Harry Turtledove - Enchanter Completed

Enchanter Completed

Table of Contents

Sprague: An Introduction

A Land of Romance

The Ensorcelled ATM

Penthesilea

Ripples

Gun, Not for Dinosaur

Father Figures

Tom O'Bedlam and the

Mystery of Love

One for the Record

The Haunted Bicuspid

Return to Xanadu

The Apotheosis of

Martin Padway

The Deadly Mission of

P. Snodgrass

The Garden Gnome

Freedom Front

The Newcomers

Sprague: An Afterword

The

Enchanter Completed

A

Tribute Anthology for

L. Sprague de Camp

Edited by

Harry Turtledove

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

permission of the author.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-9904-2

Cover art by Tom Kidd

First printing, May 2005

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH (www.windhaven.com)

Printed in the United States of America

Baen Books by HARRY TURTLEDOVE

The War Between the Provinces series:

Sentry Peak

Marching Through Peachtree

Advance and Retreat

The Fox novels:

Wisdom of the Fox

Tale of the Fox

3 x T

Thessalonica

Alternate Generals,editor

Alternate Generals II,editor

Alternate Generals III,editor

The Enchanter Completed,editor

Down in the Bottomlands

(with L. Sprague de Camp)

Sprague: An Introduction

Harry Turtledove

L. Sprague de Camp changed my life.

About how many people can you say that? Not many, not if you're honest. A favorite teacher, perhaps,

who pointed you in a direction you hadn't expected to go. That's what L. Sprague de Camp (Sprague, to

his friends) did for me—and he did it more than twenty years before I ever met him, and, of course,

altogether without knowing he'd done it or that I even existed. Writers, especially the good ones, can be

dangerous people.

I was fifteen, I think, when I found a copy ofLest Darkness Fall in the secondhand bookstore I

frequented in those days. For any who may not know it, it's one of the bestConnecticut Yankee in King

Arthur's Court stories ever written: right up there, in my admittedly biased opinion, with Twain's original.

Before I read about Martin Padway's involuntary journey through time to the Italy of the sixth century

a.d., I don't believe I'd ever heard of the Byzantine Empire. Because of Sprague, I got interested in it. If I

hadn't happened acrossLest Darkness Fall , I might well not have.

As things were, I got into Caltech, and flunked out at the end of my freshman year. When I got to

UCLA, I'd left the sciences and become a history major—and ended up with a doctorate, Lord help me,

in Byzantine history. I never would have done that had someone else picked up that book instead of me.

I never would have written much of what I've written, a lot of which is either Byzantine-based or uses the

historical and research skills I picked up acquiring my degree. I never would have met and married the

lady who's now my wife, for we got to know each other when I was teaching at UCLA while the

professor under whom I studied had a guest appointment at the University of Athens. I wouldn't have the

three girls I have today.

Other than that, findingLest Darkness Fall all those years ago didn't change my life at all.

De Camp had no small effect on the fields of science fiction and fantasy, either. Working alone and in

collaboration with Fletcher Pratt, he helped expand the fields by using their techniques to examine not just

the present and future but also the past, and by using modern viewpoint characters to get inside works of

literature written from a very different perspective. Along withLest Darkness Fall , the Harold Shea

stories collected in book form asThe Incomplete Enchanter, The Castle of Iron , andWall of Serpents

have been in print almost continuously for the past sixty years.

Sprague's special virtues were logic, clarity, and a sympathetic understanding for the foibles of mankind.

The heroes he created himself were always recognizably human and flawed, much more likely to try to

work their way out of trouble with a quip and a smile than by smashing through whatever was in their

way. (I am conscious of the irony of Sprague's having been a major factor in the rediscovery of Robert

E. Howard's Conan, and in his often working in Howard's universe. Everyone's entitled to a little time off

from what he usually does, and writers have to pay their bills no less than any other mortals—and I don't

think anyone but Howard ever wrote Conan so well.) His own special science-fiction universe was that

of theViagens Interplanetarias ("Interplanetary Voyages" in Portuguese—Brazil is the leading country in

this universe), which includesRogue Queen (among other things, a splendid satire on Marxism), the

stories collected inThe Continent Makers , and many novels set on the low-tech world Krishna, which

offers both science and swashbuckling a chance. Sprague did not believe faster-than-light travel was

possible, and so did not include it in this universe; the Lorenz-Fitzgerald contractions play a role in more

than one story.

