“That would be me,” Kit’s mama said.
“Now I’m going to have to make another pot of this!”
“How terrible for us all,” she said.
Kit finished his own bowlful and, smiling, got up and put his bowl in the sink. Then he went to get his parka and Ponch’s “leash.”
They stood out in the backyard a little while later, in the near darkness, and Kit looked down at Ponch. “Ready?” he said.
All ready.
“You’ve got Darryl’s scent?”
It’s faint
, Ponch said. We’re going to have to walk for a while.
Kit checked the force-field spell, which he had integrated into the leash-wizardry, and saw that it was charged, up and running; it would keep hostile environments out for a good while, and protect the two of them from deadly force for at least long enough to come up with a better, more focused defense. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Ponch pulled the bright leash of wizardry taut, stepped forward, and vanished into a darkness deeper than anything in Kit’s backyard. Kit stepped after him; the blackness folded in all around.
They did, indeed, have to walk for some time. Kit kept a careful eye on the line of wizardry stretching between him and Ponch, watching to make sure that it was drawing power correctly, and that the faint “diagnostic” glow of light running up and down it was doing so regularly. Beyond that, there wasn’t much for Kit to do for a long while except keep walking through the dark, watching the ever-so-faintly illuminated shape of his dog as Ponch led the way.
A whispering sound — very faint, seemingly very far away — was the first thing that Kit started to notice as differing from the darkness and silence surrounding them. It was incessant, a soft whitenoise hiss at a high frequency, but every now and then Kit thought he heard words in it. Am I just imagining that
? he thought as the hiss got louder around them. “You hear that?” he said to Ponch.
The wind
? Ponch said. Yes. It’s up ahead, where Darryl is. We’ll be there soon.
“I mean, do you hear something besides the wind? The voices?”
Ponch paused a moment, cocked his head to one side. No, he said. Not right now, anyway. Let’s get there and see if I hear it then.
They started walking again. Quite suddenly, as if they’d walked through a curtain, Kit and Ponch were surrounded by blue-white light. Kit stopped, looking around him, blinking. After the darkness, this brilliance was dazzling.
At least there was gravity, though it felt lighter than Earth’s; and he knew there was an atmosphere, because Kit could hear sound from outside his force field: the hiss of the wind. But he wasn’t convinced that the atmosphere was breathable, especially because he could feel the cold outside, even through the force field. The air on the far side of the force field was full of blue-white smoke, or fog, moving fast, blown by the wind, and there was more blue-white stuff underfoot. “It’s like being inside a lightbulb,” Kit said.
If it is, then I’ll avoid it in the future
, Ponch said, looking around him with distaste. It smells bad here.
The wind dropped off briefly, and Kit was able to look out of the lightbulb and see that the two of them had stepped into a snowfield. Except that snow isn’t blue, Kit thought. Ponch, though insulated from the cold around them by the force field, nonetheless shifted uncertainly from foot to foot in the robin’s-egg blue stuff. Kit felt the odd soft squeak of it under his sneakers, and understood Ponch’s confusion. It feels more like talcum powder than snow. Or, no, more like cornstarch — for that strange squeaky sensation persisted no matter how the stuff packed under Kit’s feet.
The wind rose again, reducing the visibility to nothing as it picked the snow up and started blowing it around in the air. The snow was as fine as powder on the wind, finer than any powdery snow that Kit had ever seen, even in blizzard conditions. The stuff piled and drifted in spherical sections around Kit’s force field, gathering like swirls of smoke, abruptly dissipating again like smoke blown away. Suddenly Kit realized what he was seeing, and realized, too, why the snow’s texture was so strange. This isn’t water snow. It’s too cold here for that. This is methane…
The wind howling around them gusted for a few breaths more, blowing the blinding snow shrieking past Kit and Ponch, and then dropped off once more, just briefly giving Kit the wider view again as the snow drifted back out of the air to the ground. We might as well call it air, Kit thought, though he knew that if he tried to breathe it at this temperature, it would freeze his lungs to solid blocks of blood and water ice. He popped his manual open to a premarked page for reading environmental conditions and let it take a moment to do its sensing while he turned in a circle, looking at the landscape.
There wasn’t much of it. Nearby, black crags of stone stood up here and there, shining with blue ice that seemed almost to glow on its own in this fierce sourceless light. Kit glanced up at the sky, wondering whether there was a star up there somewhere, on the far side of what might be a
“greenhouse” layer like Venus’s upper atmosphere. But there was always the possibility that this wasn’t a planet at all — just some kind of Euclidean space, another dimension that just went on eternally in all directions. Whichever it is, he thought, it has weather, and the weather’s bad. Even Titan’s weather is better than this.
Kit glanced at the manual page again, read the words in the Speech that began to spell themselves out there.
Nitrogen atmosphere. No oxygen. Methane and some other hydrocarbons frozen out to make the snow
… Kit shivered despite the force field: The temperature outside was about two hundred degrees below zero centigrade.
“I’m glad I brought a coat,” he said softly.
I wish I could grow mine thicker, Ponch said, looking around him with distaste. I didn’t like that other place, the hot one, but it was better than this.
“Believe me, we won’t stay long,” Kit said. “Just long enough to talk to Darryl.” The contrast between the room-temperature range that the two of them needed to function and the temperature of the space around them was as extreme as the difference between room temperature and a blowtorch… and this meant that keeping his own environment and Ponch’s tolerable would require Kit to spend a lot of energy in a hurry. He was going to have to keep a close eye on the energy levels of the force field; this was no kind of place to have it fail suddenly. Whether they were genuinely in some other universe or just inside Darryl’s mind, the cold would kill them both in seconds if their protection failed. “Let’s get going. Where in all this is he?” Kit said to Ponch.
That way
, Ponch said, turning. The contrast in temperatures stands out. But so do other things.
There’s company here.
“The same company as last time?”
The same. A heart of cold.
“Great,” Kit said under his breath. “Well, let’s head that way. I’ll put the stealth spell up around us again, though in these conditions, it may not work a hundred percent.”
If you could make the wind drop…
It was worth a try. Kit paged quickly through his manual to the environmental management section and looked for the spells that involved short-term weather control. He found one that looked likely, started to recite it— And then stopped, shocked. Something that had accompanied every spell he’d ever done, that growing, listening silence — as the universe started to pay attention to the Speech used in its creation — was suddenly missing.