Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) (15 page)

To his first
inspiration, the servant had now added subtlety.

Once it was
dark, the magician would require his servant’s presence at the magic engine,
but also, once it was dark, the full majesty of the comet would be revealed.
The climax of its dissipation would follow. Now it seemed to the servant that
if he could only bring the idiot-girl to the top of the mansion, tying her up,
perhaps, on the western roof, well away from the locality of the engine and the
mage, she must see the utmost activity of the comet and be duly appalled by it.
The noise of the supernatural engine would cover her shrieks. If fortune were
with the servant, she, like the other woman, would be delivered of her burden
before the night was over. As for the mage, in the aftermath of the spell, he
would be as one drugged and drunk, and would totter to his chamber, noticing
little if anything of extraneous events.

Night came.
The sky was quite black, all its stars blinded. Even the moon, when she floated
up in the east, was opaque. But there was light, and to spare. Like a golden
medallion on a silver chain, the comet poised above the earth, and radiance
unfolded from it like wings, each moment more lucent than the last. All the
tintings of the stonework were apparent, and the colors of the flowers on the
hillside below, as if caught in the rays of a young morning.

The engine
stood in silhouette like a toy some giant child had made itself from bits and
pieces of metal, save that here and there a small flickering aurora would eddy
up and down its tubes and pipes and wheels. The mage, at his ultimate
preparations, had not yet emerged on the roof. The servant came by a back way,
out of a trap door, shoveling the idiot-girl before him. Her wrists were tied,
and a black cloth had been swathed about her head to keep the sight of the
comet a surprise for her.

The servant
let down the trap door again, and fastened the cord, which trailed from the
girl’s hands, into the iron ring. He did this leaving so little slack she must
crouch down beside the ring. In such a position, the absorbed mage would be
unlikely to see her. Actually, as the servant had long known, the mage scarcely
saw or heard or noted anything that did not have to do with science.

When the dull
pebble of the moon was a handspan up the sky, and the glow of the comet had
grown like that of full morning, the magus stepped out on to the roof and
walked straight to the machine, glancing at nothing, save the thing above.

This time, the
levers had been set ready, and the mage had only to put his hand on a master
coil to set the process off. As he did so, he called for the servant.

“Coming, O
master,” cried the servant, in his most fawning tone.

As the noise
of the engine started up, the servant whipped the cloth from his lady’s head,
and ran to aid the magician, leaving her—as he opined—to mindless terror and
its abortive consequences.

What went on in the
deranged mind of the girl?

Contrary to
the servant’s hope, at first, not much. In her existence, all had been
confusion, nothing made sense. One confusion more would barely overwhelm her.
Also, as the clod-hopping rapist had failed to reason, since she had been kept
timelessly in the dark, without benefit of sun or moon, for rather more than
one hundred days and nights, she might only have concluded that the comet was
merely day coming, and find nothing abnormal in it.

Of course, her
eyes, weakened by the gloom underground, were hurt by the light, and so she
covered them with her hands, whimpering. But this was not fear, simply another
pain to add to the catalogs of pain she had already known. She took most pain
as a matter of no moment.

But then, as
the comet grew brilliant as a summer noon, something extraordinary began to
occur.

Men, as logic
and reason swelled in them, had lost most of their instinctual talents, which
talents, in the case of magicians, generally had to be relearned. By this
training, the mage had taught himself to understand that the rays of the comet,
far from maleficent, were a tonic, even a panacea. Had he been a truly devout
man, and less wrapped up in his own head, he might have said to the
village—“Stay and benefit from this marvelous event. Put your sick ones out where
they may receive the motes and beams to best effect.” Instead, he had kept the
whole thing secret, fearing to be pestered. He had, too, the plan to capture
some of these benefits in his machine for future use in the arts of healing and
beautifying. Also, let it be said, the mage was interested in what effect the
radiations would have on the ghastly servant—but that was by way of individual
experiment. Whatever else, the mage understood the comet was to be welcomed not
dreaded, and the servant was so far indifferent to it, having been told it was
incapable of harming him, and being too unimaginative to think up doubts for
himself.

Conversely,
the people of the village, having lost their animal awareness, and knowing no
better, had run away.

The animals
themselves, and the creatures all about, knowing nothing in particular, yet
instinctively wise, rather than run away, had
gathered
.

As the comet
burned brighter and more bright, all the birds of the region began to sing,
their most melodious and lush dawn chorus, to welcome the great light. And as
they sang, they flew and swirled about like leaves in a whirlpool, delirious
with delight. Bees and butterflies and beetles also filled the air like flying
jewelry. Lizards and serpents unfolded from the earth, basking. Cats and hares
and foxes came, sheep which had been left behind, goats, an ocelot, all
oblivious of each other, fell to rolling and purring on the grass. Monkeys and
marmosets chittered in the tree tops, throwing gourds at each other in good
humor. Flowers fanned into bloom. Fruits ripened and exploded from ripeness,
filling the air with the scents of perfume and wine. Even the stones of the
mansion, and those of the village below the hill, seemed to raise themselves,
opening their cracks like thirsty mouths to drink the golden light.

The roaring
sorcerous machine drowned out the sounds of most of these happenings, all save
the noisy rapturous bird-song, which seemed to pierce through like chiming
bells. For sure, it could have drowned the idiot-girl’s screaming. Had she
screamed.

Being witless,
she had never learned a single thing, except, perhaps, that life was cruel and
that her brother and sister humans hated her. Being witless, she had had no
reason with which to drive her instincts out.

