Spirits in the Wires (53 page)

That made them both giggle. The woman sitting at another computer station nearby shushing them only made it worse. So they got up and left before a librarian came over and threw them out, the two of them leaning against each other, bending over from having to stifle their laughter.

So, remnants of our journey
into the Wordwood continue to impact on my life.

I've got a new friend in Suzi—I love her observations about other people when we're out at a cafe or a concert, or just walking down the street. She can be serious and funny and she never hesitates at the thought of trying some new adventure. In that way, she's more like my friends in the border-lands than most of the people I meet here in the consensual world.

During that first lunch we had together, she asked me to teach her how to travel between the worlds. I knew why she wanted to learn, but I couldn't argue her out of it. She needed to talk to Aaran. So did I, but going back into the Wordwood didn't strike me as the answer.

Why did I teach her?

Partly because if I didn't, someone else eventually would. But mostly because I didn't see her getting into the Wordwood anyway. Even if Aaran—or what was left of Aaran in the Webmaster he'd become—wanted to let someone in, I doubt the leviathan would allow it to happen.

So I taught her how to find the borderlands by tricking them into existence in her peripheral vision. It's easy, really. What we actually observe is such a small part of what's going on around us.

Try this some time. Hold your hands out at arm's length and make a circle with your index fingers and thumbs that's about the size of a dinner plate.
That's
all you really see at any given point. Everything around it your brain makes up from its memories of what your eyes have taken in as you generally scan your surroundings. And that's why it's so easy to find the borderlands in your peripheral vision. All you have to do is to trick your mind into believing that they're actually there and then step sideways into them.

Though I guess that doesn't explain how you can catch something in your peripheral vision, like someone approaching, or a car as you're about to step off a sidewalk. But mostly it holds true. And I know for sure that the borderlands are always there, waiting for you.

The otherworld's tougher—at least crossing over to it from this world is. But it's simple to reach once you're already in the borderlands. The membrane, veil, whatever that lies on the edges of both our world and the spirit realm is so much thinner when you're looking through it from a vantage point inside the borderlands.

It took Suzi awhile to get the hang of it, but before too long she was moving through the worlds like a seasoned pro.

“I love this,” she said the first morning she appeared in my meadow apartment.

She was polite enough to stand outside in the cedars and clear her throat, waiting for me to notice her and invite her in.

I smiled at her and beckoned her in.

“Yeah,” I told her as she sat on the end of my bed. “It never gets old.”

Christy and I treat each other more like brother and sister now. He's stopped putting me on a pedestal, and I try to be more straightforward with him and not feel like his weird little shadow. But there are still things I won't tell him. Like Galfreya's name. I side with Geordie on that one because when it comes to Faerie, names are a big deal. It's like that in most of the borderlands and the otherworld, too. Giving someone your name is a gift; it says “I trust you.”

How come I know her name? That's a whole other complicated story involving whiskey and Maxie—never a peaceful combination—and this is neither the time nor the place for it. One thing at a time, Mumbo always tells me.

So as I was saying, mostly I try to be more forthcoming with Christy. We've even had these family dinners—Christy and Saskia, Geordie and me. I enjoy them more than I thought I would. There's none of the awkward tension of needing to make conversation that I was expecting. We just sit around and yak, stuffing our faces with some new wonderful meal that either Saskia or Geordie has put together. Neither Christy nor I can do much more than boil water and burn toast, though we make a fine clean-up team when the meal is done.

When Bojo's in town, I'll often hang out with Holly and him, though most of the time when I go by the bookstore I spend talking to Dick. We'll sit up into the middle of the night and talk about obscure books long after the others have fallen asleep. He loves the fact that I actually know a lot of the characters that started out their lives in the pages of those mostly forgotten stories. I think I've actually got him convinced to tag along with me to the next party at Hinterland, which is a big deal for a stay-at-home fairy man like a hob.

As for the others …

I never went back to see Jackson. He came through in the end, back there in the Wordwood, but I think knowing me would just cause him more problems than not. Every time he'd see me, he'd have that weird feeling of unwanted memories pushing up against the calm complacency of his life.

For some people that would be a good thing, but Jackson struck me as someone who expects to find order in the world, and knowing me tends to put a little chaos in your life instead. Look what happened to Saskia within a day of introducing herself to me in that cafe.

I didn't even meet the other Wordwood founders, but Holly tells me that they and Raul are fine. I did get her to ask if any of them had heard from Aaran, but they didn't know who he was and none of them will have anything to do with the Wordwood site anymore. When Holly asks why, they don't really have an answer and she doesn't press them.

I remember liking Raul—maybe because he was gay. He looked at me like I was an individual instead of evaluating my attractiveness the way so many men do with women. It's weird how refreshing a lack of sexual energy can be in this overly-charged world where even kids' cartoons seem to be selling sex, though it's not something I'd ever want to give up in the long term.

And it's not like I think Raul's some kind of prude. He's just got a different orientation. If I was a guy, he'd probably have been checking me out.

The only one I never met before the Wordwood business began was Robert Lonnie, but both Christy and Geordie talk so much about him that I've been keeping an ear out for that guitar playing of his wherever I go, whether it's wandering through the city or in the borderlands.

“You'll know it when you hear it,” Geordie tells me when I ask him to describe it. “Trust me.”

And he's right.

