Necromancer

by Gordon R. Dickson

  He stopped talking.

  "Well," said Paul, when it seemed to be up to him, "this is all very interesting. I take it you're trying to convert me."

  "Exactly right," said Tyne. "As I say, I don't agree with Walt, but he recruits some of the best material in the world. Eaton here's an example. And poor Malorn was a Guild member."

  "Malorn!" said Paul, looking closely at the World Engineer.

  "Yes—in a way you might say I owe you something for having been unfairly accused in connection with his death. It was a breakdown misfunction in the police machinery, and I'm responsible for the smooth working of all machinery."

  "But that isn't why you'd give me a job?"

  "Not by itself, of course. No. But Eat here speaks highly of you and says you don't seem to be completely blinkered and blinded by all those theories of Walt's. I'm willing to take a chance on talking you over to my point of view, if you're willing to take the chance of being talked. And of course, Walt will be tickled to have you on the inside, here. You see, he thinks he's outsmarting me by being completely open and aboveboard about planting his people on me."

  "And you," said Paul, "think you're outsmarting him."

  "I know I am," said Tyne, smiling. "I have an intelligent friend who tells me so."

  "It seems to be settled, then," said Paul. He stood up. Tyne and Eaton rose with him. "I'd like to meet your intelligent friend, sometime."

  "Some-day, you might do that," said Tyne. They shook hands. "In fact, I imagine you will. It was this friend's recommendation that rather clinched this matter of taking you on here."

  Paul looked at the World Engineer sharply. With his last words something had come and gone so swiftly in the other man that it was impossible now to say what it might have been. It was as if a metal edge had shown itself for a moment.

  "I'll look forward to it, then," said Paul. And Eaton led him out

  Outside the World Engineer Complex Headquarters they parted. Eaton went back in to work. Paul went on to Jase's.

  As he stepped through the entrance to Jase's apartment and put his key back in his pocket, he heard voices. One was Jase's. But the other—he stopped at the sound of it—was the deep, resonant, and sardonic voice of Blunt

  "I realize, Jase," the voice of Blunt was saying, "that you find me a little too much of a playboy at times. It's something you'll just have to bear with, however."

  "I don't mean that at all, Walt!" The younger man's voice was charged and grim. "Who's going to lay down rules for you, of all people? It's just that if I find myself having to take over, I want to know what you had in mind."

  "If you take over, it's your own mind you'll follow, and that's the way it should be," said Blunt "Let's cross such bridges when we come to them. You may not have to take over. Who just came in?"

  The last words coincided with Paul's stepping around the corner from the entrance hall into the main lounge of Jase's apartment The wall entrance to the office in Kan-tele's apartment next door was open, and through it Paul now saw the wide shoulders and back of Blunt, with the dark, startled visage of Jase beyond.

  "Me. Formain," answered Paul, and he walked toward the office. But Jase stepped swiftly past Blunt and came down into his own lounge, closing the office entrance behind him.

  "What is it?" asked Jase.

  "It seems I'm now on the immediate staff of the World Engineer," said Paul. He looked past Jase at the closed wall. "That's Walter Blunt in there, isn't it? I'd like to speak to him."

  He stepped around Jase, went to the wall, and opened it. Within, the office was empty. He turned back to Jase.

  "Where did he go?"

  "I imagine," said Jase, dryly, "if he'd wanted to stay and talk to you, he'd have stayed."

  Paul turned again and went on into the office. He went through it into the farther reaches of Kantele's apartment It was a feminine dwelling, but empty. Paul paused by its front door, but there was no clue about it to signal whether Walter Blunt had walked out through it in the last few minutes.

  He went back to the office, and through it. Jase was no longer in his own lounge. He seemed to have left the apartment. Paul was about to leave, too, in a mood of puzzled disturbance, when the entrance to Jase's apartment clicked open—he heard it—and someone came in.

  Expecting Jase, Blunt, or both, he was turning toward the entrance hall when Kantele came out of it, carrying some sort of package, and stopped.

