The Wizardry Cursed w-3

by Rick Cook

Craig couldn’t really name the impulse that drove him to visit Mikey. He hadn’t seen him since Mikey had called his weapons "toys." He didn’t really have anything he needed to talk to him about. But he still decided to go. Maybe he could explain to Mikey about his new robots. Maybe Mikey would apologize for the things he’d said. Maybe whatever, he hadn’t talked to anyone but robots for weeks.

  Craig hadn’t been in Mikey’s part of the castle for a while and Mikey had made some changes since then. Where Craig’s work area was modelled on a laboratory, airy and brightly lighted, Mikey’s wing was gloomy as a smoggy twilight. The further he penetrated the dimmer and redder the light became until he felt he was pushing his way through blood-soaked gloom.

  He turned the corner and started climbing stairs. The walls fell away as he climbed until the staircase seemed to stretch up into a bleak, blood-lit, starless sky. Come on, he told himself, this is just an illusion. You know you’re still inside the castle. But somehow that only made the illusion stronger. The wind whistled around him, tugging at his jacket and whipping his jeans against his legs. There were hints of shapes in the sky above him, huge dark-on-dark things that shifted and twisted in ways his eye couldn’t quite follow.

  Craig shivered and stayed close to the center of the railless staircase. He thrust his hands deeper into the pockets of his windbreaker and kept his eyes on the stairs under his feet.

  Suddenly he was there. There was no door, no anteroom. Just a pool of light at the top of the stairs and Mikey hunched over a desk in the middle of it.

  As he reached the top Mikey regarded him in a not-quite-hostile manner.

  "What brings you here?"

  Craig shifted uncomfortably. "Well, I hadn’t seen you in a while and I just felt like coming to see you, you know?"

  Mikey grunted and turned back to his work. Craig stood uneasily as the silence stretched out and the wind whipped and whistled around them.

  "This is kinda spooky," he said at last.

  "I like it," Mikey said without looking up.

  The silence dragged out as Craig stared at Mikey’s back.

  "You look like you’ve been learning a lot." Craig tried to flog his enthusiasm. "It must have taken some real magic to put this place together."

  "Yeah," Mikey said. "I’ve been learning. That and a whole lot more."

  "Oh?" Craig asked brightly. "Like what?"

  "Like philosophy, man. I’ve really clarified my thinking." He smiled and for an instant the old, charming Mikey flashed through. "You know who really owns something? The person who can trash it. Just fucking ruin it completely. That’s how you know the real owner."

  "But what about the guy who can use it? You know, build something with it?"

  "So what? If he can’t protect it, he doesn’t really own it. It’s like a computer. The name on the paper may say it belongs to IBM or Pac Bell, but that doesn’t mean shit. The people who really owned those computers were people like me who could get at them any time we wanted to."

  Craig laughed nervously. "Man, you’re getting heavy."

  Mikey smiled. "Heavy times. Our friends now, they understand that. You know what those guys are really? They’re the greatest goddamn hackers of all!" The smile grew wider, dreamier. "Man, this is gonna be great."

  "Yeah, but there are people out there, you know?"

  "So? If they can’t protect it, they don’t own it. Simple as that."

  "Yeah," said Craig desperately, "but you don’t have to destroy something to prove you own it, right? I mean it’s enough to know that you can do it, isn’t it?"

  "Yeah," Mikey said with the same dreamy smile. "Sometimes that’s enough."

  "So all this is really theoretical, isn’t it?" Craig pressed. "I mean it’s not like you’re actually gonna destroy anything, are you?"

  Mikey came out of his trance and regarded him closely. "Sure it’s all theoretical." He turned away from Craig and back to the crystal thing on his desk. "Just theoretical."

  Craig hesitated, torn between a desire to press his companion for more assurances and the fear he might not get them. Finally he turned away, mumbled something about needing to get back to work, and started down the dark and twisting stairs.

  Mikey didn’t even grunt goodbye.

  Thirty-seven: CHUCK JONES’S CAT

  "Not only is the universe stranger than you imagine, it is stranger than you can imagine."

