Worldweavers: Cybermage (6 page)

“But your lab isn’t a needle,” Thea said, glancing up at the smoke still wafting out of the window. “You could hardly hide all that inside an egg on an island.”

“Ah, you don’t understand, child,” Tesla murmured, and then shook himself. “I must go. It will soon be full day, and I have always found the sun intolerable if I am out in it unprotected for long. Good day to you.”

“Good luck,” Thea said, but she already spoke to his retreating back.

Kaschei’s needle
.

The idea hung in front of her eyes, tantalizing her; she knew it was essential that she understand precisely how the concept was linked to the rest of the things she had seen in the cube-world, but she
couldn’t connect the dots into a picture that made sense to her.

She glanced down at the keypad on her wrist, frowning.

“I wonder what would happen…” she murmured, and tapped something new into the gadget.
Nonspecific place and time; somewhere/when where Kaschei becomes important enough for me to understand significance.

It was risky, but then again, it was no more risky than some of the things she had already done while walking the Barefoot Road of the ancient Anasazi, the Road that led anywhere and everywhere if you knew how to use it. Cheveyo had taught her that it was possible to reach a destination on that Road with just an
absence
in her mind, shaped like the thing she sought. By weaving a world that filled the absence, and then letting the universes realign themselves so that she could step from one world into another, she could find herself in the same place as the thing she was seeking. She had done it before—she had found Signe Lovransdottir that way, back in the early days of the spellspam epidemic when Signe had been lost to the Alphiri. The only difference was that now, with Tesla’s words and images vivid in her
mind, she was chasing an idea, not a person or a place. There was no reason that it shouldn’t work the same way.

Her finger hovered above the keypad for a moment, and then she pressed her lips together and jabbed
ENTER
with rather more force than she intended.

The change was immediate, and disconcerting.

Instead of the brownstone-lined New York streets, she stood beside a small stream. She wore the same loose dark clothes that she had worn back in the city, but this time her feet were bare. She wiggled her toes luxuriously and felt the cool grass brushing her ankles. Slightly upstream from her was a jury-rigged mill wheel, turning with remarkable evenness, and beside it crouched a boy.

The boy from Thea’s dream. The boy that Nikola Tesla had once been.

He might have been about seven or eight years old, but the promise of his height was already there in the two long, lanky legs folded up about his ears. He stared despondently at his wheel and at the water, poking at both every so often with a long stick. There was a sense of tragedy about him, much as there had been in the city street on a different continent and many years in his future, but this felt
like a deeper, more personal grief.

“Hey,” Thea said helplessly. And then thought,
This is silly. I am talking to him in English. He’s seven—he doesn’t even speak it yet.

But apparently language was not a barrier here, because the boy looked up at the sound of her voice.

“Hey,” he said. “Who are you?”

“You’re Nikola Tesla, aren’t you?”

“Niko,” the boy said laconically.

“What are you doing?” Thea asked, coming closer and squatting a few steps away from him to peer at the mill wheel. “Did you make that?”

“Yeah. But it isn’t right. It’s sticking.”

Thea stared at the perfect smoothness of the wheel’s motion in perplexity. “How? I can’t see it sticking.”

The boy gave her a shriveling look. “
I
can tell,” he said. “It isn’t good enough. I’m just not good enough to make it work right. Dane would know.”

“Dah-ney?” Thea said awkwardly, trying to mimic his pronunciation.

“My brother.”

“Does he help you with these projects?”

“He used to. He’s dead.”

The bluntness of that statement took Thea’s breath away. She sat cross-legged in the grass without taking her eyes off Niko.

“I’m sorry,” she said slowly.

Niko’s eyes flicked up to meet hers, very briefly, and then he resumed staring at the wheel. “Two years ago, come next month,” he said.

“How…how did he…”

“The big black got him,” Niko said, without changing the tenor of his voice at all. “The horse. He was twelve. The horse threw him, and then stomped him.” He paused. “I saw.”

“You watched your brother die?” Thea said, appalled.

“Yeah,” Niko said, and tossed the stick he still held into the stream. It was there, in that small motion—all the violence of the pent-up guilt and sorrow that he would not allow to bubble to the surface of his demeanor, his expression, his attitude, his voice. “It should have been me,” he said, and each word fell into the water like a stone, and sank beneath the surface.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Thea said.

Niko glanced at her again, swiftly, and then away. “Maybe not,” he said. “Makes no difference. I should
have…He should never have died. There should have been a way to keep his life somewhere…safe….”

He was blindly feeling his way toward something, something that he could not name, that he did not even realize he was searching for. But in Thea’s mind something suddenly came together, like two magnets clicking.

