“Probably more than we’d like It to. All we can do is try to cover our tracks.”
“Then we should head for the Moon first,” Kit said. “If a lot of wizards are there, it’ll seem normal that we should be there, too. If after that we go out into space as just one more of however many teams, It may get thrown off our track long enough for us to find what we’re looking for.”
“Right you are,” Ronan said. “So we should get going now.”
“What, right now?” Nita said.
Ronan threw her one of those of-course-you-dummy looks that Nita had hated so much until she came to understand that they were caused by impatience, not cruelty. “There are other kinds of ‘now,’” Ronan said, “but, yeah, that was the one I meant.” He looked around at the others. “How about it?”
Filif and Sker’ret and Roshaun exchanged glances. “If the Powers That Be want to send us on the hunt,” Sker’ret said, “it seems foolish to refuse.”
“I have some issues at home that will have to be handled,” Roshaun said. “But after that”—he looked over at Dairine—”I have never yet worked directly with one of the Powers That Be.” He smiled. “It should be interesting. For the Power, of course.”
Dairine shot Roshaun a look that he entirely missed, but Nita didn’t. She had to cover her mouth to keep from snickering.
Filif rustled. “I am with you,” he said at last.
Kit turned to Nita. “What do you say?”
She let out a breath. “I say we go,” she said.
Half an hour later, they were on the Moon.
4: Engagement
At the far left edge of the face of the Moon, as it’s seen from the northern hemisphere, about halfway between the Moon’s equator and its south pole lies a vast triple-ringed crater—the remnant of a huge impact in ancient times when the Moon’s surface was still just a thin crust of stone over seas of seething lava. Whatever hit the Moon did so with such awful force that three consecutive ripples of lava, each as tall as Everest, roared hundreds of kilometers outward across the surface before they froze in place. They became the Inner Rook, Outer Rook, and Cordillera mountain ranges, all surrounding Mare Orientale—the Eastern Sea.
The mountain rings have themselves over time become pocked with countless big and little craters. One of these, at the one o’clock position on the Cordillera ring, is too small and unremarkable to have a name on any astronomer’s map. But others familiar with the Moon know it for its unusually dark crater floor, its spectacular view across the vast expanse of the Sea, and the short, sharp impact spike sticking up sheer out of the middle of it; and today it was remarkable for other reasons, too.
“Wow,” Nita said under her breath. “It’s full of wizards.”
The normal darkness of the crater floor’s basalt was obscured by what, in the pale blue-white light of the setting near-full Earth, could have been mistaken for gigantic soap bubbles. But they were really force fields full of air—hundreds of them, big and small, scattered right across the near-perfect kilometer-wide circle of the little crater that wizards call Lake View, after the nearby basin of Lacus Veris, Spring Lake. The force-field wizardries gleamed blue on one side with Earth-light, where the crater’s Earthward shadow fell over them, and on the other with the light of the Sun, now nearly halfway up the jet-black sky over the Eastern Sea; and about them all was a little shimmer or tremor of a most delicate silvery fog, as the force fields shed out frozen “waste” carbon dioxide into the lunar dusk.
Inside their own bubble of air, which Kit was handling for the moment, Nita looked down at that gathering with a strange feeling that was half excitement, half reluctance. “Anybody down there we know, you think?” she said to Kit.
He glanced at her and laughed. “Like it matters,” he said. “We’d better get to know at least some of them, and fast, if we’re going to pull this off.”
Nita glanced over her shoulder. Behind her, Ronan and Roshaun and Sker’ret were already separating off their own smaller force fields to make the passage through vacuum less of a chore. Filif stood looking down at the gathering, his fronds rustling all over, so that even his baseball cap jiggled.
Nita gave him a look. “You okay, Fil?”
Filif kept on rustling, gazing down with all those red eye-berries at the wizards massed there down in the crater, human and otherwise. “So many,” he said at last.
Nita let out a long breath. “I just hope it’s enough,” she said. Following Filif’s gaze, she spotted a force field down below that seemed a lot larger than many of the others, and it didn’t seem to be a group field, either. I’ll bet I know who that is!
