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I would be glad to donate the first use to the crown, if it please you."
    "Nigel!" the king bellowed. The prince shuffled forward, head hanging. "Here he is, wizard—let's see what you can do."
     
    The small demon is the new black box received the prince's less appetizing morsels with surprising eagerness. In a large multitasking multiplex universe, there's always someone who wants a plague of boils, and a wicked fairy godmother who wants to give some poor infant a receding chin. Available at a reasonable price on the foreign market were a jutting chin, black moustache, and excessive body hair, recently spell-cleared from a princess tormented by just such a wicked fairy. It spit out those requirements, causing a marked change for the better in Prince Nigel's personal appearance. A tidy profit, it thought, and turned its attention to retrieving the final sets of mammary tissue.
     
    The princess in the rose garden was as beautiful as her miniature; Nigel could hardly believe his luck. Her beauty, his handsomeness… he kept wanting to finger his new black moustache and eye himself in any reflecting surface. At the moment, that was her limpid gaze.
    "I can hardly believe I never met you until this day," the princess said. "There's something about you that seems so familiar…" She reached out a delicate finger to stroke his moustache, and Nigel thought he would swoon.
    Across the rose garden, Sophora Segundiflora smiled at the young lovers and nudged Mirabel, whose attention had wandered to her own new nose job.
    Mirabel was bored, but Sophora didn't mind chaperoning the young couple. Not with the great gold chain of chancellor across her chest. The previous chancellor had made his last confession the day the wizard tried out his new spells—the other had been a Stretched Scroll, which highlighted certain questionable transactions, such as the withdrawals to the chancellor's personal treasure chest. The fool should have known better. To embezzle all that money, and then choose women warriors as the group to make up the revenues… she hoped the wizard had done something to enhance Nigel's wits. Certainly his mother's side of the family hadn't contributed anything.
    Meanwhile, the Ladies' Aid & Armor Society would continue to flourish; other older warriors had decided to follow Sophora's example and study law. Girls who hitherto had hung around the queen pretending to embroider were now flocking to weapons demonstrations. Even Kristal had been seen cracking something other than a whip.
     
    ----
    After reading this, I will never look at politics or opera in the same way. provided that I can tell them apart.
    EXCHANGE PROGRAM
    Susan Shwartz
    « ^ »
     
    A headache the size of her healthcare plan—no, better make that the size of the national deficit—was turning Hillary Rodham Clintons skull into the local percussion section. One moment, she and her staff sat reviewing policy notes as the Washington /New York Metroliner rattled along. There'd been some grouching that ice had grounded Air Force One, but the benefit at the Metropolitan Opera couldn't very well be called on account of weather.
    Her gown was hanging up, ready for her to put on about the time the train reached Trenton; and her hairdresser was heating the rollers in what was probably another futile attempt to soften her image, if not her chin line. It wasn't as if she cared , mind you, but she had enough troubles without adding yet another Media Bad Hair Day to them. So far, so good. But, in the next moment, a WHAM that had to nave shattered every noise-pollution ordinance in the country and probably every bone in her body jolted the club car off the tracks.
    In one horrible moment, she had time to review all the crazies who might want her out of the picture. Someone who probably wasn't Secret Service snatched her up. If I see Rush Limbaugh's puffy face ,
    I'll know I'm in hell . On that encouraging note, she blacked out.
     
    "Do you think she needs something to