The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  “She’s the big Shadowspawn honcho of the west now, she and her hubby, now that her grandfather’s dead.”

  “He is a retiring type. By our standards.”

  “So how come she doesn’t just send a goon to do it?”

  Adrian shrugged. “Boredom, perhaps. Shadowspawn don’t go in for large organizations, my dear; they don’t even make optimum use of the human ones they control. And they act on impulse. A highly educated impulse. We must investigate further.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “We’re well settled in and getting some results,” Peter Boase said.

  “No complaints about the facilities?” Harvey Ledbetter Wasked.

  “The cook, pardon me, the chef, is too good. Fortunately this is a great area for high-impact running and looks like it’ll be great for cross-country skiing, too. Otherwise I’d look like a blond garden slug with limbs, but otherwise no complaints, nada. Anything we want appears like magic as fast as FedEx can fly.”

  Harvey looked around at the pines. Peter had the wiry, tensile build of a cross-country man, and this would be the perfect ground for it. The old base had been tucked away in a remote valley in Dalarna, designed to ride out a Soviet nuclear strike and provide a center for prolonged resistance. It was blasted deep into the granite up where Sweden faded into Norway in a tangle of hills graduating into mountains. The hills were densely green with fir and birch, and he could hear the sound of trickling water, smell rock and greenery and sap, watch a squirrel run chattering up a tree like a streak of red fire. The sun was bright, though it was well after eight, and it glittered on the long narrow lake below. Snow peaks shone like white salt far to the west, floating like the ramparts of Jotunheim in a saga.

  I wish I hadn’t thought about that, Harvey thought. Man-eating Ettins. Christ. The stories are all about them, when you get right down to it.

  “Better be a bit more explicit about that there progress, Professor,” Harvey said.

  Peter smiled—he looked much better than he had the last time Harvey saw him, which said a good deal for his basic resilience and toughness.

  Gotta remember that the opposite of badass is not weenie, Harvey reminded himself. That’s a risky way to think, could lead to underestimating people, which can lead to a bad case of the deads.

  “This isn’t like any research project I’ve ever worked on,” Boase said. “No bureaucracy, no nonphysical constraints on equipment, only the security considerations are anything like what I’m used to.”

  “Glad you’re happy,” Harvey said. “The Brotherhood hasn’t done much scientific research before; we didn’t think in those terms.”

  “I suppose you don’t, when you’re a magician,” Boase said.

  “It ain’t magic. We’ve known that for generations now.”

  “But you’ve been using it as if it were magic.”

  Harvey could feel a combination of fear and resentment and fascination in the other man’s mind; he suspected that the existence of the Power just plain offended the physicist. That it had been in the hands of black-arts secret societies and their esoteric opposite numbers probably offended him even worse. It was a good thing he’d never seen a meeting of the Brotherhood’s leadership, with the white robes and doves and meditation and chanting. The meditation actually served a useful purpose; the rest was pure theater, a relic of their origins as witchfinders. Though you could eat the doves, in a pinch.

  Harvey shrugged. “For that matter, this operation is really sorta off the reservation, Adrian bulldozin’ his own priorities through. Since he controls the financing, no reason for the leadership not to go along. Now, about the results?”

  Boase smiled. “I actually got nearly all the theory done while I was at Rancho Sangre,” he said.

  For a moment his handsome, good-natured face turned savage. “And she’d really be going to regret that if she were still alive.”

  “If she were still alive, you’d still be there. Now, the results.”

  “The essential thing was realizing that the Shadowspawn brain doesn’t create the oomph that you guys call the Power. It just modulates it, like a transistor does electric currents; the basic force comes from the substrate of the universe. Saying that someone is ‘strong in the Power’ just means they can tap more without frying their neural circuitry, the centers that step it up and direct it. But a brain is a physical object, and what one object does another can do.”

  “Wait a minute, you’ve got some sort of computer that can use the Power?”

