Intangible

by C. A. Gray

  Kane set the pace at an easy canter even though at first there wasn’t much to see. On either side of the road were huge fields. Peter had never seen grass or crops so green, sparkling like vast emeralds in the sun. There was a river at the far end of the pasture, and the vegetation seemed to glisten as if with morning dew. Far in the outer reaches of the field, they could see specks, which must have been workers.

  Peter tried to grip the edges of Lily’s jumper so that he wouldn’t actually have to touch her skin. He probably looked like a sissy, he thought, riding behind a girl, and he suspected that Brock would take the mickey out of him for it at the first opportunity.

  “So,” Lily said after a few minutes. Her tone was suddenly serious.

  “So,” Peter repeated. He wasn’t going to help her out.

  “Wonder who the other two are.”

  “Well, apparently Brock isn’t one of them,” said Peter evasively. “At least not according to Eustace.”

  “Ha! Can you imagine his ego getting any bigger if he found out he was supposed to save the world?” Half a beat later Lily went on, “Seriously, though, Peter. You do know it’s got to be you in the end, right?”

  Peter’s grip tightened on her jumper but he pushed himself away from her involuntarily as he snapped, “Can we talk about something else, please?”

  She paused. “Okay.”

  He couldn’t see her face but from her tone, he could tell he’d hurt her feelings. Good, he thought, but he felt a twinge of guilt anyway. Lily was impossible to figure out. One minute she had a razor tongue, and the next, she was crying. How was he supposed to know what would set her off?

  When she was still silent a few minutes later, Peter realized she was waiting for him to suggest an alternative topic. Finally he said, “Um. Did you sleep all right last night?”

  Lily let out a short laugh. “Is that the best you can do?”

  Peter felt his irritation rise again. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re obviously trying to apologize for snapping at me,” Lily said, “but instead of just saying you’re sorry, you’re trying to make polite conversation about something so irrelevant that it’s completely absurd. You don’t care how I slept last night and we both know it.” She paused, and then added, “And I slept horribly, by the way. Thank you for asking.”

  Peter was stunned to silence. He wasn’t sure if he was more affronted at her importunity, or impressed at her insight.

  As if reading his thoughts, she said, “Don’t feel bad. I’ve spent most of my life listening to the penumbra verbalize people’s motivations, and there are only so many to choose from. After a while I became an expert at cutting through the crap.”

  “Huh,” said Peter, and thought for another moment before he added, “That’s kind of… terrifying.”

  Lily started laughing incredulously, and after a minute Peter found himself laughing too. It felt refreshingly normal.

  As the wind flew through their hair, Peter turned around to look behind them. The castle was now far enough away that he could see the entire structure clearly: it was tall and proud against the cloudless sky. The turrets, spires, and buttresses seemed to sprawl this way and that, not necessarily with any clear purpose, and towers sprung out of every nook and cranny like mushrooms sprouting from a log. Even at a distance, they could see that it was plastered with a faintly gold tint, and at the top fluttered a flag bearing a crest of two flaming red, entwined dragons.

  “So what do you think Kane’s deal is?” Lily said finally. That sobered them both.

  “You mean why did he suddenly turn all sugar and sunshine today when he was such a prat last night?” asked Peter. “He’s up to something, of course. I have no idea what it is…”

  “Did you believe Isdemus last night, when he said he didn’t think Kane was trying to kill you?” she asked.

  Peter was momentarily surprised she knew about that, until he remembered she’d been eavesdropping on the whole conversation. He thought for a minute and said, “Yeah. Or at least I think Isdemus believes it.”

  “You do think he meant for us to hit his car, though?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Peter murmured. “If he meant for us to hit it, though, and he didn’t mean to kill us, then I don’t really understand what he expected to happen.”

  “He expected you wouldn’t be able to stop the accident from happening, of course,” said Lily, as if it were obvious. “He probably just didn’t mean for it to be so severe.”

  “I’m still not convinced I did stop it,” said Peter.

