The Song of the Quarkbeast tld-2

by Jasper Fforde

  ‘Oh, yes?’ I replied suspiciously. ‘What sort of proposal?’

  Mr Trimble took a deep breath.

  ‘My clients would like Kazam to reanimate the mobile telephone network.’

  It wasn’t the first time we had been asked to switch the network back on, and wouldn’t be the last. Mobile phones had been one of the first things to go when the drop in wizidrical power required the slow switch-off of services that ran, essentially, on magic. Mobiles and computers hadn’t been possible since 1993, colour televisions since 1999 and GPS navigation since 2001. The last electromagical device to be switched off was the microwave oven in 2004, and that was only because aircraft radar used the same electromagical principle. The only magical technologies of any size still running were north-pointing directional compasses and the spell that kept bicycles from falling over – both of which were so old that no one knew how to switch them off anyway.

  ‘We’ve been approached by BellShout, N2O and VodaBunny about this before, I said, ‘and our answer is the same: all in good time. The mobile phone network will be active just as soon as we have brought back those electromagical technologies that have priority – medical scanners, and then microwave ovens.’

  ‘Will that take long?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘A while. When the electromagical spells were shut down no one made a hard copy of the spell, so much is having to be rewritten – when you consider that a yo-yo has over two hundred lines of spell-text to make it work and a photocopier over ten thousand, you get an idea of the complexity of the task. Besides,’ I added, ‘the switch-off gave us an opportunity to reconsider the direction magic will take. We’ll not make the same mistake we made last time. Licensing the power of magic to individuals and companies placed sorcery in the hands of the unscrupulous. Magic belongs in the hands of all – or none.’

  We stared at one another for a few moments. It was a view that the Great Zambini had embraced, and almost everyone at Kazam.

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Trimble, ‘would you take it to your sorcerers anyway? I’d like to report back to my clients that the refusal was unanimous.’

  I agreed I would speak to them, and Mr Trimble rose to fetch his hat, which had automatically made its way to the hatstand, part of a self-tidying spell that ran throughout the building.

  ‘I’m most grateful to you for your time,’ he said. ‘The executives at BellShout will be very happy to talk if you change your position.’

  And after shaking my hand, he left.

  I wasn’t alone for long. The Prince dropped by with his day’s schedule, and I could see he wasn’t happy.

  ‘Pizza deliveries again?’ he said in exasperation. ‘When do we do some proper carpeteering?’

  ‘Maybe sooner than you think,’ I told him. ‘I’ve got a task for you.’

  His Royal Highness Prince Omar Smith Arkwright Ben Nasil was one of our carpeteers, which might have been a noble and exciting profession were it not for an incident one wintry night when Brother Velobius and his two passengers died when their Turkmen Mk18C ‘Bukhara’ broke up in mid-air owing to rug fatigue. For safety reasons, the Civil Aviation Authority had introduced strict rules that made it almost impossible to make magic carpet flight profitable. Limited top speed, navigation lights – and worst of all, a ban on passengers. All we could do were deliveries.

  ‘Here’s the thing,’ I said. ‘Kevin has foretold the Great Zambini returning tomorrow afternoon at 16.03 and fourteen seconds.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ said the Prince, ‘Kevin knows when but not where?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it. We need Zambini back, Nasil,[16] so stick to Zipp like a limpet. If he has a vision about where Zambini might show up, I want you to come and find me immediately.’

  He said he wouldn’t fail me, made some comment about needing to take his carpet off the flightline next month for some remedial patchwork, and we said goodbye.

  ‘Is he really a prince?’ asked Tiger, who had just returned.

  ‘Second in line to the Duchy of Portland,’ I told him. ‘What’s the deal with Moobin?’

  ‘He said come up any time. He said you’d be impressed.’

  This worried me as Moobin liked a challenge, and was quite used to risking life and limb on weird experimental stuff that he described as ‘important, cutting-edge stuff’ but we saw more as ‘just being a nuisance’.

  ‘Let’s do it.’ I sighed. ‘It’s not like things could get more weird this morning.’

  Wizard Moobin

  We walked towards the elevators.

