Part IV
(Read earlier chapters.)
Reuben was an utter disappointment.
I know that sounds unkind, and I’m sorry about that. But he was. When I got the call from Ix telling me that someone was coming, someone who had, as we say, “made it through the door,” I knew (or I should say I thought I knew) who that individual was. I had been following this certain someone’s exploits here at home and out in the wider configuration space for some time, and I knew that sooner or later our paths would cross. So just when it looks like everything is coming together, and he should be on his way, who shows up?
This…tough guy.
Right out of one of those movies with the car chases and the explosions. A man of action. A man of few words. Strong and silent.
A right git, in other words. And a bloody American to boot.
Does that seem unfair? Unduly harsh?
You have to understand that the man I was expecting is a genius. A brilliant writer. Someone who can see clear to the heart of the profoundest of mysteries — mysteries that have stolen a good part of my life, secrets that fill me with such simultaneous fear and awe that I am usually able to deal with them only through a veneer of cynicism.
I had so many expectations, so many hopes for what this meeting would be.
I suppose I built it all up unrealistically in my mind. As a result, my first impression of Reuben was clouded by my thwarted desire to meet the man I had expected to meet. So yes, I was disappointed — utterly, utterly disappointed — when I first met Reuben.
But I adjusted.
Over time, I grew to regard him with a casual dislike, which would eventually mellow to an indifferent tolerance.
Besides, when I finally did meet my would-be soul-mate, the man with all the answers — or at least what was supposed to be a version of him — he turned out to be a disappointment of catastrophic proportions. An absolute wanker, that one.
When I met him, I felt deep regret that I had ever applied that term “wanker” to any other human being. I should have saved it for him, written in fine script on a yellowed parchment.
So this Reuben comes stumbling into the shop one fine Tuesday afternoon, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt like a typical American tourist moron and dripping sweat by the litre. He wasn’t bad looking. Not exactly Denzel Washington or anything (if you see the point of the comparison), but tall and quite thin. He was a little haggard in the face, and had a big messy patch on his head. It looked like it was perhaps a burn. He made no pretense of looking at anything in the shop — which I suppose is to his credit, in a sense — but he came straight to the counter and said:
“Excuse me, do you speak English?”
Always the way to get immediately on my good side. Now why, pray tell, would I be able to speak English? But this is a business, and sweaty Americans are noted in these parts for their tendency to part with their money. Lots of it. So rather than telling him outright — or pointing out that this is, after all a former British colony and that I spent four years at university in Bristol — I decided to acquaint him with the fact that I most certainly do speak the language (better than he does, no doubt) by smiling and giving him my most courteous:
“How may I help you today, sir?”
He smiled back.
“Yes, well, I’d like to see Mr. Wong. Mr. Wong Yoke Yee.”
Brilliant.
Not that this was the first time this had ever happened. And at least he didn’t say “Mr. Yee.”
“May I ask why?”
He looked uncomfortable at this question. He turned and took a look around the shop to make sure no one else was there.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to discuss that directly with Mr. Wong. Please just tell him that Iskandar Ahmad sent me.”
So that was when it hit me. This was the bloke. Ix said somebody was coming, and I assumed I knew who it was. But I was wrong.
Ix.
How could you?
I needed a moment, but there was none to be had. And so it was right then that I decided that I hated Reuben Stone. As I mentioned, this was not to last, but it was good enough to set the tone for several things that happened next.
“So what can I do for you?” I asked.
He looked puzzled.
“No, you don’t understand. I need to speak with Mr. Wong.”
As icily as I could — which I have been assured is fairly icy — I said:
“We can dispense with the Mr. I’m Wong Yoke Yee. My friends call me Daphne.”
He looked appropriately startled and immediately apologetic.
“I’m an idiot,” he said, a point I would be slow to disagree with. He extended his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Daphne. I’m Reuben. Reuben Stone.”
“Mr. Stone,” I said, meeting his grasp with the briefest, coldest, deadest fish of a handshake I could manage. “Please call me Miss Wong.”
Git or no, it would be difficult for Reuben to miss my point. I said my friends call me Daphne. Dolt. Imbecile. American. He looked appropriately chastised.
Actually, for a moment he bore an uncanny resemblance to Modo — the beagle I had reared from a pup, whom I had put to sleep just a few weeks before. Old age. Modo would have the same look on his face whenever he tore up the flower garden or left a mess on the shop floor and I told him he was a bad dog. This resemblance may have softened me towards Reuben a bit. But only the tiniest bit.
