Worldweavers: Cybermage

by Alma Alexander

  They had shown their hand too early this time, and had acted with more rash carelessness than prudent planning. From here on, they would lay their snares with more cunning and subtlety.

  And it was entirely possible that nobody Thea cared about would ever be safe again.

  16.

  You haven’t felt Alphiri fury. Not yet. Not completely.

  Long after the Alphiri Queen and her escorts had stepped back through their portal and vanished from the plateau outside Cheveyo’s house, these words of the Faele Queen pulsed in Thea’s mind.

  She had snatched her hand from Terry’s even as the Alphiri Queen had walked away. She felt him flinch at the suddenness and force of it, but could not look at him, or any of them, as if the mere act of taking her own eyes off them would render them invisible to the Alphiri. She stumbled half-blindly around the ridge of red rock that rose at the back of Cheveyo’s abode, and no footsteps followed her.

  She felt, rather than saw, Tawaha taking his leave of the company—the day suddenly dipped into sunset around her, darkening into deeper shades of twilight to the east. Where you are and where light is, I will be with you. Tawaha had promised her that, but now there seemed to be more at stake than just herself. Her mind raced with images of all the people she now needed Tawaha to watch over—her family, her friends, people like Lorenzo and Beltran de los Reyes, even random strangers off the street whose well-being she could not remotely be considered responsible for but whom she would find it difficult to simply abandon to a fate she knew to be uncomfortable or unpleasant at the hands of the Alphiri if the possibility of preventing that was dangled in front of her.

  Even people who could be expected to be able to take care of themselves—Humphrey May and Nikola Tesla.

  She sat on a nearby boulder and buried her face in her hands. She had been building up her world, slowly—from the inner circle of her family to the sphere of her friends at the Academy to the wider arena of people who were mentors or teachers and proud of what she was and she could yet become, but now it was crumbling around her again. What she had thought of as her strength was turning out to be her greatest vulnerability.

  She suddenly understood the loneliness and isolation that she had often sensed in Nikola Tesla, who must have been faced with similar choices.

  A skitter of pebbles and the soft sound of a footfall on red dust alerted Thea to the fact that she was no longer alone, but she waited for a moment before she wiped the tears from her cheeks and looked up.

  Humphrey May stood above her, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

  “Your friend Cheveyo suggested we eat something,” Humphrey said. “Are you hungry?”

  Thea shook her head mutely.

  Humphrey squatted down beside her, reaching out to lay a hand on her shoulder. “Thea, what did the Queen say to you? Did she threaten you? We can protect you—there are avenues—”

  “They won’t come for me,” Thea said. “Not directly.”

  He looked a little startled, and then nodded slowly. “I understand,” he murmured. “But we can deal with that. They can be constrained—the Polity Court has a long reach, and not even the Alphiri are beyond that.”

  “You just granted immunity to the Faele, for doing something on our behalf,” Thea said. “There are too many things they could do. I used to think that I was scared of them, but I never knew what that really meant, not until now.”

  “I offered you a job at the FBM once,” Humphrey said. His tone was light, but when Thea looked up at him, his face was completely serious. “That still stands, you know. And if you’re part of the establishment, as it were, the Alphiri would think twice about harming you or the people close to you.”

  “Still trying to recruit a tame Elemental for the FBM?” another voice said, and Tesla stepped forward from behind the ridge of the mesa. They had not heard him coming—not surprisingly, since he could choose not to have enough of a physical presence for an audible footfall.

  Humphrey uncoiled from his crouch beside Thea, and turned to face the new arrival. “That’s hardly fair,” he said.

  Tesla raised an eyebrow. “Fair? When I was available and physically living in this world, your predecessors at the FBM tried very hard to put a leash on me. And it would have been pleasant, in a way, I will have to admit. The safety and security of it, the knowledge that I was behind a rampart and untouchable, the idea that I could have unlimited funds for what I needed for my work…so long as that work was done on your behalf, at your command. The ordinary, everyday magic of our kind—the kind practiced every day in our world, the one you are most closely charged with at the FBM—has been broken to saddle, and cultivated, and tamed.”

  “My father used to wrangle wild magic,” Thea said. “When it escaped from its confines, and took over libraries.”

  “We had a lot more of that in my day,” Tesla said. “Back then, we knew less about how things worked, but even so, we understood that there were rules, and that magic had to obey them.” He paused. “All magic, except the Elemental. You have never been able to grasp that Elemental magic cannot be broken to your will. Not that, and stay what it is. Your trouble is that you understand magic but no longer completely believe in it. Enchantment shorn of a sense of wonder becomes empty words. And numbers. And bookkeeping.”

  “You were no stranger to bookkeeping when you lived among us, as you yourself point out,” Humphrey snapped, losing his temper. “You, too, required money in order to exist. You might have commanded more power than any of us knew, but by all accounts you were appallingly bad at that bookkeeping you so despise. You were always letting money slip through your fingers, living off credit and beyond your means.”

  Tesla gazed at him with what was almost pity. “Yes, and I lived free,” he said. “Ideas are cheap—I gave mine away for nothing, sometimes, when it seemed warranted. I often lent my power to endeavors that I found pleasing or worthy, and asked no return. But I never took money for anything that involved selling my soul.”

