Dealing in Futures

Judith Tarr

Sometimes even Fate doesn’t know where the universe will end up next.

“Right,” says Lachesis. “So where were we?”

“Pigs,” says Circe, who crashed the meeting on a technicality. “Pork futures. Swine plague in—was it Gondwanaland?”

“Botswana,” says Orgoch, who wants a vacation. “Along with bubonic plague in Santa Fe, tobacco mosaic in South Carolina, and a plague of dental plaque in Stockholm. For this particular sub-era.”

In honor of the sub-era, everybody’s in dress-for-success superwoman mode, in your basic boardroom, with pads and pencils logoed Futures, Incorporated: Que sera, sera. They’re also, because this is that kind of continuum, in a cave lit by flickering lamps, wearing robes and sniffing fumes from the vent in the floor, and on a withered heath around a cauldron (which gets crowded when they’ve got a quorum), and in an environmental module jacked into a neural net, not to mention the completely indescribable not-place in the not-there that makes even Orgoch—who keeps the minutes—stop and think before she comes up with an era-reference. Somewhere a long way down the line. She gets a break after that, and somebody else gets to be Orgoch.

Anyway, they’ve covered Disease and are into Disaster, and Lachesis is running through the rest of the list. “Right, so,” she says. “Is that enough trouble for Sarajevo? How about Berlin?”

“We already did Berlin,” says Tyche, also present on a technicality.

In Orgoch’s opinion, since Lachesis put herself in charge, there are an awful lot of Greek types getting in on technicalities. Or were. Or will be. Time slips in this continuum. Makes it hard for even a Fate to keep up. She tends to get things confused herself—runs together Genghis Khan, Gog and Magog, and George Bush, or thinks about hitting Ur of the Chaldees with a nice blast of the Black Death.

While Orgoch thinks about rats in Ur, Lachesis makes a note. “Berlin, normal complement of disasters, check. Who’ll take care of Belfast? It’s due for another bombing.”

oOo

“No way,” says Mary Ann.

Mary Ann doesn’t know she’s just uttered words that resonate through the continuum and stop Lachesis cold. Mary Ann thinks she’s riding Leroy the gift Thoroughbred up in the woods behind the barn, and Leroy wants to jump a four-foot deadfall. She hauls him back down to a reasonably slow gallop from a flat run, and swerves him in between the deadfall and a tree. Quite a bit farther on, he actually slows down.

Mary Ann starts breathing again. She hates it when Leroy gets it into his head to jump anything and everything that’s even halfway in his path. Leroy thinks that he was born to leap tall buildings at a single bound. As a matter of fact he was, but something happened and that particular twist of fate got sidetracked, and the essence that should have headed right at the second star from the left, took a left at the second star from the right instead and landed at a crossroads in the dark of the moon. A mare happened to have stopped there after breaking out of her barn, and was going about having the foal she was six weeks and six days and six hours and six minutes late with. The essence, being too curious for its own good, got sucked in. By the time it realized what was happening, it found itself in the body of a then very gangly, burnt-sugar-colored Thoroughbred with a mark on its forehead like a five-pointed star.

Now, five years later, having had a completely lackluster career on the track thanks to his habit of trying to jump out of the gate before it sprang open, not to mention the time he did a mile and a quarter like a steeplechase, hurdling every shadow that hit the track, Leroy belongs to Mary Ann, who thinks he should learn to be a dressage horse. What Leroy is, in fact, is an Accident of Fate. Which makes him a Nexus, and a Critical Point. He doesn’t know that. He just wants to jump.

Mary Ann just wants him to learn how to go around a circle at less than thirty miles per hour, and maybe stop once in a while on command. Mary Ann really wants a Lipizzaner, but Lipizzaners not being easy to come by, she takes what she can get. She’s beginning to think that she should have looked this gift horse in the mouth, or at least in the eye, and pegged him for a grasshopper in a Thoroughbred suit.

Whatever, she thinks, when he finally comes jolting to a halt. He snorts and does a little bit of a happy-horse dance—he sees another deadfall, and it’s even higher than the last one. He’s going to jump this one, his whole body says, no matter what.

oOo

“—what?” Lachesis looks around. Nobody moves. The boardroom is looking wan around the edges—there’s a touch of cave wall showing through, and a suggestion of glasteel dome. The echoes are still ringing. “Who said that?”