  J.B.S. Haldane

  "And so are all the other universes."

  Wiz Zumwalt

  Jerry and Danny listened intently when Wiz related what Duke Aelric had told him.

  "That’s weird," Danny said when Wiz had finished. "I wonder how much of it is true."

  Jerry leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the console. "What I want to know is what stirred these things up. If they’ve been around forever why did they pick now to start causing trouble?"

  "Duke Aelric talked about that some when he first joined us," Wiz said. "He thinks it’s because of us. Our brand of magic apparently triggered something." He glanced past Jerry’s feet to the console screen where the convoluted blue shape slowly rotated.

  "I think the whole thing’s crazy," Danny said. "Is he still around?"

  "Aelric? I don’t think so. I think he left again right after I talked to him."

  "Pity," Jerry said. "I would have liked to ask him some questions about this."

  "Bet you wouldn’t get any straight answers."

  Before Wiz could reply the door opened and Moira came into the computer room carrying a wicker basket with a cloth over it.

  "Forgive me, my Lords, but I thought you might enjoy some refreshment," she said as she put the basket down on the console.

  Wiz started to object to covering up the stacks of papers, but then Moira folded back the cloth and he goggled instead.

  "Doughnuts! Where did you learn to make doughnuts?"

  "Jerry took me to a doughnut shop while I was in your world. I liked them, but it took me some little time to master the recipe."

  Wiz grabbed a chocolate-frosted chocolate a fraction ahead of Jerry’s and Danny’s reaching hands. He took half of it in one bite and closed his eyes in bliss.

  "You sure got it right. This is wonderful."

  "You said it," Danny enthused, spewing crumbs from his second choice over Moira’s skirt.

  The hedge witch dimpled and bobbed a curtsey. "Thank you, my Lords. Now, if you will excuse me, I must see to the unpacking of our latest load of supplies."

  "Won’t you have some with us?" Wiz asked his wife.

  "Thank you, no. I, ah, sampled several while I was making them. I fear I am more than somewhat full." She turned toward the door. "Do not eat too many and ruin your appetites. June is preparing something special for dinner." Behind her Wiz nodded and reached for his third doughnut.

  For several minutes the only sound in the computer room was working jaws. Eventually a combination of sated appetites and an increasingly limited selection made the three more talkative.

  "If she can whip up doughnuts why can’t she make coffee to go with them?" Danny asked.

  "She didn’t like coffee when she tried it," Jerry told him. "She liked doughnuts."

  "Okay, but why so many maple ones? Everyone hates maple."

  "I think they were her favorites."

  "Anyway," Wiz put in, "isn’t there something about looking gift horses in the mouth?"

  "Yeah. Sorry," Danny said perfunctorily.

  "You know," Jerry said after a moment, "what Aelric said almost makes sense in a quantum mechanical sort of way."

  Wiz looked around. "I’m not sure anything makes sense here," he said.

  "They’ve been saying that about quantum mechanics for years," Jerry said. "Anyway, this might, if you looked at it right."

  Wiz picked through the basket and selected a jelly doughnut as the best of the remaining batch. Then he turned back to his friends. "I’ll bite. What does quantum mechanics have to do with these bad guys?"

&
nbsp; "Okay, you know that in quantum mechanics you deal with the position of a particle in terms of probabilities? There’s a probability wave and the particle is most likely to be found at the wave’s greatest magnitude and less likely to be found at lower magnitudes. But the point is, you don’t know exactly where it is."

  Danny rummaged through the box. "So? Are there any more chocolate ones?"

  "I think you ate them all, but as I was saying, we already know that something like quantum effects occur here on a macroscopic scale. Remember when we tried to play cards? The shuffled deck was in something like a quantum indeterminate state. We had to create a demon to collapse the state vector by looking at the cards before we could play. Otherwise the deck would respond to everyone’s mental desires and you’d end up with everyone holding four aces or the like."

  Jerry took another swig of tea from his mug. "It’s as if the line between reality and unreality is drawn at a higher level here. Some things don’t become real here until someone becomes aware of them."

