Workforce - 5

WORKFORCE

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In which we enjoy a small scene from our hero's adolescence; a brief discussion of the untaught wizard.




Lifestyle changes define you. I can remember, for example, the exact instant of my own. The moment I turned my back on my father and his elitist, pseudo-philanthropic and thoroughly mendacious bullshit; the moment I decided that my energy would be better spent, far better spent, scaling the rarified heights of ultimate dissapation.

I was sixteen. My sister and I were walking down the coruscated platinum streets of Agartha, the glorious capital of Atlantis-in-Exile, dead center of the Otherland that floated in the nothingness outside the universe like a bubble in champagne.

Or rather, Heliotrope was walking down the street. I was more trailing in her wake, bland and uninteresting beside her glowing, golden presence.

Heliotrope, you see, is tall - taller than a woman has a right to be, in my mind- golden-skinned and haired, with eyes the color of a pale red wine and a palpible aura of power and majesty that made anyone, even someone as handsome and clever and egregiously wonderful as myself feel drab and plain and dull.

Bitch.

It wasn't even intentional. If it was, I could have  hated her. Well, to be fair, I did hate her; every perfect hair on her perfect head, from the chocolate-brown timbre of her voice to the wisdom and compassion that had settled into her burgundy eyes at around the age of nine. If she had meant it, I could have hated her without feeling bad. But no, she was genuinely wonderful and kind and ever so accommodating. Which made me hate her and thus myself more than ever.

I wasn't aware of it quite yet, I think. I chalked my intense discomfort in her presence down to jealousy. She was taking me out on the town after a particularly fruitless tutoring session, during which my father had declared me hopeless with considerable asperity and told me to get out of his sight.

She'd bought me a drink at a vendor's, a rare treat that tasted like mint and was the exact same brilliant celery green as the sky. She was dressed in a great gown of silver fur and purple velvet, and the shopkeepers were fighting for her attention as we walked down the aisles of the Grand Bazaar.  The setting sun hung low and lavender in the celery sky.

"So what's the problem, little brother?" she asked kindly, putting a silver-nailed hand on my shoulder. I fought down the urge to shrug her off and, possibly, bite off her damn fingers.

"I dunno," I responded, staring gloomily at the wealth of nations spread out before me.

"Madam, this silk is the finest in the Otherland-"

"Do not listen to that charlatan! Instead sample this scent, 100% pure attar of moon lily-"

My sister graced them only with a smile; serene and perfect.

Bitch.

"He thinks they're worth it..." I said quietly, staring into the bottom of my emerald wineglass.

"What?" she stopped suddenly, turned to stare.

"He thinks they're worth it!" I all but shouted this time, dropping the glass to shatter on the ground "what the hell do they all matter! They're vulgar and stupid and there's so many of them!"

She looked stricken as I continued "what does it matter if they live or die? Why are they more important than-" I swallowed the word me and settled for "us?"

There was an ocean of sadness in her winepurple eyes. God help me, it made me angrier than ever.

"Behind me there's a girl, a young girl," she said quietly, her eyes never leaving mine "she has a malformation of her uterus; she will never bear, and likely they will become growths, bleeding growths as she grows older and she will die of them. We cannot spare her; we are too few. That is why she matters, brother, that is why I helped her. She will never know. There is a man whose sadness is a disease; him, behind me and to your left, with the green eyes and the broad-brimmed hat. He has a wife and children and they need him to be strong and to live. That is why I helped him, and he will never know."

She spread her arms "because of me and father and our cousins, brother, there is a sky in our world, and a sun to shine above it. There is wealth and prosperity and happiness in this tiny bubble of a world, and most of them will never know how much we help them, or why. But we do it, brother, because we can," she reached out to touch my shoulder again, and this time I did shrug her off violently, stepping backwards "because we're the only ones who can."

"And the morati?" I spat "there's billions of them, and they don't even live here. What do they matter?"

"They have no wizards, brother," my sister said, and there was a touch of anger in her voice for the first time "they have no way to conceive of the dangers that they face every day, with their small and bounded worldview. Much less protect themselves."

"So?"

"Do they deserve to die for their ignorance?"

"Maybe they do!"

Any other woman would have slapped me; I saw the thought cross her mind before she dismissed it, but the imagined violence was almost as bad as the blow would have been. I jerked backwards, and her eyes filled with tears.

"I'm sorry you feel that way," she whispered in a choked and quiet voice.

I could have taken anything besides her quiet disappointment, her sadness. Anger, yells, even the slap she had for a microsecond considered. But not this.

I turned and disappeared into the crowd, at a dead run. I could hear my sister calling, first with her voice and then with her mind, but I shut her out completely. Let her and father worry about the faceless billions, clearly they were the priority.

