“We had one once,” Roshaun said, “a little one. But it was destroyed in the Burning.”
“We almost didn’t have this one,” Dairine said. “It was an accident. Something hit the Earth when it was still molten, and that splashed out.”
Roshaun looked at her in amazement. “Really?”
“Really.” Dairine looked up at the first-quarter Moon. “It took a long time to round up and get solid. But there it is.”
“But if whatever hit your world had been just a little bigger—maybe neither piece of matter would have been big enough to coalesce, and there would never have been an Earth at all.” Roshaun sat there shaking his head.
“Yeah. It’s kind of a symbol,” Dairine said, “of how sometimes, even against the odds, you can get lucky.”
In the silence that followed, resolve formed. She stood up. “Come on,” she said. “It’s a nice view of the world from there. I’ll show you.”
Roshaun stood up, too, but for once he looked uncertain. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’ll be time soon—”
“We have time for this,” Dairine said. “Come on.” She looked over her shoulder. “Spot?”
He was nowhere nearby, which was unusual for him. “I can handle it,” Roshaun said, and opened his hand to look into the little sphere of light that was his manual, and showed what the Aethyrs told him. “Give me the coordinates,” he said to Dairine.
She recited them, and as Roshaun spoke the words after her, the circle of the wizardry formed up on the ground around them. Dairine bent over to add the bright scrawl of her name in the Speech, across the circle from Roshaun’s. His name’s much shorter than I would have thought, Dairine thought, as she straightened up and began to recite, in unison with Roshaun, the words of the translocation.
It was probably completely unnecessary for her to reach out and take Roshaun’s hand as the wizardry closed in around them and the view of her house and driveway dulled through the glowing curtain of Speech expressed and space bent slightly awry. It’s just a precaution, Dairine thought. I wouldn’t want to lose him at this crucial moment—
They vanished.
12: Areas to Avoid
After their visit to the Lone Power, Nita and Kit had little to do but sit around on the beach for the rest of that afternoon, because Quelt was away dealing with the issue of the Great Vein again and wouldn’t be back until later, so Kuwilin told them.
Ponch spent the afternoon running up and down the beach, mostly in the water; Kit and Nita, in no mood to play with him, sat trying to work out how to tell Quelt what they’d learned. “Why should she believe any of this?” Kit said under his breath. He’d amassed a small pile of stones and was throwing them into the water one by one.
“Because we’re wizards,” Nita said, “and we wouldn’t lie to her. We can’t, in the Speech! And she knows that.”
“She should,” Kit said, throwing another rock in the water. “But even if she knows we’re telling the truth, I’m not sure she’s going to like what we have to tell her.”
“No,” Nita said. “She might even think it was just some weird misperception of ours, because we’re aliens… ”
Kit nodded, looking morose. “Where’s Ponch gone?” he said, looking up and down the beach.
Nita shook her head. Trying to keep track of a dog who could make his own universes, and walk at will through ones he hadn’t made, was always a challenge. “No idea. Weren’t you working on a thing to do with his special leash, so that you can track him down?”
“I was working on that, yeah,” Kit said. “It’s not perfect yet.” He reached into the little local space-pocket that followed him around, rummaged around in it, and came up with Ponch’s leash. Kit had made it of the Speech, with some added ingredients. The whole wizardry was wound together into a soft, infinitely extensible cord that nothing could break and that would allow the wizard who held on to it to safely follow Ponch wherever he might walk.
“Let’s see,” Kit said. He ran the faintly blue-glowing leash through his hands, closed his eyes for a moment. Nita could feel the direction-finding part of the wizardry come awake, but that was all—the wizardry was tuned to Kit specifically, and couldn’t otherwise be overheard.
He opened his eyes a moment later. “It’s all right,” he said. “He’s ten miles away, down the beach. He loves that he can just run and run and never run out of sand.” He stood up. “Don’t know how he’s got any pads left on his paws with all the running he’s been doing the past few days.” Kit got up. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said, and vanished with a soft pop of imploding air.
Nita sat back against the dune and looked out at the glitter and roil of the sunlit water. This was working so well, she thought, until I started to feel that something was wrong. Have I ruined myself somehow? Am I always going to go looking for what’s wrong, forever, so that even when things are perfectly all right, I can’t let them just be the way they are?
She sighed and picked up one of Kit’s stones, turning it over and over in her hand. We could have spent a lovely couple of weeks here and left these happy people living their happy lives. And, all right, so there’s something else going on at the bottom of it all. So what? Is it my business to go out of my way to make the Alaalids unhappy, just so that they’ll possibly evolve into something better? Is there—
A shadow fell over her, and Nita looked up, startled.
“Quelt!” she said.
“Nita… ”
Quelt had just come over the top of the dune. She stood there looking at Nita for a moment, and then sighed and came down, step by step, rather slowly.
“Are you all right? You look tired.”
“I am,” Quelt said, and sat down by Nita, looking at the water. “I am tired.” She looked troubled, too, but Nita wasn’t going to say anything about that; she had too many troubles on her mind to be accusing anyone else of having difficulty dealing with theirs. “There’s going to be more trouble with the Great Vein than I’d thought,” Quelt said. “The crust really is shifting down there: The layering’s become more complex than it used to be. It’s going to take days yet to sort it out.”
