Empathy

He stood stooped on the balcony, black hair dripping over his face, scratching a word or a symbol on to the top of the wooden balustrade with his once beloved laser knife, staring intently at his handiwork. Looking down at the city filled him with too much pain; looking up at the night sky afforded no respite, man’s naive dreams tracking satellites along lonely predetermined robotic trajectories.

He heard footsteps approaching, didn’t bother looking round.

“Thought I’d find you out here. Nice night.”

Silence.

"I've ironed out that bug. Come and see what you think."

He lifted his gaze to stare out over the desert city with its strange stone tower edifices and its tiny oases and let out a sigh.

"It's a bad one, isn't it? Are you going to be OK?"

He turned to look his friend in the eye.

“I don’t think I am this time.” His eyes dropped to the floor. “It just won’t go away.”

“Here, come on inside. Nothing’s that bad.”

They walked into the gloom and she clicked on a little lamp. Garish plastic fish were set into action by the heat of the bulb, darting like drunken wasps amongst the racing bubbles.

After a long moment’s quiet he spoke.

“I’m sorry, Sonia. I waved a newscast out of Mongolia. I can’t get it out of my mind.”

"They'll find out why the horses are dying, Joe. I wired the research team some creds myself the other day."

“It isn’t that. Sure it’s a tragedy, another of the world’s nascent tragedies. It’s the bloody empathic casts. Tell me - what’s the point of all that pain?”

“Well, I doubt I’d have understood the situation in Mongolia without it. The fifteen year old boy?”

Joe seemed to affirm that he’d waved the same cast.

“I’d never have known the myth, the history, the place that horses have in their culture without it. And that feeling of mortal bewilderment. It got them my creds, Joe. Doesn’t that make it a good thing?”

"It was that kid's awe - reverence even - at the Western magic that had given him the chance to tell his story to the world. I felt that deeper than the loss of the horses - didn't you?"

“Well why shouldn’t he, Joe? Empathic casting has built incredible bridges between people. So much was lost in misunderstanding before.”

"We've become a bunch of compassion junkies. Feeling good because we think we're finally getting to be a truly global nation, sharing the sorrows and joys that exist around the world. Feeling so damn human. And meanwhile, not twenty miles from here, the most fertile land in Europe is being blown away by the winds, and no one does a blind thing about it. Some magic. Some enlightened culture."

Sonia looked at him, searchingly, not understanding what he meant, wishing the empathic sense wasn’t something confined to the netted consoles that dispensed it. He finally looked up at her.

“I’m so full of other people, Sonia, I don’t know who I am anymore.”

As she looked into his eyes filling up with tears, she knew she wouldn’t be able to reach him, knew that she would have to leave him alone to his dark night.

"I'll leave you a copy of the new program anyway. We're on to a winner with the dragon ride. It's going to bring people a lot of happiness, Joe. Maybe you can look it over when you're feeling better. A bit of good VR's probably what you need anyway. Some escapism." She couldn't smile though.

His eyes didn’t leave the floor as she walked towards the door, turning to look at him, puzzled, turning away again and leaving the apartment.

He sat there for a while, feeling no pity for himself, feeling nothing, not even the freedom he had to feel nothing. Unable to find his way inside. His brain clicked in again too soon, habit overcoming the strange stillness. Thoughts began to thread their way across his mind, and he reached for the wolfskin tobacco pouch his grandfather had stitched together an age ago out in the Russian taiga.

Would he ever make anything that would be treasured like this pouch by his grandchildren? Sure, his latest VR program was breathtaking, wonderful, but in a few years it would be paling in people’s memories, just another experience. And fifty years down the line he doubted the hardware to run it would even exist anymore.

He had wanted to touch people somewhere, to reach down inside them, to show them an awe that existed beyond the workaday human farm, beyond the little jungle clearing villages of the mutant human monkey. He’d hoped to show people how to trace the information their perceptions sent them, trace it back to their cognitive centres, give them that access to their own cognition, the tools to overcome the conditioning that society had imprinted upon them, the ability to change themselves at the core. Intricate self knowledge. He knew now though that they would treat his little VR journey through mythology as a white knuckle rollercoaster ride. The only awe they were likely to experience was that of the technology and programming it had taken to create it.

The blue smoke from his cigarette curled out of the french windows, drawn by the night, and he knew what he had to do.

He turned on the crane light and sat before his console. After tapping a quick message through to Sonia, asking her to present the program to the agents alone, that he had to go away, he connected with Virgin and booked a seat on the next flight out to Tomsk.

He paged through to Hane, a friend who dealt in hardware, but Hane wasn’t receiving calls, so instead he rummaged through the closet for his backpack, filling it with the maps he’d need for his journey, tobacco pouch, water bottles and sleeping bag. He zipped his laser knife into the pocket. A bleep rang out from his console. It was Hane. He switched the output to speech, the input to voice recognition.

“Hey Joe, what’s the hang?” the simulated voice spoke out.

“Hi Hane. I need an empathy recorder and recharger, solar.”

“No problem. You want them now?”

“Could you have them sent out to the airport? I leave in three hours.”

“I’ll bring them out to you myself.”

“Thanks Hane. Does your portable take credit transmissions?”

“Sure does. You wiring through now?”

“Yeah. Here it comes. See you later.”

