The Council of Shadows s-2

by S. M. Stirling

  "It is a pleasure," the older woman said in English; then she dropped back into French. "Even if you married an American, Adrian, at least your Helene is beautiful, beautiful! May your lives have much happiness."

  The old lady drooped one eyelid at Ellen, who chuckled in reply. Adrian missed the byplay, for once.

  "Madame Lasalle, I am an American by birth, as were my parents and grandparents," he said, exasperation in his tone. "It is appropriate that I marry an American as well, hein?"

  "Bah. Jesus Christ was born in a stable; does than make him a horse?"

  "Ah…She also speaks French, Madame Lasalle."

  "Of course," Lasalle said with a sniff. "You are a man of impeccable taste. Could you marry a woman who did not speak the language of civilization?"

  Ellen laughed aloud and spoke…in French. Her accent wasn't too strong, and her grammar was good if slightly formal and slow. She'd been speaking it with Adrian for some time now, to gain fluency.

  "You have reason, madame. I was a student of the arts by profession, and French is inescapable if one is serious."

  "Indeed. I would also expect Adrian to marry a woman of solid good sense. I have stocked the appartement Henri IV so that you need not leave it if you wish."

  "There is glace Berthillon?" Adrian asked.

  "Of course there is Berthillon! Did I not know you as a youngster?"

  He smiled; Ellen blinked a little at the fond expression.

  Well, I do have fifty years of stuff to catch up with.

  "What flavors?"

  " Agenaise, Banane, Cafe au whisky, Cafe Dauphinoix, Cannelle Cappuccino, Caramel, Caramel au beurre sale, Caramel au gingembre, Choco-lat au nougat, Chocolat blanc, Chocolat du mendiant, Chocolat blanc du endiant, Chocolat noir, Creole, Feuille de Menthe, Gianduja a l'orange, Gianduja aux noisettes, Grand-Marnier, Lait d'amande, Moka, Marron Glace, Noisette, Noix, Noix de coco, Nougat au Miel, Pain d'epices, Pistache, Plombieres, Praline au citron et coriandre, Praliee aux pignons, Re-glisse, The Earl Grey, Tiramisu, Turron dejijona, Vanille…"

  "You did not stock the entire selection! There would not be room!"

  "No, but enough that you will think that I have: the new smaller containers. Go, go, you two are newly married! You do not wish to stand talking to an old woman."

  The elevator was another antique, though not quite seventeenth-century; there was a sliding accordion-joint door, with wrought-iron curlicue gates at each floor. It clunked and creaked upwards, and Ellen leaned into Adrian's shoulder.

  "I wish this were just an extension of our honeymoon." She sighed.

  "Me also."

  "What's Berthillon?"

  "The best glace…ice cream…in Paris. Which is to say, in the entire world. Made here on this island, by hand."

  He laid a palm on the apartment's door for an instant, closing his eyes and concentrating; she felt a nearly irresistible impulse to smooth the lock of black hair that fell over his forehead. Then she noticed that her right hand was resting under the tail of the windcheater jacket she was wearing, on the hilt of a knife whose blade was inlaid with silver and etched Mhabrogast glyphs.

  Wow. All that inside-the-head training really has started to bite !

  His eyes opened and caught hers. "Welcome to my world, my dear one. I am sorry."

  "Well, I'm not," she said, grabbing his ears and giving him a brief fierce kiss. "Let's unpack and have some dinner. We have to go meet this atom wrangler, but we've got an hour or two yet."

  He laughed and lifted her across the threshold.

  "Very well. I will fix us something to eat, and you unpack?"

  "Done," Ellen said. "You'll have to give me cooking lessons sometime."

  "I find it soothing to cook, but of a certainty, my sweet."

  The apartment wasn't grand, despite the mildly pretentious name, though it shone with expert care and smelled slightly of sachets and wax. A hallway, a living room with windows on the plane trees of the courtyard and the Seine, a modest but superbly equipped kitchen, a study and a bedroom. The floors were polished hardwood, with a few Oriental rugs, and the furniture mostly plain in a subtle way that said expensive and old. One of the paintings on the wall opposite the fireplace was very good, but by a nineteenth-century Academic she couldn't quite identify. French, certainly, and pre-1900.

