Fractal Mode

CHAPTER 5—JUPITER

COLENE had to laugh, because it wasn’t the time to cry. She knew Darius hadn’t been doing anything with Nona, because Seqiro was reassuring her on that. Even if Nona was a luscious young woman closer to Darius’ age with, Seqiro said, formidable powers of magic. Certainly she wouldn’t be rolling in the hay with him when the hay was reeking bat droppings.

Darius took a step toward her. “Get away from me, you stinker!” she cried. “Get into the water and wash up.” She glanced at the horse’s feet. “You too, horsehead.”

The three of them marched to the water. Seqiro stepped in, but the other two hesitated. “Yes, take off your clothes,” Colene said. “Wash them too.”

Guided by that, the man and woman pulled off their clothing. Colene watched, feeling less threatened because she seemed to be in charge. They were doing it at her direction. So it didn’t matter that Darius was a handsome man and Nona a beautiful woman. That he had one terrific kind of magic and she another. It was all under control.

Yet somehow little boxes were forming in the margin of Colene’s mind, reproducing themselves and extending down the page. She drew boxes when she was upset; they overran some pages of her diary. It was written in the form of letters to Maresy Doats, her fanciful equine companion and best friend before Seqiro came into her life. But the boxes told the story better than her written words.

Each box was really a representation of the real box she kept at home on Earth. In it was a small collection of significant things: sleeping pills, razor blades, and her Will. The Will might not be legal, but it was real. It told how to dispose of her things. She knew the box would be found after her death, and hoped that the Will would be honored. Meanwhile, while she lived, the box retreated from her awareness when she was undepressed, and loomed in close when she was normal. It multiplied, trying to surround the page. If the boxes ever succeeded in completely encircling her words, then she would be confined, and would have to lift the lid of the real box and eat the pills and slash open her wrists and let the rich red lifeblood pour out, and sink slowly into oblivion and be gone. She didn’t believe in hell, and hoped she wasn’t mistaken, because otherwise she was surely going there.

Colene blinked. Three faces were staring at her from the water. Seqiro, standing only ankle-deep. Darius, waist-deep. And Nona, also waist-deep, her bare breasts exactly the kind Colene longed for, remarkably full and firm. The three had been receiving her thoughts.

It was funny: they had no clothing, but she was the naked one.

“They have magic, but you are the remarkable one.” It was Provos, whom she had forgotten for the moment. “You do not die in my memory.”

And Provos remembered the future. She knew. Colene turned and hugged the older woman.

AFTER that things improved. The soiled clothing was beyond salvage. Nona and Darius donned new tunics Nona made magically from chips of wood: green for him, red for her. Neither wore anything underneath, as was the custom in this reality. They ate a meal Nona made from horsehairs. It was good, and the woman assured them that the food would not revert to its original form once it was inside them. Colene could appreciate how handy Nona would be to have around.

“What next?” Colene inquired.

“We must go to Jupiter,” Darius said. “For this must be where the Megaplayers live. We can ask them to help Nona change the animus to anima, and then the despots will fall and we’ll be able to go back through the anchor and travel the Virtual Mode again.”

“To Jupiter!” Colene exclaimed. “That monstrous planet Hobard showed us? How can we get there?”

“By following the filament,” Nona said. “All planets are connected by filaments; we can reach any, if we have the time and the magic. I think Darius’ magic will enable us to travel along it.”

“But Jupiter’s huge!” Colene protested. “Its gravity would crush us!”

“Gravity?” Nona was baffled.

They went through Seqiro to clarify the concept: the force that held people to the ground.

“Oh, but that is the same everywhere,” Nona said. “People change size with their planets, but all stand with equal force.”

“People change size?” Colene feared they had another confusion.

“So I understand,” Nona said. “I have not been away from Oria, but our myths tell of great folk and little folk. The Megaplayers are great folk, as we can see by the size of their instruments.”

“Okay,” Colene said dubiously. “If gravity doesn’t crush the giants, it shouldn’t crush us. Magic is wonderful stuff! But how do we get to the filament? I see from Seqiro’s mental picture that it connects to the planet under the East Sea.”

“We can go under the sea,” Nona said. “Just as Seqiro and I did.” She sent a picture of horse and woman standing under the water, with weird air tubes leading up.

Colene nodded. “We’ll have to have something better than air tubes, because that sea will get deep in that crevice. But I guess we can try it. Let’s go.”

Then Provos spoke, and they listened, understanding her thoughts if not her words.

