by Rick Cook
"Magic, Judith. You did magic there."
" . . . spell compiler . . . full of spaghetti code. Worked asses off to fix it." Her arms twitched restlessly against the soft restraints that tied them to the bed.
"The magic compiler, how did it work?"
"Weird language . . . hacked together." She drifted off into incomprehensibility.
"Have you got a copy of the code?" Mikey put in sharply.
Judith tossed and mumbled. " . . . secret. All secret . . ."
Mikey leaned closer to the bed.
"Have you got notes?" he demanded. "Where are your notes?"
" . . . notebook . . . projects."
"Where's the notebook, Judith?" Mikey persisted. "Where did you put it?"
Judith began to move her whole body against the bed.
"Hey, she's getting upset. I think we'd better leave her alone."
Mikey ignored him. "Tell me!" he hissed, grabbing Judith's hand and squeezing hard. Judith moaned and tried to pull away from his grip.
"Hey! You're hurting her."
Mikey squeezed harder, bearing down on each word. "Where. Are. Your. Notes?"
"Home," Judith gasped. "Desk." She was thrashing from side to side and breathing hard now.
Mikey released her hand. "That's fine, Judith," he said gently. "You did real good."
He turned to Craig. "You heard her. She's got stuff back at her apartment. Can you get in?"
"Well, yeah but . . ."
"Then come on." He stood up and headed for the door without another look at Judith. Craig followed more slowly. At the doorway he looked back. Judith was still moving restlessly, panting with hard, regular gasps.
It was almost like she was sobbing.
* * *
Judith's apartment was on the ground floor of a two-story complex in a quiet residential neighborhood. There were maybe fifty apartments grouped around a big central terrace and pool. They had obviously been built in the '60s, before San Jose land values went crazy, but they were well-maintained. Probably not a bargain, Craig thought as he led Mikey through the wrought iron gate into the court, but still the sort of place that was passed down from friend to friend.
The apartment was dark and the drapes were drawn. One of the nearby apartments had a television game show on, but no one was in the courtyard.
"There's a key in the planter by the door, under one of those phony rocks," Craig said. "She showed it to me when I stayed here."
Mikey gave him a knowing smile.
"Not like that! I just crashed on her couch a couple of nights." He didn't add that it had been while his mother had been in the hospital and he couldn't face going back to the house alone. Somehow that wasn't the sort of thing you told Mikey.
He groped around, picking up rocks from the planter.
"Shit. It's not here."
"May I help you?" a voice demanded sharply.
Craig jerked erect and whirled. A middle-aged woman was glaring at them from perhaps twenty feet away. She had a sweater thrown over her shoulders and a cordless telephone in one hand. Her thumb was ostentatiously posed over one of the phone's quick-dial buttons.
Before Craig could do more than flush, Mikey stepped forward smiling—far enough to establish contact but not close enough to be threatening. "Yes ma'am," he said as if he was genuinely glad to see her. "My name is Ralph Simmons. I'm Judith Conally's supervisor. This is Craig Scott, a friend of Judith's. We've just come from the hospital and Judith asked us to bring her a few things."
Some of the venom left the woman's stare. "I thought she was in a coma."
Mikey positively beamed. "Oh, she's come out of it. She'll be in the hospital a while, but she's already talking about going back to work. I don't mind telling you that's a relief to me—I mean aside from being happy she's going to be all right. Judith is the only one who really understands that code. Just between you and me, we've been hurting without her."
The woman shifted her stance and her finger moved away from the call button. "Hadn't she quit to write or something?"
"We'd brought her back on a consulting contract. You know, just for a few hours a week. You don't just let someone like Judith walk out the door."
The woman nodded reluctantly. "She always seemed like a real dedicated person."
"Very dedicated," Mikey agreed. "And a very good worker." Then he frowned ever so slightly. "But we seem to have a little trouble here. Judith told us she left a spare key under a rock in the planter, but we can't seem to find it."