“Ah, okay. Miss Wong. I don’t know if Iskandar told you I was coming?”
“He did.”
“And did he tell you that I’ve just been admitted to the…Congrigatio in Ars Magica Magnae.”
His use of the proper Latin name was halting, but the pronunciation was close enough.
“Of course.”
Actually, he never mentioned it in so many words, but he didn’t have to. Ix wouldn’t send somebody my way unless he had already cleared that hurdle.
Reuben nodded. He wanted me to say more. He wanted me to make this easy for him.
No chance.
“Right,” he said. “Well, did he tell you about my…unusual circumstances?”
I remembered, then, what Ix had said about this Reuben Stone. And I looked at him anew. This bloke had managed to do what few had ever done, even among the initiates. I considered the scar on his head and the scrawniness of his build, which didn’t seem to fit with his large frame. He had been through something.
I didn’t like him any better for it, but my curiosity was piqued.
“He told me,” I said, “but not in any detail.”
“Well, would you like to hear the whole thing?”
I sighed impatiently.
“Why not?”
I locked the front door to the shop, placing the Back Soon sign in the window. It had been a slow day for jade trinkets and fake antique Chinese woodwork anyway. I led him to the back, past the small gallery of real antiques — I hadn’t even bothered to turn the light on there — and into my office.
We sat down there, and Reuben gave me an abbreviated version of his story. Even the short version included a lot of sentimental glop about wanting to help his poor sick mother — or even more treacle than that: the woman who “was like a mother to him.” This is not to say that I’m unsympathetic on the subject of sick parents or stand-in parents or what have you, but I was more interested in getting to the bottom of how he came to be here. I would have thought that he was a member of a different context’s version of the Order, but that wasn’t the case. He had heard about the society of the greater magic in his context, but Ix was giving him and his Dad (godfather, stepfather, sugar daddy, whatever it was) the run-around. You can’t buy your way into our little bridge club, not even if you’re Michael Keyes.
What Reuben had done, he had done on his own. Apparently he pulled it off through some combination of having part of his head blown off, looking at one of the pretty pictures in the big book, and a bit of what the Americans call “dumb luck.”
He hadn’t walked through the door. He had stumbled through.
It was a fascinating story. It would make a wonderful movie. Really. But from where I sat, Reuben now looked even less likely to be what I was looking for than I had taken him for at first. He was most probably a one-off arrangement. What had happened to him was a fluke. This left with a problem: what to do with him?
So I asked him.
“Why are you here? What do you want?”
He thought about this for a moment.
“I almost didn’t come,” he said. “I’ve been having trouble deciding whether I believe in any of this or not. But I want to understand what’s happened to me. And if there really is something to all this, then I need to know whether I can somehow use it to help Betty.”
“How would you do that?”
“I don’t know.”
I thought about it.
“Well, there might be ways of doing it. If you knew what she had, maybe you could find a context where it’s been cured and bring the cure back to her. Or just find a really advanced context — where they can cure everything — and go back and get her and bring her there.”
“That all sounds pretty easy.”
“It isn’t. You have a lot to learn. But it looks like you could learn it.”
“So…what do I do? How do I start?”
“I’m afraid it isn’t as simple as that. First I have to decide whether you’re an acceptable candidate. Assuming that you are, you have to go through a period of training. That could take quite a while.”
“How long?”
“Well, we have a fellow in Chile who started the training under my dad. He was 24 years old when he started. He’ll turn 50 this year.”
Reuben looked puzzled.
“And he’s still at it? When will he finish?”
“Probably never. He doesn’t have it in him; most people don’t. But some people just don’t know when to quit. However. Seeing as you’ve already displayed a certain…innate skill, it might not take very long with you.”
“Meaning what?”
“A year, maybe two, and you would possibly be able to find your way back home. Or it could take another five or six years to find this hypothetical cure.”
“But by then…”
I didn’t press him on what he thought would almost certainly have happened by then. He was apparently under the impression that time passes at the same rate across all contexts. Six years was disappointment enough. No need to compound it by a factor of a few hundred. Or then thousand. Or worse.
“And there’s another problem. Worthy as your cause is, I’m not sure that our rules would allow you to pursue it.”
That one seemed to stick him a little. As well it might.
