“I’m not sure Jay would have much to say to a writing seminar,” said Marion. “He’s not very chatty about his work, and he doesn’t subscribe to
Writer’s Digest
or anything like that. You can ask him, of course.”
“I’ll see if Miles has managed to come up with anything else. There’s always the
Star Trek Bloopers
reel, I suppose.”
“I’ll watch the table for him if you can get him to do it. I suppose he could autograph a few books before he leaves. And sometime today we’d better let him spend some time in the computer room. The high-tech toys are his greatest joy.”
Miles Perry came out of the elevator looking more harassed than ever. His rust-colored hair hung over one eyebrow in a stubborn ringlet, and he was wearing his tie at half-mast. “Here you are!” he called to Diefenbaker. “I’m thinking of enrolling in the federal witness program, provided they can grant me a new identity today. I want never to be seen again.”
“And let Chip Livingstone run the con?” smiled Dief.
“Very funny,” said the director with a sour smile. “I’m serious, Walter. This is fraying my nerves.”
Dief nodded sympathetically. “More chaos?”
Miles started with the pre-dawn phone call, and summarized the rest of his hectic morning. “Just now Brian Kramer locked himself out of the wargames room, and he couldn’t remember where he’d put the key.”
“Did you find it?”
“Finally. After a frantic search. It was in the bag with his
Diplomacy
pieces. Did you hear that Dr. Zachary canceled?”
“Quasars at eleven? Yes. I was just asking Marion if she thought Dr. Omega would do something instead.”
Miles Perry shook his head. “Don’t bother. You know Jack Carlton from the hucksters’ room? Comic book dealer? He’s agreed to try to explain the alternate Earth systems in the Superman series and how they were resolved.”
Dief whistled. “In an hour?”
“Well, it’s a start. Now, what are you doing on registration?”
“Calm down. Dixie went to breakfast.”
“Okay. What else should I worry about?”
“Me,” said Dief. “I haven’t eaten.”
Miles Perry pulled half a Mars bar from his jacket pocket. “With my compliments and best wishes,” he said.
At ten o’clock the hotel lobby resembled an evacuation center for Sherwood Forest. A colorful crowd in homespun cloaks and rope-belted tunics milled about, discussing their player characters and speculating about the live role-playing game that was about to begin.
“I don’t see why we can’t use our weapons in this thing. Realism is what it’s all about.”
“Do you think Appin Dungannon will show up?”
Diefenbaker listened to the conversations swirling about him, but he was trying to concentrate on formulating his character. He had been assigned the part of an elf-thief, chaotic-good, with the usual agility and night vision. The other elves in the party, three giggly young women in burlap dresses, had decided to name themselves Rowan, Saffron, and Rosemary.
“And who are you going to be?” they asked him.
“Herb,” said Diefenbaker.
In the center of the throng the Dungeon Master,
in a monk’s robe and sandals, waved his scenario and shouted for quiet. “Listen up, people!” roared Jack Larson with a most unmedieval New Jersey accent. “We’re going to start now, so shut up while I read you about the quest.”
He glared belligerently at the few remaining talkers, and suddenly caught sight of a familiar white-haired personage in the crowd. “Clifford Morgan! Is that you? Don’t you ever learn?”
Morgan had joined the party of adventurers attired as usual in his Tratyn Runewind costume. He twirled the edge of his cloak in a bow to the Dungeon Master. “The golden Rune warrior honors you with his presence. May his skill in battle and his Druid wisdom serve you well.”
“Oh, let him go,” said one of the clerics. “Dungannon won’t be around anyway. He’s writing, remember?”
Monk Malone in his usual Dominican friar’s outfit joined the group, acknowledging a flutter of applause with a modest wave. “I must be a wizard, of course,” he told the Dungeon Master.
Jack Larson sighed. “I’ve already got a wizard.”
“My apprentice,” said Monk Malone smoothly. “Certainly I shall be the principal wizard in the party.”
