“Is that your star?” Roshaun said, very softly.
“Huh?” Dairine looked over her shoulder. “Yeah. It’s just a CME. You don’t have to look all worried about it.”
But he did look worried about it. “Dairine, how many of these have you had lately?”
Dairine stopped dead. She couldn’t remember Roshaun having ever spoken her name directly to her before, not once. “I don’t know,” she said, after taking a moment to get over the initial shock. “We’re in a sunspot maximum now, and we expect a lot of them. One or two a week, we’ve been having, but—”
Roshaun looked stricken. “Dear Aethyrs, that’s the first sign,” he said. “I’ve seen this before. Don’t you know what this means?”
“No,” Dairine said. “Should I?”
“Are you insane!” he shouted at her. “Your star is about to start having a crisis! And if you want to have a star for much longer, or you want your planet to be in any state to notice that it has a star, you’ll shut up and listen!!.”
Completely astounded, Dairine shut up.
“I wondered why the thing pained me to look at it,” Roshaun said. “It’s going to bubblestorm. Your Sun’s got to be fixed before it goes into a catastrophic flare cycle—”
“Are you crazy? You can’t just run off and fix the Sun! We don’t even know if it’s really broken or not!”
“I do,” Roshaun said. “It’s broken. And if somebody doesn’t fix it right away—”
“This kind of thing happens all the time here. This is normal!”
“This is not normal,” Roshaun said angrily. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. This kind of behavior is very, very abnormal in a star of this class, and it has to be dealt with before it starts to accelerate toward a crisis process that can no longer be stopped!”
Her father appeared in the kitchen again. “I assume,” he said softly, “that someone is going to get a grip on himself or herself and explain all this shouting to me?
“Roshaun is completely out of his mind,” Dairine said, “and thinks the Sun is broken. And he wants to go fix it. Which he is not going to do, because you’ve got to get permission from at least a regional-level wizard if you’re going to screw around with a system’s primary!”
“I don’t care. Unless something is done—”
Dairine had awful visions of Roshaun going off and doing something on the sly, and messing up Sol past all repair. “Look,” she said, “we really need to at least talk to Tom and Carl about this before you go off and start playing around with my star. My star, not yours, right? Thank you.” She went over to the phone, picked it up, dialed.
“Hi there,” said Tom’s voice.
“Tom? It’s Dairine. Listen, I—”
“—know the drill. Leave a name and number and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks.” Beep!
Dairine swallowed. “Tom, it’s Dairine. I need to talk to you right away. I’ll get you via Spot. Bye.”
She hung up. Where are they? she thought. She’d never called Tom and Carl’s house before and failed to get one or the other of them, except when they were on vacation, and they always warned everybody about that first. “Spot?”
Yes?
“Message both Tom and Carl right away. Flag it emergency and high-urgent. I need to talk to them right now.”
Spot sat silent for a moment. Then he said, The message has been bounced.
“What??”
The bounce message says, “Subjects are on assignment, unavailable.”
Oh no, Dairine thought. Oh no. What does that mean? She sat there and stared into space for a moment. It may be nothing, she thought. There may be all kinds of times they go off on assignment together and I don’t know anything about it. It’s not like Nita or Kit or I call them every five minutes to see where they are.
But the cold feeling at the bottom of Dairine’s gut told her that this was not just nothing. She remembered something Tom had said once, when Dairine’s dad had asked him why he wasn’t off the planet more: “Harry, would you normally open the door and get out of a car you were driving?”
“They’re not there, are they?” her dad said.
“No.”
Roshaun was looking at her in increasing anger. “We’re just going to have to do something, then.”
“No we are not,” Dairine said. “We are going up to at least planetary level on this one.”
She turned back to Spot and began firing off messages in all directions.
But there was no response. It wasn’t as if the Planetary Wizard for Earth wouldn’t talk to her; wizards at even that level were remarkably accessible to their colleagues. But again and again Spot simply said, Subjects are on assignment,
unavailable.
“What can I do to help?” her dad said.
“Daddy…” Dairine shook her head. “Nothing right now. Go on…I’ll let you know what happens.”
Silently, her dad kissed her, and went. An hour later, Dairine was still sitting in the dining room, in shock, realizing that no one in the upper wizardly structure was available at all. Good lord, she thought, where is everybody? Who’s minding the planet?!
And, horrified, she knew the answer, at least for the moment. We are…
****
Travel-Related Stress Dairine’s first urge was to go off and physically look for somebody in the echelons above the planetary level. But she couldn’t. The limitations that Tom had put on her ability to use wizardry for transit were still in place, whether he was here or not. She was limited to Sol System, and couldn’t even get around the prohibition by going elsewhere on the planet and using a fixed gate. All of the worldgates had monitoring wizardries built into them that would recognize Dairine’s banned status and refuse her access.
Roshaun was looking at her from where he’d sat down across the table. All the time Dairine had been trying to find someone higher up the wizardly command structure, he had simply sat there, not saying a word, watching her. It was perhaps the longest time she’d ever seen him be quiet. Now he said, “You’re wasting time.”
She looked at him with profound misgivings. There was no arguing that he was an expert of sorts in this business; it was his specialty as a wizard. Even Spot’s manual functions confirmed that. But—
“You don’t trust me,” Roshaun said.
“Not as far as I could throw you,” Dairine said.
“And why not?” Roshaun said. “Because I’m not like you? Maybe not. But I am still a wizard. The Powers That Be trust me, if you don’t.”
“And why?” Dairine said. “That’s what I want to know! You are the least wizardlike wizard I’ve ever met! You don’t even use wizardry if you can help it! You’re a whole lot more interested in being a prince than in being a wizard, the way it looks to me! The rules say that wizardry can’t live long in the unwilling heart. How long do you think you’re likely to be one of us if you keep acting the way you do? How long is it going to be before the act becomes the reality?”
He stared at her, and it took Dairine several breaths to realize how stricken, and then furious, the look in his eyes was becoming.
“That’s it,” he said, and stood up. “That’s it. I’m off home. I’m weary of your arrogance, and your bad manners, and your mistrust, and your—”
Dairine jumped up, too. “You’re weary of my arrogance? Why, you stuck-up, self-centered, self-important—”
“—don’t have to explain myself to the likes of you, you parochial, controlling
little—”
“—always so sure you’re right, then go ahead, go home and be right there, where all your people are so busy bowing and scraping to you that none of them has the nerve to confront you when you’re—”
Suddenly Dairine’s face was full of greenery, and a number of berries were looking at her from very, very close, in a chilly, annoyed sort of way.
You should stop this now, Filif said.
Filif’s silent speech was forceful. It was like running suddenly into a tree. Across from her, beyond the greenery, she could tell that Roshaun was feeling the same impact.