"Jack Vance - Green Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

Green Magic




Green Magic
by Jack Vance

Howard Fair, looking over the relics of his great-uncle Gerald McIntyre, found a large ledger entitled:
WORKBOOK & JOURNAL

Open at Peril!

Fair read the journal with interest, although his own work went far beyond ideas treated only gingerly by
Gerald McIntyre.

"The existence of disciplines concentric to the elementary magics must now be admitted without further
controversy," wrote McIntyre. "Guided by a set of analogies from the white and black magics (to be
detailed in due course), I have delineated the basic extension of purple magic, as well as its corollary,
Dynamic Nomism."

Fair read on, remarking the careful charts, the projections and expansions, the transpolations and
transformations by which Gerald McIntyre had conceived his systemology. So swiftly had the technical
arts advanced that McIntyre's expositions, highly controversial sixty years before, now seemed pedantic
and overly rigorous.

"Whereas benign creatures: angels, white sprites, merrihews, sandestins--are typical of the white cycle;
whereas demons, magners, trolls and warlocks are evinced by black magic; so do the purple and green
cycles sponsor their own particulars, but these are neither good nor evil, bearing, rather, the same
relation to the black and white provinces that these latter do to our own basic realm."

Fair reread the passage. The "green cycle"? Had Gerald McIntyre wandered into regions overlooked by
modern workers?

He reviewed the journal in the light of this suspicion, and discovered additional hints and references.
Especially provocative was a bit of scribbled marginalia: "More concerning my latest researches I may
not state, having been promised an infinite reward for this forbearance."

The passage was dated a day before Gerald McIntyre's death, which had occurred on March 21, 1898,
the first day of spring. McIntyre had enjoyed very little of his "infinite reward," whatever had been its
nature... Fair returned to a consideration of the journal, which, in a sentence or two, had opened a chink
on an entire new panorama. McIntyre provided no further illumination, and Fair set out to make a fuller

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investigation.

His first steps were routine. He performed two divinations, searched the standard indexes, concordances,
handbooks and formularies, evoked a demon whom he had previously found knowledgeable: all without