by Rick Cook
It was a very imposing sight, but none of them had the faintest idea what to do next.
Fourteen: VIRTUAL UN-REALITY
"This is hopeless," Wiz said finally. "We’ve just got to have more information."
The dusty smell of hay and cattle still clung to the programmers’ workroom, legacy of its days as a cow barn. Most of the stalls along the walls were no longer used as programmers’ cubicles and the people who were left could have fitted into a room inside the keep proper, but the programming team kept the Bull Pen, partly because it was easier than moving and partly because of the aptness of the name. In a little while they were settled around the long plank table down the center. "We can’t very well go knocking on the gate," Wiz said.
"Perhaps we can do exactly that," Moira said slowly. She turned down the table to Arianne. "Lady, does magic work within that castle?"
Arianne’s brow furrowed as she considered. "As best we can tell. We cannot see through their barriers, but they seem to use magic within it."
"Then perhaps someone can go knocking at the gate of the castle. Or at least the semblance of someone."
Arianne’s jaw dropped. Then she beamed and nodded. "Of course! Yes, Lady, I think that would work very nicely."
* * *
"When I proposed this, I did not have you in mind," Moira grumbled as she watched the preparations. She, Wiz and Arianne were jammed into Arianne’s workroom off the main courtyard of the keep.
As one of the Mighty, Arianne rated a tower to herself, but as Bal-Simba’s assistant she spent most of her time doing administrative work and she preferred a place closer to the meeting halls of the main keep.
"Come on, darling, you said yourself this isn’t dangerous," Wiz said from the stool in the middle of the room.
"She said no such thing," Arianne said sharply, looking up from her work table. "She said you cannot be harmed physically. But there will be a psychic link between you and the simulacrum."
"Not like a video game, huh?"
"Not a game of any sort," Arianne repeated firmly. "So be very careful and pull out at the first sign of trouble."
"That’s right about now."
"There are many others who could go."
Wiz shook his head. "Nope. We need someone who knows enough programming to understand what he sees. That’s me or Jerry. I’m higher ranking so they’re more likely to talk to me."
Arianne nodded. She reached under the workbench and produced a bag of black velvet.
"Put this over your head."
Wiz looked at the hood dubiously.
"Is this necessary?"
"Not absolutely. But it will help you concentrate."
"Let’s do without it then. That looks too much like what they put on someone before they hang him."
Arianne shrugged. "Your choice, Lord. But I will leave it around your shoulders should you want it."
She stretched to reach a shelf above her workbench and took down a carved wooden box about the size of a cigar box. Opening it, she hesitated over the contents before reaching in and removing a gnarled, forked root about the size of her hand.
"I have never seen one so large," Moira said as she came from her place by the door to get a closer look.
"Plucked from the earth by the full moon of mid-Winter," Arianne told her proudly. "It is the best I have."
"The bigger the root, the better, eh?" Wiz said from his stool.
"There are other factors, but basically yes. Now, if everyone is ready?"
Wiz nodded, Moira stepped back to the door and Arianne laid the root on the stone floor. Then she produced an ebony wand decorated with silver leaves and jeweled flowers.
Suddenly she spun and jabbed the wand at Wiz. He started and flinched at the unexpected move. Slowly and carefully she brought the wand away from Wiz and pointed it at the mandrake root, all the while keeping it perfectly level as if balancing an egg on the end.
Wiz looked down at the root. It seemed the same, but he felt dizzy and lightheaded, as if he hadn’t eaten all day. He thought about trying to clear his head and decided against it.
Again Arianne turned and jabbed the wand at Wiz. Again a wave of lightheadedness rose up in him. As she turned bark toward the root he could hear the spell she was muttering more clearly, although she had not raised her voice.
A third time she jabbed and pointed at the root. Wiz felt as if he was dividing like an amoeba. He saw the workroom from two perspectives at once, as if his vision had doubled. He closed his eyes, but both sets of eyes closed and he was completely in the dark. For a moment he felt nauseated and he took two deep breaths at once to try to settle his stomach.
With his eyes kept tightly shut, he reached up with all four of his hands and groped for the hood. He pulled it over his head and opened his eyes to darkness and to light.
He turned and faced himself and the two women.
"This is sooo weird," he said wonderingly in reverb duet.
"You will get used to it," Arianne said. "Concentrate on the simulacrum and try to ignore your body."
Wiz tried to move around the workroom to get the feel of his new body. At first both his standing body and his body on the stool tried to move together. He concentrated fiercely on the standing body and bit by bit his other body relaxed. Finally his "vision" fused completely into his new body. Distantly and dimly he could feel himself sitting on the stool and his breath sucking through the black velvet hood but he had to concentrate to feel it.
It wasn’t a perfect illusion. His sense of touch worked very poorly and his sense of smell seemed to work not at all. But he could see and hear perfectly and his balance was good enough.
He faced his audience and spread his arms.
"Ta-DAH," Wiz said. He made a low bow and instantly regretted it as a wave of dizziness washed over him. He barely managed to avoid falling on his face.
"Can you move all right?" Arianne asked.
