Read Unexpected Magic for Free Online

as she marched out into the passage again. Possibly due to its hallucinogenic nature, that damnable whistling was still going on, pure torture to her ears. From the midst of it she could hear Adny’s voice. “Nad Coven, do we have your surrender, or do we attack again?”
    I’ve had enough! thought F. C. Stone. She marched to her desk, where the screen was showing Adny’s curlicue, pulsing to the beat of the beastly shrilling. “Stop this noise!” she commanded. “And give me a picture of Partlett ’s flight deck.” If you can , she thought, feeling for the moment every inch the captain of the starship Candida.
    The whistling died to an almost bearable level. “I need function Eleven to give you vision,” Adny said—irritably? casually? or was it too casually? He was certainly overcasual when he added, “It does exist, you know.”
    Give him what he wants and get rid of him, thought F. C. Stone. “I authorize function Eleven then,” she said.
    â€œ Oh !” said the computer, like a hurt child.
    And there was a picture on the screen, greenish and jumping and sleeting green lines, but fairly clear for all that. Partlett ’s controls, F. C. Stone noted absently, had fewer screens than she expected—far fewer than she put in her books—but far more ranks of square buttons and far, far too many dials for comfort, all of them with a shabby, used look. But she was looking mostly at the woman who seemed to be asleep in the padded swivel seat in front of the controls. Mother naked, F. C. Stone was slightly shocked to see, and not a mark or a wrinkle on her slender body or on her thin and piquant face. Abruptly F. C. Stone remembered being quite proud of her looks when she was seventeen, and this woman was herself at seventeen, only beyond even her most idealized memories. Immense regret suffused F. C. Stone.
    The whistling, blessedly, stopped. “Candy is really the same age as you,” Adny observed.
    Her attention turned to him. His seat was humbler, a padded swivel stool. Sitting on it was a small man with a long, nervy face, the type of man who usually has tufts of hair growing in his ears and below his eyes, as if to make up for the fact that such men’s hair always tends to be thin and fluffy on top. Adny’s hair was noticeably thin on top, but he had smoothed and curled it to disguise the fact, and it was obvious that he had plucked and shaved all other hair from his wrinkled little body; F. C. Stone had no doubt of this, since he was naked, too. The contrast between his appearance and his voice was, to say the least of it, startling.
    Adny saw her look and grinned rather ruefully as he leaned forward to hold a paper cup under some kind of tap below the control panel. She realized he could see her, too. The contrast between herself and the sleeping beauty beside him made her feel almost as rueful as he looked. “Can you give me a picture of Nad and any damage there?” she asked, still clinging to her role as Captain. It seemed the only way to keep any dignity.
    â€œCertainly,” he said, running his finger down a row of the square buttons.
    She found herself apparently staring down at a small town of old houses built up against the side of a hot stony hill—red roofs, boxlike white houses, courtyards shaded with trees. It was quite like a town in Spain or Italy, except that the shapes of the walls and the slant of the roofs were subtly different and wrong. It was the very smallness of the difference between this and towns she knew which, oddly enough, convinced F. C. Stone for once and for all that this place was no fake. She really was looking at a real town in a real world somewhere else entirely. There was a smoking, slaggy crater near the market square and another downhill below the town. That had destroyed a road. She had glimpses of the other spaceships, drifting about looking rather like hot-air