Games Wizards Play

Sol IIIa, Sol, Sol III

OH NO. IT’S STARTING. It’s starting now.

I’m not ready for this!

And then Nita got a grip. Of course I’m ready for this. I’m a visionary. I will handle this thing, because I can see at least some of what’s going to happen. Which is more than most of the people here can do . . .

And then, instantaneously, she had that terrible sensation she’d experienced occasionally before—that she was standing on a knife-edge, and huge forces were waiting to see which way she moved. This is how it was the first time, she thought, remembering what happened to Kit’s first Edsel-antenna in Grand Central Terminal all that while ago, at the end of the Ordeal that first made them wizards: the smoking abyss full of terrible, hungry eyes anticipating their fall, the sword-bridge that the noon-forged steel became and that they both had to cross. They had been over that bridge in other forms many times since.

Now everything was different, everything was changing. But some things are still the same, Nita thought. Have to be. Have to be!

She lifted her gaze to Kit. Their eyes locked.

“Whatever you have to do,” Kit said, “do it. I’m with you.”

She turned away from Kit and went over to Penn and took his hands. He gasped in air and stared at her in shock.

“I am looking at you,” she said. “I am looking at you across the board. Do you see me here? Do you understand me? I’m looking at you. If you’re going to do something, if what you said to me was for real, this would be the moment.”

Penn stared at Nita in astonishment and terror, uncomprehending. Close behind her, she could feel Kit staring at her, not understanding either, and very afraid.

But still not moving. Not saying a word, holding still, letting her keep her balance. Trusting her—

“Just hold still,” she said to Penn, and closed her eyes.

Because you have to see this. I can see it now. Everything’s come together and I can see it at last. The choice to see became the vision, and it blinded her and spilled over out of her. Fire, fire everywhere, flurrying like wings, like something trapped in a cage and beating its wings against the bars of the cage to get out. And crying out in a voice like fire, the voice from her dreams, Let me out, let me go—

Fire, fire that flies. All the stories about the phoenix, the fire that burned out and then rekindled itself in a blaze of magic: this force was the source of them. Not stories after all, and not just magic. The nearest star, the Sun—

Something living in the Sun. Something that was part of the Sun; a living thing, its soul, the way the soul lives in a body. But also, something that left, that went voyaging. And then got caught away from home . . . got lost. That got trapped somewhere it shouldn’t have.

And in a flash, literally a flash of light, Nita understood it.

I have a problem with crowds, Penn had said to her once.

Nita swallowed. And why wouldn’t you, she thought, if something inside you was used to this kind of life? Solitary, so alone, built to be that way, happy to be that way. But stuffed into a place where you couldn’t get out, where you were trapped and crammed in tight and tied down by thought and emotion, by fear and pain . . . She thought about how Ronan had been, sometimes, his edginess and troublesome ways when the Michael Power had been inhabiting him, an immortal crammed into so small a space, physically and temporally. Of course Ronan’s still a pain in the butt sometimes but it wasn’t all him being the pain all the time—

Nita thought about Penn’s grandfather, too. You have an outrider, he’d said, practically the moment he laid eyes on her. And his grandson . . . how long did he suspect? Nita thought. Is this why Penn never wanted to spend time with him? Because his grandfather knew, but didn’t know what to do? Just hoped, maybe, that in another culture what was inside him would either find a way to sleep peacefully and leave his grandson alone—or else escape at last?

And now, here, finally, concentrated, was all that power—everything it needed to break its prison, to get free. And the spell was in sync with it. The spell’s been trying to break the connection, to let it go! “Do you get it now, Penn?” Nita said. “You’ve had it exactly backwards. You don’t want to be controlling anything to do with the Sun. You want to be taking the control structures away! You’ve got something in you that’s been in your family for a long, long time, stuck in your souls one after another, generation after generation, and it’s never been strong enough to get away before. But now it is! You’ve got the connection, you’ve got the spell! Turn it loose, let it go, set it free!”

He stared at Nita, shaking his head. “I don’t—”

“You do! You said I had something that you needed. This is it! What you needed is what I see!” She could hardly see him through the blaze of fire, the great wings beating. All she could do was grip his hands until he squeezed his eyes shut with the pain, and had no choice but to see what she was seeing. The spell was active, the linkage was there, the vision ran down the linkage and Nita felt it shock through Penn as if her hands were a live wire he’d grabbed.

The shock hit her too; Nita fell to her knees, shaken, as the vision departed from her. She felt Kit come up behind her to help her as Penn went staggering away from them toward the core of the spell, the Speech-notation all around him flaring with furious golden fire as he stumbled through it, disturbing its power flow.

There at the core of the spell, Penn reeled a moment in panic or indecision. Then he fell, collapsing onto the innermost power control statements, obscuring them, taking them out of the circuit. And as he fell, fire flowered upward.

Nita had to laugh out loud from delight now, looking up at the huge and blinding shape towering over them, throwing its wings wide, first one pair, and then another even larger. This was the fulfillment of the visions of burning that had been haunting her dreams. Flamboyant, Nita thought, isn’t that what I said about him all that time ago? Now I know why! The immense shape kept growing, rearing up and up from the lunar surface like a great fierce bird. It beat those massive burning wings so that shadows fled and flickered among the craters in the mountain peaks, as if the whole surface of the dark side of the Moon was alive with fire. It’s a good thing we’re turned the other way right now, because if they could see this from Earth . . . !

The fire burst higher upward, and as it did, it found a voice and roared with joy. Free, it cried. At last, at last!

Like everyone else on that crater-plain, Nita stood transfixed. She thought she had never heard a more beautiful voice. It was warm; it was glad; it was fierce with incalculable power. And it was female.

