Worldweavers: Cybermage

by Alma Alexander

  “How do you know that?” Thea said, recovering first. “Were you able to reach him yourself?”

  “I, no,” Cheveyo said. “But Grandmother Spider knows. And after you left the cube with me, she came to tell me something of it, to make sure I knew how to protect it.” He held out the cube to Thea. “This is your kind of power, your gift, not mine.”

  Thea took the cube, bowing her head in a gesture of respect.

  “I will leave you,” Cheveyo said. “If you have need of me later, you know how to call me.”

  “He’s scary,” Kristin said in a small voice, staring at the place Cheveyo had been standing a moment before.

  “Only if you have reason to fear him,” Thea said. She stared at the cube, frowning slightly. “I’m trying to figure out just how to go at this. The last time we all piled on was when we unlocked this thing, but we didn’t get to talk to Tesla then. It was like we were watching a movie.”

  “But that’s when we saw the pigeons,” Magpie pointed out. “The whole thing started then.”

  “But when I got to talk to him, I time-wove myself a place in his own time and space, a somewhere and somewhen that he was real, touchable, able to have a conversation with me. But I was looking for fairly specific times, then, and I was able to choose…” She looked at the others, perplexed. “The problem is that we need to speak to him directly, or else it’s all going to be hints and fancies again. But we need to speak to him at different times in his life. We probably need to speak to him in the immediate aftermath of what happened in Colorado.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Ben murmured. “He looked pretty strung out over that. Would he even be able to tell you anything coherent?”

  “Well, as soon as possible after that event, then, when it was still fresh in his mind and he could offer ideas.”

  “It would probably be constructive to speak to him before he did what he did,” Magpie said. “It would tell us far more about his motives, and if he even thought about the possibility of getting any of his Elemental abilities back, if he thought he could control them, outside himself. If he even wanted any of it back.”

  “And much later, to see if we succeeded in finding the pigeons,” Tess said.

  Thea turned to her. “How do you figure that?”

  “He might know,” Tess said. “It might be linked to his time, somehow. It might be our only clue as to whether we should go on with any of this.”

  “But we know that he didn’t have the Elemental gifts back when his body died,” Ben said. “Or he certainly took some pains over making people believe that at the time.”

  “But the cube,” Kristin said, frowning at the smooth white cube Thea held cradled in her hands. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t get how anyone could do that, transfer himself into that and let his body die…not without some magic. I don’t think there are many people out there capable of making themselves immortal. Just like that, on a whim. And living on inside an artifact.”

  “But is he living on in there?” Magpie asked abruptly. “Or is it all just his dreams and memories and the things in his life he thought to be important?”

  Thea sighed. “I think,” she said, “that we should go as far forward as we can. Seek him when he is old, and perhaps wise, or at any rate wiser than the young wizard who thought that releasing Elemental magic into wild birds was a good idea. And then we can ask Tesla himself where to go from there.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Terry said. “But that still leaves the method in your hands. Do you have to do this on your own, or can you take any of us with you?”

  “That would be pretty awesome,” Kristin said, her broad grin showing her preposterous teeth.

  “Thea, wait,” Terry said. “Perhaps at least one of us should stay behind. Just in case something happens here. Someone should keep an eye on things.”

  “He has a point,” Magpie said. “I’ll stay. You all go; you can fill me in when you get back. But you might need someone physically here in a hurry, and I’ll stick around.”

  “You’ll miss all the fun,” Kristin said. “You sure?”

  “Oh, please, can’t she stay?” Ben said, staring at Kristin.

  Thea, who had been typing on her keypad, looked up and skewered Ben with a glare. “Cut it out,” she said. “Okay, Magpie. I’ve set things up so I can ‘talk’ to you. I have no idea if any of this will work the way I think it will, but…here goes.”

  The red sands blinked out, and all of them except Magpie found themselves in a hotel room furnished in a sparingly elegant and yet utilitarian manner. Three or four pigeons balanced precariously on the ledge outside a closed window, glimpsed through half-drawn drapes. A faint sound of their cooing came drifting through the glass, mingled with a murmur of distant street traffic—tinny honking of car horns, a deep rumble of heavy buses, and the occasional staccato counterpoint of horses’ hooves and wooden carriage or cart wheels on hard tarmac.

  “What—?” Ben began, his voice hushed, but Thea closed the fingers of one hand around his wrist to silence him and pointed. They were not alone in the room. A man sat in a boxy-looking leather armchair by the window, apparently lost in thought.

  He was a striking figure—tall and gaunt, clean-shaven, his graying hair middle-parted in an old-fashioned style, his blue eyes distant and unfocused. He was dressed in a suit and a clean white shirt with a blue tie knotted under his collar. One long-fingered hand lay perfectly still on the leather armrest; the other held a half-full cut-glass tumbler containing an amber liquid. His index finger tapped against the side, gently, rhythmically, almost in perfect time to the pigeons’ coos.

  “Is that him?” Kristin whispered.

  She had spoken very softly, but at the sound of her voice the man in the armchair turned and looked straight at them.

  “I remember you,” he said after a moment, staring at Thea. A slight frown creased his forehead. “Why do I remember you?”