  "Paul!" she said.

  It was not a happy, or even pleased, sounding of his name. Rather, it was on a note of dismay that she said it.

  "Yes," he said, a little sadly.

  "Where's"—she hesitated—"Jase?"

  "And Walter Blunt," he said. "I'd like to know where they disappeared to, and why, myself."

  "They probably had to go someplace." She was ill-at-ease. It showed in the way she held the package to her.

  "I hadn't realized," he said, reaching for a neutral topic, "that Blunt wrote that 'apple comfort' song of yours. Jase told me."

  She looked abruptly a little sharply at him. Almost challengingly.

  "That surprised you, did it?" she asked.

  "Why—" he said. "No."

  "It didn't?"

  "I don't know," he said, "exactly whether to call it 'surprise.' I didn't know the Guildmaster wrote songs, that was all. And—" He stopped, feeling her bristle.

  "And what?"

  "Nothing," he said, as peaceably as he could, "I only heard the first verse before you came in that day, and the one time I heard it before. But it seemed to me more a young man's song."

  She strode angrily past him. He got the impression that she was rather pleased than otherwise to find something to get angry about. She punched buttons on Jase's music player and swung about with her back to it.

  "Then it's time you heard the second verse, isn't it?" she asked. A second later her own voice swelled from the player behind her.

  In apple comfort, long I waited thee And long 1 thee in apple comfort waited.

  "Young man's song," she said bitingly.

  In lonely autumn and uncertain springtime My apple longing for thee was not sated.

  The clear, mountain rivulet of her recorded voice paused, and then went on into the second verse. She looked across at him with her eyes fixed and her lips together.

  Now come thee near anigh my autumn winding. In cider-stouted jugs, my memories

  Shall guard thee by the fireside of my passion, And at my life's end keep thy gentle lees.

  The music shut off. He saw that she was profoundly moved by it and deeply unhappy. He went to her.

  "I'm sorry," he said, standing before her. "You mustn't let what I think disturb you. Forget I had any opinion at all."

  She tried to take a step back from him and found the wall behind her. She leaned her head back against the wall, and he put out his long hand to the wall beside her, half-convinced for a moment that she was about to fall. But she stood with her shoulders against the wall and closed her eyes, turning her face away to one side. Tears squeezed from under her closed eyelids and ran down her cheeks.

  "Oh," she whispered, "why won't you leave me alone?" She pressed her face against the wall. "Please, just leave me alone!"

  Torn by her unhappiness, he turned and left, leaving her still standing there, pressed in sorrow against the wall.

  Chapter 16

  In the days that followed, Paul did not see her again. It was more than obvious that she was avoiding him, and she must at least have spoken to Jase about him, for the Necromancer made it a point one day to speak about her.

  "You're wasting your time, there," Jase said bluntly. "She's Walt's."

  "I know that," said Paul. He glanced across the table at Jase. The other man had met him for lunch near World Engineering Headquarters, bringing him a long and curious list of cults and societies with which, as Jase put it, the Guild had some "influence." Paul was supposed to learn the names and habits of these groups against some future date when the Guild
might want to cultivate them. Paul accepted the list without protest. In spite of the fact that he was theoretically supposed to take orders only from the Guildmaster, he had yet to meet Blunt. Jase brought him all his instructions. Paul had decided not to make an issue of this for the moment. There was too much to be learned even as things were.

  There were about sixty thousand members in the Chantry Guild. Of these, perhaps fifteen hundred had dramatic parapsychological talents. Even in a world which accepted such things—even though mostly as interesting parlor tricks or talents on a par with wiggling one's ears —fifteen hundred people represented a pretty remark-able pool of potential ability. Paul was supposed to learn all about each one of the fifteen hundred odd: who could do what, and when, and, most important, who was improving his powers by exploring them in the curious, mystical, long-way-around light of the Alternate Laws.

  In addition, there were other aspects of the Guild for . Paul to learn, like the list Jase had just brought over on Paul's lunch hour. And all the work connected with the World Engineering Complex, where Tyne had Paul studying procedure like any executive trainee.

