Most of the living species on that planet were plants. There were a very few flying and creeping species with no intelligence to speak of, and of these, only the ravenous “topflyers” were tough enough to survive Sek’s awful burning light for long. These infested the uppermost levels of the rain forest that covered the two great continents of the world, eating one another and anything else foolish enough to venture up or out into the terrible fire of day.
“It looks like everything else living here except those topflyers stays undercover if it wants to keep on living,” Nita said, looking up from her own manual. “Even the one intelligent species…”
She turned a couple of pages, and Sker’ret’s display shifted to match hers, showing them a closely annotated image of one of the giant bugs. “They call themselves the Yaldiv,” Nita said, “though they’re such a hive species, I’m not sure that the concept of them ‘calling themselves’ anything is right. According to this, they’ve got kind of a common undermind or subconscious, so they may just think of themselves as one body with a lot of moving parts.” She shook her head. “Not a ‘them’: an ‘it.’”
Kit, glancing over at Nita’s manual, pointed at large blue-glowing patches that appeared here and there on the pages. “What the heck are those?”
Nita shook her head again. “Some of the species background information is blocked,” she said. She laid her finger on one patch, which came alive with the words in the Speech, “Data in abeyance.” Another lined-out passage, when she touched it, said, “Data withheld.”
“Withheld by whom?” Sker’ret said. “Or what?”
Nita looked over at Ronan. Such redacted notations, the Defender said through him, mean that some other Power is interfering with the exchange of information.
“And you can just guess which one,” Kit said softly. “Darryl did say—”
Kit saw Nita swallow. “That we shouldn’t hang around any longer than we have to,” she said. “So let’s get down there and find out what the Instrumentality is, and what we have to do to get it and make it work for us.”
Filif rustled all his branches and looked rather challengingly at Ronan. “I don’t suppose you could be a little more forthcoming now about any details you’ve received from your sources.”
I don’t have anything new to share with you, the One’s Champion said through Ronan. The other Powers seem to think we’ve been given enough information to find the Instrumentality without any further input.
“I hate that,” Kit said, though he wasn’t annoyed enough to put too much force on the statement. “You know? I really hate it when They trust us so completely.”
Ronan looked nonplussed. You’re all we have to work with, said the One’s Champion. And you’ve always produced the result before. Suddenly Ronan grinned; it was a sour look. “See, this is your reward for not letting the Lone One defeat you a long time ago.”
“You wouldn’t think it was so funny if you knew what Its idea of defeat usually looks like,” Kit said. “And I still wish the Powers thought we were a little more clueless. We might get things done faster.”
But not as effectively, the Champion said.
“Yeah, well,” Nita said, sounding uncomfortable. She turned her attention back to her manual, and when her gaze was turned away, Kit sneaked a concerned look at her. Nita had been as unnerved as Filif when they’d first gotten up here, and to Kit’s eye, she still looked pale. “Probably we should start with the cities,” Nita said. “There are two city-hives on the bigger of the two continents, kind of like giant anthills. They’re a few hundred miles apart. They’ve been fighting each other, on and off, for—” Nita looked at the numbers on the timeline indicator that shone on the page, and squinted in disbelief. “Millions of years?”
“They must really be enjoying it,” Sker’ret said dryly, “to keep the war going so long.”
“I don’t know if enjoy would be the right word,” Nita said, turning another page. “Each side sees the other as a terrible threat.” She glanced at Sker’ret. “Just think about it. If each of the Yaldiv cities always saw itself as the only being in the world—and then all of a sudden another one turned up, one that thought of itself as the only being in the world—”
“Then both sides have a great reason to panic,” Ronan said. “And an excuse to wipe the other side out.”
“It looks like somebody might already have had a run at that,” Kit said, turning a page in his own manual. “Have you looked at the background radiation numbers for this place?”
Nita looked surprised. “I thought maybe those were so high because we’re so close to the star.”
Kit shook his head, looking increasingly grim. “Oh, yeah, the atmosphere’s real ionized, but that’s not going to account for the plutonium residue all over the place.” He pointed at the manual page. “Look here. And over there—”
Filif shook all over, a horrified shudder. “Someone here was using atomics?” he said. “The Kindler must have driven them completely insane.”
“It’s a popular kind of crazy,” Kit said. “Unfortunately.”
“You’ll be telling me next that they burn their hydrocarbons!”
“Uh, no,” Kit said. “But it looks like there was a more developed civilization here once. A real long time ago. There’s nothing left now. It’s been completely degraded.”
“Were the creatures here part of that civilization?” Sker’ret said to Nita. “Or are they a successor species?”
Nita shook her head. “No way to tell. Almost all the rest of the history section is blocked out. ‘Data withheld.’”
“And here’s something else that’s kind of nasty,” Ronan said, glancing back at the group. He had been looking off into the distance, the way Irish wizards did when consulting their memory-based version of the manual. “All these creatures’ve got a significant, aware fraction of the Lone Power as part of their souls.”
Nita turned a horrified look on him. “Are you saying that the whole Yaldiv species is overshadowed?”
