The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (26 page)

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. Uniformly 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 a deep brassy 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.
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, than the one in the last universe.

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 Nita 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 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 that was 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 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, the objects 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.
I 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, 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 stihéh,
” 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,” Nita 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 another.

“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 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.