I glared at him, but my heart wasn’t in it. It’s not as if he was wrong.
A massive shape heaved itself up onto the edge of the pit, then over. I thought maybe it was our mirror-geld, the first one. It shook itself, rather like a dog coming out of water, except that hands flailed instead of hair.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but I have a couple of questions?”
Javier put a hand over his face and sighed. The mirror-geld tilted its head, still doglike.Right. Think of it like a dog. A verystrangedog. The size of a house.“When someone is reflected between mirrors, and the bits fall off, and they… um… glom on to each other… are those bits like the person who got reflected?”
It cocked its head back the other way.
I tried again. “I mean, do they have the personality and memories? Are there thousands of fragments ofmerunning around in the mirrors back home?”
A dozen hands flipped back and forth in an equivocal gesture, then held up their fingers a little space apart.
“Sort of? A little bit?”
The mirror-geld nodded ponderously. Half the hands pointed to itself, and the other half stretched out an arm span apart, holding up their hands.
“You’re very big?” I tried.
Another nod. It pointed to me, made the small motion again, then back to itself and the large motion again.
“I’m small… you’re big… uh… oh! The bits that came from me are a tiny part of something the size of you?”
Several hands clapped in delight as it wagged its head up and down.
I felt myself grinning. This might be a nightmare, but it was at least an interesting nightmare. “But the little tiny ones, are they more of a person?”
A nod, accompanied by equivocal gestures.
“They are, but it’s complicated?”
Nod.
“Do you think you’ll be playing twenty questions in mime for a while, or shall we start trying to find our way back home?” asked Javier.
“Mime, I think,” I said. “This is important. I wish I knew sign language… no,itprobably wouldn’t know it, so that wouldn’t work.” I raised my voice. “The little ones, how intelligent are they?” I was thinking of the mirror-geld that the Queen’s guard had stabbed. Had that been a sentient being?
It made the gesture forsmallagain, then tried something more complicated. Two hands held low and tapping across the ground, then lifted up and clasped together. Then it hugged all its arms tightly to itself and looked at me expectantly.
“Um… do you mean us? Rescuing us?”
The mirror-geld shook its head, then made the same set of gestures again, then again.
“Uh… running… scurrying… like insects? You eat insects? No? Youcollectinsects?”
It looked at me as if it thought my brains were a small gesture and shook its head.
“I know people who collect insects,” I muttered defensively.
“I think it’s saying that the little mirror-gelds combine together,” Javier said. “Then maybe they join up to the big one here?”
The mirror-geld pointed to him, nodding, and clapped its hands in evident delight. I tried not to feel jealous.
“So the bigger you are, the smarter you get?”
It combined a nod and a shrug, which I suspected meant that it was more complicated than that, but that I wasn’t too far off. Maybe there was some kind of upper limit to how big a mirror-geld could be, and the big ones had reached it. Or maybe there was just a limit to how smart a mirror-geld could be. I wondered how smart that was. For all I knew, this creature pantomiming at me was a genius far beyond human intellect.
“I wonder if it can read?” I mused. Of course, there’d be no point to it here in the mirror-world, where the writing would be gray on gray, but if I brought regular paper over, maybe it could communicate more effectively—
