by Mike Ashley
His true archenemies, he knew, were the progenitors of the worlds lightworkers – the cave masters. They were the first humans who, a hundred thousand years ago and more, had learned to enter the raith and identify with the radiant diamondshape of the original light, the creation fire in its first instant out of the singularity that had birthed the cosmos. Their initial link with this preterit force, when all things were pure light, spanned time. The cave masters’ early spells had revealed the secrets of fire, songdances, healing, and – as their raith-work widened through the ages – stoneworking, planting and the wondrous mystery of metals with its powers of purity and combination. Their identification with the light expanded and cooled into the shapes of all things and made them the natural nemesis of the Dark One.
Time, that thingless word, was an illusion. Arthur learned that in the twentieth century and began to use that potent knowledge to reach across time and strike directly at his enemies with his raith power. And they, successively, strove to reach forward into their future and destroy him before he annihilated them and all the dreamwork humanity had made of the cold light in the void of space.
But subversive attacks against the Dark One in the raith were useless, for the Dark One was dark – he belonged to the black spaces, and no one could see him if he did not want to be seen. To be effective, the lightworkers had to focus their attack in the physical world. And so they employed channelers – or, as the cave masters called them, the adepts – gentle people usually unaware that they served as antennae for the power of the cave masters. Through the adepts, the lightworkers found their way to Arthur in the world and then attacked him in the raith. By distracting his raith-self they had several times come close to destroying his physical body. But with each assault, the Dark One grew cleverer.
He learned about the cave masters, and he discovered how to use their adepts as conduits into the far past, where he could strike directly at the extinct race whose intelligence continued fostering civilization through the raith. If the cave masters had their way, war, disease, even involuntary death would be abolished. The human genome project existed because of their hope to shape healthier, more intelligent people. With the help of the lightworkers, humans could eventually carry their archons to the stars, and then the dreaming would never end. The torment for him and those like him who embodied the dark would be forever.
The latest adept arrived as a word-processor from Indiana, Eleanor Chevsky, divorced and with no children, whom his mental health foundation had hired. The symmetry law that had created the Dark One also allowed only one adept to exist at a time, and there was never any doubt for Arthur when the cave masters selected that time. Usually a blur of dizziness cued him to the process. A mess of vertigo flung him into a chair the day that Eleanor began channeling the lightworkers’ murderous intent.
She was five ten, a natural blonde whose gray eyes had a slight slant, as though she were part Asian or up to some mischief. Voluminously bosomed and globe-bottomed as any goddess, she caught the fancy of most of the men and the envy of many of the women in the main office, who assumed her rapid promotion to Stillman’s personal data manager had little to do with her computer skills.
In fact, Arthurs relationship with Eleanor was solely business, a job that situated her where he could watch her and wait for the cave masters to open her as a channel. She was a dangerous adversary, because she had no notion of her role as a raith-warrior. Yet, this sword cut both ways. Here was another chance for Arthur to push deep into the Ice Age when cortical complexity reached its peak with the large-brained Neanderthals, the first hominids to enter the raith. He kept her close and waited. Not that he wasn’t sexually attracted to her himself. Over the ages, his sex drive waned and flourished in long, arrhythmic cycles. Lately, since the revelation of atomic weapons, his sexual appetite had been insatiable. But he denied himself Eleanor – for the time being. He needed her working in the world and accessible, a lure for the cave masters.
When she began to channel the lightworkers’ homicidal purpose, he invited her to dinner at an opulent restaurant. He selected this restaurant, with its indoor waterfall and arbors of hanging blossoms, especially for its allusion to temporality. He ordered a meal of traditional depth-food: a timbale of bay scallops in green pepper sauce and paupiette of trout served in a hollowed blood orange – a minceur meal as sparse in calories as the last supper.
