Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth)

by Tanith Lee

  The servant let down the trap door again, and fastened the cord, which trailed from the girl’s hands, into the iron ring. He did this leaving so little slack she must crouch down beside the ring. In such a position, the absorbed mage would be unlikely to see her. Actually, as the servant had long known, the mage scarcely saw or heard or noted anything that did not have to do with science.

  When the dull pebble of the moon was a handspan up the sky, and the glow of the comet had grown like that of full morning, the magus stepped out on to the roof and walked straight to the machine, glancing at nothing, save the thing above.

  This time, the levers had been set ready, and the mage had only to put his hand on a master coil to set the process off. As he did so, he called for the servant.

  “Coming, O master,” cried the servant, in his most fawning tone.

  As the noise of the engine started up, the servant whipped the cloth from his lady’s head, and ran to aid the magician, leaving her—as he opined—to mindless terror and its abortive consequences.

  What went on in the deranged mind of the girl?

  Contrary to the servant’s hope, at first, not much. In her existence, all had been confusion, nothing made sense. One confusion more would barely overwhelm her. Also, as the clod-hopping rapist had failed to reason, since she had been kept timelessly in the dark, without benefit of sun or moon, for rather more than one hundred days and nights, she might only have concluded that the comet was merely day coming, and find nothing abnormal in it.

  Of course, her eyes, weakened by the gloom underground, were hurt by the light, and so she covered them with her hands, whimpering. But this was not fear, simply another pain to add to the catalogs of pain she had already known. She took most pain as a matter of no moment.

  But then, as the comet grew brilliant as a summer noon, something extraordinary began to occur.

  Men, as logic and reason swelled in them, had lost most of their instinctual talents, which talents, in the case of magicians, generally had to be relearned. By this training, the mage had taught himself to understand that the rays of the comet, far from maleficent, were a tonic, even a panacea. Had he been a truly devout man, and less wrapped up in his own head, he might have said to the village—“Stay and benefit from this marvelous event. Put your sick ones out where they may receive the motes and beams to best effect.” Instead, he had kept the whole thing secret, fearing to be pestered. He had, too, the plan to capture some of these benefits in his machine for future use in the arts of healing and beautifying. Also, let it be said, the mage was interested in what effect the radiations would have on the ghastly servant—but that was by way of individual experiment. Whatever else, the mage understood the comet was to be welcomed not dreaded, and the servant was so far indifferent to it, having been told it was incapable of harming him, and being too unimaginative to think up doubts for himself.

  Conversely, the people of the village, having lost their animal awareness, and knowing no better, had run away.

  The animals themselves, and the creatures all about, knowing nothing in particular, yet instinctively wise, rather than run away, had gathered.

  As the comet burned brighter and more bright, all the birds of the region began to sing, their most melodious and lush dawn chorus, to welcome the great light. And as they sang, they flew and swirled about like leaves in a whirlpool, delirious with delight. Bees and butterflies and beetles also filled the air like flying jewelry. Lizards and serpents unfolded from the earth, basking. Cats and hares and foxes came, sheep which had been left behind, goats, an ocelot, all oblivious of each other, fell to rolling and purring on the grass. Monkeys and marmosets chittered in the tree tops, throwing gourds at each other in good humor. Flowers fanned into bloom. Fruits ripened and exploded from ripeness, filling the air with the scents of perfume and wine. Even the stones of the mansion, and those of the village below the hill, seemed to raise themselves, opening their cracks like thirsty mouths to drink the golden light.

  The roaring sorcerous machine drowned out the sounds of most of these happenings, all save the noisy rapturous bird-song, which seemed to pierce through like chiming bells. For sure, it could have drowned the idiot-girl’s screaming. Had she screamed.

  Being witless, she had never learned a single thing, except, perhaps, that life was cruel and that her brother and sister humans hated her. Being witless, she had had no reason with which to drive her instincts out.

