Question Quest (11 page)

“E. Timber Bram,” he said.

So it was that Bram commenced what was to prove a significant effort. He was the one who defined the dates of Xanth that I have used here. By his reckoning, I became king in the year 952, when I was nineteen years of age. Very well; I would note the dates of the subsequent events of my life. It provided a kind of framework that hadn't been there before. I was proud of instituting this, but I knew that no one else would care. People were so uninterested in dates that the task of keeping the holiday calendar had finally fallen on the ogres, who were too stupid to get out of it. Fortunately no one cared to argue about errors with ogres, so there were few complaints.

About two years into my kingship, Dana had news for me. “I tried to prevent it, Humfrey, but you were simply too healthy.”

“Of course I'm healthy,” I said. “I fell in the healing spring. If there is anything I have done which you regret, tell me and I will undo it.”

She shook her head, smiling. “You can not undo this. We have succeeded in summoning a baby boy from the stork.”

“Well, we sent several hundred signals,” I said. “One of them was bound to reach the stork.”

“Demons can dampen out those signals,” she informed me. “This I tried to do.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to remain longer with you.”

“You may remain with me as long as you like! You have been excellent company, and I look forward to many more signals.”

“But I fear that a delivery from the stork will complicate things.”

“I will be a father and you a mother. That is wonderful news!”

She did not argue, but I could see that she was pensive. Fool that I was, I did not think to ask her why. I was too pleased with the notion of having a son. Even one who was half demon. The storks are very firm on this: they will not deliver a fully human baby to a mixed couple.

I had villages to visit, so this time I went alone, leaving Dana home to await the stork. The stork wasn't due for months, but delivery dates were never quite certain, and it would be a disaster if the stork came while the mother was absent. We didn't have any cabbage leaves growing around our house, so the baby might be set down anywhere. Unfortunately this left Dana with nothing much to occupy her attention, and she took to eating. Of course she had to eat some and remain solid, so as to build up enough milk to nurse the baby; milkweed pods were available, but it was considered better to do it personally. But she ate a lot and became quite fat. I didn't say anything, not wanting to have a bad scene before the stork arrived and perhaps scare it away, but I intended to put her on a diet once the baby was safely with us.

Then the stork did come, with a beautiful human/demon boy, and I discovered disaster. We had not understood the whole of the oracle's answer; we had forgotten Dana's original Question. She had wanted to rid herself of her soul. Now that soul went to the baby, and Dana was free of it.

She was abruptly also free of her conscience and her love for me. “Well, it's been fun, Humfrey, can't think why,” she said. “Maybe some year I'll return for one last good ****; maybe not.” She used a term which caused the curtains to blush, and which I think only an angry harpy would understand. It seemed to relate in a derogatory way to the process of stork summoning. Then she fogged into smoke and drifted away.

I was left with my half-breed baby, and no wife. Now I understood somewhat better than before why men were not supposed to associate with demons. It was a hard lesson, and my second significant disappointment.

I needed a new wife, because the King was supposed to be married and because what I knew about caring for a baby could be tallied on the fingers of one foot. As it happened there was a girl recently come of age who was smitten with the trappings of the kingship. She always smiled at me when I walked through the South Village, and lifted her hem in a manner that indicated that she would love to learn something of stork summoning from me. I was somewhat soured on storks at the moment, but I needed a woman in a hurry.

"Would you be willing to adopt my son, if I married you?” I asked her.

“I would adopt an ogret if that was the price of marrying you, Your Majesty,” she replied.

So I married the Maiden Taiwan, and she took care of my son, Dafrey. She was really very good about it, and I came to like her well enough, though it would not be proper to say that I loved her. In due course I did do some stork signaling with her, but the stork, perhaps annoyed by the business with Dana, refused to acknowledge. I can't say I was unduly upset about it; perhaps I was afraid that she too would take off if she got a baby of her own.

I continued to travel, because I kept absentmindedly walking into hanging diapers at home. My wife was happy to have me travel; that left more room in the house.

