Authors: Vernor Vinge
Alan — that was the elemental’s favorite name — peered nearsightedly, his head weaving faintly from side to side as he tried to recognize the traveler. “Ah, I do believe we are honored with the presence of Mr. Slippery, is it not so?” he finally said. He smiled, an open grin revealing the glowing interior of his mouth. His breath did not show flame but did have the penetrating heat of an open kiln. He rubbed his clawed hands against his asbestos T-shirt as though anxious to be proved wrong. Away from his magma moat, the dead black of his flesh lightened, trying to contain his body heat. Now he looked almost reptilian.
“Indeed it is. And come to bring my favorite little gifts.” Mr. Slippery threw a leaden slug into the air and watched the elemental grab it with his mouth, his eyes slitted with pleasure-melt-in-your-mouth pleasure. They traded conversation, spells, and counterspells for several minutes. Alan’s principal job was to determine that the visitor was a known member of the Coven, and he ordinarily did this with little tests of skill (the magma bath he had tried to give Mr. Slippery) and by asking the visitor questions about previous activities within the castle. Alan was a personality simulator, of course. Mr. Slippery was sure that there had never been a living operator behind that toothless, glowing smile. But he was certainly one of the best, probably the product of many hundreds of blocks of psylisp programming, and certainly superior to the little “companionship” programs you can buy nowadays, which generally become repetitive after a few hours of conversation, which don’t grow, and which are unable to counter weird responses. Alan had been with the Coven and the castle since before Mr. Slippery had become a member, and no one would admit to his creation (though Wiley J. was suspected). He hadn’t even had a name until this year, when Erythrina had given him that asbestos Alan Turing T-shirt.
Mr. Slippery played the game with good humor, but care. To “die” at the hands of Alan would be a painful experience that would probably wipe a lot of unbacked memory he could ill afford to lose. Such death had claimed many petitioners at this gate, folk who would not soon be seen on this plane again.
Satisfied, Alan waved a clawed fist at the watchers in the tower, and the gate — ceramic bound in wolfram clasps — was rapidly lowered for the visitor. Mr. Slippery walked quickly across, trying to ignore the spitting and bubbling that he heard below him. Alan — now all respectful — waited till he was in the castle courtyard before doing an immense belly-flop back into his magma swimming hole.
Most of the others, with the notable exception of Erythrina, had already arrived. Robin Hood, dressed in green and looking like Errol Flynn, sat across the hall in very close conversation with a remarkably good-looking female (but then they could all be remarkably good-looking here) who seemed unsure whether to project blonde or brunette. By the fireplace, Wiley J. Bastard, the Slimey Limey, and DON.MAC were in animated discussion over a pile of maps. And in the comer, shaded from the fireplace and apparently unused, sat a classic remote printing terminal. Mr. Slippery tried to ignore that teleprinter as he crossed the hall.
“Ah, it’s Slip.” DON.MAC looked up from the maps and gestured him closer. “Take a look here at what the Limey has been up to.”
“Hmm?” Mr. Slippery nodded at the others, then leaned over to study the top map. The margins of the paper were aging vellum, but the “map” itself hung in three dimensions, half sunk into the paper. It was a typical banking defense and cash — flow plot — that is, typical for the SIG. Most banks had no such clever ways of visualizing the automated protection of their assets. (For that matter, Mr. Slippery suspected that most banks still looked wistfully back to the days of credit cards and COBOL.) This was the sort of thing Robin Hood had developed, and it was surprising to see the Limey involved in it. He looked up questioningly. “What’s the jape?”
“It’s a reg’lar double-slam, Slip. Look at this careful, an’ you’ll see it’s no ord’n’ry protection map. Seems like what you blokes call the Mafia has taken over this banking net in the Maritime states. They must be usin’ Portals to do it so slick. Took me a devil of a time to figure out it was them as done it. Ha ha! but now that I have… look here, you’ll see how they’ve been launderin’ funds, embezzlin’ from straight accounts.
“They’re ever so clever, but not so clever as to know about Slimey.” He poked a finger into the map and a trace gleamed red through the maze. “If they’re lucky, they’ll discover this tap next autumn, when they find themselves maybe three billion dollars short, and not a single sign of where it all disappeared to.”
