Quibble, 34. Indication & 35. Pop

Quibble learns the gruesome truth about how Zeros fight.

34. Indication

Popping, if not the direst of a Zero’s powers, is yet the most stunning.

Scrivenings of the Ancient speak of a power called psychokinesis, but they usually characterize it as the movement of objects simply by an act of will. A Zero cannot move anything simply by willing it. He needs a glass.

A pop is the transport by amber glass of a Zero, and sometimes another person or an object too, from one place to another. Considerable distance is elided. To transport himself, the Zero must touch his amber. To take someone with him, he must touch the amber and his subject simultaneously. Thus, he must travel with his subject.

Whatever the distance elided, for the Zero and the subject the pop happens in an instant. Now you’re here, now you’re nowhere, now you’re elsewhere – all in the same now. So, the experience is like traveling by night-door, though a night-door typically takes you much farther than a pop.

A night-door also creates no light or sound – this is the principal difference for a pop’s observer. For observers, a pop’s duration is about as long as it takes to blink your eyes four times quickly. If I may take some poetic license, a popping Zero looks like a rainbow imploding or exploding, depending on whether the Zero is leaving or arriving.

The sight of a pop is extraordinary. A Zero “popping out” is replaced physically by a flash of multicolored light. Contrary to all provable properties of light – believe me, I’ve studied them – the flash contracts to a point and disappears.

Simultaneously, the observer hears a loud “pop” or “crack,” hence the phenomenon’s name. Exactly what it sounds like depends on where you stand relative to the popping Zero. At very close range, it sounds like metallic objects striking each other. Farther off, it sounds like someone slapping his hands forcefully together.

“Popping in” is the same in reverse: light appears at a point, expands to fill the Zero’s shape, and there he stands. A pop-in makes no sound, but close to it, you can feel a gust of displaced air.

Neither Zero nor subject hear the accompanying sound. Popping, they take along with them anything they’re touching – for example, clothes (thank kindness for that!). A Zero’s ability to take what he touches intact depends on his experience and his talent with his amber. Accidents can occur; Zeros call these “sundering.” Due to the risk of sundering, Zero protégés never pop with human subjects, except at need.

It is inadvisable to pop barefoot. An unlikely story, probably mere legend, tells of an absentminded adept named Edasich, who popped out barefoot from the vestibule of a cathedral facing the sea. Destined for the deck of a galleon in the bay, guided there by his lord’s amber, Edasich popped in to find the cathedral still around him. The ship was crushed to pieces. Edasich, his lord, and a few others survived and popped to shore, bearing the tale to his infamy. Zeros claim the tops of that cathedral’s spires can be seen in the bay at the lowest spring tides.

35. Pop @Alnasl

Quibble could already pop short distances – from one side of a dark chamber to the other. We hadn’t begun there, of course. For our first lesson, I lit my amber and let her make it her amber’s reference, and we worked within the range of just three yards on the most basic skill, avoiding a sunder. Maintaining bodily integrity was no problem for Quibble, but the first time she popped, she left all her clothes behind.

“Vision, look away!” she scolded, covering herself with arms and hands.

I chuckled. “It’s nothing a Zero hasn’t seen many times before.”

Once she dressed, I instructed her in how to think of her clothes as an extension of herself, mentioning this was key to popping with objects and other people as well. Clothes then gave her no trouble. She popped a few sticks to pieces but got the hang of keeping them intact, too. She balked at the idea of someone else being any part of her, though. Of course, there was no way for her to practice that – she had to get it right the first time. Discussions of this obstacle tended to venture into philosophical territory, a labyrinth of misgivings about the nature of the self. At times, I felt as if I was talking to the Utopian avatar called Rpophessagr, the existentialist.

We left the challenge of popping with a subject alone, and instead I taught her to pop in darkness, without my amber to guide her. This intimidated her. She was afraid of popping too far, burying herself in bedrock.

“Have you ever heard of a Zero popping into another Zero? Or into anything?”

I assured her an amber had better sense than to pop without scouting ahead, checking that air was all there was to displace, and adjusting the destination as needed.

But this only led to more abstractions: Quibble wanted to know how the amber could distinguish one sort of matter from another. I admitted I didn’t know. Then, she asked how it kept people alive in the “not-there” between here and there, one side of a pop and the other. If living bodies were things, then what was “alive”?

“Ask the sphinx!” I told her. “None of that’s relevant. Now espy and pop!”

After a long hesitation, she did. “Kindness!” she said when she blazed into being, less than a foot in front of me. The pop’s thunder bounced around the chamber. Quibble stepped back. I relit my amber and gave her a stony stare. “Sorry,” she mumbled, and I laughed, though not sure why.

It was happening more often. Even Aladfar had seen a change in me, a lightening of the spirit. “Be careful,” he’d admonished. “I understand you’re fond of her, but she’s your protégé first. Recall your distraction at the Arc of Summary. That must not happen again.”

Now, with a phantom on Quibble’s heels, I reminded myself of my duty to her. As Touch crept into Think on the other side of the world, she and I faced each other in daylight Without. Around us stretched a meadow of short grasses, beyond it a dark green wall of taiga forest. Nearby, careless of us, a goat pulled up tufts of grass and munched them roots and all. It hadn’t even stirred when we popped in.

“Get a clear picture,” I directed. “See it all. Then describe it to me.”

Quibble closed her eyes, and her amber glimmered in her palm.

“Woods all around,” she said. “Deep shadows, shafts of sunlight. The branches of the trees are spindly. Low on the trunks, all the branches are bare of foliage, rotting. That pine’s bark shows redder than the others.”

