Entire universes and continua are by definition too large and often too alien to allow quick kernel assessment and location while their genuine physical structures are displaying. Wizards on assessment/location duties therefore routinely avail themselves of a selective display option that screens out distracting phenomena, condenses the appearance and true distances of the space being investigated, and identifies the structure under assessment with a favorite structural paradigm already familiar to the wizard. Early assessment exercises default to this display option.
…So it gave me someplace I’m used to working, Nita thought. Probably just as well. She paused at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-fourth, looking across the street and downtown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then went across the street and into Central Park, continuing to read through the manual. There were no more hints, and two hours were gone already. Nita looked at some of the spells she’d used for detection in the past, but they didn’t seem much good for this. They were mostly for finding physical things, not other spells.
And the spells in the book don’t seem to be working right, anyway, Nita thought as she came out at Eighty-sixth and Central Park West, turning south. She wasn’t getting the usual slight tingle of the mind from the wizardries as she read. It was as she’d been warned: the manual’s normal instant access to the fabric of wizardry didn’t seem to be working here.
Either way, Nita started to feel that spells weren’t the answer. If that’s not it, there has to be another way. Besides just wandering around! But the silent streets in which nothing moved—no sound but the wind—made everything seem a little dreamlike, the stuff of a fairy tale, not a real place at all.
But it is real. The only thing missing…
…is the sound.
Nita stopped at the southwest corner of Central Park West and Eighty-first and thought. Then she went down the path from the corner to the planetarium doors, and cut across the dog run to go up the steps to the nearby terrace, where the “astronomical” fountain was. There she sat on a bench under the ginkgo trees, near where the water ran horizontally over the constellation-mosaicked basin, and looked at her watch. She had only two hours left. Part of her felt like panicking. This isn’t working; I don’t have time to spend another day doing this; what about Mom! But Nita held herself quiet, and sat there, and listened.
Water and the wind; nothing else. But even those sounds were superfluous. She could tune them out, the way she tuned out the CD player in Dairine’s room when she didn’t want to hear it. That didn’t take a spell.
And maybe I don’t really need to tune these sounds out, anyway. For this place to be normal, for real, she needed to tune things in. She needed those sounds, the sounds that to her spelled out what life was like in the city, what made it its own self.
Traffic, for example. The horns that everybody honked even though it was illegal. The particular way that car tires hissed on the road in hot weather, when the surface got a little sticky in the sun. The sound of trucks backing up and making that annoying high-pitched beep-beep-beep. Air brakes hissing. Car engines revving as the lights changed. Sirens in the distance. One by one, in her mind, she added the city sounds to the silence. There was a kind of music to it, a rhythm. Footsteps on the road and on the sidewalks created some of that; so did the rattle of those bikes with the little wagons attached that the guys from the stores used to deliver groceries.
And so did the voices. People talking, laughing, shouting at one another in the street; those sounds blended with the others and started to produce that low hush of sound, like a river. It wasn’t a steady sound. It ebbed, then flowed again, rising and falling, slowly becoming that long, slow, low, rushing throb that was the sound of the city breathing.
Not even breath. Something more basic. A pulse…
Nita held still. She could hear it now. It was not a pulse as humans thought of such things. It was much too slow. You would as soon hear a tree’s pulse or breathing as this. But Nita was used to hearing trees breathe, and besides, their breath was part of this bigger one. Slowly and carefully, as if the perception was something she might break if she moved too suddenly, she turned her head.
The “sound” was louder to the south. If this place had a heart, it was south of her.
Nita got up carefully. Concentrating on not losing the way she was hearing things now, she made her way back to the stairs and down from the fountain terrace, back toward Central Park West, then started heading south again. Within a block she knew she was going the right way.It’s stronger.
Within another block she was so sure of what and how she was hearing that she didn’t need to walk carefully anymore. Nita began to alternate jogging and walking, heading for the source of that heartbeat. Even in the silence, now that she’d let that recur, she could hear that slow rush of cityness underneath everything, like the sound she’d once heard of blood flow in an artery, recorded and much slowed down, a kind of windy growl. She got as far as Central Park South and realized that the source of the pulse was to her right and ahead of her downtown, on the West Side somewhere.
Nita followed the pulse beat, feeling it get stronger all the time, as if it was in her bones as well as the city’s. She went west as far as Seventh Avenue, then knew she was on the right track. The pulse came from her left, and it was much closer now. Another ten blocks, maybe?
It turned out to be fifteen, but the closer Nita got, the less she cared about the distance, or the fact that she was dog tired. I’m going to do it. It’s going to be okay. Mom’s going to be okay!
She came out in Times Square, and smiled as she perceived the joke—there were lots of people who would have claimed that this was the city’s heart. But her work wasn’t done yet The kernel was hidden here somewhere. Now that she knew what to listen for, Nita could feel the force of it beating against her skin, like a sun she couldn’t see. Nita stopped there in the middle of a totally empty Times Square, all blatant with neon signs and garish, gaudy electric billboards along which news of strange worlds crawled and flashed in letters of fire, in the Speech and in other languages, which she didn’t bother to translate. She turned slowly, listening, feeling…
There. A blank wall of a building. It was white marble, solid. But Nita knew better than to be bothered by mere physical appearance, or even some kinds of physical reality. She went to the wall, passed her hands over it.
