The other wizard, Kkirl, stretched her wings in a sudden blaze of scarlet and green, then folded them again. "I have concerns," she said. "The kernel of the planet in question is unstable. It won't stay where it's put; whether the turmoil on that world is itself a reflection of the kernel's instability, or the other way around, I cannot tell, though I have been working with it for many cycles now—"
"Planets have kernels?" Nita said.
"Not of the same power and complexity you would find in a universe-type kernel," Kkirl said, "but much smaller, more delicate ones, easily deranged if mishandled. I've spent as long as I dare assessing the situation and trying to make small adjustments. There's no more time, for the planet is inhabited by some hundreds of thousands of my people, and if that world's destruction by earthquakes and crustal disturbances is to be avoided, something must be done now. In the past two cycles, the quakes have become severe enough to threaten large parts of the surface of the planet. The Powers sanctioned an intervention that would deal with the kernel itself, and I was here to prepare one final test sequence. I don't really need it. But I'm still
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not sure it's safe to go on with the intervention by myself, let alone with—"
"Kkirl, what use is a meeting like this unless you use it to your advantage?" Pont said. "The Powers Themselves might have thrown us in your way. Let us—some of us, anyway—help you out! You can tell us how to proceed, and we'll be guided by you. Or, if nothing else, we can just lend you power. These aren't circumstances where anyone would be tempted to improvise."
Kkirl looked around, her feathers a little ruffled, uncertain. Several other wizards had been listening to their conversation, Pralaya among them. Now Pralaya stood up on its hindmost legs in order to look Kkirl in the eye more easily, and said, "Cousin, if your people's lives are in danger, letting your uncertainty hobble you is playing right into the Lone Power's desires. And delay could be fatal. Judging from what you've told us, it's becoming fatal already. You have to move past the uncertainty. What else are we all here for?"
Kkirl stood there silent. Finally she looked up, rustled her wings, and said, "You're right. I see no other way. And there's no point putting it off anymore. Who will come?"
"We will," Pont said. "What about you others?"
"I'll come," Pralaya said. "Of course. Who else?"
Mmemyn said, / am free to come; and another wizard that Nita had met only briefly, a long graceful silvery fishlike creature in a bubble of water, said, "I, too."
"Well enough. I'll draw up the transit circle, then," Kkirl said. "You will want to plug in your names and 275
bring appropriate breathing media: The atmosphere is a reducing one, and there's a lot of oxygen." She glanced over at the "fish." "Not a problem for you, Neme, except for the acid in the air."
The various wizards started to get ready, adjusting their life-support wizardries, and Nita was surprised when one of Pont rolled over to her. "You know," it said, "you might come along as well."
Nita looked down at it, and over at the others, surprised. "Me? I'm just getting started. I didn't even get the kernel this time."
"Just an accident of timing," Pralaya said, glancing up.
Kkirl paused in the act of starting to pace out the circle. "And you're probably the youngest of us here," said Kkirl, "so that whatever you might lack in expertise, you'd surely make up in power. Do come, hNeet. The kernel won't be where I left it in any case; looking for it will be extra practice for you."
Her mother's predicament went through Nita's mind. But these people were trying to help her, to help her mom. It was the least she could do to help them. "Yeah," she said. "Sure, I'll come."
Kkirl went back to pacing out her transit circle, and it appeared on the floor before them. The wizards who were going produced their names in the Speech and started plugging them into the spell, in the empty spots Kkirl was now adding for them.
Nita looked over the diagram carefully as it completed itself. The coordinates for the solar system in question had an additional set of vector and frame coordinates in front of it, which Nita thought must be the determinators for an entirely different universe. Otherwise the diagram made perfect sense, and the long-form description of the planet itself made it plain why Kkirl was working on it. It's tearing itself apart, Nita thought, bending down to look at it closely. The planet was big to start with, and then it captured all these moons, even a, little "wandering planet" passing through its solar system... and now the gravitational stresses from some of the more massive moons have thrown everything out of whack. This was a problem of the same kind as Dairine's, just as insoluble by brute force. Inherent in the transit circle, though, and written as an adjunct to it, Nita could see Kkirl's intended solution. The planet itself was going to have both its crust structure and its gravitational and magnetic fields reorganized and rebalanced. That could be done only by using the kernel, which when itself rewritten would in turn rewrite the whole under-crust stucture of the planet. It's like the kernel is the master copy of a DNA molecule. Rewrite it and turn it loose, and every other molecule in a body gets changed in response. This was fairly close to what Nita had in mind for her mother, and her heart leaped as she saw from Kkirl's diagram that she'd been on the right track, and began to see how she could implement a similar solution herself.
"See something that doesn't work?" Kkirl said, coming around behind her and looking over Nita's shoulder at the diagram.
"No." Nita said. "It looks fine."
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"I'm glad. It's taken awhile. But the conditional statements there were the worst part. Fortunately the solution is adjudged to be ethical—see the GO/NO GO toggle down at the end? If that one tiny little knot won't knot, you might as well give up and go home."
Nita nodded. "Okay," she said, and reached into the back of her mind to pull out the constantly updated graphic version of her personal description. It manifested itself in the usual long graceful string of glowing writing in the Speech, but as she ran it briefly through her hands, Nita noticed some changes here and there, particularly in the sections that had to do with family and emotional relationships. Mom..., she thought. She let the written version of her name slide glowing to the floor and snug itself into the spot waiting for it in Kkirl's wizardry.
Then, suddenly getting the feeling that someone was behind her, Nita looked over her shoulder. Dazel was towering up behind her and leaning over her, looking down at her with a number of its eyes, while its many, many pink and dark-violet tentacles wreathed slowly in the air. It said nothing. The rest of its eyes were arching down over her to look carefully at her name in the Speech.
"Uh, hi," Nita said.
"Yes," Dazel said. It said nothing further, but more and more of its eyes curled down in front of her to look at her name, where it lay glowing against the white floor, until only eye was left still looking at Nita, hanging there on its thin, shiny pink stalk about three
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inches in front of her nose. The eye's pupil was triangular, and the rest of the eye was bloodshot, if blood were purple.