Unexpected Magic (3 page)

S
he had struggled rather as a writer until she got her word processor. Or not exactly
struggled
, she thought, frowning at her screen and flipping the cursor back to correct
adn
to
and.
For some reason, she always garbled the word
and.
It was always
adn
or
nad; dna
or
nda
were less frequent, but all of them appeared far oftener than the right way. She had only started to make this mistake after she gave up her typewriter, and she felt it was a small price to pay.

For years she had written what seemed to her the most stirring sort of novels, about lonely aliens among humans, or lonely humans among aliens, or sometimes both kinds lonely in an unkind world, all without ever quite hitting the response from readers she felt she was worth. Then came her divorce, which left her with custody of her son, Daniel, then thirteen. That probably provided an impetus of some sort in itself, for Danny was probably the most critical boy alive.

“Mum!” he would say. “I wish you'd give up that lonely-heart alien stuff! Can't you write about something decent for a change?” Or, staring at her best efforts at cookery, he said, “I can't be expected to eat
this
!” After which he had taken over cooking himself: they now lived on chili con carne and stir-fry. For as Danny said, “A man can't be expected to learn more than one dish a year.” At the moment, being nearly fifteen, Danny was teaching himself curry. Their nice Highgate house reeked of burned garam masala most of the time.

But the real impetus had come when she found Danny in her workroom sternly plaiting the letters of her old typewriter into metal braid. “I've had this old thing!” he said when she tore him away with fury and cursings. “So have you. It's out of the ark. Now you'll have to get a word processor.”

“But I don't know how to work the things!” she had wailed.

“That doesn't matter. I do. I'll work it for you,” he replied inexorably. “And I'll tell you what one to buy, too, or you'll only waste money.”

He did so. The components were duly delivered and installed, and Daniel proceeded to instruct his mother in how to work as much of them as—as he rather blightingly said—her feeble brain would hold. “There,” he said. “Now write something worth reading for a change.” And he left her sitting in front of it all.

When she thought about it, she was rather ashamed of the fact that her knowledge of the thing had not progressed one whit beyond those first instructions Danny had given her. She had to call on her son to work the printout, to recall most of the files, and to get her out of any but the most simple difficulty. On several occasions—as when Danny had been on a school trip to Paris or away with his school cricket team—she had had to tell her publisher all manner of lies to account for the fact that there would be no copy of anything until Danny got back. But the advantages far outweighed these difficulties, or at least she knew they did
now.

That first day had been a nightmare. She had felt lost and foolish and weak. She had begun, not having anything else in mind, on another installment of lonely aliens. And everything kept going wrong. She had to call Danny in ten times in the first hour, and then ten times after lunch, and then again when, for some reason, the machine produced what she had written of Chapter I as a list, one word to a line. Even Danny took most of the rest of the day to sort out what she had done to get that. After that he hovered over her solicitously, bringing her mugs of black coffee, until, somewhere around nine in the evening, she realized she was in double bondage, first to a machine and then to her own son.

“Go away!” she told him. “Out of my sight! I'm going to learn to do this for myself or die in the attempt!”

Danny gave her bared teeth a startled look and fled.

By this time she had been sitting in front of board and screen for nearly ten hours. It seemed to her that her threat to die in the attempt was no idle one. She felt like death. Her back ached, and so did her head. Her eyes felt like running blisters. She had cramp in both hands and one foot asleep. In addition, her mouth was foul with too much coffee and Danny's chili con carne. The little green letters on the screen kept retreating behind the glass to the distant end of a long, long tunnel. “I
will
do this!” she told herself fiercely. “I am an intelligent adult—probably even a genius—and I will
not
be dominated by a mere machine!”

And she typed all over again:

At this point she began to get a strange sense of power. She
was
dominating this damned machine, even though she was doing it only by exploiting her own sensations. Also, she was becoming interested in what might be going to happen to the starship
Candida
, not to speak of the reasons that had led up to the mutiny aboard her. She continued writing furiously until long after midnight. When she stopped at last, she had to pry her legs loose from her chair.

“
That's
more like it, Mum!” Danny said the next morning, reading it as it came from the printer.

He was, as usual, right.
Starship Candida
was the book that made the name of F. C. Stone. It won prizes. It sold in resorts and newsagents all over the world. It was, reviewers said, equally remarkable for its insight into the Captain's character as for the intricate personal relationships leading to the mutiny. Much was spoken about the tender and peculiar relationships between the sexes. This last made F. C. Stone grin rather. All she had done was to revenge herself on Danny by reversing the way things were between them. In the book the Captain was all-powerful and dominating and complained a lot about the food. The Mate had a hypnotically induced mind-set that caused him to bleat for assistance at the first sign of trouble.

Her next book,
The Mutineers
, was an even greater success. For this one, F. C. Stone extended the intricate personal relationships to the wider field of galactic politics. She discovered she reveled in politics. Provided she was making up the politics herself, there seemed no limit to how intricate she could make them.