“The despots are searching for us. They were looking for hoofprints, but realized that we are together. Their minions spied us by midmorning, and they came in force to capture us. We were traveling under the water toward what Nona calls the East Filament, but they dived down and intercepted us. They had thought that Nona was our captive, but she showed her magic in her effort to save us, and they knew her for what she is, and killed her.”

Colene looked at Nona, who was staring in horror at Provos. Any resentment Colene had had of the lovely woman evaporated. Colene thought of killing herself—but Nona faced involuntary death. That was worse.

Darius looked thoughtful. “This is not what must happen,” he said. “This is a warning. You saved the two of us from similar mischief when we traveled together. Because I heeded the warning, and we changed my future, your past. Then your memory changed.”

Provos looked blankly at him. Colene realized why: this was in her past, so it was beyond her memory. But it offered a hint how they should proceed.

“Suppose we do something else,” Colene said. “Suppose we don’t go in the water? I mean, we just go hide in the jungle, or something?”

Provos looked confused. “We have to be more specific,” Darius explained. “And we have to actually plan to do it, so that she can remember it.”

They could change the future! But something else occurred to her. “Provos said I did not die in her memory. But if we change it, then I might die.”

“We shall find a future in which we all survive,” Darius said. “And in which we remain together. Now we must decide on it, for midmorning is not far distant.”

They decided to make short hops up toward wild country halfway toward the head of the planet, conjuring each person individually. Nona would train another familiar, with Seqiro’s help. It seemed that she had trained a bat that way before; that was how they had landed in the bat cave and gotten all gunked with guano. Once the despots gave up the chase, they would see about resuming their mission to Jupiter.

But as they reached that decision, Provos spoke again. “The despots searched us out, catching first the laggard ones and then the leading ones, who returned to try to help the others. They killed Nona and Darius, and made Colene and Seqiro slaves. Earlier, when the two almost escaped, they killed the horse also, and the girl killed herself.”

Earlier: that meant later, in ordinary time. Colene was catching on to the woman’s memory. But it was an unacceptable future, because of what happened to the others.

They tried out other scenarios, and finally found one that worked: Colene would go alone to distract the despots, while the others proceeded toward the filament. Then Colene would be conjured to rejoin the others, and they would leave the planet and be out of range of the malice of the despots.

“But exactly how do I distract the despots?” Colene demanded.

Before Provos could answer, a blackbird flew overhead, peering down at them. “A despot familiar!” Nona cried. “We must go immediately!”

“But it will see us go into the water,” Darius said.

That was readily taken care of: Seqiro stunned the bird, and it plummeted into the water. Now the despots had no spy-eye, but they already knew the location. So Colene remained, while Darius conjured the others one by one to some other location. Nona was the last to go. She used her magic to make the footprints they had all left fade out.

“Thank you for saving my life,” she said to Colene, with a warm and sincere smile.

“It wouldn’t have been threatened if we hadn’t come,” Colene replied, feeling warmed. But the woman had disappeared.

Colene shrugged, and practiced the smile. If it could warm her, it surely could melt Darius, and she wanted it.

However, she had a more immediate problem: distracting the despots. She must be successful, because Provos had remembered that the plan worked, but it would have been a lot easier if there had been time for that one additional memory. Suppose she messed it up, and changed the future again?

You did a dance and showed them your body, Seqiro’s thought came. Darius was not pleased.

So that was it! “Well, Darius isn’t the one distracting the despots!” she said. “Tell him I’ll dance for him, any time he’s man enough for it.”

Satisfied, she worked out a routine. She wasn’t humanity’s greatest dancer, but men didn’t care how accurate a girl’s steps and hand motions were, they cared how her breasts bounced. Nona could have done a better job of that, but this was Colene’s show. She had always liked the notion of dancing for a sophisticated audience, and wowing them. Of course she had also always known that it would never happen, and that if she ever did find herself in such a situation she would mess it up. But still the vision appealed. It was part of her suicidal disposition: she always had to flirt with disaster. She felt most truly alive when she did that. She had read somewhere that it was the same urge that led explorers to climb the most dangerous mountains, and drivers to race at deadly speeds. It wasn’t just the awful boredom of ordinary existence, it was that they weren’t truly alive unless they were near death.

Actually she had come to life when she met Darius. She had played the same game with him, lying virtually naked with him, tempting him to rape her, and he hadn’t, and her fascination had quickly turned to love. But she hadn’t quite believed that he was from a different reality, and by the time he proved it, it was too late: he was home in his Castle of Laughter, and she was alone in her Hovel of Despair. But then he had made the Virtual Mode, which enabled her to walk across realities as if they were thin slivers of mica, and she had set off in search of him. At first the different realities had seemed much the same as her own, but when she crossed between them, people and animals appeared or disappeared. Then they had become different, with new fundamental laws, such as animals dominating the people and having telepathy. But in one of those other realities had been Seqiro, and she had loved him instantly, and believed in him, and she seldom felt suicidal when he was near. Darius and Seqiro—that was just about all she needed.

