Kit gulped and glanced around to make sure he wasn’t going to be overheard. None of the other kids hanging around within sight were close enough to hear him, though, and none were paying him the slightest attention: mostly they were concentrating on smoking without being seen, even though it was forbidden on the school grounds. Kit whispered, “But … you can’t just make things—planets, whole universes—out of nothing!”
“Strangely enough, that’s how it was originally done. What’s unusual is that it’s not usually done that way anymore. Received wisdom had it that the grouped khiliocosms, or ‘sheaf of sheaf of universes,’ the whole aggregate of physical existence, had a stable and unchanging amount of matter and energy. What you and Ponch have been doing would seem to call that into question.”
“Uh, then I guess we’re sorry,” Kit said. “We didn’t mean to make trouble for anybody.”
Tom burst out laughing. “The only ones it’s trouble for are the theoretical wizards! Most of whom will now probably be pulling out their hair, scales, or tentacles. Sure, you get transitory changes in the structure and nature of wizardry every now and then. Mostly they’re situational ripples in the fabric of existence, and mostly they pass. But they’re going to have a party explaining this one.”
“Is it going to be a problem?” Kit said.
“For the average wizard in the street? No,” Tom said. “But I think you should have a talk with Ponch to keep him from running off and creating universes on his own. We don’t know how stable these universes are… and we don’t know if they might not be able to proliferate.”
“Proliferate?”
“Breed,” said Tom.
Kit was taken aback. “Universes can breed?” he whispered.
“Oh yes. I could get into the geometries of it, the mechanics of isoparthenogenetic n-dimensional rotations and so on, but then I’d need three aspirins, and my stomach’ll get upset. Just have a word with Ponch, okay? I’d rather not wake up and discover that one of your pup’s creations has self-rotated and left our home space hip-deep in squirrels. It’d cause talk.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Meanwhile, what you brought back is safe, and lots of people are going to want to look at it. So on behalf of research wizards everywhere, thanks a lot. What’s the rest of your day look like?”
“Geometry, history, and gym.” Kit made a face. He was not a big gym fan; wizardry can keep you from falling off the parallel bars, but it can’t make you good at them.
“Uh-oh,” Tom said, picking up on Kit’s tone of voice. “Every now and then I think, In the service of my Art I may accidentally drown in liquid methane or have my living-room rug slimed by giant slugs, but no one can ever make me climb one of those ropes again.”
“Must be nice,” Kit said.
“It will be. You’ll see; just hang in there…so to speak. Meanwhile, I think you’ve impressed Somebody with how you handled yourself out there. I was told to authorize you for further exploration. When you two go for your next walk, though, leave the manual on verbose reporting. It’ll be useful for the researchers.”
“No problem.”
“Thanks again. Watch how you go.” And Tom hung up.
Then there was nothing to do with the rest of the day but go through classes as usual. While changing periods, Kit looked for Nita but didn’t see her. Once, as he was just going into his math classroom before the bell rang, he caught sight of someone from behind, way down the hall, who he thought was her. But then Kit dismissed the idea; Neets didn’t wear skirts that short. And it’s a shame, said some unrepentant part of his mind.
Kit made an amused face. That part of his mind had been getting outspoken lately. His pop had reassured him that this was nothing to be concerned about—”revving up,” he called it—but he wouldn’t say much more. That sudden reticence simply made Kit want to laugh. His Pop, big and tough and worldly-wise though he was, had a core of absolute shyness that few people outside the family recognized—but Kit knew it was the source of his own quiet side. He suspected that when it came to the facts of life, he was going to have to ask his dad to sit down and explain it all, to get the chore out of the way.
Kit went through the rest of the day, looking around for Nita again when school finished, but he couldn’t find her. He went home, checked his manual, and found no new message from her, so he walked over to her house but found no one home. It made Kit want to laugh as he looked at the empty driveway. There’d occasionally been times when he didn’t want to see Nita about anything specific, and she couldn’t be avoided. Now, when he did want to talk to her, she couldn’t be found…
Kit went home, had dinner, and did his homework. By the time he was finished with the miserable geometry, he was more than ready to take all the blame for their fight, if only to get things back the way they ought to be—anything to distract himself from the horror of cosines and the Civil War.
He pushed all the schoolbooks on his desk aside and shot her a thought: Neets! Earth to Nita!
Nothing. But this time it was a nothing he recognized—a faint mutter of distant low-level brain activity. Nita was deeply asleep. Kit glanced at the clock in mild bemusement. At eight at night?!
Never mind. Tomorrow morning early I’ll meet her before she goes to school; we’ll walk over together.
He wandered down the hall to his sister’s room, peered in. Carmela was not there, but the little spare flatscreen and the DVD player were, and from the earphones lying on the bed, he could faintly hear someone singing in Japanese. The DVD was playing, and on the TV some kind of cartoon singing group—three slender young men with very long ponytails—seemed to be appearing in concert, while searchlights and lasers swept and flashed around them. It’s not like the house isn’t full of her weird J-pop half the time to start with, Kit thought, but she’s got cartoon J-pop, too? Oh well. It’s an improvement on the death metal…
Carmela emerged from the upstairs bathroom and brushed past him. “Looking lonely, little brother,” she said, flopping down on her stomach and putting the earphones back in. “Where’s Miss Juanita been lately?”
