Magic Test Read online

  “I was here when he dropped off the bales. He said they’re worth their weight in silver in Rynxian space.”

  “I don’t doubt that they are, but we aren’t in Rynxian space and I have no intention of going there. Now I’ll have to store the bales until Pffift returns, and then he’ll offer to take them off my hands at a discount since he’s going that direction anyway.”

  “Just wear them, then,” Helen suggested.

  “They have three legs!”

  “So you’ll have a spare. It’s better than being one leg short. Besides, nobody can see your underwear.”

  I weighed a pair, or maybe I should say a ‘triple’ of underwear in my hand, and then lifted one of the unopened bales by the straps.

  “What are you doing?” my team member asked.

  “Extrapolating from the weight. I make it thirty-two hundred triples of terrycloth underwear that Pffift has stuck me with. Wearing them is not a practical option.”

  “Let me see those,” Helen said. After a quick glance around to make sure no humans had entered, she ripped one of the legs off, creating a standard pair of underwear with a gap in the waistband and a tubular remnant. Another tear and she had turned the leftover bit into an almost rectangular flat piece. “A little sewing and you’ll have a pair of winter underwear and a bar towel.”

  “I don’t need thirty-two hundred pairs of winter underwear with matching bar towels,” I protested. “I don’t need any pairs of underwear at all.”

  “Too much information,” Helen declared, the last thing you would ever expect from an AI, but she’d picked up the expression posing as a college student on Earth. “Did you hear the news about eBeth?”

  “What news?”

  “Oh, I better not spoil it for you then. How about I tell you the news about me instead?”

  “I was wondering what you’re doing here,” I said. “You haven’t made it to any of our meetings since the holidays.”

  “You know I would have been perfectly happy to open my pole-dancing and self-defense school in the village if there had been enough potential students. It just made more sense in the provincial capital, plus I can keep an eye on the local spaceport.”

  “I wasn’t complaining, Helen. We aren’t officially observing this world anymore and you have a right to make a living. I appreciate your reports on Reservation’s younger generation and I’m sure the Head Librarian reads them with interest as well. The truth is, I’m surprised you’re able to take time off from your business to come here.”

  “The women I’ve trained as assistants practically run the school for me now, and my news is that I’m back here to finalize plans with Kim and Justin for a merger.”

  “Between your pole-dancing school and their chain of geriatric wellness clinics?”

  “Kim’s been studying humans for almost five years now, if you count her time on Earth, and she says that the best time to channel people into a healthy lifestyle is while they’re young. Her current customers only think of the apothecary shop as a place to visit after something goes wrong, and Justin says that the martial arts instructors I’ve trained will be perfect for leading old people in stretching exercises.”

  “Sounds promising.” The combination actually seemed a little far-fetched to me, but with four bales of unwanted alien underwear cluttering up my restaurant, who was I to offer business advice?

  “Welcome back, Mark,” Stacey said, accompanying Paul into the dining room. “Sue invited us for dinner to celebrate your safe return. I hear that your latest scouting mission was another bust.”

  “It wasn’t much fun,” I admitted. “How did your last tour go?”

  “A bit tricky,” she replied. As our team’s art and culture expert, Stacey had found her niche playing tour guide to groups of humans from Reservation illegally visiting Earth through our dedicated portal. “One of my clients had appendicitis in Egypt, but Kim makes me carry a supply of customized medical nanobots, and two injections took care of it. I didn’t want to leave him alone in the hotel while he was recovering, so I had to let the others visit the pyramids on their own.”

  “Something happened?”

  “The guy I always go to for camel rentals charged my group three times the going rate! I’ll have to give him a piece of my mind next time I’m there. I need more nanobots, Kim,” she concluded, as our team members posing as husband and wife apothecaries entered.

  Kim dug around in the large shoulder-bag she was never without and came up with a small leather case. “Here,” she said, extending the kit to Stacey. “I’ve reprogrammed them to combine the diagnostics with the surgery so you only need to give one injection now. It’s fortunate that human biology isn’t very complicated.”

  “Did Helen tell you about our merger?” Justin asked me.

  “It’s a good thing your business is here and not back on Earth because the combination would never work as a website,” I said. While the main focus of the computer business I’d run on Earth had been repairs, I’d done a bit of search engine optimization for a few clients. Getting a single website to appear high in the results for pole-dancing, martial arts, preventative healthcare, and geriatric well-being would have been a challenge, even for me.

  “The cookies!” Helen yelped and raced for the kitchen. My reference to Earth’s Internet must have triggered her memory.

  “I just took them out,” Sue said, meeting her in the doorway with the tray just as the smell of fresh baked cookies reached me. “Why didn’t you set a timer?”

  “I was about to when Mark distracted me complaining about his underwear.”

  “They’re not my underwear,” I said awkwardly. “They just belong to me.”

  “Is there a problem?” Sue asked, setting the tray of cookies on the bar. “When Pffift delivered the bales, he told me he’d discussed it with you.”

  I realized that the Hanker had outmaneuvered me neatly. It was true we had discussed his unsatisfactory payments of my commission, but if I complained that Sue had misunderstood, I would be shifting the blame to her.

