So copies of the logs went to Gaea-Earth to the Bureau of Folklore, Fictional Adventure Division. There being no such bureaus or divisions on Gaea-Earth, the copy came to the desk (actually two camel-bags set together) of a Moslem Monk who had become a reference point for curious information. He immediately recognized that they were thumpingly good adventure romance espionage blood-and-thunder yarns. Of course they were! When I spilled my very viscera in surviving them how could they be otherwise?
So my Adventure-Voyages are known on Gaea-Earth as fantasy-fiction rather than as many-leveled fact. In a small way they were popular on Gaea-Earth.
And they returned to Kentauron Mikron as a treasure trove of Gaea Story-Telling. They were quite popular on Kentauron Mikron also. They were recognized by the select people of Kentauron as what they were; and my wife and I took a lot of good-natured kidding about them. And yet those who kidded us about them were the ones who admired them most strongly.
But one of the adventures had indeed happened on Gaea-Earth. So this was the second time that I (but not my wife) have had planet-fall at Bassorah Rock.
“A caution, dear heart,” my Grand-Dame Wife said to me as we were about to land. “Let us keep very low expectations about this whole thing. Harun was a liar and a lecher when we knew him before. He was a calumniator. I feel truths about him now that I couldn't have felt if we were still on Kentauron Mikron with all the associations of him. His jokes, which were his trademark, were shockingly cruel. And his breath wilted the fragile ‘Breath-of-Heaven’ plant, and only the breath of a devil will do that.”
“Superstition and legend, my love,” I said. “And what can all that rubbish matter when compared to the joy of being in Harun's presence? Nothing else will stand against such joy as that! And he was only a boy, possibly a divine boy, whatever his age.”
“We were all boys and girls then, love, though we had already attained prominence and power. I wonder how Kentauron Mikron ever survived our precocity. But I doubt if Harun will play as well this time around. He had only a limited repertoire and we could already see the end of it when he died so untimely. And we’re more mature now.”
“You are more cynical now, dear,” I said. “I have never seen you like this. Harun brought joy, joy, joy. His repertoire was all conveyed in one word, ‘joy’, yes. But I wouldn't call it limited.”
Bassorah Rock is the most primitive sort of landing pad for space vehicles, an excavation in the middle of two muddy rivers where they come together. It has a three hundred foot depth of water to break the fall. And then the sudden rock brings the flight to a sudden end. The best thing that can be said of such a landing pad is that it works.
Oh, we hit! We hit! How we hit!
We splashed the three hundred feet depth of water clear out of the rivers and came bangingly onto bare and dripping Bassorah Rock. And then that three hundred feet depth came back and floated us up roughly and churningly. We received no damage except bleeding from mouth and nose and eyes and ears. There is really something invigorating about landing on a primitive world.
“What is the Local Time?” I asked the Ship.
“Springtime. It is the local year 4574 since the formulation of Adam the first man according to the Jews (my programming doesn't tell me what Jews are); it is the year 1565 since the Founding of Rome (apparently a town); it is the year 191 after the Hegira from which the Moslems count their time; it is the Year 813 of Restored Salvation according to the Christians. But be you advised that the years on this Gaea-Earth are shorter by one tenth than our Kentauron Standard Years. The implication is that the people of Gaea are in a constant rush to get a year's work done in a foreshortened year.”
“Are you able to read the local time and age of the Harun, Ship?”
“About fifty years. The news must have come to Kentauron Mikron by common carrier. It came with a cargo of birds, of course; and neither birds nor other cargo will age when traveling by common carrier. But how can markets be predicted that far in advance? As far as science goes, Harun was always an infant, of course. He wouldn't know of any extraordinary way to send the message.”
“Fifty years? Then he stayed dead less than a year. He must be quite an old ‘boy’ by now.”
“That's subject to an error of thirty years either way, Master Mariner. But you know that the Harun will always be a young boy for as long as he lives. Aye, and he will also be a young boy for as long as he bides in death. Aging isn't possible to him. And I'm sorry to have to mention it to you, Master Mariner, but aging doesn't seem possible to you or to your cronies either. It clouds your reputations and casts doubts on your humanity.”
