World of Darkness - [Time of Judgment 03] - Judgment Day

by Bruce Baugh (epub)

  I decide to dive right in. “I saw the red star, and it cut me off from spirit walking. A friend of mine said I should be thinking about apocalypse. ” He’s quiet for a moment, and I can hear the random surges of static in the transatlantic connection. “I think maybe you’d better come out here. Can you make a flight to Norway? ”

  “Sure, if I know where I’m going. ”

  “Take a note. ” He reels off addresses and directions. “Make it fast. ”

  So it is that twenty-three hours later I’m driving along a side road just south of the Arctic Circle, having gone from New York to Trondheim to Mo i Rana by successfully smaller planes, and then from there by car. I was pleased to find that I retain some of the shaman’s habitual luck even with this spirit blindness: no waits, smooth connections, good service. It cost me a lot, but I had most of the cash necessary and ran up the rest on my credit card; I’ll have time to make arrangements before the bill comes due, I hope.

  After an hour and some of twisty driving in and out of sight of the fjords, I come to the last marker Anders described to me. Silver Cottage, that’s the place. I turn and embark on a truly hair-raising set of switchbacks right down to the waterline. There’s a strip of beach that looks like it should just wash away, but apparently hasn’t, with a well-made cabin under a single massive ash tree.

  Hanging from it is a naked man, white-skinned beneath the hair and dirt, heavily scarred and tattooed. When he sees me park, he swings himself up, unties his feet, and drops easily to the gravel that makes up the beach. He watches calmly as I get out and approach, and lets me make the first move.

  “I, uh, I’m Robert, ” I say at last.

  “Anders. ” He doesn’t offer me a handshake or anything. He also doesn’t seem particularly bothered to be speaking naked to a stranger. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have that kind of confidence. “Come on, ” he adds with a tilt of his head toward the cabin. “I’ve been talking with the squirrel, but I’m about ready to go on in, and it’s not like it’d do you any good right now if what you say is true. ”

  “The squirrel? ” I’m confused. “Oh, yeah, Ratatosk. ”

  “That’s the one. ”

  “I thought he lived on Yggdrasil or someplace exotic like that. ”

  Anders laughs then, a very deep and hearty laugh that sounds awesomely suited to being laughed over a city being sacked. “He does. " He waves a hand at the tree overhead. “What do you think this is, anyway? Symbolism, man. Just big fucking symbolism. ”

  “Ah, right. Sorry, I’m feeling lagged. ”

  “No problem. We’ll get you either woken up or well put back to sleep. I’ve got some of the best damn brews you’ve ever tasted. ” Pause again. “Tell me you do drink, please. ”

  “Oh yes. ”

  “That’s okay, then. I was just thinking you might be one of those damn hippy shamans with the vegan diet and the no smokes and all. Fucking cowards messing it up for the rest of us, getting spirits accustomed to being coddled and respected instead of commanded. If you were, I’d make you wait outside. ” He looks serious. “I don’t want any pussies weakening the will of the house. ”

  “I’m old-school, ” I assure him. “I hunt to kill and eat what I get, I know the power in tobacco weed and pipe, I know where to cut and when. ” I roll back a sleeve to show him the old scars all around my left elbow.

  “Okay, then, ” he repeats. “So tell me the rest of the story. ”

  I lay it all out for him, as carefully as I can. “Man, that sucks. ”

  “Yes sir, it does, ” I say. “I’m missing my totem and all the rest. ”

  “Aw, not that, ” he says dismissively. “Fuck all that. You’ll figure it out or not. No, I mean that when I started hearing about this kind of thing, I was really hoping it was just one of those fads. But I’m hearing it too damn often, all up and down the world ash. Stars falling down, dead giants waking up, flood and fire, it’s looking a lot like Ragnarok. And I was really hoping to be better prepared for it. ”

  “The actual end of the world? ” I’m skeptical, and I suspect it shows.

  “Look, the fucker’s gotta end sometime, right? Here we are smack dab in the middle of it all: Y2K past, 2012 and the harmonic convergence coming up, the whole deal. Everybody’s staking out their turf, and I aim to be in the middle of it all. ” He’s off and running with exposition on prophecies that mostly passes me by.

