Off to Be the Wizard - 2 - Spell or High Water (3 page)

3.

Martin and Roy materialized just outside the door of Martin’s warehouse in London/Camelot. There were a few more people milling around, but it was after dark in the twelfth century, so a street in a large city like this looked pretty much the same as the street in the medium-sized town they’d just left.

Martin said, “So, this is Camelot. Not much to look at in the dark, I know. You’ll see a lot more of it in the next few days.”

Martin opened the door to his warehouse and motioned for the older man to come inside. They walked in to a large, open room, about one-third of the overall volume of the building. The walls were painted black. The wooden floor was also painted black, except for a blood-red pentagram inside a circle. At the points of the inverted star there were candles. They lit themselves as Roy entered the room, which startled him.

Martin shrugged as he closed the door. “Yeah, they do that whenever someone who isn’t me comes in. If it bothers you, I can make them not notice you. It just takes a little
programming
.”

The corners of the room were home to four ten-foot-tall stone statues of fearsome creatures undreamt of in this time’s primitive mythology. Each creature stood atop a pedestal that also bore the creatures’ names, which were all unfathomable to the ears of
the locals.
The far end of the chamber was not a wall, but a red velvet curtain. Roy pointed at it and said, “Looks like you stole it from a movie theater.”

“I did. I worked there when I was in high school. The manager was an awful racist jackass. Now he’s a racist jackass who has to explain to the owner how he let someone steal a huge velvet curtain.”

As they walked across room, Roy asked who or what the monstrous statues were supposed to be. Martin pointed to each, listing their names.

“Optimus Prime, Boba Fett, Grimace, and the Stig.”

Roy said, “Yeah, I can read. Are those names supposed to mean something to me?”

Martin had nearly reached the velvet curtain, but stopped and looked at his trainee, genuinely puzzled.

“None of them ring a bell? Not even Grimace?”

Roy shook his head.

“What year are you from?” Martin asked.

“1973.”

“Wow,” Martin said. “Seriously? Huh.”

Martin took a moment to absorb this, then said, “Well, none of these guys existed yet in ’73, except Grimace, and he probably looked pretty different. Did you ever eat at McDonald’s?”

Roy said, “No.”

Martin asked, “Why not?”

“Because I’m a grown man,” Roy answered.

Martin shrugged and parted the curtain. He gestured toward the gap and said, “After you.”

Roy walked through the curtain into Martin’s living
quarters
, which took up the remaining two-thirds of the building. The walls were bare wood and plaster. The ceiling was a tangle of timber rafters. The floor was raw planks. The space between the walls, the floor, and the ceiling was filled mostly with furniture from IKEA. The layout was what designers in Martin’s time called “open plan living.” It was one space. The bedroom was distinct from the living area and the dining area, but they were delineated from one another not by walls or partitions, but by where and how the furniture was placed.

Now Roy looked confused. “You live in a barn?”

Martin smiled as he breezed past Roy. “Pretty much. I mean, the building is in town, so I think of it as a warehouse, but before I bought it, this building’s main job was to keep hay dry before it was fed to horses, so yeah. I guess that pretty much makes it a barn.”

Martin walked to his work table and watched Roy explore his living space. The furniture was loosely clustered together in a little over half of the room. The rest of the room was open and empty. Roy walked around the dining room table and chairs, then stopped and asked where the kitchen was.

“Don’t have one. We don’t really need to cook. Are you
hungry
?” Martin asked.

“No. Pete gave me some mutton. He said it was on the house.”

Martin remembered that when he’d arrived, the only thing Pete had given him “on the house” was an assortment of threats and insults.

Roy moved on to the color-coordinated couch and easy chairs. They were modern, comfortable, and small enough to be easily maneuvered by one man. He slowly walked toward
something
he clearly didn’t recognize. It was a large, flat slab of black glass and plastic, mounted vertically on a base that sat on top of a wooden cabinet. “What’s that?’ he asked.

“That’s my TV,” Martin said. He picked up a remote control and aimed it at the slab. It played a little jingle and displayed a spinning Samsung logo. Martin turned it off.

“There are no TV channels here, of course, but I use it to watch old movies from time to time.”

