Wizard's Holiday

There were things she could do now, of course. She could talk the nerves in her skin out of feeling the pain…though that would cost her some energy and, afterward, the pain would come back. Or she could use a different kind of wizardry to speak to the nerve endings and trim back their connection to the damaged skin. That would cost her, too—rather more than the first wizardry—but it would heal the burn.

She stretched, and winced. Or, alternately, she thought, I could just get up and go in the water, which is nice and cool and won’t cost me anything…and put off dealing with the problem until later.

Nita found her bathing suit and pulled it on—she wasn’t quite yet as comfortable as Quelt was with skinny-dipping—then shrugged into a linen sun smock, hissing once or twice in irritation as the rough texture dragged across her sunburn.

But the memory of cold came back to her. She sat back down on the couch for a moment, grasping at the memory before she should be awake too long and it should fade.

Ice, she thought. There had been a lot of it. She had seen her share of cold planets, both “solid” ones, where the ice was made from water, and gas giants, where the ice was made from methane or helium, and the snow was that strange metallic, pale blue color. What she’d seen in her dream had been water ice, though. Her memory came up with a pattern suddenly—parallel lines and striations that ran curving down like a river between jagged stone walls all slicked with newer, clearer ice. But the oldest stuff, colder, deeper, discolored with the powdery, dark scrapings of ancient stone, ran like a fissured twelve-lane highway through the pass between old mountains rearing up on either side. A glacier. Nothing had happened in that dream, unless the slow, cold progress of the glacier down its valley, a tenth of an inch a day, would count as something happening.

Nita shivered, and then laughed to herself. Typical body reaction: get burned, dream of cold. Yet when she thought of that glacier again, another image from the dream surfaced. The ice spreading from the glacier, spreading up the mountain walls as more snow fell, as the cold grew. An ice age, Nita thought. Glaciers sheeting up and over everything, the contours of landscape being swallowed by them and the incessant snow that fell on them and fed them—everything happening slowly in real time, but with an ugly relentless speed in her dream, where the progression of events was compressed. “The heart of the world is frozen,” something had said to her. The voice was slow, cold, as if buried in snow itself. And it was not entirely sorry about the ice.

Nita sat in the dawn stillness and thought about that a little. On the other side of the screen, Kit was still asleep, but one sound she couldn’t hear was Ponch snoring. Nita slipped out the reed-screened door into the dimness of early morning.

She made her way out of the cluster of the Peliaens’ household buildings and down onto the beach. There Nita stood just breathing for a while in the immense

stillness, a silence broken only by the tideless sea slipping softly up and down the sand. All around her, the world sloped up to the sky at an impossible distance, to an impossible height, but Nita was getting used to it now. Its largeness now seemed to enlarge her in turn, rather than crushing her down into insignificance.

Away down the curve of the beach, she saw, two small, dark shapes were also looking out at the water, at the dawn, neither of them moving.

She walked toward them, not hurrying, for that dawn was worth looking at. In fact, every one Nita had seen so far had been worth looking at, and no two of them were the same. This one featured vast stretches of crimson and gold and peach, streaked and speckled with smaller clouds in dark gray and pale gray, edged with burning orange, and with blue showing in the spaces in between them until the sky looked like one huge fire opal. In that light, fierce but still cool, Quelt and Ponch sat on the dune-rise, looking out over the water. Nita sat down next to Quelt. “Were you up early seeing your tapi off?” she said. “He was going to follow the ceiff when they flew today…”

“No, he was gone before I got up. I came out to talk to Ponsh.”

Nita glanced over at Ponch, who was lying there with his chin on his forefeet, gazing out at the sea. “About what?”

“All kinds of things. He’s good to talk to,” Quelt said. “He knows a lot.”

Nita had to smile at that. This was a dog whose vocabulary, not so long ago, had consisted almost entirely of words for food. “Not when he’s got a stick in his mouth,” she said, to tease him.

Ponch rolled over, gave her a look, and then, as if not deigning to respond, rolled onto his belly again.

They sat there like that for a while. “Do you ever have times,” Quelt said eventually, “when you think there’s something important you should know that you don’t know?”

Nita let out a long breath, leaned back against the sand dune. “The question’s more like, are there ever any times when I don’t think that?” she said. “And when I think I know all the stuff I need to, I’m almost always wrong.”

They sat quiet for a few moments more, looking at the water. “Why?” Nita said.

“I don’t know,” Quelt said. “It’s only the last, oh, hundred years or so. I’ll be in the middle of something, fixing the weather or something like that, and—” She stopped, looked at Nita. “What?” Quelt said. “What’s so funny?”

Nita was having trouble restraining her laughter. Finally, she managed to get some control over herself. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just cultural. ‘The last hundred years or so.’ That’s a whole lifetime where I come from.”

Quelt shook her head in wonder. “It sounds strange thinking of a life that short,” she said. “It doesn’t really seem that short for your people, though, does it?”

Nita looked out at the water as it lapped at the shore, turning slowly peach-colored under the growing glow of the dawn. “Not really,” she said, “if you get the whole thing, or close to it. Seventy, eighty years…” She trailed off. “A human life span’s getting longer these days, I guess. We’re better at curing sick people than we used to be, and we eat better, and all that kind of thing. But for Earth humans, yeah, around eighty or ninety, a lot of people start getting tired. Their bodies don’t

work terribly well. Things start breaking down. Sometimes their memory starts going.”

“It seems so soon.”

“I don’t know,” Nita said. She idly grabbed the end of Ponch’s tail and started playing with it; Ponch looked over his shoulder at her, made a grumbly growmf noise, pretended to snap at Nita, and then rolled over on his back and started to squirm around in the sand. “It’s as if a time comes when even if your body does stay pretty healthy, the rest of you is ready for something else.” She looked at the white tip of Ponch’s tail, considering it, and then let it go again.

“My nana,” Nita said, “that was my dad’s grandmother—she got that way when I was small. I can just remember it. At the time, I didn’t know what was the matter with her. She wasn’t sick, and she could get around all right. But she slept most of the time, and when she wasn’t sleeping, she just sat in a chair and watched television, and smiled. Everybody was always trying to get her up and get her to go out, be more active. I tried to do it, too. And once I remember trying to get her to play ball with me…something like that…and she said, ‘Juanita, dear, I’m ninety-three, and I’m tired of running around and doing things. The time’s come for me to just sit here and see what it’s like to be ninety-three. It’s part of getting ready for what comes after.’”

Nita smiled. The memory had no pain about it; it seemed a long, long time ago. “Then, I thought it was kind of funny. Now, though, I wonder sometimes whether it’s such a bad thing that after a while you should want to go on to the next thing. Even though there’s a lot of argument on my world about what the ‘next thing’ is…”

She trailed off again. “Hey, I interrupted you,” Nita said. “Sorry about that. You were talking about fixing the weather.” She grinned. “That’s funny, too, but for different reasons. We have a saying, ‘Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.’ Except that whoever made up the saying didn’t know there were wizards.”

“Do you do weather, too?”

“Kit and I did a hurricane last year,” Nita said. “With a consortium of other wizards. It looked like it was going to cause a lot of trouble if it came ashore, so the North American Regional Wizards did a risk assessment on it with the Western Europe group, and when it turned out it wouldn’t go anywhere else if we were careful, we pushed it out to sea—”

They discussed storms for a while, the wizardries of wind management and heat exchange, of what to do with the leftover kinetic energy after you’ve pushed ten million tons of relentlessly cycling wind and water off its intended course. Alaalu was sedate enough in terms of weather—its star was quiet and predictable, its orbit very nearly exactly circular, and its seasonal tilt very small. But there were still biggish tropical storms in the equatorial belt, twice each year, and dealing with those made up a surprising amount of Quelt’s steady work.

“It seems so strange that that’s all there is for you to do,” Nita said. “Or mostly that.”

“It didn’t always seem strange to me,” Quelt said. “When I was younger, anyway. But now I keep getting this feeling, like I said, that there’s something else

that’s supposed to be happening, something I haven’t noticed. I’d notice it if I stopped and looked around…that’s the feeling I get. And I do stop and look. But so far…” She shrugged.

“I know another wizard,” Nita said, “a cat—that’s another of the sentient species on our planet—who told me once that sometimes the Powers have a message for you, but it’s like a spell that you’re building: You have to put it together piece by piece over time, and the rest of the time you just leave the bits and pieces scattered around in your head and give them a chance to come together.”

“That’s what I’m doing, I suppose,” Quelt said. And then she flashed Nita one of those grins. “But I’m impatient, I think! Something our people aren’t, usually …” She stretched her legs out on the sand. “Still, it nibbles at me. Like the keks if you stay around after they start work…”

“It’ll come together eventually,” Nita said. She yawned and stretched. “I’m surprised to see you out here,” she said to Ponch, “when the boss isn’t up yet.”

Ponch, upside down, looked at Nita with one eye. He’s lazy.

“He’s lazy? You should talk. You sleep all day!”

I’ve been doing my job, Ponch said. I don’t have to hunt. I don’t have any puppies to guard. So I sleep, and the rest of the time I have fun.

Nita chuckled. “Sensible,” she said. “Okay, I take it back.” She stretched again, ran her hands through her hair. “You know what I love about this place? No bugs.”

“Bugs?”

“Insects. Little life-forms that come and bite you.”

“The keks would do that.”

“Yeah, but the keks you can get up and walk away from. These things fly after you in the air and sit on you and bite you. Some of them are so small you can hardly see them. They’re a real pain.”

“But you can talk them out of biting you, surely…”

“I’ve tried. It’s an uphill battle, believe me. You get better reactions out of walls and rocks than you do out of most bugs.”

Quelt laughed, and got up, and stretched. “I should go put the laundry in to run,” she said. “I told my ‘mom’ I would.”

Nita laughed. “We’re corrupting you with all these strange foreign words,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t think so. I hear what you call my topi…”

Nita and Quelt smiled at each other. “Go on,” Nita said. “Ponch, go on and kick the boss out of bed. It’s a sin for him to miss this.”

Quelt and Ponch went back toward the house, and Nita watched them go with a slight smile. Chores on this world didn’t seem as onerous as chores did at home, somehow. And even less so when I don’t have to do them, she thought. But Quelt didn’t seem to mind doing them, either.

Nita sat there a while longer, looking out at the sea and watching the tiny waves slide lazily up the sand, so unlike the energetic surf of the South Shore. But then the Great South Bay has tides, because Earth has a Moon. That’s the only thing I miss here: a really big moon.

Still, this is gorgeous…

Very slowly, the east started to turn a fiercer orange red than before. Nita sat in that fiery light and soaked it up with endless appreciation.

But the dream would not quite go away.

The heart of the world is frozen, and so there is no heart.

Nita blinked, and then she shivered, her sunburn briefly forgotten.

Dairine and Filif and Sker’ret got back from Mount Everest late that afternoon to find that Roshaun had arrived while they were gone. Carmela was sitting in front of the TV with him, discussing clothes once more. Annoyed as Dairine was with the prince, she had to be amused—at least Carmela had found someone as interested in personal adornment as she was. I didn’t think it was possible, Dairine thought. And at least Roshaun had come back. Though not because of anything I said…

Filif, wanting some relaxation, joined Roshaun and Carmela in the living room. Dairine’s dad was sitting at the dining room table, making some notes about supplies for the store on a pad. As Dairine and Sker’ret came in, his head jerked up, a little guiltily, Dairine thought, to make sure Filif wasn’t in sight.

“You okay, Daddy?” she said, bending over to hug him and give him a kiss.

“Huh? Oh, fine,” he said. “How was your day? You guys have a nice lunch?”

Sker’ret looked most satisfied. “Very filling,” he said.

“Oxygen bottles, mostly,” Dairine said.

Her dad glanced up at that, amused. “Nothing wrong with a little roughage in the diet. Where are you off to?”

“Just down to Sker’ret’s pup tent. He’s going to lend me some music. Stick your head in and yell if you need me.”

“Okay.”

They went down the basement stairs more or less together—it always being a question, when Sker’ret was on forty legs and she was on two, who was ahead and who was behind at any one time, if not both at once. On the mountain, Dairine and Sker’ret had started discussing popular music while Sker’ret ingested carefully chosen chunks of garbage—including some climbing expedition’s very broken tape recorder—and Sker’ret had suggested that when they got back, they could use one of the manual’s data transfer options to pass some favorite selections back and forth. Dairine promptly had Spot grab a wide and peculiar assortment from the big computer at home—everything from boy bands to Beethoven—and was curious to see what Sker’ret was going to pass to her in return.

They slipped in through his pup-tent access. Dairine looked around and saw several of the sitting/lying racks Sker’ret’s people preferred, sort of a cross between a giant step stool and monkey bars. Dairine looked around at the stacks and racks of storage. “Very organized,” she said.

“Not what my parent says,” Sker’ret said.

Dairine snickered. “None of us is ever neat enough for our parents. One of those universal traits.” Sker’ret laughed and started rummaging around for his own version of the manual, a little flat data pad.

Dairine sat partly down on one of the racks—it was impossible for a human to get really comfortable on one of them, no matter how she tried—and perched there,

swinging her leg, while Spot spidered around, peering into everything. “You told me before that they wouldn’t let you into the restaurants in the Crossings,” Dairine said. “Why not? Did you misbehave in there or something?”

Sker’ret’s laugh acquired something of an edge. Dairine heard a hint of bitterness about it. “Oh, no,” he said. “It’s just that families of employees aren’t expected to use the same facilities as the patrons.”

Dairine stared at him a moment. Abruptly, the data slipped into place. “Oh no,” she said. “You’re not just some Rirhait, are you? You’re related to the Stationmaster …”

“I’m the youngest of his first brood,” Sker’ret said.

Dairine breathed out. “That means you inherit management of the whole place when he retires, doesn’t it?”

“It would mean that if I were normal,” Sker’ret said. “But I’m not, am I? I’m a wizard.” Now there was no mistaking the bitterness. “I’m supposed to run the Crossings, and become one of the most powerful beings for light-years around. It’s as much a political position as anything else: Control worldgates and you control so much else. No one argues with the Stationmasters.”

“But you can do that and be a wizard,” Dairine said. “Can’t you?”

Sker’ret looked at her with several eyes. “I want to,” he said. “But they don’t want me to. As far as my parent is concerned, to be a wizard is a distraction from what I’m supposed to be doing, from the business of life, and the ‘real world.’” He snorted, a most peculiar, rather metallic sound. “Not precisely a waste of time— we know as well as anybody else how useful wizards are. But my parent is furious with me. He wants me to reject the wizardry, to give it up. And I can’t!”

Dairine drew a deep breath. Wizardry does not live in the unwilling heart. That was one of the first laws of the Art. You could give it up, if you were unwilling or unable to hold by the strictures embodied in the Wizard’s Oath. It could leave you of its own volition, if pain or illness or changes in your life made it impossible for you to keep the Oath any longer. But the prospect was horrible to imagine, at least for Dairine. To actually have the people around you trying to force you to give up wizardry, to give up that most intimate connection with the universe and What had made it—

She shuddered. “You go your own way,” she said to Sker’ret. “You do what your heart tells you.”

“Hearts,” Sker’ret said.

“Whatever. You do that! That’s how They talk to you. Don’t let anyone push you around.”

“That’s easy to say,” Sker’ret said, “when your ‘father’s’ not the Stationmaster of the Crossings.”

Dairine gave Sker’ret a look. “I have news for you,” she said. “I think you’re tougher than he thinks you are. I think there’s room in the universe for you to be exactly what you want to be. Your father—sorry, your parent—may be the most powerful entity for light-years around, but if he were sure of that, he wouldn’t be pressuring you so hard. So I think you still may have some bargaining room left.”

He looked at her, all those stalked eyes weaving in a gesture of uncertainty. “There’s no harm in trying,” Dairine said. “Dig your feet in. There are enough of

those to make anybody think twice. Anyway, what’s the worst the family can do?”

“Disown me,” Sker’ret said.

Dairine swallowed. “So what?” she said. “You’ll always be a wizard. You have a bigger family than just your family. And you’ll always have a place to stay: You can sleep in my basement anytime.”

They locked eyes for a few moments. Shortly Dairine said, “You really need to stop moving them around like that. You’re making me seasick.”

Sker’ret laughed. So did Dairine.

They spent half an hour or so swapping music between Spot and Sker’ret’s manual, and after checking the sound quality, they headed upstairs again, where Sker’ret wandered into the living room to see what the others were doing. Dairine got the urge for some milk and opened the fridge, pouring herself a glass. Then, hearing laughter coming from the living room, she leaned in through the door to the dining room to see what was happening in there.

The aliens were watching cartoons. Carmela was still sitting cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth in amusement, while Roshaun sat in Dairine’s dad’s easy chair—That’s probably the closest he can get to a throne, she thought—and was laughing, too. Not as hard as the others, perhaps, but he was plainly enjoying himself. “Someone needs to tell me what mice are,” he was saying to Carmela. “And why do they bang the cats over the head with these hammers so often? Is it class warfare of some kind?”

“I don’t think so,” Carmela said. “It’s one of those cross-species things.”

The cartoons and the laughter went on for a while, and Dairine sat down at the table, scrolling through Spot’s manual functions while listening to the Rirhait music. It was surprisingly symphonic, though written in the key of M, and only occasionally did it become so weird that she had to skip ahead. The music combined strangely but amusingly with the bonks, hoots, and shrieks of the cartoons in the living room, and the metallic, hissing, or humanoid laughter of the room’s living inhabitants. Finally, a little peace came with a station break.

“Enough of that,” Carmela said. “Let’s look at some of the news.” She changed the channels.

“—the Suffolk County Pine Barrens,” said an announcer’s voice suddenly, “recent dry conditions have combined with a passing driver’s carelessness to produce the season’s first brushfire. Some fifty acres south and east of Pilgrim State Hospital, at the edges of Brentwood and Deer Park, were blackened after a—”

There was a sudden terrible rustling in the living room.

“What the—” Dairine’s dad said. He got up, and collided halfway through the living room door with Filif. The effect was much like that of a man trying to catch a falling Christmas tree, except that the tree was still trying to fall after he had caught it.

“No,” Filif said, and the word was mixed with a high, keening whine, entirely like the sound that Dairine had heard green pinewood make in the outdoor fireplace, sometimes, when her dad was burning brush.

“Oh no,” Filif said. And he hastened into the kitchen and leaned against one of the counters there, rustling uncontrollably.

“What’s the matter, son?” Dairine’s dad said, alarmed.

“It’s here,” Filif said, broken voiced. “Death—”

Her father went a little pale. “Death in Its own self,” Filif said. “The Ravager, the Kindler of Wildfires. I thought…” Filif sounded stricken. “I was beginning to think perhaps this was one of the places where the Lone Power hadn’t come. Here and there you do find places like that, worlds or planets or continua It forgot or hasn’t been to yet…places where the Bargain was done differently.” Filif looked around him with all his berries. “It’s so terrible,” he said. “I never knew—I didn’t know It was here, too. I thought this was paradise!”

Her dad looked at Dairine rather helplessly, then did all he could do in such circumstances: He hugged a tree, not to draw strength from it, but the other way around.

“It’s not going to get you here, son,” Dairine’s dad said. “Nothing like that is going to get you here. And as for the powers of darkness, yeah, they’re here, too. But we know they’re here. And we fight as we can.”

There was a long silence. Finally, Filif pulled himself away. “That’s all we can do,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

“That’s all,” Dairine’s dad said.

