Merrill's Magic
679 Words
I gazed out over the crowd and sighed—internally, of course, at their scrawny bodies draped in simple kilts and tunics of homespun and fish leather, their bulging eyes wary but interested. This break in their usual daily monotony of same, same and more of the same had brought what must be the whole village down to the square to see the newcomer give a final performance before leaving. Me being the newcomer.
It was obvious they didn’t get a lot of visitors to the village of World. Yeah, about that name. I’m pretty sure they think World is all there is, so visitors give them problems. I know; barbarians are like that. Always have been.
The whole village consisted of about thirty people, with a hard-to-count wandering herd of bony kids thrown in. Their homes were shallow caves laboriously scraped from the living stone of Tredecim. Ever since we’d got here, I couldn’t help being aware of the constant drip drop drip drop of water falling perpetually from the top of the cavern in which their village nestled.
In the larger villages and towns, especially those close to Circle stations, such condensation problems were taken care of by intricate series of blowers and baffles or even, in the techie enclaves near the surface, by nuclear-powered electric dehydrators.
The lovely little village of World was about as far as you could get from anywhere, and I doubted if many visitors made their way here at the best of times. The nearest Circle station was five day’s hard journey on shank’s mare, and with all the recent disruptions and excitements, I was pretty sure no one would be likely to come here now or for the foreseeable future. Especially since the fierce ammonia reek of the village’s surrounding cesspools made a barrier as strong as a wall for the more fastidious.
The inhabitants didn’t seem to notice the stink, lucky them, but I’d been breathing through my mouth ever since we’d gotten within sniffing distance of the place.
Still, since the boys and I had done our job as well as we usually do—that’s not conceit, by the way, we always do a great job—we wouldn’t have to stay any longer. Thus, my final, going-away performance was about ready to commence.
I admit, I’ve spent time in even less savory places, difficult as that may be to believe. It’s what I do, after all. The forgotten peoples and places of Tredecim can be hotbeds of infection and disease, so the Brainery sends me out to do two things: investigate and inoculate. With the help of the boys, I’d done both in World. We’d taken blood samples. We’d vaccinated against everything we could vaccinate against. Both had been incredibly hard, hence my decision to go the shaman/magician route. It generally works with backward cultures.
Hey, we’re all human—or mostly human, since some of the geneticists back on Old Terra had meddled a bit with the genome, as we at the Brainery had discovered early on in the Voyage. That’s why there were mer-alts near the big lakes. Somebody had to take care of the hatcheries. The miner-alts were certainly necessary to, well, mine the rock of Tredecim as our population grew.
And it stood to reason that mutations would happens. Mutations always happen and always will, and here we all were, living in a petri-dish of opportunities.
So, regardless of my orders—which, as I’ve mentioned, me and the boys had carried out in our usual, exemplary fashion—I wasn’t sure our collected samples and vaccines would do much good in the long run for the lovely folk of World. Too many strange diseases were floating around our ship-s***h-planet; that made getting back to the Brainery with our samples more important than trying to keep the people around me alive.
I gazed at circle of my attentive audience and caught their eyes.
“Magic,” I said in a portentous tone and was rewarded with a soft “Ahh…” of wonderment.
- Writer