  ‘I hope he doesn’t blow himself up again,’ I said.

  ‘Or make himself attractive to badgers,’ added Tiger, reminding us of the time Zambini Towers had been inundated with winsome, lovelorn black-and-white mustelids when a badger-repellent spell had gone badly wrong. Explosions and badger attraction aside, Moobin was easily our favourite sorcerer as he was probably the most normal. He was in his mid-forties but looked a lot younger, and although more powerful than Mawgon, lacked precise control and often surged – the word for a sudden burst of wizidrical energy just when you didn’t want it. Just before the Big Magic he had nearly blown us all to pieces when he turned lead into gold, then blew up another laboratory while trying to invent a spell that reversed the effects of laboratories blowing up.

  We took the elevator to the third floor, which involved simply saying the floor number and then stepping into the empty lift shaft. You fell to the floor you had requested and had to step smartly out before you fell back down again. Unskilled users had been known to get stuck for some time oscillating back and forth – on one occasion, for three days.

  We found Moobin in his room, which was actually three rooms knocked into one. He used it for sleeping and tinkering, which explained the vast amount of apparatus lying about, none of which I understood, but all of which looked dangerously complicated, and hastily mended.

  ‘Jennifer!’ he remarked excitedly when he saw me. ‘How did the finding job go this morning?’

  ‘It depends on your viewpoint. Did you hear that the Amazing Blix is attempting to accolade himself “the All Powerful”?’

  Moobin laughed.

  ‘His arrogance will be his undoing. Right, then,’ he continued, clapping his hands together, ‘to work. What’s the Holy Grail of the Mystical Arts?’

  I never saw him so excited as when he was experimenting, and excitement made his wild hair look wilder, and his unkempt manner of dress that much more shabby. He looked less like a person, in fact, and more like an unmade bed with arms and legs.

  ‘Invisibility?’ I asked incredulously, for not even the Mighty Shandar had ever achieved that. As far as we knew, no one had, although entire lives had been spent in the attempt.

  ‘Okay,’ said Moobin, ‘what’s the slightly-less-than-Holy Grail?’

  ‘Moving cathedrals?’ suggested Tiger.

  ‘Levitation,’ sniffed Moobin, ‘nothing more.’

  ‘Flying without a carpet or aeroplane under you?’ I asked.

  ‘Okay, even-slightly-less-than-Holy Grail?’

  ‘Teleportation?’ I said.

  ‘Exactly!’ replied Moobin excitedly. ‘The physical shifting from one place to another more or less simultaneously. The current record stands at eighty-five miles.’

  ‘The Great Zambini in his youth,’ I said to Tiger, ‘over sixty years ago.’

  ‘My personal best,’ announced Moobin grandly, ‘is thirty-eight feet, and I’m going to try and increase that to . . . seventy.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, wondering what could possibly go wrong, and thinking of eight possibilities almost immediately, which ranged from the destruction of two city blocks, through several stages of varying destructiveness to nothing more innocuous than liquifying the earwax of those in the immediate vicinity – the usual knock-on effect of a teleportation. In fact, the purpose of the original enchantment had been precisely that – ear cleaning. Spooky instantaneous transportation was simply found
to be a fortuitously useful side effect. The wizard who wrote the original spell in 1698 had been beta-testing it as ‘An Improved & Much Sanitary Method of Ear Cleansing’ when he found himself inexplicably on the street outside. Much research followed and the range and accuracy greatly increased, but the earwax issue had remained. You could always hear better at the end of a jaunt than at the beginning.

  ‘Not only will I teleport seventy feet,’ continued Moobin dramatically, ‘but I will also travel through a sheet of three-millimetre plywood on the way.’

  Tiger and I looked at one another doubtfully. Moobin’s last attempt to pass through solid objects had ended with a broken nose and a bruised knee.

  ‘I’ve been working with silk, paper and cardboard,’ he said, in an attempt to reassure us as he led us into the corridor outside, ‘and it’s time to move on up.’

