Its surface shimmered. Without any warning at all, Nita found herself seeing the world the way Pont, or one of it, did—a landscape so alien that she could make almost nothing of it. Everything had a metallic sheen to it, and everything was fluid and in constant motion, running or rolling down one surface or another. And every surface was curved. It was like a world made of mercury, not just silvery but in a hundred different colors. Every single thing Nita could see was shaped like some version of a sphere, tiny or massive, everything
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either already perfectly spherical or working hard to get that way. There were no straight lines anywhere. Where it could be seen, even the horizon was curved.
Nita blinked. More than mere vision was involved in what she was perceiving. This space was acutely curved, so that its sky seemed to bend down and cover you like an umbrella. It was a perspective both claustrophobic and oddly big, giving you the illusion that you could wrap that universe around you like an overcoat, an absolutely huge one.
"Wow," Nita said. At first she was eager to break out of this way of seeing things. But then she caught herself, and looked a little harder. This is weird, but—7 wonder... She held still, watched, and listened. Listening didn't do much good in this worldview; all the motion happened in silence. But the motion had a trend in one general direction. Everything Nita could see, everything that slid or rolled or pulsated around her, had a slight drift toward the direction in "front" of her—northward and eastward, though a little more eastward than the way she'd originally been heading.
Aba, Nita thought. One point of view is good, but a second one from another mind helps you fine-tune your first one. It's like triangulating. "Okay, okay," Nita said, and the image of the world-as-mercury oozed and flowed away, leaving her looking around her again, with relief, at edges and straight lines. She listened again for that buzz, heard it, and put it together with the direction in which things had been slipping and oozing.
"Are you all right?" Pont asked, sounding anxious.
257
Nita smiled; the "y°u" was plural. "I'm okay. Come on; you helped. We're closer than I thought—"
She headed down Forty-fifth at a trot and turned the corner onto Second Avenue, and paused there. All of Pont ran into her ankles, she'd stopped so suddenly. "What?"
Nita looked up and down Second, perplexed, for she hadn't expected it to be a canal. Where the curb would normally have been was now a sheer drop, and water reflecting that dark blue sky ran down between the white stone walls of the two sides of the avenue.
"We could roll across," said one of Pont.
"No, we couldn't. We left the wizardry home," said another. "I told you we should have brought it," said the third.
"You said we should bring the multistate compressor," said the fourth, "and so we did. We were the one that wanted to bring the solidifier, but—"
Nita began to wonder what these creatures' family life was like. Just by themselves, if that was the right term, they seemed to have trouble getting along. "Look, guys," she said, "there's a bridge across at Fortysecond."
"We'll have to go all the way down there and retrace our tracks."
"Better than going all the way up to Fifty-seventh," Nita said, peering up the avenue-cum-canal, "because that's the next one. Or we could swim."
Pont looked at her with all of itself. " 'Swim'?"
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She looked at the spheres. They lacked anything to swim with. "Okay, maybe not. Come on."
Nita jogged downtown as far as Forty-second, with Pont rolling after her, fast. The bridge arched up in a smooth ramp across the water, coming down on the opposite sidewalk, and they all headed north again. Nita could hear the little buzzing whine at the back of her mind getting stronger and stronger and followed it more quickly, while checking her progress against her memory of Font's view of the world. Pont rolled along behind, arguing genially about their last timing in "the exercise" and how it might have been improved.
Just north of Fifty-fourth, Street Nita realized that she had come a little too far north. "East from here," she said to Pont, as they came up behind her.
The spheres looked at themselves, and made a little musical sound that translated itself, via the Speech, into "Uh-oh."
"What's the matter?" Nita said. She backtracked to the corner of Fifty-fourth, and headed east toward First Avenue.
"Nothing."
"That's easy for you to say," said another of Pont. "Yes, well, you didn't like it much last time," said a third.
"And we don't like it much now, either," said the fifth one, which surprised Nita; she'd been starting to think of it as the quiet one. "We thought they would have moved it significantly. It almost always gets moved for a redo. But it looks like somebody has a little surprise for us."
Nita gave up trying to figure out what they were talking about, and headed toward First Avenue. She stopped at the corner, Pont rolling up alongside her. Nita's sense of the location of the kernel placed it right out in front of her, near where the block of Fifty-fourth between First and York should have been. But here there were no more streets at all. Directly in front of them was a huge stepped pyramid of golden stone, incomplete at its top, and behind it the East River flowed by. Sticking out into the river from one side of the pyramid was a long jetty or pier of that white stone.
"There they are," Pont said. "They didn't waste their time."
Nita squinted down at the jetty, bright in the sun, and saw down near the end of it what appeared to be a woolly mammoth, a second object of roughly cylindrical shape that wavered oddly around the edges, and a third small shape, elongated and six-legged, which was heading toward the end of the jetty while the other two faced off against each other.
"It's down there," Nita said. "Down in the water."
"We told you we should have left the compressor home," said Pont to one of themselves. "And what we said was—"
"Come on, guys," Nita said. "Give it a rest. I can do water." She headed past the pyramid, toward the jetty.
The smallest of the creatures was slipping into the water. Nita jogged down the jetty, and saw that the bigger of the two creatures looked like a woolly mammoth only in terms of the bulk of its body. Seen up
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close, it looked much more like a giant three-legged football with green-and-brown shag carpeting stapled to it. Its companion, which faced it silently, was a bundle of bright purple tentacles about six feet high, waving gently, and changing colors as they did.
"Dai stiho, guys," Nita said as she went by the two wizards. They gazed at her as she passed—the tentacly wizard with one of several stalked eyes attached to the top of it, and the furry football apparently with its fur, which "followed" Nita as she went by.
She went to the end of the jetty, where the other wizard had vanished, and looked down at the water. Down there she could clearly feel the kernel's tight small buzz of power. It wasn't even all that far down. No point in floating, Nita thought. She flicked the charm bracelet around on her wrist, came up with the charm that was shaped like a little glass bubble, took hold of it, and jumped in.
As Nita sank, the air-and-mass spell came to life around her, holding the water away but at the same time counteracting the buoyancy of the air she'd brought with her to breathe. Because it was so compact, the spell's validity was limited, but she was sure she'd have time to do what she needed to do. It's almost right underneath me. All I have to do is—
—and then she saw, right under her, the sleek form swimming up toward her. Her first thought was It's an otter—and indeed it looked like one. But otters have fewer legs. This creature, golden-pelted, was stroking strongly along toward Nita with its front and back paws; and in the middle ones it held a tangle of light