If I’d done it correctly, the model would be of enormous value to my work. I’d be able to use various techniques to do all kinds of things in town-track down lost objects, listen in on conversations happening within the area depicted by the model, follow people through town from the relative safety of my lab-lots of cool stuff. The model would let me send my magic throughout Chicago with a great deal more facility and with a far broader range of applications than I could currently manage.
Of course, if I hadn't done it correctly…
“This map,” Bob said, “is pretty cool. I’d have thought you would have shown it off to someone by now.”
“Nah,” I said. “Tiny model of the city down here in my basement laboratory. Sort of projects more of that evil, psychotic, Lex Luthor vibe than I’d like.”
“Bah,” Bob said. “None of the evil geniuses I ever worked for could have handled something like this.” He paused. “Though some of the psychotics could have, I guess.”
“If that’s meant to be flattering, you need some practice.”
“What am I if not good for your ego, boss?” The skull turned slowly, left to right, candleflame eyes studying the model city-not its physical makeup, I knew, but the miniature ley lines that I’d built into the surface of the table, the courses of magical energy that flowed through the city like blood through the human body.
“It looks…” He made a sound like someone idly sucking a breath through his teeth. “Hey, it looks not bad, Harry. You’ve got a gift for this kind of work. That model of the museum really altered the flow around the stadium into something mostly accurate, speaking thaumaturgically.”
“Is that even a real word?” I asked.
“It should be,” he said with a superior sniff. “Little Chicago might be able to handle something if you want to give it a test run.” The skull spun around to face me. “Tell me that this doesn’t have something to do with the bruises on your face.”
“I’m not sure it does,” I said. “I got word today that the Gatekeeper-”
Bob shivered.
“-thinks that there’s black magic afoot in town, and that I need to do something about it.”
“And you want to try to use Little Chicago to find it?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Do you think it will work?”
“I think that the Wright Brothers tested their new stuff at Kitty Hawk instead of trying it over the Grand Canyon for a reason,” Bob said. “Specifically, because if the plane folded due to flawed design, they might survive it at Kitty Hawk.”
“Or maybe they couldn’t afford to travel,” I said. “Besides, how dangerous could it be?”
Bob stared at me for a second. Then he said, “You’ve been pouring energy into this thing every night for six months, Harry, and right now it’s holding about three hundred times the amount of energy that kinetic ring you wear will contain.”
I blinked. At full power, that ring could almost knock a car onto its side. Three hundred times that kind of energy translated to… well, something I’d rather not experience within the cramped confines of the lab. “It’s got that much in it?”
“Yes, and you haven’t tested it yet. If you’ve screwed up some of the harmonics, it could blow up in your face, worst-case scenario. Best case, you only blow out the project and set yourself back to ground zero.”
“To square one,” I corrected him. “Square one is the beginning of a project. Ground zero is the area immediately under a bomb blast.”
“One may tend to resemble the other,” Bob said sourly.
“I’ll just have to live with the risk,” I said. “That’s the exciting life of a professional wizard and his daring assistant.”
“Oh, please. Assistants get paid.”
In answer, I reached down to a paper bag out of sight below the table and withdrew two paperback romances.
Bob let out a squeaking sound, and his skull jounced and jittered on the blue-painted surface of the table that represented Lake Michigan. “Is that it, is that it?” he squeaked.
“Yes,” I said. “They’re rated ‘Burning Hot’ by some kind of romance society.”
“Lots of sex and kink!” Bob caroled. “Gimme!”
I dropped them back into the bag and looked from Bob to Little Chicago.
The skull spun back around. “You know what kind of black magic?” he asked.
“No clue. Just black.”
“Vague, yet unhelpful,” Bob said.
“Annoyingly so.”
“Oh, the Gatekeeper didn’t do it to annoy you,” Bob said. “He did it to prevent any chance of paradox.”
“He…” I blinked. “He what?”
“He got this from hindsight, he had to,” Bob said.
“Hindsight,” I murmured. “You mean he went to the future for this?”
“Well,” Bob hedged. “That would break one of the Laws, so probably not. But he might have sent himself a message from there, or maybe gotten it from some kind of prognosticating spirit. He might even have developed some ability for that himself. Some wizards do.”
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“Meaning that it’s possible nothing has happened, yet. But that he wanted to put you on your guard against something that’s coming in the immediate future.”
“Why not just tell me?” I asked.
Bob sighed. “You just don’t get this, do you?”
“I guess not.”
“Okay. Let’s say he finds out that someone is going to steal your car tomorrow.”
“Heh,” I said bitterly. “Okay, let’s say that.”
“Right. Well, he can’t just call you up and tell you to move your car.”
“Why not?”
“Because if he significantly altered what happened with his knowledge of the future it could cause all sorts of temporal instabilities. It could cause new parallel realities to split off from the point of the alteration, ripple out into multiple alterations he couldn’t predict, or kind of backlash into his consciousness and drive him insane.” Bob glanced at me again. “Which, you know, might not do much to deter you, but other wizards take that kind of thing seriously.”
“Thank you, Bob,” I said. “But I still don’t get why any of those things would happen.”
Bob sighed. “Okay. Temporal studies 101. Let’s say that he hears about your car being stolen. He comes back to warn you, and as a result, you keep your car.”
“Sounds good so far.”
“But if your car never got stolen,” Bob said, “then how did he know to come back and warn you?”
I frowned.
“That’s paradox, and it can have all kinds of nasty backlash. Theory holds that it could even destroy our reality if it happened in a weak enough spot. But that’s never been proven, and never happened. You can tell, on account of how everything keeps existing.”
“Okay,” I said. “So what’s the point in sending the message at all, if it can’t change anything?”
“Oh, it can,” Bob said. “If it’s done subtly enough, indirectly enough, you can get all kinds of things changed. Like, for example, he tells you that your car is going to be stolen. So you move it to a parking garage, where instead of getting stolen by the junkie who was going to shoot you and take the car on the street, you get jacked by a professional who takes the car without hurting you-because by slightly altering the fate of the car, he indirectly alters yours.”
I frowned. “That’s a pretty fine line.”
“Yes, which is why not mucking around with time is one of the Laws,” Bob said. “It’s possible to change the past-but you have to do it indirectly, and if you screw it up you run the risk of Paradox-egeddon.”