The Magister (Earthkeep)

by Sally Miller Gearhart

  "Mariner, I can't tell you — and neither can anyone in this room — what would happen if we kept the Kanshoubu. Would the preservation of the Kanshoubu stop the children from dying? Or bring back the animals? Would it produce an answer to the question of why they have chosen to leave us? If we kept the Femmedarmes and the Vigilantes and the Amahs, would children suddenly begin to be born again? If we kept the Kanshoubu, would the existence of the human enterprise be guaranteed?"

  Zude put her hand on her chest. "If I could do so without offending Aga Katir, I would sketch for you the glorious visions of the future that to me are the clear consequence of abolishing our peacekeeping corps. But, alas, there is no reasoning behind these visions, no material causation, only my desires and my convictions."

  She smiled broadly at Katir. "And so, I will refrain."

  There were low chuckles and some modest shifts of position in the big chairs.

  Bisbruja moved forward in her seat and leaned on an armrest. "Magister, many of us here in this assembly are amazed that this proposal of yours has even gotten as far as this body." She still peered at Zude over her glasses. "We listen to you only out of respect for your office. . .and, some of us, still out of respect for you." She removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes. "We also listen to you because we are desperate," she looked up, "desperate for any hope that there may be some future for our species."

  The Mariner shook her head, reclaimed her assertiveness. "I agree that, in our present distress, some simplifying of government structures might be called for, that we might best be moving toward some changes that would allow us merely to accept our fate and live out these final days in peace." Her voice rose in volume. "But why the Kanshoubu? Why target for oblivion the one agency that can guarantee us that peace, the one agency that can save us from widespread anarchy and sheer chaos? Why not the Central Web or the Size Bureau? Why do you choose the largest group of public servants on the planet — and not only the largest, but the most efficient and most dedicated. Why single out our Shrieves?"

  The Mariner shook her glasses at Zude. "Where is the justice, or the good sense, in focusing upon the Kanshoubu?" The glasses trembled visibly in her outstretched hand.

  Her question echoed in the silence of the Gather-Room.

  "I am far from believing in the death of our species, Mariner Bisbruja," Zude said. She turned and looked into the tough old eyes of Vigilante Captain Luz Adelia Zurbarán of Nicaragua, whose unfailing support she, as a brand new Matrix Major, had once so heavily depended upon. Zurbarán's countenance revealed nothing, only an alert attentiveness. Zude continued.

  "I pick the Kanshou because there are some jobs that only Kanshou are capable of performing. The eradication of the expectation of violence is one of those tasks."

  Zude quietly, slowly scanned the circle, inviting each woman there to question further. When no one responded, she looked again at Yotoma. The Femmedarme Magister still gazed into space.

  "Vigilante Bisbruja is wise to ask about justice," Zude continued, "because that's what our work has been about. Justice, in the face of malevolence. Justice, in the face of exploitation or ignorance. Justice."

  Zude closed her eyes briefly and drew in a long breath.

  "I have to tell you all of my truth now," she declared, "for you deserve to know it, whatever the consequences." She tilted her head upward and said, "I can no longer serve the law. I can no longer serve justice. The time of law and justice has passed."

  No member of the Heart moved even the smallest muscle.

  Abruptly, Zude turned toward Flossie Yotoma Lutu. Sure enough, the Femmedarme Magister's warm brown eyes were smiling now into her own, alert and present, as they had not been for days. Heartened, Zude's voice rose in volume. "Colleagues, in the new world that is on our doorstep, justice and the law are antiquated concepts. I am ready – I believe we all are ready now -- to see that laws create crime, that prisons create criminals, and that what we have called justice is actually a hindrance to human freedom."

  Zude addressed Vigilante Bisbruja directly. "Far from fearing the anarchy that you mention, Mariner, I now understand that anarchism has been a pathfinder for the next stage of human evolution. Kanshoumates, the old wineskins of law and justice cannot contain the flood of forgiveness that is upon the world."

  Out of the corner of her eye, Zude registered the forward movement of Adjutant Major Rabia Nuruk of Istanbul, her face a landscape of suppressed emotion. Zude waited, calm and respectful, for the woman's outburst.

