World of Darkness - [Time of Judgment 03] - Judgment Day

by Bruce Baugh (epub)

  WILLIAM

  As I drift in this terminal isolation, I try to make some sense of it all. I categorically reject the implications in the theories of deranged reality manipulators who fancy themselves magicians, and yet it seems obvious that the holes in my worldview were larger than I ever really suspected. I recall the debates back in the eighties and nineties about the viability of consciousness as a standing wave function in “empty space” (which is to say, space filled with energy and/or information rather than matter). My team argued against the concept as something either obtainable in nature or worth pursuing given prevailing technological and budgetary limitations. The simplest hypothesis available to me now is that we were wrong, and that the shock of my physical death in such peculiar circumstances created this post-mortem consciousness.

  I wonder: if it’s happening to me (and if it isn’t that, it’s something else), is it happening to others? The Union used to debunk the “research” of credulous seekers of psychic truth partly because the alleged messages from the dead were so pathetically empty. Now, I’m both strong-willed and trained in a wide variety of techniques for mental focus, and I can tell that if this is extended indefinitely, I will break. The only questions will be when and under what circumstances. Someone without my advantages from heredity and training would break sooner, and might be relatively likely to break in a stereotypical fashion and sound just like, say... a babbling ghost.

  There is another possibility, and under the circumstances I’d be a fool to ignore it. The technology to impose arbitrary sensory data on a subject is nothing new to me: I’ve used it on enemies of the Union myself, and helped develop refinements. This could all be someone’s effort to convince me that I’m dead or in the midst of some psychological breakdown. I must keep on my guard for any signs of an agenda underlying this apparent experience.

  I’m suddenly aware of something approaching. There’s... well, there’s no sound that I can hear. It’s like feeling the pressure wave of something moving fast through the atmosphere. Uncomfortable as I am thinking of the problem in these terms, there is an aspect of pure gnosis to it: L simply know that something’s approaching. Two things, in fact. They open up before me, and...

  * * *

  THE ALCHEMICAL MARRIAGE

  We fall together in the thickening darkness, aware now only of each other. Whatever else there may still be in the universe is far away from us, and we have no landmarks except for each other. Our thoughts and feelings shine in the darkness—we cannot help but draw together, seeking something to sustain us against the void, which would take us all if it could.

  In the darkness, we intersect, even as we continue to fall. It’s not a collision, nor is it the interpenetration of intangible fields. It’s more like the blending of liquids than anything else any of us can think of, and each of us knows enough to think of alchemy as we feel our essences slide into and around the others. We do not lose our individual natures, and yet there is also something present here that is born out of all three of us without being precisely any one of us.

  To this union I bring my courage, my pride, and my reason. I have always sought to live my life in accordance with the best available evidence most rigorously analyzed, and even now, as I feel whole categories of unsuspected existence opening up to me, I remain a man of method. I am the anchor that keeps the others from drifting into folly and credulity, the voice always ready to say “Oh yeah? ” and “Sez you! ” in response to new claims. Although I’ve never thought of myself as conservative, I see now that there is an important and honorable conservative face to this way of living. I impose burdens on new things, requiring them to demonstrate their worth before admitting them to the fold, and this is a good thing to do.

  To this union I bring my empathy, my curiosity, and my perception. I have always sought not only to understand what’s going on around me, but also to make sense of it, to bridge the gaps that isolate us one from another. Brought into spiritual wakefulness in the midst of terror, I have always felt a special burden to undercut the power of fear and isolation wherever I am. I am the outstretched hand, willing to touch and hold the unfamiliar thing and assess its properties, and willing to treat the wounds of others with skill and compassion. I don’t love novelty for its own sake; what I love is the understanding that binds together new and old into something greater.

  To this union I bring my acceptance of transformation, my mastery of ritual, and my poise. I have been willing to examine myself for signs that I ought to become other than I was and to pursue such changes at whatever cost. But I have also been willing to examine myself, find my current condition good, and rest in it. I understand how to act with deference to those who deserve it and with authority to those who need it. I am the tide which sometimes rises high on the beach, covering over what has been with the waves of possibility and which sometimes recedes, allowing all the things that live on and beneath the beach the time to lead their lives. I am the balance between stasis and chaos, the ability and desire to change tempered by a love of the world as it already is, including myself with all my various flows.

  We can hide nothing from each other, and so we all acknowledge that we feel great fear. In the darkness, logic fails, community fails, ritual fails. We try to fly, to teleport, to awaken from a dream and be elsewhere. None of it works. The empty winds continue to rush past us, carrying sounds that might (or might not) be distant voices distorted beyond comprehension. As William, we know that the depths of space and more-than-space are home to creatures inimical to all life as we know it, recalling horrendous battles against such perils and secret graves for those who fell in the war for the world’s borders. As Robert, we know that there are spirits of every vile passion as there are of every good passion and worthy impulse, recalling fellow shamans whose zeal for healing led to them being devoured inside and out by the lurkers in darkness. As Xian, we know that the last emperor of all under heaven is the demon emperor who embodies all wickedness and that he draws everything that is unworthy to his service.

