by Nisi Shawl
“He—You think he’s one of us?”
“I’m a priest of the Night and its champion,” John said. “I’m no demigod. But this one…?”
“But he’s dead!”
“I’ve been dead. So have you.”
Thea surprised herself by bursting into tears.
John seemed unsure what to do. He’d taken her into his arms before, and Thea wished he would again.
“Thea.”
“It’s always something. Always.”
◊
When Thea first arrived at the Academy, John was being Called. His god was Osa, Queen of Night and Games, and John fought Her summons as hard as he could. He had manifested powers at the onset of puberty, but he was hardly religious, and he believed that his abilities could be explained through science. His struggle leeched the color from his skin until it looked like parchment, and when he thought no one was looking, a haunted, hunted look would appear in his eyes.
One morning, Thea found him in the greenhouse, kneeling before a bed of alien flowers, his face buried in his palms. She wavered for a moment, then went to him, resting a hand between his shoulder blades.
John was a telepath, and while he kept silent, the physical contact sent a bolt of emotional agony coursing up Thea’s arm. He didn’t seem to notice, and Thea didn’t pull her hand away. Instead she stood, trying to lend him what strength she could.
After a moment or two, the pure pain in him subsided a bit—or Thea adjusted to it—until she could sense his actual thoughts.
It’s not me. It’s not. You’re wrong. I’m not him. I’m not the Guy. Please—! Please just let me go!
In the stillness and among the scent of blooming plants, Thea heard something answer.
You are Ours. You are Our Clown and Our Angel of Night.
Thea had never heard her own god speak—not in words.
She didn’t think he’d noticed her, but without speaking, John turned and buried his face in Thea’s belly. He sobbed loudly, weeping like a little boy. “Why won’t she listen? Why won’t she listen to me?”
“She doesn’t understand,” Thea said. “She can’t. But…but it’s not so bad, really, belonging to a god. Some people spend their entire lives longing for what you and I wish we didn’t have.”
◊
The moment Clown and Thea appeared in Thea’s apartment, Ket squawked a greeting and leaped into Clown’s arms. He crawled round John’s back and perched on his shoulder, watching Thea.
“This is…This is so fucked. I think—I need a drink.”
John handed her a shot of whiskey.
Thea took it in one gulp as John set a bottle of Glenfiddich on the kitchen counter. Next, he handed Thea a lit cigarette.
“Wait. You can do that now? You can just materialize things?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t do that! Don’t!”
“I didn’t materialize it,” he said. “This is the bottle I keep in my cabinet at home. I reached in there and got it for you.”
“By magic.”
“By magic,” he said.
“I am so—I am sick to fucking death of magic and spirits!”
John and Ket watched as she poured herself another shot, and another.
“Listen,” John said. “I can go, if—”
“Don’t. Don’t leave me.”
“All right.”
“You just—Why did you stay away?”
He hung his head. “I understood why you warned me away. I was trying to respect your decision.”
“My decision. I’m just some girl.”
“…But you’re not.”
◊
One night during her second year, Thea snapped awake in the darkness. Jawal lay next to her, sleeping heavily.
Clown’s voice sounded at a slight remove from her own thoughts. Are you decent?
“What?”
Are you decent?
“No. What do you want?”
I need you to see this.
“Okay. Just—”
Now Thea found herself standing, fully clothed, in utter darkness. “Hey! I can’t see!”
“Sorry,” John said. “I forget sometimes.”
The lights came up, showing Thea a vast panel of black glass hung with weapons and trophies. Thea goggled at them for a full thirty seconds. Finally, “Where are we?”
“I’m not sure this place exists in any conventional sense,” John said. “It was my uncle’s.”
John’s uncle, Kid Armistice, had been, very possibly, the most powerful paranormal in history.
“Oh,” Thea said. “Oh. What did you want to show me?”