  Wait a minute, she thought. Wait a minute…Yup. It's by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, all right.

  It was a pleasure just to be an art history student again for an instant, and the Academics had become hot enough again to be a big part of her second-year course on French painting, to the scandal of old-fashioned Impressionist/Postimpressionist/avant-garde-succession worshipers still in thrall to the Whig narrative.

  This one had a lot less of the slick surface that he used for his mythological pictures; it showed two barefoot girls, one eleven or so and one a few years younger, sitting in a wood. They wore rather plain realistic Victorian-era peasant costumes colored brown and off-white, what working countryfolk actually used every day rather than the Offenbach-operetta exaggeration of festival-day gaudiness the genre usually showed. Their faces were done with a delicate realism that actually gave you a feeling for their personalities.

  Though of course they don't have the dirty, calloused feet or grime under the fingernails and their hair is far too neat and clean. Still for Bouguereau it's practically The Stone Breakers. Not one of his better-known ones. It'll come to me, it'll come to me…Ah, it's The Nut Gatherers!

  There was probably a story about how it ended up here, and she wasn't sure she wanted to hear it. The casual way Shadowspawn just appropriated what they liked from galleries and museums still made her angry-which was odd, considering the other things they routinely did, but it hit her at a level below conscious ethical priorities. This was a really fine piece of work; whether you considered it a great painting depended on what you thought of the Academics, but there was absolutely no doubt that Bouguereau had total mastery of his technique.

  The paint does exactly what he wanted it to do, she thought, with a smile. The question is whether he should have wanted it to do that.

  There were times she could just stand and look at something like this for hours. Instead she threw the traveling cases on the bed and continued her tour of the apartment. The only real luxury was a large bathroom, featuring a bathtub carved from a block of some silver-gray stone and shaped like a futuristic gravy boat.

  Just big enough for two, she thought happily.

  Adrian was already busy in the kitchen; she wandered in, took a carrot and nibbled on it while she perched on a stool and watched him work.

  "I get a man who's soulfully beautiful, with a body like a Greek god, knows just how to tie a girl up, he's rich and he cooks. There's no justice in the world and for once I'm the beneficiary."

  "Of a surety there isn't, or you would have better," he said, pouring her a glass from the bottle of red wine he'd opened. "But this is scarcely cooking; mere unpacking and setting out. Noemi has been very thorough. Hand me those tomatoes, would you?"

  She did, then hooked her feet up on a rung, sipping and watching the smooth fluidity of his motions, chuckling occasionally when he added a flourish like flipping a knife up to the ceiling and catching it as it fell; it was a pleasure with a slight frisson, when she recalled the things she'd seen him do with the same assurance. For a moment the wine distracted her.

  "What is this?"

  "Domaine de la Butte Bourgueil Mi-Pente 2003," he said. "That was a wonderful year, but perhaps…No, it's still at its peak. That hint of chocolate is nice, eh?"

  They sat and ate: salad, olives, charcuterie of dry sausage and cured ham and rabbit terrine with herbs, a round loaf of pain Poilane that crackled when you cut it, butter, a hard dry white cheese that bit gently at the mouth. She looked down again when he served the ice cream and she took her first taste. Dense, rich, tasting of actual cream and fruit…

  "My God," she said.

  "I told you so."

>   She tried to kick him beneath the table, and found her foot trapped under his. "You mustn't become predictable, my sweet."

  Noemi Lasalle gave them another set of kisses when they left. It was full dark now, or at least as dark as it got in a major city, with the tall buildings of La Defense showing to one side in the middle distance and the lower-rise center of Paris to the other. The granite paving blocks glistened in the light of the cast-iron street lamps, and the heavy, silty smell of the Seine was all around them. It was cool enough to make her jacket comfortable; that also made her less self-conscious about going armed. Beneath it she wore a silk shirt, and tights and a pleated skirt and soft black pumps.

  And a knife and an automatic pistol. Welcome to married life, she thought mordantly.

