The Magister (Earthkeep) (18 page)

7 – Regina - [2O88 C.E.]

Threads move back and forth

through universes

over moons and under suns.

Your breath on my cheek

stirs wind on a pond

ten thousand light-years away.

Weaves From The Matrix

"Adverb, tsa-a-ah, if you had any horse sense, tsa-a-ah, you would know I got a few matters of my own to deal with, tsa-a-a-ah." 

Yotoma panted as she hugged the vertical rope with her arms, then forced her knees to bend deep once more so her feet could grasp the rough hemp for the next push upward.  "You think maybe, tsa-ah, you're the only one digging short graves?  Tsa-a-a-ah!"  Her panting got louder but so did her voice.  "Think you're the only one, tsa-a-ah, got processions of self-flagellates in the streets, or crazy women trying to nurse dolls?  Tsa-a-ah!  Or broad-daylight kidnappings, tsa-a-ah, or homemade bombs in the suburbs?  Tsa-a-a-ah!" 

Yotoma pushed out her last puff of air as she triumphantly reached the top of her climb and swung there at rest, talking toward Zude's holofigure.  "Look at me, child!"  Her free hand was on her hip.

In her office 12,000 miles away, a lethargic Zude obediently pressed out her cigarillo of treated seaweed and smoothed the arms of her softshirt.  Then she folded her hands and leaned on her console table, staring at a holo-image from the faraway Aegean: Flossie Yotoma Lutu, Magister of the Africa-Europe-Mideast Tri-Satrapy, swaying like a chorus girl 20 feet above the holocameras.

For a moment Yotoma studied the subdued visage of her colleague and friend.  Then she unwound herself and dropped like a stone onto the trampoline below her.  She did not bounce.

Zude's attention was arrested in spite of herself.

"You're working in augmented gravity?" 

"Yup.  It's up by thirty percent."  Yotoma heaved her body off the tramp and stood, rubbing her close-cropped gray hair with a towel of bright Femmedarme Green.  Then she sat on the edge of the trampoline and leered at Zude.  "But oh, Might Of The Mbeles, do I climb like a bug when I switch back to normal!  Ha!"  She gave a special dig into her ears and then swung the towel down to her lap.  "I've been rough on you," she confessed.  "So say me.  About Regina."

"Not much to tell, Floss."  Zude sank back into her chair.  "I've been around the world and back.  Nobody can help her.  That magus you sent me did manage to tune into her songs.  Did you know that all of them who are dying are singing the same melodies and doing the same rituals?  All in that same strange language.  All over Little Blue." 

Zude's eyes sought Yotoma's with a deep weariness.  "We've run every test known to health and healing, and she's fine.  They've magnified her tissues up to the thousandth power and read her circuits in every possible combination of tracks.  Traced her whole life electromagnetically.  I sat for hours and watched that little soul of hers producing cell after cell, beautiful cells, healthy cells, in every part of her body.  All the healers declare her compound energy anatomy to be in top-notch condition."  Bleakly, Zude watched her thumb as it rubbed against the edge of the console table.  "She's just quiet."  She looked again at Yotoma.  "And she says she thinks she will leave us in six days." 

Abruptly, Magister Adverb's face contorted.  She struck the console top with both hands and shot out of her chair with an exclamation that Yotoma could only call a howl.

Magister Lutu watched her friend lunge toward the wall of glass that revealed, below and beyond, the sparkling blanket of the Los Angeles city lights.  When Zude seemed about to fling herself against that wall, Yotoma stood and called out, "Zudie!"

Zude rested her head on the window surface.  "I am okay, Floss," she responded.  She turned to face Yotoma's holo-image. "But it's not like there are other niñas just around the corner, you know!"  She threw up her hands and paced the wall's length. "Flossie, I never thought I'd pray for babies to be born."  She leaned on the back of one of the sofas.  "I've always worried about us having too many of them.  Now I'd like it to rain babies!  Let them be born by the litters!  By the hundreds!  I just want to see a baby again, one that's not going to squeeze my finger and grin at me and then die tomorrow!"  Zude flung herself onto one of the deep sofas, head in her hands. 

Yotoma eyed Zude in silence.  Then she said, "Have you got a body to hold you, child?  I'll be there on non-stop rocket. . ."

Zude smiled a little.  "Thanks, Flossie.  Not necessary.  Ria and I have been doing lots of holding."  She checked her tacto-time.  "And Bosca's coming."  The floor captured her stare.  When she spoke again, her voice was a whisper.  "We can't reach Reggie.  She seems loving, lets us put our arms around her and all that.  But she's . . . ah, polite, almost.  It's like she's in another place, a place we can't go." 

