Science and Sorcery (14 page)

Matt leaned forward as Senator Bilaganna appeared on the screen.  He didn't look particularly Native American; Matt would have bet good money that there was a white person somewhere in his family tree.  On the other hand, unlike some politicians who had claimed to be one-fifth Cherokee or whatever, he actually
did
have Native American blood.

“We have preserved the rituals of our ancestors for centuries,” the Senator said, firmly.  “My ancestors were told that our beliefs were superstition, or tools of the devil; many children were taken from the tribes and stripped of their cultural heritage because the invaders believed that they needed to learn about a different god.  Now our religions are proved to be true, yet we are denied the chance to practice them.  Preventing us from accessing our sacred sites violates our freedom of religion.”

The interviewer smiled.  “But, so far, there have been upwards of three hundred deaths at ancient sites around the world,” she said.  “None of those deaths have been easily explained.  Why do you object to the President taking action in the name of public safety?”

“The action is not in the name of public safety, whatever the President may say,” the Senator countered.  “He wants to study it, to tear away the spiritual world and replace it with the crass materialism that has affected most of America.  We know how to use the power flowing through the land; we will be safe.  It is those who show no respect for the land that have to fear.”

Matt privately doubted that that was true.  Some of the reports had noted modern-day druids dropping dead at Stonehenge, people who were at least
trying
to respect the land.  Maybe they hadn't believed in what they were doing.  Golem had pointed out that intentions were more important than rituals in such places and those who had good intentions could have bungled the entire ritual – and it would still have worked, at least to some extent.  That had sparked a long discussion on the nature of ritual magic that Matt had been unable to follow, except for the idea that in magic, a symbol could be the thing.  It made no sense to him.

“In other news, the Governor of Louisiana has appealed for calm following a major riot in New Orleans.  According to reports, a witch doctor cast a spell on a child, killing her.  The child’s parents led an armed crowd to the witch doctor’s home and attacked him, before rampaging out of control and causing others to join the riot.  The National Guard has been placed on alert to respond to the crisis if the city’s police force are unable to deal with it.

“In Texas, the controversial Reverend Zachariah Jenkins has been murdered by magic, apparently by his wife.  Their younger daughter was not in the room at the time, but she heard an argument, followed by a crash.  When she ran into the room, she saw her father dead and her mother seemingly catatonic on the floor.  The child has since been taken into protective custody and...”

Matt switched off the television set, looking down at the remains of the kebab.  The world seemed to be still going crazy.  It was impossible to prove that magic had been used to kill someone – at least so far – and there was no way to know if the crowd in New Orleans had been justified or not.  It was a city where many different traditions rubbed up against one another, along with extremes of wealth and poverty.  Successive hurricanes hadn't made it any easier either.  And then there was the Reverend’s wife...no doubt the Mage Force would be taking a look at her too, soon enough.  Who knew
what
had happened there?

Standing up, he washed his face quickly and headed to bed.  It was surprising how much he missed Caitlyn, even though he couldn't even say that they were together.  Perhaps they’d just been pushed together by events and now they needed each other.  Or perhaps she was grateful that she had her apartment to herself.  Shaking his head, Matt closed his eyes and went to sleep.  God alone knew what crisis would blow up tomorrow.

Chapter Fourteen

Austin, Texas

Day 13

The Reverend Zachariah Jenkins hadn't deserved to die.

Senator Thaddeus Whitehall sat in the front pew of the Church of New Hope and listened silently as the pastor honoured his dead friend.  Jenkins had been a committed Christian, a man who had saved souls and led moral crusades to hold back the tidal waves of liberalism that threatened to overwhelm the country, a staunch supporter of a person’s right to live and follow the religion of Jesus Christ.  And he’d been there when Thaddeus had lost his first wife, comforting him with the knowledge that his wife was waiting in Heaven for when he joined her.  Thaddeus, like so many others, had found comfort in religion, a solace against the ever-changing world. 

And the world was always changing.  When he’d been young, few people would have seriously considered an abortion, nor would they have had easy access to doctors willing to perform the procedure.  Now, countless babies had been murdered before they ever drew their first breath, all slaughtered in the name of progress.  How could anyone, Thaddeus had asked himself despairingly, peacefully tolerate mass slaughter?  And it
was
mass slaughter; it could hardly be anything else. 

