A Sudden Wild Magic

1

The magical activities of Britain have always been highly organized.

Anyone who doubts this should consider the Spanish Armada and the winds that so conveniently dissipated it — and perhaps further consider why even the most skeptical of historians accepts this convenient hurricane so calmly, as a perfectly natural occurrence. Or the doubter might also consider why Hitler, or Napoleon before him, never got around to invading Britain, and why we accept these facts, too, so easily.

A moment’s unclouded thought should persuade anyone that these things are too good to be true. But of course, no one’s thought is unclouded, for the very good reason that the organization has, for centuries, devoted itself to clouding it and making sure that most people perceive its activities as messy, futile, and mainly concerned with old ladies astride broomsticks. In fact, the organization is so ruthlessly secret that even the majority of those engaged in the various forms of witchcraft are unaware that their activities are being directed by a ruling council — which we shall call the Ring — carefully and secretly selected from the ranks of practitioners all over the country.

This council has had to work increasingly hard this century. Its activities have, more and more, been forced to encompass the whole world. Most of its members agreed that this was a natural result of improved communications. The only person who disagreed was the one man of the Inner Ring.

2

His name was Mark Lister, and his actual title is a secret. He made his living with computers. It always pleased him that he should work at something so unrelated to witchcraft, and make good money at it too, without more than occasionally invoking his powers as magician. He dressed the part of a businessman, in expensive charcoal gray suits, kept his pale face meticulously clean-shaven and his pale hair most conservatively cut, and, since he was of average height and neither fat nor thin, he looked almost unremarkable. This pleased him too. He made just one concession to his secret activities: he always wore a wide-brimmed hat as a covert allusion to the Magician in the tarot pack. It did not worry him that, apart from the hat, most people found him both humorless and colorless. What did worry him was certain current trends in the world.

Thinking about these trends, Mark Lister started to feed certain data to computers in his office. It was idly done at first, in a spare moment, just to make him feel he was doing something to control something that had long gone beyond anyone’s control. The answers he got back added up to something that so startled him that he set about designing a special program of inquiry. When this was done, he stayed in his office all night to run it.

His absence took careful planning. His wife, Paulie, was no mean witch herself, and Mark was not at this stage prepared to trust anyone, let alone Paulie. Halfway through the morning he phoned her with his excuse: an unexpected conference in Birmingham. This gave him time to set up a simulacrum of himself and send it to dine with another colorless simulacrum in Birmingham, in case Paulie — or an unknown — decided to check; and he had the rest of the day to recoup the considerable energy it took to do that. In the evening, as soon as his partners and staff had left, he set to work. First he had to bespell the office so that no cleaner or security man would be tempted to enter while he was there, and to make it seem as if the place were empty. He had to block telephones and fax machines so they would not distract him during the more delicate magic to come. All simple enough stuff, but if what he feared was true, he could not afford to put a finger wrong. By the time the office was silent and looked to any possible observer like the usual empty space lighted by greenish striplights, he was already shaking and sweating. He had to compose himself magically, before he started on the complex of tiny sendings to prevent anyone—anyone—from noticing the sort of data he would be receiving. Since his program was going to access a number of very secret files, further sendings were necessary to make what he filched invisible. He was not going to trust to technology alone in this.

“And all for nothing if it turns out to be my overactive imagination,” he murmured. But he did not think it would, and he cast at his gentlest, strongest, and most careful.

When it was done, he walked about waiting for the excess ambience of power to die away. He did not want that to influence the computers. Even then, after he had at last tapped in the instruction to run the program, he found he was walking about still, in terror of accidentally influencing the running of it. It was absurd. He had worked with power ten years now. He knew how to control it. But he was still scared. He stopped and grasped a tubular steel chair with both hands — not precisely cold iron, he thought ruefully, but it should serve to negate anything wild he was putting out — and stood leaning on it whenever he was not needing to monitor the program.

Results gathered. Mark took his hands from the chair, intending to take printouts before asking for forecasts, and felt the tubular steel crunch and seem to crumble under his fingers. He looked down at it rather irritably. And stepped away in dismay. The steel portions were reverting to some kind of red iron-bearing sandstone speckled with crusty black granules. The plastic of the seat was curling into feathers of something yellowish and dry, which had a strong chemical reek.

Rather grimly, he dusted redness off his hands. The chair was surely only a symbol of his state of mind — he hoped — but it looked as if his worst fears were being confirmed, even before he had asked the final question.

He asked it. He took his printouts. He erased everything and went by careful, gentle stages back up his tracks, making sure that no trace of him, magical or technological, remained in any of the places he had tapped for data, or in the office either. Around dawn he picked up his briefcase and turned to the once tubular steel chair, ready to deal with that now. It stood in the middle of the space as an impossible curved framework of red earth, although the black nodules were now a pale sickly green. Mark frowned at them. Then, as an experiment, he spread a gently imperious hand toward the nearest green blob. It obeyed him by bursting. Twisting and writhing, it enlarged and threw out two round green leaves as it grew upon a white thread of stem.

“Hm,” he said. “I seem to feel more hopeful than I think. All the same, you have to go.” He gestured again, making it a stiff push from the elbow, and succeeded in teleporting the entire strange mess from the office building into the nearest skip, where he felt it crumble away. After this he was very weary. He rubbed his face and longed for coffee. “On the station,” he decided. He also longed for his car. But that had to be left out in the parking lot in Surrey for verisimilitude. A man traveling by train was much harder to trace, too.

In the station buffet, over a large polystyrene mug of coffee, he allowed himself to wonder whether he had chosen the right member of the Inner Ring to take his discovery to. A lot hung on his deciding right. His first impulse had been to convene the entire Ring, but he still rejected that idea. The nine of the Outer Ring were all adepts and none of them was stupid, but there were those among them who came from walks of life that gave them rather too much in the way of downright common sense. These few were likely to pooh-pooh every one of his notions. He could hear Koppa Taylor or Sid Graffy now: “You can make computers prove anything! You only have to feed them the facts you want.” True. And he had. Then he knew so little about any of them, beyond the most obvious things. Take Koppa, whom he knew best of all the nine. All that amounted to was knowing she had been born in California fifty years ago. He knew much the same sort of things about the other eight, and that was all. Secrecy was important. Personal details were supposed not to count when they communed together as the Ring. Disguises apparently dropped away at the higher levels where they were At One. Mark gave a small sarcastic grunt. If they were up against what he thought they were, then disguise and shielding at every level was entirely to be expected. He could not trust one of the nine not to be a spy.

