Mathemagics Mathemagics
I fumed at the idiot school and the
idiot counselors all the time I was putting away the groceries. It was beginning to look
like my whole plan of commuting to the Paper- Pushers’ planet so Salla could get a
good education had been one big mistake. I’d been lulled by the last two years, when
things had seemed to be going so easily. Now everything was going wrong at once. Where had
I gone wrong?
I didn’t know, but I did know that
standing in the kitchen counting Dennis’s Szechwan cooking supplies wasn’t going
to help me figure it out.
Our bedroom had been about the size of one
of Zolkir’s prison cells before Dennis moved in his collection of classic
science-fiction paperbacks. Now, with floor-to-ceiling shelves lining three walls, it was
more like a walk-in closet. Sasulau, my sword, hung in her sheath from one bedpost, and
the rest of my old fighting gear was stashed under the bed in a cardboard box from the
Container Store. I shucked my Paper-Pushers costume, hung the jeans and shirt on a handy
bookcase, knelt on the floor and fished around under the bed for the box.
“That’s a beautiful sight to
greet a man after a hard day of eighth-grade math,” said an appreciative voice behind
me.
“Mumph murph phttt,” I said. One
of us really ought to do something about the dust bunny collection under the bed. I backed
out, dragging the box of armor by one hand, and saw Dennis leaning against the door.
“I’m going to work out,” I explained to him.
“I can think of better workouts than
fooling around with that sword and shield,” he said, reaching for me.
I could, too, but not while I was so mad
at the school. “Hold that thought,” I suggested. “I need to-- We need to
talk, too, but--Nauzu klevulkedimmu! I’m too angry to do anything but work out right
now.” I kissed him. It was meant to be a brief kiss, but Dennis managed to involve
his hands and my bare rump and a lot of small muscle control around the mouth, and by the
time we broke off I was breathing even harder than I had been when I left
Stankewitz’s office.
An entrancing image of the
counselor’s head on a pike swam before my eyes. It would be a waste of good lust to
jump into bed with Dennis right now; he was a man who kept his mind on what he was doing,
and I wanted to reciprocate, not get side-tracked into fantasies about Stankewitz’s
blood. “Really,” I said. “I need to work out. Besides, Salla should be home
any minute.”
“I’ll cook Szechwan for
dinner,” Dennis said. “Did you get the star anise?”
Fiend. He knew exactly what star anise,
Szechwan peppercorns and chili oil did to me. Dennis’s Chinese cooking is a sensual
experience equaled only by--well, as I said, Salla would be home any minute. And I was
still too steamed up over Stankewitz to enjoy life’s normal pleasures.
“I don’t want to feel happy and
relaxed,” I muttered. “I want to slash, hew, maim and destroy. The star anise is
in the brown paper bag with the paper towels, and Norah gave us some habañero peppers
from her garden.”
“Wonderful! I’ll
improvise.” Dennis went off to the kitchen, humming under his breath, and I put on
some of my fighting gear. It was too hot for full armor, and anyway I didn’t need the
protection when I was just running through exercises on my own. On the other hand, it was
important to keep in training to fight with the full weight of armor. I compromised by
putting on the basics--your standard chain-mail bra with welded D cups, crotch guard and
shield--and adding jogging weights at ankles and wrists.
I started with some basic stretches, then
went through a full cycle of boklu against an imaginary mirror-fighter. Dennis says this
looks like something he used to study called Ty Chee or something like that, but it seems
unlikely to me that there’s any real connection. Boklu prepares your heart and mind
to cleave through any obstacles in your path bare-handed if necessary, always assuming you
aren’t already in that frame of mind just from waking up alive another day on Dazau.
From what I’ve observed of this universe of the Paper-Pushers, they aren’t much
on cleaving either opponents or obstacles. They just wrap them up in red tape.
Which was exactly how I felt
now--encircled in a wizard’s web of words. One might as well fight clouds as try to
get sense out of people like Stankewitz. Nothing she said meant anything real--until the
end, when she’d as good as told me they could do whatever they wanted with Salla and
they didn’t need to answer to me for it.
My Dazau life had been simpler, if harder.
I earned a day’s pay for a day’s fighting and then gave back most of it to Furo
Fykrou to pay for the costs of transporting me to Paper- Pushers’ each afternoon by
the time Salla came back from school. What was left barely covered rent and groceries in
the Paper-Pushers’ neighborhood where I’d established residence as Riva Konneva
so that Salla could get the schooling I’d never had.
