Ozark Trilogy 3: And Then There'll Be Fireworks (16 page)

“And that makes
eleven
,” Granny Heatherknit pointed out. “There’s somebody left out.”

“That’s easy done and easy accounted for,” said Granny Heatherknit. “
Nobody
wants to think about the Smiths. The Purdys now, they just need encouragement and they’d be all right. And the Wommacks, a good clout between the eyes’d break them of blaming everything and its little fingernail on their old curse. But the
Smiths
, I declare there’s no hope for them! Do you know, they caught one of their Attendants
again
—this’ll be what, the ninth time? —trying to tap into the comset transmissions in the dark of the night? I cannot
believe
the—”

“Granny Heatherknit!” Charity of Airy so rarely raised her voice that they all three jumped, and Heatherknit closed her mouth in sheer surprise. “If the whole world came to an end in a thunderclap, you wouldn’t have time to get ready, for it would catch you gossiping!”

“Begging your pardon, Charity,” said Granny Heatherknit. “I got carried away.”

“And I assume,” Charity went on in a more normal tone, “that we’ve no reason to concern ourselves with the Smiths. They’ve got Lincoln Parradyne Smith the 39
^th
over there, and whatever else he may be, he’s a perfectly good Magician of Rank. It’ll be only the Wommacks and the Purdys, poor souls.”

“You don’t suppose the Mules would call on the Grannys in such a hardscrabble?” hazarded Flyswift. “Castle Purdy has one, and there’s two in residence at Castle Wommack.”

All four women shuddered at the very idea, and the other two Grannys gave Flyswift a long hard look.

“If they did,” said Granny Forthright solemnly, “there’s now three less Grannys on Ozark.”

“Pshaw! I’m not so sure,” said Flyswift. “No, I’m
not
so sure as a Granny’s mind is any punier than a Magician of Rank’s. Who’s to say, excepting always the Magicians of Rank theirselves, and why wouldn’t they?”

“You care to try mindspeech with a Mule?” demanded Granny Heatherknit. “
Or
anything else as lives and breathes? Or doesn’t, for that matter?”

Granny Flyswift admitted that she wouldn’t, particularly.

“Well, then.”

Charity of Airy, tucking back a strand of the hair now gone snow white with the long months of hardship and worry, made a sudden hushing sound. That was twice she’d caught them by surprise in one morning—it was not like Charity to be ill mannered—and they thought as they often had lately how she’d gone gaunt and old since pneumonia had taken her daughter Caroline-Ann. She’d doted on Caroline-Ann, had Charity.

“You thought of something. Charity?” asked Granny Heatherknit gently. “
Have
we forgotten somebody? Twelve Families there’s always been, and twelve we’ve counted off—unless a thirteenth’s landed, and a fine time they’ve picked if they have, I must say! We’ve accounted for all, to my mind.”

“It’s not that,” said Charity. “No, it’s something that just struck me. And I may not be right.”

“And you may not be wrong, either. Many a long year now you’ve been solving problems, it stands to reason you’d get good at it,” said Granny Heatherhut. “What’s struck you, m’dear?”

“Those things. Those crystals.”

“Struck us all, I do believe. Charity.”

“Yes, but I’ve been thinking about them ... Veritas Truebreed Motley says they’re devices to gather up energy, focus it—that they’re up there charging, like batteries. And I ask myself, where are they
getting
that energy? It’s happening fast, Grannys. You go look and see how much darker they are, and feel how much louder! What arc they drawing on for a source?”

“Charity, might could be there’s a mothership up there, beaming it down to them; might could be
any
thing!”

The Grannys nodded, all in agreement on that; the unknown was, after all, the unknown. But Charity had something on her mind.

“I have an idea,” she declared, “and I plan to spread it!” And she was running for Castle Airy’s comset speaker, her skirts hitched up in one hand and the cane she’d taken to using lately clutched in the other.

“
If
I can get through!” she called back over her shoulder, and out the door she went, leaving the Grannys staring after her.

“Well,” said Granny Heatherknit to the others, “better one of us turn on the set over there or we’ll miss it ourselves, and wouldn’t
that
be a comedown? Not a one of us as can keep up with Charity, cane or no cane.”

Granny Flyswift moved slowly, belying her name, but she was close by the comset stud, and it flickered and came on about three words into Charity of Airy’s message.

