“I am beginning to wonder whether I should have ever brought the anima,” Nona said, chagrined.
“There must have been similar violence when the animus took over, generations ago,” Colene said. “This is a lot like my world, Earth. When there’s no strong authority, nations fission into factions, and the factions fight. I thought your world was better.”
“I thought so too,” Nona said. “Now I see that the despots, much as we despised them, did keep the peace. I am very much afraid that my magic will be inadequate to restore order in more than a single village.”
“But I guess you don’t want to give it up as a bad job,” Colene said.
“A single village is better than nothing.”
They checked several other villages, performing shows at some and avoiding others when Seqiro verified that they were dangerous. The story was similar throughout: a state of overt or covert war existed. The despots had not released their power gently; they had clung to it by whatever means they could. The theows, knowing that they were no longer opposed by magic, had thrown off the yoke wherever they could. The sides were approximately even, so the issue was in doubt. Men were learning war rapidly.
There were also collections of brown-tunicked rabble, the folk Nona had released from the underworld; rejected by the folk of the surface, they were forming communities of their own, just as distrustful of strangers.
“Well, I think I’ve figured out how to solve your problem,” Colene said.
Nona didn’t laugh. She was afraid of what the girl was going to come up with. “It will require a miracle, I think.”
“What we have to do is get some more magic here,” Colene said. “Not one woman, but a group of them, so they can spread out and establish law and order.”
“But I am the only one,” Nona protested. “I can not duplicate myself.”
“You are the only one on Planet Oria,” Colene said. “But there are whole planets full of them elsewhere in Julia. There are lots of anima worlds. All we have to do is get some of those other women to immigrate. It could be a pretty good deal for them, you know. Queen for a Day, or for life. Maybe most wouldn’t be interested, but I’ll bet some are, and even if it’s only one in a hundred, that may be enough. One to a village, maybe.”
Nona listened, astonished. Anima women from established anima worlds! Of course there were many of those. The universe of Julia had an infinite number of connected worlds, of all different sizes, with their populations in proportion. Many were animus, with the men wielding the magic, but many were anima, with the women having it. And a number of such women were bound to be interested, because instead of being unremarkable in their own society, they would be the wielders of full power on Oria. Some might be bad women, not suitable, but many would be fair. It was, indeed, an answer.
“Two problems I see,” Darius said. “Selection and transport. We’ll need a way to alert them and pick out the right ones, and we’ll need to get them here. That may be a problem.”
“Two solutions,” Colene replied promptly. “We’ll go to the amazon leaders and explain the situation. They must have dozens of prospects—women who are capable but not in line for power in that world. Women who want special challenge. Women who are too ambitious so need to be removed, but who are too well connected to be eliminated without a stink. Sure, there’ll be politics galore, but there’ll be magic women available. They may not be ideal rulers, but they’ve got to be better than chaos. And we’ll transport them the same way we travel, bringing them along the filaments that connect the worlds, in small bunches. Maybe we can get Angus to help. It may take a bit of time, but it can be done.”
Nona nodded, excited. It could be done. But she had a question of her own: “What about Burgess? Can he travel the filaments? He won’t want to remain here alone.”
Colene went to the floater and put a hand on a contact point. “Hey, elephant nose, do you want to go world-hopping? It’s one weird trip, I promise you!”
There was a pause while she clarified the situation for Burgess. Then she looked up. “He doesn’t want to get left behind. We should be able to bring him along the filaments the same way as we bring him along on a group conjuration. It’s better that we stay together, as a hive.”
So it was decided. Tomorrow they would go to the East Sea and set up for their excursion to another world. That would be a horrendous endeavor, but Nona felt relieved. For the first time since she had become aware of the problem on Oria, she had some reasonable hope of remaining with her friends of the hive.
CHAPTER 9—ANIMA
DARIUS lay in the tent, awake between two sleeping women as dawn approached. He hoped they wouldn’t regret this. Colene had a positive genius for solving problems, and an almost as strong negative genius for making new problems. Her simple solution to Nona’s problem was complicated and perhaps dangerous in its details.
First they had to conjure to the East Sea. Oria was part of the fractal reality of Julia, in which every planet was connected by invisibly thin filaments and the entire universe was a deviously connected mass. Colene’s mental image, culled from her research bank in her home Mode of Earth, showed an essentially two-dimensional pattern. Each planet was shaped like a six-legged bug, with the head pointed west, with the filaments entering it at the east and departing in many directions from the bumps called rads—radicals—on its surface. There were smaller rads between the larger ones, in descending subpatterns of increasing complexity. Here in the Julia Mode the pattern was three-dimensional, and the rads projected on four sides. The surface of a pristine planet was a complicated array, but inhabited worlds were broken down by the forces of weather and the depredations of man so that they came to resemble the home worlds known by Colene, Seqiro, Burgess, and himself.
To a degree. Nona was so accustomed to the filaments that she didn’t even notice them, but Darius did. From every rad filaments issued, and these formed marvelous recurring patterns that became visible at night. All through the sky the starlike networks showed. They fascinated him in their wondrous intricacy. His eye could trace a pattern through endless loops and whirls and curls, until the fineness of the detail defeated his vision. Not merely in the large sky; the near sky had similar, smaller patterns, right down to the very spot he lay, where the filaments remained, though the original rads had been removed. It was as if they were silent ghosts, forever marking the sites of their original bodies. He knew that there were invisibly small planets associated with these patterns, and that many of these tiny planets had populations of trees, animals, and people, much like Oria. Every one was a complete world, in scale, with its effects of gravity, season, and life self-similar. It would be hard to imagine a more remarkable universe than this, yet the locals took it all for granted.
It was this duplication and similarity of planets that Colene depended on to solve Nona’s problem. There would not be another woman exactly like Nona elsewhere, but there would be other women with similar attitudes and powers. They could indeed do as well with the world of Oria as Nona could, and probably better, because they would have the motive she lacked, and there would be a number of them. So it was a flash of inspiration to think of that. But what a job it would be to accomplish! It was quite within the realm of possibility that one or more of them would get killed in the process. That was the corollary to Colene’s bright notion.
But what could he do except play it through? If it succeeded, Nona would be able to rejoin them on the Virtual Mode, and that was good. His interest might be suspect, for Nona was as lovely a woman in form and personality as he had encountered. She had marvelous musical and magical abilities. It would be easy for any man to love her.