“Yes,” Soren mumbled absently.
“Then hastening you adversary’s reincarnation into the next life, where a fresh set of relationships and circumstances could help right the ship of the soul before it capsized entirely….”
Soren grunted, “And suddenly I’m a saint, not a sinner. Possibly, Bingwen, but rationalization, I suspect, is the devil’s tool.”
Bingwen smiled broadly this time, showing his pearly whites. “Yes, indeed it is.” And now, his words, too, not just his actions, took on double, if not triple meaning.
Soren sighed. “It has been an age of revelations I’ve lived through this day, all crammed into a few hours.”
“They are not the last of them or the biggest, I’m afraid.” Bingwen laughed. “Wait till you see what is awaiting you at home.”
Soren hugged his new friend. Yes, it would do to think of Bingwen as a friend, at least for now. For whatever misgivings they may have had about one another, Bingwen saw past them all to assist him more than he could have hoped for. “Thank you, my friend. I won’t lie to you, I came in here thinking for sure you’d try and use your sophistication with the cabbala to turn me into your meat puppet. So I powered up, was all ready to sock it to you if you tried.”
“And I must confess that is a ploy I’ve used on many an adversary, Soren. But someone as powerful as you is best made a friend, for whatever my true intentions.”
Soren snorted. “Fair enough.” He squeezed his friend’s shoulder and shook him. “Now, I think I’ve earned my surprise. Time to return home,” his voice dropped in register, “though it doesn’t feel much like one any longer.”
When Soren turned his back on Bingwen he failed to see the menace on his face—except in the reflection of his many black lacquered surfaces. Thank the Chinese and their strange tastes in décor—at least by American standards—which included these ornately carved and painted black lacquer tables. There was more than menace in that face. Envy, jealousy, fear, ambition, Machiavellian scheming—they were all there. Not so much a vague expression as an overdetermined one. Soren supposed, for a man in his profession, each one of those reactions made a good deal of sense.
SIX
“You did what?!” Grabbing hold of her upper arms, Soren rocked Naomi back and forth on her heels to literally shake some sense into her. “You invited an elemental wizard to live in this building, which is already determined to no longer defy gravity? One fart from him could bring the whole place down on our heads!”
“It’s true, I do have some pretty impressive farts,” Player said from the balcony of Soren’s warehouse space, startling him. Soren wasn’t aware he was present, far less overhearing their conversation. “Why one time—”
“Shut up!” both Soren and Naomi screamed.
Soren paced, rubbing his forehead. “I’m going to kill you all.” This time he said it, the words were more of a lament than the last time he’d uttered them, and that’s how they were conveyed.
“No, you’re not,” Stealy shouted down from above. The rest of the gang was there when Soren gazed upward; they’d come out of hiding, to startle him yet again. Either they were waiting inside his room for the perfect moment to make their presence felt. Or they’d already been setting up house in the unused portions of the building he usually never stepped foot in, and had created an access point for themselves into his lab from upstairs. “We’re more powerful than you now, remember? You jacked us up with a combination of Victor’s mandala magic and your chi magic before our last grand adventure.”
Soren lowered his eyes. “Yeah, well, I was a different person then.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” Player said. “You were kind and decent, and you smelled a lot less. But hey, on the upside, my asshole days are behind me, or at least they’re on the wane, and yours are just beginning. I can’t wait to condescend. No, really, I can’t.” He panned his head to the others and pointed to his face so they could all appreciate how earnest he was being.
Soren wanted to laugh. Maybe the kids were just what he needed to calm the beast, or at least to keep him caged. But they had no idea of the dangers they were asking to subject themselves to. “There are going to be house rules,” he said.
They all gave him a dubious look.
“Natura,” Soren said, “I want you to do that hands-to-face thing you do with the animals. Only I want you to send nanites into everyone’s head to act as a distress beacon, so that if anyone of you gets over your head, the others know to come running.”
