Ring of Fire III

by Eric Flint

  “You look like George Hamilton.”

  “I look like Al Jolson in blackface.” George bared his teeth in a grimace that did look startlingly white in his walnut-tanned face. “But I wouldn’t mind that so much if I wasn’t wearing clown shoes, I Dream of Jeanie’s vest, my grandma’s curler-turban, enough Mardi Gras beads for an entire float, and M.C. Hammer’s pants.”

  It wasn’t quite that bad, but he did look...colorful. And it was a good thing that they were down-time, or he would have seriously offended any native of India that happened to spy him. When he asked for George’s help, Tom had also radioed Grantville’s theater teacher. That was Shackerley Marmion, a young Englishman who’d emigrated to Grantville the year before. Marmion had a flair for such things, and at Tom’s request he’d put together a costume for “a mysterious Hindu magician” and this was what had come with George. The pants were actually a pair of the infamous “parachute pants” from the eighties whose owner had allegedly donated them only on condition that no one reveal who he was. The vest had come right out of the Lothlorien attic. The “clown shoes” and the turban were the only actual costume pieces—they weren’t actually “clown shoes,” though they were very flamboyant with their up-curled toes.

  “I guess it could be worse,” George said, after a moment of surveying Tom. “You could smuggle a Humvee in that hat. And are you wearing a dress?”

  “It’s a caftan,” Tom corrected, sourly.

  “It’s a granny-dress,” George snickered.

  Tom considered any number of responses and rejected them all. He needed George. Mundell was the only stage-magician in Grantville. He’d done it as a hobby for years before the Ring of Fire. Thereafter, once his sons Mike and Jim started working as apprentices with Philip Massinger’s troop of actors, he’d begun doing stage magic on a semi-professional basis. He’d gotten pretty damn good at it.

  “Let’s get this show on the road,” he said instead, and gestured to the two servants to pick up their bags and schlep them along.

  He felt very uncomfortable, with a manservant following him with a bag he could very well carry himself, but Herr Doktor Thomas Stone, master of Akashic Magick and scholar of the Chakras would never demean himself by carrying anything. Even Gupta Rai Singh, his assistant, was too important to be burdened with a bag. And the farce absolutely had to begin at the front door of the Roths’ palatial home. People would be watching. Word had been spread that the famous Herr Doktor Stone had come straight from Padua just to cure the king.

  So, they made a spectacle of themselves, trucking down to the waiting carriage, which he and George occupied alone, for even their baggage handlers were so important that they required their own carriage. They proceeded through the streets of Prague to the palace, with plenty of rubberneckers along the way. Tom remained serene, upright, and enveloped in dignity, but George fanned the flames of their reputation by producing small plastic coins out of thin air and tossing them to the crowd. Tom had been worried that people would be angry when they realized George’s coins weren’t spendable and weren’t even metal, but it seemed the opposite was the case. Once again, the exotic look of up-timer plastic fakery was valued as high as or higher than the real thing.

  So by the time they got to the palace, there was a substantial buzz in the streets. Some people might have known that Tom was allegedly a physician, and some might have known that he was (in name anyway) one of the up-timer industrialists—but no one until now had known he was a magician.

  George’s sleight of hand was good—very good. It had to be. He’d been the go-to guy for kids’ parties, and you had to be good to trick kids once they were old enough to suspect trickery. Big stage illusions—not so much, in no small part, he had told Tom once, because he didn’t have the skills to build them himself, and couldn’t afford the good ones. But he was good enough at close-up work that even when Tom knew exactly what he was doing, and when, and how, Tom still couldn’t catch him. This was going to prove important, because Tom was depending on him not only to convince Wallenstein that he was seeing solid evidence of that chakra nonsense Tom was about to spout, but because George was going to perform most of a physical exam that Wallenstein had no idea he was going to get. The king had flatly refused anyone permission to do the sort of examination that would actually tell them something. Even Edith wasn’t sure why, though Tom had a notion it might have less to do with either modesty or the concept of the King’s Sacred Person and a lot more to do with a very rational fear of assassination. Who would be more in a position to do a man in than his own physician?