Roy turned to Martin, and in a quiet voice asked, “What year are you from?”

Martin chuckled. “2012. Have a seat, Roy.”

Roy sat heavily in one of the easy chairs. Martin looked at his closed laptop, thinking he’d give Roy a little more time to adjust before hitting him with that. He got up from his desk and sat on the couch opposite Roy.

“So,” Martin asked, “what happened?”

“Huh?” Roy said, snapping out of his daze.

“What brings you to Medieval England, and how the heck did you manage to find the file in 1973?”

“Nobody else from the seventies is here?”

“No. Until you, the earliest year anyone had come here from was 1984, as far as I know.”

Roy puffed up a bit. “So I found it first.”

“Yes,” Martin said, “but you got here last, so you can decide for yourself what that’s worth.”

Roy thought about that, then continued. “I was an engineer at Lockheed. It’s a company that makes airplanes.”

Martin said, “It’s called Lockheed Martin in my time. Always kinda got my attention.”

“I bet. Anyway, I worked in a division called the Skunk Works.”

“Really?!”

“Yeah. We, uh, we mainly did top secret work for the
government
.”

“I know!”

“High-speed, high-altitude stuff.”

“I know!”

“Top-secret projects.”

“I know!”

“Look, kid,” Roy snapped. “Do you want me to tell you the story, or do you already know it?”

Martin put his hands up. “Sorry. Please, go on.”

“Okay. So, back in ’65 we got ourselves a computer. An IBM 360. We didn’t know what the heck we were gonna do with it, but everyone figured those things were the future, so they ordered me to learn how to run the thing. I studied and experimented for a while. The company had a few more of them sitting around in other divisions. All of the magnetic tapes for the whole company were stored in one room. One day, I decide to see what other divisions are using the stupid thing for, so I just start loading up all the tapes in there, one by one. One of the tapes has a file on it that appears to be larger than the tape could hold. That got my attention.”

“Understandably,” Martin said. “How much could one of those tapes hold?”

“A hundred and seventy megabytes,” Roy answered. “What’s so funny?”

Martin said, “Nothing. Please, go on.”

“Okay, so I load up the file, and I get a print of the first few thousand characters. It looks like a database.”

“And eventually, you realized what you were looking at.”

“Yes,” Roy said, “proof that the world, and everyone and everything in it, is just a program controlled by a computer.”

“And you had a file that could control the computer that controlled the world.” Martin leaned forward and asked, “What did you do next?”

“I thought about giving myself a bunch of money, but I thought that was probably the fastest way to get caught.”

Martin decided to never tell Roy how he had gotten caught.

Roy continued, “I decided to use the database to give myself an advantage at work. Make my prototypes stronger. Boost the output of my team’s engine designs. I told everyone my secret was advanced computer modeling.”

“Smart. Did it work?”

“For a while. There was one project I’d really put my heart into. The A-12. It was a spy plane. It needed to fly very high and very fast. Later they added a seat and called it the SR-71.”

“You worked on the Blackbird?” Martin blurted, in spite of himself.

Roy smiled. “Is that what they call it?”

“Yeah, eventually, I guess. It went, like, Mach three, didn’t it?”

“Officially. It could go a bit faster if it had to.”

Martin leaned back heavily into his seat. “Wow. The SR-71. I had a poster of it in my bedroom. I always wondered how they managed to make something like that clear back in the sixties.”

There was a long, awkward pause, as Martin’s smile faded.

“And now you know,” Roy said. “The damned Russians were just so much better with titanium then we were. I thought having good intelligence would prevent wars in the long run, so I found ways to make the plane work. Then I found ways to make it work better. I just got carried away.”

“And that’s how you got caught?” Martin asked.

Roy grimaced and said, “I moved to a different project, then they tried to build more SR-71s. It was top secret, and I wasn’t on the team anymore, so I didn’t know it was happening. They couldn’t get the titanium parts to bond. Eventually they started asking questions.”

“And you pictured yourself having a long talk with the CIA, so you decided to get lost.”

