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 apparently written in the key of M, and only occasionally did it become so weird that Dairine 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 descended in there with a commercial 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.
Dairine’s dad went after him, alarmed. “What’s the matter, son?”
“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.
Filif went slowly 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 rinsed 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 headed back into the dining room. Thinking about another glass of milk, Dairine fetched Spot into the kitchen from the dining room, got another glass, and went back to 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. “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 just blew off a CME. That’s a—”
“I know what that is.” His eyes didn’t move from the screen.
“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 coming up on a sunspot maximum now, and you kind of expect a fair number of CMEs even though the maximums have been less intense for the last few cycles than they originally thought they’d be. One or two a week, we’ve been having, but—”
“Unusually flat maxima?” Roshaun said. “How many cycles?”
“Well, three or four, now. In fact there are some people who think the whole cycle is shifting and both maxima and minima are flattening out—”
“While you’re still getting so many eruptions like this?” Roshaun looked stricken. “Dear Aethyrs, that’s the first sign—” He stared at Dairine. “I’ve seen this before. Don’t you know what this means?”
“No,” Dairine said. “Should I?”
“Yes you should!” Roshaun shouted. “Your star’s 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 getting ready 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 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 thinks the Sun is broken,” Dairine said. “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 Galactic 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 Sol up 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 grabbed the cordless phone out of its cradle, 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?” Only most unusual circumstances took Advisories and Seniors off their posts without warning…
“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…
10: 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! But 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 raw 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. Months. And I doubt we have so much time to spare right now. There are quicker 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 the matter must be completely removed from the star’s corpus. —Don’t look at me like that: of course 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?”
“Of course not. It’s entirely the wrong sort of star for 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’d 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’d 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 wavefront’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. Half a world’s atmosphere to restore, temperature differentials to even out, a shattered ecosystem to rebuild… The quick obliteration that a nova would have brought would have seemed to some merciful by comparison.”