World of Darkness - Time of Judgement - Mage

by Judgement Day

  It begins two days after I arrive, when alarm clocks go off for the people working on the day shift. Every single one of them goes off at precisely the same time. Nobody’s running a few minutes fast or slow, or has set hers for a few minutes different than anyone else. Exactly 6: 30 A. M., every single one of them, and not one delayed by battery strength fluctuating or anything else at all. The moment passes as they get underway: this guy takes longer in the shower, that couple goes back to bed, this woman realizes she’s hung over and takes some time to administer a home-grown remedy, all the normal fluctuations. Still, I find it disturbing. So do my totems, but neither of them can find any explanation.

  Half of shamanism is about altered states of consciousness, which means that if you’re surrounded by serious drunks and addicts, you have a good pool of untrained talent available to check your own impressions of the spirit world and its doings. I make the rounds that morning, but the usual crowd in the lobby and on the steps outside hasn’t noticed anything unusual. Apart from me being more agitated than usual, that is. It’s with a distinct sense of unease that I go about my day’s errands, shopping in the local markets for more of the exotic herbs I need for large-scale wards and checking out all the spots where the time-reversed spirits made their mark. The world’s walls remain unusually weak there, but there’s no fresh activity; this is the sort of wound that heals in time, if nobody pokes at it further, and the spots are all enough out of the way that they aren’t getting a lot of random traffic from drifters with just enough spiritual sensitivity to be dangerous.

  The next day, the alarm clocks all synchronize again, and today it lasts a good ten minutes or so. The morning toilet flushes proceed from north to south in steady rhythm, as do the bathroom doors slamming shut behind their first users of the day. Everyone around me shuts off his alarm in sync, too. Only gradually does disorder return.

  Once is either coincidence or a message for someone other than me. Twice in a row just as I’m preparing for a major work means it’s something I need to deal with. I suspend my preparations for the day in favor of more time studying my neighbors, and speaking with a few. They’re a fairly homogenous crew: mostly single men, mostly about twenty-five to forty years old, pretty evenly divided between whites, blacks and Hispanics, few of them doing anything but day labor or semi-skilled labor on contract projects. Some of them are married, and there are some single women and a few gay couples, but those are all rare. And all of them look like what they are—tired workers who lack any real hope of improving their prospects and who have to worry about what injury or illness or any other misfortune might do to them.

  A fair number of these guys have problems with drink and drugs, though not usually very severely. If it takes over their lives, they lose the ability to sustain this kind of work and drop down a few more rungs on the social ladder. In this crowd, Mike and Louie stand out, because they’re almost constantly strung out on something or other, their eyes bloodshot and glazed, their voices quavering, their manner distracted. What I realize, this second day of ominous synchronization, is that they’re most thoroughly immersed in it all. They stumble but don’t quite fall over, drop something and then snatch it before it hits the ground, laze along with bouts of unobvious speed just fast enough and long enough to get across streets safely.

  They don’t have any work today, so I offer to buy them lunch at the taqueria down the block, and they take me up on it. Mike is probably a couple years older than Louie, a couple inches taller and clean-shaven, while Louie has a scruffy little goatee. They’re both pale skinned and dressed in T-shirts for second-string bands’ tours from half a dozen years ago.

  “You guys have seen me around, I know, ” I say. “Sometimes I write for the papers about how the folks in my neighborhood see things, you know? ” They nod. Journalists of that type are a known phenomenon to anyone who lives in New York neighborhoods someone might deem colorful. “Well, I’m supposed to be doing this story about anything new in how the folks like us are thinking about things. ” They pause for a moment to work it over, then nod again. “So how about you guys? Anything new in glamorous downtown Youville? ” I get out a notepad and mechanical pencil, and they laugh. They’re at ease with this.