Assuming she could survive long enough to enjoy it. What an irony, that when she had the company of both the man and horse of her dreams, so she had no desire to kill herself, she was subject to external threats to her life. And not just her life: Nona was a threat against Colene’s relationship to both man and horse, not because Nona had any evil intentions, but because she was what she was: about four years older than Colene, beautiful, and magically gifted.

Still, it was better to have things to fight for than to be without dreams. Even if she died here on Planet Oria, in the Universe of Julia, it would be better than her life had been on Earth.

Another blackbird flew overhead. There was a familiar! Seqiro had learned that the despots worked through animals, using the senses of the creatures so that they could project full pictures on walls or in the air. In fact, Darius and Wicked Queen Glom had watched a picture of Knave Naylor in Colene’s room, when he tried to rape her. Colene hadn’t fully realized then what had really freaked the man out. It wasn’t the illusion, it was the fact that it seemed real to him. The despots were good with illusion, but they always knew the difference between it and reality. So her plan to do exactly what she had done had been flawed; straight illusion would not have done it. Because Seqiro touched the knave’s mind directly, getting access to it when the man was all excited about what he thought he was going to do to Colene, the effects had seemed real. He believed. Because that was the way it worked, with Seqiro. So Naylor thought that superior magic was protecting her, and that a real serpent was out to kill or castrate him. It was as if a person had a picture of a rattlesnake on his desk, and when he went to pick it up, the snake bit him. But Queen Glom hadn’t seen anything, so she figured the knave was losing his mind, and probably they had had him put away privily. A real one-two punch. Anyway, there had been a bug—a literal bug!—in the room that was the queen’s familiar, so she had seen through its eyes. The queen had gotten an eyeful!

Still, Colene hadn’t much liked the way Darius had hefted the queen’s fat breast. The man was just too interested in the flesh of other women, and not interested enough in Colene’s. Except when he saw her naked from the waist down, without diapers. She could make him squirm, that way, and she liked that.

There was a noise. Then a blue-clad man appeared up the beach. A male theow, by the color coding. And another, down the beach. The despots must have had some magical ways to ship them, or maybe had just used fast horses, and now they were closing in on her. Well, she hoped the rest of her party had made it to the filament; there seemed to have been time.

She waited while more men appeared and walked toward her. They were looking around, probably wondering where the others were. “Sorry, nobody here but us chickens,” she said. And started her dance.

Her first steps were clumsy; she mostly just kicked up sand. Then something seemed to take hold of her, and she became ethereally light and graceful. She whirled, she sprang, she gestured in intricate patterns. How could this be? Then she realized that it was Seqiro’s influence: he was guiding her body. It was one of the things he could do.

But horses didn’t dance. How could he make her graceful, doing things she had hardly imagined? He might make her move faster or have more power, but this dance was intricately choreographed. The human folk in Seqiro’s reality were not given to this sort of thing. He should have no memory of it.

Nona! Seqiro was borrowing from her mind, and relaying it to Colene. It was Nona’s ability she was experiencing.

Colene felt another surge of jealousy. Damn that woman! She had so much that Colene lacked. But Colene couldn’t turn it down; their escape depended on her success.

The men had been moving purposefully. Now they paused. They were supposed to be capturing her and searching out the other members of her party, but she was now acting in an interesting fashion. They probably weren’t allowed to rape her, because some ranking figure of royalty had reserved that privilege to himself, and the seeing-eye blackbird was watching. Maybe they planned to kill Darius, so she would have no protector, and then wicked Knave Naylor would dare to return to complete what he had started. But it was okay to watch her. Maybe the despot who was attuned to the familiar was watching too. Men were easy to distract if a woman knew her business.

So she danced, and began lifting her green tunic so that more of her legs showed, and whirling so that the shortened skirt of it flung out, revealing yet more. She still wore the color of the unclassified visitor, which surely enhanced the interest of her person. Ordinary theows would seldom if ever get a glimpse of the private flesh of despots, and she just might be classified a despot; the doubt was there as long as she wore the green. Oh, yes, she was mesmerizing them, and she loved it. Even if it wasn’t truly her ability, it was her own little body.

But this would last only so long, and then she had to be out of here. What was keeping Darius? He couldn’t have forgotten her!

