The Magick of Camelot

by Arthur H. Landis

  I waved back, said straight-faced as he approached me, “More of the post-Victorian, right, nougat-head? You do have your predilections. But you’re entitled.”

  “You’re forgetting the source, buddy; to wit, you. Still the milieu, gaslights, bowlers and Doctor Jekylls, has its attractions. …”

  “Touche!”

  “Well, buddy.” He took a seat on the grass and fired up his Holmes pipe. “What can I do to put your mind at ease?”

  “Just tell me the story, round-ball, about who did what to whom, and why.”

  “You figure it’s about that time, huh?”

  “Yep. It’s about that time.”

  “No matter how dull?”

  “Hooli—Get on with it.”

  He grinned his Cheshire grin, made the pipe disappear, adjusted his purple shades and placed his paws in back of his head BO’S to rest both head and paws against the bole of an English oak…. He said, “Well. It goes like this, Kyrie:

  “Once upon a time, two beings from a universe beyond the comprehension of intelligent life in your galaxy were sent as watchers to another, dying universe; specifically, the one beyond the gateway. Their purpose? To observe and record the process of its death. The objective? To eventually control that process, to be able to reverse it, to keep it in stasis, or to speed it up, depending upon the requirements of its varied life forms. I generalize in this case, buddy, since there were no life forms in the universe beyond the gateway.”

  “Magus Og!” I couldn’t help exclaiming aloud.

  “Bear with me, buddy. There are many such universes. Too many, perhaps. But all must have their watchers. In the case of the two beings, however, the single small galaxy of that quite simple universe was possessed in its final stages of an inordinate amount of pulsars and collapsars—these last, if you remember correctly, Kyrie, are the black holes of all your warp-punching nightmares.

  “The years passed, eons of your time. The simple phenomenon of beta-decay, indigenous to the intensely powerful magnetic fields of pulsars and collapsars, had an insidious effect upon our two beings; the more so because of an unawareness on their part of its overall potential as applied to themselves. Their lives, bordering on immortality, were shortened; their minds, ruined beyond all hope of repair. Indeed, the creeping totality of the effect was such that they could no longer remember from where they came, or who and what they were. One of them, however, and for whatever reasons, experienced a remission sufficiently strong so as to allow him to grasp for a short span the vague outlines of his glorious past With this sole bit of knowledge, and knowing, too, that the process of their decay was irreversible, he prevailed upon the other to join in two things: To produce a third entity of their kind and then to flee with it to a safe universe, along with the data so long collected.

  “Ill as they were, and we are androgynous, by the way, though this is not as simple as it sounds, they produced me, and then began to create the gateway. Allow me at this point to state that normally, for such entities, no gateway is needed. In this case, however, he who was wholly mad could no longer project himself; thus the need. The first, who was but partly mad, was bound by unimaginable ties to save him.

  “We succeeded—and by this time it was we, for I had already achieved my first five thousand years, in your time sense. Indeed, we succeeded, but only to find ourselves in the very heart of that greatest of humanoid tragedies, war; and this time in its ultimate and most destructive form, a boiling holocaust of nuclear obliteration. To paraphrase your Bard with but one slight change: We were the victims of a tragedy of errors….

  “He who was but partly mad escaped back through the gateway. He who was completely mad escaped to Fregis in an Alphian host; physically, I mean; and I’ll not go into the details. He did this, of course, in one of the very ships that I had renovated for the rescue of the Alphian remnants.

  “Unbelievable as it may sound, I did not know for tens of decades that he who was wholly mad still lived. And then, a new phenomenon… . Though his madness was irreversible, free of beta-decay, he was regaining health—and power. I could only watch the process fearfully. A monster was being born on Fregis, the like of which this galaxy, even this universe, if not protected, would long remember. And I, by the very nature of my being, could not destroy him; whereas he could, and most assuredly would, destroy me—if he knew I lived.

  Then you came, Kyrie. And both of us, working together for disparate reasons, but mostly for the same goal, destroyed him. Unbeknownst to you, however, the first being had again come through the gateway. His purpose? To live and to search for me; this, though in his mind he was convinced that both I and the other were surely dead. Sick, and more so than ever now, he created his humanoid-servos from Alphian sperm and ovum banks; rebuilt and renovated the Alphian ships that have lain so long in the buried ruins of underground cities. They would work for him, protect him, provide that which he could no longer provide… . Might I suggest that he and they were truly ‘the blind leading the blind’? I knew he had returned. For as you have seen me, Kyrie, I need no spaceship to cross the void, any void. I had hoped to prevent him from leaving Alpha; to accost him just there With the fact that I was alive. And then to demand my right of maturity! But he, too, was not sane. Remember? He’d searched the planets of Fomalhaut II. I was not there. He would therefore go to Fomalhaut I. His first choice, without a doubt, was Fregis. And he found the still living Alphian-Fregisians there. Remember the two-day hiatus? It allowed for a briefing of his ‘robots’ as to who they were and why they were here….

