by Rick Cook
“Oh, the barrier shouldn’t be a problem. Eventually it will diffuse through or be carried through by an infected spell.”
“How long,” Jerry asked slowly, “is eventually?”
“Fermi numbers, around ten years.”
Bal-Simba looked at him. “What kind of numbers?”
“Fermi numbers. You know, within an order of magnitude.”
“In other words,” Jerry added, “it could happen in anywhere from one year to a century.” He shook his head. “But even a year is way too long.”
“Well, if you’re closer it would strike faster. If you’re right next to this thing when you invoke the program it would get it right away.”
Jerry sighed. “Okay then. We’re going to have to get in there to make this work.”
“That will not be easy,” Bal-Simba told him.
“Wiz and the others did it.”
“I am afraid that way is blocked now,” Bal-Simba told him. “We cannot walk the Wizard’s Way and the city is ever more strongly guarded by the Enemy’s non-living servants.”
“There’s another problem,” Taj pointed out. “This thing’s likely to react to your presence, right?”
“I would call that an understatement,” rumbled Bal-Simba.
“Well, understand, it’s going to take the lysing virus a while to work on anything that’s fairly complicated. If this thing has developed something like an immune system to keep it from being taken over by the competition, it may take a few hours, or even days.” He caught the others’ expressions. “Too long, huh?”
“For the main enemy, way too long. The first thing it will try to do is eat our lunch—and us with it. We can’t wait hours, we need to knock it down immediately.”
“How inorganic,” Taj sighed. “All right, let’s go back and take it from first principles again.”
###
They took special care to find a secure resting place that evening. Malkin seemed abstracted all through the dinner meal, but she didn’t say anything until they were finished.
“I have been thinking about what you said, about the monsters getting more dangerous as we come closer to our goal,” she said to Wiz as they cleaned the last of the dinner dishes.
“And?”
“Have the monsters been getting more dangerous?”
Wiz thought about it. “No, not really.”
“And have we encountered greater numbers of them?”
An ugly little prickle of his neck hair told Wiz he wasn’t going to like where this was going. “No,” he admitted.
“Then,” Malkin asked, “are we sure we are getting closer to our goal?”
“Well, the seeker says we’re going in the right direction.”
Malkin just looked at him.
“I’m really beginning to wonder about that seeker,” Danny said. “I know this place is big but we should be at least a little closer to Moira than when we started.”
“Maybe it’s been getting brighter so slowly we didn’t notice,” Wiz suggested.
Malkin reached out and tapped his shoulder. “The glow only extends out to this smudge on your right breast. That’s where it was yesterday and the day before.”
“Are you sure?”
“Trust me. In my profession you notice these things. You always hold the crystal in the same place, straight out from your breastbone to the length of the cord around your neck.”
Wiz thought about that. Then he looked down at the crystal. Then he thought about it some more. Not very pleasant thoughts.
“Let’s see something.”
“Emac.”
Instantly, a two-foot-high demon with a big bald head, flapping ears, glasses and a green eyeshade appeared before him.
“?” said the little demon.
“backslash list find_moira exe.”
The creature took a quill pen from behind one enormous ear and began to scribble fiery letters in the air. Wiz and his fellow adventurers were soon bathed in warm yellow light from the golden letters hanging before them.
“Wait a minute!” Danny said almost as soon as the Emac finished writing. “That doesn’t look right.” He pointed with his staff at a section of the code.
“It’s not,” Wiz said sourly. “Neither is that,” he added as his staff jabbed out, “that or that.”
“The spell’s been sabotaged!”
“Who?” demanded Glandurg. “Who has played such a foul trick upon us?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say the Enemy,” Wiz said. “Okay folks, gather around, it’s conference time.”
The party sat down on a convenient patch of rocks and all of them looked at Wiz expectantly “Well,” he said to break the silence, “what are our options?”
No one wanted to mention the obvious one: Give up, try to make their way to the surface and wait for rescue.
“Dwarves can find their way underground,” Danny suggested. “Perhaps Glandurg can guide us?”
“I would have to know where we were going,” the dwarf said shortly. “Impractical.”
“Besides,” Malkin said, “he tends to get lost.”
“Slander,” hissed the dwarf.
“Okay, settle down, people. The important thing is it won’t work.” Glandurg and Malkin glared at each other but obeyed.
“What about recasting the seeker spell?” Malkin asked after a minute.
“Hard to do. We could write a new spell easily enough, but we need something like a lock of Moira’s hair to focus the spell.” He sighed. “If Moira’s personality were still with her body we could work something up to seek that, but otherwise we’ve got to have something intimately connected with her.”
“Her cloak,” June said from her place beside Danny. “Like mine.”
“Similarity isn’t good enough I’m afraid.”
“From the same cloth. Made at the same time.”
With a pang Wiz remembered the long summer afternoons when Moira and June had sat together under a rose bower at Wizards’ Keep, sewing the matching cloaks for the coming winter and watching Ian and Caitlin romp among the rose bushes. Sometimes they had worked together, with a cloak stretched across their knees as they sat side by side or across from each other.
“Wait a minute! You both worked on Moira’s cloak, didn’t you?”