Slowly he went back into the living room, leaving Dairine and her dad gazing after him.

“There are really places like that?” Dairine’s dad said after a few moments. “Places where they just haven’t taken delivery on Death?”

Dairine nodded. “Here and there,” she said, and she turned away. For her, too, the subject was too close for comfort.

She went to rinse out the empty milk glass and put it in the sink. After a little while she wandered outside and looked up at the sky. The Moon was coming up in the east, and as it slid slowly up through the twilight, her dad put his head out the back door and looked at her. “You all right?” he said.

Dairine breathed in, breathed out. “Yeah,” she said. “Are you?”

Her dad let out a long breath. “How do other places get to operate like that,” he said, “when we don’t?”

Dairine shook her head. “It’s a long story,” she said. “But right now I really wish we were one of them…”

Her dad nodded and vanished back inside.

She came back in, thought about another glass of milk, fetched Spot into the kitchen from the dining room, got another glass, and went back into the fridge for more milk. While she was pouring, Sker’ret came back in.

“Ah,” Sker’ret said, “the ‘got’ stuff.”

“Yup,” Dairine said. “Don’t tell me you’re hungry again!”

“Not again,” Sker’ret said. “Still.”

Dairine glanced at her dad. “Daddy,” she said, “have we got any scrap metal…or wood?”

“Or matter of any kind,” Sker’ret said, with the air of someone trying to be helpful.

“Let me see what I can find,” Dairine’s dad said. “Now that you mention it, I’ve been thinking of replacing the old woodshed, but I keep putting it off. If I had to replace it because somebody, uh, ate it…”

Dairine snickered. Her dad got up and came into the kitchen, putting the kettle

on to boil. Then he picked up his cell phone and dialed. After a moment he snorted. “It’s still not working.” He looked over at Sker’ret. “I’m tempted to give this to you as an hors d’oeuvre.”

“No, Daddy,” Dairine said. “It’s probably still just the Sun. The effect can last a day or so, sometimes.”

Roshaun wandered in while Dairine and her dad were looking again at Spot’s display from the SOHO satellite. “Do these people know they’re feeding their data to wizards?” her dad said, as he took the kettle off the stove, put decaf instant coffee into a mug, and made himself one last cup of coffee before bed.

“I don’t think they’d mind,” Dairine said. “It’s more or less a public service.”

“That smells wonderful,” Roshaun said. “What is it?” And then his eye fell on Spot’s display.

Roshaun froze.

“It’s coffee,” Dairine’s father said. “Well, it’s sort of coffee. How much you can really consider something to be coffee when there’s no caffeine in it is a moot point.”

He wandered out of the kitchen, and so entirely missed seeing Roshaun’s ashen expression.

“Is that your star?” Roshaun said, very softly.

“Huh?” Dairine looked over her shoulder. “Yeah. It’s just a CME. You don’t have to look all worried about it.”

But he did look worried about it. “Dairine, how many of these have you had lately?”

Dairine stopped dead. She couldn’t remember Roshaun having ever spoken her name directly to her before, not once. “I don’t know,” she said, after taking a moment to get over the initial shock. “We’re in a sunspot maximum now, and we expect a lot of them. One or two a week, we’ve been having, but—”

Roshaun looked stricken. “Dear Aethyrs, that’s the first sign,” he said. “I’ve seen this before. Don’t you know what this means?”

“No,” Dairine said. “Should I?”

“Are you insane!” he shouted at her. “Your star is about to start having a crisis! And if you want to have a star for much longer, or you want your planet to be in any state to notice that it has a star, you’ll shut up and listen!!.”

Completely astounded, Dairine shut up.

“I wondered why the thing pained me to look at it,” Roshaun said. “It’s going to bubblestorm. Your Sun’s got to be fixed before it goes into a catastrophic flare cycle—”

“Are you crazy? You can’t just run off and fix the Sun! We don’t even know if it’s really broken or not!”

“I do,” Roshaun said. “It’s broken. And if somebody doesn’t fix it right away—”

“This kind of thing happens all the time here. This is normal!”

“This is not normal,” Roshaun said angrily. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. This kind of behavior is very, very abnormal in a star of this class, and it has to be dealt with before it starts to accelerate toward a crisis process that can no longer be stopped!”

Her father appeared in the kitchen again. “I assume,” he said softly, “that someone is going to get a grip on himself or herself and explain all this shouting to me?

“Roshaun is completely out of his mind,” Dairine said, “and thinks the Sun is broken. And he wants to go fix it. Which he is not going to do, because you’ve got to get permission from at least a regional-level wizard if you’re going to screw around with a system’s primary!”

“I don’t care. Unless something is done—”

Dairine had awful visions of Roshaun going off and doing something on the sly, and messing up Sol past all repair. “Look,” she said, “we really need to at least talk to Tom and Carl about this before you go off and start playing around with my star. My star, not yours, right? Thank you.” She went over to the phone, picked it up, dialed.

“Hi there,” said Tom’s voice.

“Tom? It’s Dairine. Listen, I—”

“—know the drill. Leave a name and number and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks.” Beep!

Dairine swallowed. “Tom, it’s Dairine. I need to talk to you right away. I’ll get you via Spot. Bye.”

She hung up. Where are they? she thought. She’d never called Tom and Carl’s house before and failed to get one or the other of them, except when they were on vacation, and they always warned everybody about that first. “Spot?”

Yes?

“Message both Tom and Carl right away. Flag it emergency and high-urgent. I need to talk to them right now.”

Spot sat silent for a moment. Then he said, The message has been bounced.

“What??”

The bounce message says, “Subjects are on assignment, unavailable.”

Oh no, Dairine thought. Oh no. What does that mean? She sat there and stared into space for a moment. It may be nothing, she thought. There may be all kinds of times they go off on assignment together and I don’t know anything about it. It’s not like Nita or Kit or I call them every five minutes to see where they are.

But the cold feeling at the bottom of Dairine’s gut told her that this was not just nothing. She remembered something Tom had said once, when Dairine’s dad had asked him why he wasn’t off the planet more: “Harry, would you normally open the door and get out of a car you were driving?”

“They’re not there, are they?” her dad said.

“No.”

Roshaun was looking at her in increasing anger. “We’re just going to have to do something, then.”

“No we are not,” Dairine said. “We are going up to at least planetary level on this one.”

She turned back to Spot and began firing off messages in all directions.

But there was no response. It wasn’t as if the Planetary Wizard for Earth wouldn’t talk to her; wizards at even that level were remarkably accessible to their colleagues. But again and again Spot simply said, Subjects are on assignment,

unavailable.

“What can I do to help?” her dad said.

“Daddy…” Dairine shook her head. “Nothing right now. Go on…I’ll let you know what happens.”

Silently, her dad kissed her, and went. An hour later, Dairine was still sitting in the dining room, in shock, realizing that no one in the upper wizardly structure was available at all. Good lord, she thought, where is everybody? Who’s minding the planet?!

And, horrified, she knew the answer, at least for the moment. We are…

****

Travel-Related Stress Dairine’s first urge was to go off and physically look for somebody in the echelons above the planetary level. But she couldn’t. The limitations that Tom had put on her ability to use wizardry for transit were still in place, whether he was here or not. She was limited to Sol System, and couldn’t even get around the prohibition by going elsewhere on the planet and using a fixed gate. All of the worldgates had monitoring wizardries built into them that would recognize Dairine’s banned status and refuse her access.

Roshaun was looking at her from where he’d sat down across the table. All the time Dairine had been trying to find someone higher up the wizardly command structure, he had simply sat there, not saying a word, watching her. It was perhaps the longest time she’d ever seen him be quiet. Now he said, “You’re wasting time.”

She looked at him with profound misgivings. There was no arguing that he was an expert of sorts in this business; it was his specialty as a wizard. Even Spot’s manual functions confirmed that. But—

“You don’t trust me,” Roshaun said.

“Not as far as I could throw you,” Dairine said.

“And why not?” Roshaun said. “Because I’m not like you? Maybe not. But I am still a wizard. The Powers That Be trust me, if you don’t.”

“And why?” Dairine said. “That’s what I want to know! You are the least wizardlike wizard I’ve ever met! You don’t even use wizardry if you can help it! You’re a whole lot more interested in being a prince than in being a wizard, the way it looks to me! The rules say that wizardry can’t live long in the unwilling heart. How long do you think you’re likely to be one of us if you keep acting the way you do? How long is it going to be before the act becomes the reality?”

He stared at her, and it took Dairine several breaths to realize how stricken, and then furious, the look in his eyes was becoming.

“That’s it,” he said, and stood up. “That’s it. I’m off home. I’m weary of your arrogance, and your bad manners, and your mistrust, and your—”

Dairine jumped up, too. “You’re weary of my arrogance? Why, you stuck-up, self-centered, self-important—”

“—don’t have to explain myself to the likes of you, you parochial, controlling

little—”

“—always so sure you’re right, then go ahead, go home and be right there, where all your people are so busy bowing and scraping to you that none of them has the nerve to confront you when you’re—”

Suddenly Dairine’s face was full of greenery, and a number of berries were looking at her from very, very close, in a chilly, annoyed sort of way.

You should stop this now, Filif said.

Filif’s silent speech was forceful. It was like running suddenly into a tree. Across from her, beyond the greenery, she could tell that Roshaun was feeling the same impact.

You are frightened, Filif said to Dairine. It’s clouding your thinking. Sit down and be quiet until you’ve managed the fear.

Dairine sat down, hard, as if she’d been pushed. Maybe I was, she thought, somewhat dazed. She wasn’t quite sure if Filif hadn’t given her muscles a hint.

And you’re frightened, too, Filif said to Roshaun. And it’s making you angry because you feel powerless. Sit down and be quiet until you find your power again.

Roshaun sat down as hard as Dairine had. She watched this with both confusion and satisfaction, but at the bottom of it was a kind of scared awe. She had been fooled by Filif’s diffident manner, and had been treating him as a bush in a baseball cap, someone faintly funny. She’d had no idea there was such power underneath.

For some few moments there wasn’t any sound but both Dairine and Roshaun breathing hard. Eventually this sound, too, started to slow. When it did, Filif said, So. What does one do about a problem like this?

“There are a number of possible solutions that would cure this problem permanently,” Roshaun said. “Most of them need a lot of time for assessments, though, to tailor the wizardry to the star. And I don’t think we have enough time for that right now. There are some faster interventions, though. Effective at least in the short term. They buy you time to enact the more complex solutions.”

What is the best intervention for this problem, then?

Roshaun took a long breath. “Bleeding the star.”

“What?” Dairine said.

“Bleeding the star. You remove a small percentage of its mass.”

“Remove it? To where?”

“Anywhere you like, but out of the star’s corpus. Yes, it’s dangerous! Bleed off too much mass, and fusion in the star fails. Bleed off too little, and the intervention merely makes the star’s core go critical sooner.”

“Its core—” Dairine broke out in a sweat. “It’s not going to go nova, is it?”

“No. Nothing like that. But there are worse things.”

“Worse than the Sun going nova?!”

Roshaun gave her a bleak look. For a moment he didn’t speak.

“How would you like it,” he said at last, “if your star flared up just enough to roast one side of your world? That happened to our planet once. I would have thought you’d noticed. Or maybe you didn’t read the orientation package. It’s right there on the first page of the historical material—”

Dairine flushed hot. She was a fast reader, sometimes too fast. She had missed it, and now felt profoundly stupid. “My great-great-ancestors were a family of wizards, back then,” Roshaun said. “In their time, our star flared without warning. The land on that side of Wellakh was blasted to slag and lava; the seas on that side boiled off. The air on that side all burned away. The wizards of the world had just enough time between the flare and its wave front’s arrival to isolate the spaceward side of Wellakh from the worst effects of the flare, and to keep the planet’s ecology from being completely destroyed in the terrible winds and floods and fires that followed. But only just enough. It was very close, and almost all of the wizards died from giving all of their power to keep the world and its people alive. Then, after that, it took centuries of suffering and rebuilding for our world to recover. The quick obliteration that a nova would have brought would have seemed merciful by comparison.”

Dairine swallowed. “But afterward,” Roshaun said, “my ancestors, wizards and nonwizards both, spent generations learning how the sun behaved, finding out how to cure it. And they did cure it, finally, though again, almost all of my line’s wizards died in the cure. Why do you think my family are kings now? They gave their lives to save the world, to make sure it would never need to be saved again from death by fire. So that in any generation where a wizard is born into the royal family again, everyone looks at them and says, ‘See, there’s the son of the Sun Lord, the Guarantor, there’s the one who’ll give his life to protect us…’”

Without particularly asking what you had in mind to do with your life besides that, Dairine thought, hearing Roshaun’s voice go rough with abrupt pain. And she found herself thinking of the view from the balcony of Roshaun’s family’s palace, right across that very flat, strangely featureless landscape…right in the middle of the sealess, mountainless, melted-down side of the world. Who built that there to make sure that the “Sun Kings” never forgot what they were there for? Dairine thought. As if to say, “We’ll give them everything they want…but when the bad day comes again, they’d better deliver!”

She sat there in silence, feeling shock and shame in nearly equal parts. Roshaun’s bleak look was turned more inward now, and he seemed not to register Dairine looking at him. Finally, he did glance over at her once more, and something of the old cool distance was back in his eyes. But now Dairine knew it was a mask, and she also knew what lay under it.

“I’m an idiot,” Dairine said.

Roshaun simply looked at her. So did Spot.

She looked down at him. “Yes, I am,” Dairine said. “This is no time for misguided loyalty. We’ve got to do something.” She looked back over at Roshaun. “But we still have to get permission,” Dairine said. She looked down at Spot. “Any luck finding the planetary supervisor yet?”

No.

Dairine covered her face with her hands. “Great. We can’t do this, we can’t, without making sure that no one else is—”

I do have an authorization, though, Spot said.

Dairine looked up, surprised. “What? From where?”

Spot popped his lid up and showed her.

In the Speech, very small, Dairine saw the characters that spelled out the words “Approved. Go.” Following those was a shorthand version of a wizardly name, but even the shorthand version was very long, and the power rating appended to it was so high that Dairine looked at it several times to make sure she wasn’t just misplacing a decimal point.

“This is a Galactic Arm coordinator’s ID,” Dairine said softly.

It made her feel no better in terms of an answer to the question of where Earth’s wizardly command structure had gone all of a sudden. But at least she knew now that she wouldn’t be interfering with anyone else’s intervention.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go fix the Sun.”

Kit woke up with Ponch’s wet nose in his face.

Nita says you should get up.

“Nita is a nuisance,” Kit muttered.

And Quelt is here.

Kit blinked. “That’s another story,” he said. “I want to catch her before she goes out on business or something …”

Kit rolled off his couch, grabbed the bathrobe he’d brought with him, wrapped it around himself and headed out the door at such speed that he nearly knocked Quelt flat. She was carrying a basket of laundry, and she staggered, and then laughed.

Kit grabbed her and steadied her, and then rocked back himself, off balance. “Are you all right?” Quelt said.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Kit said, “and I have one question for you. What’s the ‘Relegate’s Naos’?”

Quelt looked at him in some surprise. “Uh, it’s where the Lone Power lives,” she said.

Kit stared.

“It lives here??”

“Of course she does,” Quelt said, putting the laundry basket down and looking at Kit very peculiarly.

“Since when?”

“Well, since after the Choice. When she lost out, they built her a place of her own.”

Kit stood there with his mouth open and didn’t care who saw him. “Why in the One’s Name did they do that?” he said.

Quelt looked at him with some confusion. “Well, she had bound herself into the world, and when she lost, she couldn’t dissolve that relationship. She was stuck here. So they made her a place to stay. It’s very nice; it’s a few thousand miles from here. That’s where you go for an Own Choice, when you’re a wizard here. We go see her, and have a good talk with her, and tell her she should have behaved herself.”

Kit looked at Quelt in astonishment.

“And you just walked away from that little conversation without having any further trouble?” Kit said.

“Well, yes,” Quelt said. “Why not?”

Kit was utterly dumbfounded. He looked at Ponch, who was eyeing him with some moderate confusion himself.

“Come on!” Kit said, and headed off. Ponch ran after him, leaving Quelt gazing after them.

“Well,” she said to no one in particular, “no help with the laundry this morning, I see…”

Kit made his way straight back to the great Display, via his “beam-me-up-Scotty” spell, into which he had laid the Display’s coordinates. “There’s something I’m looking for,” he said to Ponch as they popped out in the early morning over the crystalline “pool.”

Tell me about it.

“What we’re seeing here, down below…”

Ponch’s answer was a few minutes in coming. They decided, here, what the rest of this world’s life would look like, Ponch said. Is that right?

“That’s part of it,” Kit said.

Ponch looked up at him with an expression that was both quizzical and somehow sad. But not all.

“No,” Kit said. Standing there on the brink of the interface, he hesitated, and then sat down in the grass and flowers.

Ponch sat down beside him, his tongue hanging out, still giving Kit that uncertain look. You understand it, Ponch said. Make me understand it, too. I think it’s important.

Kit pulled his knees up, wrapped his arms around them. “The universe is running down,” he said. “It’s the Lone Power’s doing. It invented entropy, the Great Death that’s the shadow over all the smaller ones. Whether the results of that invention are all bad—” Kit shrugged. “It gets too complicated to just say yes or no. But wizards do what they can to slow down the speed of energy running out of the world, that’s all.”

Ponch had looked away and was gazing down into the Display. I think I understand that.

“Okay. When enough members of a species get to the point where they know they’re alive, and they know they can think—when they start to understand the world around them, and they realize they can do something about it one way or another—then they’re offered the Choice. As a species, they can elect to slow down the Great Death, or at least try to slow it down. Or else they can just give in and decide to do nothing about it. They can even go over to Its side, the Lone Power’s side, and help make the worlds die faster…”

Ponch shuddered. How can they do that?!

“I’ve never been real clear about that myself,” Kit said. How can they do it? How can someone be angry enough, or crazy enough, to say, “Sure, if things are going to hell anyway, let’s have them go there faster’? “Sometimes it looks like a

species can get tricked into it,” Kit said. “When a Choice happens, there are always representatives from Life’s side and Death’s side to argue the case. And there are always wizards there: sometimes a lot, sometimes just a few, or even just one. But finally it comes down to what the species itself decides, through its representatives at the Choice. If the Lone One offers them something they like the sound of—better than they like the sound of what Life’s offering—and they go for it, then…” Kit shook his head.

Then bad things happen to that species, Ponch said.

He was still looking down into the Display. Kit glanced over at him, wondering what was going on. Ponch was usually more voluble than this, even when he was upset.

“That’s right,” Kit said. “And usually bad stuff happens to the other species around them, too, if the one making the Choice has the biggest population of sentient beings on that planet. If they already had death to begin with, then it tends to get a lot worse than just their bodies stopping, or whatever. If they didn’t have death…they get it.”

It was some seconds before Ponch said anything else. Finally, he lifted his head and looked Kit in the eyes again. That’s awful.

Kit nodded. “So all the people in that world have to deal with the results of that Choice until their species ends,” he said. “And wizards get born to try to make it better, if it went badly. You could say that a wizard’s Ordeal is his own version of that Choice.” Kit smiled, a small smile and not a happy one. “Whether we like it or not, it looks like it’s Choices all the way down…”

Ponch flicked an ear at the Display. Including down there.

