MARIE BYRD LAND 4 страница

It would all be so much simpler if he even understood what it meant, but he didn’t. Could he be in love with Alice? He tried to compare what he felt for her with his remembered feelings for Julia, but the two emotions were worlds apart. Things just got out of control, that’s all. It wasn’t them, it was their fox bodies. Nobody had to take it too seriously.

Mayakovsky sat at the head of the table looking smug. He had known this was going to happen, Quentin thought furiously, stabbing at his cheese grits with a fork. A bunch of teenagers cooped up in the Fortress of Solitude for two months, then stuck in the bodies of stupid horny animals. Of course we were going to go crazy.

Whatever perverted personal satisfaction Mayakovsky got out of what happened, it became obvious over the next week that it was also a practical piece of personnel management, because Quentin reapplied himself to his magical studies with the laserlike focus of a person desperate to avoid meeting anybody else’s eyes or thinking about things that actually mattered, like how he really felt about Alice, and who it was who had had sex with her out on the ice, him or the fox. It was back to the grind, pounding his way through Circumstances and Exceptions and a thousand mnemonics designed to force him to embed a thousand trivial particles of data in the soft tissue of his already supersaturated mind.

They fell into a collective tribal trance. The depleted palette of the Antarctic world hypnotized them. The shifting snows outside briefly revealed a low ridge of dark shale, the only topographical feature in a featureless world, and the students watched it from the roof like television. It reminded him of the desert in The Wandering Dune —God, he hadn’t thought about Fillory for ages. Quentin wondered if the rest of the world, his life before this, had just been a lurid dream. When he pictured the globe now it was entirely Antarctic, a whole world over which this monochromatic continent had metastasized like an icy cancer.

He went a little insane. They all did, though it took them in different ways. Some of the others became obsessed with sex. Their higher functions were so numb and exhausted they became animals, desperate for any kind of contact that wouldn’t ask words of them. Impromptu orgies were not unheard of. Quentin came upon them once or twice in the evenings—they would gather in apparently arbitrary combinations, in an empty classroom or in somebody’s bedroom, in semi-anonymous chains, their white uniforms half or all the way off, their eyes glassy and bored as they pulled and stroked and pumped, always in silence. He saw Janet take part once. The display was as much for other people as for themselves, but Quentin never joined in or even watched, just turned away, feeling superior and also strangely angry. Maybe he was just angry that something kept him from jumping in. He was disproportionately relieved that he never saw Alice there.

Time passed, or at least Quentin knew that, according to theory, it pretty much had to be passing, though he didn’t personally see much evidence of it, unless you counted the weird menagerie of mustaches and beards he and his male classmates were growing. However much he ate he got thinner and thinner. His state of mind devolved from mesmerized to hallucinatory. Tiny random things became charged with overwhelming significance—a round pebble, a stray straw from a broom, a dark mark on a white wall—that dissipated again minutes later. In the classroom he sometimes saw fantastical creatures mixed in with his classmates—a huge, elegant brown stick insect that clung to the back of a chair; a giant lizard with horny skin and a German accent, whose head burned with white fire—though afterward he could never be sure if he had imagined them. Once he thought he saw the man whose face was hidden by a branch. He couldn’t take this much longer.

Then, just like that, one morning over breakfast Mayakovsky announced that there were two weeks remaining in the semester, and it was time they gave serious thought to the final exam. The test was simply this: they would walk from Brakebills South to the South Pole. The distance was on the order of five hundred miles. They would be given no food and no maps and no clothing. They would have to protect and sustain themselves by magic. Flying was out of bounds—they would go on foot or not at all, and in the form of human beings, not as bears or penguins or some other naturally cold-resistant animal. Cooperation between students was prohibited—they could view it as a race, if they liked. There was no time limit. The exam was not mandatory.

Two weeks wasn’t quite long enough to prepare properly, but it was more than long enough for the decision to hang over them. Yes or no, in or out? Mayakovsky stressed that safety precautions would be minimal. He would do his best to keep track of them in the field, but there was no guarantee that if they screwed up he’d be able to rescue their sorry, hypothermic asses.

There was a lot to study up on. Would sunburn be a problem? Snow blindness? Should they toughen the soles of their feet or try to create some kind of magical footwear? Was there any way to get mutton fat, which they could need to cast Chkhartishvili’s Enveloping Warmth, from the kitchen? And if the test wasn’t even mandatory, then what was the point of it? What would happen if they failed? It sounded more like a ritual or a hazing than a final exam.