  Weather all over the world had been freakishly bad. In the southern hemisphere the winter had been stormy and cold. Here, the summer days were muggy and sweltering, but no rain fell. The Weather Control Complex found itself in the position of having to rob Peter to pay Paul—moisture diverted to one needy section of the Earth left other sections either twice as arid or drowned in torrential, flooding rains that caused widespread damage. It was no crisis, but it was annoyingly uncomfortable. The internal climate of the great city Complexes held the outside weather at arms length, but the emotional impact of the season's aberrancies came through even into air-conditioned interiors like this one where Paul and Jase sat at lunch.

  "It's just as well you realize she does belong to Walt," said Jase. For perhaps the first time since Paul had met him, there was a gentleness in Jase's voice. "She's Finnish, you know—you know where her name comes from?"

  "No," said Paul. "No, I don't."

  "The Kalevala—the Finnish national epic. Longfellow wrote his Hiawatha poem from it."

  "No," said Paul, "I didn't know."

  "Kaleva—Finland," said Jase.

  (Wind across snow fields. Tinkling among the icicles of a cavern—I knew it the first time, thought Paul.)

  "Kaleva had three sons. Handsome Lemminkainen, the art-smith, Ilmarinen, and the ancient VäinämÃ6inen." Paul watched Jase with interest; for the first time the drive and rush of the man was gone. He spoke the names of the old legend with the lingering love of a scholar in his voice. "VäinämÃ6inen invented the sacred harp— Kantele. And she is a harp, our Kantele. A harp for the hand of gods or heroes. That's why Walt holds her, old as he is, unyielding as he is to anything but his own way of doing things." Jase shook his head across the table. "You may be arrogant, Paul. But even you have to face the fact that Walt's something more than us ordinary men."

  Paul smiled a little. Jase, watching him, laughed shortly. Abruptly the Necromancer was his own hard, glittering self again.

  "Because you don't think you can be killed," said Jase, "you think you can't be defeated, either!"

  Paul shook his head.

  "I'm quite sure I can be killed," he answered. "It's the defeat I doubt."

  "Why?" asked Jase, leaning forward. Paul was a little surprised to see that the man was seriously asking.

  "I don't know. I—feel it," said Paul, hesitantly.

  Jase let the breath out through his nose with a faint, impatient sound. He stood up.

  "Learn that list," he said. "Burt said to tell you he'd pick you up tonight after you're through at your office, if you weren't otherwise tied up. You might give him a call."

  "I will," said Paul, and watched the other man leave, moving lithely and swiftly among the tables of the restaurant.

  Burton McLeod, two-handed broadsword with human brain and soul, had become the nearest thing to a close friend Paul could ever remember having in his life. And this just in the past few weeks and months.

  McLeod was in his early forties. Occasionally he looked immeasurably older. Sometimes he looked almost boyish. There was a deep, unvarying sadness in him, which was there as a result of the violence he had done, but not as a result of the ordinary reactions.

  He did not regret the killing he had done. His conscience saw no reason why an enemy should not die. But deep within him, it saddened him that battle was not sanctified. Surely there had been something right and holy at one time about a fiat field, a fair fight, and a fair death? He would never have thought to ask quarter for himself, and it embarrassed him that the world in which he lived insisted upon the concept of unvarying quarter for all, even for those he regarded as needing killing. He was a kind and gentle man, a little shy with those of the human race he considered worthwhile, in which class, along with Blunt, Kantele, and Jase, Paul was pleased and embarrassed in turn to find himself numbered. His mind was brilliant and he was an instinctive bookworm, and his essential moral code was so innate that there seemed to be a wall between him and any possibility of dishonesty.

  Like Paul, his life had been solitary. That might have been part of what drew them together. But a mutual honesty and a lack of ordinary fear played a part, also. It began with Paul being sent for some rudimentary tutoring in unarmed self-defense, as part of his Guild teachings, and went on from there with Paul's and McLeod's mutual discovery that Paul's overdeveloped arm was not amenable to ordinary training, or susceptible to ordinary attack and disablement.

