PART 2: Shishya
Chapter 17: A Geek Gets a Date
It was 6:57pm on Monday, and I was in front of Kaitlyn’s apartment, one of those 2-story deals where each unit is a narrow slice of a single large building. Relentless time was pushing me forward as nervousness held me back from reaching her front door. I don’t know quite how, but I managed to make it up the sidewalk before seven and knocked.
She must have been waiting right near the door, because it opened shortly.
She. Was. Stunning.
I don’t mean to say that she’d overdressed for the event, embarrassing the two of us. The Blu Pig is a local blues bar and restaurant, kind of a local take on The House of Blues chain restaurants they have in the big cities, so she was in a venue-appropriate dressy-casual outfit, like me; she just wore it a whole lot better than I did.
I’m no clothes horse, but I’m no slob, either. My idea of date clothes is a pair of my newest sand-colored cargo pants, ones without frayed cuffs, ironed for the occasion and with most of the pockets left empty. To that I’d added a nice shirt, brown socks instead of white, and a pair of leather shoes instead of the Columbia sneakers I normally wore. I was trim and neat, but the fashion snobs would have called it a disaster anyway. Eff ‘em. This was me, and I wasn’t going to start my relationship with Kaitlyn with a lie, presenting myself as something I was not.
Kaitlyn wore makeup tonight, which came as an odd shock. It took me a second to realize why: I’d met her hiking out in the desert, so naturally she wasn’t wearing any then. I suppose this past weekend set the Kaitlyn baseline for me, so that this was now above-and-beyond from that perspective. She didn’t wear much, just a beautiful saturated light pink shade on her slender but kissable lips and a bit of darkening around the eyes. Maybe she’d artfully done more that I didn’t notice, but mainly she looked like… Kaitlyn squared, I decided.
“By Ritchie and Turing, you are stunning, Kaitlyn!” I exclaimed, not an ounce of insincerity in my delivery.
She blushed, looked down and to the left, and then raised her eyes back to me with a wonderful smile. “You’re going to have to explain that oath to me, Davie.”
“Gladly, but let’s save it for the restaurant.”
“I’ll hold you to it,” she said with a mock-stern lift to her eyebrow, a compression of her lips. “I was half expecting you to show up at my doorstep tonight riding your bike.”
I laughed. “Perfect! Kaitlyn, my dear, will you go out with me on a date on a tandem bike?”
She laughed and said, “Sure, sounds fun, but don’t you think we should see how this one goes before you schedule the next one?”
I grinned right back, saying, “I’m no fool. I’m going to keep you on the line as long as I can manage it.”
She blushed and looked down again, embarrassed at the implicit praise.
We walked down the front sidewalk to my ride, a well-maintained low-mileage 1984 Toyota Land Cruiser FJ45, kitted out for rock crawling, painted sand brown. I opened the passenger door for Kaitlyn, closed it behind her, and sprung quickly around to my side, my steps suddenly quite light.
As we drove the short distance to the restaurant — everything’s a short distance in Moab — Kaitlyn said loudly over my machine’s noise, “If you’d asked me to guess what you drove, I’d have failed.”
“Yeah, it’s an unusual beast, but it suits me. I rarely drive — I put only about 2000 miles onto mi burro each year — but I need something that fills in for all of my needs when I do have to drive. This kind of splits the difference between a Jeep and a pickup truck, so there’s not much I can’t do between it and the bike.”
“Your…burro‽” she chortled.
“¡Ah, si señora!” I replied. “My little beast of burden.”
“And a Spanish speaker, too!” she cooed.
“It’s kind of hard to avoid picking up a little bit of it around here,” I deflected modestly.
“You know, now that I think about it, it does suit you, mi ranchero guapo!”
I had to think about that one for a bit, drawing on my faded memories of restaurant menus and the movie ¡Three Amigos!, but I translated it well enough to give a coherent reply, “Well, mi mujer bonita, it’s only a tiny ranch, a few acres, but mi burro doesn’t eat much, so…”
She snorted laughing, probably thinking about my FJ idly grazing the desert, waiting for me to put her back to work again for a little while.
At the restaurant, we got seated and ordered, then Kaitlyn prompted me, “So, you were going to tell me about Ritchie and Turing.”
“Ah yes,” I said, leaning back and putting my fingertips together, suddenly much more comfortable now in lecture mode, on familiar ground.
