Clef “I could give you some sleepfog,” the lady robot said. “You stayed awake all night researching, and the Game is this afternoon. You have to rest.”
“No drugs!” Stile snapped. “Better to be keyed up than fogged out.”
“Better yet to be rational,” she said.
He shook his head, looking at her. She was so exactly like a woman that most people never realized the truth. Not only could she function in all the ways of a living human female, she was extremely well formed. Her hair was a sun-bleached brown, shoulder length; her lips were full and slightly tinted, kissable; her eyes were green behind long lashes. She was the sort of creature rich, lonely men obtained to gratify their private passions more perfectly than any real woman would. But Stile knew her for what she was, and had no passion for her. “This is one time I wish I could just dick off the way you can.”
“I wish I were flesh,” she said wistfully. She was programmed to love him and protect him and she was absolutely true to her program, as a machine had to be. “Come on-I’ll put you to sleep.” She took Stile’s head in her lap and stroked his hair and hummed a lullaby.
Oddly enough, it worked. Her body was warm and soft, her touch gentle, and he had complete faith in her motive. Stile was dose to few people and he tended to feel easier around machines. His tensions slipped away and his consciousness followed.
He found himself dreaming of the time several days before, when he had passed the Platinum Flute on to the musician Clef and guided the man across the curtain. In this dream he followed Clef’s consciousness, not his own.
Somehow this did not seem strange. Stile had felt an instant and deep camaraderie with the man when they played music together. Stile himself was highly skilled with a number of instruments, but Clefs musical ability amounted to genius. It had been impossible to remain aloof from a person who played that well
Clef had never been to the frame of Phaze. He stared at the lush tufts of grass, the tremendous oaks and pines, and the unicorn awaiting them, as if he were seeing something strange.
“This is Neysa,” Stile informed him, perceived in the dream as a different person. The unicorn was black, with white socks on the rear feet, and was as small for her species as Stile was for his. Clef towered over them both, and felt awkward. “She will carry thee to the Platinum Demesnes.”
What affectation was this? Stile had spoken normally until this moment. “I don’t even know how to ride!” Clef protested. “And that’s a mythical creature!” He eyed the long spiraled horn, wishing he could touch it to verify that it was only tacked on to the horse. He had been told that this was a land of magic, but he found that hard to credit.
“Well, I could conjure thee there, but-“
“Absolutely not Magic is-incredible. Wherever I have to go. I’ll walk.”
Stile shrugged. “That is thy business. But I must insist that Neysa accompany thee. Until thou dost reach the protection of the Little Folk, this region is not safe for thee.”
“Why are you suddenly talking archaically?” Clef demanded.
“This is the tongue of this frame,” Stile explained. “Now must I conjure clothing for thee.”
“Clothing!” Clef exclaimed, daunted. “I am a serf, like you, forbidden to-I can not-“
Stile had recovered a package of clothing from a hiding place and was putting it on. “Here in Phaze, thou art a man. Trust me; clothe thyself.” He paused, then said in a singsong voice: “An ye can, clothe this man.”
Suddenly Clef was clothed like a Citizen of Proton, with silken trousers, shirt, jacket of light leather, and even shoes. He felt ludicrous and illicit. “If anyone sees me in this outrageous costume-” He squinted at Stile. “You were serious about magic! You conjured this!”
“Aye. Now must I conjure myself to the Blue Demesnes, to report to the Lady Blue. Neysa and the Flute will keep thee safe, methinks. Farewell, friend.”
“Farewell,” Clef responded weakly.
Stile sang another spell and vanished. Clef contemplated the vacated spot for a while, absorbing this new evidence of enchantment, then felt his own clothing. Blue trousers, golden shirt-what next? “And I’m supposed to travel with you,” he said to the little unicorn. “With thee, I should perhaps say. Well, he did warn me there would be tribulations. I don’t suppose you know the direction?” Neysa blew a note through her horn that sounded like an affirmation rendered in harmonica music. Clef had not realized that the animal’s horn was hollow, or that she would really comprehend his words. He followed her lead.
The scenery was lovely. To the near south was a range of purple-hued mountains, visible through gaps in the forest cover. The immediate land was hilly, covered with rich green turf. Exotic birds fluttered in the branches of the trees. No path was visible, but the unicorn picked out an easy passage unerringly.
“Are you-art thou able to play music on that horn?” Clef inquired facetiously, feeling a need to assert himself verbally if not physically.
For answer, Neysa played a merry little tune, as if on a well-handled harmonica. Clef, amazed, fell silent. He would have to watch what he said in this fantastic frame; more things were literal than he was inclined to believe.
The pace became swift, as Neysa moved up to her limit. Clef had always liked to walk, so was in no discomfort, but wondered just how far they were going. In Proton, with the limitation of the domes, it was never necessary to walk far before encountering mass transportation. Obviously there was no such limit here.
The animal perked up her small ears, listening for some- thing. Clef knew that horses had good hearing, and presumed unicorns were the same. It occurred to him that a world of magic could have magical dangers and he had no notion how to cope with that sort of thing. Presumably this equine would protect him in much the way Stile’s distaff robot protected him in Proton; still, Clef felt nervous.
Then, abruptly, the unicorn became a petite young woman, wearing a simple black dress and white slippers. She was small, even smaller than Stile, with lustrous black hair that reminded him of the mane or tail of-
Of course! This was, after all, the same creature, in a different shape. She even had a snub-horn in her forehead, and her shoes somehow resembled hooves, for their slipper tops tied into thick, sturdy soles.
“Stile is getting married,” Neysa said. There was the suggestion of harmonica music in her voice. “I must go there. I will summon a werewolf to guide thee.”
“A werewolf!” Clef exclaimed, horrified.
But the girl was a unicorn again. She blew a loud blast on her horn.
Faintly, there was an answering baying. Now Neysa played a brief harmonica tune. There was a responding yip, much closer. She changed back into the girl. Clef tried to ascertain how she did that, but it was too quick; she seemed simply to phase from one form to the other with no intermediate steps. Perhaps that was why this frame was called Phaze-people phased from one form to another, or from nudity to attire, or from place to place.
“A bitch is coming,” Neysa said, startling Clef again; he had not expected such a term from so pert a miss. “Farewell.” She changed into a firefly, flashed once, and zoomed away to the north. There seemed to be no conservation of mass here.
A dark shape charged toward him, low and furry, gleaming-eyed and toothed. Clef clutched the Platinum Flute-and suddenly it was a fine rapier. “Will wonders never cease!” he exclaimed. This was a weapon with which he was proficient. He stood awaiting the onslaught of the wolf with enhanced confidence, though he was by no means comfortable. He did not relish the idea of bloodshed, even in self-defense.
But the creature drew up short and metamorphosed into a woman. This one was older; in fact, she looked grandmotherly.
Clef was catching on to the system. “You-thou art the werewolf the unicorn summoned?”
“Aye. I am the were-bitch available, man-creature. I have seen weddings now; since my old wolf died I care not overmuch to see more. I will guide and guard thee to the Elven Demesnes. Put thou that blade away.”
“It is not a blade; it is a rapier,” Clef said somewhat primly. But now it was neither; it was the Flute again. “Neysa told you all that in one brief melody?”
“Aye. She was ever economical of speech. What is thy name, man?” the bitch inquired as she walked east.
“Clef, from the frame of Proton. And thine?”
“Serrilryan, of Kurrelgyre’s Pack. We range mostly southeast of the Blue Demesnes, up to the Purple Mountains. Good hunting here.”
“No doubt,” Clef agreed dryly.
“If thou art walking all the way to the Platinum Demesnes, thou wilt have to step faster. Clef-man. We have forty miles to go.”
“My legs are already tiring, Serrilryan.”
“We can help that. Take thou a sniff of this.” She held out a little bag of something.
Clef sniffed. The bag emitted a pungent aroma. “What is this?”
“Wolfsbane. For strength.”
“Superstition,” he muttered.
“Have ye noted how fast thy walk is now?”
Clef noticed, with surprise. “I’m almost running, but I don’t feel winded at all!”
“Superstition,” she said complacently.
Whatever it was, it enabled him to cover distance with wolflike endurance. Serrilryan shifted back to canine form to pace him.
Still, they were only partway there as night came on. The bitch became the woman again. “Do thou make a fire, Clef-man. I will hunt supper.”
“But-” But she was already back to bitch-form and gone.
Clef gathered what dry wood he could find, along with bits of old moss and straw. He formed a neat tepee, but had no idea how to ignite it. Presumably the denizens of this frame could make fire with simple spells, or perhaps they borrowed fire-breathing dragons. Such resources were not available to him.
Then he had a notion. The Platinum Flute had become a rapier when he wanted a weapon; could it also become a. fire maker?
He held it near the tepee. It had formed into a clublike rod. From the tip a fat spark jumped, igniting the mass. He had discovered how to use this thing! He was almost getting to like magic.
When the bitch returned with a freshly slain rabbit, the fire was ready. “Good enough,” she said gruffly. She roasted the rabbit on a spit.
This type of meal was foreign to Clef, but he managed to get through it. Stile had warned him there would be privations. But he was ready to suffer anything to obtain legitimate possession of the Platinum Flute, the most remarkable instrument he could imagine. Only the Little Folk could grant that; it was their Flute.
Serrilryan showed him where there was a streamlet of fresh water, so that he could drink and wash. Out of deference to his human sensitivity, she refrained from lapping her own drink until he was sated.
Now all he had to worry about was the night. He really wasn’t equipped to sleep in the wilderness. “Serrilryan, I realize that for your kind this is no problem, but I am not accustomed to sleeping outside. I am concerned about bugs and things.” Though in fact no bugs had bothered him here; perhaps the reek of the wolfsbane kept them away. “Is there any domicile available?”
“Aye,” she said. She brought out a small object. Apparently she could carry clothing and objects on her person even in wolf form, though none of it showed then.
Clef looked at the thing. It appeared to be a tiny doll’s house. “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow.”
“It is an amulet,” she explained. “Invoke it.”
“Invoke it?” he asked blankly.
She nodded. “Set it down first, man.”
He set it on the ground. “Uh, I invoke thee.”
The amulet expanded. Clef stepped back, alarmed. The thing continued to grow. Soon it was the size of a doghouse, then a playhouse. Finally it stood complete: a small, neat, thatch-roofed log cabin.
“Well, I never!” Clef exclaimed. “A magic house!”
Serrilryan opened the door and entered. Clef followed, bemused. Inside was a wooden table with two chairs and a bed with a down quilt. Clef contemplated this with a certain misgiving, realizing that there were two of them and only one sleeping place. “Um-“
She phased back to canine form and curled herself up comfortably on the floor at the foot of the bed. That solved the problem. She needed no human props and would be there if anything sought to intrude during the night. Clef was getting to appreciate werewolves.
He accepted the bed gratefully, stripped away his ungainly clothing, lay down, and was soon asleep.
Stile’s consciousness returned as Clefs faded. Sheen was still stroking his hair, as tireless as a machine. “I never realized he would have so much trouble,” Stile murmured. He told her of his dream. “I’m used to Phaze now, but it was quite an adjustment at first. I forgot all about Clef, and I shouldn’t have.”
“Go back to sleep,” she told him.
“That amulet-that would have been fashioned by the Red Adept. She’s gone now, because of me. I really should see about finding a new Adept to make amulets; they are too useful to be allowed to disappear.”
“I’m sure you will,” Sheen said soothingly.
“Phaze needs amulets.”
She picked up his head and hugged it against her bosom, smotheringly. “Stile, if you don’t go to sleep voluntarily-“
He laughed. “You’re a bitch.”
“A female werewolf,” she agreed. “We do take good care of wayward men.”
They did indeed. Stile drifted back to his dream.
Next morning Serrilryan brought some excellent fruit she had foraged. They ate and prepared to resume the march. “This cabin-can it be compressed back into its token?” Clef asked.
“Nay. A spell functions but once,” she said. “Leave it; others may use it after us, or the Blue Adept may dismantle it with a spell. Most likely the Little Folk will carry it to their mountain demesnes.”
‘Yes, of course it shouldn’t be wasted,” Clef agreed.
They walked. His legs were stiff from the prior day’s swift walk. The wolfsbane had worn off, and Serrilryan did not offer more. It was dangerous to overuse such magic, she said. So they progressed slowly east, through forest and field, over hills and through deep gullies, around boulders and huge dense bushes. The rugged beauty of the natural landscape was such that it distracted him from his discomfort. What a special land this was! In the course of the day he heard something to the east. Serrilryan’s wolf ears perked. Then he observed a column of thick, colored smoke rising from the sky. There had been a bad explosion and foe somewhere.
‘That is Blue fighting Red,” the bitch said knowingly. “She killed him; now he is killing her.”
“I realize this is a frame of magic,” Clef said. “Even so, that does not seem to make an extraordinary amount of sense.”
“Adept fighting Adept is bad business,” she agreed.
“How could they take turns killing each other?”
“There are two selves of many people, one in each frame,” she explained. “One self cannot meet the other. But when one dies, there is a vacuum and the other can cross the curtain. Blue now avenges the murder of his other self.”
“Oh, I see,” Clef said uncertainly. “And must I avenge the murderer of mine other self?”
“Mayhap. Where wast thou whelped?”
“On another planet,” Clef said, surprised. “I signed for Proton serf tenure as a young man-“
“Then thy roots are not here. Thou hast no other self here, so art not barred from crossing.”
“Oh. Fortunate for me, I suppose. Dost thou also have another self in Proton?”
“Nay. But if I crossed, I would be but a cur, unable to were-change. And the hunting is not good there.”
Clef had to laugh agreement. “All too true! Proton, beyond the force-field domes, is a desert. Nothing but pollution.”
“Aye,” she agreed, wrinkling her nose. “When men overrun a planet, they destroy it.”
“Yet Stile-the Blue Adept-he is also a serf in Proton, like me.”
“He was whelped on Proton. His root is here.”
Clef watched the dissipating grotesqueries of the cloud of smoke. “I’m glad I’m not his enemy!” He resumed slogging forward. At this rate he would be lucky to travel ten miles by dusk.
Actually, he realized, it might be just as well to take several days before reaching the Little Folk. There was a tremendous amount to learn about Phaze, and this slow trek was an excellent introduction. When he finally did arrive, he would have a much better comprehension of the frame, and know how to deport himself. With all the pitfalls of magic, he needed that experience.
The were-bitch paced him uncomplainingly. She shifted from form to form at need, conversing when he wished, scouting when there was anything suspicious in the vicinity. Finally he asked her: “Is this not an imposition, Serrilryan, for thee, shepherding a novice while thy Pack is active elsewhere?”
“I am oath-friend to Neysa the unicorn,” she replied. “For her would I shepherd a snow-demon halfway to Hell.”
“Halfway?”
“At that point, the demon would melt.” She smiled tolerantly. “Besides which, this is easy duty for an old bitch. I am sure the Blue Adept has excellent reasons to convey thee to the Mound Demesnes.” She considered. “If I may inquire-?”
“I am to play the Platinum Flute for the Mound Folk, to enable them to ascertain whether I am the one they call the Foreordained. That is all I know-except that my life will have little purpose if I can not keep this ultimate instrument.”
“The Foreordained!” she exclaimed. “Then is the end of Phaze near!”
“Why? I consider it to be a pretentious, perhaps nonsensical title, to say the least, and of course there is no certainty that I am the one they seek. I am merely a fine musician and a rather good fencer. What have I to do with the fate of a land of magic?”
“That is all I know,” she admitted. “Be not affronted, Clef-man, if I hope thou art not he.”
“I take no affront from thee, bitch.” He had long since realized that the term he had considered to be uncomplimentary was the opposite here.
“Thou dost play the flute well?”
“Very well.”
“Better than Blue?”
“Aye. But I decline to play this particular instrument in the frame of Phaze until I meet the Mound Folk. It is said the mountain may tremble if-“
“Aye, wait,” she agreed. “No fool’s errand, this.”
“Dost thou like music, Serrilryan?”
“Some. Baying, belike, at full moon.”
“Baying is not my specialty. I could whistle, though.”
“That is music?” she asked, amused.
“It can be, properly executed. There are many types of whistles. Hand-whistling can resemble a woodwind.”
“Aye, with magic.”
“No magic, bitch. Like this.” He rubbed his hands together, convoluted his long fingers into the appropriate configuration, and blew. A fine, dear pipe note emerged. He adjusted his fingers as if tuning the instrument and blew again, making a different pitch. Then he essayed a minor melody.
The sound was beautiful. Clef had not exaggerated when he claimed to play well; he was probably the finest and most versatile musician on the planet. His crude hands produced prettier music than that of most other people using fine instruments.
Serrilryan listened, entranced, phasing back and forth between her forms to appreciate it in each. “That is not magic?” she asked dubiously when he paused.
“I know no magic. This is straight physical dexterity.”
“Never have I heard the like!” she exclaimed. “The Blue Adept played the Flute at the Unolympics, and me thought that was the most perfect melody ever made. Now I think thou mightest eclipse it, as thou sayest. Canst thou do real whistling too?”
Clef smiled at her naivete. He pursed his lips and whistled a few bars of classical music eloquently. She was delighted.
So they continued, and in the evening he serenaded her with a whistle concert. Squirrels and sparrows appeared in nearby trees, listening raptly. Clef had discovered how to relate to the wild creatures of this lovely wilderness world.
This night the werebitch had located a serviceable cave to sleep in. They piled straw and fern for a bed, and she curled up by the entrance. It was a good night. He was getting to like Phaze.
Stile woke again. “Time to go for the Game,” he mumbled.
“Not yet. Sleep,” Sheen said. She was a machine, indefatigable; she could sit up and hold him indefinitely and was ready to do so. She was his best and perhaps his only personal friend in this frame. She had saved his life on several occasions. He trusted her. He slept.
The third day Clef found his muscles acclimatizing, and he traveled better. But the world of Phaze seemed restless. There was the sound of horse or unicorn hooves pounding to the east, and a lone wolf passed nearby. “What’s going on?”
“The Red Adept has sprung a trap on the Blue Adept,” Serrilryan said, having somehow picked up this news from the pattern of baying and the musical notes of the distant unicorns. “He is badly injured but can not cross the curtain for magic healing, for that a basilisk has hold of him. It is very bad.” Indeed, she was worried and, when she returned to bitch-form, her hackles were ruffled. Clef, too, was concerned; he had known Stile only a few hours before their parting, but liked him well and wished him well. There seemed to be nothing he could do, however.
But later the situation eased. “They have saved him,” Serrilryan reported. “He is weak, but survives.”
Clef’s own tension abated. “I am exceedingly glad to hear that. He lent me the Platinum Flute, and for this marvelous instrument I would lay down my life. It was the sight of it that brought me here, though I am wary of the office it portends.”
“Aye.”
In the afternoon they heard a sudden clamor. Something was fluttering, squawking, and screeching. The sounds were hideous, in sharp contrast to the pleasure of the terrain.
Serrilryan’s canine lip curled. Quickly she shifted to human form. “Beast birds! Needs must we hide.”
But it was not to be. The creatures had winded them, and the pursuit was on. “Let not their filthy paws touch thee,” the werebitch warned. “The scratches will fester into gangrene.” She changed back to canine form and stood guarding him, teeth bared.
The horde burst upon them. They seemed to be large birds-but their faces were those of ferocious women. Clef’s platinum rapier was in his hand, but he hesitated to use it against these part-human creatures. Harpies-that was what they were.
