Man From Mundania (4 page)

Electra had charged it, the cent was ready for use—and

they had always known that it would be used to complete

the Quest Dolph had started: to find Good Magician Hum-

frey, who had disappeared seven years ago with his family,

leaving his castle empty. He had to be found, for unan-

swered Questions were piling up. Xanth needed him!

Prince Dolph could not use the cent. Their parents had

been quite firm on that. Prince Dolph had gotten himself

betrothed to two girls at once, and he had to stay and face

the medicine. He had to choose between them, get unbe-

trothed to one and marry the other, when he came of age.

Until he settled that mess (Queen Irene called it a "situ-

ation" but a mess was what it was; everybody knew that),

he was not going anywhere.

So Ivy was going to use it. The magic of the cent was

that it took whoever invoked it to wherever or whatever or

whenever or whoever needed that person the most. There

was no certainty that Good Magician Humfrey needed Ivy

the most, but his message to Dolph had named the Heaven

Cent. If the Good Magician thought it would help him,

then surely it would, for Humfrey was the Magician of

Information and knew everything. So Ivy expected to find

him, wherever he was, and expected to be the right person

for the job. Magic had a way of working out, with her.

Yet she was not, deep, deep down inside, quite sure.

For one thing, there was Magician Murphy's curse. Ma-

gician Murphy had lived eight or nine hundred years be-

fore, and his talent had been to make anything that could

go wrong, go wrong. He had cursed the folk of Electra's

time, and as a result Electra had been caught up in the

spell, and Dolph had wound up betrothed to two girls in-

stead of one. Eight hundred years, and Murphy's curse

had been potent! So how could she be sure it was not still

operating? That it would somehow mess up her mission,

and make things even worse than before, and get her lost

as well as the Good Magician?

The answer was, she could not be sure. Maybe Magi-

cian Humfrey had known best—but maybe he had forgot-

ten about that ancient curse. There was only one way to

find out for sure—and that made her nervous.

But she did not express these doubts to anyone else, for

that might make it seem that she wanted to renege on her

agreement to use the Heaven Cent. She certainly wasn't

going to do that! The Good Magician had to be found;

Dolph had done his part, and now it was her turn.

The day soon came. The Heaven Cent was fully charged

and ready. Electra said so, and Electra knew; she had been

trained in this by the Sorceress Tapis, who had woven the

great historical Tapestry that now hung in Ivy's room. In-

deed, the first cent she had crafted had worked marvel-

ously well, bringing Electra herself here to the present just

when they needed another Heaven Cent.

Ivy had watched those old events more than once on the

Tapestry, verifying everything that Electra had told her,

not because she doubted the girl, but because she was

insatiably curious about old-time adventure and romance

and tragedy. Certainly her own life lacked any trace of

such elements; she was safe and dull here in Castle

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Man from Mundania

Man from Mundania

17

Roogna. That might be another reason she wanted to go

on this Quest: for the things she missed. And she did want

to go, despite her secret misgivings.

Where would the cent take her? To the top of fabulous

Mount Rushmost, where the winged monsters gathered?

To the bottom of the deepest sea where the merfolk swam?

To the heart of the savagest jungle where things too aw-

ful to contemplate quivered in their foulness? Where was

the Good Magician? That was the mystery of the age, and

she could hardly wait to unravel it.

Ivy made her farewells to all her friends and family

members. Her father looked uncomfortable, and her

mother was stifling tears. They all knew that Ivy would

not be hurt or even be in serious danger; they had been

able to verify this with incidental magic, perhaps having

private doubts similar to Ivy's. But they had not been able

to learn where she would go or how long she would be

away—only that she would return unharmed. So it was an

occasion of mixed feelings.

She said good-bye to her brother, Dolph, and his two

betrotheds, Nada and Electra. Surely she would be back

in time to see the resolution of that triangle! Nada gave

her a sisterly embrace, and then Electra gave her the

charged Heaven Cent. The girl was chewing her lip as if

wanting to say something, perhaps about staying clear of

curses; Ivy smiled with a reassurance she wished were

genuine.

