Ra

by Sam Hughes

  *

  Some are desperately in love with magic, latching onto it as the defining feature of their universe.

  Meanwhile, there's Alan Minter. He is forty, stubbly and weighty. He doesn't define himself as a mage, or even as an engineer; in fact, if somebody asked him straight, "How do you define yourself?" he'd laugh the question off as slightly ridiculous. Magic is a thing he does to live. He likes it well enough because it's challenging and stable and it gives his wife and kids some financial security. His is a boat which would rather not be rocked.

  It's 1998 and Minter's worked at Hatt Group since the mid-Eighties. He's been unable to avoid gradually acquiring managerial responsibility for a few tiers of people. He manages these people well, by being fundamentally incapable of perceiving or putting up with nonsense.

  Yes, Alan Minter is a little bit boring. (Because that's what you want in your new all-magical avionics systems: unpredictability.)

  "Alan!" Edward Hatt shouts at him one day. "I want to look into using Tanako's world for demos."

  Minter stops mid-stride, just about to push open the door to the men's room. "What?"

  Hatt is at the other end of the corridor, headed in a totally different direction. He has coffee in one hand and an open laptop computer in the other; he is between two meetings. "Customer demos," he shouts, not coming any closer. "Can you get some people together and look into it? Monday okay?"

  "Monday? Erm."

  Hatt gives him an awkward, coffee-encumbered thumbs-up and mouths "You got it" and disappears.

  Minter digests this. Many years ago, in the eleven-month gap between graduation and joining Hatt, Minter worked at a comically badly-run magic startup. The company's business model was cryptic at best; perhaps it was thought that if enough talented mages were gathered in one room, some sort of critical mass would be reached and money would start condensing out of the aether. In the absence of any consistent managerial direction, Minter spent most of that time studying the commercial possibilities of T-world. He became a very narrow expert. Then he came to his senses, bailed out of the company, took an actual job and forgot about the entire thing.

  Never be the expert, Minter tells himself. He must have mentioned it to Hatt by accident. Or mentioned it to somebody else who mentioned it to Hatt.

  It's mid-afternoon on Thursday, but Minter has the mother of all interlock tests to oversee on Friday and he knows his people are too busy. So it's a solo weekend job. He digs around in his private email for a while, seeing if he can find remnants of his old work. There are shreds.

  Edward Hatt is either one level or two levels above Minter in the Group hierarchy, depending on how you look at it. Alan Minter doesn't actually like him very much. Not many people do.

  *

  Now this is a meeting in a dull meeting room with white boards and a projector and a Powerpoint presentation. Hatt Group has two kinds of meeting room. Rooms of the first kind have actually had money spent on them. They are cool, spacious, windowed and air-conditioned. There are big, expensive chairs with headrests and lumbar support. Those rooms are for visitors.

  Minter wishes he was in one of those rooms, because this room is for internal meetings only and it is the opposite of all of those things.

  Hatt arrives fifteen minutes late, carrying the same laptop and what might as well be the same coffee. He opens the door with an impressively agile manoeuvre which involves hooking one foot under the handle.

  "Right," Hatt says, before he has sat down. This is Minter's cue to begin.

  Minter looks at the presentation that he has spent the weekend assembling and immediately loses faith in it. Too many words. Three entire slides setting up what Tanako's world is? Clip art? There's nobody in the room but qualified mages. Skip. Skip. Skip. Hell with it. Minter closes the computer and just speaks.

  "There were a few seconds there when T-world stood a chance of being the next revolution in popular entertainment media," he explains. "T-world is cold and hostile most of the time, but if you dream lucidly you can throw your own creations over it. Once you're at that point, it's better than a 3D movie. You get sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. You can even directly trigger emotional responses. The problem is that what you can do in T-world is limited only by what you can imagine."

  Minter stops talking for a second and lets Hatt think about this last statement.

  Hatt responds, "Well, shit."

