“Don’t know. ”
Snippets of other people’s conversation drift across our mutual silence, “... oughta be a law against... ” “... and so she says that she don’t like the sport. it’s the damn hippies and don’t you tell me that it can’t be, who can trust the calendar nowadays... ”
That gets George’s attention. “Even lay people are noticing it. ”
“Huh. I thought it was just me having problems with altered perceptions. ”
“Not at all, ” he breaks in while I pause to consider how to trace more connections. “Individual days and nights remain about the same length as ever, but all the markers of meaning have gone awry. Subjective sense of experience is diminished, so that time seems to flow faster. It’s like the inner structures of the calendar are melting and running out. If they go away, we’ll be left with a calendar devoid of significance, and that worries me a lot. Have you ever seen an unnamed place? ”
I shudder at the memory. Yes, once not long after my awakening, Xoca took me deep into the Latin American mountains, to see a town he knew of. The town’s leaders had tried to protect themselves forever by removing their name from the world, and ended up simply plunging the whole town into the abyss. It was much worse than looking at the blind spot, because nothing in the blind spot crawls or weeps. The thought of the whole world like that is somehow quite a bit less than comforting.
“What can we do about it, do you think? ”This is George’s best thing. If anyone can suggest a practical course of action, it’ll be him.
“I don’t know. I’m going to have to gather more data and reinterpret the whole thing. ” He gets up in a single smooth move, almost like folding himself to get out. “Keep in touch. ” And then he’s gone, back out to the car that is the first step on his trip home.
* * *
WILLIAM
In the end, all the elaborate gear doesn’t do me that much good.
There’s a whole genus of jokes about running over Elvis, Bigfoot, and the like while on some back road in Tennessee or wherever. I’ve told quite a few myself, and enjoyed songs that set some of the more entertaining ones to music. Unfortunately, when it happens to me, it’s less than entertaining. It’s not that I actually run into Elvis or Bigfoot, but...
Okay, let me take this from the beginning. It takes a week for all my orders to arrive, and by that time it’s clear that something’s really wrong with the world. I’m reminded of some of Michael Moorcock’s stories, where entropy is apparently running out in the 1970s, for no particular reason. It may be a few decades later now, but it’s something like that, if it’s not total hallucination. Man, I wish it were, but if it is, then everything is a hallucination, and I’m not prepared to go around acting as if I think I’m a brain in a jar in some unknowable universe. Better to accept this one getting strange and try to deal with it.
Except, of course, that there’s nothing to be done in dealing with it. I learn from Technocracy feeds that the hematovores seem to have slaughtered each other off. That’s good. But then there are the strange hybrid entities that think of themselves as werewolves fighting wars of their own. And... zombies? Jesus H-for-Haploid Christ, if the world’s going to go insane, could it please do so with a modicum of fucking taste? But I should have expected it to be this stupid and tacky. Something in the world had to make humanity the mess it’s been, after all. I only ever wanted to get beyond it, and now the whole damn show is collapsing to spite me. I’d commit suicide if it wouldn’t just be capitulation. I didn’t give in to schoolyard bullies and I’m not going to give into galactic-scale quantum fluctuations either.
A lot of my former colleagues aren’t so lucky or determined, unfortunately. There’s apparently a plague of psychosis making the rounds on top of everything else, and I keep finding records of agents and high-level operatives suddenly deciding that “they” were right—for some value of “they” or another. It might be the Freemasons, or the Inquisition, or the pagan legacy, or even stupider stuff. Makes them useless to me, in any event. And with so many gone that way, or killed in accidents, or just plain disappeared, the chains of command are collapsing right and left. The Union is pretty damn disunited within a couple weeks.
Back when I was with the suckers, excuse me, with the Council of the Nine Traditions, we used to talk about how things would be so much better if only the evil bad Technocracy could be removed. What a crock of shit that turned out to be. As the Union crumbles, everything that our—a Technocratic “our” this time—forces tried to keep in check breaks loose. For a while I’m on my own, since there are just enough of my fellow Union members whose idea of a suitable response to the crisis is to eliminate all traitors, real and suspected.
