All this he knew, but what he didn’t know was that he resonated to the Anima Mundi which produced his extraordinary synergic pattern sense. I used to think that the frightful shock to the infant of the crash of the R-OG craft was the cause of his hypersynsitivity. Now I know that it was the Krupp-Decco matter experiment, and the X-quantity which was multiplied by itself in Rogue was what I call a “Phane Sense,” from the Greek, phainein, meaning to show. It was this phane sense that enabled him to be shown things from apparently unrelated facts and events and synergize them into a whole.
Anima Mundi is the fundamental “Soul of the World.” Latinwise, Anima = soul life. Mundi = the world. Anima Mundi is the cosmic spirit pervading all living things and, it is argued, even all inanimate things as well. I believe that myself. An old house has a spirit and character of its own. How often have you seen a picture which doesn’t like its place in the decor and rebels by refusing to hang straight? Don’t chairs poke us for attention as we pass, and sulky stair treads trip us up?
So many of us resonate to Anima and are powerfully influenced by it. We can recognize some obvious aspects; “soul,” “vibes,” “Psi,” weather and night-and-day affects; but we don’t realize that these are merely facets of the deep, underlying Anima Mundi which is the bedrock, so to speak, the bottom line of all existence. Rogue Winter understood this least of all while he was being affected most of all. Here’s an instance of his unconscious response to the bedrock patterns, which we got from the Flemish girl.
He was on assignment on Mars and taking an afternoon off fishing a salt lake in the Welsh Dome. They’d stocked it with Coelacanths, “Old Four-Legs,” a legacy from the Cretaceous. Winter was casting and retrieving his lure, fishing east to meet the schools of Four-Legs feeding from east to west. Suddenly—he thought it was a hunch, he thought he was outsmarting the fish, but it was really his unconscious seventh sense forcing him to answer an Anima command—suddenly he reversed himself and began fishing west.
After he’d been casting without success for a few minutes, a girl appeared on the lonely lake-shore. She was wearing chopped jeans, no top, had swept bronze hair, and was carrying two heavy shopping totes without benefit of null-G. She put them down, rubbed her arms, smiled and said, “Allo.”
He was instantly enchanted by her French accent and grateful that she didn’t stare at the sunbursts blazoned on his cheeks. “Good evening. Where are you going?”
“I am guest at ‘ouse in next village. I ‘ave been buying dineur.”
“Where are you visiting from?”
“Callisto.”
“But I thought Callisto was Dutch.”
“You ‘ave never visite?”
“Not yet.”
“Is not all Hollandais. Is Benelux, comprenez? Is also Flanders, Belgium, Luxembourg. I am from Flemish Dome. You are feeshing?”
“As you see. Would you like a fish for dineur?” He reeled in and held the lure up to her. “Spit on it and that will bring us luck.” That was a lie, of course, but she was very pretty and had a delicious bosom.
She gave him a perplexed look, was reassured by his gallant glance, and spat delicately on the lure. Winter cast out into the deeper waters, started his jig-jag retrieve, and had a tremendous strike. He couldn’t believe his luck. He shouted with laughter and began fighting to bring the fish in while the girl danced excitedly alongside him. He kept a tight line on the Four-Legs but when at last he brought it to shore it was the body of a child.
The Flemish girl moaned, “Dieu! Is the Megan fille. She drown this afternoon. They ‘ave look for ‘er bodee ever since.”
“Jesus Jig God,” Winter muttered. He detached the lure from the tiny bathing suit and picked up the body. “Show me where to take her.”
He hadn’t the faintest inkling that it was a subliminal summons by the Anima to which his synsitivity had responded. There was an unbalanced death that had to be fitted into the Anima pattern, and it called him west. It might have been resolved eventually by other natural responses, but Rogue Winter’s seventh sense, his resonance to the bottom line, had drawn him there first.
