Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (2 page)

BERKELEY
,
CALIFORNIA
, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 
I960

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air, Dear God!
the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still/

—
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

 
          
IN
JANUARY OF THIS YEAR A MASSACHUSETTS SENATOR NAMED JOHN F. Kennedy announced
that he was going to run for president of the
United States
. In February, the
civil-rights protests that had torn the New South apart for the last four years
escalated in
Charlotte
,
North Carolina
, and Elvis Presley
—
a white entertainer whose
musical roots were in black "soul" music
—
received his first gold
album.

 
          
In
May, a U.S. pilot named Francis Gary Powers was shot down as he piloted his
U-2 over Russia, sharply escalating the Cold War tension that held all Europe
in the grip of a political winter, and the Queen of England's younger sister,
Margaret, married Antony Armstrong-Jones in a wedding that captured the
glamour-starved public imagination in a way that nothing had since Grace
Kelly's fairy-tale wedding four years before.

 
          
The
year when the future itself was the New Frontier. But it was a frontier that
was not without its
Old World
goblins. This was the year during which many in the world
would awaken from their emotional paralysis and finally begin to total up the
true cost of "the last good war"
—
the war before Korea, the
war whose cost had been buried in the postwar economic boom, i960 was the year
that Adolph Eichman was finally arrested in Buenos Aires and taken to stand
trial for his crimes in the embattled state of Israel. His trial would be
broadcast worldwide, cementing the new medium's
—
television's
—
place on the New Frontier,
making it an integral part of a world that could still believe in the global
classroom and the global village.

 
          
It
was a year when the Great Powers continued to divest themselves of colonial
possessions that seemed to belong to another time. A year that saw increased
fighting in an area of the world still often miscalled the Belgian Congo, and a
fledgling United Nations that was starting to flex its international muscle
(while the Vatican and its newest Pope, John XXIII, claimed the same
"right and duty" to intervene in foreign affairs for itself).

 
          
That
summer, a thirteen-year-old government agency called the Central Intelligence
Agency, which had been formed out of the remnants of the wartime OSS as a
direct challenge to the FBI's increasing power, would begin the disastrously
unsuccessful series of assassination attempts against foreign dictators
—
notably last year's new
Caribbean strongman, Fidel Castro of Cuba
—
that would cause its fall
from grace a quarter of a century later when the details of its various
attempts were finally made public. At the Democratic National Convention, the
popular and well-connected young senator from
Massachusetts
would choose a
fifty-two-year-old Texan named Lyndon Baines Johnson as his running mate, and
the
Soviet
Union
would continue consolidating the gains of its infant space program.

 
          
It
was a year of hope and despair; twelve months that saw the appetite for freedom
spread like wildfire through
Asia
and the
Middle East
while
Europe
groaned beneath the weight of an Iron Curtain rung down
upon it by allies turned to enemies. Like a phoenix from the ashes, the Russian
Bear had risen up out of the cinders of the Allied victory to menace the
nations of the West anew, armed with weapons that made a war too terrible for
sane men to contemplate. Civilization stood poised on the brink of nuclear
hellfire, and the world powers jockeyed for position in the new world order
that was to come.

 
          
This
was the world that Colin Niall MacLaren had returned to four years before
—
an exotic country that had
created television and defeated polio, and had relegated Colin's war to the
mists of the dead past. When he'd left Europe, he'd left behind a West Germany
barely beginning to come to terms with the enormity of its crimes, but a West
Germany no longer controlled by the Great Powers, a political landscape
shattered and recast in no one's image over the nearly twenty years he'd been
there.

 
          
He'd
spent almost half his life in exile of one sort or another from the country of
his birth. He'd been in
Paris
when the German army had
marched in; a tall, lanky young man with piercing blue eyes beneath shaggy pale
brows and the indefinable air of the eternal student about him. He was barely
old enough to vote in the land of his birth, but at nineteen years of age Colin
was already old enough to know that the war he was called to fight was not one
that could be fought in an American uniform.

 
          
He'd
spent the first half of his twenties running and hiding and killing, fighting
for the Light against the Black Order that had manipulated an entire nation
into doing its will. Friendships were brief and intense, made more piquant by
the threat of torture and death that was a bitter fact of life for those who
set their will in opposition to that of the Thousand-Year Reich.

           
When V-E Day had come in '45,
Colin's war had in one sense only begun, for now that the German threat was
ended, he was called upon to cleanse and to heal, to purify the battlefield
just as a doctor sterilized the wounds of battle, so that the healing could be
clean and the patient could rise up and go on with his life.

