Nightlord: Orb (61 page)

“You do know Atlantic City is on the
East
Coast?” she asked.

“Yes.  But I don’t have enough power stored up to get us to Karvalen.”

“We’re going through a magic portal to the East Coast,” she confirmed, half-questioning, half-skeptical.

“Sure.  Unless you have somewhere else you want to be.”

“You can
do
that?”

“Wizard,” I reminded her.

“I know, I know.  It’s a long way from conjuring lights or starting fires.  Never mind.  Here’s a pull-off.”  I felt us start to slow and I picked up Firebrand.  When we came to a halt, I stepped out the side door and looked up.  The drone circled us at about the same altitude.

I crouched, held out a hand, and ran tendrils down that arm.  I whipped the arm and the tendrils back and forth, building up to what I was about to do, watching them writhe together and form a long, thick limb of living night.

With a sharp jerk, I straightened, almost jumped, and lashed my arm/tentacle upward, whipping it like a psychic thunderbolt.  The line of writhing darkness snapped like a whip of death, cracking invisibly through the air.

I missed.

While the drone circled and I grumbled, I tried again.  It’s not like they could see what I was doing, aside from waving one hand around and jumping.  For all they knew, I was being attacked by a rabid wasp.  Assuming, of course, the drone’s camera could see me in the first place; I don’t show up well—if at all—on electronic surveillance at night.

It took me four more tries and a little luck.  It was good practice.  I did get it, though, snapping my tentacle like a whip into the sky.  It struck the drone on the port-side wing, breaking it.  I barely had time to register the impact and start to feel accomplished before it exploded.

The fireball lit up the canyon for several seconds.  At that altitude, nothing was hurt, not even the windows.  It certainly made an impression on everyone watching, including myself.  I stepped inside the RV again and Mary got us moving without waiting to be told—almost without waiting for me.

We made it to the tunnel with no problems and no one following us.  I wondered what our tails thought of the explosion.  It was possible they were calling home to report and get instructions.  I didn’t know how long we might be undisturbed, so we stopped just inside the tunnel mouth.

I put a spell on the mouth of the tunnel—a fairly simple spell; a spectrum-shifter.  It would move all the visible light into the infrared, making headlights useless.  The mouth of the tunnel would look like a wall of darkness and would remain pitch-dark even if they drove into it.  Since this wasn’t an autodrive road, whoever was doing the driving would almost certainly hit the brakes.  Best of all, it was a cheap spell to cast.

The other end of the tunnel was a lovely arch.  It almost made me homesick for my gate room in Rethven.  I used some tacky putty to place symbols around the arch.  Bronze helped by standing exactly where I wanted her and letting me stand on her.  I traced some lines along the concrete and stones, humming in tune with the resonating power I used.  It seemed to help.

While I worked, Mary kept watch back the way we came.  No one emerged from the area of darkness.  I thought for sure we would have people crawling up our collective rear in no time.  Maybe the explosion made them cautious about accidentally drawing more attention.  Maybe they were concerned about anti-aircraft fire.  Or they were being cautious about finding out if I had another fireball spell in prepared.  Whatever the reason, we were left alone for longer than I thought we would be.  That was fine by me; it took longer to rig the spell than I anticipated.

When I did finish, Bronze climbed up into her trailer and I got into the passenger seat.  I still held several strands of the spell structure, preparatory to connecting them and activating the spell sequence.  Mary, standing by her door, fired three shots down the tunnel; I heard people scream, but no squealing brakes.  She jumped into the RV and buckled up.

“Warning shots,” she informed me.  “They walked through the darkness.”

“Why the screams?”

“I shot low and ricocheted bullet fragments into their legs.  They seem adequately warned.”

“No doubt.  Get ready to stomp the brakes once we’re through,” I warned.  “Hit it.”

Mary stomped the accelerator and I activated the sequence.  The mouth of the tunnel swam, rippled, and spiraled away as though flushed.  The spiral seemed to wind tighter and tighter until a pinpoint of light appeared in the center.  It expanded, like a camera zooming in.  It rushed toward us, snapped into place, and the tunnel mouth was simply an entrance to a parking garage.

We went through at forty miles an hour and Mary didn’t take her foot off the floor or her eyes off the side mirror until the trailer was through.  Then she tromped on the brakes and started a gentle swing toward the outside of the upcoming turn, maximizing the distance for braking.  We slowed enough that we made the turn at the end without hitting anything and without blowing a tire.  We slowed further, down to garage speeds, and started looking for the exit.

Behind us, the moment the rear bumper of the trailer passed through the gate, the gate collapsed; I had a spell trigger on it for that.  It dissolved like tissue in acid rain, ripping and rippling as it fell apart.  I caught glimpses of the flames and sparks on the far side as my lines and symbols caught fire.  Then all was as it should be—a ramp leading from the parking garage to the street, nothing else.

We still had to pay to get out, though.  I didn’t mind.  Compared to the power we just wasted, a few dollars for using the parking garage seemed cheap.

Mary pulled us onto the road, got us going on the Atlantic City Expressway, and winked at me in the rear-view mirror.

“We were outside Los Angeles, right?  Now we’re in the heart of Atlantic City.  Boom.  Just like that?”

“Yes.”

“Can you do it again?”

“Not right now.  Like I said, moving from point to point is cheaper than universe to universe, but the bigger the opening, the more power it takes.  The tunnel was a
really
big opening—the largest gate I’ve ever opened, anywhere—even larger than the Great Arch in Zirafel.  Someday,” I added, “when we go visit Karvalen, we’ll do something much like what we just did, but on Bronze and at a dead run.  That’s so the gate will be relatively small and will only need to be open for a moment.”

