Dairine put Spot down. The laptop put out legs and quickly crab-walked out into the middle of everything, producing as many eyes as Dairine had ever seen him come up with at one time. He settled himself down flat, pointing every eye in a different direction. Apparently the architecture had him fascinated. This Dairine understood, since Roshaun’s living space in the palace on Wellakh closely resembled a three-way collision between an antique furniture warehouse, a jewelry store, and a Gothic cathedral carved and decorated by the artistically insane. Rich overlapping carpets covered the floor everywhere; sofas and wardrobes and tables and chairs ornate enough to be thrones were placed here and there under rich canopies. Delicately wrought lamps hung down from a ceiling almost lost to sight in an opulent gloom, through which the occasional gemstone gleamed down like a lazily observant eye.
Roshaun stood there looking around for a moment, then glanced over at Dairine. “I wish we did not have to make this stop,” he said.
“Family stuff,” Dairine said. “Always a mess. You’re just lucky to have parents who’re wizards.”
“Am I indeed,” Roshaun said. “You shall judge. For the moment, I have to change.”
“Really?” Dairine said in amusement. “You mean there’s somewhere in the galaxy that won’t immediately buy into Carmela’s fashion statement? She’ll be horrified.”
Roshaun gave her what was meant to be a cutting look, and with apparent regret pulled off the floppy T-shirt that had been covering him nearly to his knees. Has Carmela got a thing going for him? Dairine wondered. But no, now it’s Ronan. She had to smile a little. Wait till she figures out the ramifications of that one. Dairine spared a second for an entirely clinical appreciation of the lean look of Roshaun’s upper body above the soft golden-fabric “sweatpants” he was wearing. How old is he in “real” years, I wonder? If there’s even an approximation that makes any sense. Officially, as his people see age, he can’t be much older than Nita or Kit.
Roshaun carefully draped the T-shirt over an ornately carved chaise longue. “I shall return momentarily,” he said. “Do you require refreshment?”
Somehow Dairine didn’t think Roshaun was likely to have a supply of her favorite soft drink on hand. “I’m okay,” she said. “You go do what needs doing.”
He vanished behind an intricately carved and gilded screen. Dairine glanced over into the middle of the floor, where Spot was still watching everything with all his eyes.
“How are you feeling?” she said.
“Peculiar.”
That made her twitch a little. “Is that something new?”
“Not since this morning, if that’s what you’re asking,” Spot said. “I don’t feel like I’m losing my mind. But then again, I haven’t ‘felt’ any of these strange fugues you tell me I’m experiencing, either.”
That was one of the things bothering Dairine the most. A computer that was losing memory or files was enough cause for concern by itself. But when the computer was sentient, and at least partly wizardly, and was forgetting things it was saying or thinking from one moment to the next—
“I haven’t lost any spell data,” Spot said, sounding to Dairine’s trained ear faintly annoyed. “I’ve been running diagnostics constantly since this started to happen.”
“And they haven’t been showing anything?”
“No.” Spot sounded even more annoyed.
Dairine sighed. “In the old days, we wouldn’t have had these problems.”
“These are not the old days,” Spot said. “You are no longer half human, half manual. I am no longer just a machine with manual access. Both of us have become more, and less. And the new increased power levels do not make us who we were again. They only make us more powerful versions of who we are now.”
Dairine looked out the doors at the setting Wellakhit sun. It looked like a huge shield of beaten copper, sliding down toward the sea-flat horizon. It seemed like an age ago, now, that time when she’d come home from her Ordeal with the constant soft whisper of a whole new species’ ideation running under all her conscious thought, like water under the frozen surface of a winter stream. They had always instantly had the answers to any question—or had seemed to, the mobiles’ time sense being so much swifter than that of the human kind of computer that was built of meat instead of space-chilled silicon. And the answers they’d come up with, she had always been able to implement with staggering force, since she’d come into her power young.
