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.” She glanced back to Spot. “Any luck finding the Planetary Wizard 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’d 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; just 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 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 an incidence of his “beam-me-up-Scotty” spell into which he’d 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.
He started walking down the air toward the edge of the pool. “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, thinking, 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 th
at 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.
Kit stood up and stretched. That’s the bit that counts, he 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?
A soft whimpering noise made Kit turn, look down. Ponch was gazing up at him. The thing you want to see, he said, I can take you there.
Kit nodded. “All right. Do it!”
***
It was different this time: a slower progression down into the crystalline pool, Ponch leading the way downward in silence, with a thoughtful concentrating look in his eyes. At the bottom of it all, 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’s 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 in Its avatar as Ictanikë had stepped aside with Druvah, 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 so 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 ri
gid 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.”