The Perfect Host (48 page)

“Vé-Gédula …”
I chanted, conscious that so far I had not broken the compelling rhythm of the ancient syllables, not missed a motion with the knife. Twice more the gun yapped, and with each explosion I was struck, once in the face, once on the neck. Not by
bullets, however, but by the cold rubbery hide of the swift familiar, which dropped in front of me with its little cheeks bulging out like those of a chipmunk at acorn time. It put the two bullets down by the first and vanished. I clasped my hands on the knife-hilt, pressing it to my chest, point upward the way Goo-goo had done.

“Lé o’lam …”
From the corner of my eye I saw Ponder hurling himself at me, and the ragged figure of little Goo-goo rising up between us. Ponder struck the little man aside with one bear-like clubbing of his forearm, and was suddenly assaulted either by fifty of the blue familiars or by one moving fifty times as fast as a living thing ought to. It was in his ears, fluttering on his face, nipping the back of his neck, clawing at his nostrils, all at once. Ponder lost one precious second in trying to bat the thing away, and then apparently decided to ignore it. He launched himself at me with a roar, just as I came out with the final syllable of the incantation:
“OM!”

It isn’t easy to tell what happened then. They say The Egg hit Hiroshima with “a soundless flash.” It was like that. I stood where I was, my head turned away from the place where the skull had been, my eyes all but closed against that terrible cold radiance. Filtering my vision through my lashes, I saw Ponder still in midair, still coming toward me. But as he moved, he—changed. For a second he must have been hot, for his clothes charred. But he was cold when he hit me, cold as death. His clothes were a flurry of chilled soot; his skin was a brittle, frigid eggshell through which his bones burst and powdered. I stood, braced for a solid impact that never came, showered with the scorched and frozen detritus of what had been a man.

Still I stood, holding the knife, for hardly a full second had passed; and my vision went out with that blinding light. I saw Claire thirty yards away on her knees, her face in her hands; and whether she had fallen or was praying I could not know. Goo-goo was on the ground where Ponder had stretched him and near his body was the familiar, still at last. Beyond stood Luana, still on her feet, her auburn eyes blindly open to the great light, her face composed. She stepped forward slowly, hanging her arms, but with her head erect, her heated hair flung back. The cruel, steady light made sharp-edged shadows on the hinges of her jaw, for all they were sunlit. For a brief moment
she was beautiful, and then she seemed to be walking down a staircase, for she grew shorter as she walked. Her taut skin billowed suddenly like a pillow-slip on a clothesline, and her hair slipped down and drifted off in a writhing cloud. She opened her mouth, and it made a triangle, and she began to bleat.

They were wordless sounds, each one higher in pitch than the one before. Up and up they went, growing fainter as they grew higher, turning to rat-squeaks, mouse-squeaks, bat-squeaks, and at last a high thin whistle that was not a sound at all but a pressure on the eardrums. Suddenly there was nothing moving there at all; there was only a plaid skirt and a windbreaker tumbled together with blood on them. And a naked, lizard-like thing nosed out of the pathetic pile, raised itself up on skinny forelimbs, sniffed with its pointed snout at the light, and fell dead.

Claire drew a long, gasping breath. The sound said nothing for Claire, but much for the vale. It said how utterly quiet it was. I looked again at the plaid skirt lying tumbled on the grass, and I felt a deep pain. I did not mourn Luana, for Luana was never a woman; and I knew now that had I never seen her again after our last kiss over the gate, I would not have remembered her as a woman. But she had been beauty; she had been cool lips and infernal hair, and skin of many subtle sorts of rose; I mourned these things, in the face of which her lack of humanity was completely unimportant.

The light dimmed. I dropped the knife and went to Claire. I sank down beside her and put my arms around her. She let her hands slide off her face and turned it into my shoulder. She was not crying. I patted her hair, and we rested there until I was moved to say, “We can look at him now,” and for a moment longer while we enjoyed the awe of knowing that all the while he had been standing there, released.

Then, together, we turned our heads and looked at him.

He had dimmed his pent-up light, but still he blazed. I will not say what he looked like, because he looked like only himself. I will not say he looked like a man, because no man could look like him. He said, “Claire, take off your boot.”

