The Warlock Wandering

by Christopher Stasheff

  Whitey heard her, and turned back, raising a hand. "Guilty. I hereby confess to writing deathless prose, on occasion— and even immortal verse, now and then. But when I do, I do it alone, with only a split of vin ordinaire for company, and I do it for me, myself, only. It's pure self-indulgence, of course—'art for art's sake' really means 'art for the artist's sake.' It's the sheer personal gratification of doing something as well as I can possibly do it, of expressing my feelings, my view of existence, my self—and it's for me, alone. Oh, I don't mind if other people read it, and it's nice if they like it. Sure, I enjoy praise; I'm human, too. But that's just a by-product, a side issue." He looked around at the crowd of actors and technicians. "This—this is another matter. It's another thing entirely. This script, I wrote for other people, and I make it with a host of other people. If no one else ever hears it or sees it, it will have failed. Worse, it'll be absurd, without purpose. Without an audience, it's incomplete."

  He turned back to Herman and Gawain. "Okay, Mirane'll tidy that up and get hard copies for you. But let's tape it with the script the way it is first, just in case."

  The vampire and the hero nodded happily and went back to their places. The little sorcerer followed, grumbling contentedly.

  "Places!" Mirane spoke into a ring on her index finger, and her voice boomed out of a loudspeaker. "Quiet on the set."

  "Mist," Whitey said quietly.

  Fog seemed to grow out of the ground, rising up to obscure Herman and Clyde.

  "Lights," Whitey commanded.

  High in the air, light suddenly glared from six spots. The two camera operators sauntered out to the side and turned toward the actors. Everyone was silent for a moment, then Harve said, "Balanced."

  "Ditto," George called.

  Whitey nodded. "Roll."

  "Rolling," the camera ops responded.

  "Confirm," said a man at a console behind Whitey.

  "Action," Whitey called.

  The set was quiet a moment longer. Then Gawain came out of the hotel, looked around him with a bemused smile, and inhaled deeply.

  "It is pleasant, is it not?" said a sepulchral voice with a heavy accent. "The air of my Transylvania."

  The mist thinned, gradually revealing the tall, cloaked figure and the stooped, gnarled silhouette behind him.

  "The approach of dawn clears the air," Gawain agreed, and the scene went on.

  Whitey stood by, approving, at peace.

  Finally, Clyde stepped forward, hurling the silk kerchief. Hilda watched, alert, pushing sliders and twisting a knob, and the kerchief fluttered straight at Gawain, settling over the crucifix. Herman grinned, showing his fangs, but this time everyone froze. Silence enveloped the set again.

  Then Whitey sighed, and called, "Cut."

  Everyone relaxed, and Herman came striding out of the mist, grinning and chatting with Clyde. Gawain grinned and turned away to have a word with a young lady. Noise swelled up, as everyone started chattering, released from the thralldom of silence.

  Whitey turned to Rod with a raised eyebrow. "Little better that time?"

  "Uh… yeah!" Rod stared, astounded. "It, uh… it helps to do it for real, huh?"

  "Yeah, it does." Whitey turned and looked around. "But the new dialogue will make it work better." He turned back to Rod with a smile. "It only seems natural if you don't break the spell, you see."

  Rod gazed at him for a moment, then said, "No, I don't think I do. You mean the old dialogue might make the audience realize they were just watching a show?"

  "It might," Whitey said. "If it stood out for you, it might distract them. Then we might as well have never come to this place. Our work here would have been wasted." He smiled suddenly. "But I don't think the new version will distract anybody. No. It'll hold their attention."

  Rod frowned. "Why do you care about that so much? Isn't it enough just to know you did the job right?"

  Whitey shook his head. "If the audience is bored, they'll spread the word, and nobody'll buy the cube to view, and if nobody buys a copy, we won't make money. If we don't make money, we can't make any more epics."

  "But that's not the main reason."

  "No, of course not." Whitey grinned. "Let's get down to basics—if nobody watches it, there was no point in making it."

  "What point?" Rod demanded. "You've been the top poet of your time! Your place in history is guaranteed, and so is your bankroll, if you can afford to make an epic like this! Why should you sully your reputation by making 3DT epics?"

