Fantasy & Science Fiction, Extended Edition

by Spilogale Inc.

  Merlin bowed low. And before the royal tears came, or his own could start, he found himself hurtling backward through the centuries to the hermit Galapas and the Crystal Cave.

  Merlin didn't linger there but immediately set out across Wales, finding within himself the magic to cover miles in minutes. One story Victoria had told was of a king trying to build a castle before his enemies were upon him.

  Each day the walls would be raised and each night they would be thrown down. All were in despair until a bold youth in a cloak of moons appeared. He tamed two dragons that fought every night in the caves below the castle and made the walls collapse. Merlin knew he was that youth.

  4.

  "Queen Victoria," a commentator said at her Golden Jubilee, "inherited a Britain linked by stagecoach and reigned in a Britain that ran on rails. She ruled over a quarter of the globe and a quarter of its people."

  At Balmoral Castle in the Highlands late in her reign the queen went into high mourning because a gamekeeper, John Brown, had died.

  "Mrs. Brown mourns dead husband," was how a scurrilous underground London sheet put it.

  In fact, Brown, belligerent, hard-drinking, and rude to every person at court except her majesty, was the only one on Earth who spoke to her as one human being to another.

  He died unmourned by anyone but the queen. But she mourned him extravagantly. Memorial plaques were installed; statuettes were manufactured.

  He was gone but the court's relief was short-lived. To commemorate becoming Empress of India, Victoria imported servants from the subcontinent. Among them was Abdul Karim who taught her a few words of Hindu. For this the queen called him "the Munshi" or teacher and appointed him her private secretary.

  Soon the Munshi was brought along to state occasions, allowed to handle secret government reports, introduced to foreign dignitaries. He engaged in minor intrigue and told her majesty nasty stories about his fellow servants.

  The entire court wished the simple, straightforward Mr. Brown was back. Victoria's children, many well into middle-age, found the Munshi appalling. The government worried about its state secrets.

  "Indian cobra in queen's parlor," the slander sheets proclaimed.

  The queen would hear nothing against him. But she knew he wasn't what she wanted.

  "Oh the cruelty of young women and the folly of old men," Merlin cried as he paced the floor in the tower of glass that was his prison cell.

  Nimue the enchantress who beguiled his declining years had turned against him, used the skills he'd taught her to imprison him.

  When he was a boy, Queen Victoria had told him about King Uther Pendragon whose castle walls collapsed each night. Solving that, young Merlin won the confidence of Pendragon. The birth of the king's son Arthur, hiding the infant from usurpers, the sword in the stone, the kingdom of Britain, and all the rest had followed from that.

  But Victoria never told Merlin about Nimue. She thought it too sad.

  "Sired by an incubus, baptized in church, tamer of dragons, advisor to kings, I am a cambion turned into a cuckold," he wailed.

  Most of his magic had deserted him. He hadn't even enough to free himself. Still he did little spells, turned visiting moths into butterflies, made his slippers disappear and reappear. Merlin knew he had a reason for doing this but couldn't always remember what it was.

  Then one morning while making magic he found himself whisked from the tower and summoned to a room crammed full of tartan pillows and with claymore swords hung on the walls as decoration. Music played in the next room and an old lady in black looked at him kindly.

  The slump of his shoulders, the unsteadiness of his stance, led the Queen of England, the Empress of India, to rise and lead him over to sit on the divan next to her.

  "That music you hear is a string quartet playing a reduction of Herr Mendelssohn's 'Scottish Symphony,'" she said. "Musicians are on call throughout my waking hours. You told me long ago this was how things were arranged at the Royal Court in 2159."

  It was a brisk day and they drank mulled wine. "The sovereign of Britain requires a wizard to attend Her," she said, "for a period of time which She shall determine."

  Merlin realized he was rescued. And when the Munshi walked into the room unannounced, the Wizard stood to his full height. Seeing a white-bearded man with flashing eyes and sparks darting from his hands, the Munshi fled.