“Kaschei’s needle,” she murmured.

Niko turned his head. “What?”

“You think you could have hidden your brother’s own equivalent of Kaschei’s needle so that death didn’t find him?” Thea said gently.

“How do you know about that?” Niko asked. His voice had changed at last, a tinge of wonder mixed with fear creeping into his tone. “How do you know about Kaschei?”

“You told me,” Thea said, tears in her eyes. “Far, far away and many years from now.”

A girl’s voice came drifting over to the creek; apparently the cross-language communication applied only between Niko and Thea, because all she could make out in the girl’s call was the name
Niko
. The boy turned to look, lifted his hand in a half wave, uncoiled from his crouch.

“That’s my sister,” he said. “I have to go.”

“So do I,” Thea said. “It was nice to meet you.”

“Are you going to come back?”

“Someday,” Thea said. “Sure.”

“Good. I might have fixed the wheel by then. Maybe. So that you can see when it runs properly.”

“Okay. I’ll look forward to that.”

He turned without another word and loped away across the grass. Thea watched him run up to his sister, and then they both turned around to look at her and Niko lifted his hand in a self-conscious little wave. His sister merely stared warily in Thea’s direction. Then they both turned their backs and trotted off.

Thea sighed, looked down at her wrist, typed
Home
, and then hurriedly erased that before she turned up at her real home and freaked out her parents.
My bedroom, Elemental house, San Francisco
, she typed instead, and pressed
ENTER
.

Niko’s mill and the creek it was on melted away into the familiar bedroom in Professor de los Reyes’s house. Thea threw back her covers and realized that the Tiffany lamp beside her bed was bathing the room in radiance and a small council of war appeared to be going on.

Magpie sat on her bed, kicking her heels against the side. Ben stood by the door with his arms crossed, looking mutinous. Terry was hovering by Thea’s own bed, and Tess perched precariously just on the edge of it. They all turned to stare.

“Kaschei,” Thea gasped.

“Gesundheit,” said Tess. “Where have you
been
?”

“You haven’t run off to tattle on me, have you?”

“Just about to,” Ben muttered.

“Don’t tell Humphrey just yet. He’ll take this thing away from me,” Thea said, lifting her key-padded wrist.

“Not a bad idea,” Ben said. “Tess crashed into our room about ten minutes ago, after Magpie realized that you’d somehow
gone
, and here we all are. Lucky for you that you came back of your own free will just now. We were about to call in the cavalry.”

“What
happened
?” Magpie wailed.

“I figured…we had to talk to the Tesla who was in that cube…”

“Which one?” Magpie said. “We saw at least three of them. I would like to ask him about the pigeons.”

“I didn’t get to the pigeons,” Thea said. “Not directly. But I think I may have an inkling as to what happened.”

“
Did
you talk to him?” Terry asked, leaning forward.

“How?”
Ben demanded. “I thought we all had to go into the cube before it would allow us access to any of it.”

“But she’s an Elemental,” Tess said slowly.

“All the same, Ben has a point,” Magpie said. “How come we all needed to pitch in the first time and now all of a sudden you can sail in by yourself?”

“Because it was sealed, before,” Thea said. “What the five of us did was break the seal. We needed to do that together—there
needed
to be more than one sense, more than one Element, in there, because Tesla was a quad-Element mage and he would have used all of his skill to lock that thing down tight. If it is what I now think it might be. But it’s open now—to us. Perhaps only to us.”

“To you, anyway,” Ben said. “How did you get back in without going through the cube?”

Thea lifted her wrist. “I wrote myself in. I wove it.”

“Back up,” Terry said. “You sound as though you went in looking for something pretty specific.”

“Well, yeah,” Magpie said with a grin. “She was after Tesla. Did you get him?”

“Twice,” Thea said. “But it was the dream that pointed me to—”

“What dream?” Magpie said, suddenly serious.

Thea turned, narrowing her eyes. “Tesla. First young, then a child, then an old man…”

“And there was snow,” Tess said, nodding slowly.

“And there was a pigeon,” Magpie said. “A white one. On the windowsill.”

“Trust you to notice that,” Thea said with a quick grin, and then stared at her friends. “Are you telling me we
all
had the same dream?”

“Uh…” said Ben, and his arms had unfolded, his hands hanging by his side. “Yeah, actually. I remember the old man.”

“Me too. And the snow,” Terry said. “Weird. But what suddenly lit a fire under
you
to start chasing it down? You did that way before we knew that we’d dreamed the same thing.”

They stared at one another, wide-eyed.

“Could it be…the house?” Magpie finally
ventured, sounding spooked. “Could it have made us dream that?”