“Good question,” Kit said, and headed down the stairs.
“Where ya goin’?” she shouted after him.
He smiled. “Out to walk the dog.”
11: Monday Night, Tuesday Morning
Nita woke up after midnight. She felt a flash of guilt for having fallen asleep straight after coming home from the hospital. But no matter how much she might have felt that precious time was slipping by, she’d been completely worn out, and there was no point in trying to do anything wizardly. Now the charm bracelet was satisfyingly heavy around her wrist, glinting in the light of the lamp on her desk, and she was rested and ready. So let’s get to work…
She went downstairs to check where people were, and found that her dad had gone to bed. Nita made herself a sandwich and brought it back upstairs with her, pausing by Dairine’s door to listen.
Silence. Softly Nita eased the door open, peered inside. In the darkness she could make out a tangle of limbs, pillows, and T-shirt on the bed—Dairine, in her usual all-night fight with the bedding. Nita shut the door and went into her room again.
She ate the sandwich with workmanlike speed and changed into jeans and sneakers and a dark jacket. Then she went to her desk to pick up the few small standalone wizardries that she thought would be useful for this exercise. One at a time she hooked each of them to a different link of the charm bracelet: a small gold house key, a little silvery disc with the letters GCT intertwined on one side and the number twenty-five on the other, a tiny stylized lightning bolt, a pebble, a little megaphone.
Nita pulled out her transit wizardry and changed its time-space coordinates, triggering the fail-safe features that would abort the spell if anyone was standing in the target area. Then she dropped the circle to the floor and stepped through, pulling it after her as she went.
The side doorway in which Nita appeared was one that normally serviced a newsstand i
n the Graybar Passage on the west side of the terminal. Now there were only some black plastic garbage bags piled there, and Nita stepped over them and made her way down to the left, coming out into the big archway dividing the passage from the Main Concourse. It would be a while before Grand Central quieted down; a few trains were still moving in and out … and so was other traffic. Nita made her way to the right of the big octagonal brass information center, heading for the doorway that led to track twenty-five.
No train stood at the platform this late. Nita paused under the archway at the bottom of the platform, behind some iron racks and out of view of the control center far down the track on the right. She felt around in the back of her mind for another wizardry she’d prepared earlier, lying there almost ready to go. Nita said that spell’s thirty-fifth word, and the air around her rippled and misted over in a peculiar half-mirrored way. Whoever looked at her would see only what was directly behind her; she was effectively invisible now.
Nita walked on down the platform. Grand Central’s most-used worldgate was down here, hanging in the space between tracks twenty-five and twenty-six, and accessible from either side for those who knew how to pull it over to the platform. Quite a few wizards used it for long-distance transport in the course of any one day—
Nita stumbled. “Auuw!” said someone down by her feet.
She recovered herself and stood still, looking around but unable to see what she’d tripped on. “Uh… sorry!”
“Oh!” a small quiet voice said. “I see what you’re doing. Wait a minute.”
Suddenly there was a small black cat standing down by her foot, looking up at her. “Better,” the cat said in the Speech. “Sorry about that, cousin. We were invisible two different ways.”
“Dai, Rhiow,” Nita said. Rhiow was the leader of the Grand Central worldgate supervision group, all of whose members were cats, since only feline wizards can naturally see the hyperstring structures on which worldgates are constructed. “I’m on errantry, and I greet you—”
“Aren’t we all?” Rhiow said. “Nice to see you, too.” She was looking at the opening in the air, filled with an odd shimmering darkness, which had manifested itself at Nita’s approach. “Now, there’s a configuration you don’t see every day.”
“Carl okayed it.”
“Of course he did. It wouldn’t be here otherwise. Good timing on your part, though.” Rhiow looked back toward the scurrying people in the Main Concourse with a put-upon expression. “This gate’s been getting three times the usual use while the others are moving around.”
“Moving!” Nita’s eyes widened. She’d seen more than once now what happened when a worldgate dislocated itself improperly. The results could vary from simply disastrous to extremely fatal.
“No, it’s all right; it’s our idea, not the gates’!” Rhiow said. “We’re prepping for Penn Station’s move into a new building across Eighth Avenue, and the gates have to be prepared to move too. We’ve had our paws full.”
“It was nice of you to take the time to see me off.”
“Not a problem, cousin,” Rhiow said. “I just wanted to make sure this one behaved itself when you brought it on-line — everything’s so unsettled right now. Meanwhile, watch how you go, and watch how you handle what you find. We can bring danger with us even to a training session, so be careful.”
“I will.”
“Dai stihó then, cousin.”
“Dai…”
Manual in hand, Nita stepped through.
***
At first there was only a second’s worth of darkness and the usual feel of the brushing of the worldgate across and through her, a feathers-on-mind feeling—strange as always, but swiftly over. And then Nita broke out into light again, as if through the surface of water…
…and found herself on the opposite platform, next to track twenty-six.
