Chapter #40Some Lectures and Answers by: Seuzz   "Read any good horoscopes lately?" You hook a foot behind the leg of a chair to pull it out, then drop heavily into it.
Ursula Jensen looks up from her cell phone with something like panic in her face, then sours. "Yeah, make fun of me," she mutters. She lowers her head, but continues to look in your direction.
"Do I look like I'm making fun of you?" You lean forward to stare deeply into her eyes while cupping your chin in your hand. "Maybe I'd like a reading."
She doesn't look amused. "I'm not trained to give readings."
"You need a license?" you gasp. "Dang. Gummint regulators are gettin' in the way of ever'body these days."
"I mean--! Oh, never mind." She returns to her cell phone, tapping away, but she still glances up at you, for you continue to stare at her. She's not beautiful, but she has a foggy kind of prettiness, as though her face just needs to come into focus. It's a baby face, and the infantile element is only accented by the blue pallor of her eyes. Her blonde hair has no volume, and is cut flat in a page-boy style. The severity of her hair is, perhaps a stab at balancing the babyish cast of her face, as is perhaps the rather frumpy pant-suit wardrobe.
She taps away and glances at you, and taps away and glances at you, and you can see the cogs turning in her mind. What do you want, and how should she handle you? The texting is probably just an excuse to give her time to think, for she draws herself up decisively at the same instant she puts the phone down. "So what do you want?" There's a challenge in her tone, but a twinkle in her eye. Plainly she's not going to take any bullshit, but she's not going to try driving you off either.
"I told you, I want a reading. Or maybe not. But if I wanted to talk about the moon and the sun and the stars and the astral plane, you would be the person I'd come to."
"Is that what you're here for?"
You enfold her question in an impudent smile. "Yeah, let's go with that excuse. Tell me what you know."
"Well," she says, sucking in her breath. She gives you a quick, darting look, which you return with transparently sincere interest. "I can tell you a little bit about the constellations and their properties." Your smile widens. The constellations have no significance whatsoever, except insofar as magicians have employed them as elements in their spells. They are just accidental patterns glimpsed in the sky, and have as much to do with magic as faces that appear in clouds. But you don't say any of this as, flattered by your attention, she gradually warms to her extemporaneous lecture. You drink in her words with feigned fascination, but before long you rip a sheet of paper from a notebook, click open a mechanical pencil, and start doodling.
She lets you go for a bit, then falters as your hand continues to move swiftly across the paper. "What's that?" she finally challenges.
"It's nothing," you say. "Not yet. I'm listening." You repeat her last seven sentences back to her, verbatim except for the uhs and ums. She turns a little pink, perhaps in surprise that you are paying such close attention, and resumes with more vigor and excitement. You break away from her eyes only long enough to write out a few complicated equations. "Tell me about the planets," you murmur when it sounds like she's run out of words.
"Oh, wow, that's, like-- Okay." She takes another deep breath and launches into a rather more fragmentary account of them. This is even worse nonsense than the stuff about the constellations. The Stellae Errantes: The Wandering Stars. That's the group Joe and Frank belong to, so you know all about planets. Knowledge, Language, Generation, Errantry, Discipline, Lordship, Judgment, Evolution, Metamorphosis, Industry: there are echoes of these in what Ursula says, but only the way there are echoes of meteorology in primitive legends about angry sky gods. But if you smile widely at what she says, she takes it as encouragement.
Again, she dries up. "Tell me about yourself," you say.
Now she does turn red, and has to look at any place but you. "I dunno what to tell you."
"When's your birthday? What year? Where were you born? What time? How many siblings do you have? When were they born? How old are your parents? Where are they from?" She answers each of these as you ask, and you begin filling in the chart with her answers. Gradually, your questions become more and more random: "What's your favorite letter of the alphabet? If you could turn yourself into any animal, what would it be? Do you sleep better on your back or on your side?" Eventually they slide into near nonsense. "What would you guess is the third most disgusting thing you ever unintentionally ate? Does a clock go tick-tock or tock-tick? If you could ask it, would a spider want more legs, fewer legs, or the same number?" Her bemusement turns to incredulity, but you've drawn her in with honey-coated threads, and she just giggles as she answers. And still her answers go onto the paper.
