Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04

by Heartlight (v2. 1)

  "Score one for the new boy," Dexter said, sotto voce, appearing again. "You look like a man who needs a drink." He held out a plastic cup containing an amber liquid, no ice.

  Colin smiled, a little grimly. He might have won the skirmish, but it looked like it was going to be a long war. He accepted the drink gratefully. Scotch. Either it was a lucky guess, or Dexter had done his homework.

  With the obligatory clash with Quiller out of the way, Colin made it his business to meet most of the faculty of Taghkanic. Many of those Colin met, such as Professors Auben Rhys and Lionel Welling of the Drama Department, were perfectly amiable, but there were others who were as coolly antagonistic as the college president.

  Along the way, he cemented his impression that academics the universe over had more similarities than differences. If he closed his eyes, Colin could imagine he was back on the Berkeley campus a dozen years ago—and since Taghkanic was a liberal arts college, most of the political convictions weren't much different from those of Berkeley in the sixties, either.

  "I don't care what you say, Lion," Selena Purcifer said resentfully. "The library's book budget has been cut again, just so a bunch of crackpots can chase UFOs. I don't particularly find that a cause for celebration."

  "Now Purcy," Lion Welling said pacifically, "the one has nothing to do with the other. Everybody's budget's been cut. It's the nature of the beast."

  Colin turned away before they could catch him eavesdropping. Selena Purcifer was the Library Director, and one of the people he particularly hoped to win over to his cause. If the Bidney Institute now possessed the Rhodes Group's case files, it would be an enormous job of cataloguing to get the material ready for the public, and he'd need to work closely with the library staff. Possibly there was a way to arrange a pass-through of Bidney money to the library without opening the floodgates to a wholesale looting of the institute. But that, too, was a problem to be approached in the future.

  He was glad enough to be pulled into another conversation, and doubly relieved that it had nothing to do with either the college or the institute. Finally the reception was over, and President Quiller's guests filed in to dinner.

  While there were isolated moments of shoptalk and upcoming events of the fall term around the table, most of the talk at dinner was about current events, particularly the Watergate trial, which was still dragging on. The hearings had been televised since May, and had held a sort of perverse fascination for Colin; he'd watched them whenever he could.

  Predictably, the staff of a liberal arts college unanimously condemned Nixon and his activities, but to Colin's mild surprise, none of them probed any deeper, or asked how such things could ever have happened. Corruption and moral indifference on such a scale could not be an isolated incident, nor did it flourish in a vacuum, but none of the people at the table asked the vital questions: who, and how, and how long.

  It was as if none of them wanted to believe that the Watergate scandal could be the result of anything more than one man's evil, easily blotted out with an impeachment. The discussion left Colin feeling unspeakably depressed, as though he were listening in on the self-important chatter of young children. But these were the people who were shaping the minds of the next generation;

  Thome was right; Simon was right; even—God help me—Toller Hasloch was right, may his soul find peace in its imprisonment. In the only way that really matters, we lost the war. We were fighting for the American way of life—the four freedoms— and they simply don't exist in this country anymore.

  And each year, it takes a greater effort to remain blind to that fact. . . .

  INTERLUDE #6

  GLASTONBURY, SEPTEMBER 1979

  FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL YEARS COLIN AND I SOMEHOW SAW MUCH LESS OF each other. It was as if he were shutting the world out, though on the surface he had thrown himself more into the world than ever, at the turbulent Bidney Institute in upstate New York. Perhaps in some way Simon's accident had injured Colin as well, and made him a dark and desperate man, though I think something must have happened to him even before that.

  Whatever it was, Colin never spoke of it, in that way that we left so many things between us unsaid. But after that terrible Christmas when Simon was crippled, he was very much changed. It was as if in fighting for the institute's survival, Colin was fighting for his own life as well.

  But slowly his hard work brought success. He hired new staff, both exploiting the assets that Dr. Newland had left him and drawing on his old Rhodes Group contacts. Within a few short years the institute developed the reputation for sympathetic but tough study of matters touching upon the Unseen World. God help the researcher whom Colin caught faking his results—and nothing could help the psychic who tried to fool him.

  When he confronted psychic frauds was the only time I ever saw Colin really lose his temper—not with the cold, furious, sense of purpose I had known him to exhibit so often, but with a roaring Scots rage that thundered like a summons to judgment. There were few people who could stand up to him under those circumstances, and none of the sort that John Dexter so happily called "table-tippers," in which category John included not only fake mediums and bogus Spiritualists but every form of psychic con and fraud. I do believe that sometimes he deliberately sought those people out and encouraged them to apply to the institute, just for the joy of watching Colin read them out of the book.

  Poor John. Wherever he is now, I wish him eager audiences, and an inspiration that never fades. He was a gallant, fearless soul, taken from us far too soon.

  But that is an old sorrow, and he was certainly there for the first years of Colin's regime—and I use the term advisedly—acerbic court jester to the reigning lion.

