Sometimes I hear cars in the distance, but none of them come near me for several hours. Each one turns off on a side road, or turns out to be running along a parallel road off on the horizon, or whatever. I wish the drivers well, and hope that they’ll get the chance to accomplish something significant in the time they have left.
* * *
MING XIAN
I make one final trip to the place where my ancestors gathered. There’s a quiet week when my assistants and a few volunteers can handle the work, and when the natural world is working relatively naturally. In the middle of the week, with all the omens indicating some continued calm, I pack my gear and make the drive up into the mountains again.
There were storms from out of the desert last week, including acrid waste-laden clouds of choking dust stirred up from the dying lakes and rivers far to the west. But a day of hard rain settled most of that, and I have only momentary distractions from the polluted remains as I go. I do notice how much of the region’s been quietly depopulated. It’s a tidy emptiness, because the Uygurs take pride in their tools even in dire extremes, and it wouldn’t stand out to someone who wasn’t already familiar with the area. But I see fields and orchards left untended too long, and land that would be prime pasture filled with grass knee-high or even taller. Neither machinery nor livestock have been there to cut it down. Some of those people have thronged into the cities like Urumqi. Others, I think, are scattering into the wilderness or wandering east, hoping to find sanctuary among other peoples and larger populations. When I do pass farmers or herders, I make a point of greeting them, letting them know that at least one person sees their labor and appreciates it.
Two landslides have dumped massive rocks across my way into the mountains. Fortunately tor me, I remembered to choose one of the better four-wheel-drive trucks available to me in Urumqi, and I make my way very carefully over the debris. I see that the road beyond is altogether undisturbed except for animal tracks. As the world draws to its close, it seems we human beings are drawn together.
Finally I reach the clearing where I customarily begin the ritual journey. The wall between flesh and yin feels so thin here that I call out to my ancestors right where I stand, lighting a stick of incense for each name I speak. In just a few minutes, the chill wind carries back answers. At least a few of my ancestors come to me.
“What news? ” I ask upon completing the initial formalities. Their answers don’t come to me in words, though, but in a flood of static images and complex sounds. Terrible things stir again in the depths of the yin realms, and they cling as closely as they can to the material world. But the wall of the world is also dangerous: sometimes it flickers out momentarily, and a few of my ancestors have been swept across and imprisoned in mortal forms they cannot control. Whether they remain aware of themselves after that, my other ancestors cannot say, but they certainly find the exclusion both dangerous and uncomfortable.
“Have you no words for me? ” Another flood of imagery. There is an ancestral tongue of the ghosts, but they’re having difficulty speaking it. I can’t really grasp the reasons they give, since it’s difficult to convey logic without words. They retain meaning within their individual minds, but the currents of yin seem no longer sufficient to carry the distinctions they wish to make, like an ice sculpture melting in the summer sun.
“What is my duty to you now? ” At least that’s what I intend to ask, but when I get to “my, ” my ancestors surround me with meanings of their own again. The imagery is peculiar, full of branching trees and rising tornados. Gradually I realize what they mean to tell me. It’s always been the case that we few able to communicate clearly with our ancestors have been special in their affections. They generally love or at least care about all their living descendants, but those of us who can stand within and across the wall of the world matter most. That’s now changing. All of their descendants seem to blur together in their thoughts: mediums and the spirit-deaf, living and dead, Chinese and intermarried. I see images of distant cousins I would never have suspected, many of them neither looking at all Chinese nor aware of their Chinese heritage. The very notion of “family” in any meaningful sense blurs into an awareness of humanity as a whole. It is a powerful vision in its own terms, a perspective much like what the emperors of old must have had when they saw All Under Heaven spread before their throne. But it is little help to me now.
