Ponch paused in his eating. Maybe we do, he said. But important things look different.
Kit shook his head. Whatever color his dog saw his food in, it didn’t matter much, as it all swiftly went inside him, where theoretically everything was the same color, especially after it was digested.
When he was finished eating, Ponch circled around a couple of times and lay down to start washing his paws.
“You’re not going to go to sleep, are you?” Kit said.
Ponch looked at him with some mild annoyance. If you’re going to hunt, he said, your feet have to be clean. He went back to nibbling his paws again.
Kit sighed and sat down to wait. When Ponch was finished, he got up, shook himself again, and said, I have to go out.
“You’ll be ready then?”
Yes.
Kit opened the door and let the dog out. He put on his jacket, picked up his house keys from the hook inside the back door, and got one more thing from the place where the coats hung—the wizardry “leash” that he’d made for Ponch when they were working together in other worlds. For those who could see it, it looked like a slender, smooth cord of blue light, a tight braid of words in the Speech that had to do with finding things, remembering where you found them, and not losing what had helped you find them in the first place—namely Ponch. Kit coiled up the leash and stuffed it in his parka pocket, then locked up the house and went up the driveway to the gate in the chain-link fence. There Ponch was dancing with impatience. Kit opened the gate, and Ponch shot through and into the yard, straight to the back where the trees and bushes grew thickest.
Kit paused for a moment in the frosty morning air. It was one of those cold gray days, but the wrong kind of gray for snow—the kind of day that made you wish that spring would hurry up, but also a day when going to another universe, any other universe, would be a relief from the gloominess of your own. He reached into his pocket for the transit spell he’d used the other day to get to Darryl’s school, and ran the long glowing chain of it through his fingers while Ponch did his business back in the bushes. A moment later Ponch bounced out of the underbrush again, and ran back to Kit, bounding up and down around him.
You ready?
“Yeah. Here’s your leash.”
Kit managed with some difficulty to get Ponch to hold still long enough to slip the leash-spell around his neck. Should Ponch’s search for Darryl take them into some space where there wasn’t air, or something else humans and dogs needed to survive, the leash would make sure Kit’s fail-safe spells temporarily covered Ponch, until Kit could improvise something else. It would also keep them from getting separated in any hostile environment.
Where to first?
“Darryl’s school,” Kit said. “Let me get us invisible first. I want a closer look at him when we get there.”
Kit reached out to one side and traced his finger down the air, “unzipping” his claudication pocket, then reached in for the wizard’s manual. When he bounced it in his hand, it fell open at the spot Kit had previously marked, the invisibility spell. The wizardry was as he’d left it, in a partly activated state, waiting for the last few syllables to be pronounced.
Kit said them, and felt the wizardry take, expanding to fold around him and Ponch and then snug in close. This was one of the simpler ways to be invisible; the wizardry “looked” at what was behind you and made anyone in front of you see that instead of you. This light-diversion type of invisibility wasn’t good for use in large groups, because it tended to break down under the strain of servicing too many viewpoints, but Kit thought this would be good enough for this morning; he didn’t think he and Ponch were likely to wind up in a crowd.
Ponch shook himself as the wizardry settled in around them, then sat down and scratched. It itches!
“I know,” Kit said. “It has to fit tight to work. Try to bear with it—we won’t need it for long.”
Kit dropped the bright chain of the transit spell on the ground around them. It knotted itself closed, and the sound of the words and the power of the spell reared up around them in a roar of light. When the brilliance and the noise faded down again, they were standing where they’d been the previous day: in the parking lot, looking at the bland front of Centennial Avenue School.
Kit picked up the transit spell, tucked it away in his claudication pocket. We’d better keep it silent from here on, he said. Have you got his scent?
Sure. He’s in a room over on the left side of the building. He’s close.
Show me where.
Together they padded quietly onto the sidewalk outside the school doors, and up onto the lawn on the left side, making their way down the length of the one-story building. About half a minute later, they were standing outside the schoolroom where Darryl and his classmates were working. Kit peered in.
