“All night,” said Max, “all night with the green glowing balls and the spectral voices in the ears and the cold spots in the bed.” Wroclaw brought over his eggs, scrambled. “This place could drive you batty. I can see why you want to get out.”
“I don’t know where it’s all coming from,” Karlini mumbled. He was already on his second cup of coffee but was only beginning to look sentient. “All these manifestations just reek of energy, but I’ve been looking for weeks and damned if I can find the source.”
“This place was set up by a god,” Max said with his mouth full, “and gods operate on the second quantum energy state, that’s why they’re gods. It’s easier to set up stable power reservoirs on the second quantum level. One reason gods usually have so much power to burn.”
Karlini had stopped eating and was staring at Max with his mouth hanging open and his eyes all of a sudden fully alert. “Max,” he said carefully, “how did you find that out? That’s more new knowledge than anybody’s been able to learn about the gods in fifty years.”
“Good eggs,” Max said. “Thanks, Wroclaw. Can I have another roll?” Roni passed him the basket.
“My compliments to the oven master, too.” Haddo leaned in from the kitchen, the top of his dark hood dusted with flour, then vanished again. Max carefully selected a fluffy butter twist with a flaky crust.
Karlini was still staring. “Max,” Roni said, “I’m afraid my husband is having some sort of attack.”
“Shaa’s never around when you need him, is he?” Max commented. “These are good rolls.”
“At least Shaa usually answers a straight question.”
“You do get an answer out of him,” Max said, “but the answer usually goes with a different question.”
Karlini pointed a finger. “You’ve had run-ins with the gods before, we all know you have,” he said. “They don’t like you, and you’re still alive - I’ve never figured out how you manage that, either.”
Max looked up, gazed at Karlini with a very thoughtful expression. “Not all of the gods don’t like me,” he said eventually. “Most of them don’t like each other very much, that’s probably the key point.” He was silent for another moment. “Not that it’s much use in any given situation.”
“But how -”
“I think maybe you’re better off not knowing too much about it,” Max said, “don’t you think?” He took a bite from his roll.
“You made that remark about quantum energy states, not me,” said Karlini. “If you didn’t think we should know about it, why did you bring it up in the first place? It couldn’t be that you were just showing off, now could it?”
Max opened his mouth, then closed it and chewed his roll with a meditative expression. “Your point is well taken,” he said. “I do have certain tendencies, as you know, and as you also know, I try to resist them, not always with success.”
He swallowed the roll and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “As it happens, I have been doing some fresh research, and some of it has turned out to involve the gods. I will show you some of it later, as long as you’re so eager to know. That way, at least somebody may be able to use it, in case this damn-fool errand of yours turns out to be as nasty as it probably will. Are you satisfied?”
Karlini looked across at an étagère holding a dazzling array of dried goods and condiments, somewhat if uncharacteristically embarrassed. A tremor ran through the room, rattling the table and breaking the silence. Max sighed and shook his head, looking around for the possibility of a pastry. “What a place you’ve got here,” he said. “The crowning touch last night was the seagull. I could swear there was a seagull flying around outside my room, screeching like crazy. Now, really - you know how far this place is from the coast? No seagull could survive the trip. Any seagull that tried to fly here would be on its grandchildren by now.”
Karlini held out his arm. A seagull flapped down from the ceiling and perched. It screeched once. “It was sitting on the bed this morning,” Roni said. “I don’t think it’s anyone we know.”
Max sighed again and climbed to his feet. “I’m going to have to stop trying to guess what’s coming next. Well, we might as well get started.”
Max flopped back on the rug and panted. “Every time - I forget - how exhausting - this nonsense is,” he gasped. Symbols faded from the air around him.
“Well?” Karlini said. “What happened?”
“Didn’t you - see it?”
“I saw something,” Karlini said, “but I don’t exactly know what it really was. It looked like …”
Max lifted himself on an elbow and accepted a mug from Ronibet. He appeared to have lost about three pounds since breakfast. “You saw a sort of matrix outline of the castle, right? Like you were looking at it from three directions at the same time, only the views were superimposed?”
“Yes, right. What was it?”
“That was the field spell on the walls of the castle. That’s what you triggered, and that’s what holds the place together when it shifts.”
“But why was the geometry so distorted?” Ronibet asked.
“Well,” Max said, swallowing a chunk of hard candy from a large bowl seated next to him on the floor, “that’s the second quantum level for you. Things are pretty strange there. Did you see that big glowing mass at the base of the castle matrix?”
“The thing that looked like a jewel with tendrils coming out of the facets?” Roni said.
“Yeah. That’s the power reservoir. It permeates the rock foundation at the base of the castle.”
“I probed the rock,” Karlini said, “and I didn’t find a thing.”
“You need different techniques.” Max selected another candy, a blue one, popped it in his mouth, and started to suck on it. “There’s a lot going on in the reservoir, but I couldn’t disentangle it all. One thing I did see was that the thing’s on a deadman trigger. The rock is unstable and the field holds it together. If the reservoir runs down enough the rock falls apart.”
“And if the rock falls apart -”
“Right,” Max said. “The castle falls in.” The seagull strolled over to Max, dipped its head into the candy bowl, selected a green piece of crystal, tossed it into the air, and caught it neatly on the downswing. Its beak made crunching noises.
“Uh, Max,” Karlini said, “then how close is this reservoir to the danger point?”
“I can barely even tell the thing is there. But it’s anybody’s guess how many more jumps this place can take without coming apart. Did you see that little pulsing dot about three-quarters of the way up?”
“I wondered about that. What was it?”
“You.”
Karlini buried his head in his hands and mumbled something unpleasant.
“One thing I don’t understand,” Roni said quickly. “If operating on this second quantum level is so hard, how do the gods do it? Some of them don’t sound too smart.”
Max watched patterns form and dissolve in his mug. “I think it’s something in their auras. Somehow the aura gives them a leg up, maybe filters their perception for all I know, probably pumps their energy up too. There could be an aural stabilizing factor that gives a god easy access to the second level, but damned if I know how it works.”
“Does it have something to do with the coupling problem?”
“Maybe,” Max said. “I don’t think so, but it’s hard to tell. There’s more than one way to deal with coupling.”
Karlini snorted. “Of course there’s more than one way, that’s what -”
Roni looked at him. “That’s not what Max is saying. I know Max. Max is saying that he’s thought of a new approach to coupling, something that’s pretty hot. Isn’t that right, Max?”