“Levitation?” Dillon said in a faint voice, and stood up to meet Felipe’s innocent gaze. “Felipe. What happened?” The young man shrugged.
“Quién sabe? One suspects magic. Ah, well. At any rate”—and Felipe patted El Jeep’s rusty dashboard affectionately—“at any rate, the poor little one is saved, and—why, now that I think of it, so is Pueblo Pequeño.”
“Ole!” cried all the villagers approvingly.
Time had passed. Tio Ignacio turned they muñeco of El Jeep hopelessly in his gnarled hands.
“I am sorry, señor,” he told Dillon. “It is the same thing that happened when I put a spell on Felipe when he was a bad little boy. The spell was too weak, and Felipe became vigoroso instead of getting a fever or measles. After that, he was immune to magic.”
“But El Jeep didn’t become vigoroso,” Dillon said in a desperate voice. “El Jeep flew.”
Tio Ignacio nodded.
“A thing can do only that which is possible to it,” he explained. “Felipe could not fly. No man is capable of flight. But there are men who are strong. So any man may become strong.”
“Go on,” Dillon said feebly.
“Puis, a machine cannot become vigoroso. But there are machines of flight like your own. So any machine may become one. As El Jeep has done now, because my first spells were too weak, so that he developed immunity.”
“But it’s physically impossible! A machine of flight, yes. But El Jeep’s built to move along the ground, not through the air.”
“And fish are built to swim. Yet the flying fish flies, truly.”
“It doesn’t. It glides. It jumps out of the water when bigger fish chase it.”
“El Jeep jumped off the ground when my magic chased him,” said the wizard, with an air of complacent triumph.
There was a deadlocked pause.
“See!” cried Tio Ignacio, pointing.
In the distance, up over the rooftops of Pueblo Pequeño, rose El Jeep, laden with baskets of prawns, Felipe at the wheel. There was a far outburst of cheering.
The jeep turned, about a hundred feet up, and headed eastward. Felipe looked down and waved at the two men. Then the car was beyond the cliff and steadily moving over the Gulf toward Guaymas.
Tio Ignacio hopefully flung the muñeco into the water. There was a small splash. El Jeep remained airborne. The wizard shrugged.
“Ah, well,” he said. “All things happen for the best. Now, instead of taking the prawns to Santa Rosalia, Felipe will fly them directly to Guaymas across the Gulf. As you have desired, señor. At the beginning of our negotiations, you observed that you wished the prawns to fly to Guaymas. This occurs. So if you will now pay me two hundred pesos, the conclusion of these events will be completely harmonious.”
Dillon stared after the dwindling shape of El Jeep.
“And I call myself a business man,” he murmured, as though to himself. “Me, Tom Dillon, the guy who’s never been outsmarted in a business deal. Well, there goes my record. This is the first time I ever came out of a deal showing a loss instead of a profit, and I still don’t know how the con was worked. If I only knew . . .”
He stiffened. He turned his head and met the wizard’s wicked old eyes. Then, very quickly, Dillon looked away.
“So that’s it,” he said. “I’ll be damned.” And, suddenly, Dillon looked vastly relieved.
“Tio Ignacio,” he said, carefully watching the horizon.
“Señor?”
“When did you first hypnotize me?”
“Hypnotize you? But I did not—”
“Of course you did,” Dillon said, his voice firmer now. “There’s no other possible answer. Except magic, and—with all due respect—I don’t believe in magic. I thought I saw El Jeep fly. Well, jeeps don’t fly. But people can be hypnotized. You’re a smart business man, Tio Ignacio.”
“I know nothing of business, señor. I am only a poor old wizard—”
“You,” said Dillon, “are a crook. But now my eyes are open. Do you still have the nerve to say I owe you two hundred pesos?”
“A bargain is a bargain. The prawns did not go to Santa Rosalia. Moreover, to you the sum is a small one.”
“Well, you just try and get it,” Dillon said triumphantly, and turned away.