“Hello, this is moi, you’re talking about,” Player said, gesturing to himself, and hamming it up as usual, “the most powerful elemental wizard on the planet. I think I can handle a broken down, smelly, arthritic guy, without calling supernatural-911.”
Soren wanted to show them, but he didn’t want to scare them. That would come soon enough in one of his out-of-control moments. “Just do it, I said!” he blared, and more softly, he followed with, “And that’s the only rule. Naomi told me your plan. If you can live up to that, then you really don’t need me parenting you anymore; you’ve earned the right to be treated as adults.”
“Well, then, in that case, count me in,” Player said.
“Me, too,” Lar echoed.
“Yeah, I’m down with that,” Stealy chimed in. She’d insisted on being treated like an adult all along, and now that she had her wish, she still sounded like she was testing limits—her baseline.
Natura was already doing her thing, going from one to another of them, grabbing them by the sides of their heads, then kissing them on the forehead. “All done.” “All done.” “All done.” She sounded like she was giving out the sacrament of the Eucharist.
Naomi passed on the offering of the laying on of hands when Natura shouted down from above, “Just you left to do, Naomi,” with a gesture of the hand and a shake of the head. Maybe she wasn’t the charismatic Christian type.
“I have my own failsafe mechanism,” Naomi said, for a little extra convincing.
Soren glared at her before relenting and nodding.
“I guess it’s your turn to get parented, old man,” Player taunted, “through your terrible twos, all over again. Bring on the tantrums, buddy. We’re all ready for you. Payback’s a bitch.”
“Tell me about it.” Stealy high-fived him.
Soren allowed himself to be swept up in the kids’ excitement for a second, chuckling. He figured he owed them that much. But the second passed. And he found his mind drifting to Victor. What was up with him and the entity he’d visited upon the earth? So far, Victor seemed to undergo life’s major turning points more or less in sync with Soren.
Could they be slipping out of phase? Or did he have a rude awakening coming his way, too, any moment now?
And was it fate that had them both in its grasp, or this master chess player and celestial wizard Bingwen had hinted at?
ACT TWO
GROWTH PAINS
SEVEN
Victor was cherry-picking a piece of choice fruit from the sidewalk vendor down the street from the Excelsior in Swank Town. The gesture was analogous to arguing casuistries with Socrates, considering that every piece of produce was a genetically enhanced superfood, maximized for taste and longevity. Still, his mandala magic assisted him with selecting the one of all the peaches whose molecular lattices were more mathematically perfect than all the others. Meaning the juices would act much like power water—the molecular alignments energizing his mind and body, much in the way monks meditated on mandalas with such elaborate geometries to invigorate their own minds and bodies. His admittedly obtuse vigil was interrupted when Priestly put his hand on his cherry-picking arm.
The old geezer was still trying to mask his age by keeping his white hair, beard, and moustache trimmed, and his lithe figure exposed under the well-fitted Catholic garments with the white collar about the neck. But the last time Victor saw crooked lines that ran so deeply, it wasn’t on a face; it was on a tour of the Grand Canyon.
“Care
ful, Priestly. I’m not a charitable soul on a good day. And this is not a good day. The only reason you’re not trapped in some alternate reality right now is that I seem to remember you buying us time with the Tillerman, and well, Soren likes you. And I’d hate to disrespect my one friend like that by fucking with you. Still, don’t push your luck.”
Victor had continued scanning the fruit with his one free arm, while he waited for Priestly to come to his senses and release his other arm. That moment never came, despite Victor, very charitably mind you, allowing for the old geezer’s slower reflexes.
“I can sense him, this vile creature you summoned to this world,” Priestly said, his voice as grave and as ominous as one might expect if the voice were coming instead out of the mouth of one of the guardians at the gates to hell.
“Yes, I’m well aware of your way with celestial fire. Supposed to purify the soul. Hence the warning about touching me.” Once again Victor’s eyes left the fruit he was surveying and landed on Priestly’s hand, still attached to his arm, as a warning. “I guess it makes sense you’d be attuned to the Dark Matter Man.”
