The Practice Effect

1

Lantern-semaphore signals flashed from the castle to all gates. Guard details were doubled, and every person trying to leave the city was thoroughly searched. High overhead, members of the overlord’s aerial patrol scoured the surrounding area until dark, when they had to land.

“The Baron never put up a fuss like this before when someone got away from him. Not that he ever took it gracefully, but why the big manhunt this time?”

The one-eyed thief, Perth, looked out from an upper-story window in one of Zuslik’s newer—and hence shabbier—high-rises. He was disturbed by the flashing lights and the passing troops of marching northmen in their high, bearskin helmets.

Arth, the small bandit leader, motioned his associate away from the window. “They’ll never find us here. Since when ’ave Kremer’s northers ever picked out a single one of our hidey holes? Close the shutters an’ sit down, Perth.”

Perth complied, but he cast a sidelong look at the other fugitives, who sat talking at a table near the kitchen while Arth’s wife prepared dinner. “You and I know who they’re lookin’ for,” he told Arth. “The Baron don’t like losin’ one of his best practicers. An’ even worse, he don’t like losin’ a wizard.”

Arth couldn’t help but agree. “I’ll bet Baron Kremer regrets lettin’ Denniz sit in the jailyard for so long. He probably figured he had all the time in the world to get around to torturin’ him.”

Arth rubbed the plush arms of his recliner. Once a day, one of the free members of the band had sat in it to keep it in practice for him. Arth was pleased because it showed they had believed he would get out eventually. “Anyway,” he told Perth, “we owe those three our freedom, so let’s not begrudge ’em the Baron’s wrath.”

Perth nodded but wasn’t mollified. Mishwa Qan and most of the other thieves were out now, scouring the city for the items Dennis Nuel had asked for. Perth didn’t like having a foreigner boss Zuslik thieves around—wizard or no.

Gath looked from Dennis’s drawings to the Earthman. The boy could barely restrain his excitement. “So the bag won’t have any flying essence until the hot air is put inside it? Will it really fly then? Like a bird, or a kite, or one of th’ dragons of legend?”

“We’ll find out as soon as the Lady Aren returns with the first bag, Gath. We’ll experiment with a model and see how much practice improves it overnight.”

Gath smiled at mention of the old seamstress. Clearly the youth did not think much of Lady Aren and her strange, delusion. The old woman lived down the hall, making a paltry living as a seamstress. Yet she maintained high manners and insisted on being addressed as she had been as a young courtier in the days of the old Duke.

Right now their entire plan depended on the skill of one crazy old lady.

Stivyung Sigel sat beside Gath, puffing slowly on a pipe, content to listen and voice an occasional question. He seemed fully recovered from the effects of his felthesh trance. In fact, he had held off on his initial idea—trying to climb the city walls—only on Dennis’s assurance that there was a better way to get out of town and look for his wife.

Arth and Perth joined the three of them at the table. Dennis and Gath cleared the drawings away as Arth’s wife, Maggin, brought out a roast fowl and mugs of ale.

Arth ripped off a drumstick and proceeded to make his beard greasy with it, apparently feeding himself as an accidental side effect. The others took their turns stabbing the bird after the host, as courtesy demanded. Maggin brought a steaming bowl of boiled vegetables and joined them.

Arth spoke with his mouth full. “We had a messenger from th’ boys while you were so intent on makin’ those drawings, Dennis.”

Dennis looked up hopefully, “Did they find my backpack?”

Arth shook his head, mumbling around his food. “Ye weren’t too awfully specific, Dennzz. I mean, there’re a lotta buildings near th’ west gate, and some of ’em use their parapets as balconies an’ gardens, in which case your pack’s been picked up by now.”

“No leads at all? No rumors?”

Arth took a drink, letting red, foamy ale run around the mug and into his beard. He obviously relished home cooking after his time in jail. He wiped his mouth on his cuff. Dennis noted that Arth’s shirts all seemed to have gradually developed built-in sponges on their left sleeves.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Dennzz,, there are some strange rumors going about. They say someone’s seen a Krenegee beast sneakin’ around town. Others say they’ve seen the ghost of the old Duke come to take revenge on Baron Kremer.

“There’s even a story about a strange critter what doesn’t eat at all, but spies on people from their windows and moves faster than lightning… somethin’ nobody’s ever seen before, with five eyes.” Arth spread his open hand on the top of his head, fingers up, and rotated it, making a whistling sound. Perth coughed in his ale and guffawed. Maggin and Gath laughed out loud.

“But my backpack…?”

Arth spread his hands to indicate he had heard nothing.

Dennis nodded glumly. He had hoped the thieves would recover the pack intact. Or, barring that, they might hear about pieces of his “alien” property in the underworld grapevine. Perhaps one or two items might turn up on sale in the bazaar.

