Advanced Mythology (6 page)

Marm cleared his throat. “Well, my brewing is known far and wide as the best around. I’d be most pleased to offer beer for the party, if I can come to it.”

Keith grasped his friend’s shoulder. “It wouldn’t be a party without you,” he said. “That would be great. Your beer is the best I’ve ever had.”

“How much will you need, and when will you need it?” Marm asked. “A good brew takes longer than overnight.”

“I don’t know yet. Lots, I hope. I haven’t had much luck in making contact with other kinds so far. I try when I have time. The air sprites have been giving me these tantalizing glimpses of beings racing over the landscape, but I haven’t caught up with any of them yet. By the way, the sprites send sunrises to Tay and Holl.”

Tay grinned. “Since I’m unlikely ever to clamber into a balloon again I’ll probably never see them, but I am glad they remember me kindly. Give them greetings from me.”

“You bet.”

“And if you succeed in making contact with every being that can walk, crawl, swim, or fly, where do you propose to put them all?” Holl asked. “Your parents’ home, in the midst of the Chicago suburbs? That’d be a subtle get-together, with giants towering over the trees, and salamanders burning holes through the fences.”

“Well, I was sort of hoping to have the party
here
,”
Keith admitted. The group fell silent. A few of the older elves looked shocked. Keith bit his tongue.
Uh-oh, too soon,
he thought. He saw his glowing plans die away to ash. But not all the faces were unhappy.

“That is not an unreasonable request,” the Elf Master said after a moment’s pause.

“Really?” Keith asked, relieved. “I thought I’d have to do a lot more persuading. It would be okay with you?”

“Yes, uf course. Don’t be so surprised. You haf done much for us. It is a small thing to ask. Ve vould appreciate a chance to show our gratitude. And ve vould enjoy such a gathering.”

“Thanks, sir,” Keith said. “Wow. Yeah! I’d better start making a list of what I’ll need.”

“I can get you cold cuts at cost from Food Services,” Diane said. “Their produce doesn’t hold a candle to yours, though,” she told the Folk.

“With time enough we can persuade the fields to produce what you need,” Siobhan, Dola’s mother, said.

The others gathered, clamoring to add their own offerings. “The best cheese you’ve ever tasted, boyo.” “You’ll need a mort of bread and rolls, will you not?” “Candy! What about sweets?”

“You guys are great,” Keith said, overwhelmed by their generosity. “This is going to be one terrific party.”

“We’d be only too happy to help,” Maura said. “When would you want to hold it?”

Keith did some mental calculations. “Well, this is August. Say sometime next spring. It’ll give me a chance to fill out the guest list. I’ve got to figure some way to get the word out.”

“Take care you don’t attract anything unwelcome,” Holl warned, “such as more of your own kind. I don’t think they would enter into the celebration with the spirit you hope for.”

“I’ll make sure that no Big People even figure out what I’m doing,” Keith assured him.

***

Chapter 5

The gold pendulum swung wildly back and forth over the map of the central United States. Gradually, it slowed and began to describe a smaller oval. The tall, gaunt woman holding the end of the little pointer’s chain shifted her wrist until the oval spiraled in to an ever-diminishing circle over one spot on the face of the central United States.

“There, isn’t it as I have told you?” the woman said with a triumphant look. Her dark eyes seemed to have a red fire within them as they focused on the man in the upholstered armchair with his legs propped on the foot of the bed. “It chooses this place.”

“Bah,” Everette Beach said, rolling his pale eyes up to the stark white paint of the hotel ceiling. He had short, light-brown hair shot with gray. The thin nostrils in his spare face made it look as if he was always recoiling from smelling something bad. “There are six hundred square miles in this area. I expect you to pinpoint exactly where you think this ‘psychic realm’ is located. I want an address, not a general area. We need to find that energy cell.”

“It does not cry out ‘I am here,’” Maria Katale said surlily. She sat with her back very straight in the pseudo Louis XIV chair. “It beckons. It hints. You did not tell me that United States is so
big.
The power broadcasts its influence over a larger area.”

The stocky, dark-haired man beside her cleared his throat. “In our country, the area she shows you would be much smaller. At least she gives you where to seek.”

“I can’t help it if your education didn’t include geography lessons,” Beach said. “I had the impression that your original target was farther south than Chicago. Now your circle stretches all the way from Milwaukee to Springfield. I’m not impressed. I don’t want to go back and tell them you brought us here so you could do some shopping.”

“It is not me; it is the spirit guides,” Maria said. “If first they say it is south and now they say it is north, what of that? The spirits do not anchor themselves in the physical world. They give me the impression, the clue. We must seek on our own. I will tell you if we meet the true magic. It is here.”

