'Oh, really? But I think you do know. In any case, Mavors is not going to give you a final decision about the Uranians until after his people talk to the Destroyer and the Huntress. And, well, you know how everything slows down around the holidays. The Destroyer doesn't like to grant audiences in midwinter, when his influence is weakest.'
'I have been told that we will have definite action by the New Year. The Unseen One will act unilaterally, whether or not Mavors and Mulciber agree. Some recent event—I know not what—has convinced the Lord of the House of Silence that the Uranians are a danger.'
5.
Saturday was terribly boring for me. For the life of me, I couldn't remember what it was I did, back when I was merely Amelia, to entertain myself during my time off.
Eventually, I went to the gym and put on my tights and a sweatshirt, a leather jacket atop that, earmuffs.
Then I laced up my running shoes and began jogging the grounds. I was a little too undressed for that chill weather, but I thought my exertions would keep me warm.
I jogged. The snow had fallen a bit on Wednesday, but Thursday had been bright and fair, the temperature hovering around the melting point. Now, the snow had a slight crust of ice, soft and feathery beneath a fragile shell.
It was not the best surface for jogging. I plunged through with every step, and had to yank my unbooted and besneakered foot out of an icy mouth with every step.
I ran the mile to Arthur's Mound, which is a wide and flattened dome of raised earth, heaped up by some ancient and forgotten peoples. Over and down the other side I went, crunching through paper-thin ice with each footfall.
The trees, first one, then several, rose singly or in stands here and there along the snowy south lawn. A little farther on, the stands were thicker and more numerous, and I was not sure if it was the outlier of the forest I was in, or not.
Where was the South boundary? Colin and Quentin, Victor and Vanity, each had their separate ideas.
What was my idea?
My thoughts were loose and free at that time, since the cold wind was coursing through my lungs, and the muscle burn was beginning to make me unaware of my body. Ideas rippled like clear water through my fancy, making white ripples here and there, as other thoughts, fishlike, darted from their shining surfaces.
A big whale-type thought stirred up my mental waters. If the South boundary had not been mapped in all these years, it must be innately unmappable. A tiling is innately unmappable when the act of mapping the thing changes its ability to be mapped.
Think, for example, of Heisenberg uncertainty of mass and position. You can see a target particle only by rebounding a photon or some other particle from it. If the photon is more massive than the target, you lose the position information, because the target is struck forcefully enough to move. If less massive, the photon rebounds, but you know nothing about the mass of the target except that it was large enough to stop the photon.
I wondered if the Southern boundary, all these years, was a probability wave, a zone or clouds of possible locations, which collapse into certainty when looked for.
I turned on my higher senses and looked. I was assuming the 'boundary' would have a moral significance to me, since I had, in effect, promised not to cross it. It might also be very useful to know where it was.
The nature of the estate ground might be different than the outside ground, since there was some evidence that Lord Terminus had established this place in its own pocket universe, only tangentially related to the surface of the time-space occupied by southern Wales.
And I saw it collapse into existence not a hundred yards away from me. To one side was the estate ground. To the other were not one but four versions of the forest, each one at right angles to the other.
To my eye, the versions were identical. Each tree and snowflake was in the same location. But my other senses could detect differences.
In the first, each tree and rock brimmed with shining usefulness. No object was any more useful than any other object: as if any thing could be used for any purpose, without being restricted by what its actual properties were. A stone or a patch of snow was just as useful for lighting a fire as a stick of wood.
In the second, each tree had a moral nature. It was intelligent, or it housed an intelligence. Or was it intelligence? A dog is not intelligent, but it is still wrong to be cruel to an animal who loves you. There was something august in the trees, something that must be treated with a certain dignity and respect.
In the third, each object had a definite internal nature, set and defined, but no moral nature whatsoever, and no innate utility. In this version, things were what they were without any reference to whether they helped human beings or not.
And the fourth was bright, shining, beautiful, as every rock and tree and patch of snow was controlled by its own governing monad, its own bit of free energy, which made the other factors—utility, morality, and even inner nature—uncertain things, rich with possibility. I saw the other factors like pearly gray clouds of luminous mist, spread in wings and streams from every object, heavy with wonder. If a symphony were made into matter, it would look as that version of the forest did.
And I was on the far side of the boundary.
The boundary had collapsed into existence about a hundred yards to my right. I was off the estate grounds, but, interestingly enough, the universe was not snarling my morality in sign that I had violated my agreement with Boggin. Why? I am not sure why. Maybe it had to do with intent. I had not been trying to cross the boundary; I wasn't trying to escape. Instead, the boundary had sneaked up and jumped into being behind me when I looked for it.
Of course, now that I knew I was breaking a rule (what is the opposite of trespassing, anyway?), I sprinted back along the snow surface to get back onto school grounds.
