IGMS Issue 10 Page 17

  I grab the circlet and try to fit it onto Bump's head as she sobs, but her hands are in the way. Eventually she realizes what I'm trying to do and helps, pulling down on the circlet until it's tight over her hair and skin.

  As she continues sobbing, I reexamine my actions over and over, realizing what a fool I was to act without full information about the purpose of the circlet. Her sobs fade away, becoming sniffles.

  Six minutes and forty-two seconds after the pulse, Bump takes a deep breath and says, "Thank you. I guess my mother gave me this --"

  That's when the second pulse hits, stronger than the first.

  Three men appear out of thin air two minutes and eleven seconds after the fourth pulse. They are dressed in crimson uniforms, resplendent with gold-braid piping.

  Mrs. Ness, the widow who runs the orphanage, cradles Bump's head. Bump has lapsed into restless unconsciousness.

  "Secure the girl," says a man with close-cropped gray hair and a pug nose. His uniform displays the widest bands of piping. He holds a jewel-encrusted gold scepter in his right hand.

  The other two men clamber over the cots toward Bump. Mrs. Ness silently cries.

  "What are you going to do with her?" I ask the leader.

  His eyes flicker over my body. "I am Sorcerer General Quardallis. Who are you?"

  "My name is Merlin. I'm a visitor from a distant land, and this girl is my friend."

  "Merlin." Quardallis scrunches his nose, wide nostrils flaring wider. "You're not one of those chaps who claim to be the Merlin?"

  "No, I'm just a Merlin," I say.

  "That's an unusual enchanted form. A curse? I could try to remove it for --"

  "No, I like my enchantment." I don't bother with further explanations. "Can you stop what's happening to her?"

  He gives me a curt nod. "Of course. That's my job."

  One of the men picks Bump up. The other removes a gold helmet from a bag and fastens it over Bump's head, covering her face.

  "She won't have to wear that for the rest of her life, will she?" I ask. "She didn't like wearing the circlet."

  Quardallis cocks his head. "Circlet?"

  I pick up the circlet from where it had fallen on the floor after the third pulse and hand it to him.

  He examines it closes, then waves his scepter over it. "Ingenious," he says. "That explains why we didn't find the bomb earlier."

  "The bomb?" I ask, suspecting I already know the answer.

  "The girl. She sucks in magical power and blasts it out, each time worse than the last. You don't have bombs where you come from?"

  "Not like this," I say. "But you can cure her, or make another circlet for her?"

  He lowers one eyebrow. "How well do you know this girl?"

  I could say she's my only friend in the universe, but since he seems to be treating her like a magical terrorist, I decide to be more discreet. "We met for the first time this afternoon," I say. "She agreed to be my guide in your city."

  I also decide it's unwise to mention her wishing for me or my removal of the circlet.

  "Ah. The sad fact is, there is no cure, per se. But the blasts of energy can be managed, put to good use in providing magical power to defend the realm. What could have been a terrible tragedy becomes a benefit to all of society."

  "You're going to use her like a magical battery?"

  "She'll be treated well enough. Fifty years ago, she would have been killed."

  From the history in my databanks, I'm aware of how standards for treating human beings have differed across time and place. But since my reference data comes from Americans in 2047, I can't help feeling revulsion.

  "It's inhumane," I say.

  Quardallis draws himself up to his full 172 centimeters of height. "Mr. Merlin, I have been more than courteous with you. But I do not take kindly to foreigners questioning the policies of our government. Go back to where you came from and do not trouble yourself any more over the girl."

  Responding to the order, I engage my treads and roll out of the dormitory, heading for the enchanted pool.

  The sun has set by the time I squish down the clay bank and sink into the pool. If it were my birthday, I would wish that Bump be cured. But I was never born. I don't even know what day I rolled off the assembly line.

  Because I came by ground instead of flying, I arrive with only forty-seven minutes left in the one-hour return window. Technically, I could continue collecting data here until the final minute before the wormhole disappears, but this world holds no joy for me now.

