The Serpent Mage (19 page)
Authors: Greg Bear
Umbrals, dark and brooding and powerful; they had dug holes for themselves in the ground beneath the trees in Griffith Park and waited for the night; or they had lingered in shadows, dazzled by the sunlight, whispering softly to each other as the long day passed. Now they were abroad, trying to find a niche for themselves in this unfamiliar world.
The Pelagals had already set up liaisons with the creatures of the sea and swam with whales and sharks and huge wide-finned manias in the sparkling moonlit waters beyond San Pedro harbor.
He extended his range and focused once more on humans. There was something he had to acquire, a
sense
about the world. The sweat started again on his skin. The effort was almost painful, but he stretched the range of his probe and the breadth of its sweep, until he could feel himself extended high up into the sky, and deep into the Earth and across the city for miles around. Then he drew in the height and depth and seemed for a moment to cup the land in his hands, touching lightly upon a million, two million, five million minds.
The richness of flow was overwhelming. He drew back and became selective again, but over a much wider area.
sleeping city dark and nervous
This is what humans are
to work all day work for wages hope for gain and all this comes this nonsense fall behind expected expected this is the way life is it gets you you don't watch it and it creeps up on you Oh yes Daddy says Mommy says meanness meanness don't touch the cat that way I should have listened and not taken that position before the board Satisfaction in that the world is falling apart and still I have peace in the garden with the thick crumbling soil works into my fingers and sprinkle the bone meal think this was an animal once a cow I suppose now it's garden that's what we'll be garden stuff walking meat and bone meal for Earth's garden Yes it was sex and I don't know what to do it comes up it sneaks up I must answer like an animal not an angel ape not angel wish for self-control but what the hell Pills and such death and simple joy in a bottle so hard so hard to be good when what feels good to me kills me a bit at a time
what did she say in sleep she comes to me just stares with that look she always had when she was alive I wonder is it really her and she's talking in my sleep to me
? Shot strategy all to hell all that work all that dedication and now it doesn't mean shit well I'm free [tomorrow back to the struggle act like it's all the same but it isn't it's a nightmare out there]
Thick waves oily and blue-green up around my sleeping ankles I can wake up before it covers my head I know I can but what if I'm not asleep same dream this has happened before but I can feel it cold and know it's rising I can see the moon overhead full drawing it up over my head and those people on the shore, they see the seaweed around my ankles, they know the knife is dull
Ceiling blank and dark spackle landscape it's like a joy that doesn't let me sleep he loves me and it doesn't matter all else Stupid goddam kikes every year stronger hate them so much liars and niggers and their women breeding and the brownies from the south and now
this
shit who can take care of it maybe they'll all kill each other and what's left over will be mine ours
Take it then take it and be damned CROSSING OVER yes God is with me and I can cross over swift river river of sinners
Listening
! Must pray Jesus for a drink Wait for the sun stretch out my outrageous arms and warm them in the sun sleep in the dumpster tonight listen for the trucks in the morning mustn't drink all this tonight or I'll sleep through the truck will get me eat me What can I teach them now it's all changed have a hard enough time anyway who wants to take a test when ghosts walk the streets and oh God I'm scared what must they be feeling just young kids faced the bomb now this
Kill him Shouldn't have eaten that Kill him Damned dog cleaned it up Pray Pray
Prey
Walked all over Like frogs on lily pad staring at each other oh it hurts I want to love Lust^for nirvana that's it make them lust for enlightenment Breaking down everything Can't say it what I feel it's been twenty years we're together and she's everything and I'm so afraid of her for her for me Tomorrow I might be dead and no worries then it's getting close what can I expect five years maybe six
The grownups don't know nobody knows what do I tell my sister
Growling stomach
Filth filth and degradation Kill them Kill them
Whistling
I can't go on just being hungry and the children that bastard kill him Why won't they let me be
Listening! Somebody listening! Feel
—
He expanded the range of his probe. It seemed an effortless maneuver, but he scrambled to become more selective —
And nowhere Kristine
Beautiful women in bed making love and not thinking of love and the men not thinking some thinking of cars High glass and steel Lord could use a sniff a line how much I wonder call Marge no turn in script tomorrow Kill them Meeting Immigration car lawyer card car card lawyer My baby my baby [Emptiness, hollowness, grief close to bliss it has burned so deep] The way the paint muddies when you use those colors Bad mix Station nulls out that way six antennas got to save Utah from 50,000 watts I'll remember and tomorrow River flows river deep moon wide in my loins the blood dances with the moon 1 hate her for what she did but I hate everybody they hate me I know How do I convince them they are so bored they might as well be dead
[Pain so intense and prolonged it makes him flinch]
Interruption
Something searching
for
him not Clarkham not Tarax, long and dark plying the waters ot the Earth, a huge and ancient sinuosity, inwardly human.