"I’m still kind of clumsy." He took another turn around the room, more confidently this time. "Okay, let’s do it."
With Arianne and Moira trailing, he stepped out into the bright sunshine of the courtyard. He was particularly proud that he didn’t trip over the raised sill of the workroom.
Jerry was waiting in the chantry with Bal-Simba and a couple of other blue-robed wizards. They had decided to have someone else send the simulacrum to the castle because Wiz was afraid he might transport himself instead of his image if he tried to walk the Wizard’s Way unaided.
As "Wiz" and the others came into the room Jerry squinted at him.
"Gee, it really isn’t you, is it? I can’t tell even this close."
"Let us hope no one else can either."
Bal-Simba reached out and clapped the image on the shoulder. Then he grinned broadly at Arianne, showing all his pointed teeth.
"It even feels right! A work of art, Lady."
The usually unemotional wizardess dimpled and dropped a curtsey in return.
One of the other blue robes, a lean man with thinning dark hair named Juvian, bustled forward. "Everything you see and hear will be recorded." He tapped the glowing blue sphere he held in his palm. "It will not be necessary to stare or to overtly memorize anything. Keep your eyes moving and try to see as much as you possibly can."
Arianne stepped up beside him. "You know the recall signal. Use it at any sign of danger. We will be watching and if we see anything we will pull you back." She laid a hand on his shoulder and her brown eyes bored into his.
"Remember Sparrow, even though your body remains here you can be hurt. Do not become careless."
Wiz gulped and nodded.
A flash of darkness and Wiz found "himself" standing in front of the huge gate of the castle.
The doors were gigantic. Throwing his head back and squinting up, Wiz estimated they were at least a hundred feet high. They were made of some greenish metal with a zig-zag crack down the center where they met. The portal they were set in was made of some smooth pale blue substance wit
h softly rounded forms and no joints anywhere, as if it and the walls of the castle had been cast in a single piece. The whole thing reminded Wiz of something out of a 1930s’ comic strip.
There was no sign of a knocker or a doorbell. He thought about knocking, but if the thing was as thick as it looked he doubted he would be heard inside.
Well, nothing ventured…
He stepped up to the door and pounded three times with his fist. The door boomed and rang from the blows in a way that made Wiz’s whole body shiver.
For a minute nothing happened. Then he stepped back from the door and a motion on the portal caught his attention.
What he had taken as parts of the rounded decoration were futuristic gun turrets. The barrels poking out of the turrets were equally futuristic, with cooling fins and streamlined muzzle brakes. There were at least six of them and all of them were pointing directly at him.
Okay, so now they know I’m here. He decided the best thing to do was to act nonchalant, as if he went calling on strange castles every day. He thought about trying to whistle, but he wasn’t sure he could. So he settled for folding his arms and looking around.
Around him the red sand desert stretched away in gentle folds. The landscape was dotted here and there with dark green spindly bushes and an occasional clump of something that looked like it might have been cactus if it had known what a cactus was supposed to be. The sun was high in the sky and the reflection off the greenish metal of the gates was enough to make him squint.
Oddly, when you got this close to it the castle wasn’t very impressive. Standing next to it was like standing next to a mountain instead of something manmade. Even the gate was huge and impersonal. Somehow that made it less imposing, not more.
Well, it’s not their taste in architecture I’m concerned about.
Wiz couldn’t sense temperature very well through the simulacrum, but the glare of the sun and the bright reflection off the gate told him it had to be hot out here. He wondered if he was sweating.
Then the door started to move. Wiz opened his mouth and nearly choked on his carefully prepared greeting when he saw what was behind it.
The robot was eight feet tall with glowing red eyes and a glossy black skin. It was human-shaped, but it wasn’t what Wiz would call reassuring.
"You rannggg?" it asked in a voice like the bell of doom. It would have been even more impressive if the robot had been talking to the visitor instead of the gatepost.
Wiz dredged up the last of his nonchalance. "Yeah. I’m Wiz Zumwalt and I’m here to see the boss."
The robot paused as if considering the information. A crackling blue nimbus played over its head and down its right shoulder.
"Commeee," it commanded.
The head cocked to one side and jerked upright. The arms jerked up, elbows bent, bringing the hands to shoulder level. The robot spun on its heel, nearly lunged into the gate, recovered and strode off, weaving from side to side like a drunken sailor.
"Lead on, Lurch," Wiz said to the robot’s departing back, then hurried after him. The guns tried to track him even inside the portal.
The hall beyond the gate was so gargantuan that Wiz couldn’t make out the other end. High above shafts of sunlight washed down through the haze that hid the ceiling.
A rather thick haze, Wiz noticed as he strode along after his jerking, zig-zagging guide. It wasn’t just that the place was big, it needed a good vacuuming. He noticed that both he and the robot were leaving footprints in the film of reddish dust on the marble tiled floor.
After a few hundred yards they turned off into a side corridor. Its proportions were more to human scale, but it was round and a trickle of water down the center made the going harder. The robot splashed along unconcerned, but Wiz tried to keep his feet dry by staying to the side. He had to hurry even more to keep up with the robot.