It grew worse.  Liberalism had taken great strides towards wrecking the modern household, towards allowing men and women to seek divorce for the merest provocation.  Thaddeus would have happily admitted that some marriages were made in Hell, rather than Heaven, but smashing a holy union for minor reasons was evil.  And even if matters had moved beyond recovery, what about the children?  He’d seen fathers lose their right to visit their children, even though they were forced to spend most of their wages making support payments, depriving their children of a strong male presence in their lives.  That too was a result of liberalism.

And then there was the filth in the papers, the endless barrage of sexual content on the internet and television, the reluctance to stand up for the values that made America great, or to stand up to flag-burning fanatics who blamed the United States for their woes...how could anyone steer a course through the swamp that had engulfed the nation?  And for those who tried, such as Thaddeus, the media tore them apart.  Conservatives were expected to be whiter than white – and then attacked for
being
white – while liberals got a free pass from the mainstream media.  He opposed annual gay pride marches through major cities, purely because they created yet another dependent group, and the media told the world that he was a bigot.  Thankfully, the good folk of Texas disagreed. 

He looked at the coffin and winced.  Jenkins had been a good man, a stern head of his household and – later – Thaddeus’s father-in-law.  But no one had realised that his wife was a magician, not until
something
had happened that had left Jenkins dead and his wife in a coma – and his daughter effectively an orphan.  Thaddeus had pulled strings to get Chloe Jenkins out of protective custody, knowing that it would have pleased her father.  He’d always worried about his children being exposed to the wrong influences.

Jenkins had often spoken about the End Times in his sermons.  Thaddeus had listened, maybe not taking them quite as seriously as he should, as he’d talked about the antichrist, who would deceive the world through magic.  There would be false prophets, he’d warned, and tricksters who would duplicate the acts of Jesus, worked with the power of his father.  They would deceive many, laying the groundwork for the End Times.  And now there were magicians in the world.

Thaddeus had no love for the President – like most inhabitants of the White House, he was either a liberal or a weakling who couldn't be trusted to stand up for American interests – but his speech seemed to have opened the floodgates.  There were
dozens
of reported incidents of magic, ranging from werewolves to outright magicians.  And deaths; men and women savaged by werewolves, or killed in magical accidents.  Several people didn't seem to have survived their transformations into magical creatures either.  How many deaths would there be in the future?

And just what would it do to the world?

He glanced over at his wife, seated in the women’s pew, and winced when he saw her face.  Jean Whitehall,
nee
Jenkins, had loved her father, despite his strictness and willingness to apply the belt if necessary to punish his daughters.  Thaddeus had held her as she cried, unable to believe that their mother would
deliberately
set out to hurt their father.  He hadn't been able to blame his wife for her disbelief.  The entire world seemed to be going crazy.

Thaddeus had been raised to believe that all people were considered equal, in birth if not in achievement.  His grandest achievements, being a United States Senator and former Governor of Texas, had been his own work.  So too had his failures; he, not anyone else, was responsible for the day he crawled into a bottle after the loss of his first wife.  How could anyone blame others for their own choices?  A druggie who whined that society had failed him was nothing more than a liar, or someone who had abdicated all control over his own life.  There was no reason why someone couldn't climb out of the gutter and rise all the way to becoming President of the United States.

But magic threatened to change the very concept of human equality – and control.  The werewolves presented one aspect of the problem; could they be considered responsible for their actions while under the influence?  Thaddeus would quite happily have considered a drunk driver a murderer if he knocked down someone while driving, because few people were forced to drink alcohol, but a werewolf hadn't chosen to be a werewolf.  But even if they weren't responsible for their actions, how could they be allowed in normal society when they could lose control and bite people, infecting others with the werewolf disease? 

And then there were the magicians.  If some people could work magic, and others couldn't, what did that say about the concept of human equality?

The President hadn't provided any real guidance, proving – once again – that he was a man without a true moral centre.  Thaddeus could understand why he might want to wait and see what happened, but there was no
time
.  The events in New Orleans were nothing compared to the disasters that might be on their way, unless the government took firm action.  And if the President wouldn't take action himself, Thaddeus and those who shared his views would just have to work to force action through Congress and the Senate anyway.

He rose to his feet as the pastor finished his sermon and the pallbearers advanced to pick up the coffin and carry it to a small graveyard outside the church.  They would bury the Reverend, and pray for his wife’s soul, and then they would go back home, where he would start laying the groundwork for his campaign.  Someone had to do something about magic before the situation got completely out of hand and it looked like it had to be him.  And if it took him to the White House...well, at last America would have a President of strong moral principles. 

Besides,
someone
had to stand up for ordinary people.

