If at Faust You Don't Succeed

by Roger Zelazny

  Faust was lifted to his feet by the students and brushed clean of the dirt and chicken entrails he had fallen into. Sewers in those days were no more than the dream-children of the most impractical of those architects who created our dark, cramped, smelly but friendly cities of the Dark Ages.

  The voices wafted out the window, and insinuated themselves into Faust's ear.

  It was at the point where Mack was about to sign his name in blood to the parchment Mephistopheles had brought that Faust came unglued. There was an impostor in his house! The devil was tempting the wrong man!

  Faust turned from the window and raced around the house to the front. He entered, throwing back the heavy oak door so that it banged against the wall. Faust raced down the hallway, braked at his door, and threw it open.

  He was just in time to catch Mack's final flourish as he signed the parchment. Then the devil rolled up the parchment, saying, "Now, my dear doctor, we will proceed to the Witches' Kitchen, where our expert cosmeticians will put you into condition for the adventures that lie ahead."

  And then Mephistopheles raised his hands, flames sprang up, bright iris and violet flames, tinged here and there with sinister heliotrope, and flared in glory around the two figures. When they subsided the figures were gone.

  "Damn!" Faust cried, running into the room, stopping, and pounding his fist into his palm. "One minute too late!"

  CHAPTER 6

  Faust glared around into the gloom-shaded corners of his room. For a moment he thought he detected a presence among the bat-winged shapes in the ceiling. No, there was no one here. They had gone, the two of them, the impostor and Mephistopheles. Nothing remained but a faint smell of brimstone.

  It was apparent to him what had happened. Through some miserable concatenation of circumstances, a stranger had broken into his chambers. It was that tall, yellow-haired zany whom he had glimpsed through the window. And Mephistopheles, that silly demon with the grandiose name, had somehow mistaken the fellow for him.

  He frowned and shook his head. Faust had overheard enough to know that Mephistopheles had proposed some fine adventure, and was even now carrying the impostor away to it, and to rewards that belonged by right to Faust. And Faust was left alone in this dreary room, in this mundane city of Cracow, where he was supposed to carry on his life as though nothing had happened.

  Well, damn it, he wasn't going to have it! He would go after them, if necessary to the nethermost realms of space and time, find Mephistopheles, expose the stranger for the impostor that he was, and take his rightful place in the glorious unfolding of things.

  But then he considered for a moment. Was he ready for this? It would be a supreme test for any magician. And Faust, though he counted himself among the first rank in the controlling of the magical arts and the acquisition of esoteric knowledge, was not in his first youth. It might be beyond his powers. He might get himself killed…

  And then he remembered that only hours ago he had been considering killing himself! And why? Because nothing had seemed very interesting to him anymore. Life had stretched ahead of him in its tedious regularity, scarce in pleasures, replete with pain, devoid of meaningful accomplishment. Now he was interested again, to put it mildly! The adventure that was his by right of fame and accomplishment had been taken from him. That he would not countenance. If it must, let this adventure kill him. Nobody was going to steal his offer from the devil!

  He rose and kicked up the fire, which had burned down to glowing embers. He added wood and got a nice blaze going. He washed his face in the basin of almost fresh water the servant had left just two days ago. He found a piece of dried smoked beef, and washed it down with a tumbler of barley ale. And all the time he was planning out his next steps.

  He would need a really strong spell to transport him where he needed to go. It would have to combine the potency of a Sending with the puissance of a Visitation. Transportation Spells were notoriously difficult, involving, as they did, the sending forth of a corporeal substance, in this case himself, to regions where creatures usually walked around in subtler bodies. The sheer amount of spiritual energy required for this was daunting.

  He went to his bookcase and rummaged through his grimoires. He found a formula in Hermes Trismegistus' Surefire Travel to the Stars. But it was too complicated, calling for ingredients difficult to obtain, such as a Chinaman's left great toe, which was an item almost impossible to procure in Eastern Europe at that time, though in Venice they had a goodly supply of them. He searched on. In his Concordance to the Malleus Mallificarum he found a simpler formula with fewer ingredients. He set to making it.

