Age of Aether

Nine: The Phlogistonian

As the day wore on into evening, she asked him many questions about his world.  Bantam spent most of the time telling her about the Beatles and Facebook and iPhones and television and airplanes and even the moon landing in his own 1969.  She could not get enough of these details, and he barely had any time to ask her more about her own world.

But then conversation drifted to their beliefs in supernatural phenemenon, and she offered a tale of a medium that caused him to visibly sit up and listen.

"It's quite strange, really.  You see, a number of years ago, I went to see a spiritualist.  It was kind of on a lark, a dare, you know, with a friend.  I didn't take it seriously at all.  I thought it all flim-flam: you know, tricks done with ropes and confederates in the dark, designed to elicit wonder with the sudden ringing of bells and shaking of tambourines. 

"But this was nothing like that.  Instead, it took place fully in the light of day.  The woman -- a didikko, a gypsy, darkly beautiful -- she was confident and strong.  There was nothing about her that bespoke a charlatan.  As you know, I am a scientist, and I am no flat: I am very confident in my knowledge.  Likewise, she displayed the same confidence, the same fire in her eye about her occult art.

"She bid me to sit down and she looked at my palm.  She looked for a long time.  She seemed to descry some puzzlement there, a conundrum that she could not solve.  Finally she said, 'You were meant to have one true love, but fate has given you two.  And yet your fate is double: you have two lives, and they intertwine over one another.  I have never seen anything like this.  I do not know what it means.  But it is clear that in both lives, you are quite important.  You alleviate the suffering of billions.  That is your fate, that is your truest purpose.  Astonishingly, you manage it not once but twice, though in wholly different ways both times.'"

"This woman," Bantam said, his throat tight.  "What was her name?"

"Yes.  I will never forget it.  Madame Europa Romani."

Bantam felt like he'd just been socked in the gut.

"What is it?" asked Rachelle.

"I met her granddaughter," Bantam said.  "Before I came back.  She read my fortune and she told me something odd as well."  The encounter had been disturbing to Bantam; she had thrown him out, horrified.  But for Rachelle's sake, he kept that to himself.  "She told me I would meet my soulmate."

Rachelle smiled broadly at this.  "That is most peculiar.  You see, Madame Romani told me something else along those lines.  She said that a man would come from far away, further than I could imagine.  This man would be my true love.  And I would know him by this sign: that upon our first meeting, he would notice a fascinator in my hair.  And he would take it from me and perform an illusion with it."

His heart jack-hammered in his chest.  Rachelle's eyes burned into his soul just then.  They moved closer.

"And do you believe her?"

"I never used to believe in such things," Rachelle said.  "I was a scientist.  But now … now, I must confess: I do.  How else can one explain what you did with the fascinator?

"No one else has ever thought to do something like that?"

"No.  You must understand that here, such a thing is not done.  Men are not so forward.  Oh, I know you didn't understand that, being from your world, where I suspect such things are much more ... liberated."  She smiled at him and pulled the fascinator from her hair -- causing it to drop in a waterfall of auburn down her shoulders.  "Being from a liberated world, you are educated in the arts of love, are you not Mr. Bantam?"