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

by Bruce Baugh (epub)

  I still have the knives of those last would-be assassins, tucked beneath two layers of coat. I can feel the faint hum of their enchantment, dissipating along with the souls of their wielders. If it weren’t for this cursed isolation in the living world, I could interrogate the departing spirits and perhaps learn something of use, but as it is I can only take comfort in the fact that they are indeed departing. Once I find a place to rest, I can study the documents they had on them. I hope there’s something useful there, as this long pursuit is taking its toll.

  I turn the comer onto a street with rail tracks down the middle. The river is somewhere off to my left now, and I get a brief glimpse of the manufactured “downtown” with its earnest neon and thin facades of nightlife glamour. Nothing moves nearby... and then something does. I hear a footstep, and then I see a man in the street, straight ahead. There wasn’t time for him to emerge out of any of the side streets or buildings. Either he has enhanced speed, enough to pose a very serious threat to me, or he managed to shift in without going through mundane distances. Neither prospect encourages me. Someone lacking my awareness of the environment would likely blame herself for having missed the man’s presence earlier, or assume he’d come out of a building, or something of the sort, since our minds work hard to present the world as coherent and consistent. Part of the magician’s burden is learning how often it’s neither of those.

  He’s silhouetted by the lamps up the block, so I can only make out his general proportions. When he speaks, it’s in perfectly grammatical but bland Mandarin, the result of training in precision without nuance. “Ms. Mr. Ming. Alba. Robert. Xian. ” The words come cascading out as though several voices all competed for control of that one mouth.

  I see no point in trying to deny it. He’s obviously not on some random fishing expedition; he has both knowledge and power. “Yes. ”

  “Ms. Xian. Blanc. Castle. Ming. Ms. Ming Xian. ”

  “Yes, ” I say again, trying to keep calm. I make a show of adjusting my outermost wrap and draw one of the killers’ knives along the way.

  “My name is Dante. I believe you’ve heard of me. ” He freezes for a moment then continues conversationally. “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. ’’

  “What do you mean, my blindness? ” But I already know. Somehow this American (whom I have not heard of) knows about my isolation from the yin world. And it’s obvious what he means by the place where I first saw the rest of the world, the place that’s been in my thoughts so often lately.

  “I realize it’s a bit cryptic, ” he says with a tone of obvious amusement, “but you’ll understand once you think about. It. That’s all. All. Think. It. ” His voice dissolves into that earlier polyphony, and he seems to recede into the distance without actually walking. I recognize the distortions of perspective that come of the magical command of chi flow, but one doesn’t usually see so flashy a demonstration.

  So. Back to the place where I first saw the rest of the world.

  * * *

  ROBERT

  America feels at once familiar and strange to me, after all that travel. Every place feels strange to me now, of course, in the absence of the constant noise and bustle of the spirits that comprise it. I can just make out the faintest of distant sounds from what would normally be a shouted cacophony, disorderly and vital. My totem remains silent, apart from its appearances on the fringes of some of my deepest dreams. So it’s like looking at the world through heavily tinted glasses and listening to it through earplugs, or worse. My senses feel far more blighted than my twisted legs do.

  Even on the purely physical level, though, there’s a distinct sense of coming home as I make my way along the edges of O’Hare’s concourses. The length of people’s strides, the extra space they leave for each other while waiting in lines, the volume of their conversation and the kinds of gestures they make with their hands, all of these show me that I’m among my people once again. I enjoyed many of the people I spoke with abroad, as I generally do, and for all the reports of anti-American sentiment, I found the vast majority of the Scandinavians I met courteous and even friendly to me. It’s just that they are not the people I was picked to act as shaman for. They aren’t my people in that deep-down sense of shared history and destiny.

  I take the time to enjoy some of the sights, knowing that my ride can wait just a few extra minutes for me. That dinosaur skeleton never fails to make me smile. I loved dinosaurs as a kid, and continued to do so in adulthood. The actual souls of dinosaurs are usually disappointments, far less interesting than the typical cow or sheep, unaware of having lived in the midst of wonders. The spectacle is still great, though, and part of me always hopes that the fossil skeleton will one day come to life and go browsing among the potted trees. And then there’s what a friend calls the “laserium, ” the gloriously gaudily underground passage with neon tubing and backlit panels around moving sidewalks.

  I wish I could hear the neon chatter; it’s always got something interesting to say.

  Another time, perhaps. I hope.

  As I wait for my suitcase, I have a peculiar feeling of being watched. Peculiar for the circumstances now, of course. I am being watched, constantly, in my normal condition, since the spirits can sense those likely to be most receptive to them. Could this be a first sign of my normal aptitude returning to me? I hope so, but I doubt it. This is the sense of an unknown but specific and single thing watching me, without any of the broader nuances of the spirit world. As unobtrusively as I can, I look around for any observers.

  I have some sympathy for paranoids at times like this. The world is, after all, genuinely charged with unsuspected significance, and there are unseen powers watching you right now. Separating that out from the sort of specific and possibly dangerous surveillance of an enemy is a tricky task, requiring awareness and prudence simultaneously, and if that were easy, human history would have been very different. I gamble that I will notice the sort of attention I need to, and try to keep the anxiety down deep enough that it won’t interfere with my body language.

