Sorcerer's Apprentice (12 page)

“Steady there.” I reached to pat his shoulder or knee—it was hard to tell which. “You don't have to go on.” The effort to explain had greatly excited him—he was smoking. He stared, blankly, like a shock victim. Gambling, I gave him Trional. “Just tell me how to get out and I'll bring help—”

“So,” he said, cutting me off, five tentacles slithering over what might have been a wet forehead, “so I feel a horrified fascination for the
sploks
and so desire (and yet dread) them that I yearn for their recognition, shift from melancholy to euphoria, and think of nothing else, which”—his voice quavered—“has led other Plague victims to irascibility, violence, moodiness, a morbid fascination with Time, boredom, the loss of memory, and, worst of all, thermogenesis.”

“Beg pardon?” I asked. “Thermogenesis?”

“It's what you call internal combustion. The Plague affects us that way, physically. The final stage is extinction. We explode.”

“When you say explode, do you mean
explode?”

“Like Chinese fireworks,” he said. “Like an MTV music-video.”

“Horrible!” I swallowed. Then: “Did I come in through that corridor or—”

“You haven't heard the worst.” His voice was frail. “I can thermogenerate at any moment.”

I gave the Creature a dose of diphenylhydantoin.

It's not every day a Negro doctor is delivered a new medical anomaly with, as it were, a red ribbon around it. It was, accordingly, as you see, an awful affliction.
Awful!
He now stood only as high as my chest. The room was full of smoke. Psychosomatic, I'd have to say, and how it might be cured was more than I could have told you, but a man who has survived Carbondale for thirty years is an eternal optimist. We had but to isolate the cause of the Plague to name it, but name it to know its nature. The Nobel Prize would be a
gift
to whoever diagnosed, then cured this uncanny disease. It was front-page stuff. Medical history, I hoped, might even rename it after me. Realizing I would need help for a real examination, I fumbled into my coat, and hurried to the Telecipher for my bag. It was then that, looking up, I saw—or thought I saw—a man with a crowbar crack the lock to a farmhouse full of cats, enter, which startled an old woman inside, then smash her head like a melon. Was this Anna? As he tore at her dress, there was a break in the film, some markings, then I saw another woman, younger, and quietly eagle-rocking her hips under a boy on a high bed with a carved oak headboard. She wore a pink slip like the one I had bought last year at Penney's for Mildred. Peering at the screen, I saw…

“That's my wife!” I croaked. “Can you turn this thing up?”

The Creature increased the volume. “Would you like the odors, too? This device, as far as I understand it…”

I missed whatever he said next, for now I heard the suction of sweating bodies, whiffed the venereal, fishlike bouquet of love. My old woman sighed, “Oh, Doctor…” I leaned forward, sweating from the soles of my feet upward, fingers in my beard; then, in disbelief, I saw Gary Freeman, his back glistening with perspiration, pull on a pair of Danger High Voltage slacks, and dry Mildred with one of my best Hawaiian shirts. Chuckling, he held it up to his face. “Does Henry really wear this shit?” My stomach tightened. My throat squeezed as if in a fist. On Mildred's walnut bureau, a crumpled Trojan lay atop a copy of
The Joy of Classical Piano
. I closed my eyes, counted twenty, turned my face from the screen, then opened my lids quickly. They fell to it again. They shook my picture off the wall.

“You're the only medicine I need,” groaned Mildred.

I had cardiac arrest for the rest of my life. Too weak to stand, I sat heavily on the platform, opened my bag, took out the sphygmometer, and checked my blood pressure: 140 over 110.

