Eight Fantasms and Magics

by Jack Vance

  Behind, the ghost formed itself—a tall white thing in white robes, and the dark eye-holes stared like outlets into nonimagination.

  Kerlin the Curator sat looking.

  The ghost moved under the robes. A hand like a bird’s foot appeared, holding a clod of dingy matter. The ghost cast the matter to the floor; it exploded into a puff of black dust. The motes of the cloud grew, became a myriad of wriggling insects. With one accord they darted across the floor, growing as they spread, and became scuttling creatures with monkey-heads.

  Kerlin the Curator moved. “Baton,” he said. He held up his hand. It held the baton. The baton spat an orange gout— red dust. It puffed before the rushing horde and each mote became a red scorpion. So ensued a ferocious battle, and little shrieks and chittering sounds rose from the floor.

  The monkey-headed things were killed, routed. The ghost sighed, moved his claw-hand once more. But the baton spat forth a ray of purest light and the ghost sloughed into nothingness.

  “Kerlin!” cried Guyal. “The demon is breaking into the gallery.”

  Kerlin flung open the door, stepped forth.

  “Baton,” said Kerlin, “perform thy utmost.”

  The demon said, “No, Kerlin, hold the magic; I thought you dazed. Now I retreat.”

  With a vast quaking and heaving he pulled back until once more only his face showed through the hole.

  “Baton,” said Kerlin, “rest on guard.”

  The baton disappeared from his hand.

  Kerlin turned and faced Guyal and Shierl.

  “There is need for many words, for now I die. I die, and the Museum shall lie alone. So let us speak quickly, quickly, quickly. . . .”

  Kerlin moved with feeble steps to a portal which snapped aside as he approached. Guyal and Shierl stood hesitantly to the rear.

  “Come, come,” said Kerlin in sharp impatience. “My strength flags, I die. You have been my death.”

  Guyal moved slowly forward, with Shierl half a pace behind.

  Kerlin surveyed them with a thin grin. “Halt your misgivings and hasten; I wane; my sight flickers. . ..”

  He waved a despairing hand, then, turning, led them into the inner chamber where he slumped into a great chair. With many uneasy glances at the door Guyal and Shierl settled upon a padded couch.

  Kerlin jeered in a feeble voice, “You fear the white phantasms? Poh, they are held from the gallery by the baton. Only when I am smitten out of mind—or dead—will the baton cease its function. You must know,” he added with somewhat more vigor, “that the energies and dynamics do not channel from my brain but from the central potentium of the Museum, which is perpetual; I merely direct and order the rod.”

  “But this demon—who or what is he? Why does he come to look through the walls?”

  “He is Blikdak, of the demon-world Jeldred. He wrenched the hole intent on taking the knowledge of the Museum into his mind, but I forestalled him; so he sits waiting in the hole till I die. Then he will glut himself with erudition to the great disadvantage of men.”

  “Why cannot this demon be exhorted hence and the hole abolished?”

  Kerlin the Curator shook his head. “The furious powers I control are not valid in the air of the demon-world, where substance and form are of different entity. So far as you see him, he has brought his environment with him; so far he is safe. When he ventures farther the power of Earth dissolves the Jeldred mode; then may I strike him with fervor from the potentium. . . . But enough of Blikdak; tell me, what is the news of Thorsingol?”

  Guyal said in a halting voice, “Thorsingol is passed beyond memory. There is naught above but arid tundra and the old town of the Saponids. This girl Shierl is of the Saponids; we came to the Museum at the behest of Blikdak’s ghosts.”

  “Ah,” breathed Kerlin, “have I been so aimless? These youthful shapes by which Blikdak relieved his tedium: they flit down my memory like May flies. ... I put them aside as creatures of his own conception.”

  Shierl grimaced. “What use to him are human creatures?”

  Kerlin said dully, “Blikdak is past your conceiving. These human creatures are his play, on whom he practices various junctures, nauseas, antics, and at last struggles to the death. Then he sends forth a ghost demanding further youth and beauty.”

