Piers Anthony: Juxtaposition

Sheen and Brown were watching, amazed. “Gee, you sure are better at carving than I am,” Brown said. “My prede—pred—the former Brown Adept could make figures just like people, but I can’t, yet.”

“I can’t make them live,” Trool said shortly. Then Sheen made magic from the book, and the statue turned to flesh. But it remained cold, inanimate. The Brown Adept laid her hands on it, and it animated—a golem made of flesh. The new body was ready.

“Say—it worked!” Brown exclaimed, pleased. Stile wondered how this carved and animated figure could have living guts and bones and brain. Presumably these had been taken care of by Sheen’s spell. Magic was funny stuff!

But the soul could not yet enter this body. Two selves could not exist separately in the zone of juxtaposition. The second body would only become truly alive when the frames separated.

“Will it be all right until needed?” Stile asked. “It won’t spoil?”

“My golems don’t spoil!” Brown said indignantly. “It will keep until the soul enters it. Then it’ll be alive and will have to eat and sleep and you-know.”

“Then park it in a safe place,” he said. “And let the harmonica remain with it, so that his soul can find it in case there is a problem.” For despite all his planning, Stile was not at all sure he would succeed in his mission, or necessarily survive the next few hours. Little had been heard from the enemy Adepts recently; they had surely not been idle.

Sheen conjured body and harmonica to the Blue Demesnes, which were in no part of the current action. Stile felt another pang of separation as he lost the harmonica; it had been such an important part of his life in Phaze.

The necessary time had passed. They had the golems start the ball on its new course to the south. “But make a spell of illusion,” Stile directed. “I want it to seem that the ball is proceeding on the course Brown and I just charted.”

“I can generate a ball of similar size, made of ordinary rock,” Sheen said.

“And I’ll have some of my golems push it,” Brown said. “It won’t be nearly as heavy, so I’ll tell them not to push as hard.”

Soon the mock ball diverged from the real one, and a contingent of golems started it on its way. Stile wasn’t sure how long this would fool the Adepts, but it was worth a try.

Meanwhile, under cover of a fog that Sheen generated, the main part of the golem force levered the Phazite ball back toward the Purple Mountains. A door opened in the hillside, and they saw the tunnel the trolls had made—a smooth, round tube of just the right size, slanting very gently down. They rolled the boulder to it, and it began to travel down its channel on its own.

“From here on, it’s easy,” Sheen said. “This tube will carry the Phazite kilometers along in a short time. At the far end, the tunnel spirals up to the top of a substantial foothill; from there it can roll north with such momentum the enemy will not be able to stop it before it crosses into Proton proper.”

“Good strategy,” Stile agreed. “But can the golems get it up that spiral?”

“My friends in Proton have installed a power winch.”

Stile laughed. “I keep forgetting we can draw on science, too, now! This begins to seem easy!” They followed the ball as it moved. Stile and Clip fitting comfortably in the tunnel. Brown’s golem steed hunching over, and Sheen riding a motorized unicycle she had conjured. She was enjoying her role as enchantress. The ball accelerated, forcing them to hurry to keep it in sight. Even so, it drew ahead, rounding a bend and disappearing.

They hastened on, but the ball was already around the next bend, still out of sight. When they passed that bend, they looked along an extended straightaway—and the ball was not there.

Stile wasn’t sure whether he or his other self first realized the truth. “Hostile magic!” he cried.

“Can’t be,” Sheen protested. “I had it counterspelled.”

“Use a new spell to locate the ball.”

She used a simple locator-spell. “It’s off to the side,” she said, surprised.

“That last curve—they made a detour!” Stile said. “Had a crew in to tunnel—no Adept magic—goblins, maybe, or some borers from Proton—they can draw on the same resources we can—the ball went down that, while we followed the proper channel.”

They charged back to the curve. There it was. An off shoot tunnel masked by an illusion-spell that had to have been instituted before Sheen’s arrival. The enemy Adepts had anticipated this tunnel ploy and quietly prepared for it.

No—they couldn’t have placed the spell before Sheen got there, because Sheen had supervised the construction of the tunnel and had her magic in force throughout. Something else—ah. The offshoot tunnel was in fact an old Proton mine shaft. A small amount of work had tied it in to the new troll tunnel, and a tiny generator had sealed off the entrance with an opaque force field. No magic, and minimal effort. Someone had been very clever. “I don’t like this,” Stile said. “They evidently know what we’re doing here, and someone with a good mind is on the scene. We’re being outmaneuvered. While we made a duplicate image of me, they did this.”

But there was nothing much to do except go after the Phazite. They started down the detour tunnel, hoping to catch up with the ball before it reached whatever destination the enemy had plotted. Sheen’s magic showed no enemies nearby; like her own workers, they had departed as soon as their job was done. The tunnels were empty because the presence of anyone could alert the other side to what was going on.

They heard a noise ahead. Something was moving, heavily, making the tunnel shudder.

Ooops! The ball of Phazite was rolling back toward them at horrendous velocity!

“Get out of its way!” Stile cried. “A hundred and fifty tons will crush us flat!”

But the ball was moving too swiftly; they could not outrun it, and the intersection of tunnels was too far back. “Make a spell. Lady Machine!” Brown screamed. Sheen made a gesture—and abruptly their entire party was in the tunnel beyond the rolling ball, watching the thing retreat. Stile felt weak in the knees, and not because of their injury. He didn’t like being dependent on someone else for magic. Was that the way others felt about him?

“See—it slants up, there ahead,” Brown said brightly. She, at least, was used to accepting enchantment from others, though she was Adept herself. “They fixed it up so the ball would roll up, then reverse and come right back at us.”

‘Timed so we would be in the middle when it arrived,” Sheen said.

“No direct magic—but a neat trap,” Stile agreed. “They must have assumed that if the book blocked out Adept magic, it would leave us helpless. They didn’t realize that a non-Adept would be doing the spells.”

“Funny Trool didn’t warn us,” Brown said.

Trool appeared, chagrined. “I saw it not. I know not how I missed it.”

For a moment Stile wondered whether the troll could have betrayed them. But he found he couldn’t believe that. For one thing, he had confidence in his judgment of creatures. For another, it was a woman—a young-seeming one—who had been prophesied to betray him, and that had already come to pass before the prophecy reached him. So there had to have been enough illusion magic, or clever maneuvering, to deceive everyone in this case; no betrayal was involved.

“Set a deflector at the mouth of the detour,” Stile told Sheen, “so that when the ball reverses again, it will go down the correct tunnel.”

She lifted a finger. “Done.”

“You sure know a lot of spells,” Brown said.

“Robots assimilate programmed material very rapidly,” Sheen replied. “The advantages of being a machine are becoming clearer to me, now that I have considered life.” They marched up to the intersection of tubes. The ball had already reversed course and traveled down its proper Channel. They followed it without further event to the end.