Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (7 page)

 
          
"That
wasn't what I meant," Simon said impatiently, brushing aside Colin's
objections. "There's so much we could learn, so much we could do, if we
could put Magick on the same rational footing that Science is. Scientists don't
shiver in terror every time they look through a microscope
—
they don't worry that
they'll be struck down by jealous gods for every new insight into how the
universe works
—
"

 
          
"But
they do treat their material and their subject with the respect they
deserve," Alison reminded her pupil. "The Unseen world is a dangerous
place for the unprepared. But you're young yet, Simon. You have your whole life
ahead of you. There will be plenty of time for your studies: lifetimes."

 
          
"I
know, Alison," Simon said contritely.

 
          
But
though he dropped the subject, and for the rest of the evening the talk turned
on other things, Colin wondered about the ambition that had been so clearly
revealed in Simon Anstey's self as he spoke of his aspirations. Too much
passion was as dangerous to a would-be Adept as too little, and Simon had
passion in full measure. Passion . . . and something more, something Colin had
glimpsed in that brief instant before Alison had turned the subject.

 
          
Something
dark.

 
          
Something
dangerous.

BERKELEY
,
CALIFORNIA
, OCTOBER  1961

My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an
earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat; Had I lain for a century dead;

—
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

 
          
THE
NEW YEAR BEGAN BADLY
—
THE UNITED STATES BROKE DIPLOMATIC ties to Cuba, and
bitter fighting broke out
—
or resumed
—
in a number of places that had only been meaningless names
on a map a few years before: Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. There were Soviet
incursions everywhere, it seemed, and the Communist superpower had managed to
orbit and recover a cosmonaut, blazing the trail to its conquest of the
ultimate high ground.

 
          
In
Israel
, the trial of
newly-captured Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichman began in a chaos of news
coverage and security precautions. The testimony awakened half-hidden memories
for Colin MacLaren, and made him realize that the horrors of the Final Solution
had not been conquered, but buried. Set aside, as if, like a fretful nightmare,
ignoring them would make them disappear. Even its victims
—
those with the most personal
stake in keeping those atrocities from ever happening again
—
were as reluctant to bring
up the past as a burned child is to touch fire.

 
          
Eichman's
trial changed that, though perhaps not enough. But it was enough to rouse Colin
once more to the fear that the peaceful home-front years that
America
had enjoyed since the fall
of the Reich had not been the healing sleep that follows great effort, but the
drowsing coma that springs from a poisoned wound. His greatest fear
—
the one he lived with always
—
was that what the White
Adepts had done had been too little, too late.

 
          
The
new West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, came to
America
to meet with her young
president only days before an American general in
Germany
was relieved of his command
over fears of his ties to a new conservative organization, the John Birch
Society. When Adenauer returned home, it was to form a coalition government
that brought a temporary peace to defeated and partitioned
Germany
—
a peace increasingly
troubled by the Communist dictatorship in the East.

 
          
Was
the East, just as the politicians had feared, the direction from which the new
threat was to come? This year the Berlin Wall had gone up almost overnight,
turning from rolls of barbed wire to a brick-and-cement cliff-face standing in
the middle of a bleak dead zone. The phrase "Checkpoint Charlie"
became common currency, and the Berlin Wall became a visible sign of the
tension between Democratic and Communist Germany, East and West . . . just as a
Russian ballet dancer named Rudolph Nureyev
—
who had defected as his
troupe was performing in Paris
—
would come to be seen as a symbol of Eastern oppression and
Western liberation.

 
          
Had
the West smashed the Nazis only to allow their dark torch to be passed to the
heirs of Stalin? Had the protean evil that Colin's Order fought simply found
another form? Perhaps he
—
Alison
—
all of them
—
had been wrong in thinking that the great Dragon had been
defeated. Perhaps they had only crushed the outer shell of the darkness without
destroying its spirit, and now that spirit was roused once more to hunt for new
disciples.

 
          
There
was enough new evidence that he was right to render Colin MacLaren an
increasingly troubled man, for he knew that the Material Plane
—
what most non-Adepts thought
of as the Real World
—
was merely the reflection cast by the True Reality that
existed on the Inner Planes.

 
          
As
within, so without . . .

 
          
But
not every battle on the Material Plane was a matter for an Adept to concern himself
with, for spiritual evolution was a force as harsh and ruthless as the physical
evolution practiced by Nature. Nations were sacrificed, whole races blotted
out, in Spirit's quest for the Light. What Colin found cruel or unjust was not
necessarily a sign of the Light's jeopardy, though such a philosophical view
was never an excuse for those on the Path to countenance brutality. Certainty
was a dangerous gift, and it had not been granted to him.

