That spider, in its human form, sat curled elegantly on the pile of furs by her hearth, her hair once again snow-white and bobbed at the jawline. There was a disconcerting wrench, a moment of dizziness—Grandmother Spider looked exactly like she had looked when Thea had first set eyes on her, and she had the feeling that if a hundred years passed, or a thousand, it would make no difference at all. Grandmother Spider would look the same.
She looked up at Thea and smiled.
“Come in,” she said, as though she had been expecting Thea, as though Thea’s presence in this room was not yet another tiny miracle that Grandmother Spider seemed to be almost unaware that she was performing, something that came as naturally to her as breathing did to Thea.
“I thought…I couldn’t just do this,” Thea whispered. What had been her window had elongated into a door at Grandmother Spider’s words of welcome, and Thea stepped through and into that other world. “This passing back and forth between your space and mine. It took the Alphiri, that first time, and after that it was the computers….”
She remembered the words that had shaped themselves in her mind, that had brought her here. I wish, she had said. She was suddenly unsure if everyone in that shed had been afflicted by the three-wishes spellspam, whether they’d seen it or not.
But Grandmother Spider didn’t appear worried.
“Child,” she said, “perhaps you have forgotten that the first thing that you raised with the touch of your own hand, back when you walked under the skies of the First World with me, was a portal. Built from your own memory, your own music, your own dreams.”
“But that was back there. And everything is possible there,” Thea said.
Grandmother Spider raised one eyebrow. “You think everyone just weaves their own doorways into a different world, just like that? No, you are a worldweaver, whether you’re in the First World or in your own sphere—and if you have a different way of weaving there, that is part of the way that you choose to use your gift. However, this time I came to you. I heard you calling my name.”
Thea smiled as she settled down on the guest furs beside Grandmother Spider. “But I didn’t even say anything out loud….”
Grandmother Spider reached out with one long-fingered hand to cup Thea’s cheek. “You are troubled, child of my spirit.”
Thea opened her mouth to start explaining and stopped, wondering just how much of what she had to say would make any sense in this room—where the technology that her own world was so proud of was not only absent, but felt entirely superfluous. She felt as though she were about to start explaining algebra to a cat who was indifferent to the theory of it all but already knew how to bend dimensions of space and time and teleport through solid walls if the need arose.
“It’s all right,” Grandmother Spider said, her hair suddenly an impish shade of carrot-red, her eyes a sort of bright emerald green. “It may surprise you to know that I’ve actually heard of computers. What you have, I gather, is a trickster storm—and those are not confined to the computer world. Tricksters have always been with us. What is it?”
“Corey and I crossed paths,” Thea said. The memory of the wayward raven feathers that had been driving Corey crazy during her last encounter with him, back on the Puget Sound ferry last summer, was still vivid in her mind’s eye. “After I left here, I mean. He was…in some little trouble.”
“He always is,” Grandmother Spider said. “It is his nature.”
“You think he has something to do with what’s been going on?” Thea asked, sitting up straighter. Corey could be extremely charming or amusing, but he was no less dangerous for all that.
“If he does, then it’s with assistance—he, like all of his kin, has little use for computers. But he could have provided material and inspiration. He was always good at that.”
“My friend Ben said that one of the spellspams they used—the three-wishes one—um, it is okay to talk about it out loud here? It won’t mess things up…?”
“It’s fine. Nothing that’s said in this room can cause harm unless I will it so.”
“There is a spellspam going around right now; it asks what you would do if you got three wishes, and people could really get into trouble with that.”
“Yes,” Grandmother Spider murmured. “Wishes and hopes—your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness. Your people, of all my children, can be most lethally wounded by the best in you.”
“Ben said whoever sent that one out stole the idea from the Faele,” Thea said.
“They always knew how to exploit vulnerabilities, the Faele,” Grandmother Spider said. “Yours is the only race they have ever used the weapon of the three wishes against. You’d be surprised at what works with folk like, for instance, the Alphiri.”
It was hard to keep a thread of thought going. Grandmother Spider was apparently able to keep it all in her head, to flutter from idea to idea with the ease of a butterfly. But Thea found herself easily distracted when in Grandmother Spider’s presence, if only because she came out with the most incredible things in very matter-of-fact ways. Thea tried to wrestle the conversation back to the topic of spellspam and its fallout.
“You said if it’s Corey, he’d need human help…?”
Grandmother Spider nodded, choosing to remain silent, letting Thea navigate her thoughts until she could ask the questions she needed to ask.
“He’s kind of…hard to find if he doesn’t want to be, isn’t he?” Thea said. “But does his influence…leave a mark? Is there any way of finding that human point of contact? The person to whom the spellspam is being suggested?”
“Just trace the headers,” said Grandmother Spider tranquilly.
Thea did a double take. “What?”
“The headers,” Grandmother Spider said helpfully. “You know, the bits attached to the e-mail that tell you where it came from, who sent it, the pathways it followed from origin to destination—trace them back, from the receiving computer to the originating one.”
“I wouldn’t have the first idea how to go about that,” Thea said, astonished.
