The Vexed Generation, page 12
Gilbert and Sid both quickly took off their top hats.
Gilbert grinned sheepishly. “You kinda forget you’re wearing them after a while.”
Sid whispered, “Silence, please. It begins.”
People streamed out of the nearest building, many of them holding large mugs. A few held torches. More people lit torches as they exited. Soon, the section of dirt road between the buildings was flooded with light.
Martin walked out into the middle of the road, wearing a Harry Potter–branded wizard robe meant for a much younger and smaller person. He turned to face back toward town.
Opposite him, Phillip stood, looking exactly as he did when they saw him last, right down to the sky-blue robe, pointed hat, and staff.
“He’s fighting Phillip?” Mattie said. “I thought you said they’re friends.”
Gilbert said, “Just watch.”
A hush fell over the assembled crowd. They heard Phillip say, “Whenever you’re ready.”
Martin lifted three feet into the air, and stayed there, suspended above the ground without any visible support. He shouted, “Behold,” but his voice sounded odd, as if he were imitating a sheep, or shouting through a box fan.
“Phillip,” Martin continued. “Can your powers match this?”
“Let’s see.” Phillip’s staff emitted an eerie blue light and a deep, resonant hum. Phillip rose thirty feet into the air and hovered above the buildings, twirling his staff like a giant baton. As his twirling grew faster, the glowing staff began to resemble a glowing disk, then a glowing sphere. The light grew brighter, becoming a brilliant white that illuminated the crowd below it and the town behind him like a small sun.
In a voice both ear-splittingly loud and maddeningly casual, Phillip asked, “What do you think, Martin? How’s this?”
Martin turned and tried to run but didn’t think to drop back to the ground first, so he merely twisted and tumbled in midair without going anywhere. He came to a rest hanging upside down, tilted at a sharp angle, and immediately threw up.
The ball of light shrunk until it was just the pinnacle of Phillip’s staff, glowing as he floated serenely above the rooftops. “Thanks for visiting us, Martin. I’m sure we’ll meet again soon.”
The ball of light shot from Phillip’s staff and hit Martin in the gut. Suspended above the ground, Martin offered no resistance, so the force of the impact sent his limp body flying out of town and into the woods at a constant altitude of three feet.
He shot past his future children’s hiding spot, into the dark forest beyond, stopping only when he hit a tree.
“Friends?” Brewster hissed. “You call that being Dad’s friend?”
Gilbert shushed Brewster, and Sid grabbed Mattie’s arm, holding her back from her attempt to go help their father as he hung in the air, eyes closed, mouth open, and arms and legs dangling while he drifted slowly, having rebounded off of the tree.
Mattie tried to pull herself free of Sid’s grip but stopped when their mother appeared out of thin air, wearing a long brown hooded cloak and carrying two magic wands.
The kids watched in silence as Gwen grabbed Martin by the leg. She withdrew her hand instantly after making initial contact, but then she grabbed him firmly and started rotating his body into a more dignified pose, standing upright, though with his head still lolling forward and his limbs hanging limp.
She looked up at his slack face in the moonlight. She tried to close his mouth, but it fell back open as soon as she took her hand away.
Phillip appeared behind her. “What do you think?”
Gwen said. “He’s trouble. He’s cute, but he’s trouble. Why is he vibrating?”
Phillip laughed. “I think it has something to do with how his flight macro works. It seems pretty crude. He doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing.”
Gwen said, “Yeah, but that doesn’t stop him from doing it. You should have seen him when I picked him up on the road today. He was totally confident, and completely unprepared. That’s why he’s trouble. I say we banish him.”
“Gwen, the lad just got here. We don’t even know him.”
“We know that he’s arrogant and foolhardy, and for someone with access to the file, that’s dangerous. We have a nice equilibrium going here, and he’s going to throw it out of balance.”
“Maybe.”
“How long had you known him before he challenged you to a duel, Phillip?”