The others nodded. There were many covens and SIGs throughout this plane. Theirs, The Coven, was widely known, had pulled off some of the most publicized pranks of the century. Many of the others were scarcely more than social clubs. But some were old-style criminal organizations which used this plane for their own purely pragmatic and opportunistic reasons. Usually such groups weren’t too difficult for the warlocks to victimize, but it was the Slimey Limey who seemed to specialize in doing so.
“But, geez, Slimey, these guys play rough, even rougher than the Great Enemy.” That is, the Feds. “If they ever figure out who you really are, you’ll die the True Death for sure.”
“I may be slimy, but I ain’t crazy. There’s no way I could absorb three billion dollars — or even three million — without being discovered. But I played it like Robin over there: the money got spread around three million ordinary accounts here and in Europe, one of which just happens to be mine.”
Mr. Slippery’s ears perked up. “Three million accounts, you say? Each with a sudden little surplus? I’ll bet I could come close to finding your True Name from that much, Slimey.”
The Limey made a faffling gesture. “It’s actually a wee bit more complicated. Face it, chums, none of you has ever come close to sightin’ me, an’ you know more than any Mafia.”
That was true. They all spent a good deal of their time in this plane trying to determine the others’ True Names. It was not an empty game, for the knowledge of another’s True Name effectively made him your slave — as Mr. Slippery had already discovered in an unpleasantly firsthand way. So the warlocks constantly probed one another, devised immense programs to sieve government-personnel records for the idiosyncracies that they detected in each other. At first glance, the Limey should have been one of the easiest to discover: he had plenty of mannerisms. His Brit accent was dated and broke down every so often into North American. Of all the warlocks, he was the only one neither handsome nor grotesque. His face was, in fact, so ordinary and real that Mr. Slippery had suspected that it might be his true appearance and had spent several months devising a scheme that searched secret and US and common Europe photo files for just that appearance. It had been for nothing, and they had all eventually reached the conclusion that the Limey must be doubly or triply deceptive.
Wiley J. Bastard grinned, not too impressed. “It’s nice enough, and I agree that the risks are probably small, Slimey. But what do you really get? An ego boost and a little money. But we,” he gestured inclusively, “are worth more than that. With a little cooperation, we could be the most powerful people in the real world. Right, DON?”
DON.MAC nodded, smirking. His face was really the only part of him that looked human or had much flexibility of expression — and even it was steely gray. The rest of DON’s body was modeled after the standard Plessey-Mercedes all-weather robot.
Mr. Slippery recognized the reference. “So you’re working with the Mailman now, too, Wiley?” He glanced briefly at the teleprinter. “Yup.”
“And you still won’t give us any clue what it’s all about?”
Wiley shook his head. “Not unless you’re serious about throwing in with us. But you all know this: DON was the first to work with the Mailman, and he’s richer than Croesus now.”
DON.MAC nodded again, that silly smile still on his face.
“Hmmm.” It was easy to get rich. In principle, the Limey could have made three billion dollars off the Mob in his latest caper. The problem was to become that rich and avoid detection and retribution. Even Robin Hood hadn’t mastered that trick — but appar — ently DON and Wiley thought the Mailman had done that and more. After his chat with Virginia, he was willing to believe it. Mr. Slippery turned to look more closely at the teleprinter. It was humming faintly, and as usual it had a good supply of paper. The paper was torn neatly off at the top, so that the only message visible was the Mailman’s asterisk prompt. It was the only way they ever communicated with this most mysterious of their members: type a message on the device, and in an hour or a week the machine would rattle and beat, and a response of up to several thousand words would appear. In the beginning, it had not been very popular — the idea was cute, but the delays made conversation just too damn dull. He could remember seeing meters of Mailman output lying sloppily on the stone floor, mostly unread. But
now
, every one of the Mailman’s golden words was eagerly sopped up by his new apprentices, who very carefully removed every piece of output, leaving no clues for the rest of them to work with.