She hauled the tunic up another notch, giving them a view of her underwear. She had had to tie together bits of cloth after the knave burned her undergarments in heatless flames. Did girls wear panties under their cloaks here? Surely they did—and if not, well, she was an outsider, so she was entitled. What about bras? Well, she’d take those things off too, if she had to. Anything to stretch it out until she was conjured away.

The men were staring. They seemed even more fascinated than before. Were they undergarment freaks? Hobard had stared—maybe that was it! Folk here didn’t wear anything under their tunics, so she was startlingly different.

Yes. It seemed Seqiro had learned this, but hadn’t thought to tell her before. The horse wasn’t much for initiating things, and really didn’t care much about clothing.

Another figure appeared, this one riding a horse. The garb was black. That meant a despot male. That also meant that the game was over. He would use magic to hog-tie her, and then the conjuration might not work.

She hauled her tunic the rest of the way up and whirled it over her head. “Take a look at this, blackhead!” she cried. Maybe she could wow him too, with her naughty undies, long enough to give her whatever time she needed.

Suddenly she floated, and not by her own design. It was the magic. She was sailing toward the despot. So much for distracting him with her pants. “Damn it, Darius, get me out of here!” she cried.

There was a wrenching, and she landed waist-deep in water. Above her loomed what looked like a transparent bell. It was so large that there was room for Darius, Provos, Colene, and Seqiro, with Nona astride the horse. Several extensions reached down to the sea floor, evidently keeping the big bell stable.

“But what keeps the air fresh?” she asked.

“Nona is making more air from spent bubbles of the old air,” Darius explained, handing her a new green tunic. “But she’s not used to this, and there are several of us, so it’s a drain on her.”

She donned the tunic. The bottom of it trailed in the water, but that couldn’t be helped. “But if it’s magic—”

“Magic takes about the same energy as physical activity,” he said. “Unless it’s illusion. We don’t want her to get overtired. We’re pretty deep now.”

“But I don’t feel any pressure.”

“Pressure doesn’t build up here. It’s no worse a mile down than at the surface. But we’d have a long way to swim, holding our breaths.”

And Nona was making it possible to do this. Colene decided not to begrudge her the ride on Seqiro.

Fortunately they were close to the nethermost cleft of the East Valley. The lights of the tiny filament structures became so small that they were no more than a glowing band, and the other sides of the valley appeared. Suddenly they were there: standing over the central dimple. From it extended one straight band of light, which reached right through their bell and beyond without being intercepted. That was the major filament.

“But how do we travel along that?” Colene asked. “It’s just a beam of light.”

“Nona can tune in to the planetoids along it, and Seqiro can tune me to her, and then I can see to conjure us to them. Actually she may be able to travel along it alone; the theow legends say that those with real magic have this power.”

“But this is going to be tricky, one at a time.”

“This time we’ll travel together. She thinks the despots can do it, so it must be possible for us.”

“I hope so,” Colene said, liking this less.

Nona sat up straight, extending her arms. Seqiro moved, responsive to her will, until they stood squarely across the filament. In fact it now traveled up through her body and out the top of her head. “Touch me,” she murmured.

Darius, Provos, and Colene came close. Nona reached down to take hands with Provos on one side and Colene on the other. Darius reached past Colene to take hold of Nona’s knee. Colene wasn’t totally pleased with that, but suppressed her objection. She did feel the tingle of magic, as if a trace electric current were running through them.

The magic took hold. Colene’s awareness seemed to follow the beam up, up at the speed of light, until it focused on another Mandelbrot bug far away. Darius’ free hand moved, holding five doll figures up in that direction.

They shot up through the bell and the water and out along the beam in what turned out to be a zigzag course. Suddenly they were at the planetoid.

It took Colene a moment to get her bearings. They were no longer in the diving bell; that must remain under the sea. They were standing on a bug—but it was only a few miles across. They could step over many of its small projections. In fact, they had to; they were on the tiny head of it, which fastened to a larger head, and a larger one, until the body of it loomed. The head was in sunlight, but the far side of the body was in shadow.

Their own heads towered what should have been miles above the surface—yet they breathed without difficulty. And the gravity was the same as it had been on Oria. Nona had been right: it was the same, regardless of the size of the planet. Julia was a magic universe.

They walked around the body, heading east. The sunlight stopped at about the level of the largest side projections. They continued into the East Valley. Now all around them the filaments glowed, with most merging into ground light, but some rising to head height or beyond. It was similar to what they had seen at night on Oria, only now their heads were in daylight after their bodies were in deep shadow.

They came to the East Valley. This had a puddle of water in it, and Colene realized that it was the same as the sea on Oria. Their perspective had changed. They were like giants on this tiny planet.

“I think I must rest for a while,” Nona said.

