I bet they figure we can’t hold up our end. Huh. We did it before, we can do it again. You bet.
“Yeah, well, it’ll still be here in a couple of days,” she said. “From the look of it, you’ll have a whole bush full of flowers you can admire. Right now, you’n me’n Beth have got some tracking to do. Beth figures she knows where some of the witches around here live.”
“Not all witches,” Beth corrected. “Or at least, that’s what they’ll tell you. They run the spectrum from ultra-Christian to the absolute opposite.
But they’re all psychic and they’re strong, and I’m pretty sure once they hear what we’re up against, they’ll be willing to work together. At least, I hope so. There’s a lot of rivalry and a couple of feuds we’ll have to deal with.”
Kayla heard an unspoken undercurrent and asked, sharply, “What’s the catch?”
Beth shook her head and sighed. “The catch, me dear young child, is that most of these people range from—ah-_eccentrjc, to pure, unadulterated out-there. I’m hoping they’re enough in touch with the planet to believe they can’t vibrate their way out of this one without help. But— honey, these people are the nuts and flakes in the bowl of granola.”
“Great,” Kayla replied as flippantly as she could manage, while Sandy got to her feet. “In that case, it’ll be just like a family reunion. Everybody got change for the BART?”
Beth rubbed her temples and tried not to snap. Behind her, Kayla and Sandy stood in respectful silence.
“But the Universe is a friendly place, dear,” Sister Ruth chided gently. “You simply haven’t communicated properly with these entities. I’m sure that once you talk to them, they’ll understand that they mustn’t hurt anyone when they come over to Our Side.”
Right. And Ted Bundy is a real sweetheart, once you get to know him. Ruthie, you’d sign Charlie Manson’s parole petition. But Beth didn’t allow a shadow of her real feelings to show on her face—or get past her defenses. Sister Ruth had an erratic, but unfortunately accurate, ability to read people—and this was not the time to let her read what Beth thought of her “the Universe is a friendly place” drivel.
“Once we have the time, we’ll do that—” she promised glibly. “In fact, I don’t see any reason why we can’t put you in charge of the project. You’re so good at communicating with the non-human spirit-entities.”
Sister Ruth beamed with pride, but Beth continued before she could say anything and get off on her own Cosmic Muffin tangent. She did not need the guided tour to the spirit-world to get in the way of the real business. “Right now, though—unless we can stop this quake before it starts, we won’t have the time. In fact,” she continued grimly, “the visions of the future that we’ve been granted show most of us dead. Including me. The entities aren’t the real problem, Ruth, the quake is. According to the seer I’ve consulted, it’s the quake that kills most of the people.”
Sister Ruth frowned slightly, and Beth knew she’d inadvertently tripped another button. Oh gods. Karma. Karma and predestination.She hurried on, keeping Ruth from getting off on the “no one dies until it is time” kick. How do I get out of this one? Ah—I know.
“Sister Ruth, please remember, this isn’t a natural quake. It’s being created, by those military men over in Dublin Labs.” She paused to let that sink in. “I know. I was there; I saw the machine. It’s no more natural than if one of them dropped a bomb on the city. These people in Dublin Labs have no compunction about cutting everyone’s karma short.”
Yeah, and you signed on every petition to close them down since the sixties, whether or not you knew what it was about.
Sister Ruth hesitated a moment. “Dublin Labs? Oh dear. Oh my…they do horrible things in there. And I know that what we ignorantly call Good and Evil are just parts of the Cosmic Balance—and I’m sure that there may be a place even for people like that in the Balance—but they do horrid things in there, cutting up poor little bunnies and white mice. Making those awfril nuclear bombs and lasers. Taking over our minds with Rays. And there is such a thing as Free Will… one can choose to be Wrong Minded…”
“I’m sure that’s exactly what they’ve done,” Beth said firmly. “Really, Sister Ruth, it’s your duty to help us stop them so that they learn the lesson that not all their machines and power can prevail against the Cosmic Balance. It’s the kind of lesson they really need to learn.”
