Pont started to roll down the street, and Nita followed them. “Others? How many more people are here?”
“Oh, just a few on this run,” Pont said. “Some of them are repeating a secondary exercise—their time wasn’t good enough the last cycle out.”
“I haven’t done this one before,” Nita said. “Is it hard?”
The spheres looked at her. Two of them, to Nita’s surprise, melded into one, running together exactly the way two drops of water become one, without even ceasing to roll. “How many of these have you done before?”
“Just one.”
“Huh,” Pont said. Nita couldn’t repress a snort of laughter; the spheres’ tone of voice was almost identical to one of Dairine’s when she was impressed by something but trying not to show it. “That’s not bad. Usually you get a couple between this one and the starter scenario. You must have found the first one pretty quickly.”
“I don’t know,” Nita said. “The manual was vague about the projected solution times—”
“Oh, the manuals,” they said, and a couple of them bounced up and down in midroll, a shrug. “They’re not much good in these spaces. And even outside them, they don’t always correctly predict what’s going to happen in here. You learn not to pay too much attention to them in testing mode; and you figure things out yourselves. But you’re doing that already.” They were looking up at Nita’s charm bracelet, she could tell.
They paused all together at the corner of Third and Forty-fourth, and Nita looked up and down the street, listening. That high whining buzz was still perfectly audible if she stopped to listen for it, and still coming from the north, but also east a little more. “At least another block over,” she said.
“Lead the way.”
She trotted across Third and looked down at the patterns in the pavement again. “You know what these mean, Pont?”
“Not a clue,” Pont said as they rolled across the avenue after her. “I think we’re lacking the necessary cultural referents.”
“You’re not alone.” They headed northward again, past the sleek, polished goldstone frontages of the buildings. It was odd that though these had doorways every now and then, there were no windows at street level, or lower than about thirty feet off the ground. This feature was doubtless expressive of some truth about this universe, but Nita didn’t have the slightest idea what that might be.
“This is definitely one of the odder practice universes,” Pont said as they made their way across Forty-fifth and on past more blind walls.
Nita raised her eyebrows. “Oh? What makes you say that?”
“Well, the way the space here is curved is unusually acute. The lack of entasis makes it—”
“Oh, come on, the entasis level is fine. It’s just that everything looks odd to you,” said another of the balls.
“It does not. It’s perfectly obvious that you just don’t know—”
“You’re both crazy,” yet another of the balls chimed in. “If you just—”
Nita had had plenty of arguments with herself in her head, but now she thought she was hearing one in a form she’d never imagined. “Look, don’t fight about it,” she said. “It wastes time. Pick just one of you to tell me, or something.”
This astonished Pont so much that they stopped rolling and stared at one another. Nita stood still and waited for them to sort themselves out, while making a mental note that when she got back to where the manual worked at its normal speed, she was going to look up this life-form in a hurry. “Well?” Nita said.
One of the five—the two who had combined themselves had come apart again as they were all crossing Forty-fifth—now said, “You could put it this way—” Its surface shimmered. Without any warning at all, Nita found herself seeing the world the way Pont, or one of it, did—a landscape so alien that she could make almost nothing of it. Everything had a metallic sheen to it, and everything was fluid and in constant motion, running or rolling down one surface or another. And every surface was curved. It was like a world made of mercury, not just silvery but in a hundred different colors. Every single thing Nita could see was shaped like some version of a sphere, tiny or massive, everything either already perfectly spherical or working hard to get that way. There were no straight lines anywhere. Where it could be seen, even the horizon was curved.
Nita blinked. More than mere vision was involved in what she was perceiving. This space was acutely curved, so that its sky seemed to bend down and cover you like an umbrella. It was a perspective both claustrophobic and oddly big, giving you the illusion that you could wrap that universe around you like an overcoat, an absolutely huge one.
“Wow,” Nita said. At first she was eager to break out of this way of seeing things. But then she caught herself, and looked a little harder. This is weird, but—I wonder… She held still, watched, and listened. Listening seemed not to do much good in this worldview; all the motion happened in silence. But the motion had a trend in one general direction. Everything Nita could see, everything that slid or rolled or pulsated around her, had a slight drift toward the direction in “front” of her—northward and eastward, though a little more eastward than the way she’d originally been heading.
Aha, Nita thought. One point of view is good, but a second one from another mind helps you fine-tune your first one. It’s like triangulating. “Okay, okay,” Nita said, and the image of the world-as-mercury oozed and flowed away, leaving her looking around her again, with relief, at edges and straight lines. She listened again for that buzz, heard it, and put it together with the direction in which things had been slipping and oozing.
“Are you all right?” Pont asked, sounding anxious.
Nita smiled; the “you” was plural. “I’m okay. Come on; you helped. We’re closer than I thought—”
She headed down Forty-fifth at a trot and turned the corner onto Second Avenue, and paused there. All of Pont ran into her ankles, she’d stopped so suddenly. “What?”
Nita looked up and down Second, perplexed, for she hadn’t expected it to be a canal. Where the curb would normally have been was now a sheer drop, and water reflecting that dark blue sky ran down between the white stone walls of the two sides of the avenue.