“I too,” Darius agreed. “This is a new exercise for me, and I don’t want to go wrong.”

There is no danger for us here, Seqiro thought. It is safe for you to sleep.

Nona slid off his back, made a huge pillow from a thread of her dress, and lay blissfully down on it. Then, as an afterthought, she made another pillow for Darius.

Colene was tired too, but the evidence of Nona’s compatibility with Darius was something she did not want haunting her dreams. So she refused to rest, and turned her attention elsewhere.

This planet was just like Oria, and it helped her to understand Oria’s geography. Could there be people on this world, in scale with it? That would be funny!

“Yes,” Nona said, picking up the thought. Sometimes Colene wished that Seqiro’s telepathic ability weren’t quite so comprehensive. Were all her jealous little snits being broadcast to the others?

No. Only the thoughts of normal interest to others, unless you wish it otherwise.

Well, that was a relief! She appreciated the horse’s discretion. “There are?” she said, quickly returning to Nona’s thought so that her side dialogue with Seqiro wouldn’t be noticed. “Little people?”

“There are people on all the worlds, I think. Our stories tell of them. But few travel between worlds, so there is little contact. The ones from Jupiter are the Megaplayers, who left their great instruments by our sea.”

“You mean there really are giants to go with those things?” Colene asked, still amazed by the revelation. She knew they were going to see just such giants, but somehow their literalness hadn’t registered.

“Oh, yes. Every planet has its folk. But it’s hard to know them.”

“Now, let me see if I have this straight. Oria is just a little planet out from Jupiter, and there are littler planets along the filament between the two. And the filament comes from one of the projections of Jupiter. So what about the filaments from Oria? Do they have little planets along them, and do those planets have people too?”

“Yes, surely they do,” Nona answered. “But those folk are so tiny we can’t see them.”

Colene shook her head. “I’ll just have to see it to believe it. But they would be so small—if this planet’s about eight miles in diameter, that’s a thousandth of Earth/Oria’s size. So to be in proportion, the people would have to stand, oh, under a tenth of an inch tall.”

I can improve your sight, so you can see them, Seqiro offered.

Colene remembered how the horse had rendered her into a deadly fast and strong knife-wielder, briefly, as a demonstration of his potential power over her body. In fact he had done it in another way just recently, enabling her to dance effectively. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

They left Darius and Nona resting, and Provos sitting there with her own future memories, and walked back to the shadow’s border. It was good to be alone with Seqiro again, however briefly.

Colene lay down on the ground, realizing that it was furry rather than hard. She had assumed that this was moss. But now she realized that it was something else.

She focused on a tiny clear patch between stands of moss. Her vision became amazingly sharp. It was as if she were using a magnifying glass or even a microscope, and turning up the power.

The edge of the moss resolved itself into a stand of trees. The bare patch became a pasture. To the other side of the pasture, a speck of sand became a perfectly formed little house. This was indeed a landscape!

She squinted, concentrating. The pasture clarified. There were cows in it. She traced the route of the road passing by the house, and discovered a horse running along it. On the horse was a man.

“Like Gulliver’s Travels,” she murmured. Then, to clarify the reference for Seqiro, she amplified her spot memory: a man named Jonathan Swift had written a satire of the politics and customs of his time, phrased as Gulliver’s voyages to the land of Lilliput with its six-inch-tall folk, and Brobdingnag with its giants. One of the voyages had been to a land of intelligent and refined horses. “I’ve been there too,” she said. “That’s where I found you, Seqiro.”

The horse (the tiny one) galloped to the house. The man dismounted almost before the horse came to a stop, and dashed into the house. In a moment the tiny door opened again, and the man came out—with a woman. The man pointed—at Colene’s face. The two stared up at her.

It was because of her the man had been hurrying home! To these folk, she was a monstrous giant peering down with unknown intent. They were terrified!

“Hey, I’m just curious,” she murmured, afraid that her breath might blow them away.

It talks!

That was the man’s thought—which Seqiro had relayed to her. She could communicate with them! Their minds must be wide open, or maybe the horse had become attuned to the mind-set of all the people of Julia.

Parts of both, Seqiro responded.

“I’m just a person, like you,” she said to the tiny ones, letting her vocalization shape her thought. “I’m just passing through. I hope I didn’t step on anyone.”

Leave us alone, anima!

Obviously they had been doing damage as they tramped heedlessly across this planet! The best thing they could do for these people was to get away and let them repair the damage. Suddenly Colene felt awesomely responsible.

Yet was it any different back home on Earth? All her life she had walked without much regard for the tiny plants and bugs that might be under her feet. Didn’t ants care whether they got squished? Now that it was people getting squished, she felt horribly guilty. This was evidently an animus planet, but that did not mean it was right to crush their people.