  “Uh, yeah, " I say when he seems to be at a natural break.

  And so the conversation goes, all night. We spend some time establishing our respective levels of cluefulness, comparing experiences in the spirit world. It develops that he’s actually met my first mentor, Xoca, a couple of times, and formed the same combination of opinions I hold about him. “He’s a great man, or would be if he weren’t fucking nuts, ” as Anders puts it. At some point we talk about death scenes: what we wish for, what we expect, what we fear. Anders lays out his desire to die in the midst of a very prominent performance someplace nobody’s performed before, and lists half a dozen major landmarks in Europe and North America. He may not be all that stable, but he’s never dull.

  * * *

  Dante One of the things they don’t tell you about becoming one with the universe is that you don’t automatically get understanding to go with everything you’re experiencing.

  In the state I’m in now, whatever “now” means to someone like me, a great many things flash by that are just mysteries to me. Here’s a man who is at once a human being and a werewolf (or something like it) and a unique channel of power and a pile of ashes in the dark. That’s his whole life there. What does it mean? I don’t know; I only feel a particularly intense hatred about him in the minds of nearly everyone whose lives connect to his through channels of destiny and synchronicity. Here’s a mind open to me, filled with thoughts as complex as my own were back when I lived in just one body and one moment at a time. And not a single one of them is comprehensible to me: no recognizable language, words, sensory input, anything. Is it someone insane? Is it a mind that was never human? Unless I neglect other duties, I cannot get any sense that I’ll ever know.

  Another thing they don’t tell you is just how much of the trans-temporal world is symbolic. I sometimes feel like the whole universe turned out to be a theologian or poet or a Hermetic or something. It’s not even contextualized and adaptive symbols, a lot of the time; it’s deriving its manifestations from layers of existence still further removed from normal experience than mine. It’s a good thing I always liked riddles and puzzles, I suppose, as I spend much of my awareness deciphering the flow of usually cryptic symbols around and through me.

  I struggle with the terms to express how things change in the realms outside time. I live in the midst of what some living magi call Correspondence, the network of connections that have nothing to do with physical location. I used to manipulate these bonds unconsciously, then consciously as (if I do say so myself) one of the best hackers and social engineers of the twentieth century, and now as intimately and directly as I ever did my own body. I escaped out of mundane existence into something like the universe’s operating system. Speaking of past and future doesn’t really do justice to it, but then the whole human mind is built to live in time rather than eternity. I could invent new terms, but then I’d just have to explain them to you anyway. So I’ll act as though what you know as sequence mattered here, for simplicity’s sake.

  The Umbra is getting crowded. More and more new symbols, and redefinitions all around of the ties between existing symbols and their meanings and signifieds. Intimations of Judgment (with the capital J) multiply. I cycle through the Umbral landscapes looking for patterns, hoping that I can find out what it is in the future responsible for this activity before future becomes present. For reasons not yet clear to me, simply shifting into future time is a lot harder than it used to be: too much congestion, too much divergence and convergence of possibilities, so that stable identity doesn’t last long enough for me to learn anyt
hing useful. To use a symbol of my own, if my life in union with the power of Correspondence (with the capital C) so far has been like climbing around a hilly landscape, up ahead there are mountains with cliffs.

  Here comes another of these future-linked entities. Fortunately, its symbolism is easy enough to unravel: I’m looking at three individual Awakened minds, two male and one female, who will be connected but don’t know it yet. One of the men is lame, the other crippled, and the woman has a knot of ambiguity in her identity. They’ve all been struck by something that left bright red marks in their limbic systems, distorting some of their perceptions and a lot of their ability to control parapsychological phenomena, what they think of as shamanism or yin sensitivity or whatever. Something wounded each of them in the same place, and the psychic scars of it are starting to tie them together.

