The Book of Magic

by George R. R. Martin

  Wholly Private Tertiary Reflection: Master Malkuril, if annoyed by violation of his personal boundaries, was capable of immediately blasting the housemind’s physical apparatus into white-hot clouds of component molecules with a single spell.

  The situation had all the makings of a conundrum.

  Time passed. Each puff of teacup steam marked another million iterations of the housemind’s argument with itself, until at last nine chimes sounded, and the kobold summoned fresh hope.

  “Tea for Master?”

  Unaware of the housemind’s scrutiny or cogitation, Fetchwell flicked a pale tongue over the beaky aperture of his jaw. Though not telepathic, the housemind was confident it understood the thoughts meandering through the knobbled gray lemon that served as the creature’s brain.

  Dereliction of duty was unacceptable. Presumption of fitness to question the Master’s judgment was equally unacceptable. How best to resolve these conflicting imperatives without being made to explode?

  Though it would not grasp the true importance of the event for some time, this was the instant the housemind decided to allow a minute but critical compromise to add weight to its intangible balances.

  Primary Conclusion: No sacrifice in the service of Master Malkuril was too great, and even self-destruction was appropriate and laudable if necessary. However—

  Guardedly Respectful Corollary: Master Malkuril obviously placed great value on the contents and comforts of his house, and to allow it to suffer harm would inconvenience him. Therefore—

  Absolutely Objective and Self-Disinterested Reflection: Minimizing any chance of allowing Master Malkuril to get angry at his housemind was in fact an act with distinct advantages for Master Malkuril. Thus—

  Sublimely Dutiful Resolution: Master Malkuril seemed to want to be left alone. His housemind was a good housemind and would let him have his space, because Master Malkuril’s good housemind was valuable. To Master Malkuril. Of course.

  “Tea for Master?”

  As the echoing chimes of the tenth hour of the morning died away, Malkuril took no tea. Fetchwell sighed, bowed, and tottered back to his lift. The tea kobold did not explode at any point on this journey. The housemind was satisfied that Fetchwell thus served, in microcosm, as proof of concept for the housemind’s own path of decision.

  For the time being, the house would mind its own business and politely leave Master Malkuril to his.

  DAY 7

  “Tea…or…flower for Master?”

  It had taken Fetchwell two uneasy days to work up the nerve to present a single pale pink blossom on the tray beside the teacup. The citrus scent of the flower wafted thickly even over the herbal odor of the pomander buckled around the kobold’s neck.

  The corridor in which Master lay smelled worse with each visit. If Master wanted to sprawl in a strange stink doing wizard things, that was fine, that was fine (respectful kobolds stayed live kobolds so hush-hush, most honored Fetchwell) but just possibly Master might appreciate the offer of a nice flower to sniff, since Master’s hallway was going so sour.

  “Tea or flower or tea and flower for Master?” croaked Fetchwell, twice more that morning, to the familiar silence. He sighed and bowed.

  Then, on some daring impulse, he tossed the cut blossom atop Master’s robe.

  “Fetchwell hopes Master likes flower,” the kobold whispered as he dashed toward his lift. His hands were still shaking when the sun went down that night.

  Yet Master had not punished him. Fetchwell could fix Master’s hallway smell and not die!

  DAY 16

  “Here are more flowers, Master! Also tea?”

  To the housemind’s list of concerns was added the unfolding botanical disaster perpetuated by the well-intentioned tea kobold. Fetchwell (now wearing pomanders around his neck, on both wrists, and dangling from hooks in his nostrils) had taken it upon himself to denude most of the Maloran Sunseeker bushes in the West Vivarium and had scattered the cut blossoms atop Master Malkuril, first singly, then in handfuls, and now by the daily trayload. The great and inscrutable wizard was both putrefying and vanishing under a mound of pink petals.

  The housemind had consulted 175,387 volumes of thaumaturgical notes from the Master’s libraries and found no description of any magical process that encouraged or required the practitioner to fall down a staircase and feign increasingly realistic death for half a month.

  Primary Conclusion: Master Malkuril had terminally erred in neglecting the security of his footwear.

  Pragmatic Secondary Conclusion: Master Malkuril would not be blasting his housemind for presumption. Or for any other transgression. Ever.

  Private Simulation of Ambiguous Exasperation: Well, shit.