Nita reached out to her group’s force field, rotated her own part of the field-spell around to her in a whirl of glowing symbols, and bounced forward as she spun off her own part of the spell. The sphere of air budded out in front of Nita, closed up behind. She paused for a moment to make sure that this smaller segment of the main wizardry had her personal information correctly laid into it.
As she did, Ronan came up behind her and paused with his own “bubble” touching Nita’s. Knowing she could be heard while their two fields were in contact, she said, “What do we tell the other wizards about what we’re really going to be doing?”
“Nothing,” Ronan said. “The odds are better than usual that at least a few of them are overshadowed.”
He might be right, Nita thought, uneasy. But what’s going on inside his head? “But we can at least find out what some of them are doing.”
“Sure.”
Ronan headed down the slope. Nita looked over her shoulder at the others, who were now clustering their own force fields up against hers and the one that contained Kit and Ponch. “Come on down,” she said to them. “Houseguests, watch the gravity, it’s about a sixth of what it is back home—” She turned and started to astronaut-bounce down the slope, kicking up silvery moondust behind her. The others followed after.
Kit caught up with Nita quickly, which was no surprise: he was expert in light gravity. As he bumped his bubble back up against hers, Nita got a look at the expression on his face. It was strange. “What’s up with you?”
“Oh, you know. Carmela…” Kit was looking downslope at the bottom of the crater with an expression that suggested his ears were still ringing; their departure from his house had not been a calm one. Carmela had taken it very badly that she was being left behind.
“Yeah,” Nita said. “Kit, relax. She’ll get over it.”
“Well, I still feel like pond scum. I didn’t have all day to stand around being oh so tactful.” He sighed. “Now I wish I had.”
Nita let out a breath. “Look, before we go away, see if you can find time to sit her down and explain it all in detail.”
“You’ve never had to explain something to Carmela,” Kit said. “The universe’s life span might not contain enough time…”
The others caught up with them. They continued down the slope into the flatter area of the crater floor. The biggest of the bubbles was not far ahead of them, and inside it a huge long figure floated, slightly curved, graceful; the long double-lobed tail of a humpback whale swung upward in greeting as she spotted them, and the tiny eye came alive with a smile to match the artificial one of the great long mouth. Nita bumped her own bubble up against the bigger force field, felt the wizardry that ran it analyze her own and adjust itself to include her personal parameters for oxygen requirements and respiration rates. A moment later she was inside. Nita trotted over, bouncing a little, to throw her arms as far as they’d go—not very far—around S’reee. “Dai, big sister!”
“And dai stihó to you, hNiii’t!” S’reee said, folding a long forefin partially around her in a friendly gesture, one that made her bob up and down a little where she hovered. “Didn’t think you’d have too much trouble finding me.”
“With the kind of air supply you need for a run like this,” Nita said, “it wasn’t going to be that hard.”
The humpback glanced toward th
e others following in Nita’s wake. “Busy up here today. And everyone’s well loaded with spells, I can feel.”
Nita lifted her right wrist and shook it. Her charm bracelet, every charm standing for a spell nine-tenths ready to be used and needing only a few words’ worth of activation, jingled gently. “Seemed smart to be ready for anything on this run,” she said. “But you are, too.” She glanced up above them at the surface of S’reee’s force field; to a wizard’s eye, it swirled with faint characters in the Speech, the way a bubble’s surface swirls with colors. “That’s some spell,” Nita said. “It almost seemed to do that inclusion by itself.”
“I’m not sure it didn’t,” S’reee said. “I’ve been doing things I used to think were impossible these past few days, since it all started to change.”
“S’reee!” Kit said, as he came up beside Nita, free of his own force field, and Ponch danced briefly on his hind legs near S’reee’s nose, getting her scent. Kit thumped S’reee’s broad side in a friendly way. “I didn’t know you did space!”