  “Oh, be real, Peter.”

  “Something happened, I’m not denying that,” he said defensively. “I just can’t figure out why everyone seems ready to jump to the conclusion that I broke the laws of gravity and stopped time… or that anybody else did, for that matter, since technically if it did happen it could have been any one of us! But it didn’t happen – laws are laws. There has to be another explanation!”

  “Peter! You yourself told us about the meadow with the rainbow and all those images of the accident, and we all saw that car stop in mid-air and reverse. Cole heard you speaking the Ancient Tongue. Why are you being so stubborn? The world doesn’t all fit into your neat little science box, admit it!”

  “I will not admit that!” Peter said heatedly, “There’s an explanation for everything, Lily! And by the way, you were muttering something in that car too, I might point out!”

  “I was whimpering because I thought I was about to die!”

  “Well, maybe you were whimpering in the Ancient Tongue, for all we know!” he retorted. “Look, I don’t know what that meadow was, but maybe my life just flashed before my eyes and the adrenaline made my brain do crazy things –”

  “Like freeze a car in mid-air?” she said sarcastically.

  “Like create a scenario in which I had the capacity to collapse the wave function!”

  She paused, and then said stubbornly, “I know you want me to ask you what that means. Well, I won’t.”

  “It’s an interpretation of quantum physics. It means out of lots of possible realities, I can choose the one I want.”

  “Evidently I don’t have to ask you, because you’re going to tell me anyway,” said Lily dryly.

  “It’s something I’ve spent years thinking and dreaming about,” Peter went on, as if he hadn’t heard her, “so it’s not all that surprising that in a moment of extreme stress, that would be where my mind went…”

  “You’re telling me that in that critical moment, when you thought you were about to die, what popped into your mind was quantum physics?” Lily asked with a snort.

  “Well, not like that,” Peter scowled, even though she couldn’t see his expression. “I wasn’t theorizing. I was… I don’t know, fantasizing about a way out of the situation. Look, it’s not that hard to understand, I’ll just explain it to you really quickly –”

  “Peter, I don’t care.”

  “You will care! This is awesome! Listen, there was this really famous experiment called the Double Slit Experiment. Scientists fired photon particles at a wall with two slits in it, and got a wave pattern. That didn’t make sense, though, because they fired particles, which should have meant they’d see one single point where the particle went through one of the slits and hit the back wall. Instead, it looked like that single particle somehow split itself in two, went through both slits at the same time as a wave, and interfered with itself!”

  “Peter,” said Lily.

  “Wait, wait, here’s where it gets fun,” Peter said, anticipating her delight. “So then the scientists installed photon sensors to see which slit the photon actually went through. Then guess what happened?”

  “I’m on the edge of my seat.”

  “As soon as they installed the sensors, the particle stopped acting like a wave and behaved like a particle again, went through only one slit, and they got a single point on the back wall, instead of a wave-like interference patt
ern!”

  He waited for her to get it. Then he tried again, “The scientists’ expectations changed the outcome of the experiment. The particle did what they told it to do.”

  “Oh!” she said. Then a second later, she added, “Nope, still don’t get what that has to do with the accident.”

  “Okay, okay. Think of the wave they saw on that back wall at first as a representation of all of the possible locations of the particle. Then when they installed the sensors, out of all of the possibilities in the wave, the particle had to pick just one. One of those possible locations became its reality, and all the others went away. That’s the collapse of the wave function.

  “Larger objects have waves of possible locations too, it’s just that the probability that matter will behave in some way contrary to the laws of classical physics is so low that it’s effectively negligible in the real world. Once we hit Kane’s car at that angle and that speed, it should have killed us. The chance that all of the molecules in the Land Rover would simultaneously reverse their course without landing on top of us was astronomically low… but it was not zero.”

  She was silent for a long moment. “So what you’re saying is, there could be a scientific explanation for you stopping that car!”

  “No,” said Peter stubbornly, “because probability dictates –”

  “You broke the rules!” Lily interrupted, paraphrasing Isdemus from the night before.

