The Fissure King

by Rachel Pollack

  "What?"

  "Repeat that, please." A sharpness had come into her voice.

  Jack said "If you will grant it to me, I would like to serve you and become your student."

  She nodded. "Good. Now go."

  "What? Now?"

  "Yes. Your time here has finished."

  "But how will I get to—"

  "Do you have money in your trailer? For a bus?"

  "Sure. But we're out here—"

  "Go get your money, and anything essential, then go to the road and put out your thumb. A truck will stop for you and take you to the bus station."

  "What? You can't—" He stopped, for he realized that he did not doubt her, not for a second. He looked at the lion, resting on the grass, and the man and woman, standing together, watching him. "Okay," he said, and turned to walk back to his trailer.

  Before he'd gone more than a few steps the man called after him. "Mijnheer Shade." Later, Jack would learn that the odd word was Dutch for "Mister." Now he just turned and stared. The man—Peter Midnight—said "I too will grant you a boon."

  Jack waited. When there was nothing else, he said, "Yeah? What's that?"

  "Not now. When you need it, I will come."

  Jesus, Jack thought. He said, "Sure. Thanks."

  Now he looked at Anastasia one last time. He said "My name's not Johnnie."

  She smiled. "Yes, Jack, I know."

  Part Two—The Future

  1.

  Jack stood by the window of his hotel room a long time, it seemed, before he made the phone call. The northwest view allowed him a glimpse of both the Empire State Building and the gargoyles on the Chrysler Building. He thought the gargoyles might be singing to each other but it was hard to tell over the traffic noise. If so, they were doing it for their own amusement, for the Empire antenna did not seem to be broadcasting anything that Jack could sense.

  He went over and picked up the hotel room phone. He could never say just why he used that for certain calls rather than his cell, but it seemed right. He found himself holding his breath until a quiet voice said "Hello, Jack."

  For a moment he thought the Queen had answered in her aspect, that she'd known he would call. But then he realized it was only caller ID. He said, "Hello, Margaret. How are you?"

  "Alright."

  She was bracing herself, he could tell. "Listen," he said, "I need to talk to—Margarita Mariq." He'd almost said "your other self," but realized how rude that would have been.

  "It's not that simple."

  "I know."

  "Do you?"

  "Look, Margaret, I don't want to cause any trouble. I'm only asking because I need to find the Nude Owl, and it's very urgent."

  "The what?"

  Shit, Jack thought. This was worse than he'd expected. He'd assumed Margaret Strand might not like him asking her to summon her aspect, but it hadn't occurred to him she wouldn't just know everything the Queen of Eyes knew. He should have realized, of course. How could she get through the day with all that awareness? He said, "The Know-It-All. The Knowledge Elemental."

  "Oh."

  "Please, I've tried everything and I can't locate her. It's really important, Margaret."

  Pause. "I'll see what I can do."

  Jack put down the phone and stared at it. I'll see what I can do. What did that mean? What if she couldn't? He realized he'd tended to think of Margaret as a kind of disguise, like Clark Kent. But instead they were two separate beings, the Margaret Strand who'd grown up knowing she would one day become the Queen of Eyes, and the actual Queen, Margarita Mariq Nliana Hand, who emerged for the first time the moment Margaret's mother died.

  He thought of a Traveler he'd met once in New Zealand, Julietta Calvino, who was not actually one person but a community in a single body. "Multiple Personality Disorder" the psychiatrists called it, and maybe for some people that medical gobbledygook meant something. But Judith was a Traveler, and so were most of the others who from time to time inhabited the body (he'd asked if Judith was the "original" and was told that that was rude). Those who shared the Traveler's knowledge and skills used them according to their own temperament. It was a good arrangement, Jack thought, much better than Dupeing yourself. A Dupe was just another you, an extra body, but suppose you could become something else entirely, and all in the same shell?

