The Moment of the Magician: A Spellsinger Adventure (Book Four)

by Alan Dean Foster

  For the first time, there was no rhyme or reason to their imitations. Colors shifted wildly. Some vines expanded while others bulged. A couple shrank all the way back down into their underground, hidden trees. Two flailed the earth until they came apart, beating themselves to pieces on the hard ground.

  He didn’t have time to observe all the damage his challenge had caused, however, because he was running like mad for the beach where their raft lay.

  He had to pull Mudge at first, but the otter caught on quickly enough. This time no imitation steel materialized to block their retreat. As they crossed through the circle, Jon-Tom looked back. Those vines that were still intact were slamming into each other, beating the air, the ground, whistling and moaning and shrieking. The noise was worse than the sight.

  “I had to get them going,” Jon-Tom explained as he ran panting toward the water. “Had to get them to doing their imitations fast, one after the other, bam, bam, bam! Had to get them working without thinking, acting reflexively on my challenges, so that it would become a point of pride for each individual to keep up with its neighbors.

  “I didn’t think my earlier lullaby was going to work, but it was worth a try. They’d probably been watching out for just that kind of trick on our part, so I figured the worst that could happen was that they’d get to show us we couldn’t escape. I let them believe we were resigned to our fate and then tried to make it look like I was caught up in the spirit of the contest.”

  They were on the raft now, pushing hard on the paddles, sliding out onto the water of the Wrounipai and putting some distance between themselves and the floral asylum they’d left behind.

  Mudge glanced back toward the island. “You think they’ll ever come out of it, mate?” Distant shouts and moans could still be heard, though they were fainter now.

  “I think so. Gradually one of them will realize that they’re doing it to themselves and cure itself. Then the others will imitate its return to sanity. Those who aren’t too far gone. I could’ve left them with that thought, but I’d rather they discover it on their own, after we’re safely on our way.”

  “Right. You sure ’ad me fooled, mate.” He frowned. Jon-Tom’s expression had turned sorrowful. “Hey, wot’s wrong now?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” He turned back to concentrating on his paddling. “It’s just that … this is silly, I know… but while we were trapped back there I had thoughts of … you remember Flor Quintera?”

  “The dark-’aired lady you brought over from your own world? The one who went off with that smooth-talkin’ rabbit?”

  “Yeah, that’s her. I thought for a minute back there about asking the mimevines to imitate her. That would have been an interesting sight, thirty perfect copies of that perfect body all dancing around us.”

  “Blimey,” Mudge whispered, “now, why didn’t I think o’ that? Not to do up your ideal, o’ course, but some o’ me own favorite fantasies.”

  “Too late now,” Jon-Tom said with a sigh. “Unless you’d like to go back. I could wait for you on the raft. Maybe the same trick would work again.”

  “Not bloody likely. No thanks, mate, but I’ve ’ad more than enough o’ vegetables that look like your Aunt Sulewac one minute and somethin’ out o’ a bad dream the next. I wouldn’t go back there even for thirty perfect females. Me, I prefer me paramours with all their imperfections intact.”

  IX

  AFTER THE TIDAL WAVE of variety provided by the mimevines, the monotonous regularity of the Wrounipai was a welcome change. But as they floated further south, the terrain, if not the climate, began to change. Tall stone spires cloaked with thick foliage began to thrust skyward from the water. Instead of granite, the rock was mostly limestone. Creepers and bromeliads found footholds in the pitted stone, cracking and eroding the towers.

  “A semi-submerged karst landscape,” Jon-Tom murmured in wonder.

  “Just wot I were about to say meself, guv,” said Mudge doubtfully.

  That night they camped on a sandy beach opposite a cliff too steep even for creepers to secure a hold. While Mudge hunted for dry wood, Jon-Tom walked over to inspect the rock wall. It was cool and dry, a comforting feeling in a land brimming with quicksands and mud.

  Mudge returned with an armful of dead limbs and dropped them into the firepit he’d dug. As he brushed dust from his paws, he frowned at his friend.

  “Find something unusual?”

  “No. It’s just plain old limestone. I was just thinking how nice it was to find some firm ground in the middle of the rest of this muck.