  Nuruk expelled a short disgusted breath, waved a dismissive hand, shook her head. She sat back in an attitude of enforced patience, looking grimly at the speaker.

  Zude spoke again. "In the vocabulary of peacekeeping officers throughout history, I have just uttered an indecency: forgiveness. Forgive the murderer, Magister Adverb? Forgive the rapist? And I reply, 'Precisely. Forgive them all. Do not arrest them, do not prosecute them, do not imprison them. Any punishment due them resides in their own full knowledge of the act they have committed, and not in the meting out of punishment by any human tribunal. Let them be.'"

  Zude surveyed the room. She found the bobbing gray head of Vice-Magister Winifred Glee, and the raised thumb, inconspicuous but explicit, of Flossie Yotoma Lutu. Some of the faces were astonished or puzzled, others incredulous. Still others registered distaste or anger. Some faces Zude could not read. None, she observed, wore the mask of boredom.

  Her gaze fell upon Amah Mariner First Class Kit Lunming from Shanghai, an old friend. Zude noted that Lunming had not dropped her head in embarrassment, but sat in concentrated attention, her chin leaning on the hollow molded by her forefinger and thumb. A wave of gratitude passed over Zude. It eased her more massive bodily tensions and refined the edges of the path before her. She pressed her lips together in a half-smile at Lunming for the gift that the Amah had unwittingly bestowed.

  She turned to Malika Katir, who had originally interrupted her. "Aga, you ask me to stick to 'good reason in controversy,' as rightly you should. At least in principle, reason has always been our straightedge, the standard by which we measure our ideas and actions. I have been first to say to those who would fight, 'Come, let us reason together.'"

  Zude clasped her hands behind her back and turned casually, assessing another broad range of response in her listeners.

  "But reason has imprisoned me in its own closed system, in its own rules and fallacies. It has limited my thoughts and thus my reality. Reason is only a one-minute increment on a mile-wide spectrum. It is the contour of one snowflake in the swirl of conformations that comprise the storm of my human capabilities. I have focused upon that one tiny increment, upon that single snowflake, to the exclusion of the spectrum and the storm, and I have granted to reason a supremacy that must give way now to my full human legacy."

  Rabia Nuruk slumped further back into her chair, a heap of disapproval. Zude deliberately turned to her.

  "Adjutant Major, reason can no longer serve as my sole measuring stick for value or policy decisions in human affairs. Alone, it’s too confining. I'm using other abilities now, abilities that, in the service of reason, I have belittled and disparaged: my feelings, my hunches and, most of all, my ability to visualize beyond my daily experiences."

  Zude had grown breathless in her description. Purposefully, she calmed herself and met the eyes of individual Members of the Heart, addressing some by name. "It's the magic of my life that I'm speaking of, Sea Captain Victoria Painter. I'm talking about the things I've always called coincidence or miracles. Crazy things, Sky Commander del Dragón, which I now realize are among the proper guidelines for human action."

  Zude opened her arms. "Perhaps, my colleagues, the rumors are true. Perhaps I have lost my mind." She laughed and dropped her arms. "Whatever I may have lost," she said quietly, "I have gained an extraordinary peace and an exhilarating passion." She extended her hand. "I invite you to join me in those newfound joys."

  "I'll join you, Magister Adverb," said a voi
ce from behind her. Every eye turned to Femmedarme Magister Lutu, who sat calmly surveying the Heart. "And, if you'll permit me, I will speak briefly now."

  "With great pleasure," said Zude, sinking easily into her own chair.

  "Marshal Mead?" Yotoma addressed the Escort.

  "Of course, Magister," Mead nodded. Heart Members stirred in their chairs with renewed interest.

  Flossie Yotoma Lutu rose. She was tall and smooth in her green dress tunic, her Magister's sash marking the bottom of her long upper torso. "A question first," she said. She turned to the Heart's resting Communication Escort. "Hedwoman Gorodhov, we've done a good bit of hard work together for the Femmedarmery. Would you agree?"

  "Lots of it, Magister Lutu," replied Jovana Gorodhov. She smiled. "The Central Ural Garrison and Europe's military tribunals testify to that."

