A World of Difference

“I know your people don’t buy slaves, Mr. Dergal, but I thought you might like to meet Shannon, here.  She claims to be from another world, and she’s so odd I, for one, believe it. She’s also very clever.  She explained how giving the short rowers like herself something to brace their feet against would make it so they could row harder.  There’s less grumbling now, from the smaller rowers and from their oar mates as well.  For the last week, she’s been helping Etagon with the books, she’s very good with maths.”

The slave in question looked warily at the gentleman she was being shown to.  He was of medium height and build, and his eyes held none of the condescension she saw in abundance from the slavers.  She considered playing dumb just to make the slavers look bad, but decided it wasn’t worth it.  It might have been prudent to act stupid earlier, so when she came up with some way of fighting back they would not expect it of her.  Too late for that now, and what she’d heard about this guy was intriguing.  Apparently, he was trying to invent science all by himself. Perrin Dergal was supposed to be the biggest genius around.  Shannon wondered what Reidar the slaver had meant when he said, ‘your people don’t buy slaves’.  Ethics, economics, other customs?

He took his pipe out of his mouth to ask, “Another world?  A world much like ours, or would it be very different?”  His blue eyes looked curious but slightly skeptical.

She glanced around her for inspiration.  There’d been such a lot of each, and she wasn’t sure whether to start with the similarities or the differences.  “I’ve never seen a clear sky here, but the clouds look almost the same.  Those post-sloths look like a smaller version of our tree-sloths, except their fur is green with algae, where these glow with, well, something magical, I suppose.”  These ones appeared to function as streetlamps.  “Seagulls and horses and trees and the ocean look familiar, but my home world had no magic in it at all.  Your people appear to be the same species as mine.”  She held out her calloused hand, comparing it to that of the well-dressed man.  “Your society is different, although some of the things that are different are similar to historical societies of my world.  Some of the food is like home, but let me tell you, the idea of eating live eels is just too bizarre for words.  Eeeeeww!”

“No magic?  Your society must be very primitive.”

“No, we use science.  The city I come from has nearly a million people living in it.  I only see a few buildings here over ten floors, but back home the downtown area has dozens of them, and there are buildings a hundred stories tall in some cities.  The tallest in my city was sixty.  We have machines for fast transportation, so we get fresh food year round.  Devices for sharing information, too.  I’m not really sure how many of the things we do with machines you do with magic, so I can’t really say how our societies would compare.”

Reidar broke in here, saying, “We suspect she exaggerates.  I think she just doesn’t want to admit our land is more sophisticated than hers.”  Shannon was unable to contradict him, even to remind him that her collar precluded lying.

Perrin looked politely interested in his statement, and then turned back to Shannon.

“He said you’re good at maths?”

“Well, I don’t know if being able to add and subtract correctly makes me good at math, but if it does, I’m not good at math.  I’m an absolute genius, because I can multiply and divide, too!”  She snorted cynically.

His mustache twitched over a smirk of good humor.  “If someone wanted to buy something that cost about five thousand obars, and had a job paying eight obars and two gekk a week, how many years would it take to pay off the debt?” he asked.

Shannon, with nothing to write on, squatted down and began writing in the dust beside the street.  “What’s the conversion between gekk and obars?”

“One obar to five gekk.”

“Interest?”  She hoped it would be simple interest.  She couldn’t remember the formula for compound interest off the top of her head.

“No interest.”

“That’s very helpful.  How many weeks in a year?”

The slaver roared with laughter at this point, saying, “She claims to be so smart, but doesn’t know how many weeks to a year!”

She looked at him calmly.  “It’s about fifty-two back home, but I don’t know that it’s the same here.  That depends on planetary revolution rate and stuff.  I don’t know enough astronomy to tell if you’re the same distance from the sun as my world, and anyway, I don’t even know if you guys put the same number of days in a week as I’m used to.  I do know I shouldn’t make assumptions.”  This was as close to speaking disrespectfully to her owner as the collar would allow, and it made her neck tingle uneasily with the possibility of retribution.

The slaver had a very condescending look, as if humoring lying child, but Perrin didn’t seem to think her logic lacked anything.  He appeared not to have thought of this problem himself, and to be impressed with her for catching it.  He said, “Forty-five weeks to a year, with eight days per week.”  He watched her write unfamiliar symbols in the dust.

“Oops.  I wasn’t counting... how much does basic cost of living take out of this weekly pay figure?”

“What do you mean?”

“Rent, food, stuff like that.  You can’t use 100% of your pay – you need some to live off of.  I don’t know what anything costs here.”

“Oh, room and board are covered by the employer.”

“That’s interesting.  You don’t get that back home, at least not in most jobs.  So that’s 378 obars per year, into 5000 obars needed, one, a hundred twenty two, three, thirteen years leaving... 86 obars left, just over ten weeks, so in thirteen years and eleven weeks it would be paid off.  Assuming you didn’t spend money on anything else.”

The slaver had lost interest and was looking at the brightly painted pottery of a nearby vendor, but Perrin, looking startled, pulled out a pad of paper and started writing in his own system.  She still couldn’t read their numbers, but had thought they looked more like a Roman numeral system than an Arabic place value system.  It took Perrin nearly as long to check her work as it had taken her to do it, and he was very impressed she’d been exactly right.

As a merchant’s wagon jangling with kitchen wares and martial music passed between them and the slaver, Perrin asked softly, “If I were to pay the slaver’s price for you – about five thousand obars – would you be willing to pay it back over fourteen years or so?”

Shannon looked at him carefully, trying to throttle the hope that surged within her.  Don’t make assumptions.  Think it through.  “That’s certainly the kindest offer I’ve heard in a long while.  I don’t know where I could get a job paying that much, but I’d certainly be willing to try.”

“I’m looking for someone to help my sister Elaine with the housekeeping.  I’d pay eight obars, two gekk a week.  Plus room and board.  And a bonus for anything you can teach me about maths and science.  I really want to know how you were able to solve that problem so quickly, and so accurately.”

“Wow.  That’s hard to beat.  Can I ask you another ‘I don’t know your world’ question?”

“Certainly.”

She hesitated over the question.  Some people might find it offensive – she once would have – but her two months (or whatever it was) of slavery was too real for her to rush in.  “If I could get a job elsewhere paying as much or better, so I was still able to pay you the eight obars and two gekk a week, would that still be keeping my part of the bargain?”

He blinked in surprise.  “Well, yes.  I thought you didn’t have any prospects.  What do you have in mind?  Or don’t you like the idea of working for me?”

“Oh, goodness, no.  I’d be happy to take the job you offered.  I just need to know how the system here works.”

He looked at her thoughtfully as he considered the implications of her question.  “You thought it was just another kind of slavery.”

“Well, I didn’t think it was, but after what I’ve been through, I’m not willing to bet my life that it’s not.  It’s too important to me to make assumptions about.  The only thing I did wrong up until now is not knowing when to run.  I’d hate to end up in such a mess by agreeing to it.  Frankly, I’d probably have agreed anyway – it would still be better than where I’m at now.” She fingered the collar around her neck.  “But I had to know what I was agreeing to.”

He looked at her ruefully.  “I suppose the way our world’s treated you, I should be happy that you’re even willing to talk to me.  Welcome, oh traveler, to our fine world.  Now start rowing, or we’ll beat you.  Not exactly diplomatic.”

She laughed, relieved that he did see and wasn’t offended.  “Could you do the haggling for me?  I’m used to knowing the exact cost of something, and either buying it at the given price, or not.  Buying yourself is also probably a good way to make your price triple, if I know how people think.”

He smiled.  “Oh, yes, certainly.  People are generally willing to pay whatever they can get their hands for themselves, much more than they’d pay to acquire a similar slave.  You could also look resentful that I’m buying you.  If they think you’ll give me trouble out of your dislike for being a slave, that’s a help.”

She scowled at him as the slaver came back to reclaim her.  Perrin doubtfully considered buying her, implying that there was an expensive way he could clear this with his religion. When the price remained high – the slaver knew he must want her pretty badly to offer at all – he shifted to asking the slaver to let him know who she was eventually sold to.  He said he might like to talk to her now and then, and if she was sold locally he’d just visit occasionally.  When pointing out she might be sold to someone farther away didn’t help, the slaver dropped her price to something nearer the five thousand Perrin had predicted.  Shannon allowed her distaste at the idea of the two of them arguing what her life was worth to show.  She flinched whenever Perrin found something to devalue her for, and was quite sullen by the time the haggling was done.  The final figure was five thousand twenty five obar, and Perrin looked at her, puffing thoughtfully as if reconsidering this, but she winked and gave a tiny nod to confirm that she’d take the slightly higher price and pay it.

He shook the slaver’s hand, and took out a device Shannon had seen a few times but never had a chance to examine.  It was a pair of joined rings, each several inches in diameter, and people used them for buying things.  Now, as before, each of them held one ring, Reidar touched her arm and stated that he was selling her, Perrin stated the price he’d agreed to pay, and they both said, “Done”.  Where the actual money moved about was not apparent.  The last city they’d stopped in, several slaves had been sold this way, and she was fairly sure nobody’d delivered a sack of gekk to the boat before they left, whatever gekk looked like.  It was some sort of credit system, but she didn’t know how it worked.  Presumably magic.  Just like so much else here.

She hated shrugging things off as magic, because that told her exactly nothing, but that was this world for you.  She needed to figure out magic, at least the basics, as soon as possible. She wondered if she could swap education.  Instead of him paying extra for her to tutor him in basic math and science, get him to tutor her in everyday magic and how to read the local

language.  Their translating spell had allowed her learn to speak their language very quickly, but she couldn’t read anything and it bothered her.

As the men were politely wrapping up their transaction, she thought of something.  She phrased it carefully, so as not to antagonize Reidar.  “If you’re curious about my world, you might like to see some of the things I had when I came.  I had a watch – a bracelet that tells time – and some writing tools, and some of what my people use for money.  And you could see what factory-made clothes look like.  If that were OK with him,” she added, indicating the slaver.

He’d apparently forgotten the things they’d taken from her when she was captured, but was happy to show them off now.  They all went down to the docks, stepping aside briefly for what appeared to be a seasick nobleman, and Reidar boarded the ship.  Waiting on the windy quay, Perrin asked her,  “Are these things important to you?  I can try to buy them if you like, unless you really did just want to show me.”

She shrugged.  “I’d like them, but not if he’s charging a lot.  I really would like to have something physical I can show you about my world.  Mostly I want to show you, but if you can get them without paying too much, I’d like to keep them.”  She tried to remember what else she’d had, and if any of it might actually be useful or valuable.  “If we were in my world, they’d be considered ‘Alien Artifacts’ and incredibly valuable, a museum prize.  I don’t want them that badly, but he doesn’t seem to see things that way.”

When Reidar came back, he was carrying a bundle wrapped in thick cloth.  He set it down, unwrapped it, and ordered, “Tell me why this chirps for a while every day.”  He indicated the watch without touching it, as if afraid it might bite him.  Well, that would explain the blanket.

“It’s a watch.”  She picked it up.  “It says it’s five fourteen in the evening, on Saturday the eleventh of March.  The alarm is turned on.  It goes off at seven o’clock every morning. That’s the time I had to leave for work – that’s when it beeps.  The display lights up when you push this button.”  She pushed the button, and the watch face glowed blue-green.  When it stopped glowing, Perrin had to try the button himself.  Reidar was now trying to look unimpressed.  She showed them the pocket knife, how to open it and unlock the blade so it could be closed again.  That and her key ring kept them busy while she rifled through her purse.

They looked at the money curiously, and when Perrin was done with it, Reidar pocketed instead of putting it back.  A sarcastic, ‘where do you think you’re going to spend that?’ whispered through her mind, but she didn’t even try to say it.  The collar brooked no insolence, and she’d just stammer if she tried.  She hadn’t been able to think such things without a warning pulse from the collar at first, but she kept testing the edges of what it would and would not permit, and it seemed to be allowing more lately.  She wondered if it was sentient.

Receipts, notes, a dysfunctional PDA she didn’t know why she’d never thrown out, pay stubs, shopping lists, candy.  She showed them a pen and a mechanical pencil, writing on the back of a pay stub.  “Oh!  My glasses!”  She pulled them out and put them on.  “They’re for my vision.  I’m a bit farsighted.  Not badly, but I can see better with them on.”  She went on to explain half-remembered physics lessons about lenses and focal length, relieved when Reidar got

bored again.  He’d looked very interested until Perrin concluded they would only work for people whose sight was bad in exactly the same way as hers.  To fix bad vision with magic turned out to be expensive, and glasses that correct it while worn might be valuable, but not if they had to be custom-made.  She breathed a sigh of relief, and hoped she could keep them.  Not wearing them gave her a headache.  She showed them the beading along the edge of her wedding ring, knowing it was probably going to cost too much.  The five diamonds weren’t very big, but even a carat’s worth of small diamonds were expensive.  The other things he seemed willing to part with for a small amount as they were just curiosities, but the ring was valuable.  She forced herself to handle it casually, as if it meant nothing to her.

“This band is a gold alloy?” asked Reidar.  “Etagon said the stones are just diamond, and too small to be magical.”  She swallowed her surprise at the last and told him the gold was 14 karat.  He seemed to understand this, though half of what she’d explained about the watch had fared badly in the translation.  “Ten obars for the ring, five for all the other stuff.”

“Eh, what’s a couple more weeks,” said Shannon.  Reidar looked puzzled, and she innocently asked, “I’m sorry, what did you say?  Perhaps I misunderstood.”  The spell that helped her learn their language faster didn’t cover everything, so misunderstanding was not too uncommon.  Reidar rolled his eyes and ignored her, looking at Perrin, who was trying to figure out why the pants seemed to be held together with rivets, even though the seams were quite sturdily sewn.

Perrin bargained it down to twelve for the lot and gave back the blanket.  “You can carry all this, right?  Most of it fit in there before,” he said uncertainly.  The contents of her purse were now a large pile, but that always happens.  She tucked everything back into its places, and folded up the clothing neatly.

Once the strap was over her shoulder, she felt much better.  She hadn’t realized until just then how vital a link to home her things were.  As they walked away from the ship, she smelled the clothes.  They smelled like dirty laundry, but it was her dirty laundry, just like she used to put into the washing machine with her own two hands, and she started crying.  That was so embarrassing she hoped desperately Perrin wouldn’t notice.  She couldn’t stop, and didn’t think she’d be able to explain coherently if he asked about it.

He did notice, but when he did, he just smiled.  “Homesick?  I thought seeing my country’s flag at the Convergence would make me homesick, but it wasn’t until one of the magi pulled out a perfectly ordinary comb that I was really hit by it.  They don’t use the same style of comb here, and I hadn’t particularly missed them until I saw one again.  Then I went out to buy one, but you just can’t find them around here.  Strange.”

She took a deep breath, and managed, “The smell of my clothes...”

“Ah.  Nothing like the sense of smell to take you back hundreds of miles and dozens of years.  They say tortoises have incredible memories, but nothing has a memory like one’s nose.”

She smiled at him, buried her nose in the flannel shirt she’d been wearing when she’d been drawn here, and let the tears have their way for a minute.  Then she wiped the tears away on the shirt, and said, “I guess I can manage it.  Why are you far from home?”

