“Yeah.” Nita held out her manual a bit as she went through it, so that her mother and father could look over her shoulder. “See, Mom? Dad? It’s just an instruction manual, like I said.”
“I can’t read it,” her father said, staring at the graceful strokes of the written form of the Speech. “What is it, Arabic?”
“No,” she said. “Kind of looks like it, doesn’t it? But it’s not an Earthly language. Not strictly Earthly, anyway. A lot of the forces we work with don’t have names in any language on Earth—or they only have vague ones. You can’t be vague about magic.”
“Good way to get killed,” Kit said from where he knelt in the sand, scribbling with a stick and sounding cheerful. “Mr. Callahan, Mrs. Callahan, don’t step on any of these things I’m writing in the sand, or we’ll all be in big trouble. Mrs. Callahan, what’s your birthday?”
“April twenty-eighth,” said Nita’s mother, staring at the pale fire that was following Kit’s stick-scratchings, embedding itself in the sand around them.
“Mr. Callahan?”
“July seventh,” said Nita’s father. He gave the spell diagram in process a glance, but more of his attention was on Nita’s manual, watching the content on the open pages change and shift, displaying a small copy of the larger diagram in construction.
“Neets, how big a circle?”
“Half a second,” Nita said. “Brighter,” she said to her manual, for the moonlight wasn’t really enough to work with. The manual’s pages began to glow softly in the dark. “Okay, here we are. Four of us… about a cubic foot of air for each breath. Allow for excitement—say thirty breaths a minute. Times four...” She turned to another page. “Start,” she said, and heard over her shoulder her mother’s quick intake of breath as the page Nita had opened to abruptly went blank. “One two zero times four….” A set of characters appeared. “Okay, four eight zero times twenty… Fine. Nine six zero zero divided by three… Great. Cubic meters… Oh crap.” She just couldn’t think of what she needed next. Too much stress. “Kit, what’s the volume of a cylinder again?”
“V equals pi times r squared times the height.” He gave her a look. “Why don’t you have this stored as a macro?”
“I really wish I had an answer to that. Never mind…” Nita chewed her lip a little, thinking. “Okay,” she said to the manual, “three point one four one seven times, uh, three zero.” A figure flickered at her. “No, that was not a null, don’t get cute with me! Times three zero, right? Okay. Three two zero zero divided by nine four point two five one. Now take the square root.” The page finished doing the math, showed her the final result, while her dad stared. “Great. Kit? Thirty-six feet wide.”
“Got it,” Kit said. “Mrs. Callahan, would you hold the end of this string, please? And whatever happens, don’t go near the edge of the circle after I close it.” He started to walk around them all, using Nita’s mom and the long knotted string as a compass. “Neets? Come check your name. And theirs; they can’t do it—”
She stepped carefully over to the Speech-characters describing herself and her parents and looked them over, making sure they were correct, then glanced over Kit’s too for safety’s sake. Everything was in order. Kit finished the circle he was making in the sand, closed it with the figure-eight version of the terminator construction called a wizard’s knot, and stood up. “All set,” Nita said.
“Then let’s go.” He opened his book; Nita went looking for the page in hers on which the spell was written. “It’s a ‘read’ spell,” Nita said to her mother and father. “That means it’s going to be a few moments before it takes. Don’t say anything, no matter what you feel or see or hear. Don’t move, either.”
“You might want to hang on to each other,” Kit said. Nita gave him a wry grin; there had been occasions in the past when the two of them, terrified out of their wits, had done just that. “Ready?”
“Go ahead,” said Nita’s father, and reached out and pulled Nita’s mother close.
Nita and Kit looked at each other and began slowly to read out loud. The strange, listening stillness of a working spell began to settle in around the four of them, becoming more pronounced with every word of the Speech, as the Universe in that area waited to hear what would be required of it. The wind dropped, the sound of the surf grew softer, even the breakers in the area became gentler, flatter, their hiss fading to a bare whisper…
The sense of expectation, of anticipation, of impatient, overwhelming potential grew all around them as the silence grew… slowly undergoing a transformation into a blend of delight and terror and power that could be breathed like air, or seen as a shading now inhabiting every color, a presence inhabiting every shape.
