Dragon on a Pedestal

by Piers Anthony

  "Smart bird," Grundy repeated wanly.

  Chem chuckled. Smart bird? The Simurgh was the most knowledgeable bird--and creature--of all time!

  "You will do it?" Irene demanded, seeing his reluctance.

  Grundy grimaced. "Yes. I'll try."

  Irene grew the airplane plant. It sprouted stiff wings, an upright tail, and an airscope that sucked in air, heated it, and fired it out the rear, jetting itself forward. The plant wasn't large enough or strong enough to support any normal person, but Grundy was no normal person. He boarded the plane, and it took off with a whoosh of fumes. He was able to guide it by shifting his weight. "WIGGLE! WIGGLE!" he cried.

  "Now let's get on to the Cyclops' cave," Irene said to Chem. "We have a good notion of its location. If we hear any wiggles on the way, we can destroy them. And let's hope Grundy rejoins us in time to translate for the Cyclops! We must tell him of the wiggle menace, and ask him where Ivy is. There are no normal enemies during a crisis like this."

  Chem galloped. Irene was tense and worried, yet she experienced a certain exhilaration. Whatever threat the wiggle menace was, it certainly wasn't dull!

  Chapter 16

  Wiggle, Wiggle

  We've got to do something," Ivy said. "We can get stones or rocks and squish the wiggles as we find them," Hugo said. "But I think there are too many for us."

  Zzapp!

  "Here," Hugo said, conjuring two rockfruits. "Use these to smash it."

  Ivy took the fruits, which fitted comfortably in her little hands, and stalked the wiggle. She found it and smashed the rocks together. "Ugh, squish!" she said, wrinkling her nose as she inspected the result.

  "It's the only way," Hugo said, conjuring two more fruits for himself. "My dad says you can only really stop wiggles by destroying their nest. But anyone who gets close to it gets holed by the wiggles. He says that's how the Invisible Giant died. He was a big, big man, but the wiggles played eighteen holes in him and he crashed."

  "Poor giant," Ivy said sympathetically. "I never saw him."

  "No one ever saw him, dummy! He was invisible! So we just have to catch the wiggles as they come."

  Zzapp! Zzapp!

  "Oops, they're coming faster now," Ivy said.

  "They do," Hugo agreed. "And they radiate out in a big circle that gets bigger and bigger. Maybe we better run."

  "No!" Ivy said. "We must destroy the nest!"

  "But I told you! We can't get close to it."

  "We'll figure out how!" she snapped imperatively. She was not aware of it, but at this moment she resembled her mother quite strongly, and not merely for the tint in her hair. "You're smart enough!"

  This was of course an unfair assumption, but Hugo was used to it by now. He concentrated. It was amazing how smart he became when she insisted. "Well, we can't just walk up to it 'cause we'd get holed. Unless Stanley could keep steaming ahead and cook them in a channel--but no, he'd soon run out of water. We don't know how far away that nest is; it could be several hours' travel. Since nothing we know of can shield against the bore of a wiggle, any direct approach is doomed to failure."

  Hugo was sounding more intelligent than ever before in his life, except when he served as defender at Hardy Harpy's trial. In fact, at this moment he resembled his father. Even Stanley, who really didn't have much truck with intelligence, sat up and took notice. But Ivy wasn't impressed. She wanted results, not dialogue. "Figure out a way!" she insisted. "You can do it if you really try--I know you can!"

  "If we got there," Hugo said, "I suppose Stanley could steam the nest and cook the remaining wiggles. So the only problem is transportation. Now as I understand it, the wiggles radiate out on a plane; that is, they move out in a flat circle, not a sphere. They don't go up or down, just sideways. So it should be possible to approach the nest from above or below. Below is no good, for we can't tunnel through rock, but above--I wonder whether Stanley could fly there?"

  Ivy liked this notion, which really was an excellent one, "Stanley, you've got wings!" she exclaimed. "So you can fly, can't you?"

  The little dragon spread his wings and flapped them. He raised some dust and caused a gentle breeze, but could not get off the ground.

  "Come on, Stanley!" Ivy said encouragingnly. "I just know you can do it! Try harder!"