“One moment, señor,” the wizard called. “One moment. Let us, at least, part friends. I will agree that you owe me nothing. Let us forget that. And, to make an end, perhaps you will accept a small souvenir to prove that I hold no ill will.”
Dillon hesitated and glanced back. From the folds of his grimy serape Tio Ignacio had extracted a little clay image. Something about the doll made Dillon’s heart jump.
“What have you got there?” he asked quickly.
“This toy?” the wizard said. “Merely a souvenir—”
“That’s a muñeco of me!”
“Of you, señor? Well, there is a certain resemblance, I must admit,” Tio Ignacio agreed, examining the doll. “However, you do not believe in magic, so what of that? Now, if you will accept this small gift—”
Dillon, somewhat pale, reached.
“One moment. It is customary among men of good will to exchange gifts,” said Tio Ignacio reprovingly, withholding the image. “So if you wish to give me, merely as a souvenir, a few pesos, perhaps—let us say, the amount we agreed upon as payment for that last spell . . . ah. Muchas gracias, señor. Muchas gracias!”
A CROSS OF CENTURIES
It is the custom in these pages to attempt to introduce each writer in a light vein, but here, and in the story that follows, lightness is hardly possible. Not long after Henry Kuttner wrote this story he began a new and demanding writing job for the movies; put in his first day at the studio and worked rather long; found himself tired and went home. He died in his sleep that night Henry Kuttner was a young man, and a man who was much admired and much loved. There is no replacing him. There is only a permanent vacuum where the fine stories he would yet have written should have joined those fine stories already complete; and a permanent, personal loss to all of his friends.
They called him Christ. But he was not the Man Who had toiled up the long road to Golgotha five thousand years before. They called him Buddha and Mohammed; they called him the Lamb, and the Blessed of God. They called him the Prince of Peace and the Immortal One.
His name was Tyrell.
He had come up another road now, the steep path that led to the monastery on the mountain, and he stood for a moment blinking against the bright sunlight. His white robe was stained with the ritual black.
The girl beside him touched his arm and urged him gently forward. He stepped into the shadow of the gateway.
Then he hesitated and looked back. The road had led up to a level mountain meadow where the monastery stood, and the meadow was dazzling green with early spring. Faintly, far away, he felt a wrenching sorrow at the thought of leaving all this brightness, but he sensed that things would be better very soon. And the brightness was far away. It was not quite real any more. The girl touched his arm again and he nodded obediently and moved forward, feeling the troubling touch of approaching loss that his tired mind could not understand now.
I am very old, he thought.
In the courtyard the priests bowed before him. Mons, the leader, was standing at the other end of a broad pool that sent back the bottomless blue of the sky. Now and again the water was ruffled by a cool, soft breeze.
Old habits sent their messages along his nerves. Tyrell raised his hand and blessed them all.
His voice spoke the remembered phrases quietly.
“Let there be peace. On all the troubled earth, on all the worlds and in God’s blessed sky between, let there be peace. The powers of—of——” his hand wavered; then he remembered—“the powers of darkness have no strength against God’s love and understanding. I bring you God’s word. It is love; it is understanding; it is peace.”
They waited till he had finished. It was the wrong time and the wrong ritual. B
ut that did not matter, since he was the Messiah.
Mons, at the other end of the pool, signaled. The girl beside Tyrell put her hands gently on the shoulders of his robe.
Mons cried, “Immortal, will you cast off your stained garment and with it the sins of time?”
Tyrell looked vaguely across the pool.
“Will you bless the worlds with another century of your holy presence?”
Tyrell remembered some words.
“I leave in peace; I return in peace,” he said.
The girl gently pulled off the white robe, knelt, and removed Tyrell’s sandals. Naked, he stood at the pool’s edge.
He looked like a boy of twenty. He was two thousand years old.
Some deep trouble touched him. Mons had lifted his arm, summoning, but Tyrell looked around confusedly and met the girl’s gray eyes.
