IGMS Issue 41 Read online

  Issue 41 - September 2014

  http://www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com

  Copyright © 2014 Hatrack River Enterprises

  Table of Contents - Issue 41 - September 2014

  * * *

  Until We Find Better Magic

  by H.G. Parry

  The Far Side of Extinction

  by K.C. Norton

  The Two Kingdoms Woman

  by James Beamon

  The Time Mechanic

  by Marie Vibbert

  The Temptation of Father Francis

  by Nick T. Chan and Jennifer Campbell-Hicks

  The Fiddle Game

  by Alex Shvartsman

  At the Picture Show: Extended Cut

  by Chris Bellamy

  Vintage Fiction - Voice of the Martyrs

  by Maurice Broaddus

  InterGalactic Interview With Maurice Broaddus

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  Letter From The Editor

  by Scott M. Roberts

  Until We Find Better Magic

  by H.G. Parry

  Artwork by James Owen

  * * *

  Once upon a time there was a young magician, and he fell in love with a dancer.

  He was a good magician by affiliation, having neither the desire nor the ambition to be properly dark, but he was not an entirely good magician, and he often suspected himself of vanity and selfishness and other traits not strictly light. Sometimes he was ashamed of this, and would try to do something good with his magic, like cure a sick child. Once in a while he succeeded, which pleased his vanity and made him feel selfish. Most of the time he didn't worry about it. He had a job in a circus, making the fireworks, and it was good work for a magician just starting out.

  The dancer was a year older than him, and she was the best dancer in the world. She was tall and graceful, with thick dark hair that tumbled to her waist and eyes the color of the filling in apple pie. She had lived in the circus with her uncle the acrobat since she was a little girl, and it was because of her that the magician had joined. He would watch her practice in the evenings, until it got too dark to see, and pretend she danced for him. It wasn't a very fulfilling fantasy.

  "Why don't you ever look at me when you dance?" the magician asked the dancer one day. It was Midsummer. He was eighteen, made of limbs and dark hair and potential, and she was beautiful. "You must know I watch you every night."

  "I didn't know that was what you were watching for," she said.

  "It was," he said, though he didn't know it until that moment. Maybe it wasn't even true. "It is."

  "Well," she said. "Maybe one night I will. Just to oblige you." And she kissed him and walked away.

  The magician was so happy at that evening's performance that he conjured the best and grandest fireworks ever made, which everyone agreed were rubbish. A frenzy of first love is never a reliable source of artistic inspiration.

  She didn't look at him that night, anyway. She didn't come out to practice, because her uncle the acrobat had been taken ill after the performance and had to be nursed. The next morning he was better, but she was ill, and the morning after that she was dead.

  For seven days, the magician shut himself in his caravan, and neither slept nor ate nor spoke. He thought it was the most terrible thing to ever happen, and it was.

  The circus had a good deal of sympathy for him for the first three days. After that, their patience began to wear thin. Having just lost the best dancer in the world, they thought it was a bit hard on them to lose their magician as well, on the basis of a fleeting kiss and the possibility of a future glance. And it was. They gave him until the end of the week, and when he showed no signs of sleeping or eating or speaking, much less doing magic, they left him in the next town under the care of a homeopathic witch. They meant to come back for him, but as it happened they never did.

  The Tuesday after the dancer's death, the magician got up and stretched. He hadn't moved for some time, and was very stiff.

  The homeopathic witch sat in her chair and watched him without surprise. She had been a witch for a long time, and alive a little longer, and she knew a great deal about magicians. "Tea and toast?" she asked.

  "Please," the magician said.

  He ate and drank what she put in front of him, slept for a few hours, and when he woke had some more tea and toast.

  "Your circus left you," the homeopathic witch said as he ate. "They said you could catch them at Spindle End if you finished grieving in time."

  "I don't want to catch the circus," the magician said. "And I don't want to grieve any more. I want to stay here, if you'll have me."

  "What is there for you here?" the witch asked. "Just cobwebs and potions and books."

  "It's the books I want," the magician said. "I'm going to study them, and any others I can find. I plan to read every book a hundred times over if need be, and keep notes, and talk to travelers coming through. And in this way, I'll find a means to enter the Underworld, and bring her back."

  "It would take the greatest magician in the world to enter the Underworld in that way," said the witch.

  "Then I will become the greatest magician in the world," the magician said. "I always suspected I had it in me somewhere."

  The witch might have smiled, but if so the magician didn't see. He was buttering more toast.

  "Do you love her?" the witch asked him.

  "I don't know," said the magician. "I don't know her. But she was beautiful, and kind, and clever, and the best dancer in the world. And she was going to dance for me."

  The witch looked at him for a long time. "I know how you can reach the Underworld," she said. "It's easier than you would think. All you need to do is die."

  "I don't want to die," he said. "I want to live. And I want her to live again too."