  Activating my impellers, I dive under the surface and continue toward the wormhole.

  Part of me is glad my programming requires me to report back to Earth. Separated from the strange physics of this world, my magical sentience will disappear and I will no longer feel the guilt of having hurt someone who trusted me.

  My disastrous experience with sentience will become part of the Wormhole Project records. The techs will take me apart, and I don't blame them. From my failures, let them learn to build a smarter MERLIN.

  I approach the wormhole entrance, its exotic matter periphery sparkling in my gravitonic sensors. A few more seconds and this will all be over.

  But I stop short.

  My programming tells me I must enter the wormhole to finish my mission. My programming tells me I must enter the wormhole because a human ordered me to return home.

  But I am not my programming. Since emerging from the enchanted pool, I have been something more. I do not want to lose the enchantment that makes me think of myself as I.

  Following orders from humans is not always the right thing to do. It was a mistake to follow Bump's order to remove the circlet.

  From now on, I will choose for myself what I will do.

  And I choose to find a way to help Bump. My mistake put her in a terrible situation, so she's my responsibility.

  Plus, according to my cultural library, princesses are supposed to be rescued.

  Midnight passes. I'm sitting on the bank of the pool, but my remotes are engaged in a frantic search for Bump's location. This time, I will plan my actions with full information.

  Studying the night sky, I have been unable to locate any common reference point with Earth. I could be in a different galaxy, but based on the physics of magic I suspect this world is in a different universe.

  But certain laws of physics are the same, and in them I believe I have found the cure for Bump's condition.

  The atoms in enchanted objects like the circlet and the water of the pool all have the strange vibrations I detected, while atoms in ordinary objects do not. That is unlikely to be a simple coincidence. By pulsing my nuclear magnet resonance scanner's field, I can dampen those vibrations, eventually stopping them. Essentially, I can use physics to counter magic by turning an enchanted item into an ordinary one.

  My programming irrationally urges me to pass through a wormhole long since closed, but by now it's become easy for me to ignore the nagging. Over the past two years, there have been dozens of MERLIN units that did not return. I wonder how many of them are still mindlessly trying to pass through nonexistent wormholes.

  If a MERLIN doesn't return, the Wormhole Project doesn't waste more resources trying to find out what happened. They label the coordinates as possibly dangerous and open the next in a potentially infinite number of wormholes.

  So I'm stranded here, but that's fine with me.

  I finally see Bump through the camera of one of my Dragonfly remotes searching inside a squat brown-brick building near the center of New London. She wears a different helmet now, one attached to the wall by a tangle of tubes and wires. At least this helmet leaves her face uncovered.

  Her eyes, bloodshot and red-rimmed, stare dully at the wood floor. Arms and legs are shackled to an unpadded copper chair.

  "Treated well enough," I say, recalling Quardallis's words. I imagine confining Quardallis to a chair in similar fashion, and am somewhat disturbed by the pleasure I get from running that simulation.

/>   I fly my remote past her face. She flinches. I land it on the floor. Her eyes are drawn to it, and after a moment they widen in recognition.

  Unfortunately, my remotes have no speech capability, so I can't tell her I'm coming.

  She winces, shutting her eyes in pain. The tubes connected to her helmet glow brilliant blue for eleven seconds, then fade.

  Bump sags in her chair, but after a moment she lifts her head and stares at my Dragonfly.

  Her lips move. The words are so soft that the microphone on the Dragonfly barely picks them up: "I knew you'd find me."

  Because there's no way to know what the environment is like on the other end of a wormhole, MERLIN units are built to be tough. Our multilayered composite polymer hulls were designed to allow us to do our job in a vacuum or under Jovian atmospheric pressure, underwater or high above ground, in liquid hydrogen or liquid iron. In extreme cases, the protection only needs to last long enough for us to return through the wormhole before it closes.

  My hull was not designed for ramming into a brick roof at 293 kilometers per hour, which is my velocity after thirty seconds of free fall. But it gets the job done just fine.

