Jo Clayton - Blue Magic

He wiped the sweat off his face, beat his fist on the tabletop until it boomed, working off some of the rage that threatened to explode out of the cramping grip of the god and blow the fragile psyche of Danny Blue into dust. He might be young and wobbly on his feet, but he had a ferocious will to survive. Not as Ahzurdan, not as Daniel Akamarino. As Danny Blue the New.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

He looked up. Brann was standing in the arch of the alcove looking worried. He opened his mouth to explain but his tongue wouldn’t move and his throat closed on him. It was forbidden to think, do or say anything against the god. His face went hot and congested as he wrestled with the ban; he felt as if he were strangling on the words that wouldn’t come out She came to him, put her hand on his arm. “Never mind,” she said, “I know.”

He slammed fist against table one last time, sighed and stood up. “Help me turn this thing over.”

Brann pushed her hairoff her face, blinked at him, then began laughing. He looked up, startled. “What?”

“You wouldn’t understand. Why turn the table over?”

“Don’t want to talk about it, you know why.”

“Ah. Can the changers help?”

“No. You take that end, I’ll take this. Watch the legs. -

“Better move the candle first, unless you’re planning to burn the house down. If you want light, why not touch on the wall lamps?”

“Lamps?” He looked up. There were ten glass and copper bracket lamps with resevoirs full of oil spaced along the walls of the alcove two meters and a half above the floor; he hadn’t noticed them because he hadn’t bothered to look higher than his head. “Do you know how irritating a woman is when she’s always right? Here.” He thrust the candle at, her. “Light the ones on your side.”

When the table was inverted and lay with its legs in the air, Danny Blue knelt on it and thumped at various portions of it to make sure the wood was solid; finished with that, he sat on his heels and looked thoughtfully at Brann. “You fed Ahzurdan, you think you can do that for me?”

She frowned at him, moved to the arch. “Yaril, I need you.”

Drifting above the clouds, Jaril spread out and out and out, shaping himself into a mile wide parabolic collector seducing into himself starlight, moonlight, gathering every erg of power he could find; Yaril was a glimmering glassy filament stretching from Jaril to Brann, feeding that power into her; Brann was a transformer kneeling beside Danny Blue, feeding that power into him as fast as he could take it.

Using Ahzurdan’s memories, Danny Blue wove a shield about them like the one Ahzurdan had thrown about the room in the Blue Seamaid; he worked more slowly and had to draw more power than Ahzurdan had, the memories were there but he was no longer completely Ahzurdan and the resonances of word and act were no longer quite true. With Brann feeding energy into him, he got the shield completed, locked it into automatic and found that he’d gained two advantages he hadn’t expected. The smother couldn’t reach him, couldn’t wear at him. And the shield once it was completed took almost no maintaining. Whistling a cheerful tune he unbuckled his sandals and kicked them across the room, grabbed hold of Brann and pulled her into the alcove, shrinking the shield until it covered only that smaller room, it’d attract less attention and he had no illusions about how irritated Maksim was going to be at losing sight of what they were doing. But it was so damn good to be working again on something as simple and elegant and altogether beautiful as lift field circuits-he felt like a sculptor who’d lost his hands in some accident or other, then had to spend an small eternity waiting for them to be regrown.

Yaril filament had no difficulty penetrating the shield; she continued to transmit moonlight and starlight into Brann who kept one hand lightly on Danny’s spine, maintaining the feed as he dropped to his knees on the underside of the tabletop. He brushed his fingertips across the wood, sketched the outline of a sensor panel, but left it as faint marks on the surface. Hands moving slowly, surely, the chant pouring out of him with a rightness that was another thing he hadn’t expected (as if the magic and his Daniel memories had conspired to teach him in that instant what it’d taken Ahzurdan years to learn, as if the rightness and elegance of the design dictated the chant and all the rest), he Reshaped the wood into metal and ceramic and the esoteric crystals that were the heart and brain of the field, layer on layer of them embedded in the wood, shielded from it by intricate polymers, his body the conduit by which the device flowed out of memory into reality, his will and intellect disregarded. When the circuits were at last completed, he sculpted twin energy sinks near the tail (full, they’d power the sled twice about the world) and finished his work with a canted sensor plate that would let him control start-up, velocity, direction and altitude. After a moment’s thought, he keyed the plate to his hand and Brann’s; whatever happened, Maksim wasn’t going to be playing with this toy, it was his, Danny Blue the New, no one else’s. He added Brann, (reluctantly, forcing himself to be practical when the thought of sharing his creation made him irrationally angry), because there was too good a chance he’d be injured and incapable and he trusted her to get away from Maksim if she could possibly do it so he didn’t want to limit her options. He sat on his heels, gave Brann a broad but weary grin. “Finished.”

She inspected the underside of the table; except for the collection of milkglass squares on the tilted board near one end she couldn’t see much change in the wood. “If you say so. Shall I call the changers in?”

He tested the shielding and his own reserves. “Why not. But you’d better tell them I’m going to need them in the morning when there’s sunlight, we have to charge the power cells before we go anywhere.”

She nudged the tabletop with her toe. “I’ve heard of flying carpets, but flying kitchen tables, hunh!”

He jumped up, laughed, “Bramble all thorns, no you won’t spank me for that.” He caught her by the waist,, swung her into an exuberant dance about the kitchen whistling the cheeriest tune he knew; he was flying higher than Jaril had, the pleasure of using both strands of his technical knowledge to produce a thing of beauty was better than any other pleasure in both his lives, better than sex, better than smokedreams; he sang that in her ear, felt her respond, stopped the dance and stood holding her. “Brann…

Mmmtn?”

“Still hating me?”

She leaned against his arms, pushing him back so she could see his face, her own face grave at first, then warming with laughter. She made a fist, pounded it lightly against his chest. “If you mess me up again, I swear, Dan, I’ll… I don’t know what I’ll do, but I guarantee it’ll be so awful you’ll never ever recover from it.”

He stroked her hands down her back, closed them over her buttocks, pulled her against him. “Feel me shaking?”

“Like a leaf in a high wind.”

He tugged her toward the alcove, but she broke away. “I’m not going to bruise my behind or my knees,” she said. “Privacy yes,” she said, “but give me some comfort too. Pillows,” she said. “And quilts. Fire’s down, it’s getting chilly in here.”

The children were curled up on the couch in the living room, sunk in the dormancy that was their form of sleep. Brann touched them lightly, affectionately as she moved past them, then ran laughing up the stairs to the sleeping floor. She started throwing the pillows out the doors leaving them in the hall for Dan to collect and carry downstairs, came after him with a billowing slippery armload of feather comforters.