* * *
MING XIAN
Here in my neighborhood in Urumqi, life continues relatively normally. Outside, I believe, time is coming somewhat unhinged. It certainly seems that things are moving faster and faster.
I must turn my face against all that to do such good as I can right here. There are, after all, Uygur laborers and proletarians who need family planning assistance as much as ever. I speak to worried young wives about what sort of health they should be in to safely bear children, while I think that their children will not come. I speak to anxious young machinists and teamsters about what they can do to protect themselves on the job so that their sperm won’t become loaded with toxic waste, and I show them the measures available while thinking that perhaps, at the end of the world, genes don’t count for much. I speak to love-struck teens concerned about how too-early pregnancy might ruin their prospects, and I do not let on to them that I think their college years are as imaginary as the kingdom of Prester John and the domain of the Yellow Emperor. If I’m right, that will all become clear soon enough.
It is so hard. I want to just sit and cry, or go off to a beautiful mountain and purify myself. But then this is what comes of wanting righteousness for All Under Heaven. I always knew that the emperor as minister between Heaven and Earth would get little rest, but the realities of it have never been so terribly vivid to me as they are right now. Every morning I rise with a few more aches and pains, and every night I lie down alone in my little rooms and wonder if I will see the sun rise again or perhaps if the Red Star will at least shine on me as it shone on those poor ghostly magicians. I wish for a man to hold me in the night, but I fear that it would be a distraction from my duties: above all, I do not have the luxury of tending to myself.
Does any of this make the slightest amount of difference? I argue it with myself every day, as I go about my routine of advising, listening and prescribing. When I’m inclined to doubt, I remember that Confucius and Mencius agreed that when the people starve, they cannot think of their duty. Insofar as I remove these people’s fears about their temptations and failures, I make it that much easier for them to live virtuously. I can only hope it is enough—and sometimes I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is not.
The first time I see this, the day begins much like any other. But not long after I open my office, in comes a soldier. An ethnically Chinese soldier— Han like me, with the round features of someone bom into one of the southern provinces. He’s a long way from home. At first I tense, expecting that he might be on an official or unofficial mission of vengeance against me, but it turns out to be nothing of the sort. I don’t register his words in any detailed way: words are becoming less and less important to me as I immerse myself in the essences of the souls around me and trust in the Way to convey my meanings to them.
What I feel is his passionate desire to protect the land. He speaks to me of Mencius’s parable of Bull Mountain, the beautiful mountain that represents the higher feelings, logged bare and made ugly. He was a military policeman in one of the valleys flooded by Three Gorges Dam and is traveling in search of opportunities to atone for his collaboration with that wickedness. I do not entirely understand what official duty he has for this mission, but does it matter? Scout, courier, surveyor, internal affairs investigator, there are many masks that the righteous man may use in his travels in such circumstances.
He becomes more and more agitated as he speaks. He does not realize this, but I know that his inner eye is opening, and because of his passion, it is drawn first to what is wrong and malign here. So he sees the full complexities of the deliberately inadequate housing, the lack of pollution monitoring, the schemes for industry made without reference to the people’s skills or inclinations, and it wounds him. I try to intervene to treat him, but he won’t have it, not until he can clearly determine my own purity. Higher and higher the pitch of his voice, faster and faster the beating of his yearning heart, until at last it’s too much. He collapses. And with the eyes of yin awareness, I see his soul. It does not rise to Heaven to meet with the ministers. It sinks down toward the Thousand Hells.
What sin was it that dragged him down? I can’t know. But I can see that the holiest fire for virtue is not enough, in this dreadful end time, to save a man such as him. And if there is no redemption for him, there can scarcely be any for the rest of us.
I take that day off. I realize that neglecting my duties, even for a mourning such as this, is itself an act of vice that may taint my own soul that crucial bit more. Nevertheless, I am too weak and worn to continue this day. I will grieve, and perhaps in the morning I may find some reason to continue.
And that is only the first time. Then there comes the second, and the third, and the fourth...
