Worldweavers: Cybermage

by Alma Alexander

  She reached out behind her with her right hand, and stepped away. In the next instant she was standing near Cheveyo’s stone house, holding Magpie’s hand.

  “Did you find him? Did you talk to him? What did he say?” Magpie said breathlessly.

  “Yes, yes, and yes,” Thea said, grinning. “He said he’ll help. He said he’ll probably help best if a different him goes with different teams, and that we’ll have to split up to try and cover all the bases. So I have an idea. I need to talk to Grandmother Spider.”

  “She’s way ahead of you,” Magpie said, and her own grin widened.

  Thea turned her head and met the chocolate brown eyes of a dark-haired Grandmother Spider, sitting on a sun-warmed rock a few steps away.

  “We’ve been talking,” Magpie said, a touch smugly.

  “Indeed we have, and we’ve had much to say to each other,” Grandmother Spider said, getting to her feet. “What new venture are you planning, my child?”

  “This is going to sound awfully weird,” Thea said. “But I need to know…those spellspam dream catchers you sent us…can we use them to carry different splinters of a man’s mind or spirit? So that the man could be in several places at the same time?”

  “It is not,” said Grandmother Spider, “a use I have ever put them to. But true dream catchers can do and be many things. This man—is this your wizard, Nikola Tesla?”

  “Cheveyo said you’d told him about this,” Thea said. “Yes. It is Tesla. I left him waiting for an answer.”

  “Do you have your dream catcher with you?” Grandmother Spider asked.

  Thea fished it out of her pocket. “Always.”

  “Mine too,” Magpie said, offering hers on the palm of her hand.

  Grandmother Spider closed one of her hands around each small dream catcher and bowed her head over them. She began to hum softly, a gentle haunting melody that sparkled with ancient magic. Her hair, spilling over her face and her hands, turned shades of chestnut, wheat-gold, white, gray, and solid blue-black. A light began to seep through her closed fingers, as if she held a fistful of fireflies. Then she stopped humming, and the world sank into a silence; her hair turned silver-white, and stayed that shade. When she looked up, her eyes were dark blue, like a twilit sky.

  “I have made them empty so that they will hold what spirit comes to fill them,” she said, holding both tiny dream catchers out on the palms of her hands toward Thea. “Use them wisely. This can be a dangerous thing, this breaking apart of a man.”

  “He is already broken,” Thea said softly. “We do this in order to try and heal him.”

  “Then go with blessings, and may you succeed in your quest,” Grandmother Spider said. She turned her head a little, and smiled at Magpie. “And we two shall meet again, I think.”

  And then she was gone, and a small brown spider sat in the middle of one of the dream catchers. Thea carefully set the dream catcher down on one of the boulders by her feet long enough for the spider to scurry off it and into the shadows, and then gathered up both dream catchers in one hand.

  “I’d better get back,” she said to Magpie. “Do you want to come? I don’t think there’s any reason for you to wait here alone any longer.”

  “I’ll wait,” Magpie said. “I don’t suppose you need to make that poor old man any more spooked than he already must be.”

  “Okay. Back soon.”

  Thea closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them again she was back in the hotel room, with Tesla staring at her.

  “This is a new thing,” he murmured.

  Thea flushed, both with pride that she had managed to surprise someone like Tesla and with an anxious urge to explain herself, to justify the things she did to a supreme authority. “I have these,” she said, holding out the pair of dream catchers. “Grandmother Spider has made them…empty. Empty and ready to be filled.” She glanced at Tesla. “If we can figure out how to get some other version of you into these, a younger version with a better understanding of a special set of circumstances, these will hold those parts of you that we take with us. We will need the you that decided to split the Elementals, the you that knew how to do it in Colorado. Perhaps there’s even a chance we can figure out how to go back to a precise moment, and rescue all the pigeons, even the one you lost.”

  “Not the me of the immediate aftermath of that,” Tesla said. “I would not wish children to see me that way. The me that left New York for Colorado, perhaps. There is knowledge there. And the timing can be stretched so that a practical run at the process can happen for you to witness. But I beg you to remember that it was grief that made me as mad as you may get to see me.”