If Nita could’ve spared breath for anything but wonder, she would’ve burst out laughing. Oh, Penn. Is this why you’ve always been trying so hard to impress the ladies? Or were you just overcompensating . . . ?

But the urge to laugh left Nita as that impassioned and startling regard turned from the great company gathered around them to fix on her. Nita held very still. She didn’t quite feel like a mouse under the eye of a hawk, but that fiery gaze was profoundly unnerving nonetheless.

One who sees, said the fiery shape—immensely grave, immeasurably joyous—take my thanks. Not until I was seen again could I be found. Not until I was found again could I be freed.

All Nita could think to do was bow: Who knew what the protocol was for this kind of meeting? If there even was any. “Elder sister,” she said, “go to your place, and go well.”

I go! the great voice cried. And the form of fire launched itself up into cislunar space, and then arced around inward and made for the Sun.

And not far away, on the other side of Penn’s spell, Dairine stood staring down at it. The wizardry lay there still burning, afire with power, discharging like crazy: it was hard to make out anything definite from it. The whole thing was alight like a—

Wait, Dairine thought. Because one place where the semiconscious Penn wasn’t lying was not alight. Or rather, its boundaries were: but not the empty inside of it. Nothing was written there: no power moved.

It’s a lacuna.

You always have to leave a little wiggle room for the elemental presences, Mehrnaz had said, as if it was something very basic and elementary and it was surprising that Dairine didn’t know it.

And even Penn had mentioned it. A way we remember when the Sun was different, when it breathed differently. And all the characters of the Speech in that spot had been faded down into conditional status, into and/or. Something had been there once, something that wasn’t there now.

A lacuna, a loophole, a place where something isn’t.

Except that something is. Because otherwise, why would his spell be misbehaving like this?

Because there had been something else in the lacuna. Something that wasn’t supposed to be in the lacuna. Something that wasn’t designed for it. And whatever happened here, whatever that creature was—an elemental presence, Mehrnaz’s voice whispered again—it was now heading for the Sun to fill the real physical space or place that the spell-lacuna represented.

And when it gets there, whatever’s in there right now will be destroyed!

For a second Dairine was struck speechless and numb by sheer dread. Then she bent down and scooped up Spot, able to think of nothing but how the Sun had tried speaking to her once and she hadn’t understood it but Roshaun had, even though something had been wrong, something had been missing that she couldn’t understand. There’s something wrong here, Sker’ret had said; he’d been monitoring the wizardry they were working. Something’s interfering with the magnetic flow at this level. A darkness . . .

An empty place that should not have been empty. The memory in Penn’s spell of a space waiting to be refilled. For the elemental presence to reassert itself . . . And then Roshaun’s spell on the Moon that had failed when he was pulling energy out of the Sun while fighting the Pullulus, even though the spell should have worked, it really should have. Except his data was skewed because there should have been something in the Sun and it wasn’t—

“We need the coordinates for where we did the spell,” Dairine said as soon as she could find some breath again: she felt like she’d been punched, and even now she was fighting for air. “The one where we fixed the Sun when he was visiting and it was acting up! Project the solar rotation forward to now. Then pull the structural and locational data from the lacuna subset into the calculation, come on, hurry up, Spot—!”

Done, he said. Execute it?

“Yes!!”

They vanished.

Seconds later Dairine stood above the boiling, roiling surface and stared down into it, shaking all over. All alone now, no one but Spot to help her, no other backstop. Below her, nothing but the fire that would destroy her if the fragile force-field bubble protecting her should fail. Strong as the wizardry was that was keeping it in place, it wouldn’t last forever. Even with four other wizards holding it with her, the last time Dairine had been party to this wizardry, it had always been in danger of collapsing within a matter of minutes.

And out there, somewhere between here and the Moon, another danger was approaching. She had very little time. If that shape of fire got here before she’d done what she had to do—

She refused to think about that. “Okay,” she said to Spot. “One of the things I need, I’ve got. The other’s at home. I need you to open a very narrow transit window to my bedroom and get me the Sunstone.”

That . . . It was very rarely that she heard Spot hesitate. That is going to be dangerous. If it breaches the force field—

I knew I should have brought it with me. Dammit, I knew. “Never mind, do it now,” Dairine said, and held out her hand, waiting.

Spot was silent.

The next thing she felt was a flash of nearly unbearable heat. Stunned, Dairine opened her mouth to cry out, probably the last sound she would ever make—

And something heavy fell into her hand: a heavy gold collar, with a big cabochon stone set in the front of it, its pale yellow color almost completely washed out in the light blasting up from the star around her.

“Right,” she muttered, and managed with a struggle to get the collar around her neck. The wizardries embedded in the stone weren’t so much the issue here: its real value at the moment was as a targeting device.

The perception of heat around her was increasing nonetheless. There was only so much power built into the force field: if the local temperature flared, if she had to spend too long here, the force field would fail and she would cease to exist a millisecond later. To try to conserve some power Dairine whispered a few words in the Speech to tighten the field, snugging it in around her and Spot until it was barely more than a sheath around her clothes and skin. There wasn’t a lot of air stored in it, the wizardry that ran the shield would only run it as long as she was conscious, and when she used up the last of her oxygen—

Never mind. There in that torrential brilliance Dairine closed her eyes—not that this helped that much, such was the awful potency of the light around her—and did her best to get into sync with the Sunstone. She’d spent months teaching it to be sensitive to the Sun’s moods. Now, though, it was another set of moods she was searching for. A former user’s—

Dairine held still, listened. It was hard. As the Stone’s sympathy with the star around her settled in deeper, the noise of its burning, of its life, became more and more inescapable, more deafening every second. Dairine squeezed her eyes shut, concentrated, did her best to block out that noise. It was other life she was more interested in.

