Silver's Gods Read online

  “Yes to the Feds, and probably the Russians. Maybe the Chinese.” I pursed my lips. “And maybe others,” I said.

  “Who others? Israelis?” So worldly, she was, saying this. I felt a rush of fondness for her. So like a daughter I had once known.

  I smiled. “Maybe them, they are good at this, and have had long practice at not trusting people.” I shook my head. Out with it. “But no, I meant there are some others like me. At least one. Older.” I paused and looked off into the distance, down the beach.

  Jessica blinked behind the glasses. “What do you mean?” Fear, in her shoulders and her grip on the coffee mug.

  “Let me explain. Did you wonder where I had gone six years ago? You had, of course. Well, let me tell you. This, you should probably not tell anyone.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Spy stuff. I suppose I have been, more or less, always a spy. It is the only conclusion that makes sense to me, which I came to long ago. We observe our environment and react to it. We have senses, which implies intelligence, and we catalog our way through the world, classifying and learning and sharing what we know. This is, at its base, what intelligence work is all about. Learning what is going on in the world and reacting to it. Guiding events. I have learned at the foot of a hundred masters of the trade. More, perhaps. So, yes I am a spy, and perhaps I shouldn’t, like most spies, be trusted.

  Some intelligence organs gather information, like our eyes and ears. They take it in. More specialized services process and analyze this data, scoring it and testing its truth, the likelihood that this reported data represents the world, the true state of affairs. So the intelligence apparatus is the sense organs of the state, its eyes and ears, taste and touch. The analogy is apt, don’t you think? Our governments are functional organisms, requiring a host body to sustain them, senses for gathering and processing information, and an executive function to decide. The analytical function can also do something that humans alone have learned to do. It can lie.

  There is, in dealing with spies, always deception. Is their king preparing for war, or isn’t he? Are they suffering from poor crops, or is this a ruse to lure us into an attack? How many submarines can they make if they order this many feet of hull-grade steel? How many did they make? Can we confirm it? Against a determined adversary wise to your collection efforts, how can you be sure that what we see, what we hear, what we learn is real? Is true?

  This drives men mad. The hall of smoke, a wise man once described it to me. We can trust nothing. We can believe no one. So, I learned to trust only what I learned and things only I knew for certain. I had two advantages over most spies. Time and my dreams. Time, to wait, to watch, to see how things play out. I was only in the service of my dreams, and the ones who guided them, whoever or whatever they were. I had no master other than those tasks which were mysteriously set before me, by them.

  This maddened me, I am certain. There are long stretches of my past in which I am certain I was mad, crazed, driven to the limits of sanity and beyond by what I had seen, what I had done, what my dreams showed me. I often dream of a deep green ocean through which powerful shadow-shapes, unlike any fish in our seas, swim and sing to each other across the deep. Their song never ends.

  How is it I dream this? Is this what drives me? Are these creatures, like whales but so unlike them, singing their endless, looping, dreaming song, singing for me? Of me? To me? Or am I just a witness to a thought, a memory, of some other being, which was a witness, perhaps one of them? Or something else entirely, and I am an insane woman who cannot die.

  And you must realize that I am sure of this—I cannot die. I have, I think, come close to death many times, or rather I have come close to what should have been death. Fire, flood, war, betrayal, poison… I have seen it all, as they say. But always, I seem to survive. Most memories I have of these events are fragmentary, for I believe our minds dislike to store such evidence of trauma and guard sanity from them. I have choked on smoke, been slashed and stabbed, felt the heat of poison in my gullet, tasted froth in my mouth, and yet I wake later, sometimes far away and much later, whole and unhurt in some quiet, peaceful place, naked as a babe, but whole. I tell you this so you know what you are dealing with. I am not completely human anymore, if I was ever so except for those first years before I found the silver pearl by the river.

