“Apparently.”
One reason for the slowdown was obvious: the Landform was changing its shape. El was causing a bridge to grow across the gap separating him from Escherville, where Sophia and Maeve and several others were up to something at the approaches to the abandoned castle.
“I get it,” Zula said, in a bold assertion of non–Uncle Claude–ness. “He’s burning a lot of mana. Actually reshaping the Landform in real time. But just making a bridge isn’t expensive enough to slow things down that much.”
“True that,” said a young man nearby. Inevitably, Zula couldn’t remember his name, but she basically liked him, which was all that mattered. “Most of the slowdown is actually being caused by mana use from processes over in Landform Two. Old-school Pantheon gangstas. Including the notorious REAP.”
True That, as Zula had decided to call him, had been mostly hanging around in a corner of the big room with a smaller cluster of people who were looking at visualizations related to Landform 2: the separate chunk of Bitworld where the Pantheon seemed to hang out. Because it was all veiled in weird crypto over there, no one could really tell what it looked like, and so they were looking at abstractions: moving charts, fluctuating surfaces of data, rivers of text.
“And how do you know it is a Renascent Egdod-Associated Process?” Zula asked.
True That got an awkward look on his face. She could tell she’d committed a sort of faux pas. If she’d been a twenty-year-old intern he’d have confidently mansplained it to her. Because she was who she was, he couldn’t see a way forward.
She had to find it for him. “Never mind,” she said. “You can just tell. You have heuristics. REAPs just give off a certain holographic vibe. When one pops up, alarms go off.”
“Something like that, ma’am,” he answered with a nod so deep it almost became a bow. Behind him, she could see the thing they were looking at over there: one of those 3-D data visualizations you had to have a math degree to make sense of.
A notion occurred to her and she tossed it out, just to be mischievous: “Has anyone actually looked at it recently?”
“At what?”
“Landform Two. You know, my uncle’s neighborhood.”
“Well… you can’t see anything there, it’s… scrambled.”
She shrugged. “Just curious. You definitely can’t see if you don’t look.”
True That seemed to take her point. He raised a hand in a way indicative of working with some kind of interface. But Zula’s across-the-room conversation with him had become impossible as the larger group in the middle of the room had become very noisy. Not so much like professionals in a meeting. More in the manner of fans at a boxing match.
So Zula, along with everyone else, watched it happen. The Time Slip Ratio was definitely less than one, and so things happened slowly, on a time scale that reminded her of grand opera, where a twenty-minute aria might stand in for what normal people would cover in a quick exchange of text messages. Some kind of epic slugfest was taking place between El and a rock monster. All kinds of other things were going on too and were being excitedly noticed and pointed to by various onlookers. A lot of El’s custom-made humanoids were galloping toward Escherville. Other humanoids, and things that moved like bears, were on the move with Verna, crossing a bridge luxuriant with flowered vines, forming a defensive perimeter.
Her growing sense of Uncle Claude–like confusion was—mercifully—broken by a touch on her elbow. It was True That. “Something you should see, ma’am.”
“More so than all of this?” she exclaimed, gesturing at the melee in Escherville.
“I think so. Oh, and would you like a snack? It’s after midnight.” He proffered an energy bar or something, a gnarled confection of chocolate and granola. She accepted it gratefully, and chomped into it with artificial teeth.
She followed True That into the corner where he and his claque had been hanging out for the last few hours. They had extinguished their inscrutable data-viz-ware and replaced it with a rendering of a city.
It was a city she had never seen before. As she walked closer to it, she assumed it was somewhere in Europe. As she got closer, she began to think China. Some older burg, low lying, built on broken terrain, with an irregular medieval-style street pattern and the odd ancient castle. But it had been modernized with newer high-rises. One in particular rose above it alclass="underline" a dark tower that somehow managed to combine features of a modern skyscraper and an ancient fortification.
The only thing that made it not look like a realistic rendering of a city on Earth was a huge figure poised atop that tower. It had wings. Leathery, not feathery. It was gazing downward in a brooding way at a big lake below the tower. The lake was almost perfectly circular.
“What is that?” Zula asked.
“Landform Two,” True That said. “Uncloaked. This is the first time we’ve ever actually seen what it looks like. As you know. Ma’am.”
“And the figure on the top of the tower is—”
He nodded. “The REAP.”
It was about then that the whole room came apart into pandemonium as, apparently, very dramatic and exciting things happened in Escherville. Zula didn’t know what to look at. The REAP spread his wings and sprang into the air. He was diving into the lake. But he did so in slow motion.
A few minutes after disappearing beneath the surface of the round lake, he popped up in Escherville, on top of the castle that he had built there long ago. The stuff El had bolted around it had all fallen off. She couldn’t make out where her daughter was. This distressed her as a mother.
Much as she wanted to stare at Landform 2, nothing was going on there. All of the Pantheon had followed Dodge (there was no point in calling him anything else now) through the portal that apparently connected the lake to the unshackled castle. So she made her way back to the place where everyone was watching that. Some kind of slow-motion melee played out. The rock monster made another appearance and bear-hugged El into a canyon. People screamed, not so much in horror as in sheer astonishment.
Long ago in the early days of the Pantheon, Zula had got in the habit—which she knew at some level was lazy and wrongheaded—of identifying certain of its members with classical deities of antiquity. Dodge was some combination of Zeus and God. Pluto was, well, Pluto. One of them had always struck her as very Mercury-like in the way he moved about. Another she saw as a kind of Mars. Not that there were a lot of wars to fight in those days, but he was big and seemed to serve as a kind of bouncer. Since they spent all their time in Landform 2, it had been decades since she had seen them.
But there they were, embroiled in this melee around Escherville. Two of them—“Mars” and “Mercury”—took flight, headed south. Whoever was controlling the display made it zoom out so that the spectators could keep those two in view. They were winging southward, soaring over snowcapped mountains, and pretty obviously headed for the palace on the pinnacle. Time was speeding up again as things stabilized. Even so, covering that distance took them a little while. Spectators went out for bathroom breaks or snacks, leaving Zula largely alone. She stood there for a long time watching Dodge, who was tending to something very small and faint that he had cupped in his hand.
Mars and Mercury landed atop the palace without opposition. Meanwhile, back in Escherville, Dodge flew to the top of his castle, then dove into the crack that ran beneath it. Zula, getting the hang of it, swiveled her head toward the Landform 2 display. Sure enough, Dodge emerged a bit later from the round lake in the middle of the city. He beat his wings to gain altitude, then spread them wide to come in for a landing on the top of his dark tower.