“Sure,” Tom said, and put out his hand. The wizardry surrounding them collapsed itself to a little blue-white sphere no bigger than a ball bearing, and dropped into his palm. As the wizardry shrank away, ordinary afternoon sunshine and the reality of Nita’s dining room reasserted themselves: the flowered wallpaper, the dining room table with some of the leftovers of breakfast still on it—a marmalade jar with a knife stuck in it, a couple of crumpled paper napkins.
Tom dropped the imaging wizardry back onto the open page of his wizard’s manual. It flattened itself to the page; he reached out and closed the book again. Kit watched him do it, feeling peculiarly remote from it all. We’re sitting here in Nita’s dining room talking about the end of civilization, he thought, and not in ten thousand years, either. From the sound of it, it’s gonna be more like ten thousand hours … or minutes.
Roshaun glanced up from the table, where his troubled gaze had been resting for a few moments. “Senior,” he said, “why is all this happening now? Surely if this is so simple a strategy, the Isolate Power should have enacted it and made an end of us all ages ago.”
“We don’t know why,” Tom said. “There’s always the possibility that the Lone One might not have known how to do this before. Though they’re immortal, the Powers That Be aren’t omniscient: They learn, though the exact shape of their learning curves is never likely to be clear to us because of the way they exist outside of time, dipping in and out as it suits them. Or the Lone Power could have known for aeons how to produce this result, but for some reason was waiting for the best moment to spring it on an unsuspecting universe.”
“Then, perhaps,” Filif said, “something has happened either to embolden It, or to frighten It.”
Carl shook his head. “We have no idea,” he said. “Another possibility is that something’s going on in our universe that the Lone One doesn’t want us interfering with—and this inrush of dark matter may simply be a distraction to keep us from discovering what’s really happening, and dealing with it.”
“But you don’t have any idea which of these theories might be the right one,” Sker’ret said.
“No,” Tom said.
“What about the Powers That Be?” Dairine said. “What do they say?”
“Right now,” Tom said, “they’re waiting for the experts in this universe to give them some more data.”
“The experts?” Nita said.
Tom smiled just slightly, but once again that smile had a grim edge to it. “Us,” he said. “While They live here, too, They do it on a different level. We’re a lot more expert in the business of actually dealing with physicality, day to day, than They are.”
“It’s like the difference between manufacturing something, say a dishwasher,” Carl said, “and using it every day. You could say that the Powers know what the universe acted like when it left the factory, but we’re the ones who know the little noises it makes every day when it’s running. And where to kick it to make them stop.”
Kit spent a moment trying to see the universe as a malfunctioning dishwasher, then put the idea aside; it made his brain hurt. Meanwhile, Tom picked up his manual and put it into the air beside him. It vanished. “Anyway,” Tom said, “right now we need to stop the dark matter from tearing the universe apart—or at least slow down its growth and buy ourselves some time to solve the problem.”
“Or rather, buy you the time to solve it,” Carl said. “Wizards near latency age—near their peak power levels—are the only ones who’ll keep their power long enough to make a difference now.”
Kit saw Dairine swallow hard, and Nita raised her eyebrows at him, while Sker’ret clenched its front four or six legs together, and Filif held very still, and Roshaun looked down at the table again, as if afraid what might show in his eyes if anyone saw them.
And then suddenly, Tom smiled. It wasn’t an angry smile, though it was fierce, and it had a surprising edge of amusement to it. “Now, after all that,” he said, “believe it or not, we have some good news for you. For the duration—for as long as there is a duration—as far as wizardry goes, the lid is off. Any wizardry you can build to fight what’s happening, any wizardry you can figure out how to fuel, is fair game. Normally we all limit our workings carefully to keep them from damaging the universe, or the beings who share it with us. But now the system itself is on the chopping block, along with everything else. If we don’t save that…” He shook his head. “Then not just wizardry, but the Life we’re sworn to protect, is at an end.”