They gave him little opportunity to consider. Three of them flew at his head, discolored talons extended. “Kill! Kill!” they screamed. The smell was appalling.
Serrilryan leaped, her teeth catching the grimy underbelly of one bird. Greasy feathers fell out as the creature emitted a shriek of amazing ugliness. Immediately the other two pounced on the wolf, and two more swooped down from above.
Clef’s misgivings were abruptly submerged by the need to act. There seemed to be no chance to reason or warn; he simply had to fight.
Clef was aware that the werewolf had taken his remark about his skill at fencing to be vanity, for he was hardly the warrior type. However, he had spoken the truth. The rapier danced before him. In seven seconds he skewered four harpies, while Serrilryan dropped the fifth, dead.
The remaining beast birds now developed some crude caution. They flapped and bustled, screeching epithets, but did not charge again. Their eyes were on the gleaming platinum weapon; they had suddenly learned respect.
Clef took a step toward them, and the foul creatures scattered, hurling back one-syllable words fully as filthy as their feathers. This threat had been abated.
“Thou art quite a hand with that instrument,” Serrilryan remarked appreciatively. “Never saw I a sword stab so swiftly.”
“I never used a rapier in anger before,” Clef said, feeling weak and revolted now that the brief action was over. “But those horrible creatures-“
“Thou didst withhold thy strike until they clustered on me.”
“Well, I couldn’t let them-those claws-“
“Aye,” she said, and went canine again.
But there was something wrong. She had tried to conceal it, but his reaction to this combat had made him more perceptive to physical condition. “Wait-thou hast been scratched!” Clef said. “Thy shoulder’s bleeding!”
“Wounds are nothing to wolves,” she said, phasing back. But it showed on her dame-form too, the blood now staining her shawl. “How much less, a mere scratch.”
“But thou didst say-“
“Doubtless I exaggerated. Bleeding cleans it.” She changed back again and ran ahead, terminating the dialogue.
Clef realized that she did not want sympathy for her injury, at least not from the likes of him. Probably it was unwolflike to acknowledge discomfort. Yet she had warned him about the poisonous nature of harpy scratches. He hoped nothing evil came of this.
That night they camped in a tree. Clef was now more accustomed to roughing it, and this was a hugely spreading yellow birch whose central nexus was almost like a house. Serrilryan curled up in bitch-form, and he curled up beside her, satisfied with the body warmth she radiated. The papery bark of the tree was slightly soft. and he was able to form a pillow of his bent arm. Yes, he was coming to like this life.
“This frame is just a little like Heaven,” he remarked as sleep drew nigh. “My frame of Proton is more like Hell, outside the domes, where nothing grows.”
“Mayhap it is Proton-frame I am destined for,” she said, shifting just far enough to dame-form to speak, not bothering to uncurl.
“Proton? Dost thou plan to cross the curtain, despite thy loss of magic there?”
She growl-chuckled ruefully. “Figuratively, man-person. When I die, it will be the real Hell I will see.”
“Hell? Thee? Surely thou wilt go to Heaven!” Clef did not believe in either region, but neither did he believe in magic.
“Surely would I wish to go to Heaven! There, belike, the Glory Hounds run free. But that is not the destiny of the likes of me. Many evils have I seen since I was a pup.” She shifted back to canine and slept.
Clef thought about that, disturbed. He did not believe this was an immediate issue, but feared that she did. He was bothered by her growing morbidity and her low estimate of self-worth. She might have seen evil, but that did not make her evil herself; sometimes evil was impossible to escape. It had been that way with the harpies. Yet what could he do to ease her depression?
Troubled, he slept.
“Strange dream,” Stile said. “Every time he sleeps, I wake. But I’m dreaming in minutes what he experienced in days.”
“How much farther does he have to go?” Sheen asked.
“He should reach the Elven Demesnes in two more days.”
“Then you sleep two more times. I want to learn how this ends.” Her fingers stroked his eyes closed.
Serrilryan’s wound was not healing. It was red and swollen, the blood refusing to coagulate properly. She limped now, when she thought he wasn’t looking, and her pace was slower. She was suffering-and he couldn’t comment for fear of embarrassing her.
The terrain became more hilly. Huge trees grew out of the slopes, some of their roots exposed by erosion. But the eager grass was covering every available patch of ground, and the turf was thick and spongy. Clef was soon breathless, ascending the steep, short slopes, drawing himself up by handholds on trees and branches and tangles of roots. Serrilryan followed, her familiarity with this region making up for her weakness, shirting back and forth between forms to take advantage of the best properties of each.
Something tugged at his hair. It was not the wind. Clef paused, fearing he had snagged it in a low branch-but there was no branch. He put his hand up, but there was nothing. Yet the tugging continued, and now there were little touches on his skin.
“Something’s here!” he exclaimed, alarmed.
The bitch sniffed the air and cocked her ears. She phased into woman-form. “Whistle,” she said.
Perplexed, he whistled. Oddly, the touchings abated. He whistled louder and with more intricacy, a medley of classical themes. He enhanced it with trills and double notes, warming to it, serenading the landscape.
Slowly, shapes appeared. They were little people, perching on branches and on the slope and even floating in ail. All were listening raptly.
“Aye, the sidhe,” Serrilryan said, pronouncing it shee. “The Faerie Folk. They cause no harm, just idle mischief.”
Discovered, the sidhe moved into a dance, whirling in air. Their little lasses were, in the archaic measurement of this frame, about four feet tall, the lads not much larger. They moved prettily and smiled often-happy folk.
But when Clef stopped whistling, they faded out of sight again. “The sidhe associate not overmuch with other folk, but they do like music,” the werebitch said. “I am destined to see them three times before I die.”
“How many times hast thou seen them so far?”
‘This is the third time.”
“Then I should not have whistled them into sight!”
She made a gesture of unconcern. “I am old; my pace is slowing. My teeth are no longer sharp. The Pack will not let me live much longer anyway. Glad am I to have seen the lovely Faerie Folk once more.”
“But this is barbaric! The other wolves have no right-“
“Question not the way of the Pack. I have killed others in my day; always I knew my turn would come. Perhaps it would have come ere now, had I not been fated to guide thee. I am content. Clef-man.”
Clef shook his head, not commenting further. Obviously there was violence along with the beauty and literal magic of this frame.
They marched on. Later another phenomenon occurred -a kind of sweeping of an unbreeze through the forest, dissipation of nonexistent clouds in the sky, and revivification of things that had not been dead. A hidden tension had been released, an obligation expiated. “What is it?” Clef asked.
“The lifting of a geis,” Serrilryan said.
“I don’t think I understand.”
“The abatement of an oath. It hung over the forest; now it is done.”
“What oath is this?”
“The Blue Adept swore vengeance against the Red Adept.”
“Um, yes. But I thought he was getting married. He is also moving through the Proton Tourney. Isn’t this an awful lot of activity for such an occasion?”
“There is no comprehending the ways of Adepts.”
That seemed to be the case. The Blue Adept evidently had a lot more power, and was involved in more great events, than Clef had realized. It was mildly odd that so small a man had so large an impact on this frame.
By nightfall they reached the marker for the Platinum Demesnes, indicated by a sign saying [ FT 78 ].
“The path within is treacherous,” the werebitch said. “Morning is better for it.”
“Yes, certainly.” Clef wasn’t sure, now that he was this close, that he really wanted to reach these mysterious elves. If he were not the Foreordained, they would take the Flute from him, for it belonged to them.
Serrilryan knew of an existing shelter nearby, and they spent the night there. “I want thee to know,” he told her, “how I appreciate the trouble thou hast taken on my behalf. This all may come to naught, yet it has been worthwhile for me.”
“I thank thee, man,” she said. “It has been nice talking with thee and hearing thy music. Few among the Pack have time or courtesy for the old.”
She did not look well at all. It was evident that pain was preventing her from relaxing. Clef whistled, filling the air with melody, and after a time the werewolf fell into a troubled slumber. Then Clef himself relaxed.
“I didn’t know there were harpies in that vicinity,” Stile said, waking. “I should have given him better protection. Though the way he used that rapier-” He shrugged and returned to sleep himself, secure in the robot’s embrace.
In the morning Clef woke before the werebitch. She was breathing in pants and whining slightly in her sleep. The bad shoulder bulged with swelling, and the fur was falling out. This was obviously a severe infection. A good antibiotic could abate it-but this was Phaze, the frame of magic, where antibiotics were not available and perhaps would not work anyway.
Magic was what was needed-but he could not perform it. Unless the Flute-but no, he had resolved to play it only for the Mound Folk, because of the potential significance of the rendition. Still, maybe its magic could help. He laid the instrument against her body, as close to the wound as he could.
Her whining stopped; she was drawing comfort from the propinquity of this powerful talisman. Still, she was shivering, though the morning was warm. He had nothing with which to cover her.
Clef began to whistle again; it was all he could do. This time he selected a merry folk-song melody. He whistled it well; the joyous notes rippled through the forest, abolishing sadness. The bitch’s shivering eased, and she slept peacefully at last.
For an hour he whistled. At last she turned and woke. She made a growl of displeasure at the lateness of the hour, but Clef wasn’t fooled. She had needed that extra rest.
Breakfast was no problem. Squirrels and birds had dropped nuts and berries as offerings of appreciation, and these were excellent. This was a world that liked music.
Clef, in return, was becoming quite fond of this world. Yet t it had its dark side, as Serrilryan’s ailment showed.
They mounted the steep trail leading to the Mound Demesnes. Clef was now better able to manage than the werewolf. He wished he could help her, but all he could do was slow his pace to make it easier for her, leaving her pride intact.
Deep in the mountains there was a thin, suspended bridge crossing a chasm. Clef eyed it dubiously, but Serrilryan proceeded on across without hesitation. She was so unsteady he hastened to follow, so he could catch her if she started to fall.
Halfway across he looked down. The chasm yawned so deep and dark it made him dizzy. He did not enjoy the sensation. Fortunately the chasm was narrow, and in moments they were across.
At last they came in sight of the Mound. Serrilryan sank in a heap before it, her waning energy exhausted. She had done her job; she had delivered him safely. ;
But there was no one about. The sun shone down brightly and the hills were alive with small animals and birds-but no people. Clef, worried about the werebitch, did not care to wait overlong for an introduction. “Ho there!” he called. “I must meet with the Platinum Mound Folk.”
There was no answer. Could he have come to the wrong ‘ place? “Serrilryan-” he began. ;
She changed with difficulty to dame-form. She was haggard. “This is the place, music man. The Mound Folk go not abroad by day. At night thou wilt see them.”
“I don’t think thou canst last till night,” he said. “We must have healing magic for thee now.”
She smiled weakly. “It is too late for me, friend. My day is done. One favor only I beg of thee-“
“Anything!” ;
“I would hear the Flute ere I die. Canst thou play an epitaph for me?”
He knew this was final. She would expire within the hour. He was at the realm of the Little Folk; he was no longer obliged to wait. “Yes, it is time,” he agreed. “There can be no better use for this instrument.” He brought out the Flute.
He played an ancient folk song that he felt was appropriate to this occasion: Tumbleweeds. It was the sort of theme a wolf could appreciate, for it related to the freedom of the great outdoors, the rolling bushes called tumbleweeds drifting in the wind across the plain, cares of the world left behind. Perhaps it was not that way, here in Phaze, but he felt confident the mood would be conveyed.
From the first note, the Platinum Flute was potent, the finest instrument he had ever played, enhanced by its magic so that the sound transcended mere physics. The music rippled, it flowed, it resonated; it was as if he were flying, expanding, encompassing the landscape, the world, the universe, the split infinities that were the frames of science and magic. The sound loomed loud enough to embrace all of Phaze, yet delicate enough to touch the soul.
And the mountain trembled. The ground shook, but not in the manner of an earthquake. It started shuddering where he stood, and vibrated outward rhythmically, responding harmonically to the music of the Flute. The effect intensified as he continued playing. Leaves fluttered on trees, pine needles shook free of their moorings, and the green grass of the slopes stood up tall and quivered like the tines of tuning forks. The dear sky thickened; clouds formed from nothing, flinging outward in rainbow-hued bands. The sunlight dimmed; dusk coalesced.
Clef played on, caught in the wonder of the animation the Flute was working. Serrilryan’s fur stood out from her body, charged. There was a canine smile on her face. Washes of color traversed her, causing her human and canine aspects to mingle aesthetically.
The ground shook harder. Branches fell from trees. The roof of the Mound collapsed. The mountains in the Purple range peeled off segments of themselves and settled substantially. Dust rose up. Animals ahead. The sky swirled nearer and nearer.
The Little Folk appeared, for now there was no direct sunlight to shrivel them. They stood in the twisting dust and fog, staring while their Demesnes collapsed about them. Yet such was the power of the Flute that no one protested. An avalanche formed and crashed downward. No one moved. The rocks and debris coursed past them all, avoiding living creatures, and advanced like a channeled flow of water until they piled up in a caim over the body of Serrilryan, the werebitch. She had died smiling. She had heard the Platinum Flute; she had expired. Now she had been buried.
Still Clef played. From the cairn a spirit diffused, billowing and tenuous, extricating itself from the piled stones. Now it looked like a wolf, and now like a woman. It was Serrilryan’s soul, departing her tired body at last.
Barb-tailed, horned, fire-clothed man-form devils hurried across the slope to intercept that soul. Suddenly Clef realized that the werebitch had spoken literally of Hell; she had known her spirit would be taken there. But Clef recoiled from the concept. She had helped him loyally and given her life in consequence. Surely that helped counterbalance whatever prior evils there might have been in her life. If he had any say at all in the matter, she would go to Heaven, where she wanted to be. He owed her that much. He shifted his playing, questing for the tune that would carry her soul upward.
Now from the troubled sky came wolves, flying without wings, their fur shining, so that they seemed possessed of light auras like halos. The music brought them down, showed them the way they might otherwise have missed, and marked the caim.
The devils reached the soul first. But the angel-wolves arrived in time to balk the conveyance of the soul to Hell. A battle ensued, the half-visible humanoid figures against the half-visible canine figures. Spiritual fog and cloud and dust roiled along with the physical. But the theme of the Flute strengthened the wolves and weakened the devils. In a moment the angel-wolves wrested the bitch soul from the minions of Hell and loped up into the turbulent sky.
Yet before they departed entirely, the soul of Serrilryan paused. She looked back toward Clef, and he knew she was thanking him for a gift as unexpected as it was gratifying. Her sinful human component had been juxtaposed with her pure wolf component in death, nearer perfection than they had been in life, and the forces of Heaven had prevailed. She sent to earth one glance of purest appreciation that made the air about Clef sparkle. Then she turned again and loped on toward Heaven with her divine companions.
The Purple Mountains continued to shake and settle. Dragons flew up from the southern marches; creatures stirred all over Phaze. But Clef would not stop playing until the bitch was safely ensconced in Heaven. He would permit no loophole, no reversal.
Stile woke in alarm. The building was shaking! “There seems to be an earthquake in progress,” Sheen said. “The Purple Mountain range is settling.”
“That’s no natural phenomenon! That’s the Foreordained!” Stile cried. “Now I realize that Clef is indeed the ultimate magician, with power to level mountains and delicacy to send souls to Heaven.”
“The Foreordained,” Sheen repeated. “Clef is the one destined to save Phaze?”
“He played the Platinum Flute, and the mountain trembled and tumbled. That’s the signal. I saw it in my dream -and now I know it’s true. My vision has caught up to the present and affirmed it.”
Sheen checked the news screen. “There has certainly been a shake-up in Proton. Power has been disrupted all along the southern range. Mine shafts have collapsed. If that’s the result of one melody on one flute, it means magic is spilling over into the science frame.”
“So it seems. I’m sure my encounter with Clef was not coincidental. It was-foreordained. And my dream of his progress-there has to be some reason for that. I suspect he and I are destined to meet again.”
“You could never stay out of mischief,” she agreed. “Now it’s time to get ready for your Tourney match.”
“Did anyone ever tell you, you are inhumanly practical? The end of the split infinity may be in the offing, and you pack me off to a Game.”
“Your match is foreordained too,” she said complacently.
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CHAPTER 2
Backgammon It was Round Thirteen of the annual Tourney. Only three players remained, two with one loss each. These two had to play each other; the loser would be eliminated from the Tourney, and the winner would meet the single undefeated player.
The two who played were as different as seemed possible. One was a huge, fat, middle-aged man in voluminous and princely robes inset with glittering gems. The other was a tiny naked man, muscular and at, in his thirties.
“Ah, Stile,” the clothed man said affably. “I was hoping to encounter you.”
“You know of me, sir?”
“I always research my prospective opponents, serf. You have been extremely busy recently. You have been chasing around the landscape, crashing vehicles, and disappearing between Rounds.”
Stile was noncommittal. “My time between Rounds is my own, sir.”
“Except for what that girl robot demands. Is it fun making time with a sexy machine?”
Stile knew the Citizen was trying to rattle him, to get him tangled up emotionally so that he could not concentrate properly on the Game. It was a familiar technique. Stile could not return the favor because all Citizens were virtually anonymous to serfs, and in any event a serf could not treat a Citizen with disrespect. So Stile would have to take it-and play his best regardless. He was experienced at this sort of thing; the Citizen would probably rattle himself before he got to Stile.
It was time for the grid. Each man stood on one side of the unit, looking at the screen. There were sixteen boxes 22 facing Stile, labeled across the top: 1. PHYSICAL 2. MENTAL 3. CHANCE 4. ARTS, and down the side: A. NAKED B. TOOL C. MACHINE D. ANIMAL. Stile’s panel was lighted by the letters.
“That was a very neat stunt you worked, last Round,” the Citizen remarked. “Making that Amazon throw away her win. Of course you know you won’t be able to trick me that way.”
“Of course not, sir.” Stile touched the TOOL indication. That was his line of greatest strength.
The subgrid showed: 3B, Tool-Assisted Chance. Stile groaned inwardly. The CHANCE column was the bane of good players. It was difficult to make his skill count here.
“You don’t like it, huh?” the Citizen taunted. “Figure it to come up another slot machine, wash you out painlessly, eh?”
This man really had researched Stile’s prior Games of the Tourney. The lone Game Stile had lost had been just that way. “I am not partial to it, sir.” As long as he handled the needling without heat, he was gaining.
“Well, I’m partial to it! Know why? Because I’m lucky. Try me on poker. Stile; I’ll come up with a full house and tromp you. Try me on blackjack; I’m all twenty-ones. The breaks always go my way! That scares you, huh?”
The Citizen protested too much. That could indicate weakness-or could be a ruse. Stile actually could handle himself in games of chance; often there was more skill than showed. He would try for a suitable variant. “Luck is impartial, sir.”
“You believe that? You fool! Try me on dice, if you doubt!”
Stile made his selection. The Citizen had already made his. The third grid showed: Board Games of Chance.
“Okay, sucker, try me on Monopoly!” the Citizen urged.
But when they played it through, it came up backgammon. “My favorite!” the Citizen exclaimed. “Dice and betting! Watch me move!”
Stile thought he was bluffing. That bluff would be called. Stile was expert at backgammon. It was only technically a game of luck; skill was critical.
They adjourned to the boardroom. The table was ready.
There was no physical audience; the holograph would take care of that.
“Now you know this game represents a year,” the Citizen said. “Twenty-four points for the hours of the day, thirty pieces for the days of the month, twelve points in each half-section for the months in the year.”
