Tales From the Spaceport Bar Read online

  Eye of Cat, and the celebrated Amber series (most recently, Blood of Amber). His short stories only come once in a great while, but, happily, they come in bunches.

  It was during one of these short-story-fertile periods that Zelazny was approached by one editor looking for stories about unicorns; another looking for fantasy chess stories; and ourselves, seeking stories for the book you are holding in your hands. Now, there have been many unicorn stories, chess stories, and bar stories before (hence the anthologies), but there has never previously been a unicorn/ chess/bar story—not like this one, which Zelazny produced in a masterful attempt to please everybody. It worked, too, since "Unicorn Variation” won a Hugo.

  STRATEGY AT THE BILLIARDS CLUB

  by Lord Dunsany

  Mr. Joseph Jorkens is a member of the Billiards Club, London.

  Without any intention that is apparent to me we have days in our club, the Billiards Club, when the conversation is entirely sporting, and on another day it will be political, while on another we discuss business. Perhaps somebody starts it; and the rest go on in the same direction, like a stream running' down hill, finding it easier to go the way of the rest than to exert themselves by thinking of anything new; and, like the stream by a rock, the conversation will be sometimes turned a little out of its course by a chance remark, or it may not. However these things may be, on one day that I remember our talk was scientific. The presence of Chemsoln, an astronomer, might have accounted for this, and yet Chemsoln hardly ever opened his mouth, and indeed it is for this reason that I have never previously mentioned his name, though he has often been one of those that sat and listened to Jorkens’s stories. Well, we were talking of science late one day after lunch, and evening was coming on, but no lights were lighted yet, and I remember a rather eerie glow was coming in from the Moon, that was just outside our window, and as usual Chemsoln was sitting and saying nothing, and we had got on to the atomic bomb, and then Jorkens chimed in.

  "I don’t know if any of you are interested in spiritualism,” he said.

  Well, we weren’t. And on such occasions we have a rather unmistakable way of saying so at the Billiards Club. And Jorkens, without abandoning his topic entirely, I think dropped a good deal of the detail that he may have been going to give us.

  "I wasn’t going to tell you anything about spirits,” he said, "because there are still laws on the statute-book dealing with that sort of thing; more than you might suppose. I know you wouldn’t give anybody away, but when anyone’s liberty may depend on one’s talk, I think the less one says the better.”

  And he looked at us in the sort of way that made some of the weaker characters say, "Oh, yes, certainly.”

  "Very well,” said Jorkens; "I will say nothing of who called up that spirit, or how she did it.”

  "What spirit?” asked Terbut.

  *1 was going to tell you,” said Jorkens.

  "Oh, very well,” said Terbut.

  "In a dim room one summer, a little after sunset, with no lights turned on,” said Jorkens, "in a house in London—I will give you no fuller address than that—I was talking to a spirit. That is to say, a spirit that was in the room With us, but invisible, was talking to me; inaudibly to myself, but interpreted by the person whose name I will not divulge, a person to whom the whisperings and whistlings that I could faintly hear were clear and entirely intelligible. She had called it up. I won’t tell you how.”

  Again Jorkens looked up at our faces; and one of

  us, a new member, muttered, "I quite understand.” And at that Jorkens continued.

  "The. spirit’s story was of a long time ago and a long way off, but strategy is roughly the same in all times and places, and he had had the atomic bomb.”

  "The atomic bomb!” we exclaimed.

  "Yes,” said Jorkens, "and used it.”

  "A long time ago?” we said.

  "Certainly,” said Jorkens.

  "That’s interesting,” we said rather doubtfully.

  "Did he develop it further than we have done?” asked a soldier.

  "Much further,” said Jorkens.

  "It ought to be developed,” the soldier said. "The thing is still in its infancy.”

  "Yes,” said Jorkens, "it’s in its infancy here. But—”

  "You say it’s been tried before?” said the soldier, a retired general named Pearkes.

