Nightlord: Orb (30 page)

Anytime.  Want to get back to brooding, now?

“I do need the practice.”

Tuesday, November 3
rd

I manned—well, monstered—the stand shortly after sunrise.  Fred was already there, bundled up against the change in weather and sipping hot coffee from a thermos.  He waved as I approached and moved from my big chair to one of the folding ones.  The air was cold and the ground was wet; his chair sank a little in the yard.  That was one reason I built the big one.  It had a large, flat footprint and was unlikely to sink significantly even under my weight.

“Morning, Fred.”

“Morning, Vlad.  Coffee?”

“No, but thanks; I get up early for a hearty breakfast.”

“I wish I had.  How was your night?”

“Busy.  I’m no accountant.”  I decided not to mention the power outage; it was much later.  Most people probably slept through it.  I settled into my chair. “Nice to see you here.”

“Yes.  About that…” he trailed off.  I put my feet up and relaxed.  He’d get to it when he got to it.  It took him the space of a long, awkward silence to sort out what he wanted to say.

“You’re probably wondering,” he began, “why I’m here this morning.”

“Nope.”

“No?” he asked, surprised.

“I figure Myrna put you up to it.”

“I suppose, looked at in a certain light… yes.  In a way.  You’re not wrong, but I’m not sure you’re right, either.”  He sighed, the very picture of a man with troubles.  “Vlad, can I ask a favor?”

“Sure, Fred.  Larry still has my ladder.”

“What?  No, not that.  It’s about Myrna.”

“Oh.  The shovel is in the barn.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said, somewhat sharply.  I guess he had cause.  “I’m talking about the way you spoke to her yesterday.”

“What about it?”

“She’s my wife, Vlad.  Now, I admit I only heard her side of it.  She says you were insufferably rude.”  He held up a hand as I took a breath.  “I know—she’s easily offended.  She can also come across as bossy and rude, herself.  Do you think I don’t know it?  I’ve been married to her for fourteen years, Vlad.”

“Huh.  I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“What I’m trying to get at is I know she can be a pain, but she means well.  Usually, she does good things around the neighborhood… in her busybody way, of course.”  He sighed.  “I do my best to keep everyone’s feathers down when she rubs them the wrong way.”

“Maybe you’re not doing her a favor,” I suggested.

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe it would be better if she did get snapped at a few times.  She might adjust.”

“Perhaps.  But… look, Vlad, can I ask you to keep a secret?”

“Okay.”

“I need your promise never to speak of it,” he insisted.  Now I was interested.

“Very well.  I promise.”

“There’s a reason Myrna is so… so…”

“Intrusive?  Snoopy?  Overbearing?”

“Not quite the words I wanted, but not unjustified,” Fred admitted.  “Thing is, she needs something like that to do.  A cause, a project, whatever you want to call it.”

“Oh?”

“She can’t have children, Vlad.”

“Oh.”

“She… I guess she kind of makes up for it by trying to be a surrogate mother authority-figure to everyone around her.  It’s not that she’s trying to make your life miserable—far from it!  She wants everything to be perfect in her neighborhood.  And she wants to make it so herself, to be the person to do that.”  He paused to sip at his coffee.  “I’m probably not explaining this too well.”

“I think you’re doing a fine job.  And I think I get it.”

Well, damn.  I’m discovering all sorts of hidden depths to people.  First, Mark isn’t merely an unwashed, beer-guzzling, child-abusing single father; he’s a loyal friend with some metal in his backbone who, when the chips are down, will change his whole life around for the sake of his son.  Now Myrna, the neighborhood busybody and gossip, is trying to find some sort of substitute for motherhood by being involved in everyone’s life.  The fact both of them offend me is still relevant, but being offended doesn’t, by itself, make me right.

How do you despise someone when you understand and empathize with their reasons?  What happened to the old days when I could despise people for being unpleasant and let it go at that?  Is it a difference in the cultures, the worlds, or is it me?

“That’s why I’m here this morning,” Fred continued.  “She was really hurt by your comments—whatever they were.  No, don’t tell me. I’m sure she deserved every word.  Still, it hurt her feelings, and now she’s determined to be involved in the kids’ project.”  He finished the cup and screwed it back into place on his thermos.  “If you insist, I’ll go home, but it would make her feel better if you’d let me stay.”

Great.  I’m surrounded by decent people.  What am
I
doing in this neighborhood?

“Can’t kick you to the curb, Fred,” I told him.  “It’s not my lemonade stand.  It belongs to a bunch of neighborhood kids.”

“I think I understand,” Fred replied.  “I’ll just sit here for a while, then.  If you need a break, I’ll keep an eye on it for you.”

“Thanks for the help.  I’d be glad to have someone I can trust.  Remember, we tell people to come back so the kids can collect it, if possible.  We’ll take it, whatever it is, if they insist they can’t come back, but anyone who can come by after school should do so.”

“We’ll lose contributions that way,” he pointed out.

“
We
might, but anyone who does come back will make the proprietors happy.  It’s not about maximizing collections.  Those three need to do something for their friend.  That’s what this is about.  So we lose a few donations—big deal.  We’re not a business, trying to meet expenses.  We’re helping kids who feel helpless learn they aren’t.”

“Are you sure you’re not religious?” he asked, chuckling.  “You might make a fine preacher.”

“I don’t have to be religious to recognize a good deed when I see one.  They’re generally the things that startle me; I don’t see them all that often.  And these kids are quite startling.”

“Fair enough.”

We sat there together and waved back at the Three as they rode off to school.  After that, I left the stand in Fred’s care and went home to my spacewarp bench model.

I think I’m on the wrong track.