Beach, disgusted, flung himself to his feet and glared down at Maria. Stefan stood up between them; his five-foot-eight frame an inadequate bulwark against their employer’s six-foot-two. “She knows, Mr. Beach. She was much respected in the … old regime. She is genuine. Just because you do not like her answers does not mean she is of no use to you.”

Beach threw up his hands. “I want answers, not impressions, Stefan. I’m not saying I believe in all this mumbo-jumbo. If it exists, I want to lay my hands on a source of genuine magic.
If
it exists. I’m still not saying I believe you. I could have gotten better results tossing a dart at a board.”

“You must not doubt Maria,” Stefan said firmly. “Our … former … government respects her highly.”

“If she’s so good why don’t
you
have … our target … already in your possession? Why would you need to work with me?”

“Money,” Stefan said. “Maria is exact, but she finds by circling around her prey, like a cat. It takes time, and we could not afford the search on our own. So we are willing to share the fruit of our efforts. We have the same goal, eh?”

“I doubt it,” Beach said. An expatriate Australian who had served in numerous U.N. peacekeeping missions, Beach had had a chance to see the vast difference between the haves and have-nots in the world. More problems could be attributed to the curse of capitalism than would ever make the headlines of any newspaper—after all, they were owned by organs of the rich. He had quit, taking his connections with him, and set out with a new goal in mind: To rid the world of pernicious Western influence. Money. There was too damned much money in this country, none of it flowing into the right pockets, the pockets of the people. Capitalism enriched the very few out of the labor of the millions. The world was overbalanced in favor of the big guys. Everette was proud to be part of the effort to right that balance.

He had no trouble enlisting numerous like-minded, highly trained people to his cause. The main problem they had was the very one they were battling. In order to overthrow the moneyed powers, one had to
have
money. It’d be a nice irony once he succeeded, but a pain in the down-unders while he was working to achieve his goal. To get his stake money he hired himself and his force out for industrial espionage to the new superpowers, the mega-corporations, under the
nom de guerre
Dotcommunist. It told everyone what his eventual goals were. He liked the idea of weapons that didn’t rely upon billions in research and development. Stefan had come to him from the former government of an Eastern European power, a former satellite of the former U.S.S.R. His deposed masters had been on the edge, they said, of finding the source of supernatural power. Beach was intrigued. If his sources were right about what they were chasing, they’d have counterintelligence “equipment” that no technological power in the world could equal—or detect.

It wasn’t that the West didn’t know that such things might exist. In response to a Russian effort in the 1950s, the US and other western nations had started chasing psychics and magic, but the effort had never gone anywhere, probably because the scientists working on the research been debunked, ignored, or laughed out of whatever chamber they’d had to go into for funding. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the east had never stopped looking, testing, probing, building on the scant evidence that had made them believe in supernatural powers in the first place. And then the Soviet Union broke up.

The evidence the satellite states had that made them believe in magic was put away into vaults. Everette had seen some of it when he was stationed in the Eastern Bloc: A wealth of documents in an unfamiliar alphabet, written on parchment, leather and primitive paper in inks that laboratory tests showed was made from nut juice, soot, ochre and other pigments. In spite of the materials’ ephemeral nature, the inks had not faded and the papers resisted even the slightest crumble. That alone had excited scientists and scholars. They couldn’t pinpoint precisely when the documents had been made. They defied traditional carbon-dating, but the provenance, the chain of ownership, went back at least to the 15th century, if not before.

But there was more. They had artifacts. They sounded simple: wooden knives that cut as well as steel, a box that kept food, even milk, fresh at room temperature indefinitely, and several other things. In Everette’s estimation, what they were looking at here was forgotten technology, like the architectural skills that had built the Pyramids, moved the trilithons of Stonehenge, not magic, but it was still amazing compared with modern electronics and inexplicable in the face of its great age. He was intrigued. He had never told anyone back home about what he had seen. Only when he left the Foreign Service, citing personal difficulties, did he go back and try to find the things and the people who knew about them he’d seen. The Eastern European governments needed money. Without Soviet money they’d been left behind by the rest of the world and were desperate to catch up. They weren’t willing to sell Beach their goods, but they allowed him access to them. His intention was to build up a spy ring, but only if he could get to the source of these things, if it still existed. The Europeans assured him that it must. They showed him more documents, written on modern paper. That told him that the creators of these goods must be somewhere around.

There was more. He’d read contemporary accounts of people who claimed to have eavesdropped on voices heard in hollow hills and under tree roots. Most statements of that kind would be dismissed by skeptics as the ramblings of the insane or the attention-hungry, but they were remarkably consistent in kind. A few contained transliterations of what they had heard. Beach had put a couple of his linguists on the job. His first thought was that the subjects had overheard isolated spy installations, but they couldn’t find a correlation with any language they knew, nor did the spoken transliteration appear to coincide meaningfully with the written documents.

