The Magick of Camelot

by Arthur H. Landis

  Outside, in the great courtyard, I set their laser beams to burn and let them fire off a few practice rounds at the walls. They were pleased as punch with the new toy and would have seared every brick in the battlements had I not called a halt to it Their enthusiasm being what it was, I feared for what they would do inside the Alphian ship if there was the slightest resistance. All blasters, I concluded, would be left behind. Anything that might harm or even immobilize the ship was out!

  While they practiced, under the care of Kriloy, I had time to question our two chosen Alphian guides further.

  “What,” I asked, “can we expect in terms of a night watch?”

  The Alphian who had previously volunteered information wrinkled his brow at that “What,” he asked, “is a night watch?”

  “A commander and a handful of men, in the command room.”

  Our particularly limited sky lord with a video star’s features, then said in puzzlement, “But the ship is at rest. There is nothing for anyone to do… So we do what we please.”

  Probing further and somewhat stunned by his answers, I asked, “How many officers have you, other than Tarkiis?”

  “None.”

  “I see. And he was your commander?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if he had been killed?”

  “Someone else would be. Perhaps Diis would say.” I jumped on that “And how is Diis contacted?”

  “He contacts us, through the god communicator.”

  “But how would you contact him?”

  “The same way. But it is never done.”

  “Why not, if he is your god?”

  Hie speaker looked at me blankly. “Why he is a god. There is no reason. It is not done.”

  “When were you last contacted?” I was onto something, though I didn’t quite know what if was.

  “This morning.”

  “What did Diis say?”

  “That the others of the fleet would Join us here, for a few days.”

  Oh, ho. Hooli’d tapped the god communicator. “Why?” I asked.

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Well didn’t he tell you anything else?” My exasperation was a tingling anger. What little respect I’d had for them as sperm-bank types with an extremely limited education was fast slipping down the drain.

  “He said that he would talk to us then.”

  “When?” I grated the word.

  “When the ships come.” ‘

  “But can he not speak to the ships wherever they are, at any time?”

  “Yes.”

  I tried another approach. “Did he speak of trouble? Did he warn you of—other ships?”

  “We are fully warned of that All ships other than our own will be fought when he is near—and gives the word.”

  “And if he is not?”

  “If he’s on the other side we are not to bother unless we are attacked.”

  “That is why you attacked our ship?”

  “Others of ours attacked your ship and were lost; that was before we came through the mists to here.”

  The “mists” I took to mean the warp. I shook my head. Gods! What did it look like through his eyes, really? “And on this side?” I continued. “When you attacked us on this side, too; what of that?”

  “But we didn’t attack you on this side.”

  “But Diis, the sphere did. Were you not ordered then to attack us too?’

  “No.”

  “Because Diis attacked for you, right?”

  “No. Diis didn’t attack, and we were not ordered to attack.”

  A hot chill shot down the length of my spinal cord. “You mean that our ship was not destroyed?”

  He looked at me curiously. “Not by us. We fled from it. Diis let it live.”

  “Where did you go?”

  ‘To the south of here. To that other land beyond the water.”

  I was sweating all over, but I got back to the original problem. “So he now thinks that other ships will come tomorrow, right? And that is why the others have been summoned?”

  “No. He didn’t say that.”

  “But he wants them here, just in case—of danger?”

  “I don’t know. He will talk to us tomorrow.” I chanced it. I asked, “If he talks to you tomorrow, what do you think hell say as to what has happened here tonight?”

  By now the man was exceedingly uncomfortable. I warrant he’d never been asked to think, to reason on anything before. I’m sure his head was hurting. “I do not know.”

  “But even if I allow you to tell him, what then?”

  “But no one talks to Diis.”

  “Do you think he already knows?”

  “Yes. He is a god.”

  “But do you know he already knows?”

  He shook his head and repeated again: “He is a god.”

  The practice firing over, Kriloy. the only true alien among us, had sat silently, stolidly by my side and heard nothing. His single desire, it seemed, was to make himself invisible. I sympathized with him. I really did. I’d long categorized him as the basic intellectual clerk, the kind who’d choose to live in a small Anglicized cottage not far from his job, have a rose garden to dawdle in, a library with all the right books, the best of sound equipment and season’s tickets for everything worthwhile. He hadn’t changed across ten centuries. He was what he was—and I liked him for it. He’d been given a room not too far from my own, though I’m sure he’d have preferred the scout ship.

  I dismissed him and we moved to go about our business.

  Bright moonlight and the tail end of Ripple just making it over the horizon. The sky boots we wore were like those worn by the Deneb’s crew, light, silent, and feather-soft We passed like so many wraiths over the great bridge; phantoms, racing the coming sun, drained by the excesses of some grand Walpurgis Eve. From the bridge it was but a few hundred yards to the ship.

