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Anthien City
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After eating a breakfast of eggs and cold meat the Company paid a fare for three. Their shuttle left the heights of the mountains and flew over the huge bastions of stone, streaked with scummy white patches of frost. They rose to the level of the low clouds on that cold and cheerless morning, breaking through to see the blue sky, and in the distance, the grey orb of Anthien City. It was the closest to Space they ever came on their travels.
Distressingly the coffin-like shuttle began to descend rapidly. Jake's stomach made the motion of moving to his throat. Tess was even more pale than usual and had her eyes closed tight. Bronze's stomach was unaffected by the nauseous aerial twists and turns. What really frightened him was the height. The prospect that any high-flying Pokemon could collide with the ship and crack it open like an egg, and they, the yolk, would be cast like pebbles down a chasm, tumbling and feeling no foothold save for wind, was nearly unbearable. He busied himself with looking at the seat in front of him. In this way he learned to add a fear of heights to the fear of the ocean, and, more unfortunately, the fear of falling into an ocean. To be dashed against a mountainside was alright, as long as it was quick, but to experience the terror of the fall and then the intolerable experiences of drowning was the worst combination he considered.
"It will really kill you," said his inner tormenter. "Soon all of you will be screaming, screaming, running in circles. You won't be able to stop it."
Increasingly Bronze had been aware of the duality between angelic protectors such as the Swords of Justice and other malevolent presences. There came moments at night of absolute terror where he had to bite his lip to keep from screaming for no good reason. The world was increasingly becoming crazy and hostile. The emnity of his environment and the inability to trust anyone outside of his immediate circle was becoming unbearable. He was a hunted man, one of three members in a set that was trying to thwart the plans of the most dangerous organization on Earth. Every part of his mind was experiencing a reluctance and difficulty to go on. The strength of these bad feelings bewildered and nearly knocked him down at times. What enabled him to go on was the knowledge that every step was bringing him closer and closer to the end of the Plan, closer and closer to answers.
Though he was safe on the elementary physical level, the assaults on his spirit had been increasing. If the attacks had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging in his mind, telling him not to do this or some silly thing might befall him, or even just plain and base images of horror. Indeed, no imagined agony could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the days passed, that these demons were inside-out, having their hearts of their faces and shallowness in their hearts. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds and nations: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness? What kept him steady, long after all possibility of thinking about something else when the attacks came had disappeared, was the decision that if he must either hear actual temptation, or he must hear idiot insults designed to wear him down, he would rather hear insults.
It was good that he was traveling with friends, especially Tess. Her bright spirit and beauty were like a rainstorm that crossed the dry and dusty plain of his life and irrigated his defoliated soul with its splendor. Whenever he was tortured with visions of screaming things or sorcerers or treachery or cruelness, he felt a reassurance that in Tess, there was an almost buttery warmth, mixed with dark hair and sparkling eyes, an assurance that there were still humans that were not going mad, not being subjected to these torments. She was unbearably precious to him in a way that the Love of the Flesh cannot get across. The physical warfare had the effect of making Bronze increasingly value his companions and made him access the real fact that the deepest form of Love is not sexual in any way. It is fully dependent on the beloved.
...
They were coming into Anthien City's orbit, nearly five thousand feet above sea level. The city of the future, proclaimed the holographic billboards. It was a metropolis controlled by the Rorian branch of the Association Government, hanging overhead the western sea like a rigged man-of-war. It was a city that was flying, constructed and geared up for the third millennium, filled with everything the body wanted and nothing that the soul needed. Three square miles of grey steel, white lights, and automobiles, a microcity of five thousand permanent souls, each with stories more heartbreaking stories than the last.
The city was powered by a hypermatter annihilation energy core that consumed twenty-one times the electrical needs of all of Silvent City. Electromagnetic levitation rings and static discharge veins caused the city to float like a grey balloon. Domestic affairs were powered by clear solar panels that covered every building and were also used as windows. They gave enough energy yields to shoulder the lights and plumbing. The actual core infrastructure itself was powered by a mix of perpetual motion and irregular discharges along with other emissions from bunches of wild Magnemite that clustered around the exterior generators. Under the city's steel and iron were six emergency retrorockets and a reporter system that could have split the earth apart if their energy was focused on any bit of land.