Since then she had, well, not stuck to a formula—she was much more artfully various than that—but as she said and Danny agreed, there was no point in leaving a winning game. Though she did not go back to starship
Candida
, she stayed with that universe and its intricate politics. There were aliens in it, too, which she always enjoyed. And she kept mostly out in space, so that she could continue to describe pilots astronauting at the controls of a word processor. Sooner or later in most of her books, someone, human or alien, would have sat long hours before the screen until dazed with staring, aching in the back, itching in the nose—for the burning of Asian spices in the kitchen tended to give her hay fever—and with cramped hands, this pilot would be forced to maneuver arduously through jump. This part always, or nearly always, got written when F. C. Stone was unable to resist staying up late to finish the chapter.

Danny continued to monitor his mother. He was proud of what he had made her do. In the holidays and around the edges of school, he hung over her shoulder and brought her continual mugs of strong black coffee. This beverage began to appear in the books, too. The mutineer humans drank
gav
, while their law-abiding enemies quaffed
chvi.
Spacer aliens staggered from their nav-couches to gulp down
kivay
, and the mystics of Meld used
xfy
to induce an altered state of consciousness, although this was not generally spotted as being the same substance. And it was all immensely popular.

It was all due to the word processor, she thought, giving the nearest component a friendly pat as she leaned toward the screen again. The latest mug of cooling
kivay
sat beside her. Her nose was, as usual, tickled by burned ginger or something. Her back was beginning to ache, or, more truthfully, her behind was. She ought to get a more comfortable chair, but she was too fond of this old one. Anyway, the latest book was the thing. For this one, she had at last gone back to starship
Candida.
There had been a lot of pressure from her fans. And her publisher thought there was enough material in their suggestions, combined with F. C. Stone's own ideas, to make a trilogy. So she had decided to start in the way she knew would get her going. She typed:

Now what had some vastly learned reader suggested about this system's star? It had some kind of variability, but that was all she could remember. Damn. All her notes for it were in that file Danny had set up for her. He was at school. But he had written down for her how to recall it. She fumbled around for his piece of paper—it had worked halfway under a black box whose name and function she never could learn—and took a swig of lukewarm
xfy
while she studied what to do. It looked quite simple. She took another sip of
gav.
Store the new book. Careful not to cancel this morning's work. There. Screen blank. Now type in this lot, followed by
Candida 2.
Then—

A clear childish voice spoke. “This is Candida Two, Candy,” it said. “Candida One, I need your confirmation.”

It was no voice F. C. Stone knew, and it seemed to come from the screen. Her eyes turned to the mug of
kivay.
Perhaps she was in a state of altered consciousness.

“Candida One!” the voice said impatiently. “Confirm that you are conscious. I will wait ten seconds and then begin lifesaving procedures. Ten, nine, eight … ”

This sounded serious. Coffee poisoning, thought F. C. Stone. I shall change to carrot juice or cocoa.

“ … seven, six, five,” counted the childish voice, “four, three … ”

I'd better say something, thought F. C. Stone. How absurd. Weakly she said, “Do stop counting. It makes me nervous.”

“
Are
you Candida One?” demanded the voice. “The voice pattern does not quite tally. Please say something else for comparison with my records.”

Why should I? thought F. C. Stone. But it was fairly clear that if she stayed silent, the voice would start counting again and then, presumably, flood the room with the antidote for
xfy.

No, no, this was ridiculous. There was no way a word processor could flood anyone's system with anything. Come to that, there was no way it could speak either—or was there? She must ask Danny. She was just letting her awe of the machine, and her basic ignorance, get on top of her. Let us be rational here, she thought. If she was not suffering from
gav
poisoning, or if, alternatively, the smell of charred turmeric at present flooding the house did not prove to have hallucinogenic properties, then she had worked too long and hard imagining things and was now unable to tell fantasy from reality … unless—what a
wonderful
thought!—Danny had, either for a joke or by accident, connected one of the black boxes to the radio and she was at this moment receiving its
Play for the Day.

Her hand shot out to the radio beside her, which she kept for aural wallpaper during the duller part of her narratives, and switched it on. Click. “During this period Beethoven was having to contend with his increasing deafness—”

The childish voice cut in across this lecture. “This voice is not correct,” it pronounced, putting paid to that theory. “It is the voice of a male. Males are forbidden access to any of my functions beyond basic navigational aids. Candida One, unless you reply confirming that you are present and conscious, I shall flood this ship with sedative gas ten seconds from now.”

Then perhaps Danny has put a cassette in the radio as a joke, thought F. C. Stone. She turned off the radio and, for good measure, shook it. No, no cassette in there.

And the childish voice was at its counting again: “ … six, five, four … ”

Finding that her mouth was hanging open, F. C. Stone used it. “I know this is a practical joke,” she said. “I don't know what it is you've done, Danny, but my God, I'll skin you when I get my hands on you!”

The countdown stopped. “Voice patterns are beginning to match,” came the pronouncement, “though I do not understand your statement. Are you quite well, Candy?”

Fortified by the knowledge that this had to be a joke of Danny's, F. C. Stone snapped, “Yes, of course I am!” Very few people knew that the
C
in F. C. Stone stood for Candida, and even fewer knew that she had, in her childhood, most shamingly been known as Candy. But Danny of course knew both these facts. “Stop this silly joke, Danny, and let me get back to work.”

“Apologies,” spoke the childish voice, “but who is Danny? There are only two humans on this ship. Is that statement addressed to the male servant beside you? He asks me to remind you that his name is Adny.”