“We could roll across,” said one of Pont.
“No, we couldn’t. We left the wizardry home,” said another.
“I told you we should have brought it,” said the third.
“You said we should bring the multistate compressor,” said the fourth, “and so we did. We were the one that wanted to bring the solidifier, but—”
Nita began to wonder what these creatures’ family life was like. Just by themselves, if that was the right term, they seemed to have trouble getting along. “Look, guys,” she said, “there’s a bridge across at Forty-second.”
“We’ll have to go all the way down there and retrace our tracks.”
“Better than going all the way up to Fifty-seventh,” Nita said, peering up the avenue-cum-canal, “because that’s the next one. Or we could swim.”
Pont looked at her with all of itself. “‘Swim’?”
She looked at the spheres. They lacked anything to swim with. “Okay, maybe not. Come on.”
Nita jogged downtown as far as Forty-second, with Pont rolling after her, fast The bridge arched up in a smooth ramp across the water, coming down on the opposite sidewalk, and they all headed north again. Nita could hear the little buzzing whine at the back of her mind getting stronger and stronger, and followed it more quickly while checking her progress against her memory of Pont’s view of the world. Pont rolled along behind, arguing genially about their last timing in “the exercise” and how it might have been improved.
Just north of Fifty-fourth, Street Nita realized that she had come a little too far north. “East from here,” she said to Pont, as they came up behind her.
The spheres looked at themselves, and made a little musical sound that translated itself, via the Speech, into “Uh-oh.”
“What’s th
e matter?” Nita said. She backtracked to the corner of Fifty-fourth, and headed east toward First Avenue.
“Nothing.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” said another of Pont
“Yes, well, you didn’t like it much last time,” said a third.
“And we don’t like it much now, either,” said the fifth one, which surprised Nita; she’d been starting to think of it as the quiet one. “We thought they would have moved it significantly. It almost always gets moved for a redo. But it looks like somebody has a little surprise for us.”
Nita gave up trying to figure out what they were talking about, and headed toward First Avenue. She stopped at the corner, Pont rolling up alongside her. Nita’s sense of the location of the kernel placed it right out in front of her, near where the block of Fifty-fourth between First and York should have been. But here there were no more streets at all. Directly in front of them was a huge stepped pyramid of golden stone, incomplete at its top, and behind it the East River flowed by. Sticking out into the river from one side of the pyramid was a long jetty or pier of that white stone.
“There they are,” Pont said. “They didn’t waste their time.”
Nita squinted down at the jetty, bright in the sun, and saw down near the end of it what appeared to be a woolly mammoth, a second object of roughly cylindrical shape that wavered oddly around the edges, and a third small shape, elongated and six-legged, which was heading toward the end of the jetty while the other two faced off against each other.
“It’s down there,” Nita said. “Down in the water.”
“We told you we should have left the compressor home,” said Pont to one of themselves.
“And what we said was—”
“Come on, guys,” Nita said. “Give it a rest. I can do water.” She headed past the pyramid, toward the jetty.
The smallest of the creatures was slipping into the water. Nita jogged down the jetty, and saw that the bigger of the two creatures looked like a woolly mammoth only in terms of the bulk of its body. Seen up close, it looked much more like a giant three-legged football with green-and-brown shag carpeting stapled to it. Its companion, which faced it silently, was a bundle of bright purple tentacles about six feet high, waving gently, and changing colors as they did.
“Dai stihó, guys,” Nita said as she went by the two wizards. They gazed at her as she passed—the tentacly wizard with one of several stalked eyes attached to the top of it, and the furry football apparently with its fur, which “followed” Nita as she went by.
She went to the end of the jetty, where the other wizard had vanished, and looked down at the water. Down there she could clearly feel the kernel’s tight small buzz of power. It wasn’t even all that far down. No point in floating, Nita thought. She flicked the charm bracelet around on her wrist, came up with the charm that was shaped like a little glass bubble, took hold of it, and jumped in.
As Nita sank, the air-and-mass spell came to life around her, holding the water away but at the same time counteracting the buoyancy of the air she’d brought with her to breathe. Because it was so compact, the spell’s validity was limited, but she was sure she’d have time to do what she needed to do. It’s almost right underneath me. All I have to do is—
—and then she saw, right under her, the sleek form swimming up toward her. Her first thought was It’s an otter—and indeed it looked like one. But otters had fewer legs. This creature, golden-pelted, was stroking strongly along toward Nita with its front and back paws; and in the middle ones it held a tangle of light and power, small and bright, from which came the singing whine she’d been tracking.
As the creature flashed past, dark cheerful eyes blinked at her, and it grinned. Then it was heading toward the blue-lighted roil of surface. Nita let out a breath of slight annoyance and went after it, bobbing up to the surface in her bubble of air.
The other wizard was already clambering up out of the water with the kernel. This it showed to the other wizards, and one of them said, “All right, you’ve proved your point.”