“And the seven spots on the opposites of a die are the days of the week,” Stile said. “The two dice are day and night. It hardly matches the symbolism of the ordinary deck of playing cards or the figures of the chess set-sir.”
They were playing a variant deriving in part from Acey Deucy, traditionally a navy game. The games of Mother Earth had continued to evolve in the fashion of human society, with some variants prospering and others becoming extinct. In this one, no pieces were placed on the board at the start; all started from the bar.
It was not necessary to enter all fifteen pieces on the board before advancing the leaders. Yet it was still backgammon, the “back game,” with pieces constantly being sent back to the bar while they ran the gauntlet of opposing pieces. People were apt to assume that a given game had an eternally fixed set of rules, when in fact there were endless variations. Stile had often obtained an advantage by steering a familiar game into an unfamiliar channel.
The Citizen was, as he claimed, lucky. He won the lead, then forged ahead with double sixes, while Stile had to settle for a two-to-one throw of the dice. Doubles were valuable in backgammon, because each die could be used twice. Thus the citizen’s throw enabled him to enter four men to the sixth point, while Stile entered only two. This continued fairly steadily; the Citizen soon had all fifteen men entered and well advanced, while Stile was slower.
Soon the two forces interacted. The Citizen hit the first blot-in layman’s language, he placed one of his men on the spot occupied by one of Stile’s men. That sent Stile’s man home to the bar, the starting place. “Sent you home to your slut machine, didn’t I?” he chortled. “Oh, let there be no moaning at the bard”
That was a literary allusion to an ancient poem by Tennyson of Earth. Stile was conversant with historical literature, but made no response. The Citizen was showing pseudoerudition; he was not the type to know any but the most fashionable of quotes, and he had gotten this one wrong. The correct line was, “and may there be no moaning of the bar.” Yet, mentally. Stile filled in the remainder:
“when I put out to sea.” Tennyson had then been late in life, knowing he would die before too long. That poem, Crossing the Bar, had been a kind of personal epitaph. When he put out to sea, in the figurative fashion of the Norse boats for the dead, he hoped to see his Pilot, the Deity, face to face. Those left behind in life should feel no sorrow for him, for he, like the werewolf, had found his ideal resting place. It was generally best to read the full works of past literary figures, and to understand their backgrounds, rather than to memorize quotes out of context. But it was no use to go into all that with this great boor and bore of a Citizen.
Well, Stile intended to send this obnoxious Citizen out to sea. It was already apparent that the man was not a top player; he depended on his luck too heavily, and on a basic strategy of “making” points-of setting up two or more men on a point, so that the opponent could neither land there nor hit a blot. Luck and conservative play-a good enough strategy for most occasions. Three out of four times, a winning strategy.
But Stile was not an ordinary player. He depended not on luck but on skill. Luck tended to equalize, especially on an extended series, while skill was constant. That was what gave the superior player the advantage, even in a game of chance. It was necessary to take risks in order to progress most efficiently. There would be some losses because of these risks, but, overall, that efficiency would pay off. Stile was already grasping the weakness of the Citizen’s mode of play. Probably the man had an imperfect notion of the strategy of the doubling cube-and that could make all the difference, regardless of his vaunted luck.
Soon the Citizen had a number of men in his home board, ready to be borne off. The first player who bore off all fifteen men would win the game, but not necessarily the Round. This modification was scored by points; each man left in play when the opponent finished was one point. One hundred points was the Game. It could take several games to accumulate the total. The key was to minimize one’s losses in a losing game, and maximize one’s winnings in a winning game. That was where the doubling cube came in.
Best to test the man’s level, however. Stile needed to have a very clear notion of his opponent’s vulnerability, because the Citizen was not a complete duffer; he was” just good enough to be dangerous. Luck did play an important part in backgammon, just as muscle did in wrestling; it had to be taken into account.
Stile rolled 3-2. As it happened, he was able to enter two men and hit blots on the second and third points. It was a good break, for the Citizen left few blots he could possibly avoid. Thus Stile’s 2 and 3 dice canceled the effect of cumulative scores of twenty-one and twenty-two on the Citizen’s dice. Stile was making his limited luck match the effect of his opponent’s good luck. It was a matter of superior management.
But the Citizen was hardly paying attention to the moves. He was trying to undermine Stile’s confidence, convinced that even in a game of chance, a person’s certainty counted most. “A number of people have been wondering where you disappear to between Rounds, little man. You seem to walk down a certain service corridor, and never emerge at the far end. Hours or even days later you emerge, going the opposite direction. It is a food-machine service corridor, yet you show no sign of feasting. Now how can a man disappear from the board, like a piece being sent to the bar? It is a mystery.”
Stile continued playing. “People enjoy mysteries, sir.”
The dice rolled; the men advanced. The Citizen’s luck held; he was gaining despite imperfect play. “Mysteries exist only to be resolved. It is possible that you have discovered something fantastic, like a curtain that separates fact from fantasy? That you pass through this invisible barrier to a world where you imagine you are important instead of insignificant?”
So the man had done fairly thorough research into Stile’s Phaze existence too. Still, Stile refused to be baited. “No doubt, sir.”
“And can it really be true that in that fantasy you ride a unicorn mare and associate with vampires and werewolves?”
“In fantasy, anything is possible,” Stile said.
“Double,” the Citizen said, turning the doubling cube to two.
Now the game drew to a dose. The Citizen finished first; Stile was left with eight men on the board. Doubled, that was sixteen points against him.
They set up for the second game, since they were not yet dose to the one hundred points necessary for the finish. The Citizen was obnoxiously affable; he liked winning. Stile hoped he would get careless as well as overconfident. With luck, the Citizen might even distract himself at a key time by his determined effort to unnerve Stile.
Still, the Citizen’s luck held. The man played indifferently, even poorly at times, but the fortune of the dice sustained him. When he had a clear advantage, he doubled, and Stile had to accept or forfeit the game. Then Stile had a brief run of luck-actually, skillful exploitation of the game situation-and doubled himself. “Double!” the Citizen said immediately when his own turn came, determined to have the last word and confident in his fortune. Now the doubling cube stood at eight.
“I understand a little squirt like you can use magic to snare some mighty fine-looking women,” the Citizen said as they played. “Even if they’re taller than you.”
“Many women are,” Stile agreed. References to his height did irritate him, but he had long since learned to conceal this. He was 1.5 meters tall, or an inch shy of five feet, in the archaic nomenclature of Phaze.
The Citizen’s infernal luck continued. There did seem to be something to his claim about being lucky; he had certainly had far superior throws of the dice, and in this game, supervised by the Game Computer, there could be no question of cheating. He was winning this game too, by a narrower margin than the last, but the eight on the doubling cube gave every piece magnified clout. The Citizen liked to double; maybe it related to his gambling urge.
“I guess there could be one really luscious doll who nevertheless married a dwarf,” the Citizen observed with a smirk. “I guess she could have been ensorcelled.”
“Must have been.” But despite his refusal to be baited about his recent marriage to the Lady Blue, Stile was losing. If this special ploy did not work, he would wash out of the Tourney. If only the luck would even out!
“Or maybe she has a hangup about midgets. Sort of like miscegenation. Some people get turned on that way.”
The Citizen was really trying! But Stile played on calmly. “Some do, I understand.”
“Or maybe pederasty. She likes to do it with children.”
But the effect of that malicious needle was abated by the Citizen’s choice of the wrong concept. It was generally applicable to the sexual motive of a male, not a female. Still, Stile would gladly have dumped this oaf down a deep well.
Stile lost this game too, down six men. Forty-eight more points against him, a cumulative total of sixty-four. Another game like this would finish him.
The luck turned at last and he won one. But he had only been able to double it once, and only picked up six points. Then the Citizen won again: eight men, redoubled, for thirty-two points. The score now stood at 96-6. The next game could finish it.
Still the Citizen’s amazing luck held. Had he, after all, found some way to cheat, to fix the dice? Stile doubted it; the Tourney precautions were too stringent, and this was an important game, with a large audience. The throws had to be legitimate. Science claimed that luck evened out in the long run; it was difficult to prove that in backgammon.
Stile’s situation was desperate. Yet there were ways. Stile knew how to play the back game specialty, and now was the time. When his position looked good, he doubled; when the Citizen was clearly ahead, he doubled. But the Citizen retained a general advantage, so Stile’s doublings seemed foolish.
Stile used the back game to interfere with the Citizen’s establishment on his home board. Because most of Stile’s men had been relegated to the bar, he had them in ready position to attack the Citizen’s men as they lined up for bearing off. This sort of situation could be a lot more volatile than many people thought. “Double,” Stile said, turning the cube.
“You’re crazy,” the Citizen said, redoubling in his turn.
Stile hit another blot. He needed more than this to recover a decent position, but it helped.
The Citizen threw double sixes. That moved his blotted man all the way from the bar to one space from the end. His luck was still more than sufficient to swamp whatever breaks Stile managed.
Stile doubled again, though he was still obviously behind. The Citizen, when his turn came, laughed and doubled once more. Now the cube stood at sixty-four, its maximum. “You really want to go down big, tyke!”
They were reduced to five men each; the rest had been borne off. The game was actually much closer than the Citizen realized. Stile had already won the advantage he sought. If the game had proceeded with only Stile’s first doubling, and he won by two men, all he would have would be four more points. If he lost by the same margin, however, the Citizen’s four points would put him at one hundred for final victory. But now the cube stood at sixty-four, so that a two-man win by the Citizen would give him the same victory by an unnecessary margin-while the . same win by Stile would give him 128 points, at one stroke enough for his final victory. So he had in effect evened it up. Instead of being behind by ninety points, he had only to win two points. The Citizen had been foolish to permit the doubling to go to this level; he had thrown away a major advantage.
“I hear some of these animals can change to human form,” the Citizen said. “I guess an animal in the form of a woman could be a lot of fun to a lonely man.”
Was there anything this slob did not know about Phaze, or any limit to his crudity of insinuation? Stile allowed a little ire to show, deliberately. “It is a different frame, sir, with different natural laws. Those animals have human intelligence.”
The Citizen gleefully pounced on this. “So you have sampled the wares of the mares and the britches of the bitches!” He was hardly paying attention to the backgammon game in his voyeuristic lust. He wanted to make Stile angry and, in seeming success, he was letting the means preempt the ends. This was always ethically problematical, and often strategically unsound. The Citizen was setting himself up for a fall. If only the luck evened out!
Stile had a good roll of the dice. He hit two blots, and the Citizen hardly noticed. “I don’t see that it is any of your business, sir, no disrespect intended.”
“With animals!” the Citizen exclaimed, smiling broadly. “You admit it!”
“I don’t deny it, sir,” Stile said, obviously nettled.
“And did they bother to change form each time?” the Citizen demanded, almost drooling. He was hardly looking at the board, playing automatically and poorly. “Maybe sometimes a bitch stayed in her dog-form, just for the novelty?”
Stile wondered just what sort of bestiality lurked in the secret dreams of this nasty man. Perhaps this was the phenomenon of projection, in which a person with illicit desires projected the realization of certain acts onto others. The Citizen was giving himself away without realizing it.
Stile continued to parry him verbally, taking the worst of it, though he had the ability to reverse the onus at any time. He was tacitly egging the man on. Meanwhile, he exploited the rolls of the dice skillfully, and soon had gained a net advantage. The Citizen could have prevented this, had he been paying similar attention. But his morbid fascination with Stile’s supposed exploits with shape-changing females had done him in. By the time he became aware of the trap, it was too late; even his amazing luck could not make up for his squandered opportunities.
They entered the final stage, and both resumed bearing off men. For once Stile had better throws of the dice, and finished two men ahead.
It took a moment for the Citizen to absorb the significance. He had been so far ahead, he knew subjectively that it would take a prohibitively massive turn of fortune to deprive him of victory. No such turn had occurred. Now his eyes fixed on the number 64 at the top of the doubling cube, and he saw that this narrow margin of two pieces had at one stroke washed him out of the Tourney.
“You must visit Phaze some day, sir,” Stile said brightly. “I know just the bitch for you.”
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CHAPTER 3
Honeymoon Stile crossed the curtain at the usual place, emerging from the food-servicing hall to the deep forest of Phaze. In a moment a unicorn trotted up. But it wasn’t Neysa. This one was slightly larger, male, and his coat was deep dark blue except for the two red socks on his hind feet.
“Clip!” Stile exclaimed, surprised. “I expected-“
The unicorn metamorphosed into a young man garbed in blue shirt, furry trousers, red socks, floppy hat, gloves, and boots. His resemblance to the unicorn was clear to anyone conversant with the forms. “She’s off getting bred, at long last. The Herd Stallion’s keeping her with the herd until she foals. That’s S.O.P.”
“Yes, of course,” Stile agreed, disappointed. He found his hidden clothes and dressed quickly; it would not do to travel naked here, though there was really no firm convention. He wanted only the best for Neysa, his best friend in this frame, yet he felt empty without her company. But he had made a deal with the Herd Stallion to release her for breeding when his mission of vengeance was finished; now that he had dispatched the Red Adept, it was time. Time for relaxation, recovery, and love. Time to be with the lovely Lady Blue.
“That was the funniest thing,” Clip said, evidently following the thrust of Stile’s thoughts. “Thou didst marry the Lady, then skipped off without even-“
“An idiosyncrasy of the situation,” Stile said shortly. He had departed without consummating the marriage because of a prophecy that he would have a son by the Lady Blue; he knew he would survive the dangerous mission ahead of him if he only waited to generate that child thereafter, since such prophecies had the force of law. But now the barbs of the ugly Citizen were fresh in his mind, making this subject sensitive. “You’re volunteering to be my mount?”
“Neysa intimated gently that I’d get homed at the wrong end if I didn’t,” Clip admitted. “Besides, thou dost have interesting adventures.”
“I’m only going to honeymoon with my wife.”
“That’s what I mean.” Clip shifted to his natural form, his horn playing with the sound of a saxophone-a bar of the wedding march, trailing into a tune with risque connotations.
Stile jumped on the unicorn’s back, landing deliberately hard. Clip blew out one more startled note and took off. The velocity of the unicorn was greater than that of the horse because it was enhanced by magic; yet the two types of creatures were closely akin. As Clip himself had put it, once: as dose as men were to apes. Stile was uncertain what freighting accompanied that statement, but had never challenged it. Man had intelligence and science the ape lacked; unicorns had intelligence and magic the horses lacked.
Soon they emerged from the forest and were racing over the fields toward the moated castle that was the heart of the Blue Demesnes. “Dost thou happen to know how Clef from Proton fared?” Stile inquired. “I gave him the Platinum Flute and sent him to the Little Folk, but I’ve been too busy to follow further. I’m sure you’re up on all the news.”
Clip blew an affirmative note. He was the gossipy kind.
“Did Clef arrive safely?” Stile was interested in verifying the accuracy of his dream. The frames had always been firmly separated; if his dream were true, it meant that that separation was beginning to fuzz, at least for him.
The unicorn sounded yes again. His sax-horn was more mellow than Neysa’s harmonica-horn, though less clever on trills. Like her, he could almost speak in musical notes, making them sound like yes, no, maybe, and assorted other words, particularly colloquialisms. Actually, unicorns could express whole sentences in chords, but this was a separate mode that owed little to archaic English.
Stile was coming to understand that language too, but his grasp of it was as yet insecure.
“Was he-is he by any chance the one the Platinum Elves called the Foreordained?”
Again the affirmative.
“Then that earthquake-we felt it in Proton-that was the shaking of the mountains when he played?” But this had become rhetorical; he had the answer. The frames had certainly juxtaposed in this respect. “I wonder what that means?”
Now Clip had no answer. No one except the Little Folk of the Mound knew the significance of the Foreordained. And the all-knowing Oracle, who answered only one question in the lifetime of each querist.
Yet the arrival of the Foreordained suggested that the end of Phaze was near, according to another prophecy. That bothered Stile; he had worked so hard to secure his place here. Was he to be denied it after all?
Well, he was determined to snatch what joy he might, in what time remained. On the cosmic scale, the end might be centuries distant. Magic prophecies were devious things, not to be trusted carelessly. People had died depending on misinterpreted omens.
That brought him back to the manner in which he had secured his own fortune by postponing his fathering of a son. He was eager to get on with it. He had loved the Lady Blue from the first time he had encountered her. He had never before met such a regal, intelligent, and desirable woman. But she was the widow of his other self, and that had made things awkward. Now she was his, and he would never leave her-except for one more necessary trip to the frame of Proton, to try for the final Round of the Tourney. It really was not as important to him as it once had seemed, but he had to give it his best try.
They galloped up to the prettily moated little castle. Stile vaulted off as they entered the courtyard. The Lady Blue, his vision of delight, rushed to his arms. She was of course garbed in blue: headdress, gown, slippers. She was all that he desired.
“Are we ready?” he inquired when the initial sweetness of the embrace eased.
“I have been ready since we wed, but thou didst depart in haste,” she said, teasing him.
“Never again, Lady!”
“Hinblue is saddled.”
“We have already traveled much of the eastern curtain. Shall we pick up at the Platinum Demesnes?”
She did not reproach him about his concern for Clef’s welfare, the obvious reason to pass the region of the Little Folk. “As my Lord Blue desires.”
“Wilt thou condone magic for the start?”
She nodded radiantly. “Magic is the substance of my Lord Adept.”
They mounted their steeds, and Stile played his good harmonica, summoning his magic. His Adept talent was governed by music and words, the music shaping the power, the words the application. Actually, his mind was the most important factor; the words mainly fixed the time of implementation. “Conduct us four,” he sang”
“to the platinum shore.” dip snorted through his horn: shore?
But the magic was already taking hold. The four of them seemed to dissolve into liquid, sink into the ground, and flow rapidly along and through it south-southeast. In a moment they re-formed beside the Mound of the Platinum Elves. There was the fresh caim of Serrilryan the werebitch, exactly as his vision-dream had shown it.
“Anything I visualize as a shore, is a shore,” Stile explained. “There does not have to be water.” But as it happened, there was some cloud cover here, thickest in the lower reaches, so that the descending forest disappeared into a sealike expanse of mist. They stood on a kind of shore. Almost, he thought he saw wolf shapes playing on the surface of that lake of mist.
“And we were conducted-like the electricity of Proton frame,” the Lady commented. “Me thought thou wouldst provide us with wings to fly.”
A dusky elf, garbed in platinum armor to shield his body from a possible ray of sunlight, appeared. He glanced up at Stile. “Welcome, Blue Adept and Lady,” he said.
“Thy manner of greeting has improved since last we visited,” the Lady Blue murmured mischievously.
“As well it might have,” the elf agreed. “We know thee now.”
He showed them into the Mound. Stile noted that the structure had been hastily repaired, with special shorings. Evidently the destruction wrought by the Foreordained’s Flute had not entirely demolished it. Stile hoped there had not been much loss of life in the collapse. Clip and Hinblue remained outside to graze the verdant, purple-tinted turf.
A deeply darkened and wrinkled elf awaited them inside. This was Pyreforge, chief of this tribe of Dark Elves. “Thy friend is indeed the Foreordained,” he said gravely. “Our trust in thee has been amply justified.”
“Now wilt thou tell the meaning?” Stile inquired. “We are on our honeymoon. Yet my curiosity compels.”
