Fractal Mode

  "I'm sorry," she said. A tear fell and splashed into the pasture, spooking a cow.

  She got up, quickly but carefully. Where could she put her great lethal feet, so she wouldn't do more damage?

  She decided to put them in her own footprints. That way she would squish only what had already been squished. But she couldn't see her prints in the shadow.

  I can tune in to what is there.

  "Thanks, horsehead."

  Now the impressions of the folk of this world came to her. Surprise. Incredulity. Denial. Horror. Grief.

  Every footprint was a disaster area. Trees had been flattened, houses destroyed, people killed.

  "Oh, my God!" Colene whispered. "What have I been doing?" But she had the answer. She had been destroying. She had been like an act of nature, wiping out people randomly, not even aware. Gravity might not be any more, for her, but it seemed that she felt exactly like a giant to the folk underfoot.

  "Seqiro, guide my feet!" she pleaded, blinded by tears and horror.

  They walked back to the others, treading in their own prints. "We've got to get out of here!" Colene cried. Without waiting, she hit them with what she had learned.

  "Oh, I never thought!" Nona cried, sitting up. "I knew there were people, but—"

  "But you didn't make the connection," Darius finished. "None of us did. It was too far from our experience."

  That was true. He was the rational one, Colene remembered. But now they knew, and they could not ignore it.

  "How many more of these little planets must we pass before we get to Jupiter?" Darius asked Nona.

  "I don't know. Several. Some will be larger than this, some smaller."

  "Can we take a longer hop?" Colene asked.

  "We can try." Nona walked to the sea, stood in it, and concentrated, tuning in on the filament ahead.

  After a bit, she reported that there were two worlds she might reach near the main star. One was larger than this one; the other was smaller. Both were anima.

  "Star?" Colene asked.

  Nona's thought clarified the concept. A star was not what Colene imagined; it was merely the point at which several filaments diverged. Those on major lines were big and bright; those on minor lines were lesser structures. Those with many rays were brighter than those with few rays. Oria's sun was the nearest large star on an adjacent filament, with ninety-eight rays, closer to them than their own ninety-nine-ray star. But this particular little star had only three rays, so was hardly recognizable.

  Darius cut directly to business. "If we take the smaller world, we will risk treading on many more little folk, unless our feet touch only the tops of mountains and they are safe in the valleys."

  "No, folk live on mountaintops too," Nona said.

  "If we take the larger world, we will have a better chance of seeing where we put our feet."

  That seemed to be the better choice. Nona changed the pillows back to threads so they wouldn't suffocate any little folk, and they got together for the jump.

  Colene thought she was used to it, but this one turned out to be more dizzying than the last, because it covered considerably more distance. Now she was aware of the complicated convolutions of the filament; it was not jagged but infinitely curved, dancing this way and that as it wound through its intricate patterns. Throughout these patterns were tiny bugs, too small to step on or even to see, yet each was part of the route. Did all these have people too? At least they were not getting tramped on.

  They arrived at the planetoid. This one was over ten times the diameter of the last, according to Nona's thought, or about a hundred miles. Colene couldn't see much of it, because the curve of its heads obscured the body. Was it large enough?

  They stood astride the diminishing heads, as before, but the progression was longer. They were sliding off a boulder about thirteen feet in diameter, give or take five feet—in her dizziness she didn't care much about accuracy—to land on one about a hundred and fifty feet across. They walked around that, their heads pointing away from the surface of the head they were on, not away from the body beyond, so that they didn't have to jump down. Even so, it might have been easier to have Darius conjure them, but that magic had to be saved for the next effort.

  The next head was about two miles in diameter, and felt more tike a planetoid in itself. Now she remembered to watch for the works of people, and she saw them. Their houses were about two inches high, and the people themselves about one inch in stature.

  "Stop here," she said. "I'll ask them how we can get through without hurting them."

  She squatted, and brought her hand down carefully to point at one tiny man who defended his barn bravely with a pitchfork. Her vision sharpened so that she could see his face clearly. "You," she said for Seqiro to forward. "I will talk to you. We are traveling through from a larger world. We don't want to step on any of you. Can you tell us a way to go so that we can put our feet down safely?"

  Perhaps the man had had experience with travelers. Maybe that was why he lived here near the point of arrival. At any rate, he did not freak out. "Animus or anima?" he demanded.

  That set Colene back. Which force did they represent?

  "Anima," Nona said.

  "Anima, hiding from animus," Colene told the farmer. "Going to bring the anima, if we can."

  The farmer smiled. "Then pass with our blessing. There is a path by the south side." He gestured, pointing the direction.

  "Thank you." Colene stood carefully. She did not need to repeat the information; the others had received it too.

  They stepped carefully to the south, setting their feet down in empty pastures or barren areas. They found the path; apparently there had been a blight in this region, leaving a depopulated strip. They walked along it, alert for healthy sections, which they avoided by moving to the side or by simply stepping over. Colene was glad she had fashioned underclothing, because she was wary of what little folk might see as she stepped over them.

