Science and Sorcery

by Christopher Nuttall

  He looked at the coffin and winced. Jenkins had been a good man, a stern head of his household and – later – Thaddeus’s father-in-law. But no one had realised that his wife was a magician, not until something had happened that had left Jenkins dead and his wife in a coma – and his daughter effectively an orphan. Thaddeus had pulled strings to get Chloe Jenkins out of protective custody, knowing that it would have pleased her father. He’d always worried about his children being exposed to the wrong influences.

  Jenkins had often spoken about the End Times in his sermons. Thaddeus had listened, maybe not taking them quite as seriously as he should, as he’d talked about the antichrist, who would deceive the world through magic. There would be false prophets, he’d warned, and tricksters who would duplicate the acts of Jesus, worked with the power of his father. They would deceive many, laying the groundwork for the End Times. And now there were magicians in the world.

  Thaddeus had no love for the President – like most inhabitants of the White House, he was either a liberal or a weakling who couldn't be trusted to stand up for American interests – but his speech seemed to have opened the floodgates. There were dozens of reported incidents of magic, ranging from werewolves to outright magicians. And deaths; men and women savaged by werewolves, or killed in magical accidents. Several people didn't seem to have survived their transformations into magical creatures either. How many deaths would there be in the future?

  And just what would it do to the world?

  He glanced over at his wife, seated in the women’s pew, and winced when he saw her face. Jean Whitehall, nee Jenkins, had loved her father, despite his strictness and willingness to apply the belt if necessary to punish his daughters. Thaddeus had held her as she cried, unable to believe that their mother would deliberately set out to hurt their father. He hadn't been able to blame his wife for her disbelief. The entire world seemed to be going crazy.

  Thaddeus had been raised to believe that all people were considered equal, in birth if not in achievement. His grandest achievements, being a United States Senator and former Governor of Texas, had been his own work. So too had his failures; he, not anyone else, was responsible for the day he crawled into a bottle after the loss of his first wife. How could anyone blame others for their own choices? A druggie who whined that society had failed him was nothing more than a liar, or someone who had abdicated all control over his own life. There was no reason why someone couldn't climb out of the gutter and rise all the way to becoming President of the United States.

  But magic threatened to change the very concept of human equality – and control. The werewolves presented one aspect of the problem; could they be considered responsible for their actions while under the influence? Thaddeus would quite happily have considered a drunk driver a murderer if he knocked down someone while driving, because few people were forced to drink alcohol, but a werewolf hadn't chosen to be a werewolf. But even if they weren't responsible for their actions, how could they be allowed in normal society when they could lose control and bite people, infecting others with the werewolf disease?

  And then there were the magicians. If some people could work magic, and others couldn't, what did that say about the concept of human equality?

  The President hadn't provided any real guidance, proving – once again – that he was a man without a true moral centre. Thaddeus could understand why he might want to wait and see what happened, but there was no time. The events in New Orleans were nothing compared to the disasters that might be on their way, unless the government took firm action. And if the President wouldn't take action himself, Thaddeus and those who shared his views would just have to work to force action through Congress and the Senate anyway.

  He rose to his feet as the pastor finished his sermon and the pallbearers advanced to pick up the coffin and carry it to a small graveyard outside the church. They would bury the Reverend, and pray for his wife’s soul, and then they would go back home, where he would start laying the groundwork for his campaign. Someone had to do something about magic before the situation got completely out of hand and it looked like it had to be him. And if it took him to the White House...well, at last America would have a President of strong moral principles.

  Besides, someone had to stand up for ordinary people.

  ***

  There was a distinct advantage in being an enemy of the mainstream media, he reminded himself, a few hours later. The media might take his words and put them out of context, but one could always rely on the bloggers to point out – often in excessive detail – exactly what the media had done to his speeches. It also meant that he could reach a far wider audience than one might expect, including millions of conservatives who might otherwise have held their tongues, convinced that they were alone in their conservatism. The media liked to paint the cities as fortresses of progressive thought, and the countryside as populated by rural hicks whose only source of entertainment was getting to second base with their cousins, but anyone with any sense knew better. None of the political lines were so finely drawn.

  “The polls have definitely identified a groundswell of fear about magic,” Thomas Carmichael reported. He was a young man who had worked with Thaddeus on his campaign to reach the Senate, helping him to master the potential of the internet and other newfangled ways to reach the public. Some of Thaddeus’s more extreme supporters had muttered darkly about affirmative action, forcing him to put them straight. There were people he would have preferred to see on the left, just so he could sneer at them properly.

  “Good,” Thaddeus said. Oddly, he hadn't felt so energized in years. This was real politics, even if the rough-and-tumble had yet to begin. “And where are the people trying to lead us?”

