by Mike Ashley
But Lord Jagged only puffed on his pipe and smiled a secret and superior smile.
CUP AND TABLE
Tim Pratt
Our curve of extremeness has been rising steadily, but has started to rise sharply over the last few stories, and takes a further leap here. I reprinted Tim Pratt’s “The Witch’s Bicycle”, which is almost as extreme as this story, in The Mammoth Book of Sorcerer’s Tales. At that time I said of Pratt (b. 1976) that he is “a poet, author and reviewer from Oakland, California. He currently works as an associate editor at Locus, the news magazine of the science-fiction field, and co-edits the little magazine Flytrap. Although still quite new to the game his work is being noticed.” Well, indeed it has.
He was shortlisted for the Campbell Award for best new writer in 2004, his poem “Destination” won the Rhysling Award for Best Long Poem in 2005 and his short story, “Impossible Dreams”, a beautiful romance between alternate worlds, won the Hugo Award in 2007.
Tim’s website is at www.timpratt.org
Sigmund stepped over the New Doctor, dropping a subway token onto her devastated body. He stepped around the spreading shadow of his best friend, Carlsbad, who had died as he’d lived: inconclusively, and without fanfare. He stepped over the brutalized remains of Ray, up the steps, and kept his eyes focused on the shrine inside.
This room in the temple at the top of the mountain at the top of the world was large and cold, and peer as he might back through the layers of time – visible to Sigmund as layers of gauze, translucent as sautéed onions, decade after decade peeling away under his gaze – he could not see a time when this room had not existed on this spot, bare but potent, as if only recently vacated by the God who’d created and abandoned the world.
Sigmund approached the shrine, and there it was. The cup. The prize and goal and purpose of a hundred generations of the Table. The other members of the Table were dead, the whole world was dead, except for Sigmund.
He did not reach for the cup. Instead, he walked to the arched window and looked out. Peering back in time he saw mountains and clouds and the passing of goats. But in the present he saw only fire, twisting and writhing, consuming rock as easily as trees, with a few mountain peaks rising as-yet-untouched from the flames. Sigmund had not loved the world much – he’d enjoyed the music of Bach, violent movies, and vast quantities of cocaine – and by and large he could have taken or left civilization. Still, knowing the world was consumed in fire made him profoundly sad.
Sigmund returned to the shrine and seized the cup – heavy, stone, more blunt object than drinking vessel – and prepared to sip.
But then, at the last moment, Sigmund didn’t drink. He did something else instead.
But first:
Or, arguably, later:
Sigmund slumped in the back seat, Carlsbad lurking on the floorboards in his semi-liquid noctilescent form, Carlotta tapping her razored silver fingernails on the steering wheel, and Ray – the newest member of the Table – fiddling with the radio. He popped live scorpions from a plastic bag into his mouth. Tiny spines were rising out of Ray’s skin, mostly on the nape of his neck and the back of his hands, their tips pearled with droplets of venom.
“It was a beautiful service,” Sigmund said. “They sent the Old Doctor off with dignity.”
Carlsbad’s tarry body rippled. Ray turned around, frowning, face hard and plain as a sledgehammer, and said “What the shit are you talking about, junkie? We haven’t even gotten to the funeral home yet.”
Sigmund sank down in his seat. This was, in a way, even more embarrassing than blacking out.
“Blood and honey,” Carlotta said, voice all wither and bile. “How much of that shit did you snort this morning that you can’t even remember what day it is?”
Sigmund didn’t speak. They all knew he could see into the past, but none of them knew the full extent of his recent gyrations through time. Lately he’d been jerking from future to past and back again without compass or guide. Only the Old Doctor had known about that, and now that he was dead, it was better kept a secret.
They reached the funeral home, and Sigmund had to go through the ceremony all over again. Grief- unlike sex, music, and cheating at cards – was not a skill that could be honed by practice.
The Old Doctor welcomed Sigmund, twenty years old and tormented by visions, into the library at the Table’s headquarters. Shelves rose everywhere like battlements, the floors were old slate, and the lights were ancient crystal-dripping chandeliers, but the Old Doctor sat in a folding chair at a card table heaped with books.
