This sounds like a serious invitation. You'd like to get out of the house. But a party? You pale a little. You don't want to go out while looking like Miko. What if someone tried to pick you up?
"Well, some other time, perhaps," Kali says when you don't reply. "But I am curious to see what happens when we put you in public."
You don't like being talked of as a science experiment. "Back to the Stellae?" you ask, and return to peeling the potatoes.
"Ah yes. Well, I told you that Frank joined when he was seven. Joe joined a year later. His name is Franz, and he's from Germany. His father was a confidence man, a smooth-talking fleece artist."
"Does Joe know?"
"Joe helped him. He was only a small boy, but preternaturally self-possessed, and a skilled prevaricator and actor even as a very young boy."
"So how did he wind up in the Stellae?"
"We used his father's own tricks against him, and kidnapped him from under his nose." She turns at your gasp. "Don't be so shocked, child. We're not in the kidnapping business, and each recruitment is made in a way specific to the circumstances. Take your case. Your parents don't even know you're gone, do they?"
"No, I guess they don't."
"Quite right. We found you because of the Libra, and we used that circumstance--the Libra and what it can do--to bring you in without leaving a ripple behind."
"Is it right to have done that? To use the Libra, I mean? Everyone talks about how it's a bad book."
"It is. And there is no guarantee that the creature we left behind in your place won't come to a bad end. But the devil cannot make anything. He can only pervert that which already exists. And so, anything he perverts can be changed back to what it was intended to be."
She grasps you firmly by shoulders, and turns you so you can see her grave but kindly expression. "Your gifts are not evil, child," she says. "You and the Libra resonate with each other, and you are now entangled, as I've told you. But that doesn't mean you have been perverted. Not unless you choose to be. You and the Libra may be twins now. But you, unlike it, have the capacity to choose. And you can be its good twin, I suppose we can say, even as you can do everything it can."
You let your eyes drop, and nod. It feels like a great weight has been placed on your shoulders. But you are determined not to be unworthy of it.
She turns back to the skillet, and stirs the meat. "Take Joe, for instance. He is a great talker, as you know, and can charm a bird into the mouth of a cat. But he won't do it, unless it is a very bad bird and a very good and hungry cat. Anyway, to return to their story, we found them and took them in. They spent the first five and six of their years with Charles Brennan, the head of our order. He's the one they call 'Dad,' and he raised them and tempered their character. They are very good boys, as they would be after living with him. They came to me for training for a year, and then went about apprenticing with others. They have had some fine adventures already. This business with the Libra was their first solo mission, and they acquitted it well."
"Even though Frank--" you start before you can stop yourself.
"They found you," she says firmly, "and spun you into their orbit. That is why Frank survived, and why they did very well. But come," she says when you fall into an abashed silence. "You might cut the taters a little smaller, and you've been lagging while I've been talking."
"It's a lot to think about."
"Then perhaps--"
"Could you tell me about yourself? And Miko? I don't mean to snoop."
"Of course not. But Miko can tell you her own story. My own is much duller. My father moved to Scotland in the fifties, to train as a clergyman, and that's where he met and married my mother. When I was very young I came to the attention of the Stellae, for there are close contacts between us and the Church. There was no need to kidnap me. Margaret Dillon came up from Sussex to take me in hand, and I studied in my own home, and didn't leave for my own apprenticeship until I was seventeen."
"The Stellae and the Church?" you carefully ask. "Aren't religious types, like, suspicious of magic?"
"Yes, which is why there is an alliance of sorts."
"Are the Stellae part of the Church? Which church?"
"None. All. And not formally. That's why I speak of it as an alliance. It would be better to call it a partial 'affiliation' at the level of personnel. For various contingent, historical reasons, most of the Stellae have also been members of the Church, as worshippers and even as priests and officials. But it is not a requirement for membership. It's rather like the relationship between the army--any liberal and enlightened nation's army--and the Church. One can be a soldier and a Christian. Or a Muslim, or a Buddhist, or an animist. The Stellae, like the army, makes no distinction there, and the Church accepts warriors and doctors and shopkeepers. Whether you, as a Stellae, are a Christian or an atheist or something else is a matter between you and God."
"So the Church doesn't mind all the magic?"
"No more than they mind nuclear weapons and those who carry the keys to the missiles that can annihilate all life on earth. Of course they are interested in the character of those who carry such responsibilities, which is why there has been such a close affiliation over the millennia."
"Millennia?"
"But of course, child. Did you think that all this was invented in the time of Galileo? But I see that I must pay for that essay on American history with a short lecture on the history of the Stellae. Very well."
She scoops your potatoes into a boiling pot, and folds the other vegetables into the meat. "There have been Stellae, I suppose, though they wouldn't have been called that, ever since there have been human beings. The order itself can trace itself back to ancient Babylon. They were the first to make a systematic study of the heavens. The Chinese did too, of course, and there were Stellae-like orders there as well. There has never been a formal union between the eastern and western practitioners, though there has been close cooperation ever since regular contact was made across the trade routes at the time of Darius the Great. The very earliest adepts were probably a rather wild bunch, but there is always a reversion to the mean where mankind is concerned. The Church has been infested with parasites, and great scoundrels have been crowned Pope. In the same way, even the bloodiest and most depraved cults over time tend to become rather bureaucratic, more mindful of protecting what they have gained than at spreading ruination.
"Certainly it was so by the time of the Achaemenids, and the Court of the Stars, as it was known then, was practically a part of the bureaucracy at Ecbatana. It survived through the Hellenic and Roman periods, being associated with various cults and moving westward into Europe. Its center came to rest in Constantinople, and there, I guess you might say, it was Christianized along with the rest of the Late Roman Empire, through the simple expedient of most of its members becoming Christian, as everyone was becoming a Christian at the time. But the emperors at Constantinople couldn't make it a department of the state, for it was too widespread, with members eastward in Sassanid Persia and later the Caliphate, and westward in post-Roman Europe. That is when the Stellae acquired its present, autonomous form, and struck a long-lasting alliance with the Papacy, which was similarly struggling to free itself from Imperial control."
"That makes it sound like it really is part of the Church," you say.
"No. As I say, it was an alliance and an affiliation, and there have been periods of stress between the Stellae and the Church. There was tension during the Crusades, for instance, for the Papacy wished to use us as a weapon. We refused, for it would fracture the Order. Many of our members were Muslim and lived and worked in the Arabic lands. We got our way with the pragmatic argument that a war between magicians would be very bad business. Since then we have insisted on staying free of sectarian and ideological strife. There are enough bad things in the world for us to concentrate our particular gifts against."
"You mean you wouldn't fight the Nazis?" you ask with no little skepticism.
She smiles coolly at you. "We did. They had magicians of their own--none of us, I'm pleased to say--and we concentrated on taking them out. We left the rest of it to the Allies, though, and would have continued to operate even if the Nazis had won."
That sounds rather cold, but you say nothing.
"But our center of gravity became more Europeanized after the Renaissance, and Atlanticist after the colonization of the Americas. The Ottoman Turks did their best to extirpate us in what is today the Middle East. Of course, we still operated, and still do, in Mesopotamia and Palestine and the rest of the Turkic and Arabic and Persian lands. One of the great heads of the Stellae, in fact, was Sulieman the Star-gazer, who lived in the seventeenth century in Damascus."
"Would you fight terrorists?"
"Bomb throwers," she sniffs. "They can barely mix household chemicals. If they had gotten ahold of the Libra, of course, we would intervene. But we would also intervene if the Department of Homeland Security laid hold of it."
"So you really are neutral."
"No, child, we're only specialists."
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