Marianne, the Magus & the Manticore Read Free

require him to be present in reality.
    "Silly," she admonished herself, kicking the Box as she passed it. "Silly!" Still, she left it where it was, decided to ignore it, turned on the television set to drown out any thought of it. Despite the bus crash, the morning was full of favorable portents. No time to waste thinking of Professor Harvey S.
    Zahmani.
    "... Zahmani," the television echoed in its cheerful-pedan-tic news voice. "M. A. Zahmani, Prime Minister of Alphenlicht, guest lecturer at several American universities this spring, prior to his scheduled appearance before the United Nations this week..."
    This brought her to crouch before the tube, seeing a face altogether familiar. It was Harvey. No, it wasn't Harvey. It looked like Harvey, but not around the mouth or eyes. The expression was totally different. Except for that, they could be Siamese twins. Except that Harvey was up in Boston and this man was here at the university to lecture... on what? On Alphenlicht, of course. She had read something about the current controversy over Alphenlicht and—what was that other tiny country? Lubovosk. There was a Newsweek thingy on it, and she burrowed under the table for the latest issue as the television began a breathless account of basketball scores and piggy-backed commercials in endless, morning babble.
    "... Among the world's oldest principalities, the two tiny nations of Alphenlicht and Lubovosk were joined until the nineteenth century under a single, priestly house which traced its origins back to the semi-mythical Magi. A minor territorial skirmish in the mid-nineteenth century left the northern third of the minuscule country under Russian control. Renamed 'Lubovosk,' the separated third now asserts legal rights to the priestly throne of Alphenlicht, a claim stoutly opposed by Prime Minister of Alphenlicht, Makr Avehl Zahmani...."
    There was a map showing two sausage-link-shaped territories carved out of the high mountains between Turkey and Iraq and an inset picture of a dark, hawk-eyed woman identified as the hereditary ruler of Lubovosk. Marianne examined the woman with a good deal of interest. The face was very familiar.
    It was not precisely her own, but there was something about the expression which Marianne had seen in her mirror. The woman might be a cousin, perhaps. "Good lord," Marianne admonished the pictured face. "If you and Russia want it, why doesn't Russia just invade it the way they did Afghanistan?"
    Receiving no reply, she rose to get about the business of breakfast. "Zahmani," she mused. She had never met anyone with that name except Harvey and herself. In strange cities, she had always looked in the phone book to see whether there might be another Zahmani. Then, too, Alphenlicht was the storybook land which had always been featured in Cloud-haired mama's bedtime tales. Alphenlicht. Surprising, really. She had known it was a real place, but she had never thought of it as real until this moment. Alphenlicht. Zahmani. "This," she sang to herself as she scrambled eggs, "would be interesting to know more about."
    When she left the apartment, her hair was knotted on her neck, she was dressed in a soft sweater and tweedy skirt, and the place was orderly behind her. She checked to see that she had her key, the Box nudging her foot while she ignored it, refused to see it. Instead, she shut her eyes, turned to face the room, then popped her eyes open. She did this every morning to convince herself that she had not dreamed the place, every morning doubting for a moment that it would be there. Was the paint still the dreamed-on color? Were the drapes still soft around the windows, curtains moving just a little in the breeze?
    No rain today, so she left the window open an inch to let the spring in and find it there when she returned. "I love you, room," she whispered to it before leaving it. "I will bring you a pot of crocuses tonight." Purple ones. In a blue glazed pot.
    She could see them in her head, as