“Less than five minutes. Okay, point taken, he’s definitely going to throw things out of balance, but sometimes that’s a good thing. Besides, we don’t know what kind of trouble we’d be sending him back to.”
“The idea that he might have caused a mess where he came from isn’t a very good argument to keep him here.”
“Maybe not, but it’s good enough for me. I’m going to train him, get him all sussed out.”
“Whatever,” Gwen said. “Just try to calm him down before you bring him ’round to my place. The last thing I need is this guy slobbering all over me.”
“Done. Thanks for coming out.”
“Happy to. Anything for you, Phillip,” Gwen said, and disappeared.
Phillip looked up at the still-unconscious Martin. “Don’t worry, lad. We’ll get you fixed up. I think you’ll work out just fine.” He gripped Martin’s wrist, muttered “Transporti hejmen,” and they both vanished.
“So,” Gilbert said. “You see now why we don’t think Phillip would do anything to hurt either of your parents.”
Mattie said, “But he did. You literally just showed us Phillip hurting Dad.”
Gilbert sputtered for a moment, his eyes wide, staring at Mattie until he finally said, “Not much. And he only did it after Martin challenged him to a duel.”
Sid said, “And he was exceedingly kind to your father after the duel. Far kinder than your mother wanted to be.”
“Okay, I guess,” Brewster said. “At least from this last bit, it looks like Phillip is one of our parents’ oldest, closest friends.”
“Thank you.”
“Which will make it that much worse if he’s turned on them.”
“We don’t know that he has!”
Brewster shrugged. “I said if.”
Gilbert said, “That is progress.”
Mattie nodded. “It’s possible. Phillip might not be our parents’ enemy. But can you admit that he might not be their friend anymore?”
Gilbert and Sid looked at each other, each hoping the other would have an intelligent answer to the question.
After a long silence, Mattie said. “You have your opinion. We have ours. We can keep arguing about it, or we can get to work finding out which opinion is right.”
Gilbert said, “The only thing worse than a stubborn teenager is one who has a valid point.”
“We admitted we might be wrong,” said Brewster. “That’s not stubborn.”
Sid said, “And now you have two valid points.”
13.
They materialized on the patch of lawn in front of Sid’s Victorian house and split up in sullen silence, Mattie and Brewster sulking because the magicians wouldn’t accept that Phillip was the enemy, Gilbert and Sid moping because the twins wouldn’t take their word for it that he wasn’t.
They each used the restroom, got a drink, and reconvened at the outdoor kitchen, drawn instinctively by the smell of the grilled cheese sandwiches Gilbert was making. As they ate, Mattie stifled a small laugh.
“What?” Gilbert asked.
“Nothing.”
“C’mon, what is it?”
Mattie rolled her eyes. “Oh, it’s dumb, but, I was just thinking about how funny Dad looked flying through the woods unconscious. The little stream of drool trailing out of his mouth as he went is what got me.”
The four of them either chuckled or let out the single sharp exhalation through their nostrils that signals that something didn’t make you laugh, but that you recognize it as funny anyway.
Brewster swallowed a bite of sandwich and said, “I liked how unimpressed he looked after our magic trick. I think that’s pretty much how Mattie and I always look after he shows us one of his.”
Again, they shared a laugh, not entirely at Martin’s expense, but not exactly to his credit either.
Gilbert said, “I was just wondering how many times your father had to watch Dune to plan that wedding. Recreating the Guild Navigator especially must have taken a ton of time and effort. We all want our special day to be perfect, but he went to an awful lot of trouble to decorate his wedding ceremony with a giant smoking scrotum.”
They all laughed, Mattie shot water out her nose, they all laughed harder, and by the time they stopped, they had all forgotten that they were irritated with each other.
Sid tapped a few keys on his netbook as he finished his sandwich, then closed the lid and said, “Now then, my young apprentices, I do believe it’s time to finish up your training.”
“What do you mean, finish up?” Mattie asked. “We’re done?”
Gilbert smiled. “You can fly, you can levitate objects, you can make things appear and disappear. We haven’t figured a way to read minds yet, so there really isn’t much left to teach you.”