“Because thou art on thy honeymoon, I will tell thee only part,” the old elf said. “Too soon wilt thou learn the rest.”
“Nay! If it is to be the end of Phaze, I must know now.”
“It be not necessarily the end, but perhaps only a significant transition. That much remains opaque. But the decision is near-a fortnight hence, perhaps, no more than two. Take thy pleasure now, for there will come thy greatest challenge.”
“There is danger to my Lord Blue?” the Lady asked worriedly.
“To us all. Lady. How could we survive if our frame be doomed?”
“We can not head it off?” Stile asked.
“It will come in its own time. Therefore put it from thy mind; other powers are moving.”
Stile saw that Pyreforge would not answer directly on this subject, and the elf could not be pushed. “The Foreordained-what is his part in this? A title like that-“
“Our titles hardly relate to conventional human mythology or religion. This one merely means he was destined to appear at this time, when the curtain grows visible and tension mounts between the frames. The great Adepts of the past foresaw this crisis and foreordained this duty.”
“What duty?” Stile asked. “Clef is merely a musician. A fine one, granted, the best I know-but no warrior, no Adept. What can he do?”
“No Adept?” Pyreforge snorted. “As well claim the Platinum Flute be no instrument! He can play the dead to Heaven and crumble mountains by his melody-and these be only the fringes of his untrained power. Once we have trained him to full expertise-he is the Foreordained!”
So Earth mythology might not relate, but the implication of significance did. “So he is, after all, Adept? He seemed ordinary to me-but perhaps I did not hear him play in Phaze.”
Pyreforge smiled wryly. “Thou didst hear him, Adept. Music relates most intimately to magic, as thou shouldst know.”
So the elf knew of Stile’s vision! “And Clef is the finest musician to come to Phaze,” Stile said, seeing it. “But what exactly is he to do? May we say hello to him?”
“You may not,” the old elf said. This usage always sounded incongruous to Stile here, where “thee” and “thou” were standard-but of course it was the correct plural form. “His power be enormous, but he be quite new to it and has much to learn and little time ere he master his art. We need no more shaking of our mountains! He be deep in study for the occasion he must attend and may not be disturbed.”
“What occasion?” Stile asked with growing frustration.
But still the elf would not respond directly. “Thou shalt meet him when it be time. Lord Blue, and all will be clarified. Leave us to teach the Foreordained his music. Go now on thy honeymoon; thou must recuperate and restore thine own powers for the effort to come.”
So it seemed. They were teaching Clef music? This was either humor or amazing vanity! Disgruntled, Stile thanked the diminutive, wrinkled elf and departed. “I don’t feel comfortable being ignorant of great events, especially when there are hints they relate intimately to me,” he muttered to the Lady.
“How dost thou think I felt, cooped up in the Blue Demesnes whilst thou didst go out to live or die?”
“I don’t recall thy staying cooped long-“
“Let’s ride, my Lord.”
Stile smiled. She had the feminine way of changing the subject when pressed. She was not a woman to let fate roll over her unchallenged, and her present deference to him was merely part of the honeymoon. Had he desired a creature to honor his every foible, he would have loved Sheen. The Lady Blue would always be someone to reckon with.
They mounted and rode. Pyreforge was right: the curtain was brighter now, faintly scintillating as it angled across the slopes of the Purple Mountains. It followed the contours of the terrain in its fashion; the curtain extended vertically until it became too faint for them to see, and evidently continued below the ground similarly. As the land fell away, it exposed more of the curtain. There was no gap; the curtain was continuous.
That was what intrigued Stile-that ubiquitous transition between frames. The landscapes of Proton and Phaze were identical, except that Proton was a barren, polluted world where science was operative, while Phaze was a fresh, verdant world of magic. Only those people who lacked alternate selves in the other frame could cross between them. No one seemed to know why or how the curtain was there, or what its mode of operation was. It just served as the transition between frames, responsive to a wish from one side, a spell from the other.
They intended to follow the curtain in its generally westward extension until it terminated at the West Pole. Stile had been increasingly curious about the curtain, and the West Pole held a special fascination for him because it didn’t exist on any other world he knew. Now he had an excuse to satisfy both interests-by making them part of his honeymoon.
As the Blue Adept, he was one of the most powerful magicians in Phaze; riding a unicorn-ah, he missed Neysa!-he had some of the best transportation and protection available; and in the company of the lovely Lady Blue-oh, what an occasion this would be!
“I want to make a map,” he said, remembering. “A map of Phaze, as I know it now and as I will discover it, and of the curtain in all its curvatures.”
“The curtain is straight,” the Lady said.
“Straight? It meanders all over the frame!”
“Nay, Lord, it is the frame that meanders,” she assured him. “When we follow the curtain, we bear due west.”
Stile decided not to argue. After all, she was his new bride and she was heart-throbbingly delightful, and an argument at this time would be awkward. Nevertheless, he would map Phaze as he perceived it.
He played his harmonica, bringing the magic to him. Then he set the instrument aside and sang: “Place on tap a contour map.”
True to his visualization, the map appeared-a neatly folded pseudo-parchment. He opened it out and contemplated its lines and colors. There were the White Mountains to the north, the Purple Mountains to the south, the sites of the Blue, Black, Yellow, White, Brown, and- former-Red Demesnes, and the curtain winding around and between them. Contour lines indicated the approximate elevations.
But there were sizable blank areas. This map covered only the territory Stile knew. He had traveled around a lot of Phaze recently, but there was more to explore. He expected to enjoy filling in the rest of this map. The plotting of the curtain should take care of much of it, since it meandered-went straight?-past most of the significant establishments of this frame.
“No one uses a map in Phaze,” the Lady protested, intrigued.
“I am not from Phaze,” he retorted. He showed her the map. “Now as I make it, the curtain should bear west a day’s leisurely travel, then veer north here to pass the palace of the Oracle and on by the Yellow Demesnes near the White Mountains. That will be a couple days’ ride. Then it must curve southwest to intersect the Black Demesnes here-“
“The curtain is straight,” she repeated.
“Humor me, beloved. Then on until we reach the West Pole, somewhere over here. The whole trip should take a week, which will leave us-“
“Thou art a fool,” she said pleasantly. “Little thou knowest of Phaze.”
“That’s why I’m exploring it,” he agreed. “Thou art wife of a fool, fool.”
She leaned toward him, and her mount obligingly closed the gap. They kissed, riding side by side, while Clip played another suggestive tune. Stile gave the unicorn a sharp little kick in the flank with his left heel. Clip emitted a blast of musical laughter with an undertone of Bronx cheer and flicked his tail across Stile’s back in the familiar fly-swatting gesture.
“Now let’s move,” Stile said as the kiss ended.
The two steeds broke into a canter, following the curtain down the hill, through a valley, and up a wooded slope. Stile loved riding; it was the thing he did best. The Lady paralleled him, balancing smoothly, her hair flying out in a golden splay. She, too, was a fine rider and she had a fine steed, though no horse could match a unicorn in full exertion. Stile probably could have borrowed another unicorn from the herd, but there had been no point. This was no dangerous mission, but a gentle romance. Hinblue was a very good mare, the offspring of the Blue Stallion and the Hinny-the best equine heritage in Phaze. Stile remained sorry his friend Neysa was not here to share the trip with him-but realized that Neysa might be jealous of the Lady Blue, with some reason. Maybe Neysa’s breeding had been mostly a pretext to separate herself from this excursion. Well, Clip was good, if spirited, company.
Time passed. The curtain veered to the south, forcing them to cross over the height of the Purple range, rather than at any natural pass. Their steeds slowed to a walk, and the air became chill. There was no snow here, but the vegetation turned bluish as if from cold, and then full purple. That was what gave the range its color, of course; he should have known. Finally Stile cast a spell to make them warm-himself and the Lady and the two animals- so that no one would have to overexert to maintain body heat.
Then, on the steep downslope, he cast another spell to enable them all to float through the air, resting. A harpy popped out of a hole in a cliff, saw the two equines with their riders, all drifting blithely in midair, and popped hastily back into her hole. “Just as well,” the Lady Blue remarked. “That creature’s scratch is poisonous, and they oft resent intrusion into their demesnes.”
Clip snorted. Unicorns were invulnerable to most magic and had no fear of harpies. Stile, remembering how the werebitch Serrilryan had died, knew that if the harpy had attacked, he would have reacted with ferocity perhaps unbecoming to this occasion.
Then they passed the cliffside nest of a griffin. Three cubs poked their beaks up to peer at the weird procession. In the distance there was the birdlike scream of an adult, probably the mother, aware that her babies were being disturbed. A griffin was a fighting animal, almost as fierce as a dragon; unicorns did not normally seek combat with this species. Stile, of course, could handle it-but he elected to hasten their descent, getting well away from the nest before the mother griffin appeared. Why seek trouble?
At the southern foot of the range an extensive plain commenced. Evening was approaching, and in the slanting sunlight they saw shapes in the sky like grotesque birds. “Dragons,” the Lady Blue murmured. “This is dragon country.”
“If any come for us, we’ll simply step across the curtain,” Stile said. Again it was easier to avoid than to fight; he had no desire to waste magic or to prove his power. A unicorn, a werewolf, or a vampire could change forms as often as it wished, because that was inherent in such creatures’ nature, while Stile could use a particular spell only once. When he had to, he could accomplish more by magic than any other creature and could change one creature to another-but eventually he would run out of new spells. Magic was best saved for true emergencies.
“What of Hinblue?” the Lady asked.
“Um, yes. Maybe she can cross the curtain too.”
“She could not survive in Proton-frame. There is no good air there, no grazing. And what of thine own mount?”
“Have no fear for me. Lady,” Clip said, changing to man-form. “As a hawk, I can escape. But I cannot cross the curtain. In Proton I would be reduced to but a horse, and unable to cross back.”
“Then I will use magic if the need arises,” Stile decided.
“My lord, there is no time like the present,” the Lady said. For a shape was winging toward them.
Stile had made up and memorized a number of spells, including some dragon restraints. In this case he would simply cause the dragon to forget it had seen anything interesting here.
But as the creature flew closer. Stile squinted at it. This was a peculiar dragon. The wings were wrong, the tail, the head-
“Why, that’s no dragon,” the Lady said.
Clip snapped his fingers. “That’s a thunderbird! I didn’t know there were any left in these parts.”
“I don’t have a specific spell for thunderbirds,” Stile said dubiously. “I’ll have to go to a general one.”
“No need,” the Lady said. “The bird is full of sound and fury-“
The creature swooped close, its wings spreading hugely, then sweeping together in a deafening clap of thunder.
“Signifying rain,” Clip finished, as the drenchpour commenced.
Hastily Stile spelled into existence a large tent, already set up and guyed. The rain beat down on its canvas so heavily that he had to spell additional supports. Water seeped under the edges, and fog drifted through, coating them with condensation. A little frog appeared and croaked contentedly.
The other three were with him, but soon Clip returned to unicorn-form and moved outside to graze; the rain did not bother his equine form very much. Hinblue followed him out; grazing was always worthwhile, and the dragons would avoid this storm.
That left the Lady Blue. Stile turned to her. “I had thought of sunshine and sweet music for this occasion. Still-“
“Desist thy stalling,” she said, and opened her arms.
Thereafter, the storm disappeared from his consciousness. It was a long, ecstatic night. In the morning he woke in a fine bed of hay and feathers, so concluded he must have done some incidental conjuring, but none of that remained in his memory. He had only his awareness of the Lady Blue-his woman at last.
There was a neat pile of assorted fruits at the tent entrance; Clip had evidently scouted around in the night and harvested what he thought was appropriate. At the top of the mound was passion fruit, and below were apples, cherries, and bananas. Symbolistic humor of the equine kind. They had an excellent meal.
They resumed their ride. Clip had the sense not to play any more ribald melodies on his sax-horn, but on occasion he could not quite contain a faint musical snigger.
The curtain wandered back up the slope of the mountains, having no regard for the convenience of travelers- as well it might not; Stile’s party was probably the first to make this particular trek. Here on the southern side, flowers of many colors abounded, and the bushes and trees were highly varied. Birds flitted, and squirrels and rabbits scurried. On occasion a grassy round trapdoor would open and a little head would pop out-hermit-elves, harmless.
Then they came to a river. It cut across the curtain, deep and swift-and a formidable steam-breathing water dragon inhabited it.
They halted, eyeing the monster. The monster eyed them back. Slowly a purple tongue came out and moistened its chops. The mere sight of them made this creature salivate. This hardly seemed a safe passage.
Stile pondered which spell to use. Immobilization seemed best; he didn’t want to hurt this animal. Yet that was such a useful spell for emergencies that he hated to use it routinely. Again he was up against the ad hoc nature of magic; once any specific spell was used, it was gone. All Adepts used magic sparingly, never squandering it. Stile, a relative newcomer to the art, tended to use it more freely than was wise; the novelty had not yet worn off. Until recently, there had been so many challenges to his well-being that he had hardly worried about wasting spells; what use to save them for a nonexistent future?
Now he was a fairly secure married man, becoming daily more conservative. So he pondered: Was there any mundane way to pass by this dragon? The creature was limited to the water, having flippers in lieu of wings and frogs’ feet. This was, after all, a very restricted threat.
Again the Lady’s thoughts were parallel to his own. She had an uncanny insight into his mind, perhaps because she had had much longer experience with him than he had had with her, odd as that might seem in any other frame than this. He had in fact been momentarily dismayed during the night by her almost-too-ready anticipation of his desires; none of this was really new to her. “It would be a long trek around the river, methinks, for the dragon would pace us. Clip could change to hawk-form and fly safely across, but Hinblue has no such magic.”
“This becomes a challenge,” Stile said. “For most of my life I existed without the benefit of magic. A year ago I would have found a way across without sorcery; I should be able to do it now.”
“Though it take but a fortnight,” she murmured, smiling.
“The curtain-” Stile began, but cut that off. He kept forgetting Hinblue! “Put my steed not through that torture gratuitously,” the Lady agreed.
Clip changed to man-form. “Thou wilt be all day on this. I can get us across now.”
“Oh?” Stile asked, not entirely pleased. “How?”
“By decoying this dragon downstream while the three of you swim. The average dragon is not smart enough for that ruse.”
Of course! Simplicity itself. “Thou are smarter than L today,” Stile said ruefully.
“Naturally. I’m a unicorn,” Clip said generously. “I did not dissipate my strength all night in pointless heroics.” He changed back to his usual form and snorted insultingly at the dragon, adding an obnoxious gesture with his horn. Unicorns could convey considerable freighting in this manner. The dragon oriented on him, steam pressure building up, measuring the distance it might strike.
Clip stayed just out of range, trotting downstream with a lewd swish of his tail. He played a few bars of music, and Stile could just about make out the words: “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out . . .” Dragons were the monarchs of the kingdom of worms, and were sensitive to such disparaging references. This dragon followed Clip briskly, hoping the unicorn would stray just within range of fang or steam.
Soon Stile and the Lady stripped and swam safely across with Hinblue, holding their garments aloft. They were, after all, prevailing without magic.
“This is fun,” Stile murmured, contemplating her body in the clear water. “Shall we dally a bit?”
“Until the dragon joins the party?” she inquired sweetly.
They climbed out at the far bank and shook themselves dry in the sun. Stile tried not to stare; this was a type of motion he had never seen done by a woman of her construction, though he had lived most of his life in a society of nudity.
There was a small coughing sound. Both Stile and the Lady turned-and discovered the dragon was watching too, its labile lips pursed into the semblance of a whistle.
Stile experienced a rapidly developing emotion. He tried to control it, but in a moment it overwhelmed him. It was mirth. He burst out laughing. “Oh, I’ll bet that monster doesn’t see what I see!”
The Lady looked down at herself, frowning. “It doesn’t?”
“It sees the most delicious morsel in two frames. I see-“
“Never mind what thou seest,” she said with mock severity. “I take thy meaning.” She was neither self-conscious nor angry. She had one of the finest bodies in the frame and knew it.
A hawk arrived, swooping low and converting to unicorn-form. Clip was ready to resume the journey.
Soon the curtain veered north, crossing the mountain range again. Fortunately this occurred at a natural pass, so they were able to get past expeditiously.
They emerged into the rolling countryside that was the main grazing range of the unicorns. Now progress was swift-but the distance was long. They were not yet near the Oracle’s palace before night overtook them and forced another halt.
Again the animals grazed, and Stile was about to conjure another tent when the Lady stayed him. “Expend not thy magic superfluously, my Lord. Tonight the open sky suffices for us.”
“If that is what thou dost desire, that is what thou shalt have,” he agreed. He gathered straw and moss to fashion a bed, and they lay down side by side and looked up at the moons.
“Oh, see-the blue moon rises!” she cried, squeezing his hand.
“Our moon,” he agreed. This was sheer delight, being with her, sharing her incidental pleasures.
“Oh, play, my Lord, play,” she begged.
Obediently Stile found his harmonica and brought it to his mouth. But something stayed him-an ominous though not unpleasant feeling. He concentrated and placed it. “It was not far from here that I first found this instrument, or thought I found it. Here in the open, riding with Neysa. I conjured it without knowing.”
“It is all that remains of my former Lord,” she said. “His music and power have since found lodging in thee. Great was my grief at his loss, yet greater is my joy in thee.”
“Still it bothers me how he died. Surely he could have saved himself, had he tried.”
She stiffened. “I told thee how the demon amulet choked him, so that he could make neither music nor spell.”
“Aye. But was not this harmonica always with him?”
“Always. But he could not play it, either, if-“
“And the golem did not remove it?”
“Nay. It was gone ere the golem came.”
“Then how did it get out here in the fields for me to conjure? Or, if it were not here, how did it get wherever it hid? It remained not at the Blue Demesnes.”
“True,” she agreed thoughtfully. “Long and long I searched for it, but it was not with his body.”
“Which is strange,” Stile said. “He might have conjured it away from him in the instant he knew he would die- but why then did he not use his magic to protect himself? And why did he deny thee the inheritance of his prize possession? Such malice was not his nature, I am sure.”
For Stile himself would not have done that. Not without excellent reason.
“He could not have conjured it!” she said, disturbed.
“Then he must have placed it in the field, or hidden it elsewhere, before he died. And that suggests-“
“That he knew he was slated to die!” she exclaimed, shocked. “He deprived himself of his most valued possession. But even without it, no one could have lulled him, were he on guard!”
“Unless he intended to permit it,” Stile said.
Her shock turned to honor. “No! Nothing I did, no will of mine should have caused him-“
“Of course not,” Stile agreed quickly. “He would never have done it because of thee.”
“Then what is thine import?”
“That perhaps he knew something, received an omen, that caused him to accept what was coming.”
She considered that for some time, her hand clenching and unclenching in his. “Yet what could possibly justify- what was fated?”
“I wish I knew.” For Stile’s own passage across the curtain had been enabled by that demise of his alternate self. If the Blue Adept had sought to eliminate his brand of magic from the frame, he had acted in vain, for Stile performed it now.
That night they did not make love. They lay and watched the blue moon, and Stile played gently on the mysterious harmonica, and it was enough. Slowly sleep overtook them.
“Be at ease,” a man’s voice came from nearby. “We have met before. Adept.”
Stile controlled his reaction. He still held the harmonica; he could summon his power rapidly. In a moment he placed the half-familiar voice: “Yes, at the Unolympics, Green Adept.” He did not want trouble with another Adept -especially not when the Lady Blue was close enough to be hurt by the fallout. He was as yet unable to see the man; probably Green had employed a spell of invisibility, with related obfuscations. Otherwise he could not have gotten by the alert equines.
