Fugue, page 11
“Good thinking. I didn’t go to the trouble of paving the dirt road to the highway, but you’ll note it has excellent drainage.”
“I’ve just avoided driving in the wet.”
“We’ll get you some practice,” I promised. “Back to Iowa. Now you have an idea what to look for. Is there anything else we absolutely need in a house?”
Ahem, Firebrand projected.
“A fireplace,” Phoebe answered, instantly. She made another note.
Thank you.
“We do need a place to hang it,” I agreed, “preferably somewhere with constant flame.”
“A gas fireplace,” she amended.
“I can shovel coal if I have to.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.” She hesitated. “Pop? Does this mean we’re definitely going to live there?”
“Not definitely. Even if we do, you may decide you hate it. This is more in the way of practice for when you pick a world for yourself for real.”
“Oh. Oh! Thanks, Pop.”
“Anytime,” I told her, as she wandered back up to her room, still idly chewing on the pencil eraser, half-lost in thought. Once she had the door closed, Firebrand shot me a private thought.
Boss?
“Hmm?”
Could we pick a world where I get to burn things?
“Depends on what she wants,” I told it. “I would prefer to let her get her full growth to maximize her strength. It’s her primary vulnerability. Someone big enough and strong enough can simply grab her and pin her.”
She’s much stronger than she looks, Firebrand pointed out. You’ve also taught her moves for that.
“Yes, but as with so many things, size matters. She’s still at least an inch short of her full height. Let her hit at least five-nine and the age of twenty-one. Then we’ll talk about taking up residence in a post-nuclear survival zone for a while, or a magical world with swords and sorcery, or whatever suits her taste. I’m trying to be responsible and maximize her chances of surviving a bad encounter.”
Hmm.
“Yes?”
If you want her to survive, I think you need to hit her harder.
“I beg your pardon?”
You do your meditation moves every morning, right? She joins in, and you two practice almost every day. Thing is, she doesn’t get hurt. Oh, a little ouch here or there, but your giant maniacs had the right idea. She needs to be hit. She’s got the skills, but she’s not ready to deal with the first real wound she takes. She’s trained, but not experienced.
I tilted my recliner back and stared at the ceiling while I thought. Have I been too soft on her? I’ve been trying to be a benevolent dictator and decent parent. She’s been learning at near her capacity—it’s always been difficult, but never impossible. It’s important not to give someone an impossible task, or even an apparently impossible task, lest their morale go to hell and they give up.
But have I erred in not teaching her to take a hit? Rather, have I erred in not making the lessons more rigorous? I have hopes she’ll never get into a life-or-death struggle, but I may be overly optimistic.
Whoa. Since when did I become an optimist? Maybe this parenting thing has been good for me in ways I didn’t expect. I wonder if there are any other changes I haven’t noticed.
My real question, I suppose, is whether or not familiarizing her with pain is any part of my job as a parent. Is it better to be the one who deals out her first broken bone? —pardon me. Her first deliberately broken bone. She’s broken a couple just being rambunctious. Most kids don’t tie a rope to the barn’s hayloft hoist and swing off the roof.
She knows about pain, I suppose, but an accident isn’t the same as deliberate hostility. Is the world going to teach her all about hostility on its own? Or should I go so far as to give her experience with being attacked, even wounded?
Counterpoint: Should I let her first real injury be from someone trying to kill her?
What if I’m not there the first time she gets stabbed or shot? Will she be stunned and fail to take any necessary action? Or should she be familiar with it and prepared for it? Is it worth it to stab her, break bones, or otherwise damage her just so she knows what to expect?
How far do I go in preparing her to deal with nasty people? Soldiers are trained to go into battle, but even in advanced training schools, they’re not actually shot.
Should they be?
There’s a hell of a question.
More generally: How far is too far?
“Well, damn.”
Problem?
“Maybe. I may be about to become an abusive parent.”
How so?
“You’ve raised a valid point, you bloodthirsty, brutal piece of steel.”
I’m sharp. What point?
