“No, folk live on mountaintops too,” Nona said.
“If we take the larger world, we will have a better chance of seeing where we put our feet.”
That seemed to be the better choice. Nona changed the pillows back to threads so they wouldn’t suffocate any little folk, and they got together for the jump.
Colene thought she was used to it, but this one turned out to be more dizzying than the last, because it covered considerably more distance. Now she was aware of the complicated convolutions of the filament; it was not jagged but infinitely curved, dancing this way and that as it wound through its intricate patterns. Throughout these patterns were tiny bugs, too small to step on or even to see, yet each was part of the route. Did all these have people too? At least they were not getting tramped on.
They arrived at the planetoid. This one was over ten times the diameter of the last, according to Nona’s thought, or about a hundred miles. Colene couldn’t see much of it, because the curve of its heads obscured the body. Was it large enough?
They stood astride the diminishing heads, as before, but the progression was longer. They were sliding off a boulder about thirteen feet in diameter, give or take five feet—in her dizziness she didn’t care much about accuracy—to land on one about a hundred and fifty feet across. They walked around that, their heads pointing away from the surface of the head they were on, not away from the body beyond, so that they didn’t have to jump down. Even so, it might have been easier to have Darius conjure them, but that magic had to be saved for the next effort.
The next head was about two miles in diameter, and felt more tike a planetoid in itself. Now she remembered to watch for the works of people, and she saw them. Their houses were about two inches high, and the people themselves about one inch in stature.
“Stop here,” she said. “I’ll ask them how we can get through without hurting them.”
She squatted, and brought her hand down carefully to point at one tiny man who defended his barn bravely with a pitchfork. Her vision sharpened so that she could see his face clearly. “You,” she said for Seqiro to forward. “I will talk to you. We are traveling through from a larger world. We don’t want to step on any of you. Can you tell us a way to go so that we can put our feet down safely?”
Perhaps the man had had experience with travelers. Maybe that was why he lived here near the point of arrival. At any rate, he did not freak out. “Animus or anima?” he demanded.
That set Colene back. Which force did they represent?
“Anima,” Nona said.
“Anima, hiding from animus,” Colene told the farmer. “Going to bring the anima, if we can.”
The farmer smiled. “Then pass with our blessing. There is a path by the south side.” He gestured, pointing the direction.
“Thank you.” Colene stood carefully. She did not need to repeat the information; the others had received it too.
They stepped carefully to the south, setting their feet down in empty pastures or barren areas. They found the path; apparently there had been a blight in this region, leaving a depopulated strip. They walked along it, alert for healthy sections, which they avoided by moving to the side or by simply stepping over. Colene was glad she had fashioned underclothing, because she was wary of what little folk might see as she stepped over them.
Now the projections of the planet were plain. They ranged in height from about five hundred feet down to immeasurably small. This was the way of these fractal worlds, Colene knew; it hadn’t been evident on Oria because they hadn’t traveled enough on it by day. Also, people had plowed out most of the knobs, near the village, so as to use the land for crops. Man always did mess up the scenery. Here the mountains were shaped like boulders with smaller boulders perched on them, and smaller ones on the smaller ones, and so on without end. It was weird—but also true to the Mandelbrot set as she remembered it. True to the entire science of fractals and Julia sets,
They came to the next larger head, which looked to be about ten miles in diameter. Now Colene saw that there was a river or lake filling in the crevice between the small and large heads. Naturally the water of the planet had to flow somewhere, and since down was toward the center of each head, there was a section between heads where the attraction of both applied. That would be where the water collected. This would be a donut-shaped lake, technically a torus, circling the planet at this narrow section.
But the path did not extend across the next head. They had to hail another farmer. But Colene was getting experienced at this; she sent reassuring, friendly thoughts ahead, so that the man had a notion what she wanted before she actually broached the subject. He directed them to the north, where there had been extensive strip mining, and the land had been left mostly barren. Even some of the larger projecting spheres were gone, leaving the land oddly naked. “They are messing up their planet the same way we did Earth,” she muttered.
By the time they made their way to the lake that de-marked the next head, they were all physically tired except Seqiro, who seemed indefatigable. Ten miles was ten miles. “Say, you could have floated,” Colene said to Nona.
“That would have taken similar energy—and depleted the magic I must save for the next conjuring,” the woman replied.
True. There was no easy way across for any of them. “Actually we’re not on a schedule, are we?” Colene asked, pursuing another thought. “We can take an extra day if we want to?”
“We can,” Darius agreed.
“So why don’t we rest the night, then conjure ourselves to the East Valley, and rest again until we’re ready to make the long hop?”
They considered, and agreed. They camped by the lake, and stripped and washed themselves, then had a good meal. Nona looked so tired that Colene was hardly jealous of her fine body. Especially since Darius was carefully not looking. Then Colene thought of something else.
She walked to the nearest community of natives. “We thank you for letting us cross your world,” she said for Seqiro to relay. “Is there anything we can do in return for your hospitality?”
The little folk were taken aback. Then they rallied and decided that yes, there was something. They had a construction project that required the filling in of several large mine pits, and it was hard to spare the manpower for that. They had only recently thrown off the yoke of animus despots, and had little new magic, and there was much planetary damage to be undone.
Colene looked at Darius. “Can we move their earth for them, magically?”
“We don’t need to,” he replied. “We can shovel it physically, if we make big enough tools.”
“We can make them,” Nona agreed. “That’s not the same magic as travel-conjuring, and I am not as fatigued by it.”
“Tomorrow,” Colene told the little folk. “Mark the earth you want moved, and mark where you want it moved to, and we’ll do what we can.”
“Agreed,” the little folk said appreciatively.
This planet was oriented so that the light of the same great star that brought day to Oria slanted across at an angle to the head. Now dusk came, and then darkness, and the air cooled quickly. Nona had to make blankets for them all except Seqiro, who was satisfied to walk around grazing on the patches of grass and saplings.
“Come here, you little bundle of warmth,” Darius told her. “I remember you from Earth.”
She joined him and slept in his chaste embrace, delighted.
IN the morning Nona floated up and spied the earth mounds and the pits beyond. Everything was marked; the little folk must have labored through the night. She returned to make shovels for the human folk, and a harness and drag for the horse. Then they marched to the first site and started shoveling and dragging, each of their giant shovelfuls the equivalent of ten thousand or a million native shovelfuls. Colene tried to work it out mathematically in her head, cubing one hundred, because each dimension was about a hundred times that of the equivalent for the little folk, but realized that this wouldn’t work. It was science-reality figuring, and this was a magic reality, where the square-cube law did not hold and gravity was more or less independent of mass. At any rate, they were doing the job a whole lot faster than the little folk could.