That begins to change early one morning, while I’m on the road somewhere west of Albuquerque, looking in my rear-view mirror from time to time at a gray sedan that I’m quite sure contains a Man in White and a couple of his flunkies. There are also a growing number of momentary instabilities to watch, and it would be fascinating to study the breakdown of governing constants at fundamental levels of existence if I could do so without getting shot at. Sunrise is coming in a few minutes, straight ahead of me, and I’ve got my dark glasses ready to put on as soon as I need them. Quite suddenly, something small comes zipping over the hills off to the south, moving at what seems like a really implausible speed if the perspective I’ve got is letting me assess it correctly. Naturally, I assume it isn’t.
Turns out my initial guess was right, though. It’s a private plane, a Cessna or something else with two props, moving right about the speed of sound. As it comes up over those hills, it briefly brushes the lower edge of growing clouds and I can see the bow shock as it passes. There’s no way those props are moving it that fast. It’s got a hidden motor or, I suppose, it’s doing something more exotic.
Behind the plane, I now see, are two smaller planes, too small for any human pilot. They might be cyborg units, or they might be remotes controlled by some operator I haven’t seen yet. They’re slightly faster than the plane and firing at it as they approach. The plane is taking hits but so far without any external sign of major damage. Still, this is not a winning situation for the plane’s pilot. He, she or it (it dawns on me that the plane might also be remotely operated, after all) is handling the thing amazingly well, exploiting the particular strains that operate right below the speed of sound. The plane must be rattling and shaking in really painful ways, but its overall movements are still smooth and steady. The bow shock fades as the plane pulls down below the clouds again, but now I’ve got the thing’s pleasure and can judge its speed for myself.
I decide that this bears some watching, and pull over. The sedan tailing me pulls over a hundred yards back. Its occupants all stay inside, but I see the familiar glint of reflected light on binoculars. I wish I had anything like a full field agent’s gear kit, but this simple high-powered monocular is quite a bit better than nothing. Through its lens, I can see the shadowed form of a pilot-shaped figure in the plane’s cabin. Can’t yet tell if that’s a living human being, an inflatable dummy, or something else, but it at least takes up space, and it looks like it’s moving its arms at the plane’s controls. I lose the plane altogether for a moment when it goes into a very steep dive, its white roof blending into the morning glare, and then pick it up again mere dozens of feet above the desert. The drones follow it in tight spirals.
On their next round of shots, the drones score a whole succession of hits. Now the plane is definitely smoking. The pilot steers closer to the ground and begins a gradual turn to line up with the highway—he’s going to try a landing on the road, I realize. The Man in White and his flunkies realize it, too, and all of them but their driver get out of their car. Dark lenses cover their eyes, while their light suits all take on a rosy glow as direct dawn light strikes us all. Peculiar halos surround the sun, as though the sunlight’s passing through particulates or crystals high in the atmosphere or somewhere beyond. Given the situation, it may w
ell be. The plane gleams in rainbow hues all along its upper surfaces as it swoops down lower.
Landing a plane is one of those moments of absolute distinction. It’s in the air; then it isn’t. It may admittedly bounce a time or two, but that’s just oscillation along the boundary. There’s a clarity of definition in flight that I find appealing in the midst of disordered circumstances like these. The peculiar lighting fades as the sun rises higher, so the plane regains its white hue as it angles over the dusty black asphalt. Eddies of dust and sand kick up as the landing gear reaches down toward ground. Bump, bump, slide, and the plane is rolling smoothly due west, ahead of us. I get out of my car now and pull out the portable chair I’ve been using. The Man in White and his guys stay where they are.
For a moment I’ve forgotten the drones. The pilot of that plane hasn’t. He jumps out—out of the passenger side, not the pilot’s side—well before the plane can come to a stop, with a final tug of the wheel to send the plan careening off the road at nearly a right angle. The drones get off more bursts at the plane, and whatever they’re firing has quite a punch. Depleted uranium slugs perhaps, or something of the sort. The engine starts smoking badly and fluids spew from half a dozen punctured hoses. I strongly doubt that plane’s ever taking off again. Once it’s taken care of, the drones spin around to fire at the pilot.