Dear gods, I hope I’m making all the right noises, she thought frantically. She’s about a dozen bricks short of a full load, but she’s really powerful—one reason why nothing’s ever actually hurt her. And we need her.
“We need you, Sister Ruth,” she pleaded. “I can’t tell you how much. You’ll have to work with a few people you may not agree with—but do you know, I think your wonderful example in this hour of crisis may be just what they need to see the Light. Jeffrey Norman, for instance—you just might be the one to show him the Cosmic Way with your shining leadership.”
The simultaneous appeal to vanity, responsibility, and the opportunity to show up some of the people she despised most in the psychic community was too much for Sister Ruth to resist. She agreed to come, with much simpering and disavowal of her own powers.
Second verse, same song.
New setting though; instead of ruffles and flowered cotton, she and her crew were surrounded by red velvet and black leather. Instead of potted plants and birdcages ful of budgies, there was a microcomputer and a sleek, hi-tech stereo. Instead of genteel, gentle middle-class, the place reeked of money.
Instead of an overweight myopic woman in a flowered caftan, they made their pitch to a goateed, middle-aged cynic in leather jeans. Black, of course. Like his sofa and chairs.
“Look, Jeff, you’ve got a choice,” Beth said rudely. “You can help us— or you can watch everything you own go down in a pile of rubble.”
Although Jeff—a self-proclaimed Satanist—sat back on his leather sofa with his hands laced casually behind his head, not all the control he thought he had over himself kept his body from tensing up. Nor did it keep him from glancing at some of the more expensive appointments of his living-room out of the comer of his eye.
“How long did you say we have?” he asked cautiously, and Beth could almost see the little wheels turning in his head, as he tried to calculate how much stuff he could load into a trailer before the zero hour.
“Under forty-eight hours at this point,” she said honestly. “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to rent a trailer or a truck on short notice, but it isn’t easy. The things are usually booked pretty well in advance. You could probably waste about twenty-four of those hours just trying to find one.”
Now she could tell that he was trying to figure how big a bribe it would take to rent a truck out from under someone.
“Besides,” she continued, “you’ve got a lot sunk into this condo. I know you think your insurance will pay for it—” she leaned forward, intently “—but let me clue you in on a little fact of life. Insurance companies are in the biz to make money, not lose it, And the last couple years have been real bad for insurance companies. Lots of disasters.” Now it was her turn to lean back, and spread her hands wide. “We’re talking a Richter nine or even ten quake here. With a disaster of that magnitude, the city is gonna be flat. Every vision we’ve seen has shown major damage to every building in sight. From the looks of things, you wouldn’t even be able to rescue more than a couple of suitcases worth of clothing. I’ll tell you right now— that insurance company of yours will declare bankruptcy before they pay out. They all will. They can’t affordlosses like that. Maybe the Feds will bail them out—but after all the Savings and Loan bailouts and the hurricanes and tornadoes and floods, I wouldn’t count on getting more than ten cents on the dollar. And that’s a fact, Jack.”
She watched his face pale for a moment, watched a tic pulse in his cheek as he calculated odds. He had sold insurance at one point in his life. He sometimes joked that this was how he had become a Satanist in the
first place. From selling insurance to sel1ing your soul wasn’t that big a step…
Actually he became a Satanist partially because it suits his cynical, hedonistic attitude, and partially because it’s a good way to part fools from their cash. As witness this condo.
He didn’t like the numbers his own calculations were coming up with; Beth read that in the narrowing of his eyes. Finally he leaned forward, took an oversized deck of cards from the handcarved ebony box on the teakwood table between them, and called upon his court of last resort. As he shuffled them, his hands trembled a little.
“I hate to admit it, but I couldn’t figure why all my readings kept telling people to get out of town this week,” he said, half to himself.
But he is high-psi. I’ll give him that. His clients may be fools, but he does give them what they overpay for.
