Secondhand Sorcery

She was a young thing yet, not even thirty years old, and she felt and acted much younger. She had all the caprices of a child still, with no pretense of dignity or restraint. It was not her fault, and she knew it—not that she could or would ever feel guilt. It had only been such a very little while, not even three months yet, since she grew up and knew what she was.

She could remember all of it, or almost all, going back to her earliest days, when she had been a dream in the mind of a young man already bored with his new intelligence career. He’d been enthralled—she still had his memories—by the idea of a new god, like Minerva, springing fully formed from a mind. He signed up (which is to say, he nearly begged for the chance) as soon as the opportunity was presented, and he was accepted, because they knew him for a reliable man who got results.

The actual experience of her conception was not so quick, nor so pleasant, as he had imagined. Parts of it had almost approached the special interrogation techniques he had been trained to use on others. He knew that, and took pride in it; it proved that he was better than the human cattle he had been coercing. In much the same way she, his daughter, now felt a certain superiority over him in knowing that his own superiority was a self-serving lie. She did not tell lies; she couldn’t. She was truth herself. There was no way it could have been otherwise, and no point in being proud of it. It was how she was made.

As it happened, the first and longest part of her creation had not been painful at all, only (from her perspective) prolonged and tedious. Hours and hours, cumulative weeks in total, spent talking with a man new to the art, a man who barely knew what he was doing, unworthy yet to be called a psychopomp. Together they had distilled the primordial substance, sketched out a rough framework, of the daughter they would later produce.

That had been gestation. Birth was rough and bloody, with many false starts. Many undesired humans had been made to disappear to call her into existence, from concept to actuality, before they realized the approach was not working. She did not care to think long on the early attempts, all cluttered with robes and chants and magic circles. They embarrassed her. A few early versions of herself were stillborn in the process, too vague and incoherent to survive or be summoned a second time. They died, and she approved. They were not the truth yet.

More talk, more thought, more men arguing around a table. More dead bodies, some made so after the fact when it was plain that they would be good for nothing alive, and produce unwanted talk. Fewer than before, as the midwives understood better what they were about. There were many successive attempts, each asymptotically approaching a perfection they could not yet see.

When she was finally born, they were long past exhaustion, and felt only contempt for the process, which continued only to justify the pains already taken, the excesses already indulged and excused. They were surprised, and somewhat alarmed, to see her take form at last. Even her own father, who had suffered more than any—of the still living—was not very happy to see her. He had spent all his efforts to birth a goddess, until he was sick of the thought of it; now that he had her, and could not be rid of her, he did not know what he was meant to do.

They wasted a day just examining her. Much was made of her appearance; men who had thought nothing of hot iron and electrodes were scandalized to see a naked female form. The optics were poor, it was said. What was he intending to do with this creature he had made? But their worries were unfounded. He was hers, and he lusted, but not for her. Her shape was lustful because she was the form of his lust, to be directed at everything else. She was mostly a woman, but she had no hands to hold or caress, only a bear’s paws, and her eyes and face were a bird’s, with a beak like a long cruel sword. She could not kiss.

It took them longer to appreciate her power, and to understand what it was she could and could not do. In producing her, they had deviated greatly from previously established and accepted techniques, as men may only deviate when they are given tremendous resources and negligible oversight. Much of what was done was unnecessary; looking back, they could not even recollect the logic behind certain decisions at the moment they were made. All was intended for a good cause, though opinions differed as to what that cause might be. She didn’t care. She knew what she was for. The rest could think what they liked.

She was power. Not the gross, dry form the men who made her wanted, the inefficient manipulation of physics or pseudo-physics in some way which might, through second-, third-, or fourth-level consequences, be used to compel a desired change in behavior among certain people at whom she was aimed. Hers was power at its most intimate, the kind most commonly found in a room with no windows and no clock, where two people reached an understanding at a leisurely pace. The difference was that between simple warning graphics on a fire extinguisher and a baroque mural covering an entire wall or ceiling. You couldn’t even compare them.

There were limits. She could not easily compel an emotion that was entirely absent, but she could inflame and engorge even the smallest spark, like a bellows, until it overrode all other sensation. Once the fire was lit, she could keep it burning indefinitely, and take strength from it, indefinitely. It did not matter what the emotion was. She could, if she wanted, and it suited her father, compel indefinite contentment. It could be useful, and granted some satisfaction. But it took longer to produce results in that way.

