The World Shuffler

‘TWAS BORING IN ARTESIA

...or so thought Sir Lafayette O’Leary, ex-draftsman from Earth, and now seemingly ex-interdimensional swashbuckler extraordinaire as well. His battles were all won, his dragons all slain, and life was just the same boring round of riches, royal hunts and regattas. Boring, boring, boring; until he walked past the azalia...

Suddenly Artesia was gone, and O’Leary was trapped in
Melange,
a world of giants and pirates, karate-chopping hags and electronic flying carpets, a world where goons and harlots are the spitting images (literally!) of his own aristocratic Artesian associates. And because they think that he’s
his
double, lots of his new friends want O’Leary
dead.

Unless he can get through the interdimensional gate and find the continuum path back home, O’Leary’s life will never be boring again. Just Short.

THE WORLD SHUFFLER

“ENOUGH! PREPARE THE CRIMINAL FOR EXECUTION!”

“Wait!” Lafayette cried as the noose dropped around his neck. “Can’t we settle this like gentlemen?”

A sudden silence fell. The sergeant was looking at the captain, who was frowning blackly at O’Leary.

“You demand the treatment accorded a gentleman? On what grounds?”

“I’m Sir Lafayette O’Leary, a—a charter member of the National Geographic Society!”

“Looks like he’s got something, Cap,” the sergeant said. “With credentials like them, you can’t hardly accord the guy short shrift.”

“‘Tis is a parlous waste of time,” the captain growled. “But—very well. Remove the rope.”

“Well, I’m glad we are all going to be friends,” Lafayette said. “Now, I—”

“Out pistols!”

“Wha—what are you going to do with those?” Lafayette inquired  ...

All things considered, he should have known better than to ask  ...

THE WORLD SHUFFLER

THE WORLD SHUFFLER

copyright ® 1970 by Keith Laumer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

An ACE Book

First Ace printing: April 1981 Published Simultaneously in Canada

24680975 31 Manufactured in the United States of America

One

It was a warm autumnal afternoon in Artesia. Lafayette O’Leary, late of the U.S.A., now Sir Lafayette O’Leary since his official investiture with knighthood by Princess Adoranne, was lounging at ease in a brocaded chair in his spacious library, beside a high, richly draped window overlooking the palace gardens. He was dressed in purple kneepants, a shirt of heavy white silk, gold-buckled shoes of glove-soft kid. A massive emerald winked on one finger beside the heavy silver ring bearing the device of the ax and dragon. A tall, cool drink stood at his elbow. From a battery of speakers concealed behind the hangings, a Debussy tone poem caressed the air.

O’Leary patted back a yawn and laid aside the book he had been idly leafing through. It was a thick, leatherbound volume on the Art of Bemusement, packed with fine print but, alas, deficient in specifics. For three years—ever since Central had relieved a bothersome probability stress among the continua by transferring him here from Colby Corners—he had been trying without visible success to regain his short-lived ability to focus the physical energies, as Professor Doctor Hans Joseph Schimmerkopf had put it in his massive tome on the Practice of Mesmerism. Now
that
had been a book you could get your teeth into, Lafayette reflected ruefully. And he’d only read part of chapter one. What a pity he hadn’t had time to bring it along to Artesia. But things had been rather rushed, there at the last— and faced with a choice between Mrs. MacGlint’s Clean Rooms and Board and a palace suite with Daphne, who would have hesitated?

Ah, those had been exciting days, Lafayette thought fondly. All those years, back in Colby Corners, he had suspected that life held more in store for him than the career of a penniless draftsman, subsisting on sardines and dreams. And then he had run across Professor Schimmerkopf’s massive tome. The prose had been a bit old-fashioned, but the message was clear: with a little concentration, you could make your dreams come true—or at least seem true. And if by self-hypnosis you could turn your shabby bedroom into a damask-draped chamber full of perfumed night air and distant music—why not try it?

And try it he had—with astonishing success. He had imagined a quaint old street in a quaint old town—and presto! There he was, surrounded by all the sights and sounds and smells that rounded out the illusion. Even knowing it was all a self-induced dream hadn’t lessened the marvel of it. And then, when things got rough, he had made another startling discovery: if it was a dream, he was stuck in it. Artesia was real—as real as Colby Corners. In fact, there were those who could argue that Colby Corners was the dream, from which he had awakened to find himself back in Artesia, where he really belonged.