Eleanor dazzled in the presence of Arthur. Over the years, she had seen him numerous times at foundation functions and she had even chatted with him at his mansion during a diplomatic reception several years ago, and, though she had been working in the office adjacent to his for several months, this was her first meal with the notable man.
He spoke a soulful poetry to her that moved her deeply, “All of us under the sprawl of the sun are such provisional bodies, Eleanor – and by that truth alone we can honestly say that we are true friends to the beginning and the end. I’m glad to include you in my circle and to share with you what Shelley somewhere calls these dreams and visions that flower from the beds our bodies are.”
Charmingly, he had invited her to bring a guest to share their meal – a request he made her believe was a commonplace courtesy between him and those who had worked as hard for his foundation as she had. Her intention was to bring her latest beau, but, at the last minute, he took ill. Not wanting to show up alone and give the wrong impression, she asked her friends. All had other plans. Finally, a friend of a friend recommended you. And though you knew her not at all, the idea of an elegant meal and a pleasant evening with new people and one of them something of a luminary appealed to you.
You arrived early and were seated at the table when Eleanor arrived in the company of a skinny man with a starved monk’s face, wispy gray hair, and startling blue eyes. At your first sight of him, a wash of pity soaked you, for he seemed so frail a man. Gently, you touched the delicate fellow’s pallid hand.
Over the dainty fish dinner, while Doctor Stillman prattled on about mental hygiene and the usefulness of recording one’s dreams, you kept noticing how his pink features seemed tremulous as a husked shellfish. Several times in his eagerness to make a point, the doctor went faint, his eyelids fluttered and his wide British vowels softened.
“It’s too easy to get dispirited in this cruel and hazardous world,” he said, looking at you trustfully. “Yet, we must carry on with our lives, and, more than that, we must find the strength to create. As I remind my patients, bitterness, depression, even shattering despair are transfiguring powers that potentially accompany and corrupt every creative endeavour, because creativity is, as the mythologists insist, an intrusion into the inviolable realm of deity – of abstraction – where we with our spastic actuality can never fully go. How dare we grotesque notochords create anything in this frigid and entropic universe? It takes a lot of arrogance, don’t you think? One has to give everything to create anything.”
He gestured to the elegant dinner on the table. “Out of many grains, one bread. Out of many grapes, one wine. Out of many words, one story. The only important story, needless to say, is the one we tell ourselves. In our time, the story that science tells makes clear that our literal kingdoms are only shadows of an invisible reality. We ourselves are then part of a much vaster totality. Pars pro toto, the part sacrificed for the whole – the grain, the grape, the word for the bread, the wine and the story that sustain us during our time in this wilderness of vacuum and gamma rays.”
“You make it all sound so grim, Dr Stillman,” you said as you buttered your bread. “What then is the purpose of life? Merely to endure?”
“Purpose?” Stillman shook his head sullenly and a remote gaze opened in those arctic eyes. “Alone in the wind with our dance, humanity seems like an old medicine dancer on the sliding scree of a mountainside under the vacant swirl of the failing heavens, all of our soul hovering in our incantation. To what shall we dedicate the palsy of our dance? Hm? To God? Is there a God? Science reveals nothing of that. No, my fr
iends. We dance under the eternal night of space. We dance on a rock spinning around a nondescript star. We dance for ourselves alone. And by this solitude and pain, we learn the extremity of love.”
By the time the second course was served – a Thai vegetable roll in peanut sauce – you were far more interested in the food than in listening to Arthur Stillman discourse on the purpose of life. But he was just warming up.
“Epistrophe,” he acclaimed while pouring Fuilly-Roux into a crystal glass. “That’s what psychiatry is all about. Art, too, for that matter. And madness.”
“Excuse me,” Eleanor interrupted, accepting the glass. It was her third. You were still lipping your first, and Stillman wasn’t drinking. “Epistrophe?”
