Yesterday's Spacemage Read online

  I woke up in a white room, with a lot of metal stuff in it making a lot of light, and with several people dressed in white, doing things beyond my comprehension. I'd never seen anything like this before, and understandably, I completely freaked. I'd have thought aliens, only they were people like me. This was made worse by one of them coming towards me making noises I didn’t understand. There was a sudden pain in my arm, and everything went black this time.

  When I woke again, I could understand them. As far as I could later gather, while I slept, they'd used an experimental teaching gizmo, designed for young kids, to train my brain with basic concepts, including language. At that point, I could make out what they were saying, but understood very little of it. However enough took a hold for me to understand I was in a place of healing, and these were the local healers.

  They kept me there for a week. I'd woken up in pain across most of my body, and especially in my head. They tested me many different ways to find out why, and while over the week most of my body stopped hurting, the pain in my head remained. In the end, they gave me a series of small round things in different colours to swallow, until they found something which removed the pain. At least for a while. I learned a new word, migraine, and discovered no-one knew what caused them. Nor did anyone seem to care about finding out, beyond the basic tests already done.

  They asked me questions I couldn't answer. Where was I from? How did I get into the water? Since I had no reference to where I was, where I was from couldn’t be answered. I had no idea how I came to be in the water, so there was no answer to give. At one point I mentally yelled at them to stop asking me stupid questions, and shortly after, they did. They told me I had something called amnesia, and I might or might not get my memories back. For now though, they recommended I re-learn anything I found I didn’t know, and my memory would fix itself. Or not. It was a relief for the questions to stop, and I said nothing to encourage them to start up again.

  When they took me somewhere to live, the only reason I didn’t give in to stark terror at what the city I was in looked like, what the people wore, moved around in, and were buying and selling, was I was fascinated at the same time.

  Being moved long distances in a noisy box seemed incredible. And no matter how hard the big woman next to me tried to explain anything, I had no context with which to make any sense of it.

  I spent the next two years in a large house with other kids who had no parents. They put a teevee in my room, and I spent every hour I could watching it, in between lessons, and the daily migraine pain. If I thought my last two years had been mainly boring, these two were much more so, because I didn’t actually do much except sit, and absorb information. Of the two, teevee was more entertaining than lessons, although its reliability was less so. Neither told me what I most wanted to know.

  There were two things I really wanted to find out, and I learned the skills I needed to find the information I wanted. Between teevee and net, I found I could access most of it.

  The first was obviously, where the hell was I?

  The second, was why there was no magic here.

  Of these two, I found the latter bothered me the most.

  It took me over a year to put the pieces together of both. A sort of friend introduced me to someone who did Reiki healing. She showed me how to make the healing energy flow, and was amazed at how powerful I was. It was my first access to magic since I got here. It wasn't anywhere near what I’d had, even in my largely untrained state, as something about where I was dampened it. But knowing it was there somewhere, and I had to figure out how to access it, made me all the more determined to find a way.

  I read everything I could find with even a hint of magic in it. Almost all of it was made up, and most of that was based on clueless. What wasn’t made up was worse, since it didn’t actually work, just fooled the wielder into doing something stupid. I went looking for anyone with natural magical ability, and found all the magic entertainers to be fakes.

  Oddly, those claiming spiritual powers turned out to be accessing a crude form of magic, while having no idea what they were really doing, attributing things to a higher power. More often than not, they were accessing a lower power pretending to be a higher power. Once I figured it out, I stayed well clear of them.

  The made up stuff in books turned out to hold the clues I needed, especially when cross referenced with some of the spiritual stuff. I laughed at the whole concept of wand waving, hand waving, and spells. The magic I knew came from the deep parts of the being, focused with a clear mind, and cast with intent. You didn’t need a poem to do good magic, just a very clear idea of what you wanted. But I guess, when you have no magic, you invent ways to entertain using it.

  Useless as it was, there were gems in the rubbish. Early learning tended to use movements and objects to start you off, but if you needed a wand by the end of training, they gave you a no. Force punching was a little different, since an actual punch clarified the intent perfectly. But you were expected to not to need them either. What I found, was the physical punch put an extra erg into the damage done. Hence my spurning anything relying on objects and actions.

  The concept of yin-yang provided me with my first break through.

  When I finally understood the concept of time, I found the day was exactly as I knew it to be. Which meant I hadn't moved very far from where the town hall had been. This suggested I'd been found exactly where the town hall was, or maybe the glade I'd been aiming for, and it was underwater for some reason.

  An article on the net suggested the seas had risen a long way thousands of years earlier, and much of the land had been flooded back then. After some searching, I found an underwater map of the oceans of the world, the world itself being something I'd learned about some months earlier, and at first sat there gaping at how big it actually was. My world had been no more than a half day's ride outside my village. To find it was so big, was mind boggling. The underwater one showed the depths of the water. And on it, I recognized the shape of the coastline not far from our town.

  The implication was staggering.

  I'd jumped through time!

