. . .
“It’s a fair assumption,” Amelia explains to the nurse at the hospital, some months later. “I mean, renegade alchemy is presumably heritable.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Hospitals are invariably nice to people who can transmute lead into gold. She is receiving the VIP treatment even though she persistently claims, whenever anyone mentions the notion, that she is simply an ordinary renegade alchemist of no particular account. Then she giggles and stares off at the golden future.
She still can’t get over the fact, almost three years later, that she can get away with saying things like that without being glowered at by a toad.
. . .
Bertram is beside her. He is squeezing her hand.
“It’ll be all right,” he says. “I’m sure of it.”
“Yes, Bertram,” she agrees.
. . .
It is a remarkably easy labor because there are no toads staring at her. It is physically agonizing of course but she distracts herself by thinking about alchemy. After a while it gets so renegade that it wouldn’t work even in a world with substantively relaxed natural laws; she finds herself muttering about congealing a philosopher’s stone by counteracting paper into rock and speculating on alchemical diagrams involving squares instead of circles; “see,” she says, squeezing Bertram’s hand and mumbling incoherently in his direction, “instead of self-creating, it takes four sharp right turns —”
She tenses. Pain rises. Pain passes. She breaks from her child, and it from her, it passes born into the world, and the doctor stares into the nictitating membrane of its eyes.
. . .
. . . the doctor stares into the nictitating membrane of the baby’s eyes.
“Doctor,” prompts the nurse.
The doctor emits a startled, reflex action! He slaps the baby.
It takes a breath.
The doctor winces at that.
There are actually very clear instructions . . . from the Agency! . . . that babies with nictitating membranes and the birthmark symbol of Lemuria on their arm are to be left un-slapped and let to die. But he cannot take it back.
“Um,” says the doctor, vaguely.
“Let me hold him!” says Amelia. She glances reflexively at the toad.
. . . It isn’t there.
. . .
The toad is actually dead. By the time Hans passed on it had forgotten how to feed itself and attempted to survive by glowering balefully at flies. Amelia doesn’t know this, but if she had, she would have felt a momentary sadness and then tried to ignore it because seriously fuck that toad.
. . .
She holds out her arms.
“We have to take him, um,” says the doctor.
Amelia pushes herself up on her elbows. She glowers at the doctor balefully. The doctor yelps and almost drops the baby.
“It’s just, he’s an abomination,” babbles the doctor.
He is hypnotized by her glare. He is coming closer. He is bringing her the baby.
“Male renegade alchemists have to cultivate for centuries to make their babies, you know,” says Amelia. “Then they have to eat them!”
“Don’t eat the baby,” says the doctor, on autopilot, and hands the child to Amelia.
“Of course not,” Amelia says.
. . .
Amelia smiles at the little thing. She is lost in the baby’s squiggly little face. She doesn’t hear the doctor, and the doctor has to repeat himself.
“He’s an abomination,” the doctor says. “We should probably just kill him. I mean, if you won’t withdraw your funding for this hospital. I mean.”
“They have to cultivate a spirit pill in them for centuries,” Amelia says. She hefts the baby. She puts it down. “For centuries, little Tom! You have a thingie so I think that will have to be you. Then they turn it into a baby and eat it. But I’m going to drink reverted cinnabar instead.”
“You shouldn’t —” says the doctor.
“Not while I’m pregnant!” Amelia agrees. “I mean, later.”
“It’s just,” the doctor says, and finally comes out with it: “I think that he has parasitic snake DNA.”
. . .
“Pssh,” dismisses Amelia. “All babies are like that.”
“No,” says the doctor.
Amelia’s eyes narrow. She looks at Bertram for support. He cannot give it to her. She looks back at the doctor.
“I’m listening,” she says, coolly.
. . .
The doctor gestures, widely. “There’s a primordial, ophidian species,” he says, “that can attach its DNA parasitically to human DNA. But it gambled on the Neanderthals and lost, so it died out before the age of man. Now somehow, probably because you explored unwisely in places women were not meant to go, you have a baby with that DNA on it.”
“It’s like that, is it?”
“That’s what the Agency said,” the doctor explains. “When they gave us the parasitic DNA testing equipment. Also, as you can see, he has a nictitating membrane.”
Tom blinks, then latches parasitically onto Amelia’s breast.
. . .
“I see,” says Amelia, because she does. “But it’s all right.”
“Pardon?’ says the doctor.
“Well, I’m already a renegade,” says Amelia. “So I can have a doomful child.”
“That’s —”
. . .
The doctor hesitates. The truth is, he doesn’t really want to kill Tom Friedman, and any inclination he might have to follow the orders of the Agency like a sheep are outweighed by her being a substantial donor to the hospital.
“Very insightful, ma’am,” he says.
She strokes the back of Tom’s head. She smiles.
“The scrolls did imply that he’d end the age of man and warm the earth,” she says, thoughtfully, “but honestly. Look at him!”
She giggles. She winces. She giggles again.
Then she passes out.
– 2 –
In the absence of Hans the Devil gets out.
At first he can’t believe it.
He wanders by the net that holds in Hell. It’s made from soldier ants glued to string and stretched over the gates and fencing of damnation. He glares at it for a while. He still can’t believe that Hans had done that.
Those poor ants!
. . .
But a few minutes later, the Devil notices that something is different.
. . . Nobody’s been feeding the soldier ants. Nobody’s been touching up the glue.
A few of the ants are free, actually, and they’re swarming at the edge of Hell. Most of the rest of them are dead.
“Oh, my,” the Devil says, burning through a swathe of net.
He laughs like he’d laughed when he first got out of the orange tree Hans had trapped him in; when he’d untied his tail from the knot Hans had looped it in; like he’d laughed every other time he’d put one over on his great enemy, the svart-elf Hans, but —
. . .
This is different. This isn’t a real victory. This is Hans falling down on the job.
He ignores the surviving soldier ants. He decides that they can’t possibly cause a problem. Not in Hell. He stomps off to deal with Hans. He finds a funeral instead.
“Oh,” he whispers. “Oh, dear.”
They are marching past him. The svart-alfar, not the ants. They are marching past him.
He can’t help it. He takes off his hat. He holds it over his fiery heart. He watches as they carry dead Hans by.
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