“Definitely down there,” Kit said. “Most species only have old stories about their Choices, and it’s hard to tell whether everything in the stories is true. These guys—” He shook his head. “It’s pretty unusual to have such a clear telling. It’s nice for the Alaalids. But I can’t get over the idea that there’s something missing.”

Something they’ve left out?

“Maybe. Yeah. Or else something they didn’t think was important. What I wish I could see…is that left-out part.”

Ponch looked stumped. Let me think about that for a moment, he said.

That, Kit thought. The part with the Lone One. In all other Choices that I’ve seen, It’s been the major player. In world after world, It haunts even the species that came close to winning their Choices. But this one…He sat down. This species has death. They accepted that part of the Lone Power’s “gift” even before the Choice process began. So the heart of their own Choice, and something they accepted—or threw out—has to be even more important than death.

Kit stood there in the bright day, turning that over and over in his mind. Something more important for this species than life and death. More important than what comes after it.

What could that be?

Ponch looked up at him. The thing you want to see, he said, I can take you there.

“Do it!”

Together they walked down into the crystal. Once again they found the eight

characters of the Choice waiting for them. But this time the air of the past, or the past-made-present, wasn’t quite so pellucid. There was uncertainty in it, a kind of haze.

“Where is that haze coming from?” Kit said.

Me, possibly, Ponch said. But pay attention. I don’t know if I can do this more than once.

The Lone Power and Druvah had stepped aside, and Kit and Ponch stood nearby, watching, listening. “You are the wise one,” the Lone Power was saying. “You know what day your people are coming to, in the far future. You know to what place they will come: the place from which they will not be able to move without help. My help.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Druvah said. “I think our Choice will still remain our own. Now tell me what you want.”

“The destruction of hopes,” It said. “The devaluation of life. The end of things, early or late. The dissolution of the created. What else?”

“No,” Druvah said. “I mean, what do you want of me? You wouldn’t have called me aside unless I had the ability to do something you want.”

“I want you to let me into the heart of things,” It said.

“You want me to betray my people,” Druvah said.

“Nothing of the kind! But I can give you the power to make sure they won’t destroy themselves. They will, eventually. You know it. They’re very happy with the way they are. But to every species comes a time when the way they are is not enough…when if they’re going to go on living, they have to become something more, something different from what they’ve always been. If your fellow wizards enact the wizardry they’re building at the moment, they’ll also find that they’ve built themselves a trap from which there’s no escape. And you know that’s what they’re doing, too. You’re trying to save them. But they’re not listening to you.”

“They’re likely to listen to me even less,” Druvah said, “if I talk to you much longer.”

“Why should you care about that?” Ictanikë said. “You’re the oldest of the wizards on this world, the wisest and the strongest. And you’re the power source for this spell, the one without whom a wizardry of this scope and importance simply can’t happen. If they become offended, why, you just walk away from the spell—”

“And leave the future of my world unprotected from disasters and pain and sudden death, and alienated from the One?” Druvah said. “I don’t think so.”

“Whatever the One may do for you,” Ictanikë said, “without me included in your world, your species will never be able to change, or grow.”

“I suspect that to be true,” Druvah said, and for the first time, he looked troubled. “But I don’t trust you.”

“There I can help you,” Ictanikë said. “I will gladly give you enough power so that, for the rest of your life, if indeed you don’t trust me, you can step in to right whatever wrongs you think have been done.”

Druvah was silent for a while, gazing off into the distance. Then he looked up again. “You’re very cunning,” he said. “But what’s one lifetime against the lifetime of a world? I’m not so irresponsible as to cast away responsibility for what happens in Alaalu after I leave it. If you’re going to give me power in return for changes I

make in the wizardry we’re about to work, then it will be this way—that by your gift, I’ll be able to live here in the state of being I please, in the shape and way I please, until the last of the Alaalids passes from the world.”

Uh-oh, Kit thought. He recognized the veiled cruelty in the smile on the Lone One’s face, having seen it before. Whatever Druvah was asking for, it was something that the Lone Power thought suited Its own desires perfectly.

“After the Choice is done,” the Lone One said, “what you’ve asked for will be yours.”

“Before,” Druvah said. “I know perfectly well who you are. And I know that the gifts of the Powers can’t be recalled once bestowed.”

The Lone One looked somewhat taken aback.

“My way, or not at all,” Druvah said.

Ictanikë looked at him, narrow-eyed, furious. Finally, she said, “Very well.”

“And when you give me this power,” Druvah said, “what am I supposed to do for you?”

“Just a small thing,” the Lone One said. “Simply leave me a foothold in your world…a place where my essence can lie dormant until the day comes when you do need it for the Change that is to come. With you as the eternal guardian of your world, I won’t be able to do any harm.”

Kit knew that innocent look, and he went cold at the sight of it. The Lone One’s going to make sure something happens to Druvah, sooner or later, Kit thought. Probably sooner. It’ll find a loophole in the promise It’s made, and It’ll kill him somehow. And then the Alaalids will be stuck with It in their world forever. He had the urge to go over to Druvah and shake him and say, Don’t do it!

But Druvah was hundreds of thousands of years away from Kit. He said to the Lone One, “I agree. Pay me my price now, or I do nothing for you.”

The Lone Power looked at him for a long moment, then closed Its eyes.

The ferocity of the released power staggered Kit where he stood, even at this remove in time and space. Druvah, though, did not stagger. He went rigid as ironwood, and then, as the rigor passed, he looked at Ictanikë with the slightest smile.

“Now,” he said, “to work.”

Druvah went back to the other six wizards, who looked at him dubiously. “Well,” he said, “I’ve listened to Its words. Now you’ll listen to mine in turn. I am the power source for this Choice, this work we do to protect our world for all the generations that will come after. The spell we’ve built so far has many good things about it. Lives will be long in our world, and there will be peace and prosperity and joy for an endless-seeming time. The Lone One will have no more part in our world than entropy, Its child, makes absolutely necessary. Our world’s center, its kernel, It will never be able to reach, and this world will be a good one, a glad one, for a very long time. But not forever. I see the doings of the day after forever, when our people realize they must change and cannot, and there won’t be any release from the trap our present wizardry will have built for them.”

“You only say this because the Lone One has said it to you,” Seseil cried. “Power passed between you, just then. She has bought you!”

“Many will say that,” Druvah said. “Only the day after forever will reveal the

truth. So for now, if you want to enact the Choice we’ve made here, the wizardry that will protect our world, let’s do so. But I will only power the wizardry if we add to it this stricture: that, come the day after forever, when the children of the children of a thousand millennia from now finally realize they need to change their world and themselves, our descendants in power will be able to repeal this Choice, this protection, and make another that suits them better.”

“Never! We know what’s best for them—”

“So parents always say of their children,” Druvah said. “Sometimes they’re even right. Nonetheless, if we make a Choice-wizardry today, or ever, this is how it’s going to have to be. However, so that no such change of our whole world will be made lightly, let us add this to the stricture: The decision must be unanimous.”

Kit saw Seseil smile then. Under his breath, the Alaalid said to one of the other wizards near him, “That will never happen. So let us do as he asks.”

So the wizardry went forward. Kit watched it through to the end, watched the actual implementation of the massive working that was meant to keep this world safe from the Lone Power’s malice forever. It shook the earth when it was done, and thundered against the sky, and rooted itself into Alaalu’s star and into the fabric of all the space in Alaalu’s system, right out to the heliopause. When it was over, all the wizards went away to their homes, well satisfied that they had made their world safe from the evils of the universe until their star should come naturally to the end of its life span and go cold. Only Druvah was left. He stood and watched his colleagues go, and finally turned his own back and walked off the way Ictanikë had gone.

Kit watched him go with a strange feeling. The silence that fell after that mighty working was deafening. In it, only the wind blew. Everything seemed finished, and Kit almost expected to look up into that piercingly blue sky and see hanging there the words the end. But the way he felt, if there were going to be words written in the heavens, they could only be to be continued.

We need to get up out of this, Ponch said from beside Kit, panting. It’s over.

They stepped up out of the pool. Kit had to struggle, gasping, up the last six or ten feet of the climb; and when they came out onto the surface, he looked down and found everything beneath them empty—just water. No wizards, no past.

I think maybe I broke it, Ponch said, apologetic.

“Oh, great,” Kit muttered. “Well…never mind. We found out what we needed to. Let’s get back and tell Nita. And then we have to talk to Quelt. We’ve got to do something. They’ve made a terrible mistake, and we have to help them somehow.”

If they’ll let us, Ponch said.

In Dairine Callahan’s kitchen, hectic planning was in progress.

“This data source is useful,” Prince Roshaun said, looking over Dairine’s shoulder at Spot’s rendition of the SOHO satellite’s data feed. “But does it have history? If we’re going to avoid collapsing your star, I need data for at least the past fifty years.”

Dairine laughed weakly. “We’ve barely been in space that long,” she said. “The satellite’s only a few years old. For earlier data, you’re going to need the manual.”

“We’ll use both,” Roshaun said, running a finger down Spot’s screen and bringing up an array of solar views and a great many complicated-looking charts and graphs. “We don’t have a lot of time. Here, they have ultrasound data. And magnetographs. Good.” He went quiet for a moment, studying the images. “The star’s active side is pointing away from us right now. That buys us time…”

“But it won’t stay that way forever,” Filif said, looking over Roshaun’s shoulder. “The star rotates…”

“What’s the period?” Roshaun said to Dairine.

“Six hundred hours,” Dairine said. “Just a little less, actually.”

“And the spot that’s starting to bubblestorm has gone around more than three quarters of the way already—” Roshaun was silent for a moment. Then he said, “We have perhaps nineteen hours before that particular crisis point rotates toward us again. And maybe twenty-six or twenty-eight hours before it boils over—”

He shook his head, looking at the data. “It’s going to take nearly that long to design the wizardry,” he said. “And then we have to go implant it.”

“We have to go to the Sun??” Filif said.

The excitement in his voice was astonishing—and Dairine found it difficult to reconcile with the creature who had only hours earlier been emotionally shattered by the fact of a forest fire.

“We don’t have much choice,” Roshaun said. “We’re just four wizards against a star that weighs, oh, nine hundred octillion tons or so. We’d need a lot more power than we’ve got to just sit here and throw the wizardry at it from a distance. It makes more sense to do the serious work up close.”

Filif was trembling, and not with fear.

“Can you?” Roshaun said to him.

“Watch me!” Filif said.

Dairine shook her head. “Better show me where to get started, then,” she said to Roshaun.

He looked at her with an expression she’d never seen on his face before: just the faintest glimmer of respect. At another time, this might have either annoyed her or pleased her, but right now Dairine found that she hardly cared one way or another.

They spent the next twelve hours and more constructing the wizardry—first the “rough” version, then the real one. Dairine had never been involved in such a detailed, exacting, exhausting piece of work in her life, not even when Nita had called her in to assist with a big group wizardry in Ireland. This time, there were many fewer wizards involved, and the work the four of them were doing was, in its way, far more complex.

Conceptually, it wasn’t that much of a problem. “We have to go into the Sun,” Roshaun said, “stick a conduit into it just underneath the tachocline—that’s the layer just above the radiactive zone and just under the convective zone—pull out some mass, and then pull the shunt out and leave without burning ourselves to cinders.”

“Oh, well,” Sker’ret said, “nothing to it.” Roshaun and Dairine had found

themselves giving Sker’ret the same somewhat skeptical look. Then each of them had registered the other one giving him that look…and things had, from Dairine’s point of view, somehow, irrationally, gotten a lot better between them. “Nothing to it” was more an expression of Sker’ret’s natural ebullience than anything else. Simply having stated the problem itself produced a number of further problems. Dump the extracted solar material where, exactly? What was going to come out would emerge at a temperature of at least a couple of million degrees centigrade and would expand like mad before cooling down to ambient-space temperatures. “Expand like mad,” Dairine thought, would be a mild description of the result. The associated explosive expansion would closely mimic that of any number of H-bombs, with only the pesky radiation left out. Additionally, the wizardry itself had to be capable of conducting the material and not failing under the forces to which it was exposed, which meant pushing a tremendous amount of energy into it to produce the result. That was Dairine’s main concern, as she studied the problem with Roshaun and Sker’ret and Filif, and started building the response. Where are we going to get that kind of power? she thought. Where in the worlds?

And then, assuming they successfully built a wizardry that could handle these forces without withering away like straw in a fire, the real excitement would start…because not even a relatively small and tame star like the Sun, a GO and nothing particularly exciting, was just going to lie there and let you suction out this much mass without complaining bitterly about it. The star would throw more CMEs—several of them at least—but this time the effect wouldn’t be to breed further ones. It would be to leak off energy, the way small earthquakes prevent big ones. And after that, there would be quiet.

If everything worked.

Toward the end of the first part of their work session, Roshaun, who had been helping rough out the major spell diagram in the air above the spot where they would inscribe it for real, suddenly sat back on his heels, wiping his brow with the back of one hand and looking completely horrified.

“What’s the matter?” Sker’ret said to him.

Roshaun sat looking at the rough spell diagram. “This is all for nothing,” he said. “There’s no way we can make this work.”

He’s seen it, Dairine thought. I didn’t want to say anything. I was hoping he was going to pull some kind of rabbit out of the hat. Oh, god, what are we going to do now?!

“What do you mean?” Filif said.

“The problem is—” Roshaun looked around at the others. “The problem is power,” he said. “It’s one thing to design the conduit that’s going to take the mass out of the heart of this star. But it’s another thing to power it. There are just four of us. There’s only so big a conduit we can drive to dump the mass at a safe enough distance. Unless we get a lot more wizards—”

“There’s no time for that,” Sker’ret said. “You said yourself, it’s only a matter of hours now—!”

Dairine sat there, frowning silently at the diagram hanging in the air, as the others started to debate other ways of handling the problem, but the argument started to get desperate, for there were no other ways around the power problem.

Wizardry was not a forgiving art: You got what you paid for, and you paid for results in effort, in power subtracted from your personal ecosystem…sometimes in terms of a deduction from your life span. When she had gone on her Ordeal, and for a little while after she passed it, Dairine’s power levels had been such that she’d hardly ever bothered wondering whether she could “afford” a spell or not. There was a time, Dairine thought, when I could’ve driven this spell entirely by myself. In fact, I did do a smaller version of this, once. It infuriated her to think how easily, almost carelessly, she had once expended the kind of power that would be needed for a work like this. It’s true, what Roshaun said, Dairine thought. I was a star once, but I’m now having to deal with the limitations of not being a star anymore.

The other three sat arguing while Dairine sat just staring at the rough spell diagram. I guess there just comes a time, she thought, where you can’t bully the universe anymore. You think you can. You assume that you’ll be able to power your way through any problem that comes along. But sooner or later, the world asserts itself. That’s when you have to start substituting cleverness for raw power. And it’s really annoying, because raw power is more fun.

Still…

Dairine stood up, smiling slightly. “Would you guys excuse me for a moment?” she said, and went down into the basement.

A few moments later, she came up with something in her hand. They all looked at her, confused. Dangling there from Dairine’s fingers was one of the custom worldgates, a loose “hole” of blackness in the air.

“Er—aren’t you supposed to leave that deployed onto a matter aggregate?” Sker’ret said, looking uneasy.

“You can remove it for short periods,” Dairine said. “But this has other uses.” She looked rather pointedly at Roshaun. “Someone here has some talent for reverse engineering when it suits him. And this, unlike any of us here, has no limit on how much matter it can move. It’s subsidized!”

The look of embarrassment and annoyance that had started forming on Roshaun’s face abruptly evaporated.

“So it is,” he said. And, very slowly, Roshaun began to smile.

“The problem,” Dairine said, “is going to be control, isn’t it? You say that the amount of mass we have to remove from Sol is very specific. Whereas once you stick this into the middle of a star and open it up, it’s going to throw matter out the far end like a fire hose…and what we need is the kind of control you get with a garden hose. Or an eyedropper…”

Roshaun looked at the wizardry. “Calibrating it,” he said, “is going to be the exciting part.”

“Taking it apart so that it can be calibrated, without sucking the whole area into deep space, or another dimension,” Sker’ret said, “that’s going to be the exciting part.” He flexed his front fourteen or so legs. “Let me at it!”

“Just drop it there,” Filif said, indicating the ground with a spare frond, “so that we can all get a good look at it. I can root it in one place and keep it from jumping around while you mobile types work on it.”

Dairine dropped the worldgate to the ground off to one side of their spell diagram. Immediately a black hole opened there, one into which light fell and

vanished. The other three wizards bent over the hole, intent. But Roshaun looked up at Dairine first, and the expression was hard to read. Forgiving? she thought. Possibly apologetic? Maybe even a little more mellow than usual?

I’ll settle for the last, she thought. She got down on her knees along with the others and got to work.

The work that followed was complex beyond anything Dairine had ever done by herself. In fact, part of the complexity lay exactly in that she wasn’t doing it herself, that she couldn’t do it herself because she no longer had the power for that kind of thing. They all had to do it together, and without wasting time on disagreements. The Earth and the Sun were both rotating into a configuration that was going to be deadly enough without letting personalities get in the way.

As darkness fell, Roshaun laid out the outlines of the full spell diagram—a glowing circle with four big lobes inscribed inside, like a four-leaf clover. Be nice if it was lucky for us, Dairine thought as she bent over the lobe that was her responsibility. For nearly half an hour now she had been referring back to Spot again and again as she laid in detailed information about the Sun’s interior characteristics, tracing out the numbers and constants and technical terms in pale long curves of the cursive form of the Speech, lacing them into the spell structure. Spot had been quiet and had let her get on with it, hearing Dairine’s tone of mind as she worked. It was not a time for cheery conversation.

Her back hurt; her eyes hurt from squinting at the more delicate parts of the spell. She wondered if she was possibly getting astigmatism, as Nita had had years back. She grew out of that, though, and she doesn’t need the glasses anymore. But if we live past tonight, I won’t care if I need glasses…

She swallowed, or tried to: Her throat was dry. If we live past tonight. Dairine didn’t seem able to get past the thought, to her shame, while the others seemed a long way from worrying about it at all. The three of them were crouched over the spell diagram, all their concentration bent on it—Roshaun tracing glowing-spiderweb curve after curve of the wizardry’s interface between the portable worldgate and the conduit that would suck the plasma into it, out of the Sun; Filif’s branches all hung with faint delicate statements and syllogisms in the Speech, like luminous angel hair, as he shed them with precise control onto the “probe” part of the wizardry, which would slide into the Sun and find the right place to bleed it; Sker’ret knitting glittering cat’s cradles of fire between his claws and weaving them into the spell’s basic control structures, the shields that would keep them alive in that terribly hostile environment. He’s the real star here, Dairine thought. He’s good at everything. Look at how good he is at troubleshooting—he can find a weak link in a spell just by the smell of it. If we live through this, it’s going to be because of him—

Dairine breathed out in annoyance at herself and shook the thought aside for the twentieth time. What’s the matter with me that I can’t stop thinking about it? It wasn’t like this on my Ordeal.

