Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition (30 page)

Completely astounded, Dairine shut up.

“I
wondered
why the thing pained me to look at it,” Roshaun said. “It’s getting ready to bubblestorm. Your Sun’s got to be fixed before it goes into a catastrophic flare cycle—”

“Are you crazy? You can’t just run off and fix the Sun! We don’t even know if it’s
broken
or not!”

“
I
do,” Roshaun said. “It’s broken. And if somebody doesn’t fix it right away—”

“This kind of thing happens all the time here. This is normal!”

“This is not normal,”
Roshaun said angrily. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. This kind of behavior is very, very abnormal in a star of this class, and it has to be dealt with before it starts to accelerate toward a crisis process that can no longer be stopped!”

Her father appeared in the kitchen again. “I assume,” he said softly, “that someone is going to get a grip on himself or herself and explain all this shouting to me?”

“Roshaun thinks the Sun is broken,” Dairine said. “And he wants to go fix it. Which he is not going to do, because you’ve got to get permission from at least a Galactic regional-level wizard if you’re going to screw around with a system’s primary!”

“I don’t care. Unless something is done—”

Dairine had awful visions of Roshaun going off and doing something on the sly, and messing Sol up past all repair. “Look,” she said, “we really need to at least talk to Tom and Carl about this before you go off and start playing around with my star.
My
star, not yours, right? Thank you.” She grabbed the cordless phone out of its cradle, picked it up, dialed.

“Hi there,” said Tom’s voice.

“Tom? It’s Dairine. Listen, I—”

“—know the drill. Leave a name and number and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks.”
Beep!

Dairine swallowed. “Tom, it’s Dairine. I need to talk to you right away. I’ll get you via Spot. Bye.” She hung up.
Where
are
they?
she thought. She’d never called Tom and Carl’s house before and failed to get one or the other of them, except when they were on vacation, and they always warned everybody about that first. “Spot?”

Yes?

“Message both Tom and Carl right away. Flag it emergency and high-urgent. I need to talk to them right now.”

Spot sat silent for a moment. Then he said,
The message has been bounced.

“What??”

The bounce message says, “Subjects are on assignment, unavailable.
”

Oh no,
Dairine thought.
Oh no. What does
that
mean?
She sat there and stared into space for a moment.
It may be nothing,
she thought.
There may be all kinds of times they go off on assignment together and I don’t know anything about it. It’s not like Nita or Kit or I call them every five minutes to see where they are.

But the cold feeling at the bottom of Dairine’s gut told her that this was
not
just nothing. She remembered something Tom had said once, when Dairine’s dad had asked him why he wasn’t off the planet more: “Harry, would you normally open the door and get out of a car you were driving?” Only most unusual circumstances took Advisories and Seniors off their posts without warning…

“They’re not there, are they?” her dad said.

“No.”

Roshaun was looking at her in increasing anger. “We’re just going to have to do something, then.”

“No we are
not,”
Dairine said. “We are going up to at least planetary level on this one.” She turned back to Spot and began firing off messages in all directions.

But there was no response. It wasn’t as if the Planetary Wizard for Earth wouldn’t talk to her; wizards at even that level were remarkably accessible to their colleagues. But again and again Spot simply said,
Subjects are on assignment, unavailable.

“What can I do to help?” her dad said.

“Daddy… ” Dairine shook her head. “Nothing right now. Go on… I’ll let you know what happens.”

Silently, her dad kissed her, and went.

An hour later, Dairine was still sitting in the dining room, in shock, realizing that no one in the upper wizardly structure was available at all.
Good lord,
she thought,
where is everybody? Who’s minding the planet?!

And, horrified, she knew the answer, at least for the moment.
We are…

Dairine’s first urge was to go off and physically look for somebody in the echelons above the Planetary level. But she couldn’t. The limitations that Tom had put on her ability to use wizardry for transit were still in place, whether he was here or not. She was limited to Sol System, and couldn’t even get around the prohibition by going elsewhere on the planet and using a fixed gate. All of the worldgates had monitoring wizardries built into them that would recognize Dairine’s banned status and refuse her access.

