This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.Copyright © 2009 by Tekno Books and Esther M. Friesner.All stories copyright © by the individual authors.All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.A Baen Books OriginalBaen Publishing EnterprisesP.O. Box 1403Riverdale, NY 10471www.baen.comISBN10: 1-4391-3274-7ISBN13: 978-1-4391-3274-6Cover art by Tom KiddFirst paperback printing, June 2009Distributed by Simon & Schuster1230 Avenue of the AmericasNew York, NY 10020Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)Printed in the United States of America
Chicks in ChainmailChicks 'N Chained MalesThe Chick is in the MailChicks Ahoy! (forthcoming)Witch Way to the Mall
Ah, Suburbia! Proof positive that people aren't the only entities out there subject to prejudice and profiling. In a world full of knee-jerk reactions from some of the biggest jerks in the business, if you mention Suburbia you're fairly well guaranteed to get a condescending chuckle or a haughty sneer out of your audience as visions of Levittown dance through their heads.
Or perhaps Levittown's a bit dated (and is still the undisputed turf of ever-so-hipper-than-thou-so-don't-even-try-outhipping-me folksingers, as well as Bill Griffith, the gent who continues to entertain me and other cognoscenti with his comic strip, Zippy). Suburbia with or without Levittown is still something to mock, though now more for being the realm of the McMansions instead of the tacky tract houses. The white picket fences are an anachronism, along with the DonnaReedShowLeaveItToBeaverFatherKnowsBest housewife, wearing pearls, a crinolined dress, a lace-trimmed apron and high heels while dealing with domestic crises ("Oh my gosh, Madge, all the fruit in my Jell-O Brand Gelatin salad keeps falling to the bottom and we're out of gin!").
Good thing people are continually inventive about finding new things to patronize about the suburbs. (I mean, weren't the Stepford Wives just awful? Well, isn't that Suburbia for you? It's not bad enough that all the houses look alike, the people there think nothing's acceptable unless everyone acts and dresses alike too! I'd complain about the suburbs more, but I've got to go to a gallery opening in ten minutes, all of my black clothes are still in the dryer, I haven't had the chance to read the reviews so I know what to say about the pieces, and we're out of absinthe!)
Though Suburbia is far from perfect, I'd like someone to show me one major category of human habitation that isn't in the same boat, with or without benefit of yacht club membership. Or better yet, don't try. It's easier to fudge over the shortcomings of your own environs and bolster your self-image by scorning the place where someone else lives. Bring on the cheap shots at Soccer Moms for starters. (It's okay, you'll be safe from retaliation. They're usually too tired doing silly things like taking care of their kids to fight back.) Take a potshot at SUVs while you're at it, because now you've got the added Moral High Ground of how much high-priced gas they're guzzling. (What if some families actually need all that passenger and cargo space? Tchah! How dare their necessity not bow before the only acceptable automotive choice, namely your own? 53 miles to the gallon of self-righteousness, baby!) And don't forget the mall.
Yes indeed, the mall: What could shriek "Suburbia!" louder than that fine example of commercial kudzu, strangling the life out of all other retail venues? Forget the fact that many of the most innovative, unique, creative small businesses die the death daily in our great metropolitan centers. Ignore the fact that malls exist in urban settings, too. Urban malls are hip, stylish, cutting-edge, so you can browse through their utterly glam stores without losing a pinch of your coolness street cred.
Oops. Wait a minute. I just noticed: Most of those are exactly the same stores you find in the suburban malls. Oh dear. How did that happen? Ciao, coolness cred. Ciao.
Well, at least there's one ultracool and super-chic thing that cities have which Suburbia can never hope to get its macchiato-stained paws on: The denizens of our darker fantasies. Just because we call it fantasy doesn't mean we're not keeping it real, man. What self-respecting witch, vampire, or werewolf would be caught dead—or undead—anywhere but the Big City? Never mind that these are the same beings whose original stomping grounds were the deep forests, the mountain passes, the blasted heaths, and the rest of the non-urban landscape.
Look, let's give the uncanny crew a little credit for intelligence: If they had the smarts to see the advantage in packing up and moving into the cities, why wouldn't they have the smarts to move out of said cities if it looked like they could get a better quality-of-life/death elsewhere? (Tough enough going about your otherworldly business and evading the occasional mob wielding halogen torches and designer pitchforks, but have you ever seen city real estate prices?)
