The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (21 page)

She walked slowly back up the platform under the long line of fluorescent lights, going softly to avoid attracting any attention in this great quiet.
Now where’d Rhiow go?
Nita thought, glancing back at the platform to make sure she hadn’t missed her somehow. But there was no sign of her, no movement, no sound anywhere—nothing but the soft cool breath of the draft coming up out of the dark depths of the tunnel through which the trains came into the station from under Park Avenue.

In the archway that led out into the Main Concourse, Nita paused, looking around her cautiously. There was no one out there, and all the lights were low. That was really bizarre, for even when the station was closed in the middle of the night, the lights were always up full, and there were always
some
people here: cleaners, transit police, workers doing maintenance on the trains and tracks. The lightbulb stars still burned, distant, up in the great blue backward sky of the terminal’s ceiling, but below them the terminal was empty, drowned in a silence even more peculiar than the twilight now filling it.

Nita stood there and listened hard… not just with the normal senses, but with those that came with wizardry and were sharpened by its use. She tried to catch any hint of something wrong, the influence of the Lone Power or other forces inimical to a wizard. But there was no glimmer of danger to be sensed, no whisper of threat.
Okay,
she thought.
Mere weirdness I can handle.

Softly Nita went out across the huge cream-colored expanse of the Main Concourse floor and up the ramp to the doors that led out onto Forty-second Street. She pushed one brass door open, stepped out onto the sidewalk.

There was no one here, either, and it wasn’t one in the morning. It was midafternoon. The sun was angling westward, not even out of sight behind the skyscrapers yet.

Nita looked up and down Forty-second, unbelieving. There was no traffic to be seen; no cars, no people anywhere in sight. Nothing moved but the traffic lights hung out over the street, swinging gently in the thin chill wind that poured down Forty-second, turning from red to green as Nita watched. The wind bore no smells of hot-dog vendors, no voices, no honking horns… no sounds at all.

This
was so creepy that Nita could hardly bear it. Once before she’d been in a New York that was nearly this empty, and she and Kit had had very a bad time there. But here Nita got no sense of the Lone Power being in residence. That cold hostile tang in the air, the sense of being watched and overshadowed by something profoundly unfriendly, would have been instantly recognizable.

Nita reached into her otherspace pocket and pulled out her manual, flipping it open to the new section about the practice universes.
Aschetic Spaces Habituation and Manipulation Routine
, it said.
Introduction:

You have now successfully entered the first of a series of “aschesis” or “live proof” continua that have been made available to you. Successful handling and manipulation of this continuum will result in your being offered the next one in the series.

You are cautioned not to remain past your assigned time. Time warnings embedded in your manual may not function correctly.

A smaller block of text appeared underneath:

A timepiece based on the vibratory frequency of one or more crystalline compounds or elements has been detected on your person. Please use this timepiece for temporal measurements until further advice is given. Please do not change the vibratory frequency of [QUARTZ] in this universe.

“Gee, and that was the first thing on my list,” Nita muttered, glancing at her watch. She did a double take; the face of the watch, which until then had been plain white with black numerals, was now showing a red half-arc around the face, from the numbers 1 to 7. Nita glanced back at her manual.

Your total permitted time for this session has been marked.

YOUR GOAL:

Each universe or continuum possesses a “kernel,” or core, which contains a master copy of its physical laws and the local laws of wizardry. This master copy is a single complex statement in the Speech that lists all properties of matter and energy in the local universe, and the values for which these properties are set. To manipulate physical law on a universal scale, whether temporarily or permanently, the universe- or continuum-kernel first must be located.

To avoid easy alteration of natural laws by local species, world-kernels are normally hidden. This universe’s kernel has been concealed in a routine manner. You must find the kernel before your allotted time elapses. You must then use the kernel to change the local environment. If you cannot find the kernel within the time allowed, this assignment will be offered to you again in one planetary rotation of your home world or one idiopathic cycle appropriate to your species.

