A BARNSTORMER IN OZ by Philip José Farmer Read online

  Suddenly, six little glowing rolling balls formed on the lower part of the sphere.

  The blackness filled half the room now and was sweeping towards the center where the redhead still danced like a maniac around the sphinx.

  He could not keep the binoculars on her face; she moved too swiftly and erratically, though he had the impression that her movements were not erratic for her but were rigidly patterned.

  He put down the binoculars and looked out over the forest. Seven fireballs gleamed now and then in the trees.

  No. Eight. Another had burst through.

  He looked back at the room and put the binoculars up. The sphere now held eight fireballs.

  The redhead stopped before the sphere, arched her back, which was towards him, her left arm raised, and the corkscrew-shafted staff pointing upwards. Then the staff came down, and it was pointed at the sphere.

  For some seconds, thirty perhaps, she held the staff steady. Then it stabbed at the sphere but stopped a few inches from it. The blackness, which had been a few feet from her, closed in. He swore. Now he could see her only dimly. But he saw clearly the dazzling light that spurted from the end of the staff and struck the sphere.

  The darkness oozed back a few feet. He used the binoculars again. There were only seven fireballs. He looked out at the forest and counted seven.

  Again the staff jabbed. A twisting bolt of light shot from the tip of the staff and struck one of the balls inside the sphere. It vanished in a gout of flame. He looked out at the woods. Six were left. The one that had been in the lead was gone.

  Again and again, the red-haired woman threw light from the staff. Each time that a tiny ball in the sphere was discharged, a giant ball among the trees disappeared. The darkness shrank back towards the comers. When the final minute ball was gone, the shadows had also gone to wherever they had come from.

  The rolling spheres on the border burst as if they were signals sent up for a retreat, and the spheres behind them rolled away. The thunder also moved away. Silence except for his heavy breathing enclosed him. He was cold and sweating; his pajamas were soaked. The odor of his fear was heavy around him.

  As swiftly as they had been lit, the flames in the hundred lamps went out. The red-haired woman took the sphere from the top of the sphinx's head and put it on the table. She placed the tip of the single torch into the socket hidden on the sphinx's head. Stover used his binoculars to zero in on her face. Her expression was so forceful, so triumphant, and so savage that it scared him. He went into his room, closed the French windows, and drank more of the barley vodka. Even it did not make him go to sleep quickly, however.

  The morning of April 30th, he showered and shaved and, after some consideration, put on his barnstorming outfit instead of his civilian go-to-Sunday-meeting clothes. He felt that a uniform of some sort would be best. This was a state occasion.

  His breakfast was not brought in as usual. Shortly after the clock had struck nineteen—7:00 A.M. by his watch—Captain Lamblo and six women soldiers entered. He was marched down the hall and descended the winding staircase to the ground floor. Here he was conducted into the central part, the axis of the castle, and along a high-ceilinged, very broad, red marble hall with gold statuettes on silver pedestals by the walls and thence through an arch set with rubies as large as cabbage heads into an enormous room. Its domed ceiling was at least one hundred feet high at the apex, and it was one hundred feet wide. The floor and walls were of white marble, and gigantic tapestries bearing what seemed to be historical scenes hung from the walls. There was also much gold filigree on the walls.

  A crowd, perhaps three hundred people, animals, and birds, was lined up to form two sides of an aisle. The humans were dressed in uniforms or splendid formal clothes, the women wearing long anklelength gofwns and the men colorful kilts. As he was to find out later, though males wore trousers for work or everyday dress, they donned kilts for formal occasions.

  At the end of the aisle, near the far wall, was a platform of marble white with seven marble steps leading up to it. Its edges were set with rubies even larger than those in the hallway. In the center was a throne carved from a giant ruby. A woman sat on a cushion on it.

  This was the queen, the highest, the wise-woman, the witch-ruler, Herself, Little Mother.

  The soldiers lifted their spears in salute but did not accompany Stover and Captain Lamblo toward the throne. The little blonde led him to the foot of the platform, gave the queen a sword-salute, and stepped to one side.

  No one had spoken while he had walked down the aisle; no one had even coughed or sneezed or cleared his or her throat.

  Hank recognized the tiny, exquisitely beautiful, auburn-haired woman on the throne. He had seen her dancing naked in the enormous room during the storm. Now she was covered from ankle to throat in a loose white gown, and, instead of a conical hat, she wore a gold crown with nine points. Inset in its front were small rubies which formed the outline of an X inside a horseshoe-shape. Her hair was now coiled around her head. Her very dark blue eyes were fixed on him. The corners of her lips were slightly dimpled as if she were thinking, “You saw me that night.”

  Of course, she would have known that he had witnessed that strange frightening ritual or whatever it was. She could have drawn the curtains if she had not wished anyone to see her.

  Stover felt awkward bowing to her, but he thought that he should.

  She inclined her head slightly in acknowledgement.

  He said, “Glinda the Good, I presume?”

  “Goodness is a relative quality,” the queen said.

