Another Story

Five of Humours; one of Melancholy: one of Honey

"What if magic had a half-life?"

I think Beka says it first, although my memory is a touch ragged around the edges. We're in the crypt bar of the Sun, Moon and Stars, down on Adastra and Seventh, Friday night going on Saturday morning. We've been drinking for hours. So, Beka poses the question and, a moment or two later, Ivory repeats it, pretending he'd thought of it in the first place. Bloody typical of Ivory.

Ivory? He's the station's Chief Pathologist - and woe betide you if you forget those capital letters. Has the face of an angel, little skill in dealing with the living and is never truly happy unless he's elbow-deep in the blood and gore of the latest mutilated corpse. First name begins with a C - Clifford, Clement, Coriolanus or somesuch. He's three parts drunk, puce-faced and loud, and he lusts after the delicious Beka almost as much as she despises him.

"Half a life has no magic at all." Afton chips in. "In fact, there's bugger all in a whole one!"

Ivory looks pained and starts waving his hands about. I notice how pale they are, smooth and hairless, with nails cut down to the quick. No rings. "No, no! You've missed the entire point! You don't understand... "

"Radioactivity." I say, helpfully.

Afton gives me one of her squinty-eyed, sideways looks, the sort that mean 'if you say that again I'm going to hit you.' I ignored one once - I still have the scars.

Afton? Dee-tective-Inspector A. Afton Lamont, deductive genius, sleuth nonpareil and my partner. She's been downing vodka like water all evening and still sounds sober. This afternoon we closed a case, a nasty, protracted and complex affair, the sort that always have a high profile in the media- nets, and we're drinking to blunt the memory of it. A serial child-killer is behind bars, yet the horror still walks free.

Chrys starts to giggle. "That's silly! If magic was like radioactivity then people who used it would get sick - witches and warlocks would have no teeth! Or hair!"

Chrys? She's a young member of the Treebone clan, an arcane tribe of sisters, all named after gemstones and all psychic. We try not to let on to the media that we use accredited psychics, but this time it leaked out. This time everything went wrong - lost evidence, corrupted files and witnesses who lied - and five children paid a very high price. Chrysoprase Treebone reads tea-leaves and tarot-spreads, scrys the future in smoke or still water with hair-raising accuracy and finds the lost by dowsing with a pendulum over a map. She's a vision in apple-green, short skirt and halter-top, masses of her namesake jewellery, eyes and even bobbed hair - all green. The barman keeps staring at her.

"The bad teeth, the warts, the thin, bony fingers - it all fits." Beka runs with the idea. "It isn't sorcery - it's radiation sickness!"

Beka? That's Rebbeka Cazzandra McGee, med-tek, mystic and my best friend. She wears her dark hair braided, has beautiful hands, a sweet face, a shadowy past and the temper of Satan himself.

"Perhaps magic is an isotope of the mundane." Afton crunches through a fistful of tiny beetles, vivid red and yellow, antennae waving vainly as they pass between her lips to their doom. I blink, look again and see that they're just peanuts. "Instead of heavy water - how about heavy reality?"

"Carbon 14, cobalt 60, uranium 239... " I flounder to follow that train of thought. "Tuesday 1024, August 4096... "

"Jerome, shut up!" Ivory snaps. "Go back to counting your toes, why don't you!"

Jerome? That's me. I'm tall, dark and handsome. It's true - I top two metres in my bare feet, have a skin baked darker than mahogany by a sun three times hotter than Sol, and I'm not so ugly that I need to wear a bag over my head in public. I'm also pretty drunk. A waitress brings another round over to our table and she winks at me while she's clearing the empties. She looks just like Marilyn Monroe - red lips, that white dress, beauty spot and all.

"Can't you tell he's a tek-wiz?" Beka grins. "Knock his higher functions stone dead with a surfeit of alcohol and he reverts to base two, just like his beloved computers."