“Multiplicity, correspondence, reversion…” He felt for the meaning in the air with his long fingers, the nails precise. “No thing is just a thing. It’s also a symbol, a sign for a complex of other things. So that everything that we know, everything we are, reverts to the unknown. Epistrophe is what keeps us running in circles.”
“What makes the world go round,” you quipped, not quite following him or caring. It was just an inconsequential evening in a formal setting, something to say you did.
While the waiter poured coffee, Arthur excused himself and went to the restroom. Sitting in a stall with the door closed, he removed the small compact he had surreptitiously extracted from Eleanor’s purse and held it up before his face. His vicaresque features hardened, took on the taut fixity of a predator’s attention. In the raith, the crystals of glare tensed into view, and the dark strata between the floating archons received him. Blustery colours whipped past, and he flared through cold time and an outer space darkness that split open into the huge clarity of a noon sky.
A dozen men and women in animal hides circled with dancing a pole stuck through its shadow into the earth. Their graven faces frowned, intent on this one instant – noon at the midpoint between equinox and solstice – while their arms frenzied and their quick footwork kicked up the long-suffering earth in dust and pebbles. Their song shimmered with their exertion and then broke off entirely as the Dark One’s blur of stormlight gushed from the pole. Noon went black, and screams slipped in the air.
Killing was easy. With a raith-blade of electric shock, the Dark One hit the people at the back of their heads as they fled, and the jigsaw parts of their skulls flew apart. In the thundery, rolling darkness, barbed wires of lightning lashed, and the bodies scattered like petals. Moments later, the inksmoke darkness coiled in on itself and drained back into the wooden pole piercing its shadow. A dozen corpses lay in the thick sunlight.
A hungry shrike noticed and began to turn on the pivot of the wind.
Arthur bobbed out of his trance and observed that the mirror of the compact had turned liver red. The focus of raith energy on the silver nitrate of the mirror had been strong enough to dent the orthorhombic crystal molecules of the mirror into flakes of hexagonal red corundum. The geometry of the change displayed itself stereoscopically in his mind’s eye, and a serene psychic clarity permeated him. He had killed many of his enemies. To maintain the symmetry, it was time now to make a new friend, to create an ally out of some mind in its squirrel cage.
The after effects of the power he had released accompanied Arthur back to the table, and both Eleanor and you remarked on the brightened vigor in him. When the dessert trolley came by, he selected a velvety chocolate mud pie, black as earth. You lifted your water glass to your lips. The ice clicked against your teeth and went still as a snapshot. Fear grabbed your heart as you realized you were paralyzed, as frozen as the air rays in the ice under your nose.
And in the next leaden moment, the room turned gold. By an alchemy you suddenly knew too well, you understood everything. Arthur’s whole story entered your consciousness. In that one slow second, quick centuries of telepathy invaded you, and you took in all that Arthur knew. The swerve of terror that followed would have knocked you unconscious had you not been held firmly in the Dark One’s superconscious grip, its power black, the nothing colour, absorbing your horrified feelings and their children, the frenzied motes of thoughts seeking a way for you to escape.
But there was no escape. It was not Eleanor the Dark One wanted. She had already fulfilled her usefulness for him. It was you he was after all along, though it could have been any stranger. Numb-edged, you understood how deep in your luck you had lived your whole life – until now.
The gold light snapped off, and colours abruptly found their way back to their places. The silence you hadn’t noticed vanished in a clamor of conversation and dinner noise. You spilled your water, and Eleanor made a small embarrassed cry. A waiter rushed to lift the tablecloth and staunch the cold flow draining into your lap. You hardly noticed. Your eyes were fixed on him, Darshan, the Dark One.
He smiled back, a knowing, wicked smile, confirming the terrible truth. That had been no electrical misfiring in your brain, no hallucinatory adumbration of madness. He nodded with interest, once, to acknowledge his transmission of destiny, of the fate-bond that now and forever would unite you, and then returned his attention to his mud pie.