  Everyone at Balmoral marveled at the day her majesty put aside her secretary and gave orders that he was not to approach her. All wondered if someone else had taken his place but no evidence of that could ever be found.

  People talked about the eccentricities of Queen Victoria's last years: the seat next to hers that she insisted always be kept empty in carriages, railroad cars, at state dinners, the rooms next to hers that must never be entered.

  At times the queen would send all the ladies and servants away from her chambers and not let them in until next morning.

  Some at court hinted that all this had shaded over into madness and attributed it to heredity. Most thought it was just old age, harmless and in its way charmingly human.

  In fact a few members of her court did see things out of the corners of their eyes. Merlin could conjure invisibility but his concentration was no longer perfect.

  Her majesty walking over the gorse at Balmoral in twilight, on the shore on a misty day at Osborne, in the corridors of Windsor Castle would suddenly be accompanied by a cloaked figure with a white beard and long white hair. When the viewer looked again he would have disappeared.

  She talked to Merlin about their prior meetings and how she cherished each of them. The wizard would once have sneered at the picturesque ruins and the undefendable faux castles that dotted the landscape near any royal residence. Now he understood they had been built in tribute to the sage who'd saved the young princess, the handsome magician who had helped choose her husband, the quicksilver youth of her widowhood.

  When she finally became very ill at Windsor, Queen Victoria had ruled for more than sixty years. Merlin remembered that this was the time when she would die.

  He stayed with her, put in her mind the things he knew she found pleasing, summoned up music only she could hear. He wondered if, when she was gone, he would be returned to Nimue and the tower.

  "She assumed the throne in the era of Sir Walter Scott and her reign has lasted into the century of Mr. H. G. Wells," the Times of London said.

  In the last days when her family came to see her, Victoria had the glass with the parchment inside it under her covers. Merlin stood in a corner and was visible only to the queen.

  When her son who would be Edward VII appeared, Merlin shook his head. This man would never summon him. It was the same with her grandson who would be George V.

  A great-grandchild, a younger son who stammered, was brought in with his brothers. Merlin nodded: this one would summon him to London decades later when hellfire fell from the skies.

  The boy was called back after he and his brothers had left, was given the parchment, and shown how to hide it.

  "You are my last and only friend," Victoria told Merlin. He held her hands when she died and felt grief for the first time in his life. But he wasn't returned to his glass prison.

  Uninvited, invisible, utterly alone at the funeral, he followed the caisson that bore the coffin through the streets of Windsor, carried the only friend he'd ever had to the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore.

  "We say of certain people, 'She was a woman of her time,'" an orator proclaimed. "But of how many can it be said that the span of their years, the time in which they lived, will be named for them?"

  "A bit of her is inside each one of us," said a woman watching the cortege. "And that I suppose is what a legend is."

  In the winter twilight with snow on the ground, Merlin stood outside the mausoleum. "I don't want to transfer my mind and soul to another human or beast, and I won't risk using that magic and getting summoned. There's no other monarch I wish to serve."

  He remembered
the Hermit of the Crystal Cave. Old Galapas hadn't been much of a teacher, but Merlin had learned the Wizard's Last Spell from him. It was simple enough and he hadn't forgotten.

  Merlin invoked it and those who had lingered in the winter dusk saw for a moment a figure with white hair and beard, wearing robes with the moon in all its phases.

  The old wizard waved a wand, shimmered for a moment, then appeared to shatter. In the growing dark what seemed like tiny stars flew over the mausoleum, over Windsor, over Britain and all the world.

  * * *

  Demiurge

  By Geoffrey A. Landis | 1137 words

  Geoff Landis is the Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning author of Mars Crossing and Iron Angels. He is a scientist by trade and worked on the rover team of the Mars Pathfinder mission. His new story is about journeying into the unknown.

