The Magic Goes Away by Larry Niven

Author:Larry Niven [Niven, Larry]
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Sci-Fi
Published: 2010-02-16T19:41:51+00:00

Some phrase caught the Warlock’s attention and pulled him awake. He sat up. He felt good, better than he’d felt in days.

“There’s no mystery to it,” Olganna was telling Clubfoot. Her hair was white and wispy-thin, she was small and withered and wrinkled, but she still looked like she could climb a mountain. Deep stretch marks on her belly told of her eight sons and eleven daughters. “They simply wouldn’t surrender unless they were allowed to serve their god. Our forefathers could have killed them all, of course, but what for? This Roze-Kattee hadn’t helped them. We let them have their way.”

The Warlock sat up. Nobody seemed to think it strange that he had dozed off here.

“I wonder what makes them so loyal,” Clubfoot said.

“Why, they just…are. Or stubborn,” said Olganna. She seemed unaware that two Frost Giants, man and woman, were drying themselves on the far side of the room. “Once in my life and once before I was born, we got tired of their taking so much time off for their ceremonies. In my time it was a crop that had to be got in. We postponed the ceremonies. They stopped work, all work, till we gave in. It was a hungry winter.”

“But don’t you find that strange? All the old tales tell of gods striking mortals down for some casual mistake, or as part of some godlike game, or just for being proud of their own accomplishments. Sometimes the prayers and sacrifices were bribes for service, but usually they were just to get the god to let them alone: no more floods, no more plague, no more lightning, please. What did Roze-Kattee do for the Frost Giants?”

“I’ve wondered.” Olganna frowned. She looked about her…

They might have been father and daughter, or uncle and niece, or man and wife; their ages weren’t that different. White hair, pale skin, eyes the color of ice, spare frames seven feet tall: they looked very much alike. They sat together, with Nordiks comfortably close on both sides of them, in the egalitarian style of the sauna, and they rested in the peace that follows the heat.

Olganna called across the room, and the entire village must have heard her. “Gannik, Wilf, just why do you still serve a god nobody’s seen in a hundred years?”

The old man flinched. Certainly he had not come to the sauna to be cross-examined. But some are more equal than others, and Olganna’s son was the ring-bearer, the lord of the Hall. The pale young woman beside him didn’t help matters; she was looking at Gannik as if she too expected an answer.

He shrugged and answered. “Those who do not worship do not marry, do not love, are not loved. It was always that way. If one loses faith after a long and successful life, his wife will desert him, his children will not speak to him, none will help him when he is sick and aged. If Roze-Kattee frowns on a man, he is impotent; on a woman, her lovers are impotent.

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