Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Apocalypse

“Cloning may be a possibility,” I inserted, in an undertone.

“- a new body, I know you wouldn’t want to take over somebody else’s, so a new body, and then we pry you out of the sword, and, and -”

“I am taking,” the sword repeated, more firmly, “a vacation. I find I rather like it in here. It is surprisingly peaceful, being separated from one’s autonomic nervous system.”

“Not to mention adrenal hormones,” Shaa murmured. I hadn’t seen him edge up, but he had evidently included himself in the sword’s conversational range as well.

“But -” said Karlini. “But -” His arms were waving in front of him now, no longer in readiness for attack, but as though he was trying to figure out how one went about hugging a sword or throwing oneself at its feet. I was used to it by now, but of course the sword was flaming, too, albeit a bit less flamboyantly than when the Monoch personality had been the only active tenant, and was exerting its habitual torque on my wrist.

“Here,” I told Karlini. “The two of you work this out.” I thrust the sword - calling it Monoch didn’t seem either appropriate or accurate anymore - toward him, presenting the hilt for him to grasp. When he had done this, and had been flung to the ground on his side as the sword’s bucking-bronco heft typically tried to establish who was boss, I moved quickly back out of range.

Shaa, never to be one to ignore the actions of others when they smacked of prudence through foreknowledge, had retreated with me. “So,” he said. “What do you think?”

“About the Karlinis? I wouldn’t begin to guess. As far as I know I still have never been married.”

“Actually,” said Shaa, “while that matter is clearly of more than passing interest, I was primarily wondering about the state of the world outside.”

“Well,” I said. “For anyone fond of the old order, or of civic order in general I suppose, the situation is fairly apocalyptic. I wouldn’t venture to guess at casualty figures, and in any case it would have to be a guess since the Scapula’s pulse and the stuff that’s breeding as a result have pretty much demolished any hope of decent communications. It looks like most of the gods are gone, and most of the high-level magic users are gone, and things magical are just generally out of control, but a lot of that I imagine will die down over the next few days or weeks. Of course, there’s fallout - a bunch of potion discharges that seem to be raining sorcerously active byproducts , some really substantial explosions in the army weaponry stores, free phantasms and toxic specters wandering the streets - but the big one is what’s loose from the Karlini lab, of course.”

A general hubbub broke out at that. Before things degenerated into a morass of told-you-so’s, however, I raised my voice to try to override them all and keep them focussed. “Yes,” I hollered, “it looks like an out-and-out plague, but leave the recriminations for later, okay? There’s already an outbreak of transfiguration in Blind Park just downwind, folks bursting into flame or melting into goo, strange discharges -”

“Then why are you here talking?” shouted the former Lion. “Why aren’t you stopping this horror?”

“It’s like this,” I told them all. “There’s not much I can do. There’s not much anyone can do, things are just too out of hand, actuation paths are blitzed and energy levels are scrambled and frankly, most anything you’d try would have at least a good of chance of feeding the fire as snuffing it out, you see? As it happens, there are a few additional tricks I could try, but at this stage of the game, after everything that’s already gone on, I’m a little reluctant to take unilateral action.” Again, I thought. “So I thought I’d see if anyone in the group had any ideas on the subject first.”

“What sort of tricks are you discussing here?” Shaa asked.

“The magic cell-constituents Roni rediscovered were built with a suicide gene. They may not all still possess it - there’s been a good lot of evolution going on, so there’s no way of telling without pinning one of them down long enough to run it through a sequencer - and her reengineered free organisms that are making up the goo out there have likely had it bred out of them too. But setting loose the trigger might be worth a try. Of course, it would mean a lot of other casualties. Some folks express the magic genes more centrally than others.”

“I,” said Haddo, who I now saw had been lurking off in the shadows behind a pile of books. “And he,” Haddo added, pointing at Wroclaw.

“Quite likely,” I agreed. “Activating the suicide trigger could be tantamount to genocide. There are some other possibilities for things to do - there’s retroviruses out in the population that are inactive now but have their own trigger cofacters. They’d target the conversion cascade that powers the effectors. Might be safer, might take longer, might not work as well; no way to tell in advance. And there’s -”

The Great Karlini had regained his feet again by dint of plastering the sword against his chest with both arms entwined around it. I may have missed my guess, but I had a feeling whatever was left of Ronibet Karlini had not been telling him things to which he particularly wanted to listen. “I don’t want to hear any more about this,” he snapped in my direction. “As far as I’m concerned it’s the end of history. We won and that’s that.”

Shaa gazed after him as he wobbled away. “The Great one, in his way, just as Maximillian, in his way, has always been a creature of habit,” murmured Shaa.

“Now just a damn minute -” started Max.

“Creatures of their times,” Shaa continued, with an arch glare toward his associate, “to a much greater extent than either would acknowledge, or perhaps even realize.” He raised an eyebrow in my direction. “Such a new world order as confronts us now will demand adjustments many will not be able to meet.”

“Huh,” I said. “So are you telling me you, an old aristocrat, don’t want to step in and be Emperor?”

“Emperor is not a job I would have coveted at any stage,” Shaa said thoughtfully. “Now, with no central bureaucracy, not much in the way of living leadership, except possibly for the Emperor himself, no functional effectors, and the governing legitimacy rather much tattered, the office seems well on its way to marginalization, if it survives the decade. Is that why you brought it up?”

“No, not really. But describing the situation as a new world order may not be far wrong. Whatever we do or don’t do, things are never going to be the way they were, and there’s no telling what the world will end up with. The only thing that seems certain is death and devastation. If I don’t do a thing, that goo of Roni’s is gonna keep spreading and infecting folks and chewing on them and making more of itself. If we try to fight it by trying to shut down the system that still might happen, and even if it didn’t there’d be plenty of casualties anyway, plus the loss of a magic as a tool the way we now know it.”

“You do paint rather an egalitarian picture,” Shaa remarked, “if indeed the old hegemonic order is gone for good. In some ways magic won’t count for as much, in some ways it will likely count for more.”

“Through democratization?” said Phlinn Arol. “Gods and people and bacteria all placed on the same playing field together?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but also because any given magic user’s gonna be a lot less powerful with the network gone and the damage the Scapula did still rattling around. There’ll be more chance the stuff’ll backfire and blow your hand off. And with all these environmental toxic hazards roaming around, leaving whatever they don’t kill transformed... Well, there’s gonna be a lot fewer folks around to talk about it.”