  THERE WAS AN AUTHOR—call him Erdemacher—who wrote a fantasy novel, Werldwright. In this novel, the protagonist is also an author, one who seems very much like Erdemacher himself (although, perhaps unremarkably, with a useful ability to pick up languages, and an unlikely mastery of fencing).

  The author in the book Werldwright also writes a fantasy novel, which is (somewhat confusingly) also called Werldwright . In Erdemacher's book, the author-protagonist slowly comes to discover that the fantasy novel he is writing is real, and that by some innate talent or perhaps from his research into esoteric spells, he himself is able to tap into real powers.

  The book wasn't really very good, but it struck a chord in a small number of fans, who claimed that it was mostly autobiographical: Erdemacher did, either by an innate talent, or some accident, or as a result of his esoteric research, really have the power to cast real magical spells.

  In the book, the author-protagonist writes a spell for finding lost objects, the only spell given explicitly in the book, two short lines of nonsense syllables. (Erdemacher claimed it to be from the Etruscan, "based on his researches," and who can disprove it? Etruscan is a lost language.) According to the book, if you chant the spell and then go look in the first place you think of, "no matter how unlikely," the object will be there. In the book, the protagonist uses the spell in more and more unlikely circumstances, in the final instance finding a "thousand-year-old, jewel-encrusted silver dagger" that is important to the plot. In the real world, fans avow that, when chanted correctly, the finding spell never fails. Of course, Erdemacher had written that spells "always must be recited with the right cadence, and with the emphasis on certain syllables characteristic of the Etruscan language," so it was a no-lose prediction for Erdemacher: when the spell didn't work, surely the spell hadn't been chanted at the "right" cadence.

  Most of the fans who claimed to believe in the reality of Erdemacher's book, and the efficacy of its spells, undoubtedly were just playing let's-pretend, to make their fandom more interesting. But some of them actually did believe that Erdemacher had magical powers.

  The author's life indeed seemed to reflect their suppositions. All of a sudden the not-terribly-handsome author was surrounded by beautiful women, not always of legal age, and for that matter beautiful young boys as well—he was reputed not to be choosy. A woman who had been one of Erdemacher's groupies during this period said of him, "He could talk the pants off of a marble statue."

  And although he did not have wealth beyond his dreams, he had an income comfortable enough that he could spend some of it frivolously and extravagantly.

  He wrote two more novels in that series, books that slid ever more transparently toward authorial wish-fulfillment, the sex increasingly kinky, the protagonist increasingly irresistible. In the books the writer-protagonist finds himself facing ever more powerful evil, yet always discovering hithertofore unsuspected magical abilities more potent than he had imagined. In the third and final book, Demiurge, Erdemacher's author-protagonist writes himself into the fictional fantasy world he has created, and in that world he is a demiurge, a being with arbitrary powers who can perform acts of creation from willpower alone. There will be no more books from me, Erdemacher's fictional author says; I have left your tedious gray world for one far more interesting.

  In the real world, Erdemacher never did write any more books—why should he, when fans already treated him as a god and would give him anything he wanted? Eventually he died, dissolute and obese, they said, but still beautiful in the eyes of his fans.

  But among his fans there was whispered a different story, one claiming that nobody had actually seen the body, and that the coffin buried during the elaborate funeral was filled only with rocks. When Erdemacher wrote that his fictional author had written himself into his own book, this was no fiction, but a simple explanation of his plans, and now he really was in that world, a demiurge with enormous and capricious powers.

  Some of his fans really do believe this, although to most it is simply a means to imagine themselves away from this tedious gray world. But every year they have a festival. The preparations for the festival are shrouded in secrecy; it's in a different city every year, but somehow, through word spread from mouth to mouth, the fans know where to go. And the climax of the festival is a show, which fans pay hugely to attend—I've heard that tickets are sometimes scalped for over a thousand dollars. What happens in the show is secret, and attending fans are sworn not to tell. In this show, supposedly, Erdemacher comes back. But he no longer looks like Erdemacher from the old author's photograph on the book jacket: he looks like a beautiful young man, or a young woman—he has that power now, to appear in any body he wishes. He tells of his adventures in his world. He shows off with a few acts of magic, or illusion—minor magic, by the standards of any modern stage magicians, but he does not need to be spectacular, because his fans already believe. And his fans come away happy; they've seen a moment of bright color and arcane charm, a piece of that other world beyond this one, that no one else in the tedious gray world has seen.

