Lifeboats

“Some gates supposed to be left in place and operational,” Cheleb said. “Hoping transient encampments’ populations might change mind at last minute.” Hae shrugged, a rather hopeless gesture. “Not much chance of that, or so seems.”

They all stood a while looking at the gate management matrix. Slowly the bar graphs for transport numbers began to edge upwards again. Djam shook his head. “No,” he said, “the numbers are coming up again. A blip.” He sighed. “Probably it was one of those load-balancing things they were doing in the first couple of days, before you got here. Lots of flow without warning, then it would back down…”

They all looked sorrowfully at the graphs, and then Djam sat back down on the Stone Throne and picked up his reading again. “So,” Cheleb said to Kit, “See he’s getting you into his entertainments now. Still waiting for explanation why shouldn’t have a look at first entertainment in long series. Friend was very emphatic the other night.”

Kit rubbed his face and laughed, looking out sadly into the afternoon light. “If I show you that thing,” he said, “it’s just going to make me angry.”

“If distracts you from being sad,” Cheleb said, “might not be a bad thing.”

“Oh God,” Kit said. “All right! On your own scaly head be it.”

***

It did make Kit angry: incredibly so, as he hated some of the characters in the first sequence of the movies with a pure, white-hot flame. When he was home, Carmela knew that the quickest way to get Kit angry about almost anything was to start imitating Jar Jar Binks. Tonight, though, even though it made Kit angry, there was a strange kind of relief in it. The old familiar anger was distracting him from his own foolish hopes that something that couldn’t really happen here might’ve started happening anyway.

So he willingly lost himself as best he could in the intensely frustrating and unsatisfying display that was Phantom Menace. The only things making it tolerable were Djam’s delighted scorn—he described Qui-Gon Jinn as “a wise man who’s wise about everything but himself” and “the least effective wizard ever seen”—and Cheleb’s unremitting mockery of the Gungans and the pod race. (“Child only successful because machines love him as much as they love you!”)

It got dark, and Thesba rose over them, and things might’ve gone on in that mode well into the night, if Cheleb hadn’t gone into haes puptent at one point to bring out some of a sour-sweet fizzy drink that haes people favored, and then paused before sitting down on the Stone Throne with the other two. For some moments hae stood looking out across the plain.

“Come on, Cheleb, I’m dry here!” Djam said.

But Cheleb’s response was to stand there a little longer, and then say, as if hae doubted the evidence of haes own eyes, “…Fewer campfires out there than last night, cousin? Check me on this.”

Djam got up and went over to where Cheleb was, between two of the standing stones. He peered out into the dark. “It’s hard to tell,” Djam said.

“Broadcast power source over there having problems, perhaps?”

Kit looked up. “No,” he said “that would show on the monitor readout. Remember the other day? We saw that right away.”

And suddenly Kit’s mouth was going dry again. He reached for his manual, started flipping pages.

“Another blip?” Djam said.

Kit found his own gate monitoring readout, studied it. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Something’s wrong with the numbers.”

“What?” said Cheleb.

“They’re…” Kit peered at his manual for a few moments. “Show me what yesterday’s minima and maxima were like?” he said to it. “Thanks.”

The display altered, steadied down. No question, yesterday’s numbers were far lower. This morning’s had been similar. But now— Now they were scaling up again. They were heading for local throughput numbers that looked nearly ten percent higher than they had been.

“We should call Shask,” Djam said, that being their upstream Advisory, the Tevaralti wizard responsible for the management of the whole transport tree that culminated in their terminus gate. “Make sure this isn’t something going wrong.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. To his own surprise, his hands were shaking. It wasn’t fear. It was excitement. “Djam,” he said, “call him. If this is just us, I want to know.”

***

But it wasn’t just them.

All over the planet, wherever gate teams had transient camps nearby, the wizards managing them were seeing similar spikes in their local transport numbers. The increase had started very slowly, just that morning, early in the day, and had been growing steadily all day ever since. The Transients were picking up their belongings and had begun passing through the gates to the refuge worlds.

Most of them, it seemed, hadn’t made any particular fuss about it; they had simply moved through the nearest gates to those gates’ next destinations. Only a very few, late in the day, had spoken to the wizards and support staff at the gate complexes proper; and those who’d taken the time had simply said, “It’s all right, we’re of one mind now.” As the upstream supervisors started collecting reports to analyze them, and Kit and Djam and Cheleb, like many other wizards around the planet, read the incoming data and tried to understand it, one report jumped out and caught Kit’s attention. “Our sibik said we had to go,” one Tevaralti sire had said. “That the One had said that life was better. And so of course, then, we had to go.”

When he read that, Kit went hot and cold with terror and delight.

It did happen! he thought. It couldn’t happen until someone who was humanoid helped them make the connection. Someone who was a different kind of humanoid, and had a connection to a sibik….

…and to someone else.

For quite some time Kit was practically speechless with relief. Gradually that state began to shift as the evening went on and Thesba left the sky, and he and Djam and Cheleb gazed out into the plain, watching the campfires very slowly continuing to wink out. They wouldn’t all go out at once, Kit knew. But he grinned helplessly into the dark and thought, Tomorrow night, maybe. Or the day after. They’ll all be gone then.

And if his shiftmates caught sight of the wetness that once or twice went running down their strange Earth-companion’s face, neither of them said a thing.

***

That evening, along with the usual daily bulletins from the intervention supervisors regarding the progress of the population transfer, all kinds of other announcements came down, mostly to do with aperture-size increases to accommodate the extra outbound flow from the transients’ camps. Then one came down that was so unexpected, wizards all across the planet stared at it dumbfounded. And in many places—at least where their cultures allowed for such reactions—they began to cheer.

Word came down from Tevaral’s planetary, and from the executive committee handling business for the interconnect group on Tevaralti, that the upstream gates were going to start to be decommissioned: that traffic from the less active gate trees was already low enough that their transport load could be transferred to others; that nearly seven-eighths of the Tevaralti species had been successfully moved to the refuge worlds, and with the swiftly-increasing mobilization of the remaining fifteen percent or so, the true end of this intervention was in sight. No one had ever expected such an announcement to be made.

