King of Morning, Queen of Day

by Ian McDonald

  Names have power. To name a memory, to say it out, is to live it again.

  She cannot remember why she is decorating the Christmas tree on her own; that has been edited out, cut and recut like life in an Australian soap opera. She is draping tinsel garlands over the branches of the fir by the glow of the faery lights. She loves that glow—it is the light of Christmas, the Christ light captured in a hundred tiny glowings. The doorbell rings, she goes to answer it. It is a man her father worked with. She knows him vaguely; he obviously knows her better than she knows him. Can he come in? Yes. Can he sit down? Yes. She continues decorating the tree. They are both uncomfortable.

  Is her mother in? No.

  It’s about her dad. Just to say, when he comes back, if he comes back, his job’s open. Any time, he can have it, we’ll always find a place for him.

  And he goes.

  And she knows…

  (Slipping the rubber band around Li’l Lilli Langtree the faery’s wasp waist onto the top of the tree)

  … that this is the first of too many moments she will never be able to share.

  “She said they’d fired him because he had been embezzling money. She said it wasn’t the first time it had happened, but it was the last—she couldn’t live with someone she couldn’t trust.”

  “And?”

  “I am too much like my mother.”

  “For God’s sake, because of a little white lie, you won’t forgive her?”

  “Won’t. Can’t. As I said, I am too much like my mother.”

  “She’s willing to forgive you.”

  “Very magnanimous.”

  “She needs your forgiveness.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Just drink your coffee and go away, Ewan. I don’t know anything anymore.”

  When he has gone, long gone, she goes to the telephone. There are a number of messages on her answering machine, all of them from Saul. He is angry, a sound to be pondered over, savoured. It is a rare vintage, Saul’s anger. Where the hell is she, what is she doing, and with whom? This is the way it ends, staking claims around other’s lives, with demands, and suspicions, and message after message on answering machines.

  She cuts the machine off.

  “Saul, my life is kind of complex,” she whispers. On the pale blue screen tomorrow’s weather unfurls across the country in neatly positioned symbols. She punches a number she has never quite managed to forget.

  It is ringing. Two, three, four times. It is late. There will be wondering, who can be phoning at this time of the night? Maybe there will be alarm, maybe fear. Maybe she should hang up and call again another night, another week. Six times. Eight times:

  “Hello? Who is this?”

  She cannot say it.

  “Hello? Hello? Who is this? Who’s calling?”

  She cannot say it. Not one word of it.

  “What’s going on here? Who’s calling? Look, you had better tell me who you are or I’m putting the phone down, right now.”

  “Hello?”

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me.”

  Even those words are too many. She presses the hangup button. Prrrrrr. After a time that seems like no time but is longer than she has realised, a computer-generated voice says, “Please replace the handset and try again. Please replace the handset and try again. Please replace the handset and try again. Please replace the handset and try again. Please replace the handset and try again. Please replace the handset and try again. Please replace the handset and try again…”

  He who does not have the spirit of discipleship will never become a Master of the Way. The spirit of discipleship is the Way of the teachable spirit. The Way of the teachable spirit is the spirit of the open hand; which is the spirit that brings nothing with it, that lays claim to no thing, no value, no knowledge; the spirit that is open and receptive.

  Her sensei, in his homespun Zen koans, often chided Enye that the only thing that stood between her and true mastery of the Way of the Sword was the want of a teachable spirit. “Your hands are too full,” he would say, striking the knuckles of them gently with the sheath of his katana. “Your head is too full—full of strategies and tactics and cluttering thoughts. That may be the Way of Advertising, but sure as shit it isn’t the Way of the Sword. Let go, woman. For the love of God, just for once, let go. What the hell is it you’re holding onto so tightly?”

  She was never sure.

  Only when she came to kneel at the feet of new Masters did she begin to understand what he meant. With the fall of the early autumn nights she would return, and return again to the place beneath the railroad arch where the Midnight Children in their exquisite deformity waited to lead her in the new Way.