  Ellen tucked her arm through Adrians; the wine bar they were looking for was at 1 Quai de Bourbon, which put it at the corner with the bridge leading off the island. She looked to her right; the site of the Bastille was that way.

  "Don't tell me the Shadowspawn were to blame for that," she said lightly; there were advantages to a husband who could sense your feelings.

  "No. Too early. Though the Marquis de Sade…"

  "At last, something good they did!"

  He shook his head and staggered slightly, unlike his usual cat gracefulness. She put out a hand.

  "Adrian?"

  "I…am a little confused."

  "Why?"

  "This meeting is a nexus of…possible events. Events which depend on our decisions and actions; they will close some possible paths, open others, make some more or less likely. But there are other decision points crowding in: more and more and more, in the immediate future. I have never felt anything quite like it. And they are blurred . So many minds, so many of them with the Power and striving to warp the path of the future."

  He shook himself slightly, as if to brace himself. Au Franc Pinot had a narrow blue-fronted entrance, and the steps led down to an atmospheric vaulted-stone cellar. It was pleasant, in a funky, run-down manner, though there was a very slight but definite odor of damp stone, and the tables were islands of candlelight.

  Adrian sighed a little as they sat. "I used to come here while I was at La Sorbonne," he said. "It was a jazz club then, and a very good one. Though the food was execrable, but of course nobody goes to the Ile Saint-Louis to eat. "

  "It's a bad-food zone?"

  "No, not quite that. You can get a decent meal here. Not one of the famous gastronomique areas, though, nothing to attract someone looking for a special treat."

  He flicked a finger in the air for two glasses of white wine and settled in to wait with a hunter's patience. Ellen took out her notepad instead, and found herself looking at a headline for want of anything better to do.

  "It's amazing how she's aged," Ellen said, looking at the president's picture. "They all do."

  Adrian leaned over to take a glance and nodded. "And I know why. A day or two after their inauguration, they get a visit in the White House from the Council's representatives."

  "You're kidding," Ellen said.

  I knew they were pulling the strings from behind the scenes, but they put the gimp on the president in the Oval Office? I thought that meant something more subtle.

  "Yes. In fact, they require him, or her these days, to make a human sacrifice just to drive the lesson home, and for amusement. From the time of…Mmmm, I think Woodrow Wilson was the first."

  "Wilson?"

  "Note that he was elected on a promise to keep America out of World War One. Then he declared war on Germany. He turned into an old man overnight. Then he had a stroke. I suspect he tried to assert himself, and that is why he took so long dying."

  Ellen turned her head and looked at him. Sometimes he does these convoluted practical jokes…

  His face was dead serious. She winced.

  "This stuff just keeps getting worse."

  I mean, what I went through with Adrienne was worse for me, but that gives me an idea of the scale we're talking about.

  "And you wondered why I was always so gloomy," he said.

  "Darling, before…"

  Before you told me anything, and then I left you because you wouldn't open up, and then Adrienne kidnapped me on the rebound, as it were.

  "…I thought you were fascinatingly, broodingly, insanely, irritatingly romantic."

  "And now?"

  "Now I just think you're depressive and it's going to be my mission in life to keep you from turning in diminishing circles until you vanish up your own fundament."

  He smiled at her, and she simply sat for a moment appreciating. A man cleared his throat.

  "Monsieur Breze?"

  The man was middle-aged and thin, with an unfashionable grizzled ponytail and an aquiline face; in Santa Fe she'd have typed him as one of the inevitable aging hippies, though he was dressed rather better in a Euro-casual way. His brown eyes were uncomfortably acute, as well as holding the usual male appreciation. Her experience with Peter Boase at Rancho Sangre had taught her that physicists were no more likely than artists to live up to their stereotypes-less so, since artists were more prone to doing it deliberately.

  "Professor Duquesne?"

  The man nodded, and they exchanged names and handshakes all around in the European manner. Duquesne remained silent for a moment afterwards, studying them both. At last he spoke:

  "So, monsieur. You have persuaded me to talk with you." A slight smile. "A quarter of a million euros will buy even a crank an evening of my time."