“I come in peace. Wilt thou grant truce for a dialogue?”
“Certainly.” Stile was relieved. By custom verging on law. Adepts did not deceive each other in such matters. What in Phaze could this man want with him at this time? ,
The Adept became visible. He was a pudgy man of middle age, garbed in green. He looked completely inoffensive-but was in fact one of the dozen most powerful people of Phaze. “Thank thee. I will intrude not long.”
A hawk appeared silently behind the Adept. Stile gave no sign. He did not expect treachery, but if it came, there would suddenly be a unicorn’s horn in action. If dip attacked the Green Adept, he risked getting transformed into a clod of dung, but Stile knew he would take that risk if necessary. “Surely thou hast reason.”
“It is this. Blue: my sources give thee warning. Go not to the West Pole. Great mischief lies there.”
“There is no mischief there,” the Lady Blue protested. “It is a sacred place, under truce, like the palace of the Oracle.”
“Dost thou think no mischief lies with the Oracle?” Stile chuckled. “Excellent point. Green. But the Lady and I are on our honeymoon, and our excursion to the West Pole has private significance. Canst thou be more explicit?”
“Why shouldst thou care if mischief comes to a rival Adept?” the Lady demanded. “Thou didst evince no concern. Green, when the life of Blue hung in peril before.”
That was an understatement. No other Adept had lifted a finger or made a spell either to warn or to assist the Blue Adept in his severe crisis that had left two Adepts dead one maimed. This sudden concern was suspicious.
“Needs must I then elaborate,” Green said heavily. “My Demesnes lie athwart thy route. I would let thee pass unscathed, knowing thy mission-but by that acquiescence I commit myself to thy fate. This is not my desire. I want no part of what befalls thee. Go not to the West Pole-but an thou must go, then go not through the Green Demesnes.”
That made sense. The Green Adept had no personal interest in Stile; he merely wanted to make certain he was not implicated in what happened to Stile. If a prophecy decreed doom to all who might facilitate Stile’s approach to the West Pole, this step exonerated the Green Adept.
“Now I seek no trouble with thee,” Stile began. “But the Lady and I planned to follow the curtain to its terminus, and-“
“And we can bypass the Green Demesnes, in the interest of courtesy,” the Lady Blue finished.
Stile shrugged. “The Lady has spoken. Set out warners at thy boundaries, and we shall there detour.”
“I shall,” Green agreed. “Since thou dost humor my preference, I offer one final word: my sources suggest that if thou dost go to the West Pole, thou wilt suffer grievously in the short term, and in the moderate term will incur the enmity of the most powerful forces of the frame. I urge thee once more to give up this quest. There are other suitable places to honeymoon. The Green Demesnes themselves will be opened to thee, shouldst thou care to tarry there instead.”
“I thank thee for thy advice,” Stile said. “Yet it seems the end of Phaze draws nigh, and powerful forces already dispose themselves in readiness. The Foreordained has appeared. What is fated, is fated, and I am ready if not eager to play my part.”
“As thou dost choose.” The Green Adept made a signal with the fingers of his left hand and disappeared.
“I mislike these omens,” the Lady said. “Me thought our troubles were over.”
“Loose ends remain, it seems. I had hoped we could let them be for at least this fortnight.”
“Surely we can,” she agreed, opening her arms to him. The hawk flew quietly away. The weapon of the unicorn had not, after all, been needed.
Next day they resumed the ride north. Stile made a small spell to enhance Hinblue’s velocity and let Clip run at full speed. They fairly flew across the rolling terrain. Fire jetted from the unicorn’s nostrils, and his hooves grew hot enough to throw sparks. Unicorns, being magic, did not sweat; they ejected surplus heat at the extremities.
After a time they slowed. Stile brought out his harmonica and played. Clip accompanied him on his saxophone-voiced horn, and the lady sang. The magic closed about them, seeming to thicken the air, but it had no force without Stile’s verbal invocation.
“We can camp the night at the Yellow Demesnes,” Stile said. “The curtain clips a comer of-“
“By no means!” the Lady snapped, and Clip snorted.
Stile remembered. She didn’t like other Adepts, and Yellow liked to take a potion to convert herself from an old crone to a luscious young maid-without otherwise changing her nature. Also, her business was the snaring and selling of animals, including unicorns. Stile had traded magical favors with Yellow in the past and had come to respect her, but he could understand why his wife and steed preferred not to socialize.
“Anything for thee,” he agreed. “However, night approaches and the White Mountains lie beyond.”
“Indulge thyself in a spell. Adept.”
“How soon the honeymoon turns to dull marriage,” he grumbled. Clip made a musical snort of mirth, and the lady smiled.
The ramshackle premises of Yellow appeared. Both animals sniffed the air and veered toward the enclosure. Hastily Stile sang a counterspell: “This will cure the witch’s lure.” That enabled them to ignore the hypnotic vapor that drew animals in to capture and confinement. Before long they had skirted those premises and moved well on toward the termination of the plain to the north.
At dusk they came to the White Mountain range. Here the peaks rose straight out of the plain in defiance of normal geological principles; probably magic had been involved in their formation.
The curtain blithely traveled up the slope at a steep angle. It would have been difficult to navigate this route by daylight; at night the attempt would be foolhardy. “And there are snow-demons,” the Lady said as an afterthought.
Stile pondered, then conjured a floating ski lift. It contained a heated stall for two equines, complete with a trough filled with fine grain, and a projecting shelf with several mugs of nutri-cocoa similar to what was available from a Proton food machine. Clip could have converted to hawk-form and flown up, but the cold would have hindered him, and this was far more comfortable. Unicorn and horse stepped into the stalls and began feeding, while Stile and the Lady mounted for their repast. Eating and sleeping while mounted was no novelty; it was part of the joy of Phaze.
They rode serenely upward as if drawn by an invisible cable. “Yet I wonder where this magic power comes from?” Stile mused. “I realize that the mineral Phazite is the power source for magic, just as its other-frame self, Protonite, is the basis for that scientific, energy-processing society. But why should certain people, such as the Adepts, channel that power better than others? Why should music and doggerel verse implement it for me, while the Green Adept needs special gestures and the White Adept needs mystic symbols? There is a certain channelization here that can not be coincidental. But if it is natural, what governs it? If it is artificial, who set it up?”
“Thou wert ever questioning the natural order,” the Lady Blue said affectionately. “Asking whence came the Proton objects conjured to this frame, like the harmonica, and whether they were turning up missing from that frame, making us thieves.”
So his other self had speculated similarly! “I wonder if I could conjure a source of information? Maybe a smart demon, like the one Yellow animates with a potion.”
“Conjure not demons, lest they turn on thee,” she warned, and Clip gave an affirmative blast on his horn.
“Yes, I suppose there are no shortcuts,” Stile said. “But one way or another, I hope to find the answer.”
“Mayhap that is why mischief lurks for thee at the West Pole,” the Lady said, not facetiously. “Thou canst not let things rest, any more in this self than in thine other.”
That was quite possible, he thought. It was likely to be the curious child with a screwdriver who poked into a power outlet and got zapped, while the passive child escaped harm. But man was a carious creature, and that insatiable appetite for knowledge had led him to civilization and the stars. Progress had its dangers, yet was necessary-
Something rattled against the side of the gondola stall, startling them. Clip shifted instantly to hawk-form, dropping Stile so suddenly to the floor that he stumbled face first into the food trough as if piggishly hungry. Hinblue eyed him as he lifted his corn- and barley-covered face, and made a snort that sounded suspiciously like a snicker. “Et tu. Brute,” Stile muttered, wiping off his face while the Lady tittered.
Soon Clip returned from his survey of the exterior situation, metamorphosing to man-form. “Snow-demons,” he said. “Throwing icicles at us.”
Stile made a modification spell, and the chamber drew farther out from the mountainside, beyond reach of icicles. So much for that. “Yet this will complicate our night’s lodging,” Stile commented.
“Nay, I know a snow-chief,” the Lady said. “Once the demons were enemies of my Lord Blue, but we have healed many, and this one will host us graciously enough, methinks.”
“Mayhap,” Stile said dubiously. “But I shall set a warning spell against betrayal.”
“Do thou that,” she agreed. “One can never be quite certain with demons.”
They crested the high peak and followed the curtain to an icebound hollow in a pass on the north side. “Here, belike, can we find my friend,” the Lady said.
Stile placed the warning spell, and another to keep warm-a warner and a warmer, as the Lady put it-and they rode out. There was a cave in the ice, descending into the mountain. They approached this, and the snow demons appeared.
“I seek Freezetooth,” the Lady proclaimed. “Him have I befriended.” And in an amazingly short time, they were in the cold hall of the snow-chief.
Freezetooth was largely made of snow and ice. His skin was translucent, and his hair and beard were massed, tiny icicles. Freezing fog wafted out of his mouth as he spoke. But he was affable enough. Unlike most of his kind, he could talk. It seemed that most demons did not regard the human tongue as important enough to master, but a chief had to handle affairs of state and interrogate prisoners. “Welcome, warm ones,” he said with a trace of delicately suppressed aversion. “What favor do you offer for the privilege of nighting at my glorious palace?”
Glorious palace? Stile glanced about the drear, iceshrouded cave. It was literally freezing here-otherwise the snow-demons would melt. Even protected by his spell, Stile felt cold.
‘I have done thy people many favors in past years,” the Lady reminded Freezetooth indignantly, small sparks flashing from her eyes. That was a trick of hers Stile always admired, but several snow-demons drew hastily back in alarm.
“Aye, and in appreciation, we consume thee not,” the chief agreed. “What hast thou done far us lately, thou and thy cohorts?”
“This cohort is the Blue Adept,” she said, indicating Stile.
There was a ripple through the cave, as of ice cracking under stress. Freezetooth squinted, his snowy brow crusting up in reflection. “I do recall something about a white foal-“
Stile placed (he allusion. His alternate self, the former Blue Adept, had helped the Lady Blue rescue her white foal from the snow-demons, who did not now realize that the identity of the Blue Adept had changed. It hardly mattered, really.
“That foal would have died with thy people, being no snow-mare, though she looked it. But there was an avalanche-“
“An accident,” Freezetooth said quickly.
“An accident,” Stile agreed, though they both knew better. The demons had tried to kill the Blue Adept-and had received a harsh lesson. Surely they did not want another. But there was no need to antagonize them. “What favor didst thou crave?”
Now there was a canny glint in the demon’s frozen eye. ‘”Come converse privately. Adept, male to male.”
In a private chamber the demon confessed his desire: he loved a lovely, flowing, brilliantly hued fire-spirit. His “flame” was literally a flame.
The problem was immediately apparent. Freezetooth could not approach his love without melting. If she cooled to his temperature, her fire would extinguish and she would perish. Forbidden fruit, indeed!
Fortunately the remedy was within the means of Adept magic. Stile generated a spell to render Freezetooth invulnerable to heat. The flames would feel as deliciously cold as they were in fact hot.
The demon chief departed hastily to rendezvous with his love. Stile and his party were treated well by the remaining demons, who were no longer chilled by the wintry glare of their lord. The finest snowbanks were provided for sleeping on, in the most frigid and windy of the chambers. Without Stile’s warmth-spell, it would have been disaster. As it was, they started to melt down into the snow, and Stile had to modify his spell to prevent that. Once everything had been adjusted, the facilities were quite comfortable.
In the morning Freezetooth was back, and his icicles positively scintillated. No need to ask how his evening had worked out! He insisted that his close friend the Adept stay for a proper feast that evening.
It occurred to Stile that this hospitality could be useful. “Do thou remain here while I perform a necessary chore in Proton,” he told the Lady. “I must attend the final Round of the Tourney, but should be back by noon.”
“I know, my love. Is it selfish of me to hope that thou dost lose that Game and find thyself confined to Phaze?”
He kissed her. “Yes, it is selfish. Sheen depends on me.”
“Ah, yes-I forget the Lady Sheen. Methinks I shall consider her options whilst thou art gone.”
Stile wasn’t certain what that would lead to. The Lady Blue could cross the curtain, but Sheen could not function in Phaze. “Until noon,” Stile said, then spelled himself to his usual curtain crossing.
————————————————————————-
CHAPTER 4
Poem Stile’s opponent for the finals was a serf woman two years younger than he: Rue, a twenty-year-tenure veteran of the Game. Like himself, she had not qualified at the top of her age ladder; but also like himself, she was the best of her decade. She was one of the half-dozen serf players Stile was not eager to meet in the Tourney. He thought he could beat her, but he wasn’t sure.
Rue had luck as well as skill, for she had lost no Rounds. That meant that a single victory for her would bring her the prize, while one for Stile would merely bring him even. To beat Rue twice in succession-that would be difficult.
They played the grid. Stile got the letters. Rue was good at all manner of tool and machine games, being in superb health; he was well skilled in these areas, too, and could take her in most tool games, but would be at a disadvantage in machine-assisted games. She would expect him to go for TOOL or ANIMAL, so instead he went for A. NAKED. If she went for 4. ARTS, as he expected, this would foul her up.
But she had done the unexpected too, going for 3. CHANCE. With two chances to his one, the advantage would be with her on the straight gamble-if that was the way she wanted to play it. As evidently she did.
They played the subgrid, and finished with a very simple guessing game; each had to pick a number, and if the total of the two numbers was even. Stile won. Even, in this coding, was male; odd was female. This game was so simple it would be played on the grid. Each would enter his/her number, the total flashing on both screens only when both were entered.
Would she choose her own code, an odd number? People tended to, unconsciously, feeling more at home with their own. If she chose odd and he chose even, she would win.
Obviously he should choose odd, to cancel her odd. But, as obviously, she would anticipate that and choose even. Then the result would be. odd, and she would still win. It seemed she stood to win regardless.
It came back to the subjective. Given no advantage between alternatives, a person normally selected what pleased him emotionally. Rue, in doubt, should go for odd. Therefore Stile overruled his preference for even and chose the number of letters in his name: five. He entered this on the grid and locked it; no way to change his mind now” Rue had not yet made up her mind. Now the onus was hers, and they both knew it, and the broadcast audience knew it. She could win or lose by her decision; Stile was passive. The pressure was on her.
“Ten seconds until forfeit,” the voice of the Game Computer announced.
Rue grimaced and punched in her number. She was pretty enough, with auburn hair, an extremely fit body, and only a few age creases forming on face and neck. She was thirty-three years old, her youth waning. If she won this one, she would be eligible for rejuvenation, and Stile suspected she desired that more than the actual wealth of Citizenship.
The total showed eight. Rue had chosen the letters of her own name. Even-and Stile had won.
Stile kept his face impassive. He had been lucky-but was keenly aware of the fickleness of that mistress. Rue blanched a little, but knew her chances remained even. Now they were tied, with thirteen victories and one loss each.
There was no break between Rounds this time, since there were no complexities about scheduling. They played the grid again immediately.
This time Stile got the numbers. He certainly was not going for CHANCE, though it had just salvaged his drive. It had not won him anything beyond that, for as a finalist he had already achieved the prize of life tenure as a serf. The only real step forward he could make was to Citizenship, and now at last it was within his means. One single win-
He selected 4. ARTS, knowing that she would be playing to avoid his strong points elsewhere. The arts cut across other skills, and Rue was noted for her intellectual velocity and proficiency with machine-assisted games. Machine art would be a tossup, but he was willing to fight it out there.
But she surprised him again, choosing A. NAKED. So it was 1A, Naked Arts. Stile did not like this; he had had a very bad time in this box in his critical match with the Red Adept, and had pulled it out only by means of a desperation ploy.
They played the subgrids, and finished, to his abrupt delight, with EXTEMPORANEOUS POETRY. Stile had always fancied himself a poet; he had a ready flair for rhyme and meter that had served him in excellent stead in Phaze. But true poetry was more than this-and now he would be able to do something significant when and where it counted.
The Game Computer printed a random list of a dozen words. “Thirty minutes to incorporate these terms into poems,” it announced. “Highest point scores given for the use of one key word per line, in order, in the terminal position, rhymed. Technical facility fifty percent; content fifty percent. A panel of judges, including one male Citizen, one female Citizen, male serf, female serf, and the Game Computer, will decide the rating of each effort on the basis of zero to one hundred. The higher composite score prevails. Proceed.”
This was more restrictive than Stile liked, but he remained well satisfied. It was not that he thought he had an easy victory, he knew that Rue, too, had facility with words, perhaps greater than his own. She was an extremely quick-witted woman-which was of course one reason she had made it to the Tourney finals. She could cobble together a poem as readily as he could. But at least this particular contest would be decided on skill, not luck.
This was a fair encounter. If he won or if he lost, it would be because he had established his level. That was all he could ask.
Stile considered the words. They were: BITCH, CUBE, FLAME, SIR, SILENCE, LOVE, HORN, CHEAT, ROACH, CIVIL, FLUTE, EARTH. An anomalous bunch indeed! None of them rhymed with each other, so there were no free rides there. The only way to get a key term at the end of a rhyming line was to alternate with filler lines. “My female dog is a wonderful bitch; whenever she scratches she has an itch.” That sort of thing would hardly win the Tourney; it was literal doggerel. It might be better to alternate terminal key words with mid-line key words, sacrificing the preferred terminal spot for the sake of the also-preferred, one-key-word-per-line arrangement. The Computer had not made it easy; the contestants had to choose between sacrifices. “My female dog is a wonderful bitch; she stands on a cube and does a twitch.” That would gamer a better technical score, but nothing extra on content.
He glanced at Rue. She was frowning, evidently displeased by the first term. Stile half smiled; he would have been similarly put out if the term had been RUNT. He was a runt and she was a bitch-but that was the kind of mischief random selection could do.
Because this was Naked Arts, they could use no implements, make no written notes. No rhyming dictionaries. They had to do it all in their heads, punching only the finished poems into the grid for judgment. If either had trouble with memory, he or she could place individual lines as they were worked out. But then those lines would be final, no changes allowed. Since both Stile and Rue were experienced Game players, both could hold the developing poems in memory until the time for presentation. No, the only problem was wrestling these awkward words into the most artistic and meaningful whole.
Stile wrestled a while, but was not satisfied. He could make rhymes and meter, certainly-but where was the meaning? One ignored the content portion of the poem at one’s peril. Yet it seemed impossible to fit these unruly words into anything serious; the problem of rhyming and positioning turned his efforts to frivolous tangents, as with the antics of his female dog. What could a person do seriously with words like bitch, cube, and flame?
Time was passing. Rue was hard at work; her expression and concentration suggested she had developed a strategy of creation and was happily ironing out the wrinkles. She would probably come up with something very clever. He had to come up with something even more clever-or more significant. Sir, silence, love-what a headache! He brought himself back to basics. There were really two types of poetry: the ornamental and the consequential. Ornaments were rhyme, meter, alliteration, pattern, humor, assonance, and technical cleverness. They were stressed in light verse, parody, the libretto for popular music, and such. Serious poetry de-emphasized such things, or dispensed with them altogether. Thus some people were unable even to recognize serious poetry, because it didn’t necessarily rhyme. But ultimately any poetic appeal was to the deeper emotions, and the use of symbolism enabled it to evoke complex ramifications in the most compact presentation. As with Kipling’s Recessional: “Farcalled, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!” Presented to Queen Victoria some centuries back, this poem did not find instant favor, for it signaled the decline of the Earth-wide British Empire. But what imagery was evoked by the names of those two ancient cities, foremost in their times, finally brought to ruin by the armies of Babylonia and Alexander the Great, drunkard though the latter might have been. Kipling’s verse was superficially pretty; it rhymed nicely. But its real impact was its content, the somber warning for an overextended empire. All too soon it had been London-town under the siege of weapons unknown in the time of Tyre, as the Germans sent their bombers and rockets over. How well Kipling had understood!
