“Look, there are a lot weirder things about this place than some missing
energy when we teleport. Let’s leave it, all right?”
Jerry looked at him sympathetically.
“You’re really beat, aren’t you?”
Wiz sighed and put his arm around Moira’s waist. “Yeah, but at least
that’s over for another month. Maybe we can concentrate on writing
software for a while.”
“Oh, a week at least,” Jerry said. “Then we’ve got a couple of other loose
ends to deal with.”
Wiz thought about those “loose ends” and glared at his friend. “You had to
remind me, didn’t you?”
Two: DRAGON TROUBLE
The day was bright, the air was crisp and Judith Conally was off in a
world full of dragons, elves and heroes.
So Prince Leopold slays the dragon Ferocious before he meets the wood
elves, she thought as the trolley car jolted to a stop in front of the San
Jose Public Library. But then where does he meet Bronwyn Halfelven? It
can’t be in the troll’s cave. That’s too trite. And if he kills the dragon
before he confronts Gorbash F1eshripper, why does Bronwyn agree to
accompany him on the quest?
She sighed and shifted on the hard fiberglass seat. Her fellow passengers
ignored her. Their thoughts might not be as colorful as Judith’s, but they
were just as lost in them.
Externally, Judith was no different from the other passengers. Her
clothing was more comfortable than stylish and while no one would have
called her ugly, they wouldn’t have called her beautiful either. Her long
dark hair was lustrous, but it was caught back in a severe bun. Her figure
was substantial rather than eye-catching, her jaw was square and her nose
on the large side. She looked, well, ordinary.
Judith sighed again and rose with the rest of the passengers. Working out
the details of a novel wasn’t nearly as easy as she had thought. Maybe she
could find a solution in the book on Celtic magic the library had gotten
her through interlibrary loan. If not she would have to invent something
that would be magically consistent with the universe she had created.
Problems, problems. She never knew being a successful fantasy author could
be this difficult.
Well, almost a successful fantasy author, she admitted as she stepped down
onto the trolley platform. The outline of her trilogy had caught the eye
of an editor at Nemesis Books. The sample chapters had passed muster and
now the editor wanted to see the completed manuscript of the first novel.
The other passengers had stepped off the platform to cross the street in
either direction, but Judith still stood there, trying to decide.
For a moment she concentrated on dragons. Not dragons as they
were-quarrelsome, nasty-tempered beasts that stank of sulfur and snake-but
dragons as she had first seen them. Mighty, ethereal creatures printed
against the pale pink glow of clouds at earliest morning as they swooped
around the tower of the Wizard’s Keep.
She was bound by oath not to reveal what she had seen in that other world.
As part of the small team of programmers who had taken Wiz Zumwalt’s crude
magic compiler and turned it into a piece of production software, she had
really experienced magic and dragons and the rest of it. She couldn’t
directly refer to her time in a world where magic worked and dragon riders
were as common as 747s are here. But she could draw on what she had seen
and done to make her novel come alive. And most of all she had the
memories to sustain her as she struggled to write.
As always thinking about her time in another world refreshed her. Judith
started to cross to the library, head high and still lost in thought.
Can I do it in two trilogies? she wondered as she stepped off the curb. Or
will I need to stretch it to three?
If Judith was lost in thought, the truck driver was just plain lost. He
had driven the semi all the way from Minneapolis to deliver a load of
exhibits to the San Jose convention center next to the library. But he had
gotten his directions mixed up and instead of arriving at the back of the