Irresistible Forces

'Remember when I fixed your finger?'

'But there was nothing bad about that.'

'What about the baby?'

She'd pushed that to the back of her mind. 'Would it really be so terrible for fixers to heal like that?'

'Yes, yes it would. In that, the training's right. We can't fool with nature. That's what drove Earth to the brink. Death's natural. Without orderly cycling of the parts the whole will rot.'

'Then what are you doing with stones and grass?' She couldn't stop a sharp edge in her voice.

'Looking for a weapon. What if wild magic is more useful than tame against the blighters?'

She stared at him. 'Tell me.'

He rose and pulled her to her feet. 'If I'm going to be coherent, we'd better get dressed. I have tea.'

He picked up his shirt and found her bra and knickers underneath. With a grin, he tossed them to her. She resisted the urge to make a performance of putting them on. They needed to find a way to survive.

She noticed his small campfire, tucked behind rocks where it wouldn't be easily seen from outside the park. She dressed and went to sit there with him, holding her hands out to the warmth, though the night was not particularly cold. 'Now tell me.'

'I'm not sure I have my thoughts straight yet.' He moved a metal pot onto a trivet over the flames. Steam began to curl out of the spout.

'Talking sometimes helps.'

'Yes.' He poured the tea into two cups. Had he always planned to draw her here?

'Talk,' she said. 'How do you suspend something in the air, and what use is it?'

'I don't know.' He picked up a stone and released it in midair. It hung there, but then fell. 'We don't understand what fixers do any more than we understand the blighters, but I think our… energy… comes from the same place.'

'Negative and positive?'

'Perhaps, but perhaps not.' He put his cup aside. 'Look, assume that the blighters are not just energy but a species — undetectable to us, but following the same patterns as other species. They are born, they reproduce, they die, and they need to take in nutrients.'

'Do they?'

'I have no idea. This is a working hypothesis. It would mean that they ash animals to feed, transforming them into the same kind of undetectable energy that they are.'

'Like water transformed into steam by heat?'

'Or like green plants transformed into our ungreen bodies. That's a kind of magic if you don't know how it happens.'

'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,' she said, remembering his words.

He pulled a face. 'I can't see anything about the blighters we could remotely call technology. Perhaps that comment should say that everything we humans don't understand we classify as magic.'

'And thus unreal.'

'Until the unreal starts to eat us.'

Jenny swirled the stewed tea in her cup, swirling what he'd said in her mind. 'If the blighters are eating us, they'll have to stop, won't they? Otherwise…'

'Otherwise, they'll be like people on Earth and the cod.'

'Good point. But they re-created the cod stocks from DNA.'

'And the blighters almost certainly can't do that.'

'So what are you saying? That they'll eat us all then die of starvation? That's not much comfort.'

'I've been reading up on it. There are creatures that eat almost all their food source then go dormant until the supply recovers.'

Pieces of the puzzle clicked into place. 'That's why Gaia was so perfect for us! Fertile, lush plant life, but no large or sentient animals. The blighters had eaten it down to a nub. How long would they be dormant?'

'Probably as long as it takes.'

'But instead,' she said, almost breathless, 'we arrived…'

'Like a delivery dinner.'

'But it's been centuries!'

'Perhaps they're not programmed to stir until now. Perhaps their life cycle is naturally measured in centuries. Perhaps it's something to do with base energy stores…'

'Or perhaps,' she said, 'they were waiting for the dinner bell.'

He nodded. 'My guess is that the occasional blighters have been checking things out.'

'Like the drones combing the universe for usable planets. Fair's fair, I suppose.'

'And survival is survival.' He broke a twig off a nearby bush and began to strip the leaves off it. Something he'd done as a boy when fretting. 'Interesting, isn't it? Gaia was the perfect planet, settled with extreme care to ensure infinite harmony and balance: But it all comes back to the jungle in the end.'

'Perhaps we had a good run because we developed fixers and learned to zap the blighters.'

'Screwed up their system a bit?' He tossed the bare twig into the fire where flames licked at it. 'Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. This is all crazy speculation, you know.'

'But it makes sense.' Jenny looked from the spluttering twig to the statue of the little girl. 'Ashes to ashes … Something's told them dinner's ready, and they're rushing to the table. What do we do?'

'That's the question. When we humans find a planet we like, the native life-forms can't stop us from cleaning them out to make things right for settlers. Perhaps we can't stop the blighters from cleaning us out for food. Some small animals will survive, and one day, who knows how far into the future, it'll be dinnertime again.'

Jenny pressed her fingers to her head as if that might somehow make her brain sharper. 'But you can beat the blighters. The fixers, I mean. So why can't you beat them now?'

'Numbers. A fixer can beat a blighter one-on-one with power to spare. A fixer might be able to beat ten, or even more. It's never been tested, blighters being rather rare.' He shook his head. 'That sounds so crazy now. We aren't efficient killers — it's a real case of using a hammer to kill an ant, but it hasn't mattered before. Now, if we have to zap one after another we're soon drained — and then they eat us.

'If the fixers had concentrated to begin with, we might have stopped them, but by the time Hellbane U woke up to it, there were too many, too widely spread around the equator. It's been like trying to drain a swamp by standing in it with a bucket. With the swamp eating the bucket.'

'How many have you zapped?'

'One, to graduate.'

'That's all? No wonder the war's not going well.'

He shrugged. 'I assume some of the fixers near the equator saw more.'

She sipped the tea then pulled a face at the bitter taste and put it aside. 'What was it like?'

'We don't have words for it. Blighter is too… mundane. Even hellbane doesn't capture the sense of the alien that screeches against everything we know to be real and tries to latch on to parts of our brain that shouldn't be there. But are.'

Jenny shuddered in recognition.

'Then there's the awareness of ravening hunger, of a blind need to consume. Us. That we are nothing more to it than a food source. Like a cow, or a fish, or a loaf of bread.' She saw the shudder shake him. 'And that's just a start. You have to be there.'

'No,' she said. 'I know exactly what you mean. I can feel it now.'

His look was quick and sober. 'Then I'm sorry.'

She pushed back the sick feeling. 'Let's look at wild magic again. What can it do?'

He reached toward the fire. She saw him hesitate, but then he grabbed a glowing end of wood and held it, flames licking through his fingers. She gaped, but then he hissed and dropped it to blow on his hand. 'Good job I'm a fixer.'

Jenny wanted to laugh and cry. She wanted to hug him and keep him safe. She wanted someone to hug her and promise her that everything was going to be all right.