Time existed to keep different developmental levels of souls spread out safely from one another, according to what each could handle. Renaissance periods were the exception which proved the rule. They occurred as a kind of Singularity, a place where the physics of time and space broke down. They were hence immune from his kind. Nestled inside a Renaissance, Festus would not feel pressured every time he stepped out the door to do something to tend the timeline, the constant gardener that he was, and remove souls who wished only to sabotage history. Here, if nowhere else, he would be free from his compulsions.
SIXTY-THREE
After a several day absence, Drew found Robin passed out on her bed. She’d returned to her astral traveling homework with the renaissance figures—for the last time. He shook her until she was awake.
He sat her up, handed her a glass of water, and waited for her to come around.
That feat accomplished…
“The psychic communiques to the Renaissance types are all well and good. But you can’t remain on the sidelines forever, Robin. You have to roll up your sleeves and get more actively involved with people’s lives.”
“And make the kind of mistakes Hartman made?”
Drew, aware the underground railroad was keeping close tabs on Robin, opened the first of the closet doors. Aart was standing stork still, in his signature move, holding a champagne bottle on a silver platter. He straightened his collar, and shoved the platter in Drew’s face. “I thought you might like a drink.”
“Hold that thought.” He led Aart out the room by holding the bottle in front of him. He closed the door on Aart and picked up the conversation where he’d left off.
“You’re wiser than Hartman.”
“But not all-knowing. There’ll be a price to pay. A steep one.”
Drew checked under the bed. He reached out with his hands and pulled. First came the feet, then the rest of the torso, finally, Toby’s face set in an exasperated expression.
“It’s not fair you being the sole voice in these major turning points in her life.” Toby spoke from a reclined position in a Formula 500 go-cart.
Drew opened the bedroom door and gave him a kick-start down the hall. “You can’t win them all.”
He returned his attention to Robin. “If you’re to act as the hands of God, then you must allow Him to light up that energy body now that you’ve mastered its chakras and nadirs and removed all blockages to the Godhead.”
Robin grunted. “Removed some blockages. Not all. There’s a reason holy men lock themselves in monasteries and do not engage in matters belonging more rightly to the material world.”
Drew checked the second of the closets. He found Muriel’s torso holding her head in its right hand by the hair.
Muriel’s severed head said, “You sure about this? I know a kindred soul when I see one.”
He walked the ever-divisive Muriel to the door and helped her on her way with a kick to the butt, before slamming the door on her.
“There comes a time, Robin, when it no longer serves the greater good to keep such self-empowerment bottled up. It’s okay to feel a little touched, as if you can do no wrong.”
“Fine. I’ll go be bold and beautiful.”
Drew reined in his smirk. “Don’t make the mistake of minding only the butterflies in the garden. Some of the less colorful lifeforms require your attention, too. For instance, the staff on the Harding estate, and the other curious characters drawn to it.”
“I can’t save them all.”
Drew opened the door to the bathroom where he found Minerva crouched down, and Frumpley standing over her, both with an ear to the door.
Minerva stood with no sense of apology. “I feel anyone experiencing a spiritual unfolding under the influence of the vortex is more properly put under my tutelage.”
Drew helped her on her way by yanking on her arm.
Frumply, realizing he didn’t have long to make his case, came right out with it. “You can’t have someone reshaping the world without first informing them with my management experience and fiscal responsibility.”
Drew escorted them both out of the room. “Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.”
Drew noticed Robin was greeting the exodus from her room with none of her customary enchantment with local color. That caused Drew to soften his predictably polarized position. “Maybe it is you they will save. The last shall be first, and all that. Besides, you promised yourself a vacation from your purposefulness. If you return prematurely to the duties at hand, you won’t fully recharge your batteries so you can go after the rest of your kind. Your light’ll burn out too soon.”
“Somehow I doubt the Harding estate regulars hold any salvation for me.”
Drew actually winced. He couldn’t imagine the colorful peeps on Telegraph Avenue Robin so loved had anything on the Harding estate regulars. It seemed as if she’d lost her heart connection with the very people who truly kept her going. “If they got you to lighten up even just a little, imagine what you could do.”
Drew recognized that look on Robin’s face. It meant she was coming back on line, ready or not. And her love of the Renaissance figures would push out considerations of all else. To her detriment, if not theirs.
SIXTY-FOUR
“All right, we’re going to give it a final push,” Frumpley said, addressing the throng of servants in the Harding estate living room. “Remember, people, the idea is to get Robin to enjoy life without having to pay it forward to within an inch of her life.” He surveyed the looks he was getting from the crowd until he felt satisfied. “Very well then, dismissed.”
After the crowd had scattered to either exit, Minerva alone was left. “What if this doesn’t work?” she said.
“Well, then, she’s on her own. I can’t devote any more of the staff’s time. I’ve got a household to run, one that has yet to be put back in order from recently being under siege.”
“Hear hear.”