June nodded.
“Did you ever prick your finger while you worked and get blood on the cloak?”
A hesitation and then another nod.
“Jackpot! Okay, we can do this then.”
Everyone looked at him. “DNA,” he explained. “If June got blood on the cloak her DNA is still on there.”
“Washed it,” June said defensively.
“I’m sure you didn’t get it all out. We can home on your DNA.”
Danny grinned. “Yeah, and because it’s uniquely hers it will stand out almost as strongly as a true name.” Then his face fell. “Wait a minute. How are you going to make it sensitive enough to find June’s blood on Moira’s cloak with June standing right here?”
“I’ve got a way to make a spell directional, like an antenna. As long as June’s not in the beam, her presence won’t interfere.”
“Let’s get to it, then.”
In the event it took several hours to produce and check the spell. Part of that was because Wiz and Danny took good care to armor the code against tampering and to sprinkle alarms throughout the program to warn of attempted subversion. Part of it was the usual quota of unexpected problems and glitches. Part of it was simply that it’s harder to work sitting on rocks in a cave than it is in your own workroom. So while Glandurg fidgeted, Malkin watched and June did whatever June did, the pair turned out a new spell.
The only real difficulty came in drawing a sample of June’s blood for comparison. June was so eager to help she slashed a four-inch gash in her arm and Wiz and Danny had to break off preparing the spell to give her first aid.
Finally they held up the finished product and commanded it to find Moira. Almost instant
ly the pointer lit up and swung around, pointing almost back the way they had come.
“Wonderful!” Danny said glumly. “We have been going in the wrong direction.”
Wiz ached to get going in the new direction but common sense prevailed. “In the morning. Let’s get a good night’s rest and then we’ll head out. And this time we’ll be heading for Moira.”
Honesty compelled him to admit that what they’d actually be heading for was Moira’s cloak. There was no guarantee Moira would still be with it. He tried very hard to push that thought out of his mind.
They moved out the next morning in good order and somber spirits. Once again Malkin led the way and Wiz followed, staff at the ready. His senses we’re alert but his mind was elsewhere. Malkin was right. The defenses of this place didn’t make any sense in the real world. They made sense in terms of a fantasy role-playing game, but there weren’t any fantasy role-playing games here. The only people in this World now who knew about such things were Danny, Jerry and himself. There had been Craig and Mikey, two computer crackers who had come to this World and hooked up with the forces of primal chaos. But Craig was dead and Mikey was a mindless husk held under tight guard at the Wizards’ Keep. So where had the idea come from?
Damn, he thought for about the thousandth time, I wish we knew what we are fighting.
###
“Well,” E.T. Tajikawa said, “there’s your weapon.”
On the table sat a golden globe about the size of a softball.
“Behold the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch,” Taj said with a sweeping gesture. “It’s what you might call an anti-takeover device—a poison pill.”
“You intend to poison the Enemy?” Bal-Simba asked.
“Actually we’re going to hand him a retrovirus and he’s going to do a number on himself.”
Both Bal-Simba and Jerry waited for him to continue.
“It started with those indeterminate instructions, the ones you call I’ll Do As I Damn Well Please, IDAIDWP.”
His audience looked apprehensive. “Go on,” the big wizard said slowly.”
“Okay, first I divided them into two categories: Regular IDAIDWP and FU-IDAIDWP.”
“Foo ida id wip?” Jerry asked.
“Eff you ida id wip,” Taj corrected. “What you might call IDAIDWP with an attitude. Anyway, I rolled the FU-IDAIDWPs into the nastiest package I could dream up, added some interface code to make it easy for the Enemy to absorb and wrapped it in the prettiest package I could find.” He gestured. “Viola.”
“That’s voila.”
Taj gave him his satanic grin. “Not the way I play it.”
Taj looked at Jerry. “Okay, you say this thing’s instinct is to absorb whatever’s tossed at it?”
“Well, humans that attack it, anyway.”
“Close enough. Essentially what this thing does is to insert a sequence with a bunch of indeterminate instructions into the things code. You feed it to The Blob out there and the critter self-destructs.”
“Nasty,” Jerry said. “I like it.” He paused. “What’s the downside?”
Taj pursed his lips. “Well, there is one thing that might be a problem. It’s got to be absorbed all at once so we’ve got to get pretty close to make it work.”
“How close?”
“For immediate effect? About hand grenade range.”
For a minute no one said anything. “So we’ve got to jump down this things throat, right?”
Taj shrugged. “If you want it to work right away and if you want to be sure you get the main bad guy.”
No one said anything. “There’s another problem,” Taj added helpfully. “This thing’s been bred to learn quick. If you don’t make it the first time it will be a whole lot harder the next time.” He paused and looked hard at them. “Basically I’d say we’ve got one shot at this.”
Another pause. “I believe,” said Bal-Simba, “this is what Charlie would call a sporty proposition.”
Nineteen
Operational Plan
With the weapon came the stirrings of a plan. Soon the Wizards’ Keep was abuzz with preparations. Since the Watchers were still unable to establish communication with Wiz and his party, the first order of business was to combine an attack on the Enemy with a rescue operation. In his or her own way everyone readied themselves for what was to come.