  Batwort… He had a whole vial of that around somewhere. And the recipe called for toad's stools, four of them entire, but luckily he had some, nicely dried and stored in a thimble. Hellebore was never any problem, white willow was common, mercury he had on hand, he was out of blackened wormwood but could pick up some more at his neighborhood pharmacy. But what was this? "Will not work without a fragment of the True Cross"!

  Damnation! He had used up his last fragment last month!

  Wasting no time, Faust picked up his wallet, put his emerald into it for unexpected emergencies, and went out into the street.

  The corner pharmacy was closed for Easter Sunday, but by pounding on the shutters he managed to bring forth the pharmacist, who, grumbling, told him he had no True Cross in stock, and didn't know when the next shipment would arrive from Rome. He did, however, have a supply of blackened wormwood, which Faust purchased.

  The bishop, lounging back in his great armchair in comfortable corpulence, shook his head uncertainly.

  "I am so sorry, my dear Faust. The most recent Advice from Rome is that we are not to permit bits of the True Cross to be used for idolatrous purposes."

  "Who's talking idolatry?" Faust demanded. "This is the science of alchemy we're talking about here."

  "But to what end do you want to use it, my son? To gain great treasures, for example?"

  "Not at all! I want it to right a great injustice!"

  "Well, I guess that's all right," the bishop said. "But I warn you in advance, True Cross has gone up in price, which is only to be expected since it is a substance in limited supply."

  "All I need is a fingernail-sized fragment. Charge it to my account."

  The bishop took out a small japanned box containing True Cross fragments. "I was meaning to speak to you about your account."

  Faust reached into his wallet and set down the emerald. "There's my down payment!" He wrapped the fragment of True Cross in birchbark and then rolled it into an old altar cloth while the bishop admired the shine of the emerald.

  With the fragment wrapped securely, Faust hurried home. He started up a coal fire beneath his alchemist's furnace, and pumped the groaning leather bellows until the fire glowed red and white and gave off streams of tiny diamond sparks. Then he gathered the ingredients together. He put the jug of aqua ardens on a table near him, taking care not to spill it, since it could eat through anything not coated with aqua ardens repellent, powdered the sublimated antimony in a little brass bowl, laid out floral essences on one side, and, on the other, the toad turds, the calcified bat dung, the crystallized woodchuck's piss, and the fortified graveyard mold. He took care to keep them separate. It wouldn't do to mix them prematurely! Over here were his tartar, alum, and yeast. Here was the nigredo, which he had made just last week. He hated to sacrifice it, for with the right process it could produce a phoenix, and the phoenix was the loveliest of allegorical birds. But there was no time for aesthetics now! He was ready to begin.

  And there came a knock at the door. Faust tried to ignore it, but it was repeated, and then repeated again, and behind it he could hear a babble of voices. In a very bad humor he stomped to the door and opened it.

  Standing outside were four or five young men—it was hard to be sure of their exact number because they hobbled around so.

  "Dr. Faust, sir! Don't you recognize us? We are students from your class in Origins
of Alchemy 1b at the University. We need some advice on why the feminine anima image is always found in the changeable hermaphroditic body of Mercurius. They're bound to ask it at finals, sir, and we can't find a thing about it in our Introduction to Alchemy textbooks."

  "Why, damn it," Faust said, "the entire subject of hermaphroditism and the sexual imagery of alchemy is covered in New Directions in an Old Science, by Nicholas Flamel, which I assigned you at the beginning of the year."

  "You are supposed to know French!"

  "But it makes no sense, sir, because if the principle of hermaphroditism according to Aristotle can be subsumed—"

  Faust held up his hand, commanding silence. "Students," he said, "I am embarking on a difficult and complex experiment that will probably go down as a landmark in the annals of alchemy. I cannot permit the slightest interruption. Go to one of the other professors. Or go to the devil! Just get away from here now!"

