TH~SEWHCBGUIDEGEWHJTICS
“Every birth marked the beginning of a story. Since hospital. But I also see myself dead at the bottom of the the world wasn’t stacked infinitely deep in stories, there sea, an old man.” had to be something at the far end. You used to know “You didn’t ask how many stories there were about you.”
“That death of my old self led to something new, He wanted to ask something else, I could tell, but suddenly the wind from home tugged at him. He tried to “Look.” gasp out another question, without success. Soon both Robert peered into the pool, gingerly touching a he and the Rubbish were swirling around and around finger to it in an effort to pull part of it in close to him. the pool, farther with each orbit, and then gone from my Obligingly, a small mound of water with a reflection of sight. 1 repeated all that had happened to myself, SO that his home rose to meet him. “ I see myself dead in the I could remember it when their visit began.
TH~SEWHCBGUIDEGEWHJTICS street from his home when the vision We started with Robert’s own land, circling from came upon him. He realized dimly that Pacific to Atlantic and back again. Sometimes we his body fell Over and entered convulglided scarcely above the ground, sometimes so high sions, while his spirit fell into one of the that we’ d have drifted into space if I allowed myself to holes intheworld’swallanddroPPed into see things that way. He could see the sparks of Awakmy home. The winds cut him lightly, ened souls here and there, sometimes gathered together bringing him back into awareness of himand sometimes all alone with the quiet fires that bum in self as the shaman. all other hearts. Those of his cousins sparked briefly He recognized me, of Course. Xoca painted me in higher as we passed, like calling to like even though one of their early encounters and the memory remained most didn’t recognize my passage consciously. vivid in his memory. He greeted me with the proper “Tell me what you see about your cousins,’’ I sugdeference. “ Greetings to you, spirit of the moving bird, gested+ guardian of the ways of the old winds and illuminator of uWe1l.. - 9 , H~ looked closely, shifting from side to side. “ It looks to me like only about half of them the chambers of the new winds.”
I bobbed up and down in response, my wings flash- - in places where I know there - a lot of native ing in the bright moonlight that always shines here. peoples. I looked up a map of reservation and off- “Greetings to YOU* Student ofthe Rubbish. ‘Hummingreservation aboriginal population clusters, and 1 see bird’ willdo as aname, though I appreciate your attention Some good correlations with areas that still have functo my role.” tioning cultural heritages. But.. .”
He stood upright again. “Very well, Hummingbird.
I interrupted. “Please choose your words carefully. I W h y - I here now?” hear noise when you say things like ‘half of them - in “I see a hole in your sentence, Robert. Please ask places.. .’” He flinched as I gave him back the static that again.” my condition gave to me.
“Ah. My apologies. What led you to bring me here “Sorry, Hummingbird! I.. . I learn the rules still. I at this time?” will make a special offering when I return.”
“Much better. One of the new winds told me that “Thank you. Now, continue.” you needed to understand the state of your cousins.
“Anyway, it seems that about half of my fellow Apparently You’ll have to explain them to others soon, Dreamspeakers do not associate with anything tribal at and I thought it better to show YOU than to lust tell YOU. all. When we fly low, I can see a few of them just about Hang on.” anywhere. Ghetto, suburb, anywhere.”
As soon as I felt him wrap his arms and legs around “Correct,” I said. “And tell me, would you really mY body, just behind the wings, I took Off from mY expect otherwise? After all, if the spirits do exist, and of Perch. He gasped briefly as I grew, from the twice-mancourse we do, then wouldn’t we care about the souls height I’ d held when he came in to something sturdy who live in cities and farms as well as in tribes?The truth enough to move through the new winds safely. of the world doesn’t belong to just one people or to just that: you accepted it in the hospital.” though.” one kind of people. Even though we sometimes have to shout hard - as you know - we never stop trying to talk to all people.”
“I guess I didn’t think of it that way.”
“No, youdidn’t,” I agreed. “You got a little too much early on from Xoca and the Salmon Falls brothers. They mean well too, but they keep thinking of your people as possessing some special darkness, which you don’t. Your ancestors screwed it up in some big ways.. . but so did theirs. Now, look more closely.. . ” I paused for a quick spin and bank. I‘. . . Right down there.”
Robert looked, then laughed. “- a televangelist’s studio! ”
“True,” I said. “Didn’t you learn yet that people understand the spirits in more than one way?”