  Jack smiled as he recalled the time he went to a bar in Auckland, expecting to meet Julietta, and instead "Marcus" was there. Same face but somehow sharper, more defined, with the long hair pulled back into a biker ponytail. Same body underneath the denim shirt, leather jacket, and loose jeans. And yet, there was no sense this person was, or ever had been, female. It wasn't a trans thing. As a Traveler, Jack had met plenty of transwomen and men. They actually formed a kind of elite, with a few claiming you couldn't really be a Traveler if you hadn't changed sex at least once. Marcus was not a male version of Julietta, he was a completely different person inhabiting the same body.

  Jack had assumed any callback would come from the hotel phone, and it took a moment to realize his cell was buzzing. He grabbed it and saw the text message, officially from "Margaret," but obviously from her. It read: Feb 9, 8 PM, Poughkeepsie, Hudson Walking Bridge. Look for the murder in the middle. Nliana Hand.

  Murder? Jack thought. Was someone planning to kill the Nude Owl? Was that even possible? And was the Queen sending him to stop it? He wanted to ask more but figured she wouldn't reply, so he just keyed "thank you" and sent it off.

  Feb. 9. Two days. It would take two hours to drive up to Poughkeepsie, but he'd want to get there early. That gave him just over a day and a half to figure out how someone might kill an Elemental, and how to stop it. He called Carolien. He'd already asked her how to find the Nude Owl and she'd come up with nothing. Now he hoped she could tell him how to save the Owl's life.

  Jack's search for the Know-It-All had begun three days earlier, but his need to find her went back a couple of weeks. It began with dreams. Dreams of trees, and destruction. For several nights Jack had dreamed of terrible things happening to forests, groves, individual trees. One night he dreamed of a fire that engulfed an entire mountain. Another time a tornado swept through a small town shopping street and left all the stores and cars and people, but uprooted all the trees. Another night he'd watched the people in a small African village wail and tear their clothes because the giant Ancestor Tree in the town square had been struck by lightning.

  Carolien did her best on this one, too. While Jack ran errands—bringing her stacks of manuscripts, running searches on Jinn-net, serving her cups of coffee and bags of trail mix, Carolien ran through all her sources, from Mesopotamian dream manuals to Travelers' accounts of tornadoes and fires, and just getting lost in dark woods. She exhausted every source she could. "We are doing this wrong," she said finally. These examples and such—what you dream, schatje, is about you. You know what you need."

  They were deep in the NYTAS archives, and now Jack slumped down in his wooden chair at the end of a white marble-topped table. "Yeah," he said. "Get a dream hunter."

  They had to walk up several floors before Jack could get a signal for his phone, so he decided to wait until he was out in the street. He didn't know for a fact that Arthur Canton had filled the walls with surveillance elementals, but why take a chance? On the corner of Lexington and 45th he dialed the number.

  A pleasant female Caribbean voice said, "Horne Agency."

  "Hi, Aruna," he said, "this is Jack Shade. May I speak with Elaynora, please?"

  A pause, then "Yes, sir. I'll check."

  Jack hoped that El's father wouldn't get on the phone. Jack hadn't spoken to father or daughter since Daddy had tried to use Jack's own dream duplicate to kill him. He let out a breath when El came on the phone. "Hello, Jack," she said.

  He decided it was best to jump right in. "I need your services," he said.
r />   There was a pause, then "My services? As a dream hunter?"

  "Yes. I've been having—strange dreams. I need to know why. We've—I've been searching for days, but nothing's come up."

  "And by ‘we've' you mean you and Carolien?"

  Fuck, Jack thought. "Yeah, sorry. I'm being an asshole. It's just—well, she's the best researcher."

  "Oh, I'm sure she is." Then he could hear her smile on the phone. "I'm sorry, Jack. I was just giving you a hard time. Of course I'll hunt for you."

  "Thanks. Seriously. One thing more. Can we do it outside the office? Maybe at your place?" Oh Jesus, he thought right away. Bad move. Dream hunt where they used to screw?

  "I'm sorry," she said. "That's not possible. I don't hunt at home. We have to do it here."

  For a second, Jack considered asking her to make sure her father wouldn't be there, but then a better idea struck him. He said, "That's fine. When can I come over?"

  "It sounds pretty urgent. If you can make it right now, I'll clear the space."

