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ROBERT
There’s no such thing as an average trip out of the material world. The spirit world is vast, complex and above all constantly changing. There are challenges and opportunities I can expect to face, but every single time there’s something significant that I hadn’t—couldn’t have—known about beforehand. So I can only prepare as best I can.
It begins in my mind. Even those of us the spirits feel unaccountably chatty toward mostly deal with material things, and the rules that matter follows. So the first step must be to set my mind free of those constraints. For some people this comes naturally, or at least easily. I awoke to the spirit world in a moment of global chaos, and it seems to have marked me in ways I wish I could overcome. I can’t just drift away; I have to cut myself away, relying on that oldest and most potent of shamanic tools: pain. I use a pair of knives with blades of meteoric iron, flanking the major veins in my arms and legs with precise slashes. Blood spreads, and the sensation helps me detach consciousness from the surrounding world.
Comes the moment when I’m ready, I shut my eyes and take the step in an indescribable direction. There’s a storm blowing at the boundary between worlds, which has raged for as long as I’ve been able to make these journeys. In an instant, everything around me is filled with stabbing pains far sharper than knives. Inside me, too—one reason for cutting myself the way I do is so that the spirit knives forming inside me can whirl out without making more holes. It’s not because of the wind that I close my eyes, though. Its because of the light, a more-than-rainbow kaleidoscope that hints at messages in a language no modem shaman knows. The first time, I didn’t know anything about what was going on and the light practically flayed the back of my eyes out. It took weeks to heal. This time the light beats on my eyelids, but only dim arcs and flares pass through.
In the last moment of transition, there’s a sound as alien as the light. It has no tone; it’s... not all that much like anything, but somewhat like a chord in the moment where individual notes have not yet come together. I’ve often wished I could linger longer in the moment and hear if it’s developing, but if there’s any way to pause partway through the crossing, I’ve never found it. So the note washes over me and is gone.
I open my eyes to see the soul of New York City spread out before me. It was afternoon back in the material world. Here it’s a lingering twilight, the sky reddened by the smoke that continues to pour out of Manhattan’s wounds. I arrived in New York City for the first time on September 12, 2001, and what was planned as a quiet gathering of spirit magicians of various traditions turned into weeks of constant labor to complement the physical and social efforts of rescue workers. It’s never easy to lay the spirits of mass murder victims to rest in the middle of a city—the sacred geometry of the city works against the personal quests that redemptive repose requires—and on top of that we had to deal with the wounded and blighted spirits of plants, animals and buildings. The chimneys that now tower up over the skyscraper souls are our work, funneling the worst of the ongoing damage into realms where it can spread and do less harm. One of the chimneys recognizes my arrival and bellows out a friendly greeting. I make a squaring gesture with my arms in response, and it’s satisfied for now.
Distance in the spirit world is a matter of connection and significance. I step onto the ground. Because the city knows me, it elevates the ground for a breath and then lowers it, so that now I’m surrounded by the spirits of the block where I did my meditations. I feel a rumbling in my feet that tells me there’s trouble brewing again in the foundations. The city’s identity formed in the days before steel and concrete and there’s still no consensus among the city spirits as to whether the skyscrapers or their predecessors are the truest part of New York. My comrades and I have spent more time than I’d like since the September rescue defusing battles in the making, and we haven’t always succeeded. Living people back in the material world sense the fights as surges of unpleasant passions and a lack of confidence in their buildings. It’s one more reason people leave now. Here, of course, I would see the battle itself if it broke out, and the war of razed foundations against the buildings on top of them is a dangerous thing. I listen for my totem as I spiral on out into the rest of the city.
There are vines in the streets in this neighborhood. They’re new, and I have mixed feelings about them. Any fresh growth is welcome, after a few years of blight. These aren’t doing any harm just right now. Still, we’ll have to keep an eye on them. I bend to speak to a fire hydrant spirit. Last year something started a panic among them about impending drought, and ever since then they’ve been surly about sharing their water. I start by spreading my hands wide: no cupping, nothing in them to hold water. They’re dry. The fire hydrant’s owl-like stare doesn’t relax any, but at least I’m less worried about it biting me when I get close. We speak, not in words but in the shaping and releasing of symbols—it in drips of water, me in currents of air stirred by my waving hands—and reach an understanding. I will attend to its concerns about rust, and it will watch the vines for me.
As I stand up, there’s a rustling in the alley across the street. I recognize that particular combination of sounds. My totem is arriving on this plane of the city’s soul. In a moment it tumbles into view, glistening in the urban sun. Most shamans—at least, most of those I’ve worked with or had the opportunity to talk shop with—go on their vision quests and meet the spirit of an animal or plant that embodies an important aspect of their own soul. Me, I ended up in a nightmare junkyard realm and got chosen by the spirit of the discarded. That is, I commune with an animated mount of garbage, whatever’s been thrown away and yet has hidden value. This has some distinctive advantages, but at the end of the day, it still means that I hang out more than I’d like with random piles of trash. It smells.