  Boase shook his head. “Oh, no. Not for a long time, like two or three paradigm shifts in our ability to process information. Generations, even if the whole world were trying really hard. A computer as we know it, a Turing machine, is far too, ah, too coarse a mechanism. The brain has a subatomic, a quantum element that’s essential to consciousness, and it’s that part that interacts with the substrate of the universe, the holographic—”

  The words stopped making sense; Harvey shook his head impatiently.

  “Cut to the chase.”

  “Okay, we’d need a quantum computer as sophisticated as a brain to really handle the Power. With that we could fry any protoplasmic adept. We’d be the next thing to God, which worries me a little, but we don’t have it and we aren’t going to in our lifetimes anyway. But. The way silver screws up the Power, and the transuranics, was a clue. There’s one simple thing that we thought we could do with the electromagnetic spectrum, provided we—”

  Boase lapsed into Old High Technicalese again; Harvey spoke with dangerous patience:

  “Don’t tell me about the dilithium crystals, boy, just tell me what they can do.”

  Peter smiled beatifically, glanced at his phone’s time display, and waved a hand behind him.

  “Look,” he said. “I was stalling for this.”

  Harvey turned and did. “Well, fuck me blind,” he said mildly, blinking in astonishment.

  That was a particularly appropriate oath. The entrance to the complex was disguised as a farmhouse, red painted, with barns and outbuildings of the same, all looking considerably run-down; it had been mothballed most of a generation ago, and the new occupants had left as much of the patina of neglect as they could. The dirt road was more like two ruts through weeds, and only a careful observer would have noticed the wear of a great many trucks last year.

  The actual entrance to the tunnels was through the “barn,” which had doors big enough for heavy vehicles; the whole thing was splendidly camouflaged, and the power source was an underground water turbine powered by a mountain stream, so there wasn’t even much of a heat signature.

  None of that meant anything to the Power, of course. Even Harvey’s modest talent could sense the minds there, the flow of energies, and feel the bunching of world-lines. It was like a smell. The ability had evolved to track down humans doing their very best to hide—in caves, among other things—and to foil competitors equipped with the same brain centers.

  Everything had an effect on the world, casting its shadow back from the infinite spray of possible futures into the present. A grain of sand on the other side of the galaxy did, though of course that was far too faint even for the greatest adept to detect. People most of all, because their minds touched the foaming substrate of reality even if they couldn’t mold it the way a Power wielder did.

  Only now it isn’t there and I can’t smell a thing, he thought. It’s like the Power doesn’t apply there. But not in a way that would be obvious if I didn’t already know otherwise. It’s just about the most dramatic undramatic thing conceivable, when you think about it.

  “It’s like it’s vanished,” he said, wondering. “Not like a silver barrier. You can feel that even if you can’t get through it. Silver’s like a hole in the universe, or like having a tooth drilled if you try to probe. This isn’t an absence, it’s as if there’s nothing there to sense.”

  Boase was grinning from ear to ear. “How’s that for accelerated R and D—”

  Pop.

>   Harvey blinked. Everything was back, and now he could hardly believe that he hadn’t noticed anything before.

  “Whoa, that is one odd effect,” Harvey said. “Sorta tampering with reality, if you know what I mean. Now you don’t see it, now you do, and the whole universe switched over from one to t’other without making no fuss I could detect.”

  Boase was scowling and punching at his phone. He looked up as he did.

  “Says the walking quantum effects manipulator!” he said. “You people have been screwing with my nice rationalistic if indeterminate worldview for years now.”

  Harvey was grinning too, happy enough that not even being classed with the Shadowspawn annoyed him. He supposed that from the point of view of someone who couldn’t Wreak at all, it was fair enough.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Boase said thoughtfully, pausing in midprod at the smartscreen. “I think I’ve just had a thought.”

  “Happens to most people with functioning brain stems every now and then. What sort of thought?”

  “The Fermi Paradox.”

  “What . . . Oh, why we haven’t had little green men droppin’ in on us in flying saucers?”