It didn’t look much like the classrooms at Kit’s school, but he wasn’t expecting it to: these kids had special needs. The furniture was sofas and cushions and soft mats rather than the desk-chairs that Kit was used to, with a scattering of low tables suitable for working either from a chair or while sitting on the floor. Four teachers, men and women both, casually dressed, were working with the same group of kids Kit had seen getting into the van the day before. Some of the kids were sitting and working with books at one or another of the tables; one was lying on a mat doing exercises with the help of a special-ed teacher. Off to one side, Darryl sat, dressed in T-shirt and jeans and sneakers again, his dark head bent over a large soft-cover book. He was rocking very slightly, while next to him a young male teacher sat and read to him from the book.
There he is.
But still not there, Ponch said.
Then where, exactly?
It’s hard to tell from here. I need to get a better scent. We should go in.
Kit nodded. No point in going all the way back to the doors, he said, and flipped through the manual for yet another spell. This spell, too, Kit had prepared the night before, knitting both his and Ponch’s names and descriptions into it. The wizardry included a variant of the Mason’s Word, which involves a very detailed description, in wizardly terms, of the structure of stone. As both wizards and physicists know, even the densest stone—indeed, almost all “solid” matter—is mostly empty space. Now as Kit and Ponch walked toward the wall of the school, all the atoms in their bodies and the atoms of the wall engaged in a brief, complex, stately little dance, carefully avoiding one another in droves as wizard and dog passed through brick and mortar and reinforcing metal. A moment later, Kit and Ponch were standing inside the classroom.
The room was carpeted, which made it easy to walk softly. Kit and Ponch made their way carefully around the edge of the room, toward the side where Darryl sat on the floor, looking at the book. Or is he really? Kit thought, as his point of view changed and he could see more clearly that though Darryl was looking at the book, the expression was abstracted; if he was intent, it was on something else. His face was wearing the shadow of a smile, but it was hard to tell what he was smiling at.
They paused near him, behind him, while the teacher kept reading something about the seven wonders of the ancient world. Ponch stood looking intently at Darryl, his nose working, while Kit looked over the boy’s shoulder, trying to make something of that remote expression. Definitely his body’s here, Kit said. But as for the rest of him…
Far away, Ponch said. I can show you where now, though. The scent’s strong.
Okay—
In a moment. Ponch sat down and started scratching.
Unfortunately, in this small quiet space, a sound that Kit heard all the time, so often that he didn’t pay attention to it anymore, suddenly made itself apparent. It was Ponch’s dog-license tag and name tag, on his collar, jingling together. Just about everybody in the classroom, except for Darryl, looked up in surprise, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from.
Uh-oh, Kit thought. That was dumb! To Ponch he said hurriedly, and silently, Now would be a good time!
&n
bsp; Right—
Ponch stepped forward, pulling the leash tight, and vanished, just as Darryl’s teacher got up from the floor with a mystified look and headed toward them. Kit stepped forward after Ponch and vanished, too, relieved—
The wind hit him then, so that Kit staggered, staring around him, half-blinded by the sudden blazing light after the soft fluorescents of the classroom.
“Where are we?”
Inside his mind. He’s here somewhere, Ponch said.
Here was a landscape right out of the depths of the Sahara. Kit and Ponch were perched precariously on the crest of a dune so sharply wind-sculpted that its edge could have been used for a razor… except that every second, the wind stripped grains off it, eroding it, and whipping sand off the other dunes that stretched out all around them. A hard blue sky came down to the horizon on all sides, featureless; it held not a wisp of cloud, only the fierce sun… yet there was something mysteriously indistinct about that sun, as if, even in that sky, dust obscured it.
“Just look at all this,” Kit said, gazing around him. “Is this just the way his inner world looks to him? Or did he build it this way for some reason?”
I don’t know.
Kit shook his head. “I’ve seen an interior landscape or two in my time,” he said, “but wow, this one… This is huge. Look at it, it goes on forever…” He scanned the horizon. “Where is he, you think?”
Busy with something? Or maybe hiding?
Kit thought about that, and about what his mother had said about autistic people who might find the rush of data around them just too intense to bear. “No way to tell till we talk to him.”
