Harry Turtledove - The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

Judy was waiting for me when I got home, as I’d thought she would be. We’d been seeing each other for about two and a half years, then; I’d gotten her a spare entry talisman and given her the unlocking Word for my door pretty early in that time, and she’d done the same for me.

She greeted me with a pucker on her lips and a cold beer in her hand. “Wonderful woman,” I told her, which might have helped heat the kiss a little. She got a beer for herself, too. We sat down to drink them before we went out.

Judy’s a big tall brunette with hazel eyes and a mass of wavy brown hair that falls halfway down her back. She doesn’t walk, exactly; when she moves, it’s more like flowing. She looked too feline ever to seem quite at home on my angular apartment-house furniture. I enjoyed watching her all the same.

“So what did you come across today?” she asked.

I finished my beer and said, “Let’s talk about it at the restaurant. If I start explaining it now, we won’t get to the restaurant, and then you’ll think I invited you over just to lure you into bed.”

“It is nice to know you occasionally have other things on your mind,” she admitted, upending her own bottle. “Let’s go, then.”

We rode on my carpet; the safety belts held us companionably close. The restaurant parking lot had a sign with a big Hanese dragon breathing ornately stylized fire and a blunt warning: TRESPASSERS WILL BE INCINERATED .

Judith smiled when she saw it. I didn’t. I live in a moderately tough part of town, and I figured there was at least one chance in three the sign was no joke.

Wonderful smells greeted us just inside the entrance. The only trouble with Hanese restaurants is that so much of what they serve is forbidden to those who observe the Law. Sea cucumbers I can live without, but I’ve heard so much about scallops and lobster that I’m always tempted to try them. But how can a man who’d break what he sees as God’s Law be trusted to uphold the laws of men? I was good again. So was Judy, whose job and whose life also took discipline.

Still, you can’t really complain about hot and sour soup, beef with black mushrooms, crispy duck, and crystal-boiled chicken with spicy sauces. Everything was good, too; this was a place I’d visit again. While Judy and I ate, I told her about the Devonshire dump.

“ Three cases of apsychia this year?” she said. Her eyebrows went way up, and stayed way up. “Something’s badly wrong there.”

“I think so, too, and so does the dump administrator—fellow named Tony Sudakis—even though he won’t say so where a Listener can hear him.” I sipped my tea. “You deal with magic more intimately than I do, maybe even more intimately than Sudakis: intimately in a way different from his, anyhow. I’m glad you’re worried; it tells me I’m right to feel the same way.”

“You certainly are.” She nodded so vigorously, her hair flew out in a cloud around her head. Then her eyes filled with tears. “Just think of those poor babies—”

“I know.” I’d thought about them a lot. I couldn’t help it. Vampires and lycanthropes have their problems, heaven knows, but what hope is there for a kid with no soul? None, zero, zip. I drank more tea, hoping it would cleanse my mind along with my palate. No such luck. Then I told Judy what Charlie Kelly had said about a bird telling him something might be amiss at the dump. “He wouldn’t give me any details—he wanted to be coy. What do you suppose he meant?”

“A bird? Not a little bird?” She waited for me to shake my head, then started ticking off possibilities on her fingers. “First thing that occurs to me is something to do with Quetzalcoatl.”

“You just made dinner worth putting on the expense account,” I said, beaming. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

I felt stupid for not thinking of it, too, for no sooner had I spoken than a busboy stopped at the table to clear away some dirty dishes. Unlike our waiter, he wasn’t Hanese; he was stockier, a little darker, and spoke his little Anglo-Saxon with a strong Spainish accent. A lot of the scutwork in Angels City gets done by people from the south. As Sudakis had said, more of them come here every year, too. Times are so hard, people so poor, down in the Empire that even scutwork looks good to a lot of people.

Angels City, much of the Confederation’s southwest, used to belong to the Empire of Azteca. The nobles, some of them, still plot revenge after a century and a half. For that matter, though most people in the Empire speak Spainish these days, some of the old families there, the ones that go back before the Spaniards came, go right on worshiping their own gods in secret, even though they go to Mass, too. Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, is much the nicest of those gods, believe me.

The old families crave the Empire’s old borders, too, even if their own ancestors never ruled hereabouts. They call our southwest Aztlan, and dream it’s theirs. The way immigration is headed, in a couple of generations that may be true in all but name. Some people, though, might not want to wait. So, Quetzalcoatl.

Judy asked, “What ideas have you had yourself?” Thinking is hard work. She didn’t want to do it all herself, for which I couldn’t blame her.

I seized a big, meaty mushroom on my chopsticks, then said, “The Peacock Throne crossed my mind.”

Judy was chewing, too. She held up a finger, swallowed, then said, “Yes, I can see that, especially since—didn’t you say?—you know some Persian firms use that dump?”

“That’s right. Sudakis told me so.” The Peacock Throne is the one which was warmed by the fundament of the Shahan-Shah of Persia until the secularists threw him out a few years ago. St. Ferdinand’s Valley has a large Persian refugee community. And if Persians had been whispering in Charlie Kelly’s ear, I wouldn’t have any trouble getting a warrant from old Maximum Ruhollah, either. He was plus royal que le roi , if you know what I mean.

“After the Peacock Throne, the next possibility I thought of was the Garuda Bird project,” I went on. “Aerospace and defense are Siamese twins, and a lot of defense outfits use the Devonshire dump.”

Judy nodded, slowly. Her eyes caught fire. So did mine whenever I thought about the Garuda Bird. Up till now, no one’s ever found a sorcerous way to get us off Earth and physically into space. People have even talked about trying to do it with pure mechanicals, though anybody who’d fly a mechanical in a universe full of mystic forces is crazier than any three people I want to deal with.

But the Garuda Bird project links the ancient Hindu Bird with the most modern western spell-casting techniques. Before long, if everything goes as planned, we’ll try visiting the moon and the worlds in person, not just by astral projection.

“There’s a good-sized Hind community up in the Valley, too,” Judy said.

“That’s true.” It was, but I didn’t know how much it meant. Angels City and its metropolitan area are so big, they have good-sized communities from just about every nation on earth. If God decided to build the Tower of Babel now, he’d put it right here: the schools, for instance, have to try to teach kids who speak close to a hundred different languages, and some towns have laws that signs have to be at least partly in the Roman alphabet so police, firefighters, and exorcists can find the places in case of emergency.

I ate another mushroom, then said, “Any more ideas?”

“I didn’t have any others until you mentioned the Peacock Throne,” Judy said, “but that made me think of something else.” She didn’t go on; she didn’t look as if she wanted to.

“Well?” I asked at last.

She looked around and lowered her voice before she spoke; maybe she didn’t want anybody but me hearing. “There’s the Peacock Throne, but there’s also the Peacock Angel.”