  But I hurt, you see. I feel pain, and being killed usually brings pain, so I do not seek it or take risks I can avoid. Like you, everyone is like this. It is part of being human, which I suppose I still share. But disease I have never known, other than to watch those around me wither and waste away from it. I am protected, somehow, from this. I also suspect the new weapons, the blasts of gunpowder and other explosives, might kill me. If vaporized or burnt to ash quickly, would I die? I am a coward in this, at least, as I have, despite my many years of madness, never sought to find out. Or if I have, then I suspect the gods have taken this memory from me. I cannot be certain, but then I cannot be certain of anything. Can any of us?

  So, I learned. First I studied the wise men who sought to be near to power to attain some of it themselves. These I cultivated in a hundred kingdoms through a dozen ages. I talked with them, worked for them, and learned their ways. I became a useful tool for them. Ruthless, clever, proficient at tradecraft, and in time I mastered it. I learned the myriad ways men give away their lies. I learned how to compromise men, fool women, and turn even the most ardent enemy to my hand. I lied, stole, seduced, and killed. I have done many evil deeds in my time on this earth. I am not proud, but I am resigned to do what I must. I needed to do these things, usually, so I did them.

  Also, I learned much by watching myself and thinking about what my dreams drove me to do. After some dream task, I would ponder why I did this thing, in particular. For example, I would feel I needed to meet and befriend a certain man, a doctor, as he paid men to bring him fresh corpses in the dead of night for his studies. He was a drunk and prone to mad fits of drinking and raucous outbursts. He was a scofflaw. He needed comfort, so I gave it to him, living with him for a time as his paramour. Why this was, I did not know, but later, upon reflection, I learned that he had created a school of medicine, many years later, that bore his name for centuries in that place. Perhaps I helped him, I cannot say, but he did some good in the world after I met him. This is perhaps the point.

  I would try to study why I did these things, to help people with some task or to tell them some story. My efforts were useful it seemed. A nudge here, a kind word there, listening to someone, teaching this one to read, or this mathematikoi to figure volume of a shape…it all seemed as if I was a shepherd, of sorts. Guiding these people, my charges sent to me in crystalline visions in my dreams. I was helping people, ordinary people who later, more often than not, seemed to accomplish or assist in something foundational to a larger effort. The school of medicine, for example, saved many lives, and I have read that many historians trace the roots of modern medicine back to the tradition of such places, in that part of the world. Did I do that? Did I help with that?

  Perhaps I did. I began to study the past since, with writing, there was a now past to study. For long years I have learned and studied the past, and while I cannot say for certain I did this or I did that, there are patterns I can see, shapes to the movement of society I can discern, steered by my efforts. By my dreams and the things they drove me to do.

  Why should this surprise me? Your guess is as good as mine. It appeared as if I was an instrument. A tool put to some use by a long, slow thought watched the world somehow and needed hands to act, a voice to speak with. What gods who have such power would need an agent such as I? It is a ridiculous notion, is it not? A god, by definition, wields power over creation, all stories seem to say so. But many stories also put restrictions on our gods, that this one is the god of the air, of the sea, of the earth, of the underworld, and has no power over a realm not theirs. Perhaps that is what this is. This is a thought I have long had, that the god or gods I am agency of ha
ve limits: this place, this planet, or even the universe, reality, is not theirs. Perhaps they are weak here, or are beholden to others.

  You can see why, perhaps, thinking such things, I might be mad. Ruminating on faith, or the actions of the gods, drives people mad, I think. Or is the definition of madness. Perhaps by degrees this makes you mad, but those who are most fervent are, if history is a guide for us, the most mad. And I am among the most fervent, as I have something that the prophets and zealots and saints do not. I have proof. In my memories, my existence, I have proof I am the agent of some Mind or Minds that speak to me in riddles and portents, but speak to me they do.

  Proof? Yes, I have it. For long, long years I existed in the dreamtime, living as I could: witch, wife, or madwoman. Doing the bidding of my dreams when I must, but otherwise never questioning, since there was nothing to question. I could tell anyone I liked what I thought, that I had perhaps known a mythical king of their tribe, when I had been his queen. People would, I learned, dismiss me as another madwoman when I did this. In the dreamtime, before all of this, it didn’t matter. Nobody could prove anything, and over a long life my recollections of what happened would diverge from the myths and legends people told of themselves and their histories. This is normal. Story turns to myth and slips, inexorably, into legend.