And he calls out my name. “Bill! It’s Nicolas Rudenault! ”
I will be dipped in shit. What on earth is my old buddy Cyborg Nick doing here, quite a few thousand miles away from his old stomping grounds in Luxembourg? But that voice and gait, alternating sprint and long-distance running steps, add up to an unmistakable combination. Assuming that Nicolas is still my friend, and I don’t have any reason to suspect otherwise right now, I draw my gun and get a bead on the nearer of the drones. It hasn’t designated me as a target yet, so it goes down easy with four bullets in its carapace and rotors while Nicolas tumbles and weaves out of the other drone’s line of fire.
My actions set up a classic conflict-of-assessments glitch in the remaining drone. Its guns swing back and forth between Nicolas and me. Now, this is basic stuff in real-time combat programming, and wouldn’t ordinarily be an issue at all. Script kiddies playing on the Internet can solve this kind of thing, let alone the Union’s remote unit development teams. I suspect that the physical chaos I’ve been noticing is interfering with the basic circuitry. Whatever the cause, the effect is one Nicolas and I manage to exploit quite well with a simple 3: 2 harmonic in our rates of fire. The drone's soon toast. The plane grinds to a halt, still Smoking, and he runs toward me.
Now the goon squad goes into action. If this were a movie, bullets would be pinging off the pavement all around me while I wheel toward safety. In practice, these guys know quite a bit about aiming, and the bullets whiz post me rather than down below me. In about three bounds, Nicolas draws alongside me and then passes right over me. At least two bullets smack into his back with the distinctive ting of lead against impact-resistant plastic. He lands on his feet firing, and the goons withdraw to the shelter of car doors. It doesn’t do them much good. Nicolas can carry much larger caliber weapons than they can, and he can fire his faster than they can fire theirs, and he can just plain move faster than them. By the time he jumps over the driver’s side door and lands on the chest of the Man in White, he’s got no living opposition left. They were all down in his initial volley; the rest was just him making sure.
He pauses to catch his breath, leaning on the sedan’s hood- That kind of exertion does take its toll even with all his metabolic enhancements. I check myself and the chair for signs of serious damage, then wheel up alongside. “Thanks, Nicolas. So what brings you to New Mexico? ”
I should know better than to hand him that sort of a line. He grins broadly. “That plane over there, of course. ” A Nicolas grin is an impressive thing, because his skin stops about where an average man’s hairline would be. Above and behind that, his skull’s been replaced by layers of plastic and circuitry. A hat would cover it, but he doesn’t have one on. The muscles beneath his remaining organic areas are attached to posts within the synthetic replacements, and you can see them move when he makes broad expressions of any sort. It would look like something out of a horror movie if it were bloody; as it is, it’s got a peculiar fascination for me. “Before that, a bigger plane. ”
“Smartass, ” I answer with a smaller smile. He loves the American colloquialisms, for reasons that remain obscure to me.
“What brings you here, then? ” I’d forgotten his penchant for turning questions back on questioners. This retort of his brings it all back to me.
“That van, ” I say, “and other cars before it. But unlike you, I’ll give the rest of the answer. ” He leans forward, his face full of obvious curiosity. I point at the Man in White. “They decided I was a security risk, and then I had the unmitigated gall to survive a facility-destroying disaster, and since then I’ve been on the target list. I’m guessing from your pursuit that you must have run into something similar. ”
“Oh yes. I also had the misfortune to be the only survivor of a terror attack on our North Sea marine analysis platform, and the security force decided that I must thus be implicated. At first I went blindly, but then I decided that if I were going to perish, I might as well indulge a little bit of curiosity on my way out. ”
“And that brought you to New Mexico? ” I’m baffled.
“Oh yes. " He’s clearly waiting for me to ask.
“All right, Nicolas. Tell me. What brought you to New Mexico, in particular? ”
“Roswell! ” Another big face-stretching grin.
