Ra Page 5

  "I... I don't know how. It's a five-dimensional vector field embedded in three-dimensional space, I can't visualise it. I couldn't slice it right."

  Student Mathis Schröter is evidently in the dark. Czarnecki relents and calls on Laura. "You. Go."

  "What, me?"

  "Always you, who else?"

  "I didn't actually have my hand up."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I don't know the answer."

  "I thought you knew everything."

  "My results were garbage."

  Czarnecki strides forward, picks up Laura's results and skims the raw data for a moment. He is surprised.

  "Garbage. Fine." He hands the paper back and returns to the board. He writes "+ St;τ" on the end of his equation. Then he moves to the next board and essays a complete definition of S, a lengthy triple integral. While writing, he narrates: "The missing term is called the Sharma transduction tensor, also known as the thaumic flow transduction potential: the amount of nearby matter and energy which is enchanted and/or arranged in a mystically significant way. Flowing electrical lines will contribute to this factor. So will static or charmed magic rings, static or charmed staffs, electromagnetic waves, large electrically neutral masses and, in the smallest quantities, all other mass-energy in the universe out to an infinite range, give or take the inverse square law. It counts anything which could affect thaumic flow at that point in space or which could in turn be affected by that flow. The S-tensor is a statement of two critical facts: firstly, that magic can be created, shaped, collected, stored, transmitted and released using real, physical equipment; secondly, that magic can in turn be used to apply real, measurable effects to the physical world. The necessity of the S-tensor is the proof that magic is an interacting component of the real universe, whatever the real universe is, and not constrained to a co-located 'bare' universe of magic matter and magic energy. In short, magic is real. Precise measurement of this tensor led to the creation of the first reliable magical machinery and spelling. Congratulations, after five-and-a-half weeks of tensor algebra you have been handed on a platter what it took Indian physicists six years to derive from scratch. Welcome to thaumic physics, you are almost ready to begin.

  "The third error took longer to find. Why?"

  There's a pause, because this is a puzzle. While he waits, Czarnecki starts putting his staff together. His staff is split into six pieces of varying sizes, enabling him to construct any of two dozen different lengths using different combinations, but today he screws all six together for a total length of exactly two metres.

  "Because it was a lot smaller?" somebody guesses.

  "So how much magic do you think it takes to demonstrate that error under laboratory conditions?"

  "A lot," says the same person.

  "You, you and you, well volunteered," Czarnecki says, picking out three students in a row from the front. One is a gangly fellow with large glasses and long, scraggly hair. One is a broad-shouldered man wearing a scruffy blue shirt. The other is Laura - shortish, dark-haired, uninspiring. None of them had volunteered. "Come on. Come up here, come on. How are your mana levels? Good? Good."

  The stage is larger than most, big enough to embed a seven-metre E-class magic ring in the floor. Czarnecki wheels a piece of machinery out of a corner and kicks the power switch on at the wall. The machine is a Veblen pump. It has the dimensions of a pair of upright pianos placed back to back, but it looks more like an enormous tower PC case, with the side missing and the interior filled with small magic rings and runes and tubes instead of circuitry and disk drives. Specifically, it looks like the old kind of tower - manufactured an optimistic white, but now faded to a depressing creamy beige after a few decades of use. It's a little beaten up, and could really use replacing, but as long as it continues to serve the fairly menial purpose that it needs to serve, that will never happen. On the side of the machine are some rolls of hose with more magic rings tying off the ends. Czarnecki unwinds a few turns of hose for three of the rings and hands them out to the students. He directs the gangly student to stand at twelve o'clock on the rim of the magic ring in the floor, the shorter one at eight o'clock and Laura at four. The three of them trail long hoses over the floor ring's interior.

  Czarnecki invokes a few presets just to get the machine started. Then, "Mister Noon, would you provide me with a continuous steady flow of zeta-formatted mana, please?"

  It's a moment before the tall student realises he's being spoken to. "My name's Jeremy," he says.

