___________________________________ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ **** ** ** ** ** The **** THERWORLD CHAPTER 21 (> The Highest Wind <) Copyright 1992 by Bryce Koike All Rights Reserved ___________________________________ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Any comments, criticisms, opinions, etc, are welcome. I can be reached on Internet as: bkoike@sdcc13.ucsd.edu -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- "Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again, Because a vision softly creeping, Left its seed while I was sleeping, And the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains Within the sound of silence ... `Fools' said I, `You do not know Silence like a cancer grows. Hear my words that I might teach you, Take my arms that I might reach you.' But my words like silent raindrops fell, And echoed In the wells of silence" ("The Sound of Silence," Simon and Garfunkle) -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- On Teachings The Elementalist Holy Writ says this: One. Deface the Earth and your children will be repaid a thousand times in agony. Two. Ignore the Mother and her milk will turn sour in your mouth. Three. Take her gifts with thankfulness and return them unto her when you are done with them. Disrespect her and there will be none left for you in the end. Four. Defend her from her enemies or lose her forever. Five. Love is worthless if not tempered with respect. Love your Mother as well as you would your children -- and respect her else all your love will wither to nothing. On the afterlife, the Elementalist Holy Writ says but this: Death. In passing, we all return to that which we were made from and begin the cycle again. This is how all life has gone since the beginning of all things. The Earth was made and one day it will be unmade, for she too is alive. Ruid Prothos, a self-named Druid of the High Order, often quoted the Elementalist Holy Writ though he himself was not a member. This is a passage which lied above his grave before the destruction of Mathieson Colony by the Dark: Home. All have a place which they might call home. They will return to it after a weary day and lay their head upon their pillow and be encased in safety. Do not neglect the house which was made for all people, for in the end, it will cradle you unto death. Though the Elementalist Holy Writ has been dismissed as any true religion, its message is clear. Its roots can be traced to the ecological paranoia which was shortly followed by the Environmental Evacuation Acts. Its lessons have never been forgotten even though the religion itself has long since passed the way to obscurity. The Earth is our last, and final home. Lose it and we lose everything. The Legions have a saying that goes like this: "Strive, for life is meaningless without it." Apathy is destruction. Only those who have cried, bled, and sweated for what they love truly know the meaning of life. All other paths lead to failure. Humanity nearly learned this too late. It is thankful they were given the chance to prove themselves in the end. I, the chronicler of the Seventeenth Legion, one of the last remaining, leave this to note for those who may read of us: Take nothing for granted. Marvel at the fact that the sun rises in the morning and sets at night. Hold your loved ones tight to your breast for tomorrow this can all be stripped from you. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Date: September 30, 1992 Location: Interstate 5, south of Fresno, Southern California Otherworld Time: 11:31 am Bates popped a tape into the cassette deck of their car. It was a fairly new station wagon. By Xavier's description, it was more a land barge than a vehicle. It certainly drove like a boat. Still, with under a hundred active vehicles on the California roads, handling wasn't much of a worry. "Rock," snorted Xavier. He looked out the window with distaste, but Bates could tell that Xavier was just teasing. "You don't like U2?" Bates asked. Xavier rolled his eyes. "Oh come on, Bates. Are you trying to tell me that there's something redeeming about them?" "Damn good music." "Uh huh." "What? You like classical? Wagner? Beethoven?" "Yeah, yeah I do." "Shit. Biker who likes classical music. You want to talk anachronisms?" Tova grinned. They'd been going at it since nightfall. Male bonding, as they called it. They'd decided to stop the trip early the day before and spent much of the day foraging through stores and at the beach, watching the waves roll toward the shore, watching them break apart into their components. "Bates," she said suddenly, "you never told us what you do for a living." She instantly knew that she had asked the wrong question. Bates' brow furrowed and his eyes turned dark. It was a dangerous sort of darkness and Tova instantly knew that Bates was no stranger to murder. Not death or killing, but murder. She could see the hunt in his eyes and it turned her heart to sorrow for him. "I was a hunter," he said at last, oblivious to Xavier's concerned expression. "I hunted vampires." "Are you serious?" Xavier asked. "I mean, you really serious about that?" "I told you that a vampire sent me here." "Yeah, but I didn't think you were telling the truth." Bates shook his head. The darkness seemed to be turning in on him. "A vampire killed my father when I was younger," he explained. "I made a vow to kill every last one of them." "And did you?" "Hardly. The vampire who sent me here, a woman, told me that I'd just been lucky. Luck, shit. That if I'd fought a real vampire, I would have been killed. She was so damn powerful . . . I don't know. I don't know if I was right or not." "But vampires are evil, Bates. Of course you were right." "I don't know, Xavier. I don't know." Murder is murder, right? "Maybe I was. But I can't help thinking that they didn't have much choice about becoming vampires, you know? Vampires need blood. The way the woman put it, there were evil vampires just like there were good vampires. I don't know. I don't know much of anything anymore." Tova nodded. "That is the best point to start." Bates glanced at her. "What?" "Start where your ignorance begins," she replied seriously. Crossing her arms, she looked out of the window. Nothing but dust and desert. Years of farming had made the land useless for much else. And without the constant irrigation that kept the land unnaturally alive, things were reverting back to their natural order. She couldn't help but sense righteousness about it. No person was meant to twist a world beyond what it could be. