by Sam Hughes
Laura has never seen magical runic patterns drawn on such a large scale. Within the individual flowing channels, she can see nested patterns, carved into the base and even the wall of the first level of carvings. The complexity is bewildering at first, but a trained eye can quickly pick out the frequent repeated patterns.
This is a magic ring. More technically, it's sixty-two magic rings, interlocked and cooperating, all bound with conventional hoops of blue-painted tungsten. From the left and the right, Laura hears the dull roar of hardcore climate control engineering, driven by more magic. Precise shaping is critically important to magical efficiency, and temperature variations would cause structural shifts.
The pioneers at Montauk would recognise its purpose with just a glance, but figuring the thing's maximum capacity would leave them standing. This is the bilge battery at the base of the world.
All living humans generate waste mana, active mages and baselines alike. The quantity is insignificant to a magical machine of this size. Humanity has a few orders of magnitude to climb before it reaches Kardashev I.
But: from five known sites on Earth (a figure set to increase to seven or eight once surveys are completed), geothermal mana is naturally occurring. The mana is generated, coils into the sky, cools for a day, and evaporates into waste, at which point it is not only useless for all human purposes but invisible and undetectable. It sinks into the Earth, becoming presumably unrecoverable.
And then it is drawn here.
A time may well be coming when humans can steal one another's mana. Soon after that, a time may come when humans can do the same to the vast meta-mage that is planet Earth. This would instantly turn every geothermal mana source from a worthless (if spectacular) natural phenomenon into a billion-dollar oilfield.
Or then again, that time may never come. It very much depends on what is in the Wheel Group's long-term development chart for magical industry. It depends who figures what out, and when, and how much of a nudge they need to find the important threads.
Laura's waste mana reclamation process makes the entire question academic. It worked up at Hatt Group, and it'll work here. All it took to build was a month of hard labour and a painfully slippery True Name aliasing trick. "Trick" is the term she would use, not "spell". Even on close inspection, it's hard to know how it works. It's almost sleight-of-hand.
She raises one fist - she barely needs to think about what she's doing - and three long streams of lightning stab out from it: two flanking her forearm, and the third directly upwards from between her second and third finger.
She has completed less than one two-hundredth of her descent, but the hardest part is over.
*
Kazuya "Ra" Tanako said he crossed T-world by dreaming of scramjets. The man thought too small. Everybody thinks too small.
Laura stands directly on top of the listening post's virtual representation, the Manhattan-sized arthropod carapace. There is a kind of landing pad here. It's exactly as wide as Laura needs it to be. The glass universe is almost as dark as it ever is. At one end of the sky is the familiar triple-pointed galaxy, a little lower in the sky than is typical. At the other... what is that? Could those be city lights reflected off low cloud? No...
In T-world, you can have anything you can ask for. You're not even limited by your imagination. Laura knows what she wants, down to the level of bolts and circuits. A Space Shuttle launch stack takes shape above her. Tank, boosters, orbiter. Three gigantic engine bells, aimed straight down.
Laura flitters around the stack, conducting a practiced inspection. Instead of climbing inside, she hitches herself to the orbiter's exterior. She races through the launch checklist as fast as she can recall the steps, like a flipbook. The stack lights up.
Time doesn't mean anything to T-world, but it does to Laura Ferno. After a rigorously computed roll manoeuvre and six minutes of flight time, the unnamed Shuttle has stopped ascending and is accelerating horizontally, at an altitude that is T-world's equivalent of the threshold of space. Laura lets the SRBs empty themselves and disconnect, and simply builds new ones. Telemetry flickers in front of her. The velocity reading recalibrates itself, from kilometres per hour to Mach number to kilometres per second.
Looking over the edge of the orbiter and down, Laura can still just about discern individual features of glass geography. A mountain range rushes past, rising and falling, jagged like a graphic equaliser. On the final, tallest peak of the range she sees something. Someone.
It's a human figure made of cobweb-thin crystal, with his hand in the air, waving. Laura almost misses him. She turns and waves back. Her hair doesn't whip in the wind— she is protected by the suit and extra layers of imagined shielding. The wind chill at this altitude and velocity would be enough to kill instantly.
In an eyeblink, the figure and the entirety of the mountain range are gone into the distance.
Laura cackles, turns to face forward again and steadies herself.
Take the centre of the galaxy as your North Star, and head directly south for... call it another light year. Call it a light decade. Whatever it takes, just don't stop.
In accordance with procedure, dense waves of flying demons descend on the rocketship, but Laura barely perceives them. At this relative speed, each wave is as thin as tissue, and the force of collision turns the unlucky horrors into black mist. Physical barriers rise too, but Laura has so much thaumic and kinetic energy wound up behind her that they shatter as if shot. Brute force and ignorance. There's no stopping this thing.
And after that...
It takes almost as long as a real sunrise. A yellow star rises, directly ahead of her. It is the size of the Sun, but three-pointed, forming a Y. Under the new light, the glass landscape turns sapphire, reflecting long rainbow patterns like the back of an optical disc.
