Heartlight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “SUNY New Paltz is a state school. I take it Taghkanic wasn’t your first choice college?” Colin asked.

  Early September was still summer in the Hudson Valley, with the sultry days of Indian summer lying in wait. But the air had an agreeable bite to it, and the apple trees that dotted the campus were heavy with ripening fruit.

  “It was. But Taghkanic’s expensive, and it gives preference to New York State students, and my grades weren’t exactly …” the boy shrugged.

  “Mr. Greyson,” Colin began. Now was as good a time as any to discourage Hunter Greyson from his attraction to the parapsychology courses. He was a charming young man, and Colin distrusted that charm even as he felt its pull: such charming young men were likely also to be heartless manipulators, and additional power was the last thing that would be good for them—or for anyone else.

  “Call me Grey.” Again the flash of the irrepressible smile.

  “All right. Grey. I’ll tell you right out: I honestly don’t think you have what it takes to make it on our parapsych track, and your attempt to maneuver your way around the requirements as if they were meant for everyone but you doesn’t impress me favorably.”

  Grey stared at him as if he could not believe what he was hearing. But it was not so easy as all that to step back into one’s place in each life: Colin would not let the boy trade on a friendship they’d shared before his birth.

  “But … That’s it? If I have to wait a whole year before starting the Bidney courses I’ll be a year behind! You aren’t being fair! You didn’t even look at my qualifications—” Grey yelped.

  “You should have gotten in touch with Taghkanic sooner to find out what the requirements were,” Colin said implacably. “One of them is Introduction to Occult Ethics. I’ll be looking forward to seeing you there. Good afternoon.”

  “I wonder if you might reconsider the Hunter Greyson case?” Eden Romney said a few days later.

  The new Taghkanic president made it a point to lunch weekly with Colin in the faculty dining room—assuring them both, she had said with a smile, at least one civilized meal per week. The Bidney Institute was the original 800-pound gorilla; it had the potential to make every sort of flashy trouble for the university, and Dr. Romney was insistent on keeping up-to-date with developments there.

  “I didn’t know there was a Hunter Greyson case,” Colin said evenly.

  Truth to tell, Colin’s conscience had been poking him since his summary dismissal of Hunter Greyson earlier in the week. A freewheeling attitude toward rules and requirements didn’t necessarily indicate that Greyson was not meant to take the Path once more, nor that he wouldn’t be a good student.

  Dr. Romney shook her head. “Well, it isn’t as if there are parents involved, thank God—technically, there’s an aunt somewhere out West, but practically speaking, Hunter Greyson’s been on his own since he was sixteen. You know we hand out very few scholarships here—”

  “Good Lord,” Colin said, surprised. “Don’t tell me that Greyson’s here on a scholarship?” He remembered the boy mentioning that the school was expensive, but he’d thought nothing of it: everyone did.

  “Scholarship, work-study, and a few loans; the Finance Office had the devil’s own time making it work. But we were glad to be able to get him—you should see his list of credits and publications.”

  “I see,” said Colin, who didn’t. He was saved from having to add to that by the arrival of their lunches, brought over by a student waitress from the dumbwaiter in the corner. The area reserved for the faculty’s use was on the second floor of Taghkanic’s cafeteria building, and doubled as the faculty lounge.

  “Perhaps you’d like to fill me in,” he said, once the plates had been set out. Today’s hot entrée was roast beef; Colin sniffed the steam rising from his plate appreciatively. “Greyson mentioned that his grades weren’t particularly good, so I’ll admit I’m puzzled about the scholarship,” he said, after taking a bite.

  Romney sipped at her wine—a faculty privilege—and considered her words before answering.