“—to me,” she was saying. “I might could be wrong, but I have a feeling about this. The crystals over the Castles, they’re nothing more than enormous batteries,
storage
cells, and till they’re charged they can’t harm us. It’s perhaps they charge on sunshine, or wind, or feardust, for all we know. But I’ll lay you twelve to three, citizens, seeing as how they come from a planetary alliance that’s founded on magic and not science ... I’ll lay you twelve to three they feed and grow fat on the plain scared-sick terror that’s coming off this planet like a hurricane. I’ll just
bet
you they do!”

The Grannys looked at each other, and back at Charity’s confident face on the comset screen. She could be right; she’d always had an uncanny way of knowing things, made up of three parts common sense, three parts intuition, three parts blind luck, and one part they didn’t care to put a name to.

“It is just possible,” Charity went on, “that if we can’t stop them we can at least slow them down some. If we can only be calm, and leave off feeding them fear, while we think what to do. It can’t hurt, and it might help. I want you to turn your hand to something else than being scared, you hear me? Times tables, that’s always good. Or counting backwards from one hundred by threes, that’s even better. You can’t keep your mind on being scared if you’re doing that. You tadlings as don’t have your numbers mastered, or anybody as is so scared they’ve
lost
their numbers, you do the alphabet backwards.
Backwards
, now! You can’t do that and give off terror at the same time.”

The people listening agreed that it made sense, and even if it hadn’t it would be something to do; and those that had no comsets any longer had neighbors pounding on their doors to tell them.

Charity’s voice went on and on, soothing and stroking, going out to four Kingdoms. Even Veritas Truebreed Motley, nursing his aching temples with a cold cloth at Brightwater, was nodding agreement. She had the principle right, however ignorant she might be of its workings.

“Now,” said Charity of Airy, “I’ll do it with you. We’ll all be calm together, calm as pond water. 100. 97. 94. 91. Hmmmm ... 88. 85 ...”

In the houses, they said it with her. And the tadlings tried the other thing and were amazed at how hard it was. Glottal stop, that was easy. Z, to go on with. Y, and then X, a person could manage. But from there on it was hard work, and who ever would of thought it? The alphabet, that everybody knew like they knew the look of their thumbs! Backwards it fairly brought the sweat out all over you. X... Q?

“Can’t be Q!” said a tiny one, crossly, stamping her foot. “It’s not time yet for Q\”

“What is it, then?” challenged her brother. “You’re so smart ... oh! I know! W! Before X comes W!”

“Pheeyeew,” fussed the little girl. “W... now, let’s us just see ...”

Charity of Airy and the Grannys were well satisfied; they could feel the easing in the air almost immediately. It was just as well, under the circumstances, that none of them could see or sense the carnage in Smith Kingdom, where Lincoln Parradyne Smith the 39
^th
was paying the penalty for his phony Granny that
was
no Granny, and the people of the Kingdom along with him. Long before it occurred to any of the other Magicians of Rank to ask a Mule to pass the message along to the Mules of Smith, Lincoln Parradyne had paid his bill in full; he lay dead on the floor of the Throne Room, his brain crisped in his skull like a dead coal. And the only thing spared him was the horror outside and in, where the people of Smith trampled one another in their panic as they tried insanely to flee the menace above them. The crystal over Castle Smith was just a little different; its color matched the color of the blood smeared on the streets and the stairs of the town, almost exactly.

Troublesome of Brightwater lifted her sister out of the spring and held her close, sacred water and all, wondering if she had ever been so happy before. Bring on the giant alien crystals, bring on the slimy alien wickednesses, bring on anything you fancied; nevertheless, her sister was awake again.

Responsible fought herself free of Troublesome’s embrace, which was somewhat more enthusiastic than was compatible with breathing.

“Troublesome?”

She tugged at the long black braid, to get Troublesome’s attention, and wiped some of the water on her face, and asked plaintively if she could
please
have an explanation. It was not every day a person woke up naked in a creek, with a crowd attending.

She listened, her face growing more and more stern, while she was told. All about the awfulness that had come when she was put in pseudocoma. The poverty and the sickness and the weather all uncontrolled ... it sounded like the tales of Old Earth ... and nobody knowing what might be happening anyplace but the four Kingdoms of the Alliance, except for rumors. All about the Grannys’ climb up the mountain, and Troublesome’s dreadful ocean voyage. And when the part about Lewis Motley Wommack the 33
^rd
came along she cried out a broad word in total indignation that startled Silverweb of McDaniels right out of the last scraps of her rapture.