  “This was once the floor of a shallow sea. Tiny animals with lots of calcium in their shells and bodies died here by the trillions, fell to the bottom, and over the eons turned into this stone. As time passed the sea bottom was lifted up. Then running water went to work here, wearing away open places.”

  “Do tell,” said Mudge dryly.

  Jon-Tom looked disappointed. “Mudge, your scientific education has been sorely neglected.”

  “That’s because I was too busy getting educated sorely in practical matters, guv.”

  “If you’d just listen to me for five minutes, I could reveal some of nature’s hidden wonders to you.”

  “Maybe after we eat, mate,” said the otter, raising a quieting paw. “I want to enjoy me supper, wot?”

  Following the conclusion of a sparse but satisfying meal, Jon-Tom discovered he no longer felt like lecturing. His mood tended more toward melancholy. Lifting the duar, he regaled the unfortunate Mudge with long, sad ballads and bittersweet songs of unrequited love.

  The otter endured this for as long as he could before rolling up tightly in his blanket. This managed to muffle most of Jon-Tom’s singing.

  “Don’t be so damned melodramatic,” the insulted balladeer said. “After all these months of steady practice, my singing must have improved somewhat.”

  “Your playin’s better than ever, mate,” came a voice from beneath the blanket, “but as for your voice, I fear ’tis still a lost cause. You still sound like you’re singin’ underwater with a mouth full o’ pebbles. Or would you prefer me to be tactful instead o’ truthful?”

  “No, no,” Jon-Tom sighed. “I thought I’d improved a lot.” He strummed the duar’s dual strings as he spoke.

  Mudge’s head emerged from beneath the covers. His eyes were half-closed. “Me friend, ’tis late. You can now carry a tune o’ sorts, whereas a month ago your mouth wouldn’t ’ave known wot to do with it. That’s an improvement o’ sorts. ’Tis not willingness you lack, but a voice. Be satisfied with wot you ’ave.”

  “Sorry,” Jon-Tom replied huffily, “but I need to practice if I’m going to get any better.”

  Mudge made a strangled sound. He couldn’t win. If he praised the man’s singing, then he sang all the more enthusiastically, and if he criticized it, then Jon-Tom needed his “practice.” Life kept dealing him jokers.

  “All right then, mate.” He burrowed back beneath his blanket. “Try and get ’er all out o’ your system. Just don’t wail on till dawn, okay?”

  “I won’t be at it too much longer,” Jon-Tom assured him. He sang about days at the beach, and old mother earth, and friends he had known back in the real world. Then he put the duar aside and prepared to curl up next to the fire.

  Something gave him pause. More than a pause: it was like an electric shock against his retinas. He sat up and blinked.

  It was still there, and growing stronger. Or was it?

  Leaning over, he shook the ball of fur and blanket next to him.

  “Oh crikey, now wot?” The otter stuck his head out for the third time that night. “Listen, mate, you can ’ave the bleedin’ fire. Me, I’ll sleep on the raft. Hey”—he sat up quickly, suddenly very much awake— “you look like you saw a ghost.”

  “Not a ghost,” he mumbled. “I saw … Mudge, I’m not sure what I saw.” The otter studied the darkness. “I don’t see nothin’. Wot do it look like? Where’d you see it?”

  “O
ver there.” He rose and walked toward the bare white cliff. Mudge followed, eyeing the night uneasily.

  Jon-Tom pointed at the rock. “There. That’s where I saw it. And there was something else. Just the slightest quivering under me as I lay down. A tremor, like.”

  “Mate, this ’ole country’s on shaky ground.”

  “No, this is solid rock under this sand, Mudge. It was an earthquake. I’m sure of that. There’s lots of earthquakes where I come from, and I know what one feels like.”

  “I didn’t feel anything.”

  “You were asleep.”

  “Right. So wot were this thing you saw up against this ’ere rock?”

  “Not up against it, Mudge.” He put his hand on the limestone and rubbed it. It was cool, solid, absolutely unyielding. Impenetrable. “It was in the rock.”

  A dubious Mudge also ran a paw across the solid stone. He spoke carefully, as if speaking to a cub. “Couldn’t ’ave been nothin’ ’ere, mate. There ain’t a crack in this cliff.”