  “We first met…many years ago, for you. And then again, many years before that.”

  “That makes no sense,” Tesla said. “And yet, it does. Give me a moment, I will find the moment.”

  Even as Thea drew breath to speak, Tesla sat up in his chair, his fingers curling tighter around his glass.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “When I was a boy.”

  “That was…the second time,” Thea said carefully. “The first time was many years after that. Here, in the city.”

  “You are speaking of time shifts. I have never had occasion to try them, myself, but I know they exist. The Alphiri portals needed to be configured for those, too. The theory is familiar to me.”

  “The Alphiri portals?” Ben said, staring at Tesla. “What do you have to do with…”

  Tesla gave him a long, stern look. “They came to me with a basic idea,” Tesla said, “and struck a bargain with me to improve it. I did so. They planned to use them to improve transportation of entities across space and time, much like the human ’ports that I later developed for our own use, but far more complex.”

  Kristin was slack-jawed, Ben’s expression was one of both astonishment and outrage, and Terry looked chagrined, as though something very obvious had just been pointed out to him. But it was Thea, her instincts roused as usual at the mention of the Alphiri, who responded to his words.

  “You mean you’ve already struck a bargain with the Alphiri?”

  “For the portals. Yes.”

  “When did they come to you?”

  “Years ago. Many years ago, now.”

  “Before they came to the rest of the Human Polity?”

  “Perhaps. At that time I had no way of knowing whom they had contacted, and why. It wasn’t my business. They came to me with a problem and I turned my hand to solving it. And they paid well for it. Not like some of my own kind. People cheat and they lie, but the Alphiri always deliver on their side of the bargain.”

  Thea exchanged a frightened and bewildered look with the others.

  “Are we too late alread
y?” Kristin said in a small voice.

  “I remember you,” Tesla said to Thea, but his eyes were resting on Kristin, and he wore an expression of carefully controlled distaste as he took in the prominent teeth. “But the rest of you, I have not met. I am certain of this. Who are you and why do you come here? Why do you disturb me?”

  “We’re here because of the pigeons,” Tess said abruptly.

  Tesla turned his haunting eyes to her, very slowly. They were no longer distant and dreamy, but very sharp and piercingly probing.

  “Pigeons,” he echoed. “Continue.”

  “We saw you,” she said, “back when you were in Colorado Springs…when you tried to take your magic…”

  “Kaschei,” Thea said faintly. “You once told me of this, long ago. How someone in a fairy tale took his heart, the essence of his life, and kept it in a place where nobody could ever find it or harm it, so that he could live forever, that he would be safe. Was that really what you were trying to do?”

  Tesla remained silent for so long, Thea began to worry that they had lost him completely to some inner reverie of regret or old age, and that the entire visit was to prove useless except for the startling information about the Alphiri. But then Tesla stood up, turned to the window, and stared outside, both hands wrapped around his glass now. When he spoke, his voice might have belonged to a different man—someone more decisive, younger, and stronger—or someone still wrestling with unimaginable pain.

  “That,” Tesla said clearly, “was the worst mistake I ever made.”

  “Maybe we can help,” Thea said after a pause. “If there is a way to help. Can it be reversed? What exactly did you do?”

  He turned to face the five of them. His face was transformed, alight, glowing. But his voice had cooled, just a little.

  “It would need,” he said, and they heard the bleak edge in his words, “an Elemental mage.”

  “We have one,” Terry said.

  Tesla lifted an eloquent eyebrow. “One who will understand? Who will not judge? Who will do what is necessary, even though it may be hard?”

  “Yes,” Thea said, after a moment of silence.

  “Well, who is it?” Tesla said. Then he blinked and refocused on Thea’s face. “You? But you are a child.”

  “So were you. Once.”

  “My gifts came to me full-fledged later.” Tesla cupped his fingers around Thea’s chin, lifting her face; Thea met his eyes steadily and in silence as his intense gaze searched her face. At length he dropped his arm to his side, still not taking his eyes from her, and nodded once, slowly.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I can see.”

  “I think you had better tell us everything,” Thea said. Her heart was pounding; it was one thing for Humphrey May to tell her that she might be an Elemental, quite another to have Nikola Tesla himself, the greatest Elemental mage in the history of the human race, confirm it with just a searching glance. “Those pigeons of yours have suddenly become very important. And if the Alphiri find them before we do, you might find yourself in a position of being not the bargainer, but the bargain. And they will use you against humanity.”

  “I never have liked humanity,” Tesla said, in a voice almost conversational. “I do, however, like human beings. And it would sit ill with me to allow one to come to harm through some action of mine.” He settled back into his armchair as if into a throne, both arms laid along the leather armrests. “You have to realize, though, you are asking about troubled times. About times when I may well have been mad. This will not…be easy.”

  The story that emerged was one filled with passion and pain. Tesla had been an incredibly gifted and idealistic young man who tried to make his way in a world he never quite understood and that was quick to take advantage of him. He had been the only quad-Element mage in the history of the human race, and while he was alive that was something that everyone took for granted.

