Cybermage, page 16
“We don’t know where the actual artifact is, right now,” Humphrey said, the words all but wrung out of him.
Thea stared at him for a long moment.
“I can get your pigeons,” she said at last.
Humphrey shot her a startled look. “But we don’t know, not for certain, that the birds are even…”
“We do. You do. And if the Alphiri are out there looking, then they know it too. And if they are out there, we can get them.”
She had spoken with confidence. Something had changed, shifted; they had suddenly been transformed from mentor and trainee into something approaching equals.
Thea could see Humphrey becoming aware of this, being surprised by it, not entirely in a pleasant way.
“What makes you so sure?” Humphrey said after a moment, his voice suddenly darker and lower.
Thea looked at him steadily. “Because,” she said, “I have a Finder.”
“A Finder?” Humphrey echoed. “One of you five is a Finder?”
“No. Another.”
“Someone… else? Here, at the school? We’d agreed that this whole thing would stay within the circle, that as few people as possible would know about any of it.”
“Rafe told somebody,” Thea pointed out. “On the whole, my Finder is probably a lot more trustworthy. If you want those pigeons, use what you’ve got.”
A memory of Humphrey’s own words came back to Thea, overheard on a damp night in a cedar wood. I use what tools are given to me, and Thea Winthrop is the sharpest sword I have right now.
“One of those pigeons… has been hurt,” she continued. “Or even killed. We know that, from what the five of us originally saw when we entered the cube. Between Magpie’s connection to things that are sick or wounded and need healing, and Kristin’s ability to find the others, we can do this.”
“Who’s this Kristin? Your Finder? How do you know that she is to be trusted with any of this? How did she get to be involved?”
“Things happen for a reason,” Thea said.
“I’m not sure I like this. I need to meet this Finder of yours.”
“You said time is of the essence,” Thea said.
Almost unwillingly, he nodded. “This needs to be done quickly and quietly. Yes. If it is to be done at all. Before the Alphiri get it all together.”
“We can do it,” Thea repeated.
Cheveyo’s voice suddenly came floating back to her–You can’t hide any more. If she did this, if she showed her hand at last, there would be no more hiding. Not in this world, or in any other. And if the Alphiri failed in their quest to gather the human polity’s greatest wizard and make him do their bidding, they would know, in no uncertain terms, that there was an alternative–Thea herself, coming into her own place of power at last. Once she cast aside the concealment that had kept her safe, she would be exactly the thing that the Alphiri had wanted in the first place, a mage who could give their race the magic that they craved, who could give them a legacy, could make their race immortal. And it would be she, Thea, who would be in the front lines next time.
“Are you all right?” Humphrey said. “You look very strange, all of a sudden.”
“I’m fine,” Thea said, coming back to herself with a snap.
“Are you sure you need to involve someone new in this?”
“She’s necessary,” Thea said. “Without a Finder, we would be doing exactly what Rafe found so amusing, blundering around New York catching pigeons on a hit-or-miss basis. Which is probably more or less exactly what the Alphiri are doing. But with a Finder who is focused on a certain thing or a certain idea… we can do it.”
“Do you have a plan?” Humphrey asked, and there it was again–that change, the difference in his tone. He was frowning a little, but he had accepted her as a partner rather than an apprentice.
“Not yet,” Thea said. “But Christmas break is coming up. I can pull all of us together, with no schoolwork to distract us from this.”
“You can always reach me, through that,” Humphrey said, nodding at her keypad device, answering Terry’s question beyond any further doubt. “Let me know what logistics support you need, I’ll do whatever I can to help. Go find Tesla, Thea. Thanks for doing this for us.”
I use what tools are given to me.
Thea Winthrop is the sharpest sword I have right now.
Humphrey May had just shown his hand; the sword had been unsheathed. He had offered assistance, but he had also stepped back from the front line, leaving the battle itself to Thea. It was at once a gesture of trust, and a cold willingness to gamble Thea herself to win a game with much higher stakes.
Protect. That’s what I am sworn to do.
Humphrey’s words, again, but this time they resonated for Thea, too.
“I’m not doing it for you,” Thea said. “I’m doing it for Tesla.”
TEN
“Okay, one more time,” said Ben, ticking his points off on the fingers of his right hand. “These so-called Elemental pigeons were somehow detached from Nikola Tesla, little concrete units of personality of talent or whatever you choose to call them, and these pigeons have now… what… achieved independent existence, to the point of still being potentially alive and flitting around New York city some few decades after any ordinary normal pigeon would have kicked the bucket. The Alphiri buy this idea, and send a pigeon hunting team to New York. Humphrey May, the highest authority on this subject right now in our polity, speaking straight from the heights of FBM and all of its vast and all-powerful knowledge, buys this idea, to the extent of okaying a pigeon hunt of our own, before, quote, ‘the Alphiri get them’. But not even Humphrey May is sure of whether said pigeons, assuming they exist, assuming they can be caught, can even be… what did you call it, Thea?… rejoined to the original Tesla entity, and if they can, so far as I can tell, nobody at all has any idea what would happen next. How am I doing so far?”
