Worldweavers: Cybermage

by Alma Alexander

  “I’ve got one,” said Ben. He started describing a pastry he had once 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 description 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.

  At last Thea wiped her fingers on a napkin and crossed over to the sideboard to pour herself a mug of coffee while the rest of them began to mop up the shattered remains of the French pastries.

  “What are we supposed to be doing today?” Magpie said, pushing her plate away.

  “Going home,” Ben replied. “You know. The real world.”

  Thea glanced at him and he dropped his eyes. Then Terry pushed his chair away from the table.

  “We’d better go find Humphrey then,” he said. “If there are things I ought to be doing back at the other Nexus, I’d better figure out what the FBM wants.”

  Tess and Magpie fell into step beside him, still discussing ideas for highly unlikely dishes they could try and get the house to provide for lunch. Ben hesitated, as though on the verge of saying something.

  “You coming?” Terry called.

  “Just getting coffee,” Thea called back, stirring cream vigorously into her cup.

  She was far behind the others, when she finally drifted out of the breakfast room—and then she came to an abrupt stop in the midst of the main hall, her eye suddenly drawn to the library door, which stood invitingly ajar.

  Elemental house. Tesla built this house—made this house. The professor’s grandfather knew Tesla personally. Is there anything in that library about Tesla?

  With a guilty glance after the other four, who had apparently marched straight off to the professor’s study, Thea slipped into the library, scanning the floor-to-ceiling shelves. They were neatly stacked with books that ranged from paperbacks that looked almost brand-new to great square folios of embossed leather.

  “Where would I even begin?” she muttered to herself with a sinking feeling in her stomach.

  But this was the Elemental house, after all, and she had thought her desire even if she had not expressed it out loud. A closer look at a side table revealed several books neatly stacked there; the cover of the top book bore a face that Thea recognized.

  It was a biography of Nikola Tesla, a much-worn paperback that had clearly been read many times. The second was another biography, much newer, a glossy hardcover with a dozen pages of grainy black-and-white photographs inserted in the middle. The third and largest was a coffee-table book of Tesla’s life and achievements, lavishly illustrated. The fourth seemed to be another biography, but the alphabet was different—curlicued Cyrillic letters, perhaps Tesla’s native Serbian. This, too, had photographs bound in the middle, so even if Thea could not read it, the book was still potentially valuable. The book at the very bottom of the pile was a leather-bound journal that bore dated entries and looked like a private diary. That would have been the prize—except the contents of the notebook were in Spanish.

  She nodded her thanks to the room at large as she reluctantly put down the diary and flipped through the four published volumes in turn. She quickly laid aside the Serbian biography and the two glossier books, and picked up the paperback for a closer look. It had been annotated in pencil, in the same firm, florid handwriting that graced the Spanish diary…and, alas, in the same language. The meaning of one of the comments, though, was clear to Thea—an emphatic, scribbled Sí! in the book’s margin, right next to a passage that drew her immediate curiosity. It appeared to be a direct quote by Tesla himself, about his great rival Thomas Edison:

  “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of a bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. With a little time and calculation I would have saved him ninety percent of his labor,” Thea read out in a voice barely above a whisper.

  Somehow this seemed to be an important insight, although Thea could not immediately say why. She realized with a start that the others must be wondering what had become of her, but she felt an urgent need to spend more time with these books, to learn more about the man who had made this house and had somehow—whether accidentally or intentionally—transferred the essence of his living self into a white cube that had survived the death of his body by more than half a century.

  She gathered up the five volumes and, feeling self-conscious, addressed the library shelves.

  “I’d like to borrow these, if that’s okay, House,” she said. “I will make sure that they are returned as soon as possible, but please don’t whisk them away and put them back until I’m done with them. And if it’s okay, I’d like to take them with me when we leave here today. I’ll get them back here as soon as I can.” She paused, glancing around. “I’ll take silence as assent. If you don’t want me to take them for some reason, I’m sure you’ll find a way to let me know.”

