She dreamt again that night, confused images that held more emotion than sense. She was using Excalibur to hack her way through brambles, pushing through a grove of once-tended apple trees given over to ivy and thorns. She was searching for something, though she didn’t know what it would look like. At the end of the dream she found it: a butterfly with bright blue wings, gleaming wet as if it had just hatched. It made her unutterably sad. She was sobbing into her pillow when the alarm woke her with a full-body jolt.
At least she got to work early enough to phone Alberto about the busted back door. Nothing had bothered her in the night, except an intermittent rustling that seemed to be coming from the walls (mice?). And her mind was scattered all to hell, because it had taken her twenty minutes to find her house keys in the morning. She thought she’d dropped them on the kitchen counter, but they weren’t there, or in the pockets of her jeans, and it wasn’t until she’d rifled through every drawer in house—twice—that she finally noticed them sitting on top of the refrigerator, where she had no memory of putting them.
Alberto didn’t pick up, so she left a message explaining the situation with the door in probably a little more detail than was necessary. Just as she was hanging up, Jennifer stuck her head around the cubicle wall. “Hey, get your coffee yet?” In a close-fitting floral sundress and stack-heeled espadrilles, she looked—again—like a picture from a magazine. Viv promised herself on the spot that once her first paycheck cleared, she’d buy some clothes that didn’t come secondhand.
“I’d love some coffee,” Viv admitted.
“That’s what they left out of the orientation packet!” Jennifer exclaimed, “The break room!”
The break room, as it turned out, was equipped not only with the ordinary regular-and-decaf coffee pots and burners, but also with an espresso machine; and the fridge was stocked with whole, skim, and soy milk that was free for anybody’s use. Jennifer instructed Viv in the finer points of the latte as she prepared her own half-caf nonfat version; Viv poured herself a cup of regular joe and drank it black as they strolled back to the cubicle farm.
Her first real piece of work, Jennifer revealed, would be to write a press release for one of Nextwave’s newer clients. It was a startup that sponsored elimination-style contests among participating bloggers, with various advertisers providing the prizes and guest judges. They’d just secured a round of funding and wanted to announce themselves to the press. Jennifer gave her some recent press releases to use as a template, explaining that the trick was to make it extremely flattering to the clients while still sounding neutral enough to run in a magazine or news site—the hope always being that a busy editor would decide to run the release as written, or that a journalist under deadline might just copy whole paragraphs unedited.
When Viv sat down to look over the sample releases, though, she found they didn’t read anything like a news article. They were crammed instead with empty jargon, talking about “end-to-end turnkey solutions to industry pain points” and “leveraging synergy for the agile enterprise.” She couldn’t for the life of her figure out what the products in the announcements were supposed to actually do. Clearly, the straightforward approach—something along the lines of “Investors are putting money behind an intriguing new startup that pits blogger against blogger in Survivor-style contests”—would be considered completely unacceptable.
Instead, Viv wrestled with the English language for most of the morning, feeling perversely pleased when she managed to torture it into an opening paragraph that began, “Industry observers are buzzing about the traction generated by [COMPANY X], where investor interest is snowballing behind its revolutionary technology designed to deliver eyeballs to advertisers through an edgy, aggressive use of social networking platforms and Web-published content streams.” There was perhaps a whiff of the ghoulish around the phrase “delivering eyeballs,” but she’d read it in eWeek, and anyway the mental image of a courier bag stuffed with severed optic nerves privately amused her. She clicked the save button with a sense of accomplishment.
“Hey,” Noah said, appearing in the opening to her cube. “I stayed up late doing some reading. Want to get lunch?” He didn’t look much the worse for wear—his halo of curly hair was disordered and his t-shirt was rumpled, but he’d looked like that every other time she’d seen him as well.
“Sure,” Viv said, and picked up Excalibur from its spot in the corner of her cube. She was trying a new experiment involving tying the sword to herself with a belt: it banged against her leg when she walked, but at least nobody commented on how dorky it looked. And she didn’t want to leave it out of arm’s reach, not even for a moment.