  Carmichael checked his notes. “There’s no specific trend yet,” he reported, “apart from the people who want magic banned altogether. Quite how they intend to ban werewolves escapes me.”

  Thaddeus nodded. One rule of political campaigns, at least ones intended to help boost re-election prospects, was never to go too far. Banning werewolves from existence, no doubt with some kind of werewolf pogrom, would alienate people who would otherwise have sat on the fence and waited to see what happened. Besides, it wasn't as if werewolves could be blamed for their own existence.

  “We will need to work on the supervision factor, rather than pushing for outright destruction,” Thaddeus said. Promising people more than one could deliver wasn’t politically fatal, as countless politicians had discovered, but it should have been. A great many liberals would have been kicked out after yet another attempt to convince the world that black was white, a circle was a square and constantly borrowing money was a sustainable approach to the economy. “Did you have a chance to read through my proposals?”

  Carmichael picked up the sheet of handwritten notes Thaddeus had made on the drive back to his mansion. “I think that most of them are workable,” he said, glancing down at the paper. “However, the concept of mandatory blood tests for magical traits is going to raise hackles – and it may well be unworkable.”

  Thaddeus lifted an eyebrow. “Unworkable?”

  “Logic tells us that magical creatures – and magicians – have something in their DNA that separates them from ordinary people,” Carmichael said. “Magic, however, doesn't seem to be bound by what we would consider common sense. The mermaids, for example, undergo remarkable transformations literally overnight, but they didn't all transform together. That implies that whatever X-factor they have in their blood wasn't active until they transformed.”

  He paused, marshalling his thoughts. Like most younger assistants, he had a tendency to speak before his thoughts were fully organised. “If we did a blood test, assuming we knew what to look for, on a dormant mermaid, would we realised that she was a mermaid?”

  “I see your point,” Thaddeus said, reluctantly. Someone whose magic hadn't blossomed yet, whatever form it took, might not be detectable. “We can't lock up the entire country on suspicion.”

&
nbsp; “No,” Carmichael agreed.

  They worked through the rest of the points, one by one. Some politicians preferred to simply issue orders, rather than ask their staffers for obedience. Thaddeus preferred to have someone tell him when he might be wrong, before he took his ideas public. There would be complaints from the left, of course, but there were always complaints from the left. The real task was to convince the undecided majority that his program, rather than that put forward by the President, was the right way to handle the crisis. It helped that the President hadn't put forward a real plan.

  “Good,” Thaddeus said, finally. “I take it that you will be recording the press conference?”

  “Of course,” Carmichael said. It would be placed online, naturally, where watchers could see the entire conference rather than edited highlights. That wouldn’t save him from a real gaffe – one political career had been destroyed by a candidate who had referred to be voters as morons – but at least it would make it harder for the mainstream media to misrepresent his words. “I wouldn't miss it for the world.”

  ***

  “The world has changed,” Thaddeus said. He stood in front of a podium, looking down at the reporters and bloggers in the crowd. The reporters had come because anything a Senator said was newsworthy; the bloggers because many of them took their self-appointed task of deconstructing media lies seriously. “We have been forced to come to terms with the fact that some of our fellow citizens have become rampaging monsters, infected by a disease we only knew out of legend. And we have seen that some others may have developed powers that can be used for great good, or great evil.”

  He’d wanted to focus on the evil, but his advisors had pointed out that the Washington Healer, as the MSM had named her, was hardly evil. Indeed, she’d cured a number of cancer patients who had been expected to die within a month, despite all that modern medicine could do. According to one of his fellow Senators, the AMA was already making the rounds on Capitol Hill, trying to convince lawmakers to pass laws insisting that all Healers register themselves with the medical professionals. Thaddeus would have supported it, except for the fact that it wasn't anything like far-reaching enough.

  “This is a world-changing event that makes 9/11 look like nothing,” he continued. Bush had been a weakling, too willing to truckle to the MSM and all sorts of untrustworthy allies. “Our reaction to this event will save or damn our society. We owe it to our children to approach the issue directly, without sentimentality. Our society demands it.

  “The President has refused to tackle the issue head-on. He has asked werewolves – or suspected werewolves – to come forward, to make themselves known to the authorities. He has asked magicians to refrain from using their powers and to come forward, to help scientists study their abilities. But these steps are weak compared to what we need. We must tackle this crisis firmly.

  “It is our duty to protect the American population, magical or non-magical. When creatures like werewolves are involved, we must take steps to ensure that they cannot threaten their fellow humans, that they cannot kill or maim or inflict the werewolf curse. They cannot do this for themselves! We have all seen the interview with the Pittsburgh werewolf, one of the few to remember what happened after he transformed. A gentle man was transformed into a savage monster. How many people were bitten on that first hellish night? How many people have become werewolves because they were bitten by another werewolf?”