  Guyal said in puzzlement, “Such acts would seem derangements of humanity. They are anthropoid by the very nature of the functioning organs. Since Blikdak is a demon—”

  “Consider him!” spoke Kerlin. “His lineaments, his apparatus. He is nothing else but anthropoid, and such is his origin, together with all the demons, frits, and winged glowing-eyed creatures that infest latter-day Earth. Blikdak, like the others, derives from the mind of man. The condensation, the cloacal humors, the scatophiliac whims that have drained through humanity formed a vast tumor; so Blikdak assumed his being. But of Blikdak, enough. I die, I die!” He sank into the chair with heaving chest. “My eyes vary and waver. My breath is shallow as a bird’s, my bones are the pith of an old vine. I have lived beyond knowledge; in my madness I knew no passage of time. Now I remember the years and centuries, the millennia, the epochs—they are like quick glimpses through a shutter. Curing my madness, you have killed me.”

  “But when you die,” cried Shierl, “what then?”

  Guyal asked, “In the Museum of Man are there no exorcisms to dissolve this demon?

  “Blikdak must be eradicated,” said Kerlin. “Then will I die in ease; then must you assume the care of the Museum.” He licked his white lips. “An ancient principle specifies that, in order to destroy a substance the nature of the substance must be determined. In short, before Blikdak may be dissolved, we must discover his nature.” And his eyes moved glassily to Guyal.

  “Your pronouncement is sound beyond argument,” admitted Guyal, “but how may this be accomplished? Blikdak will never submit to investigation.”

  “No; there must be subterfuge, some instrumentality. . . .” “The ghosts are part of Blikdak’s stuff?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Can the ghosts be stayed and prevented?”

  “Indeed; in a box of light, the which I can effect by a thought. Yes, a ghost we must have.” Kerlin raised his head. “Baton! One ghost; admit a ghost!”

  A moment passed; Kerlin held up his hand. There was a faint scratch at the door and a soft whine. “Open,” said a voice, full of sobs and catches and quavers. “Open and let forth the youthful creatures.”

  Kerlin laboriously rose to his feet. “It is done.”

  From behind the door came a sad voice, “I am pent, I am snared in scorching brilliance!”

  “Now we experiment,” said Guyal. “What dissolves the ghost dissolves Blikdak.”

  “True indeed,” assented Kerlin.

  “Why not light?” inquired Shierl. “Light parts the fabric of the ghosts as wind tatters the fog.”

  “But merely for their fragility; Blikdak is harsh and solid.” Kerlin mused. After a moment he gestured to the door. “We go to the image-expander; there we will explode the ghost to macroid dimension; so shall we find his basis. Guyal of Sfere, you must support my frailness; my limbs are weak as wax.”

  On Guyal’s arm he tottered forward, and with Shierl close at their heels they gained the gallery. Here the ghost wept in its cage of light, and searched constantly for a dark aperture to seep his essence through.

  Paying him no heed Kerlin hobbled and limped across the gallery. In their wake followed the box of light and perforce the ghost.

  “Open the great door,” cried Kerlin in a voice beset with cracking and hoarseness. “The great door into the Cognitive Repository!”

  Shierl ran ahead and thrust her force against the door; it slid aside, and they looked into the great dark hall, and the golden light from the gallery dwindled into the shadows and was lost.

  “Call for light,” Kerlin said.

  “Light!” cried Guyal.

  Illumination came to the great hall, and it proved so tall that pi
lasters along the wall dwindled to threads, and so long and wide that perspective was distorted. Spaced in equal rows were the black cases with the copper bosses that Guyal and Shierl had noted on their entry. Above each hung five similar cases, precisely fixed, floating without support.

  “What are these?” asked Guyal.

  “Would my poor brain encompassed a hundredth part of what these banks know,” panted Kerlin. “They are repositories crammed with all that has been experienced, achieved, or recorded by man. Here is the lost lore, early and late, the fabulous imaginings, the history of ten million cities, the beginnings of time and the presumed finalties; the reason for human existence and the reason for the reason. Daily I have labored and toiled in these banks; my achievement has been a synopsis of the most superficial sort: a panorama across a wide and multifarious country.”

  Said Shierl, “Would not the craft to destroy Blikdak be contained here?”

