***
Victor hadn’t needed an explanation of what his scientists had discovered with the weapons they’d supplied him. Their excitement had broadcast their findings into his mind.
So, it was without further ado that he sent the arm band at her, the snake uncoiling from his arm and sidewinding against the air currents of the air-conditioning unit blowing cold air on Dracus and Victor in an impotent or perhaps mock attempt to cool them both down.
The snake grew as it twisted toward her, and unhinged its jaws. When those jaws snapped shut, it pumped an ungodly amount of venom into her neck. But she just laughed, wrapped the snake about her and resumed her dance with it, as if it was no more than a pet.
Victor sighed, pinching the upper ridge of his nose from the impending migraine. “This is going to be one of those testy second dates, isn’t it, where the girl still refuses to let you get her in bed?”
She seemed to be having more fun with his snake than paying attention to his snark. So, while she was distracted, Victor decided to make the most of it.
He mumbled the cabbalistic words of power, hoping to keep the volume just below the threshold that might disturb her from her dancing. The remaining weapons adorning his body mobilized of their own accord in response to his words. Shapeshifting from a dagger, a holstered gun; hell, the holster itself was drifting off him. As to the mandala amulet on his chest, it, too, had found its way into the levitating fray.
By the time he felt entirely naked, she was becoming clothed for the first time; the weapons weren’t exactly shapeshifting into a comfy bodysuit. They were boxing her in, making it impossible to move. It was a cryogenic freezing device—only one created by an alien civilization, meant to put into dormancy instantly any creature the master manipulators couldn’t neutralize, and keep them on ice until they could find a more lasting workaround.
The device sucked all energy required for thought out of the lifeform. The “noise-cancellation” waves prevented any energy from reanimating the victim from stasis—not that of the quantum vacuum itself; not energy which could be converted into energy from matter, not energy that could be sucked in from a parallel universe. The chamber created a vacuum of vacuums.
And for the briefest time, it worked. The Dark Matter Man was fully and completely neutralized.
But then the magic became undone, as if by the spell caster himself. And the upright, all-metal coffin, with its cabbalistic images embossed on it, did become a formfitting outfit that made her look no less naked for all its ability to follow her every curve. It had just dressed her in a tarnished silver, that was all; the only break in the tarnish, the cabbalistic shapes themselves. Her dancing resumed.
And this time, her whistling melody accompanying her dance went to work on Victor. Gutting him on the inside with memories from his childhood, when he was the nerdy guy in school that everyone made fun of for being smart, and dorky, and unable to get the girl. First on the docket were all the encounters in the school cafeteria—the public humiliations before the jocks; the encounters in the gym—where the most basic of geometric shapes—a round basketball—eluded him.
She seemed to run through the images faster than he could process them, but then she was going less for understanding than isolating the triggers for the corresponding crippling emotions. Those emotions, unlocked as much by the notes she was hitting in her whistling melody, tore through him like acid. Literally. The emotions came laced with endorphins that had been infused with Dracus’s strange magic. Among other things, it was like getting hit with sodium pentothal. He was as unable to resist the truth serum as he was the acid-based endorphins dissolving any capacity for rational thought, thus removing his one real defense; that brilliant mind he’d learned to overcompensate with; it had always been his greatest weapon against the kids in high school.
She showed him how increasingly ineffective his mind had become over the years when Google and its Deep Mind project continued to narrow the gap between him and most everyone else on the planet, who could now use wireless access in their minds to the internet to make anyone far more brilliant than they needed to be for most any task they’d care to set for themselves.
And so, with the last of his defenses ripped away, Victor lay there squirming on the floor, feeling like the worm he was.
But then something quite marvelous…. His unconscious had developed some tricks of its own since he’d become a mandala magician. His refusing to look inside the black box of his mind hadn’t stopped it from finding its own way out from under his pile of insecurities.
Quantum snakes, by the hundreds, slithered out of that Pandora’s Box in the back of his mind. They were immune to the larger molecular chains of the endorphins, to whatever biochemistry or even biophysics his body cared to throw at them. They had a mission of their own to fulfill and nothing was going to stop them. Victor had no idea what it was.
The quantum snakes tunneled their way out of his body in the millions, too small to be seen by the naked eye. They surrounded the dancer, obscuring her movements in a cloud briefly; only his mandala magic allowed him to observe, by opening singularities through which the pupils of his eyes could even take in the phenomenon.
And the snakes wormed their way into her.
And…. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
They were using the venom the larger snake had injected the dancing lady with to come together into a larger snake; to fuel their transformation. As that larger snake coiled up on itself it opened a portal. It was granting the out the dancer wanted—opening the gate to that far more advanced civilization that would allow it to keep evolving. The Dark Matter Man couldn’t resist. For the briefest of seconds, the trance of the dance was interrupted by the sheer ecstasy of the dancer.
That moment of interrupted thought was all it took for the coffin to reseal about her; and this time, she was trapped for good.
Victor gasped and laughed out his surprise in one, his chuckle coming out more like a grunt. “I’ve done it!”
He picked himself up off the floor, his lucidity returning, his toxicity diluting in the surging rise of confidence.
