The Buddha Boys were well prized for the baited traps they represented. To unsuspecting attackers, they seemed like easy enough targets. The assailants were thus goaded to make a first move, betraying their true intent. And by then, the trap was sprung. The Buddha Boys were often the first line of defense, though their skills were better put to use, by Soren’s way of thinking, as the last line of defense. But if their masters did that, they’d be encouraging everyone to try and take them on to climb the pecking order, thus denuding the district quickly of its finest assassins. For that reason, Soren supposed the upside down pecking order made a strange kind of sense.
With the way the snow flurries were coming down, Buddha Boy was probably the only one still feeling toasty in this weather. Moving chi as readily as he did would also keep him warm. It was Soren’s guess that if the weather held, many more would be far more interested in studying to become Buddha Boys themselves—even if it meant learning to eat dirt in a world starving for food to put on those extra pounds. But if Chinatown wasn’t cheesy enough on a good day, the whole snow globe effect definitely put it over the top.
Soren fought the pain in his body to climb the stairs to the building’s second story. He was wracked by more physical anguish than usual, and fighting gravity like this was just exacerbating things. He groaned with each step and was forced to make use of the handrail. Just as well. It gave him time to process things.
The salt prunes—perhaps the beast had used them to gain the upper hand on his other nanites as he had suspected, short-circuiting them long enough to give the beast a little more free room to navigate about than he might usually have. Soren was tempted to empty his pocket full of the prunes at the realization. But he was at the door of the master now on the second landing. Instead, he swallowed another salt prune for good measure. He wasn’t taking any chances with this guy.
The door opened on its own, or, more technically speaking, with a wave of Bingwen’s arm. He swiped his arm the other direction like a painter in the tradition of Jackson Pollock flicking paint to close the door behind Soren.
Soren removed his hood. Bingwen’s stony façade showed no emotion, his breathing likewise betrayed no rhythm changes. But his eyes brightened with chi, and his pupils shrank to pinpricks as they also projected a scanning beam over the part of Soren’s face covered with the vintage nanites.
Out his left hand beamed what his scanners were picking up, out of his palm chakra. The images landed on a projection screen, the right side of which were the closest matching images his computer could find. Less than one in five of the images were drawing a hit—that was to say, a match. As Bingwen continued his scan, that figure dropped to one in ten. Soren dropped the robe, allowed the scanning eyes to go over the rest of him, front and back, turning about very slowly on himself.
From what Soren had seen so far, Bingwen was a dabbler like himself, a fellow spirit scientist, mixing fringe science with the occult. The walls were covered with items hanging from hooks, necklaces mostly, wrist bands, all with carved talisman of wood, stone, bone, iron, brass—at first glance the entire menagerie looked like it belonged to a completist who went in for collecting every magically-infused bit of jewelry he could find from the Stone Age forward in time. Bingwen was no doubt ancient, but he couldn’t have gone that far back in time. Still, being ancient, meant he had more respect for old magic than new, so may well have been all-too happy to stockpile magic that existed prior to his walking this earth.
The long tables in the room were like display cabinets without protective cases, featuring more items akin to those hanging on the walls. These were more eye-catching, and possibly more valuable looking to potential thieves, who might be naïve enough to ignore the real treasures—the ones that didn’t catch the eye—along the walls.
The room looked like little more than a shop, not a place to sleep and eat and live out one’s life in private. But the beast could smell the scents wafting into the room from hidden spaces behind sliding panels—past the warding magic.
The evidence that Bingwen was equally at home with science as with magic? He would have needed transhuman upgrades to be doing what he was doing with the scanning eyes—which were undoubtedly bionic in nature. Perhaps he’d been born blind and so found it no sacrifice at all. Projecting the data out of his palm chakra would have required nanites infesting that region and conduits from the hand all the way up to the neuronal junctions in his brain.