  But there's a rumor that sometimes, in the festival, Erdemacher picks a beautiful girl, or a beautiful boy (Erdemacher still doesn't care) to whom he gives personal attention after the show—a private show, if you will. And, if they ask, Erdemacher will write them, too, into the world he created.

  And, in truth, after the festival, sometimes people disappear. Kids. Usually young, good-looking ones. And it is never the ones playing let's-pretend, but only the ones who firmly, desperately, truly believe in Erdemacher.

  Many of them don't have families, or have disowned their families, pretending that they never had a family or that all their kinsmen are dead. Sometimes, though, they do have parents who worry, and look for them.

  The families never find them.

  The police, I have been told, are suspicious, but nothing ever comes of it. How could it? Erdemacher does not even have a face, and, of the people who can be questioned, at least half of them secretly wish that they had been the ones who had disappeared.

  Kids disappear sometimes. And, especially, the ones who are desperately unhappy with the world the way it is, and long for another reality that lies beyond this tedious gray world.

  * * *

  The Man Who Murdered Mozart

  By Robert Walton and Barry N. Malzberg | 6556 words

  Robert Walton is a lifelong rock climber and mountaineer who has made numerous ascents in Yosemite and the Sierra Nevadas. His published writing includes poetry, children's books, and science fiction. Barry Malzberg is the author of dozens of novels and for all his influence he should probably be known as Gandalf the Gray Eminence. Mr. Walton says "This story exploded from Barry's imagination. I pretty much hung on for the ride." Mr. Malzberg says that "in collaboration with the intrinsic and invaluable Robert Walton I'm publishing what I take to be the most ambitious story I've written in more than a decade." Your editor says: fasten your seatbelts!

  WHAT DO YOU DO IF YOU are utterly out of sync with your age? What do you do if your age is as wildly out of sync with you? We are not here to answer these questions or even to consider them at length. Life and circ
umstance sometimes conjoin, often do not: the dancer can despise the dance. What can we say of Howard Beasley? (2042 - ?) He is neither dancer nor dance, age nor circumstance, only a composite of the weird cacophony of time itself. His brow is slanting. His eyes are bitter. His heart is impure. He has small pretensions and less hope.

  What can we accomplish if we do not consider Beasley? It is not as if other solutions are at hand, circumstances more amenable. If we do not consider Beasley, here before us, bitter of eye, impure of heart, then it is the age itself we are forced to contemplate and this will take us nowhere but to the heart of immemorial darkness. It is a hard age. It is a hard and lost time; its weight descending upon Beasley has turned his heart to stone, his hope to an overarching and implausible loss.

  In earlier life, in times slightly less decadent, Beasley pursued women, drank lavishly, lay on one bed of pain after the next, seeking the divine but settling more often than not for soddenness and despair. William Shakespeare wrote with familiarity of this problem: The Seven Ages of Man (a sprawling text); Gertrude in bed with the Bloat King; Lady Macbeth of the dry breasts and stony complexion. Truly, there is no age which does not have its predecessor, no signs and portents which cannot be found littering the corridors of any generation. Beasley, however, thinks that he is exceptional. He believes that his woe is somehow singular, his determination unique, his love of Mozart the sole beacon in his time of overproduction and dross. He is certain. He is focused.

  Of course he is quite mad.

  "I believe it's time to end this lesson, Mr. Beasley."

  Beasley lifted his bow and glared at the small, silver-haired man sitting across from him. The man sat alertly in a straight-backed chair, his slender hands folded in his lap. The silver hair was an affectation in this ageless age of endless cosmetic possibilities and extended life spans.