The Chick Is In The Mail

'Now your daughter is old enough that she really doesn't need you, except to drive her places, and you're at loose ends. The home-based businesses you may have tried didn't work out,' Stephanie went on.

I couldn't contradict her about Salla, anyway. Since she turned thirteen Salla hardly said anything to me except, 'Oh, Mooom!', 'Will you drive me to the mall now?' and 'How much longer are you gonna tie up the computer, I want to get on my chat room.'

'What you need, Riva,' Stephanie announced confidently, 'is someone to help you reenter the professional world, get you started back in a career-track job. And I can do that for you.'

'Um… ' I didn't want to insult Stephanie, but she really didn't look like somebody who would have any contacts at all with my old employers-people like Zolkir the Terrible and Rodograunizzo the Revolting. Even if I'd wanted to get back into that business.

'Stephanie came to the Writers League tonight because she was recruiting tech writers for Xycorp,' Norah put in.

'And you,' Stephanie announced, looking straight at me, 'are just the kind of person I'm looking for! Women who've been shunted out of the mainstream of professional work by our society's sexist attitude towards child-rearing, looking for a way back in… '

'Umm… I don't have much of a resume,' I pointed out.

Stephanie waved her hand airily. 'I can take care of all that. You have writing experience. And Norah's told me about your past life.'

I glared at Norah.

'Any woman with the guts to do what you've already done – to leave your child's father and your homeland, to immigrate to the United States and start a new life from scratch – well, it's clear to me that you have what it takes to make it in the trenches of office politics.'

And it was becoming clear to me that Norah hadn't told Stephanie all about my past life.

She leaned forward and took my hands. This close, the fervor in her eyes was almost hypnotic. 'I need you, Riva. Xycorp needs you. This society needs you and women like you.'

'Writers?'

'Strong women. Women who can roll with the punches and come up fighting.'

Hmm. Maybe being a technical writer wouldn't be so boring after all. At least it seemed to call for skills I really had.

'Of course,' Stephanie said, 'you'll have to dress professionally at work.'

I looked down at my jeans and T-shirt, visualized my old working outfit in its box under the bed. Somehow I had a feeling that a bronze chain mail corselet and thigh guards were not quite what Stephanie had in mind.

'What's wrong with these clothes?'

Stephanie and Norah looked at each other and there was one of Those Silences. You know the kind I mean: the kind where you realize that you've just revealed your total ignorance of the game and total unworthiness to play.

'I'm sure,' Stephanie said finally, sounding considerably less sure than she had up to now, 'that we can find something for you.'

* * *

'Finding something' turned out to be somewhat more work than I had envisioned. Take shopping malls, for instance. I used to sneer at the ladies who got their exercise by walking up and down the length of an air-conditioned mall because they couldn't stand to work up an honest sweat. After Stephanie and I had been through Barton Springs Mall three times in one afternoon I had more respect for them. If nothing else, their feet were considerably tougher than mine, which ached from instep to heel, with separate factions of rebellious nerves lodged in each toe. As a member in good standing of the Bronze Bra Guild, with forty individual kills and several successful campaigns to my credit, I had too much pride to complain. I did reflect, however, that the Guild's training, which relied heavily on forced marches through the desert, running up mountains, and combat sparring, could reasonably be augmented by a few more endurance tests. In short, I had never trained for so many hours of walking on concrete floors. Of course, on Dazau we hadn't had concrete…

By the time Stephanie pronounced herself satisfied with a gray suit that simultaneously concealed my chest and hobbled my knees, together with a set of undergarments that had been constructed by someone with bridge building and other major engineering feats on his mind, I was too tired to care about the funny- looking shoes that made me look as if I were walking on tiptoe. I couldn't tell if they fit anyway; my feet were going to hurt no matter what I wore. Ice packs seemed like a good choice.

All this may explain why for once I didn't mind when Salla staged her usual homecoming routine. This consisted of yelling, 'I'M HOME!', slamming the front door, grabbing a handful of cookies and a Coke from the kitchen, and shutting herself in the cubbyhole we called a 'study,' where she could simultaneously watch TV, log on to a chat room with her friends, and talk on the phone. This was known as 'doing homework.' Some days I regretted the passing of the time when she'd wanted to tell me every detail of her day. Today, though, I was perfectly content to lie on the bed listening to my feet throbbing.