“Twenty-four minutes,” the otter creature said to the furry three-legged wizard. “But it nearly didn’t do me any good!” It turned its long sleek head to look at Nita as she climbed up onto the jetty and banished the bubble wizardry. “Look what I passed on the way up!”
“Dai stihó,” Nita said. “Hey, you beat me fairly. I just got here late.”
“Didn’t think They were going to let anybody else in here, this cycle,” said the furry creature. “Oh well. Dai, cousin!”
“Here’s Pralaya,” said Pont, indicating the “otter.” “And that’s Mmemyn”—one of Pont rolled over to the massive three-legged creature with the strange fur—”and here’s Dazel. What was the matter with you two?” Pont said to them. “Why’d you just let Pralaya take the kernel?”
I did not wish to dissolve, said a slow silent voice that seemed to come from Mmemyn in a diffuse sort of way. After a moment Nita realized that Mmemyn’s voice was emanating from the weird patchy fur that mostly covered it. I did not anticipate the replay of this scenario putting the kernel under water.
“Neither did I,” said Dazel. “But it was plain by the time I got here that no effort would have brought me to the kernel before Pralaya got to it. Next time out, though, the outcome will be different,”
“It will if Nita here does as well next time as they did on this run,” Pont said. “They got the scent of that kernel right away and went straight across the city—a downhill roll all the way. Very direct.”
“In this continuum, that’s not easy,” Pralaya said, putting down the kernel on the stone, where it lay glowing. “You’ve made a good start, cousin! What project are you working on that They’ve let you in for practice?”
“I’m, I’m trying to save my mother’s life,” Nita said. And suddenly the strangeness of it all caught up with her, as it hadn’t done almost since she first became a wizard—the alien feel of another space and creatures all around her who were strangers to her in a way that few humans ever had to deal with. She found it hard to look at them; she couldn’t do anything but stand there, trying to hang on to her composure.
The other wizards looked at one another, silent Pont said, “In the Five’s names, why are we keeping them standing here like this when they’re distressed? It’s all too new for them! Come on, everyone—if this run’s done, let’s go to the playpen for a while. We can show them the rest of us, and replay a couple of other runs, and let them get a feel for how it’s done.”
Pont bumped against Nita’s legs. She looked down. They said, “Come with us, Nita. There’s more to this sheaf of universes and dimensions than just places to play hunt-the-kernel. Come relax; tell us the why of what you’re hunting, and maybe we can help with the how.”
Pont are right, said Mmemyn. Will you come?
“Uh, yes,” Nita said. “Sure, let’s go.”
And instantly the world faded around them all, and vanished.
15: Late Tuesday Night, Wednesday Morning
Nita blinked and looked around her. It was dark.
Not entirely dark, though. It was as if she and Pont and the others were standing on a shining white dance floor—one that was miles and miles from one side to the other. If the curvature of the last space had surprised Nita, this place had a similar effect, but exactly in reverse. You could feel the flatness of this place in the air, on your skin, in your bones. You could practically see the ruler lines embedded in everything.
Next to her, sitting up on his hind legs, Pralaya made a little raspy chuckle. “Yes, it’s a good thing it never rains here,” he said, glancing around. “You’d go crazy waiting for the water to run off.”
“Don’t know what you’re complaining about,” Pont said, rolling past them toward a light source off to one side, where Nita could see shapes silhouetted. “Lovely place, this: no ups, no downs. Paradise.” The rest of Pont went past Nita, making a feeling like a shrug. “You always could find a square thing where a rou
nd one should be, Pralaya.”
“Just a natural talent,” Pralaya said, looking after Pont with amusement. He gave Nita a wry look.
The two of them went after Pont, Dazel and Mmemyn bringing up the rear. “You two obviously have history,” Nita said.
“Oh, some,” Pralaya said, pattering along six-footedly beside Nita as they made their way toward the light. “We’re neighbors. Their home universe isn’t too far from mine, the way the local sheaf of worlds is presently structured. We started running into one another pretty frequently in here when I began this series of workouts. If you’re here more than once or twice, you’ll start recognizing the present batch of regulars pretty quickly.”
“I think it’s going to be more than once or twice,” Nita said. “I don’t have much time left, and I’m a long way from where I need to be.”
“You’re new at this, to be so sure,” Pralaya said, as they got closer to the light. “Feel the kernel?”
“Huh?” Nita paused. She hadn’t realized this was another practice universe.
“Don’t stop,” Pralaya said. “Some places you’re not going to have the leisure. You have to learn to sense on the move. Come on!”
Nita tried “listening” as they went. It was hard to do while your other senses were interfering, but this discovery obscurely annoyed her. She could just hear Dairine saying, Can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, huh?
The annoyance focused her just enough to let Nita “hear” the kernel, just for a second, as a sort of difference in texture in the feel of the local space. “It’s right there in front of us,” Nita said, surprised. “Right in the middle of everybody.”
“Not bad,” Pralaya said. “This kernel’s tough to sense; it’s a fairly low-power one. We usually keep it locked in one spot—there are so many of us in and out of this space that no one feels like hunting for it every time.”