More likely, the pack was in Baron Kremer’s hands already. Dennis wondered if even now Kremer was shaking his camp-stove or his shaving kit under the pretty nose of the L’Toff Princess, Linnora, demanding to know what they were for.

For all their reputation for mystery, the L’Toff would be as perplexed by Dennis’s goods as anyone else on Tatir. Linnora wouldn’t be able to help Kremer. Dennis hoped he hadn’t somehow helped make her incarceration any worse than it already was by angering her captor.

There came a faint knock on the door. The men tensed until they heard it repeat five times, then two, in the proper sequence.

Perth went to unlatch the bolt, and an old woman in an elegant black gown entered. She set down a large sack as the men rose and bowed to her politely.

“My lords,” the old lady said and curtsied. “The global tapestry you asked for is finished. As you requested, I embroidered only the faintest outlines of clouds and birds on the sides. You may practice the scene to perfection on your own. If this small globe is to your satisfaction, I will commence on the larger version as soon as you bring me the materials.”

Arth picked up the sewn arrangement of frail velvet sheets and pretended to inspect it briefly. Then he handed it to Dennis, who took it eagerly. Arth bowed to Lady Aren.

“Your Ladyship is too gracious,” he said, his speech suddenly almost aristocratic. “We’ll not sully your hands with paper money or amber. But our gratitude will not be denied. May we contribute to the upkeep of your manse, as we have in th’ past?”

The old woman grimaced in feigned distaste. “One imagines it would not be too unseemly if it were handled thus.”

Tomorrow a basket of food would appear outside her door, as if by magic. The pretense would be maintained.

Dennis did not observe the transaction. He was marveling at the “global tapestry.”

Coylians did possess a few respectable technologies. There were certain things that had to be usable from the day they were “made” and could not be practiced without ruining them. Paper was an example. A piece of paper might have to sit and wait in a drawer for weeks or months until it was needed for a note or letter. Then it had to have all of its “paperness” instantly ready for use. Once written upon, then, it might be stored for years before being needed for reference. It should not degrade, as happened here to abandoned things whose qualities existed purely because of practice.

No wonder they used paper money here and no one complained. The stuff had intrinsic value almost as great as amber or metal.

With papermaking came felting. Dennis had asked the thieves to “acquire” a dozen square yards of the finest felt they could find. If the experiment worked, they would want to follow that up by stealing virtually the entire supply of this small metropolis.

Dennis was mildly surprised at how little guilt he felt over being an accessory to a major heist. It was all part of his general reaction to this world, he realized with just a touch of bitterness. Earthlings had had to struggle and experiment for thousands of years to reach a level of comfort these people achieved almost without thinking. He could easily rationalize taking what he needed from them.

Anyway, the chief paper merchant of Zuslik was a close crony of the Baron. His monopoly and his flaunted wealth made certain few in the lower town would feel sorry for him.

The “global tapestry” was a sewn sphere of paper-light cloth with one open end. Its sides were vaguely embroidered with clouds and birds. The stitching was really rather uneven, though Lady Aren obviously thought herself an artiste.

Eventually, if practiced long enough by appreciative eyes, the figures would seem to come alive. Besides science, Dennis realized, art, too, had been stunted by this beneficent Practice Effect.

Dennis and Sigel and Gath waited while Lady Aren gossiped with Arth and Maggin. Sigel gave Gath a sharp look when the boy started drumming his fingers on the table. The wait seemed interminable. And Arth appeared in no hurry to end it. The little thief actually seemed to be enjoying himself!

Dennis forced himself to relax. He’d probably enjoy a little gossip, too, if he’d just returned home after a long imprisonment. He found himself longing to know who had been doing what to whom back at old Sahara Tech.

Idly, he wondered if Bernald Brady had had any luck winning the heart of fair Gabriella. He raised his cup and drank a toast to Brady’s luck in the venture.

Finally the old lady departed. “All right,” Dennis said, “let’s finish it.”

He spread the limp globe out on the table. Gath and Sigel took several soft tallow candles and began rubbing them carefully against the felt paper, laying down a thin coating of wax. Meanwhile, Dennis carefully tied a small gondola of string and bark to the open end. By the time he had affixed a candle to the tiny basket the others announced they were finished. Arth and Perth and Maggin watched, puzzlement on their faces.

Dennis and Gath carried the contraption to a corner, where a rough wooden frame had been prepared.

“It’s called a balloon,” Dennis said as he laid the fabric over the frame.

“You told us that much,” Perth said a little snidely. “And you said it would fly. A made thing would fly…and indoors where there’s no wind…” He obviously didn’t believe it. In the here and now there was one way to fly—by building, and slowly practicing, a great tethered kite.

