“Early for what? ”
“Early for the complaining. That comes in a few minutes, after the wizard and the saint have their say. ”
“I’m so fucking glad this amuses you. Tell me what’s going on, starting with why you didn’t answer me at first, ” I go back to the overbearing style.
“Oh, that was long ago, " he says quite seriously, “long before I learned English as you would speak it now. I could have given you an answer of a sort that might make sense to Chaucer, but I thought it wise to go ahead and get closer. You may thank me for that. ” “Most of us think that a minute ago isn’t all that long, ” I say. “Unless you’re claiming to be a time traveler. ”
He makes a seesaw gesture with his right hand. “I could, but I’ve never thought of it that way. It’s just that the path mapped for me doesn’t run entirely through the boring lowlands of time. I get to hike the highlands and hidden valleys as well. ”
“That’s the biggest bullshit I’ve heard since the last departmental review. Try again. ”
“Tell me, William—" I start to object at the familiarity, but he cuts me off. “Tell me, William, do you believe the evidence of your senses? ”
“Sometimes. When it’s worth my while, and I can be confident that there’s no trickery. ”
“All right, then, ” he says quietly. “Your next sentence to me will be ‘What the fuck? ’ and the one after that will be ‘Here’s the rest of the circus. ’” “I doubt it, " I say. At least that’s what I want to say. But as I start to speak, he flickers again and is suddenly covered in snow. Again, and drenched from rain. Again, and holding something strange in his arms. Is that an emu? “What the fuck? ” I say, not really thinking about it. Then I realize that I’ve been tricked, and start to say something about that, when I see a woman who looks like a community theater version of Joan of Arc and a man who looks like something from one of my high school D&. D games, complete with staff and little crystal ball. “Here’s the rest of the circus, ” I quip.
“There, ” he says with great satisfaction. “That’s good choreography, " I admit, “but it’s not prophecy. "
The old man would look a bit like an advertising version of Santa Claus if he had any hint of humor in his manner. He doesn’t; he looks like someone carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. I can’t be all that sure he’s really so old, either; I know what a lot of stressful responsibility can do to a man. I just wish his costume didn’t look so much like he wandered out of a Renaissance fair or something like that. I can’t take a man in a bathrobe very seriously anyplace but the bathroom.
When he speaks, though, it’s with a voice of command that I can only envy. This guy could move mountains, I think, if he really wanted to. “William, son of Philip, you are a fool. A very fortunate and blessed fool, but a fool nonetheless. Do not insult Magister Salonikas with your ignorance. "
Bluster won’t get me anywhere with this one, I can tell, so I settle for my customary arrogance and bitterness. “I make it a practice to insult anyone who calls himself magister, and I’ve got better things to do than sit around being the object of other people’s efforts at being clever. "
“Better things? ' he says with some amusement. “Such as dying at the hands of a colleague who sold his soul? I suppose we can put you back there, if you really want... ”
“Er. No. Okay, you’ve got my attention. ” I admit. “Tell me what’s going on already. ”
“In just a moment, ” he tells me like a teacher speaking to an impatient student. “We must gather the others. ”
“Others?”
“In just a moment, ” he repeats with less patience. The woman is a fab babe, as nearly as I can tell through the monastic robes. She’s got very large and bright dark eyes, and she’s constantly looking around at everything with the sense of wonder. I usually don’t have much use for innocence, particularly not when it’s literally wide-eyed, but she makes it appealing. She opens her mouth and... does something. It’s not speech. It’s not regular singing, either. She makes multiple sounds and somehow sends them off in different directions. If I were to map it out, it would look something like this:
Come, speaker to spirits Come, speaker to ancestors Hear the voice of the Spirit Hear the voice of the King Come, twice guarded Come, twice guarded I’m not much for classical music, but I know enough to recognize at least some of her talent. Her tones are crystal-clear and extremely precise, and she holds those final syllables an amazingly long time. I wish idly that I could get her in a lab, record her for a few months, and then dissect her to find out just what makes that effect possible.
I have a response to the old guy’s last comment, but I have to wait for the nun babe to finish. Then I get back to business. “Sir, I’ve made a career of insulting people who call themselves ‘Magister’ or who let others call them that. I’m not about to make an exception right now. You may look impressive to the rubes, but I don’t have time for this. So get on to the point. ”
The old guy growls, but the younger man raises his hand. “Hold a moment, Porthos. ’’
Now there’s a name I know from my studies back in the old days. “Porthos Fitz-Empress? ”
The old guy nods. “Porthos Fitz-Empress, Hermes bani Flambeau... ”
I interrupt him. “Yeah, yeah. The thing is, you look awfully alive for someone who’s supposed to have gone up in smoke along with the rest of this place. " I wave a hand around. “If it really is Doissetep, but I’ll give you the assumption there. ” Very much to my surprise, he looks positively wistful for a second. ‘“Awfully alive. ’ It would be pleasant if you were correct. ” That confuses me, and I look him up and down while he continues. He seems pretty tangible to me: he’s making marks in the sand, the breeze goes around him, the whole deal. Meanwhile, he’s back to being businesslike. “Mr. Albacastle, you are a guest here, brought here for a purpose. It’s clear that you are not inclined to trust our goodwill, and indeed I’m not at all sure I would trust you if you were too willing. What I wonder is simply what it would take to persuade you that you are wrong on some of the cosmological issues on which we disagree. ”
“Is that a serious question?”
