Tinker by Wen Spencer
Tinker leaned against the stall side, watching Tooloo wipe the udder clean and position the milk bucket. Tinker drew a line at milking the cows, as she'd been swatted in the face with a tail once too often. Pony watched in complete mystification. Head tucked against the cow's flank, Tooloo settled into a fast milking rhythm, shooting alternating streams of milk into the bucket. "This happened a long time ago; Windwolf wasn't even born. And even if his father is a Skin Clan bastard, so what? Oilcan's father killed his mother, and that doesn't make Oilcan a bad person."
"Nah, nah, Longwind—Windwolf's father—is just a young buck too. Politics does what time can't; Windwolf's grandfather, Howling, was murdered and Longwind took his place as clan head. Howling, though, he was ten thousand years old when the blade found him, and he had been part of the Skin Clan downfall. But to be precise, he wasn't the bastard—it was his father, Quick Blade, before him, who was the bastard, but Quick Blade died in battle during the war."
"How do you know all this?"
"How do you know about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson? These were the 'heroes' of the war and the leaders of our people afterward." Tooloo said it with such bitterness that both Tinker and the cow flinched. "It was, though, a simple trading of masters. Perhaps more benign than the Skin Clan, but iron-fisted all the same."
That Windwolf was one of "them" made Tinker uncomfortable with the conversation. Tooloo said whatever suited her with little regard to truth, and she hated the concept of being poisoned against Windwolf with lies. Still, it was fairly obvious from the caste system that the domana ruled and the others served.
"I don't understand," Tinker said. "If Quick Blade was Skin Clan, how did Howling get to be Wind clan?"
Tooloo sighed into the cow's flank. "The Skin Clan tried to wipe out the use of other magic, but they only drove it underground. And exactly what they were afraid of happened—the seeds of power became great trees. The ignorant but physically strong—like your strapping young sekasha there—pledged their services to those with arcane knowledge. Over time the castes linked together into the current clans, but they were slowly losing during the Years of Resistance."
"Until the domana joined the clans against their fathers."
"There's still hope for you, my bright wee one. Yes. The Skin Clan had added the ability to wield magic to their blood, and then fathered bastards among their rebel slaves." Tooloo stilled for a moment, considering the past. "There is, I suppose, an inevitability to it all."
Tooloo finished with the first cow and carried the milk to the scales to be weighed. "Thirty pounds. Nothing to piffle at, though Holsteins have been bred to output twice that amount. Here, take this back to the cooler."
Tinker reached for the bucket, but Pony stepped forward and took it.
"What are you doing?"
"It will be heavy for you, but nothing for me to carry."
Tinker snorted but let it go because, unfortunately, he was right. She found it disgusting that, while Oilcan wasn't much taller or more muscled, he was proportionally stronger than she was.
Pony eyed the bucket of milk as they walked to Tooloo's large walk-in cooler. "Ah, they are cows."
Tinker considered that the elves had a word for cows and chickens. "Yes. You seem . . . surprised."
"They don't look like our cows," he said. "And I have never seen any of ours milked before. Kuetaun caste handles livestock, not sekasha."
"Oh, I see." That would explain his reactions to the chickens too. "Not in a hundred years?"
"I devoted a great amount of time to training. Only the best are chosen to be bodyguards, and that is what I wanted."
"Why?"
"It is what I'm good at. I enjoy it."
"But, doesn't it mean you're setting yourself up as a sacrifice to someone else's life?"
"If I do my job right, no. But if I must, yes."
"I don't understand how you can make yourself anyone's disposable servant."
"I choose who I guard, that is the only way it can be. Windwolf values my life as much as I value his; he protects me as I protect him."
They had stopped in front of Tooloo's ten-foot-square walk-in cooler. Tinker unlatched the heavy door, frowning at what Pony had said; it seemed to defeat the whole concept of bodyguard.
"Windwolf protects you?"