  "Zeta load. Ring. As much as you feel you can part with while leaving your brain stable. Thank you in advance for your cooperation. Don't worry about overspill, I'm acting as buffer. Mister Eight O'Clock, the same amount of iota-class. Shout if you need reserves and we can work something out." As the stockier man starts his spell up, Czarnecki interrupts him with a clarification: "When I say 'the same amount', I mean tap into Noon's link and make a stabilising connector first."

  Mister Eight, whose name is Benj, constructs and recites a rather longer mantra than Noon's. He mis-speaks a few times and has to stop himself, erase syllables from the floating stack and resume from mid-word. Perfect diction is desirable in a mage, as it gives an impression of professionalism and competence to observers, but it's totally unnecessary. In practice, one can get away with anything short of a genuine speech impediment. Constructing an industrial spell invariably takes a hundred times longer than speaking it, and unmatched floating syllables will hang around for the best part of half an hour before dissolving. So every mage learns up front to be methodical rather than reckless; nobody cares if the last and least important step in the process takes a few attempts to get right.

  There's a hum now, something of a discordant buzz. Magic is silent, but the machine isn't. "And Four: mu."

  "Same amount?" asks Laura.

  "Yes, but you'll probably find yourself forced to synchronise with the others whatever you do."

  Laura says a series of words which, in sequence: identify her simplest collector-spell, written years ago but still in regular use; prime it to slurp up a certain blend of ambient mana from the invisible clouds that surround her (and every mage, and every other human); associate the collector with her True Name and assigned mu band; and kick it off, like opening a keg tap. She feels her reserves ripple and start to spiral out of her. The mana emerges from her skull into air, seeks out the magic ring in her hands and bolts down into the machine with the rest. Harmonic effects from the two other flows interfere with hers until they settle down into synch, amplitude-modulated at a natural rate of a few kilohertz. Zoontch goes the machine as it spins up a gear.

  So far so standard. These are the three most common "brands" of mana and this triple-phased feed is typical of the type used to power heavy chemical engineering equipment in industry. Three mages is two more than a real employer would be prepared to employ for this job, but these are the early days for this class and that kind of multi-tasking takes practice. Even the quantity is short. Laura softly adds some modifiers to her collector which widen its metaphorical maw by a fifth, letting more mana through. After all, the experiment calls for a lot of raw mana, right?

  Thanks to symmetry, Eight and Noon's feeds increase correspondingly in lockstep with hers. Eight and Noon feel the feedback and look at her quizzically; Czarnecki doesn't appear to pick up on the change. Laura shoots a look back at them which says "We can do better than this," and applies the same modifiers a second time.

  Unperturbed, Czarnecki strolls into the magic circle and installs a small but heavy metal bracket in the circular slot that exists at the centre. Into the bracket, he plants his staff vertically like a flag pole. He says a few magic words of his own, which add the staff to the half-built thaumic system and turn it into the core of a real live "lightning machine", an almost purely thaumic machine designed solely to vent/waste raw mana in a safe way. "Magic effects wash over you," he explains. "You're all feeling this by now. Those of you at the back of the room feel less th
an those at the front. There's a mild physical equipment response if you know what to look for and there's a mental reaction if you know how to think. These are S-tensor effects. But the reaction is fuzzy. It's like trying to figure out where the Sun is in the sky with your eyes closed, just by feeling which half of your body is warm. I count at least ten conventional senses. And this eleventh sense will indeed allow you to perceive things which cannot be perceived with the conventional ten. However..."

  He leaves the fragment hanging, strolls back to the corner where the equipment is stacked up and picks up one last piece of equipment. This is a magic ring as wide as a hula hoop, but substantially heavier and ornately machined. He adds more words to the standing spell, these words completely new to the watching class. This charms the ring. Then he holds it up, pointing it at the class as if it were the frame of an invisible painting. In the empty frame, behind the frame, as if the window were augmenting reality with its own version of events, there is now visible evidence of flowing magic: sharpened streams of white mana linking the core staff with the rings at Noon, Four and Eight, creating what, from above, would take the form of a brilliant magnesium Y. Smaller light effects appear in the gaps between the streams, fluctuating in the air like shock diamonds. Czarnecki moves around the stage, pointing the magic window in different directions, making sure that everybody gets a look.