He spoke of Weynlend, his homeland, as they walked.  He didn’t say exactly why he’d left, though there appeared to be politics involved.  Mostly he spoke of foods, games children played, and flowers, how the ones here were probably just as good, certainly very interesting, but not the same.

She assumed he was taking her home, but they stopped at what looked like a small shop. He explained they would make a kind of contract there, which would show any seller checking if such a contract had ever been broken.  “Ah.  So if I don’t repay you, it’ll trash my credit rating,” she translated.

The surprise on his face almost made her laugh.  “Even without magic, a society that trades in information as much as mine will track people’s credit.  It’s just more tedious.  All that paperwork to fill out when you’re applying for credit.  Then it’s got to be run by your bank, the government, and the major credit agencies.  It can take hours.”  She only phrased it like that because she couldn’t help wanting to shock him.  It had been quite a while since she’d had to apply for credit anywhere that wouldn’t take your word for your income and revoke it later if they found you’d lied.

They went inside, where a woman sat behind a desk.  Two chairs in front of the desk held men who appeared to be talking to the woman, but Shannon could not hear a sound, even when one straightened up and pulled his chair forward a bit.  The woman mouthed something at them, they both nodded, she touched their hands, there was a flash of light, and it was apparently over. The soundproofing disappeared, and the men were pushing their chairs back and heartily congratulating each other about whatever business they’d conducted.  Once they’d gone, Shannon and Perrin took the seats.

The woman instructed professionally, “State your full names.”  

“Perrin Owen Dergal.”  A glowing ball appeared in front of him.  A bit smaller than his fist, there were swirls of violet and crimson against a blue background.

“Shannon Doreen Peltonson.”  A similar ball appeared in front of her, in a uniform pale blue.  The woman’s eyes flicked to the collar.  “Slave all your life?  That would explain the complete lack of credit.”

Shannon looked uncertainly at Perrin.  Perrin smiled wryly at the woman, and said, “I can live with that, if she’s willing to take the rather iffy credit of an expatriate.”

Shannon nodded.  That seemed the easiest way.  The woman dropped the matter and asked for the nature of their transaction.  “I am lending this woman five thousand, twenty-five obars, and selling her to herself for that amount.  She is to pay me back at the rate of at least eight obars each week until the balance is paid off.  No interest.”

“Five thousand thirty-seven,” she corrected, adding in the cost of her belongings, “and I feel like I ought to pay you some interest.  This is so important, I hate to feel like I’m taking advantage of your generosity.”

He laughed.  “There’s enough interest in the things you tell me to satisfy me.  I want to know more about that ‘watch’ of yours.  And the pictures of your family, those weren’t painted, I’m sure of it.  Five thousand, thirty seven.  Plus conversation.”  He put his hand down on the desk between himself and the woman.  Shannon smiled and put hers next to his.

The woman seemed to be trying not to laugh.  “Well, if you’re from somewhere Mr. Dergal knows so little of, you must be very well traveled indeed.  He’s been everywhere within a thousand miles of here.”  She touched both their hands.  “Do you both agree to honor this transaction?”  She looked at Shannon.  “As this is your first contract, I must inform you that if you lie at this time, it will be shown in the color of your auricle and the transaction will be null and void.  If you agree sincerely now, but are later unable or unwilling to keep your word, the broken contract will show in the color of your auricle from that point forward, which any party may require explanation for before entering any further contract with you.”

Shannon waited to make sure all the legal-speak was done.  Then she said, “Yes, I agree to this transaction.”

Perrin also agreed, and there was a white flash.  That appeared to be it, as Perrin was pushing his chair back to stand.  She stood up too, and reached for the collar.  “So how do I get this off – oh.”  It came off in her hand.  She really needed to learn about the magic that went on here before it drove her crazy.  As they left the building, she wondered whether the woman was more like a lawyer, or a notary public.  There were three people heading into the building right after they exited, one carrying a stained-glass lamp.  Whatever else she may have been, she was certainly busy.

She turned to Perrin.  “The strangest things aren’t the ways in which our worlds are different.  It’s how they’re the same.  That lady, I don’t really know how she does what she does, or even exactly what she does, but that speech she gave me would have fit in perfectly with any legal contract’s fine print back home.  Except the bit about the auricle.  I didn’t want to ask, but I assume that’s the little glowing light?  Mine was sky blue?”

He tried to say three things at once, stopped and sorted them into some kind of order, and answered, “Yes, the glowing light is your auricle.  Mine’s just getting back to mostly blue, from the red and purple that came of the debts and broken promises I left when I had to flee my country.  Yours was pale blue, though I’m used to thinking of the sky as being a bit greener than that.  Then again, our sky here could have turned to bright orange and who would know?” Shannon glanced up, but it was still overcast.  “And lastly, if your people have the same legal practices we do, by whatever means, well, I don’t know whether to be amazed or sorry for you.”

She laughed, and tried to remember some good lawyer jokes to test this theory with.

A World of Possibilities

Perrin leaned against the kitchen doorway, watching Shannon as she knocked a code on the countertop to trigger the homing spell on the clean dishes.  They floated towards their cupboards and settled into their stacks.  For some reason, she always checked them afterwards. “Do you expect them to go visiting?  They can’t get bored with their old homes and decide to go elsewhere,” he teased.

She chuckled somewhat self-consciously and shrugged.  “I still don’t know what makes one go here and the other there, so I kind of feel like I need to check.  Who or what decides?”

“The magus setting up the homing spell.  If Elaine ever picks out those new bowls she wants, I’ll have to get him to add them to the spell, and they’d go wherever they were when he incanted it.”

He watched her run the refreshing cloth over the counters, and the conversation moved on to the properties of soap molecules.  Apparently, each molecule of soap was a kind of string which tied itself to grease on one end and water on the other, so the water could wash away the grease.  She’d explained molecules before, and while she seemed to have been educated about them, she didn’t truly understand them.  Then again, how many people here understood why magic worked the way it did?  If science took the place of magic in her world, a citizen would know how to use it, but that didn’t mean everyone understood it.  She seemed to understand a lot of science, but not everything.

Shannon put away the refreshing cloth, then pulled her list out of her pocket.  All the tasks were done differently than in her world, and she kept a list of what needed to be done each day.  She kept to herself the fact that her own housekeeping standards were much lower than Elaine’s and she didn’t want to forget anything.  She suspected that Perrin would not fire her, even if she did a poor job, but she felt there was a principle involved.  He was a good and honest man, and had done her an enormous favor.  She refused to take unfair advantage of him.  She followed her list, and he often followed her, listening to her explanations of how such work differed in her home world.

Some tasks were easier, others harder.  Mostly, it was a matter of learning new ways to do things.  Beds were still made by hand, but ironing was done by waving the garment over a red, disk-shaped stone right before putting it on.  Running water was rare, as the enchanted pitcher that was able to pour an endless supply of water was quite expensive.  Even Perrin, who seemed to be reasonably wealthy, did not have the highest-end version on which the user could control water temperature.  Having a pitcher at the kitchen sink that served as a cold-only tap was awkward.  The oven was better than back home – even better than a microwave.  It could heat anything put in it to a given temperature in under a minute.  Things heated evenly all the way through.  A bucket of water could easily be heated up, but it still wasn’t as convenient as a hot water tap.

With the kitchen done, it was time to straighten up the rooms and clean the floors.  She grinned.  The dustmuncher seemed to be a magical cross between a gecko and a guinea pig,

altered to eat dust.  When she woke it up and released it, it scampered about the place, running under furniture and climbing the walls and even skittering across the ceiling, licking up dust.  Its fluffy fur picked up more dust and later, if it got hungry while sitting in its cage, it would groom another meal off its fur.  While it ran about, she picked up the books and things that were sitting about.  Then, she whistled for the dustmuncher and set it on the mantle, where it explored the knickknacks and things there.  She’d never been into dusting at home – the dust bunnies had to be pretty obnoxious before she’d bother them – but she liked this little critter.  This was fun.

While it was dusting, she picked up the wires and tools Perrin had been using earlier, trying to build an electromagnet.  She vaguely remembered how to make one – she’d built one in a high school shop class – and he was trying to get one working.  Thin copper wire was fairly expensive, but he had an Air Elemental that would happily turn the thing indefinitely, and she knew how to make that into an electrical generator.  She was also the only hired hand they’d ever found that would clean up after Perrin’s experiments, and that was another reason for them to be glad to have found her.  She, in turn, liked working somewhere where the work was easy and people thought she was brilliant.

They’d taught her a fair bit of magic; apparently she was quite good at it.  Once you got your head around the way you told a spell what you wanted, it wasn’t hard to learn basic variants of it.  They were fairly logical.  She used a spell now to unkink the wire where it had gotten bent, and wound it back around the spool.  It broke in her hand, and she scowled and rejoined it, wondering if the spell she used could be modified to join things that hadn’t just broken in the last hour or so.  If you could use it to join several small panes of glass into one large one, that would be valuable, but Perrin assured her this wasn’t possible.  They discussed why while she put the dust-muncher back in its cage.

Folding laundry was next.  She’d already told him about washers and driers, which were more complicated and energy intensive than the device someone of Perrin’s wealth used here. So she talked about laundromats, which would be very doable with the magic version.  The clothes box here was filled nightly, and the next day she took out yesterday’s clothes, folded them, and put them away.  She did have to check for stains, though.  The box cleaned off stuff that was loosely attached, but not anything soaked or ground in.  If the magic was strong enough to remove all stains, it would remove dye, too.  She’d learned a spell for removing stains, and was getting pretty good at it.  It had to be cast for each particular item, because someone had to know what should be removed and what should stay.  She could tell Perrin there were chemicals that would remove most types of stains without damaging the fabric or its color, but she didn’t know anything about how you made them.  You didn’t make them.  You bought them at the store.  Like batteries.

That she had been able to tentatively identify the vats of acid and metal rods in the lab as batteries had deeply impressed him.  She also knew how to clean glassware and not to stick her finger into unknown chemicals, and that made her the most qualified lab assistant in town, quite possibly on the planet.  She’d copied out as much of the periodic table of the elements as she could remember (up to magnesium) and explained it as well as she could.  He’d filled in a few more bits with his own knowledge, and was now experimenting with other elements and finding places for them in the chart.

Her help in the lab often consisted of her teaching him something and then becoming a basic lab assistant as he took what she’d told him and immediately jumped ahead of anything she’d learned in school.  Sometimes what she saw while he worked, or the conclusions he drew, reminded her of something she’d forgotten, and she’d jump back into teaching, only to have him leapfrog ahead again as soon as she was done.  They were both learning a lot.  Plus, they’d invented a few things between them which were easier to make than their magical counterparts, or just different from anything available.  Some of them were now selling quite well, like the magical variety of Post-Its.  The spell could be reused a dozen times before it started malfunctioning, and even people who couldn’t read were finding many uses for them.  Perrin split this income fifty-fifty with Shannon, and her debt was shrinking quite rapidly.

Unfortunately, there would be no time for the lab today.  There were visitors coming, a couple of magi Perrin had known for many years.  One of them was a distant relation of Perrin’s, and had visited on weekends while studying magic.  He’d cast many of the spells that were part of this house (and several that had needed professional removal) while he was learning.

Elaine’s cooking was far and away better than Shannon’s, so while Shannon occasionally made something as a cross-cultural experience, Elaine was cooking today.  Shannon set the table and prepared the parlor for afterwards.

A World of Trouble

“Well, no, computers don’t actually understand the information they store, it’s like a book or something.  A painting, maybe.”  Shannon searched for words.  “You can store words or numbers or pictures, and they can follow a program, so it seems like it does or doesn’t do what you tell it, but there isn’t anything in there that understands.  It’s not aware, not the way a person or an animal or even a bug is aware.  It’s just a machine, with thousands of tiny switches, and they’re on or off, and when you run a program through it you get results, and it makes light on a screen or ink on a piece of paper to let you know.  I couldn’t begin to build one, so I really can’t explain how they work.  Artificial intelligence – building a machine that actually understands what you tell it – is a theory but we can’t do it yet.  I don’t even know if it will ever really be possible or not.  It’s more like a story than a theory.”

Winslow, the older of the two magi, looked doubtful.  “It sounds like a very strange world indeed, where machines hold knowledge without understanding, and art without feeling. To visit such a place would be interesting, I suppose.  Tell me,” he asked, with the carefully neutral tone of someone trying to ask a very important question without being alarming, “How did you accomplish this journey, from your world to ours?”

Shannon noticed the fishing, and wondered what he sought.  “I don’t really know.  I was just getting ready to leave for work, and I felt like I was pulled, not in any direction, but maybe inwards?  The room sort of faded out and another room faded in.  There were a bunch of people standing there, staring at me, and I stepped back, away from them, and they vanished.  There was … it was like the world swooped by underneath me, and when my foot touched down, I was on a beach.  Some guys came up, and I tried to ask them where I was,” suddenly her throat tightened,

as she remembered, “and they took me and put a collar around my neck.”  She was trying to speak calmly, and failing slightly.  “I didn’t even realize I should fight until too late.”  She flushed and looked down.  She knew, in her head, that she should certainly not feel ashamed that the slavers had caught her.  How was she to know?  Shame curdled in her stomach nonetheless, and she could barely hide her shaking.  When she looked up, the magi were sharing an extremely worried look.

After a long moment of apparent indecision, the older of the two met her eyes uncomfortably.  “I guess I have to admit that all of your problems are likely our fault.  Not the two of us, directly, but the Magery College at Harkwood.  It wasn’t meant to happen the way it did, but it’s… possible that you were pulled from your world by a certain casting that was done around half a year ago.  The intention was to find some help for our world’s current crisis, but…”  He faltered at the look on her face, though she barely noticed.

She’d figured it was some kind of magic that brought her here, but to hear, now, that someone had deliberately cast a spell which had somehow gone wrong, made her go cold all over.  She thought she’d been prepared, but the memory of her weeks in the slave galley washed into her mind and made her want to wallop someone.  She closed her eyes to get a grip on herself.  This guy was just telling her, and admitting that there was blame to be cast in his general direction.  He hadn’t done it himself.  Even if she found someone who had cast the spell, hitting them probably wouldn’t really help matters.  Finding out if they could send her back would.  Her family must be terribly worried about her.  She hoped they didn’t believe she’d just decided to walk out on them.  She’d been trying not to think about that.

She took a deep breath and hoped her voice would come out even.  Before she could trust herself to speak, she heard the magus move.  Her eyes snapped open, and she looked at him suspiciously.  He knelt before her.

“If it would fulfill your sense of justice, I will willingly enslave myself to you, to compensate for your having been enslaved here.  Just please, help save our world.”

She blinked a bit at that, and swallowed hard while the revulsion she felt at that idea warred with the hostility she’d already been fighting.  “No!  Slavery is a social abomination, whoever it’s practiced on.  I...” she broke off, trying to speak calmly.  “I don’t even know what’s wrong with your world, or how I could possibly help.  Tell me about this crisis of yours.” Possibly, he was worried by the way her nails were biting into her arms.  She tried to get a slightly less physical grip on herself.

