THE WANTON OF ARGUS aka THE SPACE-TIME JUGGLER

by John Brunner

  And still it clung to him, like an engulfing kiss, a wet kiss from a demon, till there was nothing but it.

  And a bubble which showed Kelab’s face, lean, cut and bruised, but oddly content, saying, “If you fall into the trap of believing, you’re lost.”

  He had almost believed!

  With a shout he stretched out his arms and tore the illusion apart. The blackness divided with a sigh and beyond he saw a familiar scene. A ship—a lean black ship, her sides shiny with wet. Brown concrete underfoot, a gray sky above. The spaceport at Oppidum!

  This was reality, Kelab had said. Then they had won?

  Kelab, his face tired but jubilant, nodded. His headscarf was gone and his clothes ripped, but he stood by the fin of his ship and smiled. And beside him, alive and well, Sharla! He cried out in joy and strode forward to take her in his arms. The greatest prize of all—

  And then he heard Kelab’s voice say again, “If you fall into the trap of believing—”

  Landor was quick, but Ordovic was quicker. He whirled, and saw that there were no low buildings at the port edge, no city of Oppidum beyond. The concrete ended at his feet.

  This is illusion!

  He laughed, and at his laughter the illusion cracked and fell in a thousand shards and there was more blackness.

  Even the blackness was not real blackness, for he could sense—more than see—the figure of the conjurer on his left, lean and serious, and behind him the soft cheeks and pendulous jowl of Sabura Mona. They overshadowed the galaxy, and the Nebula In Andromeda floated behind Kelab and was dwarfed by him. He himself was as a shadow beside him.

  He knew the reason. This was the true Kelab, who held worlds in the hollow of his hand.

  And it was as if he could hear mighty footfalls in the distance, a vastly slow and measured and inevitable tread. Kelab and Sabura Mona looked up expectantly, waiting.

  At last Landor was coming face to face with his antagonists, and for the scene of the last battle he had chosen the deeps between the stars.

  He came almost casually up to Sabura Mona and Kelab, looked at them, and made as if to pass them by.

  Sabura Mona blocked his way.

  He flickered like a blue flame, and there was no Sabura Mona, only a vague impression that was nothing more than a change in the outline of empty space. She was there still, Ordovic knew. But she was powerless.

  Landor said, in a voice that was more than any mere speech could be, “Kelab, this is between us two.”

  Kelab nodded, his bright smoky eyes on Landor’s face. He was watching, waiting—?

  Then Ordovic understood. The fight was on already, a battle of wills, without physical reality. And as soon as he realized that, he saw the weapons they used.

  He saw Landor facing a flame from which—impossibly—Kelab looked out. He saw the lightnings that flared and flamed and heard the soundless clash of mind on mind. They matched illusions—hot worlds, cold worlds, pseudo-realities scuttered like rabbits through the circle of their minds. Sometimes Ordovic recognized one of the ingredients that made up the worlds he had been through. More often they were greater, more terrifying: some there were almost too big for the mind to hold, that distended the powers of imagination to unveil things from the darkest corners of the brain, that made him almost scream aloud in pain.

  Kelab engulfed them in bright clean flame and whirled them to nothing.

  Then came a formless universe of horror that made him rock and stagger, and Landor was after his advantage like lightning. Kelab recovered and came back, a splendid figure dripping flame at his fingertips, hurling bolts of silent lightning, but Landor seemed like a mountain, untouched by fire. He had made Kelab falter once. He was bent on doing it again.

  He did. The flames on Kelab’s body died for a moment and he staggered. Landor made one step forward and his right hand swept down like a sword, bearing horror and fear and shapeless insanity.

  And Kelab poised for a moment and tumbled headlong into an endless black gulf.

  Landor stood for a moment, vast and inscrutable, and then his icy composure shattered and fell apart, and he passed his hand across his forehead wearily, while Ordovic stared in sheer horror. He had not for one second believed that Landor would win. What would become of him now?

  Then, as Landor turned slowly, an expression of savage triumph on his face, he felt something in his mind that chilled him with awe. He heard Kelab’s voice say quietly, “This is reality, Ordovic.”

  And suddenly he was not only Ordovic. He was part of a great shining organism among the stars that was the human race, and he towered over the galaxies and over Landor, who froze with his face set in a mask of terror.

  Then he was striding after him, and Landor was a tiny black figure running desperately, more afraid than he had ever been, a deformity, a blot on the shining beauty of the human race.

  And he was lost in a bottomless gulf, turning over and over, while the walls of the past fled by him and he fell beyond space and beyond time into the formless not-being before the universe was, where he would never do harm again.

  Then the horizons of the universe closed in around Ordovic, and he suddenly had weight again. There was a lean ship before him, her sides rain-wet and glistening, and brown concrete beneath his feet.

  “This too is reality,” said a quiet voice. He turned and saw Kelab standing where he had stood before, unmarked save for the content on his face. He found that he himself was also unhurt. But there was a monstrous tiredness in his mind, and a fading memory of a temporary glory that was beyond imagining.

  And—his eyes lifted and met hers—Sharla, too, on the top step of the flight leading to the lock. But of Landor not one sign. He said, “So we won.”

  Kelab nodded, “He is gone now, and I must be about the setting to rights of the Empire. You, of course, must go, and Leueen whom you know as Sharla, and Andra be installed as Regent.”

  Ordovic said, “But the people had high hopes of Sharla. Will they stand for it?”

  “A long time ago,” said Kelab, “a poet you would not have heard of said something about making us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of. There you have the people of Argus. Besides, there are rumors that their hopes were unfounded—I and Andra, whom I visited last night, have seen to that. For instance, yesterday you made rather a brutal threat to a slave—one Samsar. Today at dawn that slave was found, mutilated according to your threats, on the Street of the Morning. Andra’s doing—not mine. And it is now common knowledge that Leueen-Sharla was a woman of easy virtue, which is itself a bar to the Regency. They may regret your passing, but there are still the prophecies, so they will sigh and say it was foreordained.”

  “Is it not strange that a conjurer should regulate the destiny of worlds? Why a conjurer, Kelab?”

  Kelab’s face grew soft. He said, “To put aside my powers would be to me as cutting off your hands would be to you. As a conjurer I can use them, for show ‘tis true, but you cannot hide a sun under a dishcover. Thus I use them without exciting comment. Even so,” his smoky eyes showed somber regret, “I miss the sense of being part of the human race.”

  Ordovic was about to speak, recalling that brief moment of splendor when Kelab stepped into his mind, but the conjurer made a tiny gesture with one hand and he had a sensation as of something tremendous that instant forgotten. He shook his head to clear it.

  Kelab continued, “I can buy you passage on a ship whose captain will ask no questions. You are an Outlander, Ordovic—and so is she.”

  Ordovic’s eyes went up to the blonde girl whom he had called Sharla.

  “She is very beautiful even if she is not the regent of an empire,” said Kelab. “And I think she is in love with you.”

  She came down the steps to Ordovic and put her arm around his waist, smiling. They looked at each other for a long time. Then she turned to Kelab.

  “Which is this ship you spoke of?” she said.

  “Yonder,” said Kelab the Co
njurer.