Much…

But that seemed like such a long time ago now. And during a lot of her Ordeal, she had been running for her life. She hadn’t had a lot of time for heavy thinking when she was on the run. It was when she stopped and tried to do something else, like a wizardry, that the thoughts caught up with her and came

tumbling all over whatever she was trying to do. Like now…

She ground her teeth, a bad habit the dentist had warned her about, and then just got on with it. For quite some time, Dairine didn’t look up, but kept her mind on the structure of the Sun, the pressures and stresses and temperatures. The numbers were so insane that here, kneeling on the damp ground on a cool spring night, it was almost impossible to believe in them. Temperatures in the millions or even billions of degrees, fluid gases denser than molten metal— I should borrow Nita’s sunblock. No, she took it to Alaalu, didn’t she? Never mind…

Dairine straightened up, her back immediately rewarding her with a spasm of pain. She rubbed it, looking around. Roshaun and Sker’ret were kneeling on opposite sides of the spell diagram, fine-tuning the wizardry’s power equations. Filif was nowhere to be seen.

Took a rest break, probably, Dairine thought. I could use one of those myself. She stood up and stretched, turned her back on the spell diagram for the moment, and walked a little way toward the house.

—ashamed of myself—

She paused. “I don’t see why,” she heard her father say.

Dairine stood where she was in the shadow of the sassafras saplings just before the main part of the lawn. Maybe twenty feet away, over by the lilac hedge on the left side of the property, she could just see a shadow standing in the darkness, and another shadow, no longer hung with wizardly angel hair but faintly starred with lights. Dairine hadn’t noticed before that Filif’s berries actually glowed a little in the dark.

“After all,” Dairine’s dad was saying, “the fire you jump into isn’t anything like the one you run away from.”

It may burn you as badly…

“Maybe,” her dad said. “But…I don’t know. The quality of the pain’s different when you’re not running.”

You do know, Filif said.

Her dad was silent. “Maybe I do,” he said at last.

Yet that’s how my people became sentient, they think, Filif said, and there was a desperate laughter about his thought. They learned to run from the fire. They evolved mobility and, later, the beginnings of intelligence. And then the darkness at the Fire’s heart spoke to us and said, “You can be safe from Me, if you pay the price. Instead of burning terribly, and dying in it, without warning and in awful pain….you’ll burn just a little. But all the time, all your lives. At least you’ll know what’s coming, instead of having to always live with the unexpected…”

“And you decided,” Dairine’s dad said, “that it was better to take your chances with the wildfires.”

There was a rustle of branches, the sound Filif made when producing his people’s equivalent of a nod. Even though some of us said that we wouldn’t be what we are without the Fire, he said. That without it, all growth chokes together, and chokes out the Light. Dairine could just make out an uplift of branches toward the sky, all the berries going dim, from her angle, as they looked upward.

“Well, I think your people were smart,” Dairine’s dad said. “Light’s better, in the long run…even though you may not always like what it shows you.”

A few moments passed in silence. You were kind to me when I was frightened, Filif said.

“At a time like that, what else could I do?” Dairine’s dad said. “You’re my daughter’s colleagues. And her friends. I may not be a wizard, but I’ve been scared in my time: I know how it feels. Any time you’re feeling scared, you’re welcome here.”

Then I’m welcome now, Filif said, because though where we’re going is the source of the Light as well as the heart of the Fire, and it’d be all kinds of glory to die there, I’d really rather not.

“I’d rather none of you did,” Dairine’s dad said. “And you’re not going to. My daughter’s a pretty hot property as a wizard, and she’s not going to lose anybody on her watch.”

The absolute certainty in his voice was somehow worse than anything Dairine could have imagined, and it made her eyes sting. Hastily, she stepped back into the shadows and turned her attention back where it belonged, to the spell.

I will make Dad right, she thought, if it kills me…

****

Subversive Factions Nita stood on the beach, a few miles down from the house by the sea, and watched Alaalu’s sun come up. It always seemed to take a long time, and today it seemed to be taking even longer than usual.

Something’s missing, she thought.

When she’d first started to get this feeling, she’d discounted it. That’s how stressed out I’ve been, she’d thought at the time. They take me to an island paradise for a week, and already I’m dissatisfied with it, looking for some way to find fault. The problem’s probably in my own head. I should kick back and relax, let everything be all right for a change. I’ve just gotten out of the habit of trusting the world.

For a day or so, she’d talked herself into believing it. But this morning she knew that that was exactly what she had done. She had talked herself into believing, however temporarily, something that wasn’t true. She had mistakenly, but purposely, deactivated one of a wizard’s most useful tools: the hunch.

What her hunch told her—contradicting the whispering voices that spoke to her while she slept, the voices of the joyous but complacent—was that not everything was right here. That there was trouble in paradise. Not with the people. Not with the creatures living here. But something else, something much more basic.

Something’s missing.

And in at least one case, she thought she knew what it was—

Worlds had hearts. This was information she had started to work with when her mother got sick. People, planets, even universes—all the places inhabited by mind, either on the small scale or the grand—had “kernels”: hidden, bundled constructs of wizardry, of the fluid interface between science and magic, where

matter and spirit and natural law got tangled together. The rules for a universe were written in its kernel, and the matter in a universe or a world ran by those rules, the way a computer runs by its software. The rules could be altered, but usually it wasn’t smart to do so unless you really knew what you were doing.

Nita was still far too new at kernel studies to fall into this category. But she had a fairly good grasp of the basics, after working hard at the subject over recent months, and she’d learned a lot of the places and ways in which a world’s kernel might routinely be hidden. When she’d first started to get the “something is missing” feeling, the state of Alaalu’s kernel was one of the first things to occur to her. A lot of planets’ kernels were hidden for good reasons—mostly so that they wouldn’t be altered by those who had no right to do so. But that didn’t normally keep a properly trained wizard from at least detecting that a kernel was indeed present. And Nita hadn’t been able to confirm that by casual sensing…which was unusual.

Now she pulled out her manual and sat down in the sand with her back against a dune, twitching a little, and not from sand getting into her clothes. She felt slightly guilty about what she was doing. It wasn’t as if Quelt wasn’t taking really good care of her world, as far as Nita could tell. And normally you didn’t start investigating another wizard’s environment or practice of the Art unless you’d been asked to; “no intervention without a contract” was the usual order of business. But we’re here to see how this world works, among other things, Nita thought, and when I notice something as weird as this, what am I supposed to do? Ignore it? A world’s kernel shouldn’t he separated from it without good reason. There are too many things that could go wrong.

Maybe even things that have gone wrong already—

Nita let out a long breath and paged through the manual, bringing up the custom kernel-detection routines she had started designing over the past few months. She’d come to be able to sense a kernel directly, if it was anywhere at all nearby—usually within some thousands of miles; and if she did a wizardry to augment her internal sensing abilities, her range increased greatly. To save time, Nita had started to file away the spells she used for this purpose, hooking them into a matrix that kept them ready to fuel and turn loose. Now all she had to do for routine kernel-finding was plug in the details about a planet’s or space’s physical characteristics, and turn the spell loose.

Nita came to the pages in her manual where she kept the routines stored, and once again she looked guiltily up and down the beach. But there was no sign of Quelt, nor did Nita really expect there to be—the whole family was extremely thoughtful about one another’s privacy, and their guests’. But if you’re so concerned that something’s wrong here, Nita’s uneasy conscience said to her, why don’t you just take the problem straight to Quelt?

Nita sat thinking about that for some moments, and finally shook her head. Because I really think something’s wrong here. Because I’m not sure she’ll see it the same way I do…or maybe even see it at all. Because—

Just because. I don’t really know why. But I have to look into this. It was, finally, just a hunch. Tom and Carl had told her often enough to trust them…

She laid the manual open next to her on the golden sand and started to read. The wizardry wasn’t a showy one, and wouldn’t manifest its results outside of her

manual, but it was complex, taking several minutes to read straight through. It seemed to take forever for the listening silence to give way to the normal sounds of day with the spell’s completion, and when it finally did, Nita had to slump back against the dune and just gasp for breath for some minutes more. The wizardry was not a cheap one to enact.

It was maybe fifteen or twenty minutes more before she felt up to actually starting to use the running spell to look for Alaalu’s kernel. After that she lost track of time, something she found herself doing with great ease here where the day was thirty percent longer than at home. When she finally closed the spell down and shut the manual, it had to be at least a few hours later, to judge by the sun’s position.

Nita sat there a while more just listening to the water slide in and out, to the occasional songbird twitter of the bat-creatures that soared and swooped over the sea. It’s just nowhere here, she thought. Nowhere in the ground or in the sea, not even anywhere inside the planet’s orbit. Not even for a hundred million miles outside.

Where have they put it? And why isn’t it closer? What’s going on?

Above her Nita heard the faint scratching sound of someone coming down the dune toward her. She looked up over her shoulder and saw the twin silhouettes of Kit and Ponch sliding down the dune, cutouts against the bright sky.

“I was looking for you back at the house,” Kit said. “Demair was there, but she said no one had seen you all day.”

“I skipped breakfast,” Nita said.

“Did you sleep okay last night?” Kit said to her.

Nita shook her head. “No.”

“Dreams again?”

“Partly. But I was thinking,” she said. Kit sat down beside her with his back against the dune, and Nita told him what she’d been thinking about.

At the end of it, she looked at Kit and said, “Does that make any sense to you?”

Kit nodded. “More than you’d think. I was doing a little exploring this morning…”

He told her where he’d been. Nita’s eyes widened as Kit told her about the conversation he’d overheard, with Ponch’s help, between Druvah and the Lone Power. When he finished, Nita looked down at the sand and started digging in it idly with one hand.

“What I don’t like,” Nita said, “is that what for us is the most interesting part of the Choice, and the weirdest part, almost didn’t seem to matter to Quelt at all. She just skipped past it…”

“And we took her at her word that it was just a boring part.”

“A cultural blind spot maybe?” Nita said.

Kit shook his head. “I don’t know. But I think that now we’re going to have to go see the Relegate’s Naos.”

Kit stood up. As he did, Ponch came running up the dune behind him.

Are we going somewhere?

Kit reached down and roughed up Ponch’s ears a little. “Yeah,” he said. “To see the Lone Power. Come on…”

They stood there on the edge of the valley and looked down into it. The valley itself was huge. Looking across it, Nita wondered if this spot had indeed been one of the impact craters she’d been expecting to see, for it was like a gigantic bowl, and it had its own mini-horizon inside the greater one, where the snowy mountains of the Tamins range could be seen off to the north and east. Away down in the middle of the great round valley, Nita could just see something small and pale: a little building. There was nothing else to be seen, for what looked like miles and miles, except flowery meadows, some scattered patches of woodland, and occasional flocks of ceiff, ambling from place to place or taking flight without warning.

“That’s it?” Kit said.

Nita nodded. “It’s probably a lot bigger than it looks from here,” she said. “The distances keep fooling me.”

“We can do a quick transit spell over to it,” Kit said.

Nita nodded, and Kit constructed the spell and spoke it. The hush of the universe listening to the words leaned in around them; they vanished, and the soft bang! of the air rushing away from them as they reappeared reached them before the more distant bang! of their disappearance.

The Naos was a simple structure done mostly in the peach-colored sandstone that the Alaalids favored. Nine tall columns upheld a round dome that glittered in the sunlight as if polished slick; inside the dome was another, smaller structure, constructed of screens of the same stone, intricately carved and pierced. Pointing toward each of the directions of the Alaalid compass were six broad sets of steps, running down to the surrounding greensward from the main pedestal-level on which the columns stood. The whole structure gave an impression of elegant and airy lightness, at least as far as architecture was concerned. To Nita, it suggested an extremely beautiful trap.

They walked slowly toward one of the flights of steps and paused there. Ponch looked at it, wandered over to the side of the steps, lifted a back leg, and made a liquid comment.

Are you ready for this? Kit said silently.

Nita nodded. She had ready a set of wizardries that had been effective enough against the Lone Power in other times, and she had some newer defenses, not yet tried, that might work even better if it turned out she needed them. Let’s go, she said.

They walked up the stairs slowly, in step, in the hot sunlight—she and Kit, with Ponch between them. Nita felt a little grim amusement: The only thing missing from the present scenario was the jingling of spurs, and someone whistling menacingly off in the distance. At the top of the stairs they stopped, looking through the columns toward the curved, pierced stonework shell inside. That was the naos proper, the center of the structure. It wasn’t precisely dark in there, but by comparison with the bright day outside, it seemed shadowy enough. Right in front of them, the stonework was interrupted by a wide doorway that led into the interior.

Kit and Nita glanced at each other, walked toward that opening. Inside, it wasn’t as dark as it had seemed on first glance. For one thing, the dome that topped

off the building wasn’t solid stone, or if it was, it wasn’t any thicker than half an inch or so—like the thickness of an eggshell compared to its size. Sunlight filtered through it in a soft, vague shimmer of pink, gold, cream, and white, all mingled together. That light fell on something inside, a structure all by itself in the center of the naos, which was circular like the pedestal and columns that contained it. It was another pedestal, of only three great, broad, shallow, concentric steps, with six long, curved, stone benches arranged around it. On the pedestal sat a huge blocky chair, exceedingly simple, made of blocks of squared-off and polished creamy stone—a back slab, two side slabs, and a horizontal slab between them. It’s kind of like the one in the Lincoln Memorial, Nita thought. Except—

—except that sitting with her legs curled up under her in that great chair, and leaning on one arm of it, with her chin in her hand, looking at them with an expression of ineffable boredom, was an Alaalid woman of staggering beauty. Mahogany-skinned, she wore a loose white sleeveless tunic over a long, loose white skirt. She had a long and perfect face, striking red-and-gold-streaked hair that tumbled down around her on all sides, and eyes that shone like orange amber with the sun behind it.

Kit and Nita came to a standstill and simply looked at her for a moment. Ponch, between them, regarded the woman sitting in the chair, and let out one long, low growl. Then, rather to Nita’s surprise, he fell silent and sat down.

Nita looked at Ponch hurriedly to see what was the matter…if the Lone One was doing anything to him. But Ponch was simply looking at It, with his head tilted slightly to one side and a thoughtful expression on his face.

“Fairest and Fallen…” Kit said.

“Yes, yes, greeting and defiance, thank you very much. I really wish you people would come up with something else to say,” the Lone Power said. Her voice was as beautiful as her face, but it had an edge to it.

Nita stood there, wondering what in the world to say next. “So nice of you to drop by,” the Lone One said. “You’re a nice change from the school groups and the mothers with bored toddlers. But don’t just stand there glaring at me,” Esemeli said, and she waved a languid hand at the bench nearest to where they were standing. “Go on, sit down. That’s what they’re there for. I’m a tourist attraction.”

Nita glanced at Kit and then sat down.

“Do a lot of people come and visit you here?” Kit said, sitting down beside Nita.

“Not that many,” the Lone Power said, leaning on one elbow. “Of those who do, most think I’m some kind of live entertainment meant to follow that little multimedia show they’ve got in the valley. A few of them…a very few…realize what I really am, and have the sense to be scared. But most of them never make it past vague interest. It’s been too long since they’ve had any real trouble in this world.”

“I can see how that would bother you,” Kit said.

The Lone Power’s smile was slow and grim. Nita had to shiver at it, for she had never seen a look of such malice on any Alaalid face. “Well, I do try to keep my sense of proportion about me,” It said. “Earth, for example; there’ve been some changes there.”

“Tell us about it,” Kit said. “But I wouldn’t call them changes for the better.”

“There speaks a typical, shortsighted human being,” the Lone Power said. “Things always get a lot worse before they get better. You’d know that if you took the long view of the worlds. But you can’t help yourselves; you’re stuck in time. Those of us who just visit Time but live in Eternity see things a lot differently.” It sighed and sat back in Its chair. “Look, can we put that aside for the moment?”

“Sure,” Nita said, “as long as it’s to tell us exactly what you’re doing here.”

“I’m doing what I don’t have any choice but to do!” It said. “Which is to sit around in the Relegate’s Naos. I’m the Relegate! I’ve been relegated. Left over, dumped, thrown out of the running. Into this.” It waved a hand around at the beautiful warm stone, the polished floor, the exquisite, shell-like dome.

Nita looked over at Kit. Ponch yawned and lay down on the floor.

The Lone One gave him an exquisitely dirty look. “See that?” It said. “That’s the kind of respect I command these days. Nine-tenths of the people here don’t even begin to understand the import of the events that left me sitting here. They’ve even given me a sweet little name: Esemeli, the Daughter of the Daughter of Light.” She made a face.

“Well, you were, once,” Nita said.

“Don’t patronize me. I was the Star of the Morning!” the Lone Power shouted. “I was a Power among Powers. I was what quasars are a watered-down version of; the light of me denatured space when I had cause to turn it loose! ‘Daughter of the daughter of…’” She made an annoyed gesture and muttered off into silence.

“And now it comes to this,” Esemeli said after a moment, “that you two come along and I have to ask you to—” She rubbed her face with one hand.

Nita and Kit waited, but nothing further seemed to be forthcoming. Finally, Nita said, “You have to ask us to what?”

“You know what’s wrong here,” It said. “Something’s missing. They made it impossible for themselves to achieve it. But they’re not a whole species without it…not really.” She smiled. “And the funny thing is, I even warned them of what they were doing. But none of them believed me. Well, maybe one.” Esemeli’s expression darkened. Then the look passed. “But they froze their species’ nature in place when they made their Choice; they walled it away from any possible assault. Either from me or from other sources.”

Meaning good ones, Nita thought.

“And you can’t do anything to them, either.”

“I couldn’t do anything to them a hundred thousand years ago,” It said, just barely annoyed. “You saw it! They made their Choice and rejected me in about fifteen minutes. It happens…but I don’t often get invited to stick around afterward. I saw what they did to themselves…or failed to do. Afterward, I couldn’t do anything but sit here and wait for help to arrive. And you’re finally here. You took long enough, by the way. Can we get on with this?”

They looked at each other. “Before we ask you what we should get on with,” Kit said, “tell us why we should believe anything you say! After everything we’ve been through with you—”

“Atomic explosions,” Nita said. “Stars going nova or snuffed out. Being chased all over two different Manhattans by you and your homemade monsters!”

“Nearly being eaten by sharks,” Kit said. “Losing Nita’s mom.”

The Lone Power actually looked bored, and waved one hand in a Spare-me gesture. “You’ve been through all that,” It said. “I admit it. But not with me. Listen.” It sounded more annoyed as It saw the glance Kit threw Nita. “Why are you going to give me trouble about this? It’s not just in your world that there have been changes. I’ve had my share of them. Huge ones…which you were deeply involved in, you and your sister. How is she, by the way?”

“Grounded,” Nita said. “You should count yourself lucky. Otherwise, she’d be here instead of us, and she’d have fried you to a crisp already, just on general principles.”

“No, I doubt that,” the Lone One said. “For one thing, she’s well off her peak power by now, and dealing with all kinds of trouble secondary to that. For another thing, she wouldn’t have been sent here. She wouldn’t have been the beginning of the answer to the Alaalids’ problem. Whereas you two are… unfortunately for me. They would send me someone with whom I have so much history.” It looked disgusted. “Just common pettiness, that’s all it is with Them…”

Nita threw Kit a glance.

The Lone One sat there for a moment, drumming Its fingers on the arm of Its severely plain throne. “You know how the shift in me happened, a while ago,” the Lone One said. “You two and Dairine were simply party to a change of nature that the Powers That Be and just about all of creation had been pushing on me for aeons…slowly wearing me down until the last big push came. You just happened to be part of the breakthrough, part of the point of the spear. Because you live in Time, it looks to you like that was a thing that happened then and was over with, whereas outside of Time, the event both happened aeons ago and is still happening.”