  Humphrey threw his hands in the air. “You’re right, I don’t get it.” He looked down at Thea again. “Come eat something. Come back and talk to us. You shouldn’t be alone right now.”

  “I agree,” Tesla said unexpectedly. “But before you do, Thea, might I have a word…in private?”

  Humphrey looked as though he was about to say something else, but then apparently thought better of it. He squared his shoulders and walked away without looking back.

  “I cannot make up my mind about that man,” Thea said in a low voice. She turned to Tesla. “Are you…all right now?”

  He smiled and opened a hand; a ball of white lightning danced on his palm. “I am whole,” he said. “And I have you to thank for that. Your friend Tawaha returned Fire to me—but Thea, when I rashly killed my own power, when my own fire died on that altar…” He smiled. “When I concocted this ill-conceived Kaschei plot so many decades ago, I had no idea that the most treasured, the most sacred, the most beloved part of what I chose to call my Kaschei’s needle would one day be carried by a child who was yet to be born, and returned to me with so much grace. That was a brave and selfless choice that you made, back there.”

  “I gave you back what was yours,” Thea said. “I saw you weep over it, when you thought it gone. If it was in my power to restore that…”

  Tesla reached out a hand and laid it on her shoulder.

  “You are an Elemental. We are too alike. You do understand,” he said. “The Elemental power is vast, and with this new gift that you have, with so much of it spanning the globe in your day, your own powers can be even greater than I can now imagine. But you are still at the beginning of your journey, and I sense that there is much left for you to learn.”

  “But who is there to teach me?” Thea said. “Should I go with Humphrey May’s people, after all?”

  Tesla was shaking his head. “The choices you make are yours,” he said, “but always remember what I have said about the FBM. If you do not wish to belon
g to anyone, then that is not the way to go.”

  “But other than them, who is there?” Thea asked again. “I seem to have run in front of the pack, and there’s nobody out here but me…and maybe you.” She paused. “What do you plan to do now? What do you want me to do with the cube?”

  “There are…a number of things I have been discussing with Terry, among other people,” Tesla said. “There is always the option of simply escaping into your cyberworld, and existing within your machines, for as long as they do.”

  “But that would not be any less of a prison than your cube ever was,” Thea said. “You would be constrained by what the machines could do. You don’t want to be like that hologram that our computer teacher left behind in the Nexus. Before Terry fixed that…”

  “I helped out,” Tesla said. “I could see the inner workings that were hard to see from the outside.”

  “Yes, but it still remains just a shadow,” Thea said. “Something he left behind when he died. A bit of personality, maybe, and a limited ability to learn as an artificial intelligence, but Twitterpat himself is gone, and that thing will never be alive in the way that you are alive. I think you would find that there are many ways to raise prison bars around yourself.”

  “Even if I were to exist not in a single machine, as that other entity does, but in the space that Terry has described to me as cyberspace, which doesn’t exist until you call upon it…Ah, yes, I begin to see your point.” He frowned. “This is your world, not mine, this Cyber Element. It is you who must teach me in this regard, and there is much that I still do not understand.”

  “When you first made the Elemental cube, and you thought about what would come afterward, what were you planning to do?” Thea asked.

  “I suppose it is inevitable that the future changes in unexpected ways,” Tesla said. “But what I called my future has turned into your present; you know it better than I ever could, you know what is possible and what remains a dream. There were some things that I knew would happen, others I only hoped for—I dreamed of talking to the stars, once upon a time.”

  That drew an inadvertent smile from Thea, and Tesla lifted a questioning eyebrow.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said. “It’s just that…talking to stars is not what you might have expected it to be.”

  “You speak as one who has done this,” Tesla said.

  Thea lifted her eyes to the darkening sky above her, where now a few of the stars were beginning to show their faces. “In a way,” she said. “It seems a long time ago now. Back before I met the Trickster. Or Tawaha. Or knew anything about Elemental magic.”

  “Would you like to see them again?”

  Grandmother Spider’s approach had been soundless. She was suddenly there, beside them, with long, pale hair swept up in a kind of style that might have been familiar to Tesla on the women of his own time. He gave her a small bow.

  “Would they come?” Thea asked.

  Grandmother Spider glanced up in time to notice a shooting star fall across the sky. “Not here,” she said. “But that—” She tilted her chin toward the falling star. “That tells me that they might well return. To the place where you first crossed their path. Do you want to come back to the First World, Thea?”

  Thea glanced at Tesla. “Might I bring a companion?”

  “It could be arranged,” Grandmother Spider said. “You will have to carry him there, as you have already done through many portals. Do you still have your dream catcher?”

  “That,” Tesla said, with a faint smile, “is beginning to seem only right. I am getting comfortable with this manner of traveling. And if permitted, it would mean much to me to be able to see this marvel.”

  Grandmother Spider inclined her head by way of permission, and Thea fished out her little dream catcher from her pocket, spinning Tesla into it. When only she and Grandmother Spider stood in the shadow of the mesa, she realized that a hole had opened in the ground at her feet. She looked up, her face alight with memory.