  "And would you say, Hedwoman, that I have been a reasonable person?" Yotoma asked.

  "A relentlessly reasonable person," Gorodhov replied with a wry smile, "more hidebound by reason than any Kanshou I've known. A stickler for law and logic."

  Yotoma nodded her thanks, then addressed the assembly. "I ask," she said, "because it's got to be clear that no one is exempt from the changes afoot on this planet. In fact," and her eyes fastened briefly on Aga Katir, then on Rabia Nuruk, "it may be those of us most dedicated to reason and justice who are most vulnerable to the changes."

  Yotoma's stance took on a formality only partially military in nature.

  "I speak now as Rememorante Afortunada," she intoned. Immediately her audience was compelled to a new mood. Resistances lowered, all heads came up, all ears awoke.

  "I speak, calling back my childhood near Juba in the Sudan, fifty miles from the White Nile, calling back a jackal named Koussi, calling back Koussi as he came into our village from the desert almost every night, usually just before dawn, to scavenge our garbage and rubbish heaps."

  Her voice took on the storyteller's cadence.

  "We had good communions, Koussi and I. I would squat low at a distance from him, watching him tear at bones or shucks. He never got his belly full, but when he had eaten all he could find, he would sit with me for a while, his small gray body hard to see against the sky behind him. I knew he belonged to a pack, but other jackals never came near.

  "Now and again Koussi would all of a sudden lift his nose high to the sky, then relax again. Or sometimes he'd point his nose up and then take off, fast as the wind, like danger was just around the corner. I always wondered why he raised his nose like that. He seemed to be listening raptly to something finely tuned. I listened too — at the time, and long after the time when he ever came again. I have been listening on and off all my life. Sometimes, it has seemed, I could actually hear it, far in the distance, a single tune like my momah's voice, or the faint chords of a choir, or instruments. I would hunker down and try harder to hear it, because it sounded comforting, like a true home. But the harder I tried, the sooner it would fade away. I could never hear it clearly."

  Magister Lutu's voice became matter-of-fact.

  "And then I got educated. I practiced law. I became a police officer. And after the Kanshoubu was born, I held seats of judgement in Femmedarme and civilian tribunals, listening to other voices, hearing no music. Hearing only the summons of law and justice." She sighed. "The only internal work I ever did was to carry on conversations with my Self — rational dialogues, usually, in which I weighed the value and efficacy of one path or another."

  Yotoma cut her eyes at Zude, noting there a barely perceptible nod. An old merriment sparked the features of both women.

  Yotoma stood in the precise center of the circle and announced, "I know now what Koussi heard." She turned in an irregular pattern so as to spread her attention throughout the assembly.

  "He heard the music of the Source Self." She paused.

  "Several of you Afortunadas here have heard the howling of jackals and you know how haunting those cries were — even terrifying. But to Koussi those howls were music, the music of the jackal pack — not only the music that warned them of danger but the music that was their home, their center, their joy. No matter how far apart they had wandered."

  Yotoma drew a long breath. "Kanshoumates, you deserve to know why I have withdrawn from our proceedings these last few days, why I've left the hard work to Magister Adverb."

  She rested one hand on the half-hitch of her sash and turned her eyes for a moment to Femmedarme Rabia Nuruk. "Simply put," she said, "I have at last been listening to the music."

  No one moved.

  Yotoma continued. "By the grace of that music — that magnificent symphony — I have been recalling every executive decision that I have made over the last twenty-odd years for the Africa-Europe-Mideast Tri-Satrapy. I have been measuring the sympathetic vibration of every one of those decisions by the music in my soul. I found some of them to be in harmony with my symphony. Some others, though they may have seemed wise enough at the time, are now loud and dissonant, a cacophony of inappropriate thoughts and actions. I could never make those same decisions again. Never."

  Yotoma contemplated the group.

  "There are four of you right here in this room, Members of the Heart of All Kanshou, who have also been hearing the music, who have come into full contact with your Source Selves, who now know where your true guidance lies. I won't point you out. You know who you are."

  As she explored the faces before her, she carefully focused on foreheads rather than on eyes.

