Changer (Athanor) (27 page)

Despite Arthur’s plea that they remain, the Changer and Lovern depart soon after Jonathan’s arrival.  The Changer now bears driver’s license, credit cards, and a checkbook.

Before they leave, the Changer consigns the care of Shahrazad to Vera and Anson.  “She shouldn’t be too much trouble,” he says, glancing at the pup with a forbidding eye.  “We’ve been here for going on three weeks now.  I doubt she remembers her wild home as anything but vague memories.  Keep her in the courtyard and away from strangers and all should be well.”

“She’ll miss you,” Vera says, stroking Shahrazad between her oversized ears.  “I think she knows that you’re going.”

“She does,” the Changer says, an impish grin about his lips.  “I told her, just as I told her to stay here and obey you.  Whether she heeds my orders… well, I can’t promise.”

“What parent can?” Anson agrees.  “I certainly never have been able to make such promises for my children.  Nor have they been able to do so for me, come to think of it.”

He laughs and Shahrazad wriggles, her momentary unhappiness forgotten.  Leaving her with her toys, the group drifts to the front door where a cab waits.

“Hurry back,” Vera says as they depart, speaking as if to both, but it is the Changer that her grey gaze follows.

Anson notices, but, flippant as he can be, he chooses not to comment.  Instead, he walks to the kitchen and gathers a couple of sandwiches left from making the travelers’ care package.  Then he hurries up to Eddie’s room where his charge should be waking from his morning’s nap.

Vera stands in the doorway a moment longer, then closes the door and heads for her office.  Work is a good antidote for worry.  And for other unsettling emotions as well.

At Albuquerque International Airport, Lovern and the Changer check in, then walk to their gate.  There, Lovern indicates a couple of empty seats.  Crafted from wood, their washable fabric backs and seats adorned with brass upholstery tacks, they are modeled after Spanish Colonial designs.

“Shall we sit here?” he says.  “We have almost an hour to wait until the flight.”

“I think I’ll stand,” the Changer says.  “Soon enough we’ll be penned in on the plane.”

Once seated, Lovern pulls out a book—a techno-thriller, the Changer notes—and the Changer strolls over to the window.  Beyond the thick glass pane, ground vehicles bearing luggage, food, and fuel scuttle beneath the giant aircraft.  They remind him of egrets around a herd of elephants or remora around a shark.  He amuses himself with this fancy, studying the machines and realizing that he hasn’t the least idea how they work.

The Smith had tried to explain airplanes to him once, waxing enthusiastic about propellers and jets, flaps and rudders.  Although the Changer himself has flown for almost as long as any creature on earth (the incentive to do so being one of the things that had urged him to alter his early millennia of existence), still the method by which things of metal, heavily laden with fuel and people, can fly escapes him.

He wonders if he has reached the limits of what he can comprehend.  The thought troubles him, recalling something his brother had said centuries before humans diverged from the rest of the primates.  The conversation had not been in words, but in memory the Changer casts it so, as if he is writing a play.

They had been sea creatures then, great plesiosaurs, sleek, swift, and deadly.  The survival of these particular creatures had led somewhat to the legends of sea serpents, although the sea serpents themselves had done more.

Duppy Jonah is the name the Changer’s brother currently uses among their kind.  It means “Jonah’s Ghost” and is the origin of the sailor’s nickname “Davy Jones.”  Perhaps he uses the name out of deference to Arthur—rather than calling himself the Sea King as so many still do. Perhaps he uses it out of a cynical desire to emphasize his own recent diminished status.

Duppy Jonah had not been pleased when his sea-born brother had ventured more and more onto land.  “I cannot understand why you should shape land dwellers.  They are uncouth and graceless.  They lack our dexterity and beauty.  And they are so vulnerable.”

“There is an entire aspect of the world that you are missing, brother,” the Changer answers.  “Warm winds carry smells and noises that tell me of things unknown beneath the sea.  I feel my mind actually growing as I expose myself to them, as I comprehend more and more concepts.  Just as when we first isolated ourselves from the mass, venturing onto land is an expansion of the finest type.”

The words had not been there—no more than a coyote has a word for danger or a raven for fear.  But, just as a coyote can know what danger is without having a word for it, or a raven can feel fear without articulating the verb, so had he and his brother, already aware that they differed from the greater number of living things around them, expressed the ideas of change and the resistance to change.

Time and again, Duppy Jonah had ventured onto land over the unrolling centuries, had learned many shapes, but his allegiance remained to the deeps, and his descendants bore shapes that sometimes mingled elements from land and sea: mermaids, sea serpents, hippocampi.  Others, like the selkies, learned magic, shed their seal skins, and went ashore in human form.