Long ago, some Coylian genius who hated getting wet had invented an umbrella—now a common item owned by nearly everybody. Later, after a freak windstorm had caused a large umbrella to rise up with the wind, carrying its owner on a brief, harrowing ride, someone had a second conceptual leap. It was the birth of kites on Tatir. Furious practice led thereafter to the development of tethered wings, carrying men high above the surface to look at the ground below.

Those kites had helped Baron Kremer’s father, a minor nobleman from the northern hill country, to defeat the old Duke and force the King of Coylia to grant him domain over the upper valley of the Fingal.

Only in the past few years had the step to true gliders been taken—this time by Kremer himself. Though other armed forces now had kites, at the moment he, and only he, possessed a true air force. It was a major tactical advantage in his current conflict with royal authority.

Dennis wondered why no one else had ever developed gliders. Perhaps it had something to do with the imagery that took place when a person practiced an object. One had to have an idea of what one wanted in mind. Perhaps no one could conceive of an untethered kite as anything but fatal to the rider, and so they always were until Kremer made his breakthrough.

Dennis arranged the candle directly below the opening in the bottom of the trial balloon. He smiled with assurance. “You’ll see, Perth. Just make sure those buckets of water are handy in case we have an accident.”

He acted confident, but he was less than entirely certain. In a science-fiction story he had read as a boy, another Earthling had, just like himself, been transported to another world where the physical laws were also different. In the story, magic had worked, but the hero’s gunpowder and matches had all failed!

Dennis suspected that the Tatir Practice Effect merely supplemented the physics he knew, rather than supplanted it. He certainly hoped so.

Clear smoke rose from the candle, entering the balloon through the hole at the bottom.

Arth offered Dennis and Stivyung his best loungers and pulled out a few string-and-stick chairs that “needed a lot of work anyway,” he insisted. He gave Dennis and Stivyung two very nice pipes and happily puffed away on a hollowed twig and corncob contraption—working it slowly toward perfection, or at least staving off a decline to uselessness.

Dennis shook his head. The Practice Effect took a lot of getting used to.

“Will someone explain to me just what Baron Kremer is trying to pull?” Dennis asked as they waited for the bag to fill. “I take it he’s defying the central authority… the King?”

Stivyung Sigel puffed moodily at his pipe before answering.

“I was in the Royal Scouts, Dennis, until I married and retired. The Baron has been hard on us royal settlers out on the western frontier. He doesn’t care to have me and my land around, whose loyalty he can’t count on.

“The Baron’s supported by the maker guilds. The guilds don’t like homesteaders setting up too far from the towns. We make our own starters—chip our own flint, tan our own hides and rope, weave our own cloth. Lately we’ve even found out how to start makin’ our own paper, if the truth be told.”

Arth and Perth looked up, their interest piqued. Gath blinked in surprise. “But the paper guild’s the most secret of the lot! How did you learn…?” He snapped his fingers. “Of course! The L’Toff!”

Sigel merely puffed on his pipe. He said nothing until he noticed that all eyes were on him and he was clearly expected to go on.

“The Baron knows now,” he said, shrugging. “And so do the guilds. Common folk might as well find out, too. What’s happening out here is the sharp edge of something big that’s shaping up back in the estates an’ cities to the east, too. People are getting tired of the guilds, and churchmen, and petty barons pushing them around. The King’s popularity has gone way up ever since he cut the property requirement to vote for selectmen and since he’s been calling an Assembly every spring instead of one year in ten.”

Dennis nodded. “Let me guess. Kremer’s a leader in the cause for barons’ rights.” It was a story he had heard before.

Sigel nodded. “And it looks like they’ve got the muscle. The King’s scouts and guards are the best troops, of course, but the feudal levies outnumber them six or seven to one.

“And now Kremer’s got these free-flying kites to carry scouts wherever he wants. They scare the daylights out of the opposition, and the churches are spreading word that they’re the ancient dragons returned to Tatir again…proof that Kremer’s favored by the gods.

“I’ve got to give Kremer credit there, No one ever thought of gliders before. Not even the L’Toff.”

One more mention of the L’Toff brought Dennis’s thoughts back to Princess Linnora, Baron Kremer’s prisoner back at the castle. She had begun to show up in his dreams. He owed her his freedom, and he didn’t like to think of her still trapped in the tyrant’s power.

If only there was a way I could help her, too, he thought.

“Balloon is almost full.” Gath used the word as if it were a proper name.

The bag was starting to stretch from the pressure of hot air within. It didn’t form a very even sphere. But here it didn’t pay to lavish excess attention on most “made” goods, anyway, so long as they started out useful enough to be practiced.

The candle was less than half gone. The balloon bobbed within its frame, straining at the tiny gondola’s shrouds. The basket bounced on the floor, then lifted away entirely.

There was a hushed silence, then Maggin laughed out loud and Arth clapped Dennis on the back. Gath crouched beneath the balloon, as if to memorize it from every angle.

