Masters of the Maze (20 page)

This
was an unpaven city street where pigs (definitely not prize Poland China) rooted in the loose garbage and the freely scattered refuse of chamber pots. A dairyman milked a filthy cow into a filthy pot. The numerous grocery stores were all half saloons, swimming with spittle, swarming with flies and coarsely, brutally drunken men and women and children. An emaciated and malarial-looking family of emigrants squatted in their battered wagon drawn by slat-thin hoses whose harness sores stank abominably.

Horn stared, beginning to tremble, and aghast. He felt old. He felt sick. He felt terrified, foreboding and alone. A consumptive newsboy coughed in his face, flapped his wares. “Paper, Cap’? Magnetic telegraft report from Washin’on City, Cap’. ‘Nauguration of General Pierce … ‘S matter, Cap’? Got the epizootic?”

It must not be thought that Horn did not understand. He understood perfectly well. He had wanted to bring back the past. And the past had brought him back, instead.

• • •

“I never expected it,” Nate said. “I never thought of this happening to me.”

“But you understand why, now, surely?”

Slowly, slowly, he said that he did. “It’s because I was willing to make the sacrifice? — that’s why I didn’t have to?”

That was why. “By allowing things to occur, you allowed them to occur to you; by allowing them to happen, you allowed them to happen to you; by permitting instead of committing, by submitting to be passive instead of insisting upon being active, you have escaped the necessity of becoming the object of action,” said King Wen.

And Enoch (ancient Enoch ever young) said, with a mild smile: “More simply: you gave, therefore you received.”

And he said, “Welcome, my fellow.”

It may be doubted that any of the Chulpex realized that it was into their own sun that they were led. Dying, that sun was, but it was not yet dead. Much of its substance had, over the course of eons, been consumed; but much of it was still left. Inexorably, mindlessly, Sun Sarnis exerted its gravitational pull and gathered relentlessly to its burning bosom the children who had sought to leave it. Here and there one or two or a few of them were swept and eddied into a nook or niche and for a while escaped. But then came the dancing, darting minotaurs, who killed them all; then vanished.

It may have been a triggering action, it may have been simply because the time for it had come. Sun Sarnis exploded outward in a burst of light which there were no eyes to see and a burst of noise which there were no ears to hear. It licked up the dust and the debris of the void, it devoured its planets one by blazing one, till nothing was left of the world of the Chulpex: hives, cells, swarms, and echoing, burning chambers. Then it fell in upon itself.

Distant astronomers observed, noted, described, announced. Eventually it was all quite forgotten.

• • •

Arristemurriste had forgotten even that that was his name. Only two things survived in the mind trapped behind the charred brain-case. One was its own, its terrible, terrible pain. The other was the recollection that somewhere, somewhere, existed the cave wherein the fry hatched of the Na 14’s stolen eggs were lodged. And the ‘Murriste-Sire could not die until it had seen the Mas among the fry grow to an age to mate. Until then, until he had assured the continued existence of the Chulpex race, the release of death was and must be denied.

Darius Chauncey saw the great and grieviously injured creature come crawling out on three limbs. He knew what he had to do, but in order to do it he had to pass it. It clawed out and lunged at him, but he dodged beneath its head. The derringer concealed beneath the floor of his bedchamber had only two great, green cartridges in it, and he fired both of them into the Chulpex-Sire’s head. He yoked a hundred oxen and dragged it by night and by torchlight to the shore of the sea, where one of his ships made it fast with ropes and took it out of sight of land. Dolphins butted at it and fish tore at it. And when, after two days, it had not moved, they cut the ropes. It floated ashore, eventually, or what was left of it did. The lions and the jackals worried it and the sun and the stars and the curious moon shone down upon it, but presently it was no more.

• • •

“I don’t know yet,” Nate said. “Of course, I will see that the Watchers are informed. They don’t have to guard against Chulpex any more. But … something still has to be done, or not done, or … For as long as the Maze exists, its Gateways will be entered. Unless it is possible to seal it. We must consider this. As for myself, well —

“Even if I don’t stay on here, and I think that, probably, I won’t, but even so: I’m not as I was and will never be again. My past ambitions were absurd, comparatively. I have a thousand thousand Europes … and Asias … and Africas, Americas … to visit. If they are still there. If having done all this hasn’t, somehow, changed and upset everything.”

Lao-tze arose and walked over to his bull. He turned from the beast’s side, back to look at Nate. “Time,” he said, “is in the mind. You suppose that changing an event in the past will change an event in the present or future, but this is not so, as you will see. For have we not shown you that, despite our use of the words, there is no present, past, or future? There is only an eternal
now.
That is the secret of the Maze. One event cannot, therefore, cause another. Each event is coexistent with all the others. In the 64 hexagrams of the
Yi
we have an arbitrary representation of all the infinite possible presents, each independent of all the others. We can move from one ‘now’ to another along the straight line of clock time, or we can cross from one event to another by other routes, such as the Maze. It is all there, and from here, at the center of time, we can reach any part of it, simply by turning our attention to it. We exist in one event by forgetting the rest.”

He mounted the bull. “The Maze, you see,” he said, “is only our most well-worn path.” He smiled, and slowly rode away.

• • •

The tribe lived in the early middle of the Dreaming Times, although they did not know that their descendants would call it that. The arrival of the stranger caused some surprise, some wonder as well. Not that he was white, this was not the wonder. The color of living men, obviously, was black. White was the color of ghosts. The wonder was as to
whose
ghost he was: obviously, of some member of their tribe, or else he would not have appeared among them. It was a subject rich in occasion for talk. Eventually, an elderly but spry woman named Born when the Moon Fell Down, decided that he was the ghost of her father. He, too, in his later years, had been possessed of devils and had gibbered and shrieked in this same way.

The matter, once settled, lost much of its interest. From time to time there was a bit of a hubbub when the ghost seemed to become momentarily sensible, for at such times he would lunge for one or another of the young women: then the Old Man would hit him smartly with his boomerang — not the big kangaroo-killing boomerang, for he was rather a kindly Old Man — the smaller one used for emu. None of the young women were of the proper degree of cousinship for The Ghost of the father of Born When The Moon Fell Down. Perhaps in thirty or forty years some might be born. Meanwhile, there were quite enough babies.

Otherwise the ghost gave little trouble. Sometimes he tried to wander away and had to be tugged along firmly by his daughter, who shared her share of the lizards and the snakes and the witchetty grubs with him — and even, occasionally, a piece of kangaroo or emu. He ate greedily and abstractedly. Sometimes he moaned and sometimes he screamed and sometimes he smiled and babbled contentedly about cars as he stumbled across the achingly empty continent which had never seen a wheel.

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Copyright © 1965 by Avram Davidson
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Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

eISBN 10: 1-4405-4480-8
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4480-4