Nita glanced around, confused. Uh-oh. Am I still invisible? Checking her spell, then glancing down at herself, she saw that she was. But then Nita realized that she needn’t have worried. There was no one in sight at all.
She walked slowly back up the platform under the long line of fluorescent lights, going softly to avoid attracting any attention in this great quiet. Now where’d Rhiow go? Nita thought, glancing back at the platform to make sure she hadn’t missed her somehow. But there was no sign of her, no movement, no sound anywhere—nothing but the soft cool breath of the draft coming up out of the dark depths of the tunnel through which the trains came into the station from under Park Avenue.
In the archway that led out into the Main Concourse, Nita paused, looking around her cautiously. There was no one out there, and all the lights were low. That was really bizarre, for even when the station was closed in the middle of the night, the lights were always up full, and there were always some people here: cleaners, transit police, workers doing maintenance on the trains and tracks. The lightbulb stars still burned, distant, up in the great blue backward sky of the terminal’s ceiling, but below them the terminal was empty, drowned in a silence even more peculiar than the twilight now filling it.
Nita stood there and listened hard… not just with the normal senses, but with those that came with wizardry and were sharpened by its use. She tried to catch any hint of something wrong, the influence of the Lone Power or other forces inimical to a wizard. But there was no glimmer of danger to be sensed, no whisper of threat. Okay, she thought. Mere weirdness I can handle.
Softly Nita went out across the huge cream-colored expanse of the Main Concourse floor and up the ramp to the doors that led out onto Forty-second Street. She pushed one brass door open, stepped out onto the sidewalk.
There was no one here, either, and it wasn’t one in the morning. It was midafternoon. The sun was angling westward, not even out of sight behind the skyscrapers yet.
Nita looked up and down Forty-second, unbelieving. There was no traffic to be seen; no cars, no people anywhere in sight. Nothing moved but the traffic lights hung out over the street, swinging gently in the thin chill wind that poured down Forty-second, turning from red to green as Nita watched. The wind bore no smells of hot-dog vendors, no voices, no honking horns… no sounds at all.
This was so creepy that Nita could hardly bear it. Once before she’d been in a New York that was nearly this empty, and she and Kit had had very a bad time there. But here Nita got no sense of the Lone Power being in residence. That cold hostile tang in the air, the sense of being watched and overshadowed by something profoundly unfriendly, would have been instantly recognizable.
Nita reached into her otherspace pocket and pulled out her manual, flipping it open to the new section about the practice universes. Aschetic Spaces Habituation and Manipulation Routine, it said. Introduction:
You have now successfully entered the first of a series of “aschesis” or “live proof” continua that have been made available to you. Successful handling and manipulation of this continuum will result in your being offered the next one in the series.
You are cautioned not to remain past your assigned time. Time warnings embedded in your manual may not function correctly.
A smaller block of text appeared underneath:
A timepiece based on the vibratory frequency of one or more crystalline compounds or elements has been detected on your person. Please use this timepiece for temporal measurements until further advice is given. Please do not change the vibratory frequency of [QUARTZ] in this universe.
“Gee, and that was the first thing on my list,” Nita muttered, glancing at her watch. She did a double take; the face of the watch, which until then had been plain white with black numerals, was now showing a red half-arc around the face, from the numbers 1 to 7. Nita glanced back at her manual.
Your total permitted time for this session has been marked.
YOUR GOAL:
Each universe or continuum possesses a “kernel,” or core, which contains a master copy of its physical laws and the local laws of wizardry. This master copy is a single c
omplex statement in the Speech that lists all properties of matter and energy in the local universe, and the values for which these properties are set. To manipulate physical law on a universal scale, whether temporarily or permanently, the universe- or continuum-kernel first must be located.
To avoid easy alteration of natural laws by local species, world-kernels are normally hidden. This universe’s kernel has been concealed in a routine manner. You must find the kernel before your allotted time elapses. You must then use the kernel to change the local environment. If you cannot find the kernel within the time allowed, this assignment will be offered to you again in one planetary rotation of your home world or one idiopathic cycle appropriate to your species.
…Just once a day. Nita swallowed. Wednesday was coming fast. “All right,” she said to the manual, “the meter’s running; let’s go!”
The red arc on her watch began to flash softly. As she watched, it subtracted a tiny bit of itself from the point at which it had started.
Okay, she thought, where do you begin?
Nita walked away from the terminal, down that empty street, to pause at the corner of Forty-second and Lexington, looking up and down the avenue. Nothing moved anywhere. She leaned her head back to look up at the spire of the Chrysler Building, glittering in the westering sun against an unusually clear blue sky.
If I was this universe’s heart, where would I be?
If it was a riddle, it was one whose answer wasn’t obvious. So for a long time Nita walked north on Lexington Avenue through the windy afternoon, looking, listening, trying to get the feel of the place. It was missing something basic that her own version of New York had, but she couldn’t put her finger on what was missing. At Eighty-fourth Street, on a hunch, she turned westward, heading crosstown, and started to page through the manual again for some hint of what she was doing wrong. She found a lot of information about the structures of aschetic universes, and one piece of this caught her attention, for she’d been wondering about it.