Stivyung Sigel sat still, but his pipe poured forth aromatic smoke, and his black eyes seemed to shine.

“But this thing won’t lift a man!” Perth complained.

Arth turned on his subordinate. “How do you know what it’ll eventually be able to do? It’s not even been practiced yet! Weren’t you the one sneering at ‘new-made’ things?”

Perth backed down nervously, licking his lips as he stared superstitiously at the slowly rising balloon.

“Actually,” Dennis said, “Perth’s right. After practice this one will probably lift better than any similar balloon on… in my homeland. But in order to lift several men we’ll still have to make a much bigger balloon in that empty warehouse you told me about, Arth. We’ll practice it there, then Gath and Stivyung and I will use it to escape at night, when the Baron’s flying corps is in its sheds.”

Arth had a mercenary gleam in his eye. “You an’ Gath an’ Stivyung won’t forget about the message to the L’Toff, will you?”

“Of course not.” All three of them had good reasons for heading straight for the mysterious tribe in the mountains once they got out of town. Dennis intended to tell them about their captive Princess and offer suggestions how she might be rescued.

Arth expected to rake off a nice reward from the L’Toff for his part in all this, as well as have the pleasure of giving the Baron tsuris in the process.

The balloon bobbed against the ceiling. “All right,” Dennis said, “you all were going to teach me how to concentrate to get the most out of practice. Why don’t we start?”

They took their seats. Stivyung Sigel was the acknowledged best practicer, so he explained.

“First off, Dennis, you don’t have to concentrate. Just using a tool will make it better. But if you keep your attention on the thing itself, and what you’re using it to accomplish, the practice goes faster. You give the tool tougher and tougher jobs to do, over weeks, months, and think about what it could be when it’s perfect.”

“What about that trance we saw you under in the prison yard? You practiced the saw to perfection in a matter of minutes!”

Stivyung considered. “I have seen the felthesh before, when I dwelled, for a time, among the L’Toff. Even among them, it is rare. It comes after years of training, or under even more rare circumstances. I never imagined I would ever enter that state.

“Perhaps it was some magic of the moment and the desperation of our need.”

Stivyung seemed pensive for a long moment. He shook himself at last and looked at Dennis. “In any event, we cannot count on the ax falling twice in exactly the same spot. We must rely on normal ways as we practice your ‘balloons.’ Why don’t you tell us again just what this example is doing now and how it could gradually come to, do it better. Don’t get too far ahead of what it is, or it won’t work. Just try to describe the next step.”

It sounded like a children’s game to Dennis. But he knew that here “wish and make it so” had a very serious side to it. He squinted as he looked at the balloon…trying to see an ideal. Then he started to describe what none of them had ever before imagined.

2

Two days later, the search for the escapees had finally died down. The guards at the city gates were still diligent, but street patrols went back to normal. Dennis at last got to take a tour of the town of Zuslik.

On his first attempt, when he had arrived almost two weeks ago, Dennis had been full of vague ideas about how to get along in a strange city.

(One made contact with the local association of one’s profession, he imagined, hoping a local colleague would insist you stay at his home—and maybe offer his charming daughter as a tour guide, as well. Wasn’t that the way he had envisioned it just a short while back?)

His plans had gone awry before he passed through the city gates. Still, he had probably acquired a more intimate acquaintance with the local power structures than he would have as a tourist…and without the typical banes of the gawking traveler—beggars, bunions, and muggers.

He and Arth took lunch in an open-air cafe overlooking a busy market street. Dennis washed down his last bite of rickel steak with a heady swallow of the dirt-brown local brew. After a long day and night practicing the balloon, he had built up a hearty appetite.

“More,” he belched, bringing the beer stein down with a thump.

His companion stared at him for a moment, then snapped his fingers to the waiter. Dennis was a bit larger than the average male Coylian, but his appetite was nevertheless causing a bit of a sensation.

“Take it easy,” Arth suggested. “After I’ve paid for all this I won’t be able to afford to take you to a physic for yer upset stomach!”

Dennis grinned and plucked a rough toothpick from a cup by the rail. He watched a heavy cargo sled slide past the restaurant, almost silent on one of the self-lubricating roadways, pulled by a patient, lumbering larbeast.

“Have your boys managed to collect any more slippery oil?” he asked the thief.

Arth shrugged. “Not too much. We use street urchins to do the collectin’, but the drivers have taken to throwin’ rocks at ’em. And the kids waste a lot of the stuff play in ‘greased pig.’ We’ve only got a quarter of a jug or so by now.”

Only a quarter jug! That was almost a liter of the finest lubricant Dennis had ever encountered! Arth had certainly not acted this casually when Dennis first demonstrated the stuff to him. He had gone almost crazy with excitement.

It would make a useful commercial product, of course. It would also greatly facilitate burglary…until shop owners began practicing their doors to resist the stuff. Last night’s paper heist had depended completely on a surprise use of sled oil.

