Worldweavers: Cybermage

by Alma Alexander

  “Where is Tesla?” Ben said, lifting his worried eyes from Kristin to spare a quick glance around the park.

  “I’m here,” Tesla said, from somewhere nearby. Ben could not see him. “There was nothing I could do. Nothing.”

  “I had him,” Kristin whispered. “I had him in my hands. And he—Corey—took him. I let go, and then it was gone. Gone. The Alphiri have him.”

  “Or Corey does,” Ben said. “He’s been known to have his own agenda.”

  “No,” said Tesla, stepping forward from the corona of light that surrounded the Christmas tree, where he had been effectively concealed from sight. “There was an Alphiri waiting for him at the park gate with a cage. They took the pigeon.”

  Ben straightened and raked the park with his eyes, peering at every shadow and hiding place. “Well, they’re gone now,” he said. “Kristin…come on. Let’s go back to the hotel. We can try again tomorrow, when there’s more people. Maybe we can use the crowd…”

  “But they have one,” Kristin said.

  “There are two more out here,” Ben said. “If that one was here, then the others might be.”

  “But if the Alphiri already have one, and another was lost in Colorado…then we’ve already half failed,” Kristin said mournfully.

  “Even half,” Tesla said, “is better than none.”

  “You don’t believe that,” Ben said abruptly. “You, who held the full Elemental range in your hands…”

  “You’re right,” Tesla said, and his voice was edged with an odd bleakness. “Half of this whole will, of course, always remind me of the half that I no longer possess. But it will be something.”

  They walked the few blocks back to their hotel in mournful, doom-filled silence. Up in their room, Kristin was unable to settle, prowling like a caged animal until Tesla informed her, in an impeccably gentlemanly manner, that she was driving him crazy and that she should please quit. She finally sat down on the edge of the bed, reached out for the clock radio, and fiddled with the stations; what came up, predictably, was a program of Christmas carols. The tail end of “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men” came drifting out of the radio; Kristin’s eyes filled with tears.

  “That one always makes me cry,” she said, to nobody in particular.

  The choir switched to “Silent Night.”

  “We missed the Christmas Dance, back at school, you know,” Ben said.

  Kristin turned to look at him. “Did you have a date?”

  “Not…quite,” Ben said, avoiding her gaze. “Oh well. No great loss, I suppose, seeing as I can’t dance.”

  “Not even waltz?” she asked.

  “Especially not waltz,” he said. “Wouldn’t have the first clue how to do it.”

  “I’ll show you,” Kristin said, getting up. “Come here a sec.”

  “What, you’re a professional dancer, too?” Ben said, the memory of the skating still fresh in his mind. “Besides, waltz to what? ‘Silent Night’?”

  “It’s a waltz,” she said. “Count—SI-two-three NIGHT-two-three HOLY-three NIGHT-two-three. Come on, try it. It’s the simplest dance there is. My dad taught me, when I was little. I used to stand on the tops of his feet, and he’d dance, and it just…stuck. C’mon.”

  “I’m far too stiff from your other bright idea,” Ben said, but he was grinning. “You’re odd, but you sure can do a whole heap of stuff nobody even suspected.”

  Kristin crossed to him and settled one of his hands on her waist, lifting up the other in a dance position. “You’re supposed to be leading,” she said, “but for the time being, follow my feet-two-three back-two-three. After a while your feet just take over; it becomes second nature.”

  Tesla watched from the far end of the room, a faint smile creasing his face. Ben blundered into Kristin several times, but he was doing a passable job of an elementary waltz when suddenly she lost the rhythm and stood stock still, staring at the window.

  “What?” Ben said. He turned to follow her gaze and he, too, froze.

  Two pigeons stood on the box of the air conditioner built into the window, just outside the glass. To Ben’s eyes they might have been interchangeable with any other pigeon among New York’s teeming millions, but obviously both Kristin and, now, Tesla saw something different.

  “Earth,” Tesla said softly. “And Air. They got Water, back at the park. These are the last two. I never thought…it was possible…to see them again.”