Sid said, “Quite. You’ll want to learn to code so you can come up with powers of your own, but you’ll have to handle that yourself.”
Brewster said, “Oh, Mom and Dad have been making us take coding classes.”
“There you go,” Gilbert said. “Good parents, thinking ahead.”
“Almost certainly Gwen’s doing.” Sid motioned toward his netbook. “I’ve accessed your hats and enabled the last few powers I’m going to give you. You’re now able to teleport. You’ll find it in the menu. You can choose from one of the preset places we’ve already programmed, or you can use MapQuest to pick a place.”
Mattie scrunched her nose. “MapQuest? What is that? Some sort of ancient precursor to Google Maps?”
Gilbert said, “I prefer to think of it as a high-tech alternative to Microsoft Automap on CD-ROM.”
Sid ignored the digression. “If you teleport using your hat, we have an animation programmed that makes it look like the hat sucks you in and then vanishes. Also, anyone touching you will teleport as well, which can be either rather convenient or exceedingly inconvenient, depending on the person in question. Still, we suggest avoiding teleporting in front of people if you can help it. Also, in addition to the map interface, you’ll see that there’s a time selector, meaning that you can teleport to any place, at any time. So, that’s teleporting and time travel sorted. We won’t have you try it now, as it’s all very straightforward. You can play around with it later if you like. You won’t be doing any of it alone anyway, as Gilbert and I are going to accompany you until the investigation is complete.”
“Damn straight,” Gilbert agreed. “So, that just leaves one thing to teach you. We weren’t sure we were going to tell you this part. It’s kind of a trade secret of ours. But we want to do right by you, and your parents, so we’re gonna spill the beans. First, though, you lot need to swear, swear, that you won’t tell anybody, not even your parents, what you’re about to learn.”
The twins’ interest was piqued, and keeping secrets from their parents is pretty much what teenagers do. They talked over one another, rushing to swear secrecy.
Sid said, “One of the great disappointments of the magic community is that nobody has successfully developed a means of turning invisible without unpleasant side effects. Except, that is to say, for us.”
Gilbert held his arms outward, drawing the twins’ attention, made a showy little flourish with his fingertips, then threw some small object at the ground in front of his feet, shouting “Ninja vanish!”
The thrown object exploded in a blinding light, a billowing cloud of grayish-white smoke, and a low, slow, foomp noise. When the twins’ eyes recovered from the flash, Gilbert was gone. Sid stood, smiling at Mattie and Brewster, neither of whom said a word. After several seconds of silence, Sid asked, “So, then, where did he go?”
“Uh, he didn’t go anywhere, did he?” Mattie said. “You said he was going to turn invisible, so I guess he’s still here.”
Brewster said, “Yeah. We didn’t doubt he could do it. He said he was gonna, after all. We just want to know how it’s done.”
Sid shook his head. “That’s the damnable irony of magic. It’s a lot more impressive when you don’t believe in it.”
Gilbert’s disembodied voice said, “Yeah, I’m over here. Don’t bother to look for me waving or anything. You won’t see me. Look to the right of Sid, and I mean look carefully. Really study the background—you’ll see an area where whatever’s behind me seems a little warped. That’s where I am.”
“Oh,” Mattie said. “Yeah, I think I see it.”
Brewster squinted. “It’s like the wall of your house has a dent in it.”
Sid nodded. “You see, my young friends, all the other wizards have tried to make themselves invisible by changing themselves somehow. That’s invariably too dangerous, too difficult, or in most cases, both. We, by contrast, realized that humans see by detecting the light bouncing off of things, so we made a spell that bends the light around the magician, leaving him or her unchanged.”
Gilbert’s voice said, “All of the light that gets within two feet of where I’m standing is bent around me. Since no light bounces off me, you can’t see me. Unfortunately, the area directly behind me looks farther away, and the pattern on the floor gets distorted.”