  How far was almost impossible to determine. But this is where yin-yang came into my thinking. I was looking at what was known of the past, through information gleaned from the very rock of the world itself, and came across a reference to the age of the planet. It was suggested the planet was some four and a half billion years old. But the interesting thing was, it had another four point five to go before it died. This meant it was about in the middle of its life. Yin-yang is balanced at the middle. The early part of existence is yin, the latter half is yang.

  So if the world had just entered its yang phase, the yang magic would not have yet had a chance to manifest. And if I'd jumped across the changeover from yin to yang, hence no magic.

  But did no magic apply to me? It meant the magic I was taught was yin magic. But I’d also been taught magic was magic. You had it, or you didn’t, and the application was unique to each person. So magic had changed in nature, and in theory, all I needed to do was change the way I accessed it. People now had no access, because it hadn't yet formed. Mine was there, it was active, and all I needed was the key to using it now.

  I taught myself how to meditate, followed the exercises and recommendations to clear my mind, and when I’d not had a single thought for ten minutes one afternoon, I sought the magic at the core of my being. It was there, but it felt blocked. No matter how I tried, there was a barrier of some sort between me, and the magical energy.

  Magic isn’t real.

  The thought popped in there, and I pondered it. Yes, all the made up stuff was based on this. Magic wasn’t real. So the simple belief of millions, if not billions of people, was in itself a tangible blockage.

  So all I needed was different intent.

  "The belief of others does not and never will affect my magic," I said out loud.

  And immediately I felt the surge of energy I’d first experienced on my fir
st day of magic training. With my eyes still closed, I focused on the room. I 'felt' the teevee, and 'pressed' in the on-off switch. The teevee came on. I did it again, and it went off. The urge to keep doing it, was overwhelming. I grinned to myself.

  Over the next few weeks I practiced alone, gaining strength and power, range and control. I quickly learned not to do magic around other people. They didn’t appreciate it, even when it was supposed to help them. But when I was alone, I repaired broken crockery and ornaments, made small things I needed but could not afford to buy, and got into trouble when someone demanded to know where things came from, and they assumed I'd stolen them.

  Bullies learned to stay away from me, as there was no satisfaction in hitting someone who showed no pain from being hit. I practiced holding shields as long as I could, as often as I could, trying to build them up. This world was much more randomly dangerous than the one I'd grown up in, and I set out to protect myself as best I could.

  Shielding exercises led to hiding ones. I figured out how to change the shields so I couldn’t be seen, and immediately learned the steam in the girl's bathroom still revealed an invisible shape. No-one knew what the vague shape had been, but the scream still shocked me to the core, and left me shaken and subdued for days.

  A sports accident caused me to limp for a week, and I began short distance movement magic again, progressively moving further and further with each jump. By the time I could walk without limping again, people had noticed I'd started arriving at places early, when I was usually a bit late. Not being seen doing the jump, was the main constraint against using them, and often it was impossible. But I did quickly find places to jump from and to, which rarely saw traffic. At least once, I was accused of using a broom closet for hanky-panky purposes. I wished.

  I learned all I could, practiced everything regularly, attempted to stay partially fit, but as much as I tried, my form became a bit rounder than a warrior's ought to be. There was a time limit on how long I could stay here, as once you reached eighteen, they kicked you out to find your own way, and once they did, I'd need to find a way to make a living.

  Joining the military was an option, but Battle Mage wasn’t something offered here. Everything else was a letdown, to my mind. What I saw of boot camp on teevee, put me right off. I'd been through it once, but this version was so much worse.

  Being bored for the rest of my life, was a definite possibility. The skills I'd learned before arriving here, were useful for many things, albeit needing some upgrading. I'd picked up the tech fairly easily, but things were done differently here.

  Life went on. I dated girls every now and then, without any real success at relationships. The first guy to hit on me spent the night in the hospital. I didn’t swing that way, was very sure about it, and lost my temper when he refused to take no for an answer. I hadn't meant to hit him that hard, but he really pressed the wrong button in me.

  Until one day, on my eighteenth birthday, which had been determined by medical means, mere hours before I was due to officially leave to find my own way in the world, I meditated, focusing on the mountain top I’d been taken to as a young teen. It had a distinctive peak, required three days walk to get to it, and another three to return home. A grand adventure at that age, usually done just before turning fourteen. Now it was a link I hoped was still there.

  In my mind, I saw the place where we camped, but it looked different somehow. The actual peak looked the same from off to one side, but the camp area had changed.

  I concentrated on the spot, and willed myself to move there.

  There wasn’t where I thought it was, being a considerable way below where I materialized. I began to fall immediately. I had seconds to concentrate on an air cushion to stop me splatting myself on the rocks below, and achieved enough of one, so I only hit hard enough to woof the air out of my lungs, but without braking anything.

  "Who's there?" yelled a voice.

  I wasn’t yet able to move, let alone speak, but I could see, and a strangely dressed man, even by the standards of here and now, came around a rock, pointing some sort of fantasy ray gun at me.