…Just once a day.
Nita swallowed. Wednesday was coming fast. “All right,” she said to the manual, “the meter’s running; let’s go!”

The red arc on her watch began to flash softly. As she watched, it subtracted a tiny bit of itself from the point at which it had started.

Okay,
she thought,
where do you begin?

Nita walked away from the terminal, down that empty street, to pause at the corner of Forty-second and Lexington, looking up and down the avenue. Nothing moved anywhere. She leaned her head back to look up at the spire of the Chrysler Building, glittering in the westering sun against an unusually clear blue sky.

If I was this universe’s heart, where would I be?

If it was a riddle, it was one whose answer wasn’t obvious. So for a long time Nita walked north on Lexington Avenue through the windy afternoon, looking, listening, trying to get the feel of the place. It was missing something basic that her own version of New York had, but she couldn’t put her finger on
what
was missing. At Eighty-fourth Street, on a hunch, she turned westward, heading crosstown, and started to page through the manual again for some hint of what she was doing wrong. She found a lot of information about the structures of aschetic universes, and one piece of this caught her attention, for she’d been wondering about it.

Entire universes and continua are by definition too large and often too alien to allow quick kernel assessment and location while their genuine physical structures are displaying. Wizards on assessment/location duties therefore routinely avail themselves of a selective display option that screens out distracting phenomena, condenses the appearance and true distances of the space being investigated, and identifies the structure under assessment with a favorite structural paradigm already familiar to the wizard. Early assessment exercises default to this display option.

…So it gave me someplace I’m used to working,
Nita thought.
Probably just as well.
She paused at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-fourth, looking across the street and downtown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then went across the street and into Central Park, continuing to read through the manual. There were no more hints, and two hours were gone already. Nita looked at some of the spells she’d used for detection in the past, but they didn’t seem much good for this. They were mostly for finding physical things, not other spells.

And the spells in the book don’t seem to be working right, anyway,
Nita thought as she came out at Eighty-sixth and Central Park West, turning south. She wasn’t getting the usual slight tingle of the mind from the wizardries as she read. It was as she’d been warned: the manual’s normal instant access to the fabric of wizardry didn’t seem to be working here.

Either way, Nita started to feel that spells weren’t the answer.
If that’s not it, there has to be another way. Besides just wandering around!
But the silent streets in which nothing moved—no sound but the wind—made everything seem a little dreamlike, the stuff of a fairy tale, not a real place at all.

But it
is
real. The only thing missing…

…is the sound.

Nita stopped at the southwest corner of Central Park West and Eighty-first and thought. Then she went down the path from the corner to the planetarium doors, and cut across the dog run to go up the steps to the nearby terrace, where the “astronomical” fountain was. There she sat on a bench under the ginkgo trees, near where the water ran horizontally over the constellation-mosaicked basin, and looked at her watch. She had only two hours left. Part of her felt like panicking.
This isn’t working; I don’t have time to spend another day doing this; what about Mom!
But Nita held herself quiet, and sat there, and listened.

Water and the wind; nothing else. But even those sounds were superfluous. She could tune them out, the way she tuned out the CD player in Dairine’s room when she didn’t want to hear it. That didn’t take a spell.

And maybe I don’t really need to tune these sounds out, anyway.
For this place to be normal, for real, she needed to tune things
in.
She needed those sounds, the sounds that to her spelled out what life was like in the city, what made it its own self.

Traffic, for example. The horns that everybody honked even though it was illegal. The particular way that car tires hissed on the road in hot weather, when the surface got a little sticky in the sun. The sound of trucks backing up and making that annoying high-pitched
beep-beep-beep.
Air brakes hissing. Car engines revving as the lights changed. Sirens in the distance. One by one, in her mind, she added the city sounds to the silence. There was a kind of music to it, a rhythm. Footsteps on the road and on the sidewalks created some of that; so did the rattle of those bikes with the little wagons attached that the guys from the stores used to deliver groceries.