Noah suggested sandwiches from a nearby deli—he got avocado, cheese and sprouts on a dutch-crunch roll, and Viv asked for turkey and munster on sourdough. They walked their food over to a little park, and sat down on a bench beside a weird avant-garde statue of a businessman with a briefcase and way too many arms. She could hear a fountain splashing a little ways off.
“So I looked up those things you told me about,” Noah said, “the redcaps. They were supposed to live on the border between England and Scotland, and they would kill travelers who spent the night in old castles. Their hats are red because they dip them in the blood of their victims. They’re also supposed to wear iron boots.”
“I didn’t notice their footwear,” Viv said grimly. “You know, it’s weird. My family’s Swedish, and we tell stories about the tomte—they’re little men in red hats, but they’re nice! Mostly.”
“What, like lawn gnomes?” Noah said.
“Yeah,” she admitted, “they are basically the lawn gnomes. I mean, they might play tricks on you, but they won’t kill you. We even—instead of Santa Claus, we say it’s the tomte who bring presents on Christmas. We sing songs for them.”
“Do you leave out cookies and milk?”
“No,” she said, “we leave out vodka. Our Swedish fairies don’t fool around with this cookie nonsense.”
Noah laughed. “I know which one I’d rather have,” he said. “Well, I’m Jewish, and if we have fairies I never heard about them. There’s a whole bunch of demons though. Sometimes fairies and demons sort of blur together.”
“Those weren’t tomte I saw,” said Viv definitely, “and I certainly hope they weren’t demons either. What are evil Scottish fairies doing in California?”
“No clue,” Noah said. “Maybe they followed your sword.”
“Oh, that’s just great,” Viv said, around a mouth full of sandwich.
“But you said they went into the train tunnels. There’s two separate levels of tunnels, you know—Muni and BART—and there’s at least one whole station that’s been abandoned. It lies between Castro and Forest Hill; you can see it out the window if you’re looking at the right second. It’s possible they could live there.”
Viv thought about it. Was there a whole city of them somewhere in the darkness? Did they emerge at night to hunt, dragging their victims back to the ruined empty station? She shivered. “Did you read anything else?”
“I read about Caladbolg,” he said. “It actually goes back before Arthur. There was another hero, an Irish one—Fergus mac Roich. Caladbolg was his sword. But here’s the thing. The Arthur stories are Welsh, originally, but in the oldest of those legends Arthur’s sword was called Caledfwlch: that’s spelled C-A-L-E-D-F-W-L-C-H, but pronounced like Kaledfulk, I think. So really pretty similar to Caladbolg. As if Arthur was using the same sword that Fergus had earlier, over in Ireland. And when the Arthurian legends were written down in Latin they called the sword Caliburn, and it’s from that we get Excalibur.”
Viv blinked. “So Excalibur isn’t really the name of King Arthur’s sword?”
“No,” Noah said, “not originally. It’s just a translation, one that passed through several languages.”
“Huh,” Viv said slowly, “I guess that makes sense. I mean, we think of it as Arthur’s sword, but in all the stories it existed before him—maybe a long time before him. So there would have been other heroes, before Arthur... What happened to that guy Fergus?”
“He lost the sword,” said Noah, “to the fairy queen. Until he agreed to fight for her, and then she gave it back to him. But she asked him to go against his own people, the men of Ulster, and in the end he wouldn’t kill them, so the queen’s side lost anyway.”
“What happened to the sword then?”
Noah scratched his beard. “I don’t know, the story didn’t say. Fergus was killed by the queen’s jealous husband while he was bathing in a lake. Maybe the sword fell into the lake.”
“Maybe it came from there in the first place,” Viv mused. “When Arthur dies, don’t they throw the sword back into the lake?”
“Arthur doesn’t die,” Noah countered. “He’s sleeping. Beneath the lake, I thought. In Avalon.”
“Okay, but either way, the sword went back to the lake.”
“Still,” Noah said. “If Excalibur goes back to prehistoric Ireland, that just makes it even less likely that the sword you have is the same one.”
