Board Stiff (Xanth) (42 page)

Kandy was as shocked as the others. The five heads were merging into one, pulled by the hair. Then the necks, and the rest of their bodies. They were being drawn into a kind of hungry vortex, a globular mass of hair.

Had the sisters been thrown into some destructive storm? A black hole, from which there was no escape? Kandy and the others watched, appalled, as the bodies fed into the globular maw, leaving their dresses behind, until only their legs and feet remained. Then the feet disappeared too, leaving their shoes behind.

For a moment the ball of hair hung there, pulsing, emitting coruscations of color. Then it dissolved.

A woman stood there, nudely perfect, holding an urn. She looked much like any one of the sisters, except for her hair, which was a glittering array of colors. She was absolutely beautiful. The men, of course were mesmerized.

“Oh, I must paint that!” Art murmured.

“What, are you jilting me so soon?” Astrid asked.

“Never! You are my love. But a perfect woman must be painted.”

Astrid nodded, satisfied. It was his nature to paint, and women were his prime subjects.

The phenomenal woman looked around. “I am whole at last,” she said. “Thank you, Ease, for giving me the clue.”

Ease was as amazed as the rest of them. “You are—all of them?”

“All of them,” she agreed. “They were but fragments of me, condemned to living apart. You may call me Merge.”

“But what of the pun virus antidote?” Astrid asked. “That is what we came for.”

“Yes,” Merge agreed. “This is the portal.” She tilted the urn, and shining fluid poured out. It vaporized as it dropped, not striking the floor. “There is a planetful more where this is coming from. It will safely neutralize the virus.”

“Just like that,” Pewter said. “Our Quest is complete.”

“All this time we thought the key hair might be mine or Tiara’s,” Mitch said ruefully. “We were wasting the time and effort of the Quest.”

“But we value your support and companionship,” Astrid said. “That is never a waste.”

“I will travel Xanth, pouring out elixir wherever required,” Merge said. “But I do not wish to do it alone. My former parts have never been away from the South Village. I would be eaten by the first hungry dragon I encountered. I need company and protection.” She looked at Ease again. “You gave me the key. I owe my completion to you. Let me be your woman as we travel.”

Oh, no! Kandy thought, horrified.

“Well,” Ease said, interested. “I guess me and my board could protect you.”

What irony! Kandy would wind up protecting the woman who took Ease from her. She couldn’t even blame Merge, whose assessment made perfect sense and who didn’t know about Kandy. Or Ease, who was a sucker for any pretty face and form, and Merge’s were the prettiest; she would make him a wonderful wife. If only Kandy weren’t stuck with being a board!

“You carry a board. I carry an urn. These are like male and female symbols.”

Now she was a male symbol! Kandy felt humiliated.

“Yeah, I guess.” But Ease’s gaze remained locked on something other than the urn. If only Merge would put on some clothing!

The other members of the party stood silent, letting this play out as it would.

“Perhaps I can persuade you,” Merge said. She held her urn carefully to the side and stepped into him. She kissed him. It was immediately apparent that however inexperienced she might be as a traveler, she was thoroughly competent in this respect. Kandy felt Ease’s whole body responding to her touch. His knees weakened and he might have fallen had the firmness of the woman’s contact not supported him.

Yet there was no orbiting heart. The kiss was perfect, but true passion was missing. Kandy clung to that faint hope. Would Ease know the difference?

Merge finished the kiss and stepped back, looking at him expectantly.

Ease steadied himself, recovering equilibrium. Then he spoke. “Merge, I can see that you are the perfect woman. You would make any man a fine wife, including me. The most sensible thing I could do would be to marry you and stay with you always.” He took a breath and shook his head. “But you are not my dream girl. She is the only one I could ever love. So I can’t be with you. I mean, I’ll help you spread the anti-virus, because that’s our mission, but I can’t love you. I know this is crazy, because I can’t even find my dream girl; maybe she doesn’t exist except in my imagination. But that’s the way it is.”

“You are dumping me for an imaginary woman?” Merge demanded, her eyes flashing little multi-colored sparks.

“I guess so. I’m sorry.”

“Well, I hope you find real satisfaction with your board,” Merge said acidly.

