Harry Turtledove - The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

“Interesting,” I said again, to nobody in particular, and started squeezing the undines out of my own swamp.

I’d decided to note the contaminants from the smaller companies first, before I tackled the light-and-magic outfits and the aerospace consortia. If one of the little guys was dumping something spectacularly illicit, my hopes was that it would stand out like a mullah in the College of Cardinals.

I was amazed to see just how much nasty stuff some of the little guys messed around with. Take the outfit called Slow Jinn Fizz, for instance. Heaven help me, they were using things there I wouldn’t have expected to find coming out of Loki’s Cobold Works. I mean, they were stowing stove-in Solomon’s Seals at Devonshire. You think for a while about the thaumaturgical pressure it takes to deform one of those things, and the likely effect on the surrounding countryside when you try it, and you’ll have some idea why I noted that in red.

Chocolate Weasel had just as many nastinesses, things EPA men in most of the Confederation wouldn’t see once in a thousand years—Aztecian stuff, almost exclusively. My stomach did a slow flipflop when I saw one neatly written item on their dumping manifesto: flayed human skin substitute.

As I think I’ve said before, human sacrifice is—officially—banned within the Aztecian Empire these days. But it used to be a central part of the Aztecian cult. One whole twenty-day month of their old calendar, Tlaxipeualiztli (say it three times fast—I dare you), means “boning of the men,” and almost all of it had parades where priests capered around wearing the skins of sacrificial victims.

Obviously, death magic is some of the strongest sorcery there is. But modern technology has eliminated the need that was formerly perceived for it. Proper application of the law of similarity lets the Aztecians produce by less bloodthirsty means the same effect they used to get from ripping the hearts out of victims. But it’s still a daunting item to find on a form.

There are also rumors that some of the flayed skin substitute isn’t created through the law of similarity, but rather through the law of contagion. Yes, I’m afraid that means what you think it does: the substitute material gains its effectiveness by touching a real flayed human skin, one hidden away since the days when such sacrifices were not only legal but required.

The Aztecians spend a lot of time denying those rumors. The EPA spends a lot of time checking them—we don’t want that kind of sorcery getting loose in this country. Nothing’s ever been proved. But the rumors persist.

I noted that one down in red ink, too. Chocolate Weasel, I thought, would get a visit from some inspector soon; if not me, then someone else. Properly manufactured flayed skin substitute isn’t illegal, but it is one of the things we like to keep an eye on.

None of the other little firms that used the Devonshire dump put anything quite so ferocious in it, though I did raise an eyebrow to see how many roosters’ eggshells Essence Extractions was getting rid of. “Cockatrices,” I said out loud. The little creatures are dangerous and always have been ferociously expensive because they’re so rare, but I wondered if these folks hadn’t found a way to turn them out in quantity.

I looked thoughtfully at that manifest before I went on to the next one. If Essence Extractions had found a way to produce lots of cockatrices, they were sitting on the goose that laid the golden egg. Pardon the botched ornithological metaphor, but it’s true. And the dumping records gave some good clues on how they were going about it. Tony Sudakis hadn’t worried about confidentiality for nothing.

Seeing the folks who are trying to thwart you as people just like yourself rather than The Enemy (in Satanic red sometimes, not just capital letters) isn’t easy. You’re better off dealing with them that way, though, because it’s surprising (or revolting, depending on how you look it at) how often they have a point.

I knocked off at five, slid down to the ground. Pickets were marking on the sidewalk off to one side of the parking lot. Pickets marched outside the Confederal Building about three days out of five, touting one cause or another (sometimes the people touting one cause run into those touting another, and then there can be trouble).

These particular pickets weren’t just marching; they were chanting, too: “Hey, hey, waddaya say, let’s throw out the EPA!”

That flicked my curiosity. I wandered over to see what they were upset about. Their signs spoke for themselves: SAVE OUR STRAWBERRIES! was one. Another said, STOP AERIAL GARLIC SPRAYING! And a third— BETTER MEDVAMPS THAN TURNING MY BACK YARD INTO AN ITALIAN DELI! I liked that, actually, even if I couldn’t agree with it.

Sometimes protesters will listen to reason. I decided to give it a try, remarking to a fellow with a blond beard, “You know, if we let Medvamps establish themselves here, they’ll wipe out a good part of our agriculture. Look what they’ve done to the Sandwich Islands.”

“I don’t care about the Sandwich Islands, pal,” Blond Beard answered. “All I know is that as far as I’m concerned, garlic stinks. I have to smell it every hour of the day and night, and I think it’s making me sick. And it’s gotten into my flying carpet, and the sylphs don’t like it any better than I do. I may have to trade the stupid thing in, and with the performance shot, I won’t get near what it’s worth. So there!”

“But—” I started. Blond Beard had stopped paying attention to me; he was chanting again. I gave up and headed back to my own carpet. Reminding him that all the people in the spraying area had been warned to cover up their carpets or bring them indoors wouldn’t have changed his mind, it would just have made him angrier than he was already. Some people might as well be zombies, for all the constructive use they get out of their free will.

As I started to fly toward the freeway, I noticed a familiar-looking man holding a glass glove up to the mouth of one of the picketers. It was Joe Forbes of Ethernet Station One. “Thanks a lot, Joe,” I muttered. Thousands of people, I had no doubt, would hear about the imaginary evils of garlic spraying just as if they were thaumaturgically established.

I hoped he’d have the integrity to interview an EPA sorcerer or somebody from the citrus business, too. But even if he did, the views of people who didn’t know anything except what they didn’t like would in effect get equal weight with those of folks who’d been studying the problem since it first bared its teeth. I sighed. What could I do about it? People out picketing and raising a ruckus were “news,” regardless of whether they had any facts to back them up.

The freeway was jammed, too, which didn’t do anything to improve my mood by the time I finally got home.

Next morning, I started adding to my chart some of the toxic spell components the aerospace firms dumped at Devonshire. I hadn’t been at it for more than a couple of hours before I saw I’d have to talk with my boss.

Bea was on the phone when I went up to her office. Sometimes I think she’s had that imp permanently implanted in her ear. As soon as she laid down the handset, I scurried in. Before the phone could go off again, I tossed my still only half-done chart on the desk in front of her.

Her eyes followed it down. When she saw some of the things I’d written in red, she gave a real live theatrical gasp. “Good God in heaven, are we actually storing these things inside a populated area?” she exclaimed, raising a shocked hand. Her gaze lingered on the flayed human skin substitute. Even though it’s legal, it’s appalling to contemplate.

“Looks that way,” I said, “and this isn’t all of it, by any means. I wanted to ask you to let me do some afternoon fieldwork this week, maybe talk to some of the people who use this stuff and see if there aren’t substitutes. Or even substitutes for the substitutes,” I added, wondering if a second-generation ersatz skin would be magically efficacious.