Kit was immersed in a strange combination of shock and excitement, but at the same time practical questions nagged at him. “When you said we were going to be running things on the Earth,” he said, “you didn’t mean just us… did you?”
Tom’s grin became less fierce. “No,” he said, “we didn’t. Forgive us for making absolutely sure we had your attention when we started.”
“Obviously there are a lot of other wizards on the planet who’ll be of use in this crisis,” Carl said. “Not to mention a whole lot of wizards elsewhere in our galaxy. Seniors here and just about everywhere else have been selecting out younger wizards in their catchment areas who’ve shown promise, or have produced good results in the past. You fall into those categories. We’ve been organizing two main intervention groups—those who’ll be staying here, managing the usual problems that come up at home, and those who’ll be going off-planet to look for ways to stop the dark-matter incursion. Shortly we’ll be putting you in touch with the groups you’ll be assigned to. In the meantime, start researching on what we’ve been up to—it’ll all be in your manuals. Anybody you feel will help you handle what’s going on, get in touch with them pronto. But you’ve also got some logistical problems to deal with.”
Kit noticed Dairine beginning to squirm a little in her seat. Uh-huh, he thought. Bet I know what that’s about.
“First of all,” Tom said to Dairine, “you’ve made the best of being ‘grounded’ inside the solar system for the last little while, so—assuming you’ve learned your lesson—the Powers That Be have cleared us to unground you.” Dairine stopped squirming, and started to grin. “But don’t you assume that this automatically means you’re going to be sent off-planet. The team assignments haven’t been thrashed out yet, and you may be of more use here.”
Dairine sat still and assumed an expression that Kit had long since come to recognize as an attempt to look “serious” and “good.” As usual, he had trouble taking it seriously.
“Anyway,” Tom said, “whichever way your team assignments go, you’re all either going to have to be on call at a moment’s notice to deal with things here, or you’re going to have to be away for some time.” He glanced from Dairine to Kit to Nita. “Normally, in an emergency, we’d help you deal with your absence from school and ‘real life’ by issuing you with timeslide wizardries, so that you could spend as much time away as you needed to and come back at the same time you left. But this situation’s not normal. Local implementations of wizardry may suffer early on … and if a timeslide fails, you could wind up marooned in the wrong time period, with no way home. So you’re going to have to find other ways to handle your absence. Any way that we can help, let us know as soon as you have a plan.”
Nita just nodded.
“Uh,” Kit said, “right.” I can see it all now, he thought. I go to my mama and pop and say, Hey, I need to take some more time off school. Yeah? How much? Oh, just enough to save the universe. Might be a few weeks. But no more than a few months, because everything that exists may be destroyed by then…
Tom, meanwhile, had turned to Filif, Roshaun, and Sker’ret. “The story’s different for you three,” he said. “Sker’ret, Filif, we don’t have direct jurisdiction over you—your Seniors or Advisories at home have that. But we can advise you while you’re here. Both your species fortunately have long latency periods, so that your worlds have plenty of wizards on hand to deal with the local-level threat. Your people in particular, Filif, have such a high latency age
that nearly all the wizards on the planet are still of an age range to be immune to what’s going to happen. Officially, you’re still both enjoying excursus status. The emergency, naturally, supersedes the ‘holiday’. If you feel uncomfortable staying here, you can go home to your people at any time. But there’s no need to rush home unless you feel you must.”
“I am free to come and go as I please,” Filif said, “and have no binding ties to draw me immediately back. I am, after all, just one tree in a forest… and I think I might be of more use here.”
Tom glanced over at Sker’ret, who gave him a casual look in return. “I’m in no hurry, either,” Sker’ret said. “People of my species are legally independent a long time before we’re finished being latent. My esteemed ancestor won’t mind if I stay.”
Kit glanced briefly at Nita, and saw her eyes flick toward him, then away again. She hears it, too, he thought. There was something uncomfortable going on with Sker’ret and his family. Not something that’s going to get us all in trouble while we’re trying to handle this mess, I hope…
Tom nodded. “All right, then. But, Roshaun, unfortunately matters aren’t as simple in your case.”
