Unable to partake of the illusion of sleep in his spectral state, Todd Spigot sat watch over the snoozing company of strange bedfellows. Odd that bodies strictly immaterial should need food and rest—but the illusions propagated by the Fabrication Computer adhered at least partially to the normal cycles of real life.
Half in this pseudoreality, half out, Todd Spigot’s emotions were in a quandary. He had tried to contact his alter ego, Charley Haversham. His attempts at communication had failed dismally.
Mists roiling in the cracks and crevasses of this stark Waste Land curled up, drifted forth tentacles of vapor as though to slap back the sunlight, faded away in the effort. A morning breeze pregnant with death and rot rattled the skeletal, leafless branches of a nearby tree. Chill moisture, no doubt designed to inspire dread, swept through Todd Spigot’s ectoplasm.
All that was prearranged data, electric bursts shuffling through steel dendrites, plasti-neurons, squirming through transistors and resistors and semi-colloidal microchip harnesses in a vast, mad computer that funneled the sight, sound, smells and tastes of imagination through radio beams into his befuddled brain, then somehow monitored his responses, instantly feeding them into the structured consensus reality the machine policed. This linked all the passengers attached to Disbelief Suspenders into a temporary mass-mind which set up sympathetic harmonies with the true Human Mass-Mind, trying to physically attract and link with it. That was what Angharad said, anyway, and Angharad had been the one who had spent weeks in Hurt’s Consciousness Center, uncovering his plans.
This crazy patchwork of strangeness seemed so real, though, so substantial. Now there was an interesting philosophical question. If all the present inhabitants of the Fabrication perceived this existence as real, was it in fact real? After all, wasn’t that the way Reality worked? Who could tell, after all? The only way mankind perceived existence was through the senses, filtered through self-awareness. Maybe there was a macroscopic counterpart to this system, a true cosmos giggling mindlessly as it deluded the inhabitants of Earth, Deadrock, and the whole human empire into thinking that the things they perceived were physical fact.
A game. Some multi-universal game.
And he was a pawn, swept along in gales of laughter among the stars. Todd Spigot felt ill.
Idly, he wondered if he should throw up; would the vomit be ectoplasmic? He chuckled humorlessly at the thought.
And he thought he had problems when he had entered that shrink’s office.
He lay down on the hard ground and put his arms over his head as though in protection.
Okay, God, he thought. I’ve been a bad boy. Stick your head out of the curtain for a moment and tell me it’s okay. I’ll say my prayers, I’ll find a church and marry a nice Christian girl and raise cherubic children. This is too much for me.
No response. As though he’d expected one.
Right. I give up. I surrender. I don’t know who You are, but I sure don’t know who I am either. What should I do? Hello? You up there? Todd calling God, Todd calling God. Come in.
“Todd, are you all right?”
Todd jumped literally ten feet into the air, then slowly floated down, staring in astonishment. Below him was Angharad, gazing up with limpid equine eyes. Todd altered his drifting course downward so that he would not inadvertently impale himself on her horn. “As well as can be expected, I suppose.”
“What were you doing?”
“Praying.”
“Praying?” She gave him that skeptical Angharad look which shone even through the donkey face. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“No, Angharad. I’m not kidding. I figure we need all the friends we can get, so I’m praying to God to get us out of this mess.”
“This affair has affected your mind, Todd. Maybe we better have a little heart-to-heart.” She regarded him quizzically.
“Our affair certainly affected my mind. It screwed me up properly,” Todd said, finding an odd kind of comfort in his anger. “Everybody has done their level best to mess me up ... starting with my parents onward. Most of all, though, I screwed myself. About the only one that’s innocent, it seems to me, is God Himself, if He exists, so I figure I’d better get to be better friends with Him if I want to get a handle on my own sanity.”
“Hmm. I suppose it won’t hurt, Todd,” she said somewhat condescendingly. She glanced over to the sleeping form beside the tree. “I’d better wake up Merlin. We’ve got a job to do.”