But she had one more farewell to make: she went out

and gave Stanley Steamer a final hug. "I think it's time

for you to go to the Gap," she said tearfully. "You're a

big dragon now, and I can't keep you forever. But I'll visit

you, after I'm done with this business." Stanley gave her

face a careful lick, after she enhanced the softness of his

tongue.

She took the cent and held it before her. It was the size

of a large penny, gleaming brightly, its copper surface im-

bued with the magic of its nature. All she had to do was

invoke it!

She shivered, remembering Murphy's curse once more.

But surely that could have no real force. After all, the Evil

Magician had been confined to the Brain Coral's storage

pool ever since the time of King Roogna; how could his

curse on the Sorceress Tapis affect Ivy now? It must have

done all the damage it was going to, which was plenty. It

was foolish to worry about it!

Ivy stifled her foolishness. "I invoke you, Heaven

Cent," she said firmly.

Then it happened.

Chapter 2. Mundania

'rey woke and looked at the computer. Sud-

denly he made a connection: the computer was doing it!

Then he thought, no, that's ridiculous, a machine

couldn't do anything like that. Well, obviously it could,

but this was such a disreputable thing that it wouldn't. He

had cobbled it together from used components and gotten

a friend who understood the guts of computing to make it

work, knowing it was far from state-of-the-art, but it did

take care of his school papers. Sometimes weird messages

showed on the screen, like INCOMPATIBLE OPERATING SYS-

TEM or NONSTANDARD PERIPHERALS. What else was new?

Apparently his friend had set up something called CP/

DOS that everyone else said was impossible. He had put

a Directory on User 99 that worked most of the time, so

he stayed with it, and usually his papers came out pretty

much the way he typed them in: mediocre. That was all

the computer did, or could do.

But then he thought some more, and wasn't sure. Be-

cause there certainly seemed to be a connection. It had

started with that program, and the vacant apartment, and—

He sat up and held his head in his hands. He was sure

he could manage to come to a conclusion if he worked at

it. But after that date with Salmonella he felt so sick and

weak that even thinking was almost too much of an effort.

18

Man from Mundania
        
19

Still, he was sure he was onto something, if he could just

work it out before the revelation fled.

Grey had come here to the city apartment because his

folks couldn't afford to board him at the college. City Col-

lege had to take any local resident who qualified, and its

tuition was tax-supported low, so by renting this cheap

room and living mostly on canned beans Grey was able to

squeak by. He was not a great student, and he had no idea

what he might major in if he got that far, but his father

said that he was stuck in this mundane world and if he

didn't make something of himself, no one else would do

it for him. Since a college education was the way to start

making something of himself, he was getting it, or trying

to.

He had thought life was dull. Now that he was taking

Freshman English, he realized that he had greatly under-

estimated the case. He was receiving a superlative edu-

cation in just how deadly dull education could be! His

grades were slipping slowly from C+ through C toward

C— and points south as his metaphorical hands lost their

fingernail clutch on comprehension.

Then he had received that program from Vaporware

Limited. The ad had been impressive: "Having trouble in

school? Let the Worm enliven your life! We promise ev-

erything!" Indeed they did; they promised to improve his

grades and his social life at one stroke. If anything was

duller than his grades, it was his social life, so this really

interested him. The problem was that not only was Grey

strictly average in mind, he was completely forgettable in

body. His driver's license listed his hair as "hair-colored"

and his eyes as "neutral." He excelled at no sports, and

had no clever repartee. As a result, girls found him pretty

much invisible.

He knew it was foolish, but sometimes he was no world

beater on common sense either, so he hocked his watch

and sent off the money for the program. Then, once the

money was safely gone, a classmate had told him what the

term "vaporware" meant: computer programs that were

promised but never delivered. He had been suckered again.

Par for the course.

20 Man from Mundania Man from Mundania 21

Then the program had arrived. Suspecting it was merely

a blank disk, he had put it in his floppy disk drive, in-

tending to read its directory. But suddenly the thing was

loading itself onto his cut-rate hard disk. Then the screen

came alive:

GREETINGS, MASTER.

"Uh, same to you. What—?"