  From the first, Colin had a very definite view of what the institute should be and how he could achieve his vision. He insisted on the strictest code of standards and ethics from all the members of the institute, and even taught a course on occult ethics himself, making it mandatory for all freshmen who wished to enter the parapsychology program. You did not study Parapsychology at Taghkanic without a solid understanding of what Colin MacLaren considered right and wrong.

  What sin he was trying to expiate through this I never knew. It would have been impertinent of me to ask, and unnecessary besides—Colin was always harder on himself than any outsider could ever have been.

  Years passed, and what we asked out of life changed imperceptibly, month by passing month, so that it was only years later that each of us awoke to find ourselves on pathways that I imagine he had looked to follow as little as I had. Had Colin ever expected to be attempting to prescribe the morals of a generation? Yet what was he doing at the Bidney Institute, if not that?

  And as for me . . .

  In 1976 I was thirty-five. In her thirties, a woman finally escapes the shadow of her childhood and the inevitability of her family's expectations of her into her own adulthood, becoming at last a person of her own creation.

  Though I had severed ties with my own family long ago, and my adopted family was dead, I carried as much emotional baggage with me as anyone else my age did. More than anything, I think, I had never felt entitled to my own happiness, but 1976 was the year that I finally grew up, and realized that no one was standing in the way of my fulfillment but me.

  For many years my dream had been to own a bookstore, and in that year I opened Inquire Within in Glastonbury, New York.

  I'd decided a long time ago that the sort of bookstore I wanted was called in those days an "occult bookstore," but I also knew that I didn't want it to be anything like the Sorcery Shoppe, with its jarsful of dried bats and mummified frogs. I wanted a bookstore that could also be a refuge for seekers as troubled as I had once been.

  It was the worst time in twenty years to start a small business—inflation rates were through the roof and money was tight—but I had my savings and Peter's insurance and I was determined not to wait any longer to do what I had dreamed of for so long.

  You might say that I chose Glastonbury t
o be near Colin—and that might be so, for he badly needed friends in those years, but as much as it might have been for that reason, my choice of location was a pragmatic business decision. On the most basic level, I couldn't possibly have afforded to open an "occult bookstore" in Manhattan—I would have gone broke in a New York minute, as the saying goes. I needed a place where the rents were low but I still had a built-in clientele, and Glastonbury seemed tailor-made for my ambitions.

  What better place than a town near a college that offered a doctorate in Parapsychology? I located an empty store; Colin drafted my labor force from among his students, and in short order, Inquire Within was open for business.

  And I was lucky; the store thrived, and soon I found myself up to my nose in wholesale catalogues, confronting an array of products whose existence I had never even suspected. My favorites were the aerosol cans of Hex Be Gone—brand spray incense and the All-In-One Witch Kits, which guaranteed that they contained everything you needed to become a witch and cast a spell.

  Needless to say, neither object found its way into Inquire Within, though I did stock a small selection of harmless oils, teas, and incenses. But most of all, I stocked books, because what I wanted to provide at Inquire Within was knowledge. Never before—or since, in my opinion—was there such a need for it.

  By the 1970s, spirituality had become a part of the women's movement, divorced almost completely from its magickal antecedents. Wicca, which in the beginning most people had considered the little sister of Satanism, had prospered as an Earth Religion that owed no debt to Christianity, and which paved the way for other forms of Neo-Paganism.

  It was Goddess worship, not magick, that most of my customers were interested in. Though they weren't adverse to casting spells, their magick was of the simplest sort. If you had asked any of them to calculate planetary hours or to cast a horoscope to determine the governing angel for their rituals, they would simply have laughed: American efficiency was finally being applied to magick, with admittedly peculiar results.

  Though I was never tempted to give up my own faith, I still saw the feminist witches' covens and Goddess healing circles as a good thing, a necessary counterbalance to the deeply materialistic currents that were beginning to reshape daily life. Yuppies were replacing yippies, and those who had been on the barricades a few years before were laying away their idealism in lavender and turning to the brutal business of making a living.

  At least, most of them were.

  And then, of course, there was Hunter Greyson. . . .

  SIXTEEN

  GLASTONBURY, NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 1979

  How can thine heart be full of the spring? A thousand summers are over and dead. What hast thou found in the spring to follow? What hast thou found in thine heart to sing? — ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

  COLIN KNEW HIS INSIGHT HAD BEEN RIGHT —EACH YEAR IT TOOK MORE effort to ignore the fundamental corruption of the American soul. But it also seemed that the nation was willing to make that effort.

  By the end of the seventies, the citizens of the Woodstock Nation had, for the most part, gone quietly off to brokerages and law firms, exchanged hash pipes for coke spoons, and geared up for a decade-long consumer orgy that would lose its frenetic momentum only with Black Tuesday and the spread of AIDS.

  The last of the sixties idealism had died an ugly death in the Watergate courtrooms, and the grotesque, self-interested end of the Vietnam War in 1975 had put the stone upon its grave. Two failed assassination attempts upon Nixon's appointed successor, Gerald Ford, less than three weeks apart elicited laughter and jokes when a scant decade before they would have roused horror. It was as if the nation, like a lover betrayed too often, simply refused to care any longer.

