He was staring at her in total perplexity. “That’s not what you were saying before.”
“But you know. And it knows. The seeing knows, the vision . . .”
There was fear attached to this for her, too. If Kit was right about this, then he was also right about the danger that Nita had seen coming toward him and Carmela. Her mouth went even dryer as she realized there was no cherry-picking this scenario for an answer she liked better. You had to take the vision whole or not at all. Oh God—!
But one thing at a time. Just one!
The applause for Joona was starting up now as he finished his work and walked out the side of the column of water, waving at the crowd. The threat management wizards were already moving forward to decommission the water: a moment later the whole massive column of it was gone.
Penn was staring at where it had been. He whispered, “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can!” Kit repeated.
And Nita grabbed Penn by his shoulders and stared into his eyes.
“You have to,” she said.
“But in the dream I had—”
Nita swallowed. “I know what’s in that dream, a little. We’re all stuck in it now. If you don’t do this spell, something really bad is going to happen. Lives are going to be saved or lost because of you finishing this thing or not finishing it. Winning, losing, it doesn’t matter. The demonstration is what matters. You have got to produce the result.”
He sat there shaking his head. “But what if I can’t—”
“I’ve been down this road, believe me,” Nita said. “Once upon a time I had to produce a result after I swore to do it. It felt like it took me forever to do what I had to, to make up my mind to it. Good thing I had a lot of help, because I was seriously ready to fold. But the help was there.” She took a long breath. “And I just about got myself where I needed to be when someone stepped in . . .” Or swam, said her memory, in a darker voice. She could still see herself hanging in water that burned bright, somewhere else entirely, while overhead cruised a shape brighter than the water, glancing down at her with one dark dispassionate eye—Death passing her over, passing her by, in pleased and deadly dignity.
“And presenting next,” said Irina’s voice, “Penn Shao-Feng—”
“Get up,” Nita said, “and do it.”
Penn got up, shaking but suddenly determined, and walked out into the cleared circle. He looked like someone walking to his doom.
Kit watched him go, and abruptly realized that he was shaking too. Beside him, Nita was trembling as well with the force of something that hadn’t happened yet but was about to.
“What happens now?” he whispered.
Nita shook her head. “It all depends on him . . .”
The threat management wizards were standing around the borders of the circle now, reciting together. Above the space where they were working, the solar wind slowly became visible, spilling past the Moon in great waves and folds like the curtains of aurorae in Earth’s upper atmosphere: but these were white, not green or blue, because there were no atmospheric gases for them to react with. They lashed and rippled close to the Moon’s surface as dangerous solar storm weather would lash and lick at the Earth when the solar wind was too strong.
Penn took a huge breath, closed his eyes, and held out his arms to either side. All around him, blue-glowing on the dusty ground, it began to appear—the spell Kit and Nita had seen and debugged a hundred times now, the one Kit thought he could probably draw in his sleep.
Very quietly, almost in a whisper, Penn began to recite the spell.
From the diagram, long, graceful, frondlike golden structures began to rear up, the local wavefront guides that would push the solar radiation away from the Moon for demonstration purposes. And from the core of the spell came winding upward another, bigger structure, wavering gracefully: the spell’s power conduit, the part that was meant to be sunk into the Sun to power the redirection. The fins at the top of it, the power collectors, looked like the broad petals of a flower, and the main power conduit that would enable the redirection of the solar wind was its stem.
Slowly and lazily the gigantic, glowing, immaterial flower of energy began to twine upward . . .
And then it started to move faster. And faster. It burst upward through the sheltering dome and out past it, curving around the lunar horizon, heading with terrible speed into space . . . and toward the glow of the Sun, away past the dark circle of the new Earth.
There were shouts of alarm from some of the wizards in the audience and on the staff, because this wasn’t supposed to be happening. The integrity of the wizardly dome was holding—it had been designed to allow energy constructs to pass. But the amount of energy now passing upward through it was already frightening, far more than expected, even though—the wizardry not being impeded by minor matters such as light speed—the conduit was still barely halfway to the Sun. And shortly the incoming energy would be more appalling still, for the power collectors on their ever-stretching conduit were arrowing toward the solar surface with ever-increasing speed. They would sink into the Sun, they would pull power from it, and that awful power would be conducted back here to the surface of the Moon—
“Shut it down!” Irina shouted.
But Penn had finished the recitation and was now frozen where he stood. Irina moved forward, sudden power trembling about her hands as she flung them up and with one huge gesture brought another force shield into being between Penn’s spell circle and the surrounding audience.
Barely a second later, a horrifying spill of raw plasma came blasting down the conduit from its far end, already inside Mercury’s orbit, and slagged down the lunar surface for hundreds of yards around. Penn fell, vanished away in a blaze of eye-hurting white fire.
And Nita realized that while she stood here watching this terror in the waking world, she was also standing inside one of her dreams.
16
Sol IIIa, Sol, Sol III
OH NO. IT’S STARTING. It’s starting now.
I’m not ready for this!
And then Nita got a grip. Of course I’m ready for this. I’m a visionary. I will handle this thing, because I can see at least some of what’s going to happen. Which is more than most of the people here can do . . .
And then, instantaneously, she had that terrible sensation she’d experienced occasionally before—that she was standing on a knife-edge, and huge forces were waiting to see which way she moved. This is how it was the first time, she thought, remembering what happened to Kit’s first Edsel-antenna in Grand Central Terminal all that while ago, at the end of the Ordeal that first made them wizards: the smoking abyss full of terrible, hungry eyes anticipating their fall, the sword-bridge that the noon-forged steel became and that they both had to cross. They had been over that bridge in other forms many times since.
Now everything was different, everything was changing. But some things are still the same, Nita thought. Have to be. Have to be!
She lifted her gaze to Kit. Their eyes locked.
“Whatever you have to do,” Kit said, “do it. I’m with you.”
She turned away from Kit and went over to Penn and took his hands. He gasped in air and stared at her in shock.
“I am looking at you,” she said. “I am looking at you across the board. Do you see me here? Do you understand me? I’m looking at you. If you’re going to do something, if what you said to me was for real, this would be the moment.”