To trip over an explosive pinecone?
It was too bizarre a notion to countenance.
Nonetheless, this was not his world, and he refrained from kicking any more fallen cones as they trudged onward. One fell from an overhanging branch, making him jump. Mudge started to giggle, stifled it, and hid his face when Jon-Tom threw him a murderous look. He picked the cone up and turned it over. The top ring of seed shells was present. Fortunately.
He tossed it angrily aside. When he got home, he’d dispose of this stupid theory during his first visit to the mountains.
He just wouldn’t kick any cones first, he told himself thoughtfully.
Evening revealed an unexpected talent on the part of their tireless packer. In addition to an acerbic wit and strong back, it also developed that Dormas was the owner of a superb, lilting soprano voice. Not to mention a lifetime of songs and ballads, which she proceeded to deliver to them while seated around the fire. Enthusiastic applause punctuated the conclusion of the impromptu recital. The hinny looked away, unexpectedly embarrassed.
“I don’t do it often,” she told them, “but frankly, you lot bore me, and I’d rather hear myself sing than listen to you babble.”
“I’d rather listen to you sing too,” Jon-Tom told her. Then he frowned. Something was not right. Not radically wrong but not right, either. “Odd. I feel peculiar all of a sudden.” He held up a hand. His hand, definitely, and yet—somehow changed.
“Another perturbation.” Sorbl spoke from his evening perch in a nearby tree and he, too, did not sound quite right. Jon-Tom let his gaze wander around the firelit circle.
There was Sorbl, the same and yet not. There Mudge, also somehow subtly different. What kind of perturbation was this? And still the peculiar softness that had come over him.
Not quite like an upset stomach. Something more complete, less transitory. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
Then he did put his finger on it, in several places.
“Oh, my God.” He looked anxiously up at Clothahump. “This is one change that better not last too long.”
“I have been taking note of the most recent alteration with a great deal of interest.” The wizard’s appearance had changed only slightly. His voice, however, had undergone the same kind of shift as Jon-Tom’s. It was still penetrating, still authoritative, but an octave higher.
Moans came from Mudge and then Sorbl as they discovered the nature of the latest outrage perpetrated by the perambulator upon their personal reality.
“It is not nearly as radical a change as many we have previously experienced,” Clothahump calmly pointed out. “Some perturbations result in changes far more subtle than others.”
Dormas was studying her altered physiognomy intently. “Fascinating. I always wondered what it would be like. Seems kind of clumsy, though. I wouldn’t want it to be permanent, either.”
“The degree of change varies according to the species, of course,” the wizard reminded them all.
“This is what you call a ‘subtle’ perturbation?” Jon-Tom barely recognized the voice that spoke as his own.
There was nothing complex or indeterminate about this latest perturbation. The effects were quite clear. Each and every one of them had shifted sex. Without warning the hopeful expedition had become a quartet of ladies accompanied by a single male.
“When’s it goi’ to change back?” Mudge was moaning. Squeaking, rather, in his new, high voice. “’Tis only another temporary change. Ain’t that right, Your Sorcerership?”
“There is no way of telling how long this particular perturbation will last, Mudge. No way at all.” Jon-Tom noted that the pattern of red on his shell had changed to a distinctive mauve.
“It bloody well better not last long. Damn lucky we ain’t in Ospenspri. I couldn’t show me face, I couldn’t.”
“Something wrong with being female, water rat?” said Dormas in a tone that was all stallion.
Jon-Tom tried to ignore his own voice as he explained. “You’d have to know Mudge better to understand what he’s going through right now, Dormas. I’m afraid this particular metamorphosis has hit him harder than any of us.”
“Come on, Your Lordship.” The otter was pleading with Clothahump. “We saw wot you did back in Ospenspri, changi’ that black cloud a’ all. Couldn’t you work just a wee bit o’ magic and put us right? I don’t know as ’ow I can ’andle this for very long. I’ve a weak constitution, I do.”
