Minister Faust by From (html) (best ereader for pdf txt) 📗

“Hawk King, who’d supposedly exiled himself inside the Blue Pyramid almost every day and night for the last nine years, he came to visit me.”

“You? Personally?”

He nodded slowly and heavily, as if the power of his claim were in the mass of his chin. My wristband buzzed three quick vibro bursts into my skin; I subtly tabbed the ACKNOWLEDGE key to let Ms. Olsen know I’d received her message.

“I was sitting up on the roof of my apartment building drinking coffee,” said Kareem, unaware of what I had waiting in store for him, “pounding out my column on my manual typewriter like I did every Sunday night. Every once in a while I’d look around…maybe at all the network transmission towers, at the lights of the Hermes Theater, or over at the Tachyon Tower, wondering what kind of astonishing discoveries they were finding in their dimensional research labs, scanning out past the edge of the galaxy, spelunking black holes, gazing at quasars…

“And while my head was all whirling inside those mysteries, suddenly the moonlight went out.

“I looked up, and I was staring into the moon-frosted silhouette of a man-hawk.

“He swooped down, landed in front of me—six-four, golden beak and gold-rimmed eyes glittering, flapping his huge black-and-gold wings with enough strength in em to crush me like a ripe tomato.

“I thought…I thought he was there to kill me, Doc.”

He shook his head again, got out of his chair to gaze through the window across the Bird Island skyline.

“But he’d come to tell me he’d read what I’d written,” said Kareem, “…and that he thought I was right.

“I couldn’t believe it. I was completely in awe, humbled that he’d even read something I’d written, that he’d been moved by something I said. And somehow I managed to cough up the guts to ask him why he’d come to me.

“And then he invoked a spell…and transformed himself. Into a man, an old man, maybe five-seven, in a crummy, crumpled suit looking like something my grampa would’ve worn in maybe 1945. He was sitting there in front of me, a black man. In a wheelchair. Told me his name was Dr. Jacob George James ‘Jackson’ Rogers. That he wasn’t a god, but a man from the dawn of civilization who’d gained his celestial powers by leading a war to avenge his slain father, the ancient Sudanese mystic named Lord Usir.

“I mean, it’s a Sunday midnight and I’m sitting at the feet of the man Hawk King’s turned into, who’s revealing to me his life story underneath the city lights and the moon and the stars. He told me that after ruling over the lands of the Nile for a century as its Hawk King, he felt empty…Except for great-grandchildren, he’d outlived everyone he’d cared about: wives, mother, friends, cousins…and in all that time he’d never gotten over the loss of his father, which happened even before he’d been born. So he left. Went up into the stars to try to find his father’s souls. Found himself still in battle against his evil uncle, Warmaster Set, and holding back the chaos of the cosmic serpent Ããpep.

“Sometimes he’d come back for a while, rescue Egypt when she was in trouble…and after Egypt fell, he helped out in other places where people still knew his secret names, in Meroë, in Namoratunga, in Timbuktu…but he’d always go back out into the rolling deeps of space, searching for his father.

“And then, one time, after searching for he didn’t even know how long and still not finding him, he came back. But everything’d changed. He realized it’d been seven thousand years since he’d been born, and he hardly even recognized the world anymore. But he saw a war going on—World War Two—took a side, raised his own army. The F*O*O*J.

“But when the war was over he wanted a life, not as a hawk man but as a man. So he transmuted himself back into his human body. It’d aged—not seven thousand years, of course, but still. And when he went looking for a place to live, he made a discovery: most places in the city wouldn’t rent to a black man.

“He knew what it was like to be a persecuted refugee—that’s how he’d started his life, since his uncle’d murdered his father and he was raised by his single mother, a warrior-woman on the run. So he decided to blend in. Got an apartment in Ellison Heights in Stun-Glas. Practiced medicine for people who couldn’t afford it. Got his doctorates in archeology and cosmology and taught at the university and tried just to live as a man by day while guiding the F*O*O*J as a mystic-philosopher-king by night.

“But Dr. Rogers…he was devastated by what he saw in the world. And he just…he couldn’t figure out what to do with his powers that wouldn’t involve conquering the planet, killing and destroying to impose his will, and he didn’t wanna solve things like that. Said it wasn’t right and that it wouldn’t work in the long run anyway. So he’d decided to bide his time, do his research, figure everything out.

“He told me, when he came to see me that night, that he’d finally figured it all out. Partly because of the death of Brother Maximus Security. And partly because of what I wrote.

“He told me he was reaching out to what he called ‘the virtuous young’ to become his Shemsu-Heru. That he would entrust us with certain powers, his to enhance and his to take away depending on what we did with them. And then he gave me a papyrus roll, what he called The Book of Doing Knowledge. Told me to search out the canopic jars he’d left around the city, across the Americas, across Africa…and write down whatever words I found in them.

“Within a few months I’d found a dozen jars, mostly in Stun-Glas libraries and in the Schombro Center. They were like glowing turquoise, and after you