Pony cocked his head. "Why do you find that so hard to believe? You put yourself between me and harm, do you think that Windwolf would do anything less than that?"
She what? When did she protect Pony? Oh, when Nathan was being a butthead. "That was nothing."
She yanked open the door and cool moist air misted out into the sunshine.
"You put yourself in harm's way to save Windwolf." Pony let her take back the bucket and watched with interest as she poured the warm milk into wide-mouth crocks. "Not only against the EIA imposters at the Rim, but against the wargs at the salvage yard."
"I don't plan to make a living out of it." From another crock that had already separated, she skimmed off the cream with a clean ladle, filling a pint bottle for Lain. "Grab me one of those quart jars."
"In all things, there must be those who are willing to guard and protect." Pony picked up the bottle of milk. "It is the way of nature. You humans have police and firefighters and EIA. It is not that I do not value my life, but if I risk it, it is for a worthy cause."
Tinker supposed that Pony's job was not much different from Nathan's. Stepping back out of the cooler, she latched the door and headed back into the store. Drat Tooloo, the half-elf had her seeing everything in a bad light already. And the comparison to Nathan dragged that whole mess up. Damn him, why had Nathan betrayed her that way? Beyond Lain and Oilcan, there wasn't another person in the city she would have opened the door for dressed only in a towel. The more she thought on it, the more she realized how much she misjudged Nathan. She had been looking at the cop, not the man. She expected him to stay the nice big brother type, only with kissing thrown in. In one giant step, they'd moved into new roles, and Nathan, the boyfriend, was a different person. That Nathan was possessive and overpowering. Perhaps her instinct to flee him at the Faire was for the best; perhaps no matter when or how they'd ended up on her couch, it would have led to Nathan trying to force her into something she didn't want.
And if that was the case, what did she do now? She'd opened the door and let the warg in; how did she get it back out?
* * *
Tinker tried, but she couldn't stretch the shopping out to the full two hours without alerting Tooloo or Pony that she was stalling. She and Pony returned to Observatory Hill a full forty minutes early, but Lain had already finished up and sat in the kitchen with a cup of tea and a stunned look on her face. The expression set off alarms in Tinker. She quickly stashed away the perishables from Tooloo's store and banished Pony to the foyer so she could safely discuss the results of the DNA tests with Lain.
"It's bad, isn't it?"
Lain raised an eyebrow. "What? Oh, no, I'm still stunned at the amount of change Windwolf accomplished in an adult seemingly without fear that it would kill you. You look so much like yourself that it didn't really click until I started working with your DNA. I-I-I'm in awe."
"Lain, please, you're freaking me out."
"You have no idea of the enormity of this. It changes everything we know about the elves' ability. We've considered the concept of elves being able to turn people into frogs with magic just folklore and urban legend."
"So you're saying I'm lucky not to be a frog?"
The stunned look vanished before annoyance. "Oh, Tinker!"
"Where did scientists think the gossamers and wyverns came from?"
"Humans have made amazing changes in animals over thousands of years of breeding. One only has to look at the extreme phenotypic variation of the canine genotype."
"What?"
"Dogs. From Chihuahuas to Irish Wolfhounds, they're thought to be all descendants from a species of small Northern European wolf."
"Lain, c
"Don't you want to wait for Oilcan?"
"No. I think—if it's bad—he'll take it a lot worse than me. I want to deal with it so I can be strong for him."
"I wish I had thought to analyze your original DNA." Lain limped to her lab with Tinker following her. "This was a stunning chance to learn so much about the difference between our two races."
"Lain!"
"I'm sorry, but it's like watching someone destroy the Rosetta stone."
"The what?"
Lain sighed, picking up a thermometer. "You need a more rounded education."
"I am not in a mood to have my inadequacies discussed."
"Fine." Lain poked the thermometer into Tinker's ear, made it beep, and then took it out to look at the readout. "Ah, that's what I was afraid of." Lain limped to her medicine drawer and picked out several bottles. "Here, I want you to take these."
