"What beats?" the twelve-year-old countered.
Geoffrey's face darkened. "Dost thou seek to mock me?"
The other boy's face hardened. "Have it as thou wilt."
Geoffrey's arm twitched, but didn't swing—only because Magnus had hold of it. "He doth not realize there are beats to the music about him."
Geoffrey was totally dumbfounded. "Dost thou not hear the music?"
"Aye! Why else would we have come?"
"But is not the music everywhere?"
The boy shook his head—in time to the beat. But his attention wandered, and so did he. Geoffrey leaped forward to catch him, but so did Magnus, catching Geoffrey. A twelve-year-old girl stepped in front of him, smiling. "What seekest thou?"
Her smile was radiant, and for a moment, Geoffrey was motionless, gazing at her.
Then Cordelia giggled, and he flushed and said, "We did but ask the lad if this music is not everywhere."
"Oh, nay!" The girl laughed. "Our grown folk did gather up all the rocks, and hurl them hither! They cannot abide these sounds!"
"I cannot blame them," Gregory muttered, but Geoffrey said, "They do not come hither?"
"Nay—and therefore may we here do whatsoe'er we please."
"They allow thee?"
The girl shrugged, her attention drifting. "We did not ask…" She remembered her purpose and turned back to Geoffrey. "Wilt thou dance?" He shrank back, horrified, and she gave him a strange look, then shrugged again. "Thou art so offbeat." She danced away, her whole body bobbing with the rhythm.
"So then—they have come to the music, with no care for their parents." Geoffrey frowned, watching the children, head nodding.
"And the music doth make them to move." Magnus looked out over the crowd. "There's none here older than twelve, from the look of them—and none younger than ten could pause long enough to talk."
"I have watched the two a-tossing of the ball," Cordelia told him. "They have never ceased their game for a moment."
"The younger they are, the more firmly the pulsing of the low notes doth seize them," Magnus said. "Yet why cannot the oldest comprehend our questions?"
"Who could think with this sound beating at one's ears?" Gregory answered.
"Come!" A fourteen-year-old boy leaped forward and caught Cordelia's hand. "Dance with me!"
She gave a shriek, and her brothers yelled and leaped after her—but the crowd closed around her on the beat, and the boys slammed into bodies, bodies that rotated on one beat and punched at them on the next. Magnus shoved Gregory behind him and blocked, but Geoffrey had the sense to counterpunch on the offbeat, and his fist slammed home. His opponent's head snapped back and he fell; his comrades weren't able to move aside until the next beat, so he landed slowly, staring up at Geoffrey in amazement. "How didst thou that?"
" 'Tis almost as though the time between beats doth not exist for them," Gregory exclaimed.
"Why, then, betwixt beats, we can wend betwixt bodies! Come, brothers!" Magnus nodded his head. "One, AND two AND three, NOW!"
They shoved through and saw Cordelia dancing, her whole body bobbing and weaving, a delighted smile on her face and a glazed look in her eyes as she stared at the boy who had pulled her in.
"Is he handsome?" Gregory asked, with interest.
"As lads go, I suppose," Geoffrey grudged, "though he cannot be much of a boy if he doth wish to dance with a lass."
"Alas!" a pretty blond twelve-year-old girl cried, catching his hand. "Wilt thou not dance with me?"
Geoffrey recoiled as though a snake had bitten him. The girl flushed, hurt, and Gregory tried to smooth it over by asking quickly, "Dost thou not mind this great press of bodies about thee?"
"Nay." The girl beamed. "Wherefore should I? 'Tis but entertainment." She eyed Geoffrey with a slow smile, but he recovered, straightening, his lip curling. The girl saw and pouted for a beat, shrugged on the next, and whirled away on the third.
The boys stared at their dancing sister in the wrapping of music.
"There are words to it!" Gregory said, wide-eyed.
They listened, and heard the twanging music form into phrases:
Chew bop, chew bop! Bee bee yum hop! Yum chew sip sop, Boy and girl drop!
"What arrant nonsense!" Gregory shivered with distaste.
"What is its meaning?" Geoffrey wondered.
"Naught, I hope," Magnus scowled. "Come, brothers! We must haul our sister out from here."
"Yet how?"
"Catch her arms and fly."
"They will seek to prevent us," Gregory warned.
"I depend upon it." Geoffrey clenched a fist, his eyes glittering. "On the 'and,' brothers!"
"One AND two AND," Magnus counted. "To HER left NOW, catch HER arm AND rise AND fly NOW!"
He and Geoffrey shot off the ground with Gregory trailing behind. Cordelia disappeared so suddenly that her partner looked about for her, at a loss—to left and to right, but not up above.
She writhed and twisted in their hands. "OH! Do LET me GO now! THOU foul KILLjoys!"
"Sister, wake!" Magnus cried, but she kept twisting until Gregory swooped up before her, beating time with his hands, then clapped suddenly under her nose on the offbeat. Cordelia's head snapped up, her eyes wide, startled. "OH! What…"
"Thou wert ensnared," her littlest brother informed her.
"I was not." She blushed and looked away. "I did only… attempt to…"
"Study the phenomenon from within, perhaps?"
All looked down, startled, to see Fess looking up at them from the edge of the crowd.
Cordelia couldn't fib with his plastic optics on her. "Nay, I was caught," she admitted grudgingly. "But, oh! It doth take such a hold of one!"
"I do not doubt it," Fess said. "There is entirely too high a concentration of rock music in this meadow. Come away, children, so that we can hear one another talk."
He turned and trotted away. The boys exchanged a glance, nodded, and swooped off after him.
After about fifty feet, Magnus looked up, alarmed, and circled back to accompany his sister. "What kept thee?"
"My broomstick," Cordelia reminded him. "Thou couldst have waited, Magnus! 'Twas but a second's work to leap upon it—yet in that time, thou wast an hundred feet ahead."
"My apologies," Magnus said ruefully.
Down, Gwen's voice commanded inside their heads.
They looked down, surprised, to see their parents climbing out of a skiff and onto the bank. Aye, Mama, Magnus thought back at her, and all four children landed neatly in front of Rod and Gwen.
"What hast thou learned?" she asked.
Cordelia blushed, and Magnus was just starting to answer, when a sizzling sound made them all turn and look up.
Sudden heat seared, and a muted roaring swelled in volume and rose in pitch. "Hit the dirt!" Rod yelled and leaped aside, knocking his children down like bowling pins as a huge mass of flame shot by overhead and plummeted away in front of them, its roar fading and dropping in pitch.
"Children! Are you well?"
"Aye, Mama," Cordelia answered shakily, and her brothers chorused after her. "What is that?" Magnus cried.
"The Doppler effect," Fess answered obligingly. "As the object approached, its sound rose in pitch, and as it went away…"
"No, not the sound!" Rob said. "The object! What was it?"
"Why, do none of you recognize it? You have seen enough of them in your lifetimes, I know."
"Wilt thou tell us!"
"Why," said Gwen, "it was a fireball, such as witches and warlocks throw at one another! You have seen them ere now."
"It was a fireball." Cordelia stared off at the trail of smoke.
"That? 'Twas as much a fireball as a hillock is a mountain!"
"The difference is merely a matter of scale," Fess pointed out.
"A scale of mat much difference must come from a whale!"