But then no one had been prepared for the attitudinal shift among the transients, or the way it had swept around the world. Nearly a million of them had already departed. Millions of others were in the process of being transferred to higher-capacity gates through which they could be moved more quickly. The transients’ encampments all over the planet were shutting down one by one.

Cheleb volunteered to take the late shift that night, claiming that hae was too excited to sleep. Kit was just weary, and was glad to let haem take it. But he had enough energy to text his Pop before he collapsed on his bed.

BUSY TODAY. GOOD THINGS ARE HAPPENING. BETTER THAN WE HOPED FOR. SO TIRED, NO TIME TO TELL YOU MORE, WILL TELL YOU ALL SOON. THINK WE MAY BE HERE ONLY ANOTHER DAY OR TWO. MAYBE NOT EVEN THAT. LOVE YOU BOTH, MORE SOON.

TEN:

Tuesday

As it turned out, it wasn’t even that long.

Kit woke up and felt something so very strange when he did: the relief of that feeling of irremediable unease that he’d felt here since he came. It wasn’t that he’d gotten used to it. It was that it was gone. The context had shifted. It was still a terrible and tragic thing, what was happening here: but the best result that could be found was apparently now in train. Someone else knew that. Someone had communicated that feeling to him.

And it felt incredible.

He had barely even had time to shower and come back and eat breakfast before word came through to all their manuals or other instrumentalities that Djam and Cheleb and Kit were all being relieved by a single two-wizard team from elsewhere in the Interconnect Project, and were being released from their drafted-in status. If they chose to remain, they could, but they were no longer needed on this gate. Its upstream tree was being decommissioned, and the gate itself was expected to be closed down within the next thirty hours.

This too had been expected… but nothing like so soon. “Good news for us,” Cheleb said to Djam and Kit in the early-evening light as hae peeled his puptent’s interface off the stone where it had been anchored. “Got the job done. Can go home with a clean conscience.”

“But more than that,” Djam said. “I don’t know how closely you two looked at the statistical analysis that came down earlier today. The thing that started, the change in the numbers? It started here. It started yesterday morning, and began to spread.”

And both of them looked thoughtfully at Kit.

Kit’s problem was that at this point there was no way to be sure of anything. He had his suspicions, very strong suspicions, but he refused to take credit for what had been occurring around them until he had some kind of confirmation that the opinion was justified. “What?” Kit said. “Why would this necessarily have anything to do with me?”

“Because you were the one who was always doing something different,” Djam said. “Entertainment. Strange ideas about food.”

“Feeding sibiks,” Cheleb said. “Repeatedly. Thought you were a bit eccentric at first. Have to wonder now whether you were onto something.”

Kit wanted to believe it was true. But without more data… “Look,” he said. “If what’s been happening is something to do with me, then… I’m really happy. But I’m just one more wizard doing my job. You did your jobs too. Without you two, maybe I wouldn’t have had time to do what I did… assuming I did anything. Maybe what I did wouldn’t have been possible without you two.”

“Maybe we were emplaced here,” Djam said, “to make it possible for you to do what you did. Whatever that was.”

“If that’s true,” Kit said “then it’s as much your success as mine. Don’t go handing me credit that’s partly yours.”

Djam was looking at his manual interface. He pulled it out and let it snap back into the silver rod that housed it. “Pad’s been programmed and it’s waiting for us,” he said. “They’re taking the gates off-line until the decommissioning team comes through.”

The three of them turned to look at into the plain and saw it happening, what they had never yet seen, any of them—the space between the spinney of gate standards suddenly going empty and showing nothing but the further plain beyond.

“So where to now?” Kit said, as the three of them walked together toward the short-transport pad.

“Reception center,” Cheleb said. “Then—” he grinned. “Home. Unexpectedly happy ending. Some celebration.” Hae poked Kit as they jumped up onto the pad together. “Probably not enough entertainment to match quality of recent offerings.”

A few moments later they were all in the reception area together. It was astonishing how empty it looked by comparison to the bustle and crush of the place when Kit had arrived. There were only a few Tevaralti wandering around now, taking care of whatever last-minute administrative tasks were their responsibility; all the rest of the people in it were wizards of other species making their way to outbound gates and off planet. Most specifically, though, the pressure-cooker feeling of a week ago was gone. There was still a sense of sorrow, of something sad coming to an inevitable end. But it had changed. Though the world was ending, it was doing so with much less tragedy than had been anticipated.

Kit and Djam and Cheleb stood there for a moment looking at each other a bit strangely, all somewhat at a loss. None of them had been expecting to say goodbye quite this soon, or under circumstances so much more positive than anyone had anticipated for the end of this intervention. Finally, Kit just stuck out an arm to each of them, and had it grasped, hand-to-elbow, in the way that so many humanoids did when saying hello or goodbye. “Cousins,” Kit said. “When you’ve had a chance to recover, come to Earth and visit!”

“Have to,” Cheleb said, grinning. “Too much culture to investigate.”

“And someone’s got to keep you eating right,” Djam said. “Anyway, I never did get enough of those saltines.” He bubbled softly. “The makers are going to get some great publicity off this. The Snack That Saved A Species…”

“Not all of it,” Kit said in protest.

“Save a single being,” Cheleb said, “in the One’s eyes, supposedly like saving the world entire.” Hae shrugged. “Wouldn’t start quibbling over numbers with the One who invented them. Only one result looks possible…”

Kit grinned at him. “There’s never any arguing with you, is there?” Kit said.

“Not by any reasoning being,” Cheleb said, smirking.

“I think you need to meet my sister,” Kit said. “Djam—”

They hugged. “If she’s not interested in him,” Djam said, “ask her if she’d like to date a Wookiee’s cousin.”

“Oh God,” Kit said, imagining what kind of crush Carmela might attach to an alien with beautiful, soft, fluffy fur. “I’ll have to get back to you on that. Djam, go well!” He looked at Cheleb. “And both of you, stay in touch!”