  "I’ll tell you,” said Jorkens. "It happened like this, if the woman interpreted it right; and she was a very reliable woman. Not at all the kind of person to imagine she heard things, or to say what she didn’t hear.”

  "No, no,” one or two of us said, some out of mere politeness, and others because we wanted him to get on with his story and to hear what he had to say.

  "The spirit,” Jorkens went on, "was whispering and squeaking, or it may have been a mouse, or a draught in the wainscot: that I am not prepared to say. I mean that the spirit may have been totally inaudible to me, or only partially so; but at any rate the woman heard him, and this is what she said, speaking slowly as though the spirit spoke slowly, as though it were tired. It was a long time ago. I told you that. And the spirit had wandered a long time. Well, they had the atomic bomb and it was pretty well developed: they had had it for about a hundred years.”

  "But where was all this?” asked Terbut.

  "She didn’t say,” said Jorkens. "But they had had

  the atomic bomb there for about a hundred years. I gathered that they were a quite pacific people. That is to say, they preferred peace to war, and took a good deal of trouble, like us, to make plans to ensure peace. Only they had the atomic bomb, and it seemed a pity not to use it. Well, the war came: I wasn’t quite clear what it was about. The spirit tried to explain, but it was a little hard to follow, as other people’s causes often are. But they had a casus belli of some sort. I paid more attention to the spirit’s account of the war when it came than to the cause of it, because I wanted to know what they had done with their atomic bomb. And, mind you, it wasn’t anything like our atomic bomb, because they had been improving it for a hundred years.”

  "Never heard of that,” said the general.

  "I didn’t doubt her,” said Jorkens; "and I think she told me exactly what she heard, and the spirit gave so many precise details that I, personally, believed every word of it. You, of course, can use your own judgment.”

  "Yes, yes,” said the general soothingly.

  And we all listened to Jorkens, to see what we could make of it.

  "The details were like this,” said Jorkens, reaching for a sheet of our large notepaper from a writing-table behind him. "Can someone lend me a pencil?”

  Somehow he got a pencil, and began to draw craters roughly. "The armies were like this,” he said. And soon he and the general were bending over the paper, so that the rest of us could see very little; and they began to talk in low voices, and most of us thought it was just a talk about strategy, and those of us who were not interested in strategy or spiritualism lost interest and gradually turned away, but there seemed something a little more than that in it to me, something a little more than mere Staff-College shop, however Jorkens got hold of it, and I listened as well as I could; and I’m glad that I did, for the thing turned out to be queer. How

  Jorkens got in touch with the spirit I did not know, and of course he never told us, but what I did see was that the general was interested in his story, so that I saw that the strategy must be sound, whatever the spiritualism might be. The craters that Jorkens was rapidly drawing were evidently marking out a position held by some army on which the bombs had been dropped. Whether the craters were large or not I could not say; that depended on the scale; but they were large in regard to his sheet of paper, and so probably large in regard to the whole battlefield; which is what you’d expect, if they’d had a hundred years to practise with the atomic bomb, whoever they were.

  And Jorkens went on with his chart. He had lost the interest of everyone now, except the general, who appeared fascinated, an
d me, who was doubtful, and hovering between going and staying, and Chemsoln, who was sitting there silent as usual. Trifles decide such things. What made me doubtful was not being able to see how a spirit with mere words could describe so neat and detailed a chart, however audible he might be. What held me there, leaning forward and looking across the table at crater after crater as Jorkens sketched them in, was when the very point I have mentioned was raised by the general. Jorkens said that the woman he would not name, who had called the spirit up, had a big round crystal lying on dark-blue velvet on the table before her, and she had touched points in the crystal showing exactly the position of the army and the spots where the bombs hit it. It seemed to have been drawn up in a crescent formation in the top left hand of the crystal, that is to say with both flanks a little forward, as the general pointed out, while Chemsoln and I were gazing in silence, trying to make what we could of it.

