"It's much better, thank you."
"You have some interesting reading material, Ana Wakefield." His eyes were still shut.
"This?" She stretched out her legs and picked up the battered volume, which looked as if Glen had rescued it from a Dumpster before selling it to the woman in Vortex Books for fifty cents. The inside was in better condition, and to her relief had barely been written in by the previous owner: Volume 12 of the collected works of Carl Jung, a group of related essays entitled Psychology and Alchemy.
"Have you read any of Jung's writings?" she asked him innocently, very sure that he had.
He stirred, and she felt him looking at her. "Some of them."
"Well, I was thinking about the things you were talking about the other day before meditation, about the need for pressure in striving for personal transformation. Somewhere Jung says something along the lines of enlightenment being found at the point of greatest stress. That got me thinking about Jungian psychology in general and the goal of transformation, and I remembered that he wrote a couple of things about the symbolism of alchemy as a paradigm for change. When I was in Sedona the day before yesterday I found this book of essays in the used-book store. I'll have to see if I can hunt down the other ones." She stopped leafing through the book and made herself meet his eyes, making absolutely certain that she gave him only the face of Ana Wakefield, earnest Seeker Ana with no challenge or knowledge or academic superiority in it. She was in luck, because the sun was rising behind her, and whatever it was he saw in her face, it was not Professor Anne Waverly.
"I have it. You may borrow it if you like," he said. "You might find volume fourteen of interest."
"That's the one with the Latin title, isn't it? Mysterium Coniunctionis? Am I right, then, in thinking that Change—the Change movement—incorporates some of the ideas and symbolic processes of the alchemical tradition?"
He said something under his breath.
"I'm sorry?" she said. He rose fluidly to his feet, although he had been twisted up on the hard, cold rock in full lotus position for at least an hour.
"It's time we were going," he said. She stood up, more slowly than he had, and when she looked around she saw his head disappearing down the hill. He descended the rough terrain with the ease of a cross-country runner, leaving her to pick her way among the rocks and bushes and wonder if she had heard him correctly, and if so, what he could have meant by "not just symbolic".
Rather to her surprise, he was waiting for her at the bottom of the hill, the very picture of a man in deep thought as he stood with head bent and hands clasped behind his back. She came to a halt, not before him as a suppliant would but next to him so he had to turn his shoulders as well as his head to shoot her his piercing glance.
"Ana," he pronounced, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
She couldn't resist. "Learning," she said, and for the first time she saw Steven Change disconcerted. He blinked.
"I'm sorry?" he demanded, impatient at her apparent non sequitur.
"A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again." That is," she added,"supposing you were referring to Alexander Pope. It's a common misquotation, and granted it's a subtle distinction, but as an English teacher, I feel obligated to be pedantic."
God, she thought, in a minute I'll be waving my cane and calling him a young whippersnapper. "I admit, though, that I've often wondered what a Pierian spring is." Actually, she knew quite well what the word referred to: an area in Macedonia where the muses were worshiped, it was used as a classical romanticization of learning. Steven did not seem to know this, however, and merely allowed his ruffled feathers to be soothed by her disarming admission.
"In either case, having an insufficient command of a path of learning can be hazardous," he said firmly, and began to walk again. She fell in at his side.
"A person has to begin somewhere," she protested.
"Very true. And in some cases, personal exploration that allows for random discoveries and spontaneous growth is for the best." He paused, choosing his words carefully—or perhaps considering how much to tell her. "However, with the ideas that lie at the heart of Change, such unguided stumblings are more likely to result in disaster than in enlightenment. There are immense forces at work here; a misstep can be very dangerous, for you personally and for those around you."
Ana looked at the unrevealing side of his face, wondering uneasily if that had been a threat. She reached across with her right hand and laid it on his arm, stopping him and causing him to face her. No, there was no explicit threat in his eyes that she could see, just great seriousness. There was nothing to do but grab the ball and run, and see where it took her.
"Are you telling me that you are doing alchemy here?" she asked bluntly, an unfeigned edge of incredulity in her voice. "Is that what you're saying? That I mustn't mess around in things I don't understand because I could, in effect, blow up the laboratory?"
He stood for a long time studying her. Finally he said, "Yes, I am."
"But—you're not talking about real alchemy," she said. "Not furnaces and alembics and actual gold."
"The Philosopher's Stone," he said reverently. He put his hand up to his collar and reached inside for the sturdy gold chain he wore and pulled at it. Up came the chain, and on the end of it a gleaming drop of pure soft gold about the size of a small marble, an uneven shape smoothed by years of wear under his clothing.
She reached out a finger to touch it and drew back. "You mean—"
"I created this, under the guidance of my own teacher. Three of us here have transformed lead into gold, and twelve have transmuted silver."
Ana sat down abruptly on a convenient boulder. She did not have to feign astonishment; the man clearly believed. If she was any judge of charlatans at all, this man, this trained scientist, truly believed that he and who knows how many others had actually changed the atomic structure of one metal into another. Nothing metaphorical about it; "not just a symbol," indeed. A phrase from the other book she had been reading came vividly to mind: "The Middle Ages did not have a monopoly on credulity." She did not think Steven would care much for that quote.
Suddenly, all the oddities she had noticed about the upper echelon of Change fell into place: the calloused hands and hard muscles on men and women who rarely worked out of doors; Suellen's day-long absence, to reappear exhausted, famished, and glowing with an inner light; the small burn on her arm, very like Amelia's large and oddly placed scar, more easily explained by nearness to an open flame than to a cook stove. Alchemy was hard labor around hot flame—and glass: the tiny scars on Daniel Carteret's face could easily have come from an exploding glass vessel.
She drew in a breath and blew it out between puffed cheeks. "Wow."
"Alchemy has been a secret doctrine for millennia, precisely because of the value of this." He held out the pendant, letting it swing back and forth in the gesture of a stage hypnotist before he caught it up and tucked it back under his collars. "Alchemists who created gold were doing so as a by-product and an objedification of the internal transformation they were undergoing, but the gold was nonetheless there. That's why they welcomed and encouraged the skepticism, even ridicule, of the outside world—it kept them safer.
"But even without the external threat from greedy men, Ana, alchemy has always been a dangerous occupation. Explosions in laboratories were common when chemicals were heated carelessly. Impatience, Ana. Impatience is the killer of the would-be alchemist. You have it in you to do a great Work, Ana; I can feel it. But you must submit to guidance. You have to work slowly, or it will all blow up in your face."