Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition

  She shook her head. No time for it now, she thought. It’s some weirdness to do with him; we’ll figure it out later. The rest of the Speech was working just fine; the spell lay before her, ready to implement.

  Dairine took a breath and said the single word in the Speech that is the shorthand for the wizard’s knot, the “go” word of the spell.

  Everything went dark. Then images began to superimpose themselves on the darkness, blotting out even the viewer’s sense of being at the center of a point of view, so that Dairine felt more like a bodiless presence than an observer. She saw the strange slick cloud of some atom’s shell, from the inside, an undersky fuzzy with probabilities. The “sky” rushed toward her, blew past her like fog, leaving her gazing out on interstitial space alive with the neon ripples of “strong force” between a seemingly infinite latticework of atoms. Another few breaths, and the view was a solid mass of chains of molecules, writhing among one another like a nest of snakes. Another blurring outward rush, and reddish lightning rattled and sizzled everywhere, whip-cracking down the length of strange bumpy textures like a child’s blocks strung on rope. Another rush, and everything went milky and crystalline, with a faint strange movement going on outside the surface of the crystal.

  One last blur of fog descended, and the image resolved itself into a peculiar view seen through eyes that fringed every object with brilliant rainbows of color. It was a landscape, all in flat dark reds, the sky black with heat; and finally there was a point of view associated with it. This is it, Dairine said, exultant. This is what the world looks like for the person who’s got the Instrumentality. Now all we need to find is where they are.

  The envisioning routine backed out several steps farther. A smallish, ocean-girdled planet circled a giant white sun, the fourth of its eight worlds. Another jump, and the star dwindled down to just one of a drift of thousands in an irregular galaxy’s core.

  Several long strings of characters in the Speech appeared by that galaxy, tagging it and numerous others around it that were visible only as tiny cloudy whorls or disks.

  Okay, Dairine said. Store that. And she waited until the data was stored, and then said the word that cut the wizard’s knot and dissolved the spell.

  The space between the towers reappeared. Slowly the spell diagram faded, leaving only the image of the “found” galaxy, and the outlines of the circles in which all the spell’s participants had stood. Dairine let out a long breath. She was a little tired, but nothing like as exhausted as she should have been after such an effort.

  “I can’t get over that,” Dairine said, as Beanpole and Logo and the others made their way over toward her and Roshaun. “It was like the wizardry was helping me, somehow…”

  “It’s the power-increase effect, the peridexis,” Beanpole said. “We’ve been taking advantage of it, too.”

  Dairine walked out of her circle to where the image of the tagged galaxy burned just under the surface. She bent down to look at the annotations. “It’s fairly close to our own galaxy. At least we won’t have any more really big transits to deal with when we get back.”

  “That’s well enough,” Roshaun said, settling the torc with the Sunstone about his neck. “We may know where the person with access to the Instrumentality can be found. But if we can’t get them to give it to us, or learn how to use it to stop the expansion, this will all have been for nothing.”

  “I’m not gonna throw our own universe in the trash just yet,” Dairine said. She peered down at the tagging characters next to the galaxy. “Good, it’s got a New General Catalog number: NGC 5518. It’s in Boötes, somewhere.” Then she stopped. “What’s this?” she said over her shoulder to the mobiles.

  Spot came over to her from his own circle, and put out several eyes to examine the word in the Speech that Dairine was indicating. “Enthusiasmic,” he said.

  Dairine frowned. “You mean enthusiastic.”

  “It says enthusiasmic,” Spot said.

  “That’s not a word!”

  “It is now,” said Spot.

  Roshaun came to look over Dairine’s shoulder. “And what is that word next to it supposed to be?” he said. “Incorporation?” He looked bemused.

  “So this is a word that didn’t have a meaning until just recently?” Dairine said to Spot. “A word for something new.”

  “So I believe,” Spot said.

  Dairine shook her head. “Enthusiasmic incorporation,” she said. “Of the hesper—” Then Dairine blinked, and a moment later her eyes widened.

