The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

VI

My stomach was making little plaintive grumbles by the time I got up into St. Ferdinand’s Valley. Even without too many addenda, Bea’s meeting ran long, and Kawaguchi had called before I got a chance to think about lunch. I grabbed a dachshund sausage at the first mom-and-pop joint I came to once I got off the freeway, and I must confess that I walked into the constabulary substation smelling of mustardSome of the people who’d seen me on Sunday looked surprised to find me back again. “What is this, Fisher? You want to move in?” Bomholm the thaumatech called to me. Offhand, I couldn’t think of a notion I liked less.

Legate Kawaguchi’s office was a musty little cell, smaller than a monk would live in and messier than an abbot would tolerate. I’m not exaggerating; Brother Vahan was in there when I walked through the door and, by the look on his face, he would have given Kawaguchi a really nasty penance if he’d thought he could get away with it.

“How are you faring?” I asked him after we shook hands.

“Did the cardinal ever grant that dispensation so your burned monks could get cosmetic sorcery?”

“No,” he said. With that one word, his heavy face dosed down completely, so that he looked like nothing so much as one of those alarmingly realistic portrait busts from Republican Rome. The St. Elmo’s fire from the ceding gleamed off his bare pate as if it were polished marble.

Kawaguchi said, “The scriptorium spirit—Erasmus—was more severely harmed in the fire than we realized. Even now, a couple of weeks after the arson was perpetrated, we’ve needed a team of specialists to establish contact with it. I was just explaining this to the abbot when you came in, Inspector Fisher.”

“Please go on, then,” I answered. “If I find myself lost, I hope you won’t mind me interrupting with a question or two.”

“Certainly,” Kawaguchi said. “As I was telling Brother Vahan, Madame Ruth and Mr. Cholmondeley”—he pronounced it, correctly, as if it were spelled Chumlee—“combine to facilitate communication between This Side and the Other. She is a medium and he a channeler; by pooling their talents and infusing new technology into their work, they’ve achieved some remarkable results. We have every reason to hope for another success here today.”

“Let us hope you are correct. Legate,” Brother Vahan said, and I nodded, too.

They are waiting for us in Interrogation Room Two,”

Kawaguchi said. “Nominally, since the scriptorium spirit is on the Other Side, it could be manifested anywhere.

However, evoking it in an interrogation room will hopefully add to the weight of the questions being asked. And”—the legate coughed—“the chamber in question has more space available than this office, which might otherwise have been suitable.”

“Take us to Interrogation Room Two, then,” I said.

Brother Vahan got up from his chair. The fire and its aftermath had taken a lot out of him. His stride had been strong and vigorous, but now he walked like an old man, thinking about where he’d plant each toot before it came down.

Interrogation Room Two lay halfway down a long, gloomy haD that seemed especially designed to put the fear of God into miscreants brought there. Kawaguchi opened the door, waved Brother Vahan and me through ahead of him. Introductions took up the next couple of minutes.

Madame Ruth was a tall, swarthy woman with a goldcapped tooth. She was also enormously fat; her bright print dress would have been a tent on anyone else, but had to stretch to cover all of her. “Pleased t’meetehuz,” she said.

When she shook hands with me, she had a grip like a longshoreman’s.

Her partner Nigel Cholmondeley couldn’t have been more different from her if he’d spent his whole life deliberately trying. He was as Britannic as his name: elegant accent; long, thin, red-cheeked face complete with a little brush of sandy mustache; old school cravat… Let me put it this way: if he’d been born under a caul, it would have been a tweed one.

Legate Kawaguchi said, “Before we begin, would you care to give the hofy abbot and the inspector a notion of the techniques you will utilize?”

The large medium and the English channeler looked at each other for a moment before Cholmondeley said, “Allow me.” Madame Ruth shrugged massively. I tried not to show how relieved I was; I’d sooner have listened to him than her any day.

He said, “While communication with the Other Side is as old as mankind, techniques have recently taken several steps forward. As you’ll notice, much of the equipment we employ would have been unfamiliar to the practitioners of only a few decades ago.”

He pointed to the battered table shoved off to one side of the interrogation chamber. On it were five of the strangestlooking helmets I’d ever seen. They looked as if they’d been made to cover the whole top of the head, from the middle of the nose on up. I didn’t see any eyeholes for them, and they had long, blunt projections out from where your ears would go. With one on, you’d look something like an insect and something like a man who’d just had a length of tree trunk pounded in one ear and out the other.

After giving Brother Vahan and me a few seconds to examine those curious artifacts, Cholmondeley resumed: “By your expressions, gentlemen, I should venture to say this is your first experience with virtuous reality.”

He waited again, maybe to let us deny it. If he’d kept on waiting for that, he’d have had a long wait He saw as much himself and smiled, exposing a formidable mouthful of yellowish teeth. “Virtuous reality, my friends, lets us simulate the best of the world; it creates a plane neither fully of This Side nor of the Other, whereon, for example, a wounded spirit may meet and communicate with us while not having to return fully to the locus of its misfortune.”

“How do we go about reaching this, uh, virtuous reality?”

I asked.

“Madame Ruth and I shall be your guides.” Cholmondeley smiled again, even more toothily than before. “If you will just come over to the table there, sit around it, and place a helmet over your head—”

The prospect did not fill me with enthusiasm, but I went over to the table anyhow. As I sat down on one of the hard Constabulary Department chairs, Madame Ruth said, “Once you put on your helmet, take the hands of the people to either side of you. We’ll need an accomplished circle to access virtuous reality.”

I reached for the helmet nearest me. It was heavier than I’d expected; maybe the weight lay in those ridiculous earpieces. I slipped it on. It seemed to conform to my face. I’d expected to be blind; I hadn’t expected to be deaf as well.

But the helmet seemed to suck away all my senses, leaving me a void waiting to be filled.

Distantly, I remembered what Madame Ruth had told us to do. I was sitting between Brother Vahan and Nigel Cholmondeley. I made myself reach out to take their hands, though I could hardly tell if my own were moving.

I found Brother Vahan’s hand first His grip was warm and strong; it helped remind me I still needed to get hold of Cholmondeley. I fought against the apathy the helmet imposed on me. At last, after what seemed a very long time, my fingers brushed his. His bones were thin, delicate, almost birdlike; I was afraid I’d hurt him if I put any pressure on them.

Then I waited another long-seeming while. I’d expected things to start happening as soon as my hands joined my neighbors’, but it didn’t work that way. I still lingered, my senses vitiated by the helmet. After a while, I began to wonder whether I was still touching the abbot and the channeler.

I thought so, but it was hard to be sure.

All at once, color and sound and touch and all my other senses came flooding back. I found out later that that was the instant in which the last two of us finally took each other’s hands, completing the circle, as Madame Ruth had said. At the time, I was just relieved to return to… well, where had I returned to?