“Dennis Ritchie was one of the greatest software developers of the modern computing age, creator of one of the most foundational pieces of technology of all time and co-creator of another, the two underpinning a large amount of the tech you still use every day: the C programming language and the Unix operating system. Both are in your phone there, right now, Kaitlyn, yet they started out powering room-dominating multi-user computers in the early 1970s!”
“Alan Turing worked out a lot of the key math behind computer hardware and the software that runs on it, and he did a lot of it before the first electronic computers had even been built! Then he refined his ideas by helping to build one of those first computers in secret for the British government during World War II, using it to break German communication ciphers. That project is probably one of the main reasons the Allies won the war.”
“There’s an interesting tie between those two, even though they never met: the Association for Computing Machinery bestows the Turing Award each year, named after the pioneering computer scientist, and Dennis Ritchie won it along with the co-creator of Unix, Ken Thompson. The award is the closest thing to the Nobel Prize that we have in computing.”
She thought about that for a bit, then replied, “You speak of them with reverence, as if they were demigods.”
“I suppose they were, in terms of their effect on the world,” I mused, “but mainly I use their names that way because they’re both gone now, having left the world much better than they’d found it. I like to think of them hovering around my world in spirit form, guiding forward progress now through other hands. It’s just a fanciful notion, not serious, but…well, I suppose it just feels more positive to me to swear oaths by dead people whose work I actually know, use, and trust, rather than some ancient Middle Eastern holy man.”
“If I have anything like a true deity, it is Gaia, which is just a fancy name for Earth, which means I’m merely swearing by the world, which is dead trivial to prove the existence of, unlike the popular deities. Prove that the world doesn’t exist!” leveling that challenge at no one in particular.
Kaitlyn laughed.
“Still, I don’t swear by Gaia often. I take my love of the natural world too seriously to do that casually.” I took a breath, unwinding from my little sermon. “So that’s my quasi-religion. How about yours?”
“None at all,” she said. “No sky-beards for me,” she said quite definitely. “Not even dead computer geeks,” she needled, to see if I’d rise to the bait.
I just grinned. “Don’t worry, my saints aren’t so holy that I can’t make fun of them. One of my favorite photographs is the one of Einstein sticking his tongue out. I had a poster of that one on my bedroom wall as a kid.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I think I’ve seen that photo before!”
“I want my saints to be humans first, great people next,” I summarized.
“That sounds nice, but I think I’ll stay secular,” she returned. “I just don’t see any room for the mystical in the world. Every time we think we’ve got a mystery we can’t explain, science soon comes along and explains it. We blast one mystery to pieces, then the mystery-mongers claim we now have fifty new small mysteries, making each little unexplained fragment into a new Great Mystery. Then we blow one of those to dust and now there are a thousand tiny mysteries for them to obsess over.”
“Too right,” I agreed.
“The thing I don’t get, though, and it’s really been bugging me today,” she began, getting a bit squinchy-faced, “is how that squares with what we did over the past few days?”
“Ah, a crisis of non-faith, I see,” I joked, with a broad smile.
She stuck her tongue out at me. Cutely! Does this girl do anything that isn’t cute?
“I think there is a scientific explanation for what I’m choosing to call magic right now. It’s certainly tied to nature, so ‘super-natural’ would literally be an incorrect description. You’ve heard the term ‘natural history,’ usually in connection with dinosaur museums and such, but the term goes back to the dawn of modern science in the European Enlightenment era, where it basically meant any scientific study of nature from astronomy to microbiology. I think what we’re doing now with magic is roughly on par with those early tentative steps into a scientific worldview.
“I still call it magic because I haven’t tried to systematically understand it yet, and because the practices and effects of it match pretty well with what appears in folklore as ‘magic.’ It’s just a label for me, and it works fine for my purposes.
“I haven’t tried to nail down the principles of magic in a scientific fashion because I’m more of an applied engineering type, not a scientist. I know how to do science, but I’d rather just use science to accomplish real-world effects, not push back its theoretical boundaries and document it on increasingly finer scales. I can see myself in a lab with a note-filled comp book in front of me on the desk and an equation-filled chalkboard on the wall behind me, but I’d be setting aside my first loves to go down that path.”
She looked thoughtful, then nodded. “How do you reconcile this need for nudity with the stories of historical mages? I can’t say I’ve read any stories about naked sorcerers. Gandalf definitely had the robe; known for it, in fact!”
