built.'
'And the Land Beyond?'
'All grown from seeds. Seeds that I invented.'
'And it is also a Turing machine, then? All controlled by Wizard 0.2?'
'No,' said King Coyote. 'Managed by Wizard. Controlled by me.'
'But the messages in the Cipherers' Market control all the events in the Land Beyond, do they not?'
'You are most perceptive, Princess Nell.'
'Those messages came to Wizard-just another Turing machine.'
'Open the altar,' said King Coyote, pointing to a large brass plate with a keyhole in the middle.
Princess Nell used her key to open the lock, and King Coyote flipped back the lid of the altar. Inside were two small machines, one for reading tapes and one for writing them.
'Follow me,' said King Coyote, and opened a trap door set into the floor behind the altar.
Princess Nell followed him down a spiral staircase into a small room. The connecting rods from the altar came down into this room and terminated at a small console.
'Wizard is not even connected to the altar! It does nothing,' Princess Nell said.
'Oh, Wizard does a great deal. It helps me keep track of things, does calculations, and so on. But all of that business up there on the stage is just for show— just to impress the commoners. When a message comes here from the Cipherers' Market, I read it myself, and answer it myself.
'So as you can see, Princess Nell, the Land Beyond is not really a Turing machine at all. It's actually a person— a few people, to be precise. Now it's all yours.'
King Coyote led Princess Nell back into the heart of his keep and gave her a tour of the place. The best part was the library. He showed her the books containing the rules for programming Wizard 0.2, and other books explaining how to make atoms build themselves into machines, buildings, and whole worlds.
'You see, Princess Nell, you have conquered this world today, and now that you have conquered it, you'll find it a rather boring place. Now it's your responsibility to make new worlds for other people to explore and conquer.' King Coyote waved his hand out the window into the vast, empty white space where once had stood the Land Beyond. 'There's plenty of empty space out there.'
'What will you do, King Coyote?'
'Call me John, Your Royal Highness. As of today, I no longer have a kingdom.'
'John, what will you do?'
'I have a quest of my own.'
'What is your quest?'
'To find the Alchemist, whoever he may be.'
'And is there . . .'
Nell stopped reading the Primer for a moment. Her eyes had filled up with tears.
'Is there what?' said John's voice from the book.
'Is there another? Another who has been with me during my quest?'
'Yes, there is,' John said quietly, after a short pause. 'At least I have always sensed that she is here.'
'Is she here now?'
'Only if you build a place for her,' John said. 'Read the books, and they will show you how.'
With that, John, the former King Coyote and Emperor of the Land Beyond, vanished in a flash of light, leaving Princess Nell alone in her great dusty library. Princess Nell put her head down on an old leather-bound book and smelled its rich fragrance. One tear of joy ran from each eye. But she mastered the impulse to cry and reached for the book instead.
They were magic books, and they drew Princess Nell into them so deeply that, for many hours, perhaps even days, she was not aware of her surroundings; which scarcely mattered as nothing remained of the Land Beyond. But at some length, she realized that something was tickling her foot. She reached down absently and scratched it. Moments later the tickling sensation returned. This time she looked down and was astonished to see that the floor of the library was covered with a thick gray-brown carpet, flecked here and there with splotches of white and black.
It was a living, moving carpet. It was, in fact, the Mouse Army. All of the other buildings, places, and creatures Princess Nell had seen in the Land Beyond had been figments produced by Wizard 0.2; but apparently the mice were an exception and existed independently of King Coyote's machinations. When the Land Beyond had disappeared, all of the obstructions and impedimenta that had kept the Mouse Army away from Princess Nell had disappeared with it, and in short order they had been able to fix her whereabouts and to converge upon their long- sought Queen.
'What would you have me do?' Princess Nell said. She had never been a Queen before and did not know the protocol.
A chorus of excited squeaking came from the mice as commands were relayed and issued. The carpet went into violent but highly organized motion as the mice drew themselves up into platoons, companies, battalions, and regiments, each of them commanded by an officer. One mouse clambered up the leg of Princess Nell's table, bowed low to her, and then began to squeak commands from on high. The mice executed a close-order drill, withdrew to the edges of the room, and arrayed themselves in an empty box shape, leaving a large open rectangle in the middle of the floor.
The mouse up on the table, whom Nell had dubbed the Generalissima, issued a lengthy series of orders, running to each of the four edges of the table to address different contingents of the Mouse Army. When the Generalissima was finished, very high piping music could be heard as the mouse pipers played their bagpipes and the drummers beat their drums.
Small groups of mice began to encroach on the empty space, each group moving toward a different spot. Once each group had reached its assigned position, the individual mice arranged themselves in such a way that the group as a whole described a letter. In this way, the following message was written across the floor of the library:
WE ARE ENCHANTED
REQUEST ASSISTANCE
REFER TO BOOKS
'I shall bend all my efforts toward your disenchantment,' Princess Nell said, and a tremendous, earsplitting scream of gratitude rose from the tiny throats of the Mouse Army. Finding the required book did not take long. The Mouse Army split itself up into small detachments, each of which wrestled a different book from the shelf, opened it up on the floor, and scampered through it one page at a time, looking for relevant spells. Within the hour, Princess Nell noted that a broad open corridor had developed in the Mouse Army, and that a book was making its way toward her, seeming to float an inch above the floor.
She lifted the book carefully from the backs of the mice who were bearing it and flipped through it until she found a spell for the disenchantment of mice. 'Very well then,' she said, and began to read the spell; but suddenly, excited squeaking filled the air and all the mice were running away in a panic. The Generalissima climbed up onto the page, jumping up and down in a state of extreme agitation and waving her forelegs back and forth over her head.
'I understand,' Princess Nell said. She picked up the book and walked out of the library, taking care not to step on any of her subjects, and followed them out to the vast empty space beyond.
Once again the Mouse Army put on a dazzling display of close order drill, drawing itself up across the empty, colorless plain by platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, and brigades; but this time the parade took up a much larger space, because this time the mice took care to space themselves as far apart as the length of a human arm. Some of the platoons had to march what was, for them, a distance of many leagues in order to reach the edges of the formation.
Princess Nell took advantage of the time to wander about and inspect the ranks, and to rehearse the spell.
Finally the Generalissima approached, bowed deeply, and gave her the thumbs-up, though Princess Nell