  "Magic is lossy," he says. "Mana transferral and transduction are lossy. These waste emissions are in the chi-band. You have been told two facts in total about chi-band thaumic emissions, what are they?"

  "There aren't any," somebody says.

  "They don't do anything," somebody else adds.

  "You were told that chi-band mana will cheerfully waft through a few metres of solid lead. You were also informed that chi mana is extremely rare. The logical consequence of which, is what? Come on." Czarnecki lays the ring down. "Why is that useful?"

  "It means you can—" Laura begins, then stops when Czarnecki whirls around to face her. But he glances back at the class, sees that nobody else is about to jump in, then gestures for her to carry on. "It means you can use a Kovachev oracle like that one to see inside a machine," she says. "While it's running. And you can see how it's working and whether it's working, which means you can diagnose and debug a thaumic system."

  The doctor turns back to the audience. "Chi emissions exist almost exclusively as waste products from magic expenditure. Up until now you have been measuring thaumic effects using gut feeling, inertial reactions in Kaprekar linkers and odd bits of old-fashioned, low-accuracy, manual, mechanical devices. Your results have been usable. But the instruments you've used are from a generation now thankfully past and no longer suitable for the needs of modern magic. An oracle scoops up chi particles, transduces them into photons as they pass the mouth and multiplies the photons to make an effective virtual retina. We can now render magical activity into hard numbers at great distances, through solid rock and metal, quickly and reliably and repeatably. You've been sitting there for nearly six weeks thinking 'When is he going to get to—?', well, here we are. Diagnostic power.

  "Divination is the core skill of a mage. Oracular spells are numerous, complex and powerful. It's possible to waste arbitrary amounts of time refining them, up to and including your entire professional career. Right." A minor alarm has gone off in Czarnecki's head: whole minutes have now passed without him writing something on the board. He kills power to the oracle ring and props it against the wall. He scribbles out the third correction and its definition on the whiteboard above. "This is now Vidyasagar's Third Incomplete Field Equation. This is a name coming from modesty and cynicism. There is no third error yet, but historical trends suggest we're due. This year or next."

  The three trainee mages are still happily running their machine. Czarnecki stares at them for a moment, while still writing. "Are none of you going to speak unless spoken to or are you all in trances? Nobody wants to sit down and take these critically important notes?" That gets a tiny bit of a laugh from the class, but no reaction at all from the 'volunteers'. Czarnecki frowns. He rolls the ring out again, crouches and powers it up while looking through it. He sees the same brilliant white triple flow: stable, minimal harmonics. "Kzarn oppol we xa oerin xa," he says, switching it over to a different mode which could be called 'Is there something wrong?'

  Then he stands up, strides into the magic circle—

  *

  It's the freezing cold wind which wakes Laura up, not the approaching footsteps. She breathes in once, still lying on her side on the dark glassy ground, then rolls upright and stands. The world is deep glass, a horizontal featureless plane. Not some purified fibre optic blend, transparent to a mile depth, not volcanic obsidian, just regular glass: dirty, and deep black at a metre's thickness. Only the faintest red colouration is detectable. It's a land designed to shatter underfoot and slice your footwear and feet with the pieces, unless you tread softly or wear fat boots which distribute your weight. Or you can just fly. It's night. There's a full Moon and a glittering three-pointed Milky Way, both of which reflect dully off the ground.

  The wind is so cold it's razor-sharp. Laura is wearing... well, just clothes, suitable for a temperate to cool climate; indoor clothes and an indoorsy sort of shoes. But she can do better so she moves through an ill-defined blur which summons something warmer, something in the vein of heavily layered robes, with gloves and a hood.

  She moves around vaguely, in blips; now she is a mile away to get a different look, now she is back in place, now she is a mile up. She can't go any higher. It is still all glass. The air is still icy on her face. There's faint yellow glow all around the horizon but she knows she could wait and wait and the Sun wouldn't rise. She could try to wait, anyway.