“Nerina?” he murmured.
“Go in the pool,” she whispered. “Swim across it.”
He put out his hand and touched hers. She felt that wonderful current of gentleness that was his indomitable strength She pressed his hand tightly, trying to reach through the clouds in his mind, trying to make him know that it would be all right again, that she would be waiting—as she had waited for his resurrection three times already now, in the last three hundred years.
She was much younger than Tyrell, but she was immortal too.
For an instant the mists cleared from his blue eyes.
“Wait for me, Nerina,” he said. Then, with a return of his old skill, he went into the pool with a clean dive.
She watched him swim across, surely and steadily. There was nothing wrong with his body; there never was, no matter how old he grew. It was only his mind that stiffened, grooved deeper into the iron ruts of time, lost its friction with the present, so that his memory would fragment away little by little. But the oldest memories went last, and the automatic memories last of all.
She was conscious of her own body, young and strong and beautiful, as it would always be. Her mind . . . there was an answer to that too. She was watching the answer.
I am greatly blessed, she thought. Of all women on all the worlds, I am the Bride of Tyrell, and the only other immortal ever born.
Lovingly and with reverence she watched him swim. At her feet his discarded robe lay, stained with the memories of a hundred years.
It did not seem so long ago. She could remember it very clearly, the last time she had watched Tyrell swim across the pool. And there had been one time before that—and that had been the first. For her; not for Tyrell.
He came dripping out of the water and hesitated. She felt a strong pang at the change in him from strong sureness to bewildered questioning. But Mons was ready. He reached out and took Tyrell’s hand. He led the Messiah toward a door in the high monastery wall and through it. She thought that Tyrell looked back at her, with the tenderness that was always there in his deep, wonderful calm.
A priest picked up the stained robe from her feet and carried it away. It would be washed clean now and placed on the altar, the spherical tabernacle shaped like the mother world. Dazzling white again, its folds would hang softly about the earth.
It would be washed clean, as Tyrell’s mind would be washed clean too, rinsed of the clogging deposit of memories that a century had brought.
The priests were filing away. She glanced back, beyond the open gateway, to the sharply beautiful green of the mountain meadow, spring grass sensuously reaching to the sun after the winter’s snow. Immortal, she thought, lifting her arms high, feeling the eternal blood, ichor of gods, singing in deep rhythm through her body. Tyrell was the one who suffered. I have no price to pay for this—wonder.
Twenty centuries.
And the first century must have been utter horror.
Her mind turned from the hidden mists of history that was legend now, seeing only a glimpse of the calm White Christ moving through that chaos of roaring evil when the earth was blackened, when it ran scarlet with hate and anguish. Ragnarok, Armageddon, Hour of the Antichrist—two thousand years ago!
Scourged, steadfast, preaching his word of love and peace, the White Messiah had walked like light through earth’s descent into hell.
And he had lived, and the forces of evil had destroyed themselves, and the worlds had found peace now—had found peace so long ago that the Hour of the Antichrist was lost to memory; it was legend.
Lost, even to Tyrell’s memory. She was glad of that. It would have been terrible to remember. She turned chill at the thought of what martyrdom he must have endured.
But it was the Day of the Messiah now, and Nerina, the only other immortal ever born, looked with reverence and love at the empty doorway through which Tyrell had gone.
She glanced down at the blue pool. A cool wind ruffled its surface; a cloud moved lightly past the sun, shadowing all the bright day.
It would be seventy years before she would swim the pool again. And when she did, when she woke, she would find Tyrell’s blue eyes watching her, his hand closing lightly over hers, raising her to join him in the youth that was the springtime where they lived forever.
Her gray eyes watched him; her hand touched his as he lay on the couch. But still he did not waken.
She glanced up anxiously at Mons.
He nodded reassuringly.
She felt the slightest movement against her hand.
His eyelids trembled. Slowly they lifted. The calm, deep certainty was still there in the blue eyes that had seen so much, in the mind that had forgotten so much. Tyrell looked at her for a moment. Then he smiled.
