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Chapter 21
Clever Girl
“Why did you bring me back?” asked the man seated at the table in the dimly lit room.“Because you’re needed,” said the other person in the room, a woman.
“And you’re not …”
“Not the Jenny you knew, no. Sorry.”
He squinted.
“I can’t see very well,” he said.
“You’ve been submerged in a regeneration tank for several weeks while the nanobots rebuilt your systems. Your eyes aren’t used to being out in the air. It’ll take a few hours.”
“You said I was needed.”
“By Buffy Summers, yes.”
“Buffy is … dead,” he said, feeling a sharp, old sorrow inside.
“So are you, as far as anyone else knows. Appearances can be very deceiving, especially here in Pubspace. No, your particular Buffy isn’t dead, just misplaced until recently.”
He sighed with relief and forced back a sudden surge of emotion. He collected his thoughts and asked, “This has something to do with her, then?”
“One way or another, most things seem to have something to do with her. It appears that the Buffy Summers you knew, Buffy Summers Two Six Alpha by our reference, is very probably one of the two Transfigurative Aspects. Do you know what that means?”
He searched his mind, sorting through scraps of information long relegated to the scrap-heap of memory.
“Yes, now that I think about it. The Han Manuscript, the Threefold Prophecy: ‘And the Void shall within and without become as one, and the infinite shall become Two, and the end of all things shall be the beginning of all things.’ A rather flowery, Latinate translation, but correct in essence. In the Vulgate Translation of sixteen seventy four, the Two are noted in the margin gloss as ‘Transfigurative aspects of Lao Ping’s Infinite Bodhisattvas, representing the simultaneous forces of creation and destruction.’”
“And the Void?”
He shrugged. “Everything. Nothing. Mind and no-mind. A fairly common Buddhist concept. However, ‘the Void shall within and without become one’ is actually a slight mistranslation. It is more accurate to say that ‘the Inner and Outer Void shall be unified’.”
“It’s the unification that’s important,” said Jenny.
“Yes. Exactly. The unifying force is referred to in Adolfo of Milan’s ‘Commentaries Upon Certain Eastern Philosophies’ as the Genesis Symmetry and is, like the Two, a source of destruction and procreation at the same time. I’m sorry if it all sounds a bit confusing. I’m afraid the Han Manuscript tends to prefigure Zen in that respect.”
“You’re as good as they said you would be,” said Jenny, a note of satisfaction in her voice.
“Yes, well, one does tend to accumulate the inevitable heap of trivia in my profession,” said the man. “So you’re saying that Buffy will be one of the Bodhisattvas who will reunify the universe at the end of time?”
“No, she will not reunify the universe. That is the role of the Genesis Symmetry. The Genesis Symmetry will re-create the universe as a singularity of perfect force symmetry. All the forces — strong, weak, electromagnetic, gravitational, magical, others your science hasn’t discovered — all of them will be unified. But that won’t last. The symmetry of birth will break down into the asymmetry of growth. The forces will separate, become distinct once again. Buffy and the other Transfigurative Aspect will try to ensure that when perfect symmetry is broken Good remains in balance with Evil. She will be required to destroy the Elemental Abstract to do that.”
“And my role, exactly?” asked the man.
“You’re role is what it has always been, what you were born to do, and what Buffy Summers most needs you to be. You will be her Watcher, Giles.”
* * *
“Well, would you look at that,” said Spike as he surveyed the wasteland surrounding the city from the top of the tall spire he and Elisa had just surmounted.
Elisa turned Spike’s binoculars on the twin plumes of dust approaching from the distance. In the distance beyond the plumes, the dark expanse of the storm that had driven the two of them into the city seemed to be changing its track again. She returned her attention to the dust.
“Dune buggies,” she said. “Can’t make out who’s driving — I doubt anything native to this place would be tooling around in a go-cart, but it could be Cade’s people, I suppose.”
“Your mother had the Cade situation pretty well tidied up before we ended up in this garden spot. I’d say this is most likely the cavalry to the rescue.”
“We need to signal them, let them know we’re here,” said Elisa. “A mirror maybe.”
“Wouldn’t do any good here,” said Spike. “No sun. I don’t know what keeps this plane lit during the day, but there’s no point source to bounce off a mirror.”
“A fire, then. This roof is flagstone overtop the wood support beams, so it should be safe. Still, we probably shouldn’t stay up here once the fire’s lit. There are a bunch of old banners and pennants and such inside the tower we could use to generate smoke. Do you have a tinderbox in your pack?”
“Got something better,” said Spike, drawing a silver-plated lighter from one pocket. “This is one time it pays to have bad habits.”
They gathered a pile of old banners from inside and piled them on top of the tower, arranging them among a cone of sticks that a short time before had been wooden chairs, at least before Spike got to them.
The fire started fitfully and slowly, but then quickly spread to engulf the miniature pyre, and soon a thick column of black smoke billowed from the top of the spire.
“Clever girl,” said Spike. “Now we just have to hope we’ve invited the right class of people to the party.”