“You have no idea,” Nita said softly. She wondered yet again exactly what was involved in becoming a Senior. It’s not like they’re so old. It’s not like they’re just grown up, either. Lots of grown-ups are wizards, and they never make Senior level, or even Advisory. What is it? What do you have to do? How do they know so much stuff, and make it look so easy?
At last everyone was seated. “Normally we’d spend a lot more time being social,” Tom said, “but today’s not the day for it, so please forgive us if we get right down to business.”
He let out a long breath, looking them all over. “Some of you,” he said, “will have noticed that the world has been getting… well, a lot more complicated of late. And, seemingly, a lot worse.”
“Yeah,” Nita said, thinking ruefully (among other things) of one significant change in the Manhattan skyline in the last decade, and what had come after.
“By ‘of late,’” Tom said, just a little sharply, “I mean, over the past couple thousand years.”
“Oh,” Nita said, and shut her mouth.
“It’s not local,” Tom said. “Matters have been worsening gradually all over the worlds; and wizards who study macrotrends have been concerned about it for some time. The Powers That Be haven’t had much to say except that this worsening is a sign of a huge change coming… something that’s not been seen before in the worlds. And now we know the change is upon us… because the expansion of the universe is speeding up.”
Kit looked a little confused. “But hasn’t it always been expanding? What’s the problem?”
“Bear with me,” Tom said. He looked at Nita. “What do you know about ‘dark matter’?”
“Mostly that it’s been missing,” Nita said. “Astronomers have been looking for it for a long time, maybe a hundred years or so. Now they’ve started to find it.”
“And so have scientists on a lot of other worlds,” Carl said. “Know what’s strange about that?”
“That it took us so long?” Kit said.
Carl shook his head. “That all the species who were looking for dark matter started finding it at around the same time.”
Nita sat there and wondered what to make of that.
“The discovery or location of dark matter and the increase in the speed of the universe’s expansion are somehow connected,” Tom said. “Dark matter is being detected in ever-increasing masses and volumes… as if it’s been appearing out of nowhere. And in all the places where ‘new’ dark matter is being found, local space is beginning to expand much faster than it should. Thousands of times faster.”
“So everything’s getting farther and farther away from everything else,” Kit said.
“Right. Now, that’s bad enough by itself. But there are also side effects to this kind of abnormal expansion. Mental ones, and effects that go deeper than the merely mental.”
Roshaun stirred uncomfortably, and a sort of rustle went through Filif’s branches.
“The expansion isn’t just affecting space itself,” Carl said. “It also stretches thin the structure space is hung on—the subdimensions, the realms of hyperstrings and so on. If the expansion isn’t slowed to its normal rate, physical laws are going to start misbehaving. And since those laws are the basis on which life and thought work, people here and everywhere else are going to start being affected personally by the greatly increased expansion.”
“How?” Filif said.
“That’s going to vary from species to species,” Tom said. “In our case, the case of more senior wizards—and I don’t mean Seniors, but everyone much past latency, what our own species calls adolescence—it’s going to look like a slowly increasing physical and then mental weariness. We’re going to start finding it hard to care, even hard to believe in what we’re all doing. And then our wizardry will vanish.”
Nita looked at Tom and thought, with a sudden twisting in her gut, how very tired he looked.
“Yes,” Tom said. “It’s already begun.” He let out a long breath. “Now of course this is something we’d try to derail. Most Seniors and Advisory-level wizards from this part of the galaxy were involved this past week with an intervention that was meant to deal with the problem, at least in the short term, for our galaxy.”
Nita thought of Tom and her dad sitting in her dining room and talking, some days back, when they’d thought no one was listening. We have a fighting chance—actually, a lot better than just a chance, Tom had been saying to her dad, about something the Senior Wizards had been contemplating.
“So that’s where you were when nobody could get through to you, even with the manuals,” Nita said.
Carl nodded. “None of us was sure when the necessary forces could be completely assembled. When the call finally came, we had to drop everything and go. There was no time for explanations.”
“Or interruptions,” Tom said. “To say we were busy would have been putting it mildly… not that it made any difference, in the end. Because we failed. After that we were all sent home to our homeworlds to start organizing their defense.”
Nita went cold in a rush, as cold as if someone had dumped a bucket of snow over her head.
“Why now?” Kit said. “Why is all this happening now?”
“Not even the Powers are sure,” Carl said. “Someone’s going to have to find out, though, because the ‘why’ may be the key to solving the problem. If it can be solved.”
Kit had a very uneasy look on his face. “So, if you guys are going to lose your wizardry for a while… who’s going to take over for you as Seniors?” he said. “Who’s going to be running the planet?”
Tom and Carl looked at each other, then at Nita and Kit.
“You are,” they said.
2: Force Support
Kit sat there and came to terms with what it felt like when all the blood drained from your face. It was a feeling he really didn’t like.
“You’re kidding, right?” he said after a moment.
Tom shook his head. “I know this is a terrible thing to dump on you,” he said. “But in a very short time—certainly within a couple of weeks, possibly within days—we adult wizards are not going to be able to do our jobs anymore.”
