EIGHTEEN - LIFE AS WE WISH WE DIDN'T KNOW IT

“So anyway…” Charlie leaned back against the bar and gestured expansively. There I was at fifteen thousand feet. Nothing between me and the ground but an air mattress.”

The walls might be hung with squadron banners, old riding leathers, weapons and bits of dragon harness. The floor might be stone, the ceiling hewn beams and the leather-clad men and women dragon riders, but it was still a pilot's meeting place and Charlie fit right in, international orange flight suit and all.

Two or three of the dragon riders were gathered around him at the bar, listening intently. Several more were scattered around at the tables paying half attention. Off in the corner Mick and Karin were enjoying each other's company.

“Did he really do all these things?” Karin whispered.

They're flying stories,” Mick whispered in her ear, pausing to nibble a bit on the lobe. “You know the difference between a fairy tale and a flying story? A fairy tale starts 'Once upon a time…' and a flying story starts 'No shit, this really happened.

Karin turned to grin at him. The move deprived Mick of an earlobe but the tradeoff wasn't that bad. “We have a similar saying. He does it well, though.”

The room exploded in laughter as Charlie reached the punch line.

“Oh, he's entertaining,” Mick said quietly.

“But you don't like him?”

“Let's say our styles are different. We have another saying. There are old pilots and there are bold pilots but there are no old, bold pilots. Charlie's one of the, ah, boldest pilots I've ever met.”

“He is not young either,” Karin pointed out.

“He's lucky then. But luck runs out, especially if you push it”

The programmers' workroom was as warm and cheery as the tavern, but there were only two inhabitants. Moira had long since excused herself and now only Taj and Jerry remained. Jerry was hoarse from talking and beginning to fade around the edges, but Taj was as eager and alert as a beagle on the trail of a rabbit. There were no less than eight “screens” hanging above Jerry's desk, most tiled with several windows, as Jerry led Tajikawa through the basics of the magic compiler and how to write software for magic. Taj already had a pile of scrolls beside him to read later and he was pushing Jerry hard on subtle points of the system.

“Well, then there's this for example.” Taj pointed to a section of the compiler code written in glowing letters in thin air. “It's in here but you don't seem to use ft.”

“Oh, that's an indeterminate instruction,” Jerry told him. “You've heard of the DWIM instruction, Do What I Mean? That's kinda an 'IDAIDWP.'“

Taj cocked an eyebrow. “Ida id wip?”

“I'll Do As I Damn Well Please. You can't be sure what it will do from one time to the next”

“Cute, but why'd you write it that way?”

“We didn't. Remember, the bottom layer of the compiler, the elements we built the rest of it from, are tiny spells that exist here naturally. But we only use a subset of what's available. Some we don't use because they're redundant, as far as we can tell. But some of them, like this one, don't produce reliable results. We think it's something analogous to a quantum uncertainty effect operating on a gross level”

He pointed to the fiery letters again. “This one was particularly tricky. Most of the time it works consistently, which is why it made it into a beta of the compiler. But about one time in a hundred it does something else. Which is why we didn't use it.”

“Have you got a list of those things?” Taj asked.

“The indeterminate instructions? Some of them. Mostly we didn't bother. Why?”

“I want to play with them a little.”

“Be careful. Some of those things are damn dangerous and we don't know all the dangerous ones. Why mess with them?”

“Because,” the Tajmanian Devil said, “you learn the most about a system by observing it when it becomes unstable.”

“Yeah, well just remember that around here when the system becomes unstable you can get caught in a system crash. It nearly happened to us once and it wasn't fun.” He leaned back and rubbed his eyes. “Look, I'm about done in. How about we continue this tomorrow?

“You go on. I want to go on with this stuff a little.”

Jerry hesitated. “What did you have in mind?”

“I was thinking I'd just take the docs and dive right in.”

Jerry frowned “That's not a real good idea. Danny tried that when he first got here and ended up stuck in a DO loop.”

“So? That happens.”

Jerry shook his head. “You don't understand. When I say he got stuck in a DO loop, I mean he got stuck In a DO loop, repeating the same action over and over. Someone like had to get him out of it.”

Taj looked serious. “I take your point. But I still want to keep going.”

The big programmer considered. “Probably the best thing to do is start you out with some simple little nothing spells so you can get the feel of things. He glanced around and spotted some pieces of wood on Wiz's desk. “Wait a minute, here's something.” He picked up a stack of slats with writing on them and handed them to Taj. “Study these and the docs tonight and we'll take a crack at them tomorrow.''

The Tajmanian Devil looked at the strips of wood and cocked a quizzical eyebrow.

“This is a spell one of the wizards wrote. Only there's something wrong with it and it doesn't work. It's pretty harmless stuff, it just brightens and dims the lights, but it will give you some practice with the tool kit and the language.”

“Sounds good. Where shall I work?”

“You can use Wiz's desk. Tomorrow I'll get you in on his system. When you've got that problem spotted, I've got a couple of other things around here. But don't try to do anything tonight on your own. Remember, this stuffs dangerous.”

It was June who heard it first. They were picking their way down a straight section of tunnel when Danny's wife hissed and suddenly her knife was in her hand.

“What?” Wiz asked over his shoulder.

“Shut up!” Danny commanded. Everyone froze. “I hear something down that way.”