This is typical. De Camp's worldsalways feel real and thoroughly lived in. When he wrote of things, he

knew whereof he spoke. He learned to fence and to ride a horse. He traveled widely all over the world,

which helps make his series of historical novels set in classical Greek and Hellenistic times—The Dragon

of the Ishtar Gate, The Arrows of Hercules, An Elephant for Aristotle, The Bronze God of Rhodes,

andThe Golden Wind —uniquely authoritative. Along with the novels of Mary Renault, de Camp's give

the modern reader the best feel for what it was like to live in those times.

Trained as an engineer (unlike yours truly, he graduated from the California Institute of Technology),

Sprague entered the job market during the Depression, when, essentially, therewas no job market. The

only time he worked in engineering was during World War II, as a naval officer stationed in Philadelphia,

where he, Robert A. Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov fought the war with flashing slide rule, as he was fond of

saying.

He used his technical training in his writing, though (to writers, nothing ever goes to waste), both in his

fiction and in informative, lively nonfiction on subjects as diverse as engineering in the ancient world,

Atlantis, the elephant, American inventions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, dinosaurs, and the

Scopes monkey trial. He wrote an authoritative biography of H.P. Lovecraft, and another of Robert E.

Howard.

I first made his acquaintance more than twenty years ago now, after I had a novelette inAsimov's and

George Scithers, who was then editing the magazine, mentioned in the front material my debt toLest

Darkness Fall . Sprague sent George a postcard for forwarding to me, saying he'd liked the story and

was pleased he'd had something to do with the shape of my career. I walked on air for days after that.

When I published a translation of a Byzantine chronicle a year or so later, I sent him a copy, wondering if

he might use incidents from it in fiction of his own (so far as I know, he never did).

We met in the flesh in Atlanta, at the 1986 World Science Fiction Convention. He was, as always,

unfailingly kind to someone starting out. Later at that convention, we were on a panel together. He made

a Byzantine allusion and then turned to me, asking if he'd got it right. He had, of course. That he made the

gesture, though, speaks volumes about the sort of gentleman he was. After that, we'd see each other

once or twice a year at conventions, and would write back and forth every couple of weeks or every

month up till late 1999, not quite a year before he died. I'm not and never have been a whiskey drinker,

but I'll always cherish the knocks of Johnnie Walker over ice I had in hotel rooms with him and

Catherine.

Personally, he was tall, handsome, and elegant, and, till near the end, looked ten or fifteen years younger

than he was. I was sad to watch him get slower and more frail as the years went by. The last convention

where we met was in 1994 in Dallas, and he was not moving around well at all by then. (Even so, at

dinner one evening there, he started talking in Swahili with another writer who'd recently been to Africa.)

Later, he suffered a broken wrist, a broken hip, and perhaps a series of small strokes, and also had to

endure his wife's sinking into Alzheimer's in the couple of years before she passed away.

Sprague and Catherine Crook de Camp were married for more than sixty years. It was, I think, the best

marriage I ever saw. It made all the old cliches about finishing each other's sentences and putting up with

each other's foibles look good. When he lost her the spring before he died, everyone knew he would join

her again before long. And by what he, always a staunch rationalist, would undoubtedly have called pure

coincidence, he died on her birthday, November 6, three weeks before his own ninety-third.

He won the Gandalf Grand Master Award from the World Science Fiction Convention, and was also

named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Even so, his works, these days, are

less well remembered than they ought to be, not least because he was modest almost to a fault. When he

appeared on one of the trading cards the 2000 Worldcon put out, his quote on the back read simply,

"I've been lucky." Maybe he was, but he was also very, very good.

I count him as my spiritual father. When I told him that in a letter in 1998, he replied that I gave him too

much credit and myself not enough—again, utterly in character. Back in the days when I was trying to get

my feet wet as a writer, I would say to my friends, "I want to be L. Sprague de Camp when I grow up."

That was more than half a lifetime ago; I realize now, as I didn't then, how foolish I was. There was, and

could be, only one of Sprague. Even so, in another sense I wasn't so far wrong after all. I could have

picked a great many worse models, and very few better ones. I miss him.

A Land of Romance

David Drake

The marketing bullpen at Strangeco Headquarters held seventy-five desks. Howard Jones was the only

person in the huge room when the phone began ringing. He ignored the sound and went on with what he

was doing.

It was a wrong number—it had to be. Nobody'd be calling seriously on a Sunday morning.