Viv looked over at him. “You’re on that again?”
“It just doesn’t make sense,” he said stubbornly.
Viv tilted the blade against the light, looking at the pattern in the metal. “Dunno,” she said finally. “I’m still stuck on the ‘oh holy crud, magic is real and it wants to kill me’ point.”
“‘Holy crud?’” Noah laughed. “I hope it doesn’t shock you to learn that you’ve joined a company where we say shit sometimes.”
“Swear words aren’t shocking if you use them all the time,” Viv said primly, and then clapped her hand over her mouth. “Oh my gosh I’m turning into my mother.”
“That’s fair enough,” said Noah. “I’m turning into my grandmother. I think joining Groupon catalyzed the process, but if you catch me with a shivering Yorkie in my purse, you’ll know I’m too far gone to be saved. Anyway, when do you want to have your first sword-lesson?”
“Hmm. This weekend? Maybe after we meet Piper. We’ll know a bit more then, I hope.”
“Sounds good.”
Back in her cube, she hammered out the rest of the press release and e-mailed it to Jennifer, who came back a few minutes later with some suggested revisions. In the middle of the second draft, her phone rang: Alberto agreed to send a workman over to fix the door, but warned her that next time she locked herself out, she’d be charged for any damage she caused. She swallowed her protests—she hadn’t caused the damage!—and thanked him in advance for the repairs.
When she’d finished rewriting the press release, Jennifer showed her how to pick out a list of press contacts from the shared address book, and they went over the names together. “It’s tempting to just blast it out to every contact you have,” Jennifer said, “but if you send too much mail to journalists, especially if it’s irrelevant to their beat, they’ll just start trashing everything you send. Like here, since this is really just a funding announcement you don’t want to send it to Nick at Dr. Dobb’s; he only covers technology, not the purely business news. They pay more attention to you if you’re careful about what you funnel their way.”
As they were tightening up the list of recipients, Kate Mullawney strolled into the aisle, waving a fan of colored papers in her manicured hand. “Don’t forget, people,” she called, “the E-Coconut.com launch party is tonight!”
Viv looked over at Jennifer, mouthing silently: “E-Coconut dot com?”
Jennifer rolled her eyes. “Not my client, thank God,” she whispered. “I am so tired of these things. Hey, but you might actually want to go. Have you ever been to a launch party?” Viv shook her head. “In the boom years,” Jennifer sighed, “there was one somewhere every single night. It was crazy. I never had to go grocery shopping, I could eat for free every night. Good food too—sushi, carpaccio, caviar pockets... Now the parties are lot more scaled back. You’ll be lucky if there’s cheese and crackers. You have to watch a slideshow and shake a lot of sweaty hands and listen to their ‘revolutionary new business model,’ but they’ll have some kind of cocktails set out. It’s usually Cosmos, and they usually hand out drink tickets, but sometimes you get lucky and it’s an open bar. And honestly it is a good way to make contacts and figure out who’s who in the space. You know, at least a few of the press people from your list here will probably show up.”
Viv stuck her head out of the cubicle. “Ms. Mullawney? I think I’d like to go. Where is it?”
“Jillian’s at eight,” the vice president said, handing her one of the brightly colored slips of paper. “And call me Kate.”
Viv smiled, and pocketed the invitation as Kate swept on. “I like parties,” she told Jennifer happily.
“Have a blast,” Jennifer said dryly. “Oh, I guess since I’m training you, I should say something about professional behavior. Be professional.”
“Okay,” said Viv, “that means when I throw up all those Cosmos I try not to do it on anybody’s shoes, right?”
“On anybody important’s shoes,” Jennifer corrected. “Actually, if you’re going to this thing it’s technically work, so you can leave early. Mingle. Ask questions. Act charmed and interested. Get business cards. If you find somebody from the press, try and get them talking to somebody from the company.” She waved her hand. “That sort of thing.”
“Neat,” said Viv. “First week in the big city, and I’m going to a party!”