by Rick Cook
At first Wiz thought the pile had caught fire. Then he realized it was his own light reflected back at them, glittering off the objects in the pile. Another gesture and the light grew even brighter. Now there was no doubt at all what the heap was.
Gold winked yellow or glowed ruddy in the light. Gems flashed green and red and wine-purple fire. Pearls and opals threw back a soft luster. There were ingots and cups and brooches and rings; candlesticks and platters and coins and gems loose like marbles. Wiz even caught a glimpse of a full suit of golden armor, studded with precious stones and filigreed with enamel. All of it piled head-high in a loose, careless mass.
"Look at that," Wiz breathed.
The others could only stare. Malkin started edging toward it, only to be pushed aside roughly by Glandurg in his haste to reach the pile.
"Glandurg! Get back here. We’re not here for gold."
"What kind of adventure is it if you don’t get the treasure?" the dwarf grumbled. "Uncivilized, I say."
"Boy," said Danny, "I always knew dungeons were supposed to have treasure, but this:" He waved his arm in awe. June stayed behind her husband, obviously torn between wonder at the sight and distaste at his reaction.
Wiz noticed that there were no containers in the pile. No chests, no bags, nothing that could be used to transport or contain the hoard. It was as if it had been carefully brought here and emptied out and then the containers removed.
"Where do you suppose this came from?"
"Your dark wizards, or whatever." Malkin ran her fingers through the pile.
"Whoever it was is long gone."
"You hope," Wiz retorted.
With a clatter and the ringing sound of falling gold hitting the stone floor, Glandurg burrowed into the pile like a homesick gopher. Suddenly his head emerged from the top, sending a shower of wealth cascading down the mound. He spat out a ruby the size of a hen’s egg and grinned gleefully.
"Look, people," Wiz said, "this isn’t what we’re here for."
"But it doesn’t hurt," retorted Malkin, who was already elbow-deep in a mass of gold coins.
Danny threw himself down in the treasure; scooped up handfuls and poured it over his head. He winced when a particularly heavy and tasteless gold goblet hit him on me head. "Hey, Scrooge McDuck was onto something with his money bin." Wiz hesitated. He didn’t like this at all and he sure didn’t want to be encumbered by a lot of dead weight. But obviously the attraction of all that loot was an irresistible force for Glandurg and Malkin.
"We need a way to carry this stuff," Malkin said.
"If you think I’m going to whomp up a levitation spell just so we can take that along with us, you’re crazy." Malkin and Glandurg looked at him.
"Okay," he sighed, "you can take what you can carry in a cloak."
It took Malkin and Glandurg a minute to decide whose cloak was bigger. Then they started shoveling gold, jewels and other treasure from the pile. When the heap on Malkin’s cape was about three feet high in the center they stopped for breath.
""Now try to move it," Wiz said.
Dwarf and thief each seized an edge of the cloak and gave a mighty tug. The pile moved perhaps six inches.
"What you need is a cart," Danny suggested.
"Won’t work. Floors too rough."
"Okay," Wiz said, "if it will get us moving again, I’ve got a spell that reduces friction to almost nothing. That will make the cloak easier to haul. But we’re burying the stuff the first chance we get."
He stepped forward, raised his staff and spoke a few words.
"There, it should pull easily now."
Malkin tugged on the edge of her cloak and nearly went over backwards when her hands slipped off the material. Glandurg grabbed and yanked and went careening into Malkin when his hands slipped. Both of them landed in a tangle on the rocky floor and glared at Wiz.
"Okay, let me modify the spell."
He drew a breath to list out the spell, but before he could exhale he heard a noise from beyond the circle of light. Something was moving out there in the dark.
"Ah, folks:" Danny began. He never finished the sentence. He didn’t need to. Wiz didn’t know if it was the biggest dragon he’d ever seen or not. For one thing, the cavern was mostly dark. For another he couldn’t see all of it. But primarily, he was too scared to take accurate measurements. If it wasn’t the biggest dragon he’d ever seen it would do quite nicely for now.