Like most psychics, Jeff was a little too good; he couldn’t read for himself, for what he wanted to see would skew the reading off the true. And he was too proud to go to someone else for a reading. Which was probably why he’d missed seeing the quake for himself.
He stopped shuffling, evened up the pack, and laid out the cards; the Tower of Destruction occupied a prominent place. Swords were everywhere, most reversed—including the Princess. It was the single most negative reading Beth had ever seen with any Tarot deck, much less the Crowley.
So even if he runs—which is what I bet he was asking—he’s screwed to the wall.
“Shit.” He picked up the cards of the Crowley deck carefully, and put it back in its little ebony shrine. Only then did he look back up at her.
“All right,” he said with resignation. “When and where? And what do you want me to bring?”
The sun set over the Bay, dull red in a cloudy sky, leaving them still on the hunt; one short of a full thirteen, with no spares or backups. Beth trudged wearily down into the BART station, with Kayla and Sandy trailing behind.
She stood staring at the map for a while, her eyes fixed on the YOU ARE HERE spot without really seeing it. Behind her, elf and human fidgeted restlessly in the way of teenage young.
Was I ever that young? She thought back to endless, sullen hours of playing the same tapes over and over at ear-shattering volume while native diggers cast quizzical glances at her while they followed her parents’ direction. Or squirming in stiff wooden seats while one or the other read papers to an audience of fossils stiffer than the seats, when all she wanted was a chance to get out of there and Shop in Civilization.
Yeah, I guess I was.
“Okay, guys,” she said finally. “I’ve got an idea. It’s a long-shot, but there’s two groups meeting tonight over at UC that tend to attract high-psis. Some of our missing persons probably belong to one or the other. One advantage is that both groups bring bodies in from off-campus. The other is that the devotees of both tend to be fanatic about their hobbies.”
“What is the disadvantage?” Melisande asked. “We know you by now. You never state an advantage without there being a disadvantage.”
Beth shrugged. “Only the usual with hobbyists. They tend to take their hobby a little too seriously. That’s why they meet on the same night; the real fanatics on both sides don’t want their members to ‘waste their time’ with the rival group’s activities.”
Melisande sighed. “Like Jeff and Sister Ruth.”
“Exactly.” Now that she’d decided to take the plunge into the wilds of Berserkely, Beth wanted to get it over with and get out of there. “Are you game?”
“Lead on, McDuff,” Kayla replied, gesturing grandly. The train to the campus area pulled up, just as she straightened. “See? The gods are smiling upon us.”
“I sure hope so,” Beth muttered, and ran for the train.
“See anyone you recognize?” Beth asked Kayla, as the young healer took a slightly more aggressive stance, and Melisande tried to shrink behind both of them.
There were fifty-odd people in the room, and most of them wore expressions of faint hostility. They also wore creative variations on medieval and Renaissance clothing.
Except for the half-dozen Costuming Nazis, who wore completely authenticclothing, and expressions of complete hostility.
“They probably figure we’re from the Women’s Lib meeting down the hall,” Kayla observed, absently. “Uh—yeah. The guy in the green and black tights with the great ass, the woman that looks like a Rose Parade float, and the chick with the pregnant guitar. They were all at the conference.”
“Sandy?” Beth asked. The elf peeked out from behind her shoulder. “The young man in the particolored hose, the woman in the Elizabethan farthingale, and the girl with the lute.”
“They’re all strongly Gifted,” the elf assured her. “And imperfectly shielded.” She squinted a little. “Unless I’m greatly mistaken, the woman and the young man are related. And I think I see a Celtic knotwork embroidery pattern on the woman’s gown that used to be used as an identifying agent among the devotees of the Old Religion about twenty or twenty-five years ago.”
“Oh really?” Beth’s eyes narrowed, but she couldn’t make out anything special amid all the decoration on the gown. “If you’re right, we might have hit paydirt.” She tumed her attention back to the speaker on the dais. “I think they’re going to break for refreshments in a bit. We’ll move in then. Sandy, you try for the lute-girl; Kayla, you take the guy and I’ll take the Architectural Monument.”