Exasperated, Todd said, “This really hasn’t affected you, has it. Your ego is much too strong. As long as you’ve got a job to obsess yourself with, you’re just fine, and you use anything in your path to get what you want. Like you used me, regardless of the feelings you triggered.”
“Hmm? Oh. The old knee-jerk midbrain mammalian stuff, huh? Love, commitment, family. Any violins about? We’ve got everything else in this garbage pit of the imagination. Maybe they should strike up and play a sad song or so. Hey, fella. You had fun, I had fun ... and our teamwork helped save Earth. That’s good enough for me. Now we’ve got another job to do, an important job, so stop whining and groveling before some fancied God of yours. You think I like stomping about looking like an ass with a pointed skull? You know, your problem, Todd Spigot, is that you’re just so incredibly self-absorbed, so mopy and sorry for yourself, you can’t see how much you’ve achieved and how lucky you are to be in the position you’re in.”
“What? Lucky? I don’t know what’s going on here. My body is again being operated by someone else, while I’m floating about without corporeal form in a land that doesn’t really exist, looking for the bloody Holy Grail so that some guy won’t get a shot at being head honcho of humanity. Well, maybe I don’t believe that. Old Hurt is clearly around the bend. Given, he’s accomplished this ... this weird existence that we’re parading around in. But all the rest is just hearsay from you. Anyway, how do you know that we’re just not playing into the guy’s hands? He wants us to look for the Holy Grail ... or whatever it is. Why?”
“I told you. He’s developed some method he thinks will enable him to become Lord of the Human race. Now, Todd, I don’t know if it’s possible, but I do know that I don’t like the idea of a man like Earnest Evers Hurt directing the course of human destiny. He’s not a fun boss. I used to work for him. remember? He might be all off in his crazy calculations, but there’s more than a chance he’s not. We’re damned special people, Spigot. We’ve been given another chance to thwart something awful.”
“I don’t know, Angharad. I just can’t work up any enthusiasm this time.”
The unicorn eyed him thoughtfully. “Well, that’s not terribly surprising, considering your rather insubstantial state presently. You know, Todd, there’s another factor that we haven’t been discussing much. Something that bothers me.”
“What’s that?”
“From what we’ve been able to piece together, we know that Ort Eath is still around. Who knows what role he plays in all of this? Mystery layered upon mystery, Todd, and the only way we can deal with it is to keep forging ahead, find what’s waiting for us. Now, if you want to sit here while we go on and pray, well, that’s up to you. But you’re an important part of the group, Todd. You’re our only contact with the Star Fall. You’re our link to the people who may well be the key to true success in this business. So how about it? All for one and one for all?”
“Shit.”
“Now is that any way for a ghost to talk?” Angharad gave a donkey laugh.
“I feel like Titania in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“Oh? How so?”
“Charmed by an ass.”
“I’m not sure if I should take that as a compliment or not. C’mon. Let’s wake up our wizard, eh?”
Still, Todd figured that prayer wouldn’t hurt much at all, considering their circumstances.
* * *
Me
rlin the Magician turned out to be of great help in guiding them across the stretches of blasted wilderness. Several wild beasts that charged them were promptly zapped by bolts of power and cindered into stinking gobs of smoking flesh. The sorcerer manufactured a bridge across an abyss it would have taken quite a while to skirt.
In the distance, tongues of lightning tasted the horizon from low-slung black clouds. They walked along a field of rocks that vibrated with thunder.
A flash of ball lightning tore across the distant hills, illuminating the contorted configurations of the landscape. Black fungus and moss were the only kin to live vegetation over the expanse of the landscape. The stones themselves seemed to have an unnatural color, like the sallow flesh of the dead.
“You know,” Angharad said, glancing at Todd, “you look quite at home here.”
“Thanks. Glad to know it.”
“Any news from the Other Side?”
“Absolutely zilch,” Todd returned. He scooted over beside Merlin. “I can’t make heads nor tails of the map. Apparently the recent cataclysm changed the landmarks. How far do you think we are from the Grail Castle?”
