The warlock unlocked (4 page)

“The Church-State conflict has a long tradition, Rod. Henry II ofEngland had a protracted feud withSt. Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, because the Church’s authority obstructed Henry’s attempts to centralize government. The feud ended with Thomas’s murder, and Henry’s public humiliation; he was forced to grant concessions to the Church. His son, King John, was more obstinate; John’s feud with the Pope resulted inEngland being laid under the Interdict, which meant that no baptisms, weddings, or funerals could be held—no Masses could be said, no confessions heard; none of the sacraments could be performed. To the medieval mind, this was disaster; most of the people ofEngland felt they were being doomed to Hellfire eternally, because of their King’s sin. The resulting pressure was so great that John had to publicly repent, and do penance. The Protestant movement in Christianity succeeded partly because the German princes welcomed an excuse to oppose the Holy Roman Emperor.England became Protestant because Henry VIII wished a divorce that the Pope would not grant him. The Inquisition, the Huguenot Rebellion… the English Civil War occurred partly because the nation was Protestant, but ruled by a Catholic King… The list goes on. It is small wonder that, when theUnited States of America was established in the 18th Century, the founding fathers wrote a separation of Church and State into their Constitution.”

Rod nodded grimly. “It’s a potent force, no question about it—especially in a medieval society, where most of the people take their religion superstitiously. Just the kind of a conflict to topple a government, in fact—if the Church can drum up enough popular support, and an army.”

“With the futurians’ propaganda techniques and weaponry, neither should be too great a problem.”

“Not if it gets that far.” Rod grinned. “So it’s up to us to head it off before it gets to that pass, eh, old circuit rider? ”

“So many human battles could be averted by a little common sense,” Fess sighed.

“Yes, but the King and the Lord Abbot aren’t common—and when religion and politics are involved, no one’s got much sense.”

Travel light, don’t you, Father?” the spaceport guard commented. Father Al nodded. “It is one of the advantages of being a priest. All I need is a spare cassock, a few changes of underwear, and my Mass kit.”

“And a surprising amount of literature.” The guard riffled through a book from the stack. “ Magic and the Magi… Little odd for a priest, isn’t it?”

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“I’m a cultural anthropologist, too.”

“Well, to each his own.” The guard sealed the suitcase. “Certainly no weapons in there—unless you come across a devil or two.”

“Hardly.” Father Al smiled. “I’m not expecting anything worse than the Imp of the Perverse.”

“ ‘Imp of the Perverse?’ ” The guard frowned. “What’s that, Father?”

“An invention of Edgar Allan Poe’s,” Father Al explained. “To my way of thinking, it nicely explains Finagle’s Law.”

The guard eyed him warily. “If you don’t mind my saying so, Father, you’re not exactly what I expect in a priest—but you’re clear.” He pointed. “The shuttle gate’s over that way.”

“Thank you.” Father Al took up his suitcase and headed for the boarding area. On the way, he passed a fax-stand. He hesitated; then, on an impulse, he dropped in his credit card and punched up “McAran, Angus, ca. 1954.” Then he leaned back and waited. It must have been a long search; almost five seconds passed before the machine began humming. Then the hard copy emerged slowly—about a meter of it. Father Al pulled it out and devoured it with his eyes.

“McAran, Angus, Ph.D., 1929 - 2020: Physicist, engineer, financier, anthropologist. Patents…”

“Excuse me, Father.”

“Eh?” Father Al looked up, startled, at the impatient-looking gentleman behind him. “Oh! My apologies. Didn’t realize I was in the way.”

“Perfectly all right, Father,” the man said, with a smile that contradicted the words. Father Al folded the hard copy in thirds, hastily, and moved off toward the boarding area. He sat down in a floating chair and unfolded the copy. Amazing what the PIB had stored in its molecular circuits! Here was a thumbnail biography of a man who’d been dead more than a thousand years, as fresh as the day he’d died—which was presumably the last time it’d been updated. Let’s see, now—he’d patented five major inventions, then set up his own research and development company—but, oddly enough, he hadn’t patented anything after that. Had he let his employees take the patents in their own names? Improbably generous, that. Perhaps he just hadn’t bothered to keep track of what his company was doing; he seemed to have become very heavily involved in…

“Luna Shuttle now boarding.”

