by Diane Duane
Then Kit paused, for he thought he saw something.
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Often enough, on this trip and the last, he'd had the illusion of seeing something in the blackness when nothing was there. Now Kit tried to see more clearly, and couldn't get that tiny glitter of light—for it was light—to resolve. Not in front of us, though.
Under us?
He couldn't be sure. Ponch, you smell anything? No. What is it?
Look down there.
Kit got down on his hands and knees. This brought him closer to the minuscule glint of light, but not close enough. He passed his hands over the surface he'd been walking on. The light was underneath it... inches down, or miles, he couldn't tell.
/ wonder...
Kit pressed against the surface. Did it give a little? It hadn't ever actually felt springy under his feet, but now Kit found himself wondering if this was because he'd been taking it for granted as a hard surface, and it had accommodated him.
He pressed harder against it. A strange feeling, as if the surface was giving under his hands, or under his will. Let's see...
Slowly, slowly Kit's hands sank into the darkness as he pushed. He slipped one out, rested it where the surface was still hard, and concentrated on the other hand, sliding it further and further down into that cool, resistant darkness. Faintly he could see the glow from that tiny spark or grain of light silhouetted against his fingers. He reached even further down, having to lie
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flat on the surface now, pushing his arm in up to the shoulder. Got it—
Kit closed his fist on the light, started to withdraw his arm. It was difficult. The blackness resisted him. As he exerted himself, beginning to breathe hard, he felt a faint stinging sensation between two of his fingers. Looking down, he saw the spark escape between them and slip down into the dark again.
He pushed his hand down into the darkness once more, recovering the spark. It did sting, a sharp little sizzle like licking the end of a battery. Kit closed his hand again, pulled upward. Once more the spark slipped free, drifting lower, out of his reach.
Kit took a deep breath, not sure why he had to have this thing... but I'm going to, and that's all there is to it. He reached down as far as possible, but couldn't quite reach it. Finally he took a breath, held it, and pushed his face and upper body right down into that cool liquid blackness. By stretching his arm down as far as it would go, Kit just managed to get his hand underneath the spark. This time he didn't try to grasp it, just cupped it in his palm, and slowly, slowly brought his hand up through the pliant darkness. After a few seconds Kit dared to lift his face out, gasping, and pushed himself to his knees, while ever so slowly lifting his cupped hand.
The little glint of light almost slipped out of his hand, just under the surface. Kit stopped, let it settle, then slowly pulled his hand up toward him. The liquid
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darkness drained out of his hand, pouring away, and abruptly the spark flowed away with it...
... into Kit's other hand, which he'd put under the one that had the spark in it. As the last ribbons of darkness flowed away, there that tiny glint of light remained.
Kit sat down on the dark surface, getting his breath back. He could feel Ponch's breath on his neck as the dog looked curiously over his shoulder. What is it?
I don't know, Kit said. But I'm going to take it home.
They both gazed at it. It was not bright: an undif-ferentiated point source of light, faint, with a slight cool green cast to its radiance, like that of a firefly. Kit was briefly reminded of an old friend, and smiled at the memory. On a whim, he leaned in close to the little spark, breathed on it. It didn't brighten, as a spark of fire would have, but it stung his hand more emphatically.
Kit reached sideways to his claudication, pulled it open, and with the greatest care slipped the little spark in. When he was sure it was safe, he closed the pocket again and got to his feet, wobbling.
You all right, boss?
I think so. That took a lot out of me. Let's go home.
All right. The leash wizardry tightened as Ponch pulled Kit forward. 'What was that about?
Kit shook his head. I'm not sure, he said. The light of the normal world, nearly blinding by contrast to where they'd been, broke loose around them. I think it was because it was ...all alone.
They stood there under the streetlight, and then Kit
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undid the leash and let Ponch go sprinting down the road. A late blackbird repeated a few solitary notes up in a tree. Just me, it sang,;#s£ me.
Kit stood listening in the dark... then went after Ponch.
I
LateTuesday Evening
IT WAS A QUIET drive home from the hospital for Nita and Dairine and their dad. It was as if they'd all been hoping that when the tumor was removed, a closer look at it would prove the diagnosis wrong. But it wasn't going to happen that way. I can't waste a minute, now, Nita thought. Every second I'm not working on this, those things are multiplying inside her. Kit'll understand. I've got to get going... and I can't wait for him.
Nonetheless she tried to contact Kit before she left. She couldn't find him; the manual gave her the same subject-is-not-in-ambit message as before. He never did get a, chance to tell me just where he was, or how he's doing that, she thought, dropping her transit circle to the floor and watching it flare with the brief shiver of life and light that meant the spell was ready. Gotta find out...
