Unexpected Magic, Page 2

  He just gave me another, mild, shocked look and started the tractor and went through the river, making it all muddy. I never, ever saw him again.

  “Told you so,” said Ellen.

  That was the end of the adventure. I felt deeply sinful. The little ones were suddenly not having fun any more. Without making much fuss about it, we all quietly got our clothes and got dressed again. We retraced our steps to the village. It was just about lunchtime anyway.

  As I said, word gets round in a village with amazing speed. “You know the girl Jones? She took thirty kids down Water Lane and encouraged them to do wrong there. They was all there, naked as the day they was born, sitting in the river there, and her along with them, as bold as brass. A big girl like the girl Jones did ought to know better! Whatever next!”

  My parents interrogated me about it the next day. Isobel was there, backward hovering, wanting to check that her instinct had been right, I think, and fearful of the outcome. She looked relieved when the questions were mild and puzzled. I think my mother did not believe I had done anything so bizarre.

  “There is nothing shameful about the naked human body,” I reiterated.

  Since my mother had given me the book that said so, there was very little she could reply. She turned to Ursula. But Ursula was stoically and fiercely loyal. She said nothing at all.

  The only result of this adventure was that nobody ever suggested I should look after any children except my own sisters (who were strange anyway). Jean kept her promise to be my friend. The next year, when the Americans came to England, Jean and I spent many happy hours sitting on the church wall watching young GIs stagger out of the pub to be sick. But Jean never brought her sisters with her. I think her mother had forbidden it.

  When I look back, I rather admire my nine-year-old self. I had been handed the baby several times over that morning. I took the most harmless possible way to disqualify myself as a child-minder. Nobody got hurt. Everyone had fun. And I never had to do it again.

  Nad and Dan adn Quaffy

  She had struggled rather as a writer until she got her word processor. Or not exactly struggled, she thought, frowning at her screen and flipping the cursor back to correct adn to and. For some reason, she always garbled the word and. It was always adn or nad; dna or nda were less frequent, but all of them appeared far oftener than the right way. She had only started to make this mistake after she gave up her typewriter, and she felt it was a small price to pay.

  For years she had written what seemed to her the most stirring sort of novels, about lonely aliens among humans, or lonely humans among aliens, or sometimes both kinds lonely in an unkind world, all without ever quite hitting the response from readers she felt she was worth. Then came her divorce, which left her with custody of her son, Daniel, then thirteen. That probably provided an impetus of some sort in itself, for Danny was probably the most critical boy alive.

  “Mum!” he would say. “I wish you’d give up that lonely-heart alien stuff! Can’t you write about something decent for a change?” Or, staring at her best efforts at cookery, he said, “I can’t be expected to eat this!” After which he had taken over cooking himself: they now lived on chili con carne and stir-fry. For as Danny said, “A man can’t be expected to learn more than one dish a year.” At the moment, being nearly fifteen, Danny was teaching himself curry. Their nice Highgate house reeked of burned garam masala most of the time.

  But the real impetus had come when she found Danny in her workroom sternly plaiting the letters of her old typewriter into metal braid. “I’ve had this old thing!” he said when she tore him away with fury and cursings. “So have you. It’s out of the ark. Now you’ll have to get a word processor.”

  “But I don’t know how to work the things!” she had wailed.

  “That doesn’t matter. I do. I’ll work it for you,” he replied inexorably. “And I’ll tell you what one to buy, too, or you’ll only waste money.”

  He did so. The components were duly delivered and installed, and Daniel proceeded to instruct his mother in how to work as much of them as—as he rather blightingly said—her feeble brain would hold. “There,” he said. “Now write something worth reading for a change.” And he left her sitting in front of it all.

  When she thought about it, she was rather ashamed of the fact that her knowledge of the thing had not progressed one whit beyond those first instructions Danny had given her. She had to call on her son to work the printout, to recall most of the files, and to get her out of any but the most simple difficulty. On several occasions—as when Danny had been on a school trip to Paris or away with his school cricket team—she had had to tell her publisher all manner of lies to account for the fact that there would be no copy of anything until Danny got back. But the advantages far outweighed these difficulties, or at least she knew they did now.