“I wish it weren't so, Ship. What is that shining massif upriver?”
“It's a mirage. The name of the mirage is ‘The Magic City of Baghdad’. It has been seen in this double-river land for fifty-one years.”
“And it is fifty-three years since I was last hereabouts on Gaea,” I told my valiant Ship. “I barely missed the birth of the mirage, and I barely missed the birth of Harun. But if the mirage is older than Harun he cannot have caused it.”
“Do not be too sure of that, Master Mariner. Before several of his births he worked high magic while still in the womb.”
“Phone for camels, Ship. We wish to journey to the mirage.”
“There are no phones on Gaea, Master Mariner. But I believe that camels are already on the way.”
“Yes, I see a boy on shore and he has two camels with him. And he has the ‘camels for hire’ message shining out of his face. Boy, boy, untie that little boat there and come out and get us! I want to rent your two camels to go to Baghdad Mirage.”
“Be careful, Master Mariner,” Ship said. “He may be a boy of the Ghuls or Sila or Ifrit or other unhuman species.”
“I have been on Gaea before, Ship, and you have not.”
“And I am a total-data-processor, Master Mariner, and you are not,” the Ship told me. Nevertheless my wife and I went to the river bank with the boy in the bobbling row boat. We rented the two camels from the boy, and my Dame and myself started to Baghdad Mirage. The boy ran swiftly alongside of us. Too swiftly, too tirelessly. Very likely he was not exactly of the human species.
“How many miles is it to Baghdad Mirage, boy?” I called to him.
“It's two hundred miles, but they are mirage-miles. In real miles it is hardly any distance at all. We can arrive there as soon as we wish.”
And then, like wraiths, two other persons appeared, and they were riding swiftly alongside of us. I still wasn't sure of the boy, but I was sure of these two. One of them was an Ifrit and the other one was an Ifritah, which is to say they were a male and female Ifrit. And they were riding on two camels that were also Ifrits.
“Go before us, or behind us,” I said to the wraiths or persons of the Ifrit species. “My Dame and I wish to ride alone.”
“If wishes were horses you'd still be riding camels,” the male Ifrit said. “That's an old proverb. We can neither ride before you nor behind you because we are assigned to be your shadows and so we must ride beside you. Were it a little earlier in the day, we would be riding before you. Were it a little bit later in the day, we would be riding slightly behind you. But we are your shadows; and because of us, your Dame and you may not ride alone. We are shadows with a peculiar assignment. We are to find out what you want to do and we are to prevent you from doing it. We will prevent you even unto your deaths. You are immortal, so you can die except in your spirits if we kill you. We are merely mortals, but we cannot die either in body or in spirit until a milliard (a thousand million) of years have passed. We will dog you two. We will dog you to your deaths. There is no way you can get away from us.”
“We don't want to get away from you,” my quick-witted wife said. “Our assignment here is to find a pair of Ifrits and study them. It is fortunate that you two appeared just when you did. It saves us searching for a pair of you. Our secondary assignment here is to test out a pair of new and invisible bottles. We w
ant to see how quickly we can trap you in them. Since you cannot see them, it should be easy for us. Oh, oh, we almost had the Ifritah there. She nearly stumbled right into it. Oh, please don't make it too easy for us! We want to have a little fun with our investigations and tests. Watch out, watch out, Ifrit! You nearly stumbled into the other bottle. And if you had wandered into it you'd have been trapped there for a milliard of years. Please be careful not to be captured too quickly. 'twould do us out of part of our fun.”
I chewed on the end of my beard as we rode along, and I mused on the matter. I have always been able to recognize Ifrits, but not (I hope) for the reason that my enemies give. My enemies have charged that I myself have a ‘wisp of smoke’ in my ancestry, that I am partly of the blood of the ‘people of the smoke’. I might have become at least a regional caliph had it not been for this rumor against me. But I can see the Ifrits most of the time; and other humans (with no ‘smoke’ in their ancestry) will hardly see an Ifrit once in a long lifetime.
