by Unknown
Jessi sighed softly. She had obviously awoken. He sensed how she enjoyed the feeling of his lips on her neck and his hands on her shoulders and hips and went along with his movements. She slowly turned over, took hold of his hands and guided them to her breasts.
There was a knock on the door. In the next moment Festus poked his head into the room. His eyes narrowed as he saw the two bodies pressed against each other.
"Get your asses in gear," he said roughly. "We got visitors. My room, straight away."
"Drekhead!" said Jessi quietly when he slammed the door.
Her hand slid lightly down Pandur's body and touched him between the legs, lying there a while. "A real pity, a crying shame," she said regretfully and got up.
Pandur pulled something on and went in search of the bathroom. In the hall he was stared at by three children, an elf boy and two elf girls. The children were between four and six years old. It occurred fleetingly to Pandur that, to the children in the commune, norms must appear as strange and wondrous as the first metahuman children had to him when he attended kindergarten in Berlin's Kreuzberg district.
Jessi freshened herself up and dressed. Pandur waited for her. Then both of them slung their cyberdecks across their shoulders, went out into the hall again and entered the room next door.
The room resembled theirs: two bunk beds, two day beds, a table, four chairs, two closets. Nothing matched, nothing had been done to please the eye, but the purpose was served by the simplest means. On the walls there was worn wallpaper with a faded, varicolored flower design. Two small, low-set latticed windows, the panes almost opaque with dirt, peeling paint on the frames. Although uncared-for, the windows and the heavy supporting beams on the ceiling were the most attractive thing about the room and indicated the venerable age of the house. Houses of this type, half-timbered and thatched, were built in the 18th and 19th Century. There were only a few of them left.
Festus was lying on one of the beds. Relaxed, casual, as if everything had very little to do with him. Which, in a sense, was indeed the case.
Three of the chairs grouped around the table were occupied.
Two men, one woman. The woman was young, barely older than Jessi. She was nondescript in appearance. A somewhat plump, squat figure, draped in loose-fitting clothes, a rather unfortunate color combination of green and blue. The auburn hair, which had a reddish tinge, was medium length, cut straight and prevented from falling into her face by a plain bobby pin. Her fingers were short and fat, her fingernails cut short but painted silver. This seemed to be the only concession to fashion in her outward appearance.
One of the two men was about her age, had a narrow, wan face with a pointed nose, curly blond hair and a three-day beard. He wore a dark-green leather outfit and turndown boots, all well-worn and greasy.
The other man, a short, slight man of about fifty, wore old-fashioned half-glasses, which had slipped down his nose. He peered over the glasses as Pandur and Jessi entered. Pandur had the impression of being subjected to an optical, preliminary test. People with unpolished boots weren't admitted. People with bewitched cyberdecks least of all. Or were dirty boots and bewitched cyberdecks in this case the requirement for admission to the course?
The man had, and this was at least as noticeable as the unusual spectacles, an academic's mortar-board on his head and wore a long robe, both of a breathtakingly deep blue in which curiously blurred-looking golden yellow stars shimmered. The fabric of the robe seemed to be silk or a material of silk-like quality. As soon as the man moved, the cloth began to flow and the stars seemed to move. The outer surface of the robe created a bewilderingly three-dimensional and hypnotic effect, which was doubtless intended.
"The good old prof's got a whole load of spells up his sleeve and is now gonna conjure us up something," said Festus disrespectfully. "Besides that, the chummers've brought along ammo and a bunch of stuff to wear. You can help yourselves."
The rigger indicated one of the beds where two open suitcases lay, full to the brim with clothing of all kinds. Next to them, ammunition clips and belts towered up.
"My contribution," said the young man. "Standard ammo and special. Different calibers. I hope you find what you need. Festus was satisfied at least."
"I'd like to deal with this point first," said Pandur, going to the supplies and finding a pack of twelver clips for his Secura. He handed Jessi a second pack for her H&K Caveat. "In the shadows, the flash of a revolver is sometimes the only light," he said with a fleeting grin. "Kinda bad when you run out of firing caps."
