It’s easy to get into one of those loops with no natural exit points when analyzing the motives of your enemies in our kind of war. The Virtual Adepts (Dante was or is one, and I was once one, before I came to my senses) used to be part of the Technocratic Union, so there’s a special fratricidal hate going on between them and the groups they forsook. Yes, that same hatred applies from the Adepts' point of view to those like me who reversed the dimwitted decision to leave the Union. Furthermore, Dante’s always had a special hate on for bigots, which I certainly am. So at first look, any effort on his part to do me good must be presumed to be a trap. From there, well it dives into layer after layer of possibility. I’ll skip the summary and say that after three days of pondering I decided that I had little to lose by checking out his lead.
So I made my way by boat to Singapore and flew from there, getting a bit more anonymity. As much as a paraplegic white man can, anyway. It took me a week, all told, but eventually I ended up in Mobile, Alabama.
And there I froze for another couple days.
It was perfectly obvious what he meant, once I decided to take his message as having its surface meaning, whatever else it may have. “Back where I first saw the rest of the world” could only be where my consciousness first productively divided. Not in Mobile, but in Orange Beach, Alabama, a perfectly boring fishing town notable only because when I was twelve years old, I looked through the telescope of a doddering old astronomy buff, saw the rings of Saturn for the first time, and shifted something in my brain. Everything I’ve been and done since then stems from that moment of crisis. What point there could possibly be in going back to that particular place, I couldn’t imagine, and though I’d never admit to anyone else, I was profoundly afraid to do so. I know what happened to me the first time. What might happen the second time?
In the end, obviously, I did go. I rented a two-year-old SUV and drove south in the middle of the afternoon, arriving in time to watch the sun set behind the Gulf of Mexico and rows of twisted pine trees planted, probably fruitlessly, as windbreaks. There weren’t a lot of people around, not in the middle of the week away from a major holiday, and I had no trouble finding the spot where Dad docked our boat on that significant vacation.
And so here I am, feeling my wheelchair bump-bump-bump over the dock’s slats. I thought I might even see a telescope set up again for my edification (or torment, perhaps), but no such luck. Just a couple of derelict drunks fishing off the end of the dock and me. They turn around to look at me, see nothing that matters to them, and turn around again. I wish briefly that they’d both fall in and drown. Once I’m out where the telescope was then, I spin around and around in place, bringing my basic surveillance gear online, looking for anything I should be concerned with. Nothing.
In less time than it takes me to describe this, my consciousness redivides. I feel that detached cognition again. A richer sense of the environment floods in, my perceptions enhanced by parallel analysis and superior recall. When I touch the multi-sense rig in one arm of my wheelchair, I feel the synaptic bonds form just as efficiently as always.
In fact, I feel them too efficiently. Thought, sense, commentary flow too fast. My brain has never worked this well. I realize that it’s not just me and my separate cognition, it’s me and two separate cognitive nets. Where the hell did the second one come from? What’s going on here?
* * *
MING XIAN
Three weeks after that encounter in Chongqing, I arrive at the place the Westerner spoke of, “where I first saw the rest of the world. ” It’s been twenty-odd nerve-wracking days and nights of hitchhiking, stowing away in cargo trains, once even stealing a motorcycle for an all-night dash along the Grand Canal. Eastern China is too much the domain of my enemies, but it is also the place I first saw most of all. Having found no other cure for my soul’s blindness, I took myself into the very heart of China, to Beijing, where I grew up.
Xuanwu district hasn’t changed much since I last saw it. Most of the city’s Muslims live here, and most of the Chinese make their livelihoods selling either to the Muslims or to the tourists come to the shopping streets. My father and his family did a bit of both, since they dealt with rugs and robes. They made prayer mats woven with select verses from the Koran for the Muslims and lush thick rugs woven with images from classical Chinese art for the tourists. Likewise with the robes. I remember that my brothers and I sometimes took our thrill in dressing up in the robes for the Muslims and acting out mockeries of their prayers and rituals. If our father caught us, we’d suffer, of course, but we didn’t realize the significance of our casual prejudice then. I was just one more trouble-making boy then, or at least one more trouble-making soul in a boy’s body.
Now, in the female form that the Wu Keng intended as a prison but which proved to be what my soul had craved all along, I do see the harm we did, and I give thanks to my father for his correction. China has enough men (and women) growing up with our old attitudes never checked, and he was quite right to grieve and to try to correct. It’s been years since I saw my brothers, and I have no idea how well his lessons took, but his son-cum-daughter remembers and is glad.
Our old home is where it was, but it and the buildings on each side stand empty. There’s a big trench along their side of the street. Looks like plumbing or cabling of some sort being laid, from a distance. I step closer, taking no care to brush against any of the others wandering the streets this morning, and look down to see the roof of some big metal canister. Now I understand. Another legacy of the Great Leap Forward, this must be. We couldn’t quite get the “steel mill in every backyard” that rebellious farmers mocked, but we could get a refinery in every district, or at least a waste dump. When the Gang of Four went to their just rewards, their devious underlings destroyed many records of what they’d built and where, and so even now, almost half a century after that tragic time, officials continue to stumble across industrial ruins. Whatever is or was in that tank must have been deemed too toxic for safe residency nearby.