  "It's speed that does it," Mc Leod had said, one evening in a gym, after several unsuccessful attempts on his part to lock and hold Paul's arm. "Given speed and leverage, you don't need much La the way of muscle. But you've got the muscle, too." He examined Paul's arm with interest. "I don't understand it. You ought to be slow as a truck. Bui you're as fast or faster than I am."

  "A freak," said Paul, opening and closing his fist to watch the muscles in his forearm bulge and retreat.

  "That's it," agreed McLeod, without any overtone of comment. "That isn't just an overdeveloped arm. It's just a properly developed, trained arm for somebody six inches bigger than you. Someone rather lean, but in top shape, and about six-seven or so. Was your other arm as long as this one?"

  Paul dropped his arm down by his side. To his intense and sudden interest, he saw that the tips of his fingers hung down almost to his kneecap.

  "No," he said. "This one wasn't, either."

  "Well," said McLeod, shrugging. He began to put on the shirt he had taken off to instruct Paul. "We didn't really work up a sweat. I'll wait until I get home to shower. Buy you a drink?"

  "If I can buy the second," said Paul. And that was the beginning of their friendship.

  It was late July of the summer that Jase made his call, left the list of the cults and societies for Paul to learn, and the word about McLeod seeing Paul after working hours that evening.

  Paul called up the other man from back at the office and agreed to meet McLeod in the bar of the same restaurant where he had had lunch with Jase. He spent the rest of the afternoon running the charts, as the office phrase was, down in the heart of the huge two-hundred-level building that was the core of the world's machinery, actually in the Super-Complex, itself.

  This duty was one which everyone on Tyne's staff, including Tyne, had to perform for himself about once a month. The equipment of the Super-Complex was semi-self-adapting. Changes were constantly being made in it to keep it in line with changes being made in the ultimate mechanisms out in the world with which it was in contact and control. Also, within certain limits, it was capable—and exercised that capability—of making changes in itself. Accordingly, everyone on Tyne's staff had the obligation of keeping up their own portfolio of charts and information about the Super-Complex. You started out with a thick sheaf of notices of alteration, and went down among the working levels, checking the actual changes and seeing they were entered in you
r portfolio. Without these, there might have been a number of shifts in responsibility from one recording, computing, or controlling element to another, and the human staff might have found itself trying to initiate changes through automatic channels that had already been closed.

  It was simply the homework connected with the job of being on the World Engineer's staff, the necessary duty of keeping up-to-date in your own field of endeavor.

  Nonetheless, in Paul's case he found it to be much more than the routine duty it was supposed to be. Moving about through chance corridors allowed by the mobile units of the Super-Complex itself, surrounded level by level by the impossible intricacies of softly humming and clicking equipment, Paul could now understand why someone like the weak, drug-fogged Malorn could have been pushed over the unstable border of his mind by moving around here. There was life, all right, in this steadily operating maze of understanding and control; Paul felt it certainly and surely. But it was not life in the human sense of the living, and it did not face him directly. Rather, it slid behind the massed equipment, hid in a corridor closed a second before by a unit moving to block a path that had once been open.

  The two previous times he had been down to bring his portfolio up to date he had not seemed to notice so much purposefulness to the feeling of mechanical life about him. He wondered if he was becoming sensitized, perhaps in the same way that Malorn had.

  The idea was ridiculous. The moment he held Ma-lora's broken personality up alongside his own for purposes of comparison, that much became immediately plain. Malorn had been afraid.

  Paul stood still for a moment on the sixty-seventh level, looking about him. Far down the open corridor in which he was standing, a tall gleaming bank of units slid across the opening, blocking it, and a new path opened up, angling off to the right. It was like being down in among the moving parts of some engine. An engine equipped to be careful of crushing any small creature climbing about within it as it moved to break old connections between its parts, and make new connections.