I make a sour face. “You’re looking for fucking little gray men? ”
“No, no, nothing of the sort. I’ve seen enough of the files on genuine extraterrestrials to know that that’s just popular madness and the superstition of crowds. I just want to know what really is there, behind the Union defenses you and I both know are there. ”
“Hmm, ” I say, marking time as I think about it. “Ah, what the hell? It’s not like there’s really anything interesting waiting for me in Los Angeles. Get in. ” Five minutes later we’re heading back east.
* * *
ROBERT I SPEND THE NEXT WHILE WANDERING IN A TRANCE. I HAVE ONLY THE DIMMEST MEMORIES OF THE RUBBISH GUIDING ME, SEEING TO IT THAT I EAT AND SLEEP WHEN I MUST AND KEEPING ME FROM DOING ANYTHING LIKE WANDERING OUT INTO THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD. HOW LONG THE TRANCE IS, I’M NOT SURE, THOUGH I HAVE THE IMPRESSION THAT AT LEAST PART OF THE WANDERING TAKES PLACE IN THE SPIRIT WORLD, WHERE TIME IS MORE NEGOTIABLE EVEN WHEN THE UNIVERSE ISN’T ABOUT TO END.
When I come to again, I find myself thinking about “myself’ and a lot of the implications and inferences tied up in it. There is significance in our experiences with the magi and the Red Star that I doubt my comrades would think of. The Technocrat is the slave of his worldview; if he thinks about multiplicity of soul, it will only be in the context of neuropathology, or networking, or something like that. He’s likely to regard numerical symbolism either as reflections of simple defects in human perception or as manifestations of a physical structure that has no meaningful connection to human awareness. But the universe is neither a derangement nor unliving, whatever he might think. The Chinese woman might pick up on some of the significance a lot faster, but then she’s likely to incorporate it into her own cultural matrix, and it’s clear to me that what’s happening to us now is well beyond the boundaries of any single culture.
It takes two items in a set to establish identity: this, and the thing that is not this. The other. It takes three to break the stalemate and suggest the possibilities for growth. There’s Hegel’s thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, but that’s not the only show in town. There’s the Christian formulation of the eternal Father, the eternal Son, and the Holy Spirit proceeding eternally from both, and there are indeed spiritual unions that work like that. There’s the trinity of fundamental powers—creation, stability, and destruction or chaos.
Three is the smallest number of a system.
So what’s the system of those three magi, I ask myself as I stroll along some unfamiliar state highway, heading generally north. I cast some questions out into the ethereal realm where answers take on tangible form. I can’t travel well there myself, but I can ask the bat and mosquito spirits to search on my behalf, offering blood to the mosquitoes and captured bugs (not including the mosquitoes) to the bats. I know vaguely that Porthos is important in the Oder of Hermes’ history, but the others were strangers to me.
How about myself and the other two living ones, then? I’m not a child and Ming is not a crone, but I believe that William is older than me, and Ming older than him. Young adulthood, adulthood, adulthood shading into old age, perhaps? For all my professed (and real) independence, I am on some level part of the Nine Traditions. William is a member of the Technocratic Union. Does Ming stand in for the families of independent magicians? We come perilously close to being a microcosm of those who work with awakened will in the modern day....
I wonder if there are other trines like ours. We might, after all, be subjects in a cosmic experiment: take three, mix, see what happens, compare to the results of giving similar treatment to another three. I don’t know how I’d go about hunting for such trios, though, and if there is anyone performing that kind of experiment, my duty is presumably to be most fully myself.
There are constant stirrings in the fields to each side of the road—animals, and things less thoroughly material. It feels like the Gauntlet’s weakening. Small spirits push across it and ride small animals. Occasionally, larger spirits gust through, flap around like insects trying to get out of a summer house at night, and either do manage to return or fall asleep to wait for more favorable circumstances. It’s a strange sort of company, but the vitality of it all renews my own sense of engagement with life after that second encounter with the Red Star and those ghastly ruins. It's very hard to think of all this passing soon, but at least I get to enjoy it before it does. The passing spirits give an extra sheen to it all, like rainbows in the midst of summer storms. It’s a good feeling.
World of Darkness - Time of Judgement - Mage Page 21