I am just visiting, however, so I decide to take the risk. I wait until noonday prayer draws the Muslims off the streets and lunchtime beckons to my fellow unbelievers. I have the street to myself, just for a few minutes, so I quietly step into the courtyard of our home and slide the door shut behind me. I step to the well in the exact center of the courtyard and take a deep breath, and peer down.
When I was eleven, I looked down at just this time of day, at just this angle, and saw my first ghost. It was the ghost of a poor old woman who’d been drowned by muggers, not that I knew that at the time. I just remember how the waters parted to let her pale wet face stare up at mine and her lips form the silent words “Draw me up. ” I didn’t, not then, but a year later I did draw up her bones, take her skull with me to see the prison grave into which her assailants had been thrown after one unsuccessful robbery too many, and lay her troubled spirit to rest. That was how the yin world opened itself to me.
So I look down again.
And the waters part, and rising out of them is that female form that I recognize as the perfection of my female ancestors’ lineages. This is the consummate mother, sister, and daughter of my line, who finds some distinctive expression in each of us. She came into me after the Wu Keng worked their magic, confirming the reality of the exterior change and enlightening me into the mysteries of the distaff side. It is she who left me when that dreadful eye blinked at me. She comes to me with a smile.
But she does not come alone. The waters part again, and here comes the smiling man who is the perfection of father, brother, and son. He must know that he has nothing to do with me! I am not his! But he and the woman join hands, and they glide in through my ears, throat, and nose together. I feel both sides of the family stir within me. The female affinity with yin restores my vision of the yin world, and I rejoice at the familiar sights. The male affinity with yang stirs just as strongly, though, and I am troubled by the flood of unfamiliar sights. I know what many of these things are fr
om my studies, as the attentive scholar must comprehend yin and yang together. It’s just that there’s so much difference between study and experience. I struggle to find my own soul self in the midst of all this.
If the woman’s lineage within me has been the third eye, then now I have... a fourth?
* * *
DANTE FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW, THE TRINE UNDERGO THE RESTORATION OF THEIR VISION AT SEPARATE TIMES AND PLACES. TO ME, LOOKING AT THEIR COMBINED FORM, IT’S ALL THE SAME. THIS IS THE NEXT DISCRETE MOMENT IN THEIR SHARED EXPERIENCE. I KNOW, LOOKING SLIGHTLY AHEAD AT THEIR PATH, THAT I MUST SEND THEM A MESSAGE.
I feel around me the buzz of the ancient souls who call themselves, or allow others to call them, the Rogue Council. They often speak cryptically, and this is no exception. I can reach their meaning directly, drawing it out of the network of allusions and inferences, but I wonder whether the trine will understand. The avatars of the council tell me that they’ve chosen these three, or allowed these three to choose themselves, or something of the sort, because each of them has the capacity to carry a second avatar within themselves. This is the stuff of mad-scientist experimentation among most magicians, since souls and essences seldom take kindly to manipulation. Most efforts to force more souls into one body end in the destruction of at least one of those being forced. Usually all. I’ve seen the mindless husk that can result.
The trine, though, has something the counselor avatars recognize but do not readily explain. They describe it to me banally as extra capacity, and then wander off into extended competitive metaphysics. I’m left with the duty of drawing the trine on to the next step.
So I formulate just the sort of cryptic message I always hated getting when I was in the midst of significant sequences. I don’t imagine any of the trine will like it, either, but then they don’t have to. Indeed, being driven forward out of pique is as satisfactory a way to go as any, for this purpose. I play with their dreams, pulling together a composite of their re-awakenings, and adding in the sphinx image the counselors like so much. In the midst of it, I have drifting lights form themselves into pulsing rings around the words It takes two eyes to see most fully.
That should keep them busy for a while.
* * *
* * *
ROBERT
So here I am, with two totems talking to me. Or perhaps two manifestations of a single entity in different relationships to time as I know it, since it’s not like the Rubbish exists quite in my flow even when there’s just one of it, and the spirit world is full of creatures who experience reality wildly differently from the way I do. Like, just for instance, those time-reversed spirits I encountered in New York just before the big red eye blew my totem away for several weeks.
Now, when a man is accompanied by not one but two spirits who manifest only to his eyes and choose to appear as animated mounds of garbage, and they’re identical to each other but apparently unable to perceive each other, and they both insist on offering classic totemic advice, there’s only one thing a man can do. He needs to name them Dr. Seuss-style. That’s just what I did, labeling the one that favored my eastern side Rubbish One and the other Rubbish Two. Neither of them seemed to notice that, either; it wasn’t just that they couldn’t sense each other, but also that they couldn’t sense anyone else interacting with the other. There are times when the shamanic life goes through high weirdness and comes out the other side to simple exhaustion.
This is how it’s gone, day after day:
“So about those spirits in New York, ” I say.
