The Magic Goes Away by Larry Niven
Mirandee came picking her way delicately through fallen rock. Her face was above Orolandes when he opened his eyes. “It’s all over,” she said.
Orolandes sighed. “I’ve been thinking of giving up magic.”
What should have been a joke only made her nod soberly. In daylight spilling through the smashed cavern wall, her hair glowed white. On her shadow-darkened face his caress found roughness and wrinkles.
The daylight was dwindling as they left the cavern. Orolandes saw no trace of Roze-Kattee. He saw a scar of burned and melted rock, and smelled vaporized copper.
It was possible to imagine that the mountain range to the south had the shape of a serpent, or that the earthquake-shattered cavern had some of the symmetry of a snake’s mouth. But really, the landscape was quite ordinary. Where magicians had made their last stand, they found the red man curled up and apparently asleep beside what seemed a human skeleton with two skulls.
Mirandee stooped with difficulty. She put a large-knuckled hand on Clubfoot’s shoulder and said, “Kaharoldil, speak to me.”
“I couldn’t handle it,” Clubfoot said without moving.
“You can’t go mad. Roze-Kattee saw to that. Come on, sit up. We need you.”
Clubfoot rolled over and opened his eyes. He touched the two skulls beside him, almost caressingly.
“Nice, wasn’t it?” he said, perhaps to the skulls. “Knowing how to grant wishes instead of working for them. Must have been bad when the gods were alive, though. They might grant your prayer, they might grant your enemy’s, but they’d certainly grant their own. A god’s wishes wouldn’t have anything to do with what human beings wanted.” Clubfoot looked up at last. “Mirandee, love, we should have remembered what the gods were like. Whimsical. Willful. They wiped out humanity at least once, and made us over again. These last thousand years were a golden age. We got our prayers granted, but not often, and not too far granted, and it took some skill to do it.”
“It’s over,” Mirandee said.
“Are you both all right?”
Mirandee nodded. Orolandes said, “Nothing broken, I think. I’ll have some interesting bruises. I’d have been crushed if the Warlock hadn’t distracted the god’s attention.”
“What do we do next? We’re stranded on a mountain with no magic.”
“We’ll spend the night in the cave,” Orolandes said. “Get out of here in the morning. We’ll be hungry. You probably summoned all the game in this area. So I’ll put my spear back together, and we’ll put the pack on you, Clubfoot; it’ll be empty anyway. You won’t want your tools now. What about the skulls?”
“Might as well leave them. I wish—”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
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ABOUT
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★ BORIS VALLEJO ★
Born in Lima, Peru in 1941, Boris made his first sale at the tender age of sixteen; by the time he was twenty-three he decided he was ready for bigger things and migrated to the United States. Unfortunately he was to face several years of protracted struggle before his talent was finally recognized by Ace’s Art Director, Charles Volpe. Since that first cover for Ace (I AM A BARBARIAN, by Edgar Rice Burroughs) Boris’s popularity has increased almost geometrically until today he is one of the most sought-after commercial artists in the world.
Though forced by his enormous popularity to turn down many assignments, Boris says he will always have a special feeling for Ace—just one reason he is delighted to be involved in Ace’s Illustrated Series of Science Fiction and Fantasy.
* * *
ABOUT
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★ ESTEBAN MAROTO ★
Born in Madrid in 1942, Esteban Maroto began his professional career as an assistant on the illustrated series THE ADVENTURES OF THE FBI. His first independent work was on comic strips such as BUCK JOHN, and since 1963 he has concentrated largely on illustrated features for the English-speaking market. He is presently affiliated with Selecciones Illustradas, located in Barcelona.
Maroto definitively established his strong personality and unique graphic style with his series FIVE FOR INFINITY, followed by THE TOMB OF THE GODS and two exceptional heroic fantasies, WOLFF and MANLY. At present Maroto’s artistic powers are focused on Ace Books’ Illustrated Series of Science Fiction and Fantasy, including CONAN AND THE SORCERER and THE MAGIC GOES AWAY, soon to be followed by THE ILLUMINATED DORSAI by Gordon R. Dickson.
Maroto has received many awards, both in Europe and in the United States, and is considered by many to be one of the finest illustrators in the world.
Picture the story you have just read as the graph of a mathematical function. Its vertical axis is emotion, its horizontal one, reason. Larry Niven has plotted the poignant issue of fading wonder against orderly extrapolative thinking to produce a smoothly swelling curve of fiction. It is a relentlessly logical process. Magic no longer exists in our world. But if, as all traditional cultures assert, it ever existed, then why has it disappeared? If magic vanished because its driving energy was depleted, what caused the shortage? And above all, how did people react to the crisis?
Such mixtures of imagination and hard logic have always been the special mark of Niven’s fantasies. The Magic Goes Away is the direct descendant of his first effort in the genre, “Convergent Series”/“The Long Night” (1967), which finds a mathematical escape hatch from a diabolical pact. Niven approaches both fantasy and science fiction with a view to providing entertainment. As he describes his intention: “I’d like to train my reader to play with ideas for the sheer joy of it.” He can extrapolate equally well from possible or impossible premises. Or as one editor put it, he “can write on both sides of the science fiction fence.”