So join me now in welcoming our first group of supernatural suburbanites, the witches. Their powers are awesome, their methods of coping with the lumps, bumps, and idiosyncrasies of Suburbia are ingenious, and they always bring the loveliest gingerbread to the PTA bake sale.
But whatever you do, don't try telling them that life in a non-city setting is bland, banal and boring, or else . . .
ribbit!
Harry Turtledove writes science fiction and fantasy, much of it alternate history and historical fantasy. Recent books include The Man with the Iron Heart, The Valley-Weside War, and The United States of Atlantis. While he is not as obsessive a birder as the characters in "Birdwitching," he has taken birding trips to Nome, Alaska and Quoddy Head, Maine. He spends time combing the wilds of Chatsworth, California, tracking down reports of vagrant Siberian Dreeble-Finches, but with little success.
Lucy Parker was a birder. So was her son, Jesse. Lucy was a witch. It wasn't obvious whether Jesse had the Talent; he was only nineteen, and it didn't manifest itself till people got into their mid-twenties. John Parker, Lucy's husband and Jesse's father, was terminally mundane and had no interest in birds except dark meat. These character flaws notwithstanding, he did have other talents, and the three of them lived happily enough in Sunset Grove.
Fred O'Neill was also a birder. So was his daughter, Kathleen. Fred was also a witch, as well. Kathleen was only eighteen, so nobody knew whether she had the Talent, either. Her mother—Fred's wife—Samantha was every bit as mundane and at least as uninterested in birds as John Parker (though she liked white meat). So you can pretty much forget about her and John.
You do need to remember that the O'Neills lived in Fernwood, just over the barony line from Sunset Grove. You also need to remember that Lucy Parker couldn't stand Fred O'Neill, and that it was mutual. Who done what to whom? It all started a long time ago, and they tell different stories. They both sound sincere when they do, too. By now, that hardly matters. They ain't friends, and they ain't ever gonna be.
Jesse Parker, on the other hand, thought Kathleen O'Neill was pretty cute. She had red hair and freckles and everything else an eighteen-year-old girl ought to have—and Svarovski binoculars besides. She didn't think Jesse was half bad, either. This horrified and amazed his mother and her father. Not Montague-Capulet country, maybe, but you could see it from there. Also not your basic California Dreamin'.
And you need to remember that the annual Yule Bird Count was coming up. Sunset Grove and Fernwood birders would have been rivals even if Lucy Parker and Fred O'Neill were thick as thieves (which each thought the other was). They lived next door to one another, for cryin' out loud. If you can't brag on yourselves and woof on your neighbors, well, what's a heaven for?
So every year there was a mad scramble to spot as many different sparrows and raptors and waterfowl and other feathered critters that happened to lurk anywhere close by, and to publish same, and to laugh at the neighboring birders whose count happened to come up short. About every other year, there were charges that Sunset Grove's birders—or Fernwood's, depending—counted birds they didn't really see, just to make their numbers bigger.
Everybody denied everything, of course. Of course. Nobody would stoop to such evil, underhanded tactics, of course. Of course.
"We'll get 'em this year," Jesse told Lucy as the big day approached. Fernwood had outcounted Sunset Grove the year before. Suspicions of cheating were more than usually rampant—among Sunset Grove's birders, anyhow. Jesse was a competitive kid. It all added up.
"You'd best believe we will, kiddo," Lucy answered. She was even more competitive than her son. It wasn't easy, but she managed. "We'll whip 'em good. You can count on it."
"Cool." Jesse grinned. Then, perhaps incautiously, he added, "Kathleen says—"
"What does Kathleen say?" Was that frost in Lucy's voice? As a matter of fact, it was ice. A competition with Kathleen was a competition she'd lose. Come to that, a competition with Kathleen was a competition where she couldn't even compete. She knew it, too. She hated it, but she knew it.
For his part, Jesse knew something wasn't quite right there, but his hormones made sure he didn't know what. "She says some of Mr. O'Neill's birding buddies were talking with him the other day. They were asking him what he could do about, like, finding some extra birds for the Yule Count."