Of course, it had taken a while to discover that this was his true spiritual home. For a while it had appeared that he’d discover the answer to the old question as to whether a man who dreamed he’d fallen off a cliff would ever wake up. In his case it hadn’t been a cliff, of course—but that was about the only form of demise he hadn’t been threatened with. First there had been Count Alain’s challenge, and the duel from the consequences of which Daphne had saved him with a carefully placed chamber pot dropped at the psychological moment from an upper window of the palace; then King Goruble’s insistence that he hunt down a dragon—in return for his neck. And after that, a whole series of threats to life and limb, ending with his dispatch of Lod, the two-headed giant. And then the discovery that Lod had been transported into Artesia from another plane, along with his pet allosaur—the dragon with which he had terrorized the countryside—all at the order of the false King Goruble.

It had been more luck than wisdom, Lafayette conceded privately, that had enabled him to prove that the usurper had murdered the former king and transported his infant heir to another continuum by use of the unauthorized Traveler he had brought along when defecting from his post as an agent of Central—the supreme authority in interdimensional matters. And he had been just in time to thwart Goruble’s last-ditch attempt to secure his position by ridding himself of Princess Adoranne. It had been pure accident that Goruble, thinking himself mortally wounded, had confessed to Lafayette that he—O’Leary—was the true king of Artesia.

For a few moments there, the situation had been awkward indeed—and then Goruble had solved the problem of his own disposition by stumbling into the Traveler—which had instantly whisked him out of their lives, after which Lafayette had abdicated in favor of the princess, and settled down to a life of bliss with the sweet and faithful Daphne.

Lafayette sighed and rose, stood gazing out the window. Down in the palace gardens, some sort of afternoon tea party was under way. At least it
had
been under way; now that he thought of it, he hadn’t heard the chattering and laughter for several minutes; and the paths and lawns were almost empty. A few last-departing guests strolled toward the gates; a lone butler was hurrying toward the kitchen with a tray of empty cups and plates and crumpled napkins. A maid in a short skirt that revealed a neat pair of legs was whisking cake crumbs from a marble table beside the fountain. The sight of her saucy costume gave Lafayette a pang of nostalgia. If he squinted his eyes a little, he could almost imagine it was Daphne as he had first known her. Somehow, he thought with a touch of melancholy, it had all been gayer then, brighter, simpler. Of course, there had been a few drawbacks: Old King Goruble had been pretty intent on cutting his head off, and Lod the Giant had had similar ideas; and there had been the business of disposing of the dragon, to say nothing of the complicated problems of Count Alain and the Red Bull.

But now Lod and the dragon were dead—the bad dragon, that is. Lafayette’s own pet iguanodon was still happily stabled in an abandoned powder house nearby, eating his usual twelve bales of fresh hay daily. Alain was married to Adoranne, and quite affable, now that there was nothing to be jealous about. And the Red Bull had published his memoirs and settled down to tavern-keeping in a quaint little inn called the One-Eyed Man at the edge of the capital. As for Goruble, there was no telling where he had ended up, since he had been so abruptly transported out of the dimension by his own Traveler. Daphne was still as cute and charming as ever, of course—what he saw of her. Her promotion from upstairs maid to countess hadn’t gone to her head, precisely—but somehow these days it seemed that most of her time was taken up with the gay social whirl. It wasn’t as if he actually wished he were a hunted fugitive again, and Daphne a palace servant with an unselfish passion for him, but...

Well, it did seem that nothing much ever happened these days—nothing except the usual schedule of gaiety, such as the formal dinner this evening. Lafayette sighed again. How nice it would be to just dine tête-à-tête with Daphne in some cozy hamburger joint, with a jukebox blaring comfortingly in the background, shutting out the world. ...

He shook off the daydream. There were no hamburger joints in Artesia, no neon, no jukeboxes. But there were cozy little taverns with sooty beams and copper-bound ale kegs and roast haunches of venison, where a fellow could dine with his girl by the smoky light of tallow candles. And there was no reason they couldn’t eat at one. They didn’t have to participate in another glittering affair.

Suddenly excited, Lafayette started for the door, then turned into the next room, opened the closet door on a dazzling array of finery, grabbed a plum-colored coat with silver buttons. Not that he needed a coat in this weather, but protocol required it. If he appeared in public in shirtsleeves, people would stare, Daphne would be upset, Adoranne would raise her perfectly arched eyebrow ...