A perky young female in a blouse and skirt vaguely reminiscent of a military uniform begins the boarding process, pulling the Changer from his memories.  With Lovern, he joins the line shuffling forward.

Once aboard, situated in first class seating, they try to ignore the envious or resentful glances of the less fortunate passengers.  Taking out his thriller, Lovern tucks the rest of his bag under the seat.  The Changer debates having a sandwich and decides to wait until he sees what the airline has to offer.  Closing his eyes, he begins to make himself comfortable.

“What are you doing?” Lovern hisses in his ear.

“Taking a few inches off my hips and shoulders, shortening my legs slightly,” the Changer responds softly.  “These seats may be roomier than those in back, but they’re far from generous.”

Lovern sighs enviously and opens his book, but he doesn’t read.  Instead he sits staring blankly at the page.

“I wish I could have checked the odds that this plane will come to difficulty.”

“With the Head?”

“Yes.”

“You use it for such small things?”

“Why not?  It is an available resource.”  The wizard pauses.  “Or was.”

“And soon will be again.”

“I hope.”

Feeling rawly pleased with himself, Sven Trout drives to Santa Fe.  His spy-eyes (more of Louhi’s work) have confirmed that Lovern and the Changer have departed.  A bit of cunning telephone work (if he does say so himself) has confirmed for him that they are heading to the Florida coast—a hopeful sign.

His early-morning dip into the offerings on his website had also been encouraging.  Arthur may not know it, but the drums of change are sounding and, as with the trumpeting of Joshua’s horn at Jericho, soon the walls will come tumbling down.

Awash in self-satisfaction, the miles melt under his tires.  When he pulls into the gated community where Tommy Thunderburst resides, his euphoria has hardly diminished.

“Pity I can’t bottle
this
feeling,” he muses to himself as he crosses the lawn to Tommy’s town house.

Neither his ring of the bell nor polite thumping on the door brings any answer.  Pressing his ear to the door, he hears a dull bass thudding.  Tommy is in then, just absorbed in his music.

Ten days have passed since Sven’s last meeting with the immortal musician.  Ten days during which, he hopes, Tommy will have learned the joys contained in the little package of powder.  Ambling around the town house, Sven comes to where elegant French doors stand ajar.  The sound of the music is louder here, just at the border of what might make a neighbor complain.

Stepping through the doors and into the living room of the town house, Sven pulls the doors shut behind him.  It wouldn’t do to have anyone interrupt them now.

Tommy sits hunched over a keyboard in one corner, his shaggy hair masking his face, his long fingers dancing over the keys.  A drum machine provides the bass line and, apparently, he is listening to other instruments over earphones.

He could, Sven thought, have performed the entire operation in apparent silence thanks to modern electronics, but this is not Tommy’s idiom.  Instead sound leaks out around him and, with it, a trace of the wild charisma that accompanies his music no matter what style his compositions take.

Sven knows that waiting for Tommy to finish playing of his own accord is one of the more useless ways to spend time—quite equal with drying raindrops or bottling the wind.  Therefore, he waves his hand in Tommy’s face.  When the musician looks up, Sven notices that the amethyst thunderbird is around his neck.

“Hey, you!” Tommy says by way of greeting.  “You’re
here
.”

Sven nods.  “That’s right.  I was in the neighborhood and decided to drop in.  How are things with you?”

“Pretty good.”  Removing the headphones, Tommy rises, stretching to loosen muscles cramped from sitting crouched over the keyboard.  “The album is going to be released this month.  Lil says that the prelim reviews are good.  The video’s done, too.  I’ve just been noodling.”

“Sounded good for noodling.”

“That piece is gonna be called ‘She Ripped My Head Off and Ate My Mind.’  It’s for Lil.”

Sven makes a noncommittal noise, uncertain whether Tommy means the song as tribute or insult to the woman who has been his keeper and manager for centuries.  Tommy spares him the need for further comment by drifting into the kitchen.

“There’s coffee here somewhere, and tea.  Want some?”

Sven glances into the kitchen, notices the dirty dishes and pizza box with its shreds of dry cheese, and decides that anything he drinks here had better be boiled in his presence.  He may be immortal, but he isn’t foolish.

“Tea, thanks.”

While Tommy fills the kettle and sets it on the gas range to heat, Sven glances around the untidy living areas.  What he sees gives him something like hope.  The room is messy, but not descended into squalor.  In the heaps of cans and bottles, he sees no evidence that Tommy is taking anything stronger than caffeine—and even that in moderation.  Either that means he has finally beaten his tendency toward addiction or…