  "Because people need to learn things," Whitey said, "or they'll let themselves fall prey to slavemasters—the way the Terrans actually voted in the PEST regime. And that hurts me, because I want everybody to be free to read what I write. I don't want to take a chance that some censor might lock up my manuscript and not let anyone read it. So I'm going to teach them what they need to know, to insist on staying free."

  "With a horror story? A Dracula spectacula?" Rod exclaimed.

  "You've got it," Whitey affirmed. "Even this, just a cheap work of entertainment, can do it. What'll they learn? Oh, just a few random bits about Terran geography. After all, most people don't know where Transylvania was, or how the Dracula legend came to be, so we give them just a few facts about that. And along with it, just a touch of the history of Terra's Europe—and the peasants' struggle out of the chains of feudalism. Just a few facts, mind you; just a dozen, in a whole two hours. But if they watch two hours and twelve facts every day of their lives, they can learn enough to yell 'No!' when the next man on horseback comes riding in."

  "You're a teacher!" Rod exploded. "On the sly! This is covert action! Subversive education!"

  "I'll plead guilty again." Whitey grinned. "But I can't claim all the credit. Most of these techniques, I picked up from a cheery old reprobate on a frontier planet."

  "Cholly!"

  "Oh, you've met him?" Whitey grinned again. "Charles T. Barman, officially."

  "I, uh, did hear something of the, uh, sort…"

  "The rogue educator," Whitey said, "the only professor living who doesn't worry about tenure. Business, maybe, but not tenure. Strog and I spent a year with him out on Wolmar. Quite a chap, that. Couldn't believe how much he taught me—and at my age!" He grinned. "Not that I didn't throw him a curve or two. Dave and I thought up some techniques between us that he'd never dreamed of."

  But his words had suddenly moved away from Rod, become remote. He was remembering that Whitey the Wino had been the creative force behind the DDT's mass-education movement. It had culminated in the coup d'etat that eliminated PEST, and brought in the Decentralized Democratic Tribunal of his own times. But the history books hadn't exactly stressed the fact that Whitey the Wino was the same person as the revered, austere poet, Tod Tambourin.

  He'd been quiet too long; Whitey's attention had strayed.

  He turned away to call the extras, bustling around to set them up in a rough semicircle, facing toward the cameras. A portly man in a tan coverall moved among them, passing out flails and pitchforks.

  "And you two lounge out here in the middle for your dialogue." Whitey waved, shooing two actors into place. "Come on, now, hit your marks! You know, ninety degrees to each other! Upstage man sets up the over-the-shoulder! Okay, let's run through the lines."

  "I don't know… maybe we shouldn't try it," the innkeeper said through his walrus mustache.

  "We got to try it," the old farmer answered, testing one of his pitchfork points with a finger. "Ow! Ya, that's sharp enough."

  "To do what?" the innkeeper was irritated. "To poke him in his zitsfleisch? What good is that going to do with a vampire, hanh?"

  "You talk like an old woman," the farmer snorted. "The pitchfork is just to hold him off while we get a rope around him."

  "He'll just go to bat," the innkeeper warned.

  The farmer shrugged. "So? We'll have Lugorf standing by with his butterfly net. Sooner or later, we slam the stake through his heart."

  "And then what?" The innke
eper spread his hands. "So he lies there in his coffin for twenty, thirty years. Sooner or later, some young idiot who's looking for a reputation will go down there and pull out the stake, and where will we be? Right where we are now."

  "We've done it before," the farmer maintained, "and we'll do it again."

  "Again, and again, and again," the innkeeper moaned. "How many times do we have to go through it?"

  "How many times did our ancestors have to?" the fanner growled. "Five hundred years they've been cleaning up his messes!"

  "Five hundred years?" The innkeeper frowned. "That was the first of them—back when 'Dracula' was a title, not a name."

  "That's right. It meant 'dragon,' didn't it? Shame on them, giving dragons a bad name like that!"

  "At least dragons didn't hurt people for the fun of it," the innkeeper agreed. "At least, that's what they say about the first one."

  "His name was 'Vlad.' They called him 'the Impaler.'"

  The innkeeper nodded. "I remember. This mountain country was just a bunch of tiny kingdoms then, wasn't it?"