  “Indeed, indeed; our task would be merely to find the information. Under which casing would we search? Consider these categories: Demon-lands; Killings and Mortefactions; Expositions and Dissolutions of Evil; History of Granvilunde (where such an entity was repelled); Attractive and Detractive Hyperordnets; Therapy, for Hallucinants and Ghost-takers; Constructive Journal, item for regeneration of burst walls, subdivision for invasion by demons; Procedural Suggestions in Time of Risk. . . . Aye, these and a thousand more. Somewhere is knowledge. But where to look? There is no Index Major; none except the poor synopsis of my compilation. He who seeks specific knowledge must often go on an extended search. . . .” His voice trailed off. Then: “Forward! Forward through the banks to the Mechanismus.”

  So through the banks they went, like roaches in a maze, and behind drifted the cage of light with the wailing ghost. At last they entered a chamber smelling of metal; again Kerlin instructed Guyal and Guyal called for light.

  At a tall booth Kerlin halted the cage of light. A pane dropped before the ghost. “Observe now,” Kerlin said, and manipulated the activants.

  They saw the ghost, depicted and projected: the flowing robe, the haggard visage. The face grew large, flattened; a segment under the vacant eye became a scabrous white place. It separated into pustules, and a single pustule swelled to fill the pane. The crater of the pustule was an intricate stippled surface, a mesh as of fabric, knit in a lacy pattern. “Behold!” said Shierl. “He is a thing woven as if by thread.” Guyal turned eagerly to Kerlin; Kerlin raised a finger. “Indeed, indeed, a goodly thought, especially since here beside us is a rotor of extreme swiftness, used in reeling the cognitive filaments of the cases. . . . Now then observe: I reach to this panel, I select a mesh, I withdraw a thread, and note! The meshes ravel and loosen and part. And now to the bobbin on the rotor, and I wrap the thread, and now with a twist we have the cincture made. . . .”

  Shierl said dubiously, “Does not the ghost observe and note your doing?”

  “The pane shields our actions; he is too exercised to attend. And now I dissolve the cage and he is free.”

  The ghost wandered forth, cringing from the light.

  “Go!” cried Kerlin. “Back to your genetrix, back, return and go!”

  The ghost departed. Kerlin said to Guyal, “Follow; find when Blikdak snuffs him up.”

  At a cautious distance Guyal watched the ghost seep up into the black nostril, and returned to where Kerlin waited by the rotor. “The ghost has once more become part of Blikdak.”

  “Now then,” said Kerlin, “we cause the rotor to twist, the bobbin to whirl, and we shall observe.”

  The rotor whirled to a blur; the bobbin (as long as Guyal’s arm) became spun with ghost-thread, at first glowing pastel polychrome, then nacre, then fine milk-ivory.

  The rotor spun, a million times a minute, and the thread drawn unseen and unknown from Blikdak thickened on the bobbin.

  The rotor spun; the bobbin was full—a cylinder shining with glossy silken sheen. Kerlin slowed the rotor: Guyal snapped a new bobbin into place, and the unraveling of Blikdak continued.

  Three bobbins—four—four—five—and Guyal, observing Blikdak from afar, found the giant face quiescent, the mouth working and sucking, creating the clacking sound which had first caused them apprehension.

  Eight bobbins. Blikdak opened his eyes, stared in puzzlement around the chamber.

  Twelve bobbins; a discolored spot appeared on the sagging cheek, and Blikdak quivered in uneasiness.

  Twenty bobbins: the spot spread across Blikdak’s visage, across the slanted fore-dome, and his mouth hung lax; he hissed and fretted.

  Thirty bobbins: Blikdak’s head seemed stale and putrid; the gunmetal sheen had become an angry maroon, the eyes bulged, the mouth hung open, the tongue lolled limp.

  Fifty bobbins: Blikdak collapsed. His dome lowered against his mouth; his eyes shone like feverish coals.

  Sixty bobbins, seventy bobbins; Blikdak was no more. The breach in the wall gave on barren rock, unbroken and rigid.

  And in the Mechanismus seventy shining bobbins lay stacked.

  Kerlin fell back against the wall. “My time has come. I have guarded the Museum; together we have won it from

  Blikdak. . . . Attend me now. Into your hands I pass the curacy; now the Museum is your charge to guard and preserve.”

  “For what end?” asked Shierl. “Earth expires, almost as you. . . . Wherefore knowledge?”