  Wiz took a bite of his doughnut and chewed thoughtfully, dribbling powdered sugar down his chin.

  "How does that tie in with these-things-that want to destroy the World?"

  "Well, there’s an alternate interpretation of quantum mechanics from a guy named Everett which says that what we’re really seeing is multiple worlds, all equally real. What collapsing the state vector really means is that we’ve chosen among them. One of them becomes ’real’ because we’ve taken that branch of the skein of parallel universes and that makes the others unreal."

  Wiz put his doughnut down on the console behind him and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, leaving white streaks on his cheek.

  "That would explain a lot about this place. For instance, why there are some operations that seem to be basic that we can’t use in our magic language because they’re unstable."

  "Yes," Jerry said slowly. "We’ve been beating our brains out because we thought they have to be composed of several simpler operations. Maybe there’s some kind of uncertainty principle at work and those are primitives, they’re just one thing one day and another thing the next."

  "Well, the appearance of demons is sure influenced by the operator’s mental state, unless you specify what they look like in the spell." Wiz wiped at the sugar on his cheek thoughtfully, smearing it out more evenly. "And so these things that Duke Aelric’s worried about come from one of these parallel universes?"

  "I suppose you could say that they represent a universe with a low-probability wave function that overlaps ours," Jerry said. Then he brightened. "Hey! If I work out the mathematics on this, will that make me the Neils Bohr of this universe?"

  "You know…" Wiz began and reached behind him for the doughnut. When he couldn’t find it he turned to look.

  A mouse-sized gremlin was halfway down the desk with the doughnut clasped in front of him. The prize was nearly as big as it was and the gremlin was bent backwards under the load as it staggered away.

  "Hey!" Wiz yelled.

  The gremlin looked over its shoulder at Wiz, grinned, and broke into a wobbly run. Right to the edge of the desk and several steps beyond into empty air.

  Suddenly the grin faded. The little creature looked down and saw it was standing on nothing. Its face fell and its bat ears drooped to its shoulders.

  "Uh oh," it squeaked. Then gremlin and doughnut plummeted to the floor.

  As the gremlin scuttled away, Wiz walked over, picked up the doughnut, brushed it off and took a second bite.

  "I don’t know if that makes you Neils Bohr," he began again, "but if you’re right I think Chuck Jones is the Erwin Schr”dinger of this universe."

  "Who’s Chuck Jones?" asked Jerry.

  "Who’s Erwin Schr”dinger?" asked Danny.

  Halfway to the hills Mick and Karin met a ruined army.

  They smelled it before they saw it. The stink of burning rubber and insulation, of overheated metal and cordite. Of dust churned up in the heat of battle.

  But there was no sound of combat. No artillery, no engines. Not even the shouts of men. Cautiously, Karin and Mick eased to the top of a rise and peered over it.

  The panorama was so big and so torn up it was hard to tell what had happened here. Gilligan thought of the pictures he had seen of the destruction at Mitla Pass in the Sinai during the Six-Day War. But this was worse than any of those pictures. It seemed that the destroyed equipment spread over the plain for miles in front of them.

  His first instinct was to go around, even if it meant walking for miles. But there was no hint of movement anywhere on that enormous battlefield, no contrails in the sky. Except for the occasional crackle of flame and the whistle of the wind there was nothing.

  "Well?" Karin asked.

  "I say go across. It’s risky, but we’re low on water. Besides, we’ll be harder to spot out among all that junk than we would be out on the plain."

  The dragon rider nodded and went back to get her mount.

  It took hours to cross the battlefield.

  They walked past a line of what looked like self-propelled guns-if self-propelled guns had barrels made of glass that would droop and melt under the effects of enemy weapons.

  Here a half-dozen tanks in various stages of destruction confronted the remains of a fifty-foot-tall robot they had pulled down like wolves on an elk. Further on were the remains of a missile battery caught on the march and burned while trying to deploy.

  But there were no bodies. The wind brought the smell of burnt vehicles but not a trace of the sweetish stink of burning flesh. Not even the carrion birds seemed interested in this plain of dead machines.