Comparing her description with my amber’s memory, I found it satisfactory and said, “A bear must have scratched his back there. All right, keep the whole scene firmly in mind. Tell your amber that’s where you want to be. Use the monosyllable, ‘go.’”

She remained where she was.

“What’s the matter?” I prodded.

“I’m seeing it during the day. What if I want to go there at night?”

“It doesn’t matter. Even if the landscape changed – say, a tree fell over – the glass would know where you’re telling it to go. All you must do is specify the memory.”

Still she remained, pursing her lips.

I sighed. “What?”

“It’s just different now!” she exclaimed, opening her eyes. “It’s like I—” A pause as she considered her words. “It’s imaginary. It doesn’t really exist for me.”

“I know the trouble: you think you’re you. The memory’s in the amber, Quibble. That’s what you’re calling on for the pop. Become the amber.”

“Now, that’s just silly, Nuah.”

My breath caught, and for a moment I felt entirely disoriented. I clutched my amber tightly. Once I steadied myself, I said sternly, “Silly or not, that’s how it works.” Then I popped away to the arranged place and espied a moment to be sure my hypothesized bear was nowhere about. With an order to my amber only to intone, not to guide her, I said to Quibble, Come here!

Vision, I can’t.

Yes, you can. I’m not coming to fetch you. Either pop or learn to live off the land.

I put my amber away, mindfully made myself not touch it. An hour passed, two hours. Shadows lengthened amid the trees. My mind drifted.

I found myself contemplating the name Nuah. An abbreviation? If it was, I didn’t see the logic of it. All it had in common with Alnasl was the n sound.

A herd of deer filed by in the forest, led by a buck with a stunning spread of antlers. Then Quibble appeared beside me, a pop! sounding in the distance afterwards. The buck bolted, the other deer leaping after him. Without a word, I touched my amber and popped back.

Rejoin me in the meadow, I intoned.

At least a minute more slipped by before Quibble popped in. I didn’t wait for the echo to reach us but popped out at once, back to the place in the forest.

Faster, Quibble!

Now there was only the space of seven seconds before she reappeared. Then we popped back and forth, forest to meadow to forest. Each time, I cracked my tongue’s whip at her back, demanding speed. Each time, she popped quicker.

Our pops began to overlap. At last, popping in among the trees again, I saw the pinprick of light from her last pop-out collapse on itself and, just as it snapped shut, out of it she sprang again. There with me, hearing the metallic clap but seeing me stay, she startled and blinked her eyes.

“Yes!” I breathed. “That was the sound of your last pop here. That’s how fast you need to be, Quibble. Instinctive! Wherever you’re going, you can’t think it through.”

She sank to the ground. I thought her anxiety was flaring up, but she didn’t faint. She sat and tucked her ankles under her thighs. Sweat was dripping off her. She pulled her tunic’s collar up to wipe it away. I crouched down to face her.

“You didn’t think popping was this much work, did you?”

Her eyes now blinked from the sting of sweat. “No.”

“It only gets harder,” I said. “Just imagine a glass fight, Zeros popping all around you. And not just popping – they pop in with control bared and lit, trying to trance you. Or if they’re a bit wilier, they light control a fraction of a second after they appear, so you can’t tell what’s coming. You’re espying, seeing who’s who in this madness, and you’re intoning and visioning and popping yourself, trying to get some advantage. And while all this is going on with your right hand, you’re firing the kindness with your left hand to escape your enemies’ control, and you’re also trying to trance them.”

Quibble shook her head and looked down at the amber in her hand. “There’s no way I can do all that.”

“Someday you may have to. You have a leg up, Quibble. You’re getting better all the time at escaping control by yourself. Soon you’ll learn to trance with a kindness.”

“Even if I do,” she reflected, “and even if I judge it just right – I pop in, trance my enemy, don’t get myself tranced – then what? Am I just stuck there, holding him in the glass-dream? Waiting for him to pop out? Or for another Zero to pop in on me?”

“Now you’ve tranced him, his amber is useless. He can’t pop out. If your dream is total, he can’t espy or vision or intone either. No help is coming.”

“So what do I do?”

“You grab hold of him, pop out, and sunder him.”

The excelsior looked up, eyes growing wide. A ragged breath escaped her.

“That’s what he’s trying to do to you,” I told her, landing on the horrible truth.

“You’ve done that to another Zero?” she said in almost a whisper.

“Twice. A glass fight is a horrible thing to see, even worse to take part in.” I rose and offered her my hand. “Come on. You can pop out of sight now. That steals some of the advantage back from Lesath’s adept. Next, I’ll teach you to calculate long-range pops, to go where the amber hasn’t been, somewhere you can only see from a distance.”

Now Quibble knew the whole of her danger. I had wanted to divulge it slowly, a hint at a time, but there was no time left for hinting or implying. A hidden Zero dogged her, invisible to the array shadowing her and even to me. It all had to come out now.

However, I didn’t count on Quibble’s new knowledge terrifying her for her adroitness. Had I thought of her feelings, I would have told her the array watched Definition, too. Rasalased, most familiar with control’s machinations, had warned us that Alioth, or worse Lesath, might use Yed’s trick and take Definition hostage.

So we kept as constant a vigil for our excelsior’s adroitness as for the excelsior herself. But it never occurred to me to tell Quibble so. I hoped she hadn’t thought of such an evil twist of fate, and in my haste, Numberless, I saw no farther than my hope.

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