Among Others

eating we ordered another Vimto and a lemonade—the tea was too awful even to pretend to drink. We sat there in the warm and dry while our coats steamed gently on the backs of our chairs. We talked about Tolkien. He compared it to Donaldson, and also to something called The Sword of Shannara which I haven’t read, but which sounds like a total crap ripoff. And then by degrees we got to talking about the elves. “They could be ghosts,” he said.
    “The dead can’t speak. Mor couldn’t speak when I saw her.” I managed to say her name perfectly normally, without even a quiver.
    “Maybe not when they’re newly dead. I had a thought about that. When they’re newly dead, they can’t speak, and they look like themselves. And you can make them speak using blood, like in Virgil, you said, right? Later, they draw life from things that are alive, animals and plants, and they get more like them, less like people, and they can speak, with that life.”
    “The way they speak really isn’t much like people, not even dead people,” I said. “What you’re saying makes sense, and it would fit perfectly in a story, but I’m not sure it feels right.”
    “It would explain why they like ruins,” he said. “I went back there afterwards, on Saturday. I could sort of see them, out of the corner of my eye, when I was touching your rock.” He touched his pocket when he mentioned it. I liked the thought that he was carrying around something I’d had so long. It won’t really do anything except protect him from my mother—but goodness knows, that can’t be a bad thing.
    “You should be able to see them,” I said. “They’re all over.”
    “They’re ghosts,” he said. “You just think they’re fairies.”
    “I don’t know what they are, and I don’t know that it really matters,” I said.
    “Don’t you want to find out?” he asked, his eyes gleaming. That’s the spirit of science fiction.
    “Yes,” I said, but I didn’t really mean it. They are what they are, that’s all.
    “Well, what do you think they have to do with?”
    “Places,” I said, very sure. “They don’t move around all that much. Glor— my friend did magic to make me come down to South Wales at Halloween, he didn’t come here and speak to me.”
    “Well, that’s like ghosts, lingering where they come from.”
    I shook my head.
    “Will you teach me magic?” he asked next.
    I jumped. “I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because it’s so dangerous. If you don’t know what you’re doing, and I don’t mean you, I mean anyone, anyone who doesn’t know enough, it’s so hard not to do things that have wide-reaching effects and you don’t know what.” This was the perfect opportunity to tell him about the karass spell, and I knew it, but when it came to it, I didn’t want to. “Like George Orr in The Lathe of Heaven , only with magic, not with dreams.”
    “Have you done anything that’s like that?” he asked.
    So I had to tell him. “You’re not going to like it. But I was very lonely and very desperate. I was doing a magic for protection against my mother, because she kept sending me terrible dreams all the time. And while I was at it, I did a magic to find me a karass.”
    He looked blank. “What’s a karass?”
    “You haven’t read Vonnegut? Oh well, you’d like him I think. Start with Cat’s Cradle . But anyway, a karass is a group of people who are genuinely connected together. And the opposite is a granfalloon, a group that has a fake kind of connection, like all being in school together. I did a magic to find me friends.”
    He actually recoiled, almost knocking his chair over. “And you think it worked ?”
    “The day after, Greg invited me to the book group.” I let that hang there while he filled in the implications for himself.
    “But we’d been meeting for months already. You just … found us.”
    “I hope so,” I said. “But I didn’t know anything about it before. I’d never seen any indication of it, or of fandom either.”
    I looked at him. He was rarer than a unicorn, a beautiful boy in a red-checked shirt who read and thought and talked about books. How much of his life had my magic touched, to make him what he was? Had he even existed before? Or what had he been? There’s no knowing, no way to know. He was here now, and I was, and that was all.
    “But I was there,” he said. “I was going to it. I know it was there. I was at Seacon in Brighton