“Why not?”
“There are two schools of thought on Magic Minor. One is that we were never really meant to have access to it. That’s it’s some kind of colossal cosmic mistake. The other is that we were meant to have it, but only in the performance of a specific task. A big task.”
“What task?”
“I can’t really go into that with you now. But it’s a serious situation, to say the very least. In any case, the theory goes that magic minor has fallen into our laps as its intended remedy.”
“Intended? By whom?”
“Unknown. But pay attention to the options: either we shouldn’t use it at all or we should use it just in the service of this one task. And I’m sorry, but helping Betty is not the task.”
Now we both had disappointments to deal with. And while I may be something of a callous bitch, I’m not quite so far gone that I couldn’t see that his disappointment was the greater of the two. By some considerable measure.
“Still, I might be willing to push through an exception in your case.”
He looked up, hope returning for a moment. I had to crush it.
“I mean to get you home. Not to help your friend.”
He sat there for a long time. Looking at the floor. Then he looked up and said something that surprised me.
“I guess I understand.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. I mean, I don’t know anything about your cosmic mistake. But I can see how this is looked at as something that we aren’t supposed to have. Or that we’re supposed to use carefully. What’s to stop you from using this power to make yourselves rich or powerful? There must be scenarios — or I guess contexts is the word?”
I shrugged.
“It’s my word.”
“Right. Anyway, if there are contexts that contain cures for diseases, there are contexts that contain other things.”
He seemed to ponder this.
“Technology,” he continued. “Wealth. Weapons. You could rule the world.”
I nodded.
“Or go find one worth ruling and rule it.”
I’ll give Reuben this. It seeped in with him faster than it did for most. Probably a result of already having made the trip. It wasn’t surprising that he took the Yank alpha-male “rule the world” scenario and ran with it. But where he went next did surprise me a little.
“Or just find a perfect world that you already rule and go there. There must be one where you’ve recently disappeared under mysterious circumstances. You step in and take your own place.”
I nodded again.
“Why not? It might be hard to find one exactly like that, but it’s out there. Of course, you might want to find out what those mysterious circumstances were before you make the leap. Or you might get disappeared yourself.”
“So is every possible…context out there somewhere?”
“Nobody knows the answer to that. There are some that we can see and get to. There are others that we can see and not get to. Apparently there are some that we can get to but not see — that would appear to be what you did.”
“Wait a minute. Are you saying that you can look into these other contexts? See what’s going on there?”
I sighed. Maybe not quite as bright as I had thought.
“How would you have gone looking for that cure? Or a world to conquer? Trial and error?”
He thought about this for a while, putting it all together. He started rubbing that discolored part of his head. It looked like he was in pain. He put his hand on my desk, as though he needed to steady himself or something.
Then I became aware of the ripple. First it was just this low crackling hum. Then it surged, taking on a sharpness: a definition.
“Hey, take it easy,” I said. “What do you think you’re doing?”
He looked up. He was in pain. He didn’t say anything.
I felt the ripple again, more distinct this time.
“Reuben. Listen to me. You have to let go right now. I understand what you’re experiencing. It’s a new way of thinking for you, one you haven’t had for very long.”
He wasn’t looking at me any more. He was staring off into the middle distance. Sweat was streaming down his face. Not that that was anything new.
This time the ripple hit me heard, and I had to take hold the desk myself. I felt dizzy. I thought I was going to vomit.
Brilliant. Right there on my beautiful antique desk.
“Reuben,” I said. “Listen to me, you silly fuckwit. You have to stop now or you’re going to wake up tomorrow in another Russian prison. Or worse.”
No response.
“I’m letting go, Reuben.”
I said it, but I wasn’t actually sure if I could. I had never felt a ripple quite like this one before. One that makes you sick at your stomach.
“You’re going alone. I won’t be there to help you.”
The ripple hit again. Viciously. It was a grasping, tearing thing. The shop, my office, my desk — all began to slip away. He was taking me. Against my will.
Somehow I managed to stand up. I took hold of his plastic tumbler of water and threw it in his face.
“Reuben! You have to! Stop this! Now!”
I flung the tumbler at him but it missed.
My office was fading to a grayed out version of itself. We were on the verge. I was real, but it wasn’t. Or almost wasn’t. Once we left, we could end up anywhere. I wouldn’t be able to get us back. And he…well, who knew what he could do?
