“Different how?” asked Elanor, perplexed.
“You name it!” said Peter, encouragingly.
“Name what?”
“Peter’s trying to tell you that we can change this whole place around, Elanor.” said Julia. “Have you ever thought about how you’d like your home to be?”
“Not really. I lived here with King Thomas, and then I lived with Jinx in that little cabin, and I would rather be back there except for this place needs me. Or so you said…”
“Well, yes, it does.” said Peter. “And we’re very, very grateful that you’re willing to do that for us, and we’ll work on getting Jinx here too, we promise. But for now, how would you like this place to be?”
“What do you think Jinx would like? I like it just the way it is. Except for that stupid fire in the air.” said Elanor.
“Easily fixed!” cried Peter, and gestured with his hands, with an air of concentration similar to a man using an old familiar chainsaw. The floating fire, which had always been a key decoration in the King’s quarters, shrank, sputtered, and went out with a little puff of smoke that expanded outward in a neat sphere, and then was broken by the air currents that the fire had kept in motion.
“Peter, do you think we can give her the power to remodel this place herself?” asked Julia. “It is hers, after all.”
“You know, I’m not sure. It’ll be attuned to her, anyhow. The question is whether she can handle the mental side of it. Elanor, can you visualize?” asked Peter.
“What’s visualize?” asked Elanor.
“It’s part of what we’re doing to change this place. You have to hold a detailed image of the desired state, and project it outwards as it resonates with the matter of Rainmoor, adding to the resonance with positive feedback from your mind and your visualization as it comes into being.”
Elanor stared at Peter as if he’d grown three extra heads. “I have to what?”
At this, Julia pitched in, helpfully trying to translate for the panther Queen. “You have to imagine what you want this place to be. Like… perhaps, like a tree you enjoy climbing.”
Elanor looked at Julia, dismayed. “I have to?” she protested. Then, before Peter or Julia could reassure her, Elanor grumbled, “Oh, all right!”…
…and the bottom dropped out of the King’s Quarters.
Peter and Julia and Elanor, who had her eyes closed in concentration, wound up standing on a very large branch, perhaps twenty feet in diameter, that extended back to a sort of tree trunk, which was just one of many such tree trunks extending as far as the eye could see. “That’s very g…” said Peter, at which point he gulped and cautiously lowered himself to sit dead center on the branch, with Julia clinging to him and shaking.
He’d looked down, to find there wasn’t a ground.
“Elanor?” quavered Julia, who hadn’t a great head for heights. “Open your eyes, dear, and look, but don’t move!”
At this, Elanor opened her eyes, and blinked in surprise. “Who put that there? It’s just like I was imagin…”
The bark of the branch crackled as Elanor’s claws dug deep into the wood. She’d looked down too.
Nobody moved for a moment, and then Elanor asked reasonably, “Why did it do that, and how can we put it back?” She continued to stare wonderingly around her- the effect was much like being a tiny ant somewhere in a lilac bush. Branches and trunks went everywhere, but most of all they went down and up seemingly forever. Elanor added, “Why isn’t there a ground?”
Peter swallowed. “You must have been visualizing what was basically a tree canopy. Rainmoor latched onto that and tiled it three-dimensionally for us. Very thoughtful really so long as we don’t fall. Good lord, was that a resonance!”
“Well, I don’t know, was it?” asked Elanor, petulantly. She lifted her paws, shaking bits of splintered tree bark off them- clearly, once past the initial shock of checking her height off the ground, she had no fears of this place.
“Yes, very much so. I couldn’t do anything on this scale, Elanor- it must be thanks to your being Queen, this place is yours and it’s clearly very, very responsive. I don’t suppose you could put it back for us please, right away?”
“Oooh, a bird!” cried Elanor, and to Peter and Julia’s horror, she pushed straight past them and chased ponderously after a little flash of color in the distance, cheerfully if awkwardly running along branch after branch. The novelty of the situation had caused her to totally forget her advanced pregnancy. Julia blanched and buried her face in Peter’s chest, moaning, “I can’t look!”
“Don’t shout! She’ll come back…” said Peter.
There was a curious noise nearby, and Peter felt the distinct sensation of someone, invisibly and inaudibly, but nonetheless, swearing. A section of vertical treetrunk nearby, on a massive trunk that had to be fifty feet across, began to glow a gentle blue in a rectangular shape that was irresistibly reminiscent of a door. This was a good thirty feet away, and Peter and Julia sat tight, waiting to see what else was happening.
The newly created door opened, and Mick looked out. He blinked, and called back over his shoulder, “Vern, would you look at this? We found it, but somebody’s been remodeling.” He peered out into the endless expanse of trunks and branches. “I declare- Peter and Julia! Come on over, you two, come on over- you don’t look happy. Did you do this?”
Clinging tightly to each other, Peter and Julia walked very cautiously over to the new door, which was seen to open out onto Vernon’s familiar cave. It wasn’t that the branch was so narrow- it was quite possible to walk safely on it, but standing up made it all too easy to see over the sides to the dizzying vistas of treetrunks and branches. When the two were near the massive, fifty-foot across vertical trunk, they felt better, and when they’d stepped inside the door into Vernon’s cave, they felt better still. “Don’t shut that door whatever you do, Mick.” remarked Peter unsteadily. “Elanor’s out there.”
Mick looked thunderstruck, and to the great amusement of Vernon, the hedge-mage sputtered his way through a whole series of logical realizations without uttering a single intelligible word. Finally, he neatly summed up his conclusion. “She ain’t got the sense of a dead rat, has she?”
