It went on that way for a while, and Nita despaired of remembering more than a few of the wizards' names, let alone those of planets or universes. But shortly she was surrounded by people talking in the Speech and arguing amiably about the best way to find a world kernel in a hurry, and someone brought her what she at first thought was a glass of water, except that there was no glass involved—just the water, holding a tumbler shape by itself. Pralaya raised his eyebrows in amusement as he caught her glance, waggling them in the general direction of the kernel where it sat on the coffee table. Apparently the kernel hi the playroom often was used for just that: play.
While Nita was working out where the rim of her
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invisible glass was, she heard a lot of information and gossip from the alien wizards around her, and she quickly realized that in even a fairly short time she could find out all kinds of useful things, any one of which could possibly help her save her mother. Nita actually had worked up her courage enough to ask a few questions of the most senior of the group that had collected around her—a wizard called Evrysss, who looked more like a giant spiny python than anything else—when her attention was suddenly grabbed by someone walking by at the edge of the group. But what really got Nita's attention was that it wasn't an alien. It was a pig. It wasn't one of the spotty breeds, but plain pink-white, with bristles that looked slightly silvery in this light, so that it glinted a little.
"—and so I said to Hvin, 'Now, just look here, if you keep straining your shael out of shape trying to get the kernel to deform its laws like that, you're never going to—'" Evrysss blinked at Nita's sudden astonished look. "Oh, haven't you been introduced? Chao?" The pig stopped, looked at the group, glanced up at Nita. "He'neet', this is the Transcendent Pig."
Nita's eyes opened wide as the pig stepped toward her, and she saw that little shining ripples seemed to spread out in the floor from where it stepped, as if solid things went briefly uncertain where it trod. About six possible responses to what Evrysss had said now went through Nita's head, but fortunately, before she blurted one of them out, she remembered the right one. She looked down at the Pig, and said, "What's the meaning of life?"
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The other wizards chuckled, or hissed or bubbled with laughter, and the Pig gave Nita a wry look out of its little piggy eyes "I'll tell you the meaning of my life," it said, "if you'll tell me the meaning of yours."
"Uh... that might take a while. Even assuming I knew."
"It would for me, too," said the Pig, "so let's put it aside for the moment. Come on, sit down, make yourself comfortable."
She did, settling onto a nearby chromy framework that looked more or less like a human chair. Nita had first come across a reference to the Transcendent Pig when she was doing her earliest reading in the manual, just before she went on Ordeal. The Pig was classified as one of the "insoluble enigmas," a sort of creature that fell somewhere between wizards and the Powers That Be. Indeed the term creature was possibly inaccurate, for (so the manual said) no one responsible for creation could exactly remember having created it in the first place. At least the Pig's motives appeared to be benign, and it had been proved again and again to be immensely and inexplicably knowledgeable. Nita thought this was why the manual insisted that every wizard immediately ask the meaning-of-life question when meeting the Pig. There was always a chance the Pig might slip and actually answer it.
Well, not this time, she thought. "Do you come here often?" Nita said, and then cracked up at herself; hearing it, it seemed like about the most witless thing she could have found to say.
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"Don't feel too silly," the Pig said dryly. "Everybody tends to concentrate so hard on the mandated question that their minds go blank on anything else. But I wander in and out of here every now and then. I like being at the cutting edge, and out here where no one has to be too afraid of making a mistake, some interesting work's being done. Not all of it as personal as yours, maybe, but it's all valuable."
"You mean you know?" Nita suddenly felt slightly embarrassed.
"Knowing is most of my job," the Transcendent Pig said. "But then there's a long tradition of oracular pigs. I should know: I started it." It paused. "That is, assuming you're into sequential time."
"It works all right for me," Nita said, rather cautiously.
"Well, preference is everything, as far as time's concerned; you can handle it however you like." Nita had to smile at that. "You can, maybe. But you're built to be everywhen at once."
It gave her a sly look. "I suppose you might be right," the Pig said. "If everyone started to believe they could handle it the way I do, everywhen might get crowded."
Nita laughed. There was something about the Pig that put her at her ease—one thing being that, to her astonishment, it had a New York accent. She spent a while chatting with it about Earth and then about various other planets where her errantry had taken her, and soon realized there was absolutely nowhere she'd been that the Pig didn't know—it had been there, seen
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that, and left the T-shirt behind. "Or, rather, I'm there now," it said. "Or have been there now."
Nita smiled, reminded of trying to explain the tenses of conditional time to her mother. "My own language isn't much good for this kind of thing. Guess we should keep it in the Speech."
"No problem. Who did you come in with?"
"A bunch of people," Nita said. "Mostly Pralaya and, uh, Pont."
The Pig smiled at Nita's slightly embarrassed look as she used the "slang" version of Font's name. "Oh," the Pig said, "you're another one who can't manage the music of the spheres? Don't worry about it, cousin. No one expects anybody else to handle home languages perfectly. The Speech is all anyone here really needs."
Nita nodded. "You hear that word so much around here," she said then, "and with wizards generally: hrasbt..." It was the word in the Speech that translated as "cousin."
"Oh, the term's accurate enough," the Pig said. "We're all children of brothers and sisters, of kindred creatures who're children of that odd couple Life and Time. All related, mostly by just trying to live our lives and get by in the face of tremendous odds. But in a lot of cases, trying to do more than just get by." The Transcendent Pig looked around. "This is one of the places where you come to push past the usual definitions of what's possible." It gave her a thoughtful look. "And if you're lucky, you both pull off what you're seeking and get to enjoy it afterward."
"That's what I'm here for," Nita said.
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"Trying to save a life is always worthwhile," said the Pig. "But the bigger work can be a lot easier sometimes. Nonetheless, I'd say you're in the right place for advice." It looked over at the wildly assorted group of beings standing around a tall table, all in the light, waving their manipulatory appendages at one another and talking at high speed.
"Got any to spare?" Nita said.
The Transcendent Pig waggled its eyebrows at her. "Not for free. You know the price."
"Uh, yeah. I'll pass." Nita still wasn't completely clear about the price she would pay for this particular work of wizardry. Taking on another obligation seemed unwise, especially when it was known to be— in wizardly terms—an extremely expensive one.
"So will we all," the Pig said, and got up, quirking its tail at her. "Keep your ears open, all the same. You never know what one of your cousins'll mention that could turn out to be really useful later on."
The Transcendent Pig wandered off. In her turn Nita got up off the more-or-less chair she'd been sitting on and went over to listen again to some of the other wizards who were talking in a group. What she had come to think of as "the kernel," they were calling by as many other names as there were species in the group: the World-Soul, the Cosmic Egg, the Shard, and numerous others. Some of the wizards were knowledgeable about the structure of the kernel itself, in ways Nita was certain she would never have time to master. Pont, in particular, were in the midst of a long talk with one of the other wizards—a storklike alien about six feet tall who seemed to have had some kind of accident in a paint store, one where they sold iridescent paint that didn't keep the same color for more than a minute. "If you're having so much trouble dealing with the place's kernel," Pont were saying, "you should get help. Go in as a team! It's always an option for any of us, once we're done with the orientation runs."