Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (57 page)

GLASTONBURY
,
NEW YORK
, SEPTEMBER  1979

How can thine heart be full of the spring? A thousand
summers are over and dead. What hast thou found in the spring to follow? What
hast thou found in thine heart to sing?
—
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

 
          
COLIN
KNEW HIS INSIGHT HAD BEEN RIGHT
—
EACH YEAR IT TOOK MORE effort to ignore the fundamental
corruption of the American soul. But it also seemed that the nation was willing
to make that effort.

 
          
By
the end of the seventies, the citizens of the Woodstock Nation had, for the
most part, gone quietly off to brokerages and law firms, exchanged hash pipes
for coke spoons, and geared up for a decade-long consumer orgy that would lose
its frenetic momentum only with Black Tuesday and the spread of AIDS.

 
          
The
last of the sixties idealism had died an ugly death in the Watergate
courtrooms, and the grotesque, self-interested end of the Vietnam War in 1975
had put the stone upon its grave. Two failed assassination attempts upon
Nixon's appointed successor, Gerald Ford, less than three weeks apart elicited
laughter and jokes when a scant decade before they would have roused horror. It
was as if the nation, like a lover betrayed too often, simply refused to care
any longer.

 
          
The
jingoistic fervor of the Bicentennial festivities in 1976 rang curiously
hollow, filled more with a plaintive nostalgia for what once had been than with
the spirit of a real celebration of nationhood. That fall, in desperation, the
nation elected a largely unqualified fifty-two-year-old
Georgia
farmer without big-league
political experience, the youngest presidential candidate since Kennedy, to the
highest office in the land. Gerald Ford, who had once served on the Warren
Commission, and who would be known forever as "the man who pardoned
Nixon," disappeared from the political scene without a trace. Jimmy Carter
would follow him into political obscurity one term later, having pardoned the
draft dodgers, given away the
Panama Canal
, received a Pope on American soil, and provided the nation
with a 23% inflation rate.

 
          
People
wanted to believe in something
—
they were desperate for truths
—
but on every side they were
presented with the dangers of faith. The Reverend Jim Jones led his People's
Temple
followers into death in a
mass suicide in
Guyana
, and in
Iran
, the return of the
Ayatollah Khomeini to power led to theocratic totalitarianism and the seizure
of the American embassy in
Tehran
. Sixty-three Americans were
held hostage by "students," and all
America
's military-industrial clout
was not enough to bring them home.

 
          
And
worst of all, everything seemed to be some kind of unfunny joke.

 
          
/
wonder if I'm getting too old for this?
Colin MacLaren wondered to
himself. It was a rhetorical question; he'd never felt more vital, more in
control of his destiny. After six years the institute was on a firm footing at
last, the first wave of the new doctoral program was about to graduate, and
Taghkanic had even backed off a bit in its eternal attempt to annex the institute's
operating budget. With President Quiller's retirement last year, a new period
of harmonious cooperation seemed to have dawned for the Bidney Institute.

 
          
He
glanced around his office. For a moment, his gaze lingered on cherished
mementoes: a picture of the front of Claire's bookstore; a photo of Barbara and
Jamie Melford with their two children, John Colin and Margaret Claire; an old
photo of Colin standing in front of his college at
Oxford
; another of him standing
with Claire in
Golden Gate
Park
. Moments snatched out of
the rushing current of time, now forever inviolate. Enough such moments, and
the shape of a life was marked out for all to see.

 
          
The
interoffice phone buzzed; Colin plucked the receiver deftly out of a nest
formed by stacks of journals and raised it to his ear.

 
          
"Colin,
you told me to buzz you at one-forty-five," his secretary said.
"You've got
Welcome to the Twilight Zone
at two."

 
          
"Thanks,
Christie. I'll be there," he answered, a smile in his voice.

 
          
The
Lookerman Auditorium was almost a quarter full when Colin entered. It was a
grandly rococo building, named for the college's founder, Jurgen Lookerman,
and looked like a Viennese opera house in miniature; a fact that the Drama
Department found ideal for the staging of its various productions throughout
the year.

 
          
Today
a podium with microphone had been placed at the center edge of the half-round
stage. Several dozen students, a significant fraction of Taghkanic's student
body, were waiting for him
—
this year, for a miracle, all down in front instead of
hiding in the shadows at the back of the auditorium. As Colin took the stage,
he saw Dylan and Cassie and several others that he recognized from summer
interviews.

 
          
To
attend the Taghkanic's degree-track parapsychology classes (all taught by staff
of the Bidney Institute), a student had to have taken
Introduction to Occult
Ethics
during their freshman year and have had a personal interview with
Colin before the start of their sophomore year. Fortunately this summer's interviews
had been profitable, turning up two particularly promising candidates.