The whale chuckled, a long, slow, bubbly noise that finished in an upscaling whistle like a boiling kettle. “Why not? It’s just another Sea.” S’reee angled her head very slightly to one side, as Ponch lost interest and ran off underneath her. “And here come your excursus guests! Dai stihó, cousins. Welcome to the Moon,” she said to Filif and Sker’ret and Roshaun as they came in behind Dairine. Then she glanced past them again, and bent her head as if looking down at the moondust … and kept on bending until her nose almost touched it.
Belatedly Nita realized that what she was seeing was a bow. She looked over her shoulder and saw Ronan coming toward them, bouncing a little. “You know each other?” Nita said.
Ronan stopped his bounce just short of S’reee, waited until he got settled a little, and then put up a hand to rest it on her hide. He smiled, then, an unusually open look for him.
“Both of them,” S’reee said. “Rhoannann ‘took in the Sea,’ once. It was a notable Ordeal: those of us who live there couldn’t really have missed it. And as for the Other—I’m wizard enough these days to know the Finned Defender when I see him, whatever or whoever he’s wearing at the time. Elder brother, well met in the current that bears us!”
Ronan nodded back. “Dai,” he said. “And he greets you too.”
“It’s good you all got here before I had to leave,” S’reee said. “There’s a lot to do back home, for I, too, have been ‘upgraded.’ I am now Wetside Supervisory Wizard for Earth.”
Nita’s mouth dropped open. “S’reee, you’re kidding. The whole planet!”
“The oceans, at least. When we first met, and I’d been promoted to Senior so young, I hated it. But now the experience seems like it’s going to come in handy.” She swung her tail in a thoughtful way. “It almost makes me think—”
“That Someone or other might have planned it this way in advance?” said a rather young voice from the far side of S’reee.
Kit glanced up. He started to grin. “Is that who I think it is?” he said.
A small human shape came ducking underneath S’reee’s floating broad, barnacled belly: a little dark-skinned kid, slender and slight in jeans and T-shirt, maybe about eleven years old, with a short afro and quick, bright eyes. “Hey,” he said, “dai stihó, everybody!” And then he saw Kit, and laughed that peculiarly joyous laugh of his, and went to throw his arms around Kit in a big hug.
Nita looked hurriedly at Ronan. Listen, she said, about Darryl—
He’s a lot more than he seems, Ronan said.
A whole lot. And we don’t mention it.
Of course not.
“Darryl, my man, look at you!” Kit said as they broke the hug, and Nita headed over. “Are you taller? Are you actually bulking up?”
“Just eating more,” Darryl said. “Yeah, I’m growing all of a sudden. Guess I’ve got the energy to spare now. Don’t get into it with my mom—she says that these days I cost too much to keep. Almost too much.” He grinned, turning away from them and S’reee toward the others as the visitors merged their bubbles with S’reee’s big one. “Hi, guys, who are you all?”
Introductions got under way. As they did, Nita saw Dairine giving Roshaun an unusually intense look. Roshaun put his eyebrows up, and then took them right down again. Any wizard in Darryl’s vicinity would notice an atypical intensity of power. But once you realized what it meant, it wasn’t something you discussed with Darryl, ever. He didn’t know about it, and wasn’t meant to. The situation was like knowing a superhero with a secret identity. But the difference here was that everybody else knew about the secret identity, and the superhero didn’t… which was a good thing, because if Darryl ever found out he was a direct channel of the One’s power into the world, the discovery would kill him.
Darryl turned back to Kit after a few moments. “I looked you up in the book, saw you were off joyriding halfway across the galaxy.” Darryl looked Kit over approvingly. “Got yourself some tan.”
“Nearly got myself a scorched hide,” Kit said. “Our old ‘friend’ again.”
Darryl nodded, his grin fading a little. “Well, we’re just going to have to screw up Its plans one more time.”
“Yeah, and then we can get back to business,” Kit said, and looked up at the sky. “Like the M—”
“The Martian thing!” Nita and Dairine and Darryl more or less shouted in chorus, leaving Sker’ret and Filif and Roshaun and Ronan all looking confused.