“She didn’t know what she was doing, Mick,” soothed Peter, “and I can’t put it back. Nor you, I fancy. She’s off chasing birds- I saw a few, one was nearby.”
“Exactly. Exactly. Now she’s Queen so the place is responsive, and I’m sure I know just what went through her pea brain- don’t tell me, you asked her to visualize, did you?”
Peter nodded, and Mick continued, in full bluster.
“You think to yourself, of what a tree must seem like to a cat, why don’t you? It was branches she had in mind. Up high enough, you don’t think of the ground. She can’t climb on twigs or leaves and so she wasn’t thinking of those, but she certainly remembered the birds!”
“What color was it?” asked Julia, curious. “I was hiding my face, I can’t bear heights.”
“Vlue!” replied Elanor, poking her head through the door. The bird was indeed blue- amazingly, she’d caught it, killed it, and was carrying it in her mouth. Delighted, she bounced heavily through the door, spat the bird out onto the floor, and beamed at all and sundry. Then she caught Mick’s expression, and drooped, with a feline, resentful look.
At length Mick gave vent to his immediate feelings. “Stay!”
“All right, all right! But it’s really neat, and you should see more of it, and look at the nice bird I caught!” said Elanor, unrepentantly.
“What did I tell you about climbing trees?” asked Mick, solemnly.
“That if I went into labor I should climb right down and go home?”
“No, I told you to stay out of them!”
“Well, that’s too bad,” replied Elanor, “cos there isn’t any ground out there, just more trees. So I couldn’t climb down anyway, and so I caught a bird, see? Even though I’m kind of heavy. Whoof, I’m tired now.”
“It’s a nice bird,” said Julia, “very… blue. Good going.”
“It’s a dead bird,” said Peter. “Suppose it’s good to eat?”
“It’s MY bird,” said Elanor. “Catch your own!”
“It’s an awfully small bird,” said Vernon. “I doubt I could. I could probably toast them on the wing for you if they’re not too quick.”
Everybody looked at Mick, who crossed his arms and stared back levelly. Finally, he relented.
“It’s a spontaneously generated bird produced as a harmonic of Elanor’s visualization, so it just happens there’s infinite numbers of them distributed throughout the space. Catch all you want. Catch all you want.”
“Actually, I see a problem with that,” remarked Peter thoughtfully.
“You don’t like the color?” said Vernon.
“Oh, come on- be serious for a moment. I find it very easy to believe that was an infinitely tiled space- the trouble is, it was also the door to the outside world. How exactly is Jinx going to get back in here? I can’t picture him opening a door like Mick did.”
Elanor blinked. “Oh. I made the door go away? I didn’t notice.”
“It’s all right,” said Peter, “you can put it back and we’ll help put the door back.
At this, Elanor’s ears did a complicated dance of chagrin, resentment, more chagrin- finally, she admitted, “I don’t remember quite how it was before. I remember some things, but not everything. But this isn’t fair, I made this neat place and now I have to put it back?”
“That might be the simplest way.” said Peter.
“No!” protested Elanor. “Let’s do it a complicated way, then, so I can keep the place. I want to think up more things to put in it!”
Mick grinned. “Can’t ask for a better way of learning. We best let her. We best let her… Come on, Peter, you can’t rightly stop her now.”
“Well, I’m game, but it’s certainly going to be more complicated.” said Peter. “Elanor, you’re going to have to do a lot of the work. Do you want to put in a ground, or would you rather sort it out some other way?”
“Like what?” asked Elanor.
“Well, put it this way- places need to do certain things. Right now, this place lets you chase birds, but it also connects to Vernon’s cave. If Julia and I are ever to go home, it must also connect to the hallways of Rainmoor that it used to, and if Jinx is to come here it must connect to the King’s Gate…”
“We could do all that with more doors like the one I done here,” said Mick.
“True,” said Peter, “but there’s more. Suppose we want to gather some people in the King’s quarters? It won’t be much good if they all have to cling desperately to branches.”
Julia remarked, “Actually, that would do some of the nobles good. They don’t have much imagination.”
“You know, you have something there…” replied Peter. “What we have now might not be very functional, but it’s striking as hell. Perhaps we should keep major elements of it for effect…”
Elanor had been watching this discussion, with her ears flattening more and more, and finally she interrupted with great decision. “This is my place! Okay? I’m still not quite sure how I made it, but I like it and I’m keeping it, so you can just shut up with your talk and your ‘we’, because it’s not your place. Didn’t you say I would have to do all the work of changing anything? Well, I won’t!”
At this, Vernon rumbled in amusement. “She’s got you there, Monster. Normally you’re more diplomatic than that. In a moment you’ll have her going off to play with the birds and leaving you stranded here.”
Peter, chagrined, turned on the dragon. “Well, what would you have me say? I’m doing the best I can.”
Vernon turned to the irate feline Queen. “Elanor, we want a place where we can all gather- without falling out of the trees, that is.”
“Oh! But that’s not so hard- it would just be a flat place, right?”
“Something like that. What would you like it to be?” asked Vernon. “Come to think of it, shall we make a place where even I could fit? Thomas never made room for me in his chambers. Admittedly, if he had he would’ve died of old age toddling to the bathroom in the night across all that floor…”
Elanor perked up. “I bet I could think of a flat place big enough for you!”
Mick grinned, waved a hand at the door, and it widened visibly. “Reckon I can handle this end of it. Now we’re talking. Now we’re talking.”
“Shall we go out there and remodel?” said Peter, much relieved- and the little group did so, with the exception of Vernon, who still didn’t fit through the door- at first. Soon, the infinitely tiled responsive visualization of space was very busy…