"Oh, they were, were they?" Lucy's ice turned into a glacier and started overrunning a continent. "Magicking birds into place for the count is immoral and unethical." She paused. If you listened near the edge of the glacier, you could hear woolly mammoths trumpeting. "And I wouldn't put it past Fred O'Neill for a minute."
"Kathleen says that they said that some of them thought that maybe you'd done some birdwitching before," Jesse said.
It was a good thing he needed three dependent clauses to get where he was going with that, or the whole glacier—and probably the poor woolly mammoths, too—would have flashed to superheated steam. As things were, what Lucy said made Jesse's jaw drop. Moms weren't supposed to talk like that.
"I haven't," Lucy continued, biting syllables off between her teeth. "I didn't. But if Fred O'Neill is crooked enough to think he can get away with pulling that kind of stunt, he'd better think twice. Those nearsighted yahoos in Fernwood won't cheat their way past us again. Not a chance."
"Cool," Jesse said again. Then, even more incautiously than before, he started another sentence with, "Kathleen says—"
"What?" Lucy barked.
Her son flinched. When he got his nerve back, he finished, "She says her dad says he won't let us win by cheating, either."
"Oh, he does? Oh, he won't?" Lucy echoed ominously. "Well, we'll just have to see about that, won't we?"
Yule dawned clear and cool. It would get up into the high sixties later on, maybe even to seventy. Winter in Southern California. Lucy, who'd been born in Cleveland, loved it. Jesse, a native, took it for granted, the way he did his upper-middle-class lifestyle. Lucy and John (maybe you can't quite forget him) had busted their humps for years so he could do exactly that.
The Parkers had a big back yard, full of trees and flowers. Flowers at Yule? Sure. Why don't you pack up and move here? Everybody else has. It was also full of hummingbird feeders full of sugar water, of seed feeders on poles with big iron baffles to keep squirrels away (there were even bigger ones to keep raccoons away, but the coons didn't come around very often), of suet left out for woodpeckers and other birds that found it tasty, and little fountains so the feathered beasties could sing in the shower.
Behind the Parkers' yard were fields and scrubby chaparral. Plenty of birds that wouldn't come into a yard on a bet liked it fine out there. Some of them were even willing to be spotted.
Even though it wasn't very cold, John (yeah, there he is again) had set the Yule log burning in the fireplace at midnight. Tradition? Tradition! It was down to coals when Lucy and Jesse got up a little before sunrise. She smiled as she lurched into the kitchen to make coffee. The embers and the smell reminded her this was a holiday.
Holiday or not, it would also be a small war. She needed no witchy Talent to figure that out.
Jesse hated coffee. He bounced around anyhow. Nineteen did that for you, or to you. He peered out the kitchen window. An early-rising Anna's hummingbird that was about to tank up at the feeder hanging outside buzzed away instead.
"One Anna's," he sang out.
"Well, we're started." Lucy poured sugar into her cup. Her mix had less sweetness and more caffeine than hummer water. Hummingbirds were speedy enough—they didn't need caffeine. She darn well did.
"You ought to note it down," Jesse said, reproof in his voice.
"I will—once I get to the bottom of my mug here. I don't think I'll forget till then. If you can't stand to wait that long, do it yourself, Charlie," Lucy said. He sighed. He was no good at waiting. Along with being able to function in the morning without coffee, that went a long way toward tagging him by age.
Something moved in the magnolia not far from the window. Jesse stared intently. "Yellow-rumped warbler," he said after a couple of seconds.
"Okay. An Anna's and a butterbutt," Lucy said. Even half a cup of coffee started to clear the cobwebs.
"Butterbutt," Jesse echoed. "That's a silly name."
"I know. So what?" his mother answered. "Birders have their own secret lingo, same as witches, same as any other bunch of people interested in the same thing." There were differences, of course. Misusing birders' jargon wouldn't get you toasted by a salamander or drowned by an undine. But it would show the people you were trying to impress that you didn't really belong with them. As often as not, that was the main function of jargon.
Lucy thought about a second mug of coffee, at least as much to annoy Jesse as to get herself up to speed. It could wait, she decided, not without regret. She went over to the kitchen crystal and attuned it to the Cosmos-Spanning Consortium. Mystically linking all the crystals in the world was the greatest sorcerous achievement since the megamagics that had swept two Nipponese cities off the map at the end of the Second Great Slaughter. And CSPANC had a lot more peaceful possibilities than sorceries of mass destruction any day.