  "Ya. No Kingdom bigger than a hundred miles each way, but their rulers called themselves kings." The farmer shook his head. "What a life for our poor ancestors! Trying to scratch a living out of scraps of level ground, whenever they weren't busy dodging whichever petty king had a war going at the moment!"

  "Always fighting," the innkeeper grumbled, "always a battle. It wasn't any better the first time they woke him, a hundred years later…"

  Rod listened, amazed, as the two men gossiped through a three-minute history of the Balkans, as seen through the eyes of a couple of Transylvanian peasants. It was ridiculous, it was asinine—and it was working.

  "So stick a stake in his sternum… and, at least, we get twenty years of peace," the farmer reminded the innkeeper. "Maybe that doesn't mean much to you, but my cattle start looking pale when there aren't enough gullible people around."

  "Where do you think the gullible people stay away from?" the innkeeper retorted. "My inn! Maybe you've got a point. No matter how you bite it, the Count's bad for business."

  "So we nail him down again," the farmer sighed, hefting his pitchfork, "and twenty years from now, our sons take their turn. So? You do what you have to do to make a living, right?"

  "Right." The innkeeper nodded. "Each generation has to kill its own vampire. You don't stop planting crops just because there's a drought."

  "Right," the farmer agreed, "and you don't…"

  Out of the corner of his eye, Rod saw the arm whirl, saw the pitchfork fly. "Down!" he bellowed, and leaped into a dive at Chornoi. His shoulder slammed into her as she howled in anger. She chopped at him as he tried to untangle himself enough to stand up, then managed to get a one-handed choke hold—and froze, staring at the pitchfork sticking in the ground, its handle still vibrating.

  Rod knocked her hand loose, bawling, "Stop him!" He leaped to his feet, whirling toward the mob of extras, just in time to see the ersatz peasant disappear into the crowd. Rod bellowed and leaped after him.

  The crowd parted, giving him plenty of room.

  It made a nice lane—just in time. At its far end, Rod saw the "peasant" disappearing into an alley.

  Gwen caught a broomstick out of the hands of a stunned extra, leaped on it, and shot off after the "peasant."

  Hilda stared after her, then gave her head a quick shake and scowled down at her console. "Now, how the hell did I do that?"

  Rod sped down the lane and into the alley. He was just in time to see the "peasant" disappearing around a corner. Rod kicked into overdrive and pelted after him.

  The "peasant" dashed back out. Rod stared, then launched himself into a flying tackle. But the "peasant" saw him coming and jumped forward, and Rod smashed into the pavement with a howl of rage. He landed judo-fashion, but pain seared his side.

  "Down!" Gwen cried.

  Rod did a good imitation of a pancake, just in time for Gwen to flash by directly above him on the broomstick.

  He rolled to his feet, shaking his head, and hobbled after her with a limping run.

  A block later, he saw Gwen coming toward him, carrying her broomstick. "What's the matter?" he called. "Isn't this backwards? I thought it was supposed to be carrying you."

  "I had no wish to scandalize those who live here," she explained.

  "Honey, this is the one planet in the whole Terran Sphere where they wouldn't think much of it. They might ask you how you did the effect, though. I take it our man got away?"

  Gwen nodded. "There is a town square. From it doth open many streets."

  "Here, let me see." Rod limped on past her. The street curved and ended in a plaza, where five narrow, crooked streets fanned out amid tottering houses. The lanes twisted away out of sight.

  Rod stood in the center, looking about him and shaking his head. "Right, lady. He could have gone down any one of them."

  "Aye," Gwen agreed. "We have lost him."

  Rod glowered from one street to another, remembering the pitchfork sticking in the ground. "The bastard almost got Chornoi. Didn't take them long to find us, did it?"

  "Peace, husband." Gwen laid a gentle hand on his arm. "The man himself is of no consequence. E'en an thou wert to slay him, a dozen more like to him would spring up."

  "Like dragon's teeth," Rod agreed. "The one we need to get is the one who's sending them out. But we don't even know what outfit he works for!"

  "Is he not of our old enemies from tomorrow?"

  "SPITE or VETO? I'd thought so, but that ersatz extra was after Chornoi, not us."

  "Gwen's eyes widened. "Her erstwhile employers?"