That left the inner three. Damn it, he simply did not want to take his briefcase full of trouble to the old woman. He and she thought along such different lines. But he tried to leave his personal feelings out of it and consider them each dispassionately. Young Maureen? He smiled. Personal feelings were very much there. Every time he thought of her, he remembered the exact, scented, animal smell of her and the long-legged shape of her sharing that bed with him in Somerset. That had been some night! It had almost made up for Zillah. But he still felt Maureen was too — flimsy? flighty? There was no exact word for what he knew of her. It just meant he was not, after all, going to consult Maureen first. He needed a steady mind, and a keen one. Amanda? She had a mind, all right — too bloody right she had! He found himself wincing at the mere thought of her curiously luminous dark eyes. Oddly enough, at forty she was still considerably better-looking than Maureen and could pass for almost the same age. Mark was scared to death of her (in his secret soul where he hoped nobody knew), and he knew she would either reject his fears out of hand or pat him kindly on the head and take charge. So…

“The old woman then,” he muttered, and with resignation, got up and bought a ticket to Hereford.

3

It was a muddled old farmhouse with a verandah on the front of it that somehow melted into a porch with a green door. A garden spread from it in successive waves of overgrowth — grass first, then longer grass containing leaves of long dead daffodils, then bushes, then higher bushes, several waves of those, including laurels — and finally a row of trees that generally flowered in spring, but were liable to be untidily in bloom most of the year. The house was quite hidden from the road. On the other hand, if you knew where to position yourself in the garden, you could have an excellent view of the road without anyone knowing you were there.

The old woman knew exactly where. She had been sitting there all morning, at various tasks, with Jimbo scratching diligently beside her and the cats stalking hither and yon in her orbit. Around her, the muddled house seemed to have spread into the grass, manifesting as flowerpots, tipped-over mugs of coffee, cane chairs, a basket or so, a colander, a kettle, a few cushions. All the day’s work, the old woman thought, shunting a row of peas with her broad thumb along their pod and into the colander.

A car engine caught her ears. “Ah,” she said. “At last!” And she raised her head to watch the local taxi decant a passenger at her decrepit gate. Her squabby eyebrows rose at the sight of the pale young man in the sober gray suit who climbed out and turned to pay the driver. “It’s him!” she remarked to Jimbo. “And here was I expecting someone about that poor girl! Must have got my wires crossed. Do people like me get their wires crossed, Jimbo? Well, there’s a first time for everything, they say. And whatever he wants, it’s trouble. The poor boy looks all in.”

She watched him wait for the taxi to drive away and turn to the gate, carrying that absurd hat he affected. She watched him have the usual problems people had with her gate. She grinned when it finally fell down flat in the mud and he had to pick it up and prop it on the bushes. But the look on his face sobered her as he came on up the path, still carrying that hat and an expensive briefcase with it. She quietly replaced the gate behind him and waited for him to get to the place where visitors usually found they could see her.

“Hallo, Mark,” she said. “Important, is it?”

“Yes,” he said. “Very.” He stood and surveyed her, a fat and freckled old woman wearing a red dress and pink ankle socks, squashily embedded in a floral plastic garden chair and busy shelling peas or something. Her hair had been dyed a faded orange and fussily curled. Her cheeks hung around her lax mouth, white where they were not freckled, and her garden was strewn with objects and aswarm with cats. As usual. He had forgotten all those cats. The place reeked of cat. His foot pushed aside a saucer of cat food lurking in the grass, and he was unable to avoid fanning at the smell with his hat. And on top of all this, her name was Gladys. It was hard to believe she was any good. “Expecting me, were you?”

Gladys looked up. Until you saw her eyes, Mark emended. Her eyes knew most things. “Expecting someone,” she said. “I’ve been waiting out here all morning. It’s been trying to rain. Nuisance.” As if to prove this, a few warm drops fell from the overcast sky, splashing his hat and pinging on the colander. Gladys looked skyward and frowned. The drops instantly ceased. “A real nuisance,” she said, and possibly grinned briefly. “What’s the matter, Mark? You look like death. Take a seat before you fall down.”

Her fat hand, with a peapod in it, gestured to the nearest cane chair. Mark walked over to it and settled himself, creaking, with his hat over his knees. Instantly he was in a ring of cats. They appeared silently from clumps of grass, from under bushes and from behind flowerpots, and sat gravely surveying him, a circle of round green and yellow eyes. Her ritual. He sighed.

“What can I get you?” she asked. “Have you had any breakfast?”

“Not really,” he said. “There was no buffet car on—”

“They always forget it,” she said, “on trains out this way. Jemima, you and Tibs.”

Two of the cats disdainfully got up and walked toward the house.

“I’ve a lot to explain,” Mark said.

“So I see from the size of that briefcase,” she said. “Eat first. Get some coffee inside you at least.”

There was, without any apparent disturbance, a wooden tray now lying beside him on the grass. On it was a rack of toast flanked by a glass dish of butter and a jar of marmalade. A bone-handled knife was laid carefully across a glass plate on top of a paper napkin with a pattern of puppy dogs on it. Beside that was a glass of orange juice, and milk in a jug that matched the plate. A mug with the words THE BOSS on it and a blue steaming coffeepot materialized as Mark looked. He felt considerable irritation.

“He’ll need a strainer,” Gladys said. As the strainer duly appeared, propped in a little glass bowl, she added, “They can’t remember if you take sugar or not.”

“I do, I’m afraid,” Mark said, and tried to suppress his irritation. He had tried, any number of times, to persuade her that magic was not just something you used as a home help, and that she had skills too important to be squandered in this way. Most of the time Gladys pretended not to hear. When she did listen, she laughed and said she had plenty more where that came from, and besides, it never did anyone any harm to keep in practice. She looked at him challengingly now, knowing just what he was thinking, and he did his best to seem impassive. A glass bowl full of sugar cubes came to stand by the milk jug.

“Eat,” she said. “You need the energy.”