With that memory. Stile saw his way. Rhyme, meter, and the rest of the prettiness were encumbrances; he had to dispense with them all and concentrate on meaning and emotion. He would lose some technical points, but gain where it counted. Win or lose, he would do his best, his way.
Stile considered the first word-bitch. He knew of a noble bitch-the old female werewolf who had guided Clef to the Platinum Demesnes, sacrificing her life in the process. Stile could do worse than remember her in this poem! Cube-there was one cube that was fresh in his experience, and that was the doubling cube of his recent backgammon game, which had enabled him to pull out a lastmoment win.
Flame-well, it wasn’t the most serious thing, but he had just enabled the chief snow-demon to have a liaison with his literal flame. That might not have any meaning to the Tourney judges, but this poem was not really for them but for Stile himself-his evocation of himself. The frame of Phaze was vitally important to him, and the flame related to that and to the notion of romance, which brought him to the Lady Blue. Ah, yes.
Sir-that was easy. This very poem was Stile’s final effort to be called sir: to become a Citizen of Proton, and have similar stature and power in Proton as he did in Phaze as the Blue Adept.
But the remaining terms-they did not seem to relate. Now he was emotionally committed to this course, and had to use them in it-which meant he would have to improvise. That would be troublesome.
What was there to do except use the words as keys, perhaps as some psychic revelation that had to be clothed with syntax to become meaningful? If the first four terms brought him from the recent past to the present, the next eight might be taken as signals of the future. At least he would assume as much for the sake of the poem-insights to himself, now and to come. If the insights proved false, then this was a work of fiction; if true, of prediction. It was a worthy game, and he would take it seriously.
Stile bent to it with a will, and the lines fell into their places. No rhyme, no meter, no other ornamentation; just a series of statements like those of the Oracle, clarifying the significance of each key term. He found that there was not a great amount of mystery to it; the statements were mostly common sense, modified by what he already knew, and the whole was an affirmation of man’s resignation to fate.
Suddenly time was up. Rue and Stile typed in their poems. Now it was up to the panel of judges.
In the interim, those judges had assembled. Each one sat in a separate booth facing a central holograph. They could view the holo and converse with each other at the same time. The Game Computer was represented by a booth containing a humanoid robot, its outer surface transparent, so that its wires, hydraulics, and electronic components showed. The thing was at first eerie, like an animated cross section of the human body, but soon the eye accepted it for what it was: an animation of a simplified representation of the far more complicated Computer.
“Display one poem,” the Computer-figure said. “The serf Rue will commence her reading.”
Rue looked at the printed poem in her grid screen and began to read. A holograph of her formed above the central table, where all the judges could see it plainly. It looked as if she were standing there, a woman on a pedestal, and her eyes made contact with those of whatever judge she happened to face.
“My poem is entitled Cruel Lover,” she announced. Then she read, flouncing prettily and smiling or frowning to emphasize the meaning appropriately. As she read each line, it appeared on a simulated screen over her head, until the full poem was printed.
Call me witch or call me bitch Call me square or cube By any name I’m still the flame Burning on the tube.
I’ll take no slur, I tell you, sir I will not sit in silence I’ll take your glove in lieu of love But will accept no violence.
Now light’s reborn by dawn’s bright horn You can no longer cheat
Accept reproach or be a roach Or make my joy complete.
Desist this drivel and be civil Play violin or flute Be up with mirth or down to earth But keep love absolute.
“The key words are used correctly and in the proper sequence,” the Computer said. “Each one terminates its lines, and each is matched with a rhyme of good quality. These are credits. Four lines exist only to complete the necessary rhymes; these are neutral. The metric scansion is correct and consistent-basically iambic tetrameter alternating with iambic trimeter with certain convenient modifications in the extreme feet. This is a common mode and not considered difficult. I rate the technical facility of this effort forty-two of a total of fifty points alloted to this aspect. Proceed to my left with your judgments.”
The female serf was to the left. “I don’t know much about all those things,” she said diffidently. “But it rhymes, and I sort of like it. So I give it a forty-five.”
There was the illiterate response. Stile thought. That was the vote he had not deigned to court, though it cost him Citizenship.
Next was the male Citizen, resplendent in his ornate robes. “We are not yet discussing content or interpretation?” he inquired. When the Computer agreed, he continued: “I find the format simplistic but effective. I’ll give it forty.” Stile liked that reaction better.
Then the male serf voted. “I don’t relate well to the female tone, but technically it seems all right for what it is. The key words are all in the right place, and they do fit in more neatly than I could do. Forty-three from me.”
The female Citizen, in a sequined suit, fire opals gleaming at her ears, voted last. “Some of the lines are forced or confusing, but I suppose I must grade that in content. She’s done an excellent job of stringing the random words coherently together. Forty-six.”
Stile saw that the average score was forty-three, which was good-probably a good deal better than his own would be. Rue had certainly integrated her terms cleverly. He was going to have a rough time of this one!
“We shall now analyze the second poem for technical merit,” the Computer said.
Stile stepped up to the grid. He found himself looking past his printed poem into the glassy orbs of the Computer simulacrum robot. He glanced to the side and saw the male serf. He could see anyone he chose, merely by looking in the correct direction; their circle was laid out flat on his screen.
“My poem is titled Insights,” he said. Then he read:
Nobility is found in a werewolf bitch Defeat converts to victory by an ivory cube Magic makes ice merge with flame A Game converts serf to sir.
The mischief of the future is shrouded in silence And part of that mischief is love We must heed the summons of Gabriel’s horn Destiny the single thing we can not cheat.
All are subject: the dragon and the roach Since we are bound, we must be civil Our fate is determined by God’s flute That tumbles mountains and shakes the earth.
He had made eye contact with each judge in turn as he read, and had seen their responses. Unfortunately, these were not promising; some frowned, some seemed confused. It wasn’t going over; they did not understand its form or content.
“This is free verse,” the Computer said. “It has no consistent meter and no rhyme. This should not be taken as a defect. The key terms are terminally placed, in correct order, one to a line with no waste lines. There are natural pauses at the end of most lines. As free verse, I rate this technically at thirty-nine.”
Stile’s heart sank. The others would follow the Computer’s lead, and he would average several points below Rue’s effort.
He was not disappointed in this expectation. The serf woman wondered whether these lines could even be considered poetry, as they seemed just like sentences to her, and the others were lukewarm. The average score was thirty-eight. Stile was five points behind.
Now it was time for the content analysis. Neither poet was permitted to speak at this stage; it was felt that if the poems did not speak for themselves, they were defective. “This is a straightforward statement of position,” the Computer said of Rue’s effort. “She evidently feels slighted by her male friend, and is dictating to him the terms of their future association. I perceive no particular meaning beyond this, and therefore do not regard this as other than light verse. Rating thirty-five.”
That was a good sign. Stile thought. If the others followed this lead, her average would drop.
“It’s a good thing machines aren’t in charge of romance,” the serf woman remarked. “I find this a good telling-off. The guy is a roach, calling her such names, and I’m all with her. I say fifty.”
Stile winced inwardly. He needed to recover five points, and figured they might rate his poem an average 40. The Computer’s lead had put him right in line to even it up by dropping Rue’s score, but this 50 was a disaster.
The male Citizen was more critical, however. “I certainly don’t care to see a woman spelling out her terms like that for a romance, though I suppose, if she can find a man to accept them, it’s their business. I don’t follow this ‘burning on the tube’ reference; does it make sense at all?”
“Oh, sure, sir,” the male serf said. “In the old days on Earth they had gas burners, gas coming up a tube and the flame on top. So she’s likening herself to that sort of flame. It’s a sort of pun, really.”
The Citizen shrugged. “Clever,” he said sourly. “I rate this thirty.” Stile saw Rue wince. But he himself, while deploring the man’s narrowness, was gratified by the score. It put him back in the running.
The male serf was next. “If she becomes a Citizen, then she can set terms,” he said, and the others laughed. They were getting into this now, loosening up. “I guess I’m looking for something deeper than this, some social commentary, not just female demands. Rating thirty-two.” And Stile’s hopes elevated another notch. Now if only the other woman did not react by sexual alignment-
“I believe I note an extremely clever thrust,” the lady Citizen said. “Nowhere is the protagonist identified; it is not necessarily serf Rue at all. It could be any woman, most especially one who has been wronged by the man she loves. It could even apply to a humanoid robot female who loves a flesh-man.”
Oh, no! Had Rue slanted her verse to pillory Stile? He saw the judges turning to look at him, and at Sheen in the small physical audience permitted. They knew)
“The references to square and cube fall into place,” the lady Citizen continued. “A robot is a creature of geometrical parts, supposedly, animated by electric power from a tiny furnace fed by Protonite. She is certainly burning, internally! She must accept a man’s attentions-I understand that is what that type is primarily designed for-but can not have his love, since he knows she is a machine. Yet she can be programmed for emotion; she loves him, knowing that love is not returned. Perhaps the man she serves is a musician, playing the violin or flute-“
Sheen got up from her seat in the audience and walked toward the exit. Stile felt acute pity for her. She was not supposed to be the target! “One moment,” the male Citizen said. “That’s her, isn’t it? I want to question her.”
“That would be involving her in the panel’s deliberation,” the female Citizen said. “I doubt that’s legitimate.”
“The judges may seek any source of information they wish,” the Computer said. “Except the author of the piece in question.”
“Female robot-how do you feel about this poem?” the male Citizen called.
Sheen stopped and faced him. “Sir, I prefer not to answer, if I am to be considered an interested party.”
“Answer!” he directed, with supreme indifference to her feelings.
“You may answer,” the Computer said. “You have not volunteered your influence; you have been summoned by this panel as a material witness. We are trying to determine whether there is substance to the hypothesis that the poem in question represents your viewpoint.”
Sheen’s mouth finned. Her human mannerisms had become so facile that in no physical way was her machine nature evident. She was a beautiful woman, naked of body and perhaps of mind. “Then you shall have my viewpoint, sir. If the poem concerns me, it is not intended as a compliment. It is intended as an attack on the man I love, using me as an involuntary weapon. I am a machine-but I think that even were I alive, I would not care so cynically to hurt a living person in this fashion. This poem is crueler than anything the man I love might do. I am sure his own poem is not of this nature.”
The Citizen nodded. “That’s some machine,” he murmured.
The female Citizen considered, pursing her lips. Her opals flashed. “I am left with a choice. Either this poem is not directed at, shall we say, real people, in which case it is not remarkable-or it is so directed, in which case its brilliance is nullified by its cruelty. In either case, I can not respect it. I rate it twenty-five.”
That was disaster for Rue. It made her average score 34V2. The other panelists could reconsider their votes if they wished, but seemed content to let them stand. Rue’s poem had a cumulative score of 77’Vz. Stile had a fair chance to beat that, thanks to Sheen. All he needed was forty points.
Now the judges considered Stile’s effort for content. “This poem is more serious and obscure than the other,” the Computer said. “Some may not be aware that there exists an alternate frame of reality of this planet within which other laws of physics govern. The author is able to enter that frame, where he is a person of power and has an elegant wife. Several of the first six lines evidently refer to that frame. There was a female wolf who sacrificed her life for her duty, and a magical encounter between a creature of ice and another of fire. The future in that frame can occasionally be foreseen by magical means, and it contains extraordinary mischief, part of which is the conflict of love loyalties. Two lines refer to the Tourney now being concluded, which will lead to Citizenship for one of these serfs. Thus the first portion of the poem is relevant to the larger situation here and must be accorded credit. The second portion appears to be an advisory essay. The Angel Gabriel is destined mythologically to blow his trumpet on Judgment Day for living persons-and that call is the one no one can evade or cheat. This poem extends this concept to creatures both fanciful and repulsive. It concludes that these people and creatures must accept the inevitable with civility, and reminds us that, according to the legend of the other frame, the powerful flute-perhaps an alternate designation of Gabriel’s horn-has already announced itself by shaking the earth, in the form of the tremors recently experienced here. Allowing for a considerable figurative element, I find this poem serious and valid. The tremors were actually caused by the collapse of overworked Protonite mines in the southern range, but this can be taken as a warning: the mineral on which this planet’s power is literally based is not inexhaustible, and we shall suffer an accounting when that mineral is at last depleted. Already we have suffered a not-inconsequential damage to a number of our facilities. I therefore take this poem as a well-conceived and serious warning, and on that basis I rate it forty-eight.”
Stile was amazed and gratified. He had had no hint the Game Computer knew so much about him or the frame of Phaze, or that it could interpret oblique references with such dispatch. Now he realized that everything he had told Sheen, she had relayed to her machine friends. They in turn could have informed the Game Computer, who perhaps was one of their number. Certainly it possessed considerable self-will, backed by the phenomenal resources of the Computer memory banks and the experience of analyzing many thousands of Games. So this should not have surprised him at all.
It was the serf woman’s turn to vote. “Is there any cutting at the opponent?” she asked. The other heads indicated that no one perceived any. “I’m not sure about all the business of the other frame; this is the first I’ve heard of it. But I can believe the Protonite won’t last forever, and somehow this serf-Citizen setup must be called to account. So okay, I’ll go with the warning. I rate it forty.”
This was better than Stile had hoped from her. She had given the other poem 50, and he had feared she was a man hater.
“Good job,” the male Citizen said. “Forty-five.”
“Just what kind of a person is he in that frame you talk about?” the serf man asked,
“He is what is called an Adept,” the Computer answered. “That means he is a powerful magician.”
“Funny to hear a computer say that,” the man said. “But I sort of go for that fantasy bit, even if it is all a story. Forty-two.”
Stile’s hope was sailing. These were amazingly favorable responses. He was averaging 44. It would take a rating of 25 by the last panelist to bring him down to par with Rue. The lady Citizen seemed too perceptive for that-but she had surprised him before. He felt his hands getting sweaty as he waited for her answer.
“This mischief of love,” she said. “Is this person concerned about the feelings of the lady robot who loves him?”
“He may not answer,” the Computer reminded her. “We must divine that answer from his poem.”
“I wonder whether in fact it is his own personal reckoning he is most concerned with,” she said. “He says they must be civil, because what will be, will be. I am not sure I can accept that answer.”
Stile quailed. This woman had downgraded Rue’s verse for cruelty; was she about to do the same for his?
“Since he has a wife in the other frame, he really does not need a woman of any kind in this frame,” she continued. “It is unfair to keep her in doubt.”
“We may approve or disapprove the poet’s personal life,” the male Citizen said. “But we are here to judge only the merit of the poem. For what it’s worth, I see several indications that he recognizes the possibility of fundamental change. A bitch turns noble, defeat becomes victory, ice merges with flame, serf becomes Citizen, the fate of dragons and roaches is linked. Perhaps he is preparing his philosophy for the recognition that a living creature may merge with a machine. If this is the way fate decrees, he will accept it.”
She nodded. “Yes, the implication is there. The author of this poem, I think, is unlikely to be deliberately cruel. He is in a difficult situation, he is bound, he is civil. It is an example more of us might follow. I rate this work forty-four.”
Stile’s knees almost gave way. She had not torpedoed him; his total score would be 82, comfortably ahead of Rue’s total.
“Do any wish to change their votes on either aspect of either poem?” the Computer inquired. “Your votes are not binding until confirmed.”
The panelists exchanged glances. Stile got tense again. It could still come apart!
“Yes, I do,” the serf woman said. Stile saw Rue tense; this was the one who had given her 50 on content. If she revised her grade on Stile’s poem downward-
“I believe I overreacted on that fifty score,” she said. “Let’s call it forty-five for Cruel Lover.”
Again Stile’s knees turned to goo. She had come down on his side!
“Final score eighty-two to seventy-seven in favor of Stile’s poem,” the Computer said after a pause. “He is the winner of this Tourney.”
Now there was applause from the hidden public address system. So quickly, so simply, he had won!
But he saw Rue, standing isolated, eyes downcast. On impulse he went to her. “It was a good game,” he said. “You could easily have won it.”
“I still have life tenure,” she said, half choked with disappointment. Then, as an afterthought, she added:
“Sir.”
Stile felt awkward. “If you ever need a favor-“
“I did not direct my poem at you. Not consciously. I was thinking of someone who threw me over. Sir.”
But now the crowd was closing in, and Stile’s attention was necessarily diverted. “By the authority vested in me by the Council of Citizens of Planet Proton,” the Game Computer said, its voice emerging from every speaker under its control throughout the Game Annex, “I now declare that the serf Stile, having won the Tourney, is acquitted of serf status and endowed with Citizenship and all appurtenances and privileges pertaining thereto, from this instant forward.”
The applause swelled massively. The panelists joined in, serfs and Citizens alike.
A robot hastened forward with an ornate robe. “Sir, I belong to your transition estate. It is your privilege to wear any apparel or none. Yet to avoid confusion-“
Stile had thought he was braced for this, but the repeated appellation “sir” startled him. For a lifetime he had called others sir; now he had comprehensive conditioning to unlearn. “Thank you,” he said, leaching for the robe.
The robot skittered to the side. “Allow me, sir,” it said, and Stile realized it wanted to put the robe on him. It did not behoove a Citizen to serve himself, though he could if he wanted to. Stile suffered himself to be dressed, holding a mental picture of a horse being saddled. “Thank, you,” he repeated awkwardly.
The machine moved dose, getting the robe on and adjusted. “A Citizen need not thank a machine-or anyone,” it murmured discreetly in Stile’s ear.
“Oh. Yes. Thank-uh, yes.”
“Quite all right, sir,” the machine said smoothly.
Now a lady Citizen approached. It was Stile’s employer. Former employer, he reminded himself. “I am gratified, Stile,” she said. “You have made me a winner too.”
“Thank you, sir.” Then Stile bit his tongue.
She smiled. “Thank you, sir.” And she leaned forward to kiss him on the right eyebrow. “I profited a fantastic amount on your success. But more than that is the satisfaction of sponsoring a Tourney winner. You will find me appreciative.” She walked away.
Now the Citizen known as the Rifleman approached. “I know exactly how you feel,” he said. That was no exaggeration; the Rifleman had won his own Tourney fifteen years before. Stile had encountered him in the first Round of this Tourney and barely pulled out the victory. The Rifleman had been an excellent loser. “Accept some private advice. Citizen: get away from the public for several days and drill yourself in the new reality. That will cure you of embarrassing slips. And get yourself someone to explain the ropes in nontechnical terms-the extent of your vested estate, the figures, the prerogatives. There’s a hell of a lot to learn fast, if you don’t want to be victimized by predatory Citizens.”
“But aren’t all Citizens-that is, don’t they respect the estates of other Citizens?”
“Your minimum share of the Protonite harvest can not be impinged upon-but only your luck and competence and determination can establish your place in the Citizen heirarchy. This is a new game. Stile-oh, yes. Citizens have names; we are merely anonymous to the serfs. You may wish to select a new name for yourself-“
“No need.”