“What?”

“I don't know. Shut up and let me listen, will you?”

Instinctively the group had arrayed itself facing the side tunnel. There was a faint scrape as Malkin's rapier cleared its scabbard. Glandurg strode to the front, hand on the hilt of Blind Fury.

“Light exe!” Wiz commanded and a globe of blue light sprang from his fingertips. He gestured and the witch fight began to float down the side tunnel toward the source of the sound.

At first there was nothing to see. The tunnel was empty as far as the globe's light reached. But no, there was something…

For an instant Wiz thought the tunnel was carpeted in brown-and-gray fur. Then he realized the carpet was writhing as if alive. As the mass moved out into the light he saw that it was an army of rats, packed shoulder to shoulder and climbing over each other in their eagerness to get at the humans.

“Rats! Danny yelled and he and Wiz raised their staffs simultaneously.

“lightning rapidfire exe!”

Lightning bolts flashed and scythed through the charging mass, slaying hundreds, but the rats closed ranks and came on. Their eyes glowed feral red in the magic light.

Wiz gestured to the floor and the earth shook, bringing dust and clods of dirt down on the party. A chasm opened before the oncoming army. The rats took no notice and kept coming. Row after row of them disappeared into the crack in the earth, but others leapt across, some of them pushing off from the backs of their fellows as they tumbled into the pit.

With a flash of steel that nearly took Wiz's nose off, Glandurg drew Blind Fury and waded into the survivors. The blade's curse kept him from hitting the rats he aimed at, but it didn't matter. No matter where he struck there were rats aplenty.

Malkin stepped forward and lashed out with her rapier, skewering rat after rat. When she had three or four writhing on her blade she flicked it back toward the mass of rats, sending her victims twisting through the air and back into the horde.

Still the rats came on. Now a dozen or more of them were scrabbling up Glandurg as if he were a ladder, seeking chinks in his armor. Danny and June were laying about, he with his staff and she with her knife. But for every rat they struck down three more charged in.

Glandurg and Malkin were in front so Wiz couldn't get a clear shot. He danced back and forth, trying to find an opening for a lightning bolt. Then suddenly he had a better idea. He raised his staff and began to chant.

The oncoming wave of rats convulsed, stopped and then turned tail and ran squealing. As quickly as the tunnel had filled with rats it was empty, save for the corpses and a few survivors locked in combat with the humans.

Three or four rats were still clinging to Glandurg, including one with its teeth buried in his cheek. Without wincing the dwarf reached up and jerked the rat free. Then he held the squealing creature up before his face and glared at it. With a single quick motion Glandurg bit the rat who had bitten him back, taking off the animal's head with a single chomp. He spat the head out and tossed the corpse away.

“Impudent pest,” he muttered.

“Outasight,” Danny breathed. “Say, do you listen to Ozzie Osburne?”

The dwarf only scowled. For once Wiz was glad Glandurg was on their side.

Malkin was breathing heavily and bleeding from several bites on her arms and legs. “What did you do?”

“Jamming spell,” Wiz panted. “I figured those things were being driven by magic, so I interfered with any magic in the area. Once the spell was broken the rats panicked.”

“Nice trick,” the tall thief said as she resheathed her rapier. She looked at the bites on her sword arm. “Pity you didn't think of it sooner.”

“I'll try to do better the next time,” Wiz said without a trace of irony. “Meanwhile people, let's get out of here. All that magic is likely to attract more trouble.”

Several hundred yards and dozens of twists and turns later, the party found a cul-de-sac where they felt safe enough to rest and treat their wounds. June had some of Moira's salve in her pack and she applied it to everyone's rat bites. Even Glandurg consented to have his wounds smeared with the pungent brown ointment The sharp, minty smell and the plain little pot from Moira's stillroom brought a lump to Wiz's throat. He noticed that even as she treated their wounds June didn't turn her back on the tunnel entrance.

“Any idea where we are?” Wiz asked Danny.

“Lost,” the younger man said as he fished into his tunic for the magic compass. He looked down at the glowing disk “I don't know where we are, but what we're after is off that way.”

“Any sign of anything else?”

Danny squinted at the detector. “Not that I can pick up. This whole area's lousy with magic, but none of it seems immediately hostile.” He dropped the talisman back on his chest. “This thing's getting less effective because of all the magical interference. Pretty soon it's not going to work at all.”

That was unwelcome but not unexpected so Wiz didn't reply. “Okay, spread out. Danny you take the lead this time. And look out for those side tunnels.”

“Remember,” Charlie told Malus for about the hundredth time, “that baby's fragile.”

“Fear not, My Lord,” the apple-cheeked wizard assured him. “We will be as gentle with it as a queen cat with her kits.”

“I mean, I've put that baby into places it was hard to get out of, but this is ridiculous.”

“It has posed a bit of a problem,” Malus admitted, “but I believe we have solved it to everyone's satisfaction.”

They rounded the corner of the hall in time to see an apprentice wizard moving several of blocks of stone. He was walking backward holding a wand and the blocks were bobbing along behind him like ducklings behind their mother.

Charlie stopped dead at the sight. “What's holding those rocks up? Skyhooks?”

“That is not what we call the spell,” said Malus.

Charlie's eyes followed the line of floating stones across the courtyard. “You could put a bunch of helicopter pilots out of work with that.”

