Callahan's Place 02 - Time Travelers Strictly Cash (v5.0)

by Spider Robinson

  You may, reading between the lines, have acquired the suspicion that the mighty Warlock was something of a secret coward. Well, what kind of man did you think craves that kind of power badly enough to grasp it barehanded, to do what must be done to get it? This was the Warlock's bane: millennia of utter security had nearly succeeded in boring the beard off him—and yet facing the problem squarely would have entailed admitting that he was too cowardly to permit any change in his circumstances. For the Warlock, millennia of boredom were preferable to even a significant possibility that precious irreplaceable he could be hurled from the Wheel. He preferred not to dwell on this, with any part of his consciousness.

  Not that this would-be assassin even remotely alarmed him. The portion of his awareness that had absently divined its magicidal intent, and now idly watched its secret preparations for battle, felt, as has been said, some amusement, something like fondness (but not paternal, warlocks are sterile as witches)—but his overriding emotion was something more than scorn but less than true contempt.

  Same old fallacies, he thought. First they acquire a rudimentary mind shield and they get cocky. As though I needed to read their thoughts to outthink them! He snorted. And then they put their money on physical energies, three times out of five. They discover that magic, deeply rooted in the Earth, is limited to a sphere of a hundred miles around the planet, while physical energies are not, and they decide that that somehow implies a superiority of some kind. Ephemerals!

  He recalled the last really challenging duel he had ever fought, countless centuries before. He and the other had met on the highest peak on Earth, locked eyes for three and a half years, and then touched the tips of their index fingers together. The site of this meeting would one day be called the Marianas Trench, and the concussion had produced even more damage in the Other Plane.

  The Warlock looked upon the massive assemblage of machineries which was supposed to threaten his—well, you couldn't say his life, even in jest, could you?—his peace of mind, then; and he sneered. This building full of junk was to be raised up against him? (Could you?)

  Nothing but a big beam of coherent light, he complained to himself. Surely that silly creature can deduce that I'm transparent to the entire electromagnetic spectrum? Hell knows it has clues enough; I meditate above the ionosphere for decades at a time. I've a quarter of a mind to let the impertinent little upstart shoot that thing at me before I kill it, just to see its face.

  About that much of his mind considered the question for a few months. (Meanwhile the bulk of his awareness, as it had for the last eight centuries, devoted itself to a leisurely study of how best to mutate human stock so as to increase the central nervous system's capacity to support agony. Mess with the hypothalamus? Add new senses? Subtle, satisfying stuff.)

  By hell, I will, decided that quarter of his mind then. I'll let the impudent cretin fire its toy at me, and I won't even notice! I'll ignore its attack completely, and it will go mad with rage. In fact, I'll be rather nice to it for about a hundred years, and then I'll arbitrarily destroy it for some trivial offense or other. Delicious!

  The quarter of the Warlock's mind which troubled itself with this matter savored the joy of anticipation for several months, so thoroughly in fact that he actually did fail to notice when the upstart wizard's harmless energy-bolt passed through the space occupied by his body. The reflex that caused his physical essence to "sidestep" into the Other Plane was so automatic, so unimportant, that it took a few weeks to come to even a quarter of his attention. He chuckled at that.

  He also monitored the wizard's frustrated, impotent rage, at least on audio and video (those damned mind shields were a nuisance sometimes), and found it good. He invested a fortnight in devising a fiendishly offhand destruction for the fool, instructed himself to remember the affair in a century or so, and forgot the matter.

  Those came to be called The Last Hundred Years Of Pain, and they were long.

  At last like a child recalling a hoarded sweet the Warlock rummaged in his mental pockets and turned out the matter of the hapless wizard. Memory reported that several other shots had been fired without disturbing his peace. The mortal gave every indication of being sobbing mad. Its aim, for instance, had been going to hell for the last two or three decades; some of its shots had missed him by wide margins. He chuckled, and abandoned his century-old plan for destroying the wight without ever acknowledging its attacks.

