A Sudden Wild Magic Read online

  He slept, and the dreams of chemicals and lancets returned. But after a while, other things flitted behind those dreams, like birds going secretly from bough to bough inside the foliage of a tree. Behind the machines of the hospital, he had more than one glimpse of a blue fortress with five sides and odd-shaped towers, and occasionally there was rolling countryside with a subtly Mediterranean look. Eventually, as if the leaves dropped one by one from the tree and left the birds in full view, the hospital images fell away to show a deep tawny tone. He was somewhere very high up where everything was this curious color. There he accompanied several other people on what seemed to be an inspection of their borders and the defenses on those borders. He was relieved to find the defenses of Britain standing like a wall of amber. They were unbroken, and yet he had a feeling something was seeping under them. But as he tried to turn his attention to the defenses of Europe and the distant gamboge of America behind him, he found that the inspection party was moving on, outward and upward, on a voyage none of them had ever thought to make before. They seemed to be driven on by strong anger. He followed, in his dream, puzzled, and found that they came to the borders of the universe.

  The dream image of this outer boundary beggared description, since there were many boundaries, all weaving and writhing and partially interwoven like thick, honey-colored rainbows. Some even seemed to occupy the same space as others. The dream was forced to simplify. At first it looked like a bucket of water into which concentrated tawny dye had been stirred. But when none of the watchers could make sense of this either, the dream simplified again, and they walked the edges of fields that were also seashores, stretching from them in all directions, upward, downward, slanting and standing on end, piled up into the sky, and piled likewise into the transparent amber depths below. Mark marveled in his dream. He had not known there were so many.

  Most fields ended as simple seashore, though some had low walls with gates in them, and some hedges or lines of trees. But the party walked along its own shore until they came to one that was different, because it was defended. In the dream, it was represented as a tangle of barbed wire all around the amber field. Though it looked dark and unnatural enough, there were moments when it took on the look of a giant hedge of brambles. Beyond it, a stretch of sand had notices stuck into it at intervals: BEWARE MINEFIELD. Even in the dream, Mark was aware he was seeing an absurd diagram of a threat he would otherwise not be able to visualize at all. He, together with the rest of the party, surveyed the defenses glumly. There was no way into that field. Then his eyes fell on a large pipe, leading under the barbed wire from the field where he stood. In the distance, beyond the mined sand, he could just see the pipe disgorging a gush of substance from his own field into that other, defended place. There was no doubt that this place was the one he had been looking for.

  Meanwhile, someone else in the party was pointing out that the defended field seemed to have a satellite. It hung in the distance far out over the center of the field. It looked like a writhing amber lens.

  “Laputa,” this person said.

  “A James Blish city,” said someone else.

  Mark brought dream-binoculars out and took a closer look at the distant undulating lens thing.

  This was where the blue pentagonal tower was, he discovered, although now he could see that the structure was in fact more like a walled city with a flat base, built of some kind of blue stone. As he swept his glasses across it, he saw that it was old and that there were people in it, looking back at him through binoculars not unlike his own…

  * * *

  5

  « ^ »

  Mark awoke to find Gladys standing panting at his bedside with a supper of fish and chips. This surprised him rather more than her announcement that Maureen and Amanda were waiting for him downstairs. He struggled up and leaned against the creaking headboard, beset with anxiety. “What time is it? How long have they been here?”

  “A bit after midnight. They both got here around eight,” she told him.

  At least three cats were asleep on the bed. Another was curled up in his jacket. He stared at them with undiminished anxiety as he took the tray and thanked Gladys.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I wish you weren’t such a worrier, but I suppose it’s in your nature. Nobody knows where they really are.”

  Probably true, he thought. Every member of the Ring had carefully planned emergency arrangements, which they renewed and reorganized every week—like his own conference—so that no one in their families would know where they were. Neither Amanda nor Maureen could conceivably be a traitor. And yet, and yet… While he ate the withered and lukewarm fish and chips, his mind played with the idea of the traitor being one of their immediate families. Plotting the pattern of their absences would not help the traitor overmuch—it would merely become obvious that these happened during certain kinds of crises and at particular phases of the moon—unless one or the other of them had dropped a careless word at home. Careless words were very easy to drop to one’s nearest and dearest. Mark himself was always most carefully circumspect in what he said to Paulie, but she was not entirely ignorant. She attended all the less secret ceremonies with him. She knew the office he held. He hated to think how angry she would be if she discovered how much of his duties he concealed from her. The other three must surely feel the same—at least, not Gladys: as far as anyone knew, she was a widow. But Maureen ran a troupe of professional dancers who were almost like a family to her, and she also had a succession of boyfriends, very few of whom had anything to do with witchcraft. The present boyfriend was a rough diamond—or, to be more honest, an unpleasant lout—who ran a music shop, and the kind of fellow who could well be in someone’s pay. And Amanda? In addition to an obliging husband most people never saw, she had teenage children and, someone had told Mark, a sister living with her. It was surely too much to expect that Amanda had not dropped a word to her sister…

  All the cats’ eyes were on him, accusingly. He left the rest of the chips and padded off to the bathroom, where, to his exasperation, the toilet seat would not stay up. Another of Gladys’s jokes, like her front gate. And quite probably, he admitted ruefully, wedging the thing with the toilet brush, the whole of his anxiety was some kind of displacement. Frankly, he was scared stiff of Amanda. It was the Aspect of the Mother in her that scared him most—though why it should, when he had no recollection of his own mother, he had no idea.