  Now the projections of the planet were plain. They ranged in height from about five hundred feet down to immeasurably small. This was the way of these fractal worlds, Colene knew; it hadn't been evident on Oria because they hadn't traveled enough on it by day. Also, people had plowed out most of the knobs, near the village, so as to use the land for crops. Man always did mess up the scenery. Here the mountains were shaped like boulders with smaller boulders perched on them, and smaller ones on the smaller ones, and so on without end. It was weird—but also true to the Mandelbrot set as she remembered it. True to the entire science of fractals and Julia sets,

  They came to the next larger head, which looked to be about ten miles in diameter. Now Colene saw that there was a river or lake filling in the crevice between the small and large heads. Naturally the water of the planet had to flow somewhere, and since down was toward the center of each head, there was a section between heads where the attraction of both applied. That would be where the water collected. This would be a donut-shaped lake, technically a torus, circling the planet at this narrow section.

  But the path did not extend across the next head. They had to hail another farmer. But Colene was getting experienced at this; she sent reassuring, friendly thoughts ahead, so that the man had a notion what she wanted before she actually broached the subject. He directed them to the north, where there had been extensive strip mining, and the land had been left mostly barren. Even some of the larger projecting spheres were gone, leaving the land oddly naked. "They are messing up their planet the same way we did Earth," she muttered.

  By the time they made their way to the lake that de-marked the next head, they were all physically tired except Seqiro, who seemed indefatigable. Ten miles was ten miles. "Say, you could have floated," Colene said to Nona.

  "That would have taken similar energy—and depleted the magic I must save for the next conjuring," the woman replied.

  True. There was no easy way across for any of them. "Actually we're not on a schedule, are we?" Colene asked, pursuing another thought
. "We can take an extra day if we want to?"

  "We can," Darius agreed.

  "So why don't we rest the night, then conjure ourselves to the East Valley, and rest again until we're ready to make the long hop?"

  They considered, and agreed. They camped by the lake, and stripped and washed themselves, then had a good meal. Nona looked so tired that Colene was hardly jealous of her fine body. Especially since Darius was carefully not looking. Then Colene thought of something else.

  She walked to the nearest community of natives. "We thank you for letting us cross your world," she said for Seqiro to relay. "Is there anything we can do in return for your hospitality?"

  The little folk were taken aback. Then they rallied and decided that yes, there was something. They had a construction project that required the filling in of several large mine pits, and it was hard to spare the manpower for that. They had only recently thrown off the yoke of animus despots, and had little new magic, and there was much planetary damage to be undone.

  Colene looked at Darius. "Can we move their earth for them, magically?"

  "We don't need to," he replied. "We can shovel it physically, if we make big enough tools."

  "We can make them," Nona agreed. "That's not the same magic as travel-conjuring, and I am not as fatigued by it."

  "Tomorrow," Colene told the little folk. "Mark the earth you want moved, and mark where you want it moved to, and we'll do what we can."

  "Agreed," the little folk said appreciatively.

  This planet was oriented so that the light of the same great star that brought day to Oria slanted across at an angle to the head. Now dusk came, and then darkness, and the air cooled quickly. Nona had to make blankets for them all except Seqiro, who was satisfied to walk around grazing on the patches of grass and saplings.

  "Come here, you little bundle of warmth," Darius told her. "I remember you from Earth."

  She joined him and slept in his chaste embrace, delighted.

  IN the morning Nona floated up and spied the earth mounds and the pits beyond. Everything was marked; the little folk must have labored through the night. She returned to make shovels for the human folk, and a harness and drag for the horse. Then they marched to the first site and started shoveling and dragging, each of their giant shovelfuls the equivalent of ten thousand or a million native shovelfuls. Colene tried to work it out mathematically in her head, cubing one hundred, because each dimension was about a hundred times that of the equivalent for the little folk, but realized that this wouldn't work. It was science-reality figuring, and this was a magic reality, where the square-cube law did not hold and gravity was more or less independent of mass. At any rate, they were doing the job a whole lot faster than the little folk could.

  Still, there was a lot of earth to move, and none of the three women were in physical condition to maintain such effort. In the end it was mostly Darius and Seqiro, both sweating profusely as they labored. By the close of day, the job was done. The formerly mounded and pitted terrain had been rendered into a level field.

  The little folk were delighted. "We did not think you would do all of it!" their spokesman exclaimed. "We must reward you, O giants of another world."

  Colene tried to demur, knowing that there was nothing the local folk could do to repay such heroic effort. "It is merely our thanks for your hospitality," she said.

  "We still have the rest of the planet to traverse," Darius reminded her. "We can't walk it all; we'll need to conjure ourselves there. If they can show us good locations to land—"

  "However," Colene continued smoothly, "we could use the favor of some information. We are afraid we will accidentally step on some of your people as we travel the length of the planet, so we prefer to conjure ourselves there. But we need to have a series of clear landing sites, lest we do harm arriving blindly. If you could provide information—"

  "In the morning!" the spokesman agreed eagerly. "We are amazed that you possess such exotic magic." That reminded Colene that Darius' ability to conjure living folk was unknown in this universe; she would be more careful what she said about it henceforth.