I am a very tiny reed in the mighty river that is the Way. Just how long can I endure?
Perhaps it is not my lot to see judgment day either. I fear that this recitation is too dry, but it is all I can manage right now. If I engage too closely with these memories, I fear that my poor worn soul will break once and for all. I must make myself like the chroniclers of old, like Sima Qian who chose to accept the pain and humiliation of castration so that he could finish his grand record. I cut myself off from emotion long enough to finish this duty, and promise myself that I will resume feeling when it’s done.
* * *
WILLIAM
Another day, another kill zone, that seems to be the pattern of my life now. I remember a particular image from H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which no movie version ever caught quite the way I imagined it to be. As the time traveler goes faster into the past or future, the sun moves faster and faster until it’s an essentially continuous band of light, shifting north and south with the axial tilt of the seasons and in response to longer-term cycles of polar reorientation. Of course, I’m no time traveler and time itself isn’t actually going faster (it can’t within a given inertial framework) but it sure feels ever more tiresome.
The day after my escape from the collapsing Ragnarok, I set about arranging for better transportation. The first step is money, and this is precisely why every field agent sets aside a slush fund. After a couple transactions with an ATM and a custom card, I’ve got all the money I need on tap via pristine accounts (swiped at the source from credit companies I did some contract work for years ago; back doors can stay in place an astoundingly long time). With that I can order an accessible van arranged to my taste from an agency that’ll deliver it to my motel room, assuming I’m still alive when it arrives. Once that’s taken care of, I arrange for a replacement wheelchair and some personal firepower through covert channels I’ve built up over the years.
That actually makes it sound more impressive than it is. The fact is that most people will sell you their stuff if the price is right and if you demonstrate some basic reliability. Right now I’m mostly buying from people whom I’ve helped out over the years: this one whose shipping business was being exploited by hematovores, this one whose brother got into necromancy and created a veritable shit storm of poltergeist phenomena before I took him out, this one who’d been caught in an FBI sting operation looking for specialist pornographers and who would be rotting in jail if it weren’t my helping her with fake ID and relocation (in exchange for the info I needed to do some walk back on the FBI agents involved, but that’s another story). It’s just like any other trading in personal favors, simply more combustible. And governmental monitoring of communication channels is way overrated. A simple combination of personal code and decades-old encryption schemes suffices for these calls.
To the slack-jawed yokels who run this hotel in the ass end of Nowheresville, Deep South, I’m just a cranky-looking crip who tips surprisingly well and who ain’t queer but also ain’t interested in a hooker. Works for me. Oh, they also know that I appreciate good barbecue and am willing to take some tips to the good places to eat in whatever the next wide-spot-in-the-road pathetic excuse for a town is. If anything gets hung up more than a couple of da
ys, I’ll probably buy some dope off them, just by way of supporting the image.
All that done, I have time to sit and think. I jot notes on paper and on my PDA, develop causality diagrams, consider catastrophe surfaces worth applying to the situation. It’s hard to get much beyond the obvious: “I am so fucked right now. ” But I knew that already. What I need now is a sense of what to do next.
Some of the folks I wanted to buy supplies from weren’t at all inclined to sell, and one of them let slip that it was because he doesn’t touch doomed ventures. Word of Ragnarok’s collapse is getting around, apparently. I slide into some of the loose news relays around the edges of Union distribution systems and find that it wasn’t just my facility that got gakked last night. Swarms of hematovores attacked most of the facilities, apparently. And then a lot of them died before the night was through, their blood quite literally boiling in their veins. Damn it, it’s hard not to start giving credence to that whole Cain nonsense, and I take a break to lay in a little self-hypnosis to help me maintain a proper outlook. I really need not to collapse into religious hysteria right now.
I can’t assemble a complete map of the disaster just right now. It probably suffices to say that it’s a nearly complete loss. And I catch wind that the Men in White are very interested in speaking to survivors. So I’ve got to keep a low profile and away from the usual Union watering holes. Pfeah.
