The Last Defender Of Camelot

by Roger Zelazny

  Render felt a tingling at the base of his skull; he smelled fresh-cut grass.

  Suddenly he was moving up the great gray alley between the worlds.

  After what seemed a long time. Render felt that he was footed on a strange Earth. He could see nothing; it was only a sense of presence that informed him he had arrived. It was the darkest of all the dark nights he had ever known.

  He willed that the darkness disperse. Nothing happened.A part of his mind came awake again, a part he had not realized was sleeping; he recalled whose world be had entered.

  He listened for her presence. He heard fear and anticipation.

  He willed color. First, red ...

  He felt a correspondence. Then there was an echo.

  Everything became red; he inhabited the center of an infinite ruby.

  Orange- Yellow ...

  He was caught in a piece of amber.

  Green now, and he added the exhalations of a sultry sea. Blue, and the coolness of evening.

  He stretched his mind then, producing all the colors at once. They came in great swirling plumes.

  Then he tore them apart and forced a form upon them.

  An incandescent rainbow arced across the black sky.

  He fought for browns and grays below him. Selfluminescent, they appeared—in shimmering, shifting patches.

  Somewhere, a sense of awe. There was no trace of hysteria though, so he continued with the Shaping.

  He managed a horizon, and the blackness drained away beyond it. The sky grew faintly blue, and he ventured a herd of dark clouds. There was resistance to his efforts at creating distance and depth, so he reinforced the tableau with a very faint sound of surf. A transference from an auditory concept of distance came slowly then, as he pushed the clouds about. Quickly, he threw up a high forest to offset a rising wave of acrophobia.

  The panic vanished.

  Render focused his attention on tall trees—oaks and pines, poplars and sycamores. He hurled them about like spears, in ragged arrays of greens and browns and yellows, unrolled a thick mat of morning-moist grass, dropped a series of gray boulders and greenish logs at irregular intervals, and tangled and twined the branches overhead, casting a uniform shade throughout the glen- The effect was staggering. It seemed as if the entire world was shaken with a sob, then silent.

  Through the stillness he felt her presence. He had decided it would be best to lay the groundwork quickly, to set up a tangible headquarters, to prepare a field foroperations. He could backtrack later, be could repair and amend the results of the trauma in the sessions yet to come; but this much, at least, was necessary for a beginning.

  With a start, he realized that the silence was not a withdrawal. Eileen had made herself immanent in the trees and the grass, the stones and the bushes; she was personalizing their forms, relating them to tactile sensations, sounds, temperatures, aromas.

  With a soft breeze, he stirred the branches of the trees. Just beyond the bounds of seeing he worked out the splashing sounds of a brook.

  There was a feeling of joy. He shared it.

  She was bearing it extremely well, so he decided to extend the scope of the exercise. He let his mind wander among the trees, experiencing a momentary doubling of vision, during which time he saw an enormous hand riding in an aluminum carriage toward a circle of white.

  He was beside the brook now and he was seeking her, carefully, He drifted with the water. He had not yet taken on a form. The splashes became a gurgling as he pushed the brook through shallow places and over rocks. At his insistence, the waters became more articulate.

  "Where are you?" asked the brook.

  Here! Herel Here!

  ... and here! replied the trees, the bushes, the stones, the grass.

  "Choose one," said the brook, as it widened, rounded a mass of rock, then bent its way down a slope, heading toward a blue pool.

  / cannot, was the answer from the wind.

  "You must." The brook widened and poured into the pool, swirled about the surface, then stilled itself and reflected branches and dark clouds. "Nowl"

  Very well, echoed the wood, in a moment.

  The mist rose above the lake and drifted to the bank of the pool.

  "Now," tinkled the mist.

  Here. then . ..

  She had chosen a small willow. It swayed in the wind; it trailed its branches in the water.

  "Eileen Shallot," he said, "regard the lake."The breezes shifted; the willow bent.