The Creature gently placed a tentacle on my shoulder. “Come away, Henry.” He adjusted the Telecipher—“It seems we are both strangers here, no?”—which responded by flashing from my bedroom to images of his Lifeworld—a low-gravity planet in the Alpha Centauri-A galaxy, a star system much like our own—but I was too shaken to pay attention. I pulled loose my collar. How in heaven's name could she
do
this to me? Trembling, I gave myself a shot of Dilantin and closed my eyes. They were right, Gary and Mildred; I was wrong. You couldn't really fault Mildred or the boy if, as the new morality said, a man like me, an antique Negro with my close-cropped haircut, heavy glasses that diffused my pupils, Murray's hair pomade, and funny Old Testament ways, was a relic—the product of ideas obsolete before I was born. By the way the world reckoned things, I was, at fifty-eight, Victorian, out of fuel now and running on the fumes. Old and crapped out. A pain corkscrewed through my chest. Should I weep? Should I call my attorney? Should I return to the only thing in this world that gave my life ballast: my work? I wheeled away, still flushed with confusion, from the Telecipher with this in mind, only to discover that the Creature had in my moment of confusion gone critical and was now so sensitive and overwrought that the slightest contact with objects in the saucer made him wince. “I want to say God bless you, Henry, and thank you for trying.” He smiled sickly at me. He was no taller than my knee. His mouth slipped sideways, then he fell, his figure forming an X that seemed to obliterate everything. “The idea has just occurred to me that all phenomena are products of my ego.”

Poor creature, he was past helping.

“You have to tell me how to get out.” I lifted his head; it fell back, heavy and soft, like a bag. “Do you know how the door opens?”

Evidently, he did not know.

“I'm not Schweitzer!” I said. “Where's the key?”

In the terror of seeing him die instantly, the explosion going through me like a shock, and in the terror of being certain that without the Creature I was trapped, I backed away, then toward him, my terror greatest of all when I found no Creature there, merely vapor spiraling from a pool of black serum.

“I'm not Christiaan Barnard!” I whispered, hoping, perhaps, the words would, as in a dream dissolving, bring me back to my Buick. My eyes were swimming. My cry ricocheted about the chamber. Then the Telecipher, still beaconing, showed a thing so unearthly, so spectral my mouth fell open and I dropped my bag.

III.

My patient expired November 24. The flying saucer, predictably, has been quarantined by the army in the cornfield where it fell. They're afraid, it's clear, of a biological crisis, afraid to use cutting torches until I tell them the situation inside. It's March, by my guess, or April—the snow in southern Illinois has vanished, but the winter chill remains locked in the strange metal of the ship's corridors, which I walk and walk when not reviewing the Telecipher's endless memory tubes for some clue that will open the exit. My labor is endless. The machine at times seems to contain my mind. The entries are infinite, ton upon ton of empirical data on every subject between the Milky Way and Alpha Centauri-A. On its keyboard you can play infinite variations on knowledge. It teaches me what questions to ask. It teaches me patience. Slowly, I progress. Quietly, I program the machine for answers, probability, analysis. My patient was, I know, old: millions of years old, and once I thought I'd unkeyed the cause of his affliction. It was partly this fact that so frightened me last winter: Their cities with fragile buildings like works of glass, where bridges seemed to flow as fluidly as the water beneath them, were full of shocks and mysteries, a glimpse into the ineffable Yonder—cities of such beauty and antiquity that centuries before
Pithecanthropus
(Peking Man) these creatures founded their metaphysic foursquare on what we would call, roughly, a theory of quantum electrodynamics. In their culture, Dualism was death. The whole picture came slowly, like a collage, piece by piece, the Telecipher scolding me for my failure to grasp it instantly. For what it's worth, I will explain this odd Lifeworld, though I hardly understood two images in three on the screen, and do not trust my diagnosis.

In what may or may not have been a wise experiment, I programmed the Telecipher to interface relativity and what I recalled from Ey's elegant series of papers on neurobiology, and it read
UNCODABLE
QUESTION
STUPID
, then reconsidered, recircuited the data, and said this about the Creature's science: a quantum field, as they understood it, was the vast laboratory of subatomic phenomena in which quanta of energy simultaneously took form as particles (A=A) and waves (A=not—A). As such, the field dissolved the distinction between solid particles and the space surrounding them. (Don't get impatient—I'm coming to the point.) Continuous in time, everywhere in space, the field was the idea of polymorphy made fact, its particles mere concretions of energy, as if Being delighted in playing hide-and-seek with itself, dressing up, so to speak, as Everything, then sloughed off particularities when bored with the game. Remarkably, the Telecipher then proceeded to diagnose the Plague. Dear God, I thought. It can't be true. My mind rejected it immediately. The margin of error seemed too great; I must have misread the evidence. I reran the tapes, then headed for the entrance, squeezing my hands together, my heart still racing after what I'd seen.

