The gray-slate corpse of Ulfänt Banderz turned to pink granite, the pink granite slowly fading to pink flesh.
The Master of the Ultimate Library and Final Compendium of Thaumaturgical Lore from the Grand Motholam and Earlier sat up, looked around, and felt on his nightstand for his spectacles. Setting them on his nose, he peered at the two humans and daihak peering at him and said, “You, Shrue. I thought it would be you…unless of course it was to be Ildefonse or Rhialto the self-proclaimed Marvellous.”
“Ildefonse is buried alive in a dungheap and Rhialto has fled the planet,” Shrue said dryly.
“Well, then…” smiled Ulfänt Banderz. “There you have it. How much time do we have until the Libraries converge and the world ends?”
“Well…eighteen hours, give or take a half hour,” said Shrue.
“Mmmm,” murmured Ulfänt Banderz with a scowl. “Cutting it a little close here, weren’t we? Trying to impress the lady, perhaps? Mmmm?”
Shrue did not dignify that question with an answer but something about Derwe Coreme’s grin seemed to please the resurrected old Library Master.
“How long will it take you to set the time-space separation of the two Libraries to rights?” asked Shrue. “And can I help in any way?”
“Time?” repeated Ulfänt Banderz as if he’d already forgotten the question. “The time to repair my so-called apprentices’ little vandalism? Oh, about four days of constant work, I would imagine. Give or take, as you like to say, a half hour.”
Shrue and Derwe Coreme exchanged glances. Each realized that they’d lost their race with time and each was thinking of how they would like to spend the last eighteen hours of his or her life—give or take thirty minutes—and the answer in both their eyes was visible not only to each other but to Ulfänt Bander–oz.
“Oh, good gracious no,” laughed the Librarian. “I shan’t let the world end while I’m saving it. We’ll establish a Temporal Stasis for the entire Dying Earth, I’ll exempt myself from it to do my repair work outside of time, and that, as they say, will be that.”
“You can do that?” asked Shrue. “You can set the whole world in Stasis?” His voice, he realized, had sounded oddly like Meriwolt’s squeak.
“Of course, of course,” said Ulfänt Banderz, hopping off the bed and heading for the stairs to his workshop. “Done it many a time. Haven’t you?”
At the top of the stairway, the Librarian stopped suddenly and seized Shrue’s arm. “Oh, I don’t want to play the arch-magus of arch-maji or anything, dear boy, but I do have a bit of important advice. Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” said Shrue. The mysteries of a million years and more of lost lore were at this magus’s beck and call.
“Never hire a mouse as your apprentice,” whispered Ulfänt Banderz. “Goddamned untrustworthy, those vermin. No exceptions.”
To Shrue’s and every other human being on the Dying Earth’s way of perceiving it, the time-space crack—which no one else (except the still flying and fleeing Faucelme) even knew about—was fixed in an eyeblink.
The earthquakes ceased. The tsunamis stopped coming. The days of full darkness dropped to a reasonable number. The elderly red sun still struggled to rise in the morning and showed its occasional pox of darkness, but that was the way things had always been—or at least as long as anyone living could remember it being. The Dying Earth was still dying, but it resumed its dying at its own pace. One assumed that the pogroms against magicians would go on for months or years longer—such outbursts have their own logic and timelines—but Derwe Coreme suggested that in a year or two, there would be a general rapprochement.
“Perhaps it would be better if there’s not a total rapprochement,” said Shrue.
When the Myrmazon leader looked sharply at him, Shrue explained. “Things have been out of balance on our dear Dying Earth for far too long,” he said softly. “Millions of years ago, the imbalance benefited political tyrants or merchants or the purveyors of the earliest form of real magic called science. For a long time now, wealth and power have been preserved for those willing to isolate themselves from real humanity for long enough to become a true sorcerer. For too long now, perhaps, those of us who are—let us say—least human in how we spend our time and with whom we associate, have owned too much of the world’s literature and fine food and art and wealth. Perhaps the Dying Earth has enough years and centuries left to it that we can move into another, healthier, phase before the end.”
“What are you suggesting?” asked the war maven with a smile. “Peasants of the world, unite?”
Shrue shook his head and smiled ruefully, embarrassed by his speech.
“But no matter what comes, you want to wait and see it all,” said Derwe Coreme. “Everything. Including the end.”
“Of course,” said Shrue the diabolist. “Don’t you?”
There came several weeks as the galleon and people were being repaired when life was easy and merry—even self-indulgent—and then, too suddenly (as all such departing times always seem to be) it was over and time for everyone to go. Ulfänt Banderz announced that he had to go visit himself—his dead stone other self—at the First Library and to repair that oversight of death.
“How can you do that?” asked Derwe Coreme. “When you need the stone nose and there was only one of those and Shrue here used it on you already?”
The old Librarian smiled distractedly. “I’ll think of something along the way,” he said. He gave Derwe Coreme a hug—an overlong and far too enthusiastic hug, to Shrue’s way of thinking—and then she handed the Librarian the half-full tube of epoxy and he winked out of existence.