Terry and Tess exchanged a look. “It’s happened to us before,” Tess said. “But that’s different—it’s the twin thing. Not five completely unrelated people having
exactly
the same dream.”

“Was it the same, really the same, or are we all just bouncing off details that sound familiar?” Ben asked.

Terry shook his head. “Sounds like the same thing to me. Down to that pigeon that Magpie remembers. I saw it too.”

“I think I’m starting to figure it out,” Thea said. “Humphrey keeps calling that thing ‘Tesla’s cube,’ but I don’t think it’s so much Tesla’s work as it is
Tesla
. Himself.”

“What, like Twitterpat? Back in the other Nexus?” Terry said.

Thea shook her head. “That’s just a hologram, a piece of software. I think this is much bigger than that. I think he somehow…preserved himself in that cube. Kaschei’s needle.”

“There you go again,” Tess said. “Who or what is this Chai fellow?”

“It’s a Russian fairy tale…” Thea began, and
then the door of the bedroom opened. Ben jumped two feet into the air; the others whirled, startled, and Thea’s face and neck were suffused in a sudden vivid blush.

“
What
is a Russian fairy tale?” Humphrey May said, pleasantly enough, from the doorway. But he wasn’t smiling, and his usually limpid blue eyes were hard. “Can we all play, or is it a closed Midnight Snack party? Don’t look so trapped, Thea—the house told me you were all awake. I told it to alert me to anything out of the ordinary in these bedrooms.” He tied the sash of his robe more securely around his waist, and came all the way into the room. “Well. Now that we’re awake, and seeing as I’m personally responsible for all of you while you’re out here, perhaps someone could fill me in?”

I
T TOOK THE BETTER
part of an hour to explain everything to Humphrey, and then quite a while longer to mollify him, once he realized just how the keypad had been used without his knowledge or sanction. He postponed the rest of the confrontation until after they had all had a chance to sleep on it, having threatened Thea with dire consequences if she attempted to use the keypad again. He ordered everybody back to their rooms, and the rest of the night passed uneventfully, with no further shared dreams.

But they slept fitfully, and woke earlier than they thought they ought to have. They drifted down to breakfast in self-conscious isolation instead of as a group. Magpie beat Thea to the bathroom by a split second, and then hogged it for what seemed like hours, finally emerging and flicking her blond
streak back with a dramatic sweep as she descended the spiral staircase; Thea, growling, skimped on her own ablutions in her haste to get some breakfast.

The prevailing mood was one of wary anticipation, but the house had its own ways of defusing tensions. By the time Thea finally made it down to breakfast, the others were in the midst of a raucous game of stump-the-house.

“Wild berry jelly,” Magpie was saying as Thea entered the breakfast room. Magpie’s eyes were closed, her expression a mask of rapt remembrance. “Wild berries gathered by hand in the woods behind my grandmother’s house, and the spread she made from them—no extra sugar, just the berry sweetness, dark red, almost purple…”

“Something’s there,” Tess said. “A jar on the table, look. Is that it?”

Magpie opened her eyes and stared at a small cut-glass jar with a silver lid.

“Looks about right, but let’s put it to the test,” she said, reaching for the mysterious jar with her right hand and grabbing a spoonful with her left. She took a spoonful of the dark red jelly, and a slow, satisfied smile spread across her face. She licked her berry-stained lips and dug her spoon in for a
second helping. “Oh, yes! Oh, I haven’t tasted this for
years
.”

“I’ve got one,” said Ben. He started describing a pastry he had once had for breakfast in a Paris café when his family had been visiting France. It had been years ago, but the pastry had obviously left an impression because his description was so vivid that the others were salivating just listening to it. It was Magpie who yelped first, pointing to the pastry plate behind Ben’s elbow, where a piece of custard-filled pastry precisely matching Ben’s description had just popped into existence. Ben scooped it up and bit into it, custard squirting out of the sides.

“Amazing,” he said, through a mouthful of custard and flaky pastry.

“Give us a taste!” Tess said, reaching for the rest of the pastry still in his hand.

He snatched it away. “Get your own!” he said.

So Thea did, and then Tess, and Magpie couldn’t resist, and soon they were all licking custard off their fingers like a bunch of toddlers.

At last Thea wiped her fingers on a napkin and crossed over to the sideboard to pour herself a mug of coffee while the rest of them began to mop up the
shattered remains of the French pastries.

“What are we supposed to be doing today?” Magpie said, pushing her plate away.

“Going home,” Ben replied. “You know. The real world.”

Thea glanced at him and he dropped his eyes. Then Terry pushed his chair away from the table.