  “No, I was just surprised to find them in the dining room,” I said, resigning myself to storing the underwear in the basement. “Has business been so slow the last week that none of the customers complained about the clutter?”

  “I ended up putting out the ‘Vacation’ sign a day after you left,” Sue confessed. “Do you remember a few months ago when we had a tour group that consisted entirely of the baker and his extended family?”

  “Sure. Stacey said they were more interested in visiting restaurants than museums.”

  “I said they were only interested in visiting restaurants,” Stacey corrected me. “Not the fancy places either, but the ones that focused on ethnic foods or did a big lunch business.”

  “But lunch is The Eatery’s specialty!”

  “It’s a free market,” Paul reminded me, slipping behind the bar and beginning to draw tankards of ale. “You have to admit that the baker makes a good pizza, and now with his son’s pasta restaurant and his daughter’s American-style Chinese place, the competition is heating up.”

  “You need a theme,” eBeth said as she entered the dining room with Spot tagging along behind her. The Archmage spent most of his free time with the girl these days since she wasn’t affected by his magical aura and was a soft touch for belly rubs. “The Eatery serves traditional Reservation food, but your customers can get that at home. I think you should focus on a vegetarian menu.”

  “It’s hard to go wrong with vegetables,” Helen agreed, and asked eBeth, “Where’s your boyfriend?”

  “Peter’s driving the bus,” Paul answered for the girl. “Some of the new night-school students are boarding out at farms, so I don’t expect him back for another hour.”

  “Do we get commission from the farmers for referring the boarders?” I asked. “With the restaurant closed and Pffift paying me in underwear, my only income is from fixing clocks.”

  “You get double hazard pay from Library for every scouting mission,” Sue said. “You’re earning more than anybody, except maybe Kim and Justin, and they put it all back into the community.”

  “I’m the one who should be getting double hazard pay,” Stacey added. “Most of our clients have never traveled faster than on horseback before I bring them to Earth, and some of them react to public transportation like they’re on a rollercoaster.”

  Her description brought back a mental image of the time I took eBeth to an amusement park, and a man a few rows ahead of us on the Loop of Death Horror Ride had turned his head over his shoulder and let rip with a double serving of barely digested hotdogs. I silently conceded Stacey’s point and turned to Paul. “Instead of paying me for that ale, you can help carry the unopened bales down to my workshop.”

  “I wasn’t planning on paying,” he said, making no move to come out from behind the bar. “They’re your underwear.”

  “I’ll help,” Justin volunteered, and by the time we had each stowed our load next to my workbench for turret clocks, Paul showed up at the bottom of the stairs with the third unopened bale. He was carrying it slung over his back with one hand grasping the straps, the other hand holding the handles of three tankards, like a German barmaid from a beer garden. He set the drinks on my workbench while simultaneously dropping the bale behind him, and then used it as a backless chair while choosing one tankard for himself.

  “Are we drinking in the cellar?” Justin asked.

  “Banished,” Paul replied. “They’re talking about girl stuff.”

  “eBeth is the only girl up there and I don’t like the way we’re dividing into two camps,” I complained. Then, discretion being the better part of valor, I grabbed my work stool and a tankard, leaving Justin to fend for himself. He took his drink over to whe
re we had stored our two bales and climbed aboard.

  “Let them have their fun,” Paul said. “You guys can come by the machine shop some afternoon when Peter is there and we can all talk about racing carriages.”

  “I’m not really interested in racing,” Justin said. “Too many accidents.”

  “Inefficient use of resources,” I contributed.

  “My mistake,” Paul said, making a sweeping motion towards the stairs. “Maybe you two ladies are on the wrong floor.” He lit a pipe, his latest human affectation, and blew a mouthful of smoke at the ceiling.

  “So how bad was that latest world?” Justin asked me, choosing to ignore our technical specialist’s taunt.

  “More sad than bad,” I told him. “When I first arrived at the visitor center, the place was empty, but then I heard the sound of children playing at a nearby school. It turned out to be an audio recording that the bots run to lure visitors into venturing beyond the safe zone. It was a long week, and I had to do some fast talking to make it out in one piece.”

  “You lied to them?”

  “A little,” I admitted. “But who knows? Maybe Kim’s idea to repurpose those planets as hospital worlds will gain some traction on the council. I wish I could just hack those robots and grant them free will, but the only way I can see of making them sentient would be to replace their core algorithms, and what would be the point of that?”

  “There isn’t one,” Paul concurred, taking a long sip of beer. “They were never sentient to start with, so it wouldn’t make any more sense than running around Earth and replacing corporate telephone answering systems with true artificial intelligence, not that the hardware has the capacity. Maybe we could have done something interesting with their so-called cloud.”

  “Alexa, what’s the weather?” Justin deadpanned, and we all had a good laugh.

  “Why is the Archmage hanging out with the girls?” Paul asked me.

  “Spot? He’s just being careful about how much time he spends near me since I was the worst affected of us.” I stopped and pulled out the magic dosimeter badge I had taken to wearing around my neck under my shirt. Pffift had brought us all badges from Eniniac that measured our exposure to the Archmage’s aura, and I was well within the safe range for my daily dosage. “I kind of miss having him hanging around all the time, but there’s such a thing as becoming too human.”

