Диана Дуэйн - Wizard's Holiday

“Maybe They don’t get any, either,” Nita said, “and They think the situation’s normal.”

“If you’re right,” Kit said, “I feel sorry for Them.”

“So do I,” Nita said, “if I’m right. Meanwhile…”

“Back to the house by the sea.”

“It’ll work,” Roshaun said.

In the darkness, they all knelt (or in Filif’s case, rooted) above the wizardry together. It lay glowing on the ground under the sassafras trees, now almost completely interwritten with the long, delicately curling characters of the Speech.

“You’re sure?” Sker’ret said.

Roshaun nodded. “The final layout confirms it. Suck the matter out from underneath the tachocline, and you get a brief but big shift in the way the Sun handles its magnetic fields—for the tachocline is the dynamo for the star’s whole field. When you pull the matter out, the tachocline collapses back just a little and cools. The magnetic field drops off, and you get an artificial ‘quiet star’ period. All the other ‘inflamed’ areas have a chance to quiet down as a result. If you’re very careful with the calculations, you can get as much as a month of quiet time and derail the cycle entirely.”

He looked down at the wizardry and sighed.

“The big problem remains, though. We must put the far end of the conduit in place, by hand, as it were, underneath the tachocline. We can’t just sink it in from above and pray. The height of the tachocline changes from hour to hour, even minute to minute. Put the conduit in too high, and take out too much material of too low a density, and nothing happens. Put it in too low, take out too much higher-density material, and then the star’s core, and the nuclear burning process, are affected.”

Everybody did their own version of shaking their heads emphatically.

“We’ve got to get it right the first time,” Roshaun said. “Once the sunward side of the conduit is in place, the rest is easy. The far end will dump the matter out well beyond this solar system’s heliopause, out past—” He looked at Dairine. “What’s that last planet called?”

“Pluto.”

“But we can’t let the Sun end jump around,” Roshaun said. “Otherwise…”

He trailed off.

The others looked at one another, nodding or rustling or waving their eyes around.

“We need rest now,” Sker’ret said then. “No point in trying to do a wizardry when you’re tired. It’s a recipe for failure.”

“I’ll be in my pup tent,” Filif said. Then he looked up and around him at the night, with his berries. “No, I won’t,” he said. “If this might be my last night on a planet, I’m going to go root.” And he wandered off toward the rhododendron bed.

“I wish he wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Dairine muttered.

“Let him,” Sker’ret said. “I’m for my own pup tent. When do we start, Roshaun?”

He looked at Dairine.

“Three a.m. local time,” she said.

“You’ll call me?” Sker’ret said.

“No,” Dairine said, “you big dumb bug. Of course we’ll let you sleep through it and do it all ourselves, and then let you go home to a promising clerical career.”

Sker’ret snickered at her, a sound that did Dairine’s heart good. He went trundling off on all those legs.

She sighed, stood up, and after a few moments followed him, though she didn’t go into the house but rather paused outside, by the steps to the back door. Over the lilac hedge that separated the Callahan property from that of the next-door neighbors, she could see the Moon through the leaves.

She more or less ignored the tall dark shape, glittering slightly from the usual jeweled clothes, as he came to stand in front of her. But I can’t really ignore him, she thought. What if something goes wrong tonight?

Dairine looked up at Roshaun.

“I owe you an apology,” she said.

“You owe me nothing.”

“Yeah, well,” Dairine said, “in that case I have a word or two for you, Mr. I’m Prince of Everything I Survey. ‘We wouldn’t want people looking at us?’ ‘It wouldn’t be permitted?’ You don’t have a neighbor within a thousand miles! The only reason your palace is there on the Burnt Side is so that no one has to live by

you. Your people are scared to death of being without you. And scared to death of you. Aren’t they?”

Roshaun turned to look up at the Moon, and didn’t say anything.

“You’re all that stands between them and destruction,” Dairine said, “at least in the version of history that most of your people know. They’re terrified of what would happen without you. And you’ve let them get that way, haven’t you? It’s easier than going out the front door every now and then and explaining that you’re just like other people, just with a few extra talents that were given you for their good, too, not just yours. Wizardry is service! But your family seems to have it a little backward. And the people all over Wellakh bring you everything you want, you live nice comfortable lives, all that. But someday, when wizards are a little commoner on your planet—”

Roshaun looked at Dairine with some discomfort.

“I don’t set family policy,” he said.

“You will someday,” Dairine said. “Someday you’ll be Beloved of the Sun Lord and all the other stuff that translates into king on Wellakh. And I hope you start letting your people look at you then, because otherwise, I think that as soon as they find a way to do without you, they will. It’s only a matter of time until technology catches up to what only wizardry can do now, in terms of protecting your planet. And then where are you?”

Roshaun looked up at the Moon, and then, without much warning, sat down on the back step, half leaning on the scraggly climbing rosebush that went up the chimney.

“Are you always so reticent?” he said.

Dairine blinked.

“I didn’t want to go on this excursus at first,” Roshaun said. “My mother said she thought I should. She wouldn’t say why. She discouraged me from coming back, even from using the pup tent. I was angry about that. And then, a couple of days ago, a message came. My father has stepped down as Sun Lord. When I come back, I am king. For me, it starts now.”

He looked up at the Moon. “And it’s just as you say,” Roshaun said. “We’re— I found the Earth word, the…English word? Anyway, I looked it up. We’re pariahs. In people’s minds, we’ve become associated with the Burning. We’re its cure, but some people believe that maybe we were also its cause. They don’t dare live without us. They hate living with us. So they kill us when they can.” Roshaun shrugged. “It’s not easy, especially when the person they’re trying to assassinate is a wizard. But even wizards have to sleep. My father got tired of being the target; he’s been one for forty years. He resigned and it’s my turn now.”

Dairine’s knees felt weak under her. She had often enough had the Lone Power trying to kill her. She’d learned to cope with it. But having just people trying to kill you…that was something else entirely, and, strangely, it felt more awful. She sat down by Roshaun on the step and stared at the Moon so that she wouldn’t have to look at him.

“That’s why we have to fix your star,” Roshaun said.

“You’re not involved,” Dairine said. “Nobody’s expectations are looking over your shoulder, saying, ‘He had to do that. He didn’t do it just because it was

the right thing.’”

There was a long silence.

“It would be nice if we had one of those,” Roshaun said.

Dairine looked up, confused. “What?”

“That.” He gestured with his chin at the Moon.

“Yeah,” Dairine said. “We like it.”

“We had one once,” Roshaun said, “a little one. But it was destroyed in the Burning.”