“Robert! ” My totem forms triune lips out of paper plates and scraps of chicken bone. “We see spirits reversed! ”
“Rubbish, ” I answer with a smile. “We do. ” For reasons far from clear to me, my totem never speaks in anything but the present tense. Sometimes present perfect. I’m not sure how aware it is of time, though I know it can distinguish one of my visits from another.
A few weeks ago, I first heard one of the local lamp spirits talking about another of its kind that was “reversed” in some way. The stories have been accumulating, but none of the spirits can very clearly explain what it means. That’s not entirely surprising: the experiential world of furniture, appliances and utility installations isn’t large, and the underlying urban spirit doesn’t transmit a whole lot of extra awareness to the entities that dwell inside it. My totem and I have chosen to wander the city more or less at random in hopes of encountering one of these “reversed” spirits ourselves. So far we haven’t found any of them, just accounts of their passing.
Today we concentrate on alleys, particularly ones built with openings at both ends but since blocked off. The sacred geometry of such places draws some kinds of unattached spirits like a cage calling out for something to confine. We speak to quite a variety of spirits as the day wears on, but none with any qualities I’d call reversal.
Sunset comes to some of the crystal towers that are the souls of skyscrapers before it’s actually evening. The towers with the best western exposures often like to accumulate sunlight and then let it trickle down at just the right angle to turn it rose and gold. Some of them have sunset for hours on end. Mostly it’s just the quality of the light, but sometimes there’s the image of the sun itself held in the cascade. That’s how it is now, in our fourteenth alley, s
o there’s a sun ahead of us and another behind. The shadows make it tricky to get a proper sense of things’ shapes and boundaries. So I don’t realize at first that there’s a shadowy figure whose perspective is reversed. I don’t even realize that it is a figure in its own right, approaching me and shrinking as it goes, until it reverses course and enlarges while backing up.
The figure is vaguely human. Of course, most spirits in urban spirit landscapes are vaguely human, so saying that is about as useful as describing someone in a crowd as "the one with eyes. ” It’s translucent, visible mostly as a darkening of the air, with shading that suggests a solarized photographic negative. And it is indeed interacting very strangely with this part of the spirit world. As it gets farther away from me, it gets sharper, more focused. When it looms closer, it gets blurrier and there’s the sort of haze that happens when things move into the distance. This qualifies as reversed as far as I’m concerned. I step forward to speak with it, but it doesn’t seem to be able to hear my words. That hazy face just stares at me and mouths unvoiced words of its own.
My totem spreads itself around the alley. “I go around, ” it tells me, “and maybe I hear more. ” I nod in agreement.
I decide that I need to do something to break down these barriers to communication. The altered light within the thing makes me think that perhaps I can do something that way, so I start grabbing hold of scattered sunbeams. The effort costs me a little tangibility of my own, and my feet drag a bit as gusts in the illumination pull me around. I try some simple tricks first: eclipse, moonlight, aurora, mirroring. None of them bring the thing into sharper focus. I can see that it’s mouthing shorter sentences now, looking less desperate but more confused. I hope that has something to do with my work, though I doubt it.
After that first round, I try some more exotic tricks, starting with frequency shifts. That’s harder than you might think outside the material world. The spirits of lights aren’t directly convertible just by changing their pitch. I have to change their names as well, or rather persuade them to change their own names for a while. All of this requires further negotiation, conducted at the literally lightning tempo they live at. I promise them voltage and opportunities for display once I’m back home, and they agree to cooperate. They cycle out of visible pitches and into most of the spectrum from microwaves to radio waves, and none of it helps. Damn, that’s a lot of promises I’ll have to honor for nothing back. That’s just the way it goes sometimes.
The spirit backs as far away from me as it can in this alley, and I get my best look at it so far. I realize that it’s stepping in something like a moonwalk. Reversed in time? I call some of the light around it back to me in hopes of getting a look at it in a reversal of my own, and it snaps into focus within that pocket of recalled light. I see the face of a man, or of some extremely human spirit, and it’s terrified. I’ve seen people scared to death in my time, and this is that same look. I don’t think I can manage to speak with proper reversal without giving up the concentration it takes to maintain the light this way, so I have to hope that it’ll say something without much prompting.
It does. “You can see me. Can you hear me? Everything is falling apart. Terrible things are coming. We must all flee. The future is no place for you. ” The words come in an erratic cascade, marred by my difficulty in keeping the tunnel of reversal in place. Then the spirit falls to the ground.... No, it’s getting up from the ground, I realize as I think through the implications. I’m just seeing the actions out of order. It looks hurt on the ground, and I see why a moment later. It goes hurtling up into the sky and out of sight. Somewhere up in the future, it began falling, and somehow managed to come back to me here. It’s gone for now, though. I let the light return to normal and think about what to do next.
My totem draws itself up again. “That thing, ” it says with hesitation, “comes from... not a place. Stranger to the world. ”
"Yes, ” I say. I know that there’s no point in suggesting different times to the Rubbish, as it can’t make sense of such things. “From a place we go, perhaps. ”
The Rubbish pulls itself up lean, then blossoms out at the top. “It goes up, we go up. ” The heavy debris falls out, and it forms canopies out of plastic and the frames of umbrellas. Soon gusts will carry it up. If I’m to follow. I’ll have to change my shape.