  ‘And you’re no longer leaving your clothes behind?’ I asked, referring to an earlier and mildly embarrassing episode.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Moobin, who hadn’t been the one embarrassed, ‘I had been eating nougat earlier – I should have known better.’

  Owing to its status as a former hotel, Zambini Towers was not short on long corridors, and in the one outside his room, Moobin had hung a large sheet of plywood from a light fixture. He drew a cross on the floor about two yards in front of the ply, handed Tiger a pocket Shandometer to measure peak wizidrical output, then gave me a tape measure to hold.

  ‘Call out when I get to seventy feet, will you?’

  And he walked off past the sheet of ply and into the darkness while I watched the tape pay out.

  ‘Can’t he teleport around the ply?’ asked Tiger.

  ‘Curved teleporting is not possible.’ I told him. ‘Magic’s effect only works in straight lines. A teleportation around a corner means taking the shortest route through whatever the corner is made of. Passing through the rock and soil of the planet on a straight-line journey through the earth from here to Singapore takes a lot of wizidrical energy – it makes carpet travel a lot more crackle-efficient than transcontinental teleportation.’

  I thought for a moment.

  ‘There was an enchanter over in France who experimented with high-end clear-air teleportation. He started from Paris and reappeared two and a half thousand feet over Toulouse.’

  ‘That must have been unexpected.’

  ‘On the contrary, it was planned – but his parachute failed to open and he fell screaming to his death in a very undignified manner. The power of magic began to wane soon after, and no one tried it again.’

  ‘Isn’t that greater than Zambini’s record?’

  ‘It’s not official if you don’t survive it.’

  ‘I can recommend hayricks for soft landings,’ Tiger replied thoughtfully. ‘Sorcery isn’t really straightforward at all, is it?’

  Tiger had been with Kazam only two months, and he was still trying to get his head around the limiting practicalities of magic. Most people thought you just wave your hands and sim-sallah-bim, but it was a lot more complex than that. Sorcery was not so much doing what you wanted to do, but doing what you could do – or ingeniously finding a way around the physical limitations of the craft.

  The tape measure continued to pay out, and when it had reached the correct distance I called out and Moobin stopped.

  ‘Okay, here we go, then,’ came Moobin’s confident voice from the other end of the corridor. ‘Seventy feet and through a three-millimetre sheet of plywood.’

  I nodded to Tiger, who had lifted the cover from one of the many ‘Magiclysm’ alarms dotted about the building. In the event that Moobin’s spell went squiffy, Tiger would press the red button and the sprinklers would trip, spraying water over the interior of the building and quenching any spells. Wednesday morning was traditionally the spell test day, and many of the residents wore gumboots and raincoats indoors on that day, just in case.

  We waited in silence. Magic was odd stuff, and the powers of sorcery are more often found in those who can obsess to a degree that would be considered faintly undesirable in society. You had to focus every synapse in your mind to the exclusion of everything else and fire the magic out of your index fingers. That’s why observers remained quiet when spelling was afoot. Break the concentration and whoever was casting the spell would have to start again. It’s like interrupting poetry. It just isn’t done.

  We heard a few grunts from the darkness beyond the sheet of ply, then a pause while nothing happened. There was another pause, more grunts, and then nothing happened again. It was just when nothing was about to happen for the third time that there was a faint ‘pop’ from the other end of the corridor as the air rushed in to fill the hole in the air where Moobin wasn’t, and a half-second later he reappeared in front of us, the air he had displaced hitting us a moment later as a faintly discernible shock-wave.

  ‘Ta-da!’ said Moobin, staring at his feet where he had appeared, directly above the white cross. ‘Seventy feet, and through a sheet of three-millimetre plywood. Tomorrow I’ll try six-millimetre ply, then chipboard.’

  ‘Impressive. I’ll mark it up in the records ledger tonight.’

  ‘It’s also a new personal best,’ continued Moobin excitedly, ‘and if those heathen scum over at iMagic aren’t also doing teleport work, it makes me the best teleporter on the planet. Why are you both staring at me?’

  ‘You look like you’ve been glazed,’ I said, putting out a hand to touch him, ‘like a doughnut.’