“But you have friends who do,” Grandmother Spider said. “And yes, I know, a good hacker could disguise and channel things in a different way every time—but you wouldn’t be looking for the originating server so much as for an identifying mark.”
“How do you even know about headers?” Thea demanded, sitting up straight.
“I told you, I know all sorts of things,” Grandmother Spider said.
“But spam is so common,” Thea said, “and we’ve all been trained that just looking at an e-mail isn’t dangerous. Or wasn’t, until the spellspam started. It seems it doesn’t carry viruses or any other kind of attachments or even send you to a website to look at something. It’s even been funny. The names that it comes under!”
“Trickster, all over,” Grandmother Spider said, nodding. “Never doubt that they can be dangerous, even while you’re laughing. Especially if you are laughing. But there are ways of telling the merely irritating from the potentially dangerous.”
“I do have…a friend,” Thea said. “I know it sounds strange, but he has an allergy. He can’t talk about magic without literally choking on it. And he’s the best computer mind they’ve got at the school. He could probably track headers in his sleep.” Grandmother Spider chuckled but did not interrupt. “And the school has this huge computer called the Nexus. It used to be maintained by one of the teachers, but he was killed last year fighting the Nothing, and they haven’t had anyone else to do it ever since, and now they’re asking Terry. I know he can do it. But there’s the other aspect, the spellspam, and he’s already been caught by it once. If he’s alone with it, it might destroy him without anyone knowing, especially if it gets any worse than just jokes and teasing. If he isn’t alone, he can’t tell anyone that he’s caught on it because that would kill him anyway. Other than having one of us—one of us other four, who originally did the computer crossing, back when we lured the Nothing into the sea
world—with Terry constantly, I don’t know what to tell him, how to help him…. Does any of this make any sense at all?”
“Well,” Grandmother Spider said with a smile, “I get the idea.”
“I thought of you,” Thea said, “when Terry first found the icon for the Nexus on a computer—and it looked…it looked just like one of your dreamcatchers.”
Grandmother Spider raised an eyebrow. “Precisely what I was going to suggest.”
“A dreamcatcher?” Thea said.
“A dreamcatcher. But a special one.”
“One of yours…?”
Grandmother Spider shook her head. “Ah, no. Those don’t leave this room—and if one of them did make it to your world, you’d have the Alphiri down on you so fast that you wouldn’t have the time to worry about anything as trivial as spellspam. Don’t ever get between an Alphiri and something they really want, not without a very good reason…and perhaps not even then. But I can give you one that will be just as useful to you. You could call it…a spellchecker.”
Thea actually laughed out loud. “How would that work?”
“It’s a very innocuous thing,” Grandmother Spider said. “You hang it on the monitor, and it’s a pretty toy—but if you get e-mail, you look at it through the spellchecker. If there’s something dangerous there, you can see that it’s present—and you can flag the e-mail, or quarantine it, or delete it before you have to look at it with the unaided eye.”
“Would that work? In our world?” Thea asked, sitting up eagerly.
“Your world is one that Tawaha and I made,” Grandmother Spider said. “What I decree works in it. You will have the thing before sundown tomorrow. But have you considered something else? A different solution?”
“Like what?”
“You’re a weaver of worlds. You can pass through a world lightly; you don’t always have to ring the front doorbell to announce your arrival. Sometimes you just need to open a window into another room in your mind.”
Thea’s eyes were wide. “I thought about that. I didn’t know if I could sustain it. If I can duplicate the Nexus control room and make it exist in a world in which his allergy doesn’t—so he’s safe, then he could work on that Nexus, and it would be echoed on the primary one in our world. When he’s done, he returns to our world, the real world.”
“You really have to learn,” Grandmother Spider said with an amused shake of her head, “not to cling so hard to what is real. Or to what you think should be real. Both those Nexus rooms are ‘real’ in their moment—reality is what you are living, the things important to you. Those are the only things that are real. Everything else is illusions and dreams, trapped in my dreamcatchers.”
Thea found herself remembering an exchange on the subject of illusion and reality that she had had with Margaret Chen, who had been delegated to figure out how far Thea’s unexpected abilities went. Thea had taken Mrs. Chen to several very different worlds—and the Academy mage was starting to look a little green as they re-emerged into her study after one of these excursions.
“I asked my parents for a laptop for Christmas,” Thea had said, unable to hold back a grin.
“Please tell me you didn’t get it,” Mrs. Chen had said. “Keeping an eye on you in my hall is one thing, but knowing that you can type a sentence into a computer and go heaven knows where, without the remotest possibility that someone could drag you back to reality, is a responsibility I’m not ready for.”
“But it is reality,” Thea said. “Those other places—they’re just as real.”
“I hope not,” Mrs. Chen said firmly. “The real you is always still here, in this room, at that computer. Everything else is just mirror play.”
“But you said the safest place to hide something is behind a mirror,” Thea said. “How do you know that the place I’m in is not more real than the place where only a ghost-me remains?”
