There was no one here, either, and it wasn't one in the morning. It was midafternoon. The sun was angling westward, not even out of sight behind the skyscrapers yet.
Nita looked up and down Forty-second. No traffic, no cars, no people anywhere in sight; only the traffic lights hung out over the street, turning from red to green as she watched. A thin chill wind poured down the street past her, bearing no smells of hot-dog vendors, no voices, no honking horns... no sounds at all.
This was so creepy that Nita could hardly bear it. Once before she'd been in a New York that was nearly this empty... and she and Kit had had a bad time there. But here Nita got no sense of the Lone Power being in residence. She'd have instantly recognized that cold hostile tang in the air, the sense of being watched and overshadowed by something profoundly unfriendly.
Nita reached into her pocket of space, pulling out her manual and flipping it open to the new section ™ about the practice universes. Aschetic Spaces Habitua- 4 tion and Manipulation Routine, it said: Introduction: m
You have now successfully entered the first of a series of "aschesis" or "live proof" continua that have been made available to you. Successful handling and manipulation of this continuum will result in your being offered the next one in the series.
You are cautioned not to remain past your assigned time. Time warnings embedded in your manual may not function correctly.
A smaller block of text appeared underneath:
A timepiece based on the vibratory frequency of one or more crystalline compounds or elements has been detected on your person. Please use this timepiece for temporal measurements until further advice is given. Please do not change the vibratory frequency of [QUARTZ] in this universe.
"Gee, that was the first thing on my list," Nita muttered, glancing at her watch. She did a double take; the face of the watch, which until then had been plain white with black numerals, was now showing a red half-arc around the face, from the numbers 1 to 7. Nita glanced back at her manual.
Your total permitted time for this session has been marked. YOUR GOAL:
Each universe or continuum possesses a "kernel," or core, which contains a master copy of its physical laws and the local laws of wizardry. This master copy is a single complex statement in the Speech that lists all properties of matter and energy in the local universe, and the values for which these properties are set. To manipulate physical law on a universal scale, whether temporarily or permanently, the universe- or continuum-kernel first must be located.
To avoid easy alteration of natural laws by local species, world-kernels are normally hidden. This universe's kernel has been concealed in a routine manner. You must find the kernel before your allotted time elapses. You must then use the kernel to change the local environment. If you cannot find the kernel within the time allowed, this assignment will be offered to you again in one planetary rotation of your home world or one idiopathic cycle appropriate to your species...
Just once a. day. Nita swallowed. Wednesday was coming fast. "All right," she said to the manual, "the meter's running; let's go!"
The red arc on her watch began to flash softly; as she watched, it subtracted a tiny bit of itself from the point at which it had started.
Okay, she thought, where do you begin?
Nita walked away from the terminal, down that empty street, to pause at the corner of Forty-second and Lexington, looking up and down the avenue. Nothing moved anywhere. She leaned her head back to look up at the spire of the Chrysler Building, glittering in the westering sun against an unusually clear blue sky.
If I were this universe's heart, where would I be?
If it was a riddle, it was one whose answer wasn't obvious. So for a long time Nita walked north on Lexington Avenue through the windy afternoon, looking, listening, trying to get the feel of the place. It was missing something basic that her own version of New York had, but she couldn't put her ringer on what was missing. At Eighty-fourth Street, on a hunch, she turned westward, heading crosstown, and started to page through the manual again for some hint of what she was doing wrong. She found a lot of information about the structures of aschetic universes, and one piece of this caught her attention, for she'd been wondering about it.
Entire universes and continua are by definition too large and often too alien to allow quick kernel assessment and location while their genuine physical structures are displaying. Wizards on assessment/location duties therefore routinely avail themselves of a selective display option that screens out distracting phenomena, condenses the appearance and true distances of the space being investigated, and identifies the structure under assessment with a favorite structural paradigm already familiar to the wizard. Early assessment exercises default to this display option...
So it gave me someplace I'm used to working, Nita thought. Probably just as well. She paused at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-fourth, looking across the street and downtown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then went across the street and into Central Park, continuing to read through the manual. There were no more hints, and two hours were gone already. Nita looked at some of the spells she'd used for detection in the past, but they didn't seem much good for this. They were mostly for finding physical things, not other spells.
And the spells in the book don't seem to be working right, anyway, Nita thought as she came out at Eighty-sixth and Central Park West, turning south. She wasn't getting the usual slight tingle of the mind from the wizardries as she read. It was as she'd been warned: The manual's normal instant access to the fabric of wizardry didn't seem to be working here.
Either way, Nita started to feel that spells weren't the answer. If that's not it, there has to be another way. Besides just wandering around! But the silent streets in which nothing moved—no sound but the wind— made everything seem a little dreamlike, the stuff of a fairy tale, not a real place at all.
But it is real. The only thing missing...
...is the sound.
Nita stopped at the southwest corner of Central Park West and Eighty-first and thought. Then she went down the path from the corner to the planetarium doors, and cut across the dog run to go up the steps to the nearby terrace, where the "astronomical" fountain was. There she sat on a bench under the ginkgo trees, near where the water ran horizontally over the constellation-mosaicked basin, and looked at her watch. She had only two hours left. Part of her felt like panicking. This isn't working; I don't have time to spend another day doing this; what about Mom! But Nita held herself quiet, and sat there, and listened.
Water and the wind; nothing else. But even those sounds were superfluous. She could tune them out, the way she tuned out Dairine's CD player when she didn't want to hear it. That didn't take a spell.
And maybe I don't need to tune them out, anyway. For this place to be normal, for real, she needed to tune things in. She needed those sounds, the sounds that to her spelled out what life was like in the city, what made it its own self.
Traffic, for example. The horns that everybody honked even though it was illegal. The particular way the tires hissed on the road in hot weather, when the surface got a little sticky in the sun. The sound of trucks backing up and making that annoying high-pitched beep-beep-beep. Air brakes hissing. Car engines revving as the lights changed. Sirens in the distance. One by one, in her mind, she added the sounds to the silence. There was a kind of music to it, a rhythm. Footsteps on the road and on the sidewalks created some of that; so did the rattle of those bikes with the little wagons attached that the guys from the stores used to deliver groceries.
And so did the voices. People talking, laughing, shouting at one another in the street; those sounds blended with the others and started to produce that low hush of sound, like a river. It wasn't a steady sound. It ebbed, then flowed again, rising and falling, slowly becoming that long, slow, low, rushing throb that was the sound of the city breathing.