I grinned appreciatively. This girl…so in tune with my strange sense of humor. “I’ve thought a lot about it, and I think there are a bunch of forks to the answer.
“First, our modern conceptions of proper clothing arose quite recently on the time scale you have to use to think about magic properly. I think there have been humans practicing magic as long as there have been humans, hundreds of thousands of years. On that scale, clothing didn’t even appear until the last tenth or so of the story. Imagine a novel where all the characters are running around naked through most of the book, then in the last few chapters one goes, ‘Hey, shouldn’t we put on these bearskins or something?’ and another says, ‘Look, I just invented the needle! Let’s sew some of it together into what I shall now call clothes!’ Through most of the final chapters, only the richest characters have more than one outfit to their name, and those with three or more complete outfits were aristocrats or royalty. Then they all chase off to the book’s conclusion and don’t come up with the top hat until the last page, and then Air Jordans in the last paragraph.”
Kaitlyn laughed at my Cliff’s Notes take on humanity.
“Second, written history only goes back something like six thousand years. We call everything before that pre-history, which means we have to resort to other types of evidence to know what was going on back then. We can dig up prehistoric bones and tell each other stories about them and argue over who’s telling the most plausible story — this is called paleoanthropology — but we’re not going to find a book on magic older than six thousand years. And of those we do find, they’re not necessarily going to be by or even about actual practitioners. Just take Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth: they’re not what I’m now calling mages; they’re figures of fright, caricatures to push the story along, feeding the audience’s preconceptions.
“But, that brings me to my third point. If you look into the witching traditions, you do find accounts of witch covens dancing naked under the moon around fires and such. I suspect a lot of those stories were written by sexually frustrated old men who were angry about powerful women who chose not to get married to some man, but I also suspect those stories are based on a kernel of truth. I believe there were some individual witches and covens who managed to tap into the old magic by throwing off their robes, getting themselves into something like the trance states we used this weekend, and making things happen that they couldn’t duplicate back at home when wearing clothes so as not to frighten the villagers into wondering if witches are flammable.”
I took a sip of my drink and launched into my conclusion. “Finally, we have the crossing lines of development. The development of clothing ran in parallel with all of the other technological advances in human history: agriculture, written language, indoor plumbing, proper medicine, the printing press, rocketry, computers, and on and on. But we have an inverse curve, where magic is clearly disappearing from the world, or at least evolving into fantasy. Homer wrote The Odyssey for an audience who believed that it was a true tale about the adventures of an historical Odysseus. Today, the most broadly subscribed magical literary tradition is either Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings, and the only ones truly taking either one seriously are high on Pop Rocks or shrooms, respectively.
“It is my belief that these are not two separate curves, that they’re just inverted measures of the same thing: magic falls because of tech, not independently of it. It’s easy to prove that tech stops magic. The only daring bit of that statement is my belief that it’s truly a simple inverse relationship with only one independent variable.”
Kaitlyn correctly saw that I’d finished, so she said, “Let me see if I’ve got this straight: it’s your hypothesis that the reason we don’t have stories about nude mages is that most of it happened pre-historically, and in the rare cases where it did manage to get into the historical record, the historians misinterpreted the reasons, as with the dancing witches or with casual nudity back in the days when stripping off could have been seen simply as sensible treatment of a precious garment? Then as use of clothing rose, magic fell, so the opportunities for correct historical accounts also fell to near-zero.”
“That’s pretty much it, yes,” I agreed.
“Well,” she said, “that all seems to make sense.” She thought a bit, then asked, “But don’t your curves say that magic is doomed to be increasingly suppressed as long as technology rises?”
“Ah,” I replied, “you’re right if all you take into account is those two forces: rising technology and its effect on natural magic, which tech suppresses. There’s a new factor coming into the system in recent decades, though: the power and ubiquity of technology has gone so high that we’re about to create the world’s first truly leisure class not involving the enslavement of other people. That’s largely thanks to computers, by the way. I suspect we’re eventually going to get to a point where most people won’t have to work, if they don’t want to, but for now, what we have is a world where a large number of people can take weeks off from work without major hardship to their livelihood, and where they can demand that the environment be protected so that they can go out and enjoy it in that leisure time.”
She nodded, and I took a sip of my drink, then was off again.