  “Yes. We know there are planets around most stars and a lot of them are Earth-like, we know that for sure now. Why hasn’t anyone shown up or at least sent a message? But it just occurred to me that it’s quite likely any species with a conscious brain would eventually evolve the Power—or some subset of every species would. And that means no science.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, to invent the scientific method, you’ve got to believe in an orderly, rational, deterministic universe. The sort of billiard-ball world Newton and Laplace thought they were discovering.”

  “Hell, that isn’t the whole truth, is it?”

  “No, but it’s the indispensible first step. But if the Power is around, the universe wouldn’t feel that way. It would be magical.”

  The word sounded slightly obscene in the scientist’s mouth. He went on:

  “It would be irrational, arbitrary. Mhabrogast glyphs, water running uphill because you wanted it to, doing things because they felt lucky, shaping reality by sheer willpower. I don’t see how you could even get as far as a Hellenistic view of the world with that stuff around. Not if you’re living in a fairy-tale world for real. It would look like Hansel and Gretel all the way down, and that means you’d never discover any way to really analyze the world—or even just the Power. And without that, you’d always be limited to what brains could handle, which means no interstellar flight. And if you had telepathy, would you ever want radio?”

  “Phones are a lot less trouble.”

  “But not at first. And you’d never think that way to begin with.”

  Harvey looked up into the blue arch of the sky. “Oh, great, a universe full of Shadowspawn.”

  “Except here.”

  “Except here from the Bronze Age to the Victorians,” Harvey said. He slapped Boase on the back hard enough to stagger him a little. “And with your help, Professor, we’re going to keep it that way!”

  Peter shrugged, embarrassed. “Anyway, the effect only lasted thirtyeight seconds,” he said disgustedly. “Come on, Duquesne—”

  A conversation happened; Harvey Ledbetter didn’t even try to follow it. For one thing it was in New Middle Physics Babble-onian, a language he had never learned, and for another, unless he wanted to Wreak he could hear only half of it.

  “What happened?” he said, when the other American pocketed his phone.

  “Well—”

  Harvey listened to two sentences and then held up a hand. “In Ignoramish!” he protested. “Pretend you’re Samantha Carter trying to tell O’Neil something.”

  “Oh, you watched SG-1 when you were a kid too?”

  “Professor!” Harvey said; and he’d been a young adult, which suddenly made him feel his sixty-odd years more.

  Boase stood silent for a minute, obviously lost in thought, then shook himself.

  “Ah . . . we blew a fuse.”

  “That mean what it sounds like?”

  “No, it’s just a metaphor, and not a very good one either. Equipment failure, let’s say. There was a spillover of. . . A fuse blew. But we have proof of concept.”

  “Yes!” Harvey shouted, punching his fist in the air.

  When it came down he pointed his finger at the younger man’s face.

  “Son, if Duquesne did have a spunky, red-haired daughter, your handsome assistant ashes would get thoroughly hauled. She’d not only be smooching you, she’d be throwing herself on her back and throwing her heels towards her ears right this—”

  “Hey, I’m not his assistant!” Boase said. “Hell, I’m his boss, if anything. I’m the theorist. He’s the experimentalist. And most physicists do their best work in their thirties!”

  “Yeah, he’s just the man with the soldering iron.” Harvey chortled. “You run along now and make one that’s reliable for days at a time and doesn’t weigh more than half a ton. Something we could put on an eighteen-wheeler truck and not take up more than, oh, half the load would do right nice.”

  “Wait a minute! Going from proof of concept to—”

  “You git, you high-forehead wonder, you!”

  Harvey stood quiet for a moment and then pulled out his own phone. It had a specialized little program that not only ate all record of the conversation at either end but erased it from the servers in between.

  I come from a place northwest of San Antonio, he thought whimsically, as he waited for the acknowledgment icon as the little machines shook hands. Paranoia County.

  Operation sheet is go, he tapped out.

  It is?

  Yeah. Fondest expectations and all.