  “No psychic surgery,” George had said, flatly, when he’d heard what Tom wanted of him. “Absolutely, positively, no psychic surgery.”

  “What?” Tom had replied, shocked. “No. I just want a blood pressure check, get his temp and heart-rate, stuff like that.”

  “Good. Nobody is pulling that particular scam here down-time yet, and I’d rather they didn’t get ideas,” George had said, his grim tone conveying, even over the radio, the depth of his loathing for the sleight-of-hand charlatans that “removed tumors psychically” from the bodies of gullible victims up-time.

  They descended the carriage and mounted the steps, followed by their entourage, and paused at the door for just a moment.

  He and George exchanged a look. To his relief, he saw George smiling ever so slightly.

  “It’s showtime,” George muttered out of the corner of his mouth, and as if that had been a cue, the doors swung open, and they stepped inside.

  * * *

  The king received them in a private audience chamber, and seemed quite impressed by their flamboyant outfits. Until Tom knew whether or not Wallenstein had high blood pressure or a dingy heart, he didn’t want to put any stress on the man; that limited him quite a bit in what he could do. Not so George. Tom was the distracter so George could do his work. He’d commissioned seven hand-blown glass bowls in graduated sizes, and ordered seven framed panes of stained glass in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and white, after getting the dimensions he needed from Edith. He positioned the king in a comfortable chair under the window that the sun was coming through, then mounted the red glass inside the window frame so that the king was bathed in red light.

  “I fear, Your Majesty,” Tom said, as Wallenstein peered at him through the ruddy light, “That the good Dr. Gribbleflotz is only partially correct in his interpretation of the aura. You see, he has not studied the secrets of the aura among the ancient sages of the Tibetan mountains as I have. They teach us that the aura is merely the outward reflection of the inward emanations of the seven chakras.”

  He then launched into a sermon on the chakras which owed as much to snake-oil medicine as it did to the little he remembered from the commune days. It really didn’t matter anyway, his son was right about that. All that mattered was that he was consistent, that what he said didn’t contradict Gribbleflotz so much as make Gribbleflotz look like the kid who had brought a baking-soda volcano to a science fair where other kids were showing off their dancing robots and osmotic sea-water purifiers. In this, he was helped immensely by George, who demonstrated a robust set of chakras by producing a “chakric resonator” in the form of a crystal wand that glowed the appropriate color when held over the appropriate spot on himself—and flickered and dimmed when held over the same spots on the king.

  All except for the blue one—which corresponded to a spot right at the throat (and was the “auric color” that Gribbleflotz had told the king was his own. George made that one glow strongly. The king stared at the wand in fascination.

  “Ah, now you see, all of your chakras are unbalanced,” Tom told him. “The only strong one is the Muskogee chakra, the chakra of communication and intellect. You are a man of your mind, Your Majesty. Your mind is the most powerful part of you. But by strengthening that part of your energy exclusively, you weaken the rest of your etheric body, exactly as if you concentrated on strengthening only your hand, until you could crush a walnut
with your fist, but your legs would not take you across a room unaided.”

  Since he couldn’t remember the Indian names for the chakras, he had finally just used the names of the home towns of some of his old friends. The chakra at the top of the head he called “Sheboygan,” followed by Mishawaka, Muskogee, Oskaloosa, Chillicothe, Oolagah and Austin.

  The king nodded. “That is how I feel ever since Doktor Gribbleflotz was reading my aura and telling me it was blue!” he exclaimed. “I thought I was to be—” He broke off, looking perplexed.

  “Now I will be examining your chakras with my colleague and assistant, Gupta,” Tom carried on blithely. “Then we will know what is to be done to re-balance you.”