Mattie and Brewster both looked down and saw a spot where the brick pavers bent and warped as if filmed with a fisheye lens.
“It works best if the background is far away, the floor isn’t a repeating pattern, and you don’t move. If you sneak around slowly, it’s not so bad, but the faster you walk, the easier you are to spot.”
The distortion seemed to wobble and waver for a moment, then moved from right to left, becoming more obvious as it gained speed.
“Also” Gilbert said, “if you just stay where you were when you disappeared, you’re more likely to get spotted. That’s why we added the flash pot. It gives you a second once you’re invisible to take a couple of giant steps away. Now, how would you two like to try it yourselves?”
Mattie and Brewster practically begged, “Please!”
Sid smiled. “Splendid. To arm the spell, while wearing your white gloves, take the thumb of your right hand and touch it to the crease of the first knuckle on each finger, starting with the pinky and working your way across.”
Sid demonstrated with his own right hand. The kids followed suit.
“Now, again with the right hand, mime throwing a small object, about the size of a golf ball, at the floor in front of your feet. There won’t actually be an object, of course, but the audience will believe that they see one, because that’s what the human brain does. You needn’t shout ninja vanish, by the way. Gilbert just does that because he thinks it’s amusing.”
“And it is,” Gilbert’s disembodied voice said.
“Go ahead. Remember, touch the first knuckles on all fingers, make the throw, boom, flash, then take two giant steps.”
Mattie and Brewster both mimed throwing an object at the floor. Two small explosions fired, followed almost immediately by soft thudding noises and both Brewster and Mattie saying “Ow!”
Sid smiled, on the verge of laughing. “First lesson: if disappearing with someone, compare notes so you don’t run into each other when you make your two giant steps. Now that you’re both invisible, what’s the first thing you notice?”
Mattie said, “I can’t see.”
“Me neither,” Brewster said.
“No, you can’t! All of the light’s being bent around you, so none of it’s reaching your eyes. You can hear everything, but you can’t see, any more than you can be seen. In order to regain your vision, you’d need some way to reach out of the zone of darkness around you, collect some light, and somehow channel it back to at least one of your eyes. Some sort of periscope, perhaps, much like the one you mocked me for getting so excited about earlier!”
14.
Mattie and Brewster spent most of the afternoon and evening playing with their new powers under the guise of practicing. Sid took them on a field trip to the future to buy a few changes of clothes and better camping mattresses, letting Mattie transport them there and Brewster bring them back. Gilbert made a lavish dinner, which they ate by the pool, watching the sunset over London through the dirigible’s semitransparent skin. Afterward, they watched a movie. They let the kids choose between The Incredible Burt Wonderstone and Now You See Me. They chose Wonderstone, but switched after twenty minutes and enjoyed the second movie, despite Gilbert and Sid’s complaints that the depiction of magic was completely unrealistic.
The next morning, after another massive pile of delicious fried breakfast, they prepared to start their pursuit of Phillip, the truth or, preferably, both.
Gilbert and Sid put on freshly cleaned and pressed tuxedoes, along with their customary hats, capes, gloves, and canes. Mattie and Brewster were offered tuxes of their own, but declined, instead wearing their hats, capes, gloves, and canes with T-shirts and jeans.
Gilbert said, “That’s gonna look weird.”
Mattie shrugged. “Wearing the tuxedos at our age would look weird, too. At least this way we’ll be comfortable.”
Sid mumbled, “Hate to admit, she has a point.”
Brewster said, “I’ve been thinking about this, and I say we just go back in time to before all of this started, and prevent it from happening in the first place.”
Sid said, “No, I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
“Sure it is.”
“Let me ask you this: Do you have any memory of a future version of you coming to you with any sort of warnings?”
Mattie and Brewster both said, “No.”
“Then you didn’t. Which means you won’t.”
“No. We still can,” Brewster said. “If we can go anywhere at any time, we can go back to before Phillip froze our parents and stop all of this from ever happening. We’re time travelers now. We need to think like time travelers.”