He tried to withdraw, but it was upon him. gripping him with unbreakable gentleness, leaving a message:
Soon we must meet. Our time is coming.
Then releasing him.
And Michael, still and cold in the downstairs bed, eyes stinging, deduced, knew, what it was that had reached out several times to touch
him
: the oldest living being on Earth, even now that the Sidhe were returning; the only representative of the first humans, alone of his kind cursed by the Sidhe to remain sentient after all the rest had been transformed into shrew-like animals. Alive and thinking and remembering for sixty million years under that curse.
The Serpent Mage.
He pulled back within himself, head aching, and struggled to reduce the pain with his discipline. He had overextended; he had been met, matched and exceeded.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Tippett Residential Hotel now stood at the center of an evacuated no man's land about three long blocks in diameter. Helicopters patrolled above the Strip and the Hollywood hills in the early morning darkness, spotlights searching the cur-fewed streets. Soldiers waited nervously beyond their sandbag and brick barricades. They had been awake, most of them, all night.
Michael walked casually down Sunset toward the barricades. Police cars were parked diagonally in a line across the street before the Hyatt. Highway patrol and LAPD officers stood with arms folded, talking with each other. They paid him little attention. Gawkers had been around for days.
He reached out and skimmed across their thoughts, taking in all that had been happening — all they thought had been happening — and distilling from the different viewpoints a reasonably clear picture.
The hotel had become particularly active about two weeks before. Hundreds of Sidhe had appeared in the building and exited, most from the ground floor, vanishing into the city. A few had flown from the roof on
epon
, the Sidhe horses. Amorphals and Faer, at least, had joined in the exodus through the Tippett. Other varieties of Sidhe — the Pelagals in his sleeping vision, for example — had taken other routes, using other gates.
It would not be difficult for many of the Sidhe to doff their clothes, find or steal or even buy others and merge with the human population. With a few simple illusions — cosmetic
touchups in their appearance — the Faer, at least, could pass.
Now, however, the gate through the Tippett was blocked, at least on the ground. Michael had to go back into the building and find out what the situation was. If a backlog of refugees was building up, something would have to give, and that meant more people — and perhaps Sidhe — would be hurt or killed.
But that was not his main purpose. It was possible the gate was two-way — or that he could use the presence of a one-way gate to enhance his own abilities and cross over into the Realm. And perhaps there, someone could tell him where Kristine was…
Tonn's wife.
He did not feel easy relying on Tarax, at Tarax's leisure, to regain Kristine.
The line of squad cars and police was easy to penetrate. He threw a shadow of himself walking back up the street and moved casually past them, unnoticed. A sandbag emplacement blocked the street a dozen yards beyond, with three armed National Guardsmen sitting behind it, weapons aimed toward the Tippett Hotel. They had their backs turned to Michael. He suggested that if and when they turned, they would see — and recognize — another guardsman. None of them turned.
The side walkway of the hotel was hidden from view. Michael climbed the battered front fence quickly and found the side door open a few inches. Pausing to close his eyes and concentrate on the service hallway beyond, he took a deep breath. Nothing. The hallway was empty, as was the first floor — empty, that is, of anybody or thing he could probe. He knew he could not necessarily locate Sidhe.
The lobby of the hotel had changed little since he was last there. The elevator doors reflected a muddy, distorted view of the light coming through cracks in the freshly-boarded entrance. Bullets had penetrated the wood and left the remaining glass in pale diamond scatters on the faded and torn carpeting.
Michael walked up the stairs slowly and paused on the landing, glancing over his shoulder at the lobby now half a floor below. Indefinite emotions, memories, hung in the air like evidence of a passing cigarette: not good emotions, and not human.
It
look
him a moment to recognize the mental spoor of frightened Sidhe.