He looked greatly relieved at her rejection, and sat nervously on the dark leather sofa. “You must have noticed them covering the sky.  We call them the Swarm, and they’re thicker than the leaves of Somberweald Forest.  Where they came from, or why, we don’t know.  We do know they’re vulnerable to fire, and the students practice their fire-spells on them.  Once a month, most of the masters and journeymen burn as many as they can, giving us a couple days with thin enough cover that you can feel the sun’s warmth, and see where it is.  We used to be able to actually see the sky after such an effort, but they seem to be gaining on us.  That’s why we felt we needed to cast an appeal-conjuration.  The spell called for anyone or anything that

could help us.  If they get much thicker, there won’t be enough sunlight to grow crops.  People are afraid we’ll starve.”

“Yes, I can understand that.  Worse than that, too.  If they block out enough sun, you’ll have an ice age on your hands.  Are you sure they’re individual creatures, not some kind of strange fog or something?”

“Oh, yes,” broke in the younger magus.  His name, she’d been told, was Oistin.  She tried not to think about it.  “In the far south, where there are glaciers in the mountains, they say a few of the things land in the winter, on the glaciers themselves, and build nests of snow and ice. They look kind of like bats, with nearly translucent skin and blue blood that causes ice-burns when touched.  They’re about this big.”  He held his hands over two feet apart.  “The magi and some adventurous folks down there spend most of the winter trekking across the glaciers and burning out the nests they find.”

“Ah.  Do you know if the glaciers are advancing?”

“What?  I think glaciers just sit there, don’t they?  They’re kind of big to move.”  He looked over at his mentor, who shrugged his ignorance of glaciers.

She leaned forwards.  “In the winter, snow falls on the glaciers, making them grow.  They expand over the course of the winter, until the summer sun melts some of the ice and they shrink back to their smaller size.  Then winter comes and it starts snowing again.  If the glacier doesn’t melt as much in the summer as it grows in the winter, it will grow and reach farther each year.  If that happens all over, it could destroy your planet by more than loss of crops.  Climate changes kill whole ecosystems of plants and animals, and when more of your water is held in ice all year round, the sea level will drop.  It happens slowly, but it would be cataclysmic.  Unless you have some magic way of dealing with it.”

Oistin looked incredulous.  “That couldn’t really happen, could it?”  He glanced at Winslow, who looked surprised, but nodded tentatively.

“Actually, the Water Master told us something like that was starting to happen.  He said nothing about glaciers, but he told us if we don’t stop the Swarm, the seas would shrink and snow and ice would cover the lands.”  He looked at his student, who’s shocked expression said he’d never heard a whisper of such a thing.  “Few besides the senior masters know.  If the general public heard, they’d panic.”  He looked at Perrin, who nodded his acquiescence of secrecy.

Shannon was privately glad that Elaine had bustled off with the dishes once they’d finished their tea.  She would be the sort to panic, gossip, and otherwise overreact to such news. Perrin could keep a level head; he’d handled the situation calmly when a new battery attempt had suddenly foamed up and sprayed acid around the lab.  He’d even acted quickly and systematically when a child who’d broken into the garden shed got tangled up, injured and panicked, in an experimental tilling machine.  He could handle this.

The real question was, could she handle it?  More specifically, what was she supposed to do about it?  She hoped the spell hadn’t chosen her by accident.  Animals of cold, somehow multiplied to numbers so large they could cover the sky.  It wasn’t like she could build something scientific to wipe them out.  She tried to imagine what anyone might build.  A snowmobile with flamethrowers, to wipe out all their nests?  A fighter plane to go after them in the air?  Genetically engineering some kind of parasite to spontaneously combust?  Actually, that sounded cool, but she couldn’t do it.

“I don’t suppose whoever or whatever decided I could help gave anything specific about how, did they?”

“The conjuration doesn’t work like that.  They say time alone decides.”

“Oh, that’s terribly helpful.  What does that mean?”

“No one has ever been able to say for certain.”

“Naturally.  I can’t think of anything I could build that would help.  What you need is some fighter jets with napalm throwers, but I can’t build that.”  They looked blank as the translation spell had no way of even approximating that, and so left it in English.  “Even that wouldn’t probably take care of enough of them.  A world is a big place.  I assume they’re covering the entire planet, not just around here?”

Winslow nodded.  “You seem to understand the problem very quickly.  Please, come with us back to the College, it may be that you could help us to understand the Swarm so we can fight them more effectively.  Perrin has said you learn magic quite easily, we can teach you the magics we use to fight them and perhaps you will come up with a new application.  If we’ve turned you against Harkwood, we’d even be willing to send you to a different college, anything. You’re our best chance, even if you can’t see how, please try.”

“I’ll do what I can.  I’ve got an obligation here, though.  The inventions are earning enough to cover most of it, but I do need to keep paying it.”

Perrin laughed.  “Do you know, I believe being responsible for your getting enslaved in the first place, Harkwood College ought to pay that for you?”  He explained the nature of Shannon’s debt, and the magi assured her that they’d reimburse the whole amount happily, even the part she’d already paid back.  They implied that if she wanted more money than that, she could get just about anything she demanded, but they’d picked up the impression she wasn’t interested in being bribed into it, and she seemed to be willing to help.  Best not to offend her.

Between Two Worlds

Starting her second year of classes with one titled, “The Secrets of the Universe,” seemed pretty exciting, and a cynical part of Shannon wondered if the title was deliberately chosen to make student magi think something was more wondrous than it was.  Still, she was willing to get excited about the possibilities.  All the older students she’d asked had given her a knowing look

and said nothing.  There might be something really powerful coming up, and she’d certainly need something more powerful than she’d gotten out of first-year work.  Most of that was about focusing the mind, pronouncing words clearly, basic literacy, and using some of the specialized meditation techniques.  Basic consumer-level magic could be done haphazardly, but if you were going to cast big, powerful spells, you had to have it exactly right.  An accident in a little spell to clean the horse-apples off your shoes could result in a larger mess to clean up, but an accident in a spell that keeps a boat watertight could sink it - or cause it to explode wooden shrapnel all over the docks.  She’d done well, and it was clearly useful stuff, but it was preparatory to doing serious magic.  Hopefully, this class would be the start of the big stuff.

As the door opened, the first eager students peeked through.  Shannon had hung back, and so didn’t have much of a view.  As the crowd cleared, she fell in with the rest and saw everyone was grabbing a book from the table next to the door.  Few classes she’d taken had textbooks, and she was happy to see one here.  She sat next to a girl she’d shared a meditation class with.  Meditation didn’t involve a lot of chatting with other students, but the few times they’d spoken after class she seemed pleasant enough.  Shannon tried to remember her name, and resorted to whispering a mnemonic spell under her breath.  Ah, right.  “Hi, Edolie.”

Her neighbor grinned at her.  “Nineteen years old, and I’m as excited as a my first trip to the county fair.  Have you heard what it’s about?”

Smiling back, Shannon opened her book.  “Let’s see.”

She was now reading competently, but still rather slowly, so she looked at the pictures. In various places in the book there were a diagram of the human body, pulley and wheel systems, and pictures of balls, following arrows around other balls.  “Oh.  It’s science.”

“What’s that?”

Before Shannon could answer, Mr. Parker called the class to order.

There was a fair bit of exciting wind-up before he got to the point, but Shannon paged through her book, reading enough to get general subject matter where the pictures weren’t clear. There was basic biology, simple physics, and a solar system with six planets in it.  She wondered if that were all there were or just all they knew about.  Apparently, this planet was called Fundament and it had two moons, Silvia and Aviol.  She’d never thought to ask for the name of the planet, people mostly called it “The World” just like back home.  She’d heard moons mentioned, but not named.  Perhaps this would be educational after all.

The worrisome thing was the way the book insisted that the world was, in fact, a sphere, not flat, square, brooch-shaped (whatever that meant), or any of the other commonly held beliefs. Nor was it sitting on top of anything.  Because teleportation was a known and somewhat common thing, most people knew that it was a different time in faraway countries.  The book implied that pretty much no one knew why this was, and that the spherical world explanation would be a major revelation.  Shannon glanced around, belatedly tuning in to what the teacher was going on about.

“...The mysteries of how our bodies work, the true shape of the world, the methods of change in reality!”  This seemed to impress the class.  It depressed Shannon.  Probably better not to say anything.  She retreated into the textbook again.

Starting at the beginning, she paged through and picked up vocabulary that her translation spell hadn’t encountered yet.  Heart, lungs, kidney, appendix, bladder, spine.  Wait, the appendix was supposed to be the seat of strong emotion?  Well, in her world the heart was commonly understood to do that, even by people who knew better, so she didn’t feel too bad about that misconception.  There had to be something less disappointing in here.  Oh, new stuff.

Apparently, there was a race of people called the Dowsers that mostly lived underground and had slightly different physiology than the humans.  The comparison of Dowser and human was interesting, until she turned the page and found that the next amazing revelation was that humans (and Dowsers) were actually animals.  She winced and flipped to the physics section.

Basic Newtonian physics, with nasty complex ways of working out answers that could be done more efficiently with good old base ten math.  She wasn’t looking forward to that - there system was similar to roman numerals, and anything beyond basic addition was a headache.  She wondered if Mr. Parker would make her show her work, the way Prof. Sminton did.  She picked an example of an arrow shot at an angle, translated the equations into something she could work with, and figured out the problem.  It had been several years since she’d used the physics in her old world, and it took her a little bit of trial and error before she worked out a solution.  Once she had it, she paged forward again.

When she started on the equations for the solar system, it took awhile before she realized the equations were not for ovals, but circles.  She stopped and read through the text thoroughly, painstakingly building words out of the unfamiliar symbols.  The paths were circular, except that every so often, the planets got ahead or behind schedule and apparently you just corrected to the new spot.  Wow.  She wished her math was good enough that she could figure out how to check the examples given against an elliptical orbit.  She knew that such equations existed, but she couldn’t create them off the top of her head.

Suddenly, everyone was talking excitedly and moving.  She looked about and saw her classmates gathering up their books and exclaiming to each other about the things they’d soon be learning.  She gathered the papers she’d been writing on, but wasn’t ready to go before the last of the others were gone.

“Well, I noticed you reading ahead,” Mr. Parker casually stated.  “Are you worried about the things we’re going to be teaching you?  Puzzled at how things can be so different?  Certain everything about it is wrong?”

“I’m just wondering, if you know all these things, why do you keep it a secret?  Why let people go on teaching their children that the sun goes around the world when you know that it’s the opposite?  Why is this elementary stuff unheard-of to people who are in their second year of college?”

He blinked.  “Oh, come now, you don’t really think that people could understand that the world is a sphere before they’ve had at least a little learning now, do you?”

“When I was a child, my parents got me a desktop globe so I could learn my countries off of it.”  Shannon made a illusion of it.  It was kind of cheap but that was part of her point.  She hadn’t been an amazingly well-educated child of a privileged family, this was a cheap thing anyone might buy their child.  “See, here’s my country, the United States of America.  I lived about here, and north of America is Canada.  South America is here, and this is Europe, it’s a lot of small countries that are very old and… uh... cultural.  Over here is China, up here is Russia, and down here is Africa.  Australia is pretty isolated.  There’s another continent down here, Antarctica, but no one really lives there, some scientists go there sometimes to learn stuff, but it’s too cold for anyone to want to move there permanently.  You couldn’t grow crops, you might be able to fish for a living, but that’s about it.  I learned all this stuff when I was a child.”  She held her hand a ways below shoulder height to specify age.  “Children don’t know what shape the world is until you tell them.  They say, ‘Why don’t people fall off the bottom?’ and you tell them that down is towards the center of the world, and that’s it.  They haven’t any strong preconceived notions to fight.”

Mr. Parker’s wide eyes implied that he did have some strong preconceived notions that he was having to fight right now,  but he managed to keep his voice calm and even as he said, “Well, please allow people here to decide what things we teach to whom, when.  Will you promise not to share this knowledge with others?”

Shannon grinned sheepishly.  “Sorry, you’re a bit late.  I taught Perrin a lot of science while I was living with him.  Nobody told me it was supposed to be a secret.”

Sighing, the teacher conceded, “Well, he understands discretion, I should think.  Do you know all of the stuff in there?”  He seemed to be a bit dismayed at the prospect.

“Not the stuff on Dowsers, because we don’t have them back home.  I learned a lot of vocabulary words today, because no one’s mentioned a pancreas since I came here, but it’s vocabulary in your words for stuff I know in my own language.  Of course, I don’t know the composition of your solar system, just my own.  When I’ve finished this, is there a next book for the advanced stuff?”

“That is the advanced stuff!  There isn’t another book.”

She couldn’t help herself.  “Would you like me to write you one?”

She could see him stop his automatic reaction and think, and after a moment he approached the idea with a healthy caution.  “Tell me something that you think should be added.”

“Well, unless they’re being yanked around by magic, planets should be very predictable. Try using an elliptical orbit, instead of a circular one.  You should get very accurate results.”

“But the circle is nature’s perfect shape!  The planets are all spheres, the sun is a sphere, the moons are spheres that travel in circular orbits...  Even in other things - our heads are spherical, because that’s the shape nature takes!”

Shannon mimed measuring her head on all three axes.  “Mine’s not, and neither is yours. Nature’s perfection is amazingly complicated.  There’s a good reason bees build with hexagons. When you start looking for perfections in complex things you can learn about fractals - patterns that are copied within their own pattern.  You use future viewing magic to see weather before it comes, and it’s a bit better than our forecasting, but we’ve had to learn to track storms forming out over the ocean, coming in to shore, following the great air currents, and one thing we’ve learned is that it’s possible for one tiny thing in one place to cause huge changes elsewhere.  Not only is everything connected to everything else, but the more complexity you look at, the more amazing it is.  Humans like simplicity because it’s easier for us to understand.  Nature’s perfection is mind-bogglingly complex.  It’s not simple.”  She decided not to tell him the conclusion of this pattern - the uncertainty principle.  He’d probably take it badly.  Instead, she asked, “Have you ever seen a sunset that’s all one color?  The complexity is a major part of nature’s perfection.”

“Oh.”  He didn’t seem to be able to come up with anything else to say.

She opened her book to show the planetary diagram.  “Would you have records of planetary positions to use to calculate from?”

“Yes.”

“Try plotting them as ellipses.  See if that works.”

“I will.  Now I expect you have some other class?”

Biting her lip, Shannon pulled out her schedule.  “Literature.  I’d better go.”“I’ll look for ellipses.”  He went to a shelf at one side of the classroom.  “This could be

an interesting semester.”

A World of Learning

Concentrating, Shannon pictured the fondly remembered outline of her teddy-bear tin.  A childhood favorite, she knew it’s every scratch and dent, the places where the paint had been rubbed off by constant handling, the smudges where she’d tried to fix that with crayon.  Its exact size and weight, and even the tacky spot on the bottom where there’d once been a ‘made in China’ sticker.  The memory included the smell of ancient chocolate from the time a candy bar hidden there had melted.  She’d picked all the chocolate out with a fingernail (and eaten it), but the faint smell of chocolate had always remained.  As an adult, she’d kept the tin on her dresser and used it for hair bands, loose change, and stray buttons.  When she went to bed, she put her watch and glasses in it.  During her childhood it had usually been found between her mattresses, full of bits of string, pretty rocks, and similar childhood treasures.  She’d always pushed it far

enough into the bed that it couldn’t be seen, but if she slid her fingers between the mattresses she could feel it, and had frequently fallen asleep like that.  Her memory filled out until she could nearly feel the battered metal, but she could not quite make the vision real enough to conjure the box to her.  The spell’s words produced a faint metallic taste and a ringing in her ears, but no tin.