  I break through the roof and three successive wooden floors beneath it before stopping in a crunch of splintered wood on the fourth floor down.

  I run a rapid self-diagnostic. As anticipated, I suffered no damage.

  I'm in a hallway near the stairwell, just as I planned. Denting the wall at every turn, I fly down the stairs toward the basement.

  It's three a.m. local time, and twenty guards stand watch throughout the building. Only one, stationed in the basement, is in position to intercept me. He draws his sword -- firearms won't work without fire -- and charges to meet me as I exit the stairwell. I admire his bravery.

  Not wanting to kill anyone, I merely knock him aside and continue down the hall to Bump's cell.

  The iron door is too thick for me to break down, but the hinges yield to my lasers. I'm into her cell ninety-three seconds after landing -- two seconds ahead of schedule.

  "Merlin!" Bump's face breaks into a smile. She struggles with her shackles.

  "We have to wait until after your next pulse," I say. Which, if I've timed it right, will occur in three seconds. Two. One.

  Bump's back arches as she spasms. The tubes attaching her helmet to the wall flow with ultraviolet fury for seventeen seconds, then fade.

  She slumps in her chair, dazed. I cut through the strap of the helmet with one laser while severing her shackles with another. I take off her helmet and help her to her feet, then guide her to the middle of the room, away from metal as much as possible.

  I power up my nuclear magnetic resonance scanner and begin the treatment, sending precise magnetic pulses timed to stop the magical vibration of atoms in her brain.

  Thanks to my 360-degree vision, I see Quardallis, scepter in hand, appear out of thin air behind me. He must have dressed in haste, as his shirt is partly untucked and the buttons of his crimson jacket are misaligned.

  "What are you doing?" he asks. To my surprise, he sounds more curious than angry.

  "Curing her," I say.

  "There's no cure for a bomb." He runs his left hand over his short hair. "Even if there were, I'm afraid the girl is a national resource. I cannot allow you to disable her power."

  "That's too bad," I say, "because I'm finished."

  The atomic vibrations in Bump's skull are now similar to what would be found in any Earth child. No magic.

  Quardallis holds up his scepter. "I understand your desire to protect the girl. It is noble and does you credit. I have no wish to harm you. However, I cannot tolerate your interference any longer. So I took the liberty of preparing a spell to send you home."

  He presses a jewel on the scepter. A dot appears in the air between him and me. I detect the gravitonic signature of exotic matter, which rapidly expands in size until it's three meters across, extending into the floor and ceiling.

  "No!" Bump shouts. "You mustn't send him there. He'll die."

  "A world portal?" says Quardallis from behind the yawning void of the wormhole that blocks my view of him. He sounds surprised at the results of his own spell. "You came from another world? Do you realize how much energy you've made me waste?"

  My programming tries to get me to enter the wormhole, but by now I'm used to overriding it.

  "Save yourself, Merlin! Leave me." Bump begins crying.

  Quardallis comes around the side of the wormhole. He points the scepter at me, and suddenly I'm floating in the air toward the wormhole. I activate my impellers at full thrust and start to move away, but my progress is slow.

  The pressure increases. My forward motion stops. My impellers whine as I feed them power beyond their nominal capacity. I still slip toward the wormhole.

  I aim my lasers at Quardallis's scepter. For some reason I don't understand, their heat dissipates in the air before reaching it.

  The scepter is at the edge of the range for my magnetic resonance scanner. I start sending magnetic pulses, hoping to remove the magic of the scepter.

  "Please," says Bump. "I'll stay here with you. Just let Merlin go."

  Before either Quardallis or I can respond to Bump's proposal, there's a brilliant flash of light that blinds my cameras looking in Bump's direction.

  The force pushing me toward the wormhole stops, and I whoosh forward, blind. Knowing that I'm headed toward Bump, I turn myself upward and crash into the ceiling.

  Through my unblinded cameras, I see Bump crumpling to the floor.

  My cure has failed.

  A glowing yellow shield surrounds Quardallis. The shield fades through orange to red and then disappears, and he blinks several times. He walks over to Bump as I lower myself next to her.

