by Diane Duane
“Dirk?”
He stopped and looked at her. “What?—Oh, no, it’s nothing to do with Solomon and the genii, that was just—”
“Dirk!!”
He stopped again.
What Brianna really wanted to say was You are a king-geek among geeks!, but that would be seriously counterproductive at the moment. So instead she said, “I need to do—something kind of weird.”
Dirk turned that sideways-cock-of-the-head- look on her and looked, for the moment, completely like a bird. To Brianna’s utter astonishment, he also went pale. “Weird how?” Dirk said.
“For my parascience fair project.”
He suddenly looked very much relieved, but also puzzled. “You mean you’re not doing the sword thing with Arthur Etchison?” Dirk said.
She stared at him. “What?”
“This morning before everybody went in, he said he’d had this great idea, and you were just the one to handle the execution and do the heavy lifting.”
Brianna went ice-cold, then flushed hot a second later. “He’d had—!!” Why, that big-mouthed, stuck-up—! “Well, no I am not,” she said, not caring for the moment that she sounded furious. “And he is just very wrong. Arthur can just go forge his own sword and stick it right—” Brianna stopped herself. “—Where magic swords are usually stuck,” she said. “As a rule, stones are involved, I believe.”
Dirk gave her a crooked smile: an odd look, but one Brianna still liked much better at the moment than Arthur’s. “Okay,” he said. “So what about the project? What were you going to do?”
“A gingerbread house,” she said. “Full size. At least, I want to. But I don’t know how. And Mrs. Baldwin wasn’t much help.” Then she laughed. “Well, yeah, she was, but only to give me a sense that you can’t just whip up a whole lot of gingerbread by magic and then stick it together, and expect it to stay up.”
Dirk sat back in his chair and tilted his head sideways again, but this time the effect was more considered and less freaked-out. “Well, no,” he said. “The stresses would be all wrong for the material. It would weigh too much. Then there’s interior and exterior bracing to think about, and—” He paused. “You know, the smartest way would be to grow it.”
Brianna stared at him. “Grow it? Gingerbread?”
Dirk shrugged. “Sure,” he said, “why not? That’s probably how the witch who built the original managed it. You take some of the ingredients of gingerbread—” He paused, thinking. “Well, ginger, obviously. Flour. Water. But you know—” He suddenly got a very canny look on that face: the eyes positively came alive, like those of someone who was getting ready to play a trick on the world. “You could make this really strong if you used live ginger, rather than the dry ground-up stuff. That might have been what the original witch did, too. Get the live organic material to grow up through the stuff that was alive at one point—the flour—after you’d complexed the water in with it. You’d get an internally braced solid structure. Like reinforced concrete, but organic.”
“Prestressed gingerbread?” Brianna said, and laughed. “Are you serious?”
“Sure. It’d come out almost like wood if you got the water mixed correctly with the flour, kept it even enough. You could even just suck the water molecules into the spell right out of the air.” He turned suddenly from her to the computer. “Let me check the school weather station, I need to see what the relative humidity is—”
Brianna was astounded. “I hadn’t thought about doing this today, wouldn’t it take more time, I mean—”
“Why would it? Once you’ve designed the basic structure, and laid whatever shape you’re imagining over the construction spell, you can collapse the spell and then re-enable it anywhere you want it.”
And suddenly he turned his back on his barley-sugar pillar and headed for one of the computers by the window: pointed at its mouse, wiggled it. The screen came up out of black, displaying a kind of wireframe diagram of the pillar. “That’s so wild,” Brianna said.
“What” The structure?”
“No,” Brianna said, and laughed. “That your two columns have names.”
“Oh, yeah,” Dirk said. “They’re even in Tarot cards, in some decks. I think they symbolize the union of opposites or something.” He snapped his fingers, and the wireframe diagram vanished. “Meanwhile, there has to be a blueprint first,” he said. “And then the spell to prestress the structure.” He sat down in the typing chair in front of the monitor and began drumming his fingers on either side of the keyboard, a thinking gesture. “We have better flour than they used to have in the old days: the protein structures are different. The old stuff, it’d have been what we would think of as a really crude wholegrain prestressed. Even with the crudest flour we can get, you’re going to be working with something that’s a lot better milled. And then there’s the question of the windows. First you’d have to—”
“Whoa, whoa, wait!” Brianna said. “Too much, not all at once, give me a minute!” She pulled her notebook out and started making witch-writing on the outer cover: it would sink in and slide itself onto the lined paper inside.
“It’s okay,” Dirk said. “Don’t get stressed, this will all transfer to my laptop, and it can share it with your notebook.” He started typing, and the beginnings of a blueprint began assembling itself on the screen. “Basic stuff first?” he said. “Just the physical design. You tell me how you see it.”
“Yeah. Then, if it’s going to be a grown thing, we’ll need a couple of contagion and sympathetic magic routines to hold the growth in…”
Dirk nodded, typed, occasionally stopped to use the mouse. A basic floor plan started to appear on the screen, with space for the spell fragments to be inserted and locked into the design. Dirk was really good with the CAD: if his thought processes made him seem scary-smart, maybe that was a good thing here. And who knows what he thinks of my thought processes, Brianna thought. Probably finds them a bit lame. But that wouldn’t matter if she pulled this off.