“I’m sorry,” she said. A tear fell and splashed into the pasture, spooking a cow.

She got up, quickly but carefully. Where could she put her great lethal feet, so she wouldn’t do more damage?

She decided to put them in her own footprints. That way she would squish only what had already been squished. But she couldn’t see her prints in the shadow.

I can tune in to what is there.

“Thanks, horsehead.”

Now the impressions of the folk of this world came to her. Surprise. Incredulity. Denial. Horror. Grief.

Every footprint was a disaster area. Trees had been flattened, houses destroyed, people killed.

“Oh, my God!” Colene whispered. “What have I been doing?” But she had the answer. She had been destroying. She had been like an act of nature, wiping out people randomly, not even aware. Gravity might not be any more, for her, but it seemed that she felt exactly like a giant to the folk underfoot.

“Seqiro, guide my feet!” she pleaded, blinded by tears and horror.

They walked back to the others, treading in their own prints. “We’ve got to get out of here!” Colene cried. Without waiting, she hit them with what she had learned.

“Oh, I never thought!” Nona cried, sitting up. “I knew there were people, but—”

“But you didn’t make the connection,” Darius finished. “None of us did. It was too far from our experience.”

That was true. He was the rational one, Colene remembered. But now they knew, and they could not ignore it.

“How many more of these little planets must we pass before we get to Jupiter?” Darius asked Nona.

“I don’t know. Several. Some will be larger than this, some smaller.”

“Can we take a longer hop?” Colene asked.

“We can try.” Nona walked to the sea, stood in it, and concentrated, tuning in on the filament ahead.

After a bit, she reported that there were two worlds she might reach near the main star. One was larger than this one; the other was smaller. Both were anima.

“Star?” Colene asked.

Nona’s thought clarified the concept. A star was not what Colene imagined; it was merely the point at which several filaments diverged. Those on major lines were big and bright; those on minor lines were lesser structures. Those with many rays were brighter than those with few rays. Oria’s sun was the nearest large star on an adjacent filament, with ninety-eight rays, closer to them than their own ninety-nine-ray star. But this particular little star had only three rays, so was hardly recognizable.

Darius cut directly to business. “If we take the smaller world, we will risk treading on many more little folk, unless our feet touch only the tops of mountains and they are safe in the valleys.”

“No, folk live on mountaintops too,” Nona said.

“If we take the larger world, we will have a better chance of seeing where we put our feet.”

That seemed to be the better choice. Nona changed the pillows back to threads so they wouldn’t suffocate any little folk, and they got together for the jump.

Colene thought she was used to it, but this one turned out to be more dizzying than the last, because it covered considerably more distance. Now she was aware of the complicated convolutions of the filament; it was not jagged but infinitely curved, dancing this way and that as it wound through its intricate patterns. Throughout these patterns were tiny bugs, too small to step on or even to see, yet each was part of the route. Did all these have people too? At least they were not getting tramped on.

They arrived at the planetoid. This one was over ten times the diameter of the last, according to Nona’s thought, or about a hundred miles. Colene couldn’t see much of it, because the curve of its heads obscured the body. Was it large enough?

They stood astride the diminishing heads, as before, but the progression was longer. They were sliding off a boulder about thirteen feet in diameter, give or take five feet—in her dizziness she didn’t care much about accuracy—to land on one about a hundred and fifty feet across. They walked around that, their heads pointing away from the surface of the head they were on, not away from the body beyond, so that they didn’t have to jump down. Even so, it might have been easier to have Darius conjure them, but that magic had to be saved for the next effort.

The next head was about two miles in diameter, and felt more tike a planetoid in itself. Now she remembered to watch for the works of people, and she saw them. Their houses were about two inches high, and the people themselves about one inch in stature.

“Stop here,” she said. “I’ll ask them how we can get through without hurting them.”

She squatted, and brought her hand down carefully to point at one tiny man who defended his barn bravely with a pitchfork. Her vision sharpened so that she could see his face clearly. “You,” she said for Seqiro to forward. “I will talk to you. We are traveling through from a larger world. We don’t want to step on any of you. Can you tell us a way to go so that we can put our feet down safely?”

Perhaps the man had had experience with travelers. Maybe that was why he lived here near the point of arrival. At any rate, he did not freak out. “Animus or anima?” he demanded.

That set Colene back. Which force did they represent?

“Anima,” Nona said.

“Anima, hiding from animus,” Colene told the farmer. “Going to bring the anima, if we can.”

The farmer smiled. “Then pass with our blessing. There is a path by the south side.” He gestured, pointing the direction.