In the North Village I discovered something truly significant: a six-year-old boy who could generate thunderstorms. I examined him carefully, asking him to make small storms and big ones, and he was glad to oblige. His mother didn't like him making storms inside the house, but was surprised and pleased to see the King taking such an interest in him.

Soon I was satisfied: this was a Magician-caliber magic talent. I had found my successor as king of Xanth. Of course he would need training, and it would be some time before he was ready, but it was a great relief to know that I would not be stuck with this chore forever.

Then a peculiar disaster struck. It related, ironically, to my own home village and to my family's farm. I had to hurry back to the Gap Village to get the story from my older brother.

“The tics have mutated,” Humboldt said. “They no longer wait peacefully for harvesting and for their own clocks; now they scoot off on their own and make mischief elsewhere. We don't know what to do. But you're the Magician-King; you will know what to do.”

I saw that I was stuck with an awful chore.

As it turned out, awful was far too slight a word for it. Perhaps a variant of the word the demoness had used would adequately describe my sentiment, but of course a king could never utter such an atrocity. You see, there were not just several mutated tics; there were several major families of them, each with many members, reproducing wherever they found fertile soil. That was all over Xanth. What had started in the Gap Village quickly spread to each cranny and nook. They disrupted every type of human activity and were extremely annoying.

We started by burning the field. Humboldt hated to do it, but it was the only way to be sure of eradicating the source of the mutant tics. The other farmers of the Gap Village had to do the same, to their extreme annoyance; I was not called Good King Humfrey in that region thereafter! Unfortunately, this was ineffective; the mutant tics only sprouted again. We had not realized that they had already escaped the neighborhood and were now sprouting in the inaccessible jungles all around. We had a major infestation.

I returned to the South Village and pondered the matter. I had a thinking cap I had found in my prior travels; I donned this and cogitated considerably. This produced an answer, but a difficult one: I would have to concentrate on each variety of tic separately and devise a way to eradicate it. The process might require years, but I was the king, so it was my responsibility.

I decided to capture one of the wild tics, so I could bring it home and study it and discover how to deal with its variety. I got a net of the type used on the tic farm and a collection of bottles, and mounted my trusty winged horse, Peggy. That was a legacy of MareAnn's association; she had told Peggy to stay with me as long as I needed her, and she was doing so, and we got along well. Perhaps the feeling I retained for MareAnn communicated itself to the mare, and so she was satisfied to be with me. Or maybe she was just a nice creature. She was technically a winged monster, but all that is technical is not necessarily true.

We flew back to the farm, because I thought most of the tics should be close by there. First I picked up a regular tic to use for comparison. Then I scoured the region, watching for wild tics, and managed to spy one. I chased it down and netted it. It jumped around madly. It turned out to be a fran-tic, always rushing around. Anyone it happened to land on would assume its characteristics and become similarly frantic. This one certainly needed to be eliminated.

I squeezed it into a bottle and put it in my pack. I flew home. I had a chamber I had set up as a magic lab; my main collection of items was there. This was where I could work without being disturbed.

I brought out the bottle. The fran-tic was a mere blur of activity buzzing around inside. Well, I had a cure for that: I brought out my vial of slowsand and sprinkled some on the bottle. The fran-tic slowed right down, because nothing moves rapidly around slowsand. I had to be careful not to get any on me, because it would slow whatever part of me it touched. There had been a time with the Maiden Taiwan when some of it had gotten on the bed, and it took us two days and nights to get an hour's sleep. I had had to cancel the effect with some quicksand, because it had gotten into the mattress and couldn't be removed. Now I was more careful with it; experience was a solid teacher. So now I used tongs to unstopper the bottle and slide the fran-tic out onto the table, where I had a little circle of slowsand. I was at normal speed, but the tic was slow.

It looked like an ordinary tic, with a round body and little legs. The only thing different about it was that it was dashing madly around, in slow motion.

I brought out the regular tic. It sat there and twitched in the normal fashion. Once it got into a clock and encountered the locks it would turn to sound, becoming invisible.

What was the difference between them? What I needed to do was to find out how to change the troublesome one back into the normal one. I had thought that one might have longer legs or shorter antennae, but they looked the same. Only their actions distinguished them.

