No, he had to be near her when he reached her Mode, because she had an anchor there. So that should be no problem. But how was it possible to travel horizontally and arrive vertically?
Then he remembered another part of the explanation the Cyng of Pwer had given, whose significance had bypassed him at the time. The Virtual Mode was like a plane cutting through the Modes at an angle, but it was not infinite. It was really a plane segment bounded by the five anchors. Like a pentagon, or roughly circular in outline. He could be walking around the edge of it. When he got halfway around, there would be Colene.
The image helped reassure him, but it did not do the whole job. This Virtual Mode was really not a simple thing, and some of its incidental aspects, such as the business of drinking the water of foreign Modes along the way, were tricky. His image might be all wrong.
At any rate, he slept.
IN the morning Darius resumed his travel. He traveled around the lake. At one point he encountered a family of otterlike animals who spooked at his appearance and swam rapidly away. At another he came across a small dragon or large lizard, similarly shy. But he became wary, because where there were small dragons there could also be large ones.
Beyond the lake was a settled region. At first it was just a planted field, but as he passed by it, successive Modes brought it to more intense cultivation and a road appeared. This looked human, but his wariness increased. Human beings would not necessarily be friendly. In fact, he felt far more at ease among the animals of the wilderness, for very few of them represented any danger to him, and those few could be fairly readily avoided. But human beings were potentially worse than the dragons. Certainly he would not walk into the center of a village and announce himself!
He walked clear of the fields and found a forested section. The trees were unlike those he knew, being yellow of trunk and blue of leaf, but a tree of any color remained reassuring and protective. This was no jungle, and there was little undergrowth, but it did provide some privacy for his passage.
Then he spied a woman. She was standing in the center of a glade as if expecting him. She wore a small hat with two very long projections like the antennae of insects, a gray woolen sweater, an ankle-length brown knit dress, and high black boots laced up the front. She had what was evidently a traveling bag beside her. She was old, perhaps sixty. What was on her mind?
He approached her cautiously, following the sideways channel of this Mode. He could have stepped into the next Mode and avoided the contact, but she had seen him and he preferred to be polite as long as it was safe to be so. “A greeting,” he said, speaking in his own language.
She said something indecipherable. Her language was not only different, it was weirdly different; he could not tell whether she had uttered a greeting, a curse, or gibberish. She picked up her bag. It had straps, and he realized that it was actually a kind of backpack, which she now donned. She was certainly prepared!
He tried again in Colene’s language. “Hi.”
She smiled and put her hand on his arm. She stepped forward, drawing him along with her.
She was evidently harmless, and of course she could not go any distance with him. Having tried to communicate, and failed, he decided simply to walk along with her, and step through to the next Mode when he reached the boundary. He would fade from her sight and touch, and she would think she had had a supernatural experience. An unkind trick to play on her, perhaps, but kinder than rejecting her gesture outright. It was evident that she expected to go somewhere with him.
They walked back to the point where he had been when he had first seen her, then turned to resume his original route. They stepped through the invisible boundary together. Darius did a doubletake. She was still there! Still walking beside him, her hand on his arm.
But Prima had been able to cross Modes with him, as long as she touched him. He had understood that this was because she was of his Mode, or very close to it, despite not being an anchor person. This woman was not close at all. Had his notion been wrong? Could a person of another Mode cross simply by maintaining contact with an anchor person on the
Virtual Mode? So it seemed to be.
But that would mean that she would be stranded in a Mode that was foreign to her. It would be wrong to leave her like that.
He turned and stepped back into the woman’s Mode, bringing her along with him. “I must go where you can not,” he told her firmly, withdrawing his arm from her hand. “I am sorry. I am unable to explain, but I must leave you here.” He stepped across, alone.
He looked back. The woman was gone, of course; she did not exist in this Mode. The glade remained, and there was a small creature in a tree that he thought had not been there in the other glade. It must have watched him appear, disappear, and reappear, with an understandable perplexity.
Then the woman reappeared. She had stepped through after him.
Darius just stared. She had done it on her own! No physical contact! But that was impossible, unless—
Then he realized what the answer had to be. She was an anchor person! There were five of them, and he did not know the identity of three. It had not occurred to him that he would meet any of them, but if he truly was walking around the edge of a figurative plate, he would indeed encounter other anchor folk.
Somehow he had not expected an old woman, despite expecting nothing. What was he to do with her? He couldn’t take her with him!
She took his arm again and urged him forward. She did want to go with him, and seemed to know the situation. It was hard for him to say no, because he couldn’t speak her language and couldn’t stop her from following him. That did not make the situation any less awkward.
He sighed inwardly and resumed walking. What was to be, was to be.
“Yes,” she said.
He was startled again. He stopped in place. “You speak my language?”
“No.”
“But you are speaking it now! You—”
She uttered a mellifluous stream of unintelligibility. Evidently she knew only a few of his words.
“How did you learn ‘yes’ and ’no‘?”
“Yes, future,” she said. “No, past.”
Now he understood the words, but could not fathom the meaning. She might not mean the same thing by those words that he did. But in case she did, it could mean that she expected to travel with him from now on, and had not done so in the past.
They resumed walking. The forest disappeared, but the cultivated fields were gone; they had gone beyond the group of Modes in which these folk operated.
“Provos,” she said.
He glanced at her. She removed her hand from his arm and tapped herself above her slight bosom.
Oh. He tapped himself. “Darius,” he said.
They stepped into another Mode. Abruptly her hand tightened on his arm. “No!” she said, trying to hold him back.
He stopped. “What’s the matter?”
She merely shook her head, unable to clarify the matter.
He looked around. There was nothing threatening in view. “I have somewhere to go,” he said. He started to step forward again.
“No!” She hauled him back again.