  “It’s the New World Order, ” Mike says after a moment, and I can hear the capital letters. I make a note. “I always used to hear about how they were going to impose their order on the world, and now they are. "

  “You sound, ” I say cautiously, “like you’re talking about something besides banking regulations. ”

  “Oh, yeah, ” Mike nods. Not vigorously by most people’s standards, but maybe it’s as much as he can manage right now. “I’m talking about the way the world works. ” He’s ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, and now he takes the top piece of bread off and drops it on the floor. It lands buttered side up.

  Again and again, as often as he repeats it. “That’s what I’m talking about. Our benevolent masters started fucking with gravity and everything, just to give us a nicer world. ”

  I do my best to look skeptical rather than alarmed. “That’s a heck of a government, that’d be. ” Louie gives me a raspberry. “Never mind governments, man, this is about people making themselves God and poking at the rest of us. It’s all about taking the chance out of everything for the sake of some damn five year plan. ”

  “You’re talking about magic? ”

  Louie’s on a roll. “I’m talking about magic the way I’d be talking about retirement plans if I killed myself. This is about the death of everything random and uncontrolled. "

  I take some more notes. “That's pretty fancy language for a couple of day laborers. What’s your background. 7”

  They look at each other. Mike answers. “We met at CUNY about nine years ago now. We got along, and we picked up some habits from each other. Eventually we got wasted enough to flunk out together. We hang together because we get along, and maybe one of us will make the right score someday. ”

  “Gotcha. ” More notes on my pad. “So who’re the bosses out killing magic, you think? ”

  “Nobody you’ve ever heard of, ” they say together. The unity of response makes them both smile. Louie continues. “Nobody you’ve ever heard of. They work through fronts, and those work through fronts, and those make the kind of politics and economics any of us ever encounter. That’s just the veneer of the curtain over the stage with the show to distract us, and the real action is back behind that. ”

  “Sounds depressing, ” I venture.

  “Fuckin’ A, ” Mike breaks in. “It’s no fun at all. But I think maybe we’re done talking about this now. You’re asking a lot of questions, right? Come and talk to us when you’ve got some answers of your own. ” They get up and walk out together, trailing little pockets of that improbable order.

  I stir up the discarded sandwich wrappings, ketchup packages, and miscellaneous trash, and call forth a small manifestation of the Rubbish. It looks up at me and whimpers, “They make me hurt. ” “Hurt? How? ”

  “Too much square. Everything precise. No room for tumbling ”

  I nod. “They seem to be particularly haunted by it. "

  “No, no, ” the small Rubbish insists. “They make the square. ”

  “Eh?" That catches me off guard.

  “You talk to spirits. They make the square. It’s how they talk to the world. They say ‘make everything with edges’ and everything falls into place because they push it around. ”

  “Hurm. ” This isn’t the first time I’ve dealt with people who didn’t know their own power, but I’m not sure I want to take the Rubbish’s word for it all by itself. Time for some investigation by other means. And then, if it checks out, figuring out what I can possibly do about it.

  * * *

  WILLIAM

  I’m tired. My eyeballs feel like they’re going to fall out of my head. Our good buddies over in the life sciences have anti-fatigue treatments better than anything most people dream of, but they’ve st
ill got their limits. I’ve spent the last two weeks driving all over northwest Bosnia and beyond, including two crossings into Serbia, and finding one hematovore stronghold after another just empty. What on earth has happened to the bloodsuckers?

  Sometimes Terry tags along with me. I notice that he stays disgustingly fresh and alert, and when I ask about it, he says only that he’s forgotten about getting tired. He creeps me out, and he’s damn well aware of it. I still haven’t decided what to do about it.

  We talk as we go, about this and that and the other. Mixed in with everything else, he keeps throwing in pitches for whatever this movement of great negation he’s joined is. As a scientist, I know better than to accept the mystical claptrap at face value. I also know that the world is far stranger than we Let most people suspect, and so it’s quite possible that his mentor has stumbled onto something genuine. After all, people managed to make napalm and dynamite without quantum theory, and Greek fire and gunpowder without systematic, scientific chemistry at all. The universe doesn’t stop working as it does just because you’re too ignorant to realize how dangerous a game you’re playing.