The wizened old man turned a bloodshot eye toward Todd, pursing his cracked lips. He hazarded a look into his crystal ball, muttered a curse. “Damned if I know. I’m a sorcerer, not a navigator,” he grumbled. “But some sort of intuition—heed it if you like, I don’t give a damn—tells me that the castle borders that lake yonder, in that valley.”
“That would make sense,” Angharad said. “From what you say, the owner is generally called the Fisher King. He’d need someplace to fish, wouldn’t he?”
The general decision was to follow Merlin’s intuition, so they struck out toward the lake, which was a good three-hour march away. As they traveled through the bleached and blackened field, the sorcerer continued with his lecture on Arthurian stories and their importance in understanding the myth, the universe, and the mind of medieval man.
“Talk about screwed up! These folks take the cake! It’s natural that twisted and absurd stories like those of King Arthur and his Round Table should crop up from their warped brains,” the wizard concluded. “I’m totally disgusted to be a part of the milieu. It turns my stomach, I tell you. Turns my stomach! Tristran and Isolde, ptooie! Barf on Lancelot and Guinevere. And finally, piss on this stupid Grail, the most absurd of the lot. That’s one of the things I could never deal with in medieval Christianity. Too blasted complicated, too damned hard. Now druidism, paganism! You had a sense of immediacy there! Of belonging to the land, to the cosmos.”
“Isn’t that the importance of the Grail?” Todd said. “Or of any other symbolism in Christianity? The reaching out to something beyond appearances, beyond the general misery and degradation experienced by most people. That’s why I’m sure that the Grail Quest has turned out to be the channel which is succeeding in Hurt’s plot. Because it’s something tangible, something physical, which the minds combined within this Fabrication can grasp, imagine, focus upon. Despite the diversity of faiths, philosophies and beliefs, the Holy Grail somehow is a mystical crossroads for them all.”
“Hey,” Angharad said. “Those prayers of yours have hit paydirt, fellow. That certainly makes sense.”
“It’s not surprising, really,” Todd continued, pleased with himself. “I recall reading that the Grail legend, indeed the whole Arthurian cycle, has its roots deep in history, perhaps even all the way back to India, cutting its way across Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity, filtering of course through all kinds of paganism on the way. It’s a locus for philosophy, symbolism and religion. I suppose it’s totally reasonable that the point of contact between this amalgamation of symbols and historical and mythological personalities and Hurt’s hypothesized human mind energy-fields should take the form of the Holy Grail.
“So if it already exists, maybe Hurt is already using it. The purpose of this Quest has already been achieved, and our use has vanished.”
“If that were so, we’d be back in our real time states, wouldn’t we?” Angharad said. “That, or something else significant would have changed in this crazy scheme of things. We certainly wouldn’t be slouching toward Bethlehem, that’s for certain.” She turned a curious eye toward Merlin, who tromped along beside them, tattered robes stirring in the foul gusts of breeze. “Which brings up a certain question, Merlin. According to legend, the Grail could only be obtained by the perfectly chaste and pure in heart. In legend, it was Galahad who achieved that goal. As we mentioned, in the cataclysm a while back, Galahad checked out, shall we say, of this particular game. None of us are particularly worthy of the Grail—and certainly Hurt isn’t. Do you think the man has cooked up an impossible route to the Ultimate?”
“Bah,” Merlin snarled, wiping his nose. “No man or woman is chaste or pure in heart. Bloody Christians are right there. Bunch of brawling, selfish animals, mankind. If you let them have their individual ways. But no. In my experience, to take a pot of gold, a man, good or bad, has but to reach out. The difference is perceiving that the pot is indeed of gold. Bad men tend to be stupid and ignorant. They’ll grab for the gold all right, but what would they make of a holy relic? Its merits would be apparent only to those whose concerns lie outside their selfish motives.”
