Phaze Doubt

Proton seemed like a planet orbiting a star, but it was not. Not exactly, anyway. It was a black hole companion to the star, far smaller and denser than it seemed. The light from the star touched its shell and whipped around it to depart at right angles, leading to strange optical effects. The globe rotated on an axis pointed to the star, so that the South Pole should have been unbearably hot and the North Pole unbearably cold. They were hot and cold, respectively, but not to the degree they might have been, because of the bending of the light; the south got less and the north more than otherwise. The hemispheres of day and night were east and west, clearly demarked at the North and South Poles, where the line of their contrast actually crossed. That was what Flach had seen as a shadow over half the North Pole. That shadow slowly turned counterclockwise, with the clockwise rotation of the globe. At the South Pole the shadow would seem to turn clockwise. There was a complex explanation for just how the light of the sun appeared to be coming from above the equator when actually it was whipping around the tiny black hole inside the planetary shell, but they didn’t pay much attention to this. After all, magic made all kinds of illusions seem real. So at night they looked at the stars, not caring what devious route their glitters took. There was a chamber whose ceiling was one-way invisible, so that they could see the day and night skies, though no creature on the surface could see down into the Pole Demesnes. That was enough.

But a greater anomaly was the orientation of the two sides of it. Most planets, being round, had lands and seas extending all the way around, continuously. Thus they had no west or east poles. Proton had such poles—because they were the limits of the original curtain between its aspects. Beyond those Poles was Phaze, the other side of the planet. But this other side had not been apparent, because it was in the realm of magic. Proton and Phaze were similar geographically, and in their fundamental natures, but the laws by which things operated differed. Yet they remained connected, with the happenings and creatures of one tending to form alignment with the happenings and creatures of the other, as interpreted by their natural laws. Between the two had been the curtain, which few folk could cross. That curtain had wandered in seemingly curvaceous fashion across the planet, from East Pole to West Pole. But when a person crossed it, he crossed to the equivalent nexus on the other half of the planet. This had been the only effective connection between the universes of science and magic, for three hundred years.

When the Adept Clef merged the frames, he had in effect caused the magic hemisphere to slide around the planet to overlap the science hemisphere. Because they were fundamentally similar, they had been compatible, and the sets of selves had become individual folk with alternate natures. But this had changed the face of the planet. With its two sides merged, it lacked anything on the far hemisphere. Now there was nothing there.

That was why there was no reference to the far side of the planet. No one could go there, for anyone who stepped over the edge would fall into the black hole and never return. A short distance beyond the four Poles, the world ended. The old fear of Earthly navigators that they might sail off the edge of the flat world and be lost was valid here. Only on the doubled shell that was the residential continent with its peripheral waters was life possible.

The plan to save the planet (half-planet shell) was simple in essence, if not in detail. It was to slide the doubled shell around to the far side of the black hole, which was in the fantasy universe. Actually this wasn’t exactly a physical thing, because the shell already rotated around the black hole, making day and night feasible in their fashion. It was in relation to the aspects of the hole, which transcended normal physics. When the sides had been separate, the curtain had served as the crossing point from science to magic. Now there was no such avenue; a bit of the magic frame was caught within the science frame, so was accessible by other creatures of the science universe. That was the problem with the Hectare. But if the shell could be slid around to the fantasy frame, then it would be accessible by the creatures of the fantasy universe—and not by those of the science one. There might be horrendous magical menaces out there, but in the three hundred years the two sides of the planet had been parallel, the only exterior contact had been from the science side, so the magic universe seemed like a better bet.