“The thing is, that’s created a world where for the first time in a very long time, you have people like me who have a chance to get out there in nature and re-discover magic, because there’s one more element to the recipe: liberty, in the broad sense. That is, both freedom-to and freedom-from. At no other time in history have large numbers of people had the ability to do what they like, up to the point where their choices infringe another’s equal measure of liberty, while also having the freedom from assorted forms of oppression that limit choices they can make that wouldn’t infringe on others’ liberties at all.
“The first clothing was probably animal pelts and leaves and such in the hunter-gatherer societies. Then humanity invented agriculture, domesticated flax, invented weaving, and then developed togas, all so we could then invent Vera Wang.”
Kaitlyn smiled at my latest Cliff’s Notes masterpiece.
“The thing is,” I resumed, getting serious again, “through most of that developmental history, humans lacked one or both forms of liberty, without which they simply could not go out and rediscover magic. If you’d tried what we just did yesterday in the Bronze Age, we’d have had to sacrifice time in the fields, so we might not have had enough food to make it through the winter. If we’d tried it in the European Dark Ages, we’d have been burned at the stake if caught. During the Industrial Revolution, rising prosperity became directly tied to propriety: you didn’t get the good jobs if you weren’t a member of the right church, wear the right costumes, and spend your time in the right societies; since being outcast was a good predictor of starvation, our lineal ancestors generally didn’t make such bad choices. There may have been a few who did, but they’d end up like your childless old umpty-grand-uncle Frank The Ostracised.”
Kaitlyn looked a little sad at this point. Poor Frank.
“Do you know where the term ‘nonconformist’ comes from?” I asked.
She clearly thought I’d gone off on a wild tangent, but she answered gamely, “No idea. Lay it on me, guru.”
“It was coined in the mid–1600s during one of the religious schisms between the Church of England and broader Protestantism to refer to people who were unwilling to accept the rule of the state church, preferring some other Christian sect. You could be killed back then for being a nonconformist, because it was considered a positive danger to society. Now it just means you might be the sort to wear purple velvet pants.”
She grinned at that.
“But you see, that’s not just a shift in the use of language, because we don’t have a truly equivalent modern term to use in its place. This reflects a huge advance in social liberty. We couldn’t have gone out to the Enlightenment Age English countryside, stripped to our birthday suits, fallen into trances, and run up and down the rills and dells pulling discarded junk out of the ground. That group of guys you ran into? Their analogues of the time would probably have been farmers, their daily-use farming implements would have been close cousins to military pole arms, and the farmers would be highly skilled in the use of their tools. There’s a pretty good chance we wouldn’t have made it out of the area alive if we’d translated our past weekend’s activities to that time and place, and if we did get away, we’d have been hunted down for sure.”
She shuddered. “Now you’re making me worry that those three will come looking for us.”
“Maybe,” I admitted, “but what are they going to do? They can’t level charges of witchcraft at us any more; no one will believe that. If they complain that we were naked, well, we were on BLM land; there is no federal law against simple nudity. They could have called the county sheriff on us, who can enforce the laws of the State of Utah even on Federal land, but one of the sheriff’s deputies would have to catch us in the act, otherwise it’s just he said/she said, no actual proof. If they try to go vigilante on us, I think we can handle most assaults.
“The chance of that is pretty small. The world is getting more peaceful all the time, more prosperous, healthier, safer. It’s well-documented in Stephen Pinker’s book, ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature.’ Those three horny guys simply aren’t very likely, statistically speaking, to do something really bad to us. If they did, it would be an outlier on the general social curve we’re riding.
“You can find plenty of bad news on TV, on AM radio, in newspapers, and on the Internet, but realize that all of these news outlets make their money by attracting eyeballs, hoping they watch the associated ads. They’d literally starve themselves if they reported, ‘Well, today’s better than yesterday, and tomorrow’s likely to be better still. Peace out.’ That might make for some happy viewers and readers once, maybe twice, but they’d eventually lose the audience’s attention to boredom. No audience equals no ad sales equals jobless reporters.
“These news outlets want you to be saying to yourself, ‘What terrible thing will there be today for me to worry about?’ so that you will keep coming back to them for news. They expend lots of effort to find that latest terrible thing. When they get desperate for news stories, reporters have been known to weave stories out of the thinnest threads. The very fact that they call them ‘stories’ should make you think: these are mostly English majors, and they talk about ‘fitting the narrative’ and such. They’re no strangers to fiction writing.”