  But we also find within ourselves unsuspected strengths. William’s anger and Robert’s empathy add up to a potent foundation for strategic insight, understanding but not condoning. Robert’s willingness to reach out and Xian’s mastery of harmonious motion combine to allow for precise steering, and with a single thought we feel that we’ve ceased to fall. Now we rise back up through the blackness toward the rest of the world, faster even than the wind that whispers around us. Xian’s experience with radical change and William’s urgent desire to escape his limits make for a great flexibility of response, allowing us to reshape the ways in which we move through this unfamiliar space. Xian’s dedication to harmony and Robert’s dedication to healing make for a potent balm for our individual and collective fears, allowing us to see our strengths and chart reasons for hope even in the midst of all this.

  As we rise, we become aware of the various ways in which we are a microcosm of the world in its final days. We are male and female, and we are young and mature and aging. We do not include either childhood or great age, but then perhaps the union of those elements is the task of others. We at least cover much of the span of active independent life, and it is the adult decision-makers who shape the world now, since it lacks either scope for future generations or reason to preserve the legacy of the past. We also cover the span of those with awakened wills: Technocrat, Traditionalist, independent. (At this point both William and Robert protest that the idea of a single individual representing everyone in either the Union or the Council is ludicrous. Xian laughs for the first time since her death and responds that they didn’t object to representing a whole sex that way. The men are both embarrassed and think a little about their respective conceptual blind spots. ) We are, finally, the gamut of those outside the scope of normal health, with our various disabilities and rearrangements.

  This awareness does not diminish our respective self-awareness and doesn’t overlay it. It exists alongside, in a way the language of soli
tary beings isn’t designed to accommodate. We could separate, and by way of experiment we do, and the bond uniting us does not weaken. There is an “us” as strong as the “I” that holds each of us together.

  I talk with the others, comparing notes about what I’m forced to accept was in fact my death. It is profoundly unsettling to me to accept the validity as well as the mere existence of what the others cheerfully call supernatural, but the alternatives (like delusion, say) all seem increasingly inadequate.

  There are times when the arguments make me uncomfortable, since I lack either the fanatic drive of the engineer or the sense of duty-laying tradition that’s so important to the civil servant. My own convictions are more personal, and often all I can do is listen.

  I find the men fascinating, but so often prone to assumptions that someone must challenge. It’s just tiring, sometimes, to constantly be the teacher, when there’s so much I don’t know, either.

  We realize gradually that in terms of terrestrial time, our deaths were not simultaneous, as we’d first thought. William died first, well before the immense scrub fires that scoured that whole region. Robert died next, an early casualty of the fragmenting Gauntlet and the resulting tangibility of internal landmarks. Finally Xian died, perhaps one of the last people to maintain a separate identity. We are bound partly by fate, partly by the uniting power of... Here we pause. We have each thought of the Red Star as a nemesis, and yet it’s what brought us together in the first place, preparing us for the role we are about to play. The whole terrible trauma each of us endured was a sort of trial by fire, stiffening us so that we could linger, join and observe now. The Red Eye of Judgment has made us into eyes and minds that can watch its handiwork. We decline to feel gratitude for what we’ve been through, but for the first time we feel a great hope as well as great curiosity about what is yet to come.

  Judgment begins for us here, still in the blackness. Three pairs of eyes examine each of us in turn, not detached or dispassionate but capable of a larger vista even as we remain personally engaged with the lives we have lived. Shaman, scientist, magician; explorer, doubter, guardian; independent, employee, boss. The triads multiply in all directions, forming a prismatic halo around the essences underneath. I can look at my weaknesses: how I embraced the Wu Keng’s transformation of my sex out of the desire to be exotic as well as the desire to express my true inner nature, how I used the shaman’s burden of isolation to neglect the efforts that mundane social bonds require, how my anger at my disability led me to emphasize my difference from and superiority to humanity at large. I see pride, jealousy, sloth, and countless other sins all laid out in ways that I cannot deny. There is no shame in this, because the three of us together are not strangers to any one of us now: this is self-examination, not judgment from outside.

  Not yet, at least.

  I also see strengths and virtues that I’ve been inclined to overlook, and above all I see how my deeds have affected those around me. I was not wrong to travel as a healer rather than commit myself to one place, because my cosmopolitan approach let me complete many local patterns even though I built none of those myself. My work in family planning did indeed help strengthen the dignity of the Uygurs I worked with, and had the world continued (I see in a complex, though fleeting vision), in time it would have been one thread in the tapestry of their independence. I was right to want to guard the walls of the world, and to charge into battle against the night terrors so that the masses could sleep; again, had the world lasted, it would have contributed to the rise of that truly liberated humanity my colleagues and I dreamed of.

