Nita rolled her eyes. “Being in this situation again is the very, very last thing on my mind.”
“Good.” He was silent for a little longer. “How long do you think you’ll need?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
“Well,” Millman said at last, “I can cover for you for ten days, tops. I can pull Kit under the umbrella as well by telling the school that something came up for him over the spring break: something crucial that needs to be sorted out. Would that be true?”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “Absolutely.”
“All right. If his parents will back me up, we’ll be okay for that long. But that’s all I can give you. After ten days, if you don’t show up at school again, you’re likely to find the district superintendent banging on your dad’s door. Or, if someone at school gets too nervous, social services, and possibly the cops.”
Nita swallowed. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll tell Kit.”
“Good. Can you give me some more detail about what exactly is going to be happening to the planet, so that I can help people around here deal with the fallout, if things get sufficiently strange?”
Fallout, Nita thought. I wish he hadn’t used that word. The thought of mushroom clouds sprouting all over the planet was haunting her. “I haven’t had a lot of time yet to go over the pre-mission précis in my manual. But people are going to start losing their sense of what’s underneath reality. Only physical things are going to seem real, after a while. And even those won’t feel right for long. Finally, only violent emotions are going to feel good—”
She wondered how much sense this was going to make to Millman, if any. But the faint scratching noise she heard in the background suggested that he was taking notes. “Okay,” Dr. Millman murmured. “Any sense yet of what you’ll have to do to reverse this situation?”
“The universe has started expanding too fast,” Nita said, “and we have to stop it before it tears itself apart.”
There was another of those long, thoughtful pauses. “Um,” Millman said. “Okay, I see why you might need a few extra days off for that.”
The complete dryness of his voice was bizarrely reassuring to Nita, so much so that she laughed out loud.
“Better,” Millman said. “Hold that mood. For my own part, I’ll do what I can for people who start having trouble at school. But, meanwhile, keep me posted, all right? If things are going to get a lot worse all of a sudden, I’d appreciate knowing about it. We’re all on the same side here.”
That was the thought that Nita was still having trouble wrapping her brains around. She was much more used to hiding the things going on with her from everyone at school. “I’ll do what I can,” she said.
“So will I,” said Millman, “and together we’ll have to hope it’s enough. But, Nita… for you, this has to seem like an impossible burden.”
She swallowed hard. “Yes,” Nita said.
“Call me if you start to feel the strain. I’ll help for as long as I can.”
“Thanks.”
“Okay. Go well,” he said.
“Yeah. Thanks again.”
Millman hung up.
She sat there staring at the phone for a moment before sticking it back in its cradle. Well, she thought, at least that’s handled.
So. A total of two weeks to save the universe, huh?
It did seem absolutely impossible. But there would be powerful forces working to help them. And when someone believed in you—
Maybe this won’t exactly be a piece of cake, she thought. But at least you know people are rooting for you when you start cutting it up!
Nita picked up her manual, tucked it under her arm, and headed upstairs to her room.
***
One side of the dining room at the Rodriguez house had a sofa against the wall, and on that sofa Kit sprawled, lying flat on his back and reading his own manual. For maybe the tenth time, his arms had become tired enough that he had to rest the book on his stomach. He was having trouble believing how much new data was in that book all of a sudden. The effect wasn’t new: any manual would grow and shrink depending on what information you needed. But this time it felt like there was more stuff in there. It felt more important, and somehow more dangerous.
He turned a page and looked once more at the image he’d kept revisiting: a slowly rotating image of the galaxy, seen as if from several hundred thousand light-years away. It was displaying in negative, the stars black against white space, and the space was full of slowly growing fuzzy dark patches.
From the living room came the sound of laughter: Carmela, long since back from dumping her load of teen magazines at Nita’s place, was now sitting in front of the entertainment system’s big screen and talking to someone in the Speech. “No,” she said. “You’ve got to be kidding. It’s too early here to even think about grenfelzing…”
Kit let his manual fall closed. “‘Mela?” he said over the sound of alien laughter from the TV.
“Kit, I’m talking to somebody. Can’t it wait?”
“If I wait, I’ll forget. What is grenfelzing, exactly?”
“It’s kind of like emmfozing,” his sister said after a moment, “but with chocolate.”
Kit covered his eyes. “Sorry I asked,” he said. Since he’d made the mistake of using wizardry to configure the entertainment system, Carmela had been spending what seemed like hours every day talking to the various alien species whose hundreds and thousands of interactive channels had suddenly become available along with the more commonplace Earth cable. ‘Mela’s grasp of the wizardly Speech had been getting more acute. But at the same time it seemed to Kit that Carmela’s sense of humor was getting weird, even for her.
Well, at least she’s not turning into a wizard, Kit thought. It’s much too late for that.
He turned his attention back to his manual. “Did that last message go through?”
Received, the manual page said.
“Okay,” he said to the manual, “show me again where all this started.”
The image of the galaxy reset itself. “Zoom in on that,” Kit said.
The spiral grew and swelled past the ability of the page to show it all. Shortly after that, the page was full of the empty space between the Milky Way and the next galaxy over. “There’s nothing there at all,” he said softly.