John reached into the pocket of his khakis and withdrew what looked like an orb of concentrated night. The ball grew as he held it, levitating above his hand, and now Thea saw the Mask that hung at its center. It was much like Thea’s own, but it was pop-eyed, and its nostrils flared. Its teeth stood out from shredded lips, and its black tongue lolled from its mouth. As Thea stared at it, she thought she heard ghostly children wailing in terror.
“Where did you get this?”
“Is it what I think it is?” John said.
“It is. Rangda. It’s her Mask.”
“I brought it here because I figured this was where it would do the least harm,” John said. “But it tried to escape, so I imprisoned it. It’s—It doesn’t like being trapped. Keeping it bound causes me pain, and I’m not sure how long I can hold it.”
“This—Where did you get it?”
“There was a Thing in the Philippines. A brothel full of monsters was enacting rites to destroy the veil between worlds. Doc Crisis wasn’t available, so I went instead. One of the creatures there had this hidden under the floorboards in her bedroom. Tell me how to destroy it.”
“Destroy it?”
“If it was created, it can be destroyed,” he said. “Otherwise, it will make its way into the world, and Rangda will be reborn.”
“Are you out of your mind? This mask wasn’t created, John. It just is. It’s a fact of the Universe and it’s turning.”
“It—She killed your family. She nearly killed you. You are under my protection, so in doing this, I—”
“Get over yourself!”
John was visibly taken aback.
“That came out wrong,” Thea said. “But it’s—Do you understand that by bringing this thing here and showing it to me, you’ve made me responsible for loosing it back into the world?”
“…I’m sorry.”
“You should be. Things work the way they work. You and I, we’re only people. To tamper with the Grand Design is worse than folly, it’s…it’s a kind of evil.”
“And you’re just going to release—You want to just let it escape?” he said.
“What I want is to grind it to dust and then grind the dust into nothing,” Thea said. “But that’s beyond me. It’s beyond you, too.”
“This is insane,” John said with a bitter shake of his head. He paused, and glowered at the orb. The Mask glared back, seething in bondage.
After a beat, the orb disappeared with a sigh, and the mask clattered to the floor.
Thea’s limbs felt cold, wooden with terror, and for a moment she just stood, rooted in place. “God damn it, John,” she said.
“It’s not too late.”
“It is,” she said. “It always was.”
Thea willed herself to approach the Mask and leaned down to face it. “Go,” she said. “Do your worst. But understand that when we meet again, I’ll kill you.”
The mask’s mouth seemed to twist a little, not with malice, but with sorrow. Even staring directly at it, Thea lost sight of it somehow. She blinked and found that it had gone.
Thea leaned on her knees, her belly boiling with unease. When she could, she straightened to look at John, who, at first, showed her no emotion. She could tell it was an effort for him, but he let his guard down and relaxed out of his Clown persona. “Forgive me,” he
said.
Thea couldn’t look him in the eye “I’m going to need a few days.”
◊
“I’m not cut out for this,” Thea said.
She sat on the floor, her legs splayed out before her, the empty shot glass dangling from her hand. John had watched her kill half his bottle, stopping every so often to cry hard, like a little girl. Finally, he’d sat down beside her, taken the bottle, and reached up, without looking, to set it on the counter.
“You are. We both are. That’s the problem.”
“Oh yeah?” Thea said. “Then why don’t I know what my god wants? Why can’t I—? Why can’t He just talk to me the way yours talks to you?”
“You wouldn’t…It’s worse that way, believe me.”
“I should have let you try to break it,” Thea said. “I should have let you try to destroy Rangda for good. Maybe the world would have ended, and none of this would be happening.”
“I ended a world once,” John said casually. “A better one than this.”
Thea sat very still. Years ago, just after he took Thea in, some cataclysm had shaken all existence. Thea had never thought too closely on it because it seemed entirely beyond her, but she understood that John had been at the center of a cosmic struggle, and that whatever action he’d taken had saved everyone—herself included. He’d never spoken of it since.
