Margaret St. Clair (31 page)

“The other priests had been as surprised as I was. Now they began to mutter and heft the clubs they were carrying. The nuse might be able to handle all of them at once, but I didn’t wait to find out. I made a dash into the next room and bolted the door.

“I was wearing my chronnox. All I had to do was grab m y chest of artifacts and go to some other time. I made a dive under the bed for the chest. And it wasn’t there.”

“Stolen?” I asked helpfully.

The nuse man shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Not with a nuse installation on guard. I think the nuse had levitated the chest to some safe place for extra security. I concentrated on getting the nuse to bring the chest back, and I did hear noises, levitation noises, as though it were trying to obey me. But it had all it could do to handle the priest s in the next room.

“By now there was a considerable commotion in the palace. Doors were opening, people were shouting. I heard soldiers outside in the hall. Thumps and bumps from my sitting room showed that the nuse was still doing what it could with the priests, but several people were throwing themselves as hard as they could against the connecting door. I didn’t know how much longer the bolts would hold.

“I tried concentrating on getting the nuse to abandon the priests and bring me my chest. I’m sure it would have worked in another minute. But then there was a lot of yelling and they began using a ram on the door. One of the panels busted. The hinges were sagging. I had to go.”

-

The nuse man looked so depressed that I poured him out more tea. Just as I had suspected in the beginning, the nuse —always incalculable, always tricky, the essence of unreliability —the nuse had been at the bottom of his troubles. It always was. I had too much sense to say so, though.

“What was the point you were making about the plano-convex bricks?” I finally asked.

-

The nuse man looked even more gloomy. I wished I hadn’t mentioned it. He picked a leaf out of his tea with his spoon and frowned savagely at it.

“I went back to Ur,” he said finally. “I wanted to see what had happened about the bricks, and of course I wanted my chest. I picked a time about ten years later.”

“Well?”

“The first thing I noticed was the skyline. Every one of the ziggurats Nebu-al-k arsig had put up was gone. I walked up to where one of them had been, and there was nothing but a heap of bricks, and the bricks looked as if people had pounded them with hammers.

“I walked on to the center of town where the royal palace had been. It was gone, too, and what looked like a new royal palace was going up to the north of it. It was plain what had happened. There had been a revolution, Nebu-al-karsig had been overthrown, Ur had a new king. I ought to have gone then. But I was still curious about my chest.

The nuse factory had been just outside the palace walls. It had been razed too —my beautiful installation! —but I could see people working around where it had been. I went over to talk to them.

“When I got up to them, I saw they were making bricks. Making them by hand, in the dumb, inefficient, old-fashioned way. But these weren’t rectangular bricks. The way the ones before my nuse bricks had been. These were rectang ular on the sides and bottom, but they had round tops, like loaves of bread.”

“In other words,” I said, “plano-convex bricks.”

“Yes. It was the most impractical idea in the world. Their changing to such a silly shape made me realize how much the brickm akers had hated the nuse bricks. By the way —I know how curious you are —you’ll be interested to learn that walls made with bricks of that kind don’t look especially different from ordinary walls.”

-

“Oh,” I said. “I’d been wondering about that.”

“I thought you’d be glad to know,” said the nuse man. “Well, I went up close to one of the brickmakers and watched him working. The pace he was going, he’d be lucky if he got ten bricks done in a day. He smoothed his brick and rounded it and patted it. He p u t more mud on it and stood back to watch the effect. He pushed a wisp of straw into the surface with the air of an artist applying a spot of paint. He just loved that brick.

“I cleared my throat, but he didn’t seem to hear me. I said, ‘Say, I heard they found a chest with gold and jewels in the ruins of the old palace yesterday.’

“ ‘Another one?’ he answered, without looking up. ‘You know, they found one on the south side of the palace about five years ago. Full of treasure. Some people have all the luc k. Me, I never find anything.’

“The south side of the palace was where my rooms had been. I made a sort of noise.

“Up to then the worker had been too busy patting his round-topped brick to pay any attention to me. Now he looked up. His eyes got wide. His jaw dropped. He stared at me. ‘Aren’t you —are you —’ he said doubtfully.