It gave them a look, seeing their expressions. “Sorry, even the Speech doesn’t have some of the syntax needed to talk about this kind of thing. Or it does, but since you’re still stuck inside Time, you can’t parse it…Anyway, I did tell you at the time that there would be shadows of me around for a long, long while, doing what they’ve always done. That’s part of the nature of time in physical universes; it helps things persist.” The Lone One looked resigned. “We shadows all partake of the nature of the Power that casts us, but in different degrees, according to the local ‘lighting.’ Some are ‘darker,’ more aggressive than others…fighting the final realization of the shift, trying to make it take as long as possible.” It smiled slightly. “The one that went after your mother, for example: That one was pretty proactive, or maybe I should say abreactive. Others have been less effective.”

“Like the one of you who came after our buddy Darryl a few months ago,” Kit said.

The Lone One waved Its hand again, looking annoyed this time. “When it comes right down to it, there’s not a lot you can do to someone like that, a creature the One’s using as a direct power conduit,” It said. “They tend to be too contaminated with innocence, anyway. Assaulting them is like beating your head against the wall. I’d have thought that fragment of myself would have been smarter to cut its losses and go after an easier target.” It laughed a little breath of laughter. “Small loss. That’s not my problem.”

“No,” Kit said. “Your problem is that you’re stuck here.”

The Lone One looked more annoyed than before. “Yes,” It said, “you would notice that. And doubtless it’s going to amuse you all out of proportion that I’m going to ask for your help in getting out of here.”

Nita’s eyes widened. “Oh, sure,” she said, “we turn you loose and you go manifest on some other planet and make their lives miserable…”

Esemeli gave Nita a look that suggested she needed her brain augmented. “I’m already everywhere,” the Lone One said. “I don’t have to ‘go’ anyplace. What you need to get through your heads is that this particular manifestation has had its turn to do its job, and has failed. I offered the Alaalids their Choice, and they turned me down. And that was that.”

There’s a little more to it than that, Neets! Kit said silently.

I believe you. But don’t interrupt It! It’s on a roll; It might drop something useful…

“I mean, look around you!” the Lone One said. “Does this look like a place where I’ve been particularly successful?”

It actually sounded aggrieved, which could have made Nita burst out laughing had she not had the creeps about this whole situation. “And then,” the Lone Power said, “to add insult to injury, when they realized I was stuck here, they built me this place so I’d have somewhere to stay! They felt sorry for me.”

For just a moment Its eyes held a hint of the kind of balked fury that Nita was used to seeing in the Lone Power. This faded, but what it faded into was a glint of nasty amusement that, though much less intense than the first expression, still looked natural on Its face. “The joke, though, is that the Alaalids missed something when they made their Choice,” It said. “What’s even funnier is that they brought it on themselves. And you noticed it, didn’t you?”

It looked at Nita. “Yeah,” she said after a moment. “I spent some time feeling around for this world’s kernel, its heart. And I can’t find it. It’s been hidden a lot more securely than they usually are…and besides, there’s something else that’s not right about it. Something’s missing.”

“You are smart for a mortal sometimes,” the Lone One said. “It’s a real pity you won’t see things my way: We could do well together.” Nita bristled. “Well, it doesn’t matter. I offered the Alaalids eternal life, as usual. Unfortunately, they were smart enough not to buy into that one.” Esemeli glanced briefly upward in annoyance. “And they realized that since they were physical beings, they were going to need time to move through, as well. So they also didn’t make the mistake of trying to shut entropy out of their world-system entirely. A shame…I’ve had endless fun with the species that’ve tried that approach. Literally endless.” The Lone One smiled. Nita shivered. “But then they tried to do an end run around me, instead. They worked a wizardry on their world’s kernel, the purpose being to freeze or lock down the other, lesser side effects of entropy, besides mere timeflow, everywhere in this whole pocket of space-time. And you can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because one of those lesser side effects, on the macrocosmic level, is change,” the Lone One said. “They didn’t foresee the consequences to themselves. Did I say, ‘You can’t do that’? I meant, you can, but it’s stupid. And after they set that wizardry into their kernel, it was too late for them to do anything about it.

There’s some room for small, personal change…just. But as for the big changes that every species needs to go through every now and then, to avoid stagnating and just dying away—those are all shut away from them. They can’t evolve. And you’ve seen what their world’s become as a result! It hardly even counts as a world anymore. It’s a theme park. They’ve turned it into ‘Nice Land.’”

Kit gave the Lone One a dry look. “You wouldn’t have a lot of time for ‘nice,’ of course. So forgive me if I think your opinion’s a little biased.”

It gave Kit an annoyed look. “All right, so I’m ambivalent,” the Lone One said. “But isn’t ambivalence preferable to pure evil?”

Kit considered that one for a moment. “See? You’re buying it already,” the Lone One said. “I was getting bored with absolute evil, anyway. I find that you can do a lot more damage with ambivalence…and it’s not as easily detectable from a distance, not anywhere near as memorable. Pure evil sticks out the way pure anything sticks out in a world full of mixtures and melanges and shades of gray. Ambivalence can be discounted, or explained away, or mistaken for confusion or a mind not completely made up yet.”

“Sometimes it really is…” Kit said.

“Oh, sure. But how often? The rest of the time, in humans, it’s usually more about the refusal to make a choice. People are eager to excuse it, though. Ambivalence is seen as a sign of maturity, whereas actually taking a stance on one side or another is easy to describe as simplistic…or juvenile.” It smiled that nasty, sarcastic smile again.

Nita looked at It and asked herself, as she had been doing about once every ten seconds during this conversation, how likely the Lone One was to be telling the truth at any given moment. Yet it really did go through some kind of transformation at the end of Dairine’s Ordeal, she thought. Other Powers told us It has the chance to be otherwise now. “I’m getting bored with absolute evil”—could that be the beginning of a change?

Whether it is or not, it’s still important to be careful!

“Let me get this straight,” Nita said, “You’re telling us that in some ways, entropy would have been at the root of that big species-wide change. And when they froze it, or locked it down, they locked you in.”

Esemeli looked at Nita with those ironic golden eyes and smiled. Nita shivered again. “The point is,” It said after a moment, “these people don’t need to be physical anymore. They’ve passed all the tests and dealt with all the issues that rise out of the life that spirit lives when trapped inside matter.” The Lone Power made little whoop-de-do circles in the air with one shapely finger. “In fact, they passed them quite a long time ago. So they’ve long been ready for the next thing… whatever that turns out to mean for them. But they’re as locked in now as I am. Alaalu needs to be made unsafe again. Once that happens, they can move on.”

“To what?”

“How should I know?” the Lone One said, Its tone suddenly shifting enough so that she sounded grumpy. “With what they did to local space-time, I can’t look far enough ahead to see any more.”

“You did see once, though,” Kit said.

“That was before they set their Choice in stone,” It said. “They would have

evolved, and become glorious and wise and powerful and all the rest of it, blah, blah, blah.” It waved one hand in annoyance. “And now, who knows what’ll happen, after they’ve kept themselves from their destiny for so long? But nothing’s going to happen if they don’t take the kiddie gate off this part of space-time and give themselves a chance to fall down stairs like any other species.”

“They’re not going to do that,” Kit said.

“You’re a veritable fount of observation,” the Lone Power said.

Its tone is really starting to annoy me, Kit said silently to Nita. You know what’s weird? It bothers me less when It’s a guy.

Hah. At least It’s just sitting there. Would you rather have It insulting you or trying to blow you up?

Ask me again when we leave. Assuming that we do…

“So what are we supposed to do about all this?” Nita said.

“Unlock the kiddie gate,” said the Lone One. “Find a way to break the wizardry on the kernel. Let them out.

“Which will also let you out.”

It looked demure. “An unavoidable side effect.”

Nita sighed and got up. As she passed him, Ponch rolled over and lay looking at the Lone Power upside down, further increasing the surreal quality of the entire encounter, from Nita’s point of view. “Look,” she said, “before we agree to help you, of all beings, with anything, we need to have some questions answered, even if it upsets you. We’re still not entirely clear about what happened with you a while back, at the end of Dairine’s Ordeal. We know what it looked like, and felt like…”

It tsked at her. “And a wizard is supposed to trust her feelings…”

“Not without taking a look at them occasionally to see how they measure up against reality,” Kit said.

“It looked like you,” Nita said, “were thinking about turning over a new leaf. Giving up being the force behind evil in the worlds.”

The Lone One said nothing, just nodded slightly. Its expression was unreadable.

“It also looked like the other Powers That Be…and the One…were actually willing to take you back,” Kit said.

“You were there,” It said.

Nita and Kit looked thoughtfully at It for a few moments. “Even though we were,” Nita said, “sometimes it’s hard to believe what seemed to have happened… especially when we keep running into other versions of you who don’t seem to have heard the word yet.”

“We’ve been over that.”

“And it would be easy to believe that it was all an illusion of some kind,” Kit said. “I mean, lots of people might never believe that you could ever be forgiven for what you’ve been…what you’ve done.”

“That could be so,” the Lone One said softly. “As there might also be those who’ve become a little smug, over time, about their own redemptions…enough so that they’d feel comfortable dictating to the One their own minuscule ideas about who else ought to qualify for forgiveness.” It laughed, a suddenly bitter sound. “And it’s a fool’s game, because there is no sounding the One, no grasping It.” It looked,

and sounded, angry, and scornful, and a little haunted…even disturbed. “All we can be sure of is that, whether we like it or not, the One means us all well, more so than we can ever comprehend. And the details of that meaning are sometimes going to be impossible for any created being to fathom…even the Powers That Be.” It leaned back in Its throne and scowled. “It has no taste, no discrimination…that’s what’s so infuriating,” the Lone Power muttered under Its breath. “It’ll redeem just anybody…”

“Even you? Well, whatever,” Nita said. “But you can still understand why we’d have trouble trusting you. Me, in particular.”

Esemeli sighed and looked at Nita with those lazy, thoughtful eyes. The uncomfortable moment had sealed itself right over again, leaving Nita feeling both sorry for this particular version of the Lone One and still rather cautious. “Yes, well,” It said. “If you’re so enlightened, being a wizard and all, you’ll get past it, and get on with the work at hand, won’t you?”

The mockery was almost a relief after Its unsettled tone of a few moments before. “Well, I’m not sure exactly what we’re supposed to do,” Kit said.

“I have an idea,” Nita said. “But I’m not sure I like it. We’re going to need to investigate the species’ Choice more closely.”

“The only way you’re going to do that now,” the Lone One said, smiling slightly, “is to find Druvah.”

“As if he’s around here somewhere,” Kit said, annoyed.

“Oh, he is,” Esemeli said. “Somewhere…”

Nita thought again of the incessant good-natured whispering in the air: the whispers of the “dead.”

“So we have to find him, is that it?” Nita said. “And then we have to find the planet’s kernel? And after that, since this is Quelt’s world, not ours, we’re going to have to tell her what’s wrong here, and get her in on fixing it. Thereby turning you loose…” Nita looked over at Esemeli.

“Once this world is set free to pursue its proper course,” the Lone One said, “there won’t be any need for me to hang around here anymore, I assure you.”

Nita didn’t quite glance at Kit, but she knew what he was thinking: The Lone One’s assurances weren’t necessarily something they were going to feel comfortable depending on. “And what exactly is going to happen when the world is set free?”

“Well, there are a lot of different ways that can go…”

Nita gave It a stern look. “Really? Then you’d better start listing them.”

It laughed at her then, and there again was that old, malicious humor that was almost a relief to hear. “Why should I do your work for you?” the Lone Power said. “You should be grateful that I’ve consented to give you even this little interview. It’s more than the other Powers would do. They leave you with hints and riddles, and make you work everything out for yourselves.”

Which, considering who we’re dealing with, may he the best way to proceed, Nita thought, grimacing slightly to herself. “Kit,” she said then, “I don’t know about you, but I’m enjoying this vacation. I think this planet is just fine the way it is, and I don’t see why we should waste any more of our time playing Twenty Questions in a deserted bandstand with a Power That Has Been! I’m gonna go lie on the beach for a while, and after that I’m gonna go back home and get on with my life.”

She turned to go, but not before catching just a glimpse of the expression on Esemeli’s face as It became suddenly alarmed. “Yeah,” Kit said, sounding infinitely bored. “Let’s go. C’mon, Ponch. Bye,” he said to the Lone Power, waving, and turned to follow Nita toward the entry.

The silence stretched and stretched as they went across the polished white floor. Nita didn’t turn her head, just looked at Kit out of the corner of her eye. She could just see him looking back at her, sidelong.

They’d actually made it to the third step down from the top of the plinth when the Lone One shouted after them, “Wait!”

Both of them paused, turned.

Esemeli was off Its throne and hurrying toward them. “You cannot leave me here like this!” It said.

“Watch us,” Kit said. He turned again.

“No, wait!!”

They both stood there and watched the Lone One come out into the sunlight. It winced at it a little, but then it was bright after the shadows of the Naos. “Forget everything else,” It said. “Do you have any idea what it’s been like for me, being trapped here?” And It actually waved Its arms around in the air in frustration. “The eternal boredom of it, here in the land of flying sheep and sweet-tempered people? I may exist mostly outside of Time, in the depths of eternity, but what happens here echoes there, and do you think I don’t experience what this is like? Tedium! The whole planet’s a playpen! There are no storms, there are no floods, no earthquakes, no disasters—Even eavesdropping on the dark sides of these people’s hearts isn’t any fun. They hardly have any dark sides! The most they manage is the spiritual equivalent of sitting in the shade! They don’t know how to hate each other. They’re not greedy, they’re not envious, they don’t get sick, they don’t die in pain! They’re not even accident-prone—there’s not so much as even a stubbed toe to enjoy some days! Damn eternally graceful, temperate, loving, goody-goody—”

For the first time, Nita saw an old idiom come true, as the Lone Power began to curse and around It the shocked air literally turned blue with a haze of locally annihilated water atoms and oxygen broken down to ozone. Nita waved a hand in front of her face, rolling her eyes at the stink. When It ran out of curses, which took a while, It glared at Nita and Kit and got ready to turn some of that anger on them—until It noticed their frowns and the slight in-unison body movement that suggested they were getting ready to turn their backs on it again. Then It dropped the anger and just got desperate. “Just, help me get out of here!” It said. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know about what to do—”

“Yeah, sure,” Kit said.

“I’ll do anything you like—”

“Hah! We’re supposed to take your word for that?”

“—promise you anything you like—”

“Promises!” Nita said, and sniffed. “I’ve heard it all before.”

“There’s no promise you wouldn’t break,” Kit said, bored and scornful. “No oath you could take—”

“Well,” Nita said softly, “actually, there’s one…”

The Lone One suddenly looked even more alarmed than It had before.

Kit threw Nita a concerned glance. “What? Are you sure?

“We’ve heard It get wizards to swear this particular oath before, in shorter versions,” Nita said. “It’s at the very center of wizardry, embodied in all the Enactive modes of the Speech. Not even one of the Powers That Be would dare break it: They’re held by the stricture, whether They’re renegade or not. It’s at the root of creation. Even the Wizard’s Oath is derived from it.”

The Lone Power’s expression was becoming more than merely alarmed: It looked suspicious. “Where have you been getting information like that?” Esemeli said.

Nita’s smile was grim. “You made me do a lot of research when my mother got sick,” Nita said. “A whole lot of reading in the manual. Do you think that after she was gone, I just gave that up? And since I started really working on it, I’ve been getting access to all kinds of information I didn’t know was there before. You have no idea what trouble you’ve made for yourself.”

There was a brief silence.

“So swear,” Nita said. “Come on, it’s not so hard. And I can only do this once: It’s not like you’re ever going to have to repeat yourself on my account. ‘I swear by the One to perform what I promise—’”

The Lone Power looked at her, stony-faced, silent. “You know,” It said after a few moments, “what you’re likely to be bringing down on yourself, at some later date, by making me do something—”

Nita folded her arms and looked at the Lone One. “Threats are a bad start for what’s going to happen now…”

Esemeli glared at her.

“Won’t swear, huh?” Nita said. “No, I didn’t think so. You’ve just been yanking our chain this whole time.” She looked over at Kit. “I guess it’s true,” she said, with a sigh. “Evil can’t change. Or else,” she said, looking back at Esemeli, “you’re even more stuck than you say you are, you poor thing. Never mind. You just have a nice time sitting here in the shade for another aeon or three!”

She turned her back and started down the stairs again. Kit shrugged helplessly at the Lone Power, and turned to go after Nita.

“Wait!”

Nita didn’t stop.

“I’ll swear!”

Nita went down a couple more steps, a little more slowly, and then stopped and looked over her shoulder.

“Let’s hear it, then,” she said. “And don’t leave anything out.”

“I swear by the One,” Esemeli said, standing there in the sun and casting a longer and blacker shadow every moment, “to perform what I promise—”

“Fully and without any reservation,” Nita said, “nor with any mechanism or execution founded in the intention to deceive; to fully inform the wizards of all manner of things of which they inquire; to carry out this information at a speed and in a way best suited to these wizards’ desires and the achievement of their ends; and at the end of said achievement, to depart without doing any harm to them or any thing or person affiliated with them in whatever degree, and when the conditions of this swearing are discharged and acknowledged to have been discharged, to go

peaceably again into my own place. And all this, by the Power of that One in Which all oaths and all intentions rest, inviting It on my abroachment of this Oath to withdraw the gifts It allows me to enjoy, I swear—”

Phrase by phrase, scowling more and more blackly with every word, the Lone One recited the Binding Oath. It got as far as “any thing or person affiliated with them in whatever degree,” and then stopped, glaring at them, while its shadow boiled with half-seen nightmare shapes of fury. “Oh, come on, that could be construed as meaning your whole universe!! It said.

Nita ignored Its shadow, kept her eyes on Esemeli’s face. “So it could,” Nita said. “And if you cooperate with us, there won’t be any need to take you to arbitration over it.”

“Assuming you survive that long,” the Lone One said, grinding Its teeth.

“Anything can happen,” Nita said. “And if you start trying to sabotage us after you’ve sworn this Oath, I wouldn’t make any bets on your longevity, either. You know what that last clause means. The only reason you’re here is because the One hasn’t yet seen fit to abolish you by withdrawing the energy It gave you at the very beginning of things. If you break this Oath—” Then she grinned. “Nah. You’re infinitely destructive but you’re not actively dumb. Come on, just get it over with! Stalling isn’t going to help you.”

Esemeli grimaced, and then started reciting again. When the Oath was finished, Nita nodded and said, “All right. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

The Lone One said nothing.

“Never mind,” Nita said. “Kit?”

“Right,” Kit said. “First question: Where is Druvah?”

“I don’t know.”

Kit gave Esemeli a skeptical look.

“I mean it,” Esemeli said. “He used the energy I gave him to change his way of being. After the Choice, he bound himself into the world physically. Finding him is going to require making some preparations.”

“Then make them,” Nita said. “I want to hear all about them, of course, when they’ve been made, before we actually go looking. But don’t take too long. We’re only here for another week or so, and after we get this sorted out, I want lots of time on the beach to relax with Quelt.”

The Lone One nodded in a surly way. “You’ll hear from me tomorrow dawn,” It said, then turned and slowly went back up the steps into the Naos, vanishing into the shadows.

Kit and Nita went down the stairs again, with Ponch following after, wagging his tail. At the bottom of the stairs, they paused briefly as Ponch hurled himself off into the flowery fields, jumping at the occasional fur-bat that flapped up, startled, out of the jijis flowers.

