“Do you think it’s natural?”
“I do not know,” the wizardess said slowly. “I would not count on it.”
“Wurm’s doing?”
“It may be. However, dragons are solitary creatures. It takes a great cause to get them to cooperate, even slightly.”
“Which means that kidnapping Wiz is a very big deal for the dragons.”
“What it means, I think, is a problem for Bal-Simba when he awakens, and possibly the Council of the North. It is far beyond my abilities to decipher. What does this do to your search?”
“Complicates the hell out of it.” Jerry swiveled back to the columns of glowing letters above his bench. “We’re not getting any searchers more than a couple of hundred leagues beyond the borders of the known world. Unless we can change that we’re going to be limited in where we can look.” He took another pull on his tea mug. “Somehow I don’t think we’re going to find Wiz in the known world.”
Five: A Sudden Career Change
Never tell them the truth until you check to find out what the truth is today.
The Consultants’ Handbook
“You still here?”
Wiz jerked awake and there was Malkin standing just outside his cell.
“Of course I’m still here. I’m in jail!”
Malkin shrugged. “So? You’re a wizard, aren’t you? Why don’t you just magic yourself out of here?”
“I can’t do that,” Wiz said miserably.
“Well, don’t you know other wizards? They could get you out of here.”
“I can’t do that either,” Wiz said.
“Why not?”
“I just can’t. I’ve got to solve these people’s problems.”
“Look,” said Malkin, obviously exasperated, “the folk hereabouts don’t want you to solve their problems. They want to stake you out like a pig at a barbecue.”
“I can’t run away,” Wiz said simply. “I’ve got to stay, don’t you see?”
“I see they’re right,” Malkin said. “Them as says wizards is all cracked.”
She was right, he knew. The smart thing would be to magic himself out of the place, walk the Wizard’s Way back to the castle and return with enough help to clean up the whole situation. But he couldn’t do that. He just couldn’t. There had to be a better way and he had to find it on his own. Malkin sniffed and Wiz looked miserable as he pondered the trap he was in.
And then, in a blinding flash, he had it!
The misery and indecision were gone and his brain shifted into overdrive as he saw the possibilities. He started to smile. Then he started to grin. Then his expression became positively maniacal with glee.
Like most programmers, Wiz preferred straight talk and plain dealing. But he wasn’t a fanatic about it. It was obvious the only thing straight talk and plain dealing would get him in this situation was a quick trip to The Rock.
Malkin edged away from the bars. “Are you all right?”
“Never better,” he assured her. “Never better. It’s just the solution is so obvious.”
“What is it then?”
“Well,” he told Malkin slowly. “There’s reality, and then there’s Creative Reality.”
“Creative reality?”
“It’s kind of like Creative Accounting-except they don’t send you to prison if they catch you at it.”
“Meaning what?” the girl said with a frown.
“Meaning that a true master of Creative Reality borrows their watch and tells them what time it is, and then gets paid for it,” Wiz told her. “That’s the first rule of Creative Reality. You make people pay you to solve their problems-and then you make them like it.”
“But these people don’t want you to solve their problems,” Malkin said in the same exasperated voice. “They want you for a sacrifice.”
Wiz’s smile got even broader. “That’s normally the way it is for the masters of Creative Reality. Kind of the job’s ground state.”
“The only thing that’s going to get ground is you if you don’t get out of here.”
“Oh, not at all. Look, the first secret of consulting-that’s what we call applied Creative Reality-is that people don’t need an outsider to tell them what to do about their problems. They know they’ve got problems and they usually know what their choices are. What they don’t know is how to get from where they are to a place where they have made a choice. So they bring in a consultant and most of the time half the people in the organization don’t want advice, they want a scapegoat-a sacrifice. Now they’ve got an outsider in the game they can blame their troubles on. But the game’s rigged against him from the first.”