Nita began to jog after them, crossing Lexington and looking down as she did at the huge colored characters inlaid in slabs of stone into the surface of the street. The workmanship was beautiful; you couldn't see so much as a crack between the inlay and the road itself, all done in a pearly white stone like alabaster. / wonder what this looks like from a height, she thought. And what the letters say... She grinned as she headed toward the corner where the blue spheres had turned. Be funny if it wasn't some incredibly significant message, but just the name of the street. She came to the corner of Forty-fourth, headed around it at a run—and instantly found herself tripping over several perfectly spherical shiny blue objects, which had been in the act of rolling back up the sidewalk toward her.
Nita spent the next three seconds trying not to fall,
251
trying not to bang into the beautifully and bizarrely carved wall of the building to her left, and trying not to step on the spheres, several of which were still rolling toward her. She finally got her balance back and stood there bracing herself against the wall and breathing hard for a few seconds, while the five spherical things, like blue-metal ball bearings of various sizes, rolled around her and then paused, one after another.
"Dai stibeh," they said to her, five times over. Nita's jaw dropped.
"Uh, dai" she said.
The giant blue ball bearings looked at her with mild interest. At least Nita felt that she was being looked at, but with exactly what, there was no telling. The spheres had no features of any kind; the only thing she could see in them was the reflection of the skyscrapers behind her, the sky, and her own face, wearing an embarrassed expression.
"Where's the rest of you?" said one or another of the ball bearings.
Confused, Nita looked around her. "'The rest'? There's just one of me. I mean, I have a—I mean, there's another wizard I work with, but he's—*
"'He'? There's just one of them?" The ball bearings sounded disappointed. "Uh, yeah," she said. "We come in ones, where I come from."
The ball bearings seemed to be regarding her with faint disappointment. "But there are more of you," one said.
Nita hadn't previously heard the Speech spoken with nothing but plural endings, even on the adjectives, and she was getting more confused every moment. "Well, in general, yes."
"Look, it's another singleton, that's all," one of them said to the others. "Looks like we're unusual in this neighborhood; the rest of us need to get used to it. It doesn't matter, anyway. We're all wizards together... that's the important thing."
"Uh, yes," Nita said. "Sorry, but what exactly are you?" "People," said the blue ball bearings, in chorus.
Nita smiled. "Something else we have in common. Do you have something that other people call you?"
The spheres bumped into one another in sequence, and with their striking produced a little chiming chord, like a doorbell saying hello.
Nita took a breath and tried to sing it back at them. After a pause the spheres bumped together again, creating a soft jangling noise, which Nita realized was a regretful comment on her accent. "Sorry," she said. "Sometimes I'm not much good at staying in one key."
The spheres jangled again, but there was a humorous sound to it. "So call us Pont," one of them said.
Nita grinned a little; in the Speech it was one of the adjectival forms of the word for the number five. "Sure. It's nice to meet you. I'm Nita."
The spheres bumped themselves cordially into her ankles. "You guys here to practice looking for the kernel?" she said.
"Yes," one of them said. "Well, no," said another. 253
"What we mean is, we've done this one already," said a third. "But the others have a head start, and they're running against time, so if you want to get in on it, you'd better hurry."
Pont started to roll down the street, and Nita followed them. "Others? How many more people are here?"
"Oh, just a few on this run," Pont said. "Some of them are repeating a secondary exercise—their time wasn't good enough the last cycle out."
"I haven't done this one before," Nita said. "Is it hard?"
The spheres looked at her. Two of them, to Nita's surprise, melded into one, running together exactly the way two drops of water become one, without even ceasing to roll. "How many of these have vou done before?"
"Just one."
"Huh," Pont said. Nita couldn't repress a snort of laughter; the spheres' tone of voice was almost identical to one of Dairine's. "That's not bad. Usually you get a couple between this one and the starter scenario. You must have found the first one pretty quickly."
"I don't know," Nita said. "The manual was vague about the projected solution times—"
"Oh, the manuals," they said, and a couple of them bounced up and down in midroll, a shrug. "They're not much good in these spaces...and even outside them, they don't always correctly predict what's going to happen in here. You learn not to pay too much attention to them in testing mode. And you figure things
Late Tuesday Evening
out yourselves... but you're doing that already." They were looking up at Nita's charm bracelet, she could tell.
They paused at the corner of Third and Forty-fourth, and Nita looked up and down the street, listening. That high whining buzz was still perfectly audible if she stopped to listen for it, and still coming from the north, but also east a little more. "At least another block over," she said.
"Lead the way."
She trotted across Third and looked down at the patterns in the pavement again. "You know what these mean, Pont?"
"Not a clue," Pont said as they rolled across the avenue after her. "I think we're lacking the necessary cultural referents."
"You're not alone." They headed northward again, past the sleek, polished goldstone frontages of the buildings. It was odd that though these had doorways every now and then, there were no windows at street level, or lower than about thirty feet off the ground. This feature was doubtless expressive of some truth about this universe, but Nita didn't have the slightest idea what that might be.
"This is definitely one of the odder practice universes," Pont said as they made their way across Fortyfifth and on past more blind walls.
Nita raised her eyebrows. "Oh? What makes you say that?"
"Well, the way the space here is curved is unusually acute. The lack of entasis makes it—"
2J5
"Oh, come on, the entasis level is fine. It's just that everything looks odd to you," said another of the balls.
"It does not. It's perfectly obvious that you just don't know—" "You're both crazy," yet another of the balls chimed in. "If you just—"
Nita had had plenty of arguments with herself in her head, but now she thought she was hearing one in a form she'd never imagined. "Look, don't fight about it," she said. "It wastes time. Pick just one of you to tell me, or something."
This astonished Pont so much that they stopped rolling and stared at one another. Nita stood still and waited for them to sort themselves out, while making a mental note that when she got back to where the manual worked at its normal speed, she was going to look up this life-form in a hurry.
"Well?" Nita said.
One of the five—the two who had combined themselves had come apart again as they were all crossing Forty-fifth—now said, "You could put it this way—"