Among Others by Jo Walton

Author:Jo Walton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9781429991520
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

SUNDAY 16TH DECEMBER 1979

As long as I don’t think about them being puppets, I can have a really good time with them. Mostly yesterday I didn’t think about it at all. The whole thing with what I’d done, with the magic, just wasn’t in my mind, and I could act as if they were perfectly naturally part of my karass, both of them.

But today, thinking about it, of course I can’t help thinking about that.

When we were young, Auntie Lillian once bought us a doll that could really talk. Her name was Rosebud, and she was just the kind of doll little girls are supposed to want. Her eyes closed when you laid her down, and opened when you picked her up. She had a bland pretty face with no personality and a white dress covered in a rosebud pattern. She had pink shoes that slipped on and off and golden hair that you could really comb. She also had a string in her chest, and when you pulled it she spoke. She could say two things. “Hello, my name is Rosebud,” and “Let’s play schoo-ul!” If you pulled the string slowly, she’d say them in a deeper voice, and if you pulled it really fast, she’d squeak.

The problem with Rosebud and her really talking was that our other dolls could pretend talk, and that was better. Our collection of dolls (who mostly had some disadvantage like one arm or leg, or were animals rather than being humanoid) had epic adventures surviving after nuclear wars or rescuing dragons from evil princesses. Battered old Pippa, with her one arm and her ragged hair (Mor cut it when she was disguising herself as a soldier) could stand there vowing defiance and revenge against the evil Dog Overlord (the toy dog had a moustache which could be twirled, so he often got the bad-guy parts) and Rosebud couldn’t compete when all she could say was “Let’s play schoo-ul.”

I don’t want a karass like Rosebud.

I mean I don’t want a karass like Pippa and Dog and Jr. and the others either, so this isn’t a very good analogy. (I do not miss my toys. I wouldn’t play with them anyway. I am fifteen. I miss my childhood.) Jr. was a plastic boy on a motorbike, one of our few human male toys. His name came from Ward Moore’s “Lot.” I thought it daring and American to have an odd name like that with no vowels. We pronounced it Jirr. I was mortified for whole minutes when I found out what it really meant.

When Hugh mentioned that Wim had done a session on Delany, my first thought, my very first thought, though I know I didn’t write this down yesterday but that’s because I was ashamed, was that I could do a magic to make that not have happened yet. I could do a magic that would mean he’d do it so I could be there for it. I didn’t do the magic, or even really mean to, but I thought it.

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