“Do you know how I did it?”
“…No.”
“My uncle ascended to something resembling godhood. He killed me for standing in his way, and then he killed just about half of everyone everywhere. Then he started over: new Earth, new universe, new everything. But he didn’t leave me dead. Oh no, he let me into that other world. Gave me the life I’d always wanted. I grew up with my family. I went to school. I had a girlfriend who loved me dearly. It was wonderful. Fewer people. Less crime, and what crime there was was…It was of a different order, you know? Not so mean-spirited. In that world, my little cousin was never abducted, never tortured to death. She was a great kid, and I got to watch her grow. But after a while, my god got a hold of me. At first, I didn’t remember this life, this world, but She told me what had happened and what to do about it.”
“What did you do?”
“I fought Armistice as hard as I could, but he was just too much for me. There was no way I could beat him, unless…The whole thing, he’d done the whole thing to give his daughter the life she deserved. He only let me into that world because he knew Laurie would be happier with me around. So, I grabbed her out of the air—just like I summoned that bottle for you just now—and I held her head, like so…” he pantomimed the motion, “…and I killed her right before his eyes.”
“You…What?”
John shook his head. “That whole world, that whole existence, my uncle held it together by will alone. He was so powerful that he could do all that and kick my ass at the same time without hardly trying. But when he saw what I’d done, his concentration was ruined. His control slipped, and this world sort of…snapped right back into place. That’s how I did it. That’s how I saved reality…such as it is.”
“But Laurie’s alive. She’s—She’s okay. Better than okay.”
“She doesn’t remember. No one remembers but me.”
“Your god asked that of you?”
“She didn’t ask me. They never ask. She commanded me, clear as crystal. No room for argument.” Now he spoke haltingly and without looking at Thea. “So I’ve been, ah, living with that for, what is it now? Six years? Laurie, she was one of my best students. She’s saved my life four times now. Sometimes I look at her, and I just remember her standing there with her head all gone because it happened so fast that it took her body a moment or two to realize she was dead and fall down.
“I’m telling you this because—Well, I’ve gotta tell someone, and I’m too chickenshit to tell Laurie. I stayed away because I knew. I knew I would tell you if I saw you again, and that’s the—the last thing you need. I’m sorry. I’ve got to—I need forgiveness, or this burden on my heart will fucking kill me. Just—You know me. You know how I live, and now you know what I’ve done. Can you puh—please fuh—forgive me?”
Clown’s confession had shocked Thea stone sober. She wasn’t sure the wrong he’d done was hers to forgive. The events he’d related could hardly fit inside her head—in a sense, they couldn’t fit at all. She could only make sense of his story by reducing its details to abstractions. But one thing was not abstract—and that was the pain her friend, her mentor, was in.
Thea turned and took John into her own arms. He half-sat, half-lay against her, holding the back of her head as he pressed his face into the crook where her left shoulder met her neck. “Of course I forgive you,” she said. “Of course I do.”
He shook against her, weeping hard, making choked animal sounds.
“We’ve all done terrible things,” Thea whispered. “Our gods call upon us, and all we can do is answer. Think of all the lives you saved. Billions.”
Eventually, he pulled away, and laughter mingled with his tears. He rose and stretched, popping his spine. “Sorry about that. Sorry, I—You know, there aren’t a lot of paranormals like us. There aren’t a lot of Champions.”
“I know,” she said, looking up at him. “But you know I love you, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I love you, too. You were always my favorite.”
“Get out!”
He seemed surprised. “Wasn’t it obvious?”
“You adopted Heat Boy as your own legal heir!”
“I love Jawal. He’s my son. But you…you were like a big sister and a little sister at the same time. That doesn’t make any sense.” He paused, watching her for a moment. “Listen. For what it’s worth, I think that our problem is that you and I, we are cut out for this. For this and this only. And even if we weren’t? Our gods don’t care. They don’t understand our loneliness or our pain—and if they understood, they still wouldn’t care because they’re more than we are. Greater. We can’t imagine the stakes of the game they’re playing.”