  The hell, I'll tell it. It's more fun if it knows I've been playing with it.

  At once he was standing before the wizard in the building of futile engines, clothed in fire. In his left hand was a sword that shimmered and crackled; in his right hand was something that could not be looked upon, even by him.

  Oddly, considering its displayed stupidity, the ephemeral did not seem surprised to see him. Its anger was gone, as if it had never been; it met his gaze with something absurdly like serenity.

  Machines began to melt around them, and the wizard teleported outdoors, the Warlock of course following without thinking about it. They faced each other about five hundred feet above the top of the highest of many local mountains, and they locked eyes.

  "You have come to destroy me," the wizard said quietly.

  Of course, the Warlock sent, disdaining speech. Lasers are harmless to me, of course, but they wouldn't be against one of you, and that makes it an insult. He frowned. Had you dared attempt a genuine, necromantic assault, I might have been amused enough to simply kill you hideously. He gestured with the crackling sword at the building below them, which was also crackling now. But this incompetence must be culled from the breed.

  "We all do what we can," the wizard said.

  Indeed. Well, here you go:

  He rummaged in his subconscious's name-file, came up with the wizard's true name, which was Jessica, incorporated that name into the thing in his right hand, and reached out toward the mortal, and "Not here!" she cried and was teleporting upward like a stone hurled by a giant, and Why the hell not? the Warlock thought as he pursued the creature effortlessly, intrigued enough to let a good sixty or seventy miles go by before deciding that enough was enough and hurling the thing in his right hand after her and averting his eyes.

  She died the real death, then. Her soul was destroyed, instantly and forever, in a detonation so fierce that it was almost physically tangible. The Warlock grunted in satisfaction and was about to return to his eyrie, when he noted that the wizard's physical body continued to exist, an empty hulk still hurtling skyward. It chanced that the Warlock had not had lunch that decade.

  Straining a bit to reach it before it passed the limits of the sphere of sorcery, he retrieved the corpse and poised there a moment with the crackling sword ready in his left hand.

  And felt the mind shield he had accreted over thrice ten thousand years peeled away like the skin of an orange; felt his true name effortlessly extracted from his memory; felt himself gripped as though between some monstrous thumb and forefinger and plucked from the sphere of his power, yanked over closer to the sun where the light was better; and in the few helpless boiling-blood seconds before he died both kinds of death, the most powerful Warlock in all the history of the world had time to understand three things: that the laser beams had not been aimed at him, that lasers can carry information great distances, and that this world is only one of billions in a sea of infinity.

  Then at last the end of all fear came to him, as it had come a century before to Saint Jessica.

  Concerning "Local Champ":

  As of even date, I have written only two fantasy stories, and this is one of them. Perhaps it explains why.

  There are quite a few fantasies I've enjoyed reading; no point listing them. But at this stage in my cycle, all the wonders and enchantments and mighty magics of fantasy seem to me like pretty pale stuff compared to the scope and grandeur of the observable universe. I'm at the point where reality seems more exciting, where the puzzle of just how the hell the universe got this way fascinates me more
than all of Middle-Earth. Who shaped the primal Monobloc? And exploded it so perfectly that the number of stars in any given slice of sky will be within one percent of the number in any other slice of equal size? Starting with hydrogen and gravity, how do you get heavy metal planets? Why does gravity decrease (if you didn't know that it does, go at once and buy Heinlein's Expanded Universe), and how does that affect the Universal Escape Velocity question? What are the damned quasars anyway? What makes music so compelling, and why is a baby? What makes us all so afraid all the time, and who invented bravery? Why does pain diminish when it is shared? And underlying all, of course, how are we going to feed all these people, and power their starship?

  Show me a roc that can achieve faster-than-light speeds, and I'll be interested. Give me a warlock who can synthesize protein and you've got my attention. Tell me of a spell that has power over the heart's loneliness, and I will listen. But don't bother me with trivia about necromantic empires and zombie armies and numbskull swordsmen.

