The screen rippled in a manner reminiscent of a shrug.
YOU CAN LEAD A HORSE TO WATER, it printed.
“Look, I'll show you!” Grey said. “It's not even locked, because it's empty.'' He went to his door, opened it, stepped across the hall, and opened the facing door.
A girl stood just inside the apartment. She was rather pretty, with her brown hair tied back with a neat ribbon and every button in place. “Oh—are you the superintendent?” she asked. “The stove doesn't seem to—”
Grey swallowed his surprise. He had had no idea that anyone was moving in! “Uh, there's a switch in back that—I'll show you—I'm not the superintendent, just the boy next door—I mean—” He stifled his confusion and walked to the stove and pushed the switch. “Now it'll work. They just didn't want it going on by accident—”
“Oh thank you!” she exclaimed. “You are so helpful! What's your name?”
“Uh, Grey. Grey Murphy. I—I go to City College, and-”
“Oh, how nice! I'm going there too! I'm Agenda.”
He goggled at her. “Agenda?”
“Agenda Andrews. How nice to find a friend so soon!”
“A friend?” He was still bemused by the coincidence of names. He had just chosen that one from the Worm's list!
“Aren't you?” she asked, looking cutely troubled.
“Uh, oh, of course! The friendliest! I just—”
“Why don't we have lunch together? I'm sure you know all the best local places.”
There was another pitfall. “Uh, sure, but—”
“Dutch, of course. I wouldn't presume to impose—”
It remained awkward. He was broke until his weekly check arrived from home. “I, uh—”
“On second thought, let's eat in,” she said brightly. “I happen to have some things with me.”
“Uh, I've got half a can of beans—”
“No need.” She bustled to the kitchen cupboard, which it seemed she had already stocked. “What would you like? I have Asparagus, bread, corn, doughnuts, eggplant, fish—”
“Uh, doughnuts are fine.” She had her shelf organized alphabetically?
So it was that they had a nice meal of doughnuts. Before he knew it, he had a girlfriend, and she had his whole life organized, just about. It was great, for a few days, but then it got on his nerves. Agenda did everything by the number, or rather, by the alphabet. But Grey was a disorganized kind of guy. He didn't like having his life run by the clock and book.
It was also apparent that Agenda's arrangements were progressive. First they had an informal meal together. Then they had a formal one. Then they went on a date: a G-rated movie, where they held hands. Then they kissed. Then she set an appointment for him to meet her parents.
He realized that he was on a well-organized treadmill to marriage and a completely mundane life. He liked Agenda, but he wasn't ready to make that commitment yet. He was trying to break the mundane traces, and that would be impossible with her.
“Damn!” he muttered under his breath.
YOU HAVE A PROBLEM? the computer screen inquired. The machine was always on, now; the first time he tried to turn it off after installing the Worm program, the screen had protested with such logic that he had backed off and left it on. Grey was barely average in gumption too, it seemed.
“Well, yes,” he confessed. “I've got this girlfriend, and she's nice, but she's so organized I can't stand it, and now—”
YOU WISH TO HAVE A DIFFERENT GIRL?
“Well, I hate to say it, but—”
CHOOSE: ALIMONY, ANOREXIA, BEZOAR, BULIMIA, CATHARTIC, CONNIPTION—
“Anorexia!” he cut in. He knew better than to take up with a girl called Alimony! Of course the name might not mean anything, but why takes chances? Anorexia sounded like a good name.
GO TO THE APARTMENT ACROSS THE HALL.
“But that's where Agenda is!” he protested. “If I go there, I just know she'll have things so organized that I'll never get away.”
YOU CAN LEAD A HORSE TO WATER.
Grey sighed. He'd just have to show the machine! He opened his door and crossed the hall. He knocked on the door.
It opened. There stood a strange, thin girl.
“Uh—” Grey said, amazed.
“You don't think I'm too fat, do you?” the girl inquired anxiously. “I'm on a diet, but—”
“Uh, no, you're fine! Uh, I thought Agenda—”
“She moved out this morning. She said this place was too disorganized, or something. I'm Anorexia Nervosa.”