“It is not a life- or even situation-threatening perturbation,” Clothahump declared formally. “Hardly worth the danger entailed by a serious conjuration. You will just have to be patient, like the rest of us, and wait for the change back to occur naturally.”
“Aye, but wot if it don’t? Wot if it takes days, or even weeks? Cor, I can’t stay like this for weeks.” He turned on Jon-Tom. “Wot say, mate? Use your duar there to sing us a change-back song, will you? Just one little ditty?”
“I’m no more comfortable in this guise than you are, Mudge, but I agree with Clothahump. It’s not worth chancing any dangerous spells.” A sudden thought had him grinning. “Just sit back and enjoy the fire—beautiful.”
Mudge didn’t find the suggestion funny. “Look, mate, a joke’s a joke, but this ain’t amusin’.”
“Amusing? I’d say it’s more like poetic justice. Who says fate has no sense of humor?”
“I’m warning you, you skinny ape. Watch it or I’ll—”
“Or you’ll what? Scratch my eyes out?”
The otter growled and yanked his hat down sharply over his ears (or was it her ears?). His hat had changed along with his more personal accessories. Just as Jon-Tom’s had. Actually, he thought the dress he was now clad in rather attractive.
It is truly astonishing, he told himself, the situations that a sense of humor can carry one through.
The effects of the perturbation were most obvious in Mudge and himself, for in Clothahump, Sorbl, and Dormas’s species, the differences in appearance between male and female were not nearly so striking. Mudge continued to try to retreat into his hat, which had turned into a frilly broad-brimmed chapeau that might have been borrowed from some petite southern belle.
“Please do somethin’,” the otter whined, in a tone so pitiful Jon-Tom was moved to look hopefully at Clothahump.
“I could try, sir. It might be a good idea for me to make a stab at reversing the effects of one of these shifts when the change involved isn’t quite as severe as it might be.”
The wizard looked thoughtful. “Very well, my boy. But do be careful. It is not inconceivable that a badly thrown spell might make things worse.”
“’Ow could things be any worse?” Mudge wanted to know. “Wot could be worse than this?”
“You really can be extraordinarily insulting, you know,” Dormas told him.
“Right now I’m just extraordinarily miserable, lass—or is it to be sir?”
“I don’t know myself,” she murmured. “Let’s see what your spellsinger can do about it.”
Jon-Tom took his time preparing and choosing, keeping Clothahump’s warning in mind. He tried to use songs by both the most masculine and feminine performers he could think of, ended up alternating lyrics by good old Elvis P. with some hot flashes by Tina Turner. The result left something to be desired musically but apparently not magically.
“There,” he said with a sigh, as he cleared his throat and put his duar aside. It had been fun to sing soprano for a while, but he was glad to have his own voice back, though not as glad as Mudge. Once the otter discovered that he was indeed himself again, he bounded from his position by Sorbl’s tree and danced frenziedly around the fire. Only exhaustion finally brought him to a halt.
“’Tis a true abomination wot’s forci’ this poor perambulator to wreak such obscene havoc. I’ll personally put ’im out of ’is misery when I see ’is rotten face, I will.”
“I personally hope it is that easy,” Clothahump commented quietly. “Now I suggest that
we retire, early as it may be. We will need all our reserves in the event the morrow brings fresh surprises. The next perturbation may require even stronger magic to counter.”
As close as the wizard ever came to complimenting him, Jon-Tom thought sourly. He’d expected nothing more. He was right about getting some serious sleep, though. Jon-Tom put his duar aside, wrapped himself up in his lizard-skin cape, and rolled over. Mudge was laying out his own bedroll. Jon-Tom smiled at him.
“Good night, you cute little pinch of fluff, you.”
The otter glanced at him sharply. “’Ow’d you like to try singi’ without your front teeth, mate?” He flopped down in a huff, turned away from the tall young human.
Morning provided a powerful reminder that serious perturbations could take place as dramatically while they slept as while they were awake. The indifference of sleep offered no escape.