  I wonder what old Sauron—or for that matter Gandalf—would have thought of Lucifer's Hammer? Or Fred Saberhagen's Berserkers?

  (Say, that's a thought! Does a spell work on a sentient machine?

  Hmmmm. Back to the typewriter…)

  Concerning "The Web of Sanity":

  All Fans are crazy.

  (A capital F Fan is one who actively participates in sf fandom, as opposed to those who just read a lot of the stuff.

  Everybody knows that; it's like saying all oceans are moist. To read that sigh-fie stuff is crazy enough—but to spend good money and travel hundreds of miles to talk about it with a bunch of drunken strangers? Crazy squared, beyond a doubt. Even crazier are the demented masochists who volunteer (mind you) to organize and put on these conventions, at enormous expense in time, money and energy, and to no visible return. In some cities they fight for the privilege. And even among these hardcore certifiables there are certain people who command awed respect for the truly legendary extent of their brain damage.

  Such as the Minicon Gang.

  More formally known as the Minnesota Science Fiction Society, and sometimes (inexplicably) as Minn-STF. (No matter how many times I run that through it keeps coming out "Minnesota Science Tiction Fociety," but it's none of my business.) They pitch a ball called Minicon in Minneapolis, at no fixed interval except that there seems to be at least one a year. At this very moment they are campaigning energetically and enthusiastically for the right to hold the World Convention in Minneapolis—in 1973. They're selling advance memberships for minus one cent—write to them and they'll send you a 1973 penny for joining. Most of them are devotees (if you miss the tee, you make a divot; hence a man who's missing a few strokes is a divot-tee) of the surrealist recording group The Firesign Theater, creators of Don't Crash That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers and We're All Bozos On This Bus. The only time in my life I was affluent enough to accompany some friends to a Minicon at my own expense, I had what I vaguely recall as a very good time, but I'll never understand how I came to wake up inside that piano (let alone how the burro got in there with me), nor what ever possessed me to have a tattoo put there.

  A year or two later the Minn-STF gonzos called me long-distance at my home in Halifax.

  "We want you to come to Minicon," they said.

  "Love to. Can't afford the fare."

  "No problem: we'll pay."

  "But I heard Chip Delany was your Pro Guest Of Honor this year."

  "He is. You're our Fan Guest Of Honor."

  "But I'm not a Fan. Never have been."

  "That's okay. Bob Tucker's our Artist Guest Of Honor and he's not an artist."

  I thought a bit. "Geeze, if I was Delany, I'd be insulted."

  "Well, we wanted you three people at our convention, and we're not fussy about technicalities."

  Neither was I. A free trip to anywhere is worth it, and besides, I had always wanted to meet Samuel R. Delany. I agreed to go.

  But it left me with a small problem: as Fan GOH, I would have to make a speech—and as I said, I was not and had never been a Fan. So I thought about it, and the following speech resulted. What exactly is fandom? I think it may be:

  THE WEB OF SANITY

  Good evening, genties and ladlemen of the audio radiance, and good odding, too, for that matter. I am Spider Robinson, the Herb Varley of the Stone Age. Here I stand, a credit to my procession and a sanitary sight to see, I hope you will all agree.

  We are standing in the vestibule of a new age, which, like a corporation that kicks its deadwood upstairs, can only fire us higher. Higher than the topless towers of Ilium—

  Hey, do you remember when the towers first went topless?

  For that matter, do any of you remember Ilium? Ilium Kuryakin, used to do a solo with a guy named Team—I mean, a team with a guy named Solo, the Man From I Surrender, who incidentally was so low he once gave a camel a hickey. I once gave a guy named Hickey a Camel, myself, when I was trying to give up smoking, but according to his father that was heir pollution too— ut that's neither hither nor yon.

  Excuse me for yonning, I didn't get much nest last right… I mean, I didn't get the next-to-last rites… the second serial rights went to Conde-Nast publishers. Buy all rights, they said, and by all rights I should be asleep rite now.