  "Great," Jack said. "Thanks. I'll be there as soon as I can."

  "Good. See you soon," she said, and hung up. Her voice had taken on a professional tone that Jack had never heard before. For a second it worried him, then he decided he liked it.

  Jack stood in the middle of the room. "Okay," he said out loud. "Next stop, Papa Click and Whistle." That was Jack's name for Alexander Horne, El's father, whose real name Jack couldn't pronounce. It was the name Horne's worshippers called him, before they all died out and left him a dispossessed Sun god.

  Jack closed his eyes and said, "Ray, I need you." When he opened his eyes, the fox was there, head tilted up to look at Jack, his thick tail curled in a golden question mark. Jack said, "You remember Alexander Horne, right?" Ray didn't move. Suddenly embarrassed, Jack thought how of course Ray remembered Horne. Ray was a Fox of the Morning, and Horne a Sun god. There'd been a moment when Ray had had to choose sides, and Jack had been very grateful that Ray had stayed loyal to him.

  Now he said "I need you to get him out of his office. Just long enough for me and El to work together. Can you do that?"

  Jack didn't know if a fox could smile, but Ray gave that impression.

  Then suddenly they were down in the street, in front of the hotel. "What the fuck?" Jack said. A couple of tourists about to enter scowled at him, and he realized it was his language, not his sudden appearance. As for Ray, of course, the visitors didn't see him at all.

  A good thing, because suddenly Ray grew. He became as large as a wolf, then a lion—he looked a bit like Nero, Jack thought—and then a horse. As Jack stared, amazed, Ray gestured with his head for Jack to climb on. Jack nervously mounted the giant fox. Though he'd touched Ray many times, he still worried he'd fall right through to the sidewalk. Instead, he nearly fell off when Ray took off at a run west on 34th Street. "Fuck!" Jack said, and held tight to Ray's fur.

  They moved so fast the people and cars, and even the buildings, became streaks moving away from them. When they reached the building that housed the Horne Agency they went through the street door as if it wasn't there, then bounded up the stairs, stopping finally in the Agency's reception office, where Horne himself stood, talking with some gray-haired executive type in an expensive suit.

  It wasn't until Jack got off Ray's back that Horne seemed to notice him. "Jack?" he said. "What are you—it's good to see you." Neither the client nor the receptionist sitting behind her desk acted as if anything unusual had happened.

  Jack glanced at Ray, who nodded. "You've met Ray, I believe."

  Again Horne looked startled, as if he'd just noticed the huge fox. Then he smiled, and inclined his head like a gracious king. "Of course," he said. "Thank you for bringing him."

  "Actually, he brought me. I think he wants to show you something."

  "Really?" He looked at Ray and smiled again. "Very good. I'm ready."

  Ray glanced at Jack, who said "I think he wants you to go with him." Ray shook his head, then looked from Jack to Horne. "Sorry, I think he wants us both to go." Silently, he told Ray You're supposed to be getting him away from me, remember? So I can work with El?

  And then he was moving, running, downtown, no longer on Ray's back but propelled effortlessly alongside him. On the other side, not exactly running, but moving in a kind of streak, was Alexander Horne. Only, now he was dressed in a kind of robe formed from beams of colored lights, and his face was too bright to look at.

  Jack was so fascinated by what was happening that he didn't notice the other strange thing until they'd crossed Houston Street, following Broadway south and east. Ahead of them they should have seen the single sculpted "Freedom Tower" of the new World Trade Center. Instead, two clunky identical rectangles rose up from the squat buildings of lower Manhattan. They hadn't just run downtown, they'd run downtime, to some point before September 11th, 2001.

  They moved through the lobby door of Tower One without opening it, up the staircase and out onto the observation deck. No one saw them, yet people facing them squinted and turned away. Jack had just enough time to remember how he used to take Genie here, how it felt so much safer than the Empire State Building because you couldn't look straight down but instead at an extension of the rooftop a couple of stories below, where the government had set up weather instruments and other devices. But now, instead of machines, he saw a small tribe of people, dressed in dyed animal pelts, their Central Asian faces marked with scars and red ochre.