Even though Wiz’s temperature sense didn’t work very well, it was so cold he shivered a bit. The metal walls of the tunnel were filmed with condensation which trickled down and accumulated at the bottom of the corridor.
That’s where the water comes from, he thought. They need a little work on their climate control system. He looked down at the water in the center of the tunnel and saw it was slimed with green algae.
Not to mention their housekeeping.
A short way down the corridor was a door, round and massive like a bank vault’s. The robot stopped short and waited as Wiz came up beside him.
Just as Wiz reached the robot the door popped open and clanged against the corridor wall. Wiz jumped back to keep from being crushed. His guide remained impassive even though the door missed him by a fraction of an inch.
A few other little things they need work on, too. As he set off in pursuit of the robot he wondered if that was supposed to have been an automated door opener or a man trap.
Another few hundred feet brought them to a bank of elevators that looked like something out of a New York office building-if you ignored the remote-controlled machine guns covering the lobby and the gargoyles perched over the elevator doors.
After a brief wait one set of doors banged open and Wiz and the robot stepped into an elevator-more accurately, they stepped down into an elevator, since the car had stopped about a foot below the floor.
It took a long, long time to reach the top. Wiz wasn’t sure whether that was because they were going so high or because the elevator worked about as well as the robot guide. They jerked, lurched, sputtered, speeded up and slowed down until Wiz lost all sense of how far they had come. He wasn’t even too sure they had gone straight up.
At last the doors flew open and they stepped out into another corridor. This one was broad and clean, at least. The floor was tiled in jade-green material, the walls were malachite and the ceilings and wall decorations were in polished gold. It was like being inside a Faberge Easter egg and it removed any last lingering doubts Wiz might have had about his hosts’ taste.
The robot lurched drunkenly down the corridor and caromed off the wall, knocking off chips of malachite and bending a golden wall sconce.
At the end of the hall was a bronze portal. The robot stopped before it and made a motioning gesture with its arm that nearly took Wiz’s head off. Then it froze.
Wiz recovered from the accidental assault, realized his guide had signaled him through the door, saw that the robot wasn’t likely to make any other dangerous moves, and stepped past.
The room was as out-of-scale as everything else in the castle. One whole side and half the ceiling was picture-window-size panes of glass giving a panoramic eagle’s-eye view of red desert and sere mountains. The place was fitted out like a laboratory, or perhaps a control room, with panels of dials and switches everywhere, the odd arc of electricity here and there and huge pieces of unidentifiable apparatus scattered about. The whole room reeked of electricity and danger.
There were two humans waiting for him there.
The younger one reminded Wiz a little of the way Danny had looked when they first met, kind of soft and unformed. The other one was a few years older, harder and leaner. He was sitting on one of the control consoles with his legs dangling. Even though he was relaxed, there was something predatory in the way he looked at Wiz.
For a minute no one said anything.
"Uh, hi. I’m Wiz Zumwalt. From Cupertino." His voice was almost lost in the huge room.
"We know who you are," the older one said. He reached behind him, picked up a beer bottle and took a swig. No one made a move to offer Wiz a drink.
"Lurch there is really something," Wiz said brightly.
"He’s an early model," the younger one said. "The ones we build now are a lot better."
His companion grinned nastily. "Much better."
"Very impressive."
The silence stretched on.
"I’m Craig Scott," the young one said at last. "This is Mikey Baker."
"Craig talks too much," Mikey said conversationally. "Don’t you, Craig?"
Cra
ig wilted.
"Pleased to meet you," Wiz said.
"Yeah?"
Again the silence stretched out.
"Anyway, I thought we should meet, you know, talk."
"So talk."
"You know you upset a lot of people when you showed up."
Mikey smiled. A not at all pleasant smile. "No shit? Well, we’re going to upset a lot more people, aren’t we Craig?"
"We sure are."
"What are you going to do? What do you want?"
"We’re going to build a whole new order," Craig said. "We’re going to combine magic and technology into a system that really works for mankind. When we get done things will be better than they have ever been."
"Only you won’t be around to see it, man," Mikey said.
"We’re going to…"
"You talk too much, Craig," Mikey repeated without heat. "Now shut up and let the grownups talk, will you?"
He took another pull on his beer.
"You see, you’re squatting on a prime piece of real estate, you and your friends. Now it so happens we need that place. So in just a little while we’re going to come over and take it."
Wiz went cold. "Hey look, we can negotiate…" But Mikey cut him off with a sharp bark of laughter.
"What’s to negotiate?" he said, sliding off the table and stalking over to Wiz. "We’re here and you’re history." He jammed his face into Wiz’s, so close Wiz could see the pores on his skin. "We’re gonna get your whole flicking world before we’re through, baby, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it."
"The hell there isn’t," Wiz flared back. "Technology doesn’t work over there, remember? And we’ve got magic the likes of which you’ve never seen."
Mikey smiled. "Wanna bet?"
Then his expression softened. "But maybe you’re right. Maybe we should negotiate this thing like adults." He smiled again, a more relaxed, gentle smile. "After all, there’s plenty for both of us. Two whole worlds, right?"