“So this is what the Enemy stronghold looks like?” Kuznetzov asked Jerry as they walked down the stonewalled tunnel.
“Something like this. Only smaller and not as neat.”
The Russian sized up the space with the professional interest of an engineer who had been given the job of building the place—or a sapper who had the job of blowing it up.
Kuznetzov had wanted to see what the “battlefield” would look like. The closest thing Jerry could come up with was the cellars and storerooms under the Wizards’ Keep. It wasn’t that close to the tunnels beneath the City of Night, but Kuznetzov assured him it would help.
“Now there’re a lot more levels and twists and turns,” Jerry added as Kuznetzov knelt down to examine the way the stones fit. He produced a knife and scratched at the space between the rocks, held the scrapings to his nose and sniffed them.
“But just this mortar? No concrete?”
Jerry thought for an instant. “I’ve never seen concrete in this World.”
Kuznetzov grunted, stood up, and then said something quickly to Vasily. The other Russian nodded and set off down the tunnel.
“And these lamps.” Kuznetzov indicated the magic glow light that floated above their head. “This is standard illumination?”
“Yeah. What’s Vasily doing?”
“We are seeing how close enemy can get before we see him. This is very important in urban combat.”
“This isn’t exactly a city.”
Kuznetzov grinned. “I believe your saying is ‘Close enough for government work’.” He looked down the tunnel and motioned to his partner. Peering out past the edges of the light, Jerry couldn’t see him, but apparently Kuznetzov could.
“Now he comes back hiding behind cover and in shadows,” Kuznetzov said without taking his eyes off the tunnel. “The way an enemy would approach.”
By straining his eyes Jerry thought he could detect an occasional flicker of movement down the corridor. Finally, when Vasily was almost on them he caught a glimpse of him sidling along a wall and whipping into an open storeroom.
“He’s really good.”
“He was a specialist,” Kuznetzov said, and smiled as if he had made a joke.
There was an explosion of Russian from the storeroom and Vasily came charging out with no attempt to hide.
He pointed back to the room and spat out something long and complicated in Russian.
Kuznetzov whistled. “Da shto ve gavorete?”
“Po pravda!” Vasily confirmed.
“What was that about?” Jerry asked.
The Russian looked at Jerry strangely. “Let us say we just discovered that our paths have crossed before, indirectly. You might even say that you are the ones who got us started in our present line of work.” He waved away Jerry’s frown. “Never mind. It was another time and another country.”
The Russians were silent as they climbed the stairs from the cellar. They declined Jerry’s offer of a warming drink.
“Comrade Major, do you realize what this means?” Vasily hissed in Russian as soon as Jerry turned the corner.
“It means we have solved another mystery my friend. Now we know how the computer disappeared from the airplane.”
Kuznetzov sighed and grinned. “It takes you back, does it not, to the days when the world was young, our hearts were pure and there was no problem in human relations which could not be solved by the application of sufficient quantities of high explosive?”
He sighed once more. “Life was so much simpler then.”
###
“Complexity?” Bal-Simba echoed in bewilderment.
“Complexity,” Taj rep
eated with a satanic grin. “The weakness of all centralized systems is that they cannot handle complexity beyond a certain level.”
“And you are certain of this?”
He spread his hands. “It’s inherent in the state equations. If we wanna give this boy indigestion we start by giving him a nervous breakdown.”
“What in the world are you doing?” Jerry asked as he walked into the workroom.
“Origami,” Taj said cheerfully. “Great way to relax.”
Jerry looked over the collection of cranes and other creatures scattered over the benchtop.
“Parchments kind of scarce. We can’t waste it on stuff like that.”
“Oh, it’s not a waste,” Taj said cheerfully. Then he held up his latest creation. “See, here’s a dragon.”
Jerry looked past the long-necked shape at the litter of parchment scraps on the table. “It’s still not a very good use for parchment.”
Taj smiled evilly. “Wanna bet?”
The rhythmic scrape-scrape-scrape told Gilligan that Vasily was sharpening something. When he got close he saw it wasn’t a knife or a sword. It was a small shovel with a two-foot handle. An entrenching tool in fact.
“Where’d you find that?”
“Castle smith made it for me,” the Russian told him. He laid the stone aside and sighted down the shovel blade, turning it slightly so the light struck the edge. “Almost ready now.”
“Going to dig your way out of trouble?”
In a single catlike motion Vasily twisted and hurled the entrenching tool overhand. It flew end-over-end and buried itself in a post twenty feet away with a twang. The shovel stuck there with its handle vibrating from the force of the impact.
“Good for digging, too,” The Russian said. Then he walked over and wrenched the blade out of the timber.
Gilligan nodded. “Where’s Kuznetzov?”
Vasily inspected the edge of the blade critically. “With the big wizard,” he said without looking up.
Gilligan himself had spent a good part of the time trying to figure out how he could get into the battle. As a pilot with nearly two thousand hours in Air Force fighters he felt supremely confident. Unfortunately, riding a dragon takes a different skill set than flying an F-15.