The Stargazer's War - Chapter 3.4

Chapter 3.4: Death

I still felt it.

I felt its presence, scratching against the edges of reality, ready to appear in all its ineffable glory should I but slip into the proper state of mind.  I didn’t think that was possible without at least activating my brain meridian, and even then it would require conscious effort.  One advantage of the inhumanity my qi inflicted was that it made it awfully difficult to lose control of my thoughts.

Thank the threads for that.  Summoning what was apparently the very avatar of death in the middle of a crowded bar seemed like a very bad idea.  Much as I knew I could align with the mystery at a moment’s notice, I labored under no illusion that I could control it.

“Cal?”  A reassuring hand landed on my shoulder.  “You aren’t going to die.  Even if tarot could predict the future, Death isn’t so simple.  It’s not a thread, it’s a symbol.”

I wrenched my gaze away from the card in front of me to meet Carlos’s.  “What does it mean?”

“Change is the most common interpretation, either you’ve experienced a major change or catalyzed it in others.  Could mean you’ve caused a lot of death or been around a lot of death.  It can mean all sorts of other esoteric things like corruption or nothingness or revelation, but that’s getting into the weeds.”

My mind flashed back to the terminal encounter with Lesley in that dark tunnel, where I’d been on the brink of the revelation that would restore my spiritual sense, where I’d channeled the nothingness of the infinite sea, where the nanites had corrupted Edwin and the Mistral Prince and the city itself.

Shit.

Carlos continued.  “Symbols are complicated.  They mean a lot of things, and their meaning changes as galaxy-wide perception of them changes.  Even the name ‘Death’ is a simplification.  Older versions of tarot number thirteen are called ‘the card with no name.’  Tarot is fun because it’s open to near endless interpretation.  It’s useful symbolism practice because it encourages you to think about its icons from every possible angle.”

“So if someone were to align with Death the way you’re trying to do with The Fool…?”

“Getting ahead of ourselves, are we?”  Carlos smiled.  “You’d have a hell of a time with it.  If you read the message boards, it’s broadly accepted that The Fool is far and away the easiest of the Major Arcana to identify with.  All men are fools, Cal. Remember that.  Something like Death…”  He stroked stubbled his chin in thought.  “You’d have to be an agent of great change, probably on a galactic scale.  Similarly, you’d probably have to be responsible for a lot of death, again on a galactic scale.”  He chuckled.  “I wouldn’t worry.  If you were about to plunge us into an upheaval at that level, every thread-sensitive in the galaxy would be spouting your name.”  He pointed at the deck.  “Sometimes a random draw is just a random draw.  Practically always, in fact.  Draw another one.”

Mind reeling, I obeyed, going through the motions as Carlos gave me a rundown on the three of cups, the six of wands reversed, the eight of coins reversed, the two of wands, and the three of swords reversed.  I barely listened, my attention wrapped up in remembrance of the Gardener’s words to Xavier.

The Kai’Deiron speak as one for the first time in recorded history.  The wanderers stand unmoving.  The great machine at Duras Tal calculates in silence.  Across the galaxy, the Threads themselves quake in anticipation of coming upheaval, and the best the greatest divinatory mechanisms known to man have been able to provide is a name.

She’d thought the Stargazer a symbol, rather than a person, a symbol like Carlos’s Fool, like Death.  Maybe it was, or at least would be.  Would I align with it?  Would I find my circumstances subtly shifting to match others’ expectations of me?

“Well, there you have it,” Carlos rescued me from my spiral.  “You’ve a fascinating spread.  Certainly gives me a lot to think about.”

“Likewise,” I muttered, eyes still on the cards as he swept them up and replaced them in their box.  “If I, uh, wanted to get my hands on a tarot deck, where should I go?”

“Caught your interest, have I?  The deck itself doesn’t matter a ton, though if you’re interested in the symbolism you’ll want a traditional set rather than one of those novelty sets with art from some famous artist or popular IP.  Any off the localnet will do.”  He tossed his into the air and caught it casually.  “I prefer the showmanship of somewhat nicer set, but you don’t strike me as a showman.”

“And if I wanted to buy one around here?”

Carlos shrugged.  “Hell if I know.  I’m new to this part of town, remember?  I could point you to a few shops in sect territory, but you’ll pay through the nose, and I don’t think you’d be out in Doro if you wanted to go shopping in the Right Eye’s backyard.  You’ve got a holopad.  Use it.”

“Right.  That’s my fault, isn't it.  Sorry.”

“Don’t you worry your pretty head about it.”  He glanced down at his holopad.  “I hate to cut this short, but I have a show scheduled down the street for four o’clock.”

“That’s fifteen minutes ago.”

“I’m sure they’ll forgive me.”  He flashed a cocky grin.  “They always do.”

He grabbed my hand in both of his, a sudden intensity appearing on his face as he looked deep into my eyes.  “It’s been an absolute pleasure to make your acquaintance.  May you charge ever forth, and may you prove agile enough to overcome the hurdles in your Way.”  He stood, all sincerity vanishing as he patted me twice on the cheek.  “Until next time.  I’m sure we’ll run into each other again.  Our fates are tied, remember?”

I ended up saying my goodbye to his back as he vanished out into the street.  I exhaled, grateful, for a moment, to be distracted by the apparent grandiosity of my life by this latest specimen of remarkable insanity I’d encountered.

I browsed the localnet while I finished my beer, setting my sights on a gift shop a few blocks down.  It was then that the bartender informed me that Carlos very much did not have a tab open at this establishment.  I swiped over the credits with a sigh.

As I stood and made my own exit, navigating the avenues of Doro in search of a tarot deck, I came to the conclusion that while Carlos Esperanza left a number of impressions, one in particular made a lot of sense to me.

I was entirely unsurprised he’d been among the three chosen to be kicked out of the sect.