“You crack me up,” Darryl said, and whacked Kit in the shoulder in a friendly way. “Here we’ve got the whole universe going to pieces around our ears, and all you can think about is going hunting for ancient Martian princesses in skimpy clothes.” He guffawed.
“Will you cut it out? It’s not about princesses! That’s just in a book!” Kit said, but no one was listening. There was too much laughing going on. “Come on, Darryl, give it a rest!”
“Okay, never mind,” Darryl said, “you’re off the hook till we get present business sorted out. I can’t believe how full my manual’s gotten in the past few days. Just look at it—”
To Nita’s surprise, Darryl reached not into a nearby space pocket for his manual but into the front pocket of his jeans. Dairine stared at what Darryl brought out. To all appearances it was a sleek rectangular white-and-silver MP3 player, but as he turned it toward them, Nita could see that the apple on its little blue-glowing screen had no bite out of it.
“That is too slick!” Dairine said. Spot came up from behind and put some eyes up to goggle in a friendly way at the WizPod.
“Yeah,” Darryl said. He pulled it open—which shouldn’t have been possible—until it looked like a little book, and then opened it out again, and again, and yet again, until it was more like a flat-screen monitor than anything else, but one you could hold in your hands. Manual data started scrolling down its surface, imagery and spells together. “It’s got all the usual spell-storage and display options,” Darryl said. “And it carries my tunes. Like I’ve got time for music when this thing’s got twenty times the content, all of a sudden…” He grinned as he folded it up again.
Nita looked over at S’reee as a thought occurred to her. “Are there any other Seniors on Earth who were Seniors before but’ll still be functioning when things go bad?”
“No,” S’reee said.
“Oh, wow,” Nita said. “How that must be making you feel…”
“Yes. And just when I was starting to relax about being a Senior,” S’reee said, sounding briefly mournful. “But all we can do now is dive deep and do the best we can on short notice, even if we’re not sure we have enough data. That said”—S’reee looked less troubled—”we’ve been given access to a lot more power than we’ve ever had. It’s hard to feel so uncertain when you do a wizardry and it just jumps out of you like a waterspout.”
“Yeah,” Nita said, “I noticed.” Thirty minutes or so ago, when they’d built the wizardry to transit the group to the Moon, it had gone together i
n record time, and had left no one even slightly tired—unusual for a fairly complex spell. Nita’s first reaction had been exhilaration. But then she’d started feeling uneasy, as if something she’d always been used to paying full price for was now suddenly on sale. What if it’s actually a sign that the thing you’re buying is about to go permanently out of stock?
“Well, we’re going to need that extra power, because things are already happening out there,” S’reee said. “The effects of the unnatural expansion are spreading fast.” She looked across the crater at the jumble of bubbles of air. They were splitting and moving around, bumping into each other and merging, as wizards got together to lay their plans. “There are already pockets of space where wizardry isn’t working, and it’s only a matter of time before those pockets start occurring here. About half these people are heading off-planet, following various leads toward ways to stop the expansion. The rest will head back home to try to keep things running steadily for as long as we can. We’re going to be spread pretty thin.” She sounded wistful. “I don’t suppose you’re going to be staying?”
“No,” Nita said, “we’re outward-bound, in two different directions. Right now we just wanted to check in and see what people up here were doing.”
“It’s all in your manuals,” S’reee said. “Check those to see if anything comes up that has any bearing on what you’re about to do.”
Kit turned to Darryl. “What about you?” Kit said. “You gonna sit tight?”
Darryl nodded. “I’m too new at this,” he said. “I’ve got lots of power, but I’m not real sure what to do with it yet.” He hesitated a little. “Or how to fit it in with being an autistic: a lot of adjusting to do, still. Might be smart for me to be careful for the moment. Anyway, S’reee’s taken me under her fin. I’ll be OK.”
“You’d be OK anyway,” Nita said. “But yeah, she’s full of good advice.” Privately, Nita was pleased, for the thought had occurred to her that the Earth might be safer if this one of its precious few abdals stayed home.