by Larry Niven
“We may need him. I may know of a source of very powerful mana.”
“Where?”
“I’ll reserve that. Do the words ‘god within a god’ mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“Good.” The skull chuckled. “We’ll see what develops tomorrow. See to it that this…Orolandes is with us when we meet your friends. You, Orolandes, have you got a room here?”
“I can get one.”
“Meet us at dawn, for breakfast.”
Orolandes nodded and walked out. There was no spring in his walk. His sword hilt he left lying in a corner.
Fistfall
From Prissthil’s gate one could make out an elliptical depression, oddly regular, in the background of low green hills. Time had eroded Fistfall’s borders; they disappeared as one came near. Greenery had covered the pits and dirt piles where earlier men had dug for starstone. From what must be the rim, Orolandes could see only that the land sloped gradually down, then gradually up again.
It was just past sunrise; there was still shadow in the hollow. Orolandes shivered in the morning chill.
The old man did not shiver, though he walked naked to the waist. A talking skull sat on his shoulder, fastened by straps over the lower jaw. He and the skull and the younger man chatted as they walked: trivia mixed with incomprehensible shop talk mixed with reminiscence from many lifetimes.
Orolandes shivered. He had fallen among magicians, willingly and by design, and he was not sure of his sanity. Before that terrible day in Atlantis he would never have considered a magician to be anything but an enemy.
In the village of the fisherfolk Orolandes had waited for the images to go away. Don’t speak of it, don’t think of it; the vivid memories would fade.
But in the dark of sleep the sea would rise up and up and over to swallow the world, with his spoils and his men and the people he’d conquered. He would snap awake then, to stare into the dark until it turned light.
Or on a bright afternoon he would heave at the awkward weight of a net filled with fish…and he would remember pulling at the limp, awkwardly right-angled centaur girl, trying to get her up on the broken roof. She’d had to lie on her side; he’d felt unspeakably clumsy trying to give her artificial respiration. But he’d seen her breathe at last! He’d seen her eyelids flicker open, seen her head lift and look at him…seen the life go out of her then, draining away to somewhere else.
What had happened that day? If he knew why, then the horror would leave him, and the guilt…He had clung to that notion until last night. Now he knew. What the magicians had told him was worse than he had imagined.
The notion he clung to now might be the silliest of all. Orolandes could read nothing in the white bone face of the dead magician. Even to its friends it was a tolerated evil. But nobody else had offered Orolandes any breath of comfort.
On the strength of a skull’s vague promise, he was here. He would wait and see.
The Warlock felt uncommonly alive. As they moved into Fistfall his vision and his hearing sharpened, his normal dyspepsia eased. Over the centuries the townspeople had removed every tiniest fragment of the boulder that had come flaming down from the skies; but vaporized rock had condensed and sifted down all over this region, and there was no removing it. Old spells took new strength.
Down there in the shadow, two walked uphill toward them.
“I recognize Mirandee,” said Clubfoot. “Would that be Piranther?”
“I think so. I only met him once.”
Clubfoot laughed. “Once was enough?”
“I’m surprised he came. We didn’t part as friends. I was so sure I was right, I got a little carried away. Well, but that was fifty years ago.” The Warlock turned to the swordsman. “Orolandes, I should have said it before. You can still turn back.”
The big man’s hand kept brushing his empty scabbard. He looked at the Warlock with too-wide eyes and said, “No.”
“You are about to learn the secrets of magicians. It isn’t likely you’ll learn too much, but if you do, we may have to tamper with your memory.”
It was the first time the Warlock had seen him smile. The swordsman said, “There are parts you can cut out while you’re about it.”
“Do you mean that?”
“I’m not sure. What kind of man is that? Or is it the woman’s familiar?”
The man approaching them was small and dark-skinned and naked in the autumn chill. His hair was white and puffy as a ripe dandelion. A skin bag hung on a thong around his neck.
“His people are powerful and touchy,” said Clubfoot. “Be polite.”