Nerina said shakily, “Each time I’m afraid that you’ll forget me.”
Mons said, “We always give him back his memories of you, Blessed of God. We always will.” He leaned over Tyrell. “Immortal, have you truly wakened?”
“Yes,” Tyrell said, and thrust himself upright, swinging his legs over the edge of the couch, rising to his feet in a swift, sure motion. He glanced around, saw the new robe ready, pure white, and drew it on. Both Nerina and Mons saw that there was no more hesitancy in his actions. Beyond the eternal body, the mind was young and sure and unclouded again.
Mons knelt, and Nerina knelt too. The priest said softly, “We thank God that a new Incarnation is permitted. May peace reign in this cycle, and in all the cycles beyond.”
Tyrell lifted Nerina to her feet. He reached down and drew Mons upright too.
“Mons, Mons,” he said, almost chidingly. “Every century I’m treated less like a man and more like a god. If you’d been alive a few hundred years ago—well, they still prayed when I woke, but they didn’t kneel. I’m a man, Mons. Don’t forget that.”
Mons said, “You brought peace to the worlds.”
‘Then may I have something to eat, in return?”
Mons bowed and went out. Tyrell turned quickly to Nerina. The strong gentleness of his arms drew her close.
“If I never woke, sometime—” he said. “You’d be the hardest thing of all to give up. I didn’t know how lonely I was till I found another immortal.”
“We have a week here in the monastery,” she said. “A week’s retreat, before we go home. I like being here with you best of all.”
“Wait a while,” he said. “A few more centuries and you’ll lose that attitude of reverence. I wish you would. Love’s better—and who else can I love this way?”
She thought of the centuries of loneliness he had had, and her whole body ached with love and compassion.
After the kiss, she drew back and looked at him thoughtfully.
“You’ve changed again,” she said. “It’s still you, but—”
“But what?”
“You’re gentler, somehow.”
Tyrell laughed.
“Each time, they wash out my mind and give me a new set of memories. Oh, most of the old ones, but the total’s a little different. It always is. Things are more peaceful now than they were a century ago. So my mind is tailored to fit the times. Otherwis
e I’d gradually become an anachronism.” He frowned slightly. “Who’s that?”
She glanced at the door.
“Mons? No. It’s no one.”
“Oh? Well . . . yes, we’ll have a week’s retreat. Time to think and integrate my retailored personality. And the past——” He hesitated again.
She said, “I wish I’d been bora earlier. I could have been with you—”
“No,” he said quickly. “At least—not too far back.”
“Was it so bad?”
He shrugged.
“I don’t know how true my memories are any more. I’m glad I don’t remember more than I do. But I remember enough. The legends are right.” His face shadowed with sorrow. “The big wars . . . hell was loosed. Hell was omnipotent! The Antichrist walked in the noonday sun, and men feared that which is high . . . His gaze lifted to the pale low ceiling of the room, seeing beyond it. “Men had turned into beasts. Into devils. I spoke of peace to them, and they tried to kill me. I bore it. I was immortal, by God’s grace. Yet they could have killed me. I am vulnerable to weapons.” He drew a deep, long breath. “Immortality was not enough. God’s will preserved me, so that I could go on preaching peace until, little by little, the maimed beasts remembered their souls and reached up out of hell . . .”
She had never heard him talk like this.
Gently she touched his hand.
He came back to her.
“It’s over,” he said. “The past is dead. We have today.”
From the distance the priests chanted a paean of joy and gratitude.
The next afternoon she saw him at the end of a corridor leaning over something huddled and dark. She ran forward. He was bent down beside the body of a priest, and when Nerina called out, he shivered and stood up, his face white and appalled.
She looked down and her face, too, went white.
The priest was dead. There were blue marks on his throat, and his neck was broken, his head twisted monstrously.
Tyrell moved to shield the body from her gaze.
Collected Fiction Page 796