After maybe a minute
of hiding her eyes from the hurt of the light, the girl’s instinct had prompted
her not to hide them. So, with water streaming down her dirty face, she had
looked up into the heart of the light. And, being something of a cure-all, the
blinding rays presently cured the weakness in her sight, and she was able to
see, and rejoice in the seeing.

How beautiful
everything appeared to her, suddenly, even tied up as she was. The emerald
crickets dancing together on the stones at the roof’s edge, the birds writing
songs across heaven, the whole glory of this day-in-night. And abruptly, for
the first time in many years, maybe for the first time ever, the idiot-girl
laughed for sheer happiness.

A tawny rat
was sitting on the roof nearby. Attracted, like the rest, by the comet, he had
been interrupted in finishing the mage’s supper. Now he mused on the juicy rope
which bound the girl’s hands to the iron ring. In his own way, the rat was also
accustomed to abuse, and he did not venture near for some while. Then, seeing
the girl did not pay heed to him, he slipped forward and began to nibble the
hemp, rich in tallow spittings and grease, which, steeped in the comet’s glow,
were fit for a gourmet.

Finding her
hands free all at once, the girl did not question. She had never questioned
anything.

In that very
instant, the comet began to diversify.

The sky, which
had been black behind the gold, changed to a sumptuous rosy blue, a blushing
blue, warm and lovely. And across this sheet of color, a golden rain began to
stream in all directions, like the sparkles erupting from a colorful firework.
And then these sparkles started to fall, in glittering chains, onto the earth.

“Stand well
clear now, my dear,” said the magician to his servant—even the mage had been
affected. But the servant was already a safe distance from the roaring machine,
gawping at heaven with his mouth open. The machine pulsed and whirred, and
gemlike convulsions came and went around its wheels. Swiftly and surely, and
well-practiced, the magician began to intone his forty-seven-syllable mantra.
As he spoke the last words, a golden zigzag snaked down from the shining air
and speared into the upper section of the machine, and so remained. The machine
cried aloud in a wild register. Galvanic waves throbbed into it from the
transfixing, still visible solar levin bolt, and all the shades of the spectrum
sluiced over the machine.

“See!” feebly
cried the mage, almost beside himself.

Then he saw
another thing.

Drawn—without
logic, naturally, rather as an insect is drawn to a bright-hued flower—the
idiot-girl ran across the roofs of the mansion straight toward the machine and
its sky tower of rainbows.

“Stop her!”
cried the mage to his servant, but the servant had toppled down, still with his
mouth open. The mage tried to summon a spell, but exertions had lessened his
abilities. Before he could assert his power, the girl had reached the machine.
Moths fly against the scalding cores of candles, and die. She flew against the
scalding core of the comet fragment trapped by the quivering engine. But she
did not die. No indeed.

She clung to
the machine’s framework, her cheek against its knot of pipes. Her face was
blissful—was transparent. The mage groaned with chagrin as he perceived how the
rainbow lights ran now, out of the sky, through the sorcerous machine—and so
into her body.

It had been
his intention to build a conductor and a cistern. Never an instrument of direct
transmission.

Despite the
comfort of the solar rain, he was filled with frustration and rage. As air
rushes to fill a void, so the power was magnetized from the machine into the
girl’s vacancy. He dared not detach the girl. Such a detachment might be
dangerous to the engine—like pulling a leech from the flesh. A concussion might
be caused besides, that would shake down the mansion. Or he himself might
receive that concentration of the rays of the comet direct. He knew himself too
crowded with cleverness and civilized thought to be able to survive such a raw
contact. Only an idiot could survive it—an empty vessel. Ah! Only she.

And so he was
compelled to watch as all that exceptional energy he had travailed for so long
to capture, was dispersed into her thin, unwholesome, female body.

CHAPTER 3

Sunfire

When dawn returned over
the psychically washed sky, the golden shower was finished, the magical gases
dispersed, absorbed, and to be seen no more. The magician had also
vanished—gone to his bed most sulkily to lament.

Far beyond the
village, in an outcropping of hills, the villagers had taken shelter in caves
and crevices—and so successfully missed all the miraculous outpouring of the
comet’s rays.

On the east
roof of the mansion, a man was seated, playing with a tawny rat, letting it run
up and down him, and now and then stroking its back and ears. Both man and rat
seemed happy with this exercise.

The man was
heavily built, and apparently very strong. His skin was clear, clean and of a
bronze appearance. His eyes were large, intent and sympathetic. In repose, his
face was curiously attractive, almost beautiful, though it was only the beauty
of peace and quietness.

Not the sky
alone had been bathed. This was none other than the magician’s servant.
Probably, if he had suspected what the comet was likely to do to him, he too
would have run. It had scaled his body of its dirt, and his mind also.
Physically and spiritually it had enhanced him, and rinsed his ego of
unknowingness. Like a chest full of drawers, each had been thrown open, dusted
out, and heaped with valuables. Never again would he play tricks, brutalize or
rape. The lusts of this flesh would be wholesome, nor would many refuse him
now. By his kindness and his understanding, hereafter, this man would win the
love of others.

This then, had
been done to the servant, under the parasol of rays.

To the
idiot-girl who had embraced the machine and thereby the power source
itself—what had been done to her?

At the other
end of the eastern roof, an apparition was slowly dancing with its shadows. A
young girl, with a sweet fey countenance, clean and white as a flower, her hair
the gold of sun vapor, like the hair of the comet itself. Her movements were
childish yet graceful. She looked at her shadow as she danced, and at her own
arms and hands and feet, in pleasure and surprise.

Finally, she
danced her way to the magician’s servant, and she smiled at the rat now sitting
on his knee.

“You must not
overtax yourself,” said the servant. “Do you understand you are with child, and
I am the father?”