Moved out this morning? He had never suspected! What a coincidence! “I'm Grey. Uh, you don't believe in organization?”
“Oh, no, I'm very disorganized! No discipline at all. I keep getting fat. You don't think—”
Grey took a solid look at her. She was coat hanger thin.
“If you were any thinner, you'd look like a boy,” he said.
She laughed nervously. “Oh, you're just saying that! I'm so fat, I hate it! I thought if I lived alone, maybe I could reduce, and look pretty.”
As it turned out, this was no innocent ploy. Anorexia truly believed she was fat, and continually dieted to make herself thinner. It was awkward eating with her, because she barely pecked at her food, leaving most of it on the plate though she looked as if she were starving. He tried to reassure her, but she simply would not believe she was thin enough.
“I'm afraid she's going to keel over any moment from hunger!” Grey exclaimed in the privacy of his apartment. “Then they'll think that I'm somehow to blame.”
YOU WISH A DIFFERENT GIRL?
“I guess so.”
CHOOSE: ALIMONY, BEZOAR, BULIMIA, CATHARTIC, CHLAMYDIA, CONNIPTION—
“No, no, wait!” Grey cried. He had done a smidgeon of research in the interim, because of his association with Anorexia, and so had a notion what to expect from Bulimia, Bezoar, Conniption, or Cathartic.
DYSLEXIA, EMETIC, EMPHYSEMA, ENIGMA, EUPHORIA—
“Dyslexia!” he cried, realizing that the computer would not stop until he made a choice.
GO TO THE—
“I know!” He opened his door, crossed the hall, and knocked.
Sure enough, a new girl was there. She was a blue-eyed blonde, and looked neither fat nor thin. “Oh, you must be the nice young man across the hall!” she exclaimed. Anorexia told me—”
“Uh, yes. Uh, you don't have any hang-ups about eating, do you?”
She blinked in cute surprise. “Why no. Should I?”
Dyslexia seemed like the perfect girl. Then he discovered that she couldn't read. There was something wrong with her eyes or with her brain, so that she saw things backwards or upside down. She had managed to finesse her way through classes, for she was bright enough and had good legs, but it was a chore to get through a written homework assignment. He had to read the material to her and correct her odd errors of writing. This soon became tedious.
YOU HAVE A PROBLEM?
There was the Worm again! “I like her, but—”
The screen printed the list of names. Grey knew better than to choose Emetic or Euthanasia, and wasn't sure about Enigma, so he chose Euphoria.
Euphoria was luscious. Her black hair swirled down around her cleavage like a living thing, and her eyes were hypnotically intense. She was extremely friendly, too. But very soon he discovered what she was into. “But I don't, uh, do the drug scene!” he protested.
“Try it, you'll like it,” she urged, proffering a cigarette of strange design. “This stuff will send you to the moon and stars, and you will float for eternity!”
That was exactly what he was afraid of. He fled.
YOU HAVE A PROBLEM?
He tried one more time, passing over Melanoma, Miasma, Treblinka, and Polyploidy in favor of one that sounded safe: Salmonella. That turned out to be a mistake. Sal was a great cook, but the food turned out to be contaminated.
Now, waking weak and bleary, he had finally caught on: “Worm, you're doing it delib
erately! You are offering me only treacherous girls!”
I AM NOT WORM. THAT WAS ONLY THE INSTALLATION
“All right, already! So I'll call you Sending! Now why are you finding me only girls who are trouble?”
HOW COULD YOU SAY SUCH A THING!
“Every one of them has something wrong with her! If you can't do better than that, I don't want any! All that's happened has been a lot of heartache and my grades descending to D +! Let's give up on girls and concentrate on scholastics.”
TRY ONE MORE GIRL.
“No! I'm through with women! I want to make good grades and be something in the world!”
TRY ONE MORE GIRL.
So it was that way. He could not out argue the computer; it only repeated itself indefinitely. “All right: one more girl. And when that one messes up, it's grades.”