***
Robin awoke to the beeping, like a troublesome alarm clock. The scanner in the car’s dashboard indicated an event required their attention. She elbowed Toby beside her in the driver’s seat. He balanced his head back on his shoulders, opened his eyes.
Robin glanced back at Lady Harding, in character as Raya Stark, clutching her ray-rifle even in sleep, wrapped around it like the snake around the sword in the symbol of medicine. Robin figured the car’s acceleration would wake her. It did. Toby depressed the accelerator with enough force to simulate a head-on collision. Her head whipped back, and her eyes snapped wide. For a second, she seemed as if nothing short of the car wrapping itself around a telephone pole could wake her from her alcoholic stupor. But her startled response did the trick.
“What now?” Robin asked.
“Now we wait and see,” Raya explained. “Then we point and shoot.” She rode her rifle over each bump in the road as if it were the oar on a boat.
Robin thought, What a striking difference Raya was from Lady Harding.
Robin had to admit, allowing herself to be drawn psychically to certain Renaissance figures by surrendering to her higher power had so far shown her individuals who had as much to teach her as she had to teach them.
Only neither side was doing particularly well at the teaching part.
Maybe she just hadn’t surrendered enough. Maybe Toby and Raya would role model the next stage of surrender for her. Maybe the Harding staff as a whole was attempting to vibrate the tuning fork just right to shatter her psychic resistance to learning whatever it was she just refused to learn from them, suffering, as she evidently was, from the same malaise as her “students.”
The Renaissance types she monitored were as quick to action as she was reticent to get involved.
They were as absorbed in the moment as she was detached from it.
The truth undoubtedly lay between their extremes; the question was how to nudge either party toward the middle.
There was little to do sans a master plan but rub up
against one another until they shaped each other the way they wanted—one very slow, arduous process. And perhaps unavoidable.
But she was ready to entertain options.
If she and the rest of the Renaissance figures could all do what they did best with less compulsion and more freedom, the quality of joy might naturally emerge in their lives.
But how?
Robin gasped at the sight before her. “Holy shit!”
“Wonderful, isn’t it?” Raya leaned into the horizon, eager for it to envelop her like a well-earned steam bath at the end of a long day.
Toby gunned the stretch 1930s two-seater luxury sedan. It sped across the thin tongue of dock lapping the water—and sailed into the air. Trying to convince a car it was a plane could only end badly. Robin steeled herself for the inevitable.
The car morphed into a speedboat before it hit the water, a steam-powered craft to which the steampunk era Raya’s ray-rifle was keyed.
“What now?” Robin asked.
“Pick a side. Any side.” Toby surveyed the two pirate ships slugging it out with their cannons, doing his best to steer their own vessel so as not to be smashed between them.
“You’re kidding, right?” Robin noticed his complete absorption in the drama. Toby clutched the wheel of the speedboat as if surviving this moment was all that mattered. The sense of immediacy bordered on madness.
“Never argue with the guy keeping you from sailing headlong into oblivion,” Raya advised. Typical backseat driver.
Robin turned to face her and she was no longer human, but automaton, her figure molded like sculpted Plexiglas over brass wheels and gears and corkscrews, like viewing the insides of an antique watch. She checked her own reflection in the boat’s splashguard, noticed she had not morphed to match the times. She regarded Toby in time to see him change over—his absorption in the moment the key to his transformation.
Robin pointed to the pirate ship to their starboard side.
“Why that side?” Toby sounded frantic. She wasn’t sure if he was losing confidence in his ability to control their vessel in the increasingly turbulent tide, or losing confidence in her.
Robin explained, “They’re losing.”
Toby shook his head. “I’d like to take this time to remind you the goal is to get in, do what we have to do, and make it home alive.”
“She has a point,” Raya said, making last minute adjustments to the rifle. “We’re not going to endear ourselves to the winners of this skirmish if they hardly feel indebted to us for saving the day.”
Raya fired the rifle, ignited a cannon ball as it was ejected so it exploded against the vessel housing the cannon. She fired another couple blasts with the same effect. “That should get us in good with the underdogs.”
Toby brought their nimble craft against the pirate ship they were joining up with. The instant their sides touched, they “accepted” one another. The smaller craft crawled up the starboard side of the pirate ship like a spider; the pirate ship assisted with footholds. Robin and her two sidekicks watched the animated pieces responding to the larger consciousness of the wholes of which they were parts.
The smaller craft’s siding solidified once it dangled from the pirate vessel like a rescue raft, as one with it as if its designer had intended for it to be there all along.
Their captain, who’d watched their ascent, greeted them with his sword pointed at Raya’s throat. “You’re the one with the unique weapon. Nice of you to favor us with your talents when you did.”
His tattoos, embossed in his transparent skin, like the ones adoring his crew’s bodies, recalled animated GIFs, depicting a quick beheading, a knife to the gut, or mere jousting, as his muscles flexed; proud moments immortalized from prior ship to ship combat.