What did he want of you? You got up at once and hurried to the restroom. Your pulse knocked painfully under your collarbone as you stared at yourself in the mirror and saw the scream in your eyes. Why had this happened to you? Shock glazed your mind. What had you to do with the cave masters and the apocalyptic yearnings of the Dark One? How could any of this mean anything to you? Its absurdity ravaged your mind, and you wept and laughed at the same time, not wanting to believe. You pressed your hands against the mirror and stared hard at the greedy fear you saw there. The lizards in your face coupled, and you knew you would go mad.
But you didn’t. That, in part, was why he had selected you, or so you assumed when reason asserted itself. Later, back at the table, as he signed a credit slip for the meal, you expected more: a telepathic voice, an apparition from the raith, another knowing look – anything to reinforce the adrenalin-charged event that had carried you to a higher form of life.
Nothing.
At the door, Eleanor took his arm, drunk and amorous, and he offered you his hand. Everything in that firm handshake made you realize you were wrong to take pity on him.
A RING OF GREEN FIRE
Sean McMullen
Time to wind down, and there’s no better way than with this story by Australian writer Sean McMullen. McMullen (b. 1948) was, for many years, a professional musician before turning to writing, and that helped inspire one of his early stories, “The Colours of the Masters” (1988) where modern technology revives performances by classical musicians. McMullen was one of the co-authors of a history of Australian science fiction, Strange Constellations (1999). More recently he has concentrated on fiction, both fantasy and science fiction, which includes the Greatwinter trilogy, starting with Souls in the Great Machine (1999) and the Moonworlds Saga, starting with Voyage of the Shadowmoon (2002). McMullens website is at www.seanmcmullen.net.au
Some of McMullens shorter fiction betrays a fascination with history and the development of science from alchemy, cleverly blending scientific and magical concepts, as the following story shows.
I was tempted, given the subject of the story, to remark that it is time to go down under, but since McMullen has a black belt in karate, I won’t.
“As I was travelling through Westbury forest, I met with a man with a ring of green fire around his penis,” Avenzoar’s visitor said casually.
The poet-physician looked up at his friend and stroked his beard, then gazed wistfully across to the partially built minaret of Caliph al-Mansur’s huge mosque.
“Such a wonder,” sighed Avenzoar, then turned to his visitor and raised an eyebrow. “I suppose you did not bring him here for this poor physician and poet turned bureaucrat to examine?”
His friend glanced away, and seemed troubled. “Alas, it was not possible.”
“Such a pity. It may be an honour to be entrusted wi
th the completion of this great mosque of Ishbiliyah, but I miss the wider world. Is England really such a cold, rainswept place?”
“When I was there, yes.”
“What of your patient? Was he a traveller from even more exotic regions?”
“Not at all, yet the story of his curse is fascinating.”
Avenzoar clapped his hands. Honey pastries and ripe fruit were brought in by a servant and placed before them.
“My friend, show kindness to a captive of the Caliphs goodwill and tell me this magical story.”
“There was no magic, Avenzoar, nor was the curse any more than an exotic disease. Still, the story will afford you an hour’s wonder.”
How to begin? Affliction with the green fire was growing common in the midlands of England in the Christian year of 1188. The man in Westbury forest was a tinker, I saw that from his pack. He approached a tollbridge where I was resting in the dim light of late evening, and he drew his cloak tightly about himself as he came near.
His name was Watkin, and he was a small, thin but very energetic man, a little over thirty years of age. I introduced myself as a physician, and offered him the protection of my five men-at-arms while we camped for the night. He was glad to accept, as the forest was full of outlaws and we had also rigged a shelter against the rain. As we ate the night’s meal I raised the subject of illness with him.
“You have an affliction, I can tell that,” I said. He made no reply, yet his face was sad. He shaved slivers of cheese from a rind with his knife but did not eat them.
“Your affliction is distressing, but without pain,” I continued. “I have learned to read the signs of distress in sick people.”