 
          
April
was the crudest month ... an attempted countercoup by Cuban refugees who landed
at the Bay of Pigs failed, and it began to seem
—
as the first civilian
aircraft was hijacked to Havana a few weeks later
—
that newly Communist Cuba
would be the pretext for the nuclear war that began to seem frighteningly inevitable.
The death of United Nations' president, Dag Hammarskjold, on a peace mission to
the
Congo
, simply underscored how
fragile the peace of the Cold War was, and the peace that a generation had
fought for seemed more and more illusory as the year wore on.

 
          
That
was the spring the Freedom Riders left
Washington
for
Louisiana
, a pilgrimage from which
some would not return, as if in proof of Colin's fears that the war had come
home and become a secret war, with battle lines yet to be drawn and a battlefield
set in the hearts and minds of men and women.

 
          
It
was a war in which Colin began to realize that he would have a part to play,
though as yet he did not know what it was. . . .

           
Has it already been a year?
Colin
wondered to himself.
Yes, that and a little more.

 
          
The
windows of his hillside bungalow rattled demandingly each time a gust of wind
struck them. Occasionally there was a dry rattle as pebbles and fallen leaves
—
mostly from the groves of
eucalyptus that covered the hills
—
were dashed against the walls
by the wind. The autumn color that Colin was used to from his
Hudson
Valley
childhood was not a feature
of October in the Bay Area; instead, in fall the natural world seemed simply to
dim, to be transfigured by the winter rains from the gold and blue of summer
into the silver and brilliant green of winter.

 
          
On
this night, Colin found himself grateful to be tucked up snugly in his own
living room with a favorite pipe and a glass of Scotch. The night had come
early, and the scudding clouds played across the face of the waning moon. This
night, of all the nights in the year, always made him uneasy.

 
          
It
was Halloween.

 
          
There
were many parties being held this Tuesday evening, both on campus and off, and
he'd been eagerly invited to several of them by his student advisees, but
somehow Colin hadn't felt like company this evening. Better to stay at home
with his memories, and not inflict his company on those who would not
understand. Tonight was a night for ghosts, and Colin had many.

 
          
Perhaps
he was simply out of tune with the triviality of this so-American holiday,
which turned what had once been a powerful and portentous night that marked a
shift in the currents of the year into nothing but a light-minded excuse for
revelry. Hours earlier, the neighborhood children
—
dressed as movie monsters
and cartoon characters
—
had rung doorbells all along Colin's street begging sweets.
As Colin gave them their treats
—
forestalling the threatened tricks
—
he wondered if any of their
parents suspected that they were participating in the pallid and adulterated
end of a grisly pagan custom.

 
          
Autumn
bonfires had once been bone-fires; on this night, once upon a time, it had been
believed that the dead returned to the living world, to be placated with food
and blood and coaxed to return to their barrow-graves for another year's
slumber. It was a night that still held power for those with hearts to feel it
—
power so strong that even
the innocent and unwary were sometimes tangled in its unseen net.

 
          
What
power was out there tonight, stalking the hills that surrounded the Bay? Colin
wondered. He'd coasted through his classes that day almost unaware of his
audience, so preoccupied was he by something at the very edge of perception
—
something more urgent even
than the force of memory. He'd cut short his office hours
—
on Halloween, the students
felt that there were more important calls on their time, in any event
—
and come home, where he'd
prowled around the rooms of his little bungalow like a caged bear, trying to
isolate the source of his unease.

 
          
All
that came to his seeking attention were fragmentary images
—
cathedrals of evil
constructed with pillars of light
—
that could belong as easily
to the past as to the clouded present.

           
Easier, Colin told himself. In such
an outpost of rationalism as the UCB campus, the peculiarly European
perversions of the thirties and forties seemed like a bad dream, almost
impossible to take seriously. Nathaniel had been right: he had needed to come
here in order to let go of the past. What had been once would not be again
—
no matter how much current
world events led him to fear the Shadow's renaissance.

 
          
But
all of Colin's years of training also urged him not to lightly dismiss any
intimation, no matter how ambiguous, of trouble. The unconscious mind was not
verbal. It existed outside of time, in direct communication with the Unseen,
and it did not use words to communicate with the conscious mind. If his
unconscious was attempting to bring something to his conscious attention, it
might be using images out of his memory that were linked to importance, or
geographical location, or even to a particular type of disturbance.

 
          
But,
though psychics were in tune with the future or the far-distant present, the
reason most psychics
—
and Colin MacLaren was emphatically not one
—
tended to be so erratic in
their public predictions was that they lacked the ability to correctly
interpret the messages funneled to them by their pre-conscious minds. Colin's
own sense of disturbance came from an Adept's training: there was a disruption
on the Astral that was strong enough to intrude into the waking material
world, but elusive enough that no amount of attentive concentration was enough
to bring it fully out of the shadows into a place where his conscious mind
could deal with it.

 
          
It
was frustrating, and Colin could understand why many on the Path thought that
an Adept must be psychic as well: it would be extremely comforting right now
to have the ability to demand answers from the Unseen through his own inborn
psychic powers. But in some previous life he had chosen to deny himself those
abilities, and so Colin had no choice but simply to watch and wait.