Mark laid aside his hat and wedged the tray across his knees in its place. Breakfast, however it arrived, was thoroughly welcome. As he buttered his toast, he saw the two cats return and, quietly and disdainfully, station themselves among the others. Gladys continued shelling peas until he was on his second cup of coffee. Then she looked up again, a sharp, full look.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“Would it surprise you,” asked Mark, “if I said Chernobyl was no accident?”

“I feel bad about that,” Gladys said. “You know I do — we all do. Damned if I can see how none of us noticed that radioactive stuff until it was too late to do more than push it off to where there were fewest people to harm.” She paused, with her hands on her fat thighs. “You’re not saying that just to make me feel better, are you? Who’d do a thing like that?”

“The same people who distracted you with the bombing of Libya,” he said. “Who’d cause World War Two, or the Cold War, AIDS, drugs, or — come to that — the greenhouse effect? Who isn’t interested in our having a space program?”

“People,” said Gladys. “This is people. You don’t have to tell me the world’s a crazy place. If it isn’t stupidity, it’s greed with most people.”

“Yes, but which people?” he asked her. “Suppose I were to tell you the same people were responsible for all these things I just mentioned and a great deal more I haven’t?”

She was silent. For a second or so he feared she was rejecting every word, and he sighed. She was too old. Her face was blank. Her mind was set. He should have quelled his fear and gone to Amanda instead. Then he saw that Gladys’s expressionless face was turned toward something in the grass. Her lips moved. “Jimbo,” she said faintly, “I’d have to ask three questions, wouldn’t I?”

She was talking to that animal of hers. Some people claimed it was a monkey. Others declared it to be a small dog. Mark himself had never been sure which it was. All he knew was that it was brown and skinny. When it appeared, it scratched rather a lot — as it was doing now. He suspected this was a device to stop people looking at it too closely.

“I’d have to ask,” said Gladys, “Who? and Why? and What proof has he? Wouldn’t I, Jimbo? And why is he coming here with a tale like this when the Berlin Wall’s down at last, and just as Russia and so forth start being more friendly?”

So her mind was working, after her own fashion. “That’s all part of my proof,” Mark explained quietly. “Ask yourself — or Jimbo — who might want all technologically advanced nations at peace with one another at the moment when the world’s climate is changing.”

“Sounds like a well-wisher,” she said.

“Not if you consider that they started the global warming at the precise moment when we were all distracted by Chernobyl,” Mark told her. “It’s quite a pattern of theirs — they lull us, or they distract us until it’s too late — and it quite remarkably often seems to be aimed directly at us, at magic users in this country. I’ve got pages of proof in my briefcase to—”

“Printout things!” said Gladys. “You know I can’t make head or tail of those. Tell it plain.”

Mark creaked about in his cane chair, wondering how to explain. “Well,” he said at length, “let’s begin with global warming. Do you know how much of this country will be left if the polar icecaps melt entirely?”

“I saw a map on the box,” Gladys assented. “Not much.” In the grass, the skinny animal appeared to paw one of her freckled bare legs. “I know, I know, Jimbo,” she said. “He’s on to something. I know that. It’s the Who and the Why that worries me. Who’s going to want the world at peace while they heat us up until we’re all tropical and flooded?”

“The same people who wanted a war fifty years ago,” Mark said.

“How do you make that out?” she said. “War and peace. That puzzles me. It doesn’t make sense!”

“It does,” he said, “if you consider all the inventions and discoveries that came out of the war. I’m not just talking about rocketry and nuclear power — I’m talking about the seven new forms of protection the Ring discovered during the Battle of Britain. I’m talking about the ways we’re going to have to think of now to hold the water back, not to speak of all the new cooling techniques we’ll need when the world gets hotter.”

There was another long silence, during which a few more raindrops pinged on the colander and the breakfast tray. “Someone using us to learn things,” Gladys said. “That’s not nice. What proof have you?”

Mark reached his pale hand out to his briefcase. “For one thing, I called up records of all the plans, blueprints, and prototypes that have disappeared over the last twenty years. There’s a hell of a lot. The significant thing is that two-thirds of them vanished so completely that they’ve never been traced.”

“Oh, industry,” Gladys said dismissively. “What about us?”

“Exactly,” said Mark. “We don’t keep records. For the important things, we use word of mouth.”

They looked at each other across the littered grass. The bushes tossed as if a shiver had run through them.

Gladys levered herself from her plastic chair. “Up, Jimbo,” she said fretfully. “Time I was getting lunch. This is all too much for me.”

It sounded as if she had given the whole thing up. Mark followed her anxiously as she lumbered into the house, dutifully carrying the tray with him. It was dark and redolent indoors, of herbs, pine, cats, and bread. Plants — some of them tree-size — grew everywhere in pots, as if the garden had moved in there in the same way that the house had spread onto the grass. Mark fought his way under a jungle of tree-tall plants, which reminded him of the things you might expect to find growing in a bayou, and found her busy in the elderly little kitchen beyond.

“You didn’t need to bring that tray,” she said without turning around. “The cats would have seen to it. I’ve only chicken pies today. Will that do, with peas?” Before he could suggest he had only just had breakfast, she went on, “It has to be one of the Outer Ring, doesn’t it? No one else knows enough.”

“Yes,” he said, sliding the tray onto a surface already full of flowerpots. Some toppled. He was forced to enhance the space in order to make room for the tray. She’s got me squandering power now, he thought. “Can I help?”

“No, go in the other room and sit,” Gladys said. “I need to be on my own when I’m thinking.”

Mark went obediently, highly relieved that she was prepared to think about it, and sat on a hard sofa amongst the jungle, staring out beyond the lozenge-shaped glass panes of the verandah door. She had let the rain come down now. It was pouring outside, steady white lines of rain, and the room was nearly dark. The cats were arriving indoors around him. The cane chairs were now on the verandah, along with most of the other things. Mark sat listening to the rilling hiss of the rain, and it had nearly sent him to sleep by the time Gladys called him to lunch.

“You still haven’t told me who,” she grumbled. “Has he, Jimbo? If someone’s using us for guinea pigs, I’ve a right to know, Mark.”

Mark picked at a large, squashy commercial chicken pie and some remarkable bulletlike peas, sighed, and went with her, for security, to another level of the continuum, where he gave her his theory. He saw her eyes widen in the gloom of the kitchen.

“There’s never been any sort of proof of that,” she said. “Eat up. I don’t want to hurry you, but I’ve got to get to the hospital. There’s someone needing me there.”