  The students left. Faust gave another bellowsing to the fire, checked to make sure his descensories, with their hair-thin crosslets, were clean and in working order. The alembics were already heated and ready to go, the sublimatory was in satisfactory condition, and the cucurbit was finally balanced to his satisfaction.

  He began.

  As the elements entered the crucible they changed colors in a satisfying manner. Reds and greens swirled in the gleaming liquid, layers of vapor were let out and condensed into a mist that rose to the ceiling and hung there like a transparent gray serpent. Faust put in the True Cross fragment. The substance lighted up for a moment and then turned black.

  It is very bad when an alchemical reaction turns black. Luckily, Faust had noted the double flash of silver that occurred just before the blackening. He turned to his Alchemist's Trouble-Shooting Manual, produced by the wizards of Cairo University and translated by Moses Maimonides, and looked up the reaction. He read: "A double silver flash before the materia confusa goes to black means that the fragment of Cross used in the reaction was not True Cross. Check it with your religious assayer before going any further."

  Damn it! Stymied again! And this time there seemed no way out. Unless there was a substitute for True Cross? He raced to his library again, but found nothing of use on its groaning shelves. He felt like screaming, so deep was his frustration. And then his gaze fell upon the parcel of books brought by the man who had entered his apartments.

  He looked through them and his lip curled with contempt. They were nothing but trumpery imitations of the real thing, fairground playthings to be sold to the ignorant. But here among them was one title he recognized, though he had never been able to obtain it. It was The Marrow of Alchemy, and was a German translation of certain key texts from Eirenaeus. How had that gotten inhere?

  He flipped through it and came upon the following statement: "True Cross is in appearance almost indistinguishable from Almost True Cross. Unfortunately, it will not work in formulas of alchemy.

  However, Almost True Cross can be boosted in its power and so serve for the real thing by adding equal amounts of potassium and common lampblack."

  Faust had his vial of potassium right to hand. He had no lampblack, but if, as he suspected, the serving girl hadn't cleaned the lamps recently… Yes, he was right, plenty of lampblack!

  After the lampblack and potassium were added there were various changes of light and color in the mass in the alchemist's furnace. A dense gray vaporarose and for a moment clouded Faust and his equipment.

  When the vapor had dissipated, Faust was no longer in the room, nor, for that matter, was he in Cracow.

  Faust's first impression was of a pearly grayness that suffused everything. That persisted only for a moment, however, as Spiritual Space accommodated itself to the novelty of having an earthly observer within it by expanding outwards on all sides. After that, Faust saw that he was standing just on the outskirts of a small city, very like in appearance to cities he had seen in his travels around Europe, though by no means identical.

  He had certainly gotten to this place very quickly. But that stood to reason, since the Spiritual Realm, having no substance except for that imposed by the temporary rules of Solidification, can be shrunk down to a tiny compass by Nature, which abhors a vacuum and isn't about to leave a lot of unused space around, either. The learned doctors at the Jagiellonian taught that when the Spiritual Realm wasn't being used, it resided in a space no larger than a pinhead—to such an infinitesimal mass may the immaterial be reduced! The only thing that would cause it to expand was the presence of an observer. Then the space created itself, with the sort of scenery and personnel as might be expected in this place and at this time.

  Faust entered the city and saw a row of storefronts. Above each was a sign. Faust could not decipher the lettering on them, by which he knew they were not for him to enter. At last he saw one sign that read,

  'the witches' kitchen'. And he knew that was the place he was to go to. (So much is inherent in the Transportation Spell, which takes you unerringly to the threshold of your next adventure, though you're on your own after that.)

  Faust approached the Witches' Kitchen. He walked up to the door and touched it with a gingerly gesture. He had been afraid that his hand would pass through it, since only spirit is supposed to exist in such a place, and spirit is well known for its ability to pass through other spirits. But the door felt solid and a moment's reflection told him that even if a body in this place were not solid, it would have to act as though it were in order for anything to happen; for as the ancient philosophers have pointed out, there's no drama unless things can bump into each other. But how, being aethereal, had they managed to become solid? Faust decided that it must be because the entities here had taken a formal oath to maintain solidness despite the comforts of intangibility, and above all not to melt into each other.

