Provos made purchases. Her money turned out to be beads on a string. Colene thought of wampum, supposedly American Indian money, though it was doubtful whether the Amerinds used money before the white man came. At any rate, it seemed to work here.
When both their packs were full, they returned to the ground, and to the canal. A snake was just arriving with just the right number of seats for those who needed them. Colene reminded herself that this was really like people getting off a full bus on Earth: there was no coincidence that they got off together and went their separate ways, the ride a memory. Here, people came to fill the bus in the manner they remembered.
The serpent coursed out of the town and to the forest. The day was waning; they would make it back just about dusk. Again, no coincidence; Provos probably remembered finishing promptly then.
And so it was. They stepped into the house as darkness closed, and had supper. Colene realized that they had never had lunch; they had been so busy shopping that she had never noticed. She had not gotten hungry; that green pudding had stayed with her. If that was the kind of food they would have while traveling the Virtual Mode, it was good.
They slept. Colene dreamed of Darius, of being in his arms, of tempting him with her body and not succeeding, but managing to frustrate him something awful. It was a fun dream. The time will come, Seqiro thought to her.
She woke. Had she really received the horse’s thought? Probably not; they were now on different realities, with a slew of intervening realities. She had thought she received him once before, when they had been separated by thousands of light-years in the super-science Mode, but that had turned out to be her own dawning telepathic ability.
Or could it have been some of both? Her just-barely-developing power of mind, and his expanding mature power? How could they be sure of the limits of it? They weren’t separated by light-years now, but by realities, with the anchors connecting them. Maybe his telepathy could pass through the one anchor, and cross the realities, and cross the other anchor, and reach her. It was a nice thought.
She smiled in the darkness. That was a pun, maybe: a nice thought of hers, and a very nice and powerful thought of Seqiro’s, if it had reached her across those realities.
She drifted back to sleep, satisfied.
THEY wasted no time in the morning. They ate a solid breakfast and headed out to the anchor. They passed through it without difficulty; this one had no animus magic bollixing it. They were back on the Virtual Mode.
Provos lost her certainty. She had remembered the events of the prior day, but now it was past and she had forgotten them. She had no memory of the realities they passed in seconds, and had to enter a reality in which they were going to remain before her memory came. Before, she had known she had to go home for supplies; that had perhaps not been memory so much as common sense. Now she had only memory, and it wasn’t enough.
It was time for Colene to take the lead. She knew where she was going: Earth. It was her home, and she could orient on it more readily than Provos could. She had no memory of the trip there, because it was in her near future, but her knowledge of her purpose guided her.
She oriented, and felt the faint Rightness that was the direction of her anchor. “This way, Provos,” she said, assuming command.
But almost before she took the first step, she paused. If they went directly to Earth, not passing Go or collecting $200, they would walk smack back into that sea that had balked them before. They couldn’t go that way.
Colene pondered. There was more than one way to go. They could move to the side, seeking to get around the sea. Or they could circle the Virtual Mode the other way. Any Virtual Mode, Darius had explained, was like a circle, or rather a pentagon, anchored by five connections. The lines of awareness tended to follow the edge of it; maybe it was the edge she sensed, rather than her home reality. If she followed the edge the opposite way, eventually she could complete the circuit and reach Earth. It was inevitable. It might take longer, but it made sense, because there should be no sea. Maybe. She hoped.
She reoriented. She felt a fainter rightness in the opposite direction. “No, this way,” she said.
Provos had already shrugged, accepting it. She lacked the memory to argue. Colene had not argued when they were in Provos’ world, for similar reason.
They set off, marching through the changing forest. At times animals flicked into view, spooking at the sudden presence of the two human beings, and flicking out of view again as the two strode on across the next invisible boundary. This was a weirdness to which Colene had become accustomed; in fact she rather enjoyed it. But she knew it could be dangerous, and kept alert.
The landscape changed. The hills and valleys became ridges and furrows, crossed by right-angled ridges and furrows, as if some giant cookie-cutter had shaped the terrain. The trees became lumps of colored protoplasm. When some developed tentacles, Colene got increasingly nervous. She had them pause to take out knives they had bought, and they held them in their hands as they walked. The thing was that if a tentacle grabbed a person, that person might not be able to escape it by stepping across the next boundary. Because the tentacle would hold that person right there in that reality. So they needed to be sure they had at least five feet of freedom, so they could reach the boundary forward or behind. A quick cut at a tentacle might make the difference.
The tentacular trees faded, replaced by blocks of wood which then became metal. Colene did not feel easy about these either, remembering what Darius had said about machine realities which had almost trapped him and Provos. Provos would not remember, because that was in her past. Damn!
But the metal lumps diminished in size, and the landscape became a kind of plain, not quite level, with lines crisscrossing it, like a sheet of graph paper or a diagram of stress vectors. Suddenly cubistic creatures appeared—and disappeared as Colene and Provos hastily stepped into the next reality. Nimble feet were a great asset on the Virtual Mode.
They stopped to have lunch. It was safe, because Provos remembered that it was, and the meal was good. The woman might remember backwards, but she was competent. Colene wondered again why the woman had left her home to risk the Virtual Mode, and wished she possessed the ability to ask. But that concept was too complicated to convey. Provos just seemed to be here because she was here.
The graph paper humped and distorted, becoming more normal hills and valleys. Moss appeared, which grew by reality stages into shrubs and small trees and then full-sized trees and then giant trees reminiscent of those on Jupiter in the Julia reality. Then these twisted into tentacular monsters, making Colene nervous again. But they remained trees, not grabbing at anyone, and there were birds’ nests in their heights. Big ones. In fact something frighteningly large appeared, with a wing span of perhaps a hundred feet. A reality in which the fantastic roc birds existed? Why not; anything was possible, in some reality.
Colene was interested in the way realities seemed to be contiguous. Adjacent ones were similar to each other, changing by small stages. Such changes might seem rapid when a person was crossing a reality every two seconds, but that meant about thirty realities a minute, and a lot could shift by then. So they had the partial security of seeing new things coming, and if the trend seemed bad, they could go another way and try to avoid it, or slow down and proceed very carefully. So far they had been lucky; the terrain had been mostly innocuous or avoidable.