“Have to,” Cheleb said as the two of them turned off toward their own homeward gates. “Without you, won’t have the slightest idea what to make of Attack of the Clones.”

Kit snickered, watching them go. Then, for a few moments, he just stood there and let it all sink in.

It worked, he thought. It did work…

“So,” said Nita’s voice from behind him, “you took long enough to get here.”

“Been waiting long?” Kit said as she came up beside him.

Nita shook her head and took his elbow to guide him down and over to one spread of hexes, where a very large saurian and a single Tevaralti were waiting for them. It was Mamvish, of course, and beside her, golden-feathered, Hesh the Planetary of Tevaral.

Sweat started popping out on Kit. “Am I in trouble?”

“I think exactly the opposite,” Nita said. “Come on, stop freaking.”

Hesh was standing there in typical Tevaralti dress, one of those netlike robes that let the feathers stick out through the netting. “This is he?” he said to Mamvish.

“This is he,” Mamvish said.

“Is it Christopher?”

Kit swallowed. “Kit, actually.”

Hesh erected his head-crest at Kit in what Kit knew was a gesture of congratulation. “We’ve been continuing to crunch the numbers,” he said, “and I thought it was only right to confirm to you before you left that whatever action it was you took, that action was what began the movement of those of my people who had elected to remain behind.”

“I told a sibik a story,” Kit said.

“Whatever the details were,” Hesh said, “that story spread. It spread the way data spreads from sibik to sibik. It spread through scent trails, it spread through contact, it spread through their symbiotic/empathic links. And as it spread among them, it spread along the sibiks’ links to their owners. Then it started spreading along our own links among families and clan-groups and nation-groups, making its way among those of us who until then hadn’t shared the perception that rescue wasn’t a violation of their single-mindedness. They were exposed to the concept, as if from within them, that what was happening was another way of being of one mind.”

Kit stood there shaking as he started to understand. I was a vector, he thought. An infection, a way to spread a message. Or else the sibik was… or the one who was inside the sibik was. He rubbed his face, briefly overwhelmed. Or both of us together.

“If that message had come to the uncertain ones any other way, from the outside, it wouldn’t have worked,” Hesh said. “But because it came this way, from their own pets, along our own symbiotic and empathic linkages—along a wholly trusted connection, from our oldest companions in this world and with unprecedented power—those of our people who had previously felt themselves held away from this rescue were now able to accept that it was meant for them too.” Hesh let out a long, shaking breath. “And now we can all be saved.”

“I’m,” Kit said, and had to stop for a moment; he was reeling. “I’m really glad.”

“We will, of course,” Hesh said, rather more drily, “need a writeup from you on exactly what happened, or what you think happened, on your side.”

Kit laughed. Why wasn’t I expecting that? “Sure,” he said. “Would a couple of days from now be okay?”

Hesh twitched his crest in agreement. “That’s soon enough, I would say.”

“And in the meantime… Well, we know that Life usually finds a way,” Mamvish said, and grinned at Kit with all her teeth showing—not something you saw often, and always a good sign. “But sometimes it has help.”

“That’s what wizards are for,” Hesh said. “You did that, and did us proud. Cousin, for all our people, all the Tevaralti across all our new homes: our thanks to you, now and forever. So go—and go very, very well.”

Kit went away from that conversation very much in the mode of someone who is not going to be able, for a long time, to get his mind wrapped around the concept that he has just saved fifteen million lives. But it was them too, he kept thinking. It was Djam; it was Cheleb; it was Neets, and Ronan, and Dairine. It was Tom, and Carl, and everybody who put me in the place where I needed to be to make this difference. It was all of us. And most especially, it was Ponch.

“Cut it out,” Nita said as they headed for their hexes.

He looked at her in surprise. “What?”

“I can just hear you trying to make it smaller, what you did. Stop it,” she said. “Just let it in. You did a huge thing. Maybe this was more… I don’t know: personal than some of the stuff we’ve done? Fine. And more in your face. Just leave it alone until you can cope with it.”

“You are so smart,” Kit said softly.

“Takes one to know one,” said Nita. “Come on!”

Their hexes for the Crossings were called, and they headed over for them. There was no rush this time, no crush of wizards coming through behind them in haste. A lot of people had left already. Those who were leaving now weren’t in a rush. For the moment, for at least the next thirty-plus hours, the “weather report” for Thesba was relatively calm. Many more wizards had been added to the team tasked with keeping it from disintegrating; those others who were leaving, decommissioning gates or shutting down other services, could safely take their time.

There was a multispecies sanitary facility nearby, and as they passed it Kit said, “Just two minutes…”

“You should’ve gone before you left,” Nita said and snickered.

Kit ducked into the facility, used it—because it made sense: sometimes it could be an awfully long walk to one in the Crossings—and then pulled out his phone one last time.

WE’RE DONE HERE. LOTS TO TELL YOU, BUT I’M NOT GOING TO DO IT NOW. EVERYTHING’S GREAT. ON MY WAY HOME, SEE YOU SOON. ALSO: PLEASE TELL ME THAT THERE ARE SALTINES. AND TELL MAMA SHE’S GOING TO NEED TO BUY MORE KETCHUP.

He hit “send” and hurried out to the hex rosette again. The information standard on one of the hexes was already running a countdown, and Nita was standing there, arms folded, looking a touch impatient. Kit trotted over to her and turned around inside the hex to look his last on Tevaral. Above them, through the building’s clear ceiling, Thesba burned pale in a bright noon sky as the herald-standard counted down the seconds till their gate went patent.

Four: three: two: one…

“Last one off the planet,” Nita said softly as they looked their last on Tevaral, “turn out the lights…”

And the momentary darkness of gate transport fell over them, putting the lights out.

ELEVEN:

Wednesday

Some while later they were standing in line near the 400 hexes in the Crossings, waiting to catch one of the dedicated gate hexes back to Grand Central. There the local gating staff were waiting to process them through the locally anchored timeslide that would return Earth-based interveners who’d needed a timeslide to their departure time on February 2nd.

…Or at least Kit was standing in line at the moment. He was holding Nita’s place, as she’d gone off to the various-kinds-of-ladies’ room.