She bent to do it, and when she had, something flowed from him to us. I had my hoof under me. I felt it writhe and swell. There was
an instant of pain. I grasped the hairy ankle as the coarse hair fell out, and then my foot was whole again. Claire laughed, patting and stroking her restored foot. I had never seen her face like that before.

Then
he
laughed. I will not say what that was like either. “Thad, Thad, you’ve done it. You’ve bungled and stumbled, but you’ve done it.” I’ll say how he spoke, though. He spoke like a man.

“What have I done?” I asked. “I have been pushed and pulled; I’ve thought some things out, and I’ve been both right and wrong—what have I done?”

“You have done right—finally,” he chuckled. “You have set me free. You have broken walls and melted bars that are inconceivable to you … I’ll tell you as much as I can, though.

“You see, for some hundreds of thousands of years I have had a—call it a jailer. He did not capture me: that was done by a far greater one than he. But the jailer’s name was Korm. And sometimes he lived as a bird and sometimes as an animal or a man. You knew him as Ponder. He was a minor wizard, and Luana was his familiar. I too have a familiar—Tiltol there.” He indicated the blue beast, stretched quietly out at his feet.

“Imprisoned, I could do very little. Korm used to amuse himself by watching my struggles, and occasionally he would set up a spell to block me even further. Sometimes he would leave me alone, to get my hopes up, to let me begin to free myself, so that he could step in and check me again, and laugh …

“One thing I managed to do during one of those periods was to bring Claire’s parents together. Korm thought that the magic thing they had between them was the tool I was developing, and when it began to look like a strong magic, he killed them. He did not know until much later that Claire was my magic; and when he found it out, he made a new and irritating spell around me, and induced Claire to come out here and walk into it. It was supposed to kill her, but she was protected; all it did was to touch her with the mark of the beast—a cloven hoof. And it immobilized me completely for some hours.

“When I could, I sent Tiltol after her with a new protection; without it she would be in real danger from Korm, for he was bound to
find out how very special she was. Tiltol tried to weave the new protection around her—and found that he could not. Her aura was no longer completely her own. She had fallen in love; she had given part of herself away to you, Thad. Now, since the new spell would work only on one in Claire’s particular condition, and since he could not change that, Tiltol found a very logical solution: He gave you a cloven hoof too, and then cast the protection over both of you. That’s why the bear-trap did not hurt you, and why the wasps couldn’t sting you.”

“I’m beginning to see,” I said. “But—what’s this about the ritual? How did it set you free?”

“I can’t explain that. Roughly, though, I might say that if you regard my prison as locked, and your presence as the key in the lock, then the ritual was the turning of the key, and use of the knife was the direction in which the key was turned. If you—or Claire, which was Korm’s intention—had used the ritual without the knife, I would have been more firmly imprisoned than ever, and you two would have lived out your lives with those hooves.”

“What about Goo-goo? I thought for a while that he was the jailer.”

He chuckled. “Bless you, no. He is what he seems to be—a harmless, half-demented old man, keeping himself out of people’s way. He isn’t dead, by the way. When he wakes, he’ll have no recollection of all this. I practiced on him, to see if I could get a human being to perform the ritual, and he has been a good friend. He won’t lose by it. Speaking of the ritual, though, I’d like you to know that, spectacular as it might have been, it wasn’t the biggest part of the battle. That happened before—when you and Claire were talking to Ponder. Remember when Claire recited the spell and didn’t know what she was saying?”

“I certainly do. That was when I suddenly decided there was something funny about Ponder’s story. He had hypnotized her, hadn’t he?”

“Something very like it … he was in her mind and I, by the way, was in yours. That’s what made you leap up and go to Luana.”

I shuddered. “That was bad … evil. What about this ‘good and
evil’ theory of Ponder’s, incidentally? How could he have worked evil on you with a spell from the Bible?”