  The jingoistic fervor of the Bicentennial festivities in 1976 rang curiously hollow, filled more with a plaintive nostalgia for what once had been than with the spirit of a real celebration of nationhood. That fall, in desperation, the nation elected a largely unqualified fifty-two-year-old Georgia farmer without big-league political experience, the youngest presidential candidate since Kennedy, to the highest office in the land. Gerald Ford, who had once served on the Warren Commission, and who would be known forever as "the man who pardoned Nixon," disappeared from the political scene without a trace. Jimmy Carter would follow him into political obscurity one term later, having pardoned the draft dodgers, given away the Panama Canal, received a Pope on American soil, and provided the nation with a 23% inflation rate.

  People wanted to believe in something—they were desperate for truths— but on every side they were presented with the dangers of faith. The Reverend Jim Jones led his People's Temple followers into death in a mass suicide in Guyana, and in Iran, the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini to power led to theocratic totalitarianism and the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran. Sixty-three Americans were held hostage by "students," and all America's military-industrial clout was not enough to bring them home.

  And worst of all, everything seemed to be some kind of unfunny joke.

  / wonder if I'm getting too old for this? Colin MacLaren wondered to himself. It was a rhetorical question; he'd never felt more vital, more in control of his destiny. After six years the institute was on a firm footing at last, the first wave of the new doctoral program was about to graduate, and Taghkanic had even backed off a bit in its eternal attempt to annex the institute's operating budget. With President Quiller's retirement last year, a new period of harmonious cooperation seemed to have dawned for the Bidney Institute.

  He glanced around his office. For a moment, his gaze lingered on cherished mementoes: a picture of the front of Claire's bookstore; a photo of Barbara and Jamie Melford with their two children, John Colin and Margaret Claire; an old photo of Colin standing in front of his college at Oxford; another of him standing with Claire in Golden Gate Park. Moments snatched out of the rushing current of time, now forever inviolate. Enough such moments, and the shape of a life was marked out for all to see.

  The interoffice phone buzzed; Colin plucked the receiver deftly out of a nest formed by stacks of journals and raised it to his ear.

  "Colin, you told me to buzz you at one-forty-five," his secretary said. "You've got Welcome to the Twilight Zone at two."

  "Thanks, Christie. I'll be there," he answered, a smile in his voice.

  The Lookerman Auditorium was almost a quarter full when Colin entered. It was a grandly rococo building, named for the college's founder, Jurgen Lookerman, and looked like a Viennese opera house in miniature; a fact that the Drama Department found ideal for the staging of its various productions throughout the year.

  Today a podium with microphone had been placed at the center edge of the half-round stage. Several dozen students, a significant fraction of Taghkanic's student body, were waiting for him—this year, for a miracle, all down in front instead of hiding in the shadows at the back of the auditorium. As Colin took the stage, he saw Dylan and Cassie and several others that he recognized from summer interviews.

  To attend the Taghkanic's degree-track parapsychology classes (all taught by staff of the Bidney Institute), a student had to have taken Introduction to Occult Ethics during their freshman year and have had a personal interview with Colin before the start of their sophomore year. Fortunately this summer's interviews had been profitable, turning up two particularly promising candidates.

  Dylan Palmer was frank about his interest in ghosts—and equally frank about his desire to integrate this rowdy and disreputable stepchild of parapsychology into a classical scientific framework. His eventual ambition was to teach, and Colin thought he'd be good at it. Though he was barely twenty, Dylan's open-minded willingness to know made him a good candidate for survival in a field where cherished theories could be disproved in a heartbeat and researchers frequently had to resign themselves to a lifetime's equivocation.

  Cassilda Chandler, on the other hand, was outspokenly mystical—an "old soul," some of Colin's counterparts would have called her. She wanted al
l the tools that science could arm her with, but her interest lay in discovering the extent of the Unseen World by any means she could employ. Cassie was very much the sort of student that Colin wanted the institute's Taghkanic-sponsored degree program to attract: young questioning minds that he could guide past the many pitfalls that the study of the Unseen World entailed.

  Colin knew that if the institute were to move into the twenty-first century, he was going to have to find and train the next generation of parapsychology researchers himself, and so, in a sense, he was actively recruiting students to the degree program. In order to avoid answering the same questions over and over individually, Colin had arranged to add this lecture to the Orientation Week schedule. Though anyone was welcome to attend, his usual audience was incoming freshmen and a few curious sophomores.

  "Good afternoon. My name is Colin MacLaren, and I'm the director of the Margaret Beresford Bidney Memorial Institute for Psychic Research."

  Scattered laughter at the institute's full unwieldy name.

  "I know that many of you will be curious about what we do here, and in the course of your enrollment here at Taghkanic, many of you will participate in the institute's research as volunteers, while some of you will choose to make parapsychology your field of study. Perhaps some of you will have chosen Taghkanic for just that reason.

  "I'd like to begin by mentioning what the institute is not—it is not in the business of promulgating any particular creed or doctrine, nor is it engaged in the practice of any form of religion. Parapsychology is a young science—"