Wonders of the Invisible World Read Free Page A

its records mixed when it recommended me to him. Our historical viewpoints were thoroughly incompatible. “No, they’re not,” he had said obnoxiously, and refused to elaborate. He paid well. He paid very well. So here I was, in frozen colonial New England, listening to Cotton Mather talk about brooms.
    “The witches ride them,” he said, still wide-eyed. “Sometimes three to a besom. To their foul Witches’ Sabbaths.”
    Their foul Sabbaths, he elaborated, consisted of witches gathering in some boggy pasture where the demons talked with the voices of frogs, listening to a fiendish sermon, drinking blood, and plotting to bring back pagan customs like dancing around a Maypole. I wondered if, being an angel of God, I was supposed to know all this already, and if Mather would wonder later why I had listened. Durham and I had argued about this, about the ethics and legalities of me pretending to be Mather’s delusion.
    “What’s the problem?” he had asked. “You think the real angel is going to show up later?”
    Mather was still speaking, in a feverish trance caused most likely by too much fasting, prayer and mental agitation. Evil eyes, he was talking about, and “things” that were hairy all over. They apparently caused neighbors to blame one another for dead pigs, wagons stuck in potholes, sickness, lust and deadly boredom. I was getting bored myself, by then, and thoroughly depressed. Children’s fingers had pointed at random, and wherever they pointed, they created a witch. So much for the imagination. It was malignant here, an instrument of cruelty and death.
    “He did not speak to the court, neither to defend his innocence nor confess his guilt,” Mather was saying solemnly. “He was a stubborn old man. They piled stones upon him until his tongue stuck out and he died. But he never spoke. They had already hanged his wife. He spoke well enough then, accusing her.”
    I had heard enough.
    “God protect the innocent,” I said, and surprised myself, for it was a prayer to something. I added, more gently, for Mather, blinking out of his trance, looked worried, as if I had accused him, “Be comforted. God will give you strength to bear all tribulations in these dark times. Be patient and faithful, and in the fullness of time, you will be rewarded with the truth of your life.”
    Not standard Puritan dogma, but all he heard was “reward” and “truth.” I raised my hand in blessing. He flung himself down to kiss the floor at my feet. I activated the controls in my halo and went home.
    Durham was waiting for me at the Researchers’ Terminus. I pulled the recorder disc out of my halo, fed it to the computer, and then stepped out of the warp chamber. While the computer analyzed my recording to see if I had broken any of one thousand, five hundred and sixty-three regulations, I took off my robe and my blond hair and dumped them and my halo into Durham’s arms.
    “Well?” he said, not impatient, just intent, not even seeing me as I pulled a skirt and tunic over my head. I was still cold, and worried about my researcher’s license, which the computer would refuse to return if I had violated history. Durham had eyes like Cotton Mather’s, I saw for the first time: dark, burning, but with a suggestion of humor in them. “What did you find? Speak to me, Nici.”
    “Nothing,” I said shortly. “You’re out several million credits for nothing. It was a completely dreary bit of history, not without heroism but entirely without poetry. And if I’ve lost my license because of this—I’m not even sure I understand what you’re trying to do.”
    “I’m researching for a history of imaginative thought.”
    Durham was always researching unreadable subjects. “Starting when?” I asked tersely, pulling on a boot. “The cave paintings at Lascaux?”
    “No art,” he said. “More speculative than that. Less formal. Closer to chaos.” He smiled, reading my mind. “Like me.”
    “You’re a disturbed