Roger Zelazny - A Farce To Be Reckoned With

The system was based on a statement so self-evident as to appear obvious, yet it gave curious difficulties when he tried to prove or apply it: the cosmos and everything in it existed as a unity; as above, so below, and all parts of everything were interdependent. From this it followed that any one part could influence any other part, and that the sign or symbol of anything could influence the actuality of the anything that it stood for, since they were equivalent in the unity that linked all things. So far, so good. The trouble lay in trying to prove it. Although Agrippa could influence many things with many other things, he hadn't succeeded yet in influencing all things whenever he wished. Furthermore, he hadn't yet accounted for the presence of chance, which occasionally seemed to throw all his calculations astray in a manner that seemed random, therefore illicit in a plan-built universe, therefore actually something else. It was that and similar problems that Agrippa attended to in his high-roofed old house in that space that existed neither in the material sphere nor in the spiritual.

"Is that really necessary?" Azzie asked, holding the retort that Agrippa handed him.

"It is, if you want to convert it back again."

"If that's what you want, why do it in the first place?" Azzie asked. The retort was starting to bubble in his hands, and the liquid inside had turned from transparent to ocher yellow shot through with green. "What is this?"

"A sovereign throat remedy," Agrippa said. He was somewhat smaller than middle height, with a full philosopher's beard and mustaches, and he even wore payes like the Hasidic rabbis he sometimes talked to at the tavern in Limbo where they met for refreshments and learned conversation. He wore a long cloak and a tall peaked hat with a pewter buckle on it.

"Why is an intellect like yours bothering to concoct throat medicine?" Azzie asked.

"I try to remain practical," said Agrippa. "As for the operation with the gold, I seek to reverse the process of melting it down to a black vapor and sludge, and so be able to convert any black vapor to gold."

"That would make for a lot of gold," said Azzie, thinking of all the sludge he had seen in his lifetime.

"So it would. But plenty of gold is what men want. And hermetism is above all a humanistic philosophy.

Now then, what can I do for you?"

"Did you ever hear," Azzie asked him, "of the seven golden candlesticks that Satan gave to Adam to help him find his way back to the Garden of Eden?"

"It sounds familiar. Where's my owl?"

Upon hearing himself called, a large snowy white owl with speckled wings flew down silently from his perch up near the ceiling where the walls angled in sharply.

"Go fetch my scroll," Agrippa said. The owl circled the room once and flew out the window. Agrippa looked around puzzled, then his eye lighted on the retort in Azzie's hands.

"Ah, give it here!" He bent over it and sniffed. "Yes, that ought to do nicely. If it's not throat medicine, it'll do for the mange. I am very close to a universal panacea that will cure all diseases. Now, let's see that sludge."

He looked into his little furnace, where the gold had been bubbling. He frowned. "Even the sludge is now quite burned away. I could try to resurrect it from memory only, because the doctrine of universal correspondences posits no impossible conditions, and what the tongue can say the mind can conceive of and the hand can capture. But it's easier to start with fresh gold. Hello, here's my owl again."

The owl flew to his shoulder. In his beak tie carried a large rolled parchment. Agrippa took it, and the owl returned to his overhead perch. Agrippa unrolled the scroll and read through it rapidly. "Aha!" he cried. "Here it is! The seven golden candlesticks do indeed exist. They are stored with all the other lost myths the world has known in the Cathar castle of Krak Herrenium."

"Where's that?" Azzie asked.

"In Limbo, due south from the zero meridian of Purgatory. Do you know how to get there?"

"No problem," said Azzie. "Thank you very much!" And he was off.

Babriel kept a close watch for Azzie's return. The angel had found quarters close to Aretino's house — a small place, for he didn't need much. He also acquired a servant, an old woman 'with sunken mouth and bright black eyes round as buttons. She cooked for him, the gruel of the righteous, which Babriel preferred above all other victuals. She washed his paintbrushes when he came home from his experiments in perspective, and in all ways looked out for him.

Babriel might have missed Azzie's return to Venice, for the demon flashed down in the night like a thunderbolt and made straight for Aretino's house. But Agatha, as the old woman was called, had been keeping watch, and her whole family had been enlisted into the task. Her father, Menelaus, was the first to see the quickening of light in the 'western sky, and he went to tell Agatha. Lighting a candle, she went through the dark passages to where Babriel stayed, knocked on the door, and entered.

"The one you seek is here in Venice, master," she said.

"At last!" Babriel said. He wound a cloak around himself, as dark a one as he could find, and he went forth.

Deciding to use the quality of subterfuge that he had heard so much about, Babriel climbed Aretino's trellis and came to rest on a small balcony outside a second-story window. Inside he could see Azzie and Aretino, but he could not make out their voices. Irritably he said, "Time for a miracle here," and with those words, a glowworm detached itself from its game of tag with its fellows and came over to him.

"How do you do, sir? What can I do for you?"

"I want to know what is being said inside."

"Trust me, I'm the lad to find it out."

The glowworm moved away, and after a while found a chink in the window frame. He buzzed in just in time to hear Azzie say, "I don't know what you have in mind, Aretino, but we'll try it. And we'll do it now!" And with that there was a flash of light and Azzie and Aretino disappeared.

The glowworm returned and told this to Babriel, who decided he had been messing with complicated matters, because he didn't understand at all what had happened.

Inside the house, just before the glowworm's arrival, Azzie had been saying, "I just dropped by to tell you I've found the candlesticks."

"You have? Where are they?"

"According to Cornelius Agrippa, they're stored in a castle in Limbo. I'll pop over there and make sure they're still available, and then set them up as prizes."

"Prizes?"

"Really, Pietro, get with it. You thought up the candlesticks. Or remembered the story, whichever it was.

There are seven of them, so we will have seven pilgrims. All they have to do is get the candlesticks, and their dearest wishes will come true. How do you like that?"

"And not because you did anything to deserve it, either," Azzie said. "Just because you possessed the magical object. That's how things ought to work. Sometimes that's how they do work. At least, that's what our play is going to say. I'm going to tell my volunteers that all they need to do is find the candlesticks and their problems are over. Basically."

Aretino raised his eyebrows, but nodded and also murmured, "Basically, yes. But how will they get the candlesticks?"

"I'll give the pilgrims each a spell, and the spell will lead them to the candlesticks."

"Sounds all right to me," Aretino said. "So we're going to Limbo. Is it very far?"

"Quite far, by any objective standard," Azzie said. "But the way we do it, it'll take very little time at all. As a playwright you should find this interesting, Pietro. No living man, to my knowledge, has been to Limbo

— except Dante. You're sure you want to make the trip?"