The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

Nobody's been able to get much in the way of rain for Angels City the past few years. I mean they got nothing - no skin that the Powers linked to those charmstones were still there to be summoned. What Bea wanted me to do was determine whether the Chumash Powers were in fact extinct That's always a melancholy job. Extinction means something wonderful going out of the world forever, whether from This Side or the Other. The poor Chumash, though, have been so thoroughly dispossessed and assimilated over the last couple of hundred years that no one believes any more in the Powers they once revered. Not only does no one believe in them, hardly anybody even knows they exist. And Powers without believers will the. Even the great Pan is two thousand years dead now.

Heavens, before I could get started, I had to go to the reference library to look up Chumash charmstones and how they fit into the rest of the Indians' cult. I found out they were used not only for making rain, but also in war (they could make you invisible to arrows), in medicine, and in general sorcery. They tied in with other talismans - 'atishwin, the Chumash called those - and with the Powers who helped the Chumash shamans. And now, by what Bea had passed to me, they were just little carved chunks of steatite, as inert as ifthey'd never had any magical intent at all.

I went up to Bea's office, shot the breeze with her secretary (Rose really runs that place; if she ever quit, we'd fall apart) until she got off the phone, then ducked in fast before it made noise again. "What's my priority on this Chumash thing?" I asked her. "The Devonshire project is taking up a lot of my time right now."

"I know," she answered. "It still comes first - it's active, while if the Chumash Powers really are extinct, there's no hurry about saying so. You'll want to get a more formal investigation going to check that out one way or the other, have the thaumaturges see if the Chumash gods of the Upper World, the First People, or the Nunashish of the Lower World are still accessible to invocation."

"You've been reading up on this," I said; up until a couple of minutes before, I'd never heard of the dark, misshapen Nunaskish.

She grinned at me. "Of course I have. If I knew about these spirits off the top of my head, they wouldn't be on the edge of extinction, would they? If it turns out they haven't gone over the edge, report back to me right away, because we'll need to try to arrange a preservation scheme - assuming we can afford one."

Doing a cost-benefit analysis to figure out whether it's worthwhile to save an endangered deity is so coldblooded that it's one of my least favorite parts of the job. It is, unfortunately, also all too often necessary. As I noted when I saw Matt Arnold's door Herm, maintaining a cult for a supernatural being who would otherwise be gone is expensive: it's the Other Side's equivalent of a captive breeding program for an animal that's vanished from the wild, If the Chumash Powers were still alive, somebody - me, most likely - would have to figure out their role in the local thecosystem, and whether that role justified the money to provide worshipers and whatever else they needed. I'd never been part of the God Squad before. It's an awesome responsibility, when you think about it.

Bea must have seen the look on my face. "Don't get yourself in an uproar, David. The odds are that these Powers have just faded away, like so many others the Indians reverenced before white folks-and black-settled here. If that's so, all you'll have to do is write up the report. It's only if the Nunashish and the rest are still around that you'll have any bigger worries."

"I know that," I answered - "Actually, I hope they do survive. But if they do, and if they're very much enfeebled - which they will be-"

"Yes, I know. Holding a Power's fate in your hands isn't easy. In the old days, they were proud of ridding the world of gods in whom they didn't believe - some of the early Christian writings, the ones from the time of the Great Extinctions in Europe, will sicken you with their gloating.

But our ideas are different now; we know everything has its place in Creation, to be preserved if possible."

"But to be the one who decides if it's possible, and then to have to live with myself afterwards… it won't be easy, Bea."

"If you wanted a job that was easy all the time, you wouldn't be here," she said. "Anything else? No? All right, thank you, David."

I went back to my office and made a couple of calls, got the ball rolling on the Chumash channstones. Then I plowed through as much of the more routine stuff as I could before lunch. If I'd known how bad lunch was going to be, I'd have worked straight through it. The cafeteria must have assembled the unappetizing glop on my plate with help from the law of contagion: some time a long while ago, it might have been in contact with real food. Two crowns ninety-five shot to - well, you get the idea.