  “But though he sought me, Kyrie, I still feared him. I repeat, he was not sane; indeed, could easily be more dangerous than our Dark One. My intent, therefore, was the same: to present myself to him only at the time of my maturity, which is a period in the life of such as we that lasts for hours only, but which must be used for a melding with another of our species who is already mature. A part of the mature one is then passed to the immature one so that he becomes a complete being—able to fully reproduce himself!

  “And so, whether on Alpha or Fregis, I had but to wait for my maturity; indeed, it is what I’ve been waiting for all this time. The act of melding, a step higher than merging, cannot be refused. It is an inherited, conditioned, must. It is the priority; the only priority of all our race. In this case, by presenting myself then and only then, I would .achieve the following: He .could not refuse me; nor could he harm me. I would become a complete being. He, because of what he had become across the eons of beta-decay, would not survive the meeting….”

  He paused to observe me through a pair of merry, self-confident, Pug-Boo eyes. He then snatched his Holmes pipe from nowhere, knocked out the ash, filled it and fired up again.

  I said, “Hooli. You’re sure the one for detail.”

  “Oh, well, look, I just wanted to hit the high points.”

  “I mean that pipe, brown-bag. So that’s the way it was. You were fooling around on Alpha, decided to check me out, and found yourself in the Pug-Boo aboard the Deneb-W

  He grinned and blew a perfect ring.

  “Scared the shit out of you didn’t it?”

  “Sure did. I had to do that business with the Deneb to keep your admiral from blowing my boy into dust-bunnies. But first, I had to get you to get the Deneb back to Fregis; get you out of the ship and down to Marack. Without your being there, Kyrie, things could have been a helluva lot rougher—for the Fregisians, I mean—when my boy and his surrogates landed.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  “On the other hand, if you had just let up when I told you to. …”

  “Gog shit! You saved my ass, true; and I’m sure you would have done that anyway. But then you touted me back to Glagmaron to rescue Murie, so you said. In reality, I was your ace in the hole, to keep the Alphians from zapping you in case your boy had gone sufficiently nuts to ignore your maturity syndrome. Even with them out of the way, you still couldn’t come down on him if he came at you. But you damn well knew I’d
have to, and would! You had it all worked out, brown-bag.”

  This time his grin of pleasure literally split his hairy little face. “You hit it, Collin. I confess. He had a presentiment of peril. He knew I’d be coming. He just couldn’t believe it A contradiction. He distrusted his own, limited sanity. You see, like me, he knew the very hour and minute of my birthing; therefore, he also knew the hours and minutes of my maturity.…”

  “Wow!” I said, in contemplation.

  “I owe you, Kyrie.”

  I switched. “So you put a power dram on my poor Kriloy’s bypass to back up that weird story of a pre-nova CT sun being tapped through the gateway… You are the one, Hooli.”

  “I had to, otherwise, you’d have been screwing things up all over the place. Besides, no one got hurt beyond the usual.”

  I asked, curious, “What is your energy source?”

  “For just everyday living? Solar power. Any sun within a billion or so miles. All I have to do is breathe. Anything beyond that, well, I’d have to go to work. I don’t store all that energy.”

  “Like the Dark One did?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “We’re back to ‘no comment’?”

  “Not really. It’s just too damn complicated to explain.”

  “And the Deneb could have destroyed our boy?”

  “Yep.”

  “And you, too?”

  “Only during the hours of my maturity period; when the Alphians could have got me—when you could have got me—otherwise, it would have had to pin me down and that’s next to impossible. I’ve got mind control, Kyrie, and not just over minds. And when you get right down to it, that’s about ninety-nine percent of the ball game.”

  “Hooli. What would have happened if I’d not been there to take out the Alphians, etc., and you had been killed? Give me a straight answer.”

  He said solemnly, “Barring the quick death of the remaining being, I cannot imagine a survival of this system, or of that of the binary. And he would have gone on, too. For when I say he was dying, I’m thinking within our time sense, Kyrie, not yours. He could have been around for another thousand or so of your years.”

