Phaze Doubt

“Alas, I can not,” he told her. “But this I needs must say: thou has made my last year a delight, and banished my loneliness. For that I thank thee, lovely child.”

“Thou has been good to me too!” she said. “Ne’er didst thou beat me or starve me or do to me what the village louts did.”

“An I had known o’ those things, I would have sent my golems into the village to slay those evil folk,” he said, grimacing.

“Grandpa Brown, I beg thee, leave me not!”

He squeezed her firm little hand in his worn brown hand. “It were not my choice, O sweet girl.” Then he died.

She wept. Then she told a big golem to take him out and bury him under the garden. It was the onset of her Adept status—and her awful loneliness, which he had unwittingly bequeathed to her.

She had her doll and dog and the other golems for company, but none of them were alive. She did not dare let it be known that the old Adept was gone, for fear of an attack by others, as he had warned her. She didn’t even tell the werewolves, though they were her friends; she pretended she was merely running errands for her master, who was busy making more golems. She managed, but she wasn’t happy.

So it was for a year. She learned to make and handle the golems better, but knew she had more to learn. She longed for living company, but even when she dealt with others, trading golems for food and other staples (in the name of her master), she never got personal. She didn’t dare.

Then the Blue Adept raided her Demesnes. At first she was afraid of him, and tried to drive him out, but he destroyed her defenses with his magic and had her at his mercy. But then he turned out to be a nice person, and helped her. He had somehow thought that she was a bad Adept who had attacked him, because one of the golems had been fashioned in his likeness and tried to take his place. He was a very small man who called himself Stile, and he was even newer as an Adept than she was. He had a small unicorn with him, the first she had met up close, and she was nice too. Her horn sounded like a harmonica, and her music was wonderful.

“And that were the onset o’ our friendship, Neysa,” she said. “Thirty years gone. Much has it meant to me.”

Neysa, grazing, blew an affirmative note. She remembered their meeting, but had never heard it from Brown’s point of view before.

“I were just ten then, but suddenly I knew love,” Brown continued. “I loved the Adept Stile, but kept it secret, knowing it were laughable. He had the Lady Blue.”

“I loved him too,” Neysa said in horn talk. “And I an animal.”

“Child and animal—how could we compete?” Brown asked rhetorically, and Neysa agreed.

Stile went on about his business, in due course, destroying the Red Adept, who had killed his other self. In those days only a person who had lost his otherframe self could cross between the frames; that was why Stile had been able to cross from Proton. Then Stile became a Citizen in Proton, and the Contrary Citizens opposed him, as well as the Adverse Adepts. Brown of course helped him all she could. She would have done anything for him, but he treated her with perfect courtesy like the child she was, never knowing her love. Finally he saved the frames from the depredations of the bad Citizens and Adepts by separating Phaze from Proton. He restored the body of his other self, the original Blue Adept, and made ready to return to Proton and to the robot lady Sheen, who loved him (of course!) but whom he did not love. (How could he love any other, with the Lady Blue? How well they all understood!) Here it was that Brown betrayed him in her fashion. She had temporary access to the great Book of Magic, and made a spell to reverse things so that it was Blue who went to Proton, and Stile who stayed in Phaze, where he longed to be.

There, separated, the frames remained, for about twenty years, until Stile’s son Bane exchanged places with his other self, the robot Mach. That set off a complicated sequence, and renewed the warfare between Citizens and Adepts, as the bad ones tried to grab power. After most of another decade, Stile went the opposite route: he summoned the Adept Clef, and the Platinum Flute, and they merged the frames.

But in the long quiet periods between Adept wars, Brown remained alone. She no longer had to hide the loss of her predecessor, and she mastered the control of the golems, but her life was mostly empty. For now she found that isolation was not just a temporary state; it was standard for Adepts. Those few who were married were extremely fortunate; the others existed in increasing private bitterness, for all normal folk were afraid of them.