The line was silent for a moment. “I’m afraid it is,” he said grimly. “Remember she was attacked last year? Well, the police have reopened that case. It may be related to a rash of arsons that’s hitting the city. The last was a warehouse fire, easily killed twenty-five squatters.”
“God have mercy,” I said. “All those warehouses, with only one exit.”
“Yeah, it was pretty fucking horrific,” Doug said, his voice a bit shaken. “They’re making a huge deal of it. I expect they’ll interview anyone even remotely involved.”
Damnit, damnit, damnit! “Well, Doug… thanks for the heads up.”
“No problem,” Doug said. He sighed with relief. “OK, I think it’s safe to talk.”
“Thank God.” I filled him in on the details of last night’s attack, and Calaphase’s death-how we fell through the graffiti, how Calaphase fell into it-and how his blood was sucked out by what should have been marks on the pavement. “Please tell me you found answers.”
“Oddly enough, I cracked it helping Cinnamon with her homework, though the answer ultimately involved loop quantum gravity,” he said. “But it’s easier to think of it like… like a magic door that shows distorted images of both its source and target.”
“Doug, don’t patronize me,” I said. “I know what it’s like, but I need to know how this thing works to fight it. I dug into the literature, and there’s no such thing as a magic door outside of a fairy tale. We’re dealing with deeply hidden magic that’s never surfaced in the Edgeworld.”
“And I think I know why,” Doug said. “Have you heard of the Bekenstein bound?”
“Doug, I read Scientific American more than you do,” I said. “It’s something to do with the holographic universe, right? Somehow, deep down, we’re really two-dimensional?”
“Right. Deep down, you are your interface, ” he said. “In quantum mechanics, if a thing acts the exact same way as another thing, it is that thing. According to Bekenstein, you have no way of telling the ‘real me’ from a surface that absorbs and transmits the same particles.”
“So if you had a magic cave painting, there could be a whole world behind its surface,” I said. “ If you could paint it. But no one could paint a whole world down to its particles.”
“But they do in the movies, armies of Wookies on alien worlds,” Doug said. I started to protest, but he said, “In the computer, procedurally generated-simple rules that can be applied over and over again to populate a whole crowd and forest. But it takes millions of steps-”
“He can do that, and he doesn’t even need a computer,” I said, with a tingly ‘aha’ feeling. “He’s created graffiti that can draw itself-a self propagating intent, we’d call it.” I explained I’d seen it first with fire at the tagger’s playground, then at the Candlesticks.
“I strongly suspected that,” Doug said. “Lines of graphomancy that use mana to make more lines, one idea leading to another, a recursive pattern, unfolding forever, an infinite conceptual field. There’s no limit to how far magic can build on magic-”
“If you have the mana,” I said. “But he’d never get enough to create a whole world.”
“That’s where I’m going,” Doug said. “To link space, I think he’s using magic to create a ‘spin network.’ But a magic cave painting that held a whole world would take as much mana as creating a small universe. But if the cave painting mapped between two spaces-”
“If it was a gateway,” I said. “It’s a magical gateway.”
“Exactly,” Doug said. “If the painting is mapping points in one space to another, then there’s no need to create a whole world. All the geometry of the painting would need to do is create the map. That spin network could be atomically thin, magically thin.”
“That sounds like surface-to-surface link,” I said, “but Calaphase and I seemed to travel through an actual space, if a distorted funhouse version of one.”
“You can create arbitrary geometry with a spin network,” Doug said. “He could create a twisted little pocket space propped up by several tags. In fact, I’m guessing all the tags are connected together, like a network-and it will get stronger the more that are plugged in.”
“Jeez, Doug, that’s heavy grade magic,” I said. “How am I going to fight this shit? This guy is a Michelangelo of the genre. According to Drive, he could make his tags look like anything if he wanted to. Any reasonably sized tag could be one of his traps.”
“No,” Doug said. “You can fight it, because I can tell you what to look for. Jinx and I think the spin network will show up as some repeated pattern, like a grid or a spiral.”
“There is a spiral that’s like a grid,” I said. “There are coiling vines and barbed wire that showed up in almost every tag, looping tightly at the center to make a grid like a sunflower’s. It’s the vines, Doug, the spiral of vines. That’s your spin network.”
“Maybe,” Doug said. “I thought of that, but they don’t seem to cover the whole tag.”
“No, they don’t,” I said. Damnit. Every time I thought I had figured out how the tags worked, I ran into a brick wall. We thought it was graphomancy, quantum physics, whatever, but there were always missing pieces to the magic, like something… hidden beneath the surface.
And then it hit me. “He’s using multiple layers! I thought it was oil chalk, but Officer Horscht found an aerosol spray can. Spray painted graffiti isn’t like tattoos. It’s layers of paint.”
“I thought tattoos had layers too,” Doug said. “I’ve seen you go over designs-”
“To build up colors, but it all ends up as plaques of pigment in the dermis-a single layer that’s magically active. But we already know the graffiti doesn’t work that way.” I explained what Keif had explained to me about whitewashing the tags and using induction. “He can use several layers of paint to build up a pattern as complex as needed and we’d never see the whole of it-except the spiral of vines, which have to reach outside the canvas to pull someone in.”
“Right. And look for echoes. If it is a gateway, you’ll see echoes of your environment in the tag, and maybe distorted pictures of the target on the other end.”
“Like ghost images in a two-way mirror,” I said.
“It’s more like a television. The idea is simple, but the implementation is not,” Doug said. “There is too much physics involved. There is no way a backwoods graphomancer cooked this up on his or her own. None whatsoever.”
I was silent for a moment. “Like I said, maybe it’s hidden knowledge. Some ancient wizarding trick, developed in secret, hidden for centuries-”
“Maaaybe,” Doug said. “But I looked, Jinx looked, even you looked, and the three of us found bupkis. Now, maybe you’re up against an ancient cult of wizards, with magic beyond anything that I could find at the Harris School of Magic, or maybe some modern wizard with access to a physics lab. Or maybe, just maybe, it isn’t even human knowledge at all.”
“Not… human,” I said. “You mean like… vampire? Werewolf? Fae?”
“No,” Doug said. “The answer to your question combined thousands of years of magic and decades of study of the output of two-mile-long particle accelerators. I strongly, strongly doubt anyone just stumbled onto this on their own just dicking around. It would be like finding the design of a solid state laser in da Vinci’s notebooks, centuries before quantum theory.”
“Go back to the not human part,” I said. “If it’s not human knowledge… ”
“The graffiti links two spaces,” Doug said, “but the other side doesn’t have to be ours. ”
The Detective from Space
I spent the night in a box under a bridge halfway to Macon, Georgia. I had woven my way through the heart of Atlanta on surface streets, then risked exiting the Perimeter again on the highway, heading to Macon but intending to cut back towards Blood Rock.
The tingle as I went OTP was invigorating, but by the time I passed Stockbridge I was flagging. I turned off a few miles later, wound through smaller and smaller country roads until I found an industrial looking area with a small bridge running over a creek. I didn’t see any signs of trolls or other Edgeworld nasties, so I pushed the Vespa under the bridge, stole a box out of a nearby Dumpster, crept back under the bridge and into the box, and went to sleep.
Early, early the next morning, a truck running over the bridge woke me. I stretched, sore and cramped, and stood up. My neck hurt, my back hurt, and then both hurt more when I abruptly ducked down as I heard voices. After a moment the voices faded, and then I saw a couple of workmen walking down the road, turning in to the very place I’d stolen the box.