From outside I first heard Mildred, then George Twenhafel shouting, “Henry!” I placed my stethoscope against the door to hear them better, and heard the mayor bark, “Popper, what are you
doing
in there? Are they dead?” Mildred wept with wronged nobility. “He's
never
done anything like this before.” There were other voices, a flurry of talk about a press blackout, a possible epidemic from Mars; then Twenhafel's voice came back, gentler, conciliatory, like a father coaxing his child down from a tree: “If you're sick, we can help you, Henry, but the hospital needs something to go on.”

Any physician who wishes to be taken seriously, especially a Negro doctor, must swear by his diagnosis. He must be compassionate, too. Because you cannot tell the terminal patient he has but a week to live, I hesitated. My throat was dry. I whispered, “George—”

“Yes, Henry. What killed them?”

“The machine said—” I paused, certain I'd programmed the Creature's machine incorrectly. In the control room's wizardry light, very blue, and not an angstrom from the smoldering remains of the pilot, whose world until now had believed thought and things to be of the same species, in a brilliant readout like my own mind stammering, I had seen the screen, had seen it clearly and definitely fulgurate like lightning in a few fibrous seconds
It
‘s
the Self
and
There is no cure

THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

There was a time, long ago, when many sorcerers lived in South Carolina, men not long from slavery who remembered the white magic of the Ekpe Cults and Cameroons, and by far the greatest of these wizards was a blacksmith named Rubin Bailey. Believing he was old, and would soon die, the Sorcerer decided to pass his learning along to an apprentice. From a family near Abbeville he selected a boy, Allan, whose father, Richard Jackson, Rubin once healed after an accident, and for this Allan loved the Sorcerer, especially the effects of his craft, which comforted the sick, held back evil, and blighted the enemies of newly freed slaves with locusts and bad health. “My house,” Richard told the wizard, “has been honored.” His son swore to serve his teacher faithfully, then those who looked to the Sorcerer, in all ways. With his father's blessing, the boy moved his belongings into the Sorcerer's home, a houseboat covered with strips of scrapmetal, on the river.

But Rubin Bailey's first teachings seemed to Allan to be no teachings at all. “Bring in fresh water,” Rubin told his apprentice. “Scrape barnacles off the boat.” He never spoke of sorcery. Around the boy he tied his blacksmith's apron, and guided his hand in hammering out the horseshoes Rubin sold in town, but not once in the first month did Rubin pass along the recipes for magic. Patiently, Allan performed these duties in perfect submission to the Sorcerer, for it seemed rude to express displeasure to a man he wished to emulate, but his heart knocked for the higher knowledge, the techniques that would, he hoped, work miracles.

At last, as they finished a meal of boiled pork and collards one evening, he complained bitterly: “You haven't told me anything yet!” Allan regretted this outburst immediately, and lowered his head. “Have I done wrong?”

For a moment the Sorcerer was silent. He spiced his coffee with rum, dipped in his bread, chewed slowly, then looked up, steadily, at the boy. “You are the best of students. And you wish to do good, but you can't be too faithful, or too eager, or the good becomes evil.”

“Now I don't understand,” Allan said. “By themselves the tricks aren't good
or
evil, and if you plan to do good, then the results must be good.”

Rubin exhaled, finished his coffee, then shoved his plate toward the boy. “Clean the dishes,” he said. Then, more gently: “What I know has worked I will teach. There is no certainty these things can work for you, or even for me, a second time. White magic comes and goes. I'm teaching you a trade, Allan. You will never starve. This is because after fifty years, I still can't foresee if an incantation will be magic or foolishness.”

These were not, of course, the answers Allan longed to hear. He said, “Yes, sir,” and quietly cleared away their dishes. If he had replied aloud to Rubin, as he did silently while toweling dry their silverware later that night, he would have told the Sorcerer, “You are the greatest magician in the world because you have studied magic and the long-dead masters of magic, and I believe, even if you do not, that the secret of doing good is a good heart and having a hundred spells at your disposal, so I will study everything—the words and timbre and tone of your voice as you conjure, and listen to those you have heard. Then I, too, will have magic and can do good.” He washed his underwear in the moonlight, as is fitting for a fledgling magician, tossed his dishpan water into the river, and, after hanging his washpail on a hook behind Rubin's front door, undressed, and fell asleep with these thoughts: To do good is a very great thing, the
only
thing, but a magician must be able to conjure at a moment's notice. Surely it is all a question of know-how.