The air at Tomsk was musty, smelled so different from that in England. Joe breathed deeply of it before arranging an internal flight out to Kyzyl. He had the tongue from his father, who had grown up in Siberia, but had left, or rather run away, when in his early twenties. Joe had been out this way once before, as a boy of ten, the only time that his father had returned to visit his family. He had been mesmerised by the wide open spaces, the village’s affinity with the harsh land, and knew that one day he would come back when a man. He had kept in sporadic touch with his grandfather, finding mutual points of interest despite their wholly different worlds.

From Kyzyl he took a boat up the river Bol to the town of Sistig-Khem. The land was barren and wild, as brown and leathery as the faces of his fellow travellers, whose eyes glinted like the winter sun on the cold water. Joe’s black hair tumbled about in the wind, lashing and stinging his face, and he found himself smiling right up from his boots, in a way he hadn’t been able to for far too long. He bought a mule in the town, and enough food to keep them both on the thirty mile trek out to the north east.

He rode through the night, checking his maps carefully. The mule needed little rest, and seemed happy to keep plodding onwards. As he reached the village, the sun already well into its arc across the vast sky, he met an old woman wrapped in furs, busy hunting down plants.

“Zdravstvuitye,” he greeted her, dismounting. ”I am Joe, son of Ungrei, grandson of Tlaloc. I am here to see my grandfather.”

The woman danced over to him to get a better look. Her black eyes swept him over until, seemingly satisfied, she wrinkled up in a delighted grin.

“Tlaloc said that you would come. We tease him that it is an old man’s fancy, but here you are. Tlaloc is never wrong, that old devil. Come, Joe!”

“I am an old man, Joe. I do not know what your machine is, nor what you would that I do with it.”

“I’m sorry, grandpa. The machine can record you, record your mind, everything you see and feel..."

A fat woman stumbled into the shack and stood staring at Joe, unblinking, pouting sulkily, hands defiant on her huge hips. Tlaloc, otherwise still motionless, ran the backs of his fingers over the reindeer hide he was sat upon cross legged. He seemed amused at the intrusion.

“Please meet Varia. She is working with me.”

“They cannot have chosen this weak one over me,” she spat, still staring at Joe, who looked away, uncomfortable.

“Do not mind Varia,” said Tlaloc. “Her ways are very strange. Perhaps she will make us hot tea.”

The woman shambled over to the fire and moved the dangling pot of water into the heat, stealing glances at Joe over her shoulder.

“Your machine, kolbakka...”

“I want people to see what you see, grandpa, to know what you know. I can record you at work, and, when they play the recording, it will be as if they are you. They will see everything you see, hear everything you hear. Know your techniques. It will change them, give them the chance to change themselves.”

“And who are you, that will have people change for you?”

“No one has knowledge of their own soul anymore where I live. They know everything about things of no consequence, but this has been lost, and they do not even see the loss.”

“My boy, knowledge does not die without the minds of men to live in. It likes the minds of men, of some men, and this is why it chooses to live in them.”

“But if they could only see, grandpa. You are shaman. Do you not wish to show them?”

Tlaloc released a roar of laughter.

“You have come here to take the spirits back to England in your machine!”

He laughed until he was almost gasping for breath.

“Your father ran away to England to escape from the spirits, from the black spirits who chased him about, who spooked and scared him and made him crazy that he would become shaman, and you travel all this way to take them back to England with you in your machine!”

He swayed with laughter, clutching the fur of his rug to steady himself.

“The spirits would not go with him, with that malchik and his ugly machine,” threw in Varia, as she presented the tea, sitting down with them.

“Varia is afraid that the spirits will leave her now that you have come,” explained Tlaloc. “She has been my student for only three years. But they will not leave her - they are very comfortable in her fat belly!” He chortled some more while Varia looked daggers at him. “The spirits find the ones they want - they do not need to travel in your machine. They have found you, although so far away, have they not?”

Joe’s silence and bowed head confirmed his grandfather’s question. He remained still, holding the tea in his lap.

“It’s so hard, grandpa, that they are blind to them, blind to the worlds of transformation. Every day they become a little more like strangers to me. Every day the worlds we live in move a little bit further apart.”

“It is the way it is, my poor boy. This path of ours, it is a lonely one. The freedom that you would give to all, it cannot be come by easily. Man is a proud and lazy beast - he will not give up what he has while he has breath. Always, the spirits must hound him across much time before he will become what he is to become. A man must first die before he can become a shaman. People do not wish to do this. It is no different here.”

“Then you can’t help me?”

“I cannot change the world to fit in with the way you are. You think the fiddle player does not feel loneliness? The shepherd?”

Varia slurped on her tea whilst loosening tobacco threads into a pipe for them to smoke.

“But enough of my words. I can see that you know what I say. Varia has prepared us a pipe. And everyone wants to see more of the grand Josefka from the English city.”

Joe sat, the gusts outside drumming on the sides of the shack, feeling that the answer he had come looking for had been snatched away by the wind before it had had a chance to form itself. He took the pipe from Varia’s outstretched hands, lifted it to his lips and gently inhaled the smoke.

“Mother! Mother!” cried out the little girl, almost tumbling over in excitement. “I am to show the people in England how to make paints from the plants and draw them a picture. I think I will draw our house, or the wolf that I saw with Uncle Viktor!”

“And I will skin them a rabbit and work its hide,” gushed her brother, not wishing to be outdone.

“And Josef is going to bring us back something that they will do for us!” added the girl. “And he has a dragon that he will bring us to ride.”

“It’s not a real dragon, stupid,” scoffed the boy.

“Yes it is Vania. It is real, isn’t it mother?”

main: crow magic e-mail: sam@crowcity.com home page: www.sam.crowcity.com