Tales from the Magitech Lounge

by Saje Williams

  “Should we go after him?” someone asked. I glanced around and noticed that it was Anya.

  I shook my head. “He’s a big boy. And we really need to keep a low profile. Even on our own Earth of the late twentieth century, which this resembles, creatures that looked like most of us would’ve drawn a LOT of attention. Even in San Francisco.”

  “That doesn’t apply to all of us,” grunted Bigby. “Remember, I blended in just fine back at the end of the twentieth.”

  “If you want to follow him to watch his back,” I told him, “be my guest. But stay out of trouble.”

  “I’m particularly good at staying out of trouble,” he said with a smirk. “You should know that. Better than you, at least.”

  “Fine,” I sighed. “Take your girlfriend. And keep her out of trouble.”

  Kaleel gave me a snake-like glare for a long moment before they both simply winked out. She didn’t like it that I didn’t trust her.

  Too bad.

  About twenty minutes later Kevin reappeared, holding a newspaper. He didn’t look happy. In fact, I have to say he looked a little ill. He tossed it to me and I quickly perused it, my own expression growing more disgusted by the minute. “Fuck,” I said finally, tossing the paper aside. “They didn’t just send us through a goddam worldgate. They sent us back in time!”

  I used to be a time traveler. I originally introduced myself in this memoir by explaining this fact, and how I became a former time traveler. Time travel is dangerous, and it pissed me off to find out that we’d been transplanted in time by the mageship without even a warning. In fact, when you got right down to it, Radiance had lied to me.

  ::It was necessary:: came the silent response.

  Uh-huh. How so?

  ::Because traveling through time is illegal, you wouldn’t have agreed to help and it’s vital we stop Ranger’s activities before they screw up the continuum::

  You could have warned me.

  ::I chose not to. You need to seek out a cult called the Star-Brothers and infiltrate them. They are the men and women modified by Ranger to do its dirty work::

  A cult. Lovely. What do you mean “modified”?

  ::Ranger has used magic to change its followers. We’re still not sure what it has done. It’s a fair bet that no one in this continuum could oppose them::

  Which is why the other mageships had brought us here. And, unlike the Adjuster’s Office agents they might have chosen, we were more easily controlled. Or, at least, that was my assumption. And a pretty good one too, I thought. The only problem with that was we weren’t easily controlled, and they’d made a drastic mistake if that was indeed their rationale.

  ::You have to follow our directions:: The mageship’s mental voice actually carried a hint of the scandalized in its tone now, as if the possibility we wouldn’t play along with their agenda—whatever the hell it was—hadn’t occurred to them.

  Maybe it hadn’t. Listen, I thought at it, ordinary humans aren’t exactly big on conformity. As far as the freaks are concerned, you can just forget about it. I can point them in the right direction and pull the trigger, but how they’ll fly from there is up to them.

  I wouldn’t have used the term “freaks” had I not considered myself an honorary member of the clan.

  Radiance didn’t appreciate this information nearly as much as I thought it should. I detected a definite air of irritation in its response. ::Doing this the wrong way will only empower Ranger::

  Hey, I told it. You chose us—we didn’t choose you. You can send us all home if you’d rather. I doubt anyone would bitch about it.

  ::It’s too late for that::

  I’d tried. For what little it seemed to be worth. I had the distinct impression that there were a lot of things Radiance wasn’t sharing with me. It seemed to be able to read my mind at will, to peer into my innermost thoughts, but whatever it had done to me, it hadn’t given me the same talents.

  ::Talk to your people, find a safe place to hide until I track down the cult::

  Like I needed that advice. The deeper I got into this, the less I wanted to be involved. And the more impossible it seemed for me to break free.

  I gave the others a rundown on what I knew so far. They looked about as happy about the situation as I was, but, thankfully, none of them appeared to blame me for it.

  “We can’t just hang out in here,” Vex said.

  His female companion nodded. “Why don’t we have a look around too?” she asked, and, before anyone else could say anything, both of them vanished from sight.

  “Shit,” I grumbled. “This is not getting any better.”

  * * *

  The year was 1987. The so-called twentieth anniversary of the “Summer Of Love.” An interesting time, to be sure. It didn’t take long for us to realize that this was not our Earth. The President of the United States was Ronald Reagan. Yeah, these yahoos actually elected him to the most powerful position in the land. An actor. And not even a particularly good one. We had him on our Earth too, but we would have never elected someone like him to the White House.

  Or so I like to tell myself.

  It didn’t take us long to find someplace to set up shop. Vex and Kate showed up with wads of cash. I didn’t ask them where they got it. I was pretty certain I didn’t want to know.

  I put them in charge of scrounging.

  We’d ended up across the bay in Oakland simply because it was easier to find the kind of abandoned warehouse I wanted over there. An old defunct foundry worked well enough. Space is too valuable in SF itself for them to leave such places alone for long.

  Boneyard and Kevin ended up in charge of security, with Hydra and Hope as their backups. Hades and Steph took it upon themselves to start looking for cult activity and ended up taking Bigby and Kaleel with them.