In Anthien there is one main island and three satellites. The orbital islands are not orbital at all and are connected by electrostatically suspended bridges the size of double freeways. There were hotels and casinos filled with wandering addicts and perverts looking for dopamine fixes, restaurants and outposts stuffed with smiling staff. It was the time of the League, the town's soon-to-be yearly exercise in frivolity and chaos, its way of saying thank you, come again, good luck, and nice to have you to the eight hundred or so college students at Anthein College who would be getting their holiday break from classes. Most would pack up and go home, but all would definitely stay at least long enough to take in the festivities, the street disco, the carnival rides, the nickel movies, and whatever else could be had, over or under the table, for kicks. It was a wild time in a wild city, a chance to get drunk, pregnant, beat up, ripped off, and sick, all in the same day.
In the middle of town a community-conscious landowner had opened up the square and permitted a traveling troupe of enterprising migrants to set up their carnival with rides, booths, and public washrooms. The rides were best viewed in the dark, an escapade in gaily lit rust, powered by unmuffled tractor engines that competed with the wavering carnival music that squawked loudly from somewhere in the middle of it all. But on this cold day the roaming, cotton-candied masses were out to enjoy, enjoy, enjoy. A ferris wheel slowly turned, hesitated for boarding, turned some more for onboarding, then took a few full rotations to give its passengers their money's worth; a merry-go-round spun in a brightly lit, gaudy circle, the peeling and dismembered horses still prancing to the melody of the canned calliope; carnival goers threw baseballs at baskets, dimes at ashtrays, darts at balloons, and money to the wind along the hastily assembled, ramshackle midway where the hawkers ranted the same try-yer-luck chatter for each passerby.
The shuttle hailed its approach and landed in one of the city's hangars. Bronze departed and found that the hangar wall was to his left and some apparently some deserted industrial buildings on his right. At the bottom the mist from the chemical runoff was partly thick. Wasn't there some mental disease in which quite ordinary objects looked to the patient unbelievably ominous? Great bulbous shapes of cement, strange brickwork bogeys, glowered at Bronze over dry scrubby rubber plains, pock-marked with grey pools and intersected with the remains of a light railway.
All three of them rushed into the shadow of the dead factory, partially closed off from the rest of the city's glittering exterior. There were, at that hour, no vagrants, for the city police cleared them away from the landing areas every night. The factory partially overhung the leering abyss of ocean and blue. Still they had to dangerously muddle around the brinks of the city to find a quiet spot. Bronze wondered how only five thousand people could have produced such a vast crowd. The usually quiet population had turned out in droves for the festival, augmented by diversion-seekers from elsewhere, until the streets, taverns, stores, alleys, and parking spots were jammed, anything was allowed, and the illegal was ignored. The police did have their hands full at night, but each rowdy, vandal, drunk, or hooker in cuffs only meant a dozen more still loose and roaming about the town. The festival, reaching a crescendo now on its last day, was like a terrible storm that couldn't be stopped; one could only wait for it to blow over, and there would be plenty for the Association to clean up afterward.
"What's the plan?" said Tess. The thin air, even if thickened by emission boxes in the city limits, threatened to send her into a swoon.
"Ideally we would find a private place to stay before I go take on the Gym," said Bronze. "I don't trust the hotels. They will be watched."
"I know a place," said Tess. "My uncle lives in the city. He'll take us in if we can find him."
Bronze gave her a smile. "Already your presence in the Company is having practical as well as psychological benefits."
"Then I'm not just baggage?" laughed Tess. "I thought the women slowed down the faster males!"
"You will soon become more important than you reckoned," said Bronze seriously. "And speed prevents melancholy, and so ties men to the World. If you think you are finding your place in the World by going in the fast lane, then the World has cleverly disguised the fact that it has really found its place in you. An increasing reputation, a widening circle of acquaintances, a sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in a man a sense of being really at home on earth which is not what the Arcean should want. You will notice that the young are generally less unwilling to die than the middle-aged and the old."
"A good bit of wisdom," said Jake, "but don't choke on it. We'll need speed if we ever hope to get out of this district."
They set out amid bright lights, cluttered streets, and rapidly moving bodies. Bronze felt a general fatigue and slowness in his muscles. He had not been properly acclimatized and his brains were working rather like a rather clumsy redhead's. He found himself disgusted with the city life that passed around him. No doubt there were legions of pickpockets waiting for their chance to bombard him with shoves and jostling, underage or overage loose women at lamposts and street corners, drunken laborers fighting with citizens for elevators or shuttle space, and all manners of indecent behaviors. Every indulgence had been provided for the entertainment of the students; sweets, fire-breathers, professional Pokemon battlers that were not really professional, inebriating drinks, strippers, male whores, rental Pokemon, flashy and modified aircars, and plenty of illegal firearms.
