Roshaun laughed. “Nonsense! She’s no possible danger to me,” he said. “Go on.”
All of the servants bowed and departed, though the armed ones gave Dairine a number of hard looks as they left.
She had to smile grimly at that, though she was trying to contain her annoyance at the assessment that she was “no danger.” Never mind. People a lot more important in the big scheme of things have thought otherwise…
The room emptied and the doors closed. Roshaun dusted his hands off as if he’d actually done something, and sat back down on his “throne,” stretching his legs out lazily. “So what’s on your little agenda today?”
Dairine collapsed the almost-built shield-spell, deciding she didn’t need it anymore. And as for him, listen to him! Every word out of Roshaun is a needle, Dairine thought. Well, I’m just going to stop jumping when he sticks the needle in, no matter what he says. “We’re going up Mount Everest and K2,” she said. “Those are two of the highest mountains on Earth. A lot of people climb them—some just for the challenge, some almost as a tourist thing. But they leave a lot of garbage behind…so every now and then some wizards go up there and clean it up a little. It’s kind of an art form, taking away enough of the oxygen bottles and so forth to keep the place from turning into a dump, without taking so many that people notice they’re vanishing. That’s all we need, to turn into a yeti myth or something.”
She stopped, because he had actually yawned at her. “I don’t think so,” Roshaun said.
“I don’t think so what!”
“Housecleaning,” Roshaun said, “wouldn’t normally be a part of my job description.”
Despite all her good intentions, Dairine instantly got steamed again. “Neither would doing wizardry, most times, from the look of things around here,” she said. “Why lift a finger when all these people will jump out and do everything for you?” And once again she stopped herself. “Well, never mind,” she said. “The whole point of the excursus is to see what other people’s wizardly practice is like. This would have been good for that. And besides it being a kind of fun service-thing to do, I’d have thought you’d enjoy the view. You don’t seem to have a lot of high ground around here.”
“We have a fair amount of it elsewhere,” Roshaun said, “on the other side of the planet—”
He was still trying to sound bored, but somehow it wasn’t working. Dairine glanced over at him quickly, but if anything had shown in his face while she was looking away, it was too late to catch a hint of it now. He had sealed right over again. “Look,” Dairine said, “I really don’t know what your problem is. But let’s just drop it, okay? Why not come on back with me and we’ll—”
“At the moment, I’d rather not,” Roshaun said.
There was still something ever so slightly different about his tone of voice. Some of that snide quality had come off it, if only a few percent’s worth.
“If it’s just a personality thing…” Dairine said, after some hesitation.
“It’s nothing so simple,” Roshaun said, turning away from her and reaching out to some kind of data pad by his chair. “I don’t much like your little world, and your Sun pains me.”
Dairine wasn’t terribly sure what to make of the second remark, but the first was easy enough to understand. “Well, you have a nice time here by yourself,” she said. “Lie around and take it easy…Have someone peel you a grape or three. And don’t feel rushed into hurrying back.”
She headed back toward the access to the pup tent and made her way back through its overdecorated interior, growing gradually more annoyed. Halfway through, though, Dairine stopped, turned, and looked over her shoulder at the extra access Roshaun had added.
Somebody could get him in trouble for that…
Dairine stood there absently biting her lower lip for a few moments, considering possibilities. Then she grimaced at her own ill temper. This guy is really messing me up…and I hate it.
Never mind.
She slipped through the main pup-tent access into her basement and trotted up the stairs. “Roshaun’s not going to be with us this morning,” she said to Filif. “Something’s going on at home that he had to take care of. Let’s just get ourselves up Everest and do some tidying.”
Her dad was still standing by the counter, keying numbers into his cell phone. He held it to his ear, shook his head, and glanced at the phone.
“Honey, before you go,” her dad said, “what’s going on with the cell phones today? I was trying to call one of my suppliers. Is it the usual network-busy problem, or is the magic possibly interfering with it?”
“I really doubt that,” Dairine said. “Tom’s too good at this kind of wizardry. But you know what, I heard something on the news this morning. Let me check—” She turned to Spot, who was sitting on the counter. “Get me a weather report? The SOHO satellite’ll do.”
Spot flipped up his lid and showed Dairine the manual’s version of the live feed from the SOHO solar-orbiter satellite, with a selection of pictures of the Sun taken in various wavelengths of light—red, green, blue. “There you are,” Dairine said, pointing to the blue version, where one particular detail was clearest. “We’re having a little bad weather.”
Dairine’s dad peered over her shoulder at the image of something like a big
bump or bulge of light on the side of the Sun. “That happened last night,” Dairine said. “It’s a CME, a coronal mass ejection.”
“In English, please?” her dad said.
Dairine grinned. “Think of it as a solar zit.”
Her dad made a face. “Honey, do you think you could possibly have put that more indelicately?”
“Gives you the right impression of what’s happening, though,” Dairine said. “Every now and then the Sun shoots out a big splat of plasma into space. No one really knows why. But if the splat’s aimed toward Earth, when the front of the plasma wave gets here, there’s all kinds of trouble with satellites because of the ionized radiation. Radio gets messed up for a day or so, phone connections get screwed up until the wave front passes.” She shrugged. “It’s no big deal. These guys make sure everybody gets enough warning to turn their satellites’ sensors away from the wave front before it hits.” She put Spot’s lid down. “Probably the phones’ll come back up later today or tomorrow.”
Her father sighed, turning to the wall phone and picking it up. “It’s a nuisance,” he said as he started to dial.
“Yeah,” Dairine said.
Sker’ret came in from the living room. “So where are you three off to?” Dairine’s dad said.
“Mount Everest,” Dairine said.
Her father looked at her. She was wearing a T-shirt and shorts: It was more like summer than spring outside, at the moment. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in telling you to dress warm?”
“We all have force fields,” Dairine said. “We’ll be fine.”
Her dad watched her and hit a key on the phone’s dialing pad. “Voice mail,” he muttered. “I hate this. Mount Everest, though? Why?”
“We’re taking Sker’ret out to lunch,” Dairine said, grinning a wicked grin. “Nepalese food…sort of. See you later.”
They vanished.
It was much later that evening, after latemeal, when lamps were lit and Nita had gone down to the beach again for one last swim, when Kit finally had time to sit down in private on his bed-couch, with his manual, and page through it for some more detail.
Much of what Quelt had shown them and told them was there, and more information about the way of death on Alaalu. Entropy might have its way with the bodies of the people who lived there, but not with their spirits. Those lingered on. Kit saw from the manual that this Choice had, in fact, not taken place as quickly as it had seemed at first glance. In particular, the wizards making this Choice had understood that without entropy, there was no passage of time, no way to live or be. They’d seen that any bargain they might have struck with the Lone Power in an attempt to eliminate entropy completely would’ve been a cheat. Naturally, the Power that had invented entropy had some control over it; the exemption It had been offering the Alaalids would have been real enough, a kind of eternal life. But Kit knew enough about the Lone Power’s intentions to understand that whatever