The dragon spouted a gout of flame that illuminated the cavern to its corners and left a dark smear of an afterimage clouding his vision. He tried to raise his staff to cast a spell and realized he was magically frozen in place. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the others straining to move as well. The dragon fire had been misdirection while the creature pinned them where they stood with a spell.
Its enemies neutralized, the dragon lumbered forward for the kill
Wiz muttered under his breath.
Talons extended, the dragon’s left front paw landed on the cavern floor and promptly flew out from under him, dumping the beast on his nose. The great muzzle slipped on the floor and left the dragon lying spread-eagled and neck extended on the glistening limestone.
However dragons are not so easily defeated. The huge talons on all four feet dug into the limestone as if it were soft clay and the beast levered itself erect. It crouched to spring across the intervening distance at its prey, but its purchase failed just as it leapt and the dragon went sprawling and slithering across the cavern. Wiz and the others watched fascinated as the dragon slid helplessly by, bit the cave wall behind them and rebounded back into the cavern like a pool ball coming off the side rail
Wiz had cast the reduce-friction spell not on the floor, but on the dragon.-That not only made the dragon slippery all over, but it charged the beast to a high magic potential-and made every stalagmite, stalactite, flow-stone and ordinary rock in the cavern repel him violently. The creature had put enormous power into his spring and lost almost none of it in the inelastic collisions. As a result a very unhappy dragon went caroming off everything he hit, and he managed to hit just about everything in the cave except Wiz and his friends.
Every time the beast struck a rock it let out a roar and a gout of flame, making the walls ring and lighting the cavern to its edges. The result was like being in a giant pinball machine during especially active play.
Finally the dragon slid backwards into a tunnel off the main cave. A quick, precisely aimed lightning bolt struck inside the tunnel and collapsed the mouth into a pile of rock Behind the landslide they could hear the faint roaring of a very unhappy dragon.
"Dragon in the side pocket!" Danny whooped "Awesome."
Wiz discovered he could move again. "Let’s get our awes out of here before that dragon digs himself out. Move it people!"
"But the treasure!" Malkin protested.
"Mark it on the map and we’ll pick it up on the way out. Now come on!" Everyone complied, but Wiz noticed that Malkin and Glandurg clinked suspiciously as they hurried down the tunnel.
There was a dragon asleep beside the fire, with only an occasional tail twitch or foot thump to show he was dreaming dragonish dreams.
It was in fact an achingly normal scene for the programmers’ workroom, if you could ignore the whispering shadows outside the windows.
Jerry Andrews stared at the four screens hanging above his desk and bit his lip. As decoration they were spectacular, all neon colors ranging through the whole spectrum with annotations and hypertext finks in other glaring colors. As information they were just about use-
"Shit," Jerry exclaimed, throwing himself backwards so hard his chair creaked. The dragon lifted his head questioningly.
"My Lord?" Moira asked as her personality asserted itself.
"It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this frustrated."
As a hacker’s significant other, Moira recognized the signs. Jerry needed a sounding board. She also knew that a sympathetic ear was more important than cogent advice. A Siam
ese cat would do the job nicely if it meowed in the appropriate spots.
"A difficult problem?"
Jerry grinned but there was no joy in it "I don’t even know enough to know that" He spun around in the chair to face the dragon on the hearth.
"Normally on a job like this where you’ve got a pile of observables-stuff-and no paradigm, you just grab hold of anything that looks likely and see where it leads. You poke and prod at it and see what happens and eventually you can make sense out of what you’re seeing. Here-" he waved a hand expressively. "Here no matter where I grab and how much I poke and prod I don’t get anything that makes sense."
He spun back around and waved at the light show above his desk. "Ninety percent of this sort of project is getting inside the other guy’s head. Eventually you’ve got to be able to see the code through his eyes, to understand a little of how he thinks. Only here, no matter how hard I try, I can’t make any sense of what I’m seeing. Some of this stuff is truly elegant, some of it is a triumph of development over design, some of it is awfully crude and some of it is pigeon droppings. And there’s no sense to any of it, no rhyme or reason, no overriding structure."
