Ogre, Ogre (Xanth 5) (43 page)

"Nymphs are eternally young and beautiful and usually none too bright. They are unable to say no to a male for anything. My mother is an exception; she had to be smart and reliable to handle her job. She remains very pretty, prettier than I am. But she's not as smart as I am."

"You are young and beautiful," Smash said. "But so is Princess Irene, and she's a human girl."

"Yes. So that isn't definitive. Human girls in the flush of their young prime do approach nymphs in appearance, and have a number of nymphal qualities that men find appealing. But Irene will age, while true nymphs won't, She loves, while nymphs can't love."

"Can't love?" Smash was learning more than he had ever expected to about nymphs.

"Well, my mother does love. But as I said, she's a very special nymph. And my father Crombie used a love-spell on her. So that doesn't count."

"But some human people don't love, so that is not definitive, either."

"True. It can be very hard to distinguish a nymph from a thoughtless human girl. But one thing is definitive. Nymphs don't have souls."

"You have a soul! I am absolutely certain of that! It's a very nice little soul, too."

He could feel her smile in the dark. Her body relaxed, and she squeezed his paw. "Thank you. I rather like it myself. I have a soul because I'm half human.
Just as you do, for the same reason."

"I never thought of that!" Smash said. "It never occurred to me that other ogres wouldn't have souls."

"They're brutes because they have no souls. Their strength is all magic."

"I suppose so. My mother was a variety of human, so I inherited my soul from her."

"And it gave you strength to make up for what you lost by being only half ogre."

"Agreed.
That answers a mystery I was never aware of before. But you still haven't explained how you--"

"Functioned without a soul.
Yes. It was simply a matter of how I thought of it. You see, human beings have always had souls; they have no experience living without them. Other creatures never had souls, so they have learned to cope. My mother copes quite well, though I suppose some of my father's soul has rubbed off on her." Tandy sighed. "She's such a good person, she certainly deserves a soul. But she is a nymph, and I am half nymph. So I can function without a soul. All I had to do, once I realized that, was to think of myself as a nymph. It made a fundamental difference."

"But I think of myself as an ogre--yet I have a soul."

"Maybe you should try thinking of yourself as a man,
Smash
." Her hand tightened on his.

"A man?" he asked blankly. "I'm an ogre!"

"And I'm a girl. But when I had to, I became a nymph.

So I was able to operate without sinking into the sort of slough I did before, in the gourd. I was able to follow your fight, and to step in when I needed to."

"A man!" he repeated incredulously.

"Please, Smash. I'm a half-breed, like you. Like a lot of the creatures of Xanth. I won't laugh at you."

"It's impossible! How could I ever be a man?"

"Smash, you don't talk like an ogre any more. You're not stupid like an ogre any more."

"The Eye Queue--"

"That vine faded a long time ago. Smash! And the one you got in the Void--that never existed at all. It was sheer illusion. Yet it made you smart again. Did you ever consider how that could be?"

It was his turn to smile in the dark. "I was careful not to think that one through, Tandy. It would have deprived me of the very intelligence that enabled me to indulge in that chain of thought, paradoxically."

"You believe in paradox?"

"It is an intriguing concept. I would say it is impossible in Mundania, but possible in Xanth. I really must explore the implications further, when I have leisure."

"I have another hypothesis," she said. "The Eye Queue was illusion, but your intelligence was not."

"Isn't that a contradiction? It's illogical to attribute an effect as significant as intelligence to an illusion."

"It certainly is. That's why I didn't do it. Smash, I don't think you needed the Eye Queue vine at all, ever. Not the illusory one or the original one. You always had the intelligence. Because you're half human, and human beings are smart."

"But I was never smart until the Eye Queue made me so."

"You were smart enough to fool everyone into thinking you were ogrishly stupid! Smash, Chem told me about the Eye Queue vine. Its effect wears off in hours. Sometimes its effect is only in self-perception. It makes creatures think they're smart when they aren't, and they make colossal fools of themselves without knowing it. Like people getting drunk on the spillage from a beerbarrel tree, thinking they're being great company when actually they are disgusting clowns. My father used to tell me about that; he said he'd made a clown of himself more than once. Only it's worse with the vine."