I'm on Palm Street late one night, walking past this run-down bar, when I hear a bluesy guitar playing a familiar twelve-bar like I've never heard it played before. I know exactly who this must be and stop dead in my tracks. The place has been closed for hours. It's dark inside and the door is locked—like that has ever stopped me. Drawn by the music, I step into the borderlands, then back into this world, but take a few steps so that when I reappear, it's inside the bar.

The guitar playing stops immediately.

I see this handsome black man sitting in a booth at the back of the bar, a guitar in his lap, a big revolver in his hand, the muzzle pointed straight at me. We stare at each other for a long moment before he finally lowers his hand and lays the weapon on the table.

“Either they're making hellhounds too pretty to resist,” he says as he starts to play again, “or you've got some other good reason to come creeping around at this time of night.”

“Can I sit?” I ask.

He smiles. “I don't know. Can you?”

I don't rephrase my questions into a “may I.” I just take his smile as a yes and pull a chair from a nearby table and sit near his booth.

“I'm a friend of Christy and Geordie's,” I tell him. “Kind of like a sister, really.”

He cocks an eyebrow and his index finger does a hammer-on up around the seventh fret, bass string, that sounds like a question.

“Kind of how?” he asks.

“I'm Christy's shadow.”

“You look pretty substantial to me.”

I shrug. “He cast me off a long time ago—when he was only seven.”

“How's that make you feel?”

“I don't know. Most of the time I never really thought about it, but lately …” I give him another shrug. “I just don't know.”

Robert gives a slow nod.

“I've known a shadow or two,” he says. “The one who usually comes to mind was cast off by this brother who ended up on death row for killing I don't know how many people. Back in my time they'd have just lynched him.”

“What was he like?”

“Meanest mother I've ever had the misfortune to run across.”

“I meant the shadow,” I say.

“That's who I was talking about.”

“But…”

“You don't really believe you're locked into whatever personality you were born into when you were cast off, now do you? That you've got to stay the opposite of the one that cast you off?”

It's the same argument I gave Christy. Somehow it seems to have more weight coming from someone else.

“Not really.”

He nods. “In my limited experience, shadows have as much control in how they turn out as do the people who cast them off—and that's more than anyone thinks. Especially the people who like to use genetics as an excuse when they mess up.”

“I'd like to think it's not all been laid out for me.”

“Everybody makes their own way in this world,” he says.

He falls silent then. Or at least he stops talking. His fingers make magic happen from that beat-up old guitar of his, and I just sit there and listen to him until the morning comes banging up against the windows of the bar.

Here's the one thing I can't seem to let go: Aaran in the Wordwood.

What's he
doing
in there?

I know it's partly morbid curiosity centering around the fact that it could have been me. That maybe it should have been me. But there's also a huge helping of worry in the mix because the Aaran I met doesn't jibe with the one Saskia and everybody else knew.

Christy said that Aaran appeared to undergo a genuine change of heart. He thought it had to do with Suzi, that somehow she got inside where no one else could. That just the example of her was enough—for whatever reason—for him to want to make amends for the way he'd been living, the way he treated people. That her coming into his life was an epiphany,though we shouldn't belittle his own efforts to change and make a difference either.

Suzi's in Christy's camp, though she thinks the changes in Aaran were all his own. That all he'd ever needed was for someone to accept him at face value. To look past the bullshit face he offered the world and just believe in him.

Saskia doesn't agree. She wants to be more generous, but I guess the wound he dealt her way back when cut too deep.

Me, I can't make up my mind. I need to talk to him some more first. So I keep e-mailing him in care of the Wordwood. I go on-line on Christy's computer when he and Saskia are out, or asleep. I become a regular at the Cyberbean Cafe, stopping in every other day for a cappuccino and to use their Internet resources. I slip into the Crowsea Public Library and use their machines, usually at night when everybody's gone home, but sometimes during the day, too.

Maxie says I should just get a machine of my own. Apparently there are ways to get them to work in the borderlands, the same way my cell phone does. But I don't really want one. Except for this one little cyber quest of mine, I've about as much interest in owning a computer as I do staring at the way little bugs scurry away when you lift a rock. No, that's not true. I actually like looking at little bugs.

So I keep borrowing other people's machines, and one day when I'm in the Cyberbean, there's finally a response waiting for me in my in-box:

To: [email protected]

Date: Tue, 26 Sept 2000 15:04:21 -0400

From: [email protected]

Subject: Re: Are you there?

Hello Christiana,

I've been wanting to write for ages. And I would have gotten back to you much sooner, but … well, it's complicated. I've spent the last month or so completely caught up with the need to assimilate myself with this strange new reality I find myself in.

I guess the thing I really need to tell you … no, it's more that I need to share it with someone and, except for Suzi, you're the only one who keeps making an effort to contact me. I'd tell Suzi, but I don't know how to put it in the right words. And I know what she'd say, anyway: You make your own destiny, or some other positive thing like that. But I'm not sure she would actually understand. I'm not sure you will either, but it won't hurt as much if you don't. And maybe you will. You were inside the leviathan. Not just like the others, but like me. We were deeper inside him, I think. The others couldn't have been or they'd have put up a bigger argument to stay and do what I'm doing.

I'm not making much sense, I guess. It's funny, I can multitask like you wouldn't believe now. But it's all Wordwood business. Dealing with e-mail and downloads and running _serious_ scans for viruses on uploads. But when it comes to something personal … well, there's not a whole lot of personal left.