Drat! Just when it was getting interesting. Father Al scrambled up, folding the copy again, and hurried to tail onto a very long line. The shuttle left once every hour, but everyone who was leavingEurope for any of Sol’s planets or for any other star system had to go through Luna. Only half a percent of Terra’s population ever left the mother planet—but half a percent of ten billion makes for very long lines. Finally, they were all crowded onto the boarding ramp, and the door slid shut. There was no feeling of movement, and any sound from the motors was drowned out by the quiet hum of conversation; but Father Al knew the ramp was rolling across a mile of plasticrete to the shuttle.
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Finally, the forward door opened, and the passengers began to file aboard the shuttle. Father Al plopped down into his seat, stretched the webbing across his ample middle, and settled down to read his hard copy with a blissful sigh.

Apparently having tired of inventing revolutionary devices, McAran had turned his hand to treasure-hunting, finding fabled hoards that had been lost for centuries; the most spectacular was King John’s treasury, but there had also been major finds all the way back to the city of Ur, circa 2000 BC. This pursuit had naturally led him into archaeology, on the one hand, and finance, on the other. Apparently the combination had worked well for him; he had died a very wealthy man. All very impressive, Father Al admitted, but not when it came to magic. How would the man have been able to identify a wizard, even during his own time? Father Al had searched history assiduously, but had never come up with anyone who could have been a real magic-worker—they were either tricksters, espers, or poor deluded souls, almost certainly. Of course, in the very early days, there were a few who mighthave been sorcerers, tools of the devil. Opposing them, there were definitely saints. And, though the saints were certain, Father Al doubted there had ever really been any “Black Magic” witches; it made very poor business sense for the Devil. But magic without a source in either God or the Devil?

Impossible. It would require someone who was an esper, a medium, and had some unnamed power to break the “Laws of Nature” by, essentially, merely wishing for things to happen. That was the stuff of fairy tales; neither science nor religion even admitted its possibility, had even a chink in its wall of reason through which such powers might seep.

Which, of course, was what made it so delightful a fantasy. If any such individual ever did actually come to light, those walls of reason would come tumbling down—and who could tell what new and shining palaces might emerge as they were rebuilt?

“Gentlefolk,” said a canned voice, “the ship is lifting.”

Father Al bundled up his paper, thrust it in his breast pocket, and pressed his nose against the port. No matter how many times he flew, it still seemed new to him—that wonderful, faerie sight of the spaceport growing smaller, falling away, of the whole city, then the countryside, being dwarfed, then spread out below him like a map, one that dropped away further and further beneath him, till he could see Europe enameled on the bottom of a giant bowl, its rim the curve of the Earth… and that was just on the ballistic rocket flights from one hemisphere to another. The few times he had been in space, it had been even better—the vast bowl dropping further away, till it seemed to turn inside out and become a dome, then a vast hemisphere filling the sky, somehow no longer below him, but beside him, continents mottling its surface through a swirl of clouds…

He knew that seasoned passengers eyed him with amusement, or contempt; how naïve he must seem to them, like a gawking yokel. But Father Al thought such delights were rare, and not to be missed; to him, it was wrong to ever cease to glory in the wonder of God’s handiwork. And, at the moment when he sat most enthralled with the majestic vista on the other side of the port, a question sometimes tickled the back of his mind: Who was the true sophisticate, they or he?

This time, the overcast quickly cut off sight of the faerie landscape below, but turned into a dazzling sea of cotton beneath him, sinking away till it seemed a vast snowfield. Then, just barely, he felt the ship quiver, then begin a low, threshold hum of muted power. The antigravity units had been shut off, and the powerful planetary drive now propelled the shuttle.

Father Al sighed, and sat back, loosening his webbing, gazing out the port as his current problem floated to the surface of his mind again. There was one big question that the PBB bio hadn’t answered: How
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could McAran have known about this man Gallowglass, about something that would happen more than a thousand years after his own death? And that question, of course, raised another: How had McAran known just when to have the letter opened, or who would be Pope at the time?