  Just then, the separate sheets of thin wood veneer that made up the plywood fell neatly into three thin and very flappy pieces.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Moobin, ‘I appear to have picked up the glue from the plywood as I passed through. How did that happen?’

  He wasn’t asking any of us, of course, he was simply confused. But that was what research and development was like. Full of semi-triumphs and perplexing unforeseen consequences, such as the whole violent hiccuping thing when conjuring up fire – or the propensity for fillings to fall out of bystanders’ mouths when attempting to tease a rainstorm out of a cloud.

  ‘The Transient Moose can teleport almost without thinking,’ muttered Moobin, faintly annoyed, ‘and go around corners.’

  ‘But he’s a spell himself,’ observed Tiger helpfully, ‘and presumably has zero mass, so it must be easier.’

  ‘Probably,’ replied Moobin gloomily. ‘I wish he’d let me have a closer look.’

  The Wizard Moobin had recently become fascinated by the Transient Moose, and had fired a few spell-probes into it to discover just what particular enchantment was keeping it going. The probes had learned little except that the original sorcerer was possibly Greek and the Moose was most likely running Mandrake Sentience Emulation Protocols,[17] which didn’t help, as nearly all spells that made something appear lifelike were run under Mandrake.

  It wasn’t just curiosity. The Mystical Arts were arcane, secretive and, once a specific spell was discovered, rarely shared. Ancient wizards went to their graves with the really groovy stuff still locked inside their heads. Some wrote it down in big leather-bound books, but most didn’t. It would be very valuable indeed to find out not only how the Moose managed to live so long and teleport so effortlessly, but how it could do it on an average crackle consumption of only 172.8 Shandars a day.

  ‘I’m going to have a shower,’ said Moobin, ‘so long as someone hasn’t already swiped the hot water.’

  ‘Oops,’ said Tiger.

  ‘What, again?’ asked Moobin.

  ‘I was covered in mud.’

  ‘Have you been thinking about the bridge gig?’ I asked, changing the subject. I had yet to see a detailed plan or risk assessment.

  ‘I’m working on it,’ Moobin said, ‘although with the Dibble Coils stuck on standby we’ll need all of us if we’re to do it in a day.’

  ‘Lady Mawgon is going to try to get them back online this morning.’

  ‘The old bat’s going to try and hack the Dibble?’ replied Moobin
with a smile. ‘Rather her than me.’

  He nodded his head thoughtfully. Hacking into a well-cast spell was not for the faint-hearted. Wizards guarded their work jealously, and would often leave traps for busybodies attempting to copy their work. We watched as Moobin went back into his room, mumbling to himself as his feet made sticky footprints on the oak flooring.

  ‘Right, then,’ I said, checking my watch, ‘time to see Lady Mawgon – don’t mention the fact we took no payment for the finding gig.’

  Hacking the Dibble

  ‘What in heck are Dibble Storage Coils?’ asked Tiger as we made our way back downstairs. He still had a good decade’s worth of learning to do, and only two years in which to do it. I had to teach him most of it, and some of the stuff I needed to impart I hadn’t even learned myself.

  ‘It’s a spell designed by Charles Dibble the Extraordinary,’ I explained. ‘In the days when wizidrical power was falling, the Great Zambini looked at several ways to store what crackle there was. Dibble the Extraordinary wasn’t so much a practising sorcerer, but one who wrote spells for those who were. He wrote the entire mobile phone network incantation for ElectroMagic, Inc. back in the forties and then committed his energies to wizidrical storage devices. He was long retired when Zambini had him build the coils. Simply put, they transform the building into something akin to a huge rechargeable battery.’

  Tiger looked around, as if wondering how he could have missed something so important.

  ‘Where are they?’

  I waved my hand in the direction of the building at large.

  ‘The coils are not coils you can see – they are more like a constantly circulating field of negative wizidrical energy that can absorb, store and then discharge vast amounts of crackle on command. The applications are endless, from boring holes in solid rock to making something from nothing. We have the capacity to hold four GigaShandars.’[18]

  ‘And what could a GigaShandar actually do?’ asked Tiger, who was almost permanently inquisitive.