“I expected, well, something more,” Sigmund said, thumping the rickety table with his hairy knuckles. “A big slab of mahogany or something, a table with authority.”
“We had a fine table once,” the Old Doctor said, eternally middle-aged and absently professorial. “But it was chopped up for firewood during a siege in the 1600s.” He tapped the side of his nose. “There’s a lesson in that. No asset, human or material, is important compared to the continued existence of the organization itself.”
“But surely you’re irreplaceable,” Sigmund said, awkward attempt at job security through flattery. The room shivered and blurred at the edges of his vision, but it had not changed much in recent decades, a few books moving here and there, piles of dust shifting across the floor.
The Old Doctor shook his head. “I am the living history of the Table, but if I died, a new doctor would be sent from the archives to take over operations, and though his approach might differ from mine, his role would be the same – to protect the cup.”
“The cup,” Sigmund said, sensing the cusp of mysteries. “You mean the Holy Grail.”
The Old Doctor ran his fingers along the spine of a dusty leatherbound book. “No. The Table predates the time of Christ. We guard a much older cup.”
“The cup, is it here, in the vaults?”
“Well.” The Old Doctor frowned at the book in his hands. “We don’t actually know where the cup is anymore. The archives have…deteriorated over the centuries, and there are gaps in my knowledge. It would be accurate to say the agents of the Table now seek the cup, so that we may protect it properly again. That’s why you’re here, Sigmund. For your ability to see into the past. Though we’ll have to train you to narrow your focus to the here-and-now, to peel back the gauze of time at will.” He looked up from the book and met Sigmund’s eyes. “As it stands, you’re almost useless to me, but I’ve made useful tools out of things far more broken than you are.”
Some vestigial part of Sigmund’s ego bristled at being called broken, but not enough to stir him to his own defense. “But I can only look back thirty or forty years. How can that help you?”
“I have…a theory,” the Old Doctor said. “When you were found on the streets, you were raving about gruesome murders, yes?”
Sigmund nodded. “I don’t know about raving, but yes.”
“The murders you saw took place over a hundred years ago. On that occasion, you saw back many more years than usual. Do you know why?”
Sigmund shook his head. He thought he did know, but shame kept him from saying.
“I suspect your unusual acuity was the result of all that speed you snorted,” the Old Doctor said. “The stimulants enabled you to see deeper into the past. I have, of course, vast quantities of very fine methamphetamines at my disposal, which you can use to aid me in my researches.”
Sigmund said “Vast quantities?” His hands trembled, and he clasped them to make them stop.
“Enough to let you see centuries into the past,” the Old Doctor said. “Though we’ll work up to that, of course.”
“When I agreed to join the Table, I was hoping to do field work.”
The Old Doctor sniffed. “That business isn’t what’s important, Sigmund. Assassination, regime change, paltry corporate wars – that’s just the hackwork our agents do to pay the bills. It’s not worthy of your gifts.”
“Still, it’s what I want. I’ll help with your
research if you let me work in the field.” Sigmund had spent a childhood in cramped apartments and hospital wards, beset by visions of the still-thrashing past. In those dark rooms he’d read comic books and dreamed of escaping the prison of circumstance – of being a superhero. But heroes like that weren’t real. Anyone who put on a costume and went out on the streets to fight crime would be murdered long before morning. At some point in his teens Sigmund had graduated to spy thrillers and Cold War history, passing easily from fiction to non-fiction and back again, reading about double-and triple-agents with an interest that bordered on the fanatical. Becoming a spy – that idea had the ring of the plausible, in a way that becoming a superhero never could. Now, this close to that secret agent dream, he wouldn’t let himself be shunted into a pure research position. This was his chance.
The Old Doctor sighed. “Very well.”
“What’s it like?” Carlotta said, the night after their first mission as a duo. She’d enthralled a Senator while Sigmund peered into the past to find out where the microfilm was hidden. Now, after, they were sitting at the counter in an all-night diner where even they didn’t stand out from the crowd of weirdoes and freaks.