She looked thoughtful, then said, “You’ve clearly given this a lot of thought, and yet you claim not to have tried making this into a science. You still call it magic. Why?”
“To me, real science is backed by laws, equations, repeatable experiments. But most importantly, it has to make testable predictions. When I go out into the desert, I’m often not even sure exactly what to try next. I may have some idea of the effect I want, and I might have some ideas on ways to achieve it, but I’ve never said anything like, ‘Well, I did experiments A, B, and C, and they gave me the data I used to derive equation D, which if it models nature properly says that I should be able to do E, and I can test that by checking condition F.’ That’s science, and I’m nowhere near that point.”
She was nodding. Then a look of determination came across her face, and she said, “Challenge accepted. I’ve got a BS, and my hard science background hasn’t been well utilized in my office job. I think I need to get some more experience actually doing magic before I start trying to nail down the fundamentals of scientific magic, but it sounds like a worthy mission.”
I enthused, “Oh, I’m so happy to hear you say that! Someone needs to do it, and as I said, I’m not really temperamentally suited to the work. What I am suited to is helping you on your journey down that path, taking care of the practical applications side of things. You can be the mad Doctor, and I’ll be your Igor, building the apparatus and getting struck by lightning occasionally For Science!” I pronounced the last with my best 1950s documentary film narrator’s voice.
She laughed. “You’re going to make me do this Mad Doctor bit without even a lab coat on, aren’t you?”
“That’s right,” I grinned. “I shall call you the Denuded Doctor.”
“Only if you are Igor the Uncovered,” returning it with spin.
“Okay,” I agreed with a smirk.
Getting serious, I said, “You can’t even carry a pencil and comp book with you into the field to collect data, because that’s also technology. We’ll have to set up a data logging station outside the area of the experiment where one of us sits taking notes while the other shouts results to the other or something. That’s another reason I haven’t tried to put all of this on a sound scientific footing: the longer the iteration cycle, the slower the progress. Also, I had no lab partner.”
She picked up her drink and held it aloft, saying, “Well, then, here’s to having a long time together to collaborate!”
I clinked my glass to hers with a broad smile, drank, and proposed a new toast, “To scientific magic!”
“To scientific magic!” she responded, and we drank again.
“So, a BS degree?” I began. “You must be at least 22, then.”
“Twenty-four, actually. How about you?”
“Twenty-nine metric, but in imperial units I’m twenty-eight.” I couldn’t resist.
Kaitlyn laughed. “And the rest? Who was Devindra Bhat, back in that past life?”
“I got a master’s in computer science and was hired straight out of university by a local outsourcing firm. While working there, I got recruited by the big software house in Salt Lake that we had a contract with at the time. I was kind of trapped and lost up there, but I stuck with it long enough to get naturalized so I wouldn’t get bounced back to India when my work visa terminated. I’d vacationed down here once, and I decided I’d happily take a big pay cut to come live down here. Some would count a status cut as part of the move, too, from big-company software development to small-town computer service, but the lifestyle change makes it a net improvement to me.”
Kaitlyn was beaming at the last part. “I love this area, too! It’s why I never left for school, and why I took a degree that would let me get a job here. Ever thought about getting back into software development?”
“Maybe,” I answered. “There’s a lot you can do in the field from anywhere because of the nature of the work, but the main thing I lack is a project. I write small bits of software for myself still, but I just haven’t come up with something big enough to start my own company on. I keep plenty busy outside of work doing other things.”
Kaitlyn considered that, then ventured, “I think I begin to see how you square all of this with your occupation and why you aren’t a raging technophobe.” I nodded to let her know I was eager to hear this hypothesis. “You see no conflict between magic and computing. You don’t try to magic your computers into working correctly, and you don’t bring computers into the canyons. I saw that much this weekend: not even a retro calculator watch.”
“All correct so far,” I replied. “Do go on, shishya.”
“When it’s time to compute, you put the cargo pants on and get nerdy. When it’s time to do magic, you leave tech behind and strip. They’re just two aspects of your life, and you can’t push them any closer together, but that’s not a problem any more than…” she struggled for an analogy, “…the fact that I like both strawberry ice cream and grilled cheese sandwiches. I will not be ordering grilled cheese à la mode for dessert tonight, nor on any other night, but that’s no proof that there is a conflict in liking both.”