Opening her eyes again, she sighed.  She was teleporting small objects at short range well now – she sent Perrin several logic problems or number puzzles each week.  He often sent her descriptions of his latest experiments, or articles on anything she might find interesting.  He lived nearly fifteen miles away.

Her current goal was to teleport something from her homeworld, but she could never quite make the spell work.  She was told moving a thing across thousands of miles was very difficult, and so she assumed sending things between worlds would be harder yet.  Calling something to yourself from elsewhere was easier than sending something away, and familiar items were easier to work with than strange ones.  Something she’d used most of her life should be the easiest thing to start with, but she couldn’t be sure if it would be possible to bring something here from her homeworld.  She hoped so.  This was the next step in learning to teleport herself home again.  The magi couldn’t help her – an appeal-conjuration was a hugely intense spell, and because the choice of who or what should answer was made outside of themselves, they had no connection to the world she came from.  They also became nervous or upset when she spoke of it, so she worked on the problem alone.

She gave up for today, and headed down to dinner.  The food was reasonable here – nothing spectacular, but filling.  Magic was used for preparation, but very little was created magically.

While it was possible to make a pitcher produce a continuous supply of water, normal food could not be conjured the same way.  Sugar could, but was dreadfully difficult.  Her teachers claimed that the more ‘pure’ a thing was, the easier it was to conjure.  Salt was ‘purer’ than water, and producing salt magically was often cheaper than mining it.  They could easily produce what they called ‘essence of air’, which was presumably oxygen, and with great difficulty ‘essence of health’ which they added to their water, which might be some vitamin. She’d concluded that molecular compounds were conjurable and mixtures weren’t, and that the smaller the number of atoms in the molecule, the easier to produce.  Few of her teachers were interested in such ways of categorizing things, so this was another subject which she’d mostly given up discussing.

Dinner tonight was a sort of pancake with lumps of sausage and cheese.  Locals used a sauce that tasted something like Worcestershire sauce on them, but she thought that was weird. Jelly didn’t work with the cheese, but they’d never heard of maple syrup.  She just ate hers buttered.  Before eating anything, though, she cast an antibiotic spell on it.  It was a variation of a common spell against fleas and lice.  She’d created it after trying to explain how hygienic cooking practices could prevent diseases, because the cooks had just said ‘how interesting’ and kept on wiping their knives and hands on their apron all day long.  They frequently used spells for killing the diseases that came of this, but Shannon didn’t want to catch them in the first place. At least she could trust the conjured water.  The milk needed cleansing, but even then she

thought it nasty.  It was whole and not homogenized, meaning you practically had to chew the first inch, and after that it got runny.  She substituted extra cheese.  After all, that was supposed to be alive.

After dinner, she climbed the Lightning Tower.  Originally for studying weather magic, it was spelled to keep observers sheltered while getting them closer to whatever was coming out of today’s sky.  There was still a weather class once a week, but the tower’s primary use now was to get closer to the Swarm, both for study and for fighting it.  The tower was spelled so each step climbed lifted you about a hundred times what you seemed to be climbing, but there were still a lot of steps to get to the balconies nearest the swarm.  At least it wasn’t raining today.  The swarm always flew higher than any rainclouds, and during a good storm the climb got rather tiring.  She avoided going all the way up; the sky here was sea-green and the strangeness of it always made her feel as though it would do something strange if she didn’t keep an eye on it.

Shannon was working on a firework-style spell that would send out sparks to affect nearby creatures.  She’d described napalm to both the Fire Master and Perrin, neither of whom could do anything with the small amount she knew about it.  Once, a journeyman had helped her capture one of the things and examine it carefully.  She wore thick gloves and a sort of insulated apron she’d invented – she’d been warned that touching it would result in nasty frostbite for her and critical burns for it.  All she’d been able to conclude was that it was quite energetic and strong for something that looked as if it were made of ice, fragile but not as fragile as it looked, and not even able to withstand the temperature of the stone tower, which felt fairly chilly to her. After a few minutes of thrashing, it had died and melted into a pool of blue liquid which she had been advised not to touch.

She had figured that out herself, but appreciated the warning anyhow.  Half the people here seemed to look at her as some kind of prophesied savior, half as some stupid barbarian savage likely to eat someone or summon demons for a lark.  There was a fair amount of overlap, too, people who thought she was destined to save them, but doubted it would be through coming up with a clever idea, or through the science she knew.  If there were a clever idea that would help, they reasoned, our people would have thought of it by now.  She didn’t care, much, one way or the other.  If singing ‘La Bamba’ would scare them away, she’d consider herself lucky when she found it out.  She didn’t have to do it brilliantly or by amazing talent, she just wanted it finished.  It would be nice to ‘show them all’, but she wanted the job done more than she wanted to be admired for doing it.

Meanwhile, she practiced fire spells.  First, little pellets of fire, like bullets.  They were easy to conjure, but only able to kill something as vulnerable as these.  A human would get a burn like a cigarette burn and say, “Hey, that hurt!  Watch it!”  They were low-energy and therefore could be conjured indefinitely, but they still took time to cast and only killed one of the creatures per shot.

She shifted into larger balls of fire, a foot across and shooting away from the caster, burning a dozen or more before being drained of warmth.  Masters could manage an even bigger ball – up to three feet across – which would last until the caster lost sight of it, but she couldn’t safely control that much energy yet.

Next came the fan attack, a sheet of fire going into a 45 degree arc.  This could take out a sizable hunk of Swarm, but was tiring and took longer to cast than the smaller ones.  She’d been working on a hybrid spell, which would cast a ‘shotgun’ of the pellets in a spread like the fan, but hadn’t managed to get it working yet.

When she was getting tired, she sat down and tried to work on the multi-pellet spell. Lawrence, one of the journeymen, came over and asked what she was doing.  He was one of the few who treated her as a relatively intelligent student, showing neither awe nor scorn.  She explained the effect she was trying to get, and he suggested using a physical component, perhaps pebbles, which she would physically throw, the  spell turning each one red-hot and projecting it farther than she would be able to throw it with arm strength alone.  She was able to do that, but going down after pebbles twice took more energy just running up and down the steps than the spell itself did.  Tomorrow she’d remember to bring a big sack of pebbles when she came to practice.

By now, it was late enough that she didn’t feel like doing the stairs again without a pep-me-up spell, and she disliked using those.  She had enough trouble sleeping without giving herself a big adrenaline rush right before bed.  Instead, she wrote up a brief summary of the new spell and called it a night.

As she settled herself comfortably into bed she reflected that at least the deep-resting charm the healer had sold her was better than anything she’d tried back home.  There, her medication had reduced her average time-to-fall-asleep from four hours to two, and she’d often still been tired during the daytime.  This little thing put her to sleep as soon as she activated it, and it was a deep, restful sleep that she didn’t wake from at every little noise.  She could be woken, but it wasn’t as easy.  As a child she’d always tiptoed to the bathroom, assuming that if she made any little sound she’d wake everyone in the house and it would take them an hour or more to fall back to sleep, because that’s how it worked for her.  Now she could use a spell that knocked her straight out.  It felt wonderful.

*****

Morning found her in Clairvoyance, learning about the difficulty in scrying things that did not look the way the seer was trying to picture them.

Mr. Vyke lectured, “Say you’ve promised to check on your little sister, and when you try to do so you can’t seem to find her.  If something about her is different enough from what you expect, you’ll be unable to picture her well enough to make that connection.  When this happens, you must reduce your expected visualization until it excludes whatever has changed.  If you are trying to picture her at home, take out the background and try to visualize her wherever she may be, moving or still.  If you think she may be injured, try picturing just her face, maybe just her eyes.  If that doesn’t work, try centering your imagination on the sound of her voice, the way her eyes flash when she’s arguing with you, or the way her fingers move when she’s playing her favorite song.  These habits that are a part of her will be there, even when she’s not using them.

“As you reduce the number of defining points, you will find your vision spell much more difficult.  This is why you’ve had to practice for so long.  You may also get false matches, visions of people who look somewhat like your sister, or are nearby, or have similar tastes.  You have been taught to use as many key features in your pre-vision image as you could think of, but now that you are all able to readily induce a vision, it is time to learn to cut down on the number of points of similarity as much as you can without losing the vision entirely.”

The teacher asked them to try visualizing the project they’d made in Metamorphosis, where they were learning to shape something out of clay and turn it into wood.  Shannon had gotten the box to absorb most of the sawdust, dropping the sandy residue of the base clay, but had not yet gotten the entire transformation completed.  This resulted in a very strange texture, but she kind of liked it.  Once the transformation was complete, it would not look like carved wood, more like congealed sawdust.  After that, it would be time to take thinly sliced wood and graft it to the outside.  It was mind boggling that she could travel to an alien world, study magic, and learn how to make a cheap particle board box with hardwood veneer.  She ought to put the school logo on it.

She tried to picture the box she’d been working on for over a week, and couldn’t call up a vision of it.  It had been changed and hidden, and the assignment was to find it.  She cut the location out, and concentrated on the smell of clay and sawdust.  Everybody’s answered that description, and she started adding in shape, feel, weight, color, the way the clay had squished between her fingers, how she’d reshaped it a bit as the wood made the clay stiffer so she could get it to stand up under its own weight better.  Sometimes she felt the possibilities narrow, other times she lost the connection altogether.  She dropped out the ideas that didn’t work, kept the ones that did, and finally had a view of what looked like her box, except for being lime green and in an unfamiliar, enclosed space.  She checked out the space around it, and concluded it was under someone’s bed.  Now that she had a proper visualization, she repeated the spell that called the box to her, and it appeared in front of her with a slight wash of dusty air.  She brushed off the spell that had changed its color.

“Done already, Mrs. Peltonson?  Excellent job!  Wonderful!”

Shannon blinked off her trance, looked around, saw that several other students had their projects in front of them, and ignored the praise.  Mr. Vyke was always incredibly encouraging to her, and she wasn’t sure if he was surprised she could learn things as quickly as the other students, or trying to flatter her somehow.  She just said, “Someone needs a dustmuncher.”  The teacher retreated in confusion.  She enjoyed messing with his mind.  He reminded her of the people back home who thought children should always be praised for everything they tried, and all that mattered was that they’d done their best.  This, Shannon figured, taught children that after they’d tried something once they didn’t have to work at it any more.  They didn’t have to try very hard, either, because they’d get praised either way.  She’d resented it when she was young, and it didn’t feel any less patronizing now.

That didn’t matter, she wanted to try this new technique with her tin.  She closed her eyes and tried to picture the tin bear from different angles, removed the ‘on my dresser’ component, centered on the smell and the cool metal, changed the contents to empty and then full of various

things.  She could feel the spell getting closer, and finally realized that the lid was closed.  It had been open, with the lid under it, on her dresser.  Someone had moved it and closed the lid.  It smelled wrong, and was sitting downstairs on the mantel.  It was fairly full, but she couldn’t tell much about the contents except that they were carefully chosen for her.  She got the nasty feeling that her family had thought her dead and made a sort of shrine for her.  She had to get them a message.

She complained of a headache, common after magical exertion, and was dismissed. She’d completed the assignment anyway, so she didn’t feel bad about skipping out of class.  She went straight to her room and sat comfortably cross-legged on her bed.  She cleared her mind, visualized the box, and when she could feel it, she called it to herself.  There was a terrible feeling of pressure, sapping her energy until she could barely pronounce the words of the spell, but it worked.  When the spell was complete, she held the teddy-bear tin.  Now she did have the headache, and was exhausted as well, but felt happier than she had in a long time.  She curled up around the box and allowed the fatigue cast its own sleep spell.

*****

She awoke ravenous – a spell’s energy-cost normally came from the caster’s body, difficult spells causing not only fatigue but hunger as the body tried to replace the drained reserves.  Even before heading down to see what she could scrounge in the pantry, though, she had to see the contents of her box.

These included some pictures drawn by her little daughter, including one of the family, which said, “WE LUV YO MOMY” in uneven letters.  Shannon started crying.  They’d all signed it, her son Jeremy’s cursive unfamiliar but legible.  There was a photo, taken through an upstairs window, of Jeremy getting the cat out of the maple tree.  He’d grown a lot in three years, she supposed he could get up there without a boost now.  Tailchaser (the cat) didn’t look like she wanted rescuing, but Jeremy was determined.  Her husband Peter’d written something about the rescue on the back, but she couldn’t read it for her tears.  She carefully pushed the things away and allowed herself a good cry.  She was just getting back under control when someone knocked on her door.

She sniffled and wiped her face, then answered the door.

When Shannon let Edolie in, her friend asked, “What’s wrong?”  Edolie was a good friend to anyone in trouble, having a caring soul and a wide maternal streak, and she often dealt with the youngest students’ homesickness.  She recognized it in Shannon even though she was several years younger than the world-jumping woman.  Homesick is homesick, and living abroad is hard.  Shannon spilled out her findings, starting to cry again as she explained the pictures. “They don’t know what happened to me, they don’t know where I am or if I’m ever coming back, but they’re waiting and saving things for me, I’m sorry, I can’t help crying…”

Edolie hugged her and let the words tumble out of Shannon’s mouth.  Shannon told what the picture more or less said, adding that Sarah had barely known the alphabet song when she’d left.  She’d appeared to think ‘lemeno’ was the letter between K and P.  None of this meant

anything to Edolie, whose language was made up of different letters and whose culture considered fifteen to be a good age for those few who needed literacy to learn.  The main thing was that Shannon missed her family and had finally found out how things were.  The news was good, and she’d be fine once she caught up on all the crying she hadn’t let herself do for the last couple years.  She nodded and said mmm-hmmm and waited it out.

When Shannon was under control again, Edolie lent her a handkerchief, then said, “It’s nearly time for maths.  I was worried when you missed dinner and then literature, but I guess you must have been tired after moving something that far.  We just have time to swing by the kitchen before class.”

Shannon scrubbed her face again and grabbed her math notes.  Hearing that she’d missed dinner was bad, but the appetite that came of casting difficult spells was accounted for at the school, and she was given a sticky, stale pastry and a rather soft apple.  She didn’t mind, as ravenous as she was, she’d even consider the live eels she was once given as a slave.  These were considered a delicacy, but the ship had caught a lot of them and a storm had washed them farther from shore than their rations could cover.  They’d been served occasionally at Perrin’s, but she’d always passed on them, usually eating leftovers or a sandwich.  Now, even an apple with no crunch left in it and a honey and walnut roll were wonderful, and she was still glad she had only mathematics to endure before suppertime.

She hated her mathematics class.  Prof. Sminton was certain that her homeworld’s math was just a stupid way of getting answers without understanding the process, and made her use his methods and show her work.  She checked her work with her own system before handing things in, and the teacher still seemed to think she didn’t truly understand what the computations meant. Fortunately, this was the last required math class, the school recommended more, as magic had a certain logical-mathematical basis, but she already had that without learning how to laboriously multiply out terms.  She smiled as she remembered how shocked the teacher was at how quickly she’d picked up the method of multiplying their numbers by multiplying each part in the first number by each part in the second.  Basic algebra said how, and even that those numbers that subtracted instead of adding to the total should be negatives.  He was very suspicious of how quickly she mastered that, but he couldn’t fail her if she demonstrated the correct ability, so she was going to be done with him altogether soon.

