The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  And a knife and an automatic pistol. Welcome to married life, she thought mordantly.

  Ellen tucked her arm through Adrian’s; the wine bar they were looking for was at 1 Quai de Bourbon, which put it at the corner with the bridge leading off the island. She looked to her right; the site of the Bastille was that way.

  “Don’t tell me the Shadowspawn were to blame for that,” she said lightly; there were advantages to a husband who could sense your feelings.

  “No. Too early. Though the Marquis de Sade . . .”

  “At last, something good they did!”

  He shook his head and staggered slightly, unlike his usual cat gracefulness. She put out a hand.

  “Adrian?”

  “I . . . am a little confused.”

  “Why?”

  “This meeting is a nexus of. . . possible events. Events which depend on our decisions and actions; they will close some possible paths, open others, make some more or less likely. But there are other decision points crowding in: more and more and more, in the immediate future. I have never felt anything quite like it. And they are blurred. So many minds, so many of them with the Power and striving to warp the path of the future.”

  He shook himself slightly, as if to brace himself. Au Franc Pinot had a narrow blue-fronted entrance, and the steps led down to an atmospheric vaulted-stone cellar. It was pleasant, in a funky, run-down manner, though there was a very slight but definite odor of damp stone, and the tables were islands of candlelight.

  Adrian sighed a little as they sat. “I used to come here while I was at La Sorbonne,” he said. “It was a jazz club then, and a very good one. Though the food was execrable, but of course nobody goes to the Île Saint-Louis to eat.”

  “It’s a bad-food zone?”

  “No, not quite that. You can get a decent meal here. Not one of the famous gastronomique areas, though, nothing to attract someone looking for a special treat.”

  He flicked a finger in the air for two glasses of white wine and settled in to wait with a hunter’s patience. Ellen took out her notepad instead, and found herself looking at a headline for want of anything better to do.

  “It’s amazing how she’s aged,” Ellen said, looking at the president’s picture. “They all do.”

  Adrian leaned over to take a glance and nodded. “And I know why. A day or two after their inauguration, they get a visit in the White House from the Council’s representatives.”

  “You’re kidding,” Ellen said.

  I knew they were pulling the strings from behind the scenes, but they put the gimp on the president in the Oval Office? I thought that meant something more subtle.

  “Yes. In fact, they require him, or her these days, to make a human sacrifice just to drive the lesson home, and for amusement. From the time of. . . Mmmm, I think Woodrow Wilson was the first.”

  “Wilson?”

  “Note that he was elected on a promise to keep America out of World War One. Then he declared war on Germany. He turned into an old man overnight. Then he had a stroke. I suspect he tried to assert himself, and that is why he took so long dying.”

  Ellen turned her head and looked at him. Sometimes he does these convoluted practical jokes. . . .

  His face was dead serious. She winced.

  “This stuff just keeps getting worse.”

  I mean, what I went through with Adrienne was worse for me, but that gives me an idea of the scale we’re talking about.

  “And you wondered why I was always so gloomy,” he said.

  “Darling, before . . .”

  Before you told me anything, and then I left you because you wouldn’t open up, and then Adrienne kidnapped me on the rebound, as it were.

  “. . . I thought you were fascinatingly, broodingly, insanely, irritatingly romantic.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I just think you’re depressive and it’s going to be my mission in life to keep you from turning in diminishing circles until you vanish up your own fundament.”

  He smiled at her, and she simply sat for a moment appreciating. A man cleared his throat.

  “Monsieur Brézé?”

  The man was middle-aged and thin, with an unfashionable grizzled ponytail and an aquiline face; in Santa Fe she’d have typed him as one of the inevitable aging hippies, though he was dressed rather better in a Euro-casual way. His brown eyes were uncomfortably acute, as well as holding the usual male appreciation. Her experience with Peter Boase at Rancho Sangre had taught her that physicists were no more likely than artists to live up to their stereotypes—less so, since artists were more prone to doing it deliberately.

  “Professor Duquesne?”

  The man nodded, and they exchanged names and handshakes all around in the European manner. Duquesne remained silent for a moment afterwards, studying them both. At last he spoke:

  “So, monsieur. You have persuaded me to talk with you.” A slight smile. “A quarter of a million euros will buy even a crank an evening of my time.”

  Adrian shrugged expressively—money was more or less meaningless to him, since he could have as much as he wanted. He also suppressed a movement that was almost certainly a reach for his cigarettes. Duquesne’s eyebrows rose fractionally; Paris had held out on no-smoking rules longer than most other first-world places, but the changeover wasn’t exactly recent. A man of Adrian’s apparent age should have been used to it.

  “I think I can convince you that I am, at the least, not a crank, Professor,” Adrian said. “Have you examined the files I sent you?”

  “Interesting. Rather as if someone who actually knew quantum mechanics had written the draft of a science-fiction novel in a documentary style, disguised as research notes whose bizarre quality increases as one goes on.”

  “Peter certainly knew . . . knows . . . his physics,” Ellen said.

  The Frenchman looked at her in surprise. “Peter?”