There was a trace of irritation in his voice. “You’ll have to get rid of this ‘black and white magic’ misconception,” he said. “Is a force like electricity ‘white’ or ‘black’? You use it for the iron lung. You use it also for the electric chair. You can’t define magic by its methods and its materials, but only in terms of its purpose. Regard it, not as ‘black’ and ‘white,’ but as High and Low magic. As to the Testament, why, that ritual is older than the Bible or it couldn’t have been recorded there. Believe me, Ponder was using it well out of its context. Ah well, it’s all over with now. You two are blessed—do you realize that? You both will keep your special immunity, and Claire shall have what she most wants, besides.”

“What about you?”

“I must go. I have work to do. The world was not ordained to be without me.

“For there is reason in the world, and all the world is free to use it. But there has been no will to use it. There’s wilfulness aplenty, in individuals and in groups, but no great encompassing will to work with reason. Almost no one reads a Communist newspaper but Communists, and only prohibitionists attend a dry convention. Humanity is split up into tiny groups, each clinging to some single segment of Truth, and earnestly keeping itself unaware of the other Truths that make up the great mosaic. And even when humans are aware of the fact that others share the same truth, they allow themselves to be kept apart from each other. The farmer here knows that the farmer there does not want to fight a war against him, yet they fight. I am that Will. I am the brother of Reason, who came here with me. My brother has done well, but he needs me, and you have set me free.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“The earliest men called me Kamäel.”

“The Camel … in every language,” murmured Claire. Suddenly her eyes widened. “You are—an … an
archangel
, Kamäel! I’ve read …”

He smiled, and we looked down, blinded.

“Tiltol!”

The tiny familiar twitched and was suddenly balancing on its two legs. It moved abruptly, impossibly fast, zoomed up to Kamäel, where it nestled in the crook of his arm. And suddenly it began to grow and change. Great golden feathers sprouted from its naked hide, and a noble crest. It spread wide wings. Its plumage was an incredible purple under its golden crest and gold-tipped wings. We stared, filling our minds with a sight no human being alive had seen—of all birds, the noblest.

“Good-bye,” said Kamäel. “Perhaps one day you will know the size of the thing you have done. The One who imprisoned me will come back, one day, and we will be ready for him.”

“Satan?”

“Some call him that.”

“Did he leave Earth?”

“Bless you, yes! Mankind has had no devil but himself these last twenty thousand years! But we’ll be ready for the Old One, now.”

There was more sun, there were more colors in the world as we walked back to town.

“It was the Phoenix!” breathed Claire for the twentieth time. “What a thing to tell our children.”

“Whose children?

“Ours.”

“Now look,” I said, but she interrupted me. “Didn’t he say I was to have what I wanted most?”

I looked down at her, trying hard not to smile. “Oh, all right,” I said.

H
E HAD TALKED
with two dead men and one dead girl, and now he lay in lightlessness. He was conscious, but there was nothing anywhere to which to bring consciousness. This was a black that was darker than any other blackness. A smear of this would make a black hole in precipitated carbon.

His philosophy urged him to take an inventory. This couldn’t be just
nothing
. Consciousness itself cannot exist with nothing; they are mutually exclusive. Inventory, then:

Item: A blackness.

Item: Body. Breath warmly moistening the inside edges of his nostrils, coolly drying them. A sluggish heart. Barely resilient pressure on shoulders, buttocks, calves, heels. So the body lay on its back. Fingers on chest. Fingers on fingers. Hands together, then, on the breast. Therefore: Item, body laid out. Well, of course. This was the place where death was. This was the place to discover whether death was death, or life everlasting.

Item: The philosophy itself. The important thing. The thing that all this was about. The philosophy was … was—Later he could think of that. He had to find death first. So—

Item: Death. Just as surely as there was breath in his nostrils, as surely as he was lying there, death was here. If death found him, death was death. But if he found death, he would find his immortality. Death was here. Here; so—

Item:
Here
. There was nothing to conclude about
here. Here
was the place where he lay. It was not a place he had ever been before. There was something he had to find out about it. What? But how could he know?

Look and see
, he told himself, and opened his eyes.

A blue-green radiance pressed itself between his lids. He lay with
his eyes stupidly unfocused, seeing as little in the light as he had in its absence, until the straight band of lesser brightness directly above him commanded his lenses, and he saw.