Cybermage, page 8
“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, tantalising her; she knew that it was utterly essential that she understand precisely how the concept was linked to the rest of the things that she had seen in the cube-world, but for the life of her she couldn’t quite 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. Non-specific place and time; somewhere/somewhen 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, 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, weaving a world which filled that hole shaped like the thing that she sought, and then letting the Universes realign themselves so that she could step from one world into another–from her own to the one she had been seeking–and find herself in the same place as the thing or entity that she had been seeking to find. 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, with his images vivid in her mind, she was chasing an idea, not a person, not a place. There was no reason that it shouldn’t work the same way.
Her finger hovered above the keypad for a moment while all these thoughts chased themselves across her consciousness, and then she pressed her lips together in a resolute manner 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 stood up in back in the city, but this time her feet were bare in the long grass–she could wiggle her toes luxuriously and felt the cool grass blades brushing her ankles. Slightly upstream from her was a jury-rigged mill wheel, turning with remarkable evenness for its being very much home-made, 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, his head tucked between bony knees of two long lanky legs folded up about his ears, staring 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 again, much as there had been in the city street on a different continent and many years in his future–but this was a personal grief, something far closer and more precious had been lost than just the contents of a laboratory, however valuable they had been.
“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 shrivelling 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 allowed her crouch to turn into a comfortable cross-legged lounge 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…” Thea felt awful, as though she was prying; the loss might have been two years old, but the grief was real, and strong, and just as vivid at this moment as it had ever been.
“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. The words that followed the stick into the water were savage, too, though–as though the granite façade was beginning to crack, just a little. “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 been… 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 towards something, something that he could not name, that he did not even realise that 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 changing 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 unaccountably standing 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 have met you.”
“Are you going to come back?”
“Some day,” 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, not looking back. Thea watched him run up to his sister, and then they both turned around to look back at her and Niko lifted his hand in a self-conscious little wave. His sister merely stared in Thea’s direction with an expression equal parts curiosity and wariness. Then they both turned their backs and trotted off towards a house.
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 yet again by an unsanctioned adventure. 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, to realise that the Tiffany lamp beside her bed was bathing the room in a mellow multi-hued radiance and a small council of war appeared to be going on.
Magpie sitting on her bed kicking her heels against the side, Ben standing by the door looking mutinous with his arms crossed in a manner that was almost belligerent, Terry hovering by Thea’s own bed and Tess perched precariously just on the edge of it. When Thea popped back into the bed, in fact, her newly re-materialised foot had literally bounced Tess off the bed.
They all turned to stare even as Tess picked herself up off the floor.
“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 keypadded wrist.
“Not a bad idea,” Ben said. “Tess crashed into our room about ten minutes ago, after Magpie realised 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.
“And what’s the sneeze word?” Terry added.
“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. “How did you do that? I thought we all had to go into the cube before it would allow us access to any of it. How did you get around that? There might have been all kinds of booby traps…”
“… 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–Tesla was a four-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, but he didn’t sound convinced.
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’–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. “Nuh-uh. That is just a projection, a hologram, a program, a piece of software. This–I think this is much bigger than that. I think he somehow… preserved himself. In that cube. Kaschei’s needle.”
“There you go with atchoo 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 and barely stopped himself from tangling with his own feet and collapsing in an undignified heap on the floor; the others all whirled, startled, and Thea’s face and neck were suffused in a sudden vivid blush.
“What is a Russian fairy tale?” Humphrey May asked, 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. I think you and this house are in cahoots, Thea–it lets you get away with far more than it ought to.” He tied the sash of his dressing gown 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?”
SIX
It took the better part of an hour to explain everything to Humphrey, and then quite a while longer to mollify him, once he realised just how the keypad which he had given Thea had been used, without his knowledge or his sanction. He had been on the verge of confiscating the thing immediately, but by this time it was the early hours of the morning and 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 repeat her exploits. He ordered everybody back to their rooms, and the rest of the night, what was left of it, 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 together as a group, with Terry and Tess going down first, followed by Ben. Magpie beat Thea to the bathroom by a split second, and then hogged it for what seemed like hours while Thea hopped about impatiently outside in the corridor. Magpie finally emerged with her hair freshly washed and swanned down the stairs, flicking her blonde 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, with each of them waiting for one of the others to embark on the topic of conversation that interested them all–that shared dream, and what it really meant–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 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 apparently 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 depiction of it 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. It was, of course, precisely at this point that Madeleine Emmett turned up in the breakfast room. She swept the whole messy scene with a glance that was more than a little disapproving, but asked nonetheless if they were all right and had everything they needed. She did not seem either convinced or mollified by their vigorous nods.
“Really,” she was heard muttering as she swept out of the room, “the House ought to know better than to provide cake for breakfast.”
