Bea asked, “What communities are currently using Poseidon to handle their sewage, and what sort of results have they gotten?”
“There are several,” Phyllis said. “The first one that occurs to me is Athenaiy’Piraievs over in Ellas—”
“Not a fair comparison,” Michael Manstein put in. “In Ellas the god comes much closer to having a continuous tradition of worship than he would in Angels City, and is likely to be significantly more efficacious. I will be happy to provide documentation to support this assertion.”
Phyllis glared at him; no doubt he’d just undercut the example she was going to use. But when Michael says a comparison isn’t appropriate, he wSi have evidence to back him up. Fumbling a little, Phyllis talked about Carthage instead (I watched Michael stir in his seat, but he kept quiet).
The real trick, I gathered from what she had to say, was keeping Poseidon happy about getting his hands dirty, so to speak. Some Powers with artificially maintained cults are pathetically eager to do anything at all, as long as they keep their last handful of worshipers. Others have more pride.
Poseidon seemed to be part of the second group.
“But he does do a satisfactory job when properly incentivized?” Bea persisted. Michael visibly flinched when he heard that, but again held his tongue. Bea was a bureaucrat, after all; every so often, she went and talked like one.
That is my impression,” Phyllis answered. “Let me remind you: if Vepar were perfectly reliable, we’d have no reason for contemplating a change. And there’s the added benefit of increased earthquake protection.”
“Or increased earthquake risk, if the deity is angered,”
Michael said. Phyllis glared at him again, but I think he was right to point out the problem. Environmental issues are the most complicated ones this side of theology, and reading the text of the world is often (though not always) more prone to ambiguity than interpreting a sacred scripture.
Bea said. Thank you for the presentation, Phyllis. Do you think you’ll be able to give a preliminary recommendation on whether to pursue making this change in, hmm, two weeks’ time?”
“May I have three?” Phyllis asked.
Bea scribbled something on her calendar. “Three weeks it is.” She looked around at the rest of us. “Does anyone have anything more?” I sat very still, willing silence on everybody around me. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t Today, to my vast relief, it did; nobody said anything. Bea looked around again, just in case she’d missed someone on her first check. Then she shrugged. Thank you all.” That was the signal for us to get up and head for the door as fast as we could without being out-and-out rude. “Oh, and David—” Bea called after me.
Caught! I turned around. “Yes?” I said, as innocently as I could.
“I do hope you’ll have more progress to report on your other projects at our next meeting,” Bea said.
“I’ll do my best,” I promised, thinking that if I had fewer projects I could get more done on each of them. I also made a note to myself, not for the first time, that Bea didn’t miss much. And, I thought but didn’t dare say, I could also get more done if I didn’t have to spend dose to half a day every week in staff meeting.
The papers on my desk were starting to create a rampart effect, as if I were going in for trench warfare, d. la the First Sorcerous War. I was just getting ready for a serious assault on them when the phone delivered a sneak attack from the flank.
“Environmental Perfection Agency, David Fisher,” I said, hoping the switching imps had misspelled and given me a wrong number.
But they hadn’t.
“Inspector Fisher? This is Legate Kawaguchi, of the Angels City Constabulary Department.”
I sat up straighter. “What can I do for you. Legate?” I stopped feeling guilty about getting interrupted: after all, the call involved one of the other projects I was working on. Bea would be pleased.
“Can you come up to the Valley substation, please, Inspector?” Kawaguchi said. The scriptorium spirit Erasmus now appears capable of communicating.”
I wanted to whoop with glee, right in his ear. I don’t know how I stopped myself. “I’m on my way. Legate,” I chortled.
The ramparts on my desk would undoubtedly get higher while I was out of the office. So what? I told myself: this is more important.
Which was true, but sooner or later I’d have to catch up with the other stuff anyhow. I tried not to think about that as I hurried toward the slide.