  They were breakfasting on the balcony of her apartment. She sat on a chair and ate from dishes on a small table before her. He was in a chair and at a table which had been specially constructed for his size. Even the plates and the spoon, two-lined fork, and knife, had been made for him.

  “Goodness is relative to what?” Hank said.

  “Not to evil but to other goodnesses,” she said. “However, I shouldn't be speaking in abstract terms. There is no such thing as goodness or evil in themselves. There are only good and evil persons. And in reality there are not even those. There are what humans have agreed among themselves to define as other good and evil persons. But the definition of good and evil by one person does not match, though it may touch or intersect, the definition of these by another person.” Stover was silent for a moment. In the first place, he was not fluent enough to be sure that he understood everything she was saying. In the second place, he was wondering if she was trying to tell him something without being specific about it. He ate a slice of hard-boiled egg and a chunk of buttered bread. Since he'd come here, he'd had plenty of vegetables and fruit, wheat and barley, cheese, eggs, nuts, and milk. But no meat, fowl, or fish. Though he craved steak and bacon, he'd not complained. If he voiced his desires, he'd be regarded as kin to cannibals. His hosts would be disgusted and horrified.

  He glanced at the male moose standing by the side of her chair and the female bald eagle roosting on a wooden beam sticking out of a wall. They had said nothing so far, but it was obvious that her bodyguards understood what their mistress and her guest were saying.

  “In any event,” he said, “Your Witchness must be highly respected by your people. Otherwise, they would not call you the Good.”

  “I'm a very good witch,” she said, smiling. “In fact, I'm so good that I should be called the Best.”

  He started to say that she must be pulling his leg, but he restrained himself. That phrase, literally translated, would probably not be understood in the American sense.

  “You're having fun with me,” he said. “I'm sure that that is not what they mean by the Good.”

  Glinda drank some milk, and she said, “You shouldn't be so sure of that. Or of anything. As yet. And perhaps never.”

  She could just as well be called Glinda the Ambiguous, he thought. Glinda. That meant both The Shining One and The Swift One. Glinda must be related to, have come from the same primitive Germanic
word, as the English “glint.”

  He sipped the warm unpasteurized milk, and he shuddered a little. It stank like a cow, and he disliked its taste. But milk was healthy for him, and he would have to change many of his habits and tastes if he stayed here. Since it did not seem likely that he would get back to Earth, he might as well start now with his naturalization.

  A woman servant picked up a napkin and patted Glinda's lips with the napkin. A woman standing by Stover started to do the same for him, but he said, “Ne, thungk thuk.” It irritated him to be waited on, literally, hand and foot. He'd been raised in a house with ten servants, but he did not like this close, intent, and hovering attention.

  Glinda popped several walnuts into her mouth—thank God, the servants did not feed her, that would have been too much—and she said, “You say that you're Dorothy's son. You do have her big dark green eyes, and your face reminds me of hers. But how do I know that you really are her child?”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “I don't have many enemies, but they're very powerful,” she said. “And very clever.”

  “You mean that they might import me from Earth so that I could assassinate you,” he said. He laughed. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown... no... paranoiac is the mind of the ruler.

  She laughed, too, looking so beautiful that his chest ached. God, what an enchantress! Even if she was only four feet four inches tall.

  “It is ridiculous, isn't it?” she said.

  He held out to her the steel key and gold chain which he had removed from his leather jacket that morning.

  “My mother gave me this to wear as a good-luck charm.”

  Glinda took it and turned it over and over. When she handed it back to him, she said, “It looks just like the key she had when she came here.”

  “It’s the same one. I don’t know if the house in which she rode the tornado into this world is still standing. But if it is, this key would unlock the front door.”

  “It’s a state monument, and many Munchkins go to see it every year.”

  “I’d like to see it, too.”

  “You may be able to. Some day.”

  The servant asked softly if he was through eating or if he wished more. He told her that he was full. She probably agreed with him, since he had put away three times the amount she would have. After the table was cleared, Stover asked Glinda if he could smoke.

  “Not in my presence,” she said, smiling to take the sting out.

  Stover put the pipe and tobacco pouch back into his jacket pocket.

  “Now,” she said, “you have told Lamblo your story of just how you entered into our world. But I would like it from you.”

  He obeyed. When he was finished, she said, “Apparently, you have no idea at all of why this happened.”

  “No. Does Your Witchness?”

  “Not at the moment. Tell me what happened to Dorothy after I sent her home. Tell me of yourself.”

  That was not easy to do. He had to stop often and explain just what his references were. However, she understood more than he had thought she would, since Dorothy had explained so much to her. What a memory Glinda had! Tight as a banker’s fist. She had apparently forgotten nothing his mother had told her.

  Dorothy had been carried off in the farmhouse by a tornado, not a cyclone. Her uncle’s farm had been a few miles out from Aberdeen, South Dakota, on that day of May 23, 1890.

  “Not Kansas,” he said. “South Dakota. Kansas is further south than South Dakota.”

