She laughed. The sound was somewhat bitter. “Yes,” she said, “for all the good it’s doing at the moment.”
It surprised Rho how this response unnerved him. He was equally surprised to discover how little time it had taken him to make the jump from seeing this being as an alien to seeing her as a young woman, maybe fifty or sixty sunrounds old, truly only a little older than he. But all by herself here, Rho thought. Upset and alone—
“I am on errantry,” Rho said, “and while I cannot go into the particulars—” —because I don’t know what they are yet!— “if I can help you, I will. You said you were looking for someone?”
“Uh, yes. Her name is Mevseh. I guess she’s why I spoke to you up on the roof there. I’d thought she might have gone up there herself and—” Avseh looked fairly embarrassed, if Rho was judging her expression correctly. “It’s just—Mev kept looking at the sky like that when we were leaving home. Like she couldn’t really believe what was going on.” She looked bitter, now. “And who could blame her—”
“Why? What was going on?”
She shook her head. “Um. True, it’s a big universe after all, but half the people from there are coming out through here—”
“I haven’t been here that often,” Rho said. “And I just got here myself. Very likely I missed the details of whatever’s been happening.”
“Well, it’s been in the news. Our star, it’s called Phaleron, it’s in the next arm over and it’s getting ready to flare. They think it might destroy all three of the inhabited worlds in the system if it can’t be stopped. For a while we thought our wizards could keep it from happening, but apparently they can’t.”
She paused and ran her hands through her hair, a distraught gesture that suddenly reminded Rho of his father. “And finally all the governments got together and told everybody to leave the planets as quickly as they can. There’s some kind of interstellar disaster plan that’s being implemented, but it’s just getting started and my family didn’t want to wait. Our mother’s in the government and she had warning of this months ago, so she started making plans. The week before the announcement was made there were already a lot of rumors going around that something bad was going to happen. The announcement of the crisis, our mother thought—which meant the gating systems would get incredibly choked up and we might get caught in it. Finally she said, ‘No point in waiting, we should get our things together and leave.’ And so we did. But there were complications…”
That bitter look again. Rho felt suddenly and terribly out of his depth. He was used to thinking of planetary disaster in broad strokes, because that was how his family had been dealing with it for centuries: vast swathes of infrastructure in need of rebuilding or repair, the replacement of whole atmospheres and ecosystems. But here was an aspect of such a disaster that was just as valid—one displaced person, all by herself and in pain. And Rho couldn’t even think of what to say to her. To even suggest that he could begin to share her sorrow seemed shallow and stupid.
“I wish I could help,” Rho said.
She looked at him out of that bitterness as if he’d said something completely unexpected. “That’s very good of you,” she said. “But I don’t know how you possibly could…”
Rho tilted his head in negation of the idea that there might be nothing he could do to help. But for the moment he was confused that he’d heard no mention of this flare event, even as a potential flare event, from his father.
But then why would he mention it to me? Rho thought, feeling his own bitterness in retrospect. Assuming he’d even heard of it. It is a big universe; stars flare all the time and this one, this Phaleron, is a long way away from us. …And anyway, why would he have said anything to me? What could I possibly have done to help?
But all that’s over now! And the urge to help was certainly there. This is why I’m out here, after all, so why not?
Rho reached out into the air and pinched his Aethyr into existence. Avseh flinched a little, eyes going wide in astonishment at the sight of it. “What, what’s that—”
“Wizardry,” Rho said. And despite his desperate attempt to restrain it, a small smile popped out. He tried to hide it right away, but it was too late.
Avseh didn’t notice: she was too busy staring at the little burning light in his hand. “Is that what it looks like? I thought it was supposed to be some kind of book you read out of, or— What does it, I mean how does it—”
“It tells me things,” Rho said. “Let’s see what it can tell me about this star of yours—”
Then he heard himself, and stopped, embarrassed. “Wait, I’m sorry, that’s all wrong,” Rho said. “The star can wait a few minutes more! Who were you looking for?”