  As they make their collective way across the ontological and semiotic ripples around us, they can’t see me. I’m beyond their consciousness right now, still tied as it is to a straightforward approach to causality. I have the opportunity to trace them forward and back in time. It’s a tangled mess, and part of me is inclined to leave it all well enough alone: it’s tricky at best to mess with fate. But then my own life is, I know, tied up with fate too, and either the whole universe soon will be or I’m going to be locked out of the parts that aren’t. So I tell myself that maybe this could be a good learning experience.

  I soon find that I can approach their shared moment of crisis only through an extremely dense thicket of symbols. Whatever it is they encountered, it’s rendered in the engrammic memory of their transtemporal projections as that damn Red Eye that shows up in so many visions these days. The context is quite different for each of them, so I suspect that the blazing eye is some sort of conceptual contamination; certainly there are plenty of ways they could each have been infected by the same imagery. In any event, thanks to the Red Eye’s looming power, they’ve settled on rendering their impairment through the lens of blindness. That’s an interesting choice. Experience tells me that if I were to speak to them, I’d probably find them uncertain about their acquired power. This usually gets bundled up with self-doubt of various kinds. But this is not the moment for that. A sense of urgency draws me on.

  Here, a few steps into the future, their paths twine together more closely than usual. I hear an echo. (All right, a sense a recurrence of certain patterns in the organization of their psyches. My mind prefers to render these things with some sensory cues. ) It links back to... yes, here we go. It links for each of them to that formative moment when the higher neurogenetic circuits opened in their respective brains and they could exercise normally latent potential. People who think of this ability as magic call the experience Awakening. Christian (or pseudo-Christian, depending on who you ask) visionaries call it the gift of the Holy Spirit. Whatever. It’s all the same thing. For reasons not yet clear to me, the wounds inflicted by whatever’s under the mask of the Red Eye are blocking a conceptual link from that awakening to a crucial point in their shared future.

  On a whim, I decide to speak to them. This isn’t as easy as you might think.

  I think briefly about trying to appear to each of them separately, but that’s too much effort. Better to try manifesting in conjunction with the trine as a single entity. I recall the features I had in life, and pull up reflections in the medium to check it. I am reminded that I was, not to put too fine a point on it, hot stuff: mature but nowhere near middle aged, bright-eyed, trim, dressed sharp. If there were ever to be a movie about the history of the Virtual Adepts, I always thought, I should be played by Denzel Washington. I’ve still got it. (Of course I’ve still got it, a future self reminds me. Where would it go? I ignore it. A man needs his moment of vanity. ) My voice will sound strange to them, but there’s nothing I can do about that without a great deal more preparation than I think desirable right now.

  Then I take a step forward, and start to speak.

  * * *

  WILLIAM

  I decide to try the truth again, and tell the management that I’m feeling worn out after too much time spent with still-experimental gear and that I think I might do better with some time away from the implants. I have a solid record of success, and part of that is knowing when to stop. The bosses decide to grant me the time I want. As it happens, they say, there’s this little list of errands they’d like done: messages to be delivered with the security of personal delivery, oversight to be rendered, conflicting reports to be sorted out on the spot, and so forth. Important work for the cross-convention effort that is Project Ragnarok, which is the organizational grouping two levels above Sunburst. (In other words, they’re the Department of Defense and we’re the Naval Observatory. ) Would I enjoy making such a trip? Why, yes, I would, and in short order I’m packed and on my way.

  A friend of mine in college had a bumper sticker that read: COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT: YOUR BEST ENTERTAINMENT value. He was wrong, though. For really satisfying entertainment on the cheap, very little compares to a fine evening out funded by one of your enemies. Credit fraud is your best entertainment value.

  It’s a great afternoon in Hong Kong, the skies momentarily empty and blue after one of those sudden downpours has blown over. The Peak Tower, looking like some pagoda’s entry arch on the best growth hormone ever, offers some wonderful views: the whole of the island and most of Kowloon are perfectly clear. Even the very limited optic enhancements I can manage at the moment contribute their bit. I spend a while tracking randomly selected babes, making notes in my handheld about the places they gather so that I can go cruising later, then I go into a broader search mode for any colleagues or enemies I might want to deal with. From time to time a waiter stops by to freshen my drink, and I tip him very generously out of Dr. Kung’s credit.