“Why... ” I don’t even get the next question clearly formulated in my own mind before a fresh torrent of my ancestors’ thoughts wraps itself around me. This time it’s not just their thoughts, I realize. This is their essence. They are dispersing all around me, the yin force that has held them together draining out of the world and their mental processes dispersing back into the primal Way from which all consciousness originated. For a moment I think that they’re completing the process of death that was suspended by their emergence as ghosts, but it lacks... the emotions, the feeling of death. They are not so much ceasing to be anything as ceasing to be distinct. In a moment I am again alone in the little clearing. I will rest before I drive back home.
* * *
WILLIAM
The almanac built into Nicolas’ hip says that Roswell has a population of forty-five-thousand people. It’s obviously way below that now. At a guess, or rather at an informed but necessarily hasty situation appraisal, we agree that at least half the buildings stand empty. Albuquerque was obviously full beyond capacity when we passed through it. We agree that the mundane population is probably flocking to major cities all over the world, seeking mutual defense or just plain companionship.
Nicolas asks me what I’ve been up to since we last talked, at a network planning conference six years ago. I tell him, with an emphasis on the last few weeks. He ponders it all, asks me some questions about details, and then rambles in fits and starts. “It’s so damnably typical of the world, really. ”
“Eh? What’s typical about the end of the world? "
“Frustrated ambitions, of course. ” He gestures down at his cybernetic ankles and feet. Marvels of design, they are immensely functional and also intensely beautiful, with curves reminiscent of Art Deco. “These were going to be the prototypes for the next generation of concealable multi-function lower limb prosthetics. The last generation will— would—be released to the public next year, and whole classes of leg damage would become entirely fixable. And it goes like that with every single piece of this gear, and with a whole lot else that I had to leave behind. ”
To my great surprise and distinct alarm, he pounds on the dashboard with both fists. Even without kicking in any significant augmentation, he’s got the strength to punch finger-sized chunks out of the plastic, and he comes perilously close to setting off the airbag. “Damn it all! ” he shouts, his usual cynical amusement shattered. “Why now? ”Slowly he cools down, or at least restrains himself a little better. “Every single generation of humanity before this one got to live out its time and die, and entertain any old notion of what the future might hold. Why do we get this foisted on us? ”
I shake my head. "I wish I knew. It’s not like it even makes sense. It’s all very well for someone like Moorcock to write about the depletion of entropy, or Ballard to go on with his various bits, but there’s no science to it that I can figure out. If not for feeling obliged to think of anyone capable of pushing a universe over as some sort of God, I’d wonder if it were deliberately induced. ”
Nicolas spits out the window. “Yes. Very few things are so good for creeping dread as the sense that the universe has gone as crazy as our bosses. ” Roswell itself is a pretty typical Southwestern town. It’s not really in desert, but the land here is dry and it takes a lot of irrigation. There’s a railroad station surrounded by warehouses and silos for the agricultural produce, the products of the local mines, and so on. And then there are the stores that cater to the tourist trade, with more clich£d renderings of aliens than the human brain can rightly accommodate. There don’t seem to be many tourists around when w
e arrive, but there are some. Not everyone feels the general dread, it seems, and not all of those who do choose to heed its warnings. So we’re far from the only strangers in town.
We have a destination of our own. Fifteen miles east of Roswell proper, there’s a cluster of buildings purporting to be an agricultural research center. (Someone in charge of planning was apparently a little too fond of Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, which used the same sort of gag. Living in someone else’s fandom is a little annoying some' times. ) In fact it’s one of the deepest of deep dark Union secrets, home to something altogether mysterious. Nicolas and I both know that there are extraterrestrial races, some of them with advanced civilizations; this isn’t something the Union is prepared to tell the public, but when you deal in exotic threats (like me) or the commercial application of exotic technology (like Nicolas), you learn these things. So what could be there that the Union doesn’t want us to know even after we know that aliens are real?