  “Well, the GREs and SATs weren’t anything special, but he graduated high school at sixteen with Emancipated Minor status and has amassed quite a CV since then. Published a number of scholarly articles in academic journals and an underground comic book—about Carl Jung, of all people—appeared in dinner theater in San Francisco, did some commercial art: quite a number of different things, really; I haven’t told you the half of them. Apparently he’s finally focused his interests toward aiming for some sort of art-therapy credential based on his own theories. He’s working on a book about them; I’ve seen the first few chapters, and if the rest of the book lives up to them, I think it could be rather brilliant.”

  “And he wants to take the Bidney courses,” Colin said.

  “It’s one of the reasons that he chose us,” Dr. Romney pointed out.

  “And after I told him he had to follow the rules like everyone else, he came to you.”

  Dr. Romney looked startled; Colin was startled himself by the amount of rancor in his voice. It was a transgression against all he had ever been taught to let knowledge gained of a soul in a previous life prejudice one against them in this. And if anything, his prejudice was in favor of Greyson—not against. Why was he judging the boy so harshly?

  “I’m sorry, Eden. That was completely uncalled for. I apologize,” Colin said.

  “Well, I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that sometimes the kids can get on our nerves. But for the record, it was his advisor, Professor Rhys, who spoke to me about it, and I thought I’d see why you turned him down.”

  Fear.

  Colin was honest enough with himself to be able to admit that. When he looked at Hunter Greyson he saw not the boy’s potential for greatness but the potential for sheer disaster. He saw Simon Anstey. He saw Thorne Blackburn. He saw every other brilliant adventurer who’d flown too near the sun.

  He saw Grey’s death long ago across the sea, himself unable to save him. Oh, Michael—

  “I’ll give Auben a call and see about setting up an interview with Greyson,” Colin said, still feeling that terrible reluctance to let the boy into his life. “I’m not making any promises until after I’ve reviewed his file and spoken to him, but at this point I won’t rule anything out.”

  “Thanks, Colin. I appreciate you taking the time to look into this.”

  What in heaven’s name is wrong with me? Colin wondered, staring around his office. He toyed with the cold pipe between his fingers, tapping its charred bowl against the thick file in front of him.

  As Eden had promised, Hunter Greyson’s credentials—especially for an incoming college sophomore—were impressive. Impressive enough to have warranted at least a first look instead of a summary dismissal. He hadn’t let his emotions take control of him that way in years—and certainly not in such a surreptitious fashion.

  His first intuition had been correct: it was fear that motivated his actions. But fear of what? If Grey should choose the Path once more and fall victim to its many perils, that would be a tragedy, true, but nothing that could not be repaired by another turn of the Wheel. Yet Colin had been afraid—and for himself, not for Hunter Greyson. If Colin should take on the responsibility of teaching him—and if, then, Grey should fail …

  What would that say about Colin? The outward was the reflection of the inward: if he could not make anything that was not marred …

  Then it’s just as well to know it, Colin told himself brutally. And to address the matter while there is still time.

  There was a knock at the door. Greyson had learned to be prompt, if nothing else.

  “Come in,” Colin said.

  Hunter Greyson sidled through the door. He was dressed with scrupulous normalcy in tie and blazer, as though going for a job interview.

  Or reporting to his parole officer, Colin thought caustically. The tone of his thoughts made him feel guilty; he had less reason than before to think badly of Hunter Greyson.

&
nbsp; “You’d wanted to see me, sir?” Grey said.

  “Sit down,” Colin said, wondering how to begin the interview. After he’d spoken with Dr. Romney, he’d spoken to Grey’s faculty advisor, Professor Rhys of the Drama Department, and reviewed Grey’s original transfer application. But the Hunter Greyson he really needed to know about wasn’t in any of those things.

  “A number of members of the faculty have spoken on your behalf,” Colin began.

  Grey stood up, suddenly angry. “And so you’re seeing me because they blackmailed you into it. Forget that.”

  “Sit down.” Colin rarely raised his voice in anger, but he had a commanding presence when he chose to use it. Grey sat, his gaze fixed firmly on the gleaming silver hilt of the sword-in-stone paperweight balanced precariously atop a pile of journals.