“Precisely,” I agreed. “Computer work pays me well enough that I have the leisure time to take my bike and camping gear out to the hills about as much as I want, and computers also make society a better place, all things considered, one where I can choose to do that without too much social hassle. Look at me: in any other age, I simply couldn’t be here, a brown guy from halfway around the world, in this restaurant, dating someone like you.”
I could tell she liked that idea, that we were special, for this time and place only.
“I’m falling for you, Kaitlyn.”
It was her turn to look stunned. “You’re moving a bit fast for me, there, Davie.”
“I’m sorry, Kaitlyn, but you’ve done nothing but impress me. It is of course possible that this relationship will fall apart, but so far, you’re the girl of my dreams,” I said with utter sincerity.
We stared into each other’s eyes for approximately forever, then she scooched her chair around the corner of the small table and kissed me, hard. A span of hormone-induced amnesia followed.
My recollection returns sometime around the middle of dessert, tiramisù with jasmine tea. Love has many forms. Do I love tiramisù more than Kaitlyn? It’s a tough choice tonight, but Kaitlyn’s on the rise. Can I have both? I hope so.
“Kaitlyn, I realize that I don’t even know your last name yet,” I admitted.
“Gutierrez.”
I looked at her a bit quizzically, focusing on her light green eyes and red hair.
“Irish and Mexican,” she explained, “half and half. That wasn’t actually a tan you saw on me yesterday,” she said, grinning at my abstracted expression.
Shortly after that bomblet landed on my gourd, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen any tan lines on her these past few days, either. While I hadn’t exactly been staring, I absolutely was looking whenever I could get away with it. (And a few times when I didn’t get away with it, too!) I further realized that she was shy enough that nude sunbathing wasn’t likely one of her hobbies. That, the office job, and the strong SPF 50 sunblock explained her light, even outer dusting of cocoa powder.
I think I must have blushed, strongly enough that she could see it even on my dusky cheeks, because she grinned, knowing just where my mind had gone.
“Well, now that I know what name to put it under, any chance of me getting your phone number?” We exchanged contact details.
She took the initiative at this point, doubtless knowing I was likely to push too fast, too hard if she let me take the reins. “I had a lovely time tonight, Davie. I’d really like to do it again, but I’ll be busy the rest of the week.”
“Me, too,” I replied, “but I’d like you to join me back out in the canyons again this weekend, Kaitlyn. I’m going to finish that cleanup project and then get back to my actual project, hopefully with your help.”
She smiled a bit and looked down, saying quietly, “I’d like that, too, Davie.”
“Do you have a mountain bike?” She looked back up and shook her head ‘no.’ “Tell you what, how about you meet me at Two Rivers Cycles on Main next Saturday morning, and we’ll go shopping for what you’ll ride out to the canyon. I’ll help you find something solid that’ll get you out there and back without letting them turn you upside down and shake you like a tourist until all your money falls out.”
When she didn’t jump eagerly at my offer, I probed, “When was the last time you rode a bike? I mean really rode for distance?”
“Nailed it, me boyo. I don’t think I’ve ridden a bike since I was twelve or so,” she admitted.
“That’s fine, I’ll take it easy on you. We’ll go out to the same place, but we’ll take it in nice, easy stages. I know you’re pretty fit, but trail riding for any distance is hard work. I’ll carry most of the gear, because the weight makes it all a lot harder, and I don’t want you falling over and crashing.”
She looked a smidge offended at this. I waved my hands a bit and soothed, “I’m not trying to be all manly-man here, it’s just part of getting you used to the task in stages. I’ll be happy to load your bike up as fast as you’re able to take it, believe me.”
She appeared to accept this, then said, “All right, I’ll give it a try. All these bicyclists around here… I’ve been a little curious about it, wondering if I could be one of them.”
“Let’s stick to trail riding for now. You’ll want to get your skills up before you go head-to-head with Winnebagos and suburban APCs.” She tilted her head a bit at that last. “Big SUVs filled with mama’s little troopers,” I clarified. She grinned. “The worst that’s likely to happen on the trail is that you do an endo and get banged up. You can get a lot more badly hurt on the highway, much more easily.”
She winced at that picture, so I decided to open the kimono a little farther. “A spill on the bike is actually not that bad, not for you, not any more. I went sliding on asphalt just a few days ago. I was going about twenty-five at the time.” She looked at me, hard. “You’ve seen me starkers, and now I’m thinking you’re not believing my story. The thing is, mages can heal themselves.”
