The Magister (Earthkeep) (33 page)

"'The most precious gift of all,' you said to the world when you cut the ribbon, 'is freedom.'  For those of us like me, who are bodying, freedom is our fundamental desire, even though at times we may set it aside in order to build a companionship.  Freedom is more important than comfort, more important than respect or love, more important than safety, even more important than food or drink.  Freedom." 

The vicuña lingered only a moment in her goodbyes.  Then in an instant she was gone, bounding upward toward the plateau.

* * * * * * * *

To Zude's delight, Regina ate a hearty camp meal.  When they cuddled together by a balata tree, they listened to the sounds of a living forest that human ears had not heard for seven decades.  It was a night of wonder, and of gratitude.

Just after the next dawn, they made their way to the banks of the Great Marañón, where a Stewardry cushcar awaited them.

13 – EXCERPT FROM THE MEMOIRS OF MAGISTER LIN-CI WIN – [2089 C.E.]

If you cannot fly into the arms of God, run.

If you cannot run into the arms of God, walk.

If you cannot walk into the arms of God, sit and attend.

Her arms will find you. 

Vade Mecum For The Journey

Within a year of the Kanshoubu's dissolution, Lin-ci Win resigned her post as Steward of The Asia-China-Insula Tri-Satrapy and became Citizen Win.  She made a gracious and loving farewell speech over global flatcast, announced the release of her
Memoirs
and disappeared with several members of her household before dawn of the following day.  The most popular part of her
Memoirs
, in both its written form and its subsequent fullsense dramatizations, was the following account of her decision to support the Kanshoubu's abolition.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

In retrospect, it is clear that the coordinated eruption of the three bailiwicks, each in a separate tri-satrapy, was a watershed event marking Little Blue's radical global change.  The uprisings did not, of course, cause the changes, but — in the manner of the West's best tragic tradition — they occasioned our discovery of the vast changes that were afoot, even the dying of the children.

My own destiny began its most torturous unfolding some months later, when Vice-Magister Khtum Veng Sanh, so long my friend and comrade, left her post.  Without her at my side the world was both short of comfort and less stable.  With the subsequent defection of two regiments of Asian Amahs, my days deteriorated into dramas of increasingly bad fortune; my nights found me tossing and turning in my bed — behavior that could better be called bouncing and flinging, for it involved straps and pulleys and lifts that I could manipulate with my arms so that the position of the lower half of my body could be altered.

All I could see around me was the demise of the Amahrery, and the global rise of a reinvigorated violence; I watched our decades of progress in understanding human motivation retreat into oblivion.The dying of the children seemed only the proper consequence of a world too evil to sustain life, a world in which an age-old bitter cycle of violence reasserted itself with redoubled force: parents cursing and beating upon their children who then cursed and beat upon their children – and on and on, the legacy passing down to eternity. 

What could save us now, I asked, from that dread cycle?  In vain I thought and wrote and analyzed.  With every failure of the faculty of intelligence, I drew further from the outside world and closer to the secrets of my heart. 

It was there that I found him.  He lurked in the shadows of cognition, and he fouled the purest corners of my soul with his venom: Yeh Su T'ung, who a quarter of a century before had put the paralyzing bullet at the base of my spine.  There he was, the culprit, the villain on whose shoulders the blame belonged!  By rehearsing his single act of terror I could charge him with all the evils that now assaulted the Amahrery, the Kanshoubu, and the tottering globe.  

That fool had robbed me of my mobility, my desire, my physical ease.  He had tinkered with Fate, bringing to her knees one who was touched by Heaven for her role as peacemaker.  He had destroyed the fulfillment of a destiny I had acknowledged from my childhood: the leadership of a world of justice dispensed by the only rightful peacemakers, the women.  Had I my full physical faculties, I could stem the tide of this present disorder . . .if only he had never fired his weapon!

Crazed reasoning.  Yet the only thinking that afforded me an ounce of satisfaction.  So crazed that on one dark night in the silence of my rooms, I carved Su T'ung's full-sized figure from balsawood, dressing it in greasy rags like those he had worn that night.  I painted in his black eyes, his leer, his insolence, and I ruthlessly imprisoned him with the technologies of the Craft.  I laughed as he writhed in my punishment of his act, ridiculing myself for the decades I had spent laying roses of forgiveness across his path.

