Word Salad II

The Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility in the evening can seem like a relatively calm place for those who don’t know the venue as well as Nita and Kit do. After sunset the elective daytime ceiling removes itself from over the worldgating facility’s vast shining interior and lets in the huge night sky of Rirhath B’s native cluster: the multicolor swell-and-shrink of a couple of hundred short-term variable stars, slow and placid as breathing. It could even seem romantic, if the place wasn’t exactly as busy in the evenings as it is when the ferocious system primary is up. The transit of three galaxies goes on untroubled through the place as it has for thousands of years now, and business goes on there as well, just as cutthroat as always.

It has a tendency to go on out in the open, as the Crossings management has (after some of the ructions of more recent years) taken a liking to the concept that there’s no harm in most of the place’s business being carried out in plain view. The ability to hear what’s happening, of course, is strictly controlled by the management, who determine what translation modules are operating at any given time and in any specific area, and whether sound waves (in species that use sound to communicate) are allowed to travel past the area where business is being discussed. The privacy of other modes of communication — light, gesture, various forms of expanded sensoria, thought — are managed by other means, either science or wizardry, depending on what makes most sense. In fact, wizardry is much more in evidence than it used to be, since the Stationmaster’s position passed to a wizard in the wake of the events of the Pullulus War.

This is the case on this particular evening, when a rather fraught business meeting is taking place out in the middle of the Crossings’ main concourse, hard by the Master’s office. That office has stood for nearly a thousand years on the same spot where the first worldgate spontaneously popped open in a muddy riverside cave. Of course now acres of polished white floor stretch around that spot on all sides—the main concourse area is about the same size as London inside the M25—and the office itself is an openwork construction of blue and silver chrome and self-programming hybrid management consoles. On-demand meeting spaces are erected around the Stationmaster’s office at need, and right now one of these, with a language-specific cone of silence erected over and around it, is mostly filled with an elliptical, centerless forcefield table.

On either side of the center of the ellipse stand a number of chairs shaped like unusually longlegged camel saddles: these are occupied by six two-meter-tall creatures who look like annoyed blue preying mantises. These are flailing their triple-jointed arms around and shrieking in a manner reminiscent of what rabid peacocks would sound like if peacocks could be rabid. At the far end of the table is a young Rirhait male with his shining, manylegged magenta self draped over a rack unusually plain and utilitarian for a being of his rank and seniority (especially the Master of this facility). At the other end of the table, inside a spell-ellipse whose broad arcs and inner detail are faintly visible through the topmost layer of the polished white floor, are two hominid wizards, one male, one female, both past latency age but not so far so as to be less than extremely dangerous should the mood move them. If the shrieking blue aliens keep looking at one of them and shrieking more loudly than even these circumstances require, this will be the reason. One of these two wizards has reason to bear them a grudge, and the five-minute discussion they’ve just had with her is making them nervous...

I started suspecting some weeks back that we might be close to losing Steve Jobs. I never suspected we were this close, though. This morning's news comes as a shock, and is a source of great sadness.

From the time I first got my hands on an Apple product some three decades ago -- I was lent a IIc by a friend -- I realized that these machines were something unusual and special,  especially in terms of being forward-looking and easy to use. And later on, when other friends would come to me for advice on the subject, I would often recommend that they think about getting an Apple. (Bob Greenberger, for example, can vouch for how, in company with a group of  DC Comics folk, I happily cooperated in dragging Len Wein into an Apple dealership on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, the goal being to make him buy a Mac.)

I can't now remember when the idea came to me that the Powers that Be in the Young Wizards universe might have a favorite brand of computer. But then the issue came up during the outlining of High Wizardry... and knowing a little of the thinking that supposedly lay behind the Apple logo, there was no other possible candidate for the branding on the computer that would house the version of the Wizard's Manual offered to Dairine.

Over subsequent books -- and as new devices like the WizPod occasionally added themselves to the series -- a few fans here and there have speculated that I must be a very serious Apple geek, or (humorously)  that I was being paid by the company for the product placement. Lest anybody should be having doubts about this, people should know that the only money that's ever changed hands between me and Apple would have been when I bought my first iPod some years back. All the computers in our household are PCs of one strain or another, and most of our phones are Android-based. But that doesn't mean that I haven't had my eye on the new iPod Touch for a while... since if it's good enough for my characters, it's certainly good enough for me.

I very much doubt Steve Jobs ever knew about this affectionate running gag. If he had known, I don't think he'd have minded, as I suspect he'd have understood what I was saluting: a certain visionary quality about both the objects he helped create and the thinking behind them. In any case, the trend will be continuing. In the next YW book, the first WizPads will be appearing casually in the background (along with some perhaps predictable interplatform sniping from wizards more firmly in the Android camp). And with today's events in mind, it wouldn't surprise me if somewhere along the line there's a mention that the Powers that Be have recently "reclaimed an out-assigned member of their design team" for important work elsewhere.

...As the wizards would say: Go well, cousin Steve. And thanks for reminding us that it really is possible to change the world for the better if you just keep deciding every day that you're not going to take "no" for an answer.

 

"In the hotly anticipated ninth installment of the Young Wizards series, Kit and Nita become part of an elite team investigating the mysterious 'message in a bottle' that holds the first clues to the secrets of the long-lost inhabitants of Mars. But not even wizardry can help them cope with the strange events that unfold when the "bottle" is uncorked and a life form from another era emerges.

"Though the Martians seem friendly, they have a plan that could change the shape of more than one world. As the shadow of interplanetary war stretches over both worlds, Kit and Nita must fight to master the strange and ancient synergy binding them to Mars and its last inhabitants. If they don't succeed, the history that left Mars lifeless will repeat itself on Earth..."