  "Mick," Karin asked at last, "why do they do this? Do our enemies fight among themselves?"

  "I think it’s more likely they’re just conducting live ammo practices."

  "But they are killing their own creations!"

  "These things weren’t ever alive. They’re machines, like my F-15, not living beings like Stigi. I doubt a single living creature lost its life here."

  "Still, there is something… obscene about all this."

  Gilligan shrugged. "For us, war is a material-intense business. You go through a lot of equipment."

  But looking over the carnage, Mick tended to agree with her. Even if these things weren’t alive, it had taken ingenuity to design them and time and resources to build them. He had been taught that in a war you expended your equipment wholesale in an effort to win. If you struck hard and fast with overwhelming strength you minimized casualties, or so the reasoning went.

  Gilligan had always accepted it unthinkingly. Now, wandering among acres of scorched and twisted ruins, he began to appreciate what that meant.

  Besides, he thought, this wasn’t a battle. This was an exercise, a test. You don’t need to wreck all this just to test it.

  "Mick?" Karin said after they had trudged on in silence for several minutes more. "The people who do this, why do they do it? Why like this?"

  "I don’t know," Mick told her sadly. "I don’t understand their thinking at all."

  Thirty-eight: TRAP

  Wiz Zumwalt sat on a rock under a spreading tree and savored the experience. It was cool and pleasant here. The late afternoon sun did not quite reach down through the leaves and the forest around him was alive with birdsong and the skitterings of squirrels and other little animals.

  Wiz wondered what season it was. It looked like late summer, but the Bubble World didn’t seem to have seasons. How can a world shaped like a burrito have seasons? he wondered.

  For once the pressure was off. The visualization program was running well, Lannach was keeping the gremlins under control and everything else he could think of to do was done. So he had slipped out of the Mousehole for a couple of hours to do a little exploring.

  It was the first time he had really been outside the Mousehole since he arrived and he was enjoying it. No gremlins, no brownies, no elves and no dwarves.

  Glandurg could not believe his luck. After all the
weeks of hunting and the long weary days of waiting, there was the Sparrow, not two hundred paces away, with his back turned!

  And better yet, there was no sign of the protection spell Snorri had reported. Nothing that would do violence to an attacker. There was magic about him, of course, but after all he was a wizard.

  Glandurg nearly hugged himself with glee.

  He dropped to his belly and wormed his way forward through the fallen leaves. He moved with exquisite care as he eased his silent way toward the sitting figure. Fifty paces and still no move from his quarry. Twenty. Ten.

  Glandurg rose with a rush, took two steps and leaped toward the defenseless Sparrow.

  He didn’t exactly bounce, but he certainly vibrated. Glandurg had leaped directly into the center of an enormous spider web that sprang up in his path. His sword fell to the leaves, but he remained thoroughly stuck in the mass of sticky strands.

  Wiz turned around at the noise and gaped. There was a dwarf hanging upside down in a giant spider’s web. The dwarf was struggling frantically and cursing luridly. Wiz didn’t speak dwarfish, but it sure sounded lurid.

  Wiz waited until the dwarf ran down.

  "Now," he said. "Just what is this all about?"

  "A protection spell," Glandurg spat. "I might have known."

  "You didn’t think I’d come walking in the woods without one, did you? I hoped I’d seen the last of you back at the Capital, but I wasn’t taking any chances."

  Actually Wiz had devised the spell against any wild animals that might be lurking in the forest. He didn’t want to kill them, so he had settled for something that would immobilize an attacker.

  "You know, I’m sort of glad you did show up," Wiz said. "Now maybe you’ll tell me what this is all about."

  Glandurg nodded and the gesture made his beard fall in his face. He shook his head to clear his eyes.

  "Meet it is that you should know the cause and agent of your doom," he said in his best skaldic voice. Or at least the best voice he could manage suspended upside down in midair.

  "I hight Glandurg; son of Megli, praised above all smiths; son of Famlir, who fell in the battle of Breccan’s Doom; son of…"