Sigmund sipped decaf coffee and looked around at the translucent figures of past customers, the crowd of nights gone by, every booth and stool occupied by ghosts. “It’s like layers of gauze,” he said. “Usually I just see the past distantly, shimmering, but if I concentrate I can sort of…shift my focus.” He thumped his coffee cup and made the liquid inside ripple. “The Old Doctor taught me to keep my eyes on the here-and-now, unless I need to look back, and then I just sort of…” He gestured vaguely with his hands, trying to create a physical analogue for a psychic act, to mime the metaphysical. “I guess I sort of twitch the gauze aside, and pass through a curtain, and the present gets blurrier while the past comes into focus.”
“That’s a shitty description,” Carlotta said, sawing away at the rare steak and eggs on her plate.
The steak, briefly, shifted in Sigmund’s vision and became a living, moving part of a cow. Sigmund’s eyes watered, and he looked away. He mostly ate vegetables for that very reason. “I’ve never seen the world any other way, so I don’t know how to explain it better. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you, seeing just the present. It must seem very fragile.”
“We had a guy once who could see into the future, just a little bit, a couple of minutes at most. Didn’t stop him from getting killed, but he wet himself right before the axe hit him. He was a lot less boring than you are.” Carlotta belched.
“Why haven’t I met you before?” Sigmund shrank back against the cushions in the booth.
“I’m heavy ordnance,” Carlsbad said, his voice low, a rumble felt in Sigmund’s belly and bones as much as heard by his ears. “I’ve been with the Table since the beginning. They don’t reveal secrets like me to research assistants.” Carlsbad was tar-black, skin strangely reflective, face eyeless and mouthless, blank as a minimalist snowman’s, human only in general outline. “But the Old Doctor says you’ve exceeded all expectations, so we’ll be working together from time to time.”
Sigmund looked into Carlsbad’s past, as far as he could – which was quite far, given the cocktail of uppers singing in his blood – and Carlsbad never changed; black, placid, eternal. “What…” What are you, he’d nearly asked. “What do you do for the Table?”
“Whatever the Old Doctor tells me to,” Carlsbad said.
Sigmund nodded. “Carlotta told me you’re a fallen god of the underworld.”
“That bitch lies,” Carlsbad said, without disapproval. “I’m no god. I’m just, what’s that line – ‘the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.’ The Old Doctor says that as long as one evil person remains on Earth, I’ll be alive.”
“Well,” Sigmund said. “I guess you’ll be around for a while, then.”
The first time Carlsbad saved his life, Sigmund lay panting in a snowbank, blood running from a ragged gash in his arm. “You could have let me die just then,” Sigmund said. Then, after a moment’s hesitation: “You could have benefited from my death.”
Carlsbad shrugged, shockingly dark against the snow. “Yeah, I guess.”
“I thought you were evil,” Sigmund said, lightheaded from blood loss and exertion, more in the now than he’d ever felt before, the scent of pines and the bite of cold air immediate reminders of his miraculously ongoing life. “I mean, you’re made of evil.”
“You’re made mostly of carbon atoms,” Carlsbad said. “But you don’t spend all your time thinking about forming long-chain molecules, do you? There’s more to both of us than our raw materials.”
“Thank you for saving me, Carlsbad.”
“Anytime, Sigmund.” His tone was laid-back but pleased, the voice of someone who’d seen it all but could still sometimes be pleasantly surprised. “You’re the first Table agent in four hundred years who’s treated me like something other than a weapon or a monster. I know I scare you shitless, but you talk to me.”
Exhaustion and exhilaration waxed and waned in Sigmund. “I like you because you don’t change. When I look at most people I can see them as babies, teenagers, every step of their lives superimposed, and if I look back far enough they disappear – but not you. You’re the same as far back as I can see.” Sigmund’s eyelids were heavy. He felt light. He thought he might float away.
