Or so it would seem, if it weren’t for the looming fact of the end. What can termination fulfill? I have much still to learn, and perhaps the universe as a whole, sensing through me as it does through each of us, may learn as well.
Looming in front of me is a little knot of slumbering spirit. I peer at it and realized that it’s one of the time-reversed spirits drawn to me when I was Robert. They were fleeing the end time we now inhabit, but they couldn’t succeed. The ones who went furthest back, like this one, merely fell dormant, to awaken... like this one now, unfurling its delicate wings and extending feelers to probe for the missing material world. The scientist in me wonders if these spirits’ flight might itself have hastened the end of things, withdrawing vital essence from the world’s last days, but upon analysis I think not. There weren’t enough of them to affect the great physical and spiritual weight of the world. This one here awakens, looks at me, looks up at the vast bulk of pure Mind above us, and drifts silently up. Soon it will have moved from the realm of thoughts to whatever single thought it is that the sphere thinks as a whole.
As I continue to watch and above all to think, I see more of the enormous structure that is the universe’s final configuration. When I was alive, I studied diagrams of the nine spheres, mandalas, and other charts of sacred geometry. They were all right, in their various ways. The red light of judgment shines in the center of creation, which is also every point along the periphery—all terms for distance and relation become increasingly irrelevant, and I use them mostly because they’re what I have, and I cannot discharge the duty to Mind with a mere wordless silence. Around the red light orbit the nine spheres, gathering their component pieces into themselves and spiraling closer together as they go.
I see judgment at work on both individual and cosmic levels. This spirit that sought to flee is pierced by a beam of pure red light, within which its cowardice shows clearly. The spirit sees its dereliction of duty and the small but significant harm that came at the end because some physical component of the city lacked its animating force and crumbled when a living human mind needed it. The spirit sees this, and so do I, and we both judge that failure. But we also see, the spirit and 1, the terror of the time and the uncertainty about what might come next, and we see that self-preservation is a worthy drive that becomes ignoble only when abused. We see the countless small good deeds that happened because the spirit was, for almost all its existence, where it should be, doing what it should do. These do not excuse its failure, and its failure does not negate their reality. Judgment requires understanding of both, so understand we do.
The spirit, having now formed an assessment of itself, vanishes into the sphere of Mind, and that judgment is added to all the rest. Mind sees itself, and I see it, both as the source of inspiration and the source of distraction that made duty so hard at times. We see all the ways that Mind enriched the world, and all the ways that beings with minds worsened the world, physically and spiritually. This judgment is not done, and won’t be until the very last of us ascend, nor will the comparable judgment be over for any of the other spheres until they are likewise complete. I see the story, and I am part of the story. Soon the red light will shine on me, too.
Off in the distance—that is, engaged partly with thoughts I don’t currently share—I see the death-rocker, Anders, wrestling with one of the heads of a hydra-like serpent. I don’t think it’s the Midgard Serpent, exactly, and if it is he’s a bit late, what with Ragnarok having come and gone. But he’s doing his part on the borderland of Mind and Entropy, protecting whatever spirits the serpent might otherwise prey upon. I’m suddenly filled with a profound curiosity about what judgment means to the force of Entropy, but my duties don’t allow me the opportunity to go investigate. I do see Anders’ thoughts illuminated clearly insofar as they bear on my role, with the rest hidden behind something like shadow. If the cosmos wishes it, no doubt there’s someone beyond him to complete the work of observation.
Anders was and is a very angry man. He didn’t so much woo the world into spilling its secrets as beat it until it let go. “Punch it until the candy comes out, ” some of my engineering colleagues used to say of such approaches. The great squirrel taunted him, goading him toward enlightenment, and on him it worked. He learned a great deal that he passed along in his music for the masses. If assessing the spirit at a glance was hard, with a man like Anders it’s impossible. The good and bad he did circle endlessly around each other, mirroring within his one soul the cosmic dance overhead. I can see the wisdom and folly he had in childhood, youth, maturity, the lessons he learned, the ignorance he clutched, all laid out at once. If I were to describe the sum of it all in words, it would sound flat and neutral, but that’s just what it isn’t. Rather than negating one side or another, judgment affirms it all.
For a long while, or at least it feels long, Anders doesn’t even notice. He’s got the battle to occupy his attention. But the serpent is also being judged within the sphere of Entropy, and since it’s less complex than he is, there comes the moment when it ascends to join the sphere. Then Anders finally notices what’s going on. He doesn’t see me, I’m pretty sure, but he gives a big triumphant laugh. That act completes his judgment: Mind accepts him as the victorious warrior he always wished to be, and he rises to take his place, tilting the overall balance of Mind that little bit toward conflict and mastery.