  After maybe a minute of hiding her eyes from the hurt of the light, the girl’s instinct had prompted her not to hide them. So, with water streaming down her dirty face, she had looked up into the heart of the light. And, being something of a cure-all, the blinding rays presently cured the weakness in her sight, and she was able to see, and rejoice in the seeing.

  How beautiful everything appeared to her, suddenly, even tied up as she was. The emerald crickets dancing together on the stones at the roof’s edge, the birds writing songs across heaven, the whole glory of this day-in-night. And abruptly, for the first time in many years, maybe for the first time ever, the idiot-girl laughed for sheer happiness.

  A tawny rat was sitting on the roof nearby. Attracted, like the rest, by the comet, he had been interrupted in finishing the mage’s supper. Now he mused on the juicy rope which bound the girl’s hands to the iron ring. In his own way, the rat was also accustomed to abuse, and he did not venture near for some while. Then, seeing the girl did not pay heed to him, he slipped forward and began to nibble the hemp, rich in tallow spittings and grease, which, steeped in the comet’s glow, were fit for a gourmet.

  Finding her hands free all at once, the girl did not question. She had never questioned anything.

  In that very instant, the comet began to diversify.

  The sky, which had been black behind the gold, changed to a sumptuous rosy blue, a blushing blue, warm and lovely. And across this sheet of color, a golden rain began to stream in all directions, like the sparkles erupting from a colorful firework. And then these sparkles started to fall, in glittering chains, onto the earth.

  “Stand well clear now, my dear,” said the magician to his servant—even the mage had been affected. But the servant was already a safe distance from the roaring machine, gawping at heaven with his mouth open. The machine pulsed and whirred, and gemlike convulsions came and went around its wheels. Swiftly and surely, and well-practiced, the magician began to intone his forty-seven-syllable mantra. As he spoke the last words, a golden zigzag snaked down from the shining air and speared into the upper section of the machine, and so remained. The machine cried aloud in a wild register. Galvanic waves throbbed into it from the transfixing, still visible solar levin bolt, and all the shades of the spectrum sluiced over the machine.

  “See!” feebly cried the mage, almost beside himself.

  Then he saw another thing.

  Drawn—without logic, naturally, rather as an insect is drawn to a bright-hued flower—the idiot-girl ran across the roofs of the mansion straight toward the machine and its sky tower of rainbows.

  “Stop her!” cried the mage to his servant, but the servant had toppled down, still with his mouth open. The mage tried to summon a spell, but exertions had lessened his abilities. Before he could assert his power, the girl had reached the machine. Moths fly against the scalding cores of candles, and die. She flew against the scalding core of the comet fragment trapped by the quivering engine. But she did not die. No indeed.

  She clung to the machine’s framework, her cheek against its knot of pipes. Her face was blissful—was transparent. The mage groaned with chagrin as he perceived how the rainbow lights ran now, out of the sky, through the sorcerous machine—and so into her body.

  It had been his intention to build a conductor and a cistern. Never an instrument of direct transmission.

  Despite the comfort of the solar rain, he was filled with frustration and rage. As air rushes to fill a void, so the power was magnetized from the machine into the girl’s vacancy. He dared not detach the
girl. Such a detachment might be dangerous to the engine—like pulling a leech from the flesh. A concussion might be caused besides, that would shake down the mansion. Or he himself might receive that concentration of the rays of the comet direct. He knew himself too crowded with cleverness and civilized thought to be able to survive such a raw contact. Only an idiot could survive it—an empty vessel. Ah! Only she.

  And so he was compelled to watch as all that exceptional energy he had travailed for so long to capture, was dispersed into her thin, unwholesome, female body.

  CHAPTER 3

  Sunfire

  When dawn returned over the psychically washed sky, the golden shower was finished, the magical gases dispersed, absorbed, and to be seen no more. The magician had also vanished—gone to his bed most sulkily to lament.

