Off to Be the Wizard - 2 - Spell or High Water (8 page)

Martin held up his hands, signaling surrender. “No, I get it. You’ve got a point. I’d just hoped that other cultures were a little friendlier to women who do magic, so maybe they wouldn’t feel the need to come here.”

Gwen said, “Sadly, life is pretty nasty for women who do magic almost everywhere, and in almost any time. The only place where they get treated the same as the men is in the
colony
that’s living as Gypsies in Paris in the 1480s, and that’s just because the locals treat the male and the female Gypsies equally badly.”

They walked quietly for a moment, contemplating human nature, until Gwen broke the silence. “So, we’ll be deciding
various
issues that face our kind. How to prevent the abuse of our powers, what we will call ourselves, that sort of stuff.”

“What’s wrong with calling ourselves wizards?” Martin asked.

“We don’t all pose as wizards. There are fakirs, philosophers, wise men, alchemists, medicine men, sorcerers, and a couple of magicians. You’ll be meeting people like us from all over
the w
orld, and all over recorded history. For now we’re using ‘time travelers,’ but that doesn’t really cover it. In Atlantis, we call
ourselves
‘sorceresses.’”

“Because you’re all women.”

“And because it’s fun. It kinda makes everything into a tongue twister. ‘Send several sorceresses south.’ See?”

Phillip said, “Great. Two weeks of planned disagreements with people who aren’t used to dealing with equals. It’ll be a miracle if we get anything accomplished.”

“It won’t be a problem,” Gwen said. “Our leader, Brit, will be running the show. She’s pretty good at this sort of thing.”

“It’s a shame your leader has to do that instead of acting as a delegate for Atlantis.”

Gwen laughed. “Oh, she’s also one of our delegates.”

Wait,” Phillip said. “Isn’t anyone worried that she might somehow, I don’t know, favor herself?”

Gwen said, “Believe me, it’s not a problem. She seldom agrees with herself. Here’s the boat.” Gwen gestured toward the end of the dock, which seemed at a glance to have no boats moored to it. When Phillip and Martin actually looked, though, they could see another transparent bowl bobbing in the water. This one was much larger than the one Phillip had received. Even knowing it was there, it was more visible for the shadow it cast and the
furrow
in the water where it sat than for actually being visible itself. If Martin squinted, he could just make out a transparent floor and a shelf-like bench wrapping around the inside.

Gwen walked to the end of the dock, slipped on her sandals, and stepped over the rim, into the near-invisible boat. Martin and Phillip followed suit. When they were all seated Gwen said, “Take me home.” The boat silently lifted a foot or so above the surface and started moving, fast enough to make real progress, but slowly enough that the wind was not unpleasant.

Phillip looked at the edge of the flying bowl-boat and asked, “Is this made of diamond too?”

Gwen smiled. “Yeah. It’s laid down one molecule at a time by an automated algorithm. Makes incredibly strong structures, and if you think it through well enough you can make almost
anything
. Also, because they’re so molecularly pure, you can manipulate, levitate, or teleport them at will with no danger of them breaking apart. It was one of the Brits’ first great innovations.”

Phillip puffed up a bit with nationalistic pride. “We Brits invented this? When?”

Gwen chuckled. “Not the British. The Brits. Two of our leaders are named Brit.”

“Oh,” Martin said, “like the Magnuses.”

“No,” Gwen said. “Nothing like the Magnuses. This is one of the things I wanted to warn you about.” Gwen sighed
heavily
, thought for a moment, then plunged ahead. “See, there are three people in charge of Atlantis. They form a sort of voting council. There’s the President, whom we all elect. At the moment it’s a woman named Ida. Then there’s Brit, our real leader. She founded Atlantis and is the smartest person I’ve ever met. She’s there out of respect. She built the whole place herself. She’s, well, she’s just amazing. You’ll see.”

Martin said, “And the third, the other Brit. What’s her deal?”

Gwen winced. “See, that’s the hard part to explain. There is no other Brit. It’s the same Brit. Brit is two people, or you could say she’s one person twice. See, Brit went back in time, like a hundred years ago, and built Atlantis. She designed it, did all of the engineering, made it all work. Then she went out into the world and encouraged people to move to the city and populate it. They set up homes and businesses, gave her creation life, and made it a real city. She built the buildings, then she made it into the city it is today.”