  "Yeah. In the same way that a magic spell only works as long as the mage carries total comprehension of all of its complexity in his head, the illusion that you can deliver has to be realised in its entirety by you. On the spot. In real time. We can throw all the graphic and sound designers we like at the scenario, but you'll have to learn and reproduce all of it mechanically.

  "It's not as bad as it could be. T-world is a dream, which changes the rules from other kinds of media. We can cheat. A lot. There's only one direction which a person can look in, which is forwards. And a person can only pay attention to a few things at a time. If you can direct someone's attention confidently, you can direct their attention narrowly, which reduces the amount of stuff which you need to 'render' at any given time. This might be true even if there are multiple people in the group that you carry with you."

  "Like a card trick," Hatt says.

  "I suppose. Do you do any conjuring?"

  Hatt shakes his head. On the other hand, he likes the idea of wowing people. He could find the time to learn.

  Minter goes on. "The next factor is safety. A regular T-world trance, such as you or I have every two to seven weeks or whatever, draws almost no mana. But to bring other people with you, you're looking at real money. Days or weeks of saved 'wages'. And meanwhile, the physical danger of T-world is directly linked to the local thaumic flux density. So there's a balancing act. The more people you bring, the greater the danger."

  "What's the safe upper limit?" Hatt asks.

  Minter is an aerospace engineer. His definition of 'safe' is concrete and numerical. "Right now, the safe upper limit is not to do it at all," he says.

  Hatt is also an aerospace engineer. He correctly interprets Minter's statement to mean that there is no data available at this time. "Do you want to take a guess?"

  "No."

  "You mentioned taking multiple people just now."

  "Hypothetically. Tests are needed."

  Hatt nods.

  Minter continues. "Con three. T-world is a nightmare. It's a recurring nightmare and over time it fills up with an invasive biological grinding noise and horrible monsters which chase you until you wake up. This is not something you can get away from. There is a grace period. You'd need to end the scene before you came to the end of that grace period. Otherwise, you're exposing customers to an out-of-control horror movie."

  "How much time are we talking about?"

  "Dream time and real time aren't exactly the same thing," Minter says.

  "So you're going to go and find that out too."

  "Yes."

  "But it probably needs to be short. Like a few minutes."

  Minter doesn't comment.

  "So it's a teaser trailer," Hatt concludes.

  "I suppose so," says Minter.

  Hatt pushes his seat out a bit. He feels the need to pace, but doesn't have room. "This is okay. That's tight, but I can definitely work with it. Was that the whole list?"

  "Yes."

  "So the main piece of bad news here is that I'm going to have to do a lot of the heavy lifting myself."

  "Yes. It's a tough collection of spells. And you'll have to put most of them together yourself. Unless you want to get somebody else to handle that part for you."

  "No, no. It's my demo. I need to be the one who delivers it. Especially given what you're saying about safe carrying capacities."

  "I'm going to crunch some numbers," Minter says.

  Hatt nods again. "I'm still thinking out loud here. Even if we can push that number higher, I want to do the demo. Because that's impressive to
people. If I'm at the top, CEO position, and I can show people some gee-whizz wizardry, nothing up my sleeve, that's going to leave a strong impression. It hints at what everybody else in the organisation is really capable of. You professional mages, I mean. Everybody who doesn't sit in an office all day. This is like... it's a performance, I like it. What would I actually need to do? Am I memorising a script or something?"

  "You need a mental picture," Minter explains. "Some scenery, some personalities, some lines. Actually, you need a scene."

  "Actually, I need a vision."

  Minter shrugs.

  Hatt claps. "That's it! We're sitting here surrounded by concept art! It's hanging right there in reception. I can show them the spaceport."

  Minter can't help snorting at this. Hatt glares at him.

  "I'm sorry," says Minter. "You do a lot of business flying, right?"

  "Yes?"

