The Flying Sorcerers

by David Gerrold

  He looked both sheepish and defiant as I came up. “Well, I have to try it, don’t I ?”

  “But you said it was dead.”

  “Perhaps I’ve come to believe in magic,” said Purple. “Nothing else seems to work.” And he finished attaching the wires to the disc-shaped thing from his belt.

  He twisted a knob, but nothing happened.

  “This yellow eye should light up to show it’s working,” Purple explained, smiling foolishly. He twisted the knob again, harder this time, but the yellow light still did not appear.

  “Magic doesn’t work either,” he said. He sighed.

  I knew just how he felt then. I longed to be going home myself.

  How strange! — that I should consider an area that I had lived in for only a short time as my home; while this bleak map, the blasted remains of the village where I had spent most of my life, was no longer home but a strange and alien land. “Home” was a new land and a different life across the sea.

  For that one terrible moment Purple and I were alike. Two strangers, marooned on a bleak and blackened shore, each longing for his home, his wives, and his Quaff.

  “All I needed was one surge of power,” said Purple. “Shoogar was right. You can’t mix symbols.”

  He picked up his useless devices and trudged slowly down the hill. The ground crunched beneath his feet.

  There was nothing to eat. I lay therein the darkness and listened to the roar of the surf and the rumble of my stomach. Man was not meant to live without bread alone. I was dizzy with hunger. My thoughts didn’t even make sense any more.

  Purple had spent the red day wandering dully up and down this landscape of despair. I and my sons waited. There was little else we could do. Shoogar was the only one with a sense of purpose. He had positioned himself patiently at the top of a nearby slope to wait for the moons. He chanted a song of triumph.

  Purple muttered incessantly. “When the seas recede, we could walk back. Lant’s people did it before. We can do it again. Yes, we could walk back. The generators are still there, the looms are still there. I could recharge my battery. We could make another flying machine. Yes, of course. And this time, we would know better. I would have my battery fully charged. Fully charged. We wouldn’t have to make the same mistakes again. That’s it, we left before we were fully ready. We weren’t tested or experienced enough. But we came so close, so close. Next time, we’ll do it better and we’ll succeed. Next time, next time. Next time —”

  He crunched through the dark, mumbling insanely. He would pick up rocks and examine them, then throw them down again and stumble on.

  I stared up into the dark at the twinkling moons. There would be no next time. I was sure of that. Shoogar wasn’t going to let there be a next time. From his hill there was only silence now.

  I turned over on my blanket and raised up on my elbows. “Purple,” I called, “you should try to rest”

  “I can’t, Lant,” he called back. There was a skidding sound and a thump. “Ow —”

  “What’s the matter?” I leapt to my feet, thinking Shoogar had struck in the dark.

  But no — Purple’s flashlight went on revealing that he had tripped over a boulder. He lay there in his impact suit, grinning foolishly.

  I walked over and helped him up. The night was stale and still; the surf was a distant rumble. We stood in the dark, Purple’s light the only thing in existence, casting an eerie white aura into the chaotic blackness.

  Purple switched it off. “I guess I’d better save my power,” he said — and stopped.

  There was deathly silence. Not even insects still lived in this accursed land. “Save my power,” Purple repeated quietly. His hands clamped on my shoulders and he screamed, “Power! In my flashlight! In my flashlight, Lant!”

  “Let go, curse it!” He was as strong as an old ram.

  “Power, Lant! Power!”

  “Don’t get your hopes up, Purple. Wait until you get a response from your mother nest.”

  He sobered instantly. “Yes, you’re right, Lant,” There was a scraping sound in the dark as he removed the flashlight’s small battery, another sound as he pulled the calling device from his belt, an incomprehensible curse as he tried to attach the wires in the dark. He worked eagerly, impatiently — I could not blame him.

  At last he said, “I’m ready.” There was a click as he switched on the device. A dial on its face gave off a soft glow. Before he even pressed the call button, he peered at this dial. “There is power enough, Lant. More than enough. I can call my mother nest ten times, maybe more, with the power in this battery.”

  “Is it enough to recharge the windbags too?” I asked hopefully.

  His face was a dark blur. “No, not that much. That requires vast amounts of power, Lant. It needs a heavy-duty battery like my other one — but don’t worry. When my mother egg gets here, I’ll see that you and your sons get safely home.

  “Home,” he repeated. “I’m going home. No more double shadows. No more furry women. No more black plants —”

  “Green, Purple. Plants are green.”

  “Green is a bright color where I come from. No more odd food and foul drink. No more scratchy clothing. No more medicine shows for yokels.” He chanted this litany in man’s tongue and demon’s tongue. It was a homegoing spell and he spoke it intensely. “I’ll have books, music, normal weight —”

  “You intend to diet?”

  He laughed at that and kept laughing from sheer joy. “I’m going home!” he bellowed into the night.

  “Why not try your calling device?” I was getting impatient.

  He said, “I’m afraid to.”

  “Oh.”

  He turned the knob. A yellow eye opened brilliantly.

  “Hah!” Purple shouted. “And the red eye means that the mother nest has answered.”

  “What red eye?”