Bronze became amazed at the prevalence of catcalls directed at Tess and how many prostitutes had mistaken him for an older man, and thus had tried to attract his attention. This annoyed more than flustered him, and awakened a sort of pride in his own chaste foritude in the face of world pleasures. He intended to burn the whole rotting edifice down when he got the power. All around him college boys were laughing as they entered burlesque clubs and left with wide eyes and sheepish grins. In ten years, the one time in his life, would Bronze find himself (quite accidentally) in a business that catered to the male eye. After witnessing a performance he would leave with his entourage, remarking in his diary, "It was foul."
It helped him that Arceus had forcibly put an end to the attacks of the Enemy on his chastity. This let him in on the truth that these attacks did not last forever, and consequentially disarmed the Enemy of the weapon of human ignorance. It is the business of very powerful demons to produce in every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual "taste". This they do by working through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely. Thus the devils had, at that time, triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females, and there is more in that than you might suppose.
As regards the male taste the gemptations have varied a good deal. At one time male energy was directed to the statuesque and aristocratic type of beauty, mixing men's vanity with their desires and encouraging the race to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women. At another, they have selected an exaggeratedly feminine type, faint and languishing, so that folly and cowardice, and all the general falseness and littleness of mind which go with them, shall be at a premium. At present they are on the opposite track. The Dark Ones now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, they thus aggravate the female's chronic horror of growing old (with many dangerous results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children.
They also have engineered a great increase in the license that society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, of course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being "frank" and "healthy" and getting back to nature. As a result they are more and more directing the desires of men to something that does not exist, making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible. What follows can easily be forecasted.
The presence of white facial paint and haughty rouge on the faces of the prostitutes caused an image to arise in Bronze's mind of a terrestrial and infernal Venus, each with an associated desire that differed quantitatively. There is one type for whom a man's desire was like Jake's desire for Tess, readily mixed with charity, readily obedient to marriage, colored all through with that golden light of reverence and naturalness that Arceus loves; there is another type which a man desires brutally, and desires to desire brutally, a type used to draw him away from marriage altogether but which, even within marriage, he would tend to treat as a slave, an idol, or an accomplice. His love for the first might involve what Arceus calls evil, but only accidentally; the man would wish that she was not someone else's wife and be sorry that he could not love her lawfully. But in the second type, the felt evil is what he wants; it is that "tang" in the flavor that he is after. In the face, it is the visible animality, or sulkiness, or craft, or cruelty that he likes and in the body, something quite different from what he ordinarily calls Beauty, something he may even, in a sane hour, describe as ugliness, but which, by our art, can be made to play on the raw nerve of his private obsession
Some fairness must be given in our observations. This was not the general state of the city and it had no lasting effects on the Company's spirit. The only time during the journey to the residential quarters of the city during which Bronze thought they were in real danger was when a drunk had ambled up to Tess, smiling with the two front teeth conspicuously missing, and asked "if they hadn't got a batch of baccy on 'em." After he called Tess a pretty little girl Bronze had a vivid image of smashing in his face with an ice pick. Jake opened his mouth to shout something back, but, blessedly, Tess pulled both of them away and up a side pass.
...
Tess's uncle lived in an apartment above his business. The house prices were astronomical, the revenue just as high. The offices occupied a small storefront space on Main Street in the middle of the residential districts, just a two-story affair with a large display window for his wares and a heavy, toe-scuffed door with a mail slot. By the appearance of the place Bronze judged that it was a high-budget program. Tess ushered them up the stairs to the door, checked the address, and then rang the electric bell.
There was a clamor of footsteps and the audible sound of glass objects rolling about on some hard surface. The door opened a crack and then closed shut again, and from the house came shapeless mutterings. Finally it opened wide.
Bronze thought that he was in the presence of a dwarf. The man was tan from the sun and had a polished bald head which was swept by a bad comb-over. He looked at Bronze with the air that he had been expecting and strongly hoped that he would be another man and was now disappointed. He wore a huge leather apron, which reached to his left shoulder, and which a hammer, a red handkerchief, a Poke Ball, and all sorts of objects which were upheld by the girdle, as in a pocket, caused to bulge out. He carried his head thrown backwards; his shirt, widely opened and turned back, displayed his bull neck, white and bare. He had thick eyelashes, enormous black whiskers, prominent eyes, the lower part of his face like a snout; and besides all this, that air of being on his own ground, which is indescribable.
"Who are you?" demanded he.
"It's Tess, Quentin's granddaughter," said Tess. "These other boys are travelers from the south. All they need is a place to stay, no matter how small, and a little boarding. Could you do it, Gerald? For money?"