  Suddenly, the tribe seemed to notice Horne, or rather Papa Click and Whistle, for those were the noises they suddenly made, a clamor of impossible sounds as they waved their hands above their head. Perfect, Jack thought. How better to distract Horne than to bring his worshippers back? Sure enough, the Sun god floated down to walk among his people, who threw themselves face down on the concrete ground as he passed.

  Brilliant. Except, how was Jack supposed to return, for as he might have guessed, Ray had gone to the lower roof as well, to walk alongside the re-established deity, leaving Jack with no way to get back uptown, let alone uptime. He was about to shout at Ray when he heard a voice.

  "Jack? Hello?"

  Jack saw an ordinary human hand waving in front of his face. He looked around. He was back in—or more likely he'd never left—the lobby of the Horne Agency. El stood in front of him, squinting at him as if he'd done something strange. Which of course he had. He'd Traveled, and left his body behind, something you're never supposed to do. "I'm okay," he told El, and hoped it was true.

  El said, "So what's the urgency? What is this dream you need me to hunt?"

  As Jack described the dreams of trees burnt or flattened, El led him to a room with thick curtains on the walls. They reminded Jack of the first time he and El had made love, when she'd given him dark glasses to wear and blocked the windows with heavy shutters. He looked from El to the single person wooden bed that stood against the wall on carved feet. El rolled her eyes but he could see her blush. "For god's sake, Jack, this is our primary induction chamber. You can't dream unless you're asleep." She pointed to a wingback chair at the foot of the bed and said, "This is where I'll be. Now do you want to do this or not?"

  "Of course," he said. "How do we start? Do I need to take my clothes off and get under the covers?"

  "You can keep your clothes on. It would be nice if you removed your shoes. Helps with the cleaning bills."

  "Of course" he said, then hesitated as he took off the right boot, with his knife hidden in the leg." El pretended not to notice.

  She said, "I've never worked with a Traveler before. Normally we use hypnosis, chanting, or even mild drugs to induce dream sleep, but I assume that's not necessary here?"

  "No. Shall I start now?"

  "Please." Just before Jack closed his eyes he saw El do so as well. There was something surprisingly intimate about that moment, the way a woman closes her eyes as s
he's about to be kissed.

  Travelers tend to see dreams as dangerous landscapes that might be useful. They learn quick dream induction to get in, find out what they need, then leave. Jack glanced over at Elaynora Horne, who seemed to stare at him through her closed eyes. Then he shut his own, and a moment later was gone.

  He was standing on a wide hilltop. All around him were the wrecks of trees, some as stumps, some as burnt-out trunks, others covered in some yellow fungus, with all the leaves gone and the branches broken or twisted. As he studied them he saw a shadow figure move quickly through the desolation. Now and then it would come close to him, linger for a moment, then dash off again. "El?" he called, but there was no answer.

  He looked past the destruction to notice a small cove of healthy trees, each one wth flowers or fruit. There were magnolias and dogwoods, cherry blossoms and pomegranates. Jack found himself breathing easier, his heart rate slowing. And then the ravens attacked.

  As if spit out from a tornado, the swirled down in a tight pattern to beat their wings at the branches and slash the fruit with their beaks. Murder, he thought, then no, that's crows. Ravens were something—parliament! That was it, a parliament of ravens.

  And just as he thought that, he woke up. He gasped and nearly leapt off the bed, then sank down again. "Jesus," he said. He looked at Elaynora, who sat stiffly in the chair, hands on her knees. "Did you see that? The parliament—those ravens attacking the trees?"

  "Yes."

  He sat up, faced her. "What the hell does it mean?"

  "Jack," she said softly. "You know what it means."

  "What? No. Why would I—" And then he stopped. "Fuck," he whispered. For of course she was right, he'd known all along. Carolien couldn't see it because she was researching the history of dreams about trees. But these were Jack Shade's dreams, and it needed a hunter to get him to see it. "It's the Forest of Souls," he said. "Something's destroying it." And with it his daughter?

  El shook her head. "No, nothing can actually destroy it. But it's being culled."