“If we pull this off,” Dirk said.
The blood ran right out of Brianna’s face: she could feel it leaving her white and cold. “What did you say?”
“Sorry,” Dirk said, sounding completely unconcerned. “I have the underhearing gift sometimes, when work’s involved.” He said it as if he was discussing the weather, and boring weather at that. “I don’t pay any attention to it, mostly. It’s usually things that people’ll say out loud, sooner or later. Sometimes they even think they did say it. No big deal.”
Brianna gulped. His voice was the voice of someone who was completely used to no one paying any serious attention to him. But the pain the concept caused her was apparently either invisible or unimportant to him: he went right on with what he was doing at the computer. “There,” Dirk said, “just the basic walls-windows-and-roof stuff. Interior design can wait—”
And outside the lab, a bell rang: the bell for the end of first period. “Oh no!” Brianna said.
“What’s the matter?” Dirk said. “Plenty of time later. If you’re not too busy—”
“Me?” Brianna said. “Oh, no. No! We can meet after school—”
“If you don’t mind,” Dirk said.
“Mind? You’re only saving my life,” Brianna said. “Not to mention helping me stick it to Arthur.”
Dirk’s look was amused. “What time?” he said.
“One forty-five?” Brianna said. “Is that too early? I don’t officially have a last period, today.”
“Sounds fine,” Dirk said.
Behind them, the barley-sugar column was levitating up off the lab table as Dirk stood up. “Here, let me get that for you,” Brianna said, and pointed at the door, whispering the basic portal spell: the door swung inward for them. “Dirk—”
“Don’t thank me,” he said: and just for a moment he gave her a look that was less than strictly blue-on-blue. “If. it works, then yeah. And isn’t that Arthur down at the end of the hall? Looks like he’s looking for somebody.”
“So it is,” Brianna said. “Later!” And she swept on down that way to instruct Arthur as to the potential placement of potential magic swords.
When Brianna walked in her front door with Dirk after school, she was praying that her brother wasn’t there to start teasing her. But there was no sign of him, Relaxing a little, Brianna headed for the living room to see if there was anyone around. If there was, she wanted to get the necessary introductions over with; then she and Dirk could get out in back of the house and get to work. “Mom?” she said as she turned the corner from the front hall.
Instead of her mom, she found her dad there, sitting crosslegged in the middle of the living room floor, surrounded by a number of piles of perfectly hovering levitating paperwork, and sorting through one pile that he was holding in his lap. As they came in, he glanced up and gave Brianna and Dirk a l somewhat surprised look. “Hi, sweetie. Are you running early? Or am I running late?”
“I’m early, Daddy. I had a last period study hall I didn’t need. Got more important things to do. Daddy, this is Dirk.”
“Dirk Willis,” he said. “Hi, Mr. Wilkes.”
“Hi, Dirk.” Brianna’s dad took the pile of papers in his lap, boosted them into the air and left them hanging there; then plucked a neighboring pile down into his lap and started riffling through them. Brand’s dad ran an accountancy firm in Salem. If all his clients on both sides of the metaphysical divide described his skill with figures as magical, he just smiled and said that all his clients deserved the very best he could do. “You kids don’t need to be working in here, do you?” he said. “This place is going to turn into a paperwork blizzard if these piles get bumped into.”
“No, Daddy,” Brianna said. “We’re going to be out in the back; we’ll be working on our parascience fair project.”
Brianna’s dad nodded, and looked away, unconcerned. Knowing her dad, she could just hear him thinking: oh, the Magic Sword thing fell through—but refusing to say anything about it out loud. She hoped desperately that Dirk couldn’t hear him thinking it. Brianna started blushing—then pushed that, and the embarrassment about it, aside; there was just no time for it now. She and Dirk headed out towards the back door, and into the back yard of the house.
On the other side of the screen door, Dirk stood on the steps and looked around him with a strangely satisfied expression. “Good,” he said.
Brianna regarded him with astonishment, as this was a word that had never occurred to her in connection with her back yard. “Good?” she said, incredulous. “What we’ve got back here is crabgrass city. This is good?”
Dirk grinned at her a little. “Well,” he said, “this process could get a little bit… destructive.” He glanced around at the expense of scraggly, dried out, weed-ridden “lawn” that constituted the Wilkes back yard. “If there was anything like landscaping back here, I could feel guilty about what might happen to it. And it might take time to put back.”
Brianna shook her head, laughed, and walked out into the middle of the crabgrass, looking around at it. “Dad keeps saying he thinks the ground is cursed. Mom keeps saying he put too much bonemeal on it a few years ago, and it’s never recovered. Dad has no green thumb whatsoever. Any plant he touches, usually just withers right up.”
“That might come in useful later,” Dirk said. “But never mind it now. You have the bag?”