“Penny for them,” said the voice behind him.

Kit turned and saw Tom there, in his winter jacket with a backpack over his shoulder. “Hi. …Uh, sorry, what?”

“You’re looking thoughtful. Or maybe it’s just fatigue.” Tom yawned and rubbed his eyes. “Wouldn’t be just you. This has been a real slog.”

“Maybe you’re just not used to going out on errantry like the rest of us,” Kit said with a grin.

“Hey now,” Tom said, and gave him a mock-warning look. “…But seriously: I know that expression. What’s on your mind?”

“Well,” Kit said. “I was talking to one of the Fourth…”

“Or possibly more than one of them,” Tom said. “Difficult to tell, I imagine. How did that go?”

“Like you suggested,” Kit said. “Weirdly.”

“But something came of it.”

“Maybe,” Kit said. “I’d be happier if I understood just what. Or how.”

“Tell me about it,” Tom said with a sigh. “The story of all our lives…”

But Kit took Tom at his word for the moment, and told him about his conversation with the Fourth. Tom listened to the details without reaction, and finally shook his head. “So?” he said at last.

“So the question is… how did it know what it knew? This multidimensional thing they’ve got—does it mean they can see ahead in time somehow?”

“More like ‘ahead in space’, actually,” Tom said. “If I understand it right. Which I may not.” He chewed his lip for a moment. “But the two get so tangled up. Time’s such an odd thing… So malleable, some ways, even though people tend to think of it as immutable. There are so many ways the natural universe twists it around. It’s easy to forget that every time we look up at the sky, we’re looking back in time. Eight minutes, for the Sun; hours, days, for the outer planets. Years, for the stars… hundreds of years, thousands. Time and our perceptions are always messing with each other. Add other universes to the mix, and our intersections with them, and things get even odder. Then add wizardry, and shake…” He shrugged. “Time’s arrow may be in flight, but when it gets sucked into a tornado, who knows where it’ll come down?”

Kit blinked. “Want to mix a few more metaphors in there?”

Tom grinned. “I’ll work on that. But you know, causality can be as much an illusion as time, in some situations. This might be one.”

He moved forward with Kit as the line shuffled forward. “And whether you like it or not, you’re the star of the hour,” Tom said. “While they’ll be debating the actual mechanism for a while, it’s plain where and when the change started: where you were. The timeline of increased gate accesses, in particular, starts spiking soon after you returned little Besht’s pet the second time. Then the ripples start to spread.” He shrugged. “You can’t argue with the stats. So?”

“I told it a story,” Kit said. “Or I told Ponch a story, and he passed it on.”

“Must have been some story,” Tom said. “Care to share?”

So Kit repeated it for him. Tom was quiet for a while, and then just said, “Interesting. Not so much a joke, though. A parable. Those tend to have a certain punch.”

“Um,” Kit said, and considered that for a moment.. “Okay.”

“And the other party wasn’t just your dog… not that you don’t know that… but an aspect of the One. Getting a bit theoretical—” Hands in the small of his back, Tom stretched. “It’s not like the One isn’t paying attention to all of us all the time. That’s what It’s there for, apparently. Or, if you need another take on it, that’s what we’re here for. To be given attention to. You, however… have a lot more of the attention of one of Its aspects than is possibly strictly usual. And every now and then, if the right set of circumstances come together in the right order and the right shape, if all the pieces of the puzzle snap together correctly… unusual results can occur. Extremely good results, you’d have to admit.”

“Okay,” Kit said. He wasn’t sure he knew how he felt about any of this just yet. He shook his head. “It’s just that it was, I don’t know… Such a little thing.”

Tom gave him a look. “There are no little things,” he said. “Only things whose full relevance hasn’t yet become plain. Give it time.” And he glanced at his watch. “Speaking of which—” He patted Kit on his shoulder. “They’re calling my gate. See you at home.”

And he was off.

***

And when Kit and Nita caught their own gate, maybe twenty minutes later, and got into Grand Central and the shielded end of Platform 23, they found that the reverse timeslide had already been implemented for them. It was ten minutes after their initial departure time from GCT.

Kit stared at his watch. “This is so weird. It does not at all feel like it, but it’s Wednesday again.”

“And you still have a test on Friday.”

“I was hoping you would wait at least five minutes before reminding me of that,” Kit said. “Five minutes?! …But no.”

“And I am completely shattered,” Nita said in horrified realization. “Why am I feeling it all now? I was fine five minutes ago…”

“Five minutes ago,” Kit said, “tomorrow wasn’t a school day.”

“Ow,” Nita said. “Revenge. You are so mean to me.”

“You started it…”

“No I didn’t.” She sighed. “Anyway, it’s timeslide backlash. We’ve had it before. Just not when we weren’t also completely wrecked by other things.”

“Speak for yourself,” Kit said.

“I am. As usual. …But you know what I really want before I crash?”

“Tell me,” Kit said, as they walked around toward the protected transport area.

“Pointlessly crunchy chocolate cereal with no nutritive value.”

“Go for it. All I want is some saltines.”

“Why did I know you were going to say that? Never mind. Let’s go.”

Kit had almost forgotten how good it felt to be free to do a beam-me-up spell. Moments later they popped out in Nita’s favored landing spot out in the sassafras-shielded part of her back yard. Within a few minutes after that Nita was having her cereal in a house that was blessedly quiet, as her pop was at work and Dairine wasn’t back yet. Kit waited only long enough to see that she was sitting down, as he could tell she was fading already.

“My folks are waiting,” Kit said. “I should go.”

“Oh God,” Nita moaned, dropping her head onto the table beside the cereal bowl. “Tomorrow really is a school day. I hate this!”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Look, you really are wrecked. So am I.” He reached out and rubbed her arm. “See you tomorrow morning?”

“Yeah.”

***

Kit walked home and found his mama and pop standing in the kitchen, looking expectantly at the back door. Kit looked at them blearily. It’s so weird, he thought. It feels like I left them standing here a hundred years ago…

“Twenty minutes,” his pop said. “You’re late.”