  Far beyond the village, in an outcropping of hills, the villagers had taken shelter in caves and crevices—and so successfully missed all the miraculous outpouring of the comet’s rays.

  On the east roof of the mansion, a man was seated, playing with a tawny rat, letting it run up and down him, and now and then stroking its back and ears. Both man and rat seemed happy with this exercise.

  The man was heavily built, and apparently very strong. His skin was clear, clean and of a bronze appearance. His eyes were large, intent and sympathetic. In repose, his face was curiously attractive, almost beautiful, though it was only the beauty of peace and quietness.

  Not the sky alone had been bathed. This was none other than the magician’s servant. Probably, if he had suspected what the comet was likely to do to him, he too would have run. It had scaled his body of its dirt, and his mind also. Physically and spiritually it had enhanced him, and rinsed his ego of unknowingness. Like a chest full of drawers, each had been thrown open, dusted out, and heaped with valuables. Never again would he play tricks, brutalize or rape. The lusts of this flesh would be wholesome, nor would many refuse him now. By his kindness and his understanding, hereafter, this man would win the love of others.

  This then, had been done to the servant, under the parasol of rays.

  To the idiot-girl who had embraced the machine and thereby the power source itself—what had been done to her?

  At the other end of the eastern roof, an apparition was slowly dancing with its shadows. A young girl, with a sweet fey countenance, clean and white as a flower, her hair the gold of sun vapor, like the hair of the comet itself. Her movements were childish yet graceful. She looked at her shadow as she danced, and at her own arms and hands and feet, in pleasure and surprise.

  Finally, she danced her way to the magician’s servant, and she smiled at the rat now sitting on his knee.

  “You must not overtax yourself,” said the servant. “Do you understand you are with child, and I am the father?”

  “Oh, yes,” said the girl. “It is very wonderful.”

  “It might have been more wonderful if I had used you better,” said he. “I am very sorry for it. But I will take good care of you now.”

  “No need,” said the girl. “I believe I might have birthed a monster, or a deformed thing, but even my womb received that great fire from out of the sky. Inside me now is something most beautiful.” Then she sat by the servant, and held his hand. She was very like a child herself, but an intelligent and trusting child, with wise thoughts beyond its years. “I was something witless and almost soulless, but I have been changed. I suspect I must change again, but not yet. Till then, shall we live here? Until this baby is born. I can barely wait to see her, she will be so rare. Begun by your body and by mine, but formed in the light of a star.”

  “How beautiful your hair is,” said the servant. “It has the scent of lime trees and cinnamon trees. What is your name?”

  “I never had one,” said the girl.

  “I will call you ‘Sunfire,’ because of the way your hair has become.”

  Presently, the tawny rat, seeing they had lost interest in him, ran off to his family. Having been exposed to the comet’s rays, he had come to comprehend somewhat the speech of men. He boasted to his wives: “Two humans of exceptional good looks petted me. The man said he would call me Sunfire, for my hair.”

  “Oh,” said the wives, and “Ooh,” and they tactfully licked his whiskers to show they believed every word.

  Later, when the day waned, they went up again to visit the magician, and ate the supper which had appeared for him, as usual, by sorcery, and which his dejection had precluded his eating himself. They were glad to help him out, and eventually upset the wine jar and fell to singing raucous rat songs of the centuries when their kind had ruled the world.

  The magician, meanwhile, had returned to the roof.

  As the open spaces of the twilight gave place to the closing vanes of night, he watched the couple talking softly and strangely to each other, as they walked about the hill below.

  “Just as I thought,” the mage muttered, observing the servant, courteous and gentle, take fruit from a tree and give it to the girl. “My despair confounds me!” the mage added, as he beheld the vague still glow that seemed to emanate from her skin and glorious hair.

  Leaning over the roof’s edge, the mage called to his servant: “I am going back to the city. Do you mean to come with me?”

