Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (75 page)

 
          
"Simon,
you stand at the crossroads. If you hope to walk in the Light again, there is
still a sacrifice to be made," Colin told him. "What will you sacrifice,
I and what will you do with the power which must be dispelled from this I
place?" Colin moved his hand, and the ghostly Astral Lightning followed
his I gesture. For an instant, the gates of memory opened to Colin MacLaren.

 
          
So
had he stood, once, in a
Temple
that had been ashes for ten
thousand years, and listened as these words were said to him. He had been
offered re-
i
demption and had spurned it in the dust, and he had been
tied to the Wheel I ever since, expiating that arrogance.

 
          
Just
as Simon would be, if Colin could not save him now.

 
          
He
felt a crushing pain grow in his chest. The power in the room built, and the
Wheels of Time slid forward. In a moment all would be lost
—
they would I all go on,
forward through Time, and Simon would find some other way to commit his crime.

 
          
"Quickly,
Simon!" Colin said urgently. "Time is running out! Choose darkness or
light
—
and
be forever bound by your choice!"
Remember that you are a being of
Light, that you chose this destiny for yourself. Remember
—
and be proud.

 
          
Simon
drew a deep breath, and Colin felt the agony in his own chest.

 
          
"I
will not
—
" Simon said hoarsely. "I renounce the Darkness
forever
—
my
power
—
and
what I could have been. I renounce it forever, and that power I give to Emily
—
"

 
          
He
rose from his beastlike crouch and kissed Emily gently upon the lips, then
turned to the altar before which the child still lay.

 
          
Colin
felt Time slip from his grasp, moving onward into the Waning Tide, and with it
went all the Panoply of the Light. All of them within these walls were merely
human once more, not angels or archetypes.

 
          
The
child sat up and began to cry for her mother, human understanding flooding her
eyes at last.

 
          
"And
lest I be tempted again
—
" Simon raised his damaged hand, anc brought it down
upon the edge of the overturned altar. Colin felt as well heard the sickening
crunch as fragile bone gave way, and Simon wept

SAN FRANCISCO
,  1985

Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and
the nerves prick And tingle; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of Being
slow.

—
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

 
          
SIMON
AND LESLIE WERE MARRIED THE MOMENT SIMON GOT OUT OF THE hospital, then had
traveled for several months. While he and Leslie were gone, Emily's commitment
to Frodo deepened, and it became tacitly understood that they, too, would
eventually marry. The thought of Simon and Frodo as brothers-in-law caused
Claire a great deal of quite amusement, a distraction she sorely needed in the
weeks that followed.

 
          
Colin's
battle with the Shadow had wasted him as if it were a high fever, and through
the dark winter months he was nearly frail, moving with the stiff caution of
the aged. Knowledge of his own mortality was constantly with him like an old
well-loved friend. He recovered his old energy more slowly than he liked, and
Claire fussed over him like a nervous mother hen.

 
          
He
had said he would make any sacrifice to gain the redemption of Simon's soul,
but like every man, when he spoke he had not believed that the Powers Above
would accept what he had so freely offered. Slowly, as the weeks of slow
recuperation passed, Colin came to realize that the battle for Simon's soul
might well have been the last such battle he would ever fight. He was in his
late sixties, and while the trained Will of the Adept only grew stronger with
age and study, the physical stamina
—
the energy, the
vril
—
required for some acts of
magick could vanish overnight, blighted as by a killing frost, leaving the
Adept as powerless as an ordinary man.

 
          
But
if the Lords of Karma had taken his power at last, so be it. He would hold
himself obedient to Their Will, and strive to conduct himself, always, in the
Light. If he were to be only a spectator to the Great Battle in these last
years of his life, he would strive to learn all he could from watching the workings
of the Lords of Karma upon this plane. Though some of those lessons were bitter
ones.

 
          
The
world went on, moving faster and faster, as though it, too, were eager for the
millennium. While Colin slowly mended, the year ended on a bizarre grace note,
where a man called Bernhard Goetz opened fire upon his young attackers in a
New York
subway
—
and the world cheered.

 
          
The
love of violence was in the air. Everywhere, war seemed not only possible, but
inevitable, and Colin awoke one morning with the sudden understanding that it
was not only men who were mortal . . . dreams were mortal as well. Dreams could
die.

 
          
Thirty
years ago they'd all lived in a wonderful dream . . . the fantasy that
governments waged war, that people, left alone, would choose peace. But in the
last three decades, as the world had slowly darkened and the violence of the
great wars of the past had decayed into constant acts of random violence, the
dreamers slowly realized that they'd been wrong all those years ago. There
would always be war, because war came from the people. Not from the government,
or the military, or the industrialists. War began with the stick, the thrown
bottle, the firebomb. War began with a riot in the street . . .
your
street.
And war would not be extinguished until the last human being was dead.

 
          
But
just as eternal war seemed inevitable, there came some fugitive rays of hope.
In the spring of 1985 the
Soviet Union
began to soften its eternal opposition to the West. With
the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as premier, the unremitting winter of the
Cold War seemed at last to be ready for its own spring. That autumn, the Soviet
premier and the American president met, and the world held its breath.