  In response, the dragon pumped harder. His wings seemed to become larger and fuller and better webbed. For a moment his body lifted. Then it spun out of control and he plopped to the ground. Ivy's power, it seemed, had finally reached its limit.

  "He's not a flying dragon," Hugo pointed out. "Those wings are vestigial. If he flew, he's probably crash and hurt himself."

  Ivy considered that. She didn't want Stanley to hurt himself. She was very solicitous about pain. "Then find another way to fly," she told Hugo.

  Hugo concentrated again. "I can conjure fruit-flies," he said. In his hand appeared a peach fruit-fly. It had fuzzy pink skin and two green leaves that flapped like wings. He released the peach, and it buzzed up and away.

  "Can they carry Stanley?"

  "No. They can only carry their own weight." Indeed, the peach was already laboring, for its leaf-wings were wearing out. Obviously it was not a power-flier.

  "Then find another way," Ivy said insistently. "You're smart; you can do it. I know you can."

  Hugo sighed. Intelligence was a mixed blessing, but he did privately enjoy being considered smart, and now he had become smart enough to realize how her talent worked. He could conjure good fruit because she believed he could. He was becoming handsome because she saw him that way. He was intelligent because she insisted that he be so. She was a little Sorceress; without her, he would once more be nothing. He was in a subtle but compelling manner dependent on her, and he wanted very much to please her. But he knew they could not safely fly to the wiggle nest. Was there some other approach?

  He cudgeled his brain, but all it told him was that he had no answer. How could he arrange to accomplish the impossible? This group of three children simply lacked the resources to exterminate the wiggles.

  Zzapp!

  "I'll get it," Ivy said, grasping her rockfruits. "You keep thinking." She stalked the wiggle.

  Zzapp!

  There was another! Stanley went after it.

  Hugo noted idly that the two wiggles seemed to be traveling on slightly divergent paths. Immediately his heightened intellect reasoned it out. Naturally the paths diverged, for the wiggles were radiating out from a common source. The farther they traveled, the greater their separation from each other became. It was an elementary matter to triangulate and estimate the location of the source, which really was not far from here. He and Ivy and Stanley could reach it readily--if they had any means of keeping from getting holed on the way.

  He conjured a bunch of grape fruit-flies and watched them fly. Most of them were smaller than the peach and deep purple; their leaf-wings were much larger in proportion, which made them stronger fliers. A few were the opposite, being larger than the peach and bright yellow, with little leaves; they could not fly well at all. It all depended whether they were grape fruit-flies or grapefruit flies. Their differences in flying ability were a matter of elementary physics, which was the science of magic that Hugo was now beginning to comprehend. But the absolute weight that the small grapes could carry was no larger than that of the peach; by no stretch could the grapes support the weight of the little dragon.

  Well, perhaps if Hugo could conjure grapes-of-wrath fruitflies--No! That was definitely unsafe!

  Several of the grapes spun dizzily and fluttered to the ground. They did not seem tired, merely confused. Others were unaffected. Why was this?

  Hugo conjured a bunch of cherries. These had smaller but firmer leaves, and flapped more vigorously than the loose-leafed grapes, so they were actually stronger fliers. They pursued the grapes--and several of the former spun out of control, in the same place the grapes had.

  Ivy returned, her rocks smeared with ick. "We got 'em," she reported with sat
isfaction.

  The gist of a notion flirted with Hugo's consciousness. The fruit-flies--the wiggles--there was some connection, yet he couldn't pin it down. But he was smart enough to ask for the help he needed.

  "Ivy, make me smarter yet," he told her. "Make me super-brainy-intelligent."

  Ivy, like women of any age, did not properly appreciate the nature of her power. "Of course you're super-brainly-intelligent!" she said. "You're the smartest person in all Xanth. I just know it." And so she believed, now that she thought of it. Nights in Shiny Armor were supersmart, weren't they? And because she was a Sorceress, and had power that only Good Magician Humfrey would have believed--had he not been a baby--what she believed was mostly true. Hugo became almost too smart to be credible.

  "The fruit-flies," he said, working it out. "They are being affected by an unseen agency that causes them to lose their orientation without physically damaging them. See, there go some more cherries."