  “No one blackmails me. Not the college administration, and not you, Mr. Greyson, so relax.” Colin, following the direction of his gaze, picked it up and moved it to a safer location. “The Bidney Institute is world famous in its field, which means it’s a lodestone for crackpots, cranks, fanatics, and freaks. I have no desire to admit students to the curriculum who will be seeing UFOs or announcing that they’re possessed by the devil half a semester later. Now, your application to the college looks very promising, so why don’t we start at the beginning, and you can tell me why it is that you wanted to come to the Bidney Institute and what you expect to do here?”

  If Grey didn’t exactly squirm in his chair, Colin could see the effort he made not to fidget.

  “I think I may have given you the wrong idea about me,” Grey said with painful care. “I’m not particularly interested in parapsychology, except to lay a groundwork for my other studies. You can spend till Doomsday trying to prove its reality to the mundane world, and someone like the Amazing Randi is always going to come along and cast doubt on your results by duplicating them through stage illusionism—as if there wasn’t more than one way to skin a cat. With all due respect—and believe me, I do understand why what the Bidney Institute does is necessary—I’m just not interested in saying my ABCs over and over until the end of time. We know these abilities exist. We know how to develop them. It’s time to move on to what comes next.”

  Colin felt himself warm to Grey’s sincerity, and this time, he did not suppress the feeling.

  “Taking that as a given, Grey, what can we do for you? If you’re not interested in parapsychological investigation or research, what do you want from us?”

  Grey hesitated, obviously mulling over in his head whether he wanted to tell Colin the truth. Finally he spoke.

  “I’m interested in studying magick.”

  It must have taken a certain amount of nerve to say that, especially to someone he couldn’t believe to be a sympathetic audience.

  “You know that we don’t offer courses in magick here,” Colin said gently.

  “No,” Grey said quickly, “but I can study both Theater Arts and Psychology here, and that’s a start toward what I want to do out in the real world. And the Bidney Collection is one of the best accumulations of books on the occult available to the public. For the rest, I know I’d have to work on my own—I joined an OTO Encampment out in California, but they made me leave when they found out I wasn’t eighteen.” Grey shrugged. “I thought you might help me.”

  It wasn’t sponsorship into one of the private Magickal Lodges that Hunter Greyson was talking about—Colin would have been surprised if the boy, for all his well-traveled sophistication, suspected that such things existed … at least in this life.

  “Why me?” Colin asked.

  “The truth?” Grey countered warily.

  “Ideally.”

  “Well … I could find you. And you’re not a nut like LaVey, or a fraud like—well, you know. And I didn’t want to have to start by swearing a lot of oaths and making a lot of promises before I knew what was going on. I mean, a lot of these modern so-called secret societies are just an excuse for some loser to feel like God, and that’d just be a waste of time for me.”

  “So you’re only willing to follow the principles of a Magickal Order providing it meets your standards?” Colin asked.

  “Well … would you follow principles that didn’t?” Grey asked reasonably. Colin could not help smiling.

  “And what is your ultimate goal?” Colin asked. “Why study magick at all? I know you’ve already done your basic reading, and have a little experience if you were a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis. So it all comes down to ‘why’?”

  “Because there are answers,” Grey said earnestly, leaning forward. “Why should humankind be such a complex, evolved, self-aware creature if we’re only supposed to live seventy years and die? What is it for? What are we for? I don’t believe we ought to just ignore questions like that. I want to know the truth—but the sciences say it isn’t possible to study something like this. Philosophy’s self-referential and morally bankrupt—and religion only wants us to accept the status quo. So what does that leave? We have to gather our own information and make our own decisions—but we also have to accept that ethical behavior has a basis in objective reality. That just leaves magick.”

  It was impossible not to be engaged by Grey’s fervor.