“I’m not sure,” mused Shrue, stroking his long chin, “how instantaneous travel allows one to figure anything out along the way.”
“Is that how you’re going home?” asked Derwe Coreme. “Instantaneous travel?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” Shrue said brusquely.
Captain Shiolko and his passengers had voted and had decided—not quite unanimously, but overwhelmingly—that they would return home the long way, continuing to travel east around the Dying Earth.
“Think of it,” called down Captain Shiolko as the gangplank was being drawn up. “Steresa’s Dream may be the first sky galleon of the modern era to circumnavigate the globe—if globe it really is. My dear wife Steresa would have been so proud of the boys and me. We might be back at Mothmane Junction in a month—or two or three months—or perhaps four—six at the most.”
Or you might all be eaten by a dragon larger than the one I conjured, thought Shrue. Aloud, he shouted his wishes for a safe and happy voyage.
Then there were only the eight of them, nine of them counting KirdriK, and before Shrue could say farewell to the Myrmazons, the daihak cleared his throat—a sound only slightly softer than a major boulder avalanche—and said, “Master Magus, binder, foul human scum, I humbly ask that I might stay.”
“What?” said Shrue. For the first time in a very, very long time, he was truly and totally nonplussed. “What are you talking about? Stay where? You can’t stay anywhere. You’re bound.”
“Yes, Master,” rumbled KirdriK. The daihak’s hands were clenching and unclenching, but more as if he were running the brim of an invisible hat through them than as if he were rehearsing a strangulation. “But Master Ulfänt Banderz has asked me to stay and be his apprentice here at the Library, and if you would release me—or loan me to him, at least temporarily—I would like to do that…Master.”
Shrue stared for a long minute and then threw his head back and laughed. “KirdriK, KirdriK…you know, do you not, that this will mean that you will be double-bound. By me and then by Ulfänt Banderz, whose binding spells are probably stronger than mine.”
“Yes,” rumbled KirdriK. The rumble had the sullen but hopeful undertones of a child’s pleading.
“Oh, for the sake of All Gods,” sputtered Shrue. “Very well then. Stay here at this Library at the east ass-end of nowhere. Shelve books…a daihak shelvi
ng books and learning basic conjuring spells. What a waste.”
“Thank you, Master Magus.”
“I’ll reclaim you in a century or less,” snapped Shrue.
“Yes, Master Magus.”
Shrue gave one last whispered command to the daihak and then strolled over to where the Myrmazons had finished collapsing their tents and packing them onto the megillas. He squinted at the disagreeable, spitting, venomous, treacherous reptiles and their high, small, infinitely uncomfortable-looking saddles set ahead of the packs and weapons. To Derwe Coreme, who was tightening the last of what looked to be a thousand straps, he said, “You’re really serious about this epic seven-riding-home nonsense.”
She looked at him coldly.
“You do remember,” he said equally as coldly, “those seas and oceans we crossed coming here?”
“Yes,” she said, hitching a final strap so tightly that the huge megilla gasped out its breath in a foul-smelling whoosh. “And perhaps you remember, in all your centuries of bookish studies—or maybe just because you brag about having a cottage there—that there are land bridges around the Greater and Lesser Polar Seas. That’s why they’re called seas, Shrue, instead of oceans.”
“Hmmm,” said Shrue noncommittally, still frowning up at the restless, wriggling, spitting megillas.
Derwe Coreme stood before him. She was wearing her highest riding boots and held a riding shock-crop which she slapped against her calloused palm from time to time. Shrue the diabolist admitted to himself that he found something about that vaguely exciting.
“Make up your mind if you want to come with us,” she said harshly. “We don’t have an extra megilla or extra saddle, but you’re skinny and light enough that you could ride behind me. If you hang on to me tight enough, you won’t fall off too many times.”
“That will be the day,” said Shrue the diabolist.
Derwe Coreme started to say something else, stopped herself, grabbed a loose scale, and swung herself easily up over the packs and scabbarded crossbows and swords to the tiny saddle. She kicked her boots into the stirrups with the absent ease of infinite experience, waved her hand to the Myrmazons, and the seven megillas leapt away toward the west.
Shrue watched them go until they were less than a dust cloud on the furthest ridge to the west. “The chances of any of you surviving this voyage,” he said to the distant dust cloud, “are nil minus one. The Dying Earth simply has too many sharp teeth.”
KirdriK came out of the Library carrying the things Shrue had requested. He laid the carpet out on the pine needles first—a good size, Shrue thought as he sat crosslegged in its center, five feet wide by nine feet long. Enough room to stretch out and take a nap on. Or to do other things on.
Then KirdriK set out the wicker hamper with Shrue’s warm lunch, a bucket holding three bottles of good wine set to chill, a sweater-cape should the day turn chilly, a book, and a larger chest. “It would have been a mixed metaphor of the worst sort,” said Shrue to no one in particular.
“Yes, Master Magus,” said KirdriK.
Shrue shook his head ruefully. “KirdriK,” he said softly. “I am a fool’s fool.”
“Yes, Master Magus,” said the daihak.