Roshaun glanced up at Tom with an expression that Kit found totally unrevealing. “Though your species has a longer latency period than ours,” Tom said, “your own situation’s complicated by your family’s unique relationship with your planet, and the way wizardry’s practiced there. Since your father, the Sun Lord That Was, is your Advisory, you’re going to have to go home and sort out your intentions with him.”
Roshaun’s expression didn’t change. “It should not take long,” he said.
“All right. If he’s got any questions about what’s been going on here, have him get in touch with us; we’ll be glad to fill him in on the details. In fact, I kind of look forward to it, because I read the précis in the manual about what you did while we were gone.”
Roshaun nodded graciously, his face adding only the slightest smile of pleasure at the praise … and Kit suddenly found himself really wishing he could somehow eavesdrop on that conversation. His father’s his Advisory? The thought made him boggle. Sure, there were families in which wizardry ran; Nita’s was an example. But to have such a close relative be a wizard, too, and your superior? It’d be like having a father who was also principal of your school. It could be super— if your dad was some kind of saint. But, boy, if he wasn’t…
“So,” Carl said, “now you’re all up to date. Just make sure you understand one thing. You’re not going to be immune from the loss-of-wizardry effect forever. For a while it’ll even seem to be going the other way, because as we lose our power, the Powers That Be are going to make sure it’s not wasted by having it pass to you. But unless you work very fast to find out exactly what it is you need to do with it to save the world, then all that extra power isn’t going to help you for long. You’ll lose it, as we’ll lose it. You’ll lose the Speech, and wizardry, and even the belief that there was ever any such thing. And then the darkness will fall.”
Kit felt himself going pale all over again.
“So work fast,” Tom said. “We’ll do the same, for as long as we can. We’ll set you up with all the automatic manual assistance we can before we become nonfunctional.” His face hardened as he said it, as if he was trying hard not to let his real feelings out. “But after that, it’s up to you.”
Kit, glancing briefly sideways, saw Nita swallow. He’d seen that sealed-over expression on her often enough lately; he hadn’t ever thought he’d see it on Tom. You get used to thinking the Seniors will always have a way out, Kit thought. That they’ll figure out what to do. But when you see that it’s not going to be that way…
Tom glanced around at all of them. “So,” he said, “any questions?”
He paused as a faint clicking noise came from off to his left, and then watched with interest as Dairine’s laptop walked into the room. A small, rectangular silvery case on many jointed legs, it now hunched itself down on the polished wood floor, put up two stalky eyes, rather like Sker’ret’s, and glanced from Tom to Carl and then to Dairine.
“Wondered when you’d come out from under the bed,” Dairine said, sounding to Kit both annoyed and a little relieved. “Spot, are you okay?”
From Spot issued a small whirring noise, like a cuckoo clock getting ready to strike. Dairine leaned over to peer down at him.
“Three true things await discovery,” Spot said.
“Darkness overspreading,
A commorancy underground:
And the Moon is no dream—”
He sat there for a moment more, silent, and then got up on all his little legs again and spidered off into the kitchen.
They all looked after him. “Uh, excuse me,” Dairine called after him, “but what was that?”
There was a pause, then the sound of little feet on the kitchen floor again, and Spot put several stalked eyes around the doorframe, gazing at Dairine. What was what? he said silently.
“What you just said.”
What did I say?
Kit gave Nita a Huh? look. She gave him one right back, and shrugged.
Dairine looked perplexed. “You’re the computer wizard here,” she said. “You’re supposed to be the one with all the memory! What do you mean, ‘What did I say’?”
Kit said, “You said, ‘Three true things await discovery’—”
“‘Darkness overspreading,’” Nita said.