VI
My stomach was making little plaintive grumbles by the time I got up into St. Ferdinand’s Valley. Even without too many addenda, Bea’s meeting ran long, and Kawaguchi had called before I got a chance to think about lunch. I grabbed a dachshund sausage at the first mom-and-pop joint I came to once I got off the freeway, and I must confess that I walked into the constabulary substation smelling of mustardSome of the people who’d seen me on Sunday looked surprised to find me back again. “What is this, Fisher? You want to move in?” Bomholm the thaumatech called to me. Offhand, I couldn’t think of a notion I liked less.
Legate Kawaguchi’s office was a musty little cell, smaller than a monk would live in and messier than an abbot would tolerate. I’m not exaggerating; Brother Vahan was in there when I walked through the door and, by the look on his face, he would have given Kawaguchi a really nasty penance if he’d thought he could get away with it.
“How are you faring?” I asked him after we shook hands.
“Did the cardinal ever grant that dispensation so your burned monks could get cosmetic sorcery?”
“No,” he said. With that one word, his heavy face dosed down completely, so that he looked like nothing so much as one of those alarmingly realistic portrait busts from Republican Rome. The St. Elmo’s fire from the ceding gleamed off his bare pate as if it were polished marble.
Kawaguchi said, “The scriptorium spirit—Erasmus—was more severely harmed in the fire than we realized. Even now, a couple of weeks after the arson was perpetrated, we’ve needed a team of specialists to establish contact with it. I was just explaining this to the abbot when you came in, Inspector Fisher.”
“Please go on, then,” I answered. “If I find myself lost, I hope you won’t mind me interrupting with a question or two.”
“Certainly,” Kawaguchi said. “As I was telling Brother Vahan, Madame Ruth and Mr. Cholmondeley”—he pronounced it, correctly, as if it were spelled Chumlee—“combine to facilitate communication between This Side and the Other. She is a medium and he a channeler; by pooling their talents and infusing new technology into their work, they’ve achieved some remarkable results. We have every reason to hope for another success here today.”
“Let us hope you are correct. Legate,” Brother Vahan said, and I nodded, too.
They are waiting for us in Interrogation Room Two,”
Kawaguchi said. “Nominally, since the scriptorium spirit is on the Other Side, it could be manifested anywhere.
However, evoking it in an interrogation room will hopefully add to the weight of the questions being asked. And”—the legate coughed—“the chamber in question has more space available than this office, which might otherwise have been suitable.”
“Take us to Interrogation Room Two, then,” I said.
Brother Vahan got up from his chair. The fire and its aftermath had taken a lot out of him. His stride had been strong and vigorous, but now he walked like an old man, thinking about where he’d plant each toot before it came down.
Interrogation Room Two lay halfway down a long, gloomy haD that seemed especially designed to put the fear of God into miscreants brought there. Kawaguchi opened the door, waved Brother Vahan and me through ahead of him. Introductions took up the next couple of minutes.
Madame Ruth was a tall, swarthy woman with a goldcapped tooth. She was also enormously fat; her bright print dress would have been a tent on anyone else, but had to stretch to cover all of her. “Pleased t’meetehuz,” she said.
When she shook hands with me, she had a grip like a longshoreman’s.
Her partner Nigel Cholmondeley couldn’t have been more different from her if he’d spent his whole life deliberately trying. He was as Britannic as his name: elegant accent; long, thin, red-cheeked face complete with a little brush of sandy mustache; old school cravat… Let me put it this way: if he’d been born under a caul, it would have been a tweed one.
Legate Kawaguchi said, “Before we begin, would you care to give the hofy abbot and the inspector a notion of the techniques you will utilize?”
The large medium and the English channeler looked at each other for a moment before Cholmondeley said, “Allow me.” Madame Ruth shrugged massively. I tried not to show how relieved I was; I’d sooner have listened to him than her any day.
He said, “While communication with the Other Side is as old as mankind, techniques have recently taken several steps forward. As you’ll notice, much of the equipment we employ would have been unfamiliar to the practitioners of only a few decades ago.”