Furthermore, Niven’s matter-of-fact way with marvels makes him the remote—but legitimate—descendant of Chaucer, Dante*, and other medieval writers. According to C.S. Lewis, “the Middle Ages favored a brilliant and exuberant development of presentational realism…the art of bringing something close to us, making it palpable and vivid, by sharply observed or sharply imagined detail.” However unrealistic its content, medieval literature abounds in lifelike touches, as a glance at The Canterbury Tales will speedily confirm.
Thus Niven’s pot-bellied Warlock is truer to medieval tradition than Andre Norton’s gothic-robed witches. Norton’s romantic art evokes—but never fully explains—shadowy enchantments. On the other hand, realist Niven works his spells by daylight according to strictly rational patterns. His imagination is tightly focused at all times to record those concrete details (like the texture of enchanted clouds) which make the improbable plausible. As the author himself explains: “I want [my reader] to daydream in color and three dimensions, with sharp edges and internal consistency.”
Niven’s zeal for consistency and realism places him in the school of logical fantasy which he likes to call “rivets and sorcery.” L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt are perhaps the most famous members of this circle which flowered in the pages of Unknown magazine forty years ago. Logical fantasy is distinguished by its playful attitude towards the fantastic. It stresses ingenuity more than glamour and comedy more than melodrama. It is informal, sometimes to the point of flippancy. It may treat serious matters but without solemnity. The enterprise is fundamentally an intellectual game. Lightness alone does not qualify Roger Zelazny, Thomas Burnett Swann, or even Niven’s favorite, James Branch Cabell, as logical fantasists.
Another way to characterize logical fantasy is to contrast it with other categories. High fantasy as practiced by writers like William Morris, Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Ursula K. Le Guin is laden with mythic significance, but logical fantasy treats myths simply as one kind of data among many. The eldritch horrors dear to H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and August Derleth are too dim and diffuse—logical fantasy names its horrors. The sword and sorcery of Robert E. Howard and his imitators is too robustly muscular. (Pratt, like many logical fantasists, reportedly “ha
Similarly, Niven’s own special traits show up best in contrast with the work of his fellow writers. Here are a few of the principal authors and stories: de Camp and Pratt’s Incomplete Enchanter (1941: projection into the worlds of Norse myth and The Faerie Queen via symbolic logic), de Camp’s “Wheels of If” (1940: an alternate America split between modern Norse and Indian nations), Pratt’s Blue Star (1952: systematized hereditary magic in an empire resembling eighteenth-century Austria), Anderson’s Operation Chaos (1971: domestic magic in an alternate version of present day America), Randall Garrett’s Too Many Magicians (1967: forensic magic in the contemporary Anglo-French Empire), and Gordon R. Dickson’s Dragon and the George (1976: an alternate Middle Ages featuring intelligent dragons).
Some of the stories just listed transport characters to other realities. Others stay exclusively within imaginary realms. But all are alternate world/parallel universe tales because this has traditionally been the most popular type of logical fantasy, from Lewis Carroll onward. Niven used the transit approach in his Svetz series, reasoning that since time travel is scientifically impossible, expeditions in time are actually fantasy journeys into parallel worlds. The Magic Goes Away, part of Niven’s Warlock series, takes the other approach. It remains in the distant past on one time line that can be considered an alternate universe. (Niven also uses the parallel world device in “Wrong Way Street,” 1965; “All the Myriad Ways,” 1968; and “For a Foggy Night,” 1971.)
The physical impact of effective magic is a major element in all these stories. Niven’s Warlock series is distinguished by its emphasis on the physics and metaphysics of the Art. Niven is less interested in the technology or utility of magic than Garrett or Anderson although these aspects are not totally ignored—magic provides the industrial base for the Warlock’s world. He is most especially indifferent to the showy, pyrotechnic possibilities of magic. He condemns the wastefulness of tricks like: “‘Castles floating in the air. Dragons with golden scales. Armies turned to stone or wiped out by lightning.’” Niven’s sensible world with its mules and rug merchants is anything but a “purple and gold and crimson universe where anything can happen.”
In the examples cited, Niven is neither as sociohistorical as Pratt nor as domestic as Anderson. His briskness also excludes Anderson’s lushness. Garrett is coy and Dickson, de Camp, and Pratt have their farcical moments but Niven’s humor is distinctly wry and tart. (Niven prides himself on having “learned my projected societies so thoroughly that I could see the ‘humorous’ parts, and thus write about them.”)
Nevertheless, Niven, like Anderson and Dickson, applies the conventions of logical fantasy to serious subject matter. He treats ecology (the Svetz series), the rivalry between brains and brawn (“Not Long Before the End,” 1969), pacificism (“What Good is a Glass Dagger?” 1972), and theology (The Magic Goes Away). As the author himself puts it: “A fantasy story self-admittedly has no connection with any specific reality. Thus the writer is obligated to talk in universals. Otherwise he’s not talking about anything.”
Niven always writes by the extrapolative method “in which ideas are tracked to expose their implications.” He is guided by two principles when writing fantasy: (1) It must be internally consistent, and (2) It must not be taken at face value. The latter rule separates his fantasy from his much-admired, rigorously factual hard science fiction.