“We hoped we could head it off,” Carl said. “But even a mass intervention involving more than two thousand Seniors from this part of the galaxy couldn’t stop what was happening in our neighborhood, or deal with the cause.”
“But you said it was the dark matter,” Sker’ret said.
“That’s the ‘what,’” Carl said. “But we’re still missing the ‘why’…and there’s no point in treating the symptoms. We need to find the cause… and we haven’t.” Carl raised his hands, let them fall again. “We have hints and possibilities—”
“It’s the Lone Power again, isn’t it?” Dairine said.
“That’d be an easy first assumption,” said Tom. “But the early indications are that something different from the Lone One’s usual pattern of attack is going on. We’re continuing to investigate…”
“Not with a lot of success,” Carl muttered.
Kit squirmed in discomfort, for some of the good-natured humor that was always there when Tom and Carl talked to each other was missing. They’re scared, he thought. And they’re trying not to show it, because they don’t want to frighten the kids…
“We should start at the beginning,” Tom said. He looked over at Carl. “Do you want to do the run-through this time? Wouldn’t want to deprive you.”
Now the humor was back, but Kit was still unnerved. Carl, though, just raised his eyebrows, resigned. “You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll have plenty of chances to do it by myself over the next few days.”
Tom took a deep breath, then reached into the air and brought out his wizard’s manual. It was, as usual, larger and thicker than Nita’s—more like a phone book than a library book. He put it down on the table and opened it to about the halfway point. “Go ahead,” he said, and the manual’s pages began riffling by themselves to the place he was l
ooking for.
When the page-riffling stopped, Tom ran his finger down one column of the print on the right-hand page. “Okay,” he said, “here we go.” He began to speak, very quietly and conversationally, in the Speech. As Kit watched, the manual and its pages seemed to spread out more and more widely across the table—or maybe it was the table underneath it shrinking. But, no, that couldn’t be true; Kit was leaning with his forearms on the table, and it wasn’t moving, and neither was he.
Nonetheless, the room darkened, the yellow-flowered wallpaper fading down and out as if someone had turned off the day. The pages of the book darkened; the table darkened, too, and kept on spreading out into the darkness, somehow seeming to avoid everyone who was sitting around it. Farther and farther that flat darkness spread, though Kit and Nita and Dairine and Roshaun and Filif and Sker’ret were all still illuminated, as if by an overhead light that nobody could see.
Across the table from them, illuminated in the same way, Tom leaned back in his chair, his arms folded, his gaze cast down as he watched the ever-spreading pages of the book. There on the surface of the page, as it grew, Kit could see the previously prepared spell diagram that Tom had been working from—a blue-glowing, densely interwritten circle of characters in the Speech, the outer circle containing the basic parameters of the spell, knotted with the wizard’s knot, and the inside of the circle containing the variables.
As they sat there, the outer circle of the spell rotated up around them out of the horizontal, leaving a hemisphere of incandescent blue filigree overhead, in which various characters of the Speech sparked and glittered as the wizardry worked. For a few moments, as everything got more and more silent except Tom’s voice speaking in the Speech, they seemed to be sitting inside an elaborate blue-burning globe, a glowing wire frame. Then, without warning, the globe expanded outward in all directions, as if heading for infinity.
Where it passed, first stars flared into being, and then galaxies. Within a few breaths’ time, the kitchen table was at the heart of a viewpoint on the Local Group, the thirty-odd galaxies closest to Earth’s Milky Way spiral, which Tom had placed at the center of the view for reference purposes. Close by hovered the ragged irregular patches of starfire that were the Greater and Lesser Magellanic clouds; a little farther off, the great golden-tinged spiral of the Andromeda galaxy hung in its majesty, with the other associated galaxies scattered in various directions around it and the Milky Way. The imaging wizardry’s blue sphere shot out past the Local Group, sowing more and more galaxies and groups of galaxies in its wake, until it was as if the eight wizards—and the dining room table—were floating free in a near-infinite volume of space.
“So here’s the neighborhood,” Tom said. As he spoke, the utter blackness between the galaxies paled to a sky blue, and the light of the stars paled as well. “I’m lightening up the black of space a little, so you can see where our part of the trouble first started—”
He pointed off to one side. Faintly, in the depths of the space between the Andromeda galaxy and its neighbor, the smaller loosely coiled spiral in Triangulum, a dim patch of darkness started to grow in the blue. At first Kit wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but it became more and more distinct.
“We first spotted that dark patch about three years ago,” Tom said. “Back then it seemed as if it was just an anomaly, a dark-matter aggregate that was in the process of popping out and would stabilize after a while. Space is always springing little ‘surprises’ or accidents in interstellar structure that seal themselves up over time. Intervening too soon, or too energetically, can make them worse.”
“Like when you keep picking at something,” Kit said, “and it doesn’t heal.”
Carl chuckled.