"Was I doing that?" Smash asked, mortified.

"No! You really were smart! And it didn't wear off, until you lost the vine in the flood. And it came back the moment you got a new vine, even though you only imagined it. Doesn't that suggest something to
you.
Smash?"

He pondered. "It confirms that magic is marvelous and not entirely logical."

"Or that you became smart only when you thought you ought to be smart. Maybe the Eye Queue showed you how, the first time. After that you could do it any time you wanted to.
Or when you forgot to be stupid."

"But I'm not smart now," he protested.

"You should listen to yourself. Smash! You've been discoursing on the nuances of paradox and you've been talking in a literate fashion."

"Why, so I have," he agreed, surprised. "I forgot I had lost the Eye Queue."

"Precisely.
So where does your intelligence come from now, ogre?"

"It must be from my human half, as you surmise. Like my soul. I just never invoked it before, because--"

"Because you thought of yourself as an ogre, until you saw what ogres really were like and started turning off them. Now you are sliding toward your human heritage."

"You see it far more clearly than I do!"

"Because I'm more objective.
I see you from the outside. I appreciate your human qualities. And I think the Good Magician Humfrey did, too. He's old, but he's still savvy. I ought to know; I cleaned up his castle for a year."

"It didn't
looked
cleaned up to me. I could hardly find a place to stand."

"You should have seen it before I cleaned it up!" But she laughed. "Actually, I didn't touch his private den; even the Gorgon leaves that alone. If anyone ever cleaned up in there, no one would know where all his spells and books and things were. He's had a century or so to learn their locations. But the rest of the castle needs to be kept in order, and they felt the Gorgon shouldn't have to do it, since she's married to him now, so I did it. I cleaned off the magic mirrors and things; some of them had pretty smart mouths, too! It wasn't bad. And in that year I came to understand that behind the seeming absent-mindedness of Humfrey there
lies
a remarkably alert mind. He just doesn't like to show it. He knew all about you, for example, before you approached the castle. He had you marked a year in advance on his calendar, right to the day and hour of your arrival. He watched every step of your progress. He chortled when you came up against those ogre bones; he'd gone to a lot of work to get those set up. That man knows everything he wants to know. That's why he keeps the Gorgon in thrall, instead of
she
him; she is in complete awe of his knowledge."

"And I thought he was asleep!" Smash said ruefully.

"Everyone does. But he's the Magician of Information, one of the most powerful men in Xanth. He knows everything worth knowing. So he surely knew how much of a mind you had and crafted his Answer accordingly. Now we know he was correct."

"But our missions--neither is complete! He didn't know we would fail, did he?"

She considered,
then
asked, "Smash, why did you fight the other ogre?"

"He annoyed me. He insulted me."

"But you tried to avoid trouble."

"Because I was at half-strength and knew I'd lose."

"But then you slugged him. You knocked out a tooth."

"He was going to eat you. I couldn't allow that."

"Why not?
It's what ogres do."

"I had agreed to protect you!"

"Did you think of that when you struck him?"

"No," Smash admitted. "I popped him instantly. There was no time for thought."

"So there was some other reason you reacted."

"You're my friend!"

"Do ogres have friends?"

He considered again. "No. I'm the only ogre who ever had friends--and they were mostly human friends. Most ogres don't even like other ogres."

"Unsurprising," she said. "So, to protect me, twice you risked your soul."

"Yes, of course." He wasn't certain of the point of her comment.

"Would any true ogre have done that?"

"No true ogre. Of course, since ogres don't have souls, they would never be faced with the choice. But still, if they did have souls, they wouldn't--"

"Smash, doesn't it seem, even to you, that you have more human qualities than ogre qualities?"

"In this circumstance, perhaps.
But in the jungle, alone, it would be otherwise."

"Why did you leave the jungle, then?"

"I was dissatisfied. As I said before, I must have needed a wife, only I didn't know it then."