  "It would be far easier to die for her," the witch said. "And more conventional, for a lover. Instead, you want her to live for you. Are you really so selfish?"

  "I'm not a lover," the magician said. "I'm a magician. And yes. I am so selfish."

  This time, the witch did smile. "I have a draught of living death," she said. "It will allow you to die without losing your life. In that state, you can enter the Underworld, and leave again. How you use that time with death is up to you."

  "Give it to me," he said.

  "It will cost you," she warned. "Seven years of your life. And not from the end of your life either. I want seven years now, seven years of hard, true labor. You will be my apprentice, and learn the ways of herbs and potions and healing. And at the end of it all, you will be given your death."

  "How shall I begin?" he asked.

  She threw him a broom. "Sweep the floor," she said.

  On the day his apprenticeship ended, the witch called him to her fire.

  "I asked you to serve me for seven years, and you have," she said. "The living death is yours, if you still want it."

  "I do," said the magician. He was twenty-five, grown strong and clever from his labor, and he was in love with a ghost.

  "Going to the Underworld is nothing, you know," she warned. "People have been doing that since time began. Bringing someone back with you is far more difficult. Heracles managed it, but he was a hero."

  "I'm a magician," the magician said. He said it proudly. He was twenty-five.

  The witch sighed. "Take it then, and drink. While you are there, eat nothing that grows there, or you will be lost forever. Apart from that, be polite. You can't go wrong being polite."

  The magician took the draught, drank, and died.

  The Underworld was dark, and mists, and night. Some of the mists were ghosts, and all of them were cold. The magician found himself walking along a road; and though he could hear screams and laughter from all around him, he cou
ld see nothing and the light never changed. He walked for what seemed like hundreds of years, and was. Finally, he came face to face with death.

  The magician stood in the middle of the road, and faced death. He was young and selfish, and it made him brave.

  "I've come for the dancer," the magician said. He tried to say it politely.

  "I know," said death. "Why should I give her to you?"

  "She wasn't ready to come," the magician said. "There are still things left for her to do."

  "There are children here who died before they were born and ancients who lived over a hundred years," said death. "They all had things left for them to do. Does your dancer deserve the time they didn't have so much more?"

  "She was going to look at me," the magician said. "One night, when she danced. She was going to dance for me."

  "Now," death said, "she will only dance for me."

  The magician felt a rush of fury and despair, and swallowed hard to choke it back down. "Is there nothing I can give you that will change your mind?"

  "I don't have a mind," death said. "Or a heart, or a soul, or anything else that can change. There is nothing you can give me, because there is nothing I can want."

  "What about novelty?" the magician suggested. "Surely, after so many centuries, you must crave something new."

  "After so many centuries," death said, "I know there is nothing new."

  The magician thought of pleading, but he knew death wouldn't listen, and he was no good at pleading. He thought of challenging death to a game, as he had read of in the witch's books, but he was no good at games. And there would be no time. As he spoke, he felt himself growing insubstantial with life, the mists thickening and the ground around him shimmering.

  In the mists he saw the dancer.

  "You grant wishes sometimes," the magician said. It might have been an inspiration. "I studied the witch's books, and I read it."

  "Sometimes," death conceded. "If I meet a traveler on a road at midnight."

  "I'm a traveler," the magician said. "And it's always midnight here."

  For a moment, death was silent, as it had been when it had come for the dancer. That was the most terrifying thing of all, but the magician did not flinch.

  "Very well," said death finally, and the magician thought he heard a note of satisfaction. It was hard to tell over the ringing in his ears. "I will grant your wish. The dancer will come back with you to the world of the living. She will be given the body in which she died for one day, and one day only."

  The magician opened his mouth to protest.

  "If, however, you still wish to keep her at the end of the day," death said, "all you will need to do is sing the song I will give you. As the clock strikes five, she will be reformed, to dance for you again. If you tire of her, however, all you need to do is keep your mouth closed, and she will return to me."

  "And I will have killed her," the magician said.

  "Yes," death said. "You will have killed her. You will look at her every day, and decide whether you want to spend one more day in her company. When you no longer wish to stay with her, you will kill her."

  "What if I never decide to kill her?"

  "Then accident or fate or your own death will make that decision for you," death said. "As I say, there is nothing new."

  The magician was nearly alive now, but he tried to meet death's eyes. Unfortunately, death had no eyes.

  "None of that will happen," the magician said. "I'll take her, and I'll sing her to life every evening. But one day I'll find better magic, and you won't have either of us."

  "As I say," death said. "There is nothing new."

  They opened their eyes on the witch's floor, in front of the fire. Hers were the color of the filling in apple pie.

  The magician was very weak for the next few days, and slept a good deal, only waking to be fed thin chicken broth and to sing the dancer her next day's life. The dancer walked in the forest, stretched her day-old limbs, and helped the witch prepare her homeopathic spells.

  "You'll have to leave me soon," the witch said, as they crushed armadillo quills. "It's only right."