“Well, yeah, but.. .”
“So he thinks he hears angelic choirs. We do sing, making him not altogether wrong by it. Maybe you could doubt a bit, if you think too securely that nothing like his God actually exists?” bl-rNAmENcA I dove into a narrow valley in the Rockies and followed it to its sister channel in the Andes. I pulled up to let Robert get a good overview before resuming the up-and-down survey. The tumult of spirit speech rose and sank around us, some of the words carried by birds and other messengers and others winging themselves as shimmering constructions of raw essence, while still others passed merely as sounds. “Listen,” I told Robert.
“I don’t understand a word of this,” he said after a moment. “ I thought that everything across the wall spoke one language. I mean, I know about regional variations just from the differences between the trees at home and the ones where Xoca hides out between missions, but.. .”
“Listen again.”
He did. “Wait.. . I can make out a word here and there. - hard, though.”
“Yes. The spirits here don’t always talk about the same things they do around you, and they talk in ways that show the influence of forces you don’t deal with at home. The world branchesdifferently indifferent places.
But remember both your initial confusion and that beginning of understanding. They’re both true, all the time, when you move into a new place. Now, tell me what you see of your cousins.”
“At first I thought they were just swirling around, but I think I see a pattern.” still billowed higher than the Moon around the open wound, more than two Years later. The shrieks of Shattered and shattering souls sounded louder and louder, until we could “talk” only directly from mind to mind.
Physical and mental agony echoed all around us, ripping at our hearts, my feathers and his skin.
“This - awful!” he shouted, just before words I spun out over the Atlantic. We approached one of ing away from the press of the West. Not just geographically, though. Some of them gather along the coasts and in the mountains, not just in the big jungles the edges of their people. They teach what they can to sympathetic outsiders as a substitute.” I chuckled. “ When the right people find the keys in TV documentaries or doctoral dissertations, strange things can happen.
But that would tell another story. What else do you see?”
“I see a matching spiral out, into the farms and cities. I can’t tell who they belong to, precisely.”
“Indeed you can’t. More mixing of the races took place under Spanish and Portuguese rule than further north. They came as conquerors and people out to get rich quick, not as settlers and self-proclaimed humble folk. You know from talking to your own ancestors how hard you have to look to find anything like a ‘pure Anglo,’ but the search takes much, much more effort for a pure Spaniard.. .or a pure Indian, most places. Now, what makes them move ?”
“They think they go to where the people are. They hear needs, or the spirits show them needs, and they go to teach and heal. But.. .”
“Yes, I see something else.”
“I see new sparks in the cities. A lot of new sparks.
None of them seem more than a few years old. Why?”
“Many spirits would like to know that, too, Robert.
They started appearing not long after what some of your cousins call the Avatar Storm started. Something causes a whole generation of new spirit masters and mistresses to spring up here. The older ones seldom realize that these new cousins are calling them, along with the needs they know about sofar. I expect a lot of interesting things in a few years, when the new souls come into their inheritance. Perhaps you’ 11 have something to say to M en “Yes.”
“What made this ?”
I didn’t say anything much in reply, just pulled myself in tight to survive as we rushed toward the eye of the storm. Then we were through, into the Silence. The only sound was my wings’ beats.
“Maybe it can get worse,” he said at last.
“Always,” I agreed.
Once they start hearing the spirits, his kind grow used to always hearing them. Even when they make no effort to pay attention, they hear a constant hum out of everything, organic and inorganic: the pulse of life that defines the world. None of that exists here. In the eye of the storm with a soul, there exists just dead water and below it the dead remains of an island snatched out of reality long ago to serve as a haven.
“Where did you take me?”
“NO place you could find on a map. If you tried to sail here, you’d always find yourself a little off. It would always look natural, too: the compass a little off, wind stronger or weaker, current shifted a bit. This whole dead zone,” I turned to let him see, “covers something like fifty miles here in the spirit world. In your world the whole thing stretches only a few yards. Even that much poisons currents and taints winds, but it might have deteriorated much, much further if fate went another way.”
“How ...” He choked, tried again. “HOW did it happen?”
“A lot of us would like to know that, too. We don’t deal with the dead. We know that some sort of big explosion happened here, and then another one much deeper down among the dead. Then the winds started, and they still blow. It all hangs together, I feel sure, but how, I cannot see. If you ever find out, you’ 11 have a potent thing to bargain with. In the meantime, none of your kind can go here, so nobody can lead the healing.