“And what is this?” the captain said, holding his blade to Robin’s throat. “I thought the humans were all gone now. Why have you kept this one alive?” His one eye, not covered by an eye patch, seemed to work doubly hard at scrutinizing her.
“She’s a soul-seer,” Raya explained.
“Automatons have no souls.” One Eye lowered his sword, caressed Robin’s cheek with his hook that doubled as his left hand. The rest of his crew, snickering, emboldened by their captain’s tough talk, continued to hang back and give him space, the one clue Robin and the rest of her party were addressing the captain. “All the same, the crew could stand to hear some tall tales and to have their future divined,” One Eye said. “You read tarot cards, do you?”
Robin nodded, still having trouble slipping into character. Without knowing who it was she was meant to save, whose destiny she was to effect, she was all but lost.
Finished deliberating her fate, the captain announced his decision to the crew, his voice raised. “A seer for our amusement later. For now, there’s the matter of a ship’s bounty to be plundered.” The remark was greeted with loud cheers and swords stabbing the sky.
The men swung on ropes to the deck of the other ship to put an end to the last of the wounded automatons unable to coordinate their movements effectively to defend themselves. Many were caught in movement loops, and repeated the same sequence over and over again. They were easy enough to get around once their attackers ascertained the limited range of the choreography.
***
Robin locked eyes with FarAway, an automaton-pirate shaped like a glorified arachnid, a body type which he wielded effectively above-deck against the enemy. He swung swords with multiple appendages and used pincer talons at the end of his remaining limbs to guillotine the opponents who managed to dodge his swords. He perched on the stool before her, all his limbs folded in, and hit her with his best poker face, refusing to reveal any hints about himself that would make her job as seer any easier.
Robin continued to flip tarot cards, and say nothing, just watched his eyes skitter nervously from card to card as the crucifix layout of cards took shape. “Ah ha!” she shouted with satisfaction at last. “You are out of sorts because you have not embraced your highest destiny.”
“What’s that?” he said, as if he really didn’t want to know, his guttural sounds indicating his voice box was in desperate need of oiling.
“You were meant to imprison your victims in your thorax and torture them endlessly with your spider venom. The venom generates hallucinations in your prey that are quite addictive. It’s a sick form of codependent love that suits you. Try it and you’ll see.”
FarAway wasted no time putting the theory to the test. He grabbed hold of various pirates, but none would fit inside his thorax. Finally, he managed to squeeze one in. Taking advantage of the cage, he injected his special lubricant into the spinal fluid lubricating his victim’s brain.
The rest of the crew laughed as his prisoner hissed and fought desperately to get free until the agonizing serum took hold of him.
The pirates witnessing the transformation howled with pleasure and satisfaction.
“She’s a real seer!” One Eye shouted. “Saints be praised. Get out of the way, matey.” He brushed aside Gimpy, the automaton pirate with the game leg, knocked him off the stool, and planted himself before Robin, dared her to say something untoward that would invite her death. “Let’s hope that wasn’t dumb luck, or you’ll walk the plank. No pressure.”
Robin smiled. This was fun getting lost in the drama. She could allow herself to do things in this world she could never permit herself in real life. The vacation from herself felt as invigorating as sticking her finger in a light socket. A sure sign she had a long way to go to remove the tarnish from her soul that continued to make it fly heavy under all the muck.
She gathered up the tarot cards, shuffled the deck, all the while eying her fresh mark. How to feed his megalomania, make him look good in front of his crew, and get him to embrace his darkest fears all at once? A real puzzle. She bristled with excitement contemplating her next move.
***
When Robin transitioned back into her world, she felt a twinge of remorse. She watched the ocean
and the pirate ship dissolve in the speedboat’s rear view mirror. She sensed the lawn of the Harding estate beneath the wheels of the antique sedan in place of the ripples of the ocean.
“Thanks, Toby.”
“For what, mam?” Toby fought with the steering wheel of the car as he had with the steering wheel of the speedboat over the ocean waves.
“For helping me to realize it’s never going to be enough just to whisper in the ears of the Renaissance figures. I have to get more actively involved. As you’ve done with me. You’ve shown me the way, Toby, you and the others. Drew suggested as much. It just didn’t take until now. Maybe I needed my batteries recharged to make the connection.”
***
Robin hardened into place beside Toby and Raya in the moving car as if carved by an artisan’s hand out of quick-drying cement. As her catatonia set in, Toby just sighed. The woman was one of them all right: incorrigible to the end.
He shouted over the wind and the road noise in hopes some part of her was still responsive to this world. “My prayer for you, mam, is you one day know joy in absence of burdensome responsibility, and fear of what comes next.”
His words had magic, all right. Just not the magic he intended. Robin dematerialized before his eyes. Apparently she was no longer astral traveling; she was teleporting.
RENAISSANCE 2.0
BOOK 5
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 174