Poul Anderson - Operation Chaos

I killed her.

In the last fragmented second, I heard-not with my ears—the shriek of the foul spirit within. I felt—not with my nerves—the space-time turbulence as it struggled to change the mathematical form of its Schrodinger function—thus fleeing to the Low Continuum where it belonged and leaving me with the exchange mass. But my fangs had been too quick and savage. The body perished and the soulless demon was no more.

I lay by the wolf corpse, gasping. It writhed horribly through shapes of woman, man, horned and tailed satanoid. When its last cohesive forces were spent, it puffed away in gas.

Piece by tattered piece, my wits returned. I lay across Ginny’s dear lap. Moonlight poured cool over us, under friendly stars, down to a castle which was nothing but piled stones. Ginny laughed and wept and held me close.

I became a man again and drew her to me. “It’s okay, darling,” I breathed. “Everything’s okay. I finished her. I’ll get Amaris next.”

“What?” Her wet face lifted from my breast to my lips. “Don’t you n-n-n-know? You have!”

“Huh?”

“Yes. Some of my education c-c-came back to me . . . after you’d gone.” She drew a shaking brew “Incubi and succubi are identical. They change sex as . . . as . . . indicated.... Amaris and that hussy were the same!”

“You mean she didn’t-he didn’t you didn’t—” I let out a yell which registered on seismographs in Baja California. And yet that noise was the most fervent prayer of thanks which Our Father had ever gotten from me.

Not that I hadn’t been prepared to forgive my dearest, having had experience of the demon’s power. But learning that there wasn’t anything which needed to be forgiven was like a mountain off my back.

“Steve!” cried Ginny. “I love you too, but my ribs aren’t made of iron!”

I climbed to my feet. “It’s done with,” I whispered, incredulous. In a moment: “More than done with. We actually came out ahead of the game.”

“How’s that?” she asked, still timid but with a sunrise in her eyes.

“Well,” I said, “I guess we’ve had a useful lesson in humility. Neither of us turns out to own a more decorous subconscious mind than the average person.”

An instant’s chill possessed me. I thought: No average persons would have come as near falling as we did ... on the second night after their wedding! Nor would we ourselves. More than the resources of a petty demon was marshaled against us. More than chance brought us to its haunts. Something else wanted us destroyed.

I believe, now, that that Force was still at hand, watching. It could not strike at us directly. No new agents of temptation were near, and we were fire-tempered against them anyway. It could not again use our latent suspicions and jealousies to turn us on each other; we were as purged of those as common mortals can be.

But did it, in its time-abiding craftiness, withdraw the last evil influences from around and within us—did it free us of aches and weariness—and itself depart?

I don’t know. I do know that suddenly the night was splendor, and my love for Ginny rose in a wave that left no room in me for anything else, and when many days later I remembered that encounter on the sea cliff, it was as vague to me as the former ones and I dismissed it with the same casual half-joke: “Funny how a honk on the conk always gives me that particular hallucination.”

There in the courtyard, I looked upon her, drew her to me, and said-my throat so full of unshed tears that the words came hoarse- “In what counts, darling, I learned how you do care for me. You followed me here, not knowing what might be waiting, when I’d told you to run for safety . . .

Her tousled head rubbed my shoulder. “I, learned likewise about you, Steve. It’s a good feeling.”

We walked onto the carpet. “Home, James,” I said. After a pause, when James was airborne: “Uh, I suppose you’re dead tired.”

“Well, actually not. I’m too keyed up yet . . . no, by gosh, I’m too happy.” She squeezed my hand. “But you, poor dear—”

“I feel fine,” I grinned. “We can sleep late tomorrow. ”

“Mister Matuchek! What are you thinking?”

“The same as you, Mrs. Matuchek.”

I imagine she blushed in the moonlight. “So I see. Very good, sir.”

Which turned out to be a prophecy.

After we returned to our apartment we took summer jobs, quitting when classes reopened in fall. Like most newlyweds, we ran into budgetary difficulties: nothing too serious, but we had to sell the carpet, for instance, when Ginny got pregnant. Otherwise, that first couple of married years, we lived unspectacular lives, except when we were alone together.

And then a nurse led me to the bed where my darling lay. Always fair-hued, she was white after her battle, and the beautiful bones stood sharply in her face. But her hair was fire across the pillow, and though the lids drooped on her eyes, that green had never shone brighter.

I bent and kissed her, as gently as I could. “Hi, there,” she whispered.

“How are you?” was the foolish single thing that came to me to say.

“Fine.” She regarded me for a moment before, abruptly, she grinned. “But you look as if couvade might be a good idea.”

As a matter of fact, some obstetricians do put the father to bed when a child is being born. Our doctor followed majority opinion in claiming that I’d give my wife the maximum possible sympathetic help by just sweating it out in the waiting room. I’d studied the subject frantically enough, these past months, to become somewhat of an authority. A first birth for a tall slim girl like Ginny was bound to be difficult. She took the prospect with her usual coolness, unbending only to the extent of casting runes to foretell the sex of the child, and that only so we wouldn’t be caught flat-footed for a name.

“How do you like your daughter?” she asked me.

“Gorgeous,” I said.

“Liar, she chuckled. “The man never lived who wasn’t horrified when they told him he’d sired that wrinkled blob of red protoplasm.” Her hand reached for mine. “But she will be lovely, Steve. She can’t help being. It’s so lovely between us.”

I told myself that I would not bawl right in front of the mothers in this room. The nurse saved me with a crisp: “I think we had better let your wife rest, Mr. Matuchek. And Dr. Ashman would like to finish things so he can go home.”

He was waiting for me in the naming office. When I had passed through the soundproof door, the nurse , sealed it behind me with wax and a davidstar. This t was an up-to-date hospital where they took every care. Thomas Ashman was a grizzled, craggy six-footer with =’ a relaxed manner, at present a bit droopy from weariness. I saw that beneath the impressive zodiacal traceries on his surgical gown, he’d been wearing white duck pants and a tee shirt-besides his amulet, of .~ course.

We shook hands. “Everything’s good,” he assured: me. “I’ve gotten the lab report. You understand that, with no therianthropes on the maternal side, none of your children will ever be a natural werewolf. But: since this one has inherited the complete recessive, gene complex from you, she’ll take transformation spells quite easily. A definite advantage, especially if she goes in for a thaumaturgic career like her mother. It does mean, however, that certain things should be guarded against. She’ll be more subject to paranatural influences than most people are.”

I nodded. Ginny and I had certainly had an undue share of adventures we didn’t want.

“Marry her off right,” Ashman joked, “and you’ll have werewolf grandchildren.”

“If she takes after her old lady,” I said, “Lord help any poor boy we tried to force on her!” I felt as idiotic as I sounded. “Look, Doctor, we’re both tired. Let’s make out the birth certificates and turn in.”