"Booze brings out the base in most men, in my experience." Afton finishes her current vodka and starts on the next.

"Your experience?" Ivory arches one eyebrow. "Would that be considerable, I wonder, or very limited?"

"I've seen more of the world than you." Afton says, quite mildly. "Most of my best friends are alive."

"My Aunt Amethyst talks to the dead." Chrys tells us, apropos of nothing. "A useful skill, although it can make after-dinner conversations a little unsettling."

"Is that the dead generally, or particular denizens of the non-living community?" Beka stirs the ice-cubes in her rum and something-brown-and-treacly with a fingertip.

"Usually absent friends or late relatives - Great-Aunt Sardonyx pops in most weeks, to check we're all behaving ourselves."

"Anyone famous?" Afton asks, ignoring Ivory's grimace at the very idea of chit-chat with his clients.

"Well, there's a holo-cast cook who drops in to swap recipes - Delilah Brooks... "

"Delilah's Dishes of Delight!" Beka squeals. "I always watched her programmes - she taught me to cook Green Dragon Pie! How I hated it when she died!"

The name catches my mind and flips it sideways. "Green Dragon Pie?"

"Lentils." Ivory says, in the sad tones of a man who's known disappointment. "Fancy name like that and it's always lentils. Or tofu."

Afton smiles with a whiff of sympathy. "Just where do you get fresh dragon steaks these days?"

Chrys frowns as she lists her aunt's visitors, oblivious to our attempt to hijack the subject. "There's a rather odd little man with a bandit moustache - Aunt Tourmaline says he's a terrorist, but Amethyst always denies that. He was a political activist from Sol system who died in a shuttle crash, but he insists that he was assassinated... "

"Armand Theunissen?" Ivory asks. "I remember that, but he died over a decade ago and the news-nets said it was an accident."

"That's him." Chrys wrinkles her nose and sips at her drink, which is, of course, lime green. "I don't care for him much - he always sounds as if he's got a cold and he's as miserable as a month of wet Sundays. Now, Caro's much more fun - she's the soprano, Dame Caroliana Augustine. She sings for us and knows all of the funniest songs out of Gilbert and Sullivan, you know - the Major-General, the Lord High Executioner and the Captain of the Pinafore... "

"And we are his sisters and his cousins and his aunts?" I dredge the appropriate quote up from the mudpools of my memory.

Chrys beams at me. "Uh-huh! Hey, that's cute!"

"The big guy has a brain." Beka shrugs. "Your secret's out, Jerome, so you can't play dumb anymore."

"Tonight he can." Afton flicks a peanut at me - I'm too drunk to dodge and it pings off my shoulder.

"Quit teasing him!" I can't believe anyone would dare to scold my partner, but Chrys gets away with it. "He's a little tipsy, is all - hell, none of us is one hundred percent sober!"

"I don't want to be sober." Beka tries to smile, but I feel the ripples of horror beneath her devil-may-care mask. "Tonight I want to forget."

"And tomorrow?" Afton wonders.

"Tomorrow can take care of itself."

The ghosts are too close to us, with pain skipping along at their heels. We drink for a while and I lose my grip on the conversation. I think about the different worlds we all come from, the different worlds we all walk through here, whilst inhabiting the same space. Ivory's a home-boy, born and bred here on Siobhos, a conventional eccentric, with his grey suit, short hair and ghoulish sense of humour. Chrys is also a native, happily of a more colourful kind, smart and individual, a girl who dines with the dead. Beka claims to hail from Farramond, a rural backwater of a world, but I know that's a lie. I've seen the edge of the tattoo on her breast, the silver swirls she usually keeps hidden, taboo marks of a barbaric culture. She's from deeper into the Cluster, Miscandiou perhaps, or Triamond - one of the dark planets exiled from civilised society. Afton was born on Earth, the Mother-World herself, but don' t tell her I said so or she'll nail my skin to the wall.