“Hold on,” Carlsbad said. “Help is on the way. Your death might not diminish me, but I’d still like to keep you around.”
Sigmund blacked out, but not before hearing the whirr of approaching helicopters coming to take him away.
“I’m the New Doctor,” the New Doctor said. Willowy, brunette, young, she stood behind a podium in the briefing room, looking at the assembled Table agents – Sigmund, Carlotta, Carlsbad, and the recently-promoted Ray. They were the alpha squad, the apex of the organization, and the New Doctor had not impressed them yet. “We’re going to have some changes around here. We need to get back to basics. We need to find the cup. These other jobs might fill our bank accounts, but they don’t further our cause.”
Ray popped a wasp into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and said “Fuck that mystic bullshit.” His voice was accompanied by a deep, angry buzz, a sort of wasp-whisper in harmony with the normal workings of his voicebox. Ray got nasty and impatient when he ate wasps. “I joined up to make money and get a regular workout, not chase after some imaginary Grail.” Sigmund knew Ray was lying – that he had a very specific interest in the cup – but Sigmund also understood why Ray was keeping that interest a secret. “You just stay in the library and read your books like the Old Doctor did, okay?”
The New Doctor shoved the podium over, and it fell towards Ray, who dove out of the way. While he was moving, the New Doctor came around and kicked him viciously in the ribs, her small boots wickedly pointed and probably steel-toed. Ray rolled away, panting and clutching his side.
Sigmund peered into the New Doctors past. She looked young, but she’d looked young for decades.
“I’m not like the Old Doctor,” she said. “He missed his old life in the archives, and was content with his books, piecing together the past. But I’m glad to be out of the archives, and under my leadership, we’re going to make history, not study it.”
“I’ll kill you,” Ray said. Stingers were growing out of his fingertips, and his voice was all buzz now.
“Spare me,” the New Doctor said, and kicked him in the face.
By spying on their pasts and listening in on their private moments, Sigmund learned why the other agents wanted to find the cup, and see God:
Carlotta whispered to one of her lovers, the shade of a great courtesan conjured from an anteroom of Hell: “I want to castrate God, so he’ll never create another world.”
Ray told Carlotta, while they disposed of the body of a young archivist who’d discovered their secret past and present plans: “I want to eat God’s heart and belch out words of creation.”
C
arlsbad, alone, staring at the night sky (a lighted void, while his own darkness was utter), had imaginary conversations with God that always came down, fundamentally, to one question: “Why did you make me?”
The New Doctor, just before she poisoned the Old Doctor (making it look like a natural death), answered his bewildered plea for mercy by saying “No. As long as you’re alive, we’ll never find the cup, and I’ll never see God, and I’ll never know the answers to the ten great questions I’ve composed during my time in the archives.”
Sigmund saw it all, every petty plan and purpose that drove his fellows, but he had no better purpose himself. The agents of the Table might succeed in finding the cup, not because they were worthy, but simply because they’d been trying for years upon years, and sometimes persistence led to success.
Sigmund knew their deepest reasons, and kept all their secrets, because past and present and cause and effect were scrambled for him. The Old Doctor’s regime of meth, cocaine, and more exotic uppers had ravaged Sigmund’s nasal cavities and set him adrift in time. At first, he’d only been able to see back in time, but sometimes taking the Old Doctor’s experimental stimulants truly sent him back in time. Sometimes it was just his mind that travelled, sent back a few days to relive past events again in his own body, but other times, rarely, he physically travelled back, just a day or two at most, just for a little while, before being wrenched back to a present filled with headaches and nosebleeds.
On one of those rare occasions when he travelled physically back in time, Sigmund saw the Old Doctor’s murder, and was snapped back to the future moments before the New Doctor could kill him, too.
Ray ate a Sherpa’s brain two days out of base camp, and after that, he was able to guide them up the crags and paths toward the temple perfectly, though he was harder to converse with, his speech peppered with mountain idioms. He developed a taste for barley tea flavored with rancid yak butter, and sometimes sang lonely songs that merged with the sound of the wind.