A Wizard in Mind

Начало книги

A spy can’t quit and stay healthy—everybody knows that. In fact, a spy can’t quit and stay alive—but Magnus d’Armand was still living, even though he had resigned from the Society for the Conversion of Extraterrestrial Nascent Totalitarianisms more than six months before—still alive, and not really terribly worried about it.

Of course, SCENT wasn’t a secret service with missions of mayhem—it was (officially) a private organization dedicated to subverting dictatorships before they started, by converting planets to democracy before they developed out of their Middle Ages. So Magnus wasn’t really a spy, though he was a secret agent. He was also a secret wizard. That helped, sometimes. A lot.

At the moment, he was sitting in the control room of his spaceship, talking with its robot brain. “Well, Herkimer, which planet shall we subvert next?”

“There is a wide choice.” Herkimer supplied the sound of index cards flipping behind his rather theatrical sigh. “I do not suppose I could persuade you to consider a planet for which democracy is obviously the ideal form of government?”

Читать дальше →