by Larry Niven
At last, I stood beside the old chair—now covered with a blanket—into which I had placed her. If I had just done something decent and noble, why did I feel so stupid about it? Probably because it was out of character. I was reassured, at least, that I had not been totally corrupted to virtue by reason of my feeling resentment at having to use all of that mana on her behalf.
Well…Put a good face on it now the deed was done.
How?
Good question. I could proceed to erase her memories of the event and implant some substitute story—a gas leak, perhaps—as to what had occurred, along with the suggestion that she accept it. I could do that. Probably the easiest course for me.
My resentment suddenly faded, to be replaced by something else, as I realized that I did not want to do it that way. What I did want was an end to my loneliness. She trusted me. I felt that I could trust her. I wanted someone I could really talk with.
When she opened her eyes, I put a cup of coffee into her hands.
“Cheerio,” I said.
She stared at me, then turned her head slowly and regarded the still-visible ravages about the room. Her hands began to shake. But she put the cup down herself, on the small side table, rather than letting me take it back. She examined her hands and arms. She felt her face.
“You’re all right,” I said.
“How?” she asked.
“That’s the story,” I said. “You’ve got it coming.”
“What was that thing?”
“That’s a part of it.”
“Okay,” she said then, raising the cup more steadily and taking a sip. “Let’s hear it.”
“Well, I’m a sorcerer,” I said, “a direct descendant of the ancient sorcerers of Atlantis.”
I paused. I waited for the sigh or the rejoinder. There was none.
“I learned the business from my parents,” I went on, “a long time ago. The basis of the whole thing is mana, a kind of energy found in various things and places. Once the world was lousy with it. It was the basis of an entire culture. But it was like other natural resources. One day it ran out. Then the magic went away. Most of it. Atlantis sank. The creatures of magic faded, died. The structure of the world itself was altered, causing it to appear much older than it really is. The old gods passed. The sorcerers, the ones who manipulated the mana to produce magic, were pretty much out of business. There followed the real dark ages, before the beginnings of civilization as we know it from the history books.”
“This mighty civilization left no record of itself?” she asked.
“With the passing of the magic, there were transformations. The record was rewritten into natural-seeming stone and fossil-bed, was dissipated, underwent a sea change.”
“Granting all that for a moment,” she said, sipping the coffee, “if the power is gone, if there’s nothing left to do it with, how can you be a sorcerer?”
“Well, it’s not all gone,” I said. “There are small surviving sources, there are some new sources, and—”
“—and you fight over them? Those of you who remain?”
“No…not exactly,” I said. “You see, there are not that many of us. We intentionally keep our numbers small, so that no one goes hungry.”
“‘Hungry’?”
“A figure of speech we use. Meaning to get enough mana to keep body and soul together, to stave off aging, keep healthy and enjoy the good things.”
“You can rejuvenate yourselves with it? How old are you?”
“Don’t ask embarrassing questions. If my spells ran out and there was no more mana, I’d go fast. But we can trap the stuff, lock it up, hold it, whenever we come across a power-source. It can be stored in certain objects—or, better yet, tied up in partial spells, like dialing all but the final digit in a phone number. The spells that maintain one’s existence always get primary consideration.”
She smiled.
“You must have used a lot of it on me.”
I looked away.
“Yes,” I said.
“So you couldn’t just drop out and be a normal person and continue to live?”
“No.”
“So what was that thing?” she asked. “What happened here?”
“An enemy attacked me. We survived.”
She took a big gulp of the coffee and leaned back and closed her eyes.
Then, “Will it happen again?” she asked.
“Probably. If I let it.”
“What do you mean?”
“This was more of a challenge than an all-out attack. My enemy is finally getting tired of playing games and wants to finish things off.”
“And you are going to accept the challenge?”
“I have no choice. Unless you’d consider waiting around for something like this to happen again, with more finality.”
She shuddered slightly.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’ve a feeling I may be too,” she stated, finishing her coffee and rising, crossing to the window, looking out, “before this is over.
“What do we do next?” she asked, turning and staring at me.
“I’m going to take you to a safe place and go away,” I said, “for a time.” It seemed a decent thing to add those last words, though I doubted I would ever see her again.
“The hell you are,” she said.
“Huh? What do you mean? You want to be safe, don’t you?”
“If your enemy thinks I mean something to you, I’m vulnerable—the way I see it,” she told me.
“Maybe…”
The answer, of course, was to put her into a week-long trance and secure her down in the vault, with strong wards and the door openable from the inside. Since my magic had not all gone away, I raised one hand and sought her eyes with my own.
What tipped her off, I’m not certain. She looked away, though, and suddenly lunged for the bookcase. When she turned again she held an old bone flute that had long lain there.