In class, the teacher started talking about numeric series and how they could be used to extrapolate new spells and calculate the relative energy cost of various related spells.  Shannon had figured out part of this herself, and when she’d asked an older student he’d given her more specifics.  She felt she could safely ignore Prof. Sminton for a while, and started writing a letter home.  She looked up regularly so he’d think she was taking notes.  At least he didn’t insist she write them in his language, though she sometimes did for practice.

The hard part was not crying, which would certainly tip off the teacher she was not focused on his lecture.  She looked carefully over the first attempt, nodded sagely, and set it aside.  Crumpling it up would be a giveaway.  Three tries later, she had a reasonable letter.  It explained she was sorry she’d disappeared and was trying to learn enough to get home.  Until she got better at the spell, she’d be able to jump something back and forth once or maybe twice a

day, but she’d keep practicing until she could teleport herself home.  She thanked Sarah for the picture, complemented Jeremy’s climbing skill, and asked Peter what all was happening.  She wrote that she loved them repeatedly and, if the end result wasn’t very coherent, it didn’t matter. She didn’t feel very coherent, so it expressed her feelings very well.

Finally class was dismissed, and she headed down towards supper.  She sat next to Edolie and told her more about her family and her plan to try to send the box back before she went to sleep.  A good friend Edolie always had been, and she helped Shannon to pocket some extra food from supper because she’d be ravenous again.  Shannon ate as much as she could stuff down and headed back to her room.

Once there, she took everything out of the tin, smiling over the things they’d decided to include.  A bathsalt-based Christmas ornament Jeremy’d made in school would certainly be used – the soap they had here was terribly harsh.  Sarah’s inexpertly folded origami (possibly a duck?) was carefully placed on the dresser.

In return, Shannon got out a few prizes she’d picked up in hopes she’d have a chance to give them to her family.  A wooden toy horse that reared and ran about for a few seconds when fed a grain of sugar.  Jeremy’d been crazy about horses, three years ago.  A paintbrush for Sarah with colored stripes on the handle that changed the paint to the color you squeezed.  It also had a clear stripe, which caused it to erase.  Very practical.  A wound closer, not strong enough for major injuries but perfect for scraped knees, minor cuts, thorns, and other everyday hurts.  Peter had two small children and a fairly physical job.  He also enjoyed outdoor sports and often came home with scratched up legs.  She’d written instructions for these things when she’d bought them, and painted some nice wrapping paper for them now.  Before closing the tin, she sniffed it, and noted the soap-and-chocolate smell to be remembered for next time.

She checked her watch, which claimed it was currently 8:05 AM on May seventh, and she labeled the pile ‘terribly late Christmas presents’ and put the letter she’d written on top of them.  She wished she could see their faces when she opened them, but sending the box would pretty much wipe her out.  They’d know she was still alive and loved them, and that she wanted to come home and should be able to sometime soon.  That was the important thing.  She meditated a bit to gather her strength and sent the box home.  Then she scarfed down her saved bread and chicken and collapsed.

A World of Details

Shannon woke on Midweek, a day off.  She thought having the ‘weekend’ split up with three workdays, a Midweek day off, three workdays, and a Weekend day off was great.  This world had several good things, and this was one of them.  Especially now, when she had things to do.  She sought her tin, finding it back on the mantle.  She called it to herself and opened it, panting.  Inside were three letters, quite a few pictures, and some of Peter’s homemade cookies in a Ziploc to keep them from tasting soapy.  The cookies were still a little warm and made her room smell wonderfully homey.  She ate two and stored the rest in her stasis-box, grabbing her trade-rings before closing it again.  She had shopping to do.

She took the letters to breakfast with her, willing to risk crying in front of everyone.  She found Edolie finishing breakfast, and updated her.  Her friend didn’t hide her curiosity and asked her for details, but had to wait while Shannon shoveled in some breakfast and read the letters. She hadn’t read very far before she stopped and stared with her eyes so wide Edolie thought she was choking.  Shannon nearly did choke trying to swallow so she could explain.

Since her disappearance, magic had been flowing into their world.  It was emanating from the spot where Sarah had seen her vanish, and now scientists were coming by on a regular basis.  They’d found some way of measuring magic, and it was increasing all the time.

Those nearest the arcanely glowing Blue Spot were finding themselves able to do magic, quickly discovering spells.  This excited some people and alarmed others, but her family wasn’t willing to move.  Sarah had proclaimed that Momma’d be home eventually, and she seemed to have developed a talent for precognition, so they stayed.  Meanwhile, Jeremy had learned a spell to turn the cat various colors, then realized he could use the same spell on his own hair. Currently, he wore it traffic-cone orange, though when the picture of him in the tree was taken, it had been pale green.  Shannon had noticed that, but assumed it was dyed for Halloween or something.

Other people besides scientists were interested, wanting to learn magic, or verify its existence, or just see the strangeness for themselves.  The family was doing an odd sort of tourist trade, as people came to see the strange glowing blue spot where she’d been standing.  Jeremy was selling t-shirts, with a picture of the Blue Spot which he would magic to glow.  The glow would last for about a month, and many people came back again.  Since they were paying twenty dollars admission to get into the living room to see the Blue Spot, Jeremy usually re-spelled the shirt for free.  Unless the person bullied him, in which case Jeremy would ‘accidentally’ spell their nose to glow, then apologize and claim he couldn’t fix it.  Skin wouldn’t stay glowing for long, because the spell couldn’t affect living tissue.

When they’d gotten her package, they’d opened it right away, and Jeremy had tried out the horse.  He’d loved it, and so had the tourists.  He’d been offered five thousand dollars for it, but he was fiercely determined to keep the gift his missing mother had sent him.  If she could send another one they could sell, that would be nice, and from now on, they planned to open anything from her in private.  Not that they really needed the money, Peter’d quit his job and now pretty much spent all day home with tourists and scientists.  He’d been remodeling to give the family privacy in the rest of the house while the front porch and living room were open for guests.

Peter asked if she could send any information on spell casting – he didn’t like the fact that they were learning magic randomly without anyone who knew what they were doing to make sure nothing went wrong.  Obviously there would soon be many new and interesting crimes to commit, possibly ones that weren’t even illegal yet because no one had thought of them.  Since she was in a world where magic was part of society, anything she could tell them would help.  Were there books she could send?  Class notes they could borrow?

Was there anything she needed from home?  Her sleep medication had expired, but they could probably talk to her doctor about prescribing more, even with her unable to come in person, he’d always been very reasonable.

Shannon finished her breakfast without tasting it, which was an improvement for something made of organ meat.  She wanted to do five things at once, shopping, writing up a basic magic primer, asking details about what was going on back on Earth as a result of this influx of magic, talking to master magi to see if magic was disappearing here, and figuring out some theories about why this was happening.  She wondered what Perrin would think, and hoped she’d have time to see him.

She started with shopping, which seemed the easiest.  She got a bunch of cheap trinkets that would look impressive to someone who’d never seen them before.  The local equivalent of a dollar store grab bag of party favors.  Two of the horses.  She bought a pair of dustmunchers and spent a little while writing up care instructions.  Nobody else in her family was any fonder of cleaning than she was.  She found a few sweets that were different than anything back home.  As she wrote notes for the items, she reminded herself to ask for some good old ballpoint pens.  She hated these quills they used, even the expensive ones charmed not to need ink.  If you were in a hurry and pressed hard, the tip broke.  She went through a lot of tips.  Heck, she’d gone through seven today, though that was unusually high.

When she saw the jump-box, she had to check her account balance.  The box was spelled to be easier to teleport than normal, as if it only weighed a couple pounds even when full.  Such enchantment came extremely expensive, but she haggled it down until she could just afford it. Edolie, who had enjoyed her excitement earlier, disapproved.  “You could get an awful lot of other stuff for that money.  You don’t want to spend all you have, think what would happen if you needed something.”

Shannon grinned.  “You told me once your family made a lot of money by importing this foreign stuff called cacao?  My people call that chocolate.  I can get it quite cheaply.  I can send junk like this,” she hefted the bag of knick-knacks, “which will sell for a lot of money, and a little bit of that money can buy things like chocolate, ballpoint pens, plastic bags, and very high quality paper.  Stuff that’s expensive or unheard of here but common and cheap there.  Come back to my room with me, I’ll show you what they sent.”

She bought the box, which was just bigger than a microwave, and put her other purchases in it.  As Edolie helped her carry it home, she tried to explain the relative cost of things, using basic earning power as a conversion.

“Someone with a moderate education who gets a basic, entry level job, works hard, and proves to be reliable and competent could soon be making $10 per hour.  That’s what I’ll use for man-hours.  For one man-hour he can get a meal at a decent restaurant, or two meals at a cheap, greasy, fast food place.  Half of each month’s pay will rent him a basic apartment.  Groceries, he can probably earn a week’s worth in half a day.  He can earn a decent set of clothing for about half a day’s work, half of that going to shoes.  He can also buy similar things for lots more

money, but someone with a ten dollar an hour job has to budget carefully.  Are you following me so far?”

Edolie nodded, saying, “That sounds like what an experienced deckhand makes on my father’s ships.”

Shannon grinned.  “For one hour’s work, he could buy a couple chocolate candy bars, a ream of fine white paper, a pack of pens, and a mug that keeps his tea hot for hours.”

“Wow.  What will you send them in return?  More cheap junk?”

“That’s just for the tourists.  The dustmunchers are a present for my family; I should have gotten my mother some, too.  Do you know what’s common here, but very valuable there? Small diamonds.  Little ones too small to use for magic will be worth a fair bit there.  They’re useful in industrial applications, for grinding and cutting, as well as being considered prime jewelry material.”

Edolie laughed.

“Really.  They’re rare, and that’s what defines value in gems.  Anyhow, colored stones look good with some outfits and not others, where diamonds go with everything.”  Here, they were like rhinestones.  Flawless diamonds of a carat or more stored and focused magical energy. Shannon wished she had one to cast this teleport spell with.  Smaller than a carat were useless for magic.  Student magi used coal or other forms of carbon to build diamonds, a process that taught patience and concentration as well as occasionally producing a usable gem.  It also produced many unusable gems.  If the magus broke concentration on the gem they were building, it was finished and could not be made bigger.  If they were distracted, the gem might become flawed or cracked, still unusable unless a gemsmith could cut an unflawed gem of at least one carat from it. Shannon had a fair pile of small and flawed gems.  She never threw out her own, and occasionally picked up ones others had discarded, in case she could take them home someday. Because they were so readily available here, they weren’t special.

Back in her room, she gave her friend a cookie, and had another herself.  Because of the stasis-box, they were still warm.  She started packing up the jump-box, wrote about the box itself and how they were all going to get rich, and cast her antibiotic spell on the candy.  The chocolate chips in the cookies impressed Edolie, and the ziplock bag impressed her more.  She began to come up with ideas herself, though she also seemed to expect a rather primitive society.  They plotted while Shannon wrote up some beginning magic exercises; then they went to find a professor to ask about magic transferring between worlds.

Mr. Parker, her teacher in Metamorphosis, was out.  He was interested in discussing her theories of physics and magic, and would have been her choice.  Rector Lartin was gone for a month, researching something in a desert far north of Harkwood.  Instead, she went to the dean, who’d been part of the group of magi who’d cast the spell that brought her here.  Mme. Flambeau wasn’t very interested in science or Shannon’s theories, but liked explaining how

magic worked, particularly to Shannon, to whom she was always was condescending.  Shannon could put up with her for something this important.

After more than an hour of irritating explaining back and forth, all that Shannon got out of it was, no, there didn’t seem to be less magic around here, but it was possible it could be disappearing from the beach where she’d appeared.  It would have to be checked on.  Since Shannon hadn’t known where she’d was, this would involve one of the magi talking to the slavers who’d found her.  She declined to go along, not trusting herself to hold a civilized conversation with them.  Mme. Flambeau was upset by the whole conversation, and it made her more abrasive than usual.  Finally, Shannon said she needed to go to Perrin’s yet today, as an excuse to get away.

She could not understand why the magi got upset whenever she talked about her homeworld, and her efforts to return there.  When she asked about it, they either said something along the lines of, ‘Don’t you like it here?’ or flat out denied being bothered by it, while looking increasingly uncomfortable.  She’d finally shrugged off the whole thing.  They all seemed to believe their world, their country, their city, their college, was better than anywhere else could possibly be.  It was a kind of geographical egocentrism that drove her nuts.

Perrin didn’t seem infected by it, either regarding his homeland of Weynlend or his new home here.  She went to him for refuge.  Since he lived fifteen miles away, she hoped she’d catch Winslow in.  He had a small flying carpet he sometimes lent her, and she really wanted Perrin’s opinion.

Winslow was actually planning on visiting Perrin after dinner, so Shannon used the time getting together notes from her early studies and writing things to bridge the gaps the notes left. She wrote notes about legal enforcement and common crime associated with magic, and was making two shopping lists as ideas occurred to her.  One list was things she wanted to buy here to send home, and one was things she wanted her family to send her.  She’d barely gotten through her first couple months of school notes before the chime rang for dinner.  She rolled up her papers and took them with her.

The hearty stew they had for dinner was a good, solid filler for Shannon, who realized she’d never be able to keep teleporting stuff back and forth so frequently.  She added a note in the letter to Peter that she’d send this tonight, and pick it up after classes tomorrow.  If she picked it up in the morning, she’d never make it through her classes.  If one teleport a day was too much, she’d have to try less frequently.

On the trip to Perrin’s, she told Winslow about the troubles of a world unused to magic having it suddenly introduced, and he told her about magical equivalents to fingerprinting and bloodhounds.  She couldn’t take notes – the carpet was spelled to keep them warm and prevent falling off, but it was still too windy for writing.  After they arrived, Shannon wrote up the new information while Winslow and Perrin caught up on family news.  Then she told them both all about her last couple days, and the implications of her husband’s letters.

Perrin confirmed that magic must disappear from somewhere for it to appear in her world, and they discussed Newton’s laws.  They concluded that magic was, indeed, just another form of energy, and could not be created or destroyed, only changed into other forms of energy. Perrin had trouble with the concept of matter being just another form of energy, but was rather excited once he accepted it.  Shannon knew the look in his eye; he would spend half the night in the lab once they’d gone.  She warned him against trying to turn matter directly into energy.  “A cherry pit would produce enough energy to destroy a city, and if it’s not properly controlled, it will.”  She didn’t think he could do something like that in his lab, but wanted to be very certain. Some of his magical tools could easily do things she’d considered nearly impossible, and there was no harm in making sure things were clearly understood.

He helped her adapt a spell for understanding languages to translating written words.  He had excellent theoretical knowledge of magic; it was just the practice of it he was no good at. When she cast their spell on a magnifying glass he’d made while she still lived here, it worked fine.  Now she’d be able to send text books home without rewriting them in English first, and she wanted to get Perrin some puzzle books and science textbooks.  She jotted down more notes on her lists, and then added a voice recorder to her ‘from home’ list.  Then she could make notes while on flying carpets.