Local temperature is increasing past shield tolerance, Spot said softly.

“Ask me if I care,” Dairine muttered, concentrating on the stone. The noise around her, the roar of the star, kept getting louder and louder. The Sunstone’s not enough. It’s been too long since he’s been in contact with it—She’d been afraid of that, but she had to try the stone first, because if she tried the stone and her other solution and neither of them worked, then she would have to give up. And if she had to give up . . .

From out of her pocket, Dairine pulled the thing she was hoping she wouldn’t have to use: the chain of emeralds held together with a single strand of the Speech—the gems Roshaun had given her, saying, They’re like your world’s color, everything’s so green, I always think of you when I see these. And the chain—

She tucked Spot under her arm, stripped the round emeralds off it and stretched the long chainlike sentence in the Speech between her hands. It was two names, actually; a long version of hers restated in the Wellakhit style, Dairine daughter of Elizabeth daughter of Pearl and so on back ten generations and more to match his: Roshaun ke Nelaid ke Teriaufv ke Umren . . . But in his strand of the chain were words and concepts and feelings that did not appear in the public version of his name, just as there were in hers—things no one else knew but they two alone. At first Dairine thought about pulling the two strands apart. Then she thought, And what if this doesn’t work? If I’ve got to go, I’m going with them still wrapped around each other.

She wrapped the twinned strand of Speech-made-concrete around the fist of the hand that was holding Spot to her, and gripped the Sunstone with the other, closed her eyes again, and concentrated. That ridiculous lazy drawl of his, the long, graceful gait, the truly silly height of him, the bizarre dress sense, that supercilious smile: all these things she summoned up. And the way his eyes softened and went strangely quiet that time he said “Just” friendship? A poor modifier for so high and honorable a state.

Under her the fire roiled, the subsurface turbulence growing. Local temperature increasing sharply, Spot said. Survivability index is decreasing. Force field duration estimated fifteen seconds . . .

“Going to use another ten of those looking,” Dairine muttered. And maybe another five . . .

—and just kept listening, listening. That voice, laughing, scorning, speaking in anger or pain; you are the only one who hears me. The only one. Around her the fire licked and blasted at her shield, and Dairine hung on, stopped breathing, turned off the life support because it was eating energy, the roar scaled up—

And she heard it. The whisper. So weak, so faint.

Down! she said to the force field. Obediently, it sank further into the Sun’s roiling plasma. The whisper was weaker. But it was also closer.

Down!

She sank faster. The heat began to pierce the shield now. Nonsurvivable in five seconds, Spot said.

Dairine let go of the Sunstone, thrust her arm out into the fire, reached, felt around—

Her hand touched something that wasn’t plasma.

Dairine clutched it, desperate. Get us out! she screamed to Spot as all around a new wave of turbulence rose up around her as if from a sea suddenly agitated to storm.

The roaring scaled up once more until it obliterated everything. White fire utterly blinded her as the shield began to collapse.

She felt the familiar fizz of a last-ditch transit spell folding in around her. From light, everything abruptly flashed into darkness as a great burning winged shape came diving in past her through the corona and arrowed into the surface of the Sun as if into a pool.

Under Dairine the chromosphere heaved and rippled like the liquid it was. The enraged corona lashed at her as everything went black. And the last thing Dairine knew was the sense of something heavy, inescapable as gravity, dragging her down . . .

A bare moment later she came down on something hard and cold with a heavy weight clutched in her arms, crushing her. I can’t breathe. Am I in vacuum? But she didn’t care; the coldest vacuum to be found from one end of the universe to the other couldn’t have kept her from opening her eyes right then. Wheezing, her chest tight with fear or anoxia, she didn’t care which, Dairine opened her eyes to see what she held.

It was something in humanoid shape, long, lean, still afire with terrible light, too bright to look at—limbs splayed every which way, a heavy dead weight. Dairine gasped again, struggled up from beneath, desperately blinked her tearing eyes to try to see something besides a blur. As she tried to sit up, long hair fell into her face—sun-golden, silken fine. In anguished haste she pushed it away, squinting and wincing into the raging glow around what she held, trying to see something that mattered more than hair—a face, eyes with life in them, a chest with breath in it—

What Dairine held stirred weakly against her. She felt a heart beating, she heard a wheeze of breath. And now the tears in her eyes weren’t entirely to do with the light, though that blazed still. “Oh God!” she moaned, trying again to sit upright, but he was too heavy, and she was too tired all of a sudden, it was all hitting her at once . . .

An instant later there was a shape bending over her, even taller, nearly as lean after months of pain suffered for the one who’d been lost. He helped her with the weight, shifted it so that Dairine could at least sit up. Nelaid was holding her in one arm and his son in another, gasping with shock as awful as Dairine’s. He looked up into the dark of the space above the Moon and cried, “Miril!”

And barely a gasp later Roshaun’s mother was there in a spill of silver-fair hair, taking everything in, pulling off her long outer robe and wrapping her son in it. Roshaun shone through it like a candle. Nelaid and Miril bowed themselves over him, holding him tightly, shaking with their own anguish and relief. “He’s breathing,” the Lady Miril was whispering, “O Aethyrs be thanked, he’s breathing . . . !” And then she threw her arms around Dairine. “Daughter, he’s breathing, what did you do . . . ?”

“What I taught him,” Nelaid said, his voice muffled as he once more held his son close.

“What he taught me,” Dairine muttered, and rubbed at her eyes, still tearing uncontrollably. But it wasn’t so much because of the light now. That was slowly fading, and even through the blurring of her eyes Dairine could make out the long nose, the clean-cut features. There was a slight frown stamped on them.

