Jo Walton - Among Others

“Jesus, how awful for the driver,” Wim said.

“I don’t know what he saw, or what he thought,” I said. “I wasn’t in any state to ask.”

“But you stopped her? Your mother?”

“We stopped her. But Mor was killed.”

The waitress interrupted me by putting two red cups of black coffee down on the table. One of them was slopped into the saucer, onto the packets of sugar. Wim paid, before I could offer to.

“And then what happened?” he asked.

I couldn’t, of course, tell him about those awful days after Mor was killed, the bruise on the side of her face, the days when she was in a coma, the time when my mother turned off the machine, and then afterwards when I started to use her name and how nobody challenged me, though I’m sure Auntie Teg knew, and probably Grampar too. We might have been identical, but we were different people after all.

“My grandfather had a stroke,” I said, because however unbearable that was it was the next bearable thing to say. “I found him. They used to call it elfshot. I don’t know if she made it happen.”

I tried my coffee. It was horrible, even worse than instant coffee if that was possible. At the same time, I could see how it could become an acquired taste if I tried hard to like it. I’m not sure it would be worth the effort. After all, it’s not as if it’s good for you.

“So what are you going to do about her?” Wim asked.

“I don’t think I need to do anything. We stopped her. Her last chance was Halloween.”

“Not if your sister didn’t go under the hill like she was supposed to. Not if she’s still there. She could use that again. You have to do something to really stop her. You have to kill her.”

“I think that would be wrong,” I said. The other girls from school were all getting up, and I knew it must be time for the bus.

“I know she’s your mother—”

“That has nothing to do with it. Nobody could hate her more than I do. But I think killing her would be the wrong thing to do. It feels wrong. I could talk to the fairies about it, but if it would have helped, I think they would have told me to do it already. You’re thinking about it in the wrong sort of way, as if it was a story.”

“This is just so damn weird,” he said.

“I’m going to have to go. I’ll miss the bus.” I stood up, leaving the rest of my coffee.

He gulped his own coffee. “When will I see you?”

“Tuesday, like always. For Zelazny.” I smiled. I was looking forward to that.

“Sure, but on our own?”

“Next Saturday.” I shrugged my coat on. “It’s the only time there is.”

We started walking out of the cafe. “They don’t let you out of there at all?”

“No. They pretty much don’t.”

“It’s like prison.”

“It is in a way.” We walked down to the bus stop. “Well, Tuesday then,” I said, as we reached it. The bus was there, and the girls were pouring onto it. And then—no, this needs to be on a line of its own.

And then he kissed me.

It took me until today to finish writing up what happened on Saturday.

I’m not sure I really like The Number of the Beast . There’s a lot to like about it, but it’s all over the place as far as plot goes, and as far as location goes as well. I’ve never read Oz or the Lensmen, and I’m not quite sure what they were doing there.

Apart from that, the main excitement has been that all the girls who were on the bus have been asking me nonstop about “my boyfriend,” where I met him, what he’s like, what he does, and so on and on and on. Some of them who were in the cafe know about his reputation and have warned me about him—what, seventeen-year-old boy had sex with girlfriend, shock horror! It’s such a weird mixture of puritanical and prurient. The girls who have local boyfriends say they’re not serious about them, and some of them have what they call serious boyfriends at home. What they mean by serious is just what Jane Austen would have called an eligible parti, a boy of the same class who they might marry. They’re slumming with the local boys, and the local boys mostly know that. It’s vile, they’re vile, the whole thing is vile and I don’t want to think about Wim in the same breath as that.

The real difference is that we’re not of different classes. Wim and I are both of a class that expects to go to university. I don’t know what his father does, but that his mother works in the hospital kitchens while I go to school here is irrelevant. Well, maybe not irrelevant, but not the point. Anyway, I’m not sure if Wim is my boyfriend, and even if he is it isn’t at all the thing they’re talking about with their serious and not serious. I’m only fifteen. I’m not sure I ever want to get married. I’m neither messing around while waiting nor looking for some “real thing.” What I want is much more complicated. I want somebody I can talk to about books, who would be my friend, and why couldn’t we have sex as well if we wanted to? (And used contraception.) I’m not looking for romance. Lord Peter and Harriet would seem a pretty good model to me. I wonder if Wim has read Sayers?

But that’s also almost irrelevant, because there’s also the ethical thing of the magic. I should probably tell him, and then he’d hate me, anybody would.

I’ve asked Nurse to make me a doctor’s appointment. She didn’t ask what for.

Zelazny meeting last night. Wim thinks Zelazny’s the greatest stylist of all time. Brian thinks style is unimportant compared to ideas, and he thinks Zelazny’s ideas are ordinary, except for Shadow. It’s funny how people divided on that one. I think if we’d voted for whether style matters or only ideas, the division would have been really different from whether Zelazny has good ideas. I think he does, and I think both matter, which isn’t to say that the Foundation books suck because they have no style, or Clarke either. Zelazny can get where he’s all style and no substance—I can’t forget Creatures of Light and Darkness after all, which almost put me off him forever. But mostly he keeps the balance.

We talked about Amber and what’s going to happen, and we talked about the kind of wisecracking voice he uses in those and in Isle of the Dead and This Immortal and we talked about whether it was actually science fiction or fantasy. Hugh thinks the Amber books are fantasy, and so is Isle of the Dead , because despite the aliens and everything, worldbuilding is talked about in such magical terms. “That’s condemning him for being poetic!” Wim said.

“Saying it’s fantasy isn’t condemnation,” Harriet said.

So, a good meeting. Afterwards Wim said to Greg, “Do you have a recent Ansible ?”

There’s a magazine, a “fanzine” called Ansible ! It’s for information about what’s going on in the SF fan world, it’s funny, and it’s so exactly what I would have called it that I love the author, Dave Langford, sight unseen without meeting him. Ansibles are from The Dispossessed and they’re faster-than-light communication devices. Brilliant. All the details about Albacon in Glasgow at Easter were in Greg’s copy, and I copied them down, and all I have to do now is get the money from Daniel when I see him, probably at half term, which is at the end of next week, and send it off.

Walking out of the library, Wim held my hand. “Are you sure I can’t see you until Saturday?” he said. “Will you be locked up in school the whole time?”

“Well yes, apart from going to Shrewsbury Thursday afternoon for acupuncture,” I said.

“What time are you going?” he asked.