She sighed, leaning back on her elbows. “And on top of everything else, there seems to be something wrong with the Display,” Quelt said. “It seems to have stopped functioning, and I have no idea why… or what to do about it. It’s puzzling. The wizardry laid into that was always very resilient: Vereich told me that Druvah himself put it in place.” She shook her head.
Uh-oh, Nita thought. I wish I could put this off, but there’s not going to be a better time, and we can’t just sit around and hope that this issue goes away.
“Quelt,” Nita said, “I think I know how that happened.”
Quelt looked surprised. “You do?”
“Kit and Ponch were down in there, and it stopped working while Kit was viewing something to do with Druvah,” Nita said. There. That’s the truth…
At that, Quelt turned a very strange look on Nita. Anywhere else, she thought, in anyone else, it would look like suspicion, Nita thought. “Something to do with Druvah,” Quelt said. “What about him?”
“Well… ”
Nita suddenly saw Kit coming down the beach. Trotting along beside him was Ponch; the wizardly leash was around his neck, and Ponch was carrying the other end of it in his mouth, like any more ordinary dog out for a walk. “Here he comes,” Nita said, feeling awful to push this off onto Kit. But he was there. He can tell her better than I can.
“Hey, Quelt,” he said, as he came up to them, “dai.” Ponch, with the leash in his mouth, went straight to Quelt and started nuzzling her. She took his head under her arm and started rubbing his ears.
“He’s got you trained already,” Kit said. Nita caught his eye. Here it comes…
After a moment Quelt looked up at him. “Nita says you were down in the Display when it failed,” she said.
“Yes,” Kit said.
Ponch looked up into Quelt’s eyes
. I think it was my fault, he said. Please don’t be angry at Kit. Quelt produced a strange, unhappy smile and roughed up Ponch’s ears some more.
“I can’t let him try to take the blame for this,” Kit said. “I asked him to alter the way the Display was working. I wanted to hear what Druvah actually said to Esemeli.”
Quelt didn’t look up. “And what did you hear?”
Kit told her.
It took a long while. Kit’s memory was excellent, Nita thought; the phrasing he was using was that of an older time, and she could almost hear the ancient wizard speaking through him. All the time, though, Quelt’s expression never changed. She sat looking down at the sand until Kit finished.
“So then,” she said, “having heard that, you went to see Esemeli.”
“Yes,” Nita said. Now, she figured, it was her turn. She told Quelt everything the Lone One had said to them, leaving out not a word. It was surprisingly easy for her, for she had been turning all those words over again and again in her mind, looking for anything dangerous hidden under them that she might have missed the first time around. Once again, Quelt held very still, kept very silent, while Nita told her what the Lone Power had said about the Alaalids’ need to evolve. And then Nita fell silent herself, waiting to see what Quelt would do.
The silence lasted a long while, and Nita forced herself to listen to the water slipping up and down the beach, and the little hissing noises that happened when air got trapped in the sand and bubbled out. When she looked at Quelt again, she found the Alaalid gazing at her with an indrawn expression very unlike anything Nita had seen on her before.
“And you believe this?” Quelt said at last. “You believe these things It told you?”
Nita took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said.
“Because of the Oath you made It swear?”
“Not just that,” Nita said. “After I started hearing the whispering, it seemed to me that there was something”— she paused— “not wrong about it, not as such. But there was something missing about the world. I went looking for your world’s kernel. It’s not here, Quelt. It’s been separated from your world—and it shouldn’t be.”
“Or it wouldn’t be in your own world,” Quelt said, her voice very strange. “Is that it? That you think my world should be more like yours?”
Nita gulped. “Not at all,” she said. “But your world’s kernel—”
“Enough of that for a moment,” Quelt said. “I must come back to this. You believe what the Lone One told you?”
“Yes, because this once, It had no choice but to tell the truth,” Kit said. “Not after Nita was finished with It, anyway.”
“And we ought to make the best of it,” Nita muttered, “because this is the last time I’m going to be able to manage that stunt. One per customer… ”
Quelt was silent. Finally, she looked up again, but not at either of them: out to sea. “I want to say this without being rude,” she said. “You’re our guests, and Those Who Are sent you here. But—”
She shook herself all over, like someone under intolerable pressure, and leaped up. “What makes you so sure you’re right?” Quelt said, standing very stiffly, with her back turned to them. “How dare you think you can interfere with something like this, with our Choice? What gives you the right to tell me that my people should repeal it—just throw away everything we have here and start over? What makes you think you know better than we do how we should be growing as a species, what we should be doing with ourselves?”
Nita couldn’t think of anything to say right away. “Quelt,” Kit said, “it might just be that we have more experience with this kind of thing, with the Lone One, than you do.”
“I think perhaps you do!” Quelt said as she turned back toward them. She was shaking all over as she stood there. “I asked the wind to tell me about your world! I had to, because every time I asked you, you’d always stop and say that it was going to take a long time to explain. Well, it did! It seemed like it took forever for the wind to tell me everything I wanted to know. And there was always more. I thought it would never stop.” She was nearly in tears, but she was hanging on to her control… just. “I didn’t know what a war was, until it told me about one. I’d never heard of murder. Or plague. Or a hundred other awful things.”
