The Chrome Borne Read online

  Enter Tannim, who hadn't been back home in more than a year. The elves felt very strongly about the ties of kith and kin, and took a dim view of people who treated such things carelessly. Around about March, Keighvin had begun to hint that it would be a good idea for Tannim to "spend some time with his family." By the end of March, the hints had turned about as subtle as a ten-pound sledgehammer upside his head.

  In April, Tannim thought he might get off the hook; a major disaster Underhill and in the more mundane lands of North Carolina had left Elfhame Outremer in ruins and all of the Seleighe Court in shock. Virtually everyone on the East Coast was needed to help put the pieces back together again. But by the middle of May, with Joe about to graduate, Keighvin's hints turned into an order. Tannim would go visit his family, and while he was there, he would pick up young Joe and bring him back to Fairgrove. But not until he had spent at least two weeks in the family bosom.

  Go rest, he says. Spend time with your family. They miss you; they need to know you're all right. Relax, he says. Like I'm going to be able to relax around my parents! I can't tell them more than a tenth of what I really do! And good old Chinthliss—if he gets wind of the fact that I'm not busy, he'll want to show up, and the last time he showed up—

  "Hiya, boss!"

  Tannim yipped in startlement and rose straight up in his seat, narrowly avoiding running off the road. He was no longer alone in the Mach I.

  Lounging at his ease in the bucket seat next to him was James Dean, famous boyish good looks, Wayfarer sunglasses, red leather jacket, and all. There was just one small addition: in fancy chrome over the right breast of the jacket was a tiny logo composed of two letters.

  FX.

  "Mind if I come along for the ride?" Foxtrot X-ray asked with a lopsided smile.

  Tannim calmed his heart and his temper with an effort. There was no point in getting mad at Fox; the Japanese kitsune-spirit operated by his own rules. There was no point in complaining. Fox wouldn't understand why Tannim was upset. And Fox was good-hearted. He'd done Tannim plenty of favors since they'd met.

  "Can anyone see you but me?" Tannim demanded, his attention torn between his sudden passenger and the road. Having a James Dean lookalike along was going to complicate an already complex situation. . . .

  Why couldn't I just be gay? It would be a lot easier to come out of the closet than to explain any of this to my parents. . . .

  "Of course not!" Fox replied. "Why? Do you want to show me off? That could be fun—"

  "No!" Tannim shouted. "No, I do not want anyone else to see you! Not my parents, not the neighbors, not the people in the next car—"

  "Oh, they won't be able to see me," Fox said, shrugging dismissively. "I don't know whether your parents have the Sight, but even if they do, I can keep them from seeing me if you really want. They won't think I'm real, and that's half the battle. Half the fun, too!" Fox cracked a vulpine grin. "But what about that kid you're supposed to pick up? He could probably see me even if I shield from him, unless I made a point of not coming around while he's with you. That could be fun, too. I could make it a game. You sure you want me to stay hidden?"

  Tannim paused a moment before saying anything, thinking hard. It could be useful to have Fox appear to Joe—could it cause problems as well?

  "I don't know," he said finally. "Just do me a favor and stay out of sight until I get a feel for the situation, all right?" It was useless to ask Fox to just go away; there wasn't a chance in the world that he would if he thought Tannim was going to be doing anything really interesting. Fox had more curiosity than a zoo of raccoons, and every resource imaginable to indulge that curiosity. There was no place here, Underhill, or in any plane known to Tannim, that the charming and often annoying fox could not go. He was not a powerful spirit, as power was measured among such beings, but what he had, he used cleverly.

  Fox sighed and shrugged his leather-clad shoulders. "I 'spose so," he said with some reluctance. "It won't be as much fun, but I 'spose so. Hey, how 'bout some tunes?"

  Glad for something to distract his uninvited passenger, Tannim fumbled for the still-unfamiliar controls of the CD player in the dashboard. Not exactly stock equipment for a '69 Mach I, but then, neither were the in-dash radar-detector, the cassette player, the CB, the police-repeater scanner. Tannim had never been one to let authenticity get in the way of gadgetry.