You could have stopped at any time, for early on you saw that her astrological chart--the real kind of chart, not the flummery of fakirs--wasn't going to reveal anything interesting. But when you've judged you've dragged it on long enough, you click the pencil shut and slide the sheet toward her. She gives you a skeptical but amused look before bending over it. She gasps, as well she should at the dense web of circles, polygons, tangents, arcs and mass of symbols and equations laid out neatly along all the margins and inside all the empty spaces. "What is this?"
"It's a portrait of you. A sketch, based on what you told me," you smile. "A real horoscope."
She gives you a look. "I've seen real charts," she starts.
"No you haven't," and there's a snap in your voice and your smile has faded. You daunt her with a meaningful look. "I wanted to talk to you because you're the only person who would take the idea seriously. Look at it carefully."
Her own smile has vanished, and she keeps glancing up at you as she looks back down at the paper. Her finger traces over and through it, then stabs at it. "That's the symbol for Uranus," she exclaims. "How did you know--"
"Inference from what you told me." In fact, she has no more connection to Uranus than to Zimbabwe, but you have inferred that she thinks she does, and so doodled it into an open space.
Elsewhere she finds a stack of six constellation signs arranged in a pyramid. Her own sign is at the top, and she studies the other five carefully. Her lips move, and she nods. "Yes, that makes sense," she says uncertainly. You stop yourself from rolling your eyes. "Are these Chinese characters," she gasps over another cluster.
"Yes. Year of the Dog. It doesn't mean much, but it works as a convenient translation term between the solar and sidereal functions. The real number expressing their proportionality is irrational, so it's easier to make the calculation by using a transformational derivative."
You say this in a very bored tone--and it really is too boring to talk about--but that tone is probably what convinces her. She raises her head slowly and stares searchingly into your eyes. You bluntly return her challenge. And when she swallows, you can read her thoughts: This guy isn't the idiot everyone says he is.
You lean across the table and whisper at her: "We've been watching you for a few weeks now. Me and Frank. Trying to figure out if we could trust you. Can we?"
You pull back, but continue to look at her probingly. "Trust me with what?" she quietly asks.
"This." You tap the paper, then sweep it up and fold it into a smile bundle. "Real secrets. You're the only one we've seen who has an open mind. People like you--like us--are very rare."
Her nostrils flare hungrily.
* * * * *
"Joe, who won the Spanish-American War?" Ms. Cussler's harsh voice cuts sharply through your reverie. You look up guiltily to see her leaning against the lectern in that very tired way she has when her patience is gasping along on fumes.
"The Spanish-American War?" you gulp. "Um ... The Spanish-Americans?"
Snickers--some of them quite nasty--go up from the rest of the class. Joe Dumbass strikes again. Cussler grips the lectern. "Take another guess."
"Okay, um ... The French?" More laughs. You snap your fingers. "Oh, I know. We did! Boo-yah!"
"Whaddaya mean 'we,' paleface," Geoff Dunholm snickers. You shoot him a dirty look.
"Joe, can I ask you a question," Cussler asks in a tone that implies she'll provide the answer.
"You may fire when ready, Gridley," you archly reply.
And you thought she looked pained before. With a deep sigh, she returns to her lecture, and you return to Ursula's chart.
You need a mask that you can show to her, and you'd hoped a reading of her chart would give you clues to who she would be tempted by. No dice: She seems astonishingly self-possessed.
Well, then, you're just going to have to tell her a lie about why you need masks of people. In a sense that makes it easier, for you'll just pick girls you would like to grab. Becky Torres would be nice. So would Alyssa Randal, or most any of the cheerleaders.
But maybe that would set off alarm bells in Ursula's head. Your eyes flick over to Darcy Whitehead. Cool, cerebral, slightly neurotic: yes, you could fashion a convincing "story" around why she needed to be copied.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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