And me? I'm from a place so secret, so forbidden that no-one ever speaks its name; a place of whips and torture, of men with fangs and tails and reptile-scales, a desert place of death and terror. Call it Hell - it deserves no better name.

Five separate lives, five different worlds. Fantastic worlds - and none more fantastic than that on the inside of your own skull.

I drift back into reality. An eternity has passed, or was it no time at all? Chrys is still telling tales of her aunt's late table-guests.

"...and a writer of strange, mysterious books - real paper and ink page-books that she printed and bound in leather herself. Her name was Emily but she wrote under the pseudonym Elixir O'Clock."

A tiger walks through the bar, with a smile pinned on its face and a gold ribbon tied on its tail. "Apricots are the work of the Devil." it says, in ringing tones. "Lance carbuncles only on Wednesdays. Galileo was wrong."

"Did you see that?" I try to point, jiggling my beer with the rogue finger. It spins like a gyroscope, but Beka catches it before it can fall. "Sorry."

"How many litres of that foul brew have you sunk?" she slaps my hand down. "And don't point - it's rude. Did I see what?"

"The gift-wrapped tiger who didn't like apricots... "

Chrys giggles at that, a sound so sweet and delicate that it must break every male heart clear across the bar. "Don't scold him, Mistress McGee! He's just so cute when he's drunk!"

Beka scowls at the psychic and in that instant I see my future branching away into the night, a premonition so crystal clear that I never doubt the truth of it. Three branches: order another beer and walk out of here with the lovely Miss Treebone on my arm, sober enough to take her home, have coffee under the watchful and multi-coloured eyes of her aunts, kiss her goodnight and later, after a scramble up the mulberry tree outside her window, perhaps discover how much of her hair was dyed apple-green; or order three more wheat-beers and a couple of absinthe chasers on the side, and be so helpless that Afton and Ivory would have to take me home and pour me insensate onto my couch, with all the potential for month's and month's worth of teasing and innuendo that the amnesia involved in that scenario would provoke; or stop drinking now, take Beka back to her flat and, flying in the face of all logic and sense, sweet-talk my way into her bed. I like that idea a lot, possibly more than future number one. Ah, sweet temptation! I stare at the almost-empty glass in front of me, with its full brother beside it, and I consider pushing it away, and I consider pushing it away, but I'm thirsty and another swig or two of good ale won't hurt, will it?

"Why Wednesdays?" I wonder aloud.

"What?" Ivory glares at me across the rippling pond of the table.

"Carbuncles." I say, vaguely. "Only on Wednesdays. You have to lance them, you know."

"What the hell are you yattering on about?" Afton demands.

"The tiger said." I give in and empty that glass. "You know, the one you didn't see."

Beka saves me from further interrogation as she explodes into giggles. She tries to contain them with one hand but they leak out, and tears trickle most appealingly from the corners of her eyes. It's several minutes before she recovers enough to speak. "When Jerome mentioned carbuncles... " she gasps in some more breath. "Same as rubies, you see... and I just thought... ooh, you'll think this is so insulting... but I just thought... I mean, it struck me... well, I wondered... do you have an Aunt Carbuncle?"

Then Chrys folds up as well and Beka starts giggling all over again, so I join in for good measure. I think even Afton manages a laugh or two, but Ivory is beyond good humour by now. He shouts at us to stop and bangs on the table, which only makes it worse. I laugh until I run out of breath, until I have a pain under my ribcage. Chrys has to bite her lip to stop and her cheeks are painted psychedelic with green rivulets of mascara. Beka ends up with hiccups. Marilyn the waitress come over with a jug of iced water and tells us to calm down.

"For God's sake!" Ivory says, sternly. "You'll have us thrown out!"

"No they won't" Afton makes a face. "Who'd have the nerve to do that?"

"Oh my stars!" Beka fans her fingers over her glowing cheeks. "They might... hic!... call the police!"

Chrys lets out a cursory giggle, but I still lack the breath. We sip water and recover.

