This seemed to Kit like a huge imposition. “Listen, when I signed up for this nobody told me I was going to have to be all that luminous! Would’ve been nice if I’d been warned.”
There is never warning, the figure said. All is surprise. In surprise alone lies solution, and salvation. And very suddenly the figure brought up the Coleman lantern and held it up between them, so that the light of it, even turned down so low, briefly blinded Kit as it was held right in front of his face.
Kit flinched back and blinked and grabbed the lantern’s handle to pull it to one side and out of his eyes. But even with the light so high up and so close, he could for a moment see nothing of his companion’s face but a tangle of shadow. Except not even shadow, Kit thought, with the idea that this should remind him of something. At the moment, though, he couldn’t think what.
Then suddenly he could see his companion’s face—except it wasn’t one. There were eyes, though, quite a few of them, with a nubbly green-blue hide surrounding them. When the eyes realized Kit was looking at them, most of them squeezed themselves shut. But a couple of them stayed open, just a crack, as if what lived inside them was pretending to be asleep.
For some reason that made Kit want to laugh. He held the lamp up closer, peering at those eyes. And doing so, he saw a glint in them, something familiar, someone he knew.
Kit’s own eyes widened in sudden recognition. He opened his mouth to say the name—
And just like that, Kit’s eyes were open and he was staring up into the dimness of his puptent.
The image of the last moments of that dream, though, was perfectly clear, still hanging in front of the eyes of his mind. Sibik eyes.
Except what was in them? That wasn’t any sibik.
Kit swallowed, swallowed again. It wasn’t easy. Apparently he’d been sleeping with his mouth open; his mouth was dry and tasted terrible.
Ponch…
Kit kicked the bed clothes off, got up, and went across to the open package of bottled water—cracked one of them, took a long drink, swooshed it around in his mouth to try to get rid of the something-died-in-my-mouth-overnight taste, swallowed. He took another drink and held it in his mouth for a moment, feeling/listening to the bubbles, and swallowed again as things continued putting themselves together in his head.
He thought of the Fourth, and shivered. It wasn’t fear causing that response: just the strangeness of the experience. Some echoes of his contact with the being—if “contact” was the right word—were still echoing in Kit’s body. He could just feel a shadow of the odd, odd feeling that had pressed against his nerves while he’d stood there bearing the weight of its regard. And since then, even before Nita had yesterday mentioned the Playroom—that peculiar “aschetic” universe set aside for as a testing space for wizards learning to manipulate matter/energy kernels—the word “pathfinder” had been niggling at Kit, reminding him that he’d heard it before.
And now something extra had been added to the mere word, as if someone knew that Kit needed confirmation that the hint was worth following up. Seer for the seer in the dark…
He could see himself standing there on the Playroom’s peculiar, endlessly-Euclidean, white-shining floor. He’d followed Nita’s trail there with Ponch’s help, after Neets had vanished while working on healing the kernel of her mother’s body. Having found his way there, Kit had run into some of the colleagues that she’d been working with. Now he thought of the one with all the eyes and all the tentacles—an alien called a Sulamid—and how at the time it had spoken to him and looked at him so strangely, and had used that phrase. He was so distracted then by his worry for Nita that he’d hardly given thought to the peculiar way he felt when the Sulamid looked at him. Now, though, he had a referent for that. It was very like the bizarre, unclassifiable sensations he’d experienced the other day with the Fourth.
Another of these creatures with a metabolic extension into a higher-numbered dimension, then. What they certainly seemed to have in common so far was a gift for being obscure. But from what Nita had said, it sounded as if this was just a side effect of their particular style of being. Apparently it was hard to make sense to a creature living exclusively in one set of dimensions when you lived in more than one.
Standing there with his bottle in his hand, Kit laughed once under his breath. If I got into a conversation with Mr. A. Square from Flatland, he thought, probably a lot of what I might wind up saying to him would seem obscure too. And if there was a multidimensional take just on physical things, there was no reason to think there wouldn’t be a similar angle on mental ones, emotional ones, philosophical ones, as well.
He put the bottle down and started putting on clothes. I need to start making some kind of sense out of this, Kit thought. But first I want a shower, and some food. And I want to talk to Neets.
First, though, he waved the puptent’s portal orifice open and stepped out. It was dark, but the light was growing. Not even dawn yet, Kit thought, and made a face. The clouds had moved on, though; the predawn sky was a clear, intense, dark blue-green, and many stars of the neighboring OB association were blazingly bright in it, a scatter of white and blue-white jewels. And most to the point, the sky was empty of Thesba. The moon’s absence made the sky look healthier, less oppressive somehow.
Kit breathed out in the cold, clear air and leaned against his standing stone. His breath actually smoked, the temperature having dropped lower than usual over the course of the night. Kit tilted his head back against the stone and just rested there, feeling the cold, breathing out, relaxing into the feeling of looking up into a sky that didn’t have a horrible, crushing weight lowering down from it.
Pathfinder. Kit turned the word over in his mind. Maybe it meant more than just being a tracker, a physical locator—though Ponch had been that, too, while hunting for Nita. They both had.
Or maybe it meant not just finding physical paths, but virtual ones: metaphorical ones. Finding a path, a way, as in a way to do something. To fix something, Kit thought. Solve something.
But what? And how, exactly?
No answer came.
A moment later Kit laughed quietly at himself. This was part of what being a wizard was: when you asked the universe for answers, often you expected to get them. But that approach made sense, since so much of the universe would talk to you, once you started the conversation. That was what the Speech was all about, after all. Not commanding things to happen; convincing them to. You could command if you had to… but persuasion always worked better. Conversation was the whole point of the exercise.
Kit shivered again, but now it was for a different reason. The sensation that made the hair rise on the back of Kit’s neck now was the beginning of excitement, a hint of exhilaration. There was something he was needed for here, some purpose above and beyond just minding a gate. In the face of that realization, everything suddenly got… not easy to bear, but at least easier. A little less hopeless.
Okay, Kit thought. What now?
No answer came. That’s fine with me, he thought. I need a shower anyway.
And sometimes, maybe, all you can do is wait.
So Kit got busy doing that, and meanwhile did his job: the things that over recent days had started to become routine, and some things that hadn’t.
He went over to Ronan’s gate complex to shower and touch base with him. He came back to the circle of stones and had some breakfast (dry cereal that promised it was fortified with vitamins and minerals, which made him feel just a shade less guilty about his eating habits over the past few days). Then for the next four hours or so he shared the Stone Throne with Djam, who had taken over from Cheleb a few hours before dawn, and gatewatched with him while idly chatting some more about Earth entertainment, as well as some Alnilamev media-based “ritualized storytelling” that looked to Kit like a strangely jazzy cross between kabuki theater and a sort of interactive Cartoon Network.