Directly beneath the star-shaped star, at Tanako's world's precise South Pole, is a second artificial structure. There is no direct physical route between this object and the surface of the Earth. The only way to signal this deep is using chi, or by somehow applying modulation to a major tectonic plate movement. And the only way to get here in person is to cheat the universe.
Laura's getting good at that.
The listening post is a toy, a cheap plastic spy microphone glued to the underside of the world. This is genuine God-hardware, an artificial country at the centre of the world. It exists under pressure measured in millions of atmospheres, and temperatures beyond the boiling point of tungsten. This is the machine which makes magic.
Laura produces more SRBs, and trains her space rocket directly on the object's core.
From Darkness, Lead Me To Light
"Did you say Natalie Ferno?"
Exa just took a mobile phone call while travelling through the Channel Tunnel. This is a completely normal thing that he can do. He was bound for the bomb site already, but the specific task of interrogating this one woman has only just arrived.
"Affirma—"
"Natalie Ferno?"
"Affirmative," Casaccia repeats. "Problem?"
"Check your files," Exa says.
"Hmm?"
"We have history with that woman. Four years ago. I don't blame you for trying to forget about it. Look her up, do it now. The relevant keyword is 'fiasco'."
Casaccia does so. Some seconds elapse as he reads. His eventual response is a long inhalation followed by a single, drawn-out swear word.
Exa sighs. He sometimes thinks he's the only competent person in the entire organisation.
*
Zeck's been called Zeck for so long that it even appears on official University documentation. Sometimes people who don't know him well try to call him by his birth name, but it always comes off as slightly insulting, not just because they inevitably mangle it, but because "Zeck" is, according to everybody including Zeck, the man's real name.
Zeck's wife calls him Zeck.
Their house is built wholly from flat surfaces: windowsills, mantlepieces, side tables, noo
ks. Every flat surface is covered with greying knick-knacks. The place would be a nightmare to dust if either of them dusted it. Zeck is old and immobile enough that he's one of the few theoretical magic tutors to host tutorial sessions at his own home. He and Natalie usually work at the kitchen table, which, while it is as cluttered with objects as any other flat surface in the house, is at least cluttered with objects which can be picked up and piled up elsewhere.
Zeck is a perfectly cordial human being, and a fine tutor. His house makes Nat's skin crawl. It's a cold place, too. It rattles in the wind.
It's the first term of Nat's first undergraduate year. Zeck tutors Phonic Algebra. Out of all of introductory theoretical magic, Phonic Algebra is the course which would be the least recognisable to students of, say, physics. Magic has a language: an alphabet, a vocabulary, a grammar and an accent. Everything a mage says means something. Every syllable does something to the preceding syllables and to the universe. The topic is "basic", in that it forms the basis for almost all magical theory, but it is also riddled with traps, one-time exceptions and maddeningly finely-distinguished vowel sounds.
It is extremely easy to write down spells which work perfectly on paper and which no human tongue can possibly pronounce.
Another fun fact: in 1978, a long but startlingly elegant theorem by Shilmani proved that the language of magic had a name. That is, that the language of magic contained within itself a name for the language of magic. The proof was not constructive; it was only in 1980 that Shilmani went on to prove that the name of the language of magic was, in fact, the empty string.
Point being, magic is so complicated as to be embarrassing, and protecting wannabe mages from that complexity is a great way to protect them from becoming mages. Phonic Algebra is the sharp end of the intro. It is the mandatory course which turns wannabe mages into either serious mages-in-training or equally serious electrical engineers.
"You did something interesting," Zeck says, beginning the session. He is reviewing Natalie's solutions to problems set the previous week. "Question ten. You solved it and then you overshot a little."
"What? Ah."
"Would you want to explain? You overflowed onto a whole back page of extra working. I'm not complaining, it's just that there aren't any extra marks back there."
"Does it make sense?"
"It does," Zeck says, nodding many times. "Where did it come from?"
Ultimately, it came from her mother. It was a curious and abstract result which, for Natalie, had existed in complete vacuum, memorable and yet pointless. It had never made sense to her until she saw question ten. And then it had been like applying voltage to a tangle of dull glass, and seeing the neon colours light up inside it.
But Natalie automatically withholds the whole truth.
"It just... worked."
Zeck says, "You got the question correct. That's fine, we don't need to belabour that. The 'extra credit' is correct as well. Except that this is a quite novel result. I haven't seen it before. Now—"
Zeck is old enough to predate magical science. Mages can be broadly broken down into two categories: those under forty, who essentially grew up inside magic, and those over forty, who retrained from some other discipline, and had to retrain hard to hold their own. Zeck was a respectable applied mathematician when upstart magic began muscling in on the research funding. He has seen magic unfold, live. He was one of the few people on Earth - other than the very earliest pioneers, the Vidyasagar enclave - to know, at one moment in time, all of the magic that was known by anyone at that time. That moment is a decade and a half in the past now, but the point still stands that if Zeck hasn't seen something before, there's a bankable probability that nobody has seen it before.