 
          
Dylan
Palmer was frank about his interest in ghosts
—
and equally frank about his
desire to integrate this rowdy and disreputable stepchild of parapsychology
into a classical scientific framework. His eventual ambition was to teach, and
Colin thought he'd be good at it. Though he was barely twenty, Dylan's
open-minded willingness to
know
made him a good candidate for survival
in a field where cherished theories could be disproved in a heartbeat and
researchers frequently had to resign themselves to a lifetime's equivocation.

 
          
Cassilda
Chandler, on the other hand, was outspokenly mystical
—
an "old soul,"
some of Colin's counterparts would have called her. She wanted all the tools
that science could arm her with, but her interest lay in discovering the extent
of the Unseen World by any means she could employ. Cassie was very much the
sort of student that Colin wanted the institute's Taghkanic-sponsored degree
program to attract: young questioning minds that he could guide past the many
pitfalls that the study of the Unseen World entailed.

 
          
Colin
knew that if the institute were to move into the twenty-first century, he was
going to have to find and train the next generation of parapsychology researchers
himself, and so, in a sense, he was actively recruiting students to the degree
program. In order to avoid answering the same questions over and over
individually, Colin had arranged to add this lecture to the Orientation Week
schedule. Though anyone was welcome to attend, his usual audience was incoming
freshmen and a few curious sophomores.

 
          
"Good
afternoon. My name is Colin MacLaren, and I'm the director of the Margaret
Beresford Bidney Memorial Institute for Psychic Research."

 
          
Scattered
laughter at the institute's full unwieldy name.

 
          
"I
know that many of you will be curious about what we do here, and in the course
of your enrollment here at Taghkanic, many of you will participate in the
institute's research as volunteers, while some of you will choose to make
parapsychology your field of study. Perhaps some of you will have chosen
Taghkanic for just that reason.

 
          
"I'd
like to begin by mentioning what the institute is
not
—
it is not in the business of
promulgating any particular creed or doctrine, nor is it engaged in the
practice of any form of religion. Parapsychology is a young science
—
"

 
          
As
he went on with the introductory lecture
—
covering only the most
rudimentary outline of the subject
—
Colin allowed his gaze to
roam over his audience. They were universally long-haired and denim-clad, some
listening raptly, some already trying to come up with embarrassing questions to
trap him with later.

 
          
As
he continued, explaining that parapsychology was not something supernatural,
but in fact a normal
—
though rare
—
part of the natural world, he noticed that someone else had
come in. He
—
Colin was guessing about the newcomer's gender
—
was wearing a white buckskin
jacket that glowed almost supernaturally in the gloom of the back of the
auditorium. As Colin glanced at him, he felt a sudden flash of
akashic
memory;
a sense of recognition. Here was one whom he'd known once, and would know
again.

 
          
He
put the distraction from him firmly. If the two of them were meant to know one
another, they would not be able to avoid doing so
—
it was not for Colin to
force the Unseen Hand or tell others the truths they had chosen to put aside in
this life. He spoke for another fifteen minutes, and then opened the floor to
questions.

 
          
"You've
said that parapsychology isn't the occult," a girl sitting in the front
row said. "But aren't you studying the occult?"

 
          
"In
part," Colin said. "What we today refer to as 'the occult' preceded
the development of parapsychology by several thousand years, just as church exorcism
preceded a knowledge of mental illness. The word 'occult' only means 'hidden';
it comes from the same Latin root as 'oculist,' and physicians still speak of
testing for 'occult' blood and mean nothing magical by it, I assure you. Much
of what we today dismiss as folklore and magick came into existence when
people misapplied cause and effect relationships or misinterpreted what they
saw in the natural world. One of the goals of the Bidney Institute's work is to
separate the wheat from the chaff, and to decide what part of this inheritance
has value to the modern world."

 
          
"Professor
MacLaren?" A boy this time, almost painfully neat in corduroy jacket,
creased jeans, and Hush Puppies. "Do you mean that there
is
magic?"

 
          
"I'm
afraid I have to beg the question, as we first have to define 'magic' If you
mean the rabbit-from-a-hat, stage illusionism variety, it's alive and well, but
it's not something we teach at Taghkanic or study at the institute. If you mean
comic-book hocus-pocus, then I'd have to say I've never seen any."

 
          
"What
about the art of making changes to the nature of reality in accordance with
the will?" a new voice asked. "Do you believe in magick-with-a-K, Dr.
MacLaren?"