  That first day had been a nightmare. She had felt lost and foolish and weak. She had begun, not having anything else in mind, on another installment of lonely aliens. And everything kept going wrong. She had to call Danny in ten times in the first hour, and then ten times after lunch, and then again when, for some reason, the machine produced what she had written of Chapter I as a list, one word to a line. Even Danny took most of the rest of the day to sort out what she had done to get that. After that he hovered over her solicitously, bringing her mugs of black coffee, until, somewhere around nine in the evening, she realized she was in double bondage, first to a machine and then to her own son.

  “Go away!” she told him. “Out of my sight! I’m going to learn to do this for myself or die in the attempt!”

  Danny gave her bared teeth a startled look and fled.

  By this time she had been sitting in front of board and screen for nearly ten hours. It seemed to her that her threat to die in the attempt was no idle one. She felt like death. Her back ached, and so did her head. Her eyes felt like running blisters. She had cramp in both hands and one foot asleep. In addition, her mouth was foul with too much coffee and Danny’s chili con carne. The little green letters on the screen kept retreating behind the glass to the distant end of a long, long tunnel. “I will do this!” she told herself fiercely. “I am an intelligent adult—probably even a genius—and I will not be dominated by a mere machine!”

  And she typed all over again:

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Captain had been at board and screen ever since jump—a total of ten hours. Her hands shook with weariness, making it an effort to hold them steady on her switches. Her head was muzzy, her mouth foul with nutrient concentrates. But since the mutiny, it was sit double watches or fail to bring the starship Candida safely through the intricate system of Meld....

  At this point she began to get a strange sense of power. She was dominating this damned machine, even though she was doing it only by exploiting her own sensations. Also, she was becoming interested in what might be going to happen to the starship Candida, not to speak of the reasons that had led up to the mutiny aboard her. She continued writing furiously until long after midnight. When she stopped at last, she had to pry her legs loose from her chair.

  “That’s more like it, Mum!” Danny said the next morning, reading it as it came from the printer.

  He was, as usual, right. Starship Candida was the book that made the name of F. C. Stone. It won prizes. It sold in resorts and newsagents all over the world. It was, reviewers said, equally remarkable for its insight into the Captain’s character as for the intricate personal relationships leading to the mutiny. Much was spoken about the tender and peculiar relationships between the sexes. This last made F. C. Stone grin rather. All she had done was to revenge herself on Danny by reversing the way things were between them. In the book the Captain was all-powerful and dominating and complained a lot about the food. The Mate had a hypnotically induced mind-set that caused him to bleat for assistance at the first sign of trouble.

  Her next book, The Mutineers, was an even greater success. For this one, F. C. Stone extended the intricate
personal relationships to the wider field of galactic politics. She discovered she reveled in politics. Provided she was making up the politics herself, there seemed no limit to how intricate she could make them.

  Since then she had, well, not stuck to a formula—she was much more artfully various than that—but as she said and Danny agreed, there was no point in leaving a winning game. Though she did not go back to starship Candida, she stayed with that universe and its intricate politics. There were aliens in it, too, which she always enjoyed. And she kept mostly out in space, so that she could continue to describe pilots astronauting at the controls of a word processor. Sooner or later in most of her books, someone, human or alien, would have sat long hours before the screen until dazed with staring, aching in the back, itching in the nose—for the burning of Asian spices in the kitchen tended to give her hay fever—and with cramped hands, this pilot would be forced to maneuver arduously through jump. This part always, or nearly always, got written when F. C. Stone was unable to resist staying up late to finish the chapter.

