Nita smiled, amused, as even without wizardly shielding it was almost impossible to see the neighbors’ houses through the undergrowth or past the taller trees. If you hauled a lawn chair out here in nice weather you could feel astonishingly distant from suburbia and the general troubles of the world. But with the shielding up, what little view was visible past the trees was blurred and uncertain—the shield-spell’s way of verifying that it was up and working. “You could say that,” Nita said. “How’s your day been so far?”
“Uh, okay. Thanks. Where’s Kit?”
It’s going to be so much fun breaking you of this, Nita thought. Possibly too much fun. “He’ll be along in a few.”
“And am I supposed to be laying the spell out here?” Penn stared at the leaf-littered ground. “Kind of, uh, untidy. And cramped.”
“The trees don’t do active art installations back here anymore,” Nita said, “but even so, you’re right, there’s not a lot of space to stretch. I’ve got something roomier set up.”
“Oh,” Penn said, “okay.” He folded his arms and leaned against a tree. “Before he gets here—can I ask you a question?”
Nita reached into the otherspace pocket that always hung near her while she was working, and pulled out her manual. “Sure,” she said. Especially since it’s probably going to be more words than you’ve said to me since we met.
“Why does Kit let you do so much stuff?”
Let me? Nita thought. This just gets more bizzare all the time . . .
“I mean,” Penn said, “isn’t he afraid you’re going to get in trouble?”
“All the time,” Nita said. And she grinned. “But he knows not to interfere with that, since the job keeps getting done. That’s how we work.”
“It seems—dangerous.”
“It’s dangerous for him, too,” Nita said. “And believe me, I’ve got nothing on him when he gets in trouble. That’s when I get my worrying done. But somehow we come out all right. At least so far . . .” She flipped through her manual, found the spot she needed, and scanned down the page. All the necessary permissions were there. “One thing I need you to do,” Nita said, and handed him the manual. “Check your name here and make sure I’ve got all the other details right.”
Penn took the book and looked curiously at the subdiagram that contained his name. He stood quietly for a moment, tracing the long curve of Speech-characters with one finger. “Yeah,” he said, “it looks fine.”
“You sure?”
“It’s fine,” Penn said, and passed Nita back her manual with an expression that looked faintly uneasy. It was the first time she could recall the cocky expression falling off his face. She liked him a lot better without it; he had nice eyes, and they were nicer still when that set expression of certainty wasn’t squeezing them small. “Okay,” Nita said, and was even more amused by Penn’s look of concern as she slapped the manual shut.
“Wait, aren’t you going to—”
“Not with that,” Nita said, tucking the manual under her arm and taking hold of one of the charms on the bracelet she was wearing. In it, the activator phrase of the spell she needed was stored; at her touch it awakened, waiting for her to speak the trigger phrase. “Ready? Here we go.”
She began to speak the long trigger phrase, and glanced around her with satisfaction to see things darkening down around them, to hear that silence settling over the space where she and Penn stood—the sound of the world listening to a wizardry, getting ready to make it come true. When all sound had fallen away, when the light and the trees around them seemed to be dissolving into darkness, Nita spoke the last word of the spell—the one she’d said often enough, when her mother was ill, that she didn’t need to read it from her manual anymore.
And with that one word, light flooded back everywhere except in one wide, vertically poised circle of darkness right before them. Through that circle, a shining white surface stretching away into the distance could be seen: nothing else.
Penn was staring. “Here’s where we’ll be working,” Nita said. “Come on.”
She stepped through and stood there once again on that surface that could have been mistaken for a floor, except that it reached seemingly to infinity, as far as the eye could see, and was a condition of that space rather than any made or built thing. Even that place’s horizon, out at the edge of vision, was peculiar—the air was perfectly clear, so there was no haze to obscure the distance.
Penn stepped through the doorway behind her, staring around him. “Where is this?”
“Not sure the question means anything in terms of location,” Nita said. “It’s another dimension. A space where wizards come to practice dangerous spells without endangering other people’s lives. Thought you might find it useful. Once we’re started I’ll show you what I made you.”
“How big is this place?” Penn said from behind her as Nita headed farther into the space.
She spun around once as she walked, considering. “Not sure. Probably the question has an answer—I mean, the space isn’t infinite, I don’t think. But you’d be a long, long time trying to find the other side. If there is another side; if there’s anything but horizon out past the horizon.” Nita smiled. “I’d pack a lunch.”
“It’s really . . . flat.”
“Perfect Euclidean surface,” Nita said. “I keep wanting to bring a bike in here sometime and just ride. You’d never have to worry about hills. It’s funny, though, the way when you look at it you keep trying to see some kind of bump or rough spot. But there aren’t any. It’s not like our space. No curvature at all.”
When they were about a hundred yards in through the portal, Nita paused and took the opportunity, as she turned again, to glance at Penn. He wasn’t exactly green around the gills, but his look of overconfidence was gone.
Almost against her will she felt sorry for him. “This can be a little weird visually,” Nita said. “How about if I do a kind of tile floor thing in here? It’ll make it easier to focus.”
“Okay,” Penn said.
There was a strained tone to his voice that made Nita think hurrying up would be a good idea. The physical eccentricity of this space had made her feel ill once or twice when she’d been working here for long periods. It didn’t surprise her that Penn might be having a similar response. And is there the slightest possibility, she thought as she reached out to the air for the otherspace pocket in which the Playroom’s kernel was stored, that I was sort of hoping that would happen? Shame on me.
“Here we go,” Nita said, finding the spot she wanted and plunging both arms in it up to the elbow. Sometimes habitués of the Playroom hid the kernel from each other as a combination exercise and game—kernel management being one of the main reasons they came here in the first place. But the last user had left the kernel in its default position, convenient to whatever ingress the next user employed to get into the space, and immediately available on demand. Nita pulled the cantaloupe-sized kernel out of the otherspace pocket where it was stored and turned it over in her hands, feeling with slight satisfaction the faint burn and tingle of the energy involved in confining this place’s physical laws to one tightly interlaced and exceedingly complex bundle of phrases and statements in the Speech. It looked like a big tangle of yarn made of burning light, and in a hundred colors. Everything a space required in terms of physical constants was here—gravity, mass, distance, time, the control structures for all of them arranged in one handy management bundle.
She turned the kernel over until she caught sight of the one command-strand she wanted, then reached two fingers in and teased it out. The strand had a number of minuscule nodes dotted along it, like beads on a string: presets, some of them featuring bumps or scratches as tactile indicators of what they held. Nita ran her fingers down the strand until she found a node she wanted, on which she could feel the tiny crosshatch markings that indicated the “tiled floor” routine. She squeezed the node, gave it a half twist.