“Thank you.” Colene stood carefully. She did not need to repeat the information; the others had received it too.

They stepped carefully to the south, setting their feet down in empty pastures or barren areas. They found the path; apparently there had been a blight in this region, leaving a depopulated strip. They walked along it, alert for healthy sections, which they avoided by moving to the side or by simply stepping over. Colene was glad she had fashioned underclothing, because she was wary of what little folk might see as she stepped over them.

Now the projections of the planet were plain. They ranged in height from about five hundred feet down to immeasurably small. This was the way of these fractal worlds, Colene knew; it hadn’t been evident on Oria because they hadn’t traveled enough on it by day. Also, people had plowed out most of the knobs, near the village, so as to use the land for crops. Man always did mess up the scenery. Here the mountains were shaped like boulders with smaller boulders perched on them, and smaller ones on the smaller ones, and so on without end. It was weird—but also true to the Mandelbrot set as she remembered it. True to the entire science of fractals and Julia sets,

They came to the next larger head, which looked to be about ten miles in diameter. Now Colene saw that there was a river or lake filling in the crevice between the small and large heads. Naturally the water of the planet had to flow somewhere, and since down was toward the center of each head, there was a section between heads where the attraction of both applied. That would be where the water collected. This would be a donut-shaped lake, technically a torus, circling the planet at this narrow section.

But the path did not extend across the next head. They had to hail another farmer. But Colene was getting experienced at this; she sent reassuring, friendly thoughts ahead, so that the man had a notion what she wanted before she actually broached the subject. He directed them to the north, where there had been extensive strip mining, and the land had been left mostly barren. Even some of the larger projecting spheres were gone, leaving the land oddly naked. “They are messing up their planet the same way we did Earth,” she muttered.

By the time they made their way to the lake that de-marked the next head, they were all physically tired except Seqiro, who seemed indefatigable. Ten miles was ten miles. “Say, you could have floated,” Colene said to Nona.

“That would have taken similar energy—and depleted the magic I must save for the next conjuring,” the woman replied.

True. There was no easy way across for any of them. “Actually we’re not on a schedule, are we?” Colene asked, pursuing another thought. “We can take an extra day if we want to?”

“We can,” Darius agreed.

“So why don’t we rest the night, then conjure ourselves to the East Valley, and rest again until we’re ready to make the long hop?”

They considered, and agreed. They camped by the lake, and stripped and washed themselves, then had a good meal. Nona looked so tired that Colene was hardly jealous of her fine body. Especially since Darius was carefully not looking. Then Colene thought of something else.

She walked to the nearest community of natives. “We thank you for letting us cross your world,” she said for Seqiro to relay. “Is there anything we can do in return for your hospitality?”

The little folk were taken aback. Then they rallied and decided that yes, there was something. They had a construction project that required the filling in of several large mine pits, and it was hard to spare the manpower for that. They had only recently thrown off the yoke of animus despots, and had little new magic, and there was much planetary damage to be undone.

Colene looked at Darius. “Can we move their earth for them, magically?”

“We don’t need to,” he replied. “We can shovel it physically, if we make big enough tools.”

“We can make them,” Nona agreed. “That’s not the same magic as travel-conjuring, and I am not as fatigued by it.”

“Tomorrow,” Colene told the little folk. “Mark the earth you want moved, and mark where you want it moved to, and we’ll do what we can.”

“Agreed,” the little folk said appreciatively.

This planet was oriented so that the light of the same great star that brought day to Oria slanted across at an angle to the head. Now dusk came, and then darkness, and the air cooled quickly. Nona had to make blankets for them all except Seqiro, who was satisfied to walk around grazing on the patches of grass and saplings.

“Come here, you little bundle of warmth,” Darius told her. “I remember you from Earth.”

She joined him and slept in his chaste embrace, delighted.

IN the morning Nona floated up and spied the earth mounds and the pits beyond. Everything was marked; the little folk must have labored through the night. She returned to make shovels for the human folk, and a harness and drag for the horse. Then they marched to the first site and started shoveling and dragging, each of their giant shovelfuls the equivalent of ten thousand or a million native shovelfuls. Colene tried to work it out mathematically in her head, cubing one hundred, because each dimension was about a hundred times that of the equivalent for the little folk, but realized that this wouldn’t work. It was science-reality figuring, and this was a magic reality, where the square-cube law did not hold and gravity was more or less independent of mass. At any rate, they were doing the job a whole lot faster than the little folk could.

Still, there was a lot of earth to move, and none of the three women were in physical condition to maintain such effort. In the end it was mostly Darius and Seqiro, both sweating profusely as they labored. By the close of day, the job was done. The formerly mounded and pitted terrain had been rendered into a level field.