  “That’s one,” Tess said. “But the Alphiri are chasing pigeons in New York. Do they know something we don’t? Why would the pigeons have gone to New York?”

  “Back to New York,” Tesla said. “I had started feeding them, in the city, before I left for Colorado. And then, when I returned, I continued to do this. The city is where they knew me best. That is where they very well might have gone.”

  “Two, then,” Thea said. “One for Colorado, one for New York. One for each dream catcher. And if Terry needs to ask questions, for the computer, there is always the cube, directly.”

  “You’re going to give me the wretched thing?” Terry said. “How am I supposed to keep it safe from anybody? What am I supposed to tell Humphrey?”

  “You have the notes he gave you. If he asks, tell him you are working from those.”

  “So. Two. How?” Tesla said succinctly.

  Weighing the dream catchers in his hand, Terry thought about the problem for a moment. And then his eyes lit on Thea’s wrist keypad.

  “Can I borrow that?” Terry said.

  “First I need to get us to where we need to be, to find the two personalities that we need,” Thea said, loosening the wrist-strap and dangling the gadget from her fingers. “Those parts of you, Tesla, that we need to get for this to work. But once we get there, Terry, say the word. The rest of you are going to have to wait for us here. I’ll just take the three of us who need to be there.”

  “Fascinating,” Tesla said, his eyes alight as he stared at the keypad. “May I examine…?”

  Thea fought the impulse to hold on to the keypad and relinquished it to Tesla, who turned it over in his hands, obviously rapt.

  “Fascinating,” he said again, “absolutely fascinating. What is this thing, and what is it that it does? Is that how you have achieved coming here to see me?”

  Thea retrieved the keypad. “If you will tell me something about the moment where one of those two parts of you that we need to find exists, I’ll show you how it works.”

  “What precisely do you need to know?” Tesla asked.

  “Anything. Any detail. What your surroundings were like. What you looked like.”

  Tesla hesitated. “Shall we try the New York one first? I feel a little queasy at the thought of returning to Colorado…at that time.” He took a deep breath. “The New York me is perhaps ten or fifteen years younger than I am at this moment. Take some of the gray out of my hair, make it darker. Give me a mustache.” His fingers twirled a nonexistent one on his upper lip as he spoke. “Perhaps a little later than that. Make me…walk with a cane. I did, after my accident. A car hit me, and after that it was easier to have a third leg. Try…this very room.”

  Thea was typing as he spoke. “Okay,” she said. “Ready.”

  The others appeared to fade from around them, and the three of them—Nikola Tesla, Terry, and Thea—suddenly stood in the very room they had just left, except there was another Tesla present, a younger one. He looked much as he had described, down to a dapper wooden cane leaning against the armrest of his armchair, and he sat in almost exactly the same position that the elder Tesla had been found in when they had first seen him, cradling a glass of whisky.

  “One of my little indulgences,” the older Tesla murmured, at Thea’s elbow. “I did not allow myself many. What is it that you need
to do now?”

  “Thea,” Terry whispered, holding out his hand for the typepad.

  Thea handed it over.

  Terry typed for what seemed to be an inordinately long time; fortunately, the other Tesla in the room didn’t react to their presence. But the elder Tesla’s breathing was very quick and shallow as he stared at his younger self, and Thea, sparing him a swift apprehensive glance, turned her head to look back at Terry.

  “Hurry up,” she hissed.

  “Done,” he said instantly, handing her back the keypad and one of the dream catchers. “Hold that thing up—like this—so that you can see the whole figure within the circle,” Terry said. “And then press ENTER.”

  Thea obeyed, squinting through the dream catcher until the Tesla in the armchair just fitted within the circle of the web, and then hit the ENTER key.

  For a moment, nothing happened. And then, suddenly, the dream catcher started to spin in Thea’s hand, very fast, and a strange bluish light began to stream from it. They all turned their attention from the man in the chair to the spinning dream catcher, and it was only the gentle thud of an object falling onto a carpeted floor that brought their attention back to the armchair.