Beneath that, there’s the question of what the hell happened to me starting in Bosnia. I absolutely refuse to believe in the literal truth of all that bullshit. But how the hell can I find out where experience ended and manipulation began? If I could get the attention of some good cross-convention analytical unit, I bet we could pin it down quickly, but that's not in the cards. I go around and around about this, and end up not actually reaching any firm conclusions. I guess I’ll have to wing it, keeping open to possibilities and trying not to form any particularly strong opinions in the meantime. (That’s opinions beyond “all that bullshit, ” which I think is worth holding with conviction. )
In some ways it would be easier if I were to manifest systems of standard mental illness. (Don’t talk to me about “insanity. ” There’s organic dysfunction and deviant behavior, and nothing else. ) But no. I can do a lot of self-testing to establish sound neurology and at least partially sound neurochemistry, and the other stuff isn’t anything like typical symptomatology. I’m the victim of conscious manipulation rather than things going wrong at the medical layer of existence. I feel a sudden sympathy with some of the poor bastards I’ve helped railroad over the years, considered unreliable after the wrong kind of encounter with reality deviants. Well, I certainly am unreliable; I’d fire me. But since it’s just me, I have to keep at it. Grunk.
I do think about contacting some of the Freedom Road crew, or any of the other semi-organized dissident groups I have leads on. I decide against it, for several reasons. First, if I know about them, there is at least a decent chance that internal security agents do too, and I don’t want to end up talking to an undercover cop or a narc, either for the Union itself or the civil authority. Second, pretty much all the dissident groups are worse off than I am. Freedom Road’s always been prone to religious mania, and it sounds like they’re at it again. Then there are the orgone freaks, the advocates of whatever this year’s flavor of anti-Einsteinian ether physics is, and the ones who regard electrical appliances as innately carcinogenic, not to mention that bunch who think that absolute monarchy can be established as objectively best fit for certain obscure genetic factors. No thanks. Instead, I put out tracers for my comrades at Ragnarok. I could do a lot better even with the nimrods from there than with these other bozos.
And that’s how I pass the next night, working out what I can and ought to do. Sometimes I think I should have taken up the hick on his hooker offer after all.
* * *
ROBERT FOR A GHASTLY WEEK OR SO, I WONDER IF THESE DOOMED AWAKENINGS ARE HAPPENING BECAUSE OF ME, BECAUSE OF UNDISCIPLINED POWER HAULED BACK FROM DOISSETEP OR WHATEVER. IT TAKES THAT LONG FOR ME TO ESTABLISH THAT SIMILAR INCIDENTS ARE HAPPENING AHEAD OF ME AND IN PLACES I’M NOT GOING. IN THE SECOND WEEK, THE MAINSTREAM PRESS PICKS UP ON IT AS A WAVE OF MYSTERIOUS PSYCHOSES AFFLICTING PEOPLE OF AVERAGE AND ABOVE AVERAGE INTELLIGENCE AND AVERAGE AND ABOVE AVERAGE INTROSPECTION. RUMORS OF BIOCHEMICAL WARFARE FOLLOW NOT LONG THEREAFTER. I DON’T LIKE THE PANIC AROUND THAT, BUT IT DOES PROVIDE ME WITH SOME EXTRA MARGIN OF SAFETY, THE FURTHER IT ALL GETS FROM THE TRUTH.
At the end of the second week, I finally call on... well, not a friend, but at least an informed colleague to talk with about this stuff. George Brown is an Iroquois medicine man who works for the Defense Intelligence Agency as some sort of specialized analyst. We met right after the millennium, when I was on a canoeing trip with friends. His totem raven took umbrage at the Rubbish, and we got to talking after breaking up the spiritual equivalent of a catfight. From time to time I’ve passed him information, and occasionally he sends me something. I remember him after a few days of aimless wandering and arrange for a meeting in Columbus. It’s hot and sticky and I wish I was elsewhere, but right now this part of the world is relatively calm. I perch in a donut shop and wait for him.