And he hadn’t the faintest inkling that it was this same Anima resonance which produced the serendipity which always amazed and amused him. Serendipity is the faculty of making unexpected and unsought discoveries by accident. You’re on your way from A to B, minding your own business, and you stub your toe on X, much like Herschel stumbling on Uranus. This was the quality that made Rogue Winter our “Pointer.”
What else on him from our Meta file (MAX SECRET. ALEPH AGENTS ONLY) Operation Pointer:
He had curious recall. He remembered shapes to the milli, but not colors. He could remember the argument and action of everything he had read or seen, but not addresses or phone numbers. He remembered the personality of everyone he had met, but not their names. He recalled his love affairs in patterns which the ladies would not appreciate.
He had undergone risky cerebral surgery to install prosthetic synapses which gave him a brain-wave interface with his studio computer. Winter could think to his workshop computer which would print, tape, and/or graphically illustrate his concepts. Not many can use this advanced technique. It demands an unswerving concentration which cannot be deflected by stray associations.
He would do anything to puzzle out the warp and woof of a pattern; lie, cheat, charm, steal, bully, humble himself, break any one of the Ten Commandments plus the Eleventh (Thou Shalt Not Get Caught) and he had broken most of them in the line of duty.
He was thirty-three years old, 6-1½, 187 lbs., in fair condition. Once upon a time he’d been married to a darling girl from the Frisco Dome on Luna. She wore her fair hair in a casque, had slitty dark eyes, a supple swimmer’s body, and a big front, a type to which Winter was always attracted. She spiced every sentence with the ig-words that were the current cant of the Lunar Domes and are spreading: “Zig, man, I love you, gig? but I’m jig sleepy is all, gone to bed, mig.”
Charming, flaky, entertaining, but, alas, merely with it in the I.Q. department, so the marriage broke up. Winter loved ladies, but only as equals. One of his ladies, also a slender-big-front-number, remarked bitterly that even he couldn’t live up to his idea of equality. The Titanian sprite took care of that.
A change of life in a day of synergy.
Winter had returned from an assignment inquisiting the Women’s Movement on Venucci and he was still in shock from a violent event in the Bologna Dome; the more so because he couldn’t understand it. This was the night before the day that changed his life.
He had a floor-through apartment in the Beaux Arts rotunda, a complex built in the old Edwardian style with bay windows, fireplaces, and thick walls for the protection of creative artists from each other. The insulation muffled the cries of sopranos coping with coloratura, the electronic thunder of “Galactic Gavotte in G-minor,” the dictation of the Oxford English Dictionary being translated into Nü-Spēk.
His pad was old-fashioned and exactly suited to his taste: Large living room with Georgian furnishings, utility kitchen, bath with a monster six-foot tub, two bedrooms in the rear, one large, one small. The small resembled a monk’s cell in its simplicity. The large was his workshop and a mess; walls lined with books, tapes, films, software; a conference table for a desk; the studio computer to which he was neurally linked—he had to make sure the read-in was switched off when not in use, otherwise it would record everything he was thinking in the apartment—stacks of stationery, virgin film and tape, shambles of old stories cluttering the floor, some spewing off their spools looking like a clutch of serpents in search of Laocoön and his two sons.
He was so upset that he didn’t bother to unpack his travel tote or even change, and the Alitalia jets are not famed for cleanliness. Instead he got a whiskey bottle, sat down on the living-room couch with his feet up on the coffee table and tried to drink himself numb. He was trying to recover from his first killing, which had taken place his last night on Venucci.
Turn
ing points occur in moments. This was a three-second affray in the dim Central Gardens of the Bologna Dome that changed Winter’s life. He was waiting for a girl to keep her date with him when a gorill armed with a deadly knife came at him out of the dark bushes. Years of childhood drilling had trained Winter’s reflexes. He did not meet force with force as was natural and expected; instead he went limp, fell supine, did a double-roll as the assailant floundered over him, and was on the killer’s back. Two smashes with a knee into the testicles, knife-wrist twisted back and snapped with both hands, knife seized and right carotid slashed. All this in three seconds of hissing silence. It took the killer much longer to die. Winter didn’t like to think of that.