  But now—or rather, recently—there are those who keep the story of the world. Historians keep what they know, which is the accepted and shared story of what happened, though they quarrel like rats in a cage over the details. I can, for example, tell you Napoleon’s favorite meal, or Louis of France, what he liked whispered to him in his ear in bed. I know these and other secrets too.

  And there are those, beyond the historians, who keep these secrets. For instance, I know why the fledgling United States hanged seven men after the Revolution, in a quiet Virginia glade, on General Washington’s orders. They know this, the keepers of secrets of the United States Federal Government, though it is a secret buried so deep I doubt they know they even know it now. A banal thing, minor now, but then, to them, a shameful thing they had to hide. I know other, more recent things which only someone like me, long-lived and driven to insert herself into business most would prefer to avoid, would or could know.

  I know that in the East, in the Soviet Union, they built two dead-man systems to deter attacks. Fearsome things, hidden well; bombs hidden in shallow caves, massive bombs. Bombs that could poison the world, kill every human on Earth should it go off there, in Russia. I know that one of them is still, or was twenty years ago, operational. They know such things. The spies, those who would style themselves the true historians of the secret truths of the world.

  But beyond what I know about the past, I also know that I am recently in a novel situation for me. I am hunted. Your FBI seeks me. Others too, I suspect, have noticed me. One cannot hide anymore, not easily, if you move through civilization. Before it was simple. Information ambled, glacial. A man tasked with protecting his Prince, the spymaster, would gather reports of a woman such as I, who had the ear of this magnate or that princeling. But he would grow old and die before such reports could gather, be matched and compared to each other. Spies grow in power as their knowledge, their data grows. The more data, the more information, the more to spy on, and government is mostly about power over data, its currents and flows. It makes it hard to escape notice, these scriveners, photographers, and tabulators of the movements and actions of people.

  So, they are after me. You saw it when they interviewed you, did you not? But interpreting fact is everything, so I could lie and just be, as I seem, a woman with a crazy story. But I need your help. Something is happening which will, once it occurs, be impossible to stop. Something that will, just as the step from the dreamtime to the waking, civilized world all around us, be a marker for the future to look back on and say, “This was where it all changed.” A terminus, a line which, like language or writing, once crossed can never be uncrossed. A Rubicon. We will cross this line, of this I am certain. It is a cliff we walk at night. We know there is a cliff, but which step will drop us over the edge? I need to be there when it happens. Come with me.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I was always European. In Europe. Always had been. People came up out of Africa following waves of earlier people, or near-people, in the young dreamtime. When human minds were still unkindled, still animal or nearly so. What makes our minds so different, so new, is that key aspects of our brains, how they fold in some areas and grow in others when compared to early human or proto-human brains. We’re different. Newer. An accident, perhaps, of evolution.

  But I never left the Old World, as it’s called today. Or was until recently. I first came to America in 1565 in Mexico, or what is now Mexico. Me-hi-co, they called it when the Spanish took it. New Spain. After that, Mexico, a part of Spain. So I knew only a little more about it than you do, probably. I had never lived there.

  My family was probably from what is now central Russia, having had, I recall, a tradition of being former elk and reindeer hunters. They had settled there after the ice had receded, generations before my time, it seems. The men still hunted the great deer when they could, but had only legends of the great mammoths. I only saw a few myself, much later and very far north. So I think they were dwindling even then. The Ice gave life to a wide region south for long, long miles. As it melted, the streams and lakes filled, so life flocked there.

  I say probably, because I honestly do not know. Couldn’t find the place if you gave me a map, and wouldn’t remember enough about it to know for sure. I was a child first, and then a fugitive, thoroughly lost in the world. I was scared out of my wits for several lifetimes at least, maybe more. Perhaps then I went mad. Hard to say, really. My point though, was that my genes gave me my skin tone, brown as a bear if I work at it.