The doors of the great hall were large enough to accommodate a cavalry dragon, but the creature would have to stoop and bend to get through. Charlie's biplane couldn't stoop and bend, so a team of workmen and a couple of wizards had spent the better part of two days taking off the doors and removing stones to expand the opening.

“We're ready, Lord,” one of the workmen said as he came over to join them.

“All tight,” Charlie said. “Let me get into the cockpit and you put your guys on the lower wing. I'll take the brakes off and you can push it out.”

“Then what, Lord?” asked the foreman.

Charlie looked around the stone-walled court and sighed. Then I guess she'll just sit there on gate guard. No other use for her here,” he added sadly.

That evening Wiz called another council of war. “Okay people, you know we're running low on food?”

Nods all the way around. The dried vegetables, fruit and grains that constituted this world's “iron rations” were easy to carry, but there was still a limit to how much they had brought with them.

“Well, on the theory that we'd have to head back, at least to replenish our supplies, I ran some tests this afternoon.”

Tests?” Danny asked.

Wiz grinned but there was no humor in it. “I'm developing a nasty, suspicious nature down here. I wanted to make sure we could walk the Wizard's Way with no trouble.”

“I take it there was trouble?” Malkin asked dryly.

“In spades. I can't open the way. It's closed. Blocked by some kind of magical jamming.”

Everyone was quiet for a moment.

“So we can't go back?” Danny asked at last.

“Looks not.”

This smells like a trap,” Danny said. “Like we've been lured in.”

“Lured?” asked Glandurg. “We have had to fight every step of the way. Only the power of Blind Fury has brought us this far.”

That wasn't the way Wiz remembered it, but he didn't object.

This reminds me of Shiara's tale of the cursed tomb that took her sight and magic,'' Malkin said quietly. That was a trap too, but the trap was cloaked by a series of other traps designed to eliminate those who were not clever and possessed of strong magic.''

There was silence while they all considered the possibilities. June moved closer to Danny and he slipped his arm around her shoulders.

“So what do we do about it?” Danny asked finally.

“Well,” Wiz said slowly, “We can't go back.” He looked around the group, hoping someone would dispute the point, but no one did “So we've got to go forward against this thing.”

“Seems to me we've got just one chance,” Danny said at last.

“What?”

The young programmer flicked a tight little smile. “We're gonna have to be a whole lot tougher than the thing that set this trap in the first place.”

“Yes!” roared Glandurg and brandished Blind Fury aloft. The gesture drove the sword into the tunnel roof, knocking a liberal shower of fine, choking dirt down on them all.

Spitting, sneezing and brushing dirt out of their eyes, the other members of the group glared at the dwarf. He grinned sheepishly and carefully returned the sword to its scabbard.

“This stuffs trickier than I thought,” E.T. Tajikawa said when Jerry broke to refill his tea mug. For the last two days he had been working his way systematically through the compiler and development system, coming back to Malus' light dimming spell from time to time.

“It has its peculiarities,” the big programmer agreed as he ambled over to look at Taj's work “What's the problem?”

Taj grinned sheepishly. “Probably really simple because I can't find it. The listing looks fine.”

For an instant Jerry wondered if Taj was really as good as his reputation. “Well,” he asked carefully, “how does it fail?”

“That's the nasty part. It's apparently an intermittent because I can't get it to fail at all.”

Jerry leaned over Taj's shoulder and peered closely at the program, running down the instructions. That's funny. I don't see anything there that would cause an intermittent.”

“You mean you don't know what's wrong with it?”

“Well, no,” Jerry admitted. “Wiz was working on it when… well anyway. Let's see.”

A quick command and Jerry executed the program. The lights in the workroom brightened promptly.

“That's real weird.”

“You mean it isn't me?”

“No. That's what it's supposed to do. Except Malus said it didn't work.”

“I think,” Taj said slowly, “maybe we'd better have a talk with this Malus character.”

Jerry hesitated. Of all the problems they faced, a sticky light switch spell was far and away the least important. But Taj was quivering like a bird dog and the truth was that Jerry wasn't getting anywhere with what he was doing. What the heck? he thought, we might learn something.

They found Malus in the Wizards' Day Room, digesting lunch and talking to a few of his fellow wizards. Winter sun filtered weakly though the large diamond-paned windows and a small fire in the carved stone fireplace took the chill off the air. Magic provided most of the heat and light but the fire and windows added warmth and coziness.

“Malus, could you try this spell again?”

“Certainly, My Lord,” the wizard said, getting up from his chair. “Have you found the problem?”

“I'm not sure. I want to see you do it.”

“Very well.”

Malus picked up the wooden strips, arranged them on a small table and then spoke the command.

Instead of brightening, the magic glow lamps in the Day Room flickered, dimmed, brightened and then dropped to a febrile glimmer.

Jerry and Taj looked at each other in the sudden gloom.

“Let me try,” Jerry said.

This time the spell worked perfectly.

“That doesn't make…”

“Wait a minute!” Taj cut him off. “Do you each have physically separate copies of the compiler or are they all just instantations of the same compiler?”

Jerry looked at him. “I don't know. I never thought about it.”

“Might be interesting to find out,” Taj said.

“My Lord,” Jerry said to the little wizard, “will you list out the compiler for me?”

