Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition (38 page)

“Or it wouldn’t be in your own world,” Quelt said, her voice very strange. “Is that it? That you think my world should be more like yours?”

Nita gulped. “Not at all,” she said. “But your world’s kernel—”

“Enough of that for a moment,” Quelt said. “I must come back to this. You believe what the Lone One told you?”

“Yes, because this once, It had no choice but to tell the truth,” Kit said. “Not after Nita was finished with It, anyway.”

“And we ought to make the best of it,” Nita muttered, “because this is the last time I’m going to be able to manage that stunt. One per customer… ”

Quelt was silent. Finally, she looked up again, but not at either of them: out to sea. “I want to say this without being rude,” she said. “You’re our guests, and Those Who Are sent you here. But—”

She shook herself all over, like someone under intolerable pressure, and leaped up. “What makes you so sure you’re right?” Quelt said, standing very stiffly, with her back turned to them. “How dare you think you can interfere with something like this, with our Choice? What gives you the right to tell me that my people should repeal it—just throw away everything we have here and start over? What makes you think you know better than
we
do how we should be growing as a species, what we should be doing with ourselves?”

Nita couldn’t think of anything to say right away. “Quelt,” Kit said, “it might just be that we have more experience with this kind of thing, with the Lone One, than you do.”

“I think perhaps you do!” Quelt said as she turned back toward them. She was shaking all over as she stood there. “I asked the wind to tell me about your world! I had to, because every time I asked you, you’d always stop and say that it was going to take a long time to explain. Well, it did! It seemed like it took forever for the wind to tell me everything I wanted to know. And there was always more. I thought it would never stop.” She was nearly in tears, but she was hanging on to her control… just. “I didn’t know what a war was, until it told me about one. I’d never heard of murder. Or plague. Or a hundred other awful things.”

Nita wanted to say something… and couldn’t for the life of her think where to begin. And it was questionable, she thought, whether she could have stopped Quelt anyway. “I wasn’t going to say anything,” Quelt said. “I thought, Those Who Are wouldn’t send us wizards who would hurt us, who were dangerous. It’s not
their
fault their world is so horrible. But now I have to ask. What’s the
matter
with you people? What happened in your Choice that you got it so wrong, that you kill each other all the time?”

“We’re not sure,” Nita said. “We spend a lot of time wondering about that ourselves.”

“Is that true?”

Kit looked at her in shock. “Why would we lie?”

“Because when you’re not using the Speech, you
can?”
Quelt said.

Nita and Kit were stunned silent.

“Your world seems to be full of that kind of thing,” Quelt said. “I was terrified when I found out about it! It’s got to be one of the worst things that’s wrong there. How awful it has to be for people in your world when you can never know for sure whether something someone tells you is
true?”

“That’s one reason we use the Speech,” Nita said. “It’s one less question to ask—”

“But then you have to go on to the next one,” Quelt said. “Yes, people can’t lie in the Speech. Fine. But if they’re confused, they can say what they believe to be the truth, conversationally, and what they say will still be wrong. How do I know It hasn’t somehow tricked you into believing all the things It told you are true?”

Nita looked helplessly up at Kit. She couldn’t think of an answer to that.

“Or worse yet,” Quelt said, “how do I know you’re not
working
for that one?”

Kit went ashen. “Wizards
can’t,”
he said. “Not willingly!”

“Not here, no,” Quelt said. “But in other worlds, they can be ‘overshadowed’—unwilling accomplices. And what about in
your
world? What are things really like
there?
The Lone One practically runs that place, it seems! I never
knew
It could do things like that to a world. And here It sits on our planet, and we made It welcome here—” She was pacing back and forth on the beach, her fists clenched, like someone afraid she’d explode into some terrible action that she’d regret.