  “Very well.” Colin pulled open the drawer to his desk and rummaged through the papers there. “Here’s a reading list—let me know which ones you’ve already read, and prepare me written reports on all of them—as long as you like, but fifteen hundred words minimum. I’ll sign your admission into the advanced courses—Practices and Ethics is still a prerequisite, and if I don’t see you there every single session, you’ll get an ‘F’ for all your parapsychology courses. Do you agree?”

  “Yes, sir,” Grey said meekly. But his eyes were shining.

  Colin looked out over the heads of his latest freshmen class—had he ever been so young? It seemed that they got younger as the world turned darker, and while his students in the dawn of the sixties had spoken of changing the world, at the end of the seventies, students spoke of finding a place in the world as it was, as if change were no longer possible.

  “Professor MacLaren?” A hand went up in the back—Jeremy, a good student but cautious. “Could you tell us—in your opinion—what it’s all for? I mean, supposing you can prove that psychic powers exist, everybody still isn’t going to have them. So what practical use could they have?”

  It was a common question, for which Colin had a practiced answer. For a moment his mind wandered—to his contemporaries, to those other students whose lives he had touched through the years. To Grey, who in his senior year remained an endless challenge to authority. He thought of the sacrifices two generations had made, the losses both had suffered in trying to realize their dreams. Was it all for this—that the world should end neither with a bang nor a whimper, but with some slow inexorable dwindling, impossible to mark?

  February second fell on a Monday, and the New Year had come in with a bitter black cold that did not fall as snow, but sheathed every stem and branch with a brilliant coating of dense ice. Colin had been director of the institute for eight years now, and was beginning to look toward the day when he’d hand the institute off to someone else. But not yet. He still had more to do here.

  Colin drove carefully along the slippery roads. It would not do to put the car in a ditch and be late for his own surprise party.

  He was, of course, not supposed to know, though half a dozen clearer heads had warned him clandestinely—including Christie, who knew her boss’s temperament well enough to know that surprise parties worked out better when the victim cooperated. Since he’d known what was afoot, it had been easy to collaborate in all the runaround errands designed to keep him from getting home too soon.

  Sixty-one this year. I hope they haven’t tried to put a candle on for every year—they’ll burn the house down, Colin thought whimsically. He’d done his best to avoid this sort of observance of his birthday—a date of interest, now, to no one but himself—but since it
was inescapable, he found himself actually looking forward to it. You’re turning into a foolish old man, Colin MacLaren.

  He turned onto Greyangels Road and could now see the farmhouse in the distance. All the windows were dark, but nothing could disguise the wealth of tire tracks leading up the empty drive.

  I wonder where they parked? Colin thought to himself, before deciding that it was probably down in the old orchard. The apple orchard behind the house was long past its fruiting days, though it still produced blossoms in spring and a few apples in the fall, and the ground was hard-frozen enough to allow the easy passage of even Eden’s 4WD Jeep. He spared a hope that Grey’d had the sense to hitch a ride with someone else—a motorcycle wasn’t safe on these winter roads, though Grey rode his year-round in most weather, with a fine disregard for his personal safety.

  Colin pulled in to the top of the gravel drive and stopped. Leaving the motor running, he got out to drag open the doors of the woodshed-cum-garage. before getting back into the car and driving it inside. The wide wood planks of the floor testified to the building’s earlier incarnation as a stables and carriage house.

  Several cords of wood—a winter’s supply—were stacked along the side wall, and along the back were a wheelbarrow and various gardening implements, the grace notes of country life. Fortunately Greyangels’ owner, Ted Zacharias, took care of what groundskeeping the place required. Colin was no gardener and had never had any ambitions in that direction, though Claire, who had an apartment in Glastonbury, came out and fussed over his flowers occasionally. She’d offered him a kitten from Poltergeist’s latest litter, but Colin had not accepted; cats were at far more risk in the country from foxes and weasels than in the city, though it was never a good idea to let a pet animal roam.

  Running her own bookstore agreed with her; Colin had to admit he hadn’t seen Claire this happy since Peter had died. He only wished he could say as much for himself.