Wherever it was, it wasn’t dingy old Interrogation Room Two. It was a garden, the most beautiful I’d ever seen. Colors seemed brighter than life, sounds clearer and sweeter, smells as sharp and informative as if they came through a cat’s nose instead of my own.

“Welcome, friends, to the world of virtuous reality,” Nigel Cholmondeley said. Suddenly I could see him, though he hadn’t been there a moment before. He still looked like himself, but somehow he was handsome now instead of horsefaced.

This will be a new experience for you, so look around,”

Madame Ruth chimed in. She too appeared when she spoke.

The big city had vanished from her accent, as had the cap from her tooth, and I saw that about sixty percent of the rest other had disappeared, too. She was still Madame Ruth, as Cholmondeley was still Cholmondeley, but now she looked good.

“Amazing,” Legate Kawaguchi murmured softly, which made him spring into view. While remaining himself, he also looked like a recruiting poster for the Angels City Constabulary Department no cynicism was left on his face, and no tiredness, either.

This is—remarkable,” I said. I presume that let me become visible to the others, but not to myself: as far as I could tell, I remained a disembodied viewpoint Too bad; I would have liked finding out what an idealized version of me looked like.

“Let us proceed,” Brother Vahan said. Now I saw him, too.

“He doesn’t look any different!” I exclaimed, which was true: the abbot remained a careworn man in a dark robe.

Nigel Cholmondeley spoke with enormous respect “In virtuous reality, only those who are themselves trufy virtuous before the experience have their seeming unchanged during it” Suddenly I wondered how much I’d altered to my companions in this strange place. Maybe I didn’t want to be idealized after all.

Then all such petty concerns faded into insignificance.

You see, I saw a serpent in the garden, and—I don’t quite know how to explain this, but it’s true—the serpent wasn’t crawling on its belly. This isn’t just a garden,” I said, awe in my voice as the realization crashed over me. This is The Garden.”

“That’s right—very good.” Madame Ruth sounded pleased I’d caught on so fast “Virtuous reality has translated you to a simulacrum of the place mankind enjoyed before the Original Sin, while we were truly virtuous ourselves.”

“I am not sure I approve,” Brother Vahan said heavily.

“The theological implications are—troubling.”

“It’s only a thaumaturgical simulation, a symbol, if you will,” Cholmondeley assure him. “We don’t pretend otherwise. The test of a symbol is its utility, and we have found this one to be of enormous value. On that basis, will you bear with us?”

“On that basis, yes,” the abbot said, but if he was happy about it, he concealed the fact very well.

“Good. Without the willing consent of the participants, the simulation is all too likely to break down, which would precipitate us back into the mundane world where, sadly, virtue is less manifest,” Cholmondeley said. “And, as I said, virtuous reality can be valuable—as you see.” He pointed.

Coming through the trees was Erasmus. In the strange space of virtuous reality, the scriptorium spirit seemed as real and solid as any of the rest of us—more real and solid than I seemed to myself. Brother Vahan made a choked noise and ran toward the spirit. Erasmus ran toward the abbot, too; they embraced.

“I can feel him!” Brother Vahan exclaimed. Finding his old friend palpable seemed to wipe away his reservations about virtuous reality at a stroke.

While Brother Vahan greeted Erasmus, I took a longer look at the trees from which the scriptorium spirit had emerged. I recognized some of them; orange and lemon, pomegranate and date palm. But others were strange to me, both in appearance and in the scents that wafted from their fruits and flowers to my nose.

I wondered if the Tree of Knowledge grew in this version of the Garden, and what would happen if I tasted of it. Haw to ask that serpent, I thought but when I looked around for if it was gone. Just as well, I suppose.

“I grieve that you were wounded,” Brother Vahan was saying. We all gathered around him and Erasmus. The abbot went on, “Never in my worst nightmare did I imagine evil being so bold as to assail our peaceful monastery.”

“Nor I,” Erasmus answered mournfully. I’d never heard him speak till that moment on This Side, he’d manifested himself only with written words on the ground glass. His apparent voice perfectly fit his studious appearance and the spectacles he affected: it was dry, serious, on the pedantic side. If you imagine Michael Manstein as a scriptorium spirit you’re dose.

“Are you in pain now?” Brother Vahan asked anxiously.

“No. Pain, I think, is impermissible in this remarkable place.” Erasmus peered from one of us to the next. “I recognize here Inspector Fisher of the Environmental Perfection Agency, and this other gentleman’s semblance is also somehow familiar to me, although I do not know his name.”

“I am Legate Shiro Kawaguchi of the Angels City Constabulary Department,” Kawaguchi said when Erasmus looked his way. “Perhaps you sensed my aura during the Bre; officers under my command helped rescue you.”

“That must account for it,” Erasmus agreed. “I fear I have not yet made the acquaintance of the other two individuals here.” \ “Madame Ruth and Mr. Cholmondeley have made it possible for us to use what they term virtuous reality as a meeting ground with you,” Brother Vahan explained.

“Yes, I have encountered the concept in recent journal issues”—Erasmus’ voice suddenly grew sad again—“now without doubt lost to the flames. Intriguing to observe an application of it”

“Speaking of the flames,” Legate Kawaguchi broke in, “I would be grateful for your account of what took place during the evening on which the Thomas Brothers monastery fire took place.”

“Must I recount it?” Even in virtuous reality, Erasmus looked scared. “So dose came I to being eKtinguished forever.”

“If you want the perpetrators apprehended, we must have your statement,” Kawaguchi answered. “Yours, I think, is the only reliable testimony as to what occurred on the Other Side during the commission of the felony.”

Brother Vahan added, “You should also know, old friend, that eleven of the brethren lost their lives in the fire, and many others were badly burned.” His face twisted. I thought about the stiff-necked Cardinal of Angels City and his doubts about cosmetic sorcery.

“I did not know,” Erasmus whispered. His pale, thin visage twisted, too. Remembered pain? Fear? I couldn’t tell.

“They warned me it would be folly of the purest ray serene to speak of what they did to me, evenassuming I was thereafter able to manifest myself, which they found unlikely. But eleven of the holy brethren—Very well, abbot. Legate: I shall speak in praise ottofly.”

Legate Kawaguchi held a stylus and note tablet in his hands. I don’t know where they came from; they hadn’t been there an instant before. Maybe it was just the nature of virtuous reality to accommodate itself to the wills and desires of those who occupied it. Being a constable, Kawaguchi felt he needed written documentation when he questioned a witness. Since he needed it, he got it. Or maybe I’m altogether off base; I don’t pretend to be a thaumaturge.

At any rate, note tablet poised, the legate asked, “What do you mean by ‘they,’ Erasmus?”

The individuals who tormented me on the night of the fire,” the scriptorium spirit answered.

Kawaguchi scribbled a note. Then he said, “Let us take that night in chronological order, if possible. That may be the clearest method of ascertaining the facts in this matter. Is that a reasonable request?”