  Its design, as stated, was almost standard; which says a great deal for the effects of the parallel technological evolution among all sentients. The main body was a duel-level ovoid, with control room, sensor pods, sleeping and recreational quarters and the like. To the rear on corridored shaft appendages were the great CT converters. The nuclear engine was suspended below, something on the order of the leaded keel of a sailing ship.

  We seized it without a shot being fired, and it was as simple as that. I used Tarkiis’s pack to open the prime exit, a simple device, also on the sound-vibratory principle. A door swung out, the ladder-platform mechanism came out and down. We climbed it and entered….

  It took myself and Rawl just thirty seconds to find the control room and to witness that it was just as our Alphian said it would be—empty!

  Then we split, Gen-Rondin with nine of us going down the right half-circle corridor, and myself with the remaining nine going down the left half-circle corridor. We found our first Alphian and his lady, en flagrante sexualis extremis; which, in this case, meant in die act, as it were. We disarmed him, then marched them down the corridor to the next sleeping pod, collected our second man, etc. I hardly need add that my comrades, together with the half-dozen or so Marackian swordsmen given us by Fel-Holdt could scarce contain their hilarity after the first two. It was like a surprise raid in a brothel; what would we find behind the next door? And we were surprised. For in this area, at least, the sperm samples of the great race of Kentii had been quick to learn.

  The two corridors met in the rec-room to the rear. We arrived almost simultaneously with our forty naked Alphians , and their forty naked ladies; upon which Murie demanded furiously that all of them be sent immediately back to get their clothes, though she hadn’t been all that modest during their capture.

  Not a one of them had put up a fight or asked a question. They were unhappy, however; though irritated is more the word, for what ,was happening to them. Their ladies exhibited a similar irritation. I was prompted to remark to Murie upon this most interesting phenomenon, saying that even though our Marackian lovelies were here because
they’d been brought here and had no choice in’ the matter; still, that very lack of choice had also relieved them of a proper responsibility. In effect, I told her, grinning the while, the old adage, relax and enjoy, seems to have been on the order of the day. I even reminded her that, as she herself had put it, the standard sky lord as opposed to the standard Marackian, well there was just no comparing. One was perfection; the other, a ploughboy. Why not then enjoy them, while they had them?

  Rawl, listening solemnly to what I had to say, could not help but agree, profusely—and got a slap in the face from Caroween to equal the one I got from Murie at the undeniable correctness of my analysis….

  And that was that And if one dared to think about it, he could only conclude that Murie, who’d introduced this Achilles heel of simple sex to the Alphians, had been quite knowledgeable of its potency as a weapon to be used against them….

  Kriloy, as my surrogate, slept aboard the ship. He was fresh. I was dead on my feet. He was instructed to familiarize himself with its armament, since on the morrow it would be him and me at the weapons controls. As a last point before tearing myself away from his unhappy visage, I suggested softly that he cheer up—that from now on we had nothing to fear from the sphere.

  He grew very solemn; screwed up his eyes and studied my face. He simply couldn’t accept my statement as a fact as any Marackian would. He had to ask, “Why, Kyrie? Just why the hell do we suddenly have nothing to fear from the sphere?”

  “Because I say so, buddy. The missing pieces are coming together. And that’s all you’re going to hear, except that with a bit of luck, by this time tomorrow there’ll be a lot of singing in Marack and perhaps some dancing in the streets.”

  I bedded with Murie in her apartment high in the east tower. We didn’t make love. We were too drawn out, too drained. That would come later. Bathed-and relaxed, she just sort of put herself within my arms, both of us propped against the pillows and mother-naked against the soft and oh, so sweetly perfumed night breeze.

  She said just once against my chest, “Well, my lord, would you like to hear now of all the things that have happened?” I grimaced. “Another time. I’m still male enough to pass on that for now. Still, there is a parallel from my far world, of a lady called Godiva who rode the streets of her capital, naked, to free her people from unjust taxes. Her fame, my love, lived on in saga long after those with little minds and priest-ridden souls had gone then-way…”

  “Why, now.” Murie sat up, pleased with the tale. “That one seems a queen as she should truly be. But still, my lord, there are things I must tell you.”

  “Nay,” I begged. “Later—mayhap when this pelt of yours is more gray than gold.”

  “But there’s a thing, great fool, that I must say.” • “Must?”

  “‘Tis that I’m pregnant, Collin.”

  “The hell you are.”

  “By god!” She reached to grab my ears and to stare into my eyes. “What, my lord, do you mean by that?”

  “Just that I hadn’t thought it would be so soon.”

  “You are disturbed, you bastard?”

  “Nay, my lady.” I grinned wickedly. “But you might be.”

  “Explain yourself.”

  “Well. I’m reminded that you showed distaste for those of my comrades aboard the Deneb for their lack of fur.”

  “But you have fur.”

  “Indeed I do. But ‘tis a thing of science-witchcraft. A child of ours could very well be furless. Moreover, their eyes were generally brown, or dark. Remember?”

  “But yours are purple-blue, like my own.”

