“… and still facing the law of diminishing returns.” HuanJen added. “I have my limits.”
“Fancy that …” Jade smirked. “You know, the sad thing is, I’ll have no idea what to get you next year.”
“Love, I think you’ll find that good ideas are worth repeating …”
The phone rang.
” …” which we can deal with at a later time.” HuanJen finished, as reality returned forcefully to the couple.
INTERLUDE: Meeting
These are places of power and their titles.
Xai is the where-we-all-go, Earth-between-Earths, the all-forgive.
Metris is the Center City, the point-of-arrival, the heart of Xai beating with the lives of those who live within it.
Shard Tower is the point of government, home to the Guild Council, from where good and profitable order emanates.
… and on one of the many balconies and overlooks on Shard Tower, a man stood …
Solomon Dell, on the other hand, could have been called by many titles, but was really a short, overworked man with native-braided blond hair and a good suit that he didn’t seem to like. He could call himself the Head of the Rancelman, leader of the Guardians of Travel, or anything else, but he was still a man who was in a foul mood.
Titles solved nothing. Words were never enough.
“Good evening Mr. Dell.” The voice came from behind him, from the balcony’s entrance.
“Hello, HuanJen. Dell shook his head and began to turn around. “I really dislike that stealth act. How are …”
The Rancelman stopped. He blinked. He looked. He blinked again. His brain scrambled to find sensible words, then resorted to simple but effective obscenity.
“What the hell?” Dell asked as articulately as he could.
A man stood before him that was arguably HuanJen, Zone Cleric of Guild Esoteric and member of the Taoist Order. The visitor at least looked like HuanJen; a thin, elegant, if somewhat plain Chinese man, with short dark hair bearing a severe white streak down the center. He had the same effortless poise as the exorcist and general busybody. However one thing was out of place.
“It’s a suit,” HuanJen said calmly, gesturing at the business outfit he was obviously wearing with great reluctance. “I have to wear it for joint work at Guild Medical. I help monitor pharmaceutical processes, they have certain, rather … strict … policies.”
Solomon Dell nodded. Policies and procedures he understood all to well - people were always complaining about his.
“I … am meeting my wife at the Outlook in awhile,” the Rancelman said conversationally. “I missed Valentines day, business with 2-124. I owe her, and it is a bit of a fancy place. I hate this.”
“As do I. This is impractical, even if it is once a week.” HuanJen shook his head, striding up to the balcony, looking through the glass windows. In the spring and summer, the glass would be drawn aside, but even in the mild winters in Metris, the Shard Tower staff kept them closed.
“I feel better in my armor.” Dell turned to look out over the city as well. “I feel better at work.”
“I know.” HuanJen nodded thoughtfully. “The Outlook is a nice place, Jade was taken there once by … I think a suitor. Friend of mine who’s back in town. Nice man, very nice restaurant.”
“Very.” Dell nodded, silent for a moment, then finding his words again.
“Thank you for meeting with me again, considering everything. And how I acted last time.”
“It’d be impolite to refuse.” the mystic answered, not formally, but the with the echo of propriety present. “You said no offers.”
“No … quite the opposite.” Dell paused. “You were right, HuanJen. I felt I should tell you.”
The cleric turned, giving his companion a strange yet compassionate look.
“Please, clarify?” HuanJen asked.
Dell sighed, and walked next to the Magician-Priest. He ran his fingers across the window of the balcony, as if touching the city.
“It’s … my job was never political to me, HuanJen. Hard to believe, but it’s very important to me for many reasons. Not to everyone who tried to join, especially with my last recruiting drive. Not to some others out there.”
“Yes.” HuanJen nodded, looking at the Head Rancelman curiously. “I’d heard things got unpleasant. Some people left …”
“Fired.” The word was thrown like a knife. “They saw opportunity or influence. They didn’t … care. I know why HR took me out of recruiting. I attracted the wrong elements. I wanted people … to have them.”