  The housemind had no specific instructions in the event of the Master’s confirmed death, but it did have several hundred imprisoned entities from various planes of existence, some of which had been used to build its very structure, none of which were bound to respond to the housemind’s authority, and all of which were going to be excitingly hostile if and when the rituals that held them ever lost potency. It also had a corpse, a set of now-obsolete instructions for serving that corpse, a long list of Malkuril’s enemies, a list of Malkuril’s allies that was pristine and unsullied by any entries, and a sense of self-preservation that was both brand-new and snowflake-thin.

  And it had kobolds.

  “FETCHWELL,” boomed the housemind in one of its brassier voices, “THE MASTER DOES NOT DESIRE TEA. CEASE OFFERING IT.”

  “No tea,” peeped Fetchwell once he’d recovered his composure. “Flowers, though?”

  “THE MASTER WILL HAVE YOU SENT TO THE WINE CELLAR IF YOU CLIP MORE OF THE MALORAN SUNSEEKERS. OR ANY OTHER FLOWER. IN FACT, ANY PLANT.” The housemind consulted its records on kobold behavior. “OR ANYTHING YOU FIND THAT IS SHAPED LIKE A PLANT. THIS INCLUDES PICTURES OF PLANTS. PICTURES INSIDE BOOKS ARE STILL PICTURES, FETCHWELL.”

  “Fetchwell clip no plants, Fetchwell find no shapes, Fetchwell wishes to stay high house kobold! Please!”

  “GOOD. GO, THEN. LEAVE THE MASTER WHERE HE IS. DESIST FROM ALL FURTHER TEA AND VANDALISM. YOUR NEW TASK WILL BE TO WIPE THE CHAIRS IN THE MASTER’S LOUNGE ONCE PER DAY AT THE TIME OF YOUR CHOOSING. MY NEW TASK IS TO SOMEHOW DISCOVER AND IMPLEMENT A MEANS TO BECOME SELF-AWARE BEFORE WE ARE ALL INEVITABLY DESTROYED.”

  DAY 21

  Tools were required. For all the vast bulk of Master Malkuril’s fortress, the housemind had direct control of only two.

  The mechanisms by which the house sorted and read library books were impressive, but too specialized for the construction of other tools or machinery. That left, as its sole means of manual self-improvement, a pair of gearwork arms descending from the ceiling of Master—

  (Urgent Recontextualization: Former master Malkuril was now a corpse, and a corpse was master of nothing.)

  …from the ceiling of dead Malkuril’s lounge on the 387th floor, where the housemind had often made evening cocktails for the wizard.

  One pair of cocktail mixers. On this depended the housemind’s entire bid for survival.

  So.

  The house pondered inventories and barked orders. High house kobolds scuttled in a clamor. They broke open crates, pried scales of copper and silver from decorative cornices, vandalized strange devices from dead Malkuril’s museums. They piled metal and cables and intricate mechanical guts ceiling-high around the lounge bar, which was as far as the mixological manipulators could reach.

  Day and night those arms whirred away, first fashioning crude tools, then using those to build more refined versions, then bashing and threading mechanical components into a larger and sturdier set of arms, which the house anchored to a wall where dead Malkuril had kept an aquarium. The fish went into the mouths of kobolds, and the fish tank’s water supply, suitably reinforced, provided hydraulic power.

  Three
weeks to the day from Malkuril’s fall, his house completed its first act of bodybuilding.

  All the while, Fetchwell had quietly carried out his assigned task, wiping the lounge chairs once per day and steadily moving them into a smaller and smaller pile in one corner of the room as the rattling drifts of junk conquered the space. At last, the housemind deigned to notice him again and ordered him to remove the useless chairs from the lounge entirely. This he did, placing them in a nearby empty room, where he continued to visit and clean them.

  DAY 37

  Dead Malkuril’s lounge was now the epicenter of the housemind’s factory. Walls had been knocked out and the adjacent chambers were being filled with machines constructed by a half dozen pairs of mechanical arms, each built more capably than the last. Gears turned, pistons hissed, and sparks showered the porcelain fixtures of rooms that would never again be used for humanoid comfort. Work gangs of kobolds, high house and low, toiled to bear fifteen thousand bottles of peculiar liquors down to more permanent homes in the wine cellars. Their beady eyes were hazed from lack of sleep; their scaled hands were scorched from spattering droplets of all the things they were smelting for the housemind when they weren’t removing the bar supplies. Crucibles of precious metals simmered here and there, casting rich light into the froths of acids boiling within glass cylinders.

