Dan sat beside Jenny at the bar. She made a business of picking up her glass because it let her move an inch away. She probed the air around him. Nothing. Nothing more than the usual aura that was Dan. Had he burned it all up in that singing?
By the time Ozzy threw them out and locked up, the city was quiet—a soft quiet that seemed infinitely safe. They set off home together, but Rolo and Tom split off not far from the square. Jenny, Dan, Gyrth, and Yas carried on in a group, singing, teasing, and even tussling sometimes.
Like kids again. Or like teenagers. Dan kept apart a bit, and Jenny remembered that he’d missed most of these nights—the singing, the horseplay, the maneuvering for possible bedmates. She noticed Yas maneuvering for Dan. That’d be nothing new, but she was glad he wasn’t responding tonight.
In Chestnut Copse, Yas went into her building alone with a last, hopeful look. Gyrth turned off at the next corner, leaving Jenny and Dan alone for the last little way. Nothing unusual in that, except that, for the first time, she was nervous.
It was just that it had been a strange day, but she hoped he wouldn’t touch, wouldn’t even want to talk. Perhaps he felt the same, because he walked beside her in silence, and by the time they came to his place, that silence was comforting as a lambswool blanket. It said that everything was all right.
The fixer’s flat took up the whole ground floor of a large house. They held parties there sometimes because no one else had such a space to themselves. Jenny still lived at home.
They paused at the bottom of the steps. “Night, then,” Jenny said.
“I’ll walk you to your place.”
She stared at him. “You expect a blighter to leap out of the pavement?”
“You never know.” But then he smiled. “I’m just not ready to go to bed.”
Tension ricked her shoulders, but she said, “Oh, okay, then. Thanks.”
He touched her arm. “You’re feeling the effects of the music, aren’t you?”
“No. Yes, but it was okay. It was good.” She might as well tackle it. “Did you make it happen?”
“I helped.” He turned her, and they walked on. “I am the town’s fixer, after all.”
“What were you fixing?”
“The closing of the gates upset a lot of people.”
How often did he do things like that? Could he, did he, fix people’s moods? Fix hers? They were on her street now, a tall terrace facing a small park called Surrey Green.
“It’s a bright-burning night, and I’m not ready for sleep,” he said. “Do you want to walk around the park and talk some more?”
It was the dead hour on a chilly night, and Jenny felt drained, but she couldn’t not go. Something important hovered here. They walked through a gap in the hedge, but as soon as they were away from the sparse streetlights, she couldn’t see what was in front of her feet.
She stopped. “I’m likely to break a leg.”
Dan put an arm around her. “Then you’re with the right person. Come on.”
“It’ll still hurt.” It came out light as she’d hoped, but her entire skin was jumping as she let him lead her forward. “Night vision, too?”
“Right.”
And what else?
There was talk about fixers and sex. Yas spoke about Dan in a way that suggested things. But this was Dan. They’d played in the sandbox here together. Say something, Jenny. Something light and normal.
“The anthem really is terrible, isn’t it?”
“Awful. But you know, that used to mean full of awe. And terrible might not be a word to toss around these days.”
No talking about terror or awe. “Perhaps we should write a new one.”
“I don’t think you can do that with an anthem. It has special powers.”
No talking about special powers. “Do you think Yas’ll resign over not getting that promotion?”
“No, she’ll sabotage her rival and get her way in the end.”
“Poor rival.”
“Some people are forces of nature.”
Jenny knew then that he wanted to talk about forces of nature, about powers, about blighters. Was it because she’d admitted to sensing things, revealed that she might have a bit of whatever made up the fixers? She’d rather bury that in the Surrey Green sandbox.
Distant streetlights glinted on bits of the playground, and she grabbed on to the past. “Remember the hours we used to spend on the swings here?”
“And the high slide.”
“You certainly kept the fixer busy.”
“I sometimes wonder if that caused it. If it’s infectious.”
She stiffened, on the edge of pulling away. “Really?”
He laughed and snagged her tight. “No. I could always do weird stuff. Mum and Dad tried to get me to hide it, but testing sniffs it out anyway. Remember that time you caught the cricket ball funny and thought you’d broken your finger?”
“Yes.”
“You had.”
Jenny remembered the horrible pain that had suddenly eased, so that when some adults came running they thought she’d been making a fuss about nothing. They’d been—what?—eight? Dan hadn’t even touched her. He’d just stood there saying stupid things like “Are you all right, Jen?”
She knew he didn’t glow or anything, but she’d thought he had to touch. She tried to remember whether there’d been a tingle. She’d probably been in too much pain.
“We’re lucky, aren’t we?” she said.
“You and me?”
She bumped him with her hip. “Gaia! The perfect planet. Healthy, fruitful. Rare earths to pay our way, and fixers to mend almost everything.”
“And blighters,” he pointed out.
“Perhaps every grail has to have a python.”
“I’d rather have the fluffy bunny. But blighters aren’t too high a price to pay.”
Jenny thought of the refugees. “Still? Could the price become too high?”