“Pretty much covers it,” Thea said.
They had gathered together, all six of them, in what Kristin called Thea’s pseudo-classrooms–a bubble-universe classroom emptied of its student population, after the last class of the day, shielded and warded and made safe for Terry to speak his mind in. Thea had called them in, to report on the outcome of her conversation with Humphrey May, and, with a twinge of guilty misgivings, to inform them that she had volunteered them all for the pigeon hunting project.
And Ben, judging from the sharper-than-usual edge of sarcasm that sparked in his words and the tone of his voice, wasn’t taking to the idea very well.
“And you agreed to help him find these… these…” Ben waved his hand in front of his face, helplessly searching for the right adjective. “It’s a wild goose chase!”
“Wild pigeon,” Kristin said, grinning.
Ben growled at her.
“Terry… it might come down to you, in the end,” Thea said, turning away from Ben to hide a quick grin and addressing Terry.
“You’re thinking that the only way anything remotely like a re-joining can be achieved would somehow have to happen inside a cyber-environment,” Terry said. “It makes sense, that’s the only place where all the pieces can actually all exist together without violating all kinds of real-world rules. But what do you want me to do about it, precisely?”
“You’d need to write something. Some kind of code. Something that unifies the pieces that were scattered. Make it all whole again.”
“That’s quite a job,” Terry said, a strange expression on his face.
“Well, you’ve had practice,” Tess said. “The Twitterpat thing in the Nexus. You’ve worked with it for quite a while now.”
“Yes, but Twitterpat wrote that. All I did was tinker.”
“Yeah, right, and you’re so bad at tinkering that they handed you the Nexus on a silver platter,” Ben said.
“I thought you were against this whole idea,” Magpie said, turning to him.
“I am!” Ben yelped. “I think the whole thing is getting weirder and weirder, and the further we get the more out of control it looks to me. The basic idea seems to be that nobody knows anything at all, and yet we’re all ready to go running off putting our necks in various assorted nooses anyway just to prove a point that isn’t necessarily provable. I’d like to see a shred of concrete evidence.”
“Your father is a scientist, isn’t he?” Kristin murmured.
“So?”
“Sometimes,” Kristin said, “you have to have faith first and evidence later.”
“Oohhhh,” Ben said, turning away. “You started all this, you know. You and your bright idea, stealing the cube.”
“Well, there is that,” Thea said.
“What?”
“You wanted evidence. We can get evidence, of sorts. From the cube. From Tesla himself. He was the one that did the split in the first place, he–if anyone–will know if anything can be done to reverse it.”
“And you’re telling me that if you can go back in there and actually talk to this Tesla spirit or whatever’s trapped in there–if he tells you it’s all a wild goose chase–you’re going to go back to Humphrey May and tell him it’s all off?” Ben said.
“Would that be satisfactory?” Thea said, and this time she couldn’t quite hide the grin.
“You’re just making fun of me now,” Ben said, narrowing his eyes.
“Some,” Thea said, the grin broadening a notch. “Ben, I don’t blame you. I don’t quite believe any of it myself. Still… we all saw what we saw. And then there’s the Alphiri. They might be jumping at shadows, but have you ever known them to do that before? They live by the bargain–something about all this made them believe that there’s a bargain to be had. Whatever else I might think of them, I trust their instincts on that score. They must think there’s something in this for them or else they’d be quite happy to let us do our own pigeon-chasing and wouldn’t deign to stoop to doing that themselves.”
“Humphrey said that the Alphiri were seen chasing pigeons,” Tess said slowly.
“Yes, and?” Ben said, turning on her.
“There’s varying levels to this,” Tess said. “If they didn’t think it was worth their time, they would be doing nothing at all. If they were marginally interested, they might have contracted somebody to do this particular hunt for them, and just present them with the pigeons, if found. But no, they themselves were seen in New York chasing birds. This is important enough, apparently for it not to be trusted to underlings.”
“Important enough to break cover,” Magpie said. “They could have sent in a human team. It might have looked strange, having a bunch of people prancing around Central Park scooping up pigeons in butterfly nets, but enough strange things go on there that they might have been dismissed as a bunch of nuts and nobody would have thought twice about it, ever again. But you’re hardly likely to be able to ignore or to forget an Alphiri doing that exact same thing.”
“All right, so someone believes that there’s really something in it,” Ben said, conceding that point at least, however unwillingly. “What possible use can we…”
“And how much attention would you give to a kid prancing around trying to catch a pigeon in a butterfly net?” Tess said thoughtfully.
“We won’t have to resort to random netting,” Thea said. “Kristin is a Finder. If she can turn her talents to Finding particular birds…”
Kristin sat up. “You want me… you want me to…”
“I thought we were going to talk to Tesla first,” Ben said.