  Even if he had been, this CD player, gift of a friend, would still have become the crown jewel in his dashboard.

  Donal, my friend, I never jack up the volume without honoring your memory. Miss you, pointy-ears.

  He'd forgotten what he'd left in the player, but the first bars told him. Icehouse. "Great Southern Land." Appropriate. Fox certainly appreciated it; he slouched down in his seat with every appearance of pleasure, propped his black fox-feet on the dash, and surveyed the rolling hills beyond the window. An Australian "digger" hat appeared from nowhere to cover Fox's head.

  "So, where are we going?" the kitsune asked innocently. "For that matter, where are we?"

  "Oklahoma," Tannim said in answer to both questions. Fox's brow wrinkled in puzzlement.

  "Isn't it supposed to be—like—flat?" he asked. "No trees? Covered in dust?"

  Since that was what virtually everyone said, Tannim only sighed. Fox wasn't stupid; he had perfectly good eyes. "If you want flat and treeless, I'll take you to West Texas," he said. "Not everything's the way you see it in the movies. Most things about Oklahoma are filmed out in California anyway." He had no idea if that was really true or not, but it probably was.

  "Except UHF," Fox reminded him with glee. "Supplies!"

  Trust a Japanese kitsune to remember an obscure Asian joke from a Weird Al Yankovic film, Tannim thought, grinning in spite of himself. "Okay, you're one up on me. How about sitting back and enjoying the ride while I get us through Tulsa rush hour?"

  "Tulsa rush hour? Both cars and a mule?"

  Tannim smirked. "Just you wait, silly fox."

  * * *

  They survived rush hour, although Tannim had never been able to get used to the schizophrenic traffic patterns even when he still lived here. The mix of granny drivers too timid to merge, urban cowboys determined to prove their macho behind the wheel of their pickups, guys who'd stopped off for "one for the road" before heading home after work, midwest Yuppies in Range Rovers, and people who just plain shouldn't have been allowed in the driver's seat all made for some white-knuckle maneuvering. By the time they escaped the stream of traffic headed out of the city toward Broken Arrow and outlying bedroom communities, Tannim's tangled hair was sweat-damp and he had to force the muscles in his hands to relax.

  No way am I going to go through this on the way back. I'll wait until after dark and start the drive at night. I'm a racecar driver, I don't need commuter craziness. It's too damned dangerous.

  Fox wasn't the least bit perturbed, which was aggravating. Then again, if there was an accident, Fox wouldn't have to stick around and suffer the consequences of someone else's stupid driving. I've been in fights that were more relaxing.

  Never mind. The last of it was behind him now. In a few more minutes, he'd have an entirely new set of problems to worry about.

  "Don't try to talk to me when my folks are around, okay?" he said to Fox. "Don't try to crack me up, don't make faces at me, don't play practical jokes. Don't try to distract me. Whatever you think about doing while they're there, don't."

  "Would I do that to you?" Fox replied, all injured innocence.

  "Yes," Tannim said shortly, and left it at that.

  Fox pouted. Tannim ignored it.

  Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. Look what I brought home. Oh God, all I need now is for Chinthliss to show up.

  He resolutely put the thought away, because sometimes simply thinking about Chinthliss would conjure him up.

  No. I do not need that.

  Finally, with a mixture of anticipation and dread, he turned down a county section-line road running between two windbreaks of trees. Beyon
d the trees were fields that hadn't seen the touch of a plow in decades, dotted with the fat brown backs of grazing cattle. The road itself was bumpy and pitted; they didn't exactly pave roads out in the county, they just laid asphalt over what ruts and holes were already there, and hoped it wouldn't wash out too soon. As long as it stayed flat enough that VW-swallowing valleys didn't form, it would usually do.

  He crossed two more section-line roads, ignoring the rough ride. Not a lot of money in the county budget for fixing these roads. Well heck, a few years ago they hadn't even been paved, just graveled, and wasn't that hell to drive on? The blackened remains of an old barn loomed up on his right out of a sea of uncut grass, and he averted his eyes. That, if anywhere, was the place where his current odyssey had begun, in the ruins of that barn, and his budding "business" of restoring cars. If the barn hadn't burned, would he be the person he was now?