He is here, though. Look! Ponch said. Kit looked where Ponch’s nose pointed. Footsteps led down from the dune-crest, dug in deep where someone had had to dig his heels in to stop sliding, and then had kept on sliding anyway. Down at the bottom of the dune, in the space sheltered from the wind, the footsteps were better preserved, better defined. They reminded Kit of certain footsteps left in the moondust of Tranquillity Base, except that those were now being eroded by micrometeorites. These footsteps were still sharp, and they had a familiar sneaker company’s logo scored across them, one that Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s boot soles had definitely been missing.
“Weird,” Kit said softly. The footsteps led away across that blazing wilderness, up the next dune and into the unremitting day. “Where’s he going?” Kit said.
Away from the Other One, Ponch said. Can’t you feel It? It’s here, too. It’s following him. Ponch scented the air. It’s been following him for a long time.
“Three months?” Kit said.
I think much longer.
“How can that be?”
I don’t know. But Its scent’s strong in Darryl’s neighborhood. No way to mistake it: I’ve smelled it often enough when It’s been chasing after you. Ponch shook himself all over … and this time it had nothing to do with feeling itchy; it was his version of a shudder. He flees—It pursues. Ponch’s nose worked; he looked bemused. And not just here.
“Then where?”
I’m not sure. Come on.
The sand they slid down was more pink than golden. Kit looked at it and thought of the book that Darryl’s teacher had been reading him. “That book was open to a page about the Pyramids,” Kit said.
Was it? Ponch looked around him as they slid down the dune. If it was, then it’s something he’s seen before. None of this is new.
The heat from the sun was oppressive. Kit pulled off his parka, rolled it up, and stuck it into his otherspace pocket. Then he and Ponch reached the bottom of the dune and started the climb up the side of the next one. “We could airwalk it…,” Kit said.
He didn’t, Ponch said. His trail’s down here. For now we need to go the way he went.
Kit nodded, put his head down to try to keep the wind-whipped sand out of his eyes, and went up the next dune in Ponch’s wake. That way, Ponch said as he came up to the top of the dune.
Kit looked across the sand, following Ponch’s gaze. Maybe eight or ten miles away, almost obscured by the height of the farther dunes and the haze of sand and dust in the air, a low line of jagged stone rose against the horizon. “Are those hills?” Kit said.
I think so. He’s there somewhere. Come on.
Ponch led, and Kit followed. Once or twice, Ponch was certain enough of the trail to let Kit use a transit spell to cover some distance, but more often he insisted on doing it on foot, so Kit simply had to slog after him, for the time being unwilling to use any spells to protect him from the wind and the sand, on the off chance that they would somehow interfere with Ponch’s tracking sense. The sand seemed to get into everything—down Kit’s shirt and up his pants, into the bends of his knees and elbows. It rubbed him raw around the neck and even under his socks. I can barely stand this, Kit thought as he toiled up yet another dune after Ponch. And if I can’t, what’s it doing to Darryl?
Ponch reached the top of that dune and looked ahead of them. From here the low, jagged hills that had shown earlier near the horizon finally seemed within reach, no more than a few miles away. They looked taller than they had, harsher and more forbidding; they cast long, dark shadows at their feet, under that unforgiving sun, which hadn’t moved in the sky the whole time they had been there. Kit glanced up toward it, then away. “This is incredibly detailed,” he said softly. “So very real.”
Maybe it has to be, so that it’ll be real to What’s chasing him…
Kit shook his head at that. Tom’s warning not to get caught up in Darryl’s Ordeal had been straightforward enough. Yet was it going to be possible to stand to one side and let another wizard handle the Lone Power by himself? And what if It doesn’t want just to concentrate on him? Kit thought. What am I supposed to do if It decides to try to do something about me? Just cut and run, just leave him there?
I wish Neets was here. I could really use some backup.
Ponch stood panting in the heat, gazing down. That looks sort of like a building, he said.
Kit squinted. Down among the rock-tumble at the foot of the steep, jagged hills, there did seem to be something that looked built, and in it was a vertical, oblong darkness that could have been a gigantic door. “Is that where he went?” Kit said.
