Asimov's SF, July 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “The angels are inaudible and invisible to the eyes of ordinary men,” Kelley continued, raising his voice as he always had during his past performances as a false oracle, “but you and I are extraordinary, in our different ways, Master Field. We can hear the voices of the angelic host, and we can see them about their work, not merely as messengers but as guardians. We can see them in the dark realm that is theirs, but we can also see them reaching into our world, and making themselves felt as beings made of matter might. They are not material themselves, of course, and there is something subtle and vaporous about their most urgent manifestations—but they can make themselves felt, can they not, Master Field?”

  Unready to leave that particular challenge entirely to the power of suggestion, Kelley tried with all his might to make his words true: to use whatever mysterious potential was expanding out of him to manage the sensations of the watcher who could not help but look into the stone. Kelley imagined an angel emerging from the stone, like some angry ghost—not an angel from one of the Church decorations of which the Puritans disapproved so strongly, but an angel such as he had seen, at such a vast distance, within the void suggested by the stone's black depths.

  And something did emerge, although Kelley did not suppose that anyone but he and Field could see it.

  It had wings, of a sort, but it did not have a humanoid body. Nor were its wings a dove's or an eagle's wings; they were the wings of some hasty buzzing insect. Insofar as the angel had a face, he supposed, it would have a face that was more like a locust's than a human's, but not so very like a locust as to resemble the Lunar horde that had already started work on an Armada of ether-ships with which to invade the Earth ... because the angels were angels, after all.

  Kelley had no idea how to make a face beautiful that was not at all human, or even to make it imperious, but he had to suppose that the angels did, and that his role here was merely that of a facilitator, like the philosopher's stone that turned base metal into gold without itself being altered.

  The angel was magnificent, after its fashion. It was huge, and dazzling, and unmistakably, undeniably, indubitably an angel. Kelley knew that John Dee, Giordano Bruno and the twelve brutal apostles of the Church Militant could not see it, but he knew that John Field could. Kelley even felt free to wonder whether this might, after all, have been the purpose of his mission—that the stone had sent him into Brother Cuthbert's trap in order that it should finally be delivered, by cunning and mysterious means, into the hands of John Field, even though it would not remain there for long.

  It was obvious that Field could see the angel towering over him, because he was no longer peering drowsily into the stone. He was looking up now, with his eyes wide open and his irises closing against the dazzling glare that only he and Kelley beheld. He could see the angel, and he knew the angel for what it was. He could also hear the angel.

  What the angel commanded John Field to do, as Moses had once commanded Pharaoh, was to let his people go. The angel meant far more by that, however, than that John Dee and his companions should be released and allowed to make their way to Wilton unhindered. The angel meant that John Field's Church Militant should respect the principle of tolerance that Queen Jane's parliament had incorporated into English law. The angel meant that the Puritans should desist from stirring up a holy war in reflection of the long and fragmentary war that had been raging in Europe and the Americas for decades as petty prophets played into the hands of secular ambition by providing justification for oppression and conquest. The angel meant that John Field must see the truth, and realize that the demons that his life was dedicated to combating were not what, or where, he thought they were.

  And John Field, like Saul of Tarsus on the road of Damascus, accepted that revelation for what it was.

  Edward Kelley, who knew that he was part and parcel of the instrumentality of the revelation, could not help but share in it. His own ideas and beliefs were not turned upside-down—quite the reverse. They were put on a firm foundation for the first time. He not only heard the voices of the angels, but understood them, for they were now more eloquent than ever before. His consciousness expanded much further than it already had, and much further than he had ever imagined possible. He felt, in fact, that he was being taken far beyond the bounds of human imagination, borne on angelic wings. He felt that he was being taken up to the summit of a paradisal mount, there to look out upon the whole of Creation, acquiring a standpoint from which worlds like his own were mere motes of dust or tiny clouds of gas, while the spaces between them were crowded with life.

  He saw that the infinitesimally tiny creatures that swarmed upon the tinier and lighter dust-worlds were, indeed, insects and other spineless creatures, although the greater number of them were intelligent, capable of awesome feats of engineering, and capable of flying in the ether as well as in air. He saw that the larger creatures that swam in the dense atmospheres of the gas-worlds were also invertebrates, formed as worms, jellyfish, or cephalopods rather than whales or seals. He understood that the greater number of the inhabited dust-worlds were hollow, with far more life inside them than on their surfaces; the life in question was soft and slimy, but no less intelligent for that. He understood how different humans were from the common run of dust and gas-dwellers, and that surfaces where entities weighed as much as they did on Earth, because of the denseness of the Earth's core and the power of affinity that held objects down, were normally hostile in the extreme to the evolution of complex life, let alone intelligence.

  “So Bruno's principle of plentitude does not apply universally after all,” Kelley said, although he did not pronounce the words aloud.

