The Lost Gate (14 page)

But the fact that there were no legends about huge explosions from the idiotic actions of untrained gatemages suggested that either it could be done safely or it couldn't be done at all.

So he stood there, trying to make a gate without going through it. The trouble was, he didn't really understand what he was doing when he made a gate of any kind. He just knew how it
felt
—what he was doing inside himself while thinking of a place he wanted to be. How could he feel that way, including visualizing the inside of the trash receptacle, without moving himself into the place?

The man in the stall sighed with relief. How nice for him, thought Danny.

“Oh, damn,” whispered the man. “Damn damn damn.”

Danny pressed the backpack against the trash receptacle and tried to think of it being inside. Nothing happened.

I might as well cross my fingers and wish, thought Danny.

“Are you still there?” asked the man.

“Yes,” said Danny.

“This stall is out of toilet paper. Can you get me some toilet paper from the other stall?”

Danny set down the backpack and went into the other stall. Danny thought of unrolling long sheets of toilet paper and lofting them over the wall between stalls. Then he noticed that there was a spare roll of toilet paper behind the partial one. Only a thin sheet of metal stood between him and that entire roll.

The idea formed in the process of carrying it out. Danny
would
move through a tiny gate in a metal sheet—but it would be just his hand, not his whole body. He reached out his hand while producing that gatish feeling inside himself and his hand pushed through the metal as if it weren't there—though he could still see it. It was his hand that disappeared. He thought: Hi, I'm one-handed Danny, the gatemage who drops off pieces of himself in every metal box he passes.

He felt his fingers close around the spare toilet paper roll. He pulled it out. It came easily. His hand was intact. So was the surface of the toilet paper dispenser.

He pushed his hand back through the surface and there was no resistance. He could feel around the empty space where the spare roll had been. He pushed the roll back through and it went, fitting nicely into the space. Danny pulled his hand back out—the roll was where it belonged.

“What are you doing?” demanded the man.

“Getting toilet paper for you,” said Danny.

“Can you hurry it up?”

Danny wanted to say, You're pretty snotty-sounding for a guy trapped on a toilet who needs a favor.

Instead, Danny reached back into the little gate he had made. This time he had no gate-making feeling. The gate was simply … there. And he knew it was there, he could sense it, it was part of his mental map. He wondered if the gate would be there now for everyone else to use—if the janitor could now reload the dispenser without using his little key to open it up.

“Come
on
!” the man insisted. And then, as if on cue, he let go with an enormous prolonged fart and there was another plop.

What flashed into Danny's mind was a perverse version of a line of Lady Macbeth's: “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much poo in him?” Auntie Uck would have been proud of him for finding just the right quote.

Danny reached the roll of toilet paper to the top of the stall divider. “Catch,” he said.

The man groaned.

Danny let go of the roll. It hit the floor and rolled back under the divider into Danny's stall.

“I missed it,” the man said. His voice sounded agonized. More noises.

Danny nudged it back under the divider with his foot. The room stank worse than ever.

“Thanks,” said the man. “For getting it dirty with your shoe.”

Danny almost laughed at the man's stupidity. “Any time,” he said.

He walked back out of the stall and went straight for the trash receptacle. He made a gate in it by pushing his hand through to grab trash. He pulled out a handful of damp, wadded-up paper towels and dropped them on the floor. Now the gate existed. It was a simple matter to push the backpack through it and jam it into the space.

When he had withdrawn his hand, Danny wondered why the backpack didn't just pop right back out through the gate. Then it occurred to him to wonder just how big the gate actually was. He pushed his finger against the metal surface just beside the spot where he could sense the gate was. Nothing. He touched a lot of other spots, and the metal was impermeable. He had to be reaching for the
exact
location of the gate—a place that no one else could possibly distinguish from any other—and then his whole hand went through as if the metal weren't even there.

So that's why it took magery even to
find
a gate. A Sniffer might not be able to make anything or open a closed gate, but he could tell where one existed. A Keyfriend could reach through a gate like this one, even though he couldn't make one. So gates didn't actually have to be hidden. They were unfindable to those without gatemagery.

Or maybe it was only lame, half-assed gates like the kind an untrained gatemage like Danny could make that were automatically hidden. Maybe if he were a really powerful mage, he could make gates that anyone could use.

Anyway, the backpack was hidden inside the dispenser, Danny could get it out any time, and judging from the condition of this restroom, the trash receptacle wasn't going to be emptied anytime soon. Then again, the fact that the toilet paper dispensers were mostly empty might suggest that it was about time for the janitor to show up.

Well, if he finds my backpack, I'll just shoplift another. I can live without my old raggedy begging clothes. Maybe I'll stop begging anyway.

Danny gathered up the paper towel litter he had pulled out of the receptacle when he made the gate, and jammed it down into the trashbin from the top.

He heard the toilet flush. He heard the man stand up, the sound of pants being fastened. The man was sighing with relief when Danny reached the door and was gone. Only later did he realize that his encounter with this dump-taking jerk was precisely the kind of thing that the Family expected of drowthers. Danny remembered how sentimental and admiring he was about drowthers while looking at the Capitol dome, and he felt as if he had learned something. He wasn't sure what. Maybe just that nobility and baseness could coexist in the same species. Maybe even in the same person. And that was just as true of the Westil Families as of drowthers. Great heroes, officious dump-taking morons—maybe they were even the same guys. For all he knew, this clown had won the Congressional Medal of Honor when he was younger.