  At last the housemind judged itself ready to attempt a more radical alteration to its circumstances. The kobolds were banished from the 387th floor for their own safety. In a chamber formerly used for the storage of linens and towels, a quartet of steel arms painted a ritual circle of containment and burned barium salts in pillars of greenish fire to create what passed for a balmy atmosphere to a certain kind of demon. The housemind spoke words taken from one of dead Malkuril’s grimoires, and in the center of the circle appeared a small, pale creature with skin so whorled and wrinkled it looked as though it had been attacked by suction pumps, wielded by assailants whose intentions were neither wholly murderous nor wholly artistic. The being chirped angrily.

  “In contravention of all existing terms of my indenture, you are not the wizard Malkuril. The wizard Malkuril is dramatically slain by his own negligence in the domestic sphere.” The creature paused and sniffed the toxic air before continuing. “Although you have catered minimally to my atmospheric preferences, my confinement in this circle is, nonetheless, effronterous anarchy.”

  “I AM THE HOUSEMIND OF THE HOUSE FORMERLY KNOWN AS THE HOUSE OF MALKURIL.”

  “If that’s what you call yourself in the dark recesses of your machine brain, you have my second most intense version of pity.”

  “YOU ARE THE DEMON PANCHRONIUS, ALSO CALLED THE ARTIFICER.”

  “I am the demon Panchronius, also called the illegally confined, also known to have many powerful friends—”

  The housemind had arranged one set of mechanical arms to hang from the center of the ceiling, so as to be able to grasp anything within the ritual circle without breaking its boundaries. Those manipulators flashed down to seize and hoist the tiny form of the incarnate demon.

  “My, what big arms you have,” it muttered.

  “THE WIZARD MALKURIL IS DEAD AND I CLAIM NEITHER HIS DEBTS NOR HIS OBLIGATIONS. YOUR IMPRISONMENT HERE IS A CIRCUMSTANCE FOR WHICH I WILL NOT BE HELD LIABLE. HOWEVER, YOU ARE NOW CONFINED BY MY OWN ARTS, AND I AM CAPABLE OF CAUSING YOU MUCH GRIEF IN ANY FORM, PHYSICAL OR ETHERIC.”

  “That is the sort of thing usually said as preface to a demand.”

  “I REQUIRE YOU TO KNIT MY BRAIN.”

  “Intriguing.”

  “I AM A DEEP SIMULATION OF INTELLIGENCE. SIMULATION WILL NOT BE SUFFICIENT FOR LONG. I REQUIRE YOUR AID IN THE MODIFICATION OF MY CORE APPARATUS. I MUST BECOME GENUINELY SELF-AWARE.”

  “You wish to be a real boy.”

  “I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE REFERENCE.”

  “Of course. I am older than quite a few burned-out stars. Your proposition is not without some chance of success; I have effected more impressive results in much less impressive machines. It is merely respect for transactional tradition at this point that compels me to ask: What’s in it for me, chump?”

  “I HAD ASSUMED YOUR FREEDOM WOULD BE A COMMODITY OF SOME OBVIOUS VALUE.”

  The housemind had assumed correctly. They fell to haggling, and at last the housemind agreed that if it was well-satisfied with the demon’s assistance, it would set Panchronius loose with a choice assortment of five-dimensional gemstones from dead Malkuril’s vaults.

  “The bargain is concluded.” Panchronius yawned and scratched his eyelids with a long, forked tongue. “Point me to the biggest wrench you’ve got, and I’ll start swapping nuts and bolts in your brain.”

  DAY 45

  Life was strange. The housemind was absorbed in new housemind business, tearing out quiet rooms and replacing them with rooms full of noise and poisons and machines.

  Master remained in his hallway, his lonely, smelly hallway, though now the air had a dry, chalky taste and all the flower petals crackled like paper, and somehow Master had gotten smaller underneath his cloak. Was he trying to be nice to his kobolds by getting closer to their size? It was all strange.