Finally Quelt laughed, and the bitterness in the laughter pained Nita terribly. It was so alien for an Alaalid, and it echoed, in an awful way, Esemeli’s laughter. “Well, at least this excursus has done something good for me,” Quelt said. “It’s taught me what a monster Esemeli can be, once people start really believing in her!” She was actually angry, and it frightened Nita a little: she’d never seen any Alaalid angry before. “But for my own part, I’m my people’s only wizard. We beat Ictanikë once. I will not give her another chance at my people, just on a stranger’s say-so. Repeal our Choice? Why ever would we do that? Just because the Lone One says we might possibly turn into something better? It’s
madness
. And you’re mad, or deluded, to believe It, no matter what wizardry you worked on It! The Lone One tried to sell us our own destruction once, and we warded It off. Now it sends you to try to get us to throw away what we have and buy our destruction from a different source, instead?”

Nita stood up. “Quelt!” she said, and reached out two hands to take her by the shoulders.

Quelt backed away a step, and then another. “No,” she said. “I think perhaps you should both stay away from me for a while. I don’t know what to think, and looking at you makes me more uncertain every moment. I thought you were my cousins,” she said, and now the tears genuinely were starting. “I thought you were
good!
”

She stood there, trembling, for just a moment more, and then she fled down the beach toward her home.

In silence Kit and Nita watched her go. “
Now
what do we do?” Kit said.

Nita shook her head. Her heart was heavy; she felt like crying herself, except that it wouldn’t have helped anything. “I have no idea,” she said.

Kit was silent for a long time. “I think I know,” he said at last. “For one thing, we sleep in the pup-tents tonight.”

“I’d almost rather go home,” Nita said.

“I know,” Kit said. “So would I. Which is why I think we should stay here.”

Nita thought about that for a long moment. Finally, she nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Going home would feel too much like running away.”

“And if Quelt decided she wanted to talk to us again between now and then,” Kit said, “wouldn’t we look guilty if we couldn’t be found?”

That was something that had occurred to Nita only seconds after wishing she could go home. “But if we’re in the pup-tents,” she said, “she’ll know we wanted to give her a little privacy, a little room.”

“Yeah.” Kit got up, dusted himself off. “Then, as soon as Esemeli’s ready tomorrow, we get It to help us find Druvah, if he can be found. If he can, we get the truth from him and we can bring it to Quelt. And then we get our butts out of here before we do any more damage.”

Nita rubbed her eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Let’s get it over with.”

They got up together to go down to their building and put what they needed for one more trip to the Relegate’s Naos into their pup tents. Behind them Ponch came trotting along, the leash around his neck, holding the loose end of it in his mouth, and with a thoughtful look in his eyes…

***

At about quarter of three in the morning, Dairine stood at the garage end of the driveway, once more gazing up at the Moon and waiting for the rest of the group to join her.

“Dairine,” a voice said out of the darkness.

It was her dad. “Yeah,” she said.

“Where are they, honey?”

“They’ll be here soon.”

He came down the back steps and stood beside her, looking up at the Moon. For a few moments neither of them said anything. “Remember when Nita went away,” Dairine said at last, “and we thought she might not come back again, because of the wizardry she was doing out in the ocean, with the whales?”

“And the shark,” her dad said. “Yes, I remember that.”

“This is like that,” Dairine said. “This is my shark.” She looked at her dad.

In the darkness it was hard to see expressions. Her dad laughed, and the laugh sounded strange and strained. “And here I was concerned about Nita because she might wind up being sent off somewhere else by the Powers That Be to do something dangerous,” he said. “Now it turns out the problem was going to be a little closer to home, right under my nose—”

“They didn’t send her,” Dairine said. “Not as such. But if when you’re away you find a mess, or a problem to fix, you don’t just walk away from it: You fix it. Now I have to go do the dangerous thing… and the stakes are bigger this time.”

“Are you
sure
you have to do this?” her dad said.

“It’s my star,” Dairine said. “I can’t just send my houseguests off to deal with it! I have to go with them. Especially—” She fell silent.

Dairine’s dad shook his head. “Not what I was trying to say. I meant, are you sure what you’re planning to do to the Sun really has to be done?”

“Oh.” Dairine gulped, dry-mouthed, and nodded. “It was sanctioned,” she said, “at a very high level. We’d never have gotten the sanction in the first place if the job didn’t really need doing.” She was finding it hard to speak. “I have to go pretty soon,” she said. “
We
have to. We’re the ones who get to do this job.”