“We’d better go find Humphrey then,” he said. “If there are things I ought to be doing back at the other Nexus, I’d better figure out what the FBM wants.”

Tess and Magpie fell into step beside him, still discussing ideas for highly unlikely dishes they could try and get the house to provide for lunch. Ben hesitated, as though on the verge of saying something.

“You coming?” Terry called.

“Just getting coffee,” Thea called back, stirring cream vigorously into her cup.

She was far behind the others, when she finally drifted out of the breakfast room—and then she came to an abrupt stop in the midst of the main hall, her eye suddenly drawn to the library door, which stood invitingly ajar.

Elemental house. Tesla built this house
—made
this house. The professor’s grandfather knew Tesla
personally. Is there anything in that library
about
Tesla?

With a guilty glance after the other four, who had apparently marched straight off to the professor’s study, Thea slipped into the library, scanning the floor-to-ceiling shelves. They were neatly stacked with books that ranged from paperbacks that looked almost brand-new to great square folios of embossed leather.

“Where would I even begin?” she muttered to herself with a sinking feeling in her stomach.

But this was the Elemental house, after all, and she had thought her desire even if she had not expressed it out loud. A closer look at a side table revealed several books neatly stacked there; the cover of the top book bore a face that Thea recognized.

It was a biography of Nikola Tesla, a much-worn paperback that had clearly been read many times. The second was another biography, much newer, a glossy hardcover with a dozen pages of grainy black-and-white photographs inserted in the middle. The third and largest was a coffee-table book of Tesla’s life and achievements, lavishly illustrated. The fourth seemed to be another biography, but the alphabet was different—curlicued Cyrillic letters, perhaps
Tesla’s native Serbian. This, too, had photographs bound in the middle, so even if Thea could not read it, the book was still potentially valuable. The book at the very bottom of the pile was a leather-bound journal that bore dated entries and looked like a private diary. That would have been the prize—except the contents of the notebook were in Spanish.

She nodded her thanks to the room at large as she reluctantly put down the diary and flipped through the four published volumes in turn. She quickly laid aside the Serbian biography and the two glossier books, and picked up the paperback for a closer look. It had been annotated in pencil, in the same firm, florid handwriting that graced the Spanish diary…and, alas, in the same language. The meaning of one of the comments, though, was clear to Thea—an emphatic, scribbled
Sí!
in the book’s margin, right next to a passage that drew her immediate curiosity. It appeared to be a direct quote by Tesla himself, about his great rival Thomas Edison:

“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of a bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. With a little time and calculation I
would have saved him ninety percent of his labor,” Thea read out in a voice barely above a whisper.

Somehow this seemed to be an important insight, although Thea could not immediately say why. She realized with a start that the others must be wondering what had become of her, but she felt an urgent need to spend more time with these books, to learn more about the man who had made this house and had somehow—whether accidentally or intentionally—transferred the essence of his living self into a white cube that had survived the death of his body by more than half a century.

She gathered up the five volumes and, feeling self-conscious, addressed the library shelves.

“I’d like to borrow these, if that’s okay, House,” she said. “I will make sure that they are returned as soon as possible, but please don’t whisk them away and put them back until I’m done with them. And if it’s okay, I’d like to take them with me when we leave here today. I’ll get them back here as soon as I can.” She paused, glancing around. “I’ll take silence as assent. If you don’t want me to take them for some reason, I’m sure you’ll find a way to let me know.”

She gathered up her half-full coffee mug, clutching
the books to her chest with her free hand, and made her way hastily to the professor’s study.

“We were wondering what had happened to you,” Humphrey said as she entered.

“I paid a visit to the library,” Thea said. “The house showed me these five books, and I asked if I could borrow them. Apparently it was okay with the idea.”

“You’ve only got four,” Ben said, tilting his head for a closer look.

Thea glanced down at the books in her arms. The four published volumes were still there; somehow the old Spanish diary had disappeared from her arms.

“There
were
five,” she said. “The fifth was apparently too precious to lend. It was a diary, handwritten. It makes no difference, really, because I couldn’t have read it anyway—it was all in Spanish. But it seems it’s okay for me to hold on to these.”

Humphrey sighed. “Well, I guess that’s okay. The house seems to know what it shouldn’t let out of its sight—and I must say, I wouldn’t mind taking a look at that diary myself. I’ll have a look in the library later; perhaps the House will be kind enough to leave it out for me. But in the meantime, we’d
better conclude our business so that Mrs. Chen can whisk you back to the Academy.”

“I’ll keep on working on those printouts, sir,” Terry said.

“It is almost too much to credit, but if Thea is right and it’s somehow Tesla himself within that cube world…I don’t suppose I have to tell the five of you that what you’ve learned here shouldn’t be discussed beyond these four walls.”

