Tinker. Part 12

"No, they're not quite the same," Lain announced after several minutes.

Tinker grunted. "What do you suppose it means?"

"I don't know," Lain said. "But you seem to be in good company. This is the royal majesty herself and her court. They're the world leaders of Elfhome."

Good company or not, she didn't want to be part of it. In her book, elves made colorful neighbors but she was glad not to be one of the family. She'd seen enough of their stiff formality and causal cruelty between castes to know it would drive her nuts.

Tinker started at another familiar face. "This is Windwolf."

Lain leaned over to check the photo. "Yes, it is."

Tinker realized that despite a growing awareness that Windwolf was important in the local politics, she didn't know exactly what his t.i.tle was. "This might be a silly question, but who exactly is Windwolf?"

"Lord Windwolf is the viceroy of the Westernlands."

Viceroy? Before Tinker could ask what that meant, the doorbell rang.

"Looks like I have company," Lain said, reaching for her crutch.

"What am I? Sauerkraut and kielbasa?" Tinker muttered.

"Hush, my little pierogie," Lain called back as she limped up the hallway to the front door.

Tinker considered the photo of Windwolf as Lain answered her front door. Tinker had thought him stunning the few times she had seen him, but now she knew she hadn't yet seen him at his best. The creature in the photo seemed as untouchable as a G.o.d.

Lain's visitor, in a deep raspy male voice, introduced himself as the son of her fellow crew member who had died in the training exercise that crippled Lain. "I don't know if you remember me at the memorial. I was about five at the time."

That drew Tinker out of the kitchen. Lain stood, apparently rendered speechless by the sudden appearance.

The man was in his early twenties, tall with a shock of black hair and a long sharp nose. He was in biking leathers, wore a pair of sungla.s.ses, and had a helmet tucked under his arm.

Tinker recognized him with a start. He was the motorcyclist she and Oilcan had seen nearly hit on Shutdown Day. "I thought you might be a half-elf."

He looked at her, frowning, and the frown deepened. "No. I'm not, lady. You're mistaken."

"Tinker!" Lain admonished with a single word, then turned her attention back to the man. "I remember you. My, how you've grown, but children do that, I suppose. You were such a grieving little boy; I don't think I heard you say a single word that day."

"It was long ago. I've moved past that," he said.

"Riki was your name, wasn't it?"

He nodded. "Yes, you do remember me. I was afraid that you wouldn't."

"Your mother spoke a lot about you before the accident." Lain indicated Tinker. "This is Tinker, who is very worth knowing."

Riki turned to look at Tinker. She reflected in his sungla.s.ses. He nodded and turned back to Lain. "I was hoping you could tell me about my mother."

"You stranded yourself on Elfhome just for that?"

"No. I'm going to be attending the University of Pittsburgh once fall cla.s.ses start. I've got a grant from Caltech as part of my graduate studies. I showed up a little early so I'd have a chance to experience Elfhome fully. It would be exploring an alien world, just like my mother hoped to."

Lain clicked her tongue over what she certainly considered the folly of youth. Tinker had heard the sound often enough to recognize the thought behind it. "Pitt is a shadow of what it was; it's barely more than a community college right now. Well, there's not much to be done about that now. You're here. The question is, what is to be done with you now? Do you have a place to stay? Money enough to last?"

"I have the grant money." Riki tapped a breast pocket, making paper inside wrinkle loudly. "It's supposed to last me six months, but I've got to make it stretch to nine. I'm hoping to find a job, and a cheap place to stay."

"Housing shouldn't be too hard; it's summer-just find someplace that looks empty and squat," Lain said, and limped back to the kitchen. "Come have something to eat and drink, and we'll consider work."

Riki followed Lain, glancing around with vivid interest, pausing at the doorway of the living room to scan it fully. "It's a nice place you have here. I expected something more rustic. They talk about how backward Pittsburgh has become, cut off as it is. I half expected log cabins or something."

Lain laughed from the kitchen.

Tinker had stayed in the foyer. She picked up her helmet and called, "Lain, I'm going to go."

Lain came to the kitchen doorway. "You! Stay! Into the kitchen."

Tinker put down the helmet and obediently went into the kitchen. One didn't argue with Lain when she used that voice. "Why?"

"All the positions up here on the hill are government funded; all hiring has to be written out in triplicate and approved in advance. You have more contacts than I do down in the city."

Tinker winced. "Lain, I'm not an employment agency."

Riki regarded Tinker with what seemed slight unease. It was hard to tell with the sungla.s.ses. "You seem too young to be anything but a high school student."

Tinker stuck her tongue out at him and got smacked in the back of the head by Lain.

"Behave." Lain filled the teakettle and set it onto the gas range. "Tinker is much more than she seems. She's probably the most intelligent person in Pittsburgh. Now if she could learn a bit of common sense and get a more rounded education..."