  “Not in the cliff,” Jon-Tom corrected him firmly. “In the rock.” He turned abruptly on his heel, returned to the campsite, and picked up his duar. He started to repeat the last song he’d sung.

  Nothing. Mudge stood near the cliff looking angry, tired, and frustrated all at the same time.

  Then it was back. Just the slightest trembling in the earth, hardly enough to disturb one’s sleep. They would have slept right through it if Jon-Tom hadn’t seen it as well as felt it.

  This time Mudge saw it, too. Jon-Tom knew he did because the otter was backing quickly away from the cliff. The earth tremor faded and returned, but the thing in the cliff remained.

  “You see it, too, Mudge. You do!”

  “Not only do I see it, mate,” the otter whispered, “I see them.”

  Jon-Tom continued to play. More and more of the wispy, ghostly creatures materialized. They were not slipping or crawling over the face of the rock: they moved easily through the unbroken limestone itself. Faintly glowing worm-forms about the size and shape of Jon-Tom’s arm. Oversized, brightly luminous eyes showed against the front of each specter. Barely discernible designs flickered to life on glowing sides and backs, each different from the other, no two alike.

  As Jon-Tom and Mudge stared in fascination, they linked together head to tail, forming a long line that snaked through the rock. The line gave a twist, and the earth underfoot trembled again. Then the line broke apart and they scattered, a bunch of insubstantial big-eyed flatworms swimming through the stone.

  Jon-Tom stopped singing. They began to fade away, only that wasn’t right. They didn’t fade away: they dove down into the solid rock. He moved as if in a trance toward the cliff. There, a minuscule crack no wider than a hair, running through the rock and down into the ground. That was where they’d congregated when they’d formed the link and the last tremor had struck. They’d lined up along the tiny stress fracture and twisted, and when they’d twisted, the ground had convulsed.

  “I wonder what they are,” he muttered aloud.

  “I don’t know, mate, but they seem to be going on their way, and I ain’t about to ask ’em to linger.” The otter was retreating toward his blanket, his gaze fastened to the rock. “I’ve seen enough of ’em.”

  A few still swam across the cliff face. Jon-Tom put his fingers on the duar’s strings. “All right, I guess we’ve seen enough. I called them up, so I guess I can make the last of them go away.”

  “That is what you think,” said one of the worm-shapes in a breathy, barely audible voice.

  Jon-Tom’s fingers froze halfway to the strings. “My God, they talk!”

  “Of course we talk.” The voice was like a distant breeze, a faint rustling against his tympanum.

  Mudge was too mesmerized to retreat. “How can they talk,” he asked, “when there ain’t nothin’ to ’em?”

  “There’s something to them, Mudge. Just not very much. But they’re there, they’re real.”

  “Of course we are real. Such conceit.” The faint words were precise, very proper and clear, though Jon-Tom saw no movement of lips. Indeed, the spectral worm had no mouth. “As a matter of fact, we can talk quite well, but there is no reason to practice conversation with those who live on the world’s skin.”

  “Then why are you talking to us now?” Jon-Tom wondered.

  “Your singing fetched us forth from our homes in the crust. Most extraordinary singing.” The shaped glow momentarily vanished, only to reappear seconds later at another place in the cliff. It moved easily, fluidly, as if traveling through water.

  “We are sensitive to vibrations. Good vibrations.”

  “The last song I sang,” Jon-Tom mused. “I’ll be damned.”

  “We are also in the business of vibrations,” it told him. “Normally we ignore those who inhabit the void above the earth, as we ignore the vibrations they make. But yours were pleasing and unusual, extremely much so. We came to feel your vibrations, and to return the favor to you.”

  “Return the fav—”Jon-Tom considered. “You mean you made the little earthquakes?”

  “The vibrations, yes.” The worm-light paused and linked itself to several of its kind. Once again they lined up along the hairline crack in the cliff. Once again they gave a sharp twist. The sand shifted under Jon-Tom’s feet.

  The chain dissolved and many of its component individuals fled back into the rock.

  “But this is impossible. You can’t live in solid rock.”