  No, but foolishly, folks—did you ever notice that comedians always say "No, but seriously…" right after they've laid an egg?—the reason I'm squatting here tonight is to pass a great gasp of relief at the way we're all managing to fart at staggered intervals rather than all at once, holding it down to a tolerable level, even, if you will, helping all the candles of the world to burn a little brighter. I think it's magnificent that the Lord, in His downtown Providence, Rhode Island, saw fit to arrange things so that peristalsis runs downward. Imagine if digestion ran in the other direction! Toilet bowls would be placed at chin-height; tables would be drastically lowered; chairs would require total redesign. All food would have to be in suppository form, and banquets like this one would probably pass out of existence. So would all beards and mustaches… facial ones, I mean; in effect everyone would be bearded (And I can tell you, a mustache is hard enough to keep sanitary when it's, uh, right under your nose as it were.) I leave the tailoring problems to your imagination. And while you're at it, imagine young lovers having to bend over and back up to each other…

  And of course all the Greeks would become French and vice-versa.

  Now that I've helped you all to return your dinners (and not a moment too soon; they're booked elsewhere), it looks like I can't put off much longer saying something reasonably serious and intelligent about what it feels like to be a Fan Guest Of Honor, when you've never felt much like a Fan before. As I said last night, for those of you who weren't here then, I barely knew that fandom existed until I happened to sell Ben Bova a story. Almost accidentally, he's responsible for having exposed me to you zanies. I was too much of a loner by nature to be more than vaguely aware of fandom's existence, until I sold a story. This state of virginity was ended rather quickly thereafter, and, as such things go, rather painlessly.

  The shock has not yet faded. I kind of hope it never will.

  It has been said—I don't know if correctly or not— that the ancient Chinese treated the insane with reverent fear. I believe this is an appropriate response. I have had enough friends who worked in mental institutions and hospitals to be certain that insanity can be more contagious than leprosy. Hell, I'm living in New York City this month, or anyway residing there.

  And if insanity is contagious, it seems reasonable to me therefore that so is sanity. I know this is going to dismay, affront and offend many of you, and I apologize in advance; but I maintain that as a group you are one of the sanest collections of folks I know. I'll grant you, there's a wealth of evidence against me on this, but I think it's true. I think of us as people who inoculate ourselves against a plague of insanity with a powerful anti-idiotic called science fiction. I think sf is a literature which by its ve
ry nature requires that you be at least a little sane, that you know at least a little something. You must abdicate the right to be ignorant in order to enjoy science fiction, which most people are unwilling to do; and you must learn, if not actually how to think things through, at least what the trick looks like when it's done. Frequent injections will keep a lot of madness away. I can tell you: I've been on sf therapy since the age of five, and here I am, I'm not even thirty years old yet and I'm a happy man, which would have surprised the hell out of me five years ago.

  But even the strongest dosage of even science fiction reaches a threshold effect, and side effects start to outnumber the benefits. The inability to remember which continuum you're in at the moment, the constant necessity of reminding yourself that you're not immortal, not to mention the aching eyeballs and the good friends who cannot be persuaded or cajoled by any means to try just one little bag of science fiction, for free.

  And so we gather together at frequent intervals to reinfect each other with sanity, in person. You may dispute this, but I contend that in a world like this one, gathering together to wear funny hats, sing parodies off-key, get smashed and shine lasers at each other can be—and probably is—sane behavior. The Firesign Theater, whom some of you may know, would probably consider us a subset of the group they belong to, the Bozos. ("People who get together with other Bozos to wear funny clothes and have a good time.") And the world needs all the Bozos it can get.

  It seems to me that the central problem of the world today, if I may be so pretentious, is morale. Or rather, the lack thereof. I have a cousin who visited me last week, who lives in New York City, and we talked five or six hours that particular visit. At least five times in the course of conversation she said, almost like a litany, some variant of: "The whole world is going to hell, it's going to go smash in a few years and nothing can be done, so the only thing for a smart person to do is get everything you can for yourself before the end."