But slowly that power had faded to more normal levels, and the connection to the computer wizards of what Dairine thought of as the “Motherboard World” had stretched thin, carrying less power, less data. It never entirely failed. That whisper of machine thought still ran at the bottom of her dreams, and if she listened hard while waking, she could find it without too much trouble. But nothing now was as easy as it had been in the beginning. Knowing that this was the fate of wizards everywhere didn’t make it any easier. I thought I wasn’t wizards everywhere. I thought I was different.
Roshaun came out from behind the screen. Dairine’s jaw actually dropped. And I thought he looked a little too formal before.
Those long golden trousers had been exchanged for others completely covered with thousands of what looked like star sapphires but were orange-golden and as tiny as beads. The upper garment was, by contrast, a simple gauzy thing, like a knee-length vest of pale golden mist. Under it Roshaun was bare-chested except for a massive collar of red gold with a huge amber-colored stone set in it, a smooth and massive thing the width of Dairine’s clenched fist.
The stone shifted as Roshaun swallowed. “How do I look?” he said.
Between the realization that he was actually nervous and the total effect, Dairine was for once sufficiently impressed to tell him the truth. “Great,” she said. “Tiffany’s would want you for their front window. Why is it always gold with you people?”
“It’s Life’s color,” Roshaun said. “In this way we do Life honor. What about you?”
Her eyebrows went up. “What about me?”
“Are you going to meet my father dressed like that?”
“Like what?” Dairine looked down at her cropped jeans and T-shirts and the long black tunic-y T-shirt that said “THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE 127.0.0.1”. “I look fine.”
“Surely something more formal…”
Dairine made a face. Of various things she hated, dressing up (except at Halloween) was close to the top of the list. “Why not just tell him this is formal wear on my planet?”
“I could tell him that,” Roshaun said, “but it would not be true.” He frowned.
Dairine sighed. “Oh, all right.” she said. “Spot?”
He came ambling over and she picked him up, flipped his screen open, called up the manual functions and started paging through the menus for what she wanted.
“It cannot be a seeming,” Roshaun said. “He will see through that.”
Dairine frowned. “You’re such a stick-in-the-mud sometimes.”
“And you are so intransigent and disrespectful,” Roshaun said, “nearly all of the time.”
“What? Just because I don’t let you walk all over me, Mister Royalty?”
Roshaun let out a long breath. “He is waiting,” he said. “This is going to be difficult enough as it is. Please do something about the way you look. Something genuine.”
Dairine grimaced. Still… She couldn’t think when he’d last said “please” to her; for a while she’d thought his vocabulary didn’t even contain the word. “Oh, all right,” she said, closed Spot’s lid again and put him down. “Spot, what’re the coordinates of my closet?”
“Here are the entath numbers,” he said, and rattled off a series of numbers and variables in the Speech. “Do you want me to set it up?”
“Sure, knock yourself out.”
A straightforward square dark doorway appeared in front of her. The darkness cleared to reveal the inside of the closet in Dairine’s bedroom. As usual, its floor was a tumble of mixed-up
shoes and things fallen off hangers; her mother had always said that when the Holy Grail and world peace were finally found, they would be at the bottom of Dairine’s closet, under the old sneakers.
Dairine sighed and started pushing hangers aside. Last year’s Easter dress and the dress from the year before looked unutterably lame. Lots of jeans, lots of school clothes … but none of them suitable for meeting a former king. “This doesn’t look promising,” Dairine said under her breath.
“Hurry,” said Roshaun.
The tension in his voice cut short all the acid retorts Dairine could have deployed. “Oh, the heck with this,” she said, irritable. She turned her back on the closet. “Spot, close that. Do we have a routine for making clothes?”
“Searching,” Spot said, as the darkness went away. “Found.”
In her mind, Dairine looked down the link between them and saw the wizardry he’d located. It was a matter-restructuring protocol which would use what she was wearing and turn it into something else. She glanced at Roshaun. “How unisex is what you’ve got on?” she said.
