Meet Maybeth

Water, waves, seagulls, sand, the occasional crab, a squirrel or two begging for handouts. I'd spent five whole days on that lonely beach, coated with maximum strength, non-chemical sunscreen, and pretty much all I'd seen was water, waves, seagulls, sand, crabs, and squirrels. Burned out at my job, I had craved solitude. This is where a travel agent pointed me, and she had certainly provided what I'd asked for.

I think after five days of dealing with nothing more demanding than a room service menu, I was healed. My mind had slowed, my pulse dropped, and I was somewhere in that delightful space between contentment and happiness.

So it wasn't stress that made me sit straight up in the sand so I could see this enormous creature lumbering out of the ocean. And it wasn't my imagination that saw him hesitate, look back toward the ocean, then start lumbering toward me and my beach again.

And do not try to tell me it was a trick of the sunlight on the water or a momentary lapse of sanity that made me see him start to change from a creature the size of a house to a regular human male on a somewhat massively-built scale.

And speaking of scales, his disappeared as he changed form, and smooth, darkly tanned skin took their place. He grew hair in all the normal places and his dragon-like appendages, wings, talons and tail were absorbed into mighty shoulders, human hands and ... uh ... no tail.

I watched all this with interest.

You just don't see a dragon every day, and no magician I'd ever seen could produce such a delightful metamorphosis. He was gorgeous.

When he got up close, I could see he had the most amazing green eyes and midnight hair coursing over his shoulders and down his back. Which brought me to the undeniable fact that the guy was totally naked. Jaybird. Skyclad.

And there he was.

And there I was.

I grabbed one of the huge beach towels I'd brought from my hotel room and handed it to him.

He took it with a toothy grin and wrapped it around his hips. Then he dropped to the sand beside me. "Losurdo of the Clan Percheus, at your service," he said absurdly.

"No," I said. "You don't appear out of the ocean as a dragon, change into a man, and then announce your name like we'd just met at a bar or something."

"Well, I think I just did that, and the polite response from you would be your name and clan affiliation," he answered, still grinning at me.

I'd obviously lost all my marbles, no need to keep even a single cracked shooter in my brain. I stuck my hand out in a friendly fashion, and announced, "Maybeth of the Pringle clan, if you can call us a clan."

He took my hand and we shook briefly on our exchange of names. Civilization. Okay.

"You like the beach, Maybeth?" he asked.

"Yes. You're a dragon, yes?" Turnabout. Fair play. That sort of thing.

"Yes, in real life. Human guise is a convenience."

"Well, you do human very nicely." Drop dead gorgeous, actually. In every particular and I'd had time to look him over quite thoroughly before I handed him that towel.

"Fully functional, too." There was that grin again.

I closed my eyes and let my mind wander for a split second. I popped them open and blinked against the sunlight. "Why are you here, Losurdo of the Clan Percheus?"

"My friends call me Loser," he offered.

Fair enough. "Why are you here, Loser?"

"Recruiting mission."

"Oh my." A headhunter. Programmers were always in demand, but here? A million miles away from the craziness I'd left behind? Here? "Go away, Loser. I'm on vacation." I closed my eyes, lay down on my towel and pretended to ignore him.

I could actually feel him looking at me. "Go away, Loser," I repeated.

"I'm staying," he answered mildly.

Even headhunting dragons have their uses. I sat up. "Then make yourself useful and spread sunscreen on my back." I handed him a bottle and lay face down on the towel.

Shortly, I was purring like a basketful of contented kittens. Dragon talons turn into magical fingers with carefully blunted nails. Every inch of exposed flesh was coated with sunscreen and tenderly massaged into quiescence. "Are you married, Loser?" I asked idly.

"No. Too young."

"Not too young," I corrected him. "Afraid to commit? Haven't met the right woman? Too caught up in career to marry?"

"Too young," he repeated, almost wistfully.

"How young?" I sat up and eyed him with suspicion. Early thirties or late twenties, I figured.

"Two hundred and forty-six."

I was willing to believe the unbelievable. Sure. "Two hundred and forty-six."

"My Uncle Perche didn't even start looking for a mate until he was almost seven hundred," he said earnestly.

"Two hundred and forty-six?"

He shrugged. "I do look old for my age."

I shrugged, myself. Then to keep myself occupied, I picked up the bottle of sunscreen and began applying it vigorously to my shoulders, arms and legs. Loser watched silently. Finally, I decided I wouldn't fry no matter how long this conversation lasted. "And you're a recruiter for?"