“Weren’t you a little mean to It?” Kit said under his breath as they went after Ponch.

“After a whole week on the Planet of Nice,” Nita said, equally softly, “and come to think of it, a week without Dairine, I kind of wanted an excuse to get cranky about something.” She smiled slightly.

“Do you trust It?”

“Now? After It swore the Binding Oath? Sure.” She glanced at Kit out of the corner of her eye. “About ninety percent. I wouldn’t put it past Esemeli to keep trying to find a way out of what I made It swear. But at least the odds are on our side. And we’ve got to find out the truth about what’s going on around here. Druvah is definitely still here…and he’ll be able to tell us.”

They walked on a little ways.

“So this turns out to be errantry after all,” Kit said.

Nita nodded. “Just not formally declared, nothing that the Powers officially sent us on.”

Kit shook his head. “But why not?” he said. “Why didn’t they just send us here and say, ‘There’s something wrong with this planet and we need you to fix it’?”

“Or,” Nita said, “why didn’t They just get in touch with Quelt and tell her what the problem was?” She picked up a small rock and threw it off into the flowers. One flower moved slightly in a sea of them as the rock came down, and then everything was still once more.

She and Kit sighed more or less in unison. No answers were going to be forthcoming. They were just going to have to get on with it.

“It’s like Rhiow said, a while ago,” Nita muttered. The little black cat who was head of the New York gating team had been describing a pleasure trip when she’d routed outward through the Crossings and had wound up spending days there, helping them repair a recalcitrant worldgate. “Wizard’s holiday…”

Kit grinned. The phrase meant a vacation or pleasure trip that rapidly turned into something else, usually involving errantry, but was still pleasant in a strange way, simply because of the change. “I don’t know why the Powers let us think we’re ever going to get a real vacation,” Kit said.

“Maybe They don’t get any, either,” Nita said, “and They think the situation’s normal.”

“If you’re right,” Kit said, “I feel sorry for Them.”

“So do I,” Nita said, “if I’m right. Meanwhile…”

“Back to the house by the sea.”

“It’ll work,” Roshaun said.

In the darkness, they all knelt (or in Filif’s case, rooted) above the wizardry together. It lay glowing on the ground under the sassafras trees, now almost completely interwritten with the long, delicately curling characters of the Speech.

“You’re sure?” Sker’ret said.

Roshaun nodded. “The final layout confirms it. Suck the matter out from underneath the tachocline, and you get a brief but big shift in the way the Sun handles its magnetic fields—for the tachocline is the dynamo for the star’s whole field. When you pull the matter out, the tachocline collapses back just a little and cools. The magnetic field drops off, and you get an artificial ‘quiet star’ period. All the other ‘inflamed’ areas have a chance to quiet down as a result. If you’re very careful with the calculations, you can get as much as a month of quiet time and derail the cycle entirely.”

He looked down at the wizardry and sighed.

“The big problem remains, though. We must put the far end of the conduit in place, by hand, as it were, underneath the tachocline. We can’t just sink it in from above and pray. The height of the tachocline changes from hour to hour, even minute to minute. Put the conduit in too high, and take out too much material of too low a density, and nothing happens. Put it in too low, take out too much higher-density material, and then the star’s core, and the nuclear burning process, are affected.”

Everybody did their own version of shaking their heads emphatically.

“We’ve got to get it right the first time,” Roshaun said. “Once the sunward side of the conduit is in place, the rest is easy. The far end will dump the matter out well beyond this solar system’s heliopause, out past—” He looked at Dairine. “What’s that last planet called?”

“Pluto.”

“But we can’t let the Sun end jump around,” Roshaun said. “Otherwise…”

He trailed off.

The others looked at one another, nodding or rustling or waving their eyes around.

“We need rest now,” Sker’ret said then. “No point in trying to do a wizardry when you’re tired. It’s a recipe for failure.”

“I’ll be in my pup tent,” Filif said. Then he looked up and around him at the night, with his berries. “No, I won’t,” he said. “If this might be my last night on a planet, I’m going to go root.” And he wandered off toward the rhododendron bed.

“I wish he wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Dairine muttered.

“Let him,” Sker’ret said. “I’m for my own pup tent. When do we start, Roshaun?”

He looked at Dairine.

“Three a.m. local time,” she said.

“You’ll call me?” Sker’ret said.

“No,” Dairine said, “you big dumb bug. Of course we’ll let you sleep through it and do it all ourselves, and then let you go home to a promising clerical career.”

Sker’ret snickered at her, a sound that did Dairine’s heart good. He went trundling off on all those legs.

She sighed, stood up, and after a few moments followed him, though she didn’t go into the house but rather paused outside, by the steps to the back door. Over the lilac hedge that separated the Callahan property from that of the next-door neighbors, she could see the Moon through the leaves.

She more or less ignored the tall dark shape, glittering slightly from the usual jeweled clothes, as he came to stand in front of her. But I can’t really ignore him, she thought. What if something goes wrong tonight?

Dairine looked up at Roshaun.

“I owe you an apology,” she said.

“You owe me nothing.”

“Yeah, well,” Dairine said, “in that case I have a word or two for you, Mr. I’m Prince of Everything I Survey. ‘We wouldn’t want people looking at us?’ ‘It wouldn’t be permitted?’ You don’t have a neighbor within a thousand miles! The only reason your palace is there on the Burnt Side is so that no one has to live by

you. Your people are scared to death of being without you. And scared to death of you. Aren’t they?”

Roshaun turned to look up at the Moon, and didn’t say anything.

“You’re all that stands between them and destruction,” Dairine said, “at least in the version of history that most of your people know. They’re terrified of what would happen without you. And you’ve let them get that way, haven’t you? It’s easier than going out the front door every now and then and explaining that you’re just like other people, just with a few extra talents that were given you for their good, too, not just yours. Wizardry is service! But your family seems to have it a little backward. And the people all over Wellakh bring you everything you want, you live nice comfortable lives, all that. But someday, when wizards are a little commoner on your planet—”

Roshaun looked at Dairine with some discomfort.

“I don’t set family policy,” he said.

“You will someday,” Dairine said. “Someday you’ll be Beloved of the Sun Lord and all the other stuff that translates into king on Wellakh. And I hope you start letting your people look at you then, because otherwise, I think that as soon as they find a way to do without you, they will. It’s only a matter of time until technology catches up to what only wizardry can do now, in terms of protecting your planet. And then where are you?”

Roshaun looked up at the Moon, and then, without much warning, sat down on the back step, half leaning on the scraggly climbing rosebush that went up the chimney.

“Are you always so reticent?” he said.

Dairine blinked.

“I didn’t want to go on this excursus at first,” Roshaun said. “My mother said she thought I should. She wouldn’t say why. She discouraged me from coming back, even from using the pup tent. I was angry about that. And then, a couple of days ago, a message came. My father has stepped down as Sun Lord. When I come back, I am king. For me, it starts now.”

He looked up at the Moon. “And it’s just as you say,” Roshaun said. “We’re— I found the Earth word, the…English word? Anyway, I looked it up. We’re pariahs. In people’s minds, we’ve become associated with the Burning. We’re its cure, but some people believe that maybe we were also its cause. They don’t dare live without us. They hate living with us. So they kill us when they can.” Roshaun shrugged. “It’s not easy, especially when the person they’re trying to assassinate is a wizard. But even wizards have to sleep. My father got tired of being the target; he’s been one for forty years. He resigned and it’s my turn now.”

Dairine’s knees felt weak under her. She had often enough had the Lone Power trying to kill her. She’d learned to cope with it. But having just people trying to kill you…that was something else entirely, and, strangely, it felt more awful. She sat down by Roshaun on the step and stared at the Moon so that she wouldn’t have to look at him.

“That’s why we have to fix your star,” Roshaun said.

“You’re not involved,” Dairine said. “Nobody’s expectations are looking over your shoulder, saying, ‘He had to do that. He didn’t do it just because it was

the right thing.’”

There was a long silence.

“It would be nice if we had one of those,” Roshaun said.

Dairine looked up, confused. “What?”

“That.” He gestured with his chin at the Moon.

“Yeah,” Dairine said. “We like it.”

“We had one once,” Roshaun said, “a little one. But it was destroyed in the Burning.”

“We almost didn’t have this one,” Dairine said. “It was an accident. Something hit the Earth when it was still molten, and that splashed out.”

Roshaun looked at her in amazement. “Really?”

“Really.” Dairine looked up at the first-quarter Moon. “It took a long time to round up and get solid. But there it is.”

“But if whatever hit your world had been just a little bigger—maybe neither piece of matter would have been big enough to coalesce, and there would never have been an Earth at all.” Roshaun sat there shaking his head.

“Yeah. It’s kind of a symbol,” Dairine said, “of how sometimes, even against the odds, you can get lucky.”

In the silence that followed, resolve formed. She stood up. “Come on,” she said. “It’s a nice view of the world from there. I’ll show you.”

Roshaun stood up, too, but for once he looked uncertain. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’ll be time soon—”

“We have time for this,” Dairine said. “Come on.” She looked over her shoulder. “Spot?”

He was nowhere nearby, which was unusual for him. “I can handle it,” Roshaun said, and opened his hand to look into the little sphere of light that was his manual, and showed what the Aethyrs told him. “Give me the coordinates,” he said to Dairine.

She recited them, and as Roshaun spoke the words after her, the circle of the wizardry formed up on the ground around them. Dairine bent over to add the bright scrawl of her name in the Speech, across the circle from Roshaun’s. His name is much shorter than I would have thought, Dairine thought, as she straightened up and began to recite, in unison with Roshaun, the words of the translocation.

It was probably completely unnecessary for her to reach out and take Roshaun’s hand as the wizardry closed in around them and the view of her house and driveway dulled through the glowing curtain of Speech expressed and space bent slightly awry. It’s just a precaution, Dairine thought. I wouldn’t want to lose him at this crucial moment—

They vanished.

****

Areas to Avoid After their visit to the Lone Power, Nita and Kit had little to do but sit around on the

beach for the rest of that afternoon, because Quelt was away dealing with the issue of the Great Vein again and wouldn’t be back until later, so Kuwilin told them. Ponch spent the afternoon running up and down the beach, mostly in the water; Kit and Nita, in no mood to play with him, sat trying to work out how to tell Quelt what they’d learned.

“Why should she believe any of this?” Kit said under his breath. He’d amassed a small pile of stones and was throwing them into the water one by one.

“Because we’re wizards,” Nita said, “and we wouldn’t lie to her. We can’t, in the Speech! And she knows that.”

“She should,” Kit said, throwing another rock in the water. “But even if she knows we’re telling the truth, I’m not sure she’s going to like what we have to tell her.”

“No,” Nita said. “She might even think it was just some weird misperception of ours, because we’re aliens…”

Kit nodded, looking morose. “Where’s Ponch gone?” he said, looking up and down the beach.

Nita shook her head. Trying to keep track of a dog who could make his own universes, and walk at will through ones he hadn’t made, was always a challenge. “No idea,” she said. “Weren’t you working on a thing to do with his special leash, so that you can track him down?”

“I was working on that, yeah,” Kit said. “It’s not perfect yet.” He reached into the little local space-pocket that followed him around, rummaged around in it, and came up with Ponch’s leash. Kit had made it of the Speech, with some added ingredients. The whole wizardry was wound together into a soft, infinitely extensible cord that nothing could break and that would allow the wizard who held on to it to safely follow Ponch wherever he might walk.

“Let’s see,” Kit said. He ran the leash through his hands, closed his eyes for a moment. Nita could feel the direction-finding part of the wizardry come awake, but that was all—the wizardry was tuned to Kit specifically, and couldn’t otherwise be overheard.

He opened his eyes a moment later. “It’s all right,” he said. “He’s ten miles away, down the beach. He loves that he can just run and run and never run out of sand.” He stood up. “I don’t know how he’s got any pads left on his paws with all the running he’s been doing the past few days.”

Kit got up. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said, and vanished with a soft pop of imploding air.

Nita sat back against the dune and looked out at the glitter and roil of the sunlit water. This was working so well, she thought, until I started to feel that something was wrong. Have I ruined myself somehow? Am I always going to go looking for what’s wrong, forever, so that even when things are perfectly all right, I can’t let them just he the way they are?

She sighed and picked up one of Kit’s stones, turning it over and over in her hand. We could have spent a lovely couple of weeks here and left these happy people living their happy lives. And, all right, so there’s something else going on at the bottom of it all. So what? Is it my business to go out of my way to make the Alaalids unhappy, just so that they’ll possibly evolve into something better? Is

there—

A shadow fell over her, and Nita looked up, startled.

“Quelt!” she said.

“Nita…”

Quelt had just come over the top of the dune. She stood there looking at Nita for a moment, and then sighed and came down, step by step, rather slowly.

“Are you all right? You look tired.”

“I am,” Quelt said, and sat down by Nita, looking at the water. “I am tired.”

She looked troubled, too, but Nita wasn’t going to say anything about that; she had too many troubles on her mind to be accusing anyone else of having difficulty dealing with theirs.

“There’s going to be more trouble with the Great Vein than I’d thought,” Quelt said. “The crust really is shifting down there: The layering’s become more complex than it used to be. It’s going to take days yet to sort it out.”

She sighed, leaning back on her elbows.

“And on top of everything else, there seems to be something wrong with the Display,” Quelt said. “It seems to have stopped functioning, and I have no idea why…or what to do about it. It’s puzzling. The wizardry laid into that was always very resilient: Vereich told me that Druvah himself put it in place.” She shook her head.

Uh-oh, Nita thought. I wish I could put this off, but there’s not going to be a better time, and we can’t just sit around and hope that this issue goes away. “Quelt,” Nita said, “I think I know how that happened.”

Quelt looked surprised. “You do?”

“Kit and Ponch were down in there, and it stopped working while Kit was viewing something to do with Druvah,” Nita said. There. That’s the truth…

At that, Quelt turned a very strange look on Nita. Anywhere else, she thought, in anyone else, it would look like suspicion, Nita thought.

“Something to do with Druvah,” Quelt said. “What about him?”

“Uh,well…”

Nita suddenly saw Kit coming down the beach. Trotting along beside him was Ponch; the wizardly leash was around his neck, and Ponch was carrying the other end of it in his mouth, like any more ordinary dog out for a walk. “Here he comes,” Nita said, feeling awful to push this off onto Kit. But he was there. He can tell her better than I can.

“Hey, Quelt,” he said, as he came up to them, “dai.” Ponch, with the leash in his mouth, went straight to Quelt and started nuzzling her. She took his head under her arm and started rubbing his ears.

“He’s got you trained already,” Kit said. Nita caught his eye. Here it comes…

After a moment Quelt looked up at him. “Nita says you were down in the Display when it failed,” she said.

“Yes,” Kit said.

Ponch looked up into Quelt’s eyes. I think it was my fault, he said. Please don’t he angry at Kit.

Quelt produced a strange, unhappy smile and roughed up Ponch’s ears some more. “I can’t let him try to take the blame for this,” Kit said. “I asked him to alter

the way the Display was working. I wanted to hear what Druvah actually said to Esemeli.”

Quelt didn’t look up. “And what did you hear?”

Kit told her.

It took a long while. Kit’s memory was excellent, Nita thought; the phrasing he was using was that of an older time, and she could almost hear the ancient wizard speaking through him. All the time, though, Quelt’s expression never changed. She sat looking down at the sand until Kit finished.

“So then,” she said, “having heard that, you went to see Esemeli.”

“Yes,” Nita said. Now, she figured, it was her turn. She told Quelt everything the Lone One had said to them, leaving out not a word. It was surprisingly easy for her, for she had been turning all those words over again and again in her mind, looking for anything dangerous hidden under them that she might have missed the first time around.

Once again, Quelt held very still, kept very silent, while Nita told her what the Lone Power had said about the Alaalids’ need to evolve. And then Nita fell silent herself, waiting to see what Quelt would do.

The silence lasted a long while, and Nita forced herself to listen to the water slipping up and down the beach, and the little hissing noises that happened when air got trapped in the sand and bubbled out. When she looked at Quelt again, she found the Alaalid gazing at her with an indrawn expression very unlike anything Nita had seen on her before.

“And you believe this?” Quelt said at last. “You believe these things It told you?”

Nita took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said.

“Because of the Oath you made It swear?”

“Not just that,” Nita said. “After I started hearing the whispering, it seemed to me that there was something”—she paused—”not wrong about it, not as such. But there was something missing about the world. I went looking for your world’s kernel. It’s not here, Quelt. It’s been separated from your world—and it shouldn’t be.”

“Or it wouldn’t be in your own world,” Quelt said, her voice very strange. “Is that it? That you think my world should be more like yours?”

Nita gulped. “Not at all,” she said. “But your world’s kernel—”

“Enough of that for a moment,” Quelt said. “I must come back to this. You believe what the Lone One told you?

“Yes, because this once, It had no choice but to tell the truth,” Kit said. “Not after Nita was finished with It, anyway.”

“And we ought to make the best of it,” Nita muttered, “because this is the last time I’m going to be able to manage that stunt. One per customer…”

Quelt was silent. Finally, she looked up again, but not at either of them: out to sea. “I want to say this without being rude,” she said. “You’re our guests, and Those Who Are sent you here. But—”

She shook herself all over, like someone under intolerable pressure, and leaped up. “What makes you so sure you’re right?” Quelt said, standing very stiffly, with her back turned to them. “How dare you think you can interfere with something

like this, with our Choice? What gives you the right to tell me that my people should repeal it—just throw away everything we have here and start over? What makes you think you know better than we do how we should be growing as a species, what we should be doing with ourselves?”

Nita couldn’t think of anything to say right away. “Quelt,” Kit said, “it might just be that we have more experience with this kind of thing, with the Lone One, than you do.”

“I think perhaps you do!” Quelt said as she turned back toward them. She was shaking all over as she stood there. “I asked the wind to tell me about your world! I had to, because every time I asked you, you’d always stop and say that it was going to take a long time to explain. Well, it did! It seemed like it took forever for the wind to tell me everything I wanted to know. And there was always more. I thought it would never stop.” She was nearly in tears, but she was hanging on to her control…just. “I didn’t know what a war was, until it told me about one. I’d never heard of murder. Or plague. Or a hundred other awful things.”

Nita wanted to say something…and couldn’t for the life of her think where to begin. And it was questionable, she thought, whether she could have stopped Quelt anyway. “I wasn’t going to say anything,” Quelt said. “I thought, Those Who Are wouldn’t send us wizards who would hurt us, who were dangerous. It’s not their fault their world is so horrible. But now I have to ask. What’s the matter with you people? What happened in your Choice that you got it so wrong, that you kill each other all the time?”

“We’re not sure,” Nita said. “We spend a lot of time wondering about that ourselves.”

“Is that true?”

Kit looked at her in shock. “Why would we lie?”

“Because when you’re not using the Speech, you can?” Quelt said.

Nita and Kit were stunned silent.

“Your world seems to be full of that kind of thing,” Quelt said. “I was terrified when I found out about it! It’s got to be one of the worst things that’s wrong there. How awful it has to be for people in your world when you can never know for sure whether something someone tells you is true?”

