It irritated Foaly immensely that a centaur of his genius was being forced to justify himself to an assistant for the sake of relations with his sister.
“I got permission just now, from Commander Kelp. It’s all on video.”
“Wow,” said Mayne. “In that case, let’s see those little fellows in action.”
Maybe he’s not so bad, thought Foaly, keying in the activation code on an old-fashioned manual keyboard in the case.
Once the code was punched in, the case synched with the lab’s wall screen, splitting it into a dozen blank boxes. This was nothing particularly special, and would have absolutely no one clapping their hands and saying Ooooh. What would have people applauding and gushing was the swarm of miniature genetically modified dragonflies waking up inside the case. The insects shook their sleepy heads and set their wings buzzing, then lifted off in perfect synchronized formation to hover at Foaly’s eye level.
“Oooh,” said Mayne, clapping his hands.
“Just wait,” said Foaly, activating the little dragonflies’ sensors. “Prepare to be amazed.”
The cloud of dragonflies jittered as though suddenly charged, and their tiny eyes glowed green. Eleven of the twelve onscreen boxes displayed composite 3-D views of Foaly, stitched together from the viewpoint of each insect. Not only did the insects read the visible spectrum, but also infrared, UV, and thermal. A constantly updating stream of data scrolled down the side of the screens, displaying reams of information on Foaly’s heart rate, blood pressure, pulse, and gas emissions.
“These little beauties can go anywhere and see everything. They can glean information from every microbe. And all anyone can see is a swarm of dragonflies. My little ARClights could fly through the X-ray in an airport, and no one could tell they are stuffed with bio-tech. They go where I send them, and spy on who I tell them to.”
Mayne pointed at a corner of the screen. “That section is blank.”
Foaly harrumphed. “I did a trial in Fowl Manor. And Artemis somehow detected the virtually undetectable. I imagine my beauties are lying in pieces under an electron microscope in his laboratory.”
“I didn’t read that in any report.”
“No. I forgot to mention it. That trial wasn’t exactly an unqualified success, but this one will be.”
Foaly’s fingers were clicking blurs on the keyboard. “Once I program in the mission parameters, then my ARClights will have citywide surveillance restored in minutes.” Foaly instructed a single bug to land on his index finger. “You, my little fellow, are special, because you will be going to my home, just to make sure my beloved Caballine is all right.”
Mayne leaned in, peering at the little bug. “You can do that?”
Foaly wiggled his finger, and the bug flew off, winding sideways through a vent.
“I can do whatever I like. They are even coded to my voice. Watch.” Foaly leaned back in his chair and cleared his throat. “ARClight activation code alpha alpha one. I am Foaly. Foaly is my name. Immediate deployment to downtown Haven. Scenario three. All sections. Citywide disaster. Fly, my pretties, fly.”
The ARClights moved like a shoal of silver fish through water, gliding through the air in perfect synchronized flight, then forming into a tight cylinder and shooting through the vent. Their wings skittered against the chute wall, sending back data from every inch covered.
The theatricality appealed to Mayne’s graphic novel–loving sensibility.
“‘Fly, my pretties, fly.’ Cool. Did you make that up yourself?”
Foaly began analyzing the data that was already flooding in from his ARClights.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Every word a Foaly original.”
The ARClights could be steered manually; or, if that function was off-line, they would fly to preordained irradiated spots on the cavern roof. The tiny bio-tech insects performed perfectly, and within minutes Foaly had a functioning network suspended above Haven that could be manipulated with a word or gesture.
“Now, Mayne,” he said to his nephew. “I want you to take over here and feed information to Commander Kelp over the”—he shuddered—“radio. I am going to take a minute to check on your Aunty Caballine.”
“Mak dak jiball, Oncle,” said Mayne, saluting. Something else actual unicorns could not do.
Humans have a saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which basically means if you think it’s beautiful, then it is beautiful. The elfin version of this saying was composed by the great poet B.O. Selecta, who said: Even the plainest of the plain shall deign to reign, which critics have always thought was a bit rhymey. The dwarf version of the maxim is: If it don’t stink, marry it, which is slightly less romantic, but the general gist is the same.