He was fairly sure he had lost her now, but he did his best to eat the pie. Anxiety caused it to form a hard lump, with corners, in his stomach. He watched Gladys encase herself in a transparent plastic mac and sort through a floppy purse for money.

“You can come too if you like,” she told him. “I’m still thinking — and I’d like you to see this girl anyway. Coming?”

He nodded and followed her out into the soaking garden, where he was not particularly surprised to see the taxi that had brought him here once again drawn up outside the tumbledown gate. He climbed into it after her and sat curled up around the square pie in his stomach, wondering whether to feel hopeful or simply wretched.

4

It was clear that Gladys knew her way around the hospital. She waddled swiftly ahead, encased in her ectoplasmic mac, down an interminable corridor and into an elevator. Mark thought, following her, that only the raindrops on the surface of the plastic showed that she was not in fact being manifested by some medium or other. He was not surprised when none of the people they passed seemed to notice her. He was putting out the same kind of Don’t see, but with an effort. Hospitals always bothered him acutely. They were so full of pain, and of pain’s obverse, cheerful insensitivity — or was cruelty the word?

Gladys turned to him in the elevator. She looked intent and busy, almost cheerful. “They brought this girl in around five in the morning,” she said. “The poor thing was hurt bad, and she put out a call. Only one call. Then she stopped and drew everything in — as if she’d made a mistake. Anyway, she needed everything she’d got just to stay alive with. Luckily I managed to hitch on when she called. I’ve been monitoring her ever since, and there’s something very peculiar there. As a matter of fact, when you turned up, I was sure it was going to be someone come about her. You gave me quite a surprise. I’m not often wrong that way.”

Mark only nodded. The elevator shaft was like a section through the varied pain of the hospital. The lift carried him past the blinding worry of a parent, the grinding of a broken bone, the eating acid of an internal growth, fever dreams, and for a short — mercifully short — instant, the vivid agony of a knife slicing anesthetized flesh. He had to fight to shield himself.

It was still as bad when he left the elevator and followed Gladys down further corridors where they passed beds. This hospital was on some kind of open plan. Every few yards or so, a corner with windows held a cluster of beds. There were wrung faces on pillows. Women here and there sat up and, in the concentrated egotism of mortal sickness, greedily ate chocolates or stared while visitors harangued them. When they came to the place Gladys was looking for, that was a corner too. You could have taken it for a corner where equipment was dumped, had there not been a bed there. And here was relief. It was such blessed silence from the insistent pains of the hospital that Mark did not understand at once.

Gladys nodded at him. “Feel that? Did you ever know such shielding?”

Only then did Mark associate the silence with the bed around which most of the equipment centered. Silly of me! He marveled that the occupant of the bed seemed so young and small. Anyone who could block out that amount of pain while being so sick as this girl must be a powerful adept indeed. He thought he knew everyone throughout the world who had this kind of strength. But the thin, scraped face among the equipment was not the face of anyone he knew.

“Now, who are you, my darling?” Gladys wondered aloud. Her fat, freckled hands fastened on the girl’s free arm, tenderly, gently. Her breathing grew heavy as she concentrated. “She’s come from a long way away,” she said. “Bad, bad. That car that ran into her crushed her in all down the other side, poor dear, and they haven’t given her enough painkiller, the fools. There. There, Auntie Gladys has put in a few blocks for you, my love, so you can spend your strength on getting well.” She turned over her shoulder to mouth at Mark, “What do you make of the color of her?”

Mark considered. The scraped, half-raw little face had the mauvish tinge of someone badly in shock. Carefully avoiding the abrasions, he put his hand to the sharp, unconscious corner of the girl’s jaw. Mordant blue-gray pulsed from the contact, sickening and strong enough to make his stomach heave. He removed his hand. “She’s been poisoned. It’s no kind of poison I know.”

“Me neither,” said Gladys. “Worse and worse. Those fool doctors haven’t even noticed. Give me your hand and we’ll see what we can do.”

She snatched his hand as she spoke. For a while they both concentrated in silence, drawing off the blue-gray sickening waves and feeding them to whichever of the various sumps would accept them, drawing again, casting the venom, drawing — until no more would be accepted.

“It was a massive dose, whatever it was,” Mark said, “and it’s antipathetic to most of the usual sumps.”

“They did their best,” Gladys said defensively. “So did we. Let’s see if it’s helped at all.” She tapped gently at the girl’s skinny arm. “Wake up, my darling. Auntie Gladys is here. Gladys is here to help. Wake up and tell Gladys what needs to be done for you, my love.”

The girl’s eyes had been half-open all along. Now, slowly, they were seeing. A weak but practiced consciousness played over first Gladys, then Mark.

“Friends, dear,” Gladys said.

They could tell that the girl knew that. Her mouth made a mumble. It sounded like “Thank goodness!” But Mark, moving automatically to another plane of being, interpreted it there and exchanged a look with Gladys. The girl had tried to say “Thank the Goddess!”

“And may She bless you too,” he said. “Where are you from?”

The girl’s mouth mumbled again. Gladys, tenderly holding the girl’s wrist in one hand and grasping Mark’s hand with the other, was forced to join Mark, and both had to move to a more distant plane before the sounds made sense. The girl manifested there as a little flame, flickering and guttering, but somehow fresh and sweet.

“The Ladies of Leathe,” the flame fluttered at them. “I wasn’t careful enough and my Lady Marceny found out — found out, my love, my love — it wasn’t done for the Brotherhood — it was wicked, wicked — and I tried to get away and warn you, my love — but I think she poisoned me — and they have traps out — I didn’t know and I was caught — and my love has no idea — I must warn—”

“Where were these nasty traps, my love?” Gladys asked. “Tell Gladys and she’ll take them apart.”

“Through every band of the Wheel,” flickered the flame. “Between the two of them.”

“But where?” Gladys insisted gently. “Where did you come from, my love?”

“Neighbors,” whispered the flame. It was down to a weak phut-phut now. “Next-door universe — the Brotherhood studies yours — but it was wicked—” The guttering light flared desperately. “I must warn him—”

And went out. On the pillow the eyes were still half-open but evidently saw nothing now. A green light that had been scribbling on a screen drew a straight green line.

“We’d best get out,” Gladys said briskly. “They’ll be along to see her any second.”

