Rick Cook - The Wizardry Cursed

There was deep blue ocean and spotted through it were islands. As Craig watched the islands formed as faceted images, then smoothed and took on color and texture. Vaguely he sensed that one end of this place connected to his own world and the other end to the world of magic.

Again the zooming effect and they were falling toward a large island in the center of the ocean. The place was long and narrow, with reddish brown desert shading from mountains at one end down through brown-yellow plains in the center to lush gray-green at the other end.

Faster and faster they fell, closer and closer to the mountains at the desert end. Craig sucked in his breath as the mountain peaks rushed up toward them.

Then suddenly they were standing on the tallest peak of all, looking out over the mountains and desert.

In this place the magic of both worlds works, the voice inside their heads told them. It is yours for now. Make good use of it.

And then they were alone on the crag.

Craig tasted bile on his tongue. His head hurt with a roaring, throbbing ache that threatened to take the top of his skull off with every beat of his hammering heart. Mikey didn’t look too much better.

The two looked at each other for a long moment while the chill mountain wind whipped around them and tugged at their clothing.

"Come on," Mikey said at last. "Let’s get to work."

The amazing thing was, Craig realized, he already knew this stuff. He didn’t have to think about how to do it, he could already make magic.

Working alongside Mikey, he sketched out the form of their new home, the citadel and fortress which would be their base for the attack into the new world.

Shadowy cloud forms hovered around the peak as the pair pushed and shaped the outlines of their castle. It would be small at first, covering no more than the top of the peak. But already Craig could visualize its spread as a great stronghold and arsenal to pour forth the sinews of conquest.

It was somehow right that they should conquer this world of magic. It was the natural order of things, meant to be. As he shaped and formed, Craig realized in the back of his mind he hadn’t always felt that way. But that was immaterial, like a long-ago dream. This was fated and he would bend all his talents to seizing this other world.

Something told him that those talents were now considerable.

A push, a twist, a sudden shimmering coalescence and their magic castle was done! Craig breathed a sigh and admired their creation.

The walls soared straight up out of the sides of the peak. Towers and turrets sprouted everywhere, flags flew from the staffs and whipped in the incessant wind. It was magnificent!

At least it was magnificent for a first effort. He had to admit that the walls leaned askew in a couple of places and that some of the towers slumped as if half-melted. Some of the windows were funny shapes too. And somehow it wasn’t as big as he had imagined it would be.

"Needs a lot of work," Mikey said.

"It’s pretty good for a first effort."

Mikey shrugged. "Come on. Let’s get the hell out of this wind."

Together they strode over the canting drawbridge and through the lopsided gate of their redoubt.

Craig looked at his handiwork sitting in the flagged stone courtyard and suppressed a pang of disappointment. It was smaller than he had thought it would be, maybe ten feet from wingtip to wingtip. The color was a nice battleship gray, just like a real F-15, and the twin tails stood proudly above the jet exhausts, but somehow it didn’t look just right. It looked kind of like an F-15 Eagle, or maybe a Russian Foxhound or Flanker interceptor, or maybe even a Navy Tomcat. He tried to remember just exactly what an F-15 looked like and found he couldn’t separate the images of twin-engine, twin-tail interceptors in his mind.

Well, all right, it would have to do. They needed air defense, didn’t they? This might not be exactly right, but it could fly and it could fight. That was good enough.

Anyway, there was some good stuff. The conformal fuel tanks along the sides of the fuselage under the wings were right. And the missiles and drop tanks hanging from the pylons beneath the wings and body looked right. Who cared if it wasn’t perfect? It was wicked and it was all his.

"Hey Mikey," he yelled, "look what I’ve got."

"Yeah?" Mikey came out of the main keep, wiping his hands on a rag.

"There," Craig gestured proudly. "It’s a robot F-15."

Mikey walked over to the plane. "Bullshit."

"Huh?"

"Bullshit. Look, you’ve got a missile under the left wing and a drop tank under the right."

"So?"

"So what happens if you drop the tank or fire the missile? You’ve got an unbalanced load on the plane. And anyway, that missile isn’t off an F-15. It looks Russian or something. And you’ve got the center drop tank painted with a red nose, like a bomb."

"So who the hell cares? It will fly and it can fight. All right? That’s what’s important, isn’t it?"

"Who’s it going to fight?" Mikey demanded. "We’re the only people in this world. You think the Russians are going to come swarming in here or something?"

"We’re here to fight someone," Craig said stubbornly. "They told us so."

"Oh yeah," Mikey agreed. "We’re gonna have to fight all right. But shit like this," he gestured at the plane, "isn’t going to be what decides that battle."

"Oh yeah? Well, what will decide that fucking battle, hotshot?"

Mikey got that sneering smile Craig had come to hate. "Something a lot more powerful than any robot airplane. You’ll see when the time comes."

Well, fuck you very much! Craig thought as Mikey disappeared back into their lumpy castle. He picked up a loose stone and threw it against the castle wall with all his strength.

He needed a better way to do this. He’d created the F-15 just by imagining it, but the problem with that was that you had to imagine all the details at once. That was too hard.

Okay, so what about breaking it down? Suppose you could imagine something one part at a time, like drawing it out on paper? Or on a computer screen! Yeah. Like a workstation!

What he needed was a magical workstation. Already the image was forming in his mind. He’d never seen a jet fighter up close, but he knew exactly what a workstation was like. Of course, he’d want to make a few improvements.

Craig left the misshapen fighter sitting in the courtyard. He’d do a hell of a lot better the next time, but he was going to build that fighter anyway. Squadrons and squadrons of them, just on principle.

It took him nearly three days, but at last Craig had his workstation. The "screen" was a gently glowing rectangle nearly a yard across. There was a keyboard and a mouse, of course, but the system also had voice input. If he really wanted he could just think hard at the screen and make things happen.

The display was an engineer’s dream. Infinite resolution, at least sixteen million colors, three-dimensional, fully shaded modeling and redraws at better than sixty frames a second. He could design anything on this baby!

Craig stared at the glowing surface and tried to think of his first project. Maybe jet fighters were a little old fashioned for what they needed to do. They needed weapons that were more far-out, more science-fictional.

Like giant robots! Yeah, now there was something he could really get into. He’d always liked Robobattle, where the gamers slugged it out in twenty-fifth-century robot war machines. Now he could actually build something like that.