"Questours Interdimensional, Incorporated." He reached into somewhere and produced a business card. "Travel agency for ... uh ... the arcanely talented and the innately magical."

"A travel agency?"

He nodded soberly. "We've been growing rather fast, and we need some computer expertise to keep things coordinated."

"Why not just grab a travel package and use that?" Reinventing the wheel was no fun.

"If you'll meet with our managers, you can get a better idea of the caliber of the problem."

"I'm not looking for a job." I had a job. Responsibilities. Waiting for me. My left eye jumped. I cleared my mind. Breathed deep. My eye twitched again.

"It's not a job. It's an adventure," he laughed.

"I'm not cheap," I warned.

"We're not poor."

"I think I'll just retire." I lay back down on my towel and closed my eyes.

"You can work anywhere you like, anytime you like, any world you like."

"Huh?" I almost forgot my complete lack of interest in his proposition.

"Think about it. No hurry." He stood up and dropped the towel. He started walking into the water and I could see his shape changing into the behemoth he'd been before.

Two days later, I had convinced myself that Lizard of the Clan Percheus was a figment of my imagination and too much sun. I spent more time inside the hotel, enjoying my private balcony and ocean view. I think I also caught up on about ten years worth of lost sleep. I felt calm and rested, and I still had a week of vacation left before I returned to the airline.

Dining in the small hotel's dining room was a treat, with delicious tropical drinks, fresh food, and luxurious desserts, all served by smiling waiters with dark eyes and very white teeth. I was sipping a rum-and-something-sweetly-tangy when he appeared at my table.

"Changed your mind?" he asked, seating himself in the empty chair of my table for two.

"You're not real. Go away." I motioned at my waiter for a refill on my drink.

"I'm real all right." When the waiter brought my drink, he ordered a large black coffee. "Now, you might be wondering what we can offer you to come work for us. How about," he started counting on his fingers. "One ... you name your own salary. Two ... no deadlines. Three ... state of the art computing equipment and methodologies. Four ... you run the show, based upon your own assessments of our needs. Five ... unlimited travel via Questours. Six ... worksite and timesite of your choice."

I swallowed my entire drink, almost choking on the tiny umbrella. "Why so much, and why me?" I finally asked.

"Do you remember a teacher at the university called Dr. Reseibud?"

I nodded.

"He is on retainer with us, strictly on the mundane side. Finances and such. We asked him if he'd ever had a student whose relationship with computers seemed symbiotic, who didn't seem to have the smarts to make it all work, but it did work. Who didn't seem to understand the machine, but ..."

"But whose code made the machine sit up and beg," I finished for him. I'd been telling my colleagues for years that computers were run by magical means, and had been lectured to any number of times about binary switches and circuits and electricity. And I had never believe a word of any of it, because I had a sort of Dr. Doolittle relationship with the beasties. They didn't seem electronic to me at all. And they did my bidding. True, I had to learn their languages, but it all seemed rather natural to me. And I had pulled off some pretty complicated code without actually know how or why it worked.

He nodded pleasantly. "Then you understand. We can use talent like yours. We need talent like yours. You'll enter our company on the same level as a master mage, and be entitled to all the perks of that position."

"Wait a minute. Master mage? Just because I have a certain familiarity with the mysterious nature of computers does not mean I believe in magic."

He snorted, and coming from him, that snort was a definitive statement of denial. "You not only believe in it, Maybeth, you practice it. You depend upon it. You live by it." He leaned toward me, those brilliant green eyes brooking no argument.

I got angry. No longer amused or indolent. "Loser, if I believed in real magic, I'd snap my fingers right now and be far away from you."

He settled back in his chair and sipped his coffee. Then he looked up at me. "Do it," he said.

I am not stupid. I didn't just snap my fingers and wish myself away. I pictured myself back out on the beach with the sky a diamond-studded black and the tide rolling in. Then I snapped my fingers.

Nothing happened. I looked at Loser and smiled.

He handed me an amulet on a golden chain. "Now try it."

I put the chain around my neck, re-pictured myself on that beach, and snapped my fingers.

Still nothing.

Satisfied, I started to stand up to leave via my own two feet.

He waved to stop me. "Hold the amulet in your right hand and say ..." He continued with a short stream of nonsense syllables.

"You're sure?" I said, entirely ignoring his amusement.

"Try it."

I held the amulet in my right hand and spoke the words. Third time is, indeed, a charm. I was on the beach, and shortly joined by a grinning man. I said I'm not stupid. I never got anywhere in my life by denying the obvious. "It's magic," I announced.

"Told you."

"I guess I want to talk to your guys."

"Whenever you like, at your convenience."

