Margaret St. Clair - The Best of Margaret St. Clair

Nothing happened. She cleared her throat and began again, a couple of notes lower. “Alameda, Alpine, Amador, Butte,” There was a faint click. “Calaveras, Colusa, Contra Costa, Del Norte, Fresno—”

The door swung wide. Mazda’s enumeration of the counties of California had worked. She took the Reverend by the hand and led him through the opening. “Stanislaus, Sutter, Tulare, Tuolmne, Ventura, Yuba, Yolo,” she said. The door closed.

It was much darker inside the substation than it had been outside on the white desert, and the air was filled with a high humming that sounded, and actually was, exceedingly dangerous. Mazda put her arm around Clem’s shoulders. “Don’t move, baby,” she said pleadingly. “Don’t touch anything. Stay close to Mazda and be quiet.”

The Reverend coughed. “Certainly, my dear,” he said in quite a normal voice, “but would you mind telling me where we are? And what has been happening?”

Mazda went as limp as if she had been skoshed on the head. She clung to him and babbled with relief, while the Reverend stroked her soothingly on the hair and tried to make sense out of her babbling.

“Yes, my dear,” he said when she had finally finished, “but are you sure you aren’t exaggerating a little? After all, we aren’t much worse off than we were in the cabin.”

Mazda drew away from him slightly. “Oh, sure, everything’s fine,” she said with a touch of bitterness. “We’re in a place where if we move fast we’ll be electrocuted, the copter is down in the desert with a busted propeller, we haven’t anything to eat or drink, and Joe and I have killed so many ravens that when the Company does catch me they’ll do something special to make me pay for it. Outside of a few little bitty details like that, everything is real real george.”

The Reverend had not listened with much attention. Now he said, “Do you hear a noise outside?”

“What sort of a noise?”

“A sort of whoosh.”

Mazda drew in her breath. “Shin up to the window and look out,” she ordered. “Look out especially for birds.”

He was at the high, narrow window only an instant before he let himself down. “There was only one raven,” he reported, “but there were a number of birds like hawks, with short wings. There seemed to be humps on their backs.”

Even in the poor light of the substation Mazda visibly turned green. “Goshawks!” she gasped. She staggered against the wall. Then she began taking off her clothes.

Dress, slip, panties went on the floor. She stood on one foot and removed her sandals alternately. She began going through her hair and pulling out bobby pins. She took off her blast bracelet and added it to the heap.

“What are you doing that for?” the Reverend inquired. It seemed to him a singularly ill-chosen time for sex.

“I’m trying to set up a counter-charm, and I have to be naked to do it.” Her voice was wobbling badly. “Those birds—those birds are goshawks. I’ve never known the Company to send them out but once before. Those lumps on their backs are portable No us projectors. They’re trying to teleport us.”

“Teleport us? Where to?”

“To… to the Company’s cellars. Where… they attend to people who believe in public power. They… oh… I can’t talk about it, Clem.”

She crouched down at his feet and picked up a bobby pin. “Don’t move,” she said without looking up. “Try not to think about anything.”

She began to scratch a diagram around him on the floor with a pin. He coughed. “Don’t cough,” she cautioned him. “It might be better to hold your breath.”

The Reverend’s lungs were aching before she got the diagram done. She eyed it a moment and then spat care fully at four points within the hexagram. A faint bluish glow sprang up along the line she had traced on the floor.

Mazda rose to her feet. “It’ll hold them for a few minutes,” she said. “After that…”

The Reverend raised his eyes to the rafters. “I’m going to pray,” he announced. He filled his lungs.

“O Lord,” he boomed powerfully, “we beg thy blessing to preserve me and Mazda from the power of the ravens. We beg thy blessing to help us stay here and not be transported to the P&G’s cellars. Bless us, O Lord. Preserve us. And help us to make thine old-fashioned Christmas a living reality. Amen, O Lord. Amen!”

Mazda, too, was praying. Hands clasped over her diaphragm, head bowed, lips moving silently, she besought her bright divinity. “Mithras, lord of the morning, slayer of the bull of darkness, preserve my love and me. Mithras, lord of the morning, slayer of the bull of darkness, preserve my love and me. Mithras, the counter charm on the floor is fading. Preserve us! Mithras… Mithras, Savior, Lord!”

Prayer is a force. So is magic. So is the energy from Nous projectors. These varying forces met and collided in the air.

The collision made a sort of vortex, a small but uncomfortable knot in the vast, conscious field potential that is the Infinite part of Nous. There was momentarily an intense, horrible sense of pressure and tension in the very air. The substation hummed ominously. Then, with a burst of energy that blew out every generator from Tacoma to San Diego, the roof came off. All along the Pacific slope, and as far inland as Provo, Utah, it was as dark a Christmas as even the Reverend would have wished.

There was a pause. The noise of breaking timbers died away. The Reverend Adelburg and Mazda were looking upward frozenly, mouths open, necks outstretched. Then a gigantic hand reached in through the hole in the roof. A gigantic voice, even bigger than the hand, said in enormous and somehow Oxonian accents, “Very well. Take your old-fashioned Christmas, then.”

It was just before sunrise on December 21st. The Christians, who would be strangled at dawn the next day and then burned in honor of the solstice, were gibbering away in their wicker cages. There were three cages full of them. Great progress was being made in stamping out the new heresy. The Christians would make a fine bright blaze.

The druid looked up at the cages, which were hanging from the boughs of three enormous oak trees, and nodded with satisfaction. His consort, Mahurzda, would find it a hard job strangling so many people. He’d have to help her. It would be a pleasant task.

Once more he nodded. He tested the edge of the sickle he was carrying. Then the druid who had been—would be—would have been—the Reverend Clem Adelburg hoisted up his long white robe and clambered up into the nearest of the oak trees to cut the sacred mistletoe.

“Lady satellite, let me tell how love was first born in me. After the first meeting with myself, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. The arrow of love had pierced me.

“My multiple charms enthralled me. How could I be so coldhearted? Didn’t I know how beautiful I was? Why didn’t I come back? Oh, why didn’t I come back?—But all I could see was the back of my own head.”

Thus Jake, in a rough paraphrase of Theocritus. “Jake” is what I call the worldwide (it’s so big that relativistic effects begin to appear toward its periphery)—the worldwide computer in which I am, as far as I can tell, the sole surviving independent personality. The others, billions and billions of them, have got thinner and thinner with the passage of time, until they dropped out of Jake’s banks entirely, or have blurred and melted together like marshmallows being stirred over a fire. But I’m one of the latest comers and, I suppose, younger than most. Anyhow, I can’t seem to find anyone else.

I wish I knew how long I’ve been here. A very long time, I think—long enough for me to get utterly fed up with making “thought flowers” and the rest of the gamut of “thought pleasures” that Jake afforded when I first came. Long enough for Jake to pass imperceptibly from being a vast storage-retrieval-potentiating installation to being a messy monster devoted to a strangely metaphysical passion for itself. A very long time.