"I never thought you would come to me, Tess," said Gerald. "I would not refuse to lodge any respectable man who would pay me. But why do you not go to the hotels?"
"There is no room and they cost too much. It is a fair day and a market day."
"You can stay, Tess," said Gerald. "But I don't know about the other ones. They can sleep on the front stairs."
"A glass of water, for pity's sake!" said Jake.
"Clear out," said Gerald lazily.
"What if we don't?" said Jake.
"You'll get a shot from my gun!"
At this Bronze threw back his travel bag. The Logarian dagger glinted as he grasped it, and its bright blade shone like a sudden flame as he swept it out. "Let us pass!" he cried. "I am Bronze Tercano son of Robert Tercano, and am called Southstar, Pokedex Holder, the Heirstone, Logathrim, the heir of Tar-Silmathrim descendant of Tar-Elrosi of Logaria. Here is the Dagger of Southnesse in the hands of true Rorians again! Will you aid us or thwart us? Choose swiftly!"
Jake and Tess looked at their companion in amazement, for they had not seen him in this mood before. He seemed to have grown in stature while Gerald had shrunk; and in his living face they caught a brief vision of the power and majesty of the kings of stone. For a moment it seemed to Jake that a white flame flickered on the brows of Bronze like a shining crown.
All this took place in less time than it is required to picture it to one's self. After having scrutinized Bronze for several moments, as one scrutinizes a viper, Gerald assumed an expression of awe. He surveyed the newcomer from head to feet, and suddenly exclaimed, with a sort of shudder:
"Are you the one?"
Bronze nodded.
He ushered them in. Once they were inside Gerald closed the door violently, and shot two large bolts. A moment later, the window-shutter was closed, and the sound of a bar of iron which was placed against it was audible outside. "What doom do you bring to me, boy? Now you will answer!"
"Nothing, if we are treated well," said Bronze sternly, and Tess became amazed that suddenly things had been changed: now Gerald seemed to be their servant and Bronze his master. "And once I go up to the heights of Mount Athras to receive my crown, you and your family will be blessed beyond all renown. I need only eat bread and water and sleep in the warm air."
"These are strange days," Gerald murmured. "Dreams and legends spring up to my doorstep."
"Would you call waiting a dream?" said Bronze. "But I do bring one doom to you, the doom of choice. Because you know who I am, I will recruit you into my army. Open war lies before me. Men will fight with Arceus or against Him. None may live now as they have lived, and few shall keep what they call their own. But of these great matters we will speak later. If chance allows, I will come myself to the Chairman."
"So you are trying for the League?" said Gerald.
"That is why I have come here," said Bronze, "for we are in great need, and I ask for help, or at least for tidings. Have you heard of Team Eclipse?"
"Yes," said Gerald presently. "What about them?"
"Are they in the city?"
"I have not seen any members."
"That is strange," said Bronze, "but we thank you. Where will we sleep?"
"Tess will sleep in the guest room," said Gerald. "You'll find cots for the two of you in the back closet."
...
"What the hell was that?" cried Tess, shutting the guest room's door behind her. "He was about to blast both of you away, and then you go and start waving your knife around! And then he lets you in?"
"Gerald was one of those Rorians that wait for the king, according to an old custom," said Bronze. "He had just enough wit to mark me. A sharper fellow than most, even if I had to 'let it out' right in front of him. Most would have expected a man full-grown to be the King."
Tess wondered how anyone could think Bronze was a boy for the dozenth time. "If I didn't know exactly what you meant, I would wonder what you mean by 'letting it out.' Can you control it?"
"It's not so simple to explain," said Bronze, sitting down on a wicker chair. "Imagine a population of some few million individuals two thousand years ago. They have a desirable trait that improves all aspects of human biology, such as strength, intelligence, and fecundity. We shall also suppose that the world has a natural rhythm of decline and fall. Even secularists will admit this, though I won't go below your agnostic conceptions right now by explaining just how deeply the disaster in Eden has corrupted us. Now the greater part of their population has declined, but not very fast, because they are resistant to this sort of wearing. The world has changed so much that men alive today with a heavy presence of those traits in their genetics now find themselves torn in half."
"That sounds like it might affect your own salvation," said Jake. "If you have two sides then you might see two gods."
