concede that at the time of our telephone conversation I did not have a full appreciation of it. My apologies for that error.”
“Who would have believed this?” I said. My guess was that Kawaguchi still didn’t have a full appreciation of what he’d been part of today. Put what happened here together with our desperate struggles back at the Devonshire dump, let both containment efforts fail, and Angels City goes light off the map. And who could say what was happening elsewhere in the Confederation, or would have followed Azbedan success here? Maybe we’d put a spike in the wheel of the Third Sorcerous War.
“David, I shall take you back to Westwood now,” Michael said in a tone that brooked no argument. I wasn’t in a mood to argue, anyhow; now that the terror which had kept me hopping most of the day was easing, I could feel myself subsiding into something with all the crisp decisiveness of a bowl of tapioca pudding. More boneless with every step, I walked over to his carpet. We headed down toward the Venture Freeway. I told myself I never wanted to see St Ferdinand’s Valley again.
When we got to the Confederal Building, Michael got off the carpet and headed for the entrance instead of going home. He gave me a bemused look when I fell into step beside him. “I may as well keep working,” I told him. “The more I have to do, the less time I have to worry.”
“Ah,” he said, “The anodyne of distraction,” Which is what I’d just said, but I hadn’t managed to boil it into four words.
If I didn’t have anything urgent on my desk, I figured I’d write up what I’d been through today. The EPA, like any government agency, thrives on documentation, and I must confess that I’ve been indoctrinated to the point where I sometimes don’t believe something is real until it’s committed to parchment On the other hand, if Moses had had to fill out all the EPA forms parting the Red Sea would have required, the Bible would be written in Egyptian.
Only one message waited for me, from a woman named Susan Kuznetsov. I frowned, trying to remember who she was. Then name and face matched: the no-nonsense gal from the Barony’s Bureau of Physical and Spiritual Health who’d reported little Jesus Cordero’s apsychia to me.
I asked my watch the time: going on six. Mistress Kuznetsov had impressed me as the hard-working type, so I called her back. Sure enough, I got her. “Inspector Fisher!” she said, I thought she sounded pleased. “I’d expected you’d be gone for the day.” °I just got back in,” I told her. “What can I do for you?”
“Inspector, the Cordero family has been contacted by a consortium styling itself Slow Jinn Fizz,” she answered. “This consortium mentioned the possibility of instilling a soul into the infant, something they had been given to believe was impossible. Unlike too many poor and poorly educated families, the Corderos called me for advice instead of allowing themselves to be taken in by probable charlatans. My preliminary investigation, however, indicates that Slow Jinn Fizz may perhaps be able to deliver on some of its claims. I called you to learn whether it’s yet come under EPA scrutiny yet”
“As a matter of fact, I was out there myself, right around the time Jesus Cordero was being born,” I said.
When I didn’t go on right away, Susan Kuznetsov said,
“And? Are they flimflam men like so many outfits with impressive claims?”
“You know, I don’t really think so,” I answered. “I think they’re right on the edge of making psychic synthesis possible, and I think the procedure may well have important benefits for apsychic patients and give them at least a chance at life after death.”
“Really?” She sounded surprised. “You recommend the procedure, then?”
“I didn’t say that,” I told her, and then explained: “I don’t knew where or from whom the pieces of soul the jinni are synthesizing come from, or whether Slow Jinn Fizz is solving one problem now at the expense of widespread psychic depletion years, maybe even generations, down the line. It’s certainly a tempting technology, but you know who the Tempter is.”
“I certainty do,” she said. “So you’d suggest the Corderos stay away from it?”
If she’d asked me that the day before, I would have said yes. Thanks to modem medicine, Jesus Cordero had every chance of living to a ripe old age, and psychic synthesis would be investigated and refined until people understood all the gremlins in the process. That would be the right time for him to have a soul implanted.
But after what had happened at the Devonshire dump and then at Chocolate Weasel, I felt less easy about that waitfor—developments approach. Just because the odds said you were likely to lead a long life didn’t mean you would: a big piece of Angels City had almost gone up in flames. If you were an apsychic, could you afford to take a chance like that?
Would you want to, knowing extinction awaited?
“Mistress Kuznetsov,” I said carefully, “the EPA hasn’t taken a position on Slow Jinn Fizz and what it does. Before we do, we’ll have to weigh short-term benefits against lowergrade long-term risks. My guess is that the technology won’t be allowed out of the experimental stage and into general use for many years.”
“I know that much already,” she answered. “The people from Slow Jinn Fizz said as much to the Corderos, and I give them credit for it. What I’m realty asking is, what would you do if that were your kid?”
“If it’s my kid, I worry about saving him first and everything else later,” I said. “Isn’t that what being a parents all about? But just because that’s what I’d do doesn’t mean it makes good public policy.”
“That’s fair,” she said. “Let me put it a different way, then; would the EPA have kittens if the Slow Jinn Fizz experimental protocol expanded to include Jesus Cordero?”
“Right now, the answer to that is no,” I said. Too much else—bigger stuff—was going on for us to worry about Slow Jinn Fizz right now, but I didn’t tell that to Susan Kuznetsov.
I hoped that one day (one day soon. God willing) things would slow down to the point where we’d be able to worry about the problems synthesized souls present No doubt they were important but they weren’t world- threatening, so for now they’d just have to wait And besides, I told myself, how much environmental damage on the Other Side would manufacturing a soul for one little boy cause? Not much, surety, and it would do so much good for Jesus Cordero.
You know, of course, which road is paved with good intentions. So do I. So does the EPA. The real question wasn’t what would happen when one apsychic kid got a soul. The real question was what would happen when jinnetic engineering and jinn-splicing techniques began stirring up the psychic material of the Other Side on a large scale, I didn’t have any answers for that. Neither did anybody else. The EPAs job was to make sure we found those answers before exploiting those techniques got us into trouble, not afterwards. But to give Jesus Cordero, a series of one case, a chance at life after life—why not?
Mistress Kuznetsov said, “Inspector, I want to thank you for being flexible; you’re going to make the Corderos very happy, and as for Jesus—he won’t understand what’s happened for a long time yet, but when he does, he’ll be eternally grateful.”
“I hope so, anyway,” I said. “The technique is experimental and, from what Ramzan Durani told me, it hasn’t yet undergone the test of mortality. But when you’re in that position, you have to grasp at straws, don’t you?”
“That’s my view as a public health officer, certainly,” Susan Kuznetsov said. “I wasn’t sure how the EPA would view the matter.”
“If you’d said you wanted to add a thousand people to the experimental list I would have given you a different answer.
But one little boy, and one I’ve met—”
“Yes, the law of contagion does remind us of how important personal contact is, doesn’t it? I was just afraid you’d be working against contagion, as I often have to do, rather than allowing it full scope.”
“Not this time,” I answered quietly. Letting Jesus Cordero have a chance to beat apsychia wasn’t as big a thing as thwarting the Chumash Powers or keeping Huitzilopochtli and his fiery friend from establishing themselves in Angels City, but it felt just as good. Maybe better—as Susan Kuznetsov had said, this was personal.
I only wished the rest of my personal worries were doing as well. No word of Judy, none at all.
To keep myself from thinking of that and what it might mean, I plunged into the environmental impact report on what importing leprechauns into Angels City was liable to do to the local thecology. I made more progress in an hour and a half than I had in the past two weeks. No wonder; now I could make my prognostications secure in the knowledge that the Wee Folk weren’t going to have any adverse effect on the Chumash Powers. I’d taken care of that myself, in spades.
Eventually, I supposed, I’d get around to feeling bad about siccmgthe Garuda Bird on them. An EPA man,