  Faust entered the Witches' Kitchen and saw a whole host of small demons of not very frightening aspect attending to a group of patrons who sat in chairs with striped sheets over their bodies. It seemed to be a beauty salon of some kind. These demons were evidently barbers, or surgeons, for not only did they cut hair, they also scalloped away fat from obese bellies, trimmed beef from sausagelike thighs, and added strands of glistening red muscle to wasted arms and shrunken calves. They scrubbed dirt off the body and sandpapered blemishes out of the skin. Under their skilled claws, faces were reconstructed, the devils utilizing gobs of all-purpose flesh that they kept in vats beside their barber chairs.

  In a moment, however, it became obvious that the demons were mere assistants. Walking among them, supervising, and themselves performing the more delicate bits of reconstruction, were a dozen or so witches. They all wore the same ragged, rusty garments, and they had high peaked hats perched on their narrow heads, hats whose brims sloped uncannily over their glittering eyes. And they all had high lace-up boots around their skinny shanks, and most of them had a baleful black cat perched on a knobby shoulder.

  "Well, what's this?" said a senior witch, whose rank could be told by the black crepe rose she wore pinned to her hat. "Are you the basic material package we requested? Step over here, dearie, and we'll have you dismembered in no time." "I am nobody's package," Faust said proudly. "I am Johann Faust, a doctor of the Earth Realm."

  "It seems to me we just had a person of that name passing through here," the witch said.

  "Was he accompanied by a tall, skinny demon named Mephistopheles?"

  "Why, yes, he was, though he wasn't skinny to my tastes."

  "That man with him was not Faust! He was an impostor! I am Faust!"

  The witch looked at him levelly. "I thought he was young to be a learned doctor! Do you have any identification?"

  Faust rummaged through his wallet (which had been transported and spiritualized but otherwise was the same as back on Earth) and found an honorary sheriff-ship from the town of Lublin, a voter's registration shard from Paris, and a silver commemorative medal awarded to him at the Great Fair of Thaumaturgy that had taken place two years p
ast in Prague.

  "Well then, you are Faust," the witch said. "And that other fellow deceived me, and Mephistopheles, too, unless I miss my guess. It's too had. We gave him such a nice rejuvenation. You would have wept to see how beautiful we made him." "It was wrongly done!" Faust cried, gnashing his teeth. "Now you must do the same for me!"

  "That will not be possible," the witch said. "We already used up most of the allotment for that rejuvenation. Still, let's see what we can do." She guided Faust to a chair. There she called over one of her demon assistants, and the two conferred in low voices.

  "The trouble is," the demon said, "we used up almost all the longevity serum on the other fellow." "Strain out the dregs and use them. They're better than nothing."

  "But his features!" The demon tilted Faust's head to one side and then to the other. His eyes, hard as agates, studied Faust's features and showed no sign of being impressed. "Lacking a beauty pack, what can I do with this gross, long-nosed, sunken-cheeked, thin-lipped, and ill-formed visage?" "Hey!" Faust cried. "I didn't come here to be insulted!"

  "Shut up," said the demon. "I'm the doctor here, not you." Turning to the witch, he said, "We could build up his physique, not to superhuman powers, of course, since that preparation hasn't come through, but to a respectable degree."

  "Do what you can," said the witch.

  The demon worked swiftly and with an elan that frightened Faust until he perceived that the demon's ministrations didn't hurt. Then he relaxed in the chair while the demon, humming monotonously to himself, plucked away some of the more pendulous portions of Faust's anatomy and molded fresh flesh in their place, holding the strips of dripping skin in place until they had hardened to the bone. Lastly he ran strands of nerve and muscle and sinew 'into the appropriate places so that Faust could smile or grimace or move his limbs, and fixed them in place with small applications of Universal Fastener.