“My clone,” Avseh said.
That made Rho blink a bit: he had heard of such folk but had never met one. “Your clone-group was traveling,” he said, “and one of you became separated from the others?”
“Yes,” she said. “It sounds so idiotic after the fact. There was an incredible crush of people when we came in, though, so many folk from our old world, heading to the new one. Normally we can feel one another a good distance away. The bond’s not just genetic: because we’re Archaint, and most Archaint are empaths or telepaths, there’s a mindlink as well. But we didn’t realize how in a place like this it gets drowned out… especially when it’s so much busier than usual. Too many different kinds of thought, too many different kinds of mind. Too much like looking for six other grains of sand on a beach. And we weren’t wearing mechanical locators, we never even thought of it, because when you can always feel where all the others are, who’d bother?…”
She sounded utterly wretched. Once again Rho wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. “I’ve heard it said that members of a clone may experience physical side effects if they become separated for too long—”
“The word you’re looking for is ‘die,’” Avseh said. “And if one member of the clone dies the bond between the others is weakened, and—”
Her voice was growing choked: she was seconds from weeping. “No,” Rho said.
Avseh looked at him in sudden confusion.
“There will be no dying,” Rho said. “I forbid it.”
Her look turned from despair to a kind of amused annoyance. “Oh really.”
“Yes, really,” Rho said, and scowled his best I-am-a-Prince-do-not-dare-argue-with-me scowl. “No more of that for a moment. I need to think.” He turned his attention back to the Aethyr. “Do you know your star’s name?”
“Didn’t I tell you? Phaleron.”
“That’s what you call it,” Rho said. “Do you know its name?”
Avseh stared at him in confusion. “What? No.”
Rho sighed. “Never mind… the identification will be positive enough with the system-primary name. Phaleron—”
The place in the back of his mind where the Aethyr displayed its images flurried with them. Rho let it get on with its sorting. “Once you find your clone-sister,” he said, “where will you and the rest of your clone go then?”
“We’re heading for a system a couple of lightyears away,” Avseh said. “There’s a planet there called Melesh; it’s another of the Archanin worlds. Our branch of the Archaint exordium has ‘right of return’ there because our planet was originally settled from there. Melesh has been suffering from net offplanet migration for centuries, and so they’re actually kind of glad to have people coming back. There’s plenty of room for us, the climate and the atmosphere are similar…” She hitched her shoulders up a little and down again, a gesture that Rho didn’t understand. A shrug, one of the Aethyr-voices whispered in his ear.
This is their star, whispered another of them.
It showed him Phaleron—another of those troublesome little yellow dwarfs that could have been Thahit’s twin. Across the floor of his mind spilled a network of graphs, mathematical equations, luminosity curves, statistics of every kind.
It was something of a stretch to analyze them quickly without having the stel
lar simulator to feed them into, but Rho could manage. Just from looking at the light curves for the past few tens of Phaleron-sunrounds he could see something about them that made him feel a bit queasy—a morbidity that he little liked the look of. Light bleeding away, irregularly, out-of-cycle… The look of it pained him. Cycle was everything for stars: the lack of it or derangement of it was never a good sign.
Then (in the statistics and the historical reports) came the first of several truly bad patches of weather, borderlining on the “bubblestorm” state in which the star repeatedly coughed great gouts and bubbles of plasma out across its system: always a sign of a star getting seriously sick in the regions beneath its heliopause. And the wizards in the worlds around Phaleron tried to intervene, but the interventions were too few, too ineffective and had been left too late to affect what was happening… the long-deferred bubblestorm, building inexorably toward a serious flare. No question but that it will seriously damage all three of those worlds, if not destroy them outright. A single day’s rotation for each world would be enough to scorch them bare.
“I don’t understand it,” Rho said, opening his eyes to find Avseh giving him a rather peculiar look. “Why didn’t they call in expert help?”