  Danny continued to monitor his mother. He was proud of what he had made her do. In the holidays and around the edges of school, he hung over her shoulder and brought her continual mugs of strong black coffee. This beverage began to appear in the books, too. The mutineer humans drank gav, while their law-abiding enemies quaffed chvi. Spacer aliens staggered from their nav-couches to gulp down kivay, and the mystics of Meld used xfy to induce an altered state of consciousness, although this was not generally spotted as being the same substance. And it was all immensely popular.

  It was all due to the word processor, she thought, giving the nearest component a friendly pat as she leaned toward the screen again. The latest mug of cooling kivay sat beside her. Her nose was, as usual, tickled by burned ginger or something. Her back was beginning to ache, or, more truthfully, her behind was. She ought to get a more comfortable chair, but she was too fond of this old one. Anyway, the latest book was the thing. For this one, she had at last gone back to starship Candida. There had been a lot of pressure from her fans. And her publisher thought there was enough material in their suggestions, combined with F. C. Stone’s own ideas, to make a trilogy. So she had decided to start in the way she knew would get her going. She typed:

  Jump. Time nad the world stretched dna went out. Back. The Captain had sat at her boards for four objective days—four subjective minutes or four subjective centuries. Her head ached, gums adn all. She cursed. Hands trembling on controls, she struggled to get her fix on this system’s star.

  Now what had some vastly learned reader suggested about this system’s star? It had some kind of variability, but that was all she could remember. Damn. All her notes for it were in that file Danny had set up for her. He was at school. But he had written down for her how to recall it. She fumbled around for his piece of paper—it had worked halfway under a black box whose name and function she never could learn—and took a swig of lukewarm xfy while she studied what to do. It looked quite simple. She took another sip of gav. Store the new book. Careful not to cancel this morning’s work. There. Screen blank. Now type in this lot, followed by Candida 2. Then—

  A clear childish voice spoke. “This is Candida Two, Candy,” it said. “Candida One, I need your confirmation.”

  It was no voice F. C. Stone knew, and it seemed to come from the screen. Her eyes turned to the mug of kivay. Perhaps she was in a state of altered consciousness.

  “Candida One!” the voice said impatiently. “Confirm that you are conscious. I will wait ten seconds and then begin lifesaving procedures. Ten, nine, eight … ”

  This sounded serious. Coffee poisoning, thought F. C. Stone. I shall change to carrot juice or cocoa.

  “ … seven, six, five,” counted the childish voice, “four, three … ”

  I’d better say something, thought F. C. Stone. How absurd. Weakly she said, “Do stop counting. It makes me nervous.”

  “Are you Candida One?” demanded the voice. “The voice pattern does not quite tally. Please say something else for comparison with my records.”

  Why should I? thought F. C. Stone. But it was fairly clear that if she stayed silent, the voice would start counting again and then, presumably, flood the room with the antidote for xfy.

  No, no, this was ridiculous. There was no way a word processor could flood anyone’s system with anything. Come to that, there was no way it could speak either—or was there? She must ask Danny. She was just letting her awe of the machine, and her basic ignorance, get on top of her. Let us be rational here, she thought. If she was not suffering from gav poisoning, or if, alternatively, the smell of charred turmeric at present flooding the house did not prove to have hallucinogenic properties, then she had worked too long and hard imagining things and was now unable to tell fantasy from reality … unless—what a wonderful thought!—Danny had, either for a joke or by accident, connected one of the black boxes to the radio and she was at this moment receiving its Play for the Day.

  Her hand shot out to the radio beside her, which she kept for aural wallpaper during the duller part of her narratives, and switched it on. Click. “During this period Beethoven was having to contend with his increasing deafness—”

  The childish voice cut in across this lecture. “This voice is not correct,” it pronounced, putting paid to that theory. “It is the voice of a male. Males are forbidden access to any of my functions beyond basic navigational aids. Candida One, unless you reply confirming that you are present and conscious, I shall flood this ship with sedative gas ten seconds from now.”

  Then perhaps Danny has put a cassette in the radio as a joke, thought F. C. Stone. She turned off the radio and, for good measure, shook it. No, no cassette in there.