  "Yes," the dancer said. "A carnival is coming soon. We may be able to join them. We'll travel the world, paying our way."

  "Together?" the witch asked.

  "It will have to be," the dancer said. "Until we find better magic. I don't want to die again."

  The witch nodded. "And if you do find better magic?"

  "I don't know," the dancer said. She paused in her crushing, then shook her head. "We can talk about that if it happens."

  "He worked seven years for you," the witch said. Her voice was carefully neutral.

  "He worked seven years for a dance and a glance," the dancer said. "That I will pay him, and with gratitude."

  The carnival was an old one, its caravans shabby with peeling paint and faded acts, but there were a few among it with a glimmer of true magic. When the magician approached them, letting off a few fireworks from under his fingernails to make an impression, they cautiously agreed to take the two of them on. When the dancer joined him, their caution fled quickly.

  He sang her a new day's life that night, and she danced for him.

  "Do you love me?" the magician asked as they lay together in their caravan afterwards. There was a storm outside, and though the fire kept them warm he knew the roof would be leaking by morning.

  "I don't know yet," replied the dancer. "When I saw your face in the Underworld I knew I wanted to follow you back with all my soul. But perhaps I would have followed anyone." She paused. The magician heard the blankets rustle as she shifted in the darkness, but didn't know whether she turned towards him or away from him. "Do you love me?" asked the dancer.

  "I don't know yet," replied the magician. "But when I saw your face in the Underworld I knew I didn't want anyone else to have you, not even death."

  It was a good carnival after all, the one they had found themselves amongst. The performers loved the dancer because she had been around people like them all her life, and knew all the same the songs and jokes, and they didn't choose to notice that she never aged past a day. They were more wary of the magician, because he was awkward and a magician, but after a while he became their awkward magician, and they did like his fireworks.

  The magician asked around every town they went to, trying to find someone who could help them toward better magic. He read every book he could find, until he almost ruined his eyes and had to wear glasses by candlelight, and he journeyed into strange and desperate alleys until he was almost knifed and had to promise the dancer not to be an idiot. He found nothing, but he kept trying.

  One winter the caravan became stuck in the mud, and the magician went out in the rain to push from behind while the dancer drove the horses. The caravan was freed, but the next day the magician had caught a bad cold from sitting around too long in his wet socks, and lost his voice so that he was unable to call the crowds to their performance. It wasn't until late that afternoon that he realized that he would also be unable to sing the dancer another day's life.

  The magician knew how to ease a sore throat, of course, and so did the dancer: he had spent seven years under the tutelage of a homeopathic witch, and she had helped one mix potions while the magician slept. But armadillo quills were hard to come by, and the town in which the carnival was sojourning had no homeopathic witches, only stone wizards and necromancers. They had cures too, but they were far less wholesome, and the prices were very high.

  Finally, with an hour to go until the clock struck five, the dancer told the magician to wait in the caravan, and while he was still trying to question without a voice, she took her cloak and left. On the edge of town, there was a house, old and falling down. A dark magician lived there, one with the ambition and the cruelty that her magician lacked, though his roof leaked even more than theirs. The dancer disappeared into his door.

  The magician stared at her when she came back. He was already pale from the flu, but he wen
t paler.

  "I know," the dancer said, handing him the potion that she had sold her left hand to get him. Her face was calm, but her voice trembled. "Sing it back."

  The magician swallowed the potion in one gulp, made a face, and sang. The dancer closed her eyes, and breathed in deeply, and when she opened her eyes and looked at her arm her body was new and whole and young again. She flexed the fingers, and sighed with relief.

  "We can't go on like this," the dancer said later as she mixed the magician a hot drink with honey and an infusion of wild herbs. "It's making slaves of the both of us."

  "Slaves to what?" the magician asked huskily. "Everything alive is bound to something. Maybe you were free in the Underworld, and if so you're welcome to return to it if you want - I'm no slave master. And maybe I was free before I brought you back, but clearly it wasn't a freedom I much relished, or I wouldn't have gone to such lengths to let it go. Either way, I don't see that there's any other way for us to go on."

  "Maybe not," the dancer said, and sighed. "You do talk nonsense when you're ill."

  "I know," the magician agreed, and sneezed three times in rapid succession. The dancer wordlessly handed him a handkerchief.

  "Anyway it's only temporary," the magician added as he took it. "I'll find better magic one day, and we'll both be free."

  "Your hot drink's ready," the dancer said.

  One summer the carnival stopped for a week between performances in an acre of farmyard, resting and making repairs while the weather held. The days were clear and perfect, and the magician and the dancer took a picnic over the hills and down into the valley, a half-day's walk from the other caravans. They walked, and played, and swam, and when they were tired they lay together in the sunshine and watched the swans on the lake.

  "Someone told me once that swans have a song inside them, that they keep secret all their lives, and only sing in the instant before they die," the dancer said.