If it is, then I ll avoid it in the future,Ponch said, looking around him with distaste.It smells bad here .
The wind dropped off briefly, and Kit was able to look out of thelightbulb and see that the two of them had stepped into a snowfield.Except that snow isn t blue , Kit thought.Ponch, though insulated from the cold around them by the force field, nonetheless shifted uncertainly from foot to foot in the robin s-egg blue stuff. Kit felt the odd soft squeak of it under his sneakers, and understoodPonch s confusion.It feels more like talcum powder than snow. Or, no, more like cornstarch for that strange squeaky sensation persisted no matter how the stuff packed under Kit s feet.
The wind rose again, reducing the visibility to nothing as it picked the snow up and started blowing it around in the air. The snow was as fine as powder on the wind, finer than any powdery snow that Kit had ever seen, even in blizzard conditions. The stuff piled and drifted in spherical sections around Kit s force field, gathering like swirls of smoke, abruptly dissipating again like smoke blown away. Suddenly Kit realized what he was seeing, and realized, too, why the snow s texture was so strange.This isn t water snow. It s too cold here for that. This is methane
The wind howling around them gusted for a few breaths more, blowing the blinding snow shrieking past Kit andPonch , and then dropped off once more, just briefly giving Kit the wider view again as the snow drifted back out of the air to the ground.We might as well call it air , Kit thought, though he knew that if he tried to breathe it at this temperature, it would freeze his lungs to solid blocks of blood and water ice. He popped his manual open to apremarked page for reading environmental conditions and let it take a moment to do its sensing while he turned in a circle, looking at the landscape.
There wasn t much of it. Nearby, black crags of stone stood up here and there, shining with blue ice that seemed almost to glow on its own in this fiercesourceless light. Kit glanced up at the sky, wondering whether there was a star up there somewhere, on the far side of what might be a greenhouse layer like Venus s upper atmosphere. But there was always the possibility that this wasn t a planet at all just some kind of Euclidean space, another dimension that just went on eternally in all directions.Whichever it is , he thought,it has weather, and the weather s bad. Even Titan s weather is better than this .
Kit glanced at the manual page again, read the words in the Speech that began to spell themselves out there.
Nitrogen atmosphere.No oxygen. Methane and some other hydrocarbons frozen out to make the snow Kit shivered despite the force field: The temperature outside was about two hundred degrees below zero centigrade.
I m glad I brought a coat, he said softly.
Iwish I could grow mine thicker ,Ponch said, looking around him with distaste. Ididn t like that other place, the hot one, but it was better than this.
Believe me, we won t stay long, Kit said. Just long enough to talk to Darryl. The contrast between the room-temperature range that the two of them needed to function and the temperature of the space around them was as extreme as the difference between room temperature and a blowtorch and this meant that keeping his own environment andPonch s tolerable would require Kit to spend a lot of energy in a hurry. He was going to have to keep a close eye on the energy levels of the force field; this was no kind of place to have it fail suddenly. Whether they were genuinely in some other universe or just inside Darryl s mind, the cold would kill them both in seconds if their protection failed. Let s get going. Where in all thisis he Kit said toPonch .
That way,Ponch said, turning.The contrast in temperatures stands out. But so do other things. There s company here .
The same company as last time
The same.A heart of cold.
Great, Kit said under his breath. Well, let s head that way. I ll put the stealth spell up around us again, though in these conditions, it may not work a hundred percent.
If you could make the wind drop
It was worth a try. Kit paged quickly through his manual to the environmental management section and looked for the spells that involved short-term weather control. He found one that looked likely, started to recite it And then stopped, shocked. Something that had accompanied every spell he d ever done, that growing, listening silence as the universe started to pay attention to the Speech used in its creation was suddenly missing.
Blocked, Kit thought.But how ! Not even the Lone Power Itself should have been able to keepa wizardry from executing. Once executed, of course, it might fail, but
Kit tried the spell again, and again got no result. Yet his force field was working fine. If it hadn t been, he andPonch would both have been frozen solid by now.
Weird, Kit said, closing the manual for the moment. Looks like this environment s been instructed not to let itselfbe altered.
Could the Lone One have done that
Kit shook his head. I don t know.
Never mind,Ponch said.I don t need to see, to lead us.And as for the Lone One Ponch s nose worked.It s distracted ,Ponch said.And Darryl s moving. Come on .
Ponchpulled on the leash, and Kit followed him across the squeaking blue snow, while every now andthen a new and ferocious gust of wind blue-whitedeverything out. Snow tonight, a voice said from somewhere immeasurably distant.
You heard it that time, right Kit said.
I heard something,Ponch said. And then he paused inmidstep . Ihear something besides that, too .
Kit waited.
Wings
Kit listened, but couldn t make anything out except that the wind was rising, the hiss scaling up to a soft roar. The last time he d heard a wind like this was when the hurricane had come through three years ago. The hurricane, though, had at least sounded impersonal in its rage. The sound of this wind had a more intimate quality, invasive, as if it was purposely pointed at Kit. And the voices were part of it.
won t be able to
and in local news tonight
wish I could understand why, but there s no point in even asking, I guess
come on, love, we need to get this on you. No, don t do that. Remember what we talked about
The voices somehow both spoke at normal volume and screamed in Kit s ears, intrusive, grating,maddening . He couldn t shut them out. He opened his manual and hurriedly went through it to the section that would allow him to soundproof the force field, for the voices were scaling up into the deafening range now, an ever increasing roar. The noise wasn t just made up of voices, either. Music was part of it, too, but music gone horribly wrong, screeching at him, and also sounds that might have come from Kit s own house, a door closing, someone opening a drawer, sounds that were magnified past bearing, intolerable
Kit recited the wizardry, having to do it nearly at the top of his lungs to hear himself think. To his great relief, it took; he could tell that the sound all around him outside the force field was still rising, but now at least it was muted to a tolerable level. Wow, he said toPonch , who was shaking his own head, also troubled by the noise.
Ilost him ,Ponch said.He moved again. He moves very fast sometimes. He
Ponch shead whipped around. Kit looked the way his dog was looking, through the blowing blue snow, just in time to catch sight of the thin young shape running past them, dressed in nothing but jeans and a T-shirt, running through the terrible cold and wind, running headlong, a little sloped forward from the waist as Kit had seen him running for the van at school.
Darryl! Kit shouted. Hey, Darryl, wait up!
Darryl turned his head for just a flash, looking toward Kit. For a fraction of a second, their eyes met.
Darryl ran on. Kit reeled back as if someone had hit him across the face, and staggered with shock and pain. He had felt, for that second, what Darryl had felt: the unbearable pain of another person s regard.
Kit had sometimes found it hard to look into someone else s eyes, but that was nothing like this. This pain denied even the existence of the one who looked back. For Darryl, even meeting the gaze of his own eyes in the mirror was impossible, nonsensical,painful . Yet Kit also thought of the blind looks of the statues at the edge of the world of dunes, and suddenly realized that maybe it was only to him that their blindness seemed creepy. To Darryl, in his autism, maybe they were as close as he could comfortably get to the experience of being looked at by another being.It s something he wants, even though it hurts .
At least hewantsit, though. If he didn t
Kit shook his head. Where d he go
That way.
Come on!
Kit andPonch ran after him. But it seemed as if, in this world, Darryl could run a lot faster than they could. The wind s filling in his tracks, Kit gasped.
Idon t need them. Listen, though !
Kit could hear very little now that he d turned the sound down inside the force field.
What
The wings! They re here