Dennis wondered why these people had never discovered the very substance that made their roads work. Were they that uncurious? Or did it come from operating under a totally different set of assumptions about the way the universe worked?

Of course, history showed that most of Earth’s cultures had been caste-structured, and slow to improve on the way things had been done for centuries. Here, where innovation was less necessary, people had not developed a tradition for it until very recently. The war between Baron Kremer and the King seemed to be part of that change.

This morning he and Arth had rented a warehouse. The growing fear of war had caused a decline in river commerce, and the landlord was desperate to find any tenant at all. Someone had to occupy the place and keep it fit until times improved. Already the walls were showing a creaky roughness, starting to resemble wooden logs again.

Arth was quite a bargainer. The landlord would actually pay a small sum for them to move in for a while!

Last night had come the great felt heist. Arth’s thieves had arrived at the warehouse furtively carrying bolts of the fine cloth. Lady Aren and several assistant seamstresses, all from families that had been brought down in class by Kremer’s father, were soon at work. And young Gath was at this moment constructing a gondola for the big balloon. The lad was ecstatic over the chance to make something new—something that would be of use almost before its first practice.

Arth paid the luncheon bill, muttering over the total. “Now what?” he asked.

Dennis motioned with his hands. “What else? Show me everything!”

Arth sighed resignedly.

Their first stop was the Bazaar of Merchants and Practicers. Unlike other open-air markets, with their collections of practice-on-your-own goods, this plaza featured high-quality merchandise. The ziggurat buildings were gleaming and tasteful. Their first floors, open to the street, were supported by arching, fluted pillars. Well-dressed men and women hawked wares at long tables before the openings.

Dennis examined keen-edged chisels and razors, ropes of marvelous strength and lightness, bows and arrows that had obviously been practiced against targets thousands of times and would have sold on Earth for handsome prices.

There was no sign whatever of screws or nails, and hardly any metal. Nowhere was there anything resembling a wheel. At one end were cheaper items—crude axes, body armor consisting of tanned strips of leather sewed together. Below each table was the sigil of the appropriate maker guild—a sign that the “starter” was sanctioned by law.

Dennis looked up at a banging sound. Two men walked lackadaisically around the third-story parapet, striking the walls with clubs.

Arth explained. “They’re gettin’ the clubs better at bashin’, and gettin’ the walls better at keepin’ out bashers.” He winked at Dennis. “Bashers like us.”

Burglary here usually involved breaking through the walls of a house while the tenant was away. Sometimes people forgot that living in a house practiced it well to stand sturdily and keep the rain out, but nothing more.

The owners of this building clearly had not forgotten.

The plaza was crowded with aristocrats from the upper town and from estates outside Zuslik’s walls. The gentry were accompanied by their servants.

Master and lackey generally dressed identically, and usually they were about the same size and build. They could be told apart only by the nobles’ imperious manner, their hair styles, and the bits of metal jewelry they wore.

On Earth the rich flaunted their status by acquiring large amounts of property that was rarely used. Here such property would quickly decay to its original, crude state. To maintain appearances, then, the affluent needed servants who not only performed housework, gardening, and other tasks, but who kept their employers’ property practiced for them, as well.

Dennis perceived some of the social implications.

When they were so busy always wearing their master’s clothes, the servants had no time to practice their own. They might look good all the time, but the fine threads on their backs weren’t theirs. If they left their employer they would have nothing at all of their own!

It would be a symbol of status among the rich, of course, never to be seen wearing or using anything that truly needed practicing.

Besides food and land, metal and paper, the chief commodity of value here was the human man-hour. Even when exhausted from a hard day’s labor in the fields, a serfs time was not his own. In relaxing he practiced his master’s chair; in eating, he practiced his mistress’s spare dinnerware. He couldn’t save to buy his freedom, because anything saved away had to be maintained, or face decay!

No wonder there was trouble brewing in the east! The combination of the guilds, the churches, and the aristocracy made sure that change would come hard, if at all.

Fixxel’s Practicorium, at the north end of the plaza, was a tall building that reminded Dennis of home.

For one thing, its walls were in large part brilliantly transparent, as if of the clearest glass, slightly tinted to moderate the afternoon sunlight.

Arth explained that the panes had started out as sewn paper sheets, practiced hard during dry seasons, until they were weatherproof and clear. After many years of this they were probably better than any windows on Earth.

Facing the boulevard were displays of men’s and women’s clothes, tools, pottery, and rugs. “Nothing New! All Old and Used!” a sign stated proudly.

The window displays were constantly changing. Workers removed items and replaced them as Dennis watched.

The furnishings on exhibition were stunning. Realistic mannequins were draped in what looked like exquisite silks and brocades. Some of the gowns would surely have gone for thousands at Neiman-Marcus.