"Oh, I took that in after the accident. Didn't seem safe."
"That was very thoughtful of you, ma'am. I wonder if you could see your way clear to let us use it for a few minutes. You see, Judith wanted to look over some of the listings and the doctor thought it would be good for her. Kind of therapy, you know."
"Well . . ."
Mikey turned up the wattage on the smile. "Oh, I know it's a lot to ask, but they never did find Judith's keys after the accident. Naturally if you'd like to call the hospital . . ." again the trace of a frown, "only Judith's not supposed to have phone calls and they'd probably have to track the doctor down."
"Just some papers, you say?"
"Yes, ma'am. She won't be needing clothes or anything for a while."
"I don't suppose it would hurt. I'm Mrs. Mapelthorpe, the manager. I can let you in on my pass key."
"Yes, ma'am. If you'd like to come in with us, just to make sure . . ."
Mrs. Mapelthorpe smiled. "Oh, I'm sure that won't be necessary." She fished in the pocket of her sweater and brought out a key ring. "Just stop by 102 and check with me before you leave. Oh, and if you could, remind her that her lease is up next month. She needs to decide what she's going to do about the apartment then."
Mike flashed that winning smile, again. "We will. Thank you."
* * *
The place smelled of dust and cool, stale air. Someone had obviously tidied up after the accident, but apparently no one had been here since. The place had the feel of being not quite lived in.
"This is weird," Craig said, looking around the apartment. Mikey made a beeline for the desk.
"If we're going to see the old bitch on the way out I don't guess we'd better take anything except the papers—unless she kept that gold here?"
"No, that's in a safety deposit box."
"Bingo!" Mike said, holding up a thick notebook triumphantly. "Right on top of the pile." He looked at the papers stacked beneath it. "And here's some more." He started scooping up the papers and stacking them on top of the notebook. "And some disks too. Find me a box to carry this shit, will you?"
* * *
They couldn't wait to get back to Mikey's apartment, so they took a corner booth in a coffee shop and set their box of plunder on the seat while they spread the papers out to study them.
"Boy, I didn't think that would work," Craig said. "When the old lady showed up I was sure we were dead."
Mike looked at him contemptuously. "All you have to do is act sincere and be polite. Then people will believe any bullshit you feed them. Especially the old farts."
Neither of them said anything as they studied the papers and notebook. Their coffee arrived and Craig hardly looked up to add extra sugar and nearly a whole pitcher of creamer. Mikey sipped his black, apparently oblivious to the heat.
"It looks like the whole damn language is here," Craig said finally. "Weird-looking stuff, though."
"You expected maybe ANSI C? Of course this shit's weird. Look at what it does."
Craig put his hand down on the stack of papers and leaned across the table to Mikey, eyes glowing. "You know what this is? I mean really? It's the road to your heart's desire. Anything you want."
"So, what do you want?"
Craig hesitated. "I guess a better world. Where people really care about people, you know?"
Mikey looked amused. "No, I don't know. Tell me."
Craig fidgeted. "I dunno. But we went wrong here. I mean with all the pollution and shit
. We've just squeezed the beauty out of the way we live. There's no magic in the world."
He toyed with the spoon in his coffee. "Maybe with magic we can build something better. Something that uses magic and technology both in the way they were supposed to be used."
Outside the traffic rushed by.
"What about you? What's your heart's desire?"
Mike grinned lopsidedly. "That's easy. I want to be master of all I survey."
Seven: JOURNEY
"Getting there is half the fun."
—Wrong-way Corrigan
"I thought we were going outside," Ragnar the dwarf complained as he puffed along under a pack nearly as large as he was.
"We are," Glandurg told him as he led his band up the sloping passageway. Each of the dwarves was nearly buried in weapons, food and other necessities for the journey.
"This doesn't lead to the gate. The only things up here are the watch posts."
"You will see," Glandurg assured his men. "Step lively now."