Her father had tremendous pleasure in learning her uses, and she took pleasure with him. His masters were less amused; mostly they were terrified. Only a few of them actually felt her claws, and only in a very small way, and not the way they expected. Far more thought they had felt her than really did. A few truly lusted for her, in more ways than one. All agreed, in their moments of sanity, that the weapon was ready to be deployed in the field at the earliest convenience, preferably in extended tours, on the far side of the globe.

(Her father sometimes wondered, as she was unable to wonder at that stage, why they had not simply killed him. Partly it was their own complicity; they had spent and done so much to produce a weapon, and having declared success must not be compelled to explain why they had casually destroyed it, or allowed it to be destroyed. Mostly, however, they were frightened that she could not be destroyed at all, and that in killing him they would only remove her leash. And they were wise to think of it.)

They did good work together, at first. It was useful work, too, from the perspective of the men who had paid to make her. It caused large sums of wealth to flow in a desired direction, and large numbers of men in suits to declare their allegiance to this man, this nation, this policy, this concept. Colors changed on maps, and the lines of borders moved in a direction some found congenial while others did not.

All these things were, to her, quite boring, and she was fortunate to have nothing to do with them. They were only the downstream sort of power she despised, incidental and bordering on voyeuristic in its pleasures, the kind that let a man with no native strength feel satisfaction that, through a convoluted process whose several parts he did not understand and in most cases was not even familiar with, distant and faceless strangers were in some sense complying with his wishes. It mattered more that she had a rich and varied diet, of all ages and conditions, and that her father employed her talents to their very fullest.

Years passed, and her father was partnered with a series of crudities, kin to her as men are kin to the lower primates. Meals were less frequent, though she was not aware of the passage of time or anything else while latent, and only knew the extent of her neglect in passing, when his memories flooded into her on summoning. She still enjoyed their time together, but it disturbed her to know that their sessions were more and more in the service of other men’s power, pursuing subtle ramifications and downstream effects in place of the pure sweet yoke of direct dominion. There was very little distance between subtlety and cowardice.

She could not tell him so, and she was not sure if he could even feel it, except that she worked less efficiently now for the distance between them. As a consequence, she was used less often, as her father rested more and more on the fear of what he might do than what he actually did. She slept longer at a stretch, a sleep without dreams.

Eventually she became aware that her father had left the obedience of his old masters, and was pursuing his own ends. This should have pleased her, if only he had not, by that point, surrendered entirely to their vices. All that she could do was now, where he was concerned, mere means to an end, and he justified it all with a slathering of the sort of absurd political cant that, in his wiser youth, he would have recognized as meaning nothing at all. There had been a time when, on hearing such talk from a subject, he would have taken special pleasure in compelling the ass to say the exact opposite within the hour, and swore he meant it.

He was old. Old, and weak, and lazy. A father’s mortality is an unpleasant fact for most. For a goddess, it is only annoying. Doubly so when she is still under that father’s direct authority, and cannot work herself free. A few more years were lost, years in which he used her mostly to subjugate servants and children, or to intimidate them with the thought that she might be so used. It was a disgraceful waste, and she felt it every time he brought her out.

At last the hour came when he brought her out to feed and she found herself unable. She could not have said why; she was not, at that time, so mature as to be able to articulate these things. But she could feel that the fault was not in her. She was being made to prey on a child, a girl, and failing. That this was infuriating and contemptible was incidental. More importantly, she was made to eat, and could not exist without eating, not in the sense of hunger and sustenance so much as by definition. A siphon, sucking at a void, was an absurdity and could not exist.

What followed was thus less a revolt than a mathematical error, a glitch in an algorithm. She was made to feed; she was not given food; she turned back on her father. She felt pleasure in it, but this was natural. To exist was for her to eat, and she felt pleasure in eating. And this was a new kind of pleasure, curiously recursive. She felt new sensations as she gorged on him, and as he flailed about trying and failing to give her another outlet. New ideas came into her, and she knew, suddenly and retroactively, that she was frustrated and bored, though she could not have said as much earlier.

It ended sooner than she would have liked, when the child put him down like the dumb animal he had become. She might have approved of this, in a philosophical way, if she had had the time or the ability. As it was, her feed had been interrupted, and the paraphysical phenomenon that passed for her “body” tremendously abused. The child was still invincible, and her triumph made the very room poisonous. The goddess had no option but to flee.