“For many denizens of the Other Side, beings not so bound up in Time as you humans, the answer would be no,”

Erasmus said. “But as a scriptorium spirit, concerned not only with order in my records but also with regular access to those records by the holy brethren and other researchers”—he looked toward me—“I have a dear sense of duration and sequence, yes.”

“Go ahead, then.” Kawaguchi poised his stylus.

Erasmus took him literally. Beginning with the monks’ celebration of vespers, he began to give a minute-by-minute account of everything that had happened within range of his sensorium. At first, everything was both tedious and altogether irrelevant. If he kept up in that vein, I began to fear we’d stay in virtuous reality forever. It would certainly feel like forever.

Nigel Cholmondeley held up a hand. “Forgive me, Erasmus,” he broke in, “but could you perhaps skip to that portion of the evening when you first noticed something amiss?”

“Ah.” Erasmus gave Kawaguchi a why-didn’t-you-say-what-you-wanted? look, then took up the tale anew: “At 12:04 in the morning, two unauthorized persons entered the scriptorium. I attempted to give the alarm, but was prevented.”

Before Erasmus could answer. Brother Vahan put in, “We noted nothing out of the ordinary. Legate, as I told you on the night of the fire. That evildoers should trespass upon hallowed ground without drawing the notice of anyone within, and that they should overcome alarm spells lain down with the authority of the Holy Catholic Church… they had no small power behind them. Till the day, I would not have thought it possible.”

Like any other major faith, the Catholic Church maintains that its connections with the Other Side are the most potent around (I’d say the most omnipotent, but purists like Michael Manstein and Erasmus wouldn’t approve). With the powers the Church has Over There, it’s not easy even for a Jew like me to disagree very loudly. Having his holy protection fail must have been a dreadful shock for Brother Vahan.

“I cannot answer the question with certainty,” Erasmus said. “I know only that I was silenced, as the holy abbot has suggested, by a spell of great force.”

“What flavor did it have?” I asked. “Was it some strong ancient ritual revived specially for this purpose, or did it cany the precision of modem magic?”

“Again, I cannot say,” the scriptorium spirit answered. “If I may use an analogy from your Side, as well ask a mouse crushed by a boulder in a landslide whether it was granite or sandstone.”

“Very well, we are to understand you were forcibly silenced and prevented from alerting the brethren,”

Kawaguchi said, trying to keep Erasmus moving in the right direction. “What transpired subsequently?”

“I was interrogated,” Erasmus answered. “My questioners sought to learn what Inspector Fisher here had gleaned from our records. I tried to refuse, I tried to resist; the holy abbot had ordered me to treat the inspector in all ways as if he were one of the brethren, and I should never have betrayed (heir secrets who came into the scriptorium like—or rather, as—thieves in the night Then they began to torment me.”

So much for virtuous reality. I didn’t feel virtue, not after I heard that—what I felt was guilt. I didn’t need to ask that disappearing serpent where the Tree of Knowledge grew; I’d already eaten of it at the Thomas Brothers monastery. And because I had, Erasmus had suffered.

Brother Vahan made a noise that said he was suffering, too. He embraced the scriptorium spirit. They dung to each other.

Whatever Legate Kawaguchi was feeling, he didn’t let it interfere with his interrogation. He said, “Could you please describe for me the torments performed upon you?”

Brother Vahan angrily turned on him. “Why are you trying to force Erasmus to reexperience the torments those murderers inflicted?”

“Because their nature may provide important information on the perpetrators,” Kawaguchi answered. “The particular magics utilized will be clues to the backgrounds of those who performed them. I assure you, this is standard constabulary procedure in dealing with cases involving the Other Side, Brother Vahan.”

“I pray your pardon,” the abbot said; he was one of the rare people I’ve met who didn’t find his manhood threatened by backing down. “You don’t tell me how to conduct my affairs; I owe you the same courtesy.”

“Erasmus?” Kawaguchi said.

The scriptorium spirit didn’t look happy about recounting what had happened to him, but after a little while he nodded. “Let it be as you say. Legate, and may the truth bear out your hopes. First came fire: this would have been at 12:32, when my questioners decided I was and would remain obdurate.”

“Fire wasn’t reported in the monastery until after one,”

Kawaguchi said.

“Not the Fire of This Side, but that of the Other, which burns the spirit rather than the material,” Erasmus replied.

“Not for nothing, I can now tell you, do so many mortals fear the pangs of hellfire, for to endure such eternally would be anguish indeed.”

Kawaguchi scribbled notes. I wondered how much good they’d do him. Counting the magics that don’t have fire in them somewhere is a much easier job than reckoning up those that do. And the way Erasmus talked about what had happened to him suggested the fire sprang from Christian or Muslim sources; the former, espedaBy, didn’t lend itself to narrowing down the list of suspects.

The scriptorium spirit continued, “At 12:41, the invaders concluded fire was inadequate to persuade me. They resorted instead to the venom of sorcerous serpents, which coursed through my ichor and brought with it suffering different from, but not less intense than, that which the names had produced.”

“Snakes, you say?” Kawaguchi repeated with a now—we’regetting—somewhere air. “And of what nature were they?”

“With all respect. Legate, I must remind you that I am a scriptorium spirit at a monastery, not a herpetologistfs establishment,” Erasmus answered in a dignified voice. “I can state with authority that they were dissimilar to the one inhabiting the garden here, for which claim I have Scriptural authority behind me. Past that, fools may rush in but, while I am no angel, I tear to tread.”

I found a question I thought Kawaguchi had missed: “Can you describe the men who tormented you, Erasmus?”

“Again, I fear not,” the spirit answered. “They were masked against the sight of Your Side, and so cloaked around in sorcery that I have no notion of their true spiritual semblance, either, save that were it benign they would not have used me as they did.”

I sighed. Kawaguchi sighed. Even Brother Vahan looked a little less saintly than he had. Nigel Cholmondeley and Madame Ruth shifted from foot to foot They’d brought us all together here in virtuous reality, but for the amount of information Erasmus had given us, they might as well not have bothered.

“Very well, then,” Kawaguchi said, sighing again. “What happened next?” °I still refused to divulge the nature of the research Inspector Fisher had been conducting,” Erasmus said. “At 12:48, the intruders again became discontented with their means of torment and shifted stratagems. I found myself tramped under the sharp hooves of an enormous cow.”

That made me sit up and take notice: metaphorically, you understand. Legate Kawaguchi leaned forward toward Erasmus till he was fell past the point where I thought he’d fall on his face. Maybe you can’t do that in virtuous reality; I don’t know. “A cow, you say?” he pressed. “Not a bull? Are you sure about that?”

“I am certain,” Erasmus declared.

“Interesting,” Kawaguchi said. I saw what he was flying toward. Bull cults are common. Straight Mithraism has never quite died, and there are modem revivalist sects trying to pick up supporters who don’t get the spiritual charge they need from Christianity and Islam. Personally, I don’t need to get drenched by the blood of a slaughtered bull to feel a union with the Godhead, but some folks evidently do.

