Not even breath. Something more basic. A pulse...
Nita held still. She could hear it now. It was not a pulse as humans thought of such things. It was much too slow. You would as soon hear a tree's pulse or breathing as this. But Nita was used to hearing trees breathe, and besides, their breath was part of this bigger one. Slowly and carefully, as if the perception was something she might break if she moved too suddenly, she turned her head.
The "sound" was louder to the south. If this place had a heart, it was south of her.
Nita got up carefully and, concentrating on not losing the way she was hearing things now, made her way back to the stairs and down from the fountain terrace, back toward Central Park West, then started heading south again. Within a block she knew she was going the right way. It's stronger.
Within another block she was so sure of what and how she was hearing that she didn't need to walk carefully anymore. Nita began to alternate jogging and walking, heading for the source of that heartbeat. Even in the silence, now that she'd let that recur, she could hear that slow rush of cityness underneath everything, like the sound she'd once heard of blood flow in an artery, recorded and much slowed down, a kind of windy growl. She got as far as Central Park South and realized that the source of the pulse was to her right and ahead of her: downtown, on the West Side somewhere.
Nita followed the pulse beat, feeling it get stronger all the time, as if it was in her bones as well as the city's. She went west as far as Seventh Avenue, then knew she was on the right track. The pulse came from her left, and it was much closer now. Another ten blocks maybe?
It turned out to be fifteen, but the closer Nita got, the less she cared about the distance, or the fact that she was dog tired. I'm going to do it. It's going to be okay. Mom's going to be okay!
She came out in Times Square, and smiled as she perceived the joke—there were lots of people who would have claimed that this was the city's heart. But her work wasn't done yet. The kernel was hidden here somewhere. Now that she knew what to listen for, Nita could feel the force of it beating against her skin, like a sun she couldn't see. Nita stopped there in the middle of a totally empty Times Square, all blatant with neon signs and garish, gaudy electric billboards along which news of strange worlds crawled and flashed in letters of fire, in the Speech and in other languages, which she didn't bother to translate. She turned slowly, listening, feeling...
There. A blank wall of a building. It was white marble, solid. But Nita knew better than to be bothered by mere physical appearance, or even some kinds of physical reality. She went to the wall, passed her hands over it.
It was stone, all right But stone was hardly a barrier to a wizard. Nita jiggled the charm bracelet around on her wrist until it showed one spell she had loaded there, the charm that looked like a little house key. It was a molecular dissociator, a handy thing for someone who'd locked themselves out or needed to get into something that didn't have doors or windows. Nita gripped the charm; it fed the wizardry into her mind, ready to go. All she had to do was speak the words in the Speech. She said them, put her hands up against the stone, feeling the molecules slip aside... then reached her hands through the stone, carefully, since she wasn't sure if what she was reaching for was fragile.
She needn't have worried. Her first sense of it as her fingers brushed it was that it was not only stronger than
Monday Night, Tuesday Morning
the stone behind which it was hidden but stronger than anything else in this universe, which might reach who knew how many lightyears from here in its true form rather than this condensed semblance-ofconvenience. What Nita pulled out through the fog that she had made of the stone was a glittering tangle of light about the size of a grapefruit, a structure so complex that she could make nothing of it in a single glance... and that was just as it should be. This was a whole universe's worth of natural law—the description of all the matter and energy it contained and how they worked together—gathered in one place the same way that you could pack all of space into a teacup if only you took the time to fold it properly. The kernel burned with a tough, delicate fire that was beautiful to see.
But she didn't have time for its beauty right this moment. Next time I'll have more time to just look at one of these, Nita thought. Right now I have to affect the local environment somehow.
The longer she held the kernel in her hands, the more clearly Nita could begin to feel, as if in her bones, how this core of energy interacted with everything around it, was at the heart of it all. Squeeze it a little this way, push it a little that way, and this whole universe would change—
Nita squeezed it, and the sphere of light and power grew, and her hand sank into it a little, the "control structures" of the kernel fitting themselves to her. Her mind lit up inside with a sudden inrush of power, a webwork of fire—the graphic representation of the natural laws of this universe, of its physics, mathematics, and all the mass and energy inside it—and she knew that it was hers to command.
For a moment Nita stood there just getting the feel of it. It was almost too much. All that kept her in control was the fact that this was not a full-fledged universe but an aschetic one, purposely kept small and simple for beginners like her—a kindergarten universe with all the building blocks labeled in large bright letters, the corners on all the blocks rounded off so she couldn't hurt herself.
Still, the taste of the power was intoxicating. And now to use it. Through the kernel, Nita could feel the way all energy and matter in this universe interrelated, from here out to the farthest stars... and while she held what she held, she owned all that power and matter. She ruled it. Nita smiled and squeezed the kernel harder, felt her pulse increase as that of local space did—energy running down the tight-stranded web-work, obedient to her will.
In that clear afternoon sky, the clouds started to gather. The day went gray in a rush; the humidity increased, and the view of the traffic lights down the street misted, went indistinct. She felt the scorch and sizzle of positive ionization building in the air above the skyscrapers as the storm came rolling and rumbling in.
Nita held it in check for a while, let the clouds in that dark sky build and curdle. They jostled together, their frustrated potential building, but they couldn't do anything until Nita let them. Finally the anticipation and the growing sense of power was too much for her. Do it! she said to the storm, and turned it loose.
Monday Night, Tuesday Morning
Lightning flickered and danced among the skyscrapers and from cloud to cloud as the rain, released, came instantly pouring down. The Empire State Building got hit by lightning, as it usually did, and then got hit several more times as Nita told the storm to go ahead and enjoy itself. Thunderclaps like gigantic gunfire crashed and rattled among the steel cliffs and glass canyons, and where Nita pointed her finger, the lightning struck to order. She made it rain in patterns, and pour down in buckets, but not a drop of it soaked through her clothes—the water had no power over her. And when some of the electrical signs started to jitter and spark because of all the water streaming down them, Nita changed the behavior of the laws governing electricity, so that current leaped and crept up the rain and into the sky, a slower kind of lightning, sheeting up as well as down.
In triumph Nita splashed and jumped in the flooding gutters, like a kid, then finally ran right out into the middle of the empty Times Square and whirled there in the wet gleam and glare all alone—briefly half nuts with the delight of what she'd done, as the brilliant colors of the lights painted the puddles and wet streets and sidewalks with glaring electric pigment, light splashing everywhere like Technicolor water. The feeling of power was a complete blast... though Nita reminded herself that this was just a step on the way to something much bigger. Curing her mother was going to be a lot more delicate, a lot more difficult... and the wizardry was going to cost her. But the innocent pleasure of doing exactly as she pleased with the power