  Rhetorical question. One that did not need answering. One thing led to another, and if one path was not taken, who was to say that another would not have brought him to the same end?

  One more section-line road, and then a bright red, oversized mailbox with "Drake" in reflective letters on the side, and "RT 4 Box 451" appeared on the left. It was his father's little surprise for mailbox-bashers; it was really two mailboxes, a smaller one inside a larger, with a layer of concrete poured between them. Anyone who hit that with a bat was going to regret it, and anyone who tried to run it over with a truck was going to be a very unhappy camper. Depending on whether they were driving a tall truck or a short one, it would end up in their radiator or in their laps.

  He signaled, and turned into the gravel drive. There were changes evident immediately.

  He replaced the fences! That was an expensive proposition, especially since the post-and-barbed-wire had all been replaced with welded pipe. He must've dug out my old welding rig—I didn't know he knew how to weld! Behind the fences, instead of cattle, horses looked at him with interest, while foals sparred with each other.

  The house looked a little more prosperous, too. And—

  I don't believe it. I do not believe it. He put in a satellite dish!

  The mesh dish presided over a front yard patrolled by guinea hens, birds which were noisy as a Lollapalooza tour, but the only sure-fire means of getting rid of ticks without spraying. Tannim pulled up in front of the garage, beside a pair of shiny aluminum four-horse trailers.

  Altogether it looked as if the quarter-horse business was doing well.

  "Vanish," he growled out of the corner of his mouth, as the front door opened and two middle-aged, slim people in jeans and work shirts came out to greet him.

  Fox vanished, eyes wide, obeying the warning in Tannim's voice. Parents. Now things were going to get scary.

  * * *

  Tannim had always known that his father loved techie-toys as much as Tannim did. He just hadn't realized that Trevor Drake knew as much about techie-toys as his son did.

  ". . . so we've got a LAN hooking up the office, the stable, and the kitchen, since your mom has to access the database if we get a call from a customer and I'm out in the fields," Dad said, as Tannim's head spun under the burden of all the computer neepery. "We're using dBase for our data, and I've got a record not only of full pedigrees but everything I've ever done with every field. Got a plat of the property in a CAD program, can keep track of where every buried line and fencepost is to the tenth of an inch." Trevor's voice filled with pride. "We're doing as much without spraying and chemicals as we can, and we let the horses free-range all year except for foaling and really bad storms. The file-server's a 486 with a 2-gig read-write optical drive—it's in the closet in your old room so don't kick it or drop something on it."

  There was no doubt that Trevor was Tannim's father; the two had the same slim build, although Trevor's hair was lighter as well as laced with gray and cut as short as a Marine's. Their faces had some superficial similarities in the shape of the jaw and the high cheekbones; Trevor's was tanned to a leathery toughness by years in the fields in all weathers. But there the resemblance ceased; Trevor was as muscular as a body-builder from all those years of hauling hay and wrestling calves, and if he looked like anyone, it was Will Rogers. For all his strength, Tannim really didn't look as if he could defend himself in a fight against a wily garden hose, and he looked more as if he belonged on MTV than behind the wheel of sophisticated racers. Unlike his father's buzz-cut, he'd had his hair styled short in front and on top, but let it grow long in the back, where it formed a tangle of unruly curls. That changed due to the couple of months he usually went between haircuts, though. He was expecting to hear something about the length of his hair, but so far the only comment had been from his mother, a compliment on the style. Peace flag up and accepted.

  Trevor cocked an eyebrow at his son, a signal that Tannim knew meant he was waiting for a reply.

  "It's very cool, Dad," Tannim replied dazedly. "I didn't know you'd been doing all this—"

  What he was thinking was, Where did he get the cash? The beef market hasn't exactly been booming. Even if he liquidated the whole herd, he wouldn't have had enough for all those horses, let alone computers, software, satellite dishes, renovations. . . . There were a number of ways he could think of where his father could have gotten a bankroll, but none of them were on the Light Side of the Force, so to speak. It worried him. If I'd known he really wanted all of this so badly, I could have found a way to make it happen, somehow.