Nita raised her voice into the stillness unafraid, speaking the words of the spell formula, barely needing to look at her book. The magic was rising in her, pouring through her with dangerous power. But with the sureness of practice she rode the danger, knowing the wonder to which it would bring her, reveling in her defiance of her fear. And in more than that: for Kit was across the circle from her, eyes on hers, matching her word for word and power for power—peer and friend and fellow-wizard, as scared as she was in his own way, but still willing to dare, for the delight of what lay on the other side of the magic—
Almost through, Nita thought, exulting. Her words and Kit’s wound about one another, wove together, binding the spell tighter around the circle—squeezing air in, squeezing power in, pushing inward with such force that the circle and its contents had no choice but to be somewhere else than they were.
Almost there— Nita matched her words to Kit’s with a laugh in her voice, rushing him, finding that she couldn’t rush him because he had already matched pace to keep up with her. She laughed at being anticipated so. Faster and faster they went, like two kids seeing who could recite some poem faster. All around them the silence began to sing with inturned power, the air shimmered and rang with force like a gong ringing backward, soft at first, then louder, though without sound, without breaking that silence—a hiss, a murmur, an outcry of something about to happen, a shout of inner voices, a silent thunderclap. And the last not-sound, so loud it unmade the world around them and struck them deaf and blind—
Then true silence again, with darkness above and whiteness below—but not the same darkness or whiteness as on the beach.
“We’re here,” Nita whispered. “Mom, Dad, have a look around. Don’t go near the edges of the circle.”
“Be careful how you move,” Kit said. “You only weigh a sixth of what you usually do. If your muscles overreact you could bounce right out of the circle. I almost did, first time.”
Nita watched her mother and father stare around them. She swallowed—partly out of reflex, for her ears were ringing in the silence that surrounded them now. That was to be expected; this stillness was more total than anything experienced on Earth. Her other reason for swallowing was more practical. The sudden transfer to one-sixth gravity tended to upset your stomach unless you were used to it.
Her father was staring at the ground, which had changed from wet beach sand to a mixture of grayish gravel and pebbles, and rocks the size of fists or melons, all covered with a gray-white dust as fine as talc. But Nita’s mother was staring up at the sky with a look of joy so great it was pain—the completely bearable anguish of an impossible dream that suddenly comes true after years of hopeless yearning. Tears were running down her mother’s face at the sight of that sky, so pure a velvet black that the eye insisted on finding light in it where light was not—a night sky set with thousands of stars, all blazing with a cold fierce brilliance that only astronauts ever saw; a night sky that nonetheless had a ravening sun standing noonday high in it, pooling all their shadows black and razor-sharp about their feet.
Nita was blinking hard herself to manage the stinging of her eyes; she knew how her mother felt. “Over there, Mom,” she said very quietly. “Off to the left. Look.”
“Off to the left” was a steep slope tha
t plunged down and down to a deep chasm, filled with absolute blackness ungentled by the presence of air. On the far side of the chasm stretched a flat, rocky plain that seemed to stop too soon, running up against a horizon abnormally close. Out on the plain, not too far away, a dazzling squarish glow of gold sat on four spidery legs. Some thirty yards from the bright platform on legs stood a silvery pole with an American flag standing out from it, held straight by a rod running through the top of it: a necessity—for here where it stood, no wind would ever stir it.
“No,” Nita’s father said, his voice hushed. “Impossible. Tranquillity Base—”
“No,” Kit said, his voice soft too. “That’s going to be a tourist attraction some day, when they build the Hilton there—so we don’t go down there. Nobody wants to disturb the original footprints. This is from Apollo 16. See over there?” He pointed past the abandoned first-stage platform of the LEM Orion at the first Lunar Rover, which sat parked neatly beside a boulder—a delicate-looking little dune buggy, still in excellent condition, used only once by a couple of astronauts from Pasadena for jaunts to Stone Mountain, on which the four of them stood.