  It was not difficult for him to recall her face, her body. The tree spun as though rootless. Eileen stood in the midst of a quiet explosion of leaves; she stared, frightened, into the deep blue mirror of Render's mind, the lake, She covered her face with her hands, but it could not stop the seeing.

  "Behold yourself," said Render.

  She lowered her hands and peered downward. Then she turned in every direction, slowly; she studied herself. Finally:

  "I feel I am quite lovely," she said. "Do I feel so because you want me to, or is it true?"

  She looked all about as she spoke, seeking the Shaper.

  "It is true," said Render, from everywhere.

  "Thank you."

  There was a swirl of white and she was wearing a belted garment of damask. The light in the distance brightened almost imperceptibly. A faint touch of pink began at the base of the lowest cloudbank.

  "What is happening there?" she asked, facing that direction.

  "I am going to show you a sunrise," said Render, "and I shall probably botch it a bit—but then, it's my first professional sunrise under these circumstances."

  "Where are you?" she asked.

  "Everywhere," he replied.

  "Please take on a form so that I can see you."

  "All right."

  "Your natural form."

  He willed that he be beside her on the bank, and he was.

  Startled by a metallic flash, he looked downward. The world receded for an instant, then grew stable once again. He laughed, and the laugh froze as he thought of something.

  He was wearing the suit of armor which had stood beside their table in the Partridge and Scalpel on the night they met.

  She reached out and touched it.

  "The suit of armor by our table," she acknowledged, running her fingertips over the plates and the junctures. "I associated it with you that night.""... And you stuffed me into it just now," he commented. "You're a strong-willed woman."

  The armor vanished and he was wearing his graybrown suit and looseknit bloodclot necktie and a professional expression.

  "Behold the real me," he smiled faintly. "Now, to the sunset. I'm going to use all the colors. Watchi"

  They seated themselves on the green park bench which had appeared behind them, and Render pointed in the direction he had decided upon as east.

  Slowly, the sun worked through its morning attitudes. For the first time in this particular world it shone down like a god, and reflected off the lake, and broke the clouds, and set the landscape to smouldering beneath the mist that arose from the moist wood.

  Watching, watching intently, staring directly into the ascending bonfire, Eileen did not move for a long while, nor speak. Render could sense her fascination.

  She was staring at the source of all light; it reflected back from the gleaming coin on her brow, like a single drop of blood.

  Render said, "That is the sun, and those are clouds," and he clapped his hands and the clouds covered the sun and there was a soft rumble overhead, "and that is thunder," he finished.

  The rain fell then, shattering the lake and tickling their faces, making sharp striking sounds on the leaves, then soft tapping sounds, dripping down from the branches overhead, soaking their garments and plastering their hair. running down their necks and falling into their eyes, turning patches of brown earth to mud.

  A splash of lightning covered the sky, and a second later there was another peal of thunder.

  "... And this is a summer storm," he lectured. "You see how the
rain affects the foliage and ourselves. What you just saw in the sky before the thunderclap was lightning."

  ... Too much," she said. "Let up on it for a moment, please."

  The ram stopped instantly and the sun broke through the clouds.

  "I have the damndest desire for a cigarette," she said, "but I left mine in another world."As she said it one appeared, already lighted, between her fingers.

  "It's going to taste rather flat," said Render strangely.

  He watched her for a moment, then:

  "I didn't give you that cigarette," he noted. "You picked it from my mind."

  The smoke laddered and spiraled upward, was swept away.

  "... Which means that, for the second time today, I have underestimated the pull of that vacuum in your mind—in the place where sight ought to be. You are assimilating these new impressions very rapidly. You're even going to the extent of groping after new ones. Be careful. Try to contain that impulse."

  "It's like a hunger," she said.

  "Perhaps we had best conclude this session now."

  Their clothing was dry again. A bird began to sing.

  "No, wait! Pleasel HI be careful. I want to see more things."