  “That window doesn’t open,” Kristin said, suddenly tense in Ben’s arms. “How do we get them inside?”

  “There was a time it did,” Tesla said. “I had a coop there, on the ledge, right where the air conditioner is now. They knew it. They knew where to come. But when I came back to New York, after the fiasco in Colorado, they never came to me. They never came back.”

  “They’re here now,” Ben said. He fished out the dream catcher in which Tesla had traveled here, and turned to face their ghostly companion. “Mr. Tesla, make sure you’re ready to get back in here, fast. We may have to leave in a hurry. Now both of you, don’t let go of them. Keep thinking about them, keep them here—they will flee, but you have to call them back.”

  “What are you doing?” Kristin said as Ben, who had been looking around for a bludgeon, picked up the chair by the hotel room’s desk and hefted it experimentally.

  “In case of fire, break glass,” Ben muttered. “In case of Earth and Air, then, Humphrey May and the FBM will just have to cough up for the damages.”

  The pigeons exploded from the windowsill as he brought the chair down on the glass. It took two more smashes to shatter the window, and Ben closed his eyes and prayed that the pieces of broken glass were being caught by the lower ledges of the New Yorker Hotel’s ziggurat terraces and not raining like shrapnel onto unsuspecting pedestrians. But the window was open, now, with cold winter air and a few flakes of snow drifting inside.

  “Call them back,” Ben said breathlessly. “Call them back, now.”

  “I have no idea how to even begin,” Kristin said, but Tesla, half-translucent, stepped up to the broken window, put an arm through the hole that Ben had made, and just stood there, still and silent, eyes closed.

  They came, the Elemental pigeons. First one, then the other—gently, fluttering warily down, settling on incorporeal flesh, cooing softly as Tesla slowly, slowly, drew his arm and both pigeons inside the room. He seemed to have a hypnotic effect on them, because the one that had landed first simply tucked its head under one wing and appeared to go to sleep. The second one sat quiescent, its chest vibrating gently from the cooing.

  “Get them,” Ben whispered.

  They had been furnished with a birdcage in case they met with success. Kristin reached for it and then folded her hands around the second, more awake pigeon. It roused for a moment, its coos never quite stopping, and allowed itself to be transported into the cage without further protest. The sleeping bird did not stir at all. Kristin expelled a deep sigh and latched the cage door.

  Ben was already peering at the Tesla wraith through the eye of the dream catcher, setting it spinning as he had been instructed to do.

  “We don’t have much time,” Ben said, glancing back toward the door. There was no sign of movement or noise yet out in the corridor, but he was certain there would be very soon. With the dream catcher spinning rapidly in one hand, he rooted around in his pocket for a cell phone and tossed it back to Kristin. “Call Tess. Whatever emergency contact they’ve set up with Thea, they’d better invoke it. She needs to get us out of here. Right now.”

  12.

  “IT FEELS,” A YOUNG, dark-haired Nikola Tesla said in a voice that was tightly controlled, “as though there’s one too many of me here.”

  “The other Tesla can’t see you. He has no way of knowing about or even suspecting your presence,” Thea said.

  “I can see him,” her ghostly companion said. “I can see him, and I know what he is about to do.”

  He lifted his hand and laid it across his che
st, as though trying to prevent a racing heart from leaping out of it. The three of them—Magpie, Thea, and the young Tesla ghost—were alone in the wooden building that had housed Tesla’s Colorado Springs laboratory a hundred years before. Thea had arranged it so that they could be either participants or observers in this particular universe, but they were invisible to the other, real Tesla who was working here at this time. However, the Tesla ghost always succumbed to what was almost a panic attack whenever his alter ego was approaching, and sure enough the door to the laboratory opened before the ghost Tesla had finished speaking.

  “It is to be today,” the ghost said. “The mail arrived two days ago. It was that mail that finally pushed me into attempting this.”

  “You never mentioned that before,” Thea said.

