Magic!
She sat and listened to Kit. With each passing second she could catch more clearly the clean metallic taste of the equation as it began to form itself, flickering chill and bright in her mind. Kit’s speech was giving it life, and with quiet, flowing efficiency it was going about its purpose. It was invoking the attention of what Nita might have called physical laws, except that there was nothing physical about them—they had to do with flows of a kind of power as different from ordinary energy as energy was from matter. The equation stretched and coiled and caught those powers within itself as the words wove it. Nita and Kit were caught in it, too. To Nita it seemed as if, without moving, she held out her hands, and they were taken—by Kit, and by the spell itself, and by the ponderous powers caught across from her in the dance. There was a pause: Kit looked across the diagrams at her.
Nita scowled at the symbols beside her and began to read them, slowly and with some hesitation—naming herself one concept or one symbol at a time, binding herself into the spell. At first she was scared, for she could feel the strangeness folding in close around her. But then she realized that nothing awful was happening, and as her name became part of the spell, that was what was sliding down around her, protecting her. She finished, and she was out of breath, and excited, and she had never been happier in her life.
Kit’s voice came in again then, picking up the weave, rejoining the dance. So it went for a while, the strange words and the half-seen, half-felt movements and images falling into a rhythm of light and sound and texture, a song, a poem, a spell. It began to come whole all around them, and all around the tingling air stayed still to better hold the words, and the trees bent close to listen.
Kit came to the set of symbols that stood for his name and who he was, and read them slowly and carefully. Nita felt the spell settle down around him, too. He finished it and glanced up at Nita, and together they began the goal section of the spell. Nita did her best to make a clear image of the pen as she spoke—the silver case, gone a little scratched and grubby now, her initials incised up near the top. She hardly had time to wonder at the harmony their paired voices made before things began to change again. The shadows of the trees around them seemed to grow darker; the aura of expectancy grew sharp enough to taste. The silence became total, and their voices fell into it as into a great depth.
The formula for their goal, though longer than either of their names had been, seemed to take less time to say—and even stranger, it began to sound like much more than just finding a pen and being left alone. It began to taste of starfire and night and motion, huge and controlled, utterly strange. Saying the formula left Kit and Nita breathless and drained, as if something powerful had briefly been living and speaking through them and had worn them down. They finished the formula together, and gulped for air, and looked at each other in half-frightened expectation, wondering what would happen next.
The completed spell took effect. Nita had thought that she would gradually begin to see something, the way things had changed gradually in the grove. The spell, though, had its own ideas. Quick as a gasp it slammed them both out of one moment and into another, a shocking, wrenching transition like dreaming that you’ve fallen out of bed, wham! Instinctively they both hung on to the spell as if onto a railing, clutching it until their surroundings steadied down.
The darkness had been replaced by a lowering, sullen-feeling gloom. They looked down as if from a high balcony onto a shadowed island prisoned between chill rivers and studded with sharp spikes of iron and cold stone. Manhattan? Kit asked anxiously, without words.
Nita felt frozen in place like a statue and couldn’t turn to answer him—the spell was holding her immobile. It looks like Manhattan, she said, feeling just as uneasy. But what’s my pen doing there?
Kit would have shaken his head if he could have. I don’t get it. What’s wrong here? This is New York City—but it never looked this this dirty and ugly and… He trailed off in confusion and dismay.
Nita looked around her. It was hard to make out anything on the island—there was a murky pall over the city that seemed more than just fog. There was hardly any traffic that she could see, and almost no light—in fact, in all of Manhattan there were only two light sources. In one place on the island—the east Fifties, it looked like—a small point of brittle light seemed to pulse right through steel and stone, throbbing dully like a sown seed of wildfire waiting to explode. The pulses were irregular and distressing, and the light was painful to look at. Some blocks to the south, well into the financial district near the south end of the island, another fire burned, a clear white spark like a sunseed, beating regularly as a heart. It was consoling, but it was very small.
Now what? Nita said. Why would my pen be in this place? She looked down at the dark grainy air below them, listened to the brooding silence like that of a beast of prey ready to spring, felt the sullen buildings hunching themselves against the oppressive sky. Then abruptly she felt the something malevolent and alive that lay in wait below—a something that saw them, was conscious of them, and was darkly pleased.
Kit, what is that?
I don’t know, but it knows we’re here, and it shouldn’t be able to! His thought was singing with alarm like a plucked string. Nita, the spell’s not balanced for this. If that thing grabs us or holds us somehow, we won’t be able to get back!
Nita felt Kit’s mind start to flick frantically through the memories of what he had read in his wizards’ manual, looking for an idea, for something they could do to protect themselves. It was weird to somehow see some of what he was thinking, as if she was looking over his shoulder while he read. Though part of her trembled at the thought of that dark presence that was even now reaching out toward them, lazy and deadly, Nita concentrated on holding still and looking over Kit’s shoulder at his thoughts—
Kit, stop! No, back one— That’s it. Look, it says if you’ve got an imbalance, you can open out your side of the spell to attract some more power.
