ALL THE WHILE this fraying of the fabric of time and space was going on among the first years, with the mistress watching on with mixed feelings of delight and horror, Vetta Mindal looked around her placidly, noting odd things here and there but otherwise not very much moved by her surroundings. To her Frangea and especially Cherryball Flats contained so much novelty that what was real and what mere illusion blurred to her perceptions.
'Miss,' she said, pointing at a curious display of mathematical formulas that glided slowly across a dark wall in symbols of gold. 'What is this meant to do?'
The mistress looked at the algebraic lines and frowned.
'I think, my child, it refers to language, how ideas can be expressed in manifold ways,' she said uncertainly, seeking guidance from her exhibition notes.
'Is that a nine or a zero?' Vetta asked, her finger jabbing at a digit as it marched along with other symbols.
'It can be either,' a voice sounded next to her ear. It was Sharshua Dragonsong again. 'I recognise some of the text,' the Octora girl said. 'Theories on gravitation and grid tension, flat planes and curved space. A fascinating conflict of ideas that has been going on for a thousand years I think.'
'There is a battle between numbers?' Vetta said, horrified.
'On one side of an equals sign there can be a disparity,' the other girl said, 'and that creates inequality.'
'Quite right,' Pirouette jumped in. She often leant an ear to other people's conversations, hoping they might be talking about her in an admiring way. 'Perfecta is the land that invented inequality, for it contains a society very much of a superior nature. If we were all on the same level where would be the opportunity of looking down on others?'
'Such feelings seem ungenerous,' Vetta stuttered with worry at contradicting a dorm mate but the language used was too harsh for her just then. 'Though you express what you believe to be right very nicely.' This was an attempt to balance the equation in her own way.
There was a cackle from the shadows where the Evernight girl loomed, waiting her moment to jump out and startle someone but the noise gave her away and she sullenly reappeared.
'All I can see,' Danique said, waving her arms this way and that, 'is a deliberate attempt to throw doubt on what everyone believes. And I don't care. We are all going to die sooner or later, and then the confusion will end.'
This effectively brought the pleasant afternoon's school trip to a conclusion and the mistress thought it was time to usher her charges back out onto the street and into the waiting vehicle. She knew she had one seriously long and complex report to write up for Miss Plazenby later as well as a few night watches to undertake for a week or two at least until she was sure the effects of the 'Seeing is Disbelieving' exhibition had fully worn off.
On the journey back Bubbles Bannatyne was mulling things over.
'How,' she said to her dorm mate from Octora, 'could both nine and zero be right? I don't get it.'
Sharshua squinted a moment as she sucked upon a pencil, the ones from Octora being flavoured for just such an occasion, and then she smiled.
'Alternate realities,' she said.