Then there was the man himself, of course. A face that was old and young at the same time. Skeletal features that would resist time’s passing made his face somewhat ageless, true. He had just a few more wrinkles about the eyes than most men in their 40s, but that was the only tell-tale sign that he was actually much older, for his skin remained healthy and umblemished. That, and his white moustache that ran into his white beard of no more than an inch or so—both with thinning whiskers, also spoke to someone who was much older than he appeared. He was nearly bald, with close-cropped hair to the sides that was a fraction of the length of the hair in his moustache and along his jaw and chin. That there was as much science as magic behind such a façade had to do with the ever-more sophisticated alchemy that came with slowing aging for anyone in their sixties—far less someone who might well be in his hundreds.
Finally Bingwen’s scanning beam stopped. “You can get dressed,” Bingwen said, sounding more like the family practitioner than the most powerful wizard in the district, and possibly the world. Of course, Soren was just guessing. But as a rule, in their profession, the more you knew, the more esoteric the knowledge, the more far reaching, the more true power resided in you. And Soren’s brief scan of Bingwen’s digs suggested there was much more to this man, for those with the eyes to see past the subterfuge.
Whether or not a wizard of his caliber chose to broadcast his abilities to the world, as Victor did, was another matter. Most chose not to publicize, for obvious reasons; it would just invite an endless series of challengers to the throne showing up at his door.
“Well?” Soren said, sounding impatient rather than grateful.
“I will be studying these patterns for some time. But the three percent that are a match for the images on my data base are the ones that coincide with the oldest known cabbalistic images ever uncovered, from somewhere around ten thousand years ago. The others either go back further, prior to recorded history, or at least any history that we have established records for, or….”
“Or what?” Soren said, dialing up the surliness in his tone.
“Or possibly we’re dealing with something else.”
“Something besides ancient aliens? Or some yet-to-be discovered Atlantis-like civilization that goes even further back in time before the fall from grace, the fall to a more primitive and barbaric civilization, awaiting the whole cycle to begin anew?”
Bingwen smiled faintly. “Yes, something besides one of those two options. A channeler perhaps, someone able to tap the Akashic records—the memory of God, if you will—which would have the accumulated wisdoms of all civilizations that ever were, on this planet, and on all planets in all universes.”
“So you’ve read Irvin Lazlo. That’s two of us. Nikola Tesla confessed that was how he worked his magic.”
“Actually, he believed he was communicating with aliens who he could channel. Maybe they acted as a repeater, or relay station for him, if his mind wasn’t strong enough to make contact with the Akashic field directly.”
“Or wasn’t simply psychotic in addition to being a genius.” Soren’s gruff manner was getting on his own nerves; the beast oozing through his voice like sweat through pores.
“Psychosis is understandable in anyone whose mind is being used as a relay station for information like this.”
“And your best guess as to what the figures themselves pertain to?” Soren was eager to get them back on point.
Bingwen had been massaging the knuckles in his hands. What appeared to be on the surface little more than hand wringing to help him
think, perhaps by alleviating the pain of arthritis in his hands, could well have been something else; the gesture typically indicated distress of some kind, fear, concern, even guilt. “Just some very fanciful notions, I’m afraid.”
“I’m a fanciful kind of guy.”
Bingwen strayed toward his projector. Soren couldn’t help but note that the brightness of the morning light outside, considering the angle of the sun, should have illuminated the room a lot more. The fact that the ancient wizard would waste warding magic to keep his interiors darker, more cave-like, was a clue. Perhaps he’d prepared in advance, somehow anticipating Soren’s arrival, or perhaps he’d been studying some other artifacts with the aid of his projector, and that’s all it was and Soren was just reading in. But the beast wouldn’t be placated by Soren’s rationalizations. He seemed to smell the ancientness on Bingwen. Maybe this guy did date back to the age of cave dwellers. Soren dismissed the idea as ridiculous.