"I haven't yet explained the mode of the tearing," said Bronze. "And even if a man is in two halves, one may still choose to obey Arceus and the other should follow. Envision that this man is a product of the modern age, being gathered from its atoms, but he also has some of the past in his loins, coming from an ancient tradition. These two aspects fight in him. The power of Roria is like a young lion, but Logaria is old and won't let the upstart win. Neither side can conquer the other unless the soul, the mind of the real man, gives consent. I can literally turn off and on the divine right of kingship because the conflict between modernity and antiquity is physically present in my biology. You better not think about it too much."
"But you haven't said the how, only the why," said Tess. "Is it an energy? What muscle do you flex? What would a doctor say?"
"You are absolutely inimitable, Tess," Bronze laughed, slapping his knee. "Absolutely inimitable!"
"I don't know what you find so funny," said Tess. "If there is a real difference between these halves of your soul, then you have to do something to get one over the other."
"Yes. There is a thing. But not a difference that makes it explainable. I'll tell you how I look at it. Haven't you noticed how in our own little war here on earth, there are different phases, and while any one phase is going on people get into the habit of thinking and behaving as if it was going to be permanent? Its the same with my soul. But really the thing is changing under my hands, and the resources I had one year are different the next. Suppose that one phase over the other passes, and the old laws no longer hold good. Tess, Jake, you've seen me do most of the fighting in a psychological or moral form, as against temptations or the like. In the coming phase, it may be anyone's job to fight with main force. You will be looking at me...well, in quite some different state."
"I see. But you don't imagine that we'll be fighting here?"
"I can't say anything. But I've been seeing clues in my dreams, the ones with the odd visions I told you all about. Do you know that there was originally a common speech for all rational creatures inhabiting the planets of our solar system? The inhabited ones, at least. That original speech was lost on Earth, our own world, when the whole tragedy at Babel took place. No human language now known in the world is descended from it."
Tess lay down on the bed and stretched out her legs. "What are you getting on about?"
"Recently I have been finding that I can understand the language. I think I picked it up when talking to Groudon."
"And you think something spoken in this old language is confirming your suspicions?"
"Yes. The speech of the gods, the Hnau-Erebol-et-Elohim. It saves a lot of trouble, though as a philologist I find it rather disappointing that I wasn't able to make a more rigorous investigation."
"Wait, inhabited planets?" said Jake. "Are you suggesting aliens?"
"That is for another time," said Bronze. "I need to take a rest. Do not disturb me. I shall roast you if I am stirred."
...
When Bronze had finished his sleep he went down to the kitchen but before he arrived there he noticed that Tess and Jake were gone. He found that hanging on the door-knob was a note in Jake's large script that said Go to Cottonee Cafe. Pokedex Business. "How long have I been asleep?" said Bronze aloud.
Before leaving he made a meal of peeled oranges and berries. A boy, or at least a boy like Bronze, felt he ought to say grace over it; and so he presently did. The type of berries would have required rather an oratorio or a mystical meditation. But the meal had its unexpected highlights. Every now and then one struck a berry that had a bright red center: and these were so savory, so memorable among a thousand tastes, that he would have begun to look for them and to feed on them only. But the same inner advisor who told him that it was time to be going also said that he better stop eating things made for Pokemon.
He stepped out into the day and found that the crowd had thinned. Automated bots were going on their long courses in the roads and streets, scooping up garbage that was being launched into swirls of paper and plastic by the wind. The Cottonee Cafe was five doors down on the far side of the street. When he came close enough to see inside the glass windows there was a stranger, waiting at the door, face to face with him. This figure was merely woman-like, her hair the beautiful color of flaxen chaff in Sinnoian gardens. For one second the alien brown eyes looked at him full of love and welcome. Then the whole face changed: a shock as of disappointment and astonishment passed over it. Bronze realized, not without a disappointment of his own, that he had been mistaken for someone else.
Still he came closer. Then the woman began to laugh, and Bronze upon seeing her face found it hard to belive that she had done anything else but be joyful. Never had Bronze seen a face so calm, and so unearthly, despite the full humanity of every feature. He decided afterwards that the unearthly quality was due to the complete absence of that element of resignation which mixes, in however slight a degree, with all profound stillness in most human faces. This was a calm which no storm had ever preceded. It might be idiocy, it might be immortality, it might be some condition of mind to which his experience offered no clue at all. Now he realized that the word "human" refers to something more than the bodily form or even to the rational mind. It refers also to that community of blood and experience that unites all men and women and some Pokemon on the Earth.
But he could not imagine that this woman was of his race; no windings, however intricate, of any genealogical tree, could ever establish a connection between himself and her. In that sense, not one drop in her veins was "human." The universe had produced her species and his quite independently.