  Amanda was leaning across the kitchen table when he came in, with a sheaf of Mark’s printouts in her hand, talking trenchantly to Maureen. Upon her, Gladys’s dim electric light seemed to play like the white shaft of a spotlight. It lit Amanda’s hair blue-black, and the handsome lines of her face clear white. Her eyes glowed in it, compellingly.

  “So this is what we’ve got,” she said, and her voice was as clear and compelling as her eyes. “Another universe, one of many next door to this one, and in it a world probably much like ours, where they seem to have found some way of manipulating our world to their advantage. Their pattern seems to be to orchestrate a crisis—like a world war or an epidemic; AIDS, I suppose, is a good example—and then study what we do about it. If we solve the problem, they import our findings into their world.”

  Maureen, by contrast, was all reds and browns in the light—copper hair, tawny freckles, yellow eyes—and a brown jumpsuit clothing her long body, which was never wholly still. She writhed from a lotus position while Amanda was speaking and turned her kitchen chair backward, to sit astride it with her freckled forearms on its rickety back. “Don’t forget their little habit of keeping us busy while they set up their experiments,” she said. “That’s the thing that really gets up my nose!”

  “I was coming to that,” Amanda replied. “There’s no question that the pirate universe knows something about the way the Ring is organized. Either they tested us out during World War Two or we gave ourselves away keeping Hitler out. And since then they’ve flung things like Chernobyl at us from time to time to
see if we were still on our toes, and finding we were—”

  “Just about,” Maureen commented, hitching her knees under her chin. “That one was a real closie.”

  “I know, but we did deal with it,” said Amanda, “and I’ve no doubt that gave them the conditions for their latest experiment. Now they’ve handed us global warming, with the superpowers at least at an understanding, so that they can deal with it, while the Ring here in Britain is going to have its hands full with the country half underwater. That way, they can study how the Ring holds back the water, and make sure we haven’t much left over to interfere with the technological approach. My guess is they want both magic and science out of this one.” She turned across her shoulder to look at Mark in the doorway. “I hope you agree with my summary.”

  She said it with a strong and kindly smile, including him in the conversation because she had plainly known all along he was leaning in the doorway. He wished she would not treat him so kindly. It seemed to have something to do with the fact that she was both a professor of theology and a feminist, and it never failed to make him feel inadequate. “Perfectly,” he said. “I couldn’t have put it anywhere near as well.”

  Maureen turned as he spoke and half smiled too, looking up at him under her eyelids, full of the secret knowledge of that bed they had shared in Somerset. “We took a look at this other universe while you were asleep,” she said, and her voice was full of the secret as well. It did not seem to perturb her that Amanda’s brilliant eyes met Gladys’s knowing ones across her, in perfect understanding of that secret.

  It embarrassed Mark. “I was with you,” he said curtly, coming to sit at the end of the table. “It seems rather well defended.”

  “I’ll say!” said Maureen. “Mile-thick stoppers strewn with traps the whole way round. I saw it like a cell wall with hormone triggers against invading microorganisms.”

  “It was more like the ramparts of a prehistoric hill-fort to me,” Amanda observed, “with sharpened stakes and pitfalls all over it. There was a culvert under the walls to take in what they learnt from us.”

  “Funny the way everyone sees things differently,” Maureen said. “It’s something I never quite get over at this level. Gladys said it was like the barbed wire on the Normandy beaches to her. Isn’t that right?” she asked Gladys.

  Mark turned to Gladys, startled that he and she had seen so much the same. “Or a very thorny wood,” she said, dumping on the table a fat teapot clothed in a striped cozy. “Anyone but Mark take sugar? Good. Well let’s get on and decide what we’re going to do about these blessed pirates.”

  There was a short silence. Maureen’s long hands, faintly mauve under the freckles, fidgeted around a mug with a picture of Garfield on it. “I’m too mad to think properly,” she confessed. “I just want them stopped.”

  “One possible way is to stop their culvert. I expect we can find it,” Amanda pointed out. “Stuff is bleeding off to them quite fast, and we ought to be able to trace where it goes.”

  “Out of the question,” said Mark. “As soon as they realize we’ve stopped it, it’ll be war. And they’ll fight us with our own weapons, not to speak of their own, which we don’t know about. I’m willing to bet they’ll know as soon as we find the outlet. They have to be good to have had us under observation all this time without our knowing they had.”

  “Then I’ll throw out another thought,” Amanda said imperturbably. She seldom lost an argument, and never admitted it if she did. “How about putting up defenses even bigger than theirs?”

  “Heavy job” was Maureen’s comment. “Worldwide—it might work.”

  “They see those and it means war again,” Mark pointed out.

  “Well, anything we do and they notice is going to mean war,” Amanda said in her most brisk and reasonable way. “Do you want to look into the possibility of rendering our universe invisible to theirs?”