  “Nay, my love.” I passed a hand before my eyes and dropped the contacts. “Voila!” I said. “Brown!”

  “By Ormon’s grace!” she exclaimed, peering closely. And then, “They are sort of pretty, my lord. Indeed, one senses a softness, a kindness not too much visible before. There’s even a hint of understanding, too, which I swear has been hidden all these months. Well! So you have blue-purple and brown. You must make me a pair of brown, too, my lord. It is not well for a queen to lack that which her consort has.” She smiled happily. “Well be a pair. And if all goes well tomorrow; well, ‘tis still summer. The height of the ‘season’ lies before us; what with our brown eyes—and our marriage, well be the rage.”

  I sighed, said, “Come. Sleep. There are still a few things left to do….”

  We breakfasted aboard the Alphian ship, now christened Ormon’s Bliss, since it had had no name of its own. The naming came from our stout student-warrior, Kodder, and was a bit of a double entendre, referring to a famed brothel, now destroyed, which had held forth for many years right next to the king’s collegium.

  Great Fomalhaut I arose and nothing happened. It climbed the eastern sky until the tenth hour, and still nothing happened. To the southwest the sphere’s surface continued bluely iridescent. Nothing had changed there except that it also seemed, for whatever reason, to be growing ever smaller.

  To say that nothing was happening, however, is not exactly correct. Something totally unexpected was happening. For purely Marackian reasons—though Rondin and Elioseen, joining us on the Alphian ship, said not to worry since it would in no way interfere in what we had to do—the king and queen, plus a few of the remaining lords of Marack who had not been slain and were filtering back, were making a festive occasion out of the engagement to be; of ourselves with the alien ships. This savoir-faire of the royal house, considering, was remarkable; their trust in me, unconscionable, since if I lost, and survived, I’d then have no other recourse but the Terran anachronism of hara-kiri.

  The Alphian weapons were: CT pencil-shells, which became clouds and could only be used in deep space. Two batteries of laser beams with a range of a hundred thousand miles or better. Two batteries of ion-projectors with a tremendous implosion potential, and a double bank of heavy weapons with plain old nuclear warheads.

  The laser and ion beams were at speed of light. They were, therefore, in terms of in-atmosphere fighting, unobservable by any scanner until after the fact In essence, at speed of light in an atmosphere, release and impact are simultaneous.

  I knew this. Hooli knew it. Even my unhappy, and therefore quite dopey Kriloy knew it. If the Alphians knew it, well that was the extent of it. They presupposed nothing and were therefore prepared for nothing.… Their two ships—and the rumor of a malfunctioning on the part of the remaining two was apparently correct—came sailing in on anti-gravs around high noon, at about two thousand feet.

  I’d had all bridge communications switched direct to weapons control—so that if either or both of the ships made contact it would be with me. They did, but only to appear on the viewer to say that they were coming in. That I didn’t reply bothered them not a bit. It was as if they hadn’t expected me to.

  Kriloy was at one weapons computer bank, I was at the other. Each bank fed two heavy lasers. On target, we hit the data-fire bars almost simultaneously. Four great laser beams, two to each ship, instantly destroyed the enemy anti-gravs and all of his sensor pods.

  They hadn’t a chance. Their automatics cut in with an attempt to switch to mag-line power, or CT-nuclear. But at two thousand feet, no way. Before ever they got a positive wobble, they’d smashed into the ground through the thick foliage of the forest southeast of Glagmaron City.

  And that was it.

  Crowds from the city had gathered on the far edge of the field to watch. They cheered hysterically. King Olith Caronne and his sister, the Lady Elioseen, with Queen Tyndil and sundry lords led by Commander Fel-Holdt, then came down from the bridge towers to advance toward our ship. Their intent? To salute us personally and with the proper accolades.

  Hooli—and this was another first—rode with the king. He had a reason. It was made known immediately; to me, that is. At the skirt of the bridge where it was anchored on the plateau side of the chasm or ravine splitting the field from the castle, the king’s dottle halted—seemingly of its own accord. Those of Garonne’s entourage imm
ediately followed suit; though with puzzled, frowning expressions.

  Caronne, seeing that the dottle would respond to neither his verbal nor his physical commands, baton, spurs, and the like, simply shrugged and relaxed against his saddle’s high cantle. He then awaited the outcome of whatever the dottle had in mind, with a purely Fregisian form of patience.

  The dottle bowed its head as if in an act of genuflection. Its saver mane covered its great blue eyes. Hooli then tight-roped out from where he’d been clinging to the saddle horn to position himself at the point of the animal’s descending neck. Again he held the silver flute…. I switched my contacts to ten mags so that I was but a few feet short of eyeball contact. I received no friendly wink, nor even the slightest attempt at fun and games. The little black eyes were wide, solemn. Again he blew but a single note. .To me it lasted scarcely a second. To the others? Well, apparently he’d gone far beyond my frequency, for they still listened. Odd that I. would learn precisely then that Fregisian hearing could approximate that of a Terran dog….