“You…”
He was silent for a long time. “Anyway, that stuff I said before, what I told you; I take it back.”
A strange sensation fluttered against the surface of Thea’s mind—like fingers plucking lint from fabric.
“Take what back?”
“Don’t worry about it,” John said. “Listen, I have to go, but one thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t go near that boy again. He’s bad news. He’s like us. He’ll probably skip town as soon as he wakes up, and when he does, don’t look for him. Clear?”
“Cluh—Clear. What were we talking about?”
“When?”
“…Before.”
“I was rambling,” John said. “You want me to tuck you into bed before I leave?”
“No. No, I’m okay.”
“I’ll leave the bottle,” John said.
He didn’t fade. He didn’t even disappear.
“…And then he was not,” Thea thought.
She thought of Simon, beautiful Simon, and of the shambles her life had become.
◊
Hours later, Thea still sat in her favorite chair, fuzzy-headed and silent, staring away at nothing. Barong Ket loped into the living room and climbed onto the sofa where he grabbed the television remote. He turned the TV on, then off again. He hopped down from the sofa and crossed to Thea.
Clown is wrong.
It was unusual for him to speak this way, Thea noticed dimly. Usually, he’d say, “Clown wrong.” He must be making an extra effort to be understood.
“Wrong about what?”
What the gods want of you—all of you—is both simpler and infinitely more complex than he imagines. They want you to be better than you are. That is why they demand more of you than you can give. In striving, you achieve. From time to time, every believer cries out under the yoke of faith, but faith gives more than it takes.
“But why does it hav
e to be so—? Why do I have to feel this way?”
Ket sighed and scratched his beard. Because you are a weapon, and your god is forging you like steel.
Thea fell silent. She thought back to the morning after she was discharged from the hospital, when the social worker, Ms. Hand, took her home to gather her things. She’d asked to be alone in her bedroom for a moment, and Ms. Hand had agreed. As soon as the woman was gone, Thea knelt and pulled the Mask from its hiding place.
The numbness in her face told her she was crying. She couldn’t even feel the tears. “Give it to me,” she sobbed. “I know Arto was your Champion. Let me take his place.”
In the silence that followed, Thea listened as hard as she could. She heard no voice, but something touched the core of her. A vast, overwhelming intelligence turned its attention toward her—or no—she had the sense that she’d always held its attention, but now it focused on her directly. She must seem so weak in its eyes, so unworthy.
“Anything,” she said. “I’ll do anything. If I’m too weak, then make me strong. Make me what you need.”
No definite answer came. No words or thoughts, but now she had an impression that her plea had been heard and that the terms she’d laid out were agreeable. The Presence she felt receded to the background, and a sense of peace flooded through her. The sensation was so powerful that she swooned as she knelt, and the next thing she knew, she was in Ms. Hand’s car, headed for the group home.
◊
“That’s what this is?” Thea said aloud. She spoke not to herself or to Barong Ket, but to the Presence, which, while it seemed distant, was not altogether absent. “All this is to make me stronger?”
Ket wavered for a moment, then turned and left the room.
Thea rose from her chair and knelt before it. Her body ached. She wondered how long she’d been coasting along the edge of her endurance. “O great god who leaps across continents,” she said. “God of my father and his father before him. Ever your servant, I entreat you: hear my humble prayer…”
Empathy Evolving as a Quantum of Eight-Dimensional Perception
Claude Lalumière
1. Empathy
The human male is dying, his body incorrectly configured. Humans have long been extinct, but the biologist recognizes the primate physiology. She knows the creature should be externally symmetrical; that its head should be attached by a neck sprouting from the cavity at the top of the thorax; that its skeleton should be entirely internal; that its reproductive organs should dangle from its pelvis; that its four limbs should not be attached and joined together to its spine; that it should not be excreting so much fluid.