As close as the wizard ever came to complimenting him, Jon-Tom thought sourly. He’d expected nothing more. He was right about getting some serious sleep, though. Jon-Tom put his duar aside, wrapped himself up in his lizard-skin cape, and rolled over. Mudge was laying out his own bedroll. Jon-Tom smiled at him.
“Good night, you cute little pinch of fluff, you.”
The otter glanced at him sharply. “ ‘Ow’d you like to try singin’ without your front teeth, mate?” He flopped down in a huff, turned away from the tall young human.
Morning provided a powerful reminder that serious perturbations could take place as dramatically while they slept as while they were awake. The indifference of sleep offered no escape.
Instinctively he reached for his duar. Not only was the instrument missing, he discovered that he had nothing to reach with. He tried to sit up and found to his considerable confusion that he had nothing to sit up with, either.
No amount of bewilderment could mask the fact that this was the most radical perturbation they’d yet suffered.
Around him the air was murky, thick, and cloying. He tried to see through it and felt his vision slide. It was as if his eyes were rattling around loose inside his head. Shoving down the panic he felt, he struggled to get hold of himself. At least he could still see, even if only in shades of black and white. He could not make out any colors. Or perhaps, he told himself, he could make out colors and there were none to see.
The sky overhead was a pale, reflective white. Surrounding him were dark gray trees. That was when he saw the monster and recoiled from it. At the same time the monster shrank back from something unseen, and Jon-Tom realized it was cowering away from him.
There were other monsters around, and every one of them appeared petrified by the sight of its neighbor. Jon-Tom began to wonder what he looked like.
Along with color vision he’d lost any sense of smell. He could still hear clearly, though. Just as he could hear the sound of his own body moving forward. The sound was not pleasant. It implied a means of locomotion involving something far less sophisticated than legs.
This time the perturbation had not merely knocked reality askew, it had turned it inside out. Heretofore the perambulator’s changes had made some sense, but this current transformation made no sense at all. Had it begun to draw upon its captor’s insanity?
He struggled to form words. “Can anyone understand me?”
“I can.” The gross form that replied was more incongruous than repugnant in appearance. It did not seem an appropriate home for someone as lithe and swift as Mudge, but it was Mudge’s voice that spoke to him. Directly, through some unknown variety of thought transference. Neither the Mudge-shape nor Jon-Tom nor any of the other monsters possessed anything recognizable as a mouth.
Clothahump spoke up, and then Sorbl and Dormas. Transformed as they were by the unaccountable, all were accounted for. Dormas was the biggest of the five, Sorbl the smallest. The perturbation had stuck to the laws for transformation of mass. It seemed that some rules still applied.
Excepting differences in size, they all looked pretty much like each other: bloated, colorless blobs of gelatinous protoplasm drifting in a slightly less dense fluid. Smaller shapes and outlines were visible within their own bodies. Their shiny epidermi were in constant motion.
Giant single-celled entities, mutated amoebas—Jon-Tom didn’t know enough to be certain exactly what they’d become, but he was glad of what little biology he’d been forced to take.
“This is most disconcerting,” murmured Clothahump voicelessly. “I wonder how limited our present range of movement is.” He extruded a pseudopod and tried to grip something floating through the liquid. This led to the discovery that they could change their positions by shifting their internal mass. It would have upset Jon-Tom’s stomach if he’d had one. Instead he suffered a faint mental nausea.
“What is this? What’ve we turned into?” the Dormas-shape wanted to know.
“My experience does not extend to acquaintance with such shapelessness,” Clothahump told her.
“Well, mine does.” All light-sensing organelles turned to Jon-Tom. “We’ve been turned into something like amoebas, only much larger and far more complex. Just as an example, we’re still capable of higher thought.”
“That’s all right, mate,” said the Mudge-mass. “We’ll all shift back to ourselves in a minute or two. Ain’t that right, Your Blobship?”
“I certainly hope so.” He glanced around. “Our supplies appear to have vanished. This has not happened during any of the previous perturbations.”
It struck Jon-Tom then that his appraisal of their current situation was more accurate than he’d first imagined.
“Our supplies haven’t disappeared. They’re right here, all around us. We just can’t see them in our present states. See, we don’t resemble microscopic organisms. We’ve become microscopic organisms. We’ve shrunk.” He gestured with a pseudopod. “Those boulders over there are probably nothing more than grains of sand, those trees microscopic lichen or something. A light breeze could scatter us, blow us away. It’s a good thing we decided to sleep in a protected glade.”
“How can something so small be capable of thought and speech?” Dormas asked him.
“How should I know? I’m no expert on the ramifications of perturbations. Who says they have to be logical, anyway?”
“The danger is apparent,” said Clothahump grimly. “We cannot wait passively for our return. We must try to do something. But my potions are elsewhere, and I have not the faintest notion of how to begin.”
“How about a spellsong, Jon-Tom?” Sorbl asked him.
“I need my duar, Sorbl. You know that.”
“Can’t you just try without it?”
He sighed, and it washed through his entire body. “It’d just be a waste of time and energy.”
“Perhaps not.” Jon-Tom could feel the wizard’s attention on him. “Since you have no duar on which to accompany yourself, you must try to fashion one.”
Jon-Tom let his simplified gaze roam through their oleaginous surroundings. “Out of what? There’s no wood here, nothing to fashion strings from. Even if I could rig a crude sort of duar, I couldn’t play it.”
“Why not?” Sorbl wondered.
“Because ‘e ain’t got no fingers, featherbrain,” Mudge told him.
“That need not hold him back,” said Clothahump thoughtfully.
“You could spellsing up a duar, mate, if you ‘ad a duar.”
“What do you mean, it needn’t hold me back, sir?”
By way of reply Clothahump twisted a section of himself into an intricate figure eight. “Our present bodies are extraordinarily flexible. They can be stretched into any possible shape.”
“Oh, I see. Even into fingers.”
“No, my boy. Not only into fingers. Into a duar itself.”
“That’s impossible.”
“That word is an obsession with you. Try.”
Jon-Tom shrugged, felt a portion of himself ripple. “Why not? It’s better than sitting here waiting to be blown or washed away.”
How does one go about becoming the instrument one is used to playing? He fought to conjure up a concrete image in his mind. Strings like so, resonance chamber so, measurements such and such—just thinking about it hurt his mind. When he had the mental picture refined to his satisfaction, he began to twist, to contort, to strain.
It was not only difficult, it was painful. But he kept at it, readjusting his tissues, polishing his exterior, until to his very considerable surprise he had molded himself into a familiar shape composed of gleaming gelatinous material.
A song now, he mused. Something appropriate to their situation, something suitable for changing shape and volume. Yes, Paul Williams should work. He began to sing, and to play himself.