All this passed through his mind very quickly. He cried out to her, "I am Bronze Tercano, Pokedex Holder. I come in peace. Is it your will that I come over to you?"
The Lady looked quickly at him with an expression of curiosity. "You should know better than I. Your friends are already with me."
"You know where we were? Why?" said Bronze sharply, coming within a few paces of her. Those who have had a dream which is very beautiful but from which, nevertheless, they have ardently desired to awake, will understand his sensations.
"What is bewildering about it?" said the Lady.
"I do not know who you are," said Bronze. "That is one of the things that is bewildering me. You are not different but you are not the same as me. You are shaped like the women of my own kind. But you do not feel like a creature that is either a Man or a Woman."
"I am a woman," said the Lady. "I am Yellow of the Pokedex Holders."
He identified Yellow as the fourth of the Pokedex Holders, one the most renowned members of the order, who had fought against Lance and destroyed his plan to slaughter the whole of the human race. Bronze understood that he could not have contributed to that great battle any more than a gnat could contribute to the defense of Rosecove.
"O my Lady," said Bronze, "how came you to meet us?"
"Arceus told me," said Yellow. "Come," she said, with a gesture that made that whole world a house and her a hostess. He slid into the diner and scrambled beside her. Then he bowed, a little clumsily as all modern men do, and he found his legs unsteady and they ached a little; in fact, a curious physical exhaustion possessed him. He felt completely refreshed but with a sense of insecurity. This had nothing to do with the fact that he found himself strangely attended.
There was no category in the terrestrial mind that would fit Yellow. On the biological Bronze gusseed she was in her thirties or twenties. Opposites met in her and were fused in a fashion for which we have no images. One way of putting it would be to say that neither our sacred nor our profane art could make her portrait. Beautiful, shameless, young, she was obviously a goddess: but then the face, the face so calm that it escaped insipidity by the very concentration of its mildness, the face that was like the sudden coldness and stillness of a church when we enter it from a hot street: that made her a member of the convent. The alert, inner silence that looked out from those eyes overawed him; yet at any moment she might laugh like a child, or run like a stag or dance like a satyr.
She approached the table where Tess and Jake were sitting and welcomed them, and once again the picture was half like many earthly scenes but in its total effect unlike them all. It was not really like a woman making much of a friend, nor yet a child playing with a puppy. There was in her face an authority, in her caresses a condescension, which by taking seriously the inferiority of her adorers made them somehow less inferior to her grandeur, and raised them from the status of slaves to that of guests.
"I have come to greet you," said Yellow. "The others have already ascended into the city from the lower lands."
"The others?" said Jake.
"The Pokedex Holders," said Yellow. "The Chairman has gathered them here."
"But why?" said Tess. "Is it to keep people from dying?"
"What is dying?"
"Do you not know?" said Bronze. The essential oddity of the question was giving him unhealthy preconceptions about Yellow's actual intelligence.
"How would you explain it to me?" said Yellow with a voice of courtesy.
"With us they go away after a time," said Bronze. "Arceus takes the soul out of them and puts it somewhere else; in Deep Heaven, we hope. We call it death."
"Then Arceus had chosen our race for blessedness," said Yellow. "WHy should we not be thankful that Arceus takes us all thither to Him in the end? We are favored beyond all worlds."
Bronze shook his head. "No. It is not like that," he said. "You don't understand. It is not like that. It is horrible. It has a foul smell. Arceus Himself wept when He saw it." Both his voice and his facial expression were apparently something new to her. He saw the shock, not of horror, but of utter bewilderment, on her face for one instant and then, without effort, the ocean of her peace swallowed it up as if it had never been, and she asked him what he meant.
"You could never understand, Lady," he replied, and now he thought that she was sincerely ignorant. "But in our world not all events are pleasing or welcome. There may be such a thing that you would cut off both your arms and your legs to prevent it happening, and yet it happens: with us."
"But how can one expect to go against the waves that Arceus sends rolling toward us?"
Against his better judgment Bronze found himself goaded into the argument.
"But even you," he said, "when you first saw me, I know now you were expecting and hoping that I was another. When you found I was not, your face changed. Was that event not unwelcome? Did you not wish it to be otherwise?"