“But why, baby? Why?” he kept asking.
Three drinks later he was suddenly inspired.
“What I need right now is a girl to lose myself in. That’s the only way to wait for a pattern to show.”
One of his reciprocal Rogues (he had a dozen alternate selves) answered, “Feel free, but you left your big red book in the workshop.”
“Why, for jigjeeze sake, can’t I have the little black book, famed in song and story?”
“Why can’t you remember a phone number? Never mind. Shall we join the ladies?”
He made three calls, all negative. He had three more drinks, all positive. He stripped, went to his Japanese bed in the monk’s cell, thrashed, swore, and slept at last, dreaming crazed
p a t t e r n s
a t t e r n s
t t e r n s
t e r n s
e r n s
r n s
n s
s
Next morning Winter was up fairly early and out. First to the network for a script conference with his producer. Next to his publisher for a battle over graphics. Last to Solar Media where he entered the editorial corridors and began his customary circus parade, kissing and pinching the staff without bias and finishing in Augustus (Ching) Sterne’s corner office. Ching was editor-in-chief.
“Have you got the story, Rogella?”
“Got it.”
“Deadline in three weeks.”
“I’ll make it. Have you got an empty office I can use for an hour or so? I have to make some calls and production gave me my galleys to check. They want them back today.”
“Which story is that?”
“Space And Mongolian Idiocy: Arrested Development in E = Mc2.”
“Crikey! That should have gone to the lab yesterday. Use the conference room, Rogella. Nobody’s brainstorming in there today.”
Winter settled down in the conference room, made his calls, rang the copy department to come pick up his Venucci reference material for their files, finger-read his author’s galley tapes—electrotaxis was another facet of his synergic skills—flew into a rage, rang Ching Sterne and began to ream him out.
A girl poked her head into the conference room. It was a streaky blonde head with hair like a helmet and slitty dark eyes; Demi Jeroux from the copy department. Winter motioned her to enter, blew her a kiss and continued to swear venomously on the intercom. “I’ve been checking the galleys on the idiot piece and some sonofabitch has been rewriting my copy. How many times do I have to tell you? Nobody fucks around with my copy! You want changes, ask me and I’ll make them. I won’t let a shit-ass second-guesser climb onto my by-line.”
Winter banged the intercom down, turned and beamed at the girl who looked frightened. “Demi, love, what a dear sight you are for a drinking man. Come on, give Daddy a big hug.” He opened his arms and she trembled against him. “My peerless copy-checker, I’ve got all the Venucci background material for you.”
“I’m not a copy-checker anymore,” Demi said in a soft Virginia voice.
“Don’t tell me they’ve fired my Gem of the Ocean.”
“I was promoted. I’m a junior editor.”
“Congratulations! And about time. They’ve been wasting a bright girl from— What was that cockagiggy college you took from?”
“Marymount.”
“Did they give you a raise?”
“Alas.”
“Shits! Never mind, we’ll celebrate anyway. Come on out and I’ll get you stoned.”
“You won’t want to, Rogue.”
“Why not?”
“Well… my first assignment was— It was your Mongolian piece.”
“You mean you’re the sonofabitch who—? And you heard me hollering down the pipe?” Winter burst out laughing and kissed the girl, who blushed vividly. “You’ve had your first lesson in handling me. Will you be editing my Women’s Lib inquisition?”
She nodded shyly. “I’ve been assigned to you. Mr. Sterne says it’ll be educational.”
“Now I wonder what he could possibly mean by that? Well, well! Look at Demi Jeroux, the Dixieland Demon, now my editor.”
The girl took a deep, shaky breath and sat down on one of the conference chairs with a fetching mixture of determination and terror. “I want to be something else,” she said in her soft voice.
“Oh?”
“Remember that story you told me about the Irish houseparty?”
“No, dear.”
“That time you took me to lunch at the Kosher Space-Ahoy Seafood Grotto?”
“I remember the lunch but not the story.”
“There… There was an infant crawling around under everybody’s feet and you got mad and kicked him.”