Someone came astronaut-bouncing along toward them, a little clumsily. “Sorry,” Dairine’s dad said, thumping to his knees beside them, “I keep thinking I’m getting the hang of this and then I fall over again. Dair, what the hell was that, what did you just do there?”

“Got in trouble,” Dairine said between heaves of breath.

“You have no idea,” her dad said, “no idea how grounded you are!”

“Okay,” Dairine said, and fell over on him.

He caught her and held her in a way not too much different from the way Nelaid was holding Roshaun. Nelaid’s voice was choked. “Oh, my son, how are you even here, how does this come to be, what have you been doing?”

A long, long silence. And then, though his eyes stayed squeezed shut, then came words at last, raw and difficult, in a voice unused for so long:

“Holding . . . someone’s . . . place.”

“Take him home,” Dairine gasped. “I’ll be right behind you.”

“You will not,” her father said. “You will stay right here until Nel comes back for you.”

“Okay,” Dairine said, and slumped back onto her dad again.

“Nita? Kit!” she heard him shout.

“Roshaun,” Dairine said, and fainted with a smile on her face.

A crowd of medical wizards was already gathering around Roshaun and Dairine and Penn, Matt being one of the first to arrive. Nita knew she had nothing to add to their expertise: she stood back and let them get on with it. Besides, she was in a state of shock of her own, though she didn’t require medical assistance.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Oh, I can’t believe it—”

“I think you’d better,” Kit said behind her, hushed.

“But finally . . .” Nita said. So many of the things she’d seen in her head, the terrors, the things she didn’t understand: in terms of this, they made sense. This was what had been coming. This was what she had been afraid of—Wow, was I dim!

“So all that worrying you were doing,” Kit said, “turns out to have been for nothing.”

“Not for nothing,” she said, so torn between annoyance and relief that she was having trouble pushing the words out. “For this. It was all part of the process. Everything counts.” Just for that moment, the vision was staggering, and Nita saw it whole; event and causality with joined hands, dancing, dipping each other, taking turns leading, deadly serious but laughing, too. It was too big for her to take in, but Nita knew suddenly that it wouldn’t always be. I’ll get the hang of this. It may take forever but it’s going to be so much fun when it isn’t scaring me to death . . .

“Oh,” Kit said, “you mean all the times you nearly killed Penn?” Already the teasing was climbing into his voice.

“Yeah, those, apparently,” Nita said, somewhat annoyed with herself. Me and my temper . . .

“The time when you charred all those pancakes?”

“Look, you know that was the burner, it’s got a short in it somewhere, we need to—”

“Or the time after the Cull when you were freaking out on the dance floor?”

So close. And the gold in his eyes . . .

He was laughing now. “Or no, wait, I know, the time when—”

She turned around and grabbed him by the shoulders and kissed him.

Kit shut up. His eyes went wide. Then they closed.

Some seconds later Nita pulled back and regarded him with shivery satisfaction. “That worked,” she said.

“Uhh,” Kit said. It was the sound of someone who’d briefly forgotten how to talk. He opened his eyes, and then they widened again at the sight of something behind Nita.

“What?” she said.

From behind her there came a soft throat-clearing noise. Kit made a face that suggested that Nita needed to sort herself out and turn around.

She put a little air between herself and Kit, and turned. Irina was standing there looking at them, jiggling her baby in his sling. Her parakeet was sitting on her head, looking behind her and far above at where that shape of fire had been. “You know,” Irina said, “I don’t know if we should let you participate in any more group projects. Things keep happening.”

Nita blushed. “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry, everything sort of all came together and—”

“If you’re sorry,” Irina said, “I’m not sure I understand why. The Simurgh has been missing for a long, long time; it’s kind of nice to discover where it’s been.”

Nita and Kit stared at each other. “It’s not like stars can’t do without a soul fragment,” Irina said. “Lots of them do. There’s even a technical term for it, because some stars just have it in them to wander, and the attempt to repress that tendency is usually counterproductive. Sooner or later the star Exhales a soul-fragment and lets it go wandering around for a while, and eventually, after getting the urge out of its system, it makes its way back home. Sometimes these stars go a long way away first, and sometimes they get lost. But this is the first case I’ve ever heard of where an Exhalation got lost inside a human.”

“Really?” Nita said.

“Yes,” Irina said. “And by the way, do you know the Chinese name for that star-bird in the old stories?”

They shook their heads.

“Peng,” Irina said. “Usually these days Anglicized to ‘Penn.’” She paused a moment to let that sink in. “Anyway, the Simurgh used to have a fairly regular schedule—it would journey for twelve thousand years or so, a ‘Simurgh year,’ and then come home to roost. But then it went missing. At least now we know where. And there are those who’ll use today’s events to suggest that one of the reasons the Sun has been behaving so unpredictably of late is that it was starting to suffer ill effects from its Exhalation being gone so long. Or from being in the very near neighborhood but never coming home.” In his sling, Sasha moved a little and made a plaintive noise; Irina jiggled him a bit harder.

“Oh,” Kit said.

“Yes,” Irina said with an air of great patience. “So we’re going to have to wait a while to see if that’s the case. In the meantime, we’ve got to recess for a couple of hours and clean this place up enough to do the remaining two demonstrations. And since the live demo of your mentee’s spell has revealed a serious functional flaw, he’s going to have to revise it and submit it for testing before the manual steering committee allows it to be listed for public use. When he’s up to it, anyway.” She glanced over toward where Penn was sitting, being checked over by the medical staff and looking thoroughly shattered. “In the meantime, I’d appreciate it very much if in the next few days you two would make time for me to debrief you, again—” She gave them both a stern look. “And after that, please go home and try not to do anything destabilizing for the next month or so, all right? I have a family holiday planned.”