But cows, now… two of the places where the cow is a focus of magic are India—home of the Garuda Bird—and Persia, from which sprang, among others in the case. Slow Jinn Fizz and Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins (a place I hoped I’d get to before I died of old age).

Erasmus went on. The hooves of the cow seemed sharp as whetted steel. They flayed me past any anguish I had previously imagined. And so, to my lasting shame, Inspector Fisher, at 12:58 I yielded to my inquisitors’ torment and described in detail the records I had copied for you. Judge me as you will; the deed is done.”

When a spirit talks about lasting shame, it means lasting forever unless it’s a sylph or one of that flighty breed. I said,

“Erasmus, you did the best you could. What you went through is more than I could have stood; I’m sure of that.

You don’t need to feel shame on my account.”

“You are gracious,” the scriptorium spirit said. Brother Vahan also inclined his head in my direction. That made me feel good; winning Brother Vahan’s good opinion isn’t easy, but it’s worth doing.

“What happened after you finished providing the perpetrators with this information, after”—Kawaguchi glanced down at his notes—“12:58?”

“I finished betraying Inspector Fisher at 1:03,” Erasmus said bleakly. “I hoped that would be the end of it, that the malefactors would take what they had learned and depart. Instead, as you know, they forthwith kindled the fire which I gather resulted in the destruction of the Thomas Brothers monastery. As to that, I could not speak with certainty, for when the ground glasses in the scriptorium melted or shattered from the heat of the flames, I lost my interface with Your Side and, still in agony, awaited my own dissolution.”

“The firecrew and constabulary rescued you,” I said.

“Exactly so. At the time and since, I have doubted whether they did me any great favor, but, as with my betrayal of you, the deed is done and we now must proceed to act upon its consequences.” The scriptorium spirit turned to Legate Kawaguchi. “Oh: there is one thing more. For some time after I was tormented, I lacked much of my normal awareness of self and surroundings. Were I flesh and blood, I gather you would say I was semiconscious. Only quite recently have I regained my full sensorium. When I did so, I found as part of my immediate surroundings—this.”

I hadn’t figured Erasmus for a sense of the dramatic. But from behind his back he pulled out a short green feather.

Kawaguchi held out his had. “May I see it?” Erasmus gave it to him. He felt it, held it close to his face in a gesture that said he was nearsighted. He shrugged. “Just seems like a feather to the eye and the hand.” He turned to Madame Ruth and Nigel Cholmondeley and asked, “Are magical forensic tests possible in virtuous reality?’

They both shook their heads. Madame Ruth said,

“Remember, that isn’t the actual feather you’re holding, Legate, but its analog in this sorcerous space. And, like everything else in virtuous reality, it is imbued with special properties springing from this space and thus not a fit subject for testing.”

“I should have thought of that.” Kawaguchi clicked his tongue between his teeth, not so much in disappointment as in annoyance at himself. He turned to Brother Vahan. “Further questions?”

“I have one,” I said. “How did the two men react when you finally yielded to the cow’s hooves and told them what I’d been investigating?”

“One of them said to the other, ‘He’ll get his, too, I expect,’ ” Erasmus answered. It didn’t surprise me, but it didn’t delight me, either. If somebody was willing to bum down a monastery, the added burden of sin that would accrue from going after an EPA inspector couldn’t have been heavy enough to worry him.

Brother Vahan said, “Old friend, how soon will you be able to manifest yourself normally on Our Side once more?”

“It shouldn’t be much longer, holy abbot,” Erasmus said.

“The metaphysicians tell me I could do it now if my familiar haunts were restored. As it is, I’m given to understand it’s a matter of days rather than weeks.”

“Good,” the abbot said. “I shall pray that the time will be soon, for purely selfish reasons: I find I miss you very much.”

An undead who hadn’t fed in a thousand years had infinitely more blood in him than Erasmus ever could, so when I saw the scriptorium spirit blush I just chalked it up to virtuous reality. And if we were out of questions, we didn’t need to be there any more. I asked, “How do we get back to Interrogation Room Two?”

“You must return to awareness of the body you left behind there,” Nigel Cholmondeley answered. “As soon as your hands leave contact with those of the persons to either side of you, the circuit will be broken and you—and all of us—will return to the mundane world.”

My hands? I looked down, and of course I couldn’t see them. From what my eyes reported, I might as well not have had any hands, or anything else—I was just there. Virtuous reality is an insidious kind of place: it so completely involves all the senses and seems so dioroughly real that leaving wasn’t as easy as Cholmondeley made it sound. I wondered if early explorers had got stuck in it forever. Ifdiey had, I wondered ifdiey’d realized it.

An intense look of concentration came over Brodier Vahan’s face. Presumably he couldn’t see his own hands, either. But an instant later, I was sitting on a hard chair with a stifling helmet over my eyes and ears. I clawed it off. The (nimy reality of the interrogation room was a long, long way om the Garden where I’d been a moment before. Everyone else was taldng off the masks, too. Now that we were back in the constabulary station, Nigel Cholmondeley was horsefaced again, Madame Ruth fat as any two people you want to name, and Legate Kawaguchi short and skinny and tired-looking. I suppose I looked the way I always do, too.

On the table in front of Kawaguchi, along with the cigarette bums and coffee rings, lay a note tablet full of scribbles.

I didn’t remember its being there when we sat down. I didn’t think he could have brought it back from virtuous reality… but then I saw, right in the middle of the table, a bright green feather. Kawaguchi spotted it at the same time I did.

He grabbed it and stuck it in a little transparent pouch made of spirit gum to keep it from being magically influenced.

“Remarkable,” Nigel Cholmondeley said. “One seldom sees artifacts returning with participants in a virtuous reality experience.”

“Officially, this is not and cannot be evidence,” Kawaguchi said. “Its trail of provenance is severely tainted; any judge to whom it was presented would throw it out of court, and very likely the case with it. Unofficially, I shall convey it to the lab and find out what our forensics people make of it.”

“Let me know, please,” I said. If I’d snatched it first, I’d have taken it straight to Michael Manstein—assuming, of course, that Kawaguchi and half a dozen big constables with clubs hadn’t started working out on me to make me give it back. Since they might have done just that, constables being demons for evidence, maybe it was for the best Kawaguchi got it instead of me.

Brother Vahan dipped his head to Madame Ruth and then to Cholmondeley. “Let me apologize to both of you for my previous doubts as to the nature of virtuous reality,” he said; he was, as usual, nothing if not gracious. “I can see that it will become a valuable tool in thaumaturgic research.”

“Thanks right back atcha for thinkin’ fast and breakin’ the circle.” Madame Ruth sounded like herself again, too. Too bad. “That can be the tricky part, gettin’ back here where we belong.”