It was Malus' turn to frown. “Very well. “Emac.”

Instantly a little demon with a green eyeshade popped into existence. Jerry noticed it was rounder than the ones he was used to. In fact it looked a lot like Malus himself.

“?” the demon said.

“list compiler exe,” Malus pronounced, and the demon removed a quill pen from behind a large bat-like ear and began to scribble lines of fiery letters in the air.

The compiler was big and took a while. By now several other wizards, had gathered around to watch.

“Shall I list out the libraries and include files as well, My Lord?” Malus asked when the Emac at last completed its task.

“No, this is fine for now,” Jerry told him. “Emac.” he commanded, and proceeded to order the demon to list out the compiler again. Taj watched closely, but aside from the fact that Malus' Emac wrote in letters of golden fire and Jerry's preferred electric blue he couldn't see any difference.

“Now,” he said, as the second demon finished.

“Emac.”

The blue fire superimposed itself on the yellow. Suddenly several sections of the code stood out in brilliant green.

“Your version of the spell compiler. It's different.” Jerry checked the changed sections against Malus' spell. “Your spell didn't work because something messed with your copy of the compiler. The program was fine but the tool was broken.”

“But, My Lord, I can assure you I have done nothing to change it!”

“I believe you,” Jerry said. And, he didn't add aloud, that's what scares me.

A quick check of the other wizards present in the day room showed that two of them had compilers which had suffered minor changes, but none so great as Malus'.

“I wonder how many other broken copies of the compiler are loose around the castle? Or broken anything else?” Jerry said as the last wizard in the group checked out clean. “I think we'd better start a sweep of the software.”

“You go ahead,” Taj told him. “I've got some stuff I want to check up on.”

Jerry was so engrossed in the problem he only nodded, forgetting his objections to Taj going out on his own.

“Well,” Jerry said tiredly a few hours later, “we were lucky. So far we've only turned up a half-dozen infected programs.” He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “Maybe more than lucky. We didn't exactly build the spells to be virus-proof but we were real conservative in our design. There's an error-correcting code built into every spell and if the check sums and such don't match it won't execute. Plus the critical stuff uses triple redundancy.”

“I noticed,” Taj said. “Is there any pattern to what's been attacked?”

“Not that I can find. There's a lot of stuff here that's been nibbled around the edges but aside from Malus' copy of the compiler nothing else serious is really broken. Damn! I wish Wiz and Danny were here.”

“Need some more insights, eh?”

“That's part of it. But now I'm going to have to go through and design anti-virus software to protect every spell we've got. It would be easier if there were three of us doing it.”

Taj looked at the changed code again. “Who's writing these puppies?”

Jerry shrugged. “If I had to guess I'd say it's our enemy in the City of Night.”

“Seems kind of piddly for a deliberate attack. Are you sure none of your students worked these up?”

Jerry shook his head. “You don't understand how seriously these people take magic. This isn't like a bunch of bored high school lads or out-of-work Bulgarians. Everyone here respects magic too much to do something like this for the hell or it.”

Taj looked skeptical. “This thing came from somewhere.”

“Yeah,” Jerry said. “And that's what worries me. One more thing that worries me.”

Moira rose dripping from the bath. The water streamed off, making little rivulets between her shoulder-blades and breasts, splitting at her swelling belly and dripping off her sparse orange thatch of pubic hair. She stepped out onto the tiled floor and a skeletal hand offered her a towel.

She accepted it without noticing either her attendant's appearance or smell. In life the zombie maid had been a harem attendant for a mighty wizard of the Dark League. She had died on the surface when her master's palace collapsed and had lain there until the new master of the City of Night had claimed her. Even in this cold land, decay had set in while she lay dead on the surface and now that she was often in the steamy atmosphere of the bath her rotting flesh seethed with maggots.

Neither sight nor smell mattered to Moira's body or the intelligence that animated it. Bathing was necessary for human health, so Moira bathed, fallowing barely remembered rituals gleamed from the dead brains of its other servants.

In the same way the body was fed, exercised and rested, cared for as a brood mare is cared for. Not for the sake of the body, but for the sake of what it would bear. Or more correctly, what would be torn from it at the proper time, since natural childbirth played no more role in the Enemy's plans than did a normal child.

Oblivious, unseeing and uncaring, Moira finished rubbing herself down and accepted the shift and long, fur-lined black robe from her shambling attendant. Then she sat as the decaying creature tenderly but clumsily pulled on her boots.

Warmth is important to human health as well.

“Okay,” E. T. Tajikawa said, “there's part of your problem.”

Jerry, Bal-Simba and Moira all crowded around the table. Jerry squinted at the glowing letters over the Tajmanian Devil's desk. Some of them were the conventional magic notation used for writing spells in the code compilers. Others were odd symbols he had never seen before. The result made no sense at all.

Squatting underneath was the demon the code fragment manifested.

It had a nasty sneer on its face—or at least on its top, Jerry amended. The thing sat on six spindly legs like a demented version of a Lunar Lander. The main body was cylindrical and semi-transparent. Inside were vague outlines of something coiled into a long spiral. The top, where the face was, was a regular geometric solid, a dodecahedron, he realized after making a quick count of the edges on each surface.

“What the heck is it?”

“It's a virus,” Taj told him. “You've got an infection in your system.”