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Date: September 30, 1992 Location: Northern California, Otherworld Time: 3:28 pm They had emerged from supposed wilderness into a parking lot the day before. Norwell surprised her by producing a set of keys which matched with a pickup truck. "Damn, they were right," he said increduously. "Thing's right where I had left it." The spent much of what remained to the day driving inland. There was a mountain, it seemed, which according to Norwell, "has my name on it." Angela stood precariously on the edge of a cliff and looked down toward the valley. Though fatigue begged her to lie down and rest, she felt a need for some childish folly. "Look!" she cried. "I'm on top of the world!" Her voice carried and rebounded back and forth until it died on the winds. Norwell chuckled as he snacked. Now that he understood the girl, he was comfortable. Her strangeness was something that he could understand. The Psionics Research Center had encountered more bizarre specimens than she. He frowned on the term "specimen." It dehumanized them. And yet, had it not been for the PRC, many of those children would have spent their lives as invalids or worse, crippled by abilities that none knew they had. Before the PRC they would have been called autistic, retarded, schizophrenic, or worse. With the help of the PRC they were given some semblence of freedom and gave America a chance to learn more about the human mind. And a chance to exploit poor helpless children. Norwell shuddered. What they had done . . . Francis had called it science and he had followed blindly. Angela peered into his face from under a foot away. "A shadow crossed your soul," she said, "and everything turned to ashes." Astonishment crossed Norwell and he sat speechless, captivated by her incredibly clear eyes. They seemed so deep. She flopped down beside him. "Sometimes I don't know if I should be afraid of you or not," she said. "There's a hint of evil in you that I don't really like at all." "You don't trust me, do you?" asked Norwell. Angela shrugged. "Oh, I trust you well enough. You'll not kill me, I think. After all, you ARE a good guy. But I think there's a very unhappy man inside of you that does some very mean things. I wouldn't want to be around when he comes out." My god, she knows, Norwell thought. She's far too mature for her age. What happened to her? She sighed. "But I'm glad the good Roger is here now. I think that when the mean Roger comes, though, I'll be far, far away." Roger chuckled weakly. "Don't worry, Angela, the mean old Roger isn't coming out anytime soon." She looked at him with pity. "The good Roger thinks that he rules over the whole, but he's wrong. The mean Roger is there waiting to come out and he'll come out where the good Roger is weakest. You should have dealt with the mean Roger when you had the chance. Now he's all over your insides." "You make him sound like a cancer." "Don't you understand anything?" she said. "He IS a cancer. But it's not a cancer you can cut out and throw away. It's a cancer you've got to fight against piece by piece. If you just wall it off inside you, the cancer will just get bigger and stronger. It'll get bigger and bigger until you can't hold it in anymore and when you're weak it'll spill out of you and make you all mean." Norwell felt like his mind was grasping blindly for something. Her depth was so far beyond him. Then he realized that he was jealous of her. He realized that his jealousy stemmed from what made her different, from what allowed her to see things that no normal human being could see. "What should I do to stop the mean Roger, then?" he asked. He tried to sound playful, but everything sounded like doom. She shook her head. "You've got him all hidden, I can't tell. You know him best, Roger, because the mean Roger is you. You have to find out why he wants to hurt people and deal with it. If you can't deal with it, he'll eat you up just like cancer." Eat me up, thought Norwell. I'm eating me up. He was reminded of the ouroboros which bit its own tail. What would he do when his mouth met itself on the other side? "You'd die," answered Angela. She stood up and walked stiffly away. She'd read his mind as clear as day. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Fresno was mostly a ghost town. For good reason -- the Eternals were said to be moving south and were known to murder a human or two simply out of spite if not for joy. Still, there were a few people here and there. "Gassers left about two months back," said Sally Jordan. Her husband, Sung Kim, was cleaning out a rifle he had taken from a sporting goods store when the first attacks had begun. They'd been on a simple family outing when a storm had hit them and deposited them in Otherworld. "Not much use for gas out here," Kim explained. "Lots of stations around still with lots of fuel in them. Feel free and use any of them. Where you headed exactly, anyway?" Xavier chewed his lower lip. Gassers were excellent sources of information. Kim and Jordan were almost hermits by comparison. They knew less about the threat than Bates. And they'd been hearing strange things in Southern California about the people up north. About cults . . . "Just north," Bates replied blandly. "Taking a look around, you know?" Kim nodded. "Yeah. You seen the battle site yet?" "Battle site?" "Yeah, where the kid blew up the craggies. Big monument there and everything." Xavier looked up. Craggies meant Eternals, he figured. It was good he was here; he could pick up some of the new slang. Kim and Jordan seemed normal, they were just too secluded. Still, it couldn't pay to be too friendly. "Never been there. Maybe we'll visit, though. Thanks anyway." "No problem," Sally said. "If you just head up the street a bit there's a Shell station that's got gas in it. In fact, it should be all set up for you. The Gassers pumped a little out for their vehicles