“My dad’s going to want to barbecue for you again,” Nita said.

At that, Irina smiled. “That I won’t mind,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’d appreciate it if you did a pre-debrief report for me in your manuals. Nothing too detailed . . . five or ten pages each will do.”

Nita and Kit both groaned.

“Sorry,” Irina said. “If you’re going to routinely be a force for good, you’d better get used to the paperwork.”

And she disappeared without even a puff of dust to mark where she had stood.

Kit heaved a long breath of relief.

“Yeah,” Nita said. She rubbed her face. “Come on, let’s go see if Dair’s recovered a little.”

But one more thing apparently wanted to be handled before she left. Matt extricated himself from among the crowd of medical people, and with him, Penn stood up. The two of them, bouncing very shallowly so as to stay stable, made their way over to Nita and Kit.

“Gonna take this one back to San Francisco,” Matt said, “and let him get some rest.”

“But I . . .” Penn was rubbing the back of his neck in a way that seemed to have nothing to do with trying to put his hair to rights. He looked mortified. “I feel so different.”

“I bet you do,” Nita said. “After having what you had stuck inside you for all your life get out all of a sudden . . .” She shivered. “It has to leave behind, I don’t know . . .”

“A lacuna?” Penn said.

Nita had to laugh at that. But the laughter trailed off as she realized Penn was looking at her as if he’d never really seen her before.

“Yeah,” Penn said. “My head feels, I don’t know, a lot less—crowded.”

“I think you need to talk to our buddy Ronan,” Kit said. “He’s been through something, well, it’s not just like this, but he might be able to shed some light on what it’s going to be like for you now.”

Penn nodded, looking around him in an unfocused way. Then he looked back at Kit and Nita with an extremely unnerved expression. It was like the face of a person of exquisite taste and coolness who had suddenly realized he’d left the house wearing nothing below the waist.

“Have I, uh,” Penn said, “have I been a complete jerk?”

Nita and Kit traded glances and then turned back to him. “Every waking minute,” Nita said.

“To both of us,” said Kit. “But mostly to her.”

“No way, more to him!” Nita said. “You provoked him into a duel!” Then she sighed. “I guess some of your trouble’s been secondary to having a frustrated Exhalation stuck inside you. But I wouldn’t blame her for everything. She had to have some raw material to work with . . .”

A little dejected, Penn looked back and forth between the two of them. “Does this mean you’re not going to mentor me anymore?”

Nita gazed at him in shock and wasn’t surprised to see Kit doing the same. For his part, Kit burst out laughing. “Penn,” he said, “you don’t need us now! You’ve got the full attention of the Invitational’s finals panel, and they’ll put you in touch with wizards who’ll be way better than us at helping you debug your spell for the manual.” He raised his eyebrows at Nita. “Maybe they can set you up with Dairine.”

“Nooooo,” Nita said, glancing sideways at the small crowd around her. “I think Dairine is going to be busy. Better talk to Irina and see who she recommends.”

“Okay,” Penn said. “Well, listen . . . I’m really sorry. I wish this had gone better.”

Nita shook her head and smiled, glancing over again at Dairine. “Penn,” she said, “don’t sell yourself too short. You’ve been a pain in the butt, but this has gone way better than you think. So you get going, okay? And go incredibly well.”

He smiled sheepishly, and looked surprised and pleased when Kit put a fist up to bump. But when Nita moved forward and put her arms around him and gave him a big squeeze, his mouth fell open.

“Go on,” she said as she let him go, noting with amusement Kit’s slightly widened eyes. “Get out of here and go get some rest.”

“Yeah,” Penn said. “Yeah. Dai stihó . . .”

He and Matt moved off together and dropped out of sight. When they were gone, Kit regarded her with astonishment. “You willingly touched him,” he said.

“Yes, I did,” Nita said. “Doesn’t mean I’m ever going to do it again . . .”

“Good,” Kit said, with such emphasis that Nita gave him a cockeyed look.

“Not the jealousy thing!” Nita said. “You have zero need for that. Meanwhile, we have other things to think about.” And she looked around them. “One of them being that I think I’ve got my sister back . . .”

Dairine was sitting up among her own medical people, who were leaving her one by one. She looked white and drawn and incredibly tired, but her eyes were bright, and the grin of absolute joy spread across her face gave Nita a pang of happiness. She dropped to her knees in the moondust and threw her arms around her sister and whispered in her ear, “I am so happy.”

Dairine hugged her back. “So am I,” she said. “You have no idea.”

“And still in big trouble,” their dad remarked.

Dairine threw her hands in the air. “Okay!” she said. “Okay! I did a dangerous thing! But look how well it turned out!”

Her father covered his eyes and shook his head. “You are plainly too drunk on adrenaline and happiness for us to have this conversation right now,” he said. “And I am too relieved to see Roshaun back, and happy for Nelaid and Miril, and amazed that I have lived to see a Phoenix rise from the ashes, more or less, and blown away that I’m standing on the surface of the Moon while this whole thing is going on, even though I keep falling down every time I try to get anywhere—”

“That would be because your pockets are full of Moon rocks,” Nita said. “They still have mass, Daddy, and when you—”

“Don’t interrupt.—And I’m completely covered with dust and need a shower—”

“Yes, you do. So why don’t you take Dairine home? Nelaid’ll come and get her as soon as they’ve got Roshaun sorted out.”