Niven applies these principles to hilarious effect in his Svetz stories (collected in The Flight of the Horse, 1973). Their logic is madly plausible and their naive hero tumbles into one pitfall after another because he believes in everything he sees. Hanville Svetz, a browbeaten thirty-first century bureaucrat, is assigned to retrieve extinct animals from the past for the amusement of the drooling idiot who rules his world as hereditary U.N. Secretary General. But his expensive (“several million commercials per shot”) trips into the past are, in fact, sideways jaunts across probability lines. As his superior muses:
‘Did you know that time travel wasn’t even a concept until the first century Ante Atomic? A writer invented it. From then until the fourth century Post Atomic, time travel was pure fantasy. It violates everything the scientists of that time thought were natural laws…Every time we push an extension cage past that particular four-century period, we shove it into a kind of fantasy world.’
Svetz unquestioningly accepts fantasy phenomena as real partly because his civilization has so little knowledge of previous eras and partly because he himself is so stupid. “We’ve forgotten so much about the past that we can’t separate legend from fact.” He brings back a medieval unicorn instead of a horse and a Chinese dragon instead of a gila monster (“The Flight of the Horse”/“Get a Horse,” 1969), Moby Dick for an ordinary sperm whale (“Leviathan,” 1970), and a werewolf instead of a wolf (“There’s a Wolf in My Time Machine,” 1971). Then he is entangled in transforming an ostrich into a roc and altering his own time line by the removal of Henry Ford’s first automobile (“Bird in the Hand,” 1970). Finally, he wrestles with Death personified and renders his own world illusionary (“Death in a Cage,” 1973).
Earnest, timid, and frail, Svetz is a kind of anti-Walter Mitty—a man thrust into exciting adventures he neither wants nor understands. Niven satirizes big government and small-scale human frailty through his inept floundering. But some of the humor is a bit heavy-handed (e.g., the unicorn tamed by a “frigid bitch” staff member at the Institute) and by the last story the medium has peeled away from the message.
The Svetz series is a vehicle for environmental warnings. Svetz’ ravaged world is home only to man, food yeast, and a few zoo animals.
Once the ocean teemed with life, Svetz thought. Now the continental shelf is as dead as the Moon. Nothing but bubble cities. Once the whole continent was all forest and living desert and fresh water. We cut down the trees and shot the animals and poisoned the rivers and irrigated the deserts so that even the desert life died;…We’ve wiped out most of the forms of life on Earth in the last fifteen hundred years, and changed the composition of the air to the extent that we’d be afraid to change it back.
Living in Southern California makes Niven especially sensitive to the problems of air pollution. He uses this as a plot point throughout the series. Over the centuries people have adapted well to chemical fumes and high carbon dioxide levels; exposure to the clean pre-industrial atmosphere would kill them. Svetz has to wear an air filter to shield himself from the “heady poison” breathed by past generations. Likewise, the animals he retrieves require special sealed environments in captivity.
Since Svetz was born into a world virtually devoid of non-human life, he hates animals and all alien creatures. His hunting assignments would be agony to fulfill even if he managed to complete them without injury. The captured animals reciprocate. The unicorn, dragon, whale, roc, and werewolf all try to kill him. (Only the deadly polluted air saves him from the angry roc.) Ironically, the zoo’s only benevolent large animal, the elephant, is devoured by the roc and the friendly, viable dogs have to be caged for their own protection. “The dogs were behind glass because people were afraid of them. Too many species had died. The people of 1100 Post Atomic were not used to animals.”
The Svetz series is worth studying for the light it sheds on the artistically superior Warlock series. It gave Niven practice in writing fantasy, a genre he initially found difficult, and contributed a few clever notions to the other series (large flightless birds as neotenous rocs, Homo habilis as the troll, and werewolves as wolves transformed into humans rather than vice versa).
The stories of the Warlock are better than those of Svetz in all respects. Their humorous and serious parts fit together as smoothly as if laminated. Their
There are four items in the series but “Unfinished Story #1” (1970) can be disregarded. It is merely an excuse for a pun on the Maxwell’s demon analogy in physics. But “Not Long Before the End” and “What Good is a Glass Dagger?” are directly related to The Magic Goes Away.
The setting of the stories is 12,000 B.C., “an age when miracles were somewhat more common.” It makes no real pretense of being our own pre-historic past—the anachronisms are too obvious. It might as well be considered an alternate universe. Niven apparently chose a period as remote as Howard’s Hyborian Age in order to underscore his own distaste for the “slash and screw” or “fur jockstrap” brand of fantasy.
“Not Long Before the End,” Niven’s earliest venture into sword and sorcery subject matter, was written as an independent story. Niven had no further plans for its premises beyond inverting some mighty-thewed barbarian clichés. (In comparison, Anderson’s “Barbarian” and de Camp’s Jorian stories poke fun at Conan more affectionately.) Then Niven saw further possibilities in his material and more episodes followed. However, no further sequels should be expected. The Magic Goes Away is a “story to end all stories.”