Quibble, 36. Steppe

Popping on the Patagonian steppe, Quibble meets the alluring protégé Nihal.

36. Steppe @Quibble

Late on the fourth thought in the heat, after a tense supper with Nish, I met the vision on the southwest hill – our new rendezvous. Looking at me sharply, he declared a lesson out of the question.

“You need to rest,” he said. “Take Sing, Study, and Work, too. Meet me here on Speak at midnight. Meanwhile, if you have need of me, intone. I’ll be nearby.”

Indeed, the next day I had need. Alnasl received the news of Nish’s departure with apparent indifference, but I saw through his ruse. He was worried.

“Any sign of the phantom?” he asked, referring to the Zero who chased me on the prior touching.

No, there had been no sign, but I doubted it meant Lesath’s adept had decided to leave me alone. Despite the morning’s drama, I was relieved Nish was going home.

But already I regretted how I sent her away. I’d been a coward. As our days had passed together at the Adroit consensus, Nish grew restless, distant. Often, her thoughts did not seem to be there, with me, but elsewhere. It was clear she missed the tranquility of the monastery. I understood her feelings and I sympathized with them, but when I needed an excuse to send her off, I used them – I made it her fault.

Numberless, do you torture yourself with your wrongs? As you commune with a glass, living totally Within, do you only think endlessly of the past, of One you hurt and what you might have done differently?

My days off passed without incident. I spent them at work with Imay, glad of his company. I interrogated myself at my mirror. Leaving the consensus to meet Alnasl half an hour before midnight on the speech, I espied an amber on the northeast hill’s south side. Now better at espying, I sustained negativity, hoping to learn more and perhaps to glimpse the Zero’s face. But I saw no human figure at all.

I made for Alnasl with speed. The amber did not follow me.

“He had to have been there, right?” I asked, reporting the sighting.

“We never leave our ambers behind,” answered Alnasl. He said no more. I could guess why: he had not espied even the phantom’s amber.

He handed me a gray protégé’s cloak, told me to put it on. We went Within, then by night-doors – a shorter route than previous ones. We arrived in a vast land of rocky, shingled hills, sparsely vegetated and pocked with lakes, facing high, snow-tipped mountains. We saw many creatures of an unusual variety. I mistook one for a llama – Alnasl said it was a guanaco, a wild version. Deprived of humans when Ones went Within, domesticated llamas were extirpated nearly to extinction. I saw rheas – large, flightless birds with long necks and legs. Alnasl advised me to watch out for cougars, but I saw none. How there could be such a population of rheas with cougars prowling about the area stumped me.

“Cougars ambush prey,” Alnasl said. “Chase a rhea, and watch how fast it runs.”

From my study of geography with Cate, I surmised this was Patagonia. We were here to sharpen my calculation of long-range pops. The lesson went well. My amber did most of the work. All I had to do was focus on a point in space and ascertain some idea of the distance, the elevation, and the gradient relative to myself, and the amber did the rest. My only blunder was popping in too high off the ground, but Alnasl foresaw it – he’d made the same mistake at the Pyramid of the Sun – and until I could get rid of the blunder, he stood at my destination to catch me.

“If my amber’s so clear-sighted it won’t pop me into the hill,” I wondered, “then why can’t it pop me right onto the hillside?”

“Earth’s center is a gravitational zero point—” The vision drew the fingertips of his left hand together. “—and everything—” He wiggled his fingers downwards to imitate rain. “—is falling to that point. Things fall at different speeds depending on how far they are from it. At Earth’s surface—” A hand almost flat. “—the rate of acceleration doesn’t vary a lot because there’s little change in the distance from gravitational zero. But there is some change.” Now his hand swept the air. “What’s our exact altitude?”

I stared out across the tumbled steppe. We’d walked and popped our way quite high up now, but how high? Meissa chimed in: Somewhere between 1,800 and 2,000 meters above sea level. I relayed this data to Alnasl.

“Ah, but how does the amber know that?” he pursued. “We got here by a night-door, and it gave your amber vital information about the area. So, why is the glass uncertain now about the exact altitude? We’ve walked uphill and down, throwing it off. Even if you touched the amber all the way, it would have no better than an educated guess about the altitude here, thus about the exact gravitational acceleration. In the pop, it’s only estimating that factor.”

Don’t Ones still get scientific tutelage early on? Meissa asked me.

Yes, we do, I intoned, imagining a sigh, but I’m better at chemistry than physics.

That’s a pity. Brush up, Quibble. You’re going to need the physics.

Now that I was calculating pops more finely, Alnasl sent me well ahead of him with instruction to have my amber let his amber know where I was. I popped four hills ahead and intoned. All right, stay there, he said. Keep touching your amber. Guide me.

Then another voice came intoning: Hello there! Out practicing your pops?

Meissa?

Kindness, no! the voice laughed. Mind if I join you?