“Oh God! Gig!” Winter laughed. “It was in the Dublin Dome. I’ll never forget the shock of horror that ran through the assembled. It was a rotten thing to do, but it was such a damned dull party.”
“And the infant looked at you with love.”
“He did. He did. Liam must be eight years old by now and he still loves me. He writes to me, in Gaelic. It’s almost as though he was born with a mad passion to be kicked.”
“Rogue,” Demi said, “you’ve kicked me, too.”
“I—? Kicked—?”
An amazed thrill prickled his skin. He’d been propositioned before, but never quite like this.
Have I asked for it?
Did I invite it?
Is she aware of a two-way attraction that I never sensed?
Am I lying?
Did I want this all along?
So his reciprocals quaeried while he got up, closed the door of the conference room, came back to the girl, pulled a chair around so that he could face her knees to knees, and took her hands.
“What is it, Demi?” he asked gently. “Rotten old love?”
She nodded and began to cry. He pulled out a kerchief and put it in her hand.
“What a brave thing to say, darling. How long has this been going on?”
“I don’t know. It just… happened.”
“Just now?”
“No, it— It just sort of happened.”
“How old are you, love?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Been in love before?”
“Never with anyone like you.”
Winter looked at this weeping slender little thing with a big front and sighed. “Listen to me,” he said carefully. “In the first place, I’m grateful. When someone offers love it’s like the end of the rainbow, and not many of us find that treasure. In the second place, I could love you right back, but you have to understand why, Demi. When love is given, the response is love; it’s a kind of beautiful blackmail. I’m just distracting you with the obvious so you won’t get my kerchief too wet…”
“I know,” she whispered. “You’re always honest.”
“So I can be had. I’m queer for women—it’s my one vice—and now of all times I need a girl badly, but—now you must look at me, Demi—but you’ll only have half a man… less, maybe. Most of me belongs to my work.”
“That’s why you’re a genius,” she said.
“Stop adoring me!” He stood up abruptly and crossed to a giant map of the Solar which he examined without interest. “My God! You’re determined to harpoon me, aren’t you.”
&nbs
p; “Yes, Rogue. I don’t like it but… yes.”
“Is there no mercy? The late, great Rogue Winter landed by a Marymount nebbish, proving yet again that I’m a clown who can say no to anybody except a girl.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Damn right I am, but I’m helpless. All right, come on.” He opened his arms to her and she fled into them. They kissed; merely a firm contact of lips from him.
“I love your hard mouth,” she murmured. “And your hands are hard, too. Oh, Rogue… Rogue…”
“That’s because I’m a Maori savage.”
“Not you. There’s no one like you, Rogue.”
“Will you zig off the worship. I’m vain enough as it is.”
“Golly! I never thought I’d get you.”
“Yeah? Like hell!” Winter appealed to the ceiling. “Please, holy ancestors of the royal Uinta line, noble kings who have ruled the Maori for fifteen generations and whose souls now reside in Te Uinta’s left eye… Please don’t let me be gaffed by this black widow spider!”
Demi giggled and let out a Ssss! of delight.
“What can a noble savage do when a girl sets her sights on him? He’s surrounded, doomed, losted.”
“Left eye?” Demi asked.
“Uh-huh. We believe that’s where the souls dwell.” He closed his right eye and the left returned her look of delight and anticipation. “Gigsville, Demi. Leave us go out and celebrate, only now it’s me that’s going to get smashed… to numb the pain.”
“Ssss!”
Had we but world enough, and time, this coyness, lady, were no crime.
First she had to tour the apartment, inspecting and sometimes admiring every piece of furniture, every picture, every book and tape, the knick-knacks and souvenirs of his assignments through the Solar. She raised an eyebrow in old-fashioned surprise at the six-foot tub (formerly illegal because such luxuries devoured too much energy before the Age of Meta), cocked an eye at the Japanesey bed, merely a thick white mattress on a giant slab of ebony, and let out a little moan at the mess in the workshop.
THE DECEIVERS Page 3