Time Travelers Strictly Cash (20 page)

You must understand that he was unquestionably and indisputably the mightiest Warlock the world had ever known; for twice ten thousand years he had owned it. It was barely within the realm of conceivability that another as mighty as he could simultaneously exist, but they could no more have escaped each other’s notice than two brontosaurs in the same pond. There had never been such a one.

Further, he was invulnerable. Not just physically, although that was nice of course, but really. A warlock-any sorcerer-can only be truly destroyed by a spell using his name, and it had been thrice five thousand years since the last living being who knew the Warlock’s name had gone down to the final death. Since that time he had induced certain subtle mutations in the human race, so that no man now living could have pronounced his name had they known it.

His most deadly secret was literally unstealable.

He suffered other minor wizards to live and work, since they kept life interesting and made tolerable servants; when they reached their two thousandth birthday he methodically killed or utterly destroyed them as indicated. He could never be seriously challenged.

In a-way he was almost flattered by this latest would-be assassin. Though the Warlock had spent centuries becoming the nastiest and most sadistic being it was within him to be (which was considerable), it had been a long time since anyone had hated him even more than they feared him. When the bugs always scurry away, you lose the fun of stepping on them. He felt something very like fondness for this gallant little bug, amused approval of its audacity. Briefly he contemplated an act of mercy: allowing the poor wretch to live out its two thousand years, in utter agony, and then simply killing it. Anyone who knows anything knows that even two thousand years of torment and physical death are preferable to the real death, the final extinction. The most unpleasant points on the Wheel of Karma are infinitely preferable to the awful emptiness within which it turns.

But even that much charity was alien to the Warlock; the impulse passed. Besides, great wizards (and the occasional especially apt sorcerer) reincarnated with their necromantic potential intact, if not mildly amplified, and there was no assurance that this young upstart would profit from the lesson. Humans seldom did. This tendency toward rebelliousness; piquant though it might be, was not after all something a prudent master of the world should encourage. From his high eyrie, the Warlock observed the pitiful pile of,junk being raised up against him with perhaps a quarter of his attention, and sighed.

You may-reading between the lines, have acquired the suspicion that the mighty Warlock was something of a secret coward. Well, what kind of man did you think craves that kind of power badly enough to grasp it bare-handed, to do what must be done to get it?

This was the Warlock’s bane-millennia of utter security had nearly succeeded in boring the beard off him-end yet facing the problem squarely would have entailed admitting that he was too cowardly to permit any change in his circumstances. For the Warlock, millennia of boredom were preferable to even a significant possibility that precious irreplaceable he could be hurled from the Wheel. He preferred not to dwell on this, with any part of his consciousness.

Not that this would-be assassin even remotely alarmed him. The portion of his awareness that had absentlyy divined its magicial intent, and now idly watched its secret preparations for battle, felt as has been said, some amusement, something like fondness (but not paternal, warlocks are sterile as witches)-but his overriding emotion was something more than scorn but less than true contempt.

Same old fallacies, he thought. First they acquire a rudimentary mind shield and they get cocky. As though I needed to read their thoughts to outthink them! He snorted. And then they put their money on physical energies, three times out of five. They discover that magic, deeply tooted in tke Earth, is limited to a sphere of a hundred miles around the planet, while physical energies are not, and they decide that that somehow implies a superiority of some kind.

Ephemerals!

He recalled thp last really challenging duel he had ever fought, countless centuries before. He and the other had met on the highest peak on Earth, locked eyes for three and a half years, and then touched the tips of their index fingers together. The site of this meeting would one day be called the Marianas Trench, and the concussion had produced even more damage in the Other Plane.

The Warlock looked upon the massive assemblage of machineries which was supposed to threaten his-well, you couldn’t say his life, even in jest, could you?-his peace of mind, then; and he sneered. This building full of junk was to be raised up against him? (Could you?)