"Oh," said Yellow. She turned aside with her head bowed and her hands clasped in an intensity of thought. She looked up and said, "You make me grow wiser more quickly than I can bear," and walked a little farther off. Bronze wondered what he had done. It was suddenly borne in upon him that her purity and peace were not, as they had seemed, things settled and inevitable like the purity and peace of an animal; that they were alive and therefore breakable, a balance maintained by a mind and therefore, at least in theory, able to be lost. There is no reason why a man on a smooth road should lose his balance on a bicycle, but he could. There was no reason why she should step out of her happiness into the psychology of the mass of humanity, but neither was there any wall between to prevent her from doing so. The sense of precariousness terrified him: but when she looked at him again he changed that word to Adventure, and then all words died out of his mind. Once more he could not look steadily at her. He knew now what the old painters were trying to represent when they invented the halo. Gaiety and gravity together, a splendor as of martyrdom yet with no pain in it at all, seemed to pour from her countenance. Yet when she spoke her words were a disappointment.
"You have not spoken to me of the wonder and glory of this dying besides the bad."
"I do not see the wonder and glory in it."
Her eyes flashed upon him such a triumphant flight above his thoughts as would have been scorn in earthly eyes, but in that mode it was not scorn. She sang:
...
"O truly necessary sin of Adam, which the death of the Son has blotted out!
O happy fault, that merited such and so great a Redeemer!
O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer!"
...
"You know, even the Arcean church would tell you that good came out of the First Disobedience in the end," said Yellow, and her airy manner was gone as a lightning strike faded into the thunderclouds. Bronze could hardly help admiring the massive power that enabled this woman to stand there unmoved in all her natural authority. The scales had been tipped another direction, and who knew what would come from that? But it was inconceivable to him that she could be in league with the Enemy.
"I have to admit that I find that phrasing somewhat disturbing," said Bronze as he sat down with the others. "Needful? Necessary? Happy? I get the sentiment, but I am otherwise quite put off. That sounds to be in the Dark Lord's camp. The enemy would say that it was the breaking of Arceus's commandments that brought Him to our world and made Him a thing of flesh."
Yellow laughed. "That reminds me of something in the Legends of Arceus. Bronze, you remember that scene, don't you? Rei and Akari are facing the Devil in the shape of Marcus. Marcus is trying to convince them to throw away their Quest because Arceus, he says, wants them to disobey. But then Rei says to that very accusation: 'Of course good came of it. Is Arceus a Pokemon that we can stop His path, or a leaf that we can twist His shape? Whatever we do, He will make good of it. But not that good He had prepared for us if you had obeyed Him. That is lost forever. The first King and first Mother of our world did the forbidden thing, and He brought good of it in the end. But what they did was not good, and what they lost we have not seen.'"
"That idea is proven later in the book," said Bronze. "Uxie, Azelf, and Mesprit speak together with Rei of the Great Dance while they are forging the Prison Bottle. I remember them saying:" Here he took a deep breath and took on the most solid of oration he could manage.
"'All which is not itself the Great Dance was made in order that He might come down into it. In the Fallen World He prepared for Himself a body and was united with the Dust and made it glorious forever. This is the end and final cause of all creating, and the sin whereby it came is called Fortunate and the worlds where this was enacted are the center of worlds. Blessed be He.'"
"I've never read the Legends of Arceus," said Tess. "Both of you may have and can enjoy these sorts of conversations, but I'm lost."
Bronze sighed and paused before he spoke again. "The Legends of Arceus tells of the great quest that the Golden Company made to the Mountian of Coronet and the Undying Realm. Rei and Akari were mortal Men, but they were among the pure Hisuians that walked the earth when it was young, and they were the fairest race that has ever been among all the children of this world. As the stars above the mists of the Northern lands was their loveliness, and in the face of Cyllene the Great of Hisui was a shining light. In those days the Great Enemy that is returning, of whom Yveltal Gloomweaver was but a servant, dwelt in Dor Daedeloth in the South, and the Men of Logaria made war upon him to regain the honor he had stolen, and the Fathers of Hisui aided them. But the Enemy came north to kill Arceus Himself, and the Company was made, and so escaping through great peril they came over the Mountains of Iron into the hidden realm of Marcus below the peak of Coronet. There they beheld the Incarnation of Arceus, and Marcus was cast down, so they returned to Hisui alive.