Nita’s sister was staring at her with a thoughtful kind of astonishment. “And this has been really good for you,” Dairine said, “because I have never heard you speak so much good sense at any one time in my life.” She leaned up against Nita. “And you were the one who told me to stick with this, even though I was jet-lagged out of my mind. Now I’m wondering if I’d even have made all these connections without being so wired from exhaustion and pissed off at Mehrnaz’s people!” And she laughed wearily. “Maybe not. Maybe the Powers know what they’re doing . . .”

Nita smiled at her. “From you,” she said, “that’s some concession.”

A movement off to one side caught Nita’s eye. She turned and saw Mehrnaz Moon-bouncing in their direction, and within a few moments she had joined Nita on her knees next to Dairine and thrown her arms around her. “I told you,” she said, “I told you how awesome you were. Do you believe me now?” She turned to Nita. “She went in the Sun! That is so amazing!”

Dairine laughed. “You think that was amazing,” she said to Nita, “you should have heard me tell off her aunt. That was something.”

Mehrnaz clapped her hands in delight. “It truly was! You should have seen her face afterward. It would have curdled milk for hours.”

“The only problem I have with that now,” Dairine said, “is that it’s probably going to make more trouble for you with your family.”

“It’s not,” Mehrnaz said. “There are people in my family who have been wanting to do that for decades. And Irina called my mother herself and told her—” Mehrnaz blushed. “Well, a lot of good things about me. So it’s all going to be okay. The World Earthquake Management Group has already messaged me about my spell, they want to use it as a jumping-off point for some other implementations . . .” Then her expression changed and she said nervously, “But I have to present next and you won’t be here!”

“Listen,” Dairine said, “you know I’m always right. Didn’t I tell you that you were going to make a difference in people’s lives? And see, you’re doing it already. So now I’m telling you you’re going to be fine, and I’m right about that too. So go get an energy drink or something and get ready to present. I have to go, I have to . . . but I’ll watch on the live manual hookup.” She patted Mehrnaz’s back. “And don’t forget your spell-casting thing! You’re such a star.”

“You made me shine,” Mehrnaz said, and leaned over and kissed Dairine’s forehead.

Dairine smiled. “Go on, get out of here before I faint some more.”

Mehrnaz bounced up, made a little baby-wave at Dairine, bowed to everyone else, and vanished.

“I think that’s all the cute I can stand for one day,” Dairine said. “Can I please go home and have some coffee before I leave for Wellakh?”

Nita rolled her eyes at her dad. “She’s all yours . . .”

Nita wandered back to where Kit had been watching this farewell and others. “I’ve just about had it,” she said. “Too much excitement. Shall we stick around for Mehrnaz and the other guy, or should we wander?”

“You could convince me,” Kit said—and then paused, suddenly going stiff and tense. “Except . . .”

Nita stared at him. “What’s the matter?”

Kit pointed. About fifty yards away, a tall dark shape draped all in shadows was standing quite still and watching them.

Nita laughed. “Feel around you,” she said. “It’s not our old friend. This is . . . someone different. Come on . . .”

She bounced over to him, Kit following her. When they came to a stop and the dust was settling, Nita said, “Pluto, Kit. Kit, Pluto.” She smiled. “See, I got it in the right order that time.”

Kit’s eyes widened. “Excellent Planetary,” he said, with a bow, “greetings, and may our orbits cross without too great a perturbation.”

He bowed to Kit in turn. “Always a pleasure to meet a cousin who is learned in the protocols,” he said. “I hope you’ll forgive me.” He turned to Nita. “Third time’s the charm, they say. May I have a word?”

“Sure,” she said, mystified, and moved a short distance away.

He followed her in his drift of shadows. “My own sphere calls me,” he said, “and I won’t be here much longer: just until the last two have presented. But before I leave I feel I should warn you that some of us who’ve been here have not merely been scouting new talent. Some of us are investigating possible future colleagues.”

Nita stared.

The shadowy shape looked down at her with an amused glint in its darker-than-dark eyes. “There is a sort of . . . I think in your idiom the phrase would be ‘steering committee.’ Those of us who have experience of more than one solar system lead it, as we’re thought to be less invested in the inevitable in-system politicking: more objective. In years when the Invitational’s held, normally one or another of us will be in attendance, looking for wizards who might be suited to such a role. Ideally, these are individuals who are not overawed by size or power, who’ve survived fairly broad or deep experience acquired rather early. Frequent change of specialties can be an indicator in some cases, or dissatisfaction with one area of study that leads to research into another. Sometimes personal crises are involved, but that’s not necessarily a diagnostic.”

“Uh. Pluto . . .”

“Call me Aidoneus if you like,” said the Planetary, enthroning itself on a nearby rock. (There was no way, Nita thought, in which the way it settled itself in majesty amidst its enfurling shadows could merely be thought of as “sitting down.”) “Still one of your words, but perhaps a bit more targeted. The other word has more to do with concept surrounding wealth. Not really my department . . .”

“Wow. Aidoneus. Okay.” Nita was fighting to keep about four different things from coming out of her mouth, any one of which would have made her sound like a needy six-year-old if it turned out that she was wrong. “Uh, when you say ‘such a role’—”

He said nothing, merely looked at her gravely.

You’re not gonna help me out at all here, are you, Nita thought. No, of course not. I’m gonna make myself look like an idiot in front of one of the oldest bodies in the Solar System. Probably older than the Sun. Oh, who the hell cares? Compared to this guy, Jupiter really is a spotty teenager. “I just want to make sure I’ve got the right end of this,” Nita said. “‘Colleagues?’ As in Planetaries.”

