“I guess it could be worse,” George said, after a moment of surveying Tom. “You could smuggle a Humvee in that hat. And are you wearing a dress?”
“It’s a caftan,” Tom corrected, sourly.
“It’s a granny-dress,” George snickered.
Tom considered any number of responses and rejected them all. He needed George. Mundell was the only stage-magician in Grantville. He’d done it as a hobby for years before the Ring of Fire. Thereafter, once his sons Mike and Jim started working as apprentices with Philip Massinger’s troop of actors, he’d begun doing stage magic on a semi-professional basis. He’d gotten pretty damn good at it.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” he said instead, and gestured to the two servants to pick up their bags and schlep them along.
He felt very uncomfortable, with a manservant following him with a bag he could very well carry himself, but Herr Doktor Thomas Stone, master of Akashic Magick and scholar of the Chakras would never demean himself by carrying anything. Even Gupta Rai Singh, his assistant, was too important to be burdened with a bag. And the farce absolutely had to begin at the front door of the Roths’ palatial home. People would be watching. Word had been spread that the famous Herr Doktor Stone had come straight from Padua just to cure the king.
So, they made a spectacle of themselves, trucking down to the waiting carriage, which he and George occupied alone, for even their baggage handlers were so important that they required their own carriage. They proceeded through the streets of Prague to the palace, with plenty of rubberneckers along the way. Tom remained serene, upright, and enveloped in dignity, but George fanned the flames of their reputation by producing small plastic coins out of thin air and tossing them to the crowd. Tom had been worried that people would be angry when they realized George’s coins weren’t spendable and weren’t even metal, but it seemed the opposite was the case. Once again, the exotic look of up-timer plastic fakery was valued as high as or higher than the real thing.
So by the time they got to the palace, there was a substantial buzz in the streets. Some people might have known that Tom was allegedly a physician, and some might have known that he was (in name anyway) one of the up-timer industrialists-but no one until now had known he was a magician.
George’s sleight of hand was good-very good. It had to be. He’d been the go-to guy for kids’ parties, and you had to be good to trick kids once they were old enough to suspect trickery. Big stage illusions-not so much, in no small part, he had told Tom once, because he didn’t have the skills to build them himself, and couldn’t afford the good ones. But he was good enough at close-up work that even when Tom knew exactly what he was doing, and when, and how, Tom still couldn’t catch him. This was going to prove important, because Tom was depending on him not only to convince Wallenstein that he was seeing solid evidence of that chakra nonsense Tom was about to spout, but because George was going to perform most of a physical exam that Wallenstein had no idea he was going to get. The king had flatly refused anyone permission to do the sort of examination that would actually tell them something. Even Edith wasn’t sure why, though Tom had a notion it might have less to do with either modesty or the concept of the King’s Sacred Person and a lot more to do with a very rational fear of assassination. Who would be more in a position to do a man in than his own physician?
“No psychic surgery,” George had said, flatly, when he’d heard what Tom wanted of him. “Absolutely, positively, no psychic surgery.”
“What?” Tom had replied, shocked. “No. I just want a blood pressure check, get his temp and heart-rate, stuff like that.”
“Good. Nobody is pulling that particular scam here down-time yet, and I’d rather they didn’t get ideas,” George had said, his grim tone conveying, even over the radio, the depth of his loathing for the sleight-of-hand charlatans that “removed tumors psychically” from the bodies of gullible victims up-time.
They descended the carriage and mounted the steps, followed by their entourage, and paused at the door for just a moment.
He and George exchanged a look. To his relief, he saw George smiling ever so slightly.
“It’s showtime,” George muttered out of the corner of his mouth, and as if that had been a cue, the doors swung open, and they stepped inside.
The king received them in a private audience chamber, and seemed quite impressed by their flamboyant outfits. Until Tom knew whether or not Wallenstein had high blood pressure or a dingy heart, he didn’t want to put any stress on the man; that limited him quite a bit in what he could do. Not so George. Tom was the distracter so George could do his work. He’d commissioned seven hand-blown glass bowls in graduated sizes, and ordered seven framed panes of stained glass in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and white, after getting the dimensions he needed from Edith. He positioned the king in a comfortable chair under the window that the sun was coming through, then mounted the red glass inside the window frame so that the king was bathed in red light.
“I fear, Your Majesty,” Tom said, as Wallenstein peered at him through the ruddy light, “That the good Dr. Gribbleflotz is only partially correct in his interpretation of the aura. You see, he has not studied the secrets of the aura among the ancient sages of the Tibetan mountains as I have. They teach us that the aura is merely the outward reflection of the inward emanations of the seven chakras.”
He then launched into a sermon on the chakras which owed as much to snake-oil medicine as it did to the little he remembered from the commune days. It really didn’t matter anyway, his son was right about that. All that mattered was that he was consistent, that what he said didn’t contradict Gribbleflotz so much as make Gribbleflotz look like the kid who had brought a baking-soda volcano to a science fair where other kids were showing off their dancing robots and osmotic sea-water purifiers. In this, he was helped immensely by George, who demonstrated a robust set of chakras by producing a “chakric resonator” in the form of a crystal wand that glowed the appropriate color when held over the appropriate spot on himself-and flickered and dimmed when held over the same spots on the king.
All except for the blue one-which corresponded to a spot right at the throat (and was the “auric color” that Gribbleflotz had told the king was his own. George made that one glow strongly. The king stared at the wand in fascination.
“Ah, now you see, all of your chakras are unbalanced,” Tom told him. “The only strong one is the Muskogee chakra, the chakra of communication and intellect. You are a man of your mind, Your Majesty. Your mind is the most powerful part of you. But by strengthening that part of your energy exclusively, you weaken the rest of your etheric body, exactly as if you concentrated on strengthening only your hand, until you could crush a walnut with your fist, but your legs would not take you across a room unaided.”
Since he couldn’t remember the Indian names for the chakras, he had finally just used the names of the home towns of some of his old friends. The chakra at the top of the head he called “Sheboygan,” followed by Mishawaka, Muskogee, Oskaloosa, Chillicothe, Oolagah and Austin.
The king nodded. “That is how I feel ever since Doktor Gribbleflotz was reading my aura and telling me it was blue!” he exclaimed. “I thought I was to be-” He broke off, looking perplexed.
“Now I will be examining your chakras with my colleague and assistant, Gupta,” Tom carried on blithely. “Then we will know what is to be done to re-balance you.”
So the king sat in the red light while Tom dipped his fingers in a little water and made the biggest bowl “sing” by running his wet finger around the top of it, chanting nonsense syllables the entire time. The king’s eyes widened at that; evidently no one had invented the glass harmonica yet. Tibetan “singing bowls” were made of brass and made to sing in much the same fashion but using a wooden mallet-Tom had never quite mastered that, but he was pretty good at making wineglasses sing. George made mystical passes, made red silk handkerchiefs appear and vanish, did the same with glowing balls that he rolled around on his hands. Then they repeated the whole routine with orange light from an orange pane of glass, a higher pitched bowl, and so on right up to the white light. George meanwhile was getting a wealth of information.