  Zhzzzzzz.

  It's a fuzzy place, but this fuzziness is all normal. It's an unhappy place, but that's okay.

  She still hears the footsteps.

  "Laura, take my hand, this is—"

  Familiarity. That's okay. But Laura doesn't remember where the familiarity is coming from. The memory of her asking him "How do I know you?" appears in both of their heads, without any sound having been transmitted.

  The man is a fixed size, older and bearded. He wears dark brown trousers and a boring blue jumper and his dark brown hair in a dated style. Laura knows these colours even though there's no real light. This oddity passes her by. "What are you wearing?" he asks in return. Her clothes are shifting, inches thick and layered and elaborate. They would take an hour to don and remove if they existed, but they haven't actually been designed or put there. These are just the impressions he receives when he concentrates on her. The name of a thing is the same as the thing.

  His name is Dan, Laura remembers. He is her... her... they know each other.

  "Do you remember what happened?" he prompts her.

  "I don't really know."

  There's a buzzing, a locusty zhhrhzrrzrhzrhz as if from a very quiet badly-tuned radio.

  Laura blips them across the country in mile bursts, which seems to startle the man. He stumbles around as the geography of the dark glass changes. First it's big glass cuboids with rounded corners, in neat stacks. Then they're in a valley with huge sharpened black glass peaks rising around them. There's a crunch as they land. Why does he stumble? Laura stands him up. Now triangular polygon surfaces, like crystal landscape from some antique videogame. Now a mosaic of tiny hexagonal glass tiles. Dan begins to find his mental footing and starts rippling between locations himself, but he doesn't quite know how he's doing it yet.

  "We don't have a lot of time," he says. "Laura, two more people are stranded here. Can you find them? Kzarn eset." Bright colours seem to pour out of his mouth as he speaks the magic words, but he frowns at the results and waves them away, like bad breath. They aren't what he wants to see. "Kzarn eset. Kzarn uum. This is loco." Now he has a staff in his hand and is trying more words. Elementary charging words, then collector spells and other simple things. The magical equivalent o
f Three Blind Mice. There are thumps and crackles and sparks. Laura watches and listens with interest. Bigger and more convoluted magical machines dance into existence, hook together and fade out over time. None of it seems to be giving him the results he wants.

  "What are you doing?" she asks.

  "Laura. Jeremy Willan is here somewhere. Can you find him?"

  Saying things and doing things are the same thing, so now they have also found Jeremy. He was found because he was trying to be found. There was no flare, just something that he and Laura mutually made happen. Jeremy is in another part of the world on the glass shore of the glass ocean. He is young, about Laura's age, much taller. The glass is greener here, but the sky is still pitch dark and it is still cold and odd. The horizon is a fraction lighter and there is a faint hzzh on the wind.

  "Are we okay? What is going on?" Jeremy asks. He's shivering.

  "Why is he cold?" Laura wonders out loud.

  "I'm cold," Jeremy says. "I don't know."

  "Just be warm."

  "I don't know how. I can't get anything to—"

  Laura tries to make him be warm but it doesn't work.

  I don't feel well, Jeremy has now said. He seems to be icing up.

  Dan catches up with them both, out of breath from figurative running. "Do either of you know what happened to Kazuya Tanako?"

  "That's not any of our names," Jeremy says, angry. "Why don't you bother to remember our names? Stop calling us 'you' all the time!"

  "I do know your names," says Dan. "Dulaku, tolo, ennee." Again, nothing.

  "I'm so cold. We shouldn't be here."

  "Kazuya Tanako isn't any of you. He was one of the greatest mages of all time. He died when he was just 25 and this is how. We need to locate Benj. Jeremy, do you remember what happened? Magic doesn't work here."

  "Are we in trouble?" asks Jeremy, teeth chattering.

  "Do you see shelter? Water? Food?" says Dan. "Do you feel welcome? No equipment, no rules. We need to locate Benj."