Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (21 page)

           
Perhaps one of the lives he touched
here would make more difference to the future than anything he could do
fighting the White Eagle of Thule. He could not
know
—
he could only trust in the
Light. But the Light did not make puppets or robots of its servants. The
Adept's Will was always his own, his choices always his to make.

 
          
And
so the question now was, should he intervene in Jonathan's decision, and if so,
how much? Who was this Thorne Blackburn whose disciple Jonathan was so eager to
become? Simon Anstey had spoken of him; Colin should call Simon later and try
to gain his further impressions.

 
          
The
name nagged at him, as if Colin should have heard it before, and finally the
unresolved itch of it drove him to the pair of battered file cabinets that
occupied the corner of his office. After only a little digging, he found a file
with that name scrawled at the top in his own handwriting.

 
          
He'd
received a letter from Thorne Blackburn.

 
          
Colin
stared at the sheet of paper as though it were a communication from an alien
planet. The return address was
New Orleans
. It was dated 1961, just
after Colin had started at
Berkeley
. Blackburn was writing a
letter in response to an article Colin had submitted to one of the esoteric
journals, a preliminary inquiry into the question of whether the system of ley
lines so well known in Britain might not in fact extend over the entire globe,
and whether it might be possible to deduce the pattern both by extending the
known leys, and by cross-checking those extrapolations with certain
characteristic phenomena.

 
          
Blackburn
's response
—
the letter was handwritten
in an exquisite crabbed script, tiny and nearly impossible to read
—
was both enthusiastic and
technical, and from certain references
Blackburn
made, Colin was reasonably
sure that Simon had been right in assuming that the man had received at least
some training. If Colin had replied to the letter, he'd kept no copy of the response,
and wondered why he'd kept the letter at all.

 
          
Stuck
to
Blackburn
's letter was another one.
Colin glanced at the letterhead
—
it was from Nathaniel Atheling, dated the following year.

 
          
Nathaniel
had left the hurly-burly of
Manhattan
for a private clinic somewhere
in
Massachusetts
. He and Colin corresponded
erratically, but the purpose of this particular letter was a business one.
Nathaniel was letting Colin know, in his position as Exoteric Head of the Order
in
America
, that one Douglas Thorne
Blackburn, who had achieved the Sublime Grade of Master of the
Temple
at the Avalon Lodge in
England
, was not to be received or
acknowledged as such by any of his brethren.

 
          
Why?
Colin crumpled both of the letters together and began tearing them into
strips. He had no business keeping a copy of such correspondence in the first
place
—
he
must have meant to respond to Nathaniel's letter and forgotten about it.

 
          
Or
chosen not to. What was there to say, after all, unless he chose to take the
unknown young man's part? If
Blackburn
had protested his expulsion from the Order, his protest
had not succeeded.

 
          
Colin
frowned, revising his mental picture of Thorne Blackburn from that of a
frivolous Pied Piper close to Jonathan's age to one of a dark and brooding
Svengali. Master of the
Temple
was not the highest grade
it was possible to attain, but it was one which took years of study to reach.
He dropped the shreds of paper into the wastebasket and sat back down at his
desk, brooding.

 
          
"Colin?"
Claire stood in the doorway. "What's wrong? I feel . . ."

 
          
"A
bad mood and some bad news," Colin told her, banishing both with a
directed effort of will. "Claire. Come in. It's good to see you."

 
          
Claire
Moffatt stepped into Colin's office. She was wearing a neat pantsuit in sage
green, and her fringed suede shoulder bag was large enough to contain enough
items to meet most of life's emergencies. Her blond hair was short and neat in
a fashionable helmet cut, and
—
as always
—
she wore very little makeup.

 
          
"I
stuffed all my bags in the trunk," she said, smiling. "It's too nice
a day to be lumbered with bundles. But tell me what's happened. You look pretty
blue. It isn't Jonathan, is it?"

 
          
Fortunately,
Colin was long used to the unnerving accuracy of Claire's hunches.

 
          
"As
a matter of fact, yes. He's dropping out of school. It seems he's found a guru
and decided to hand over his mind and his money." Colin couldn't keep the
bitterness out of his voice. "Someone named Thorne Blackburn."

 
          
"Now
there's a coincidence," Claire said, her voice neutral. "You remember
Debbie Winwood? I went to school with her. We'd lost touch, but about six
months ago she turned up again. She's living with
Blackburn
over in
San Francisco
."

 
          
"Good
lord," Colin said inadequately. "Is he a friend of yours, Claire? I
have to admit I haven't heard much that's good about him."

 
          
He
thought about the letter he'd received from Nathaniel Atheling. While it
tarnished
Blackburn
's reputation further, it
really wasn't something he could share with Claire. Despite their closeness,
his oaths bound him still, just as they would with any other person not of his
Lodge.