Dynamic 25-year-old executive . . . Howard sucked in his gut as he typed, not that there was much gut

to worry about. Ready to take on adventurous new challenges. . . .

The phone continued to ring. It could be the manager of one of the Middle Eastern outlets where they

kept a Friday-Saturday weekend, with a problem that only a bold—aswashbuckling —marketing

professional like Howard Jones could take on. Did Strangeco have a branch in the Casbah of Algiers?

The company slogan circled the ceiling in shimmering neon letters: It's not a sandwich—it's a

Strangewich! Slices of kangaroo, cassowary, and elk in a secret dressing! Strangewich—the healthy

alternative!

The phonestill rang. Howard's image staring from the resume on the screen had a stern look. Was he

missing his big chance? The caller could be a headhunter who needed the hard-charging determination of

a man willing to work all the hours on the clock.

Howard grabbed the phone and punched line one. "Strangeco Inc!" he said in what he hoped was a

stalwart tone. "Howard Jones, Assistant Marketing Associate speaking. How may I help you?"

"Oh!" said the male voice on the other end of the line. "Oh, I'm very sorry, I didn't mean to disturb

anybody important."

Sure, a wrong number. Well, Howard had known that there wouldn't really be a summons to a life of

dizzying adventure when he—

"I'm at Mr. Strange's house," the voice continued, "and I was hoping somebody could come over to help

me word an advertisement. I'm sorry to have—"

"Wait!" Howard said. He knew the call couldn't be what it sounded like, but it was sure the most

interesting thing going this Sunday morning. Itsounded like the most interesting thing of a lifetime for

Howard Albing Jones.

"Ah, sir," he continued, hoping that the fellow wasn't offended that Howard had bellowed at him a

moment ago. "You say you're calling from Mr. Strange's house. That would be, ah, which house?"

"Oh, dear, he probably does have a lot of them, doesn't he?" the voice said. "I mean the one right next

door, though. Do you think that you could send somebody not too important over to help me, sir?"

Howard cleared his throat. "Well, as a matter of fact, I wouldn't mind visiting the Strange Mansion

myself. But, ah, Strangeco staff isn't ordinarily allowed across the skyway, you know."

"Oh, that's all right," the voice said in obvious relief. "Mr. Strange said I could call on any of his people

for whatever I wished. But I really don't like to disturb you, Mr. Jones."

"Quite all right, mister . . . ," Howard said. "Ah, I'm afraid I didn't catch your name?"

"Oh, I'm Wally Popple," the voice said. "Just come over whenever you're ready to, Mr. Jones. I'll tell the

guards to send you down."

He hung up. Howard replaced his handset and stared at the resume photograph. That Howard Jones

looked very professional in blue suit, blue shirt, and a tie with an insouciant slash of red. Whereas

today—Sunday—Assistant Marketing Associate Jones wore jeans and a Fuqua School of Business

sweatshirt.

Howard rose to his feet. Daring, swashbuckling Howard Jones was going to risk entering the Strange

Mansion in casual clothes.

* * *

A transparent tube arched between the third floors of the Strange Mansion and Strangeco Headquarters

to connect the two sprawling buildings. When Strange occasionally called an executive to the mansion,

the rest of the staff lined the windows to watch the chosen person shuffle through open air in fear of what

waited on the other side.

Shortly thereafter, sometimes only minutes later, the summoned parties returned. A few of them moved

at once to larger offices; most began to clean out their desks.

Only executives were known to use the skyway, though rumor had it that sometimes Robert Strange

himself crossed over at midnight to pace the halls of his headquarters silently as a bat. Now it was

Howard Jones who looked out over cornfields and woodland in one direction and the vast staff parking

lot in the other.

The skyway was hot and musty. That made sense when Howard thought about it: a clear plastic tube

was going to heat up in the bright sun, and the arch meant the hottest air would hang in the middle like the

bubble in a level. Howard had never before considered physics when he daydreamed of receiving Robert

Strange's summons.

The wrought iron grill at the far end was delicate but still a real barrier, even without the two guards on

the other side watching as Howard approached. They were alert, very big, and not in the least friendly.

Muscle-bound, Howard told himself. I could slice them into lunchmeat with my rapier!

He knew he was lying, and it didn't even make him feel better. Quite apart from big mennot necessarily

being slow, this pair held shotguns.

"Good morning!" Howard said, trying for "brightly" and hitting "brittle" instead. "I have an urgent

summons from Mr. Popple!"