  So the king sat in the red light while Tom dipped his fingers in a little water and made the biggest bowl “sing” by running his wet finger around the top of it, chanting nonsense syllables the entire time. The king’s eyes widened at that; evidently no one had invented the glass harmonica yet. Tibetan “singing bowls” were made of brass and made to sing in much the same fashion but using a wooden mallet—Tom had never quite mastered that, but he was pretty good at making wineglasses sing. George made mystical passes, made red silk handkerchiefs appear and vanish, did the same with glowing balls that he rolled around on his hands. Then they repeated the whole routine with orange light from an orange pane of glass, a higher pitched bowl, and so on right up to the white light. George meanwhile was getting a wealth of information.

  By the time they were done, poor Wallenstein was exhausted and more than willing to go back to his bed while Tom and George “consulted” and “made their calculations and charts” to present to him the following day.

  In reality they went back to the Roths’, and Tom holed up with the radio and the closely-written pages of notes, consulting not with the stars, but with Dr. Nichols back in Magdeburg. Some things were obvious—Wallenstein had gout, for instance, a common complaint among nobles whose diets were worse than any American teenager who lived on fast food. His heart was definitely dodgy. By process of elimination, they figured he had a chronic infection somewhere.

  “The heart’s going to kill him eventually,” Nichols said, “I’d say three, four years.” Tom clearly heard the frustration in Nichols’ voice, and he sympathized. Things that could have been treated with a couple generic prescriptions up-time were deadly now, and sometimes he could tell it grated on the Doc that Tom often knew more about what worked in the here and now than he did, with all of his experience and medical knowledge. “But you’ve got foxglove to keep him going, and the point is mostly to get the baby past the danger zone of infancy, according to Mike and Ed.”

  “We can improve his diet some, if I put enough mystical spin on it. Garlic and kelp might clear up that infection, especially if it’s his tonsils; heck, I know I can make a Lister’s Fluid he can gargle with. Or if it’s in an infected tooth, maybe Edith can get him to get the tooth pulled.” Tom rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. “I’ll see what I can figure out. He’s a tough old bastard, and he might surprise us. Look how long Henry the Eighth lasted, and he not only had a lot of the same problems, he had an abscessed leg too.”

  “I hate this,” Nichols said, after a long pause. “I hate knowing that I know what to do, if only I had a modern operating theater, if only I had the right drugs, if only—”

  “Don’t beat yourself up, Doc,” Tom interrupted. “Look at it this way. You and me, we’re still managing to save people no one down-time could before.” He said that, and he knew as he said it that it wouldn’t help much. Nichols was a real doctor; he had never been in medicine for the money, but because medicine was his calling. “And have patience. We’re getting antibiotics. We’ve got chloramphenicol and even some small amounts of penicillin. We’ll get there.”

  “Providing quacks like Gribbleflotz don’t kill them first,” Doc said sourly. “All right, I’ve used up my allotted time. Good luck.”

  Tom didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye; the voice of someone else, calling another station, immediately filled the speakers. He turned off the set, gathered up his notes, and headed for bed. Enough for now; tomorrow they’d start treatments and see if their guesses were going to work.

  * * *

  The treatments had begun to work. Tom really had not expected such a quick result, but already Wallenstein’s color was better, his breathing had eased thanks to the rosemary-infused steam he was inhaling, and Tom thought his BP might be going down. That might have been partly the placebo effect, partly the effect of just getting some of the king’s other conditions under control.

  Whatever, there was progress, and it was beginning to look as if he and George would be able to go back to Grantville and leave things in Edith’s hands.

  Which was, of course, the moment when everything went pear-shaped.

  * * *

  “I’m going to kill him,” George said for the fifty-sixth time. “I am going to mug Gribbleflotz in a dark alley, tear out his liver, and feed it to him.”

  Dr. Gribbleflotz had been closeted with the king all morning, and the longer he was in there, the more convinced Tom became that things were not looking good for Chakras versus Kirlian.

  Still. They had an ace in the hole, and that was Edith. Wallenstein trusted her as he trusted no one else.

  But George was pacing up and down the antechamber they had been sent to wait in, muttering. Tom had never seen him this agitated before. Something more was going on here than Tom was aware of, obviously, but if George wasn’t going to say anything—

  That was when Edith entered the room, and she didn’t even have to say anything; the expression on her homely face told both of them everything they needed to know.