  The other Tesla was gone. The whisky glass had fallen from the armrest, its contents pooling in an amber puddle on the hotel carpet.

  The dream catcher continued to glow faintly blue in Thea’s hand.

  “I think we have him,” Thea whispered. And then, glancing up at Tesla, she added, “Are you all right?”

  “It feels…strange…and yet terribly familiar,” Tesla said. “It feels as though I’ve suddenly lost a memory I did not believe I could ever lose, stopped remembering something I cannot believe I could forget.” He drew a deep shaky breath, and ran a hand through his hair—and then patted it back down into place again, tidy and dapper. “Well,” he said, “I suppose we’d better go and get the other one.”

  11.

  “CHEER UP,” SAID KRISTIN. “It could be worse.”

  “I’m cold, I’m miserable, and I’m alone in a city I don’t know, chasing pigeons that may or may not exist,” Ben muttered into the dark green knitted scarf wrapped around his neck and mouth, his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his jacket.

  “You’re not alone; you’re with me,” Kristin said. “And there’s Tesla’s ghost.”

  “You’re right,” Ben said. “It’s worse.”

  They had all told their families that they needed to stay at the Academy over the short break. When they had broken up into teams, it had seemed obvious that Tess would stick around with Terry at the Academy Nexus during the Christmas break, holding down the home base, and acting as aide and a contact point for everyone else. Thea had taken on the thorny problem of the lost Fire Elemental pigeon, and if anyone could help out on that front it was Magpie, with her ability to commune with hurt animals and her healing touch.

  It was clear, of course, that Kristin, their Finder, would have to go to New York to find the rest of the pigeons. It had come as a complete and unpleasant surprise to Ben that he would be expected to go there with her. It was only when he became aware that he was being a source of both amusement and exasperation to Tesla himself that Ben folded, sulkily and with ill-grace.

  And that’s where they were now, the two of them—bundled up in winter jackets, gloves, and sheepskin boots, late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve. Everywhere Ben looked, people were laughing, excited, enjoying themselves. Bryant Park, behind New York’s Public Library, was crowded. Women were weaving enthusiastically in and out of the Christmas shops set up in brightly lit small kiosks along the park’s outer walkways, followed closely by bags and packages floating in their wake; children were careening around and shrieking in delight; usually dour-faced businessmen wore benevolent smiles. The fragrance of roasting chestnuts mixed with spice, cocoa, pizza, and hot cider.

  Above them, perching on statues, fences, and window ledges, or scurrying and ducking on the ground between people’s feet, were the pigeons. Puffed up to twice their size against the cold, pecking hopefully at some bit of debris or another or crowding expectantly around some benevolent soul who had, in defiance of park ordinance, clandestinely started scattering bread crumbs or popcorn.

  And in those crowds of birds and men, pigeons flocked to what seemed to be empty space, and perched in midflight as if they were resting on something that wasn’t there—the incarnation of Nikola Tesla, whom Ben and Kristin had released from their dream catcher.

  They had been given strict instructions by Terry and Thea. During the capture of the Tesla avatar the dream catcher has been spinning clockwise, and in order to release the spirit they had to spin the dream catcher counterclockwise, very fast. They could recapture their version of Tesla for the return journey by looking at Tesla’s figure through the dream catcher so that he was contained inside its circle, and then spinning the dream catcher clockwise again.

  The release instructions had worked perfectly, and a shadowy, half-transparent Tesla now stood under the light of a park lamp with a strange, dreamy smile on his upturned face. He was apparently a corporeal presence to the pigeons alone—nobody else, with the obvious exceptions of Kristin and Ben, seemed to notice or care about the presence of a hatless man with neatly parted hair, dressed in an old-fashioned and oddly formal pin-striped black suit and black patent leather shoes, oblivious of the time of year or the weather.