Because some strange stupid girl had a cancer-in-waiting, she mattered more than me. What about me? I had cancer. It was inside me already at sixteen eating me up from the inside out and it was just that I hated them, I hated them all so much, and I hadn't even realized it till now.

I didn't stop running until I reached one of the bad sections of town, where my friend Sacriphant and his little gang of cronies hung out when they fancied themselves rebellious. I opened the door with a blast of furious magic; the stunned silence in the room turned into a chorus of welcoming voices.

Sacriphant, dishevelled, nearly nude, glowing purple dust smudged around his nostrils and fingers and sparkling hazily in the pupils of his eyes called my name and rose greet me.

"I'd never thought I'd see you here," he slurred a little, focusing on me with enormous difficulty and nearly falling over "what can I get you?"

Oh, what the hell.

"Let's start with everything," I suggested brightly, while my sister called my name in the silent vaults of my mind "and work our way from there."

He complied, and gladly, and I'd never for a moment regretted it.

Enough of this.

Isabelle's room...well, alright. Imagine that you're the greatest mathematical genius the world has ever known. Imagine your mind works on a level unimagined by everyone around you.

Now imagine that nobody has taught you to count. No, worse than that, imagine you live in a world where nobody will admit that numbers exist.

That was Isabelle.

She had tried, though. The room was dark and small and packed with drawings and sculptures and paintings and little twisted bits of colored glass; it was all clearly her work and it was all brilliant but reaching, reaching desperately for the thing she could just barely see.

You could tell from her art if you knew what to look for, and despite my slipshod education I did. You could see she stared crosswise at reality. That she saw into the fifth dimension as well as the others.

Poor bitch.

"You wanted to talk to me?" I asked carefully. I could feel her mind, battering at mine. She wanted to know, so badly. And god above, was she strong. She'd probably been influencing events and people in the cradle, tweaking at the laws of probability and nibbling away at causality like a fiddly little crab.

"I, uh," she seemed flummoxed.

The question was just behind her teeth. A simple question, along the lines of Why the hell are you glowing?

Do you know what I am?

Maybe even as simple as Help me.

Predictably, because she was a pain in the ass, the question never made it out. She veered instead into:

"What the hell are you playing at with Carlotta?"

"Who?" I asked blankly "Oh, Carl. Look, I don't have any, er, plays in mind, because she's a-" I bit down belatedly on the world simpleton "very nice girl," I finished lamely.

Because she's a very nice girl? Oh, brilliant. The hell does that even mean, jackass.

"She likes you," Isabelle said accusingly.

I spread my hands innocently "I'm likable."

She peered at me for a moment under her greasy cloud of hair "no. No, you're really not."

Like she was one to talk. If she'd been around in Salem you could see why the poor bastards would crush her under a stone rather than tolerate her company.

That was when I tried it. My geas stipulated that I could only use magic in the defense of my own life, or another's, right? Well, Isabelle needed me. And I needed her.

I couldn't use magic to get myself home before my six weeks were up, but the geas sure didn't apply to dear Izzy, now did it?

Isabelle was on a fast track to suicide if I didn't help her. She needed me.

I cast out a bit; the geas seemed to agree with my reasoning. I shaped it carefully, threw it out with my next words.

"You want to see me again, though," I said with utter conviction "in fact, you really, really do."

I was completely and staggeringly unprepared for what happened next. I tossed the little like-me-like-me spell at Isabelle with an ingenuous smile, and suddenly her eyes blazed, she drew up straight, and my tiny little spell flew backwards from her and smacked me in the head like a hurled stone. I clutched the doorframe and managed not to fall over.

She glowered at me; she couldn't possibly know what I or she had done, except instinctively,  but she was still blazingly angry.

"No I don't," she snapped "I really, really don't. Come on. I'm taking your dumb ass home."

She shoved past me, rudely, before striding to the door.

Wisdom: when you need to bring down for a group, always go for the weakest link.

"So," I said conversationally as I walked past Carl, who was watching something bright and happy on the picture box "see you tomorrow?"

Carl practically glowed "sure! Any time."

I gave Isabelle a grin; she returned a glare, with considerable interest. I followed her out of the building, practically glowing with the knowledge that the first battle, at least, was won.

I know you're wondering: no, of course I didn't give a shit about Isabelle intrinsically. She was a shrew and a bag of antlers and insufficiently hygienic besides; in the ordinary course of things, I'd let her devolve like most undiscovered wizards into alcoholism or serial murder with nary a  backwards glance.

But she had magic. And I didn't. And crazy and unpleasant and distressingly ugly as she was, she was damned powerful. Powerful enough, I was sure, to break the geas. To get me home. To get us home, once I'd told her some choice whoppers, and possibly...just possibly...shake things in that damn bubble up a little.

Atlantis-in-Exile, I was sure, would never see us coming.