Instinctively he reached for his duar. Not only was the instrument missing, he discovered that he had nothing to reach with. He tried to sit up and found to his considerable confusion that he had nothing to sit up with, either.
No amount of bewilderment could mask the fact that this was the most radical perturbation they’d yet suffered.
Around him the air was murky, thick, and cloying. He tried to see through it and felt his vision slide. It was as if his eyes were rattling around loose inside his head. Shoving down the panic he felt, he struggled to get hold of himself. At least he could still see, even if only in shades of black and white. He could not make out any colors. Or perhaps, he told himself, he could make out colors and there were none to see.
The sky overhead was a pale, reflective white. Surrounding him were dark gray trees. That was when he saw the monster and recoiled from it. At the same time the monster shrank back from something unseen, and Jon-Tom realized it was cowering away from him.
There were other monsters around, and every one of them appeared petrified by the sight of its neighbor. Jon-Tom began to wonder what he looked like.
Along with color vision he’d lost any sense of smell. He could still hear clearly, though. Just as he could hear the sound of his own body moving forward. The sound was not pleasant. It implied a means of locomotion involving something far less sophisticated than legs.
This time the perturbation had not merely knocked reality askew, it had turned it inside out. Heretofore the perambulator’s changes had made some sense, but this current transformation made no sense at all. Had it begun to draw upon its captor’s insanity?
He struggled to form words. “Can anyone understand me?”
“I can.” The gross form that replied was more incongruous than repugnant in appearance. It did not seem an appropriate home for someone as lithe and swift as Mudge, but it was Mudge’s voice that spoke to him. Directly, through some unknown variety of thought transference. Neither the Mudge-shape nor Jon-Tom nor any of the other monsters possessed anything recognizable as a mouth.
Clothahump spoke up, and then Sorbl and Dormas. Transformed as they were by the unaccountable, all were accounted for. Dormas was the biggest of the five, Sorbl the smallest. The perturbation had stuck to the laws for transformation of mass. It seemed that some rules still applied.
Excepting differences in size, they all looked pretty much like each other: bloated, colorless blobs of gelatinous protoplasm drifting in a slightly less dense fluid. Smaller shapes and outlines were visible within their own bodies. Their shiny epidermi were in constant motion.
Giant single-celled entities, mutated amoebas—Jon-Tom didn’t know enough to be certain exactly what they’d become, but he was glad of what little biology he’d been forced to take.
“This is most disconcerting,” murmured Clothahump voicelessly. “I wonder how limited our present range of movement is.” He extruded a pseudopod and tried to grip something floating through the liquid. This led to the discovery that they could change their positions by shifting their internal mass. It would have upset Jon-Tom’s stomach if he’d had one. Instead he suffered a faint mental nausea.
“What is this? What’ve we turned into?” the Dormas-shape wanted to know.
“My experience does not extend to acquaintance with such shapelessness,” Clothahump told her.
“Well, mine does.” All light-sensing organelles turned to Jon-Tom. “We’ve been turned into something like amoebas, only much larger and far more complex. Just as an example, we’re still capable of higher thought.”
“That’s all right, mate,” said the Mudge-mass. “We’ll all shift back to ourselves in a minute or two. Ain’t that right, Your Blobship?”
“I certainly hope so.” He glanced around. “Our supplies appear to have vanished. This has not happened during any of the previous perturbations.”
It struck Jon-Tom then that his appraisal of their current situation was more accurate than he’d first imagined.
“Our supplies haven’t disappeared. They’re right here, all around us. We just can’t see them in our present states. See, we don’t resemble microscopic organisms. We’ve become microscopic organisms. We’ve shrunk.” He gestured with a pseudopod. “Those boulders over there are probably nothing more than grains of sand, those trees microscopic lichen or something. A light breeze could scatter us, blow us away. It’s a good thing we decided to sleep in a protected glade.”
“How can something so small be capable of thought and speech?” Dormas asked him.
“How should I know? I’m no expert on the ramifications of perturbations. Who says they have to be logical, anyway?”