  “Or maybe I dreamed the whole thing –”

  “It happened, Peter!” she protested. “And I’ll bet you that’s exactly what Kane was trying to prove you couldn’t do.”

  Peter had been just about to argue automatically with whatever she said next, but this stopped him cold. “But why? What possible motive could he have?”

  “Can’t you tell?” she said, surprised. “Isdemus said he became obsessed with you. He admitted to stalking you the moment we met him. You saved all of our lives, but he seemed almost mad about it. He’s jealous of you.”

  Now it was Peter’s turn to be surprised. “Why, because Isdemus and the rest of the Watchers think I’m the Child of the Prophecy?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What, you think he wants to be the Child of the Prophecy instead?” Peter scoffed.

  “Yes, Peter. That’s exactly what I think.”

  Chapter 13

  Peter fell silent for a long moment, absorbing Lily’s theory as the fields merged into Carlion’s version of suburbia. Smaller castles dotted the landscape that once must have belonged to lords and ladies, like Sir Ector, and the other knights of Arthur’s day. The servants of each castle bustled about in livery very much like that of Isdemus’s servants, except in different colors: green with silver trimming, royal blue with white, and so forth. One of the castles had a garden in front, and several enormous fireflies hovered over it. Peter did a double take and realized they were not fireflies at all, but little nimbus pixies.

  Far in the distance, he could see the edges of an orchard advancing very slowly towards the road. He saw a single speck in the distance that looked like a farmer, and then suddenly trees sprang up from the soil and grew towards the sky before his very eyes. That was when Peter realized that in the last thirty minutes or so of their ride, he had seen a good number of field hands, but not a single piece of farm equipment. He remembered what Kane had said the night before: “We don’t use technology because we don’t need it.”

  Then he remembered what Fides Dignus had said about exploring the castle: “I’d save it for a day when the precipitation specialists order rain.” Peter looked up, suddenly suspicious of the cloudless sky, revealing an uncommonly cheerful sun.

  Lily began to pull back on Candace’s reins, and she slowed to a trot. The castles had thinned out, and aside from the occasional harried servant galloping past them into town, the countryside was eerily silent, like the calm before a storm.

  Then, all at once, the city burst into view. The main road emptied into a major thoroughfare, impassable by horse. Kane stopped at the hitching post just outside of town and dismounted. The others did the same, their eyes so wide that they scarcely had attention to spare in order to glance at one another in stunned amazement.

  Several of the spires on either side of the street towered high, marked with battlements just for show. Cobbled red sandstone paved the street itself: Peter had never seen a color like it before. He happened to glance over at Brock, who was shaking his head with a look somewhere between shock and disgust.

  Everything was loud, from the colors to the sounds to the smells. The villagers of Carlion possessed absolutely no concept of complimentary or matching colors, and instead seemed to be trying to out-do each other in garishness. There were emerald greens and fuchsias, with clashing floral and plaid patterns beneath royal purple silk capes and leather boots with zips up the center, which seemed to be all the rage. An elderly woman passed by with a basket over her arm filled with eggs and laced with a crimson ribbon through the handle that ended in an enormous floppy bow. She tipped her hat to them in greeting, which burst with a fan of feathers arrayed as if a miniature peacock had plopped down on her head. Nor was she the only one: ostentatious hats adorned the heads of nearly every female not dressed in the livery of one of the castles. Some were shaped like medieval-style dunce’s caps with veils floating on top of them, some like eighteenth century bonnets, and still others like wide-brimmed sombreros. All of them burst with feathers, flowers, and the occasional piece of fruit.

  Squawking birds and braying donkeys roamed throughout the crowd, and the clop of obedient horses and the delighted screams of children pierced the air. Several of the children pounded away at a peculiar kind of instrument that seemed to be a cross between a bell and a cymbal. About every fourth person glowed like the noonday sun, and some of them fluttered above the crowd, aloft on one, two, or even four pairs of wings. There were giants, elves, and graceful hybrid creatures that none of them recognized, and none of the townspeople gave the slightest indication of surprise at their presence.