Christ on a crutch! What if this was some kid's practical joke? Let's see if we can scam some sucker

into busting into the Strange Mansion! Maybe they'll shoot him right where we can watch!

Howard glanced down, which probably wasn't the smartest thing to do now that he wasn't protected by

the excitement of the thing. At least he didn't see kids with a cell phone and gleeful expressions peering

up expectantly.

One of the guards said, "Who're you?" His tone would have been a little too grim for a judge passing a

death sentence.

Howard's mind went blank. All he could think of was the accusing glare of his resume picture—but wait!

Beside the picture was a name!

"Howard Albing Jones!" he said triumphantly.

"Nothing here about 'Albing,'" said the other guard.

The first guard shrugged. "Look, it's Sunday," he said to his partner. Fixing Howard with a glare that

could've set rivets, he said, "We're letting you in, buddy. But as Howard Jones, that's all. That's how you

sign the book."

"All right," said Howard. "I'm willing to be flexible."

One guard unlocked the grating; the other nodded Howard toward a folio bound in some unfamiliar form

of leather, waiting open on a stand in the doorway. The last name above Howard's was that of a regional

manager who'd been sobbing as he trudged into the parking lot for the last time.

The first guard pinned a blank metal badge on Howard's sweatshirt, right in the center of Fuqua. "Keep

it on," he said. "See the yellow strip?"

He gestured with his shotgun, then returned the muzzle to point just under where the badge rested.

An amber track lighted up in the center of the hallway beyond. The glow was so faint that it illuminated

only itself. Focusing his eyes on it meant that Howard didn't have to stare at the shotgun.

"Right," he said. "Right!"

"You follow it," said the guard. "It'll take you where you're supposed to go. And youdon't step off it,

you understand?"

"Right," said Howard, afraid that he sounded brittle again. "I certainly don't want you gentlemen coming

after me."

The other guard laughed. "Oh, we wouldn't do that," he said. "Pete and me watch—" he nodded to the

bank of TV monitors, blanked during Howard's presence "—but we ain't cleared to go wandering

around the mansion. Believe me, buddy, we're not ready to die."

Howard walked down the hall with a fixed smile until the amber strip led him around a corner. He risked

a glance backwards then and saw that the light was fading behind him. He supposed it'd reappear when it

was time for him to leave.

He supposed so.

Howard hadn't had any idea of what the inside of the Strange Mansion would be like. There were a

thousand rumors about the Wizard of Fast Food but almost no facts. Howard himself had envisioned

cathedral-vaulted ceilings and swaying chandeliers from which a bold man could swing one-handed while

the blade of his rapier parried the thrusts of a score of minions.

There might be chandeliers, stone ledges, and high balconies on the other side of the blank gray walls but

that no longer seemed likely. The corridor surfaces were extruded from some dense plastic, and the

doors fitted like airlocks with no external latches.

The amber strip led through branching corridors, occasionally going downward by ramps. The building

sighed and murmured like a sleeping beast.

Howard tried to imagine the Thief of Baghdad dancing away from foes in this featureless warren, but he

quickly gave it up as a bad job. It was like trying to imagine King Kong on the set of2001 .

The strip of light stopped at a closed door. Howard eyed the blank panel, then tried knocking. It was

like rapping his knuckles on a bank vault, soundless and rather painful.

"Hello?" he said diffidently. "Hello!"

The corridor stretched to right and left, empty and silent. The amber glow had melted into the

surrounding gray, leaving only a vague memory of itself. What would Robin Hood have done?

"Hello!" Howard shouted. "Mister Popple!"

"Hello," said the pleasant voice of the girl who'd come up behind him.

Howard executed a leap and pirouette that would have done Robin—or for that matter, a Bolshoi prima

ballerina—proud. "Wha?" he said.

The girl was of middle height with short black hair and a perky expression that implied her pale skin was

hereditary rather than a look. "I'm afraid Wally gets distracted," she said with a smile. "Come around

through my rooms and I'll let you in from the side. The laboratory started out as a garage, you know."

"Ah, I was told not to leave . . . ," Howard said, tilting forward slightly without actually moving his feet

from the point at which the guide strip had deposited him. After the guards' casual threats, he no longer

believed that the worst thing that could happen to him in the Strange Mansion was that he'd lose his job.

