THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

What worried him now was that if Piscator had indeed been responsible for accidentally causing the tracker to malfunction, then he might somehow bring the Ethicals back to life. And if he did that... he, X, was done for.

He stared across the plain at the foothills covered with the long-bladed grass and trees of various kinds and the gloriously colored blooms of the vines on the ironwood trees and then past them to the unscalable mountains walling in The Valley. His fear and frustration made him angry again, but he quickly used the mental techniques to dissipate his anger. The energy, he knew, made his skin temperature rise for a hundredth of a degree Celsius for a few seconds. He felt somewhat relieved, though he knew that he'd be angry again. The trouble with the technique was that it didn't dissipate the source of his anger. He'd never be able to get rid of that, though he had appeared to do so to his mentors.

He shaded his eyes and glanced at the sun. Within a few minutes, the stone would vomit lightning and thunder along with the millions of others on both banks. He moved away from the stone and put the tips of his fingers in his ears. The noise would be deafening, and the sudden discharge still made one jump though you knew it was coming.

The sun reached its zenith.

There was an enormous roar and flashing upward of ravening blue white-shot electricity.

On the left bank, not the right.

Once before, the right-bank grailstones had failed to function.

Those on the right bank waited with apprehension and then increasing fear when the stones failed to spout their energy for di

By the next day, the hungry people invaded the left bank en masse.

SECTION 2

Aboard the Not For Hire

2

THE FIRST TIME THAT SlR THOMAS MALORY DIED WAS ON EARTH in A.D. 1471.

The English knight got through the terrible weeks after Resurrection Day without too many body wounds, though he suffered grievously from spiritual shock. He found the food in his "littel greal" fascinating. It reminded him of what he had written in The Book of King Arthur concerning Galahad and his fellow knights when they ate of the food provided by the Sangreal. "... ye shall be fed afore this table with sweetmeats that never knights tasted."

There were times when Malory thought he'd go mad. He'd always been tempted by madness, a state in which a person was both touched with holiness by'God and invulnerable to the cares and woes of the world, not to mention his own. But a man who'd spent so many years in prison on Earth without going crazy had to be basically tough. One of the things that had kept his mind unclouded in prison had been his writing of the first English prose epic. Though he knew that his readers would be very few, and most of them would probably not like it, he did not care one whit. Unlike his first work, which had been based on the great French Writers of the cycles about King Arthur of ancient Britain, this was about the rejections but final triumph of his sweet Jesu. Unlike so many once-devout Christians, Malory clung to his faith with fierce obliviousness to "facts"—in itself an indication that he had gone mad, if his critics were to be believed.

Twice slain by savage infidels, Malory ended up in an area inhabited on one side by Parthians and oh the other by Englishmen.

The Parthians were ancient horsemen who got their name from their habit of shooting backwards from their steeds as they retreated. In other words, they always got in a parting shot. At least, that was the explanation for their name according to one informant. Malory suspected that the gri

The Englishmen were chiefly of the seventeenth century and spoke an English which Malory had trouble understanding. However, after all these years, they also spoke Esperanto, that tongue which the missionaries of the Church of the Second •• Chance used as a universal medium of communication. The land, now known as New Hope, was peaceful, though it had not always been so. Once it had been a number of small states which had had a savage battle with the medieval German and Spanish states up north. These had been led by a man called Kramer, nicknamed the Hammer. After he had been killed, a long peace had come to the land, and the states eventually became one. Malory settled down there and took as his hutmate Philippa Hobart, daughter of Sir Henry Hobart. Though there was no longer a giving in marriage, Malory insisted that they be married, and he got a friend who had been a Catholic priest to perform the old ceremony. Later, he reconverted both his wife and the priest to their native faith.

He was set back somewhat, though, when he heard that the true Jesu Christ had appeared in this area with a Hebrew woman who had known Moses in Egypt and during the exodus. Jesu had also been accompanied by a man named Thomas Mix, an American, the descendant of Europeans who had emigrated to the continents discovered only twenty-one years after Malory had died. Jesu and Mix had burned to death together in bonfires ignited by Kramer.

At first, Malory had denied that the man calling himself Yeshua could be the real Christ. He might be a Hebrew of Christ's time, but he was a fake.

Then Malory, after tracking down all the evidence he could of Yeshua's statements and the events of his martyrdom, decided that perhaps Christ had truly been present. So he incorporated the tale told by the locals into the epic he was now writing with ink and a pen formed from the bone of a fish on bamboo paper. Malory also decided to canonize the American, and so Mix became Saint Thomas the Steadfast of the White Hat.

After a while Malory and his disciples forgot that the sainthood was a fiction and came to believe that Saint Thomas was indeed roaming The Valley in quest of his master, sweet Jesu, in this world which was purgatory, though not exactly the middle state between earth and heaven portrayed by the priests of lost Earth.

The ex-priest who'd married Thomas and Philippa, as a bishop ordained on Earth and so in the direct line of priesthood from Saint Peter, was able to instruct others and to make priests of them. The little group of Roman Catholics, however, had a different attitude in one respect from that they'd had in their Terrestrial days. They were tolerant; they did not attempt to bring back the Inquisition nor did they burn suspected witches. If they had insisted on these old customs, they would have quickly been exiled or perhaps even killed.

Late one night, Thomas Malory was lying in bed and pondering on the next chapter of his epic. Suddenly, there was a great shouting outside and a noise as of many ru

High up were two strange objects silhouetted against the celestial blaze. One, much smaller, was composed of two parts, a larger sphere above the other. Though those on the ground could not see any linkage between the two, they got the impression that the two were co

The other object, far greater, resembled a gigantic cigar.

The same woman said that this was an airship or dirigible or perhaps was a vessel of the unknowns who'd made this planet.