by Sam Cabot
“They can’t. Like the elders who’ve always done the Ceremony for the children, they don’t know who can Shift until it happens. But the elders knew what to do. How to help, how to control it once they saw it starting. Edward and van Vliet have no idea.”
“Is that what went wrong, then? The eagle-man I saw. He can’t . . . He’ll be like that forever?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen that. The stories say it can happen that way, though.” He threw back three aspirin. “But that’s just part of it. The other part is, these are adults.” A hawk wheeled against the gray sky. Michael framed his thoughts. “To children, the world is magical. I don’t mean unicorns and rainbows. I don’t even mean benign. I mean, causation isn’t obvious. Or a possibility. My people tell children to walk slowly in the dark because that’s when the ghosts come out. If you run you might bump one and anger him, and he’ll hurt you. So if a child runs at night and falls and breaks his leg, he’s perfectly willing to believe he offended a ghost and the ghost threw him down. An adult would believe he couldn’t see and he tripped. The child will move slowly at night from now on. The adult will buy a flashlight and if he’s in a hurry, he’ll run.” Michael looked over at Livia. “But what if there really are ghosts? The child’s learned a different way of being in the world now, and it’ll matter. He won’t offend any more ghosts and he’ll be fine. The running adult, even with his flashlight, will break his leg again when he bumps another ghost.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“I don’t really believe in ghosts. But I try not to run in the dark. And I know I can become a wolf. I learned that when I was too young to understand that it was impossible, or even strange. I could, my friends couldn’t. One of my friends on the rez, he had blue eyes. None of the rest of us did. In my mind, those phenomena were equal. Do you see? I was told I’d been given a gift, that it was to benefit our people, that I’d have to learn to control it, that I couldn’t talk about it except with Grandfather and Edward. None of this seemed odd to me. I learned how to live in the world in both skins, before I was old enough to have established any other way to live.”
“You don’t think adults can learn what you did as a child?”
“I don’t know. I want to think they can, but there you have the curse of science—I can’t believe things just because I want to.” He drank more coffee. It wasn’t melting the ice inside him but it was warming his arms, his legs. “Livia, your people. You Change as adults. Is it always easy?”
She met his eyes, then looked back to the road. “It’s never easy. For new Noantri, there’s an initiation, a period of learning. Sometimes it doesn’t help at all. Some people are overwhelmed from the beginning by their new, heightened senses. They never learn to filter or ignore. Others seem to adjust without difficulty, but slowly it grows on them: eternity is a very long time.”
“What happens to them?”
“Some go mad. They have to be protected and cared for. Others . . . Spencer told you there are ways we can die. Suicide is a problem among us.”
They rode in silence for a time. Finally, Livia asked, “Will the mask help? Or do they only think it will?”
“It will. The real one, if they can find it. If they’ve done the Ceremony seven times, conservatively figuring fifty people each time, and had four responses, that’s just over one percent. It’s not high enough. It should be closer to one and a half or even two. Van Vliet’s obviously good but he’s not good enough. He needs more powerful tools. Why are you smiling?”
“The way you rattled those numbers off. In case I didn’t know you were a scientist. But Michael, the one percent, the one and a half. How do you know those numbers are right?”
“It’s my work. It’s always been my work.”
46
Michael had fallen silent again. Part of Livia wanted to let him be, to let him digest what they’d learned and choose a course of action. But she felt a growing sense of urgency. “You say this is your work,” she said. “But you study smallpox, Spencer told me.”
“That’s how I get grants. I wouldn’t get far if I told the NIH I’m looking for the werewolf gene.” He finished his coffee. “And on one level it’s true. Smallpox took a disproportionate toll on Shifters. It’s a hard trail to follow. Whites weren’t keeping records of who died where, just shoveling them into mass graves as fast as they fell, but some of the tribes did, in the wampum, in the buffalo robes, in the stories. I’ve spent years piecing it together. The same way blacks are more likely to develop sickle-cell anemia, or Ashkenazi Jews, Tay-Sachs, people who carry the Shifter gene seem to have even less ability than the native population as a whole to fight off smallpox. I’ve found if I follow the virus, I can follow the gene.”