  “That’s not a word in the Speech,” said Gigo, sounding perplexed.

  “No,” Dairine said. “It’s not. But it’s a word we know in English. Or part of one.” She swallowed. “Enthusiasmic incorporation of the Hesper—”

  She hurriedly bent down and picked Spot up. “Quick,” she said. “You have to message Nita for me. Or one of the others. I don’t care where they are. Just get me one of those guys!”

  The ground underneath all their various feet or treads or wheels came alive with the kind of display that would have shown on Spot’s screen, had it been open—the apple-without-a-bite imagery of the manual software’s Earth-sourced version, rippling bluely under the surface. And then the message, both written in the Speech and seemingly speaking itself into their bones: Messaging refused. Please try again later.

  “Refused?” Roshaun said.

  “They’re somewhere where they can’t take an incoming communication, because they’re scared they might be overheard,” Dairine said. She bit her lip.

  “Perhaps we should simply go to them,” Roshaun said.

  “You’re exactly right,” Dairine said, putting Spot down again. She turned to the mobiles. “Guys, I hate to spell and run, but we’ve got to find them right away—because if they don’t realize what they’re dealing with, they’re going to mess it up. And if it gets messed up this once, then the whole universe is screwed up forever.”

  “Even more screwed up than it is at the moment?” Roshaun said.

  “You have no idea,” Dairine said. “Come on, let’s open up a gate and get going!”

  8: Active Defense

  Kit came half awake to the sound of something bumping on the floor, very fast, and something jingling. He opened one eye.

  Dim light—the wizard-light he’d left hovering near the ceiling in case he needed to get up in the middle of the night—showed him Ponch, sitting by where the door of the pup tent would be when Kit spoke it open. Ponch was scratching behind his collar, turning it around and around as he scratched.

  It wasn’t as if Kit didn’t hear this jingling nearly every day. What had awakened him was the utter silence into which the sound fell: a silence devoid of the little creaks and breathing noises that every house made, of wind or rain or weather outside the house, and of the normal world in which it all existed. Kit lay there for several moments just listening to that barren stillness. There was nothing but vacuum and cold outside. Well, that’s all there is on the Moon, too, Kit thought. But the Moon was different. It was within sight of home. And it didn’t have that roiling, growing darkness above it, shutting out the stars.

  Kit felt around for the zipper of his sleeping bag and pulled it down, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. His pup tent was sparsely furnished compared to Nita’s. Besides his sleeping bag and some essential toiletries, mostly it seemed to contain dog food. “You can starve when you have to,” his mother had said to him, “but your pet won’t understand why his meals are late, whether he can talk or not! So you make sure your dog always eats before you do. And whether you do or not.” And when Kit’s mother finished with it, the “short wall” of Kit’s pup tent was half obscured by a stack of cans and bags about four feet high, not to mention five or six big bottles of watercooler water. His own supplies seemed meager by comparison—mostly beef jerky and fruit jerky and trail bars, and one or two of the kinds of cereal he didn’t mind eating straight from the box, since finding milk while out on errantry was usually a problem. br />
  I have to go out, Ponch said, standing up and shaking himself.

  “Okay,” Kit said, reaching for his manual. “I’ll make you an air bubble.”

  No, it’s all right, Ponch said. I can take air with me, if I think about it.

  Kit stood up and stretched. Maybe it’s not just our power that’s getting boosted, he thought.

  Would you open the door? Ponch said. I have to go!

  “Okay, just a minute.” Kit pulled on his jeans and had to hunt for his sweatshirt before he found it had somehow managed to get under his sleeping bag.

  Kit pulled it on. Ponch had started turning in circles on the pup-tent floor, either in excitement or because he really needed to be out of there. “Okay, okay,” Kit said, and reached down for the door’s little spell tab, which acted like the pull on a zipper. A long spill of words in the Speech came up on the plain gray wall, showing him details about the outside environment: some words flashed urgently on and off to remind Kit that there was hard vacuum outside.