Nita’s father slowly went down on one knee and brushed his hand along the dry, pale lunar soil, turning over the stones that lay there, then picking one up and clutching it hard in his fist.
“Harry,” Nita’s mother said, still looking up. The tone of her voice made her husband look up too—and seeing what she saw, he forgot the rock.
What they saw was part of a disk four times the size of the Moon as seen from the Earth; and it seemed even bigger because of the Moon’s foreshortened horizon. It was not the full Earth so familiar from pictures, but just a slim crescent, streaked with cloud swirls and burning with a fierce green-blue radiance—a light with depth, like the fire held in the heart of an opal. That light banished the idea that blue and green were “cool” colors; it seemed hot enough for one to warm one’s hands at it. The blackness to which it shaded was ever so faintly touched with silver—a disk more hinted at than seen; the new Earth in the old Earth’s arms. Across that darkness, pale golden city lights traced out the shapes of North and South America. But at this distance the planet and everything on it looked small and somehow fragile.
“There’ll be a time,” Nita said softly, “when any time someone’s elected to a public office—before they let them start work—they’ll bring whoever was elected up here and just make them look at that until they get what it means...”
Kit nodded. “You wanted to know where the power came from,” he said to Nita’s mother and father. “The grownups who’re wizards tell us that whatever made that made the power too. It’s all of a piece.”
“The grownups who’re wizards?”
“And as for ‘why,’ ” Kit said, “that’s why.” There was no need for him to point to “that.” “Not just for the—for what you felt on the way in. That’s part of it. But because somebody’s got to take care of that. Not just part of it—not just one country, or one set of rules, or one species, at the expense of the others. But everything that lives, all the kinds of ‘people.’ All of it, with nothing left out. One whole planet. Somebody’s got to make sure it grows as well as it can. Or just survives. That’s what wizards do.”
“Daddy,” Nita said, “it’s like you always say. If you don’t do it yourself, it may not get done right. And we can’t afford to let that get screwed up. We have to live there. So will other people, later.”
Her father shook his head, confused. “Nita,” he said, sounding unsure, “you’re too young to be thinking about this kind of thing.”
She bit her lip. “Dad—that sort of thinking might be one of the reasons why everything’s so messed up down there.”
“Neets,” Kit said. “Time to get back. We’re losing heat pretty fast.”
“Mom, Dad,” Nita said, “we can come back some other time.” It was out of her mouth before she even realized what she was saying: and then it was too late to say If I survive… which isn’t likely. And what would be the point? “It’s late, and Kit and I have an early day tomorrow. Got the rock?” she said to Kit.
“Uh-huh. Ready?”
Nita’s mother reached out and pulled her husband close this time. “Is it going to be like it was before?”
“Huh? No. It just takes a lot of effort to push all this air up out of Earth’s gravity well,. You have to reach escape velocity—”
Nita’s father blinked. “Wait a minute. I thought this was—magic.” He said the word as if for the first time in his life.
Nita shrugged. “Even with magic, you have to obey the rules. Downhill’s easier than uphill in wizardry, same as anywhere else. Kit?”
“Ready,” he said. They looked at each other, took a breath, and said one short word in unison.
WHAM!—and air and sand and water blew outward in all directions as they left noon for midnight, standing once again on the long dark beach silvered with moonlight. Kit stepped to the edge of the circle, first scuffing the wizard’s knot out of existence, then going around and breaking the circle once at each compass, and finally scrubbing out the spell diagram proper. “Let’s go in,” Nita said to her parents.
The four of them trudged up the stairs to the front door, back into the living room. Her dad plopped down onto the couch and said, “Nita, wait just a few minutes. I have to ask you something.”
Nita looked at him, sighed, and did as she was told. “Tell me again,” her dad said, “this stuff about what you’re doing underwater. Just very briefly.”