  “Which, if they find us doing, they’ll just pirate too,” Maureen observed. “I’m sure it would suit them very well to be invisible to us. Not wanting to be critical, Amanda, but they might even be hoping we’ll think of that.” She turned and stretched her legs the opposite way.

  “And,” added Mark, “none of these suggestions help with the greenhouse effect.”

  “We seem to be stuck with that, even if the pirates did start it,” Amanda said. “I’d assumed—and since I’m simply throwing out ideas, I’m perfectly open to criticism, Maureen, though I wish you and Mark could contrive to be constructive for a change!—I’d assumed we’d get the pirates off our backs and then turn our attention to readjusting the climate.” Her hands clenched around her cup fractionally. She was irritated.

  Aware that she despised him, Mark found himself protesting, “I wasn’t being destructive, Amanda! I just wondered if there wasn’t a way to deal with both things at once. For instance, if we were simply to do nothing?”

  Amanda’s shapely black eyebrows came to a sharp point, exactly in the middle. An astounded crease grew between them, above her elegant nose. “Do nothing? At all?”

  Maureen took this up eagerly. “Mark has got a point, Amanda. You must see that. If we did nothing and made sure none of the Rings all over the world did nothing, and just let the climate get hotter and the seas higher, then the pirates would have to stop the greenhouse effect themselves, don’t you see? It’s not in their interests to let everyone here die!” She was climbing about all over her chair in her vehemence, beating her mug on the table—and yet Mark was uneasily aware that it was all because the idea was his in the first place. Maureen was taking sides like a child in a school playground. There was even a faint jeering tone to her voice.

  Amanda responded to the jeer. “Oh, perfect, Maureen! So we call their bluff. The only result, as far as I can see, would be that our world dies and the pirates simply start exploiting another one.”

  “I didn’t mean—” Maureen and Mark began together.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Gladys interrupted. “We’re not in business to do nothing, are we, Jimbo? It’s obvious what we’ve got to do! We have to go into that universe and stop those pirates at their fun and games, for once and for all!”

  In the ensuing silence, the creature called Jimbo appeared to climb into Gladys’s lap. She hugged it and stared at them, a mulish and stony old woman.

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” she said. “It’s the only thing we ought to be discussing.”

  After another long silence, Amanda said, “I agree. How do we get there? Whom do we send? And what would a raiding party do when it gets there?”

  Maureen, subdued and still for once, added, “Yes, and how do we keep what we do secret from these people? They must have the best intelligence in the world.”

  The discussion that followed this was, to begin with, slow and heavy and very, very serious. All four of them were overwhelmed with the nature of what they were discussing. This was war, against an enemy who knew all their weapons, and it made every other war look small and local and feeble by comparison. They knew their campaign had to be careful. It had to be good. And it had to succeed. It was clear to all four that, if they bungled, the pirates would finish them.

  “Come on, come on!” Gladys said at length. “You’ve got to remember this is really no different from the way we went against Napoleon or Hitler. It’s just bigger and in a new place, that’s all. We need a smoke screen first. We’re going to need to make it look as if we’re powering up against this greenhouse thing. That’s what we’ll have to tell everyone else we’re doing. It’ll be too late when they find we’re using the power another way.”

  “In that case we’ll have to tell the Outer Ring,” Amanda stated.

  “Yes, we’ll be breaking the rules, not telling them,” Maureen agreed. “And—”

  The Jimbo creature stirred in Gladys’s arms. “Oh, don’t give me that!” she said. “You young ones! You’re all for breaking the rules when it doesn’t matter, and when it does matter, you don’t
seem to know how to do without your precious rules! One of the things Mark spent all last night proving is that there has to be an informer pretty high up among us. So we have to break the rules. None of this is to go beyond this house and the wards I’ve put around it. Is that clear?”

  “I second that,” said Mark.

  “You always were rather paranoid, Mark,” Amanda said, but she gave in. So, after a little squirming and some clamor, did Maureen.

  The discussion proceeded much more efficiently after that. They forgot how momentous it was to wage war on another world and simply discussed how to do it. Breaking into that world was the first major problem. The defenses they had all in their different ways perceived seemed truly formidable. This had them at a stand for a while, until Maureen pointed out that the satellite they had all noticed was far more lightly warded than any other part.

  “Could we get in through Blish City somehow?” she asked. “It seems to be part of the pirating setup too.”

  “Somehow, somehow,” Mark said. “There must be a reason they don’t ward it so well. Can anyone think why?”

  “Well, it can’t be there just to make an easy way in,” Gladys observed. “I sensed a lot of people there.”

  “So did I,” agreed Amanda. “How is this for a working theory? Their defenses in the main world make it quite difficult for them to observe our world as closely as they want, so they have to build Laputa as a sort of observation platform. I saw Laputa myself as a sort of floating island—which is why I called it that, after Gulliver—but I suspect it’s more on the lines of a pocket universe.”

  “I think you may be right,” Mark said soberly. “And if you’re right, then they won’t need wards on the place, because that’s where the main strength of their witchcraft will be.”