There was another knock on the door, and Rafe stuck his head into the room.

“Kay has everything running smoothly back at the office,” he said. “Luana wants to see you about some results, but Kay told her you’d be in touch when you got back. Have I missed something?”

“Who’s Kay?” Tess said in a low voice, close to Thea’s ear.

Humphrey glanced up at that. “Not that it’s any of your business, young lady, but Kay is my other assistant, the one holding down the fort in Washington. And no, Rafe, you haven’t missed anything huge. We’re still looking for a needle in a haystack.”

Thea frowned slightly, as the Tesla quote from the book under her arm swam back into her mind.

Kaschei’s needle.

Tesla had transferred his mind and spirit into a vessel other than his body. Thea had been thinking about that in terms of the layered Kaschei story, and assuming that the “needle” had been Tesla himself. But suddenly things shifted in her mind, and she was presented with a series of memories in quick succession. Tesla in the Colorado lab, his hand in the column of flame. Humphrey’s voice—
His most extraordinary achievements in Colorado seemed to have diminished him.
Four birds. One dead pigeon cradled in Tesla’s hands, a keening cry of unspeakable mourning raised over the small body. The white pigeon in the window of Tesla’s room, there at the end, the one they had all seen in their dream. Tesla’s famous feeding of pigeons in the parks of New York.

Pigeons.

The needle in the egg in the duck…in the
duck…

“Oh my God,” she said abruptly, out loud.

Everyone swiveled to face her.

“What?” Humphrey said sharply.

“I’ve been thinking of
Tesla
as the needle. What if I’m wrong—what if he tried to preserve himself even further? It’s the Kaschei story all over again….”

“What was that, now?” Rafe said.

But it was Magpie who made the connection.

“The pigeons,” she said, gripping both arms of her chair tightly. “It’s the pigeons. You said he was a quad-Element mage—
there were four pigeons
.”

“He transferred the Elemental magic out of himself,” Thea said faintly. “Into the birds.”

“But something went wrong,” Tess said. “One of the birds died. We saw it die.”

Humphrey’s head was snapping from one to the other as though he were watching a tennis game. “Are you suggesting that Tesla drained his magic from himself?”

“To preserve it. To keep it safe. Yes. You said he came back from Colorado different.”

“But if one died, what happened to the rest of them?” Magpie said. “Where are the other three pigeons?”

“A Kaschei maneuver that went wrong,” Ben said. “He thought he could keep the part of himself that he treasured most safe—in whatever way—but then something went awry and one of the four was permanently lost. The other three disappeared while he was still too distraught with the death of the first one to deal with the rest, and then he was stranded.”

“Do you think that’s why he kept feeding the pigeons, the rest of his life?” Tess said. “When he got back to New York, I mean?”

“So what you’re saying is that all we have to do is find a couple of specific pigeons in New York City?” Rafe said, his hands in the pockets of his chinos. “Very funny. I come from New York. Do you have any idea how many pigeons we’ve got per square inch there?”

“But surely the original pigeons are long dead already,” Ben objected.

“If Thea’s right, they aren’t regular pigeons anymore. They’re, I don’t know,
Elemental
pigeons—they can live forever, or certainly for many times a normal mortal pigeon’s lifespan,” Terry said.

“But even given that Tesla’s Elemental pigeons may still be flapping around this world, what possible use would finding them be now, even if they were findable? Tesla—the real Tesla—has been dead for fifty years!” Ben said obstinately.

“Maybe not,” Thea said. “If he really is alive in some sense, inside that cube—”

“
Wait
a minute,” Ben said. “It’s an
Elemental
cube. You said he was a quad-Element mage. It took all of us to break the seal. That cube was made
when he had all his powers. But we saw him as an old man, and that means he didn’t transfer into here until right at the end of his life. He must have had his powers to make the cube, to make the transfer—but if his Elements were scattered to the four winds, literally…”

“Make the cube, yes, but not necessarily the transfer,” Terry said. “That’s pure mechanics.”

“And you should know…” Humphrey began, then stopped. He sighed. “You may remember, the first time I came to the Academy, back in the early days of the spellspams, I told you that there had been
three
Nexus computers. That one had been lost.”

“I remember,” Terry said.

“The first one…was around a long time before the others. It was very, very primitive—in fact, it was something that you, Terry, would probably not have called a computer at all. But it was a harbinger, and it was Tesla’s work. He, if anyone, would have known exactly how to do this. He might have made this cube long before he conceived of transferring his Element powers into birds, but in the end, if he set it up right, the mechanics of the thing were not…Elemental in nature.”