Off to Be the Wizard - 2 - Spell or High Water (37 page)

“Just get it over with,” Phillip spat.

“Okay,” Jimmy said. “I will.”

Jimmy centered himself within the circle of terrified
wizards
, spun around once, savoring the moment, then fell to his knees, raised his hands above his head, and in a voice drenched in
emotion
, he cried out, “I am sorry! I apologize! I was wrong, so terribly wrong! I was wrong to play God. I was wrong to cover it up, and I was certainly wrong to try to kill all of you.”

“What the hell is this?” Tyler asked in disbelief.

“It’s me apologizing,” Jimmy said. “I don’t blame you for being confused. You’ve never seen it before.”

“You’re not here for revenge?” Phillip asked.

“I don’t deserve any. It’s not like any of you wronged me. I deserved the punishment you gave me for what I did to Tyler alone. I deserved far worse if you throw in my attempt to have you all beaten to death by orcs, making the orcs in the first place, and what happened to Rickard’s Bend, which was an accident, but that doesn’t make those people less dead, does it?”

“No,” Martin agreed. “As a matter of fact, it doesn’t.”

Jimmy turned to Martin. “I know, I can never truly make up for any of it, even that awful, humiliating beating I gave you in this very room. The shame and anger must be terrible. The embarrassment must still feel for fresh for you. Can you ever forgive me, for humiliating you with your own macro like that?”

“It wasn’t that humiliating,” Martin said. “I mean, I held my own pretty good.”

Jimmy smiled. “That’s very gracious of you, Martin, but please, don’t sugarcoat it. I attacked you brutally with a macro you yourself designed, making you look pathetic and inept in front of a large crowd of spectators. Can you ever forgive me?”

Martin said, “I doubt it.”

“I don’t blame you. I don’t blame any of you. Not one bit. I am asking you to forgive me, though. I have returned to ask you all to please forgive me for what I’ve done, not because I deserve your forgiveness, but because you deserve the opportunity to
forgive
.”

Gary said, “So you were telling me the truth.”

“Yes,” Jimmy said. “The easiest way to manipulate someone is to tell them the truth.”

“After you’ve twisted the truth to fit your needs,” Phillip spat.

“I prefer to think that I pruned the truth like a banzai tree. I removed some of the ugly bits, and made it more elegant. Gary, Eddie, you wanted to believe that I was here to apologize, and the truth is I was here to apologize, but for the apology to be believed I needed everyone to be helpless. I told you that. I just glossed over the fact that you are part of everyone. Most people forget that they are part of everyone. You say everyone, and everyone hears
everyone else
.”

Phillip said, “Does this really seem like the best way to
apologize
to us? Manipulating us like this?”

“I see your point,” Jimmy said, “but what can I do? It’s what I’m good at. It’s part of my nature. I can’t help manipulating
people
any more than you can help being sarcastic.”

“Oh, that’s brilliant,” Phillip said.

“Well, here’s some more truth,” Tyler said. “Your apology is a load of crap. You say your apology wouldn’t hold water unless we saw you as a threat. Well, if we accept it, that won’t hold any water either, for the same reason. Saying ‘forgive me, or else’ doesn’t show a lot of remorse.”

“Quite right,” Jimmy said. “That’s why your powers were all reinstated, and mine were taken away, when I said, ‘I am sorry. I apologize’. That’s why I had to lower us back to the floor. If I didn’t, we’d have fallen.”

The wizards glanced around the circle at each other, then quickly let go of each other’s hands as if they’d all received a mild electric shock. Jeff produced his wand and tested it by levitating Jimmy, holding him helpless in the air. He started to put Jimmy back down, but Phillip stopped him.

“No, leave him up there. I have some questions to ask.”

Jimmy said, “That’s fine. Perfectly understandable. You have my permission to keep me suspended here if it makes you all more comfortable.”

“Shut up,” Phillip barked. “So you’re here to apologize, huh? And you expect us to just welcome you back with open arms?”

“That would be wonderful, but no, I don’t expect that. You can’t truly trust me now, but I hope you’ll give me the
opportunity
to earn your trust.”

“What if we don’t? What if we take your powers away again and send you back where you came from?”