  Meanwhile, the natives put on a show for the entertainment of their giant guests. Their material magic remained weak, for their new generation of women were still girls, but their illusion was strong. They generated huge pictures (for them) against the backdrop of night, making images of their dancing—and it was truly evocative dancing. It was a costumed re-enactment of their overthrow of the despots across the world, after the animus had changed. It showed the despots, deprived of their magic, bowing down, and the theows assuming the mantle of dominion. The women performed a symbolic finale that suggested the magic their daughters would have, but ; was incidentally quite sexy. Especially when they threw off Ibeir red tunics and danced naked. She could fed Darius' appreciation. He did not regard the illusion pictures as real, so felt free to watch them intently. She would remember that; would he watch her dance naked if he thought she was an illusion image?

  So they slept again. Colene was getting to like this little planet. It was remarkably similar to Oria, except for size; it would not have been possible to tell that its size differed had the five of them not been there for contrast. The proportions of the people were the same, and when they jumped, they took the same amount of time to land. There simply was no change because of the scale. This was just not a science reality.

  In the morning the little folk had the information. There was a suitable site beside the lake that separated the main head from the body, forty miles away, and another near the East Sea. They could do it in two hops, if they wished, or one.

  "These are longer jumps than we did before, on Oria," Darius said. "The filament isn't the same. Better to try the forty, then the hundred."

  They set up for it. It was clear that the little folk meant well; their minds were quite open to Seqiro. The site was described as completely accessible, and Provos remembered no difficulty here. So Darius conjured Seqiro there first, then used his linkage with the horse's mind to conjure the others in turn to the vicinity. Colene was the first to follow Seqiro; then came Nona, Provos, and Darius himself.

  Now they stood at the edge of the much larger lake separating the head from the body. It was quite similar to the one they had left, in all respects apart from size. That was the nature of this fractal universe: everything was self-similar.

  They made a similar series of conjurations to the East Sea. This was just like the one they had left on Oria, only much smaller. But they decided to rest one more day before making the final conjuration to Jupiter.

  RESTED, they used a new weighted diving bell to march down under the water. This time the journey was brief, and soon they stood astride the East Filament.

  They joined together, in bodies and minds, and sailed up along the filament. This time Colene saw even more: how they zoomed along at Ughtspeed (or magic-speed), down into the juncture of three rays, and indeed it seemed like another dimension, for she felt as if they were accelerating toward infinite velocity while traveling a path extending toward infinity. Then suddenly the infinities met and canceled, and they were zooming out of the well and toward Jupiter, which now loomed awesomely huge.

  They landed on the smallest feasible head of the head of one of the major projections on the side of Jupiter. The connected heads became much larger than Oria, and Jupiter itself was almost unimaginable.

  Now there was no concern about stepping on the natives. Rather, they would have to be concerned about being stepped on by the natives. The tiniest head might be small, but Jupiter was large, so the natives would be Jupiter-scale. This was certainly the home of the fabled Megaplayers; the size was right.

  But first they had to rest, for Darius and Nona were exhausted by their joint effort of travel. Colene decided to make herself useful by harvesting a berry or grain of wheat and making a nonmagical meal for them. However, she needed water, and wood for a fire. So she and Seqiro got busy.

  Provos joined her without
being asked. They had camped at the edge of a forest of what appeared to be literally mile-high trees; there was plenty of wood in the form of fallen twigs, which were full-sized logs to them.

  There was a lake nearby. Colene headed for it, but Provos held her back. "There is a bad memory," she explained.

  So they took another path. Colene looked to the side, to see what might be on the one she would have taken.

  She saw an ant. It was a foot long. Suddenly she realized that their most immediate danger was not the Megaplayers.

  CHAPTER 6

  ANGUS

  DARIUS nodded, watching. He was tired, but he still did not care to let Colene go into a strange world alone. An ant, twenty times the size of what he had known. That would be the least of it. What about the birds and snakes?

  "Seqiro, can you stun animals?1' he inquired, not raising his voice. He had found that it was not the sound, but the thought that counted; the speech tended to focus the thought suitably. The horse was with Colene, but well within mental range. Darius wanted their dialogue to be private, and the horse could pick that up too, and would honor it.

  I can, if their minds are not closed. Human minds tend to be guarded, even in realities where telepathy is not known, but animal minds tend to be open. I have been fortunate in my ability to attune to the minds of the smaller folk, perhaps because some of these are animar like Nona.

  "Then you may be our main protection against monsters, as well as our main means of communication with the human giants here."

  I will do what I can.

  He turned to Nona. The young woman was spread out on her magically made pillow-mattress, attractive though she wasn't trying to be. "Can you conjure weapons?" Again, Seqiro could pick up both the thought and the person for whom it was intended. Also, which thought was to be relayed, and which was not. Darius was really coming to appreciate the horse's ability.