Along with several other wizardries, Nita had added her invisibility spell to her charm bracelet, as a small
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dangling ring with nothing inside it. Now she activated it and a moment later stepped through the transit ring, popping out once more in that vacant doorway in Grand Central. This time of day there were a lot more people around, and a fair number of trains coming in and out. It took Nita some minutes to get down to the worldgate end of the platform, as she had to sidestep in one direction or another about every three paces to keep from being run over by commuters who couldn't see her. At least the gate was idle and ready for her when she reached it. She went through in a hurry.
On the other side she found the platform empty again, and everything quiet. Nita walked down to the gateway on the Main Concourse and paused there to look at the painted sky. The figures of all the constellations were strange—the center of the "sky" not a bull, here, but a strange cat-shape, like a jaguar leaping with outstretched paws. Other odd forms shared the ecliptic with it: lizards and frogs and birds with long curling tails. Even this sky's color was different, a deep violet blue rather than the creamy Mediterranean color of the ceiling that Nita was familiar with.
She went up the ramp across the empty, shining floor and past the information booth—which was a brass ziggurat here—and came out into what at first she took for early evening. Then Nita got a glimpse of the sun and realized that it was afternoon... but in a Manhattan that was definitely not her usual one.
The skyscrapers all around were capped with stepped pyramids of the kind she had just seen substituted for the usual information booth inside the terminal. Uni
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formly the buildings seemed to be made of a golden stone—or maybe this was just the effect produced by that strange sun, which was bigger than it should have been, and was orange gold, though it stood at a height more like that of noon than sunset.
Down the center of the street ran a green strip of grass that reminded Nita of the built-up flower beds running down the middle of each block of Park Avenue. She looked across the street, and up; from high on the tops of some of the buildings south of Forty-second, Nita saw blinding orange light reflecting back. Mirrors? she thought. And the sky was very dark blue, almost a violet color. She was reminded of the way the sky looked on Mars. Maybe not as much oxygen in the atmosphere? Nita thought. An old Earth, maybe; a tired one...
It didn't matter. Her job was to find the place's kernel. And it would be better hidden, here.
She sat down on the curb of that empty Forty-second Street and listened. A slower pulse this time, fainter... like a place running down, a heart beating more out of habit than from any desire to go on living. Resignation? Could a whole universe feel resigned, ready to let go of life? It was an odd sensation. But ours is old, too. Does it feel that way?
After a few seconds she put the thought aside. There was something about the light here that was affecting her, maybe, or just the influence of this place's great age. But the realization itself could be useful. She'd listen for a slower pulse, a more leisurely beat...
Nita closed her eyes, held still, and felt for the kernel, the heart. She had no idea what this city sounded
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like when it was inhabited. But the wind, breathing down between the skyscrapers, didn't change. She listened to it, and let it give her hints.
Very slowly, they came. Strange hornlike sounds, not the wind but something else... also the muted cries of birds and animals, the clatter of machinery. Nita put her hands flat down on the sidewalk on either side of her, feeling it, listening through the touch.
The sidewalk was stone, not concrete. Its gray-black basalt was quarried out of the island itself—brought here in great slabs by mechanical means of which Nita got glimpses—then carved to size, set in place, and fastened by some physical process that she didn't understand, again sensed only obscurely and at a great distance in time. There was a characteristic scent to the stone, sharp, hot—They used lasers on it, maybe?— then a glimpse of some kind of crystal, maybe not exactly the lasers Nita understood but similar enough.
She started to think that this approach might have been typical of the people who built this place, simple techniques and very advanced ones combined—an "old science," more like wizardry than anything else, and a "new science," far ahead of anything her own world had. And this world would have been that way because of the way its own universal law ran, a combination of some kind of science actually left over from some other universe—That's weird!—with something newer, homegrown: the two sorts of law tangled together but never perfectly melded, the ancient tension between them defining a particular feeling, unique to this world, a vibration like what a wizard could hear in a crystal's heart, a pulse not slow but actually very fast— Then Nita heard it, a buzz, a faint whine like a bee going by. Got it!
She opened her eyes and turned slowly where she sat, checking what she "heard" and felt against the evidence of her other senses—
—and caught a sudden motion of something down the street. Nita stared in surprise. Something moved there, going across Forty-second Street and heading uptown; crossing the street, low...
