Authors: Finder
I knew that voice; I knuckled under. "We find out the hard way, I guess."
"Which is?"
"We tramp around town asking until we find somebody who'll tell us."
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"And if we find a gr
eat many people who
don't
want to?"
"That'll tell us something right there."
Neither of us mentioned that there might be people who didn't want us to ask.
I know Bordertown isn't Utopia, and never has been. It's riddled with old hates and grudges that people have brought to it from wherever they came from in the World, no matter how pointless and outdated those grudges might be in the strange new world of the Border. Worse, sometimes; sometimes old
prejudices are as comforting as old clothes when you're up to your lower lip in elves, in magic, in all-bets-are-off B-town weirdness. Some people, faced with the perfect opportunity to give their lives a complete makeover, turn tail and do everything they can to identify "our kind" and stick to it. This is why Dragontown exists, for crying out loud, and the whole silly two-block area stubbornly referred to by its inhabitants as "the Barrio," and even the desperate attempts at suburbia that crop up in pockets around the outside of the city proper. Give them the choice between the familiar—even if the familiar is
terrible
—and the unknown, and they'll take familiar
any
time.
And there are people who think they
have
brought their lives up to date, simply because they've put aside hatred of whoever or whatever it was they hated back home and replaced that with hating
something they can only find in Bordertown. Once we started asking questions, I began to wonder if both kinds of immigrants were deeply and personally involved in the issue of drugs that promised to turn humans into elves. I suppose if I'd thought about it beforehand, I would have realized that the answer was yes.
There was the fierce, black-haired human girl with the broken nose, who glowered at Tick-Tick while she told us that if she did know where to get hold of something like that, she'd turn herself into an elf and cross the Border and beat the shit out of every elf in Faerie.
There was the round-faced brown-skinned human boy who laughed heartily and wanted to know who
the hell would want to become an elf fag anyway, and then made it even more disconcerting by looking conscious and apologizing to Tick-Tick.
There was the tall, slender, silver-haired beautiful girl whose only sign of her halfie blood was a pair of undisguisable honey-hazel eyes, who looked down at me with haughty amusement and asked if the
people who'd developed the drug had started by turning sow's ears into silk purses.
There was the elfin knight with thin features and a brush cut, who thought the drug sounded like a good idea, since it could make it possible for Bordertown to be entirely elven without having to force anyone out, thus allowing the inhabitants to make a start on achieving a golden age of civilization. Then his brushed-aluminum-colored eyes widened as he realized what he'd said, and he apologized to
me
.
Those were only the most articulate ones. I'm leaving out the people who glared, who mumbled, who had something they had to do somewhere on the other side of town—not because we were asking
uncomfortable questions, but because one or the other of us was the wrong species.
We were sitting on the wall outside the Antler Brewery at the corner of Ho and Wildwood (I was
swinging my feet; Tick-Tick's reached the sidewalk) when I finally said, "I don't think I'm stupid. Or naive. Am I?"
Tick-Tick thought about it. "I suppose it depends on the subject, really."
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"Tha
nk you very much. No, I've always known that B-town has its share of dipstic
ks. I just didn't think
they were as
high a percentage of the population as this. And in my line of work, I've
met a lot of people
in this town."
She looked at me, a little aslant and rueful. "I was afraid you were noticing the miscellaneous lapses of manners."
"Whatever subjects I'm naive about, racial and ethnic slurs aren't among 'em. What's happening here?"
The Ticker was silent for what was, in the context of the conversation, a long time. "You know," she said at last, "a human who truly hated and feared fey things, or one of my folk who hated and feared humans, might prefer to leave misplaced things misplaced, than to come to you." After a moment, she added, "I don't say it to hurt."
"I know you don't. Fact of life, and a very wise observation. Besides, it only hurts a little. Except—
remember the one in the gray leather vest? He
has
come to me. About six months ago, I found seeds for some kind of antique tomato for him, and everything was fine. We even compared notes, a little, on what it was like to grow up weird in the World. Now he's about as friendly as an ice sculpture. Hell the cops get better treatment down here than that."
Then I looked at her, and she looked at me. "Uh-oh," the Ticker said, summing it up for both of us.
"What Rico was afraid of has started, hasn't it?" I asked, just to be sure.
"This drug—even the rumor of it—is a divisive force. My people can view it as a threat to the safety of the Border. Yours must hear of its failures and think it a murderous fey trap."
"Excuse me. What is this 'my people, your people' stuff?"
She opened her mouth, and closed it, and finally said, "A very wise observation, my chick, in spades.
