Jon-Tom nodded thoughtfully, then reached for the duar, which was hanging by its shoulder strap from one of his bed’s corner posts. He slipped the strap over his shoulder, cradled the instrument against his ribs.
Now it was the wizard’s turn to look discomforted. “What are you going to do with that, my boy?” While Jon-Tom’s control over his spellsinging had improved dramatically under the turtle’s tutelage, it was still far from precise. His ability to evoke marvelous things with his music was still matched only by his inability to control them.
“I’m just holding it,” Jon-Tom replied irritably. Did Clothahump still regard him as nothing more than an amateur? “Do you think that after all my practicing I still don’t know what I’m doing?”
“I could not have put it better myself.”
Jon-Tom was ready with a sharp retort, but he never voiced it. He was too busy staring at the little finger of his left hand. It had grown six inches and turned into a bobbing, weaving worm. It curled back over his palm and glared up at him out of tiny glittering gold eyes.
As quickly as it had appeared, it vanished. He wiggled the small finger again, swallowed.
“Yes, I saw it,” said Clothahump in response to Jon-Tom’s unasked question. “The changes vary in degree. Not all need be as drastic and complete as the one we awoke to. The whole world and everything in it can change, or only a small part can shift. One finger, for example. Our reactions to such changes depend on what we happen to be doing at the time the change occurs. We were fortunate that we were engaged in nothing more complex than eating breakfast when the first perturbation struck. The damage, not to mention the psychic shock, would have been much more severe had, for example, you been spellsinging or sitting on the John.”
“I get the idea,” Jon-Tom shook his head. “I’ve been exposed to a lot of magic since you brought me here, but I’ve never heard of anything half so powerful as this.”
“It has nothing to do with magic,” said the wizard firmly. “What has happened, what is happening, is the result of natural law.”
“Whatever.” Jon-Tom waved the comment off and took a second to make sure the object doing the waving was a normal five-fingered hand. “You call it natural law, I call it magic, somebody else calls it physics. The result is the same. Structures and functions are being altered against the will of those involved.” He let the fingers of his right hand strum lightly over the duar’s strings. A mellow, soft tone filled the room. Fortunately that was all, but Clothahump checked the corners of the chamber just to be certain.
“Yes. And there is no way of predicting when the changes will occur or how severe will be their effects. But it must be stopped. If nothing is done, the changes will continue with greater and greater frequency. They will also become more extreme.”
“How could I turn into anything weirder than a giant blue crab?”
“Look at yourself and reconsider that question,” said the wizard dryly. “I would rather live as a blue crab than as a tall mammal devoid of pigment.”
Jon-Tom had become inured to comments about his species defects and continued to lightly strum the duar. “So who’s out to get us, then?”
“No one is out to get us.”
“There’s no vast evil behind what’s happening? That’s a switch.”
“Not on the part of the cause of the disturbances, no,” Clothahump told him. “It is a natural phenomenon, like an earthquake.”
Jon-Tom knew better where earthquakes were concerned but decided not to interrupt the wizard with a digression. “You say ‘it.’ Everything that’s happened has a single cause?” His little finger tried to turn back into the worm again, but a sharp glance seemed to put a halt to the incipient transformation.
“That is correct.” Clothahump began to pace the bedroom. “It is producing blurs, alterations, changes in the composition of existence by inducing shifts in the atomic substructure of matter. It does this by emitting destabilizing bursts of energy of unbelievable intensity. The degree of change our universe experiences varies proportionately to the strength of each burst.”
“Our universe?” Jon-Tom swallowed.
Clothahump nodded somberly. “Did I not say it was a large problem? Fortunately such occurrences are as rare as they are serious. There are not that many perambulators around. And that, my boy, is the source of these unsettling alterations we are experiencing.” He squinted through his glasses. “You comprehend my meaning?”
“Oh, sure, absolutely. Uh, what’s a perambulator?”
“Well, it is one of two things. It is either a baby carriage or a perambulating prime. I believe we can safely exclude the first as the cause of what is happening. The other is difficult to define. It is reputed to be a part organic, part inorganic, part orgasmic creature that’s neither here nor there, only in this instance it’s both here and there. It drifts around, cavorting between an infinite number of possible universes as well as the impossible ones, inducing changes wherever it goes.”
“I see,” murmured Jon-Tom as he frantically tried to sort some sense out of the bits and pieces of seemingly contradictory nonsense the wizard had been spouting.
“There aren’t many of them,” Clothahump continued. “Normally they pass through our universe so quickly that the few disruptions they cause occur without attracting attention. Although it has never been done, it is theoretically possible to capture a perambulator, to restrain it, and to hold it in one place. As you can imagine, this would be very unsettling to something that is used to traveling freely between entire universes. Our theoretically restrained perambulator would be likely to respond by throwing off more frequent bursts of perturbating energy. This is what I believe has happened.”
“So what you’re saying,” Jon-Tom replied slowly, “is that we are in trouble because something that is capable of disturbing the entire fabric of existence is suffering the equivalent of an interdimensional attack of claustrophobia.”
“Your analysis is unnecessarily verbose, as usual, but you are essentially correct.”
“Wish I wasn’t. How do you stop something like that?” He was aware that his skin had suddenly turned a delicate shade of puce. Clothahump had gone bright pink. It only lasted a moment, and then his normal healthy skin color returned. “I understand the need for urgency. The world’s a tough enough place to try to make a go of it in without having to worry about its changing from day to day.”
“The solution is simple, though accomplishing it may prove otherwise. We must find the place where the perambulator has been frozen in space-time and free it to go on its way.”
Jon-Tom shook his head. “I still don’t understand how something that’s capable of traveling from one dimension or universe to another can be restrained. It’s not like catching a butterfly.”
Clothahump spread his hands. “I don’t know how it can be done, either, my boy. But something has done it. Or someone.”
The tall youth essayed a nervous grin. “Come on. Surely you don’t think someone like you or me is capable of doing something like that?”
“Anyone is capable of anything,” Clothahump informed him sternly. “There is nothing that can be imagined that cannot be done given enough time, devotion, intelligence, and blind luck.”
“So somebody has to find this thing, cope with whatever has it trapped, and free it before we all go nuts. Swell.” Again his fingers caressed the duar’s strings. “So why can’t somebody else do it for a change? Why not send a whole coterie of wizards after this thing?”
“Because, as you well know,” Clothahump said in his best lecturing tone, “I am the most powerful and important wizard there is, so it behooves me to act for the common good in instances where others would have not the slightest inkling how to proceed.”