  “Did I not?” Tesla murmured, his mouth slightly open as he stared at his other self moving around the room, checking, adjusting. “It must have slipped my mind. Many things slipped my mind, after.”

  “But what was in the…” Magpie began, turning to stare at him with sudden curiosity.

  Tesla hushed her with a peremptory gesture, and then rubbed his temples with both hands as though warding off a headache.

  “I am not certain if I can watch myself doing this,” he said faintly.

  “We are here to try and change the outcome, if we can,” Thea said. “But first you need to tell us exactly what happened.”

  Tesla, watching his other self busy with preparations for the experiment to follow, began what was almost a running commentary, delivered for the most part in a flat, inflectionless voice. Two spots of hectic color burned on his usually pale cheeks.

  “Two letters,” he said. “One, letting me know that a loan had been denied—a loan I desperately needed to continue working. And another, without a signature, merely asking if I realized what would happen to me if I lost everything again, as I had done in New York, in that fire. That if anything more of that sort happened to me, I would die. That unless I took steps to protect my gifts, and keep them somehow safe, and perhaps in a different place than I bestowed myself…”

  “Sounds like a trick Corey would pull,” Thea muttered.

  “It was that last that brought Kaschei to my mind,” Tesla said, ignoring the interruption. “I had been brought low; this place, and all the tools I had assembled here against all odds—this was a new hope, almost a last hope. I needed to come up with a way to channel the power that was in me, to keep it safe—to keep it immortal.”

  “What is he doing?” Magpie said, craning her neck; the other Tesla had stopped with his back to them, busy with something on a bench in front of him, out of their sight.

  “He…I…the warding mechanism needs to be reset every time.” Tesla shook his head. “It is hard to explain. Elemental magic, especially at the scale on which I was planning to unleash it here, needs to be warded carefully; it is possible to achieve this in the mind of the mage, but when you are juggling all four Elements at once you are best doing it with all of your faculties. The warding mechanism sets an outer circle that will bounce back any stray shafts. We do not want local inhabitants getting caught up in the backwash—at best there would probably be physical repercussions that would have been difficult to explain.”

  “Like what?” Magpie asked, fascinated.

  “Does it matter?” Tesla said sharply. “What if I told you that it would be quite possible, for instance, for an escaped pod of Water Elemental out here in the mountains to result in the birth of children with gills—children who were born on a mountaintop a thousand miles away from the sea?”

  “And that would be the best case scenario?”

  Tesla was silent for so long that Magpie thought he had decided to deliberately ignore her, but then he sighed, raising one hand to smooth his mustache, keeping his eyes down.

  “At worst…well, magic can kill,” he said. “And wild Elemental magic can be more murderous than anything you can imagine.”

  Magpie took a step away from Tesla, as though the wild magic he spoke of might unexpectedly burst forth from his fingertips.

  “I think he is ready,” Thea said.

  The real Tesla had turned now to the platform on which Thea and her friends had, during their first visit, seen his Elemental magic splinter into its component parts. He looked a little wild-eyed, his long-fingered hands clenching and unclenching as he hesitated, staring for a long moment at the empty platform, a wooden cylinder that resembled an upside-down barrel. As he seemed to come to a decision, he raised his arms and raked his hands through his hair, leaving it standing on end in a riotous and very un-Tesla-like disarray.

  The ghost Tesla closed his own eyes.

  “What will come,” he whispered. “If you have never seen Elemental magic at work, this was such a moment. Perhaps it is worth seeing. But I was once inside of it. I cannot bear to watch.”

  The roof above the platform was open, rising in a gabled pyramid into the tower rearing above the building, the tower with its strange bulbous onion-shaped top. Even as the ghost Tesla closed his eyes and turned away, there was a sound like thunder; twin sparks from the real Tesla’s hands met upon the platform, twined together like two snakes of fire, and then flowed together into a solid column of flame that went straight up, through the open roof and into the tower, wreathing the mushroom bulb at the top of the tower’s antenna in a blue-white glow before rejoining into a single column and continuing straight up into the sky. The air smelled of ozone and smoke.