“Candidates for the position,” Aidoneus said. “Yes. There are routinely a number of beings in differing degrees of candidacy, or training for it, as no inhabited planet can be left without a Planetary for very long. Yet in the normal course of events, as I think you might guess, the position is hardly something that happens to someone overnight. Not even as I reckon overnight.” There was a dry smile somewhere inside that darkness: Nita could sense it. “Aptitude is the main issue. Though to be sure it needs a certain type of personality; or a range of personality traits that work together. A certain flexibility.”

“You’re thinking I might have that,” Nita said.

“You’d know best,” the dark Planetary murmured. “In any case, it’s something to think about in the long term, as you pursue other avenues of practice.”

“You wouldn’t even be mentioning this if you didn’t think I had a chance, would you?”

“It’s never wise to raise hopes without some possibility of them being fulfilled,” said Pluto. “Entropy is thereby increased. You might never come to that position, despite a lifetime of candidacy. You also know, I suspect, that the work is dangerous and wearing, and that Planetaries on your world can be relatively short-lived if circumstance and their own natures join to conspire against them.”

Nita did know that. She thought of Angelina Pellegrino, Planetary at twenty-two and dead at thirty-seven. She thought of Atiehwa:ta and Delacroix and Henoseki, who’d been mighty in the position and had fallen before their time. But also there were people like Asegaff and Davidson who’d worked as Planetaries and lived to a great old age, dying old and full of honor, among wizards at least. And is there any other kind of honor I’d care about?

Nita sat quiet for a moment. “I’m nowhere near ready for this.”

“That’s a matter for debate,” Aidoneus said. “But the assessment rests with you for the time being; others’ opinions, except for mine right now, and Irina’s of course, have no particular bearing on the process as it unfolds. Let’s just say that there’s interest, and if you choose to pursue the various courses of study needed for prequalification, you would find no opposition. That,” and Nita could actually feel Pluto’s Planetary grimacing, “normally comes later. When things start getting political.”

Nita let out an exasperated breath. “Do not even try telling me that there’s politics involved in this.”

“Sentient beings are involved in this,” Aidoneus said. “Of course there’s politics. Motivation and countermotivation, ebbing and flowing and chafing against one another: how else can things be? But we do what we can to make it work regardless.”

And it smiled at her inside those shadows. “In the meantime,” Aidoneus said, “consider your options. There’s no rush. And come see me.”

Nita smiled back. “I will.” She nodded back at Kit. “Can he come too?”

“Of course,” said the darkness of the outermost Solar System as it faded away. “ . . . But no furniture.”

Shortly thereafter Nelaid and Miril departed for Wellakh with the still only partially conscious Roshaun, taking Dairine and Nita’s dad with them for the first short hop to Earth; and the cleanup crews got busy putting the crater Daedalus in order for the Invitational’s last two presentations.

Out of a sense of sisterly loyalty (and because in a wholly nonvisionary manner she foresaw Dairine giving her endless grief if she didn’t), Nita decided to hang around long enough to see Mehrnaz’s presentation. There in company with the astonished thousands in the crater, an hour or so later, she and Kit watched the senior geomancers present trigger a violent earthquake that (while sparing the crater) shook the Moon for hundreds of miles around. But hardly had it begun before Dairine’s protegée flung the huge and dazzling network of her spell out across the lunar surface to its full extent, powered it up, and stopped the quake cold in a splendid anticlimax closely resembling a gigantic and devastating sneeze that had failed to go off.

The roar of applause that went up as the ground outside the crater quieted made Nita grin in triumph. But at the same time she felt the weariness coming down on her more and more heavily. And there was a peculiar flickering of images going on at the edge of her vision, a remnant of the kind of thing she’d briefly seen when Penn’s internal guest broke loose. She turned to Kit.

“So now what?” he said, knowing—she suspected—perfectly well.

“I’m wrecked,” she said. “I want to go home and do something really ordinary. Sit down, have something to drink . . .”

“Pitanga juice? Celery soda? Aussie lemonade?”

Nita punched him in the shoulder in the good old-fashioned way. “Tea.”

The two of them were just sitting down at the dining room table when the doorbell rang.

Kit pushed his mug off to one side and bent over to thump his forehead on the table. “Nooooo . . . .”

“Oh, now what,” Nita muttered, and got up to answer the bell. But as she opened the front door and realized who was standing there, her mood of slight annoyance fell right off. “Carl!” she said. “I thought Tom said you were off doing supervisory stuff again.”

“Nope,” he said. “Can I come in?”

“Sure,” Nita said, leading him into the dining room. “Want some of your coffee?”

“Thanks, but no need. I’ll only be here a few minutes. Hi, Kit.”

“Hey, Carl!”

He sat down at the table with them. “I wanted you to know that I’m available for counseling services over the next week or so should you require them,” he said, “because from the sound of it, and from even the short version of the report on the Invitational before they had to recess for the site cleanup, I can’t think offhand of anyone more likely to need them.”

“Well, Penn, possibly,” Kit said. “He’s going to have a ton of issues.”

“One of his local Supervisories will be handling that with him,” Carl said.

“Or maybe Dairine,” Nita said.

“Though she’s got an above-Supervisory wizard on hand already,” Carl said, “I suspect Nelaid would recuse himself. So extend the offer to her on my behalf, if you would.”

“No problem,” Nita said. “I’ll take care of it.”

“And I’ll drop a note in her manual as well. Meanwhile, how’re you holding up?”

Nita shivered. “I’m starting to see all kinds of things. Way better than usual, when I concentrate on them.”

“I think that’s partly due to exercising the talent in a crisis situation so close to a major shift in wizardly power balances,” Carl said. “Everybody who was in the neighborhood for the Simurgh’s release will be having similar surges . . . But you did something else, too. If I read your own précis correctly, when you were in a liminal state in the run-up to the finals, you extended an unusual kindness to an old enemy. And apparently had it returned in an unusual mode.”