“When there’s no choice, the price can never be too high, can it? Earth’s recovering, but it’s still trying to ship people out rather than take them back. Even spread around other colonies we’d be an unbalancing factor.”
“So it’s Gaia or nothing. That’s all right. I can’t imagine leaving.”
They wove through the playground where the swings, the slides, and the roundabout sat still, as if waiting for ghostly children. A vision swept upon her—of the whole of Gaia like this. The blighters didn’t destroy things, only animals and people.
“There’s no real danger, is there? From the blighters? I mean to Gaia.”
He didn’t immediately answer, and chill seeped into her bones. He was going to be honest, and she wished she hadn’t asked.
“There’s danger,” he said at last, grabbing a bar of the roundabout and spinning it as if doing so might whirl something away. “People are being ashed. A lot of people, and even more animals. But the local fixers and teams from Hellbane U should be able to control things, especially now that people are leaving. They’ve been told to kill all the large animals before they leave so the blighters won’t have anything to feed on.”
“Feed on?” She moved out of his arm, spinning the slowing roundabout as an excuse.
“Where else do the victims go? They’re consumed, so it has to be a kind of feeding. Of energy, we assume. The blighters are a form of energy.”
Jenny shivered, even though it wasn’t really so shocking. It was more that she’d not thought much about blighters before. Why should she? They were nasty, but they hardly ever popped up even near the equator, and if one did, a fixer got rid of it before it could do more damage.
Like pimples—of a lethal sort.
The roundabout had slowed again. She gave it a running spin and jumped on. “So you’re going to starve them, and that’ll be an end of it?”
“That’s the plan.” He caught it, spun it again, and joined her, but on the other side for balance. The world whirled, but they were steady inside this circle.
“W
hat are the blighters doing, Dan? What are they? What do they want?”
“We don’t know. Despite generations of study, we know grot all. They’re not easy to study. Until recently they were hard to even find. There’ve always been people who thought they were an hallucination, or a neurosis brought on by bad air. Or by planetary contamination of our food.”
“Food? We brought in Earth plants.”
“But they feed on Gaian soil. As we do.”
The roundabout slowed and slowed, and neither of them spun it again.
“Blighters can’t be imaginary,” Jenny said. “What about the ashes?”
“That’s the rub, isn’t it? But apparently there’s something called spontaneous combustion. It’s been recorded on Earth. People suddenly burst into flames and burn up, leaving acrid ash. It doesn’t fit because blighters cause no flames or smoke, but we humans hate something we can’t measure and explain.”
“Like magic,” she said, stepping off the still roundabout.
“Like magic,” he agreed, joining her on the grass.
The late night and the chill were getting to her, aching in her bones, shivering over her skin, especially now they were apart. “How do you zap a blighter?”
“We sense them coming and instinctively fix them. It seems to kill them. It’s hard to explain. We don’t really understand what we do. We just know it works.”
“So the fixers down south are fixing things, but they need help from Hellbane U?”
“There are rather a lot of blighters.”
“Why so many now?”
“No one knows.”
“No one knows much, do they?”
He laughed, but wryly. “No.”
She was suddenly exhausted, as much by a sense of helplessness as by the late hour—and that helplessness came from Dan.
“I have to get to bed,” she said. “I have to go to work tomorrow. Music usually invigorates me, but tonight it wiped me out.”
Without protest, he turned to cross the soccer pitch toward the houses beyond the hedge, but he put an arm around her, and she found it too comforting to resist.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t need much sleep. I sometimes forget that normal people do.”
Normal. On the street, beneath the lights, she gently moved away from him, trying to ignore a drag, as if two sticky surfaces were pulling apart. Stuck like two toffees…
“You don’t sleep much because of your fixer abilities?”
“The energy of it, yes.” He took her hand, rubbing the knuckles with his thumb. “There are things that help.”
All kinds of interesting muscles contracted, but she knew—perhaps had always known—that her friend Dan Fixer was too strong a drink for her. Spontaneous combustion.
“You should have gone with Yas, then.”
The streetlight two doors down showed his smile. “I don’t think so.” He raised her left hand and kissed the palm—a lover’s move, designed to invite without words. “Anytime you’d like, Jen. Sleep tight.”
She watched him walk away.
Anytime?
She had only to ask?
She turned and pressed the lock, her exhausted mind staggering around perilous possibilities.
She stumbled up the stairs and fell into bed thinking she’d probably dreamed the whole thing. For that and a bundle of other excellent reasons, she couldn’t imagine taking him up on the offer.
3
For a few days everyone spent time on the wall watching the stream of refugees, but then they lost interest. There was nothing new to see, it was depressing, and Anglians were growing more worried about their own security. The town was overcrowded, but that wasn’t the problem. It was worry about whether they, too, would end up on the road north.
An occasional group of refugees had a citizen in the family and had to be let in. Those people told tales of whole families ashed. Angliacom showed charts and maps that tracked the hellbane wave, though the announcers assured everyone that the fixers down south had everything under control and that the refugees should be able to go home any day.
