Daily, Helga reported progress, and the red tide on the map ebbed. Then she began to announce places that were now safe, inviting people to return. There was never a trace of joy or triumph.
Jenny had learned to distrust the news, but she'd come to believe in Helga. The woman reminded her of jowly Churchill, someone who tamped down emotion and simply got the job done.
Anyway, Jenny knew in other ways that what Helga said was true. The pressure of sick fear in her mind was easing, the bitter taste was less. She actually had some appetite and began to put back the weight she'd lost. Sometimes she had to probe for the unreal parts of her mind instead of fight them off.
With victory clear, it was like Christmas. She could have gone to ten parties a night, but instead she spent every night in Dan's place. She didn't watch the war films anymore. Instead she wandered through his sys — music, poetry, games, comedies. She saw
Then she came across his family album and some film from when they were kids.
A group of them running around screaming in the park under water jets.
A birthday party with Dan wearing a Sirius V helmet, a milkshake mustache, and missing his front teeth. Had they really once played at war?
Dan and her building something out of Robot-Robot, then cheering as their construct poured juice into a glass without spilling any. She thought about Earth, where apparently war was mostly waged by robots.
Lucky Earth.
Helga stopped reporting, and Jenny missed her stony solidity, but the good news kept coming. The red swath around the equator shrunk thinner and thinner, and Jenny linked it to Dan's return. He was working hard, to his limit, destroying hellbanes. When that shrinking stain disappeared, Dan would come home.
Then one day she realized that her magic had gone. No, no, that wasn't quite it. That strange bit of her brain that shouldn't be there was still there, but it felt… alone. As if the rest of the magic had gone.
As if the fixers had gone?
She clicked on the screen, heart pounding. More jubilation. More stupid speeches. Say something about the fixers, you berks!
After an hour or so of nothing, she phoned the station. She managed to talk her way through to the newsroom and asked why there were no interviews with fixers.
'I thought you were offering to set up an interview with a fixer,' a woman snapped.
'It's hard?'
The woman cut the connection.
With the screen on mute, Jenny closed her eyes and tried to sense Dan. She probed for him, hunted him, blanked her mind so something could come on its own. Eventually she opened her eyes, defeated. It was as if the magic didn't exist anymore.
As if Dan didn't exist anymore.
Surely if the fixers were gone someone would say so.
Stomach churning, she watched ten screen-sectors at once. She stilled on one. that showed people returning to their homes. The camera was like a predator itself, seeking the moments of horror, the faces of loss. Even while thinking that, Jenny couldn't move on. The continuing scenes of return were made weirder because all the buildings and machinery were intact, simply waiting for the inhabitants to return but often coated with ash.
A camera swooped in on a woman scrubbing, weeping, saying over and over, 'Who am I cleaning up here? Who am I cleaning up?'
Soon it was almost as if the Hellbane Wars had never been, and yet, and yet, it seemed to Jenny that people held their breath as she did, not really able to believe that the terrible things were gone for good. And no one mentioned the other terrible thing — that they might have to carry on without fixers.
Eventually Jenny had to return to life. She cleaned Dan's place one last time and moved into her own home. Her family was coming back anyway, so she had to stock the house with basics and restart the energy sys. She went back to work and found that the manager, Sam Witherspoon, was back. Her family returned for a tearful reunion and told her Dan's family was back, too.
Jenny hurried over there, and her last hope died. They'd heard nothing, and they assumed he was dead. A hero, but dead.
Someone designed a poster of Dan Fixer, Hero, and it hung everywhere. Heaven knows Where'd they'd found the shot to start with, but it didn't look much like Dan in the end. Square-jawed and rugged, he looked resolutely into the distance against a flaming red sky.
Jenny bought one and kept it, knowing he'd be amused.
Hoping he'd be amused.
Her last hope wasn't really dead.
Then Angliacom announced that in view of the lack of response from the fixers, a team of Mayan reporters was on its way to the Gaian Center for Investigation and Control of the Hostile Amorphic Native Entities. They would carry the thanks of the world and report back on the situation.
Needing privacy, Jenny watched on Dan's screen, watched through the camera's eye as the reporters approached the pale rock walls that looked like part of the Mayan mountain. The gates stood open, but no one waited to welcome them.
With the benefit of top-reality technology, she wandered empty streets and peered into deserted buildings. The mikes picked up only silence broken by breeze-blown dust and rubbish. At least the dust seemed ordinary dust, sandy and dry.
Were any of the houses places where Dan had been? Had he shopped at that bakery, drunk at that tavern? A reporter was droning on about Hellbane U in former days. Jenny made herself listen.
New students had been housed in dormitories in the central buildings ahead. Later, they could board with families in the town. Most of the citizens of Hellbane U were fixers — teachers or researchers — but some had been family and descendants of fixers, without special powers.
Then Jenny realized that the reporter was such a person, that he was a refugee from Hellbane U, returning to his former home and shocked by the desolation. He was a professional, however, and his voice stayed steady as the team progressed through the ghostly town, but she could hear the thickness of tears in it.
Tears were falling down her own cheeks.
Eventually the camera reached the central buildings. It panned lecture halls, libraries, and rooms that defied general descriptions. The tour continued, and Jenny watched it all, but Hellbane U was a dead place, the inhabitants gone. She remembered an old Earth term for it. A ghost town.
She found the song in the system and set it to play.
Another war song.
Damn war.
She listened, and watched, and wept for all the heroes who weren't coming back from the war.
6
They held a parade, renamed Bond Street Dan Fixer Way, and life went on.
Doctors had to learn how to mend broken bones with splints and plaster, but the latest technology was on the way. Apparently they had bugs and bots now to do just about anything the fixers could do. The Minister for Post-Fixer Adjustment moved into the fixer's flat. Dan's things were sent to his parents, who turned most of it over to a committee planning the Dan Fixer Museum. Jenny managed to sneak the red jacket out and take it home.
No one knew what the fixers had done, but they were heroes for sure. Yet it seemed to Jenny that, other than Dan's family and friends, people didn't seem deeply affected by the loss.
Her pain was beyond words or expression, so she hid it, glad that no one knew about that last night.
Then, as she wandered out of work at the end of another meaningless day, a woman in the street bumped into her.
