You all right, boss?
I think so. That took a lot out of me. Let's go home.
All right. The leash wizardry tightened as Ponch pulled Kit forward. 'What was that about?
Kit shook his head. I'm not sure, he said. The light of the normal world, nearly blinding by contrast to where they'd been, broke loose around them. I think it was because it was ...all alone.
They stood there under the streetlight, and then Kit
Tuesday Evening
undid the leash and let Ponch go sprinting down the road. A late blackbird repeated a few solitary notes up in a tree. Just me, it sang,;#s£ me.
Kit stood listening in the dark... then went after Ponch.
I
LateTuesday Evening
IT WAS A QUIET drive home from the hospital for Nita and Dairine and their dad. It was as if they'd all been hoping that when the tumor was removed, a closer look at it would prove the diagnosis wrong. But it wasn't going to happen that way. I can't waste a minute, now, Nita thought. Every second I'm not working on this, those things are multiplying inside her. Kit'll understand. I've got to get going... and I can't wait for him.
Nonetheless she tried to contact Kit before she left. She couldn't find him; the manual gave her the same subject-is-not-in-ambit message as before. He never did get a, chance to tell me just where he was, or how he's doing that, she thought, dropping her transit circle to the floor and watching it flare with the brief shiver of life and light that meant the spell was ready. Gotta find out...
Along with several other wizardries, Nita had added her invisibility spell to her charm bracelet, as a small
Late Tuesday Evening
dangling ring with nothing inside it. Now she activated it and a moment later stepped through the transit ring, popping out once more in that vacant doorway in Grand Central. This time of day there were a lot more people around, and a fair number of trains coming in and out. It took Nita some minutes to get down to the worldgate end of the platform, as she had to sidestep in one direction or another about every three paces to keep from being run over by commuters who couldn't see her. At least the gate was idle and ready for her when she reached it. She went through in a hurry.
On the other side she found the platform empty again, and everything quiet. Nita walked down to the gateway on the Main Concourse and paused there to look at the painted sky. The figures of all the constellations were strange—the center of the "sky" not a bull, here, but a strange cat-shape, like a jaguar leaping with outstretched paws. Other odd forms shared the ecliptic with it: lizards and frogs and birds with long curling tails. Even this sky's color was different, a deep violet blue rather than the creamy Mediterranean color of the ceiling that Nita was familiar with.
She went up the ramp across the empty, shining floor and past the information booth—which was a brass ziggurat here—and came out into what at first she took for early evening. Then Nita got a glimpse of the sun and realized that it was afternoon... but in a Manhattan that was definitely not her usual one.
The skyscrapers all around were capped with stepped pyramids of the kind she had just seen substituted for the usual information booth inside the terminal. Uni
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formly the buildings seemed to be made of a golden stone—or maybe this was just the effect produced by that strange sun, which was bigger than it should have been, and was orange gold, though it stood at a height more like that of noon than sunset.
Down the center of the street ran a green strip of grass that reminded Nita of the built-up flower beds running down the middle of each block of Park Avenue. She looked across the street, and up; from high on the tops of some of the buildings south of Forty-second, Nita saw blinding orange light reflecting back. Mirrors? she thought. And the sky was very dark blue, almost a violet color. She was reminded of the way the sky looked on Mars. Maybe not as much oxygen in the atmosphere? Nita thought. An old Earth, maybe; a tired one...
It didn't matter. Her job was to find the place's kernel. And it would be better hidden, here.
She sat down on the curb of that empty Forty-second Street and listened. A slower pulse this time, fainter... like a place running down, a heart beating more out of habit than from any desire to go on living. Resignation? Could a whole universe feel resigned, ready to let go of life? It was an odd sensation. But ours is old, too. Does it feel that way?
After a few seconds she put the thought aside. There was something about the light here that was affecting her, maybe, or just the influence of this place's great age. But the realization itself could be useful. She'd listen for a slower pulse, a more leisurely beat...
Nita closed her eyes, held still, and felt for the kernel, the heart. She had no idea what this city sounded
Late Tuesday Evening
like when it was inhabited. But the wind, breathing down between the skyscrapers, didn't change. She listened to it, and let it give her hints.
Very slowly, they came. Strange hornlike sounds, not the wind but something else... also the muted cries of birds and animals, the clatter of machinery. Nita put her hands flat down on the sidewalk on either side of her, feeling it, listening through the touch.
The sidewalk was stone, not concrete. Its gray-black basalt was quarried out of the island itself—brought here in great slabs by mechanical means of which Nita got glimpses—then carved to size, set in place, and fastened by some physical process that she didn't understand, again sensed only obscurely and at a great distance in time. There was a characteristic scent to the stone, sharp, hot—They used lasers on it, maybe?— then a glimpse of some kind of crystal, maybe not exactly the lasers Nita understood but similar enough.
She started to think that this approach might have been typical of the people who built this place, simple techniques and very advanced ones combined—an "old science," more like wizardry than anything else, and a "new science," far ahead of anything her own world had. And this world would have been that way because of the way its own universal law ran, a combination of some kind of science actually left over from some other universe—That's weird!—with something newer, homegrown: the two sorts of law tangled together but never perfectly melded, the ancient tension between them defining a particular feeling, unique to this world, a vibration like what a wizard could hear in a crystal's heart, a pulse not slow but actually very fast— Then Nita heard it, a buzz, a faint whine like a bee going by. Got it!
She opened her eyes and turned slowly where she sat, checking what she "heard" and felt against the evidence of her other senses—
—and caught a sudden motion of something down the street. Nita stared in surprise. Something moved there, going across Forty-second Street and heading uptown; crossing the street, low...
... rolling across the street? Nita stood up to see better but got only a glimpse as whatever it was went up Lexington Avenue and vanished behind the building at the corner. If what she'd seen was a machine, it was one the likes of which Nita had never seen before. And while there was some machine-based life that had become sentient, this didn't look like any member of the various mechlife species with which Nita was familiar. From where she'd been sitting, this looked more like a long stretched-out Rollerblade —
Weird, but it can wait. Nita stood still and listened again, shutting everything out but this place's own pulse. Uptown.., The sense was fainter this time, which didn't surprise her; she knew the tests would be getting harder. Nonetheless, it was clear enough to follow, and whatever Nita had seen down the road was heading in the same direction.
She went after it, not with any concern for her safety—after all, the practice universes were limited to wizards—but with considerable curiosity. As she came
Late Tuesday Evening
around the corner of Forty-second and Lex, Nita looked uptown, where the ground rose slightly, and saw something rolling up the sidewalk on the left-hand side of the avenue. It wasn't a single object at all, but a number of them, rolling away from her in a loose cluster. In this strange, rich light, they gleamed a dark bluish metallic color. Most of them looked about the size of tennis balls, at this distance, but there were two or three of them that were larger, maybe soccer-ball size. They were approaching the corner of Forty-fourth and Lex. As Nita watched, they rolled out onto the ornate pavement of Lexington Avenue, here all covered up and down its shining white length with characters in some alien language, then crossed the avenue and headed east down the side street.