  "Well, they came on like this,” Jorkens was saying, "and their bombs came down where 1 have marked the craters; there were not many of them, because they were too expensive to make, but they were effective, only too effective.”

  "But which side won?” asked the general. "And who were they? I never heard of anything like that anywhere.”

  "It was a long time ago,” said Jorkens. "Neither side won. It was the end of their history. Only we mustn’t suppose that, because they left no record, we are the first to have discovered the rather obvious powers there are in the atom.”

  "But this is nonsense,” the general said. "How can one believe it?”

  "Well, come and look,” said Jorkens.

  "What?” said the general.

  "Come to the window,” said Jorkens.

  Then Chemsoln grabbed the chart that Jorkens had made of the craters.

  "You don’t mean...” he said.

  "I do,” said Jorkens.

  The three men went to the window, and there was a round Moon shining, a bit past full, with its oddly battered face looking sadly on London.

  "They smashed it, you see,” said Jorkens.

  Jorkens teased and tantalized the other members of the Billiards Club through five volumes and several uncollected short stories, all by Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the eighteenth Baron Dunsany (1878-1957). Dunsany’s famous liar was never quite caught lying, but he was never caught telling the irrefutable truth either. The trick was always that no one could be sure.

  Lord Dunsany himself led an adventurous life. He was an Anglo-Irish peer, the scion of one of the oldest families in Europe, who saw service in the Boer War and the First World War, and was wounded during the Easter Rebellion in Dublin in 1916. His later life included an unsuccessful run for Parliament and a narrow escape from Athens as the Germans closed in on the city in 1941. Well into his old age he was an enthusiastic world-traveler and big-game hunted. Somehow he found time to write numerous volumes of exquisite fantasy short stories, such as A Dreamer’s Tales, The Book of Wonder, and The Sword of Welleran, besides plays, poems, essays, and such classic fantasy novels as The King of Elfland’s Daughter. It is when we realize that the Jorkens stories represent only one phase of a long and varied career that we understand why, prior to Tolkien, he was widely regarded as the most influential fantasy writer of the twentieth century. Now he is one of two.

  THROUGH TIME &

  SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT!

  by Grendel Briarton

  ...a saloon called the Bilge Pump.”

  One of Ferdinand Feghoot’s favorite haunts, a Time Travellers’ Club rendezvous where they told magnificent tales, was a saloon called the Bilge Pump. In the 1980s, however, it became infested by an odd group of science-fictionadoes, writers trying to pilfer story ideas, and addicts scrounging fringe benefits, all arguing bitterly about who did what first.

  Old Juniper Widget, author of Regurgitations from the Glob Galaxy, boasted that he had once pinched H. G. Wells; even older Veronica Lewdski bragged of being the first woman seduced in a submarine—by a grandnephew of Jules Verne at that; young Pat Squirrell claimed his granddad had organized the first SF convention just before McKinley’s election.

  One evening, Feghoot appeared among them garbed as a Japanese Buddhist priest. "Bah!” he exclaimed. "Newcomers! I have just returned from the century of Japan’s civil wars. When I started my wanderings, my friend Norimitsu the swordsmith was worried. 'Feghoot-sama' he said, 'though a priest wears no sword, no man should go unarmed in these evil times. Allow me to forge you an uchiwa—a steel war-fan. With it, because of the virtue and strength of my name, you can smite any assailant.’ Of course, I accepted.” Feghoot produced the heavy steel weapon. "Here it is. See how he signed it? Bishu ju Norimitsu, Choroku Third Year.”

  "What’s that got to do with SF?” shrilled Ms. Lewdski.

  "Choroku Third Year,” said Ferdinand Feghoot, "was A.D. 1460. That is the date of the first Feghoot fan club.”

  The adventures of Ferdinand Feghoot (through time & space!, of course) have appeared in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Venture Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and Amazing Science Fiction Stories, as well as three editions o/The Compleat Feghoot, each one more compleat than the one before.