“Her training covers a lot, but she needs to know what it’s like to take a hit from someone out to hurt her. I can fix anything I do to her, so I lack some of the ethical issues surrounding doing harm. Which means…”
You have to hit her, and you don’t want to do it.
“I don’t.”
So build a death-pit and throw her in it with someone to kill.
“While your methods are doubtless effective, I question their correctness.”
A lunatic with a knife is going to worry about social niceties?
“Damn you.”
Just calling ’em as I see ’em, Boss.
“I’ll discuss it with her and see what she thinks. I’m just glad she’s no longer a child. Sort of. At least she’s old enough for informed consent.”
Huh. That’s funny.
“What’s funny? Funny ha-ha or funny strange?”
Funny strange. I remember a time when you would have been all bent out of shape and ready to whittle a rock with your fingernails at this discussion. You seem less angry than I recall.
“I’ve got a good meditation habit going on, and I’m making steady progress on the bugs-in-brain issue.”
Yeah. I’m not sure that’s it, Boss.
“What else could it be?”
I dunno. Telepathy aside, I’m more a killer than anything else.
“Let me know if you figure it out.”
Will do.
Technical Note: The Bugs
All through Phoebe’s life, I worried. I worried only a little bit about things I could plot on a graph. Height. Weight. Eyesight. IQ. You know. Things I understand.
Her social development was not one of these things. I wasn’t sure how to test it. I’m not sure what the axes would be on the graph, anyway. Personality tests don’t make sense to me—I’m a computer programmer, Jim, not a doctor!
On the plus side, she displayed a fair level of empathy. She didn’t like it when other children were crying, so she tried to comfort them. She seemed reasonably responsible, as well. If another kid was hurt, Phoebe was the one to go get Mrs. Krupnick—the nice lady who was ran the home daycare. Phoebe always wanted Mrs. Krupnick to call me, though. Phoebe is unimpressed with mercurochrome, bandages, and ice. “Papa will fix it!” Thanks to Phoebe, Mrs. Krupnick had the impression I’m a doctor.
None of these things told me if Phoebe had a soul or not, but I lean toward saying she does. I’m not sure if it could all be learned behavior—especially in this household—but I suppose it’s possible. Bronze did a lot to offset the more murderous members of the family.
Back when she was still little, I routinely went over her progress charts in my headspace. I took note of the scratching and scrabbling noises coming from the stairway vault. There’s always the background noise of the Coping Mechanism chopping bugs to bits, but sometimes the bugs make more or less noise against the armored door.
I’ve spent considerable time examining the inside of my own head. I have a huge swarm of insecurities scrabbling around in my undermind, always trying to get out through the Coping Mechanism and getting minced in the process. At that moment, though, I wondered how many were still down there.
I did some math on the rate of flow through the Coping Mechanism and discovered I should have run out of the little bas—little buggers by now. I should have noticed some diminution, at least. Yet, from the sound of it, there were just as many as ever. They crumbled to dust when destroyed, yes, but somehow they must reconstitute down in my undermind again.
I should have expected it. It’s a Coping Mechanism, not a cure.
One of the issues I have with being a parent is being a safe, sane, and stable one. I’m grossly underqualified in the parental skills department. If they ever institute a license program, I won’t make it past the written test. Partly, this is because I have issues. No, it’s worse than that. I have a subscription and a collection of back issues.
How does one deal with a minor insecurity? All the pop psych I know tells me I’m supposed to face the things. I have a mental study. I have the metaphorical monsters of my mental maladies made manifest. I doubt the psychologists had such a direct confrontation in mind. If they weren’t so well-confined in my subconscious, I’d be schizophrenic.
Crap. How do I know I’m not? No, no, no—I’m not going down the rabbit hole. If I get stuck at a Mad Tea Party I’ll wind up eating the guests. Besides, I don’t like to gyre, though I gimble rather well, despite the uselessness of a sundial for me.
All right, let’s face an insecurity and see what I’m insecure about. Or, rather, see which one of my insecurities it is. I have a horde of the little annoyances. Pick any of them.
