more than enough o' vegetables that look like your
Aunt Sulewac one minute and somethin' out o' a bad
dream the next. 1 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 Wrou-
nipai 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, crack-
ing 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 oppo-
site 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 Syom his paws, he frowned at his friend.
"Find somethin' unusual?"
"No. It's just plain old limestone. I was just think-
149
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ISO
ing 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-Tbm looked disappointed. "Mudge, your scien-
tific education has been sorely neglected."
"That's because I was too busy gettin' 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, "1 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 man-
aged 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. "1 thought I'd im-
THE MOMENT OF THE MAGICIAN
151
proved 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 pow 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 as-
sured 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 pre-
pared 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,"
Alan Dean Foster
152
The otter studied the darkness. "I don't see nothin'.
Wot do it look like? Where'd you see h?"
"Over there." He rose and walked toward the bare
white cliff. Mudge followed, eyeing the night uneasily.
Jen-Torn 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 coot, solid,
absolutely unyielding. Impenetrable. "It was m 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," Jen-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 ifJon-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 ba
cking quickly away from the
THE MOMBffT OF THE MAGJCMJT
1S3
cliff. The earth tremor faded and returned, but the
thing in the cliff remained.
"You see it, too, Mudge. You do!"
"Not only do 1 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
ofJon-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
jEhe earth underfoot trembled again. Then the line
-broke apart and they scattered, a bunch of insubstan-
tial 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
BO wider than a hair, running through the rock and
down into the ground. That was where they'd con-
gregated 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
Alan Dean Foster
154
put his Fingers on the duar's strings. "All right, I
guess we've seen enough. I called them up, so I
guess 1 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 spec-
tral 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 sec-
onds 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, extreme-
ly much so. We came to feel your vibrations, and to
return the favor to you."
THE MOMKfIT OF THE MAGICIAN
169
"Return the fav—"Jon-Tom considered. "You mean
you made the little earthquakes?"
"The vibrations, yes." The worm-light paused and
linked kself to several of its kind. Once again they
Une<^ 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
^fclts 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 bi-
1 Zaire names like color and flavor. The planets them-
selves were largely composed of nothingness.
So why not creatures which would find such empti-
ness 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 insubstandality. 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
wateriogged 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 supernat-
ural sense.
"We do not name what is, and we simply are," said
the glowing nothing.
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Alan Dean Foster
TUB MOISEHT OF TBB MAGICIAN
157
"Sing another song." whispered a voice in Jon-
Tom's ear. "Sing another song abou^ the earth we
live in." '
He did so, drawing on every tune he could remem-
ber that mentioned the earth, the ground, the rocks.
The cliff came alive with dozens of the warm-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. '7-
"What a pity you cannot follow and sing always ^
among us," the speaker said. "Such exquisite rip- '^
plings in the fabric of reality. But you cannot live in • ^
our world, just as we cannot exist in the void you call ' V
yours." 'ji
"It's not a void." Jon-Tom reached out and touched 1|
the stone. "There's atmosphere here, and living , •f
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."
&nb
sp; 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 spelfsing and
you can't control it when you're not, wot?"
"At least I didn't conjure up anything dangerous
this tame," 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
ail 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
Alan Dean Foster
188
cape over his face to keep ofi the rain. "What do you
think the center of the planet is, if not molten rock?"
Spellsinger 04 - The Moment Of The Magician Page 17