“Give me a break! I walked over from Nita’s.”

His pop smiled. “Ever the gentleman. How’re you feeling?”

“Wrecked.” Because there still wasn’t a better word for it. “You got the texts?”

“Yeah. Still reading them, actually…”

His mama was looking at him curiously. “I don’t know, Juan,” she said, looking thoughtfully at Kit. “But it looks like someone’s filled out a bit. What’ve you been eating?”

Kit thought it would probably be better not to get into the cheese-in-a-can too much. They were going to have enough to say about all the saltines. “Vegetables,” Kit said.

His mama’s eyebrows went up, and she stepped forward and put the back of her hand against his forehead for a moment, then reached down to take Kit’s pulse.

Kit laughed and pushed her away. “Mama!”

“Just checking,” said his mother.

Kit grinned, then yawned. It was all hitting him at once. “Gonna crash,” he said. “Make sure I don’t miss the alarm in the morning?”

“I’ll make sure,” his mama said, and kissed him. “See you in the morning, sweetie.”

Out she went, the door shutting behind her: moments later the car started and she was gone, off to work. Kit stood there wobbling slightly as he got his coat off and tossed it over one of the dining room chairs. “So,” his pop said, scrolling down through the texts, “world saved as planned?”

“Not as planned,” Kit said. “Absolutely not. But saved? Yeah.”

“Good,” Kit’s pop said, “because it’s hard to tell from some of these. This one has a lot to do with marshmallows.”

“Oh.” Kit started laughing again. “Yeah, they were kind of a problem that night. Was that Friday? Saturday? I can’t remember.”

“I don’t know,” his pop said, “it’s got all these JD numbers over it…”

“I’ll give you a better timeline tomorrow,” Kit said. “There’s all this paperwork they’re going to make me do. They make you write it all up when you save the world…”

“Such a nuisance,” Kit’s Popi said, and came over and gave him a hug. “Go on, get some sleep, you look like you need it.”

“Yeah,” Kit said, able to summon up at least enough energy to hug his pop back. Then he hauled himself up the stairs to his room.

He paused in the doorway, looking at everything. As so often happened after spending a lot of time away in a new place, everything familiar also looked somehow small and strange. And the knitted-rag rug by the bed was still empty. Yet at the same time… not so empty: Ponch’s presence still made itself very much felt even though his physicality might be absent.

Or not so absent, some places. Tentacles! “You goofy mutt,” Kit said. “What am I going to do with you?…”

Kit shuffled in and stood for a moment looking at his desk with vague disgust—the math books and notebooks still scattered across it where he’d left them, a hundred years ago. Dammit, Kit thought, calculus still exists. But that was a problem for another day. And now I have to make my bed.

He turned, prepared to throw the portal against his closet door and go in and fish his blanket out. But then he realized he was already staring at a bed all made up with blankets and sheets. I have the best mama in the world, he thought. Any world. Oh God I’m wrecked.

He fell onto the bed face first, arms spread, reveling in the marvelous smell of sheets and pillowcases and blankets and in not having to move.

“Better get some rest,” Carmela said from down the hall in her room, “because you have to start studying for your test again tomorrow.”

“I hate you,” Kit said. “I completely forgot about calculus for almost a week. It was wonderful.”

“It’s still there, though,” Carmela said from the hallway.

“Yes. And so are you. Better if you didn’t remind me.”

“Better if you were nicer to me,” Carmela said, sticking her head in the door, “or when I’m a wealthy cocoa smuggler I won’t buy you your own starship.”

“Who needs a starship when we’ve got worldgates?” Kit said, not looking up. “The technology’s way inferior.”

“Snobby,” Carmela said. “Starships are cool.” She trotted down the stairs.

Kit turned his head. “Only if you can afford to pay the crew!” he shouted after her. But a moment later the back door banged shut.

Kit turned to go face-forward into the pillow again, inhaled from the pillowcase the smell of the fabric softener his mama favored for the laundry, and instantly fell asleep.

***

In the middle of that nap, it struck him as not even slightly surprising that Ponch was lying on the bed with him. They’d been having a conversation for some while, but at the moment Kit couldn’t remember how it had started.

“Timeheart’s such an echo chamber, though,” Ponch said. He was lying with his hind legs splayed out to one side underneath him, his nose propped on Kit’s shoulder. “The more central it gets, the more connected everybody is. The Powers work in and out of each other all the time, the One works in and out of all Its avatars… Anything can get heard. And because the Lone Power is still a Power, It can still hear some things too. That ability can’t be removed from It. Once given, gods can’t take back their gifts.”

“Mmm, kind of a problem.”

“Yes. And sometimes things are delicate; sometimes they have to happen just so, if they’re going to happen at all. It’s like stalking a squirrel. You twitch at the wrong moment and they see you, next moment they’re up a tree and it’s all over…”

“So sometimes you have to whisper.”

“Yes. But I knew you’d hear me,” Ponch said. “You always did. You hear me even better now.”

“Sometimes, anyway.”

“Oh, most of the time,” Ponch said. “Sometimes, like this, it’s important. I knew you’d get it. You were always smart; if I got smart, it was because of you. So this went real well.”

“I hated running out of saltines,” Kit said. “But somehow I knew that was you.”

“And you gave them all away,” Ponch said, nuzzling him. “So typical. Whatever I know about sacrifice, I learned from you.”

“Well, okay, that’s good.” He reached up to scratch Ponch behind the ears. “But now there’s a whole species of creatures crazy about saltines and living in a world where there aren’t any. You’re gonna have to do something about that.”

“Always thinking of everybody else,” Ponch said. “Leave that with me. I’ll take care of it. You get some sleep.”

So Kit did.

TWELVE:

February 14, 2011: Tevaral

Elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy, in the planetary system of a star of the great OB association near mu Cephei, otherwise known as Erakis, matters progressed to their inevitable conclusion. And as usual, when reality reasserted itself after wizardry had so tightly held sway over Thesba for so long, the natural processes there that had been baulked for so long turned out to have their own surprises up their sleeves.