  He looked at me for a long moment, and shot me.

  Three

  The room I woke up in appeared to be a big metal box with a door in one side. It was packed full of randomly abandoned stuff, suggesting I was in some sort of storage area. I was sitting up against a round metal thing going floor to ceiling, hands behind my back, and unable to be moved apart, or very far from the metal.

  I was quite surprised to find I didn’t have any holes in me.

  I was beginning to think getting out of bed on my birthdays was a really bad idea. Two years ago they'd tried to kill me. Last year I’d been in a fight with the school bully, and had to use some of my military training to put him down before he did some real hurt to me. I’d tried force punching him, but at that time, I hadn't worked out here and now magic, so it hadn't worked. The punch had broken a rib though, and I'd nursed a very sore wrist for days after. And this year, I get shot, and locked up in a storage room, who knows where?

  Actually, where wasn’t the really strange thing. The room was metal. I'd never seen a metal room before. I’d heard of them on ships, but never seen one. Was I on a ship? If so, how had they moved me so far, so fast? And without anyone asking questions about it. Even stranger, every teevee ship I’d seen constantly moved in the water. There was no sense of movement here at all.

  Where wasn’t going to be solved sitting here like a trussed chicken. My hands and legs were bound with plastic strips, and my hands were behind me, and also tied to the metal round thing.

  I moved myself enough so I could see the tie holding me there, and concentrated on a small chunk of it. It vanished, going to wherever it was the things I made vanish, went to. Finding out where, was something we were supposed to do in training, but I'd never made it that far. It was on my list of things to do.

  With my body being able to move more, I twisted myself around so I could see my hands, and did the same thing. The tie dropped away. I repeated it on the one around my ankles. And stood up.

  Or rather tried to. I'd made it partly upright before my legs gave way, and I dropped back down again. For several minutes, I rubbed my legs, flowing healing into them, and again stood. This time I made it, although I felt weak and wobbly. Whatever they'd shot me with, seemed to affect the body more than just knocking you out.

  If nothing else, I wanted me one of those. I needed to make sure I could shield myself from it, assuming one was likely to be fired at me again. Now I knew something like it existed, I could throw a shield up to protect myself, but without trying it, I wouldn’t know if what I did would be effective or not. A knock out gun wasn’t a physical attack in the context I knew of, and it wasn’t a magical attack either. Although technically, now I was thinking about it, it had to use some form of energy, and energy could be considered magical, so maybe I was fine. Note to self, avoid finding out the hard way.

  The door was locked. Or I assumed it was locked, since I couldn’t move it. Locks were something I’d had to learn about, since we hadn't had anything like it at home, or even the need for one. This door had what I assumed was a lock, although it looked nothing like what I'd seen and used before.

  I took a moment to get the square of lock area fixed in my mind, and concentrated on vanishing a cube. The lock vanished, and by bending down, I could now see out into a passageway. It was also metal. And deserted. There was a faint hum in the background, but otherwise no noise at all.

  The door pulled inwards, and I stepped out. The passageway was as filthy as the storage room had been.

  Left or right? Right went towards the faint hum, so I assumed this was towards the ship's engines, assuming as I was, I was on a ship. I couldn’t think of anywhere else I’d be.

  I turned left, and tried to creep quietly along, stepping over any obvious debris, to avoid making any loud noises.

  The room next door also had a locked door, and I removed the
lock with a thought, and pushed the door open.

  Inside, the room was somewhat cleaner, and contained a bed.

  On the bed was a girl. She ignored my entry, and continued ignoring me as I went over to her. I leaned down to speak softly to her, but suddenly froze.

  She hadn't been ignoring me. She was dead. I’d seen dead before during my military training, and this was it. There was a cover over most of her, and I drew it back to see what killed her. Underneath I found she was naked, with huge bruises over a lot of her body.

  I turned away, dropping the cover, and threw up in the corner.

  It wasn’t long before I recovered, and the only bad thing about making the mess vanish, was the clean spot in the corner was now very obvious.

  I went back to the bed, and looked at the girl again. She'd been very pretty. There was no smell, and when I touched her shoulder, it was still warmish. She hadn't been dead long.

  I left her as she was, and returned to the passageway. But my temper was now aroused. I wanted to find who'd killed her, and do the same to them. Which was of course, probably a really stupid thing to do, but hey, I'd been shot, kidnapped, tied up, and found out what they did to captives. It would make you mad too.

  I channeled some calming energy, as I’d been taught. A warrior goes into battle calm, using his head as much as his sword, shield, war machine, and magic. I was calm. Furious, but calm.

  I continued along to the left, looking into rooms, most of which were not locked, until I heard voices. I understood nothing they said, and I had to rack my brains to remember how to access translation magic. On the battlefield, being able to understand what your enemy was yelling made the difference between blundering around, and being prepared. I hadn't expected to need to use it so soon, and paused until the intent manifested, and the end of a sentence was actually understood.

  I crept up to the side of the door through which the voices were coming, and peeked inside.