“Come on,” Arth said, nudging Dennis. “Don’t give old Fixxel a free push.”

Dennis blinked. He had been entranced by the beautiful things. Then, all at once, he realized what Arth meant. He laughed out loud in admiration of the scam. By just looking at the merchandise, and appreciating its beauty, he had helped just a little to enhance that beauty! No wonder the mannequins looked so lifelike. They were practiced by generations of passersby!

What a racket!

Still, Dennis couldn’t help but wish his camera wasn’t lost with his backpack. The clothing designs alone would be worth a fortune back on Earth.

Under Dennis’s urging, they went around back to peek into the great practice arena at the rear of the building. It was a scene of furious activity.

Teams of men and women poured water into and out of long lines of pitchers, cups, and goblets. Others kept busy digging holes with shovels, and then refilling them, or slicing great logs into kindling, practicing shiny tools in the process.

There was a large open area in which men muffled in layers of clothes sat on half-finished chairs and threw weapons at targets. The crudest knives were being tossed against near-finished suits of glossy leather armor.

No wonder technology never developed here! It didn’t pay to specialize. Wherever a person could practice three or four items at once, it paid. The niceties of concentration seemed less important than keeping as many things busy as possible all the time.

This was the equivalent of an Earthly factory, but something about it struck Dennis as terribly futile. All this hard work would be for nothing if the constant maintenance stopped for just a few weeks or months. Left alone long enough, each of these products would decay to its original state.

Still, Dennis thought, there were no mountains of garbage here, either—no great landfills heaped with worn-out, unwanted things. Almost anything these people created was ultimately recycled to nature.

On neither world, it seemed, was there any such thing as a free lunch.

Later, in another part of town, Dennis and Arth watched a religious procession pass through one of the main squares. A trio of yellow-robed priests and their followers carried a pillowed platform on which a gleaming sword was carried. At the four corners of the palanquin were set freshly severed human heads.

“Priests of Mlikkin,” Arth identified them. “Bloody panderers. They appeal to th’ more unsavory cit’zens of Zuslik with their murderin’ ways.” He spat.

Dennis made himself watch, though his gorge rose at the grisly sight. From what he had picked up during the past week, he could tell that the priests were engaged in a campaign to inure the people of the town to the idea of death and war.

Sure enough, when the procession stopped at a platform set up at one end of the square, the chief priest held up the sword—obviously a product of generations of daily practice by acolytes of Mlikkin—and harangued the rowdy crowd that had gathered. Dennis could not make out much, but clearly the fellow thought little of the “eastern rabble.” When he began speaking ill of King Hymiel, some parishioners looked at each other nervously, but nobody cried out in disagreement.

A number of Zuslikers, though, frowning in distaste, hurried off, leaving the square to the celebrants.

With one exception. Dennis noticed that an old woman knelt in a far corner of the plaza, before a niche in which was set a dusty statue. With age-wracked hands, she cleared away layers of debris and replaced flowers in the twisting, helical pedestal.

Something about the shape of the shrine made Dennis’s neck tingle. He started forward, with Arth trailing along nervously, complaining that this was not a healthy place for them to be.

“What is it?” Dennis asked his companion about the shrine.

“It’s a place of th’ Old Belief. Some say it was here b’fore even Zuslik was founded. The churches tried to have it pulled down, but it’s been practiced so long it’s impossible to scratch. So they dump offal on it an’ have gangs of toughs push around people who try to pray there.”

No wonder the old woman glanced up and around nervously as she went through her devotions. “But why should they care—”

Dennis stopped, still twenty yards away. He recognized the figure at the top of the pedestal. It was a dragon. He had seen its likeness on the haft of the native knife he had found by the zievatron.

In the dragon’s grinning mouth was a malevolent, demoniacal figure—a “blecker,” as Arth identified it. Covered with layers of filth and graffiti, the dragon nevertheless gave a frozen wink to passersby. Its open eye shone with gemstone brilliance.

But it was the pedestal beneath the mythical beast that seized Dennis’s attention. The fluted column was a delicate double helical coil, held together by delicately knotted rails, like the rungs of a twisted ladder.

It was a chain of DNA, or Dennis was the pixolet’s blood uncle!

Dennis felt a return of that nervous feeling of unreality that had plagued him since his arrival on this world. He approached the shrine slowly, wondering how these people ever could have learned about genes lacking the tools or mental disciplines required.

“Hssst!” Arth nudged Dennis. “Soldiers!” He nodded toward the main street, where a troop was strolling in their direction.

Dennis glanced longingly back at the statue, but then nodded and hastily followed Arth into an alley. They watched from the shadows as a patrol passed by. The squad marched along haughtily, their “thenners” raised port high. The big sergeant, Gilm, paced alongside, heaping verbal abuse on civilians not quick enough to get out of the way.