They passed the nurse hurrying that way as they went. Both of them made very sure they were not noticed either by her or by anyone else they encountered, until they came to the parking lot, where the taxi driver was patiently reading a newspaper spread over his steering wheel. “Back home?” he asked Gladys. “That was a quickie.”

“It takes all sorts,” said Gladys. “And I can’t wave a magic wand over all of them.” The driver laughed.

Mark fell asleep on the way back, into dreams of drugs uneasily seeping and knives lancing, and did not wake until Gladys was heaving herself out of the taxi at her tumbledown gate.

“Well, how about that?” she puffed, somewhat triumphantly, as they walked up the muddy path. “The only way I slipped up was not seeing you and that poor girl were part of the same thing!”

Mark nodded. It had been proved to him over and over again that there was no such thing as coincidence in magic, but he still felt a kind of incredulous excitement, weary as he was. “You believe me now?”

“As soon as I set hands on her, I knew she wasn’t out of this world. Didn’t you feel the strangeness? It wasn’t just the strange poison either.”

Again Mark nodded. It was easier than confessing that touching the girl had told him nothing beyond the fact that she was poisoned.

Gladys shot a look at him as she unlocked her green door. “You’re going to lie down and sleep while I look into this. Where do I tell Paulie you are?”

“Birmingham,” he said. “The conference took longer than I expected. But she has to be able to get in touch with me there. I gave her a phone number. I’d better—”

“I’ll do it,” said Gladys. “It’ll be a bad day when I can’t tangle a few phone lines. She’ll get a hotel receptionist who’ll promise to give you the message. You get upstairs. There’s a bed for you in the room on the right.”

He stumbled his way gratefully up the shallow, creaking stairs, knowing there was some other anxiety in his mind, but almost too tired to place it. Traitors, he thought. Spies and traps. That was it. But he had warned Gladys. He could surely trust her to handle it. He found the room. He removed his jacket and shoes and fell on the bed, which proved to be as shallow and creaking as the stairs. He slept.

He slept, and the dreams of chemicals and lancets returned. But after a while, other things flitted behind those dreams, like birds going secretly from bough to bough inside the foliage of a tree. Behind the machines of the hospital, he had more than one glimpse of a blue fortress with five sides and odd-shaped towers, and occasionally there was rolling countryside with a subtly Mediterranean look. Eventually, as if the leaves dropped one by one from the tree and left the birds in full view, the hospital images fell away to show a deep tawny tone. He was somewhere very high up where everything was this curious color. There he accompanied several other people on what seemed to be an inspection of their borders and the defenses on those borders. He was relieved to find the defenses of Britain standing like a wall of amber. They were unbroken, and yet he had a feeling something was seeping under them. But as he tried to turn his attention to the defenses of Europe and the distant gamboge of America behind him, he found that the inspection party was moving on, outward and upward, on a voyage none of them had ever thought to make before. They seemed to be driven on by strong anger. He followed, in his dream, puzzled, and found that they came to the borders of the universe.

The dream image of this outer boundary beggared description, since there were many boundaries, all weaving and writhing and partially interwoven like thick, honey-colored rainbows. Some even seemed to occupy the same space as others. The dream was forced to simplify. At first it looked like a bucket of water into which concentrated tawny dye had been stirred. But when none of the watchers could make sense of this either, the dream simplified again, and they walked the edges of fields that were also seashores, stretching from them in all directions, upward, downward, slanting and standing on end, piled up into the sky, and piled likewise into the transparent amber depths below. Mark marveled in his dream. He had not known there were so many.

Most fields ended as simple seashore, though some had low walls with gates in them, and some hedges or lines of trees. But the party walked along its own shore until they came to one that was different, because it was defended. In the dream, it was represented as a tangle of barbed wire all around the amber field. Though it looked dark and unnatural enough, there were moments when it took on the look of a giant hedge of brambles. Beyond it, a stretch of sand had notices stuck into it at intervals: BEWARE MINEFIELD. Even in the dream, Mark was aware he was seeing an absurd diagram of a threat he would otherwise not be able to visualize at all. He, together with the rest of the party, surveyed the defenses glumly. There was no way into that field. Then his eyes fell on a large pipe, leading under the barbed wire from the field where he stood. In the distance, beyond the mined sand, he could just see the pipe disgorging a gush of substance from his own field into that other, defended place. There was no doubt that this place was the one he had been looking for.

Meanwhile, someone else in the party was pointing out that the defended field seemed to have a satellite. It hung in the distance far out over the center of the field. It looked like a writhing amber lens.

“Laputa,” this person said.

“A James Blish city,” said someone else.

Mark brought dream-binoculars out and took a closer look at the distant undulating lens thing.

This was where the blue pentagonal tower was, he discovered, although now he could see that the structure was in fact more like a walled city with a flat base, built of some kind of blue stone. As he swept his glasses across it, he saw that it was old and that there were people in it, looking back at him through binoculars not unlike his own…

5

Mark awoke to find Gladys standing panting at his bedside with a supper of fish and chips. This surprised him rather more than her announcement that Maureen and Amanda were waiting for him downstairs. He struggled up and leaned against the creaking headboard, beset with anxiety. “What time is it? How long have they been here?”

“A bit after midnight. They both got here around eight,” she told him.

At least three cats were asleep on the bed. Another was curled up in his jacket. He stared at them with undiminished anxiety as he took the tray and thanked Gladys.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I wish you weren’t such a worrier, but I suppose it’s in your nature. Nobody knows where they really are.”

Probably true, he thought. Every member of the Ring had carefully planned emergency arrangements, which they renewed and reorganized every week — like his own conference — so that no one in their families would know where they were. Neither Amanda nor Maureen could conceivably be a traitor. And yet, and yet. While he ate the withered and lukewarm fish and chips, his mind played with the idea of the traitor being one of their immediate families. Plotting the pattern of their absences would not help the traitor overmuch — it would merely become obvious that these happened during certain kinds of crises and at particular phases of the moon — unless one or the other of them had dropped a careless word at home. Careless words were very easy to drop to one’s nearest and dearest. Mark himself was always most carefully circumspect in what he said to Paulie, but she was not entirely ignorant. She attended all the less secret ceremonies with him. She knew the office he held. He hated to think how angry she would be if she discovered how much of his duties he concealed from her. The other three must surely feel the same — at least, not Gladys: as far as anyone knew, she was a widow. But Maureen ran a troupe of professional dancers who were almost like a family to her, and she also had a succession of boyfriends, very few of whom had anything to do with witchcraft. The present boyfriend was a rough diamond — or, to be more honest, an unpleasant lout — who ran a music shop, and the kind of fellow who could well be in someone’s pay. And Amanda? In addition to an obliging husband most people never saw, she had teenage children and, someone had told Mark, a sister living with her. It was surely too much to expect that Amanda had not dropped a word to her sister.