Actually, I realized, it wouldn't do any good to fix this one tic. There might be dozens of this variety out there, reproducing their kind, spreading out across Xanth. I couldn't catch them all! I needed a way to nullify every one of them, without having to bring them in to my lab. That meant finding a way to change them back in the field. So I had a greater challenge than I had thought.

I struggled with this problem for days. I analyzed those two tics every which way but loose. Their only real difference seemed to be in personality. Neither of them spoke my language, so I could not reason with the fran-tic and try to get it to change its ways and to persuade others of its kind to do likewise.

Then I started experimenting with elixirs, and this finally gave me the key. I mixed some healing elixir with some mute powder and doused the fran-tic with it. This slowed it down, and it became like the normal tic. I added some multiplier potion, so that it would keep increasing, making more of itself. Then I let the muted fran-tic go. It would associate with its own kind, and each time it did so, the other tic would be similarly muted by the multiplying potion. I hoped. It would take time, but in due course all the fran-tics should be quiet.

I went out again. This time I netted a cri-tic. This one was a real trial!

“So you're the nitwit who thinks he's a king,” it said. I wished this hadn't been the one to speak my language! “You have been doing a despicable job! Whatever gave you the idea you could govern Xanth?! I could do a better job than you, with three legs and one feeler tied behind me. In fact I don't see why they didn't make me king, as I am so obviously superior to you, you poor excuse for a gnome.”

This one really needed stifling! But the former mix of elixirs, powders, and potions had little effect on it. It criticized the mix with disdain. “I could make a better concoction than that!” it said.

“Very well, you do it,” I said, giving it the ingredients.

But it refused. “I shall not soil my feet with common labor. In fact, I decline to do anything useful. It is my business to tell all others what incompetents they are, you first among them.”

I could get to dislike this creature, if I concentrated. It had an attitude problem. Naturally, it thought it was the rest of Xanth with the problem, and was not about to listen to any contrary view. The only contrary views it tolerated were its own.

I feared I would pop a blood vessel or two before I was able to figure out a formula that would mute this cri-tic. For days it berated me for every evil its devious little mind could imagine. If I hadn't already known that tics are bugs, I would have realized it after being bugged by this one. But I finally fashioned a de-bug potion that turned it from a cri-tic into an an-tic, and that was the best I could do. I let it go, knowing that once the conversion had spread to all its cousins and they encountered people, the would-be cri-tics would perform an-tics instead. That was not ideal, but this had been one hard nut to crack.

Incidentally, I learned years later that some cri-tics had drifted into Mundania before being overtaken by an-tics. There they spread recklessly, and soon the whole of Mundania was infested with them. They had no natural enemies, you see, but they did their best to convert the rest of Mundania to enemies. They were having some success in this effort, the last I heard.

The next tic I caught was a roman-tic. I considered the matter, and finally let it go untreated. Xanth would not be harmed by its influence.

So it went, from tic to tic. There was the poli-tic, who infected those with ambition and the luna-tic, who made folk crazy. The hera-tic, who was concerned with matters of faith, and the dras-tic with its desperate measures. They would none of them be missed! Some were interesting and more or less harmless, like the aqua-tic and elas-tic. The gymnas-tic was one of the nimblest, but the acroba-tic was similar. The hardest one to figure out was the enigma-tic, the most difficult was the problema-tic, and the wildest was the orgias-tic. I was annoyed by the bombas-tic and bored by the pedan-tic. It was useless to argue with the dogma-tic or to try to calm the empha-tic. I managed to turn the spas-tic into a sta-tic. The largest was the gigan-tic, and the most interesting the fantas-tic. Some were nuisances mainly to children, like the arithme-tic and gramma-tic. The op-tic actually enabled folk to see better, so I let it go untreated. I had trouble distinguishing between the clima-tic and the climac-tic, but there was nevertheless a significant difference. I finally had to catch a characteris-tic to help me get them straight. It turned out that one affected the weather and the other affected great events. Sometimes these were similar, but not always.