Harry Turtledove - The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

“Really?” She sounded surprised. “You recommend the procedure, then?”

“I didn’t say that,” I told her, and then explained: “I don’t knew where or from whom the pieces of soul the jinni are synthesizing come from, or whether Slow Jinn Fizz is solving one problem now at the expense of widespread psychic depletion years, maybe even generations, down the line. It’s certainly a tempting technology, but you know who the Tempter is.”

“I certainty do,” she said. “So you’d suggest the Corderos stay away from it?”

If she’d asked me that the day before, I would have said yes. Thanks to modem medicine, Jesus Cordero had every chance of living to a ripe old age, and psychic synthesis would be investigated and refined until people understood all the gremlins in the process. That would be the right time for him to have a soul implanted.

But after what had happened at the Devonshire dump and then at Chocolate Weasel, I felt less easy about that waitfor—developments approach. Just because the odds said you were likely to lead a long life didn’t mean you would: a big piece of Angels City had almost gone up in flames. If you were an apsychic, could you afford to take a chance like that?

Would you want to, knowing extinction awaited?

“Mistress Kuznetsov,” I said carefully, “the EPA hasn’t taken a position on Slow Jinn Fizz and what it does. Before we do, we’ll have to weigh short-term benefits against lowergrade long-term risks. My guess is that the technology won’t be allowed out of the experimental stage and into general use for many years.”

“I know that much already,” she answered. “The people from Slow Jinn Fizz said as much to the Corderos, and I give them credit for it. What I’m realty asking is, what would you do if that were your kid?”

“If it’s my kid, I worry about saving him first and everything else later,” I said. “Isn’t that what being a parents all about? But just because that’s what I’d do doesn’t mean it makes good public policy.”

“That’s fair,” she said. “Let me put it a different way, then; would the EPA have kittens if the Slow Jinn Fizz experimental protocol expanded to include Jesus Cordero?”

“Right now, the answer to that is no,” I said. Too much else—bigger stuff—was going on for us to worry about Slow Jinn Fizz right now, but I didn’t tell that to Susan Kuznetsov.

I hoped that one day (one day soon. God willing) things would slow down to the point where we’d be able to worry about the problems synthesized souls present No doubt they were important but they weren’t world-threatening, so for now they’d just have to wait And besides, I told myself, how much environmental damage on the Other Side would manufacturing a soul for one little boy cause? Not much, surety, and it would do so much good for Jesus Cordero.

You know, of course, which road is paved with good intentions. So do I. So does the EPA. The real question wasn’t what would happen when one apsychic kid got a soul. The real question was what would happen when jinnetic engineering and jinn-splicing techniques began stirring up the psychic material of the Other Side on a large scale, I didn’t have any answers for that. Neither did anybody else. The EPAs job was to make sure we found those answers before exploiting those techniques got us into trouble, not afterwards. But to give Jesus Cordero, a series of one case, a chance at life after life—why not?

Mistress Kuznetsov said, “Inspector, I want to thank you for being flexible; you’re going to make the Corderos very happy, and as for Jesus—he won’t understand what’s happened for a long time yet, but when he does, he’ll be eternally grateful.”

“I hope so, anyway,” I said. “The technique is experimental and, from what Ramzan Durani told me, it hasn’t yet undergone the test of mortality. But when you’re in that position, you have to grasp at straws, don’t you?”

“That’s my view as a public health officer, certainly,” Susan Kuznetsov said. “I wasn’t sure how the EPA would view the matter.”

“If you’d said you wanted to add a thousand people to the experimental list I would have given you a different answer.

But one little boy, and one I’ve met—”

“Yes, the law of contagion does remind us of how important personal contact is, doesn’t it? I was just afraid you’d be working against contagion, as I often have to do, rather than allowing it full scope.”

“Not this time,” I answered quietly. Letting Jesus Cordero have a chance to beat apsychia wasn’t as big a thing as thwarting the Chumash Powers or keeping Huitzilopochtli and his fiery friend from establishing themselves in Angels City, but it felt just as good. Maybe better—as Susan Kuznetsov had said, this was personal.

I only wished the rest of my personal worries were doing as well. No word of Judy, none at all.

To keep myself from thinking of that and what it might mean, I plunged into the environmental impact report on what importing leprechauns into Angels City was liable to do to the local thecology. I made more progress in an hour and a half than I had in the past two weeks. No wonder; now I could make my prognostications secure in the knowledge that the Wee Folk weren’t going to have any adverse effect on the Chumash Powers. I’d taken care of that myself, in spades.

Eventually, I supposed, I’d get around to feeling bad about siccmgthe Garuda Bird on them. An EPA man, after all, is supposed to protect endangered Powers, not exterminate them. From their point of view, I couldn’t really blame the Lizard and the Great (but not Great enough) Eagle and the rest for wanting to overturn the balance of Powers and twist things back to the way they’d been before the first Europeans touched the New World.

But, along with a couple of hundred million other people, I live in the world that’s sprung from the European expansion. And, as Michael Manstein said, we’d done more and better with this land than its original inhabitants would have in the same length of time. So while I figured I’d eventually get round to feeling bad, it wouldn’t be any time real soon.

Speaking of Michael, he poked his head into my office about then. “I’m going home now,” he said. “Perhaps you should do the same.” He clearly wasn’t used to me working | longer hours than he did. He was right. I went home. I ate something (don’t ask me what), then went to bed. Worries or no, I slept almost as soundly as if I’d been in Ephesus: the aftermath of nearly dying a couple of times during the course of a day. If my alarm dock hadn’t screamed me awake, I might be snoring yet No sooner had I got to the office than the phone started yelling. I came this close to knocking over my cup of cafeteria coffee grabbing for it. “Environmental Perfection Agency, David Fisher.”

“Inspector Fisher, this is Legate Shtro Kawaguchi, Angels City Constabulary Department.” Kawaguchi spoke as if he were introducing himself for the first time. “Inspector Fisher, interrogation of the suspect Jorge Vasquez has led us to your fiancee, Mistress Judith Ather.”

I let out a whoop that rattled my windows. “That’s wonderful, Legate! When can I see her?” He didn’t answer right away. My joy crashed into dread. “Is she—all right?”

“Unfortunately, Inspector Fisher, I must tell you she is not,” Kawaguchi answered. “You will perhaps remember that an Aztecian Power, variously called the Cracker, the Page, and the One Called Night, was involved in the abduction of Mistress Ather.”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“From what our forensics man has to say. Inspector, it appears that the One Called Night, to use the name with which you appear to be most familiar, has carried Mistress Adier’s spirit into the realm known as the Nine Beyonds. We have recovered her body. She appears to be physically unharmed; she will eat or drink if food or water is placed in her mouth.