Her eyes got wide with realization. “I told you what happened to my glasses. Do you suppose a bit of road rash, even a broken wrist are out of reach to the likes of us? It’ll take you some time to learn how to fix that stuff. Mainly what you’re doing is helping your body do something it already wants to do; it’s a self-healing machine. What you’ll be learning to do is feed energy into the process from the Earth to make it all go faster.”
She got a curious little grin on her face.
I continued, “The main thing you’ll have to learn is how to get into trance state quickly and reliably, even under trying conditions. You’ve got a lot of work to do on that. You saw how much faster at that I am than you; I’ve got years of practice getting there. Now imagine needing to do it while you’re bleeding and bruised, maybe with a broken bone besides.”
That sobered her up. “Yes, I can see your point. That gives me some great incentive to learn, though,” she said with some grit in her voice.
I smiled at her proudly. “Right on. This is going to be great. We’re going to be great.”
She blushed, then grew thoughtful. “You talked about your DIY eye surgery. My eyes are 20/20, but I wonder… Are there any other elective surgeries we can do on ourselves?”
“Like what?” I prompted. I had some ideas, but I didn’t want to name any, lest she think I was implying that she needed any work. She was perfect already, and even if she weren’t, mama’s little boy Davie wasn’t so stupid he’d consciously imply otherwise.
“Well, like cosmetic stuff. Could I…you know…” Then she leaned over the table towards me a bit and dropped her voice, “…make my boobs a bit bigger?”
I grinned a bit, but then thought. “Well, getting your body to do something its DNA isn’t set up to allow is difficult, the more so the further you get away from the body’s coded plan. I think you can add breast tissue, but I believe your body will just slowly absorb it and return to its plan.”
She looked disappointed.
“There is one well-known way to get bigger breasts naturally.” She looked hopeful, but then her face fell. “You guessed it: have a child and then breast-feed the child. That sets up a hormone process that keeps the breast milk flowing, which enlarges the breasts to carry the milk. If you do it long enough before weaning the child, the breasts tend to stay larger than they were before, probably in anticipation of you having another child soon, as was common for women through most of human history.”
“I think you could probably use your magic to induce those same hormone cycles, but now you’re messing with your body’s natural cycles, which is dangerous.”
Her face finished falling into a scowl, unhappy with my answer.
“You know, I’ve heard that you can induce lactation through suckling even without becoming pregnant…” I let that hang for a bit, waiting for her expression to lighten, then dropped this on her: “There must be a way for you to get someone to suckle your boobs for you, but heaven help me if I can figure out how you’d arrange that.” I grinned lasciviously.
She let out a belly laugh, drawing sharp attention from the tables around us.
“Seriously, though, what you can do is fix genuine imperfections in your body’s plan, anything from scrapes and cuts to horrible diseases. I think you might even be able to cure cancer.” Her eyes went wide again. “Pretty good trade for not getting safe and easy breast augmentation, yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said, quietly. Then, after thinking a bit, she stated, “So no magic dong, then.”
I roared with laughter, drawing attention back on us. It took me a bit to get my belly laugh under control, then said, “Nope; what you saw this weekend is what I drew in the genetic lottery.”
“Well, blessèd ye are then, Davie,” she offered, coyly.
It was my turn to blush. “I will stipulate that my danglies are above average, Kaitlyn, but I wouldn’t call them ‘blessèd.’ Shouldn’t that include a halo or something?” She guffawed. I went on in a musing tone, “Maybe there’s a monastery out there with a sacred triptych of the three wise dicks, bobbing through a Middle Eastern desert seeking…” I trailed off, since she was now doubled over giggling.
“I know exactly what they were seeking, me boyo!” Kaitlyn cackled.
I let her settle down a bit, then said, “Well, on that edifying note, how about we call it a night?”
We paid the check, left, and were back on her doorstep, having walked up hand in hand.
We turned to each other and fell into each others’ eyes. I decided I could do that for a good long time and be perfectly content. She made the first move again, pulling my head down for a good long kiss. Tongues battled. Angels sang. Probably there was tectonic action, but I was in no position to notice.
She pushed me back gently with a grin, saying, “Good night, Davie.” Then she slipped inside, looking back at me stunned on her doorstep.
“Good night, my shishya,” I whispered after she was gone.