  “Question, and I’m just hitting around now: If you are your own space vehicle—and even our most recent visitor made it to Fregis from Alpha on his own—even considering a space-warp jump—why then couldn’t the first D.O. return to Alpha and the gateway on his own?”

  “I honestly don’t know. My conclusion is that since he was the craziest of our trio and had automatically assumed our deaths, that he’d simply extended this conceptual flaw to the gateway, too.”

  “Weird.”

  “Elementary. He was as mad as a hatter.”

  “We’ve dumped the Alphians, you know. Dropped them off in a valley in upper Om. We left food, clothing and shelter for a year or so, plus the tools to survive. But there are no women. None would volunteer.”

  Hooli shrugged.

  I decided to hit him with the big one. “What,” I asked slyly, “of the powers of the Lady Elioseen, of Goolbie, Fairwyn, Gaati? It seems to me that their witchcraft, their sorcery went somewhat beyond the ordinary.”

  “The ordinary?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I’d caught him again. And if I hadn’t asked, he’d never have told me. I wasn’t so sure he’d tell me now.

  He made noises, frowned, blew a lot of smoke rings and finally said, “Well magick, Kyrie, that is in the accepted sense of the word, is unacceptable to all you straights, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well. Look at it this way: What would be true magick to you is not true magick to me—or to the D.O. and his uncle. And there is simply no way to explain that.”

  “Try, Hooli: Real hard.”

  “Well I can cast a real spell. I can turn you into a flimpl or a dust mop. I can put you into a sound sleep, and with my personal guarantee that only a princess with one blue eye and one red and weighing one-hundred-seven-and-one-half pounds can wake you up, etc., etc. . . To you, that’s magic. To me it is not. It’s all a part of the same big picture. You see, even with yourself as an undeveloped humanoid, the potential for an understanding of what I’m saying is there. This being true, the potential for doing it is there too. All one has to do with that inactivized frontal brain mass is to—”

  I was staring at him in absolute awe, it had hit me that hard. I whispered hoarsely, “Hooli? You didn’t do that, did you? You didn’t mess around with Elioseen, Goolbie, and those others?”

  He looked as sheepish, then, as a rodentius drusis could possibly look. He said, “I’m afraid I did, but only a little bit”

  “To how many, across the years?”

  “Maybe a thousand or so. I had to give the north a weapon, Kyrie; something that my insaner third couldn’t trace to me. Then, given time, and if he got to me first, and if they developed it properly, well, then they could beat him on their own. They were just beginning to really learn….”

  “That wasn’t very adult of you, Hooli.”

  “Who the hell ever said I was an adult? And I’m not sorry, either.”

  “You can reverse it, right?”

  “Nope. It’s irreversible. Not only that, it inevitably becomes an hereditary factor.”

  I sighed. “Bloody Jesus! And this is your gift to us before you go off to play among the stars?”

  “Kyrie,” he then said flatly, and I could see he was dead serious. “Look at it positively. With magick you can’t implode a sun or vaporize a world; nor can you poison a planetary ocean, or make a desert out of teeming forest lands. There are serious, natural limitations to magick. I wouldn’t worry all that much. Indeed, from what I’ve seen inside your head and those of some of your constituents, if I were you, I’d prefer the magick any day to what you have….”

  I sighed again. “But the greater part of it is still dependent upon sound and the mag-field and its use, right?”

  “Right,” and he winked. “Fregis’s mag-field.”

  “Good enough. Ill stick to that as your story. Hopefully, our Elioseen who, with the Lord Oen-Rondin, is going to Foundation Center and from there to other places, will play ft cool.”

  He grinned again. “Not to worry. Most of it will be linked forever to Fregis anyway.”

  I brightened. “Hey! I like that. A World of Magick, unlike any other. And it will always be that way … What will you do now, Hooli?”

  “Relax. Observe. Go galaxy hopping for the next few thousand years. After that, well, I’ve got to find my roots. That means universe hopping. They’re out there you know, those from whom I came. I must find them.”

  I sighed again.

  He got up and stretched, and I saw that one of his legs was missing. He’d already begun to fade.

  He said, “I love you, Kyrie.”

  “I love you, too, Hooli. Will I ever see you again?”

  “Sure.” His eyes glittered. He hobbled his head and his tongue came out to do its pendulum swing. He dearly loved to make me laugh.

  Then he straightened his jacket and his brimmed beanie and said softly, “Tell ya what, buddy. If you ever want me, I mean really want me for something, well all you have to do is to say these numbers….”

  And he came to where I sat, also leaning against a tree bole, stood on his one visible tippy-toe, put his small paws on my shoulder—and whispered them in my ear.