Blank faces. Circe’s suit has a distinctly classical—as opposed to classic—look. Sleek, well-groomed Third Witch is looking quite a bit ruffled, as if she’s been standing in the wind.

Orgoch shakes herself out of a dizzy spell. She’s been seeing things she wasn’t supposed to see for another two sub-eras according to the agenda. That war on Ceti Five—

“Well,” says Lachesis, straightening her wimple. “Just an interruption in the flow. We were on the Black Death, weren’t we? Third round, the score gets better for the human faction. What say we make it worse for round four? Add a little more pneumonic to the mix?”

oOo

“Not bloody likely,” says Mary Ann, cranking in rein before Leroy can head for his dream jump. She has no idea she just saved Belfast from a bomb that would kill twenty and injure thirty-four. Or that, just now, back a sub-era or three, round four of the Black Death didn’t up the ante and wipe out most of northern Europe.

She rides Leroy at a walk past the deadfall—he’s sulking, dragging his feet and making sure he stumbles at least twice as they go around the obstacle. After that it’s pretty well a clear ride down to the road and home. Mary Ann can’t really stay mad at Leroy. She pats his neck and tells him he’s all right for a Thoroughbred. He hears the “all right” part and snorts. Sure it’s all right. He didn’t get to jump, did he?

He’ll jump the pasture fence later and head for Mackey’s-down-the-road, which has a field full of jumps all set up, and usually a pretty white mare grazing in it. The mare, being a mare, believes in putting geldings in their place, but Leroy’s not proud. He knows his place as well as her princesshood does.

oOo

“—and then they end the interregnum on Ceti Five,” says Lachesis, in the environmental module, linked to the rest of the Fates and Fortunes through the neural net. “Give the CEOship to Princess Marjo-Sixteen, send the king into exile, polish it off with a nice short space war.”

Nods around the net. Except for Orgoch, whose headache is getting worse. She can’t remember the shift from sub-era to sub-era. Weren’t they doing the Black Death? Or the Early Computer Age? Or are they still in the Ur-era, and have the mammoths died?

She starts to say something, but gives up. Circe is at it again. “Men are such pigs. Let’s zap the patriarchy on Gehenna and roust out the Retro-Feminists.”

oOo

“Oh, no, you won’t,” says Mary Ann. She had a feeling Leroy would get up to something once she put him out to run off his frustration. Sure enough, there he is, ready for takeoff over the pasture fence.

He’s gone before she gets there, with a little flick of his heels. She says something not very nice and starts trudging. No use running. She knows where he’ll go.

And to be honest, she doesn’t much mind heading over to Mackey’s. They’ve got a Lipizzaner. All right, just a mare, and all the books say the mares aren’t any good, but she looks pretty good to Mary Ann. Mary Ann thinks the books are just a little bit sexist, you know?

Right, and there’s Leroy in the jumping field, but he’s barely paused to say a polite horse-hello and get his due squeal-and-strike from the mare, before heading for the jumps.

“I think he’s trying to tell you something,” says Mackey’s kid, the one who’s a year behind Mary Ann in school, what’s his name, she can’t remember. Doesn’t matter anyway. They lean on the fence and watch Leroy jump a nice clean round, then go back and do it again, just to show everybody how he did it. The mare isn’t paying any attention. She’s got priorities, and those start with the clover in the south corner.

“I think,” says Mary Ann, “I’ve got the wrong horse. All he ever wants to do is jump.”

“You don’t jump?” asks Mackey’s kid. Mary Ann hopes he isn’t sneering, because she’ll pop him one if he is.

“Of course I jump!” she says. “Just not every spare minute. When he’s not jumping, he’s running his feet off.”

Mackey’s kid looks sympathetic, for a boy-type. “All Belladonna wants to do is levades. And caprioles. She doesn’t see why she has to do the other stuff, too.”

“Oh,” says Mary Ann with a bit of a sigh, “but she’s a Lipizzaner.”

“And your guy’s a Thoroughbred. They run. And jump.”

Mary Ann hates it when people are logical. “I’d rather have a horse who did levades.”