and left a setup behind for people to use." One of the great benefits of the Otherworld society -- people who were willing to work for each other for nothing save a little friendliness and hospitality. For Bates it was utterly alien. For Xavier, it was still a surprise at times. They left Kim and Jordan behind to their children and proceeded to refill the car's tank as well as the extra cans they had brought with them. Tova, once again, took to the cleaning of her weapon. She was jealously protective about it, but in a cool calm-minded manner. It served as a totem for her, if nothing else. Still, the barrel looked so small that it was more a pea-shooter than a true weapon. Bates didn't want to see the day when she learned how useless it really was. Xavier shook his head as they parted. One of the most incredibly evil races reduced to slang. If the forces in Los Angeles won, Sally Jordan and Sung Kim wouldn't be calling them anything for long. Tova glanced back and sighed. "Their daughter will face a great harshness," she said after a while. "Whose?" asked Bates. "Those people back there?" Tova nodded. "She's a born practitioner if ever there was one. She'll not face open arms when they discover her strangeness. They're not the type." "Pity to her," Bates snapped. His brow furrowed as Tova watched him sink deeper into himself. He nearly missed the Shell station and it took Xavier tugging on his sleeve to pull him out of his reverie. Tova decided that a brooding leader could very well pull down the moral of the team. She would simply have to find a solution to that one. The problem was finding the keys into that man's mind. She frowned. His was a puzzle indeed. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- "Ugh," muttered Angela at the sight of what Norwell was cooking for dinner. "I hate macaroni and cheese." Norwell raised an eyebrow. "You saying you don't want to eat? I know some bears who are plenty hungry tonight and would love a little macaroni and cheese." "No! I LIKE macaroni and cheese!" He piled out a generous portion and she took to it quickly, if not willingly. Admitted, after a day's heavy exercise, even nasty macaroni and cheese had a sort of attraction to it. She was getting to understand what it meant to be hungry enough to eat a horse. When dinner had finally been complete and the generally unpleasant job of cleaning dishes had finally been completed (a job which, unfortunately, Norwell had insisted Angela share with him), they sat around the small fire Norwell had built and looked at each other, remarking in their own minds on the other. "Angela," Norwell began, cautiously as he could, "I know it's not polite to ask a woman her age, but would you mind fulfilling my curiousity?" In all the seriousness and politeness that she could muster, Angela answered, "I'm a full sixteen years old. And it is really rude of you." On the movie screen and in literature, sixteen was old indeed. Twenty was the mark of a full-grown woman. In reality, though, as Norwell knew well, sixteen was still rather childlike with all the drawbacks of the process of physical maturation while twenty was only a handful of moments away. The girl before him seemed to shift from a little girl to an old wise woman at a moment's notice. He wondered how to treat her this time. "I'm thirty-two." Getting up there, really. He realized that he should have settled down a long time ago. His salary could have supported a family well, but instead he chose the loneliness of bachelorhood for no reason other than it seemed appropriate. "And yeah, that's old." She smiled at him. "Only twice my own age. You never told me what you do for a living. It's pretty obvious for me." "I'm . . . a researcher. Psionics research." The rift between them tore apart then and though she did not recoil from him physically, mentally he knew she could not possibly be further. And yet, he knew that it was necessary. To be truthful to her was absolutely necessary. Norwell knew that she could never trust him again. She shook her head sadly. "It's not that easy. God, the things you have done. They make you all ugly for it." My cancer, Norwell thought. And it's growing. "Is that why we're together?" he thought, projecting them as he would words. "For me to teach you what you're to know?" Angela reached forward across the fire and with an incredible firmness, ground her hand into the coals. Her eyes looked across the fire with coolness though the flames flickered in them. When she lifted her hand away, he knew that they would be unharmed. "How much do you think you can really teach me?" she asked. Matt had taught me all too much. "You've power enough," Norwell sighed. "But how much control do you have over that power? Not enough to keep out a psychic interloper, it seems. Not enough to keep the dreams of others from seeping into your own. That's what you need control for. It's the difference between a flamethrower and the doctor's scalpel." "I'll never distrust you, Norwell, though your past is awful," Angela said. "If you know the way, then show me. I'll follow in your hands." He nodded reluctantly. "The first step to control is understanding. Understanding has nothing to do with power. It has to do with yourself, who you are, and what you want to become. That will guide your use of your abilities in the future -- all of your abilities." He felt himself slipping into teacher mode and realized that she was pushing him gently in that direction. She still trusted him despite his betrayal? How many times more would he betray her in the future? "So then teach me to understand myself. This is my hand," she said, displaying it. "What do I not understand about it?" "Look at it more closely," Norwell said. "And look beyond the skin to see the muscles and bones working underneath it. Beyond them are cells. From there we have molecules, then atoms . . . this is an analogy to what you are. Layer after layer entering into greater depths of detail." "That is where I must go?" Nod. She sighed. "I'm in your hands, Norwell, man whose past is so black. You know the way. Show me." Angela was bitter of the two-faced life she lived. She knew that one day the child in her would die and that would be a day that she would long resent.