Synopsis

These are linked stories, in the spirit of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. They are about a sixteen-year old girl, Kedzie Greer, who was raised in a utopian community and leaves home to make her way in a dystopian society. The year is 2199; the place, the Reunited States.

In these stories, technology coexists with a haunted world. There are witches and robots, ghosts and e-beasts, a mystical lake and a human warehouse.

Excerpt

In the end, it was the town gates that got to Kedzie. The gates were symbols of the caged feeling that was driving her crazy, and the fact that they had stood for hundreds of years was particularly maddening. Except for the summer tourists who came to gawk at what they called its quaintness, no one new ever showed up in Stillwater. Everybody who was already there knew everybody else who was already there. She could not walk past those heavy ironwork gates without wanting to shake them and cry out.

The vigilbots that manned the gates were polite and amiable. They said hello and wished you Godspeed. Although in 2199 vigilbots could be legally programmed to kill, the worst the Stillwater bots could do was surround people and deliver mild, persistent electric shocks. This, too, exasperated Kedzie. Why bother having a defense if it did not actually defend you?

Kedzie had ridden her bicycle over every street in Stillwater. She had been inside most of the houses. She had been to every community celebration: Christmas, Yule, Thanksgiving, Halloween, the first day of spring, summer, fall, winter. She had been to every picnic, done every volunteer job. Every step she took, she had taken before.

All the shopkeepers said, “Hi, Kedzie,” when she entered. Kind Mr. Glimm always gave her a piece of candy, not caring to notice that she was an adult of sixteen. In the Reunited States in 2199, sixteen-year-olds were economically accountable for themselves. They had no legal right to be supported by anyone. Kedzie was so well-loved that it never occurred to her that one of the consequences of turning sixteen was that her parents could force her out. All she knew was that if she wanted to leave, her parents had no legal power to make her stay.

Kedzie’s parents, Julia Margoles and Adele Freyer, practiced white witchcraft. As faithfully as any believers of old, they celebrated the Sabbats, they prayed to the God and Goddess. They did no harm to any creature on Earth. Kedzie had heard them say many times that they lived in harmony with “the great round”—the turning earth and the tenets of their faith.

It was fortunate that they never pressured Kedzie to adopt their beliefs, because she did not believe in anything they said or did. The idea of devoting her life to benign witchcraft—home, community, nature, and smiling—made her itch and toss restlessly in bed. She did not see what was so great about those elaborate stories her parents called spells:

Now walk into the forest. In a clearing, you will see a golden well with a bucket suspended from a rope. Lower the bucket into the well. All her parents’ incantations sounded like that.

“We live in a false bubble,” she said to her parents. “Stillwater is unreal.”

Her mother Julia said that Stillwater was the real world. “Outside is the place of unreality,” she said.

“It is not easy to live as we do,” her mother Adele said. “We have to choose to do right every day of our lives, and it can be very, very tiresome. We do not alway