It turned out to be more than briefly, since much of what Nita had told her parents had fallen out of their heads the first time, discarded in shock and disbelief. With growing dismay Nita watched the unease build up again in her parents’ facesas she told them again about the undersea tremors, the pollution of the water, the slaughter of the whales—and the purposes of the Lone Power, though she tried to keep the detail about that to a minimum.
“Nita,” her father said at last, “what are the chances that you could get hurt doing this ‘Song’ business? The truth.”
She looked at him unhappily. “Pretty good,” she said.
“And the same for Kit?” her mother said.
“Just about,” Kit said.
Nita’s father shook his head. “Nita. Look. I understand… no. I sort of understand how you and Kit feel about this. Magic...” He raised his hands, dropped them again, in a helpless gesture. “If someone offered me the chance to be a magician, I’d jump at it...”
“A wizard,” Nita said. And, No, you wouldn’t, she thought. Because if you would have, really, you’d have been offered it! There are never enough wizards.
But her father was still talking. “But this business. Endangering yourself, or endangering Kit— Your mother and I can’t permit it. You’re going to have to bow out.”
For just a moment, as far as Nita was concerned, everything faded out, drowned in a great wash of relief and hope. The perfect excuse. Perfect. My mom and dad won’t let me. Sorry, S’reee, Hotshot, Ed…
Opaque black eyes looked at Nita out of the scene her eager mind was already constructing for her—and hope died. The hair stood up all over Nita—not from fear, but from something more terrible. Without any warning, and for the first time, she understood in her own person what had only been a word to her before: honor. I can’t, she thought. For me—for me—it’s not right.
“Dad,” she said unhappily, “you didn’t get it. I’m sworn to the Song. If I back out now, the whole thing will be sabotaged.”
Her father got up, a sign that he intended this argument to be over shortly. “Come on, Neets. Surely someone else could do it—”
“No.”
“Nita,” said her mother, looking stern, “you don’t understand. We’re not letting you do this. Or Kit either, while he’s under our roof. You’re going to have to find a replacement. Or the—the whales will. Whoever. You’re not going.”
I must not have said it right, they
’re not understanding! “Mom—” Nita said, searching frantically for words. “This isn’t just some cute thing that Kit and I are doing because it’s fun! If we don’t stop the forces that are beginning to move, there are going to be massive earthquakes all up and down the East Coast. That’s not a maybe. It’s a will! You think the Island would survive something like that? The whole place is nothing but rocks and trash the glaciers dumped in the ocean; it’ll break up and wash away like a sandcastle at high tide! And what about Manhattan? It’s got four unstable geological faults of its own, right through the bedrock! And none of the buildings there are earthquake-proof. One quake’ll leave the place looking like somebody kicked over a pile of blocks!” Nita was waving her arms in the air now, so upset that she was beyond caring whether she looked silly or not. “Millions of people could die—”
“Could,” her father said, seizing on the word. He was pacing now.
Kit shook his head. “Will,” he said. There was such a weight of certainty and misery on the word that Nita’s father stopped pacing, and her mother closed her mouth, and they both stared at Kit in amazement.
“You’re saying,” Kit said, gazing at them out of eyes suddenly gone dark and fierce, “that you don’t care whether ten million people, more than ten million people, would die, just so long as we two don’t get hurt.”
Nita’s mother spluttered, to Nita’s great satisfaction. That one had sunk in. “No, we aren’t, we just—”
“You don’t even care that ten million people might die,” Nita said. “Just so Kit and I are okay, you’re willing to run that risk.”
“No, I—” Nita’s father saw what was being done to him. “Young lady, no more out of you! Just the quakes going on off the coast now, by the reports we’ve heard, are too dangerous for you to be down there.”
“Daddy, believe me, we’ve survived a lot worse!”
“Yes—and your mother and I didn’t know about it then! Now we do.” Her father turned away. “The answer is no, and that’s final!”