Mackey’s kid shrugs. “She jumps, too. Just not all the time.”

oOo

“Time,” says Lachesis, “is getting short. Are we done with Disaster? Do we add a few, or keep them for the next session?”

“I don’t think…” says Tyche. She’s looking puzzled. “Did we do the early late empire yet? I can’t recall.”

“Why, of course we—” Third Witch stops. “By Hecate, I can’t remember, either.”

They all look at one another. Getting confused is one thing. Even a Fate is subject to that, what with everything she has to look after. But forgetting—that’s not in the specs. Fate remembers everything. Every fall of a sparrow. Every vibration of that damned butterfly’s wing in Venezuela, and if you think it’s easy getting that to resonate just right so it makes a president trip over his feet on the golf course, you should try it yourself.

“Check the records,” says a voice so old it’s barely a whisper, but it throbs in every corner of the continuum.

Everybody starts and stares at the One who always sits alone, who never changes, who doesn’t even have a name. When she swam out of the dark, nothing was named; everything just was. She never talks—can’t, Orgoch would have said, except that obviously she can.

Lachesis doesn’t argue. Doesn’t ask questions. Just does what she’s told. That’s power, Orgoch thinks. She’s interested to see how strong it is, especially coming from that tiny, wizened, naked figure like a mangy monkey, with its heavy forehead and its moist brown eyes.

It’s a long while, reckoning in shifts of the continuum, while Lachesis goes from record to record. Stone tablet, clay, papyrus, parchment, paper, phosphor, neural induction, pure mind-to-mind, she runs through them all. The others wait. Nobody says anything. They all look as headachy as Orgoch feels.

Finally Lachesis sits up straight. Her face is grim. “Something,” she says, “has been meddling with our continuum.”

Orgoch mentally applauds her. Brilliant deduction. It only took Orgoch half a millisecond to reach the same conclusion.

But Lachesis can prove it, which helps with the skeptics, such as Circe, whose obsession with pigs keeps her from seeing much of anything else. Lachesis calls up an image of the continuum—it comes through to Orgoch as a flow chart inside a crystal ball—and points with a long bony finger. “There,” she says. “There, and there. Disruptions. Shifts of fate from one line to another.”

Third Witch, known in polite circles as Dame Fortune, considers the scrying bowl in front of her and nods. “Somebody’s turning the wheel out of turn.”

“That’s not possible,” says Tyche. “Fate rules even the gods.”

Lachesis casts her a quelling look, but not before Orgoch observes, “It’s possible if someone’s done it. Does anyone have a spell for migraine?”

“Moly,” says Circe promptly.

“Willow bark,” says Third Witch with a sharp glance at Circe, “gathered in the dark of the moon, steeped in water from a virgin’s bath, drunk three times standing and three times sitting, while intoning a Paternoster.”

“What nonsense,” says Lachesis. “Take two aspirin and call your broker in the morning.”

Orgoch sighs. Her headache is worse, or maybe better. It’s hard to tell. “So who’s twisting fate? That poet isn’t loose in Baghdad again, is he?”

Lachesis shudders delicately. “Spacetime forbid. This is something different. Something that—”

oOo

“Stop it!” Mary Ann whacks Leroy on the nose. He’s objecting to coming home after his visit with the pretty lady mare, not to mention the hunt course with its lovely, lovely jumps. So of course he tries to jump the shadow of a telephone pole in the road, and nearly pulls Mary Ann off her feet.

“I’ll sell you down the river,” she threatens him. “I’ll chop you up for dogmeat.”

He picks up the irritation but not the threat, seeing as how Mary Ann would never sell any horse to a cannery, even Leroy the grasshopper horse. He’s just a little bit contrite. He likes Mary Ann, she sits light on his back even when she won’t let him run, and except for not letting him jump enough, she’s a nicely trained human. She feeds him fine grain and sweet hay, and grooms him when he itches, and talks to him in that long pleasant water-flow of speech that humans are so inexplicably fond of.

So he doesn’t jump the next few shadows, and walks quietly into his stall, where there’s plenty of hay and fresh water and—oh joy joy joy, a carrot in his special sweet-things bucket. Carrots are almost as good as jumps. He eats it with loud appreciation, dribbling orange bits in thanks-offering to the human who’s leaning over the stall door.

