“Not ours,” Kit’s mama said.
“Not that ours doesn’t need saving,” his Pop said, and turned away for a moment to go get a cup. Kit knew immediately where he was headed: the new capsule-coffee machine that Kit’s mama had given him for Christmas. “I see more of the headlines in one day than most human beings, so believe me, I know…” He went hunting in the little bin on the counter by the fridge for the capsule he wanted. “So what is it this time?”
“There’s a planet with a big moon that’s blowing up,” Kit said. “Well, not blowing at the moment. Getting ready to come apart. Though there’ll probably be some blowing up in the later stages…”
“Wonderful,” his dad said as he fiddled with the coffee machine. “And there are people living there?”
“A hundred fifty million, plus or minus. We’ve got to get them off before stuff starts happening—especially before the pieces of moon start falling out of orbit.” Kit turned a page over in the manual to a double-page spread that illustrated part of the celestial mechanics involved, and the long accelerating spiral of debris that would start to hammer down onto the surface of the planet when the moon began breaking up.
His pop looked down at this, frowning, while Kit’s mama turned a stricken expression on Kit. “And we have problems getting a few hundred thousand people away from a war or a disaster,” she said. “But a hundred million and more…!”
“How do you even move that many people?” his pop said.
“Worldgates,” Kit said. “A lot of them. Which is why Mamvish is involved—”
“Wait,” Kit’s mama said, “the Mamvish who was here at Christmas, the Spin-The-Dreidelsaur, she’s in on this?”
“Yeah, she just delivered the summons in person. Stuck her head in through my bedroom wall.”
The coffee machine clicked. “The life we live,” Kit’s pop said, watching it spit coffee into his cup. “No structural damage?”
“She knocked down my Spitfire, but it’s better now.”
“Magic,” his pop said, shaking his head and staring at the machine, from which the flow of coffee had suddenly stopped. “Where’s the rest of the coffee?”
Kit’s mama peered past him at the buttons on top of the machine. “You left it set for espresso again.”
“Anyway,” Kit said, “Mamvish specializes in this kind of thing; she’s the Species Archivist to the Powers that Be. Her whole work is saving threatened species. If she can’t get them all safely off their planet alive and move them somewhere else—it’s called ‘rafting’—she’ll put them in stasis until she can get them out. But this time it looks like something else is going on.” What, exactly, he’d had no time to discover as yet, there was so much briefing material to read. “That’s why she’s requisitioned…” Kit flipped another page in his manual and then stopped, not sure he was reading the Speech-numeral correctly, but yeah, there’s the thousands-separator— “Eighteen thousand, four hundred and twenty-nine wizards from Earth to go there…”
“Eighteen thousand!!” Kit’s mama said. “Who’s going to stay home and keep an eye on Earth then?”
“Everybody else,” Kit said. “There are a lot more wizards on Earth than that, mama. But Mamvish is picking the ones she thinks will be best for this. The younger ones, the more powerful ones…”
“The smarter ones,” his pop said, as if it was simply a given that his son would be one of these. He pulled his coffee cup off the capsule machine’s little ledge and stared down regretfully at the half cup of coffee in it. “Son, you think you could have a word with this guy for me? Whatever I want to make, it always makes the opposite..”
“Uh, popi, I think I might have to teach it mindreading for that. Don’t know if its chip can take the strain…”
“Might work better if someone just learned to check the buttons first,” Kit’s mama said, while pulling her phone out of her scrubs pocket and starting to make a note to herself: “Buy… more… capsules…”
“Everybody’s a critic,” Kit’s pop said. “All right. Nita’s going too?”
“Yeah.” She’d have messaged Kit by now if there were any problems with that.
“And how far away is this?”
Kit glanced down at the manual, flicked a couple of pages back to the precis. “Just nineteen hundred light years. Barely out of the neighborhood.”
Kit’s father rubbed his eyes. “One of these days I’m going to be used to you saying things like that. Are Tom or Carl going to be along on this joyride?”
“Uh, I don’t know—” Kit flipped hastily through to the substantial part of the mission description that had to do with personnel assignments: but his heart was sinking as he did so, because Supervisories didn’t that often leave the planet for errantry unless—
“Oh,” Kit said. “Yeah, Tom is—” He flipped back a few pages. “And Carl. And…” He ran a finger down the page: the list was actually getting longer as he read. “And a lot of other Senior wizards, Supervisories… Wow.”
“It’s not like you need babysitting,” his pop said, “it’s just, you know, reassuring to know you’ve got backup if something happens.” Kit opened his mouth, and his Pop actually laughed and said, “Kit, seriously. With you something always happens. You think I’ve forgotten how before you could even walk straight we had to tie another playpen on top of yours to keep you from escaping and running away to seek your fortune? Come on.”
Kit blushed at this. Every now and then pictures of the (multiple) incidents in question got trotted out, and he lived in hope that Nita had never seen them—though with his Mama, you could never tell.
He turned his attention back to the manual, trying not to look too rattled. “And they’ve authorized energy allowances for puptents too—” Parental concerns aside, this was sounding more serious by the moment. When They send even Supervisories out on the High Road? For the first time in a long while, Kit felt something strange creeping up his spine: uncertainty. Am I going to be up to this?
“Oh, wait!” Kit’s mama said. “The puptents, that’s what you called what you had at the holiday party, isn’t it? When our favorite Christmas tree and Mr. Legs were all down in the basement, except they weren’t really, because they’d brought little packages of other spaces with them and attached them to the inside of the house? If you’ll have one of those, then you can come upstairs and just be home whenever you want to.” She looked at Kit’s pop. “That sounds okay…”
“Oh,” Kit said, “uh, no. This is the kind you take with you, like we took to Alaalu when we were going to be away for a couple of weeks. See, when you’re timesliding—”
“Wait,” Kit’s pop said, “that was the next question.” He gave Kit one of those slightly-narrowed-eyes looks that suggested there might trouble coming. “How long is this thing going to take? Not that I’m running down the importance of saving all those lives, and I can see where it would take a while even with wizardry. But in case you haven’t noticed, this is a school week, and somebody has a calculus test on Friday if I remember right…”
“Fifteen minutes,” Kit’s mama said.
Kit scrunched up his face in a wince, wishing he could just agree with her and leave it at that. But if he tried, it was going to cause serious trouble with his pop later. “Yeah, but also somewhere between a few days and ten,” he said.
“Oh now,” Kit’s pop said, shaking his head.
“But the other way I will just be gone fifteen minutes,” Kit said. “It’s not hard, popi. In fact Neets and I did it on my Ordeal! Our Ordeal, I mean. We were away for hours and hours, as far as we could tell. Long enough for a whole lot to happen…”
“Yes,” his dad said, turning away just long enough to hunt around on the counter for the sugar bowl, “I seem to remember something about the Sun going out…”