  "There is always the next visit," said Render. "But I suppose we can manage one more. Is there something you want very badly to see?"

  "Yes. Winter. Snow."

  "Okay," smiled the Shaper, "then wrap yourself in that fur-piece...."

  The afternoon slipped by rapidly after the departure of his patient. Render was in a good mood. He felt emptied and filled again. He had come through the first trial without suffering any repercussions. He decided that he was going to succeed. His satisfaction was greater than his fear. It was with a sense of exhilaration that he returned to working on his speech.

  "... And what is the power to hurt?" he inquired of the microphone.

  "We live by pleasure and we live by pain," he answered himself. "Either can frustrate and either can encourage. But while pleasure and pain are rooted in biology, they are conditioned by society: thus are values to be derived. Because of the enormous masses of humanity, hectically changing positions in space every day throughout the cities of the world, there has come into ^ necessary being a series of totally inhuman controls upon •^ these movements. Every day they nibble their way intonew areas—driving our cars, flying our planes, interviewing us, diagnosing our diseases—and 1 cannot even venture a moral judgment upon these intrusions. They have become necessary. Ultimately, they may prove salutary.

  "The point I wish to make, however, is that we are often unaware of our own values. We cannot honestly tell what a thing means to us until it is removed from our life-situation. If an object of value ceases to exist, then the psychic energies which were bound up in it are released. We seek after new objects of value in which to invest this—mana, if you like, or libido, if you don't And no one thing which has vanished during the past three or four or five decades was, in itself, massively significant; and no new thing which came into being during that time is massively malicious toward the people it has replaced or the people it in some manner controls. A society, though, is made up of many things, and when these things are changed too rapidly the results are unpredictable. An intense study of mental illness is often quite revealing as to the nature of the stresses in the society where the illness was made. If anxiety-patterns fall into special groups and classes, then something of the discontent of society can be learned from them. Karl Jung pointed out that when consciousness is repeatedly frustrated in a quest for values it will turn its search to the unconscious; failing there, it will proceed to quarry its way into the hypothetical collective unconscious. He noted, in the postwar analyses of ex-Nazis, that the longer they searched for something to erect from the ruins of their lives—having lived through a period of classical iconoclasm, and then seen their new ideals topple as well—the longer they searched, the further back they seemed to reach into the collective unconscious of their people. Their dreams themselves came to take on patterns out of the Teutonic mythos.

  "This, in a much less dramatic sense, is happening today. There are historical periods when the group tendency for the mind to turn in upon itself, to turn back, is greater than at other times. We are living in such a period of Quixotism, in the original sense of the term. This is because the power to hurt, in our time, is the power to ignore, to baffle—and it is no longer the exclusive property of human beings—'*A buzz interrupted him then. He switched off the recorder. touched the phone-box.

  "Charles Render speaking," he told it.

  "This is Paul Charter," lisped the box. "I am headmaster at Dilling."

  "Yes?"

  The picture cleared. Render saw a man whose eyes were set close together beneath a high forehead. The forehead was heavily creased; the mouth twitched as it spoke.

  "Well, 1 want to apologize again for what happened. It was a faulty piece of equipment that caused—"

  "Can't you afford proper facilities? Your fees are high enough."

  "It was a new piece of equipment. It was a factory defect—"

  "Wasn't there anybody in charge of the class?"

  "Yes, but—"

  "Why didn't he inspect the equipment? Why wasn't he on hand to prevent the fall?"

  "He was on hand, but it happened too fast for him to do anything. As for inspecting the equipment for factory defects, that isn't his job. Look, I'm very sorry. I'm quite fond of your boy. I can assure you nothing like this will ever happen again."

  "You're right, there. But that's because I'm picking him up tomorrow morning and enrolling him in a school that exercises proper safety precautions."

