“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 that great intervention 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. “This satellite’s only fifteen years old. Any earlier data’s got to come from 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. But here, look, 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. “A little less, actually.”
“And the spot that’s preparing 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’ve little choice,” Roshaun said. “We’re just four wizards against a star that weighs, oh, nine hundred octillion tons at a glance. 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 the previous summer. This time, there were a lot 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 radiative 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, then.”
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.
But 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.
And “expand like mad,” Dairine thought, is putting it real, real mildly. 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 they all 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 G0 dwarf 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 all this works.
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 in Ireland. It infuriated her to think how easily, almost carelessly, she had once expended the kind of power that would be needed for an intervention 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, “will 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 mellow, she thought, got down on her knees along with the others, and got to work.
***
The spell-construction 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 talked her eyes out of that, though, and she doesn’t need the glasses any more. 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 so 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’d 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…
Dairine caught herself grinding her teeth, a bad habit the dentist had warned her about. She stopped, and then just got on with it. For quite some time Dairine didn’t look up; just 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 or crouching 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—
“I don’t see why,” she heard her father say.
Hearing his voice, Dairine paused 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… ”