  "You fly alone? First class? Yeah." Minter smiles broadly. "Airports haven't been cool since the Fifties, and spaceports are going to be even worse. When I'm in an airport, I have three kids and my other half. To us, an airport means screaming kids, crowds, queues, lost baggage, cramped seats and delays, delays, delays. All the concept art in the world isn't going to shake off that association. For the love of God, don't show them the spaceport. At least, not the interior."

  Hatt and Minter deliver the last line together: "Show them the spaceships."

  *

  It's now.

  Anil Devi is one of the fastest-moving minds Ed Hatt has ever worked with. Devi treats conversations as optimisation problems. He assumes everybody involved possesses all the knowledge he does and thinks as fast as he does, and then proceeds to skip two out of every three sentences because the rest is so obvious that it doesn't need to be said. His magic work is the same: intermediate stages of spell construction, which others would insist on having a big explicit written plan for, he will wave away as trivial because he can improvise them in the moment. Every mage has a distinct style and Devi will cheerfully steal pieces of that style from every mage he meets. He is a packrat for shortcuts. His spells are baffling spaghetti.

  All of this makes him hard to work with. Mere procedure and best practice are anchors around his neck. Meanwhile, any kind of engineering not involving magic in some way - of which Hatt Group does a great deal - bores him stiff. Managing him is a juggling act. But then, managing any collection of one or more people is a juggling act.

  He phones Hatt directly from D12A and says, "So, I don't know what the flux was in Ferno's farewell stunt but there's definitely been a conservation violation. You should pull in a biotech lab because I've got no idea what this thing is. I can give you some phone numbers."

  "...What thing?"

  "The good news is you've got around a hundred and fifty gigs left in your battery. 'Aliasing' was a good keyword but the technique is probably basically brain surgery, it'll take me a little while to hack out. End of the year? She had a head start, clearly. I'd love to meet this mythical parent of hers. So anyway, this Christmas you're looking at some rainy day money."

  "'Rainy day money'," says Hatt, blankly.

  "And it reeks down here!" Devi adds. "You should have punched up the priority on this, I had to get a mask, you have no clue."

  "I'm sorry, who is this?"

  Devi gears down. "Anil. Anil Devi. Three-and-a-half weeks ago you asked me to cover the fallout from Laura Ferno's 'leaving do'. Right?"

  "Yeah. Yes, I remember. Wait, you're just doing this now?"

  "I've had the 4100-series closeout," says Devi, "and you gave me the clearance but you didn't say there was a corpse involved and then the two-factor thing happened, so, yeah."

  "There's a corpse involved?"

  "What did you think it was, chopped liver? Actually, there is a certain resemblance."

  "What what was? Where are you?"

  "I'm in D12A," Devi says, "and my friend, it is a horror show down here. T plus three-and-a-half weeks and oh my bloody god."

  "Are you saying there's a dead body in there?"

  Devi inhales, stops, exhales puzzledly, inhales again, "Yes, I'm saying that my name is Anil Devi, and I'm saying that I'm in D12A and I'm saying that there's been a dead body in here for the last three-and-a-half weeks."

  "Whose?"

  Devi glances at it. "I would say it's extremely doubtful that it's anybody's in particular."

  "But it's human?"

  "I did not, and would not, say that."

  "I'm coming down."

  *

  D12A is still itself: a tall, square, fluorescent-lit room with a thirteen-metre D occupying most of its floor space. In one corner is a rack of safety equipment (fire extinguishers, Montauk rings, telephone) and a short flight of stairs leading up to the door. Spread around the circle are the various Hatt Group-owned magical artifacts that Laura Ferno was using for her ill-advised spell. There is also the small music stand that she was using for her notes. The notes themselves, she took with her, along with her staff and other own equipment.

  This much is exactly as Hatt remembers it ought to be.

  "I escorted her out of the room," he recalls. "I swiped us both out and locked the door behind me. I fired her, and a few minutes after that I told you to come down and try to piece together her bilge mana spell."

  "And then I ignored you for most of a month," says Devi.

  "I didn't see this. I wasn't even looking for this. Half of the lights weren't turned on. You understand."