Ponch was lying upside down on the floor with his feet in the air. Now he glanced up. Where? Ponch said.
“Here.” Kit put the manual down on the floor, stood up. “Walk-in, please?” he said to the manual.
The imagery spread out of the book format and surrounded Kit, obscuring the dining room. He walked into the space between the Milky Way’s spiral and the spot that Tom had shown them earlier. Ponch got up off the now-invisible dining room rug, shook himself, and wandered into the negative-image intergalactic brightness, standing beside Kit with his tail idly waving.
“This is where it began,” Kit said. “You sense anything?”
Ponch stretched out his head and sniffed. I don’t smell anything, he said. But it’s hard for me to scent through this. Your manual has its own way of telling what’s happening. It’s not like the way I scent things.
Kit shook his head. “The manual doesn’t detect anything, either,” he said after a moment. He reached out a hand and poked it into the brightness. The manual obediently rolled down a menu showing Kit a list, in the specialized characters of the Speech, for the various forces and energies that had been operating in that part of space when the stretching had happened. “Light, gravity, string structure, everything was behaving itself.” He shook his head and closed the Walk-in. “Then this came out of nowhere…”
In the living room, the laughter started again. Kit rolled his eyes, picked up his manual, and slapped it shut. “How am I supposed to save the universe with all this noise?” he hollered.
“Go save it somewhere else?” Carmela said. “I mean, even if you go read in your own room, and shut the door so that the sound of other people having lives does
n’t bother you, you’ll still be in this universe. Right? And you should be able to save it just fine from there.”
Kit gave Ponch a helpless look. “She has a point…”
I don’t think it would be smart for you to admit that, Ponch said, glancing in Carmela’s direction.
“Come on,” Kit said, getting up.
He went through the living room as quietly as he could. Carmela, sitting cross-legged in front of the TV, didn’t look up as he passed. As Kit went up the stairs, behind him she said, “You’re tense. I forgive you.”
I hate it when she forgives me and she’s right, Kit thought. But aloud he just said, “Thanks,” and went up the stairs.
Ponch trotted up behind him, his nails clicking on the wood of the steps. So you were serious before, when you said about us having to save the universe?
They came out on the landing, and Kit paused there for a moment with his hand on the banister. Ponch went under his arm and paused, too, looking up at him. “Yeah,” Kit said.
I wasn’t sure if you were joking, Ponch said.
Kit laughed a single laugh. “Not this time.”
All right. Let’s do it, then.
Kit laughed again as they went into his room. “You’re on,” he said. “You point me in the right direction when you see what we need to do.” He tossed his manual onto the bed and looked around at the place: desk and work chair, chest of drawers, braided rug, pushpin-stuck maps of the Moon and Mars, neatly made bed. Everything was unnaturally clean, but then he’d been away for the better part of ten days and hadn’t had time enough to get things into their normal comfortable mess.
He sprawled on the bed, picked up the pillows at the head of it and started whacking them into a shape he could lean against, while trying to think some more about where to start attacking this problem. The weirdest thing is that space started stretching in some place where there was so little stuff to do a wizardry on. Anyone who could work directly on the structure of space-time is going to be really powerful…
That was the thought that kept making Kit think that once again the Lone Power was involved. But Tom and Carl seemed real eager to keep us from coming to that conclusion. And if the Powers That Be themselves think that this is something new…
He picked up the manual and flipped it open again, pausing briefly to look at the Wizard’s Oath, all by itself in a block of text in the middle of its page. Just after that came a section containing your own personal data—especially about the way the “long version” of your name looked in the Speech at the moment, information that was vital for doing spells. After that normally came the sections on spell writing, specialized vocabulary in the Speech, and so on. But now, before those sections, Kit’s manual contained a “notifications” area nearly a quarter inch thick. Every page of it was full of bold headings and blocks of text that rewrote themselves as you read them, constantly updating with real-time information from the physical universe. He glanced down at one heading: METEOROLOGICAL INTERVENTION:
Diversion of tropical disturbance/incipient cyclone “Pewa” (NOAA) aka CP102010 (JTWC) approved JD 2455307.2625. Cyclone centerpoint latitude: 21:11:15N, longitude 141:55:30E, SSE of Iwo Jima. Storm heat energy release presently holding at only 1.6 × 1012 watts/day, making it ideal for “bounce-away” intervention within thirty hours (cutoff time/latest implementation 2455312.8900). Intervention team is scouting for available backup wizards with past experience in tropical-latitude hydro and meteo work (usual SE Asia specs on assignment to master [interim] crisis evaluation group Earth). Seniors are urgently requested to check their local talent for availability.
Kit shook his head, for this was just one small problem on a planet full of them. On all the pages that followed were status reports on more interventions of every kind. Wizards all over the world were doing spells for everything, from melting back an overaggressive glacier to stopping a small southeast Asian “bush war” from breaking out by giving all the potential combatants a brief, profound case of amnesia. The fighters in question had instantly forgotten what they’d come for; by the time the spell wore off, all of them had wandered hours and miles away from the battlefield, and were universally so freaked out that they had no desire to find their way back..
