Huw stopped dead. “That’s a good idea. Hold this.” He passed the chair to his brother while he opened up the laptop again and hastily tapped out a note. “You volunteering?”
“What, me? No! I can’t skydive! I get dizzy wearing platform soles!”
“Just asking.” Huw shut the laptop again. “Whoever does it, that intrepid adventurer, they’ll get lots of attention from the ladies.”
“You think?” Yul brightened slightly.
“Absolutely,” Huw said blandly. Especially from her majesty, but best not to swell Yul’s head. “Hand me that test meter then get the carpet protector. . . .”
It was, he figured, a matter of getting the conditions right.
“There are a couple of possibilities,” he’d told Helge earlier in the morning, when she’d appeared in the stables, unannounced and unexpected, just like any other country squire’s wife making her daily rounds of the estate. “It could be the exclusion effect.” It was well known that you couldn’t world-walk if there was a solid object in the way in the destination world. “What if the ground pressure of feet or shoes doesn’t set up a potential interpenetration, but wheels do? There’s a smaller contact area, after all.”
“Can women world-walk in stiletto heels?” Helge had thrown back at him, looking half-amused.
“What? Have you—”
“I’ve never tried. I’m not good in heels, and world-walking in them isn’t something I’d do deliberately.” She paused. “But it’s one for your list, isn’t it?”
“I’ll do that,” he agreed. “Would you like to sit in on the experiment today? You might spot something I wouldn’t. . . .”
“I wish I could.” A pained expression crept across her face. “They’re keeping me busy, Huw, lots of protocol crap and meetings with tedious fools I can’t afford not to be nice to. In fact, I’d better be going now—otherwise I’ll be late for this morning’s first appointment. I think I’ve got an hour free before dinner, maybe you could fill me in on the day’s progress then?”
He’d asked Lady d’Ost about the stiletto thing over lunch: The answer turned out to be “yes—but if you’re drunk you’ll likely twist an ankle, so you take your shoes off first.”
As for the chair and the matters in hand . . . “I’m seeing no conductivity at all,” Huw muttered. “Good insulators.” Bare feet were insulators, too, of course, albeit not that good, and damp leather shoes were piss-poor, but dry rubber-soled boots or bare feet didn’t seem to make any difference to world-walking. “Okay, you want to try these?”
“Alright.” Yul sighed and tugged the chair onto the middle of the plastic carpet-protector mat. “I’m getting tired, though, bro.” He sat down and glanced at the back of his left wrist.
Huw looked at the floor. “Hey, you’re off the target—”
He stopped. Yul, and the chair, had disappeared.
“Shit.” Elena will fucking kill me, he thought incoherently. He slid a foot forward, then stopped. Opening the laptop again, he tapped out a quick note. Then he stood on the correct spot—not a foot to one side, where Yul had been—and looked at the knotwork he carried on a laminated badge, ready to world-walk.
The headache was sudden and harsh, a classic interpenetration blast. “Ow.” He’s moving about. Huw swore a bit more, then went and stood precisely where Yul had put the chair, and tried again.
The walls of the shack vanished, replaced by trees and sunlight and a warm summer breeze. Huw staggered, jostling Yul, who spun round with pistol drawn. “Joker’s bane, bro! Don’t do that!”
“Sorry.” Huw bent double, the headache and visual distortions coinciding with a huge wave of nausea. He barely noticed the chair, lying to its side. The grass around its wheels was almost knee-length. Should have surveyed more thoroughly, he thought, then lost his attention to the desperate problem of hanging onto his lunch.
After a minute, he got things under control. “You going to be alright?” Yul asked anxiously. “Because one of us needs to go back.”
“Yes.” Huw stayed bent over. “Not just yet.”
“I fell over when I came across. I think I bruised my ass.”
“I’m not surprised.” He retched again, then wiped his mouth. “Ow.” Shuffling round, he knelt, facing the tussock Yul had stood in. “We missed an angle.”
“We did?”
“Yeah.” Huw pointed. “You had a foot on the ground.”
“So?”
“So you brought the chair over. And you were grounded. When you sat in it, you were fiddling with one armrest.” Huw shuffled towards it. “Right. You had your fingers curled under it. Were you touching it?”
“I think so.” Yul frowned.
“Show me.” Huw was nearly dancing with impatience.
Hulius raised the chair and sat in it slowly. He lowered one foot to touch the ground, then shuffled for comfort, leaned forward with the fingers of his left hand curled under the armrest.
“Okay, hold that position.” Huw contorted himself to look under the armrest. “I see. Were you fidgeting with the post?”
“Post?”
“The metal thing—yeah, that. The fabric on the armrest cover is stapled to the underside of the arm. And that in turn is connected to the frame of the chair by a metal post. Huh. Of course if you try to world-walk home, holding the chair up by the underside of those arms, it’ll go with you, as long as the wheels aren’t fouling anything.”
“You think that’s all there is to it?” Yul looked startled.
“No, but it’s a start. We go across, we take ourselves—obviously—and also the stuff we’re carrying, the stuff we’re physically connected to, but not the earth itself. The planet is a bit too big to carry. The question is, how far does the effect propagate? I’ve been thinking electrical or capacitive, but that’s wrong. I should probably be thinking in terms of quantum state coherence. And the exclusion effect, as a separate spoiler, to make it more complicated. What is a coherent quantum state in a many-worlds Everett-Wheeler cosmology, anyway?”
Yul yawned elaborately. “Does it matter? Way I see it, the lords of the post won’t be enthusiastic about folks realizing they’re not needed for the corvée. It could be a power thing, bro, to bind us together by misleading us as to the true number of participants required to set up a splinter network. If it only takes two guys and a wheelbarrow to do the work of six . . . that might present a problem, yes? On top of which you’re the only relative I know who’s mad enough to try to disprove something that everyone knows is the way things work, just in case everyone else is wrong. Must be that fancy education of yours.” He paused. “Not that I believe a word of it, but I wouldn’t mention it to anyone except her majesty if I were you, bro. They might not understand. . . .”
The next day, Miriam received the visitor she’d been half dreading and half waiting for. Rising that morning, she’d donned Helge like a dress even as her maids were helping her into more material garments. Then she’d started the day by formally swearing Brilliana and Sir Alasdair to her service, before witnesses, followed by such of her guards as Sir Alasdair recommended to her. Then she’d gone out into the garden, just to get out of the way of the teeming servants—Brill’s self-kicking anthill was still settling down and finding itself various niches in the house—and partly to convince herself that she was free to do so. And that was where her mother found her, sitting on a bench in an ornamental gazebo. And proceeded to lecture her about her newfound status.