  "Well, I wouldn't have been able to, if it hadn't been for that boss of yours," Trevor Drake said, with a certain fond satisfaction. "You signed on with a good firm, there. Remember when you had that pile-up a couple of years ago that landed you in the hospital, and he sent you off for some rest?"

  When that mess with the Unseleighe against the Underhill side of Fairgrove happened, and I creamed my knee the first time, yeah. He nodded cautiously. Dad had been talking about wanting to convert to quarter horses, but he didn't have the bread. A certain suspicion dawned, hardening into certainty when he dredged up a vague memory of drugged hallucinations while healing. Yeah, he'd been babbling something in a dream about his parents' money troubles, how he was worried about who'd take care of them if something happened to him, and how it would take a big load off his mind if only he could do something about it.

  "You wouldn't believe how well he has you insured," Dad continued. Tannim nodded cautiously again. "Turns out he's got a basic load of policies on you, with us as beneficiaries on some of 'em. And when you tore up your knee, once the fuss all died down, they sent us a check. A really big check. I thought it was a mistake, so I called Fairgrove, but your Mister Silver said no, it was right, and I was supposed to keep the money, and then he asked if the herd was still for sale. Paid me top dollar for 'em. Between that and the insurance money, we had enough for some top stock and all the rest of this."

  That pointy-eared— Tannim bent down to adjust his pant-cuff as an excuse to keep his father from seeing his face flush. He throttled his reactions and simply shook his head, expressing mild appreciation of "Mister Silver's" generosity. Actually, he wasn't quite sure how to feel. Not that he wasn't pleased that his folks had been taken care of, but—

  It felt like a cheat.

  You've got no right to feel that way, he scolded himself, as his father led the way to his old room and showed him where the file server lurked in the back of the closet, humming to itself. Dad's worked hard all his life. He earned all this, it wasn't just given to him! Yeah, Keighvin was making sure that Mom and Dad were going to be okay. That's the way he operates. No matter how modern he acts on the surface, underneath it all he's still a medieval feudal lord, and medieval feudal lords take care of their people and the relatives of their people. It comes with the territory.

  Put that way, he felt a little better about it all. But it would have been nice if Keighvin had asked first.

  Medieval feudal lords don't ask, they dictate. It's just—dammit, he took it all out of my hands, and they're my
parents! I thought I was doing all right by them, and then Keighvin comes in and trumps me! I feel like he took me right out of the loop, and he eavesdropped on my dreams to do it. I suppose I ought to be grateful he didn't send them a bag of gold or something.

  "It was pretty funny, son—Mister Silver had the check for the cattle sent over in a Wells Fargo bag marked `gold bullion.' I thought I was gonna bust a gut laughing!"

  That does it. Silverhair Stew when I get back to Georgia.

  "When you're ready, come on down to the stables," his dad was saying while Tannim brooded over the file server as if it was personally responsible for all this. "I've got some stuff down there that I have to take care of right now, and a lot more I can't wait to show you."

  "Great—" Tannim began, but his Dad was already gone.

  He turned around slowly, and shut the door. The Ferrari poster he'd hung on the back of the door when he was ten was still there; so were all the models he'd built, although he had never arranged them quite so neatly on the shelves. And he didn't remember all those shelves being there, either.

  The plain wooden desk was empty, except for a clean blotter, a phone, and a single pen next to a cube of notepaper. It had never been that empty when he'd lived here, not even on the rare occasions that he'd actually cleaned the room. It was always piled with car magazines, comics, rock rags, books about art, and paperback science fiction books. His autographed picture of Richard Petty had been neatly framed and now hung right over the desk, but the holes where he'd thumbtacked it to the wall still showed near the edge of the mat. The drawers of the desk and the matching bureau beside it were empty, but all of his paperbacks were in a new bookcase on the other side of the desk, with a set of magazine-holders taking care of the magazines. There was a metal Route 66 sign hanging on the wall opposite the Petty photo, and his tattered Rush 2112 banner.