Nita nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said.

“Dangerous game,” Carl said, looking at her thoughtfully. “But sometimes it pays off. So some of that energy will be coming back to you too. Has started to already, from the sound of it. What you want to see, for the next little while, you’ll probably find a lot easier to visualize. That’ll fade in the near future, so don’t let it spook you either way.”

“Okay.”

“And about Dairine,” Carl said. “What’s your take on how she’s holding up?”

Nita closed her eyes. “Well . . .”

On a splendidly upholstered couch, somewhere very far away, a long, lean form lay all wrapped up in the silken bedclothes of another world, as someone sat by the bed and looked down at him, practically vibrating with concern. And under the weight of that regard, eyes slowly opened—eyes colored a very pale gold—and gazed into the gray ones that watched.

The face was very still, almost bemused. Then its lips parted.

“Whatever took you so long?” Roshaun said.

A second later a pillow hit him in the face.

Nita opened her eyes again, acutely aware from unspoken context that a fierce bout of hugging was about to start, and she didn’t need to be there. “I think she’ll be fine,” she said. “Anyway, this isn’t so bad, for as long as it lasts.”

“Let’s just hope what you’re able to see stays at about this level before it starts falling off,” Carl said. “I know a visionary who had a surge and started receiving other planets’ sports channels on his interior antennae. Not exactly a picnic.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. It’s just, if now I’m supposed to be doing this other thing, then I guess this won’t stay . . .”

Carl looked at her quizzically. “What other thing?”

“Well, I mean, the Planetary thing. When all this time Tom’s been pushing me toward the visionary stuff . . .”

Carl looked at her with incredulity. “Pushing you? You’re kidding, right? You were always a visionary, Nita. You presented that tendency as part of your Ordeal! Almost—if I’ve got the timing right from what you’ve told me—almost before your Ordeal even got properly started. You fell asleep on top of your wizard’s manual and threw a prophetic dream right off the bat.”

“Well, yeah . . .”

“So this is one of your ground-of-being states. Of course it’ll always need sharpening: no gift’s ever perfect right out of the box. But you’re in no danger of losing it if you start concentrating on something else. In fact the two disciplines will probably help each other. If you did decide to go into Planetary work—and you’re talking about a course that would last decades, like a doctorate you get to keep doing over and over—then having the visionary talent overlaid on it can only be useful.”

Nita sighed. “Okay,” she said. “But I’m going to need a while to think this over.”

“So think,” Carl said. “Take your time. The Planetaries aren’t going anywhere.” Then he grinned. “Except around in big circles.”

“You mean ellipses.”

He gave her an amused look that said both You’re correcting a Supervisory? and Good, about time.

Then something went ping! and Nita and Kit looked at each other in confusion, as it wasn’t an alert that belonged to either of their phones.

“Sorry, just me,” Carl said, and went fishing in his pockets. A moment later he came up with his phone and peered at it.

“Huh,” he said, resigned. “So much for rooting for the home team.”

“What?” Nita said.

“Tiilikainen got it.”

“What?” said Kit.

“The second fella who presented,” Carl said, turning the phone around to show Nita and Kit the list of scores and rankings from the Moon. “The one with the solution for the Gulf Stream convection problem. He took it on points.”

Nita peered at the phone’s screen. “I could never say his name . . .”

“All those vowels,” Carl said.

“But Penn came in third,” Kit said.

“And Mehrnaz came in second!” Nita said. “Dairine’ll be glad.”

Carl nodded. “So that’s that for another eleven years,” he said. He turned off the phone and stuffed it back in his pocket. “By the way,” he said to Kit as he did so, “this reminds me. I meant to have a word with you about your sister.”

“Oh God,” Kit said in dread. “What’s she done now?”

“I wanted to let you know that while everybody was up on the Moon, Carmela was videoing the final rounds. She got some wonderful footage of the Simurgh going home, and that’s already hitting the intergalactic Nets. She’s probably going to clean up on it. I know she’s a very sensible person, as a rule, and God knows I don’t care to squash anyone’s entrepreneurial spirit. But do me a favor and make sure she doesn’t post it on the Web, all right?”

Kit covered his face and moaned.

Carl stood up, grinning. “A word to the wise, that’s all,” he said. “So you two have a good evening. Sit tight . . . I’ll let myself out.”

And he made for the front door and a moment later shut it behind him.

“Oh sweet Powers That Be in a bucket,” Kit said, staring into what was left of his tea and rubbing his hands through his hair. “When I catch up with her, we are going to have such words.”

“Might help you with that,” Nita said, as she got up and walked over to the sink with the cups. “Let’s go take care of it. Your mama cooking tonight?”

“I think we can talk her into it.” He held a hand out to her.

She took it.

Shortly thereafter a casual observer of suburban life would have seen a couple of teenagers walking down the street together, hand in hand in the deepening dusk, with the full Moon rising behind them. As they reached the nearby corner, one of them stood still, glancing back at that Moon, and then looked up at the other. Their faces were coming closer together in the dimness when the quiet around them was broken by one of their phones beeping for attention.

“Oh, come on now . . .”

“Go on, you might as well get it.”

A pause.

“What is it?”

“Oh no.”

“What? Let me see.”

A moment’s silence. And then the words:

“She didn’t.”

“She did.”

“And it’s going to be all over school in about a minute!”

There was a pause. “If I were her,” the deeper of the two voices said, “I would head for the most distant possible planet right now!”

And hand in hand they jogged around the corner and out of sight.