"Why?"
"Your white blood cell count is extremely high. Elves seem more resistant to disease, which suggests an aggressive immune system, so it's possible that an elevated count is normal. But you're running a low-grade fever, which isn't surprising considering all the cells of your body have been radically altered."
"They have?"
"All four of your samples were identical, which indicates the change was global."
"Oh. What are these?" Tinker eyed the pills that Lain shook out into her hand from several different bottles.
"Tylenol to control the fever." Lain recapped the bottles. "Calcium, folic acid, iron, zinc, and a multivitamin. I have no idea what Windwolf has done to you, but it might be viral in nature, so trying to stop the process might be disastrous. Those will help keep you strong through this; you probably should take a nap after this afternoon. Pushing yourself now could be very bad."
"So, all of my DNA samples were the same. What about mine compared to Oilcan's?"
"I separated the DNA out of all the samples, and used a restriction enzyme to cut the DNA into a defined set of fragments." Lain opened up a window on her workstation. "Those I stained with a fluorescent dye and passed it through the flow cytometer. As the laser strikes the fluorescent dye molecules that are bound to the DNA fragment, a photon 'burst' occurs. Because the number of photons in each burst is directly proportional to the fragment's size, the cytometer counts the photons in a burst to obtain an accurate fragment-size measurement."
Lain clicked open an image file showing a line of smudgy dots in a vertical row. "The resulting distribution of fragment sizes in the sample shows the raw DNA fingerprints. It's rough, but it's enough for our purposes. Basically, the more closely related two people are, the more gene sequences they will share."
"The smudgy dots?"
"Yes, those are gene sequences. This is the fingerprint of your blood."
"Okay." Tinker braced herself. "And Oilcan's?"
Lain reduced Tinker's sample and clicked open a second scan. "This is his."
At first glance, they didn't match. As Lain made them the same size, and placed them side-by-side, the differences only seemed greater.
"Oh." Tinker sat down, amazed at how much it hurt. She didn't think it would matter so much to her.
"It isn't as bad as it looks." Lain pointed to a cluster of dots in the center of Tinker's fingerprint. "These spots are from DNA on the telomere."
"The what?"
"Telomeres are segments of DNA at the ends of chromosomes. Each time a cell divides to make a copy of itself, the telomere gets shorter. Once it gets too short, the cell can't copy itself and dies. That's how we age. We've theorized that the elves would have longer telomeres than humans and thus age much slower; this is evidence that we're right."
"And the extra DNA is muddying the fingerprint, so to speak."
"Yes." Lain pointed to a second cluster. "This is from telomeres, and here too." Lain tapped a third section. "If you try to ignore these three regions, you'll see that the rest of the fingerprint is very similar."
Tinker squinted, trying to see "around" the smudges, wanting desperately to see the similarities. "I don't see it."
"Here." Lain opened up a third image. "This is my DNA."
"This is supposed to help?"
"Wait. I'm now isolating telomere DNA on your sample."
Red shot through Tinker's sample as the sections that Lain had pointed out as telomeres shifted color.
"Okay, let's find matching probe locus points in lane one and two." Lain flicked through another menu. Green flooded through Tinker and Oilcan's samples as ranks of black smudges turned to jade.
"That's what we share?"
"Yes." Lain pulled up a fresh copy of Tinker's DNA, isolated out the telomere, and placed it next to Lain's sample at the bottom of the screen. "As a control, let's compare your sample and mine."
Only a trace of green appeared.
Tinker looked back to the top of the screen, and all the lovely jade in the first two samples blurred slightly until she blinked away the tears. "So we're still cousins?"
"In my professional opinion, yes."
Tinker clapped, making the gods aware of her, and said, "Thank you."
"That settled, I have questions. How did Windwolf do this? Did he inject you with anything? Did he give you something to ingest?"
They spent the next ten minutes with Lain asking detailed questions and taking notes.