"Hear, hear," Festus offered. "What poetry in this rude hut. "
"My name is Professor Lutius Magnus of the Magical Faculty of the University of Heidelberg," said the older man, introducing himself. "I have brought along my assistant, Imogen." The girl twisted her face into the ghost of a smile. " Our arranger is called Tassilo."
"At your service," said Tassilo, who came across as much more relaxed than he appeared. "I'm a specialist for bits and pieces, but you shouldn't expect any trendy stuff. If any of the things fit, then it's more luck than good management."
"We'll find ourselves something later," Jessi promised. It was considerate of the Klabauter to have thought of it, but clothes to change into weren't vital.
The many mages Pandur had come across in the shadows belonged to the hermetic school, but he had never before met a really academic mage. In some way he was disappointed. He didn't know what he had expected, but he supposed subconciously it had been a theatrical appearance full of thunder and lightning. Instead he was seeing a narrow-chested, civil servant type who possibly needed the big rectangular hat, not only for conjuring but also to prop up his self-confidence.
You 're unfair. Outward appearances are nothing, as you should know. The man is courageous. Otherwise he wouldn't be here. And inside he must be anything other than a civil servant, or he wouldn't be supporting the Klabauterbund in his position.
"I'd like to warn against getting your hopes too high," Magnus said. "I'm only here to assense the phemomenon and give others an indication as to how the problem can be solved."
Neither Professor Magnus nor his assistant seemed to set much store by academic formality or dry theory. Rather, Imogen produced from among her many wide skirts a plain, scuffed document case, tipped the contents out onto the table and started to sort them. There was nothing but stones, some more colorful than others: amethysts, obsidians, opals, rock crystals, lapislazuli, onyx, tourquoise, rubies, moonstones, even simple river pebbles and granite splinters. Now Imogen proceeded with far greater care. Each of the stones was closely examined and turned. Each seemed to have its very special, previously determined position and to have to sit at a precisely defined distance from others. In the end, three lots of thirteen stones produced a curious pattern that roughly resembled a recumbent figure eight with an additional, smaller eight in the middle of the first, but which thickened to display a knotted effect in certain places.
Magnus regarded Imogen's work with the greatest concentration and made minimal corrections in two places. It didn't go unnoticed by Pandur that the assistant jerked when this was done, as if the professor had boxed her ears.
"This," said Magnus, "will focus the magic." He bent over the stones, fixed his eyes on the point where the two circles intersected and mumbled a long spell. Then he brushed the stones with the wide sleeve of his robe with apparent disregard. Although he touched them as he did so, none of the stones moved even the tiniest fraction of a millimeter. When Magnus drew the sleeve away, all the stones were glowing with a dark-red, wavering light. Magnus looked like an angel from hell that had forgotten to take off its reading glasses. Again he mumbled a spell. The glow intensified to give off an unearthly, transparent light.
The professor stretched out both hands. "The cyberdeck!"
Pandur had already taken it out of its case and laid it carefully in the outstretched hands of the mage, who drew the deck to him and placed it gently on the shining stones.
&nb
sp; Then he withdrew his hands and gazed at the deck.
Pandur waited for something spectacular to happen. But nothing whatsoever did happen. At least nothing he could see. The professor did nothing more than stare at the cyberdeck, and the stones did nothing more than sparkle. Whatever else happened, it did not take place in this world. Pandur now realized that the professor's gaze was not directed at the cyberdeck, but into emptiness. Lutius Magnus, Professor of the Magical Faculty at the venerable University of Heidelberg, was in Astral Space. He was assensing. He was examining the entity of the cyberdeck in Astral Space, an entity which a high-tech appliance actually wasn't supposed to have at all.
Ten minutes or more passed. Magnus appeared motionless, almost like a dead man. No one spoke. Even the rigger desisted from comment. Everyone knew that a ceremony of this kind had nothing in common with the humbug of magicians in earlier times, to whom true magic had been inaccessible. They sensed that Magnus was performing heavy labor, strength-sapping labor, and they knew enough to respect it.