“So your work is the gene? What you told us back at Spencer’s about the research—”
“It’s my research. No one else is doing it and no one knows. My whole life’s been about this. But Edward won’t hear me.” His voice wavered; then he went on. “My thought was to be able to identify the children. If I could find them, if I knew . . . At the same time I’ve been searching out people who can do the Ceremony. I’ve found some. They’re all old, so in a way I’m racing the clock. But in a way, not.”
“How, not?”
“When I first told you about the Ceremony, about the specific emotional state, you brought up neuroaesthetics. The brain’s and the body’s response to art—to anything—it’s all physical. The cause isn’t the point. It’s like . . . You can put a potato on the fire and cook it from the outside in, or you can put it in the microwave and cook it from the inside out. It’s cooked either way.”
“But cooked differently.”
“In a way that matters? I’m not sure. If I can identify the biochemistry, what goes on in me as I Shift, maybe I can give a child that same experience without the Ceremony.”
“Or an adult.”
“No. Just because it would be controlled still doesn’t mean an adult could handle it.”
“But a child . . .” She trailed off, unsure how to put into words what was bothering her.
Michael looked over at her. “You’re worried it’s unethical. Interesting, isn’t it? When it’s demystified, when it’s just a physical state and not the magical result of some romantic ancient ritual, it’s different. If I chant and dance and a girl turns into a deer, she’s fulfilling her fate. What the Buddhists call her dharma. If it happens because I gave her a shot, it’s a bizarre kind of human experimentation. Well, don’t worry. I’m not nearly there yet.” He rubbed his eyes. “And I’ll never get there if Edward and van Vliet aren’t stopped.”
“Why not? Why is your work and their . . . whatever they’re doing, even connected?”
“You don’t see it?” He gave another laugh, but a humorless one. “That’s because you’re not American. Do you know much about our history—my people’s history, Indian history, I mean?”
“I’m sorry, no. The art that comes into my area is from early in the discovery of the continent.”
“Right there, that’s a loaded word, ‘discovery.’ We ‘discovered’ this continent fifteen thousand years ago when we crossed the land bridge from Siberia. When Europeans first came we were curious but not impressed. They had oceangoing ships but they couldn’t paddle a canoe. They didn’t know how to hunt or farm this land. We helped them out the way we helped each other, and you can see where that got us. We were destroyed. By the nineteenth century we were hunted for fun.”
Livia made no response. What could she say?
“Now,” Michael said, “now there’s a museum in Washington and everyone claims to have a Cherokee grandma. We’re romantic figures. Mother Earth, medicine men, the Seven Generations—no one has any idea what the hell they’re talking about but boy oh boy, do they admire us. But in the 1970s when Indians started demanding rights, like women and blacks, that didn’t go over well. At
Wounded Knee, on my own rez at Akwesasne, there were gun battles, armed standoffs. It’s what Spencer said. It’s what happened to your people until your Concordat was signed. Once it’s known that this is an Indian gene, once it’s clear that all Shifters, even if they look white or black, must carry Indian blood or it wouldn’t be happening, once the Shifters all go mad or die—or kill—Jesus Christ, it’ll be open season on us again.”
Livia went cold. She flashed back to last fall, to being told by the Conclave that she must not fail at the task she’d been given. She heard Counsellor Rosa Cartelli saying that if she did, the fires will come again. She hadn’t wasted a moment imagining that Cartelli might be wrong.
“And you want to talk about human experimentation?” Michael said. “A gene that gives this Power? Just wait. The NSA, the CIA, whoever the hell, they’ll be all over it.”
Quietly, she said, “I can’t argue. It’s an ugly picture but I’m afraid it’s true. Michael? Just now, when we went back to see van Vliet, and he wasn’t there. What were you going to do if we found him?”
