“True. Then I will go with you and protect you from their malice. As long as I am with you, my power will seem to remain, and it will daunt them. If it does not, I can simply step on them.”
Earle would have argued, but he now had two excellent reasons to desire her company, so he did not.
They took the filament together, and arrived at the East Valley of Jupiter. Kara waded out of the sea.
Then they paused to reconsider. Earle did not want her giant feet to trample on the peons. Where could they go, where Kara would be welcome? “I fear you have no more place on my world than I on yours,” his image said sadly.
Then she had an idea. “Is this not close to the origin of our species?” her image inquired.
“Why, yes, as legend has it. The tiny subordinate world of Oria is fabled to have been the origin from which mankind spread across the universe.”
“Then on that tiny world must be the secret of size,” she said. “For as we have seen, every world has people and animals and plants in proportion to itself. Everything is self-similar; it is a guiding principle of our universe. They must have been magically changed to fit, and the first people must have known how to do it. That magic has been lost in the course of the eons, but perhaps it remains known on that one world, or can be rediscovered there.”
“The secret of size!” he said, excited. “If we had that, we could become the same in body as we are in image!”
“That was my thought,” her image confessed, blushing prettily.
Now Earle remembered how she had said “our children,” perhaps unconsciously, and he understood that she returned his love. She had not been teasing him; she had been giving him all that was possible.
So they flew a quarter circle around Jupiter, treading on no peons, and landed at the tip of the head of the head of the appropriate rad. Then they rode the filament out to Oria.
Oria was tiny. Every step Earle took was like twenty or twenty-five of his normal ones. For Kara, it was worse. To her, the natives stood only about the thickness of the cloth of her tunic in height, and were no more visible than an ant. To avoid squishing folk, she decided to wade at the edge of the water, or to fly, rather than to tread on land.
But where was the place to find the secret? They considered, and concluded that since this was the ninth world in the chain, it must be at the ninth rad. As it happened, that rad was well up toward the East Sea. In fact, it was under the East Sea. It was believed that mankind and all the animals originated under the sea, so this made sense.
They went there, and Kara stood over the rad, and set Earle down on it. They were right at the verge of the sea; the top of the rad formed an island just offshore, large enough for Kara to lie on.
Earle stood on it and brought out his dulcimer. Kara had hers, but it was reduced to the size of his for easy transport, and she saw no need to restore it yet. He was the one with the special magic, and only his music would do it.
He played, and the sound spread out across the sea and made it shimmer, and across the land and made it quiver. It reached into the sky, and the clouds shivered and turned to haze. “I feel it!” Earle cried. “I can change the size of the one for whom I play. I will make me large, to match you.”
“No, make me small to match you,” Kara said. “We shall still both be large for this world, and we can remain here together in comfort.”
Earle agreed. Since he now had the power, and could invoke it anywhere, they decided to get safely to the shore first. She quickly took him up and floated to the shore, where they sat side by side on the edge of the water, she towering over him as he dangled his feet in the water. To her, the bank was merely a rise, and the sea here barely covered her toes.
He played for her, and she began to shrink. It was working! Once started, the process continued by itself, so he put aside his dulcimer and reached up to hold her huge little finger.
It grew steadily smaller, until he was able to grasp her huge hand. The hand became smaller, along with her body, until at last she was his size. She got up and stepped out of the sea to stand before him. She had shrunk entirely out of her clothing and was naked.
Delighted, he embraced her and kissed her on the lips, physically, for the first time.
But she continued shrinking. Horrified, he tried to hold her, but she shrank in his arms. He took up his dulcimer and played, but the spell would not be reversed. It was running its course, heedless of his will. He had invoked a spell he did not properly understand, and now was paying the penalty.
Helpless, he watched her diminish. Her own mandolin, formerly a tiny thing in her huge hand, remained as it was, and now was far too large for her to play. It slid off the bank and partway into the sea. He was now too large to be her lover. She diminished to a quarter his height, to an eighth, a sixteenth. All he could do was shield her with his huge hand, preventing her from falling into the sea.
Then, less than a twentieth of his height, she stopped. She was now the same size as a native of this planet. Their problem of size remained; they had in effect changed places.
Suddenly he understood. “The magic makes a person fit the world!” he exclaimed. “It makes folk grow or shrink, depending on the world, so that thereafter they can reside there in comfort.”
She sent up an image: “Then join me, beloved!” the image cried.
Immediately, he played the music for himself. He began to shrink. He set down the dulcimer and the two hammers, for they were not affected, and his own cloak became too large for him. He stepped out of it, and back from the brink of the cliff, which was now quite formidable though it had been no more than knee height to him before. His dulcimer slid off, joining her mandolin, partly in the sea. It could not be helped.
He became her size, and stopped. Again he embraced her, and kissed her, and did with her the things they had done only in image before. Then they made new clothing for themselves and walked away from the sea. They were united at last.
CHAPTER 8—SECRET
NONA came out of the story, the understanding forming. Kara the giantess had looked exactly like Nona herself; she had seen it in the picture in Angus’ mind. This myth explained not only the coming of the animus but also the origin of mankind on Oria itself.
“No,” Angus said, answering her thought. “Mankind was there on your world and mine long before then. It merely explains the arrival on your world of two whom you call Megaplayers, one of them my size, the other much larger. Perhaps Kara did not look like you; that was my fancy. But it is one of our stories of the way of the universe, and it suggests how those instruments of ours came to your world.”
“Must I go to the origin of the universe, as Earle did?” Nona asked, appalled.
“I think not. The animus, as our myth has it, flows from the origin to the smaller worlds. But the anima is opposite. That should flow the other way.”
“The other way!” Nona exclaimed, seeing it. “But there are many small worlds, and only one master world. How can we know which one?”
“I suspect that it is no single world, but any world,” Angus said. “Each world can be changed from its own proper source. It may be that the animus sweeps all worlds at once, while the anima takes one world at a time, as its folk discover how to do it. Thus we should be subject to periods of complete animus, followed by gradually increasing anima, until some champion invokes the animus again for all.”
“The little world we stopped at on the way here!” Colene exclaimed. “They had just converted to anima! They had found the way.”
“Perhaps they can tell you, then,” Angus said. “It should be simply a matter of standing over the correct spot, playing your music, and invoicing the anima. But I must warn you—”