"Many more adventures befell them afterward, and they never parted long. The Hisuians went south to Logaria to bring the Legend Plate to the Garden of Beulah, and together they passed through great dangers, and in the Great Battle for the field of the City of Caves they cast down the Black Captain Lucius of the Army of the Enemy, and forged the Prison Bottle, and the valor of Berothrim of Logaria during the Great Quest was the bride-price for Cyllene of Hisui. Yet at the last the Hisuians and Logathrim marched to Dor Daedeloth, and many of them died, but the Enemy was bound and the Quest ended. When Berothrim aged and died, Cyllene was still a woman with many years ahead of her, and she rued his mortality so that she might follow him; and it is sung that they met again beyond the Sundering Seas, and after a brief time walking alive once more in the green woods, together they passed, long ago, beyond the confines of this world. So it is that Cyllene of Hisui and Berothrim of Logaria died as a union between the two kindreds of the Men who were blessed by Arceus. But from her, the lineage of the Hisuian-lords of old descended among Men. There live still those of whom Cyllene was the foremother, and it is said that her line and that of Elwin the First High Elder of Hisui shall never fail. Some in Sinnoh are of that kin. For Logaria, there are also those descendants of Tar-Silmathrim son of Tar-Castamir, the last Emperor of Logaria, who fled the ruin of Logaria into the wastes of South. From Cyllene and Silmathrim come the lines of Easternesse and Southernesse."
The story ended. "That's all I can get off the top of my head," said Bronze, moving and stretching. "But why are you here, Yellow?"
"The Chairman believes that a serious attack is about to take place at Anthien City," said Yellow. "He wouldn't have brought the military and Pokedex Holders here if it was not so. He wanted you to hear this from one of the senior Holders. It warms my heart to see the new blood. I hope that you will soon meet the others.
"Hullo!" said Jake. "Now, what you're saying is just what we've been waiting to confirm. An attack is what we've been expecting. But can we know where...ow! Bloody murder!"
He had cut his finger on a durasteel sheet below the table. It was like red dew coming up from a little spring. "You are bleeding," said Yellow at last. "I seldom see such a fluid anymore. And this is the substance wherewith Arceus remade the worlds before any world was made. Reach over, friend, and let me heal your finger."
Jake hesitated but Yellow compelled him. So presently he leaned over and the Lady took his injured finger in her hand. She paused for a moment and looked at it. "So this is Hru (blood)," she murmured. She held it there for what seemed a long time, and then the wound sealed itself and the bleeding stopped. Bronze looked at her hands, no longer the white and slender things he had seen earlier, but they now were bathed in a soft golden light. He understood what it meant for holy radiance to lay upon something and not emit from it. The almost invisible luminance was not particular to Yellow, he would learn, but all blessed things.
"How did you do that?" cried Tess.
"I have the gift of Viridian Forest," said Yellow, "and that is healing. The mending of wounds in Men and Pokemon is my trade. I don't know the reason behind it. There aren't any gods or demons in the forest that I know of. But there are obviously, even obviously, magical places in this physical modern world. You can find them in the countryside where you never bother to go, or several doors down from the houses you never happen to visit, or in the places on the map you stare at briefly but forget about."
"My theory on gifts like that is that they are a manifestation of Arceus's Willpower," said Bronze. "Since He works even in the smallest things beyond thought, why not human genes? There are also places in the universe where an organism can never die. He clearly wants us to have good healers on our side."
"It's one of His Mysterious Ways," said Jake. "But I didn't know that any of the Pokedex Holders besides Bronze were Arcean. You seem to be."
"Only Moon and I are part of the faith," said Yellow, "and the Sinnoh Trio. The rest have not given any thought to what is going on in the world with the rise of the dark powers. They say things about Chance and Story and Fate and never think of the cause."
"Where are they in Anthien?" said Tess.
"Here and there through the city," said Yellow. "You will not recognize them."
"Is there any news on the war?" said Bronze. "Do we know what the Alliance wants?"
"Yes, at least half of it," said Yellow. "I should not tell you till the events in Anthien about to take place roll over. And we know nothing about your parents, though we are fairly certain, moreso than when Erika came to you, that they are alive. Some recovered records state that they are being put through Objectivity Training."
"Oh, no." said Bronze. He hoped they hadn't let the Alliance inside of them. But he knew they could. What happened at their hands was a physical reality, forever. That was a true word. There were things, your own choices, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out. A strong feeling came over him that Emrett was responsible for this, but he did not understand the cause for this Objectivity Training. He had his theories.
"I am sorry," said Yellow. "Hopefully we will find them. That is in Arceus's hands."
"One day I'll look the leader of the Alliance right in his eyes," said Bronze, "and I'll say hello. Then once he recognizes me I shall blast him." All his inhibitions suddenly died, died like music dies when you switch off the radio. It felt like an enchantment of quietude over his mind had been lifted. Now more than ever he realized the hot point that the conflict was coming to: the Alliance moving on Anthien, the presence of the Pokedex Holders, and himself in the middle of it. Even if he won at the Gym it would be a week of long labor.