—Come on, Meyer said. I don’t think the wizard is interested in this. I know I’m not. I’ve heard quite enough of this and we still have a long way to go if we are to sleep away from the fires tonight. He inclined his head. Thank you for your trouble, he said.
—Not to mention, I said. If my powers were greater, it might have been different, but of course they are also part of the consequence here. Their destruction, I should say. Much has gone out of the world since the ring was lost.
—Well yes, Siegmund said, but we don’t want to talk of that now, do we? He practiced a yawn, then turned, extended his hands. Let us leave, he said. She’ll probably be down there waiting for us after all.
—Of course she will, Meyer said. She has absolutely nowhere to go.
—None of us do, Siegfried said, but in a distracted way, not really addressing anyone. They linked arms, showing somewhat more accord than they had on the way toward me—but this might only have been further evidence of newly crushed spirits—and hobbled away. As they passed into the swaddling light, I thought that one gave a suggestion of a wave but it was difficult to tell and then they were gone. It hardly mattered anyway.
I shrugged—another encounter gone—and went back to my quarters. Inside the smell of smoke was ebbing, time soon enough to throw another stick or three into the fire. Poised toadlike, their little eyes gleaming, the six Alberichts perched by the walls and stared at me, voiceless.
—I got rid of them, I said.
The Alberichts blinked, murmured, rubbed against one another.
—Simple, I said. They aren’t even questioning anymore. They left in half the time that the last group did. Soon enough, they won’t even ask questions. I’ll just wave at them, shake my head and they’ll go.
The Alberichts seemed to cackle. One chittered a question.
—Not yet, I said. It’s not time.
They stared at me. I thought of the question of lost language and for a moment considered its replacement but decided that it was not time. It had been much easier, much less unpleasant with the Alberichts deprived of tongue and unable to speak.
—They’ll go away soon enough, I said. But I think a few more groups will be coming through. It’s a matter of purgation, that’s all.
The Alberichts looked at me inquiringly. I strode over to the side, took a pair of sticks and lofted them toward the fire.
—Soon, I said, we’ll go down to the river. We’ll make our plans and go to the river together.
The Alberichts nodded with pleasure and anticipation. Loss of language does not mean loss of comprehension. To the contrary, it heightens comprehension as any good spellcaster will know. In that moment, then, it seemed that the Alberichts, just as I, understood everything.
—Mine, I said quietly. It will all be mine.
The Alberichts nodded.
—All mine, I said.
—No, a voice beyond the tent said firmly. And then through the opening, in postures of sudden menace and determination the four of them appeared, their elvish, dwarfish, gigantic features suffused with pleasure and witness.
—Not quite, Barbara said. I raised a hand, miming incantation.
She went to the pile in the corner and raised a stick.
—You see, she said. We have our own magic, old wizard.
Traitorously, the Alberichts giggled.
I think the situation has, perhaps, gotten away from me.
Down the River Road
Gregory Benford
The fairy tale is the primer from which the child learns to read his mind in images.
The boy continued down the silver river in search of his father.
He crouched in his skiff, swaying with the rippling currents, and watched his trawling line. He had not eaten for two days. A fat yellow fish shimmered far down in the filmy water but would not bite.
Curiosity overcame hunger and he leaned over to see if the fish was nosing about his line. Instead of plump prey he saw himself, mirrored in a tin-grey metal current. But his image wore the cane hat he had lost overboard yesterday. He stared down into the trapped timeflow, which had kept pace with his skiff’s downtime glide, and studied his optimistic gaze of yesterday—with smudged forehead and sprigs of greasy hair jutting around his big ears.
He edged back from the lip of the shallow-bottomed skiff.
The liquid metal current was rising through the skin of water. It could sink him with a casual brush. Danger dried his mouth, tightened his throat.
Down through murky water he had glimpsed a slow churn of ivory radiance, mercury which shaped and roiled the broad, mud-streaked course. Treachery lurked in that metallic upwelling—oblong-shaped many-armers, electric vipers, fanged things that glided through the metal currents like broad-winged birds.
He lay still in the skiff bottom, hoping the time-dense flow would subside. A queasy temporal swell oozed through his gangly body, and to distract himself from the nausea he gazed up at the great spreading forest which hung overhead.
Patches of bare worldwall shimmered there, opulent with smoldering glows. The world was tubular, its sole great river a shiny snake that wound through bluffs and forests. Downriver, the vast bore of his circumscribed cosmos faded into mist. He could see a sizable city there beside a shimmering bend in the river. Behind him, uptime, he could make out the immense curve of the world and its rich hills until perspective warped and blurred them. He was tempted to take out his binoculars to see—
A thump against the skiff. Something heavy, moving.
He held his breath. Normally the skiff moved feather-light, responding to the rub and press of the air’s very compression behind him as he voyaged down the silver river and thus accelerated through time.
Irregular patches of bare crust overhead gave forth smatterings of prickly light. He wished for a moment of darkness, to hide him. There was no sun here, and the boy had never seen a star to know what that word meant. Light came splintering down from the crust spots, like volcanoes of iridescence spattering the land on the opposite curve of the world-tube. He knew as well, but only because his father had told him, that these shifting colors were the transmuted glow of monstrous collisions between unknown energies, distant flares vast and unknowable, the unfurling heritage of meaningless violence beyond human ken.
Something worried the water’s surface.
He sat up and reached for his paddle and a skinny thing shot out of the water and snapped past his head. He ducked and slapped the tendril with his paddle. A knobby head with slitted yellow eyes heaved up from the wrinkled water. It smoked acrid green, out of its metal element, and struck at him again. He swung the paddle. It caught the tendril and sliced through.
The mercury-beast bleated and splashed and was gone. He dug into the water with the paddle—half its blade sheared cleanly off—and thrust hard. Splashing behind.
He labored into deeper water. The green fumes swirled away. When the currents calmed he veered toward shore. The big-jawed predator could snap him from the surface in an instant, crunch his skiff in two, if it could extend out of the low-running streams of silver-grey mercury and ruddy bromium. A turbulent swell had brought it up, and might again.
His arms burned and his breath rasped well before the prow ran aground. Hurriedly he splashed ashore, tugging a frayed rope. He got the skiff up onto a mud flat and into a copse and slid it far back to hide it among leafy branches.
Pondering and weak, he fetched forth some stringy dried blue meat to quiet the rumble in his stomach.