The boarding ramp shivered to a stop, and Father Al filed out into Luna Central with a hundred other passengers. Gradually, he worked his way through the flow to a data wall, and gazed up at the list of departing ships. Finally, he found it—Proxima Centauri, Gate 13, lifting off at 15:21. He glanced up at the digital clock above—15:22! He looked back at the Proxima line in horror, just as the time winked out, to be replaced by the glowing word, “Departed.” Then the gate number blanked, too. Father Al just stared at it, numbed, waiting for the departure time of the next ship to light up. Presently, it did—3:35Greenwich Standard Time. Father Al spun away, fueled by a hot surge of emotion. He identified it as anger and stilled, standing quiet, letting his whole body go loose, letting the outrage fill him, tasting it, almost relishing it, then letting it ebb away till it was gone. Finagle had struck again—or his disciple Gundersun, in this case: “The least desirable possibility will always exert itself when the results will be most frustrating.” If Father Al arrived at Luna to catch the Centauri liner at 15:20, of coursethe liner would liftoff at 15:21!

He sighed, and went looking for a seat. There was no fighting Finagle, nor any of his minions—especially since they were all just personifications of one of humankind’s most universal traits, perversity, and had never really existed. You couldn’t fight them, any more than you could fight perversity itself—you could only identify it, and avoid it.

Accordingly, Father Al found a vacant seat, sat down, pulled out his breviary, and composed himself to begin reading his Office.

“Gentleman, Iwas sitting there!”

Father Al looked up to see a round head, with a shock of thick, disorderly hair, atop a very stocky body in an immaculately-tailored business coverall. The face was beetle-browed and almost chinless, and, at the moment, rather angry.

“I beg your pardon,” Father Al answered. “The seat was empty.”

“Yes, because I got up long enough to go get a cup of coffee! And it was the only one left, as you no doubt saw. Do I have to lose it just because there was a long line at the dispense-wall?”

“Ordinarily, yes.” Father Al stood up slowly, tucking his breviary away. “That’s usually understood, in a traveller’s waiting room. It’s not worth an argument, though. Good day, gentleman.” He picked up his suitcase and turned to go.

“No, wait!” The stranger caught Father Al’s arm. “My apologies, clergyman—you’re right, of course. It’s just that it’s been a bad day, with the frustrations of travel. Please, take the seat.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it.” Father Al turned back with a smile. “No hard feelings, certainly—but if you’ve had as rough a time as that, you need it far more than I do. Please, sit down.”

“No, no! I mean, I do still have some respect for the clergy. Sit down, sit down!”

“No, I really couldn’t. It’s very good of you, but I’d feel guilty for the rest of the day, and…”

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“Clergyman, I told you, sit down!” the man grated, his hand tightening on Father Al’s arm. Then he caught himself and let go, smiling sheepishly. “Will you look at that? There I go again! Come on, clergyman, what do you say we junk this place and go find a cup of coffee with a table under it, and two seats? I’m buying.”

“Certainly.” Father Al smiled, warming to the man. “I do have a little time…”

The coffee was genuine this time, not synthesized. Father Al wondered why the man had been waiting in the public lounge, if he had thiskind of expense account.

“Yorick Thai,” the stranger said, holding out a hand.

“Aloysius Uwell.” Father Al gave the hand a shake. “You’re a commercial traveller?”

“No, a time traveller. I do troubleshooting for Doc Angus McAran.”

Father Al sat very still. Then he said, “You must be mistaken. Dr. McAran died more than a thousand years ago.”

Yorick nodded. “In objective time, yes. But in my subjective time, he just sent me out in the time machine an hour ago. And I’ll have to report back to him when I get done talking to you, to tell him how it went.”

Father Al sat still, trying to absorb it.

“Doc Angus invented time travel back in 1952,” Yorick explained. “Right off, he realized he had something that everyone would try to steal, especially governments, and he didn’t want to see what that would do to war. So he didn’t file for a patent. He made himself a very secret hideout for his time travel lab, and set up a research company to front the financing.”