Foaly had no need of these sayings, for in his mind beauty was personified by his wife, Caballine. If anyone had ever asked him for a definition of beauty, he would simply have directed their gaze to his wrist, and then activated the hologram crystal built into his wrist computer, projecting a revolving CG rendering of his wife into midair.
Foaly was so in love with his wife that he sighed whenever Caballine crossed his mind, which was several times an hour. As far as the centaur was concerned, he had found his soul mate.
Love had tugged Foaly’s fetlock relatively late in life. When all the other centaurs had been galloping around the sim-pasture, pawing the dirt, texting the fillies, and sending their chosen ones candied carrots, Foaly had been up to his armpits in laboratory equipment, trying to get his radical inventions out of his head and into the real world. By the time he realized that love might be passing him by, it had already disappeared over the horizon. So the centaur convinced himself that he didn’t need companionship and was content to live for his job and work friends.
Then, when Holly Short was missing in another dimension, he met Caballine at Police Plaza. At least that was what he told everyone. Met might be a slightly misleading verb, as it implies that the situation was pleasant, or at least nonviolent. What actually happened was that one of Foaly’s face-recognition software programs malfunctioned in a bank camera and identified Caballine as a goblin bank robber. She was immediately pounced on by the security guard jumbo pixies and ridden to Police Plaza. The ultimate ignominy for a centaur.
By the time the entire mess was traced back to software error, Caballine had been confined to a gel cell for over three hours. She had missed her mother’s birthday party and was extremely anxious to throttle the person responsible for the mix-up. Foaly was told by Commander Kelp in no uncertain terms to get down to the holding cells and take responsibility for his foul-up.
Foaly trudged down there, ready to spout one of a dozen standard excuses, all of which evaporated when he came face-to-face with Caballine in the hospitality suite. Foaly didn’t meet many centaurs, and he certainly would never bump into one as beautiful as Caballine, with her chestnut eyes, strong wide nose, and glossy hair down to her waist.
“Just my luck,” he blurted, without thinking. “That’s just typical of my luck.”
Caballine had herself all psyched up to tear metaphorical strips off the hide of whatever imbecile had been responsible for her incarceration—and perhaps actual strips, too—but Foaly’s reaction gave her pause, and she decided to give him one chance to dig himself out of the hole he was in.
“What is just typical of your luck?” she said, regarding him frankly, letting him know that his answer better be a good one.
Foaly knew the pressure was on and so thought carefully before answering.
“It’s just typical of my luck,” he said eventually, “that I finally meet someone as beautiful as you, and all you want to do is kill me.”
This was a pretty good line, and, judging by the misery in Foaly’s eyes, there was also more than a grain of truth in it.
Caballine decided to take pity on the dejected centaur before her and dial down her antagonism a few notches, but it was too early to let Foaly off the hook completely.
“And why wouldn?
??t I want to kill you? You think I look like a criminal.”
“I don’t think that. I would never think that.”
“Really? Because the algorithm that identified me as a goblin bank robber is based on your thought patterns.”
This lady is smart, Foaly realized. Smart and gorgeous.
“True,” he said. “But I imagine there were secondary factors involved.”
“Such as?”
Foaly decided to go for broke. He felt an attraction toward this centaur that was short-circuiting his brain. The closest he could come to describing the sensation was a sustained low-level electrical shock, like the ones he inflicted on volunteers in his sleep-deprivation experiments.
“Such as, my machine is incredibly stupid, because you are the opposite of a goblin bank robber.”
Caballine was amused but not won over just yet.
“Which is?”
“Which is a non-goblin customer making a deposit.”
“Which is what I am, dummy.”
Foaly flinched. “What?”
“Dummy. Your machine is a dummy.”
“Yes. Absolutely. I will have it disassembled immediately and reassembled as a toaster.”
Caballine bit her lip and could have conceivably been holding back a smile.
“That’s a start. But you still have a long way to go before we’re done here.”
“I understand. If you have any capital crimes in your past, I could wipe them from your record. In fact, if you’d like to disappear altogether, I could arrange that.” Foaly rethought this last sentence. “That sounded like I was going to have you killed, which I totally am not. The last thing I would ever do is have you killed. Quite the opposite.”