Roshaun was looking at her from where he’d sat down across the table. All the time Dairine had been trying to find someone higher up the wizardly command structure, he had simply sat there, not saying a word, watching her. It was perhaps the longest time she’d ever seen him be quiet. Now he said, “You’re wasting time.”

She looked at him with profound misgivings. There was no arguing that he was an expert of sorts in this business; it was his specialty as a wizard. Even Spot’s manual functions confirmed that. But—

“You don’t trust me,” Roshaun said.

“Not as far as I could throw you,” Dairine said.

“And why not?” Roshaun said. “Because I’m not like you? Maybe not. But I am still a wizard. The Powers That Be trust me, if you don’t.”

“And why?” Dairine said. “That’s what I want to know! You are the least wizardlike wizard I’ve ever met! You don’t even
use
wizardry if you can help it! You’re a whole lot more interested in being a prince than in being a wizard, the way it looks to me! But the rules say that wizardry can’t live long in the unwilling heart. How long do you think you’re likely to
be
one of us if you keep acting the way you do? How long is it going to be before the act becomes the reality?”

He stared at her, and it took Dairine several breaths to realize how stricken, and then furious, the look in his eyes was becoming.

“That’s it,” he said, and stood up. “That’s it. I’m off home. I’m weary of your arrogance, and your bad manners, and your mistrust, and your—”

Dairine jumped up, too. “You’re weary of
my
arrogance? Why, you stuck-up, self-centered, self-important—”

“—don’t have to explain myself to the likes of
you,
you parochial, controlling little—”

“—always so sure you’re right, then go ahead, go home and be right there, where all your people are so busy bowing and scraping to you that none of them has the nerve to confront you when you’re—”

Suddenly Dairine’s face was full of greenery, and a number of berries were looking at her from very, very close, in a chilly, annoyed sort of way.

You should stop this now,
Filif said. Filif’s silent speech was forceful. It was like running suddenly into a tree. Across from her, beyond the greenery, she could tell that Roshaun was feeling the same impact.
You are frightened,
Filif said to Dairine.
It’s clouding your thinking. Sit down and be quiet until you’ve managed the fear.

Dairine sat down, hard, as if she’d been pushed.
Maybe I was,
she thought, somewhat dazed. She wasn’t quite sure if Filif hadn’t given her muscles a hint.

And you’re frightened, too,
Filif said to Roshaun.
And it’s making you angry because you feel powerless. Sit down and be quiet until you find your power again.

Roshaun sat down as hard as Dairine had. She watched this with both confusion and satisfaction, but at the bottom of it was a kind of scared awe. She had been fooled by Filif’s diffident manner, and had been treating him as a bush in a baseball cap, someone faintly funny. She’d had no idea there was such raw power underneath.

For some few moments there wasn’t any sound but both Dairine and Roshaun breathing hard. Eventually this sound, too, started to slow. When it did, Filif said,
So. What does one do about a problem like this?

“There are a number of possible solutions that would cure this problem permanently,” Roshaun said. “Most of them need a lot of time for assessments, though, to tailor the wizardry to the star. Months. And I doubt we have so much time to spare right now. There are quicker interventions, though, effective at least in the short term. They buy you time to enact the more complex solutions.”

“What is the best intervention for this problem, then?

Roshaun took a long breath. “Bleeding the star.”

“What?” Dairine said.

“Bleeding the star. You remove a small percentage of its mass.”

“Remove
it? To where?”

“Anywhere you like, but the matter must be completely removed from the star’s corpus. —Don’t look at me like that: of
course
it’s dangerous! Bleed off too much mass, and fusion in the star fails. Bleed off too little, and the intervention merely makes the star’s core go critical sooner.”

“Its core—” Dairine broke out in a sweat. “It’s not going to go nova, is it?”