However, part of the screen constantly showed the warning that refugees must slaughter large animals before leaving. It was presented as a kindness—the animals would lack care and possibly be victims of a terrifying death—but it was, of course, to starve the blighters.
Jenny wondered how many people recognized that. She also wondered how many saw how the news was sugaring everything and sensed the darker truth. Was she the only one to feel she could taste bitter ashes on the wind, who sensed the peril in the earth, thrumming stronger and stronger, coming, coming, coming…
If the starve-them-to-death plan was working, why did the pressure grow day by day?
Attempts to contact settlements near the affected areas either failed or found people frightened and planning to move. Gaia Central was having trouble keeping track of who was where. Just possibly the first settlers had made a mistake when they’d rejected Earth’s efficient communication system and strong, centralized government.
Paradise didn’t need that, they’d said, but Gaia wasn’t paradise anymore.
Tension was making her jumpy and queasy. Drops got her through her workday, but she stayed home at night, watching the screen with her family.
Dan came over once. He checked her out, but said there was nothing he could fix. He looked worried, and she knew then that the way she felt was to do with the blighters. He looked fine, however, and she heard that every night at the Merrie was a wild night.
She decided all that energy might help her and went there after work, but it was nothing like the music night. Dan flared with too much energy, edgy energy that screamed down her nerves and twisted up her spine, giving her a crashing headache. No one else seemed bothered, but she fled for her own salvation, and because she thought Dan might burn himself to ash.
There was nothing she could do.
Or nothing she wanted to do.
She’d caught his eyes on her once. He’d held the moment before looking away. There must be a hundred women ready to have sex with Dan Fixer, especially now, and she couldn’t. Not now.
Spontaneous combustion.
Then Polly’s baby was born sick. Jenny was at the hospital with some of the others, waiting for the exciting news. She caught a glimpse of the baby being rushed from delivery room to intensive care in a red pod incubator. It looked tired of life already. A word came into her mind. Blight.
A tight-faced nurse came out of Polly’s room. Jenny stepped in her way. “Has the fixer been called?”
“It’s not a problem that can be fixed.” The nurse walked away, and Jenny turned to the others.
“There must be something Dan can do!”
Yas gave her a look. “This isn’t a broken bone or a gash, Jenny. You think he walks on water.”
The sharpness of it took Jenny aback. “It wouldn’t hurt to ask.”
“If you want to chase him down…”
Jenny controlled an angry retort. “I do.”
She strode to a wall phone and punched in his code. Nothing. She left a message, then tried Ozzy. Dan wasn’t at the Merrie. She tried three other possible places. Nothing, nothing, nothing. If only she had his buzzer code, but that was for official business.
She’d always thought Gaia’s ways right, but on Earth and most other worlds everyone had a buzzer. They could phone and be phoned anywhere, anytime. A horrible thought, but right now she wanted it.
She should give up, but Yas was looking at her with something close to a smirk, so she went out to search. She hopped a tram and rode it around Low Wall, then took another in to Market Square. Where the hell was he?
He might be at the hospital by now! She leapt off the tram at the next stop and ran to a phonepost. He wasn’t there, and the baby was fading fast. She turned from the post—and found Dan there. She knew from his face, but asked anyway. “You heard?”
“Yes.”
“So what are you going to do?”
>
“There’s nothing I can do.”
“What do you mean? You’re a fixer.”
He looked worn. Not so much tired, but fined down, burned down.
“I can’t do anything, Jen. Do you think Assam and Polly want me there to toss out platitudinous comforts?”
“No, they want you there to do something, no matter how small.”
“Think!”
She jerked back, feeling for a moment as if he might shake her.
“My father died last year. I’d have fixed that if I could do miracles, wouldn’t I?” He sucked in a breath and ran a hand through his hair. “This is why they recommend that fixers don’t return to their homes. Too many personal pressures.”
His resistance was like a hand pushing her away, but she said, “Since you do live here, can’t you at least try? Come on.” She took his hand and tugged. After a moment he went with her, but she felt his reluctance like a weight.
She pulled him onto the West Street tram, but stayed standing near the doors. She couldn’t bear to sit down. “Are you all right?”
“Of course.”
But he looked almost as weary as the sick baby and she was going over his words. He’d said he couldn’t do anything. Had he lost his powers? Had he blasted them away?
They got off at the hospital stop, and she steered him toward the main entrance. But then he balked and turned aside.
“Dan!” She hurried after. “Dan, stop. Please!”
He turned down a side street, and she caught him at a small door. “What are you doing?”
He pressed a lock. Hand print, not code. He used this door often.
The door opened, and she followed him in, watched as he took a set of hospital grays off a shelf and pulled them on over his uniform. “Jen, think. What happens if Dan Fixer walks around the hospital?”
“Everyone wants you to heal them.” Why hadn’t she thought of that?
He added a stretchy helmet, one designed for a man with a beard, which left only his eyes uncovered. He looked older, harder. Or perhaps he was.
“Why don’t you, then? Heal everything.”
“For a start, there’s not enough of me to go round. But I can only fix things to make them right, which means mostly injuries. Disease is part of nature, like death. I can’t fix nature.”