He pointed to the battered table shoved off to one side of the interrogation chamber. On it were five of the strangestlooking helmets I’d ever seen. They looked as if they’d been made to cover the whole top of the head, from the middle of the nose on up. I didn’t see any eyeholes for them, and they had long, blunt projections out from where your ears would go. With one on, you’d look something like an insect and something like a man who’d just had a length of tree trunk pounded in one ear and out the other.
After giving Brother Vahan and me a few seconds to examine those curious artifacts, Cholmondeley resumed: “By your expressions, gentlemen, I should venture to say this is your first experience with virtuous reality.”
He waited again, maybe to let us deny it. If he’d kept on waiting for that, he’d have had a long wait He saw as much himself and smiled, exposing a formidable mouthful of yellowish teeth. “Virtuous reality, my friends, lets us simulate the best of the world; it creates a plane neither fully of This Side nor of the Other, whereon, for example, a wounded spirit may meet and communicate with us while not having to return fully to the locus of its misfortune.”
“How do we go about reaching this, uh, virtuous reality?”
I asked.
“Madame Ruth and I shall be your guides.” Cholmondeley smiled again, even more toothily than before. “If you will just come over to the table there, sit around it, and place a helmet over your head—”
The prospect did not fill me with enthusiasm, but I went over to the table anyhow. As I sat down on one of the hard Constabulary Department chairs, Madame Ruth said, “Once you put on your helmet, take the hands of the people to either side of you. We’ll need an accomplished circle to access virtuous reality.”
I reached for the helmet nearest me. It was heavier than I’d expected; maybe the weight lay in those ridiculous earpieces. I slipped it on. It seemed to conform to my face. I’d expected to be blind; I hadn’t expected to be deaf as well.
But the helmet seemed to suck away all my senses, leaving me a void waiting to be filled.
Distantly, I remembered what Madame Ruth had told us to do. I was sitting between Brother Vahan and Nigel Cholmondeley. I made myself reach out to take their hands, though I could hardly tell if my own were moving.
I found Brother Vahan’s hand first His grip was warm and strong; it helped remind me I still needed to get hold of Cholmondeley. I fought against the apathy the helmet imposed on me. At last, after what seemed a very long time, my fingers brushed his. His bones were thin, delicate, almost birdlike; I was afraid I’d hurt him if I put any pressure on them.
Then I waited another long-seeming while. I’d expected things to start happening as soon as my hands joined my neighbors’, but it didn’t work that way. I still lingered, my senses vitiated by the helmet. After a while, I began to wonder whether I was still touching the abbot and the channeler.
I thought so, but it was hard to be sure.
All at once, color and sound and touch and all my other senses came flooding back. I found out later that that was the instant in which the last two of us finally took each other’s hands, completing the circle, as Madame Ruth had said. At the time, I was just relieved to return to… well, where had I returned to?
Wherever it was, it wasn’t dingy old Interrogation Room Two. It was a garden, the most beautiful I’d ever seen. Colors seemed brighter than life, sounds clearer and sweeter, smells as sharp and informative as if they came through a cat’s nose instead of my own.
“Welcome, friends, to the world of virtuous reality,” Nigel Cholmondeley said. Suddenly I could see him, though he hadn’t been there a moment before. He still looked like himself, but somehow he was handsome now instead of horsefaced.
This will be a new experience for you, so look around,”
Madame Ruth chimed in. She too appeared when she spoke.
The big city had vanished from her accent, as had the cap from her tooth, and I saw that about sixty percent of the rest other had disappeared, too. She was still Madame Ruth, as Cholmondeley was still Cholmondeley, but now she looked good.
“Amazing,” Legate Kawaguchi murmured softly, which made him spring into view. While remaining himself, he also looked like a recruiting poster for the Angels City Constabulary Department no cynicism was left on his face, and no tiredness, either.
This is—remarkable,” I said. I presume that let me become visible to the others, but not to myself: as far as I could tell, I remained a disembodied viewpoint Too bad; I would have liked finding out what an idealized version of me looked like.
