Fractal Mode

Chapter 28

through one of the five anchors that held it in place? That Nona and the place of the huge stone musical instruments had just become the fifth anchor?

No, even if there were no language barrier, they could not blab all that to these grim strangers. So what could they say? They didn"t really know what kind of a world this was, apart from the facts that it had magic and a strong upper-class/lower-class social structure. What would satisfy the despots without giving away too much?

We have come from afar by virtue of a spell, and wish only to return, Darius decided. That did seem to be the best answer.

So Darius used gestures and pointings to images to try to get that across. It turned out that the despots already knew that, they thought; they had a concept of interplanetary travel that was weird, and assumed that the party had somehow walked from one planet to another. They wanted to know the origin planet.

Colene and the others were baffled by this. How could anyone walk between planets? Even if the force of gravity did not prevent this, Earth"s moon was so far away that it would take thirty years to walk there, and the other planets were much farther away. Were there seven-league boots for this purpose?

The despots were skeptical of their confusion. It was almost as if the despots believed the visitors knew all about it, and were playing ignorant. "You are human," Hobard said, making a number of pictures to get the concept across. Because Colene and the others were genuinely curious about the nature of this world, they drew on Seqiro"s telepathy to clarify it. The minds of the other despots remained opaque, but Hobard was trying to establish a liaison, and his mind was opening so that they could start to receive his more complicated thoughts. This was especially true when he focused on a specific thing. "You came from a human world." World was not exactly the concept, but the exact one was not quite fathomable. Planet? Aspect? Subdivision?

"From a human world," Darius agreed, by indicating the correct pictures. "Far away."

Now a diagram appeared, with what might be the wires and resistors of a weird radio set. There was something nag-gingly familiar about it, but Colene couldn"t place it. "Which one?" Hobard demanded. One bug in the picture glowed, and then another.

Maybe we had better try to tell a bit of the truth, Colene thought to Darius. They"ll know if we claim a planet that is wrong; this is their territory.

Darius agreed. "Far in a different way," he tried to clarify. "Not in distance, but in mode."

But this was lost on the despots. Evidently they had no concept of the Virtual Mode or alternate realities. Indeed, their own reality seemed quite strange enough to hold their attention.

Hobard generated another picture. In its center was a shape like a hairy roach, or perhaps a hairy fat-bodied spider, for it was at the center of a weblike structure of