The Wizardry Consulted

Eight: Calling Home

Two hours later Wiz started his latest creation running and then let out a long, whooshing sigh.

"You all right?" Malkin asked in a voice that showed more curiosity than compassion.

"Yeah, fine. But if I’m going to get anything done around here I’m going to have to hire a housekeeper."

Malkin crossed her arms over her chest. "Good luck. Not many as will want to work for a strange wizard in a haunted house."

"Well put an ad in the paper will you? Or have the town crier announce it or whatever you do here."

"I’ll take the news to the market." She looked over at the rapidly scrolling letters of golden fire above his desk under the window. "Meanwhile, what’s that?"

"It’s a workstation. I just built it."

Malkin looked at the gray box and keyboard sitting on the table and the letters of golden fire hanging above it.

"Built it out of what?"

"Well, actually it’s a program, a spell you’d call it. See, we’ve found that in this world a sufficiently complex program, or spell, produces a physical manifestation, what you’d call a demon."

Malkin regarded the things on the desk. "Don’t look like no demon I’ve ever heard tell of," she said. "But you’re the wizard. What’s it good for?"

"Well, what you see here is really just a user interface. It virtualizes what I was used to in my world and that makes it easier for me to relate to."

"Seems to me any relations you had with a demon would have to be illegitimate," the tall thief said. "But what’s it good for?"

"Just about anything I want it to be. Right now I’m setting up an Internet connection so I can talk to my friends."

"More magic, eh?"

"No, it’s technology. I need a machine on the other side," Wiz explained to the uncomprehending but fascinated woman. "So I’ve created a little dialer demon to troll the net for systems I can set up accounts on."

Malkin cocked an eye at him. "I see. So it’s demons and trolls but it’s not magic."

"No, it’s… Okay, have it your way. It’s magic."

Just then the system emitted a bell-like tone. "Boy there’s luck. Less than five minutes and I’ve found one. Uh, excuse me will you?" With that he turned back to the console.

"Now what are you doing?" Malkin asked. "Magic aside."

"I guess the easiest way to explain it is to say I’m breaking into something that’s locked. Something a good ways from here."

For once the tall thief seemed impressed. "Burglary without being there," Malkin said wonderingly. "Wizard, I think I’d like this world of yours."

Wiz thought about Malkin as a computer criminal. Then he shuddered and turned his attention back to the computer.

Exploiting a hole in the system’s security was easy. In a matter of minutes Wiz had two new accounts set up. The final wrinkle was a simple little shell script to take messages from one account and pass them to the other. Anyone who tried to trace him back could only follow him as far as this machine.

"There, that’ll give me more protection," he told Malkin as he leaned back from the keyboard. Not a lot, he admitted to himself. But until he got Widder Hackett off his back he wasn’t going to be able to do much better.

"Protection from who?"

"From anyone at the Wizard’s Keep who might want to find me."

His erstwhile assistant regarded him with a look Wiz was coming to know all too well. "These folks are your friends, right?"

"Of course."

"Then I’d think you’d be yelling to them for help instead of hiding from them."

"I can’t," Wiz said miserably. "I can’t let them find me."

Malkin muttered something about "wizards" and left the room.

The first order of business, Wiz decided, was to tell everyone he was all right. He quickly composed an e-mail message and sent it over the net to thekeep.org, the Wizard’s Keep’s Internet node.

He typed furiously for several minutes, stopping frequently to erase a revealing phrase or to re-read his work to make sure he wasn’t giving too much away. Then he spent some time planning the exact path the message would take to reach its destination. At last he hit the final "enter" to send the message on its way and settled back in his chair with a sigh of contentment.

He was promptly jerked erect by Widder Hackett’s screech at air-raid-siren intensity.

"Loafing again, are you? The house falling down about your ears and you lolling at your ease. Wizard or not, you are the laziest, most good-for-nothing layabout I have ever seen in all my days."

There was a lot more in that vein.

Over the course of the day Wiz discovered that the person who said you can get used to anything had never met Widder Hackett. The combination of her awful voice and her complaining nearly drove Wiz to distraction. If she had been there all the time he might have gotten used to her. But she would vanish for five or ten or fifteen minutes only to reappear with more demands just as Wiz was settling in to concentrate on what he was doing.

And there was nothing he could do to satisfy her. Even an attempt to sweep and dust the front parlor ended with the ghost shrieking that he was a useless ninny and all he was doing was moving the dirt from one corner of the room to another. Meanwhile, he not only wasn’t getting anything done, he wasn’t even able to think seriously about what he wanted to do. Worst of all, Wiz discovered that the exorcism spells that laid demons to rest had no effect at all on ghosts.

Fortunately for Wiz, Widder Hackett shut up at about ten o’clock at night-perhaps because old ghosts need their sleep. Be that as it may, Wiz got several hours of uninterrupted work in late that night.

Unfortunately Widder Hackett was back at sunup the next morning, loud as ever and full of new complaints and demands. Even putting a pillow over his head couldn’t shut her out, so Wiz was up and about before the cock stopped crowing.

Meanwhile Wiz’s message was on its way to the Wizard’s Keep. It traveled a long and convoluted path through two worlds. First it was injected into the telephone lines by magical interference with a digital switch in a telephone company central office. It traveled over the regular phone network to the modem attached to the system he had cracked. There it slipped by security, thanks to Wiz’s handiwork, and was received in one mailbox, transferred to another mailbox and sent out on the Internet. It traveled from computer to computer over the net as each node routed it to a succeeding node moving it closer to its destination. After traveling for several hours and touching every continent, including penguin.edu at Ross Station, Antarctica, it reached a node in Cupertino where it was stored until the final node made its daily connection to collect its mail. When thekeep.org called, the message was forwarded along with the rest of the day’s e-mail down a telephone line to the junction box serving an apartment building-specifically the line leading to the apartment occupied by a programmer and fantasy writer named Judith Conally. There it was magically picked off, translated back to the Wizard’s World along with most of the rest of the mail and showed up in Jerry’s mailbox in his workstation in the Wizard’s Keep.