Nothing but a big beam of coherent light, he complained to himself. Surely that silly creature can deduce that I’m transparent to the the entire electromagnetic spectrum? Hell knows it has clues enough; I meditate above the ionosphere for decades at a time. I’ve a quarter of a mind to let the impertinent little upstart shoot that thing at me before I kill it, just to see it’s face.

About that much of his mind considered the question for a few months. (Meanwhile the bulk of his awareness, as it had for the last eight centuries, devoted itself tO a leisurely study of how best to mutate human stock so as to increase the central nervous system’s capacity to support agony. Mess with the hypothalamus? Add new senses? Subtle~ satisfying stuff.)

By hell, I will, decided that quarter of his mind then. I’ll let the impudent cretin fire its toy at me, and I won’t even notice! I’ll ignore its attack completely, and it will go mad with rage. In fact, I’ll be rather nice to it for about a hundred years, and then I’ll arbitrarily destroy it for some trivial offense or other. Delicious!

The quarter of the Warlock’s mind which troubled itself with this matter savored the joy of anticipation for several months, so thoroughly in fact that he actually did fail to notice when the upstart wizard’s harmless energy-bolt passed through the space occupied by his body. The reflex that caused his physical essence to “sidestep” into the Other Plane was so automatic, so unimportant, that it took a few weeks to come to even a quarter of his attention. He chuckled at that.

He also monitored the wizard’s frustrated, impotent rage, at least on audio and video (those damned mind shielde were a nuisance sometimes), and found it good. He invested a fortnight in devising a fiendishly offhand destruction for the fool, instructed himself to remember the affair in a century or so, and forgot the matter.

Those came to be called The Last Hundred Years Of Pain, and they were long.

At last like a child recalling a hoarded sweet the Warlock rummaged in his mental pockets and turned out the matter of the hapless wizard. Memory reported that several other shots had been fired without disturbing his peace. The mortal gave every indication of being sobbing mad. Its aim, for instance, had been going to hell for the last two or three decades; some of its shots had missed him by wide margins. He chuckled, and abandoned his century-old plan for destroying the wight without ever acknowledging its attacks.

The hell, I’ll tell it-It’s more fun if it knows I’ve been playing with it;

At once he was standing before the wizard in the building of futile engines, clothed in fire. In his left hand was a sword that shimmered and crackled; in his right hand was something that could not be looked upon, even by him.

Oddly, considering its displayed stupidity, the ephemeral did not seem surprised to see him. Its anger was gone, as if it had never been; it met his gaze with something absurdly like serenity.

Machines began to melt around them, and the wizard teleported outdoors, the Warlock of course following without thinking about it. They faced each other about five hundred. feet above the top of the highest of many local mountains, and they locked eyes.

“You have come to destroy me,” the wizard said quietly.

Of course, the Warlock sent, disdaining speech. Lasers are harmless to me, of course, but they wouldn’t be against one of you, and that makes it an insult. He frowned. Had you dared attempt a genuine, necromantic assault, I might have been amused enough to simply kill you hideously. He gestured with the crackling sword at the building below them, which was also crackling now. But this incompetence must be culled from the breed;

“We all do what we can,” the wizard said.

Indeed. Well, here you go:

He rummaged in his subconscious’s name-file, came up with the wizard’s true name, which was Jessica, incorporated that name into the thing in his right hand; and reached out toward the mortal, and “Not here!” she cried and was teleporting upward like a stone hurled by a giant, and Why the hell not? the Warlock thought as he pursued the creature effortlessly, intrigued enough to let a good sixty or seventy miles go by before deciding that enough was enough and hurling the thing in his right hand after her and averting his eyes.

She died the real death, then. Her soul was destroyed, instantly and forever, in a detonation so fierce that it was almost physically tangible. The Warlock grunted in satisfaction and was about to return to his eyrie, when he noted that the wizard’s physical body coutinued to exist, an empty hulk still hurtling skyward. It chanced that the Warlock had not had lunch that decade.

Straining a bit to reach it before it passed the limits of the sphere of sorcery, he retrieved the corpse and poised there a moment with the crackling sword ready in his left hand.