Some people just are born to be soldiers, I think. George is about six feet four, with square features and muscles such as I can only dream of. He’s precise in his movements and soft spoken in the way that marks people who know they never need to shout. That’s real authority, George said at our first meeting, and I agreed both then and now. He’s in khakis and polo shirt now, but honestly, you only have to look at him to know that he’s a soldier.
He doesn’t smile as he sits down. “I was able to cook up some plausible reasons for this trip, but I’m not happy about it. Things are getting strange, Robert. "
“No fooling... ” I stop. “You’re not just referring to what I called about, are you? ”
He shakes his head. At the extreme end of each turn, a single hair flies loose and traces spirals in the air. I recognize a low-keyed but powerful privacy warding. “No, I’m not, ” he confirms. “It’s chaos on a great many fronts. Someone is taking out Technocratic and suspected Technocratic facilities at an alarming rate. Not that I mind the destruction, but I don’t want the Union panicking. And whoever it is, they’re also taking out facilities we have no reason to suspect are connected to the Union, which means reappraisal on top of everything else. But that’s not all. ” He lays out a horrific litany of what we can both recognize as signs of the spirit world running amok. It includes both private tragedies and some very public displays, which we agree will be difficult to deal with.
Some of the biggest changes will affect the world indirectly. The spirits that inhabit, draw on, and define the souls of the various planets are getting wiped out in battles I can barely understand. As they die, the meaning of the planets will change. Popular astrology is almost entirely a bundle of superstitions, but there are truths underneath it all. Saturn has embodied wisdom, time, and age, for instance. Now those associations will become unreliable. People will behave differently without knowing why.
The pathways between points of stability just beyond the material world and out into the realm of the planetary souls are crumbling, too, some attacked and some apparently just wearing out. That’s already manifesting in a general sense of isolation and alienation. People feel that the places far from them are becoming stranger, less relevant to them, fearful and worth avoiding. George speculates that physical communication will become less reliable as well, since mere matter can’t do much without spirit sustaining it, and I find his reasoning sound.
The Red Star now shines openly, in at least some parts of the world. (Why not all? Are some areas particularly blessed, or protected, or just saved for later abuse? I need a spiritually aware astronomer to bounce ideas off of, and they’ve never been very common. ) It isn’t always associated with doom, but often. Some of those manifestations of doom are interesting, too: there are—or rather, were—
things loose in the world that were sustained only by ancient curses, like vampires and haunting ghosts. These things are apparently gone now, or at least a lot less common. Were I a monotheist, I’d say that God finally became bored with the world. As it is, I think (and here George follows my analysis) that the very deep merging of spiritual forces is breaking the pockets of isolated power on which those curses depended.
So far there isn’t much manifestation of the union that’s supposed to wait at the end of time. Insofar as I ever believed in such a thing, I assumed that it would be a building up from existing things. Instead it seems to be a breaking down, with the most atomistic fragments of shattered souls dripping down into the pools of being.
“This sucks, " George remarks. I agree.
It turns out that he hasn’t heard much of my own original concern, the wave of awakenings gone bad. He takes notes as I describe the halfdozen cases I’ve dealt with so far, and then a separate page for the incidents I’ve heard of but not witnessed personally. Then he looks right at me and says, “You have a theory about the underlying cause. Tell it to me. ”
“I do, but how did you know? ”
“Intuition and a great deal of experience reading body language. Tell me. ”
So I do, starting with the first appearance to me of the Red Star and ending with my decision to contact him.
“The end of the world, ” he says flatly.
“As I understand it, ” I agree.
He smiles briefly. “Grandfather will be so pissed off. ”
“Eh? ”
The smile vanishes even as he tells a lighthearted story. “Grandfather complains more about other people’s complaints than anyone else I know of. He has a very lengthy rant about how every generation tells him they’ve got it worse, and they never do. This time he’s wrong, though.... ” The words trickle off. “When? ”
World of Darkness - Time of Judgement - Mage Page 20