On the second floor, he saw a piece of fabric cast aside in a comer opposite the elevator door. He bent and picked up the cloth, holding it loosely in both hands. It was a jerkin, dark amber, embroidered with vivid brambles and unfamiliar thorny flowers. The jerkin smelled like a winter forest. He laid the fabric down, disturbed by it, and saw another piece of clothing and a wooden staff on the stairway, the staff lying along one step.
The higher he climbed, the more discarded articles of clothing and accessories he found: bits of polished and engraved rock, even viewing crystals similar to the ones he had peered into in the Crane Women's hut, but dark and empty; a long full robe the precise color of a thunderstorm; several pairs of slipper-like shoes; and gems that would command a fortune in normal times.
On the fourth floor, Michael stopped. The spoor was strong enough here to tighten his stomach. The thought of powerful and noble Sidhe knowing such fear, almost panic, was frightening in itself.
On the fifth floor, he felt rather than heard a movement in the shadows. The dawn light did not relieve the gloom much. He walked between a thin forest of creeper-like electrical conduits hanging from the ceiling. The interior walls had been torn out long ago, leaving the entire floor open but for the elevator and stairwell.
The floor undulated and crawled as Michael slowly approached the rear of the building. His feet brushed soft objects, and he stopped; the objects soundlessly huddled and bunched away from him.
His vision adapted with uncanny quickness.
"Birds," he whispered. The floor was carpeted with sparrows, pigeons, robins and blackbirds. They all watched him warily, without menace but also without fear, and silently; not a single coo or chirp among the thousands of them.
On the porch, beyond shattered and leaning sliding glass doors, a single much larger bird, about two feet tall, perched on the edge of a concrete rail. Its feathers ruffled in a passing breeze, and it turned to face him. It appeared corvine, but with a blood-red breast and beak; its eyes were small black jewels lined in white. Michael thought it might be the same bird that had watched from the roof when Tommy came.
The large red-breasted bird stabbed its beak toward the upper floors and nodded three times, making a tiny
gluck
sound in its throat.
"Arno?" Michael asked. The bird preened itself, ignoring him. Then it smoothed its feathers and pointed to the upper floors again.
Michael backed away from the carpet of silent birds and resumed his climb. There were no more abandoned articles of clothing; if anything, the stairway and halls of each floor seemed less cluttered than when he had last been there, as if a group had made some pretense at cleaning and inhabiting the empty rooms.
As he approached the eleventh floor, he could feel the presence of an intrusion quite strongly. The gate was still open. And someone was standing before it… That much he could sense but no more. He paused by the elevators, staring down a long, dark southern hall, all its doors closed. The end of the hallway was darker than it should have been — a rectangle of subterranean blackness. Standing before the blackness was a white-haired figure in dark clothes.
Michael's heart was subjected to two separate moments of alarm and shock. The first came when he thought the figure was Tarax. He had half-expected to find Tarax here, and perhaps his daughter as well, but this individual was neither. As his eyes probed the gloom, he saw that it was long of arm and leg and short of trunk, which gave him his second shock; he thought it was one of the Crane Women. Then it approached him.
It was indeed an old Breed female, but it was not Nare, Spart or Coom. Her long white-blond hair hung down to her shoulders. Her lips were full, pink, even luxurious, but her skin was nearly as pale as her hair. She regarded him suspiciously with small, bright blue eyes sighting along a thin nose. She wore a man's black suit, which hung loosely on her, a stiff, starchy white shirt (also baggy) and a narrow black tie. "I've been here two days," she said with a mild Scottish brogue. She did not touch his aura to learn what language to speak. "The Serpent told me to wait for you and bring you back with me."
"Who are you?" Michael asked. Why did such a simple question seem so clumsy? Because he already knew the answer, had known without even asking. "You're his attendant," he said.
She nodded. "The Serpent expects you. You are a candidate."
Then she motioned for him to follow. "This is not the path the Sidhe take from the Realm," she said, waiting for him to approach only two steps behind her before she reached with one hand toward the cavern-dark rectangle at the end of the hallway. "That is closed temporarily, but its power is here, waiting for those who know how to hitch on." The Breed pushed her hand into the blackness and passed through, briefly filling the hallway with blinding daylight. The blackness closed around her, leaving only her left hand suspended in the gloom, long finger curling, curling, urging him on.