“I … anyway. It’s …” The cleric closed his eyes for a moment. “People can do things because it is what they do, or for smaller reasons. Those smaller reasons do not cover the larger, it leaves people uprooted, as it were.”
“You must clean up in the counseling arena,” Dell said with a mixture of bitterness and humor.
“You ought to hear my apprentice’s opinion of me.”
“Oh, I got plenty of opinion from her when I called you. No thanks, I have my limits.” The Rancelman smirked. “How do you put up with her?”
“I love her.”
“That will do it.” Dell fidgeted for a few moments before akwardly putting his hands in the pockets of his suit. “So … how’s work?”
“What do you think?”
“I think … you’re annoyed, tired, exhausted, sick of hearing about the Travelers’ and the University versus the Mercantile Alliance or whatever, and remembering that, once, this was all about ‘do we give control of the Communicants to the Guild Council.’”
“You forgot that my Guild gets to monitor the vote … while everyone asks us for assorted spiritual and mental aid,” HuanJen added respectfully.
Dell’s expression stayed sour, but some humor gleamed in his dark eyes. “Try being a Rancelman. I’ve got everything locked down tighter than the city during a Cross-storm. People are … leaning on me. It’s an opportunity for change as people make deals before the big vote.”
“Yes. I hear the Messengers are especially concerned. So, what is wrong besides that, Solomon?”
Dell looked at the mystic thoughtfully. “That obvious?”
“Yes.” HuanJen’s voice held no malice or cunning. “You don’t talk to people much. Sometimes, then, what is held back seeks to emerge. I see that often in many guises.”
“No I don’t talk to people much, and I yelled at the one person I do talk to on the job, right after the Travelers’ and the University got so buddy-buddy. I think she and I are OK, but … well.”
“I still can’t believe people expect you to handle this at thirty …”
“Thirty-one.”
“Thirty-one,” HuanJen corrected himself. “Then again, I know it’s a young person’s job after the changes in the Rancelmen.”
“Deaths,” Dell said primly, “everyone says anything but ‘deaths.’”
“I am aware. I didn’t want to bring up bad memories. With the plague, it’s easy to do so. You never know.”
“Yes.” The Rancelman swayed back and forth slightly, dispelling nervous energy. “What you do, do you like it? I think it must give you some freedom. Flow through the world like water. I wish …”
HuanJen’s answer was sympathetic. “I’m a Zone Cleric, Solomon. It is what I do. No more. I am where I am. Besides, honestly, where else would you rather be on this world?”
“True. Piscion is boring, and … well you heard about Greenpoole …”
The cleric raised a warding hand. “That friend I mentioned was staying there. I’ve heard all the stories. Repeatedly. Whatever we have in this city, we can use our toilets without worrying about devastating the neighborhood.”
“That’s one rather crude way to look at it. Never saw you as the sense of humor type, HuanJen.”
“Most see me as one type. Only one sees me as myself.”
Dell rolled his eyes. “Tell me about it. I think only one person treats me as myself. I don’t know what I’d do wit
hout her.”
“I understand that. Do you … like being married, Solomon?”
“Yes. Had some tough times, but, yes. Miriam, she … she’s the one at work I can really trust, I’m hoping she can be friends with my wife.”
“I see.” HuanJen gave Dell a curious glance. “Well, you have a dinner to go to, and I have my job. Thank you for the talk, Solomon, I wish you well. Remember my original thoughts to you.”
The exorcist turned to go, but was interrupted.
“Here.” With a quick motion, Dell tossed a guilder-piece towards the cleric. HuanJen snatched it out of the air automatically.
“Fifty guilders? May I ask what this is for?”
“Counseling. I figure I owe you, HuanJen.” The Head Rancelman gave his companion a tired grin. “Guild rates and all. Besides, it’s nice to talk to someone who’s neither chewing me out or kissing my backside.”