  Adrian shrugged expressively-money was more or less meaningless to him, since he could have as much as he wanted. He also suppressed a movement that was almost certainly a reach for his cigarettes. Duquesne's eyebrows rose fractionally; Paris had held out on no-smoking rules longer than most other first-world places, but the changeover wasn't exactly recent. A man of Adrian's apparent age should have been used to it.

  "I think I can convince you that I am, at the least, not a crank, Professor," Adrian said. "Have you examined the files I sent you?"

  "Interesting. Rather as if someone who actually knew quantum mechanics had written the draft of a science-fiction novel in a documentary style, disguised as research notes whose bizarre quality increases as one goes on."

  "Peter certainly knew…knows…his physics," Ellen said.

  The Frenchman looked at her in surprise. "Peter?"

  "Peter Boase, ScD from MIT." She didn't say doctor; in France that applied only to physicians, dentists, apothecaries and vets. "Later he worked at the Los Alamos laboratories. I was the one who, ah, acquired his notes. Long story."

  "I know of him, a very sound young man, if adventurous…but he is dead, surely? Several years ago."

  "Not as of this spring, although it was put about that he died. I came to know him rather well."

  Adrian interrupted. "We could save a good deal of time by a little practical demonstration." He looked at her. "Two days, is it not, my sweet?"

  "Red cell count doing fine, so Power away, darling, and the drinks are on me tonight."

  "Then this is justified. Professor, that is a perfectly ordinary water glass, is it not?"

  The older man nodded briefly; it was, of a long-stemmed type.

  "Then please observe closely," Adrian said, and murmured under his breath: " I-Moh'g, tzee, sha."

  Oh, how I hate the sound of Mhabrogast, Ellen thought. She could see Duquesne wince too, though he didn't know why. You wouldn't think a symbol set could sound evil, but it does.

  Then Adrian frowned in concentration. Duquesne waited skeptically, glancing between him and the glass. Then he blinked.

  Slowly, and without any fuss, the water was beginning to run up the inside of the glass, a thin film inching evenly up the surface. The physicist's eyes went wider and wider as it reached the rim and flowed over it and rilled down the stem, leaving a spreading stain around the base. The last of the water in the bottom froze with a crackle.

  Duquesne reached out and touched it
. "Cold…"

  "Some of the energy came from subtracting the heat from the rest, I suspect," Adrian said.

  "You suspect?"

  The physicist sounded scandalized. Adrian shrugged again.

  "The process is unconscious. But tell me, Professor Duquesne, how long would you have to wait before the molecules in a glass of water spontaneously behaved in that manner?"

  Duquesne sat silent for thirty seconds, his eyes locked on the spreading blotch on the tablecloth.

  "Not until proton decay and the end of matter," he whispered at last. "I am assuming this is not some sort of hoax. Though I very much wish that it were."

  "No. You will require further proofs, of course; extraordinary claims-"

  "-require extraordinary proofs, yes," the professor said. "For the sake of argument I am willing to grant for the moment that this is genuine."

  His face lit with enthusiasm. "This phenomenon must be studied! Evidently Penrose was right after all! A quantum consciousness-"

  Adrian shook his head. "I am very sorry, Professor, but study is not possible. Not in the sense you are using the term."

  Before Duquesne could boil over Ellen put a hand on his. "Professor Duquesne, you're not a biologist. But consider, how would such an ability arise?"

  "If there was something for evolution to work with, a means whereby the mind could affect quantum states, the obvious selective advantages- Oh," he said.

  "Exactly." Ellen took a deep breath and closed her eyes. "I had it explained to me as…'A long time ago, when humans first spread out from Africa-which was far longer ago than the archaeologists think-a small band of hunters was trapped in the mountains of High Asia, a few families, perhaps twenty or thirty in all. Each year the glaciers rose around their plateau, and the food was less, and the cold was more. It was most likely that they would merely eat one another and die. But one was born who was lucky…'"

  "Why would the whole human race not have such abilities by now?" Duquesne asked.

  "To a certain extent they do," Adrian said. "As you said, consciousness is a quantum process. My…subspecies…has taken this to another level. Unfortunately, it arose very long ago as a bundle of abilities associated with, how would one say, a particular ecological adaptation."