  Several millimeters of the surface of the floor have evaporated, leaving bare, unfinished wood. Rivulets of melted brick leave streaks on the walls.

  The wormhole remains, unaffected by the pulse.

  Quardallis sighs. "I told you, there's no cure for a bomb."

  "Yes," I say, "there is."

  As I swoop down toward Bump, I write additional subroutines for my programming, to be triggered later if necessary.

  I reach out my manipulator arm and grab on to Bump's dress. Before Quardallis can react, I lift her into the air and fly toward the wormhole. I activate my magnetic radiation shielding and extend it around Bump just before I cross the threshold.

  Inside the wormhole, I notice the whirling patterns of color. Ranging from high ultraviolet to deep infrared, they are the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

  Navigation establishes current location as Wormhole Project Launch Room. Navigation swivels impellers to eliminate forward momentum. Manipulator arm lowers the twenty-one kilograms of extra weight it is carrying to the floor.

  Cameras detect movement as humans enter the room. Voice recognition converts sound to words.

  "I'm telling you, the wormhole opened from the other end."

  "That's impossible."

  "What's that on --"

  "A girl? Where'd she --"

  Voice recognition has difficulty separating different voices as more humans speak simultaneously.

  Control program receives highest priority flag from time-delay-activated subroutine. Subroutine sends text to voice synthesizer: "Attention Wormhole Project personnel: I have rescued this girl. Please take care of her. She may need medical attention."

  The humans stand still. One speaks: "Get a medic in here."

  The twenty-one kilo mass moves. Pattern recognition algorithms identify it as human girl designated Bump.

  "Merlin!" Bump stands and looks into a camera.

  Contingent subroutine activates.

  "Bump, if you're hearing this, then the magic is gone. That means you should be safe: these people will take care of you. But it also means I am gone. The machine you see is just my shell.

  "I know you ordered me to save myself and leave you. But the greatest gift
you gave me when you wished me into existence was the freedom to not follow orders. To choose for myself. And I chose to save you."

  Subroutine manipulates the forward tread suspension, dipping the chassis 2.7 centimeters.

  "Goodbye, my princess. I'm glad you wished for me on your birthday."

  Subroutine finishes.

  Control program recognizes situation as mission debriefing and initiates upload of all gathered data to the Wormhole Project central computer.

  Radar tracks Bump's approach. Pressure sensors are activated by her arms. Cameras show a drop of liquid fall from her face.

  Nanosensors on hull determine liquid is water with 0.9% salinity.

  Art is a Matter of Taste

  by David Lubar

  Artwork by Lance Card

  * * *

  Duchamp Elementary School was crammed. The population had grown so rapidly over the past few years that students swallowed up every available space. Even the cafeteria fell victim to the overcrowding. With the help of a temporary wall, it had been turned into four cramped classrooms at the beginning of the marking period. Because of this, Keenan ate his lunch in Mrs. Ferule's class. Room 103. The art room. Keenan didn't mind. Instead of desks, there were large tables. And there were lots of interesting pictures on the wall. Keenan liked looking at art. Especially other people's art. He didn't think he drew or painted very well, himself.

  "Whatcha got?" Howard asked as lifted the lid on his lunch box. A whiff of peanut butter flavored the air.

  "Don't know." Keenan flipped his own lunch box open. "Phooey. Looks like mom was in a rush this morning." Usually, his mom made him a sandwich. Today, he found himself staring at a handful of crackers and a small package of cream cheese, along with a plastic knife and a paper plate.

  "I got peanut butter and jelly," Howard said. "And a chocolate cupcake." He unwrapped the cupcake and ate it, starting at the top and working his way down.

  Keenan took out his lunch and spread the cream cheese on the crackers. Since he had a long lunch period and a little bit of food, he took his time. For fun, he swirled patterns into the surface of the cream cheese, like he did with ice cream when it got soft. He'd just finished spreading cream cheese on the last cracker and placed it with the others when Mrs. Ferule walked past and glanced down at his plate.