Secondhand Sorcery

The trail was cold. It had been cold by the time of their briefing on the 23rd, a week after the disaster. Then they had to get Dr. Gus out of the hospital, make travel arrangements, and actually get out of Thessaloniki after its airport had been totalled, just as hordes of international bigwigs and aid society volunteers were pouring in and anxious locals and tourists were charging for the exits. In the end, they’d needed General Green to finagle them an Osprey ride from a carrier in the Aegean.

Now it was Saturday the 26th, the trail was positively iced over, and they were stuck in Budapest, waiting on word from six different guys Hamp knew from back in the day. At a moment’s notice from any contact they could bolt for the airport, and get practically anywhere on the EU’s eastern border within two hours. They weren’t holding their breath for a quick answer. In the meantime, Hamp had other questions on his mind.

“Look,” he said, “it’s not that I mind helping you out here. I don’t. I’m always ready to serve. But as long as we’ve got some downtime, I’d appreciate it if you brought me up to speed before we go any further.”

“Up to speed how, exactly?” Dr. Gus inquired. “I do not believe we have withheld any vital intelligence from you. We have all received the same briefings, have we not?”

They had a comfortable private hotel suite with a kitchen. It was just the four of them and a lot of mostly-empty takeout containers scattered across the table. No angelflies, since they were waiting on phone calls, but they were pretty damn sure nobody had bugged the room.

The Colonel still lowered his voice to say, “Defensively, I mean. You two are field operatives, and I assume the good doctor there knew all the tricks before you were born. I’m just the guy who makes the phone calls, but given recent events, would it kill you to teach me how to keep the damn freaks out of my head? We’re still not sure that goddamn Yunks is even accounted for.”

Dr. Gus kept his poker face. Keisha was pretty sure she did likewise. Ethan leaned forward and said, “The hell you talking about?”

“He’s asking to be taught Sovereignty Protocol,” Keisha clarified. She should have known this was coming. “It’s not an unreasonable thing to want.”

“Say what?” Ethan looked bewildered. “How in the hell is he going to do SP? How’s he even know SP is a thing, anyway?”

“Because I used it to defend myself against Marshall’s familiar in our first encounter,” she said, subconsciously willing him not to blurt out the wrong thing. “He hadn’t had the training, so he couldn’t.”

Ethan opened his mouth, ready to say something derisive. His dark eyes darted around the table, taking in the three faces arrayed against him. Miraculously, he said only, “Oh. So, uh, Keisha, why don’t you explain to the man why he’s not eligible for sovereignty training?” He might not totally understand what was going on yet, but the bastard was enjoying this.

Dr. Gus answered for her. “Unfortunately, Colonel Hampton, Sovereignty Protocol is itself dependent on a lengthy and complex series of other aptitudes, in which we have neither the time nor the ability to instruct you.”

Hamp sighed. “And I don’t suppose you can give me the quick version.”

The Doctor shook his head. “There is no quick version. Only trained paraphysical operatives can execute it properly. To teach you without that foundation would be worse than useless, it would be hazardous.” None of this was technically lying, Keisha supposed—though you’d have to interpret the words a very specific way.

“Hell, then, teach me the foundations,” Hamp said. “I’m ready to listen. You’re a teacher, aren’t you? Trained half the PPOs in the Numenate, from what Keisha tells me. I don’t care if I don’t learn enough to take on the world tomorrow; anything’s got to be better than being the one man in the fight who hasn’t even got a gun. I’ll take a dinky little holdout pistol if it’s all you can offer me.”

“Every man’s got the right to bear arms,” Ethan drawled, a shit-eating grin on his face. He’d put it together already, of course. For all his faults, he wasn’t stupid. Now he was going to have fun watching them try to squirm their way out of this.

“It is not as simple as you think, Colonel,” Dr. Gus temporized.

“There’s not a blessed thing you can teach me, for the next time? Really? Not even the most basic crap we give kids straight out of boot camp? I’ve met some damn stupid PPOs in my time, and we teach them!”

Keisha thought she spotted their chance. “If it were that easy, Hamp, we’d train the whole population in SP, and emissors would be useless. We could firebreak them out just by putting areas on alert. But we don’t. What does that tell you?”