  Purple twiddled the knob impatiently. “Come on,” he whispered. “Come on.”

  Nothing happened.

  He shook the device. “Come on, damn you! I want to go home!”

  The yellow eye burned steadily. There was no red response light.

  “We’re far enough north,” said Purple. “Close enough to the equator. The seeing should be good; the curve of the planet isn’t in the way. What could be wrong? It can’t be sending the wrong frequency,” he mumbled. If he was making magic, it wasn’t working.

  “Perhaps it’s your battery.” I suggested.

  “It’s not my battery. Why doesn’t it answer? Why doesn’t it answer?” He jumped to his feet and went raging off into the dark. After a moment, I followed him.

  I found him sitting in ashes and despair. He had his device on the ground in front of him and was banging on it with a rock.

  He hadn’t damaged it though — only pounded it deeper into the soft dead earth.

  “Purple, stop,” I said softly. “Stop.”

  “Why should I?” he said bitterly. “We’ve come all this way for nothing. All of your devices have worked, Lant. None of mine have. Your aircloth got us here, your generators got us here, your airpushers got us here — but my calling device doesn’t work. So why did we bother to come at all. The only one who’s going to get any benefit out of this will be Shoogar.”

  “Huh?” Did he know about the duel ? Had he realized?

  “Yes, Shoogar,” he answered my questioning look. “He needed to know about the moons. He had to come north.

  The rest of us might as well have stayed home.” He started pounding again.

  “Perhaps we have not come far enough north,” I suggested.

  He made a sound that suggested he thought me a fool.

  I was grabbing for ideas now, anything to restore his spirit. “Or perhaps there is still a planet in the way.” Whatever that meant. He had used the word before.

  For a moment, there was silence. “What did you say? —”

  I opened my mouth to repeat it.

  “Never mind. I heard it the first time.�
� There was a sound of digging in the dirt. A scraping and a crunching. “Damn me. I’m so stupid sometimes —”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He stood up, a blur in the darkness. He held his device in his hands. “Lant, you are a genius sometimes. And all this time I thought you didn’t understand a thing I was talking about but were only being polite and pretending that you did. Of course there’s a planet in the way,” he stamped his foot. “This one.”

  “H’m,” I said, pretending to understand. Who was I to shatter his illusion?

  “Don’t you see? My egg hasn’t risen yet. Like the suns, it’s probably on the other side of the world. I will have to wait until it is in sight, before I try calling it again. That’s probably why it didn’t work before.”

  When magic doesn’t work, a good magician usually has an explanation ready. Purple was one of the best. I wondered if he understood his own explanation. I asked, “How long will it take before you can call it down?”

  “A couple of hours should be all I need. I’ll try calling it every fifteen minutes. Its orbit is only two and a half hours. I couldn’t possibly miss it, no matter how low on the horizon it is.”

  I left him mumbling happily to himself, explaining things to no one in particular.

  Blue dawn snapped up over the eastern rim, revealing a world even bleaker and drearier than before — if such was possible.

  Aching with hunger I stumbled up a black hill to find Shoogar tracing a gigantic pattern in the greasy dust. He was using a brilliant white powder and mixing it with various colored potions as he trickled it into graceful curves. Every so often he stopped to consult a parchment in his hand.

  I recognized the skin, with its circles and ellipses looping around a central dot — then I recognized the larger pattern. “Shoogar! What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m casting a spell!”

  “And your oath of fealty?”

  “You know perfectly well that I swore by the local gods. Different territories imply different gods and different oaths. Now we’re on my home territory. Here, I painted the runes of the duel against Purple. Here, that duel is still in progress!”

  “But so much has changed —” I stopped, for he was right. “And you stole his map of the moonpaths.”

  “No. He gave it to me, the fool. I’ll use his own magic against him. And his own name — his real name! Of course, he wasn’t worried before. He knew I couldn’t hurt him because his speakerspell hadn’t told his true name. But this time —”

  “Maybe he was lying,” I said quickly.

  Shoogar gave me a contemptuous look. “Lant,” he explained patiently, “the act of saying ‘my real name is,’ is a consecration spell. Even if he was lying when he said it, the act of saying it made it as good as his real name. And it can be used against him! If this were not so, a magician would have no power at all. People would change names at will to avoid local spells.”

  “But why the moonpaths?” I said. Then it dawned on me. “No — you can’t!”

  “I can — and I will. I’m going to drop a moon on his head.”

  I felt a strong urge to laugh. It was insane. Wildly, incredibly insane.

  And he meant every word of it.

  “Shoogar,” I said. “A moon did fall once. Do you know what the results were?”

  “I have seen the Circle Sea.”

  “Circle Sea was once a rich farming area. Now the sea rolls in a circular depression of blasted stone, where nothing grows at all.”

  Shoogar shrugged unconcernedly. “This place is already accursed, Lant. What harm can a falling moon do here?”

  “It can kill us!” I almost shouted.

  “I’ll pick one of the little ones —”

  “Even a little one can kill us — they say that the Circle Sea was a ring of molten rock for many years, before the sea stopped boiling and moved in to cover it.”

  “Probably, they exaggerate.”