  “Dear master,” said the servant, “if I can be of help, I will gladly accompany you. But then I would ask that you allow me to rejoin my wife.”

  It was spoken in a tone of such kindness, with such an obvious desire to be obliging, that the mage was filled with fury.

  He turned and kicked the magic engine, one ringing blow, and stamped to his private chamber. Here he summoned some sort of flying conveyance, packed his books and instruments, and promptly vacated the premises.

  The lovers did not see his departure. They were locked, for the first time, in love, amid the long grasses of the hill.

  When the villagers came back from the caves, driving their herds bleating before them, they found the land was a little altered. And, as the days went by, the weeks, the months, greater alterations were come on, and greater yet. Men will fear almost anything changeable. It is part of the instinct of preservation and defense. But as these changes were of benefit, or else of charm or grace, gradually fear melted away.

  In all the region where the comet’s radiation had dispersed, there was not a dead tree or plant that had not put out leaves and blossoms, not a barren place that did not begin to mantle itself with seedlings. Fruits had ripened before season, and as they fell or were plucked, others ripened and burst out in their place. A mighty harvest overspilled from the earth, and as each stand of grain was scythed, so another began to grow, and after that, another yet. Three, four or five times the normal yield of the land was obtained, and for decades after, it would be so.

  There was an old mine, long eviscerated of its minerals. Five months after the dispersal of the comet, the first traces of copper and gold were found there.

  Blue roses, those prized flowers of the first earth, were found blooming under hedges, beside ditches. Orchids emerged from cracks in the walls.

  Wild cats no longer attacked the flocks. Foxes no longer preyed on the chickens. Now and then, an animal would talk (though generally the substance of its conversation was unconscionable).

  And, as time went on, unknown trees rose from the ground, with gilded leaves and heady perfumes. Fish with golden scales were discovered in the streams, the flesh of which creatures were inedible—though, when they died, they petrified into pure metal, and their eyes into sapphires.

  A waterfall broke from the rock above the pool where the reeds grew. As the waterfall fell, it would make music, like the notes of a harp.

  Men said to each other: “If so much excellence came to this place from that light in the sky, then surely it was not harmful after all.”

  The women said: “If only we had not run away. If only we had looked for good instead of evil.”

  “If only we had received that flame from the sky also, we too might
have flourished like the land.”

  They had noticed, additionally, that the idiot had gone at last. Heaven had removed the curse. Heaven had sent the light. They blessed the gods.

  Scarcely observed, totally unrecognized, Sunfire dwelled by the musical waterfall in company with her husband. Their house was a bothy of stems and mud, the garden of which was the world beyond.

  They passed their days and nights happily in this garden. Animals ran to them and played with them. Food leapt out of the soil and from the trees to feed them. The water sang, and the man learned to sing from the songs of the water, and to make songs of his own. And Sunfire cut reeds and wove them into fantastic shapes—delicate boats, fragile birdcages, dainty figurines, and these she left on the edge of the pool. Women who came here to bathe would pick up these toys, marveling at the intricacy of their design, and bear them home. Coins and jars of honey and household articles were left in exchange.

  Every morning, Sunfire would kiss the man as he lay asleep at her side. But as she wove the reeds, she would talk softly to the child in her womb, “Dear love, I shall never be as close to you as now I am.”

  And at night, sometimes, Sunfire would walk alone about the pool. She would gaze deeply into the eyes of the stars. The man would come to her, and ask her, “Are you troubled?”

  “No, there is no trouble in me, or to come.”

  But her soul and her mind were far, far off, flowing up in the ether like two feathers bound to each other by a silken thread.

  “I think,” he said, “you will not be with me always. Even now, you are traveling to some other place.”

  She would put her arms about him, and her hair and skin would glow in the darkness. Moths would flutter to her as if to a lamp, and the nocturnal wasps who visited the water-flowers for nectar, would perch on the tips of her fingers. She grew big with the child, but in a neat and gainly way.