“Very serious, ” he says, and he looks it, too. “I’m not sure, ” I say as I think it over, “but I can lay out some boundary conditions. ”
“Please do. ” All three of them are actually listening to me, carefully, which I find interesting but not especially comfortable.
“I’ve built up a new worldview twice in my adult life. The first time, I went from collegiate materialism to the techno-mysticism of the Virtual Adepts. The gang set me up with the idea that some aspects of modern science are just the re-representation of old magical insights, and vice versa, and fed the idea that the magical side of that is at least partly true. That worked for a while. Then I started exploring some more and ran into Technocratic interpretations, and slid back toward where I’d started, with a more comprehensive data set and better analytical tools. I haven’t run into anything in the last, hmm, ten or fifteen years now that clearly requires handling with anomalistics. ”
“Commendable, " says Salonikas with a wry little smile.
“Couldn’t be anything else, ” I tell him. “The point here is that there is no set of phenomena that would make me smack myself and say ‘Holy shit! I gotta get back to rattling bones and worshipping the local pine trees! ’ The very best it could accomplish is making me think that I need to study it all very carefully and see whether others who share my outlook have already had any success analyzing it. ”
The guy who thinks he’s Porthos clearly ponders that back and forth. “So no display of miracles would command your attention? No summoned demon, no alchemical transformation? ”
“Nope, ” I say with a vigorous shake of my head. “Senses are too easily manipulated. I’m a professional sensory trickster, at least some of the time. The whole point of cybernetics and external prosthetics is to feed the brain input it wouldn
’t normally get. Stagecraft is probably as old as big flat rocks that people could stand on to get attention. And even though there’s no fundamental validity to the sort of claptrap your lot peddle, there’s enough exploitable complexity in neurology and the physiology of perception that you can seem awfully plausible without a whole lot of specialized tools I seem not to have with me at the moment. ”
The guy takes a stab at being tactful. That worries me: why the hell would someone who thinks he’s the greatest archmage of the last couple centuries want to be nice to a mid-level operative in the employ of his worst enemies? “You certainly have a thorough skepticism. ”
“Not at all. ” Well, I’m not going to figure out his motives right now, so I may as well keep being direct. “I am not a skeptic. I’m a disbeliever. All I’m saying is that part of my disbelief is the willingness to proceed slowly to the conclusions part of an analysis. ‘This is impressive-looking bullshit’ is the insight of a moment; ‘this is the subconscious exploitation of a cognitive pattern we can establish in primate and proto-primate species evolved for aquatic hunting’ is the insight that comes much later. But just because I don’t know what the end answer is, don’t think that in the meantime I’m willing to believe your story. ”
“I see. ” The guy apparently does, too, or at least he understands about the use of an overall intellectual framework. Hermetics are still full of shit, but it’s a comprehensible sort of shit. I have no idea what Salonikas might be into. The nun’s getting obviously offended and looks like she might be ready to lecture me about the limits of intellect in the face of God’s ineffable mystery. I decide to cut her off at the pass. “The ineffable can always be effed. It's just a matter of learning how. ”
That does indeed get the nun stirred up. “Your blindness is appalling! ”
The old guy cuts her off. “Another time, Bernadette. ” Something about that name rattles around in my brain, but it doesn’t quite connect to anything. Must be someone in Tradition history, but I’ll get the details another time.
* * *
MING XIAN
The shaman is strange in many ways, but it’s clear that we have been following parallel paths in our ways. We walk and talk, he often asking thoughtful questions that make it easy for me to draw my experiences together into a coherent pattern.
“So it was a red eye, or at least red eyes, for you too? ” He asks.
“Yes, " I say again, thinking back to that terrible scene with what might not have been my ancestors at all.
“Did you hear many stories of the Red Star? That might have been just a Western thing, for all I know. ”
“Yes, I heard a few, ” I say as scattered memories refresh themselves. “There were hermits who said that a new red star was sneaking through the heavens, hiding itself from most eyes down on earth while preparing some grand scheme. ”
“That’s very much like what I heard, too. There were theories about what it was up to and where it had come from. It seems pretty clear to me that your ancestors’ red eyes and my red eye were manifestations of the thing that looks like a star when it’s in the sky. At first I thought that the rest of our pair of mysteries would tie into that but... maybe not. ” He questions me then about the black man who appeared to me before my reawakening. Gradually, as we are able to recall specific lines, we find that he said precisely the same things to us and to one other.