  It’s the absence of survivors that’s really getting to me at this point. The hematovores didn’t just go away themselves. They took their lackeys with them, too, all the retainers who’ve been partially infected and for that matter the ones who’ve been preyed upon by the psionic talents some hematovores demonstrate. Everyone who’s been directly affected by the infected blood is gone. We find some untainted minions to question, but they don’t have much to say, and nothing that we couldn’t have worked out: the same night, they all went to their usual appointments and found their masters gone. The disappearances apparently happened at the same time, or at least within a window of opportunity no more than twelve hours wide. Which helps as far as it goes, but these guys don’t really know anything relevant.

  I do tag a few for the follow-up team to interrogate, naturally. They’ll have things to say about pre-disappearance operations that will help with later analysis, and given the prevailing chaos, we can probably just whisk them off for full-bore electrochemical interrogation and not have anyone worry about it. But that’ll take time, and for now I’m the only guy on the spot. Radio and chemical markers will guide the others later.

  Meanwhile, there’s Terry and his spiel to deal with.

  “Look, ” I say for the sixth or sixtieth time, “you’re talking bullshit, and you know it. The very fact that you’re talking to me and I’m understanding you proves my point. The kind of absolute freedom you’re talking about never actually exits. Time and space impose constraints, and every action makes other once-possible actions impossible. If you wanted to talk to me about increasing the bounds of possible, then I’d listen. That’s what we’re all about, really. But you can’t talk to me about complete freedom and have me think of you as anything but a prat who isn't bothering to check his own assumptions. ” Terry keeps quiet at that.

  We’re not actually on a road at the moment. I’m following a set of tracks up a fairly smooth, dry stream bed somewhere southeast of Gradacac, looking for a cliffside hideout the last bunch of lackeys told me about, just before I ran them down. Damn fools thought they’d lure me into a false sense of confidence with useful information, then gun me down and take my body as a trophy to their absent master, or absent mistress as the case may be. I recognized the ploy about three sentences into our conversation. Three tons of van. A hundred forty kilos of Bosnian farmer. Sir Isaac Newton says I win when I put my van up against the farmer, and sure enough, I did. There are times when a repeatable universe is a great comfort.

  I glance over at him, wince as another long sharp rock takes its turn pounding on the transmission, and keep up my verbal barrage. “So given that you’re continuing to exist in a consistent manner, to use comprehensible language, and all the rest, I see that you are not anything like completely dedicated to what you’re trying to sell me. That makes you either hypocritical or stupid, or maybe both. It also means you think I’m stupid enough to fall for it or greedy enough not to be bothered by it, and that just pisses me off. I never was a moron, and I’ll thank you not to start treating me like one now.

  Tell me what you really want, or just get the hell of my life and let me get on with things. ”

  That’s when the repeatable universe goes away. Fuck my hubris, I think momentarily. It begins with Terry himself. His body starts folding in and out on itself... at first it’s something I can grasp, at least a little. There is a very large but finite number of three-dimensional forms that any complex organic molecule can take on—if you think of throwing a piece of string with a few rigid stretches into the air and studying the shape it takes on falling down, you’ve got the idea. I recognize a few of the bulges that appear and disappear beneath his skin from reviewing Union bioweapon data. There are chemicals that can throw all the proteins of a particular kind that they can reach into one or another of their many possible forms. This also locks up metabolic processes that depend on protein refolding, so it kills the subject. I don’t think Terry’s dying— mores the pity. And soon the changes are well beyond the boundaries of what I think biochemistry will allow.