For a long time, Michael didn’t speak. Then: “You were right, wanting to go after Edward. I shouldn’t have let him go.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was thinking with my heart. Hoping to find a way . . . But now I understand: they’re not deluded, ineffectual dreamers. They’re dangerous and they have to be stopped.”
“Stopped, how?” Livia asked, but she knew. “Michael, he’s your brother.”
Miles passed in silence. She asked, “If you can’t find them? If they move their operation, do the Ceremony somewhere else?”
“They want the mask. If they get it they’ll do a Ceremony as soon as they can. If it succeeds, they’ll go underground, traveling rez to rez. As van Vliet has more Shifts, as his confidence grows, his power will grow. Soon he won’t need the mask. He’ll pass it to someone else and he’ll teach others. He’s dying, Livia. Edward told me. But if he teaches, if they can see it happen while they learn from him . . . Ivy Nell’s fire. In her dream. I don’t know if it was real or metaphorical. Or both. This could be it. It could be coming.”
“If they don’t find the mask, would it stop them?”
“It might, because they think it would. They think their failures are related to van Vliet’s weakness. The same way confidence will make his power grow, self-doubt will diminish it. It’s not magic. When you’re uncertain, you stutter, you stumble, you sweat. He won’t perform the Ceremony perfectly and he won’t get as many Shifts, even partial ones, if he’s not sure of his power.” Michael paused. “And then he’ll die.”
“And then? What about Edward?”
“He’ll need to find someone else who can perform the Ceremony. I’ll need to find him before he does.”
Livia didn’t ask again what would happen then. “Then we need to find the mask. Or at least be sure they don’t.”
“Yes.” Michael blew out a weary breath. “But I have no idea how.”
“I don’t either. But there’s someone who might be able to help.”
47
Rosa Cartelli sat on the Via Veneto in the sidewalk café of Harry’s Bar. Even in the wan light and cool air of a February afternoon she enjoyed this place, had come here frequently to take a late-day hot chocolate—or in the heat of summer, a Campari—since the first confectioner’s, the Golden Gate, had opened on this corner in 1918.
Rosa Cartelli was among the Eldest of her people. Vividly, she remembered the first time she’d seen Rome. She’d arrived in what present usage referred to as the third century, in the year Diocletian became emperor. Much travel was behind her and much ahead at that point, and like most of her kind she kept, by and large, to sparsely settled areas. She avoided her fellow humans until a hunger she could neither understand nor control drove her to feed; afterwards she’d retreat again to regret, self-loathing, and solitude. It was a life of heartache, wary loneliness, and physical discomfort, a life she did not understand to be endless until she could no longer count the years since she herself had been attacked by a man none of the members of her household, or any of the citizens of Uruk, had ever seen before. She was not young then, and her children and grandchildren feared for her life, but her recovery was rapid and complete. More than complete. She grew stronger, more able, more adept at every task; but as she became powerless to avoid her dark desire for the blood of others, as she watched her family age around her, she was forced to admit the gods had treated her with a different hand. Eventually her grandchildren began to have children of their own and they in turn neared the age of marriage, while she did not, any longer, change at all. As people in the town began to whisper and to turn from her, she understood she could not remain in the Mesopotamian valley that had until then been her entire world.
One night, without goodbyes, she left her loved ones and walked into the hills. The world, she found in the centuries that followed, was much, much larger than she had ever imagined. She saw great swaths of it, from the early dynastic towns of what would become the towering Chinese empire to the cold, rough fishing villages along the North Sea. Then one day she came by ship to the center of the Roman Empire, for no reason other than that she had not been there before. The hot and dusty hills, with their umbrella pines and vineyards, captured her heart. She stayed; eventually, as she had to, she left; but throughout the centuries she continued to return. It was here, outside the walls of the city proper in the dock quarter now called Trastevere, among peoples of all the Old World’s races coming and going, that she first became aware of others of her kind.