It’s rather worse than that, the One’s Champion said. And rather more permanent. They’re all avatars.
Everyone stared at Ronan. “All of them are mortal versions of the Lone One?” Sker’ret said. “How’s that possible? Such a multiple embodiment would require immense power.”
Which It has, said the Champion. But, yes, even for one of us, this kind of power outlay would be significant. My guess is that this culture has either been owned for so long that this kind of avataric presence has simply seeped into the species’ nature over millennia. Or else the manifestation is something new, a test bed for something the Lone Power is planning.
“Probably a good reason for the world’s history to be blocked,” Filif said, “at least from the Lone One’s point of view. It would be a fair guess that we’d have a better idea where to start looking for the Instrumentality if we knew more about when this process started, and what this world has been through.”
Ronan ran his hands through his hair and looked harried. “All right,” he said. “Where do we go from here? We’ve got to figure out what the Instrumentality is, and where it is … and what to do about it. While walking around in the middle of a war zone full of giant bugs who can see us even when we’re invisible.”
“And just how did that happen?” Nita said to Ronan. “And how was that thing able to get through my shield-spell?”
“The Lone One can break a working wizardry when it’s directly present,” Ronan said. “It was party to wizardry’s creation, so It can easily interfere, if It’s got a local foothold in a willing soul. That’s what avatars are all about. They can be worked through a lot more effectively than the merely overshadowed.”
“But did that avatar recognize us as wizards?” Kit said.
Possibly not, said the Champion. Avatars don’t have to be conscious of their status.
“With such creatures about, it’s a shame there’s nowhere quieter to do our reconnaissance,” Filif said. “Say, the other co
ntinent.”
Ponch had been lying stretched out, looking down with a brooding expression at Rashah as the planet rotated in seeming serenity beneath them. But what we’re looking for is down where I brought you out, he said. Why go elsewhere? We’d just be wasting our time.
“That being something we don’t have a lot of,” Nita said. “So let’s get busy.” She glanced over at Ronan. “I do want to call my dad in a little bit, though, to make sure what day it is back home. Is it going to be safe?”
I can cover you, the Defender said. But putting forth power as a cloak is itself a detectable usage, if anyone’s looking for such. So keep it short.
Nita nodded. “But as for the Instrumentality,” she said, “what do we do when we find it? Just take it? What if it’s something that belongs to the Yaldiv? What if they don’t want to let us have it? Or they won’t tell us how it works?”
“One thing at a time,” Sker’ret said. “We’ve got to go down there and do some research.” He was looking through his own manual. “I can set up short-range transits for us from here to the surface in such a way that they ought to be undetectable. You’ll want to look over my shoulder to make sure I don’t miss anything,” Sker’ret said to Ronan. “But what then? We’re going to have to walk some places. We’re going to have to go into the Yaldiv cities and pass unnoticed. And as you say, the usual invisibility doesn’t seem to be enough. These creatures, the warrior-foragers anyway, have a better-than-usual sense of smell, as well as what looks like an innate sensitivity to force fields. Merely visual disguises aren’t going to do the job.”
Filif suddenly shook every frond he owned, and all his berries blazed. “Well, it’s plain that there’s no such thing as coincidence,” he said. “Have a look at this.”
A moment later, Kit found himself looking at another Nita. He glanced over at the original one. Her jaw had dropped.
“How does it look?” Filif said. And, bizarrely, his voice sounded like Nita’s.
“Wow!” Kit said.
“Does it feel right?” Filif said. He held out an arm.
Kit pinched it experimentally. “Yeah…”
“Does it smell right?”
“I wouldn’t answer that if I were you,” Nita said. She got up and went over to Filif, looking at him up close and very carefully. “It’s almost like a mirror,” she said.
“It’s a mochteroof,” Filif said.
The word was plainly in the Speech, but Kit had never heard it used before. “Some kind of seeming?” he said.
“About halfway between a seeming and a full shape-change,” Filif said… and once again the voice was Nita’s. “It’s less likely to leave you with the side effects that a complete change would. Yet it looks and feels solid. It’ll pass all the common sensory tests—touch, smell, taste.”
Kit was impressed. “When’d you start work on this?”
“When I started to realize I didn’t want to look, sound, or smell too much like a vegetable,” Filif said, “in a world full of herbivores.”
Nita suddenly looked embarrassed. “Uh. Sorry. We, uh—”
“Don’t apologize!” Filif said. “I found soon enough that plants on your world aren’t like they are on mine. And I got caught up on my research and discovered you were built to eat the way you do. Just look at your teeth! Anyway, when Roshaun and Sker’ret and I started going out visiting places with Dairine, I built myself a wizardry that was mostly a strictly visual illusion. It worked well enough when we first went to the mall, but it failed when I got distracted. So afterward I took the work I’d done and used it to construct something more robust—an overlay that wasn’t as taxing as a full shape-change but could still cope with being touched, and would react properly to all the other senses.”
Nita leaned close to Filif and pushed his/her bangs aside to stare at his/her forehead. “What?” Kit said.