They waited, patiently, enduring the glares from the mortally offended, until the Seneschal finally ran out of wind. When people began leaving their seats, Kayla and Beth headed for the woman and the young man, while Melisande took a lateral to intercept the musician before she could join the others who were gathering in a corner.
“Hi,” Beth said cautiously, as she stepped in front of the Farthingale, forcing the woman to stop. “You don’t know me—but you do know a friend of mine. Her name is Elizabet—”
“And she’s the teacher of that charming and obstinate little child who’s trying to back my son into a comer,” the woman said, with a faint smile. “Since you don’t have that nasty ‘desperately mundane’ look of those goons that were lurking about the conference, I assume you must be all right. Or has Elizabet sent you to warn me about them?”
“Uh—sort of” Out of the comer of her eye, Beth watched the lute-girl shaking her head violently at whatever Melisande had told her. Her face was white, and her hands clutched the neck of the lute like a lifeline. “Listen, this is awfully complicated, and well—”
“I know just the place.” The woman waved at her son, who nodded at Kayla and gestured at her to precede him with frill High Court grace.
Wonder if there’s a touch of elven blood in there somewhere?
All three of them followed the woman out into the hail, to a little alcove with a pair of loveseats. The Farthingale needed one all by herself; the son took up a seat on the arm of the sofa, and Kayla and Beth took the other seat.
“By the way, I’m Marge Bailey. Which was not the name I used for the conference, if you’re interested.” The woman smiled again, this time wryly. “Call me paranoid if you like, but I’ve always had a suspicion that some day some government goons would show up at one of these things and start taking names and addresses. So I only use the SCA post office box, and one of my old persona names.”
Beth grimaced. “Just off hand, I’d say that this time your caution was entirely appropriate…”
Fifteen minutes later, Marge and her son Craig were pale with shock, and Beth was dry-mouthed and talked out. She nodded to Kayla, who took over.
“We’ve got a plan,” she said. “We think we can head this thing off. But we need—”
“A circle,” Marge interrupted, leaning forward, her eyes afire with intensity. “A circle. The kind the witches of England gathered in to thwart the Armada.”
“Wow!” Kayla went round-eyed. “I didn’t know that! Yeah, that’s exactly what—”
“When and where?” Craig said. “We�
�ll be there; Dad’ll come, and maybe we can get a couple of others.” He took a deep breath. “We knew something wasn’t right; we’ve been getting signs for weeks. But none of us are real good at prediction. That’s why we went to the conference in the first place; we figured if there was anyone who’d know what was up, he’d show up there.”
Beth felt a great weight lift from her shoulders. This was her thirteenth body—and one, maybe two spares. “Mount Tam—if you’ve been up there, you know the place. As soon after sunset as you can manage.”
Marge nodded. “No problem. Did you plan on checking the Paper-gamer’s Club meeting for some more recruits?”
This time it was Beth’s turn to be surprised. “Uh, yes. Why?”
Marge chuckled. “Because my husband’s in there. Ask someone to find Chuck Bailey for you; he’ll round up the couple of gamers with—ah—esoteric talents. That should save you some time.”
Beth didn’t know quite what to say. “Marge—thank you. I think you just bought us our chance at making this work.”
Marge shook her head. “Well, I grew up reading old J.R.R. and the Norse sagas—I always wanted to be Galadriel, the Ringbearer or another Beowuif. You know what they say about being careful what you ask for.” She recovered some of her color, and managed a weak chuckle. “I suspect you’ve had a time convincing some of the others to get involved.”
Beth nodded. “I’m still not sure why you agreed so easily.”
This time Marge Bailey laughed out loud. “My dear Beth, it’s really quite simple. I may be crazy, but there’s one thing that I’m not.”
“What’s that?” Kayla asked.
“Stupid.” Marge rose majestically. “I’d better get back before the others think you’ve recruited me for your biker gang. And we will see you tomorrow night.”
Summoned to Tourney Page 22