Just two years ago that way of life had
begun to feel like a trap closing in on me. We were just scraping by, but the future did
not look bright. As a swordswoman gets older, her earning power diminishes; just when
Salla would be needing even more money to pay for higher education on Paper-Pushers’,
my take-home zolkys would be dwindling to nearly nothing. That was if Duke Zolkir kept me
on at all. If he didn’t, I’d be just another middle-aged freelance swordswoman,
always on the road, and Salla would have to leave her schooling to come with me; I’d
never be able to afford Furo Fykrou’s transport fees on the odd jobs I would pick up
as caravan guard or merchanters’ security. The only way out of that trap was to find
another way of earning a living, and I didn’t have time to learn a new profession
while working as Duke Zolkir’s top swordswoman.
Then I met Dennis.
We got stuck together chaperoning a
fourth-grade field trip to my workplace. It seemed like a bad idea at the time, but
I’d learned it was no use arguing with the earnest, dull young women who organized
these things. It seemed like an even worse idea when we arrived in my home reality--after
paying exorbitant fees to Furo Fykrou for transporting the entire class--and discovered
that I was scheduled for a revenge duel with Vordokaunneviko, the acknowledged champion
fighter of all Dazau. And it seemed like an absolutely terrible idea when the duel started
and Vordo announced his intention of turning me into something suitable for Chinese
stir-fry.
It was one of Salla’s classmates who
saved my butt that day. The kid was called “hyperactive” and
“difficult” on Paper-Pushers’; what that meant was that he noticed
absolutely everything that was going on around him and insisted on discussing it. At the
top of his voice. When he noticed that Vordo was flickering with the activation of a magic
shield every time I tried to land a blow, he discussed that in a loud clear voice. Once I
realized that the magic shielding was being provided by Baron Rodograunnizo’s new
house wizard, a sleazeball if ever I saw one, it was a simple matter to work Vordo around
so that the wizard couldn’t get a clear view of him. And when the wizard--
Mikhalleviko, his name was--started throwing differential mathemagics directly at me,
Dennis integrated every one of his incantations right back at him.
When the dust cleared, Vordo and Mikh had
both run for it, and Dennis talked Baron Rodo into paying me very substantial compensation
for having lured me into an unfair fight. (My patron, Duke Zolkir, and about half of the
Bronze Bra Guild helped persuade Rodograunnizo to pay up.)
The zolkys I got from that fiasco had been
enough to support Salla and me here on Paper- Pushers’ for nearly two years. And now
that I had some free time, Dennis offered to teach me enough math so that I could go back
to Dazau and apprentice to a wizard. (An honorable wizard, needless to say, not a scumbag
like Mikhalleviko--even supposing he ever dared show his face in the trade again.)
It had all seemed to be working out
perfectly. After a few months of late-night tutoring sessions, Dennis moved in with Salla
and me so that he could tutor me all the time when he wasn’t at school. In practice
that meant he went over the math texts with me first thing in the morning, I sweated out
the problems he had fiendishly devised while Salla was in school and he was teaching, he
corrected my work in the afternoon, and our nights were free for more interesting
pursuits. Did I say “working out perfectly”? Make that better than perfect.
Dennis is a very creative man, and he concentrates his full attention on whatever he is
doing. Also, he cooks great Szechwan food, which is the only cuisine on
Paper-Pushers’ that I consider truly superior to Dazau cooking.
It’s a dynamite combination of
talents, let me tell you.
When Dennis picked up the Chinese cleaver
and began chopping the ingredients for dinner, I took up Sasulau and matched his rhythm
with my own fybilka practice--short, fast strokes to mince the air around my imaginary
opponent while coming closer and closer to her skin. Fybilka was one of the classic arts
of swordcraft at home, something every Guild member studied but that few of us mastered. A
swordswoman trained in the art could literally flay her opponent by inches. Even those of
us who’d passed the final exercises seldom got a chance to put the art into practice,
though; hiring a fybilka killing is expensive, and most of our patrons prefer the cheaper
and quicker methods. And even back home, there aren’t that many people who really
deserve to die that way.
I could think of one now, though.
“There--and there--and there!” I
shouted at my imaginary opponent as my sword took precise shavings of skin from her pasty
cheeks, one pudgy thigh, the tip of a fat white finger. I could feel Sasulau humming with
pleasure as her blade whizzed through the motions of a fybilka execution.
“That’s how you’ll answer to me, Stankewitz!”
Fybilka was too slow; I plunged forward to
drive Sasulau through the spot where her heart would be if she were facing me. Always
assuming she had one.