“He’s even got my zit!” Nita said, straightening up. She sounded rueful but impressed. “You’ve really been working hard on this, Fil.”
“I noticed you looking at it,” Filif said, “and inserted it. The image self-updates when you do that. Otherwise, it just runs true to your last memory of a given template. Here, look at this.”
And suddenly the other-Nita turned into Carmela.
Kit made an exaggerated choking noise and fell over. “Oh, no,” he said. “Not her, not here! No way.”
“What’s the matter?” Filif said, sounding confused. “Did I get something wrong?”
Nita snickered. “No,” she said, and got up to stretch. “I’d say you got it just right.” She looked at Kit in amusement. “No wonder ‘Mela spends so much time bugging you! You give her these huge reactions. If you didn’t make such a fuss, she wouldn’t have nearly so much fun.”
Kit rolled his eyes. Filif went back to being a tree again, and Ronan, too, stood up and had a stretch. “All right,” he said. “So all we need to do now is decide where to start looking for the Instrumentality.”
Kit looked up at Ronan. “You saw where Ponch brought us out. I think we should have some faith in his talent, and start our work near there. One of the cities isn’t too far from our landing site.”
“We’ll have a lot less trouble getting lost in the crowd where there are a lot more Yaldiv,” Nita said. She touched Sker’ret’s rotating globe with one finger. The view of the planet in her own manual and in the larger display expanded to show the cities’ locations. “Yup, that’s the bigger of the two cities.”
“So all we have to do now is tailor versions of Filif’s mochteroof for ourselves,” Sker’ret said.
Ronan nodded slowly. “Right you are,” he said. “And since it looks like the Yaldiv are diurnal—a lot of them go out of the city to work in the forest in the daytime, then come back when it starts to get dark—when they do, we’ll go back in with them.”
“Makes sense,” Sker’ret said. “We’ll need someplace near our target city to use as a base, though, somewhere to put up the pup tents. A cave or something similar.”
“My very thought,” Ronan said. “I’ll go see what I can find. Back in a tick.”
He vanished.
Nita stood looking down at the planet’s surface, while off to one side Sker’ret started laying down his short-transit routines, a lacy filigree of glowing lines embedded in the invisible surface they stood on. Kit wandered over to Nita. “You okay now?” he said.
“Huh? Oh, yeah. I got past it.” She folded her arms, hugging her manual to her. “It’s just … Ronan. Sometimes he sounds so normal.”
“Sometimes,” Kit said.
“But then without warning he gets edgy again.”
“So? Where he’s concerned, so do you,” Kit said.
Nita looked at him. “What?”
Kit shrugged. “You should see your face sometimes. It’s a real ‘You get on my nerves but I can’t take my eyes off you’ kind of look.”
Nita’s expression went suddenly exasperated. “There wasn’t anything like that going on with us,” she said.
“But there could have been.”
“Like what? He’s about a million years older than me!” Nita said.
“Two,” Kit said.
“Two million?”
“Two years older than you,” Kit said.
Nita looked less exasperated and more befuddled. “Your point being…?”
Kit took a breath. “You kissed him,” Kit said.
Nita briefly looked shocked. Then she rolled her eyes. “That was all I did.”
“I know that!”
“Yeah? And how, exactly?”
This, by itself, was almost enough to stop Kit cold. Wizards who worked closely together sometimes overheard things going on in each other’s heads that hadn’t been specifically “sent” by the other party. It was an occupational hazard … and a sign of their closeness. But this is as far as I’ve ever gotten along this line with her, Kit thought, miserable, and if I give up now, I may never have the guts to bring it up again! Or the ti
me—
He opened his mouth. “Look, never mind, I can guess,” Nita muttered, and turned away. “Anyway, you know it’s true. And it just happened. It was just— He was— I don’t know. So vulnerable right then. You see how he is usually! Ronan being vulnerable—it’s kind of an attention-getter.”
She really did sound embarrassed. Back out of this slowly while you can, said some unusually nervous part of Kit’s brain.
“But I do feel a little better about him generally,” Nita said. “If I was feeling a little paranoid about him, maybe it was left over from the last time someone I trusted was being overshadowed by the Lone One. It’s not like Ronan can be overshadowed while he’s got the One’s Champion inside him.”
“As far as we know,” Kit said. “But a lot of things aren’t working the way they usually do.”
“Oh, don’t you get paranoid now,” Nita said. “Remember how it was with Ronan before, when he just wanted the Champion to fall asleep or go away? Now at least the two of them seem to be working together. We ought to be really grateful, because we’re all going to need that.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Kit let out a long breath, feeling relieved. But Nita glanced back at him, and the smile she was wearing was distinctly odd. “What?” Kit said.
“Uh, nothing serious,” Nita said. The smile started to turn into a grin. “I was just thinking about Carmela.”
“Filif got a little too close to the original there,” Kit said, passing a hand over his eyes.
Nita snickered. “Not that. I was thinking that when we get back, somebody’d better make sure she knows exactly what she’s getting into.”