  Render ended the conversation with a flick of his finger. After several minutes had passed he stood and crossed the room to his small wall safe, which was partly masked, though not concealed, by a shelf of books. It took only a moment for him to open it and withdraw a jewel box containing a cheap necklace and a framed photograph of a man resembling himself, though somewhat younger, and a woman whose upswept hair was dark and whose chin was small, and two youngsters between them—the girl holding the baby in her arms and forcing her bright bored smile on ahead. Render always stared for only a few seconds on such occasions, fondling the necklace, and then he shut the box and locked it away again for many months.

  Whump! Whump! went the bass. Tchg-tchg-tchga-tchg, the gourds.The gelatins splayed reds, greens, blues, and godawful yellows about the amazing metal dancers.

  HUMAN? asked the marquee.

  ROBOTS? (immediately below).

  COME SEE FOR YOURSELFl (across the bottom, cryptically).

  So they did.

  Render and Jill were sitting at a microscopic table, thankfully set back against a wall, beneath charcoal caricatures of personalities largely unknown (there being so many personalities among the subcultures of a city of fourteen million people). Nose crinkled with pleasure, Jill stared at the present focal point of this particular subculture, occasionally raising her shoulders to ear level to add emphasis to a silent laugh or a small squeal, because the performers were just too human—the way the ebon robot ran his fingers along the silver robot's forearm as they parted and passed....

  Render alternated his attention between Jill and the dancers and a wicked-looking decoction that resembled nothing so much as a small bucket of whiskey sours strewn with seaweed (through which the Kraken might at any moment arise to drag some hapless ship down to its doom).

  "Charlie, I think they're really people!"

  Render disentangled his gaze from her hair and bouncing earrings.

  He studied the dancers down on the floor, somewhat below the table area, surrounded by music.

  There could be humans within those metal shells. If so, their dance was a thing of extreme skill. Though the manufacture of sufficiently light alloys was no problem, it would be some trick for a dancer to cavort so freely— and for so long a period of time, and with such effortlessseeming ease—within a head-to-toe suit of arm
or, without so much as a grate or a click or a clank.

  Soundless ...

  They glided like two gulls; the larger, the color of polished anthracite, and the other, like a moonbeam falling through a window upon a silk-wrapped manikin.

  Even when they touched there was no sound—or if there was, it was wholly masked by the rhythms of the band, Whump-whump! Tchga-tchg!Render took another drink.

  Slowly, it turned into an apache-dance. Render checked his watch. Too long for normal entertainers, he decided. They must be robots. As he looked up again the black robot hurled the silver robot perhaps ten feet and turned his back on her.

  There was no sound of striking metal.

  Wonder what a setup like that costs? he mused.

  "Chdrlie! There was no sound! How do they do that?"

  *Tve no idea," said Render.

  The gelatins were yellow again, then red, then blue, then green.

  "You'd think it would damage their mechanisms, wouldn't you?"

  The white robot crawled back and the other swiveled his wrist around and around, a lighted cigarette between the fingers. There was laughter as he pressed it mechanically to his lipless faceless face. The silver robot confronted him. He turned away again, dropped the cigarette, ground it out slowly, soundlessly, then suddenly turned back to his partner. Would he throw her again? No ...

  Slowly then. like the greatlegged birds of the East, they recommenced their movement, slowly, and with many turnings away.

  Something deep within Render was amused, but he was too far gone to ask it what was funny. So he went looking for the Kraken in the bottom of the glass instead.

  Jill was clutching his biceps then, drawing his attention back to the floor.

  As the spotlight tortured the spectrum, the black robot raised the silver one high above his head, slowly, slowly, and then commenced spinning with her in that position—arms outstretched, back arched, legs scissored— very slowly, at first. Then faster.

  Suddenly they were whirling with an unbelievable speed, and the gelatins rotated faster and faster.

  Render shook his head to clear it.

  They were moving so rapidly that they had to fall— human or robot. But they didn't. They were a mandala. They were a gray form uniformity. Render looked down.