The cleric closed his eyes and thought for a moment. He spoke after a moment’s deliberation, knowing exactly what he had to ask. It was the kind of thing Guild Esoteric required of its people.
“Will you need a receipt?”
“I …” Dell scowled. HuanJen was sincere, and he did know Guild Esoteric preferred everything be nice and aboveboard. “Send it to my home address.”
“I’ll have Jade do it tonight. Enjoy yourself, Solomon.”
“I’ll try …”
Solomon Dell watched the cleric walk into the depths of Shard Tower, passing out of sight like a fog on a sunny day. After a moment, he turned to look back over the city.
“Lucky bastard …”
Everyone had a place of power, a place to fit, and despite all his titles …
… he didn’t feel like he did.
POWERS AND PRINCIPALITIES
“For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”
-Ephesians 6:12
“The social, the political, the spiritual, there are no divisions. These are illusions that take us from the Heart when we misunderstand their source. All arises from a single source. Forgetting this is the beginning of disaster. You, in the front, I saw that …”
-Ikkaru “Old Man” Green, the “Personalities of Metris” Lecture series, Guild Esoteric Sequence.
February 20st, 2000 AD, Xaian Standard Calendar
A rolled up canvas lay in a dumpster, waiting for the Garbagemen of the City Services Guild to arrive. The Garbagemen were one of the invisibles of the Guilds, doing their job, obvious only when they were truly absent.
Halfway open, an observer could see someone had tried to do a picture that turned into something else. There was an odd, angular flare to the design, indicating the painter was likely not native-born - most artists of Xai tended to paint in either realistic or highly symbolic designs.
It was a half-done painting of a man, but the artist apparently couldn’t resist putting him in a strange, head-covering mask. There were frustrated brush-marks defacing part of it, a sign that the artist had given up when his vision hadn’t been what he’d expected.
A gust of wind blew a page of the Metris Time against the dumpster. A single headline was visible on the stained paper: COMMUNICANT VOTE 20 DAYS AWAY.
Some things appear because you’re looking for them - in the wrong place.
February 21st, 2000 AD, Xaian Standard Calendar
Jade stretched beneath her bedcovers, feeling her consciousness flow into a silver stream of self-awareness. She was waking up, not due to the blare of her alarm, but naturally, one of those rare moments where she didn’t need an outside stimulus to awake.
A look at the clock confirmed it was about a half hour before she was actually supposed to be awake. It was one of those lazy, relaxed moments where you realized you had a handful of minutes before, technically, you had to do anything. Absolute free time.
The Vulpine smiled to herself, an ivory-toothed slash gleaming in her black-furred face. She could go back to sleep. She could run a few select fantasies through her head. There was the chance to think over today’s schedule. Or …
Something scratched at the back of her mind. Meditate. HuanJen was a gentle mentor, but the time had come where she could neither carry and blend potions or work on itineraries or charge into the Otherworld. She knew it, and thus he had begun to instruct her in the finer points of her future job as Cleric, including meditations and philosophy, to take her into his world.
Meditation. Years raised in the maze of colony, languages and politics, plotting and planning, and she now meditated. A year ago, she’d never believe she’d be doing something like this. Now she couldn’t imagine not doing it.
HuanJen, her lover-sage, that gateway to confusing infinity, he’d given her hints on how to get where he was. Ever since she’d met him, she’d known he was somewhere larger in his head, and she wanted to get there. Despite her missteps, she kept getting closer …
“Let’s give it a shot.”
She closed her green eyes. It was simple, at least in her teacher’s words; Tao, the Great Mind, beyond all concepts, was the mother-of-all. To get to it, you let everything else go, until you were at where everything came from. Having nothing gave you everything …
… everything reconciled. Her body was an emanation of Greater, her thoughts were emanations, even herself all came from the Larger, and in the end she had nothing as she was …
… smelling an incredibly evil smell. The kind that made your nostrils regret not being ears.
Jade opened her eyes. Something small, brown, and very furry stared back at her enthusiastically.