She quickly steered to the CSPANC scroll that recorded birds seen in the Sunset Grove Yule Count. Other local birders had already identified house finches, house sparrows, white-crowned sparrows, and a California towhee. All of those, like her Anna's and yellow-rump, were completely unsurprising, which didn't mean they didn't count.
"Oh!" she said, spotting another check on the list.
"What's up?" Jesse came over to see for himself. "A barn owl! That's pretty neat."
"It is," Lucy agreed. Barn owls lived over most of the world—they had one of the widest ranges of any bird—but weren't common anywhere. You sure couldn't rely on conveniently spotting one for Yule. Somebody'd done it, though: somebody who'd crawled out of bed too bloody early, odds were.
"What have they seen in Fernwood?" Jesse asked.
Murmuring a charm, Lucy shifted to the rival town's CSPANC scroll. They must have had somebody out at the lagoon early in the morning, because they were reporting double-crested cormorants and a pied-billed grebe and a northern shoveler, which was a duck with a bill shaped like a serving spoon. And they'd spotted a California scrub jay and some American robins.
"Nothing they shouldn't have," Lucy said grudgingly. "Not yet, anyhow." She trusted Fred O'Neill as far as she could punt him. Since she was no football player, and since dear Fred weighed about 250 pounds . . .
A flock of tiny, twittering birds flew into the leafless apricot tree from the yard next door. Then, one by one and two by two and several by several, they fluttered into the magnolia. They hopped around the branches, looking for bugs. A moment later, they were gone, as abruptly as they'd appeared.
"Bush tits," Lucy said.
Her son nodded. "Tree fleas," he said scornfully—the birders' nickname for the bouncy little birds.
"Hey, I like 'em," Lucy said. Jesse looked at her as if she were dribbling marbles out her ears. Most birders thought bush tits were nothing but nuisances that disturbed less common, more interesting birds. They reminded her of a pack of first-graders turned loose on the playground for recess. They were fun. If you couldn't have fun with your birds, why watch them?
To keep track of how many different kinds you've seen. Plenty of birders, Jesse among them, would have given the answer without even pausing to think. He was a good kid, so good she almost forgave him for liking Kathleen O'Neill. No denying he could be too serious for his own good, though.
Another quick spell brought Lucy back to the Sunset Grove Yule list. "How many bush tits would you say there were?" she asked. "Maybe twenty-five?"
After careful consideration—he was Jesse, after all—her son nodded. "Sounds right."
"Okay." The bush tits they counted would get added in with all the others Sunset Grove birders spotted today. Somewhere behind the scenes at CSPANC, a sprite with an abacus would draw overtime.
Lucy did pour herself another cup of coffee then. She split a bagel and put honey on one side and jam on the other. Then she slapped them together and started eating breakfast. Jesse scrambled eggs. He was young enough so he didn't have a healer clucking reproachfully whenever he did something like that.
His pocket crystal made a noise like a rhythmic kangaroo as he was sitting down at the kitchen table. Till he started using that particular ringspell, Lucy hadn't imagined there was any such thing as a noise like a rhythmic kangaroo. But there was, and Jesse was far from the only kid with that ringspell. Hip-hop music was all the rage these days. You could either put up with it or wear earplugs, one.
"Hello?" Jesse said, and then, on an altogether different note, "Oh. Hi!"
Kathleen, Lucy thought unhappily. She knew that note, all right. He's talking with fat Fred O'Neill's daughter. Talking with the enemy's daughter. With the enemy. Was Jesse sleeping with the enemy? Lucy didn't know. She couldn't very well ask. Parents who snooped on their pretty-much-grown children's love lives deserved the trouble they landed in. Lucy did know one thing: if Jesse wasn't sleeping with Kathleen, he sure wanted to. He was male. He was nineteen. He had a pulse. 'Nuff said.
"Nothing real exciting here so far," he was saying. "Tree fleas, a butterbutt, an Anna's . . . Oh, wait. A couple of stoogebirds just landed on the platform feeder."
"A couple of what?" Lucy could hear Kathleen's voice coming out of the pocket crystal.
