Unexpected Magic Read Free Page B

con carne. The little green letters on the screen kept retreating behind the glass to the distant end of a long, long tunnel. “I will do this!” she told herself fiercely. “I am an intelligent adult—probably even a genius—and I will not be dominated by a mere machine!”
    And she typed all over again:
    CHAPTER ONE
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â The Captain had been at board and screen ever since jump—a total of ten hours. Her hands shook with weariness, making it an effort to hold them steady on her switches. Her head was muzzy, her mouth foul with nutrient concentrates. But since the mutiny, it was sit double watches or fail to bring the starship Candida safely through the intricate system of Meld....
    At this point she began to get a strange sense of power. She was dominating this damned machine, even though she was doing it only by exploiting her own sensations. Also, she was becoming interested in what might be going to happen to the starship Candida , not to speak of the reasons that had led up to the mutiny aboard her. She continued writing furiously until long after midnight. When she stopped at last, she had to pry her legs loose from her chair.
    â€œ That’s more like it, Mum!” Danny said the next morning, reading it as it came from the printer.
    He was, as usual, right. Starship Candida was the book that made the name of F. C. Stone. It won prizes. It sold in resorts and newsagents all over the world. It was, reviewers said, equally remarkable for its insight into the Captain’s character as for the intricate personal relationships leading to the mutiny. Much was spoken about the tender and peculiar relationships between the sexes. This last made F. C. Stone grin rather. All she had done was to revenge herself on Danny by reversing the way things were between them. In the book the Captain was all-powerful and dominating and complained a lot about the food. The Mate had a hypnotically induced mind-set that caused him to bleat for assistance at the first sign of trouble.
    Her next book, The Mutineers , was an even greater success. For this one, F. C. Stone extended the intricate personal relationships to the wider field of galactic politics. She discovered she reveled in politics. Provided she was making up the politics herself, there seemed no limit to how intricate she could make them.
    Since then she had, well, not stuck to a formula—she was much more artfully various than that—but as she said and Danny agreed, there was no point in leaving a winning game. Though she did not go back to starship Candida , she stayed with that universe and its intricate politics. There were aliens in it, too, which she always enjoyed. And she kept mostly out in space, so that she could continue to describe pilots astronauting at the controls of a word processor. Sooner or later in most of her books, someone, human or alien, would have sat long hours before the screen until dazed with staring, aching in the back, itching in the nose—for the burning of Asian spices in the kitchen tended to give her hay fever—and with cramped hands, this pilot would be forced to maneuver arduously through jump. This part always, or nearly always, got written when F. C. Stone was unable to resist staying up late to finish the chapter.
    Danny continued to monitor his mother. He was proud of what he had made her do. In the holidays and around the edges of school, he hung over her shoulder and brought her continual mugs of strong black coffee. This beverage began to appear in the books, too. The mutineer humans drank gav , while their law-abiding enemies quaffed chvi. Spacer aliens staggered from their nav-couches to gulp down kivay , and the mystics of Meld used xfy to induce an altered state of consciousness, although this was not generally spotted as being the same substance. And it was all immensely popular.
    It was all due to the word processor, she thought, giving the