“All right, that’s fair,” he grumbled. “I just wish they hadn’t taught me that useless mindfulness meditation shit instead; it hardly even slowed Yunks down.” He looked at Dr. Gus again. “I take it you’re being so vague because a lot of this is classified?”

“You could say that,” Ethan answered, still smiling. “The relevant information has to be compartmentalized for national security purposes. What a shame, and in a supposedly free society.” He looked at Keisha as he said it. Thankfully he was obnoxious enough normally for this to seem like more of the same.

“Uh-huh.” The Colonel’d had a couple of sessions of physical therapy since last week’s nightmare, but he still moved like a man several decades older. His hands trembled on the table. Possibly they always would. She hoped not. “If that’s a no-go, is there any way one of you could cover me, when and if a halo goes up?”

“I could put up my own halo,” Ethan offered. “Song’s always glad to have a little more help.”

Hamp didn’t even look Ethan’s way. “Doctor?” he said. “Is there any promise you can give me, that I won’t be left out in the cold alone next time?”

“You would hardly be alone, Colonel. I have told you, Yunks was an aberration, a freak. Her predatory effect is not at all typical of—“

“I don’t care about that,” Hamp said, a little louder than necessary. “Look, I’ve been patient. Haven’t I been patient? I let Chief Graham there do my old job for weeks, and I was fine, because I knew it needed doing. Enough is enough. Why won’t you tell me how I can keep from being anybody else’s puppet?”

“Was Yunks’s halo the first you’d ever personally experienced?” Keisha said.

“No, there’s been a couple over the years. Usually they trotted it out to show off, to try and spook me. I hated it every time. But why the hell should I have to put up with some bastard hijacking my brain, huh? Why should anybody ever have to submit to something like that? Is it wrong for me to expect some goddamn privacy in my own goddamn head, all of a sudden? You’re the experts, you tell me!”

“It’s just the new face of war, mon frère,” Ethan told him. “A man shouldn’t have to pick up a gun and fight just to live free, neither, but the time comes when he does. Your mistake was thinking you could depend on the state to preserve the illusion of your safety—“

“Ethan, shut up,” Keisha snapped. “You’re not helping. Hamp, I don’t think that’s necessarily a helpful way of thinking about it. Do you know what a familiar is, and how it’s made?”

“Does anybody really know what the blasted things are?” he growled. “I know people like him brew them up out of their heads somehow. They’re fantasies made real. Whatever you want, you can force it on the world.”

“That is a layman’s understanding,” Dr. Gus said. “Not entirely incorrect, but incomplete and misleading. A familiar or emissant is, in essence, an expression of what an early theorist termed der Wille zur Macht. That is to say, there exists a portion of your mind which is aware of the world as a series of sensations, captured like snapshots, moment to moment, and stitched together into a model it thinks of as reality. Do you follow me?”

Hamp gave him a wary nod.

“Then there is another part, which knows better, and is aware—though it does not dare express it—that the model of the first part is a mere artifice, and that the world as such is no more than a disjointed sequence of phenomena passing across our minds, apparently devoid of intrinsic meaning or any hope of permanence. And into this terrifying gap steps der Wille, to bridge it and make us whole by constructing a framework, a cage to hold reality captive by making it into truth. Truth is not reality, nor reality truth. Truth is but the story we tell, to assign the appearance of context to our fragmented perceptions.”

Hamp took another, very small serving of paprikash from the foil trays on the table. The spaetzle were already gone. “Sorry, now you’ve lost me.”

Doc could be very obtuse when he was in lecture mode. Keisha stepped in: “All the stuff that happens to us, happens for a lot of reasons, and a lot of them are random or unknown. We simplify things a lot, just out of habit, to make the truth understandable. That’s not exactly what he’s trying to say, but it’s close.”

“Close enough, I suppose,” Dr. Gus allowed. “I mean to say that we have known for some time that perception—as opposed to mere sensation—is a deliberate editorial act by the brain. The raw input which crosses our awareness is pruned and curated into what seems immediately relevant, then pruned again to form narratives, then bundles of narratives. Small events are grouped together into larger stories, bestowing our lives with dramatic arcs and at least the appearance of direction and purpose.”

