Then, by mutual resignation, they drew apart. She brought a cloth to his face and cleaned him up, and he realized that half the tears were his own. Through the blur he saw the shimmer of the landscape about them, the reaction of the environment to an expression of deep truth. The unicorns perceived it too, and were turning to look at the couple.
But now they both had control again. They uttered no further words, letting their statement of love be the last.
Stile turned to Neysa to bid her farewell: But she stood facing away from him, standing with her tail toward him—the classic expression of disapproval. The woman might forgive him his departure; the unicorn did not.
He could not blame her. His body, so recently so warm, now felt chilled, as if his heart had been frozen. Had he expected Neysa, his closest friend in Phaze, to welcome his announcement with forward-perking ears? There was no good way to conclude this painful scene. Stile walked silently away.
Clip stood near, watching his sister Neysa. His mane was half flared in anger, and his breath had the tinge of fire, but he was silent. Stile knew Clip was furious with Neysa, but had no authority to interfere. There was justice in it; Neysa expressed the attitude the Lady Blue did not, in her fashion freeing the Lady to be forgiving. The complete emotion could not be expressed by one person, so had been portioned between two.
The Brown Adept was waiting for him at the edge of the unicorn circle. “I told the Stallion,” she said. “He’ll help.” She looked toward Neysa and the Lady Blue. “I guess it didn’t work out so well, huh?”
“I fear I’m not much for diplomacy,” Stile said. “I don’t want to go, they don’t want me to go—there’s no positive side.”
“Why dost thou not just stay here when the frames part?” she asked naively.
“I am a usurper here in Phaze. This good life is not mine to keep—not at the expense of mine other self. I was brought here to do a job, and when the job is done I must leave. So it has been prophesied.”
“I guess when I’m grown up, maybe I’ll understand that kind of nonsense.”
“Maybe,” Stile agreed wryly.
Stile mounted Clip and they returned the way they had come, setting small markers to show the prospective route for the ball. There was no interference from the other Adepts; they were of course biding their time, since they were unable to strike at him magically at the moment They would have their minions here in force to stop the ball, though! The unicorns would have an ugly task, protecting this decoy route. The irony was that this was an excellent path; if there were no opposition, the ball could travel rapidly here.
When they recrossed into the zone of juxtaposition, his other self rejoined him. The personality of Blue assimilated the new experience and shrank away.
“Thou dost look peaked,” the Brown Adept said. “Is aught wrong?”
“It is mine other self,” Stile said. “I fear he likes not what I have done.”
“The true Blue? Speak to me, other Adept.”
“Aye, Brown,” the other self said. “But surely thou dost not wish to be burdened with the problems of adults.”
“Oh, sure,” she said eagerly. “ ’Specially if it’s about a woman. Some day I’ll grow up and break hearts too.”
“That thou surely wilt,” Blue agreed. “My concern is this: for many years did I love the Lady Blue, though she loved me not. When finally I did win her heart as well as her hand, I learned that she was destined to love another after me, more than me. This was one reason I yielded up my life. Now I know it is mine other self she loves. Am I to return to that situation, at his expense?”
“Oh, that is a bad one!” Brown agreed. “But maybe she will learn to love thee again. Thou dost have charm, thou knowest; the Lady Machine’s nerve circuits do run hot and cold when thou dost address her.”
“The Lady Machine is programmed to love mine image,” Blue said. “I admit she is a fascinating creature, like none I have encountered before. But the Lady Blue is not that type. She will act in all ways proper, as she did before, and be the finest wife any man could have, but her deepest heart will never revert. Her love never backtracks.”
“Then what good is it, coming back to life?” Brown asked, with the innocent directness of her age.
“There are other things in life besides love,” Blue said. “The Lady will need protection, and creatures will need attention. There will be much work for me to do—just as there will be for mine other self in the fabulous science frame. He will be no happier than I.”