  “But —”

  “Lant,” he said, “I can do no less. Consider: Purple has insulted the Gods themselves. He has claimed repeatedly that they do not exist at all — and he has had the incredible effrontery to build a flying machine that proves it! In his violations of reason, such as his games with the ballast concept, he mocks the laws that even the gods obey.”

  Shoogar paced furiously as he spoke, red-eyed and wild. “He has insulted custom, Lant. He has given names to women and taught them the trades of men! He has interrupted housetree consecrations, and turned housetrees into prickly plants. He has reduced our village life to chaos. Some of our traditional trades no longer exist, while others, like coppersmithery, have swollen monstrously in importance.”

  He stopped pacing and looked at me. “He has introduced new concepts to us, Lant. He has taught us evil things that lessen the value of life and increase the importance of things!

  “But most of all,” he said. “He has insulted me. He would not teach me to fly, until he needed to fly himself; and he still has not taught me the spells that make electrissy. We depend on his charity for his lightning boxes and airmakers! He has undermined my authority with his spurious cures, so that they trade my spells for his at ten to one!”

  “I was bound to him by an oath of servitude, but he never asked for my help in anything. Never, not once. He even threw my sails overboard!”

  “No little death spell would retrieve my honor,” Shoogar screamed. “I will bring a moon down upon his head! This one last time I must show my might, before he escapes me forever!”

  “It won’t help you,” I said feebly.

  “You don’t have to, Lant. I’m sure it was your help last time that yn gvied me up.”

  “How long will this take?”

  “Not long. I will finish this soon and then I will chant. I will chant until the red sun is high in the west. Then we will move off and wait.”

  “I would rather you do something about finding us some food,” I grumbled.

  “Forget your stomach for once, Lant. Before the blue sun rises again, Purple will be destroyed.”

  Purple tried his calling thing three more times. On the third try the red light flashed. It began winking steadily.

  Purple screamed with delight and threw the device joyously into the air. He capered about wildly, singing and dancing. “I’m going home, I’m going home — I’m going home.”

  He flung himself on the ground and rolled and kicked. He jumped up with a holler and ran furiously in all directions. Back and forth, in a great circle about me, he pranced and yelled.

  At last — it seemed like days — he tired and came gasping up to me. “Lant, I can hardly believe it. It has been so long,” he panted. “But it’s true. It’s happening. My mother egg has heard.”

  I glanced nervously at the hill where Shoogar still worked. He was sitting and chanting now. “Uh, how long will it take before your egg gets here, Purple?”

  He frowned. “Who cares? It’s coming — that’s all.”

  “I care!” I almost screamed.

  He gave me a peculiar look. “I hadn’t realized this meant so much to you.”

  “Well, it does,” I said, in a slightly quieter tone. “How long will it take?”

  “Maybe a day,” he said. “Maybe a little longer. The egg was on standby. It will have to activate itself, come to full power, take bearings, check its systems, plot a course, make an approach — it will take time, Lant. The egg could not possibly be here before blue sunset.”

  I groaned.

  “I know how it must pain you, my friend. But fear not. I have waited this long. I can wait a little longer.”

  I groaned and trudged away, clutching at the ache in my stomach.

  I went down to the shore. The sea surged restlessly at the slope where Wilville and Orbur worked.

  “Father, you look ill,” said one.

  “I am,” I said. “I am tired and hungry and I hurt all over. I long for a decent bed and a decent meal —”
/>
  “Wilville has found some cavernmouth eggs,” said Orbur. “Do you want one?”

  I groaned. But it was better than nothing. I took the heavy sphere and bit at its rind. A salty-sweet taste flowed into my mouth. “Oh, that’s awful,” I said. I took a drink of water from a ballast sack.

  “Don’t let Shoogar see you doing that.”

  “Curse Shoogar!” I said. “Do you know what he’s doing? He’s trying to call down a moon!”

  Orbur snorted. Wilville didn’t say anything.

  “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

  “We heard you,” said Wilville. “Shoogar is trying to call down a moon. At least it will keep him out of our way.”

  “Oh,” I said. Apparently they were so intent on what they were doing, they were oblivious to what was going on around them. “What are you working on?” I asked. I squatted down on my haunches to look.

  They explained. One of the pulleys had worked loose from a bicycle frame. But they had almost no tools at all to work with. Purple had thrown them all overboard. They were working now with rocks and sticks and shreds of aircloth. “If we can get this working again, we can use the boat to get away from here, whether we have windbags or not.”

  I nodded and offered my help, but Orbur said I would only be in the way. I gathered up the cavernmouth eggs and took them off a ways. I found some driftwood and made a small fire to roast them. They were still awful, but they were food.

  I took one up to Purple, but he had spread out a piece of aircloth from the ripped balloon and was snoring blissfully and peacefully; it was the first time that I had seen him completely relaxed since I had known him.

  I let him sleep and trudged across the slope to Shoogar. He shook his head at the sight of the egg, “I will have it later, when I finish my chant.”

  I looked at his gigantic spell pattern. “Why don’t you draw it around Purple?” I asked.

  “Why bother? If a moon falls on him, it won’t matter if it hits him directly or not — it’s going to make another Circle Sea.”