The little folk were delighted. “We did not think you would do all of it!” their spokesman exclaimed. “We must reward you, O giants of another world.”

Colene tried to demur, knowing that there was nothing the local folk could do to repay such heroic effort. “It is merely our thanks for your hospitality,” she said.

“We still have the rest of the planet to traverse,” Darius reminded her. “We can’t walk it all; we’ll need to conjure ourselves there. If they can show us good locations to land—”

“However,” Colene continued smoothly, “we could use the favor of some information. We are afraid we will accidentally step on some of your people as we travel the length of the planet, so we prefer to conjure ourselves there. But we need to have a series of clear landing sites, lest we do harm arriving blindly. If you could provide information—”

“In the morning!” the spokesman agreed eagerly. “We are amazed that you possess such exotic magic.” That reminded Colene that Darius’ ability to conjure living folk was unknown in this universe; she would be more careful what she said about it henceforth.

Meanwhile, the natives put on a show for the entertainment of their giant guests. Their material magic remained weak, for their new generation of women were still girls, but their illusion was strong. They generated huge pictures (for them) against the backdrop of night, making images of their dancing—and it was truly evocative dancing. It was a costumed re-enactment of their overthrow of the despots across the world, after the animus had changed. It showed the despots, deprived of their magic, bowing down, and the theows assuming the mantle of dominion. The women performed a symbolic finale that suggested the magic their daughters would have, but was incidentally quite sexy. Especially when they threw off their red tunics and danced naked. She could feel Darius’ appreciation. He did not regard the illusion pictures as real, so felt free to watch them intently. She would remember that; would he watch her dance naked if he thought she was an illusion image?

So they slept again. Colene was getting to like this little planet. It was remarkably similar to Oria, except for size; it would not have been possible to tell that its size differed had the five of them not been there for contrast. The proportions of the people were the same, and when they jumped, they took the same amount of time to land. There simply was no change because of the scale. This was just not a science reality.

In the morning the little folk had the information. There was a suitable site beside the lake that separated the main head from the body, forty miles away, and another near the East Sea. They could do it in two hops, if they wished, or one.

“These are longer jumps than we did before, on Oria,” Darius said. “The filament isn’t the same. Better to try the forty, then the hundred.”

They set up for it. It was clear that the little folk meant well; their minds were quite open to Seqiro. The site was described as completely accessible, and Provos remembered no difficulty here. So Darius conjured Seqiro there first, then used his linkage with the horse’s mind to conjure the others in turn to the vicinity. Colene was the first to follow Seqiro; then came Nona, Provos, and Darius himself.

Now they stood at the edge of the much larger lake separating the head from the body. It was quite similar to the one they had left, in all respects apart from size. That was the nature of this fractal universe: everything was self-similar.

They made a similar series of conjurations to the East Sea. This was just like the one they had left on Oria, only much smaller. But they decided to rest one more day before making the final conjuration to Jupiter.

RESTED, they used a new weighted diving bell to march down under the water. This time the journey was brief, and soon they stood astride the East Filament.

They joined together, in bodies and minds, and sailed up along the filament. This time Colene saw even more: how they zoomed along at lightspeed (or magic-speed), down into the juncture of three rays, and indeed it seemed like another dimension, for she felt as if they were accelerating toward infinite velocity while traveling a path extending toward infinity. Then suddenly the infinities met and canceled, and they were zooming out of the well and toward Jupiter, which now loomed awesomely huge.

They landed on the smallest feasible head of the head of one of the major projections on the side of Jupiter. The connected heads became much larger than Oria, and Jupiter itself was almost unimaginable.

Now there was no concern about stepping on the natives. Rather, they would have to be concerned about being stepped on by the natives. The tiniest head might be small, but Jupiter was large, so the natives would be Jupiter-scale. This was certainly the home of the fabled Megaplayers; the size was right.

But first they had to rest, for Darius and Nona were exhausted by their joint effort of travel. Colene decided to make herself useful by harvesting a berry or grain of wheat and making a nonmagical meal for them. However, she needed water, and wood for a fire. So she and Seqiro got busy.

Provos joined her without being asked. They had camped at the edge of a forest of what appeared to be literally mile-high trees; there was plenty of wood in the form of fallen twigs, which were full-sized logs to them.

There was a lake nearby. Colene headed for it, but Provos held her back. “There is a bad memory,” she explained.

So they took another path. Colene looked to the side, to see what might be on the one she would have taken.

She saw an ant. It was a foot long. Suddenly she realized that their most immediate danger was not the Megaplayers.