The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (49 page)

Actually, they went to the Shabu place that was Peter's favorite restaurant in town. He always felt guilty for eating there alone, which he did often, because it was kind of an interactive experience, where you grilled your own meat and/or made your fancy stew, and you really needed someone else there to join in. The staff wore crisp white uniforms to underscore that they did no actual food preparation themselves. There were tables, but almost everybody sat around a big U-shaped bar in the center, which had little grills embedded in it. The sound system blasted a mixture of Foreigner, 38 Special, Yes, and some J-Pop from a CDchanger.

Peter was nervous about being seen out on a date, and having people act weird about it during or afterward. (
Did you cast a "babe magnet" spell? Ha-ha-ha.
) But the Shabu Palace was pretty empty, and a few people stared a little bit but it was no big deal. Peter found the meat vapors comforting, like carnal incense.

"I hate this town," Rebecca said. "It's just big enough to have restaurants like this, but no actual culture. We don't even have a roller derby team any more. No offense, but that's one reason why you're such a big deal. We finally have a local celebrity again, to replace that sitcom actor who was from here who died." Peter wasn't offended by that at all, it explained a lot.

Rebecca was saving up money from her pet store gig to go to L.A., where she wanted to go to barista school. Peter didn't know that was a thing you went to school for, but apparently it was a big deal, like knowing the science of grinding the beans just right and making just the right amount of ristretto and steaming the milk to the edge of burning. And of course latte art and stuff. Rebecca had tried to be a psychologist and a social worker and a vet, but none of those career paths had worked out. But she was excited about the barista thing because it was hip and artistic, and you could write your own ticket. Even start your own fancy café somewhere.

"It's cool that you're so ambitious," Peter said. "I think L.A. would drive me insane."

"I am guessing L.A. would be okay as long as you don't want to be a movie star or whatever," Rebecca said. "I mean, the barista school is probably hella cutthroat. But I can handle that."

Peter hadn't really thought of this as a small town – it seemed pretty big to him. There was a freeway, and the downtown with the opera house, and the art museum, and the world headquarters of a major insurance company. And there was a small zoo during the spring and summer, with animals that wintered in Florida somewhere.

"People hate you, you know," Rebecca told Peter halfway through dinner. "You're super threatening, because you're the proof that there's something wrong with them. If they'd only been good people, they would have gotten away clean, too. Plus, it offends our sense of order. Power should have terrible consequences, or life would be too easy. We want people to suffer for anything good they ever have. People are governed by envy, and a sense of karmic brutality."

"That's a very bleak view of human nature," Peter said. But he found it kind of a turn-on. Misanthropy was just undeniably sexy, the way smoking used to be before you had to do it out in the cold.

It turned out Rebecca had never even tried to do magic herself. "I never wanted to risk it," Rebecca said. "I'm the least lucky person, of anyone I know. I can only imagine how badly I would be screwed if I tried to bribe the universe to give me a shortcut."

By now, Peter was really hoping that Rebecca would go home with him. He could almost imagine how cool it would be to have her naked and snarky in his big four-poster bed. Her body heaving to and fro. The way her hair would smell as he buried his face in it. He almost started getting hard under the counter of the Shabu Palace just thinking about it. Bryan Adams was singing about Heaven on the stereo. Everything was perfect.

"So," Rebecca said, leaning forward in a way that could have been flirtatious or conspiratorial. "I gotta ask. What was the spell that you did? The famous one?"

"Oh man." Peter almost dropped his meat piece. "You don't want to know. It's really dumb. Like really, really dumb."

"No, come on," Rebecca said. "I want to know. I'm curious. I won't judge. I promise."

"I... I'd rather not say." Peter realized he'd been about to lift this piece of meat off the grill for a while, and now it was basically a big carcinogenic cinder. He put it in his mouth anyway. "It's really kind of embarrassing. I don't even know if it was ethical."

"Now I really want to know," Rebecca said.

Peter imagined telling Rebecca what he'd done, and tried to picture the look on her face. Would she laugh, or throw sake at him and tell him he was a bad person? Immature? He couldn't even go there. Even Bryan Adams suddenly sounded kind of sad, and maybe a little disappointed in Peter.