Then the magical light of the stones died away. Within seconds the last spark was extinguished. They were nothing more than colorful mineral, quite pretty to look at but of no particular material value, nor of choice shape or color. Magnus moved, picking up the cyberdeck and passing the arm of his robe over the stones. Some of them rolled onto the floor. Imogen gathered them up, cleared the rest off the table and stuffed everything with seeming carelessness into the shabby document case.
Magnus stretched out his arms and handed the cyberdeck back to Pandur. "I wish you could see your cyberdeck in Astral Space," he said. "Or rather what surrounds your cyberdeck. It displays itself as a fascinating pattern of multi-colored light strands, each strand having thicker parts that form a sort of node script. Each strand stands for a spell in a magical language that I couldn't decipher... " He searched for words to conceptualize the sensory impressions of a different kind of seeing. "I followed individual structures. It is an uncommonly artful interweaving. I know nothing of computers and cyberspace, but I assume the network of spells approximates to the network in the electronics. I deciphered a few elements. Enough to know that each of the spells complements the operation of the mechanical elements of the board. When you press a certain key on your cyberboard, intending to give certain commands, other keys are activated at the same time through the effect of the spell. So the commands are negated or turned into their opposites. Your deck as such, your chips and the other electronic elements are not under a spell. But the operating elements certainly are. It is most interesting. I wouldn't have thought such subtle magic possible."
Basically, Magnus wasn't saying anything new. He was only reaffirming what was general scholarly opinion. Magic could not influence electrical charges, the flow of electrons. It could only have an effect on matter.
"How can the spell be broken?" Jessi asked. "Can it be broken at all?"
"I can't do it," said Magnus plainly and honestly. "Not with the power of the stones, not with the magical knowledge that has been gathered in the course of the research work of our faculty."
"So we'll have to give up on the data?" asked Pandur, disappointed.
"Not necessarily, " Magnus replied. "I see two ways to access the data. One way is magical. In a ceremony carried out by a ritual team, if possible in a place itself inhabited by powerful magical forces, the magical complex can be destroyed in its entirety. The other way is non-magical and seems to me less elaborate. The blocking of the deck has been triggered by magic, but the blocking itself is of a mechanical nature. Someone equally adept in magic and cybertechnics can circumvent the magic by negating the board's malfunctions."
"Only I'm afraid there is no one who's really competent in both areas," said Jessi softly. She sounded resigned. Pandur guessed the reason. She herself was one of those who had tried both fields. She knew best how hopeless it was to get beyond a few basics. Each of the two disciplines demanded a talent, a fundamental genetic pattern that apparently lay beyond human cell capacity.
"There is such a man," said Magnus, shattering Pandur's theories. "A distinguished representative of the hermetic school who at the same time, by reason of a special gift of nature, is an excellent engineer and a specialist in cyberware. He sympathizes with the Klabauterbund and is willing to help us."
"When's he gonna be here?" asked Festus. In his voice lay the impatience of a man who knew he didn't have much time left.
"He won't be able to come," Magnus replied. "He is too occupied with his researches. You'll have to seek him out in Prague. The Klabauterbund..."
"In Prague?" The rigger had leapt up from the bed. "Well, excellent. As it happens, I have to go there anyway."
"The Klabauterbund will find a way to take you over the border," Magnus went on. He wrote a name and an address on a piece of paper and passed it to Pandur. "I'll arrange for you to see him. I'm sure he'll take the time to examine the problem."
Pandur read the note.
Nadros Vladek, Cervena ulice 13.
"Easy to find," said Magnus. "I once went to see him myself. He lives in a house near the old Jewish City Hall with the Hebrew clock that runs backwards, you might have heard of it. Otherwise you can get your bearings by the Old-New Synagogue or the Jewish Cemetery. It's all nearby. That's why Vladek lives there. For the magic prevalent in that place."
"All roads lead to Prague," said Jessi, looking first at Festus and then at Pandur.
Pandur nodded. It was worth a try. In Prague they would be out of the immediate reach of AG Chemie. If Vladek failed, at least the trip wouldn't have been wasted. They would keep their promise to Festus.