CHOOSE—
“No you don't! All those names are pied! I don't care about the name! Just find me a good girl, one I can be with and—”
AGREED.
“No tricks, now, or the deal's off! Any little pretext and I'll dump her! You got that, Worm—I mean, Sending?”
GO TO THE APARTMENT ACROSS THE HALL.
“All right! One more time!” Because, after all, he did need a girl. Without one, he would be reduced to having to do his homework, which was a fate only half a smidgeon this side of oblivion.
Grumpily, still in his rumpled pajamas though he saw by the bleary clock on the hall wall that it was nearly noon, he knocked on the apartment door.
The door cracked open and a blue eye peered out.
“You're not a monster, are you?” she inquired.
Grey had to smile. “Well, I do feel like one at the moment, but as far as I know, that's temporary. Who are you?”
She opened the door wider, reassured. “Oh, good, a human person! I was afraid that in this horror house it would be much worse. I'm Ivy.”
“I'm Grey. Are you a normal girl?”
Now she laughed. “Of course not! I'm a princess!”
Well, she had a sense of humor! Despite his best intention, he liked her. Maybe the Sending really was playing it straight this time.
Ivy invited him in, and they talked. She seemed just as eager to know about him and his situation as he was to know about her. Soon he was telling her all about his dreary life, which somehow seemed much less dull when she was listening. Ivy was an attractive girl about a year his junior, with blue eyes and fair hair that sometimes reflected with a greenish tint, evidently picking up whatever color was near her. She had been frightened at first but now was relaxed, and was a fun person to be with.
But there were some definitely odd things about her. For one thing, she seemed quite unfamiliar with this city, or indeed, this country, perhaps even this world. He had to show her how the stove worked and even how to open a can of peas. “What funny magic!” she exclaimed, watching the electric can opener.
For it seemed that she believed in magic. She claimed to be from a magic land called Xanth, spelled with an X, where she was a princess and pies grew on trees. So did shoes and pillows. Monsters roamed the jungles, and she even had a pet dragon called Stanley Steamer.
She was obviously suffering delusions. Sending had mousetrapped him again. But by the time he was sure of this, it was too late: he liked Ivy too well to let her go. She was a great girl, apart from her dreamland. Since her delusion was harmless, he decided to tolerate it.
But there were hurdles. One came when she realized that he was not teasing her about his situation. Her face clouded with horror. “You mean, this isn't a setting in the gourd? This really is Mundania?”
That was a quaint way of putting it! “That's right. Mundania. No magic.”
“Oh, this is worse than I ever dreamed!” she exclaimed. “Drear Mundania!”
She had that right! His life had been about as drear as it could get—until she came into it. “But what are you doing here if you didn't know you were coming?” he asked. For the sake of compatibility, he did not debate her Xanth delusion; he would find out where she really was from, eventually. The truth was, he rather liked her dream realm; it had a special quality of appeal. Pies growing on trees—that certainly sounded better than canned beans!
“I used the Heaven Cent,” she explained matter-of-factly. She lifted a common old style penny she wore on a chain around her neck. “It was supposed to take me where I was most needed, which is where the Good Magician is lost. But the curse must have—oh, no!” He was catching on to the rules of her magic land.
“You mean it would have taken you there, but a curse made it go wrong? So you're stuck where you shouldn't be?”
“Yes,” she said tragically, near tears. “Oh, how am I to get out of this? There's no magic in Mundania!”
“That's for sure.” Yet somehow he wanted to help her to return to that magic land, even though he knew it wasn't real. Her belief was so firm, so touching!
“Oh, Grey, you've got to help me get back to Xanth!” she exclaimed.
What could he say? “I'll do what I can.”
She flung her arms around him and kissed him. She was an expressive girl. He knew she was suffering from a pervasive delusion, and that sooner or later the authorities would pick her up and return her to whatever institution she had escaped from, but he also knew that he liked her. That made his dilemma worse.
Grey did what he could. He took Ivy to the college library and looked up Xanth. It turned out to be a prefix, “xantho,” meaning “yellow,” that connected to various terms. Ivy said that wasn't what she wanted. The library was a loss.