It took some doing to set things up, but I finally isolated one bug from the basement vault, took it to my desk, and put it under glass for close examination. Welcome to the light, my little friend. Let’s see what makes you tick, flea, and roach. If I’m going to fumigate my subconscious, I should have an appropriate bug spray, should I not?
In this frame of mind, I examined a brain bug. I scanned it, probed it, all the usual stuff. I even imagined surgical instruments and dissected it, at least as far as I could before it crumbled to dust and vanished.
Not to worry. There were plenty more where it came from.
Finally, after not making much progress, I lost my temper a little bit and sliced my latest test bug into little bits with my tendrils. Tendrils writhed over it and bored into it. It was resistant, but not immune. They lashed at it, flailing, twisting, slicing into it, cutting it to the quick. It didn’t disintegrate and fall to dust. Instead, it bled, and the black blood flowed up through my tendrils bearing impressions, feelings, memories, until all of it was dissolved and consumed.
Jassel was a cobbler. His first wife died of the same fever that took his daughter, but his second wife gave him two healthy sons. He wasn’t a rich man, but he was well-off enough. He made quality shoes and charged accordingly for them. He died when the Lady of Flame cursed Zirafel for the decree of Queen Flarima. His ghost haunted the dusty streets of Zirafel for an unmeasured time, until he fled through a door of darkness, held open by a man with one foot on either side of the threshold.
The bug was gone, sucked up by my tendrils. I had a headache and a pretty good idea of how to make shoes. Other things came with the knowledge, less obvious and potent, but it was clearly someone’s life.
Someone—I think it was Samuel Clemens—said, “Eat a live frog every morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” I ate the frog. More specifically, I ate the bug. Disgusting? I agree. But the bug was gone.
Turns out, it’s not insecurity. It’s indigestion. Okay, it’s indigestion and insecurity, but mostly indigestion. Partly indigestion. Some of it, at least.
As far as I can tell, these ugly little bugs are the remnants of the population of Zirafel. I’m supposed to be a retail predator, not a wholesaler. Sucking down half a million ghosts at once was more than a little outside my design parameters. My mystical digestion process stripped away all the easy stuff as they went down, but what’s left is stuck in my gizzard. And I don’t have a gizzard, so I have brain bugs.
How would this have worked out for a nightlord without a wizard’s mental training? Would someone else have gone insane? Or have I gone insane and failed to notice? Or is it a matter of degree?
I have other Things down there, unrelated to the ghosts of Zirafel. I hope the ghosts are the majority, though. I can manually chew up the crunchy bits of a ghost-remnant bug. I’m not so sure about personal neuroses.
The headache lasted for over an hour, but it wasn’t a physical problem. It was the psychic backlash of cracking the shells on the hard-to-digest bits. I do not enjoy the experience. On the other hand, I don’t enjoy having bugs in my mental basement, either! I decided I should try to make a point of doing at least one every night. I can do more than one a night, I suppose, but if each one is going to be this much of a headache… yeah, one a night.
If all the citizens of Zirafel are still waiting down there, one every night works out to… not counting leap days… as an approximation… call it 1,370 years, give or take.
That’s comparable to how long Zirafel was cursed.
Consistency. Yeah. Day by day, one by one, over the course of an immortal lifespan, I’ll eventually stomp my bug problem.
Sometimes, it really is all about persistence.
Assuming I get the bug population under control, I’ll have a clear mental field. Maybe then I can work on all my other psychological issues. At that point, I should be caught up with myself on a temporal level, too. Maybe the psychoanalysis expert system Diogenes found will actually be useful.
As an aside, when Phoebe and I practice in the mornings, we share a low-level psychic link. It was there to help her develop muscle memory more quickly during our “dance lessons.” It simply can’t handle the bandwidth to allow the transfer of a bug. Besides, those are confined to the basement. I’m not even sure if they’re psychic problems or spiritual ones, or if they can be transferred.
I added additional filtering anyway. I’m cautious like that. Children get too many psychological issues from their parents in the first place. No need to compound the problem.