——

Tarot deck in hand and fistful of credits poorer, I followed my holopad’s directions back to the transport terminal to find the private taxi Jeremy had called me had long since departed.  With neither the funds to waste nor the self-importance to bother, I didn’t call another one, not with a perfectly good bus system right in front of me.

It took more than a few minutes to work my way through the unfamiliar UI—why the hells was destination-based routing three submenus deep?—but I eventually cobbled together a way back with only a single transfer out in one of the predominately mortal arcologies.  My artificial core set as it was, I’d fit right in.

I’d hoped to spend the hour or so’s transit time taking in some more of the sights, but it turns out inter-arcology transit tunnels look pretty much the same across solar systems.  You’ve seen one poorly lit metal hallway lined with artificial gravity deflectors, you’ve seen them all.  I amused myself instead by downloading and reading the little info packet that’d come with the tarot deck.

Soon enough, the transport pulled up to an unassuming dock, depositing me on a sparsely populated street a brief walk from where my holopad told me I was headed.  The passersby around me kept strictly to their business, dressed in a hodgepodge of street clothes, stained work clothes, and the pristine uniforms of front-of-house staff.  I suppose I should’ve expected the public transport to deliver me to the service entrance rather than the swanky lobby from which I’d departed.  

People who own pleasure cruisers don’t take the bus.

In the end, I needed neither my holopad nor the small placard under the ID reader next to the door to identify my destination, as the raised voice of argument pulled my attention there as surely as a map ever could.

“As I’ve already told you,” a man dressed in the same slacks, button-down, and bowtie as Jeremy explained with no small amount of exasperation in his voice, “under no circumstances can I allow uninvited guests into the hangar.  If the venerable ancient wishes to see you, you will be sent an invitation.  Until that time, I advise you to leave.”

“Enough about the damn soulship,” snarled the grizzled voice of a clean-cut man in a pinstripe suit.  “We know He’s here, and—”

A woman, the other of the two figures—one mortal, one tin—whose backs were turned to me, interrupted her companion with a hand on his arm.  She was, at a glance, everything her partner wasn’t.  Her clothes were ragged and stained where his were clean, her hair a tangled mess where his was combed, her voice an eerie calm to his full of fire.  Despite the clear discrepancy in their appearances, however, I found it immediately, stunningly clear that of the two, she was in charge.

“A message, then.  I would wait ’til eternity’s dying gasp if it would earn His favor.  A days are nothing.  I beg of you, tell Caliban—”

“Tell me what?” I intervened.

The valet snapped into a salute.  “Welcome back, sir.  I trust your trip proved—”

The two strangers spun to face me, the man with surprise on his face, the woman with awe.  She fell to her knees, prompting her companion to do the same.  “Lord,” she spoke, the words clearly rehearsed, “this humble penitent begs for your mercy and for your wisdom.”

I blinked, the familiarity of the voice clashing with both its fervor and the spectacle of it all.  It took nearly a minute for me to recognize it.

“Elder Lopez?” I spoke with a furrowed brow, barely believing the words even as I said them.  “What… happened?”  Last I’d seen her, she’d been a bronze tier cultivator with a core of brilliant light.  To even compare the high-and-mighty elder who’d tried to kill me to the wretch in front of me felt like a kind of sacrilege.

“Elder no more, eternal one.  I am but Maria, wayward soul who in her penitence has finally taken the first true step on her Way.”

“My Lord,” the man spoke, “for months we have toiled to bring your message to the people, but they have proven resistant.  We’ve come to report our failure, and beseech a way that we might show them the truth that we have seen.”

I blinked.  “What?”

Lopez—Maria, I corrected myself—spoke.  “If you could show them what you’ve shown me, we could let the world know the magnanimity of your message.  The great powers may tremble, but the people deserve to know you’re on their side.  The Stargazer comes, and in his wake may we find freedom.”

Shit.  Shit shit shit shit shit.  I blasted qi through my heart and lung meridians to school my response, barely keeping a lid on my rising panic.  Unable to fully process what she’d asked, I said the first thing that came to mind.  “Be careful with that name.”  Thread-sensitives tended to disappear, and from what the Gardener had said I got the impression the great powers were getting nervous.

“Of course, great one,” Maria replied, still on her knees.  “I shan’t take it in vain.  About our request…”

“No.”  If seeing the infinite sea had sparked this insanity in Maria, there wasn’t a chance in all the cosmos I would show it to anyone else, especially not after what’d happened to Nick.  

Thoughts still reeling, I stepped around the kneeling pair, desperate for a chance to think all this through.  I flashed the man at the door my best ‘can you believe these crazies?’ look.  “Could you show me back to hangar?  I’m sure these two won’t bother you again.”

He raised an amused eyebrow.  “Of course, sir.  Right this way.”

The door closed behind me.  I followed the valet past the kitchen and the locker room and the back office, infrastructure far beyond the needs of one little skiff.  I barely noticed it.

Locked out and returned to whatever alley from whence she’d come, Maria Lopez may’ve been out of sight, but she and her strange companion remained firmly in mind.  She, at the very least, was convinced.

With every ounce of my being I hoped the Gardener had been right, that I wasn’t the Stargazer, that the stars in my eyes when I cycled my sense meridian were mere coincidence, that somewhere else in the galaxy’s vast expanse some kind of social movement had already begun in the name of some icon that had nothing to do with me.

But Charlotte hadn’t been wrong when she’d pointed out how much my ability to generate light qi threatened existing power structures.  The Arcadian Gardener hadn’t been speaking nonsense when she’d claimed Xavier as a free seer could spark a war.  Maria Lopez wanted to build a religion in my name.

And I hadn’t just managed to align with Death in the perfect circumstances of Lesley’s domain.

I still felt it.

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