  "The PEST secret police." Rod nodded. "Probably. I was right when I said we'd be a marked crew if we took her along."

  Gwen's hand tightened on his arm. "We cannot desert her."

  "No," Rod agreed, "we can't. Besides, we still need a native of this era to guide us. Okay, so we could probably find one who isn't as big a potential liability as Chornoi, but we'd still have GRIPE and/or VETO after us."

  "Thou dost but seek to discover reasons," Gwen accused. "When all's said and done, thou'lt not abandon a companion."

  "Probably," Rod admitted. "Sometimes I wish I had as high an opinion of me as you do."

  Gwen smiled, and slipped her arm through his. "That is my province, my lord. Thou mayest entrust it to me."

  "Then I will." Rod smiled down at her. "And try to perform the same function for you."

  "Not too well," she murmured, as his face came closer. "'Tis drafty, placed up so high."

  "Oh, come down off your pedestal for a moment!" Rod muttered. Then his lips brushed, touched, and claimed hers.

  A minute or two later, she murmured, "We must preserve those poor folk from Yorick."

  "Yeah," Rod sighed, clasping her hand around his arm as he turned back. "We must save those poor, innocent city folks from our Stone Age country slicker."

  As they came back to the shooting site, they heard a voice protesting, "But we weren't really planning it that way…"

  "Darn straight you weren't." Whitey's voice was grim. "In fact, this whole elaborate explanation has the definite ring of an ad-lib. Now, what say we try it again—with the truth?"

  "If you say so," Yorick sighed, "but you're not going to believe this."

  "So what else is new?"

  "We are… or at least, two of my friends are. They were born about five hundred years from now. And there's an interstellar organization out to get them. It kidnapped them and dumped them back here."

  Whitey just stared at him for a moment, then said, "You're right. I don't believe you."

  "Then try this," Chornoi snapped. "I used to be a spy for the LORDS. That's right, I'm one of the ones who got us all into this mess! But after the coup, I realized what an amoral, calloused cadre they were, and tried to quit, so they sent me to Wolmar. Gwen Gallowglass and her husband got me out of there, and I'm trying to guide them to Terra."

  Whitey stared at her while the s
light remaining amount of color drained out of his albino face. Then he said, "That, I believe." He turned to Stroganoff. "Take over, Dave. I suddenly got hit with a yen for a stroll."

  "Sounds good to me, too." Stroganoff was pale as a skid row bum with an air conditioned bar available. He turned to Mirane. "Tell 'em to go home."

  "Home?" Mirane yelped. "Are you crazy? They each have to be paid for the full day; it's in their contracts!"

  "Do it," Whitey said grimly. "It's cheaper than a coffin."

  Mirane stared at him for a moment, then threw her computer-pad up in despair. She turned to the cast and crew, stretching out a hand to catch the pad. "Okay, that's it for the day! Strike the setup and go home!"

  One or two of the extras cheered, but the principal actors and the technicians stared at her, then scowled and started packing up.

  Mirane watched them for a moment, then turned to Whitey. "You run a good company. This is the first time I've ever seen a crew who'd rather finish the shoot than have the day off."

  "They're good kids," Whitey agreed, "but I'd rather be shooting with them tomorrow, than having them come to my funeral." He turned to Rod, Gwen, Yorick, Chornoi, and Brother Joey. "I think you'd better come with me."

  "I'm not sure whether it's safer with us, or away from us," Stroganoff explained to Mirane.

  "Neither am I, but I don't feel safe alone."

  Dave nodded. "Let's go, then."

  They hurried to catch up with the cortege.

  As they came up, Rod was saying, "Why a casino?"

  "Safest place," Whitey explained, "except for a dream-house. I mean, you're out there in public, where plenty of people are watching you, and the management doesn't want any unpleasant scenes for the patrons."

  "I like the dreamhouse idea better." Chornoi had a happy, faraway look.

  "So do I," Whitey grunted. "Whether it's a PEST agent who's after you or not, he's on a free planet now, and he has to adhere to local laws. And the dreamhouses are very good at keeping unwanted clients out." He turned to Rod. "Stroganoff and I aren't exactly popular with PEST, either."

  Dave nodded. "They know about our epics. And they know that education is the dictator's enemy."