  He took a breath. “They may not even be the worst problem,” he added. He ignored the clicking cameras through the ease of long practice. “What happens when one person uses magic as a weapon? We have already seen cases of Voodoo being used offensively, or less traditional powers – and people have died. Too many people have died. We have no legal framework to come to terms with people who possess supernatural powers. Can we really charge someone with a crime if they curse a victim and the victim dies?”

  The law was good at recognising cause and effect, mostly, although the liberals sometimes had a pretty weird idea of where ‘cause’ began. Someone stupid enough to jump off a roof after watching Superman cartoons should not, in any logical world, have grounds to sue the cartoon producers. But where magic was concerned, where did ‘cause’ actually begin? If a person was cursed by a Voodoo priest, was the priest responsible for the car that knocked him down, or was it the driver? How could anyone hope to untangle the mess.

  “The President has refused to tackle this issue,” he repeated. “Therefore, I am announcing the formation of the Campaign for Magical Regulation. The goal of the campaign will be to bring magic under control, to prevent those afflicted with curses from harming others – and to regulate the use of innate magical talents. We do this for society’s protection – and the protection of those cursed with magic. I do not wish to see America threatened with the same unrest threatening Saudi Arabia.”

  Thaddeus scowled inwardly at the thought. He hated Saudi Arabia, for all sorts of reasons, but the last three days had provided a new one. From the vague reports filtering out to the West – he would never have thought that there was a reason to be grateful for Al Jazeera – a girl had developed supernatural powers, only to be beaten to death by the religious police. But her parents hadn't accepted the death of their daughter and unrest was spreading rapidly. The reports were contradictory, to the point where outside observers speculated that there had been more than one trigger incident. Getting accurate news out of Saudi was sometimes harder than getting blood from a stone.

  And how long would it be before something similar occurred in America?

  “This isn't about power, or about control,” he concluded. “This is about preserving as much of our society as possible, about ensuring that we pass through the dangerous days ahead without sacrificing the liberties that made America great. If you are concerned about magical threats, if you feel that the CMR is providing the right framework to tackle these issues, let the world know.”

  Afterwards, he watched the feedback with Carmichael and a couple of other advisors. The MSM had slanted the speech, of course, but the bloggers were more thoughtful. Not all of them agreed with him, yet even the dissidents were considering the issues properly, rather than screaming insults at him. The early reports suggested that the speech had gone down very well, but he knew better than to take that too seriously. It had only just begun.

  “I’ve booked you in for a dozen interviews over the next few days,” his Press Secretary said. “I’m afraid that some of them are likely to be hostile.”

  “No surprise there,” Thaddeus said. “I’d better start working on my answers. No rest for anyone who wants to be a politician. Or wicked.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  New York, USA

  Day 15

  “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” Misty Reynolds said, fighting to keep her voice calm. “You are firing me?”

  The principal looked back at her, rather nervously. “I’m suspending you,” he said, carefully, “until we know what degree of threat...”

  “I don’t pose any threat,” Misty snapped. “I just defended myself!”

  She wondered, absently, if the principal would have been happier if she’d let herself be mugged, raped and possibly murdered. There had been no way of knowing what the two gangbangers who had accosted her had wanted, although the fact that one of them had grabbed her breast suggested that their motives had been worse than a simple mugging. She'd lashed out with a power she hadn't known she had – and both gangbangers had been slammed into the nearby wall by an invisible force, breaking a number of their bones. The NYPD didn't seem inclined to press the matter, although they had warned her not to leave the city until further notice, but she’d had to report the whole incident to the principal.

  And then he’d called her into his office the following morning and told her that he was suspending her. The nightmare hadn't ended at all.

  “I know that,” he said, tiredly. “Misty, I don’t have a word to say against your teaching skills...”
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  Given that it was very difficult to fire teachers who were incompetent, that was no real compliment, but Misty took it anyway. She had had all the usual difficulties in coping with a class too large to be effective, with children who had never been taught any real discipline or respect for authority, yet she had managed to make a small impression on the children. And telling them that she was a magician might even have improved discipline.

  “There are issues here,” the principal admitted. “I don’t know if it is safe for you to be around young children...”

  “I'm not a fucking paedophile,” Misty snapped, feeling her temper flare. Her magic, the force that had awoken yesterday, boiled under her skin. “This is...this is rank discrimination. You can't take my job because I defended myself against two thugs who...”

  “I know,” the principal said. “But right now, I have to explain to the PTA why I allowed you to work at the school in the first place. Enough of them have heard the news to ask questions – and the rest have heard rumours. They’re terrified of leaving someone with such a power in charge of a classroom. You know what can happen when teachers lose it – and you have a deadly weapon under your control.”