Диана Дуэйн: Wizards At War

Kit shivered, looking over at Nita. She glanced at him, a sidewise, nervous look.

“Why do I get this feeling,” Nita said, “that on a planet with nuclear weapons, we’ll probably blow ourselves up a long time before light and gravity start to malfunction?”

“Not that the rest of the known universe won’t be just a little way behind us,” Kit said.

Carl cleared his throat. “Exactly.”

They all sat there in silence for a few moments. Then, after a moment—”If that’s all,” Filif said, sounding a little forlorn, “please, may we have the daylight back again?”

“Sure,” Tom said, and put out his hand. The wizardry surrounding them collapsed itself to a little blue-white sphere no bigger than a ball bearing, and dropped into his palm. As the wizardry shrank away, ordinary afternoon sunshine and the reality of Nita’s dining room reasserted themselves: the flowered wallpaper, the dining room table with some of the leftovers of breakfast still on it—a marmalade jar with a knife stuck in it, a couple of crumpled paper napkins.

Tom dropped the imaging wizardry back onto the open page of his wizard’s manual. It flattened itself to the page; he reached out and closed the book again. Kit watched him do it, feeling peculiarly remote from it all. We’re sitting here in Nita’s dining room talking about the end of civilization, he thought, and not in ten thousand years, either. From the sound of it, it’s gonna be more like ten thousand hours … or minutes.

Roshaun glanced up from the table, where his troubled gaze had been resting for a few moments. “Senior,” he said, “why is all this happening now? Surely if this is so simple a strategy, the Isolate Power should have enacted it and made an end of us all ages ago.”

“We don’t know why,” Tom said. “There’s always the possibility that the Lone One might not have known how to do this before. Though they’re immortal, the Powers That Be aren’t omniscient: They learn, though the exact shape of their learning curves is never likely to be clear to us because of the way they exist outside of time, dipping in and out as it suits them. Or the Lone Power could have known for aeons how to produce this result, but for some reason was waiting for the best moment to spring it on an unsuspecting universe.”

“Then, perhaps,” Filif said, “something has happened either to embolden It, or to frighten It.”

Carl shook his head. “We have no idea,” he said. “Another possibility is that something’s going on in our universe that the Lone One doesn’t want us interfering with—and this inrush of dark matter may simply be a distraction to keep us from discovering what’s really happening, and dealing with it.”

“But you don’t have any idea which of these theories might be the right one,” Sker’ret said.

“No,” Tom said.

“What about the Powers That Be?” Dairine said. “What do they say?”

“Right now,” Tom said, “they’re waiting for the experts in this universe to give them some more data.”

“The experts?” Nita said.

Tom smiled just slightly, but once again that smile had a grim edge to it. “Us,” he said. “While They live here, too, They do it on a different level. We’re a lot more expert in the business of actually dealing with physicality, day to day, than They are.”

“It’s like the difference between manufacturing something, say a dishwasher,” Carl said, “and using it every day. You could say that the Powers know what the universe acted like when it left the factory, but we’re the ones who know the little noises it makes every day when it’s running. And where to kick it to make them stop.”

Kit spent a moment trying to see the universe as a malfunctioning dishwasher, then put the idea aside; it made his brain hurt. Meanwhile, Tom picked up his manual and put it into the air beside him. It vanished. “Anyway,” Tom said, “right now we need to stop the dark matter from tearing the universe apart—or at least slow down its growth and buy ourselves some time to solve the problem.”

“Or rather, buy you the time to solve it,” Carl said. “Wizards near latency age—near their peak power levels—are the only ones who’ll keep their power long enough to make a difference now.”

Kit saw Dairine swallow hard, and Nita raised her eyebrows at him, while Sker’ret clenched its front four or six legs together, and Filif held very still, and Roshaun looked down at the table again, as if afraid what might show in his eyes if anyone saw them.

And then suddenly, Tom smiled. It wasn’t an angry smile, though it was fierce, and it had a surprising edge of amusement to it. “Now, after all that,” he said, “believe it or not, we have some good news for you. For the duration—for as long as there is a duration—as far as wizardry goes, the lid is off. Any wizardry you can build to fight what’s happening, any wizardry you can figure out how to fuel, is fair game. Normally we all limit our workings carefully to keep them from damaging the universe, or the beings who share it with us. But now the system itself is on the chopping block, along with everything else. If we don’t save that…” He shook his head. “Then not just wizardry, but the Life we’re sworn to protect, is at an end.”

Kit was immersed in a strange combination of shock and excitement, but at the same time practical questions nagged at him. “When you said we were going to be running things on the Earth,” he said, “you didn’t mean just us… did you?”

Tom’s grin became less fierce. “No,” he said, “we didn’t. Forgive us for making absolutely sure we had your attention when we started.”

“Obviously there are a lot of other wizards on the planet who’ll be of use in this crisis,” Carl said. “Not to mention a whole lot of wizards elsewhere in our galaxy. Seniors here and just about everywhere else have been selecting out younger wizards in their catchment areas who’ve shown promise, or have produced good results in the past. You fall into those categories. We’ve been organizing two main intervention groups—those who’ll be staying here, managing the usual problems that come up at home, and those who’ll be going off-planet to look for ways to stop the dark-matter incursion. Shortly we’ll be putting you in touch with the groups you’ll be assigned to. In the meantime, start researching on what we’ve been up to—it’ll all be in your manuals. Anybody you feel will help you handle what’s going on, get in touch with them pronto. But you’ve also got some logistical problems to deal with.”

Kit noticed Dairine beginning to squirm a little in her seat. Uh-huh, he thought. Bet I know what that’s about.

“First of all,” Tom said to Dairine, “you’ve made the best of being ‘grounded’ inside the solar system for the last little while, so—assuming you’ve learned your lesson—the Powers That Be have cleared us to unground you.” Dairine stopped squirming, and started to grin. “But don’t you assume that this automatically means you’re going to be sent off-planet. The team assignments haven’t been thrashed out yet, and you may be of more use here.”

Dairine sat still and assumed an expression that Kit had long since come to recognize as an attempt to look “serious” and “good.” As usual, he had trouble taking it seriously.

“Anyway,” Tom said, “whichever way your team assignments go, you’re all either going to have to be on call at a moment’s notice to deal with things here, or you’re going to have to be away for some time.” He glanced from Dairine to Kit to Nita. “Normally, in an emergency, we’d help you deal with your absence from school and ‘real life’ by issuing you with timeslide wizardries, so that you could spend as much time away as you needed to and come back at the same time you left. But this situation’s not normal. Local implementations of wizardry may suffer early on … and if a timeslide fails, you could wind up marooned in the wrong time period, with no way home. So you’re going to have to find other ways to handle your absence. Any way that we can help, let us know as soon as you have a plan.”