Stoogebirds was family slang, not regular birders' slang. Jesse had to explain it: "You know. Mourning doves, on account of their wings go woob-woob-woob-woob whenever they take off. Just like Curly, right?" He paused, listening, then answered with more than a little pride in his voice: "Sure I'm weird. Like you didn't already know." He listened one more time, then said " 'Bye" and stuck the crystal back in his pocket.
Lucy checked the Fernwood scroll on CSPANC again. As soon as she did, something way more strident than a hip-hop kangaroo went off inside her head. "They can't get away with that!" she yipped.
"With what?" Jesse ambled over to see what she was talking about.
"With that." Quivering with indignation, Lucy pointed out the offending entry. "Yellow-billed magpie? Here? Or in Fernwood, I mean? No way, Jessay." She pronounced his name so the phrase rhymed, which made him wince. She went on, "No way unless Fat Freddy magicked it in, I mean. Well, if he's gonna play that way, we can play that way, too. Oh, yeah!" So much for immoral and unethical. What were rules, in war?
"What'll you do, Mom?" Anticipation and alarm jangled in Jesse's voice.
"I'll make sure those no-good, lousy cheaters in Fernwood don't steal this year's count, that's what." Lucy stormed out of the kitchen and into her study. She came back with several grimoires and an armload of materia magica—oh, and a few birders' guides, too. She paged through one of them, then smiled carnivorously and nodded. "We'll have people down by the old slough, right?"
"We always do," Jesse answered.
"Right," Lucy said again. "Now we find out whether they're awake." You could conjure in a bird—sure. But if you did and nobody spotted it, you might as well not have bothered.
Lucy's materia magica, unlike those of a lot of witches, included feathers of all different colors . . . just in case. She pulled out a dark green one, and a little bronze crown that might have graced a doll's head once upon a time. She knew where her target birds lived. She knew where she wanted to put one. The charm and the passes that got the bird from A to B were second nature to her. After umpty-ump years of training and practice they were, anyhow.
"What exactly did you do?" Jesse asked. "I mean, I can guess, but—"
"Go ahead and guess," Lucy said. "We'll find out if it worked pretty soon." If it didn't, if the loafers at the slough were standing around yawning or just not paying attention . . . Well, she'd find some other way to make sure they weren't asleep over there next year, by God!
She made herself sit there for fifteen minutes before she checked the Sunset Grove scroll on CSPANC again. That was at least fourteen minutes longer than Jesse wanted to wait. By the time they finally looked, he had a bad case of the wiggles.
His grin almost made the top of his head fall off. "Green kingfisher!" he whooped. "I thought that's what you were up to!" Belted kingfishers, larger and blue-gray, were common over water. Green kingfishers barely came north of the Rio Grande, and never visited California—not unless a friendly witch lent a hand.
Not two minutes later, his pocket crystal made hip-hop noises again. "If that's Kathleen bitching—" Lucy began.
Her son waved her to silence. A call on the pocket crystal was important. A parent standing right there? Fuhgeddaboutit. "Hello?" he said, and then, "Hi!" His face got all goofy. It was Kathleen, all right. He listened, then looked at Lucy. "She says her dad's not real happy about the kingfisher."
"T.S., Eliot," Lucy answered. "What about the yellow-billed magpie?"
Jesse asked the question. He listened some more, then reported: "She says her dad says it just happened to be there. He didn't have anything to do with it."
"Yeah, right," Lucy sneered. "And the check is in the mail."
"Uh, my mom's not so sure of that." Talking to a girl he was sweet on, Jesse was more polite than Lucy had been. He listened to Kathleen. To Lucy, he said, "She says her dad says the magpie was legit. But if you want to play that way, he can play that way, too."
"Tell Kathleen to tell him to bring it on," Lucy answered. Only later did she realize there were ways to say things like that, and then again there were ways. One particular fellow who'd used almost her exact phrase was still trying to shovel his way out of Mesopotamia.
But the Great Yule Bird Count in Sunset Grove and Fernwood was never the same again.
WATCH THE SKIES! the old posters shouted—as if there could be life on other planets, when magic had proved that planets were nothing but lights attached to moving crystal spheres. But weird-looking invaders from Mars were fun to tell stories about, even if they couldn't be real.
Fernwood and Sunset Grove got invaders, too, but they didn't come from Mars....
allforjesus2001