"Oh, give me that," the girl said. She deftly unpinned the badge from Howard's sweatshirt and pressed

her thumb in the middle of its blankness, then handed it back to him. "There, I've turned it off."

She walked toward the door she'd come out of, bringing Howard with her by her breezy nonchalance.

He said, "Ah, you work here, miss?"

"Actually, the only people who work here are Wally and the cleaning crews," the girl said. "And my

father, of course. I'm Genie Strange."

She led Howard into a room with low, Japanese-style furniture and translucent walls of pastel blue. It

was like walking along the bottom of a shallow sea.

"Have you known Wally long?" Genie said, apparently unaware that she'd numbed Howard by telling

him she was Robert Strange's daughter. "He's such a sweetheart, don't you think? Of course, I don't get

to meet many people. Robert says that's for my safety, but . . . "

"I've enjoyed my contact with Mr. Popple so far," Howard said. He didn't see any reason to amplify the

truthful comment. Well, the more or less truthful comment.

Genie opened another door at the end of the short hallway at the back of the suite. "Wally?" she called.

"I brought your visitor."

The laboratory buzzed like a meadow full of bees. The lighting was that of an ordinary office; Howard's

eyes had adapted to the corridors' muted illumination, so he sneezed. If the room had been a garage, then

it was intended for people who drove semis.

Black silk hangings concealed the walls. Though benches full of equipment filled much of the interior, the

floor was incongruously covered in Turkish rugs—runners a meter wide and four meters long—except

for a patch of bare concrete around a floor drain in an outside corner.

"Oh, my goodness, Mr. Jones!" said the wispy little man who'd been bent over a circuit board when they

entered. He bustled toward them, raising his glasses to his forehead. "I'd meant to leave the door open

but I forgot completely. Oh, Iphigenia, you must think I'm the greatest fool on Earth!"

"What I think is that you're the sweetest person I know, Wally," the girl said, patting his bald head. He

blushed crimson. "But just a little absentminded, perhaps."

"Mr. Jones is going to help me advertise for a volunteer," Wally said to the girl. "I don't see how we can

get anybody, and we reallymust have someone, you know."

"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Jones," Genie said, offering her hand with mock formality.

"Ah, Howard, please," Howard said. "Ah, I have a position with Strangeco. A very lowly one at

present."

"That's what my father likes in employees," Genie said in a half-joking tone. "Lowliness. My step-father,

I should say. Mother buried two husbands, but Robert buried her."

Howard shook her hand, aware that he was learning things about the Wizard of Fast Food that the

tabloids would pay good money for. Remembering the uneasiness he'd felt while walking through the

mansion, he also realized that the money he'd get for invading Strange's privacy couldn't possibly be good

enough.

An area twenty feet square in the center of the lab was empty of equipment. Across it, beyond Wally as

Howard faced him, was what looked like an irregular, razor-thin sheet of glass on which bright images

flickered. If that was really the flat-plate computer display it looked like, it was more advanced than

anything Howard had heard of on the market.

"Well, Mr. Popple . . . ," Howard said. If the conversation continued in the direction Genie was taking it,

Howard would learn things he didn't think he'd be safe knowing. "If you could tell me just what you need

from me?"

"Oh, please call me Wally," the little man said, taking Howard's hand and leading him toward the thin

display. "You see, this piece of mica is a, well, a window you could call it."

Wally glanced over his shoulder, then averted his eyes with another bright blush. As he'd obviously

hoped, Genie was following them.

"I noticed that shadows seemed to move in it," Wally said, peering intently at what indeed was a piece of

mica rather than a high-tech construction. Hair-fine wires from a buss at the back touched the sheet's

ragged circumference at perhaps a hundred places. "That was six years ago. By modulating the current to

each sheet separately—it's not one crystal, you know, it's a series of sheets like a stack of paper and

there's a dielectric between each pair—I was able to sharpen the images to, well, what you see now."

Howard eyed the display. A group of brightly dressed people walked through a formal garden. The

women wore dresses whose long trains were held by page boys, and the men were in tights and tunics

with puffed sleeves. They carried swords as well, long-bladed rapiers with jeweled hilts.

"How do you generate the images, Wally?" Howard said. "This isn't fed from a broadcast signal, is it?"

"They aren't generated at all," Genie said. "They're real. Show Howard how you can move the point of

view, Wally."

Obediently the little man stepped to the computer terminal on the bench beside the slab of mica. On the

Harry Turtledove - Enchanter Completed

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