I think so. Do you want to take us down there?
Kit looked at the dark patch in the long ominous shadows thrown by the hills. Want to? he thought. Wow, I can’t wait. Nonetheless, he pulled out the transit spell. “Let’s go,” he said.
A few moments later, they stood at the foot of the biggest cliff. Kit looked up at it, and up, and up, and hardly knew what to think. The whole side of the cliff was a dark red stone, carved, deeply, for at least three hundred feet up. The red stone must have been the source of the pink tint in all the sand they’d been toiling through. Someone had carved the cliff into pillars and arches, galleries and balconies, reaching back into solid stone that looked as if it had been laboriously hollowed out, chip by chip, by gloriously detail-minded artisans. Niches and pedestals were carved into the stone; in them and on them stood statues, of people and animals and creatures not native to Earth, some of them not native to any planet Kit knew. Some of the poses, some of the expressions, were very creepy, indeed; all the statues, human or not, were staring down at the space in front of the oblong opening with stony blind eyes—staring at Kit as if, stone or not, they could still see. And it all looked brand-new, as if whatever or whoever had done this work might still be here, somewhere inside the gigantic gateway that loomed, dark and empty, in front of Kit and Ponch right now.
It wasn’t an idea that made Kit particularly happy. What a great place to have a cozy chat with Darryl about what’s giving him trouble, Kit thought. “Can you smell anybody else here?” he said to Ponch. “Besides us, and Darryl, and you-know-who?”
No. Ponch stood there with his nose working. But I’m not sure that means that nobody else can be here…
I’ve got to stop asking him questions when I know the a
nswers are going to make me more nervous than I already am, Kit thought. “In there?” he said, breaking his resolution immediately.
In there.
“So let’s go.”
Ponch stalked forward into the darkness. The way he was walking made Kit almost feel like laughing a little, even through his nervousness. It was the way Ponch stalked squirrels out in the backyard: stealthy, a little stiff-legged. That’s all we need in here, he thought as he followed Ponch into the dimness. To be attacked by millions of evil squirrels. Then he hastily squashed that thought: all he needed was for it to come true.
As the darkness around them got deeper, Kit pushed that thought away as one it was probably smarter not to encourage. “Can you see all right?” he said very softly to Ponch.
I can smell all right. Seeing doesn’t matter so much.
Kit swallowed as the darkness got deeper. To you, maybe, he thought. He started to reach into his otherspace pocket for his manual, to pull out a “virtual flashlight” spell he sometimes had recourse to. Then he paused. Maybe not a smart idea to do wizardries in here unless absolutely necessary: might screw up something Darryl has going. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his smartphone, and brought up the flashlight app that made the whole screen go bright. When it came on, he turned it toward another immense carving set into the wall to their left. Kit held the light on it for a few seconds and quickly turned the phone’s light elsewhere, reminded much too clearly of the alien with the laser eggbeater. The carving could have been one of that alien’s relatives in a very bad mood, and it seemed to be looking right at him—not only with all its eyes, but also with all its teeth.
Kit shook his head and moved away, using the phone-flashlight to look around as Ponch led him further into the hill. There was no dismissing this space as just a cave. It was a long hall, a vast corridor of a dwelling of some kind, as intricately carved inside as it had been outside—as if thousands of creatures with a passion for strange statuary had been working here for centuries. Where the walls were lacking actual statues, they were wrought in weird but wonderful bas-reliefs, vividly colored, touched here and there with the glint of gold or the glassy sheen of gems. Kit moved past them in a mixture of nervousness and admiration, his light flicking past stern creatures with vast, spread wings; tall, rigid humanoid shapes with arms held in positions ungainly but still somehow expressive; strange beast shapes whose expressions were peculiarly more human than those of the man-shapes that alternated with them. The place made Kit think of the set of some kind of adventure movie about exploring ancient tombs, but realized in a hundred times more detail—every chisel mark accounted for, the backs of the statues as perfectly executed as their fronts, everything sharp and clear, down to the last grain of sand or dust.