And you know what she told me? "I don't want to believe in any of it; it just makes me feel sick. But at the same time, I can't stop knowing it's all out there: every kind of magic being and nightmare. They're all real."
I remember thinking of Cutter and that other guy in his apartment and what Cerin said about them. Did that make my Mom a bad person? I couldn't believe that.
"But they're not supposed to be real," Mom said. "That's what's got me feeling so crazy. In a sane world, in the world that was the way I'd grown up believing it to be, that wouldn't be real. The Kelledys could fix it so that I'd forget again, but then I'd be back to going through life always feeling like there was something important that I couldn't remember. And that just leaves you with another kind of craziness an ache that you can't explain and it doesn't ever go away. It's better this way, and my medicine keeps me from feeling too crazy."
She looked away then, out the window of her room. I looked, too, and saw the little monkey-man who was crossing the lawn of the sanitarium, pulling a pig behind him. The pig had a load of gear on its back like it was a packhorse.
"Could you could you ask the nurse to bring my medicine," Mom said.
I tried to tell her that all she had to do was accept it, but she wouldn't listen. She just kept asking for the nurse, so finally I went and got one.
I still think it's my fault.
I live with the Kelledys now. Daddy was going to send me away to a boarding school, because he felt that he couldn't be home enough to take care of me. I never really thought about it before, but when he said that, I realized that he didn't know me at all.
Meran offered to let me live at their place. I moved in on my birthday.
There's a book in their library ha! There's like ten million books in there. But the one I'm thinking of is by a local writer, this guy named Christy Riddell.
In it, he talks about Faerie, how everybody just thinks of them as ghosts of wind and shadow.
"Faerie music is the wind," he says, "and their movement is the play of shadow cast by moonlight, or starlight, or no light at all. Faerie lives like a ghost beside us, but only the city remembers. But then the city never forgets anything."
I don't know if the Kelledys are part of that ghostliness. What I do know is that, seeing how they live for each other, how they care so much about each other, I find myself feeling more hopeful about things. My parents and I didn't so much not get along, as lack interest in each other. It got to the point where I figured that's how everybody in the world was, because I never knew any different.
So I'm trying harder with Mom. I don't talk about things she doesn't want to hear, but I don't stop believing in them either. Like Cerin said, we're just two threads of the Story. Sometimes we come together for a while and sometimes we're apart. And no matter how much one or the other of us might want it to be different, both our stories are true.
But I can't stop wishing for a happy ending.
MAZIRIAN THE MAGICIAN
by Jack Vance
Chosen by Robert Silverberg
Choosing favorites among the six novelettes that make up Jack Vance's The Dying Earth is a disagreeable task. Abandoning "Liane the Wayfarer" means giving up the unforgettable Chun the Unavoidable. Dismissing "Turjan of Miir" loses us the Excellent Primastic Spray and the Omnipotent Sphere. Casting out "Ulan Dhor" robs us of Rogol Domedonfors, the last ruler of Ampritatvir. And so on.
I console myself with the thought that the book as a whole will continue to exist even after one story has been selected for this book, and so we really lose nothing by plucking one forth. You still remain able to run from this anthology to the complete text, something that I would do instantly, if I were you and had never read Vance's lovely fable of an astonishingly beautiful far future that will never happen. Herewith, then, is the rich, profusely colored "Mazirian the Magician" one of the six best tales from this magical book, one of my six favorite stories out of this group of wondrous fantasies.
- Robert Silverberg
Deep in thought, Mazirian the Magician walked his garden. Trees fruited with many intoxications overhung his path, and flowers bowed obsequiously as he passed. An inch above the ground, dull as agates, the eyes of mandrakes followed the tread of his black-slippered feet. Such was Mazirian's garden three terraces growing with strange and wonderful vegetations. Certain plants swam with changing iridescences; others held up blooms pulsing like sea-anemones, purple, green, lilac, pink, yellow. Here grew trees like feather parasols, trees with transparent trunks threaded with red and yellow veins, trees with foliage like metal foil, each leaf a different metal copper, silver, blue tantalum, bronze, green iridium. Here blooms like bubbles tugged gently upward from glazed green leaves, there a shrub bore a thousand pipe-shaped blossoms, each whistling softly to make music of the ancient Earth, of the ruby-red sunlight, water seeping through black soil, the languid winds. And beyond the roqual hedge the trees of the forest made a tall wall of mystery. In this waning hour of Earth's life no man could count himself familiar with the glens, the glades, the dells and deeps, the secluded clearings, the ruined pavilions, the sun-dappled pleasances, the gullys and heights, the various brooks, freshets, ponds, the meadows, thickets, brakes, and rocky outcrops.
Mazirian paced his garden with a brow frowning in thought. His step was slow and his arms were clenched behind his back. There was one who had brought him puzzlement, doubt, and a great desire: a delightful woman-creature who dwelt in the woods. She came to his garden half-laughing and always wary, riding a black horse with eyes like golden crystals. Many times had Mazirian tried to take her; always her horse had borne her from his varied enticements, threats, and subterfuges.
Agonized screaming jarred the garden. Mazirian, hastening his step, found a mole chewing the stalk of a plant-animal hybrid. He killed the marauder, and the screams subsided to a dull gasping. Mazirian stroked a furry leaf and the red mouth hissed in pleasure.
Then: "K-k-k-k-k-k-k," spoke the plant. Mazirian stooped, held the rodent to the red mouth. The mouth sucked, the small body slid into the stomach-bladder underground. The plant gurgled, eructated, and Mazirian watched with satisfaction.
The sun had swung low in the sky, so dim and red that the stars could be seen. And now Mazirian felt a watching presence. It would be the woman of the forest, for thus had she disturbed him before. He paused in his stride, feeling for the direction of the gaze.
He shouted a spell of immobilization. Behind him the plant-animal froze to rigidity and a great green moth wafted to the ground. He whirled around. There she was, at the edge of the forest, closer than ever she had approached before. Nor did she move as he advanced. Mazirian's young-old eyes shone. He would take her to his manse and keep her in a prison of green glass. He would take her brain with fire, with cold, with pain and with joy. She should serve him with wine and make the eighteen motions of allurement by yellow lamp-light. Perhaps she was spying on him; if so, the Magician would discover immediately, for he could call no man friend and had forever to guard his garden.
She was but twenty paces distant then there was a thud and pound of black hooves as she wheeled her mount and fled into the forest.
The Magician flung down his cloak in rage. She held a guard a counter-spell, a rune of protection and always she came when he was ill-prepared to follow. He peered into the murky depths, glimpsed the wanness of her body flitting through a shaft of red light, then black shade and she was gone Was she a witch? Did she come of her own volition, or more likely had an enemy sent her to deal him inquietude? If so, who might be guiding her? There was Prince Kandive the Golden, of Kaiin, whom Mazirian had bilked of his secret of renewed youth. There was Azvan the Astronomer, there was Turjan hardly Turjan, and here Mazirian's face lit in a pleasing recollection He put the thought aside. Azvan, at least, he could test. He turned his steps to his workshop, went to a table where rested a cube of clear crystal, shimmering with a red and blue aureole. From a cabinet he brought a bronze gong and a silver hammer. He tapped on the gong and the mellow tone sang through the room and out, away and beyond. He tapped again and again. Suddenly Azvan's face shone from the crystal, beaded with pain and great terror.