Yotoma said nothing. 

Zude still stared.  "I will handle it, Floss.  We'll lose her.  And Enrique, too."  She glanced at Yotoma.  "He's okay, so far."  She leaned on her knees.  "I'll survive.  We'll all of us over twenty going to survive.  But what then?  Or does it even matter?"

Yotoma wiped her face.  "Pretty natural, wouldn't you say, to resist death?  That's all we're doing, Zude.  No business as usual anymore."  She paused, then spoke vigorously.  "You ought to see the pink lather that Medicine is in over here.  Downright frantic.  Every research institute staff's working and worrying around the clock, most of them on double shifts.  All the blessed night they prefigure and test and titrate and fluoresce and precipitate!  And they come up with the same big nothing as before.  And all that time they got crowds screaming at them, sitting in their foyers or in cushcar lots shouting, 'Save us, save us!  The race is dying!'  And the researchers themselves drag home 72 hours later and cry with their own barren partners and use up a mile or two of holofilm on their own white-haired children."  Yotoma wiped her face, rubbing her eyes especially hard.  "It will make a weeper out of an angel."

Zude was quiet. 

Yotoma tried again to raise some collegial interest.  "In Medina," she said, cataloguing as she paced, "the 'Darmes confiscated a so-called fertility drug that's already killed 300 women.  In Johannesburg and Helsinki, pharmaceutical houses have given up trying to do business and closed down completely.  For that matter, whole bunches of demesne webs have quit, too, for lack of a quorum.  Everybody's either shrieking in fear or drowning in a pot of depression.  The whole Mediterranean coast is jammed with religious ceremonies, and when they're not praying they're fornicating.  Orgies block the streets of Leipzig, all night, all day.  Everybody in rut, everybody hoping to reproduce."

Zude was nodding.  "Here, too."  She reached for her seaweed cigarillos, threw the package down, and clasped her hands. Calmly she said, "Flossie, could I be incompetent?"

"Incom--?"

"I know, I know.  Everybody's feeling that way, I guess.  But my mind's been doing spooky things. . .I can't think straight sometimes, couldn't remember Edge's pager sequence the other day.  And I get these impulses, like today I started humming salsa tunes in staff meeting.  Had to keep myself from dancing.  Wild dreams, silly notions. . ."  She ran her hands through her hair.

Flossie Yotoma Lutu narrowed her eyes, taking full measure of Zude's state of mind.  She reconfigured the holo-angles and brought her image into close-up capacity on Zude's receptor field.  She sat on the floor in front of her trampoline. 

"Magister Adverb," she said, "trust me.  You are not incompetent and you are not even a little crazy."  She paused.  "Now.  You don't sound at all interested in the affairs of this planet of ours, but we got some business.  You feel up to it?"

Zude raised her head.

Flossie gave her neck a broad swipe with the towel.  "I finally ran down our dragon.  Magister Lin-ci Win."

Zude gathered her attention.  Then she activated her own  close-up link and put her colleague's life-size image mere inches across from her.  "Where was she?"

"Doesn't matter.  Off in some Fujian convent. Retreating."  Yotoma took a long breath.  "Zudie, you and I, we been talking this thing into the ground.  About freeing the habitantes."  She held up her hand to stop Zude's interruption.  "And I have not given you an ounce of support about it."  She leaned against the trampoline.  "Fact is, when you first said it to me, I did figure you'd gone one brick shy of a load.  I said to Self, 'Self, am I hearing right?  She wants to put a million people back on the streets?  All of them violent, some of them killers, and bingo! right now!  Why, Self, we'd have to double the number of Kanshou overnight to handle that change!'  And Self says to me, 'Yes, that seems to be what the girl is suggesting.'  But then Self reminds me, saying, 'But Flossie, nobody knows more about bailiwicks than Zudie does.  Bailiwicks are her thing, remember?    So you just take a balance-breath and think about it,' Self says to me."

Yotoma watched Zude carefully.  "Now I figure maybe our Zudie hasn't lost her cookies after all."  She hung the towel around her neck and leaned forward.  "By the time I'd laid out all your arguments to Lin-ci Win for closing down the bailiwicks — and added a few of my own - your crackpot idea was not just logical.  It seemed like our only option.  Let the habitantes live out their lives in freedom, like the rest of us.  Send them back to their families, to their children if they've got any.  Given the state of the world, it's only right." 