 
          
Claire
shrugged. "He's pretty . . . extreme, isn't he? But come on, let's go to
lunch. I'm starved."

 
          
Telegraph
Avenue in June seemed a mirror twin of its counterpart in
San Francisco
, but the experienced eye
could discern differences between the two, though the crowds of children
thronging the streets seemed identically dressed and the same scents of incense
and patchouli hung in the air.

 
          
But
in
San
Francisco
the emphasis was on "feeding one's head" and
"tune in
—
turn on
—
drop out"; while here in
Berkeley
the emphasis was on social
change, from the SDS to the Black Panthers to people calling for a moratorium
on the war.

 
          
Despite
the fact that he shared many of their views, Colin distrusted the young
firebrands. Political activism could quickly turn to the sort of violence that
inevitably paved the way for a fascist state, as history had all too often
shown in recent years. Colin found himself walking past the banners and petitions
as tense as if he watched a jumper balancing on a window ledge a dozen stories
above the street. The country stood at a crossroads of history
—
in which direction would
Fate compel it?

 
          
Claire's
choice of restaurant was one of the new ones tucked into a corner of an old
building in what had until a few months ago been a run-down urban area. The
words "It's A Beautiful Day" were painted on the window in an
elaborate psychedelic lettering that Colin found almost impossible to read, and
surrounded by painted symbols from all the world's religions.

 
          
But
inside, the restaurant was bright and clean
—
if covered with posters for
political rallies and rock concerts
—
and offered a menu of plain,
old-fashioned standards, with some exotic additions like couscous and bean
sprouts. The smell of baking bread came from behind the counter. Salvaged
stained-glass windows hanging from the ceiling splintered the bright summer
sunlight into a patchwork of rainbow hues.

 
          
"Say
what you will about the decor," Claire said cheerfully, "the place is
cheap, and two salaries don't seem to go any farther than one these days."

 
          
"How's
Peter?" Colin asked on cue.

 
          
Claire
shrugged, still smiling. "Working all kinds of hours. He says things are
getting worse out on the streets
—
not just the runaways, or even the drugs, really. But drugs
mean money, and that means organized crime, Peter says."

 
          
"I
imagine he'd know if anyone did," Colin said. "It seems like half the
kids on campus are high on something these days."

 
          
And
particularly bad
—
from Colin's admittedly specialized point of view
—
was that the drugs they were
choosing to abuse were some of the ones that had been in the arsenal of High
Magick for centuries, to be used
—
cautiously and under the strictest of controls
—
to add power to the
magician's work and lower the veils between the magician and the Infinite. Now
the children seeking to cast off all established standards had seized upon the
memoirs of those philosophical pioneers to use them as justification for their
own experiments.

 
          
It
was hard even now for Colin to feel that they were completely wrong in what
they did. But he was convinced absolutely that what they did was dangerous.

 
          
"On
drugs, on campus, and in the emergency rooms," Claire agreed. "There
are some clinics around town that specialize in drug overdoses
—
well, that and VD," she
said frankly. "That's how bad it's getting. Still, you've always said
that each generation finds its own
—
'appalling forms of excess,'
I believe your words were."

 
          
"Good
heavens, I must have been in a foul mood that day," Colin said, smiling
sheepishly. "I may be getting old, but the youth of today still strikes me
as somehow . . . reckless."

 
          
'"Live
fast, die young, and leave a pretty corpse,'" Claire quoted flippantly.
"At least, if the Bomb lets you
—
leave a corpse, I mean. But
how did we ever get onto such a depressing subject on such a pretty day? Let's
find something nicer to talk about."

 
          
"All
right," Colin said. "I saw Alison the other day. She and Simon are
back from their jaunt back East
—
"

           
The two friends kept their
conversation turned to lighter subjects for a few minutes, but as soon as the
waitress
—
a cheerful young woman in tie-dyed overalls
—
had taken their orders and
left them, the conversation turned inevitably back to Thorne Blackburn once
more.

 
          
"I've
only met him a couple of times when I was visiting Debbie, and I guess he isn't
that much crazier than some of these other antiwar demonstrators," Claire
said. "But Jonathan dropping out to go live at the
Voice of
Truth}"
Her voice was bewildered and disapproving. "It's an
underground paper, sort of a
—
well, a bully pulpit; Thorne writes most of it himself and
it all seems to be about astrology and Tarot cards and that sort of thing.
Well, that and Thorne Blackburn's philosophy and politics. Debbie keeps trying
to give me copies of the thing
—
they hand it out free, or you pay whatever you like
—
but I'll admit I've never
read one." She took a bite of her salad, which was filled with chunks of
fresh chicken and exotic greens, all in a wonderful herbed vinegar dressing.