All the cats’ eyes were on him, accusingly. He left the rest of the chips and padded off to the bathroom, where, to his exasperation, the toilet seat would not stay up. Another of Gladys’s jokes, like her front gate. And quite probably, he admitted ruefully, wedging the thing with the toilet brush, the whole of his anxiety was some kind of displacement. Frankly, he was scared stiff of Amanda. It was the Aspect of the Mother in her that scared him most — though why it should, when he had no recollection of his own mother, he had no idea.

Amanda was leaning across the kitchen table when he came in, with a sheaf of Mark’s printouts in her hand, talking trenchantly to Maureen. Upon her, Gladys’s dim electric light seemed to play like the white shaft of a spotlight. It lit Amanda’s hair blue-black, and the handsome lines of her face clear white. Her eyes glowed in it, compellingly.

“So this is what we’ve got,” she said, and her voice was as clear and compelling as her eyes. “Another universe, one of many next door to this one, and in it a world probably much like ours, where they seem to have found some way of manipulating our world to their advantage. Their pattern seems to be to orchestrate a crisis — like a world war or an epidemic; AIDS, I suppose, is a good example — and then study what we do about it. If we solve the problem, they import our findings into their world.”

Maureen, by contrast, was all reds and browns in the light — copper hair, tawny freckles, yellow eyes — and a brown jumpsuit clothing her long body, which was never wholly still. She writhed from a lotus position while Amanda was speaking and turned her kitchen chair backward, to sit astride it with her freckled forearms on its rickety back. “Don’t forget their little habit of keeping us busy while they set up their experiments,” she said. “That’s the thing that really gets up my nose!”

“I was coming to that,” Amanda replied. “There’s no question that the pirate universe knows something about the way the Ring is organized. Either they tested us out during World War Two or we gave ourselves away keeping Hitler out. And since then they’ve flung things like Chernobyl at us from time to time to see if we were still on our toes, and finding we were—”

“Just about,” Maureen commented, hitching her knees under her chin. “That one was a real closie.”

“I know, but we did deal with it,” said Amanda, “and I’ve no doubt that gave them the conditions for their latest experiment. Now they’ve handed us global warming, with the superpowers at least at an understanding, so that they can deal with it, while the Ring here in Britain is going to have its hands full with the country half underwater. That way, they can study how the Ring holds back the water, and make sure we haven’t much left over to interfere with the technological approach. My guess is they want both magic and science out of this one.” She turned across her shoulder to look at Mark in the doorway. “I hope you agree with my summary.”

She said it with a strong and kindly smile, including him in the conversation because she had plainly known all along he was leaning in the doorway. He wished she would not treat him so kindly. It seemed to have something to do with the fact that she was both a professor of theology and a feminist, and it never failed to make him feel inadequate. “Perfectly,” he said. “I couldn’t have put it anywhere near as well.”

Maureen turned as he spoke and half smiled too, looking up at him under her eyelids, full of the secret knowledge of that bed they had shared in Somerset. “We took a look at this other universe while you were asleep,” she said, and her voice was full of the secret as well. It did not seem to perturb her that Amanda’s brilliant eyes met Gladys’s knowing ones across her, in perfect understanding of that secret.

It embarrassed Mark. “I was with you,” he said curtly, coming to sit at the end of the table. “It seems rather well defended.”

“I’ll say!” said Maureen. “Mile-thick stoppers strewn with traps the whole way round. I saw it like a cell wall with hormone triggers against invading microorganisms.”

“It was more like the ramparts of a prehistoric hill-fort to me,” Amanda observed, “with sharpened stakes and pitfalls all over it. There was a culvert under the walls to take in what they learnt from us.”

“Funny the way everyone sees things differently,” Maureen said. “It’s something I never quite get over at this level. Gladys said it was like the barbed wire on the Normandy beaches to her. Isn’t that right?” she asked Gladys.

Mark turned to Gladys, startled that he and she had seen so much the same. “Or a very thorny wood,” she said, dumping on the table a fat teapot clothed in a striped cozy. “Anyone but Mark take sugar? Good. Well let’s get on and decide what we’re going to do about these blessed pirates.”

There was a short silence. Maureen’s long hands, faintly mauve under the freckles, fidgeted around a mug with a picture of Garfield on it. “I’m too mad to think properly,” she confessed. “I just want them stopped.”

“One possible way is to stop their culvert. I expect we can find it,” Amanda pointed out. “Stuff is bleeding off to them quite fast, and we ought to be able to trace where it goes.”

“Out of the question,” said Mark. “As soon as they realize we’ve stopped it, it’ll be war. And they’ll fight us with our own weapons, not to speak of their own, which we don’t know about. I’m willing to bet they’ll know as soon as we find the outlet. They have to be good to have had us under observation all this time without our knowing they had.”

“Then I’ll throw out another thought,” Amanda said imperturbably. She seldom lost an argument, and never admitted it if she did. “How about putting up defenses even bigger than theirs?”

“Heavy job” was Maureen’s comment. “Worldwide — it might work.”

“They see those and it means war again,” Mark pointed out.

“Well, anything we do and they notice is going to mean war,” Amanda said in her most brisk and reasonable way. “Do you want to look into the possibility of rendering our universe invisible to theirs?”

“Which, if they find us doing, they’ll just pirate too,” Maureen observed. “I’m sure it would suit them very well to be invisible to us. Not wanting to be critical, Amanda, but they might even be hoping we’ll think of that.” She turned and stretched her legs the opposite way.

“And,” added Mark, “none of these suggestions help with the greenhouse effect.”

“We seem to be stuck with that, even if the pirates did start it,” Amanda said. “I’d assumed — and since I’m simply throwing out ideas, I’m perfectly open to criticism, Maureen, though I wish you and Mark could contrive to be constructive for a change! — I’d assumed we’d get the pirates off our backs and then turn our attention to readjusting the climate.” Her hands clenched around her cup fractionally. She was irritated.