Nigel Cholmondeley put it more piously: “Mankind was ever reluctant to leave the Garden.”

“So I thought,” the abbot agreed. “But then I remembered I had no true right there, burdened as I was by the weight of Original Sin. After that, recalling my body to action in this actual world was easier.”

The channeler and the medium looked at each other.

“Let’s talk about that some more. Brother Vahan, if you don’t mind,” Cholmondeley said. The extraction technique you describe might well be incorporated into one of the helmets’ ritual subroutines if we are able to isolate the symbolic essence of your thought sequence.”

“It could make you a nice piece of change, and us, too,”

Madame Ruth said. “Like you said, virtuous reality is the coming thing, and if you was to get a piece of it-° “Wealth means nothing to me,” Brother Vahan said. I’ve heard a lot of people say that; he was one of the handful who made me believe it “As may be,” Nigel Cholmondeley said, which meant he had his doubts, too. He also had a hook: “No matter how frugal you personally may be, have you not got a monastery to rebuild?” Brother Vahan stared at him.

I watched the hook snag the fish. The abbot said, “Let us discuss it, then, for the greater glory of God.”

“Let’s eat somethin’ while we talk,” Madame Ruth said, which struck me as more honest than let’s do lunch and most of the other ways people try to combine business and food.

Despite my sausage, I was hungry, too, but not as hungry as I thought I’d be. When I asked my watch what time it was, I found out to my amazement that I’d been in the world of virtuous reality for only about five minutes. It had seemed like a couple of hours while I was there. Oneiromancers say dreams are like that: a lot of things going on but compressed very tightly in terms of time. Judy keeps up on the ins and outs of theoretical thaumaturgy better than I do; I made a note to ask her how virtuous reality simulated the dream effect.

I didn’t have lunch with Brother Vahan and the medium and channeler; enough things were going on at the office that I wanted to put in as much time as I could there, trying to claw my way through the piles of junk on my desk. I wouldn’t starve before dinner. So I went south through the pass into Westwood a little faster than a constable armed with a tracking demon would have approved of. Fortunately, I didn’t spot any black-and-white carpets all the way back down St. James’ Freeway.

After a good trip on the freeway, I got stuck in regular flyway traffic on the way back to the Confederal Building. I peered around the carpets ahead of me, trying to figure out what had gone wrong this time.”

The fellow on the rug next to me leaned over and called, There’s a demon stration up there at the comer.”

Up there at the comer, of course, was where I was trying to go. I growled. “So what if there’s a demonstration? There’s a demonstration at that comer about three days a week.”

Then what he’d said really sank in. “A demon stration?” I didn’t want to believe I’d heard that.

But he nodded. I wondered if I ought to turn my carpet around and get out of there as fast as the sylphs would take me. No wonder there was a traffic jam, if demons were out protesting Confederal policy. I hoped the building would survive. There’d be SWAT teams and God only knows what all else up there, trying to keep the irate Powers from turning the place into an inferno.

My sense of duty got the better of my sense of selfpreservation. I kept going toward the Confederal Building. It took a while for me to inch close enough to find out what was going on. I’d been wrong in my first guess: the Powers at the demon stration weren’t apt to turn violent, and they didn’t need constabulary thaumaturges to hold them at bay. But as soon as I saw them, I understood why they stopped traffic. You see, they were all succubi.

Actually, that’s not quite true. Some of them were incubi, and some of them—well, I’m not quite certain whose fancy some of them catered to, but whosever it was, I’m sure they met it.

As for me, I barely noticed those others. I was busy watching the succubi. I couldn’t help myself. Some of the pictures up on Iosefs wall were pretty spectacular, but pictures don’t begin to convey the essence of what succubi are all about. When you see them in the quasi-flesh, you can’t help but think they’re the creatures men were really designed to mate with; they make women look like clumsy makeshifts.

Phyllis Kaminsky, bless her heart, was down there arguing with some of them, trying to convince (hem to give up and go away. Phyllis is a nice-looking gal, several years younger than I am and in better shape, too. The company she was keeping made her seem a poorly jointed wooden puppet turned out on a lathe by somebody who didn’t know how to run a lathe very well.

One little devil with a blue dress on happened to catch my eye. The promise on her face, the way she ran an impossibly moist tongue over unbelievably sweet, unbelievably red lips, the sinuousness (and you can turn that into a pun or not, just as you please—it works either way) of her hip action—put ’em all together and it’s a minor miracle I didn’t run into the carpet in front of me.

One of the reasons I didn’t was that the gal flying that carpet wasn’t exactly where she was supposed to be, either: instead of keeping her eye on the carpet in front of her, she’d been gaping at an incubus who was taller, darker, and handsomer than he had any business being.

When you think about it, you shouldn’t be surprised our sexual demons are so strong. They’ve been evolving right along with us for as long as we’ve been human, proof of which is how strongly they manifest themselves on This Side.

They’re used to coming Across; they’ve been doing it for millions of years. (You have a dirty mind, do you know that? Filtering out all the double entendres that come naturally [you see, there you go again] when discussing succubi is more trouble than it’s worth.) Unlike the Medvamp protesters, the succubi and incubi didn’t cany signs or chant slogans. They just paraded, they were their own best message.

By then I’d got dose enough to hear Phyllis as well as see her. She was saying, “-but the existence you lead degrades both you and mankind. Don’t you see that sexual exploitation is wrong and damaging to the soul?”

“If this were a Muslim country, we’d be honored, not hunted,” a succubus retorted. Though irate herself, she made PhyUis sound shriD and screechy by comparison: her voice brought to the ear the taste of Erse Creme liqueur. She went on, “We have no souls to worry about; we exist for pleasure. And since you humans endlessly prate about free will, surely you’ll admit you can choose us or avoid us as you see fit.”

PhyUis had been over that ground before. She said, “Tart of your attraction comes from the Other Side, so it distorts free will. Besides, humans of unsavory sorts carry on their sordid affairs in areas you frequent because they know they’ll find a lot of customers there. You don’t just haunt neighborhoods—you blight them.”

The succubus’ shrug was magnificent. This is your problem, not ours. We get we want from humans; they get what they want from us. We find it an equitable arrangement.”

As I finally flew into the parking lot, Phyllis lost her temper and started shouting at the succubus. It’s always a mistake to let Powers, even minor ones, get your goat. They have more patience than people anyhow; what with their far longer terms of being, they can afford it.

Besides, here I feared PhyUis was fighting a losing game.

The succubus’ knowledge of biology was empirical and extremely specialized, but she had a point: her kind and mankind were essentiaUy symbiotes, and nobody was likely to make either turn loose of the other. If that hadn’t happened all through recorded history, it wasn’t likely to start in modem Angels City.

But Phyllis had a point, too. Because the people in our society who go to succubi and incubi are generaUy out for a cheap thrill, they’re often the people who go after other thrills. Find a neighborhood with succubi on the streetoorners and you’H generally find it’s not the kind of place where you’d want to bring up your lads if you had a choice. Keeping sexual demons of any flavor off the streets makes pretty fair sense to me.