“And you’re telling me an emissor is a package deal of the biggest and most overblown stories? I already figured that out.”

“But you erred in your reasoning. Let us approach the question differently, then. While I have served the Numenate, and its various ancestors, in many different capacities, the bulk of my career has been spent as what is called a ‘psychopomp.’ A psychopomp is effectively a midwife to emissants; he supervises the process, counseling the prospective emissor through the long, complex, and aggravatingly failure-prone protocols used to distill human desires at their most fundamental level into a weapon of war.

“The actual process is kept highly secret, for obvious reasons, but no emissor program I am aware of, by any country, has more than a five percent success rate. So-called primevals such as Myriad or Shum-Shum excepted; by abusively employing certain schizophrenics or autistics the rate may be boosted as high as ten or fifteen, although a much higher percentage of the failures will be drastic, and require the agent to be euthanized to prevent his uncontrollable botched familiar from running rampant. Current American protocols—“

“Current?” Hamp’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve been banned from making them for half a decade now, haven’t you?”

“Pardon me. The most recent protocols, then, have a terminal botch rate of less than one percent. Our failures are—were—typically more mundane; the agent never produces anything militarily useful, either because the familiar is incoherent and half-formed or because they cannot summon anything at all. A number are too traumatized by the process to continue.

“Even among those who succeed, the resulting familiar is not a ‘fantasy,’ it is not what the subject most desired. The soul has a more subtle business than that. A familiar is a distillation and focusing of the narrative framework through which the individual’s brain makes sense of the universe. That framework functions at the most fundamental and basic level of processing—which is how, when summoned, the emissant is able to subvert the minds of those around it so quickly. It is tunneling under our defenses, you see?”

Hamp thumped his fist on the table. “I’m sure this is all interesting to you, but it’s not telling me a damn thing I need to know, is it? What does this have to do with my right to have my own brain work the way I want it?”

Dr. Gus looked peeved. “What I am trying to tell you is that you need not resent familiars as some kind of wish fulfillment, as your domination by others. They are as ‘dominated’ as you. The lust for meaning which propels the whole process is indifferent to the higher-level concerns of the mind which hosts it, because it is a child lost in the woods, hunting for a way out. It is only a bit of vanity which makes us assume that our deepest selves are consistent with the superficial froth of personality.”

“I’m not buying it,” Hamp said. “You’re telling me it’s a coincidence that Mr. Don’t Tread On Me over there makes Tantrum Song?”

“Tantrum Song is the fortunate product of the most recent protocols, applied by a psychopomp with decades of experience—more than virtually any other in the industry. I was successful in cultivating a familiar more or less compatible with his … superego, to use the more popular term. But Tantrum Song is what you might call a ‘fluke.’ Even so, I believe you have the connection backwards; Ethan’s political preferences have grown markedly more extreme since he acquired the familiar. As usually happens.”

“Yeah, I figured the old man might have a point, seeing as he’s me and all,” Ethan affirmed. Now that Dr. Gus had successfully moved the conversation away from the danger zone, he looked less interested in it. He’d virtually memorized this spiel.

Keisha didn’t need to hear it again, either; she’d never enjoyed thinking about this stuff. She excused herself to go to the bathroom—Hamp and the Doc barely noticed—and hung out by the window when she came back, instead of returning to the table. Was there anything more tedious than men arguing over a technical subject?

She pulled out her phone when it buzzed, grateful for the distraction. She was less grateful when she saw what it was: You have a new message from Ty Washburne. What time was it over there? Well after midnight. There was only one kind of message Ty would send her at an hour like this. She opened it anyway, just to be sure. And she was right.

baby I hate to do this to you and I know we’ve been here before but I don’t think we can make this work I been trying honest I have but a man

She didn’t read any more. It was another story she’d heard plenty of times before. Ty was almost certainly drunk. Drunk, and feeling guilty, because he was sending the message from Selena’s apartment. There’d be another, better composed message in about twelve hours, apologizing for the first without walking any of it back.

The hell of it was, she couldn’t blame him. She’d last seen him for a few hours back in … November? Maybe early December? He had his career too, he knew how it was, but he was still a Marine, and even the Marines couldn’t take over your life like the Numenate. She imagined the recruiters didn’t tell you that. They led with the exciting stuff, let you find out for yourself that you would wind up as a highly decorated, well-paid thirty-two-year old who spent too little of her time at home to keep a cat, let alone a man.

