The Magic (October 1961–October 1967). Roger Zelazny
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“I’m very eager to see them.”
“They are not here. We will have to go into the Temple—they may not be removed.”
I was suddenly wary.
“You have no objections to my copying them, do you?”
“No. I see that you respect them, or your desire would not be so great.”
“Excellent.”
She seemed amused. I asked her what was so funny.
“The High Tongue may not be so easy for a foreigner to learn.”
It came through fast.
No one on the first expedition had gotten this close. I had had no way of knowing that this was a double-language deal—a classical as well as a vulgar. I knew some of their Prakrit, now I had to learn all their Sanskrit.
“Ouch, and damn!”
“Pardon, please?”
“It’s non-translatable, M’Cwyie. But imagine yourself having to learn the High Tongue in a hurry, and you can guess at the sentiment.”
She seemed amused again, and told me to remove my shoes.
She guided me through an alcove . . .
. . . and into a burst of Byzantine brilliance!
*
No Earthman had ever been in this room before, or I would have heard about it. Carter, the first expedition’s linguist, with the help of one Mary Allen, M.D., had learned all the grammar and vocabulary that I knew while sitting cross-legged in the antechamber.
We had had no idea this existed. Greedily, I cast my eyes about. A highly sophisticated system of esthetics lay behind the decor. We would have to revise our entire estimation of Martian culture.
For one thing, the ceiling was vaulted and corbeled; for another, there were side-columns with reverse flutings; for another—oh hell! The place was big. Posh. You could never have guessed it from the shaggy outsides.
I bent forward to study the gilt filigree on a ceremonial table. M’Cwyie seemed a bit smug at my intentness, but I’d still have hated to play poker with her.
The table was loaded with books.
With my toe, I traced a mosaic on the floor.
“Is your entire city within this one building?”
“Yes, it goes far back into the mountain.”
“I see,” I said, seeing nothing.
I couldn’t ask her for a conducted tour, yet.
She moved to a small stool by the table.
“Shall we begin your friendship with the High Tongue?”
I was trying to photograph the hall with my eyes, knowing I would have to get a camera in here, somehow, sooner or later. I tore my gaze from a statuette and nodded, hard.
“Yes, introduce me.”
I sat down.
For the next three weeks alphabet-bugs chased each other behind my eyelids whenever I tried to sleep. The sky was an unclouded pool of turquoise that rippled calligraphies whenever I swept my eyes across it. I drank quarts of coffee while I worked and mixed cocktails of Benzedrine and champagne for my coffee breaks.
M’Cwyie tutored me two hours every morning, and occasionally for another two in the evening. I spent an additional fourteen hours a day on my own, once I had gotten up sufficient momentum to go ahead alone.
And at night the elevator of time dropped me to its bottom floors . . .
*
I was six again, learning my Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Aramaic. I was ten, sneaking peeks at the Iliad. When Daddy wasn’t spreading hellfire brimstone, and brotherly love, he was teaching me to dig the Word, like in the original.
Lord! There are so many originals and so many words! When I was twelve I started pointing out the little differences between what he was preaching and what I was reading.
The fundamentalist vigor of his reply brooked no debate. It was worse than any beating. I kept my mouth shut after that and learned to appreciate Old Testament poetry.
—Lord, I am sorry! Daddy—Sir—I am sorry! —It couldn’t be! It couldn’t be . . . .
On the day the boy graduated from high school, with the French, German, Spanish, and Latin awards, Dad Gallinger had told his fourteen-year old, six-foot scarecrow of a son that he wanted him to enter the ministry. I remember how his son was evasive:
“Sir,” he had said, “I’d sort of like to study on my own for a year or so, and then take pre-theology courses at some liberal arts university. I feel I’m still sort of young to try a seminary, straight off.”
The Voice of God: “But you have the gift of tongues, my son. You can preach the Gospel in all the lands of Babel. You were born to be a missionary. You say you are young, but time is rushing by you like a whirlwind. Start early, and you will enjoy added years of service.”
The added years of service were so many added tails to the cat repeatedly laid on my back. I can’t see his face now; I never can. Maybe it was because I was always afraid to look at it then.
And years later, when he was dead, and laid out, in black, amidst bouquets, amidst weeping congregationalists, amidst prayers, red faces, handkerchiefs, hands patting your shoulders, solemn faced comforters . . . I looked at him and did not recognize him.
We had met nine months before my birth, this stranger and I. He had never been cruel—stern, demanding, with contempt for everyone’s shortcomings—but never cruel. He was also all that I had had of a mother. And brothers. And sisters. He had tolerated my three years at St. John’s, possibly because of its name, never knowing how liberal and delightful a place it really was.
But I never knew him, and the man atop the catafalque demanded nothing now; I was free not to preach the Word. But now I wanted to, in a different way. I wanted to preach a word that I could never have voiced while he lived.
I did not return for my senior year in the fall. I had a small inheritance coming, and a bit of trouble getting control of it, since I was still under eighteen. But I managed.
It was Greenwich Village I finally settled upon.
Not telling any well-meaning parishioners my new address, I entered into a daily routine of writing poetry and teaching myself Japanese and Hindustani. I grew a fiery beard, drank espresso, and learned to play chess. I wanted to try a couple of the other paths to salvation.
After that, it was two years in India with the Old Peace Corps—which broke me of my Buddhism, and gave me my Pipes of Krishna lyrics and the Pulitzer they deserved.
Then back to the States for my degree, grad work in linguistics, and more prizes.
Then one day a ship went to Mars. The vessel settling in its New Mexico nest of fires contained a new language. —It was fantastic, exotic, and esthetically overpowering. After I had learned all there was to know about it, and written my book, I was famous in new circles:
“Go, Gallinger. Dip your bucket in the well, and bring us a drink of Mars. Go, learn another world—but remain aloof, rail at it gently like Auden—and hand us its soul in iambics.”
And I came to the land where the sun is a tarnished penny, where the wind is a whip, where two moons play at hot rod games, and a hell of sand gives you incendiary itches whenever you look at it.
*
I rose from my twisting on the bunk and crossed the darkened cabin to a port. The desert was a carpet of endless orange, bulging from