  Kit just pulled up on the tab. Like a blind going up, the silvery-gray surface of the pup tent gave way to a view of the barren surface of the planetoid where they had camped. Ponch burst out through the interface, galloping away across the surface and bouncing in the lower gravity. Kit watched him go, noting idly that this place wasn’t as dusty as the Moon, even though it felt much older.

  He went back to the sleeping bag and rooted around for his socks, put them on, and his sneakers, and then picked up his manual. “Bookmark, please?” he said to it.

  The manual’s pages riffled through to an image of the world to which Ponch had brought them. The world had no name that living beings had ever given it. Nonetheless, it had its own name in the Speech, Metemne, and the manual showed its location, well out toward the edge of a small irregular galaxy some hundreds of thousands of light-years past the Local Group. A long way from home…

  Kit paged through the manual to his routines for vacuum management, found the one that he’d been using on the Moon, and spoke the words that would activate his personal bubble. Then he stepped out through the pup-tent door onto the rough dark gray surface.

  Except for the position of the planet’s little star, now high in the sky, nothing had changed; the dark shifting and swarming of the Pullulus continued. I didn’t think I could hate something just because of the way it looked, Kit thought, but I think I hate that. Maybe because I feel so much like it hates me.

  Kit glanced off to his left. There was a little rise off in that direction, and he could see the soft slow wreathing of the fire about the head of the Spear of Light, jutting up from behind a massive boulder at the top of the rise. Ronan was still on guard, or if he wasn’t, the Defender in him was. It has to be weird, Kit thought, to have something, someone, like that, sharing brain space with you. But at least He’s on our side. I think…

  Kit sighed. Once it hadn’t been so complicated. If someone was a wizard, they were on your side, on the right side. But these days, the mere exercise of wizardry wasn’t a guarantee. You found yourself wondering about people’s motives all the time. And if you didn’t know them well, you started to be less certain about turning your back on them in a tight situation.

  And there were other issues on his mind. Ronan and Nita had been close in ways that Nita was too shy to discuss. Now Nita was feeling twitchy about Ronan, and Kit kept wondering why. Oh, it wasn’t anything serious with them. I know that.

  At least, I think I know that…

  From around the shoulder of that rise, Ponch came galloping back and skidded to a stop in front of Kit. Okay, let’s go for a walk!

  Kit laughed and went off after his dog, taking it easy at first to make sure he had the hang of the local gravity. It was heavier than the Moon’s, so that you could run without completely bouncing off the surface if you were careful. Passing the rise where Ronan still sat, Kit had a long look around the surface of Metemne and decided that it wasn’t someplace he would come back to for a holiday. The planet wasn’t much more than a bumpy rock pile. Whether there had even been water here in the planet’s earliest days was a question Kit couldn’t answer just by looking.

  He crouched down and put a hand on a largish boulder that sat off to one side. From the beginning of his practice of wizardry, Kit had always been good at hearing what was going on with objects that most people would have considered inanimate. Now he let his mind go a little unfocused, and waited.

  …no one here, the stone said eventually. For a long time…

  It wasn’t that it actually spoke; that took a different kind of life. But the impression was plain. “Did anyone ever live here?” Kit said.

  Never. It would have been nice, the boulder said. There was an atmosphere. And water. But nothing ever got started.

  “I’m sorry,” Kit said.

  We can’t all have what we want, I suppose, the boulder said, and fell silent.

  Slowly Kit got up and dusted off his hands as Ponch came running along from behind a nearby outcropping of gray stone.

  There’s nothing here, Ponch said. Come on, let’s play!

  “I wouldn’t say nothing,” Kit said, glancing down at the boulder. “No people, maybe.” He walked off to have a look around the outcropping, and Ponch trotted along beside him.

  Then it’s nowhere important.

  “I guess it’s easy to think that,” Kit said. “There’s so much life around, we start taking it for granted that any planet’ll get some in time.” He shook his head. “Trouble is, once life does show up, before you know it, the Lone One’s turned up, too, and it’s running around messing up the Choices of every species It finds.”