“Yeah. My board’s my best companion. It’s always there when I need it.” He paused. “Except when my dream girl comes.”

Nobody said a word.

“What happens to it when she comes?” he asked himself. “Why is it always there when she goes? Why have I never seen them together, even in my dreams?”

Silence.

Ease lifted the board before his face. He stared at it. “It’s like it has two knothole eyes, and a crack for a mouth,” he said, really looking at the board for the first time. “And there’s sap at an eye, like a tear.”

Oh yes, there was a tear. Would he catch on, or was she doomed?

He stood a moment more. “I think I’ve been a fool. I love you, board.”

Then he brought the board to his face and kissed it on that mouth.

And the spell dissolved. Kandy manifested, in the midst of an ardent kiss. The spell had been broken. Like a sleeping beauty, she had been roused by the kiss of the right man, who truly desired her. At last.

After an eternal moment Kandy broke the kiss. She saw that their heads were surrounded by orbiting hearts. No more needed to be said. She realized that the wishing well had granted her wish for adventure and romance in perhaps the only way it could. And along the way she had gained so much more she had never even thought to wish for! Such as true friends, and--

The scene froze. One of the hearts assumed the form of Fornax’s face, which was Kandy’s own face, as the Demons assumed any form they chose. “And the position of liaison between Demons,” Fornax said. “My communications to you will be of a preemptive nature; you will stop whatever you are doing at the moment and attend to them. In return for this occasional inconvenience, you will be safeguarded from all threats to your person, and will be granted a long and healthy life, in addition to Xanth’s little gift.”

“I understand,” Kandy said. “Thank you, Demoness.”

The scene unfroze. The hearts resumed their orbiting. Kandy remained in her clinch with Ease. Fornax was gone.

In the background Pewter spoke. “Ease is taken, Merge, as you can see. But your mission will still be facilitated, for it is also ours. You do not require a boyfriend at this stage; you need a protector. In your presence, with the pun virus antidote elixir, I will be able to relax my firewall and practice my normal magic. I can protect you from virtually any threat simply by changing local reality. I can make a hostile dragon friendly, or change vicious nickelpedes into half as many innocuous dimeopedes, or render a dangerous river placid, at least in our immediate vicinity. It will be good to exercise my powers again. We will travel Xanth, eliminating the virus, and conclude at Caprice Castle, where we will assist them in the restoration of puns from their capacious storage cellar. There will be time. Somewhere along the way you will surely find a man who is worthy of you.”

“That would be nice,” Merge agreed.

“We’ll travel together, as a group, as friends,” Astrid said. “Completing our mission. I will help protect you from any unkind monsters.”

“And I will have four lovely ladies to paint,” Art said. “Tiara, Astrid, Merge, and Kandy.”

“Five,” Tiara’s hair said. The demoness Metria formed, assuming the likeness of a splendidly buxom creature. “This promises to be interesting.”

“Five,” he agreed, thrilled.

Ease finally spoke. “But I sort of liked my board. It served me well. I wish I could have it too.”

Then Kandy felt her power. It was the other part of Xanth’s gift. “You will have both. Now I can change at will. That will enable me to rest while you carry me on long dull hikes. But I’ll always be your dream girl when you want me, by night or day.” She paused, considering. “And if you annoy me, I will do this.” She kissed him again, and in the middle of it became the board.

The others laughed. It was bound to be a pleasant tour.

Author’s Note

Every novel I write is a personal adventure as well as a fictive one, and each has its own special identity, like a person. This one is special in that it completes the alphabet in Xanth novels, from
Air Apparent
to
Zombie Lover
, with some duplications along the way. The first Xanth novel was
A Spell for Chameleon
, published in 1977, which I thought would be a singleton. I had no idea then that the Xanth series would make me halfway famous as a writer, and put me on the bestseller lists. The fifth one,
Ogre, Ogre,
published in OctOgre 1982, may have been the first original paperback fantasy novel by any author to make the NEW YORK TIMES bestseller list. Have I mentioned the story behind that? I was accused of being an ogre at fan conventions, when I had never even attended a convention. One of my problems with fandom is that it is not too concerned about truth. So I made an ogre the hero of the next Xanth novel I wrote. Stupid, no? But ogres are justifiably proud of their stupidity. And that one put me on the map. Now they can call me an ogre if they like; ogres are not bad folk when you get to know them. At this writing I am 78 years old; I think I have earned the right to be ogrish on occasion, though I have attended many conventions since and never been that way there. Visit my website if you wish, at
www.HiPiers.com
, where I do a monthly blog-type column and maintain an ongoing survey of electronic publishers for the benefit of aspiring writers. I was one of those myself, once upon a time; I know how rough it can be.