I restrained myself in mid-mutter. It was a power-object that she held, one of several lying about the room, and one of the few that had not been drained during my recent workings. I couldn’t really think of much that a nonsorcerer could do with it, but my curiosity restrained me.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I’m not going to let you put me away with one of your spells.”
“Who said anything about doing that?”
“I can tell.”
“How?”
“Just a feeling.”
“Well, damn it, you’re right. We’ve been together too long. You can psych me. Okay, put it down and I won’t do anything to you.”
“Is that a promise, Dave?”
“Yeah. I guess it is.”
“I suppose you could rat on it and erase my memory.”
“I keep my promises.”
“Okay.” She put it back on the shelf. “What are we going to do now?”
“I’d still like to put you someplace safe.”
“No way.”
I sighed.
“I have to go where that volcano is blowing.”
“Buy two tickets,” she said.
It wasn’t really necessary. I have my own plane and I’m licensed to fly the thing. In fact, I have several located in different parts of the world. Boats, too.
“There is mana in clouds and in fogbanks,” I explained to her. “In a real pinch, I use my vehicles to go chasing after them.”
We moved slowly through the clouds. I had detoured a good distance, but it was necessary. Even after we had driven up to my apartment and collected everything I’d had on hand, I was still too mana-impoverished for the necessary initial shielding and a few strikes. I needed to collect a little more for this. After that it wouldn’t matter, the way I saw things. My enemy and I would be plugged into the same source. All we had to do was reach it.
So I circled in the fog for a long while, collecting. It was a protection spell into which I concentrated the
mana.
“What happens when it’s all gone?” she asked, as I banked and climbed for a final pass before continuing to the southeast.
“What?” I said.
“The mana. Will you all fade away?”
I chuckled.
“It can’t,” I said. “Not with so few of us using it. How many tons of meteoritic material do you think have fallen to earth today. They raise the background level almost imperceptibly—constantly. And much of it falls into the oceans. The beaches are thereby enriched. That’s why I like to be near the sea. Mist-shrouded mountaintops gradually accumulate it. They’re good places for collecting too. And new clouds are always forming. Our grand plan is more than simple survival. We’re waiting for the day when it reaches a level where it will react and establish fields over large areas. Then we won’t have to rely on accumulators and partial spells for its containment. The magic will be available everywhere again.”
“Then you will exhaust it all and be back where you started again.”
“Maybe,” I said. “If we’ve learned nothing, that may be the case. We’ll enter a new golden age, become dependent upon it, forget our other skills, exhaust it again and head for another dark age. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless those of us who have been living with it have also learned something. We’d need to figure the rate of mana exhaustion and budget ourselves. We’d need to preserve technology for things on which mana had been used the last time around. Our experience in this century with physical resources may be useful. Also, there is the hope that some areas of space may be richer in cosmic dust or possess some other factor that will increase the accumulation. Then, too, we are waiting for the full development of the space program—to reach other worlds rich in what we need.”
“Sounds as if you have it all worked out.”
“We’ve had a lot of time to think about it.”
“But what would be your relationship with those of us who are not versed in magic?”
“Beneficent. We all stand to benefit that way.”
“Are you speaking for yourself or for the lot of you?”
“Well, most of the others must feel the same way. I just want to putter around museums…”
“You said that you had been out of touch with the others for some time.”
“Yes, but—”
She shook her head and turned to look out at the fog.
“Something else to worry about,” she said.
I couldn’t get a landing clearance, so I just found a flat place and put it down and left it. I could deal later with any problems this caused.
I unstowed our gear; we hefted it and began walking toward that ragged, smoky quarter of the horizon.
“We’ll never reach it on foot,” she said.
“You’re right,” I answered. “I wasn’t planning to, though. When the time is right something else will present itself.”
“What do you mean?”
“Wait and see.”
We hiked for several miles, encountering no one. The way was warm and dusty, with occasional tremors of the earth. Shortly, I felt the rush of mana, and I drew upon it.
“Take my hand,” I said.
I spoke the words necessary to levitate us a few feet above the rocky terrain. We glided forward then, and the power about us increased as we advanced upon our goal. I worked with more of it, spelling to increase our pace, to work protective shields around us, guarding us from the heat, from flying debris.
The sky grew darker, from ash, from smoke, long before we commenced the ascent. The rise was gradual at first but steepened steadily as we raced onward. I worked a variety of partial spells, offensive and defensive, tying up quantities of mana just a word, just a fingertip gesture away.
“Reach out, reach out and touch someone,” I hummed as the visible world came and went with the passage of roiling clouds.
We sped into a belt where we would probably have been asphyxiated but for the shield. The noises had grown louder by then. It must have been pretty hot out there too. When we finally reached the rim, dark shapes fled upward past us and lightning stalked the clouds. Forward and below, a glowing, seething mass shifted constantly amid explosions.