Sweet, Kit thought, reading that précis with admiration. And smart. But that spell must have really cost the wizards. The psychotropic wizardries are so tough to work.
The trouble was that the smart people who thought up that solution were the very ones whose expertise the Earth would shortly be losing—the typical adult wizards who worked the spells that kept Life going, or stopped bad things from happening, unnoticed by anyone but other wizards, their Seniors, and the Powers That Be. It’s going to be us carrying the weight now. And either doing what the real Seniors have been doing… or screwing it up.
Kit made himself breathe. Don’t get too hung up on how big it looks, he thought. Take it a piece at a time. That has to be what Tom and Carl did. They weren’t born Seniors.
Ponch jumped up on the bed and walked up to just behind Kit, flopping down. The springs creaked under them both as he settled himself with his head over Kit’s shoulder. Kit turned over a few more pages, looking at team wizardries going on all over the planet. There are so many things happening, Ponch said, looking down at the pages.
Kit turned his head to look at Ponch in some surprise. “Can you read this?”
I see things happening on the page there, Ponch said. Those marks—when I look at them, I see the ice melting. Is that reading?
“Maybe not exactly the way I understand it,” Kit said, “but, yeah, I think so.” He turned another page.
Look at all the spells. Everybody’s so busy.
“This is what the wizardly world’s like every day,” Kit said. “And for us, it’s about to get a lot busier than this if we’re going to solve this problem.”
What if you can’t?
It was a thought that had been coming up for Kit about every ten minutes. “We have to,” he said. “We don’t have a get-out clause. We have to do everything to make the ‘end of the world’ not happen. Everything.” He was surprised to find himself shaking.
From outside in the hall came a loud popping sound and a puff of displaced air that stirred some of the papers on Kit’s desk. A second later, Nita looked in Kit’s door. “Hey,” she said.
“Thought you were going to meet me ‘upstairs,’” Kit said, jerking a thumb toward the ceiling, or, rather, toward something beyond it.
“I thought I’d check here first.” She came over to the bed and looked down over his shoulder at the manual. “Yeah,” she said, seeing what Kit was looking at. “I’ve been spending a while with that. Any ideas?”
“I’ve got a few,” Kit said. “But we need to talk to the others—” Kit tipped the cover of the manual shut and got up. “You tell your dad yet?”
“Not yet. You talk to your mom and pop?”
“Yeah, but I think it’s not the kind of conversation you can have just once. My pop just said, ‘I trust you to do the right thing. You’ll figure it out. You always have before.’”
“Oh, God,” Nita said. “Well, at least Millman has us covered.”
“Millman?” Kit gave her a surprised look. “You and Dairine, yeah, but—”
“No, you, too, if your folks’ll go along with it. But only ten days.”
I should eat first! Ponch said. He scrambled off the bed, turned several times in an excited circle, and shot out the bedroom door and down the stairs, making small enthusiastic woofing noises to himself.
“I was going to ask you how he was taking all this,” Nita said as they went after him, “but I guess that’s my answer.”
“As long as the end of the world doesn’t mess up his mealtimes,” Kit said, “he’ll be fine.”
“Hah,” Nita said. “Anyway, you’ve been looking the problem over again—”
“Yeah. I hate to say it, but I think Tom and Carl and the other Senior Wizards were running d
own a blind alley.” They went down the stairs into the living room. “I think whatever started that part of space expanding was done from somewhere a long way off. No point in wasting time sniffing around out there.”
“Ohaiyo gozaimasu!” yelled the big-screen TV and the DVR and the DVD player all together as the two of them came into the living room.
Kit stopped just long enough to bow to them. “Hey, guys,” he said. “Anything good on today?”
“…On insponder 2186043, the Gratuitous Transaction Channel presents the sixth-rerun thirteenth episode of How Much for Just the Planet? In this episode, Mexev finally hears from Anielle, who reads her an electronic communication from Turun, alleging that Nisb had a clandestine meeting with Keniphna at which they discussed the possible bribery of Twell—”
Kit gave Nita a look. “This is what happens when certain people leave the Galactic TV guide turned up to ‘verbose.’” He looked back toward the big screen and the other equipment. “Guys,” he said in the Speech, “back it down to ‘vaguely tantalizing,’ will you?”
“Ahem,” the DVR said, sounding put out. “The Planetary Acquisitions team is menaced by a strange alien force.”
Nita snickered.
Kit rolled his eyes and led the way into the dining room. “Remind me never to use wizardry on anything electronic again,” he said. “Anyway, even if the Seniors managed to stop the expansion in that one part of space, what were they going to do then? Patch all the other spots one at a time? Even if there were enough wizards to do it, it’d be like sticking Band-Aids on a sponge. The leakage just starts happening somewhere else.”
“I think you’re right,” said Nita. “Small-scale solutions won’t work on this problem. We need to stop wasting time on finicky analysis of the affected space, and find the source of what made it misbehave.”
“Wherever that might be,” Kit said. He collapsed onto the sofa. “So what now?”
“I think first we should start getting in touch with the younger wizards who’ve been picked for these intervention teams Tom was talking about,” Nita said. “I know he said he’d be in touch, but somehow I don’t feel comfortable just sitting around and waiting.”