“Mela, you see anything about what they called this planet?” Nita said.
Carmela shook her head. “I’m not sure,” she said. “There were lots of names for it, at the beginning. Probably as many names as we have for Earth. But then they start to get fewer. In all this later stuff, there are just two left, and I don’t know which one to use. One of the two groups that dominated the planet called it Shamask. The other called it Eilith.”
“What do the words mean?” S’reee said.
Carmela looked up then, and her expression was grim. “‘Ours.’”
Nita and S’reee exchanged a glance.
“They don’t seem to have liked each other a whole lot, the Shamaska and the Eilitt,” Carmela said, getting down on her knees to look at the writing embedded in that part of the pattern. “All along here, it’s descriptions of things that one side did, or the other side did—” She shook her head. “I don’t understand most of it. But the tone’s never friendly. Then it gets angry. Then—”
Nita started in surprise, and so did S’reee, as the first flashes and impacts of energy weapons erupted among the spires of the First World. Mountains fell and buildings crumbled in a newer and deadlier sort of erosion. “Surprised it took that long,” Carmela said, getting up again to head farther down that stroke of the pattern. “Their first really big war…”
“Why were they fighting?” Nita said.
Carmela stood where she was and looked all along that stroke of the scorpion pattern with her hands on her hips, hunting an answer. “I’m not sure,” she said. “There are so many reasons and excuses here. A lot of them don’t make sense. I think each side thought the other had cheated them out of something, or stolen something, that they needed to survive.” She shook her head, annoyed. “So they started having wars. This one went on for—” She hunkered down to trace out, with one finger, a specific sequence of the long, curved characters. “Twelve or thirteen thousand years.”
Nita and S’reee exchanged a glance. “This one??” Nita said.
S’reee blew out an unhappy breath. “There are species,” she said, “that are very advanced at science and technology …but the technologies of being in harmony with one another just elude them. They tend to have more wizards than most.”
“You’d think species like that would blow themselves up quicker,” Nita said.
S’reee flipped a fin, resigned. “In such cases, the Lone One can have Itself a long, ugly playtime. Often It tries to keep the combatants from ever destroying each other completely, so the ‘fun’ can go on for as long as possible.”
“I’d believe that was happening here,” Carmela said, getting up to walk along another long, tangled chain of symbols buried in the design. “You’d have trouble finding any time when these guys weren’t fighting. Though here they seem to have taken a breather…”
Carmela straightened up. Nita could feel that slight draining sensation that said the wizardry needed more power. She sat down where she was and closed her eyes, concentrating on breathing more power into it. But even with her eyes closed, she could sense a cooling and darkening around her. “That would be why,” S’reee sang, sounding somewhat troubled. “The Sun is dimming. And so quickly.”
Bobo, Nita said, will this much power hold the spell for now?
Yes. But it won’t run much longer. If there’s anything to be learned, better do it with your eyes open—
She opened them, stood up, staggered. “hNii’t,” S’reee said, “are you all right?”
“Yeah,” Nita said, looking toward the Sun. No wonder that S’reee had been taken aback: it was getting fainter by the second, as if someone was turning down a dimmer. The elapsed time was passing by at thousands of years per second, but the speed of the Sun’s fading still seemed uncomfortably swift. In the precipitous valleys between the needle-sharp peaks, the atmosphere was freezing out, dusting itself down as dry ice and oxygen snow.
“They started doming their cities over,” Carmela said, “and trying to change their climate. But the Sun just cooled too fast. All the changes they made weren’t enough.”
Nita watched the Sun’s light keep on fading. It had struck her hard, some time back, how dim the Martian day seemed compared to Earth’s, even at such a small increase in the distance from the Sun. And Shamask-Eilith would have been maybe sixty or eighty million miles farther out, getting even less light and heat than Mars. A cold world, getting colder, she thought, as she watched the Sun far off in the deeps of space slowly settling into what would be its future normal magnitude.
“And still their wars went on,” S’reee said, turning gently in the air to watch yet another swath of nuclear explosions and massive energy-weapon fire scorch its way across the planet’s increasingly ravaged surface.
“Oh, yeah,” Carmela said, sounding resigned. “They weren’t going to stop fighting just because of a little thing like the Sun going cool…”
“You’d think if they had a technology like this, they’d have considered moving everybody to a warmer world,” Nita said. “There weren’t all that many Shamaska or Eilitt by then. They’d already killed so many of each other.”
S’reee swung her tail in agreement. “The Sun’s behavior could even have been a hint,” S’reee said. “The Powers That Be have been known to make Their suggestions indirectly— usually with some hope that the peoples involved will come to some greater good that way than just by being told right out what to do. Or maybe this was just an attempt to break their cycle of destruction when other hints had failed.”
“‘Those who will, the Powers lead,’” Nita said, quoting a line from the manual, “‘and those who won’t, They drag…’”
“If you guys are right,” Carmela said, “this might be where the dragging started.” She gazed down at the floor in a slightly unfocused way as she walked around, pausing at one particular spot. “Listen to this,” Carmela said. “‘Then from the darkness… came the fate and the death which had long been promised. And all the folk looked up into the night and cried out in rage and fear that all their striving against each other was wasted—’”
They looked toward Shamask-Eilith’s spiny curvature and saw, distant but enhanced by the wizardry, the incoming shadow of “the death long promised.” From high above the plane of the ecliptic—the orbital zone in which all the other worlds of the Solar System except Pluto rode—a dark rogue planet, ensnared by the Sun’s gravity who-knew-how many years before, was diving slowly and inexorably into the system. There could have been no possible error about its path, which was taking it straight toward where Shamask-Eilith would be in its orbit in only a matter of decades.
“I don’t suppose this possibly means that they saw sense and stopped fighting with each other?” Nita said.
From the look S’reee gave Nita, she had her doubts. “I wonder,” S’reee said, “how quickly did they see it?”
“Pretty quickly,” Carmela said, walking along and looking down at the pattern. “The scientists on both sides worked out that it wouldn’t hit them. But it would come close enough to destroy their world, even if it didn’t actually hit. Just the tidal forces of the bigger body as it passed by would break the First World up. So they started making plans to save as many of their own people and life forms as they could, and make their way to the next planet in. But it looks like both sides did it secretly.”
“What?” Nita said. “Why? Are you trying to tell me—?”
Carmela looked at Nita and S’reee with an expression both annoyed and completely unsurprised. “You got it,” she said. “Each side figured that if it didn’t tell the other one, their enemies might not have enough time to evacuate their populations. Then the ones who escaped successfully would have the whole new world to themselves.”