"I'm sorry," Peter said. "I think this was maybe a mistake." He paid for both of them and got the hell out of there.

By the time Peter got home, Dobbs was freaking out because he really needed to go out and do his business. Dobbs ran around a tree three times before peeing on it, like he was worried the tree was going to move out of the way just as Dobbs was letting go. Dobbs looked up at Peter with big round eyes, permanently alarmed.

O
f course, Derek called Peter the next morning and wanted to know how the date went. They ended up going for breakfast at the retro-1970s pancake place downtown, and Peter grudgingly told Derek the whole deal.

"So what you're saying," said Derek, "is that you plied her with meat and soft rock, and you had her basically all ready to Shabu your Shabu. And then she asked a perfectly reasonable question, and you got all weird and bailed on her. Is that a fair summary?"

"Um," Peter said. "It's not an
unfair
summary."

"Okay," Derek said. "I think there's a way this can still work out. Now she thinks you're complicated and damaged. And that's perfect. Ladies love men with a few psychic dents and scrapes. It makes you mysterious, and a little intense."

"You're the only one I've told about that spell," Peter said. "You didn't tell anyone what the spell actually was, right?"

"That part, I haven't told anyone," Derek said. "I only mentioned the part about how you had no complications."

"Okay, cool," said Peter. "I don't want people to go nuts on me. Even more than they already have."

"Listen," Derek said. "I'm kind of worried about you. I think this spell you did is just a symptom. I feel like you've been kind of messed up ever since Marga..." Derek trailed off, because Peter was scowling at him. "I just think you shouldn't be alone so much. I feel like a new relationship, or a fling – either way – would be good for you."

Derek and Peter had been friends since college, where they'd bonded over hating their History 101 professor, who had a cult following among almost all the other students. Literally a cult – there was a human sacrifice at one of the professor's after-exam parties, and it'd turned ugly, as human sacrifice so often does. Peter and Derek weren't so close lately, because Derek had gone into real estate and never had time for Peter; plus until pretty recently Peter had just been hanging out with Marga's friends all the time. Like Marga herself, her friends were all erudite and artsy, with clever tattoos.

"You don't have to worry about me," Peter said. "I've got Dobbs. And all I really wanted was to be left alone."

"We're not back to that again, are we?" Derek threw his arms up in a pose of martyrdom.

"It's okay," Peter said. "The media frenzy seems to have died down, and some other asshole is getting his fifteen minutes now."

P
eter almost called Rebecca a couple times. He imagined telling her the truth about his spell, and it made him cringe from the balls of his feet to the back of his neck. He always put the phone away, because he didn't think he could work the "damaged and complicated" angle without telling the whole story. He went to sleep and dreamed of sitting naked with Rebecca in bed, explaining everything. He woke up with Dobbs sitting on his chest, legs tucked under his fat little body, saucer eyes staring at him. Dobbs licked Peter's chin in slow flicks of his brash tongue. Lick. Lick. Lick.

When Peter went to work, his face was on the television in the breakroom again. Some expert had concocted a theory: Maybe Peter was the reincarnation of an ancient wizard, or maybe he was some kind of spiritually-pure mystic or something. Obviously, if Peter really did know the secret of doing magic without any strings attached, he would be the world's richest and most powerful man. So he either really didn't have a secret method, or he was some kind of saint.

This day, in particular, Peter had a progress meeting with some of the other team leaders, and he was trying to explain why the desalination pilot projects he was funding were slow going. It's easy to add salt to water, but taking it away again is a huge challenge – you have to strip the sodium and chloride ions out of the water somehow, which involves a huge unfeasible energy cost. Peter got halfway through his presentation, when Amanda, who was involved in microfinance in Africa, asked, "So why don't you just use magic?"

"Um, sorry?" Peter said. He had clicked through to his next slide and had to click back, or risk losing his thread.

"Why not just use magic to remove the salt from the water?" Amanda said. "That gets around the high energy cost, and in fact there might be zero energy cost. Potable water for everybody. Water wars averted. Everybody happy."

"I don't really think that's an option," Peter said.