“Then he made up his mind. ‘Brothers! Brothers!’ he shouted. ‘It’s the foreign magician, come back to curse us again! Hurry! Kill him! Kill him! Kill the stinking sheep liver! Quick!’

“You wouldn’t have thought that people who were working as slowly as they were could move so quick. As soon as they heard the words ‘foreign magician,’ they went into action, and before he got to the second ‘Kill him!’ the air was black with flying bricks.”

“So that’s how your face —”

“Yes. Of course, not all the bricks were dry. If they had been —but even a wet brick can be painful.”

“And you never got your chest back.”

“No. All I got were the artifacts the priest brought me just before the nuse levitated him. Would you like to see them?”

He sounded as if he wanted to show them to me. I said, “Yes, I’d like to.”

He got out a little box and opened it. Inside was a piece of lapis lazuli that he said was a whetstone, two crude gold rings with roughly cabochon cut blackish stones, and a handsome gold necklace with lapis lazuli beads and gold pendants shaped like some sort of leaf.

“Very pretty,” I said, examining them.

“You should have seen the stuff I had! But this is better than nothing. The home office will be glad to see it. I don’t usually get even this much.”

-

This was true, and he looked so depressed when he said it that I felt a burst of sympathy for him. I didn’t know what to say.

He picked up his last piece of toast on the plate and looked at it.

“Burned,” he said sourly, “and one of the other slices was, too. Listen, why don’t you let me put in a nuse installation for you? Then your toast would never be burned. It’s this housework that’s getting you down. You might get so you didn’t look any older than your real age if you used nuse.”

“You should live so long,” I said.

1960.
Galaxy

-

An Old-Fashioned Bird Christmas

The Reverend Clem Adelburg had come out to cut some mistletoe. He tucked the hatchet tightly in the band of his trousers and shinned up the knobby trunk of the apple tree. When he got high enough, he saw t hat two ravens were seated on the apple tree branches, eating the mistletoe berries. There were always ravens around the cabin nowadays; he chased them away indignantly, with many loud whooshes. Then he felt a twinge of remorse.

“O Lord,” he prayed among the branches, his face upturned toward the dramatic cloudscape of an Arizona winter, “O Lord, bless this little experiment of thy servant. O Lord, grant that I wasn’t wrong to chase away those darned ravens. Yes, Lord.”

He sighted up at the berries. He chopped with the hatchet. Three branches of mistletoe fell down on the sheets of newspaper he had previously placed at the foot of the tree. He climbed down.

It was beginning to get dark. Mazda would have supper ready. There was a premonitory rumble and then the sound of Silent Night, played on an electric xylophone, filled the sky.

The Reverend Adelburg frowned. The noise must be coming from Parker; the municipal Christmas tree there would be thirty-five feet tall this year, and already he cou ld see the red glow of Parker’s municipal Christmas street decoration project in the southern sky. Well, if the Lord continued to bless him, and if his next few sermons had the effect he hoped they’d have, he might be able to change the character of Parke r ‘s Christmas celebration. The Forthright Temple, in Los Angeles, was a long way from Pa rker, but these F.M. broadcasts were receivable here, too.

He went in the kitchen. Mazda was cooking something on the oil stove, an oil lamp burning dimly on the table beside her. The kitchen smelled good.

“Hello, Clem,” she said, turning to face him. She smiled at him. “Did you get the berries for the tea?”

“Yes, dear.” He handed her the three branches of mistletoe. “Make it good and strong this time, dear. I just want to see if there’s anything in my little idea.”

“About mistletoe being the common element in all religions? Sure.”

He watched her as she went to fill the teakettle at the sink. She was a tall woman, with masses of puffy ginger hair and a very fair skin. Her figure was excellent, though rangy, and he always enjoyed watching her.

Most of the time Mazda’s being in the cabin seemed so ordinary, so fitting (she was remarkably domestic, when you got to know her), that he simply didn’t think about it. But there were moments, like the present, when her physical immediacy seemed to catch him in the solar plexus. Then he could only stand and look at h e r and draw deep, surprised breaths.

It wasn’t so much his living with her, in the technical sense, that troubled him. He hadn’t even tried to feel guilty about that. It seemed at once so extraordinary, and so perfectly natural, that it wasn’t something h is conscience could get a grip on. No, it was Mazda’s being in the cabin at all that was the surprising thing.