Stile had no argument with that. His other self was the same person as himself, in a superficially different but fundamentally similar situation, facing life with a woman who was not precisely right. The days of great adventure and expectation were almost past. To lose the present engagement would be to die, knowing the frames would in time perish also as the unrelieved stress developed to the breaking point. To win would be to return to a somewhat commonplace existence—for both his selves. The choice was between disaster and mediocrity.
“I’m not sure I want to grow up, if that’s what it’s like,” Brown said.
They reached the ball of Phazite. Sheen had returned to it also. “Is the other route ready?” Stile asked.
“Not quite. We must delay another hour. But it will be worth the wait.”
“Then I have time to make a golem body for Blue,” Brown exclaimed. Evidently she had resigned herself quickly to the situation and was determined to do her part even if Stile and Blue were not destined for happiness. “I hope I can do it right. I haven’t had much practice with lifelike figures, especially male ones. My golems are mostly neuter.”
Stile could appreciate the problem. “Maybe Trool can help. He’s quite a sculptor.”
Trool appeared. “I model in stone, not wood.”
“We’ll convert stone to flesh,” Sheen said. “All we need is the form.”
So while the golems rolled the great ball along its soon-to-be-diverted course, Trool the troll sculpted in stone. He excavated a rock from the ground in short order, his huge gaunt hands scraping the earth and sand away with a velocity no normal person could approach, and freed a stone of suitable size by scraping out the rock beneath it with his stiffened fingers. Apparently the stone became soft under his touch, like warming butter. Stile picked up a half-melted chip and found it to be cold, hard stone. No wonder trolls could tunnel so readily; the hardest rock was very much like putty in their hands. No wonder, also, they were so much feared by ordinary folk. Who could stand against hands that could gouge solid stone? Trool had stood with the Lady Blue against the ogres, Stile remembered, and the ogres had been cautious, not exchanging blows with him. They had been able to overpower him, of course, by using their own mode of combat.
When Trool had his man-sized fragment, he glanced at Stile and began to mold the image. Rapidly, magically, the form took shape—head, arms, legs. The troll was indeed a talented sculptor; the statue was perfect. Soon it was standing braced against a tree—a naked man, complete in every part, just like Stile.
Sheen and Brown were watching, amazed. “Gee, you sure are better at carving than I am,” Brown said. “My prede—pred—the former Brown Adept could make figures just like people, but I can’t, yet.”
“I can’t make them live,” Trool said shortly.
Then Sheen made magic from the book, and the statue turned to flesh. But it remained cold, inanimate. The Brown Adept laid her hands on it, and it animated—a golem made of flesh. The new body was ready.
“Say—it worked!” Brown exclaimed, pleased.
Stile wondered how this carved and animated figure could have living guts and bones and brain. Presumably these had been taken care of by Sheen’s spell. Magic was funny stuff!
But the soul could not yet enter this body. Two selves could not exist separately in the zone of juxtaposition. The second body would only become truly alive when the frames separated.
“Will it be all right until needed?” Stile asked. “It won’t spoil?”
“My golems don’t spoil!” Brown said indignantly. “It will keep until the soul enters it. Then it’ll be alive and will have to eat and sleep and you-know.”
“Then park it in a safe place,” he said. “And let the harmonica remain with it, so that his soul can find it in case there is a problem.” For despite all his planning, Stile was not at all sure he would succeed in his mission, or necessarily survive the next few hours. Little had been heard from the enemy Adepts recently; they had surely not been idle.
Sheen conjured body and harmonica to the Blue Demesnes, which were in no part of the current action. Stile felt another pang of separation as he lost the harmonica; it had been such an important part of his life in Phaze.
The necessary time had passed. They had the golems start the ball on its new course to the south. “But make a spell of illusion,” Stile directed. “I want it to seem that the ball is proceeding on the course Brown and I just charted.”
“I can generate a ball of similar size, made of ordinary rock,” Sheen said.
“And I’ll have some of my golems push it,” Brown said. “It won’t be nearly as heavy, so I’ll tell them not to push as hard.”
