"Anything worth having demands a commensurate price," Carl said. "What is your mother's life worth to you?... And yes, this option has dangers. But I see that's not likely to stop you in the present situation."
He leaned back a little in his chair, folding his arms, looking at Nita. "We have to warn you clearly," Carl said. "You think you've been through a lot in your career so far. I have news for you. You haven't yet played with anything like this. When you start altering the natural laws of universes, it's like throwing a rock into a pond. Ripples spread, and the first thing in the local system to be affected, the first thing the ripples hit, is you. You're going to need practice handling that, keeping yourself as you are in the face of everything changing, before trying it for real... and unfortunately, in this universe, everything is for real."
"I don't care," Nita said. "If there's a chance I might be able to save my mom, I have to try. What do I need to do?"
"Go somewhere it's not for real," Carl said. "One of the universes where you can practice." Nita stared at him, confused. "Like learning to fly a plane in a simulator?"
"It wouldn't be a simulation," Tom said. "It'll be real enough. As Carl said, figures of speech aside, it's always for real. But if you have to make mistakes while you're learning how to manipulate local changes in universal structure, there are places set aside where you can make them and not kill anybody in the process."
"Or where, if you kill yourself making one of those mistakes, you won't take anyone else with you," said Carl.
There was a moment's silence at that. "Where?" Nita said. "I want to go."
"Of course you do, right this minute," Carl said, rubbing his face. "It's going to take time to set up." "There may not be a lot of time, Carl! My mom—"
"Is not going to die today, or tomorrow," Tom said, "as far as the doctors can tell. Isn't that so?"
"Yes, but—" Nita stopped. For a moment she had been ready to shout that they weren't being very considerate of her. But that would have been untrue. As her Senior wizards, their job was to be tough with her when she needed it. Anything else would have been really inconsiderate.
"Good," Carl said. "Get a grip. You're going to need it, where you're going. The aschetic continua, the 'prac- I tice' universes, are flexible places—at least the early ones in the sequence—but if you indulge yourself in sloppy thinking while you're in one, it can be fatal."
"Where are they?" Nita said. "How do I get there?"
"It's a worldgating," Tom said. "Nonstandard, but you'd be using existing gates." He glanced at Carl. "Penn Station?"
"Penn's down right now. It'd have to be Grand Central."
Nita nodded; she had a fair amount of experience with the worldgates there. "What do I do when I get there?"
"Your manual will have most of the details," Carl said. "You'll practice changing the natures and rules of the nonpopulated spaces that the course makes available to you. You'll start with easy ones, then move up to universes that more strenuously resist your efforts to change them, then ones that will be almost impossible to change."
"It's like weight lifting," Nita said. "Light stuff first, then heavier." "In a way."
"When you finish the course," Tom said, "if you've done it correctly, you'll be in a position to come back and recast your mother's physical situation as an alternate universe... and change its rules. If you still want to."
If? Nita decided not to press the point. She'd noticed over time that sometimes Tom and Carl spent a lot of effort warning you about things that weren't going to happen. "Yes. I want to do it."
Tom and Carl looked at each other. "All right," Tom said. "You're going to have to construct a carrying matrix for the spells you'll take with you—sort of a wizardry backpack. Normally you'd read the manual and construct the spells you need, on the spot, but that won't work where you're going. In the practice universes, time runs at different speeds, so the manual can be unpredictable about updating... and you can't wait for it when you're in the middle of some wizardry where speed of execution is crucial. Your manual will have details on what the matrix needs to do. What it looks like is up to you."
"And one last thing," Carl said. He looked sad but also stern. "If you go forward on this course, there's going to come a time when you're going to have to ask your mother whether this is a price she wants you to pay."
"I know that," Nita said. "I'm used to asking my mom for permission for stuff. I don't think this'll be a problem." She looked up at them. "But what is the price?"
Tom shook his head. "You'll find out as you go along." "Yeah," Nita said. "Okay. I'll get started as soon as I get home."
And then, to Nita's complete shock, she broke down and began to cry. Tom and Carl sat quietly and let her, while Dairine sat there looking stricken. After a moment Tom got up and got Nita a tissue, and she blew her nose and wiped her eyes. "I'm sorry," she said, "that keeps happening all of a sudden."
"Don't be sorry," Tom said. "It's normal. And so is not giving up."
She sniffed once or twice more and then nodded.
"Go do what you have to," Tom said. She and Dairine got up. "And Nita," Carl said. On her way to the front door, she looked back at him.
"Be careful," Carl said. "There are occupational hazards to being a god."
Sunday Afternoon and Evening
NITA AND DAIRINE WALKED home, and Nita went up to her room and settled in to work. The moment she sat down at her desk, she saw that her manual already had several new sections in it, subsequent to the usual one that dealt with worldgatings and other spatial and temporal dislocations.
The first new section had general information about the practice universes: their history, their locations relative to the hundreds of thousands of known alternate universes, their qualities. They're playpens, Nita thought as she read. Places where the structure that holds science to matter, and wizardry to both of them, has some squish to it; where the hard corners on things aren't so hard, so you can stretch your muscles and find out how to exploit the squish that exists elsewhere. There was no concrete data about how the practice universes had been established, but they were very old, having apparently been sealed off to prevent settlement at a time almost too ancient to be conceived. One of the Powers That Be, or Someone higher up, foresaw the need.
While it was useful that no one lived in those universes to get hurt by wizards twisting natural laws around, there seemed to be a downside as well. You couldn't stay in them for long. The manual got emphatic about the need not to exceed the assigned duration of scheduled sessions—
Universes not permanently inhabited by intelligent life have only a limited toleration for the presence of sentients. The behavior of local physics within these universes can become skewed or deranged when overloaded by too many sentient-hours of use in a given period. In extreme cases such over-inhabition can cause an aschetic continuum to implode—
Boy, there's a 'welcome I won't overstay, Nita thought, though not without a moment's curiosity about what it was like inside a universe when it imploded. Something to get Dairine to investigate, maybe. Nita managed just a flicker of a grim smile at the thought.
Access scheduling is arranged through manual functions from the originating universe. Payment for the gating is determined by duration spent in the aschesocontinuum and deducted from the practitioner at the end of each session. Access is through local main-line gating facilities of complexity level XI or better; the gating type is a diazo-Riemannian timeslide, which, regardless of duration spent in the aschetic continuum, returns practitioners to the originating universe an average of +.10 planetary rotations along duration axis, variation +/- .005 rotation.
Nita did the conversion from the decimal timings, raised her eyebrows, So you go in, then come out more Sunday Afternoon and Evening