Zude relaxed a little, into the cushioned sofa.  "No joke?"  She smiled wanly.

"No joke."  Yotoma smiled back.  "Look, Adverb.  What's the worst that could happen?  Let's say we let them go, and then all the children don't die after all.  Let's say the human enterprise has not ended, that it's only paused a little to shake us up some.  So then the worst we got to do is say to these released habitantes, 'Sorry folks, we thought we were finished as a species but we're not.  So now we have to remand you into custody, put you back into your bailiwick again.'  Or maybe we wait and see if they need to be sent back.  Maybe they will have learned all the lessons they need to learn.  Maybe we all will." 

Yotoma paused. 

"I figure it's worth it, Zudie." 

She paused again. 

"So I'll line up my boots beside yours when you lay out the proposal for the Heart and the Central Web."

Zude swallowed against a big welling up of tears.  "Floss!" she cried, and in the next instant found herself laughing ruefully.  "Flossie, Flossie!" she exclaimed, hugging herself.  "Here's a little irony: You're finally ready to let the habitantes go free, and I just spent this afternoon convincing myself that we shouldn't try to do it after all!" 

She leaned toward Flossie, excited now.  "Admit it, Floss, the bailiwicks work like nothing else ever has!  They contain violence, keep it out of the way of ordinary citizens, and they do it without taking away the dignity of the habitantes!  Looked at historically--"

A roar from the Aegean stopped her. 

"Zude!  You're shuffling back and forth like a drunk crossing heavy traffic!"  Yotoma was bending into the holofield toward her Co-Magister, thrusting each word across the miles with her pointed finger.  "How in All The Fields Of Glory are you and me and our Nirvana-bound Lin-ci Win going to hold this lunatic show together if you keep switching ground?  How am I going to convince Lin-ci. . ."

"Floss, maybe nobody can hold it together.  Maybe we shouldn't try!" 

Silence filled the holowaves.  Yotoma stared at her friend.  "I take it all back," she said calmly.  "You are crazy."  She rested her back against the trampoline.  "Maybe I am, too."

Zude stared at her.

Yotoma chuckled.  "Zudie, you give me such soul-smarting grief." 

Zude relaxed.  "We're tired," she offered. "And we don't live in very ordinary times."

Yotoma finally spoke into the silence.  "Today's Monday.  I am due in Vancouver Thursday.  I'll come to Los Angeles that night.  I want to see Regina.  And you, child."

Zude nodded.  "Thanks, Flossie."

"And now I got to perish on this rope.  Two more climbs before I go to work."  Yotoma's eyes imprisoned Zude.  "It is all just like it is supposed to be," she said slowly.  "And when a soul passes, Zudie,
any soul
, always it is carried on the backs of a thousand cranes.  Always." 

Then she was gone.

"Yeah," Zude whispered, staring at the empty spot that a moment before had held Yotoma's image.  She pushed herself up, and deactivated the holo-unit.  Aimlessly she moved around the familiar furnishings.  She picked up magnopads and laid them down, she brushed off consoles and arranged sofa cushions.

With a sigh she activated her wall panels.  Statistics and graphics flowed in and out of the room.  She noted that bailiwicks still reported small salvos of vandalism and anti-social behavior.  No big revolts.  Just yelps of pain, sporadic bursts of impotence and grief.  Public forums and chat-chambers, gathertalks and vent meetings — all were busy, all were doing their job.  She wiped the screens and closed her eyes.  "Swallower," she whispered. 

A tiny light flickered in her mind. 
"Joy,"
it whispered back. 

"Joy?" Zude yelled. "Ha!"  She reached for the silver case that held her real cigarillos, then rethought the desire and explosively flung the case across the room.  It hit the taxidermed calico cat, knocking it from its perch to the floor.  She was instantly at the animal's side, swooping it up with apologetic murmurings. 

When Captain Edge escorted Bosca to the office's dissolving entranceway, they found a casually clad Magister, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, stroking an armful of very stiff cat.

"Dealing with my nurturing instincts," Zude explained, trying to smile in welcome.

"I see," the tall woman smiled back. 

In contrast to the dampened energy field that accompanied the departing Captain Edge, Bosca blazed like the noonday sun.  Zude allowed herself a bit of congratulation that she was able now to observe this phenomenon.

Bosca slipped off her cotton shoes and drew her feet onto the sofa beneath her long skirt.  Zude came and sat beside her.