*****

A few months later, she felt exhausted.  She was transporting her box every other day, and her classwork was much more draining.  Partly this was because she was learning harder spells.  She’d achieved journeyman status, with the extra workload that went with that.  Creating new spells and adapting spells she knew to new applications was no longer something she did occasionally on her own, but as a regular assignment.

Another assignment was to analyze the Lightning Tower.  She was told that the ‘strength’ to boost people up the Lightning Tower had to come from somewhere, and that she should study it and figure out how the spell worked.  That was Newton again, and she spent a couple days watching the spells function as other students trotted up and down the steps.  When a storm blew up and she saw the energy of wind and lightning being transformed and channeled through the tower, she understood.  Protecting the people in it from lightening and wind, the tower absorbed the energy from the storm around it, storing it for later.  She found that storage deep underground, a large shelf of granite that grew slightly warmer throughout the storm.  Later she saw heat being absorbed from the rock and used to boost the people climbing the steps.

When she brought her conclusions to Mr. Parker he nodded and asked if she had questions.

“Is there anything to keep the granite from absorbing too much energy?  If you had a lot of storms in a row, or if people stopped climbing the steps, could the granite become dangerously hot, causing earthquakes or geysers?”

“Very good.  When the spell was first laid down, there were two outlets included for dealing with excess energy.  If the heat gets to about half of what can safely be stored there, the

tower begins to glow.  In the early years of the tower’s existence, this was a signal to get some stonemasons out to make the tower taller.  Lifting a bunch of large blocks of stone was an effective way to use up any excess energy.  If it reaches three-quarters of the safe capacity, a linked spell represses the original spell so it absorbs energy over a smaller area.  That’s not a problem since we started having fire-magic practice up there – with all the extra traffic we use the energy fairly quickly.”

“Why don’t you use the energy against the Swarm?”

“How do you mean?”

“It doesn’t take much heat to kill the creatures, if you used the extra energy to heat the stone of the tower at the height of the swarm, they’d have to stay away or die of the heat.  The way the glide everywhere, I’m not sure they’re smart enough to avoid it, and even if they are, it would be a clear area.  Or the students could practice pulling heat out of the tower and projecting it toward the Swarm.”

“The first is a very interesting idea.  It’s kind of too bad we don’t get that kind of surplus very often anymore, but if we get some good storms maybe we can try it out.  Now that we have everybody climbing up there all the time, there’s little energy to spare.”

“Could you expand the weather protection radius?  I doubt very many locals will complain about less wind and lightning.  Or is there a problem with changing the weather like that?  I know storms are caused by imbalances between the temperature of the earth and various air masses, does large-scale magical manipulation cause problems?”

Professor Parker looked startled, then slowly answered, “I think we may want to talk to the Air Master about that.  Possibly the Earth Master as well, he knows all the details of how the Tower’s connection to the granite bedrock works.  Journeyman Peltonson, I think this might be a very important idea.”

Shannon shook her head.  “It might help locally, but never on such a big scale as you’ll need to rid your world of these things.  That’s my real goal, after all.  My master’s thesis, if you will.”  She grinned self-consciously, then said, “I guess I’d like to see a little progress, after all.  I hope they say it’ll work.”

He offered to arrange a conference, and then she asked details of the spell that changed electrical energy from lightning into heat energy in the bedrock.  She hoped to be able to use the stored energy to power spells, since it was already set up more or less for that purpose, but that turned out to be very difficult to accomplish.  She might be able to do this as a master, but it would still take twice as long to set up the spell in the first place.  It worked better for enchanting objects, which took power from whatever source they were set up with when cast.  That was part of the difficulty of enchanting objects.

Transmuting energy on the fly while casting a spell wasn’t easy at all, using your own energy was much easier.  Only pure diamond held power in such a way it was just as easy to

draw upon as your own energy, any other energy source needed to be carefully drawn into yourself, then used.  Because you had to pull it into yourself first, you couldn’t handle much more power than you contained naturally.  Magi sometimes used this if they needed to cast several high-power spells in quick succession, recharging themselves between spells from whatever energy source was at hand.  This was dangerous, because if you took in more power than you could control, you’d be in trouble.  Spontaneous combustion, electrical shocks, sudden massive internal bleeding, and madness were all possible results of taking more energy than you were able to handle.

After making sure she understood the dangers, he assigned her to try using three different power sources to refresh herself after casting major spells over the next couple weeks, and to write up a comparison in terms of ease, speed, and any subjective descriptions of how they felt to use.  He also warned her not to take in more energy than she normally held unless she was about to use it.  Trying to store extra power for an extended period of time held similar dangers.

Opportunity would be easy enough to find – she’d try it after her transport tonight. Before then, she had to endure a court dinner.

These were tedious and slightly scary for her.  She was always nervous she’d say or do something wrong, but mostly she just listened as various self-important nobles and upper-class members spoke at length on stupid things.  She wouldn’t go at all if Perrin didn’t insist that this was needed for the Abolitionist Society.  She had to know important people to promote change. The government here was a constitutional monarchy, but the only people in the Votekeep were nobles or very rich, or more often both.  These were the people she needed to speak against slavery to.  Unfortunately, they tended to believe she was only against it because she’d been a slave for a while.

Now that she’d been passing news between the worlds, she thought she could try a new tack.  There was a lot of support, back on Earth, for finding some way to help this poor, besieged world.  There’d been an unpleasant shock when they found out that slavery was still common here.  She hadn’t even told Peter that she’d worn a collar herself for a couple months.  But she could let these people know that her people were unhappy about helping a slavery accepting society.

The problem was, finding a way to say this without it coming out as a threat or coercion. She couldn’t demand they change the law before she would help them – that was nearly as evil as the slavery, too many people here hadn’t enslaved her, didn’t have any say in the laws, and couldn’t be left to die because she was angry at a few people.

She sighed and headed back to the dorm to change into her nice clothes.  At least, the food would be good.  Because she was trying to get these people to think of her as a sort of ambassador – a visitor from afar, who might arrange foreign aid for their local problem – she wore the very foreign blue jeans and a nice blouse.  Around campus, she generally wore a t-shirt and a sweater, with her older jeans.  It was wonderful to be back in comfortable clothing again, with the excuse of ‘national costume’.

After changing she had a few minutes to spare, so she reread the last letter from home.

Jeremy’d tried to teach the dustmunchers to ride the toy horse, but they really were too big.  Then he’d made a cart for the horse to pull, but had to feed it several grains of sugar to get that to work.  Fortunately, the horse didn’t actually eat with its mouth, and Jeremy found wiping a finger dipped in sugar water on the horse’s back the most effective way of giving it plenty of energy to trot across the room.

Then Sarah had offered the toy horse a lick of her lollypop.  Since a grain of sugar would give it energy to run about for a few seconds, the lollypop was a bit excessive.  Especially since it had started by rearing, and the lollypop had gotten stuck in its mane.  It had galloped madly about for half an hour, running under the furniture, jumping toys and things, until Jeremy had finally caught it.  Peter had been unable to help, because he’d been laughing too hard.  Sarah had cried because the horse had ‘eaten’ most of her lollypop, when she’d only meant to give it a lick. Peter had considered the entertainment to be well worth a lollypop and gave her new one.

The kids had named the dustmunchers.  The male was Meestaah Moooohncheee (Mr. Munchie was not right unless you drawled it out, apparently) from some cartoon Sarah watched called Mad Professor Alexandria.  The female was Fuzzbrain, from a book Jeremy liked.  Both had given rather involved explanations of the names, which Shannon couldn’t follow.

Peter had passed along several notes from the World Bridge League.  They were an organization on Earth trying to help this world against the swarm.  Over the last few months, they’d come up with using fireworks, remote-control toy airplanes with butane flame-throwers, and a weird gun that shot heated sand.  Earlier that week, at their request, she’d captured another live ‘swarmite’, stuffed it into a cooler of dry ice, and sent it over, having arranged a time beforehand.  Apparently the scientists had pretty much taken over the living room that day and given it a fast and thorough examination, learning things Shannon couldn’t even pronounce.  She would pass their information back to Perrin, who was able to give more detail about the natural world here than Shannon knew.  He also augmented the information from the magi at Harkwood with explanations on magical theory that Shannon had trouble putting into words and her teachers thought self-evident.  He was learning nearly as much from them as they were from him.  Occasionally, Shannon felt left behind.

The League and the magi of Harkwood together had invented a spell making a kind of lens in the air above the swarm, focusing sunlight into a kind of laser that burnt through the layers of swarm to eventually fall into the farm fields below.  The magi couldn’t hold it together long, but for hours after there was a warm glow of sunlight on the crops.  The spell was too draining to be used regularly, but seeing the sun again was a wonderful thing.  They were planning to use it again at the upcoming summer solstice, and at Shannon’s insistence had agreed to give the spell for free to the other Magery schools and any independents who asked for it. She’d made it clear she was not helping their school, but their whole world with this.  While she hadn’t crafted the spell herself, they wouldn’t have thought of it on their own.

She sighed with resignation and left, heading for the keep.  Good food, boring conversation, a bunch of jerks, a few decent people, one long evening.  No time for teleportation

until afterwards.  It would be after midnight, but home time would be about two in the afternoon. After all that, she’d try to bring herself up to full readiness for magic, keeping in mind that she could melt her brain if she overdid it.  Wheeeeee.

The World of Commerce

Shannon’s brow furrowed.  “I don’t understand.” 

Edolie looked ready to cry.  “It’s my uncle Roden.  He’s upset because you’re importing chocolate and other things that can affect our business.  He thinks if you’re bad for our family business, you’re no friend of our family.  I’m sorry, I can’t…”  She sniffled.  “Oh, Shannon, I just can’t!”

Shannon watched, bewildered, as her friend hurried away.  When the shock passed, she was angry.  What kind of idiot put business before friends?

She was upset throughout Intermediate Elementals and then Empathy practicum.  Oistin, who was the teaching assistant here while working on his mastery, saw very easily that she wasn’t putting her full attention on her attempts to modify his mood.  When he asked her about it her misery flared into anger and she snapped at him.

“Why am I even taking this class?  It’s not like I’m going to jolly the swarm into going away!  I’m just wasting my time here!”

“You’re here because learning this is a prerequisite to learning other things.  Perhaps you’ll have to coordinate several magi to attack at once.  You can’t start Friendspeech until you’re proficient in Empathy.”

“Fine then!” she retorted.  She shoved happiness in his general direction as forcefully as she could, but she realized even before he reacted she’d allowed too much of her own frustration in with it as well.

Oistin steadied his psyche before speaking.  This was his exercise, to take all the emotions the class would inexpertly shove down his throat and still be in charge of his own thoughts and feelings.  He couldn’t answer based on what they’d made him feel, he had to reorient himself first.  Once he’d chased away the urge to laugh hysterically, shout back, or lash out in return, he paired up the other students to practice with each other and pulled Shannon aside.  Still keeping an eye on the others, he started the lecture Shannon knew she deserved.

“That’s often a good way to let your enemy learn about your weaknesses, but in this case it’s just a good way to get asked nosy questions.  What’s bothering you?  I know it’s not this class – it’s older than that.”  He thought about the overtones of loss, betrayal and loneliness.  “Is it,” he realized that friction with her distant husband might be a likely guess, but was not one he should make without discretion, “bad news from home?”

“No,” whispered Shannon, “it’s here.  I can handle it.”  She closed her eyes and ran through a mental exercise for calmness.  Afterwards she didn’t feel better, she felt empty, as if without the anger and loneliness she couldn’t feel anything at all.  She walked back to the others feeling hollow.

She did a poor job manufacturing happiness for the rest of class and she knew it, but she was in control of herself, so Oistin said nothing more.  After class, Shannon headed to her dorm until supper.

How could Edolie abandon her just because her uncle said so?  You can’t let other people choose your friends for you!  What kind of idiot did that?  And what kind of family would demand that Edolie choose between her and them?

Finally, Shannon’s reason had something it could process.  Edolie’s family was being unfair, but Edolie’s reaction was understandable.  If her family commanded her to make such a choice, Edolie could not resist.  She had a large, close knit family, and she dearly loved all of them.  Edolie, bless her tender heart, loved pretty much everyone and anyone dearly, but could not abandon her whole family in favor of one friend, however much Shannon needed her.

For that matter, Shannon firmly told herself, she wasn’t the sort of woman who depended on someone to the point she couldn’t get along without them.  She had the self-sufficiency and confidence to manage alone.  Edolie’s defection hurt, but Shannon was capable of surviving it. She washed her face and headed to supper, trying to decide what she’d say if she saw Edolie.

In the huge dining hall, she fetched her supper and settled at her usual table.  There were already people waiting, and she sold the ballpoint pens, paper, M&Ms, and ziploc bags she stocked as staples.  She ate between sales and explanations, regretting again that Edolie wasn’t there to help.  Normally the younger woman took turns with her so they both got a chance to eat. Shannon sighed.  There were more than enough people who’d be willing to help her, but Edolie had been a steadfast friend when Shannon wasn’t getting rich, and that meant a lot.

One customer asked her about a catalog item.  Shannon told him, “It’s a folding cot.  For sleeping on.  Those guys are standing on it to show how strong it is.  And that guy there is showing how portable it is.  The cot is folded up in that bag on his shoulder.  It’s for camping or travelling, you take it with you.”  She turned again.  “I’m out of paperclips, Bryony, sorry about that.  I’ll have more tomorrow.”  She gulped down a few bites, missing Edolie for purely practical reasons.

At least business was faster than it would be in the marketplace, because she didn’t haggle.  She’d written a sign giving prices and that was that.  If anyone didn’t like it, they could shop somewhere else.  Not that this stuff was available somewhere else.  She wished there was a store somewhere, so she could send them there and eat in peace.

That thought suddenly ran into her wish for Edolie and exploded into a whole new plan. She jumped up on her chair, searched the dining hall with her eyes, and spotted Edolie on the opposite side of the room.  Dropping down again, she swept everything into her backpack,

declared herself ‘closed for a bit’, and took off.  Her customers probably thought her quite rude, but this idea was too perfect to hold in.

Halfway to Edolie, she slowed down and made herself approach calmly.  She also came up behind Edolie, who could only be sitting way over here to avoid a confrontation with her. She needed time to explain before Edolie had a chance to hurry off.  When she stopped, Edolie was taken entirely by surprise.

In a professional tone, but with hope beneath it, Shannon said, “I have a business proposition for your family.  There are too many people trying to buy this stuff off me between classes, I can hardly eat a bite of supper, and it’s frankly distracting when I need to be concentrating on my studies.  Do you think your family would be willing to set up a shop or stall somewhere, selling the stuff I bring over so I don’t have to?  I know they’ve been in the import business for generations, so they’re probably better at this than me anyway.”  She realized she was breathing hard.

Edolie looked uncomprehending for a few seconds, possibly because Shannon’s speech had gotten rather rushed in the center.  You could almost see her reviewing the whole speech in her head.  She tested out the idea against her knowledge of her family’s usual business practices and had amusement shining in her eyes when she turned back to Shannon.  “For what percentage?”

“I was thinking twenty-five percent of the profits.”  Shannon wasn’t too sure about this, but didn’t care.  The stuff she sold was nearly pure profit anyway, she rarely brought expensive items.  Hopefully, Edolie would give her a clue if she was too far off.