  “What has South Dakota, whatever that is, to do with this?”

  Stover sighed, and he said, “I wished I could sail a straight course. But we’re going to be wandering through the Unexplained Seas.”

  “South Dakota?” she said firmly.

  “What I have to explain is that an Earthman, an American, wrote a book about Dorothy’s adventures here,” he said. “But it was fiction or purported to be. Actually, much of it was fiction. And the parts that were true were bowdlerized. They had to be because he was writing a book for children.”

  “Bowdlerized?”

  “Censored. Expurgated.”

  He had a hard time finding words which were the equivalent of censored. Finally, he gave up and defined the term.

  “Mother was gone for six months, but, in the book this man, Lyman Frank Baum, wrote about her, she was here for only a few weeks. This man Baum was a fiction writer but at the time was the editor of a newspaper in Aberdeen. He heard about the little girl whom everybody thought had been carried off by the tornado. Her body was searched for but not found. People thought that she’d probably been dropped into a ravine or woods many miles from Aberdeen. Maybe the coyotes had eaten her.

  “Then my mother showed up with a tale of having been transported to some unknown land beyond the desert in the Arizona Territory. At least, that’s where she then thought she’d gone to. Of course, nobody believed her story about talking animals and people no taller than an eight-year-old child and an animated scarecrow and a woodman made of tin and witches and flying monkeys and all that. They thought that she was either lying or crazy.”

  “And so your mother quickly realized this and claimed that she had been delirious. Or something like that.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Your mother was an extremely tough and adaptable child. Very matter of fact. She would have understood the best course to take once she saw that she was not believed.”

  “That’s Mother all right. Rough and ready. A loving and sympathetic heart but very little sentimentality or soaring imagination. A brain as quick and tenacious as a wolf trap. Her attitude is: This is the way the world is, no matter how strange and unjust it seems, and I can handle it.”

  “An excellent character analysis,” Glinda said. “But then what happened?”

  “Baum heard about the child’s story and went out to the farm to talk to her. Though he did not—probably—believe her, he pretended to. He took notes after his three conversations with her, but he did not print a word of it in the newspaper. That would have embarrassed Dorothy and her aunt and uncle and caused even more ridicule and doubt about her sanity or veracity. But he did not forget her fantastic tale, and, later, he used his notes as the basis for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

  “It was very successful, a best seller,” Stover said. “Mother was very surprised when she read it and also angry because of the liberties Baum took with her story. She thought about writing him and telling him so. But she cooled off quickly—Mother is very stable—and she decided to ignore it. After all, what else could she do? She did not want publicity. She wouldn’t like it nor would her husband and his parents, and she’d be accused of being insane. So she did nothing about it.”

  Dorothy did, however, read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz aloud to her son when he was five. He was entranced by it, and, when the sequels came out, he read them over and over again.

  “When I was eight, my mother told me that she had been to this world and that she was the Dorothy in Baum’s books. At least, that she was the child on whose adventures Baum had based his first book. The sequels were all fictional, of course, except for a few items like personal and geographical names. I was both stunned and delighted to find this out, though I was disappointed, frustrated, because she’d made me swear never to tell anyone about her revelation.”

  Though he was often tempted to tell his playmates that his mother was the Dorothy of Oz, he did not. Then, when he got older, he lost his belief in the existence of Oz. He decided that his mother had been fantasizing. But he was not sure. She was not the joking kind nor would she have lied to her child. To anyone, in fact.

  One day, when he was eleven, he brought the subject up. He asked her if she had indeed been telling him the truth or was she merely entertaining him and making him feel important because his mother had been the heroine of a child’s book?

  She had gotten angry, though not for long. She had taken him into her bedroom and unlocked a little bureau. Out of the dr
awer she took a small iron box. She unlocked that and took from it, not the treasure he had expected, jewels or gold or a dagger, but a common steel housekey.

  “Mother said, ‘This is the key to the door of the house that was carried by the tornado to the land of the Munchkins.’ ”

  Stover had gazed awestricken at it.

  “ ‘I wish that Uncle Henry and Aunt Em were still alive,’ Mother said. ‘They could tell you that, after I’d returned from the Quadling country, I had a shining spot on my forehead. It was visible at day, and at night it gleamed brightly. That was the mark that the witch of the North set on my forehead to indicate that I was under her protection. That mark was the main reason why my aunt and uncle believed my story. But they were not dumb. They knew that I’d be subject to all sorts of publicity and pestering by curiosity-seekers and newspaper reporters and that I’d be ridiculed and mocked or exploited. They made me put face-powder on it. They also told me to keep quiet about where I’d been. But I couldn’t help telling other children. They told their parents, and word got around. Of course, I was bound to be a celebrity, since everybody thought that the tornado had carried me and the house off, and I was a seven days’ wonder when I showed up. But Uncle Henry put out that I’d been wandering around all that time and that I’d had amnesia—forgot who I was—and had also suffered from brain fever. That’s what he told Mr. Baum when he came out to see me.’ “