The daylight flashed around him this time, and he stood on the barren shore of a broad slate-colored lake. The time was early afternoon. Thick clouds hovered over the lake and the adjacent brown hills. Nearby, gnarled pines encroached upon the rocky shore. A mist drifted across the far shore, obscuring more hills and a small peninsula sparsely fletched with more pines. The air was chill and moist but not cold. The Breed female stood near the still edge of the lake a few yards away. "Do you know where you are?" she asked.
Michael sniffed. "East," he said. "England… or Scotland."
"Have you been here before?"
He shook his head.
"Do you know why you have been called here?"
"No, not exactly."
"You've heard the tale… of the War, and the fall, and the loss, and the rise again, the flight and the return?"
"Yes," Michael said.
She nodded, and then she was gone. In her place stood a tree stump, its roots covered with algae below the water's murky line. "Thank
you
," he said with mock brightness. Then he sat on a rock and waited, feeling curiously patient. Only the gnawing thought of Kristine's captivity disturbed an extraordinary peace that settled over him.
This was finally the time, and it was sufficient in and of itself. What he felt was akin to pride, but he was not prideful. He was worthy to meet the Serpent Mage, but did that convey any honor? Yes, and no. If Michael thought as a human might think, then yes. If he thought as a Sidhe, it conveyed something else entirely. A fitting into the flow, a final integration into the overall story.
Late afternoon lengthened imperceptibly into dusk. He was neither bored nor anxious. He simply waited, his
hyloka
throbbing, heating and cooling him like another kind of breathing. Michael did not think much, nor did he daydream or doze. The hour approached. He would feel apprehension and even terror when it arrived; he was not above his origins. Transcendence, perhaps, but not aloofness.
He had come a long way to be here. Distance in space was the smallest component of that long, difficult vector. He had learned many disturbing things about himself, about the world and about his family. He was no longer the same Michael Perrin he had been when he had first entered Clarkham's house, passed through and around and entered the house next door, to find Tristesse's backyard and alley and the gate that gave access to the Realm.
The water of the lake — the loch — rose in a glassy, swelling hump in the middle distance, then smoothed again without waves. The hump reappeared halfway toward the shore, this time disturbing the water with the faintest iridescent ripples. Night was falling rapidly, and the mist was thickening, beading his shirt and light jacket.
The oldest living creature on the Earth, or perhaps anywhere else. Older even than Adonna called Tonn.
The air warmed. Michael surveyed the nearby waters. A very long black shape — perhaps twenty yards from beginning to end — lay curled just below the surface of the loch about ten yards offshore, taking advantage of the decline and deeper water beyond.
Slowly, it unwound and moved toward the shore, sine-waving from side to side, sending out oily ripples in beautiful whirlpool patterns. Its head broke the surface in the shallows, and Michael felt its dark gaze on him.
The Serpent Mage was ugly. It looked dangerous, with its smooth black skin dimpled all over like a very old catfish or electric eel, its filmed eyes tiny, its fins small and barbed, dorsal fin little more than a ridge of thorn-like stickles in the middle of its back. It was a yard and a half wide and squat in cross-section, as if oppressed even in the water by its freight of time.
Michael shivered The head slithered up the shore, cresting sand and gravel before it. Then it rested, careened slightly to one side, still watching him, silent on all levels.
Its mouth was a wide, round-gummed crescent recessed behind the blunt two-lobed snout. The mouth opened an inch or two and shut, then again. Recessed deep behind the gums were crescents of sharp, tiny teeth, no larger than Michael's, but far greater in number.
Michael dropped his legs over the side of the rock and approached the Serpent, hands held out before him. His fingers trembled.
But for a tiny, final thread of noctilucent cloud, the last light had gone out of the sky, He was seeing the Serpent by all of his new senses, and in that seeing, the Serpent was suddenly wrapped in cold fire. Mother-of-pearl stripes retreated down its length from its snout. Its eyes became sullen blood rubies. Then the decorations passed away, and it lost all character but its length and its width. It sat on the shore as black as polished obsidian, blacker than the turbid loch water and the mist-shrouded night air beyond.
"You called me," Michael finally said.
"Yes, I did," a voice issued from the long form. It spoke human words but hardly sounded human. There was too much age in it, too much time wrapped in solitary contemplation.
"I don't know why you called me."
"We must discuss what you're going to do," the Serpent said. "The world is remaking itself."
"I'm ready to listen," Michael said, stopping three strides from the Serpent's head.
"I am not here to give instructions," the Serpent said. "The most I will do is suggest. The rest is up to you. Do you know what you are now?"