From the way the townsfolk scattered, Dennis presumed Kremer’s northern clansmen still didn’t think of themselves as Zuslikans, though the town had been the Baron’s capital for a generation.

When Dennis next looked back at the little niche-shrine, the old woman had departed, no doubt scared away. Gone also was his best chance to find out more about the Old Belief.

The troop of soldiers was followed by nearly a score of young civilians, downcast and tethered to one another at the wrist.

“Press gang!” Arth whispered harshly. “Kremer’s buildin’ up th’ militia. War can’t be far off now!”

It reminded Dennis that he was still a hunted man. He looked up and saw, high in the sky, a set of broad black wings sailing in an updraft. A pair of small human figures sat in a light wicker framework beneath the glider, steering it lazily toward a thermal south of town. The underside was painted to resemble leathery wings, to take advantage of the traditional dragon reverence that filled most Coyhan fairy tales.

Fortunately, these people had never developed telescopes. Those scouts would not be likely to pick them out in Zuslik’s crowded streets. He and Arth only had to worry about foot patrols.

When they made their break in the balloon, however, it would be a different story. Those gliders might present a problem.

Discretion seemed well advised. He let Arth lead him away from the busy square, resolving though to return to study the statue in more detail later.

The Hall of the Guild of Chairmakers was overrun with children.

The chairmakers’ guild was the poorest of the maker castes. Unlike that of the stonechoppers, the hinge and door builders, and the papermakers, it had no secrets to protect. Anyone could make a chair or table “starter” with twine and sticks. Only the law kept the guild in its monopoly.

Youngsters ran all over the place. The floor was a litter of string and shredded bark. Arth explained that open guilds like the chairmakers’ hired mostly children and old people— unsuited for the high-volume practicing that took place at salons like Fixxel’s.

Under the supervision of a few master chairmakers, boys and girls assembled furniture starters to go into the homes of the needy. After a year or so of using these tables and chairs, the poor would sell the practiced models to somewhat better-off folk and buy another set of crude starters with part of the proceeds. The furniture would slowly work its way along the socioeconomic ladder as it grew older and better—upward mobility for things, if not people.

A red-robed priest moved among the children, accompanied by two master chairmakers, blessing the finished starters. Dennis couldn’t remember which deity the red gown represented, but something about the color seemed almost to remind him of something.

“Another patrol, Dennzz.” Arth pointed out a troop of guards passing by, one street over. “Maybe we better be gettin’ back.”

Dennis nodded reluctantly. “All right,” he told Arth, “let’s go.” It would be at least a week before the escape attempt, and there would be other chances to explore the town.

They ducked down a side alley and emerged on the Avenue of Sweetmeats. Arth bought pastries, and Dennis tried to make sense out of the chaotic but apparently efficient sled-rail traffic pattern as they walked.

Still, he couldn’t shake the image of the red-robed priest from his mind. Somehow it made him feel simultaneously angry and frustrated.

Arth grabbed Dennis’s arm as they were approaching the little thief s neighborhood. He looked up and down the street suspiciously. “Let’s take a shortcut,” he said, and led Dennis between a pair of stalls into another alley.

“What’s the matter?”

Arth shook his head. “Maybe I’m just nervous. But if you sniff a trap five times, and you’re wrong four of ’em, you’re still ahead if you avoid th’ smell.”

Dennis decided to take Arth’s word as the expert. He saw a stack of crates against the wall of one of the wedding cake buildings. “Come on,” he said, “I’ve got a tool that’s super at detecting traps. We can use it up on the roof.”

They climbed to the first parapet, then up a garden trellis to another level. Dennis reached under the robe Arth had lent him and pulled the little camp-watch alarm out of one of his overall pockets.

Arth stared at the flashing lights, entranced. He appeared totally confident in the Earthman’s wizardry, sure that Dennis would be able to tell, from this magic, whether it was safe to go out onto the streets.

Dennis twiddled with the tiny dials. But the screen remained a chaos of unreadable garbage. The alarm, over a week out of practice, kept trying to go off regardless of what he did.

Dennis sighed and reached into another pocket. The slim, collapsible monocular had been in the packet Linnora had thrown him. Fortunately, it had only been scratched in Kermer’s futile attempts to open it.

Dennis used it to scan the streets below.

There were crowds up and down the main boulevard— farmers come to town to market their produce and purchase starters, aristocrats with their clonelike entourages, an occasional guard or churchman. Dennis looked for suspicious clumps of activity.

He focused on a group of men at the for end of the street. They idled about in front of a pub, apparently lounging.

But the spyglass told a different story. The men were armed, and they glanced intently at passersby. They had the high cheekbones of Kremer’s northmen.

Dennis adjusted the focus. A tall, armed man with the look of an aristocrat emerged from a building behind the toughs. He was followed by a short, stooped fellow with a patch over one eye. They were conversing in an agitated manner. The one-eyed man kept pointing in the direction of the waterfront. The aristocrat just as insistently seemed to indicate that they would wait right where they were.