  “Peter Boase, ScD from MIT.” She didn’t say doctor; in France that applied only to physicians, dentists, apothecaries and vets. “Later he worked at the Los Alamos laboratories. I was the one who, ah, acquired his notes. Long story.”

  “I know of him, a very sound young man, if adventurous . . . but he is dead, surely? Several years ago.”

  “Not as of this spring, although it was put about that he died. I came to know him rather well.”

  Adrian interrupted. “We could save a good deal of time by a little practical demonstration.” He looked at her. “Two days, is it not, my sweet?”

  “Red cell count doing fine, so Power away, darling, and the drinks are on me tonight.”

  “Then this is justified. Professor, that is a perfectly ordinary water glass, is it not?”

  The older man nodded briefly; it was, of a long-stemmed type.

  “Then please observe closely,” Adrian said, and murmured under his breath: “I-Moh’g, tzee, sha.”

  Oh, how I hate the sound of Mhabrogast, Ellen thought. She could see Duquesne wince too, though he didn’t know why. You wouldn’t think a symbol set could sound evil, but it does.

  Then Adrian frowned in concentration. Duquesne waited skeptically, glancing between him and the glass. Then he blinked.

  Slowly, and without any fuss, the water was beginning to run up the inside of the glass, a thin film inching evenly up the surface. The physicist’s eyes went wider and wider as it reached the rim and flowed over it and rilled down the stem, leaving a spreading stain around the base. The last of the water in the bottom froze with a crackle.

  Duquesne reached out and touched it. “Cold . . .”

  “Some of the energy came from subtracting the heat from the rest, I suspect,” Adrian said.

  “You suspect?”

  The physicist sounded scandalized. Adrian shrugged again.

  “The process is unconscious. But tell me, Professor Duquesne, how long would you have to wait before the molecules in a glass of water spontaneously behaved in that manner?”

  Duquesne sat silent for thir
ty seconds, his eyes locked on the spreading blotch on the tablecloth.

  “Not until proton decay and the end of matter,” he whispered at last. “I am assuming this is not some sort of hoax. Though I very much wish that it were.”

  “No. You will require further proofs, of course; extraordinary claims—”

  “—require extraordinary proofs, yes,” the professor said. “For the sake of argument I am willing to grant for the moment that this is genuine.”

  His face lit with enthusiasm. “This phenomenon must be studied! Evidently Penrose was right after all! A quantum consciousness—”

  Adrian shook his head. “I am very sorry, Professor, but study is not possible. Not in the sense you are using the term.”

  Before Duquesne could boil over Ellen put a hand on his. “Professor Duquesne, you’re not a biologist. But consider, how would such an ability arise?”

  “If there was something for evolution to work with, a means whereby the mind could affect quantum states, the obvious selective advantages—Oh,” he said.

  “Exactly.” Ellen took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “I had it explained to me as . . . ‘A long time ago, when humans first spread out from Africa—which was far longer ago than the archaeologists think—a small band of hunters was trapped in the mountains of High Asia, a few families, perhaps twenty or thirty in all. Each year the glaciers rose around their plateau, and the food was less, and the cold was more. It was most likely that they would merely eat one another and die. But one was born who was lucky.. . .’”

  “Why would the whole human race not have such abilities by now?” Duquesne asked.

  “To a certain extent they do,” Adrian said. “As you said, consciousness is a quantum process. My . . . subspecies . . . has taken this to another level. Unfortunately, it arose very long ago as a bundle of abilities associated with, how would one say, a particular ecological adaptation.”

  Duquesne had an abstracted look for a moment. “Predation on human beings?” he said. “But why . . . Ah, the same phenomenon would make a human consciousness easier to affect, eh? And once committed to that, path dependency would maintain it even if it was no longer essential when the ability had grown. A legacy system, as it were.”

  Well, he’s a cool one! Ellen thought. Then: Well, judging by Peter—which is to judge by a sample of one—the stereotype is true to the extent that physicists really can get lost in an idea. But then, so do artists. Or even art historians like me. Or anyone in a field that requires really deep thought and intense commitment.

  “I am deeply sorry, but by involving you in this matter, I have endangered you, Professor Duquesne,” Adrian said gently. “You now know of our existence, and of the Power.. . .”

  “The Power?”

  “The term for the ability in general.”

  The man made a dismissive gesture. “Let me develop my line of thought. So, if this phenomenon is instinctive, it is not well understood even by those who possess it?”

  “No. There are many techniques for amplifying the effect, but no real scientific understanding.” He smiled bleakly. “My breed is many things—paranoid, sociopathic, sadistic—but we have produced no scientists that I know of, though some have been scholars. It is only a few generations since the whole business was thought of in superstitious terms, as magic.”

  “If I could do such things”—Duquesne nodded towards the glass—“I might not have developed a scientific sensibility either.”

  He thought for a moment. “The information you sent me . . . in retrospect, and taking them seriously, the sections on the—”

  Duquesne was still speaking French, but Ellen lost him after half a dozen words. She could see Adrian do the same a few seconds later.

  “Professor, you are speaking to scientific illiterates,” Adrian said. “Can you put this in layman’s terms?”

  The academic made a quick impatient gesture. “No. Not without complete misunderstanding.”

  “There is nothing you can say?”