Soon the mock ball diverged from the real one, and a contingent of golems started it on its way. Stile wasn’t sure how long this would fool the Adepts, but it was worth a try.
Meanwhile, under cover of a fog that Sheen generated, the main part of the golem force levered the Phazite ball back toward the Purple Mountains. A door opened in the hillside, and they saw the tunnel the trolls had made—a smooth, round tube of just the right size, slanting very gently down. They rolled the boulder to it, and it began to travel down its channel on its own.
“From here on, it’s easy,” Sheen said. “This tube will carry the Phazite kilometers along in a short time. At the far end, the tunnel spirals up to the top of a substantial foothill; from there it can roll north with such momentum the enemy will not be able to stop it before it crosses into Proton proper.”
“Good strategy,” Stile agreed. “But can the golems get it up that spiral?”
“My friends in Proton have installed a power winch.”
Stile laughed. “I keep forgetting we can draw on science, too, now! This begins to seem easy!”
They followed the ball as it moved, Stile and Clip fitting comfortably in the tunnel, Brown’s golem steed hunching over, and Sheen riding a motorized unicycle she had conjured. She was enjoying her role as enchantress.
The ball accelerated, forcing them to hurry to keep it in sight. Even so, it drew ahead, rounding a bend and disappearing.
They hastened on, but the ball was already around the next bend, still out of sight. When they passed that bend, they looked along an extended straightaway—and the ball was not there.
Stile wasn’t sure whether he or his other self first realized the truth. “Hostile magic!” he cried.
“Can’t be,” Sheen protested. “I had it counterspelled.”
“Use a new spell to locate the ball.”
She used a simple locator-spell. “It’s off to the side,” she said, surprised.
“That last curve—they made a detour!” Stile said. “Had a crew in to tunnel—no Adept magic—goblins, maybe, or some borers from Proton—they can draw on the same resources we can—the ball went down that, while we followed the proper channel.”
They charged back to the curve. There it was. An offshoot tunnel masked by an illusion-spell that had to have been instituted before Sheen’s arrival. The enemy Adepts had anticipated this tunnel ploy and quietly prepared for it.
No—they couldn’t have placed the spell before Sheen got there, because Sheen had supervised the construction of the tunnel and had her magic in force throughout. Something else—ah. The offshoot tunnel was in fact an old Proton mine shaft. A small amount of work had tied it in to the new troll tunnel, and a tiny generator had sealed off the entrance with an opaque force field. No magic, and minimal effort. Someone had been very clever.
“I don’t like this,” Stile said. “They evidently know what we’re doing here, and someone with a good mind is on the scene. We’re being outmaneuvered. While we made a duplicate image of me, they did this.”
But there was nothing much to do except go after the Phazite. They started down the detour tunnel, hoping to catch up with the ball before it reached whatever destination the enemy had plotted. Sheen’s magic showed no enemies nearby; like her own workers, they had departed as soon as their job was done. The tunnels were empty because the presence of anyone could alert the other side to what was going on.
They heard a noise ahead. Something was moving, heavily, making the tunnel shudder.
Ooops! The ball of Phazite was rolling back toward them at horrendous velocity!
“Get out of its way!” Stile cried. “A hundred and fifty tons will crush us flat!”
But the ball was moving too swiftly; they could not outrun it, and the intersection of tunnels was too far back. “Make a spell, Lady Machine!” Brown screamed.
Sheen made a gesture—and abruptly their entire party was in the tunnel beyond the rolling ball, watching the thing retreat. Stile felt weak in the knees, and not because of their injury. He didn’t like being dependent on someone else for magic. Was that the way others felt about him?
“See—it slants up, there ahead,” Brown said brightly. She, at least, was used to accepting enchantment from others, though she was Adept herself. “They fixed it up so the ball would roll up, then reverse and come right back at us.”
“Timed so we would be in the middle when it arrived,” Sheen said.