  Lying at one node on the edge of the D is a dead thing.

  Its skin colour is probably comparable with Caucasian, but the thing is almost completely coated with dried blood, and certainly is not human. It's gangly and long: if it stood up straight, it would be more than two metres tall. It is emaciated. Its highly visible bone structure is all wrong: its knees and elbows are backwards and instead of hands or feet it has four large fingertips with torn nails. Its spine bifurcates halfway up its back, and it has a row of closed eyes running up between its shoulders. Its head lacks all orifices but a lipless hole where a mouth would usually go, with two rows of sharp metal scalpels for teeth. Meanwhile, its six sets of ribs are actually jawbones; each pair parts individually to reveal one of five mouths, complete with conventional teeth and a tongue.

  Devi shows Hatt the details. Both Devi and Hatt wear face masks and latex gloves.

  The horror's cause of death is uncertain. It looks as if every one of its joints is dislocated, but it could be meant to look like that. It's even less certain whether it was ever technically alive.

  D12A is filled with the stench of decay.

  Devi summarises, "It's something out of a nightmare. I mean, a specific one. One guess whose."

  "She actually did it," Hatt says, standing up from a difficult crouch. "She brought a real object back from Tanako's world. If all the mana she spent had been piped into a perfect energy/matter exchanger, the most she could get out was two point four milligrams. This is something else."

  Hatt has that chill again. The rules of his universe are expanding. And he's right there at the beginning. The thing in front of him is terrifying, but the feeling is good.

  Devi says nothing.

  "You mentioned phone numbers?" Hatt says to Devi. "Pick a discreet one."

  "And send them some samples for testing," Devi says. "You got it."

  "Have you got enough equipment down here to set up a refrigeration spell?"

  Devi nods. The ground underneath them is a working D-class with a nested E. It would be difficult to pick a better location.

  Hatt takes his gloves off. "And once you've done that, find Laura Ferno."

  Deeper Magic

  The entity possessing Nick Laughon sits in the easy chair. It sits easily.

  Laura remains standing, arms folded. Laura's been watching it carefully. There's a thing that the-thing-that-isn't-Nick hasn't done. It hasn't displayed any unfamiliarity with its surroundings. Right after being "woken up", the thing t
hat isn't Nick got up, took a leak, put some clothes on. Now it slouches in a very Nick-like position, enviably comfortable, feet up, with a big glass of water. It moves like Nick. It? He?

  Laura has waited long enough. "Explain."

  "I am Kazuya Tanako. My True Name was ra."

  There it is. It's beautiful to her, like light dawning. "...Of course you are. Of course! That makes sense. You died in Tanako's world. Your world! The place we named after you after you'd died there. You didn't call it that, obviously. You called it something else."

  "'The glass place', 'the glass dream', 'pattern one', 'black marble', lots of different things," Tanako explains. "Now, my question to you is, what else do you know?"

  "You... you were one of the most talented young mages of your generation. And magic is at most two generations old, which puts you into the top twenty of all time. God. You were— you weren't magic's Mozart but you were almost our Jimi Hendrix." Tanako laughs at this. "You were the first person to lead a team investigation of Tanako's— of the glass. The experiment in which you died... involved lying down at the reflux core of a powered Dehlavi lightning apparatus, then being placed into an induced coma. A REM trip to the glass world usually lasts minutes of real time. Your intention was to stay there for at least an hour. You wanted to... try to work your way towards a point of lucidity, where it would be possible to start gathering real observations. I remember now. You wore a freaky sensor helmet thing, which covered your whole head and face.

  "You had a stroke. You died in the glass place. But you didn't die. It looked like you died, but you didn't. So what really happened?"

  "I just want to clear some things up before we continue," Tanako says. "Am I still the only person to have died there?"

  "As far as anybody knows, yes," Laura says. "Sleep science research slowed way down after the accident. We have libraries of safety guidelines now. I know this better than most. I've had that stuff dropped on me from a great height."