It was stone, all right. But stone was hardly a barrier to a wizard. Nita jiggled the charm bracelet around on her wrist until it showed one spell she had loaded there, the charm that looked like a little house key. It was a molecular dissociator, a handy thing for someone who’d locked themselves out or needed to get into a place that had no doors or windows. Nita gripped the charm; it fed the wizardry into her mind, ready to go. All she had to do was speak the words in the Speech. She said them, put her hands up against the stone, feeling the molecules slip aside; then reached her hands through the stone, carefully, since she wasn’t sure if what she was reaching for was fragile.
She needn’t have worried. Her first sense as her fingers brushed it was that it was not only stronger than the stone behind which it was hidden but stronger than anything else in this universe, which might reach who knew how many lightyears from here in its true form rather than this condensed semblance-of-convenience. What Nita pulled out through the fog she’d made of the stone was a glittering tangle of light about the size of a grapefruit, a structure so complex that she could make nothing of it in a single glance. And that was just as it should be. This was a whole universe’s worth of natural law—the description of all the matter and energy it contained and how they worked together—gathered in one place the same way that you could pack all of space into a teacup if only you took the time to fold it properly. The kernel burned with a tough, delicate fire that was beautiful to see.
But she didn’t have time for its beauty right this moment. Next time I’ll have more time to just look at one of these, Nita thought. Right now I have to aff
ect the local environment somehow.
The longer she held the kernel in her hands, the more clearly Nita could begin to feel, as if in her bones, how this core of energy interacted with everything around it, and was at the heart of it all. Squeeze it a little this way, push it a little that way, and this whole universe would change—
Nita squeezed it, and the sphere of light and power grew, and her hand sank into it a little, the “control structures” of the kernel fitting themselves to her. Her mind lit up inside with a sudden inrush of power, a webwork of fire—the graphic representation of the natural laws of this universe, of its physics, mathematics, and all the mass and energy inside it—and she knew that it was hers to command.
For a moment Nita stood there just getting the feel of it. It was almost too much. All that kept her in control was the fact that this was not a full-fledged universe but an aschetic one, purposely kept small and simple for beginners like her—a kindergarten universe with all the building blocks labeled in large bright letters, the corners on all the blocks rounded off so she couldn’t hurt herself.
Still, the taste of the power was intoxicating. And now to use it. Through the kernel, Nita could feel the way all energy and matter in this universe interrelated, from here out to the farthest stars … and while she held what she held, she owned all that power and matter. She ruled it. Nita smiled and squeezed the kernel harder, felt her pulse increase as that of local space did—energy running down the tight-stranded webwork, obedient to her will.
Overhead, in that clear afternoon sky, the clouds started to gather. The day went gray in a rush; the humidity increased, and the view of the traffic lights down the street misted, went indistinct. Nita could feel the scorch and sizzle of positive ionization building in the air above the skyscrapers as the storm came rolling and rumbling in.
She held the growing power in check for a while, let the clouds in that dark sky build and curdle. They jostled together, their frustrated potential building, but they couldn’t do anything until Nita let them. Finally the anticipation and the growing sense of power was too much for her. Do it! she said to the storm, and turned it loose.
Lightning flickered and danced among the skyscrapers and from cloud to cloud as the rain, released, came instantly pouring down. The Empire State Building got hit by lightning, as it usually did, and then got hit several more times as Nita told the storm to go ahead and enjoy itself. Thunderclaps like gigantic gunfire crashed and rattled among the steel cliffs and glass canyons, and where Nita pointed her finger, the lightning struck to order. She made the water bursting from the sky rain down in patterns and pour down in buckets, but not a drop of it soaked through her clothes—the water had no power over her. And when some of the electrical signs started to jitter and spark because of all the water streaming down them, Nita changed the behavior of the laws governing electricity, so that current leaped and crept up the rain and into the sky, a slower kind of lightning, sheeting up as well as down.
In a burst of triumph Nita splashed and jumped in the flooding gutters like a little kid. Then finally she ran right out into the middle of the empty Times Square and whirled there in the wet gleam and glare all alone—briefly half nuts with the delight of what she’d done, as the brilliant colors of the lights painted the puddles and wet streets and sidewalks with glaring electric pigment, light splashing everywhere like Technicolor water. The feeling of power was a complete blast… though Nita reminded herself that this was just a step on the way to something much bigger. Curing her mother was going to be a lot more delicate, a lot more difficult: and the wizardry was going to cost her. But the innocent pleasure of doing exactly as she pleased with the power she’d come so far to find was something she badly needed.