The wizardly team who had been holding Thesba together through the final weeks of the Tevaral Rafting Intervention were naturally unwilling to simply remove all the safeties at once. Best practice in such events mandated that when discontinuing a wizardry that had been changing or maintaining the structural integrity of an entire astronomical body, the constrictions and controls applied to it should be removed in reverse order to that in which they’d been applied.

One by one, power feeds were gradually reduced to the complex webwork of wizardries that had been holding the warped and damaged cores of Thesba in the same relationship to one another, then to the ones that had been maintaining those cores’ integrity relative to the moon’s inner mantle and its outer one, and then to the largest and most powerful of the wizardries, those that had been holding the crust in place over the restless, molten substructure. Finally the last connections between those wizardries and the hundreds of wizards who had been fueling them were cut. Everyone for whom breathing was a normal function of their physiology then held that breath to see what would happen next.

For some long minutes Thesba seemed to do nothing in particular—merely continued on its normal course around Tevaral, heading for what in Kit’s gates’ location would have been its second rising of the day. Many of the wizards involved in monitoring the decommissioning of the management wizardries, at least those who were of a betting temperament, began laying wagers with one another as to how long this process would continue. Others, more deeply versed in planetary and orbital mechanics, or with a better instinctive feel for events of this type, didn’t bother.

Approximately six minutes and forty seconds after power was withdrawn from the final maintenance wizardries that had been holding Thesba in one piece, a fissure began to develop in the crust on Thesba’s leading side, stretching from about halfway up into its northern hemisphere to just south of its equator. Other similar fissures began to develop on the opposite side of the moon, but the first one continued to grow, stretching longer, pulling wide, deepening with astonishing speed. Through the already-hot glow of the revealed upper mantle, hotter material from deeper inside the moon began to spew out. The great longitudinal fissure pulled wider yet, stitching up into the polar regions, across them, and down into the northern hemisphere on the other side.

Though wizardly data recorders were functioning and analyzing every movement of mass in real time, with merely visual senses it quickly became impossible to grasp exactly what was happening. The moon’s atmosphere had kindled, and the flammable gases in it began oxidizing at such a rate that within a very short time all of Thesba’s surface became invisible under a planet-wide sheet of fire.

It took some minutes more of the moon’s transit along its already disturbed orbital path to make it possible to tell what was going on. Thesba’s overall shape seemed now more transversely ovoid than spherical as it sailed along in an obscuring cloud of its own rapidly combusting atmosphere, trailing burning gases and outthrown magma behind it in a long disastrous trail. But then came the unexpected thing—terrible in the way that only events of such magnitude can be, fascinating even though frightening, a sight that would leave the analysts working out the moments of inertia behind this particular event for months if not years to come. Through the ruin of Thesba’s structure, past the split shell of the mantle layers and the shattered crust, the misshapen iron core slowly shouldered bodily out of the moon that had hidden it since it coalesced, tumbling as it came, rotating more quickly now that it was freed from the pressure of the quintillions of tons of mass that had so long held it in check. Slowly the core began to draw further and further away along the orbital path, making its way ahead of the broken halves of Thesba that were now ever so gradually beginning to fall behind it, trailing further and further in its wake.

The general prediction of what would come next, once this had happened, was straightforward enough. The two great halves of Thesba would remain in orbit a while, tumbling, fragmenting, some of the fragments rebounding into one another. A debris field somewhat congruent to the moon’s old orbit would form. But it would not remain in that form for long. The core, plowing through Thesba’s shattered remnants again and again in its early orbits as the fragments began to decelerate due to their lesser mass, would impact over and over with the larger pieces—some of them becoming briefly gravitationally associated with the core again, some being caromed violently out of its way in what to a player of the Earth game “billiards” would have recognized as massively destructive bank shots. Those impacts, brutally inelastic and as subject to the laws of motion as anything else, would themselves change the rogue core’s orbit more than once, deforming that orbit, bumping it into a more elliptical configuration and finally into one that would be terminally parabolic. It would be the core’s acceleration, increased by interactions with Tevaral’s mass and a serendipitous angle with the system’s white-giant primary, that would finally bring the core plummeting into Tevaral’s southern hemisphere in sixty-three days’ time—the bullet-like impact of a three quintillion-ton mass of spinning metal into the body of a dying world already racked by weeks of massive earthquakes and tsunamis.

The Interconnect Project wizards and scientists most skilled with numbers and probabilities would be exercising their skills at the betting end of things for several weeks to come over the issue of whether Tevaral itself would survive that impact as a single body, or itself break up as Thesba had, its shattered mass slowly becoming the source of a vast asteroid field that would someday occupy its orbit around Sendwathesh. But on the day Thesba shattered, the world called Tevaral, identified (in Earth’s astronomical nomenclature) as 11848 Cephei IV, was proactively struck from the records of all extant Galactic and interstellar associations of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, and formally declared uninhabitable…

…and its dominant species and biosphere classified as “successfully resettled without undue loss of life”.

THIRTEEN:

February 14, 2011: Earth

Valentine’s Day was a Monday this year. Mondays were bad enough as a general thing, but the strains of this one had been unusual. Now Nita and Kit were walking home from school, both of them slightly weary after the overexposure to everybody else’s showy declarations of affection.

Kit in particular was tired due to the results from his calculus test having come back. He hadn’t failed. Neither had he passed brilliantly. He was going to be hearing about this from his Pop. Right now he had other things on his mind as they came up to his driveway.

“I didn’t want to give you your thing today,” Kit said, “because everybody was watching and… I didn’t want to have to make the explanations in front of them, because it would all have been made up and it wouldn’t have made any sense. I thought I’d wait till now. So here.”

He reached into his pocket. “I was going to wrap this,” he said, “and then I couldn’t find any wrapping paper —and we were all out of ribbon—”

“And you are absolutely useless at wrapping things,” Nita said. “I hate to have to say it, but you know it’s true. So it’s okay.”

Kit nodded, blushing, and reached into his pocket: handed her what he had made. It was a small heart-shaped object, maybe an inch long, and it glinted in the afternoon light.

Nita turned it over in her fingers, feeling the weight of it. “It’s crystallized carbon,” she said.