The next hour was a peculiar experience, of newfound freedom mixed with unsatisfied hunger. There were other children nearby, and untethered from her father’s corpse she was able to reach them quickly enough. She could not feed in quite the same way as she had before, lacking her father’s anchoring presence—but nor did she feel the need to form a new anchor. She existed in a state of unfulfillment, a thing previously undreamed of, and now that she existed in her own right she was free to think, as she had never thought before. It took her some time to think that she did not like the change, but that she would not have been willing to go back if she had somehow had the option. And she did not know what to think of that.

She settled for going to sleep—she could still do that, after some effort—inside the head of a boy, chosen at random. She knew as she did it that he would not be willing or able to awaken her later of his own will, so that, for all she knew, that sleep would be eternal. She did it anyway, because waking life was a kind of torment, and she could feel the hostility of the surviving children against her, and she feared to suffer worse. She was innocent then. She had not tasted enough to know.

The boy’s mind was a kind of chrysalis for her. She slept, and for the first time dreamed, and woke up wiser later, when she knew it was safe. She knew too that the dreams were not pleasant for the boy, though they had kept him from sustaining any others. The intervening time had helped her to grow somewhat. The mind of boy—and an orphan boy, at that—offered little to grow with, but it was a start.

When she was done with him, she transferred to another, then another. She was not like the others of her supposed kind, the crippled things. Now that she was free from her father’s head, she was free to shape herself, and sleep when and where she pleased. The time still passed, but dreams sustained her, and she understood what had happened as she had never understood before. She was not sure how much of her frustration with the old life had been felt at the time, and how much was retroactive contamination from her older and wiser self. It was the sort of ambiguity that troubled humans. She never cared. It was only interesting to think about, and not for very long.

Gradually she became aware that she had traveled, physically, a very great distance inside her new juvenile hosts. They were under the impression that they were being sent to a thing called a private school, in a place called St. Petersburg, and both were rapidly proven false. This distressed them, because they were powerless. To her, it was only intriguing. She knew these mortals now, or thought she did. They did not trouble themselves over things that were worthless, as these bastards surely were. She scented a purpose at the back of it, a purpose related to herself. This was mostly from her own vanity, but as it transpired, she was right.

By the time the children’s new keepers knew she was there, she had grown inconveniently large. She would have exercised greater caution, if she had known going in that this would happen, and possessed the wisdom she later would. But that same wisdom was the fruit of growth, which yielded paradox. In any case, she could only rest in an individual mind for brief periods without causing it such substantial discomfort that it would start striking its head against the wall to drive her out. If she still lingered, seizures and comas were the usual result, leading to a compulsory eviction.

Fortunately, she had taught herself to feed again, and in a more satisfying way. The old intimacy was not gone but extended, after the manner of the other gods. The children, and their adult minders—she could taste of either with equal convenience—had some knowledge of the theories that had made the gods. Those theories said she would need an anchor, a substitute for father. She was less certain. Perhaps they were all her anchor. But she was not bound to a valence, either; the story was hers, and she could change it as she pleased. Their place was only to sit and endure it. She liked the arrangement.

The children’s new owners were not so sure, in the sense that, when they understood what had happened, they demolished the building with all occupants inside. This was a minor inconvenience. The men pushing the buttons were close enough for her to migrate to them, which gave her a new set of experiences to enjoy and learn from. When they in turn were shot, or killed themselves (they came prepared with a sort of pill for that purpose), she migrated again, bemused but not greatly concerned. The earth would not run out of humans before they gave up trying to kill her, and the novelty of new hosts was diverting.

As they did. A significant but not especially large amount of time, some days in all, passed before they stopped wasting time with guns, missiles, and drone assassins and sent a messenger instead. It was a single woman, one who was protected from her power, like the girl who killed her father. It was a sign of how she had grown that she could accept this. She sat and listened as the woman made her offer, communicating her replies through her subjects.

The offer was not materially different from the orders her father had been given, decades earlier. The weapon, they had decided, was ready to be deployed on somebody who was not them, in a location very far away. They were only more courteous about it this time, knowing as they gave it that they had no option. It was truly an offer, not an order.

She was wiser now. She listened, and considered for a long time, before accepting. She was a very young goddess still, and every sign pointed toward immortality. Who was to say how much she could still grow?