  He got no verbal answer; the angel he had summoned from the stone was not Aristocles, or even Muram. He understood, though, that the principle of plenitude did apply, but was not quite what Giordano Bruno imagined it to be. It was the interpretation that was at fault—and that fault of interpretation was common to humankind's enemies and allies alike. It was for that reason, somehow, that the Great Armada would be launched—and for that reason, too, that the Great Armada had to be thwarted in its ambition.

  “Earth is special, then,” Kelley concluded. “Even on a vast universal stage, Earth stands at the focal point of a unique Creation, for which reason humans are God's chosen people.” But that was flatly wrong, and he felt the force of his error as a blast of pure angelic contempt.

  “You are, at best, a catalyst,” he was told, by the angel that was not Aristocles, and must have been far older, if not wiser. “Earth is, at most, a philosopher's stone.”

  Then it was over, and he was back in the hall of the deserted manor house, where very little time seemed to have passed, and where only he and John Field were even conscious of the time that had passed. His expanded soul seemed to burst, and then shrivel to its ordinary dimensions, with a shock that left a cruelly authentic ache in his head. He put his hands up to cover his face for a moment or two, but collected himself soon enough and obtained enough mastery over his disturbed consciousness to put mere pain to the back of his mind.

  When he looked again at the silent crowd, he knew that there had been a profound change in every one of them, although mere appearances had barely shifted at all. John Field had replaced the stone on the tabletop and was now sitting back in his chair, frowning thoughtfully. “It's just a stone,” he said, in a tone that almost smacked of disappointment. “A piece of obsidian, shaped and polished to resemble a lens. It's a cozener's device. It has no demons in it, any more than the man we captured in our net is a demon. All this is foolishness, in which wise and serious men should not become involved, when they have God's good work to do.”

  Kelley expected protestations, or at least expressions of surprise, in response to this declaration, but none came from anywhere. The other people present had neither heard nor seen any angel, but they had not by any means been unaffected by what had happened. They saw the world differently now, and if they had any awareness at all that they had ever seen
recent events in another way, that other awareness now seemed to them to be a kind of dream, which could not begin to compete with the trustworthiness of their present sensory experience, and all the brutal pressure of obvious reality that went with it.

  “Release that man,” said Field—and three ambushers joined the spy named Simon in dragging away the heavy weights that constrained the prisoner within the net so closely that he could barely move. Then the net itself was lifted. Kelley looked at the face of the released man in amazement, unsure now as to how and why he had imagined that the tanned face was made of bronze, or that his bloodshot eyes were literally red. The man was a gypsy, to be sure, but he was definitely a man.

  “You have no right to arrest us, Master Field,” said John Dee, with only a hint of temerity in his voice. “I am an honest Englishman traveling in my own country. Master Bruno is a scholar, and my guest. Master Kelley and Master Talus are students. We are visiting fellow scholars at the home of one of the peers of England.”

  “You're incorrect, Dr. Dee,” Field said, icily. “I have every right to arrest you, to investigate you, and to interrogate you, and would have that right even if you were not entertaining a Romanist who might easily be a spy for the French or the Italians. I had a duty, in fact, to act on the denunciations laid against you, which charged you with possession of magical devices provided by the Devil. It is obvious, however, that the charge is unfounded, and I can only conclude that the denunciation was malicious, perhaps encouraged by scholarly rivalry. Personally, I cannot see any merit in this book-collecting mania that has infected such men as you and Stephen Batman, and you ought to be very glad indeed that the grimoires and books of ritual magic that you have collected are such obvious fakes. Had I received a darker report on the contents of your library from Master Bacon, I'd have thrown you in Hungerford jail overnight to teach you a lesson—and might have done that anyway, had I not heard that the jail is so ill-kept that its wall collapsed the night before last. You must not tempt me further by challenging my rights, though. I am the Church of England's strong right arm, the commander of the Church Militant. I have every right.”

  “That makes it all the more important, sir,” John Dee replied, unrepentantly, “that you use your rights wisely, discreetly, and in the service of God. Might I take it, since you have interrogated us so minutely and found no fault, that we are free to go?”

  “Aye,” said Field. “My men and I have urgent business in London, and it would only slow us down to take you prisoner. Foolish scholars are no more worth the trouble of collecting than scabrous books, given that we have one book that tells us all that any God-fearing man could ever want or need to know.”

  Kelley opened his mouth to speak, but the gypsy to whom Dee had referred as Talus put a hand on his arm and moved his lips close to the scar where Kelley's right ear had once been.

  “You must be careful now, Master Kelley,” the gypsy breathed. “You, and you alone, know what the ethereals can do, even in an environment as hostile as this, and have at least an inkling of their sly means. Remember what I told you: they do nothing out of altruism; they have their own ends to pursue, and are not agreed amongst themselves as to what those ends ought to be. Aristocles is a powerful friend, and you'll doubtless be in dire need again of the kind of help he and his kind can provide—but you must not trust them, as you might desire to trust an honest angel. They might well believe, honestly, that they do God's work, conveying his messages and guarding the virtuous—but so did John Field, until they taught him better. Doctor Dee is a great mathematician, but philosophers, like tricksters, often fall prey to fancies they produce, and commit their faith too readily. You know what really happened just now, and you must cling to that knowledge lest it be stolen by forgetfulness. You may be sure that the ethereals will handle you gently, for they have no other catalyst here to match you, at least for the present.”