“And then something about a commorancy underground,” Dairine said. “Whatever a commorancy is—”
“And the Moon is no dream,’” Roshaun said. “Well, I should say not. It’s real enough. Indeed, when we went there—”
Dairine elbowed him. “Ow!” Roshaun said.
Did I say that? I don’t recall. And Spot headed off into the kitchen again. A second later there came a little subdued pop! of displaced air as he teleported outside.
“Oh, great,” Dairine muttered. “Since when does he have memory errors? This is just not the time.”
Tom, however, looked thoughtful. “Has he done this before?” he said.
Dairine shook her head. “Absolutely not!”
Tom looked over at Carl. “That certainly sounded oracular to me. How about you?”
“Sounds a lot like our koi,” Carl said. “Not haiku, though, more like some kind of poetic shopping list. Better start taking notes,” he said to Dairine. “Some of this might turn out to be useful at some point.”
“Well, that’s just great, because he’s what I usually take the notes in!” Dairine said, aggrieved. “If all of a sudden he’s forgetting stuff—”
Nita put her eyebrows up, reached across the table, and pushed a pad of yellow sticky notes over to Dairine.
“Oh, sure! So we’re going to be running all over the place, saving the universe, and I’m going to have to write things down on stickies while I’m doing it?” Nonetheless, Dairine pulled one of the notes off and started scribbling on it furiously. “How do you spell ‘commorancy’?”
“You’re asking me?” Nita said.
“You’re the spelling champ.”
“It’d help if I’d ever heard the word before!”
“Better look it up,” Tom said. “Meanwhile, we have to get moving. We’ve got a lot more people in the area to see today, and some who’re a lot farther away than the Island. Any questions before we go?”
For Kit, there were at least ten or twenty, many of them variants on the theme of How are we supposed to save the world when you don’t know how? One question, though, had pushed its way to the forefront and was going to drive Kit crazy until he got an answer.
“Why didn’t you tell us about this before?” he said.
Tom and Carl each let out a long breath. “Because there might not have been any need for you to worry about it, if we’d solved it?” Carl said after a moment. “Because you had enough to deal with in your own lives? Because we were fairly sure we could handle the problem—and so we
re the Powers That Be?”
Everyone was quiet again. “And then things didn’t turn out the way any of us thought they would,” Carl said, “so it became time to start worrying you. Believe me, we wish we didn’t have to. But right now, wishing’s a waste of time. We’ve got our work cut out for us. So…”
He and Tom got up. “Thanks for making the time for us,” Tom said. “We’ll be in touch.”
They headed for the back door. Nita got up and went out after them, and Kit got up and followed her, while Dairine finished scribbling on her sticky note, and Roshaun, Sker’ret, and Filif watched her.
Nita peered in Tom’s open car window as he settled himself in the driver’s seat and Carl got in on the far side. “If you’ve got all these people to see,” she said, “why don’t you just worldgate it?”
“We’re saving our strength,” Tom said as he started the car. “And, anyway, when all this is done, we still need some groceries.” His smile, though kind of tired looking, had the usual humor about it. “See you later…”
Tom backed the Nissan out of the driveway, turned, and headed up the street. Neither Nita nor Kit said anything until the car was almost down to the traffic lights at Park Avenue.
“They are both completely freaked,” Nita said at last. “I’ve never seen them like that before.”
Kit shook his head. “They’re freaked? What about us?”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “I know.”
Nita still looked a lot calmer than Kit felt. He envied her composure. “All we have to do now,” he said, “is start figuring out what to do until they get us assigned to these teams.”
Behind them, the screen door banged. They both turned to look. Dairine came out. A moment later she was followed by Roshaun, who stood there, somehow managing to look regal in a floppy T-shirt, and glanced down the driveway as if nothing particularly upsetting had happened. And what about him? Kit said silently. Completely cool. Or so he wants us to think…
I don’t know him well enough to know what’s going on inside his head, Nita said. But Dairine’s another story. The very thought that she might have to stay home again while we’re out in the Great Wherever is driving her nuts. I think she’s got her plans made already…