Without another word, Shrue extended his fingers, jinkered the old carpet’s flight threads into life, lifted it eight feet off the ground in a hover, turned to look sideways directly into the daihak’s disinterested—or at least noncommittal—yellow eyes, shook his head a final time, and commanded the carpet west, rising quickly over the trees, pursuing the disappearing dust cloud.
KirdriK watched the speck dwindle for a moment and then shambled bowleggedly into the Library to find something to do—or at least something interesting to read—until his new Master, Ulfänt Banderz, returned, either alone or with his other self.
Afterword:
The summer of 1960—I was 12 years old and visiting my much-older brother Ted and my Uncle Wally in Wally’s third-floor apartment on North Kildare Avenue just off Madison Street in Chicago. Most of the daylight was spent taking the El to museums or the Loop or North Avenue beach or to the beach near the planetarium or to movies, but some days—and many of the evenings—were spent with me sprawled on the daybed in Wally’s little dining room, under the open windows with the heat and street noises of Chicago coming in, reading Jack Vance.
Actually, I was reading a tall stack of my brother’s Ace Double Novels, old issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and other paperbacks, but it was the Jack Vance that I remember most vividly. I remember the expansive, odyssiad power of Big Planet and the the narrative energy of The Rapparee (later known as Five Gold Bands) and my introduction to semantics through The Languages of Pao and the brooding fantasy brilliance of Marizian the Magician (later to be The Dying Earth) and the literary style that saturated To Live Forever.
Mostly, it was the style. My reading even then had already moved beyond a steady diet of SF and other genres, but as my tastes sharpened and my appetite for literature grew—as I encountered not just the stylistic power of the best in genre but also that of Proust and Hemingway and Faulkner and Steinbeck and Fitzgerald and Malcolm Lowry and all the others—what stayed with me was the memory of Jack Vance’s expansive, easy, powerful, dry, generous style, the cascades of indelible images leavened by the drollest of dialogue, all combined with the sure and certain lilt of language used to the limits of its imaginative powers.
When I finally returned to SF in the mid-1980’s, not only as a reader but as a writer working on my first SF novel Hyperion, it was to celebrate SF styles old and new, from space opera to cyberpunk, but most of all to acknowledge my love of SF and fantasy in an homage to Jack Vance’s work. Please note that I didn’t say in an attempt to imitate the style of Jack Vance; it’s no more possible to imitate the unique Vancean style than it is to reproduce the voice of his friend Poul Anderson or of my friend Harlan Ellison or any of the other true stylistic giants in our field or from literature in general.
Reading Jack Vance’s work today, I am transported back forty-eight years to the sounds and smells of Chicago coming in through that third-floor window on Kildare Avenue and I remember what it is like to be truly and totally and indelibly transported into a master magician’s mind and world.
—Dan Simmons
Howard Waldrop
Frogskin Cap
Howard Waldrop is widely considered to be one of the best short-story writers in the business, having been called “the resident Weird Mind of our generation” and an author “who writes like a honkytonk angel.” His famous story “The Ugly Chickens” won both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Awards in 1981. His work has been gathered in the collections: Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters Of The Recent Past: Neat Stories By Howard Waldrop, Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories By Howard Waldrop, Going Home Again, the print version of his collection Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (formerly available only as in downloadable form online), and a collection of his stories written in collaboration with various other authors, Custer’s Last Jump and Other Collaborations. Waldrop is also the author of the novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999, in collaboration with Jake Saunders, and of two solo novels, Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs, as well as the chapbook A Better World’s in Birth!. He is at work on a new novel, tentatively entitled The Moone World. His most recent book is a big retrospective collection, Things Will Never Be the Same: Selected Short Fiction 1980-2005. Having lived in Washington state for a number of years, Waldrop recently moved back to his former home town of Austin, Texas, something which caused celebrations and loud hurrahs to rise up from the rest of the population.
Here he takes us to a Dying Earth very near at last to the end of its span, to show us that the one thing that never ceases is the quest for knowledge.
Frogskin Cap
Howard Waldrop
The sun was having one of its good days.
It came up golden and buttery as if it were made of egg yolk. The dawn air was light
blue and clear as water. The world seemed made new and fresh, like it must have seemed in previous times.
The man in the frogskin cap (whose given name was Tybalt) watched the freshened sun as it rose. He turned to the west and took a sighting on a minor star with his astrolabe. He tickled the womb of the mother with the spider, looked away from the finger and read off the figures to himself.
A change in light behind him gained his attention. He turned—no, not a cloud or a passing bird, something larger.
Something for which men had sometimes taken dangerous journeys of years’ duration, to the farthest places of this once green and blue planet, to see and record. Now it was just a matter of looking up.
The apparent size of a big copper coin held at arm’s length, a round dot was coming into, then crossing, the face of the morning sun.
He watched the planet Venus seemingly touch, then be illuminated by the light, which suffused all around it in an instant. So it was true, then: there was still an atmosphere on the planet, even so close to the Sun as it had become (there was once an inner planet called Mercury, swallowed up long ago.) This Venus had once been covered with dense clouds; its atmosphere now looked clear and plangent, though no doubt the sunlight beat down unmercifully on its surface.
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