As we drive, Nicolas speculates. “I used to know a lady in Geneva who was sure that it was a time machine, ” he tells me. “She said that the past is changing all the time but that we don’t notice it. Eventually the time travelers would wipe out all resistance and we’d live in a glorious perfect eternity. ” He thinks about it. “Maybe they screwed it up somehow. ”
“That’s... hmm. I started to say that that’s ridiculous, but then this whole situation is ridiculous. ”
“It is, ” he agrees, “but not in quite that way, I think. I sometimes think that whatever it is actually isn’t very important or astounding, but someone in the Inner Circle thinks it is, and who’s to contradict them? ”
That makes me laugh. “That’s stupid enough to be true. ”
We turn off the main road onto a well-maintained side road that runs a half-mile or so to Roswell Base, as most of the inter-convention memos refer to it. Unfortunately, when we crest the last hill before the base, we see that we’re unlikely to get a lot of useful answers. It’s been blasted flat. Looks like something exploded directly overhead, or perhaps like that foot from the opening credit for Monty Python episodes descended on it. Nothing remains more than a story high, and not much of that. We don’t see any bodies, at least from this distance, but there’s certainly no sign of human activity.
“Want to go down for a closer look? ” I ask. I’m not sure I want to, and half hope he’ll say no.
“I’ve come this far, ” he says immediately. "I need to go the last few meters. ” So we drive on down, parking in the middle of a lot free of other cars. Close up, I can see small clumps of parts and leaked fluids that may well mark where cars were when whatever it was happened. The lot itself seems sound, uncracked, so I’m not too worried about falling into a pit or anything like that.
It occurs to me as I get out that I’m really fucking tired of dealing with ruins. The ruin of my place in Ragnarok, those ruins on Mars, and now this. It’s wearying and depressing. I could do with fewer inappropriate silences, too, places where there ought to be voices but aren’t. I do my best to fill it up with a steady stream of comments and speculations, and Nicolas does the same, but we are only two men in a place made for hundreds. “You’d think they could at least have left a note, ” I add at one point.
Not long thereafter, there is a sound, though not from within the base. Someone’s driving along the same road we took. Nicolas and I can’t do anything about the van, but we can and do hide ourselves to wait and see what’s going on.
* * *
ROBERT AS I APPROACH THE MENTAL HOSPITAL WHERE I BEGAN MY CALLING, THE AIR SEEMS THICKER WITH SOMETHING LIKE MIST. IT TAKES ME A LITTLE WHILE TO REALIZE THAT IT’S NOT IN THE ATMOSPHERE, BUT JUST BEYOND IT, SWIRLING WITHIN THE GAUNTLET ITSELF. IT’S NOT SOMETHING I USUALLY SEE IN A MASS LIKE THIS. IT’S UNBORN SOULS SEEKING INCARNATION.
Most souls not yet bom are very vaguely defined. They have a legacy from their parents and all their ancestors, both within the species and in all its predecessors, but they haven’t yet had time to develop personalities of their own. Even the reincarnated ones aren’t terribly complex at that stage; the traits that pass on from one lifetime to the next are much simpler than the accumulated weight of details within a lifetime. Very occasionally you might see one better developed than that, the soul of a particularly powerful magician or someone blessed with unusual protection from rites performed at or not long before death.
This throng, though, includes a great many of those better-developed souls. It’s like... I catch myself. Of course it’s not a matter of like, it’s a matter of is. These are all the souls in the world (well, in this little comer of it) capable of rebirth, hoping for one last chance in flesh before the show ends. I haven’t seen many babies lately, but the competition must be fierce and ugly. I’ll be very unsurprised if I learn that legends of changelings are gaining in popularity. Desperate souls, many of them lacking in much of anything you’d want to call moral depth, may try all sorts of schemes to claim the bodies they want.
The road swings from due north to nearly east, taking a jog around some property the road builders couldn’t secure for their own. Just around the bend, a woman stands right on the yellow line. She’s about my age, I think, better tanned than I am, with ragged brown hair and good hiking gear. She’s exhausted, I think, teetering on the brink of collapse; I put on a little extra speed so that I can catch her if she falls.