  "When I heard you listening with me, even as we also heard Adverb's words, I knew for the first time what the Heart's decision will be. You have given me faith. And I thank you."

  Yotoma waited for many seconds before she bowed to Escort Mead and took her seat beside Zude.

  In the silence of the Gather-Room, Amah Sea Admiral Sulan Ka'ahumanu's voice was a piercing whisper: "Thank you, Magister."

  Gently, Yotoma nodded to her.

  Zude rose. She let the silence lengthen while she gauged the mood of her listeners. At last she spoke.

  "My colleagues, if we close our eyes and settle our minds into the comfort of the best that is within us, into our memories of a child's laughter or our first breathtaking discovery of love, if we can touch the Inner Self that reminds us of who we truly are, then we can see there the meaning and the beauty of our lives."

  She paused, watching some pairs of eyes as they closed, other pairs as they focused upon her. She kept her own eyes open, her voice matter-of-fact.

  "We can also see the linear progress of Time as we have conceived it. It presses toward us out of the vivid and magnificent narrative that we call our history, flowing forward from this moment into the countless unknown possibilities that we call our future. In that flow of Time is a window. It has been opening gradually over the past weeks, and now it is closing again. Once it closes, it will be lost forever."

  Zude held the moment carefully.

  "This window frames the most splendid of our possible futures. It urges us to shake off fears and old beliefs. It dares us to test our identity as women of uncompromising courage and good will."

  Zude now spoke slowly, firmly.

  "The present is the only thing we have, and the power of all human wanting, in all past moments of human experience, is visiting us in this present moment. Here. Now. At the sill of this window in time."

  She turned within the circle, looking directly at whatever eyes would meet hers.

  "We cannot step through the window of yesterday or a few hours ago, for those moments have fled. We cannot step through it tonight or tomorrow, for by then the window will have closed. We can only step through it now."

  Zude realized that she was holding her Magister's sash, her thumb stroking it lightly. Unhurriedly, she studied the sash and then gently pressed its ends against her cobalt blue tunic. She raised her head.

  "You are the only people in the world," she said, "who can take us through the window. You are, right here and right now, the key pla
yers in humanity's most crucial decision. What you are called upon to do will come from the deepest knowledge of your truest Self. With your dissolving of the Kanshoubu, every Amah, every Femmedarme, every Vigilante — and every other person on Little Blue — will be released to the rich achievement of this next step in human evolution."

  Zude's eyes were alight. Her audience was motionless. An audible sniff came from someone behind her. Casually, Zude turned to see Flyer First Class Niki Keya of Calcutta pressing a handkerchief to her cheek. The old Amah had been merciless in her hounding of Zude and Yotoma during the past week. As she caught Zude's eye, Keya coughed several times and blew her nose, conspicuously dealing with the symptoms of a bad cold.

  When the Magister spoke again, she did close her eyes.

  "You are Our Heart," she said. "You are those in whom every Kanshou trusts. We thank you for keeping us these many years in such safety, in such honor, and in such love."

  There was no sound. For one fragile moment, the will of every Kanshou in the room rose into a singularity of understanding and acceptance. Zude held her breath. The moment endured. And still endured. It did not begin to fray until Amah Keya's sniffing nudged the group into small tension-relieving movements.

  Zude dared to open her eyes. The array of faces around her wore a wide spectrum of feelings, some of them changing — even as she watched them — from a deep wonder to a smiling conviction. Others were frozen in bewilderment or concern. Still others fought to control displeasure or frustration.

  Zude released a slow sigh and started toward her seat. She was halted in her tracks by the steady voice of Vice-Magister Winifred Glee, who was on her feet and staring across the room at the southwestern door.

  "She's coming," Glee announced, her smile dazzling. "Magister Lin-ci Win is coming!"

  Chairs swiveled. Eyes began looking with those of Vigilante Glee toward the doorway. The hum of excitement mounted. Communication Escort Mead pounded the gavel to still the rising voices. "Colleagues!" she called out, at the same time pressing her fingers to her earphone. She struck the gavel again. "Colleagues!" Chairs swiveled back toward her. The clamor subsided.