“They did, it didn’t work—”
His first thought at that was: Not expert enough by half. Speak immediately to the King, take his advice on this! But hard behind that idea came, not so much another idea, but a couple of feelings, quite intense ones: embarrassment paired with an intense unwillingness. He could just hear how the conversation would go. My son, wait, you’re a wizard? And you didn’t come straightway and tell us? Instead you ran away, ran off to—
Rho hastily clamped down on that line of reasoning before the guilt and frustration inherent in the scenario swamped him. Besides, I have the tools now. I can figure this out. I’m a wizard now and I don’t need help to manage this!
And the joy of it—the longer he examined the problem—was that this opinion wasn’t mere bluster: he really did not need help. Thahit had produced a very similar episode of deep-atmosphere pathology several hundred sunrounds before, and the Queen regnant at that time had dealt with it fairly quickly, leaving extensive notes after the fact. Rho had in fact re-enacted her solution and variants on it more than once in the simulator, with his father looking on, and had found it— Well, not a simple fix, he thought. But manageable.
As for the problem with this star, and that he should be here right now to deal with it, Rho was caught somewhere between delight and annoyance. The delight was easily expressed: It’s just as father and mother always said. There’s a question to which every wizard is the answer. And by the Aethyrs’ will I’ve been brought here to answer this one! And the annoyance was straightforward too. All the tales of Challenge I’ve heard have been so awful. Death and destruction, puzzles too hard to solve. Is this all I’m going to get?
“Still,” Rho muttered, “no point in complaining. Here’s this mess and someone needs to do something about it…”
Avseh was gazing at him in complete confusion. “Yes, but what…?”
“What I was sent to do,” Rho said. “I shall go to Phaleron and bring them the solution they need. But first of all I will handle a solution closer to home.” He looked at her drink. “Are you done with that?”
She glanced from the container, to Rho, to the container again. “Uh, I suppose so.”
He held out a hand. Avseh handed the drink container to him, watching while Rho wiped the rim of it where she had been drinking. Then he passed the Aethyr to those fingers and let it sit there briefly.
A few moments later Rho put the container down on the table and let the Aethyr wink out. “Come with me then,” he said, “for there’s someone we need to see.”
***
Some minutes later at the great central nest of blue metal tubing, the Stationmaster looked up from its endless data input and regarded Rho with numerous annoyed eyes. “You again,” it said, with a kind of amused disgust. “What in the worlds is it now?”
“This being requires your assistance,” said Rho.
“Every being in this place requires my assistance, it seems,” said the Stationmaster, the disgust growing more pronounced. “There are days when I really wonder what we’re paying the help for.”
Avseh looked uncomfortable, but this answer left Rho feeling somewhat cheered. He was more than familiar with this kind of cranky-functionary response from years of interchanges with Sunplace’s most ancient retainers, and he knew from parental example exactly how to deal with it. “Doubtless you do,” he said. “No matter. Attend me. You naturally do covert genetic-material detection on all creatures entering this facility—“
Some of the eyes trained on Rho acquired an unusually sharp-edged look. “We never discuss ongoing security operations,” the Master said.
“That’s well, for I have neither time nor desire to enter into such a discussion. By Wizard’s Right I require access to your system for a few programming microcycles, no more.”
Once again all those eyes were staring at him, and this time it wasn’t a look of lazy dismissal: it was serious annoyance. “For what purpose?”
“Genetic material tracking,” said Rho. “Somewhere in the facility is a member of this being’s clone-family. They have become separated and have no mechanical aid to assist them in relocation. Their genetic identity data will be near-identical within a vanishingly tiny tolerance, and its location will therefore involve no invasion on other travelers’ privacy.”
“You can get at the data from inside your instrumentality, surely,” said the Master.