“All right, god damn it! I’ll do what you want! We’ll help Betty! You’ve got it! You win! Just STOP NOW!!”
The ripple stopped. The lights came back on. It took me a moment to catch my breath. He sat there stoically, as though nothing had happened. Then he pulled out a handkerchief and began dabbing at the water I had thrown at him. After a moment, he reached down and picked up the tumbler and set it back on my desk.
“Sorry,” he said with utter calm. Then he just stared at me.
This was a pickle. Now what should I do?
My impulse was to kick him the hell out of my shop. Ix or no Ix. The fact that I’d just promised to help his sick friend didn’t even register. I was under duress. I would have said anything.
No, what made it a pickle was not what I had said. It was what he had done. That ripple.
That ripple.
My God, I had never experienced anything like that in my life. This git had no idea what he was doing and he was still better at agitating the waveform than anyone I’d ever seen. Maybe, I thought, we should start shooting all our initiate candidates in the head.
An idea that appealed to me on more than one level, believe you me.
So what to do with him? I had to be realistic. As I’ve said, Reuben was not who I was expecting. I had good reason to expect someone else. But here he was.
And time was growing short.
“You’re sorry,” I said. “That’s good. Now you listen to me. I want to be very clear about what I have to say. If you ever do that again, I will kill you. Do you understand me? That isn’t just an expression with me. I don’t use those kinds of expressions. When I tell someone that I’ll see them later, I mean that I’ll see them later. When I tell someone they’ll be sorry, I mean that they’ll be sorry. And when I say that I’m going to kill you, I mean…”
“That you’re going to kill me,” he said defiantly. “I got it.”
I was expecting him to be a little more apologetic, but he really bristled when the subject of killing him came up. I would have thought that a tough guy would take this sort of thing with a bit more aplomb. Later I learned why he took it so personally. Even under the circumstances, threatening to kill Reuben was something of a faux pas.
A certain nasty incident with the former Mrs. Stone, don’t you know.
But it served to even the score between us. Now he hated me, too.
“Good,” I said. “I’m glad we’re clear. You’re a military man, aren’t you?”
He shook his head.
“Really? But you’ve served somehow. Somewhere.”
“CIA.”
Another surprise.
“Well…good enough, I guess. That means you understand about following orders.”
“Yes.”
“And you understand about a chain of command.”
“Yes.”
“Good. Well then get this straight. There’s the chain of command, and then there’s me. I’m the anchor at the end of the chain. Do you follow me?”
“I think so.”
“Well let’s be sure. You’re a recruit in the Marine Corps. What do they call them in the movies? A…grunt. And I’m the head Marine. The Minister of Defense.”
He blinked.
“No, that’s not right. What do you call it? Never mind. I’m the President. That’s it, I’m the President of the United States. And you’re a grunt Marine. Clear?”
He nodded sullenly.
“Clear?”
He glared at me.
“Clear,” he croaked.
“You will address me as Miss Wong.”
He half-smiled.
“Clear, Miss Wong.”
“Wipe that idiotic smirk off your face.”
He did, replacing it with an expression of sheer hatred. That was all right; I could live with hatred. I wondered whether I wasn’t laying it all on a little thick. But I would need to for what was to come next.
“Here’s how it’s going to work. Your training will begin tomorrow evening. I’m going to give you a copy of the little book, which you will have read by the following day. We’ll meet here at six tomorrow and then every day at the same time.”
“Yes, Miss Wong.”
And then I had this idea.
It came to me all at once: the convergence of several seemingly unrelated strands. It was a good idea, but a not a particularly nice idea, if you can see the distinction. But there it was — I could get this wanker’s help with the Situation, punish him for not being who he was supposed to be, and finally put into action a plan I had been nursing along for twenty years or so. All at once.
It was perfect.
“But before we start, you have to do something. To prove to me that you’re serious.”
I took a sheet of paper from my notepad and jotted the number down on it. I was surprised to realize that I knew it by heart. I handed it to him.
“I have a bank account in Switzerland. Between now and six tomorrow evening, you will have made a deposit into this account.”
He took the sheet of paper and looked at the number.
“Yes, Miss Wong,” he said.
When I didn’t say anything he asked:
“How much, Miss Wong?”
I smiled at him.
“One million dollars, US.”
Posted by Phil at February 29, 2004 11:59 AM | TrackBack