  "Cherries!" Ivy exclaimed, alarmed.

  "No, these are cherry fruit-flies, not cherry bombs," he clarified. "These fly, they don't explode."

  "Oh, goody!" She relaxed.

  "But the disorientation effect is localized. There seems to be a region through which the fruits can not safely pass. And the nature of that region, judging from other small hints we have had, must be--a forget-whorl, of the kind my father described before he regressed to infancy."

  "Is that bad?" Ivy asked, impressed.

  "Yes and no. It is bad for us, for we must avoid it. Had we blundered into it, we should have suffered immediate amnesia." He knew about the whorls because he had been along when Good Magician Humfrey had told King Dor about them, back in Castle Zombie. With his present genius, he grasped their nature thoroughly. "However, we should now be able to use this whorl for our purpose, since it should have the same effect on the wiggles that it does on the fruits. This is not a certainty, but is a high probability. All we need to do is move that whorl over to the wiggle nest, and it will cause the worms to forget their purpose and perhaps forget even how to move. Then their menace will likely abate."

  "Wonderful!" Ivy agreed. "Let's move it!"

  "We can't even see it!" Hugo pointed out, now experiencing the necessary caution of a smart person. "And the thing is dangerous. It can wipe us out, too, as surely as if it had giant teeth. How can we move it?"

  "You can figure out a way!" she said encouragingly. Hugo sighed. Somehow he had known she would say that.

  He concentrated again. "It seems there are a number of whorls, drifting generally southward from the weakening forget-spell on the Gap Chasm. They seem to have changed their nature, causing total forgetting instead of just Gap Chasm forgetting. I could probably work out a rationale for that effect--"

  "Stick to business," Ivy said firmly.

  Hugo sighed again. "These whorls seem to associate loosely with the Gap Dragon, or his rejuvenated state, perhaps because his exits from the Gap are through a convenient channel--convenient for the whorls as well as for the Dragon. Presumably the Dragon is at least partially immune to the effect of the forget-spell, having spent all his life within it. So it may be no coincidence that there is a whorl in this vicinity. But this suggests two things--that the whorls are to some extent affected by the prevailing winds and the lay of the land, and that Stanley may have more influence over them than other creatures do. If we assume this is true, Stanley should be able to move a whirl by fanning it with his wings and blowing along natural channels in the terrain."

  Ivy clapped her hands. "I just knew you could do it, Hugo!" she cried joyously. "Now tell me what you said."

  Hugo translated. "We can blow the whorl to the wiggle nest."

  "Oh, goody! Let's do it."

  They did it, after some further discussion and organization. Hugo explained that they should be safe from the on-zapping wiggles if they kept the whorl between them and the nest, for the wiggles would forget their purpose--assuming his conjectures were correct--when they entered the whorl and would be of no further threat. The three of them would have to stay together, not venturing out to destroy individual wiggles, as it would not be safe anywhere but behind the whorl. And Ivy and Hugo had to stay behind Stanley because, while the whorl might not hurt the dragon, it would erase the two of them if it touched them. This was a rather tricky, dangerous business.

  But Ivy was not a creature of caution. She knew the wiggle nest had to be nullified, so she was bound to do if. Her mother would have had another vision, worse than the first, had she known what was contemplated here.

  They proceeded. Stanley was in the lead, using his wings to fan the whorl. He could not fly, but he could generate a gentle, steady breeze that made the whorl slowly drift away. It did seem to respond to his breeze more than to the incidental passing natural breezes. Hugo was at the rear, conjuring bunches of flying cherries that he sent around and into the invisible whorl. The cherries that spun out of control showed where the whorl was; that was the only way it could be spotted. Ivy stayed between Stanley and Hugo, enhancing both their powers. It might have looked to an outsider as if she were doing nothing, but without her, Hugo assured her, neither he nor Stanley would have been able to perform. Both dragon and boy had enhanced intelligence and powers in her presence. The pedestal and the Shiny Armor needed constant tending now.