“Then I’ve lost nothing. In fact, I’ve already gained the
knowledge
that I at least offered an apology.”

Tyler said, “Great! So either we send you back, and you win, or we welcome you back like nothing ever happened, and
you win.”

Jimmy shook his head. “I don’t really win in either case. I either lose my powers again and get sent back to the future to die, or I stay here with thirty years’ worth of wear on my body and bad memories in my head, struggling to regain your trust and respect, which I probably will never get. I can’t really call either of those
winning
. They’re just better than where I was before.”

“There’s a third option you haven’t mentioned,” Martin said. “We decide not to forgive you, and you disappear with your powers intact. You may be sorry for what you did, but you’ve admitted that you’re willing to omit parts of the truth to get your way. Do you honestly expect us to believe that you don’t have an escape plan in place?”

“That’s a very good question, Martin, but I can’t answer it. If, hypothetically, I said ‘yes, I do have an escape plan,’ it would undo all of my arguments. If I say no, you won’t believe me
anyway
. What can I say?”

“Tell the truth,” Martin said. “Do you have an escape plan?”

Without any hesitation, Jimmy said, “No. I don’t. Now you tell the truth, Martin. Do you believe me?”

“No.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“I don’t care.”

Jimmy was left floating in the middle of the hall while the wizards huddled in the far corner and argued for a good long time. Jimmy could identify which wizard was speaking, and their general tone of voice, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. There was almost always at least one wizard peering at Jimmy nervously. Occasionally, all debate would stop and all of the wizards would turn as a group to stare at him for a moment. The first time it happened, Jimmy smiled and waved. He could tell from the tone of the voices he heard immediately after that that it had been a bad move. He spent the rest of the time trying to convey a sense of nervous hopefulness with a slight note of desperation.

Finally he heard Phillip say something in that loud, stilted voice guys like Phillip use when they’re trying to sound like a leader. Then he saw the majority of the wizards raise their hands. Phillip said something in the tone of voice guys like him use when they’ve dropped something heavy on their foot, and Jimmy knew things had gone his way.

The wizards came back to where Jimmy floated, but they stayed grouped together, rather than reforming a ring around him. Phillip snarled with obvious distaste, “Okay, we’ve come to a decision, but before we tell you what that is, we have some questions.”

Jimmy said, “Ask me anything.”

“Why did you come back now? From our point of view you just tried to kill us all less than two months ago. Some of the guys are still having nightmares about it. Why not give us a year or two to calm down?”

“It’s almost always best to apologize as soon as possible after you’ve wronged someone. It shows more remorse, and while sometimes people do get less angry over time, just as often they actually get angrier. The more they remember what you did, the worse it can seem to them, until eventually they blame you for doing things that are much worse than what you actually did.”

Tyler asked, “What would be worse than ghosting me,
killing
an entire town, trying to murder all of us, and trying to kill
Martin
with your bare hands?”

Jimmy said, “I don’t know, and I didn’t want to find out.” The wizards grumbled, but nobody argued, so Jimmy continued. “I would have come back right after you banished me if I could, but I also needed a time when, well, I can’t think of a better way to put this. I needed the coast to be clear. I knew that you,
Phillip
, or Martin might just attack me at first sight, so I had to find a time when all three of you were scarce, and my informant told me that this week they were in Atlantis, which I can’t wait to hear about, by the way, and that you were away researching your next book,
Dragon Wagon
.”

“
Dragon Wagon
?” Jeff asked.

“Yeah,” Tyler said, “it’s an idea I have about a guy who hitches a wagon to a dragon, and uses it to haul freight. It’s sort of a sword and sorcery meets
Smokey and the Bandit
kinda thing.” Tyler’s curiosity overwhelmed his anger. He asked Jimmy, “How does it turn out?”

“My informant says it’s some of your best work, but it doesn’t sell very well.”

“Who’s your informant?”

“You are, Tyler. I visited you in the future and persuaded you to help me.”

“What could you possibly say to make me want to help you?”

Jimmy said, “I can’t tell you. The only reason you even talk to me in the future is to find out what I’m going to say to you to get you to help me. If I say it to you now, it won’t work then.”

“Tell me!” Tyler yelled.

“I will, just before you help me.”