“This is my young protégé, Ramon.” Ramon wore the classic brown woolen monkish robe preferred by certain Christian orders, not unlike the one Soren was wearing when he paid him a visit looking like freshly burnt toast. Ramon had a wild look about him, from the mop of unruly hair revealed as he pulled back the hood of the cloak, to the impish smile on his generous mouth. No matter what he did with those lips and that expression, both evolving rapidly, as he tried to contain his excitement in more appropriate vessels, the impishness never entirely went away; the small, recessed, dark eyes contributed to the overall air of deviousness. The pretty boy looks just seemed an invitation to court disaster. Ramon bowed respectfully to him, solemnly, with a mock attempt to rein in all that unruliness, then his excitement overcame him, and he extended his hand to shake.
Victor rolled his eyes and shook his head as the boy came to the inevitable conclusion for himself, “Oh, that’s right, you don’t like to be touched.” He withdrew his hand after feeling a bit of the fool.
“Cut to the chase, Priestly, before you’ve exhausted my last ounce of charity.”
“I said I sensed him. I didn’t say where.”
Victor was suddenly no longer interested in fruit. “Where?” His one word was driven with the force of a hammer on a nail that drives it all the way in with one strike.
“The Transhumanist district.”
Victor’s Tux and top hat had already teleported off him back to his clothes closet, revealing his flexible body armor that hugged his body like a scuba outfit.
The energy bridge which he surfed across the sky—like riding a many-colored rainbow made of interlinked mandala geometries—was already forming at his feet, preparing to whisk him away to the Transhumanist sector.
“One more key piece of information, Victor,” Priestly said. “But it comes at a price. I want you to take the boy on as your protégé. Despite my staunchest warnings to stay far away from you, he’s determined to become a mandala magician.”
“I’d sooner torture you both for the information.”
“If the boy gives you the all-important clue you need to overcome the Dark Matter Man, you’ll agree to take him on?”
Victor hesitated. What harm could it to do to lie? “Yes.”
Ramon stepped toward him with overeagerness and zeal once again, forgetting his place, and then remembering, and taking a more judicious step back. “Sorry. I believe this creature learned to use the dark matter zone to facilitate its thinking, to make its computations. That he’s searching for the closest corollary here on earth. The souped-up mind of a transhumanist would be better than any supercomputer because….”
“It would have access to more than computational logic, but to human intuition, as well. Not to mention a body with which to move around and interact with the world,” Victor said, his eyes gone vacant, as he finished the teen’s thought for him.
Priestly squeezed down on Victor’s arm even harder as he was preparing to sail off. “Listen to the rest, Victor.”
The boy inched forward yet again, swallowing hard. “It makes sense that his first order of business would be to neutralize you. If he’s been thinking with the aid of dark matter, then he’s been thinking with the aid of space-warping geometries. And you’re our greatest magician in this area.”
“With you out of the way,” Priestly said, “he’ll be free to open one rung after another of Dante’s hell right here on Earth.”
“You’ve done well, both of you. I will honor your request, old man.” He turned his eyes toward the youth. “If you can access my rooftop flat, which is warded by mandala magic, you’ll find a room full of trinkets you can begin your studies by learning how to use. Consider each one of these hurdles a test. You’ll get no help from me. Though if you fail the first test, I will rescue you from whatever alternate dimension you land in. That much I’ll do for you, but no more.”
And then Victor was gone, sailing across the sky, moving as if gravity meant nothing and space-time were an elaborate mirage. Of course, relative to his mandala bridge, both those things were true.
“Why so charitable?” Ramon asked the old man.
“His friend Soren is ailing, so can be of no use to him against the Dark Matter Man. He needs friends now more than ever, though he’s loath to admit it. Even if you’re a moron of a mandala magician compared to him, so long as morons have the occasional worthy insight, like you just had, you’re worth your weight in gold. But don’t ever relax your guard around that man. The second you’re no longer of any use to him, I suspect you’ll need everything you learned from him to rescue yourself from whatever lockbox in space-time he throws you into.”