"Well, Wiz always said you start with what you know."
Jerry spun back to her. "I know enough to know I’m out of my depth on this. We need help, heavy-duty help from our world."
"Another programming team?"
Jerry shook his head. "Not that simple. We need someone who can get his mind around this thing."
"Another wizard programmer?"
"No, we need someone even more powerful. We need a programming legend, a code demigod"
"Do you have anyone in mind?"
Jerry thought for a minute. That’s a problem. You can’t very well go up to someone like Ken Thompson and ask him to take a sabbatical from Bell Labs to go off to another world to solve a problem involving an evil magician."
"You mean he might not believe you?"
"I mean the paperwork would be a little excessive. People of this caliber don’t grow on trees and a lot of them are key figures at their companies, teaching at the university level or in jail for getting cute with someone else’s computer. In any event they’re not available."
"Are there some who are not occupied?"
"Yeah, a few." He thought for a minute. "Well, Tom Digby isn’t available right now, so the best is probably Taj."
"Taj?"
"E.T. Tajikawa, the Tajmanian Devil. The guy spends most of his time surfing the far, far end of the bell curve, out three sigmas west of Strange." Moira didn’t know what that meant but it sounded powerful. So she concentrated on the part she thought she understood.
"E.T. Is that like the movie Wiz likes so much?" Moira asked.
"No, it’s E.T. as in Elvis Twitty." Jerry shrugged. "His mom was Korean. She didn’t speak English real good but she loved country music and she wanted to give her son an American name.
"Taj used to teach an extension class in debugging down in the Valley. I learned a hell of a lot from him, but for the first four weeks I thought I’d wandered into a ’Kung Fu’ episode. He started us off with Tai Chi exercises and quotes from Bugs Bunny cartoons. We ended with five minutes of meditation while he rang this little bell. And crazy as it sounds, it all tied together."
Moira, who didn’t know what Tai Chi was and to whom a lot of programming was a mystery anyway, was willing to take his word for it.
"His power isn’t in his techniques. It’s in the way he sees."
"That sounds like Patrius," Moira said.
"The wizard who brought Wiz here in the first place?
Yeah, from what I’ve heard of him he would have liked Taj."
"What would it take to get him?"
"Mostly you’d have to catch his interest. But that’s hard to do. Last I heard he was hip-deep in a six-figure design project for a gaming company."
"Would it hurt to ask him?"
"No," Jerry said slowly. "No, it wouldn’t hurt." He brightened. "Thanks, Moira, you’re a genius."
Moira took the compliment without comment. "You had best ask Bal-Simba before you talk about bringing another through from your world."
"Right. I’m sure he won’t have any problem with it."
In a matter of minutes Bal-Simba was summoned and he listened carefully, if somewhat sleepily, to Jerry’s proposal.
"If you think it will aid us, by all means ask this person to come here," he said when Jerry finally wound down.
"Even if he can’t physically come to us we can probably do a lot over the Internet. But it would be better if he can get free for a while." He looked at Bal-Simba. "Can we still do a Great Summoning to bring someone over from our world?"
"Almost certainly. The shadows do not seem able to block that path."
"Well, let’s find out then." Jerry picked up the telephone sitting incongruously on his desk and began punching in the number. "I’ll put it on the speaker. I hope it’s late enough in the day that he’s up."
"Hallo," came a female voice with a hint of Scandinavian accent. In the background he heard the steady click of computer keys.
"Is Taj there? This is Jerry Andrews, jerry thekeep.org, I’m kind of a friend of his."
The keystrokes didn’t even slow. "Oh yah, I remember you, I think. From alt.comp.lang.theory.wild_blue. This is Sigurd, you know,
Sig Tniskatonic.frodo.org."
Jerry remembered Tajikawa’s girlfriend/soulmate/companion/secretary/keeper. "Hi, Sigurd. Is Taj there?"