  The state of communication technology in the late 1980s was abysmal. The only mobile phones in existence were the size of a brick, and prohibitively expensive. Not that we couldn’t have afforded them if forced to rely on them, but thankfully the mages were quick to find a way to modify our PCDs to work without repeater towers or any of the other high-tech geegaws we were accustomed to having nearby to transmit the signals along.

  Hades was a halfway decent engineer, as it turned out, and he pulled and modified the molecular circuit-boards inside all our PCDs, embedding each with an intricate spell sigil that would allow us to communicate with one another anywhere within about fifty miles.

  Worked for me.

  Truth be told, tracking down the cult wasn’t all that hard after all. It took a lot of legwork, but we had a lot of legs. About two weeks from the point we arrived in 1987, Hades and Steph found their compound outside of Santa Cruz. They called themselves the Children of the Stars, and their leader was a man using the single name “Sirius.” Radiance had apparently gotten the name wrong when she’d originally told me about them. It was nice to know she wasn’t infallible.

  It almost sounds like a joke, right? It’s not.

  Now we don’t have a lot of problem with cults in my time. The more influential ones are “convinced” into applying for a colony license and shipped off into the Great Beyond. If they’re likely to cause trouble, the Confed has all sorts of ways of making it difficult for them to rise above the status of Provisional World.

  Sounds a bit harsh, I’ll admit, but who’d know better how dangerous cults can become than someone who’s watched a million of them rise and fall? Deryk Shea takes a very dim view of people trying to play messiah and exploiting the gullible.

  Back in the twentieth century, however, the good ol’ United States of America had the First Amendment of the Constitution that allowed any old crazy to declare himself some kind of a prophet and start gathering followers like a modern pied piper. This inevitably led to some terrible events like the Jamestown Massacre and the debacle in Waco, Texas. Jim Jones and David Koresh existed in my universe as well as this one, believe me.

  Agnostics and atheists outnumber “True Believer
s” in my time in my universe. The primary religion on Earth Prime itself is a sort of Pantheist/Humanist creed that promotes a certain kind of “live and let live” morality that the Adjuster seems to consider perfectly acceptable. Religions with no powerful leaders weren’t on his list, it seemed, and that seemed to work out just fine for everyone.

  Here and now, in this particular universe, however, the Children of the Stars had some kind of a commune going in the hills not far off the coastal highway. They hadn’t attracted much attention from local law enforcement yet, because they hadn’t needed to set up any kind of obvious fences. Nor had they started gathering weapons, as did many of these kinds of cults.

  No, the Children had a major ace up their sleeve the common cult of the era did not have. Their leader was a mage.

  Once we’d tracked them down, we were left with the problem of how to get to them. Hades assured us he could break through their perimeter defenses, particularly with Rio, Steph, and Kevin as backup. I didn’t doubt his word, but I wasn’t completely certain his confidence wasn’t slightly misplaced. I didn’t like the non-answers I’d been getting from Radiance, and suggested a slower, more devious approach.

  About three nights after we’d discovered their location, Stormchild—by far the best flyer among us—led us on an aerial reconnaissance mission.

  Let me make this perfectly clear. I don’t like flying. I especially don’t like flying when there isn’t even a machine wrapped around me to explain how I’m doing it.

  I also didn’t care for the fact that we were flying with the assistance of mage-created spirits I myself couldn’t perceive. The damn things could read my intentions, apparently, and allowed me to soar with no regard for wind currents or other atmospheric variables.

  The spirits also seemed to protect us from the side effects of soaring aloft—things like flying debris, passing birds and wind force. “And what’s the purpose of this?” I yelled to Stormchild, who was showing off by doing loop-de-loops and other aerial maneuvers that made me sick to my stomach just watching them.

  This particular journey included myself, Stormchild, Rio, Hope, and Hades. Initially it seemed to me that I was the only one for whom flying didn’t seem second nature. Hope, of course, had her wings. The rest were relying on windsprites to fly, like I was. They seemed a hell of a lot more comfortable with the creatures than I did. Except for Rio, who bore it with an almost stoic resignation, which led me to believe she wasn’t nearly as comfortable with the idea as I’d originally assumed.

  Of course, besides myself and Stormchild, they were all mages, accustomed to such things. And Stormchild, well, air was his element. He wasn’t a mage yet he could command any windsprite. Or so he told me. His familiarity with the things apparently didn’t carry over to his girlfriend, I mused with some amusement.

  “If we’re going to come up with a battle plan, it’s important that you have a look at the place,” he said in response to my question. What I found really aggravating at that particular moment was that he didn’t even have to yell. He seemed to be speaking in normal tones, yet his words found my ears with no trouble whatsoever.

  Damn immortal showoff.

  I have to admit the view was spectacular. As we flew above the coast road, the glittering Pacific lay to our right, a great expanse of blue vanishing into the distance as the Earth curved below it, its azure serenity broken at times by the sight of a set of sails or a fishing boat slicing its way through the waves.

  To our left lay an unnamed set of green dotted hills. Okay, I’m sure they were named—since when did anything go without a name around humans?—but they were unnamed to me.