“We’re not taking the RV?”

“Doubt it.  No powered roads.”

“It’ll run on internal power for at least a thousand miles.  These camping vehicles always have a larger battery, and we’ve got a spare, remember?  Plus, the roof is coated in solar panel material.”

“Those will take days to fully recharge us,” I pointed out.  “Plus, opening a gate that big will be ridiculously draining.  If we have to keep be-bopping across the continent, I’m not sure how we’ll ever get enough power together to get
us
through to Karvalen, much less something the size of an RV.”

“So, when hopping between universes, we have to travel light.”

“Exactly.”

“And when we pop from one edge of the continent to the other, we can bring everything.  Okay.  Where to now, Boss?”

Hey!
Firebrand snapped.

“Yes?” Mary asked, surprised.

That’s what
I
call him!  Find your own pet name,
Firebrand demanded.  Mary shrugged.

“Oh.  Sorry.”  To me, she asked, “So, where to now, Honey Bunches of Yummy?”

Much better.

I reserved my opinion.

“We still don’t have a destination.  Right now, we’re trying to perfect the art of keeping a low profile while living like modern-day nomads.”

“How about Karvalen?  You said we could visit.  You did say!”

“It’s dangerous there, too.”

“Is there anywhere it
isn’t?
” she countered.

“Good question.  I’ll start searching through unknown universes.  Maybe I can find someplace.”

“That’s fair, I sup—
what?
” she gasped.

“I thought it was obvious.  All the work I’ve been doing on the symbols and the tube and whatnot?”

“To you, maybe!”

“Oh.  I’m sorry; I should have been more explicit.  I keep forgetting what I’ve told you and what I haven’t.”

“Maybe you could try telling me everything?” she suggested.

“That’ll take a while.”

“In my office.”

“Oh.  All right.  I’ll try, but I keep forgetting things in the press of other matters.”

“As long as you try,” she allowed, mollified.  “Now, you’re trying to do what with whom to where?”

“Universes.  There are, potentially, an infinite number of them.  Parallel realities which may or may not share the same or similar physical laws as the space we occupy.”

“Is this like alternate timelines?  I’ve seen that sort of thing on video.”

“Sort of.  An alternate timeline is, for this discussion, the same universe.  If we went to one, we would be encountering the same universe along a different line of the time plane.”

“Okay, now you’ve lost me.  Want to try again?”

“Um.  You go back in time and change something.  The universe proceeds as usual, but with the difference making more changes and accumulating.  Potentially, the change is minor enough it damps out rather than escalating, but for this discussion, assume it’s a material change to the history of the world.  When you reach your original chronological point, lots of things are different, but the
universe
hasn’t changed, only the events within it.”

“I meant about the time plane.  Time is a plane?”

“Well, no… but it helps to… when you visualize… let me think a second.”  I ordered my thoughts.  “Okay, you think of time as a line.  One second follows another in sequence.  Now, when you get to alter the past, you pick a particular second.  At that second, you change something and your time
line
branches off from the first one.  Do this several times and you have lots of branches off your original line, all advancing in the same direction.  All drawn on the same sheet of paper, or on the same geometrical plane.”

“Okay, that makes more sense.  But why a plane?  Why not a three-dimensional thing?”

“Planes are easier to visualize.  It could be a three-dimensional space or a higher-order geometry, yes.”

“You’re talking about things over my head.  I’ll stick with the temporal plane and let it go.  Okay?”

“Sure.”

“So, the difference between multiple universes and alternate timelines?”

“Okay, we’ve got the idea on alternate timelines?”

“I think so, but I hope it won’t be on the test.”

“Given the severe differences between Karvalen and here, I don’t see how they could be different branches of the same timeline in any meaningful way.  There’s no point in history where we could go back—in either world—and undo some sort of change that caused them to diverge.  They don’t spring from the same line.”

“So, different temporal planes?  Like pages in a book, forming a three-dimensional temporal space?”

“Huh.  That… makes sense.”

“And so the student teaches the master,” she replied.  “Go on about multiple universe theory.”

“The other pages—the other universes—seem to have different physical laws, too.  Here the speed of light is generally accepted at three hundred million meters per second.  Technically, it’s 299,792,458 meters per second.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, I know it by heart.  Yes, I’m a nerd.  Want to hear pi to the one hundred and twenty-eighth decimal place?

“No.”

“It’s a six.  But the speed of light is a universal constant; that’s the way the universe is put together.  In another universe—Karvalen, for example—the speed of light may be slightly faster or slower.  This could cause considerable changes in the structure of the universe and how it operates.  In order for life as we know it to exist, a whole slew of physical laws have to fit together.  Change one and a whole bunch of others have to alter, too, if human life is going to work.

“Those changes in physical laws may also account for the power requirements of an inter-universal gate; it has to change whatever goes through it to correspond with the new universal constants or the interactions could be messy and fatal
. 
But I’m getting off the subject again.”

“You keep doing that,” she agreed.  “Are you sure you were a teacher?”

“Yes.  It’s been a while since I had to tutor anyone. I do better in front of a class.”

“You’re weird.  I’d get stage fright.”

“It helps to remember you can flunk them if they get uppity.”

“I’d imagine.  Go on.”

“So if I tell a gate to open to a reality where the speed of light is
exactly
three hundred million meters per second, it’ll be an entirely different reality, not a point on this universe’s timeline tree.  I could also specify the Fine Structure Constant is slightly less, or the value of pi is ever so slightly more, or any of a hundred other things.  I hesitate to get too far off the standard values; some of them might access spaces too alien for anything familiar to live, no matter what else you change.