“Don’t be sorry. It doesn’t matter.” It really didn’t. They looked at the ceiling and listened to the cicadas some more. She felt pleasantly fleshly. She was mind and body both, for once.
“But just so I know, is that why you want this so much?” she asked, sitting up. “The power? Like, if one day you’re that strong, then maybe you’ll be safe enough that the rest of you can come out?”
“Maybe.” He grimaced, incidentally showing off those interesting lines around his mouth. She traced one with her finger. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know, or you won’t say?”
Nothing. Blue screen of death: she’d crashed his system. Oh, well. Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized. She flopped back down on the thin hotel pillow.
“So where would you put Project Ganymede’s chances of success?” she said, just making conversation now. “Percentage-wise?”
“Oh, I like our chances,” Pouncy said, his personality, such as it was, coming back online now that he was back on safe ground. “I’m gonna go seventy-thirty us. You?”
“More like even steven. Fifty-fifty. What are you going to do if it doesn’t work out?”
“Try again somewhere else. I still think Greece is ground zero for this stuff. Would you come if I did?”
“Maybe.” She wasn’t going to reassure him just for the sake of it. “The wine’s better here though. I’m not an ouzo girl.”
“That’s what I like about you.”
He played with her fingers on top of the scratchy hotel blanket, studying them.
“Listen, I lied before,” he said. “I think I do know why I’m doing this—what’s in it for me. Or part of it. It’s not about power for me, not really.”
“Okay. What then?”
This oughta be good. Julia propped herself up on an elbow, and the sheet slid down off her shoulders. It was strange to be naked in front of Pouncy after all the time they’d spent together clothed. It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn’t think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.
“I was in Free Trader before you. You weren’t there when I came in.”
“So?”
“So to be crude about it, you haven’t seen my prescriptions.” Pouncy grinned, ruefully, a different smile from his regular smile. “In terms of raw dosage, I am the official all-time record-holder for Free Trader Beowulf. At first they didn’t even think they were real.”
“And they’re for . . . depression?”
He nodded. “Ever notice how I never drink coffee? Or eat chocolate? Can’t. Not with this much Nardil in my system. I’ve had a half dozen courses of ECT. I tried to kill myself when I was twelve. My brain chemistry, it’s just hosed. Not viable, in the long term.”
Now it was Julia who felt panicky. She wasn’t good in these moments, and she knew it. Hesitantly she put her hand on his smooth chest. It was all she could think of. It seemed to work well enough. God, did he actually manscape?
“So you think Our Lady Underground can heal you? Like with Asmo, that scar, whatever that was?”
It was sinking in, what he was saying. This wasn’t an intellectual exercise for him, or a power grab.
“I don’t know.” He said it lightly, like he didn’t care. “I really don’t. It would be a miracle, and I guess miracles are O.L.U.’s business. But to be honest I wasn’t thinking of it that way.”
“How then?”
“If you laugh I swear to God that I will kill you.”
“Careful, She might be listening.”
“I’ll plead insanity. I can back it up.”
Pouncy’s face wasn’t a naturally expressive one. His cut cheekbones might have worked for a model, if he’d been a little taller, but never for an actor. But for a second she could really see what he was feeling, as he felt it.
“I want Her to take me home with Her,” he said. “I want Her to take me back with Her, into heaven.”
Julia didn’t laugh. She understood that she was looking at another person like herself, a broken person, but Pouncy was even more broken than she was. She was used to feeling sorry for herself, and angry at other people. She was less used to feeling sorry for someone else, but she felt it now. She would never be in love with Pouncy, but she felt love for him.
“I hope she does, Pouncy,” she said. “If that’s what you want, I truly hope she does. But we’ll miss you if you go.”
Back at Murs Julia did something she hadn’t done since she’d gotten there in June. She went online.
None of them had been on Free Trader Beowulf in ages. It took them a while to crack the new log-in routine, which changed every couple of months. They raced each other, alone in their bedrooms but yelling trash talk back and forth. (Except for Failstaff, who was too much the gentle giant to talk trash, which may have contributed to his eventual victory. Asmo quit early and futzed around hacking the router instead, so she could kick Pouncy offline at will.) Once she was in Julia didn’t announce her presence—you didn’t have to, you could slip in without the system pinging everybody—because she didn’t want a blizzard of IMs from Free Traders wanting to catch up after her long absence. For a couple of hours she just lurked, cruising through old threads, and new ones that had sprung up while she was offline. There had been some turnover in the membership—there were a couple of new fish, and a couple of old fish were gone, or in hiding.
It seemed like years since she’d been there. She felt so much older now. You could customize the Free Trader interface any number of ways, but Julia had always gone for a bare-bones look, ASCII characters only, approximating the look and feel of an olde-timey Unix shell. Her eyes filled with tears just looking at everybody’s user names, picked out in green-on-black text. So much had changed since then, since she’d been living a life of quiet desperation in a mundane universe, racking up hours at the IT shop and killing time till she could take off for Stanford. So much that couldn’t be changed back. But not much had changed here.
Pouncy, Asmo, and Failstaff were running a private thread just like back in the day. She checked in.
[ViciousCirce has joined this thread!]
PouncySilverkitten: hey VC!
Asmodeus: hey
Failstaff: hey
ViciousCirce: hey
Electric silence for a minute. And then:
Asmodeus: so. big damn show tomorrow huh?
ViciousCirce: maybe
Failstaff: don’t come much bigger
Asmodeus: waddaya mean maybe?
ViciousCirce: big show if OLU shows up
Asmodeus: why wouldn’t she?
ViciousCirce: . . .
ViciousCirce: she might not exist? the summoning might fail? she might be on the rag? there are 10K reasons why not. just saying.
PouncySilverkitten: yes but what about the mirror/silver coins/milk/etc???
Asmodeus: and she fixed my scar
ViciousCirce: yeah yeah yeah look I don’t want o be the asshole. just, I’ve seen some serious major league spellwork. no actual gods yet tho.
PouncySilverkitten: but you do believe that there is a higher praxis
ViciousCirce: believe there might be. = why I’m still here
ViciousCirce: and anyway
ViciousCirce: what if OLU does come. what if she is real. what next. how does it go down. what if she won’t teach us. I mean do you want to just summon a god or do you want to be a god?