“Holy shit,” Jerry breathed. “But how?”

Taj just shrugged.

Jerry tore his eyes away from the demon and examined the spell more closely.

“Does that make any sense to you?” Taj asked.

Jerry just shook his head. “For one thing it's not entirely in standard magic notation. More than that, well, it just doesn't make a Tot of sense. What does it do?”

“It attaches itself to a spell and starts shifting instructions around or combining them.”

Jerry bit his lower lip. There was something terribly wrong with this but he couldn't quite put his finger on what yet.

“Could it be a weapon?”

“If it is it's a piss-poor one. The thing's not very destructive and it's hardly hidden at all. It doesn't poly-morph and if you know the sequence you can grep it out of any spell it's in.”

Everyone was silent for a moment.

“There's something not right about this,” Jerry said

That appears to be an understatement,” Bal-Simba said mildly.

“No, I mean there's something really wrong here. Something we're missing.”

Moira cocked her serpent-like head. “Another of your premonitions?”

“More like a feeling, but yeah. That sort of thing.”

Moira furrowed her scaly brow. She had been more intimately associated with the programmers than Bal-Simba or any of the other wizards and she knew Jerry's knack for spotting problems even if he couldn't quite grasp the whole.

“You've never had a virus here before?” Taj asked.

Jerry shook his head. “Now that it's happened I can see how it could, but no.”

“Hmm,” Bal-Simba said, staring at the glowing letters. “Do you think it is related?”

“Directly? No. But I suspect it's a manifestation of the same kind of underlying phenomenon. Sort of the fundamental particle of your problem.”

“And it works by sticking stuff together,” Jerry said in an effort to forestall the inevitable. “Let me guess, you call this a glue-on, right?”

Taj brightened. “Hey, that's a good name for it”

“Me and my big mouth,” Jerry muttered. “Anyway, it still doesn't explain who our enemy is.”

“What about,” Taj said slowly, “the possibility that the glue-on arose naturally? It's not very complicated. Only about a dozen basic instructions.”

“I suppose that's possible,” Jerry said equally slowly. “Like I say, we've never seen that. But we really haven't been here long.”

“Where do you suppose all these complicated magical phenomena come from?”

“Around here that's like asking why the sky is blue. They just are.”

“The sky's blue for a reason,” Taj pointed out.

“It's something we never really wondered about.”

Taj smiled, looking more satanic than ever. “Those are the ones that get you in the worst trouble.”

While Jerry chewed on that Taj went back to wandering about the room restlessly, looking at things without quite seeing them. He came to rest in front of Danny's magical fish tank and suddenly froze like a bird dog coming on point. The rainbow denizens of the tank were oblivious to him, but everyone else in the room was suddenly watching him intently.

“Those fish aren't natural, are they?”

“No, that's something Danny was working on for his son,” Jerry told him.

“Do they change?” he asked in a peculiar voice.

Jerry frowned, remembering his earlier misgivings. “Yeah. He made them so they'd change over time. They kinda mutate.”

“But they don't follow a pre-programmed pattern?”

“I don't think so.”

Taj turned back to the fish tank and stared fascinated.

“Bingo!” he breathed softly. “Oh, boy howdy!”

“You've found something?”

“Alfie.”

“Huh?”

“Alfie—A-Life, you know artificial life.”

“What do you guys know about artificial life?”

Jerry shrugged. “It only got hot after we came here. We've been following the newsgroups on the net.”

“Its a very rapidly developing field.”

“As good as its hype?”

Taj snorted. “Get real. But they're still getting some interesting results, especially with evolutionary systems.” He paused. “What's more, I'll bet your enemy isn't 'someone', it's 'something'—the mother of all artificial life programs.”

Zombie army ants. The phrase flashed in Jerry's mind.

“Meaning the thing's not alive?”

Taj shrugged. “Define 'life' and I'll tell you. What it definitely means is that you've got stuff breeding out there.”

“Wait a minute, A-life has to have a purpose. There's a design.”

Taj gave another of his satanic smiles. “Teleological reasoning. The A-life we're familiar with is designed originally because humans created it. But there's nothing that says there has to be a designer. If you've got the right conditions and the right precursors it could arise spontaneously.” He looked over at the fish tank “Offhand I'd say you have the right conditions here.

“From what you've told me, there's natural magic everywhere, but the spells didn't combine very well. So now you guys come along and develop your spell compiler that sticks little spells together and eventually these things pick up the trick.”

“But we didn't write anything like that,” Jerry protested.

“Not necessary that you do. This kind of genetic crossover has been known for a long time in bacteria and a couple of workers have produced it in artificial life programs.” He frowned. “So then the question is, how much available resources do they have? You sort of indicated that magic is an infinite resource here, right?”

“Well, not exactly. Some areas are more magical than others. There are dead zones all through the Wild Wood, for instance. And at times you can produce something like a magical drain effect and some resources become scarce. Wiz did that in his attack on the City of Night.” It was his turn to frown. “But that kind of thing is rare. There's an awful lot of available magic out there.”

Taj nodded. “Makes sense. If you're really resource constrained it's hard to get any kind of complex development. You get the equivalent of lichens and algae. If there's no constraint you lose a potent driver for evolution. But if there's a lot of resources before you hit the constraints…” he shrugged.

“Jeez,” Jerry muttered.