  It didn’t mess up ours, Ponch said.

  Kit raised his eyebrows. “I keep meaning to get the details on that,” he said, as they walked around the outcropping together. “Though it must have gone the usual way, since there’s no Choice without wizards, and there are dog wizards, Rhiow tells me…”

  Ponch’s expression was eloquent of skepticism. Oh, well, if you’re going to believe things cats say about dogs…

  Kit got a sense that he was poised above a dangerous abyss. “Uh,” he said, “okay, maybe I should ask someone who knows about it firsthand.”

  Ponch woofed; it was a dog laugh, of sorts. He picked up a rock in his mouth, shook it from side to side as if to make sure it was dead, and came bouncing over to Kit to put it in his hand. We have wizards, yeah. But as for the Choice, I just know what everybody’s mom tells them when they’re still drinking milk.

  Kit took the rock and spent a while trying to get the dog slobber off it. “So educate me,” he said.

  Oh, it’s the usual thing, Ponch said. There was us, and the Ones, and we ruled the world. And then the Bad Thing came and said, I can make it better for you. But we said, How? We have the Ones. We live with them, and hunt with them, and run around with them, and they give us whatever we need, and everything’s fine. So the Bad Thing went away. The End. …So come on and throw the rock!

  Kit blinked, and threw the rock well away from the outcropping, across the bare gritty plain. Ponch tore off across the planet’s surface after it, leaving little scoots of gravel hanging up in the vacuum in a trail behind him. If that’s his idea of “the usual thing,” Kit thought, then all the Choices I’ve run into now have been real unusual. In fact, Ponch’s version of his species’ Choice didn’t sound much like a choice at all. And he didn’t sound very interested in talking about it.

  He watched Ponch pounce on the rock, pick it up, shake it around, and lose it because of shaking it too hard; he went bounding across the surface again to get it back. Then again, Kit thought, there are some species that’re in really close relationships with each other, and their Choices are interrelated. Why shouldn’t the dogs’ Choice be involved with the human one? It makes a kind of sense.

  Ponch skidded to a stop in front of Kit, dropping the rock in front of him. Again!

  “Yeah, sure,” Kit said. He picked up the rock an
d threw it. Ponch went bouncing off after it. Boy, he’s really into it this morning. Needs to dump some stress, I guess.

  Kit had to grin at himself then. Oh, great. Now you’re doing psychoanalysis on your dog.

  But still… There’d been an overly casual quality to the way Ponch had been talking about the canine Choice. As if there was something about it he didn’t want to be thinking about. Almost as if he was trying to distract himself.

  Ponch came bounding and plunging back with his rock, and dropped it in front of Kit once more. Again!

  “Uh, no, I think we’ve done enough of that.”

  Why? Is it time for something? Ponch looked a little crestfallen.

  “Probably,” Kit said, fervently hoping that this was true. But he had to smile; Ponch’s sense of time was weak, except when mealtimes were concerned. “Let’s have a look here.” He got out his manual and flipped its cover open to show the front page, which he’d set to show him the date and time. “See, it says here—”

  Then his jaw dropped.

  314.3? How did that happen? Crap!!

  Kit slapped the manual shut, turned around, and started back toward the pup-tent accesses. “Come on,” he said, “we’re running really late! We have to get Neets up.”

  Ponch began to jump up and down with excitement as they went; in the low gravity, he was able to jump up to a height where his head was level with Kit’s. How come?

  “Because it’s a lot later than it should be!” Kit started doing the astronaut-bounce that was the only way to hurry in this kind of gravity without falling on your face. “And I don’t know how it got that way. Come on!”

  ***

  Nita stood in front of the mirror over the chest of drawers in her bedroom, staring anxiously at her face. I was right, she thought, utterly exasperated, as she pushed her bangs aside to get a closer look. It is a zit.

  She let out a breath, then. Trouble is, this isn’t real. I’m asleep. And what am I wasting my time dreaming about? Zits! Nita shook her head. I can’t believe that the other day I actually thought this was a big deal.