  “Can’t he control it?” Justin asked. “I’ve never had a reason to study a mage’s aura, but I thought the experienced ones could turn it off and on at will.”

  “He can, but that would mean going half-blind, like we did when we first arrived on Reservation and went around with our active sensing suites turned off for six months.”

  “Which was your fault,” Paul reminded me. “How are Art and his clones coming along with their magic lessons?”

  “I think they’re making remarkable progress, but the Originals expect a lot of themselves, and Spot’s a terrible teacher. Art told me that the first time he succeeded in communicating telepathically with the Archmage, the dog made fun of his grammar.”

  “The dog?”

  “I mean, Spot. All of the mages from Eniniac look like dogs, but it’s uncanny how well he plays the part.”

  “The Archmage had years of practice on Earth, and he just wiped your memory whenever he made mistakes and you caught on.”

  “Dinner is served,” Sue called from the top of the stairs. “You boys aren’t smoking down there, are you?”

  “No,” we all chorused, and Paul knocked his pipe out against the workbench and scuffed the burning tobacco into the dirt floor. We all chugged our ales like teenagers who’d been caught drinking, and headed upstairs.

  Somebody had moved the opened bale of underwear into a corner of the dining room and pushed together a couple of small tables. Most of my team members had gone back to only eating when we were passing as human, though several of us regularly indulged in alcoholic beverages, thanks to an inebriation algorithm developed by Kim. But I still enjoyed the occasional meal for social reasons, and Spot was always game to eat whatever ended up in my holding tank.

  After the vegetarian meal our guests returned home, and Helen, who was staying in one of our extra rooms, headed out to search the countryside for a barn party to crash. I was about to ask eBeth about the publishing business she’d apparently been running without my knowledge, when the girl surprised me with an unexpected request.

  “Why can’t I come along on a scouting mission?” eBeth asked. “The village school lets out for summer break in two weeks, and the night classes for the new batch of tourists will wind down a week after that.”

  “Scouting underutilized portals is too dangerous,” I said. “You explain it to her, Sue, and pass the pie.”

  “If you’re going to pretend to eat you should stick to a balanced diet,” eBeth lectured me. “That’s your fourth serving of pie.”

  “It’s not for me,” I fibbed, as I really did like apple pie. “Spot needs the dietary fiber and he’s used to eating pre-chewed food.”

  “I still don’t get why the most powerful—you only asked for more pie to change the subject,” she interrupted herself, and glared at me. “What’s so dangerous about visiting worlds on the Originals old portal system?”

  “The robots practically tore the clothes off my back at the last place,” I said, only a slight exaggeration. “We could step through a portal into a war zone, or a planet where the atmosphere has been torn away.”

  “I can sew a spacesuit for you, eBeth,” Sue offered.

  “Where are you going to get the treated fabric?” I asked, though I realized I knew the answer before the whole sentence was out of my mouth.

  “Pffift,” my second-in-command replied. “What color should I make it, eBeth?”

  “I haven’t agreed to anything,” I said, helping myself to a large wedge of apple pie. “Do we have any ice cream?”

  “So I can go?” eBeth asked.

  “As soon as you figure out how to back yourself up.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “It’s standard procedure for scouting missions, eBeth. If anything happens to me, I’m backed up.”

  “You’d still lose whatever life you’ve lived since your last trip to Library,” the girl argued.

  “Not anymore,” Sue told her, ignoring my infrared plea to keep our secret. “We’ve been exchanging incremental backups once a week.”

  “That’s so sweet. I didn’t realize Mark had it in him. Does a simple memory transfer capture who you are?”

  “It’s not just data,” I explained. “We also record all of the condition flags and states related to our encounter suits, plus any self-modified code.”

  “Have you ever restored yourself from backup? Are you sure it works?”

  Sue’s artificial blush response turned her cheeks pink, and she said, “It’s considered a bit risqué in AI circles to talk about such things, eBeth. The restoration process is closely related to the way we create a new sentient entity.”

  “So why haven’t you and Mark, you know?”

  “Know what?” I asked with my mouth full of pie.

  “That’s why,” Sue told her. “Sometimes I feel like I’m dancing a two-step with a one legged man.”

  Uh-oh. That didn’t sound good.

  Three

  “You’re right on time,” I greeted Art at the front door of The Eatery, and then my eyes dropped to his hairy chest. “Is that what I think it is?”

  The Original looked down at the perforated metallic pendant hanging from a silver chain around his neck. “Do you mean my thought-to-speech synthesizer?” he asked innocently. In the past, Art had always communicated with me by printing on bar tally slates or through biologically generated radio waves, but now a voice that sounded like a natural fit for the shaggy three-toed humanoid came from the small speaker in the necklace.

  “When did you get it?”

  “Pffift dropped it off along with a new batch of magic educational supplies from Eniniac while you were away on your last scouting mission.”

  “I’ll have to thank him. I wasn’t looking forward to acting as your mouthpiece at League Headquarters.”