“Okay, now suppose that these things are out there, these little spells, competing for resources. It becomes survival of the fittest. The things that can grab the most resources and hold on to them best survive longest.”

“And we started that?”

Taj pursed his lips. “Actually that probably pre-dates you. I suspect that's where this world's naturally occurring demons and such come from. What you added were code fragments that made it easier for pieces to combine.”

“So we are responsible.”

“Law of nature, man. You can't do just one thing. Anyway, eventually this proto-evolutionary process turns out our friend the glue-on.” He nodded toward the desktop where the virus sat. Jerry thought it didn't look like anyone's friend, but before he could say that, Taj was off again. “Now you throw in something like this recombinant virus and the things that survive are the ones that get reproduced.”

He shrugged, “Kind of like an artificial life version of Core Wars, only we're in the core.” He laughed. “Evolution in action. I'll bet by now there's a whole ecology out there.”

“Wonderful,” groaned Jerry.

“That too,” Taj agreed, obviously having missed his tone. The big question is how high a lambda have you got?”

“Lambda?”

“Information mutability. If information is hard to change you stifle any kind of evolution. If it's too easy to change self-organization doesn't have a chance. There's a fairly narrow band where A-life is possible.”

Jerry thought about that. He didn't like it, but it made sense. “We know some areas are less magical than others. The whole place around the City of Night is an especially magically active zone. Plus there's a lot of leftover magic down there from the days of the Dark League.”

“And we have kept scant watch there,” Bal-Simba rumbled. “My fault, I am afraid.”

“So,” Taj said, “these things had the equivalent of a petri dish where they could grow and evolve. And now you've got something that's looking to spread out.”

“Why is it so hostile?”

“Because that's the way it evolved. Maybe it gives the thing an edge in surviving, maybe it's an accidental characteristic, like something it picked up along the way.”

“Point is, that it's out there and that's the most likely explanation for what's going on here.” Taj shook his head. “Boy, what the guys at the Santa Fe Institute wouldn't give to see this.”

“What we wouldn't give to see the last of it,” Jerry retorted “The real question is how do we stop it?”

“Now that,” said the Tajmanian Devil, “is going to take a little thought.”

“More strangeness, Lord.”

Bal-Simba had had about all the strangeness he could stand in the last few weeks, but he forbore to say so to the chief Watcher. “What and where?” he asked.

Erus, the head of the watchers, was a lean gray-haired man with a broken beak of a nose and fierce blue eyes. Years of stooping over a scrying crystal had left him with a permanent slouch.

“Where is to the south, out over the Freshened Sea. As to what…” He shrugged. They travel in groups, and they seek darkness or clouds, but each day they range further north.”

Bal-Simba grunted. “Enough of both at this time of the year, what with long nights and winter storms over the Freshened Sea. You say you have never encountered them before. What are they most like?”

Erus hesitated. Like most of those in his line of work he disliked making guesses, but for him as for all of them guessing was part of the job. “Lord, they appear to be ridden dragons, at least for the most part.”

“For the most part?”

“There are other things as well, but not so many. Mostly they seem to be dragons, but of an odd sort.”

“Odd in what way?”

“Like the rest of this thing's magic—cold.” He looked up at Bal-Simba. “Lord, I have never seen anything like it. Nor have any of the other Watchers.”

“What do you think they are doing?”

“I cannot say with certainty, but it appears they are scouting, perhaps testing our defenses. At their present rate they will reach our lands ere long.”

Bal-Simba considered. “Then best we seek these things out to see what they are. Order our patrols south again, but cautiously. And try to steer them to a small group they can meet in overwhelming strength.”

“Jerry tells me you have developed a weapon against our enemy,” Bal-Simba said without preamble as he walked into the programmers' work room.

“Yep,” Taj said proudly. “It's a lysing virus. Or maybe a self-reproducing restriction enzyme would be a better way to describe it”

Jerry squinted at the code hanging above the desk Taj was using. “Describing it in English would be better yet”

“Okay,” Taj said. “Basically the problem is that this virus of the enemy's glues spells together, with some transcription errors. Then those new spells compete against each other in what amounts to a Core Wars tournament where only the fittest survive. Eventually the winners get big and nasty.”

He gestured to the code. “What this virus does is exactly the opposite. It breaks spells into pieces at certain specific points, sort of makes them come unglued.”

“What's going to prevent this thing from running wild and reducing every piece of code to rubble?”

Tajikawa smiled, looking more satanic than ever. “It won't affect a piece of code smaller than a certain size.”

“Wait a minute. How do you keep the anti-virus from mutating?”

Again the satanic smile. “You can't. It has to mutate if it's going to do its job because the sticky virus is going to mutate. But we can make sure it won't attack anything smaller than the limit. Here, take a look.”

Jerry scanned the indicated portion of the code.

Taj reached past him and pointed to several sections of the listing. You will note that there is not a test in there for code size. Nor is it localized to one part of the program. It's more subtle than that.”

Jerry nodded. “Clever.”

“As far as we know there are no programs that big. None of yours anyway. It won't prevent things from forming, but it will limit their size and that will probably limit their power.”

“Probably?”