“Hmm.  It’s lower than usual, but if you’re covering the transportation, we don’t have the risk factor involved with bringing goods across the sea.”  She pulled herself up with her own mask of business conduct.  “I shall convey your proposal to my father and see what he says.” Here in public, she wouldn’t give her personal feelings, but she sent Shannon an Empathic touch of hope and eagerness.  Shannon nodded soberly and went back to her own table, where she finished her meal, still insisting she was closed for business until her hopeful customers left.

*****

Two days later, Edolie brought Shannon to meet her uncle Mercer.  Just after she knocked at the door, she whispered, “Just don’t stare at my cousin Blaise.”  Before Shannon had a chance to ask about that, the door opened and Edolie was making introductions.  So she shook hands and was led inside.

Following Mr. Mercer down the hallway to the sitting room, they made small talk.  He seemed a nice enough fellow, but merchants are very good at that.  Shannon made herself be pleasant too, knowing that Mr. Mercer was not at fault for his niece’s quandary.

As they entered the sitting room, Mr. Mercer casually introduced, “My son, Blaise.” Blaise gave them a rather diffident nod from his chair by the fireplace.  Perhaps he was very shy.

He looked about fifteen.  Shannon gave him a smile and a nod, then looked back at the father. He showed them to some very comfortable leather-upholstered chairs, and then brought over drinks.  Blaise turned back to his thick book.  That was a bit unusual – few children so young were proficient readers.  Shannon decided it was none of her business and ignored it.  Mr. Mercer wasted no time getting down to business.

“I understand you’re looking for someone to market the merchandise you bring from your homeworld?”

“Yes.  It’s wonderful to have people so interested, and partly I started doing this to get people used to the idea that my world is an advanced and viable place, when everyone’s first assumption is that we’re a bunch of barbarians, but I don’t have time for this.  I’d like to offer a lot more merchandise, but there’s too much time involved, and I need to study.  Doing the actual teleportation I can justify because I’ll probably need to bring stuff from my world to yours to fight the swarm, but until then I’ll just practice jumping whatever I can find, and paperclips and chocolate are just as good as bouncing a rock back and forth like we did when I first learned it in class.”

“Well, I think we can help you there.  I understand you’re mostly talking about items that have a fairly high profit margin in the first place?”

“Mostly.  There is an exception, though.  There’s some stuff I’m bringing over, and more I want to, that is for health and safety.  Like the helmets.” She shuddered.  “I’ve seen the children at parks playing tag with some sort of flying spell.  In my world, they’d be expected to wear helmets.  They do run into each other or trees and things sometimes.  Now it’s a matter of one of their friends finding a healer, and hope they get back in time.  My world is big on preventing injury in the first place.  Their parents would make them wear helmets, which would reduce the likelihood of serious injury or death.  I know children die once in a while, and it’s considered too bad, isn’t that tragic, but no one stops their kids from doing it again.  I can’t understand it.”

“I see.  So you want to import children’s helmets?”

“And other things that are for safety.  And health.  There’s stuff you can use to wash around the house with that stops diseases from spreading.  Your people seem to think getting sick and going to the healer is perfectly normal, but I don’t like getting sick in the first place. Many people can’t really afford a healer.  Some healers work for free, but those tend to be so busy, they can only help when people are deathly ill.  Nobody here understands the connection between dirtiness and disease, so they have a lot more sickness in the poorer parts of town than they should.  I’ve already got health agencies back home offering to send smallpox vaccine, but I don’t have anyone here that can administer the stuff, so they’re waiting until I do.”

“I can probably sell smallpox, er, was it ‘vixens?’ if that’s what you want.  I’m not sure what you’re looking for here.”

Shannon sighed and clarified herself.  “The things I’m talking about, they need to be offered at a price that the people who can’t afford a healer can pay.  They’re the ones who need

this stuff.  You can set the prices for the luxury items wherever you want.  But the items that are for people to live safe and healthy, even if they can’t afford a healer whenever they need one, those items will be set barely above cost, I really want that.”

“How much is ‘barely above cost’?  I need to pay for the place and someone to do the selling, I have to have some profit margin here.”

“I’ll sell them to you for around what Peter pays for them, you can add ten percent.  Most of these things are going to cost an obar or two.  A bottle of pills that will ease most minor pains and fevers would probably cost an obar.  A tube of ointment that will prevent small cuts from becoming infected would only be a few gekk.  Do you know how some older people have trouble walking, and if they fall are more likely to break a bone than when they were younger?  A device called a walker, a metal frame with wheels, can make it easier to walk, safer.  That would probably be several obar, but it should sell well, because healers can’t always help when people just get older and lose strength and balance.”

“You’ve got something that can make it so people whose legs are weak can walk?” exclaimed the youth sitting across the room.  He dropped the book and started working his way along the table.  Apparently, there was something wrong with his legs, because he lifted himself with his hands on the back of the chair and the table, then maneuvered himself along with his hands until he got to the end of the couch.  He scooted himself along the couch until he was near enough to speak to Shannon, who’d noticed Edolie flinch and look worriedly at her.

Wondering if this was what Edolie had been warning her about, Shannon addressed the boy, who no longer looked shy but tense and excited.  “In some cases.  How weak are they?”

“How weak?  They just don’t work.  How would you measure weakness?”

“The same way you measure strength.  How much weight you can move.  Do you mind if I take a look?”

He shook his head, leaning back on the couch and tugged up his pant legs.

Shannon came around and squatted by the boy.  The legs were pencil thin and pale as milk.  She took one foot in her hand, then asked, “OK, Blaise, can you push your foot against my hand some?”  He had some control there, they hadn’t dragged as he pulled himself along, but they hadn’t helped much either.  Now he pushed down a bit, but nowhere near enough to support his weight.  “Does that hurt?”

He shook his head, and she asked him to push as hard as he could without it hurting. Then she asked him to pull his leg up against her grip, again as hard as he could.  Afterwards she sat on the couch.  His gaze was disturbing, and his father’s was warning.  Not quite hostile, but troubled.  She realized that if she gave the boy any kind of hope at all, she’d better be able to follow through.  She wondered who’d sold them snake oil before.  Blaise’s hope held an echo of pain, and she understood his father’s anxiety.  Best not to mention physical therapy, then.  She didn’t know enough.

“Well, I’m not sure your legs are strong enough for a walker, but your arms are certainly strong enough to use a wheelchair.”  She explained how a wheelchair worked, and both father and son agreed that one would help.  None of the catalogs she’d brought had one pictured, but she knew they were easy enough to find.  This, in fact, led to a rather interesting discussion about the differences between their two worlds.  “Pretty much any store there has a ramp for wheelchairs, and enough room to roll a chair wherever customers need to go.  For that matter employees, too.”

“Employees?  Are you saying I could just work in a store there?”  This seemed to be the most amazing thing Blaise had ever heard.

Shannon forced herself not to laugh, but couldn’t resist making something of a joke about it.  She studied him.  “Actually, I don’t think so.  How old are you?”

“Fourteen, why?”

“I’m afraid you need to be sixteen to work most jobs there.  Sorry.”

All three of them stared at her.

“At your age, you would be expected to go to school during the day, like everyone else. ALL children are required to attend some kind of schooling between the ages of five and sixteen, and public school is free until eighteen.  If you make it that far without learning the basics, for whatever reason, there are free classes available, they’re just harder to find.  It’s considered shameful that about six percent of adults can’t read.  My brother is a different story, he can’t read and probably never will, but he still goes to school.  He has special classes for learning what he can, pointing to a picture to ask for something he wants and using special equipment to do things he can’t manage on his own, stuff like that.  You’re far better off than him, you’d have been in a normal classroom the whole time, except that you might have physical therapy while the others were in gym learning sports.  You’d be expected to learn math, science, history, reading and writing, just like everyone else.”

“And the other kids wouldn’t have a problem with that?  Or their parents?”

“The kids might think it strange at first, and likely ask you questions, some of them rather impolite.  They’d be expected to get used to it.  And, I suppose, you’d be expected to get used to people asking impolite questions.  There’s always someone.  This is fairly new, within the last few generations.  Some people still aren’t used to it, but you could get a job anywhere you can do the actual work.  If putting in a lift to get your chair up where you need to be or setting up a lower counter for you to work at would make the job feasible, there are ways to get those adaptations set up.  And of course, if you have money to spend, any store employee will be happy to help you find or reach the merchandise you want.”

Blaise snickered at that, glancing at his father, who looked thoughtful.  Shannon decided to go back to business.  She pulled out one of the catalogs from her backpack.  It had cupboard door and drawer safety latches, padded furniture corner covers, baby nail trimmers and tweezers,

and playpens.  The doorknob covers might fit a few doorknobs around here, but not many of them.  The car seats and outlet covers she’d crossed out to make it easier to skim through the stuff that might be appropriate.

“These safety gates are for keeping small children and pets out of places like the kitchen or stairways.  Sometimes for keeping them in their own room without closing the door, so parents can keep an eye on them without them getting underfoot.  Also, a consistent shortage of falling down stairs is considered healthy for growing children.  This is the sort of thing I want offered at fairly close to cost.  And things like walkers, wheelchairs, and bent silverware for people who can’t flex their wrists easily.  Stuff to help people who can’t afford a healer.”  In the back of her mind, a question suddenly came up.  This was a well-off family.  She turned to Blaise.  “You’ve surely seen healers?  What did they say?”

Looking down at his hands, embarrassed, Blaise mumbled, “I was born this way.  They can’t repair my legs because that’s just the way they’re made.”

And clearly, there was a major social stigma in effect here.  The best way for Shannon to deal with that was to completely ignore it.  “Right, I knew about that, it’s why I haven’t sent my parents a major healing potion for my brother.  Most of what’s wrong with him now isn’t congenital, but he was born with a malformed heart.  He had to have surgery as an infant, and he lost circulation to his brain for a while.  That’s probably to blame for most of his current problems, but any potion that could cure the brain damage would also restore his heart to it’s original condition, and that would probably kill him.”

Blaise thought about this.  “And if they gave him some more ‘surgery’, it would give him the brain damage again?”

Her breath caught, and she stared at him.  “No, not necessarily.  Why didn’t I think of that?  It’s much easier to operate on an older child than a newborn.  And brain damage is an effect of the operation not going quite right in the first place.  Maybe this could work, after all. They’d just have to explain it to his surgeon, maybe give him the potion after prepping him for surgery, so they can fix the heart immediately.  He’d still have problems, because he’d still only know the things he learned growing up, mostly how to get people to do the stuff he can’t, but he’d be able to learn more.  Blaise, you’re a genius.”

She made herself calm down, then grinned nervously.  “Gosh, I have something else I need to buy now.  Actually, I think it’ll take longer for my mother to convince a surgeon to try this than it will take me to find the right potion.”  Potions that powerful were quite expensive, but she was making a hefty profit now, and would probably make more once someone else was doing the selling.  She should get a couple potions, actually.  They were expensive here, but just think what they’d be worth at home.  She wished she could give them away, but there was no way she could send enough of the stuff to begin covering the people who couldn’t be helped by medical science.  One for her brother, one for his doctor, and let him figure out who to give it to.

With difficulty, she pulled herself back to the current question.  “In any case, there’s a lot of stuff that people would find helpful, and I want that stuff to be affordable.  Luxury stuff, you can price wherever supply and demand puts it.”

“I see.”  Mr. Mercer was obviously preoccupied with the ideas of his son’s legs being less of a limitation than they’d always been, but the lifelong merchant in him spoke up while his mind was elsewhere.  “How much of the lower-profit merchandise are we looking at here?  We should have a wide variety, don’t you think?”

“I think at first, I’ll try and get about half and half.  We’ll see how stuff sells.  I’m up to sending a load home, then bringing one back every day now.  I have a jump-box about this big,” she framed air with her hands, “and I jump that home and back every day, but a wheelchair wouldn’t fit in it.  That would have to be my only item for the day, there’s no way I could pull off three jumps.  I’m bushed after two as it is.”  Replenishing her energy made her able to cast spells again, but her concentration didn’t focus as easily for the second jump.  A third attempt might go awry, and you could get some very strange side effects.  At least she could lose the stuff she was jumping, including the very valuable jump-box.  Jumping stuff across worlds was much trickier than within one.

“How big is a wheelchair?  I might be able to arrange for a larger jump-box.  Would you be able to manage that?”

Shannon blinked at him, then grinned.  “Oh, yes.  I’ve gotten quite strong, now.  I’d be able to bring over larger merchandise and some more of those flaming planes, everyone who tried those loves them.  It’s hard to jump enough butane to keep them flaming, plus batteries, but I’m trying to adapt the ‘everful pitcher’ spell to make batteries that don’t run out, so hopefully soon we’ll be able to get lots of those flying.”

Mr. Mercer looked blank.

“I guess it’s only the magi that have been using those.  How about a lot of fireworks? They always seem to go over well.  Oh, another thing I need to mention.  Whenever dangerous things like fireworks are sold, whoever’s doing the selling must give the buyer the safety warning.  I don’t want to be responsible for someone losing a hand because they thought holding onto a bottle rocket would be like a flying spell.  My people put warning labels on them, but the buyers here can’t read them, so they must be told.  That goes for any medication, too.  Painkillers can be dangerous if someone takes too much, or if they’re allergic.”

“Like herbal simples?  I know willow tea shouldn’t be given to anyone with severe wounds or ulcers, it can restart bleeding.”

“Exactly.  In fact, one of our painkillers is a straight derivative of willow tea.  You get a measured dosage, not dependent on the season or the age and health of the willow, but it’s the same chemical underneath.  Do many people use herbal remedies?”

“More in the countryside than here in the city.  Healers are fewer, and country-folk know more about treating basic illnesses than most city people are willing to give them credit for.  I learned a fair bit about them when the Healers couldn’t help Blaise, but they couldn’t either.”

Shannon nodded.  “Our medicines are more along those lines, although more precise. We’ve learned to take something general like willow tea apart and find out just exactly what makes it work.  You won’t be getting advanced medicines, though, because those need to be prescribed by a doctor and I doubt there’ll be any travel back and forth for a while yet.  In any case, the medicines have warnings, and some items have warnings, and whoever’s selling stuff needs to read the warnings to customers, or memorize and recite them if they’re illiterate.”

“Well, now, that seems sensible.  I’ll make sure they can do that.”

“Say,” began Blaise thoughtfully, “What if you had a separate store, maybe called ‘Scientific Healing’, for those things?”  When both his father and Shannon seemed to think that a reasonable idea, he went on, “I could sell stuff there.  To show people how science can help people when magic can’t.”

His father had the trapped look of parents everywhere when their kids come up with an argument they can’t refute, and Shannon laughed.  “That’s a great idea, Blaise.  You can read, and I bet you can understand the instructions and warnings better than most people who are used to magical medicine.  I’m sure you paid attention to the stuff about herbal simples and non-magical healing, that’s as good as anyone around here is likely to be able to do.”  Mr. Mercer nodded weakly, unable to come up with any reasonable objection.