Bingwen keyed in the search he wanted to do on the computer that was linked to his projector. What unfolded then was more like a slide show in fast-forward. “As you can see from the range in designs—there is very little coherence between one set of drawings and another. As if they’d been drawn by different people in different epochs… possibly… yes, even on different worlds.”
“And the fanciful part?”
“Think about it.” Bingwen’s hand wringing continued; Soren wondered if it was an indication of subterfuge. “You’ve opened your mind to the Akashic field, but why bother risking the mind-blowing effect at all? Clearly at whatever point in history you’re in, on whatever world, the accumulated knowledge of the most sentient species isn’t going to cut it. Think now that some of these civilizations are potentially millions of years more advanced than our own. It’s hard to imagine any databases that robust and all-inclusive, as being all that exhaustible.
“But to a teleporter, who wanted to go anywhere in the cosmos, without really knowing what he’d encounter before getting there, what kind of adaptations he’d need…. Well, such a person would need to ensure access to the magic and science of the Akashic records at all times. And he couldn’t very well fit that library inside his head. Even if he could, he’d be weighing himself down with a lot of useless data he might never actually need.
“But what he could do is plant seeds that would only germinate in the right soil. And once it had taken root, when conditions were right, he’d be able to access the full body of knowledge in the Akashic records pertinent to his problem at hand.
“Think of these cabbalistic patterns more as keys that unlock the doors. They are not at all what’s inside the rooms behind those locked doors.”
Suddenly Bingwen’s hand wringing took on yet another layer of meaning to Soren. If those knuckles were portals through which his energy passed as part of his magic en route to shooting out his fingertips, if they were infused with spirit-science nano, as much magically-endowed as scientifically-endowed—perhaps of a proprietary nature—they might well be allowing him to see more clearly through time and space. Maybe the old man had suffered from arthritis long enough to turn negatives into positives; to turn a focus on his hand pain into a way of meditating on a very high level.
“But even such a minimalistic approach…” Soren balked, “we’re talking a multiverse here. That’s a lot of potential worlds where advanced sentient life could have taken root.”
“But just those, which is still an infinitesimally small percentage. Why clutter the mind with details pertaining to worlds you had no intention of visiting?
“Even so, you’re correct.” Bingwen’s hand-wringing flared. “I suspect that’s why your whole body has been turned into a kind of brain. There was no way to stuff all that inside your head. And that’s why the nanites are still proliferating.”
“So you confirmed as much?”
“Oh, yes. And the babies are having babies, onwards and downwards in scale. The fractal geometries will open up limited infinities within you that will allow you ultimately to fit in all the magic you need, and perhaps, all the scientific acumen both, to survive most any world. Difficult to say how long this process will take.”
“Or if we’re both just talking out our asses.”
Bingwan grunted. “Yes, well, wizards like us don’t make it to this level without full-brain access. Mortal men may be left-brain-dominated scientists or right-brain-dominated artists, and transcendental meditators may extend that two minutes every twenty-eight where they are perfectly balanced between left and right brain to much longer periods.
“But we, you and I, have to maintain that balance throughout the day. And even that’s not enough. For we will have to access and integrate our conscious, subconscious, and unconscious minds as well.”
Again more hand wringing on Bingwen’s part. “And as you’ve learned here today, the integration doesn’t stop there. There are realms of the unconscious that go far beyond any Freud tapped. We’re talking about Jung’s Archetypical mind shared by all humans, and perhaps beyond that, a realm that links all sentient beings together across the cosmos, if only you can drill down far enough. If only you can center yourself enough in your meditations.”
And suddenly Bingwen’s hand wringing took on new meaning, yet again. Was he using it to send out a distress signal? To not only help him communicate across time and space, to draw down wisdom from the Akashic records, but to signal confederates? Soren wanted to dismiss the notion outright, but he sensed the Beast was pleased with the observation by how much the pain in his body receded.