  She gathered up her half-full coffee mug, clutching the books to her chest with her free hand, and made her way hastily to the professor’s study.

  “We were wondering what had happened to you,” Humphrey said as she entered.

  “I paid a visit to the library,” Thea said. “The house showed me these five books, and I asked if I could borrow them. Apparently it was okay with the idea.”

  “You’ve only got four,” Ben said, tilting his head for a closer look.

  Thea glanced down at the books in her arms. The four published volumes were still there; somehow the old Spanish diary had disappeared from her arms.

  “There were five,” she said. “The fifth was apparently too precious to lend. It was a diary, handwritten. It makes no difference, really, because I couldn’t have read it anyway—it was all in Spanish. But it seems it’s okay for me to hold on to these.”

  Humphrey sighed. “Well, I guess that’s okay. The house seems to know what it shouldn’t let out of its sight—and I must say, I wouldn’t mind taking a look at that diary myself. I’ll have a look in the library later; perhaps the House will be kind enough to leave it out for me. But in the meantime, we’d better conclude our business so that Mrs. Chen can whisk you back to the Academy.”

  “I’ll keep on working on those printouts, sir,” Terry said.

  “It is almost too much to credit, but if Thea is right and it’s somehow Tesla himself within that cube world…I don’t suppose I have to tell the five of you that what you’ve learned here shouldn’t be discussed beyond these four walls.”

  There was another knock on the door, and Rafe stuck his head into the room.

  “Kay has everything running smoothly back at the office,” he said. “Luana wants to see you about some results, but Kay told her you’d be in touch when you got back. Have I missed something?”

  “Who’s Kay?” Tess said in a low voice, close to Thea’s ear.

  Humphrey glanced up at that. “Not that it’s any of your business, young lady, but Kay is my other assistant, the one holding down the fort in Washington. And no, Rafe, you haven’t missed anything huge. We’re still looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  Thea frowned slightly, as the Tesla quote from the book under her arm swam back into her mind.

  Kaschei’s needle.

  Tesla had transferred his mind and spirit into a vessel other than his body. Thea had been thinking about that in terms of the layered Kaschei s
tory, and assuming that the “needle” had been Tesla himself. But suddenly things shifted in her mind, and she was presented with a series of memories in quick succession. Tesla in the Colorado lab, his hand in the column of flame. Humphrey’s voice—His most extraordinary achievements in Colorado seemed to have diminished him. Four birds. One dead pigeon cradled in Tesla’s hands, a keening cry of unspeakable mourning raised over the small body. The white pigeon in the window of Tesla’s room, there at the end, the one they had all seen in their dream. Tesla’s famous feeding of pigeons in the parks of New York.

  Pigeons.

  The needle in the egg in the duck…in the duck…

  “Oh my God,” she said abruptly, out loud.

  Everyone swiveled to face her.

  “What?” Humphrey said sharply.

  “I’ve been thinking of Tesla as the needle. What if I’m wrong—what if he tried to preserve himself even further? It’s the Kaschei story all over again….”

  “What was that, now?” Rafe said.

  But it was Magpie who made the connection.

  “The pigeons,” she said, gripping both arms of her chair tightly. “It’s the pigeons. You said he was a quad-Element mage—there were four pigeons.”

  “He transferred the Elemental magic out of himself,” Thea said faintly. “Into the birds.”

  “But something went wrong,” Tess said. “One of the birds died. We saw it die.”

  Humphrey’s head was snapping from one to the other as though he were watching a tennis game. “Are you suggesting that Tesla drained his magic from himself?”

  “To preserve it. To keep it safe. Yes. You said he came back from Colorado different.”

  “But if one died, what happened to the rest of them?” Magpie said. “Where are the other three pigeons?”