“Let us proceed,” Brother Vahan said. Now I saw him, too.
“He doesn’t look any different!” I exclaimed, which was true: the abbot remained a careworn man in a dark robe.
Nigel Cholmondeley spoke with enormous respect “In virtuous reality, only those who are themselves trufy virtuous before the experience have their seeming unchanged during it” Suddenly I wondered how much I’d altered to my companions in this strange place. Maybe I didn’t want to be idealized after all.
Then all such petty concerns faded into insignificance.
You see, I saw a serpent in the garden, and—I don’t quite know how to explain this, but it’s true—the serpent wasn’t crawling on its belly. This isn’t just a garden,” I said, awe in my voice as the realization crashed over me. This is The Garden.”
“That’s right—very good.” Madame Ruth sounded pleased I’d caught on so fast “Virtuous reality has translated you to a simulacrum of the place mankind enjoyed before the Original Sin, while we were truly virtuous ourselves.”
“I am not sure I approve,” Brother Vahan said heavily.
“The theological implications are—troubling.”
“It’s only a thaumaturgical simulation, a symbol, if you will,” Cholmondeley assure him. “We don’t pretend otherwise. The test of a symbol is its utility, and we have found this one to be of enormous value. On that basis, will you bear with us?”
“On that basis, yes,” the abbot said, but if he was happy about it, he concealed the fact very well.
“Good. Without the willing consent of the participants, the simulation is all too likely to break down, which would precipitate us back into the mundane world where, sadly, virtue is less manifest,” Cholmondeley said. “And, as I said, virtuous reality can be valuable—as you see.” He pointed.
Coming through the trees was Erasmus. In the strange space of virtuous reality, the scriptorium spirit seemed as real and solid as any of the rest of us—more real and solid than I seemed to myself. Brother Vahan made a choked noise and ran toward the spirit. Erasmus ran toward the abbot, too; they embraced.
“I can feel him!” Brother Vahan exclaimed. Finding his old friend palpable seemed to wipe away his reservations about virtuous reality at a stroke.
While Brother Vahan greeted Erasmus, I took a longer look at the trees from which the scriptorium spirit had emerged. I recognized some of the
m; orange and lemon, pomegranate and date palm. But others were strange to me, both in appearance and in the scents that wafted from their fruits and flowers to my nose.
I wondered if the Tree of Knowledge grew in this version of the Garden, and what would happen if I tasted of it. Haw to ask that serpent, I thought but when I looked around for if it was gone. Just as well, I suppose.
“I grieve that you were wounded,” Brother Vahan was saying. We all gathered around him and Erasmus. The abbot went on, “Never in my worst nightmare did I imagine evil being so bold as to assail our peaceful monastery.”
“Nor I,” Erasmus answered mournfully. I’d never heard him speak till that moment on This Side, he’d manifested himself only with written words on the ground glass. His apparent voice perfectly fit his studious appearance and the spectacles he affected: it was dry, serious, on the pedantic side. If you imagine Michael Manstein as a scriptorium spirit you’re dose.
“Are you in pain now?” Brother Vahan asked anxiously.
“No. Pain, I think, is impermissible in this remarkable place.” Erasmus peered from one of us to the next. “I recognize here Inspector Fisher of the Environmental Perfection Agency, and this other gentleman’s semblance is also somehow familiar to me, although I do not know his name.”
“I am Legate Shiro Kawaguchi of the Angels City Constabulary Department,” Kawaguchi said when Erasmus looked his way. “Perhaps you sensed my aura during the Bre; officers under my command helped rescue you.”
“That must account for it,” Erasmus agreed. “I fear I have not yet made the acquaintance of the other two individuals here.” “Madame Ruth and Mr. Cholmondeley have made it possible for us to use what they term virtuous reality as a meeting ground with you,” Brother Vahan explained.
“Yes, I have encountered the concept in recent journal issues”—Erasmus’ voice suddenly grew sad again—“now without doubt lost to the flames. Intriguing to observe an application of it”
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