“Uh, Arth"—Dennis’s mouth felt dry—"I think you’d better look at this.”

“At what, that little box? Are you lookin’ through it, or at somethin’ inside it?”

“Through it. It’s like a sort of magic tube that makes things far away look bigger. It may take you a minute to get used to it, but when you do, I want you to use it to look at that tavern at the end of the street.”

Arth squatted forward and took the monocular Dennis had to show him how to hold it. Arth grew excited.

“Hey! This is great! I can see like th’ proverbial eagle of Crydee!... I can count th’ steins on th’ table over at... Great Palmi! That’s Perth! An’ he’s talkin’ to Lord Hern himself!”

Dennis nodded. He felt a hollowness within his chest, as if fragile hope had suddenly turned into something heavy and hard.

“That scum!” Arth cursed. “He’s turnin’ us in! His dad even served with mine under th’ old Duke! Ill have his intestines an’ practice ’em into hawsers! I’ll...”

Dennis slumped back against the wall behind them. He was fresh out of ideas. There didn’t seem to be any way to warn his friends back at Arth’s apartment, or in the waterfront warehouse, where construction of the escape balloon had just begun.

He felt so helpless that, once again, the strange detachment from reality seemed to fall over him. He couldn’t help it.

Arth made a grand art out of cursing. He had quite a vocabulary of invective. For a while it kept him busy while the Earthman simply felt miserable.

Then Dennis blinked. A brief, sharp reflection had caught his eye from one of the neighboring rooftops not too far away.

He sat up and looked. Something small was moving about among the vents and rooftop debris.

“They’ve got somebody!” Arth declared, still staring through the monocular at the scene at the cafe. “They’re draggin’ him down from my place…” Arth whooped. “But they’ve only got one! The others must have got away! Perth don’t look happy at all! He’s tuggin’ at Lord Hern’s arm, pointin’ to th’ waterfront.

“Hah! By th’ time they get there all our people will be gone! Serves ’em right!”

Dennis barely heard Arth. He got up slowly, staring at the shape on the rooftop several blocks away; it glistened and scuttled from hiding place to hiding place.

Arth exclaimed. “It’s Mishwa they’ve caught! And…and he’s broken free and managed to jump Perth! Go get him, Mishwa! They’re tryin’ to get him off before he—Hey! Dennis, give that back!”

Dennis had snatched away the monocular. Ignoring Arth’s protests, he tried not to shake as he focused it on the roof a hundred meters away. Something quick and blurry passed in front of his line of sight.

It took him a few moments to find the exact spot. Then for seconds all he could see was the roof vent the thing had ducked behind.

At last, something rose from behind it—an eye at the end of a slender stalk that swiveled left and right, scanning.

“Well, I’m the son of a blue-nosed gopher…”

“Dennzz! Give me back th’ box! I gotta know if Mish got that rat Perth!”

Arth tugged at his trouser leg, Dennis shook free, focusing the monocular.

What finally moved out from behind the roof vent had changed subtly since the last time Dennis had seen it, on a highway late one dark night. It had turned a paler shade, blending well with the color of the buildings. Its sampling arms and cameras scanned the crowd below as it moved.

On its back it carried a passenger.

“Pix!” Dennis cursed. The little animal voyeur had found the perfect accomplice for its favorite activity, sidewalk superintending. It was riding Dennis’s Sahara Tech exploration ’bot like its own personal mount!

The multiple coincidences and irony were overwhelming. All Dennis knew was that the robot was the key to everything…to rescuing his friends and the Princess, to getting out of Zuslik, to repairing the zeivatron…to everything!

What couldn’t a man who knew what he was doing accomplish, simply by using the Practice Effect on a sophisticated little machine like that? It could help him build more machines, even a new return mechanism!

He needed that ’bot!

“Pix!” Dennis shouted. “Robot! Come to me and report! At once! Do you hear me? Right away!”

Arth grabbed furiously at his arm. In the street below people were looking up curiously.

The strange pair on the far roof seemed to pause briefly and turn his way.

“Prior orders are overridden!” he screamed again. “Come to me right now!”

He would have shouted more, but then Dennis was knocked down as Arth took him behind the knees in a powerful tackle. The little thief was wiry and strong. By the time Dennis managed to pull free to look again, the robot and pixolet had disappeared from sight.

Arth was cursing at him soundly. Dennis shook his head as he sat up, rubbing his temple. His attack of tunnel vision had evaporated, almost as suddenly as it had come on. But it might already be too late.

Oh, boy, he realized. What I just did.

“All right,” he told Arth. “Let me go! Let’s get out of here. We can go now.”

But moments later, when soldiers climbed onto the roof, Dennis realized that he was wrong again.