Danny strode purposefully into a large open room—no, a
vast
room—filled with tables and counters and computer screens, and now there were shelves here and there with books on them, though it was obvious that these could not be a significant part of the vast collection of the Library of Congress. Probably you had to look up the title you wanted and then ask for it to be delivered to you.

Danny sat down at a computer and began to feel his way through the software. On a whim he tried “gate magic” as his search terms. He expected to get either thousands of hits or none at all, depending on whether the search engine scanned through the contents of books or insisted on finding only that exact combination in a title.

There were thousands of hits. Of course—the search engine had a notation:
POWERED BY GOOGLE
. Drowthers could do magic with data, as surely as treemages did magic with trees. Was it possible that this really was a power? That if he could bring one of the Google programmers through a great gate to Westil and back again, his power would be vastly increased? Then again, why would he need to? Computers were a kind of magery in themselves, or might as well be—to people who didn't understand them, they were every bit as inscrutable. The programmers got to know them and love them and understand them in order to coax the right results out of them—just as beastmages did with their beasts, or stonemages with stone.

Danny smiled at the thought of all the great mages in the history of the Westil Families as if they were stereotypical computer geeks.

“Young man, can I help you with something?” asked a woman. Her i.d. made her an employee of the library.

“My dad's in the bathroom,” said Danny.

She smiled. “I just wondered if I could help you find something.” She looked at the screen. “ ‘Gate' and ‘magic,' ” she said. “Is this a research project?”

“I wanted old legends,” said Danny. “About … magical travel. Getting from one place to another.”

“Seven-league boots,” said the woman.

“Maybe,” said Danny, who had never heard the term but guessed at its meaning. Boots that could take you miles with every step—maybe that's how gatemagery would seem to drowthers. “Or, like, the winged feet of Hermes.”

“Oh, excellent,” she said. “You've already done some research before you came—you'd be surprised how many people come here without having done enough research to know how to recognize what they're looking for even if they find it. Here, let me narrow your search a little.” She sat down in the next chair and typed in a list of search terms and various pluses, minuses, and parentheses. In moments she got a much smaller, more refined list of book titles, and then entered another command. “The list is printing out at my desk right now,” she said. “I'll get you the top six books and you can pick them up over there in about fifteen minutes.”

“Wow,” said Danny. He really was impressed.

“We're here to serve the public,” she said. “And … we finally have decent software. You should have seen what a mess it was before. It was a miracle if you could find
anything
if you didn't already know exactly what you were looking for.”

And then she was gone.

Ah, drowthers, thought Danny. Sometimes you love them, sometimes you hate them.

Then for the first time it dawned on him that classing all drowthers together made no more sense than having a word for all animals that can't stand upright on two legs for more than a minute, or all animals with dry noses. What possible use could there be for such classifications? The word “drowther” didn't say anything about people except that they were not born in a Westil Family. “Drowther” meant “not us,” and anything you said about drowthers beyond that was likely to be completely meaningless. They were not a “class” at all. They were just … people.

Danny didn't want to loiter around doing nothing, so while he waited for the books he went into another room, a smaller one where people were sitting at tables reading or studying or taking notes. There was art on the walls and Danny walked around the room looking at it. Nobody did more than glance up at him—apparently being an unaccompanied child in this room was okay, as long as he didn't make noise or touch anything.

I'm just six inches away from being a human being, thought Danny. Just a little taller, maybe a touch of moustache, and I won't have to put up with all the suspicion.

Then again, dump-taking man would probably have treated me with disdain just for being younger than him and not wearing a suit.

I need a suit. Not right now, but eventually. I need to be able to look as if I come from more than one social class. I need clothes that look rich, and not just Wal-Mart clothes. What good does it do for me to gate my way into a place, if I immediately look out of place there, and everyone stares at me? Just getting from place to place is nothing if I can't appear normal in the new place.

I wonder what they wear in Westil? When I make a Great Gate and go there, will they dress like us? Or something as different from shoplifted Wal-Mart clothes as our modern clothes are from ancient Egyptian or Chinese costumes?

It had been fifteen minutes. He didn't have to look at a clock, he just knew. He had always had that knack—waking up when he planned to, staying away from home until an exact time, even though he didn't own a watch. When he returned late, having missed dinner, it was never because he lost track of time. It was because he got better food after his parents made the rule that if he was late, he'd get no food in their house. Then he'd stop by Aunt Lummie's on the way home and get a great sandwich even as she scolded him for his irresponsibility. “But a growing boy can't miss meals, it's just
wrong,
” she'd say, and Uncle Mook would roll his eyes.

Danny stood up. The nice library woman must be back by now. That is, if her estimate of fifteen minutes meant anything.

There she was at the counter, and there were six books beside her, just as she had said.

“These are almost the best I could do,” she said as soon as he was close enough that she didn't have to raise her voice.

“Almost?” asked Danny.

“Maybe you don't care about oddities in the collection, but I'm afraid they're my favorite thing,” she said.

“I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘oddities.' ”

“Come with me and see,” she said. “Of course, you can't touch it.”

“Touch what?”

“You'll see.”

She led him through an employees-only door and up a flight of stairs. At the top, there was a door with a keypad, and when she entered the code and pulled open the door, there was a whoosh of air. “Climate controlled,” she said. “Try not to do any global warming while you're in here.” She chuckled.

He followed her inside. It was a large room full of books in acrylic boxes. But she led him to another area, where books were shelved without separate cases. On a low table an oversized book was lying open.

“The book itself is only a couple of hundred years old,” she said, “and it isn't in English, so I don't know what use it would be to you.”

“It's in Danish, isn't it?” said Danny.

She looked at him a moment. “You recognize Danish?”