Piranther’s companion was a head taller than he was, a slender woman in a vivid blue robe. Snow-white hair fell to her waist and bobbed with her walk. Mirandee and the Warlock had dwelt together in a year long past, sharing knowledge and other things, experimenting with sex magic in a way that was only partly professional.
But now her eyes only brushed the Warlock and moved on. “Clubfoot, a pleasure to see you again! And your friends.” Visibly she wondered what the scarred, brawny, bewildered man was doing here. Then she turned back to the Warlock, and the blood drained from her face.
What was this? Was she reacting to the bizarre decorated skull on his shoulder? No. She took a half-step forward and said, “Oh my gods! Warlock!”
So that was it. “The magic goes away,” he told her gently. “I wish I’d thought to send you some warning. I see that your own youth spells have held better.”
“Well, but I’m younger. But you are all right?”
“I live. I walk. My mind is intact. I’m two hundred and forty years old, Mirandee.”
Wavyhill spoke from the Warlock’s shoulder. “He’s in better shape than I am.”
The woman’s eyes shifted, her brow lifted in enquiry.
“I am Wavyhill. Mirandee, I know you by reputation.”
“And I you.” Her voice turned winter-cold. “Warlock, is it proper that we deal with this…murderer?”
“For his skill and his knowledge, I think so.”
The skull cackled. “I know too much to be absent, my dear. Trust me, Mirandee, and forgive me the lives of a few dozens of mundanes. We’re here to restore the magic that once infused the world. I want that more than you do. Obviously.”
But Mirandee was looking at the Warlock when she answered Wavyhill. “No. You don’t.”
The age-withered black man spoke for the first time. “Skull, I sense the ambition in you. Otherwise you conceal your thoughts. What is it you hide?”
“I would bow if I could. Piranther, I am honored to meet you,” said Wavyhill. “Do you know of the god within a god?”
Piranther’s brow wrinkled. “These words mean nothing to me.”
“Then I have knowledge you need. A point for bargaining. Please notice that I am more helpless than any infant. On that basis, will you let me stay? I won’t ask you to trust me.”
Piranther’s eyes shifted. His face was as blank as his mind, and his mind was as dark and hidden as the floor of the ocean. “Warlock, I should be gratified that you still live. And you must be Clubfoot; I know you by reputation. But who are you, sir?”
“Orolandes. I, I was asked to come.”
Wavyhill said, “I asked him. His motives are good. Let him stay.”
Piranther half-smiled. “On trust?”
Wavyhill snorted. “You’re a magician, they say. Read his mind. He hasn’t the defenses of a turtle.”
That, and Piranther’s slow impassive nod…“No!” cried Orolandes, and his hand spasmed above the empty scabbard. He backed away.
The skull said, “Stop it, Greek. What have you to hide?”
Orolandes moaned. His guilt was agony; he wanted to burrow in the ground. One flash of hate he felt for these who would judge him: for the Warlock’s sympathy, the woman’s cool curiosity, the black demon’s indifference, the red magician’s irritation at time-wasting preliminaries. But Orolandes had already judged himself. He stood fast.
Corpses floated in shoals around his raft. They covered the sea as far as the horizon. Sharks and killer whales leapt among them…
Piranther made a grimace of distaste. “You might have warned me. Oh, very well, Wavyhill, he’s certainly harmless. But he trusts you no more than I do.”
“And why should he?”
Piranther shrugged. He settled gracefully onto a small grassy hillock. “I had hoped to be addressing thirty or forty trained magicians. It bodes ill for us that no more than five could come. But here we are. Who speaks?”
Cosmology
There was an awkward pause. Clubfoot said, “If nobody else wants to…”
“Proceed.”
Mirandee and the Warlock settled cross-legged on the ground.