  We curved toward the hills and rapidly approached a set of buildings set high on the summit of one, at the end of a long and curving road partially hidden by trees. “That’s it!” yelled Hades, who apparently didn’t have Stormchild’s neat little trick of speaking conversationally in these conditions. “I’d like your permission to try to infiltrate the cult!”

  I stared at him. “You’d look a little out of place, don’t you think?”

  He shrugged—not an easy thing to do while flying, let me tell you. “I can change my pigmentation,” he told me. “I don’t think they’re racist. An African-American would fit right in, I’m sure.”

  “How do they recruit?” I asked. The whole yelling back and forth thing was starting to irritate me.

  “They apparently hang out at the beaches and other public areas and approach people who look like they may be looking for something new.”

  “Sounds pretty innocuous.”

  “Yeah. Doesn’t it just? What does that voice in your head have to say about the cult’s goals?”

  “It hasn’t exactly been helpful,” I growled. “Originally I thought it was supposed to track down the cult for us. It’s a good thing we didn’t wait around.”

  ::I’ve been busy trying to keep Ranger from noticing your presence:: The mageship spoke into my head for the first time in almost a week. ::You should be thankful::

  It had to know that I was suspicious of its motives, yet it never said anything about it. Where’s your pilot, Radiance?

  ::I have reason to believe you might find her down there in the compound::

  I didn’t like its choice of words. What the hell did ‘reason to believe’ actually mean? Fine. “No,” I told Hades abruptly. “I want to be the one to go in.”

  “What? That’s crazy!”

  “Why? I’m completely normal, except for whatever Radiance has done to my brain. If the leader is a mage, don’t you think he might detect you’re one too? All it would take was one slip-up and you’d be screwed. With me, there’s nothing really to detect.”

  He scowled, but he couldn’t refute my logic.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” interjected Stormchild. “But be careful. We can’t risk losing you.”

  I shot him an incredulous look. “And why the hell not? What’s so special about me? I’ll tell you. Not a goddam thing. If this little mission can spare anyone, it can spare me.”

  Hades was shaking his head. “I don’t like it. I think you’re more important than you realize.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, the ship chose you to communicate with for a reason, didn’t it?”

  “I’m not sure that’s a positive thing, Hades.”

  ::Your biggest weakness has always been a lack of faith in yourself, Jack::

  Stay out of this!

  ::You know, I don’t like the idea of you going in any more than they do:::

  Now that makes it damn near irresistible.

  ::You’re a very contrary man, Jack::

  Radiance was starting to figure me out. Took long enough, considering it practically lived inside my head with me these days. You betcha.

  I’d initially worried about being spotted from the ground, but Hades had erected some sort of invisibility shield around us all, which led me to worry about something entirely different. What if a small plane or helicopter decided to fly through the ostensibly empty air we were currently occupying?

  I left this fear unspoken. Even I realized there wasn’t much chance of that happening, so it fell under the ‘unreasonable fear’ category. As I’m not generally prone to such fears, I figured it was a side effect of flying like this in the first place.

  We swooped fairly low over the compound—maybe three hundred feet up or so—and watched as a group of about ten members climbed inside a mini-van and headed down the hillside. Recruiting? Or going into town for supplies?

  Only one way to find out. I turned and followed the van.

  Episode II: Groovin’ with the Rattlesnakes

  In retrospect it was almost hideously easy. Like many cults, the Children were very interested in expanding their membership, and all it took was being at the right place at the right time. They were hardly subtle about it, wandering the Santa Cruz boardwalk with printed handbills and trying to drum up interest among the summer beach-goers.

  Restored to nor
mal, no longer bound to a windsprite or rendered invisible by Hades’s magic, I simply placed myself in their path.

  I was looking a little rough around the edges, my hair a bit shaggier than it had been in years, the three days of stubble on my cheeks and chin a testament to how single-minded I’d been in pursuing this bunch. The way I saw it, the only path home was to do what Radiance wanted, and that meant finding and disrupting their agenda. Whatever that was.

  The two young women who approached me were both quite pretty, and struck me immediately as terribly naïve. I doubted either of them had seen their twentieth birthday. One I took for an ugly duckling who hadn’t quite realized she’d become a swan while she wasn’t looking. The other struck me as a child of privilege who’d walked away from her life without a backward glance. Idealistic, but not the brightest bulb on the tree.

  I knew all of this within a minute of meeting them. Whatever Radiance had done to my mind, it had increased my perceptiveness a hundred fold. I still wasn’t sure that was a good thing. I’d long accepted the idea of being a freak by association—I couldn’t decide whether I was ready to become one for real.

  Of course, it was far too late to worry about that now. Radiance hadn’t asked my permission ahead of time.

  I was leaning against the pier, a straw hat I’d bought at one of the vendors shielding my eyes from the sharp glare of the sun off the water, when they walked up to me. The newly-minted swan spoke first, a little hesitantly. “Sir? Are you out of hope?”

  I turned to look at them and smiled wanly. “Hope? That’s in pretty short supply these days.”

  She flashed me a dazzling grin, only the slightest dart of her gaze away from mine revealing how little she realized the effect of that smile. “It doesn’t have to be,” she said.

  “Would you like a little hope?” the other asked, holding out one of their handbills.