"In answer to your question, I don't have an Aunty Carbuncle." Chrys says, wiping the vivid streaks from her face with a grubby tissue. "I think it's a sweet idea though - she'd be all round and ruddy, like a strawberry dumpling! At present the Treebone family consists of... " and here she counts them off on her fingers. "My aunts Garnet, Amethyst, Topaz, Tourmaline, Opal, Iolite and Peridot, and my cousins Sapphire, Citrine, Tiger's Eye and Moonstone, and me, of course."

"All female and all psychic?" asks Ivory.

"Of course. We never marry - we just pick out a suitable mate, and we always have girls. It's all according to great-great- great-granny's will."

"You must use a good gene-splicer." Ivory observes.

"No medicine." Chrys shakes her head violently. "Don't need it - we use magic."

The Chief Pathologist curls his lip in a professional sneer. "Oh really?"

"Pact with the devil." she winks one jade-green eye and smiles at me. "No, honestly!"

"Ivory doesn't believe in magic." Afton explains.

"Do you?" asks Beka.

She doesn't answer at once, my partner. She lifts up her glass, looking into it as if it were crystal, then she knocks back the vodka in one swallow. "I've seen things - things that science has no words for, the impossible conjured into this reality. Once I even saw the vengeance of a goddess. Do I believe? I'd have to say that I don't know."

Chrys likes that answer - I can see respect in her eyes. She shifts her gaze around the table. "And you, Beka? What about you?"

"You're talking to a girl who's seen a unicorn!" Beka grins. "I'm a believer!"

"Pish and tush!" Ivory snaps, ever one for the reasoned argument. "It's all nonsense! If you can't weigh it or measure it, it doesn't exist!"

"And you, my poor, drunk Jerome?" she turns to me, haloed in light, a lovely emerald angel. "What do you think?"

For an instant everything plunges into absolute utter clarity. I'm in the crypt bar of the Sun, Moon and Stars, on Adastra and Seventh, and the room is full of drunken, loud people. The waitress isn't Marilyn anymore - her name's Vanessa and her feet hurt. The peanuts are just peanuts and the tiger never was. Five little girls in pretty lace dresses skip across the room, smiling at me and waving before they vanish through the wall. One of them blows me a kiss. I'm sober enough to know I'm the only soul in here who can see them.

"When the universe was young, magic was everywhere." I hear a voice say. It's my voice - I'm impressed. "We were steeped in it and thought nothing of it. Magic was normal. The tragedy was that it did have a half-life and it slipped away, decaying eon by eon until only a shadow of wonder was left. Now all we see is a flash here, a spark there, barely enough to convince anyone. But I've seen and I believe. Is that a good enough answer?"

Chrys is staring at me, her rosebud mouth agape. "That's beautiful...!"

"That's crap!" Ivory slaps the table with the flat of his hand.

"You're a poet, big guy." Beka blesses me with a glorious smile and I know that if I asked her for anything at this moment - anything! - she'd say yes.

"Christ, Jerome, you're drunk!" Afton proves the existence of miracles by standing up, steady as a rock. "I'm going to take you home."

And with those words, the clarity is gone. I know I'll never make it across town on my own, so I shuffle my pride to the back burner and accept her help. The room closes in around me and I only catch snatches of the conversation, as Ivory gallantly offers to escort the girls home and they cheerfully decline, opting to share a taxi instead.

The tiger stalks back in, grinning at me. "You'll be sick tomorrow, boy, that's for sure."

"Damn right I will!"

"Never mind the carbuncles and apricots - you done good tonight. They won't forget, whichever one you choose, the darkness or the light." he winks just before he fades into mist. "Now me, I always did prefer the night."

Then Afton's helping me to my feet, Beka's patting me on one cheek and Chrys is kissing the other, while Ivory's wishing me a good night and shaking my free hand. We stumble out into the damp grey of Saturday's dawn and leave most of our pain behind.

© Gillian M Paddock 1997.

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