Maybe someday.”
T a n we leave now?”
“Yes.”
EURm We flew onquietly, Robert clearly recovering as the sounds of the world flooded in again. As we approached Europe, I said, “Time to show you something else again.
Pay attention. I will quiz you as usual.” I could feel him lean forward.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Tell me what it looks like.”
“It looks like a bunch of other shamans out there, but half of themgo around under little mirrored shrouds.
A lot of the rest carry some other kind of soul-spark over the one I recognize.”
“Then you see correctly.”
“What does it mean?”
“You remember how long you struggled before finding out what your soul wants?”
He shuddered. “Oh, yes.”
“Insight comes no more easily to most of your cousins across the sea. Some of them, like you, spend their whole lives thinking themselves mad, and their sparks lie almost completely smothered. Many more come to a false but useful understanding.”
“A what ?”
“I mean to say that they find a way of putting their vision and passion to use even though they don’t fully understand it. If they create art, they think of themselves as having a special eye for their work. As physicians and scientists, they just know that they have aparticular insight for some field, never realizing outside dreams that they hear the spirits with their unAwakened ears.
Some of them believe themselves mediums and other mystics; malicious spirits prey upon many of those, and particularly during this storm, the souls of the restless dead can do terrible things to your unwitting cousins.
All of them maintain some fidelity to themselves, despite their ignorance. When they do fully awaken, they almost always evolve into what you call Solitaries, if not outright Orphans.”
We circled more as he scrutinized the passing landscapes. I could feel him struggle to hold back tears as he grasped the magnitude of what I said. He understood how much hurt those brave men and women endured, how much good they tried to do and failed, how much misery went unaddressed around them for want of the right vision. ‘What would it take to wake them up?”
“You ask a question many also ask. I don’t know. It depends on each individual, really, just as it did with you.”
A long silence ensued. Finally he asked his other question. “What - going on with those two-layered souls!)) I shook my head to clear the static from it, and Robert winced as he realized his mistake. “Some of your cousins do manage to Awaken, but drift for want of the right circumstances. Unlike you, promptly encountering people and spirits who could teach you correctly, something shocks them into enlightenment though they lack a mentor. So they seek, naturally. Some of them find magicians of other Traditions. Souls seldom come with labels saying ‘Property of My Totem.’ The intended shaman may easily end up somewhere else.
The adopted ones still have their underlying nature, but in general they’ 11 never realize it.”
“Does that work?”
I understood what he meant. “ Sometimes. In some cases, the adoptee never makes a good practitioner of another art and drifts through mediocrity. A few of those end up making particularly powerful enemies, when they sell their souls for a grant of real power from one of the Forces Below. Mostly they just don’ t matter.
But some find ways to combine their inner inclinations with the circumstances around them and grow into innovative, powerful practitioners of their arts. We think that many of the innovations in Westem magic over the last three or four hundred years came from shamans who ended up elsewhere.”
“What about.. .”
“The Technocracy? Much harder for someone born to be a shaman. A very few do manage to make their way as futurologists or something else with a lot of room for speculation, but mostly the Technocracy interprets them as crazy and medicates them.”
“So Europe has a lot more shamans than anyone realizes.”
“Yes. If something ever happened to really cripple the coherence of the other traditions, you’d find many more shamans springing up in their own right.’’ AFRICA South again we flew, hurtling up into clouds and gliding through the rain family to emerge high over the middle of the continent.
“I hear strange voices again.”
“Yes.”
But this time Robert listened carefully and managed to figure out more of it on his own. “I see. Different dialects?”
“In part. Some of those spirits speak trade jargons, and for the same reasons humans speak them in southem Africa, the Columbia River, and other places where lots of cultures meet. They develop synthetic labels to bridge the gaps between local experiences. This works fine as long as everyone remembers that the labels do follow individual reality, rather than vice versa. Trouble comes when people go on a kick like Joseph Campbell and assume that the overall averages matter more than individual cases. But I digress. Some spirits also independently invent new words to refer to changing circumstances.