I wrote this novel in the months of SapTimber, OctOgre, and NoRemember, 2012. Those are ogre months, of course, reflecting the legendary violence and mental weakness of the species. As it happened, I got a new computer system and moved to it the first of OctOgre, which required some adjustment, because things didn’t happen quite the same way. You can’t fix a balky computer by bashing it into smithereens. Com Pewter is of course a parody of the mundane computer, often unfeeling and perverse. Getting along with a computer is like getting along with the opposite gender: can’t live with it, can’t live without it. I use a free open-source Linux system, which is why I can get away with parodying MacroHard Doors, with Fedora, KDE and LibreOffice. They’re not perfect, and they do glitch on occasion, but I like them very well. Then along came Hurricane Sandy, which devastated northeastern America. Then came the Presidential election. I live in Florida, so naturally the fouled up Florida election tally was not complete until four days after the election. Xanth is based on Florida, only with magic added; you can see that it is needed. You can see it in the place names: the friendly Kiss Mee River, which feeds into Lake Ogre-Chobee. The Ogre-fen-Ogre Fen to the north. I live near the With-a-Cookee River in the central area, by Lake Tsoda Popka. No, Lake Tsala Apopka in Florida does not have soft drink water, and cookies do not grow beside the Withlacoochee River, alas.

Sometimes the local news inspires episodes. For example, in this period there was a macaque monkey loose in the city of St. Petersburg, Florida that the natives, that is, people, were hiding and feeding. He was pretty well making a monkey out of the wildlife authorities. Then one day he bit a woman, apparently because she was sunning herself instead of offering him food, and the resulting commotion located his position for the authorities. But how to catch him without hurting him? They tried putting food in cages, but he was too smart to fall for that. Then they put another monkey in a cage, and when he came close, they got him with an anesthetic dart. And I thought, suppose it was a man escaping an alien zoo, too savvy to fall for their tricks, and then they put out a cage with a young woman in it? That became the chapter “Zoo.”

I had many suggestions for puns, character, and stories, and used what I could. I try to use a suggestion by a new fan before using a second one by an old fan.

I also try to maintain some balance. Would you believe, there are some readers who don’t much like puns and ask me to use less of them—while making their own pun suggestions. I even lose some readers because they get pundigestion. So every Xanth novel is a compromise, and there are always puns left over. As it is, a number of notions I could make much more of have to be given incidental treatment; I simply can’t do full justice to them all, to my regret. But some fans hardly know when to stop. Tim Bruening sent so many puns that I had to make a separate section for him in my list; that section is 1,500 words long. I told him that if I tried to use all his puns, I’d have to say that the novel was merely attached. Andrew Fine sent notions that became the bases for two chapters; in the credits I list only the basic notions, but he also filled in considerable detail, such as the centaur economic model, and the complete roster for the space voyage to Alpha. The most frustrating one was the idea that formed the original basis of this novel: that a virus destroy the puns of Xanth, so that they have to be saved, by heroic effort. I agreed it was a good idea, and this novel was born. But because that suggestion came long before I started writing the novel, I did not have it in my record, and was unable to credit it here. You’d think I’d have been smart enough to note the source at the time. Remember what I said about the intelligence of ogres? Sigh. Someone is going to be deservedly mad at me.

I’ll start the credits with one so abysmal that it needs an explanation. That is the parachute gun that shoots parrots, in Chapter 9 when they face the challenges of the Pyramid Good Magician’s Castle. It was conceived by a six year old boy who had recently immigrated from Europe and perhaps did not yet have the language straight. It is also the oldest suggestion I have processed, as it dates from about 1940. Right: that was me. As you can see, advancing age did not reform me much.