  The plague of changes spreads outward from him, taking the van out of my control. Every possible type of metal fatigue and then some strikes at once, and the damn thing just plain shakes apart. The ground I land on, as I sprawl out of my wheelchair, trembles too, and flashes through muddy and dry and icy and hot and just plain strange. After that I can’t really see much, because the air isn’t reliably passing along photons. I wonder why my own body is remaining constant. I suspect that Terry has something else in store for me. Can’t say I’m looking forward to it.

  I hear his voice in the midst of the sensory chaos.

  I can’t see anything but random flashes in my optic nerves like pre-migraine sparkles, and I can’t hear anything but a static-filled roar. But his voice comes through it all clearly. “Bill. Bill, Bill, Bill. Who says I accepted any of that permanently? That was just to talk to you. Enough talk now, though. ”

  The static gradually ebbs, but for some reason I don’t find empty void all that much better. Terry described his first encounter with it as “black. ” Seeing or rather not seeing it for myself, I realize that that was sloppy. It’s the absence of sensation, like the blind spot engulfing everything else. I retain awareness of what’s inside my skin, and of nothing else. Except for when he speaks. “Well, fuck you, Bill. Why are you still hanging together like that? ” I don’t exactly speak: when I open my mouth, I get that absence-of-sensation in my mouth, and there's nothing for my lungs to get purchase on. I do manage to cast my thoughts out into whatever there may be around me. “Clean living. ”

  “Asshole. ” The emotion is draining out of Terry’s voice, very much to my lack of surprise. If he’s been spending any time here, then he’s probably much further detached from human norms even than I’d guessed. “You’ve got something going for you that none of my other victims did. Dunno what it is. It’s like a fucking wall right around your essence. But it’s okay. I can keep you here until it wears away too, and then scoop you out just like the rest. I still win, asshole. "

  Honestly, unless I can manage to change the terms of our interaction, he’s right. I’ve been given some of the best training in psychological discipline the Union can provide, and part of that was instruction in what training won’t help with. Everyone is finite. Everyone breaks. Give me enough of this, and I will go mad, or beg to accept the source of his power as my own new boss, or do something else idiotic. I start thinking about my options. Hard.

  * * *

  MING XIAN

  When Qin Shihuangdi, the first man to rule all of what we now think of as China, died, he went into the afterlife with some of the most elaborate preparations for death a ruler has ever had. He had always been obsessed with death and immortality, and while he didn’t get to be immortal among the living, his soul descended into the yin realms with
whole armies and his entire palace enchanted for the trip. It didn’t take him long to turn all of the Yellow Springs, our people’s part of the underworld, into his new empire. For the next two thousand years and then some, he ruled it all, until the great storm shattered his forces and cut off each piece of the empire from all the rest.

  I am making my way along the grand road to his palace. Here there is no alternative route, unless I were to try flying, and that’s an art I’ve never mastered in any realm. South of the modem city of Xi’an, the hills sink down into a valley that descends more and more steeply, down and down and down past the skin of the world. Even the pale light that characterizes the yin realms close to mortal existence fades into the dark of a cloudy moonless night. There is but one path, long ago smoothed and paved with stones made from alchemically forged souls. I’ve never been here before, but I’ve seen representations of it in paintings and sculptures, since the Emperor retained in death his fondness for public art that would remind his subjects of the glories he’d made. The valley itself fades away somewhere above and behind me, and now the road descends through the first layer of the vast void beneath the world. If I were to step off here, I could fall for years, if I didn’t get caught in the storms, until I finally rammed into the black stone labyrinth that is the purest expression of yin.

  To my surprise and relief, the wind that carries the voices of my slain loved ones fades along with the valley. I expected it to follow me and perhaps even intensify. The Wu Keng seem not to have suspected that I might come here. If I am particularly lucky, I might even manage to use the maps and guides within the palace to take me back to Xinjiang while skipping much of the intervening space. I expect to find the palace largely abandoned for simple want of resources—no more tributaries providing the spiritual equivalent of raw materials—but it should either still be inhabited by forces I can bargain with, or be in a condition such that I can exploit what remains.