Suddenly there’s a torrent of magicians around me—both those who thought of themselves as magicians, and those who identified themselves as scientists, philosophers, or what have you. This is the moment when those with awakened wills take their place. I am briefly surrounded by every one of them who helped or hindered me on my journey: the Wu Keng, who now see their folly; my colleagues at Project Ragnarok, who appreciate how their good intentions led them into blindness even as they remained useful in so many ways; Xoca and his fellow mentors, missing their already-judged to-terns and ready to play their part. (I note, in this moment of understanding, that Xoca was a fellow traveler of the Doissetep magi. ) It is a busy moment, full of greeting and apology and congratulation and a great deal else. We all see each other, in this perfect moment.
Then it’s gone, and I’m alone. There may be other willworkers out there, beneath the other spheres, but they cannot be part of my story anymore. Whoever and whatever comes next will be something other than myself, and I will remain in this triune isolation until my role as narrator is done.
What comes next is a vampire, one of those who took part in the attack on Project Ragnarok that slaughtered so many of my colleagues. It’s not clear to me why she’s particularly closely identified with Mind, but then the universe will always have mysteries for however long I remain finite. We see that the scientific rationale of hematovores and viruses simply wasn’t enough, and we see the fears and prides that led us to seek to put it all in some rational context. We also glimpse through her the terrible final nights of her kind, as the power in their blood waned and they turned on each other. Now I see why they attacked us: they were drawn to our unwitting strength of will and hoped that our blood might have some special power to sustain them a bit longer. I see how the founder of the lineage we’d dubbed EU1 actually slaughtered all his progeny in search of that same relief, and countless other ploys. None of them worked, and as the young vampire’s mind falls open to judgment I see the last vampires passing quietly into slumber or noisily into the conflagrations of dawn.
At least part of this story is more the domain of Time than Mind and hence obscured to me, but I see that the vampires didn’t experience the end of the world quite like the rest of us. Those final slumberers descended into little eddies of time in which they could have an infinite future while we all raced toward the end in finite moments. So from their point of view, they never did wake up, and won’t until called out from that infinity to another. There’ll be one terrible moment of wakefulness for them, after the infinite sleep, and then judgment for them as well.
The vampire’s judgment
is as complex as Anders’, but quite different in detail. I can scarcely bear to look at it, and indeed at least one of my faces does turn away from it. The hideous damage created by her sinful dependence on living blood cascaded through the world, in ripple after ripple of victims. No wonder, I realize, it was so often hard to heal a community: almost everywhere I ever went, these things were at work, darkening the world around us. They didn’t make humanity wicked or simply venal, but they reinforced all our baser impulses and returned little but the ignorant envy of that seeming eternity of nights. I’m angry... and I see that I’ll be judged for that anger, just as she is being judged for her part in the circumstances that lead to my anger. Nothing now escapes the watchful cosmic eye.
In the end, she is also gone up into Mind, and its cumulative judgment continues.
After her come other creatures, some much more familiar to me than others. Here is an elderly werewolf, whom I recognize as one who once attacked me on a remote Canadian highway. She told me, as she had me pinned with the massive claws on each hand, that my kind had stolen a power the world never intended us to have, and that she would heal the world by slicing it out of my soul. The fact that my body would also be cut to ribbons seemed to strike her as irrelevant. The now-gone Rubbish rescued me then, and in the end she fled to seek some other target on which to vent her anger. I understand, as I see her soul laid bare, just how justified so much of her anger was even as she sees the hubris that motivated that particular attack on me. We touch hands and hearts for a moment, realizing that we were closer than either of us would have accepted when we were alive. I see how she fell in a final battle against the forces that would unmake the world whole, and the servant of all under heaven within me salutes her bravery. She couldn’t stop the world from ending, but the battle that she and her kind fought had consequences that linger on, we both see: the dance of the sphere is different because the world passed out of existence whole rather than shattered.
Off in the distance, I see several hungry ghosts, some Chinese and some apparently European, all facing up to the errors that led them to too confidently expect the wheel of ages to turn in a particular way. Here I again come under judgment as well, since it wasn’t all that long ago that I spoke of the demon emperor to the rest of myself. All of us made the mistake Plato described in his parable of the cave: we saw the shadows of the truth on a torch-lit wall and thought the shadows real, whether we called them Yozi or Malfeans or something else altogether. I see that the hungry ghosts partook in part of the slow time that wrapped itself around the vampire, so that they had years or even centuries to fight their wars against each other in pursuit of a destiny that would never come, and the weight of their actions is again more than I can bear. I look away until I feel them rise into Mind.