“Uh huh.” Jack Larson glanced at his game plan, trying to decide how long it would be necessary to wait before letting the wererats eat the people who gave him a hard time. Jack Larson’s calligraphy button said:
GOD IS DEAD,
AND I WANT HIS JOB.
When the twenty-two participants had seated themselves around the overstuffed chair, the
Dungeon Master explained their mission. The human fighters were all apprentice knights in the fourteenth-century court of the king of France.
“But what about me?” asked Mona Walton. “I’m human/fighter but—a woman squire?”
Jack Larson thought fast. “Yes. Because … because a famous wizard has predicted that a woman warrior will someday save France, and when you asked to be trained, they were afraid to turn you away in case you turned out to be the one.”
Mona nodded. “Joan of Arc. Am I?”
“No,” said a Scadian. “Wrong century.”
“Right. Now one of you human warriors …” He consulted his notes. “Gawaine …”
“You pronounce it
Gavin,”
said the Scadian.
“Whatever. He’s from Scotland. Who’s Gawai—Gavin?”
One of the better-looking fourteen-year-olds raised his hand. “I am.”
“Okay. You’re nominal leader of the group. You’re the son of a clan chief, and he sent you to France to learn warfare, but you don’t want to be a knight. You want to study magic. Okay?”
The boy nodded.
“Now, one day you’re in your room studying your Latin when a message arrives for you from your father in Scotland.” Larson paused for effect. “Someone has been stealing black horses throughout the Borders. Only black horses.”
The adventurers whispered among themselves.
“So you decide that something magic and dangerous is happening. You don’t know what. But you decide to go back to Scotland with some of your friends and try to find out.”
“We’re going to Scotland?” Tratyn Runewind
applauded. Sensing their cue, the human fighters got to their feet.
“One more thing,” said the Dungeon Master. “At the bottom of the letter is another note.”
“What does it say?” asked Gawaine anxiously.
Jack Larson grinned at the group. “Come back when you find it.”
Bill Fox, setting up “The Trouble with Tribbles” on the VCR, caught a glimpse of Walter Diefenbaker wandering down the corridor wearing the myopic lost look of Mole in
Wind in the Willows
. “Hey, Dief!” he called. “How’s it going?”
Dief sighed. “I am a very stupid Scottish elf named Herb, and I am supposed to warn the adventurers to look out for ‘Beans in the Road.’ Whatever that means. Most of the others are searching for—not the message; they found that—a ring of Saracens, I think. Although having infidels in Scotland, even near the time of the Crusades, strikes me as being a bit far-fetched. Still, I suppose it means something sensible. The Scadians will probably know.”
Bill Fox grinned. “The fantasy people are probably in their rooms thumbing through their folklore texts.”
“Herb!-Yoo hoo!-Herb!”
Dief, finally realizing that he was being addressed by the name of his player character, turned to find his fellow elf Saffron waving at him from the elevator.
“Excuse me,” he said to Bill Fox. “Delusion calls.”
Saffron held the elevator until he arrived. “You’ll never guess what I found out!” Her elfin eyes shone with excitement.
“Probably not,” Dief admitted.
“The Ring of Saracens! I know what it is.”
Dief remembered Bill’s remark about the folklore texts. “Which book was it in?”
“None that I know of. I was right here in the elevator trying to figure out the clue … You know, muttering to myself, over and over, Saracen … Saracen … And this short, oldish guy got on at the third floor, and on the way down, he overheard me. He said, ‘Why are you blethering about a pub in Glasgow?’”
“That’s what it is? A pub in Glasgow?”
“No. Did I mention he talked funny? It turns out he’s from Scotland himself.”
Dief nodded. “That would be Mr. McRory.”
“I guess so. Anyway, I asked him if that pub would have been around in the fourteenth century, but he said no, so I asked him what else the word
Saracen
could mean in Scotland. And he told me!”
“Well?”
