“It’s beautiful!” I said at last. “I could stay here and watch the clouds for the whole twelve hours alone!”
“Many do,” came the voice again.
I looked around. Aside from an impertinent squirrel foraging on the grass, I was entirely alone.
“Who are you?” I asked. “And why can’t I see you?”
“Bradshaw asked me to keep an eye on you,” came the voice. “The name’s Square—Agent Square. If you want to know why you can’t see me, it’s because I’m from Flatland and bounded in only two dimensions. At the moment I’m presenting my edge to you. Since I have no thickness, I am effectively invisible. Watch.”
A line a half inch thick and two feet long appeared in the air quite near me. The line separated and opened out into a thin rectangle, which broadened until it was a square, hanging in the air.
“How do you do?” I said.
“Oh, can’t complain,” said Square. “A spot of trapezoidism in this chill weather, but hey-ho. I worked with the real Thursday several times. Do you really look like her?”
“You can’t see, then?”
“Since I am only two-dimensional,” said Agent Square, “I can see the world only as a series of infinitely thin slices, like a ham. May I approach and have a look?”
Square moved closer. Out of curiosity I put my hand inside the area bounded by his vertices, and a soft bluish light gave me four rings around my fingers.
“Four disks is all I can see,” said Square. “Viewing one dimension up is always a bit confusing. Mind you, for you people bounded in three dimensions, it’s no different.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Time,” said Square, “is your next dimension, so to anyone in the RealWorld it appears as your third spatial dimension does to me—a thin slice in plain view but with the abstract notions of ‘forward’
and ‘beyond’ unseeable. May I?”
Square approached me and then tilted to a narrow rectangle, again became a line, vanished and then reappeared again. It was as though he were tilting in front of me in order, I assumed, to allow his two-dimensional frame of reference to scan my features. Once satisfied, Square withdrew.
“Spooky!” he said. “You do look just like her. What’s the mission?”
“To find Thursday.”
“Nothing hard, then.”
I moved to stand up, but everything felt funny, so I sat down again.
“Why does my face feel all draggy?” I asked. “The underneath of my arms, too, and my boobs—everything feels all . . . well, weighted down.”
“That’ll be gravity,” said Square with a sigh.
“We have gravity in the BookWorld,” I said. “It’s not like this.”
“No, we just talk as though gravity existed. There’s a huge difference. In the BookWorld, gravity is simply useful. Here it is the effect of mass upon space-time. It would be manageable if it were constant, but it isn’t. Acceleration forces can give one a localized gravitational effect that is quite disconcerting. If you’re here for only twelve hours, I’d stay well clear of trains, elevators, airplanes and cars. Very odd, I’m told, although I don’t notice it myself. By the way, do you have a timer on your watch? You’re here for just twelve hours, remember.”
I looked at my watch, which had nothing but hands and a face. “No.”
“You’ll get used to that, too. If this were the BookWorld, you’d have one of those watches that counts down from twelve hours to add some suspense. Believe me, the plot in this world takes a bit of getting used to. I’ve not done anything for Bradshaw for six months. That’s nothing in the BookWorld, barely half a dozen words. Out here it really is six months. Hell’s teeth! The boredom. There’s a limit to how much reality TV one can watch, although it’s become a lot easier for me since they brought in flat-screens. Now, what do you want to know first?”
“Walking would be a good start.”
Agent Square was a good teacher, and within the space of twenty minutes I had mastered the concept of mass and the ticklish practical considerations of coping with momentum. Though easy to someone who’d been doing it for years, being able to lean back when negotiating a sharp stop to avoid falling over was an acquired skill.
“Bipedal movement is the skill of controlled falling,” said Square. “If it weren’t so commonplace, it would seem miraculous—like much out here, to be truthful.”
I found the “walking straight” part fairly easy to master, but learning to conserve momentum while doing a right-hander at speed was a lot harder, and I was flailing my arms for balance until Square patiently taught me how angular velocity, centripetal forces and shoe/ground friction coefficients all worked together.