Диана Дуэйн - Wizard's Holiday

And she was standing still, on the stone, and Kit and Esemeli were standing there on it with her. Nita breathed out and looked around.

The plateau on which they stood was the pale plain peach-colored sandstone of the Inner Sea lands. Nita made herself hold still and breathe and try to get used to some kind of normality again…if you could call this normal. We’re on a pillar of rock maybe a thousand miles high, inside a planet, Nita thought, at a level where there should be nothing but magma, or maybe even molten iron under millions of tons of pressure. There’s a sky here where there can’t be one, and air here where there can’t be any. If I were a pseudoscience freak, this would be terrific, and I’d be expecting flying saucers next. As it is, I think maybe normality needs an overhaul…

Next to her, “Wow,” Kit said softly.

“What?” Nita said, looking around.

Then she saw Kit turning slowly, looking all around him. And Nita saw that he had good reason. The perspectives of things had shifted again, or rather their topologies, so that what had been the truncated top of a cone was now the flat top of a shallow rise, and all around them, from perhaps thirty feet away to the horizon, and seemingly right up into the impossibly glowing sky, there were people.

Nita’s mouth went dry with sudden irrational fear at the sight of them. All around her she heard, more strongly than ever, the sound that had been trembling at the edge of her hearing since they came to Alaalu…an incessant, friendly whispering. Now she knew where it came from. It was from these people, a myriad of Alaalids,

all standing around with their amiable, interested faces, looking at her, and Kit, and Esemeli, and the Alaalid man who stood nearby the place where they had come to rest.

Nita found herself experiencing a case of the shivers. The people were the dead: everybody who had ever lived on Alaalu, in their many billions, filling all this vast space out to the edge of the sky.

And as for the man—

He had a shock of red hair that was rather untidy and casually kept, by Alaalid standards, but a face that was composed and good-humored, even for an Alaalid, with those dark and liquid eyes suggesting a profound wisdom underneath the good humor. He was very casually dressed, in the long kilt that some Alaalids wore, and a long loose jacket thrown over it. He looked like someone who’d just been out for a swim. But he carried in his hands something that not many beachgoers would have brought with them. It was a tangle of near-blinding brilliance, lines of fire in many colors and many thousands or tens of thousands of words in the Speech, all knotted together in one complex structure. It was Alaalu’s world-kernel, the “software” in which was contained the laws—natural, physical, and spiritual—that governed Alaalu and its homespace.

The man holding that kernel nodded, first of all, to Esemeli. “I thought you’d turn up here eventually,” he said.

It smiled and bowed to him. “You and I,” Esemeli said, “have unfinished business to transact.”

“So we do,” the man said. Then he looked over at Nita and Kit.

“Druvah,” Kit said.

The Alaalid bowed a little to Kit, and then to Nita.

“Cousins, well met on the journey,” he said. “You’re very welcome to the heart of things.”

“Thank you,” Kit said.

“Yes,” Nita said, “thank you. But I have a question…

“Ask,” Druvah said.

“When we’re finished talking to you…how do we get out of here?”

“No one does that,” Druvah said, “until we change the world.”

And Esemeli smiled—

Dairine, Roshaun, Sker’ret, and Filif were standing in position in blazing light, perhaps two thousand miles above the Sun’s photosphere, while the invisible corona lashed space with superheated plasma above their heads.

The wizardry was protecting them from the heat and more than ninety-nine percent of the visible light that boiled out of the Sun’s nuclear furnace to express itself in the photosphere’s glare. That outermost layer of the Sun’s actual body was no more than an eggshell’s thickness compared to the vast bulk of the star beneath it, but it boiled and roiled with golden fire. It was beautiful, but instantly deadly to anyone not protected as they all were. Even so, none of them intended to linger a moment longer than necessary. But the beauty was compelling.

“Look at it,” Filif said, gazing into that furious brilliance with all his berries,

which caught it and glinted red as blood. “So magnificent, so dangerous—”

Dairine had to smile just slightly at the poet living inside the bush who liked baseball caps. Her own impression was more prosaic. “It looks like oatmeal,” she said. And so it did, if oatmeal boiled at seven thousand degrees Celsius and every grain of it was a capsule full of burning liquid helium eight hundred miles across. The motion was the same, though—new grains bubbled up every second, persisting in the violent roiling pressure for maybe twenty minutes, and then were pushed away to be swallowed into the depths. They rumbled, and the sound was real; sonic booms from them rippled incessantly across the surface of the Sun.

“Where’s the tachocline?” Roshaun said.

“Two-hundred-eighteen thousand five hundred kilometers through two-hundred-twenty-one thousand six hundred,” Sker’ret said. “It’s fluctuating, though.”

“Which way?”

“Up.”

Roshaun looked uncertain. “We could wait for it to stabilize,” he said. Then he shook his head. “No point in that. I’m going to adjust the wizardry to take us in, and hold steady at two-twenty-two. Everyone, check my numbers.”

They all watched as Roshaun brought out his version of the manual, a little tangle of light like a miniature sun itself, and read from it a precise string of words and numbers in the Speech. Inside the wizardry, the “depth” constant changed to reflect the shift. Everyone looked at the numbers.

“Did you all check me?”

Dairine read the numbers three times. “You’ve got it,” she said.

“Check,” Sker’ret said.

“And I check you, too,” said Filif, trembling.

“Then let’s go—”

They vanished again—this time into the inferno.

In the heart of hearts of Alaalu, Nita and Kit stood looking at the planet’s oldest surviving wizard—if his present state—half myth, half spirit—could be described as “surviving”—as he said, “We’ve been waiting for you here for a while.”

“Not too long, I hope,” Kit said.

Druvah’s smile was reassuringly ironic.

“Long enough,” he said. “But I don’t mind.” He bowed to Esemeli, and It looked at him and eyed him with an expression of reserved disdain.

“You did a good job hiding your kernel,” Nita said.

“It seemed necessary,” Druvah said. “Under the circumstances, it seemed wise to keep it in an ambivalent state: not quite in the real world, in Time; not all the way into the deeper world, out of Time; but oscillating between them, a million times every moment, so that its location was always more a possibility than a definite thing.”

“Uncertainty,” Nita said to Kit. “The way you get it in atomic structure, with the electrons more or less certain to be in a given area, but never really just in one spot…”

“That quality of matter I borrowed for this wizardry, yes,” Druvah said. “And for myself as well, so that I could keep an eye on what our destiny was bound to.” He looked at Nita and Kit. “But where is the last wizard?”

They looked at each other.

“Well,” Nita said.

“Unfortunately,” Esemeli said, “she will not be coming.”

Druvah looked at her in a shock so stately, it resembled composure.