Aware that she despised him, Mark found himself protesting, “I wasn’t being destructive, Amanda! I just wondered if there wasn’t a way to deal with both things at once. For instance, if we were simply to do nothing?”

Amanda’s shapely black eyebrows came to a sharp point, exactly in the middle. An astounded crease grew between them, above her elegant nose. “Do nothing? At all?”

Maureen took this up eagerly. “Mark has got a point, Amanda. You must see that. If we did nothing and made sure none of the Rings all over the world did nothing, and just let the climate get hotter and the seas higher, then the pirates would have to stop the greenhouse effect themselves, don’t you see? It’s not in their interests to let everyone here die!” She was climbing about all over her chair in her vehemence, beating her mug on the table — and yet Mark was uneasily aware that it was all because the idea was his in the first place. Maureen was taking sides like a child in a school playground. There was even a faint jeering tone to her voice.

Amanda responded to the jeer. “Oh, perfect, Maureen! So we call their bluff. The only result, as far as I can see, would be that our world dies and the pirates simply start exploiting another one.”

“I didn’t mean—” Maureen and Mark began together.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Gladys interrupted. “We’re not in business to do nothing, are we, Jimbo? It’s obvious what we’ve got to do! We have to go into that universe and stop those pirates at their fun and games, for once and for all!”

In the ensuing silence, the creature called Jimbo appeared to climb into Gladys’s lap. She hugged it and stared at them, a mulish and stony old woman.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” she said. “It’s the only thing we ought to be discussing.”

After another long silence, Amanda said, “I agree. How do we get there? Whom do we send? And what would a raiding party do when it gets there?”

Maureen, subdued and still for once, added, “Yes, and how do we keep what we do secret from these people? They must have the best intelligence in the world.”

The discussion that followed this was, to begin with, slow and heavy and very, very serious. All four of them were overwhelmed with the nature of what they were discussing. This was war, against an enemy who knew all their weapons, and it made every other war look small and local and feeble by comparison. They knew their campaign had to be careful. It had to be good. And it had to succeed. It was clear to all four that, if they bungled, the pirates would finish them.

“Come on, come on!” Gladys said at length. “You’ve got to remember this is really no different from the way we went against Napoleon or Hitler. It’s just bigger and in a new place, that’s all. We need a smoke screen first. We’re going to need to make it look as if we’re powering up against this greenhouse thing. That’s what we’ll have to tell everyone else we’re doing. It’ll be too late when they find we’re using the power another way.”

“In that case we’ll have to tell the Outer Ring,” Amanda stated.

“Yes, we’ll be breaking the rules, not telling them,” Maureen agreed. “And—”

The Jimbo creature stirred in Gladys’s arms. “Oh, don’t give me that!” she said. “You young ones! You’re all for breaking the rules when it doesn’t matter, and when it does matter, you don’t seem to know how to do without your precious rules! One of the things Mark spent all last night proving is that there has to be an informer pretty high up among us. So we have to break the rules. None of this is to go beyond this house and the wards I’ve put around it. Is that clear?”

“I second that,” said Mark.

“You always were rather paranoid, Mark,” Amanda said, but she gave in. So, after a little squirming and some clamor, did Maureen.

The discussion proceeded much more efficiently after that. They forgot how momentous it was to wage war on another world and simply discussed how to do it. Breaking into that world was the first major problem. The defenses they had all in their different ways perceived seemed truly formidable. This had them at a stand for a while, until Maureen pointed out that the satellite they had all noticed was far more lightly warded than any other part.

“Could we get in through Blish City somehow?” she asked. “It seems to be part of the pirating setup too.”

“Somehow, somehow,” Mark said. “There must be a reason they don’t ward it so well. Can anyone think why?”

“Well, it can’t be there just to make an easy way in,” Gladys observed. “I sensed a lot of people there.”

“So did I,” agreed Amanda. “How is this for a working theory? Their defenses in the main world make it quite difficult for them to observe our world as closely as they want, so they have to build Laputa as a sort of observation platform. I saw Laputa myself as a sort of floating island — which is why I called it that, after Gulliver—but I suspect it’s more on the lines of a pocket universe.”

“I think you may be right,” Mark said soberly. “And if you’re right, then they won’t need wards on the place, because that’s where the main strength of their witchcraft will be.”

“All gathered to spy on us and exploit us,” Maureen murmured. “I think you’re right too, Amanda.”

“So an attack on Laputa ought to devastate them,” said Amanda. “Of course, we’ll need to research it more thoroughly, but let’s plan on those lines provisionally. Now, how are we going to get a strike force to the place? Transition between universes is bound to cause all sorts of problems.”

6

The discussion continued all that night and went on at intervals over the next month. Paulie Lister grew exasperated.

“Conferences, conferences!” she exploded to her lover. “Tony, I’m sure Mark’s got a new woman, and I bet you it’s that Maureen Tenehan! He only comes home to sleep!”

“Why do you let that bother you?” said Tony.

Maureen’s dancers grumbled too. Maureen, it seemed, had strained a shoulder and was forced to make frequent visits to the only osteopath she trusted, who, it appeared, lived in Ludlow. But as her absences went on, little Flan Burke began to prove such a good deputy that most of the troupe foresaw that Maureen would lose her place to Flan and end up simply teaching the younger dancers. Maureen’s boyfriend took the view that Maureen was doing it to spite him.

Somewhat the same opinion was held by Professor Amanda Fenstone’s teenage children. They grumbled to their aunt that Mum’s career seemed to mean more to her than they did. Why else was she always away giving lectures?

Only Gladys was spared human grumbling, and she often came back from another place to find herself in an accusing ring of cats long past their feeding time. For she took to sitting, hour after hour, on the Normandy beach forest borders of the pirate world, watching through notional spyglasses for any activity in Laputa-Blish (as it came to be called). Her skin grew flabbier and more blotched. Her feet were often numb, despite tartan socks and furry slippers, and she was tired. The other three worried about her. But Gladys was firm. This was the part of the task that she had set herself. As she said, she was the only one among them who was canny enough to watch without letting Laputa-Blish suspect it was being watched.

And her work bore fruit. One of the first things she was able to report was that there was always at least one observer in Laputa-Blish watching Earth. Often there were many more. They seemed to sit regular watches, and whenever the time came around for a group to be watching Earth, she became fairly sure that at least one was always focused upon the activities of the Ring.