“It is a game more intricate and far-reaching than any within the Tourney. Make a point to master its nuances, Stile-soon.” And the Rifleman gave him a meaningful glance.
The audience was dissipating as the novelty of the new Citizen wore off. Stile signaled Sheen. “Can your friends provide me with a mentor conversant with the nuances of Citizen behavior?”
“They can, sir,” she said. “Or they could program me-“
“Excellent! Get yourself programmed. They’ll know what I need. And do it soon.”
Sheen left. Stile found it incongruous that she should remain naked while he was now clothed. Yet of course she remained a serf-an imitation serf-now in his employ; she would remain naked the rest of her life.
Her life? Stile smiled, a trifle grimly. He was forgetting that she had no life. Yet she was his best friend in this frame.
Stile turned to the robot who had brought his robe. “Take me to my estate,” he ordered it.
The machine hesitated. “Sir, you have none.”
“None? But I thought all Citizens-“
“Each Citizen has a standard share of the Protonite mines. All else follows.”
“I see.” It seemed there was much that was not handed to a Citizen on a platter. He needed that manual of Citizenship! Where was Sheen? Her programming should have been quick.
Then she appeared. “I have it, sir,” she said.
“Excellent. Take me to an appropriate and private place, and deliver.”
“Don’t I always-sir?” She led the way out of the Game Annex.
The place turned out to be a temporary minidome set up on the desert. Its generator tapped an underground power cable, so as to form the force field that prevented the thin, polluted outside atmosphere from penetrating. A portable unit filled the dome with pleasant, properly cooled air. Sheen set up a table for two, put out crackers, cheese, and mock wine, adjusted the field to turn opaque, and planted a spy-disrupter device on the ground. “Now we are private, sir,” she said.
“You don’t have to say sir to me,” he protested.
“Yes, I do, sir. You are a Citizen and I am a naked serf. We violate this convention at our peril.”
“But you’ve been my friend all along!”
“And once more than that, sir,” she reminded him. She had come to him as guardian and mistress, and had been good in both capacities. His marriage to the Lady Blue had deleted the second. Sheen, a machine supposedly without any human emotion not programmed into her, had tried to commit suicide-self-destruction. She had become reconciled after meeting the Lady Blue. Sheen still loved him, and for that Stile felt guilty.
“It occurs to me that, as a Citizen, I could have you reprogrammed to have no personal feeling toward me,” he said.
“This is true, sir.”
“Do you wish it?”
“No, sir.”
“Sheen, I value you greatly. I do not want you to suffer. That poem of Rue’s-I am absolutely opposed to giving you cause to feel that way. Is there anything within my present power I can do to make you happy?”
“There is, sir. But you would not.”
She was uncompromising. She wanted his love again, physically if not emotionally, and that he could not give. “Aside from that.”
“Nothing, sir.”
“But I may be able to make your friends happy. As Citizen, I can facilitate their recognition as sapient entities.” Her friends were the self-willed machines of Proton who, like Sheen herself, had helped him survive Citizen displeasure in the past. He had sworn never to act against their interests so long as they did not act against the interests of man, and both parties honored that oath. Stile did not regard their desire to achieve serf status as contrary to the oath; he agreed they should have it. But such status was not easy to achieve; the Citizens were devoted to the status quo,
“All in good time, sir. Now shall we review the appurtenances and privileges of Citizenship?”
“By all means.”
Rapidly, in simple language, she acquainted him with his situation. He was entitled to use the proceeds from his share of the mines to purchase or construct a physical estate, to staff it with serfs, robots, androids, cyborgs, or anything else, and to indulge in any hobbies he wished. The amount of credit available from his share was sufficient to enable him to construct a moderate palace, hire perhaps twenty-Eve serfs, and buy six robots of Sheen’s type. Expensive hobbies like exotic horse breeding or duplicating the Hanging Gardens of Babylon would have to wait until the palace was complete. The income of a Citizen was not limitless; it only seemed that way to serfs.
It was possible, however, to increase one’s resources by making and winning large wagers with other Citizens. Bets of a year’s income were not uncommon. However, if a Citizen got two years in arrears, further wagers would not be honored until he caught up. It was never permitted for a Citizen to become destitute; a basic lifestyle had to be maintained. Appearance was vital.
“I’ll have no problems there,” he said. “I’m not a gambling man, outside the Game. I shall be a very conservative Citizen and live well within my income. Most of the time I won’t even be here, as you know.”
She nodded sadly. “Yes, sir. There’s a note in the program from my friends. They warn it is not safe for you to stand pat. Forces are building rapidly. To protect yourself you must soon develop your estate to a hundred times its original magnitude. Within six months.”
“A hundred times!” he exclaimed. “In six months!”
“And you must unravel the mystery that is associated with your lasering, sir. Who sent me to protect you? My friends have disturbing new evidence that this is not an isolated event. Someone or something is interfering with your life, and my friends can’t discover who.”
“Yes. And in Phaze, someone set the Red Adept against me on a false alarm.” He had had an extraordinary amount of trouble in that connection, ending in the banishment of the Red Adept from both Phaze and Proton. The Oracle had said Blue would destroy Red, and that had proved correct-but none of that mischief would have occurred if someone had not started the rumor that Blue intended to attack Red.
“And there was that earthquake, sir, which you believe is connected to events in Phaze,” she continued. “Another portent, perhaps.”
“Definitely. The Platinum Elves informed me that I would be involved in important developments, after my honeymoon.” Ooops-he had not meant to mention the honeymoon to Sheen. He continued rapidly. “I’m not sure I like the implication. I don’t know what the linkages between frames might be, but since a number of people can cross, there can be interactions, perhaps quite serious ones.” He breathed deeply. “I was psychologically prepared for banishment from Proton when I got eliminated from the Tourney. I’m not so certain about how to proceed now that I have permanent tenure. I don’t feel comfortable here in clothing.”
“That is why you needed to isolate yourself, sir.”
Stile got up and paced the small enclosure. “I promised to return to Phaze by noon. I have already overrun that deadline. Why don’t you set in motion the machinery for the establishment of my physical estate, and start hiring serfs, while I cross the curtain to-“
“That might not be wise, sir.”
Her constant “sirs” were still getting on his nerves, but he knew this was good conditioning. “Not wise?”
“You will need your money as a stake to multiply your estate, sir, so should not fritter it away on nonessentials. And if it became known that a machine was disposing your assets-“
“I am a Citizen, aren’t I? I can use a machine if I want to, can’t I?” Stile was irritated, not liking the implied slur at Sheen.
“Yes, sir.”
“So I’m appointing you my chief of staff, or whatever the appropriate office is. I’d better hire a staff of serfs, for appearances, and become a compulsive gambler. But I’ll lose my new fortune unless I have competent input. Will your friends help?”
“They will, sir.”
“Then ask them to locate an appropriate adviser for me. One who knows how to break in a new Citizen.”
“And how to escalate a Citizen’s fortune rapidly, sir.”
“Precisely. Now I’ll go finish my honey-uh, my business in Phaze. Assuming I can get out of Proton unobserved.”
“A Citizen can, sir,” she assured him. “If you will make a brief, formal holo statement of authorization, so I can draw on your funds-“
“Ah, yes.” Stile took care of that immediately.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, accepting the recording. “I shall set the wheels in motion.”
“Excellent. And I’ll ponder what I can do for you and your friends.”
Sheen nodded, knowing he could do nothing for her. She would serve him loyally and lovingly, regardless.
————————————————————————-
CHAPTER 5
Wesa Pole He was late, but the Lady Blue forgave him. “I had the news before thee. Thou art a Citizen now.”
“It’s anticlimactic,” Stile complained. “Citizenship is the ultimate prize of Proton. Now that I have it, it’s mainly a nuisance. Hidden forces decree that I must commence a new and chancy course, to be ready for even more tension. I wonder if this relates in any way to the promised mischief at the West Pole?”
“How can such complications arise now?” the Lady inquired rhetorically. “All we seek is a simple honeymoon.”
“Somehow I don’t think we’re going to have it.”
They attended the snow. demons’ banquet. It was magnificent, in its fashion. Candied icicles for aperitif, iceburgers, fried avalanche, sludge freeze as a beverage, and snow cones for dessert. The snow-demons pitched in with gusto; Stile and the Lady nibbled with imperfect enthusiasm, until Stile sneaked in a small spell and changed their morsels to items with food content concealed under snow frosting.
At night, side by side in a surprisingly comfortable snowbank, they talked. “I have a problem,” Stile said quietly.
“I think it must needs wait till the snowmen sleep,” she murmured. “They exhibit unseemly curiosity as to how flesh-mortals perform without melting from generated heat.”
He patted her anatomy under the snow blanket, where the curious demons couldn’t see. “A Proton problem.”
“The Lady Sheen.”
“The lovely self-willed robot lady Sheen, who will not accept reprogramming. I must work closely with her, for I have agreed to help her machine friends. They helped me survive when times were hard in Proton, and I must help them achieve serf status now. And they warn me that more trouble is coming; that I must gamble to enhance my estate vastly and research to learn who sent Sheen in the first place. I fear it links in some way to events in Phaze, so I must follow through. Only I wish I didn’t have to use Sheen-take that in what sense thou wilt. It isn’t fair to her, and I feel guilty.”
“As well thou might,” she agreed. “I promised to consider her case, and so I have done. Now let me see if I have this right. The self-willed golems-machines-wish recognition as people?”
“Correct. Serfs are the lowest people, but are more than the highest machines. Serfs can play the Game, compete in the Tourney, win privileges or even Citizenship. When their tenure expires, they depart the planet with generous cumulative pay. Machines are permitted none of this; they are slaves until junked. Yet some are intelligent, conscious, feeling.”
“And the Lady Sheen is one of these unrecognized machine creatures.”
“She is. She is in every way a person, with very real emotions. They merely happen to be programmed, rather than natural.”
“And is there a difference between program and nature?”
“I doubt it. Different means to similar ends, perhaps.”
“Then thou must marry the Lady Sheen.”
Stile paused. “I don’t believe I heard thee properly, Lady.”
“It is the other frame. She can never cross the curtain. Thou canst do as thou wilt with her there.”
Stile had been growing sleepy. Now he was awakening. “I am sure I am misunderstanding thee.”
“If a Citizen marries a machine-“
“Nobody can marry a machine!”
“-then that machine must have-“
“Machines don’t have-” Stile stopped. ‘I wonder. The spouses of Citizens do not achieve Citizen status, but they do have certain prerogatives. They are considered to be employed-their employment being the marriage. And only serfs are employable.”
“So a married machine would be a serf,” the Lady concluded. “And if one machine were a serf-“
“The precedent-“
“Thinkest thou it would accomplish thy purpose?”
Stile considered, his head spinning. “If the marriage stuck, it would be one hell of a lever for legal machine recognition!”
“That was my notion,” she said complacently.
“But I am married to thee!” he protested.
“In Phaze. Not in Proton.”
“But thou canst cross over!”
“True. But I am of this frame, and never will I leave it for aught save emergency. I have no claim on the things of Proton, nor wish I any.”
“But I love only thee! I could never-“
“Thou lovest more than thou knowest,” she said with gentle assurance. “Neysa, Sheen-“
“Well, there are different types of-“
“And I spoke not of love. I spoke of marriage.”
“A marriage of convenience? To a robot?”
“Dost thou hold the Lady Sheen beneath convenience, for that she be made of metal?”
“Nay! But-” He paused. “Nay, I must confess I do think less of her. Always since I learned she was not real, that-“
“Methinks thou hast some thinking to do,” the Lady Blue said, and turned her back.
Stile felt the reproach keenly. He was prejudiced; he had great respect for Sheen, but love had been impossible because she was not flesh. Yet he reminded himself that he had come closer to loving her before encountering the Lady Blue. Had Sheen’s nonliving nature become a pretext for his inevitable change of heart? He could not be sure, but he was unable to deny it.
How could he fight for the recognition of the sapient self-willed machines if he did not recognize them as discrete individuals himself? How could he many Sheen if he did not love her? If he came to think of her as a real person, wouldn’t such a marriage make him a bigamist? There were two frames, certainly, but he was only one person. Yet since the Lady Blue had generously offered to accept half-status, confining herself to Phaze-
Think of the commotion the marriage of a Citizen to a robot would make in Proton I It would convulse the social order! That aspect appealed to him. Yet-
“Wouldst thou settle for a betrothal?” he asked at last.
“An honest one,” she agreed sleepily.
“Say six months. Time enough to get the legal issues clarified, one way or the other. There would be formidable opposition from other Citizens. And of course Sheen herself might not agree.”
“She will agree,” the Lady Blue said confidently. “A betrothal is a commitment, and never wilt thou renege. She will have some joy of thee at last.”
This was not a way he had ever expected the Lady Blue to speak, and Stile was uneasy. Yet perhaps she had some concern of her own, knowing She had taken him away from Sheen. Possibly the social mores of Phaze differed from those of Proton in this respect, and sharing was more permissible. Certainly his friend Kurrelgyre the werewolf had believed it, assigning his bitch to a friend while Kurrelgyre himself was in exile from his Pack. The Lady Blue had met Sheen, liked her, and accepted her immediately as a person; apparently that had not been any social artifice.
“And if in six months it is legal, then shall I marry her,” Stile continued. “In Proton. But I can not love her.”
“Then love me,” the Lady Blue said, turning to him.
That was reward enough. But already Stile had a glimpse of that controversy he was about to conjure, like a savage magic storm.
In the morning they resumed their tour of the curtain, recrossing the White Mountain range and bearing southwest. There were some deep crevices on the ground; when their steeds’ hooves knocked sand into them, it fell down and away beyond the limit of perception, soundlessly. “Deep caves, mayhap,” Stile remarked, a bit nervous about a possible collapse of the footing. But Clip tapped the ground with a forehoof, indicating that there was no danger of a fall as long as a unicorn picked the way.
Stile checked his contour map and discovered they were heading for the Black Demesnes. He did not like the Black Adept, and by mutual consent they spelled rapidly past the grim castle and well on toward the Purple Mountains.
Now the curtain bore directly south. Suddenly there was an explosion of fire before them. Stile squinted at the flame, trying to determine whether it was natural or magic.
“The warners!” the Lady exclaimed. “The Green Adept!”
“It must be,” Stile agreed. “I promised to bypass him.”
They went around, rejoining the curtain southwest of Green’s marked territory. The curtain was curving back westward, through the foothills of the southern mountains. The scenery was pleasant; waist-high bushes covered the rolling terrain, topped with faintly purple flowers. The steeds trotted through, finding firm footing beneath. The midafternoon sun slanted down.
Suddenly a creature jumped in front of Hinblue. The thing had the body of a powerful man and the head of a wolf. It bayed-and the horse spooked. The Lady Blue, an expert rider, was not in any trouble; she brought her steed about and calmed her.
Then a second creature appeared, this one with the head of a ram. It bleated.
Stile’s mind formulated a spell while his hand went for his harmonica. But he withheld his magic, uncertain whether it was necessary. He had heard of the animalheads, but understood they were not aggressive toward human beings. Was his information mistaken?
More animalheads appeared, making their assorted noises. Cats, goats, hawks, bears, turtles-none of them with the intelligence or verbal ability of a man, but each quite formidable in its fashion. They were all snarling, squawking, roaring, or growling aggressively. A pighead charged toward Stile, grunting.
“I fear they mean mischief,” the Lady Blue said. “This is not like them. Something has angered them, methinks.”
“Yes,” Stile agreed. Clip’s horn was holding the pighead at bay, but a crocodilehead was circling to the rear. “We had best avoid them till we know their motivation.”
“Methinks we can outrun them,” she said, concerned but not worried.
Their steeds took Off. Hinblue was a fine mare, capable of a galloping velocity that shamed ordinary horses; she really did move like the wind. But Clip was a unicorn whose inherent magic made him swifter yet. By common consent they used no other magic, not revealing Stile’s status; Adepts were not necessarily favored in the back reaches of Phaze.
The animalheads gave chase enthusiastically, baying, bellowing, and hooting. But their human bodies could not compare with the equine bodies, and they soon fell behind. Yet two things narrowed the gap; this was animalhead territory, more familiar to the beastmen than to the intruders; they could take the best paths and shortcuts, and kept popping up just ahead. Also, there were a number of them, so that a good many were already ranged along the route, and these formed living barricades. This made the chase dose enough for discomfort.
Three catfaces rose up before them. Both steeds, well versed in this sort of thing, did not leap, for though they could have cleared the creatures, they would in the process have exposed their vulnerable underbellies to attack from below. Instead they put their heads down and charged low.
The catheads could have handled the horse, but not the deadly horn of the unicorn. That horn could skewer a standing creature instantly. The cats dropped down, giving way, and the party galloped on unscathed.
Half a dozen pigheads appeared, grunting urgently. This time the steeds leaped. The pigheads reached up, but their weapons were their tusks, not good for vertical goring. One got struck in the head by Hinblue’s front hoof, and the others desisted.
A pack of wolfheads closed in, but the steeds dodged and galloped to the side and got around and through, then put on speed to leave the beasts behind. No more animalheads appeared, and Stile knew that his party had gotten away clean.
Unnoticed in the hurry, the vegetation had changed. They were now forging through a forest of huge old trees -oak, ash, elm, and beech, by the look. But it was not necessarily easy to tell them apart, for the trunks were gnarled and deeply corrugated, and the tops shaded the ground into gloom.
*’! like not the look of this,” the Lady Blue said.
Stile agreed. Their escape had led them away from the curtain, so that they now had to relocate. It would not be safe to return to their point of divergence from it; the animalheads were there. Stile still preferred to avoid the use of magic in the present situation; this was an annoyance, not a crisis.
All of which meant they would have to search for the curtain the tedious way-slowly, eyes squinting for the almost invisible shimmer. The curtain was easy to follow lengthwise, but difficult to intercept broadside unless one knew exactly where to look.
“Well, it’s all part of the honeymoon,” Stile said. The Lady smiled; she had known there would be this sort of interruption in the schedule.
They looked, riding slowly around the great old trees. The forest was so dense now that even indirect light hardly penetrated, yet there were an increasing number of small plants. They twined up around the bases of the tree trunks and spread across the forest floor. Some were a suspiciously verdant green; others were pallid white. Many were insidiously ugly.
Yet they were plants, not creatures. None of them sent questing tentacles for the intruders; none had poisonous thorns. They flourished in gloom; that seemed to be their only oddity.
There was no sign of the curtain. “It will take forever to find it this way,” Stile said. “I want to be back on it by nightfall.” He jumped down and walked. “We can make a better search on foot,” he said.
Clip blew a warning note. Unicorns were naturally resistant to magic, and this protected the rider. The Blue Adept, Clip felt, needed protection, and should not be straying from his steed. As if Stile did not have ample magic of his own.
Stile walked on, peering this way and that, searching for the curtain. It had to be somewhere near here; they had not gone all that far and they had not diverged from its path greatly. In this gloom the shimmer should be clear enough.
Clip’s ears turned. He blew a low warning note. Stile paused to listen.
The animalheads were catching up. Stile’s party had to move on before-
Too late. A pigface appeared in front of Stile. A dogface came up behind the Lady. There was rustling in the bushes all around. Perhaps aided by some sort of stealthspell, the animalheads had surrounded them.
The Lady called Hinblue, who charged toward her. Stile stepped toward Clip, but already tile pighead was on him. Stile did not use magic. He drew his sword, threatening but not attacking the creature. There was something odd about this, and he did not want to do anything irrevocable until he fathomed it.
