I Earth
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.