  As this assessment comes to completion, we soar out of the blackness, up into the endless Umbra. The spiritual landscape has changed substantially in however long it was we fell and rose. The world we lived on is gone now, every scrap of matter released back into the spirit from which it came. This isn’t to say, though, that there’s no planet Earth. It’s still there, just no longer separated from the rest of the universe by the Gauntlet. Whatever’s there now is there because it had some inner significance that endures to face judgment. Physical senses no longer matter in this stage of existence, but there’s something comparable in our rapidly expanding sense of affinity. Some people, places, and things seem close at hand. We can’t yet always (or even very often) tell why, but we know at a very deep level that these are all things that share some important part of their identity with us. We are briefly blinded by the flood of new insights as we leave the blackness behind, but then we adjust and find ourselves in a sky far richer and deeper than any that could exist within the confines of matter.

  As a child, I always hated the awareness of having come in too late, after the start of a joke, the first act of a play, the first play of a game. I see now, from my multiplied viewpoint, that this was one more way my lives prepared me for the chronicling I’m doing now: my curiosity across all three lives gives me the resolve to keep looking even as details become hard to follow. I’m motivated in ways that others wouldn’t be. We also realize that I’m slipping back and forth between singular and plural in thinking of ourselves and how I interact with the surrounding cosmos. My lives haven’t become blurred; each one remains vivid and distinct. But the more we see together, the more a new composite awareness claims the singular for itself. I am the sum of Xian, William and Robert, but we are also something in my own right. We do not yet have a name for what I am, but we see that I am something.

  * * *

  Dante My journey is nearly done, I think. I’m spending most of my time now walking, or whatever the spirit equivalent of that is, step by step across this final landscape. The power of Correspondence that I served doesn’t mean much anymore when there’s nothing but correspondences. Here there’s nothing arbitrary or unrelated, so saying that I identify myself with Correspondence is a lot like saying I identify myself with air. Well, yes. Who doesn’t?

  High overhead, I see a familiar shape. Yes, as I peer more closely at it, I can see that it’s one of the triune entities I guarded in the material world’s final days. It looks to be prospering. (They look to be prospering? I have no idea what the right usage is. ) I give it a little wave and wish it well before resuming my own march.

  * * *

  THE ALCHEMICAL MARRIAGE

  I told the Doissetep magi that I never found the Traditions’ model of the nine spheres, or ten spheres and one missing, or whatever it was, all that useful. That was true, too. My work in all three lives was at once more general and more particular than that model, and founded on very different assumptions about the basic divisions of reality. Well, the joke was on us, at least in part. The nine spheres did reflect important historical truths about the differentiation of power from primal unity to what Confucians called the ten thousand things or all under heaven. From one through two to three and then to differentiation within each branch, this is how it went, and I can see how I would have advanced my work in all our lives by paying it a little more heed. I see that all three of me have a particular affinity for the primal force of Mind, and that in part we see and analyze now because the cosmos wishes it: we are something like neurons in the cosmic mind.

  Not that this is license to see or understand everything. There are entities who were as deeply identified with another one of the spheres as we are with Mind, and they are rapidly passing beyond my ken. I see that it is my role to understand what people did with the gift of Mind and what came of their decisions; others will tend the rest.

  I always thought of the universe as a neutral background on which the complex stories of living souls could unfold. I knew, quite early after my awakening, that whole worlds can have souls, but I didn’t extend that insight far enough. The universal soul is not just the sum of the myriad individual and collective beings within it, but a thing of its own as well, defined by the spheres and with a history I have yet to fully grasp. For a moment my consciousness unfolds into its three distinct lobes again, to permit a trio of parallel realizations.

  I s
ee that the universal soul is wounded, far more deeply than I ever suspected, and I know that my work as the bringer of healing-at-cost isn’t yet done. I am still a shaman with a shaman’s duties.

  I sought the order of impersonal forces that defines the interaction of the data sets that comprise the universe, and I find them arrayed around me. Just as theorists from de Chardin and Soleri on have speculated, information is more fundamental than energy and matter. Here are the fields of probability, making it possible to measure information in terms of what could be transmitted and is not. The surprise for me is how intimately consciousness is interwoven with all of this, but it’s a surprise only because of my old materialistic biases. I can and do extend my vision to encompass these new data without giving up my drive: I see my desire to understand fulfilled in unexpected ways. I am still a scientist and there are still phenomena to understand through the lens of reason and logic.

  I took the Chinese traditional divisions as fundamental and regarded the “Western” spheres as an approximation. I see that there is truth in both, and yet also incompleteness. This is not the realm of pure yin and yang, which prove to be more intimately bound with matter than I had suspected. And yet it is a realm of forces in the sort of dynamic tension I was taught to understand and guide. I remain a student of the harmony of things, capable of interceding to forestall chaos and foster benevolence.

  When I was three souls, there would have been an inevitable contradiction here. Those views could not all be true at once. Now that I am a single soul, reconverging even as I think that particular thought, I see that each of them can be entirely true as far as it goes and yet not encompass the whole. My earnest theory-minded fellow magicians who spoke of somehow transcending or escaping the paradigms within which they practiced their art were wrong after all. The fundamental nature of things affirms rather than refutes every approach that supports the awakened will. This state beyond matter seems featureless, a blank slate for the will to force itself upon, only because it takes effort to learn its ways. The ultimate truth is fulfillment rather than negation.