“But the antagonist in this case,” Angharad said, “is a decided baddie. From what we can discern, his means have been odious and his motives arise entirely from self-interest. Merlin, you’re just a constructed pawn in his plan as well, as self-assured as you seem. He wants to plant himself firmly in the central point of humanity out here in Underspace. If he succeeds, at the slightest whim he could make monarchs dance widdershins, send armies and starships roaring into oceans like lemmings. He could hurl human beings through the universe like stones, spreading like a disease with him as root, to consume whole planets and cultures. I certainly don’t even begin to understand the implications of what he’s up to, but I’ve learned about Hurt, seen enough of what he has done to know that he’s not what you might call a good man. Yet he obviously knows the value of this hypothetical Grail—and means to put it to definitely selfish use.”
The legendary druid’s eyes grew distant and thoughtful, glittering their subtle color-flecks. He scratched his crusty nose. Flakes of skin fell off onto his salt-and-pepper mustache and beard. “What you claim to be the truth of our presence in this most strange land may be as illusory as everything else I have encountered. And yet, I know of the ways of the universe, of some of the forces that shift and shamble behind the curtains of existence. I know enough to realize that what you have told me of our situation rings with truth. Perhaps there is indeed a man named Hurt who has created all this expressly to discover a portal that will give him access and mastery of an Overreality. From what you have said, his means have been ruthless, and yet you have only guesses as to his true ends. From what you have related, I would hazard that most of his more ruthless acts arise more out of desperation than inherent evil. He clearly feels he has some kind of deadline in which to accomplish his goals.
“He is intelligent and wealthy enough to believe he can find a way to stop himself from dying—or at least continue his existence in some form. How very curious. How like the follies of mankind. In talking with the various philosophers and wise men who roam this land, I have heard of the thought processes called deterministic, a thought pattern which arises from nihilism. You would think that after all of this study to peer into the very nature of existence, he would have achieved more of that simple yet marvelous commodity, wisdom. That which allows an old man to bear his death as a baby bears its birth.”
“I suppose it has something to do with power. Hurt has power and he doesn’t wish to lose it. In fact, he wants more,” Angharad said. “Motivation enough, I guess. They say that power corrupts. If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then if Hurt gets what he wants, he’s going to be one corrupt fellow!”
“He seemed nic
e enough to me,” Todd said, “when I spoke to him. Of course, everything that’s happened since then has put things in a much different light.”
“Yet you can still only guess at his motives and ultimate goals,” Merlin said. “And you are approaching it all from an entirely negative point of view. Can negativity but produce negativity? That’s hardly the way to deal with the situation. Mustn’t one face up to one’s destiny?”
“Anyway,” Todd offered, “it’s not exactly as though we can escape. I’m the only one among us whose real time body is mobile. The rest of you are pretty much physically fixed in place. Your minds are doing the roaming.”
“So, it’s to the Grail Castle then, eh?” Merlin said, satisfaction in his voice.
“Sounds like you’re the only one who’s sure that’s where you want to go,” Todd said.
“I like,” the old man retorted, “to be where the action is.”
* * *
The door was shut.
Veronica leaned against the wall and slowly slid down into a heap in the shadows. “That’s the chamber. Wish I hadn’t left my mag-key there. Anyway, that’s where we should find the Wizard of Oz.”
Charley Haversham knocked hard and loud. He waited. No answer. He examined the opening mechanism. Combination double mag-lock. Clearly old Hurt did not relish the idea of possible interruption in his private procedures. This room would take a bit of work to get into.
“Hey? You still alive down there?” he asked, peering down at the pretty mass of mussed hair and sprawled limbs.
“Oh, sure. Just still tired.”
“Look at it this way. You’ve motivated me.”
“How delightfully romantic you are, Charley.”
“No, really. I’m already feeling markedly superior to Charley Haversham Prime, despite the fact he’s the real McCoy. I’m already feverishly jealous of Todd Spigot and hope he decides to do a Peter Pan in Never-Never Land.”
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