"He’s at Comdex. He’s not gonna be back until, like, a week from Sunday."
"Oh. Well, is there any way to reach him?"
"I don’t think so. He said he was gonna beg crash space off a friend. Didn’t say who and I don’t think he knew himself."
"Didn’t he take a celluar phone?"
"Well, kinda. He’s got a loaner from MMCC-you know, the
Mini-Microcell-Communications Consortium-that’s running a demonstration network at the show. They’re setting up stations at all the major hotels. Only, one of their crates got lost in transit, then they had a problem with some weird connectors and had to have replacements airfreighted from Taiwan. Plus their directory software apparently has some kind of suicide pact with their hard drives and:"
"So their phones aren’t working," Jerry cut in.
"I understand the hotel books are giving eight to three that they won’t have them working before the show ends."
"Well, what about e-mail? Is he going to be on-line?"
"Well, he took his laptop but I don’t think he’s got the modem working. It’s a new machine with a Type III PC Card modem, only the card services for Linux are, like, flatlined. He was going to hack a driver but he didn’t have time before he left."
"That’s too bad. Look, do you know who’s he’s going to be seeing? It’s really important that I reach him."
"He wanted to check out some scientific visualization software, but other than that he didn’t say. I’m sorry."
"If he does check in have him contact me. It really is a matter of life and death. Have him send to jerry thekeep.org."
"Okay, let me open a window here." There was a brief pause then more clicking of keys as she took the address. "If I hear from him I’ll sure give him the message."
"Shit," said Jerry as he broke the connection.
"What now?’ Bal-Simba asked. "Will another serve?"
There aren’t any others in Taj’s class," Jerry said, "at least none that I know of who are available."
"Is there any other way to contact him?"
"We can put out the word on the Net, but I’m not sure how long that will take and we’ll probably get a lot of bogus reports. Taj is pretty famous." He thought. "Comdex only lasts a week so he should be home next Monday at the latest."
Bal-Simba considered. "I am not sure we can wait that long. These things press us relentlessly and ever closer despite our efforts."
"Can we hide Moira somewhere?"
"I d
o not think there is any place in the World where these things could not find her," Bal Simba told him.
"Okay, then. There’s only one thing to do."
Wizard and dragon looked at the programmer expectantly.
"We," said Jerry, "are going to Comdex."
PART II: QUEEN OF THE STRIP
TWELVE
ANOTHER QUEST
For a minute no one said anything. For a long minute.
"That does not seem terribly practical," Bal-Simba said at last. "A dragon cannot survive where there is no magic."
"Normally no, but I think I have an answer to that. You know how our method of getting into the other world’s telephone system works."
Bal Simba looked at him. "No."
"Basically we use magical energy to influence semiconductors on an atomic level-well, really it’s subatomic because what we’re doing is analogous to actualizing virtual particles out of the quantum froth. You see:"
Moira cleared her throat significantly. It was especially impressive coming from a dragon.
Jerry took the hint "Ah, right Anyway, we have found we can leak a little magic across if the conditions are right That’s how we signal back to this World for a Great Summoning to bring someone through from our world. We can apply the same principle to draw magical energy from this World to support the dragon’s metabolism."
Bal-Simba only nodded. "I will take your word for it. But tell me, are there any other difficulties?"
"Well, one. The magic flow messes up the signaling scheme for a Grand Summoning. There are only a few points on our world where we will be able to signal you that we’re ready to return. Vortex points, they’re called. There’s a big one out in the desert about a hundred and fifty miles north of Las Vegas. That area’s practically uninhabited so we won’t have any trouble getting back through it" He stopped. "There was another one a few hundred miles away in Sedona, Arizona, but they built a McDonald’s on top of it."
Bal-Simba rubbed his chin. "This spell of yours does not sound stable."
"It will hold for a few days. Once we get on the ground that should be all we need to find Taj. Meanwhile it will take the pressure off the Wizards’ Keep." Bal-Simba turned to the dragon. "My Lady, how do you feel about this?"