Eleven centuries after her first sight of these hills, ten after her first meeting with others like herself, the Council of Constance and the signing of the Concordat made it possible for her people—known to themselves, by then, as the Noantri—to settle permanently and together, if they chose. She did, taking the name Rosa Cartelli, leaving Rome after that only for the periodic Cloaking Noantri life required. As her formerly scattered, furtive people began to create the Laws and structures that would define their lives henceforth, Rosa Cartelli engaged wholeheartedly in the debates and deliberations that helped build these systems and their uses. Her eloquence, passion, and clear thinking had brought forth from their acknowledged leader, the Pontifex, an invitation to take a seat on the newly formed Conclave. Though many Counsellors chose to serve for a time and then return to private life after some decades or centuries, Rosa Cartelli had remained in service to her people. She sat now on the right hand of the Pontifex, acknowledged as second only to him in wisdom and fineness of perception.
She was, however, with all that, still a fairly private person who would rather not be interrupted over her chocolate and biscotti. Thus when her cell phone rang on this afternoon in Harry’s Bar and the screen informed her the call was from the Conclave offices, she considered not answering. Duty won out, however; the Noantri administration rarely contacted a Counsellor except in a situation of importance.
“Salve. Sum Rosa Cartelli,” she said, speaking in Latin as was the custom when discussing affairs of the Community.
“Salve, Consiliaria,” replied the familiar voice of Filippo Croce, the Pontifex’s private secretary. Continuing in Latin, he told her, “Livia Pietro has called from New York. She wishes to speak to you.”
“Livia Pietro? What on earth could she want?” Five months ago the task Pietro had been set was the most urgent business in the Noantri world. Any communication from her then was given the utmost priority. But that situation had been resolved satisfactorily, and Pietro had gone back to her uneventful life in the study of art history.
“I don’t know, Counsellor. She said her concerns were private, to be shared only with you. I have her on the line and can send the call through, or I can tell her you’re unavailable if you prefer.”
“No, it’s all right, I’d better speak with her. I can’t imagine what it’s about—you say she’s
in New York?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Filippo. Please put her through.”
A pause, an electronic hum, and then, “Professor Pietro, here is Counsellor Cartelli. I’ll absent myself now, and the line is secure. Salve.”
In the early days of this technology, until not long ago, one would at this point have heard a click. Now nothing but a subtle silence announced Filippo’s departure.
“Signora Cartelli?” came Livia Pietro’s voice, speaking Italian. “Thank you for taking my call.”
Rosa switched to Italian, also. “I must admit to a certain concern, Professor Pietro. If you wish to discuss an issue of importance to the Community, a protocol exists that you, of all people, know very well. Thus I wonder why you insisted upon contacting me individually. If you have something else in mind, my perplexity is all the more. Tell me, how can I be of service?”
“I’m afraid your concern is justified, Signora. The issue I’m calling to discuss is of enormous importance to the Noantri, but I don’t feel I can talk about it at this point with anyone except yourself.”
“I don’t recall us being the closest of confidantes.” Rosa signaled the waiter for another chocolate. “Please explain yourself.”
“Yes. I assume Signor Croce told you I’m in New York. Spencer George and Father Thomas Kelly are here, also.”
“An embarrassment of riches for New York.”
Pietro didn’t respond to the mild barb. “We’ve met two men here. Not Noantri, but also not Unchanged.”
“Don’t speak in riddles, Professor. It’s tiresome.”
“I apologize. But when I tell you—” Pietro took an audible breath and began again. “Signora Cartelli, these men are what the legends call shapeshifters.”
During the long pause that followed, a motorino buzzed up the street and a truck rumbled the other way. Rosa stared at the ancient bricks of the Porta Pinciana, recalling the hot summer when it had been built. “Livia Pietro, be very careful what you say. These are not concepts to be trifled with. Down the ages many people have claimed many abilities. Some have known themselves to be liars, while others have believed their own words. All, though, have turned out to be charlatans. America is no different from the Old World in this, except that the impostors may be both more persuasive, and unfamiliar to you. Whatever these men are claiming—”
