Tim Pratt - Sympathy for the Devil

“Strangers in the night,” Velma said. “My only romance, I’m afraid.”

“Try somebody from your own millennium, kid,” said Dietz. “He might be more appreciative. So where might Mr. Riggs be?”

“I have no idea. Somewhere out West.”

Dietz studied the paper. “This kind of lead, we’ve got about a snowball’s chance, you should pardon the expression. But it’s your money, Miss Fish. I’ll take two-fifty up front, the other half on completion.”

Velma signed the check. She dotted the “i” with a cute little heart.

A few days later, Dietz called her in.

“Would that be Charles Gideon Riggs, born March 30, 1924, at Hingham, Massachusetts?”

“Hingham! Yes, that’s Charlie!”

“He’s in Arizona.”

“You found him?”

“And he’s not going anywhere. Spent the last four years in a Phoenix cemetery. Prostate cancer.”

“Charlie dead,” Velma said, and then blurted: “He got me pregnant.”

And she really hadn’t thought about it up until right then, as if suddenly permitted to think the miscarriage back into being: back into her own being, so long ago.

She looked back at Dietz, who registered frank disbelief. “And then what happened?” he said.

“I’m afraid I lost it,” Velma said. “Well. I owe you two hundred fifty dollars.”

“Right. And by the way, Miss Fish. That check you wrote? ‘Valued customer since 1957’…?”

“It didn’t clear the bank?”

“Sure, but-”

“Well, then,” said teenaged Velma Fish, “don’t sweat it, sonny.”

A few weeks later, well past midnight, she found herself in the warehouse district, standing outside a club where the music was a form of headache, pounding and booming and twittering-but sort of catchy, really.

She stood in line for half an hour, the only Earthling in the bunch, but Velma wasn’t bothered. She was comfortable in her own skin. That was one thing she’d learned in this life.

When she got to the door, she smiled at the big black man, who said: “Need some ID.”

Velma kept smiling. “There’s an age requirement?”

“Twenty-one,” he said. “Next.”

She put her hand in her bag. Then she thought better of it. “Well, now what?” she said, half to herself.

“Step aside now,” said the black man. “Figger it out, Slim.” He was rather rude, to tell the truth.

A boy stuck his head out the door. Then he came out and stood, resplendent in a suit whose cut and color Velma had never seen. Like most of them he wore an earring, and his sunglasses made him look like an insect. “Hey, Rock,” he shouted to the black man. “Rockster. She’s with me.”

“Oh, she’s with you.”

“I’ve been waiting for her all evening! Hurry up and let her in.”

“Whatever,” said Rock, and motioned. “Go, girl.”

Velma went past. The boy held the door for her and took her hand. The thumping got louder.

“Well,” Velma shouted over the music, “chivalry is not dead.”

“I lied to him,” he shouted back. “I’ve actually been waiting for you all my life.”

“Quite the playboy,” Velma said. “Aren’t you. Neat trick for meeting underage girls.”

“You have to own the club,” the boy said. “And you don’t look that underage. Mainly you look beautiful.”

She seemed remarkably serene, self-possessed, which always turned him on-was she tripping on something? Yet she did not conceal her wonder at the churning scene inside, the lasers and smoke and strobes.

They crossed the crowded floor. “What’s your name?” the boy said.

“Velma. V – E – L -”

“Spinster!” he shouted.

She froze.

“Got someone I’d like you to meet,” he said. “DJ Spin, this is Velma. Velma, this here’s the Spinster: my man at the controls.”

“Velma, cool name,” said the Spinster, and kissed her hand. “She’s in the Jetsons, right?”

“Scooby Doo, fool,” the playboy said.

She didn’t know how to dance. Neither did he, he said, and off they went into the blaring noise. It was even more fun than she expected.

“Call me weird,” he said. “But I like to get stuff out in the open, up front.”

This is it, Velma thought. She was not exactly prepared for whatever she was setting in motion.

For decades, she might have walked off into the wilderness without anyone noticing. A narrowed-down life, getting narrower. And no one there to care.

But that was then. She let her breath out and said brightly, “Well, honesty’s the best policy.”

He held up a foil-wrapped condom. “I always carry one of these.”

“Of course you do,” Velma said. “You’re a gentleman.”

“But if it breaks or something-I’m not getting involved with somebody’s pregnancy.”

“You needn’t concern yourself,” said Velma. “I’ve always been regular. Like clockwork. And it’s been at least three weeks.” Three weeks in her new body. Had everything been restored to her? She might not even have periods.

“It’s not just that,” he said. “Nothing personal, but these days nobody knows who’s carrying what.”

“I don’t have venereal disease, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” said Velma. “The very idea.”

“Of course not, baby,” he said. “I guess I’m just extra careful.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Cool,” he said. “Anything to ask me?”

And here, on the verge of intimacy with this stranger from another time, she had occasion to realize that her sex relations with Charlie, the few they’d had, were not all they were cracked up to be. She’d built it up over the years, while the truth had been something different.

“Why, yes,” she said, “I do want to ask you something. You wouldn’t be one of those fellows who gets his business over with early, and leaves the girl hanging out to dry?”

He just looked at her. “Where are you from?” he said.

It’s like riding a bike, as they say. You don’t forget.

She was aroused, and looked forward now to taking real pleasure with a man, for the first time ever. Making no effort to be someone she wasn’t. Which was something she’d learned.

But he was finished almost immediately.

“I’m like really sorry,” he said afterwards. “You were just so powerful. You’ve got this incredibly powerful aura.”

“You boys,” Velma said, “if only you saw yourselves.”

In her mind it was already fertilized, catalyzed, fully dragged up from the depths: the awful sex, the pregnancy, the hasty wedding, followed within days, providentially you might say, by the miscarriage, the horrible, endless bleeding. It was all so very unpleasant, she’d been soured on sex and men for the rest of-

Well. For quite a while there.

And she and Charlie had looked at each other, and known: there was no need for a marriage after all; they would undo it as easily as they did it, submerge it, put a continent between them and each start over.

Which is just what happened. Or at least Charlie thought it was a miscarriage. Instead of what it was. She knew for a fact now: he’d gone to his grave believing it.

– And now, first of all. Because unprecedented. For reckless procedural disregard and collusion with an agent of chaos: Summary expulsion of a Throne-

– Excuse me, Excellency, but there is a more pressing matter. Likewise unprecedented.

– Really. It had better be.

– A checksum error in Purgatory, Excellency. Consistent with a… spontaneous reactivation.

– Reactivation? A false alarm, in other words.

– It looks real, Excellency. We’re investigating, of course.

– I would remind you that the Hindu cosmos is three doors down. Souls don’t reactivate; they commit irrevocably to their bodies, once elementary brain structures are in place…