Phillip put a hand on Tyler’s shoulder. “Okay, look, we’re
getting
sidetracked. Tyler, you two can discuss it later.”

Jimmy added, “And we do.”

“Shut up,” Phillip barked. “Next question; how’d you get access to the file? We fixed you so that no computer would work anywhere near you. How’d you get around that?”

“I found someone who would be motivated to help me.”

“Who?” Phillip asked.

“The federal agents who tried to arrest Martin. I figured since
Martin
had vanished right in front of them twice, they’d probably want to know how he’d done it.”

Martin asked, “How did you find them?”

Jimmy smiled. “Your parents gave me their number.”

“What?! You . . . what did you do to my parents?”

“I told them that you hadn’t hurt anybody, and that you hadn’t broken any laws that I knew of, and if they’d give me the number of the agents who’d been there, I could prove it. I told them the truth. They’re lovely people, by the way.”

“You told the feds about the file?” Phillip asked.

“Yes, and I understand your concern, Phillip, but think it through. If the men I worked with ever figure out how to use the file on their own, what are they going to do, come back here and arrest us? No, they’d join us if they could. Anyway, don’t worry. They’ll never find their way back to the file without my help, and even if they do, we’ll have password protected that instance of it just like you did all the others. How’d you do that, by the way?”

The wizards were confused by this. Phillip put up a hand to silence their muttering, and said, “All known copies of the file have been locked down, but we still have total access. It’ll be in the report.” He turned his attention back to Jimmy. “How’d you get into the file? I know the copy you found was locked down. It was the first one I told the Atlanteans about.”

“I know. I checked,” Jimmy said. “We hunted down every copy I knew of and they were all locked. Eventually I remembered that there was one wizard who’d never trusted any of us enough to tell us where he found the file.”

“Todd,” Phillip said. “You went to Todd.”

“I went to Todd.”

Todd was the one wizard nobody ever wanted to talk about. Martin didn’t know why, because nobody wanted to talk about it.

“How is he?” Phillip asked.

“In prison for life,” Jimmy answered.

“That’s good. Nice of you to point him out to the feds. I’m sure they have a lot to talk about. They’ll probably tell us all about it when he leads them here.”

“That’s not going to happen, Phillip. However your friends in Atlantis locked down all of our file instances, now they can do it to his as well. I can tell you exactly where it is.”

Tyler asked, “What did you tell him to get him to help you? You banished him. He must hate you nearly as much as I do.”

“He hates all of us,” Jimmy said. “So I told him that giving me the means to come back here would make the rest of you very angry. In essence, I am his revenge. You should be grateful. It could have been much worse.”

Phillip said, “I’ll be the judge of that.”

The wizards retreated back to their huddle. They had another hushed conversation. They took another vote. From the sound of it, Phillip suffered another disappointment.

When the wizards returned, Phillip spat his words at Jimmy. “You’ve got a choice. You can either go back to the time you came from, with your magnetic field restored and your access to the file cut off, for good this time. Or—”

Jimmy said, “I choose the second option.”

“Wait,” Phillip sputtered. “I haven’t even told you what it is!”

“It’ll be preferable to the first option. I’m sure of it.”

“It could be something awful. It could be that we’ll kill you.”

Jimmy laughed. “Phillip. You’d never be a party to that. As much as you hate me, you’d never kill me unless it was self-defense. You’re a good man, and we both know it.”

Phillip was disgusted. “You say ‘you’re a good man’ like it’s an insult.”

“No,” Jimmy protested, “I mean it as a high compliment. You just hear it as an insult when it comes from me. Honestly, I wish I were more like you, Phillip. The last thirty years of my life would have been very different if I were.”

“So you want to be good, for selfish reasons.”

Jimmy shrugged. “It doesn’t sound great when you put it that way, but you gotta admit, it’s progress.”

Phillip decided to just plow ahead as if he hadn’t been
interrupted
. “The second option is that you stay here where we can keep an eye on you, and that is exactly what we will do. Rest assured, we will all be watching, just waiting for you to do
anything
we don’t like. The file modifications that stop the aging process and make you impervious to physical damage and
illness
will be left in place for now, but at the first sign of anything we don’t like, you’re cut off and sent back to the future to die in squalor.”