Then, on the way back to the apartment building. Ivy spied something in a store window. “There's Xanth!” she exclaimed, pointing.
Grey looked. It was a paperback book. On it was a star proclaiming “A New Xanth Novel!” Did Ivy think she came from this book?
“There's Chex!” she continued.
“Chex?”
“The winged centaur. She's actually four years younger than me, but she seems older because her sire's Xap the hippogryph, and monsters mature faster than human folk, so she matured halfway faster than I did, and she's married now and has a foal, Che. And there's Volney Vole, who can't say his esses, only he thinks we're the ones who have it wrong. And—”
“This book—it really describes where you think you're from?” he demanded incredulously.
She faced him, baffled. “Where I think I'm from?”
“This book—it's fantasy!”
“Of course! Don't you believe me?”
Damn! He had his foot in it now! Why hadn't he thought to avoid the issue? “I believe—you think you're from there,” he said carefully.
“I am from Xanth!” she retorted. “Look in the book! I'm in there, I know!” But she was perilously close to tears.
Grey wavered. Should he get the book and check? But if she was in it, what would it prove? Simply that she had read the book and made it the focus of her delusion. Besides, he remained broke.
“Uh, I'm sure you're right,” he said. “I don't need to look in the book.” That was a half truth, but it mollified her. They continued walking back to the apartment building.
Grey's mind was seething with thoughts. Now he knew where Ivy thought she was from, but he didn't know whether to be relieved or alarmed. It wasn't a land of her own invention—but was it any better as a land someone else had invented? The delusion was the same. Still, it did offer some insight into her framework; if he got the book and read it, he would at least be able to relate to the things she did.
Still, he wished that she had a better notion of the distinction between fantasy and reality. She was such a nice girl in other respects, the perfect girl, really, and he could really like her a lot, if only—
Could like her a lot? He already did! Which made it that much worse.
In the hallway she stopped. “This can't be Mundania!” she exclaimed.
“Where else would it be?” he asked warily.
“Beca
use we can understand each other!” she said excitedly. “We speak the same language!”
“Well, sure, but—”
“Mundanes speak gibberish! They can't be understood at all, unless there is magic to translate what they say into real speech. But you are perfectly intelligible!”
“I should hope so.” Was this the beginning of a breakthrough? Was she coming to terms with reality? “What language do they speak in Xanth?”
“Well, it's the language. The human language, I mean. All human folk speak it, just as all dragon folk speak Dragonese, and all trees speak tree-talk. Grundy Golem can talk to any of them, and my little brother Dolph when he becomes one, but the rest of us can't, because our talents are different. Not that it matters much, usually, because all the partbreeds speak human too, like the centaurs and harpies and naga, and those are mostly whom we deal with. But the Mundanes are sort of crazy; they speak all different languages and can't even understand each other a lot of the time; it's as if each group of them is a different animal species. Only in Xanth do they speak the human language. So this has to be an aspect of Xanth. You almost had me fooled!” Just when he thought she was getting better, she got worse! But because he liked her, and knew how sensitive she was to criticism, he spoke cautiously. “How do you know that you aren't speaking Mundanian? I mean, that maybe this is Mundania, and you can speak our language when you really want to?”
Ivy considered. Then she shook her head. “No, that's impossible. I've never been to Mundania, so I've had no way to learn its language. So this has to be an aspect of Xanth. What a relief!”
“But if this is Xanth, then everything I've known all my life is a delusion!” Grey said, hoping to shock her into some awareness of the problem.
“I know,” she said sympathetically. “You're such a nice man, I hate to have it be like this, but you will have to face the truth sometime. I'll do my best to help you with it.”
Grey opened his mouth, but closed it again, baffled. She had the situation reversed! How was he ever going to get through to her?
“Let me think about it,” she said. “First I'll figure out a way to convince you. Then we can go look for the Good Magician, who must be somewhere near here. Then we can guide him home, and the Quest will finally be done.”