  Tesla appeared to be equally invisible to half a dozen Alphiri who fruitlessly attempted to mingle with the human throng. The Alphiri were not necessarily a startling presence among humans—they were a common enough workday sight, often sitting politely at business lunches where they did not eat or at cocktail parties where they did not drink, mingling with humans in banks, in offices, and on city streets everywhere. But they stood out in this crowd, somehow—a head taller and slender to the point of looking emaciated when compared to the well-padded Christmas revelers. The Alphiri wore their usual assortment of not-quite-right clothes, although they at least tried to acknowledge the time of year and the occasion. One of them, whom Ben and Kristin had glimpsed several times, wore a bright red woolen hat with an enormous pom-pom, and a headband with reindeer antlers on top of it. At least two of the others sported Rudolph-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer noses over their own bony proboscises, and one was wearing snowshoes attached to his long-toed bare feet.

  The one with the antlers had just surfaced again, making his way through the crowds toward where Ben and Kristin stood, and Kristin glanced around for options.

  “Let’s go skating,” she said, nodding at the rink set up behind them. “I seriously doubt any of them know how, and it might give us a bit of a chance to just observe.”

  “I can’t skate,” Ben said sulkily. “And what about Tesla? Are you just abandoning him there?”

  “What, you never tried ice-skating? It’s about time, then. Tesla will be fine. If he sees something, he’ll let us know. Come on.” She stepped away, and paused when he didn’t follow, glancing back at him. “Or do you want to stand here by yourself and draw their attention to you rather than to me?”

  “You just want me to make a fool of myself,” Ben said, but he dragged his unwilling feet after her anyway.

  Humphrey May had made sure they had enough money, and Kristin hauled a twenty out of her pocket as they came up to the rental pavilion beside the rink. They exchanged their shoes for two pairs of somewhat battered blue skates. Kristin tucked the claim tickets into a pocket before stuffing her feet into her skates and lacing them up in a brisk, businesslike manner. She glanced at Ben, who was still frowning at his laces.

  “I think this has been done up wrong,” he said.

  “No, it hasn’t. Honestly, you’re such a dork.” Kristin leaned over and expertly laced up the skate closest to her. Ben wiggled his foot experimentally.

  “Hurts,” he said.

  “They’re rentals, you can’t expect heavenly comfort,” Kristin said. “Make sure the other one’s tight.
You don’t want a broken ankle.”

  “Now she thinks about that,” Ben muttered.

  Kristin rose to her feet, balancing precariously on her blades. “Ready?”

  “Are you sure this was such a good idea?” Ben said, making no move to get up from the bench.

  “We can shake the Alphiri, at least for a while,” Kristin said.

  She teetered from the bench to the edge of the ice rink, turned once to give Ben another encouraging look, and launched onto the ice.

  Ben almost missed the transformation, so intent was he on wobbling on his own unsteady feet to the edge of the rink, but when he looked up from his efforts he almost failed to recognize Kristin. The only reason he knew who she was at all, in fact, was her vivid yellow jacket, a bright spot of color in the rink. Gone was the awkward girl who was always on the edge of things. In her place was someone confident and graceful, who threaded her way through the circling skaters into the less crowded center of the rink, pirouetted twice, and then drifted back through the crowd until she hovered beside the entrance, beckoning Ben in.

  “Come on, the water’s fine,” she said.

  “The water’s frozen,” Ben retorted. But he took a deep breath and stepped out on the ice.

  His feet immediately threatened to slide straight out from under him, and he hung on desperately to the plastic barrier fence, which was scarred from many previous encounters with nervous beginners.

  “Not fair,” he said. “You didn’t tell me you’ve been doing this from the cradle. I’m going to make a complete idiot of myself. And look, there’s that wretched Alphiri again. All we did was draw attention to ourselves. You’re brilliant, and I’m a clown.”

  “I’ll teach you,” Kristin said breezily. “You have to let go. You can’t take the fence with you. I Find best when I’m not actually concentrating on what I’m looking for. You wait—it’ll come popping straight at me as soon as I take my eyes off it.”

  “What will?”

  “The pigeon, you twit. What we came here for, remember? Now come on—move your feet. One at a time. Just a little bit. You have to forget how to walk and learn how to glide. Watch.”