Mary Ann shakes her head. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you,” she says. “I’m not about to take you on the Grand Prix jumping circuit. Couldn’t you just, like, be a little bit inclined to do exercises on the flat once in a while?”

Leroy, nose down in his hay, swishes his tail and stamps at a fly. He’s thinking about leaping things. Tall buildings, why stop there? Mountains. The moon.

Leroy thinks big. And Leroy, not being entirely a horse, thinks in the future tense once in a while, which is part of what being a Nexus means.

oOo

“—means trouble,” says Lachesis jerkily. They all felt the continuum shift that time. Being aware of it means they can feel it, but it doesn’t stop the shift. Orgoch notices that the room’s edges are blurry. Bits are starting to fade out altogether.

“What can cause a thing like this?” Circe demands.

“You should know,” says Tyche.

“There, there,” says Third Witch. She looks at Circe with something resembling kindness. It comes across as condescension. “Witchcraft could do it, yes. It would have to be a very strong witch, or a coven of witches. And they would need a very strong will.”

“We would know of such,” says Lachesis.

“But why would they do it?” Circe wants to know.

“Why do witches do anything?” asks Tyche. “For the fun of it. For power.”

Orgoch is fascinated. She’s not paying much attention to the catfight, she’s seen enough of those through the aeons to leave her yawning unless the blood flies. She’s found something else to fix her eye on. The robe that Lachesis is wearing at the moment seems to be all white, but it’s subtly and intricately figured. And it’s unraveling around the hem. As she watches, bringing her eye a bit closer to be sure, the thread slips another handspan.

Lachesis doesn’t seem to notice, but then anyone can see how the walls are turning transparent. What’s beyond doesn’t bear looking at, even if you’re a Fate and inured to anything. She says, “Get to work, ladies. Find the coven.”

“And then?” asks Third Witch. She has a gleam in her eye, and Circe and Tyche in either hand, spitting at one another.

“Then,” says Lachesis, “we do what we have to do.”

oOo

“No,” says Mary Ann, pushing Leroy’s nose away. He’s hunting for another carrot. She isn’t carrying any. He’s death to her carrot budget as it is, and he hasn’t done much to earn one carrot today, let alone two.

He goes back to his hay. She thinks for a while, then heads into his stall with brushes and currycomb, and starts grooming him. She doesn’t have to. She just feels like it.

His mane is in knots. His tail is even worse. She starts working out tangles. While she works, she hums to herself. Nothing particular. She hates Top Forty. She likes to make up her own songs anyway.

This one has words to it, sort of. Tangle in, tangle out, tangle back and round about.

oOo

“Got it!”

Orgoch’s howl wouldn’t shame a wolf. The whole continuum by now is swimming like an underwater extravaganza. Her voice brings the others homing in on her like fish to a blood trail. They’re losing shape. Circe’s profile has a remarkably porcine cast. Third Witch’s cloak looks like a bat’s wings. The others have a shadowy look to them.

They’re solid enough close up, crowding around Orgoch’s scrying bowl. “What’s that?” Lachesis snaps. She sounds waspish—Orgoch can almost see the stinger.

They all stare at the image in the bowl. It’s a big brown horse, eating hay, and a smallish brown girl, grooming the horse. She’s singing to herself. The horse is in horse bliss.

“Look at it,” says Orgoch. “Really look.”

It’s Circe who says, “Great Father Zeus. Look inside the horse.”

A slow sigh goes round the circle. “A Nexus,” Third Witch says. “How in the world? None of us approved that!”

“Who rules the Fates?” says the voice they’ve all forgotten, the old, old voice, the One who alone stays solid and substantial no matter where she is, no matter how the continuum frays. “We deal in futures—we make them, we like to think. Who balances us?”

“Why,” says Lachesis, “no one. We are past and present and to come, all that was and is and will be.”

The Old One shakes her head.

“Chance,” says Orgoch suddenly. “Chance balances Fate.”

“But I am Chance,” says Tyche, “and I had nothing to do with this.”

The Old One shakes her head again. Tyche looks mulish. Or pigheaded, Orgoch thinks, not very kindly.