The screen door slammed and Salla came
down the steps, munching an apple. “Why are you yelling at Stinky Wits?” she
inquired through mouthfuls of Golden Delicious. “You didn’t really run her
through the heart, did you? That would be too cool for words.”
“You know Ms. Stankewitz?”
Salla shrugged. “Yeah, I hadda go to
her office one afternoon last week. She’s always asking these dumb questions, like,
you know, she goes, how do you feel about puberty, and aren’t you confused about
boys, and really gross stuff about like private things, you know? And I go, like, I’m
just a little kid, ma’am, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“She called you in for counseling
without asking my permission? Oh, I forgot. They don’t have to ask permission.”
“Mom,” Salla said indistinctly
through a bite of apple, “don’t snarl, okay? Like, it’s no big deal.
She’s like, we do this with all the kids, it’s just like a routine checkup, like
seeing your doctor.”
“And does she call in all the
kids?”
Salla shrugged again. “Enough of them
that I knew what to expect. Why do you think we call her Stinky Wits? She’s best
friends with Fishbreath,” she added. “About all they use the computers for is to
e-mail back and forth about what rotten kids we are. I think Fishbreath hates our whole
class.”
“Ms. Fishbeck to you,” I said
automatically, “and how do you know what teachers say in their private e-mail?”
Salla smirked. “Never mind,” I
said hastily, “on second thoughts, I don’t want to know. I want you to take your
sketch pad into the front yard and draw a picture of our house. This house,” I
emphasized. “This plain, ordinary, Paper-Pushers’--I mean, Earth-style house.
Four windows. One door. White siding, green trim, tree in front yard.”
“Why?” Salla demanded.
“Because you were idiot enough to
draw a picture of Dazau as your homework assignment for the first six-weeks report, and
Stinky Wits--I mean, Ms. Stankewitz--got ahold of it and claims you’re emotionally
disturbed and she wants to have you moved to a special classroom for problem kids.
“Mind you,” I added, “I’m impressed by how well you remember the Falls
of Nauzu’s Blood. It must be, what, five years since I took you there for a
picnic?”
Salla had that totally blank expression
she puts on when you cut too close to her feelings. Well, I was sorry if she was hurt by
finding out that she was on the verge of being bounced out of the Gifted and Talented
program, but she’d be a lot more hurt if it actually happened. “So you’re
going to draw a nice normal boring picture of this house and I’m going to substitute
it in your folder and say Ms. Stankewitz must be emotionally disturbed herself to imagine
such wild fantasies.”
Salla looked at me with more respect than
I’d seen since I gave up sword work to study mathemagics. “Like really sneaky,
Mom. I didn’t know you had it in you. But don’t worry about Stinky Wits. For the
next assignment I’m doing this like wizard report on the Female Quest. See, I’m
gonna like rip Joseph Campbell and his sexist theories to shreds. Even Fishbreath has
gotta give me an A+ on this one.”
Well, I told you Salla was the one with
brains in this family; I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about.
“Just draw the picture, okay?”
“Okay, Mom. I never argue back to a
lady with a sword in her hand.” Salla flipped her apple core into the bushes and
sauntered back inside.
< center> * * *< /center>
After dinner Dennis had papers to grade.
Salla holed up in her room to practice her new computer skills (like reading other
people’s e-mail?). And I went into our bedroom to activate Call Trans-Forwarding
through the universes to Furo Fykrou.
“It’ll cost extra,” Furo
Fykrou said, predictably, when I explained what I needed. “You can’t just
transimage the papers to me; I’ll have to have them in their physical form. And you
want it done tonight? Did you know the Wizards’ Guild has approved a minimum Express
Magic fee for overnight work?”
“I still have credit with you from
the compensation Rodograunnizo paid me,” I reminded him.
“Not that much. You’ve been
having a lot of it translated into Paper-Pushers’ green stuff. Now, let me see, at
forty zolkys for the round-trip cross-universe transform of the physical papers, plus the
fee for mathemagical alterations indistinguishable to the mundane or nonwizardly eye . . .
You wouldn’t want to buy the Anti-Wizard-Detection Warranty for just an extra ten
zolkys, would you?”
“I would not,” I said.
“There aren’t any wizards here. If you can fake up the transcripts to pass
mundane inspection, that’s all I need. But I need them back before 7:00 A.M. on
Paper-Pushers’.”
After a little discussion of the Express
Magic fee, Furo Fykrou announced that the zolkys I’d left with him would, surprise
surprise, just cover the cost of magically altering Salla’s transcripts and returning
the improved file to me by tomorrow morning.
“There might even be a little
over,” he said. “A few kauven, at least.”
