Eight: Calling Home
The problem with being a miracle worker is that everyone expects you to work miracles.
The Consultants’ Handbook
Two hours later Wiz started his latest creation running and then let out a long, whooshing sigh.
“You all right?” Malkin asked in a voice that showed more curiosity than compassion.
“Yeah, fine. But if I’m going to get anything done around here I’m going to have to hire a housekeeper.”
Malkin crossed her arms over her chest. “Good luck. Not many as will want to work for a strange wizard in a haunted house.”
“Well put an ad in the paper will you? Or have the town crier announce it or whatever you do here.”
“I’ll take the news to the market.” She looked over at the rapidly scrolling letters of golden fire above his desk under the window. “Meanwhile, what’s that?”
“It’s a workstation. I just built it.”
Malkin looked at the gray box and keyboard sitting on the table and the letters of golden fire hanging above it.
“Built it out of what?”
“Well, actually it’s a program, a spell you’d call it. See, we’ve found that in this world a sufficiently complex program, or spell, produces a physical manifestation, what you’d call a demon.”
Malkin regarded the things on the desk. “Don’t look like no demon I’ve ever heard tell of,” she said. “But you’re the wizard. What’s it good for?”
“Well, what you see here is really just a user interface. It virtualizes what I was used to in my world and that makes it easier for me to relate to.”
“Seems to me any relations you had with a demon would have to be illegitimate,” the tall thief said. “But what’s it good for?”
“Just about anything I want it to be. Right now I’m setting up an Internet connection so I can talk to my friends.”
“More magic, eh?”
“No, it’s technology. I need a machine on the other side,” Wiz explained to the uncomprehending but fascinated woman. “So I’ve created a little dialer demon to troll the net for systems I can set up accounts on.”
Malkin cocked an eye at him. “I see. So it’s demons and trolls but it’s not magic.”
“No, it’s . . . Okay, have it your way. It’s magic.”
Just then the system emitted a bell-like tone. “Boy there’s luck. Less than five minutes and I’ve found one. Uh, excuse me will you?” With that he turned back to the console.
“Now what are you doing?” Malkin asked. “Magic aside.”
“I guess the easiest way to explain it is to say I’m breaking into something that’s locked. Something a good ways from here.”
For once the tall thief seemed impressed. “Burglary without being there,” Malkin said wonderingly. “Wizard, I think I’d like this world of yours.”
Wiz thought about Malkin as a computer criminal. Then he shuddered and turned his attention back to the computer.
Exploiting a hole in the system’s security was easy. In a matter of minutes Wiz had two new accounts set up. The final wrinkle was a simple little shell script to take messages from one account and pass them to the other. Anyone who tried to trace him back could only follow him as far as this machine.
“There, that’ll give me more protection,” he told Malkin as he leaned back from the keyboard. Not a lot, he admitted to himself. But until he got Widder Hackett off his back he wasn’t going to be able to do much better.
“Protection from who?”
“From anyone at the Wizard’s Keep who might want to find me.”
His erstwhile assistant regarded him with a look Wiz was coming to know all too well. “These folks are your friends, right?”
“Of course.”
“Then I’d think you’d be yelling to them for help instead of hiding from them.”
“I can’t,” Wiz said miserably. “I can’t let them find me.”
Malkin muttered something about “wizards” and left the room.
The first order of business, Wiz decided, was to tell everyone he was all right. He quickly composed an e-mail message and sent it over the net to thekeep.org, the Wizard’s Keep’s Internet node.
He typed furiously for several minutes, stopping frequently to erase a revealing phrase or to re-read his work to make sure he wasn’t giving too much away. Then he spent some time planning the exact path the message would take to reach its destination. At last he hit the final “enter” to send the message on its way and settled back in his chair with a sigh of contentment.
He was promptly jerked erect by Widder Hackett’s screech at air-raid-siren intensity.
“Loafing again, are you? The house falling down about your ears and you lolling at your ease. Wizard or not, you are the laziest, most good-for-nothing layabout I have ever seen in all my days.”
There was a lot more in that vein.
Over the course of the day Wiz discovered that the person who said you can get used to anything had never met Widder Hackett. The combination of her awful voice and her complaining nearly drove Wiz to distraction. If she had been there all the time he might have gotten used to her. But she would vanish for five or ten or fifteen minutes only to reappear with more demands just as Wiz was settling in to concentrate on what he was doing.
And there was nothing he could do to satisfy her. Even an attempt to sweep and dust the front parlor ended with the ghost shrieking that he was a useless ninny and all he was doing was moving the dirt from one corner of the room to another. Meanwhile, he not only wasn’t getting anything done, he wasn’t even able to think seriously about what he wanted to do. Worst of all, Wiz discovered that the exorcism spells that laid demons to rest had no effect at all on ghosts.
Fortunately for Wiz, Widder Hackett shut up at about ten o’clock at night-perhaps because old ghosts need their sleep. Be that as it may, Wiz got several hours of uninterrupted work in late that night.
Unfortunately Widder Hackett was back at sunup the next morning, loud as ever and full of new complaints and demands. Even putting a pillow over his head couldn’t shut her out, so Wiz was up and about before the cock stopped crowing.
Meanwhile Wiz’s message was on its way to the Wizard’s Keep. It traveled a long and convoluted path through two worlds. First it was injected into the telephone lines by magical interference with a digital switch in a telephone company central office. It traveled over the regular phone network to the modem attached to the system he had cracked. There it slipped by security, thanks to Wiz’s handiwork, and was received in one mailbox, transferred to another mailbox and sent out on the Internet. It traveled from computer to computer over the net as each node routed it to a succeeding node moving it closer to its destination. After traveling for several hours and touching every continent, including penguin.edu at Ross Station, Antarctica, it reached a node in Cupertino where it was stored until the final node made its daily connection to collect its mail. When thekeep.org called, the message was forwarded along with the rest of the day’s e-mail down a telephone line to the junction box serving an apartment building-specifically the line leading to the apartment occupied by a programmer and fantasy writer named Judith Conally. There it was magically picked off, translated back to the Wizard’s World along with most of the rest of the mail and showed up in Jerry’s mailbox in his workstation in the Wizard’s Keep.
Since Jerry slept mornings he didn’t find it until he came into the workroom about mid-afternoon. He was still yawning over his second mug of blackmoss tea when he sat down at his terminal. He looked over the job he had left running, found it was progressing satisfactorily and punched up a list of his mail.
Jerry called the message up and started reading. By the time he had finished the first screen he was biting his lip.
“Danny! Moira! You’d better come look at this.”
Hi Jerry and everyone (especially Moira!):
I can’t tell you where I am or what I’m doing, but I’m safe-at least for now.
I don’t know how long this job is going to take, but I’ll have to stick with it until I’m done.
As to what I’m doing, let’s just say I’m taking a lesson from Charlie Bowen.
Say hi to everyone for me and don’t worry about me.
Give my love to Moira.
PS: Please don’t try to find me. It’s very important.
W