The Ifrits are spirits, but they are not immortal. They are of the larger family of the Jinn, along with the Marid who have such acute hearing that they can overhear conversations in the heavens; and the Shaytam who are able to cause conflict in the heavens and on the earth and under the earth; and the Ghuls who are shapechangers and who eat dead bodies and are incomparably evil. But the Ifrits have all the powers of the Marid and the Shaytam and the Ghuls, and greater powers besides. But to compensate for this, the Ifrits have a weakness that the other Jinns do not have. The Ifrits are simple-minded (stupid really) in spite of their great powers.
As to the other Jinns such as the Sila, I do not speak of them at all, and I shudder when I hear their names.
As the Ifrits are the ‘People Who Are Not Quite People’, so their camels are not quite camels. As the Ifrit are ‘people of smoke’, so their camels are ‘camels of smoke’. The Ifrits however make a point of not being malevolent as are such other Jinns as the Ghuls and the Sila. When the Ifrits kill a person, it is always an accident. I myself in my diplomatic-and-espionage adventure-voyages in the service of my world Kentauron Mikron have used Ifrit killers; and Ifrit killers have tried to use me and have struck at me through my agents. In my eighth adventure, an Ifrit who had made himself very large (as they are able to do) had come to me with the murdered and mangled body of one of my most competent agents cupped in his two hands as if it were an egg.
“Master Mariner, this one of yours, I had no idea he would break so easily,” the huge Ifrit had said. “Master Mariner, my big red heart is aflame with sorrow over this thing. Master Mariner, it was entirely an accident, the same type of accident that might very well happen to you in the next five minutes. There is bad engineering in you people or you would not break so easily. I am absolutely sorry that I have killed this agent of yours by accident. And my sorrow will increase when I kill the next agent of yours by accident, and the next agent after him, and the next agent after him, too.”
It is very hard to get ahead of the Ifrits even though they are simple-minded.
“Great Mariner,” called out the running boy who had rented our camels to us. “You want to avoid the Baghdad Mirage, do you?” he cried in his golden voice (who do we know with such a golden voice?), “It stands athwart every road, and yet I believe that I know one path by which we may avoid it. It is a path that hardly anybody knows.”
“What, what?” the male Ifrit cried out. “We thought you wanted to go to Baghdad Mirage, so we would not have allowed you to enter it. We'd have killed you first. But if you wish to avoid the place, we will oppose you there too. We will compel you to ride right into the misty city. And if you try to ride out of it again, it's dead you'll be. There is no way you can escape from us or from the city. Here, here, Mariner, veer your camel not away from the road. It's death for you to leave the road on either side. I can crush your skull with the fingers of one hand, and the skull of your camel with the fingers of the other. And my wife can compress the head of your wife till the eyes pop out of it. Into the Baghdad Mirage you two shall ride, and out of it you shall never come alive!”
“Do be careful, you two,” my wife protested. “Whichever way I turn the bottles away from you you still almost blunder into them. It destroys the fun for us if you are trapped too quickly. And once trapped, you know, you are trapped for a thousand million years.”
We had been traveling like the very wind, and we had near completed the two hundred miles from Bassorah Rock to Baghdad Mirage. But they were mirage miles. The Ifrits and their Ifrit camels had been throwing shadows of smoke on the sand and rocks as they rode. Shadows of our shadows they were! — for the Ifrits said that they would shadow us like our shadows.
But our own proper shadows had been green-and-sunshine as they raced over the dappled sand and stones. And the shadow of the tirelessly running boy had been pure gold as it sped along over the storied countryside. Who did we know who cast a golden shadow like that?
There was a duality about our ride now, for we were riding through a mirage. There were gaps in the ground as we rode over (the mirage-illusion was not quite complete) and we could see a lower ground beneath it. We were really riding through a low sky. And then we came to edified and constructed greatness. We rode through one of the thousand gates of Baghdad, a great arched gate five hundred feet tall. Nor was it the greatest of the gates. Some of them were so tall that no archer could shoot an arrow all the way down to the ground from the top.
