
“I want someone,” I said, lying back onto the ground, my eyes seeking out patterns in the stucco ceiling, “that comes into my life as a vision comes to a prophet.”
“And that,” said Tom, “is why Mordred can’t have nice things. Like casual sex.”
“Lyon, 1607,” I countered.
“Lyon?” asked Natalia.
That was the invitation I’d been waiting for since that fateful “Count Chocula.”
“The ducks,” I began, “were all Tom’s idea….”
THERE is no filter between me and the voice enthroned upon the soul it possesses. Nothing except the desire to scream in obedience. My arm falls.
“Good Boy.”
But then, something at the edge of my vision flickers. Gold.
“Don’t you dare!”
The voice has been infiltrated by static.
“No spell will save you,” hisses the voice. “I’ve got your number.”
But the world flickers again. The quality of my silent screaming changes, ever so slightly. My eyes relearn focus.
The gold flickers are coming from the mouth of the body chained to the ship wall.
Excalibur flares, bright-white, star-hot, ripping the voice from its throne.
Enough.
MEEP? Grumph! Meep. Meep.
“It’s here,” I whispered, turning on my side to look into Imp’s glowing red eyes. “On Earth.” So is the other one, but no need to agitate Imp further with the reminder.
Meep!
“Baron said he’ll help us find it. It’ll speak for us.”
Murrrp? Gruump?
“Then they’ll have to let us come home, won’t they?”