Shannon handed Blaise the catalogs that held baby supplies and home health adaptations, and turned to his father with the catalog of fancy chocolates and candies.  Exotic gifts and fancy treats, those would be high-profit items anywhere.  He kept glancing back at Blaise, looking like he wanted to object, until she got to the cheeses.  Exotic foreign cheese was an item he knew some higher nobles who would be interested in... and soon the Scientific Healing store was something he was glad he could let his son deal with because there was serious money to be made elsewhere.

A World of Progress

“It’s not enough to visualize your destination, especially not for your very first attempt. Teleportation across long distances requires a good, clear understanding of just how immense the distance is.  You must utilize extra references while you’re first learning, just like you did with Clairvoyance.  The safest and easiest is attaching yourself to someone you love.  If you are going to visit someone you’re connected to, through blood or deep friendship, you first locate them, usually speak to them to let them know you are coming, and then jump yourself there.  If you have a mental pathway to them, you will find your destination more readily.  You should also scry the area itself, to make sure there is nothing in the way.  Busy streets are an unwise choice, have your companion find an out-of-the-way area, look to see where the walls and things are, and then recite your spell.  Most importantly, keep your focus exactly on one spot.  If conditions change, say someone walks into the spot you were going to jump to, do NOT adjust as you cast

your spell.  Stop the incantation, reorient yourself, and begin anew.  You also must be very still, beginners often feel like they should step into the new place, but if you’re moving when you jump, the little step you take could move you miles away from your target.  Journeyman Peltonson learned about that possibility, didn’t you?”

Shannon nodded, ignoring the nervous giggling of some younger students.  She’d heard many bad things about long distance jumps, and so had not attempted one on her own, but that meant putting up with Mme. Flambeau’s lecture style and personality.

“Because you are shooting across the world, quick as a sunbeam, even the teensiest shifting of your feet, even leaning forward or back, can throw you away from your destination like a child’s ball kicked aside.”

Wondering whether Mme. Flambeau actually meant teleportation happened at the speed of light, Shannon settled her weight as she had learned in a martial arts class she’d taken as a teen.  ‘Root yourself like a mountain,’ whispered through her head, and she was surprised to get nearly as clear a mental image of her Shifu as she normally got of Peter.  She blinked at that and refocused on her current teacher.

“First, you should all make the mental link to your partner.”  Everyone who had family or close friends more than fifty miles away had contacted them already and asked for help with this class.  Those who didn’t had picked out partners from class and Mr. Parker had taken half of them to the city of Borchwin, where the day was four hours older than here.  Shannon had thought of India when she’d been there.  Edolie was Shannon’s partner, and now that she’d teleported herself, she had only to provide a partner for Shannon before she could be done.  The traditional reward for mastering long-distance jumps was a week off of school, so students could visit their distant family or friends, or have a nice vacation in an exotic location.

Shannon did contact Edolie, but only a quick check-in.  She’d already told her friend that she planned to attempt to get home, and would only try for Borchwin if she couldn’t make Earth. Instead, she linked to Peter, harder because he wasn’t trained, but getting surer all the time as they spoke daily now.  He was ready, hopeful but trying not to be pressuring her, as they didn’t know if this would even be possible.  She sent a wash of love and eager expectation, happy that finally she could at least attempt this important step.  ‘Without stepping’, she reminded herself. ‘Keep very still.’

“Look around them, be sure you know where everything is.”

The living room was unfamiliar, a wall now partitioning the stairs away from what had become a fairly public place.  Some chairs and a bench, a computer and a pile of boxes she knew to be full of tourist items had replaced the homier sofas and entertainment center she remembered.  There were no guests today, but a scientist with some sort of equipment was focused on the blue spot, where they expected it would be easiest for her to come through.  She focused on the fireplace – the one thing in the room that still looked the same.  Jeremy and Sarah were sitting in front of it looking excited.  Even now that she could check on them regularly, she was always amazed at how big they’d grown.  Golden sunlight poured through the window

behind Peter.  Shannon reached for the spot near the door, wrapping her mind about it as if she were going to teleport the room to herself, as she’d gotten so proficient at jumping things to and fro.

“Now, without moving, put yourself into the mental image you have of that place and incant your spell.  Don’t move an inch!  Just be there.”

Shannon tuned out the other voices murmuring around her as she recited the words herself.  There was resistance, heavy inertia dragging her back, but she knew if she could not summon the strength needed she would pass out rather than be lost in the not-space or any such terrible thing.  She’d only done so once, and passing out was a lot more unpleasant than she’d imagined, but it was worth the risk today.  She poured more energy into the spell and forced the words to keep coming.  She pulled her mind away from the pressure in her chest and doggedly focused on the room she wanted to be in.  For a moment after she’d finished the spell she felt suspended and squashed, like a strawberry in a malt blocking the straw.

Suddenly the pressure increased and she could see the living room more clearly than her classroom.  The pressure drained away and she was there.  Once she was sure, she threw herself at Peter who scooped her in.  The children leapt at them, and the four of them hugged each other for a minute, laughing and kissing and babbling happily.

Still panting for breath, Shannon collapsed on the bench and noticed the scientist again. He studied his instruments and printouts, politely giving the family a measure of privacy. Looking around the remodeled living room, she admired Peter’s handyman skills.  The north end of the room held scientific equipment, the bench and tourist stuff was on the south end.  A door marked ‘residents only’ led to where she remembered the dining room, and presumably from there to the kitchen.

Thinking of that woke her stomach, empty and demanding, and her nose smelled food. Peter caught the sniffing of the air and the sudden look towards the door, and laughed.  “You said you’d be hungry after such a hard spell, so I made ribs and baked potatoes.  They could sit in the oven for awhile if it took longer, but they should be about done now.”

Legs no longer trembling, Shannon jumped up, but before she could step towards the door, Mme. Flambeau appeared.

“I knew it!” she exclaimed, “This is precisely why I didn’t want you taking this class.  I cannot allow this!”  Without another word she seized Shannon’s arm and jumped them both back to Harkwood College.

Furious, Shannon pulled away.  “What are you doing!  I was home!  With my family I haven’t seen in years!  I know the rules, I get a week at home before I have to put up with you anymore!  Leave me alone!”

She closed her eyes and jumped herself back home again.  Peter caught her as she sagged. “I could just smack her sometimes.  Apparently she’s the world’s biggest expert on trans-

dimensional space.  Personally I think it’s because she has such a fine example between her own ears.”  Peter laughed.  “If she tries again, I’m going to the Rector.  This is too stupid for words.”

Sure enough, she felt the touch of a questing mind since she was watching for it this time. She tried instinctively to push it away, but Mme. Flambeau appeared within half a minute.  As soon as she was all the way present, Shannon rather bitterly declared, “I ought to have moved the chair to that spot while you were coming.”  It wasn’t exactly a conciliatory thing to say, but she was too angry to be polite.

Mme. Flambeau’s eyes widened.  The jumps between worlds had taken much longer than going to Borchwin, long enough that Shannon could move something.  If an object stood where one was appearing, one would end up missing pieces of one’s body.  A chair could effectively cut off someone’s legs, or worse.  Shannon wasn’t quite ready to do that, but she was ready to threaten it.

“Nevertheless, I can’t allow you to desert us in this way.  If you cannot abide with us out of gratitude, we will have to limit your mobility in some other way.  Regardless, you’re coming with me now.”  The pressure and release came again, popping them back into Harkwood.

Since Shannon had been trying to pull away, she ended up near the edge of campus, alone.  Good.  She jumped herself to the hallway outside the Rector’s office.  Short jumps, less than a mile, were much easier.  She’d been doing that for months, but on top of the other spells, even this was exhausting.

The Rector’s secretary looked up, but Shannon was too winded to speak for a few seconds, and as she caught her breath Mme. Flambeau reappeared, looking now confused. “What are you doing here?”

“Registering a complaint!”  Gasping a couple more breaths, Shannon continued, “You’ve no right!  I’m not standing for this!”

“Why, you ungrateful little barbarian!”  Before Mme. Flambeau’s response could continue, they heard a door open.

Professor Lartin, Harkwood’s Rector, looked mildly at them.  “Usually, if I have people shouting at each other outside my office, they’re either very young students or parents of young students.  Rarely older students, and almost never teachers.”  Mme. Flambeau flushed, but Shannon was too angry to be embarrassed.  “You’d better come in here before you give some passersby the wrong idea,” he added.

They filed in after the Rector, whose thinning hair, neat but unadorned clothing, and slightly short stature made him look misleadingly meek.  Shannon had heard that he could be quite firm when the occasion called for it.  She really hoped he’d take her side here, because there would be serious trouble otherwise.  The door closed silently behind them.

He looked at them both, Mme. Flambeau upset and flustered, Shannon fuming, and began by stating, “I believe I heard mention of a complaint.  Why don’t you start, Peltonson, and then I’ll go on to Mme. Flambeau’s side of the issue?

Shannon took a deep breath, and made herself as calm as she could manage.  “I would like to know why I’m not allowed a week at home with my family, who I haven’t seen in over five years, when I’ve just learned how to teleport myself there!”

The Rector looked to Mme. Flambeau with some confusion, and the teacher cleared her throat.  “Well, certainly there’s no problem with her having her week’s leave, Borchwin is lovely this time of year, but obviously we cannot allow her to return to her own world!  She must be kept here until the problem of the Swarm is resolved, if she is free to return to her own world, what motivation has she for helping ours?  We’d never see her again!”  She turned to Shannon, who gaped at her in shock.  “You may return to your own ridiculous excuse for a home once you’ve done your job here, not before.”

Shannon’s shock turned sharper, and she felt flushed and cold in turns, remembering the slave collar she’d worn and the fear and anger that came with those memories.  Through the roaring in her ears she heard the Rector’s words; they were hard and admonishing.  She managed to listen to them.

“Mme. Flambeau, that is enough!  You know very well how unwise it is to coerce magi in any way, and I don’t see how you expect to force her to help.  Aside from that, she has already helped us a great deal, and if she announced that she was going to leave us altogether we would have to accept the things we’ve already learned from her as her ‘job here’ as you so uncouthly worded it.”  He turned dismissively from the flustered and gasping teacher to speak more moderately to Shannon.  “Journeyman Peltonson, enjoy your time with your family.  I apologize for this trouble.  I will see to it that you are not interrupted again.”

Shannon thanked him and stood up.  Again, she reached for Peter’s familiar mind, pictured the living room, heard Peter’s voice warning Jeremy to get away from the blue spot. She looked at the scene, young faces worried and could just smell a hint of barbeque in the air, but she could not focus it.  She tried pulling in power from the nearby sources she’d become used to, but she could tell she’d never make it all that way.  She started the spell anyway, but stopped when it was obviously not working.  Looking at the Rector, she asked, “If I need a night’s sleep before I can get there, does my week start today or tomorrow?”

In response, Professor Lartin rummaged in a drawer a moment before pulling something out and tossing it to her.  As she caught it, she felt a mental grip on it release, probably a precaution in case Shannon had fumbled it.  “I’d like that returned to me one week from today, Journeyman.”

It turned out to be a huge diamond, over two inches in diameter, big enough to focus a lot of magic through.  After staring at it for a moment, she folded her hand around it and visualized her living room again.  Focusing through the gem, she had no trouble incanting her spell and the pressure swept her along more smoothly than either previous attempt.  She came to her house

with no difficulty, and carefully tucked the stone into her pocket without letting the scientist or his camera get a look.  She did NOT want people to know about she had such a thing.

Peter wrapped his arm around her and helped her to the dining room.  “For sure, now?” he asked, half kidding and half afraid she’d be snatched from him again.

“Yep.  The Rector gave Mme. Flambeau a bit of telling off, and I think there was more to follow.  I don’t really care, so long as she’s not going to drag me off again.  Holy cow, those ribs smell great!”  By now she was hungry enough to eat them bone and all.

“Actually, they’re pig, which I don’t think anyone considers holy.”

Shannon laughed.  “I’ve missed your sense of humor terribly.  It’s so good to be home.”

Jeremy grabbed the milk from the fridge, Sarah squeaked that she’d forgotten silverware and ran to get it, and within five minutes Shannon was well into a desperately needed meal. Everyone told her how glad they were to see her again, and the kids poured out everything they’d been wanting to tell her, interrupting each other and squabbling about that occasionally.  She didn’t really mind the fighting, it was so good to hear their voices again.

*****

Where you find strange new happenings with exciting potential to do things long considered impossible, you get religious crackpots, either claiming it’s the Ultimate Evil or the Only Possible Truth.  Shannon looked at the scorch marks on the front of the house, shaking her head.  The fire truck was pulling away, and Peter was already finishing his phone call to the insurance folks.  “You never mentioned this in the letters.”

“Well, there wasn’t much you could have done about it.”

“How bad is it?”

“It didn’t look too bad this time.  I’ve been looking into getting the siding replaced with stucco, or possibly brick.  Jeremy suggested a moat, but the basement floods enough in the spring without giving it help.”

“I meant, how bad is the general problem of,” she searched for phrasing, “idiots attacking our house.  Or you – has anyone come at you three?”

“Arson, graffiti, rocks through windows, that sort of thing happens every few months. Jeremy has some kind of spell to keep people from noticing him – when an amazingly hateful bunch of Baptists had a mob in the street, Jeremy just walked through without anyone noticing that he was one of the people they were protesting.  Someone did give him a pamphlet, though. He thought it was hilarious.”  Peter didn’t seem to be amused, but Shannon didn’t blame him.

“What did the mob do?”

“The police told them they had to protest on the sidewalk, without blocking the thoroughfare.  They protested for two days and then went off to protest the military, instead.”

“Sound like charming people.”  She followed him back up the steps.

“Apparently you’re a witch, and they hate witches nearly as much as they hate gays.”

“Really.  How much do they hate gays?”

“They’ve decided gays are the reason the world’s going to hell in a handbasket.  Some Americans are tolerant of gays, so America is evil. The military lets soldiers be gay without court-marshaling them, so the military is evil.  Therefore, they hold protests at funerals of soldiers with signs saying “God hates you” and “Thank God for dead soldiers”.

“Oh, nice.  They sound like swell folks.”

“These guys are so extreme, the Ku Klux Klan considers them a bunch of hateful wackos.”

Shannon turned from locking the door.  “You’re joking?”

“Nope.  When the KKK makes a statement to the effect of, ‘We’re not with those guys. They’re too extreme,’ you really ought to look at what it is you’re doing wrong.”

“Do many people agree with them?”

“Pretty much no one.  They seem bent on alienating everyone in the country; the best guess is they’re just in it for the media attention.  They don’t seem to be trying to get anyone to join up with them, and they can see that people aren’t listening to them.  You get more same-sex make-out sessions in front of their protests than your average gay bar.  People who aren’t really gay start hugging and kissing just to annoy them.  They stage protests pretty much every day – there’s that many things they feel the need to hate.”

“Well, now.”

“Let’s get going before someone else gets destructive.”

Heading to the car, she said, “Remind me to fireproof this place when we get home.”

“Wow!”  Jeremy waited impatiently for his sister to be buckled in, then scrambled into the car himself.  “Teach me that spell, mom!”

“Sorry, but the easiest mispronunciation will cause the target to sprout vicious, thorny growth that will attack anyone in reach.  It’s not really a beginning level spell.”

“Cool!  That’ll keep the vandals away.  Teach me that one instead!”

“Um, no.”

“Aw.”