Yeah, but if the wrong kind of power answers, we’re in for it!
We’re in for it now if that gets us, Nita said, indicating the huge, hungry darkness billowing upward toward them like a cloud. Look, we’ll make a hole through the spell big enough for something friendly to fall into, and see what turns up.
Nita could feel Kit’s uncertainty as he started choosing from memory the words and symbols he would need. All right, but I dunno, if something worse happens…
What could be worse? Nita hollered at Kit, half in amusement, half in fear. The hungry something drew closer. Hurry up!
Kit started to answer, then got distracted as he put the equation together in his head. There, he said, laying out the change in the spell in his mind for Nita to see, I think that’ll do it—
Go ahead, Nita said, watching anxiously as their pursuer got closer and the air around them seemed to grow thicker and darker yet. You say it. Just tell me what to do and when.
Right, Kit said, and began speaking in his mind, much faster than he had during the initial spelling. If that first magic had felt like the weaving of a whole, this one felt like ripping something apart. Their surroundings seemed to shimmer uncertainly, the dark skyline and lead gray sky rippled like a wind-stirred curtain; even that stalking presence seemed to hesitate in momentary confusion. Okay, push, Kit said suddenly, push right there!
Nita felt the torn place that Kit had made in the spell, and she shoved clumsily at it with her mind, trying to enlarge it. It’s, I think it’s giving…
Now, hard! Kit said.
Nita pushed at the tear in the spell until pain stabbed and stabbed again behind where her eyes should have been. At the moment she thought she couldn’t possibly push anymore, Kit said one short sharp syllable and threw the spell wide open like a door.
It was like standing at the core of a tornado which, rather than spinning you away to Oz, strips the roof off your home, opens the house walls out flat as the petals of a plaster flower, and leaves you standing confu
sed and disbelieving in the heart of a howling of smoke and damned voices; like moving through a roomful of people, every one of whom tries to catch your eye and tell you the most important thing that ever happened to him. Nita found herself deluged in fragments of sights and sounds and tastes and feelings and thoughts not her own, a madly coexisting maelstrom of imageries from other universes, other earths, other times. Most of them she managed to shut out by squeezing her mind shut like eyes and hanging on to the spell. She sensed that Kit was doing the same and that their stalker was momentarily as bewildered as they were by what was happening. The whirling confusion seemed to be funneling through the hole in the spell like water going down a drain—things, concepts, creatures too large or too small for the hole fell through it, or past it, or around it. But sooner or later something just the right size would catch. Hope we get something useful, Nita thought desperately. Something bigger than that thing, anyway —
And thump, something fitted into the hole with snug precision, and the crazy whirling died away, and the two of them had company in the spellweb. Something small, Nita felt; very small, too small—but no, it was big, too …
Confused, she reached out toward Kit. Is that it? Can we get out of here now? Before that what’s-its-name—
That was when the what’s-its-name shook itself with a ripple of rage and hunger that Kit and Nita could feel even at a distance. It headed toward them again, its angry speed saying that it was done playing with them.
Uh oh! Kit said. Let’s get out of here!
What do we do—?
What in the worlds—? said a voice that neither of them recognized.
Out!! Kit said, and hooked the spell into the added power that the newcomer provided, and pulled.
Plain pale daylight fell down around them, heavy as a collapsed tent. Gravity yanked at them. Kit fell over sideways in the dirt and lay there panting on the ground like someone who’s run a race. Nita sagged, covered her face, bent over double right down to the ground, struggling for breath.
Eventually she began to recover, but she put off moving or opening her eyes. The book had warned that spelling had its prices, and one of them was the physical exhaustion that goes along with any large, mostly mental work of creation. Nita felt as if she had just been through about a hundred English tests with essay questions, one after another. “Kit?” she said, worried by his silence.
“Nnngggg,” Kit said, and rolled over into a sort of crouch, holding his head in his hands. “Ooooh. Turn off the Sun.”
“It’s not that bad,” Nita said, opening her eyes. Then she winced and shut them in a hurry. It was.
“How long’ve we been here?” Kit muttered. “The Sun shouldn’t be showing here yet.”
“It’s—” Nita said. She opened her eyes again to check her watch and was distracted by a bright light to her right that was entirely too low to be the Sun. She squinted at it and then forgot what she had started to say.
Hanging in midair about three feet away, inside the circle, was a spark of eye-searing white fire. It looked no bigger than a pinhead, but it was brilliant all out of proportion to its size, and was giving off light as bright as that of a two-hundred-watt bulb without a shade. The light bobbed gently in midair, up and down, looking like a will-o’-the-wisp plugged into too powerful a current and about to blow out. Nita sat there with her mouth open and stared.
The bright point dimmed slightly, appeared to describe a small tight circle so that it could take in Kit, the drawn circle, trees and leaves and sky; then it came to rest again, staring back at Nita. Though she couldn’t catch what Kit was feeling, now that the spell was over, she could feel the light’s emotions quite clearly—amazement, growing swiftly into unbelieving pleasure. Suddenly it blazed up white-hot again.