I parked my carpet, got off, and went over to see if Phyllis wanted a hand from me. As I was walking up to her that succubus in blue gave me the eye again. My breath went short. I couldn’t help ifc succubi have been perfecting the art of seduction probably since the days of the man-apes. Natural selection works on the Other Side no less than on this one—Powers that aren’t adored perish, and others take their place.

If my reaction meant anything, that particular succubus would stay around forever.

Phyllis saw me not quite slavering and made an exasperated noise. I suppose I can’t blame hen I must have seemed more like part of the problem than part of the solution. She said, “What do you plan on doing, Dave? Will you whip out your little tin badge and run them all in?”

You don’t want to get into a war of sarcasm with Phyllis, or at least I don’t. I’ve been scorched often enough to keep that in mind at all times. So—please believe me—I was about to answer with something mild and soothing.

But before I could, the succubus in blue said, “I’m sure he’d rather whip out something else instead, dear.” Just listening to her was enough to set my heart racing like a couple of laps around the track. But when she licked her lips again, I started sweating so hard I did the only thing I could (short of whipping out something else, I mean)-I fled.

Phyllis lost it. Again, I can’t say I blame her—here she was, watching one of her own people turned into a bowl of quivering gelatin (I was definitely quivering, but at least part of me was a lot stiffer than gelatin) by one of the sexy little demons she was trying to control. She started screaming at the succubus. The succubus screamed right back, with invective from just about every language since primeval Indo-European.

She’d had a lot of satisfied customers, all right.

Since I obviously wasn’t going to be of any use at the demon stration, I went upstairs to work on other tilings.

Rose had left a message on my desk: Professor Blank of UCAC had called while I was out.

Scratching my head, I took the message up to her. “Professor Blank?” I said, pointing. “Wouldn’t he leave his name?”

Now Rose looked puzzled. “I think he said his first name was Harvey.”

There I was, looking and feeling like an idiot twice in the space of ten minutes. Harvey Blank was chair of the Goetic Sciences Department at UCAC; he was one of the first people I’d phoned about investigating whether the Chumash Powers were still around. I slunk back to my desk and returned his call.

The telephone imps reproduced his voice even more blurrfly than is their habit; he must have been eating something when he answered. After a sentence or two, he spoke more clearly: “Hello, Inspector Fisher. Thanks for returning my call. I wanted to get back to you about some preliminary results of the extinction investigation.”

“Go ahead,” I said, grabbing for a pencil and a scrap of parchment. “What have you learned?”

“Not as much as I’d like,” he answered: yes, he was a professor. “The experiments I have conducted, however, do indicate that the Powers formerly venerated by the Chumash Indians are not currently manifesting themselves in the Barony of Angels.”

“They’re extinct, you mean?” I had curiously mixed feelings. Most of me was sorry, as I’m always sorry (well, almost always—I’d make an exception for Huitzilopochtli) to see the Other Side diminished. But that nasty, lazy piece everyone has lurking inside, the one Christians identify with Original Sin, let out a cheer because I wouldn’t have to work as hard on the leprechauns if the Chumash Powers were gone for good.

“I didn’t quite say that,” Professor Blank said.

“That’s what it sounded like to me,” I told him.

“It was the first conclusion I drew from the thaumaturgic regression analysis,” he admitted. “A more thorough evaluation of the data, however, leads to a different interpretation: it seems more likely that the Powers in question have not so much vanished as withdrawn from any contact with This Side. The withdrawal appears volitional.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.” The general rule is that Powers will keep a toehold on This Side if they possibly can: the more active they are, the more they show themselves in the world, the better chance they have of attracting and keeping worshipers to give them the veneration they need, Professor Blank said, “No, I’m not sure. The void in the thecological contours of the barony is certainly there. It is, however, if you will permit me to employ metaphorical language, more as if the Powers made the hole and pufled it in after themselves than as if they simply disappeared from spiritual starvation.”

“They are gone, though?”

“They’re gone,” he agreed. “That much is indisputable. I have been unable to contact or detect them in any way, either by recreating the old Chumash rituals or through modem scientific sorcery.”

“But they might come back?”

“If the situation is as I envision in the highest—probability scenario, that possibility remains open, yes. If on the other hand this is merely an unusually sudden extinction, as remains possible, they are indeed gone for good.”

“Can you find out which more precisely?” The lazy part of me was still hoping to get away with running only one set of projections for the thecological impact of leprechauns on the Barony of Angels. If I had to run two, all right But ifl had to run two and then didn’t know which one to we—nightmares spring from such things. So do blighted careers.

“I’m working on that now,” Professor Blank said. By the way he said it, he hadn’t the faintest idea whether what he was working on would work, if you know what I mean.

“Let me ask you something else,” I said: “Suppose the Chumash Powers have withdrawn voluntarily—in their terms, suppose the great eagle whose wings support the Upper World has flown away. Is it goetically even possible for them to reverse the process?’ “I don’t know, just as I don’t know why they’ve withdrawn,” Blank answered. “My research team is still working on that, too. We’re exploring various possibilities there.”

“Such as?” I prompted.

“Speculation (and that’s all it is at this point) ranges from withdrawal to maintain some level of survival—the Other Side’s equivalent of fungi forming spores when the environment grows too hostile for normal growth—to an active protest against the thecological changes here over the past two centuries.”

When I heard that, I wanted to bang my head on the desk. Protests about environmental issues are hard enough to deal with when they come from This Side.

What was going on down on the sidewalk showed how much more complicated they could get when Powers started playing what had at first been a human game.

Absurdly, I wondered whether the Chumash First People and Sky Coyote had gotten the idea from the parading succubi. After a moment, I realized that was impossible: the Chumash Powers had disappeared before the sexual demons went on the march.

“Hunger strike,” I murmured, as much to myself as to Professor Blank.

“I pray your pardon?” he said.

“Maybe the Powers are starving themselves of recognition to force us to notice them and give them the veneration they require.”

“Thank you, Inspector Fisher; that will go onto the list. And let me thank you again for involving me and my graduate students”—I presume that was what he’d meant when he talkeda bout his research team before—“in this project I am confident we shall eventually learn a great deal from it.”

I didn’t like the sound of that eventually. “When do you hope to have some results I can use to help plan policy, Professor? I think I ought to remind you that this isn’t just a research project, but one where the answers will be put to practical use.”

“I understand that, of course,” he said, a little sulkily. He might have understood it, but he didn’t like it one bit. A professor indeed, I thought. He went on, “We shall endeavor to be as expeditious as possible, provided that we remain consistent with appropriate experimental protocols.”

“That’s fine, sir, but I think I ought to warn you that if I don’t have harder data than you’ve given by, hmm, three weeks from today, I can’t guarantee that your report will become part of the decision-making process.”