"Lain," Tinker growled. "I don't want to beat that horse right now."

"Then be nice to my guest. Offer him a job."

"I doubt if he wants to do demo work at the yard," Tinker said. "He certainly doesn't know anything about magic, and it's nearly as unlikely that he knows anything about quantum physics."

"I've got a master's degree in quantum physics," Riki said.

"Eat crow, little girl!" Lain cried, laughing at the look on Tinker's face.

Riki startled at Lain's reaction.

"You're kidding," Tinker said.

"I'm going to do my doctorate on the quantum nature of magic. No one has done research on magic in its natural state. That's why I'm studying at Pitt."

"If you want to learn about magic, you need to work with Tinker. She's the expert."

"No, I'm not; elves are."

"True, true, their whole society seems to be based on the ability to cast spells." Lain laughed, putting out cups. "But that does him no good, not as closed mouthed as they are."

"What do you mean? Anyone can cast spells."

Lain looked at her with surprise. "Tooloo has never explained why the n.o.bles rule over the other castes?"

"I'm never sure when Tooloo is telling me the truth," Tinker said. "She's told me that n.o.bles can feel ley lines and can cast certain spells with gestures and words instead of written patterns... which might be true. Certainly the spoken component of spells is merely setting up certain subtle resonance frequencies. I'm not sure about the hand gestures. Written spells follow a logic system similar to the and/or gates of computer circuitry, creating paths for energy to follow toward a desired effect. The only way I could see it working was if somehow the n.o.ble's body replaces the circuitry...." She fell silent, thinking of energy following fingertips while the hands moved through the pattern of a spell. The ability to feel ley lines could result by simply bioengineering an organ like the inner ear that was sensitive to magic. How would you manipulate magic with your hands? She looked at her own oil-stained hands, the left one with its new patchwork of pink scars. With what she knew of biology, it was unlikely that they fitted new organs into their fingertips, unless it was on the tip of the bone, or perhaps their fingernails. She flexed her fingers as if typing. She supposed fingernails would work, although if one could engineer it so each finger bone had a separate function, then each finger could perform three functions instead of just the one....

"Tinker. Tinker." Lain interrupted her thought process.

"It might work that way," Tinker conceded. She added, "Tooloo also tells me stories about elves making gems or frogs falling out of people's mouths when they talk, and unless you have an N-dimensional s.p.a.ce filled with frogs, it couldn't work. Besides, what would the frogs eat? How would you deal with the heat they generated packed together like that? I suppose you could use that energy to move a frog into our dimension."

A smile spread across Riki's face. "I like how your mind works."

That startled Tinker into silence. No one had ever said that to her.

"If you hire him," Lain said, pouring tea out, "every minute he frees up, you will have for fiddling around with your inventions."

Tinker opened her mouth and shut it on a protest. She remembered the condition of the offices-her workshop still on the back of the flatbed and thoroughly splattered with blood. Suddenly the idea of having help, and thus more time, was seductive-and Lain knew it. "That's not playing fair."

"I don't like wasting time."

Tinker frowned. The words "sucker for strays" on her forehead were coming into play. "Well, I could offer part-time at minimum wage, but nothing more than that. Tooloo might have some work."

He looked at her for a minute, and finally said, "I don't know if this is rude-I don't know elf customs-but what's the mark for?"

Speaking of casting spells with just a gesture. Tinker rubbed at her forehead, wondering how exactly Windwolf had marked her. "I don't know. We were just trying to figure that out."

Lain looked troubled. "That worries me. Why don't you see Maynard about that? You should find out why Lord Windwolf marked you."

"The viceroy?" Riki asked.

Tinker got up, annoyed that this newcomer knew more about Windwolf than she did. "Look, if you want the job, show up at my sc.r.a.p yard tomorrow morning. Lain can tell you how to get there. And I'll need to see your papers. I'm not getting into trouble with the EIA for hiring an illegal immigrant."

Lain gave her a look of disapproval, but Tinker clumped out. She'd had enough motherly scolding for the day.

5: Variable Subst.i.tutions

Tinker's grandfather had often told her that moving Pittsburgh to Elfhome raised the intelligence of human bureaucrats. He commonly cited the Housing Act as proof. People fleeing Elfhome registered their property with the EIA in return for displacement vouchers. The United Nations redeemed the vouchers for a house of equal value (prior to the gate of course) anywhere on Earth, doling out the Chinese Compensation money to those most affected by the gate. The EIA resold the Pittsburgh real estate for a dollar to anyone who pledged to make the home his or her permanent primary residence. The system encouraged squatters to maintain property that would otherwise stand empty. Housing, which had always been affordable and easy to find in Pittsburgh, became basically free.

Her grandfather, Oilcan, and she had lived in an old hotel looking out over the river on Neville Island. It was a four-story palace bought for a dollar.