Thea sighed. “All right,” she said, “I’d need to go…”
“We might as well all go,” Ben said. “It took all of us last time, and we would all be there to hear whatever he had to say.”
“Skeptic,” Thea grumbled, pushing up her sleeve and staring thoughtfully at her wrist keypad for a second. “Fine. Hold on to your hats.”
The sudden appearance of open sky and flat-topped mesas around her made Kristin ’s breath whistle through her teeth as she gasped in astonishment.
“What?” Ben said. “Haven’t you ever used a ’port before?”
“It’s different,” Tess said, a mild reproof in her voice.
“It’s cool,” Kristin said. “And it isn’t the same thing as… yike!”
She caught a glimpse of Cheveyo stepping out from behind a stone outcrop, his staff in one hand, the Tesla cube held in the palm of the other.
“Catori,” he said, acknowledging Thea. And then, with a brief nod at the others, “And to all of you. Welcome back. I told you that it would only be a short while before you would return for this, Catori. I did not realise myself just how few a span of days it would be.”
“You may still need to guard it for me a while longer,” Thea said, “But we need to contact the man who lives inside of it. We need… a few answers.”
“Your wizard. Tesla.” The words were nothing less than the truth, but coming from Cheveyo, who had no way of knowing what the cube contained, they froze his visitors in their tracks.
“How do you know that?” Thea asked, recovering first. “Were you able to reach him yourself?”
“I, no,” Cheveyo said. “But Grandmother Spider knows. And after you left the cube with me, she came, to tell me something of it, to make sure I knew how to protect it.” He held out the cube to Thea. “This is your kind of power, your gift, not mine.”
Thea took the cube, bowing her head in a gesture of respect.
“I will leave you,” Cheveyo said. “If you have need of me, later, you know how to call me.”
“He’s scary,” Kristin said in a small voice, staring at the place Cheveyo had been standing a moment before.
“Only if you have reason to fear him,” Thea said. She stared at the cube, frowning slightly. “I’m trying to figure out just how to go at this. The last time we all piled on, it was when we unlocked this thing. But we didn’t get to talk to Tesla then. It was all… just… watching, like we were watching a movie.”
“But that’s when we saw the pigeons,” Magpie pointed out. “The whole thing started then.”
“But when I got to talk to him–I time-wove myself a place in his own time and space, a somewhere and somewhen that he was real, touchable, able to have a conversation with me. But I was looking for fairly specific times, then, and I was able to choose…” She looked at the others, perplexed. “The problem is that we need to speak to him, directly, or else it’s all going to be hints and fancies again. But we need to speak to him when he was different people. We would probably need to speak to him in the immediate aftermath of that pigeon thing in Colorado.”
“Are you sure about that?” Ben murmured. “He looked pretty strung out over that. Would he even be able to tell you anything coherent?”
“Well, as soon as possible after that event, then, when it was still fresh in his mind, when he could offer ideas.”
“It would probably be constructive to speak to him before he did what he did,” Magpie said. “It would tell us far more about his motives, and if he even thought about the possibility of getting any of his Elemental facets back. If he thought he could control them, outside of himself. If he even wanted any of it back.”
“And much later, to see if we succeeded in finding the pigeons,” Tess said.
Thea turned to her. “How do you figure that?”
“He might know,” Tess said. “It might be linked to all this–it might be linked to his time, somehow. It might be our only clue as to whether we should go on with any of this at all.”
“But we know that he didn’t have the Elemental gifts back when his body died,” Ben said.
“But the cube,” Kristin said, frowning at the smooth white cube Thea held cradled in her hands. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t get how anyone could do that, transfer himself into that, let his body die… not without some magic. I don’t think there are many people out there capable of making themselves immortal. Just like that, on a whim. And living on inside an artifact.”
“But is he living on in there?” Magpie asked abruptly. “Or is it all just his dreams and memories and the things in his life he thought to be important?”
Thea sighed. “I think,” she said, “that we should go as far forward as we can. Seek him when he is old, and perhaps wise, or at any rate wiser than the young impulsive wizard who thought that releasing Elemental magic into wild birds was a good idea. And then we can ask Tesla himself where to go from there.”
“Sounds good to me,” Terry said. “But that still leaves the method in your hands. If all of us going in, the way we did before, isn’t going to work, do you have to do this on your own, or can you take any or all of us with you?”
“That would be pretty awesome,” Kristin said, her broad grin giving an eye-watering glimpse of her preposterous teeth.
“Thea, wait,” Terry said. “Perhaps at least one of us should stay behind. Just in case something happens… here. Someone to keep an eye on things.”
“It isn’t the computer classroom back at school,” Thea said. “There’s going to be no ambush here.”
“But he has a point,” Magpie said. “I’ll stay. You all go; you can fill me in when you get back. But you might need someone physically here in a hurry, and I’ll stick around.”
“You’ll miss all the fun,” Kristin said. “You sure?”
“Oh, please, can’t she stay?” Ben said, staring at Kristin.