  She learned the names and natures of her enemies, the phaguses, the Nimrod—both names uncomfortable and unwieldy, though in time they would become as familiar as old gloves—and why, despite the appalling wounds she had inflicted upon it, the Nimrod had refused to die, was even now regenerating itself into a new form. Not being any kind of living creature, but a manufacture of the subconscious mind, it, all phaguses, would continue to manifest themselves as different aspects of that same subconscious mindset. Until either the anomaly in the reality/Mygmus interface that permitted their existence was restored to harmony. Or the subconscious mind-set was erased.

  She learned the name and nature of her own power: mythoconsciousness. The word tasted bitter at first, like her first sip of ceremonial Japanese tea, but as she drank deeper of it, so its sacramental nature filled her being. Mythoconscious—she was mythoconscious; of that rarest sisterhood that throughout human history had channelled and shaped humanity’s deepest fears and hopes into the gods, demons, and heroes of its darkest nights. Mythoconscious; she wielded the name, the title, like a sword; like a sword, it cut reality and left it bleeding.

  “Unlike your Adversary, you don’t have the gift of the great dream-shaping,” Sumobaby told her, with the ember light raising dull highlights on his sweating flesh and the boom box wired to the car battery beating it out into the night hip-hop rhythm. “The genes were diluted by recessives. Skipped a generation. You have only recently developed the ability to interact with the Mygmus. The talent must be consciously developed if you are to bring the healing.”

  And, pressed up close to the afterglow warmth of Saul’s sleeping body in her bed, she read from the Rooke archive by the light from the yellow streetlights:

  I have this dread that afflicts me in the dead of night: it is that somehow, we have lost the power to generate new mythologies for a technological age. We are withdrawing into another age’s mythotypes, an age when the issues were so much simpler, clearly defined, and could be solved with one stroke of a sword called something like Durththane. We have created a comfortable, sanitised pseudofeudal world of trolls and orcs and mages and swords and sorcery, big-breasted women in scanty armour and dungeonmasters; a world where evil is a host of angry goblins threatening to take over Hobbitland and not starvation in the Horn of Africa, child slavery in Filipino sweatshops, Colombian drug squirarchs, unbridled free market forces, secret police, the destruction of the ozone layer, child pornography, snuff videos, the death of the whales, and the desecration of the rain forests.

  Where is the mythic archetype who will save us from ecological catastrophe, or credit card debt? Where are the Sagas and Eddas of the Great Cities? Where are our Cuchulains and Rolands and Arthurs? Why do we turn back to these simplistic heroes of simplistic days, when black was black and white biological washing-powder white?

  Where are the Translators who can shape our dreams and dreads, our hopes and fears, into the heroes and villains of the Oil Age?

  And again, with the rain cutting in sheer and cold across the grey industrial sloblands, she muffled up in her fleecy hooded sweat top:

  “You keep telling me telling me telling me I’m to bring healing. I don’t know what you mean, how, even why.”

  Raindrops drummed on the black plastic roof to their small council chamber
. Lami had coiled herself tight, hugging thin arms about her body for warmth. The joints passed around the circle, to the left-hand side, to the widdershins, the witching side. Moonface spoke.

  “The deeper your Adversary pushes her roots into the Mygmus, the more powerful she becomes, the more the boundary between present-state and Mygmus-state become uncertain. It may not be tomorrow, it may not be next year, next decade, but a time is coming when the distinctions between reality and Mygmus become so tenuous they vanish altogether.”

  Lami took up the thread. Fingers exhaled a pale tree of aromatic smoke from her scar.

  “We’re talking the collapse of consensus reality, of our comprehension of a universe of space and directed time. Cause and effect would cease to exist; present time, past time, and future time would cease to be discrete entities; everything would exist simultaneously and eternally. Things would happen, events occur, objects be created and decreated without any causation or reason.”

  “Chaos,” Sumobaby said. “Utter chaos.”