“That’s one reason we use the Speech,” Nita said. “It’s one less question to ask—”

“But then you have to go on to the next one,” Quelt said. “Yes, people can’t lie in the Speech. Fine. But if they’re confused, they can say what they believe to be the truth, conversationally, and what they say will still be wrong. How do I know It hasn’t somehow tricked you into believing all the things It told you are true?”

Nita looked helplessly up at Kit. She couldn’t think of an answer to that.

“Or worse yet,” Quelt said, “how do I know you’re not working for that one?”

Kit went ashen. “Wizards can’t,” he said. “Or not willingly!”

“Not here, no,” Quelt said. “But in other worlds, they can be ‘overshadowed’—unwilling accomplices. And what about in your world? What are things really like there? The Lone One practically runs that place, it seems! I never knew It could do things like that to a world. And here It sits on our planet, and we

made It welcome here—” She was pacing back and forth on the beach, her fists clenched, like someone afraid she’d explode into some terrible action that she’d regret.

Finally Quelt laughed, and the bitterness in the laughter pained Nita terribly. It was so alien for an Alaalid, and it echoed, in an awful way, Esemeli’s laughter. “Well, at least this excursus has done something good for me,” Quelt said. “It’s taught me what a monster Esemeli can be, once people start really believing in her!” She was actually angry, and it frightened Nita a little: She’d never seen any Alaalid angry before. “But for my own part, I’m my people’s only wizard. We beat Ictanikë once: I will not give her another chance at my people, just on a stranger’s say-so. Repeal our Choice? Why ever would we do that? Just because the Lone One says we might possibly turn into something better? It’s madness. And you’re mad, or deluded, to believe It, no matter what wizardry you worked on It. The Lone One tried to sell us our own destruction once, and we warded It off. Now it sends you to try to get us to throw away what we have and buy our destruction from a different source, instead?”

Nita stood up. “Quelt!” she said, and reached out two hands to take her by the shoulders.

Quelt backed away a step, and then another. “No,” she said. “I think perhaps you should both stay away from me for a while. I don’t know what to think, and looking at you makes me more uncertain every moment. I thought you were my cousins,” she said, and now the tears genuinely were starting. “I thought you were good!”

She stood there, trembling, for just a moment more, and then she fled down the beach toward her home.

In silence Kit and Nita watched her go.

“Now what do we do?” Kit said.

Nita shook her head. Her heart was heavy; she felt like crying herself, except that it wouldn’t have helped anything. “I have no idea,” she said.

Kit was silent for a long time. “I think I know,” he said at last. “For one thing, we sleep in the pup tents tonight.”

“I’d almost rather go home,” Nita said.

“I know,” Kit said. “So would I. Which is why I think we should stay here.”

Nita thought about that for a long moment. Finally, she nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Going home would feel too much like running away.”

“And if Quelt decided she wanted to talk to us again between now and then,” Kit said, “wouldn’t we look guilty if we couldn’t be found?”

That was something that had occurred to Nita only seconds after wishing she could go home. “But if we’re in the pup tents,” she said, “she’ll know we wanted to give her a little privacy, a little room.”

“Yeah.” Kit got up, dusted himself off. “Then, as soon as Esemeli’s ready tomorrow, we get It to help us find Druvah, if he can be found. If he can, we get the truth from him and we can bring it to Quelt. And then we get our butts out of here before we do any more damage.”

Nita rubbed her eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Let’s get it over with.”

They got up together to go down to their building and put what they needed

for one more trip to the Relegate’s Naos into their pup tents. Behind them Ponch came trotting along, the leash around his neck, holding the loose end of it in his mouth, and with a thoughtful look in his eyes…

****

At about quarter of three in the morning, Dairine stood at the garage end of the driveway, once more gazing up at the Moon and waiting for the rest of the group to join her.

“Dairine,” a voice said out of the darkness.

It was her dad.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Where are they, honey?”

“They’ll be here soon.”

He came down the back steps and stood beside her, looking up at the Moon. For a few moments neither of them said anything.

“Remember when Nita went away,” Dairine said at last, “and we thought she might not come back again, because of the wizardry she was doing out in the ocean, with the whales?”

“And the shark,” her dad said. “Yes, I remember that.”

“This is like that,” Dairine said. “This is my shark.” She looked at her dad.

In the darkness it was hard to see expressions. Her dad laughed, and the laugh sounded strange and strained. “And here I was concerned about Nita because she might wind up being sent off somewhere else by the Powers That Be to do something dangerous,” he said. “Now it turns out the problem was going to be a little closer to home, right under my nose—”

“They didn’t send her,” Dairine said. “Not as such. But if when you’re away you find a mess, or a problem to fix, you don’t just walk away from it: You fix it. Now I have to go do the dangerous thing…and the stakes are bigger this time.”

“Are you sure you have to do this?” her dad said.

“It’s my star,” Dairine said. “I can’t just send my houseguests off to deal with it! I have to go with them. Especially—” She fell silent.

Dairine’s dad said, “I meant, are you sure what you’re planning to do to the Sun really has to be done?”

“Oh.” Dairine gulped, dry-mouthed, and nodded. “It was sanctioned,” she said, “at a very high level. We’d never have gotten the sanction in the first place if the job didn’t really need doing.”

She was finding it hard to speak. “I have to go pretty soon,” she said. “We have to. We’re who gets this job.”

Her dad was silent for a moment. “I don’t have to tell you not to do anything stupid,” he said then. “That’s the last thing you’ll do.”

“How can you be so sure?” Dairine said. “After the dumb thing I did that started all this—”

Her dad shook his head, plainly feeling around for the right words. “Maybe it wasn’t so dumb after all, what you did,” he said. “It brought these particular wizards here just in time to do a job that at least one of them is a specialist in. Prince

Unlikely.”

Dairine nodded and said nothing. Her feelings about Prince Unlikely were far too complex for her to discuss. For the moment, she was scared to death, and upset, and didn’t dare say how she felt for fear that it should overwhelm her and make her useless for what had to be done in a very little while. All she could do was go to her dad and hug him.

“Dairine, you may be thoughtless sometimes,” her dad said, “but never stupid. If there’s anything you’ve got, it’s a brain…and I’d say your heart’s in the right shape, too. Go do what you have to do. And be careful.”

He didn’t let her go for a long time…then finally released her and went inside.

At 3:00 a.m., Filif, Sker’ret, and Roshaun joined Dairine out at the far end of the backyard. The circle of the wizardry lay glowing on the ground, ready to be implemented, the elaborate interlace of sigils and symbols pulsing gently in the night.

With Spot in her arms, Dairine was doing as the others were doing: moving slowly around the periphery of the wizardry, checking its terms, making sure that everything added up, that nothing was misspelled or misplaced, and—most important—that each of their names was correctly included, and that each name was tied into the wizardry correctly for the role that wizard would be playing.

The roles divided fairly neatly for this piece of work. Roshaun, as main designer of the work and the one most familiar with the theory behind it, would be watching the timing of the wizardry and directing the others in when each stage should implement. Sker’ret, the fixer, would be the one to actually “flip the switches,” speaking the words in the Speech that would take them in, help them locate where they needed to be, and manipulate the Sun’s mass once they got to the right spot. Filif would be the main power source for the wizardry, the one whose job it was to “get out and push,” leaving the others free to do fine adjustments and to react to situations as they developed. “Our people’s life comes from that of our star,” he’d said to Dairine while they were still in the design stages, “a little more directly than usual. This is a chance to give the power back. The universe appreciates such resonances…”

And as for me, Dairine thought, I go along for the ride.

Roshaun glanced over at her and said nothing. Dairine paid no attention, being in the process of checking her name for the third time. Sker’ret finished his check and came along beside her, peering at her name.

She waved the darkness she was holding in her hand in front of Sker’ret’s various eyes. “You sure you can spare this?” she said.

He spared a few eyes to peer at it. “It’s not like I’m going to have much trouble getting home even if we blow this one up,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll just go through Grand Central.”

“You’ll love it,” Dairine said absently. “The food’s great there. Just please don’t eat the trains.”

She looked at her name one last time and sighed. It was no shorter than it had been when she first started her wizardry, but some of its terms had changed to shapes not strictly human, and a number of the characters were truncated, or

indicated power levels much reduced. “You guys hardly even need me for this,” she said, “it’s so perfectly tied up.”

Filif rustled at her. “You’re here,” he said, “because this is your Sun. You’re its child, native to the space inside its heliopause. It knows you. It will listen to you where it might not listen to us.”

“Yeah,” Dairine said, allowing herself a breath of laughter. “Sure.” She knew she was no longer quite the power at wizardry that she had been, but she was good enough to hold up her part of a group working and make sure that if anyone else needed help, they would get it in a hurry.

She glanced at her watch. “We’d better move,” she said. “The bubblestorm area’s going to be coming around toward the Sun’s limb soon.”

Roshaun nodded, and took his position near the part of the wizardry that held a precis of its blueprint and the coordinates they were heading for, along with the latest data that the manual had for them on the depth of the tachocline. There would be no more precise data until they got closer to the Sun and could correct for relativistic errors and other problems.

The others arranged themselves around the rim of the wizardry, and then each took one step into it, into the locus prepared for them—the area that held optimum life support for each and that also contained a last-ditch “lifepod” wizardry intended to at least get them out with their lives if anything went wrong. But if anything goes that wrong, Dairine thought, we’re not likely to have time enough to implement the lifepods, anyway…

It was a thought she kept to herself as she looked past the circle and saw the tall shadow standing there in the dark, watching her, saying nothing. She raised a hand to him. He didn’t move for a few breaths…then raised his own.

“Ready?” Roshaun said.

“Ready,” each of the others said, and “Ready,” Dairine said, though she was starting to shake. This wasn’t like the wizardries she did by herself, where if anything went wrong, she was the one to blame, and the only one who would suffer.

“Then let’s speak,” Roshaun said, “and the Aethyrs be with us, because we really need Them tonight.”

The four wizards looked down at the wizardry that surrounded them. In unison, they started to speak its basic propositions in the Speech. The fire of it came up around them, blue green to start with, rapidly tinged with the gold of the star on which they were about to operate. The silence of a listening universe leaned in around them as they spoke the words; the power built—

They vanished into a suburban silence only slightly troubled by the echo of the hiss of solar wind

****

Flashpoints Nita and Kit left the Peliaens’ homestead early the next morning, partly with the intention of seeing no one. And they did see no one, which hurt Nita, but there was

nothing she or Kit could do about it right now. They’ve got to feel we’ve violated their trust, she thought. Quelt, especially. And we so very much didn’t mean to, but —She let out a long breath of discomfort. Explanations would have to wait.

“You ready?” Kit said to her.

“Yeah.”

Doing a short transit to the Naos was the matter of a few moments; there, in the morning mist, Nita and Kit stood at the bottom of one of the flights of steps and looked around them uncertainly.

“She’s late,” Kit said.

“I very much doubt that,” Nita said. “The big question on my mind right now is, where’s Ponch? I thought you said he would meet us here.”

“I thought he would,” Kit said. “After he’s been out all night, he usually meets us first thing in the morning.”

Nita sighed. “Where’s the leash?”

“That’s the problem. I left it on him last night.” Kit shrugged. “I do that sometimes. He usually comes back at night so that I can take it off him. Last night he didn’t come back.” Kit shrugged. “He’ll turn up.”

Nita sighed and sat down on the bottom step. “I feel so rotten,” she said.

“I know.”

“But I didn’t think she was going to react so badly. I mean, this isn’t as if it was something that was going to happen overnight. Or even terribly soon. Think about it! The stricture said that if the Alaalids wanted to reject it, and remake their Choice, they had to do that unanimously. They’re never going to—”

Kit shook his head. “Yes, they could. Or, specifically, not them. The wording Druvah used was, ‘Our descendants in power.’” Kit shook his head. “When you were reading the orientation pack, did you look up the Alaalid word for ‘wizard’?”

Nita shook her head.

“Tilidi’t,” Kit said. “ ‘One who walks in power.’”

Nita gulped. “Oh no,” she said.

“And it’s easy for a decision among wizards to be unanimous,” Kit said, “when in a whole world there’s only one…”

“Oh no,” Nita said again. Suddenly it all made sense. She could just see herself if someone offered her such a piece of information. Know what? Your whole species is in danger of never achieving its potential. But you can do something about it…you, all by yourself. And what happens to all of them hinges entirely and only on you…

Nita shivered. “Shouldn’t Ponch have turned up by now?” she said.

“Yeah…”

But they waited, and waited, and he didn’t turn up. The one who did turn up was Esemeli, still impeccably clad in white and looking wearily amused. “So,” It said, “you’ve decided to trust me after all.”

Kit didn’t say anything. Nita said, “Let’s get on with it. Where are we headed?”

“Down,” the Lone One said. “Do you want to handle the transit yourself, or shall I do it?”

Kit made an ironic after-you gesture.

The three of them vanished.

“This is where it begins,” the Lone One said.

They were standing somewhere else, in the mist at the bottom of a huge cliff. The cliff was some dark stone, towering up into the mist, lost in it; and in the stone of its base was a huge vertical cleft that ran down from the cliff, across the ground, nearly to their feet.

Nita and Kit looked dubiously at the great opening in the Earth. Nita had started taking Latin in school, and the sight of the crevasse suddenly made her remember something she’d translated from the Aeneid last semester: It’s easy to get into the Underworld. The door stands open night and day. But retracing your steps, getting back up to the light—there’s the real work, the tough part—

She took a deep breath. It doesn’t matter, Nita thought. We’re as prepared as we can be. Except for one thing—

She glanced over at Kit and saw that Esemeli was regarding him with an expression of concern. “Where’s your doggy this morning?” It said.

Kit looked at the Lone Power. “I can’t believe, somehow, that you don’t know.”

“I told you,” Esemeli said, “that my ability to perceive what’s going on is severely limited here. So I have no idea where your dog is. And, anyway, after what she made me promise”—and It glanced in annoyance at Nita—”if I knew, I would have to tell you if she asked.”

“Where’s Ponch?” Nita said immediately.

“I don’t know,” the Lone One said.

Kit stood still and closed his eyes for just one last try. Nita heard him calling Ponch silently.

But there was no response.

“You can wait, if you want,” the Lone One said.

“No,” Nita said. The state in which they had left Quelt was very much on her mind. “The sooner we get the proof we need for Quelt, the better. Let’s get going.”

They turned and entered the mouth of darkness, vanishing.

At first the path downward seemed nothing spectacular: a winding passage between stone walls, the walls growing closer together, the rough ceiling growing lower and lower as they went. Nita, looking around her, began to get nervous as they went downward and the walls began to close in. She had never been wild about tight, constricting spaces; and in this one, her general cast of mind was not helped by the strangely organic feeling to the stone. It had that same warm color, a muted gold with pink overtones, that was seen in many of the buildings on the continent. As the path twisted and turned and descended, it was very hard to keep from thinking that they were descending not into the bowels of the planet but—

Nita pushed that thought aside vigorously, and concentrated on keeping an eye on their guide. Esemeli walked casually and confidently ahead of them, seeming untroubled by the way they went. “How can you be sure Druvah came this way?”

Kit said, pulling out his manual and producing a small light to bob along ahead of him.

“He’s left traces,” Esemeli said, “even after all this time. He was, after all, the greatest of the wizards who met to enforce the Alaalid Choice.” It chuckled a little. “There’s a joke there, actually; if he hadn’t been so scrupulous about bowing to the wishes of the majority, none of us would need to be here now. The Alaalids would’ve moved on to the next stage in evolution, oh, thousands of years ago…if he’d made them. But like so many wizards who are too wholeheartedly on the side of the Powers That Be, he insisted on making his work difficult for himself. And for the people he was supposed to be serving…”

They made their way around a tightly curving corner in the stone, a place where all of them had to put their backs against the wider side of the curve and inch around it, little by little. Nita breathed in, trying to make herself as thin as possible, and kept herself moving; but she had to keep her eyes closed. The downward-pressing closeness of the stone was beginning to affect her.

Ahead of her, Esemeli moved slowly but with no sign of distress. Nita could hear Kit’s breathing becoming labored. He was no fonder of these tight quarters than she was. “We could just go through the stone,” he said at one point, when he was finding it difficult to follow the Lone Power.

“No,” Esemeli said, “we can’t. All this road into the heart of the Earth is permeated by Druvah’s power.” She smiled a secret, rather uncomfortable smile, which Nita could just make out by the faint gleam of Kit’s wizard-light. “He made sure that anybody who was going to follow him on this road would have to go through exactly what he did when he first found his way to the world’s kernel. Even if it was going to be the wizards who would repeal the Choice he oversaw— they would have no easier time of it. He wanted to give them plenty of time to have second thoughts.”

I’m having plenty of them right now, Nita heard Kit thinking.

Not just you, Nita thought. “How do you know where he hid the kernel?” she said.

“I watched him do it,” the Lone One said. “He was using the power that I gave him at the time. And at the time, that made it impossible for him to hide his whereabouts from me.” She was smiling, amused again.

They came out of the tight, close tunnel into a slightly more open area. Kit had to stop and get his breath, and for a moment he stood bowed down with his hands on his knees, gasping. Nita wiped her fore head. It was definitely getting warmer. She tried to work out how far underground they might have come, but she wasn’t sure exactly how to tell. I could look in the manual, she thought. But at the same time, she found herself thinking that even that wasn’t likely to do her any good. There was a strange sense coming down over her as if this journey was not exactly a physical one, or not merely a physical one…

She looked up to find the Lone One gazing at her with that amused expression. “Yes,” It said, “you do feel it. I was wondering if you would.”

“We’re not exactly inside Time,” Nita said. “Or outside it. This is one of those ‘complex states.’”

“Yes,” Esemeli said. “I’m afraid that, as wizards go, Druvah was fairly

expert.”

“Which has to be bad for you,” Kit said, straightening up, “and good for us…”

The Lone One threw him an annoyed look. “Let’s get moving,” It said. “We’ve got a ways to go yet…”

They moved on, downward again. Kit dropped back toward Nita a little. “Neets, this is weird,” Kit said under his breath. “It isn’t like the real inside of a planet…any planet. This is more like another dimension.”

“It could be a little of both,” Nita said. “There are ways to make a place’s mythical reality coincide with the physical one…or make one temporarily a lot more powerful than the other.” She shook her head. “But normally you need a kernel to mediate that kind of overlap or substitution.”

“That, at least, means we’re on the right track,” Kit said. “You’ve been doing a lot of reading. Are you thinking about changing specialties? Maybe turning into a research specialist, like Tom?”

“I don’t know,” Nita said. “Things are changing, all right…but into what, I’m not entirely sure.”

Kit nodded, moved ahead again. For her own part, Nita was relieved to find that the path they took widened out a great deal. But the passage was always downward, and the weight of millions and billions of tons of rock continued to weigh on her. At least she was able to partially distract herself with the splendor of their surroundings: for the chain of complexes of caverns through which Esemeli led them in the next hours—or what felt like hours—would have been a first-class tourist attraction on Earth. One after another they passed through gigantic multicolored arenas and caves of stone, festooned with stalactites, or growing great crops of stalagmites like petrified forests. There were some caverns in which the stone itself glowed, and there was no need for wizard-light at all; they wove their way among pillars and chandeliers of down-hanging, luminous rock, their shadows stretching in ten different directions, or abolished entirely by the glow. But always the way led down, and down, and further down.