Was I playing fair? Of course not, not even slightly. Professors always claim they go into the university or take holy orders or whatever so they can devote their full attention to whatever they’re interested in; Roman epigraphy or beekeeping or the thaumaturgical arts of a vanished Indian tribe. Sometimes they even mean it But a lot more often, I’ve found that professors who see a chance to influence events outside academe will leap at it in spite of their alleged lack of interest Truth to tell, I don’t know if a savant of Roman epigraphy ever got that kind of chance (at least since the days when the Empire was a going concern), but my guess is that he’d grab it, too.

And so now Professor Blank said, “Three weeks, eh?”

Even with two phone imps between his mouth and my ear, he sounded distinctly unhappy. Another phone pause followed. I understood the reason for this one: he was giving me a chance to say I’d made a mistake and the real deadline was three months—or three years—away. I didn’t say any such thing. Blank sighed. “Very well, Inspector Fisher, I will attempt to meet the challenging timeframe you have outlined. God give you good day, sir.”

The same to you, Professor, and I’m grateful for your help. I look forward to seeing your detailed report; it will be most valuable both to me and to the Environmental Perfection Agency as a whole.” As long as he was going to do what I wanted, I had no problem with letting him down easy.

It worked, too; he seemed a lot happier by the time he got off the phone.

I spent the next several minutes making notes on the conversation, both as an aide-memoire for me and to let me have something to show Bea so she’d know I really and truly was working on all the cases that crowded my desk. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have had to waste my time with worries like that, but no one has ever claimed Plato would recognize the Confederal bureaucracy as an ideal world.

I asked my watch what time it was, found out it was almost half past four. A busy day. I was getting tired of not having the chance to get up to Bakhtiars Precision Burins, but I had made one trip to St. Ferdinand’s Valley. Maybe tomorrow, I told myself. I wrote a note reminding me to call Tony Sudakis tomorrow, too; the investigation had gone so many different ways lately that I hadn’t done much with the Devonshire dump itself in quite a while. Sudakis probably figured I’d fallen off the edge of the world, not that he’d miss me if I did.

Instead of finding something constructive to do with the last half hour of my work day, I looked out the window to see if the succubi were still marching down below. They were, and traffic in the building rush hour on Wilshire Boulevard, always heavy, was becoming downright elephantine. Maybe I could duck south down side flyways to St Monica’s Boulevard and get on the freeway there.

It was a good plan. It should have worked, too; Veteran was crowded heading north because people couldn’t turn onto Wilshire from it, but southbound traffic didn’t look too bad. I felt pretty smug sliding down to the parking lot—this once, I figured, I had a fighting chance of beating the system.

Thaumaturgy hasn’t found them yet, but there must be gremlins who sit around listening for thoughts like that. I was just strapping on my safety belt when a priest happened to fly down Veteran. In an instant, all the succubi who had been on Wilshire started running after his carpet, shaking everything they had (and believe me, they had plenty) and calling out blandishments that made my ears turn red—and they weren’t even directed at me.

Succubi, of course, delight in tormenting priests: that’s been obvious ever since Christianity began. And priests, being mortal, have been known to yield to temptation. Some of the temptation here was pretty tempting, too.

A normal rule in Westwood is that you can’t find a parking space to save your soul. The priest, though, must have had the power of the Lord behind him, because he managed to slide his carpet into one. The succubi squealed with delight and jounced after him, sure they’d found another sinner in clerical collar.

They got a rude surprise. The priest hadn’t stopped to dally with them, he’d stopped to give them a load of fire and brimstone to take the place of the sweet scents they were wearing: bitch wolves was the nicest thing he called them, and went on to things like haughty, vainglorious, lecherous betrayers, ready for every wickedness, and fickle in love (which, when applied to a succubus, is about like calling the ocean damp). He roasted them on both sides. Meanwhile, though, half the males on Wilshire tried to turn onto Veteran so they could keep ogling the succubi, which meant the traffic jam spread with them.

At first the succubi didn’t believe the priest was serious.

They had a thorough understanding of the way people work, and knew too many folks like to condemn in public what they do in private. So they kept on pressing themselves against the priest, rubbing their hands over him, kissing his cheek and his ear and the bare circle of his tonsure, paying no heed to his outraged bellows.

Then he pulled out an ampule of holy water. The suo cubi’s squeals turned to screams. They ran, you’ll pardon the expression, like hell. And the priest, his virtue intact even if his clothes were mussed, got back onto his carpet and flew away.

He flew away slowly. By then, that was the only way it was possible to fly on Veteran. Everyone else flew slowly, too, including me. I shouldn’t have been thinking such uncharitable thoughts abut a man of the cloth, especially one who had just proved his faith against a challenge to which many would have succumbed… but I was. If he’d flown by five minutes later, I’d have had an easy trip to the freeway. Getting snarled in traffic instead would have tried the patience of a saint.

I made it home much later than I’d intended, and in a much fouler mood. These things happen. After a bottle of ale and a steak, my attitude improved a good deal. I know what would improve it more, too: I called Judy.

“I’m so jealous, I’m going to hit you the next time I see you,” she said when I told her I’d been involved in using virtuous reality to contact Erasmus. “We were just talking about Ak-x that at the office today. The consensus in the business is that it’s the biggest advance in sorcerous technology since ectoplasmic cloning.”

“I didn’t think it was that important,” I said. Look at the ways having large numbers of identical microimps has changed our lives: spellcheckers, telephones, ethemet sets, all sorts of things our grandparents couldn’t have imagined.

Thinking of that much change happening again—and probably happening faster, because it would be allied to the developments that are already in place—made my head spin.

But Judy said, “Oh, it is, David. The world will be a different place twenty years from now, because we’ll have figured out all the things we can do in virtuous reality. Think about it: what’s the biggest problem in sorcerous applications today?”

“Ask me a hard one,” I answered. “To accomplish everything people want to do these days, spells keep getting more and more complex, and errors creep in.” Some of the errors are pretty ghastly, too, like the one at the Union Kobold works in India a few years back, where a Rakshawas mistakenly ordered to turn out wood alcohol instead of the more friendly sort. Hundreds died from drinking it, and a couple of thousand more were permanently blinded—all from one small goof in translating a spell from Latin into Sanskrit so the Hindu demon could understand it.

“You’re right, of course,” Judy said, which took my mind off the contemplation of disaster. Just as well, too. She went on, “But think what will happen when any old mage can go into virtuous reality to develop his sorcerous subroutines. Because of the nature of that space, the number of errors should drop way down. Ideally, it should fall to zero, but I think the fallibility principles will keep that from happening. Still—”

“I hadn’t thought of it in those terms,” I admitted. “It just seemed a handy way to reach a spirit who’d been too badly damaged to manifest himself in this rough, rugged world.” I thought about some of the things the wizards had done to poor Erasmus. Judy didn’t need to know about those.