“There was a lot of it exposed on Tevaral’s surface after they started scraping the biosphere off,” Kit said. “So I thought—”

“It’s diamond, actually,” Nita said.

Kit blushed. “It’s not diamond diamond,” he said. “The crystalline structure’s all wrong, you know that perfectly well, don’t give me grief here. It’s pretty, and it’s tough, and it takes a whole lot to hurt it.” Like someone else I know.

“Oh really,” Nita said very softly.

Kit cleared his throat. “I asked Hesh if he would have somebody grab me a chunk. Worked it over a little bit.”

Nita turned the little heart over in her hand. On the outside of it was engraved one of the simpler graphical restatements of the Wizard’s Knot. “There’s something in there, though,” she said, looking up at him.

Kit nodded. “Turn it over,” he said.

She did. The other side was very finely micro-engraved with the words, TEXT ME.

“Cheleb had this funny idea,” Kit said. “That maybe you’d asked me to change my name for you. Or that I was thinking about asking you to change yours for me.”

Nita laughed under her breath. “He really has a tendency to sort of plunge around without being entirely clear about the cultural underpinnings of some of the things he says, doesn’t he?” She gave Kit a wicked look. “‘Impregnation rituals…’” She covered her eyes.

“Yeah,” Kit said, “when we get him here, we’ll sort him out. Anyway… I encoded my full name in the Speech into the crystalline structure in there for you, and it syncs to the one in my manual. It’s not like you didn’t have it already, anyway, it’s not like we haven’t done stuff like this occasionally when we needed to for spells, for interventions. But if you need it in a hurry, or when we’re doing preflight on a wizardry, with this you can just plug this into the spell the way you would plug in a USB stick.”

She nodded, smiled. “Great minds think alike,” she said.

“Oh really?”

She reached into the pocket of her jeans, brought something out and handed it to Kit. At first glance it appeared to be a very tightly-woven cord of metal mesh, the individual strands of the black metal catching the light as you turned it. There was a black metal catch to fasten it. The thing as a whole looked very sleek and smooth, like one of those elephant-tail-hair bracelets that people used to wear. It wasn’t very long: in fact, bracelet length was just about right.

Nonetheless, Kit was in teasing mood. “Keychain?” he said.

Nita gave him a look. “Maybe,” she said, “if I asked Sker’ret really nicely, he’d sort me out a ‘trapdoor transport’ so I could drop you in it and have it send you back to Tevaral in exactly the spot where you could stand there just long enough to have time to look up and see a nice big chunk of Thesba getting ready to fall on your head…”

She was kidding. It was just as well. Kit grinned at her, and they started walking again while Kit ran the smoothly braided thing through his fingers. It felt beautiful. He could also feel the Speech, a lot of the Speech, sizzling in it.

“You were working on this before we left, weren’t you,” Kit said. “All those times when we were manual-chatting and you didn’t want to go visual.”

“Yeah, I tried doing both at once earlier on and— well, it wasn’t a good idea.” She grinned. “A few accidents…”

“So what is it?”

“It’s every spell we’ve ever done together,” Nita said. “With the enacture stripped out. And the actuator sequences removed, just to make sure.”

Kit breathed out, shaking his head in amazement. “It’s terrific,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Thank you.”

They’d come to a stop at the end of Kit’s driveway. “Oh,” Nita said. “There’s one more thing.” She reached into her otherspace pocket and pulled it out, handing it to him.

It was a box with a heart-shaped cellophane window. He looked up from it and grinned at her.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” she said, and hugged him.

He hugged her back, not particularly caring at the moment if the neighbors saw. After a moment, though, she put some air between them and made a peculiar face. “Also,” she said, “I have no idea what this is about, but Bobo says to tell you, ‘Don’t worry, she doesn’t know about the Jacuzzi.’” Nita raised her eyebrows. “You had a Jacuzzi over there? You had it really well hidden.”

“Uh, no,” Kit said. “Something Ronan was up to.”

“What hasn’t he been up to, more like,” Nita said under her breath. “Never mind.”

She hugged Kit harder, then pushed him away and headed off down the street.

Kit looked at the box, opened the top of it, and as he’d done with Cheleb, poured a little stream of hearts out into his hand.

Then he started to smile… and then to laugh out loud where he stood. Kit turned over the hearts in his hand, the way Cheleb had, with his finger, one by one. They were pink and blue and yellow and purple and green and white. And regardless of the color, every single one of them said:

I KNOW.

Afterword:

There’s a saying among some writers that a novel should be the story of the single most important thing then happening in the viewpoint character’s life. This seems like a good rule to follow, and until now I think all the major Young Wizards works in print have followed it. However, it’s been my intention for a while to do some longer works in-universe that would be, not so much an abandonment of the rule, but a relaxation of it. I’ve been wanting a chance to display and explore aspects of the characters’ lives that we don’t always get a chance to see in a main-continuity YW novel—situations in which the characters’ usual position at center stage is subverted a bit.

Probably this urge arose because in real life, we’re not always at the center of the stories that surround us. In fact, mostly we’re not. Often enough, whether we like it or not, we function at the periphery of something much bigger, our contributions seeming marginal. And since the life Nita and Kit are living is real-life to them, it stands to reason that sometimes the wizardly life will be less personally manageable, in terms of just deciding what you’re going to do and then going off and doing it. Sometimes you’re going to be part of a larger group, working on a single problem in unison, and you won’t be driving the problem’s solution except in the sense that you’re working in support of it.

Unfortunately it seems likely that in traditional or conventional publishing, and especially in the present market, the proposal for such a novel might not get much further than your editor’s desk. Fortunately, the technologies now available to storytellers to independently make out-of-continuity works available to large numbers of readers have made it possible to tell this kind of story after all.