My original idea was that pre-stretching the fabric of space it would make it easier to open a magical gateway in that zone.  To use a water metaphor, it would be like stirring the water by hand to get it moving before starting the whirlpool generator.  That’s what it looks like through a gate, anyway.  It’s not unreasonable to think along those lines.

It doesn’t seem to work that way.  I’m using a couple of cardboard toilet-paper rolls as gates.  They’re easy to write on and small enough to be relatively cheap on the magical front.

Yes, I use toilet paper.  There are also children around who occasionally need to use the bathroom immediately, rather than go all the way home.  As for my own biological waste, the less said the better.  Trust me on this one.

The target gate faces a lamp so it’s easy to tell when they form a connection.  Every time I’ve tried to open my tiny point-to-point gates with a warp magnet on, it’s taken
more
power than I expected, not less.  I think there’s something fundamentally flawed with my hypothesis.  Maybe I need stabilized space to open a gate, rather than weakened space?  If so, the experiments aren’t a total loss.  Maybe iridium warp magnets could be used to defend an area from that sort of magical intrusion.

Wait a minute.  What if I made a miniature gate out of iridium?  Would it be a better material to make a gate out of?

I think I need to get some more iridium.  No, I need to order some iridium already made into rings; iridium is one of the hardest elemental metals.  I’ll get someone else to do the heavy lifting on forming it.

The ruthenium is another story.  I’m moderately optimistic about using it as a transformer coil.  I only have one ingot, but if I treat it like an electrical transformer, it emits a magical field, not a magnetic one.  This produces a detectable level of power.

This could be the key to producing magical energy from other energy sources.  Technomagical devices?  Enchanted technology?  Maybe.  All I know is the potential is there.  I’ll start fiddling with the ingot and see if I can enhance the transformative properties by putting spells on the metal.  If so, I could be on to something big.  I could go to a non-magical world and have a way to make the magical energy I need to get
out
of it!

Which brings me to my cosmological questions.  I already have the idea that universes can be ranked, or stacked, in a sort of trickle-down diagram based on their magical potential.  High-magic universes are higher up; low-magic universes lower down.  Using magical energy in one universe causes a portion of that power to flow downward into a lower-magic universe, which is how magic can accomplish work.

How does the warping of space affect that?  Another question:  are all universes of similar magical potential—all of them on the same level in that hypothetical ranking—similar in other ways?  If a universe has an arbitrary magic rating of six, is it the only one with that exact rating?  Or could there be a whole layer of the diagram with a dozen, or hundreds, or an infinite number of exactly magic-rating-six universes?

I really need to build a gate.  A highly efficient gate, one I can use for experiments without exhausting my magical budget for a month.  As it is, the warp magnets will not help with that.

I started dissecting the gate spell itself, then.  It’s a highly-complex spell with… forgive me, but I’m going to have to use a computer metaphor.  If a spell is a program, then a gate spell has tons of subroutines.  I would expect it to, naturally.  It has to handle all sorts of different things to work correctly.  It has to be able to lock on to a destination.  It has to adjust to the different shapes of two gates—you don’t want to find your shape warped by going through a round gate and coming out a rectangular one, for example.  You’d look like a funhouse mirror victim.  Gates also have to adjust for relative velocities; a gate from one universe to another, for example, has to let you come out normally at the other end, not traveling at some ridiculous speed in a random direction.  All sorts of stuff.

There are innumerable subroutines like that.  Most of which, to be honest, I don’t know what they do.

I think it’s time to stop cutting-and-pasting when I cast the spell and start learning how to build one—learning how it works, and
why
it works, rather than how to operate it.

This is going to take a while.

I made it back to the charity stand before school let out.  There was another pile of loot to haul away, so I got started on that, putting anything that wouldn’t mind the cold out in the barn.  I also emptied the cash bucket.  Susan helped me move stuff.  She came by the house earlier, when she saw Fred holding down the stand, but I didn’t answer the door.  I made a note to put another doorbell downstairs; if I’m concentrating, I don’t hear it down there.  Maybe I should get a link to my skinphone.  I’ll have a word with Diogenes.

That feeling of being watched came back and haunted me for a while.  There were plenty of people around, but no one paid me any special attention.  Still, my paranoid feeling persisted.  I didn’t see a scrying spell, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one, only that I didn’t find one.  Someone with a technological spying setup?  A drone?  No, I didn’t see one, and they don’t make invisible drones.

Well, phooey.  Maybe they do.  I’ll have to look it up.

Could there be a spell on me?  Or could Sparky be watching me, somehow?  I doubted there was a spell on me.  Once alerted and actively searching, I would notice—or Firebrand or Bronze would.  But I don’t know the mechanism by which energy-state beings do anything.

I went down into the basement and stood in the Ascension Sphere.  The feeling of being watched stopped the moment I stepped over the line.

Well.  What does this tell me?  First off, I’m not imagining it.  It’s magical, whatever it is, and it doesn’t produce a visual distortion near me.

This does not comfort me.

I stepped out of the Sphere and waited.  The feeling did not return.

Okay, so, it’s broken when I step into an Ascension Sphere.  Either the Sphere eats the spell or it breaks the target lock.  How do I find out which?  Considering what I have to work with, I don’t.

I hate that.

Other than that, the afternoon and evening were similar to yesterday.  There was less in the way of baked goods, more along the lines of hot drinks.  We still had a wave of people wanting to give stuff away.

Maybe I’ve spent too long being a suspicious and unpleasant person.  Or too much time with my own inner demons.  I’m not used to this… this… unbridled generosity.  Oh, sure, the things we’re getting are mostly small or old—a couple cans of soup, or someone’s spare shoes, a quilt from the back of the closet, or the couch that’s been in the garage for the last two years.  But people are making an effort to scrounge up this stuff and actually
bring
it.  They’re not saying “Oh, wow, sucks to be them.”  They’re
doing
something.