Approaching her prison, he stroked the cabbalistic-symbol-embossed surfaces of the tarnished silver upright coffin. It would make a wonderful addition to his collection.
He used his mandala magic to shrink space-time around it, so it was no bigger than his genie bottles at home, only a hyperrectangle.
He opened a portal to his penthouse, stepped through, and delighted in adding the latest flask to his collection.
Upon setting it on its new roost he indulged the laughter bubbling up from below. With each mad chuckle, he allowed the acoustic blasts to push the earth further back into its former orbit around the sun—the sounds transmitted and amplified by his space-time magic. It wasn’t a stunt he could have pulled off before; but with the Dark Matter Man’s help…. He was already all-too willing to bargain for his release.
And who knows? With this newfound ability, if you can’t capture the attention of the celestial wizards any other way, you can always start collapsing space-time on itself to get a rise out of them.
His laughter hit a whole new register.
***
“So, Victor’s won.” Naomi didn’t sound like she believed it even now. Her vacant eyes suggested she was reviewing the footage in her mind, looking for the lie. She kept rubbing her arms from the cold, still not responding to the already warming planet. The reality she was looking to set in was of a much higher order.
Soren kissed the top of Naomi’s head. “I’m not so sure.”
The confirmation of her worst fears paradoxically brought her back into the moment; the chill gone. “Why do you say that?”
“The beast and I suspected we were being played by a larger figure than just the Dark Matter Man. That he in turn was little more than the hand puppet of a far superior master manipulator.”
“A cosmic wizard.”
“Nothing short of that seems likely.
Though the real answer might be more nefarious yet.”
“How?”
“I wonder if this alien race of beings that supplied the cabbalistic magic still exists. And if not, maybe just one of them survived all these millennia, just like Bingwen survived, learning to lay low, biding his time waiting for his opportunity.”
“That opportunity being the one Lar unwittingly granted him the instant he shot you up with the cabbalistic nanites.”
“I guess we will have to wait for me to be reunited with the beast once more to be certain. I won’t have the mind power I need to even look into the matter until then.”
“What shall we call that adventure, Frankenstein Reawakened?”
Soren chuckled halfheartedly and kissed her some more, teasing her pullover off her. “Sounds ominous, downright scary,” he said in panting breaths between kissing her neck. “Not sure if you’re speaking the beast’s language, or the language of our master manipulator somewhere far, far away in the cosmos. But I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
THIRTY-ONE
Lar picked himself up off the floor after tripping for the umpteenth time. He needed a new name for this pyramid. Yes, Olympus Mons. As big as that last pyramid was, this one was that much bigger.
He reflexively went to brush off his knees, failing to recognize—as he had the last half dozen times—that he had kneepads on, shoulder pads, a cup covering his crotch…. He’d borrowed the entire ensemble from a football team’s locker room. He figured if he was going to be tackling the floor every few steps with his face, he needed the helmet, too, which he readjusted on his head now, so he could see better. He looked as if he were late for the scrimmage line on a ball game that started millennia ago. The Black Panther team uniform and helmet he’d gone with was meant to lend him the ferocity of the panther. None of which he felt right now.
He held up the lantern to see if it would pierce the distance and reveal any clues. Nada. What the light illuminated spoke only to immensity and scale. This pyramid, buried deep beneath the Antarctic’s surface, looked to be three times bigger than the last one. Strangely, it was no less drafty though scientists and explorers had yet to open a channel from the surface to it that might allow for air currents to pass through. Of course, the ice, always shifting and melting, might have opened underground passages through which air flowed, allowing the vents built into the pyramid to function as they might if the temple weren’t buried miles beneath the surface.
“To boldly go where no man has gone before…. Lar, what were you thinking? You get lost between the bathroom and the kitchen. And where is Captain Klutz when you need him, huh? All your stumbling about and getting turned around on yourself hasn’t revealed one clue of note.”
He had kept walking the whole time he was bellyaching. “Whoa.”
All of a sudden he was standing at a five-way intersection of hallways. “This place couldn’t possibly be this big. Must be some kind of optical illusion.” If he didn’t know better, he’d say he was standing in the center of a pentagram, a place ordinarily reserved for wielding magic.
“Hey!”
Lar, startled, screamed “Ahhh!” as if it was a word of power that could shatter all enemies to pieces. Maybe that was another superpower he could work on as a way of turning timidity into a plus.
He turned to find Ramon regarding him, his eyebrows twitching, that impish smile forever on his face. As always, he looked playful, and up to no good, but in a harmless way. Lar wasn’t so sure anymore; something told him Ramon was up to no good in a way that could do all sorts of harm; he just knew better than Victor to keep that side of himself hidden. “What are you doing here, besides scaring me half to death?”
Ramon held up the amulet in his hand. “I figured out how to work it.”
“Give me that,” Lar said, snatching the gold trinket out of his hand, feeling competitive again. He started turning dials.
“You see it yet?”