The two Rubbishes answer simultaneously in identical voices. “They flee from the not-yet. ” “They are spirits in New York but not of the city. ”
If I’m lucky, I distinguish the two sentences spoken in precisely the same gravelly not-really-a-voice. If not, I hear something like, “They they are flee spirits from the in not New York yet but not of the city. ”
I decide to ask one of the totems a question. “Not of the city. Do you mean just not part of the city’s present, or from some place other than there as well as some other time? ” This kind of question is always tricky, because the Rubbish doesn’t seem to really understand what a human means by time, but we can often work out at least some partial communication.
As Rubbish Two starts its answer, Rubbish One responses with... well, you know how comic strips sometimes show a person not quite saying anything by a word balloon that just has an ellipsis in it?
that is. Rubbish One answers in a way that isn’t composed of sound, but of chunks of absent meaning, making it hard to think very much in the same way that loud noise makes it hard to hear. Rubbish Two says in its most labored expository style, “City in this time is only really this city. The city in any other time is not same self. But spirits come from beyond the not-same city. Not just other face of self but other place. "
“Do you know where? ” I ask.
Rubbish One continues with its non-answers, which flow (I think) from its inability to reconcile my actions, which it sees as clearly as any totem does, with the totems’ isolation from one another. The non-answers fill out the whole confusing situation with a smoother, more readily dismissible silence. Rubbish Two shifts its vocalization to a stack of used photocopy paper, so it whistles a bit at the end of each phrase. “From city that might be. ”
That doesn’t help much. Shamans and others who travel outside the walls of the world know that a great many things which never achieve physical being nonetheless exist in the infinite realms of thought and possibility. But mostly they stay in their own places. There are walls around those equivalents of worlds, the homes of dreams, speculations, archetypes, totems, everything that comes before form and is required for substance to take on form or meaning. And the spaces in between are not conducive to many travelers’ well-being, any more than trying to swim in deep ocean is good for most land-dwelling creatures. The things native to the wilds between bordered places, in turn, don’t thrive much, if it all, inside world walls. If they survive at all, they have a depressing tendency to turn mad, becoming the horrors that dwell in nightmares and folklore.
Obviously we spirit travelers manage the journeys, as do some other entities. More likely, though, anything loose in my world from any place sensibly described as “city that might be” was carried by someone or something, wrapped in a little bubble of stable existence to go safely through the chaos. But trying to get details on that from the Rubbish (either one) won’t be easy. Just how do you go about trying to pin down the nature of a spirit’s cosmos of origin and its means of travel into material existence without being able to use censes, for crying out loud? I need a different source of answers.
Naturally, none of the entities likely to be able to provide me with that sort of answer lives anywhere around this old hospital. Time to hit the road again.
* * *
WILLIAM
My thoughts continue to flow at this abnormal pace. I continue to wonder why.
First I have to provide a suitable cover for my period of impairment. One of the good things about working with organizations full of obsessive risk takers well beyond the generally accepted limits of technology and physiology is that there are great archives of very strange physical and psychological failure modes. The conviction that intellectual progress requires both trepanning and castration? Eighty-two cases of it, the first in 1891 when the Union was still young, the most recent a few months ago. The inability to distinguish any even number from any other? Two hundred and six cases of it, generally among military programmers immediately after a war. (Interesting unpublished dissertations about it, too. ) The paranoid suspicion of hive intelligence among one or more species of vermin? Scarcely a month goes by without it. (Oddly enough, it’s become less common since the invention of real hive intelligences. ) Into this ocean of fuckups I cast my nets and draw forth a story I like and can establish as part of a known pattern.
I have to sell it to my bosses, of course, but they are desperate to believe it. They
need me. The hematovores are up to something strange: most of them are weakening, rapidly, but some are picking up unusual strength and particular aptitudes none of us have seen before. The similarities between some of the tricks shown by recently deceased and revivified individuals and some of the very old stories in our anthropological archives suggest that ancient forms of the elusive “vampire virus” are reemerging. That in itself is troublesome, both because there are usually messy side effects from that sort of genetic reversion, and because (in the immediate) it means a fresh wave of stronger “vampires" to deal with. Much as I might like to go out into the field with shooting teams myself, I know that being smarter than usual doesn’t itself make me any less paraplegic than usual. I have to get my jollies in other ways.
Patterns. That’s what I do. I work to identify previously unsuspected patterns and understand their significance. Most of the time, of course, they aren’t significant at all, because when enough things happen, some of them cluster in ways that look meaningful to the human mind but are just plain random. Of course, humans and other intelligent beings trying to hide themselves from the Union’s notice, endeavor to make their patterns of behavior look random. Distinguishing the real patterns from the illusory is harder than you might think, the mind being wired to treat sequence as desirable, but it is possible, and the race between hider and seeker is very much like the endless competition between code makers and code breakers. So we shovel a million kinds of data into the computers and parse it a thousand different ways, and look for something useful.
World of Darkness - Time of Judgement - Mage Page 7