And felt the mind shield he had accreted over thrice ten thousand years peeled away like the skin of an orange; felt his true name effortlessly extracted from his memory; felt hunself gripped as though between some monstrous thumb and forefinger and plucked from the sphere of his power, yanked over closer to the sun where the light was better, and in the few helpless boiling-blood seconds before he died both kinds of death, the most powerful Warlock in all the history of the woridhad time to understand three things: that the laser beams had not been aimed at him, that lasers can carry information great distances, and that this world is only one of billions in a sea of infinity.

Then at last the end of all fear came to him, as it had come a century before to Saint Jessica.

Concerning “Local Champ”:

As of even date, I have written only two fantasy stories, and this is one of them. Perhaps it explains why.

There are quite a few fantasies I’ve enjoyed reading; no point listing them. But at this stage in my cycle, all the wonders and enchantments and mighty magics of fantasy seem to me like pretty pale stuff compared to the scope and grandeur of the observable universe. I’m at the point where reality seems more exciting, where the puzzle of just how the hell the universe got this way fascinates me more than all of Middle-Earth. Who shaped the primal Monobloc? And exploded it so perfectly that the number of stars in any given slice of sky will be within one percent of the number in any other slice of equal size? Starting with hydrogen and gravity, how do you get heavy metal planets? Why does gravity decrease (if you didn’t know that it does, go at once and buy Heinlein’s Expanded Universe), and how does that affect the Universal Escape Velocity question? What are the damned quasars anyway? What makes music so compelling, and why is a baby? What makes us all so afraid all the time, and who invented bravery? Why does pain diminish when it Is shared? And underlying all, of course, how are we going to feed all these people, and power their starship?

Show me a roc that can achieve faster-than-light speeds, and I’ll be interested. Give me a warlock who can synthesize protein and you’ve got my attention. Tell me of a spell that has power over the heart’s loneliness, and I will listen. But don’t bother me with trivia about necromantic empires and zombie armies and numbskull swordsmen.

I wonder what old Sauron-or for that matter Gandalf-would have thought of Lucifer’s Hammer? Or Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers?

(Say, that’s a thought! Does a spell work on a sentient machine? Hmmmm. Back to the typewriter…)

Concerning “The Web Of Sanity”:

All Fans are crazy.

(A capital F Fan is one who actively participates in sf fandom, as opposed to those who just read a lot of the stuff.

Everybody knows that; it’s like saying all oceans are moist. To read that sigh-figh stuff is crazy enough-but to spend good money and travel hundreds of miles to talk about

it with a bunch of drunken strangers? Crazy squared, beyond a doubt. Even crazier are the demented masochists who volunteer (mind you) to organize and put on these conventions, at enormous expense in time, money and energy, and to no visible return. in some cities they fight for the privilege. And even among these hardcore certifiables there are certain people who command awed respect for the truly legendary extent of their brain damage.

Such as the Minicon Gang.

More formally known as the Minnesota Science Fiction Society, and sometimes (inexplicably) as Minn-STF. (No matter how many times I run that through it keeps coming out “Minnesota Science Tiction Fociety,” but it’s none of my business.) They pitch a ball called Minicon in Minneapolis, at no fixed interval except that there seems to be at least one a year. At this very moment they are campaigning energetically and enthusiastically for the right to hold the World Convention in Minneapolis-in 1973. They’re selling advance memberships for minus one cent-write to them and they’ll send you a 1973 penny for joining. Most of them are devotees (if you miss the tee, you make a divot; hence a man who’s missing afew strokes is a divot-tee) of the surrealist recording group The Firesign Theater, creators of Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers and We’re All Bozos On This Bus. The only time in my life I was affluent enoughto accompany some friends to a Minicon at my own expense, I had what I vaguely recall as a very good time, but I’ll never understand how I came to wake up inside that piano (let alone how the burro got in there with me), nor what ever possessed me to have a tattoo put there.

A year or two later the Minn-STF gonzos called me long-distance at my home in Halifax.