“It would of been when I was asleep, Troublesome,” declared Responsible of Brightwater. “That fool man!
Ig
norant, that’s what he is, not to mention no sense at all. Half the night on Brightwater it’s day on Kintucky, clear across that ocean on the other side of the world—did he never learn
anything?
I was dreaming ... I remember the dreams. Oh, I remember them well, and they’re not fit for Silverweb’s ears. But never, never did I imagine that while I dreamed I was intruding on his mind ... The
id
iot! Oh, I’ll make him pay, I promise you—oh, how I’ll make him pay! He’ll curse the day he was born, and long for the day that death releases him before I’m through ...
stu
pid man!”

“He is that,” said Troublesome. “He might have asked you—but he wouldn’t stoop. That’s how he put it.”

Responsible struggled from her sister’s arms onto the rocks, where she sat hugging her knees and clothed only in her long hair, that was almost dry now in the hot desert sun.

“It was the Timecorner Prophecy,” she said sorrowfully, “and no way to escape it. But I must say there’s nothing elegant to the way it was fulfilled.”

“Nor any excuse,” said Silverweb. “For either him
or
you.”

Responsible hadn’t any interest at that moment in subtle moral questions. “
Now
what?” she said. She was a tad dazed, but she was not so addled that she intended to get into a discussion of how she and young Wommack might have managed to avoid what had been decreed since the beginning of time. What she wanted to know was the status of things.

Before Troublesome or Silverweb could speak, the Skerrys took it up.

RESPONSIBLE OF BRIGHTWATER, THE PLANETS OF THE GARNET RING NOW SEE THIS WORLD AS RIPE FOR THE CONQUERING, AND THEY HAVE COME TO PLUCK IT—IT FALLS NOW WITHIN THEIR LAWS OF COLONIAL RIGHT.

I CAN SEE THAT IT MIGHT, Responsible replied, not caring how much her mindspeaking might startle the other two women. There didn’t seem to be much left in the way of secrets anyhow. WHAT HAVE THEY DONE, EXACTLY?

THEY HAVE HEARD THE REPORT OF THE OUT-CABAL, THAT THIS WORLD HAS FALLEN TO ANARCHY AND DISASTERS, AND THEY HAVE SET A ... YOU HAVE NO SEMANTIC CONSTRUCT FOR IT. NO ... YOU DO! YOU MUST IMAGINE A STORAGE CELL, DAUGHTER OF BRIGHTWATER, ONE HUNDRED AND TEN FEET FROM POINT TO POINT, POISED OVER EACH AND EVERY OZARK CASTLE AND FEEDING NOW—CHARGING NOW—WHILE WE STAND HERE TALKING. THEY ARE SHAPED LIKE DIAMONDS, AND YOU WOULD CALL THEM ... CRYSTALS. THEY ARE DEADLY, AND THERE IS VERY LITTLE TIME.

WHAT HAS BEEN DONE? Responsible asked them, and Troublesome realized suddenly that her sister’s mindvoice was just that, a voice, and not bells. When she had the leisure,
if
she had the leisure, she would consider the question of why that caused no barrier to the conversation. HAVE THEY BROUGHT OUT THE LASERS AGAINST THE THINGS? HAVE THEY TRIED A TRANSFORMATION, A DELETION TRANSFORMATION WITH ALL THE NINE MAGICIANS OF RANK—

The Skerry cut her off.

YOU FORGET, it Said. THERE HAS BEEN NO MAGIC ON THIS WORLD WHILE YOU SLEPT—YOU HAVE BORNE IT ALL WITHIN YOURSELF. AS FOR THE LASERS, YOUR PEOPLE HAVE NO WAY OF KNOWING WHAT IT MIGHT DO IF THEY WERE TO PIERCE THE CRYSTALS, OR EVEN IF THEY WERE TO TRY—NOR DO WE, NOR DO THE MULES, NOR DO THE GENTLES. THE GENTLES, DAUGHTER OF BRIGHTWATER, ARE
VERY
DISTRESSED BY ALL THIS... I DO NOT KNOW IF THEY WILL EVER COME UP TO THE DAYLIGHT AGAIN. NOW, WE ALL ASK THE SAME THING, AND IT SEEMS TO US ONLY JUSTICE, SINCE IT IS YOUR PEOPLE WHO HAVE BROUGHT ALL THIS UPON US. WE ASK THAT
YOU
DO SOMETHING, FOR THIS WORLD IS IN YOUR CHARGE.

It seemed to Troublesome that that wasn’t justice atall, or even likely, and she and Silverweb both protested at once that Responsible was bound to be weak and like a newborn babe for some time, that she would have to get her strength back as anybody does after a long time ill, and that asking her to take on a whole passel of alien planets in her condition was downright ridiculous. It came out garbled, a scrap from Troublesome and a scrap from Silverweb, and some scraps from both, but they were of one mind on the matter.