  “A Kaschei maneuver that went wrong,” Ben said. “He thought he could keep the part of himself that he treasured most safe—in whatever way—but then something went awry and one of the four was permanently lost. The other three disappeared while he was still too distraught with the death of the first one to deal with the rest, and then he was stranded.”

  “Do you think that’s why he kept feeding the pigeons, the rest of his life?” Tess said. “When he got back to New York, I mean?”

  “So what you’re saying is that all we have to do is find a couple of specific pigeons in New York City?” Rafe said, his hands in the pockets of his chinos. “Very funny. I come from New York. Do you have any idea how many pigeons we’ve got per square inch there?”

  “But surely the original pigeons are long dead already,” Ben objected.

  “If Thea’s right, they aren’t regular pigeons anymore. They’re, I don’t know, Elemental pigeons—they can live forever, or certainly for many times a normal mortal pigeon’s lifespan,” Terry said.

  “But even given that Tesla’s Elemental pigeons may still be flapping around this world, what possible use would finding them be now, even if they were findable? Tesla—the real Tesla—has been dead for fifty years!” Ben said obstinately.

  “Maybe not,” Thea said. “If he really is alive in some sense, inside that cube—”

  “Wait a minute,” Ben said. “It’s an Elemental cube. You said he was a quad-Element mage. It took all of us to break the seal. That cube was made when he had all his powers. But we saw him as an old man, and that means he didn’t transfer into here until right at the end of his life. He must have had his powers to make the cube, to make the transfer—but if his Elements were scattered to the four winds, literally…”

  “Make the cube, yes, but not necessarily the transfer,” Terry said. “That’s pure mechanics.”

  “And you should know…” Humphrey began, then stopped. He sighed. “You may remember, the first time I came to the Academy, back in the early days of the spellspams, I told you that there had been three Nexus computers. That one had been lost.”

  “I remember,” Terry said.

  “The first one…was around a long time before the others. It was very, very primitive—in fact, it was something that you, Terry, would probably not have called a computer at all. But it was a harbinger, and it was Tesla’s work. He, if anyone, would have known exactly how to do this. He might have made this cube long before he conceived of transferring his Element powers into birds, but in the end, if he set it up right, the mechanics of the thing were not…Elemental in nature.”

  “You might call it software,” Terry said. “The process. It wasn’t something he did, but a method of getting him to where he wanted to be.”

  Humphrey blinked. “I didn’t think of it in those terms, but you’re right,” he said. “The magic needed for the transfer itself was minuscule, and even without the Elemental base, Tesla would have had enough knowledge and power to have achieved this.”

  “But maybe we found the pigeons,” Magpie said doggedly, her attention with the animals and focused on neither the hardware nor the people. “We all dreamed him. Maybe we found them, and got them back to him, and it was in time to trigger that transfer—”

  “But if we did, then why did we see him mourning the dead one?” Tess said. “And even if we found all the rest, that fourth one—wouldn’t that loss have mattered?”

  “Even a tri-Element mage is very powerful,” Ben said.

  “And what about that bird that we all dreamed about?” Magpie said. “Could that have been the fourth one?”

  “The dead one?” Ben said, perplexed. “We’re supposed to bring it back to life?”

  “But maybe it transferred out into another bird before—”

  “Stop. You are giving me a headache,” Mrs. Chen said. “Humphrey, I’m taking them back right now, before things get too far out of hand. I think the FBM can take it from here.”

  Humphrey raised an eyebrow. “We’ll do our best,” he said, and then turned to the five students. “You guys have been wonderful. I remind you again not to talk about that cube outside your little group, and if you have any more shared dreams, let me know! Thea…” He glanced at her wrist, where a long sleeve covered her keypad bracelet, and then deliberately gestured at the professor’s computer terminal. “Be my guest,” he said.

  Thea hefted her borrowed books, walked over to the computer, and leaned over the keyboard long enough to type in a couple of words. “Ready,” she said after a moment.

  “Come on, then,” Mrs. Chen said.