He looked surprised. “‘Unisex’?”
“Do girls wear that kind of thing where you live?”
“Well, yes, but—” Surprise became confusion. “What is the problem with your own clothes? What do your people usually wear when meeting your leaders?”
“If we’ve got any guts at all, a real annoyed expression,” Dairine said. “Never mind, I can come up with something. Spot, hit it.”
“Working.”
A second too late it occurred to Dairine that this process might show Roshaun more about her than was anybody’s business but her own. A sudden chill ran over her body as every stitch of clothing on her pulled an inch or so away and resolved into its component atoms, then started to reassemble in new shapes. Her first urge was to duck behind the nearest sofa, but it was too late; any movement could possibly result in a dress that came out her ears. She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and held still.
The chill faded. Cautiously Dairine opened one eye. Roshaun’s expression was confused but not scandalized. Not that that means anything in particular. Does his culture even have a nudity taboo? Never mind, mine does! She looked down at herself.
“Whoa,” Dairine said.
She was wearing a simple, scoop-necked, short-sleeved, floor-length dress, in a velvety substance as green as grass and as light as fog. Around her left wrist, where her watch usually went, was a bracelet of emeralds the size of quail’s eggs, held together with nothing but a series of characters in the Speech—a delicate chain of symbols in softly burning green smoke, scrolling through the gems as she watched. Another chain just like it held a single similar stone at her throat.
“Nice,” Dairine said. Then she realized there was something on her head. She put her hands up to feel it.
Her eyes widened, and then she grinned. Tiaras might have gone out of fashion again after their recent brief period as a fashion accessory, but Dairine paid only so much attention to fashion as pleased her, and right now it pleased her to wear the thing, if only for shock value. She turned toward Roshaun. “That okay?” she said.
Roshaun looked impressed. “There are likenesses to our own idiom,” he said. “To what land of your world is such raiment native?”
“Possibly Oz,” Dairine said, “but I doubt the Good Witch of the North’s gonna come after me for stealing her look.”
“Good,” Roshaun said. “This way—”
They headed toward those crystalline doors, Spot spidering along behind them. Out beyond the doors lay a goldstone terrace with a broad stone railing, and beyond that, a huge formal garden full of red and golden flowers and plants. Past the garden, the surface of the “sunside” of Wellakh spread: miles and miles of unrelieved flatness reaching straight to the horizon on every side—the everlasting reminder of the catastrophic sunstorm that had blasted half the surface of Wellakh to slag all those centuries ago.
Just in the doorway, before stepping out onto the terrace, Roshaun suddenly paused. He stood there for some seconds simply looking at the setting sun—straight at it, blinding as it was. Finally he dropped his gaze. “This is not good,” Roshaun said softly. “Still, let us go.”
They walked through the doors and out across the terrace, and as they did, Dairine thought she saw something stirring out there, a waving movement. Her first thought was that she was seeing the motion of wind in the garden plants. But there isn’t any wind, she thought as they came closer to the rail. Is there a—
She froze. There were people out there… about a million of them. Or two, for all I know, Dairine thought. Since I don’t know a thing about counting crowds—
Two million, six hundred and eight thousand, four hundred twenty-four, said Spot silently.
The multitude of Wellakhit men and women started just past the formal garden and went on and on, seemingly all the way to the horizon. The slight motion Dairine had seen was the million-times–multiplied tremor of people shifting a little in place as they stood waiting for someone to appear.
Roshaun walked up to the railing and just stood there, resting his hands on the broad rail. As he came to where everyone could see him, a sound started to go up from the crowd nearest the balustrade, and rolled back across it like a wave: a murmur of comment, curiosity … and straightforward hostility. These people wanted to see Roshaun, but not because they liked him. The murmur sounded to Dairine like the thoughtful sound an animal makes deep in its throat when it sees something it considers a threat, an utterance just short of a growl.