 
          
And
then, as if some dark force were mocking their hopes, the second half of the
eighties began with the death of another dream: the space shuttle
Challenger
exploded, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

 
          
They
were black, white, Asian . . . men, women
—
and one special woman named
Christa McAuliffe. The explosion tore the heart out of an
America
that refused any longer to
invest its soul in leaders; of an
America
that had grown to distrust
promises and only believed in deeds. An
America
that had learned to believe
that promises were lies.

 
          
Colin
thought of that, as he watched Ronald Reagan offer words of expertly-crafted
commiseration to a grieving nation
—
topspin from a president
hypocritical enough to have publicly honored Nazi dead only six months before.
It made Colin angry in a dull, quiet way: nearly four decades had passed since
V-E Day, and this was to have been the world in which all men were free.

 
          
But
the victory that Colin had waited for
—
that clear-cut, shining moment
—
had never really come. It
was always just one more fight away, somewhere in the glittering future.

           
Wearily the nation bound up its
wounds and went on. When the scandal that the newspapers, with a fine sense of
history, called variously "Irangate" and "Contragate"
erupted that fall, Colin didn't even bother to follow the coverage on CNN.

 
          
What
did it matter? They would learn nothing new from it.
America
's leaders were corrupt
—
the country had known that
since Watergate, since
Chicago
, since
Kent
State
. It would take two years to
bring home indictments against Colonel Oliver North and his coconspirators,
and in his heart Colin knew that the judgment did not matter.

 
          
By
the late spring
—
six months after his collapse
—
Colin had resumed most of
his regular activities, though he had little heart for them. Emily and Frodo
married in a Wiccan ceremony held in
Mount
Tamalpais
Park
, with Cassilda Chandler
officiating. During his convalescence, Colin had sold his interest in the
Ancient Mysteries Bookshop to Cassie, and she and Claire managed it together.
He'd set the price deliberately low: his real estate investments brought in an
income sufficient to his needs, and Colin was not a greedy man.

 
          
Cassie
was fulfilling her early promise as an occultist and teacher. Though the path
she followed through the Light was far from Colin's own, he could find it
within himself to be joyful that she was on the journey.

 
          
And
slowly it began to seem, now, that every worldly loss was balanced by a gain,
in a subtle playing-out of some great chess match. The Russians withdrew from
Afghanistan
, bringing a measure of
peace to that oft-disputed country, but at the same time the
U.S.
was taking the first steps
toward an armed clash with
Iran
. The Chinese massacred
students demonstrating for freedom in
Tiananmen Square
, but in
Poland
, the worker's union known
as Solidarity was providing the first substantial challenge to Russian communism
since the end of World War II. Two and a half years after the
Challenger
disaster,
the
Discovery
launched successfully
—
and deaths from AIDS topped
fifty thousand a year, as many as were killed in a single holiday weekend by
drunk drivers.

 
          
Weeks
turned to months, months to years. And on
November 9,
1989
,
the Berlin Wall came down.

 
          
Colin
watched it, alone, in his apartment. The men and women who could have known
what this moment meant to him were all dead, or scattered beyond any hope of
recall. None of his present circle of friends, dear though he held them, could
have understood. Not even Claire.

 
          
We
won. This means we won.

 
          
As
a young man, Colin had thought he was a realist
—
now, having reached the
threshold of his seventies, he was beginning to understand what the word really
meant. To be a realist, one needed a certain perspective.

 
          
It
was night in
Berlin
, the live televised image
carried to him by far-distant cameras. Gone were the days when film had to be
flown out of the war zone and developed for the six o'clock news
—
"and now, the
news"
—
gone the days when news was a voice carried by
transatlantic cable to the parlor radio
—
"This is London
calling." Now the minicam and the satellite uplink brought the events into
homes all over the world at the moment they happened
—
the announcers sounding
giddy and drunk with the enormity of what they were watching, the Berliners in
ordinary clothes, carrying sledgehammers and spray cans to smash and deface
the Wall that had scarred two postwar generations.

 
          
This
shows that we've won. A battle, at least, if not the war. And so long as the
war continues, there is hope.

 
          
It
was a block party on an unimaginable scale; an entire city turning out to
rejoice in freedom in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate and the symbol of Cold
War oppression. Soon Checkpoint Charlie would be no more than a legend, fast
becoming a myth. And future generations would never understand that tyranny had
once had a visible face.

 
          
Perhaps
it is better that way,
Colin thought. He watched the distant images of the
night from a room where sunlight still streamed through the windows. It seemed,
as the years passed, that he understood himself better than before, and with
more emotional distance he could be saddened by the passionate follies of his
animal nature, but no longer surprised by them.
Perhaps the best thing to do
with victories is to forget them.
He raised his glass of wine and silently
toasted the television screen.

 
          
There
was a new emotion growing in his chest, something that had been unfamiliar to
him for many years. A fierce, pure hope, a stainless joy. He had looked too
long into the Darkness, counting up its victories as if they were his own. But
the Light won its victories as well, and they were just as real.

 
          
He
watched the broadcast a while longer, as it cut back and forth between live
footage and talking heads in the studio. At last, the channel switched to other
coverage and Colin turned it off. He sat quietly on his couch for almost an
hour, basking in this rediscovered sense of grace, then picked up the phone and
dialed a familiar number.