It was getting warmer all the time as they went. But this didn’t reassure Nita; it wasn’t nearly as warm as it should have been underground, and she knew that they were, indeed, not entirely in the physical world anymore. She had done some reading in the manual about these so-called “complex states,” in which normal space was blended or “affiliated” with constructed spaces that could be based in myth, or one mind’s delusion, or some commonly held belief. Such complex-state spaces could have physical realities that mirrored some old fairy tale or ancient legend…or a physical reality that had once existed but was now long gone. As they passed out of one deep cavern and into another, always with Esemeli leading the way and Kit following It, Nita’s misgivings grew, despite the Binding Oath she had made the Lone One swear. It was very old, and very wise…and entirely too clever. But it was hard to know where she might have gone wrong. We’re just going to have to rely on the manual for the moment, and try to keep our eyes open, Nita thought, as they went down, and down, and down…

The walk through the caves began to seem more and more like a dream that had always been happening, and always would. In front of her was Kit, with his wizard-light; in front of him, Esemeli, a white shadow that never paused, never got tired. Not like me, Nita thought. She was beginning to regret not having eaten at least something for breakfast that morning. And when was this morning? she thought. How many hours ago? How many years? It was becoming increasingly difficult even to believe in “this morning,” except as something that had happened in a dream a long time ago.

The way before them opened out again, the sound of their footsteps echoing against distant walls as it hadn’t done for some time. Esemeli stopped for a moment, and Kit behind It, and the three of them stood still on the shores of a vast cavern lake under a huge, high-domed ceiling dripping with more stalactites, which glowed. The water was a strange, milky blue color in Kit’s and Nita’s wizard-lights; and everything was absolutely still, not the slightest ripple of air touching that water. It was like blue glass, as solid-seeming as the crystalline surface of the Display had been.

“It looks too deep to wade,” Kit said.

“Indeed, I don’t know that it has a bottom,” Esemeli said. There was something strange about Its tone of voice. Nita glanced over at It and was surprised to see the uncertainty in Esemeli’s face and stance, normally so self-assured and lazily mocking. Maybe even It’s a little out of Its depth here, she thought.

But the next moment, Nita reminded herself once more that this was the Lone Power, or a fragment of It—immensely old, immensely powerful, and absolutely not to be trusted, no matter how secure you thought your hold over It might be. And just how sure am I about that? Nita thought.

There was another issue, too, one that she hadn’t mentioned to Kit, but that she suspected was going to come up in the near future and probably make him yell at her. Such strictures as the Binding Oath could not be one-sided; there was also a price to pay by the one doing the binding. What is bound eventually breaks loose, the manual said; the power of the binding is directly proportional to the power of the backlash. Sooner or later, Nita thought, this is going to come back to haunt me. Later, I hope…

And down they went through the darkness, and further down. Slowly, though, Nita noticed something strange beginning to happen. She had been starting to slow down, so that every now and then she would have to force herself to hurry to catch up with Kit and Esemeli, who had moved ahead. But now she was having less trouble keeping up, and this confused her. It’s not like I’m any less tired. I’m not! But walking was less trouble. And the further downward they continued, the less of a problem it became. Stranger still, she was starting to become aware of light filtering up from below them, as they continued downward through the caverns and passageways in the depths of the world. The caverns seemed brighter, somehow, though there was none of the glowing stone they’d seen earlier—

Nita followed Kit through one more exit from a vast cavern into one more new one, and put her foot down wrong on a place where the stone was uneven. She tripped, and thought she would fall.

She didn’t. She bounced, and came up on her feet again, and bounced once

more before she settled.

Hearing the scuffle of Nita losing her footing, Kit turned and saw her bounce. Behind him, Esemeli stopped, too, watching them.

G is less, Nita thought. “Kit,” she said. “Gravity’s decreasing!”

He stared at her. “How can it?” But then he jumped, and Nita saw him hang there briefly in the air before he came down.

“Maybe half a g,” Kit said. “How can this be happening?”

Nita shook her head. “Come on,” she said.

Esemeli turned to lead the way again. Kit and Nita went after, bouncing a little in an adaptation of the astronauts’ walk that everyone who went to the Moon learned, because until you did, you spent a lot of time lying face first in moondust. Esemeli, for Its own part, did not bounce; possibly It considered that beneath Its dignity.

They continued downward, and as they went, the gravity kept lessening, and the caverns all around them seemed progressively brighter, as if the stone of them was going translucent. This is beyond weird, Nita thought. It was nothing like the smothering heat and pressure that they should have been experiencing even fairly high up in a planet’s crust, let alone down into its mantle. This is definitely a complex-state environment, someone’s myth about the middle of the world coming true around us. Well, I don’t mind the lessened gravity, anyway…

That was fortunate, for it got less the deeper they went. Nita was grateful that she was used to it; she’d spent enough time on the Moon that she wasn’t troubled anymore by the human body’s usual reaction to microgravity, which was to complain bitterly that it wanted to throw up anything that had been eaten recently. Just as well, maybe, that I didn’t eat any breakfast this morning, Nita thought. Not that I felt like it. The pain and betrayal on Quelt’s face was still very much with her, and the anguished cry, “I thought you were good!”

They were becoming light enough now that it was becoming something of a difficulty to stay on the ground. Nita had to grab on to handholds in the stone of passages and tunnels they went through. But ahead of them, she could see a huge portal into another cavern, and there would be nothing to hold on to there. We’re going to fall up, Nita thought wearily. We’re going to fall into the sky. She had walked on air often enough in her work as a wizard, but falling was never entirely pleasant, whether you did it up or down. She swallowed, trying to keep her stomach under control; it was already trying to do backflips at the thought of what was coming—

They passed through that gigantic archway, and everything happened at once. Nita saw Kit’s shadow leap out behind him, and Esemeli’s as well—but Its was longer and far blacker than it should have been in that light. Before them lay a great broad plain with a high horizon…but the plain was above them, and the horizon was upside down.

Nita’s stomach flipped in earnest now. It was as if, for all the descending they’d been doing for all these weary hours, they had somehow come right around through the heart of things and out back on Alaalu’s surface again. Yet they hadn’t. They were still in the middle of the world: Nita knew this for sure as she looked at that horizon and realized that it didn’t stop—there was never any sky at the top of it,

just more and more land. And suspended in space before them, like a pillar buttressing the center of the world, was one great needle of stone, reaching down, or up, an incredible distance into that silvery-glowing, blinding sky. The confusion assailed Nita completely; she no longer could tell which way up or down was. And as if that confusion wasn’t all that was needed to complete the effect, it was then that the earth seemed to let go of them, and all three of them fell into the sky….

Fortunately, the fall itself partook to a certain extent of that dreamlike quality, so that what might otherwise have left Nita screaming in terror now left her in a muted state of astonishment and mild annoyance, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Up and up the three of them fell, and closer and closer to that peak of stone. “Toward that!” Esemeli cried; and Kit and Nita, having learned in passing a little about handling themselves when free-falling in atmosphere, spread out their arms and legs and did their best to maneuver themselves toward the top of the peak. They were falling up at enough speed for Nita to erect a personal-shield wizardry around herself; she was concerned about the possibility of slamming into the rocks. But she was pleased to find that the velocity of their fall seemed to be lessening as they got close to the top of that peak. By the time the haze of distance disappeared, they had slowed to a leisurely plummet; by the time they were within perhaps a mile of it, they had slowed to a glide. And as they came to the top, or the bottom of it—

Who knows what it is anymore? Nita thought, as she concentrated on somehow putting her feet flat down on stone instead of air. Let it be up or down just as it pleases. I only want to stand still!

And she was standing still, on the stone, and Kit and Esemeli were standing there on it with her. Nita breathed out and looked around.

The plateau on which they stood was the pale plain peach-colored sandstone of the Inner Sea lands. Nita made herself hold still and breathe and try to get used to some kind of normality again…if you could call this normal. We’re on a pillar of rock maybe a thousand miles high, inside a planet, Nita thought, at a level where there should be nothing but magma, or maybe even molten iron under millions of tons of pressure. There’s a sky here where there can’t be one, and air here where there can’t be any. If I were a pseudoscience freak, this would be terrific, and I’d be expecting flying saucers next. As it is, I think maybe normality needs an overhaul…

Next to her, “Wow,” Kit said softly.

“What?” Nita said, looking around.

Then she saw Kit turning slowly, looking all around him. And Nita saw that he had good reason. The perspectives of things had shifted again, or rather their topologies, so that what had been the truncated top of a cone was now the flat top of a shallow rise, and all around them, from perhaps thirty feet away to the horizon, and seemingly right up into the impossibly glowing sky, there were people.

Nita’s mouth went dry with sudden irrational fear at the sight of them. All around her she heard, more strongly than ever, the sound that had been trembling at the edge of her hearing since they came to Alaalu…an incessant, friendly whispering. Now she knew where it came from. It was from these people, a myriad of Alaalids,

all standing around with their amiable, interested faces, looking at her, and Kit, and Esemeli, and the Alaalid man who stood nearby the place where they had come to rest.

Nita found herself experiencing a case of the shivers. The people were the dead: everybody who had ever lived on Alaalu, in their many billions, filling all this vast space out to the edge of the sky.

And as for the man—

He had a shock of red hair that was rather untidy and casually kept, by Alaalid standards, but a face that was composed and good-humored, even for an Alaalid, with those dark and liquid eyes suggesting a profound wisdom underneath the good humor. He was very casually dressed, in the long kilt that some Alaalids wore, and a long loose jacket thrown over it. He looked like someone who’d just been out for a swim. But he carried in his hands something that not many beachgoers would have brought with them. It was a tangle of near-blinding brilliance, lines of fire in many colors and many thousands or tens of thousands of words in the Speech, all knotted together in one complex structure. It was Alaalu’s world-kernel, the “software” in which was contained the laws—natural, physical, and spiritual—that governed Alaalu and its homespace.

The man holding that kernel nodded, first of all, to Esemeli. “I thought you’d turn up here eventually,” he said.

It smiled and bowed to him. “You and I,” Esemeli said, “have unfinished business to transact.”

“So we do,” the man said. Then he looked over at Nita and Kit.

“Druvah,” Kit said.

The Alaalid bowed a little to Kit, and then to Nita.

“Cousins, well met on the journey,” he said. “You’re very welcome to the heart of things.”

“Thank you,” Kit said.

“Yes,” Nita said, “thank you. But I have a question…

“Ask,” Druvah said.

“When we’re finished talking to you…how do we get out of here?”

“No one does that,” Druvah said, “until we change the world.”

And Esemeli smiled—

Dairine, Roshaun, Sker’ret, and Filif were standing in position in blazing light, perhaps two thousand miles above the Sun’s photosphere, while the invisible corona lashed space with superheated plasma above their heads.

The wizardry was protecting them from the heat and more than ninety-nine percent of the visible light that boiled out of the Sun’s nuclear furnace to express itself in the photosphere’s glare. That outermost layer of the Sun’s actual body was no more than an eggshell’s thickness compared to the vast bulk of the star beneath it, but it boiled and roiled with golden fire. It was beautiful, but instantly deadly to anyone not protected as they all were. Even so, none of them intended to linger a moment longer than necessary. But the beauty was compelling.

“Look at it,” Filif said, gazing into that furious brilliance with all his berries,

which caught it and glinted red as blood. “So magnificent, so dangerous—”

Dairine had to smile just slightly at the poet living inside the bush who liked baseball caps. Her own impression was more prosaic. “It looks like oatmeal,” she said. And so it did, if oatmeal boiled at seven thousand degrees Celsius and every grain of it was a capsule full of burning liquid helium eight hundred miles across. The motion was the same, though—new grains bubbled up every second, persisting in the violent roiling pressure for maybe twenty minutes, and then were pushed away to be swallowed into the depths. They rumbled, and the sound was real; sonic booms from them rippled incessantly across the surface of the Sun.

“Where’s the tachocline?” Roshaun said.

“Two-hundred-eighteen thousand five hundred kilometers through two-hundred-twenty-one thousand six hundred,” Sker’ret said. “It’s fluctuating, though.”

“Which way?”

“Up.”

Roshaun looked uncertain. “We could wait for it to stabilize,” he said. Then he shook his head. “No point in that. I’m going to adjust the wizardry to take us in, and hold steady at two-twenty-two. Everyone, check my numbers.”

They all watched as Roshaun brought out his version of the manual, a little tangle of light like a miniature sun itself, and read from it a precise string of words and numbers in the Speech. Inside the wizardry, the “depth” constant changed to reflect the shift. Everyone looked at the numbers.

“Did you all check me?”

Dairine read the numbers three times. “You’ve got it,” she said.

“Check,” Sker’ret said.

“And I check you, too,” said Filif, trembling.

“Then let’s go—”

They vanished again—this time into the inferno.

In the heart of hearts of Alaalu, Nita and Kit stood looking at the planet’s oldest surviving wizard—if his present state—half myth, half spirit—could be described as “surviving”—as he said, “We’ve been waiting for you here for a while.”

“Not too long, I hope,” Kit said.

Druvah’s smile was reassuringly ironic.

“Long enough,” he said. “But I don’t mind.” He bowed to Esemeli, and It looked at him and eyed him with an expression of reserved disdain.

“You did a good job hiding your kernel,” Nita said.

“It seemed necessary,” Druvah said. “Under the circumstances, it seemed wise to keep it in an ambivalent state: not quite in the real world, in Time; not all the way into the deeper world, out of Time; but oscillating between them, a million times every moment, so that its location was always more a possibility than a definite thing.”

“Uncertainty,” Nita said to Kit. “The way you get it in atomic structure, with the electrons more or less certain to be in a given area, but never really just in one spot…”

“That quality of matter I borrowed for this wizardry, yes,” Druvah said. “And for myself as well, so that I could keep an eye on what our destiny was bound to.” He looked at Nita and Kit. “But where is the last wizard?”

They looked at each other.

“Well,” Nita said.

“Unfortunately,” Esemeli said, “she will not be coming.”

Druvah looked at her in a shock so stately, it resembled composure.

“The strangers on whom you pinned all your hopes,” Esemeli said, “unfortunately have given your wizard the fright of her life, by telling her the truth. A choice irony. She’s seen what the Telling showed her of their world and wants nothing to do with it, or them. Or, by extension, you, Druvah. She even made herself unavailable enough to them this morning that they couldn’t be warned in time about what they were so eager to do.”

Esemeli turned Its attention to Nita and Kit and smiled at them sweetly…a little too sweetly. “You, at least,” the Lone Power said to Nita, “will recognize the source of the Whispering you’ve heard in the nights. This is the Whispering’s core, the place into which the souls of the Alaalid die, when they die into the world. Here, by virtue of the Choice the Alaalids made, everything is preserved forever as it was when it arrived. Think of it as a sketchy little version of Timeheart.” The furious, hating twist It put on the word gave Nita an abrupt shiver. “Too sketchy, though. And also by virtue of that Choice, nothing that comes here ever leaves here, whether it comes of its own free will or not.”

Esemeli directed the full force of that infuriating smile on Nita. “You should have asked fewer questions about how soon you could get where you were going,” the Lone One said, “and more about whether you could get out afterward. But most to the point, you forgot the line in the Binding Oath about not allowing you to err by inaction.”

Nita felt all the blood run straight down out of her face, leaving her staggered and shivering.

She and Kit looked over at Druvah.

The most powerful of the ancient Alaalid wizards nodded regretfully. “What It says is true,” Druvah said. “I have no power to change it. And the one who has that power has not come with you, as I had hoped she would.” His voice was filled with regret, and Nita looked over at Kit, her mouth suddenly going dry with fear. “Indeed, that was my only hope. But the future has not turned out the way I thought it would. It seems my people must remain as they are. And here we must all stay, until the day after forever…”

The Lone One’s laughter began to echo in that bright place, filling it, and drowning out all other sound, even the sound of the Whispering

The wizardry brought Dairine, Roshaun, Filif, and Sker’ret out in the midst of a hurricane of fire.

Not exactly in the middle of it, Dairine thought, trying desperately to keep hold of her nerves, for the status readouts hanging in front of her own part of the wizardry told her exactly what was going on out there, and it terrified her. It was one

thing, as she’d once done, to sink a skinny little spatial slide into this nuclear fury and pull out a pencil-sized stream of molten mass. When she’d done that, she’d been dealing with a star’s core, and the core was a placid pool on a windless night compared to the place where they now found themselves. By definition, the tachocline was turbulent. Its name meant “the place where the speed changes,” and it was where the more placid motion but more terrible temperatures of the radiative zone below met the boiling madness of the convective zone above. The tachocline slid between the two zones like ball bearings rubbed between two hands, in wide belts and roiling spots like the atmosphere of Jupiter, but at wind speeds that made Jupiter’s seem tame. “Wind,” though, seemed a pitiful word for the insensate power that was raging around them in wildly varying directions. The solar medium was no denser than water here—but even water becomes a deadly weapon when it’s blasting past you at twenty times the speed of sound, and at two million degrees.

Filif was pouring power into the wizardry at a prodigious rate, but even so, the wizardry itself was suffering under these atrocious conditions. It would not hold forever. And it was being buffeted around like a Ping-Pong ball in the terrible, constantly shifting pressure.

Roshaun was trying to get a reading on the lowest levels of the tachocline, but Dairine saw that every second the readings changed more violently. The layer was like a blanket being wildly shaken up and down by people holding it at the edges. Until it calmed, there was no chance that they were going to be able to do what they needed to do. And it was not going to calm—

Come on, Roshaun said to the Sun in the Speech. He spoke silently to be heard over the roar. Come on, cousin! What are you waiting for? Why all this trouble? You know what you need to do. Otherwise, life on all your planets is going to be problematic. Give us some help, here. Let us help you sort yourself out!

The Sun raged around him; the tachocline bucked and heaved like a live thing, stung by the approaching magnetic anomalies swinging around from the far side of the Sun, the skin of the border layer twitching and shuddering. Dairine started to hear something she never would have imagined it was possible to hear: the Sun itself speaking, like a sentient thing. It was using the Speech, but she couldn’t understand the words. It wanted something; it was trying to tell her, but she couldn’t understand—

That’s impossible. I have to be able to understand; it’s the Speech. What’s the matter?

There’s something wrong here, she heard Sker’ret saying in her mind. Something’s interfering with the magnetic flow at this level.

The bubblestorm area? Dairine asked.

No. Something else. A darkness…

Sunspots? Dairine said.

No! Something else. But dark—

Under them, the tachocline heaved ever more violently. It won’t stay still! Dairine cried. How are you going to get the worldgate down in there long enough to bleed the mass off if it keeps heaving around like this?

There was a long silence from Roshaun. There are ways, he said

conversationally.

Something about the tone of that thought brought Dairine’s head up, made her look him in the eye. But he wouldn’t meet her eye.

Roshaun?

You know what I am, he said to the Sun, ignoring her.

A blast of reply.

Yes, Roshaun said. A Guarantor.

Another blast.

He could understand it and she couldn’t. It wasn’t fair—

Sker’ret, Roshaun said, detach the worldgate for me.

“What?” Dairine shouted.

If Roshaun heard the thought behind the shout, he didn’t betray it. At any rate, the way the roar of the Sun was coming through even the wizardry now, there was no point in using normal speech. Sker’ret said three words, very quickly, and the black shadow that was the worldgate, reduced to a thin scrap of grayish fog in this terrible light, leaped straight into Roshaun’s hands as if he’d called it.

What are you thinking of? Dairine demanded. Let me help you—

You need to stay here and let me do this, Roshaun said.