I cross my arms in front of my chest and pull my skin off from the shoulders down. Feathers sprout underneath. Two tumbles down the length of the alley suffice to catch my clothes and legs and pull both off, so that my newly formed tail can emerge. I take to the skies as an unkempt gray and white bird something like a seagull. A scavenger of some sort, certainly, though I don’t know if it’s a reflection of some real species (material or spiritual) or just my soul’s fondness for junk expressing itself again.
We rise along the same arc that the reversed thing took, curving over the most actively growing crystal towers. These don’t always correspond to construction in the material world in a direct way— when there’s material construction, something also grows here, but the tower spirits use their subordinates to fight for control of the vital sparks construction unleashes. The strongest towers get their cuts in a sort of psychopompic protection racket. In any event, the reversed thing had zoomed up somewhere right in the heart of the thickest-growing towers, into space that they’ve already claimed but not yet filled with anything more than slender rods and shafts. The torrents of sunset make it hard to pick out fine details, but I can still see the thing's wake when the illumination is just right.
As we approach, I see more wakes. Thinking about altered flows of time always confuses me, so I have to sort it through carefully. From their point of view, these things all emerged somewhere close together and spread through the city, lasting for at least a few weeks. From our point of view, they’re rising to that point of origin. I can’t see any other actual entities right now, but the turbulence has a distinctive widdershins spin to it. (In terms of their experience, this must be a shockwave of some sort, like a sonic boom or the wave that builds up at the bow of a fast-moving ship. ) It’s not yet clear from here whether the things all emerged from a single dimensionless point or just somewhere close together, but soon—
A piercing glare from somewhere higher than straight up interrupts my train of thought. The light is a venomous red, brighter than blood and tinged with a glow like nothing in nature. If it weren’t for the sense of menace surrounding the glare, it would look like someone’s not-very-well executed special effect. I look up, knowing what I'll see. Hanging at the zenith is a daytime star, even more vivid red than the light pushing down at us. This is Anthelios, the Anti-Sun, now drifting from its position directly opposite the solar disc. It arrived in the spirit world’s skies not long after I awoke to my calling, and it’s been a nagging mystery ever since. It doesn’t fit anyone’s cosmology very tidily, and it gives off that dreadful passion without actually doing very much. Until now, that is. This light is spiraling around like a spotlight.
My totem and I turn down to avoid it, but a little too late. I glance up once more, and the red light spears me from directly overhead. Without any warning at all, I feel the inward knives that tell me I’m crossing back into the material world. I didn’t choose this. Indeed, I struggle to resist it, but to no avail. The last thing I see is the Red Star, now appallingly clear as I look up within the beam. It’s open like an eye staring at me. It blinks, and in that blink I’m pushed out of the spirit world.
I open my eyes in the motel room I rented for the purpose, surrounded by the tools of my tradition. I probe for the spirit world, but I can’t find it. The only thing my inner eye can see is the Red Star’s blink, endlessly repeating, and the only thing my spirit hands can feel are the knives of the barrier. Somehow the Red Star has cut me off from my soul’s home.
* * *
WILLIAM
“Listen up, you primitive screwheads! ” I shout at the second squad of technicians. They don’t even get the allusion
. Damn but I hate having to rely on whatever monkeys the Project happens to send me this week. Come to that, I’d prefer real monkeys, who at least have a better sense of their own ignorance. These kids think they know exactly how dynamic multi-aperture multi-frequency telescopes work. They don’t. I’d love to go crawl around underneath the floor myself and get the cabling hauled right, but my damn legs don’t accept the cybernetics they’ve tried out on me and in this wheelchair I can’t reach a lot of the places that need reaching.
I realize that it may seem quaint for a cutting-edge technologist like myself to be concerned with analog phenomena. Data as the foundation of the universe, quantized nature of fundamental forces, bits... they’re all handy abstractions. But matter’s got a wave nature that’s just as real as its particle nature, and there are things we can study only when we look at the waves. I had to go over all these basics all over again at the last design review meeting. Dammit, my high school physics teacher knew this stuff. She had at least a dozen of her original teeth, too, which puts her ahead of most of the Project’s tired old eunuchs. Probably similar taste in men, too, now that I think about it. Sometimes I consider setting deathtraps in the boardroom in hopes of breeding a better quality of bosses, but there’s just no such animal. Pfeah.
We live in a dangerous time. The ignorant masses would call it a time of awakening monsters, if we let them know the whole story. The universe is depressingly full of loopholes that let stupid and annoying things be true. It takes people like me and these damn monkeys to find the holes, map them out, plug them up, and shoot anything that tries crawling through, all so that the masses get their chance to someday get a damn clue and grow up into a species worth respecting. Yes, on my off days I often contemplate flapping my arms and flying to the moon. Then I get back to work, because despite my bitching, I’d rather know how things work and do something about them than not. And here with Project Sunburst I’m in the midst of the best effort to understand and deal with the most interesting (and most dangerous) things of all. So it could be worse.
World of Darkness - [Time of Judgment 03] - Judgment Day Page 1