“I see we’re two of a kind,” Soren said. “Whole-mind integration is something I’ve sought for some time now, a bit of a holy grail for me, actually. Only you’ve been at this a lot longer than I have. And well, now that I’m more Frankenstein’s monster than Dr. Frankenstein, it’s possible our paths have begun to diverge.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that; we are not men of faith. We have to experience everything first hand to truly trust it. In the way that artists taste the divine firsthand in their channeled works, their books and paintings, or the way any one working at such a high level in any field experiences the divine directly, as a lived experience, making faith almost unnecessary.
“Your internal struggles with the beast may well expose the channels that connect these various layers of your psyche. Perhaps it is as much the beast’s project now, as it is yours.” Bingwen’s hand wringing had flared yet again, this time Soren felt more concern coming from him than anything.
“I pray you’re right. I suspect our natures diverge on one key point; I’m more a cynic, you’re more of an optimist.”
Bingwan’s smile suggested understanding. “Perhaps Soren is the optimist, and the Beast is the cynic?”
Bingwen and Soren both shared enough suffering along the way by trying to internalize esoteric teachings that subjected their minds and bodies to all kinds of tortures. It lent one more reason to Bingwen’s hand wringing: empathy. For Soren, trying to integrate the beast into his nature was just the latest torture. And like any martial artist starting out his discipline, the pain was evident, but the rewards—still so far off in the future—less so.
“The man whose work the book of teachings was based on, from which this nano was made, was a spiritualist and a member of the occult. He was also a brilliant scientist in his day. Toward the end he lost himself in dark magic. Some say he went mad, but he insists he simply fused his science with his spirituality.”
Bingwen returned to his hand wringing, just one knuckle this time, on the left hand, massaging it slowly, over and over again. Was he narrowing the search for one man across the cosmos with his meditation? “A fellow traveler, another one of us.” Soren noted, it wasn’t a question; it was a revelation.
“You think he was preparing himself to teleport?”
“It’s possible he had already experienced the ability, hopping from one to another corner of this planet. Saints and sages have many such incidents of being in mul
tiple places at once subscribed to them. If, once you’ve opened that door, you want to leave the Earth, a certain amount of additional preparedness would be in order, even for a saint or someone who had learned to tap those dormant abilities inside us all. Maybe that’s when he wrote his book, and pioneered his go-anywhere science of teleportation.”
Soren paced the apartment, running his hand over some of the items on the tables. “Victor wants to take his game off-world, you know? He’s itching to meet the celestial wizards on their stomping ground. Finds this planet a bit too provincial for him.”
Bingwen smiled vaguely without showing teeth. “It would seem you’re being steered along a path, perhaps so you can follow with him and continue to exert a positive influence.”
“The Tillerman’s influence on us all is what led Lar to reach for the one book he could still comprehend, at least enough to activate these more primitive nanites inside me to bring me back to life, in a manner of speaking. If I’m being led on a path, whoever this chess player is, he thinks many moves ahead.”
“I would expect nothing less of a celestial wizard.” Bingwen cracked his knuckles finally, and then ceased his unusual hang wringing meditation, letting his hands fall to his side.
Soren grunted. “Fair enough. Still….”
“Still, you’re concerned that glorifying the monster inside you—and whatever he’s up to—is not wise, any more than ceding any more power to him.”
“Aren’t you?”
“You must do as Nietzsche advised, go beyond good and evil. Otherwise you will not be able to fully integrate both sides of your nature. And I suspect that is what your cabbalistic magic is attempting to do.”
Soren groaned loudly, like a mother giving birth. “Possible, but pat. I don’t like, or rather I don’t trust, neat explanations.”
Bingwen had taken to dusting one of his trinkets on one of the tables. As with his hand wringing earlier, Soren suspected the act served not one, but several purposes at once. “That scene on the street below, the savage slaying of your opponent that was so over the top. It could be interpreted as an act of pure evil. Or it could be interpreted as an act of kindness. If the beast in you sensed that your opponent was on the wrong path that would just lead him to increasing evil…and the beast’s senses are keener than yours, are they not?”
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