“Not the genetic-material data,” Rho said. “Rightly, that is protected. I therefore require your assistance under the Right. There is certainly an unlock code…”
He extended the Aethyr toward the Stationmaster. It angled several eyes toward it, and then cautiously extended a claw into the brilliance.
Rho felt the information he needed snug into the Aethyr and run like wildfire down the lines of the little wizardry he had laid out ready inside it. “Thank you,” he said. “Obviously this data will be deleted immediately after use.”
“As if I won’t be changing that password a millisecond later,” said the Stationmaster.
“Of course you will,” Rho said. He paused a moment, watching absently as the inner data processing functions of the Aethyr riffled through the entirety of the Crossings’ genetic identification data. There was so much of this that it actually took several seconds before there was a result.
He watched with utter satisfaction as, one after another, six lights flickered into being on a map of the Crossings that the Aethyr was building in the back of his mind. Four lights together: one light at a considerable distance, right across the huge facility, over by the entrance to one of the methane-breathers’ food halls: and a sixth one right by the single orange-golden light that marked Rho’s spot at the Stationmaster’s office.
“Now, worthy being, I have coordinates for you,” Rho said, and read them off. “If you would be so kind as to program a convenient hex?”
“In the 200’s again,” said the Stationmaster, claws tapping away once more at its seemingly blank metallic input pad.
“Wait,” Avseh said, breathless. “What are you—do you mean that—”
“She’s a long way across the facility,” Rho said, “but you’ll be with her in a minute. Stay out of the methane, it almost certainly smells dreadful and will do you no good. After that, noble Stationmaster, once they’re together again, if you would kindly transfer them to this location—” He read off the second string of numbers.
“Do I look like a gate podium attendant to you?” the Stationmaster muttered. “I need to have that looked into. Please Gods it’s not infectious.”
“I must go,” Rho said to Avseh. “But go on: go to your clone-sister, and rejoin your family, and tell them all the Aethyrs greet them by me.”
Shocked, astonished, Avseh stared at Rho—then
threw her arms around him and squeezed him very tight. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you!”
And without a word more she took off at a run toward the 200 hexes.
Rho watched her go, fascinated, happy for her, glad to have been able to help. But that star is waiting! And there’s what I’ve been sent to do—
“Is there anything else I can do for you in my incredibly ample free time?” the Stationmaster said.
“I could use a gating to these coordinates,” Rho said, and began to read.
The Stationmaster snarled something in Rirhait that even knowledge of the Speech seemed incapable of rendering, and tapped at its input pad even faster.
Three
So it was (he felt quite sure the songs would someday say) that Prince Roshaun ke Nelaid-and-all-the-rest-of-it went forth upon his Challenge-day to heal the sick star Phaleron—
At least that was how it should have gone. Typically, though, the business turned out to be not quite so straightforward.
Even wizardry has its bureaucracies… its etiquettes of cooperation, and its best-practice standards for various levels of wizardly intervention, with and without supervision. Rho knew—having been told so in no uncertain terms by his father—that to merely arrive on a planet and announce “I’m here to save your world” is seen, at best, as a touch gauche, and at worst as quite egotistical. Wizardry has reasons for its structures and its channels, and wise wizards observe them if they want to get anything done.
So before leaving the Crossings Rho spent a short time with his Aethyr determining exactly to whom he needed to make his case, and where they were. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the system’s most senior and most gifted wizards and all those who had any experience at all with stars had been for weeks in practically nonstop conference sessions sited on the most distant of their three worlds, working out what to do to keep Phaleron from flaring until the planetary populations could be evacuated. So to that meeting Rho immediately made his way.
The people of Phaleron’s three planets were, like Avseh’s people, of Archaint-hominid descent, and (like many of them) empathic telepaths. This meant that under present circumstances, being around them when they were in such distress was, well, distressing. Though Wellakhit had something of a reputation for being mind-deaf, Rho nonetheless felt a headache coming on as he made his way through a large ornate room sited at the heart of a government building in one of the planetary capitals.