The corridor grew steeper until finally it challenged even the surefootedness of the dwarves, burdened as they were. The way was narrower here above the highest of the workshops and habitations and the walls and floor rougher. The tunnel began to turn more frequently as the very mountain narrowed toward its peak. Several times they passed doors leading to lookout posts on the mountain itself. The dwarves guarding the doors did not salute them as they passed, but they didn't try to stop them either. That was reassuring to Glandurg's followers, who still had trouble believing that King Tosig had trusted his ne'er-do-well relative with an important mission.
Finally, just when it seemed the trail couldn't get any steeper or the mountain any narrower, Glandurg stopped in front of an iron door set in the rock. Fumbling in his pouch he produced a large key and turned it in the lock. Soundlessly the door swung open and blinding daylight flooded into the tunnel.
Hard on each others heels the dwarves tumbled out onto the mountain top. They were standing on a broad, flat expanse of dark gray stone. Squinting off in the distance they could see the other peaks of the Southern Forest Range, most of them lower than they were now. Beyond the mountains in every direction stretched the dark green of the Wild Wood, cut here and there with the meandering silver thread of a river.
None of them had ever been this high on the mountain and most of them had been outside their home tunnels perhaps a half-dozen times in their lives. It was an intoxicating sight and they peered in every direction, jabbering excitedly as they pointed out features to one another.
Glandurg ignored his unsophisticated comrades and strode toward the edge of the open space. He reached into his pouch and produced a polished bone whistle, elaborately carved in dwarvish fashion. Placing it to his lips he blew loud and hard, but no sound came from it. He scanned the skies and then blew again.
The response came not from the air as he expected, but from behind him. There was a scrabbling sound and a griffin leapt lightly down into the center of the ledge.
There was a gasp from Glandurg's followers and they shrank away from the apparition which had appeared in front of them. Glandurg gulped, terribly aware that the griffin was between him and the door to safety. But he put on his best leader's manner and strode toward the beast in what he hoped was a good imitation of fearlessness.
The other dwarves were under no such burden. They moved back against the doorway, ready to vanish down their tunnel to safety at the first sign of a hostile move.
The griffin managed to look smug, amused and dangerous all at the same time. The dwarves were on her turf and they all knew it.
Dwarves and griffins shared the mountains in an uneasy truce. The griffins nested on the uppermost crags and the dwarves tunneled through the rock. Dwarf mothers frightened their children into obedience with tales of dwarf children who had wandered away and been seized and eaten by griffins. By the same token dwarves were known to enjoy the occasional griffin egg surreptitiously taken from the nest.
"I told you we would ride," Glandurg said as he strode to the griffin.
The griffin hissed loudly and backed away.
"But you agreed to take us to the human wizard," Glandurg protested.
The griffin nodded.
"Well," said an exasperated Glandurg, "if we don't ride how will you get us there?"
The griffin smiled—as much as a creature with the beak of an eagle can smile—and flexed its claws.
Craig scowled as he riffled through the papers spread out on Mikey's coffee table. The clock display in the upper-right corner of the television set showed it was after midnight, but he paid no more attention to that than he did to the old movie on the screen. He took another pull on the can of grape soda and slammed it down, slopping sticky purple fluid on Judith's notes.
"We got a problem."
Mikey looked up from the recliner where he was curled up with Judith's notebook. "Like what?"
"How are we going to get to this other world?"
"Judith got over there, didn't she?"
"Yeah, but someone took her."
Mikey considered for a moment. "What about that first guy, the one she called Wiz? He got there on his own, didn't he?"
"No, he was taken over too. By one of their wizards." Craig drained the last of the soda and threw the empty can in the general direction of the wastebasket. "Great! So we've got all this magic and stuff and we can't do anything with it."
Mikey laughed and shook his head.
"What's so goddamn funny?"
"You. You're talking like a system administrator. If it's not obvious or it's not in the manual, it can't be done. What you need to do is chill out and keep working on this stuff."
"What good does that do?" Craig asked, half-sullen.