Where had she come from, anyhow? He’d gone outside one morning early in September, meaning to walk up and down in the sand while he put the fin ishing touches on his sermon for next week, and there she had been, sitting quietly under a Joshua tree.

She couldn’t have been there for more than ten minutes: her skin, as he had come to know later, was extraordinarily sensitive to sunlight, and she wa s wearing the skimpiest Bikini imaginable. She’d have been sunburned all over if she’d been there for any length of time. And how had she got there? There’d been no sign of a car in any direction, and he hadn’t even heard the noise of a plane or a copter i n the sky. Had she walked over from Parker? In a Bikini? Five miles?

He knew so little about her —no more now, really, than he had known on that first day when she had said, “Hi,” and gone in the house. It wasn’t that she was close-mouthed or sullen —s he just didn’t talk about herself. Once only, when he had been elaborating his idea that the use of mist l etoe might be the common element behind all religion, had she come out with anything that might be a personal remark. He’d spoken of the use of mis tl et oe in classical paganism, in druidism, in Christian festival, in the old Norse religion, in Zoroastrianism —Her lower lip had begun to protrude defiantly. “There’s no mistletoe in Zoroastrianism,” she had cut in sharply. “I know.”

Well? It wasn’t much for the fruit of more than three months.

He couldn’t help wondering about Mazda sometimes, though he didn’t want to fail in Christian charity. But he knew he had his enemies. Could she possibly be a Retail Merchants Association spy?

The teakettle was beginning to hum. Mazda gave the pot of string beans on the stove a stir with a wooden spoon. “How did you come out with your sermon, Clem?” she asked.

“Eh? Oh, spendidly. The ending, I really think, will have an effect. There are some striking passages . The ravens were quite impressed.” He smiled at his little joke.

“Ravens?” She turned to face him. “Were there ravens outside when you were rehearsing your speech?”

“Yes, indeed. We have ravens all the time here now. There were even ravens in the appl e tree when I was cutting the mistletoe.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh …” she said thoughtfully.

“I fear I chased them away a little too vehemently,” he said, becoming serious. “Ravens, after all, are the Lord’s creatures too.”

“Not
those
ravens,” Mazda said.

There was a very brief pause. Mazda fingered the bracelet on her left wrist. Then she said, “Listen, Clem, I know you’ve talked about it, but I guess I’m just dumb. Why are you so down on modern Christmases, anyway?”

“My dear, if you’d ever attend the Temple service …” the Reverend Adelburg said in gentle reproof. “But I’ll try to make my point of view, which I humbly trust is also the Lord’s point of view, clear to you.” He began to talk.

He was an excellent talker. Phrases like “star in the darkness, “ “the silent night of Bethlehem, “ “pagan glitter, “ “corruption, “ “perversion, “ “truer values, “ “an old-time America, “ “Myrrh, frankincense,” and “1776,” seemed to shimmer in the air between them. Mazda listened, nodding from time t o time or prodding the potatoes in the saucepan with a two-tined kitchen fork.

At last he appeared to have finished. Mazda nodded for the last time. “Um-hum,” she said. “But you know what I think, Clem? I think you just don’t like lights. When it’s dark, you want it to be dark. It’s reasonable enough —you’re a different guy once the sun goes down.”

“I don’t like the false lights of modernity,” the Reverend said with a touch of stiffness. “As I intend to make abundantly clear in my sermon tomorrow.”

“Um-hum. You’re a wonderful talker … I never thought I’d get fond of somebody who didn’t like light.”

“I like some kinds of light,” said the Reverend Adelburg. “I like fires.”

Mazda drew a deep breath. “You’d better wash up before supper, Clem,” she said. “You’ve got rosin on you from the apple tree.”

“All right, dear.” He kissed her on the cheek and then —she had seductive shoulders, despite her ranginess —on the upper arm.

“Mmmmmmmm,” Mazda said.

When he had gone into the pantry to wash, she looked after him slantingly. Her caramel-colored eyebrows drew together in a frown. She had already scalded out the teapot. Now she reached into the drawer of the kitchen table and drew out a handful of what looked like small mushrooms. They were, as a matter of fact, mescal buttons, and she had gathered them last week from the top of a plant of Lophophora Williamsii herself.