  There he is. A tall, good-looking African American man. He seems vaguely familiar. Another magician of some sort? Did I meet him in person, and if so, within the physical world or somewhere else? I can’t recall. He’s seen me see him, and he strides over. I notice that he never has to break stride, because everyone in his way gets out of it in just the nick of time. Nothing flashy, but he’s showing me that he can affect the distribution of the world’s fortunes in a fairly significant way. I take the lesson to heart.

  Without saying anything, we step into an alcove where the airport stores baggage carts. Nobody takes notice of us; people do this all the time, usually to reduce the background volume a bit for a cell phone call. We’re just two guys talking. As far as everyone else is concerned, that is.

  “Mr. Ms. Mr. Robert. Ming. Lege. ” That’s the first string of words out of his mouth. I can’t dignify it with a term like “sentence. ” It’s far too uncoordinated for that. It’s also... duplicated, or triplicated. I used to read a lot of science fiction back in my mental hospital days, and I recall stories of alternate universes. Is he speaking to someone who might be here, if I weren’t? The focus in his eyes seems to shift back and forth as though he were dividing his attention between me and things behind me. Except that there’s nothing behind me except wall.

  “Some of that is me, yes, ” I say, as calmly as I can.

  “Robert. Albacastle. Mr. Robert. Blanclege. Ming. Blanclege, ” he says next, his voices gradually harmonizing into a single word at a time. I wait. “My name is Dante, ” he says in a voice now fully unified. “I believe you’ve heard of me. ”

  I have indeed. Techno spirits of many kinds talk to urban shamans about the other humans they deal with. There’s a shamanic edge in the technomancy practiced among Virtual Adepts and Sons of Ether (which are traditions with shallower
roots but more focused agendas than Dreamspeakers), and I’ve dealt with some of them for whom affiliation in this group rather than that is really purely a matter of personal taste. They tell us other stories, just as we tell them stories about people and things that might matter to them. Dante isn’t supposed to be one of those nearshamans, but I’ve heard of him anyway. Some of his fans say he’s likely to be the next magician of our time to merge directly with his focus of practice. And that reminds me... “Didn’t you get killed a few years ago? ” “We’ll have that conversation another time, ” he says. He pauses, eyes briefly closed. “What I need to tell you now is just this. ” His eyes open again. “The cure for your blindness is back where you first saw the rest of the world. ”

  I think about this. “That makes a certain amount of sense, ” I answer, “and I’d already thought about doing it sometime soon. But, if you don’t mind my asking, how is it that a hacker knows anything useful about shamanic blindness? Have you got an encoding scheme for spirits T'

  “I realize it’s a bit cryptic, " he says, and laughs. I wonder what the joke is. Then it dawns on me: from “encoding” to “encryption” to “cryptic, ” it’s a typical hacker pun. I groan, and his laughter continues. “But you’ll understand once you think about it. ” His voice becomes disjointed and polyphonic again. “That’s all. All. Think. It. ” He takes a step backward and disappears into the crowd. Literally disappears, that is: I can’t find him anywhere, and suspect I wouldn’t even if my soul’s eyes were fully open.

  Just as he told me to, I do think about it, and it begins to make sense. Like most shamans, I deal with the spirits of the present moment, even though I know that there are manifestations of other times. The masters of the Virtual Adepts deal not so much with any individual thing as with the connections between them, and some of them, I understand, treat “this now” and “this as it will be” as things whose connections can be probed just like “this now” and “that now. ” He might have seen my own future recovery, or have encountered the necessary news as a side effect of whatever it is he’s up to. It wouldn’t be the first time a practitioner of one art stumbled onto something useful and traded or gave it to another, just because it would be handy.

  I take a deep breath, and get out my cell phone. I’ll have to change my plans.

  Twelve hours after that airport encounter, I step out of a rental car on a now-neglected road in upstate New York. The sign on the dangling gates blocking the road says new Cheshire asylum for THE MENTALLY ILL in lettering all too familiar to me. This is where I spent my last year as an unawakened man, and my first days as a shaman. I’m relieved to see that it remains abandoned, despite (judging from all the construction along the highway) a boom in population and business in the area. It might be luck. It might also be a bit of protection from my totem and guardians, and just to be on the safe side of gratitude I build a little shrine to them beside the center gatepost. It never hurts to thank those who’ve helped you in the past and will in the future even if they aren’t doing all that much for you right now. Shamanism is all about recognizing your debts.

  Where you first saw the rest of the world, the man who might be Dante told me yesterday. I won’t forget anytime soon that first moment when the world poured on me, in the death throes of an ancient horror and its unloving brood. I woke screaming to see the nightmare face of the world that sun and moon usually hide, and it took me days of continuous wakefulness to struggle back to something like sanity. That happened here, half a decade ago. Yesterday I called my friends in Chicago, told them I had an assignment in New York, and went directly to arrange a ticket for myself to the nearest airport and to schedule a rental car. There were delays— there are always delays at O’Hare, it’s just too crowded—but in the end I did get here.