Various versions of the “How To Save A Planet” problem have been wandering around in the YW universe’s middle distance for me for a good while now. In particular, questions and answers about the technologies and themes implied by Mamvish’s appearance on the scene in A Wizard of Mars have been percolating since approximately 2008, when the first skeletal notes on the Interconnect Project begin appearing in the Errantry Concordance. You could in fact make a case that this whole issue has been bubbling under the surface for much longer than that—since the time our viewpoint characters first set foot in the Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility during the course of High Wizardry. After all, it hardly seems likely that a gigantic gating facility of this kind would just appear out of nowhere all by itself. The presence of a place that works and acts like the Crossings implies the presence of massive technological and infrastructural support from multiple species, along with a long-established tradition of interstellar trade, commerce and cooperation.

Getting more specific, though, I think it’s safe to say that the seed of this aspect of Crossings-related backstory was planted in High Wizardry and the events that follow it. Dairine’s overheard conversation in which she tells somebody “No I will not move your planet, it’s fine right where it is!” can be read as implying not only that species may and do move their planets electively, but also, logically, that they may relocate them when dire necessity requires it.

And, wizardry being what it is—all about preserving life—when I started considering the issue, it seemed likely that there would be, at the very least, some kind of working group that dealt specifically with this kind of problem, and concentrated the expertise for its solution in a single resource. From that understanding, the basic blueprint and rationale behind the Interconnect Group—originally primarily concerned with worldgates, but its remit having since been extended to include many other useful technologies—began to lay itself out.

The Group’s operational rationale is straightforward. When they’re endangered, move planets and their populations to safety if you can. If you can’t move the planet, clone or twin it as closely as you can somewhere else, and relocate the population. If you can’t do that, archive the living population—using some instrumentality either wizardly or scientific (or both)—and preserve them until you can.

The old saying “show don’t tell” is sometimes somewhat abused by people who don’t understand that sometimes, despite your best intentions, you do have to tell. That said, showing is usually better. Once I started to understand how the Interconnect Group functioned, the next question became how to tell a story that showed the saving of a specific world.

The idea of a moon falling onto its primary, and the image of what would really happen, had been nagging at me for a while secondary to my involvement as science advisor for an event-TV project called Impact that eventually aired on SyFy. (For all I know, it still may air occasionally, and you’ll see my advisor-credit there if you bother watching through to the end.) As sometimes happens in cases like this, the script’s story through-line was already in place, and a lot of creative choices had been made that didn’t have a lot to do with physics, or indeed with many of the finer details of physical reality as we presently understand it. I was therefore thrown into the position of being the youngest fairy godmother at the christening, with no power to undo the curse presently saddling the about-to-be-newborn infant—only enough to attempt to mitigate the curse somewhat. (And even this attempt turned out to be of minimal effect. Never mind: you do what you can, cash the check, and move on.)

As part of this work I found myself in the situation of giving notes to the production partners rather than taking them, which was interesting (and amusing) for a change. But some of the notes have a certain air of desperation about them. Like this one:

Just a note here in passing: whichever character tells the President or whoever it is that “not even bacteria would be left” after an impact of any significant portion of the Moon with the Earth is seriously understating the nature of the problem by suggesting that there would be something left afterwards that vaguely resembled a planet. The result would more likely be the very early stages of an asteroid belt… if that. An impact of this type would at the very least split the Earth open like a melon. But much worse damage is likely.

Think of the structure of a bubble. The air inside is held in place by a very thin and fragile structure, and the whole thing comes undone with any really significant puncture. The Earth’s crust is similarly thin in comparison to what it contains. (Just as a referent: no known meteoric impact has ever punched all the way through the crust, not even the great Yucatan impact. Proof: life still exists here.) A much more likely outcome, after the initial splitting that would follow so traumatic an impact, would be the explosive escape of vast amounts of magma from the Earth’s lower mantle, where all that molten metal and stone is held (under immense pressure) by the upper mantle and crust above it. Imagine shaking a bottle of soda and then popping off the cap. Then imagine that the soda is four sextillion tons of molten metal and lava …You wouldn’t want to be standing too close.

… So if you get a sense that I was looking forward to a chance to tell a Moon-falls-down-on-a-planet story correctly, you’d be absolutely right. In particular, I was looking forward to a chance to tell the tale of such a cataclysm not as something that happens all of a sudden and in a hilariously compressed time frame—the way it did in Impact—but as something that’s been going on for a while and still, sadly, even with all available technological and wizardly power brought to bear on it, just can’t be stopped.

This was the story I realized I needed for Lifeboats. It involves the kind of wizardly work that’s probably about half or three-quarters of what wizards do—work not characterized by breakneck haste or personal versions of what we now sometimes refer to in film trailers as “situations of extreme peril”. It allowed me the opportunity to put our viewpoint characters in situations where they have enough time to examine what’s going on around them in depth, and where the work requires revelation of some of what’s been going on in the background, unsuspected or uninvestigated, for a long time.

Inside the shell of the story, of course, lies the matter of most interest, to me anyway: the characters’ reactions to being stuffed into this kind of situation, along with many many others, and the understanding that sometimes you don’t get much of a vote in how things play out. Sometimes, instead of making up your own mind what you’re going to do, you’re just going to have to do what those older, wiser, or more centrally placed have told you to do. Sometimes you’re going to have to sit on your butt and wait. And sometimes (as here) there’ll be obscure or mysterious elements to what’s going on around you. That’s as it should be. Even for wizards the world isn’t always explicable, no matter how much we’d like it to be. And it would be a duller place if it was.

The challenge for a wizard doing such work will always be remembering that employment of the Art in this mode can be surprisingly efficacious, even if you’re not always “in control”, or involved in what looks like a dangerous and convoluted quest or a heroic last stand. In the normal course of things, I suspect that if you’re a youngish wizardly practitioner, you’re going to frequently be reminded that sometimes you and the Powers That Be get the job done simply by holding still, paying attention, and allowing yourself to have your natural reactions to what’s going on. You don’t always have to nearly get nuked by the Lone Power or nearly eaten by a shark. Sometimes slow and steady really does win the race… even when you honestly don’t think you’re racing: because all is done for each.

In the broad spectrum of wizardly intervention, there have to be a lot of stories like this. It’s been fun to tell at least one of them.

Thanks for listening!

— Diane Duane

September 1, 2015

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Games Wizards Play

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