Orson Card - Magic Street

"I understand that," said Mack.

"With your mind," said Titania. "But in here"—she touched his chest—"you would never be able to do such a thing. So loyal and true. Fly with me, Mack Street."

"I can't fly."

"But I can." In a quick, sudden movement she swung herself around behind him, gripped him across his chest and under his arms, then wrapped her legs around him. All the while, she was beating her wings, so she weighed nothing. Less than nothing: Under her wings they both rose from the ground.

In a moment they were above the clearing. She took one soaring circle. No birds came near them. Mack could see the glorious spring forest spreading in all directions. Only now did he realize that in all his wanderings, he had never seen spring. Perhaps there was no spring when Titania wasn't free in this world.

Not so far away, smoke was rising from a gap in the hills—the place where the drainpipe rose in the other world.

"He's coming up now," said Titania. "Away we go."

He was surprised at how fast she flew. Like a dragonfly, not a moth. She could hover in one place, then dart like a rocket. He could feel the muscles flexing in her chest and arms as they balanced and responded to the exertions of her wing muscles. As womanly as this fairy queen might be, she was also a magnificent creature, overwhelmingly strong.

"So the pixie dust thing is just a myth," said Mack.

She laughed. "J. M. Barrie knew boys. But he didn't know fairies. Not like Shakespeare. He glimpsed Puck once, and one of my daughters. He thought the sparks of light were fairy dust. He had no idea what was going on."

"What was going on?"

"Oberon's first attempt to make you," said Titania. "Using Puck as the father. And no humans at all. It didn't work."

"How many tries?"

"Four. Five counting you. The last two could have done it, but they were never able to connect with the people around them. Never able to catch the dreams. It takes a village to raise a changeling."

"That's what humans never understand," said Titania. "They're so seduced by the material world, they think that's what's real. But all the things they touch and see and measure, they're just—wishes come true. The reality is the wishing. The desire. The only things that are real are beings who wish.

And their wishes become the causes of things. Wishes flow like rivers; causality bubbles up from the earth like springs. We fairies drink wishes like wine, and inside us they're digested and turned to reality. Brought to life. All this life!"

"More to the right," Mack directed her. "That hill over there. You're heading for Cheviot Hills."

"I never did get the grasp of LA. Too much asphalt. Tar smeared over the face of the earth."

"On which you rode that motorcycle."

"It was the closest I could come to flying like this. Only they would never let me ride naked."

"So the dreams that I absorbed and stored—they're real."

"Dreams are the stuff that life is made of," said Titania.

"And what am I made of, then? Coming into the world after gestating only an hour?"

"You're Oberon's wish. All his wishes for beauty and truth and life. For order and system, for kindness and love. Poured out into the body of a woman and allowed to grow in the form that she dreamed of."

"So she really was my mother."

"The mother of your shape. But Oberon was father and mother of your soul."

"I thought I didn't have one."

Titania laughed lightly, like music in the hurtling wind.

"So," said Mack. "How are we going to fight him?"

"I don't know," said Titania.

That was not good news. "I thought you had a plan."

"I have a plan to make me as strong as possible. And him a little weaker. But once you start hurling unformed causality around, you never quite know what's going to happen. I'll do some things.

He'll do some things. The things we do will change the way things work. So we'll do different things.

Until I'm strong enough to bind him."

"What does it mean, to bind him?"

"So it's all about you and him."

"That's right. I draw power from the fairy circle. And he can't see it. He won't know they're there. At first, anyway."

Mack thought about that. "What am I here for? Why didn't you send me back with Ceese?"

No answer.

"Yo Yo?"

No answer.

"Titania, tell me. I should know."

"You're his fairy circle," she said. "The power he's been storing up for years. Storying up, so to speak."

"So I'm on his side?"

"In a way," she said. "But by having you near me, he can't do anything really awful to me."

Now he understood. "I'm your hostage."

"It's a similar relationship. Except that normally, hostages don't get eaten."

"You're going to eat me?"

"No, silly. I love you. He wants to eat you. Or the dreams stored in you, I mean. He'd spit the rest of you back out."

"So I'd live?"

"It won't happen, so don't worry about it."

"Why won't it happen?"

"Because he knows that while he's eating the dreams out of you, I would reunite you with him.

I'd restore the virtues he drove out of him."

"And he doesn't want that?"

"Suddenly he'd have a conscience again. He'd remember how much he loves me. It would completely ruin his side of this little war."

"What would happen to me?"

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know," she said. "Like I told you, baby. I don't know how this will all come out. We just play with the causalities he gives us, and throw our own realities back at him."

She settled lightly to the ground in the middle of the henge of seventeen columns. She unwrapped herself from Mack's body. "Time to do your art, baby."

Mack set to work at once with a red magic marker, drawing a small heart on each column and moving quickly on.

Word was exhausted at the end of his sermon. His listeners weren't—after all, it was still daylight when he finished, and they were all hoping that his healing touch would come into their lives, too. But he was finished because the invisible hand down his back had finally let him go. He had nothing left.

He would have gone into Rev Theo's office to rest, but he remembered the use it had been put to so recently. He sat down in one of the folding chairs at the back of the sanctuary and closed his eyes.

Whatever possessed him had spoken again. This time Word wasn't taken by surprise, and he was fatalistic about it. Either it would come or it wouldn't. Either he'd be given words to say, or he wouldn't.

But by whom? He didn't like the sense that it was linked to Mack and Yolanda. What went on with them was not from God—he knew that much, at least. So why did the spirit only start working through him when the two of them emerged from their semi-holy tryst? Whatever spirit it was, it still worried him that it might not be the Holy Spirit of God.

If I don't serve Jesus with what I do, then whose service am I in?

All the things I said to people. Were they true? Or did they become true because I said them?

That was what Word had come to believe when he studied psychology as an undergraduate. He came to the conclusion that Freud wasn't discovering things, he was creating them. There were no Oedipus complexes until Freud started telling that story and people started interpreting their own lives through that lens. Like neuralgia or the vapors or UFOs or humors or any of the other weird theories—once the story was out there, people started believing it.

So now, am I doing the same thing? Do I say things, and then they become sort of true because I said them? Or are they already true, and this spirit that possesses me reveals that truth and heals whatever can be healed? Am I giving peace, or creating chaos?

Is any part of this from me, my own wish to make sense of things? Or some even deeper need that I didn't know about—a desire to dominate? Because that's what's happening. The way they look at me. Worshipful. Grateful. It's the look of faith. I've given them something I don't even have myself—certainty. Trust.