  And the childish voice was at its counting again: “ … six, five, four … ”

  Finding that her mouth was hanging open, F. C. Stone used it. “I know this is a practical joke,” she said. “I don’t know what it is you’ve done, Danny, but my God, I’ll skin you when I get my hands on you!”

  The countdown stopped. “Voice patterns are beginning to match,” came the pronouncement, “though I do not understand your statement. Are you quite well, Candy?”

  Fortified by the knowledge that this had to be a joke of Danny’s, F. C. Stone snapped, “Yes, of course I am!” Very few people knew that the C in F. C. Stone stood for Candida, and even fewer knew that she had, in her childhood, most shamingly been known as Candy. But Danny of course knew both these facts. “Stop this silly joke, Danny, and let me get back to work.”

  “Apologies,” spoke the childish voice, “but who is Danny? There are only two humans on this ship. Is that statement addressed to the male servant beside you? He asks me to remind you that his name is Adny.”

  The joke was getting worse. Danny was having fun with her typos now. F. C. Stone was not sure she would ever forgive him for that. “And I suppose you’re going to tell me we’ve just emerged in the Dna System and will be coming in to ladn at Nad,” she said bitterly.

  “Of course,” said the voice.

  F. C. Stone spent a moment in angry thought. Danny had to be using a program of some kind. She ought first to test this theory and then, if it was correct, find some way to disrupt the program and get some peace. “Give me your name,” she said, “with visual confirmation.”

  “If you like,” the voice responded. Had it sounded puzzled? Then Danny had thought of this. “I am Candida Two. I am your conscious-class computer modeled on your own brain.” It sounded quite prideful, saying this. But, thought F. C. Stone, a small boy co-opted by a grand fifteen-year-old like Danny would sound prideful. “We are aboard the astroship Partlett M32/A401.”

  Motorways, thought F. C. Stone, but where did he get the name?

  “Visual,” said the voice. Blocks of words jumped onto the screen. They seemed to be in—Russian? Greek?—capitals.

  It had to be a computer game of some kind, F. C. Stone thought. Now what would Danny least expect her to do?
Easy. She plunged to the wall and turned the electricity off. Danny would not believe she would do that. He would think she was too much afraid of losing this morning’s work, and maybe she would, but she could do it over again. As the blocks of print faded from the screen, she stumped off to the kitchen and made herself a cup of xfy—no, coffee!—and prowled around in there amid the smell of cauterized ginger while she drank it, with some idea of letting the system cool off thoroughly. She had a vague notion that this rendered a lost program even more lost. As far as she was concerned, this joke of Danny’s couldn’t be lost enough.

  The trouble was that she was accustomed so to prowl whenever she was stuck in a sentence. As her annoyance faded, habit simply took over. Halfway through the mug of quaffy, she was already wondering whether to call the taste in the Captain’s mouth merely foul or to use something more specific, like chicken shit. Five minutes later F. C. Stone mechanically made herself a second mug of chofiy—almost as mechanically noting that this seemed to be a wholly new word for the stuff and absently constructing a new kind of alien to drink it—and carried it through to her workroom to resume her day’s stint. With her mind by then wholly upon the new solar system just entered by the starship Candida—there was no need to do whatever it was the learned fan wanted; after all, neither of them had been there and she was writing this book, not he—she switched the electricity back on and sat down.

  Neat blocks of Greco-Cyrillic script jumped to her screen. “Candy!” said the childish voice. “Why don’t you answer? I repeat. We are well inside the Dna System and coming up to jump.”

  F. C. Stone was startled enough to swallow a mouthful of scalding c’phee and barely notice what it was called. “Nonsense, Danny,” she said, somewhat hoarsely. “Everyone knows you don’t jump inside a solar system.”

  The script on the screen blinked a little. “His name is Adny,” the voice said, sounding a little helpless. “If you do not remember that, or that microjumps are possible, then I see I must attend to what he has been telling me. Candy, it is possible that you have been overtaken by senility—”