"Why not?" Amanda said. Everybody else was nodding. Peter remembered seeing Amanda on television, talking about him a few days earlier. She was the one who'd explained carefully that Peter had a twelve-year-old Dodge Neon and rented a one-bedroom apartment in a crumbling development near the freeway. If he was a master sorcerer, Amanda had told the ladies on
The View
, Peter was doing a pretty good job of hiding it.

Now Amanda was saying, in the same patient, no-nonsense tone: "Isn't it irresponsible not to explore all of the options? I mean, let's say that you really can do magic without some backlash, and you're the one person on Earth who can. What's the point spending millions to fund research into industrial desalination when you could just snap your fingers and turn a tanker of salt water into spring water?" This particular day, Amanda was wearing a blue paisley scarf and a gray jacket, along with really high-end blue jeans.

Peter stared at Amanda – whom he'd always admired for helping the poor women in Africa get microloans, and who he never thought would stab him in the back like this – and tried to think of a response. At last, he stammered: "Magic is not a scalable solution."

Peter fled the meeting soon afterward. He decided to take the rest of the day off work, since he was either fatally irresponsible or secretly the reincarnation of Merlin. He passed Amanda in the hallway on his way to the elevator, and she tried to apologize for putting him on the spot like that, but he just mumbled something and kept walking.

Dobbs wagged his tail as the leash went on, and then tried to play with the leash with one of his front paws, like it was a dangling toy. At last, Dobbs understood that the leash meant going outside and relieving himself, and he trotted.

P
eter went to bed early, with Dobbs curled up on top of his head like a really leaky hat. He dreamed about Rebecca again, and then his phone woke him up, and it was Rebecca calling him. "Whu," he said.

"Did I wake you?" she said.

"Yes," Peter scraped Dobbs off his forehead and got his wits together. His bed smelled foggy. "But it's okay. I was just waking up anyway. And listen, I've been meaning to call you. Because I need to explain, and I'm sorry I was such an idiot when we..."

"No time," Rebecca said. "I called to warn you. There's been an incident, and they're probably coming to your house again soon." She promised to explain everything soon, but meanwhile Peter should get the heck out of there before the TV news crews came back. Because this time, they would be out for blood. Rebecca said she would meet Peter at the big old greasy spoon by the railroad tracks, the one that looked like just another railroad silo unless you noticed the neon sign in the window.

Peter put on jeans and a T-shirt, grabbed Dobbs and got in his Neon just as the first people were getting out of their TV vans. He backed down the driveway so fast he nearly hit one of them and then sped off before they could follow. Just to make sure, he got on and off the freeway three times at different exits.

Rebecca was sitting at the booth in the back of the Traxx Diner, eating silver dollar pancakes and chicken fried steak. The formica table had exactly the same amount of stickiness as Rebecca's plate. Peter wound up ordering the chicken-fried steak too, because he was suddenly really hungry and it occurred to him he might have skipped dinner.

As soon as Peter had coffee, Rebecca shoved a tablet computer at him, with a newspaper article: "TWELVE DEAD, FIVE CHILDREN UNACCOUNTED FOR IN SCHOOL DISASTER." One of the headlines further down the page was for a sidebar: "Peter Salmon: Made People Think They Could Get Off Scot Free?" And there was a picture of Peter, giving a thumbs up to a group of people – taken from his site visit to a water purification project in Tulsa two years earlier.

Peter spilled coffee on his pants. The waitress came and poured some more in his cup almost immediately.

"Don't worry," Rebecca said. "Ulsa won't tell anybody you're here. She's a friend. Plus she's really nearsighted so she probably hasn't gotten a good look at your face."

"Okay," Peter said. He was still trying to make sense of this article. Basically, there was a middle school in New Jersey that was coming in at the bottom of the rankings in the standardized tests, and state law would have called for the school to be closed by the end of the year, which, in turn, would wreck property values. So the teachers and some of the parents got together to do a spell to try and raise the children's test results by twenty percent, across the board. And it had gone very wrong. Like "everyone's heads had turned to giant crayfish heads" wrong. There were some very gruesome pictures of adults lying around the playground, their beady eyes staring upward. Meanwhile, some of the children had gone missing.