“Bingo. I’d read a book that had just come out.
The Best Years to Live in Medieval England
, by some guy named Cox. It was a gift. Anyway, I snuck into the chart room and grabbed the coordinates for the Cliffs of Dover, made a side trip to the computer room, entered the coordinates, picked a date, and that’s how I got here.”

Martin considered this for a moment, then asked, “So where’s your computer?”

Roy squinted. “I don’t own a computer. I’m just a guy.”

“What about the computer you used to get here?”

Roy kept squinting. “That’s Lockheed’s computer.”

“Whatever,” Martin said. “Where is it?”

“Where I left it, at the Skunk Works.”

Martin had difficulty absorbing what he was hearing. “You didn’t bring it with you? Roy? Oh man, it was a one-way trip for you!”

“Like I said, kid, I panicked.”

“Without a computer here, how’d you plan to pass yourself off as a wizard?”

“I didn’t,” Roy said, chuckling. “I figured I’d use my engineering background to make a living. I walked into that bar, they took one look at me, and assumed I was a wizard.”

“Yeah,” Martin agreed, “I bet they did.”

Martin spent the next hour laying out the situation for Roy in much the same way Phillip had done for him. He explained that there were communities of wizards all over Europe in this time, and in various other places, at other points in history. He told Roy that all of the wizards were guys like them, who had stumbled across the file in one of its many forms, gotten into trouble using it, and come back in time as a means of hiding.

They spent some time puzzling over the fact that while
everyone
else had found the file on some corporate mainframe, Roy had found it on a magnetic memory tape, but Martin
eventually
dismissed the topic as just one of the many things about the file, and the universe itself, that seemed
counterintuitive
.

Martin explained that women who found the file all ended up going to Atlantis, as life everywhere else wasn’t
particularly
hospitable
for women with magic powers. Martin was just explaining about chronological pollution, and how nothing they did to the past seemed to have any effect on the future, when Roy interrupted him by snoring.

Martin roused Roy just long enough to get him set up to sleep on the couch. As he tucked a sheet set into the cushions, Roy asked, “When do I get to meet the guy in charge?”

They guy in charge,
Martin thought
.
There’s a thorny issue.
For a moment, Martin considered telling Roy about how the
current
chairman had only held that position for a short time, and how the chairman before had changed his name from Jimmy to
Merlin
, and then tried to reshape the entire country
according
to his whims, which included trying to kill all of the other
wizards
.

Nah,
Martin thought,
that’s a little too heavy to drop on him on the first night. I’ll explain the whole thing later, when we talk about banishment.

Martin answered, “I don’t know when you’ll meet the
chairman
. It’ll happen at some point, but it’s hard to say when. He’s a busy guy.”

4.

Some would think that Phillip enjoyed being the chairman of the wizards in spite of the busy schedule that came with the job. Phillip would tell you that he enjoyed being
chairman
because
of the busy schedule. Many people found this hard to understand, but those people hadn’t actually seen the
schedule
.

Phillip rolled out of bed at his official residence, the same hut he’d lived in for the last ten years. He stretched his back and regretted for the thousandth time that he hadn’t gained the ability to freeze the aging process until he was in his forties, and
predictably
thick around the middle. He pulled some breakfast out of his hat and ate it in a bleary haze. When breakfast was done and he was mostly awake, Phillip grabbed his wizard staff, put on his pointy hat and light blue robe, and commuted to work. Some days he’d make a show of flying to his shop in
public
, but today he simply teleported there. He had a full agenda, and he wanted to get to it.

He appeared in front of his building, entered right away, and walked through the storefront that was just there for show. He went straight through the séance room, with its fake crystal ball. He climbed the staircase at the back of the building, and reached his goal, the second story, which was decorated with the finest furnishings and entertainment devices that 1984 had to offer.

He pushed a button on the massive Sony stereo, and the room quietly filled with the resonant sounds of The Alan
Parsons
Project. He walked to the chrome and white plastic bar and looked at his official schedule.

Item one: get up. Done!

Item two: eat breakfast. Done!

Item three: think up some busy work and delegate it to a wizard who’ll make a lot of noise about it.