Furo Fykrou made a point of never fleecing
his victims--clients, I mean--of their last copper kauve. He said it created ill-feeling.
All the same, the thought that my assets now amounted to about $1.56 in Paper-Pushers
money did not fill me with a tide of warm feelings towards Fykrou. I cut off the
Trans-Forwarding call before he could think about charging me for that, too, and flopped
down on the bed.
“I wish you’d take your armor
off before collapsing,” Dennis said when he came in. “It’s hell on the
sheets. What was all that about?”
I lifted one hand to unhook my chain mail
corselet and decided it was too much trouble. Besides, I could probably get Dennis to do
it for me. “I’m broke,” I said. “But by tomorrow, Salla’s
transcripts will show that she is an emotionally stable, responsible, respectful gifted
child.”
“She is,” Dennis said.
“Not according to her files. Do you
know a counselor named Erica Stankewitz?” I filled him in on the afternoon’s
events.
“Bitch,” Dennis said when I
finished. “I quit referring any of my problem kids to counseling a few years ago when
I noticed that they were coming back more mixed up than they went in. Now I know
why.”
“So,” I said, “tomorrow
I’ll return the files to Stankewitz and go look for a job.”
“Why?”
“I’m broke. I told you. Furo
Fykrou is skinning me of my last zolkys to do the transcripts up properly.”
“So? I make enough for us both to
live on. In fact, now that you mention it, why don’t we make this arrangement legal?
Solves everything.” Dennis beamed at me while reaching one hand around to find the
clasp of my bronze corselet.
“I can’t let you support
me!”
“I don’t see why not.
You’re finishing your studies. Lots of women work to put their husbands through
school and nobody thinks anything’s wrong with that.”
“Yeah, well, most of those women are
counting on their husbands to get high-paying jobs after school and support them for a
while . . . not that it always works out that way,” I said, remembering Norah Tibbs
and her ex. Dennis had the top half of the corselet unfastened now, but instead of doing
anything about it, he was trailing his fingers along the chain mail fringe. The man made
it very difficult to concentrate.
“I thought you were going to get one
of those high-paying jobs when you’d learned enough math,” he said while
investigating the lower edges of the fringe. I shivered and felt my stomach muscles
tightening.
“Umm . . . there are some
complications I didn’t mention when we started this project,” I said slowly.
“Because they weren’t complications then, but now they are. I think. See, I
don’t just need the math; I need the magic, too. Normally I could learn that by
apprenticing to a wizard. But that means living full-time on Dazau. An apprentice has to
serve the wizard day and night, whatever hour she’s called on. Some of those spells
have to be checked every three hours for weeks and weeks. I couldn’t do that and come
back here at night. I’d have to live there.”
“For how long?” Dennis asked.
I shrugged. “For however long the
wizard decides it takes, I guess.”
“Sort of like grad school,” he
commented, “only worse. No, I take that back; one year I roomed with a guy who was
doing his Ph.D. dissertation on oats. He had to get up and measure how much the baby oat
seedlings had grown every three hours. How come you didn’t mention this little fact
when I started tutoring you?”
“I didn’t think . . . it would
be that important.”
“Or when I moved in?”
Dennis’s voice had an unfamiliar tone, one I wasn’t sure I liked; and he’d
quit exploring the boundaries of my corselet. “When I was hauling all those boxes of
books into your house? You don’t think that might have been a good time to mention
this little matter?”
“Hey, I carried as many boxes as you
did, and they were your books,” I pointed out. “Anyway, I guess . . . I guess I
was trying not to think about it. I didn’t want to . . . I don’t want to . .
.”
“Go on,” Dennis said. “Say
it.” He sounded as though he was bracing himself for a double-handed sword blow.
“I like living with you,” I said
miserably. “I don’t want anything to change. I . . . oh, all right. I love you.
I think. Sort of.”
Dennis propped himself up on one elbow and
studied me intently. “I want to remember this moment,” he said fondly.
“Riva the Invincible, Riva the Amazon Warrior of Dazau, waffling and side-stepping an
issue. What’s the matter? Were you afraid I wouldn’t be willing to come to Dazau
with you?”
I gasped. “You’d do that?”
“I’ve always wanted to
travel,” Dennis said blandly.
“Well, I haven’t. I’ve done
more than enough traveling,” I told him. “And I’m not even sure I want to
go back to Dazau.”
“Fine. We can do it either way. We go
back to Dazau and you support me in idle luxury, or we stay here and get married and I
support you in--well, okay, a teacher’s salary isn’t exactly luxury, but we can
live on it. Plus, once you’re married they won’t be able to tag Salla with
‘dysfunctional family’ and ‘single-parent household,’ and all that
other garbage. Solves everything.”