Didn't I say it was a divisive force?"
"Well. So the rumor's out, and the wedge is in. No wonder Linn's worried about Rico's state of mind.
She's probably cancelled Christmas until this gets solved."
We sat in silence for a minute, our elbows crossed over our respective knees. Then Tick-Tick said, "You like Rico, don't you?"
I frowned at her while I thought about it, so she would know that I wasn't ignoring the question. Also so I could pretend that the question hadn't thrown me into more confusion than I could account for. "I respect her."
"Perhaps that's it," the Ticker replied inscrutably, and stood up. "Then let's return to our quest, my dear.
After all, if we can help solve her case, the respect will be mutual, won't it?"
I almost said it was already; she'd seen fit to hire me, hadn't she? Of course, she'd also seen fit to fire me.
I hopped down from the wall, and followed her around the corner onto Ho Street.
Two blocks later we found Camphire. No, actually, two blocks later we found Camphire's advance
guard, in the form of a grid of chalk lines on the street, the sidewalk, and up the sides of buildings as
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high as a
medium-sized person could reach. Already outlined on the grid were shapes a
nd figures that
looke
d random
to me—but if they were random, why grid them first? Then I looked further ahead, and
saw the filled-in color that didn't yet extend to where we stood, and how it made sense of the design.
The two blocks ahead of us were filled, walls and street, with chalk-drawn animals, plants, and people elongated, geometricized, and abstracted into a knot-work that was part Celtic, part Aztec. Some of the people were elven, some human; some of the animals were real and some were fantastical. I couldn't vouch for the plants. It seemed at first as if we couldn't go any farther without walking on the art. Then I noticed the path that wound through, as non-random as the art itself, calculated to bring you to just the right viewing distance for each major group of figures.
"This must have taken weeks," Tick-Tick breathed.
"Two and a half to do," said a sweet, breathy voice behind us. "On paper, though, designing it, that was a couple months. I think. Getting there is half the fun, or maybe it's that packing takes longer than travelling. One of those things that's supposed to be broadening, anyway."
It was Camphire, of course. She was stunningly ordinary to look at: middling height for an elf, collar-length hair dyed brown and tucked untidily behind her peaked ears, eyes more like gray than silver, regular but undistinguished features. There was a smudge of indigo chalk dust on the side of her nose.
She wore a T-shirt that was much too large for her, and a wide denim skirt that didn't seem to have ever been hemmed, and a carpenter's apron with the pockets full of colored chalks.
"Of course," she went on, with a not-exactly-focussed-on-anything smile, "a journey of a thousand steps begins with a single mile, unless they're really small steps. Here," she said to me, and handed me a length of dark green chalk. "Fill in that stem. Start at the bird's tail, and don't do the leaves yet." She held out a handful of chalks to Tick-Tick. "Over there, that's a sunflower. Make it whatever color you think sunflowers are."
"Yellow?" Tick-Tick ventured, not as if she thought it would help. Horticulture isn't Tick-Tick's subject, either.
"If you want them to be," Camphire told her, nodding.
"We're sort of… in the middle of something," I said to Camphire.
"Of course!" Her grin was big and bright and not vague at all, and she directed it at me as if she were a third-grade teacher and I had just correctly spelled "aardvark" out loud. "You're in the middle of green.
You'll like it."
Much as I hesitate to admit it, she was right. For the next three hours, she placed the Ticker and me like a general places troops, while she skritched furiously away herself, filling in color with a speed and certainty that baffled me. She seemed to hold the finished work in her head; she never referred to a drawing, and she never seemed to have to think about the next step.
Wolfboy, only—how many days ago had it been? Too much had gone on between then and now—not
long ago, had told us that Camphire had said, "You have to break an omelette to make eggs." I wondered if he'd been in the middle of this when she'd said it. Camphire was a byword in Bordertown for not having the firmest grasp on reality; in fact, most of the time one could feel pretty certain that she had both hands full of something else, and reality, if she had any contact with it at all, was slipping out from where she'd tucked it under one elbow. We collected Camphire-isms as ultimate nonsense and non
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sequ
iturs, and didn't pay a lot of attention to what she did while she uttered them.
This, all around me, was what she did, and she was very good at it. She still smiled and nodded at the Ticker and me, and in that pretty, insubstantial voice said things like, "Is negative space the space you don't like, or the space that's not there? And if it's not there how can you tell?" and "I can see the light at the end of the candle. We're almost done." But she always knew where the next color went, and never smeared a grid line or dragged her skirt hem through the chalk.