“You are Chance given coherence and substance,” Orgoch says. “Raw Chance, essence of chaos—that’s something different. Look, there’s a seed of it in the horse. And every time she touches him—”

oOo

“Stand still,” says Mary Ann, working away at Leroy’s mane. The horse stands still. So does all the rest of the continuum, Fates and Chance and all.

“All right,” she says, smoothing the last of the mane, moving back toward the tail.

And the continuum can move again.

oOo

“Lightning,” says Tyche. “A thunderbolt.”

“A spell,” says Circe. “If she were a pig, could she touch the horse and affect the continuum?”

“Cast her from the wheel,” says Third Witch with blood in her eye.

Lachesis frowns, thinking about it.

“Obviously,” says Orgoch, wondering why the others can’t see it—her eye is good, but she never thought it was that good—“this child is a little something more than a slave to her fortune. Or, for that matter, to her horse.”

“Coincidence,” says Tyche. “Chance. Every time she touches him, she says just the right thing.”

“But how could she,” Orgoch points out, “if she weren’t something else in her own right?”

“There are no witches in her sub-era,” says Lachesis. “We removed them. You seconded the motion, as I recall.”

Orgoch shakes her head. “This is raw Chance, ladies. Anything can happen. Anything at all.”

“And,” says Third Witch, “if she says the right thing—or the wrong one—”

She breaks off. They all freeze. But the girl is still brushing out the horse’s tail, and she’s not even singing. She’s working at a knot full of burrs, scowling with concentration.

“I wish,” she says suddenly, “that you could keep it all straight.”

The continuum quivers. Are the walls more solid? Orgoch doesn’t dare hope.

It’s a rare spectacle. The online committee of Fate, Chance, and the Future Imperfect, huddled around a scrying bowl, praying as hard as even gods can pray. They can’t do direct intervention. That’s against the rules. All they can do is wait.

It’s beastly like being human.

“I wish,” says the girl behind the horse, “that you could be reasonable about things.”

The continuum is making a noise somewhere between a groan and a purr. The horse, to Orgoch’s eye, is starting to glow from inside, like a very large clay lamp. The girl doesn’t seem to notice.

“I wish,” she says, and it rings like gongs under the sea, “that you could be, like, normal, you know?”

There’s a seed of fire in the horse, so bright it turns the big horse-body to air and shadow. It’s not sentient, not exactly, but it has purpose. That purpose has been asleep. It’s remembering stars. And mornings. And leaping over the moon.

“There,” whispers the Old One. Her voice somehow sounds the way the fire-seed looks. “There, out yonder. Second on the left.”

The spark wobbles a bit. It wavers to the right. It hesitates. Then all at once, so fast it leaves a trail like a meteor, it heads where the Old One is pointing.

oOo

In the cave that’s a heath that’s a boardroom that’s an environmental module that’s a nexus of not-space, there’s an immense and awful quiet. The walls are solid. So is the floor. Circe has her Greek-vase profile back, above a Halston twinset. Third Witch straightens her blazer and smooths her impeccably coiffed hair.

Lachesis takes a deep breath. “Right. Then. Orgoch, the minutes, please? You can leave out the…disturbances. We were on Belgrade, I believe.”

Belfast, Orgoch thinks, but she doesn’t say it. It’s business as usual again, and vacation not much closer than it was before. She sighs. She’s going to be glad to hand over that eye and head for Club Med Elysium. Meanwhile, there are futures to deal, fates and chance and all the rest of it, just one more aeon in the old continuum.

oOo

Mary Ann finishes brushing Leroy’s tail, gives him the horse cookie she finds in her pocket, and adds a hug to it. “Oh, well,” she says. “You may not be perfect, but you’re my horse. I guess I’ll keep you.”

Leroy sighs contentedly and nibbles her hair. He has a vague sense of something missing, and a lot more of something asking for a way in. He thinks about jumping mountains. No, maybe not that. Maybe outrunning the wind. Yes. He’ll show his human tomorrow. Grand fun, a grand run, and carrots joy joy joy.

Leroy is a happy horse. Leroy is also a Nexus. There’s a whole continuum full of essences, and a crowd of them right here, all begging for a turn. What’s a horse for, after all, if you can’t ride him?

Copyright © 1995 by Judith Tarr

First published: WitchFantastic, ed. Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg (DAW)