***

There was a
distinct advantage in being an enemy of the mainstream media, he reminded himself, a few hours later.  The media might take his words and put them out of context, but one could always rely on the bloggers to point out – often in excessive detail – exactly what the media had done to his speeches.  It also meant that he could reach a far wider audience than one might expect, including millions of conservatives who might otherwise have held their tongues, convinced that they were alone in their conservatism.  The media liked to paint the cities as fortresses of progressive thought, and the countryside as populated by rural hicks whose only source of entertainment was getting to second base with their cousins, but anyone with any sense knew better.  None of the political lines were so finely drawn.

“The polls have definitely identified a groundswell of fear about magic,” Thomas Carmichael reported.  He was a young man who had worked with Thaddeus on his campaign to reach the Senate, helping him to master the potential of the internet and other newfangled ways to reach the public.  Some of Thaddeus’s more extreme supporters had muttered darkly about affirmative action, forcing him to put them straight.  There were people he would have preferred to see on the left, just so he could sneer at them properly.

“Good,” Thaddeus said.  Oddly, he hadn't felt so energized in years. 
This
was real politics, even if the rough-and-tumble had yet to begin.  “And where are the people trying to lead us?”

Carmichael checked his notes.  “There’s no specific trend yet,” he reported, “apart from the people who want magic banned altogether.  Quite how they intend to ban werewolves escapes me.”

Thaddeus nodded.  One rule of political campaigns, at least ones intended to help boost re-election prospects, was never to go too far.  Banning werewolves from existence, no doubt with some kind of werewolf pogrom, would alienate people who would otherwise have sat on the fence and waited to see what happened.  Besides, it wasn't as if werewolves could be blamed for their own existence.

“We will need to work on the supervision factor, rather than pushing for outright destruction,” Thaddeus said.  Promising people more than one could deliver wasn’t politically fatal, as countless politicians had discovered, but it should have been.  A great many liberals would have been kicked out after yet another attempt to convince the world that black was white, a circle was a square and constantly borrowing money was a sustainable approach to the economy.  “Did you have a chance to read through my proposals?”

Carmichael picked up the sheet of handwritten notes Thaddeus had made on the drive back to his mansion.  “I think that most of them are workable,” he said, glancing down at the paper.  “However, the concept of mandatory blood tests for magical traits is going to raise hackles – and it may well be unworkable.”

Thaddeus lifted an eyebrow.  “Unworkable?”

“Logic tells us that magical creatures – and magicians – have something in their DNA that separates them from ordinary people,” Carmichael said.  “Magic, however, doesn't seem to be bound by what we would consider common sense.  The mermaids, for example, undergo remarkable transformations literally overnight, but they didn't all transform together.  That implies that whatever X-factor they have in their blood wasn't active until they transformed.”

He paused, marshalling his thoughts.  Like most younger assistants, he had a tendency to speak before his thoughts were fully organised.  “If we did a blood test, assuming we knew what to look for, on a dormant mermaid, would we realised that she
was
a mermaid?”

“I see your point,” Thaddeus said, reluctantly.  Someone whose magic hadn't blossomed yet, whatever form it took, might not be detectable.  “We can't lock up the entire country on suspicion.”

“No,” Carmichael agreed. 

They worked through the rest of the points, one by one.  Some politicians preferred to simply issue orders, rather than ask their staffers for obedience.  Thaddeus preferred to have someone tell him when he might be wrong,
before
he took his ideas public.  There would be complaints from the left, of course, but there were always complaints from the left.  The real task was to convince the undecided majority that his program, rather than that put forward by the President, was the right way to handle the crisis.  It helped that the President hadn't put forward a real plan.

“Good,” Thaddeus said, finally.  “I take it that you will be recording the press conference?”

“Of course,” Carmichael said.  It would be placed online, naturally, where watchers could see the entire conference rather than edited highlights.  That wouldn’t save him from a real gaffe – one political career had been destroyed by a candidate who had referred to be voters as morons – but at least it would make it harder for the mainstream media to misrepresent his words.  “I wouldn't miss it for the world.”

***

“The world has changed,” Thaddeus said.  He stood in front of a podium, looking down at the reporters and bloggers in the crowd.  The reporters had come because anything a Senator said was newsworthy; the bloggers because many of them took their self-appointed task of deconstructing media lies seriously.  “We have been forced to come to terms with the fact that some of our fellow citizens have become rampaging monsters, infected by a disease we only knew out of legend.  And we have seen that some others may have developed powers that can be used for great good, or great evil.”