  Eventually Dr. Kung will notice, of course, but then that’s part of the exercise. I’m testing him, I’ll tell the security goons if they notice inconveniently soon. For all that he talks big, he didn’t manage to do anything about Hong Kong’s hematovore problems until they actually attacked his damn lab, and even then his assistants did a lot of the heavy lifting. I need to convince the Ragnarok bigwigs that he’s unreliable, and I figure that this is as good a way as any to do it. So I hired a local con man to get Kung’s wallet and papers in a simple pickpocket and snatch. I’m keeping the receipts for all of this to buttress my argument. I’m sort of hoping he doesn’t notice until I can check out more than one of those babe magnets I’m seeing.

  At first I don’t notice the man standing at the window next to me and my wheelchair. American, I think after a look—the African-descended people in Southeast Asia are usually darker skinned. I consider offering him a drink, but decide not to. He’s not my type, after all. I go back to examining the view.

  “Mr. Mr. Alba. Mr. Castle. Alba. Mr. Albacastle, ” he says, quietly. It’s one of the strangest sounds I’ve ever heard out of an apparently unaugmented human throat, and I’ve heard Tuvaluan throat-singers and others at the edges of human potential. His voice comes out stacked on top of itself in a way that far exceeds any ventriloquist act I know of, and it seems like it took him a while to get the syllables all in order. I look up. He doesn’t seem to be stoned, though as I know myself, there’s a lot you can take to leave you thoroughly blissed out in the most formal and conservative of settings.

  “Pardon? ” Keep it neutral, I tell myself. It's daytime, so this probably isn’t one of our targets, but it could easily be someone in their service, or someone else out for revenge. Being the world’s secret policeman does mean building up a list of enemies.

  “Mr. Ms. Mr. Castle. Ming. Robert. Albacastle. ” He pauses. “Mr. William Albacastle. ”

  I don’t say anything this time. I haven’t the faintest idea what he’s up to, if he’s not a robot running a scratch mix with his own memories. But a random American guy in Hong Kong who knows my full name just is not what I consider good news.

  He tries again. “My name is Dante. I belie
ve you’ve heard of me. ”

  That gets my attention. The world is full of Dantes, but not that many who are black men with American accents who know the names of Project Ragnarok operatives. To the best of my knowledge there’s just one of them, and... “Yup. Last I heard, you were dead, all blown up when your Digital Web burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp. You’re looking very tangible for a man in your condition. ”

  He smiles. “We’ll have that conversation another time. What I need to tell you now is just this: the cure for your blindness is back where you first saw the rest of the world. ”

  “Gone into being an oracle, have we? I imagine the money’s good. ‘See the Dead Hacker! Hear the future through the mouth of the man once plagiarized and denounced by Richard Stallman, now come to tell you all! '” Damn. He doesn’t rise to the bait.

  “I realize it’s a bit cryptic, but you’ll understand once you think about it. ” He pauses. “That’s all. All. Think. It. ”

  And then just like that he’s gone. Empty air. No inrushing, so he didn’t teleport out, or if he did, he filled up the hole with air. Just gone.

  My drink doesn’t taste so good now.

  * * *

  MING XIAN

  The alleys are cold and damp, but I don’t mind. It’s easy enough to add another layer of jacket or overcoat if I need it, and the wet pavement and looming dark buildings carry echoes of sounds I need to hear. If anyone is following me, they’ll give themselves away unless they’re managing to move very, very quietly indeed, and anyone who can do that is likely not someone I can defend myself against in any event. I’ll take opportunities like this where I can find them.

  The air reeks even more than usual. Some particular convergence of wind and the channeling effects of the street grid here plunges me into a visible miasma of river pollution. I try to breathe shallowly and through my mouth rather than my nose, but breath discipline can only do so much. There are thirty million people stuffed into Chongqing’s sprawl with no master sewage system. Their effluvia is more than I can manage, and I regard not passing out as a minor triumph, under the circumstances.