Dear Artificer, it said in bemused delight, I’ve blown my quanta and gone to the Good Place!
Nita sat there in silence for a moment, thinking a great many things at once. Uhh, … she thought. And, So I wanted to be a wizard, huh? Serves me right. Something falls into my world and thinks it’s gone to Heaven. Boy, is it gonna get a shock. And, What in the world is it, anyway?
“Kit,” Nita said. “Excuse me a moment,” she added, nodding with abrupt courtesy at the light source. “Kit.” She turned slightly and reached down to shake him by the shoulder. “Kit. C’mon, get up. We have company.”
“What?” Kit said, scrubbing at his eyes and starting to straighten up. “Oh no, the binding didn’t blow, did it?”
“Nope. It’s the extra power you called in. I think it came back with us.”
“Well, it—oh,” Kit said, as he finally managed to focus on the sedately hovering brightness.
“Yeah, ‘oh.’ And it says it’s blown its quanta. Is that dangerous?” she asked the light.
Dangerous? It laughed inside, a crackling sound like an overstimulated Geiger counter. Artificer, child, it means I’m dead. “Child” wasn’t precisely the concept it used; Nita got a fleeting impression of a huge volume of dust and gas contracting gradually toward a common center, slow, confused, and nebulous. She wasn’t flattered.
“I hate to tell you this,” Nita said, “but I’m not sure this is the Good Place. It sure doesn’t seem that way to us.”
The light drew a figure eight in the air, a shrug. But it looks that way to me, it said. Look how orderly everything is! And how much life there is in just one place! Where I come from, even a spore’s worth of life is scarcer than atoms in a comet’s tail.
“Sorry,” Kit said, “but what are you?”
The light said something Nita could make little sense of. The concept she got looked like page after page of mathematical equations. Kit raised his eyebrows. “It uses the Speech,” he commented as he listened.
That Nita could tell, but she couldn’t make much of the terminology as yet. “So what is it?”
Kit looked confused. “Its name says that it came from way out in space somewhere, and it has a mass equal to—wow, to five or six blue-white giant stars and a few thousand planets. And emits all up and down the matter-energy spectrum, all kinds of light and radiation and even some subatomic particles.” He shrugged. “You have any idea what that is?”
Nita stared at the light in growing disbelief. “Where’s all your mass?” she asked. “If you’ve got that much, the gravity should have crushed us up against you the second you showed up.”
It’s elsewhere, the light said offhandedly. I have a singularity-class temporospatial claudication.
“A warp,” Nita whispered. “A tunnel through space-time. Are you a white hole?”
It stopped bobbing, stared at her as if she had said something derogatory. Do I look like a hole?
“Do I look like a cloud of lukewarm gas?” Nita snapped back, and then sighed—her mouth was getting the better of her again. “Uh, sorry. That’s just what we call your kind of—uh—creature. Because you act like a hole in the Universe that light and radiation come through. I know you’re not, really. But, Kit,” she said, turning, “where’s my pen? And where’s the power you were after? Didn’t the spell work?”
“Spells always work,” Kit said. “That’s what the manual says. When you ask for something, you always get back something that’ll help you solve your problem, or be the solution itself.” He looked entirely confused. “We asked for that power aura for me, and your pen for you—that was all. If we got a white hole, it means he’s the answer—”
“If he’s the answer,” Nita said, bemused, “I’m not sure I understand the question.”
This is all absolutely fascinating, the white hole said, but I have to find a functional-Advisory nexus in a hurry. I’ve learned that the Naming of Lights has gone missing, and I managed to find a paradimensional net with enough empty loci to get me to an Advisory in a hurry. But something seems to have gone wrong. I don’t think you’re Advisories.
“Uh, no,” Kit said. “I think we called you—”
Wait, you called me? The white hole regarded Kit with m
ixed reverence and amazement. You’re one of the Powers born of Life? Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t recognize You—I know You can take any shape but somehow I’d always thought of You as being bigger. A quasar, or a mega-nova. The white hole made a feeling of rueful amusement. It’s confusing being dead!
“Oh, brother,” Kit said. “Look, I’m not—you’re not—just not. We made a spell and we called you. I don’t think you’re dead.”
If you say so, the white hole said, polite but doubtful. You called me, though? Me personally? I don’t think we’ve met before.
“No, we haven’t,” Nita said. “But we were doing this spell, and we found something, but something found us, too, and we wouldn’t have been able to get back here unless we called in some extra power—so we did, and it was you, I guess. You’re not mad, are, you?” she asked timidly. The thought of what a live, intelligent white hole might be able to do if it got annoyed scared her badly.
Mad? No. As I said, I was trying to get out of my own space to get the news about the Naming of Lights to someone who could use it, and then all of a sudden there was a paranet with enough loci to handle all the dimensions I carry, so I grabbed it. The white hole made another small circle, looking around him curiously. Maybe it did work. Are there Advisories in this—on this—What is this, anyway?