  Hugo continued to triangulate the location of the nest by listening to the zaps of passing wiggles and performing rapid mental calculations. The zaps became more prevalent as progress was made. But it was not possible to approach the nest in a straight line, for there were trees and boulders in the way, and a hill that the whorl tended to slide away from, and a pond too deep for them to wade through. So they had to travel the contour, which meant moving the whorl sidewise on occasion.

  This was a challenge. Stanley could blow the whorl directly forward, but sidewise travel meant he couldn't do that. The wiggles were zapping thickly out from the nest, preventing Stanley from moving to the side. He might be immune to the effect of the whorl, but he wasn't proof against the wiggles.

  They were stuck.

  Ivy, of course, had the answer. "Figure it out, Hugo!" she cried, cowering as the zapping of wiggles became close and loud. Zzapp! Zzapp! Zzapp! "How can Stanley blow around a corner?"

  Hugo cudgeled his brain yet again. Blow around a corner?

  Ridiculous! Only if he had a baffle--and he had no way to get one. There were half a dozen close zaps every minute now; he would be holed in short order if he ventured from the shelter of the whorl. As it was, he had to watch his flying fruits carefully, because a number were getting shot down by the wiggles. If he misread the position of the whorl by confusing holed fruit with forgetted fruit, disaster could follow! Then it came to him. "Vectors!" he cried.

  "Another menace?" Ivy asked, alarmed.

  "No. Vectors are lines of force," he explained. "My father the baby was reading about them in a Mundane text once, while he was baby-sitting me before he got infanted himself." Hugo paused, smiling. "Now I can baby-sit him! If I ever get home." Then he returned to his concept. "Vectors are one of the types of magic that work in Mundania. Stanley's breeze represents one vector--pushing the whorl straight forward toward the next. The slope of the hill is another vector, pushing the whorl back. The vectors oppose, and therefore we can't make progress. But the slope isn't straight back; it's a little sidewise. So if we blow forward, and the hill pushes a little to the side, the net resulting force will be to the side."

  "I'm glad you're smart," Ivy said dubiously. "It doesn't make any sense to me."

  "I'll show you. Stanley, blow forward, steadily." The little dragon flapped his wings, blowing forward at the whorl. The whorl moved a little, as shown by the falling cherries, then nudged to the right. As the blowing continued, the whorl moved faster rightward.

  "It's sliding to the side!" Ivy exclaimed, surprised. "Precisely," Hugo agreed. "This is slow but effective. As we make progress around the hill, the vectors will change, and we'll make
better progress. We shall reach the nest--in due course."

  It happened as he had foreseen. The curve of the hill made progress gradually easier. In addition, they discovered that by angling Stanley's breeze slightly, they could cause the whorl to roll or spin some, affecting its progress. They were getting better at this.

  But the extent of the wiggle menace became evident as they rounded the hill and cut across the depression beyond it. Ivy looked back and saw the entire hill riddled by wiggle holes. Trees were tattered, and a few had fallen, their trunks so badly holed they collapsed. What an appalling number of wiggles!

  Hugo glanced back, too. "Good thing we didn't try to fly," he remarked.

  "Why?"

  "Because now I see that a number of wiggles do, after all, travel upward," he said. "The holes do not form a perfectly horizontal plane; most holes are in a level line, but some are above and below. Some wiggles are angling upward or downward, and probably a few go straight up. If Stanley had tried to fly over the nest, he would probably have been holed so many times before he reached it that he never would have made it."

  "Oooh, awful!" Ivy agreed with a shudder. Zzapp! Zzapp! Zzapp! Now she was even more conscious of the concentration of wiggles. They were everywhere except right here, and the landscape of Xanth was devastated by their passage. She could see dead animals and birds, holed by wiggles. Even the ground was chewed up by frequent holing. The wilderness was becoming a wasteland.

  But now at last the nest itself was in sight. It was a dark globe as tall as a grown man, perched on the ground beyond a ravine. There was a haze around it, which Ivy realized was actually the mass of wiggles hovering in the region, before zapping on outward. Most of them did hang in a plane parallel to the ground, making the nest resemble the planet Saturn--but of course this was much larger than Saturn, which as everyone knew was only a tiny mote in the night sky that never dared show itself by day.