Stefan had also produced Maria and her psychic gifts. Dowsing with a pendulum was her specialty, alongside occasional clairvoyance. She’d done a reading for Beach that impressed him enough to commit resources, at least for now. They had never convinced the skeptical Everette that they weren’t chasing rainbows, but that wasn’t his problem. If it was enough to get him to his goal, that was all that mattered.

One might say he was a spy, but he was a sincere spy. Human nature being what it was, he assumed that everyone else was committed to the cause partly out of naked self-interest. He was taking a fee from Stefan’s bosses for a share in the results, true, but it was a tiny fraction of what he could earn doing corporate espionage for any of the enormous international corporations that were large enough to be considered countries in their own right without worrying about such artificial boundaries as borders. They did battle without armies, in the media, in the boardrooms and on the stock exchanges, destroying lives and depleting resources with the stroke of a pen or a computer key. He especially hated advertising. It was the devil. It told lies about inferior products to sell them to the hordes of feebleminded, hypocritical people who cared about nothing further than instant gratification, the satisfaction of the moment. Bleat, bleat, bleat about human rights, until you asked capitalists to pay more for a pair of designer sneakers because the underage, foreign child worker that made them only earned fourteen cents an hour, then they shut up quickly, not liking to be held accountable for their choices. Why with all its resources the United States, for example, didn’t have colonies in space at that very moment was that they couldn’t focus on the future because the pretty baubles of the present were too enticing to ignore, and their weak-spined government didn’t want to risk getting tossed out of office to pursue the issue.

Everette pushed his idealism back. He was there to get whatever it was they were chasing, or destroy it so it couldn’t be used by the powers that be. The West didn’t need any more advantages than it already had.

But Beach wasn’t relying solely upon the powers of one unreliable psychic. He had a team of other operatives in this country. Some had been here for years, like his chief communications operative, just waiting to be activated. Ming Na-seh hailed from Sydney. She was now a naturalized citizen and a highly placed executive within one of the telephone companies. Others, such as most of his enforcers, had to rely upon tourist visas. Lying about seeking employment while within the borders of the United States, Beach chided them in his mind. Tch tch. Beach hoped that he could accomplish his mission before their visas ran out. He didn’t want to have to activate another shift.

In the meantime, Ming was proving invaluable. She had provided the latest piece of evidence that brought Beach to the United States.

Most of the newspaper-reading public had by now heard about a computer program being run by the Central Intelligence Agency called Carnivore. It scanned millions of e-mail messages and other electronic communications every day. It was supposed to be used only to inform the C.I.A. about drug-runners and other criminals, but self-interest being what it was, Beach doubted that they stopped there. With a combination of favors and cash, he’d staked a couple of young hackers to create a better program than theirs, which he nicknamed “Omnivore.” Capable of worldwide infiltration of the Internet, it scanned graphic and multiple language transmissions as well, and it excerpted the surrounding text of any reference it found.

It turned out to be money well spent. Omnivore had detected e-mail messages containing that alphabet rocketing back and forth across the Atlantic. The gateway servers turned out to be of no help. They were supposed to provide the source location of messages, but his people were unable to discover the senders. They pinned down a part of Europe as the most likely point of origin. It was far easier to try and trace the American side of the correspondence.

They had been lucky. The coding on the e-mail showed that both sides were using a smaller server gateway instead of one of the huge services. Ming had turned Omnivore to search for the name across all e-mails being sent. The closest she had come so far to pinpointing its location was somewhere in central Illinois. But here was Maria saying that the source wasn’t in the center of the state at all. Beach was frustrated.

“Are you certain you aren’t sensing any magic?” he asked Maria again.

The woman deployed her pendulum once more, swinging it out on its chain over the section of map. It reacted as though it had a mind of its own, though. Instead of describing a circle or oval, it leaped and hopped erratically. Maria captured it in her other palm, hiding it from the keen eyes of the two men. “There is nothing.”

“Try again.”

“I cannot,” she insisted. “The powers have stopped speaking to me. I must try again later.”

Beach regarded her with exasperation. “We’re not here just to chase some linguist’s wet dream of a lost language. We’re here for the goods, if there are any.”

“We will find it,” Stefan assured him. “When Maria finds it, she will know. She will be positive.”

“Good! Then we will take our … advantage home with us.”

“Be careful,” Stefan cautioned him. “You don’t want the U.S. State Department knowing what you are doing.”

“Why?” asked Beach humorously. “It is not illegal for us to be in this country. We are tourists. It says so on our visas. Besides, they think you are Bulgarian.”

“Perhaps we can go shopping,” Stefan said. “Since Maria must rest, I would like to look for things for my wife. She has given me a list of many things she has seen on the Internet. It would be good to bring her at least one of them.”

Bourgeois. Beach rolled his eyes.

***