“Something like that,” Tom said. “At any rate, the wizards over in Andromeda kept an eye on it. The dark-matter area grew, but not much, and not quickly. There came a point where it seemed to have stopped. But then another one appeared…”
They saw it fade in, very gradually, on the opposite side of the Local Group, over by the small irregular galaxy known on Earth as GR8. “And after that, the dark-matter aggregates started appearing more quickly,” Tom said. “In rapid succession, over the past couple of years, concentrations of dark matter appeared near 30 Doradus and M32.”
The dark splotches were spreading fast, popping up seemingly randomly in every direction. “It’s getting closer,” Nita said. “There’s one right by the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. That’s really close; just next door, almost.”
Kit didn’t know the names or locations of the galaxies as well as Nita did: the fine details of astronomy were her department. But right now what troubled him most was the rate at which the darkness seemed to be spreading. “Did you just speed up the simulation?” he said to Tom.
Tom shook his head. “No, the spread began accelerating last year,” he said. “That was when the Powers That Be first asked wizards to start doing local interventions.” He let out a breath. “The early wizardries, which were large-group workings like the one we just came back from, seemed at first to work. The aggregates of dark matter froze, even began to retreat in a few cases. As you see here—”
The assembled wizards watched the twilight-colored virtual space between galaxies and groups of galaxies continue to undergo a bizarre and splotchy nightfall. After a few moments, the darkness grew no darker, but there was still too much of it. And to Kit, the galaxies burning in the simulation-wizardry began to look small and threatened.
“That’s how the situation stood until a few days ago,” Tom said. “That spot over there”—he pointed at one side of the simulation, and the view of that area leaped closer—”that’s where Carl and I were last week. Two thousand Seniors and Planetary-Supervisory Wizards from all over our own galaxy, along with groups from Andromeda, the Sagittarius and Canis Major Dwarfs—we went there to reverse the effect in that one spot. We defined a local control structure, a temporary ‘kernel’ for that part of space, and operated on it to force the dark matter back out of our space.”
“And the intervention did not work,” Roshaun said softly.
“No,” Tom said. “Instead, this happened.”
The darkness began to spread again—and this time, much faster.
“It was as if someone was waiting to see whether we’d be able to pull it off,” Carl said. “When it was plain that we couldn’t, the expansion took off again at twice the speed. And this is what the projected result looks like.”
Kit looked up into what was left of the blue of intergalactic space as the simulation ran. In a frighteningly short time, the blue was all gone. Then, the blackness began to intrude among the stars of the galaxies themselves. Their stars pushed apart; the galaxies started to lose shape.
“But how can it be happening so fast?” Kit said. “That has to be a lot faster than the speed of light. Matter can’t go that fast in space.”
Nita was shaking her head. “But space can,” she said. “Sit an ant on a balloon and blow up the balloon really fast, and the ant winds up moving a lot faster than it could ever move by itself. If something’s stretching space out of its usual shape, then everything inside space—matter and light and gravity and time—gets distorted, too.”
“And that’s where the real trouble starts,” Carl said. “Physical law is fairly robust, but wizardry is more delicate and subtle. The way this expansion undermines what we do is very simple … very nasty.”
“When you do a spell,” Tom said, “you have to accurately describe what you’re working on in the Speech, or you risk destroying it. And to accurately describe anything, you have to know, and describe, not only what it is, but where it is. Now, your manual normally helps you factor in the adjustments you need for the way things in your location are moving: your planet’s rotation, its orbit around the Sun, and so on. But if all of a sudden, because of this expansion, things are moving unpredictably in directions or speeds they shouldn’t be—”
“Then your wizardry doesn’t work a
t all,” Kit said. “Or else starts to and then breaks down.”
The thought gave him the shivers. There were so many ways that a failed wizardry could be deadly that he hated to give it much more thought. And what’s worse, Kit thought, is that up until now, the one thing you could always count on was that a spell always worked. If all of a sudden it doesn’t…
“That would be bad enough,” Tom said, “but matters get even worse. The changes in the structure of space then start affecting the thought processes and reactions of all living beings in the area. Their behavior will start to become less and less rational… less committed to Life. This is the point where a wizard whose power levels are below a certain level starts losing the ability to speak or understand the Speech … because you stop believing that you can. Soon you stop believing in the Speech.”
Kit gulped at the awful thought.
“‘Wizardry will not live in the unwilling heart,’” Sker’ret said, quoting one of the most basic tenets of the Art.
“Yes,” Tom said. “And nonwizards will suffer, too. Matters of the heart and spirit will be valued less and less. Shortly only physical things will seem real to people. And when that happens—because most humans will still remember that, once, the heart and the spirit did matter—they’ll get scared and angry. Eventually anger and violence will be the only things that seem to work the way they used to, the only things left that make people feel alive.”
Kit shivered, looking over at Nita. She glanced at him, a sidewise, nervous look.
“Why do I get this feeling,” Nita said, “that on a planet with nuclear weapons, we’ll probably blow ourselves up a long time before light and gravity start to malfunction?”
“Not that the rest of the known universe won’t be just a little way behind us,” Kit said.
Carl cleared his throat. “Exactly.”
They all sat there in silence for a few moments. Then, after a moment—”If that’s all,” Filif said, sounding a little forlorn, “please, may we have the daylight back again?”