Sparrow's dog thrust her nose under the smith's hand and joggled him, because he'd been concentrating too hard to pet her willingly. He muttered a curse, but his fingers were gently firm as they flexed to scratch the animal's ruff.
Sparrow had said—Sparrow had boasted—that he would bring Saburo his bride; and so he would.
But precisely how was another matter.
Sparrow's handmirror held a tiny image of Plane Three; raw swamp, not Mala's dome kilometers to the west of where the smith now focused. He would enter the plane through a discontinuity rather than by forcing a hole in the Matrix. To do otherwise would be to alert the entire android defense structure, and Sparrow was under no illusions as to his ability to battle through that.
He had nothing against kidnapping the princess against her will. Saburo had directed him to bring the girl; if Saburo felt there should be limitations on the methods his servant chose to use, then he should have said so from the start. But Sparrow had no intention of getting into a biting match with a sabertooth, either.
So . . . Sparrow would have to enter Plane Three at some distance from his objective and travel through the swamp to Mala's outlying bower. The terrain was unpleasant; and, while the wildlife didn't include sabertooths, there were some hazards of a similar line.
The beast which Sparrow studied through his window on other realities was a dimetrodon several meters long. It would weigh several hundred kilos after a good meal. It lay on a rock, sideways to the dawn. The sail arching high on the dimetrodon's back would warm its blood more quickly to splay-foot after its prey. Such beasts wouldn't be the real danger of the journey, but they weren't negligible either.
The dog peered at the dimetrodon's reduced image. She growled from the back of her throat, uncertain of what she saw but disquieted by it. Sparrow stroked his pet.
The smith adjusted the handmirror, returning—for he had stared at this during three hours of the past four—to a scene in the Open Lands. In the palace of the Emperor Venkatna, a tracery of metal and silk-fine semi-conductor crystals waited for operators who could drive it to capacity.
Sparrow shifted his viewpoint down into the Web's microstructure. He did not understand the mechanism by which the construct channeled event waves, but he could use one. . . .
There were, of course, risks.
The big man stood up in sudden decision. He switched off the viewing mirror which he had built according to shadows in the Matrix that no one but he could have seen.
What Sparrow built now would be a still greater triumph of his craft.
The bitch rubbed against her master's legs. The braces of living metal which Sparrow had made for both of them clicked together. She could sense his excitement, and she felt it was too long since they had hunted together. . . .
It took the smith over an hour to gather the raw materials which he needed, then to array them precisely to the side of the split-log bench. Any surface would do when he entered the Matrix, but the old symbols were best.
The dog waited, alert but patient. The smith lay down on the bench and closed his eyes. After a moment, the pile of raw materials began to shift. Stones grew webs of gossamer crystals, doped with traces of other elements at the necessary points in the silicon lattice.
Chance could have brought the molecules together in this fashion. Somewhere in the infinite universes, chance had done so.
The will of Sparrow the Smith picked atoms from the pile he had prepared and shifted them in accordance with the pattern only he could have discerned in the Matrix. From the ores and scraps of metal grew a delicate object—small, but in every other respect a duplicate of the probability generator in Venkatna's audience hall.