Clubfoot looked toward Mount Valhalla, collecting his thoughts. He may have been regretting his temerity. After all, he was the youngest of the magicians present. Well—
“First there were the gods,” he said. “Earth sparkled with magic in those days, and nothing was impossible. The first god almost certainly created himself. Later gods may not have been that powerful, but there are tales of mountains piled one on another to reach sky-dwelling gods and overthrow them, of a god torn to pieces and the fragments forming whole pantheons, of the sun being stopped in its track for trivial purposes. The gods’ lives were fueled by magic, not fire. Eventually the mana level dropped too low, and the gods went mythical…as I suppose we’d die if fires stopped burning.
“We still have the habit of thanking the gods, mundanes and sorcerers alike. With reason. Before they died, some of the gods played at making other forms of life. Their creations were their survivors. Some live by what seems to be slow-burning fire…men, foxes, rabbits…and most plants use fire from the sun. Other plants and beasts use fire and mana both. We find unicorns surviving in mana-poor regions, though the colts are born with stunted horns, or none. But many mana-dependent peoples are going mythical: mer-people, dragons, centaurs, elves. Hey—”
Clubfoot did a strange thing for a man making a speech. He darted over to a boulder, heaved at it and turned it over. Underneath was a blob of grayish jelly two feet across.
In his youth the Warlock had killed carnivorous goo the size of houses. To a mere warrior they were more dangerous than dragons: a sword was generally too short to reach the beast’s nucleus. By contrast this goo was tiny. It was formless and translucent, with darker organs and vacuoles of food showing within its body. It arched itself in the morning sunlight and tried to flow into Clubfoot’s shadow.
“There! That’s what I’m talking about!” Clubfoot cried. “The goo are surviving, but look at it. Goo are named for the first word spoken by a baby. They’re said to be children of the first god: formless, adaptable, created in the image of the Crawling Chaos. We saw them smaller than a man’s fist in the desert, where the mana is poor. Do you see how small it’s gotten? Goo live by fire and magic, but they can use fire alone. When the world is barren of magic the goo will remain, but they’ll probably be too small to see.
“And we’ll survive, because we live by fire alone. But we’ll be farmers or merchants or entertainers, and the swordsmen will rule the world. That’s why we’re here. Not to save the centaurs or the dragons or the goo. To save ourselves.”
“Thank you. You’re very eloquent,” said Piranther. He seemed to have taken charge, with little challenge from anyone. He looked about at the rest. “Suggestions?”
Mirandee said, “What about your project, Piranther? Fifty years ago you were going to map the mana-rich regions of the world.”
“And I said that was self-limiting,” said the Warlock.
“And you called me a short-sighted fool,” Piranther said without heat. “But we carried through in spite of you. As you know, there are places human magicians never reached or settled, where the mana remains strong. I need hardly point out that they are the least desirable living places in the world. The land beneath the ice of the South Pole. In the north, the ice itself. The clouds. Any fool who watches clouds can tell you they’re magic. I know spells to render cloud-stuff solid and to shape it into castles and the like.”
“So do I,” said the Warlock.
“So did Sheefyre,” Mirandee said dryly. “The witch Sheefyre will not be joining us. She took a fall. Where are you on a cloudscape when the mana runs out?”
“Precisely. It was our major problem,” Piranther said. “There are places one can practice magic, but when the spells stop working, where are you? A desert, or an inaccessible mountaintop, or the terrible cold of the South Pole. But our search turned up one place of refuge, an unknown body of land in the southern hemisphere.
“Australia was probably infested with demons until recently. They’re gone now. All we have of them is the myth of a Hell under the world. But why else should the fifth largest land mass in the world have been uninhabited until we came? You know that when we finished our mapping project,” said Piranther, “I took my people there, all who would go. The mana is rich. There are new fruits and roots and meat animals. On a nearby island we found a giant bird, the moa, the finest meat animal in the world—”
The Warlock grinned. “Do I hear an invitation to emigrate?”
For a moment Piranther looked like a trapped thing. Then the bland, expressionless mask was back. He said, “I’m afraid we have no room for you.”
“What, in the world’s fifth largest land mass?”
“At the conference fifty years ago you said…what was it you said? You said that mapping mana-rich places only brings magicians to use up the mana. So—” Piranther shrugged delicately. “I take you at your word.”