  George was already angry—but it was Tom who suddenly felt himself overcome with fury.

  “Come on,” he growled, “Follow my lead.” And before Edith could say or do anything at all, he charged towards the king’s private chambers. Fortunately, Edith managed to sprint ahead of them, or they might have gotten skewered on the halberds of Wallenstein’s guards.

  As it was, when they burst through the doors together, both Gribbleflotz and the king nearly jumped out of their skins.

  “Thanks be to the Lord Jesus!” Tom bellowed. “I am here in time! Gupta! The violet ray! This is an emergency!”

  And he leapt, not for the king, but for Gribbleflotz.

  “Doctor, God save us,” he shouted, pulling the first thing he could lay his hands on out of his sleeve—it was an atomizer full of Lister solution—and spraying Gribbleflotz liberally. “Your chakras are fluctuating so dangerously that we felt the effects in the antechambers!”

  George meanwhile had fished out the little flashlight they’d put a tiny scrap of blue theatrical gel on and was playing it into Gribbleflotz’s startled eyes.

  “I beg your pardon, Majesty,” Tom continued, waving a quartz crystal point all over Gribbleflotz’s upper torso. “We dared not wait any longer. Your devoted doctor has put his own life in jeopardy by treating so many sufferers. His Mishawaka is utterly drained, his Sheboygan enlarged, and the rest of his chakras so muddled it is a wonder he has not collapsed before now!”

  “They are?” Gribbleflotz managed, face stricken with doubt. “It is?”

  Now George took over. “When you drink wine at dinner, do you sometimes feel dizzy when you rise, sahib?” he asked, earnestly, carefully mangling his German. “Do you find yourself waking in the night with a terrible need to relieve yourself? Do you find yourself stumbling over nothing? Do you sometimes forget a word or a name that you know as well as your own?”

  Gribbleflotz paled. The doubt on his face was erased by slowly growing fear.

  George had managed to palm one of his little lights, and he suddenly thrust it at Gribbleflotz’s belly, where it began to flash most alarmingly. “Sahib! Dr. Thomas!” George screamed in panic. “The Mishawaka! There is no time! I must operate!”

  Before anyone in the room could react, Tom sho
ved Gribbleflotz down into a chair, and ruthlessly yanked up or tore open his clothing, exposing a very pale belly. In an instant, George had plunged his fingers into that belly, as both the king and Gribbleflotz’s eyes bulged and the king’s guards backed away, making furtive signs against evil.

  One of them fainted dead away as George pulled his hand back out, bloody and sticky, and opened them to reveal a mass of what looked like bloody hair and things best left unidentified. “You see!” George shouted. “You see! It was almost too late!”

  Gribbleflotz fainted dead away.

  * * *

  Back in Grantville at last, Tom and George gave the president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia their reports in person. Ed Piazza had come up from the new provincial capital at Bamberg to hear their report, on his way to Magdeburg. He’d pass the information along to Mike Stearns and Rebecca Abrabanel later, when the current political ruckus settled down. The dynastic situation in Bohemia was important but not exactly an urgent matter.

  “Although I thought you said no psychic surgery,” Tom said. “I thought—”

  “Look,” George growled. “I’m not proud of myself, all right? I hate those bastards. But we needed something dramatic, something that couldn’t be explained away as up-timer science, and we needed it right then. I had the feeling we might, so I helped myself to some stuff from the kitchen and a hairball one of the cats coughed up that morning. When I saw he wasn’t falling for your crystal waving, I played my ace. Do not ask me to do it again.”

  “I won’t,” Tom replied. He didn’t add that he was making no promises about Ed Piazza or Mike Stearns.

  “So, the treatments are going well, then?” Ed prodded.

  Tom nodded. “Wallenstein’s actually making some improvement—he’s not going on any long hikes, but he’s able to do pretty much everything that a king needs to do on most days. Edith’s pleased. She asked me about the dyes I used in his medicines. I just told her they’re safe enough. I didn’t have the guts to tell her that Doc Nichols said congestive heart failure is going to kill him long before the dye will.”