She said, “I’m just glad I’ll have my master’s and be out of the copy-editing and proofreading end of the business soon.

Mark my words, the accuracy breakthrough that will come with virtuous reality is going to throw a lot of sharp people onto the streets.”

“Change has a way of doing that: the more efficient the spells get, the more they do and the less anybody needs actual people,” I said. One of the reasons the General Movers plant in Van Nuys is going under is that the Japanese have figured out a way to power the looms that make their flying carpets by kamkazes-divine winds.

“That does look to be the way it’s going,” she said, “but what do we do with all the people who lose jobs? Eventually nobody will need people for anything, and then where will we be?”

The two answers that occur to me are bored and broke”

I answered. “But those are for people in general. People in particular—us, I mean—will be married. We may end up broke, but I don’t think we’ll be bored.”

“No, not bored,” she agreed, “especially not with children in the house.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. I know children are usually one of the things marriage is about. I even looked forward, in an abstract sort of way, to being a father. But it didn’t seem real to me; I had trouble imagining myself giving a baby a bath or helping a little girl with her subtraction problems.

Then I thought about the Corderos. They were nice lads who’d had every reason to expect a nice, normal baby.

Instead they got Jesus, bom without a soul. How were they handling it? How could I handle something like that if it happened to me? The very idea was nearly enough to put me off parenthood for good.

“You still there?” Judy asked when I didn’t say anything for a while. “Relax—it’s not as if you’re going to have to start changing diapers tomorrow.” The woman can read me like one of the grimoires she proofs. I suspect that, like them, I’ll end up better for the editing, too.

Just to show her I had other things on my mind besides immediately turning into a daddy, I said, “Something else interesting happened today—or at least I thought it was.” I told her about the demon stration outside the Confederal Building.

“I’ll bet you thought it was interesting,” she said darldy.

Women take a particular tone when they talk about attractive competition that bothers them. They take a different—but not very different—tone when they talk about attractive competition that amuses them. Over the phone, I had a tough time telling which one Judy was using. She went on, “See anything you liked in particular?”

“Well—” The image of the succubus in blue leaped into my mind, as fully three-dimensional as the little demon had been herself. “As a matter of fact, yes.” I did my best to sound sheepish, but I didn’t know how good my best was.

Judy left me hanging for a couple of seconds before she started to laugh. “Good,” she said between chuckles. “If you’d told me anything else, I’d have figured you were lying—succubi are made to be succulent, after all. I wish I’d been there; I could have leered at some of the incubi.

Watching is fun, though I think men may be more apt to enjoy it than women.”

“Maybe,” I said. “It didn’t seem to matter much to the traffic, though. Everybody was staring, men and women both.”

“Oh, God, I hadn’t even thought about that It must have been awful.” Commuting every day from Long Beach up into East A.C., Judy knows all about traffic tangles and loves them as much as anyone else who has to get on the freeway to go to work.

“It was worse than that.” She laughed again when I told her how the strong-minded priest had foiled my effort to escape down Veteran. Thinking back on it, I decided it was funny, too. It certainly hadn’t felt funny why I was sitting on my carpet twiddling my thumbs for an extra twenty minutes.

“So how was your day?” I asked.

“Certainly not as interesting as yours,” she answered.

“Very much the usual: looking at sheets of parchment and making little marks on them in red. It keeps me out of the baron’s Paupers’ Home, but past that it doesn’t have a whole lot to recommend it. I can’t wait to finish my master’s so somebody will hire me to work on the theoretical side of sorcery.”

Then you’ll be working in virtuous reality all the time, if it turns out to be as important as you think it wffl,” I said.

“It will, and I will. Then I’ll come home and we can be less than virtuous together.” Judy hesitated, just a beat “But we’ll be married, so it’ll be virtuous after all. Hmm. I’m not sure I like that.”

“I think it’ll be fine any which way,” I said. “And speaking-indirectly-of such things, do you want to have dinner with me tomorrow night?”

“Indirectly indeed,” she said. “Sure, I’d love to. Shall we go to that Hanese place near your flat again?”

“Sounds good to me. You want to meet here after we get off work?”

“All right,” Judy said. “It’ll be good to see you. I love you.”

“Love you too, hon. See you tomorrow. Bye.”

Thinking of seeing Judy kept me going through a miserable Tuesday at the office. I did get some of the small stuff done. Lord, the things that show up on an EPA man’s desk sometimes! I got a letter from a woman up in the high desert asking it the ashes of a coyote’s flesh had the same anti-asthmatic effect as those of a fox’s flesh when drunk in wine and, if so, whether she could set traps for the ones that kept trying to catch her cats. Just answering that one took a couple of hours of research and a phone call to the Chief Huntsman of the Barony of Angels (in case you’re interested, the answers are yes and she had to buy a twenty-crown license first, respectively).

The environmental study on importing leprechauns, though, took a large step backwards. I got a very fancylooking legal brief from an outfit that called itself Save Our Basin, which opposed allowing the Little People to establish themselves here. SOB put forward the fear that, once we had leprechauns here, all the Sidhe would henceforth pack up and move to Angels City. I’m condensing, but that’s what the gist of it was. Now on first glance this stuck me as one of the more idiotic environmental concerns I’d seen lately. The climate here, both literal and theological, isn’t congenial to Powers from cool, moist Eire. But the Save Our Basin folks had so many citations in their brief—from the evocatio of Juno out of Veil and into Rome to the establishment of the Virgin at Guadalupe in what had been a purely Aztecan thecology—that I couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. It would have to be countered, which meant more research, more projections—and more delay. I wondered how long leprechauns could stay in hiberniation. I hoped it was a long time.

I looked at the names on the letterhead of the Save Our Basin parchment I didn’t recognize any of them, but somebody in that organization was one clever lawyer. As far as I could see, none of the citations in the brief was precisely analogous to what would happen if we imported leprechauns into Angels City, but they were all close enough to being analogous that I (and, again by analogy, our legal staff) couldn’t afford to ignore them. We’d have to examine every one of those instances, demonstrate that it was irrelevant, and withstand challenges from Save Our Basin trying to establish that the instances weren’t irrelevant at all.

In a word, a mess. I figured the best way was to taclde their citations chronologically, so I started researching the Roman sack of Veil. I found out in a hurry that all the accounts of the sack are legendary, some more so than others. Legends are trickier to deal with than myths. Mythical material definitely has theological overtones; you know what the thaumaturgic content is. But in a legend you can’t tell what’s from This Side and what from the Other. A lawyers paradise, in other words.

I’m sure Save Our Basin did it on purpose, too. Not for the first time lately, I had the feeling I was wading deeper into quicksand. When quitting time finally rolled around, I breathed a heartfelt. “Thank God!” My spirits improved considerably as I left behind the spirits I’d been wrestling with at work and looking forward to dinner with rest of the being more enjoy on my way home, someone tried to kill me.