“The last time I checked, I found more than two dozen separate terms for the spirits who lose their homes when dams flood out river valleys. Gradually the spirits and their mediators like you will decide which terms work best, and others will slip away. Every change in the environment breeds this kind of thing. You hear the sound of life happening, and it happens messily all at once. Now, tell me what you see,”
“It looks like South America.”
“HOW so?”
“I see a lot of shamans - more here than there, I think - retreating from modem civilization, hanging to their tribes. And I see shamans in the cities and farms again, tied to the newer communities. Wait.”
He paused while peering closer, sometimes motioning me down to look at particular cities, mostly in or new war zones.
“It looks like the urban shamans mostly belong to the last generation,” he said at last. “The young ones seem to mostly head out to tribal areas. Do they?”
“Yes, they do, for two reasons. Some flee out of fear.
They’ ve seen genocide and attempted genocide, famine and all the other problems of modernity. The spirits of the dead torment them. So they go somewhere they hope will be quieter. Others go deliberately, the brave ones who’ d rather stay but whose guides tell them that they must survive the troubles ahead so that they can participate in recovery.”
“Troubles ahead?”
“You didn’t think that all the African wars were over, I hope.’’ “Well, no.” Silence. I could feel tears welling up again in him.
“Save the tears for now, Robert. Look on those ready for the future.”
“Well, okay. Um, things look more tangled in Muslim areas, but I don’t know how to make sense of what I’m seeing.”
“You remember the preacher back home.”
“I do.”
“The same thing applies here. Someone who believes in one God and His prophet doesn’ t want to believe in spirits bent on telling him things, out of submission to God. So he interprets them as angels instead, or as with the European unknown shamans, simply as inspiration and intuition. The colors look different because of the overlap with Muslim and Middle Eastern traditions you haven’t dealt with much yet.”
ASIA East and north, across storm-troubled seas, we went.
“Watch carefully,” I told him, “and don’t expect any generalizations you make to apply everywhere in Asia.
When it comes to size and complexity, Asia has more than you do.”
“Sometimes you really have to strain to get across a point without using the words banned to you, don’t you?” he asked in a sudden digression.
“I only have to strain when I’m talking to humans,”
I replied. No offense, but the real problem here comes from your lack of understanding. If you knew more of the spirit world, I could use more of my own language, including symbols in passion and feather, and say it with more nuance and less struggle. Maybe someday you’ll hear me as myself, and glory in it.” tlsorry.” ‘IN0 harm done.” We flew in the now-familiar pattern of high glides and sudden dives.
“This looks simpler,” he said.
“In some ways, yes, complications intrude less.
Apart from the basic reality of a third of the world’ s population interacting as they have for more centuries than you have years of life. What makes the difference is that the hostile forces overlay and creep in, but manage to destroy less.”
“In the big cities I see some of those orphans, though.”
“Yes, and more of them all the time. The other traditions mostly neglect Asian cities, apart from the martial artists and a few other specific factions, and the Union sees them as labor pools of the unenlightened, not as a place to go looking for recruits except when particular individual prodigies catch their attention. So when your own people spread thin - as they must, in the face of such numbers and need - the safety net often fails. Stories of madmen and terrorists often begin with such orphans.”
“I didn’t expect to see so many of us there are in China. I would have guessed that the Cultural Revolution and everything else stamped out more.”
T h e y learned to wear new hats. Literally, in some cases. Did you never notice how much a crusading Stalinist or Maoist sounds like an ecstatic trancer?”
“They just made themselves into communists ?”
“Not always, obviously. But yes, dozens of your cousins hid themselves that way. Some of them now back movements like Falun Gong, emphasizing ways of evoking spiritual power in everyday life. They hope to train up a new generation of shamans out of the sea of curious seekers.”
And with that we flew home. ”I’ve seen things you people.. .” I only get that far when he interrupts me. ‘I.. .wouldn’tbelieve,”hesays, inamuch better impersonation of Rutger Hauer than I can do. ‘‘Attack ships on fire offhe shoulder of Orion.. .” His noma1 voice return. “Actually, I never went quite that far.” p, L ‘$4 D R E A ~ I I S ~ E R S We laugh. It is our first fully relaxed moment together, a reminder that for all our differences, we do have some things in common. He lives and moves in a metaphysic almost totally unlike mine, and yet I share some things with him that I don’ t with any other member of my own “Tradition” that I’ve yet encountered. Not to put too fine a point on it, we’re both geeks: