The Magic Labyrinth Read online

  What worried him now was that if Piscator had indeed been responsible for accidentally causing the tracker to malfunction, then he might somehow bring the Ethicals back to life. And if he did that . . . he, X, was done for.

  He stared across the plain at the foothills covered with the long-bladed grass and trees of various kinds and the gloriously colored blooms of the vines on the ironwood trees and then past them to the unscalable mountains walling in The Valley. His fear and frustration made him angry again, but he quickly used the mental techniques to dissipate his anger. The energy, he knew, made his skin temperature rise for a hundredth of a degree Celsius for a few seconds. He felt somewhat relieved, though he knew that he'd be angry again. The trouble with the technique was that it didn't dissipate the source of his anger. He'd never be able to get rid of that, though he had appeared to do so to his mentors.

  He shaded his eyes and glanced at the sun. Within a few minutes, the stone would vomit lightning and thunder along with the millions of others on both banks. He moved away from the stone and put the tips of his fingers in his ears. The noise would be deafening, and the sudden discharge still made one jump though you knew it was coming.

  The sun reached its zenith.

  There was an enormous roar and flashing upward of ravening blue white-shot electricity.

  On the left bank, not the right.

  Once before, the right-bank grailstones had failed to function.

  Those on the right bank waited with apprehension and then increasing fear when the stones failed to spout their energy for dinnertime. And when they failed again at breakfast time, the consternation and anxiety became panic.

  By the next day, the hungry people invaded the left bank en masse.

  SECTION 2

  Aboard theNot For Hire

  2

  * * *

  The first time that Sir Thomas Malory died was on earth in A.D. 1471.

  The English knight got through the terrible weeks after Resurrection Day without too many body wounds, though he suffered grievously from spiritual shock. He found the food in his "littel greal" fascinating. It reminded him of what he had written in The Book of King Arthur concerning Galahad and his fellow knights when they ate of the food provided by the Sangreal. ". . . ye shall be fed afore this table with sweetmeats that never knights tasted."

  There were times when Malory thought he'd go mad. He'd always been tempted by madness, a state in which a person was both touched with holiness by God and invulnerable to the cares and woes of the world, not to mention his own. But a man who'd spent so many years in prison on Earth without going crazy had to be basically tough. One of the things that had kept his mind unclouded in prison had been his writing of the first English prose epic. Though he knew that his readers would be very few, and most of them would probably not like it, he did not care one whit. Unlike his first work, which had been based on the great French Writers of the cycles about King Arthur of ancient Britain, this was about the rejections but final triumph of his sweet Jesu. Unlike so many once-devout Christians, Malory clung to his faith with fierce obliviousness to "facts" – in itself an indication that he had gone mad, if his critics were to be believed.

  Twice slain by savage infidels, Malory ended up in an area inhabited on one side by Parthians and on the other by Englishmen.

  The Parthians were ancient horsemen who got their name from their habit of shooting backwards from their steeds as they retreated. In other words, they always got in a parting shot. At least, that was the explanation for their name according to one informant. Malory suspected that the grinning fellow was pulling his leg, but it sounded good, so why not accept it.

  The Englishmen were chiefly of the seventeenth century and spoke an English which Malory had trouble understanding. However, after all these years, they also spoke Esperanto, that tongue which the missionaries of the Church of the Second Chance used as a universal medium of communication. The land, now known as New Hope, was peaceful, though it had not always been so. Once it had been a number of small states which had had a savage battle with the medieval German and Spanish states up north. These had been led by a man called Kramer, nicknamed the Hammer. After he had been killed, a long peace had come to the land, and the states eventually became one. Malory settled down there and took as his hutmate Philippa Hobart, daughter of Sir Henry Hobart. Though there was no longer a giving in marriage, Malory insisted that they be married, and he got a friend who had been a Catholic priest to perform the old ceremony. Later, he reconverted both his wife and the priest to their native faith.

  He was set back somewhat, though, when he heard that the true Jesu Christ had appeared in this area with a Hebrew woman who had known Moses in Egypt and during the exodus. Jesu had also been accompanied by a man named Thomas Mix, an American, the descendant of Europeans who had emigrated to the continents discovered only twenty-one years after Malory had died. Jesu and Mix had burned to death together in bonfires ignited by Kramer.

  At first, Malory had denied that the man calling himself Yeshua could be the real Christ. He might be a Hebrew of Christ's time, but he was a fake.

  Then Malory, after tracking down all the evidence he could of Yeshua's statements and the events of his martyrdom, decided that perhaps Christ had truly been present. So he incorporated the tale told by the locals into the epic he was now writing with ink and a pen formed from the bone of a fish on bamboo paper. Malory also decided to canonize the American, and so Mix became Saint Thomas the Steadfast of the White Hat.

  After a while Malory and his disciples forgot that the sainthood was a fiction and came to believe that Saint Thomas was indeed roaming The Valley in quest of his master, sweet Jesu, in this world which was purgatory, though not exactly the middle state between earth and heaven portrayed by the priests of lost Earth.

  The ex-priest who'd married Thomas and Philippa, as a bishop ordained on Earth and so in the direct line of priesthood from Saint Peter, was able to instruct others and to make priests of them. The little group of Roman Catholics, however, had a different attitude in one respect from that they'd had in their Terrestrial days. They were tolerant; they did not attempt to bring back the Inquisition nor did they burn suspected witches. If they had insisted on these old customs, they would have quickly been exiled or perhaps even killed.

  Late one night, Thomas Malory was lying in bed and pondering on the next chapter of his epic. Suddenly, there was a great shouting outside and a noise as of many running. He sat up and called to Philippa, who awoke frightened and trembling. They went out then to ask what the commotion was about. The people questioned pointed upward into the cloudless sky made bright as a full moon by the packed stars and flaming cosmic-gas sheets.

  High up were two strange objects silhouetted against the celestial blaze. One, much smaller, was composed of two parts, a larger sphere above the other. Though those on the ground could not see any linkage between the two, they got the impression that the two were connected because they moved at the same speed. Then a woman who knew of such things said that it looked like a balloon. Malory had never seen one, but he had heard descriptions of them from nineteenth- and twentieth-centurians, and this did indeed look like the description.

  The other object, far greater, resembled a gigantic cigar.

  The same woman said that this was an airship or dirigible or perhaps was a vessel of the unknowns who'd made this planet.

  "Angels?" Malory muttered. "Why would they have to use an airship? They have wings."

  He forgot about that and cried out with the others as the huge vessel of the air suddenly dived. And then he screamed with the others when the vessel exploded. Burning, it fell toward The River.

  The balloon continued to travel northeastward, and after a while it was gone. Long before that, the flaming airship struck the water. Its skeletal framework sank almost at once, but some pieces of its skin burned for a few minutes before they, too, were extinguished.

  3

  * * *

  Nei
ther angels nor demons had voyaged in that vessel of the sky. The man whom Malory and his wife pulled out of the water and rowed to shore in their boat was no more and no less human than they. He was a tall dark rapier-thin man with a big nose and a weak chin. His large black eyes stared at them in the torchlight, and he said nothing for a long while. After he had been carried into the community hall, dried off and covered with thick cloths, and had drunk some hot coffee, he said something in French and then spoke in Esperanto.

  "How many survived?"

  Malory said, "We don't know yet."

  A few minutes later, the first of twenty-two corpses, some very charred, were brought to the bank. One of them was a woman's. Though the search continued through the night and part of the morning these were all that were found. The Frenchman was the single survivor. Though he was weak and still in shock, he insisted on getting up and taking part in the search. When he saw the bodies by a grailstone, he burst into tears and sobbed for a long time. Malory took this as a good indication of the man's health. At least he wasn't in such deep trauma that he was unable to express his grief.

  "Where have the others gone?" the stranger demanded.

  Then his sorrow became rage, and he shook his fist at the skies and howled damnation at someone named Thorn. Later, he asked if anybody had seen or heard another aircraft, a helicopter. Many had.

  "Which way did it go?" he said.

  Some said that the machine making the strange chopping noise had gone down-River. Others said that it had gone up-River. Several days later, the report came that the machine had been seen sinking into The River two hundred miles upstream during a rainstorm. Only one person had witnessed that, and he claimed that a man had swum from the sinking craft. A message via drum was sent to the area asking if any strangers had suddenly appeared. The reply was that none had been located.

  A number of grails were found floating on The River, and these were brought to the survivor. He identified one as his, and he ate a meal from it that afternoon. Several of the grails were "free" containers. That is, they could be opened by anybody, and these were confiscated by the state of New Hope.

  The Frenchman then asked if any gigantic boats propelled by paddlewheels had passed this point. He was told that one had, the Rex Grandissimus, commanded by the infamous King John of England.

  "Good," the man said. He thought for a while, then said, "I could just stay here and wait until the Mark Twain comes by. But I don't think I will. I'm going after Thorn."

  By then, he felt recovered .enough to talk about himself. And how he talked about himself!

  "I am Savinien de Cyrano II de Bergerac," he said. "I prefer to be called Savinien, but for some reason most people prefer Cyrano. So I allow that small liberty. After all, later ages referred to me as Cyrano, and though it was a mistake, I am so famous that people cannot get used to my preference. They think they know better than I do.

  "No doubt you've heard of me."

  He regarded his hosts as if they should feel honored to have such a great man as their guest.

  "It pains me to admit that I have not," Malory said.

  "What? I was the greatest swordsman of my time, perhaps, no, undoubtedly, of all times. There is no reason for me to be modest. I do not hide my light under a bushel or, in fact, under anything. I was also the author of some remarkable literary works. I wrote books about trips to the sun and to the moon, very pointed and witty satire. My play, The Pedant Out-Witted, was, I understand, used with some modifications by a certain Monsieur Moliere and presented as his own. Well, perhaps I exaggerate. Certainly he did use much of the comedy. I also understand that an Englishman named Jonathan Swift used some of my ideas in his Gulliver's Travels. I do not blame them, since I myself was not above using the ideas of others, though I improved upon them."

  "That is all very well, sir," Malory said, forbearing to mention his own works. "But if it does not make you overwrought, you could tell us how you came here in that airship and what caused it to burst into flames."

  De Bergerac was staying with the Malorys until an empty hut could be found or he could be loaned the tools to construct one for himself. At this time, though, he and his hosts and perhaps a hundred more were seated or standing by a big fire outside the hut.

  It was a long tale, more fabulous even than the teller's own fictions or Malory's. Sir Thomas, however, had the feeling that the Frenchman was not telling all that had happened.

  When the narrative was finished, Malory mused aloud, "Then it is true that there is a tower in the center of the north polar sea, the sea from whence flows The River and to which it returns? And it is true that whoever is responsible for this world lives in that tower? I wonder what happened to this Japanese, this Piscator? Did the residents of the tower, who surely must be angels, invite him to stay with them because, in a sense, he'd entered the gates of paradise? Or did they send him elsewhere, to some distant part of The River, perhaps?

  "And this Thorn, what could account for his criminal behavior? Perhaps he was a demon in disguise."

  De Bergerac laughed loudly and scornfully.

  When he had stopped, he said, "There are no angels nor demons, my friend. I do not now maintain, as I did on Earth, that there is no God. But to admit to the existence of a Creator does not oblige one to believe in such myths as angels and demons."

  Malory hotly insisted that there were indeed such. This led to an argument in the course of which the Frenchman walked away from his audience. He spent the night, from what Malory heard, in the hut of a woman who thought that if he was such a great swordsman he must also be a great lover. From her accounts, he was, though perhaps too much devoted to that fashion of making love which many thought reached its perfection, or nadir of degeneracy, in France. Malory was disgusted. But later that day de Bergerac appeared to apologize for his ingratitude to the man who'd saved his life.

  "I should not have scoffed at you, my host, my savior. I tender you a thousand apologies, for which I hope to receive one forgiveness."

  "You are forgiven," Malory said, sincerely. "Perhaps, though you forsook our Church on Earth and have blasphemed against God, you would care to attend the mass being said tonight for the souls of your departed comrades?"

  "That is the least I can do," de Bergerac said.

  During the mass, he wept copiously, so much so that .after it Malory took advantage of his high emotions. He asked him if he was ready to return to God.

  "I am not aware that I ever left Him, if He exists," the Frenchman said. "I was weeping with grief for those I loved on the Parseval and for those whom I did not love but respected. I was weeping with rage against Thorn or whatever his real name is. And I was also weeping because men and women are still ignorant and superstitious enough to believe in this flummery."

  "You refer to the mass?",Malory said icily.

  "Yes, forgive me again!'' de Bergerac cried.

  "Not until you truly repent," Malory said, "and if you address your repentance to that God whom you have offended so grievously."

  "Quelle merde!" de Bergerac said. But a moment later he embraced Malory and kissed him on both cheeks. "How I wish that your belief was indeed fact! But if it were, then how could I forgive God!"

  He bade adieu to Malory, saying that he would probably never see him again. Tomorrow morning, he was setting out up-River. Malory suspected that de Bergerac would have to steal a boat to do so, and he was right.

  Malory often thought of the man who'd leaped from the burning dirigible, the man who had actually been to the tower which many spoke about but none had seen except for the Frenchman and his crewmates. Or if the story could be believed, a group of ancient Egyptians and a huge hairy subhuman.

  Less than three years later, the second great paddlewheeled boat came by. This was even more huge than the Rex and it was more luxurious and faster and better armored and weaponed. But it was not called the Mark Twain. Its captain, Samuel Clemens, an American, had renamed it the Not For Hire. Apparently, he'd heard that
King John was calling his own boat, the original Not For Hire, the Rex Grandissimus. So Clemens had taken back the name and ceremoniously had it painted on the hull.

  The boat stopped off to recharge its batacitor and to charge its grails. Malory didn't get a chance to talk to the captain, but he did see him and his surprising bodyguard. Joe Miller was indeed an ogre, ten feet high and weighing eight hundred pounds. His body was not as hairy as Malory expected from the tales. He was no more hirsute than many men Malory had seen, though the hairs were longer. And he did have a face with massive prognathic jaws and a nose like a gigantic cucumber or a proboscis monkey's. Yet he had the look of intelligence.

  4

  * * *

  On drove the pursuer.

  It was an hour to high noon. In another hour, the fabulous riverboat would be anchored, and a very thick aluminum cable would connect a copper cap placed over a grailstone to the batacitor in the vessel. When the stone delivered its tremendous voltage, the batacitor would be charged again and the grails on another copper plate in the boat would be filled with food, liquor, and other items.

  Its hull was white except over the paddle boxes, or wheel guards, over the four paddlewheels. On these were painted in big black letters: NOT FOR HIRE. Under this in smaller letters: Samuel Clemens, Captain. And under this line, in still smaller letters: Owned and Operated By The Avengers, Inc.

  Above the pilothouse was a jack staff flying a square light-blue flag on which was a scarlet phoenix.