The novelty took a while to wear off. Finally Nita banished the storm, sweeping the clouds away and right out of the sky with a couple of idle gestures—exactly the kind of thing a wizard normally couldn’t do in the real world, where storms had consequences and every phrase of every spell had to be evaluated in terms of what it might accidentally harm or what energy it might waste. It’d be great if wizardry were like this all the time, Nita thought. Find the heart of power, master it, and do what you like; just command it and it happens; just wish it and it’s done…
But that was a dream. Reality would be more work. And it would be more satisfying, though not all that different—for bioelectricity was just lightning scaled down, after all, and every cell in the body was mostly water. Now Nita stood there in the cool air, as the sun started to set in the cleared sky behind the skyscrapers, and looked again at the tangle of power that she held, this whole universe’s soul. On a whim as she looked down at it, Nita altered its semblance, as she’d altered the look of the spell matrix she wore. Suddenly it wasn’t a tight-packed webwork of light she was holding, but a shiny red apple.
Nita looked at it with profound satisfaction, and resisted the urge to take a bite out of it.Probably blow me from here to the end of everything, she thought. She brought the kernel back over to where she’d found it, and held it up to the stone wall. It didn’t leap out of her hand back to its place, as she’d half expected it would; it was reluctant. It enjoys this,she thought. It likes being mastered, being used.
It likes not being alone.
Nita smiled. She could understand that. Carefully she said the words that would briefly dissolve the stone, and slipped the kernel back in.
Wait till Kit sees this, she thought, pulling her hands out of the stone and dusting them off, when it’s all over and Mom’s better at last. He’s gonna love it.
She checked her watch. Half an hour to spare; not too bad. I’ll do better next time. She turned the charm bracelet on her wrist to show the little disc that said GCT/25, her quick way back to the ingress gate. “Home,” Nita said, and vanished.
***
She came out on the platform at Grand Central, invisible again; a good thing, for just as she stepped out of the gate, a guy went by driving a motorized sweeper, cleaning the platform for the rush hour that would start in just a couple of hours. Nita glanced at her watch. It was three in the morning; as predicted, the return gating routine had dropped her here two hours after she’d left. But she was six hours’ worth of tired. She fished around in her pocket and came up with her transit circle…
…and couldn’t bear to use it for a second or so yet. Nita walked off the platform out into the Main Concourse—where a guy with a wide pad-broom was pushing some sweeping compound along the shiny floor—and out past him, invisible, and up the ramp, to push open the door and stand on Forty-second Street again. This time there was traffic, and garbage in the gutter, and horns honking; this time the streetlights were bright; this time the sidewalks were full of people, hurrying, heading home from clubs or a meal after the movies, hailing cabs, laughing, talking to each other. As Nita dropped her transit circle onto the sidewalk, out of the way of the pedestrians, the wind coming down Forty-second flung a handful of rain at her, like a hint of something happening somewhere else, or about to happen.
Nita grinned, stepped through her circle, and came out in her bedroom. She pulled the circle up after her, and had just enough energy to pull her jeans off, crawl into bed, and pull the covers up before the darkness of sheer exhaustion came down on her like a bigger, heavier blanket.
***
“Nita?”
“Huh?!” She sat up in bed, shocked awake. Her father stood in the doorway, drying his hands on a dish towel, looking at her with concern.
“Honey, it’s eight-thirty.”
“Omigosh!!” She leaped out of bed, and a second later was amazed at how wobbly she felt.
“Don’t panic; I’ll drive you,” her dad said. “But Kit was here ten or fifteen minutes ago. I thought you’d gone already—you don’t usually oversleep—and then he went so he wouldn’t be late.” Her dad looked at her alarm clock. “Didn’t it go off? We’ll have to get you another one.”
“No, it’s okay,” Nita said, rummaging hurrie
dly in her drawer. “I forgot to set my phone. What time are we going to see Mom today?”
“When you get back from school.”
“Good. I’ve got something to tell her.” And Nita smiled. It was the first time in days that she’d smiled and it hadn’t felt wrong.
It’s going to work. It’s going to he okay!
12: Tuesday Morning and Afternoon
Nita’s father took the blame for her lateness when he delivered her to the school’s main office, and when her dad left, Nita went to her second-period history class feeling more or less like she’d been rolled over by a steam shovel—she was nowhere near recovered from the previous night’s exertions. She waved at Jane and Melissa and a couple other friends in the same class, sat down, and pulled out her notebooks, intent on staying awake if nothing else.
This was going to be a challenge, as the Civil War was still on the agenda, and the class had been stuck in 1863 for what now seemed about a century. Mr. Neary, the history teacher, was scribbling away on the blackboard, as illegibly as ever. He really should have been a doctor, Nita thought, and yawned.
Neets?
She sat up with a jerk so sudden that her chair scraped on the floor, and the kids around her looked at her in varying states of surprise or amusement. Mr. Neary glanced around, saw nothing but Nita writing industriously, and turned back to the blackboard, talking about Abraham Lincoln at his usual breakneck speed while he wrote.
Nita, for her own part, was bending as far over as she could while she wrote, trying to conceal the fact that she was blushing furiously. Kit—
I was starting to think you were avoiding me!
No, I—
Where’ve you been? Don’t you answer your manual anymore?
She could have answered him sharply … then put the urge aside. That was what had started this whole thing. Look, she said silently. I’m really sorry. It was all my fault.