Taj shrugged. “Theoretically these things could become efficient enough to be pretty potent within that limit, but with the smaller code sizes the global minima tend to be in pretty steep wells on the state surface. Plus there are a lot of local minima to act as traps. A genetic algorithm might reach a minimum but it would be pretty much a random event. Like the monkeys at the typewriters trying to produce Shakespeare.” He frowned. “Of course there is a question of how many monkeys and typewriters we've got here.” He got a faraway look as he considered the problem.

“Will this thing leave us worse off?” asked Bal-Simba, who had understood perhaps a quarter of what Tajikawa had just said.

“No.”

“Then we will do it.” He paused. “How long will it take for this thing to work?”

“It starts as soon as we tell it to execute,” Taj said. It will start here and then spread like the original virus did.”

“Wait a minute,” Jerry said, “how long will it take to affect what's in the City of Night?”

“That's a ways from here right?”

“And it's protected by some kind of magic barrier.”

“Oh, the barrier shouldn't be a problem. Eventually it will diffuse through or be carried through by an infected spell.”

“How long,” Jerry asked slowly, “is eventually?”

“Fermi numbers, around ten years.”

Bal-Simba looked at him. “What kind of numbers?”

“Fermi numbers. You know, within an order of magnitude.”

“In other words,” Jerry added, “it could happen in anywhere from one year to a century.” He shook his head, “But even a year is way too long.”

“Well, if you're closer it would strike faster. If you're right next to this thing when you invoke the program it would get it right away.”

Jerry sighed. “Okay then. We're going to have to get in there to make this work.”

“That will not be easy,” Bal-Simba told him.

“Wiz and the others did it.”

“I am afraid that way is blocked now,” Bal-Simba told him. “We cannot walk the Wizards Way and the city is ever-more-strongly guarded by the Enemy's non-living servants.”

There's another problem,” Taj pointed out. “This thing's likely to react to your presence, right?”

“I would call that an understatement,” rumbled Bal-Simba.

“Well, understand, its going to take the lysing virus a while to work on anything that's fairly complicated. If this thing has developed something like an immune system to keep it from being taken over by the competition, it may take a few hours, or even days.” He caught the others' expressions. “Too long, huh?”

“For the main enemy, way too long. The first thing it will try to do is eat our lunch—and us with it. We can't wait hours, we need to knock it down immediately.”

“How inorganic,” Taj sighed. “All right, let's go back and take it from first principles again.”

They took special care to find a secure resting place that evening. Malkin seemed abstracted all through the dinner meal, but she didn't say anything until they were finished.

“I have been thinking about what you said, about the monsters getting more dangerous as we come closer to our goal,” she said to Wiz as they cleaned the last of the dinner dishes.

“And?”

“Have the monsters been getting more dangerous?”

Wiz thought about it. “No, not really.”

“And have we encountered greater numbers of them?”

An ugly little prickle of his neck hair told Wiz he wasn't going to like where this was going. “No,” he admitted.

“Then,” Malkin asked, “are we sure we are getting closer to our goal?”

“Well, the seeker says we're going in the right direction.”

Malkin just looked at him.

“I'm really beginning to wonder about that seeker,” Danny said. “I know this place is big but we should be at least a little closer to Moira than when we started.”

“Maybe it's been getting brighter so slowly we didn't notice,” Wiz suggested.

Malkin reached out and tapped his shoulder. “The glow only extends out to this smudge on your right breast. That's where it was yesterday and the day before.”

“Are you sure?”

“Trust me. In my profession you notice these things. You always hold the crystal in the same place, straight out from your breastbone to the length of the cord around your neck.”

Wiz thought about that. Then he looked down at the crystal. Then he thought about it some more. Not very pleasant thoughts.

“Let's see something.”

“Emac.”

Instantly a two-foot-high demon with a big bald head, flapping ears, glasses and a green eyeshade appeared before him.

“?,” said the little demon.

“backslash list find_moira exe.”

The creature took a quill pen from behind one enormous ear and began to scribble fiery letters in the air. Wiz and his fellow adventurers were soon bathed in warm yellow light from the golden letters hanging before them.

“Wait a minute!” Danny said almost as soon as the Emac finished writing. “That doesn't look right.” He pointed with his staff at a section of the code.

“It's not,” Wiz said sourly. “Neither is that,” he added as his staff jabbed out, “that or that.”

“The spell's been sabotaged!”

“Who?” demanded Glandurg. “Who has played such a foul trick upon us?”

“If I had to guess, I'd say the Enemy,” Wiz said. “Okay folks, gather around, it's conference time.”

The party sat down on a convenient patch of rocks and all of them looked at Wiz expectantly. “Well,” he said to break the silence, “what are our options?”

No one wanted to mention the obvious one: Give up, try to make their way to the surface and wait for rescue.

“Dwarves can find their way underground,” Danny suggested. “Perhaps Glandurg can guide us?”

“I would have to know where we were going,” the dwarf said shortly. “Impractical.”

“Besides,” Malkin said, “he tends to get lost.”

“Slander,” hissed the dwarf.

“Okay, settle down, people. The important thing is it won't work” Glandurg and Malkin glared at each other but obeyed.

“What about re-casting the seeker spell?” Malkin asked after a minute.

“Hard to do. We could write a new spell easily enough, but we need something like a lock of Moira's hair to focus the spell.” He sighed. “If Moira's personality were still with her body we could work something up to seek that, but otherwise we've got to have something intimately connected with her.”