“No direct magic—but a neat trap,” Stile agreed. “They must have assumed that if the book blocked out Adept magic, it would leave us helpless. They didn’t realize that a non-Adept would be doing the spells.”
“Funny Trool didn’t warn us,” Brown said.
Trool appeared, chagrined. “I saw it not. I know not how I missed it.”
For a moment Stile wondered whether the troll could have betrayed them. But he found he couldn’t believe that. For one thing, he had confidence in his judgment of creatures. For another, it was a woman—a young-seeming one—who had been prophesied to betray him, and that had already come to pass before the prophecy reached him. So there had to have been enough illusion magic, or clever maneuvering, to deceive everyone in this case; no betrayal was involved.
“Set a deflector at the mouth of the detour,” Stile told Sheen, “so that when the ball reverses again, it will go down the correct tunnel.”
She lifted a finger. “Done.”
“You sure know a lot of spells,” Brown said.
“Robots assimilate programmed material very rapidly,” Sheen replied. “The advantages of being a machine are becoming clearer to me, now that I have considered life.”
They marched up to the intersection of tubes. The ball had already reversed course and traveled down its proper channel. They followed it without further event to the end.
“Be alert for other hostile effects,” Stile told Sheen. “The enemy can’t hit us with new magic, but, as we have seen, the prepared traps can be awkward enough.”
Sheen held her finger up as if testing the wind. “No magic here,” she reported.
They stood at the winch. It was a heavy-duty model, powered by a chip of Protonite, and its massive cables were adequate to the need. They placed the harness about the ball; it fitted with little bearings so that the ball could roll within its confinement. With the pulleys and leverage available, the ball should move up the spiral.
It did move up. There were no hitches. Yet Stile worried. He knew the enemy would strike; he didn’t know when and how. Why hadn’t they destroyed the winch, since obviously they had had access to this tunnel? “Trool?” he asked.
There was no response from the troll. Probably he was out surveying the situation, and would report the moment he spied anything significant.
The winch cranked the ball of Phazite up the spirali
ng tunnel, providing it the elevation it would need to roll all the way across the juxtaposition zone to Proton. Once that boulder started rolling, it should be prohibitively difficult to stop. Victory seemed very near at hand—and still Stile worried. He was absolutely sure something ugly was incipient.
At last they reached the top. The winch delivered the ball to a platform housed in earth, surely resembling a mound of the Little Folk from outside. All they had to do now was open the gate and nudge it out.
Trool appeared. “Found thee at last!” he exclaimed. “Take not this route, Adept!”
Stile looked at him sourly. “We have already taken this route. Where hast thou been?”
“Looking all over for thee! There are a hundred traces of thy presence, all mistaken—until this one.”
“Diversion magic,” Stile said. “False clues to my whereabouts, laid down in advance, so that I become the needle in the haystack. But why would they try to mislead thee?”
“Because I have spied on them. Barely did I reach thee in time to give warning; the goblins have bypassed the giants, indulged in forced marches, and are lurking in ambush for thee here. Thou canst not pass this way, Adept.”
“Nonsense,” Sheen said. “I detect no goblins within seventy kilometers.”
“Thou shouldst get beyond their screening spells,” Trool said. “From behind, they are naught. There are maybe five hundred goblins there, armed with Proton weapons and busy making entrenchments. That much did I see; I looked no more, so that I could return in haste to warn thee. But then did I face the enchantment that concealed thee from me. All of it is passive magic, set in place before we came here, yet a nuisance.”
“I knew things were too easy,” Stile muttered. “They left us alone so we would continue on into their trap. We have perhaps four hours remaining to get the Phazite across the north border of the juxtaposition zone. We can not backtrack now. We shall have to proceed.”
“I can neutralize the screen magic,” Sheen said. “But that will not remove the goblins. The enemy Adepts will prevent me from performing any mass spell on them.”
“So there are, after all, limits to the book,” Stile said with a wry smile.