... rolling across the street? Nita stood up to see better but got only a glimpse as whatever it was went up Lexington Avenue and vanished behind the building at the corner. If what she'd seen was a machine, it was one the likes of which Nita had never seen before. And while there was some machine-based life that had become sentient, this didn't look like any member of the various mechlife species with which Nita was familiar. From where she'd been sitting, this looked more like a long stretched-out Rollerblade —
Weird, but it can wait. Nita stood still and listened again, shutting everything out but this place's own pulse. Uptown.., The sense was fainter this time, which didn't surprise her; she knew the tests would be getting harder. Nonetheless, it was clear enough to follow, and whatever Nita had seen down the road was heading in the same direction.
She went after it, not with any concern for her safety—after all, the practice universes were limited to wizards—but with considerable curiosity. As she came
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around the corner of Forty-second and Lex, Nita looked uptown, where the ground rose slightly, and saw something rolling up the sidewalk on the left-hand side of the avenue. It wasn't a single object at all, but a number of them, rolling away from her in a loose cluster. In this strange, rich light, they gleamed a dark bluish metallic color. Most of them looked about the size of tennis balls, at this distance, but there were two or three of them that were larger, maybe soccer-ball size. They were approaching the corner of Forty-fourth and Lex. As Nita watched, they rolled out onto the ornate pavement of Lexington Avenue, here all covered up and down its shining white length with characters in some alien language, then crossed the avenue and headed east down the side street.
Nita began to jog after them, crossing Lexington and looking down as she did at the huge colored characters inlaid in slabs of stone into the surface of the street. The workmanship was beautiful; you couldn't see so much as a crack between the inlay and the road itself, all done in a pearly white stone like alabaster. / wonder what this looks like from a height, she thought. And what the letters say... She grinned as she headed toward the corner where the blue spheres had turned. Be funny if it wasn't some incredibly significant message, but just the name of the street. She came to the corner of Forty-fourth, headed around it at a run—and instantly found herself tripping over several perfectly spherical shiny blue objects, which had been in the act of rolling back up the sidewalk toward her.
Nita spent the next three seconds trying not to fall,
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trying not to bang into the beautifully and bizarrely carved wall of the building to her left, and trying not to step on the spheres, several of which were still rolling toward her. She finally got her balance back and stood there bracing herself against the wall and breathing hard for a few seconds, while the five spherical things, like blue-metal ball bearings of various sizes, rolled around her and then paused, one after another.
"Dai stibeh," they said to her, five times over. Nita's jaw dropped.
"Uh, dai" she said.
The giant blue ball bearings looked at her with mild interest. At least Nita felt that she was being looked at, but with exactly what, there was no telling. The spheres had no features of any kind; the only thing she could see in them was the reflection of the skyscrapers behind her, the sky, and her own face, wearing an embarrassed expression.
"Where's the rest of you?" said one or another of the ball bearings.
Confused, Nita looked around her. "'The rest'? There's just one of me. I mean, I have a—I mean, there's another wizard I work with, but he's—*
"'He'? There's just one of them?" The ball bearings sounded disappointed. "Uh, yeah," she said. "We come in ones, where I come from."
The ball bearings seemed to be regarding her with faint disappointment. "But there are more of you," one said.
Nita hadn't previously heard the Speech spoken with nothing but plural endings, even on the adjectives, and she was getting more confused every moment. "Well, in general, yes."
"Look, it's another singleton, that's all," one of them said to the others. "Looks like we're unusual in this neighborhood; the rest of us need to get used to it. It doesn't matter, anyway. We're all wizards together... that's the important thing."
"Uh, yes," Nita said. "Sorry, but what exactly are you?" "People," said the blue ball bearings, in chorus.
Nita smiled. "Something else we have in common. Do you have something that other people call you?"
The spheres bumped into one another in sequence, and with their striking produced a little chiming chord, like a doorbell saying hello.
Nita took a breath and tried to sing it back at them. After a pause the spheres bumped together again, creating a soft jangling noise, which Nita realized was a regretful comment on her accent. "Sorry," she said. "Sometimes I'm not much good at staying in one key."
The spheres jangled again, but there was a humorous sound to it. "So call us Pont," one of them said.
Nita grinned a little; in the Speech it was one of the adjectival forms of the word for the number five. "Sure. It's nice to meet you. I'm Nita."
The spheres bumped themselves cordially into her ankles. "You guys here to practice looking for the kernel?" she said.
"Yes," one of them said. "Well, no," said a
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"What we mean is, we've done this one already," said a third. "But the others have a head start, and they're running against time, so if you want to get in on it, you'd better hurry."
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 vou 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. "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
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out yourselves... but you're doing that already." They were looking up at Nita's charm bracelet, she could tell.
They paused 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.