Brianna nodded, and from the schoolbag over her shoulder pulled out the plastic grocery bag that had taken them the better part of the after-school afternoon to fill with the right ingredients. They had spent lunch going over the Materia Magica together, working out the exact characteristics and species of the ginger they were going to need. Then they wound up teleporting out on the sly to three separate supermarkets, one after the other, looking for the right kind of ginger. The difficulty was that all the ginger rhizomes looked approximately the same, whether they were magic or not: there were few signs to guide you with certainty to the kind you needed. But finally, in the fourth supermarket they’d gone to them—an Asian supermarket that specialized in supplying the local Chinese restaurants—they had stumbled across the right stuff. Now, as she handed Dirk the bag, he rooted around in there and pulled the knobby golden root out, regarding it with satisfaction.
“This has to be what they used,” he said. “Must have gotten to Europe by coming all the way down the Silk Road. It doesn’t look like much, does it?”
Brianna shook her head. From the carrier bag she pulled out a sack of whole wheat flour that they’d picked up at the first supermarket they’d gone to. “Is this going to be enough for the whole thing, do you think?”
“Should be fine,” Dirk said. “Under the Law of Contagion, part stands for all. If you can hold the right imagery in your head, it’s not the amount of materials that will matter; it’s the quality of the imagery and the amount of power you apply to it. Like you saw before, with the barley sugar column. That whole thing came out of one sugar packet from the cafeteria, and a lot of intention.” Dirk walked around the weedy expanse of the backyard for a few moments, pacing. “Okay,” he said. “You got it all into your notebook out of my laptop, I think—”
“I think so,” Brianna said. “Let’s give it a shot.” She pulled the notebook out of her shoulderbag, paging through it past the notes she’d been making all day for the posters and other visual aids that would be mounted in and around the gingerbread house. Brianna sighed at the sight of the scribbles, all of which were going to need extensive work in the computer to smooth out the wording. But it was going to look good when it was done, especially all the data about the cultural background of the house, and the worn-down “magical” rhymes that still persisted in some versions of the Hansel and Gretel story. Probably there’d also be room for some heartfelt commentary about how witches should not allow their cultural heritage to be peeled away from them, even if it sometimes seemed of dubious value or correctness in this modern time. “We are all part of all of our heritage,” it would go; “we can’t afford to try to cherry-pick the parts we want to keep or the parts we’d prefer to throw away. The context can only be understood in terms of the entire picture. And this is part of the picture, no matter how stereotypical it looks and how many calories it seems to contain …”
But right now the fancy verbiage could wait. Brianna put her notebook down on the ground. Then she stood over it for a moment, held her arms out in the proper invocatory gesture, and called up in her mind the words that she would need to kick it out into expansion mode.
Dirk suddenly looked a little concerned. “You do have a visual-blocking ‘glamourie’ field around the edges of this place, don’t you?”
Brianna paused, grinned. “With my brother?” she said. “Oh yes. And it’s robust. When Mick built his first rocket ship to go to Mars, the neighbors never even noticed the ignition.”
“That would pass for robust,” Dirk said. “Okay… let’s go for it!”
Brianna said the words. Immediately the notebook began spreading itself away across the back yard, like an oversized picnic tablecloth covered with designs—the very specific spell diagram necessary to let the ginger do its job, and the outlining of the “blueprint” for the house itself. She and Dirk had gone back and forth about the basic design, but at the end of a long discussion it had seemed simpler to go for something that would duplicate a German peasant’s cottage of the 1600’s, rather than a prettied-up version that might have more room for people to stand around inside, but also possibly be accused of being less realistic. The final result—two rooms, one with a small bed for the witch and a tinier one for Gretel, the other containing a sort of condensed kitchen/dining area, complete with nasty small cage—had satisfied them both and would, Brianna thought, impress everybody who saw it. “We’ll get as close as we can to archetype,” Brianna said, as she now looked over the fully expanded blueprint where it lay glowing on the ground, “without getting fetishistic about it.”
Dirk gave her an amused look. “Is there any
body else at our school,” he said, “who would use the words ‘archetype’ and ‘fetishistic’ in the same sentence?”
Brianna actually paused, wondering if that was something she ought to be blushing about—then laughed out loud, because the look Dirk was giving her was nothing whatsoever like the looks she either got from Arthur, or dreamed about getting from him. “Probably not,” she said, “so if you won’t tell on me, I won’t do it again. Is the magic ginger ready?”
“It was born ready, as far as I can tell,” Dirk said, and walked out into the middle of the cottage plan. “I think you’d better put the flour down first, though.”
“Right,” Brianna said. She walked out onto the plan after him, and carefully tore just a corner off the bag of flour. “Is it going to need a whole lot of this, or will just a little be enough?”
“Keep it light,” Dirk said. “You’re going to want to have enough to resurrect the design when you put it up in the school gym, or the parking lot or wherever.”
Brianna started to head for the outer edges of the diagram—then changed her mind. No, better do the inside first: you’ll be less likely to mess it up. Cautiously she sprinkled the flour over the glowing spell-tracery of the “blueprint”, covering up the lines that marked where the interior walls would rise. “I feel like the kids in the story,” she said. “Except without the breadcrumbs.”
Dirk watched how she was walking, not looking up. “What breadcrumbs?” he said. “I thought when the wicked stepmother tried to lose them, they used rocks or something to mark their trail.”