  “Solid? Most of what appears to be solid is empty,” the creature told him. “Do you not know this to be so?”

  It was quite right, of course. Matter was composed of protons and neutrons and electrons and far smaller bits of existence like quarks and pi-muons and all sorts of exotic almost-weres. In between them all was nothingness, bridged by forces with even more bizarre names like color and flavor. The planets themselves were largely composed of nothingness.

  So why not creatures which would find such emptiness spacious and comfortable? Of course they would have to be composed largely of nothingness themselves.

  “What do you call yourselves?” In his own world they would be called ghosts—frightening, rarely glimpsed creatures of luminous insubstantiality. They didn’t look anything like dead human beings, but then, manatees didn’t look much like mermaids, either, and look how many sailors had mistaken them for waterlogged sirens.

  Why shouldn’t these worm-shapes be responsible for the reports of ghosts in many worlds? Vibrations could call them forth, psychic in his own world, his spellsinging here. It made a certain sort of supernatural sense.

  “We do not name what is, and we simply are,” said the glowing nothing. “Sing another song,” whispered a voice in Jon-Tom’s ear. “Sing another song about the earth we live in.”

  He did so, drawing on every tune he could remember that mentioned the earth, the ground, the rocks. The cliff came alive with dozens of the worm-glows, all cavorting to and delighting in his spellsinging and the vibrations the duar and his voice produced. From time to time they linked up to produce minute, no longer disquieting earthquakes.

  “What a pity you cannot follow and sing always among us,” the speaker said. “Such exquisite ripplings in the fabric of reality. But you cannot live in our world, just as we cannot exist in the void you call yours.”

  “It’s not a void.” Jon-Tom reached out and touched the stone. “There’s atmosphere here, and living creatures.”

  “Nothingness,” said the worm speaker, and before Jon-Tom knew what was happening it had glided into his hand. He stared openmouthed at his fingers. Mudge let out a little moan. “Nothingness, except for those few solid things that move.”

  His hand was on fire, radiating light in all directions. There was no pain, only the strangest trembling, as though the bones had fallen asleep. It traveled all the way up to his elbow, then slid back down to his fingers. He pressed them to the cliff and the light went back into the rock.

  “That hurt,
” said the worm-glow, “and I could not do it for long. There is practically nothing to you, near vacuum. The earth is better, more compact, room to move about without losing oneself. Now it is time to go. Proximity to the void you are depresses us.”

  Only the speaker remained. The others had all vanished into the rock. “Sing for us some other time and we will try to stay longer.”

  “I will.” Jon-Tom waved. He didn’t know how else to say farewell to something that barely existed.

  The head went first, followed by the rest of the worm-shape in a continuous, sinuous curve. It melted into the cliff. Then it was gone. There was a last feeble earthquake, accompanied by a distant rumble. Analog to his wave? Perhaps. Then sound and shaking, too, had ceased.

  “Good-bye. They were saying good-bye to us,” he murmured, enchanted by the memory of their visitors. “What a world this is.”

  Mudge sucked in a deep breath. “I do so wish, mate, that you’d let me know in advance when you’re planning on doin’ some spellsingin’.”

  Jon-Tom turned from the cliff. “Sorry. I didn’t know I was doing any. I was just singing.”

  Mudge sat down and pulled his blanket over his legs. It was starting to drizzle. “I ain’t sure you can just ‘sing,’ guv.” Raindrops sizzled into oblivion as they contacted the fading campfire.

  Jon-Tom curled up beneath his cape, careful to make certain the duar was also out of the rain.

  “I mean,” the otter continued, “it seems you can’t control the magic when you’re tryin’ to spellsing and you can’t control it when you’re not, wot?”

  “At least I didn’t conjure up anything dangerous this time,” Jon-Tom countered.

  “Blind luck. They were an interestin’ lot, though.”

  “Weren’t they? Kind of pretty too. I wonder how much of the earth they claim for their home. Maybe all the way to the molten inner core.”

  “Molten wot? Now that’s a unique conception, guv’nor.”

  “Nothing unique about it.” Jon-Tom pulled his cape over his face to keep off the rain. “What do you think the center of the planet is, if not molten rock?”