On the last morning Quentin got up early with the idea of foraging for contraband spell components in the kitchen. He had made up his mind to compete. He had to know if he could do it or not. It was that simple.

Most of the cupboards were locked—he probably wasn’t the first student to have thought of it—but he did manage to load up his pockets with flour and a stray silver fork and some old sprouting garlic cloves that might come in handy for something, he didn’t know what. He headed downstairs.

Alice was waiting for him on the landing between floors.

“I have to ask you something, ” she said, her voice full of crisp determination. “Are you in love with me? It’s okay if you aren’t, I just want to know. ”

She made it almost all the way through, but she couldn’t quite say the last phrase full voice and whispered it instead.

He hadn’t even met her eyes since the afternoon they’d been foxes together. Three weeks at least. Now they stood together on the smooth, freezing stone floor, abjectly human. How could a person who hadn’t washed or cut her hair in five months be so beautiful?

“I don’t know, ” he said. His voice was scratchy from lack of use. The words felt more frightening than any spell he had ever cast. “I mean, you’d think I would, but I don’t. I really don’t know. ”

He tried to make his tone light and conversational, but his body felt heavy. The floor was accelerating rapidly upward with both of them on it. At that moment, when he should have been most lucidly present, he had no idea whether he was lying or telling the truth. With all the time he’d spent studying here, everything he’d learned, why hadn’t he learned this one thing? He was failing both of them, himself and Alice.

“It’s okay, ” she said, with a quick little smile that strained the ligaments that held Quentin’s heart in his chest. “I didn’t think so. I was more wondering whether you would lie about it. ”

He was lost. “Was I supposed to lie? ”

“It’s okay, Quentin. It was nice. The sex, I mean. You do realize it’s all right to have nice things sometimes, right? ”

She saved him from having to answer by standing up on tiptoe and kissing him softly on the lips. Her lips were dry and chapped, but the tip of her tongue was soft and warm. It felt like the last warm thing in the world.

“Try not to die, ” she said.

She patted his rough cheek and disappeared down the stairs ahead of him in the predawn twilight.

After that ordeal the test was almost an afterthought. They were released separately out onto the snowpack, at intervals, to discourage collaboration. Mayakovsky made Quentin disrobe first—so much for the flour and the garlic and that bent silver fork—and walk naked out beyond the range of the protective spells that kept the temperature bearable at Brakebills South. As he passed through the invisible perimeter the cold hit him face-first, and it was beyond all belief. Quentin’s whole body spasmed and contracted. It felt like he’d been dropped into burning kerosene. The air seared his lungs. He bent over, hands jammed in his armpits.

“Happy trails, ” Mayakovsky called. He tossed Quentin a Ziploc bag full of something gray and greasy. Mutton fat. “Bog s’vami. ”

Whatever. Quentin knew he had only a few seconds before his fingers would be too numb for spellcasting. He tore open the bag and jammed his hands inside and stuttered out Chkhartishvili’s Enveloping Warmth. It got easier after that. He layered on the rest of the spells by turns: protection from the wind and the sun, speed, strong legs, toughened feet. He threw up a navigation spell, and a great luminous golden compass wheel that only he could see appeared overhead in the white sky.

Quentin knew the theory behind the spells, but he’d never tested them all together at full strength. He felt like a superhero. He felt bionic. He was in business.

He turned to face the S on the compass wheel and trotted off toward the horizon at speed, circling around the building he’d just left, bare feet fluffing silently through bone-dry powder. With the strength spells in place his thighs felt like pneumatic pistons. His calves were steel truck springs. His feet were as tough and numb as Kevlar brake shoes.

Afterward he remembered almost nothing of the week that followed. The whole thing was very clinical. Reduced to its technical essence, it was a problem of resource management, of nurturing and guarding and fanning the little flickering flame of life and consciousness within his body as the entire continent of Antarctica tried to leach away the heat and sugar and water that kept it burning.