“Give me a second!” Lar’s hands were literally shaking for fear he wouldn’t be able to figure it out on his own. And then, as he kept sliding dials against one another, he saw one of the cabbalistic symbols he’d committed to memory form between not one but three dials. Not all the way formed yet. He needed to slip the fourth dial into place. “The cabbalistic words of power…. This amulet has some of them, and if we can find them all, we’ll have the spell it’s meant to invoke.”
“I found four of the words. But it has five dials. I thought it made sense there would be five words in the mantra, you know?”
“Show me the four you found. I’ll see if I can guess the fifth.”
Ramon came over and stood shoulder to shoulder with Lar and moved the dials for him. Lar still refused to let go of the amulet. “Yes, yes,” Lar said, as Ramon revealed the individual symbols to him.
Lar yanked the amulet away, took a deep breath, called upon the aid of the “great deity” Captain Klutz, and took his best guess as to which symbol was meant to be the first word in the prayer. He formed the symbol and said the word aloud. The five pointed star configuration of halls they were standing in shifted. The hub they were standing in didn’t change, but the halls themselves lost some of their ceiling height with the shift.
“Shiiiit!” Ramon said.
Continuing as he had, Lar went through the other words in the prayer, one by one. Each time the halls about them shifted, losing height. After the fourth word, the five corridors had all but sealed them in the hub. If they identified that last word and uttered it, they’d be trapped in the hub, sealed in a crypt. His eyes met Ramon’s; it was clear they both feared the same thing, getting trapped in here forever.
“Fuck it. I can always beam us out of here, Lar.”
“And if the magic of this giant pentagram, in conjunction with this spell, is too strong for your mandala magic?”
“A pentagram is just a very simple mandala shape. Somehow I doubt it.” But Ramon’s tone betrayed his words. Still, his curiosity had to be quenched. So like Victor, Lar thought. Always overreaching. Always the need to learn overpowered all common sense. If all mandala magicians shared this core temperament, if he was just a young Victor in disguise, how did Ramon plan on upstaging Victor? Was it with greater access to and knowledge of ancient mandala magic? Would he use a more comprehensive, scholastic understanding of his field, that only librarians like Lar and Ramon were truly capable of to…? Was that his angle? Did he think Victor’s fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants, unstudied approach to his own field, running on pure talent alone, made him vulnerable? And that the day would come when Ramon could take advantage of that vulnerability? If so, maybe it was for the greater good that Lar seal himself and Ramon in here forever. A worse version of Victor, the universe surely didn’t need. Speculating on Ramon’s true motives was a strange way to invoke courage, but it did the trick. It also leant a certain clarity of mind.
Suddenly, Lar knew how to arrive at the fifth symbol. He got it by aligning the dials so that all four symbols were produced at once. As with a Rubik’s cube, you couldn’t just solve one side of the cube and think you were done. But when he did that, the fifth symbol still hadn’t revealed himself, despite Ramon gasping with surprise and shouting, “Yes!” as he jumped off the ground.
And then it donned on Lar. “You dunderhead!” He was being self-deprecating, not chastising Ramon. He turned over the mandala, and there it was, the fifth symbol. He said the word, and the corridors shifted yet again, sealing them in completely this time.
***
Ramon gulped, beholding his own entombment, held out his hand, fired up the mandala in his palm. Nothing materialized. He couldn’t even get the light show to manifest in his palm. “Shit,” he said. “The magic of the pyramid is overriding my mandala magic, alright.”
“I’m not done yet.” Lar started chanting the entire mandala, speaking the words together in a fluid, almost musical sequence. Over and over again.
The ground began to shake. That humming they heard before in t
he chamber in the first ancient aliens pyramid they explored…. Something along that line was sounding now, not quite the same, but of a kind. It was cycling through various octaves.
Lar pressed on with the chant when the metallic sounds reached a ceiling and stopped climbing in register. He chanted louder and more confidently. He noticed Ramon wasn’t joining him. Whatever was about to happen he didn’t want to be blamed for it; he didn’t want Victor’s wrath directed at him. Who could blame him? But Captain Klutz was on a roll, lending Lar courage.
And then it happened.
The walls about them crumbled. As the stones fell away, it was like watching Michelangelo work, slowly revealing the sculptures beneath with each hammering of the chisel.
Lar continued with the chant, fine-tuning his musicality further.
Finally, the shaking stopped. It was about the time that Lar had grown speechless. Michelangelo, carrying on his work from beyond the grave, as if summoned by the magic, was finished with his carving.
“It’s the alien race, mummified,” Ramon said. “The question is, are those the slaves, or the masters?”
Lar beheld the mother and father and two children carved in some kind of metal. It might well take Player’s sophistication with elemental magic to determine what kind of metal, or what composite of metals.
Lar was already dusting the figures off. The adults were a good twelve feet tall. The children, the boy and the girl, a little over eight feet. Lar was trying to get a better feel of them in order to answer Ramon’s question.
Ramon was helping him now. Both of them were climbing the figures, working with brushes and chisels and other tools they had on them to finalize the renderings. They moved with a sense of desperation and urgency.
Finally, they stepped back and away from their handiwork. “This is the slave race,” Lar said.
Ramon sighed relief. “Well, that’s a good thing, huh?”
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