Phillip thought for a moment about the busy work, and about whom to make busy with it. His eyes drifted around the room, past his Commodore 64 computer, past the mint-
condition
Pontiac
Fiero he kept inside as if it were a work of art. His gaze lingered on his original stand-up arcade GORF cabinet. He remembered how he had carefully dismantled it and
transported
it back in time one piece at a time. He saw the scratches around the cabinet’s coin box, and remembered seeing Magnus, the younger of the two wizards who resided in Norway, trying to pry it open. That answered the question of
who
, but he still needed to think of a
what
.

After a few moments he called Magnus on what the
wizards
euphemistically called
the hand phone.
He raised his right hand in front of his face, as if imitating a Shakespearian actor
reciting
the “Alas, poor Yorick” speech. Phillip said, “
Komuniki kun
Magnus
two
.” Almost instantly, Phillip’s raised hand was filled with
Magnus
’ place-holder icon, a flickering, semi-transparent image of the devil sticking out his tongue. The demon’s left hand held the neck of a white, V-shaped guitar. The other hand was making a devil-horns gesture.

It’s redundant for the devil to make devil horns,
Phillip thought.
He could just point at his horns and send the same message
.

Finally, the image of the devil was replaced with a bleary-eyed Magnus. Clearly Phillip had woken him.

The image of Magnus’ head said, “Hey, Phillip.”

“Good morning, Magnus. How’s Magnus?” Phillip replied. Magnus’ best friend was also a wizard who lived in Norway, who was also named Magnus.

“He’s Magnus,” Magnus answered, “you know what I mean?”

“I think I do.”

“What’s up?”

Phillip said, “Official business, I’m afraid. As you know, I am now the chairman of the wizards.”

“Well, yeah. I voted for you. It was only two months ago.”

Phillip smiled. “Right. Well, I’ve decided that we need to take a census.”

“A census,” Magnus said, clearly thinking he’d
misunderstood
.

“Yes. We need to count and list every wizard in Europe,” Phillip explained patiently.

Magnus squinted, and said, “But, Phil, you know every
wizard
in Europe.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Phillip said, “I think I do. We both think we do, but we can’t be sure. For all we know, David, out in Russia, might know another wizard who he never mentioned because he assumed we already knew about him.”

Magnus kept on squinting. “I guess that’s true. Why are you calling me?”

Here we go
, Phillip thought. “Magnus, I’d like for you to make a list of all the wizards in Europe that you know of.”

Magnus nodded and said, “Okay, I can do that.”

“Good,” Phillip said. “Then I want you to call every wizard on that list, and ask them to make the same list.”

Magnus’ eyes widened. “You want me to call everyone?”

“Yeah,” Phillip said, brightly. “It’s not like I’m asking you to go see them in person.”

“Yeah, I suppose not,” Magnus agreed, grudgingly.

“Unless someone comes up with a wizard you’ve never heard of. Then I want you to go track them down and get their
information
.”

“What kind of information?”

“You know. Who they are. Where they’re from. Where they found the file. The basics.”

“How soon do you need this, Phillip?”

“Oh, there’s no particular rush. A couple of days, I guess.”

Magnus sucked his teeth, then said, “That’s fine if there are no new wizards. If I do have to hunt someone down I’ll need more time. Can I have a week?”

Phillip looked disappointed, but said, “Of course, Magnus. If that’s how long it takes.”

They said their goodbyes and Phillip turned his attention back to the list.

Item three: think up some busywork and delegate it to a
wizard
who’ll make a lot of noise about it
. Done for the week! On to item four.

Item four: Do whatever you like for the rest of the day.

Phillip played some GORF, then settled in to his most comfortable chair to read his dog-eared copy of
Catch-22
.

He had been reading for about an hour when he heard the noise. It wasn’t an inherently alarming noise. It sounded like someone at the foot of his staircase had rung a crystal bell. The sound shook Phillip down to his bones, since he didn’t own a crystal bell, and due to his magical security measures, it shouldn’t have been possible for anyone to be at the foot of
his stai
rs.

Phillip put down his book, grabbed his staff, and carefully crept to the head of the staircase. Carefully, he peered down into the distance below and was thoroughly confused by what he saw there.