“Let’s give them something to watch then,” Maureen said. “I’ll start having everyone power up on the ecology from now on, something cruel.”

“They’ll be expecting us to,” Gladys agreed, and went back to watching. As she moved away in her mind, she chuckled. Maureen was into ecology anyway. On the rare occasions Gladys had visited Maureen, she had found the flat full of tasteful green packages labeled ozone friendly and ecologically sound. The toilet roll had had recycled toilet paper printed on every sheet. Could one recycle toilet paper? she wondered, grinning as she drifted away, and if so, how?

During this stint of watching, she saw Laputa-Blish put out tenuous threads and translate them down to an earthly plane. Before she could trace them, they were gone. But she was ready for them next time they happened. She made one of her rare linkages with Jimbo and let him take her down, right down to his disquieting native ether. There she lurked, watching like a fox in a hole, and found that, as she suspected, the threads connected with the pirate world itself. She was lucky. It was a big joining that went both ways in all the planes of matter, and it lasted until her strength was almost gone.

“I think people were going back and forth, or supplies, or both maybe,” she told Amanda, who came to put a rug around her shoulders and a mug of tea into her shaking hands.

“That stands to reason,” Amanda said, going back to her careful checking of Mark’s printouts. “It would be hard to make a pocket universe an entirely closed ecology. And I suppose the crew has to go on leave sometimes. Now, if only we could find out what sort of supplies they need regularly, we’d be home and dry. We could send our team in disguised as provisions.”

“I’ll see what I can get you on that,” said Gladys. Lord! Amanda made a lousy cup of tea! Too intellectual, that was her trouble. Mind above tea. “You really think we’re going to have to send people across?”

“Can you see any other way to get close enough to blast them and cope with all the surprises they’re going to heave at us?” Amanda asked. “The Trojan horse idea still seems the best bet to me.”

“You’re probably right,” Gladys agreed mournfully. Probably because she was so recently out of linkage with Jimbo, she found her mind full of earthy sadness, playing over all the brightest and best and most beautiful of the young folk associated with the Ring — feisty little Flan Burke, that lovely boy Tam, the nice-looking blond fellow who was Paulie Lister’s lover, bossy Roz Collasso, and many, many more. Any of these could be chosen as storm troopers bound for Laputa-Blish. Such a waste. Such a shame. But no point mentioning that to Amanda.

“I’ll have a look at the supplies they’re getting,” she promised. Disguise the kids as corned beef? Unless the citizens of Laputa-Blish turned out to be vegetarians. That would cause problems.

She was out of luck the next few watches, however. Laputa-Blish neither received nor sent anything concrete. All it did was move.

“Move?” Mark asked, startled.

“Bless you, they all move, these universes!” Gladys said. “Ours wriggles about, and theirs wanders up and over and around ours, and all the others do it too. Every time I go, there’s a difference. Cup of tea, Mark, please.”

Mark, who had spent his stint looking after Gladys in laboriously exploring ways and means of transferring matter between universes — the pirates had proved it could be done, otherwise he would have despaired — sprang to the kettle, and then stopped. “What about Laputa-Blish? Does that move?”

“Yes. It sort of jostles in a circle around theirs. The first time I went back to look for it, I thought it had gone,” Gladys confessed. “But it was just around the back of them after all. I was in quite a panic till I realized.”

“I’ll need its course plotted,” he said. “If it’s moving about, our capsule could miss it and simply disintegrate in the void between. That void’s giving me nightmares anyway. All sorts of things could happen to our team there. I must have a chart of how Laputa-Blish moves.”

“You’ll get it. When do I get my tea?”

“Now — at once,” he said, diving to the stove through the jungle trees. They kept the kettle perpetually simmering these days. “Amanda left you some soup in a thermos. Want some?”

“Not if it’s like her tea,” said Gladys.

“It’s not. She said her sister made it.” Mark brought her the soup with her tea, and she did not refuse it. As he got back to work, she said sharply, “Did you feed my cats?”

“They make damn sure I do,” he said. She chuckled. When he next looked, she was off again, or perhaps asleep, with Jimbo a dark, leggy, motionless heap on her lap. He got down to work again, grateful for the heavy warding Gladys kept around her house. Someone kept trying to contact him. He was fairly sure it was Paulie. It was sharp and possessive and had a female feel to it. Whoever it was had some difficulty penetrating Gladys’s wards as more than a little nagging whisper. At any other time he would have answered at once, just on the off chance it was Zillah — even though Zillah was never possessive and had anyway made it plain that everything between them was finished — but not now. Transfer was fiendishly difficult. He kept wondering why, when the pirates could do something of this order, they needed to steal from Earth at all.

Gladys burst out laughing.

Mark jumped around to find her leaning back in her chair cackling, and Jimbo capering around her legs. “Are you all right?” he said cautiously.

“Oh, dear me, yes!” she said, wiping a tear of laughter away with her blotchy knuckles. “Oh Lord! You’ll never believe this, Mark! I’ve found out what those big linkages are. I was fairly sure they were transferring people, and they are. They’re women, Mark — girls for the troops! They just sent the lot of them back.”

“Are you sure?” he said. Her earthy cackle unnerved him. He felt prudish dismay.

“Of course I’m sure! Every soul in Laputa-Blish at this moment is a man. Think I don’t know the difference?”

“Then we’ve got our strike force,” he said, divided between distaste and relief.

“That’s right, dear,” Gladys said. “Trojan women. Girls for the troops. Jael smote Sisera sleeping, and a few Jezebels for luck. I almost wish I could be going myself!”

Further careful observation confirmed that the resident population of Laputa-Blish was indeed all male. Amanda and Maureen gleefully set about choosing a group of the gifted, committed, and good-looking from which the strike force could be selected.

“It serves them right,” Amanda said, briskly ticking names on her list, “for confining the use of magic to the male sex.”

“Oh, but they don’t,” said Gladys, and her eyes met Mark’s. “That poor girl in the hospital was a proficient, wasn’t she?”

“We’d better get in touch with her,” he said uneasily.

“All in good time. When she’s ready to talk.” Gladys stroked her animal. “Jimbo says she’s still in shock yet. He thinks the pirates don’t really understand about rebirth the way we do.”