Suddenly a curiously familiar sound lay in the air. Very, very quiet, scarcely within the limits of perception of the human ear. Before Pandur could identify it, other, louder noises could be heard. Shouts. Then, in the house and outside in the farm buildings, sirens wailed.
Magnus and his company jumped up. The runners put their equipment on and grabbed their weapons. Then Pandur's brain deciphered the sounds he had first heard. The pressing, flapping, scraping, rhythmical lashing sound of helicopter rotors. Several. It swelled frighteningly quickly.
A red-haired elf of perhaps forty, in blue working clothes and with a wrinkled face, jerked open the door. "Combat helicopters!" he yelled. "Maybe they're only flying over, but it looks like an operation targeted at us. You've got to get away at once!"
"Our car's parked a short way down the road," said Magnus. " For security reasons we... "
"You can forget the car!" the elf broke in. "Come with me. We have an escape tunnel. If they're serious, it's your only chance."
He ran along the hall ahead of them to the cellar entrance below the stairs leading up.
From the front door, the older of the two women called to them that the helicopters bore the emblem and the lettering of AG Chemie.
The elf operated a light switch. "Straight ahead, keep going!" he shouted. "Through the opening behind the curtain." Then he turned back to his people.
The rigger led the group. They hurried down the narrow steps, dashed through a clay-damp, low cellar, reached the curtain, tore it aside. Behind it gaped an opening dug at a later date. They plunged into it and raced along a dark gallery towards a distant crack of light, bumping into beams supporting the passage, smelling and sensing the earth around them. Crumbs of clay trickled down on them, slipping down their necks and into their clothes.
Up above shots were fired. Then there was a massive explosion. The earth heaved and shook. Thick lumps of earth broke away from the ceiling. A second explosion. A third. A fourth. They held tight to the supporting beams.
People were screaming. More explosions, more shots. Then the screaming stopped. At the cellar entrance there was a pale-red glow, shattered by one more explosion. There was a smell of burning. Then the silence of the grave.
"Those fucking sons of bitches!" Pandur whispered. "Those fucking drekheads! That miserable ratpack!" He was thinking of the children who had s
tared at him full curiosity.
Jessi was beside him. He felt her presence. He sensed she was shivering.
"They just dropped bombs, real cool, flattened the farm, reduced it to ashes," Festus stated soberly. "None of them upstairs has managed to save his ass. No way. If anybody escaped the flames and started running, then they blew them away from the air."
"This is a protected enclave!" said Magnus tonelessly.
"Heard that once already today," said Festus. "It was one, Prof. You can frame it. Then at least one person will have done it. AG Chemie certainly won't be hanging up the motto. They'll pay the government a few ecus, express their regret for the oversight to any relatives there may be, and that's that. That's unacademic practise, Prof. Bit different from the Magical Faculty, huh? Don't let it bother you. Some people are just born as shit and have nothing else on their minds than to turn the world into a heap of shit. So ka?"
Magnus made no comment. The others remained silent as well. They were listening. Very quietly, as if at a great distance, they could hear the sound of rotor blades. Then the noise faded away and disappeared. The only noise that remained was the crackle of three-hundred-year-old beams burning up in the flames.
The air in the tunnel smelt of burning and irritated the mucous membranes.
"We can't go back through the house," said Pandur. "It could take hours for the fire to burn itself out. By then we'll have suffocated down here."
"Besides, they might have left a few drekheads behind to shoot at anything that shows itself in the ruins," Jessi added. "Or we'll come across the fire brigade, the cops, the TV crews. That's not for us. We don't have the right faces for ID checks, witness statements and television interviews."
For a moment, Pandur considered whether the possible presence of TV crews didn't offer them a chance. They could publicly accuse AG Chemie and ask the media for protection, promising them the red-hot data in the cyberdeck in return. He rejected the idea. It wouldn't have been the first time that a TV team attempting to gather unwelcome information had been given filming permission for the Great News Story in the Sky. Reporters lived dangerously, they had accidents. Everybody knew that, nobody would be surprised. That was no way.