Su T'ung suffered that night for more than his crippling of my body.  My revenge, I discovered, had been eons in the making; the cycle of violence overflowed the present to reach back in time.  In my mind I saw the parade of history, the catalogue of atrocities and massacres, the worldwide epics of slaughter.  They did not come as events happening to others, not as pictures on a distant screen, but as my own lives, in bodies I had occupied over millennia, over kalpas and yugas: the countless generations of emerging into flesh and departing, again and again, avenging in one lifetime the torment of the lifetime gone before, only to suffer retribution for that vengeance in the life to come.  In the ongoing replay of vengeance I had only two alternatives, one role or the other, either the ravaging warrior or the plundered, the slayer or the slain, the rapist or the defiled.  If today I were victor in Burma, I would tomorrow be victim in Rome.

And I discovered a motive much deeper than revenge, for I touched in these visions — at least those in which I was perpetrator rather than victim — the elation that accompanied cruelty and killing.  The anticipation of rapture seductively drew me toward every destructive act.  I played the rapacious, pillaging tribesman to perfection, surrounding him in ever more subtly acceptable accommodations, garbing him in the armor of protector and defender, transforming him into the hero or savior who wore the trappings of righteousness.  But whether villain or champion, footsoldier or emperor, I harbored in every case the thirst for blood.  I loved its salt and its succor. 

Revenge, I decided, was only a flimsy excuse for the exhilaration of my rage and uncompromising desire.  What truly drove me was the love of violence; for that prize I ruthlessly protected the cycle of vengeance.  In my present existence, ironically enough, I could hope to experience my shrouded exhilaration only by being an Amah, by being a part of the control of violence.

Then Adverb and Lutu proposed to me the abolition of the Kanshoubu.

I refused their proposal, and I descended into an indescribable despair.  In those weeks before the meeting of the Heart, Adjana, my long-love, held me when I could allow it, sang to me when I could hear her, and fed me when I would eat, but we no longer laughed or played or loved together.  I withdrew from friends, from the chosen familyship of our household.  Now as never before, Adjana and my aides — Dani, May, Hu Wei Chu — were my caretakers, those who stood by with open hands to soothe me in my deliriums, to clear away the wreckage of my howling rages.  In all the world, only these four women might be able to describe my frail mental state or the wild visions of bloodlust that nightly overtook me.

I slept fitfully if at all and rose to every day exhausted, able to function only by becoming an automaton and by delegating increasing responsibilities to my Vice-Magisters.  In particular, I refused audience to anyone wishing to discuss the abolition of the Kanshoubu or my silence on that matter.  The affairs of the tri-satrapy lurched forward.

Then, in yet another dream, Confucius himself came to me: The only male in all of recorded time whose thinking I had ever respected, whose doctrine I valued enough to take as my creed, probably the single most influential person of Chinese birth in all of human history. 

He sat in formal pose, an old man plucking a sanxian, there in a softly lit corner of my room.  He was garbed as it is said he always was, in his girdle and high court dress, his big sleeves dangling.  As he played, he sang of the spear, the bow, the hunt, and of the wild boar finally taken by brave men and dogs. 

He ended the song with a flourish and looked at me with earnest eyes.  "You must not let them do it, my daughter," he said.  "You must not let them destroy the Kanshou."

"The Kanshou are lovers of violence, Master," I replied.  "We pretend to protect the innocent and punish the violator, but we are the true sadists, exhilarated by the drama of conquest, and addicted without hope of release to the intoxication that chaperones our cruelty."

"Your sadism is a lie," he said.  "Your exhilaration is false.  The True Way is hidden beneath both."  He struck an intricate chord on the sanxian. 

"With respect, Master!"  I spat.  "It is not my cruelty which is false!  What is false is your hope of governing by the sheer force of moral example!  The Kanshoubu has been committed from its inception to being that example, but it has failed because it, too, is corrupt!  It, too, loves violence!"