  “Through a sipapu, again?” she said.

  “That is the gate into the First World,” Grandmother Spider said. “All the other worlds that you have seen, or been in, or woven into your life, are like a deck of cards—you can shuffle them, and stack them, and go from one to another with the ease of stepping sideways and finding yourself in a shadow cast by a different sun. But the First World…is the First World. There is nothing beyond it, nothing before it. It is a beginning. There is only one way in.”

  “I made a portal there once,” Thea said, and the words were a question.

  “It is still there,” Grandmother Spider said. “But it is a way out, not a way in. Not even you can step back into that world through such a portal. When you are ready, step into the sipapu.”

  Without any further hesitation, Thea raised her foot over what seemed to be an impossibly small opening in the ground—and stepped through it, onto a ledge under a different sky, velvet-black and full of huge, bright stars. Some streaked across the heavens like comets and trailed streams of light in their wake, which cast shadows edged in improbable shades of amber, pale blue, red-gold, or pure white. It was the First World she remembered, where she had first walked with Grandmother Spider and had first met Tawaha. And the Trickster.

  The place where she had learned to be afraid of the Alphiri.

  She fought a sense of panic at that last thought, and busied herself with restoring Tesla’s presence, shutting her mind to all else except the presence of Tesla, and Grandmother Spider, and stars in the sky.

  “I think I may have dreamed of this place,” Tesla said, looking around him with fascinated curiosity.

  “Many do,” Grandmother Spider said. “You, of all others, might have done—you, who have held in your hands the Fire of the World and were not burned by it. Now, if you will give me a moment…”

  Thea touched Tesla’s elbow and motioned him back while Grandmother Spider lifted her face and her hands to the skies. Tesla watched with keen interest as first one of the stars overhead, then another, then a third and a fourth, seemed to leap out of the sky and come streaking down toward the three of them on the rocky ledge, bathing them in colored light.

  Tesla lifted a hand and watched it cast different-colored shadows on the ground as the stars came closer.

  “It is very much like the Elemental entities, the ones that Terry created with his computer,” he said. “It is energy. It is light. This is astonishing.”

  The four stars touched down on the ground, turning into four women.

  One glowed with an inner light so rich and dark, she seemed to be glowing black, and yet underneath this shimmering darkness, there was a light that was bright and pure and almost unbearable. The one next to her had an amber glow, and long strands of red-gold hair seemed to dance about her face. The third one was a vision of bluish-green light as though glimpsed through deep water. And the last had a diamond-bright white light, with hair of spun starlight and eyes that were night sky flecked with stars.

  Thea remembered that one.

  It was mutual, because the white star smiled down at Thea in her turn.

  “We meet again,” she said, directly to Thea, and then, inclining her head to Tesla, continued, by way of introduction, “Maia, of the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters. And these are some of my sisters: Celaeno, Electra, Merope. Our other sisters—Alcyone, Taygeta, Asterope—were otherwise occupied this night. What news of the younger worlds?”

  “Nikola Tesla, at your service,” Tesla said, with one of his small formal bows. “A long time ago, I had dreamed of being able to speak to the stars, and I knew in my heart that there would be someone there who would hear. I never imagined that it could be…someone like you.”

  “In your world, it would not be,” Maia said.

  “Tesla, of the Fire,” Celaeno said. “We have watched. We have seen. Your name is not unknown.”

  Tesla looked taken aback, even humbled. “I am honored,” he said.

  “You are not flesh, as the child
is,” Merope said. “You are essence, spirit.”

  “Like we are in this place,” Maia said, nodding.

  “This could be a world for you,” Thea said slowly, turning to Tesla with a dawning sense of wonder. “It would be freedom—there would be no boundaries, and nobody could reach out here to harm you again. You can exist here…or out there…in a sense that none of us can imagine. You could be their companion, with whole worlds at your feet. And should you ever wish to contact us, there is always—”

  “The cyberspace,” Tesla finished, his own voice echoing the wonder in hers. “That…would be a high enchantment indeed.”

  “This is possible,” Maia said. “You are not one of us, as we exist out there, but you are Fire, and you can burn brightly among us. You would never be alone. You would never be bound. And we would be glad and honored to have you in our ranks.”

  “You continue to be my path to liberty and salvation,” Tesla said, turning to Thea. “This was but a dream to me, once; I would never have pursued it, not in this way, because I never knew it was possible. But if it is possible…” He looked at the four stars again. “The honor would be mine. Greater and deeper than I could ever express.”

  “Then come,” Maia said, holding out one star-white hand. She shed light as she moved, sparks falling from her arm like water and fading into shadow before they reached the ground. “Come with us, and see your world in the palm of your hand, as you have never seen it before.”

  “I am in your debt,” Tesla said to Grandmother Spider formally. And then, turning briefly back to Thea, “And in yours, Thea Winthrop. Eternally. You and I, I think, will need no artificial means to speak to each other. Even in your world, the younger world, you can call upon me and I will come.”

  He reached out and put both hands on her shoulders, drawing her closer to him, and kissed her on the forehead.

  “You,” he said, “are my legacy to the human race. I leave them in your care.”