Thursday, June 4th, 1959
Phoebe spent considerably more time on her assignment than I expected. She still went out to… well, I guess she’s too old to “go play,” but she went out with her friends. Movies, bowling, malt shops, drive-ins—I don’t know, exactly, but I don’t need to know. She’s making good decisions and I’m here if any of them turn out to be not so good.
I used to keep a tracking spell on her and on Gus. She would go outside to play and roam all over the place. Now she drives—Bronze goes with her, but lets her do the driving—and she prefers not to have a tracking spell on her.
Does this make me a “free-range” parent? Or simply trusting and stupid? My initial impulse was to control every aspect of her life, or at least watch over her every instant. This worked pretty well when she was an infant, but as she grew older and more independent, I’ve had to be more subtle about watching over her, then more trusting of her judgment. It has not always been an easy process. It certainly wasn’t easy on William Piper.
Bill was fifteen, Phoebe was twelve—but Phoebe was a beautiful twelve, and the school held Bill back a year. He was being “manly” and “assertive” by putting his hands on the lockers and hemming Phoebe in between.
I got called down to the school to take her home. She was fine. Bill was not. A hospital was involved. We packed up to move shortly after. I was pleased I didn’t have to arrange for something awful to happen to him. Phoebe happened to him first, the lucky punk.
Where’s the line between Guardian Demon and Guardian Angel? Is that what being a parent is? Being both? It sure feels like it, sometimes.
When she isn’t keeping up with her social calendar, she’s up in her workroom, peering into a mirror and making notes. She won’t say what she thinks, yet. She says she hasn’t formed an opinion. She’ll report when she has a report to make.
Do you have any idea how hard it is not to peek at her notes?
On a more pleasant note, ever since the drag race I’ve taken to parking the vehicles in the barn. Normally, Bronze parks her car out front, under the roofed-over section of the circle drive. Portico? No, it’s not a portico, but that’s close.
Hang on. I can look it up.
Okay, a portico is a walkway area in front of a door, usually denoted by columns out front. In many ways, it’s a fancy porch. On the other hand, the area out front where someone pulls up in a car, coach, or carriage, under cover and out of the rain, is called a porte-cochere—also known as a coach gate or carriage gate. People often confuse a porte-cochere for a portico, so I guess I’ll go on calling it a portico. “When I use a word,” and all that.
At any rate, parking the car and truck in the barn makes the house look as though nobody’s home. We have light-blocking curtains, obviously.
My pit trap is just inside the gate and armed by default. I’ve got an alarm on the dirt road drive so I can decide for each visitor whether to leave it armed or lock it in place.
The anticipation of wondering if and when Chuck would decide to re-furrow the lawn has been a pleasant thing. It’s been nice to have something to look forward to, even if it is something small. Perhaps that’s true especially if it is something small.
Would Chuck be a good subject for bliss-addiction and experimental treatments? Maybe. Thing is, I’m not logistically ready to start keeping human lab animals. I really need to get some specialty work done on the voidstation. Part of the holdup is building life support systems. I’ll have to think about systems with feedback. The voidstation is a pocket universe and has the same time-differential difficulties as any other, so sometimes I’m gone for quite a while.
Maybe I need to build an Igor. It could tend the station’s hydroponic gardens, feed prisoners, and lisp “Yeth, Mathter” a lot.
Can I make a giant turtle immune to chaos energies and build a voidstation on its back? No, Eric. Stop being silly. Or be less silly, at least.
At any rate, Chucklehead turned anticipation to actuality today. He borrowed his former hotrod from his father, collected his friends, and decided to pay a visit. I’m not sure what they intended. Maybe they were going to check on the state of the lawn and were incensed at the smooth, neat, greenness of it. Maybe they planned to slash through it again on the theory any lawn repair must have taken both money and effort. Maybe they had some other sort of childish revenge in mind. A paper bag full of feces, set on fire on the porch, perhaps? Or pouring out a bucket of salt behind the car as they drove over the lawn? Possibly something equally imaginative.