And so did the voices. People talking, laughing, shouting at one another in the street; those sounds blended with the others and started to produce that low hush of sound, like a river. It wasn’t a steady sound. It ebbed, then flowed again, rising and falling, slowly becoming that long, slow, low, rushing throb that was the sound of the city breathing.

Not even breath. Something more basic. A pulse…

Nita held still. She could hear it now. It was not a pulse as humans thought of such things. It was much too slow. You would as soon hear a tree’s pulse or breathing as this. But Nita was used to hearing trees breathe, and besides, their breath was part of this bigger one. Slowly and carefully, as if the perception was something she might break if she moved too suddenly, she turned her head.

The “sound” was louder to the south. If this place had a heart, it was south of her.

Nita got up carefully. Concentrating on not losing the way she was hearing things now, she made her way back to the stairs and down from the fountain terrace, back toward Central Park West, then started heading south again. Within a block she knew she was going the right way.
It’s stronger.

Within another block she was so sure of what and how she was hearing that she didn’t need to walk carefully anymore. Nita began to alternate jogging and walking, heading for the source of that heartbeat. Even in the silence, now that she’d let that recur, she could hear that slow rush of cityness underneath everything, like the sound she’d once heard of blood flow in an artery, recorded and much slowed down, a kind of windy growl. She got as far as Central Park South and realized that the source of the pulse was to her right and ahead of her downtown, on the West Side somewhere.

Nita followed the pulse beat, feeling it get stronger all the time, as if it was in her bones as well as the city’s. She went west as far as Seventh Avenue, then knew she was on the right track. The pulse came from her left, and it was much closer now.
Another ten blocks, maybe?

It turned out to be fifteen, but the closer Nita got, the less she cared about the distance, or the fact that she was dog tired.
I’m going to do it. It’s going to be okay. Mom’s going to be okay!

She came out in Times Square, and smiled as she perceived the joke—there were lots of people who would have claimed that this was the city’s heart. But her work wasn’t done yet The kernel was hidden here somewhere. Now that she knew what to listen for, Nita could feel the force of it beating against her skin, like a sun she couldn’t see. Nita stopped there in the middle of a totally empty Times Square, all blatant with neon signs and garish, gaudy electric billboards along which news of strange worlds crawled and flashed in letters of fire, in the Speech and in other languages, which she didn’t bother to translate. She turned slowly, listening, feeling…

There.
A blank wall of a building. It was white marble, solid. But Nita knew better than to be bothered by mere physical appearance, or even some kinds of physical reality. She went to the wall, passed her hands over it.

It was stone, all right. But stone was hardly a barrier to a wizard. Nita jiggled the charm bracelet around on her wrist until it showed one spell she had loaded there, the charm that looked like a little house key. It was a molecular dissociator, a handy thing for someone who’d locked themselves out or needed to get into a place that had no doors or windows. Nita gripped the charm; it fed the wizardry into her mind, ready to go. All she had to do was speak the words in the Speech. She said them, put her hands up against the stone, feeling the molecules slip aside; then reached her hands through the stone, carefully, since she wasn’t sure if what she was reaching for was fragile.

She needn’t have worried. Her first sense as her fingers brushed it was that it was not only stronger than the stone behind which it was hidden but stronger than anything else in this universe, which might reach who knew how many lightyears from here in its true form rather than this condensed semblance-of-convenience. What Nita pulled out through the fog she’d made of the stone was a glittering tangle of light about the size of a grapefruit, a structure so complex that she could make nothing of it in a single glance. And that was just as it should be. This was a whole universe’s worth of natural law—the description of all the matter and energy it contained and how they worked together—gathered in one place the same way that you could pack all of space into a teacup if only you took the time to fold it properly. The kernel burned with a tough, delicate fire that was beautiful to see.