Roshaun simply stood there with his head up and let it wash over him. The sound got not necessarily more angry, but more pronounced. Roshaun moved not a muscle, said nothing. Very slowly the murmur began to die away again. Only when the crowd was quiet did Roshaun move at all, to look over his shoulder.
“Don’t stay hiding back there,” he said. “They know you are here. Come out and let them see you.”
At the moment, it was the last thing Dairine wanted. No one could ever have called her shy—but not being shy in front of a classroom full of kids, or a crowd of wizards, was one thing. Not being shy in front of a couple of million pairs of staring, hostile eyes was something else entirely.
Dairine swallowed and stepped forward to stand beside Roshaun at the railing. She couldn’t think of anything to do with her hands. She put them down on the balustrade as Roshaun had, and held very still.
She had thought it was quiet before, but she was mistaken. A silence fell over all the people at the edge of the garden, rolling back from them right across that vast multitude. The stillness became incredible.
Dairine didn’t move a muscle, though she desperately wanted to bolt. The pressure of all those eyes was nearly unbearable. The faces closest to the two of them wore a look very like Roshaun’s normal one: proud, aloof, very reserved. They were all as tall as he was, or taller, which made Dairine feel, if possible, even smaller than usual. And the expression in the eyes of the closest people held a hostility of a different kind than what they’d turned on Roshaun. Alien, it said. Stranger. Not like us. What is that doing here?
Dairine manufactured the small the-hell-with-you smile that she usually applied just before getting into a fight with somebody. “You might have mentioned this beforehand,” she said under her breath.
“Why?” Roshaun said. “Would you have worn something different?”
Maybe a force field! “Who are they all?”
“My people,” Roshaun said. “They have come to look at their new king.”
“How long have they been here?”
“I have no idea,” Roshaun said. “Perhaps since the time they heard that my father had abdicated.”
Dairine tried to figure out when that might have been. A couple of days ago? She wasn’t sure. “What do they want?”
“What I do not think I can give them,” Roshaun said.
He turned his back on the great throng of people. Reluctantly—for to her it felt
somehow rude—Dairine did the same. “Our transport will be here in a moment,” Roshaun said. “We have very little time. However casually you may enjoy speaking to me, believe me when I tell you that such a mode would not be wise with my father. He may have resigned his position, but he keeps his power as a wizard—”
“However much of that anyone his age is going to have for much longer,” Dairine said.
Roshaun looked at her, and for the first time Dairine understood what it was like to see someone’s eyes burn. That sunset light got into them and glowed, impossibly seeming to heat up still further in Roshaun’s anger. “I would not put too much emphasis on that if I were you,” he said. “Not with him, or with me. He and I may have our differences, but anybody who would find humor in a wizard losing his power should probably consider how it would feel to them. Or does feel.”
Spot came spidering along to Dairine. She bent down to pick him up, glad of the chance to get control of her face, for she was blushing with embarrassment at how right Roshaun was. “Sorry,” she said.
“Yes,” Roshaun said. And more quietly, over the upscaling scream of an aircar that Dairine heard approaching, he said, “I, too. Now stand straight and properly represent your planet.”
Dairine stood straight. Between them and the crystalline doors of Roshaun’s residence-wing, the egg-shaped aircar, ornately gilded like everything else here, settled onto the terrace and balanced effortlessly on its underside’s curve without rocking an inch to one side or the other. Dairine looked up past it to what she had partly forgotten—the mountainous bulk of the rest of the Palace of Wellakh, bastion upon bastion and height above height, all carved from and built into the one peak that had survived the solar flare that slagged down everything else on this side of the world. The palace was not only a residence but a reminder to the kings who lived in it. Your family saved us all once, it said in the voice of the people of Wellakh, and you showed such power then that now we fear you. We keep you in wealth and splendor now; just make sure you protect us. Because if the Terror by Sunfire should ever come again, and you don’t—And the message was far stronger than usual with them all standing there, silent, watching.