Sunshine

“It is not a very reliable effect, and ordinary ward- and spell-crafters won’t notice much difference. But to those of us who soak ourselves deeply in a magical source, it can have profound consequences. This is not a chosen thing, you know. Or it chooses you, not the other way around.”

“I always thought my grandmother looked very young,” I said slowly. “I haven’t seen her since I was ten. When I was in my teens I decided it was just that she had long dark hair and didn’t look like other people’s grandmothers.”

“I never knew your grandmother, although I knew some of the other Blaises at one time. But my guess is that she was much older than you had any idea of.”

“Was,” I said. “None of it got her through the Voodoo Wars. Or my father either.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know they’re dead. But I can’t believe my gran wouldn’t have let me know…” My voice trailed off. “I…I have been my mother’s family’s kid all my life—even when we were still living with my dad, I think—till four months ago. Almost five months ago. It’s a shock to the system.”

She looked at me thoughtfully. “Consider the possibility that you had to be a certain age to bear it, when it finally came to you.”

“There must have been an easier way.”

She laughed again. “There is always a better way, in hindsight.”

I said, trying to smile, “The cousins I know—my mother’s sisters’ kids—are married by the time they’re my age. The younger ones do stuff like play varsity sports or collect stamps or dollhouse furniture. The two in college, Anne wants to be a marine biologist and William wants to teach primary school. It’s like the Other side doesn’t exist. Even Charlie, who you’d think of anyone would remember, says he’d almost forgotten who my dad was.” I paused. “I don’t even know how my parents met. It doesn’t seem very likely, does it? That Miss Drastically Normal should fall for Mr. All That Creepy Stuff. All I know is that my mom worked at a florist’s before she married my dad.

“What happened to the safety net, you know? If I was going to turn out this way, why didn’t I get apprenticed? Why didn’t my gran leave a codicil in her will asking someone to keep an eye on me? She taught me to transmute. She knew I’d inherited something.”

Yolande didn’t say anything for several minutes while I sat there trying not to be embarrassed for my outburst. “I don’t believe in fate,” she said at last. “But I do believe in…loopholes. I think a lot of what keeps the world going is the result of accidents—happy or otherwise—and taking advantage of these. Perhaps your gran guessed you might be one of those loopholes. Perhaps she left a codicil in her will saying to leave you alone at all costs. What if you’d been apprenticed, and learned that there is no way through nowheresville?”

I couldn’t settle down to read that evening—anything about the Others made me twitchy, anything else was so irrelevant as to be maddening. Child of Phantoms, another favorite comfort-read for over a decade, failed to hold me. Reading was of course a problem with my dark vision getting in the way, but in fact flat black type on a flat white page was easier to deal with than almost anything else. I did pretty well so long as I remembered to keep my head and the page perfectly still; if I didn’t, the print jumped sick-makingly into three dimensions. It was like the advertising about some latest thriller or other: This story is so exciting it will leap off the page at you! For me it did. This is disconcerting when you’re reading Professional Baking Quarterly, which I usually tried to do. It made me feel I had some of the right attitude, and the letters page was always good for a laugh. Mom renewed my subscription every year as a supportive-maternal present. Surprise.

I did shut myself into the closet for half an hour with my combox. I had to screw up my courage to hit the “live” button. But nothing happened except what is supposed to happen. Whew. Perhaps the com cosmos isn’t so homogenous after all. I knew that the official line is that the comcos is entirely a human creation, but then the official human line would be that, wouldn’t it? And if there is a lot of vampire engineering in it, that would help to explain both where a lot of vampire money came from and why every authority on the planet—business, ecosyn, social service, governmental, all of them— is droolingly paranoid about vampires. However, if my combox was still in one piece and the comcos equivalent of the Big Ugly Thing That Ate Schenectady hadn’t burst out of the screen and seized me, there must still be enough human input to the workings of the comcos to keep it…heterogeneous.