“Hello, Buster.”
The Yorkshire Terrier panted harder at the acknowledgment, Jade’s sense of smell agonizing at every searing breath. Buster’s ideal method of waking people up was to splay himself across their chests and breathe in their faces. The fact his breath could be used to strip paint usually meant the person in question woke up quickly, and at times screaming.
It had seemed such a good idea at the time to take care of Buster for Mrs. Kline from next door. Two days ago, Buster had been a cute change of pace, and had somehow mutated into an attention-starved ball of halitosis. Worse, he liked to sleep on her bed and had decided she was “mommy.”
“Let’s go, fuzzball.” Jade scrambled out of bed, lifting Buster up in one furred hand. Buster, tongue hanging out, appeared to enjoy the ride.
Maneuvering around what the random fluctuations in gravity that only attacked people woken up suddenly, Jade made her way to the living room of the apartment she shared with HuanJen. Buster, for some indescribable reason, had decided she was easier to wake up, or at least more fun, when he needed to “do his business.”
“Good morning dearest.”
A figure that was quite probably HuanJen swam into Jade’s blurred view. Tall, thin, sort of oriental, if a bit fuzzy. It was close enough to the real thing.
“Here. Buster. Out.” Jade proffered the dog casually.
“Of course dear.” HuanJen took Buster gently. “I don’t have breakfast ready yet, I’d assumed you’d be asleep another fifteen minutes.”
“Yeah.” Jade fell onto what she assumed was the living room couch. There was only one really fluffy sitting-level piece of furniture in the living room, at least that she remembered, so she was pretty sure it was the couch.
There was the sound of the apartment door opening and closing. Bereft of her lover and Buster, Jade attempted the long mountain climb back to full awareness. She wasn’t sure if sleepiness or the meditation had done her in, but she definitely wasn’t functional.
She also needed to get dressed, as she was wearing panties and socks. She would definitely need to get conscious enough to get clothes on to avoid controversy when she went to work.
Work. She still needed to talk to HuanJen about that, and with the time of the month here she hoped she was going to b
e civil. With so much going on, it was hard to remain civil, and her civility wasn’t that well honed to begin with.
“Back dear.” HuanJen appeared, a happy and apparently much more relieved Buster following him in through the door.
“Good. I was doing some meditation and I think I zoned out. Little bugger snuck right up on me and wham, flamethrower breath.”
Buster leapt from the floor and onto Jade’s lap in a streak of enthusiastic brown fur. The dog spun around happily, then curled up in a contented torus of canine.
“At least he feels comfortable around you,” HuanJen commented, walking into the kitchen. A half-prepared breakfast awaited his attentions.
“Wonderful.” Jade petted Buster despite her best and most annoyed instincts. “Hey, Huan, I wanted to ask you something. I meant to last night, but you know how things got.”
“Yes dear?”
“Look, with stuff getting busy, I know I shouldn’t rush, but I figured maybe until the Communicant vote we could divide up more duties. Give me some more field time and you some more sane time. Being in the field, well, it gives me perspective anyway.”
“Actually, I was going to mention that.” HuanJen scooped out some of the contents of a tin of muselix into two bowls. “I’m going to be more tied up than I had predicted, and I think that may be a good idea.”
“I think I can handle it. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about things, like I said I would.”
“I know.” HuanJen carefully set down the bowls, glasses of juice, and the other elements of one of his usual nutritious-yet-edible breakfasts.
Jade’s brain finally engaging all gears, Jade gently shifted Buster onto the couch and took her place at the kitchen table. Breakfast. Her stomach woke up enough to be hungry.
“Anyway.” Jade poked at her meal. “I want to do more on my own. I think I need to in order to, well, understand. The Big Picture.”
“I agree.” HuanJen reached across the table and gave her hand a friendly squeeze. “I’ve been glad to see you at my services and actually asking questions. I think its a good idea, and I know you can do it.”
“Yeah. um, Huan?”
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