  Cole caught up with Peter and said anxiously, “Some of those creatures look exactly like the ones that attacked us last night!”

  “Yes, but they’re not,” said Lily. “Those are nimbi. They glow.”

  “I know, but they look the same!” Cole insisted.

  “They are the same,” said Kane, sidling up to him and adding, “In substance, anyway. Just like good people and bad people are all still people.”

  “Brock?” said Lily. “You all right?”

  Brock looked like he was about to be sick. He nodded with difficulty but did not reply.

  “What’s with him?” Peter asked, trying to sound casual. In truth, though, he felt just a bit nauseous himself.

  “His worldview is coming in direct contradiction with his senses,” said Kane matter-of-factly. “We call it the Schism Response. It’s not uncommon.”

  Cole looked at his brother with concern. “How come the rest of us aren’t having it, then?”

  “I was already a Seer,” said Lily, shrugging.

  Kane added to Cole, “You’re pretty gullible, too. You’d probably have become a Seer even on the outside, if anybody had ever pointed out to you that the penumbra exist.”

  Cole looked affronted at first, but he thought about it for a moment and nodded in as if he couldn’t really argue. Then he looked at Peter. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “I’m…” Peter began, swallowing hard. “Sure. Sure.”

  Kane flashed Peter a superior smile and announced to Cole, though his eyes never left Peter’s face, “Peter is too much of an empiricist not to have at least a few adjustment issues, aren’t you, Peter? Having been raised by a Watcher had to help, though, at least a little.”

  Peter flinched, and then scowled at Kane.

  “What’s an empiricist?” said Cole.

  “He means I only believe in things I can experience with my senses.” Peter looked around at the city, which assaulted nearly every one of his sense
s to the point of overload. Then he added grudgingly, “I’d say this qualifies.”

  Lily patted Peter on the shoulder sympathetically, and said, “You’ll get used to it.”

  “Pete, look!” Cole cried. He pointed at a cart in the street that read Pickled Snapdragon. “They’re giving samples! Want to try?”

  “Are you completely mental?” Brock snapped. “You can’t just eat something off the street. It could be poisoned!”

  “It’s not ‘off the street,’” Cole retorted, taken aback. “They’re selling it, aren’t they?”

  Kane watched the brothers bicker with amusement. “He’s entering Stage Two of the Schism Response already. That was quick,” he observed to no one in particular.

  “Oh yeah? What’s Stage Two?” Brock demanded.

  Kane regarded him mildly. “Stage One is shock. Stage Two is either misdirected anger or paranoia – depending on the person. Sometimes both.”

  Brock’s jaw muscles popped out as he ground his teeth and took a threatening step towards Kane, who did not look the least bit concerned, even though Brock was significantly bigger than he was. Brock snarled, “Where should I be directing my anger, then?”

  “Brock!” said Cole, alarmed.

  “Back off, little brother,” Brock growled at Cole without looking at him, still towering over Kane.

  Instead of responding, Kane merely smiled and sidestepped him, approaching the cart that boasted Pickled Snapdragon. When he got close enough, he said to the owner pleasantly, “Hello, Dolores.”

  The round woman with rosy cheeks looked up at him as he approached, and exclaimed with surprise, “Well, bless me, if it isn’t Kane the Watcher!” She spoke with a thick cockney accent, and winked at him. “Haven’t seen you around in ages! Isdemus hasn’t been keeping you too busy, has he?”

  “Oh, I spend almost all my time outside city walls these days,” Kane replied with a charming smile.

  “Well, of course you do – you’re so important, being the youngest Watcher ever and all!” She looked as if she might have pinched his cheek if she’d been close enough. “Tell me the truth, now,” she added, and leaned forward, lowering her voice, “what’s it like out there? On the outside? Is really it how they say – with scandals and adventures all the time?”