Since Jerry slept mornings he didn’t find it until he came into the workroom about mid-afternoon. He was still yawning over his second mug of blackmoss tea when he sat down at his terminal. He looked over the job he had left running, found it was progressing satisfactorily and punched up a list of his mail.

Jerry called the message up and started reading. By the time he had finished the first screen he was biting his lip.

"Danny! Moira! You’d better come look at this."

Hi Jerry and everyone (especially Moira!):

I can’t tell you where I am or what I’m doing, but I’m safe-at least for now.

I don’t know how long this job is going to take, but I’ll have to stick with it until I’m done.

As to what I’m doing, let’s just say I’m taking a lesson from Charlie Bowen.

Say hi to everyone for me and don’t worry about me.

Give my love to Moira.

PS: Please don’t try to find me. It’s very important.

-W

"Who’s Charlie Bowen?" Danny asked.

"Someone Wiz used to work with at Seer Software," Jerry told him, abstractedly. "Another programmer."

"A real hotshot, huh?"

"No, that’s the funny thing. He was a lousy programmer. He wrote their accounts payable routine and he made a royal mess of it. The module kept fouling up assigning purchase order numbers, choking on invoices and if there was the least little problem in the paperwork, it kicked the thing out and it had to be processed manually. It was taking Seer Software six or eight months to pay even a simple bill and they kept having to explain to everyone it was the software’s fault."

Danny took a swig of tea. "So did they fire him?"

"That’s the other funny thing," Jerry said. "They promoted him."

Just then Moira came dashing into the room, face flushed and flour up to her elbows. "You’ve heard from Wiz!" she panted.

Jerry gestured to the message on the screen. She craned forward to read it over Jerry’s shoulder. As she read her face fell and then she started to frown, deeper and deeper as she read along. By the time she reached the bottom she was scowling.

"There is something very wrong here. Why didn’t he tell us where he is?"

Jerry shrugged. "He said he didn’t want us to know."

"He also said he did not want us to worry," Moira said grimly. "Those are mutually exclusive and he knows that."

"Then maybe," Danny said slowly, "he can’t tell us."

Jerry frowned. "You mean he doesn’t know where he is? That’s crazy. Wiz’s magic could tell him in an instant."

"So maybe he knows and can’t tell us," Danny said, groping.

"A geas!" Moira exclaimed. "Of course! He cannot tell us because he is magically forbidden to do so."

"He doesn’t sound like anything is stopping him," Jerry objected. "It sounds more like he’s being secretive of his own free will."

"That is the problem with a geas," Moira told him. "You do not necessarily know you are under it. Everything seems normal to you and you think you have the best reasons in the world for doing what you do, no matter how badly you want to do the opposite."

Jerry rubbed his chin. "Well, it sure fits with Wiz’s behavior. He wants to tell us, so he contacts us. But he can’t so he comes in through the net and then won’t say where he is."

"Is there any way to trace him?" the hedge witch asked. She gestured at the message header. "Wiz told me once that gives the location of the sender."

"Normally it does," Jerry said. "But take a look at it."

Danny frowned as he ran his finger along the line. The further he went, the deeper his frown became. "That can’t be natural," he said at last.

"It isn’t! That isn’t a routing path, it’s a shaggy dog story."

"Meaning what?" Moira demanded.

"Meaning he deliberately set up this routing to be as difficult and obscure as he could make it," Danny said before Jerry could answer. "See, normally a message is routed automatically by the most efficient path-given the location of the source, location of the destination, topology of the net and the amount of traffic. But you can force the route by using bang paths."

Moira didn’t understand much of that, but she was game. "Bang paths?"

"Yeah. Site names separated by bangs." He pointed to an exclamation point between two names. "That’s a bang." He studied the list for an instant and pointed at one sequence. "Here he’s going from a U.S. site belonging to a Danish industrial concern to the Los Lobos League for Love and Understanding, the sex researchers. So that part of the path is bang!llulu."

Jerry groaned. "I wonder how long he searched to come up with that one?" Moira glared at him for the distraction.

"Anyway," Danny went on hastily, "I don’t recognize all these site names but from the looks of it this message traveled a couple of times around the planet. Here’s a site in Ukraine. That one’s in the science city just outside of Tokyo. This one is the Coke machine at Rochester Institute of Technology-they put the Coke machine on the Internet so the computer science majors could find out if there were any sodas in the machine without having to walk all the way to it."

"Personally I always preferred the one at Carnegie-Mellon," Jerry said. "It’s the original and it’s got a graphical user interface."

Moira wasn’t about to let the conversation wander off into a comparison of computerized vending machines. "Well, can you trace him or not?"

Jerry rubbed his chin. "That’s hard. See, the path shown on a message isn’t completely reliable. You can fake some of it. It’s going to be hard to figure out where he’s connecting to the net, much less where he is in our world."

"Maybe not," Danny said. "If we can rig up a little perl script and plant it on all these sites we may be able to trace him back to where he’s really connecting."

Moira’s face lit up. "Can you do that?"

"Well, we’re going to have to get into a pile of computers, including that Coke machine, but…" His eyes focused on something far away. "Let me think about this and see what I can come up with. But we should be able to do it."

"And then?" Jerry asked.

"Then," said Moira grimly, "we go to his rescue whether he wants it or not."