So I met with the directors and managers of Questours Interdimensional, Incorporated. At their request, I sat down at a desktop computer and produced a model of their main problem.

Who could ever imagine the variables involved in cross-time, interplanetary travel? The mind boggles if it doesn't just accept the chaos and make music with it. Music is the closest analogy I can think of to this day. If you imagine all the potentials of all the sounds that can possibly be produced by a full orchestra, including synthesizers and a conductor on acid, and start organizing those sounds into a cogent whole that travels in a semi-organized fashion toward a triumphant finish sometime in the future (or the past), you have a vague idea of the complexity involved in Questours arcane calculations.

They really needed me.

I was really surprised that they had mages on staff whose understanding of magic was such, and so intuitive, that they could (and did!) send vacationing arcane folk to the most amazing times and places with supreme confidence, and absolute certainty that they could fetch them home again in safety.

So, it was a dream job with dream compensation. We talked bucks and requirements and perks. I accepted the job. We ordered up the computers to be delivered and set up right before I went to work for them, and I returned home to quit my job at the airline.

They were not happy at the airline. One of the reasons I was so able to understand the requirements of Questours was my experience in solving much the same problems, on a smaller scale, at the airline. To be absolutely fair, I gave them a month's notice and spent much of that month teaching members of three teams The Big Picture. I am a big believer in The Big Picture. If you don't get caught up in the branches of a particular tree, the forest can be a magnificent place in which to live and work.

Finally, I walked out that door. The Questours folks had packed my house up and moved all my stuff to a large apartment inside the Questours complex. My office, on the other hand, was in a module that I could move anywhere I liked by invoking an amulet. It had a self-contained power supply for the computers, a small apartment for use when I wanted to stay right there, but needed to get some sleep or eat, and large windows all around. And the beauty of the whole thing was its immense portability. It stayed warm in winter conditions and cool in summer conditions. I could wish it to a beach and watch the waves from air conditioned comfort, or to the top of a mountain and be amused by snow. The whole thing was invisible to onlookers, which was a good thing. My corner office at the airline was nothing to this!

At the suggestion of Questours' Chief Mage, I enrolled in elementary magic classes at a Magestry of her choice. She was convinced that someone who programmed computers intuitively must have at least limited magical abilities. Turned out she was right.

It was a big surprise to me that I could create magic as well as use the magic of the Questours amulets. It was a larger surprise to the instructors that I seemed to pick it all up rather casually.Truth to tell, I hate to study. I hate to practice. I have to extract some sort of mystic gestalt from things immediately, or I just won't pick them up at all. And I don't usually do them well, but once I've assimilated the truth of the matter, I get really good at them. When I was learning to program in school, I just did not get it. But things worked. I didn't know why they worked, but they did. When I got out of school and started programming for real, I got very good at it. It took some time and I still don't understand the basics, the whys, the whatfors, the electronics and circuits, but when my dogs' daily food depended on my programming well, I got very good at programming. I suppose the same thing would be true with magic, under the same circumstances. Fortunately, Questours was way more interested in my way with computers than they were with my being able to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

Learning a smattering of magic did help in setting up problems on the computers, but that wasn't so necessary. What was necessary was setting up the variables that kept everyone in every time and every place on track. Most travelers just invoked their amulets to return from a vacation; however, some travelers ran into trouble and couldn't do that. Questours agents were then dispatched to rescue the travelers. My computers and I kept track of the time and place the travelers had traveled to, the circumstances, and the problems likely to have occured. You might wonder how we knew the traveler hadn't invoked the return spell. Well, that was another piece of the puzzle. Each amulet was keyed to return to a certain time, usually the day after they had left. If the traveler didn't show up at the appointed time, it was off to the rescue by our most experienced agents.

Sometimes I felt like Santa Claus. I was in charge of making lists and checking them twice. I got hypertext set up for every available tour, with linkages to world histories, political systems, languages, timelines, customs, agent who found the quest or tour, who knew the place best, emergency procedures, levels of medical treatment, indigenous plants and animals, most likely things to have gone wrong. Everything we could think of just in case a search and rescue was required. Questours recruited me a staff worthy of such an undertaking, in all specialties. It was great fun and a ton of work. We brought Questours up from a one-horse tour agency with manila folders and notes written in the margins to a full-service, electronic marvel of efficiency. It took some time, but time wasn't a problem when you have available cross-time travel. If we were working on something the agency required yesterday, we went cross-time to some world or other and worked at a decent pace until it was finished, and came home on the date required. People got bonuses for dropping out of their own time/space. I made sure of it.