They looked at him. He was hiding something…and he knew they knew…“I must,” he said. “The castles we raised by magic along the coast are falling down. The ambrosia is dying. We must migrate inland. I fear the results if my students can’t learn to use less powerful spells.”
“They’ll go further and further inland,” Mirandee said in a dreamy voice, “using the mana as they go.” Her face was blank, her eyes blind. Sometimes the gift of prophecy came on her thus, without warning. “Thousands of years from now the swordsmen will come, to find small black people in the barren center of the continent, starving and powerless, making magic with pointing-bones that no longer work.”
“There is no need to be so vivid,” Piranther said coldly.
Mirandee started. Her eyes focused. “Was I talking? What did I say?”
But nobody thought it tactful to tell her. Clubfoot cleared his throat and said, “Undersea?”
The Warlock shook his head. “No good. There’s nothing to breathe in the water, and the mana is in the sea floor. When the spells fail, where are you?” He looked around him. “Shall we face facts? There’s no place to hide. If we can’t bring the magic back to the world, we might as well give it to the swordsmen.”
Piranther asked, “Do you have something in mind?”
“An outside source. The Moon.”
Nobody laughed. Even the Greek swordsman only gaped at him. Piranther’s wrinkled face remained immobile as he said, “You must have been thinking this through for hundreds of years. Is this really your best suggestion?”
“Yes. Silly as it sounds. May I expound?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t have to say anything that isn’t obvious. Stones and iron fall from the sky every night. They burn out before they touch earth. Their power for magic is low; it has to be used fast, while they still burn.
“Some starstones do reach earth. The bigger they are, the more power they carry. Correct?” The Warlock did not wait for an answer. “The Moon is huge. Watch it at moonrise and you’ll know. It should carry enormous power—far more than the Fist carried, for instance. In fact, it must. What else but magic could hold it up? I suggest that the Moon carries more mana than the world has seen since the gods died.
“But you don’t need me to tell you that, do you?—Orolandes, is there magic in the Moon?”
The ex-soldier started. “Why ask me? I know no magic.” He shrugged uncomfortably. “All right, yes, there’s magic in the Moon. Anyone can feel it.”
“We all know that,” said Piranther. “How do you propose to use it?”
“I don’t know. If our spells could reach the Moon at all, its own mana would let us land it.”
“This all seems very…hypothetical,” Mirandee said delicately. “I don’t know what holds the Moon up. Do you? Does anyone?”
There were blank looks. Wavyhill’s skull cackled. “We could pull the Moon down and find we’d used up all the mana doing it.”
Mirandee was exasperated. “Well, then, does anyone know how big the Moon is? Because the bigger it is, the higher it must be, and the harder it’s going to hit! It could be thousands of miles up!”
“It must be tremendous,” Piranther said. “From Iceland and from Australia, it looks exactly the same. Nothing remotely as large has ever struck earth. Otherwise we’d find old records of a time when there were two moons.”
“We’ll have to give it plenty of room, if we solve the other problems.” The Warlock hesitated. “I’d thought of the Gobi Desert.”
Wavyhill said, “There’s even more room in the Pacific.”
Clubfoot made a rude noise. “Tidal waves. And we couldn’t get to it after it sank.” He tugged thoughtfully at a single braid of straight black hair. “Why not the South Pole? No, forget I said that. The Moon never gets over the Poles.”
Piranther wore an irritating half-smile. “Basics, brothers, basics. We don’t know how big the Moon is. We don’t know what it weighs, or what holds it up. We don’t have magic powerful enough to reach it. You’re all thinking like novices, trying to do it all in one crackling powerful ceremony of enchantment, whereas in fact we need spells and power to reach the Moon, and study it, and learn enough to tell us what to do next, and finally to use that magic to tap the Moon’s power.” His smile deepened. “There is nothing in the world today that is sufficiently sacred to do all that. Warlock, you once called me a short-sighted fool. I will not call you short-sighted. Your daydream would be work for generations, if it could be done at all.”