Still thinking it must be one of the amber’s previous owners, I agreed. I was startled to jumping when, just in periphery, I saw a gray-cloaked Zero pop in several yards away and more than ten feet off the ground. I turned. To my amazement, the Zero didn’t fall but glided gently to the ground. The hood was thrown back to reveal a young woman, no older than me, with wide-set eyes and abundant hair. At her throat was a neckband of black silk. She scooped her hand through her hair, freeing it to fall in dark tresses over her shoulders. Her long hair surprised me as much as her floating did.

“How did you do that?” I said, gaping at her.

She began to take her left hand from her cloak, but seeing how I flinched, instead she withdrew the right, open to show she’d released her amber. Without it, I knew, she could light no glass. Then she withdrew the left, which held a large, dark blue glass.

“That’s a yinman!”

She smiled, unusually expressive for a Zero. “If you pop self-dreaming with it, you float! Isn’t that something?”

“It is. Sorry, I thought you were a relic in my amber. So, you’re practicing too?”

“Oh, you’re new here. Didn’t your adept tell you? It’s a training ground. Most of the protégés are up there, where it’s challenging.” She waved her empty hand towards the cordillera. “It’s chilly, too crowded for me. I always come down here for peace and quiet. Where are my manners?” She hurriedly gave me assent. Not waiting to receive it back, she went on, “My name’s Nihal. It means camels drinking.” She giggled. “Do you wish you’d gotten to choose your own name?”

“Kindness, yes! Mine’s Quibble, a pointless objection you shouldn’t pay attention to.”

Nihal cackled. “Don’t be silly, that’s a One’s name!”

When I didn’t laugh in turn, her laughter died away. Slowly, I drew my left hand from my cloak and pulled back my hood, revealing my white hair and letting Nihal get a better look at the paleness of my skin.

“Kindness!” she exclaimed breathlessly. “You’re the excelsior!”

I didn’t know what to say, but I was now on my guard. So was Nihal: at once her empty hand dove into her cloak, seeking her amber, and the yinman in her other hand lit to exude blue fire. Looking her in the eyes, I bared my right hand to show no glass there but my amber. She relaxed and put the yinman away. I couldn’t be perfectly sure, since all protégés wore the same gray, but I intuited Nihal was a kind Zero.

“Whatever you heard about me, I’m not a threat,” I told her. “I don’t have any potent glasses, even.” I gestured behind me. “My adept’s back there, on his way.”

On cue, Alnasl popped in beside me. “Good touching, protégé,” he said to Nihal as the faint echo of his pop reached us.

“Good touching, vision,” she said, noting his white cloak as she gave assent, but still she seemed skittish.

“I apologize for the delay,” Alnasl said to me. “I did a little sightseeing. Then I espied a lit glass over here, so I thought I’d better come along.”

“Nihal is frightened of excelsiors.”

“I am not!” she cried. Then, seeing I was ribbing her, she broke into a grin. “Cute, Quibble, very cute. At lauds, my lord Cebalrai warned us all an excelsior would be out here today. He said to give you a wide berth. I guess I got the wrong idea.”

“Understandable,” said Alnasl, returning assent to Nihal at last. “Our lesson was just concluding. I’ll thank you not to mention you saw us.”

“Of course! Good touching!”

With a wink at me, the protégé popped out, leaving light and sound in her wake.

“I’m glad you made a friend,” the vision chided, “but the next time you meet a strange Zero, don’t lower your hood. Give the name Alhena. Intone to me right away!”

“Well, you took your time getting here! She’d already put away her glass.”

“It was a kindness.”

“But how could you know she was kind?” I insisted.

“What glass did she light? Blue. Almost without fail, a threatened Zero goes for a familiar glass. It’s easier to use. Anyway, it didn’t trance you, did it?”

“No,” I said, finding it odd I hadn’t noticed that. “But it could have, and if it did, she might’ve done anything. Didn’t you say—”

“A protégé? Here?” Alnasl shook his head. “It’s forbidden by edict. Control and kindness agree on this much at least. Protégés must have the freedom of the steppe and the cordillera. Glass fights never happen here.”

“Nihal seemed to think one might.”

The vision frowned. “Yes, and that is odd. The spirals are silent. But what song is going around the hives about you and the burst orb? That I don’t know.”

“The Adroit had an indiscreet song. They all thought I was freeing the Ones!”

“What do you think of that?”

I didn’t expect this question. It irked me that Vega might want me to lead a Zero revolution – something even Meissa hardly achieved – yet she couldn’t produce even a scrap of news about Quiddity. Or she just hadn’t delivered it. I trusted Alnasl to tell me anything he learned, but now I wondered whether Vega was stringing both of us along. She had practiced two deceptions on me already. Would there be a third?

“I think some people smoke too much qeht-li-qah,” I said, and Alnasl laughed. “Nish is right, I’m not a messiah.”

Growing grave again, Alnasl took both my shoulders in his hands and stared me in the eyes. I thought he would exchange assent with me, but instead he said, “Messiah or not, you are an excelsior. You don’t yet know all you might be capable of.”

“Do you?”

“No, Quibble,” the vision admitted. “But I have faith, and I’m glad you’re my protégé.”

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