Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

Kit burst out laughing. “Never mind. Gotta go talk to the folks. Catch you afterwards? ”

“Me too. Say an hour or so.”

***

Before he went downstairs, Kit took just long enough to have a very brief glance at the précis Mamvish had dumped into his manual. It was going to have to be brief, because the red-highlighted section of pages which had appeared in the book was about as thick as his finger. “Jeez,” he said under his breath as he looked over the abstract on the first page of the section. Speech-words of a severity that he’d never seen before were peppered all through it, including the one thorny phrase corresponding to “species/environment extinction event” that somehow managed to look as if it was crouching on the page and preparing to leap at your throat.

Kit shivered with a sudden chill down his back and realized that he’d actually started sweating again just looking at the précis. The basics of it were bad enough, quickly grasped as he looked at the diagram displaying itself at the top of the manual page and cycling through several different views and modes. A relatively Earthlike world circling a distant star; a moon of that world’s, much larger than Earth’s moon; a schematic of a set of tectonic lines underlying the crust of that moon, all flaring and flowing red with violent stresses—

He shook his head, not really needing the following view of the inevitable next stage in the process, the moon’s breakup. Doesn’t much matter where the pieces go after that, Kit thought, sucking breath in. Bust up one of a pair like that and the other one’s gonna be uninhabitable pretty quick… And that was the problem, because there were a lot of people living on that planet. Which is where Mamvish comes in. Question is, what’s she got planned?

Kit slapped the manual shut and headed out of his room and down the stairs, fairly twitching with unease and excitement. It was interesting how news of a major interstellar disaster could within seconds make your own problems seem so amazingly small, so utterly petty. Especially since for these last few hours, Kit’s mind had been bouncing back and forth in helpless discomfort from one to another of three subjects, trapped among them like a pinball trying to bounce out of the machine. They were (in repeatedly-changing order of importance) his dad’s job troubles, calculus, and Valentine’s Day.

Well, there are sure better things to think about now…

Except (some unconvinced fraction of his head insisted as he thumped down the stairs) maybe Valentine’s Day…

“If you keep on running down the stairs like that you’re going to break a leg some day,” said a voice from the kitchen as Kit came down into the living room.

“Maaaamaaa,” Kit said in profound annoyance as he headed into the kitchen. His little plump brunette mama was in scrubs—pink pants and a flowery pink top—and cleaning up after herself, having just made and eaten a pre-work sandwich.

“You will!” his mama said, turning to him and grabbing a paper towel to dry her hands on. “And I will have absolutely no pity on you when it happens.” She reached up to open a cupboard and put away the washed plate she’d just been eating from.

“Got much more important stuff to worry about than that,” Kit said.

His mama leaned back against the counter and eyed Kit. “I told you to stop worrying,” she said. “Your pop’s coping just fine.”

Kit sighed. His father’s promotion into a senior manager’s position at the regional newspaper’s printing plant had caught them all by surprise. It had also left Kit’s pop in something of a state of shock for a couple of weeks, especially when it became apparent that he was going to have to do a lot of extra training to replace the guy who’d had to leave the company because of an injury, and whose position he’d been promoted into. Kit couldn’t remember ever seeing his pop get so thrown by anything, and it had disturbed him more than he’d expected.

“It’s not that,” Kit said, and found that he suddenly felt strangely guilty that it wasn’t. “Something’s just come up.”

“Uh oh,” his mama said. “Magic stuff?”

“Uh, yeah. An end of the world thing.”

His mama’s eyes widened. “Excuse me?”

“What? Hey, no no no, not ours!”

“Oh good,” his mama said, leaning back against the counter. “I mean, I had plans for the weekend…”

“Yeah. Well, some other people had plans too, but their world’s about to end, so we need to go save them.”

“I don’t know if I even want to know the details about how that’s going to happen,” Kit’s mama said. “…Though I see I’m going to have to. How long were you planning to be gone?”

“About ten minutes.”

His mama rubbed her eyes. “You’re saving a very small world?”

“Well, the population’s just a hundred fifty million or so, yeah…”

“And you’re going to do that in ten minutes?”

“No,” Kit said, popping his manual open again and dropping it on the counter beside his mama. “Looks more like about a week. But we’ll only be gone for ten minutes.”

She looked down at the diagram on the changing page—visible to her because Kit wanted it to be—and shook her head. “More magic…”

“Timeslides,” Kit said. “When you’ve got something serious like this going on, the Powers that Be aren’t stingy with the energy allowances for the people handling it.”

At the sound of a car in the driveway, both their heads came up. “Hmm, running early,” Kit’s mama said, “wonder what that’s about?”

As he heard the engine in his Pop’s station wagon shut down, Kit thought—not at all for the first time—of one of the basic premises of wizardry, and the way it worked in wizards’ lives: “there are no coincidences.” This is really serious. The universe is trying to make this simpler for me… The question, as always, was whether the attempt was going to work.

Bundled up in his parka and not merely one but two scarves, Kit’s Pop came in the back door and stood there a moment stamping his feet on the back mat as he started peeling himself out of the layers of cold-weather gear. “All this slush,” he muttered, “it freezes and it thaws and then it freezes again, and it gets dirtier all the time…”

“Just so it doesn’t come in here,” Kit’s mama said. “I just mopped an hour ago.”

“No, no, I wouldn’t…” He sighed as he pulled off the last layer, a heavy sweater that he wore in this weather so he wouldn’t have to keep putting on his coat and taking it off when running back and forth between the hangarlike press buildings and the newspaper’s offices down the street from them.

“Is there a problem at work?” Kit’s mama said. “You’re early.”

“No, everything’s fine. My training guy just had to leave early today, so I’m done early too.” He shook his head. “He’s as stressed about this whole thing as I am. He and Telly were good friends, and now suddenly I’m where Telly is and neither of us want me to be there, really…” He leaned against the counter where Kit’s mama was leaning, and she leaned against him while he looked down at Kit’s manual. “So what’s going on? Anything interesting?

“Kit has to go save the world,” his mama said, sounding resigned.

His pop glanced up at him from under his eyebrows. “Again?”

Kit had to grin at that. Though being a wizard caused a lot of problems, he was well beyond grateful that one of them wasn’t having to hide what was going on from his family.

“Not ours,” Kit’s mama said.

“Not that ours doesn’t need saving,” his Pop said, and turned away for a moment to go get a cup. Kit knew immediately where he was headed: the new capsule-coffee machine that Kit’s mama had given him for Christmas. “I see more of the headlines in one day than most human beings, so believe me, I know…” He went hunting in the little bin on the counter by the fridge for the capsule he wanted. “So what is it this time?”