  Kelley was confused, but not by what the automaton had said—because he knew, even though he could no longer perceive the fact, that the automaton really was an automaton, with a face of bronze and blood-red eyes. He was confused because, even though he knew what had really happened, he now had a second set of memories in his mind, of a long and detailed interrogation to which Doctor Dee had been subjected by John Field, in the course of which Doctor Dee had deflected and deflated all Field's accusations and suspicions, so successfully that Field had been persuaded of the innocence of all his captives, at least in the matter of practicing sorcery.

  John Dee, Kelley knew, would remember events that way, as would Field, and all the Church Militant's witnesses to the event. The automaton was correct, however; Kelley did know the truth, not merely of what had happened, but of how ingeniously the angels—the ethereals—could work, once they had the aid of an appropriate intermediary: what they and the automaton both called a “catalyst.”

  It was neither the black lens nor the red powder that was the real philosopher's stone, Kelley realized, but himself ... and, in some larger and not-yet-graspable sense, the entire Earth.

  He nodded to inform the gypsy that he had understood what he had been told, and was thoroughly resolved to be discreet. He went to the table to pick up the black stone and replace it in his satchel, which he shouldered without meeting any opposition. Then he turned to follow John Dee, Giordano Bruno, and the gypsy, who were being escorted through the gloomy vestibule by two members of the Church Militant while the remainder set about extinguishing candles, in the interests of thrift, like the good Puritans they were.

  Once the four released prisoners were outside again, in the strange half-light that immediately precedes the dawn, Kelley was taken aside by someone else: the false Brother Cuthbert.

  “You should be grateful to me,” the impostor said. “Had I not given Master Field such a convincing account of your harmlessness, he'd never have bothered to interrogate Dee so carefully. I've played you false—though no more false, I think, than you played me in pretending to be a Catholic—but it has worked to your advantage. If not for me, you really might have been taken for a Satanist rather than a trickster and a fantasist. You should be careful, in future, about what you pretend to be. The pretense of being a cunning man, a fortune-teller, or a Paracelsian might impress credulous folk, but the word of God is spreading now as never before, and enlightenment will soon reach into every corner of English society. You will fare far better as an honest, God-fearing servant than any kind of mountebank.”

  “Thank you for your advice, Brother Cuthbert,” Kelley said, deliberately using the false name even though he knew the true one. “I am indeed grateful to you, for I know what a narrow escape I've had. I'll certainly be careful in attempting to plan my future.”

  By the time this brief conversation had run its course, the first rays of the nascent sun were rising from the eastern horizon, proud and pure in their ambition.

  “We cannot walk all day, having had no sleep,” John Dee complained. “We must find a place to rest.”

  “Indeed we must,” Giordano Bruno advised. “Wilton is a long way off, and we must conserve our strength as best we can. We have work to do when we arrive.”

  “Aye,” said John Dee. “There's gold to be made, and wisdom to be cultivated.”

  “And an army to be gathered,” said the gypsy, “and a fleet constructed. The odds will be against us, but we are forewarned and forearmed.”

  Against our immediate enemies, at least, Kelley thought, although he said nothing. He felt strangely intoxicated, yet again, as he made his way on to the muddy road and turned westward, but it was not the effect of angelic possession. This time, it was confidence in his destiny, and the knowledge that he had been set apart from common men. For the first time in his life, and in spite of his confusion, he knew that he was a true magician—which might well be a better thing to be than not, in the turbulent times that were to come.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Brian Stableford

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *


  Poetry: LIGHT ACROSS AN IMPOSSIBLE LAKE

  by Mark Rich

  Day breaks over the impossible lake

  seven light years long. A newborn may take

  from her birth to dawning self-awareness

  before the family's down-shore friends express

  —

  joy at seeing sunrise gleam in the east:

  Dawn, at last! They know this glow has increased

  to shocking morning on that first-touched shore—

  eyes upon the sky, they hope to see more

  —

  of what easterners are calling daylight.

  Straight against the wall, the child has her height

  marked in pencil. She loves her first-day dress.

  Class starts soon; her parents trained in darkness.

  —

  Down-shore friends will only now be learning

  how she was born and starts school this morning.

  Light bathes all the lake, and will for ages—

  far generations will see the edges

  —

  of their lake-lands turning red with sunset.

  Such thoughts fail to make those present forget

  what luck has been theirs: she who learns to play

  well with others on this beautiful day

  —

  soon will grow, wed, and, some hour, die,

  while the sun climbs higher into the sky.

  Her own child will never see first morning,

  just day, and, on the lake, bright sun burning.

  —

  —Mark Rich

  Copyright (c) 2008 Mark Rich

  [Back to Table of Contents]