“She sounds great,” Phillip said.

“She is,” Gwen agreed. “The problem is that before she did all that, she came to the past for the first time, eleven years ago, and found Atlantis here, already up and running. Then she met herself and discovered that she had gone back in time and built Atlantis so that it would be ready for her when she arrived.”

There was a long silence, which ended with Phillip yelling that this made no sense, and that the whole thing was preposterous, followed by Martin agreeing with Phillip, followed by Gwen agreeing with both of them, but assuring them that it was true, or at least it seemed to be.

“Brit has a theory about how it happened. When she explains it, it makes sense.”

“Well, let’s hear it.” Martin said.

Gwen shook her head. “You’ll have to ask her. It only makes sense when she explains it.”

Phillip grimaced. “I don’t like it,” he said.

Gwen said, “I knew you wouldn’t,” putting a steadying hand on his shoulder. “You’ll have plenty of time to ask Brit about all of this. For now, you just have to keep in mind that there are two Brits. We call them
Brit the Elder
and
Brit the Younger
, and they are the same person at two different ages.”

Martin exhaled loudly. “That should be easy to keep straight.”

Gwen added, “Oh, and I should mention that they’re the same age. Physically. You’ll see.”

The men did not seem reassured.

Gwen pressed on. “The summit is Brit the Elder’s idea. She saw early on that it would be easy for one of us to abuse our abilities. She wants to avoid that, but she needs everyone else to cooperate, and people don’t like the idea of limiting their own power. Because she’s the leader of the earliest known colony of time travelers, she has the luxury of time. She spoke to all of the girls who’ve come to Atlantis from all of the other colonies,
pinpointed
a moment a month or two after some time traveler tried to abuse his power, then invited leaders from that time to come here for a summit. That way, she knew they’d be in the right frame of mind to cooperate.”

“And I’m sure Brit the Younger agreed,” Phillip said, ruefully.

“No. Brit the Younger thought it was manipulative. They have a . . . difficult relationship.”

“But they’re the same person,” Phillip cried.

Gwen shrugged.

“So that’s why we were called now,” Martin said. “Because Jimmy tried to kill us all two months ago.”

“Which means she knows all about the Jimmy situation,” Phillip said. “That’s a bit embarrassing.”

Gwen said, “Don’t be embarrassed. I told Brit the Elder the whole story and she agreed that Jimmy had to go. She said that he was clearly dangerous, greedy, manipulative, and cruel.”

Phillip said, “I’m glad we’re in agreement.”

Gwen shielded her eyes with her hand and peered into the distance. “She also said that he lacked vision, and thought too small.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Martin asked.

Gwen smiled. “Judge for yourself.” Gwen gestured ahead. “Gentlemen, the sunken city of Atlantis.” Martin and Phillip shielded their eyes, and in the distance, they saw it.

The ocean was calm and vast. There were no islands to interrupt the flatness of the horizon, but in the distance, there did appear to be a hazy collection of square-sailed ships. It was
difficult
to look at them. Something about how the light was shimmering made their eyes strain. It was also difficult to look at the ships because it was impossible to ignore what was above them. Hovering above the wavering, wobbling patch of sea there were what appeared to be a great many tall buildings, just
hanging
in space. Seagulls soared above the impossible skyline, and the small armada of ships bobbed below.

“Wow,” Martin gasped.

“Yes,” Gwen said. “The genius of picking Atlantis as a base of operations is that it’s destined to disappear anyway, so Brit was free to build anything she wanted. Of course, that was before she knew that nothing we do seems to affect the future anyway, but still, it was clever of her.”

Martin whistled, then said, “One person built that? No
wonder
it took her a hundred years.”

“She spent the first week designing the city and writing the construction algorithm. She set that in motion, and the basic
construction
was done in a few days. The rest of the time was spent establishing a culture, encouraging immigration, and
creating
a system of government. That was the hard part.”