“It does not! I told you, I
can’t just let you support me.”
“Why not?” Dennis lay back down
and pulled me towards him. I discovered that he had, in fact, been doing something
practical all the time I’d thought he was just fiddling with the fringe on my
corselet; he’d opened every one of the leather-bound fasteners. The armor stayed on
the bed. I sprawled over Dennis. “See?” he murmured in my ear while caressing
the areas that had just been freed from the armor. “I’m supporting you right
now, and it doesn’t hurt a bit, does it?”
I couldn’t answer that for a few
minutes. Finally I pushed his hand away. “Did I ever tell you how I happened to join
the Bronze Bra Guild?”
“Later,” Dennis murmured,
reaching for me again.
“It’s relevant.”
“So is this.”
“Mmmm, yes . . . but wait a minute,
would you? I want to tell you about this. I . . . when Salla was born, I . . . “
“Your ears are turning pink,”
Dennis said. “I didn’t think anything could make you blush. I’ll have to
try harder.”
“I thought I was apprenticing to a
wizard,” I said. “I was fresh out of the mountains, dumber than a box of rocks,
didn’t know you have to pass Elementary Mathemagics and Linear Transformations before
you can even seal a binding apprenticeship contract. This sleazeball says,
‘Apprentice to me, do exactly what I say, you’ll learn magic and make a good
living.’”
“Is this going to be a story about
sex for grades?”
“It’s a story about a dumb
mountain girl who thought everything the slimy sleazeball did was making magic. And who
believed he was using contraceptive spells. Then when I found out I was pregnant, he said
that needn’t interfere with the apprentice training . . . until Salla was born. Then
he smirked and said he’d be perfectly willing to support me, that I didn’t know
enough to learn wizardry and had no talent anyway but that he’d let me stick around
to keep house for him and cook his meals. On Dazau,” I explained carefully, “the
rules are basically the same as here, only they’re a little more explicit. If you
take support from somebody without providing services for it, you’re his
property.”
“And housekeeping and cooking and
child care don’t count as services worth paying for?”
“Do they count for that here? If
you’re married to the person providing the services?”
Dennis sighed. “I see your point. But
I’m not like that. You should know that by now.”
“So. I was a dumb mountain girl, but
I was big and strong. The Bronze Bra Guild was willing to give me an apprentice loan while
I learned fighting, and they’re one of the few guilds that provides decent child
care. So I became a swordswoman. And,” I added after a few moments of silent
reflection, “rather a good one, if I do say so myself.”
“That’s not the only thing
you’re good at,” Dennis said. “How does this leather panty thing come
off?”
“You know perfectly well,” I
said. “I have to wriggle out of it. Like this.”
“Uh-huh,” Dennis agreed.
“And I like to watch you wriggle.”
For quite some time after that we
didn’t argue about anything, partly because our mouths were otherwise occupied. My
armor got shoved over the side of the bed, and I felt guilty about that--no way to treat a
perfectly good set of armor--but not guilty enough to stop what we were doing and put it
away properly.
We were drifting companionably off to
sleep when I remembered the other thing I’d forgotten to tell Dennis. “Guess
what,” I said. “Vordo’s here!”
“What? Where?”
“Not here. Here,” I explained.
“Somewhere in this reality. Probably somewhere in this country.” I told him
about the display I’d seen in the supermarket. “And Louise Pilkinton knew his
name and everything. It was definitely him. Where do they make covers for romance
novels?”
“New York? That’s where the
publishing industry is.”
“Then that’s where Vordo
is,” I said with some relief. New York was nice and far away.
“You sound worried.”
“Not about Vordo,” I said. That
was absolutely true, if not quite complete. “He was running for his life last time I
saw him; he wouldn’t give us any trouble here even if he did know where we
were.”
“But that wizard who was working with
him nearly got you killed first. Maybe it would be a good idea to find out exactly how
Vordo got to this universe.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, trying to
sound bored, “mathemagics doesn’t work in this world.” At least not as far
as I knew. “So even if the wizard came here too, he can’t be any trouble. But
you’re right, we might as well check it out. Let’s ask Norah Tibbs to dinner and
she can give us the scoop on the romance publishing industry.” Because it had just
dawned on me: even if Vordo was way off in New York, that didn’t necessarily mean the
wizard who’d helped him was there.
And I would very much like to know whether
Mikhalleviko had transported himself as well as Vordo to this reality, and why, and what
he was doing here.
That sleazeball.