  Feghoot first manifested himself during a game of Scrabble, when EFGHOOT appeared in Mr. Briarton’s tray.

  Of the present story, Mr. Briarton remarks: "As to the Bilge Pump, it is a San Francisco waterfront bar which I invented for a story I have not yet written. It derives from a vessel, the H.M.S. Blighty, commanded by Feghoot’s friend, the redoubtable Captain Bowen, and which was scuttled by her mutinous crew during the gold rush of 1849 and sank at her moorings. Bowen and seven seamen, including the second officer and ship’s carpenter, made it back to England in a longboat. The crew perished to a man in the savage mining country of California. So there."

  ON THE ROCKS AT SLAB’S

  by John Gregory Betancourt

  Naturally there are taverns on this fantasy world, which happens to be flat, with a sun that travels around it, rising and setting as any proper sun should.....

  The Oracle rode alone through the gates of Zelloque: around him crackled an almost-visible aura of power and authority. The City Guard fell in behind him as he headed, intent on his mission, straight for the steps of the palace.

  I was watching two disembodied heads sing drunken songs when the trouble started. A couple of City Guards sauntered in, glanced around with disdain, then headed toward my private table. They looked splendid in full uniform, with their red capes flapping boldly behind them.

  Quite a few of my tavern’s patrons made a hasty retreat through the back door. The floating heads vanished in puffs of ethereal gases. I had nothing to hide—nothing much, anyway—so I waited.

  "Ulander,” the guard on the right said, "I have a message for you.” Only then did I recognize him beneath his red-plumed helm—Nim Bisnar, an old City Guard who’d worked off and on for me during the last ten years.

  "What is it?” I demanded. "You know you’re supposed to use the back entrance—you’ll give my place a bad reputation!”

  He ignored my protests. "Captain Yoonlag sent us. An Oracle from Ni Treshel—that’s right, the Ni Treshel, where the bones of Shon Atasha are kept —came to the Great Lord’s palace yesterday. He’s looking for more splinters of his god’s bones. Somewhere he’d heard tales about Slab’s Tavern—and he persuaded the Great Lord to let him search your place!”

  I jolted to my feet, alarmed. "What? When?”

  "In an hour, maybe two.”

  Calling to Lur, my doorman and bodyguard, I dug a handful of silver royals from my pouch and poured them into Nim’s hands. "Half are Yoonlag’s. Split the other half between you.”

  "Thank you, sir!” they both said, then turned to go—through the back door, this time.

  Lur lumbered over to my side. He was a large man—about seven feet tall, with broad shoulders and muscles enough to make him look twice as large. I’d always found those ch
aracteristics ideal for my purposes.

  "Master?”

  "Throw everybody out,” I said, "except the servants.”

  "Sir?” he said, bewildered.

  "You heard me—do it!”

  The tavern was large and dark, its dim light concealing the crumbling plaster and footworn paving stones. Huge wooden columns—hewn from the hearts of ancient oaks—supported the high ceiling.

  Weird shadows stretched everywhere. There were numerous secluded spots, and off at the curtained booths along the edge of the room, illegal transactions were taking place.

  I marked the pirates at their tables, with their rich, colorful, jewel-encrusted clothes that mimicked but never equaled nobles’ dress, and nodded to the ones I knew—Rigelem Teq, Hilan Lammiat, Kol Fesseda, a few others. (In return for protection for his city’s ships, the Great Lord of Zelloque had made his city an open port ten years earlier.) In one dark corner a couple of black-robed slavers threw dice; in another, two dockhands threatened each other with knives. With little patience or gentleness, various barkeeps persuaded them to take their squabble to a nearby alley. But mostly the people drank and talked and sang too loudly, the room ringing with boisterous shouts as they swore, laughed, and argued.

  Lur moved among them, bending now and then to whisper something in various ears. Usually the men would turn pale, then tremble, then bolt for the door. Even the pirates left without a fight—Lur’s imposing bulk was just too much for them, I guessed. Within minutes the place was deserted.