Phillip said, “It took Jimmy years to build one castle, and he had an army of builders helping him. How on Earth could this Brit of yours build that in a few days?”

Gwen rapped on the side of the crystal-clear bowl that was whisking them toward the city. “The same way we built this boat, and the bowl we sent you. You know how you copy coins and food items? We do the same thing, with individual atoms, and instead of replicating the atoms in a hat, we place them precisely next to the last atom we copied, in a pattern pre-determined by and automatically carried out by computer code.

“Domes are the strongest shape, and the easiest one to
program
. She got the idea from a science fiction book she read. It had a lot of diamond domes in it, but she chose to make basins instead.”

“That explains how she built the buildings,” Martin allowed, “but how did she make them float in mid-air like that?”

Gwen said, “She didn’t. They float, but not in the air.” She leaned over close to Martin. She put a hand on his shoulder, and put her head next to his, looking off into the distance in the same direction as him. She pointed at a ship at the edge of the
shimmering
armada. “Look at that ship on the end, with the blue-striped sail. See anything odd about it?”

“Yes,” Martin said, squinting into the distance. “It’s sitting next to a ship with the exact same sail.”

“No,” Gwen said. “Look closer.”

Martin squinted some more, then exclaimed, “It’s sitting next to half a ship with the same sail.” It was now clear to Martin what he was looking at, and it wasn’t what he’d first thought. They weren’t buildings: they were just the tops of buildings. The empty space beneath them wasn’t empty at all: it was the
reflection
in a giant, curving, mirrored wall. The shimmering wasn’t magic: it was distortion from the curvature of the mirror and a mirage from the heat it was reflecting. The gathering of ships beneath the city was a much smaller gathering of ships around the city, and their reflections. The city was not floating above the water, but rising up from it.

They were approaching the city quite quickly now. Clearly, the flying half-bubble that Gwen kept referring to as a boat was moving deceptively fast. With the city looming ever larger in front of them, Gwen turned to Martin and Phillip and said, “Look, guys. One last thing you should know. There are some things about Atlantis that I’m not entirely proud of.”

“What do you mean?” Phillip asked.

“You have to understand,” she said, “it’s a society ruled entirely by women.”

“We expect it to be different,” Martin said.

“Yeah,” Gwen sighed, “well, expect it to be different from what you expect.”

The guys clearly did not understand what she meant.

“I’ll put it this way,” she continued, “have you ever been to a bar where a bachelor party was going on?”

Both men said yes.

Gwen asked, “Have you ever been to a bar where a
bachelorette
party was going on?”

Again, both men said yes.

Gwen asked, “Which one was more out of control?”

The craft started gaining altitude, flying above the ships, massed around the perimeter of Atlantis. Ancient Greek traders standing on their ships craned their necks and watched them fly overhead.

As they approached the rim of the wall, Martin said, “Gwen, if it’s a walled island, why do you keep calling it ‘The Sunken City of Atlantis?’ ”

Gwen said. “You’re thinking
sunken
as in
sunken treasure
. You should be thinking
sunken
, as in
sunken living room
.”

The craft crested the rim of the city and kept climbing.
Looking
at Atlantis from above, it was as if a gigantic hole had been dug into the ocean itself. The city was a perfect circle, and while there were tall buildings around its outer rim, the interior of the circle fell away sharply, forming yet another bowl shape, this one quite irregular, made up of windows, terraces, and rooftop
gardens
. All of the buildings were made of a smooth,
gleaming
white material, formed into flat surfaces joined with rounded edges.

Tracks divided the city like slices cut into a pie. Broad, flat lifts teeming with people slowly inched up and down the tracks. Terraced foot paths, crowded with pedestrians, radiated around the city at regular intervals, interspersed with large public plazas where people could meet and enjoy the view.

It was immediately clear to both Phillip and Martin that the outer wall of Atlantis was nothing more than another
molecularly
pure diamond bowl, only much larger than any they had seen before. Glancing at the edge of the city, the bowl looked to be at least three feet thick. What they had taken for a wall had
actually
been the upper rim of the bowl extending above the water line. Gwen confirmed this, and added that it had been partially
silvered
, for security, and because it just looked cooler that way.