The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [134]
She’d tried the door to the Library once before but it hadn’t opened for her, and she hadn’t bothered trying to hack the locking charm. She was tired of picking locks. She stood in front of the door for a minute, plucking at the fabric of her summer dress, watching the second hand of the clock in the hall.
At the appointed hour the door opened by itself. Julia lowered her chin and went inside.
They were all there, sitting around a long worktable. The Library was clearly the crowning achievement of whoever had renovated the Murs farmhouse. They’d hollowed out the space completely, cut away three floors and exposed the roof beams thirty feet up. Morning sunlight lasered in through tall thin windows. Bookshelves soared along the walls, all the way up, which would have been totally impractical except for some tasteful oak platforms that floated magically alongside them, ready to hoist the browser up to whatever level he or she wanted to be at.
They stopped talking when she came in. Nine faces turned to look up at her. Some of them had books and folders of notes in front of them. They could have been a corporate board meeting, if the corporation were Random Genius Freaks LLC. Pouncy sat at the head of the table. There was an open seat at the foot.
She pulled out the chair and sat down, almost demurely. Why weren’t they talking? They just looked at her calmly, like a parole board.
So. She’d met their expectations. It was time they met hers. Cards on the table. Show me whatcha got. Read ’em and weep.
“All right,” she said. “So what are we doing?”
“What would you like to do?”
It wasn’t Pouncy who spoke, it was Gummidgy. You tell me, Julia wanted to say. You’re the pyschic. She was built like a model, tall and skinny, though her face was too long and severe to be really beautiful. Julia couldn’t place her ethnicity. Persian?
“Whatever comes next. Whatever comes after level two hundred fifty. Two hundred fifty-one. I’m ready.”
“What makes you think there is a level two hundred fifty-one?”
Her eyes narrowed. “The fact that there were levels one through two hundred fifty?”
“There is no level two hundred fifty-one.”
Julia looked at Pouncy, Failstaff, Asmodeus. They looked back at her patiently. Asmo nodded.
“How can there be no level two hundred fifty-one?”
“There’s nothing after two hundred fifty,” Pouncy said. “Oh, you can craft more spells. We do it all the time. But at this point you have all the building blocks, all the basic components, that you’re going to have. The rest is just permutations. After two hundred fifty you’re just rearranging base pairs on the double helix. The power levels plateau.”
Julia had a weightless, floating feeling. Not a bad feeling, but like she’d been cut adrift. So this was it. As mysteries went it wasn’t exactly a showstopper.
“That’s it? That’s all there is?”
“That’s it. You’re done leveling.”
Well. You could do a lot with what she had. She already had some ideas about spells involving extreme temperatures, extreme states of matter. Plasmas, Bose-Einstein condensates, that sort of thing. She didn’t think they’d ever been tried. Maybe Pouncy would front her some money for equipment.
“So that’s what you’re doing here. Running the permutations.”
“No. That’s not what we’re doing.”
“Though we have run a hell of a lot of permutations,” Asmo put in.
She took over the narrating.
“Once we realized that the way forward consisted of an indefinite series of incremental advances, we began to wonder if there was an alternative to that. A way to break the cycle. To take the power curve nonlinear.”
“Nonlinear,” Julia said slowly. “You want to find a magical singularity, kind of thing.”
“Exactly!” Asmodeus grinned her wide Cheshire grin at Pouncy, as if to say, see? I told you she’d get it. “A singularity. An advance so radical that it takes us into another league, power-wise. Exponentially bigger energies.”
“We think there’s more to magic than what we’ve seen so far,