We ascended by glittering paths and avenues to the turrets and towers and battlements of magic Baghdad. Our camels were running on roads that went almost straight up, that sometimes even overturned us; but they were running up the high roads of a Royal Mirage. The stones were mirage stones; the bronze doors were mirage bronze; the towers full of extraordinary people were wraith towers full of happy apparitions. But they did not collapse. The mirage was reinforced with stone and iron and bronze.
“There should be more towers over this way!” the boy with the golden voice cried out. “I command! I command! But the spirits are so slow to fulfill my swift commands! Quickly, quickly, spirits! Nine hundred more towers over this way!”
And, lo, there were nine hundred more towers! Who did we know who could do tricks like that?
“I go now,” the boy golden-mouthed the words, “but I will be out on the prowl tonight with all my cronies from vasty space. I will tread every steep roof of Baghdad. I will leap the turrets, and dive through the stones into the dungeons. I will ascend the tallest towers and descend into the lowest cellars. I will revel with the best and the worst people of all the worlds all the night long. And every night in Baghdad bides for a thousand hours. Oh, this is the last city I will ever build by magic! But it doesn't have to end.”
Who do we know who builds cities by magic?
“Harun!” I cried in my voice that can be heard for a hundred sea-leagues.
“Of course, Master Mariner. Open your eyes, Stormy Petrel! I have more fun being Harun than being anybody else I know.”
“Harun Al-Rashid! The Golden Boy!” Grand-Dame Tumblehome called to him. “The City need not end. But do you have to end now?”
“Only till dark, Grand Dame. Then I will prowl for a thousand-hour night. Be in the magic streets tonight with the revelers. Look at all the masqueraders, for even the flesh-faces are masks. Look till you come to the Golden Tom-Cat. Ask him. He will know where I am.”
Then the Magic Boy Harun disappeared into the golden mist.
And A Taller Town Than Rome
If I had come to Gaea-Earth to find the reborn Golden Boy Harun, why then had the other great spies from the other worlds come here? For they were here. I saw their ships hovering at sky-anchor in a state of beta invisibility. And I had known that they were coming. My own instructions in my under-mind had been welling up into my consciousness.
Everything here had an air of what is metaphored as ‘An Arabian Nights Adventure’. How odd, for this really was Arabia of that era, and i
t certainly promised adventure.
The finding of the Boy Harun was only a cover of my real mission, of course. And each of the other great spies would have a cover nearly as fascinating.
But it happened that my cover-mission and my real mission were inextricably tangled together.
There was weeping in the canebrakes and the broken lands going on for a thousand years at a time. These canebrakes and broken lands were a part of the botanical gardens of Baghdad, but the weeping was older than the well-contrived landscape. So wept the giant-dwarf Dan Cupid. So wept the giant-dwarf Nimrod the mighty hunter.
“Wept over her, carved in stone.” it is said of one, and were those limestone tears? “By the Waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,” it is recounted again, and Babylon occupied the same site as the Baghdad Mirage. Or “ — not turned aside and wept,” “I must weep but they are cruel tears,” “Weep for Saul who clothed you in scarlet,” “ — to Hecuba that he should weep for her,” “I weep for Adonais,” “ — in the forest, weeping,” “Weeping and gnashing of teeth,” “hear the children weeping,” “ — loves, and weeps, and dies,” “my very heart and flesh cry out.”
Great Pan wept for his lost youth in Arcadia, and he was an immortal. David wept when he remembered Absalom; Daedalus wept when he remembered Icarus; great blinded Samson wept when he remembered Delilah of the long hair; Apollo wept when he remembered Daphne; a nameless soul wept in Hell when he remembered Lilith and the three golden hairs from her head, not noticing that it was the same tre file d’ore, the same three threads of gold that bound him tighter than chains in the bottom of Hell. Great Karl wept when he remembered Roland. Prometheus, Jason, Priam, Charon, Peter, Julian the Apostate, Dionysus all wept in Olive Groves. And one other.
Dives wept in Hell. And Pluto the Lord of Hell wept iron tears.
Sindbad, The Thirteenth Voyage Page 2