  “But how?” Enye shouted. “How how how? You never tell me how. My God, I’m supposed to save the universe, and you won’t even tell me how I can get through next week.”

  “Help from beyond comprehension,” said Moonface, grinding out the roach on the cardboard floor with the heel of his Doc Marten’s. “Your own mythoconscious talent is the only thing that can help you. Somehow, somewhen, it will provide you with a weapon.”

  “And Shekinah,” said Lami.

  “Shekinah,” Sumobaby whispered, and Cello moaned a minor chord, and Fingers folded her hand-head tight, into a gesture that spoke more eloquently the word danger than any words ever could.

  The name of Shekinah was one the Midnight Children mentioned often; one which, when questioned, they hid from Enye’s light in some deep dark casket of sorrows. But there were hints and allusions in the Rooke archive.

  If we accept mythoconsciousness as an altered state akin to hypnosis, dreaming, drug hallucination, may it not be possible to artificially induce it, as these other states may be artificially induced? In the past I had success in inducing a mythoconscious state through hypnosis; admittedly, in a naturally highly mythoconscious individual. Might it not, through artificial means, be possible to stimulate the mythoconscious talent we all possess, even in subjects as singularly insensitive as myself?

  I think the answer may lie in the use of drugs. The sacramental use of narcotics has a central role in many religions—not in the least Christianity. After all, alcohol is the most abused narcotic. The mystical experience seems common to all religions, and depends largely on the use of disorienting media (in Hinduism, repeated mantras: in Zen, the psychic assault of repeated questions; in Sufism, the physical act of whirling; in Christian hermeticism, extreme physical sensation through the mortification of the flesh) to induce altered states of consciousness.

  They mythoconscious state is closely allied to the mystical state. It might be possible, using some form of psychedelic drug, to break down the walls between consciousness and mythoconsciousness, between present, aware state and Mygmus.

  It is a very gentle kind of psychedelia methinks; certainly contemporary synthetics are too powerful and too crude. I rather favour older, more natural drugs, from fungi and the leaves of certain plants. Fungi seem to hold out particular promise—there are a number of specimens that can induce psychotropic hallucinations.

  Saul stirred in his massive sleep. Umble-grumble: Whajja readin’?

  “Nothing. Nothing, Go back to sleep. Little lawyer’s got himself a busy day in court tomorrow.”

  Mr. Antrobus knocked on her door before the shower-and-muesli hour next morning, wondering if she knew of anything untoward going on in the rear laneway.

  No, should she have? (Liar. And to dear Mr. A.)

  Only that he had heard funny noises last night as he was putting the cats out. Like dogs. But not exactly.

  The nihilistic November rain was still raining raining raining down as she walked across the scablands toward the smudge fire of the Midnight Children.

  “It’s a drug, isn’t it? Hannibal Rooke’s mythoconsciousness enhancing drug.”

  “Mythoconsciousness creating …” Moonface’s correction was cut short by the touch of Lami’s hand on his sleeve.

  “We’ve got to tell her.” Those of the Midnight Children capable of assent agreed. Wolfwere scratched under her blanket at her crotch. Lami pulled her human torso close to the fire, zipped shut the leather biker’s jacket over a raggedly cut-off cerise leotard. “What the Rooke archive doesn’t tell you is that Hannibal Rooke needed assistants in his experiment to find his mythoconsciousness drug. Five of them. One was a psych post-grad, one was a doctor of chemistry, one was an undergrad pharmacist, one was an anthropologist researching sacramental narcotics among Orinoco Amerindians. And one was a med student.”

  “You.”

  “It’s a long and fairly uninteresting story. The research finally culminated in a combination of drugs that stimulated those areas of the hippocampus that seemed connected with human chronoconsciousness. Rooke tried it himself, of course. We took notes, shot a video. There’s nothing to see on the tape but an old man in a wheelchair raving on, but he claimed that under the drug he was capable of perceiving the mythlines, the lines of human psychic energy that generations of faith and belief have laid down across the physical landscape—more, that he had generated some ill-defined proto-phagus. The official experiments ended there—he may have tried it again himself, privately. It wouldn’t surprise me. He was murdered soon afterward.”