"And you could have had a nice brute of an ogress, with a face whose full glare would have made the moon rot, if you'd reacted more like an ogre. Are you sorry you blew it?"

Smash laughed, becoming more conscious of her hand on his. "No."

"Do ogres laugh?"

"Only maliciously."

"So you've thrown away the Answer you worked so hard for, you think. Are you going back to the lonely jungle now?"

Strangely, that also did not appeal. The life he had been satisfied with before seemed inadequate now. "What choice do I have?"

"Why not try being a man? It's all in your viewpoint, I think. The people at Castle Roogna would accept you, I'm sure. They already do. Prince Dor treated you as an equal."

"He treats everybody as an equal." But
Smash
wondered. Would Prince Dor have been the same with any of the Ogre-Fen Ogres? This seemed questionable.

Then something else occurred to him. "You say I was able to make the illusory Eye Queue vine work in the Void because I always did have human intelligence, so there was no paradox?"

"That's what I say," she said smugly.

"Then what about the gourd?"

"The gourd?" she asked family.

"That was illusory, too, in the Void, and it had nothing to do with my human nature, yet it also worked."

"Yes, it did," she agreed. "Oh, Smash, I never thought of that! But that means--"

"That illusion was real in the Void. That what we thought was there really was there, once we thought it, such as gourds and glowing footprints. So there is no proof I'm smart without the vine."

"But--but--" She began to sniffle.

Smash sighed. He hated to see her unhappy. "Nevertheless, I admit to being smart enough now to find the flaws in your logic, which, paradoxically, proves your case to that extent. Probably we're both right. I have human intelligence, and the Void makes illusion real." He paused, yet again aware of her hand on his. What a sweet little hand it was! "I have never in my life thought of myself as a man. I don't know what it could accomplish, but at least it might be a diversion while we wait for the dragoness to stop searching for us."

Her sniffles abated magically. "It might be more than that. Smash," she said, sounding excited.

Smash concentrated. He imagined the way men were: small and not very hairy and rather weak, but very smart. They used clothing because their natural fur didn't cover the essentials. They plucked shoes from shoe trees and socks from hose vines. He had a jacket and gloves; that was a start. They lived in houses, because wild creatures could otherwise attack them in their sleep. They tended to congregate in villages, liking one another's company. They were, in fact, social creatures, seldom alone.

He imagined himself joining that company, walking like a man instead of tromping like an ogre.
Resting on a bed instead of on the trunk of a tree.
Eating delicately, one bite at a time, chewing it sedately, instead of ripping raw flesh, crunching bones, and using sheer muscle to cram in whatever didn't conveniently fit in his mouth.
Shaking hands instead of knocking for a loop.
But the whole exercise was ridiculous, because he knew he would always be a huge, hairy, homely monster.

"It isn't working," he said with relief. "I just can't imagine myself as--"

She set her other hand on his gross arm. Now he felt the touch of her soul, her half soul, for he was attuned to it after borrowing it. There seemed to be a current of soul traveling along his arm between her two tiny hands. He had rescued that soul from the gourd, and it had helped rescue him from the ogres.

He also remembered how quick she had always been in his defense. How she had kissed him. How she had stayed with him, even when he went among the ogres, even when she lacked her soul. Suddenly he wanted very much to please her.

And he began to get the point of view. He felt himself shrinking, refining,
turning
polite and smart.

Suddenly it opened out His mind expanded to take in all of Xanth, as it had when he first felt the curse of the Eye Queue. This time it was no curse; it was self-realization. He had become a man.

Tandy's hands remained on his arm and hand. Now he turned to her in the dark. His eyes saw nothing, but his mind more than made up the difference.

Tandy was a woman. She was beautiful in her special fashion. She was smart. She was nice. She was loyal. She had a wonderful soul.

And he--with the perspective of a man he saw her differently. With the mind of a man he analyzed it. She had been a companion, and he realized now how important that had become to him. Ogres didn't need companions, but men did. The six other girls had been companions, too, and he had liked them, but Tandy was more.