“Her cloak,” June said from her place beside Danny. “Like mine.”

“Similarity isn't good enough I'm afraid.”

“From the same cloth. Made at the same time.”

With a pang Wiz remembered the long summer afternoons when Moira and June had sat together under a rose bower at Wizards' Keep, sewing the matching cloaks for the coming winter and watching Ian and Caitlin romp among the rose bushes. Sometimes they had worked together, with a cloak stretched across their knees as they sat side by side or across from each other.

“Wait a minute! You both worked on Moira's cloak, didn't you?”

June nodded.

“Did you ever prick your finger while you worked and get blood on the cloak?”

A hesitation and then another nod.

“Jackpot! Okay, we can do this then.”

Everyone looked at him. “DNA,” he explained. “If June got blood on the cloak her DNA is still on there.”

“Washed it,” June said defensively.

“I'm sure you didn't get it all out. We can home on your DNA.”'

Danny grinned. “Yeah, and because it's uniquely hers it will stand out almost as strongly as a true name.” Then his face fell. “Wait a minute. How are you going to make it sensitive enough to find June's blood on Moira's cloak with June standing right here?”

“I've got a way to make a spell directional, like an antenna. As long as June's not in the beam, her presence won't interfere.”

“Let's get to it, then.”

In the event it took several hours to produce and check the spell. Part of that was because Wiz and Danny took good care to armor the code against tampering and to sprinkle alarms throughout the program to warn of attempted subversion. Part of it was the usual quota of unexpected problems and glitches. Part of it was simply that it's harder to work sitting on rocks in a cave than it is in your own workroom. So while Glandurg fidgeted, Malkin watched and June did whatever June did, the pair turned out a new spell.

The only real difficulty came in drawing a sample of June's blood for comparison. June was so eager to hero she slashed a four-inch gash in her arm and Wiz and Danny had to break off preparing the spell to give her first aid.

Finally they held up the finished product and commanded it to find Moira. Almost instantly the pointer lit up and swung around, pointing almost back the way they had come.

“Wonderful,'' Danny said glumly. “We have been going in the wrong direction.”

Wiz ached to get going in the new direction but common sense prevailed. “In the morning. Let's get a good night's rest and then we'll head out. And this time we'll be heading for Moira.”

Honesty compelled him to admit that what they'd actually be heading for was Moira's cloak. There was no guarantee Moira would still be with it. He tried very hard to push that thought out of his mind.

They moved out the next morning in good order and somber spirits. Once again Malkin led the way and Wiz followed, staff at the ready. His senses were alert but his mind was elsewhere. Malkin was right. The defenses of this place didn't make any sense in the real world. They made sense in terms of a fantasy role-playing game, but there weren't any fantasy role-playing games here. The only people in this World now who knew about such things were Danny, Jerry and himself. There had been Craig and Mikey, two computer crackers who had come to this World and hooked up with the forces of primal chaos. But Craig was dead and Mikey was a mindless husk held under tight guard at the Wizards' Keep. So where had the idea come from?

Damn, he thought for about the thousandth time, I wish we knew what we are fighting.

“Well,” E.T. Tajikawa said, “there's your weapon.”

On the table sat a golden globe about the size of a softball.

“Behold the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch,” Taj said with a sweeping gesture. “It's what you might call an anti-takeover device—a poison pill.”

“You intend to poison the Enemy?” Bal-Simba asked.

“Actually we're going to hand him a retrovirus and he's going to do a number on himself.”

Both Bal-Simba and Jerry waited for him to continue.

“It started with those indeterminate instructions, the ones you call I'll Do As I Damn Well Please, IDAIDWP.”

His audience looked apprehensive. “Go on,” the big wizard said slowly.”

“Okay, first I divided them into two categories: Regular IDAIDWP and FU-IDAIDWP.”

“Foo ida id wip?” Jerry asked.

“Eff you ida id wip,” Taj corrected. “What you might call IDAIDWP with an attitude. Anyway, I rolled the FU-IDAIDWPs into the nastiest package I could dream up, added some interface code to make it easy for the Enemy to absorb and wrapped it in the prettiest package I could find.” He gestured. “Viola.”

“That's voila.”

Taj gave him his satanic grin. “Not the way I play it.”

Taj looked at Jerry. “Okay, you say this thing's instinct is to absorb whatever's tossed at it.”

“Well, humans that attack it, anyway.”

“Close enough. Essentially what this thing does is to insert a sequence with a bunch of indeterminate instructions into the thing's code. You feed it to The Blob out there and the critter self-destructs.”

“Nasty,” Jerry said. “I like it.” He paused. “What's the downside?”

Taj pursed his lips. “Well, there is one tiring that might be a problem. It's got to be absorbed all at once so we've got to get pretty close to make it work”

“How close?”

“For immediate effect? About hand grenade range.”

For a minute no one said anything. “So we've got to jump down this thing's throat, right?”

Taj shrugged. “If you want it to work right away and if you want to be sure you get the main bad guy”

No one said anything. There's another problem,” Taj added helpfully. This things been bred to learn quick. If you don't make it the first time it will be a whole lot harder the next time.” He paused and looked hard at them. “Basically I'd say we've got one shot at this.”

Another pause. “I believe,” said Bal-Simba, “this is what Charlie would call a sporty proposition.”