  “You think he may have created his own murderers?”

  “We think his breaking through to partial mythoconsciousness signalled his presence across the mythlines to the phaguses. And to the Adversary. He knew her personally, you see.”

  “Shone out like a bloody great lighthouse,” Sumobaby swore, almost religiously.

  “Why kill him?”

  “Because a mythoconscious individual—any mythoconscious individual—is a threat to them. Some of them hold the pseudolife they’ve been given very dear indeed.”

  Suddenly Enye knew what question she must ask: a question she had known she must ask from the first time she had been brought to this dismal huddle of shacks, a question she had always known was never appropriate, never right. Until now.

  “Lami, why are you as you are?”

  Fingers expelled a great shuddering sigh from her tracheotomy wound.

  Even as she asked, Enye knew the answer Lami would make.

  “We took Shekinah.”

  “Why?”

  “After Rooke’s murder, we took it upon ourselves to try and heal the damage the Adversary had done.”

  “And you broke through…”

  “A massive overdose…”

  “And touched her reality-shaping power.”

  “Drew it down into us. And were reshaped, according to our subconscious hopes, and fears, and whims, and fantasies.”

  “Dear sweet God.”

  “We thought at first… I don’t know, God knows what we thought: we thought we’d all died and gone to hell, that’s what we thought. We thought we were going to be this way for always, that’s what we thought. We didn’t know the change only endured during darkness. Even so, it was enough to make sure that we couldn’t live in society any longer; not people who are men, and women, and God, even dogs by day, and things like you wouldn’t even dream in your worst nightmares by night. God, men used to think I was beautiful.”

  She wept. Moonface drew her to him. Small solace. Her tears ran down the curve of his crescent face.

  “You know you can bring us back,” he said. “You know that. You have the reality-shaping power. You have the ability to heal and restore to harmony. You can change us.”

  “I would. Don’t you think I would, this instant, if I knew how?”

  Fingers held out a small transparent plastic sachet in the palm of her left hand. Inside was what looked like a year’
s supply of toenail clippings and bleached pubic hair.

  Shekinah, she breathed through the hole in her throat.

  Shekinah: the Radiant Presence of God.

  “No, I can’t. What if, what if…”

  “You have to. Yours is not the great gift. Yours is the lesser gift, and it must be tuned, and amplified, and trained,” said Sumobaby.

  She ran from the cardboard shelter, through the long grey rain of November, away from the railroad viaduct and the heavy night freights shunting and clunking over the points. The plastic envelope remained where she had dropped it, on the roach-scorched cardboard floor.

  She found Mr. Antrobus sitting on the stairs. He had been crying. When she asked him what was the matter, he began to burble and blubber again. He had never been ashamed of his tears, Mr. Antrobus. One of his cats had not come home with the others when he had banged his fork on the side of the cat food tin. Unheard of. Something amiss. He had gone out to look, calling Tigger Tigger here puss puss puss and rattling a favourite little jingly toy. He had found the body in front of Mrs. Blennerhasset at number three’s garage.

  “Horrible, horrible, horrible,” he said. “All torn and smashed and ripped apart. It looked as if something had tried to eat him. Poor poor little Tigger. What kind of thing could do that to a poor little cat?”

  Enye did not like to answer.

  Omry will tell you Lycra is the fabric of the decade. Omry wears black stretch one-pieces with boots and ridiculous quilted micro-bomber jackets. Omry looks like a testimonial to the joys of totalitarianism.

  Omry works as a dispatcher with a bicycle courier company. Omry will tell you the bicycle courier is the street-level ground-zero hero of the decade. Jimmy Dean in chamois padded shorts. Life in the bus lane—live fast, the under the wheels of an anonymous German-something car with Catcon. Omry would be in the coronary care unit if she cycled more than two blocks.