“The danger is apparent,” said Clothahump grimly. “We cannot wait passively for our return. We must try to do something. But my potions are elsewhere, and I have not the faintest notion of how to begin.”
“How about a spellsong, Jon-Tom?” Sorbl asked him.
“I need my duar, Sorbl. You know that.”
“Can’t you just try without it?”
He sighed, and it washed through his entire body. “It’d just be a waste of time and energy.”
“Perhaps not.” Jon-Tom could feel the wizard’s attention on him. “Since you have no duar on which to accompany yourself, you must try to fashion one.”
Jon-Tom let his simplified gaze roam through their oleaginous surroundings. “Out of what? There’s no wood here, nothing to fashion strings from. Even if I could rig a crude sort of duar, I couldn’t play it.”
“Why not?” Sorbl wondered.
“Because ’e ain’t got no fingers, featherbrain,” Mudge told him.
“That need not hold him back,” said Clothahump thoughtfully.
“You could spellsing up a duar, mate, if you ’ad a duar.”
“What do you mean, it needn’t hold me back, sir?”
By way of reply Clothahump twisted a section of himself into an intricate figure eight. “Our present bodies are extraordinarily flexible. They can be stretched into any possible shape.”
“Oh, I see. Even into fingers.”
“No, my boy. Not only into fingers. Into a duar itself.”
“That’s impossible.”
“That word is an obsession with you. Try.”
Jon-Tom shrugged, felt a portion of himself ripple. “Why not? It’s better than sitting here waiting to be blown or washed away.”
How does one go about becoming the instrument one is used to playing? He fought to conjure up a concrete image in his mind. Strings like so, resonance chamber so, measurements such and such—just thinking about it hurt his mind. When he had the mental picture refined to his satisfaction, he began to twist, to contort, to strain.
It was not only difficult, it was painful. But he kept at it, readjusting his tissues, polishing his exterior, until to his very considerable surprise he had molded himself into a familiar shape composed of gleaming gelatinous material.
A song now, he mused. Something appropriate to their situation, something suitable for changing shape and volume. Yes, Paul Williams should work. He began to sing, and to play himself.
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The notes didn’t sound quite right, nor did his voice, but he persisted. Distortion was only to be expected under the circumstances. It still seemed a waste of time, until something vast and glowing could be seen coming toward them. It was an enormous lambent shape, like a small sun, though within the light he thought he could make out the dim outline of something almost familiar.
Dormas shrank away from it, and Mudge and Sorbl tried to flee. As Jon-Tom played on, only Clothahump held his position. For he recognized it immediately. Its appearance was not only proof that Jon-Tom’s spellsinging was working, but of the true size to which they’d been reduced.
“Stay,” he ordered the others. “It is quite harmless. It is only a gneechee.”
A single gneechee, those can’t-be-seen specks of light that were so much more. They were attracted to active magic, and this one had sought them out to cavort in the echoes of Jon-Tom’s spellsinging.
As he played himself on, the eerie wail became real music. He found that regardless of the results, he was enjoying himself. It is one thing to play an instrument well enough to feel it is a part of you. It’s quite another to make it all of you.
As he sang on, played on, the sky began to lighten. From a liquid translucence it brightened to yellow, the first true color he’d been able to perceive since the perturbation. The yellow intensified to gold. The sun seemed to be coming straight toward them. Not the gneechee this time but the bright, glowing orb that warmed the world: the true sun.
The by-now familiar mental snap, a moment of complete disorientation, and he staggered momentarily as he fought for balance, clutching with one hand at the duar hanging from his neck and at a rock with the other.
Back again.
A single bright spot of light vanished from the comer of his vision. He bid a silent farewell to the gneechee, hoping it had enjoyed the concert. Music rang through his brain, reverberated the length and breadth of his body. These aftereffects of the perturbation and his time as an instrument did not linger long, for which he was sorry. Not every perturbation made you feel lost or ill. He had been granted a few moments to live the musician’s dream. From now on he would only be able to live up to those moments of musical epiphany in his memory.