  “More now than ever,” gasped Kerlin. “Attend: the stars are bright, the stars are fair; the banks know blessed magic to fleet you to youthful climes. Now ... I go. I die.”

  “Wait!” cried Guyal. “Wait, I beseech!”

  “Why wait?” whispered Kerlin. “You call me back?”

  “How do I extract from the banks?”

  “The key to the index is in my chambers, the index of my life. . . .” And Kerlin died.

  Guyal and Shierl climbed to the upper ways and stood outside the portal on the ancient floor. It was night; the marble shone faintly underfoot, the broken columns loomed on the sky.

  Across the plain the yellow lights of Issane shone warm through the trees; above in the sky shone the stars.

  Guyal said to Shierl, “There is your home; do you wish to return?”

  She shook her head. “We have looked through the eyes of knowledge. We have seen old Thorsingol, and the Sherrit Empire before it, and Golwan Andra before that, and the Forty Kades even before. We have seen the warlike green-men, and the knowledgeable Pharials and the Clambs who departed Earth for the stars, as did the Merioneth before them and the Gray Sorcerers still earlier. We have seen oceans rise and fall, the mountains crust up, peak and melt in the beat of rain; we have looked on the sun when it glowed hot and full and yellow. . . . No, Guyal, there is no place for me at Issane. . . .”

  Guyal, leaning back on the weathered pillar, looked up to the stars. “Knowledge is ours, Shierl—all of knowing to our call. And what shall we do?”

  Together they looked up to the white stars.

  “What shall we do .. .”

  The Men Return

  The Relict came furtively down the crag, a gaunt creature with tortured eyes. He moved in a series of quick dashes, using panels of dark air for concealment, running behind each passing shadow, at times crawling on all fours, head low to the ground. Arriving at the final low outcrop of rock, he halted and peered across the plain.

  Far away rose low hills, blurring into the sky, which was mottled and sallow like poor milk-glass. The intervening plain spread like rotten black velvet. A fountain of liquid rock jetted high in the air. In the middle distance a family of gray objects evolved with a sense of purposeful destiny: spheres melted into pyramids, became domes, tufts of white spires, sky-piercing poles; then, as a final tour de force, tesseracts.

  The Relict cared nothing for this; he needed food and out on the plain were plants. They would suffice in lieu of anything better. They grew in the ground, or sometimes on a floating lump of water, or surrounding a core of hard black gas. There were dank black
flaps of leaf, clumps of haggard thorn, pale green bulbs, stalks with leaves and contorted flowers. There were no recognizable species, and the Relict had no means of knowing if the leaves and tendrils he had eaten yesterday would poison him today.

  He tested the surface of the plain with his foot. The glassy surface (though it likewise seemed a construction of red and gray-green pyramids) accepted his weight, then suddenly sucked at his leg. In a frenzy he tore himself free, jumped back, squatted on the temporarily solid rock.

  Hunger rasped at his stomach. He must eat. He contemplated the plain. Not too far away a pair of Organisms played—sliding, diving, dancing, striking flamboyant poses. Should they approach, he would try to kill one of them. They resembled men, and so should make a good meal.

  He waited. A long time? A short time? It might have been either; duration had neither quantitative nor qualitative reality. The sun had vanished, and there was no standard cycle or recurrence. Time was a word blank of meaning.

  Matters had not always been so. The Relict retained a few tattered recollections of the old days, before system and logic had been rendered obsolete. Man had dominated Earth by virtue of a single assumption: that an effect could be traced to a cause, itself the effect of a previous cause.

  Manipulation of this basic law yielded rich results; there seemed no need for any other tool or instrumentality. Man congratulated himself on his generalized structure. He could live on desert, on plain or ice, in forest or in city; Nature had not shaped him to a special environment.

  He was unaware of his vulnerability. Logic was the special environment; the brain was the special tool.

  Then came the terrible hour when Earth swam into a pocket of noncausality, and all the ordered tensions of cause-effect dissolved. The special tool was useless; it had no purchase on reality. From the two billions of men, only a few survived—the mad. They were now the Organisms, lords of the era, their discords so exactly equivalent to the vagaries of the land as to constitute a peculiar wild wisdom. Or perhaps the disorganized matter of the world, loose from the old organization, was peculiarly sensitive to psychokinesis.