The locks and dams that controlled the Allegheny, Monongahela, and the Ohio rivers, however, stayed mostly on Earth. Every spring, the muddy river water would creep up the steep bank and swirl into the hotel's downstairs. The bas.e.m.e.nt had slowly filled with river silt, as they only pumped out the water. The first floor they shoveled out and sprayed down with fire hoses. All the wallpaper had long peeled off, leaving stained plaster behind. They left the windows open all summer to dry out the wood. When Tinker and Oilcan rode their bikes through the large empty first-floor rooms, or played street hockey using the old fireplaces as goals, they would kick up clouds of fine dust. Come fall, they would loot empty buildings for window gla.s.s, and patch the plaster anywhere the winter winds would be able to blow through.

Her grandfather had converted the second floor to the kitchen, workshop, and cla.s.sroom. The third floor contained the library, away from the lower-level floods and the fourth story's dripping roof. They slept on the fourth floor, drips and all, as it was the safest place in case of flash flood.

Oilcan moved out the winter of his sixteenth birthday to Mount Was.h.i.+ngton, claiming he wasn't going to spend another spring worrying if the river would wash into their bedrooms. When their grandfather died the next year, Oilcan offered to take Tinker in with him. Nothing could make him move back to the river's edge. Nor would he let her stay at the hotel alone when she refused his offer. Showing surprising strength of character, he insisted she find someplace above the floodplain.

Tinker had scoured the hill around the sc.r.a.p yard. After the high ceilings, long halls, and sprawling first floor of the hotel, everywhere else had seemed small and cramped. Finally she'd found a large loft. The living room was thirty by sixty, and the one bedroom was a roomy fourteen by twenty.

Now she went up the steps to her loft wearily, unlocked the door, mumbled her security code to her security system, and slammed the door behind her. She was at the fridge, opening the door to get a cold beer, before she realized her security system hadn't acknowledged her. She jerked around, hand still on the refrigerator door handle, and found she wasn't alone.

A woman-tall, leggy, with dark spiky hair and armed with a stocky handgun leveled at her-drifted out of the shadows to block the front door. "Durrack?"

A man appeared at the bedroom door. He quirked up one eyebrow. "Well, what do we have here?"

"She let herself in, and gave a security code," the woman said. Her taste in clothing ran to black, and very tight fitting. If she had any weapons other than the handgun, they were small, or strapped to her back. Tinker couldn't tell how lethal the handgun was. It seemed too large to be loaded with something as mundane as bullets.

"Who are you?" Tinker asked, and was somewhat pleased she didn't sound as scared and angry as she was. When was her life going to go back to normal? "What are you doing here?"

"We're going to ask the questions," the man said. "We're looking for Alexander Graham Bell. He goes by the name of Tinker. This is his residence."

He? h.e.l.l, they were confused. They had her name right, but certainly not her s.e.x. Not that she was about to point out the error in their thinking. "And I take it that he's not here." h.e.l.l, they were confused. They had her name right, but certainly not her s.e.x. Not that she was about to point out the error in their thinking. "And I take it that he's not here."

"No," Durrack said, closing the distance between them. "What's your name? Let me see some ID."

Tinker backed away. "Look, I don't want any trouble. My name is Lain. My ID was stolen two days ago by some big goons. I've had a really s.h.i.+tty week, and I haven't seen Tinker for days. Skippy, activate emergency system!"

"We turned the AI off." He checked his forward motion. "Cooperate with us, and you're not going to get hurt."

"You break into my house, wave guns at me, and expect me to turn over my boyfriend?" It was weird talking like this, keeping p.r.o.nouns straight. It was like a math problem, subst.i.tuting in values.

"You live here with him?" Durrack asked.

"Yeah."

The woman made a disgusted noise. "How long have you two been together?"

What would the right answer be? A few weeks or months? It didn't seem long enough. "Three years."

Durrack and the woman exchanged dark looks. Perhaps three years was too much.

"I hate this a.s.signment more and more," the woman muttered.

"Patience, Briggs. It's a whole new world."

"Doesn't mean I have to like it."

And while they murmured together, Tinker said lowly, "Tripwire."

Briggs jerked her head up, and then swore. "She's activated a backup defense system!"

Durrack caught Tinker under the arm and hustled her out of the house. Out on the street, he pushed her up against the wall. Not as hard as he could, but still she found herself dangling a foot from the ground.

"Look, you little twit. We've been down to your boyfriend's sc.r.a.p yard, and there's blood everywhere. We've been to Mercy. We checked with all the Earth-based hospitals. He wasn't checked in at any of them. If your boyfriend is still alive, he's running on borrowed time. If someone finds him before we do, he'll end up roadkill just like his father did. Do you understand?" She didn't understand any of that, but she wanted him to let go of her, so she nodded. "Now, where is Tinker?"