"You are impatient, my daughter," Confucius smiled.  "I have said that if rulers were virtuous for one hundred years, then crime would be negligible.  The Kanshoubu has lived barely half that long!  It has not been given its chance.  Let it live another fifty years, my daughter, and you will see.  The Kanshoubu is wind; the people are grass."

Before I could speak, he continued.  "You believe that you love violence.  But what you truly love is Order.  Great Ones must teach lesser ones the way.  You are a Great One, my daughter.  This is your exhilaration."

No!  His words intensified my grim and relentless despair. 

"Then, Master," I said, "my Greatness rests upon the smallness of others.  My Order depends upon their waywardness."  What seemed a final darkness closed around me.  "And, you, my Great Teacher, have required the violence of millions upon which to rest the millennia of your fame.  Like the Cross-Broken One of the West, your salvation depends on others' sin.  Behind your exhortations of Beneficent Order, you are as great a lover of violence as I!"

He sat a moment, his hands hidden in his sleeves.  Then without another word to me, he took up his instrument and resumed his formal pose.  He sang of the spear, the bow, the hunt, and of the wild boar finally taken by brave men and dogs. 

I watched the vision fade, heard the sanxian sounds recede into silence.

If in the weeks after my encounter with Adverb and Lutu I had doubted my sanity and my worth to humankind, in the days after my meeting with the Master I was a madwoman drowning in self-loathing.  In consigning my Great Teacher to the flames of eternal vengeance, I had consumed the last remnants of my own soul.  I grew terrified, not just of the demons who lurked behind my eyes, but of the outer world as well, where I saw malice in every glance.  I heaved my body behind barriers.  I hid in corners and flinched at sharp sounds.  My every breath became a retreat from life.

Two days before the Heart was to meet, I slipped into an oblivion that even with use of the Full Disciplines I still cannot recall. I am told that I refused food, that my eyes stared steadily without sleep or blinking, that only Adjana could force my lips apart for the taking of liquids.  The best healers in Guangdong Province, and some from far beyond it, were unable to bring me to any brink of communication.

In desperation my loved ones transported me to the Mother's Healing Springs on New Zealand's North Island, there to immerse my rigid body in waters that had often been a balm to me.  They tell me that, when they placed me in the pool, I broke my trance for the first time, wailing for the Mother of Heaven to give me a vision; I ate ravenously, then closed my eyes, and slept without waking for three more days. 

Toward the end of that long sleep, I was visited in my dreams by two smiling Kanshou whom I knew well: Femmedarme Magister Flossie Yotoma Lutu and Vigilante Vice-Magister Winifred W. Glee.  They moved like clouds around my aching heart.  Why these two, I do not know, or why they should bring with them, of all things, affectionate wild turkeys, flights of butterflies, dancing swordfish and slick black cats.  I only know that, with the vision of those animals, I lifted my eyes for the first time in weeks and asked for life again.

My loved ones rejoiced.  They fed me, cleaned me and immersed me again in the sulfur springs, for though I could not speak, it was clear that some awful danger had passed and that I actively craved those easing waters. 

There I was joined by Jezebel Stronglaces, an adept of profound talents and intelligences.  We Sat Hearkening to the Fundaments Of The Craft, and within those hallowed pools this patient Witch heard what I had heard, saw what I had seen.  I felt fully known.  She suggested to me that the age-old paradigm can be broken, that there is a dwelling place where I am neither victim nor perpetrator, that the twins of Violence and Order are our own best illusions, and that violence itself is in the eyes of its beholders.    

Jezebel Stronglaces did not know the extent or the importance of her gifts to me.  She left me floating under a starlit sky, watching my useless legs as they stirred with the occasional pressures of the pungent waters.

The snort that startled me came from my own throat.  It was rough and guttural, like a coarse snore, but it carried with it the sure knowledge of where the Quick One masqueraded.  I laid my snout into the deepest thickness of the brush and drew it aside with my tusk.  There she was, no longer darting but frozen against the bronze grass, lost in it except for that fat stomach bellowing out and in. 

We Ratified The Devour. 

"You beauty," I sent to her, "you are my life!"  I snatched her, teeth sinking into her back and her fleshy underbelly.