  It’s quiet now, the moonlight shining through thickening clouds. If I have to stay very long, I can expect to get rained on. I take an umbrella out of the rental car and head on up the driveway on foot, once I establish that the gates are too firmly rusted in place for me to conveniently part them. I hear small animals in the undergrowth, and I see the footprints of drifters and vagrants, but none of them are very fresh. That fits. The last time I was here (four years ago, already?!? ) I observed it long enough to see the pattern, and I’m relieved that it apparently remains undisturbed.

  As always, the true bulk of the asylum isn’t apparent until you’re almost at the front door. The robber baron who lived here first built two small artificial hills to augment the existing ones and keep the manor from overshadowing the rest of the estate. Once he died and his heirs moved out and the place was donated to the local mental hospital, the directors thought about bulldozing the hills down before realizing that the tempered view was good for inmates as well as patients. I turn the last corner, moving with more limp than usual thanks to my cumulative fatigue, and see the dark bulk now towering right overhead.

  Will I have to enter? I can do it if I need to do, but ever since my awakening I’ve been slightly afraid of the dark. I always fear that something even worse than that first experience is waiting to jump out at me. The thought of making my way through the empty dark halls, listening to the echoes, hoping to hear nothing... I begin to sweat. Please no.

  Fortunately, no it is. There was a fire here not long after my last visit, and they just put tarps on the roof. One of them has blown free just right, so as to let the moonlight shine in, through the window of my old cell, and down here to where I stand. Sometimes the universe is very subtle. And then sometimes, like right now, it’s very, very obvious indeed. I stand and wait for whatever might come next.

  A screaming comes across the sky. It’s familiar. In fact, it’s obviously an echo of the death-shriek that woke me in 1999, in the midst of that week of nightmares. It’s traveled through the upper air ever since, waiting for the moment to descend and scare the shit out of me all over again. It works, too. If I were just a tiny bit less anxious, I’d break and run right now. The scream goes on and on, piercing me down to the marrow and back out again.

  The world begins to spin around me, as the bonds between it and me are severed by the scream. I alone remain on the great axis; adrift, the world flops back and forth, and all my belongings are flung around just like everything else. One of the trees in the front courtyard, weakened by disease or insects long ago, breaks apart as the stress mounts. I hear ominous creaks in the asylum proper. Something had better change soon.

  It does. Even though I know (or at least hope for) what's coming, it’s still a shock. I feel like my head’s split open. My eyes no longer monopolize vision: my whole head seems to have become a giant eye, seeing in all directions at once. My useless ears’ input is drowned out by the flood of sounds registering directly in the depths of my mind. I touch everything I see and hear, and smell it, and taste it. I taste the moon when I look up. I taste the dirt when I look down, the dirt and the grass and the seeds and the bugs that crawl through the grass in search of the seeds and the rock beneath the dirt and the magma beneath the rocks.

  I collapse in ecstasy.

  Some unknown while later, my senses begin returning to their respective organs, and I open my eyes again. There comes the Rubbish, out of the asylum. And, um, there it comes again. There are two of it, chattering away at each other. They’re not copies of each other: one runs more toward industrial waste, one more toward domestic garbage, and their voices sound different. The thing is, the part of my soul that recognizes its totem recognizes both of them as mine. Something’s gone wrong, or at least very different.

  * * *

  WILLIAM

  Orange Beach. My God, I can’t believe I’m still in Orange Beach. Forget it, I don’t sound nearly as impressive as a young and drunk Martin Sheen.

  Damn it all, I’m tired of feeling so stupid. I long ago got accustomed to having a mind structurally superior to most other people’s, to revisiting the independent bicameral structure that Julian Jaynes says prevailed before the advent of modem c
onsciousness, but without sacrificing modern self-awareness. Ever since that crucial moment of insight, I’ve lived with a separate lobe of consciousness acting as a source of feedback and instigation, letting me use my brain’s capacity much more efficiently and flexibly than conventional single-mode consciousness allows. That got blasted in the telescope accident along with my ability to make cybernetic connections.

  It’s fucking tiring to have to think through things in a linear matter. Planes and volumes exist for a reason, after all, and it’s not basic capability that keeps humanity from pursuing multi-dimensional thought, it’s just evolutionary accidents that some of us managed to escape. Except here I am, back with the stupids.

  I thought about what Dante had said. First thing I did after he left was make some calls to see if anyone had hard information on Dante’s current status. Nope, but there were rumors. Now, there are always alleged sightings of people high on our hit lists (and on our “capture and interrogate, but no disintegrations” lists, and on the others). Some of these sightings are genuine mistakes and some are deliberately planted for various reasons. One of my early jobs for the Project was extending existing sociometric models to allow for better filtering of this kind of anecdotal evidence, and I still recall a lot of the baseline computations. So after my Hong Kong encounter, I gathered up all the information I could without making too-formal requests and let it chum away on the laptop for a while. Eventually my algorithms decided that there was a fairly good chance that Dante was indeed alive and up to something strange, with sighting details pushing a bit out of the expected noise levels.