The pighead halted its aggression-but three sheepheads were closing from the sides. A spell would freeze them, but Stile still didn’t want to do it. Rather than shed blood, he dodged around the pighead, hurdled a fallen branch- and an offshoot moved up and intercepted his leading ankle, causing him to take a heavy spill into a flowering bush beyond.
There was a kind of zap! as the leaves were disturbed, and Stile felt the presence of magic. Quickly he jumped up, feeling about his body, but he seemed to have suffered no injury.
The animalheads had taken advantage of his fall to surround him. Clip had stopped a short distance away, perceiving that the animalheads could reach Stile before the unicorn could. No sense precipitating an attack by spooking them.
Stile decided to make an honest attempt at communication before resorting reluctantly to magic to freeze them temporarily in place. It wasn’t natural for normally peaceful creatures to attack and pursue strangers like this. Maybe he could establish a yes-no dialogue with one of the more intelligent ones. He really wasn’t looking for trouble on his honeymoon!
He opened his mouth to speak-and nothing but air emerged. He couldn’t talk!
Stile tried again. There was no pain, no constriction in his throat-but he could not vocalize at all. The plant-it had zapped him with a spell of silence! The animalheads did not know about his power of magic, so did not know what he had lost. They thought him an ordinary man-which he was now. They converged.
Stile quickly brought the harmonica to his mouth. He might not be able to speak or sing, but the instrument’s music would summon some protective magic. He blew- and silence came out.
He stamped his foot on the ground and made no noise. He banged his sword against a root-silently. He whistled ef-without even a hiss of air.
The spell had rendered him totally quiet. Since he could nullify it only by using his own magic, and that required sound, he was trapped.
These tests had been performed rapidly, and the conclusion drawn in a few seconds, for the animalheads were on him. Still he did not use his sword. He had threatened with it, but remained unwilling actually to shed blood. The mystery of these creatures’ attack bothered him as much as the threat to himself.
A cathead pounced. Stile ducked, reached up, and guided it into a turning fall. He might be silent, but he wasn’t helpless!
But now a tremendously tusked hoarhead came at him from the left and an alligatorhead from the right. There was no question of their intent. He could dodge these two-but how long could he hold out against the converging mob?
Meanwhile, Clip had resumed motion. Now the unicorn arrived. His horn caught the alligatorbead and impaled it.
A powerful heave sent the creature flying back over the equine’s shoulder. Then a forehoof knocked the hoarhead away.
Clip stood beside Stile, giving him a chance to mount.
Then they were away in a great leap. Soon they joined Hinblue and the Lady Blue and galloped clear of the animalheads once again.
The Lady Blue realized what was wrong. “Thou art victim of a silence-spell!” she cried. “We must take thee back to the Blue Demesnes for a counterspell!”
But the animalheads were already catching up again, cutting off the return-and of course it would be a long ride all the way back to the Blue Demesnes, even cutting directly across to it. Their only avenue of escape at the moment was north, deeper into the jungle.
The steeds plunged on, but the vegetation thickened. Now grasping plants occurred, reaching thorny branches toward them, opening green jawlike processes. This jungle was coming alive-at the time when Stile had lost his power. A single spell could quell every plant-but he could not utter that spell.
The Lady Blue exclaimed as vines twined about her body. Her steed had to halt, lest she be drawn off. Then the vines attacked Hinblue’s legs, seeking to anchor the horse to the ground.
Stile nudged Clip. The unicorn charged back. His horn touched the vines, and they writhed out of the way, repelled by the countermagic. Meanwhile, Stile used his sword to chop at the nether vines, freeing the horse. The weapon normally carried by men in Phaze was the rapier, but Stile felt more comfortable with the broadsword, and now the cutting edge was useful indeed. There was a renewed baying of animalheads, catching up yet again. Stile’s party moved forward once more.
The plants got worse. Tree branches dropped down to bar their way, dangling poisonous-looking moss. Stile cut the moss away with his sword, clearing the path for the Lady and steeds. Ichor from the moss soon covered the blade, turning it gray-green. The stuff reeked with a pungent odor, almost like dragon’s blood. Stile did not like this at all. Yet he had to keep hacking the encroaching growth away, afraid to let any of the party get caught.
At last the sounds of pursuit diminished. The animalheads had been foiled by this vicious jungle too.
But the trees, bushes, and brambles had closed in behind, forming a virtually impenetrable barrier. Stile’s sword was already stained and pitted under the ichor, and holes were appearing in his clothing where drops had spattered. He didn’t want to hack through any more of this!
Clip blew a musical note. Stile dismounted, and the unicorn phased into the hawk and flew up. The sky was the one open route!
The Lady Blue also dismounted and came to him. “Mayhap I can help thee,” she offered. She laid her hands on his throat, and their healing power warmed skin and muscle deep inside. But the silence was not any constriction in his throat, but a cloud of nonsound that surrounded him. He could not be healed because he wasn’t ill; the spell itself had to be abated, somehow.
“Mayhap a potion?” the Lady mused, fishing in her purse. But none of the elixirs she had with her seemed promising, and she did not want to expend them uselessly. “Clip may find something,” she said hopefully. “From the air, more can be seen.”
The jungle was not being idle, however. Plants were visibly growing toward them. This time they were ugly, jointed things, with great brown thorns hooked at each juncture. These things were structured to engage a retreating form, and not to disengage, and they looked as if they had hollow points. Bloodsuckers, surely. Stile brought out his knife and sawed off the nearest thorn stem, severing it with difficulty; the fiber was like cable. By the time he completed the cut, several other tendrils were approaching his boots. He had to draw his sword again, hacking the fibers apart by brute force, clearing a circle around the Lady and horse. He had almost forgotten how formidable nature could be for those who lacked the convenience of magic. It was a reminder in perspective-not that that helped much at the moment.
The hawk returned, changing into man-form. “There is a domicile ahead, and the land is clear around it,” Clip reported. “An old man lives there, a hermit by his look; mayhap he will guide us out, can we but reach him. Or we can follow the curtain; it passes through that clearing. I have scouted the most direct approach to the curtain. I can not cross it, but if thou and the Lady and Hinblue can-the clearing is but a quarter mile from there.”
Stile squeezed Clip’s arm in thanks. The unicorn had really come through for them! They could hack their way to the curtain, cross to Proton, hurry forward, and recross to recover breath. It would not be fun, but it should be feasible.
They chopped through the undergrowth with renewed will. This time the plants were rigidly fan-shaped leaves on tough stems, the edges of the leaves as sharp as knives. They did not move to intercept people, but they were extraordinarily difficult to dear from the path because the stems were almost inaccessible behind the leaves. When Stile reached under to sever one stem, the leaves of another plant were in his way; if he sliced through anyway, he risked brushing the knife-edges along his wrist or forearm. Without magic to heal cuts, he found this nervous business, though he knew the Lady could help heal him. Progress was slow, and his sword arm grew tired.
Clip stepped in, using the tip of his horn to reach past the leaves to break the stems. This enabled them to go faster, and soon they intersected the curtain.
Stile could not even perform the simple curtain-crossing spell. The Lady did it for him and Hinblue-and suddenly the three of them were in Proton, on a barren plain, gasping for air. Clip changed to hawk-form and flew directly to their rendezvous in the clearing.
They were able to walk on the bare sands, but breathing was labored, and Hinblue, as the Lady had feared, did not understand at all. The horse’s nostrils flared, and she was skittish, squandering energy better saved for forward progress. Hinblue was a very fine mare, who could have been a prizewinner in Proton, but she had had no experience with this. The Lady led her, though the Lady herself was gasping.
Stile heard his own labored breathing-and realized what it meant. “I’m not silent any more-no magic in this frame!” he exclaimed.
“But when thou returnest-” the Lady responded.
When he crossed again, the spell would still be on him. He could not escape it this way, except by traveling in this frame back to the region of the Blue Demesnes, where he could cross to get the Lady’s reserve spells. But no Proton dome was near; even if he wanted to risk entering one, the trip wasn’t feasible.
The horse was in increasing trouble. “My Lord, I must take her back,” the Lady gasped. “She does not understand.”
Stile had handled a horse in these barrens before. He recognized the symptoms of the growing panic. “Take her across; maybe we’re far enough.”
They willed themselves across at what seemed to be a clearing. It was-but also turned out to be no safe resting place. The ground writhed with sucker leaves that sought to fasten to the flesh of human or equine. Hinblue stamped her hooves, trampling down the suckers, but already some were fastening on the sides of the hooves, trying to drink from the hard surface. Stile tried to cut off the plants, but they were too low to the ground, making his blade ineffective.
“We can not stay here,” the Lady said, her feet moving in a dance of avoidance. “We must cross again.”
Stile agreed. The horse had recovered her wind. They crossed back to Proton and made a dash for the better clearing ahead. This time they made it.
Now they were in sight of the hermit’s hut. Clip rejoined them, remaining in hawk-form so as not to betray his nature before the watching hermit. They saw the old man’s eyes peering from the dark window.
“He sees us,” the Lady said. “We shall need his help, for we cannot go through more of this jungle or through Proton.”
Stile could only nod. He didn’t like this situation at all. Some honeymoon they were having!
The Lady went up to talk to the hermit. But the old man slammed the rickety door and refused to answer her call.
Stile began to get angry. The hawk made a warning cry, and Stile stayed back. Clip had caught on to something important, by his attitude.
The Lady Blue gave it up. “Surely the hermit knows our predicament, but he will help us not,” she said. The touch of a flush on her cheeks betrayed her irritation.
-The hawk spoke again, then flew to the ground and scratched a place bare. In that spot he gouged out a word:
ORANGE.
The Lady was first to catch on. “The Orange Adept! No wonder he is such a curmudgeon!”
Stile signaled, pointing to himself and raising an eyebrow questioningly. He wanted to know whether the Orange Adept was aware of the identity of his visitors.
Clip thought not. This was merely the way the Adept treated all strangers. Few Adepts cared what happened to those who intruded on their Demesnes, and those Adepts who did care, generally were malignant. Stile had encountered the syndrome before, but he did not like it any better with repetition.
They walked to the far side of the clearing, while the beady eyes of Orange peered from the window of his hut. Here the curtain plunged into the thickest of the bramble tangles. Hinblue tried to trample them down, but they wrapped around her foreleg, making her squeal in pain as the thorns dug in. There was a snicker from the hut.
Stile slashed at the mass with his sword, but no matter how many stems he severed, the mass held its form, like a pile of brush. It would be necessary to draw each severed stem out and set it in the clearing-and each stem seemed to interlink with others, so that the entire mass tended to come loose, falling about his bare arms and scratching. The hermit sniggered, enjoying this.
After a time, scratched and sweaty and tired, they gave it up. They could not get through this way. But meanwhile, the clearing had diminished; new plants were encroaching, and they looked just as ugly as the brambles. The Orange Adept’s mode of magic evidently related to plants. Indeed, it must have been one of his creatures that silenced Stile. Now the old man was enjoying watching the flies struggle in the web.
“Mayhap the other side of the curtain, again . . .” the Lady said. But at her words Hinblue’s ears went back, her nostrils distended, and the whites showed around her eyes. She did not want to brave the oxygen-poor, polluted air of Proton again t Yet they couldn’t remain here. By nightfall the advancing plants would leave them no opening, and they would have to fight for their lives while the Orange Adept laughed. Stile was furious with frustration, but unable to oppose this magic with his own.
Still, he could act directly against the malignant Adept. He put his hand on his sword, facing the hut.
“Nay, my love,” the Lady cautioned. “There are worse plants than these, and surely they protect him. We must not approach him.”
She was right. Stile had to contain his rage.
Clip flew up and away, searching for some way out. The Lady calmed Hinblue. One thing about the Lady Blue- she did not lose her nerve in a crisis. She was in all respects an admirable woman, his ideal and his beloved. Before Stile let her suffer, he would charge the hut and menace the Adept with his sword, heedless of whatever plants might make their hideous presence known. But first he would wait for Clip, hoping the unicorn would be able to help.
The sun descended inexorably, and the plants continued to close in. Some were like giant vines, with flowers that resembled the orifices of carnivorous worms. Transparent sap beaded in those throats, and drooled from the nether petals like saliva. The sword should stop these-but what would happen when darkness closed? Stile did not want to fight these plants at night.
Clip returned. He landed behind the Lady, so that he could not be seen from the hut, and changed to man-form. “I may have found help,” he reported, but he seemed dubious.
“Out with it, ‘corn,” the Lady snapped.
“I saw no way out of this garden of tortures; it is miles thick. So I searched for other creatures who might assist, but found only a lone-traveling troll.”
“A troll!” the Lady cried, distraught. “No help there!”
She was tolerant of many creatures, but hated trolls, for a tribe of them had once tried to ravish her. Stile knew that his alternate self, the former Blue Adept, had had a bad altercation with trolls who had massacred his whole home village and been in turn massacred by him.
“Yet this one seems different,” Clip continued. “He travels by day, which is unusual; he was voluminously swathed in black cloth, so that no sunlight might touch him, but I knew his nature by his outline.” He wrinkled his nose. “And by his smell.” Trolls tended to have a dankearth ambience.
“Why should a troll travel by day?” the Lady asked, intrigued despite her revulsion. “They are horrors of the night, turning to stone in sunlight.”
“Precisely. So I inquired, expecting an insult. But he said he was in quest of the Blue Adept, to whom he owes a favor.” Clip shrugged in seeming wonder.
Stile looked askance at this. He had had no commerce with trolls!
“That’s what he said,” Clip continued. “I was skeptical, fearing more mischief, but, mindful of thy plight, I investigated. ‘What favor canst thine ilk do for the likes of the Adept?’ I inquired politely. And quoth he, I am to bring him to a plant this night.’ And quoth I, *How can the Adept trust a monster like thee?’ and quoth he, *He spared me in my youth, and him I owe the favor of a life-mine or his. He may kill me if he wishes, or follow me to the plant. Only then will part of mine onus be acquitted.’ And I said, ‘He can not be reached at the moment,’ and he said, ‘Needs must I go to him now, for only tonight can the first part of my debt be abated,’ and I said-“
“Enough!” The lady cried in exasperation. “I know him now. That is the troll my Lord spared a score of years ago. Perhaps that one, of all his ilk, can be trusted. But how can he get here?”
“I was just telling thee,” the unicorn replied, hurt. “I said, ‘How canst thou pass an impassable barrier of thorns?’ and he said he was a troll, skilled at tunneling, like all his kind.”
“Tunneling!” the Lady exclaimed, her face illuminating.
“It will take time, for rock is hard, but he promised to be here by midnight.”
By midnight. Could they hold out against the encroaching plants until then? They would have to!
It was a mean, harrowing interim, but they held out. At the crack of midnight the ground shuddered and the grotesque head of the troll emerged into the wan moonlight, casting two shadows. The big eyes blinked. “The night is painfully bright,” the creature complained.
“This is Trool the troll,” Clip introduced. “And (his is the Blue Adept, who does not deign to address thee at this time. Lead him to thy plant.”
The troll sank back into the earth. Stile followed, finding a fresh tunnel large enough for hands and knees. The Lady came last. Clip shifted back to his natural form and stood with Hinblue, defending against the plants. If Stile did not recover his power and return in time to help them, only the unicorn would survive.
The tunnel continued interminably, winding about to avoid the giant roots of trees and buried boulders. Stripped of his magic. Stile began to feel claustrophobic. If there were a cave-in, what spell could he make? But he had to trust the troll-the one his other self had spared, long before Stile came to Phaze. For this creature felt he had a debt to the Blue Adept, and Stile now held that office. He could try to explain the distinction between himself and his dead other self to the troll, but doubted this would matter. What use to inform Trool that he had come too late, that the one who had spared him was already gone? Better to let the troll discharge his debt and be free.
At last they emerged beyond the Orange Adept’s garden. Stile straightened up with relief. They continued on until the troll halted beside a nondescript bush. “This is the plant,” Trool said. His voice was guttural and harsh, in the manner of his kind. What made it unusual was the fact that it was intelligible. He must have practiced hard on human speech.
The Lady leaned forward to peer at the growth in the waning light of the blue moon. Her face was somewhat gaunt, and Stile knew she feared betrayal; certainly the troll’s appearance was somewhat too providential. “This is the herb I need!” she exclaimed in gratified wonder. “It will cancel half the spell!”
Half? What else was needed?
^The touch of the horn of a unicorn,” she said, understanding his thought.
So he could not be cured until they returned to Clip. His magic would have to wait; he could not use it to facilitate things now.
The Lady took the leaves-she needed and thanked the troll a bit diffidently. Trool, perhaps unaware of the cause of her mixed feelings, shrugged and departed, his deed done. They started the trip back to the Orange Demesnes.
It was no more pleasant traversing the tunnel the second time, but at least the route was familiar. Dawn was approaching as Stile finally felt the end and poked his head up through the surface of the ground-only to find it overgrown with vines. Were they too late?
He wrestled his broadsword out and around and began slashing and sawing. The plants, attacked from below, capitulated quickly, and soon Stile and the Lady stood in their own little hacked-out clearing.
He heard grunts and thumps in the direction of the hermit’s hut. The yellow moon was now out, showing two equine figures backed against the hut wall, still fighting off the encroaching foliage. Perhaps the plants were less active at night, unable to grow as fast without sunlight; or maybe the Orange Adept was saving the finale for morning, when he could see better. At any rate, the end was not quite yet. ‘
Stile hacked a path across the writhing mass of vegetation, the Lady following and tidying things up with her knife. As the sun broke across the eastern horizon, they reached the equines.
Hinblue was sweating and bleeding from numerous scratches, and was so tired she hardly seemed able to stay on her feet. Clip was better off, but obviously worn; his horn swung in short vicious arcs to intercept each reaching tendril. There was very little room left for the two of them; soon the press of plants and their own fatigue would overwhelm them.
And the Orange Adept peered out of his window, grinning as if at an exhibition. This was his private arena, his personal entertainment, and he was enjoying it immensely. Stile experienced a flare of primal rage.
Now it was the Lady’s turn to act. “Take these leaves,” she told Stile, giving him the branch she had taken from the troll’s bush. “Clip-thy horn, please.” The unicorn paused in his combat with the foliage. Guided by the Lady, he touched his horn to the leaves in Stile’s hands.
Stile felt something ease, as if he had been released from an ugly threat. He heard his own breathing. “I thank thee,” he said.
Then he did a double take. “Hey, I can speak!”
“Do thou speak some suitable spell,” the Lady suggested, nipping off a reaching tendril with her small knife.
Quickly Stile summoned a general-purpose spell from his repertoire. “All save me, in stasis be,” he sang.
He had not taken time to coalesce his magic force with preliminary music, so the spell was not fully effective, but its impact was nevertheless considerable. The aggressive plants stopped advancing, and Stile’s three companions stood stunned.
Only the Orange Adept proved immune. His head swiveled to cover Stile. “What’s this?” the man demanded querulously. “Foreign magic in my Demesnes?”
Now Stile let out his long-accumulating wrath. “Oaf, didst know not against whom thou didst practice thy foul enchantment?”
“I know not and care not, peasant!” Orange snapped, sneering.
“Then learn, thou arrogant lout!” Stile cried. He took his harmonica, played a few savage bars to summon his power, then sang: “Let every single spellbound plant, against its master rave and rant!”