"—that's not to say it's going to shatter the Earth. It could be worth pursuing formally. Academically. Although it could equally be a little early for you, career-wise. Before we embark on that particular ship, I need to ask you again, are you sure this isn't derived from anywhere? Extracurricular reading?"
"No," Natalie lies.
"Then I think I might try it out," Zeck announces. Although specialising in theory, Natalie has been required to take a fixed quantity of practical courses. That means she's bound herself a True Name - once, with help - and can confidently get as far as eset, which is the magical equivalent of Chopsticks. Zeck is better-positioned to try a real spell out, although it would still be a break from habit. "It'll take some time to glom it together into a real spell, but I shall see whether I can find the time."
"That's, ah. Thank you. I didn't think it was important."
"It may not be! But, regardless, it's novel. We'll find out, if I can find the time," Zeck says. "Actually, what I shall do first is read around the subject a little and see whether I can't see whether it's been done. But, otherwise. If. Et cetera. So. No problems with questions one to nine. Ten is correct. Eleven is where you started to hit problems..."
This is Zeck and Natalie's second-to-last tutorial session of the academic term.
Their final session is a week later. Both of them have forgotten about the earlier discussion.
(Well, actually, Zeck has indeed tried the spell out, but the effects were forgettable. So, he decides not to mention it, unless Natalie raises the topic. Natalie correctly infers Zeck's line of reasoning, and does not mention it either. But it's the same thing in the end.)
After that, Phonic Algebra is over. Christmas is next, and in the spring, Natalie will move on to a whole new collection of courses and tutors.
Over Christmas, Natalie's near-identical twin sister is stabbed in the kidney by a man whom she (the sister) then kills in self-defence.
*
Exa's in lecturing mode.
"A refresher for anybody who's listening: the Natalie Ferno fiasco is what happens when someone other than Caz is on security duty. It's what happens when Scott fucking Parajsa decides to hit a person for no good damned reason and then delegates the hit to external third parties who'll screw it up at any cost. Instead of, for example, me.
"Where is he right now? Drunk? In Chile? Best place. It's a travesty that we left him his privileges.
"I am one hundred percent in favour of killing people who need to be killed. Natalie Ferno did not need to be killed. Wiktor Czekanowski, may he rest in peace, did not need to be killed.
"Who knows what Ferno would have done if she'd linked the attack back to us?"
*
It's months later, the following year. Over coffee, Laura has just given Natalie two gifts: a self-defence shield spell, and a warning. "Be safe."
Natalie spends the whole journey home checking over her shoulder and working out what she needs to do to be safe.
Suppose someone really tried to kill her. Not her sister, at random. Her. On purpose. They botched it, and lay low for months. Why didn't they come back? Will they? When? She knows nothing for certain. But the probabilities are high enough that she can't ignore them.
She has never felt like this. It's as if the whole outside world is flooded with ionising radiation. Being in public is dangerous exposure, and the longer she stays there, the more likely she is to die.
First of all, she tries the shield out. She can't make it work. She has just enough capability to understand that the gift, EPTRO, is far beyond that capability. Next, she rearranges her academic schedule to allow time for a self-directed crash course in applied magic and twenty hours of structured meditation per week. Knowing the exercises isn't enough. She needs to get her mind back into shape.
Once she can reliably cast the shield, and has tested its capabilities, Natalie's simmering fear begins to level off. The need to carry both the bangle and the driver dot is still a liability. She gets one ear pierced, and carries out a highly specialised optimisation computation that enables her to discard the bangle entirely.
Suppose someone tried to kill her. Why?
Natalie reviews every page of work she's produced since her education in magic began. She eliminates the ob
vious— that is, the results that are known to the whole world. This leaves her with a relatively small pool of what are essentially magical doodles. She cross-references by time frame, reducing the pool further. But it's just paperwork. Theory.
What about practice?
Practical magic releases floods of chi particles. Chi particles are usually described as neutrinos with attached metadata. They are almost non-interacting unless deliberately intercepted.
Natalie imagines the Big Brother future. She imagines the magical equivalent of a directional microphone, trained directly on her head, recording every spell she ever casts. Natalie works with theory. She can enumerate almost every spell she ever cast, there are so few.
She imagines everybody in the world with an identical microphone pointed at them. Has anybody else ever cast a spell she wrote? Could that have been tracked back to her?
Oscillating crazily between conclusions, she calls Zeck's number.
The person she reaches is his widow.
The last winter, Natalie learns, had been too hard for Zeck. He became terribly ill, terribly quickly. Pneumonia.
*
"Caz, another thing. Did you say Nat Ferno witnessed the bombing of her sister's house?"
"Yeah," Casaccia tells Exa. "That's what the news is saying."
"From where?"
Casaccia pulls the relevant feed up again. Delving into the records like this is starting to bring on a headache, because he's not doing it the right way. Scin, the seer, would be able to do a better job, but is still hours away.
Shortly, Casaccia will remember that he is a Wheel Group member, and set his kara to chase the headache away. But he's going to suffer for another twenty or thirty minutes before that.
"She—" he begins.