Nita wanted to say something… and couldn’t for the life of her think where to begin. And it was questionable, she thought, whether she could have stopped Quelt anyway. “I wasn’t going to say anything,” Quelt said. “I thought, Those Who Are wouldn’t send us wizards who would hurt us, who were dangerous. It’s not their fault their world is so horrible. But now I have to ask. What’s the matter with you people? What happened in your Choice that you got it so wrong, that you kill each other all the time?”
“We’re not sure,” Nita said. “We spend a lot of time wondering about that ourselves.”
“Is that true?”
Kit looked at her in shock. “Why would we lie?”
“Because when you’re not using the Speech, you can?” Quelt said.
Nita and Kit were stunned silent.
“Your world seems to be full of that kind of thing,” Quelt said. “I was terrified when I found out about it! It’s got to be one of the worst things that’s wrong there. How awful it has to be for people in your world when you can never know for sure whether something someone tells you is true?”
“That’s one reason we use the Speech,” Nita said. “It’s one less question to ask—”
“But then you have to go on to the next one,” Quelt said. “Yes, people can’t lie in the Speech. Fine. But if they’re confused, they can say what they believe to be the truth, conversationally, and what they say will still be wrong. How do I know It hasn’t somehow tricked you into believing all the things It told you are true?”
Nita looked helplessly up at Kit. She couldn’t think of an answer to that.
“Or worse yet,” Quelt said, “how do I know you’re not working for that one?”
Kit went ashen. “Wizards can’t,” he said. “Not willingly!”
“Not here, no,” Quelt said. “But in other worlds, they can be ‘overshadowed’—unwilling accomplices. And what about in your world? What are things really like there? The Lone One practically runs that place, it seems! I never knew It could do things like that to a world. And here It sits on our planet, and we made It welcome here—” She was pacing back and forth on the beach, her fists clenched, like someone afraid she’d explode into some terrible action that she’d regret.
Finally Quelt laughed, and the bitterness in the laughter pained Nita terribly. It was so alien for an Alaalid, and it echoed, in an awful way, Esemeli’s laughter. “Well, at least this excursus has done something good for me,” Quelt said. “It’s taught me what a monster Esemeli can be, once people start really believing in her!” She was actually angry, and it frightened Nita a little: she’d never seen any Alaalid angry before. “But for my own part, I’m my people’s only wizard. We beat Ictanikë once. I will not give her another chance at my people, just on a stranger’s say-so. Repeal our Choice? Why ever would we do that? Just because the Lone One says we might possibly turn into something better? It’s madness. And you’re mad, or deluded, to believe It, no matter what wizardry you worked on It! The Lone One tried to sell us our own destruction once, and we warded It off. Now it sends you to try to get us to throw away what we have and buy our destruction from a different source, instead?”
Nita stood up. “Quelt!” she said, and reached out two hands to take her by the shoulders.
Quelt backed away a step, and then another. “No,” she said. “I think perhaps you should both stay away from me for a while. I don’t know what to think, and looking at you makes me more uncertain every moment. I thought you were my cousins,” she said, and now the tears genuinely were starting. “I thought you were good! ”
She stood there, trembling, for just a moment more, and then she fled down the beach toward her home.
In sile
nce Kit and Nita watched her go. “Now what do we do?” Kit said.
Nita shook her head. Her heart was heavy; she felt like crying herself, except that it wouldn’t have helped anything. “I have no idea,” she said.
Kit was silent for a long time. “I think I know,” he said at last. “For one thing, we sleep in the pup-tents tonight.”
“I’d almost rather go home,” Nita said.
“I know,” Kit said. “So would I. Which is why I think we should stay here.”
Nita thought about that for a long moment. Finally, she nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Going home would feel too much like running away.”
“And if Quelt decided she wanted to talk to us again between now and then,” Kit said, “wouldn’t we look guilty if we couldn’t be found?”
That was something that had occurred to Nita only seconds after wishing she could go home. “But if we’re in the pup-tents,” she said, “she’ll know we wanted to give her a little privacy, a little room.”
“Yeah.” Kit got up, dusted himself off. “Then, as soon as Esemeli’s ready tomorrow, we get It to help us find Druvah, if he can be found. If he can, we get the truth from him and we can bring it to Quelt. And then we get our butts out of here before we do any more damage.”
Nita rubbed her eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Let’s get it over with.”
They got up together to go down to their building and put what they needed for one more trip to the Relegate’s Naos into their pup tents. Behind them Ponch came trotting along, the leash around his neck, holding the loose end of it in his mouth, and with a thoughtful look in his eyes…
***
At about quarter of three in the morning, Dairine stood at the garage end of the driveway, once more gazing up at the Moon and waiting for the rest of the group to join her.
“Dairine,” a voice said out of the darkness.
It was her dad. “Yeah,” she said.
“Where are they, honey?”
“They’ll be here soon.”