  A long pause, and then: All right. I’ll want details on that, but provided you satisfy me, Defarge can proceed. Surprised you got Mowgli to sign off on it.

  I’m persuasive.

  He turned off the phone function and did a purge just to be sure, then drew back his arm and threw. The little black oblong soared away, turning in the air and then hitting a lakeside rock with a faint crack. The pieces went into the lake like a string of pebbles, and then the crystal blue water closed over them.

  “Hallelujah,” he whispered.

  Deep within his mind an image of a mountain city grew. And a fire brighter than a thousand suns. When he spoke again, for a moment his voice was an exultant shout that echoed off the hills:

  “ ‘For I am become death, breaker of worlds.’ ”

  “At last, a place where neither of us sticks out, Jack,” Anjali Guha said, looking out the window of her side of the cab. “Here in the entranceway to Europe.”

  “More like the stinking lower intestine of Europe,” he said sourly, slumped behind the wheel of the waiting vehicle; the elevation gave a good view. “Which orifice it uses to eat and crap.”

  “I grant it is not beautiful,” she said, and sniffed at air heavy with a mixture of stale brackish water and every variety of hydrocarbon. “Nor is it a rose garden.”

  Europoort-Scheldt wasn’t. The whole area was reclaimed marshland in the Scheldt delta, flat as a tabletop, and covered in gray concrete for the most part to match the gray North Sea just visible beyond the cranes and container blocks, and the gray November sky above. The stacks of shipping containers around them were the most colorful things in sight, their blue and red and yellow in contrast to the many acres of oil refinery, the storage tanks, and the vast coal and iron-ore heaps. Boxy, hulking modern freighters plowed the waters, and heavy trucks and strings of freight cars moved in and out in an intricate computer-controlled dance.

  “Still, Veracruz was worse.”

  “Yeah, it literally smelled like shit. This just smells like PetroDystopiaLand.”

  But they both did fit in with the human geography; Farmer had a generic northwest European look, as long as he didn’t open his mouth and expose his heavily accented Dutch or French or American-variety English, and the Netherlands�
� long-standing connections with the east made her South Asian features boringly unremarkable anywhere outside the depths of tulip-growing rural Blondistan.

  Besides which, I speak better Dutch than Jack does, she thought a little snidely. Better English, too, if you want to be picky, and I do.

  They were dressed in stained blue overalls, and they had really good forged IDs as well. None of that would help them if some Shadowspawn simply followed a line of might-be down to the docks. Her own slight talent was already starting to shrill at her, a feeling like giant snake slithering through her dreams. Or as if her mind had looked too long into the sun, a rolling wave of flame and heat coming at her out of the future. On many of the possible world-lines that bomb was going to send lives by the tens of thousands into the stratosphere in a gout of radioactive flame.

  Possibly including all the strongest adult Shadowspawn, she thought with savage satisfaction. Oh, indeed, yes. Decapitation! So many years of defeat, and at last victory is possible.

  The freighter was the CM Pavlina, Panama-registered with a mixed but mainly Filipino crew, currently out of Mexico with a cargo that was officially mainly industrial parts. The Panamax cranes moved like vast robotic elephants as the last of the load came ashore, neatly grouped in rectangles four containers high, half a dozen technicians performing labor that would once have taken hundreds of stevedores days of effort.

  The control unit on their dashboard beeped as the code for the container matched that loaded into the truck’s computer. In a few years this wouldn’t need humans at all . . . or perhaps in a few years this would be broken ruins, with the sea reclaiming it and the metal gantry shapes tilting up out of the mud.

  Our job is to see that it does not happen. No wonder my precog is blinded, with Trimback facing us!

  Jack engaged the engine and let the big eighteen-wheeler purr forward; it was a nearly new Daimler hybrid, and the all-glass control panel looked like an F-42’s. It also prompted the driver in a female German voice that somehow conveyed a grating, hectoring, anal-retentive personality along with a strong Mecklenburger accent.