“If Soren can temper him, so can I. I can learn to bleed that turnip of the last remaining drops of charity in his heart, too.”
“If Victor appears to have a good side he only shows certain people, rest assured it is a pretense and nothing more.”
“You can’t know that, not for certain.”
“Ah, but I can. It’s part of the gift of celestial fire.”
Ramon swallowed hard for the second time in as many minutes, but found there was no saliva in his mouth to swallow; his throat had run dry.
EIGHT
Victor was descending on the mandala bridge into the Transhumanist sector; he was still high enough to touch the moon and look down on all but the tallest skyscrapers. And already he was being accosted. The transhumans had no trouble flying about either—even if their means were a bit different and as varied as the individuals that lived here. The transhumans, in transcending the genes they were born with, were all exploring evolutionary trajectories uniquely their own.
“Victor! We were expecting you.” AeroGel guy was floating before him, ninety-nine percent of the cells in his body gone to make room for air, so, like the original aerogels, he could indeed be lighter than air. The chemical reactions occurring between the remaining modified cells allowed him to adjust his buoyancy. And much more, of course, otherwise the makeover would scarcely have been worth it.
Before Victor could answer the guy, in zoomed Iron Man—of sorts; this guy’s suit was a mix of copper, silver, and gold alloys, but Victor’s guess was it was designed to do everything the one the comic book character in the movies wore could do—and then some. “Victor,” boomed the modified voice coming from the glorified tin man that had risen rapidly on his thrusters, and had powered down now so he could simply hover nearby. “What took you so long to pay us a visit?”
God, Victor seriously hated being a celebrity. He was as cut out for glad handing as someone who came from a universe without any politicians. They knew he was the bad guy in this story—in any story—but they cut him all sorts of slack because his wizardry was based on math and physics, the two underlying sciences that underpinned much of the transhumanists’ engineering work.
“Victor!” The voice shot at him out of the
darkness as the hovercraft came in, drifting down from above. The flying platform was being used to teach Levitation Yoga. The guru’s disciples were all striking yoga poses as they floated—of their own accord—above the deck that used four thrusters, one in each corner, much like a quadcopter, to navigate about; the thrusters rotated to give direction. The one waving jubilantly at Victor, who had also called his name, was the guru-instructor. Victor could tell the students had all imbibed a nanococktail that would allow them to defy gravity if only they could lock in the right brainwaves, which it was the job of the yoga instructor to teach them how to do. Their excitement levels were spiked enough to make reading their minds easy.
At least these guys were worth a good laugh. They were so determined to evolve beyond a baser humanity that no ploy to that end was considered the least bit extreme or ridiculous; hence they were all ridiculous in the extreme.
Victor managed a mock smile and an amicable enough wave back at the guru instructor to Victor’s own surprise. The instructor and his class moved on. Superman and Silver Surfer were flying toward Victor next, out of entirely different quadrants of the sky. Superman would have been using the latest generation nanites, migrated to the chakras to boost the flows of chi energy there, thus allowing him to fly his body about—much like a rocket ship. The chakras in the balls of his feet could be used for vertical thrust off the ground, and the chakras along his spine could be recruited if he wanted to fly horizontal to the ground in conjunction with the foot thrusters; his palm chakras would serve to break him if he cut the chi flowing through his foot chakras. The human body could also be used to teleport and be in several places at once, if you just moved enough chi through it and divined how to use the controls of the human body as a spaceship well enough. This kind of control on one’s own, without the nanococktails and the accompanying sophistication when it came to working with the energy body, would have been impossible for all but the true chi masters. Soren might have been able to pull it off, if he was given to these kinds of endeavors; perhaps more easily with the mandalas Victor had lent him in their last adventure. But Soren wasn’t the type to play superhero any more than Victor was. The superheroes had their own sector; the ones here were just seeing their nanococktail doctors to make sure they stayed in tune.
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