Science and Sorcery Read Online Free Page A

would not survive a second failure.  Tomlinson would have grounds for claiming that he had allowed her some rope to hang herself, if the entire affair proved to be nothing more than a waste of time.  “With your permission, I will leave for New York immediately.  The body can be transferred from the morgue to the FBI building in the city and dissected.  We need to know what happened to her, and why.”
     
    “Good luck,” Tomlinson said.  He wrote out a travel pass, allowing her to draw a vehicle from the motor pool or board a plane on the FBI’s dime, and then nodded.  “Find out what the hell is going on.”
     
    ***
    The new world was...eerie.
     
    Golem walked down a street, hidden behind a concealing glamour, slowly taking in his surroundings.  A human would have had real problems accepting what he was seeing, let alone comprehending it, but Golem was very far from human.  Seemingly impossible sights – carriages moving with neither horses nor magic, or flickering squares displaying images of people or places – were nothing more than another piece of data on just what had happened since mana had faded from the world.  Clearly, the human race had found another way to bend nature to its will.
     
    The population looked healthy and happy, perhaps healthier than the population had been, back before Golem had been buried to wait for the mana to return.  They wore clothes made from materials Golem couldn't recognise, some of them so thin and patchy that he’d taken the women for sorceresses, women so powerful that none would dare to molest them.  But there was barely enough mana in the air to support the concealing glamour hiding his true nature, let alone a full-fledged sorceress.  The immodest clothes, he realised slowly, were their standard form of dress.  This society was happy and confident in a way that his old society had never been, even before the Thirteen.
     
    There were towering buildings, reaching up so high that they seemed to brush against the sky, so tall that Golem found it hard to imagine how they’d been built without magic.  They might not have been floating in the air, but they were remarkable, far larger than any mundane structure he’d seen in the old world.  Strange metal objects flew through the air, big enough to be dragons, if all the dragons hadn't died out during the war with the Thirteen.  Golem couldn't even begin to understand how they flew – there wasn’t enough mana in the air to support a child, let alone something the size of a dragon – but the puzzle wasn't important.  It was just another piece of data for him to contemplate while continuing his mission.
     
    He found it hard to understand the various shops he was looking at, even when he tried to draw comparisons between the new shops and the ones he recalled from before his slumber.  Some seemed to sell potions, or drugs; others seemed to see objects that meant nothing to him, although they seemed very important to the scurrying humans all around him.  It was almost a relief when he found the bookshop and walked inside, looking around for the historical section.  He needed to know what had happened in the thousands of years he’d been sleeping under the ocean. 
     
    Unsurprisingly, the books were written in a strange language.  It didn't seem to be related to Babel, the language everyone had spoken back before the mana leeched away.  Patiently, Golem picked up one of the books and worked a translation spell, hoping that there was enough mana in the world to allow the spell to work.  It was a mental spell, rather than a physical spell intended to affect the outside universe, but...he allowed himself a sigh of relief as the letters seemed to twist, becoming something more comprehensible.  A moment later, he was thumbing through the book and trying to understand just what had happened.  Nothing quite seemed to make sense.
     
    It was nearly an hour before he started to realise the truth.  He’d