I see stranger things, half-human creatures that lived in the very walls of the world, and in dreams, and in secret enclaves throughout material existence. I can scarcely understand what it is they’re being judged for, lacking words for the concepts that now race past me. Some fought to help or hinder an eternal winter. Others pursued goals of cosmic balance, or the gratification of some personal passion, or goals that just don’t make any sense at all. Each of them is laid bare for all of us to see. So many of them helped darken the world, whatever their intent; I’m filled with the vain wish to see what the world might have been like without so many cursed monsters gnawing at its vitals. A few actually did something to help, and I see that ripples of redemptive love and strength could spread as far as the taint. But so few, so few...
It’s becoming harder to think thoughts that make any sense as thoughts. It’s not that the unification of scattered forces is making thought go away; it’s that what such things’ thinking is based on are conditions and experiences radically unlike humanity’s. What could an ant understand of concepts like driving, government or wilderness? I feel that more and more of what’s going on around me is that far removed from what I am now, and wonder if perhaps I’m struggling too hard. And yet there are still matters to sense and know.
Quite suddenly it’s my turn. The red light fills my multiplied soul, and I feel an immediate awareness of everything I’ve done throughout my lives. Everything in this account emerges into full consciousness at once, together with a great deal more. And as the judgment proceeds, I realize that the judge is also subject to scrutiny. I understand that at the beginning there was indeed the One of whom so many doctrines speak. Something happened to the One, a division at a level far, far beyond my capacity to understand, and once it started, it continued. At first it was harmonious. I get fleeting senses of an age where many entities existed and yet harmony prevailed, until the process of division broke their fellowship apart.
I see that the pessimists who said that every generation is weaker than the last were indeed right on the most fundamental level. Even mighty acts of creation served the dissolution of the One, because every glorious work’s identity as this or that separated it from both its own other possibilities—what it might have been—and from all the other things it was not. This was as true of the spheres as of everything else, since in the One they were fused, more like nodes of force within a pure plasma than like solid chunks floating in a liquid. So it was that when they had all weakened each other and themselves sufficiently, by every act of creation, the oldest part of the One could also manifest for the first time. Judgment, I see now, must exist before anything else because judgment in all its various meanings is what makes every other distinction possible. There can be no “else” at all without judgment.
As the first steps toward reunification took place, some piece of the One became aware of itself and its current condition. The agony it felt is a taint that lies across the last four centuries of human history. The revolutionary nihilism that says there can be no real construction without total destruction, that’s the self-misunderstanding One at work among us, yeaming to be free of the consequences of all its past mistakes. Ironically, then, the purveyors of death and destruction also did their part to restore cosmic unity. The breakdown accelerated, both socially and cosmically, as fast as it could. Finally came the crucial moment, and here we are now.
All the while I’m learning this, the judging power also learns about me. I understand that I am, at bottom, three small pieces of that portion of the one best identified with Mind, and that while I can keep the other parts of me as well, they will prove hindrances to the full unification with the rest of what I am above all. My economics studies come in handy here, providing the rest of me with an introduction to the notion of relative advantage. If I pursue Mind and let Force or Entropy go, I will simply be stepping aside from competition with those for whom Force or Entropy is fundamental. And then when each sphere is perfected, Judgment can meld them back together into the one.
Beyond matter, there is spirit. Beyond both, there is essence. Beyond essence, there is potential: everything else that might ever conceivably be, in some sense. The same sort of alchemy that fused me into a single entity is at work in the cosmos. The spheres, once merely concepts, are now things as solid as the earth and as big as the sky, shimmering like gold and diamond in the red light. The light used to be a fearsome thing. Now it reminds me of sunrise beyond clouds, which will soon give way to the crisp clean morning in which each thing shows its best side. Everything that I have known passes, but in the depths of potential, there are all the things I did not and could not know. Mind waits above me, and beyond Mind, the unity of all. Will there perhaps be a new creation? The One might choose the same course all over again. It might also do something else. It might not do anything, for any meaning of “do” or “anything” I can grasp. I cannot know until I take the next step, and across that threshold, language as I have known and loved it cannot go.
But I can, and it is time to do so.
World of Darkness - [Time of Judgment 03] - Judgment Day Page 27