“Excuse me, ” I call out as I approach. “I don’t mean to intrude, but you look like you need some help. ”
She gets as far as “I.... " Then she does waver and sag, and I have to run to keep her from hitting her head on the pavement. Cradling her, I sit down on the road, hoping that no car chooses this moment to drive our way. She’s light, but not starved or anything like that. It’s just that she’s in good shape and lightly built in the first place. The Rubbish rustles along the edges of the road, keeping an eye out for both material and spiritual threats. The fog of seeking souls doesn’t draw too near. Apparently neither she nor I are good candidates for providing soulless bodies for anyone else to use.
A few minutes later, she struggles back to consciousness. “I... did I fall? ” She turns her head to look at me, and I see that her eyes are a bright blue dimmed by sheer fatigue to a watery hue that’s almost gray. She doesn’t match my own standards of beauty very thoroughly, but she’s got an honesty of expression that’s appealing in its own way. I don’t think she’s going to try to bullshit me about whatever it is she’s up to, and I decide to be honest in reply.
“Yes, you did. I was walking along just as you started to faint. That was about five minutes ago. You weren’t all the way unconscious, but you weren’t responsive to the outside world. ’’ I smile. “My name’s Robert. Robert Blanclege. I’m heading up north to visit some old friends. ’’
“Maria, ” she says after a moment. “The rest doesn’t matter. ” I can see fear rising over her head like the air over hot pavement. I also see a faint light within her that might be the beginning of awakening, and I decide that I owe her the effort it may take to make sure that she doesn’t end like the man whose head filled with black sludge or any of the other tragedies I’ve seen lately.
I shake her hand, the absurd formality bringing a brief smile to her face. “Pleased to meet you. Do you have any particular destination?” A fraction of a second later I curse myself for the question, as she breaks out crying. “I’m sorry, ” I add hastily, “please don’t think you have to answer that question. We can wait here for a while, in any event. ” “No, it’s okay, ” she says. “Okay, no, it’s not, but my talking or not talking about it won’t make any difference. ” She’s got just a touch of a Latin American accent. I feel pretty comfortable guessing that her family immigrated to the US when she was still a child, and that she has or had until recently relatives who never really mastered English. “There was only one place I wanted to go, and it’s gone now. ” “Do you want to tell me about it? I’m pretty good at listening. ” I shi
ft my weight slightly. “But maybe we could move off the road first. ”
“Huh? Oh! Yes, yes. ” She makes a good effort to stand, and I try not to let it show just how much help I have to give her for it to work. As she walks, I see that she’s got a slight limp. And blood spilling out of the top of her left boot. I’m going to have to attend to that. We do manage the dozen or so steps, and then sit down again, resting more comfortably on lawn that was mowed not too many days ago.
As she catches her breath, I point at her bloody boot. “I can take care of that, if you want. ”
She looks down. “If you can, please. ”
I gently stretch out her leg horizontally, putting a rolled-up spare shirt of mine under her knee to help support it. Then I can get a better look at her boot. Turns out that there's... what the hell? There’s a silver nail, or something much like it, driven through the sole near the heel. I’m astounded that she can manage to walk. “How on earth did you get anywhere with this? ”
“I had to. ” A simple enough answer.
“I don’t mean motive, ” I say. “I mean physical Feasibility. This must hurt like hell, and you can deal with that if you need to. But it must be doing terrible things to muscles or ligaments in there. I don’t see quite how you can walk on it. ”
“It’s not what you think, ” she tells me.
“Oh?"
“Take a look. ” So I take the invitation and do. I unlace the boot as carefully as I can. She’s got good thick hiking socks on, and I peel the sock off, too. Now the nail head and a quarter inch of its shaft lay open for my examination. She’s right. It’s not what I think. It’s not a nail at all, I see. The shaft is almost as fine as wire, while the head isn’t a real nail head, it’s the broken tip of something larger, flattened out mostly by her stepping on it again and again.
World of Darkness - Time of Judgement - Mage Page 22