Among Others

the queue.
    “See you Tuesday,” I said, as I got on the bus.
    Gill was just ahead of me. She turned around and gave me a look of utter contempt.
    S UNDAY 16 TH D ECEMBER 1979
    As long as I don’t think about them being puppets, I can have a really good time with them. Mostly yesterday I didn’t think about it at all. The whole thing with what I’d done, with the magic, just wasn’t in my mind, and I could act as if they were perfectly naturally part of my karass, both of them.
    But today, thinking about it, of course I can’t help thinking about that.
    When we were young, Auntie Lillian once bought us a doll that could really talk. Her name was Rosebud, and she was just the kind of doll little girls are supposed to want. Her eyes closed when you laid her down, and opened when you picked her up. She had a bland pretty face with no personality and a white dress covered in a rosebud pattern. She had pink shoes that slipped on and off and golden hair that you could really comb. She also had a string in her chest, and when you pulled it she spoke. She could say two things. “Hello, my name is Rosebud,” and “Let’s play schoo-ul!” If you pulled the string slowly, she’d say them in a deeper voice, and if you pulled it really fast, she’d squeak.
    The problem with Rosebud and her really talking was that our other dolls could pretend talk, and that was better. Our collection of dolls (who mostly had some disadvantage like one arm or leg, or were animals rather than being humanoid) had epic adventures surviving after nuclear wars or rescuing dragons from evil princesses. Battered old Pippa, with her one arm and her ragged hair (Mor cut it when she was disguising herself as a soldier) could stand there vowing defiance and revenge against the evil Dog Overlord (the toy dog had a moustache which could be twirled, so he often got the bad-guy parts) and Rosebud couldn’t compete when all she could say was “Let’s play schoo-ul.”
    I don’t want a karass like Rosebud.
    I mean I don’t want a karass like Pippa and Dog and Jr. and the others either, so this isn’t a very good analogy. (I do not miss my toys. I wouldn’t play with them anyway. I am fifteen. I miss my childhood .) Jr. was a plastic boy on a motorbike, one of our few human male toys. His name came from Ward Moore’s “Lot.” I thought it daring and American to have an odd name like that with no vowels. We pronounced it Jirr. I was mortified for whole minutes when I found out what it really meant.
    When Hugh mentioned that Wim had done a session on Delany, my first thought, my very first thought, though I know I didn’t write this down yesterday but that’s because I was ashamed, was that I could do a magic to make that not have happened yet. I could do a magic that would mean he’d do it so I could be there for it. I didn’t do the magic, or even really mean to, but I thought it. If I did it, I’d be making them into Rosebud. I’d also be risking what happened to George Orr, because so far, I might have made it all happen but I might not. I didn’t see it without. It could have been there all the time. If I didn’t exist, or if I had died with Mor, they could still have had a session on Delany. Maybe all the magic did was make me see the group was there and find them. I can’t tell. I won’t ever be able to tell. Deniable magic. If I did that, I really would be treating them as Rosebud, to say the same things when I pulled a string. And that’s if I even could do that. I think actually I couldn’t, it would do that thing Glory talked about where too many people create too much weight and you can’t change what’s happened.
    But even thinking about it.
    I don’t want to be evil, I really don’t. The worst of anything she could do to me would be to make me like her. That’s why I ran away. That’s why the Children’s Home was better, why this is better.
    I hereby solemnly swear to renounce the doing of magic for my own benefit, or for anything but protection against harm.
    Morganna Rachel Phelps Markova, 16th December 1979.
    M ONDAY 17 TH D ECEMBER 1979
    I hadn’t realised that with the exams over this week would be given over relentlessly to fun.
    In English, I played Scrabble with Deirdre. I beat her by 600 points, but it wasn’t any fun. It would be a good game with someone who could spell and had some vocabulary. I made “torc,” Celtic necklace. She suggested shyly that it should be spelled “talk.” Then we