The longer Salla spent on the phone, the louder her voice got. That would have been okay with me, too, except that the walls of our house were made from something with all the sound-baffling qualities of a damp cardboard box. Thin cardboard. So I had the dubious pleasure of listening to one side of a conversation that seemed to consist entirely of, 'No way!', 'He did?' and 'No fucking way, dude!'

'Salla,' I called, 'are you aware that I can hear every word you're saying?'

'That's okay, Mom,' she yelled back, 'I only reveal my innermost thoughts on the chat room. Right now I'm online with a nice old man in Copenhagen who likes little girls.'

Well. I had to move sometime, if only to go to the bathroom. I hobbled to the study and looked over Salla's shoulder. The chat-room log showed nothing but the usual string of banalities:

SoMch2dI4: blah

FadeSoSlow: oaky

SoMch2dI4: blah

SoMch2dI4: Do u know Y jess is so mad at mark?

FadeSoSlow: no

SoMch2dI4: i c

FadeSoSlow:so are you gonna do the fucking assignment?

SoMch2dI4: Yeah

SoMch2dI4: if I don't my parents will KILL me

SoMch2dI4: they are like totally paranoid about school

'You got that right, anyway,' I told the back of her head, 'but what happened to the dirty old man from Copenhagen? You enticed me in here under false pretenses.'

Salla giggled. 'Come on, Mom. You know I wouldn't be dumb enough to chat with anyone like that.' She paused and pretended to think for a moment. 'Unless, of course, he had candy… '

'So what's the `fucking assignment'? And why aren't you doing it now?'

'Just a minute, Mom!' Salla typed, 'got2go, my mom is hassling me,' and logged off.

'It's that dumb thing for the ancient Egypt study unit, okay? You know, we gotta do a diorama in an oatmeal box, act in a dumb play, or… hell, where's the damn assignment sheet?' She rooted around in her backpack, tossing several empty juice boxes and a collection of ponytail holders onto the floor, and finally pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. 'Or find some other original and creative way of dramatizing ancient Egyptian life and making it real to your fellow students,' she read with a sarcastic twist of her lip.

I hadn't seen this piece of paper before, and the decorative markings around the edges made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I took it from her. 'Where did you get this?'

Salla sighed again, more elaborately. 'From Mr. Kruzak, where else?'

'But these symbols… ' An old phrase from my apprenticeship to the wizard Mikhalleviko came to my mind. 'Sacred carvings.'

'Mom. They're just old Egyptian writing. Hieroglyphs. Nothing to get bent out of shape about. I got a cheat sheet off the Net that says what they stand for and how to pronounce them. See, this one means `star' or the sound `sba,' and this one means… ' Salla's eyes drifted to the top of her cheat sheet and she looked confused. 'And it says right at the top of the page that the word `hieroglyph,' literally means `sacred carvings.' How'd you know that?'

'I've… seen them before. Some of them, anyway. On Dazau they're… a wizard told me once that they were extremely potent magical symbols from the Old Tongue, only most of them had been lost and nobody knew exactly how to pronounce the ones that are left, so it was dangerous trying to invoke them; you never knew quite what you were going to get.' Some of the results Mikhalleviko had gotten while experimenting with Sacred Carvings Magic were enough to wake me up screaming in the middle of the night fifteen years later.

'Way coool,' Salla said. 'Too bad Dazau magic doesn't work here.'

'Thank goodness.' I took a deep breath, tried to calm my fluttering nerves, and remembered just how much my feet hurt. 'So what are you going to do for your project?'

Salla's three-cornered grin should have warned me, but I was thinking about those peculiar shoes and wondering whether I'd actually be able to stand up on them. 'Something original and creative, of course. That's ten points extra.'

'Like what?'

'When I figure it out, I'll tell you.' Salla sat back in her chair and stared at me with that opaque look she'd developed around her thirteenth birthday. It