"The more you learn, the easier it is to make things happen. That's the secret of hacking. You don't worry if something seems impossible. You just keep watching and learning and pretty soon it's not impossible."
He stood up and stretched on tiptoes, leaning far back to work the kinks out of his spine. "Now here, we can't get over ourselves, but maybe we can get someone to bring us over."
"How?"
"We make something like a beacon. Something that says 'here we are, come get us.' "
"Can we do that?"
"Your friend thought so. She worked out a way to do it."
He flipped open the notebook and put it on the coffee table. "See?"
Craig studied the block diagram scribbled on the page. "I don't think that's gonna be easy."
Mikey grinned lopsided. "So? Nothing that's worth having is."
Craig was right. It wasn't easy. Judith's notes had no more than outlined the beacon spell. It was broken down into modules, but half the modules hadn't been written and several of the ones that had been needed modification.
Worse, they were flying blind. They had no way of testing anything because the magic compiler didn't work in their world. All they could do was check and re-check their work manually and hope they had everything correct.
They didn't have much in the way of tools. Judith had started work on a cross-compiler for the magic language that would run on an MS-DOS computer, but it was only a skeleton. She had written a sort of a syntax checker for the magic language that worked something like lint for C. But like lint it flagged all possible errors. Since there was no way of running a test compile, they had to be "more Catholic than the fucking Pope," as Mikey put it, and correct everything that the checker flagged.
Mikey ended up picking the basic approaches and doing the broad outlines while Craig did the detail work and coding. Partially this was because Craig wasn't very good at the big-picture stuff and partially because that was just the way it worked out, somehow. That meant that while Craig spent hours sweating over the grunt work, Mikey lounged around the apartment drinking beer and playing computer games.
Since both of them were system breakers they worked essentially around the clock, catching naps when they felt like it and ordering in
from fast-food joints when they got hungry. Thus it was nearly three o'clock in the morning when Craig came in to tell Mikey they were finished.
"I'll get some sleep and then we can go over the whole thing one more time," he said to Mikey's back. "What are you playing anyway?"
"Empire."
Craig nodded. He was familiar with the game. You explored an unmapped world, captured cities and built armies and fleets while the computer did the same thing. Eventually you met the computer's forces in a climactic battle for control of the planet.
"Looks like you've got him on the run," Craig said, surveying the map on the screen. "One or two more turns and he'll surrender."
"He surrendered a while ago," Mikey said, maneuvering about thirty aircraft to attack the sprinkling of enemy armies in the upper left corner of the screen.
"So why are you still playing?"
"Because I want to crush the motherfucker," Mikey said as his legions of aircraft tore into the opposing forces. Most of the armies went down under the onslaught, but one beat off five separate attacks.
"Die, you cocksucker!" Mikey snarled as he used the mouse to mass even more air forces against the remaining red marker on the screen.
"I always quit when the computer surrenders," Craig told him as he watched over his friend's shoulder.
"I don't want surrender. I want him wiped out," Mikey said without taking his eyes off the confrontation.
Craig took a swig of soda. "Takes too long that way."
"Yeah, but when it's over I'm the only one left standing."
The computer beeped as its final army vanished under the combined attack of nearly twenty aircraft.
* * *
This is extremely undignified, Glandurg thought as he watched the green forest sail by beneath him. Warriors should ride into battle, not be carried along like a sack of meal.
Behind him came eleven more griffins, each carrying a dwarf dangling from its talons.
Still, there are advantages, he admitted. It would be hard to hold on riding griffin-back.
* * *
Craig looked at the stuff laid out on the coffee table dubiously. Some of it, like the sheets of typing paper with the spell written on them, was perfectly ordinary. Others, like the hibachi full of glowing coals, were ordinary but out of place. Still others, like the roots and powders he and Mikey had scoured Chinatown to find, were just plain odd. The table had been shoved to the center of the room and a circle drawn around it in blue marking chalk.