"You don't have to put down that we made love, do you?"
"Obviously it was vital to the spell. Sperm is made by nature to be a perfect carrier of DNA."
"Lain!"
"No one will know. This is just for me to know." Lain saved the notes, making them disappear into her computer system under heavy encryption. "So, Windwolf was the tengu of my dream after all."
Tinker paused, trying to remember exactly what Lain was talking about. "Oh, the raven elf."
Lain looked out her window at the garden Windwolf gifted on her. "You brought the tengu to me to bandage up. It turned you into a diamond and flew away with you in its beak."
"Lain, I'd rather not talk about prophetic nightmares and Chinese legends."
"Japanese," Lain corrected absently. "Just as the Europeans had brownies, and pixies, and elves, the Japanese have tengu, oni, and kitsune, and so forth."
"And Foo dogs."
"Well, the Foo dogs are Chinese, but they were imported along with Buddhism. The original religion of the Japanese is Shinto, a worship of nature spirits."
"If the tengu are the elves that can become crows, what are oni and kitsune?"
"Kitsune are the fox spirits. They usually appear to be beautiful women, but they really are just foxes that can throw illusions into their victim's mind."
Tinker made a face; silly nonsense was what she hated about fairy tales.
Lain tapped her on the head to stop Tinker from making faces. "Oni are fearsome ogres usually depicted as seven feet tall with red hair and horns. I've heard a theory that the oni are actually lost Vikings with horned helmets."
Now that sounded familiar. It all clicked together in her mind. "The three men who attacked us were very tall, with red hair. Windwolf called the pseudo-wargs Foo dogs. He also recognized your references to tengu. If we have legends of elves, and they are real, by simple logic then, the oni are real too."
Lain admitted Tinker's theory might be true with a thoughtful nod of her head, and then poked holes into it. "The world doesn't always follow simple logic. The cultures of the ancient worlds were highly contaminated by each other. The Chinese interacted with the Japanese, and then traded on the Silk Road to the Middle East, which spread into Europe. You can find the same children's story of Cinderella with the evil stepmother and the magical fairy godmother in almost every culture now. The oni could be just the Japanese version of our elves."
"But someone used Foo dogs and onilike people to try to kill Windwolf."
"There's so little we know about the elves, even after twenty years. For all we know, these attacks are part of
Tinker considered it, and shook her head. "No. Tooloo just gave me a history lesson and—provided it's all true—the elves are quite homogeneous."
"Ah." Lain murmured and thought for several minutes. "Then maybe there's something about oni that the elves aren't telling us."
Tinker glanced toward the foyer where Pony stood guard. "Weren't telling us. Windwolf has changed the game by swapping one of the players to the other team."
"Well," Lain locked up her workstation. "You crack that nut, and I'll make lunch."
* * *
Tinker felt guilty when she walked into the foyer and realized that Pony had been standing there since they returned from Tooloo's. "Why don't you sit down?"
"It's not proper—"
"Oh, sit down!" She pointed at the chair beside the door.
Pony sat, unhappy but obedient.
Tinker settled on the fourth step of the staircase, which put her level with Pony. "What do you know about oni?"
"Oni?" Pony lifted his hands to his head and made his index fingers into horns.
"Yes, oni."
"They are cruel and ruthless people with no sense of honor. Their weapons are crude, for they are a younger race than either elves or humans, but they spawn like mice and would crush us with sheer numbers."
So much for oni being mythical. "They live on Elfhome?"
Pony looked puzzled at this. "No, then they would have been elves. They live on Onihida."
"So, where is Onihida?"
Pony screwed up his face in the way that Tinker recognized as him reaching the limit of his ability to explain something. Finally he held out his left hand, palm down. "Elfhome." He waved his right hand under it. "Earth." Then, holding his right hand still, he moved his left hand under his right and waved it. "Onihida."
She pointed at his left hand. "How did you get to Onihida? Or did the oni come to Elfhome?"