“Thea Winthrop, you’re almost fifteen,” Mrs. Chen said. “I don’t feel remotely ready to discuss the nature of reality with you right now, despite the fact that you can apparently create your own. There’s still a lot we don’t know about this thing you can do, and I prefer to withhold judgment on which reality is more real until I have more information.”
Thea blinked, and Mrs. Chen was far away again. In front of her, looking faintly quizzical, Grandmother Spider was looking at her with a tiny smile hovering around the edges of her mouth.
“Thank you,” Thea said.
“You’re welcome,” Grandmother Spider said. “I’m watching over you. If you need me, all you have to do is call. Rest and save your strength—you will need it. And I will do what I promised. Sleep, now.”
Thea woke with a start, blinking. She was in her bed, in her nightgown, her comforter wrapped around her as it always was—an ordinary morning, even down to the small mewling sounds in the next bed that meant that Magpie was waking, too.
Except that Thea could not recall going through the motions of getting ready for bed the night before. Her memory of the clandestine gathering in the garden shed was sharp, right up to the point where she and Magpie returned to their room—and after that, what intruded as memory could not possibly have been anything but dream.
“I’m going crazy,” Thea announced to the ceiling.
“Urngh?” Magpie said sleepily, turning her head a little. “What do you mean, going?”
Thea glanced at the clock on her bedside table. “We’re late,” she said. “I didn’t hear the alarm.”
“It’s Saturday,” Magpie said patiently.
Thea rubbed her eyes. “Crazy,” she repeated, and swung her legs out of bed. She froze as her gaze fell on the crack in the drawn curtains, which was letting in a cold gray light.
She got up and padded to the window, flinging the curtains open, heedless of Magpie’s squawk of protest. Outside, the weather had worsened, and what had been a gentle drizzle had turned into a full-fledged storm with rain lashing down and trees swaying in the wind.
“Just as well we weren’t planning on any expeditions today,” Magpie said as she raised herself on one elbow and cast a glance out the window.
Thea shook her head. “Just as well,” she muttered. “If I told you just how much farther I went last night than the garden shed, you’d probably tell me I was losing it.”
“Anyone else, probably,” Magpie said. “You promised you’d do no more solo flights, but it isn’t as though I believe you. So, are you going to tell me about it?”
“When I wake up,” Thea said. “Talk to me after breakfast. I really hope we have a nice, quiet day. I don’t think I could handle much more excitement right now.”
“Perhaps we should drop in on LaTasha, if they’re letting her have visitors,” Magpie said, getting out of her own bed. “It’s funny, but there’s been very little talk about it. You’d think that anyone who was actually there would—”
“Magpie, people don’t particularly want to sound like complete nuts, even to their own best friends. People who saw LaTasha yesterday probably preferred to think they hadn’t. But it won’t be too long before even the kids in here realize that what happened to LaTasha wasn’t an isolated incident.”
“Do you think other stuff might get through? More spellspam?” Magpie asked, running her hands through her tangled hair. “Will they shut down Terranet completely in here?”
“They’d probably find it harder to do than they think. Most of us at this school depend far too much on e-mail. And parents will want to know their kids are okay. If they shut down those avenues of communication, they may as well shut down the school.”
“There’s always telephones,” Magpie protested, but without much conviction.
“Sure, until people start getting annoyed that the phone is always busy. Which it will be, if everyone in this school starts phoning home.”
“There’s always cell phones,” Magpie said obstinately.
“Okay, you win—there’s cell phones! But they can carry only so much—and you know how mu
ch we all depend on e-mail for real information. The Nexus is the center of operations for Terranet access from the Academy—and if the principal keeps it shut down for much longer…Well, I guess we’ll find out what happens when chaos breaks loose.” She paused. “I need to talk to Terry.”
Magpie looked at her beadily. “About what?”
“About how to stay safe,” Thea said. “I had an idea.”
She actually felt the blood rush to her cheeks at that, the blatant claiming of Grandmother Spider’s inspiration, but somewhere deep inside her, she heard Grandmother Spider chuckle softly. It’s quite all right. It was your idea. I just helped you put it all together.
2.
THE “IDEA” ARRIVED IN a manila envelope later that morning.
Mrs. Chen waved Thea down in the entrance hall as she and Magpie raced down the stairs.
“You’ve got mail,” Mrs. Chen called out, diverting Thea into her office. “Who on earth,” she added, peering at the return address before handing Thea the envelope, “is Arachne Yiayia?”
“A grandmother,” Thea said with a grin, “of sorts. Thanks!”
Mrs. Chen hesitated, and Thea looked up with wide eyes that were pools of innocence. “Do I have to open it now?”
“No-o-o, but…”
“Trust me, Mrs. Chen,” Thea said. “What’s in here may solve a lot of problems.”
“Why is it that sentences that begin with trust me usually wind up being trouble?” Mrs. Chen murmured, relinquishing her hold on the envelope. “I’m not sure I should—”
“I will do absolutely nothing without talking to the principal,” Thea said. “I promise.”
Shaking her head, Mrs. Chen waved her out of the office.
Magpie craned her head at the envelope across Thea’s shoulder.
Worldweavers: Spellspam Page 5