She stuffed the phone back in her pocket, and looked out the window at downtown Budapest. It looked like a lot of other cities she’d seen before. Nice, polished, modern, with just enough old-world style to have character. You could see the Danube, too. It had been a long time since she’d bothered to see the sights anywhere she went. The touristy junk didn’t appeal anymore.

Instead she went out for coffee, even late at night, just to be around people. She usually brought a book, but seldom read it. She’d deleted all her social media accounts, or simply stopped using them. Too depressing, and she wasn’t allowed to share most of what she did. So she passed her time with stupid games, tapping at a screen like a rat pressing a lever, and waited for someone to talk to her. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they got a conversation going. Half of what she told them about herself was, by necessity, lies.

To her immense displeasure, Ethan joined her. “There’s a lot more to you than I thought, isn’t there?”

She looked back at the table, where Dr. Gus was trying to convince Hamp by throwing words like chthonic and apollonian around. Inside baseball stuff. When she was sure they weren’t paying her any mind, she muttered, “Piss off, Ethan.”

“No need for that,” he cajoled. “You can’t deny this is all very fascinating. I’m not going to ask for all the details. Just tell me one thing: what do you see, when you do SP? What’s your image?”

“A magnolia,” she told him, though she wasn’t sure why. He didn’t need to know.

“Well. Isn’t that ladylike. Very southern, too. I like it.”

“I don’t care what you like, Ethan. You know that.” She pulled up the magnolia again, for the comfort of it. Grandmama’s magnolia. But it wasn’t very comforting anymore. She was glad that Nadia was—probably—still alive, honored to be doing some good in the world with her life. It was just … starting to feel like a burden, was all. Like there wasn’t much of a life left to do good with. Only work. Maybe she would feel better in the morning.

“Your secret’s safe with me, you know that. I can keep my mouth shut, when I really need to.”

“You just choose not to, at the moment. Right. Why did you get involved with all this, Ethan?” And how lonely was she feeling, that she asked him of all people?

“You know the answer to that, ma chérie. I’ve always been the kind of man who believes in America. Song only helped me clarify my thinking, a little.”

“Mm-hmm. You know why I’m here? Because I switched from clarinet to oboe.”

“Say what?”

“That’s what they told me. I joined the Marines to be a plain old grunt like my daddy. They transferred me to VRIL training because I did band in middle and high school, and I switched halfway through from clarinet to oboe. I was really only bored with clarinet, and oboes sound nicer. But the two instruments have different notation, plus oboe embouchure’s a plain bitch to get right, so they took it as a sign of my ‘versatility, dedication, and drive.’ That was enough to get me in ahead of the other candidates, even though I didn’t so much as apply.”

Ethan snorted. “Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children. And now you’re one of the famous ‘halftime gunners,’ huh? And even a little bit more than that …”

“Shut up, Ethan,” she told him reflexively, whipping her head around to check on the table. At almost the same moment, her phone buzzed again. She pulled it back out, hoping it wasn’t more from Ty. But then Hamp and Ethan’s phones went off too.

Nobody said anything; they just read. And read, and read, as more messages came in, and their phones kept buzzing. A few videos popped up too, but Keisha didn’t bother to play them. This didn’t make sense, none of it did—

“May I ask what is the matter?” Dr. Gus spoke up. His phone was mercifully dead; he’d only joined the modern age under duress a few years back, and never remembered to charge it.

By way of an answer, Ethan picked up the remote and turned on the TV, flipping through channels until he got news. It was all in Hungarian, but the images spoke for themselves. Scenes from another city, someplace far away—she spotted minarets in the background of one shot. It was getting towards evening there, too, but you could still see the clouds of smoke against the sky from all the burning buildings. There were a lot of them. The camera cut away to a woman-on-the-street interview, an unfamiliar language uselessly subtitled in Hungarian again. Then to another shot, a trio of people clustered together this time.

“Ankara,” Dr. Gus said, peering at a caption on the screen. “They are feeling vengeful, I see. And … are those people covered in glass?”