He slept lightly and very little. His urine turned a deep amber then ceased to flow entirely. The monotony of the scenery was relentless. Each low crunchy ridge he topped revealed a vista composed of its identical clones, arranged in a pattern of infinite regress. His thoughts went around in circles. He lost track of time. He sang the Oscar Mayer jingle and the Simpsons theme song. He talked to James and Julia. Sometimes he confused James with Martin Chatwin and Julia with Jane. The fat melted out of his body; his ribs grew more prominent, tried to push their way out through his skin. He had to be careful. His margin of error was not large. The spells he was using were powerful and highly durable, with a life of their own. He could die out here, and his corpse would probably keep jogging merrily along toward the pole on its own.

Once or twice a day, sometimes more, a lipless blue crevasse would open beneath his feet, and he would have to trot around it or cross it with a magic-assisted leap. Once he stumbled right into one and fell forty feet down into blue-tinted darkness. The ward-and-shield spells around his pale, nude body were so thick that he barely noticed. He just ground to a slow stop, jammed in between two rough ice walls, and then lifted himself back out again, like the Lorax, and kept on running.

Even as his physical strength faded he leaned on the iron magical vigor that his sojourn under Professor Mayakovsky had given him. It no longer felt like a fluke when he worked magic successfully. The worlds of magical and physical reality felt equally real and present to him. He summoned simple spells into being without conscious thought. He reached for the magical force within him as naturally as he would reach for the salt on the dinner table. He had even gained the ability to extemporize a little, to guess at magical Circumstances when he hadn’t been drilled on them. The implications of this were stunning: magic wasn’t simply random, it had an actual shape—a fractal, chaotic shape, but subconsciously his blindly groping mental fingertips had begun to parse it.

He remembered a lecture Mayakovsky had given a few weeks before, which at the time he hadn’t paid much attention to. Now, however, jogging forever south across the frozen, broken plains, it came back to him almost word for word.

“You dislike me, ” Mayakovsky had begun. “You are sick of the sight of me, skraelings. ” That was what he called them, skraelings. Apparently it was a Viking word that meant, roughly, “wretches. ”

“But if you listen to me only one more time in your lives, listen to me now. Once you reach a certain level of fluency as a spellcaster, you will begin to manipulate reality freely. Not all of you—Dale, I think you in particular are unlikely to cross that Rubicon. But for some of you spells will one day come very easily, almost automatically, with very little in the way of conscious effort.

“When the change comes, I ask only that you know it for what it is, and be aware. For the true magician there is no very clear line between what lies inside the mind and what lies outside it. If you desire something, it will become substance. If you despise it, you will see it destroyed. A master magician is not much different from a child or a madman in that respect. It takes a very clear head and a very strong will to operate once you are in that place. And you will find out very quickly whether or not you have that clarity and that strength. ”

Mayakovsky stared out at their silent faces a moment longer, with undisguised disgust, then stepped down from the lectern. “Age, ” Quentin heard him mutter. “It’s wasted on the young. Just like youth. ”

When night finally fell the stars burned shrilly overhead with impossible force and beauty. Quentin jogged with his head up, knees high, no longer feeling anything below his waist, gloriously isolated, lost in the spectacle. He became nothing, a running wraith, a wisp of warm flesh in a silent universe of midnight frost.

Once, for a few minutes, the darkness was disturbed by a flickering on the horizon. He realized it must be another student, another skraeling like himself, moving on a parallel path but way off to the east, twenty or thirty miles at least, and ahead of him. He thought about changing course to make contact. But seriously, what was the point? Should he risk getting busted for collaborating, just to say hi? What did he, a wraith, a wisp of warm flesh, need with anybody else?

Whoever it was, he thought dispassionately, was using a different set of spells than he was. He couldn’t piece out the magic at this distance, but they were throwing off a whole lot of pale pink-white light.

Inefficient, he thought. Inelegant.

When the sun rose he lost sight of the other student again.

Some immeasurable period of time later, Quentin blinked. He had lost the habit of closing his magically weatherproofed eyes, but something was bothering him. It was a matter for concern, though he could barely formulate why in any conscious, coherent way. There was a black spot in his vision.

The landscape had, if anything, gotten more monotonous. Far behind him were the moments when streaks of dark frozen schist occasionally marred the white snow. Once he’d passed what he was fairly sure was a fallen meteorite stuck in the ice, a lump of something black, like a lost charcoal briquette. But that was a long time ago.