 
          
And
at last, as with all tasks, there had come a time when that work, too, must be
counted as done.

 
          
Coming
back to
Manhattan
in the spring of 1956 had
been like returning to an alien future for Colin MacLaren. There were
skyscrapers everywhere he looked, and more under construction. The new UN
Building dominated the East Fifties, and the friendly trolleys he remembered from
his boyhood excursions into the City with his parents were long gone
—
along with the grassy verges
on
Park
Avenue
and the five-cent cup of coffee. Fortunately, Colin wasn't faced with the
immediate need to find employment upon his demobilization
—
his back pay, courtesy of
the U.S. Army, saw to that.

 
          
Almost
at once, Colin had fled the city for the security of his boyhood home in
Hyde Park
. His Scots father had died
when Colin had still been a boy, and his mother had died while Colin had been
in
Europe
, but the old white
farmhouse was still just as he'd remembered it. The house was the bulk of his
mother's estate, but there was enough left over to pay property taxes and most
of the bills for some years to come.

 
          
And
so, for the first time in more years than he wanted to think about, Colin
MacLaren found himself both at liberty and at leisure, without any demands on
his time and no one attempting to kill him. The
Hudson
Valley
was still as peaceful and
welcoming as he recalled; he surrounded himself with his books and his music
and learned once more to sleep without having to keep an ear cocked for a
knocking at his door or the summoning
midnight
ring of the telephone. He
was free. The world was at peace.

 
          
The
quiet of the country healed something inside him that he hadn't known was
injured, but after only a few months at home Colin realized that the bucolic
countryside was no place for him, and so, after much thought, he'd sold the old
place and gone south again, back to the bustling city in the spring of 1957.

 
          
There,
he invested the proceeds from the sale of the house and the small family legacy
in the purchase of a three-story apartment building on a side street in the
East Twenties. It was divided into seven apartments; Colin left the management
of it in his landlord's hands and moved into the vacant apartment on the top
floor. The building was an investment that would
—
he hoped
—
provide him with both a roof
over his head and a certain amount of income in the years to come, freeing him
to continue his true work.

 
          
If
he could only still be sure of what that was. Once not so very long ago it had
seemed presumptuous to plan for a future that included old age, and afterward,
his work had been clear-cut, and clearly set before him. Now everything had
changed. For an Adept on the Right-Hand Path, dedicated to the Great Work of
Transformation, his responsibility was to provide aid to those in need and
succor to those others who were, as he was, pilgrims upon the Path. But the
country he'd come home to was throwing itself headlong into the twenty-first
century, intent on only what it could see and hear, smell and touch and taste.
America
in the fifth decade of the
twentieth century seemed curiously indifferent
—
even numb
—
to the Unseen World that existed
just beyond the grasp of these five senses.

 
          
That
disinterest was not enough to make Colin despair
—
despair, in any case, was a
sin, and Colin had seen things far worse in the last several years than the
cheerful contentment of the American middle class. But it did make him wonder
what his work in the world was to be, and if he had indeed made the right
decision by coming home.

 
          
But
knowledge of the future was in no man's gift, and so Colin set aside his own
worries and concentrated upon the work before his hands, just as his teachers
had taught him. Colin hated superstition with a passion; if not for the
superstitious fears of the average German of three decades before, the whole
nightmare machinery of the Nazi Party would never have gained its death-grip on
European politics. He would fight superstition when and how he could, with the
greatest weapon at his disposal: knowledge.

 
          
He
signed a contract to give a series of lectures on folklore and the occult in
one of
Manhattan
's numerous
"universities without walls," and set about making his new
accommodations into a true home. His few personal possessions were quickly
reclaimed from storage, and bookshelves built and fitted to the walls. Slowly
he adapted to the bustling beat of "cliff-dweller" life. He bought a
typewriter and began producing articles for a number of small and arcane
journals; their publication brought him a small but carefully-tended list of
correspondents and
—
very occasionally
—
a cry for the sort of help
Colin was uniquely qualified to provide.

 
          
But
something was still missing, and as winter drizzled its way into spring once
more, Colin took to the streets, trying to relearn what he thought of as
"his" city on his long, rambling walks. The street that held his
brownstone bordered (at least in a realtor's imagination) on the northern edge
of Greenwich Village, and most evenings, after his other obligations were
finished, Colin found himself walking the Village's twisted streets and byways.