“All right!” I shouted. “I’m going to charge up everything I brought with me and tie up some more mana in a whole library of spells! Make yourself comfortable!”
“Yeah,” she said, licking her lips and staring downward. “I’ll do that. But what about your enemy?”
“Haven’t seen anybody so far—and there’s too much free mana around for me to pick up vibes. I’m going to keep an eye peeled and take advantage of the situation. You watch too.”
“Right,” she said. “This is perfectly safe, huh?”
“As safe as L.A. traffic.”
“Great. Real comforting,” she observed as a huge rocky mass flew past us.
We separated later. I left her within her own protective spell, leaning against a craggy prominence, and I moved off to the right to perform a ritual that required greater freedom of movement.
Then a shower of sparks rose into the air before me. Nothing especially untoward about that, until I realized that it was hovering for an unusually long while. After a time, it seemed that it should have begun dispersing…
“Phoenix, Phoenix, burning bright!” The words boomed about me, rising above the noises of the inferno itself.
“Who calls me?” I asked.
“Who has the strongest reason to do you harm?”
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t ask.”
“Then seek the answer in hell!”
A wall of flame rushed toward me. I spoke the words that strengthened my shield. Even so, I was rocked within my protective bubble when it hit. Striking back was going to be tricky, I could see, with my enemy in a less-than-material form.
“All right, to the death!” I cried, calling for a lightning stroke through the space where the sparks spun.
I turned away and covered my eyes against the brilliance, but I still felt its presence through my skin.
My bubble of forces continued to rock as I blinked and looked forward. The air before me had momentarily cleared, but everything seemed somehow darker, and—
A being—a crudely man-shaped form of semisolid lava—had wrapped its arms as far as they would go about me and was squeezing. My spell held, but I was raised above the crater’s rim.
“It won’t work!” I said, trying to dissolve the being.
“The hell you say!” came a voice from high overhead.
I learned quickly that the lava-thing was protected against the simple workings I threw at it. All right, then hurl me down. I would levitate out. The Phoenix would rise again. I—
I passed over the rim and was falling. But there was a problem. A heavy one.
The molten creature was clinging to my force-bubble. Magic is magic and science is science, but there are correspondences. The more mass you want to move, the more mana you have to expend. So, taken off guard, I was dropping into the fiery pit despite a levitation spell that would have borne me on high in a less encumbered state. I immediately began a spell to provide me with additional buoyancy.
But when I had finished, I saw that something was countering me—another spell, a spell that kept increasing the mass of my creature-burden by absorption as we fell. Save for an area between my feet through which I saw the roiling lake of fire, I was enclosed by the flowing mass of the thing. I could think of only one possible escape, and I didn’t know whether I had time for it.
I began the spell that would transform me into a spark-filled vortex similar to that my confronter had worn. When I achieved it, I released my protective spell and flowed.
Out through the nether opening then, so close to that bubbling surface I would have panicked had not my mind itself been altered by the transformation, into something static and poised.
Skimming the heat-distorted surface of the magma, I swarmed past the heavily weighted being
of animated rock and was already rising at a rapid rate, buffeted, borne aloft by heat waves, when it hit a rising swell and was gone. I added my own energy to the rising and fled upward, through alleys of smoke and steam, past flashes of lava bullets.
I laid the bird-shape upon my glowing swirls, I sucked in mana, I issued a long, drawn-out rising scream. I spread my wings along expanding lines of energy, seeking my swirling adversary as I reached the rim.
Nothing. I darted back and forth, I circled. He/she/it was nowhere in sight.
“I am here!” I cried. “Face me now!”
But there was no reply, save for the catastrophe beneath me from which fresh explosions issued.
“Come!” I cried. “I am waiting!”
So I sought Elaine, but she was not where I had left her. My enemy had either destroyed her or taken her away.
I cursed then like thunder and spun myself into a large vortex, a rising tower of lights. I drove myself upward then, leaving the earth and that burning pimple far beneath me.
For how long I rode the jet streams, raging, I cannot say. I know that I circled the world several times before any semblance of rational thinking returned to me, before I calmed sufficiently to formulate anything resembling a plan.
It was obviously one of my fellows who had tried to kill me, who had taken Elaine from me. I had avoided contact with my own kind for too long. Now I knew that I must seek them out, whatever the risk, to obtain the knowledge I needed for self-preservation, for revenge.
I began my downward drift as I neared the Middle East. Arabia. Yes. Oil fields, places of rich, expensive pollutants, gushing mana-filled from the earth. Home of the one called Dervish.
Retaining my Phoenix-form, I fled from field to field, beelike, tasting, using the power to reinforce the spell under which I was operating. Seeking…
For three days I sought, sweeping across bleak landscapes, visiting field after field. It was like a series of smorgasbords. It would be so easy to use the mana to transform the countryside. But of course that would be a giveaway, in many respects.