“Ery!” He looked toward the broad stone stairs that led down from the courtyard. It was Erythrina, the Red Witch. She swept down the stairs, her costume shimmering, now revealing, now obscuring. She had a spectacular figure and an excellent sense of design, but of course that was not what was remarkable about her. Erythrina was the sort of person who knew much more than she ever said, even though she always seemed easy to talk to. Some of her adventures — though unadvertised — were in a class with Robin Hood’s. Mr. Slippery had known her well for a year; she was certainly the most interesting personality on this plane. She made him wish that all the secrets were unnecessary, that True Names could be traded as openly as phone numbers. What was she really?
Erythrina nodded to Robin Hood, then proceeded down the hall to DON.MAC, who had originally shouted greetings and now continued, “We’ve just been trying to convince Slimey and Slip that they are wasting their time on pranks when they could have real power and real wealth.”
She glanced sharply at Wiley, who seemed strangely irritated that she had been drawn into the conversation. “‘We’ meaning you and Wiley and the Mailman?”
Wiley nodded. “I just started working with them last week, Ery,” as if to say,
and you can’t stop me
.
“You may have something, DON. We all started out as amateurs, doing our best to make the System just a little bit uncomfortable for its bureaucratic masters. But we are experts now. We probably understand the System better than anyone on Earth. That should equate to power.” It was the same thing the other two had been saying, but she could make it much more persuasive. Before his encounter with the Feds, he might have bought it (even though he always knew that the day he got serious about Coven activities and went after real gain would also be the day it ceased to be an enjoyable game and became an all-consuming job that would suck time away from the projects that made life entertaining).
Erythrina looked from Mr. Slippery to the Limey and then back. The Limey was an easygoing sort, but just now he was a bit miffed at the way his own pet project had been dismissed. “Not for me, thanky,” he said shortly and began to gather up his maps.
She turned her green, faintly oriental eyes upon Mr. Slippery. “How about you, Slip? Have you signed up with the Mailman?”
He hesitated.
Maybe I should
. It seemed clear that the Mailman’s confederates were being let in on at least part of his schemes. In a few hours, he might be able to learn enough to get Virginia off his back. And perhaps destroy his friends to boot; it was a hell of a bargain.
God in Heaven, why did they have to get mixed up in this? Don’t they realize what the Government will do to them, if they really try to take over, if they ever try to play at being more than vandals?
“Not… not yet,” he said finally. “I’m awfully tempted, though.”
She grinned, regular white teeth flashing against her dark, faintly green face. “I, too. What do you say we talk it over, just the two of us?” She reached out a slim, dark hand to grasp his elbow. “Excuse us, gentlemen; hopefully, when we get back, you’ll have a couple of new allies.” And Mr. Slippery felt himself gently propelled toward the dark and musty stairs that led to Erythrina’s private haunts.
Her torch burned and glowed, but there was no smoke. The flickering yellow lit their path for scant meters ahead. The stairs were steep and gently curving. He had the feeling that they must do a complete circle every few hundred steps: this was an immense spiral cut deep into the heart of the living rock. And it was alive. As the smell of mildew and rot increased, as the dripping from the ceiling grew subtly louder and the puddles in the worn steps deeper, the walls high above their heads took on shapes, and those shapes changed and flowed to follow them. Erythrina protected her part of the castle as thoroughly as the castle itself was guarded against the outside world. Mr. Slippery had no doubt that if she wished, she could trap him permanently here, along with the lizards and the rock sprites. (Of course he could always “escape” simply by falling back into the real world, but until she relented or he saw through her spells, he would not be able to access any other portion of the castle.) Working on some of their projects, he had visited her underground halls, but never anything this deep.
He watched her shapely form preceding him down, down, down. Of all the Coven (with the possible exception of Robin Hood, and of course the Mailman), she was the most powerful. He suspected that she was one of the original founders. If only there were some way of convincing her (without revealing the source of his knowledge) that the Mailman was a threat. If only there was some way of getting her cooperation in nailing down the Mailman’s True Name.
Erythrina stopped short and he bumped pleasantly into her. Over her shoulder, a high door ended the passage. She moved her hand in a pattern hidden from Mr. Slippery and muttered some unlocking spell. The door split horizontally, its halves pulling apart with oiled and massive precision. Beyond, he had the impression of spots and lines of red breaking a further darkness.