A Sudden Wild Magic

Probably true, he thought. Every member of the Ring had carefully planned emergency arrangements, which they renewed and reorganized every week — like his own conference — so that no one in their families would know where they were. Neither Amanda nor Maureen could conceivably be a traitor. And yet, and yet. While he ate the withered and lukewarm fish and chips, his mind played with the idea of the traitor being one of their immediate families. Plotting the pattern of their absences would not help the traitor overmuch — it would merely become obvious that these happened during certain kinds of crises and at particular phases of the moon — unless one or the other of them had dropped a careless word at home. Careless words were very easy to drop to one’s nearest and dearest. Mark himself was always most carefully circumspect in what he said to Paulie, but she was not entirely ignorant. She attended all the less secret ceremonies with him. She knew the office he held. He hated to think how angry she would be if she discovered how much of his duties he concealed from her. The other three must surely feel the same — at least, not Gladys: as far as anyone knew, she was a widow. But Maureen ran a troupe of professional dancers who were almost like a family to her, and she also had a succession of boyfriends, very few of whom had anything to do with witchcraft. The present boyfriend was a rough diamond — or, to be more honest, an unpleasant lout — who ran a music shop, and the kind of fellow who could well be in someone’s pay. And Amanda? In addition to an obliging husband most people never saw, she had teenage children and, someone had told Mark, a sister living with her. It was surely too much to expect that Amanda had not dropped a word to her sister.

All the cats’ eyes were on him, accusingly. He left the rest of the chips and padded off to the bathroom, where, to his exasperation, the toilet seat would not stay up. Another of Gladys’s jokes, like her front gate. And quite probably, he admitted ruefully, wedging the thing with the toilet brush, the whole of his anxiety was some kind of displacement. Frankly, he was scared stiff of Amanda. It was the Aspect of the Mother in her that scared him most — though why it should, when he had no recollection of his own mother, he had no idea.

Amanda was leaning across the kitchen table when he came in, with a sheaf of Mark’s printouts in her hand, talking trenchantly to Maureen. Upon her, Gladys’s dim electric light seemed to play like the white shaft of a spotlight. It lit Amanda’s hair blue-black, and the handsome lines of her face clear white. Her eyes glowed in it, compellingly.

“So this is what we’ve got,” she said, and her voice was as clear and compelling as her eyes. “Another universe, one of many next door to this one, and in it a world probably much like ours, where they seem to have found some way of manipulating our world to their advantage. Their pattern seems to be to orchestrate a crisis — like a world war or an epidemic; AIDS, I suppose, is a good example — and then study what we do about it. If we solve the problem, they import our findings into their world.”

Maureen, by contrast, was all reds and browns in the light — copper hair, tawny freckles, yellow eyes — and a brown jumpsuit clothing her long body, which was never wholly still. She writhed from a lotus position while Amanda was speaking and turned her kitchen chair backward, to sit astride it with her freckled forearms on its rickety back. “Don’t forget their little habit of keeping us busy while they set up their experiments,” she said. “That’s the thing that really gets up my nose!”

“I was coming to that,” Amanda replied. “There’s no question that the pirate universe knows something about the way the Ring is organized. Either they tested us out during World War Two or we gave ourselves away keeping Hitler out. And since then they’ve flung things like Chernobyl at us from time to time to see if we were still on our toes, and finding we were—”

“Just about,” Maureen commented, hitching her knees under her chin. “That one was a real closie.”

“I know, but we did deal with it,” said Amanda, “and I’ve no doubt that gave them the conditions for their latest experiment. Now they’ve handed us global warming, with the superpowers at least at an understanding, so that they can deal with it, while the Ring here in Britain is going to have its hands full with the country half underwater. That way, they can study how the Ring holds back the water, and make sure we haven’t much left over to interfere with the technological approach. My guess is they want both magic and science out of this one.” She turned across her shoulder to look at Mark in the doorway. “I hope you agree with my summary.”