“Of course not. It’s entirely the wrong sort of star for that. But there are worse things.”

“Worse than the Sun going nova?!”

Roshaun gave her a bleak look. For a moment he didn’t speak. “How would you like it,” he said at last, “if your star flared up just enough to roast one side of your world? That happened to our planet once. I’d have thought you’d noticed. Or maybe you didn’t read the orientation package. It’s right there on the first page of the historical material—”

Dairine flushed hot. She was a fast reader, sometimes too fast. She’d missed it, and now felt profoundly stupid.

“My great-great-ancestors were a family of wizards, back then,” Roshaun said. “In their time, our star flared without warning. The land on that side of Wellakh was blasted to slag and lava; the seas on that side boiled off. The air on that side all burned away. The wizards of the world had just enough time between the flare and its wavefront’s arrival to isolate the spaceward side of Wellakh from the worst effects of the flare, and to keep the planet’s ecology from being completely destroyed in the terrible winds and floods and fires that followed. But only
just
enough. It was very close, and almost all of the wizards died from giving all of their power to keep the world and its people alive. Then, after that, it took centuries of suffering and rebuilding for our world to recover. Half a world’s atmosphere to restore, temperature differentials to even out, a shattered ecosystem to rebuild… The quick obliteration that a nova would have brought would have seemed to some merciful by comparison.”

Dairine swallowed. “But afterward,” Roshaun said, “my ancestors, wizards and nonwizards both, spent generations learning how the sun behaved, finding out how to cure it. And they
did
cure it, finally, though again, almost all of my line’s wizards died in the cure. Why do you think my family are kings now? They gave their lives to save the world, to make sure it would never need to be saved again from death by fire. So that in any generation where a wizard is born into the royal family again, everyone looks at them and says, ‘See, there’s the son of the Sun Lord, the Guarantor, there’s the one who’ll give his life to protect us… ’”

Without particularly asking what
you
had in mind to do with your life besides that,
Dairine thought, hearing Roshaun’s voice go rough with abrupt pain. And she found herself thinking of the view from the balcony of Roshaun’s family’s palace, right across that very flat, strangely featureless landscape… right in the middle of the sealess, mountainless, melted-down side of the world.
Who built that there to make sure that the “Sun Kings” never forgot what they were there for?
Dairine thought.
As if to say, “We’ll give them everything they want… but when the bad day comes again, they’d better deliver!”

She sat there in silence, feeling shock and shame in nearly equal parts.

Roshaun’s bleak look was turned more inward now, and he seemed not to register Dairine looking at him. Finally, he did glance over at her once more, and something of the old cool distance was back in his eyes. But now Dairine knew it was a mask, and she also knew what lay under it.

“I’m an idiot,” Dairine said.

Roshaun simply looked at her. So did Spot.

She looked down at him. “Yes, I am,” Dairine said. “This is no time for misguided loyalty. We’ve got to do something.” She looked back over at Roshaun. “But we still have to get permission.” She glanced back to Spot. “Any luck finding the Planetary Wizard yet?”

No.

Dairine covered her face with her hands. “Great. We can’t do this, we
can’t,
without making sure that no one else is—”

I do have an authorization, though,
Spot said.

Dairine looked up, surprised. “What? From where?”

Spot popped his lid up and showed her. In the Speech, very small, Dairine saw the characters that spelled out the words “Approved. Go.” Following those was a shorthand version of a wizardly name, but even the shorthand version was very long, and the power rating appended to it was so high that Dairine looked at it several times to make sure she wasn’t just misplacing a decimal point.

“This is a Galactic Arm coordinator’s ID,” Dairine said softly. It made her feel no better in terms of an answer to the question of where Earth’s wizardly command structure had gone all of a sudden. But at least she knew now that she wouldn’t be interfering with anyone else’s intervention.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go fix the Sun.”

***

Kit woke up with Ponch’s wet nose in his face.