He was far gone. After days without real sleep his mind was a machine for monitoring spells and moving his feet, nothing else. But while he was checking off anomalies, there was something screwy going on with his compass wheel, too. It wobbled erratically, and it was getting kind of distorted. The N had grown vast and swollen; it was taking up five-sixths of the circle, and the other directions had withered away to almost nothing. The S he was supposed to be following had shrunk to a tiny squiggle in microscopic jewel type.

The black spot was taller than it was wide, and it bobbed up and down with his stride the way an external object would. So it wasn’t corneal damage. And it was growing larger and larger, too. It was Mayakovsky, standing by himself in the powdery nothingness, holding a blanket. He must be at the pole. Quentin had completely forgotten where he was going or why.

When he got close enough Mayakovsky caught him. The tall man grunted, wrapping the heavy, scratchy blanket around him, and swung him down to the snow. Quentin’s legs kept moving for a few seconds, then he lay still, panting, on his side, twitching like a netted fish. It was the first time in nine days that he’d stopped running. The sky spun. He retched.

Mayakovsky stood over him.

“Molodyetz, Quentin. Good man. Good man. You made it. You are going home. ”

There was something odd in Mayakovsky’s voice. The sneer was gone, and it was thick with emotion. A twisted smile revealed for a moment the older wizard’s yellow teeth in his unshaven face. He hauled Quentin to his feet with one hand; the other hand he flourished, and a portal appeared in the air. He shoved Quentin unceremoniously through it.

Quentin staggered and fell into a psychedelic riot of green that assaulted him so violently that at first he didn’t recognize it as the rear terrace of Brakebills on a hot summer day. After the blankness of the polar ice the campus was a hallucinatory swirl of sound and color and warmth. He squeezed his eyes tight shut. He was home.

He rolled over on his back on the baking smooth stone. Birds sang deafeningly. He opened his eyes. A sight even stranger than the trees and the grass met them: looking back through the portal, he could still see the tall, soft-shouldered magician standing there with Antarctica in the background. Snow kicked up around him. A few stray crystals drifted through and evaporated in midflight. It looked like a painting executed on an oval panel and hung in midair. But the magical window was already closing. He must be preparing himself to go back to his empty polar mansion, Quentin thought. He waved, but Mayakovsky wasn’t looking at him. He was looking out at the Maze and the rest of the Brakebills campus. The unguarded longing on his face was so excruciating Quentin had to look away.

Then the portal closed. It was over. It was late May, and the air was full of pollen. After the rarefied atmosphere of Antarctica it tasted hot and thick as soup. It was a lot like that first day he’d come to Brakebills, straight through from that frigid Brooklyn afternoon. The sun beat down. He sneezed.

They were all waiting for him, or almost all: Eliot and Josh and Janet, at least, wearing their old school uniforms, looking fat and happy and relaxed and none the worse for wear, like they’d done nothing for the past six months but sit on their asses and eat grilled cheese sandwiches.

“Welcome back, ” Eliot said. He was munching a yellow pear. “They only told us ten minutes ago you might be coming through. ”

“Wow. ” Josh’s eyes were round. “Man, you look skinny. Wizard needs food badly. And also maybe a shower. ”

Quentin knew he had only a minute or two before he burst into tears and passed out. He still had Mayakovsky’s scratchy wool blanket wrapped around him. He looked down at his pale, frozen feet. Nothing looked frostbitten, anyway, though one of his toes was sticking out at an angle. It didn’t hurt yet.

It was very, very comfortable, deliriously comfortable, lying on his back on the hot stone like this, with the others looking down at him. He knew he should probably get up, for the sake of politeness if for no other reason, but he didn’t feel like moving yet. He thought he might just stay where he was for another minute. He had earned himself a rest.

“Are you all right? ” Josh said. “What was it like? ”

“Alice kicked your ass, ” Janet said. “She got back two days ago. She already went home. ”

“You were out there a week and a half, ” Eliot said. “We were worried about you. ”

Why did they keep talking? If he could just gaze up at them in silence, that would be perfect. Just look at them and listen to the chirping birds and feel the warm flagstones holding him up. And maybe somebody could get him a glass of water, he was desperately thirsty. He tried to articulate this last sentiment, but his throat was dry and cracked. He wound up just making a tiny creaking noise.

“Oh, I think he wants to know about us, ” Janet said. She took a bite of Eliot’s pear. “Yeah, nobody else went out but you two. What—you think we’re stupid? ”

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