  But he had to work for every achievement, and sometimes begged and scrounged for loans and for outright gifts, most of which ended up in the laboratories and workshops where he researched and honed his Elemental talents. When he lost his New York laboratory and office to fire, he thought he had reached rock bottom.

  “When the opportunity came to go to Colorado—to have a free hand—I hesitated not for a moment,” Tesla said. He kept his eyes on the birds, which still strutted and shivered on his windowsill. “And then, out there, alone…I lost my head. I panicked. I thought about how it would be to lose that, too, to some error of judgment or to accident beyond my control—and I remembered Kaschei. I came to believe that if I could keep the best of me safe, somewhere outside of me, then nothing could ever hurt me again.”

  He lapsed into silence, and it was Kristin who broke it—Kristin, the only one who had not seen with her own eyes what had happened in the Colorado laboratory, had not seen the dead bird in Tesla’s hands or heard his keening cry of grief.

  “But it went wrong,” she whispered.

  Tesla started as though someone had broken into a reverie. “It went wrong,” he echoed.

  “We saw it,” Tess said quietly. “We were there. We saw the birds in the pillar of flame. We saw one appear, then two, then three, then four…then they were gone, all except the one.”

  “The Elemental birds,” Tesla said. “And I had not taken into account that they would be free, and that they would be frightened, and that they would all go away. All except the one, as you say.”

  “Which one was it, sir?” Terry asked.

  “It was the Fire Elemental,” Tesla said. “The others were lost, but this one was gone. Gone. And I felt his absence inside of me like someone had ripped out my soul. I knew that Kaschei could never have felt like this. Or else the tales lied, all along, and I had believed that lie and I was now lost along with the best part of me.”

  “You lost all of your magic?” Thea asked.

  “No. Enough remained, and I could fake it for the rest of my days on Earth. But my body grew tired and old, and my mind was always searching, and my soul was gone from me. When the time came for me to lay down my earthly shape…You see, I had made the cube that you now carry, an Elemental cube, years before I had torn myself apart, and I believed that when I grew too physically frail in the earthly plane I could endure in a different form.” He paused. “But you already know this,” he said. “It was the cube that must have brought you here. It was the only thing that could have done that.”

  “No, sir,” said Thea. “It brought us into your existence that first time, the time that we saw you and the pigeons at the Colorado laboratory. And we saw other things too—we saw you in a park in a great European-looking city somewhere, and when we came close to you, you kind of collapsed….”

  “I remember that,” Tesla said, sitting up. “It was Budapest, and they called it a nervous breakdown at the time, overwork, stress. But I remember that day, and I remember feeling as though the sunlight was suddenly too heavy for me to bear. Every sound was magnified until I could hear a fly buzzing a block away, and the sound of horses’ hooves out in the street felt like cannon fire in my brain. It took me a long time to recover from that. They called it a breakdown, but it was after that…it was that day that really woke the Elemental….”

  The other five exchanged a puzzled look.

  “You mean we made you into an Elemental?” Ben said.

  “The powers must have been there all along, but it may well have been that encounter that woke them to fullness,” Tesla said. “So you all were my blessing and my curse, you children.”

  “Do you want it all back?” Kristin asked abruptly.

  “How can I have it back?” Tesla said. “At least a part of it has gone, vanished permanently, died a final death.”

  “But the rest,” Kristin persisted. “The other three pigeons. We could find them. We’re on our way to look for them. But first we need to know, do you want them back? Can you have them back? Can it be done?”

  “Reintegration? As I said, it would nee
d an Elemental mage and all kinds of other things. The kind of thing that wasn’t even properly invented when I was still among you as a man of flesh and blood.”

  “You mean computers,” Terry said, stepping forward. “There has been much done in that field. That part of the problem, you can leave up to me.”

  “You?” Tesla said, looking him up and down. “But you are so young.”

  “So were you, once,” Terry said, with a quick look back at Thea.

  “We would need your help,” Thea said. “We don’t know nearly enough. We can go out and seek your pigeons, but you would need to guide us. Perhaps it might be possible to return to a point that’s early enough, to a place where your Fire Element pigeon might not have perished.”

  “And we’ll do it before the Alphiri find them,” Kristin said stalwartly.

  “You would have to be in at least two different places at the same time, and so would I. And it would help if it was a different I for every occasion,” Tesla said.

  “Tell us what we need to know, and we can always come back and ask if we need answers,” Terry said.

  “No…wait,” Thea said slowly. “I mean, are you actually able to do that? Split yourself into different…avatars?”

  “He did it with the pigeons,” Ben said.

  “Yes, and it is not an experience I would repeat lightly, young man.”

  “But if you could…” Thea said slowly. “If you could, or would be willing to, it would help. And I think I know a way.”

  Tesla frowned. “I will listen,” he said.

  Thea looked down and spoke, apparently, to the floor. “Magpie, are you there?”

  “Yup,” a voice from nowhere replied instantly. The disembodied sound managed to be both distant and disconcertingly present in the same room, as though an invisible person standing right next to Thea had actually spoken.

  Tesla’s back stiffened, and he searched the empty air around Thea with wary eyes. “What was that? Where did that voice come from?”

  “It’s a friend,” Thea said. “Would you excuse me for a moment?”