  Another string of technicalities, ending with phase shifts.

  “And that is why silver resists the Power?” Adrian asked.

  “From what Boase said, the transuranics should as well. Fascinating!”

  “No less fascinating is that the memory stick itself had . . . I find myself in the same position as you, Professor . . . it is hard to express . . . a feeling of no feeling. Usually anything linked to a significant nexus of probabilities in the future has a feeling of importance. Or of nonimportance if it does not. This information simply did not show either.”

  “Fascinating,” Duquesne murmured again. Then he laughed. “Perhaps it is as it was with the Large Hadron Collider. The future is interfering with the present to prevent certain information from being accessible.”

  He stopped laughing when they both stared at him expressionlessly.

  “That was a joke, monsieur,” he said.

  “I’m afraid it isn’t.” After a moment Adrian went on: “You are willing to continue this research?”

  “Ah . . . well, that is a difficult matter. I have commitments to other projects. I certainly cannot do research in isolation, without informing colleagues.. . . It would all be completely irregular. Things are not done in such a fashion. But if a project can be arranged—we must think and plan in some detail.”

  “Of course,” Adrian said soothingly.

  After a little more conversation Duquesne left, still shaking his head.

  “The poor man,” Ellen said wistfully. “This is his last normal moment, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, alas,” Adrian said. “Wait . . . wait . . . now we follow him.”

  “How many?”

  “It’s not quite certain yet,” Adrian said as they went out the door and turned right into the bustling night; Duquesne was walking towards the nearest metro station. “The world-lines are coalescing . . . yes. Two normals, renfield muscle, and a Shadowspawn. He will intervene only if the normals fail.”

  “You’ll take care of him?”

  “Exactly. I’m afraid you must keep the normals occupied.”

  Gulp.

  “I wish Harvey were here to help.”

  So do I!

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “You!”

  The man who called himself José Figuerez froze in the corridor with a spray of files against his chest. Harvey Ledbetter raised his hands in a soothing gesture.

  “Hey, Dhul Fiqar—”

  “You know my name?”

  “Obviously.”

  “How did you get in here?”

  The man’s eyes darted to the stairwell. Obviously he was wondering how Harvey had gotten up here unnoticed; there was an inconspicuously armed guard on the front door and at the vehicle entrance, and the rear was locked, with steel reinforcement on the inside. Nothing out of the ordinary here in Veracruz, though the concealed stash of automatic weapons would raise eyebrows if anyone knew about them.

  “I walked,” Harvey said. “Let’s talk, shall we?”

  The man waved him through the door of the office. There were only two chairs in the little third-floor room, the office model on casters that Dhul Fiqar went to behind his desk, and a plain molded-plywood-and-wire type near the louvered window that cast bars of savage light and ink-black shade on the plain polished concrete floor. The air that came in past it was hot and rank-heavy with rancid smells, traffic stink and petrochemical plant effluent and the smell of a warm sea not far away and far too full of rotting garbage and raw sewage and the odd dead pig, dog or inconvenient human.

  Veracruz was big. Not quite the thirty million–plus monster that Mexico City was, but bigger than New York or Tokyo, with a lot less in the way of frivolous infrastructural luxuries like sanitation than a first-world city.

  The Arab seated himself behind the desk, keeping his hands on the edge. His left thumb was pushing an alarm trigger that would alert some of his followers, or at least would have if Harvey hadn’t bent the path of some electrons, ju
st so. The other was twitching with readiness. Which meant . . .

  Yeah, gun in the upper right drawer. And that’s making him feel safer, Harvey thought. He probably thinks he’s got me trapped. Silly bastard.

  “How did you find us?” the man behind the desk said tightly.

  “Well, Dhul, ol’ buddy, consider that we got seventeen kilos of weapons-grade plutonium out of Seversk—”

  “Seventeen kilos?”

  “Y’all weren’t the only destination. Sorry, fourteen kilos for you.”

  I used the rest to kill Brâncuşi. Well, kill his postcorporeal energy matrix. Sorta debatable whether that was the same him who was a bouncing baby boy ’round about 1911.

  He went on aloud: “We brought it all the way to Port-au-Prince with every security service in the world lookin’ for it, and handed it over to you intact.. . . Are you really surprised we can find out what we need to?”

  Dhul Fiqar—the name meant Sword of the Prophet, and Ledbetter assumed it was a nom de guerre—was quite believable as a Mexican here in Veracruz even apart from his accentless command of the local Spanish dialect; he was olive-skinned and had a few gray hairs in his bushy black mustache.

  In fact he was from Lebanon, originally, and Harvey suspected he’d been placed here as a sleeper agent by an organization that no longer existed to any great extent. He was extremely fit, even a little gaunt, with the face of someone whose compulsions were eating him slowly from the inside. Right now he was obviously thinking hard.

  “Perhaps it is not so surprising,” he said after a moment. “You knew to whom you were selling the material?”

  “Is that a surprise either?”

  Contempt glinted in the dark eyes; he might as well have sneered mercenary aloud. Then a hint of caution. But a capable one.

  “You were well paid,” Dhul said. “Ten million euros is a great deal, even in these times.”