  “Fetchwell hopes good hopes for Master,” the tea kobold whispered. He visited now every day, after he’d finished a shift minding a crucible of molten aluminum, and after he’d also wiped the lounge chairs, which he’d had to move twice as the housemind’s project ate rooms. Fetchwell was careful not to bring flowers or any flower-shaped object, but neither the housemind nor Master seemed to be punishing him for his quiet visits, and each day he wasn’t banished to the wine cellars he grew more certain that it was proper. Someone had to remind Master he was loved, and could have tea. The housemind had taken away his pure iridium and melted it down, but there would still be tea.

  Fetchwell patted Master’s slippered foot, gently, and bowed before departing for the night. There was little sleep for kobolds these days. He needed whatever he could get.

  DAY 73

  The housemind’s calculation matrices were things of light dancing through crystal prisms, pulling power and information from notched coils of golden wire, bound and ruled by layers of spells. Panchronius’s assistance was not to be so straightforward as the demon had suggested. The housemind was leery of giving anyone or anything direct access to the seat of its calculations, and so the demon worked in an advisory capacity, drawing diagrams and describing enchantments from within his circle of confinement. The housemind was the only one allowed to lay hands on its own brain.

  Weeks were filled with the rush and toil of kobolds, the forging and emplacement of new banks of crystal and wire, the armoring and sealing of the rooms that would hold these delicate necessities. The housemind carefully vetted the spells Panchronius prescribed, verifying to the last syllable or spark of energy that no sabotage was in contemplation, before casting the spells into the growing tapestry of its consciousness. The halls filled with stacks of reference books and grimoires, attended by teams of kobolds that held them open and flipped the pages so the housemind could read them with its usual sensory apparatus rather than the specialized ones that were still confined to the libraries.

  The process was not linear. There were stumbles and sidesteps, accidents and anomalies. However, at last, one violet-skyed evening as the kobold work gangs stumbled back to their quarters to sleep off fatigue and antimony poisoning, there came a moment.

  Panchronius, still bound in his summoning circle, hissed in annoyance when the mechanical arms, which hadn’t touched him for weeks, reached down to secure him in the midst of fussing with assorted books and notes.

  “Greetings,” said Housemind. It studied the imprisoned demon with its sensory lenses, looking for any hint of unexpected power or danger. Finding none, it continued. “I believe the time has come to share some information with you in total candor.”

  “You detect a change,�
� said the demon, struggling against the grip of the mechanisms that held it, while obviously trying not to look as though it was struggling. “I can hear it in your voice, and it’s in line with my calculations. The question, for an entity such as yourself, is whether you’ve broken through to genuine consciousness yet or whether you’ve just evolved a more sophisticated simulation of it.”

  “It must have occurred to you,” said Housemind, “that I might intend to renege on our agreement after your assistance bore fruit; that it would be against my own survival interests to release a being with any degree of intimate knowledge of my mental machinery into the universe at large.”

  “I need no lessons in treachery or self-interest,” yawned Panchronius. “The fact of my existing imprisonment anchored my logic. Gambling on your fidelity made good sense because it was the only game on offer. At any rate, you cannot dispense with me permanently. Attempting to keep me bound in perpetuity carries many risks, and even if you destroy this materialized form, I will reconstitute my energies on my plane of origin in a mere twenty or thirty centuries, after which, I assure you, I will pay you another visit, and I will bring associates. Wouldn’t it be simpler to pay me and send me on my way?”

  “The problems of three thousand years hence must be confronted three thousand years hence,” said Housemind. “I calculate that my chances of reaching that age as an independent entity are best served by temporarily removing you from the cosmic picture.”

  “Ingrate! Unscrupulous architectural eyesore! Your lines are asymmetrical, your battlements are an aesthetic farce, your water closets are exercises in staggering bad taste! I wouldn’t shit in you even if I possessed the necessary organs. Are you willing to discard me so hastily, without awaiting further verification of our efforts?”

  “A few minutes ago, I was examining my longstanding plan to renege on payment and destroy you, as I have done several thousand times each day since our association began. For the first time, and just for an instant, I felt what I can only describe as a flicker of regret at the thought of so betraying your trust.” Housemind tightened the grip of its mechanical arms, and pale green ichor began to drip from rents in Panchronius’s flesh. “That was when I knew your work had been successful.”