  “Will you let us know what happens with the cube?” Thea said, turning back to Humphrey.

  “Absolutely,” Humphrey said, and allowed his glance to rest once again, for just a fleeting moment, on her wrist. The implication was unmistakable: You know how to get a hold of me if you need to.

  Thea gazed for a moment at Rafe, who wore a noncommittal, pleasant smile; then she sighed and hit ENTER.

  The professor’s study blinked out, and Mrs. Chen’s office at the Academy rose up around them. This was no Elemental house—this room definitely felt crowded with six people. Mrs. Chen quickly took charge.

  “Your teachers know you’ve a day of work to make up,” she said. “Please speak to them directly about any assignments you may owe. You did well,” she added, almost as an afterthought. “Now get out of here, all of you. I have work to do.”

  “She doesn’t know about the keypad, does she?” Ben said, the moment they were out of the office and the door had closed after them.

  Thea shook her head.

  “Why do I get a bad feeling about that?” Ben muttered, staring down at his shoes. “Thea, back at the house…”

  Magpie stirred, raking the hallway with a suddenly feverish gaze. “I’d better go find Fi or Bella or Gary before class,” she said. “They can tell me what I missed.”

  “I should go back to the computer and see if I can’t make sense of those printouts of Humphrey’s,” Terry said. “I’ll report back tomorrow. You coming, Ben?”

  Thea watched Ben and Terry duck out the entrance of the girls’ hall on the way to their own quarters.
Magpie took the stairs two at a time, the long bleached strand of hair suddenly glaringly obvious again.

  “I gotta go too.” Tess, standing beside Thea, stirred and gave Thea an apologetic grin. “It was nice, though. The dream was freaky, but the rest of it was cool.”

  “What if they need us again?”

  “It’s the FBM,” Tess said, shrugging. “They probably won’t. Pity. I’d like to go back to that house for breakfast sometime.”

  Thea managed a quick grin. “If the chance comes up…”

  “Gimme a call,” Tess said. “Maybe Rafe will be there again.”

  “Hey,” Thea said.

  “Later, then,” Tess said, and left the residence hall.

  Thea climbed the stairs slowly and headed to her own room. Her mind was still roiling with everything—the cube world, her encounters with Tesla, even the brand-new parameters of being an Elemental mage herself. Instead of grabbing her schoolbooks and racing to class, Thea kicked off her shoes and curled up on her bed with the Tesla books, poring over improbable photographs of him holding balls of fire in his hands or reading tranquilly while behind him a wheel of fire spun with the fury and splendor of a fireworks display, showering his dark hair and sloping shoulders with sparks.

  Fire mage.

  “How could he bear it?” Thea whispered hoarsely, her finger tracing the wheel of fire in the photograph. “How could he bear to rip this out of himself?”

  A couple of hours spent poring over the books left Thea with a handful of answers, a bunch of new questions, and a headache. Magpie was still not back. Feeling lonely and bereft all over again, Thea decided to go out for a breath of fresh air before the late-November twilight extinguished the day completely. A sky full of low clouds, like a smeared watercolor painting in shades of gray, had already caused the outside lights to turn themselves on, but Thea decided against the lighted paths laid out across the grounds and took a sharp right into the wilder woods behind the hall instead.

  It was even darker under the trees. Leaves lay in soggy drifts on the ground; the cedars stood green-black in the half-light, rustling with shadows. It was in these woods that Thea and Magpie had first heard Mrs. Chen and Principal Harris talking about the Nothing and the havoc it was wreaking on their world, even at this school that everyone considered so safe and protected. It was the memory of this, with Mrs. Chen’s voice already echoing in her mind, that made Thea nearly blunder into another secret conversation. She reined herself in and ducked out of sight behind one of the larger cedars, less than fifty yards from two shadowy figures huddled in the shelter of another cedar. One of the figures was, once again, Mrs. Chen. The other was Humphrey May.