“It’s a ring of big stones. You know, like Stone-henge. That’s what they call them in Scotland. Saracen Stones. Isn’t it great that I got it?”
Diefenbaker hesitated. “I guess so, Carolyn. I mean, Saffron. But remember that you’re an elf. It’s the humans who have to find out what it means.”
“That’s okay!” said Saffron brightly. “I’m a very unusual elf. Lawful good. I can befriend a human and tip him off. I think I’ll tell Gawaine. He’s cute.”
“Hmm. Where’s everybody else?”
“Running all over the hotel, I guess. The Dungeon Master has people going everywhere looking for clues.”
Appin Dungannon was pleased with his chapter.
It shone on his computer screen like a bad deed in a saccharine world, and as usual he had enjoyed the thrill of finality in rereading that special chapter. He glanced at his watch. Nearly ten-thirty. His editor was due to arrive soon. In time for lunch, he hoped. Louis could always charge it to the publisher’s expense account.
Suddenly he remembered that he would be addressing the entire convention at one. Damn! He hoped Louis wasn’t hungry. Given a choice between a burger at rush hour and a lunch deferred, he would always choose the latter.
Pressing Home, Home, Up, Appin Dungannon scanned the chapter from the beginning, looking for typos and other lapses of concentration. Thus far he hadn’t found any. His work had been pretty good this weekend, all things considered. No one had bothered him all morning. He was pleased that he had frightened the fen so thoroughly that they had left him alone.
Of course, one of them hadn’t been frightened. He glanced again at the note he’d found under his door last night. Not frightened at all. But Dungannon was pleased with the overall results of his weekend. His image was intact.
He supposed he ought to get a printout made for Louis, archaic bastard that he was. As a science fiction editor, Louis would believe in six impossible things before breakfast, including a civilization of cloud beings, but you couldn’t convince him that a floppy disk was as good as a manuscript. It was a pain to lug a printer around in his travels. Appin Dungannon smiled to himself: not that he ever lugged personally, of course.
He adjusted the paper feed in the printer and
flipped on the machine. There was probably something ironic about creating rune sagas on a computer; he wondered what
Beowulf
would have been like, had it been word-processed. Longer, probably. He reached for a blank note card and scribbled a memo to himself. That might make an interesting talk: the effects of technology on world-perception. It had occurred to him before. Late twentieth-century people saw landscapes as a moving panorama, going by at fifty-five miles per hour. Surely this made their thinking different from the rest of humanity, who had seen landscape as a static view, like a painting. Such differences in perception probably meant that he had failed miserably at capturing the ethos of Celtic Britain, but at least he had the wit to realize it. Unlike the buffoons who thought they could live his works and still cook their dinners in a microwave. There was more to capturing the past than dressing the part. He wondered if such a lecture to a fantasy audience would be a waste of breath.
The printer was noisy, but probably no more than a television tuned to one of those mindless game shows. No one should be trying to sleep at this hour of the morning anyway. Appin Dungannon leaned back in his chair and watched the machine spit out pages of pseudo-Celtic drivel. Maybe in the next one he would have a French character named Louis confined to a leper colony near Glastonbury. Louis the Leper. It had a ring to it. He wondered if his editor would let that one go by. Tratyn Runewind goes to find someone at a leper colony near Glastonbury … It was the wrong period, of course. There weren’t any lepers in Britain until the time of the Crusades, but he doubted if
any of his readers knew that. He turned the idea over in his mind. Yes, it was interesting. One might bring in the healing wells … He grabbed for another note card, and wrote down “Lepers. Glastonbury.” What could he use for a working title? Books went better for him if they had names.
Appin Dungannon was still snickering at his new creation,
A Farewell to Arms
, when he heard the knock on the door.
Louis, already? Dungannon glanced at the printer. Judging by the size of the paper stack, it still had a good bit to go. With a sigh, he bent over his note card, intent upon looking busy, and called out, “Come in! It’s open.”