But there they were, embroiled in this melee around Escherville. Two of them—“Mars” and “Mercury”—took flight, headed south. Whoever was controlling the display made it zoom out so that the spectators could keep those two in view. They were winging southward, soaring over snowcapped mountains, and pretty obviously headed for the palace on the pinnacle. Time was speeding up again as things stabilized. Even so, covering that distance took them a little while. Spectators went out for bathroom breaks or snacks, leaving Zula largely alone. She stood there for a long time watching Dodge, who was tending to something very small and faint that he had cupped in his hand.

Mars and Mercury landed atop the palace without opposition. Meanwhile, back in Escherville, Dodge flew to the top of his castle, then dove into the crack that ran beneath it. Zula, getting the hang of it, swiveled her head toward the Landform 2 display. Sure enough, Dodge emerged a bit later from the round lake in the middle of the city. He beat his wings to gain altitude, then spread them wide to come in for a landing on the top of his dark tower.

At the same moment, in a strikingly symmetrical way, back over in the middle of Landform 1, Mercury rose up into the air above the white tower. In one hand he was holding a thing that looked like a horn. He raised this to his lips, and blew.

They could not hear the sound of it, but they could see it spreading outward like a shock wave. Above, this dissipated into the sky like one of those ice halos sometimes visible around the sun on a cold day. But below, as it propagated downward along the sheer shaft of the pinnacle, it seemed to touch off a disturbance in the hivelike cellular structure that had grown around the rock. This was a little like seeing a trail of gunpowder flash into smoke. Or one of those things atomic scientists used to see the trails of subatomic particles through vapor. A cloud chamber. But too it put her in mind of buds unfurling in time-lapse.

It propagated quickly down the skinny part of the pinnacle where the hive was thin but slowed dramatically as it reached the lower stretch where it broadened to include many more cells.

And at some point, the display simply froze up. She turned toward Landform 2 and saw it frozen as well. She heard a man, an older chap, making a joke about needing to reboot the projector—a reference that meant nothing to most of the people in the room.

“It’s not actually frozen,” someone explained. “The Time Slip Ratio has dropped to ten to the minus three. And still dropping.” Meaning that a thousand or more seconds had to elapse in Meatspace to simulate one second of time in Bitworld.