  A pigeon appeared just over the edge of the open roof; it hovered for a moment, and then circled down into the laboratory. At first, it slipped through the narrow gap between the column of flame and the roof, but then, apparently glimpsing Tesla standing there with one hand thrust straight into the fire, it plunged directly down, into the heart of Tesla’s fiery pillar.

  And vanished.

  Both Teslas flinched, the one in the laboratory with his hand in the fire, lifting his free hand slowly as though reaching for a switch or trying to make a gesture of power; the other, the ghost, shuddered without opening his eyes.

  Then the bird reappeared.

  Two birds.

  The pair of pigeons hung suspended in the flame for a long moment…and then they both disappeared.

  “Wait,” they heard the real Tesla say. “Wait, this isn’t…”

  The birds reappeared. Three of them.

  And vanished again, even as the real Tesla’s hand strained to rise, as though some great force was keeping it down.

  Four birds reappeared.

  Tesla touched a piece of his apparatus with a superhuman effort.

  The pillar of fire died instantly.

  In its place, in the center of where it had been, a bird lay with its wings splayed out awkwardly, its coral feet in the air.

  “It’s dead,” Magpie said, her hand at her throat.

  The ghost Tesla flinched, covering his face with his fingers.

  They saw the real Tesla, as they had seen him once before, gather up the bird into his cupped hands, very gently. They heard him whisper, as though he were offering up a prayer, “Please…oh, please…”

  And then he lifted his head, his face a raw mask of pain and anguish, and screamed.

  Thea had steeled herself for this, but still could not help shuddering as she reached for her keypad and typed a few key phrases. The scene winked out; they were back, once again, to a time just before the pigeon’s immolation.

  The ghost Tesla was still standing with his face buried in his hands. Magpie was breathing in shallow gasps. Thea closed her eyes.

  “All right,” she said, her voice coming out more faintly than she had intended. She cleared her throat. “All right,” she said again, more forcefully. “I’m sorry. It had to be done. We had to see. Before, it was all too fast, and we didn’t understand. We were too far away, and we didn’t have you with us. Talk to me, please; tell me what I need to do. Is there any way of making it unhappen?”

  Tesla heaved a hu
ge sigh and allowed his long fingers to drop from where they had been pressing into his temples.

  “I know what he—I—did, and how it was done,” he said, fighting to keep his own voice level. “As far as I know now, which is as much as I knew then, there was every reason for this to work exactly the way I had projected. When this happened…it was a shock to me, a deep and hard blow, and that was before I realized all the ramifications of what I had just done. I had meant to take the Elemental out of myself and keep that precious part of me safe from harm, in a place where it could come to my aid if my physical shell was ever in need. But what I did instead…when that bird died…was to sever my connection with it. I was left with only a thin and oily slick of magic that clung to the surface of my core; I would never, in my lifetime, touch it again, that thing that I had sought so hard to protect. I looked for them, after, the pigeons. I spent my life looking for them. I would feed and minister to thousands of their fellows in the years that were to come. But if these particular birds ever came close to me again…I do not remember it.”

  “But if the others find the rest of them, in New York, and if we achieve anything at all here in Colorado…” Thea frowned, shaking her head. “There isn’t just one paradox; there are a dozen. What else might we be changing?”

  Tesla glanced at her with the faintest of smiles curving under his black mustache. “Elemental magic,” he said, “does not play by the rules. A true Elemental mage changes the world a little every day, every minute, with every breath that he takes. It might be that doing nothing would be the thing that changed the flow of history and time. With Elemental magic…you do what it tells you, and you worry about consequences later. It’s a touch of raw chaos matter, my dear. You can predict nothing ahead of time. Elemental magic has been described as deliberately acting to confound the expectations placed upon it.” He saw the shocked expression on Thea’s face, and added, “Did they tell you this would be easy?”

  “She’s trying to help you,” Magpie said.

  Tesla’s face crumpled again, the smile fading into pain. “I know,” he said. “I apologize. What is it that you need me to do?”