Robots vs. Fairies(58)
Occasionally there were more frantic pings: followers who were about to hurt themselves and needed an interface with local police forces in their area, or followers rendered irate by the fact that they could no longer visit and pay homage in person.
At the new moon, full moon, and sabbaths, Sigrid recorded video messages to share with her followers. They were not the rituals she had once led online, but simple meditations and wisdom relevant to the time of year. Since she had devoted herself completely to the gods and hidden folk in her latter years, she had ceased public ritual work and focused solely on private worship. Some followers said the quality of the videos had changed, now that she could speak to a humanoid. Others treated her usage of a mechanical assistant as a betrayal; for these she prominently displayed the black tourmalines at the corners of her cottage, and the shungite stones in all her water glasses.
“I need to protect myself from your electromagnetic frequencies,” Sigrid told him, after he came home with her. “Anything that interferes with my personal vibrations will disrupt the waves of intention I send into the ethers.”
She glared at him and dropped another polished black stone into the pitcher of water that belonged to the refrigerator. The refrigerator bonged softly to get it back; the sticker on the pitcher and the sticker in the fridge chittered at each other in a language that only the assistant could hear.
“There are spirits all around us, you know,” she said. “And the elves, outside. They’ll smell it, your presence. They’ll smell it on me.”
“What is the smell like?” the assistant asked. “I myself have no sense of smell, only an air filter calibrated to detect toxins.”
Sigrid made a sign in the air that was either a banishing stave or an obscene gesture. Either way, the assistant let her leave the room until she asked him, rather sheepishly, to open a jar of loose dragon’s-blood resin.
*
The house told the assistant about the Vegagerdin representative’s surprise visit long before he actually arrived. The representative’s ride had a very specific call sign, and it told all the intersections and buses when it would be passing moments before it actually passed. Not that there was much need for such a device in their tiny town, but the ride was a special-edition model for municipal and other government use, and the national budget algorithm had found it as a way of filling a gap while in “use it or lose it” mode. The same model was also available in Los Angeles, Bogotá, Seoul, and Mumbai. Their little community was by far the smallest to ever see such a thing: a jagged gray structure invisible to sonar or LIDAR, sharp and dark as the blades of black kyanite Sigrid used to cut etheric cords still knotted in her aura after a particularly bad dream.
It trundled up to Sigrid’s cottage on big, chunky wheels. It had very good manners and alerted the assistant as soon as the representative had shut its door to leave. This allowed the assistant to open the door just as the representative had reached it.
“Good afternoon, sir,” the assistant said. “Welcome.”
“Oh.” The representative’s fist was raised to knock. It opened and closed twice before he hastily dropped the fist to his side. The assistant performed a basic scan: the representative was small for a man of his age, and his BMI would give him problems later. He did not dress like the people the assistant interacted with regularly. His clothes were more expensive than they should have been; when the assistant matched them against online catalogues, he noticed that they had no real lifesaving properties of warmth or dryness. The man obviously did most of his work in the city. “Hello. How—” His mouth snapped shut. This interaction seemed to be rather difficult for him. It was up to the assistant to make him feel more comfortable.
“We are having a lovely day,” the assistant said. “Thank you very much for asking. Will you come in?”
“Oh. Yes. I will. Thank you.”
The assistant opened the door a little farther and welcomed the representative inside. The chicken-foot door hanger, sent all the way from Texas in the United States, scratched softly at the wood as it closed. The representative squinted at it for a moment before abruptly directing his gaze to the floor.
“I will bring Sigrid,” the assistant said.
The representative said nothing. He’d fixed his attention on the ram’s skull over the fireplace.
“This is about the elfstone, isn’t it?” Sigrid asked, when the assistant fetched her.
“Hello. My name is Brynjar Jonsson, and I’m with the Road and Coastal Administration—”
“I know who you represent,” Sigrid told Mr. Jonsson. “Is this about the elfstone? The one that’s causing you so much trouble?”
“Perhaps your guest would like some tea,” the assistant said, and Mr. Jonsson shot him a look of such pure gratitude that the assistant took a moment to upload it to the general database.
When he returned from the kitchen with a tray, Mr. Jonsson sat perched on the best couch, the one Sigrid had swathed in a bearskin from a disciple in Canada. He sat well away from the fur, although his eye kept catching it and he seemed unable to look away from it entirely. He took the tea eagerly, turning it around and around in its saucer, fussing with the milk and sugar, getting it just right. Not for the first time, the assistant wondered what tea tasted like. Sigrid made the blend herself.
“Did you drive here?” she asked.