  So it amazed me. Here were people, two whole continents of people, unknown to the world except by vague rumor. Brown people like me, or close enough. I fell in love with the New World. It enthralled me. You cannot know this joy. It was beautiful, Mexico was. Orderly and civilized. Merchants sold their goods in much the same way as in European cities. Men and women worked, farmed mostly, but also a lot of urban specialized trades and artisans. There were schools and great universities. Priests, mysterious and frightening as all priests are, perhaps of a more visceral fright, but priests all the same. New architecture, religion, tradition, myths, legends, it was a treasure. The entire world, all of Europe and Asia, shocked and amazed and eager to learn of the New World. It changed everything.

  Like the other changes, the big changes such as language and writing, it was, once made, unstoppable.

  My dreams the first few lives I spent in Mexico were of an ocean, hotter than blood and blue as turquoise, suffused with a song of the most rapturous joy. Of being swept along with an ocean of pure, astonished happiness. Music that soared through wild structures of emotion and logic with equal ease, climbing upwards to a peak, a plateau of mathematical ecstasy. Joy at the discovering this world, joy to this world. This song suffused me, in my dreams and in my waking life it drew me to learn as much as I could of this new world. I lived in Mexico for many lifetimes, all throughout the south, and down even to Peru.

  It was a race; you could see it all around you. A race to meet people, to talk to them, to learn their ways before they dwindled and evaporated, like smoke through the trees. Like a mist. Everywhere was chaos. Upheaval. Disease spreading everywhere. Spreading like a wave before us, coming with our animals, their pests, even from within us. Perhaps not me, as no disease has ever troubled me, but from those I came with. Panic bubbled just under the surface of society, for generations. This damages societies, has long-lasting effects. It still to me has never recovered, and the echoes of that time slosh around like waves in a pond. I fret upon this still. It gnaws at me.

  You don’t know, as an American, much about this. They have kept it from you. Oh yes, they have, believe me. I see you doubt me, but you weren’t there. I was there
. I was there with the Spanish, and later the French, and eventually you English. Just like the English, forever sticking their noses in where they don’t belong. Even the Romans saw it. Nasty people. And yes, I know you’re not English anymore. I get it. U-S-A. U-S-A. Almost as bad. But it’s not your fault you don’t know, that you’re mostly ignorant of all this. Intentionally so, by design.

  Did you know there were at least one hundred and fifty million people, in North America alone, when Columbus landed? At least. The place was crawling with them. And they all died. Most of them long before the Spanish came. Plague took them, brought by lice, either on us or the animals. I don’t know which type, as I was far away and came here later. The few that survived in North America are in concentration camps. Settled like cattle, and monitored as closely, out of a fear now centuries old; old enough to have slipped from fear to tradition. It was genocide, intentional or not. Apocalypse.

  So I came here, frantic and driven, and I learned. I met their wise men and women and spoke much with them about their traditions and histories. I learned of the Maya, and that the Aztec were the latest in a long line of civilizations, stretching back millennia. I felt sick, and still do when I think of the loss, the lost knowledge, what we do not know about who these people were or where they came from, how they thought of themselves. What their stories were—from their dreamtime—that became their traditions, myths, legends. That became them, and that they became. We become our stories, did you know that? It’s true. People believe what they are told, mostly, so we believe them and become them. If you can catch them young enough, people will believe whatever the fuck you tell them. Look at Santa Claus.

  Anyway, here I was, so happy to be there, so desperate to learn as much as I could before it went away, before everyone I needed to talk with died. It terrified me. And it wasn’t easy, as a woman, getting around Mexico back then. I couldn’t just walk into a village and become their witch. I didn’t know what to say; I didn’t speak their languages. I didn’t really look like them, although if I got enough sun I could brown enough. But my eyes are not their eyes. So I needed to stay with the Spanish and live some role that fit in with them. Highborn ladies were rare, in those days, with the Spanish. But they brought plenty of whores with them.