Her dad was silent for a moment. “I don’t have to tell you not to do anything stupid,” he said then. “That’s the last thing you’ll do.”

Her insides clenched.
“How can you be so sure?”
Dairine said. “After the dumb thing I did that started all this—”

Her dad shook his head, plainly feeling around for the right words. “Maybe it wasn’t so dumb after all, what you did,” he said. “It brought these particular wizards here just in time to do a job that at least one of them is a specialist in. Prince Unlikely…”

Dairine nodded and said nothing. Her feelings about Prince Unlikely were far too complex for her to discuss. For the moment, she was scared to death, and upset, and didn’t dare say how she felt for fear that it should overwhelm her and make her useless for what had to be done in a very little while. All she could do was go to her dad and hug him.

“Dairine, you may be thoughtless sometimes,” her dad said, “but never stupid. If there’s anything you’ve got, it’s a brain… and I’d say your heart’s in the right shape, too. Go do what you have to do. And be careful.”

He didn’t let her go for a long time… then finally released her and went inside.

***

At 3:00 a.m., Filif, Sker’ret, and Roshaun joined Dairine out at the far end of the backyard. The circle of the wizardry lay glowing on the ground, ready to be implemented, the elaborate interlace of sigils and symbols pulsing gently in the night.

With Spot in her arms, Dairine was doing as the others were doing: moving slowly around the periphery of the wizardry, checking its terms, making sure that everything added up, that nothing was misspelled or misplaced, and—most important—that each of their names was correctly included, and that each name was tied into the wizardry correctly for the role that wizard would be playing.

The roles divided fairly neatly for this piece of work. Roshaun, as main designer of the work and the one most familiar with the theory behind it, would be watching the timing of the wizardry and directing the others on when each stage should implement. Sker’ret, the fixer, would be the one to actually “flip the switches,” speaking the words in the Speech that would take them in, help them locate where they needed to be, and manipulate the Sun’s mass once they got to the right spot. Filif would be the main power source for the wizardry, the one whose job it was to “get out and push,” leaving the others free to do fine adjustments and to react to situations as they developed. “Our people’s life comes from that of our star,” he’d said to Dairine while they were still in the design stages, “a little more directly than usual. This is a chance to give the power back. The universe appreciates such resonances… ”

And as for me,
Dairine thought,
I go along for the ride.

Roshaun glanced over at her and said nothing. Dairine paid no attention, being in the process of checking her name for the third time. Sker’ret finished his check and came along beside her, peering at her name.

She waved the darkness she was holding in her hand in front of Sker’ret’s various eyes. “You sure you can spare this?” she said.

He peered at it with a few eyes. “It’s not like I’m going to have much trouble getting home even if we blow this one up,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll just go through Grand Central.”

“You’ll love it,” Dairine said absently. “The food’s great there. Just please don’t eat the trains.”

She looked at her name one last time and sighed. It was no shorter than it had been when she first started her wizardry, but some of its terms had changed to shapes not strictly human, and a number of the characters were truncated, or indicated power levels much reduced. “You guys hardly even need me for this,” she said, “it’s so perfectly tied up.”

Filif rustled at her. “You’re here,” he said, “because this is your Sun. You’re its child, native to the space inside its heliopause. It knows you. It will listen to you where it might not listen to us.”

“Yeah,” Dairine said, allowing herself a breath of laughter. “Sure.” Filif was right about that. And as for anything else, Dairine knew that though she was no longer quite the power at wizardry that she had been, at least she was good enough to hold up her part of a group working and make sure that anyone else who needed help would get it in a hurry.

She glanced at her watch. “We’d better move,” she said. “The bubblestorm area’s going to be coming around toward the Sun’s limb soon.”

Roshaun nodded, and took his position near the part of the wizardry that held a précis of its blueprint and the coordinates they were heading for, along with the latest data that the manual had for them on the depth of the tachocline. There would be no more precise data until they got closer to the Sun and could correct for relativistic errors and other problems.