Some of the wilder journal articles suggest using either lodestone levitation or sylphs of the air to raise the dump above the ground and to keep it separated from the alkahest below. I think anybody who’d try such a scheme ought to be made to live in the dump office. Lodelev is a purely physical process, and, like any physical process, vulnerable to magical interference. And sylphs of the air really are just as flighty as their reputation makes them out to be. They’d get bored or playful or whatever and forget what they were supposed to be doing.
That wouldn’t be good, not where alkahest is involved. They used it in the First Sorcerous War, but not in the Second. It’s just too potent, even as a weapon. As it eats its way straight toward the center of the earth, it’s liable to bring up magma or ancient buried Powers through the channels it cuts. Nobody even stockpiles it—how could you?
So, no alkahest under the Devonshire dump. Instead, the designers had put in the usual makeshifts: blessings and relics and holy texts from every faith known to mankind, and elaborate spells renewed twice a year to use the law of contagion to extend their effect to the places where they weren’t actually buried.
“It looks like a good arrangement on parchment,” I said grudgingly. “I presume you rigidly adhere to the resanctification schedule.” I made it sound as if I assumed nothing of the sort.
Tony Sudakis set more parchments in front of me. “Certification under canon law, the ordnances of the Baron of Angels, and national secular law.”
I examined them. They looked like what they were supposed to be. The dump management outfit might have forged the secular documents; the worst the Baron of Angels can do is send you to jail, the worst the secular power can do is leave you short a head. But you’d have to be pretty bold to forge a canon lawyer’s hand or seal. The punishment for that kind of offense could go on forever.
I shoved the pile of parchments back at Sudakis. Now my tone of voice was different: “I have to admit, I don’t know what to tell you. This really does look good on parchment. But something’s not right hereabouts; I know that, too.” I told him about the rest of the birth defects I’d spotted, the vampirism and lycanthropy.
He frowned. “You’re not making that up?”
“Not a word of it. I’ll swear by Adonai Elohaynu, if you like.” I am, God knows, an imperfect Jew. But you’d have to be a lot more imperfect than I am to falsify that oath. People who would risk their souls by falsely calling on the Lord won’t make it past the EPA spiritual background checks, and a good thing, too, if you ask me.
Sudakis’ beefy face set in the frown as if it were made of quick-drying cement. “Our attorneys will still maintain that the effects you cite are just a statistical quirk and have nothing to do with the Devonshire dump, its contents, or its activities. If we go to court, we’ll win.”
“Probably.” I wanted to hit him. The certain knowledge that he’d murder me wasn’t what stopped me. Getting in a good shot or two would have made that worthwhile. Far as I’m concerned, people who hide “it’s wrong” behind “it’s legal” deserve whatever happens to them. The only thing that held me back was knowing I’d bring discredit to the EPA.
Then Sudakis pulled out that little amber charm again. He licked a fingertip, ran it over the smooth surface of the amulet, and murmured something in a language I not only didn’t know but didn’t come close to recognizing. Then he put the amulet back and said, “Now we can talk privately for a little while.”
“Can we?” I had no reason to trust him, every reason to think he was trying to trap me in an indiscretion. The lawyers he’d been throwing at me would have loved that.
But he said, “Yeah, and I think we’d better, too. I don’t like the numbers you laid out for me, I don’t like ’em at all. This place is supposed to be safe, it’s been safe ever since I took over here, and I want it to keep on being safe. That’s what they pay me for, after all.”
“Why do you have to turn aside the Listener if that’s so?” I asked. Come to that, I didn’t know his outrÇ little ritual really had turned aside anything.
He said, “Because the company basically just wants me to run this place so it makes them money. I want to run it right.”
All I could think was, Hell of a note when a man has to deafen the Listener before he says he wants to do a proper job. But he’d convinced me. Too many top corporate managers hide dorsal fins under expensive imported suits. If one of those types got wind of what Sudakis had said, let alone what he’d done, he’d be out on the street with a big dusty footprint on his behind.
“How’d you get word there was trouble here, anyhow?” he asked. “Did you paw through the Thomas Brothers’ files hoping you’d stumble over something you could use to curse us?”
His bosses wouldn’t have let him manage the dump if he was stupid. I answered, “No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t. I got a call from the District of St. Columba this morning, telling me I ought to check things out. So I did, and now you know what I found.”
“That’s—interesting.” He stuck out his chin. “How’d Charlie Kelly know back there that something was up when you hadn’t heard anything out here?” No, he wasn’t stupid at all, not if he knew the fellow at the EPA who was likeliest to give me orders.
“His job is to hear things like that,” I answered, suspicious again. Not all the ways Sudakis might have learned about Kelly were savory ones.
“Yeah, sure, sure. But how?” If he was acting, he could have given lessons. He looked down at his wrist, said something scatological. That’s a safer way to work off your feelings than swearing or cursing. “My stinking watch says it’s day before yesterday. Must be eddy currents from the garbage outside.”
“You ought to wear something better than that cheap mechanical,” I said. I touched the tail of the timekeeper that coiled round my wrist. It’s a better-behaved little demon than the one that sits on my nightstand at home. It yawned, stretched, piped, “Eleven forty-two,” and went back to sleep.
Sudakis scatologized again. “The Listener will go back on duty any minute now. I can’t put it out two times running; the magic doesn’t work. I hate doing it even once: too much magic loose here as is. That’s why I don’t wear a fancy watch like yours. Mechanicals are all right. When one gets bollixed, I just buy another one: no need to worry about rites or anything like that.”
I shrugged; it wasn’t my business. But I have as little to do with mechanicals as I can. If the Other Side weren’t as real as this one, they might be all right. But as Atheling the Wise put it, though, most forces are also Persons, and mechanicals have no Personalities of their own to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—to say nothing of outraged (or sometimes just mischievous) Forces. That’s why you’ll never see lodestone levitation under an alkahest pool.
Sometimes, when I’m in the mood for utopian flights of fancy, I think about how smoothly the world would run if all natural forces were as inanimate as the ones that let mechanicals operate. We’d never have to screen against megasalamanders launched on the wings of supersylphs to incinerate cities anywhere in the world. Neither of the Sorcerous Wars that devastated whole countries could have happened. For that matter, I wouldn’t have had to worry about toxic spell dumps or the ever-growing pollution of the environment. Things would be simpler all around.
Yeah, I know it’s a dream from the gate of ivory. Without magic, the world would probably have farmers, maybe towns, but surely not the great civilization we know. Can you imagine mass production without the law of similarity, or any kind of communications network without the law of contagion?
And medicine? I shiver to think of it. Without ectoplasmic beings to see and reach inside the body, how would medicine be possible at all? If you got sick, you’d bloody well die, just like one of Tony Sudakis’ cheap watches when magic touched its works.