A fleeting thought makes me smile. He asks what it is. “I just remembered a lesson from the basic instruction in my old school. One of the reasons the Kangxi emperor rejected a 1746 petition that he set a good example for China by converting to Christianity was that a monk in the party of emissaries mentioned a medieval tale of bilocation—appearing in two places at once, that is. The emperor decided that this was contrary to the Way of human beings, for whom life must always be a singular experience, and so he rejected their entreaties despite finding much merit in the doctrines. ” The shaman looks a little confused. “Now here I am owing my soul and perhaps my very life to a Westerner engaging in trilocation. It’s a potent lesson in humility. ”
He gets it. “Yes indeed. ” Sobriety returns after one hearty laugh. “What I’m wondering, though, is whether Dante rescued us from that second death, too. ”
“I... " I’m going to dismiss it, and then I think about it some more. “I suppose it could be. I have so little idea what’s going on, and I dislike living in a world without rules, or even with rules that remain hidden from me. ”
That makes him laugh again. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to mock you or your preferences, ” he says as he calms down. “It’s just that my whole existence is taken up in experiences where very few rules ever apply. I deal with psychology, with soul if I want to put it in a way that avoids some implication traps.
There are rules to thought, sure, but it’s not like what most people would think of as laws of nature. The part of the universe I deal with is always changing its mind and making a mess. ”
I think of several questions I’d like to ask about that, but a woman’s voice interrupts. Or is it several women’s voices? Their song, in some traditional Western mode, drifts across the ruins:
Come, speaker to spirits Come, speaker to ancestors Hear the voice of the Spirit Hear the voice of the King Come, twice guarded Come, twice guarded The shaman and I look at each other and nod. We will seek out the singers, and continue our conversation another time.
* * *
WILLIAM
I’m about to try provoking the nun some more when I hear footsteps somewhere nearby. The old guy glares at me and says, “Our other guests are about to arrive. Refrain from rudeness just for a moment. ”
Man. Talk about red flags in front of the bull. I open my mouth to say something snappy just as he makes a pair of little gestures with each hand. As my mouth opens, I feel it getting hotter and hotter in there, racing toward the temperature of an open flame. I close it, and it cools. Open it, and it warms up again. Looks like I’ll be refraining from rudeness. Just for a moment.
There are two newcomers, a young American or European man and a Chinese woman older than me. I realize that they’re the ones I’ve had glimpses of in those moments of morphic resonance entanglement, or whatever it is. I’d like to say something, but my mouth heats up again; I glance over at the old guy and see that he’s in no mood to let it up. I’m pretty sure that it’s some kind of induced auto-hypnosis, but damned if I can find a way to shock myself out of the rut. Sometimes this whole human nature thing just sucks.
The old guy makes a shallow bow to the new arrivals. “On behalf of the Rogue Council, I welcome you to Doissetep, and regret that we cannot show you the courtesy which our guests could once expect. "
Oh ho! I think to myself. Every so often some group of would-be rulers of the worlds decides to get everyone stirred up, organized, disorganized, or otherwise suitably manipulated. They send out messages hither and yon until someone better disciplined and less delusional comes along to make them shut up. The most recent group of this sort has been surprisingly successful, getting messages to (as nearly as we can tell) everyone participating in what the Traditions like to call the Ascension War, as well as to a lot of would-be bystanders. The very name “Rogue Council” is something cobbled together out of recipient responses; the senders don’t stick any labels on themselves and vary their methodology a lot. The only reason our analysts are confident that the group exists at all is their messages’ persistent emphasis on Ascension, the overthrow of restrictions and the like, and the persistent brilliance of their infiltration past everyone’s defenses.
It’s always wise to be a little cautious about this kind of thing, but I suspect that our analysts didn’t spend a lot of time asking each other, “Hey, what if the Rogue Council is three old-school farts who think they’re famous wizards of history, hiding out on Mars? ” I hope I live to tell them what they’ve missed.
The new arrivals recognize the name too, I see. The man doesn’t bow. Rather stiffly, h
e says, “Thank you for the welcome, sir. Do you mean to say that you’re the ones who’ve stirred up so much apocalyptic fear and nonsense among those of us back on Earth? ”
“No. " The old guy can be impressively brief when he wants to be.
“Then is it not true that the Rogue Council is responsible for these ‘ascend now or die’ messages! ”
“We do indeed send them, my colleagues and 1, and others who aren’t able to present themselves to you now. ”
The American looks frustrated, and I can’t blame him. I’m still trying to speak, testing the old guy’s ability to keep up the effect while he’s busy with other things. No luck yet. “Then what is it you object to? "
“It’s not nonsense, ” the old guy says, and he really is angry. “We are all running out of time and chances very rapidly indeed, and this is our way of trying to help as many as possible before it is too late. ”
The Chinese woman speaks for the first time since they arrived here. “Sir, men have predicted the end of the world since the beginning of recorded history. Some say that the first sentence ever spoken was a prophecy of the end. If you mean to tell us that you think the end is nigh, then I mean to tell you that you’ve joined an often honorable but always wrong throng. ”
* * *
MING XIAN
I am suddenly irritated by all of this. Have we gone through death, torment, rebirth, and mystery merely to listen to hoary cliches? I can see tremendous power in all three of these, and in the fourth, who seems to be choking whenever he tries to speak. I think about the matter of innate power and study more closely. The yang power seems to have been burned out in my second death, but I know how to use the evidence of yin to give myself plenty of raw data to work with. I realize...
World of Darkness - Time of Judgement - Mage Page 16